Journalist Jim Laurie said on Fox News Tuesday that watching Kabul fall to the Taliban was like watching Saigon fall in the final days of the Vietnam war.
Laurie said that Afghanistan, which was overtaken by the Taliban in a matter of days, is like watching what happened in Vietnam at “warp speed.”
“What is happening in Afghanistan this last seven days is like Vietnam, Cambodia, at warp speed,” Laurie said. “It is all collapsing much more quickly. We at least had in Vietnam 55 days to watch the unraveling of the South Vietnamese effort there.” (RELATED: Video Shows Massive Crowds Bolting To Kabul Airport As Artillery Goes Off In The Background)
He said that after U.S. troops withdrew from South Vietnam, the U.S. was able to evacuate a large number of people. “It was not a totally unmitigated disaster,” he added.
Laurie said that it is “heartbreaking” to watch what happened in Saigon occur all over again, but hoped that Americans will be able to evacuate more people from Kabul despite the city being controlled by the Taliban.
“It’s never easy to lose a war and in my time I’ve watched the U.S. leave tragically from Cambodia, and then a few weeks later from Vietnam, and it has been heartbreaking for me to see all this occur again,” Laurie added. “The only thing we can do now is trying to get people that we know out … It is, to put it mildly, a totally tragic condition.”