We’ve spent most of the past several years listening to liberals nattering away about how first Iraq and now Afghanistan is the new Vietnam. But finally, those making such arguments in the hope of undermining our efforts to resist the Taliban have a leg to stand on, even if a proper understanding of this episode leads to conclusions they don’t like.
The New York Times‘s front-page story for December 17 is about the efforts of American diplomat Peter W. Galbraith to depose the president of Afghanistan last year — which ought to set our collective Vietnam-analogy alarm bells ringing. According to United Nations officials, it appears that Galbraith tried to enlist the Obama White House in a plan to oust Afghan President Hamid Karzai last summer. Galbraith appears to think that Karzai is too corrupt to be a plausible leader of that country and tried to use the wholesale fraud committed to secure the president’s re-election to convince Obama to throw our Afghan ally under the proverbial bus. Galbraith was right about the level of fraud, but his position as the No. 2 UN official in Afghanistan did not entitle him to play kingmaker, let alone be the moving force behind what amounts to a plot that aimed at some sort of coup d’état. Galbraith, a protégé of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s top Afghanistan envoy, was fired in the aftermath of his attempt to force a change in government. He claims he only discussed such a plan but did not actively promote it.
Vietnam analogies have fallen flat in Afghanistan not least because America’s role in the country is the direct result of the 9/11 attacks on our soil and not because of some remote strategic concept about potential threats. But the spectacle of a would-be America pro-consul blithely attempting to install a new Afghan government ought to remind us of a key event in the Vietnam saga. In the fall of 1963, the Kennedy administration had soured on the South Vietnamese government led by Ngo Dinh Diem. Like Karzai, Diem was a fairly effective ruler but corrupt and undemocratic. Kennedy ordered U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to refuse to meet with Diem, and the United States gave South Vietnamese generals who were hoping to replace Diem America’s tacit support. On Nov. 1, 1963, the plotters struck, and the United States made no attempt to stop the coup. A day later Diem and his brother were captured and executed.
The fallout from this affair would have long-range effects on the outcome of the war. South Vietnam’s stability was fatally undermined. The American-backed coup and assassination helped the Stalinist rulers of North Vietnam portray the South as an American puppet regime. Rather than work with a strong local leader, Kennedy, who would also be tragically assassinated only weeks later, had fatally undermined the South’s efforts to resist the Communists. Though the war in Vietnam would undergo many other twists and betrayals, the ousting of Diem set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the establishment of a Communist police state throughout the length of that country and an unprecedented humiliation for the United States. Though Americans lost interest in Vietnam after the last U.S. soldier left, the legacy of our failure there was paid not so much in the loss of our prestige as it was in the suffering of the Vietnamese people as hundreds of thousands were forced to flee as “boat people,” and untold numbers were tortured and killed in Communist “re-education” camps.
The memory of the Kennedy administration’s criminal stupidity in Vietnam ought to stand as an example of exactly how Americans ought not to try to micromanage Afghanistan. Like Diem, Hamid Karzai is no Jeffersonian democrat, but his government may well be that nation’s best hope to prevent a return to power of an Islamofascist Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies.
The Left’s conventional wisdom about the lessons of Vietnam tends to spin around the notion that all American attempts to prevent far-off countries from falling into the hands of totalitarians are expressions of hubris that must be punished with failure. But this is flawed history. The full-scale commitment of half a million American troops in Vietnam might have been misguided, but that failure was guaranteed not so much by the shortcomings of our local allies as much as by the misguided attempts by American diplomats and presidents to micromanage Saigon. Those who disliked the corrupt Diem were forced to accept far worse successors, and in the end, the whole country was swallowed up by a Stalinist regime that made Diem look like a saint by comparison. Those who can’t stand Karzai should think about this before they blithely assume that no one can be worse than him. That this piece of knavery should be concocted by Galbraith, the son of one of Kennedy’s court jesters, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as JFK’s ambassador to India, only adds to the irony.
