Although each side reportedly suffered at least 100,000 casualties, it was the South that emerged the weakest. To stave off the Northern onslaught, Saigon stripped several quiet sectors of their garrisons, and the VC happily re-infiltrated those locales, initiating a big revival. In 1973, a fed-up Washington pushed the South into a peace agreement that was really just a pause before the final conquest, which occurred in 1975.
In the end, the fatal combination was Western exhaustion, local corruption, and some degree of morale-sapping atrocity. What Saigon was in 1972, Kabul could be soon.
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