Shades of CORDS in the Kush

First let me say that we are all on the same side. Perhaps, as they say no one will savage the Church like a priest whose faith was devastated by the behavior of the hierarchy, but in truth we are all little humans trying to deal with it all so we can die comfortably feeling that I gave, didnt just take. On this site there is someone who had experienced Vietnam, Soviet Afghan and American Iraq/Afghan Wars. Admittedly, in decreasing order of intimacy with the American side but certainly with equal grasp of the other sides. And a certain linear trend seems to exist between all the three opponents view of our effort: America has no follow through and no resilience. And why should she? She values herself by being the land of the pursuit of happiness for its citizens, not asking them to give their lives brutally to the world revolution or for Allah. Fair enough, but then why do we start out with blind ordnance? Why make it a corporate boondoggle? As a Viet, an Iraqi and an Afghan what he thinks of the corporate guys we pay so well to be part of our "crusade" certainly crimps the outcome of our venture. He would notice that it is imperial because the corporate guys are there, like 19th Century Brits and Frenchies, to get rich, not to do anything for the locals. A few may say nice altruistic slogans at the start but when hell breaks loose, they grab the money and run; others are out and out crooks pocketing the change right from the start. What is a better sign of the Rummy/Cheyne bizzaro world than DoD contractors bringing in Third Country nationals, paying them peanuts, while 80% of Iraqis were unemployed? And yet Bush had the audacity to say that we're going to end all this totalitarian "welfare state" and impose democratic "free enterprise"? A lot of your soldier guys died for that dribble and field commanders of the insurgency more than cheered Bush as their best weapon; without food and water to keep their families alive Iraqis were hiring out as gunmen to the insurgency for payment in both Drhams and revenge. The Iraq-Iran War at least taught them all a hirable combat profession for employment after the US invaded. WE SET UP OUR TROOPS TO DIE WHILE CORPOATE-TYPES GOT RICH PRETENDING! Gentlemen, as officers and leaders of men, don't you spend nights awake feeling guilt for the men you lost to that? Despite all the guys who retired to cash in on the corporate scam in Iraq, I am very sure most of you are in the sleepless moral PTSD category.

Col. Gentile, read Mai's biography instead of her recent RAND report running over the war. Her book runs over the human, not institutional story of Mai. It's worth far more than her husband's pro Hanoi selective reading of intel reports and captured documents (all RAND guys were pro-Hanoi out of frustration with out high ordnance military except for Hosmer). Arens writes as if the war was CIA against GVN only. Sooo THERE IS NO HISTORY. Hey, I remember Komer-- well named "Blowtorch." For body and soul commitment-- he believed in pacification as doing something for Viets, not for KBR, and he did it as refugees scrambled for cities to escape endless daisy cutters, napalm and other anti-personnel stuff.

We killed VIETNAMESE, not Viet Cong. That' what you do when you're intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb. Are we doing any different in Iraq/Afghan War? Are we not getting even with the "towel heads"? SO whatever Mai had to say about US in Vietnam applies equally to our Bush "CRUSADE" against Islam. So, we've got someone reading these SWJ Blogs who saw the changes in Vietnam over a decade saw the changes in Iraq over nearly a decade and saw the changes in Afghanistan-- FROM BOTH SIDES!

That person can personally compare Le Duan with Zarqawi and Hekmatyar, for example. That person can tell you that all of them were cold blooded operators who had some abstract idea way up there in their Cingulate gyrus but in he brainstem all they had was motor programs for killing--mindlessly and feelingless, like a cat killing a mouse when its upper lip feels the warm fur of its prey. Yet they knew that real people with real feelings would follow them in this real war because the Americans would always do real harm to these real people for such unreal reasons.

Westy was, at least he told me this over several years, trying to shut up McNamara somehow by reaching the latters famous "crossover point" where the men&materiel infiltration is less that American destruction of it. It was his war against McNamara and he won it in the Central Highlands just about when McNamara quit. Even Hanoi's generals later admitted that. But that only caused Le Duan to switch from infantry to mechanized, after all, LBJ had so limited bombing that the Soviets could run the Vladivostok to Hai Phong to Hanoi to Mu Gia Pass tank line unmolested--down the Ho Chi Minh Trail on carrier trucks!!!! But boy, you should have seen the HaiphongïÆ' Hanoi Corridor with full trains and our jets streaking overhead, doing nothing until Christmas 1972. Once in Laos it was all statistical game of blind targeting under triple canopy jungle. But what did that do, given that in the end it was tanks and cannons that "liberated" South Vietnam?

1970 was the high point of pacification. Komer has to be given singular credit for that. He urbanized the people, so much by 1967 that Hanoi had to sacrifice the VC to destabilize the cities. The Radio Hanoi broadcasts TO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE just before Tet 68 made it very clear-- like Taliban Night letters-- which we, the Revolution-- are coming to get you where you think you're safe and modernizing. Well, as of 1969 you could see, not only that the cities held, but that the GVN was spreading to the countryside. So many RAND and CIA Viets I knew from before suddenly were in GVN jails, exposed by the Republic's intel as the Phoenix expanded into the countryside. Sure, a lot of scores were bitterly settled, but it was nothing like the tribal stuff in Iraq. Yet, IT WAS ALL VIETNAMESE, despite the self-lies Americans tell themselves to justify the most draining times of their lives. We didn't give a damn about the Viets. Our people there were out to build careers-- THOUGH MANY WENT NATIVE AND MANY CAP/MAT teams were like Jesuits spreading Catholicism to the natives in how they became part of the local scene. Cook's "Advisor" is a book you should read instead of just Elliott. There were many "Cooks" in the countryside! After 1969 the countryside went GVN and it was transformed with commerce, traffic, travel, electricity--all the things we never did in Iraq and Afghanistan. For their part, PAVN had to shoot Katushka rockets from the woods into the village market places at 10AM when most crowded to remind the peasants that theyre still there. In revenge many RF/PF units went after them with their MAT/CAP advisers. NVA rocketing wasn't like the VC terrorism--which was SELECTIVE-- that was like the American indiscriminant bombing. Luckily, we were thinning down by then and looked relatively nicer. But the CORDS house that Komer-- God bless that angel's wings-- built was going full steam. Viet went back to the countryside to do business and link up with one time VC "struggle village" captive relatives. Hanoi was awfully busy keeping ARVN out of its North Cambodia/Laos rear bases. Compared to Harriman's planned surrender late in 1968 at Paris accepting a coalition Gov in response to Hanoi's despondency over the failure of Tet Offensive (confirmed by Le Duan and the Soviet ambassador in Hanoi), what Nixon extracted from Hanoi is quite something. And the real reason was that, as Le Duc Tho admitted in a speech to Party historical conference in 1984, the VC was "only a minor nuisance" to GVN, so the liberation was totally done by us [PAVN]." Phoenix wrecked the VCI, not by killing but by thousands of Hoi Chans seizing the opportunity. Compared to our Iraq "reconciliation," where we pay Sunni gangster tribes to kill each other as alQaeda, I think the CORDS ops flowered into quite a COUNTERREVOLUTION. But I hesitate to add that the recent election re-count may yet label us "revolutionary" in Iraqi history in that we brought back a SECULAR elected Gov... lets stay tuned and pray!

I wouldn't contemplate punishing myself absolutely for supporting Bush in 2000 and, after escaping WTC on 9/11, supporting his attack on alQaeda if I could see any redeeming quality to it. But it was really only bait-and-switch. Bush got Congress to support retaliation in Afghanistan and then abandoned it, allowing binLaden to escape, so he could present Congress with a fait accompli in Iraq, arguing: YOU CAN'T REFUSE FULLY FUNDING IRAQ WAR, AFTERALL, OUR BOYS ARE ALREADY IN THE FIELD!

My doubts began to appear when once Bush-loving fellow Conservatives in White House and DoD alerted me that the Vietnam lessons will not be learned. So much so that a general on loan to the White House task force PUBLICLY warned me: if you want the meaningful dialogue between us to continue don't ever again bring up "that looooser's war, Vietnam." That's when I realized that I'm going to see the necons' World War IV against Islam unfold, would see my President that I worked to elect heart and soul call it a "Crusade." That's when I realized that this is going to be our bloodbath, led to a paroxysmal thirst for blood by the neocons who never served.

WE had a CORDS blue print, but it wasn't brought up until 2006, when Rummy was gone, in MILITARY REVIEW....and suddenly it was some big solution. Well, it was...ACTUALLY THE MODERNIZATION THROUGH URBANIZATION part. But now McChrystal thinks he's Jesus at the wedding and will make all the fish, bread and wine for the victory out of nothing. He and Petraeus thought they could intimidate Obama into 80,000 troops. But Obama knows that hes no Jesus, he's only US President, and he can't make 80,000 troops out of what we've got left. Nevertheless, McChrystal threw away the CORDS experience and here we are looooosing, UNLIKE Vietnam!

I'M ON YOUR SIDE, COL. GENTILE. I fully agree that an army exists to destroy an attacking army. What Petraeus wants to build his presidential campaign on and what McChrystal wants as his military campaign are really POLICE work, like the POLICE WORK Phoenix did after the military did its job at Tet. We should be running an urban revolution in secure areas where we REVOLUTIONIZE Afghan youth, for only they can be catapulted into 21st Century within 5 years. We can't hold the countryside; its too vast, too varied and too localistic. Afghanistan has to come to us after seeing what we offer in the cities that we--NOT Karzai-- run. From then on it is police work, not the kind of kinetic stuff that only increases the number of people sworn to a blood oath against us we decreased the number of Taliban fighters, their beloved relatives. That, by the way, is what the Elliotts were saying and I have to admit they were right, despite their excessive admiration for a regime under which they would not live.

Sorry for the free flow. I can't type and have a visual problem that makes it very hard. But I tell you, I'll put my foot where my mouth is anytime and am ready to EARN my pension volunteering to be of help in Afghanistan at no salary. I think old men who negotiate with the Afghans are less threatening than young soldiers in spacesuit armor armed to the teeth.

I hadn't read all of the SSI paper until now, Gian.

Wow. Just wow. It's soooooooo bad.

It doesn't even reflect reality as told in the source material of its day. In many ways, its stupidity is dangerous for policymakers who might actually believe the absurdity of a paragraph like this:

"In early 1968, 59 percent of South Vietnamese lived in secure villages.
By 1971, the figure increased to 96 percent, with most of the gains in the rural districts that had been the core of the insurgency."

That's source to Komer's autobiography! No, you can't make this up!

Even the most rudimentary competence in the literature would note that the "one war" data mining fell apart because of inconsistencies in the reporting tied to the Hamlet Evaluation System, the Terrorist Incident Reporting System, the Revolutionary
Development Cadre Evaluation System and the National Police Evaluation System.

This figure is tied to HES, but like all the collection sources mentioned above it suffered from what Starry called "widespread skepticism." He had reason to term them that way because soldiers bound for these "pacified" areas often found themselves in raging firefights.

The SSI author also doesn't seem to understand that what men put in their autobiographies to salvage public opinion about their efforts often is put to a lie by the men's own words uttered or typed during their time in the suck.

Komer in a 1970 trip report, for example, wrote "Vietnam analyses are still a dime a dozen, and still run the whole gamut from overconfidence to despair." If he didn't trust the HES/70 reports then, why should we trust his self-congratulatory tone in his later autobiography?

We shouldn't, and I don't know a serious historian who would. Now we're asked to take, apparently on faith, the SSI paper's author on the subject and apply his utopian vision to current operations?

He might make some very good points about PRTs, unity of effort and other important issues, but how can I trust him when he drags out these absurdities about Vietnam metrics?

On another issue, he never even mentions "Phoenix." Wow.

Everyone seems to be talking around the problem.

The reason why we don't know how well CORDs actually worked was because we never developed a system of metrics that could show us progress or failure on the murky, irregular battlefield.

Partly, this is because we never really understood aspects of causation (what was causing the rebellions locally) for all sorts of cultural reasons and so we couldn't arrive at a consensus on how to mitigate or "solve" the problem.

This doesn't merely apply to CORDS under Komer but to the entire suite of carrot pacification efforts under US or Saigon control: territorial security forces and RF/PFs, RD, refugee resettlement and care, Chieu Hoi, the police recruitment and training program, rural economic development, hamlet education and yada yada yada.

When Gian mentions this scholarly thrust, he's talking about this paradox. He's actually being kind, because Komer's CORDS ran into all sorts of problems throughout MACV's AOR that appeared inexplicable to those looking at the metrics then.

Physical control of the population didn't always seem to lead to destruction of VC infrastructure. Heightened security didn't always seize the villagers' hearts and minds, with attitudes remaining hardened against occupation and the corrupt Saigon government. Being incompetent and corrupt, ARVN's revolutionary development programs often fizzled and Saigon increasingly came to depend on US forces, further tainting it as a puppet government illegitimately propped up by foreign, colonial occupiers.

Some useful reading (if I can get this formatting right) might include Dale Andrade and James H. Willbanks, "CORDS/Phoenix: Counter-insurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future" in the 2006 Military Review; Richard A. Hunt, "Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnams Hearts and Minds"v (1995); George W. Allen, "None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam" (2001); and Eric M. Bergerud, "The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province" (1991).

Just my two Afghanis.

I pain at the way Mr. Gentile sites Kimball Elliot and Ahern, all very controversial, limited and not unbiased. I'm going through Aherns American lenses account now, the other two I fully read decades ago. We have a lot of retrospection now with which to discredit them, though that wouldnt be fair. But I might point out that it is rather looking at one side of Vietnam. Kimball's documents are not the actual evaluations of the war as Hanoi saw it because these are only now being released to a few Chinese and Russian scholars along with three Viets from Hanoi. Elliot speaks in his two volumes of one province and not to the end. Im sure he doesnt consider Vietnam a "peoples victory" anymore.

The whole problem is that we depended on Americans who enter with Vietnam and Communism as mysterious to them as Islam and Central Asia are to many now--and these guys were imposing OUR solutions like three blind mice. We conceptualize nation-building issue at levels of abstraction that suited our need to get oriented and then end up being the deadly simplifiers that make it us against them, them being "our" Viets. No chance then that we could admit that they could have done it better than us were it not for the compliant crooks we put in power--as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last time we fought a war well was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan because we didn't do the fighting, leaving it to the mujaheedins to do it their way. We see now that other than kill Soviets we didnt give a crap what happened. And now we expect to be welcomed and listened to? On what basis, 9/11 which would have never happened had the airlines obeyed the law?

Our guerrilla enemies never put some sort of magic guerrilla against us. It is ALWAYS untrained kids who can't even read and learn through experience surviving. And what do we put against them? Highly trained closed-minded and short fuse soldiers and even more rigidly trained officers, ALL TRAINED LIKE PAVLOV DOGS on the assumption that SF and SEAL school knows it all! The formats, in which they train, as Ms. Grossman's report on our intel ops shows, are so rigid that their minds can't even process the data we get on the high-tech equipment provided. Gen. Flynn has finally understood this. Our officers operate like cub reporters, looking for the "scoop" gem on the ground without processing the terrain in which we search for it. Perhaps I might compare it to my trek as a refugee across Europe vs. my trek as a backpacking tourist decades later. As a tourist I wanted to see a lot in a very short time and could not afford to linger looking at the forest; I was running to see this and then that tree... .. I finally would throw away my itinerary and did what I did in Vietnam: risked it all just SLOWLY wondering into VC territory as someone else whom they would consider acceptable because hes no danger. The only other people I ever met who operated that way were very highly trained to do that KGB agents in Cambodia.

To be sure, the CAP and later the MAT teams learned to operate as people who lived off the "vil" like the locals and depended on the RFs/PFs to stay alive. I would se these teams of marvelous Americans (many were allowed to re-up in the same place) evolve over months, much as did the wonderful American soldiers I met as a refugee across Europe. And sure enough, the very things WE ALL CAME TO LOVE ABOUT AMER ICANS were manifest in many MAT/CAP guys. They came to the "vils" to help, not to lead. The villagers told them what they need and the "advisor" struggled like hell to get it. A MAT platoon could get more of a CORDS priority than a civilian advisor and they would develop blood ties with locals because they followed rather than led. I saw a lot of cocky idiot lieutenants become the kind of guy that we always came to love Americans for because learned humility through going native. Before that only Special Forces were allowed to do that with the Montagnards. But that's like becoming just another Viet Cong against Saigon. In the end they had to stand there while some ARVN officer with a "bac," who had never been to the countryside all his life, kicked these "moi" (savages) around like animals-- same with the Khmer Scouts on the Mekong border.

The trouble is we never understand the local scene because our military's job is to make McChrystal (or Petraeus) happy....And who are they but guys who got their stars shouting "yes sir"? In Vietnam I never saw anything more unhappy than bird-colonels because they were always the guys in between. They knew that we had to learn to Vietnamize ourselves rather than Americanize the Viets. Yet old Westy thought that if the Viets couldnt be at least as smart as chimps they might as well become well trained dogs. How things turned out proved that point. Americans go in like newborn kittens. Intel blind with their eyes still not open but they have walky-talkies with which to call in firepower that makes the enemys invisibility irrelevant as he has been pulverized--or has he? So that's why they did: smash three acres into dust and live thee days...repeat....repeat... until all is "pacified." So what have we learned" How to say "boom!" We killed so many people for one reason because they looked like Mr. Charlie, so into the body count they go! That's what the authors Gentile sought to present as the aid we gave Vietnam. They wanted to say that you can't win over people with things they never had as compensation for destroying the only things they ever valued.

Still, I agree that we won by urbanization. Look, both Petraeus's electoral campaign and McChrystal's military campaign are measure by high body count (Afghans) and low casualties (ours). Trouble is that friend and foe look alike so we are blind and cant afford to take chances because theres the wife and the kids waiting for a homecoming. When you're job is foremost kinetic with lots of machines that kill, what else could ever take predominance. When you read his report that reads like an English 101 term paper at a Community College--you realize right away that McChrystals "strategy" is all a delay tactic and cover-up for fact that Afghan villagers would rather salvage what they could from Taliban days and get us the hell out so we dont blow it all up. The evolution of our militarys frustration can be demonstrated by looking at Bing West. He was one of the best enunciators of the CAP concept because it worked so you don't have to speak too much Vietnamese to see how the Northerners acted when they invaded I Corps compared to the CAP marines and so you realize how you can win-over the peasants by hitting PAVN in its staging areas while helping the peasant. Yet, when it came to Fallujah his prescription was: "let the Marines do what they do best, kill people!" Too often we fail to come down to the level of whats important to the peasants we try to get to fight on our side. SFs sought to impress on II Corps Viet peasants the importance of night patrol outside the vil perimeter and ambush couriers and PAVN recon. We finally gave the locals light-weight M-16s instead of M-1s and also able HUNGARIAN SF guys who, with the failed Hungarian Revolution in their blood, knew humility and the tactics of the weak (same with Hungarians in MAT Teams) needed to beat an invading army. But What I tried to get for them from Bien Hoa and never could was warm jackets. No one down there understood that Viets can't tolerate cold and those guys were useless, shivering uncontrollably when on patrol at night in the moist cold night air of the mountains. So, my kingdom for a nail...in this cases a warm field jacket!

Americans suffer from two deadly sins: AROGANCE and AVARICE. If frustrated Afghan/Iraq vets resort to robbing banks after the war, like many of the French "paras," I can understand because the war became a corporate boondoggle instead of nation-building. After a few years of that anything done well is useless. A couple of $millions skimmed by this or that corporation seems like nothing in the scheme of things, but when they prevent getting jackets to trembling Viet RF/PFs it is losing the war for want of a nail.

As his first act Kissinger issued NSC Order #1 consisting of 21 questions for every agency to answer. If you read the text you will want a law passed for the public beheading of every section director from Colonel on up in every segment of our involvement. How could people in command for so long sound so crazy, disjointed, and discoordinated after we had lost some 40,000 men?

The criminals-- top criminals are Rumsfeld and the JCS, per the same judgment as DERELICTION OF DUTY-- never looked at alternatives once the s**t hit the fan. The key goal then became cover-up and the best answer as to how to do that was: if we blow it up media can't film it. In the end, Petraeus "surges" PLEJURIZED CAP/MAT and CORDS--even the tribal Iraqis gave him the plan. But it's too late now because Muslims just want the killer Crusaders out since kinetic blowing things up is all we can do.

Iraq was already urban when we got there. I challenge Gentile to compare what CORDS did with the swelling cities of South Vietnam with what Rumsfeld did with the cities of Iraq where the people were already urbanized. We lost Iraq to American corporate corruption, not to alQaeda. In Afghanistan we screwed around for a decade. It's as if some incompetent surgeon repeatedly operates you and fails; but because somehow you survive, he keeps insisting that you cannot refuse him to go back in because his reputation as a surgeon is at stake.

Lastly, at first I respected Kilcullen as I did the Aussies in Vietnam, so much so that I would have offered him the hand in marriage of my beautiful first daughter, were she not married to an Aussie already and having made two more of them. But when I read his book I wanted nothing more than to debate him because he came across as a careerist serving as cover-up for totally incompetent and dangerous surgeons...so much so that, thanks to his outrageous account of Kumar, we're dreaming-on in our illusions about what kinetics in Helman and Kandahar. The real issue is that Americans think they can do anything and are accountable to no one so long as they can wrap things in the war on terror shroud. When they fail they blame the locals and then shoot them as Taliban. How does that differ from the Soviets?

Meanwhile the lesson of Vietnam is left undiscovered after so many mom&dad soldiers go wasted, making for so many orphans and widows back home. I feel so personally responsible, as an American by choice not chance, that late at night reading Afghanistan reports I have dangerous thoughts that, having failed to stop the killing of patriotic soldiers by a nation suffering from "ain't my kid going to war" disconnect syndrome, caring more about defeat than about casualties, I really think that I lost my right to live eating my grandkids' lunch as pension. So for me this has become very personal, having survived 9/11 at WTC.

The lesson we missed is that we WON in Vietnam through urbanization. You can quote all those rabid anti-war guys or you can quote Le Duc Tho. Read Col. Symington as to how Congress assured Hanoi's victory, it's no big secret! Soooo, here we are in Afghanistan, bleeding to death while no one cares. After all, during Vietnam everyone's kid went. But the polls never dipped UNTIL LBJ INCREASED TAXES WITH A 10% SURCHARGE, a lot of money. I remember when I showed the analysis in Scientific American to Gen. Eagleton, sitting on his bunk in IV Corps, he said: "Dan dont show me that because if I ever came to believe it I wouldnt be able to function anymore." How many such generals have got now? Now that Wall Street did us in better than binLaden would have ever dared hope on 9/11, we're getting ever more kinetic and lying about sacrificing troops to save citizens from acts of terrorism doing that. Ha! Watch that happen.

What we could have done is recognize NATO's limitation in territorial security. We could have secured a NE region, built economically productive cities there that make things the other countries in the area would buy (a good kick in China's rear, sort of Muslim Wal-Mart cities) and then invite ONLY young Afghans to live, study and work there well paid under strict regulations. The remittances sent home to their parents would speak louder than anything the Taliban mullahs have to say. The problem is that pompous Americans don't realize that they are not up against INSURGENTS but up against REVOLUTIONARIES. I marveled at how Elliot and his wife considered the Commies so good for the South Viets but not for themselves; she, like all the other pro-Hanoi Viets never went back and live under the "peoples victory." The Viets driven to the towns by our incessant bombardment of the cities would never return to the countryside. After victory Hanoi sent them there at gun point. Well, if we do the same urbanization REVOLUTION to cites NATO RUNS in Afghanistan, taking it from 85% rural to 75% urban where we educate and employ the youth, the Taliban would disappear within 5 years because there are no one million PAVN to come to its rescue and attack such cities. WE could have made an urban revolution within 5 years that would have constituted irreversible modernization. Studies in South Africa long ago showed that rural folk who move to cities don't ever want to go back to rural pursuits, like growing poppy. The Soviets, after 1985, were starting to do that too but they went broke and couldn't supply the cities because of OUR anti-chopper STINGERS.

CORDS never dealt with crooked corporation as we had under Bush, manned by crooked military retirees that want to make up for lost time. NATO could do the same and we could bring a COUNTER-REVOLUTION to Afghanistan that would bring it to modernity if NATO--NOT KARZAI-- runs several new productive Northwestern cities for 5 years. In that time we could create enough modern youths that like the moderns we created in Saigon resisted Communism to make that conquered city to this day 10x more productive as Hanoi.

Eugnid - "Nixon kept his word and in 1979 China kept its word"

Well, it figures it would've been something like that. I got the impression that Nixon was seen as a hero in Singapore during the Seventies, and Kissinger was practically "Honorary Chinaman of The Year", ten years in a row (I think he still commands that kind of respect).

When we saw Spiro Agnew chowing down at a local golf club, my folks made me go up and get his autograph. The theme from The Godfather was popular back then and was a staple on local muzak tracks. So I'm walking up to get Spiro Agnew's autograph while the Godfather theme is playing over the clubhouse sound-system. He seemed like a nice guy, he had a friendly smile. What a strange world.

Later on you'd get the occasional American friend foaming at the mouth when they'd see Nixon's "The Real War" on our bookshelf. Thanks for that post, I don't know much about the realpolitik of the time, but I'd never seen it summed up in quite that way..

One of my relatives was taking business trips out of Singapore to SVN in 1974 to buy scrap metal. As far as I know it was not considered unusual or risky by that time (at least that was the impression given). On one occasion he hooked up with two very streetwise Israeli businessmen who managed to procure a couple of semi-automatics and a jeep on their first afternoon in Saigon. They were interested in any piece of scrap or surplus connected with TOW missiles. They didn't manage to find anything, but were apparently very amusing companions.

James Harris: Yes--Lots of places became "safer" to one degree or another (lots of leeway there)...From 1973-75 The last Asst DEPCORDS MR III was comfortably retired in an unguarded home in an area the VC had walked around in as if they owned it in 1965, for example...But I disagree with your botom line. I mean, time was decidedly not on the GVN's side. Most who were there throughout would agree that the time security was most widespread was mid 1970. But most of those would also agree that by mid 1971 (when I arrived)there had been alarming deterioration. Look--by mid '71 US military strength was down to 250K--50% of the 1969 max. The enemy base areas had been heavily a US responsibility. As you likely know, the in-country base areas were a veritable lymph system of nodes connected by channels (infiltration routes). And the largely lightly- or unpopulated "nodes" were dispersed. Our withdrawal enabled PAVN to fill the vacuum by reinfiltrating the base areas, which we had hit but definitely not eradicated. Besides, Abrams's emphasis toward population security meant less pressure on the unpopulated base areas. Enemy influence radiated out of the base areas to affect nearby communities. I mean, with PAVN looking over their shoulder, the populace acted accordingly. A productive nexus operated between the units (even local force units were by then heavily PAVN fillers)and the much reduced VCI--the VCI task was now often relegated to VC combatants' relatives living in the villages (legal cadre). (Elimination of VCI travelling with the combatant units outside the population had been heavy--simply because of attrition to the units--IMO Phoenix was a loss).

So should there be a lesson however remotely applicable to Afghanistan, perhaps it is that it is one thing to skirt enemy base areas when you are in an upsurge and expect to attend to them later, say, once enough host country have been trained to "hold"......But quite another to leave hard base areas to the enemy when you withdraw from theater--on the assumption that the host country can tackle that problem later, Inshallah...You'll note I haven't mentioned porous borders--same problem writ large--as I assume all are well cognizant of that issue...

Cheers,
Mike.

The paper pretty well gets a 75% solution regarding the organizational and organizational culture challenges facing the PRTs up to around 05-06.

I recall a visit to Qalat PRT by the CFC-A deputy (a British general) when I was the number two there in 2004. He asked us if we realized we were the main effort. It was all we could do to not laugh, because even if that is how it was briefed in Kabul it was far from true on the ground. It became even less true when the 173rd replaced the 25th ID.

Part of the problem not fully touched on here goes to the dissolution of CJCMOTF. When the PRTs were established in 02-03, I think you could say there really was a PRT campaign plan and PRT IO plan. (I was on the Bamian PRT in 03). However--and unfortunately--reserve component leadership at the CJCMOTF was spotty and at times highly unprofessional. For example, a newly arrived CJCMOTF commander was relieved in 03 for cheating on War College papers (He had a lieutenant writing them for him.) Additionally, the staff at Bagram was constantly bombarded with stories of misbehavior by CJCMOTF soldiers--often field grade officers--in Kabul. An officer I know overheard LTG Barno say the CJCMOTF needed adult supervision. So, the decision was made to move it to Bagram even as LTG Barno moved to Kabul to affect greater pol-mil integration.

With the ultimate end of CJCMOTF, I think we can say that despite the existence of various boards and committees at ISAF, UNAMA and the US Embassy there really was no theater-wide PRT campaign.

Last note: This problem was further aggravated by the lack of consistent PRT missions, organization and resourcing across the Coalition. Every Coalition partner runs their PRT as they see fit. The differences are huge and it really makes almost no sense to say that and American PRT, a German PRT and a New Zealand for example are the same thing doing the same mission. I suspect that many coalition nations saw PRTs as a relatively low cost and safe mission that would allow them to check the block when it came time to show they were supporting the US in GWOT. I would also suspect that some of the blame for this must lie with the US Government that from my worms eye view from 02-05, seemed to be almost desperately casting about for any way to unload as much of the Afghan mission as possible onto other countries.