October 13, 2009
TED KENNEDY ISN'T AROUND...:
The Real Afghan Lessons From Vietnam: The 'clear and hold' strategy of Gen. Creighton Abrams was working in South Vietnam. Then Congress pulled the plug on funding. (LEWIS SORLEY , 10/11/09, WSJ)
All the better-known early works on the Vietnam War—by Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, George Herring—concentrated disproportionately on the early period of American involvement when Gen. William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces. As a consequence, many came to view the entirety of the war as more or less a homogeneous whole, and to apply to the whole endeavor valid criticisms of the early years, ignoring what happened after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive. [...]In the later years, Abrams, along with Ellsworth Bunker (at the head of the embassy in Saigon) and William E. Colby (in charge of support for pacification) devised a more viable approach for conducting the war even as U.S. forces were being incrementally withdrawn.
Security for the South Vietnamese became the new measure of merit. Instead of "search and destroy," tactical operations were now focused on a "clear and hold" objective. Greatly increased South Vietnamese territorial forces, better trained and equipped and integrated into the regular army, provided the "hold."
Abrams, Bunker and Colby regarded South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu as his country's "No. 1 pacification officer." Against the advice of virtually all his advisers, Thieu took the courageous step of organizing and arming a People's Self-Defense Force to back up localized defense forces that defended their home provinces. Thieu's own view, validated by the results, was that "the government had to rest upon the support of the people, and it had little validity if it did not dare to arm them." Ultimately four million villagers were enrolled in the self-defense force.
Thieu also implemented a "Land to the Tiller" program which, for the first time, brought real land reform to the South Vietnamese peasantry. By 1972 over 400,000 farmers had acquired title to two and a half million acres of land. Tenancy was eliminated.
Better intelligence and a structured Phoenix program (as the campaign against the enemy infrastructure was called) progressively identified and neutralized the enemy's covert infrastructure. Most were either captured or induced to rally to the government side, providing valuable sources of intelligence for going after the rest.
By the time of the enemy's 1972 Easter Offensive virtually all U.S. ground troops had been withdrawn. Supported by American airpower and naval gunfire, South Vietnam's armed forces gallantly turned back an invasion from the North amounting to the equivalent of some 20 divisions, or about 200,000 troops.
...to screw over this ally.