Diem TKOs Karzai After First Round!

CRINGING AT REPEATING THE SAME MISTAKES.

On Monday the Afghan Independent Election Commission certified that Afghan President Ngo Dinh Diem had won reelection against rival Abdullah Abdullah, removing the need to conduct a second round of voting at the onset of winter in an increasingly insecure country.

Oh, sorry—Diem didn't win reelection; he's been dead for decades!

It was Hamid Karzai who was (ahem) reelected.

You can't blame me for making an analogy to the one-time leader of South Vietnam. Vietnam War comparisons are a dime a dozen in the pundit business lately.

Unfortunately, they're usually the wrong Vietnam analogies.

These wrong analogies focus on the Afghan war based on how it impacts the U.S. They focus on U.S. forces, on the war's cost, on its impact on domestic politics, on how it affects presidential legacies. They focus on the problems of exiting a Vietnam-like quagmire, on sustaining Vietnam-like casualties, on how each new insurgent offensive is a potential Tet, on how our men and women train and strain to be capable soldiers, diplomats, medics and engineers, and how some of them die.

All this echoes how the U.S. focused on itself (or on the Cold War contest) during the Vietnam War, rather than on South and North Vietnam themselves.

The Vietnam analogy I rarely hear relates to how the U.S. is making precisely the same mistake with President Karzai as it did with President Diem of the Republic of South Vietnam.

As in the case of Diem, the U.S. wants an Afghan leader who can be effective on behalf of U.S. policy. And certainly, like the former South Vietnamese strongman, Karzai cleans up well (he wears recognizable clothing and speaks excellent English). His corruption, or that of his family and friends, is tolerable (if it's not overly publicized). There are few other Afghan leaders in Karzai's league (who aren't warlords).

Also like Diem, Karzai's writ stops a few kilometers outside the national capital. His military is undisciplined and untrustworthy (although not yet as treacherous as the ARVN, which shot Diem in 1963). Both Diem and Karzai rely/relied on U.S. aid and military force for their positions, and both made themselves appear indispensable to keep these resources flowing.

There are differences. Tribe was relatively unimportant in South Vietnam, although Diem belonged to the Catholic elite that helped the French rule a Buddhist nation; Karzai belongs to Afghanistan's majority tribe and Islamic denomination. Thanks to both royal and French rule, South Vietnam had a functioning civil service that Afghanistan lacks. Vietnam did not suffer through decades of civil war before U.S. intervention, as Afghanistan has.

Importantly, I don't see the Taliban as a primarily nationalist movement in the way the Vietminh and Vietcong are now considered (or at least nationalists first, Communists second). I see the Taliban as Arab-influenced provincials who manipulate Pashtun affiliations to their own ends.

The fact remains, though, that the U.S. is again propping up an ineffective leader and his light-fingered cronies in a nation that rates domino-like deference from U.S. policymakers. It is maddening to watch the U.S. support an election-stealing figurehead who alienates Afghans from the Kabul government as much as the Diem (and Nhu) families did the South Vietnamese.

Petraeus and Nagl's Counterinsurgency Manual (download the PDF from this link) advises that protecting and providing services to the host-country population are the counterinsurgent's primary concerns, and that the host government should be enabled to provide these services. It follows that counterinsurgents should do everything possible to help Afghans create an honest, effective central government—and then stand back.

Senator Kerry and others have inspired President Karzai to at least genuflect toward clean government. Following his election 'victory,' Karzai held a press conference where he vowed to clean the government of corruption:

"My government will be for all Afghans and all those who want to work with me are most welcome," Karzai said in a nationally televised victory speech.

"There will be crucial changes in our future government. Now we are determined to use all our forces, by any means, to remove this stain (of corruption) from our soil," he said.

But while Karzai said he was committed to reform, some analysts felt he did not spell out his plans in sufficient detail, indicating no major changes were planned.

The Communists won in 1940s China because they were seen as incorruptible, as well as competent administrators of the territory they occupied before 1949. The North Vietnamese copied this formula in the 1960s and won over Vietnamese peasants while the U.S. fretted over who ruled Saigon.

The Taliban national government of the 1990s was seen as incorruptible—at first—and provided security to Afghans, but few other services. Similarly, their insurgent heirs are trying to repeat this pattern by hand-picking a parallel government in areas they control, arguing that Kabul is corrupt and home to only a puppet government.

What will it take for the U.S. to stop supporting its 21st-century Diem and recognize that the first requirement for an Afghan leader is that he be honest and serve all of Afghanistan's citizens?

It almost doesn't matter at this point; the window on voting out the Karzai administration closed with a thump when Abdullah dropped out of the runoff. The next opportunity to get a competent, effective leader in office in Kabul won't be until 2013 or 2014.

Until then, I'm going to keep making the only Vietnam analogy that matters, the one that should flow off the lips of every U.S. officer and diplomat when they go to work in Afghanistan each day:

We saw what happened when we backed crooked leaders in Vietnam. What step am I going to take today, next week and next year—no matter how small—to make sure a clean, competent leader for all Afghans has a chance in 2013?

A Tout France

Sometime correspondent (and blogger on all things culinary near Puget Sound) Ronald Holden is in New York for French Affairs, a conference put on by the French Government Tourist Office.

Although Ron rightly complains about this agency's overly busy Web site (although I love that it leads to a vlog called Lost in Francelation), he finds much to admire about France's unified national program for attracting tourist dollars:

France was the first country to target a wide variety of niche travel markets: gay & lesbian, Jewish, religious, Hispanic, luxury, first-timers, retirees, French expats. Theme travel, too: culinary, wine, ski, spa, and so on. There's no comparable agency promoting the entire USA; individual companies (airlines, hotel chains, Disneyland destinations) and individual states and cities are expected to do their own marketing campaigns. The Sarkozy government pitched in to help France's embattled hospitality sector by cutting the VAT on restaurant meals by 75 percent, but hotel revenues, in the world's most visited country (77 million foreign tourists a year) are still down 13 percent.

So: Not only does France go out of its way to welcome everyone and tempt them with everything, it's also applying good old-fashioned tax policy to make eating out cheaper across the entire country.

That can only encourage longer stays and accomplishing something I was unable to do last year: tear myself away from Paris proper and see the countryside.

It makes me wonder who could possibly take the reins and promote Brand America with one voice, 'round the world. I mean, besides Disney.

Cupping Rwanda

COFFEE MAY HELP REBRAND A NATION BETTER KNOWN FOR GENOCIDE.



A few years ago I helped a client edit a paper on improving African value chains. The paper looked at out how, say, Ugandan growers who made just a nickel on each pineapple could capture more of the five euros the same pineapple fetched by the time it wound up at a Paris grocery store.

There are lots of ways to pull this off. Growers can band together to demand better prices from middlemen, or form their own middleman organization. Or they can pool funds for a processing plant that creates value-added foods like pineapple chunks or slices. Or get a reputable group to certify the pineapples as organic. Or create a brand around the supposed uniqueness of pineapples from a specific Ugandan region, much like the DOC system does for Italian wines. Even simply building cool-storage facilities that keep a surplus fresh for sale at a more favorable time can improve returns.

If you're Rwanda and you have excellent coffee beans but a slight image problem thanks to the 1994 genocide, rebranding seems to be the way to go. In this morning's Post, "A pick-me-up for Rwanda" details how some entrepreneurs are promoting Rwandan coffee here in D.C., a town that I assure you is in desperate need of better espresso:

Emblazoned on the windows of Bourbon Coffee is the phrase "Murakaza neza," which in the Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda means "We welcome you with blessings."

Rwanda is better known for the 1994 genocide that left more than 800,000 people dead than for its cappuccino. But that doesn't stop Arthur Karuletwa, founder of Bourbon Coffee, from dreaming big.

"If done right, it could be the platform to re-brand the country," says Karuletwa, former chief executive and now a shareholder in the company. Coffee can "create awareness that there's recovery, there's trade, there's investment opportunities, there's tourism. There's life after death."

Rwandan coffee growers experience some typical developing-world problems, including poor infrastructure for getting coffee to market, large numbers of small growers, and corrupt officials. But they've also got a product that raises eyebrows among coffee professionals:

"Rwanda is a very wanted origin," says Susie Spindler, executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, which runs the Cup of Excellence competition [the Oscars of coffee]. She says coffee traders and roasters visiting Rwanda are discovering unusual flavor profiles they never knew existed.

"It mixes a lot of regular characteristics that you usually only find in one area," agrees Stacey Manley, Bourbon's barista. "Latin American coffees tend to be lighter-bodied and kind of nutty with cocoa. But you almost never find an earthy, really heavy-bodied Latin American coffee. Those are typically Indonesian characteristics. And in Indonesia, coffee is very rarely bright. So the weird thing about Rwandan coffee is it'll have all these different characteristics in one coffee."

In the tradition of European wines, Rwanda has succeeded in establishing five distinct coffee appellations. Altitudes and soils vary among the appellations, creating unique flavors: spicy with hints of tea and cocoa in one, nutty with berry and floral notes in another.

So I'm going to go and try Bourbon Coffee, which is at 2101 L St. NW. Watch for stores in Boston and New York. Socioeconomic competitor: the three Juan Valdez Coffee outlets in D.C., which I tried once. While the decor was beautiful, I could barely gak down the espresso; Juan must have been having an off day because everyone else seems to love the joint.

Clinton, Russia and the Caucasus

YOU DON'T HEAR MUCH ABOUT RUSSIA, BUT IT SURE DOES TAKE A LOT OF SECRETARY CLINTON'S TIME.


Secretary Clinton doesn't spend a lot of time at home lately, and I suspect one big reason is that she's taken on the Russia portfolio at State.

Not only does she have the thankless task of persuading Moscow to tighten the screws on Iran, prodding it gently on human rights, and supporting its WTO bid, she also appeared at the signing of the new Turkish-Armenian agreement that opens the countries' borders for the first time in 16 years and invites the establishment of embassies in each other's capitals.

What's this last task have to do with Russia? A financially exhausted Moscow would love to see a more stable Caucasus whose squabbling nations—Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, various "autonomous republics," etc.—didn't soak up quite so much money and attention.

It's no surprise that the first visit by an Armenian president to Turkey is to attend a Turkey-Armenia soccer match. Feelings about the match run high in both countries but at least neither is still in the running for the World Cup. As one Armenian man interviewed by the BBC put it, "Perhaps a draw would be the perfect score as it would be a show of goodwill between the two countries. ..."

BJP and the One-Party State

This morning's Times had an interesting piece about the collapse--to near irrelevance--of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu ultra-nationalists whose rise interrupted generations of Congress Party dominance. What's interesting is that Lydia Polgreen explicitly compares the BJP's flameout to the U.S Republican Party's loss of the presidency last year:

NEW DELHI — It is an all-too-familiar political story.

First there was the electoral drubbing at the hands of a center-left juggernaut. Next came the recriminations, with party leaders taking nasty, public swipes at one another in dueling magazine articles, op-ed articles and talk show appearances. Then came the agonizing debate: should the party lurch rightward to consolidate its base, or rush toward the center to attract moderate voters? And finally, the purge: party members who do not make the ideological cut are cast out or pushed aside.

If the script sounds familiar to those who have followed American politics in the last year, this one is playing out in the majestic, colonial-era halls of power in India’s capital ...

Polgreen points out that, virulent though the BJP may have been, its emergence as a viable alternative to Congress drove New Delhi to actually get things done--which Congress, unopposed in the past, didn't excel at. In the U.S., the Republican Party also shook things up with its dozen years' control of Congress following Democrats' 40 years.

At its roots the BJP is a Hindu fundamentalist party that alienated many with its insistence that a Hindu temple should replace a Muslim mosque, a stance that caused rioting and hundreds of deaths over the past decade or so. Now that it's in the wilderness, the BJP will be forced to reexamine its core beliefs and, like the GOP here, has begun that process with a purge of those judged insufficiently zealous.

It remains to be seen whether later generations see the coming years as the point where these parties were reduced to merely regional power, or expanded their influence by beckoning a wider range of followers.

The GOP has experience with reinventing itself in precisely this way, dating back to the rise of Ronald Reagan. Will the BJP make the same choice, or doom itself to ruling Gujarat?

Israel, Hamas, and German Neutrality

HEY, GAME THEORISTS! PRISONER'S DILEMMA, INDEED.

Sometimes soft power comes from being seen as neutral.

In Richard Boudreaux's account of Israel's effort to retrieve a soldier captured by Hamas during the 2006 Gaza war, one item stands out: Both sides see a German as an adequately disinterested party.

Israel wants proof that Gilad Shalit is even alive. Hamas wants the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has made an updated video of Shalit, but Israel doesn't trust that Hamas is providing adequate evidence of Shalit's well-being. Israel needs a way to know that the evidence is good enough without turning over the Palestinian prisoners and without seeing the video, which would generate expectations of a quid pro quo.

It's a classic prisoner's dilemma where Israel can't defect but is extremely reluctant to cooperate.

Here's what happens next:

Israel Radio reported that a German mediator had reviewed the recording in Cairo and would show it to Israeli officials. They would then decide whether it conveys enough information about Shalit's condition to go ahead with the release of the Palestinian prisoners.

It reminds me strongly of Martti Ahtisaari's role in brokering the peace in Northern Ireland. As I recall, Britain wanted proof that the Irish Republican Army's weapons had been destroyed; the IRA wouldn't do that but offered to put them "beyond use," whatever that was supposed to mean. Both sides turned to Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and a man whose word is considered beyond reproach.

Apparently the IRA took Ahtisaari (and a South African counterpart) for blindfolded rides somewhere, and they indeed saw that the IRA's guns were permanently unusable—without ever specifying how. They reported back that the IRA was true its word, which cleared the way for today's largely peaceful Northern Ireland.

The idea that a mediator from Germany—with its Nazi past (however distant) and its troops in Afghanistan (however reluctant)—is acceptable to both Hamas and Israel is an impressive if unheralded part of German soft power. If the parties cannot trust each other, they have at least found a neutral who they can trust.

Brazil Steps In

SOUTH AMERICA'S 800-POUND GORILLA FLEXES ITS MUSCLE IN ... TEGUCIGALPA?




On the whole, Brazil has kept a pretty low profile on the international stage in the past few years, letting Venezuela's President Chavez bang his shoe on the table of the Americas. Brazil has seemed content to let Chavez preen and posture, especially in the case of the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

Chavez has wanted Zelaya, a fellow constitutionally elected rabble-rouser, returned to power, presumably so that he can count another leftist-turned-autocrat in his corner. The Obama administration has straight-facedly insisted it also wants Zelaya back in power, remembering the soft-power carnage wrought by the Bush administration's quick embrace of a coup that briefly ejected Chavez in 2002.

Now, after being repeatedly denied reentry to Honduras, Zelaya has popped up at Brazil's embassy in the Honduran capital, causing near-apoplexy in the de facto Micheletti government.

Brazil has already protested Honduran security forces' actions against its mission--but the question remains: Why would Brazil take the dramatic step of using its embassy as Zelaya's staging ground in the first place?

(Readers who served at State in the 1960s and '70s can stop laughing at the idea of Brazil, then perennially under military dictatorship, upholding any constitution. Stop it. Right now.)

I'm tempted to say the answer is profile, profile, profile.

Brazil, South America's biggest country and largest economy, has surely chafed at Chavez's hijinks--particularly since President da Silva is also mildly lefty but has tried to run his country somewhere besides into the ground. Brazil has called for a prompt meeting of the UN Security Council to consider the Honduran crisis. And Brasilia has the political capital and all-around muscle to weather a lengthy disruption to its diplomatic activities in Honduras.

In short, Brazil takes a welcome turn on the side of law and order; asserts regional leadership while stealing Hugo Chavez's spotlight; gets to make that dramatic call to the UN; and is now owed a favor by the Obama administration which, despite efforts to broker a deal in Honduras, has been unable to pull it off.

Maybe there's some quid pro quo on Brazilian ethanol in our future. ...

James Fallows at Gov 2.0

John Podesta and The Atlantic's James Fallows did a nice let's-interview-each-other at Gov 2.0 today and Fallows provided a few scraps of wisdom, based largely on his past three years' residence in China.

He noted that Chinese impressions of the U.S. are not yet created by social media, but said that it's "still American movies and TV iving impressions of the U.S. ... Old media still tell more of America's story internationally than new media do."

Podesta said that "The role of English overseas is a marvel ... you see Poles speaking to Koreans [in English] and all the rest," meaning that English is now a true lingua franca in his experience; he sees an opportunity to engage ESL foreign audiences with English-language broadcasting across platforms.

He was hopeful about the idea of having conversations with foreign publics as opposed to issuing statements to them, noting that "this sweeping empowering steps may be one that the U.S. is better equipped to take than other countries."

On Chinese search-engine freedom, Fallows thinks Google remains a big improvement, in terms of sheer numbers of results returned, than Baidu or other Chinese-language search sites.

And not to end on a down note, but Fallows feels the "sense of American renewal" he says foreign audiences had immediately after President Obama's election has "evaporated completely."

Heading to Gov 2.0

I'll be at Gov 2.0 to be among the twitterati for the next couple days, starting with tonight's reception at Google HQ. Please call rather than e-mailing if you're in town and would like to meet up: 818.749.2420.

Germany's Reputation

During the time I was in Afghanistan last year, it would have been a mistake to say that German forces kept a low profile in northern Afghanistan. They kept zero profile, by report of everyone I worked with at Bagram: no active patrolling outside their base, some daytime reconstruction activity, all in all pretty hunkered down.

Whether the German soldiers themselves wanted it this way was beside the point since civilian leadership back home told them to stay put. That's because Chancellor Merkel wanted a twofer: to get Germany credit for being a pillar of NATO, but ideally to sustain zero casualties in the process by playing it safe with a minimal mission in the safest part of Afghanistan.

Shh--the German electorate is sleeping.

And this scheme worked for years, as Germans generally seemed unaware that their soldiers were fighting, or fighting to stay out of, a war thousands of miles from home.

Now, Merkel has gotten the worst possible outcome: German commanders decided to destroy two hijacked fuel trucks; they ordered an air attack based on single-source intelligence; many civilians died; and through some near-mystical lack of cojones, German soldiers weren't ordered to secure the site of the attack until the next day. In a singular episode of what my boss at Bagram used to call the "self-cleaning battlefield," there wasn't a single body left.

U.S. commanders will see a familiar pattern here: We bomb, good and bad guys die, everyone gets buried before even a rudimentary investigation gets under way. It's a universal problem of this type of war, and not a big deal for electorates in the U.S. and Britain which have no problem referring to an "Afghan war."

The real problem is back home in Germany, where some members of Parliament are going bonkers and "prosecutors in Potsdam said Monday that they were considering whether to open a homicide investigation into the decision by a German military commander to order the airstrike. ..."

In other words, a Germany that's unaware it's involved in a war, or refuses to call it that or certify its military actions as such, may have to decide what it really thinks. On the fly. Right before German national elections on September 27. Anyone want to ask former Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar whether any of this sounds familiar?