Leaving Afghanistan, the ghostly picture books of the American general are set in history

August 31 (Reuters) – With the rifle at his side, Major General Chris Donahue, commander of the famous 82nd Airborne Division, became the last American soldier to embark on the final flight of Afghanistan a minute before midnight Monday.

Taken with a night-vision device from a side window of the C-17 transport plane, the fantastic black-and-white image of the general walking towards the plane waiting on the asphalt of Hamid Airport Karzai of Kabul was released by the Pentagon hours after the United States ended its 20-year military presence in Afghanistan.

As a moment in history, the image of Donahue’s departure could be projected next to that of a Soviet general, who was directing an armored column across the Friendship Bridge to Uzbekistan, when the army red left Afghanistan for good in 1989.

Ending a military operation that with the help of allies managed to evacuate 123,000 civilians from Afghanistan, the last air force of American troops that remained under cover for the night.

Although it is a still image, it looks like Donahue is moving fast, without her expressionless face. He wears full combat gear, with night-vision goggles on his helmet and a rifle on his side. He still had to leave Afghanistan and achieve security.

Instead, images of General Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviet Union’s 40th Army in Afghanistan, show him walking arm in arm with his son across the bridge across the Amu Darya River carrying a bouquet of red and white flowers.

The withdrawals of the United States and the Soviets from a country known as the cemetery of empires were carried out in very different ways, but at least they avoided the disastrous defeat that Britain suffered in the first Anglo-Saxon war. Afghan of 1842.

The permanent image of this conflict is Elizabeth Thompson’s oil painting, “Remains of an Army,” depicting a lone exhausted pilot, Assistant Military Surgeon William Brydon, swaying in the saddle of an even more exhausted horse in the retreat from Kabul.

By the time the Russian Red Army left, a pro-Moscow communist government was still in power and its army would continue to fight for three more years, while the U.S.-backed Afghan government had already capitulated and Kabul had fallen to the Taliban just over two weeks before the August 31 deadline for the departure of U.S. troops.

Making an orderly exit, the last of Gromov’s 50,000 troops still suffered isolated attacks as they drove north to the border with Uzbekistan, although they had paid groups of mujahideen to ensure safe passage along the way.

Gromov’s column crossed the Friendship Bridge on February 15, 1989, ending the Soviet Union’s ten-year war in Afghanistan, during which more than 14,450 Soviet soldiers were killed.

Asked how he felt about returning to Soviet soil, Gromov is said to have replied, “Joy, that we have done our duty and come home. I did not look back.”

The final evacuation of the United States from Kabul will be judged by the number of people who were evicted and the number who were left behind.

But Donahue and his comrades will bring harrowing images of their chaotic last days in Kabul; parents who passed babies by the razor, two young Afghans who fell from a plane soaring into the sky, and worst of all, the aftermath of a suicide Islamic State attack on the airport on 26 of August that killed dozens of Afghans and 13 of their own.

Written by Simon Cameron-Moore; Lincoln Feast Edition.

Our standards: the principles of trust of Thomson Reuters.