Last Chopper Out of Kabul

What ails our foreign policy establishment?

Recently, President Obama has been severely tested in his conduct of the Afghan war, battered by his own party for his escalation of George W. Bush’s quagmire. Insurgents seem to be surging in province after province. Washington’s man on the ground, President Hamid Karzai, continues to siphon American aid and his own national treasury into his nepotistic coterie, and his people seems to be disaffected, to say the least, from his incompetent government. The national army is no match on its own for the insurgency, which makes American withdrawal either less likely or more costly. At home, speculation is rising that those mercurial “hearts and minds” have been won by the enemy.
Substitute Obama for Kennedy, and Afghanistan for Vietnam, and so forth, and you’ve got a near perfect match. In Vietnam, as in Afghanistan, the U.S. government and the press were enthusiastic about bringing human rights and democratic institutions to backwards Asia. But traditional anti-communist figures such as the Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, and tribal and religious leaders of the Cao Dai or Hoa Ho wouldn’t deliver on those goals. Instead, the U.S. preferred a well-spoken leader who could communicate with the West and assure us that political and social modernization would transform Vietnam. This new president, Ngo Dinh Diem, directly received millions of dollars in aid, enough to make up a majority of the national budget of the newly created South Vietnam. Mysteriously, to Americans anyway, the South Vietnamese despised their president almost as much as Afghans today detest Hamid Karzai. As Harvard seniors think about careers in journalism or the foreign service, it might be useful to think about America’s continuing problems with picking its friends abroad.
The last period of security and development in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, was under the monarchy. Both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai started as loyal ministers to deposed monarchs, but went for the role of top dog once America decided democracy had arrived to stay. In this new iteration, the CIA has taken up the task of keeping the Karzai family well-funded. Hamid’s brother Mahmood, who has extensive experience as a Boston restaurateur, now holds down the national security council and oversees Afghanistan’s heavy industry. Afghans are so confused by our attachment to this corrupt government and by our tightly-written rules of engagement that rumors abound to the effect that the Americans must actually be aiding the Taliban insurgency. Afghan hearts and minds turn out to prefer Taliban law and order to Karzai corruption and inconsistent American protection.
Though there are fewer foreign desks these days, the media’s boosting of democracy and Karzai as the solutions to our problems in Afghanistan follows the same script as the one they followed when it came to Diem and South Vietnam. In 2004, the New York Times proclaimed Karzai the man to bring a “new chapter” to Afghanistan, the man who would eliminate the poppy fields within two years and set up schools for girls. In October of this year, American readers learned from the same source that Karzai depends not only on the American military presence, but on Iranian money. Most of the Afghan cabinet remains unfilled after the last shady election.
Are we at the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end? Long years might await our soldiers in Afghanistan and our “non-combat troops” in Iraq, as they did for Kennedy’s so-called “advisors” in South Vietnam. Perhaps we have learned how to speed up history, and perhaps soon we can expect the last chopper from Kabul that Obama has promised. But he question of American military involvement in democracy-building and humanitarian intervention won’t go away: The executive director of Human Rights Watch proposed recently in Foreign Policy decisive action against rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army, in Uganda.
If you’re a Harvard student interested in foreign affairs, the good news is that the ranks of the political and journalistic establishment have never been more in need of well-educated young people interested in foreign policy—well, perhaps not since the ’60s, anyway. The bad news is that it’s up to you to think about the fruits of  promoting democracy abroad at the tip of a sword, to investigate our refusal to think about priorities, and to find out a way for us to pick better friends the next time boots hit the ground.
Daniel Barbero ’11 is a former Books & Arts Editor.
Photo Credit: Flickr – Steve Evans