THE REAL AFGHAN LESSON FROM VIETNAM
09, 10:37 P.M. ET
The Real Afghan Lessons From Vietnam
The ‘clear and hold’ strategy of Gen. Creighton Abrams was working in South Vietnam. Then Congress pulled the plug on funding.
By LEWIS SORLEY
More than 30 years have passed since North Vietnam, in gross violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, conquered South Vietnam. That outcome was partly the result of greatly increased logistical support to the North from its communist backers. It was also the result of America’s failure to keep its commitments to the South.
Those commitments included promises to maintain a robust level of financial support, to replace combat materiel, and even the use of air power to support the South in case of aggression by the North. That failure was the doing of a U.S. Congress that had tired of the country’s long involvement in a war in Southeast Asia and cared nothing for the sacrifices of its own armed forces or those of the South Vietnamese people.
Since then, whenever America has entered into other military actions abroad or contemplated such commitments, the specter of Vietnam has been raised. It is entirely appropriate that earlier military experiences be examined for such “lessons learned” as they may yield. But it is equally essential that those prior campaigns be accurately understood before any valid comparisons are made. When it comes to the Vietnam War, much skewed or inaccurate commentary has impeded our understanding of that conflict and its outcome.
All the better-known early works on the Vietnam War—by Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, George Herring—concentrated disproportionately on the early period of American involvement when Gen. William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces. As a consequence, many came to view the entirety of the war as more or less a homogeneous whole, and to apply to the whole endeavor valid criticisms of the early years, ignoring what happened after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive.
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Associated Press
South Vietnamese paratroopers, April 15, 1972.
William Colby, who headed American support for the South Vietnamese pacification program (and was later director of the CIA), once remarked that the prevalence of such truncated treatments of the Vietnam War was like what Americans would know about World War II if the histories of that conflict had stopped before Stalingrad, the invasion of North Africa and Guadalcanal.
We now know, or should, that virtually everything changed when Abrams took command. The changes grew out of his understanding of the nature of the war, and of his conviction that upgrading South Vietnam’s armed forces and rooting out the enemy’s covert infrastructure in rural hamlets and villages must be accorded equal priority with combat operations. Even combat operations were radically reconfigured.
Westmoreland had concentrated on a buildup of American forces—eventually peaking at 543,400 by 1969 in response to his repeated requests for more troops—to be used in large sweeps called “search and destroy” operations. The measure of merit was “body count,” the number of enemy killed, based on his conviction that if enough casualties were inflicted on the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong elements in the South they would be induced to cease their aggression.
Westmoreland did, during his four years in command, inflict a horrifying number of casualties. But North Vietnam relentlessly sent more and more men into battle. Westmoreland largely ignored the crucial tasks of upgrading South Vietnam’s military forces and supporting pacification, especially the campaign to eradicate the covert enemy infrastructure that used terror and coercion to dominate the rural population.
“Pacification bored him,” said Gen. Phillip Davidson, Westmoreland’s senior intelligence officer. As a consequence, the enemy’s covert infrastructure continued to keep the rural peasantry in the South under domination. Meanwhile, South Vietnam’s armed forces, consistently outgunned by the enemy (U.S. forces, already rich in combat assets, were given priority for issue of such weapons as the M-16 rifle), were slowed in their development and consequent ability to take on more responsibility for their nation’s security.
In the later years, Abrams, along with Ellsworth Bunker (at the head of the embassy in Saigon) and William E. Colby (in charge of support for pacification) devised a more viable approach for conducting the war even as U.S. forces were being incrementally withdrawn.
Security for the South Vietnamese became the new measure of merit. Instead of “search and destroy,” tactical operations were now focused on a “clear and hold” objective. Greatly increased South Vietnamese territorial forces, better trained and equipped and integrated into the regular army, provided the “hold.”
Abrams, Bunker and Colby regarded South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu as his country’s “No. 1 pacification officer.” Against the advice of virtually all his advisers, Thieu took the courageous step of organizing and arming a People’s Self-Defense Force to back up localized defense forces that defended their home provinces. Thieu’s own view, validated by the results, was that “the government had to rest upon the support of the people, and it had little validity if it did not dare to arm them.” Ultimately four million villagers were enrolled in the self-defense force.
Thieu also implemented a “Land to the Tiller” program which, for the first time, brought real land reform to the South Vietnamese peasantry. By 1972 over 400,000 farmers had acquired title to two and a half million acres of land. Tenancy was eliminated.
Better intelligence and a structured Phoenix program (as the campaign against the enemy infrastructure was called) progressively identified and neutralized the enemy’s covert infrastructure. Most were either captured or induced to rally to the government side, providing valuable sources of intelligence for going after the rest.
By the time of the enemy’s 1972 Easter Offensive virtually all U.S. ground troops had been withdrawn. Supported by American airpower and naval gunfire, South Vietnam’s armed forces gallantly turned back an invasion from the North amounting to the equivalent of some 20 divisions, or about 200,000 troops.
Critics were quick to attribute the successful defense to American airpower. Abrams would have none of it. “The Vietnamese had to stand and fight,” he said. If they hadn’t done that, “ten times the [air] power we’ve got wouldn’t have stopped them.”
When the last U.S. forces departed South Vietnam in March 1973 pursuant to the Paris Peace Accords, South Vietnam had a viable government and military structure that was positioned—had the U.S. kept its commitments—to sustain itself against the renewed aggression from the North that began almost immediately after the peace accords were signed. When America defaulted on those commitments, South Vietnam was doomed.
Lessons learned from the past are only as good as our understanding of the past. This is especially important to keep in mind now, as the commander in chief, his principal national security advisers, and senior military leaders contemplate the next step in Afghanistan. Analogies to the real history of Vietnam could be as useful as those based on a flawed understanding of that conflict are dangerous and misleading.
Mr. Sorley, a military historian and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, is the author of “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam” (Harcourt, 1999).
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