Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency

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Books by Thomas L. Trivia About Vietnam Declassif Ahern quotes exchanges with Headquarters, cites conflicts with MACV, and documents the complex political terrain. From the CIA standpoint, it battled for success with two constituencies, one American, the other Vietnamese, and yet it never conducted a comprehensive analysis of the insurgency's political dynamics.

Journal of Cold War Studies

The Vietnamese insisted on the final say on all programs — it was, after all, their country. But they could never control their own bureaucracies, whose competing equities led them to interfere with agreed-upon CIA operations that were seen as challenges to power. The story is not one of unremitting failure, however.

Informants were recruited to identify communist cadres and a civic action program trained security teams and strengthened provincial administration. Roads were repaired, haircuts given, security provided, and the villagers responded by informing on VC forces.

Ahern identifies many reasons for the collapse of the pacification efforts. Some South Vietnamese recognized them as well. Despite all the programs designed to disrupt VC infrastructure, it remained virtually intact. One complicating factor was the decision of the Vietnamese government to treat captured VC as criminals, not prisoners of war, with the result that after short sentences they were free to return to the fight.

Cases of brutality resulted when old traditions among the Vietnamese prevailed, a problem aggravated by the lack of trained interrogators.

Experiments conducted under flawed assumptions are likely to provide unsatisfactory outcomes. In the final chapter Ahern discusses what he believes to have been the fatally flawed assumptions of the war in Southeast Asia, for example, conflict in Vietnam was between communism and democracy rather than a battle for national liberation — this prejudiced policy and operations.

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In this edition, Ahern includes a preface that reflects on the Vietnam precedents and the lessons they suggest for battling insurgencies. The circumstances are not identical, but the similarities are significant, though complicated by the magnitude and complexities of an insurgency incorporating fanatical religious beliefs.

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Still, the United States again faces the problems of foreign forces trying to protect populations that do not fully participate in their own defense and the alienation brought on by the destruction inherent in counterinsurgency and counterterrorist operations. He served five tours in Asia, including three in Indochina. Since retirement, he has served as a CIA contract historian.

A slightly redacted version of Rural Pacification was released in Five other Ahern histories of CIA efforts in the region were declassified with varying degrees of redaction in All six can be found at http: The last of the series, Undercover Armies: 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.

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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.

Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency

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.