America and the Dictators

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 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 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.