by Nathan Hodge
Komer, known as “Blowtorch Bob” for his abrasive, hard-driving style, was given ambassadorial rank, unprecedented power for a civilian, and, crucially, was made part of the military chain of command: Komer reported directly to Westmoreland and later to Abrams, the commanders of MACV. He was no mere civilian figurehead: Komer led a mixed civilian-military staff drawn from the military, the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency (the external propaganda arm of the U.S. government), USAID, the CIA, and the White House. Four regional deputies were assigned to each of the four corps-level commanders, and hybrid civilian-military teams were assigned to 250 districts and forty-four provinces of South Vietnam. Soldiers reported to civilians, and vice versa.19
Komer recognized that the conventional military tended to focus on finding and killing the enemy. Even though the U.S. agencies and the South Vietnamese governments had forwarded a few piecemeal programs to promote rural security and development before then, Komer later noted that “pacification remained a small tail to the very large conventional military dog.”20 Placing the military’s pacification programs under civilian leadership, he found, gave the civilian experts greater influence over the project. The main problem, in his view, was a lack of managerial focus, not of armed might. In essence, the U.S. government was putting into practice strategies that had been advocated by veterans of colonial administration like Thompson, who believed the problems of guerrilla war could basically be solved by intelligent civilian administration, better policing, and political reconciliation.
Land reform was an example of how this could work. The Communists had made a promise of land redistribution to win support.21 With U.S. government encouragement, the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu forwarded a program called “land to the tiller,” whereby the government of South Vietnam gave deeds to tenant farmers who actually worked the land. By early 1973, the government distributed over 2.5 million acres, helping undercut the Communists’ promise. In his conversation with Thompson, Morris discussed the land program; as Thompson noted, Thieu’s government was consciously borrowing from a lot of the same programs that Ho Chi Minh had originally used to gain his political capital with people in that region there.
Nonetheless, the military was resistant to taking on what were essentially nonmilitary jobs, even after Abrams took command of MACV. In a 1970 commanders’ meeting, Abrams complained that the 173rd Airborne Brigade had brought all of its parachutes and rigging equipment to Vietnam, perhaps in the hope that they could get in some D-Day-style combat parachute jumps. “They’ve got all that stuff,” he said. “What are they doing? It’s never going to be used here—none of it! And the reason is that that’s not what you need. Really, in order to help this thing along, you’ve got to do something else. That’s no good, parachuting around the country. It isn’t going to advance the cause by a nickel.”22
Even in 1970, three years after the creation of CORDS, the military officers had failed to see the nature of their work. Abrams complained pointedly, “And I think everyone, especially the military officers, has got to realize—. I mean, you can say, ‘Jeez, it’s nonmilitary, I mean that’s not what the military is supposed to be doing.’ No shit! Too bad! That’s not what we’ve got. We’ve got something else! And we’ve got to do what this thing needs, and the problem is to understand what is best and what it does most need, and then go ahead and do it!”23
In 1969, David Passage, a junior Foreign Service officer, was assigned to CORDS. It was his second overseas posting. His first State Department assignment was to the U.S. embassy in London—a plum job, but at the height of the war, he knew sooner or later his number would come up for Vietnam. Like most of the other junior Foreign Service officers in his CORDS training class, he was young and single—somewhat expendable, in the view of the bureaucracy.
Prior to arriving in Saigon he attended a six-week course at the Foreign Service Institute’s Vietnam training center. Each class received lectures on the history and economy of Vietnam, and the culture of the region. They learned some rudimentary Vietnamese, and talented linguists were singled out for further language instruction. Instructors also led classes on insurgency and guerrilla warfare that drew on the experience in Vietnam and other counterinsurgency campaigns, including the Hukbalahap Rebellion, a Communist guerrilla movement in the Philippines that was put down in the early 1950s with U.S. assistance. Finally, Passage and his fellow Foreign Service officers received a week’s training at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
Most of the CORDS team members would be assigned to small advisory teams in the provinces, but Passage was assigned to work directly for William Colby, the career CIA officer who had been seconded to USAID to work as Komer’s deputy. He lived in a USAID compound halfway between downtown Saigon and Tan Son Nhut airport. The USAID presence in South Vietnam at the time was enormous. Between 1962 and 1975, South Vietnam was the largest single recipient of USAID funds; at the height of the war, the agency spent over a quarter of its total annual budget there.24 The agency’s commitment to South Vietnam also carried another price: The memorial wall at USAID headquarters in Washington lists fifty-three agency employees who were killed in Vietnam and Laos.
Passage was assigned to MACV headquarters. His office ran the Hamlet Evaluation System, the complicated and time-consuming security and development reports that were so widely disliked by advisors like John Morris. The reports required answering lengthy multichoice questionnaires on questions of nation building (or “economic development” in the parlance of the time) and security. The HES reports were highly politicized, and could have serious implications for advisors’ careers: If a report was too negative—showed too many enemy-held villages—the advisors weren’t doing their jobs. But if the advisers were too positive—didn’t report any contested hamlets—they couldn’t show progress. Passage’s job was to “adjudicate” the report to provide a reality check against the self-reporting bias of the advisors. The whole point of the exercise was to create accurate metrics, a practice that appealed to the technocratic sensibilities of the time but was also a way of countering the phenomenon of “ticket-punching.” Most civilian and military personnel served one-year tours, which meant that little if any collective wisdom about the place was accumulated. As one CORDS official put it: “We don’t have twelve years’ experience in Vietnam. We have one year’s experience twelve times over.”25
CORDS staff in Saigon would review the monthly tactical operations center reports, or TOC summaries, for each province and compare them with the HES reports. The TOC summary was basically a digest of radio traffic and incident reports: the Viet Cong overrunning a hamlet; the assassination of a village official; the request for an air strike or artillery fire. Passage would then go out to the field to compare notes with the advisors on the ground. He had blanket travel orders with the military, which meant he could fly within the country on military aircraft on a “space available” basis. He could hop military flights on Air America, a CIA front company that operated an airline within South Vietnam. He would make the arrangements with the province senior advisor and visit district-level teams. Armed with the HES reports and the radio summaries, he would sit down with the advisor and ask, “Are we talking about the same place?” He found that some advisors were honest and can-do, but others were so cynical by that point that they saw no reason to justify staying in Vietnam.
Passage spent about fifteen days per month traveling around one of South Vietnam’s four corps (Vietnam was divided into four tactical zones by the military). He was issued a weapon to carry when he was out in the field. He was also given an International Harvester Scout, a small four-wheel-drive truck, a sort of civilian equivalent to a Jeep. After a field trip he wrote a short summary on how pacification programs were doing and where CORDS needed to focus more effort. That short memorandum was included in a larger report that was summarized and sent to Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, to Abrams, to Komer, and to the president.
The other part of Passage�
��s job was the “dog and pony show.” A regular series of congressional delegations visited Saigon on brief fact-finding junkets, and Passage was Abrams’s command briefer on pacification. His briefing usually followed briefings by bright, squared-away military officers; Abrams sandwiched him in between J-2 (intelligence) and J-3 (current operations). Passage also briefed Thompson.
Despite the massive U.S. involvement in the hearts-and-minds effort, however, Passage was pessimistic about the government of South Vietnam, upon which the responsibility for winning ultimately would rest. Despite reforms by the government of Nguyen Van Thieu, and the appointment of more competent Vietnamese generals, the simple fact, he felt, was that the government of South Vietnam was hopelessly corrupt and inept. He was learning the hardest lesson of U.S. intervention: Pouring millions of dollars of aid into building military, political, and civil institutions sometimes had the paradoxical effect of weakening the host government. U.S. assistance to a kleptocratic government only created more opportunities for corruption. And time was not on the side of the intervening Americans. Passage’s final briefing for a congressional delegation was for Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine. As he went through the pacification brief, he ended by concluding: “I have spent fifteen of the last thirty days in the field, and I can detect no improvement in the loyalty of the rice farmer whose father grew rice and whose children and grandchildren will grow rice. They think the GVN [government of Vietnam] is beastly and corrupt.”
In Passage’s view, the operation, CORDS and the U.S. government pacification effort, was a success, but the patient was irretrievably ill. The population was still sitting on the fence, and massive U.S. aid only made things worse. The U.S. government, Passage felt, never tried to root out the corruption in the government of South Vietnam, but unless the government was able to win the loyalty of its own people—to get them off the fence, and volunteer information about where the enemy was—they would be at a hopeless disadvantage. The main lesson, at least in Passage’s view, was that sometimes less is more. The larger the involvement, the more likely it was to fail.
In Vietnam, Passage was a mid-rank Foreign Service officer, an FSO 5 going on FSO 4, so he had little power.* He resolved that one day, if he had the chance, he would do things differently, and get it right. He continued to work with the military during his diplomatic career and had a chance to put the principles he had learned in Vietnam into practice—in El Salvador. Between 1984 and 1986, he was deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in San Salvador, at the height of that country’s civil war. Every key member of the military and diplomatic team in El Salvador had served in Vietnam, and they were determined to avoid the massive involvement that had undermined Vietnamese self-reliance. “We were convinced that we could do it right and it worked,” Passage told me. “We … turned it around. It was El Salvador’s fight, not ours, and they were going to win it.”
There would be no massive U.S. military presence in El Salvador: Less was more. The Reagan administration, its hands tied by a Democratic Congress, avoided the temptation of committing massive amounts of men and matériel that would undermine the will of the host country to fight for its own survival. “We would train the Salvadorans to fight … but we would not advise them,” Passage told me.
The United States compelled the government of El Salvador to make significant internal reforms; retrained the Salvadoran military, which had been guilty of grotesque human rights abuses, and, most important, kept the U.S. military footprint small—no more than fifty-five trainers were in the country at a time. In Passage’s view, El Salvador was a model of successful counterinsurgency.
As a retired diplomat, Passage was often invited to lecture senior military officers on counterinsurgency. But he found that the Vietnam conflict remained a taboo subject: “The military as a whole did a reasonably complete job of putting Vietnam aside. We were simply not allowed to use Vietnam as a case study. We used Angola and Mozambique. Anytime anybody suggested Vietnam, a sort of advanced palsy or Saint Vitus’ dance would take hold.”
This changed after the Iraq invasion. In early 2006, Passage, then a retired ambassador, received a letter from the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Center for Army Lessons Learned was convening study groups under the direction of Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who was leading an effort to write a new counterinsurgency doctrine. The team drafting the manual wanted input from civilians who had experience in the mission of armed nation building in Vietnam, and Passage was uniquely qualified.
The U.S. military, chastened by the horrific failures in Iraq, was about to undergo a serious culture shift. Confronted by failure, commanders would reach out to diplomats, development experts, even human rights advocates for fresh insight into what was now acknowledged as a nation-building mission. In part, commanders were searching for a bureaucratic fix. “Getting it right” meant that the rest of government would sign on for the mission, and the military would not have to go it alone. That was supposed to be the template for success in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan.
Getting nation building right, however, ignored some larger historical lessons. When U.S. intervention was massive, and intrusive, it threatened to wreck local self-reliance. Building a functioning state and a robust civil society was a difficult, drawn-out process that took decades, even lifetimes. But like the generation that preceded them in Vietnam, the military planners and policy practitioners dealing with Iraq’s implosion were can-do types who thought that “we” could somehow save the situation if enough energy, ingenuity, and resources were brought to the mission.
* William Colby would later quietly change the R in CORDS to stand for “rural” to soften the implication that development would be imposed on the population in a draconian, top-down way.
* Foreign Service ranks go in reverse numerical order: The lower the number, the higher the rank.
CHAPTER 7
The Accidental Counterinsurgents
In late 2005, the journalist Thomas Ricks paid a visit to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Leavenworth was home to the Army’s Command and General Staff College, the midcareer school for Army officers, and Ricks had been invited to give a talk to a lecture hall packed with majors, many of whom had seen recent action in Iraq. At that point, he was in the midst of writing a new book on the war in Iraq, then entering its third deadly year. For Ricks, a longtime military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the decision to invade Iraq had been a devastating strategic blunder, followed by a series of frustrating missteps by U.S. military commanders. The title of his book was Fiasco.
Ricks had been working on his manuscript around the clock, seven days a week. When he finished the first draft of a section, he would e-mail it to every soldier mentioned in the passage. When he finished a second draft he would repeat the process. One soldier wrote back, “I am in Iraq, just got back from a firefight, but give me a couple of weeks and I will tell you more.” He was writing history as it unfolded, in near-real time.
Ricks also immersed himself in French counterinsurgency theory, scouring old volumes and memoirs in a search for answers to the questions he had brought home from his reporting trips to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. “I would read it and again and again find the key to the problems that had bothered me,” he told me. “How should troops deal with prisoners? How should commanders think about the enemy? What is the proper command structure in an operation like this? It was all there.”
Those same questions were on his mind when he drove out to Fort Leavenworth. I need to leave them with something concrete. The room had a green chalkboard. He began his talk by writing one word, in block letters: GALULA.
Then he turned and looked up at the thousand or so majors in the auditorium, and asked, “Who knows what this word is, or means?”
Two or three hands went up.
Oh no, Ricks thought. “If there was anything you take away from this lecture,�
� he continued, “you need to go and find out who David Galula was, and what he wrote, and how it might help you in Iraq.”
Galula, a French theoretician of irregular warfare, fought in North Africa, Italy, and France during the Second World War, and later observed revolutionary wars in Indochina, Greece, Algeria, and China. In 1964, Galula published an influential volume, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. The book elaborated a simple, compelling idea: Insurgency is at heart a struggle for the support of the population. Eighty percent of the counterinsurgent’s task was civilian in nature: administering aid, building roads, policing villages. It is a manpower-intensive task, and Galula stated that the armed forces are usually the only organization equipped to handle the mission. But soldiers are no substitute for civilians. “To confine soldiers to purely military functions while urgent and vital tasks have to be done, and nobody else is available to undertake them, would be senseless,” Galula wrote. “The soldier must then be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout. But only for long as he cannot be replaced, for it is better to entrust civilian tasks to civilians.”1
Galula was writing primarily about twentieth-century insurgencies, anticolonial liberation movements or Communist insurrections, but his description seemed to neatly describe how so many nation-building tasks had fallen to the military in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army had published an interim counterinsurgency manual in October 2004, but the literature on the subject was still scarce. Many of the classic counterinsurgency texts were out of print. In the Pentagon library there had been a waiting list to check out the lone copy of Galula’s book.