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xv Preface No one still believes that history has come to an end. On the contrary, the further the twenty-first century advances, the more it resembles the one that preceded it. Millenarian ideology—once political, and now religious—aggravated by nationalist and ethnic antagonisms, dominates the politics of what is euphemistically (and patronizingly) called the developing world. The resulting conflicts play out on a stage still shaped by the legacy of European colonialism. The twentieth-century history of Vietnam displays all these features. Nationalism, anticolonialism, sectarian strife, and plain xenophobia all played a part in a struggle seen by the communist Vietnamese as one of national liberation and by American political and military leaders in terms of the existential confrontation between communism and liberal democracy. With Islamic fundamentalism substituted for Leninism, very similar things define the contemporary battle between radical Islam and the West. Warlords and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Sunni-Shia antagonism in Iraq, ungoverned and perhaps ungovernable tribal areas in Pakistan—all have their counterparts in the Vietnam of the Second Indochina War. I do not, of course, suggest that today’s problems in the Middle East are identical to those confronted in Vietnam. But there are compelling similarities. And I do suggest that American political and military leaders brought a nearly identical mindset , one deeply rooted in our culture, to their initial reaction to both cases. Faith in the efficacy of force, especially when supplemented by material largesse bestowed on a client population, is supported by unreflective confidence that the client needs and wants “freedom and democracy.” The effects of this mind-set were aggravated in Vietnam by thorny practical problems, some of which we see again in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in our incursions in northwestern Pakistan. One is that of leverage: how do we promote a government that is truly independent and yet responsive to U.S. guidance, especially on the inevitable occasions when its policy predilections seem to us not just ill considered but actually self-destructive? Also: can xvi the need for security be reconciled with building democratic institutions? That is, can we support rule by autocrat or junta and still see progress toward representative government? And can we prescribe the content of a governmental or political program—a constitution, say—to ensure its democratic authenticity , and still hope to see it become an organic part of the political culture we’re trying to create? Other such questions: can we win the loyalty of a population living in a subsistence economy by raising its material standard of living? What is the role of physical security in gaining or holding peasant allegiance? In particular, can we or a surrogate government win active acceptance by introducing forces from outside to protect a population that does not participate in its own defense? And finally, how do we solve the dilemma that results when the destruction seen as necessary to defeat an insurgency alienates the very population we seek to bring over to its government’s cause? The story of the American venture in South Vietnam can be seen as having three overlapping aspects. The first is the military, a war of movement pitting U.S. and the government of South Vietnam forces against the communists’ regulars. Second is the governmental, the effort to create national political institutions. Third, the part of the story told here, is the struggle to suppress the Viet Cong and win the loyalty of the peasantry. It is told primarily from the perspective of the CIA officers who supported and helped to shape the Saigon government’s effort to defeat the insurgency. I have also included the perspectives of insurgents, key South Vietnamese participants, and peasant witnesses to the struggle. Throughout, I am concerned to try to answer the question a version of which now challenges us in the Middle East: how—and how accurately—did the CIA, along with its Vietnamese and U.S. government partners, see the nature of the long struggle to defeat the Viet Cong and create a pro-Western polity south of the 17th parallel? This account of the CIA’s participation in rural pacification in South Vietnam describes specific programs against the background of the evolving agency—and U.S. government—understanding of the insurgency and of the political environment in which it took place. This evolution took place in a spontaneous, intuitive way, which accounts for the improvisational flavor of the programs themselves. Unconstrained by doctrine and thus free to...

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