History Rhyming

So I read in the Guardian that the US-installed Karzai controls little of Afghanistan beyond his presidential palace in Kabul. Meanwhile, the traditional north/south ethnic divide in Afghanistan is spilling over into renewed conflict and assassination. The US avoided garrison duty, and now the British are desperately trying to convince the Turks to take this hot potato. They are refusing.

Reading about increasingly-embattled Karzai remindes me a lot of Vietnam and Generals Thieu and Thé. I read that US warplanes are actively bombing the opposition forces in Afghanistan. And then, fortuitously, I came across this article:

In Vietnam, the United States pursued its interests, as it perceived them, throughout; and as its perceptions changed, so did its allegiances, as any great power’s would. The rest was rhetoric … What political lessons can we learn from this tangle? First, great powers are fickle, and only care about themselves, not their small allies of opportunity, the Generals Thieu and Thé of the present and future. Then again, there is no such thing as a trustworthy surrogate: they have wills of their own, aims that may coincide with their protectors’ only in the short term, and an alarming ability to drag great powers into their quarrels and to change sides when the dollars dry up.

Earlier here.