Viet Nam: The Bases of Accommodation

Conclusion

IN HOI AN (capital of Quang Nam province) the overwhelming majority of the students in the local high school rallied to the Government, requested arms to fight the enemy and helped to capture most of the Viet Cong cadre which had entered the city expecting to set up its own administration. Similar responses by students, labor-union members and civil servants elsewhere produced a rallying of support for the Government which had not been equalled since the early days of the Diem regime. The weak spot was not in the people's lack of hostility toward the Viet Cong but in the suspicion of many Government officials toward the people.

In the past the Viet Cong could expect to win the war simply by preventing Saigon from extending its control in the rural areas. This the Viet Cong can still do but it is no longer sufficient to achieve victory. Increasingly the Viet Cong must also demonstrate their ability to win support and to exercise authority in the cities. So far, they have been even less successful in these efforts than the Government has been in winning support in the countryside. In this sense, history--drastically and brutally speeded up by the American impact--may pass the Viet Cong by. Societies are susceptible to revolution only at particular stages in their development. At the moment the rates of urbanization and of modernization in the secure rural areas exceed the rate of increase in Viet Cong strength. At a time when the South Vietnamese Army is beginning to show signs of being able to operate on its own, the Viet Cong are becoming increasingly dependent on North Viet Nam for manpower as well as supplies. A movement which once had the potential for developing into a truly comprehensive revolutionary force with an appeal to both rural and urban groups could now degenerate into the protest of a declining rural minority increasingly dependent upon outside support.

In an absent-minded way the United States in Viet Nam may well have stumbled upon the answer to "wars of national liberation." The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.

Time in South Viet Nam is increasingly on the side of the Government. But in the short run, with half the population still in the countryside, the Viet Cong will remain a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency to exist. Peace in the immediate future must hence be based on accommodation.

IV

DURING the past three years the pattern of the military conflict has been largely determined in Hanoi and Washington, which are also playing the dominant role in negotiations. The stability of the political settlement which eventually results in South Viet Nam, however, will depend primarily upon the extent to which it reflects the social and political forces within that country rather than on external influences, either military or diplomatic. Hence, there is good reason to encourage the early inauguration of a political process within South Viet Nam in which all significant political groups can participate and to allow that process rather than a diplomatic conference to have the lion's share in determining the future of the country.

It is often argued that this process should begin with the creation of a coalition government. There are, however, many disadvantages to such an approach. Neither the NLF nor Saigon wants a coalition with the other, and it is difficult to envision how the existing leaderships could work together. From the viewpoint of the Government such an arrangement would, as one moderate Vietnamese leader put it, simply allow "the wolves into the chicken pen." More specifically it would surrender to the Viet Cong a major share in the exercise of authority in urban areas, which is precisely what they have been unable to win through military means.

Conversely, it would be difficult for the NLF to enter into association with a group of men whom it has repeatedly denounced as puppets and traitors. Even if external pressure from the United States, Hanoi and the Soviet Union produced something in Saigon which could be labeled a "coalition government," it clearly would not be a coalition government in fact. A "coalition" implies sustained cooperation between autonomous groups. If there was a reasonable balance of power within the Government, however, it would be a government divided against itself, a temporary expedient which neither side would expect to endure; each side would be busily organizing its military and political forces for the final showdown. Alternatively, pressure from Moscow and Hanoi plus impatience in Washington might lead to a coalition weighted on the side of the communists. In this case, the "coalition" would not only be temporary, it would be a sham, with the political outcome a foreordained conclusion.

HE urban-rural division of the country and the mixed pattern of political control in rural areas suggests that the process of political accommodation should start at the bottom and work up rather than the reverse. Some forms of local accommodation have, of course, existed for some time in parts of the country, particularly in the Delta. Most frequently they have involved "live-and-let-live" arrangements among local military commanders. To some extent they have also involved mutual tolerance of each other's revenue-raising activities. On the Government side, the weakness of its forces and the natural desire to remain in the towns and avoid the efforts and dangers of combat have provided incentives to accept these arrangements, while for 'he Viet Cong it has been a general war-weariness among local cadres, especially in the Delta. To expand these local accommodations substantively and geographically will entail many difficulties. None the less, this is the way to start a political process which will reflect the actual balance of forces within the society.

IN SOME RESPECTS this pattern of accommodation would not be very different from that worked out between Saigon and the Hoa Hao. It would mean that the Viet Cong would as effectively dominate its hard-core areas as the Hoa Hao and Catholic organizations do in their villages and districts. To be sure, the indigenous Viet Cong clearly differs in important respects from the religious sects and the nationalist parties, but it also shares many characteristics with them. Up to a point, the evolution of relations between the Viet Cong and the established political system paralleled that of the sects and other parties. Like them, the Viet Minh developed organizational and political consciousness in the 1930s; it then came into conflict with the French and their puppet authorities; after 1954 it in effect withdrew and, like the other sects and parties, went underground during the period when Diem was attempting to centralize authority and eliminate local centers of power.

Unlike the other parties and sects, however, the Viet Cong began in the late 1950s to receive significant reinforcements in the form of returnees and supplies from North Viet Nam. Consequently, at that point the Viet Cong broke the pattern of evolution which it had shared with the other groups--consciousness, confrontation, with-drawal--and instead instituted a renewed period of confrontation. After 1963 the other groups reached varying degrees of accommodation with the Government while the confrontation between the Government and the Viet Cong intensified. Yet it is not unreasonable to assume that when it becomes clear that this confrontation cannot succeed, the indigenous Viet Cong will again move into a phase of with-drawal, which conceivably could then be followed by accommodation and incorporation into a restructured and expanded political system:

INITIALLY the practical needs for and benefits from accommodation are likely to be greater at the local than at the national level Differing patterns of control will be possible in different area, and concessions in one area can be traded for comparable concessions in other areas. If the cease-fire arrangements divide the country into military zones of control, political control in a village will in most cases be determined by the zone in which it is located. A large number of districts and the majority of provinces, however, will undoubtedly be divided between zones. At these levels, consequently, the functioning of government will require some cooperation between, and eventual integration of local NLF and Saigon governmental structures. One means of accomplishing the would be to elect province chiefs and or enlarged and strengthened provincial councils. Elections at the provincial level are likely to encourage political candidates and groups to appeal to both rural and urban voters and to promote cooperation among non-communist groups. They would give the VC NLF the legitimate opportunity to enter the political process and to demonstrate their ability to win power at the grass-roots level. Provincial elections could also be suitably staggered so as to permit more effective supervision by outside observers and international bodies.

IF accommodation worked in a majority of provinces, the way would be opened for its extension to the national Government. The next step would be the election of a new constituent assembly, perhaps in part by universal suffrage and in part by the provincial councils, to devise new basic laws and choose a new Central Government. If as a result of this process the VC-NLF secured control of the Central Government, the United States would obviously regret the outcome but could also accept it and fall under little compulsion to reintervene.

In the interests of promoting widespread access to the Government and accommodation among groups, it would be wise for the constituent assembly to shift some authority from the Central Government to provincial and local governments. Centralization of authority in the national Government simply complicates the problem of accommodating Viet Cong and noncommunist forces. If all power resides in the Central Government, the struggle or control is all the more intense: cooperation becomes nearly impossible. Political integration from the bottom up will facilitate the loosening up of the political structure, and the loosening of the political structure will at the same time promote political accommodation, particularly at the national level.

Any suggestion for greater decentralization of authority in Viet Nam is always met with the charge that it will encourage "warlordism," to which a strong Central Government is the only antidote. In actuality, however, as the earlier history of China. Viet Nam and even Western Europe amply demonstrates, warlordism is the product not of efforts to provide a structured decentralized authority, but rather of efforts to maintain a narrowly based, centralized authority where it is inappropriate to the situation. Warlordism is the illegal, disruptive, and violent way in which a centralized system is adapted to the realities of dispersed power. Warlordism is the alternative to the formal decentralization of authority, not a product of it.

In the recent past, the French, Bao Dai, Diem, each in different ways, attempted to perpetuate centralized authority, and in every case they weakened it. To strengthen political authority, it is instead necessary to decentralize it, to extend the scope of the political system and to incorporate more effectively into it the large number of groups which have become politically organized and politically conscious in recent years. Such a system might be labeled federal, confederal, pluralistic, decentralized--but, whatever the label, it would reflect the varied sources of political power. In the recognition of and acceptance of that diversity lies the hope for political stability in Viet Nam.

Copyright by the Council on Foreign Relations. Inc. Reprinted by permission.