administration dealings with Afghanistan's echo disastrous missteps
Vietnam
Thursday, Apr 15, 2010 17:16 ET
America and the Dictators: From Diem to Karzai
The Obama administration's dealings with Afghanistan's president
ominously echo disastrous missteps of Vietnam
By Alfred McCoy
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/04/15/america_dictators_obama_karzai
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/america-loves-dictators
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge
of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse
than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast
across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces,
recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat
and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising.
Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar
terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.
After years of lavishing American aid on him, the leader of this
country, our close ally, has isolated himself inside the presidential
palace, becoming an inadequate partner for a failing war effort. His
brother is reportedly a genuine prince of darkness, dealing in drugs,
covert intrigues, and electoral manipulation. The U.S. Embassy demands
reform, the ouster of his brother, the appointment of honest local
officials, something, anything that will demonstrate even a scintilla
of progress.
After all, nine years earlier U.S. envoys had taken a huge gamble:
rescuing this president from exile and political obscurity, installing
him in the palace, and ousting a legitimate monarch whose family had
ruled the country for centuries. Now, he repays this political debt by
taunting America. He insists on untrammeled sovereignty and threatens
to ally with our enemies if we continue to demand reforms of him. Yet
Washington is so deeply identified with the counterinsurgency campaign
in his country that walking away no longer seems like an option.
This scenario is obviously a description of the Obama administration's
devolving relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this
April. It is also an eerie summary of relations between the Kennedy
administration and South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon
nearly half a century earlier, in August 1963. If these parallels are
troubling, they reveal the central paradox of American power over the
past half-century in its dealings with embattled autocrats like Karzai
and Diem across that vast, impoverished swath of the globe once known
as the Third World.
Our Man in Kabul
With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai
seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began
disintegrating after World War II. When the CIA mobilized Afghan
warlords to topple the Taliban in October 2001, the country's capital,
Kabul, was ours for the taking -- and the giving. In the midst of this
chaos, Hamid Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan, gathered a
handful of followers and plunged into Afghanistan on a doomed
CIA-supported mission to rally the tribes for revolt. It proved a
quixotic effort that required rescue by Navy SEALs who snatched him
back to safety in Pakistan.
Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, the Bush administration
engaged in what one expert has called "bribes, secret deals, and arm
twisting" to install Karzai in power. This process took place not
through a democratic election in Kabul, but by lobbying foreign
diplomats at a donors' conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint him
interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose
family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 200 years, returned to
offer his services as acting head of state, the U.S. ambassador had a
"showdown" with the monarch, forcing him back into exile. In this way,
Karzai's "authority," which came directly and almost solely from the
Bush administration, remained unchecked. For his first months in
office, the president had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies
that he was guarded by American security.
In the years that followed, the Karzai regime slid into an ever
deepening state of corruption and incompetence, while NATO allies
rushed to fill the void with their manpower and material, a de facto
endorsement of the president's low road to power. As billions in
international development aid poured into Kabul, a mere trickle
escaped the capital's bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished
villages in the countryside. In 2009, Transparency International
ranked Afghanistan as the world's second most corrupt nation, just a
notch below Somalia.
As opium production soared from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons just
six years later -- a remarkable 53% of the country's entire economy --
drug corruption metastasized, reaching provincial governors, the
police, cabinet ministers, and the president's own brother, also his
close adviser. Indeed, as a senior U.S. antinarcotics official
assigned to Afghanistan described the situation in 2006, "Narco
corruption went to the very top of the Afghan government." Earlier
this year, the U.N. estimated that ordinary Afghans spend $2.5 billion
annually, a quarter of the country's gross domestic product, simply to
bribe the police and government officials.
Last August's presidential elections were an apt index of the
country's progress. Karzai's campaign team, the so-called warlord
ticket, included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who slaughtered
countless prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed
Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights
abuses; Sher Muhammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand
Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound back
in 2005; and the president's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the
reigning drug lord and family fixer in Kandahar. "The Karzai family
has opium and blood on their hands," one Western intelligence official
told the New York Times during the campaign.
Desperate to capture an outright 50% majority in the first round of
balloting, Karzai's warlord coalition made use of an extraordinary
array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and
checking, the U.N.'s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in
October 2009 that more than a million of his votes, 28% of his total,
were fraudulent, pushing the president's tally well below the winning
margin. Calling the election a "foreseeable train wreck," the deputy
U.N. envoy Peter Galbraith said, "The fraud has handed the Taliban its
greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United
States and its Afghan partners."
Galbraith, however, was sacked and silenced as U.S. pressure
extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest. The runner-up
soon withdrew from the run-off election that Washington had favored as
a face-saving, post-fraud compromise, and Karzai was declared the
outright winner by default. In the wake of the farcical election,
Karzai not surprisingly tried to stack the five-man Electoral
Complaints Commission, an independent body meant to vet electoral
complaints, replacing the three foreign experts with his own Afghan
appointees. When the parliament rejected his proposal, Karzai lashed
out with bizarre charges, accusing the U.N. of wanting a "puppet
government" and blaming all the electoral fraud on "massive
interference from foreigners." In a meeting with members of
parliament, he reportedly told them: "If you and the international
community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the
Taliban."
Amid this tempest in an electoral teapot, as American reinforcements
poured into Afghanistan, Washington's escalating pressure for "reform"
only served to inflame Karzai. As Air Force One headed for Kabul on
March 28th, National Security Adviser James Jones bluntly told
reporters aboard that, in his meeting with Karzai, President Obama
would insist that he prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight
to the narco-traffickers." It was time for the new administration in
Washington, ever more deeply committed to its escalating
counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, to bring our man in Kabul back
into line.
A week filled with inflammatory, angry outbursts from Karzai followed
before the White House changed tack, concluding that it had no
alternative to Karzai and began to retreat. Jones now began telling
reporters soothingly that, during his visit to Kabul, President Obama
had been "generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan]
ministers and the seriousness with which they're approaching their
job."
All of this might have seemed so new and bewildering in the American
experience, if it weren't actually so old.
Our Man in Saigon
The sorry history of the autocratic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon
(1954-1963) offers an earlier cautionary roadmap that helps explain
why Washington has so often found itself in such an impossibly
contradictory position with its authoritarian allies.
Landing in Saigon in mid-1954 after years of exile in the United
States and Europe, Diem had no real political base. He could, however,
count on powerful patrons in Washington, notably Democratic senators
Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy. One of the few people to greet
Diem at the airport that day was the legendary CIA operative Edward
Lansdale, Washington's master of political manipulation in Southeast
Asia. Amid the chaos accompanying France's defeat in its long, bloody
Indochina War, Lansdale maneuvered brilliantly to secure Diem's
tenuous hold on power in the southern part of Vietnam. In the
meantime, U.S. diplomats sent his rival, the Emperor Bao Dai, packing
for Paris. Within months, thanks to Washington's backing, Diem won an
absurd 98.2% of a rigged vote for the presidency and promptly
promulgated a new constitution that ended the Vietnamese monarchy
after a millennium.
Channeling all aid payments through Diem, Washington managed to
destroy the last vestiges of French colonial support for any of his
potential rivals in the south, while winning the president a narrow
political base within the army, among civil servants, and in the
minority Catholic community. Backed by a seeming cornucopia of
American support, Diem proceeded to deal harshly with South Vietnam's
Buddhist sects, harassed the Viet Minh veterans of the war against the
French, and resisted the implementation of rural reforms that might
have won him broader support among the country's peasant population.
When the U.S. Embassy pressed for reforms, he simply stalled,
convinced that Washington, having already invested so much of its
prestige in his regime, would be unable to withhold support. Like
Karzai in Kabul, Diem's ultimate weapon was his weakness -- the threat
that his government, shaky as it was, might simply collapse if pushed
too hard.
In the end, the Americans invariably backed down, sacrificing any hope
of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the
local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. As
rebellion and dissent rose in the south, Washington ratcheted up its
military aid to battle the communists, inadvertently giving Diem more
weapons to wield against his own people, communist and non-communist
alike.
Working through his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu -- and this should have an
eerie resonance today -- the Diems took control of Saigon's drug
racket, pocketing significant profits as they built up a nexus of
secret police, prisons, and concentration camps to deal with suspected
dissidents. At the time of Diem's downfall in 1963, there were some
50,000 prisoners in his gulag.
Nonetheless, from 1960 to 1963, the regime only weakened as resistance
sparked repression and repression redoubled resistance. Soon South
Vietnam was wracked by Buddhist riots in the cities and a spreading
Communist revolution in the countryside. Moving after dark, Viet Cong
guerrillas slowly began to encircle Saigon, assassinating Diem's
unpopular village headmen by the thousands.
In this three-year period, the US military mission in Saigon tried
every conceivable counterinsurgency strategy. They brought in
helicopters and armored vehicles to improve conventional mobility,
deployed the Green Berets for unconventional combat, built up regional
militias for localized security, constructed "strategic hamlets" in
order to isolate eight million peasants inside supposedly secure
fortified compounds, and ratcheted up CIA assassinations of suspected
Viet Cong leaders. Nothing worked. Even the best military strategy
could not fix the underlying political problem. By 1963, the Viet Cong
had grown from a handful of fighters into a guerrilla army that
controlled more than half the countryside.
When protesting Buddhist monk Quang Duc assumed the lotus position on
a Saigon street in June 1963 and held the posture while followers lit
his gasoline-soaked robes which erupted in fatal flames, the Kennedy
administration could no longer ignore the crisis. As Diem's batons
cracked the heads of Buddhist demonstrators and Nhu's wife applauded
what she called "monk barbecues," Washington began to officially
protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diem (shades
of Karzai) began working through his brother Nhu to open negotiations
with the communists in Hanoi, signaling Washington that he was
perfectly willing to betray the U.S. war effort and possibly form a
coalition with North Vietnam.
In the midst of this crisis, a newly appointed American ambassador,
Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived in Saigon and within days approved a plan
for a CIA-backed coup to overthrow Diem. For the next few months,
Lansdale's CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon's
generals to hatch an elaborate plot that was unleashed with
devastating effect on November 1, 1963.
As rebel troops stormed the palace, Diem and his brother Nhu fled to a
safe house in Saigon's Chinatown. Flushed from hiding by promises of
safe conduct into exile, Diem climbed aboard a military convoy for
what he thought was a ride to the airport. But CIA operative Conein
had vetoed the flight plans. A military assassin intercepted the
convoy, spraying Diem's body with bullets and stabbing his bleeding
corpse in a coup de grâce.
Although Ambassador Lodge hosted an embassy celebration for the rebel
officers and cabled President Kennedy that Diem's death would mean a
"shorter war," the country soon collapsed into a series of military
coups and counter-coups that crippled army operations. Over the next
32 months, Saigon had nine new governments and a change of cabinet
every 15 weeks -- all incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective.
After spending a decade building up Diem's regime and a day destroying
it, the U.S. had seemingly irrevocably linked its own power and
prestige to the Saigon government -- any government. The "best and
brightest" in Washington were convinced that they could not just
withdraw from South Vietnam without striking a devastating blow
against American "credibility." As South Vietnam slid toward defeat in
the two years following Diem's death, the first of 540,000 U.S. combat
troops began arriving, ensuring that Vietnam would be transformed from
an American-backed war into an American war.
Under the circumstances, Washington searched desperately for anyone
who could provide sufficient stability to prosecute the war against
the communists and eventually, with palpable relief, embraced a
military junta headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu. Installed and
sustained in power by American aid, Thieu had no popular following and
ruled through military repression, repeating the same mistakes that
led to Diem's downfall. But chastened by its experience after the
assassination of Diem, the U.S. Embassy decided to ignore Thieu's
unpopularity and continue to build his army. Once Washington began to
reduce its aid after 1973, Thieu found that his troops simply would
not fight to defend his unpopular government. In April 1975, he
carried a hoard of stolen gold into exile while his army collapsed
with stunning speed, suffering one of the most devastating collapses
in military history.
In pursuit of its Vietnam War effort, Washington required a Saigon
government responsive to its demands, yet popular with its own
peasantry, strong enough to wage a war in the villages, yet sensitive
to the needs of the country's poor villagers. These were hopelessly
contradictory political requisites. Finding that civilian regimes
engaged in impossible-to-control intrigues, the U.S. ultimately
settled for authoritarian military rule which, acceptable as it proved
in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry.
Death or Exile?
So is President Karzai, like Diem, doomed to die on the streets of
Kabul or will he, one day, find himself like Thieu boarding a midnight
flight into exile?
History, or at least our awareness of its lessons, does change things,
albeit in complex, unpredictable ways. Today, senior U.S. envoys have
Diem's cautionary tale encoded in their diplomatic DNA, which
undoubtedly precludes any literal replay of his fate. After
sanctioning Diem's assassination, Washington watched in dismay as
South Vietnam plunged into chaos. So chastened was the U.S. Embassy by
this dismal outcome that it backed the subsequent military regime to a
fault.
A decade later, the Senate's Church Committee uncovered other U.S.
attempts at assassination-cum-regime-change in the Congo, Chile, Cuba,
and the Dominican Republic that further stigmatized this option. In
effect, antibodies from the disastrous CIA coup against Diem, still in
Washington's political bloodstream, reduce the possibility of any
similar move against Karzai today.
Ironically, those who seek to avoid the past may be doomed to repeat
it. By accepting Karzai's massive electoral fraud and refusing to
consider alternatives last August, Washington has, like it or not, put
its stamp of approval on his spreading corruption and the political
instability that accompanies it. In this way, the Obama administration
in its early days invited a sad denouement to its Afghan adventure,
one potentially akin to Vietnam after Diem's death. America's
representatives in Kabul are once again hurtling down history's
highway, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, not the precipice that
lies dead ahead.
In the experiences of both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai lurks a
self-defeating pattern common to Washington's alliances with dictators
throughout the Third World, then and now. Selected and often installed
in office by Washington, or at least backed by massive American
military aid, these client figures become desperately dependent, even
as they fail to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them
to build an independent political base. Torn between pleasing their
foreign patrons or their own people, they wind up pleasing neither. As
opposition to their rule grows, a downward spiral of repression and
corruption often ends in collapse; while, for all its power,
Washington descends into frustration and despair, unable to force its
allies to adopt reforms which might allow them to survive. Such a
collapse is a major crisis for the White House, but often -- Diem's
case is obviously an exception -- little more than an airplane ride
into exile for the local autocrat or dictator.
There was -- and is -- a fundamental structural flaw in any American
alliance with these autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is
a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of such
American-anointed leaders almost inevitable. At the outset, Washington
selects a client who seems pliant enough to do its bidding. Such a
client, in turn, opts for Washington's support not because he is
strong, but precisely because he needs foreign patronage to gain and
hold office.
Once installed, the client, no matter how reluctant, has little choice
but to make Washington's demands his top priority, investing his
slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. Responding to
an American political agenda on civil and military matters, these
autocrats often fail to devote sufficient energy, attention, and
resources to cultivating a following; Diem found himself isolated in
his Saigon palace, while Karzai has become a "president" justly, if
derisively, nicknamed "the mayor of Kabul." Caught between the demands
of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and
desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while
struggling uncomfortably, and in the end angrily, as well as
resentfully, in the foreign embrace.
Nor are such parallels limited to Afghanistan today or Vietnam almost
half a century ago. Since the end of World War II, many of the
sharpest crises in U.S. foreign policy have arisen from just such
problematic relationships with authoritarian client regimes. As a
start, it was a similarly close relationship with General Fulgencio
Batista of Cuba in the 1950s which inspired the Cuban revolution. That
culminated, of course, in Fidel Castro's rebels capturing the Cuban
capital, Havana, in 1959, which in turn led the Kennedy administration
into the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion and then the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
For a full quarter-century, the U.S. played international patron to
the Shah of Iran, intervening to save his regime from the threat of
democracy in the early 1950s and later massively arming his police and
military while making him Washington's proxy power in the Persian
Gulf. His fall in the Islamic revolution of 1979 not only removed the
cornerstone of American power in this strategic region, but plunged
Washington into a succession of foreign policy confrontations with
Iran that have yet to end.
After a half-century as a similarly loyal client in Central America,
the regime of Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza fell in the Sandinista
revolution of 1979, creating a foreign policy problem marked by the
CIA's contra operation against the new Sandinista government and the
seamy Iran-Contra scandal that roiled President Reagan's second term.
Just last week, Washington's anointed autocrat in Kyrgyzstan,
Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the presidential palace when his riot police,
despite firing live ammunition and killing more than 80 of his
citizens, failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of
the capital, Bishkek. Although his rule was brutal and corrupt, last
year the Obama administration courted Bakiyev sedulously and
successfully to preserve U.S. use of the old Soviet air base at Manas
critical for supply flights into Afghanistan. Even as riot police were
beating the opposition into submission to prepare for Bakiyev's
"landslide victory" in last July's elections, President Obama sent him
a personal letter praising his support for the Afghan war. With
Washington's imprimatur, there was nothing to stop Bakiyev's political
slide into murderous repression and his ultimate fall from power.
Why have so many American alliances with Third World dictators
collapsed in such a spectacular fashion, producing divisive
recriminations at home and policy disasters abroad?
During Britain's century of dominion, its self-confident servants of
empire, from viceroys in plumed hats to district officers in khaki
shorts, ruled much of Africa and Asia through an imperial system of
protectorates, indirect rule, and direct colonial rule. In the
succeeding American "half century" of hegemony, Washington carried the
burden of global power without a formal colonial system, substituting
its military advisers for imperial viceroys.
In this new landscape of sovereign states that emerged after World War
II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy as it dealt
with the leaders of nominally independent nations that were also
deeply dependent on foreign economic and military aid. After
identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington
usually tries to coax, chide, or threaten its allies into embracing
what it considers needed reforms. Even when this counsel fails and
prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal, as in Saigon
in 1963 and Kabul today, American envoys simply cannot let go of their
unrepentant, resentful allies, as the long slide into disaster gains
momentum.
With few choices between diplomatic niceties and a destabilizing coup,
Washington invariably ends up defaulting to an inflexible foreign
policy at the edge of paralysis that often ends with the collapse of
our authoritarian allies, whether Diem in Saigon, the Shah in Tehran,
or on some dismal day yet to come, Hamid Karzai in Kabul. To avoid
this impending debacle, our only realistic option in Afghanistan today
may well be the one we wish we had taken in Saigon back in August 1963
-- a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probes the
conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over the past
50 years. His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The United
States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State,
explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the
spread of internal security measures here at home.
· Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of
Torture: CIA Interrogation, "From the Cold War to the War on Terror."
Later this year, "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State," a forthcoming
book of his, will explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency
operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.
More: Alfred W. McCoy
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