America and dictators: Diem to Karzai
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD17Df01.html
By Alfred W McCoy
Apr 17, 2010
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.
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 grace.
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 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 US 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 US
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 US 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 US ultimately settled
for authoritarian military rule, which, acceptable as it proved in
Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry.
Death or exile?
So is 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 US
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 US 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 US
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 US 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 US 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 Ronald Reagan's second
presidential 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 Bakiyev's rule was brutal and corrupt,
last year the Obama administration courted him sedulously and
successfully to preserve US 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, 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 US forces.
--
Alfred W McCoy is the JRW 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 counter-insurgency operations on
the spread of internal security measures here at home.
.
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