The U. S. und Southeast Asia-Four Articles:
WRIGHT, HANS J. MORGENTHAU \ WILL SPARKS \ LUTHER A. ALLEN \ EDWARD R. Jr.
The U.S. and Southeast Asia - Four Articles Realities of Containment By Hans J. Morgenthau IT is difficult, hazardous and painful to try to discover beneath the layers of official...
...It was in the midst of this deteriorating situation that Tuu took up his post as Province Chief and commenced his Pacification Program...
...An American field worker reports the Vietnamese director of the college as saying that all graduates have gone to Saigon desk jobs—a result far from the intended goal of the project...
...The French found that out in Indochina and Algeria...
...can no longer afford to tolerate a negative and badly administered aid program justified solely on an anti-Communist basis...
...A Time for Patience By Will Sparks Only a few months ago, most Americans believed that the persistent guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam was itself proof of the hopeless unpopularity of the government in Saigon...
...Hilsman says of his Burma experience, "we gave no quarter to the enemy and his supporters, but we did everything we could to avoid creating hardship for the rest and to help them when we could...
...This was balanced to an extent, however, by mistakes on the part of the local Vietcong, who had made the classic blunder of alienating the local population...
...There is reason to hope that eventually there can be achieved in Vietnam a de facto settlement at least as stable as Korea's...
...In early March, Tuu recruited 15 Pacification Teams designed to secure the province against Vietcong pressures...
...Each consists of 14 civil servants (formerly assigned to comfortable province headquarters), 34 self-defense volunteers, and two women...
...A benevolent fate in the form of Chinese weakness has thus far protected us from having to face this...
...It has not been uncommon in the past for aid goods to be sold to villagers either directly or in the form of a "tax...
...To the eyes of a military strategist, the incredibly difficult terrain of Southeast Asia makes the hills and plains of Korea seem, by comparison, the desert sands of North Africa...
...Perhaps, after all, the most realistic policy alternative is to attempt some kind of accommodation with Communist China...
...We are now realizing that the same principles and ground-rules are not entirely applicable...
...IN other words, the extension of the war would raise acutely the issue that has been implicit in our Asian policies for 15 years and that became acute only once, during the Korean war: the peripheral containment of China...
...Agency for International Development representative in Quang Tri (who fortunately speaks Vietnamese), with supplies of fertilizer or bulgar wheat as payment for a wide variety of small projects taking as little as four days to complete...
...The best we can hope for is a regime with enough confidence in itself to permit flexibility on the part of its military commanders in the field and the exercise of independent judgment by district and provincial officials...
...One thing is certain, however: The U.S...
...Others, like the Rhades, have little communication with the dominant Vietnamese and would prefer to have even less...
...This shortage of qualified manpower can be traced partly to the lack of facilities for training needed workers, and to an exodus of qualified technicians to other countries...
...Such agreement should be adapted to the needs of each particular recipient nation, and should be as detailed as possible in its provisions...
...Applying these considerations to the situation in Southeast Asia, one realizes that two contradictory political tendencies dominate the area...
...After the rest of the party bedded down for the night in the school house, Tuu spent some time catching up on his administrative chores, signing papers for that day's work at Quang Tri's Province Headquarters brought to him by one of his deputies...
...Just as there is no quick military solution for Vietnam, so there is no quick political solution...
...Tuu himself is particularly well qualified for his position both personally and politically...
...Obviously the present government of South Vietnam must wage an uphill struggle to regain the allegiance of the Delta's population...
...And when we had to ask them for food, we paid for it or arranged an airdrop of double the amount of rice we took...
...To an Asian, the United States, with its economic prosperity and political stability, presents a seemingly impossible goal...
...Giving his unofficial opinion that the corps had proved to be virtually useless, he indicated that 700 corps officers were in this relatively untouched-by-the-war city of Saigon in safe, bureaucratic positions...
...It has been estimated that to seal Vietnam's endless borders against infiltration would require more infantry divisions than are possessed by NATO...
...These are qualities hard enough to come by, in a country emerging from 100 years of French bureaucracy superimposed on the Chinese Mandarin tradition, without the added burden of a paranoid, suspicion-ridden government in Saigon...
...conscription into the Army not different from forced labor for the Vietcong...
...His first official act was to reduce the contributions which villages had been required to make to province funds, and to abolish the onerous taxes on markets and transport...
...The first of Guevara's Three Principles: "The forces of the people can win a war against the Army...
...These barriers to progress in Vietnam—military insecurity, waste and corruption, and a shortage of trained leadership—need not present an unbridgeable chasm...
...More important, there was serious interference with the Communist guerrillas' overland supply trails from the north, via Laos and Cambodia...
...The tribes of the highlands have suffered every injustice a "civilized" society is capable of inflicting upon aborigines who stand in its way, from land expropriation to social denigration (a practice as common among men with yellow skins as among those who are white...
...Never a unified nation and containing a polygot population— including Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and various highland tribes —South Vietnam is trying to bypass the growth pains of more technologically advanced nations to achieve viability in an extremely insecure and unstable part of the globe...
...The extent of U. S. economic and military aid totals about $1.5 million a day, and our aid mission totals approximately 16.000 persons...
...Nguyen Xuan Oanh, former International Monetary Fund official, indicated that the primary method for acquiring this money was through "kickbacks" from contractors...
...These hamlets, though well fortified and theoretically defensible, have been generally unsuccessful, primarily because of insufficient support by both the people involved and the Vietnamese military...
...Their duties require them to live, work, and eat with the people in the villages...
...To cite other examples: One American contractor turned over a substantial amount of heavy construction equipment to the Vietnamese Department of Public Works after completing a highwaybuilding project...
...At night, these same Pacification Teams carry on two quite different forms of activity...
...My own closest experience has been with the educational system, which is encumbered by a flood of students and a dearth of teachers and administrators...
...for some reason, they violated the tenet by their conduct in the highlands...
...the Revolution of November 1 was extolled for being fundamentally nationalist and democratic, while the reasons for opposing Communism, colonialism, the Diem family dictatorship, and the latest Communist tactic of neutralism were thoroughly explored...
...I think Guevara and Colonel Nemo are right...
...If you agree that cadres are decisive for the success of the movement, you can see clearly how important your role is...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that the Vietcong are primarily supplied with U.S...
...Moreover, there is a deep traditional distrust of China among all Vietnamese, whose ancestors suffered 900 years of occupation and exploitation by China centuries before the word "colonialism" was coined...
...He gave them two weeks of intensive training, including political instruction...
...In one aid-mission "self-help" project, it was found that hamlet leaders were inclined to request pigs and cows rather than construction materials for badly needed school rooms, community centers, or health facilities...
...Six weeks earlier the area had been under the control of the Vietcong by night, and was dangerous for government officials even by day...
...But such a regime will not end the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam...
...Although the percentages of pro and con may be somewhat different, this is substantially what is happening now in Vietnam...
...Communist North Vietnam) is grown there...
...This is one of the matters which the Diem government stubbornly refused to understand and a principle cause of its ultimate failure...
...If it was not clear a decade ago, it should be clear now that our national interest, as presently defined, requires the containment of Russian and Chinese power, and requires political and military opposition to Communist governments elsewhere only in so far as they serve that power...
...He kept in touch with both Province Headquarters and the seven District Headquarters through a radio car, messages from which were carried across the river by aides into the middle of the night...
...There can be no doubt that much of what is being said officially about what we shall do in that part of the world is aimed at deterring the enemy, hardening our friends, disarming the domestic opposition and preventing a catastrophe from occurring before November...
...Before the November 1 Revolution a government official said in private that the 200,000-member civil defense corps was "in shambles...
...It has long been a Vietcong custom, for example, to assassinate unpopular officials as a technique for winning friends...
...For such opposition, driving the Communist governments of Asia into the arms of China, defeats containment, and the end of containment is in the long run not likely to be achieved with the limited military means chosen...
...On February 19, a man who until the Revolution of November 1, 1963, had been imprisoned in Hue by the Ngo Dinh Diem regime—Hoang Xuan Tuu— was named Province Chief of Quang Tri...
...government official—or Presidential candidate —can openly espouse such an approach until after next November's national elections...
...The Teams did not go into action until March 20 and it is still too early to determine what permanent effect they will have, but as early as the first 10 days of April the rate of resistence to Vietcong attacks in the strategic hamlets had surged up from the low of 19 per cent in March to 75 per cent...
...We should realize from our experience of the past few years in Vietnam and elsewhere that "ideology," while certainly a factor in international politics, cannot provide sufficient impetus or foundation for resolving the social and political problems of underdeveloped nations without demonstrating a capacity for economic and industrial development...
...Diem is gone...
...should turn to such an all-out effort it would run the real risk of Communist Chinese intervention, with the final result of a larger-scale and more devastating stalemate than at present...
...A Peace Corps unit in South Vietnam would have very poor life-expectancy...
...This tenuous attempt at modern nationhood was conceived in 1954 at an international conference in Geneva...
...North Vietnam, after all, has troubles of its own, not the least of which is the Moscow-Peking split...
...Nor is there any military expedient which could do so...
...We should not refuse to consider at least any policy alternative...
...Operations Mission established a College of Agriculture at Blau, a rural town between Saigon and the mountain city of Dalat...
...Perhaps it is because of a subconscious desire to hide this impotence that the great commanders have minimized the role of guerrilla operations...
...And these, though legal, took essentially the same form...
...We tend to think that the very existence of guerrillas indicates a miserable government, unworthy of our support...
...What the Saigon government's present Pacification Program actually means to the day-to-day conduct of the struggle being waged against the Communist Vietcong guerillas has tended to get lost in discussions of the larger, ideological issues of the war...
...To give but one example: when a member of the Vietcong in Binh Duong Province north of Saigon recently declared his loyalty to the government, six members of his family were beheaded by the Communist guerrillas...
...When Communist forces ventured south of that demarcation line, we fought until they went back...
...Now a vigorous 37, very thin and wiry, a selfless and ingenious administrator, he has resumed the task which his years in jail have made all the more urgent...
...The Vietcong will not permit itself to be killed by kindness...
...Since the South Vietnamese have not proved themselves to be sufficiently unified politically or developed economically to combat the Communist aggressors in their land, the U.S...
...Almost a million refugees had come from the north to escape Communism, and it will remain the historic merit of the late President Ngo Dinh Diem that he personified and organized resistance to it...
...Government officials are, in fact, understandably afraid to venture into the countryside for fear of being killed by guerrillas...
...We could not, however, do much about the depredations of their own government...
...He has discovered from examination of the financial statements and books of the past few years that projected costs of various projects ordered by the Diem regime were "somewhat high," and that new estimates on such projects are running considerably lower...
...must seek an alternative to its policy of helping the Vietnamese help themselves...
...The answer is: Nothing...
...Instead, they would have sought to appear to the governments of Southeast Asia, Communist or non-Communist, as the protector from Chinese domination by committing the total power of the United States to that end...
...They would not have allowed themselves to get committed in a civil war which cannot be won short of a political miracle...
...Of that anti-Communist mood, little is left today...
...At the University of Saigon's Faculty of Law, there are seven instructors for about 3,000 first-year students...
...On the night of April 9, I accompanied one of these troupes to the village of Thach Dau, Cam Lo District, which is located in the foothill region some distance from the road...
...It was the top-level government administration under the Diem regime, however, that apparently provided the greatest opportunity for aid fund drainage...
...The village itself can be reached only by crossing a river in a sampan...
...In the absence of a discernable political or military solution, the alternative is withdrawal—or patience...
...In launching the Pacification Program, Tuu told his recruits: "The people of the whole nation ask us to take care of them, to understand them profoundly, to serve effectively their interests...
...When we found the anti-Communist mood in South Vietnam 10 years ago, we could support it, and we were successful in doing so...
...Subsequently, temporary village Pacification Committees were established to serve as local governing bodies pending elections that are slated to follow the current transitional phase...
...We left the village the next morning, with the thanks and greetings of the villagers...
...They are supported by more than 100,000 "part-time" guerrillas, and by a large portion of the rural Vietnamese population...
...The known instances are sufficient to lead to the conclusion that graft and waste in Vietnamese society are forces working against a sense of national political consciousness, economic progress, and a successfully implemented foreign aid program...
...The Operations Mission also has spent approximately $200.000 to train Vietnamese to operate sugar mills in South Vietnam, a nation with insignificant sugar production...
...There is, first of all, patrolling and laying of ambushes by the self-defense cadres throughout the surrounding area...
...If we do not will such a policy, which is tantamount to an all-out war against China, we have no rational ground for willing the end of containment...
...in an excellent position to push for reforms...
...This is not the place to discuss all the means by which this was achieved...
...Hoan's position in the government...
...shortly thereafter, however, it was severely threatened...
...On the one hand, the paramount power of China, potential and actual, is as inescapable today as it was for hundreds of years past, and it compels Communist governments, such as that of North Vietnam, as well as non-Communist ones, such as that of Cambodia, to accommodate themselves to it...
...Firm fighting by the people and for the people is what leads to final victory...
...Local American military advisors are optimistic, despite the recent loss of the Police Chief of Trieu Van village— a Dai Viet veteran of the Ba Long resistance who was caught by the Vietcong at his isolated post near the sea and refused to surrender...
...Though we have achieved in our own society something of an equilibrium between freedom and authority, we have no magic formula which can bring to emerging nations instant justice along with a significant degree of individual liberty...
...It is futile, of course, to expect that our latest remedy—the quantitative expansion of such an army, already enjoying approximately a 10-1 superiority over the Vietcong —can have any effect upon the political and military situation except to increase the Vietcong's chances of acquiring additional recruits and weapons...
...With luck, there may eventually appear a government which mollifies the Buddhist monks of Hue and the intellectuals of Saigon and reconciles the generals...
...military advisors by correctly predicting, one day in advance, that such an attack would take place—a prediction disregarded by the Vietnamese security officials then in charge...
...to benefit of our own industry...
...Nguyen Dinh Hoa, is also Director of Cultural Affairs for the government, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Vietnamese-American Association, and a prolific writer of textbooks in the English and Vietnamese languages...
...This principle is, incidentally, a contradiction of Mao Tsetung, who views guerrillas as the prelude to a conventional army which must come into being before the regulars can be defeated...
...and paralleled, the Dai Viet organization and also suffered Diem's repression...
...I was particularly struck by this during my last visit to South Vietnam, less than two months ago, when I had an opportunity to witness the Program's implementation practically under the noses of the Vietcong forces...
...The identification of Communism anywhere in Asia with the expansion of Chinese power can bring the issue of containment prematurely to a head, as it is threatening to do today in Vietnam...
...As the Saigon Post put it on May 20: "It is plain common sense that it takes much more than money to win a war...
...Accomplishing what one has set out to do is not a defeat...
...When the Communists attacked, the commander of the government forces "lost control" of his troops—that is, his troops ran away...
...They know we can afford it...
...On the other hand, the threat of Chinese domination calls forth fear and resistance, and that is true of North Vietnam, which is totally Communist, of Laos, which is partially Communist, and of Indonesia, which combines a non-Communist government with a strong Communist movement...
...Short of the miraculous appearance of an anti-Communist national leader with charismatic powers, there appears to be no chance of restoring those ties between government and people which, once severed, are severed forever...
...but it cannot be created from the outside...
...According to the needs of the villagers, these smaller groups work by day repairing roads, fences and canals...
...Nguyen Ngoc Huy (who, incidentally, recently won his PhD at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris with a dissertation on "The Elite in Ancient Chinese Political Thought") is now responsible for directing the political encadrement of Pacification...
...It was at that time that the Dai Viet organization won the confidence of U.S...
...Conventional war between North and South Vietnam means full-scale hostilities throughout Southeast Asia—a fact which proponents of "military pressure" against Hanoi might do well to ponder...
...Until November 1963, the area had remained relatively secure...
...A native of the province, where he was born of a humble Buddhist family, he is no newcomer to the fight against the Vietcong...
...There was a reason for expecting that the stipulated purposes and administrative methods would be adhered to by the recipient nations...
...The problem is to impress upon the existing governments of Vietnam and other emerging nations that our aid cannot be used to support an unjust status quo...
...The initial reservations of the then-government of Vietnam eventually deepened into interference with the program, and there was too little support from unenthusiastic American staff officers assigned as advisors...
...Yet U.S...
...In the highlands, this degenerated into the practice of assassinating all antiCommunists, whether or not unpopular, and even village chiefs who refused to support either the government or the guerrillas...
...The Korean War lasted three years and cost the lives of 34,000 Americans killed in battle...
...Occasionally this is executed in a somewhat amateurish manner—it is not uncommon for a stray water buffalo to be shot in the process— but the result nonetheless gives the villagers a sense of security...
...And much medical equipment supplied by aid funds is standing idle because there are not enough trained technicians to operate the equipment...
...In another case, the U.S...
...In much of the country, and especially the Mekong Delta region where the government's strongest effort was concentrated, the Diem regime at last succeeded in creating conditions very close to those which the Communists had falsely alleged to exist when they began their campaign in 1959...
...On the government side, there are 200,000 active regulars, and nearly 200,000 part-time civil guardsmen and self-defense corpsmen...
...Unarmed, dressed very simply in khaki and a beret, driving his own jeep, Tuu keeps his provincial administration —which, besides himself, consists of an able police chief, several guards, and an armed radio car—constantly mobile...
...Taxation, to a Rhade, is expropriation...
...The point is that it was accomplished in a region where, as in Burma 20 years ago, at least 80 per cent of the population was, at the very least, indifferent to the outcome...
...3. Leadership vacuum and shortage of trained personnel...
...This work is often assisted by the U.S...
...The process of transformation demands some secrecy, as well as new kinds of image-making and public appeals...
...It was a classic demonstration of Ernesto Che Guevara's Second Principle of Guerrilla Warfare: "It is not necessary to wait for the fulfillment of all conditions for a revolution because the focus of insurrection can create them...
...It can be assumed that the padded costs found their way to both government officials and contractors...
...In order to understand the rational choices open to us it is therefore necessary to distinguish these two purposes...
...He told me that when he was offered that command, his predecessor warned him not to take it because he could not win and it would ruin his health...
...We have been the victims of our own false expectations...
...Our presence in Vietnam and our general commitment to the preservation of the status quo in Southeast Asia has a dual purpose: the containment of Communism and the containment of China...
...Army Special Forces have succeeded in organizing many of them into some of the most effective antiguerrilla forces in Southeast Asia...
...The chairman of the English department at the University's Faculty of Letters, Dr...
...Thus it is vital that the divergent nationalist and democratic forces opposed to Communism in Vietnam be encouraged to play a constructive role in the current crisis...
...Yet even if the government of North Vietnam had the power to end the civil war in the south by withdrawing its support, it would certainly require more than some token raids to bring North Vietnam to its knees...
...Barriers to Progress By Edward R. Wright Jr...
...What we are saying and doing must, then, have as its main purpose to prevent the collapse of the morale of General Nguyen Khanh's government and of its military forces...
...The audience's response seemed to indicate that the party's security in the village was by now guaranteed, for the villagers were genuinely delighted and honored to have these men as their guests...
...And it clearly owes this style to the dynamic activities of Tuu and his colleagues...
...Our most basic mistake has been in attempting to pattern our aid to underdeveloped nations after the postwar European program...
...It is ideologically consistent, but politically and militarily foolish, to oppose a Communist government for no other reason than that it is Communist, and to support a nonCommunist government, regardless of its relations to the Soviet Union or China...
...This accommodation could involve our de facto recognition of Red China and/or agreement to its admission to the United Nations...
...The troupe itself consisted of young people, several of whom had been Tuu's students in high school...
...We are fighters who give ouselves to the people, who share our bread with them, our bowl of rice, our mouthful of water...
...Assassinations of local officials went up by 800 per cent during the first three months of 1964...
...Local notables indicated their satisfaction at the fact that both the Province Chief and District Chief live among them in this manner, and that the villagers are thereby able to make their wishes known...
...The peasants arc simply more interested in security and peace than in political ideology...
...Upon his release last fall, he taught literature in the high school of his native district until his appointment as Province Chief...
...No one knows this better than the Communists but...
...aid funds...
...Of course, the question remains whether Tuu and his associates will be equally effective in the ultimate transition from the Pacification Program to village elections and their long-range political aftermath...
...In any event, Special Forces troops arrived in the highlands to find the villagers feeling much like American businessmen suffering from the "protection" rackets of the '30s...
...We are committed to the containment of Chinese territorial control within its present boundaries, and we have attempted to achieve this end through the creation of military strongholds around the periphery of China from Taiwan to Pakistan...
...A high-ranking ministerial official recently indicated to me that the Department of Foreign Affairs was critically understaffed, a situation which prevails in all government bureaus...
...For whoever seeks to contain China by military force must in the end be ready to fight the power of China, not at its periphery but at its core, and not through weak proxies but with its own armed might...
...1. Military insecurity...
...The troupe had also taken the trouble to include in their program one local villager, an amateur vocalist...
...building houses, and providing notebooks for school children...
...and a drastic shortage of trained technicians and responsible political leadership...
...And is it conceivable that China, in view of its national interests confirmed by 2,000 years of history and recent experiences in Korea and Laos, would remain idle if this should come to pass...
...Tolerable will do...
...It is a source of minimum trouble...
...Let us share with them their anxiety, their special problems, their family difficulties, and let us consider them relatives of our own blood...
...military advisor in Vietnam, who deals primarily with officers and officials of the ministries...
...should be increasingly alert to changing attitudes and views throughout the world, and pursue a more open policy than we could have dared several years ago...
...At twilight the Communistinfested mountains loomed close at hand, and one of the Vietnamese in Tuu's party lost his nerve at the last minute and had to be taken back to Province Headquarters...
...At this juncture, Solon himself could not devise a regime which would end the conflict...
...He was, in fact, one of the last appointees named by Ha Thuc Ky, the Minister of the Interior who recently resigned because the military command exercised so exclusive a control over the naming of other province and district chiefs...
...Colonel Huynh Van Ton, Commander of the 7th Division at My Tho in the Delta area, typifies the Dai Viet's links with the military...
...Villages which failed to "volunteer" food, shelter, and manpower to the guerrillas suffered severely for their lack of cooperation...
...advisors...
...The villagers were invited to the performance, and one by one, after their work and evening meal, they came...
...Once they are emotionally committed, men and nations do not appear to be susceptible to rational argument...
...More important, several of the Americans killed in Vietnam happen to have been close friends...
...Such face-to-face confrontation of Montagnard and GI was looked upon with suspicion by the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and mistrusted by many of the U.S...
...Before the war was over, it was the enemy and his supporters in the puppet government who appeared oppressive to the people—not us guerrillas...
...For the entire Dai Viet civil guard of 1,200 men was suppressed in 1955 after a 12-day battle launched by 3,000 Diemist troops that ended with most of the civil guard and its leaders, Tuu and Ha Thuc Ky, being jailed...
...In Southeast Asia, on the contrary, the cultural and social systems are sufficiently different from those of the Western world so as to provide little reasonable expectation that rather loosely defined aid program terms will be adhered to in the manner intended...
...A recent study by a team of American and Vietnamese researchers in Long An province indicated that the Vietcong are in substantial control of the people in that area just to the south of Saigon...
...The Vietcong in South Vietnam are most often estimated to have a hard core of 25,000 full-time professionals (some estimates run as high as 40,000...
...More and more of the indifferent majority began to cooperate with the guerrillas in response to a newly aroused active hostility to the government and its Army...
...The same official also characterized 50 per cent of the civil guardsmen as "kids" under the leadership of sergeant-majors with no military experience...
...The South Vietnamese government has had little or no contact with people of many rural areas in recent years...
...Adverse experience must teach them what reason cannot, and the best reason can do is to shorten the time which experience needs to leach its lessons...
...Considerable dependence on our aid puts the U.S...
...During his eight years as a prisoner in Hué, Tuu was converted to Catholicism...
...Some time ago, 600 Vietcong were surrounded by 2,000 government troops...
...A Communist government may or may not be subservient to the Soviet Union or China—and so may a non-Communist government...
...Vietcong propaganda leaflets quickly boasted of this as a "little Dienbienphu...
...These are the Rhades, Churus, Chils, Mas, Muongs and Chams, generally referred to as the "Montagnards...
...As in the case of emerging nations throughout the world...
...Recalling his own experience as a guerrilla leader in Burma during World War II, former Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman observes that about 10 per cent of the people were pro-West, another 10 per cent were pro-enemy, and the rest were indifferent or turned inward toward their own family and villages...
...Ten years ago, anti-Communism was the prevailing mood of South Vietnam...
...its representatives, the tax collector and the pressgang...
...Yet China is next door and Moscow a long way off...
...A few of these tribes, like the Chams, a Malayan-Polynesian people who once ruled what is now the Republic of Vietnam, Cambodia and part of Laos, have been almost assimilated into the majority culture...
...Having thus established rapport with the audience, the troupe subtly introduced propaganda themes...
...It derives from the peculiar conditions of guerrilla warfare which have beset the former French Colony of Vietnam for nearly a generation, and may best be defined as positive, peaceful action designed to counter the disruptive effects of such warfare...
...In Vietnam our economic aid program cannot function properly in an atmosphere of guerrilla warfare...
...In the political sphere, he immediately purged village councils of one-third of their membership, expelling those known to the Dai Viet organization as having Vietcong affiliations...
...On January 12, guerrilla forces overran the village headquarters of Hai Phu, killing three officials...
...Tuu has succeeded in putting renewed meaning into the very words Quang Tri —which, literally, stand for the administration that reaches out...
...Despite the fact that the Dai Viet group was the most effective, organized Vietnamese anti-Communist force in the country, the Diem regime refused to cooperate with it...
...One U.S...
...But no U.S...
...A few examples should suffice...
...The fact that we cannot win "victory" in Vietnam does not mean that we must suffer defeat...
...This was in contrast to the regular U.S...
...After dark, lighting and loudspeakers were set up behind the school house...
...His position is greatly enhanced by the presence in General Nguyen Khanh's regime of the respected and liberal-minded Dr...
...did Thach Dau receive word that Tuu and his party (which included the District Chief and five Americans) would spend the night there...
...This equipment is now in disuse and in a poor state of repair...
...They have one aim: to be done with what they regard as senseless slaughter and destruction...
...He is always on the move in his province, and no one can predict just where he will make his next appearance— a tactic which robs the Vietcong of its initiative in disrupting the political administration as well as the life of the area...
...His task is essentially one of finding potential recruits, setting up training programs, seeking a broad alliance of the various fractured elements of Vietnamese political and religious life and—most important—fitting all this into the policies of General Khanh's government...
...The primary Vietcong target is the ricerich and thickly populated Mekong Delta region at the southern tip of the country...
...At that meeting the independence of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was recognized...
...As the UN Commander in the conflict, he did himself an injustice...
...What we shall do in the end will not depend so much upon what we now say we are going to do as upon what we think we can do without undue risks and with a chance for success...
...It is now generally accepted that the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was killed after 10 years of rule in the Revolution of last November 1. had little success in gaining the allegiance of the people...
...Attendance is relatively sparse, since there is no attendance requirement...
...In our European aid programs we extended material help without great insistence on terms regarding administration...
...To them, government has always meant oppression...
...Government-trained civil-defense corps units have been highly demoralized, according to the reports of U.S...
...paiticipation in the war, it is highly doubtful that any South Vietnamese government can defeat the Vietcong...
...elections to unify the two Vietnams were scheduled to take place within two years, but have never been held...
...the arrest and disappearance of a village chief, identical with guerrilla kidnapping and assassination...
...Ho Chi Minh is Moscow-trained and, for a Marxist, rather pragmatic in his philosophy...
...The Johnson Administration shares the view that it is in our national interest to prevent this...
...The Americans, in groups of 10 or 12, lived in the Montagnard villages and dealt directly with the people they were trying to recruit...
...In our relations with the emerging nations we need to display fortitude, patience and understanding...
...To begin with, we misapprehend Mao Tse-tung's famous dictum that "the people are like water and the guerrilla is like a fish...
...They expressed deep appreciation for the work of the Pacification Teams, and for the reduction of taxes that allows the villages to accumulate more resources of their own...
...Rumania, though Communist, is less dangerous to our interests than is the United Arab Republic, even though it is ideologically opposed to Communism...
...The highlanders were thus receptive to offers of arms and training with which to repel the extortionists...
...This is in accord with a fundamental tenet of guerrilla tactics and is, of course, the point of Mao's metaphor of the sea and the fish...
...It is tiresome but necessary to say again what has been said so many times before: The problem is political and not military, and it is impossible to win the war in Vietnam without the political support of at least a very substantial segment of the population...
...Our principal difficulty in evaluating events in South Vietnam—that is, beyond a congenital impatience so pronounced drat it is everywhere recognized as our point of greatest vulnerability—is a fundamental fallacy about the significance of guerrilla insurgency...
...The new Province Chief in the central Vietnamese Province of Quang Nam was the 1955 local leader of the National Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dan) maquis—a group which preceded...
...The regime permitted itself to be maneuvered into a position of steadily increasing oppressiveness until, finally, it became itself a cause of the disaffection of its people...
...Tuu's activities in Quang Tri are, in a sense, a way of testing at the riceroots level the potential of Dr...
...it is a threat to our vital interests only as long as it remains a political and military outpost of the Soviet Union...
...Many peasants are reported to be antagonistic to government policy because of their having been uprooted from their ancestral homes for these supposedly secure hamlets...
...In such cases, family allegiance easily supercedes any sense of national loyalty...
...Acting on the principle of the lesser evil, as they see it, the governments of Southeast Asia prefer the risk of Chinese domination—which they have not yet experienced—to the known ravages of civil war under Western auspices...
...The rest of us arrived safely, however...
...Facts revealed since the November Revolution seem to confirm this toplevel, though unofficial and unpublicized, estimate of the civil defense corps' ineffectiveness...
...But it worked...
...This policy has been thus far successful only by virtue of the weakness of China, and of the relative military and political stability of the territories adjacent to China...
...Professor Vu Van Mau, a leading member of the Law School faculty is now Vietnamese Ambassador to London...
...Several three-wheeled vehicles carrying lighting equipment, loudspeakers and movie projectors are used, and three troupes of a dozen persons provide live shows in which music, comedy skits and anti-Communist propaganda are skillfully interwoven to humorous and practical effect...
...Communist control in Vietnam is still limited to the areas North of the 17th parallel, and there is no reason whatever to assume that "time is on the side of the guerrillas," as we are so often told...
...The question at the moment, therefore, is whether or not South Vietnam and its immediate Southeast Asian neighbors can withstand the Communist onslaught until November without substantially increased U.S...
...The government of Saigon is lucky when its troops just desert rather than join the Vietcong...
...Thus our main immediate problem is apparently not to win the war against the Vietcong but to prevent the ascendancy of an anti-war government in Saigon...
...The war in South Vietnam is a civil war, aided and abetted by the North Vietnamese government but neither created nor sustained by it...
...And Asian Communism has certainly wrought no miracles in the emerging nations...
...Gia Dinh, the province encircling Saigon, is led by Nhan Minh Trang, a Dai Viet colonel who has markedly improved the security situation in his crucial area...
...One hears much about the more than a million dollars a day the United States is spending to support the anti-guerrilla effort, although this is really not a vast sum for a nation with a Gross National Product in excess of 600 billion dollars, particularly when much of it is spent in the U.S...
...Only humiliation or catastrophe awaits us there as long as we perisist in our simple-minded combination of indiscriminate ideological opposition to all Communist governments with peripheral military containment of a potentially great power...
...senior advisors at headquarters in Saigon...
...10 per cent of the corps served in servant capacities for province officials...
...For since it treats all Communist governments alike, it forces them to act alike...
...We shared a cultural heritage and a basic value system with the European nations which, significantly, were striving for "reconstruction" following the most devastating global war in man's history...
...Then Tuu and some of the visiting Americans made a few remarks, and were very warmly received...
...We are therefore left a continuing effort—and the need for patience...
...In January 1964, the newly-appointed Governor of the National Bank of South Vietnam revealed that officials of the previous government had pocketed an estimated "tens of millions" of U.S...
...When 10 years ago we committed ourselves to the support and defense of the anti-Communist regime of South Vietnam, our policies and the aspirations of the people of South Vietnam coincided...
...In one skit, a lazy husband was told by his nagging wife that he ought to ask the Province Chief if he could join a Pacification Team...
...Where that stability breaks down and China takes advantage of the breakdown by trying to fill the vacuum, our policy of peripheral containment is put to the test and is likely to fail...
...One reason why Americans still pilot helicopters and fighter planes in Vietnam is Saigon's fear that in the hands of its own forces such aircraft can too easily turn on the capitol—which, indeed, is exactly what happened in February 1962, when two unescorted Vietnamese pilots were permitted aloft in aircraft armed with bombs and rockets...
...One of my law students offered this realistic appraisal: "The peasants will accept any government, including that of the Vietcong, if they can live safely and can realize material benefits...
...In my opinion, guerrilla pressures on South Vietnam will begin to slacken when—and not before—the Communists in Hanoi are convinced that the United States is prepared to resist their advance below the 17th parallel until hell freezes over...
...These can be reduced to three major categories: military insecurity...
...The 40-mile border separating South Vietnam across the Se Ban Hai River from North Vietnam has been effectively sealed...
...The proposal to extend the war to North Vietnam rests upon two assumptions: that there exists a direct causal nexus between the war in South Vietnam and the policies of the North Vietnamese government, and that the war in South Vietnam can be won by rupturing this causal nexus...
...The reason for this involvement is clear: the U. S. is determined to guarantee South Vietnam's independence in order to block the spread of Chinese Communist influence throughout Southeast Asia...
...Many hamlets, particularly in the Mekong Delta, are controlled by the Vietcong, which in some instances has a more effective system of taxation than the government...
...It is probably idle, but nevertheless illuminating, to speculate on how a Richelieu or Bismarck, given responsibility for our foreign policy, would approach the problem of Southeast Asia...
...2. Waste and corruption in use of aid funds...
...Nguyen Ton Hoan, leader of the Dai Viet since 1947...
...The wellqualified Dean of the Law Faculty is burdened with outside duties, particularly related to official government functions...
...Do these men—along with the Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa politicoreligious leaders in Tay Ninh and An Giang in the Southwest—represent an actual coalition allied with the military regime of General Khanh...
...The temperature of the water must be such that the fish can live in it, but it need not be ideal...
...Tuu enjoys the distinction of being the only civilian appointed as Province Chief—a distinction made possible by the fact that Quang Tri includes a portion of the demilitarized zone established by the Geneva Accords of 1954...
...More than a decade later, the Communists remain north of the 38th parallel in Korea...
...Pacification in Quang Tri By Luther A. Allen The term "pacification," as applied to the situation in South Vietnam, is of French origin...
...In fact...
...Asian Communism is largely a rationalization for Chinese expansionism into Southeast Asia, and this expansion is being contained today not by healthy political regimes in the area, but by U.S...
...The distances and terrain in Vietnam make it impossible for anything more than token support to reach the guerrillas in the Mekong Delta from the north...
...And the attitude of the young recruits from the coastal towns toward their present duties resembles that of the Peace Corps...
...Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations were convinced that the loss of Vietnam would be a catastrophe, that it would lead to the submission of the whole of Southeast Asia to Communism and to the ultimate subjugation of India and Indonesia...
...Beginning in the fall of 1961, a few units from the 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa entered the central highlands of Vietnam and began recruiting volunteers for antiguerrilla forces...
...The ultimate success of a program like that undertaken by Tuu and his recruits in Quang Tri is contingent upon the political success of the government in Saigon...
...Much of the elite Vietnamese professional ranks is living abroad...
...Each Team is assigned a portion of the district, and is then divided into three smaller groups which spend from two to three weeks in particular villages...
...Very many Rhade actually defected from the Vietcong to join the anti-guerrilla forces of their native villages...
...And American casualties on the peninsula to date amount to approximately one-fourth of one per cent of our annual traffic fatalities...
...The unreality of these propositions is the measure of the irrationality of our policies in Southeast Asia...
...Unconventional though it may be, this is a military operation, and it recognizes no non-combatants...
...He recently conducted a one-year credit course for graduate students in civil law within a nine-day period...
...weapons, abandoned or surrendered by government troops...
...Neither assumption has any basis in fact...
...A "paramilitary" group whose mission is part civil and part military, the civil-defense corpsmen seldom venture from their posts, and have been known to stay in their posts while Vietcong forces destroyed outposts and hamlets...
...dollars in graft from the nation's development projects...
...Of 411 hamlets in the two Mekong Delta provinces of Long An and Dinh Tuong, only those near province capitals or large district towns—50 to 60—remain under effective governmental control...
...The U. S. has meanwhile become increasingly involved in the affairs of this little nation under constant threat from the north...
...Nevertheless, Hilsman's group operated successfully, drawing recruits not only from the 10 per cent who were pro-West, but also from the 80 per cent who were indifferent...
...Perhaps the strategist in Hanoi—being, after all, Vietnamese—find the Montagnards as alien and incomprehensible as do their adversaries in Saigon...
...By comparison, the conflict in Vietnam can scarcely be considered an unbearable burden...
...Remember, we are dealing with a situation where provincial school teachers must go to class toting rifles, where doctors are warned away from disease-ridden villages, where engineers are assassinated for the crime of devising a better irrigation system...
...In that event, we will find ourselves, hopefully, with approximately the situation of 1960...
...The pigs and cows could conceivably benefit only one or, at best, two families...
...Also, help is generally provided by families whose sons or daughters are active members of the Vietcong...
...The decisive test for our foreign and military policies must, then, be whether a government, Communist or not, is subservient to the interests of the Soviet Union or China...
...It is not difficult to discover examples of perversion in the use of U.S...
...Strategists contemplating an overt military action between the two Vietnams find themselves confronted by the same considerations which twice led the German General Staff to invade Belgium to get at France...
...Hoan, who kept his party alive from his Paris exile quarters in the period 19541964, ranks as the top civilian political figure in Saigon...
...If the war in South Vietnam cannot be won without the political support of the population, it cannot be won either by expanding it northward...
...Not until 6 P.M...
...At least 15 per cent of Vietnam's population, for example, is not Vietnamese...
...It should recognize the national integrity and interests not only of the receiving nation, but also of the contributing nation...
...In early February, an even more serious attack was made on district headquarters in Ba Long and 100 prisoners were taken along with considerable arms...
...In addition, these nations are going through the process of initial technological development and construction, a process for which there is no precedent in their history, as there had been throughout Western Europe...
...Where the experience of Vietnam differs is in the externally supported guerrilla effort of the Vietcong...
...Many young men, for example, enroll as university students in order to avoid military service, even though only a small percentage of enrolled students actually attend classes or take examinations...
...Matters are worse, perhaps, than they would be if the Diem regime had fallen sooner, but they are not beyond all hope...
...The task which confronts the Saigon government at the present time—that of gathering the forces of formerly fragmented and clandestine groups into a unified public political formation—makes a definitive answer impossible...
...In any event, some heretofore unexplored political approach is required to resolve the Vietnamese problem...
...Consideration is now being given to moving the College to the crowded, land-hungry city of Saigon...
...In addition, it may be that Quang Tri is a unique case, and that the success of Pacification there owes a good deal to the recentness of Vietcong full-scale attacks in the area, to its own rooted nationalism (which exceeds that of other provinces in South Vietnam), and to the presence of so unusual an administrator...
...But they are also convinced that we have neither the will nor the patience...
...For the war in Vietnam is a fight for villages, not cities—Guevara's Third Principle—and in the countryside the palace coups in Saigon are of significance only to the local military commander...
...The audience was enthusiastic...
...About six-and-onethird of South Vienam's more than 14 million people live in the Delta, and most of the nation's rice supply (envied by agriculturally deficient...
...It is for this reason that the constitutional democracies of the Western world have an advantage in the long run over suppressive totalitarian and dictatorial regimes...
...A year later, his health was ruined and victory was not in sight, and he gave the same warning to his presumptive successor, with the same negative result...
...The late General MacArthur was a spokesman for the view that Korea was a defeat for American policy, that "for the first time in our history we accepted less than victory...
...The success of any national policy will be judged on the international scene according to its ability to promote material security along with some degree of individual freedom...
...Has the Pacification drive in Quang Tri significantly reversed the deteriorating situation that Tuu faced when he took over his post in February...
...30 per cent were reported as "sick" or as having disappeared...
...Such an evaluation may indeed seem callous, yet it must be faced...
...The situation which Tuu confronted in Quang Tri at the time of his appointment was critical...
...The Diem government's answer to this problem was centered on the muchheralded "strategic hamlet" program, which was intended to achieve population-control and security by isolating the Vietcong from the rest of the population...
...Short of full-scale U.S...
...But I believe that unless we learn to accept such sacrifices and convince the world of our willingness to do so, Communism will ultimately win not only Southeast Asia but everything else...
...For example, it is estimated that from 20,000 to 40,000 Vietnamese are now residing in France, a significant number in view of the fact that many are trained technicians and professional people who are now badly needed in their country's struggle for survival...
...For an adequate understanding of the dilemmas facing U.S...
...and Southeast Asia - Four Articles Realities of Containment By Hans J. Morgenthau IT is difficult, hazardous and painful to try to discover beneath the layers of official pronouncements the hard rational core of the alternatives open to us in Southeast Asia...
...On every professional level there is an evident shortage of qualified leadership and technicians...
...The final skit was a take-off on a Vietcong returnee and his lover, who had at first been seduced by neutralism but later, with the advice of her uncle and husband, knew enough to turn on him...
...Cuba, being nothing but Communist, would indeed be only a "nuisance" to the United States...
...In return, China would have to agree to abandon its expansionist designs on Southeast Asia, particularly its support of the Vietcong guerrilla force in South Vietnam...
...Certainly it will be no better...
...In the interim, however, it appears to have been intensified...
...We were careful to move around their growing crops...
...These are dangerous fallacies which create a climate of public opinion that may someday have a disastrous effect on our foreign policy...
...While 10 years ago these two purposes indeed coincided, they do not necessarily do so today when the Communist world is rent by polycentrism and the Soviet-Chinese split...
...The key figure of the January 30 coup, which according to the Dai Viet narrowly averted a Frenchinspired neutralist take-over...
...And in view of the Russo-Chinese split, this test must be supplemented by determining whether a particular government is more likely to be subservient to the USSR or China...
...The problem arises along the 1,000 miles of frontier separating the country from Cambodia and Laos...
...The location was Quang Tri, the northernmost province of South Vietnam...
...So they applauded the fall of Ngo Dinh Diem and awaited the diminution of the conflict...
...In the strategic hamlets that bore the brunt of these assaults, and which in Quang Tri are simply traditional hamlets surrounded by bamboo or barbed-wire fencing, resistance dropped month by month to a low of 19 per cent in March...
...What has gone wrong...
...I am aware that a million dollars is a lot of money...
...When Diem lost popular support and was kept in power long after he had become a political liability, the known evils of a discredited anti-Communism seemed to many Vietnamese to be at least as bad as the unknown evils of Communism...
...They do not coincide now...
...Military action against the Vietcong guerrillas within South Vietnam also holds little promise of an early solution...
...It is obvious that in such a situation an ideologically oriented military policy is not only ineffective but also counter-productive...
...Neglecting his wife and seven children, and his health, he spends at least five nights a week behind the bamboo fences in the company of villagers and newly recruited Pacification Teams...
...They began in a low key with cabaret-type music—guitar and accordion, Vietnamese-beatnik style...
...The Geneva Accords which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel were not unlike the agreement which gave Communists a portion of Korea north of the 38th parallel...
...In 1954-55, as a member of the Dai Viet (Greater Vietnam) party which had been actively resisting the Vietminh in that region since 1946, he helped organize a sizable counter-guerrilla campaign that succeeded in clearing the Communists out of the mountainous areas of Quang Tri's Ba Long district...
...And it was Tuu's deep commitment to this anti-French, antiCommunist force which, in the cruel contradictions of South Vietnam's internal political situation, led to his imprisonment...
...Nevertheless, Tuu has demonstrated what kind of civilian leadership is needed to win the confidence of the people, and Quang Tri could prove a source of inspiration elsewhere in the country...
...Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara's frequent trips to Saigon reflect growing concern over the failure of Washington's efforts to solve Vietnam's myriad economic, military and political problems...
...and South Vietnamese policy-makers, it is necessary to examine the basic problems which underlie the current crisis...
...military might as well as by Soviet economic and political pressures...
...Thus it is our own policy that transforms China from a threat to the national independence of the nations of Southeast Asia into the protector of those nations from white imperialism...
...The restoration of security is therefore essential in the government's attempt to regain the confidence of the rural population...
...Nor would they have allowed themselves to get involved elsewhere in piecemeal military commitments at the periphery of China...
...Worse, we accept the corollary that guerrillas could not survive in the face of reform and greater economic development...
...Saigon It is now abundantly clear that United States policy here during the past 10 years—to help the Vietnamese help themselves—is in need of revision...
...It is noteworthy, however, that the brilliant and dedicated Chef de cabinet of Vice Premier Hoan...
...It will be interesting to see what happens...
...The highlands are occupied by a Negrito people thought to be the original inhabitants, displaced by the Mongoloid Vietnamese some 2,000 or 3.000 years ago...
...What we need are men to do the job, men with the will to undergo sacrifices in order to win...
...Guerrilla strategy is thus intimately connected to the country's economic profile...
...By the end of 1962, the Montagnard villages in the vicinity of Ban Me Thout, which lies about half-way between Saigon and North Vietnam, were safer places in which to spend the night than most villages only a few miles outside Saigon...
...Aid Mission officiai tells of a district chief who became wealthy from selling U.S.-provided cement...
...And they would have put the vaunted new amenability of Soviet foreign policy to the test by marshalling its support for the Communist governments of the area against Chinese domination...
...As Vice Premier for Pacification Dr...
...If the U.S...
...Using over 1,500 armed guerrillas who had been trained for a year in the mountainous area bordering Laos, and at least 183 Quang Tri-born Communist cadres whose members had been sent north under the Geneva Accords but had now reinfiltrated their native villages, the Vietcong began a series of increasingly heavy attacks...
...Recent large-scale Vietcong attacks on hamlets and ambushes of government troops are the culmination of a long period of guerrilla growth and government neglect...
...Properly conceived, an aid program from a relatively stable industrial nation to a young emerging nation should be one in which there is some mutuality of purpose and agreement on administration...
...The Assistant Dean is also the Dean of the National School of Administration, which is responsible for training civil servants...
...widespread waste and corruption in the use of U.S...
...Then came some very sentimental Vietnamese songs and some homely and humorous skits that had an immediate appeal for the assembled villagers—about 500 of all ages (out of the total population of 1,500 for the three hamlets which use the three-room school house...
...involvement...
...As a pseudonymous Colonel Nemo writes in the Revue Militaire General de France, "regular armies have almost never succeeded in gaining the ascendancy over guerrilla operations of any importance...
...To call it "foreign aggression" is to misrepresent the facts and thereby confuse the issue with which our policy must come to terms...
...The style, then, of Quang Tri's Pacification Program is clearly remarkable...
...The other, more unusual nocturnal activity is the entertainment which the teams bring to the villages...
...In May the Vietcong stepped up terrorist activities to an alarming degree, using such tactics as setting road mines, attacking peaceful villages, killing local hamlet leaders as well as higher officials, and aiming for American personnel and installations in Saigon...
...A few weeks ago, I asked the opinion of a French general who commanded French forces in Indochina...
...One can only conclude that the people in the countryside of South Vietnam are hardly convinced that there is a national cause to fight for, and that the urban population has thus far been reluctant to take any substantial risk to insure the eventual success of an anti-Communist political force...
...Vietnam is finding the path from feudalism to the modern technological world as difficult as the proverbial attempt to force a camel through the eye of a needle...
...The great mass of the South Vietnamese people are today either indifferent or hostile to our policies...
...We are not fully informed—to put it mildly—of the degree to which that morale has already deteriorated...
...aid funds...
...Even among the educated ranks now residing in Vietnam, there is—to a Western mind—a decided lack of positive initiative and industriousness...
...and above all, seeking out recruitable local inhabitants for future management of village affairs...
...While there are no exact parallels in other provinces, there are encouraging signs...
...Popular support can be strengthened from the outside where it exists...
...Vietcong assassinations of district governors and province chiefs have been on the increase in recent weeks...
...Colonel Ton has the reputation of eating and sleeping with his troops and of directing operations alongside them —not, as is customary, from a helicopter...
...I never met a Special Forces soldier in Vietnam who did not prefer Montagnards in combat to the lowland Vietnamese...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 12
