Expendable Allies: Vietnam's Diem, Afghanistan's Karzai | Black Agenda Report

Expendable Allies: Vietnam's Diem, Afghanistan's Karzai

Glen Ford, BAR executive editor

18 Nov 2009

🖨️ Print Article

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Click the flash player to listen to or the mic to download an audio in MP3 format.

Superpower gangsters steal whole nations as a matter of routine, but feign shock when their handpicked puppets deal in unlicensed larceny. Hamid and Ahmed Karzai are no more nor less loyal to the American Project – and their own fortunes – than were South Vietnamese President Diem and his brother Nhu, who found themselves expendable 46 years ago this month.

Expendable: The Brothers Karzai and Diem

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Freelancing can get you killed by the Boss of All Bosses, in Washington.”

In the last days of 2001, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Americans’ handpicked Hamid Karzai to head that country’s new, puppet government. Eight years later, Washington is blaming Karzai for most, if not all, that has gone wrong with the U.S. occupation. Before and after Karzai’s attempt to rig his re-election, in August, various U.S. generals and politicians – including President Obama – made it clear that they wished Karzai would drop dead or otherwise disappear from the scene.

The U.S. occupiers seemed to totally miss the irony in the fact that it was they who had rigged Karzai's initial rise to power and subsequent election in 2004. Rigged elections are fine when engineered by the U.S., but when the puppet pulls his own strings, it's a crime.

It is bizarre in the extreme how nation-stealers and occupiers cannot bear to see their own boundless corruption reflected in the faces of their Third World hirelings. Karzai was selected to be the Americans’ front man in Afghanistan precisely because of his advanced criminal skills and total absence of loyalty to his own country. These are the qualities that made him attractive to the Americans in the first place – his willingness to participate in crimes against his own nation, for a price. Freelancing, however, can get you killed by the Boss of All Bosses, in Washington. Such is the law of the imperial gangster jungle.

“Nation-stealers and occupiers cannot bear to see their own boundless corruption reflected in the faces of their Third World hirelings.”

Karzai's brother, Ahmed, has long been rumored to be amajor drug lord. He's also the council chief in Kandahar Province, which is the heartland of the Taliban. The Americans pretend that the drug trade is the moneymaker that finances the Taliban, but in fact Afghan heroin has expanded to more than 90 percent of the world market since the Americans and the Karzai brothers took over the country. The same thing happened with Colombian cocaine after the Americans intervened in that country's civil war. The international cocaine and heroin “connections” are actually facilitations of the American government – specifically, the CIA. So, it is hilarious to hear Americans expressing shock and disgust that Karzai brother Ahmed, the reputed drug lord, has been on the CIA's payroll for the last eight years. Well, of course he has! That's what the CIA does. Their modus operandi, throughout the Third World, is to recruit criminal elements to subvert their own countries to America's will. In return, these favored criminals are awarded franchises in the drug trade and other illicit enterprises.

The road to American empire is paved with one criminal enterprise and subversion after another. Two other brothers in service to America come to mind. Ngo Dinh Diem became the American puppet in South Vietnam when the French were forced out. His brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, became chief of the secret police – the top communist-killer. But by 1963, the two brothers who had served the Americans so loyally, had fallen out of favor. They were killed in an American-backed coup, just three weeks before President Kennedy was himself assassinated. The Karzai brothers in Afghanistan are no doubt aware of the historical parallels. But then, gangsters get into “the life” with their eyes open. The boss can always turn on you – and the Americans usually do. Just ask Saddam Hussein.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.

More Stories

Gary Wilson
The Alaska summit and the crumbling proxy war in Ukraine
20 Aug 2025
Washington's strategy of endless war in Ukraine is collapsing under its own weight. The Alaska summit isn't a victory for diplomacy but a stark admission of its defeat.
State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China
Full text: The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2024
20 Aug 2025
A new report from Beijing reveals the hypocrisy of U.S. human rights rhetoric, revealing a nation where gun violence, political corruption, and poverty are not anomalies but features of a broken…
Mohammed El-Kurd
Guilty by Affiliation
13 Aug 2025
The Israeli murder of heroic Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif was bookended by accusations that he was part of Hamas. For many of our allies, the instinct is to prove his innocence by proving…
Edzorna Francis Mensah
Understanding the plot to break Ghana and destroy the AES Countries
13 Aug 2025
When Ghanaian hospitals run out of basics and power grids fail, it’s not mismanagement; it’s the deliberate unraveling by the west of a society that dared to partner with anti-imperialist neighbors.
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
Trump and Democrats Fuel the Washington DC Crime Panic
13 Aug 2025
Donald Trump’s takeover of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department is not merely a result of his racist and authoritarian tendencies, nor is it new. It is part and parcel of a history of…