s taying the c ourse 231each time, following some delay while the arguments were rehashed,
Johnson would agree to resume the air raids.
On the ground within South Vietnam, meanwhile, the United States
would fi ght what amounted to two separate wars. In response to the
threat posed by the Vietcong and its NLF political wing, American and
South Vietnamese forces continued the counterinsurgency eff ort. Th ey
aimed to win over the rural population through a combination of
security measures and economic development. Th e task was daunting,
however. Most peasants likely did not care who won and thought
instead in more immediate terms about their security; they might go
either way, depending upon which side could better protect them. Th e
communists had built up a strong political infrastructure and intelli-
gence network that would take time to dismantle. For its part, the
Saigon government had demonstrated little capacity for pacifi cation,
and its troops often alienated the population they were supposed to
safeguard by indiscriminate harsh treatment of anyone suspected of
sympathizing with the communists. Despite the obvious importance
of counterinsurgency, pacifi cation proceeded haphazardly during the
first several years of the Americanized war. General Westmoreland
reported at the beginning of 1968 that the South Vietnamese gov-
ernment seemed to have made very little progress, suff ering from wide-
spread corruption and inefficiency, while the VC infrastructure
remained intact.
Th ere was ample blame to go around. Part of the problem was insti-
tutional: no U.S. agency owned the responsibility for making a real
nation out of South Vietnam. By default, then, the task fell to the
American military, which lacked either the experience or the capacity
for pacifi cation. Westmoreland showed far more interest in tackling
regular communist forces, which he deemed the greater threat, than in
the slow work of bringing security to the countryside. His own intelli-
gence chief said pacifi cation bored the MACV commander. When an
army study found that pacifi cation depended on successful small-unit
operations that improved security at the local level, Westmoreland
rejected the report, which implied that his approach was misguided.
He treated local security and his military operations as unrelated.
(Regular communist units understood the importance of political
support among the rural population because they depended upon local