Office of the Historian

543. Memorandum From Harold H. Saunders of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow)1

Washington, May 2, 1967.

SUBJECT

  • Further Aid for Afghanistan

Now that we have broken loose the PL 480 for Afghanistan, we ought to look forward to the two remaining aid items on the Afghanistan agenda:

1.
The big one, of course, is the Kajakai Dam loan. This has now worked its way almost all the way through the AID loan machinery and will come to us sometime in the next week or two.
2.
There is also a $4.6 million loan for earthmoving equipment to be used in the Helmand Valley, largely for irrigation works. This is already to go and would not normally come to the President because it is less than $10 million. However, in view of the President’s general freeze on Afghanistan aid, AID is asking whether it can go ahead on its own. I agreed to sound you out since you have talked recently with the President.

If the President does not feel strongly about this any longer, you may want me to give AID a go-ahead on the small loan. The Kajakai loan will have to come to the President later anyway. If you feel the President would not like anything to go ahead without his knowing, we can hold the small loan a week or two until we are ready to [Page 1077] check the Kajakai project with him and simply make the smaller one a paragraph in that memo.

Hal

Go ahead with the equipment loan

We’d better check it with the President later2

  1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Files of Harold H. Saunders, Afghanistan, 4/1/66–1/20/69. Secret.↩
  2. Rostow changed the second option to read: “We’d damned well better check it with the President,” and added, “See me, WR.”↩