Many commentators are likening the recent Taliban seizure of Kabul to a “repeat” of the 1975 “fall of Saigon”.

But the Taliban less closely resemble Vietnamese communists than they do Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. More than two decades ago, when the Taliban, a Sunni Islamist group, held power in Afghanistan, they massacred members of their country's Shia Muslim minority and others. In the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide against Cambodia's Cham Muslim minority and others. In March 2001, the Taliban deployed dynamite to blow up their country's monumental 6th-7th century stone sculptures, the Bamyan Buddhas, part of Afghanistan's historic heritage. That act of vandalism resembled the Khmer Rouge's demolition of Phnom Penh's Catholic Cathedral, stone by stone, and their repression of Cambodia's Buddhist religion.