Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency by Thomas L. Ahern, Jr. (review)

It is impossible to read Thomas Ahern's magisterial account of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam without the mind wandering to America's present-day wars in Iraq and, especially, Afghanistan. Ahern clearly intended for the book to be read against the backdrop of today's conflicts, even though he seldom addresses the obvious parallels directly. When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) commissioned Ahern, a retired career CIA officer who served around the globe (including Iran, where he was among the U.S. hostages held for 444 days during the Islamic Revolution), to write an official history of the agency's counterinsurgency programs in Vietnam, it did not intend for the book to be for posterity alone. Ahern writes with urgency to inform the agency's critical efforts in countering a new wave of insurgencies, and he effectively highlights many of the key problems that bedevil U.S. counterinsurgency efforts abroad to this day.

Ahern exhaustively traces the evolution of the vast array of CIA-sponsored pacification initiatives in Vietnam. Many focused on developing village-based defense forces to stand up to the Viet Cong. The Citizens' Irregular Defense Groups, the Mountain Scouts, and the Strategic Hamlets represented early attempts to inoculate villages against Communist infiltration by empowering communities to defend themselves. Yet the establishment of local paramilitary forces outside the national command structure made the authoritarian South Vietnamese government (GVN) extremely uneasy. Ngo Dinh Diem and his revolving door of weak successors did not trust what they could not totally control. Ahern notes that the GVN was always pessimistic, even paranoid, in its assessments of the political loyalties of South Vietnam's peasantry.

This view was not necessarily inaccurate. The GVN never succeeded in commanding wholehearted loyalty from its people. The CIA, and the U.S. government as a whole, spent considerable time trying to win popular support in provinces and rural areas for the GVN, without truly grasping the depth of the GVN's legitimacy problems. Ho Chi Minh's regime in North Vietnam was the heir to the national liberation movement against French colonialism. The South Vietnamese government of Diem and his military successors, by contrast, was in many ways the heir to the French colonial tradition. South Vietnam's urban, Catholic elites had little in common with the majority of the country's population and could not identify or empathize with it.They resisted meaningful political and economic reforms that might have undermined the appeal of the Communist message. Their efforts to preserve the existing order and the attendant privileges for those at the top forestalled attempts to redress legitimate grievances of the population.

The GVN was thus a difficult regime for which to generate much support. Yet the U.S. government and some South Vietnamese leaders—notably, Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu—kept attempting to cultivate a "revolutionary" anti-Communist ideology among the people. The Force Populaire, a paramilitary force that was to deploy in the villages to perform good deeds by day and provide security by night, and the Census-Grievance teams, small units drawn from the local population that combined political action with intelligence-gathering, were examples of efforts to provide local security while generating anti-Communist fervor. Yet such programs failed to achieve more than tactical successes because they rarely produced significant improvements in peasants' quality of life that could be tied to the GVN. Unsurprisingly, the stagnant, status quo GVN was unable to manufacture a dynamic ideology that would inspire mass support. Dramatic-sounding concepts such as "Revolutionary Development," meant to seize the "revolutionary" mantle from the Communists, were little more than slogans in the face of persistent GVN opposition to land-reform initiatives and the empowerment of local leaders.

Ahern's conclusions challenge much of the currently prevailing wisdom on counterinsurgency as it is being conducted today in Afghanistan. He is particularly critical of the U.S. failure to take advantage of the coup against Diem in...