The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

54 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The United States did not support the Diemgovernment’s effort to reach the rural population by sending civilian civic action teams into the villages until it was too late. the noncommunist Vietnamese real independence—the prime political cause motivating all Vietnamese. In the 1954-1955 post-Geneva Accords era, Ngo Dinh Diem emerged as the person who finally achieved complete inde- pendence, overthrowing Emperor Bao Dai and establishing the Republic of Vietnam. This gained him widespread sup- port. Underpinning that was a reformed and motivated South Vietnamese army with a positive set of civic action–oriented attitudes toward the civilian population. This ethos earned popular support while defeating sectarian insurgencies, and began to wean villagers’ allegiance away from the Viet Minh. The approach owed much to Edward G. Lansdale’s advice, based on his involvement in Ramon Magsaysay’s successful campaign against the communist Huks in the Philippines and election as president with an overwhelming popular mandate. Once firmly in power, however, Diemmade political errors that were compounded by U.S. mistakes. Most prominent was our decision to take the Vietnamese Army entirely out of the internal security role it had played and convert it into a con- ventional regular army—trained, organized into corps and divisions, and equipped to confront an overt North Vietnamese invasion (which would not occur for another 20 years). Despite clear evidence that the North intended to revive its earlier rural-based insurgency, a poorly trained, inadequately equipped Civil Guard took over rural security, supported under the U.S. aid program by a Michigan State University contract team consisting mainly of retired U.S. police officials as advisers. The United States did not support the Diem government’s effort to reach the rural population by sending civilian civic action teams into the villages until it was too late. 1961-1963: The Kennedy Era and Rural Affairs In 1961, when faced with possible South Vietnamese col- lapse caused by a revived Hanoi-directed insurgency, the John F. Kennedy administration decided to take a stand in Vietnam against further communist expansion in Asia. The watchword was counterinsurgency, but at higher official levels the mission was understood more as a traditional military combat approach with an overlay of Special Forces than as an effort to address the security, political and economic sides of the conflict where it mattered most—at the village level. American military advis- ers were inserted at all Vietnamese army levels down to the provinces. Initial CIA efforts supported irregular defense forces among the mountain tribes (e.g., the Montagnards) and other home-grown sources of popular resistance to the Viet Cong. In 1962, following an onsite study of how to get USAID involved in counterinsurgency, the Saigon aid mission was reorganized, with a new special office called Rural Affairs that assigned representatives to each province. (At the time, only Rufus Phillips on a 1954 inspection trip to a formerly Viet Minh- controlled area in the Mekong Delta recently handed over to the South Vietnamese Army. Courtesy of Rufus Phillips