Sir: For months, presidency’s spokespersons and top officials of Nigeria’s government talked up with childish relish about the imminent arrival of the America’s made and supplied Super Tucano fighter jets purchased at a whopping sum of $494 million.

Well, the point is the omnipotence and invisibility ascribed to American-made weapons are the mere figments of Nigeria’s officials’ imagination who fetishize and even worship it far beyond its actual potency. And here is where the America’s Afghan debacle is of supreme lesson to those who do actually wish to learn.

For the past 20 years, the United States with a fringe or sprinkle of their NATO allies built the Afghan 350,000 strong military force from the scratch and equipped it, a venture estimated at more than $150 billion. Yet, just as the United States of America was cutting and running, by abruptly ending its military mission in the country, barely a month ago, the resurgent Taliban rallied its forces, without an air cover and began talking province after province until, it strolled into the Afghan presidential palace, with the America’s propped up and protected regime collapsing like pack of cards and its henchmen fleeing in different directions.

The chaotic exit, without adequate consultations with its NATO allies is why Washington is not quite good for an ally but a pragmatic and useful partner engaged for a targeted cooperation and specific areas or fields of mutual benefit. However, having built, trained and equipped the Afghan military, it could not teach it, the overriding rationale for which the military exist and bear arms: the love of country and people and the imperative to make the supreme sacrifice when the need arise. An army lacking in the virtue of patriotic devotion, no matter how equipped or well-trained will collapse like a pack of cards when confronted with existential danger. The America-built, trained and equipped Afghan Army literally melted away, leaving the Taliban forces without any air cover at all to overrun the country and seize the presidential palace in the capital, Kabul in a blitzkrieg.

Earlier on July 8, President Joe Biden soon after the American forces withdrew from the Afghan Bagram Air base, which served as its hub in the 20-year-old war in Afghanistan, declared that “the Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army. They are not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There is going to be no circumstance where you see people being airlifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan”, in reference to Saigon, the former Vietnamese capital that Americans have to hurriedly evacuate, after the puppet regime they installed, collapsed under the determined military onslaught of the Vietnamese army led General Vo Nguyen Giap and under the political leadership of the legendary Ho Chi Minh.

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But like the Saigon incident, where American personnel and others would climb to the roof of the U.S embassy building to board a helicopter that could not find a landing space on the Vietnamese soil in 1975, history repeated itself as U.S embassy in Afghanistan has to hurriedly relocate to the Kabul International airport, from where its personnel and others scampered to escape waiting aircrafts. By August 15, the Taliban fighters were swarming the gold-draped presidential palace, following the collapse of the U.S puppet regime and helping themselves to assorted meals left behind by the fleeing regime hench persons.

As it is currently, evidence abound overwhelmingly from the regime-change failure in Syria to the chaos in Libya and Iraq, and now ultimately capped with Washington’s capitulation in Afghanistan that U.S military invincibility is grossly exaggerated.

Last April, Nigeria’s enlightened community have been terribly shocked when President Buhari provocatively and naively requested that Washington relocate its Africa high command, the military base from Stuggart, Germany to Africa to contain terrorist threats, for which the Americans pointedly declined.

The U.S which is still a sole ‘hyper power’ is undoubtedly militarily formidable and incurring its wrath can be forbidden in many implications, but brandishing American power as an all-time fixer of all problems, including military solutions to local challenges like terrorisms and insurgencies is surprisingly naive and a blundering non-starter.

America was not defeated in Afghanistan, as the debacle may have erroneously suggested. They simply cut and run as any survival instincts would dictate and in the best tradition of national interest, leaving the Afghans, like the Libyans and Iraqis to sort out the mess.

• Charles Onunaiju,  Abuja.