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.
From the archives:
If American policy-makers were capable of learning from history we wouldn’t still be in Afghanistan.
Karzai himself is plenty of evidence that it’s easy to install a new govt, much much harder to make that govt legitimate and effective.
we can learn some lessons while forgetting others.
yeah, not good.
that nyt piece of fluff is just the tip of the iceberg. internal corruption, is just an excuse for the administration to apply pressure. hell, they’ve even repurposed the rumsfeldian homily with “We’re coming to terms with dealing with the Karzai we have.”
asia times has a much broader, realistic look at the situation today:
Karzai’s China-Iran dalliance riles Obama
as for the question of whether or not we learned anything from the experience in vietnam; l think it’s save to say that we, as a nation, and certainly the powers that be, did not. had we, we wouldn’t be in iraq or afghanistan.
Only if you think that the Vietnam War, still haunts American policy-making.
The stated goal of the Obama administration in Afghanistan is to eliminate al Qaeda, all of it, from the region and to have a stable government in which al Quaeda cannot regroup. No doubt Ahmedinejad has the same national interest.
The unanswered question is whether the US has the ambition to control the region. Clearly during the Bush administration that motivated US policy to war in Afghanistan instead of pressuring the Taliban for the delivery of al Quaeda foreigners in their country. And in 2001 there was the hope by some of an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan to India; that pipeline dream is gone because Turkmenistan has made arrangements with Iran and China and was merely seeking to avoid having Russia as its sole customer.
It is the US view that a corrupt government cannot be stable and democratic and that corruption undermines the resources available to extend control to Taliban-controlled provinces. Karzai meanwhile is beginning to sound like a reader of the Nation. And it is the Taliban themselves who would have the most public legitimacy against corruption.
But the corruption issue is not primarily an Afghan one but an American one. Karzai is using the foreign aid money provided by US taxpayers to finance his corruption. And I have no doubt that unlike in Vietnam, the Afghan military are in on the take. Therefore, any coup d’etat would have to come from members of the Northern Alliance. That in turn would restart an inter-ethnic war that American policy has so far carefully avoided.
One of the political characteristics is that although corruption is almost the normal state of political life, charges of corruption almost always presage a coup. Most Americans do not think in those terms; charges of corruption in the US always presage a generally toothless investigation. Not considering this necessarily comforting because of past CIA actions, Karzai no doubt is worried.
My sense is that Obama is trying to hold the whole enterprise together long enough to root out the last of the Al Quaeda operatives in the region and get commitments from Pakistan, Afghanistan, leaders of the Northwest provinces of Pakistan, and ultimately the Taliban that they will not be allowed to return. The last piece of the puzzle is the Taliban organizations in the Kandahar region. There is some really strange things going on for the US to announce that they are going to occupy Kandahar in force in June.
The holy grail for the US military in this is the reputation for having succeeded in counter-insurgency. Too many of the leaders of the current efforts got their military training either during or in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. And some of them are trying to redeem the military’s reputation for winning.