Deep Into The Roots Of War

War Comes To Long An by Jeffrey Race

Reviewed by Jason Johnson

October 23, 2010
Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"

The United States wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to a deluge of literature on insurgency, civil war, and counter-insurgency. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, more work has been produced on counter-insurgency than over the previous 40 years combined.

One book that has stood the test of time is Jeffrey Race's War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, which was re-released this year with new forewords and an analytical conclusion by the author. First published in 1972, the book remains a seminal read for academics and policymakers concerned with these ever-evolving inter-related subjects, as well as for those more specifically interested in the Vietnam War.

Outside the academy the book has long received strong recognition across the political spectrum. Not only is it a mainstay in the curriculum of all senior service schools for the US military and leading US universities that train future diplomats, but even the most scathing critic of modern US foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, once wrote that it was the "best account of the origins of the insurgency" in South Vietnam. 

The book is based on events in Vietnam's southern Long An province, located near Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City), during the period between the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954 and the escalation of the US's intervention that took place in 1965. After an initial stint in Vietnam as a lieutenant with the US military in 1965 and 1966, a 24-year-old Race returned to Vietnam from late 1967 to mid-1968 to conduct research in the area. 


In the book's preface, Race explains his inspiration for carrying out micro-level research was motivated by his belief that at the time there were no convincing explanations for the rise of the insurgent movement in South Vietnam. Then there was a widespread belief that its rise resulted simply from communist influence and infiltration from Hanoi, and was provided extensive weaponry from foreign communist powers.

High-ranking Vietnamese officials claimed that the opposition National Liberation Front (NLF), or what the Americans commonly referred to as the Vietcong, mobilized the peasantry through a vicious program of terrorism and forced recruitment. Some US academics and officials even believed South Vietnamese peasants were prone to adopting communist ideology because it resonated with their more communal, Confucian way of life.

These explanations were often provided by people out-of-touch with the grassroots' dynamics of the war. Fluent in Vietnamese, Race dug deeper by sifting through primary documents and interviewing hundreds of people, including local, provincial and national-level Vietnamese officials, American government officials, members of the NLF - the military organization of what Race refers to as a "revolutionary movement" in South Vietnam - and ordinary residents of Long An.

The result was an innovative and authoritative account that explained how the revolutionary movement, with relatively meager human and material resources, was able to outmaneuver a dramatically more powerful government in Saigon backed by US military might.

Race's research revealed a disjuncture between local-level interpretations and provincial and national-level takes on the relative success of the NLF. Non-local interviewees mentioned that corruption, inefficient governance, and a lack of government aid limited government effectiveness. They also claimed that peasants were deceived by both infiltrators from Hanoi and the NLF, and viewed revolutionary fighters as criminals and terrorists.

Race is highly critical of these interpretations, but he did not altogether dismiss them. He emphasized the important role of northern communist leadership and the NLF's reliance on selective violence and coercion, noting even that some important fighters had criminal backgrounds. But the author also convincingly argued that the NLF's assassinations, threats, and kidnappings were epiphenomena of a comprehensive program of social change that the Communist Party and the NLF used to tilt grassroots sympathies in their favor.

The communist leadership's use of "pre-emptive" policies such as land redistribution, progressive tax reform, and decentralization of political authority appealed to the majority of peasants. All of Race's informants involved with the movement, as well as many local-level government officials, highlighted these policies as reasons for the movement's mass appeal. In sharp contrast, Vietnamese and American officials were utterly unaware of, or simply preferred not to recognize, the progressive policies of the communists that ultimately underpinned their victory.

Race's research argued that the Communist Party's relatively successful efforts to recruit and motivate people drew from the contingency of such policies. That is, if one wanted to receive land, one had to support the movement. Similarly, if a young man wanted to avoid the government's national draft, he would receive protection from the NLF so long as he was willing to fight on its side when called.

For Race, the Saigon government's decision to use non-local soldiers was another crucial policy mistake that served to diminish young men's motivation to fight for the government. This played directly into the hands of the revolutionary movement's recruitment efforts, where preference was often given to those hailing from less privileged backgrounds.

Out Of Local Touch

The over-centralization of government decision-making was one of many policy flaws that hampered Saigon's efforts to win over the population, the author argued. Though the government had its own land redistribution policies for the peasantry, decisions were made at the national level and often on the basis of inflexible laws. On the other hand, the communists' village-level agent was given great authority over not only land distribution but also other matters such as taxation, justice, and military recruitment.

Meanwhile, the US military's use of traditional warfare against the movement's guerilla tactics often proved counter-productive. Large-scale and indiscriminate violence resulted in a dramatic number of casualties among revolutionary fighters and civilians, feeding into the sympathetic environment that revolutionary fighters used to operate freely over wide areas under supposed government control.

United States and South Vietnamese officials' assessment that modernization and development - the forerunner of today's "hearts and minds" counter-insurgency strategies - could undermine support for the revolutionary movement was ultimately off the mark. Race found that those people unsympathetic to the government were more than willing to accept its aid, but this did not sway them away from the movement.

The issue, Race argued, was that government aid programs were incremental, not distributive. Put otherwise, the government's programs reproduced existing socio-economic hierarchies, while the revolutionary movement, both in rhetoric and practice, aimed to dismantle these disparities.

Initially, Race's findings were poorly received by US officials. The Pentagon ignored many of the factors that Race argued were critical to motivating peasants in South Vietnam and instead stood by the notion that no guerilla enemy could withstand its conventional military power. Indeed, most counter-insurgency literature from that era posited that a numerical superiority of troops would prevail against any opponent.

The empirical evidence from the Vietnam War showed that those assumptions were deeply flawed and it is now commonly accepted in mainstream theory of civil war and insurgency that indiscriminate violence is an ineffective means to win a war.

Some still argue that the US lost the Vietnam War because of the US government's decision to gradually withdrawal troops - a decision pundits claim was pushed by a hostile media and subsequent loss of domestic support. Those arguments have some merit, but the crux of War Comes to Long An remains largely unchallenged by experts of the Vietnam War. Many of today's leading comparativists researching civil wars and insurgencies still look towards Race's seminal study - and for good reason.

By studying the material, security and symbolic motives influencing individual interests and actions through in-depth local level research, Race overcame what award-winning civil war expert Stathis Kalyvas refers to as the "urban bias" of civil war research, or the tendency of insurgencies to be explained through the lens of urban intellectuals and practitioners even though most violence takes place in rural areas.

This bias was particularly problematic in the Vietnam War, as foreigners who covered the war could not speak Vietnamese and relied heavily on Vietnamese and American officials for explanations. Race's bottom-up focus also allowed him to steer clear of the related problem of urban intellectuals' inclination to use ideology or the overarching cleavage wrought by conflict as an explanation for individual motivation.

Though members of the NLF were generally ideological communists, Race found that the vast majority of peasants were not. Nor could a legitimacy crisis or nationalism provide adequate explanations for understanding the motivations of grass roots people.

To be sure, NLF recruiters lured peasants on side through appeals that the South Vietnam government lacked legitimacy because it represented a feudalist system backed by an imperialist foreign power. Although Race claimed this narrative served as a useful legitimizing theme, he argued that contingent policies were far more significant in motivating peasants who supported, or were at least neutral to, the communists' aspirations.

Despite stinging revisionist arguments that US and South Vietnamese government officials failed to understand the significance of these insurgent policies, readers will not find a discourse of condemnation of either government officials or revolutionary fighters in Race's timeless book. Both were portrayed as individuals trying to do what they believed was right at a certain point in time.

Race's concern for objectivity deserves high praise, but it was his empirical findings in Long An that first turned the heads of academics, policymakers, and others grappling to understand the Vietnam War. Nearly 40 years later, War Comes to Long An still holds enormous value to anyone interested in civil war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency and the US's new generation of wars.

War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, Updated and Expanded by Jeffrey Race. University of California Press February 2010. ISBN: 9780520260177. Price: US$26.95, 368 pages.

Jason Johnson is an independent researcher and consultant covering southernmost Thailand. He is currently based in Pattani province, southern Thailand, and may be reached at jrj.johnson@gmail.com

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Lost Battles Of The Vietnam War

By Carlton Meyer
Courtesy Of G 2 Mil

One theme presented by supporters of the American empire is the U.S. military is invincible and can never lose unless stabbed in the back by impatient politicians. They claim the U.S. military never lost a battle during the entire Vietnam war. This was disputed by America's most decorated officer of that war, Col. David Hackworth, in his book "About Face." The U.S. military had every advantage, yet mistakes were made and battles lost. Internet research turns up these 20 lost battles of the Vietnam war:

1. The Attack on Da Nang - North Vietnamese Army (NVA) sappers infiltrated this airbase on July 1, 1965. They destroyed three large C-130 transport aircraft, three F-102 fighters, and damaged three more F-102s. The sappers escaped leaving behind one dead.

2. Iron Hand Air Strikes - American aircraft had suffered losses from North Vietnamese Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) systems. On August 13, 1965, the Navy aircraft carriers USS Coral Sea and USS Midway launched 76 low-level "Iron Hand" missions to seek out and destroy SAM sites. Five aircraft and three pilots were lost to enemy guns, and seven other planes were damaged, but no SAMs were discovered.

3. The Battle for LZ Albany - The 1st battalion of the 7th Cavalry barely survived its now famous 1965 battle in the Ia Drang valley. After saving its 1st battalion, the exhausted 2nd battalion headed for LZ Albany for an aerial extraction. It was in a long column in open terrain when it ran into a concealed NVA battalion, which attacked and shot it to pieces during a bloody battle that claimed the lives of 155 Americans, with 124 wounded.

4. The August 1967 Air Battle - This war produced two American "Ace" fighter pilots (i.e. more than five aerial kills), yet the North Vietnamese had 16, including Nguyen Van Coc (right), the top Ace of the war with nine kills. On Aug. 23, 1967, Coc led several MIG fighters to intercept a group of 40 American aircraft on a bombing mission. They shot down three American F-4D fighters and one F-105D fighter-bomber without losing a single MIG. Eight American aviators were killed or captured.

5. The Battle for Hill 861 - In 1967, Bravo Company, 1st battalion, 9th Marines went to search for caves on Hill 861. After a skirmish, the company attacked up the hill without knowing that it had encountered a large enemy force. Most of Bravo was wiped out and the survivors were pinned down until rescued by Kilo company that night.

6. The Kingfisher Battle near Con Thien - In 1967, "Operation Kingfisher" was launched to destroy NVA forces based just south of the DMZ. On Sept. 21st, the 2nd battalion, 4th Marines began a "search and destroy" mission and quickly encountered the entrenched 90th NVA regiment. The Marines lacked tank support because recent rains limited road mobility, while the dense vegetation and close proximity of the enemy restricted air and artillery support. After a day-long battle, the Marines had suffered at least 16 dead and 118 wounded while trying to break out of the enemy's kill zone. The battalion withdrew at dusk, although flee may be a better term since 15 dead Marines were left behind. Details are sketchy, but the battalion didn't return to collect its dead until three weeks later. Veterans of the battle state they lost 34 KIA that day.

7. The Ambush at Hoc Mon - In 1968, 92 American soldiers of C Company, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 25th Division began a search-and-destroy mission near Saigon. They were looking for a Viet Cong force that had been firing rockets into their Tan Son Nhut Air Base. As they rushed along a road without flank security to catch up with their battalion, they ran into an ambush. Within eight minutes, 49 American soldiers were dead or dying, and 29 were wounded.

8. The Battle of Kham Duc - This large Special Forces camp was abandoned as it was overrun, despite reinforcement by an American rifle company. Hundreds of friendly civilians and militiamen were left behind as Americans escaped aboard helicopters and C-130s.

9. The Battle of the Slopes - A company of American paratroopers was searching for the NVA in rough terrain when it was attacked by a large force. It suffered 76 KIA as it fled, with two platoons wiped out.

10. The Battle of Dai Do - A Marine Corps infantry battalion was mauled and forced to retreat after a disorganized attempt to dislodge a large North Vietnamese force near the DMZ. The Marines suffered 81 KIA and 397 wounded while killing hundreds of NVA. Accounts of this action are hidden within reports of operations in region of Dong Ha.

11. The Battle of Ong Thanh - After minor enemy contact the previous day, a battalion commander led some 150 American soldiers single-file into the bush to destroy the enemy. They ran into an NVA regiment with some 1400 men. Alpha company was wiped out in 20 minutes, and by sundown, 59 American soldiers lay dead with 75 wounded. An excellent documentary is on-line where survivors describe the onslaught.

12. The Battle of Two July - The 1st battalion, 9th Marines went up a road to find the NVA, and found them. Information is vague, but Bravo Company was overrun and the remnants of Alpha Company pulled back, leaving a combined 53 known dead, 190 wounded, and 34 missing.

13. The Battle for Hill 875 - or the Siege of Dak To - The 2nd battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade with over 300 soldiers advanced up this hill with artillery and air support. They encountered stiff resistance and suffered heavy causalities, but were shocked when the NVA counterattacked. The battalion formed a tight defensive perimeter and was surrounded while chaos ensued after a Marine Corps' jet dropped a 500 lbs bomb on their position. The brigade's 4th battalion arrived the following day and broke the siege, then advanced to secure the hill after the NVA withdrew. Of the 570 US troops involved in the attack on the hill, 340 became casualties.

14. The Battle for Firebase Mary Ann - Some 50 NVA sappers attacked at night, then slipped away. The U.S. Army suffered 33 killed and 83 wounded among the 231 soldiers at the base. Their brigade commander was relieved of duty and the firebase closed.

15. The Battle of Ngok Tavak - On May 10, 1968, an NVA battalion attacked an old French fort manned by a 150 Chinese mercenaries led by eight American Special Force troopers and three Australian advisors, plus 33 Marine artillerymen with two 105mm howitzers. Helicopters flew in 45 more Marine artillerymen as reinforcements and evacuated casualties during the day-long battle. The fort was overrun and everyone fled, with some literally clinging to the skids of a helicopter. At least 32 Americans were killed and several helicopters shot down. A book about this lost battle was published, and a short account is here.

16. The Battle of Lang Vei - In 1968, the NVA surprised everyone by using light tanks to overrun the well-defended U.S. Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, despite heavy American artillery and air support. Most of the 500 defending Montagnards were killed. Losses among the 24 U.S. defenders were 7 killed in action, 3 POWs, and 11 wounded.

17. The Attack on Cu Chi - In February 1969, enemy commandos attacked the large U.S. Army airfield at Cu Chi. They destroyed nine large CH-47 helicopters, heavily damaged three more, and caused minor damage to two others. (photos are here) 14 Americans were killed and 29 wounded during the three-hour battle.

18. The Battle for FSB Ripcord - American Generals made one final attempt to block the Ho Chi Minh trail, and found more NVA troops than expected. As the NVA assaulted remote Fire Support Base Ripcord, Generals decided to evacuate the base. Four battalions from the 101st Division conducted a fighting aerial evacuation that lasted 23 days with the loss of at least 75 American KIA and 463 WIA. Dozens of helicopters were shot down or damaged, while several soldiers and all major items of equipment were left behind.

19. Day Three of Operation Linebacker II - Of the 99 huge B-52 bombers in this Dec. 20, 1972 bombing raid on targets around Hanoi, eight were lost to enemy fire, resulting in 36 airmen killed or captured. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) blamed the tactics utilized (flight paths, altitudes, formations, timing, etc.), which had not varied from raids the two previous days. Air Force historian Earl Tilford noted: "Years of dropping bombs on undefended jungle and the routines of planning for nuclear war had fostered a mind-set within the SAC command that nearly led to disaster."

20. The Battle of Koh Tang - This was the last battle of the war. In 1975, Khmer Rouge patrol boats seized the container ship, USS Mayaquez, which was the last American ship to leave Saigon. Surveillance indicated the ship anchored at Koh Tang island so the Marine Corps assembled a rescue force. Most helicopters were shot up while landing Marines on the island and were disabled or crashed. The Marines faced stiff enemy resistance and were pinned down. It was then discovered that the Mayaquez crew had already been freed on a small boat, so the landing force was recalled. A total of 18 GIs were killed and 41 wounded in the rescue attempt, while 23 airmen perished in a helicopter accident during the preparation stage.

This Myth is Now Dead

This proves that at least a dozen battles were lost during the Vietnam war. There were more, but hiding embarrassing losses is standard procedure in any military organization. This is shown in that documentary about the Battle of Ong Thanh, where survivors tell how commanders tried to spin that loss as a victory, while the loss of FSB Ripcord was hidden from the public until 1985. This list does not include battles lost by the Army of South Vietnam, whose forces were supported by American advisers and firepower.

Some veterans may be upset by these accounts because the U.S. military won nearly all other battles. However, this destroys the myth that no battles were lost. Some may claim these were too small to be counted as battles, yet the U.S. military and historians note most of these as battles. Others will argue that some were stalemates, not losses. These are valid debates, but no sane person will claim that none of the 20 accounts listed here were losses. In contrast, the publication of this article is likely to generate more nominations for this list from combat veterans.

Wikipedia is often linked for details because it provides concise accounts. One can search the Internet for more information if they doubt what they read there. The point is that myths of invincibility may cause future miscalculations, and more lost battles. Ignoring these losses does great disservice to all those brave men who fought and died in these battles, as well as those now dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ironically, the USA succeeded in Vietnam only after its military left. Billions of dollars in annual aid were no longer required, while American GIs were no longer killed or maimed. There was no Chinese communist take over of the region. In contrast, traditional rivalries resurfaced leading to a short yet bloody war between China and Vietnam in 1979. Without the distraction of fighting a war, the Vietnamese government was forced to address economic problems. It recognized the need for foreign trade and the value of free enterprise and has gradually become a capitalistic economic power. American corporations now operate factories in Vietnam while United Airlines has daily flights. Likewise, the USA will never win the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan until its troops come home.

Given the ample historical facts available, many historians are amazed this "we never lost a battle" myth persists. Part of the blame lies with certain professors, who published this myth in articles like: "Lessons of History and Lessons of Vietnam" where in 1986 U.S. Army Major David H. Petraeus (left) wrote: "Vietnam planted doubts in many military minds about the ability of US forces to conduct successful large-scale counterinsurgencies. These misgivings do not in all cases spring from doubts about the capabilities of American troops and units per se; even in Vietnam, military leaders recall US units never lost a battle." Despite this dismal scholarship, Petraeus became a four-star General, partly due to marriage to the daughter of four-star Army General William Knowlton. General Petraeus is now in charge of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and since he failed to learn from the Vietnam war, he is likely to fail based on myths of U.S. military invincibility.

The PitFalls Of Pacification

As Obama unveils new efforts in Afghanistan, it is worth a look at what happened in Vietnam. Part two in a series.

By Matt Steinglass - GlobalPost
Published: March 27, 2009 10:15 ET
Updated: March 28, 2009 16:12 ET
Courtesy Of The Global Post

LONG AN PROVINCE, Vietnam — My Hanh, 20 miles west of Ho Chi Minh City, is a prosperous town of brick and concrete farmhouses interspersed with huge Japanese-owned electronics factories.

When Cai Van Minh, 56, was growing up during the Vietnam War, My Hanh was a tiny village surrounded by an unbroken expanse of rice paddies and thatched-roof bamboo huts. In March 1963, the South Vietnamese government ordered Minh and his family to leave My Hanh, relocating them into a brand-new “strategic hamlet” half a mile away called Tram Lac.

The Saigon government was building the hamlets as part of an all-out push to defeat the increasingly aggressive communist Viet Cong insurgency, which already effectively governed much of the territory of South Vietnam.

The “strategic hamlets” campaign was one of the first major U.S.-backed counterinsurgency efforts in the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1960 to 1975 and killed at least 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. (Click here to read the first part of this series: Lessons of Vietnam.)

The same year that Minh’s family was relocated, a 22-year-old American foreign service officer was posted to a province in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, where he found himself running the province's "strategic hamlets" program.

It was the officer's first experience with insurgent warfare in a career that would involve many. The officer was Richard Holbrooke, who is now U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, charged with the diplomatic side of American efforts to defeat the Taliban insurgency. And while the details differ, many of the problems the U.S. faces today in Afghanistan are the same as those Holbrooke faced at the beginning of his career in Vietnam.

The idea of the strategic hamlet was first put forward by the British officer Robert Thompson and the visionary CIA officer William Colby. It was modeled on a program that helped the British defeat a communist insurgency in Malaya in the early 1950s.

The aim of the program was to separate the Viet Cong from the population they depended on. Chinese communist ruler Mao Zedong had said a guerrilla army moves among the people like a fish in water. Now South Vietnam’s authoritarian anti-communist president, Ngo Dinh Diem, vowed he would “drain the pond to catch the fish.”

Minh remembers the anger of peasants taken away from their ancestral lands — home of the graves of their ancestors — and dumped in shoddy concrete houses surrounded by barbed-wire fences, forced to present identification cards to soldiers at the hamlet gate. He recalls the terror of random shelling by South Vietnamese artillery every night, which was an ineffectual attempt to harass Viet Cong troops. The shelling only added to the population’s antagonism. Although the strategic hamlets were supposed to protect the peasants from the Viet Cong, they were actually driving even more of them to support the communists.

“At that point, the number of people in the strategic hamlet who supported the Viet Cong was about two-thirds,” Minh says.

For Minh, the shift in allegiance was permanent. After South Vietnam fell to the North in 1975, Minh pursued a career in the communist town administration. He retired last year as vice chairman of My Hanh's People's Committee.

The fact that the strategic hamlets program failed does not mean it was poor counterinsurgency theory.

According to military historian Nguyen Huu Nguyen, a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) who fought in the South from 1965 to 1975, the strategic hamlets program was a good idea. In fact, the goal it sought to achieve was crucial: “population control,” as it is called in the new 2007 U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual, co-authored by Gen. David Petraeus. It is the same goal that Petraeus pursued in Baghdad by walling off ethnically homogenous neighborhoods and instituting curfews and checkpoints.

But in Vietnam, it didn’t work. Corrupt government administrators stole funds meant for construction and social programs. To generate positive statistics, the government expanded the program too fast — when Holbrooke arrived in the Mekong Delta, he found many of the hamlets in his province existed only on paper. The government lacked troops to defend them.

In mid-1963, the Viet Cong launched a campaign to overwhelm the hamlets. They assassinated village government officials, including administrators and teachers, and encouraged villagers to tear down the fences. The campaign gathered steam when president Diem was killed by his own generals in a coup in November. By early 1964, most of the strategic hamlets had been destroyed, their populations returning to their former villages or streaming into the cities as refugees.

“In Vietnam the U.S. built strategic hamlets and still lost,” Nguyen said. “In Afghanistan, where they cannot even build strategic hamlets, there is no way for the U.S. to win.”

One reason the strategic hamlets program failed is that it was too inflexible an application of a technique from Malaya.

Many analysts have criticized the U.S. for misapplying old solutions, fighting in Vietnam as if it were Korea, Malaya or the Philippines rather than adapting to local realities. The new counterinsurgency manual tries to avoid such mistakes. Planners in Afghanistan will not simply replicate techniques from Vietnam or Iraq. They will recognize that the goals, actors, resources and constraints in Afghanistan are different. And they will employ an “iterative” process, testing out new techniques, discarding failures and adopting successes.

But counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam was iterative too. The strategic hamlets program was an early example of a long series of increasingly sophisticated attempts to pacify South Vietnam’s countryside between 1954 and 1975.

Popular mythology holds that the U.S. never attempted to address the social roots of Vietnam’s civil war. But in fact, numerous American analysts devoted immense resources to studying and addressing the sociopolitical side of the war.

Col. John Paul Vann and then-National Security Adviser Robert Komer saw that social change was a prerequisite for political success, and created the “Revolutionary Development Cadres” — teams of South Vietnamese social workers who were paired with USAID workers to bring social and economic improvements to the countryside. This evolved into the CORDS program, which has influenced the Provincial Reconstruction Teams that operate today in Afghanistan.

CIA officer William Colby recognized that security required local defense forces, and he backed the “Combined Action Platoons,” which paired a squad of U.S. Marines with local soldiers living in a single village.

The RAND Corporation’s social science researchers realized that pacification required a metric for assessing success, and devised the “Hamlet Evaluation Surveys,” which tried to produce reliable data that could generate a measurement of how much of the countryside was really under government control.

The CIA, meanwhile, understood that a sophisticated social and political view of the conflict required an attempt to dismantle the Viet Cong’s shadow government, and set up the “Phoenix” program to gather intelligence and promote defections, arrests and assassinations of Viet Cong officials. Experts at USAID, RAND, the State Department and elsewhere saw the need for land reform to draw impoverished poor peasants away from the communists, and finally convinced the Vietnamese government to adopt a law that redistributed land from wealthy landowners to poor farmers. And this is just a partial list of efforts to combat the war's social underpinnings.

The U.S. war in Vietnam, particularly from 1966 on, was never purely military in nature.

Indeed, American civilian aid efforts in South Vietnam dwarf the American efforts in Afghanistan today. In 1967, USAID’s budget in Vietnam was $550 million — $3.5 billion in today’s dollars, compared with a U.S. aid budget in Afghanistan of $1 billion a year. Meanwhile, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan are almost entirely military, with just 50 civilian staff.

The U.S. has announced it will send up to 300 more State Department civilians to Afghanistan. But that number pales in comparison to the more than 2,000 civilian personnel USAID had in South Vietnam in 1967. And South Vietnam was smaller, both in physical size and population, than Afghanistan.

The U.S. new strategy review for Afghanistan, scheduled to be unveiled March 27, reportedly focuses on integrating the sociopolitical and military elements of counterinsurgency. But in introducing the Afghanistan strategy to NATO officials earlier this week, Holbrooke said that simply spending a lot of money on aid does not guarantee results.

Holbrooke called the U.S. program to eradicate opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan — which has thus far cost $800 million — “the most wasteful and ineffective program I have seen in 40 years."

The last time Holbrooke saw such a wasteful and ineffective program, then, was in the late 1960s, when he was one of America's senior pacification officials for Vietnam.

Part one: Lessons of Vietnam

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