Page 1 of 2 America and dictators: Diem to Karzai
By Alfred W McCoy
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 United States 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 US 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, US 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 Barack Obama administration's
devolving relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this April. It
is also an eerie summary of relations between the John F 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 Central Intelligence Agency 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 George W 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 US 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 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 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 tonnes in 2001 to 8,200 tonnes 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 US anti-narcotics official assigned to Afghanistan described the
situation in 2006, "Narco corruption went to the very top of the Afghan
government." Earlier this year, the United Nations estimated that ordinary
Afghans spend US$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 tonnes 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 UN'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 UN 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 US 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 UN 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 28, 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,
US 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 US 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 Vietcong
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 gulags.
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, Vietcong 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 Vietcong leaders. Nothing worked. Even the best
military strategy could not fix the underlying political problem. By 1963, the
Vietcong 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 US war effort and
possibly form a coalition with North Vietnam.
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