Final Draft - 11/12/68

The Paris peace negotiations have been marked by the classic Vietnamese syndrome: optimism alternating with bewilderment; euphoria giving way to frustration. The halt to the bombing produced another wave of high hope. Yet a civil war which has torn a society for twenty years and which has involved the great powers is unlikely to be settled in a single, dramatic stroke. Even if there were mutual trust -- a commodity not in excessive supply -- the complexity of the issues and the difficulty of grasping their interrelationship would make for complicated negotiations. Throughout the war, criteria by which to measure progress have been hard to come by; this problem has continued during the negotiations. The dilemma is that almost any statement about Vietnam is likely to be true; unfortunately, truth does not guarantee relevance.

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# I. THE SITUATION WITHIN SOUTH VIETNAM PRIOR TO NEGOTIATIONS

The sequence of events that led to negotiations probably started with General Westmoreland's visit to Washington in November, 1967. On that occasion, General Westmoreland told a Joint Session of Congress that the war was being militarily won. He outlined "indicators" of progress and stated that a limited withdrawal of United States' combat forces might be undertaken beginning 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 lived in relatively secure areas; the figure was expected to rise. A week later, the Tet offensive overthrew the assumptions of American strategy.

What had gone wrong? The basic problem has been conceptual: the tendency to apply traditional maxims of both strategy and "nation building" to a situation which they did not fit.

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American military strategy 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 was deployed along the
frontiers of South Vietnam 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. Victory would depend on inflicting
casualties substantially greater than what we suffered until
Hanoi's losses became "unacceptable."

This strategy suffered from two disabilities: (a) the
nature of guerrilla warfare, (b) the asymmetry in the definition
of what constituted unacceptable losses. A guerrilla war
differs from traditional military operation because its key
prize is not control of territory but control of the population.
This depends, in part, on psychological criteria, especially a
sense of security. No positive program can succeed unless the

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population feels safe from terror or reprisal. Guerrillas rarely seek to hold real estate; their tactic is to use terror and intimidation to discourage cooperation with constituted authority.

The distribution of the population in Vietnam makes this problem particularly acute. Over ninety percent of the population live in the coastal plain and the Mekong Delta; the Central Highlands and the frontiers, on the other hand, are essentially unpopulated. Eighty percent of American forces came to be concentrated in areas containing less than four percent of the population; the locale of military operations was geographically removed from that of the guerrilla conflict. As North Vietnamese theoretical writings never tired of pointing out, the United States could not hold territory and protect the population simultaneously.

By opting for military victory through attrition, the United States' strategy produced what came to be the characteristic feature of the Vietnamese war: military successes that could not be translated into permanent political advantage.

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( Even the goal of stopping infiltration was very hard to implement in the trackless, nearly impenetrable jungles along the Cambodian and Laotian frontiers.)

As a result, the American conception of security came to have little in common with the experience of the Vietnamese villagers. American maps classified areas by three categories of control, neatly shown in various colors: government, contested and Viet Cong. The formal criteria were complicated, and depended to an unusual extent on reports by officers whose short term of duty (barely 12 months) made it next to impossible for them to grasp the intangibles and nuances which constitute the real elements of control in the Vietnamese countryside.

In essence, the first category included all villages which contained some governmental authority; "contested" referred to areas slated to be entered by governmental cadres. The American notion of security was a reflection of Western administrative theory; control was assumed to be in the hands of one of the contestants more or less exclusively.

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But the actual situation in Vietnam was quite different;
a realistic security map would have shown few areas of
exclusive jurisdiction; the pervasive experience of the Viet-
namese villager was the ubiquitousness of both sides. Saigon
controlled much of the country in the daytime, in the sense
that government troops could move anywhere if they went in
sufficient force; the Viet Cong dominated a large part of
the same population at night. For the villagers, the presence
of government during the day had to be weighed against its
absense after dark when Saigon's cadres almost invariably with-
drew into the district or provincial capitals. If armed teams
of administrators considered the villages unsafe at night, the
villagers could hardly be expected to resist the guerrillas.
Thus, the typical pattern in Vietnam has been dual-control
with the villagers complying with whatever force was dominant
during a particular part of the day.

The political impact of this dual control was far from
symmetrical, however. To be effective, the government had to

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demonstrate a very great capacity to provide protection;
probably well over ninety percent. The guerrillas' aim
was largely negative: to prevent the consolidation of
governmental authority. They did not need to destroy all
governmental programs -- indeed in some areas, they made
no effort to interfere with them. They did have to demon-
strate a capability to punish individuals who threw in their
lot with Saigon. An occasional assassination or raid
served to shake confidence for months afterwards.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had another
advantage which they used skillfully. American "victories"
were empty unless they laid the basis for an eventual with-
d withdrawal. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, fighting in their
own country, needed merely to keep in being forces sufficiently
strong to dominate the population after the United States
tired of the war. We fought a military war; our
opponents fought a political one. We sought physical
attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion.