Just when you were thinking that I am a lone voice among former British diplomats lamenting the plummet in intellectual coherence and standards within the New Labour FCO, here is another one.

He has sprung into action after seeing this strange article by David Miliband in the New Statesman in which the Foreign Secretary tries to put the Taliban in context by comparing them to the Vietcong:

The Vietcong were a broad, deeply rooted, popular movement tapping into nationalist feelings throughout the country and society, and their appeal and legitimacy ultimately proved superior to that of the South Vietnamese regime. The Taliban have limited appeal due to their ethnicity, geography and the recent memory of their brutal, reactionary misrule. Afghans fear their return…

Any normal person might agree that the Taliban are vicious and primitive, but note the carefully drafted, rather romantic if not lyrical way the Vietcong are portrayed, their ‘appeal and legitimacy’ being contrasted with the ‘reactionary’ Taliban. (Didn’t Hitler lead a broad, deeply rooted, popular movement tapping into nationalist feelings throughout the country and society?)

And maybe my memory is a bit wobbly these days, but did not a large number of South Vietnamese ‘fear’ the Viet Cong-style communists and try to run away from them?

Luckily we have people around who know the answer.

Such as Derek Tonkin, British Ambassador to Vietnam 1980-82, who has been moved to submit a Comment:

David Miliband is seriously mistaken if he believes that the "Viet Cong", a pejorative name which the Americans gave to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, either won the battle for the minds of the population of South Vietnam or played any serious role in the defeat of the South Vietnamese forces.

By the time the Americans had withdrawn their troops from Vietnam by the end of March 1973, the Viet Cong had effectively been neutralised to the point that they were no longer a serious military threat. South Vietnam was lost as a result of a premeditated invasion in violation of the 1973 Paris Agreements by regular North Vietnamese forces in which the Viet Cong played only a marginal role.

The reaction of the South Vietnamese population to the North Vietnamese invasion was one of general horror and despair, epitomised in the "Convoy of Tears" from the Central Highlands in March 1975 and the tens of thousands who in subsequent months sought to escape from South Vietnam by boat and of whom as many as one third are thought to have perished at sea…

That is pretty conclusive?

Of course as a little boy David Miliband soaked up his Marxist father’s love for Vietnamese Communists and his opposition to the US military effort to stop them:

In 1967 he wrote in the Socialist Register that "the US has over…a period of years been engaged…in the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children, the maiming of many more" and that the United States’ "catalogue of horrors" against the Vietnamese people was being done "in the name of an enormous lie.

Remember David Miliband’s gushing tribute to Joe Slovo, another die-hard communist and Miliband family friend?

Dismal? Banal? Dishonest? I can’t make up my mind.