Hamid Karzai: Afghanistan's Diem

[bemildred]

The mountains of Afghanistan are quickly growing verdant in their similarity to the jungles of Vietnam. The revelation this week in the New York Times that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Karzai, is a ''thug'', ''suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade'', and ''on the CIA payroll'', is striking not for its news quotient, but for the fact that it was made by what appear to be White House officials. We are in 1963 all over again.

It was that year that American president John F Kennedy, fresh off his victory in the Cuban missile crisis, began asserting himself more deeply in the Vietnam conflict, which had, until then, been run almost entirely by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The president was intervening because Ngo Dinh Diem, the CIA's man in Saigon, a city he ruled in a country he only tried to rule, had gained a reputation as a gangster, thug, and narcotics dealer both on the ground in Vietnam and in the international press.

Diem had carefully built a network of power from his base of Catholic supporters, French post-colonial arms and narcotics dealers, local criminals, control of the prostitution and bar industry, and through work with a longtime Saigon criminal syndicate known as the Bin Xuyen, originally river pirates, now traders in narcotics, and more importantly, information. His spy network was thorough and terrifying to the local populace. Through this network, Diem, a man who kept a working casino on the top floor of his presidential palace, had gained a firm grip on the security of Saigon.

However, the North Vietnamese had built a successful public relations campaign against Diem for these very reasons. Kennedy felt he had to win over the population of Vietnam, and could never do so with such a known thug in office. This was in direct contradiction to the CIA's perspective. Their chief man in Asia, Edward Lansdale, had personally nurtured Diem's rise to power. He felt that Diem, while dirty, had taken great strides in gaining control of a country that the colonial French had so recently fled.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ30Df05.html