As these lines are being written, the negotiations in Paris have ended their sixth month. Their course has been marked by the typical Vietnam syndrome; optimism alternating with bewilderment and frustration. Sudden bursts of activity have punctuated stretches of stagnation. As with every other aspect of the war in Vietnam, the problem has been of understanding the situation both on the ground and at the conference table. In its absence, criteria for progress have been hard to come by.

# I. THE SITUATION WITHIN VIETNAM

It is truism that negotiations are not autonomous; they can reflect an objective situation, not create it. But the American tragedy in Vietnam has been above all conceptual. Our preconceptions of war, of diplomacy, of political stability have fitted Vietnamese realities with the greatest difficulty, if at all. Any discussion of the prospects for negotiations must inevitably start with an analysis of the situation within Vietnam.

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Perhaps the best way to begin is with General Westmorland's visit to Washington in November, 1967. On that occasion, General Westmorland told a Joint Session of Congress that the war was being militarily won. He gave figures marking our progress and indicated that a limited withdrawal of United States' combat forces might be undertaken starting late in 1968. On January 17, 1968, President Johnson in his State of the Union address emphasized that the pacification program -- the extension of the control of Saigon into the countryside -- was progressing satisfactorily. Sixty-seven percent of the population of Vietnam was under government control and the figure was expected to rise. A week later, the Tet offensive overthrew the assumptions of American strategy. What had gone wrong, of the expectations of those who emphasized military means as well as those who stressed political and economic programs?

Perhaps the key problem has been the tendency to apply traditional maxims of both strategy and "nation building" to a situation which they did not fit. The American military

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strategy has followed the classic doctrine that victory depended
on a combination of control of territory and attrition of the
opponent. Therefore the majority of the American forces were
deployed along the frontiers to prevent enemy infiltration and
in the Central Highlands where most of the North Vietnamese
main force units -- those units organized along traditional
military lines -- were concentrated. The theory was that
defeat of the main forces would cause the guerrillas to
wither on the vine.

However, a guerrilla war differs from traditional war
because its key prize is not control of territory but control
of the population. At issue is, above all, the expectations
and the sense of security of the population. This problem has
been particularly acute in Vietnam because of the great con-
centration of the population in the coastal plains and the
Mekong Delta. Hence, it is difficult to fight guerrillas and
hold territory simultaneously. Eighty percent of United States'
forces were to be concentrated in an area containing less than
four percent of the population.