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221 chaPTer 11 CORDS Every American and Vietnamese pacification manager recognized, by late 1966, that accomplishments had failed to match early expectations. Over the course of that year, pacification operations recorded a net gain of just over 400 hamlets, bringing the number of those declared secured to 4,400 of a total of 11,250. This progress represented only a little more than a quarter of the 1966 goal, and the modest scope of the so-called National Priority Areas for 1967 demonstrated the reduced scale of GVN and U.S. pacification objectives. In the five provinces of I Corps, for example, only the area around Da Nang city now qualified for priority treatment. Two districts and parts of two others in Binh Dinh Province constituted the priority area in the vastly larger II Corps area, while in III Corps only Gia Dinh Province, surrounding Saigon, and parts of contiguous provinces were to get special emphasis. Only in IV Corps, portions of which had never hosted a strong insurgent presence and where pacification should therefore be relatively easy, was more than one entire province to get priority attention.1 Nevertheless, a CIA analysis done at the request of Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance saw the Viet Cong infrastructure as newly vulnerable. Hanoi’s military offensive, launched in late 1964 in hopes of victory before the United States could intervene, had sapped the VCI by drawing guerrillas into main force units. Harsh exactions on the population, with heavy taxation and forced recruitment, and “heavy-handed terrorism” for those who resisted, had accompanied the drive for a military decision, and alienated many of the previously noncommitted. In the wake of allied military victories, the VCI found itself, at least in Annam, “in a weakened and exposed state.”2 Even in the Mekong Delta, as much as 50 percent of the VCI and local VIETNAM DECLASSIFIED 222 force leadership had been transferred into main force units. In III Corps and in some lowland portions of II Corps, the VC were calling on women to replace male cadres conscripted into the army. A station analysis of this development concluded that it must already have produced leadership and other weaknesses “which should have been boldly and imaginatively exploited on our side” in order to defeat the resiliency that allowed the VC “to respond, to re-group, to rebuild, and to reinfiltrate.” The station lamented that “we have, unfortunately , not seen enough of this” kind of exploitation, which it thought should emphasize direct attack on VC command elements. Such a campaign would not only produce organizational disruption and personnel and materiel losses, but also generate a destructive atmosphere of betrayal in VC ranks.3 Nevertheless, even if opportunities to weaken the VCI were going unexploited , it appeared to John Hart that demands for support of the main forces had stretched the system beyond its capacity. “Food and manpower,” he wrote, “are inadequate in many areas and, according to recently captured documents, guerrilla forces are shrinking. [Declining] morale is contagious, and the spirit of the political and support forces is suffering along with that of the battered main-force troops.” The COS saw the pacification programs as taking advantage of the more favorable military balance: “The enemy is hurting not just in his main-force military effort, but all down the line.”4 But Hart did not argue that the VCI had been crippled, and headquarters agreed. The paper prepared for Deputy Secretary Vance acknowledged that “the timeliness and adequacy of [the communists’] renewed focus on the rural political struggle will be a decisive factor in our own pacification progress this year.” Exploitation of allied gains would require recognition that the underlying aim of “‘People’s War’ is to mobilize the rural populace in order to overthrow the GVN and place the Communist Party in power.” Pacification could succeed only in the form of a countermobilization, with security and development programs viewed not as ends in themselves but as means of “turning the people against the VC and gaining their support for the GVN.”5 CIA analyst George Allen noted the asymmetry of the VC’s and GVN’s respective bases of support and the advantage this conferred on the VC. While the VC had replaced traditional local government with “youthful cadre imbued with revolutionary zeal and Marxist ‘scientific’ efficiency,” the GVN relied on an urbanized middle class that viewed GVN corruption and incompetence with “cynicism and scorn.” A successful pacification strategy would have to overcome this...

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