While current regimes and their immediate successors aren't irrelevant, when it's clear that they seem ineffectual or passively aggressively resistant to the policies you want to have implemented, the focus should be on winning the hearts and minds of the next generation, which is a rather long term investment.

This may sound trite, but you want to create a consumer society that wants to connect with the rest of the world, where the kids are indoctrinated to want to drink coke and eat at McDonald's. You might even say corrupting the national moral fibre. With it comes the drive to buy electronic toys and consume media especially stuff that turns out to be very relateable and easily pirated. Essentially, you want the populace to be want what the West has and to be able to live that lifestye.

Gandhi disliked railroads for two reasons. It destroyed his non-existent nostalgic concept of how India should be, and identified it as one of the cornerstones of how the British maintained their rule over the subcontinent, and the facilitation of it's economic exploitation. While I wouldn't know of any community that doesn't welcome a better road system, if one is built, it will allow the world to have a deeper impact on rural life, and perhaps on the tactical side, make it difficult or impossible to set up ambushes or plant IEDs without immediately detecting them.

The Vietnamese government might want to keep the lid down without curtailing economic development, but the Vietnamese themselves want everything the world can give them and get rich.