Sometimes I wonder if the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem is the reason that Hamid Karzai is still alive and nominally in control of Afghanistan. As bad as Diem was, things only got worse in South Vietnam after Kennedy had him offed. Okay, I know that the actual murder of Diem was not ordered by Kennedy, and that Kennedy was upset about it. But, a truer picture came from CIA Director John McCone:
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recounts that Kennedy was meeting with his senior advisers about Vietnam on the morning of November 2 when NSC staff aide Michael V. Forrestal entered the Cabinet Room holding a cable reporting the death (of Diem). Both McNamara and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a participant as White House historian, record that President Kennedy blanched at the news and was shocked at the murder of Diem. Historian Howard Jones notes that CIA director John McCone and his subordinates were amazed that Kennedy should be shocked at the deaths, given how unpredictable were coups d’etat.
Twenty days later…
In any case, if you read about the problems the Kennedy administration was having with Diem, they just sound too eerily familiar to what we’ve learned about Karzai. Without the benefit of seeing what happened in Vietnam when we lost a corrupt but semi-competent partner, I believe Karzai would have already have learned about the ‘unpredictability’ of coups d’etat.
