Monday, October 19, 2009

Another Viet Nam? You bet.

CNN is reporting the results of a new poll that 6 in 10 of Americans questioned feel like the American commitment in Afghanistan could turn into another Viet Nam. That has already happened.

A few weeks ago my toddler knocked a bunch of books off a low shelf, one of them being Stanley Karnow's excellent Viet Nam: A History. So I re-read parts of that.

(I am in the camp contending that the central folly of our Viet Nam War was the belief that Ho Chi Minh was essentially a Communist, when he was in fact a nationalist. If the Best and the Brightest had viewed the Viet Cong--and Viet Minh before them--through that prism, they would have rightly judged the war unwinnable. )

The US support of Diem in the late '50s and early '60s is what really caught my eye. He was corrupt in the way that such a leader in such a circumstance needs to be corrupt to survive. He also stuffed ballot boxes, all with the acquiescence of the US government, including the Democratic Administration of JFK. He was our puppet.

You may not remember a certain news story back in the heady days after the fall of the Taliban in 2002. The grandees of tribal Afghanistan gathered for their tribal loya jirga (a political convention, for these purposes), to form the Afghanistan Transitonal Administration. Hamid Karzai was trotted out on stage at one point to accept the jirga's election of himself as President. Except that the participants had not yet cast their votes. Whoops. Strike one for his handlers.

I guess that was my first clue that we were setting him up as our puppet. And now look. Opium trade accounts for, by one estimate, HALF of the country's GDP. Wow. The country is falling apart so completely that some Afghans would rather have the hated Taliban running the show than the corrupt officialdom now bleeding them dry. And Karzai can't buy himself an election.

Diem was assassinated by coup plotters in November 1963, also with the acquiescence of JFK, coincidentally only a few weeks before he met a similar fate in Dealy Plaza. What followed were increasingly corrupt and weak presidents (I'm talking about Viet Nam here.) We need to change policy but fast in Afghanistan.

The US at first raised only minimal "concerns" about what was obviously overwhelming fraud--because he is our guy. But now he may be going the way of Diem.

1 Comments:

Blogger bigsoxfan said...

Interesting the Afghan PM has surrounded himself with American bodyguards, at least he has learned something. Although, with that much money, I wouldn't put it past his "trustworthy" bodyguards to toss a grenade in the back of his APC.
What do you do with a country that doesn't have or envision or can imagine a system of self government? Beats me, but the hole has been dug and a lot of guys are threatened with burial.
well written questions. Anyone that says they have the answer, I would call an idiot/moron or professional liar/politician. What a freaking mess.

9:49 PM  

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