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Home , Antonio Ledesma, Civil war, Cold war (general term), Counterinsurgency, John Nagl, Military service

Success and Failure in Campaigns Lessons from the Cold

✣ Ethan B. Kapstein

Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents. Robert Gates1 Why did the U.S.-assisted counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign succeed in the during the yet struggle in a decade later? Why were counterinsurgency forces able to score a quick victory in in the early but later became embroiled in long and bloody conflicts in and ? These questions that emerge from the era take on renewed relevance as the contemplates how to manage security threats emanating from fragile and conflict-prone regions around the without putting thousands of “boots on the ground.”2 To be sure, campaigns succeed or fail for myriad reasons. For example, the troubled U.S. effort in Vietnam has been explained by numerous writers over the years as the result of, inter alia, flawed U.S. strategy and tactics, poor leadership, the absence of a clear “objective function” or definition of what constitutes success, and a dysfunctional bureaucratic response.3 Similar criticisms have been leveled more recently at Washington’s handling of the

1. Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014), p. 592. 2. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for Defense (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 2012). 3. The relevant literature is voluminous, but critical studies of U.S. policy and strategy include Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1981); Andrew Krepinevich, The and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); , Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Gregory A. Daddis, No Sure Victory: Measuring US Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (New York: , 2011); and David Halberstam, TheBestandtheBrightest(New York: Ballantine Books, 1969).

Journal of Cold Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2017, pp. 125–159, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00720 C 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Institute of Technology

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in and .4 What these critiques tend to have in common is that the roots of failure are located within the U.S. government. Largely overlooked in many such accounts are the underlying structural conditions within a that the counterinsurgents face and to which they must ultimately adapt. The political, economic, and social conditions that have given rise or at least sustenance to civil conflict are bound to shape the U.S. government’s response to it.5 From a levels-of-analysis perspective, these structural conditions set the “macro” parameters for a campaign, defining the political limits of what is possible or even achievable. As a consequence, the actual organization and tactics of the counterinsurgents may be somewhat less determinative than analysts often suppose. How, then, might we explain the success and failure of U.S. COIN op- erations during the Cold War? Examining four cases from that period—the Philippines, Vietnam, Venezuela, and El Salvador—I provide theoretical mo- tivation for the oft-made claim that U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has been most effective in whose government engaged in meaningful reforms to address a population’s grievances in the face of a determined .6 (Even “greed-” or kleptocratic-based must feed off local grievances to some extent if they are to sustain themselves.7) Indeed, in separate ac- counts of U.S. counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War, both John

4. Critiques include Andrew Krepinevich, “How to Win in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (September/October 2005); Bing West, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan (New York: Random House, 2011); Steven Metz, Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle, PA: Institute, 2007); and Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: Norton, 2010). 5. The late Douglass North and colleagues described societies in which “insiders” prevent “outsiders” from full participation in political and economic life. They argue that such societies, which remain prevalent in the developing world, are especially prone to violent conflict. See Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Inter- preting Recorded Human (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For an argument that emphasizes the contingent nature of and , see S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolu- tion and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978). 6. For arguments that link counterinsurgency to domestic reform, see Douglas Blaufarb, The Coun- terinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1977); D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); John David Orme, Political Instability and American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Mar- tin’s Press, 1989); Douglas J. Macdonald, Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel Byman, Going to War with the Allies You Have: Allies, Counterinsurgency, and the War on (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies In- stitute, November 2005); and Ben Connable and Marin Libicki, How Insurgencies End (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). 7. See Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in ,” Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 56, No. 4 (2004), pp. 563–595.

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Orme and Douglas MacDonald define U.S. strategy in terms of “reformist intervention.”8 Daniel Byman has put the problem of reformist intervention succinctly: “The ally’s structural problems and distinct interests have daunting implica- tions for successful U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. ...U.S. COIN doctrine, no matter how well thought out, cannot succeed without the appropriate po- litical and other reforms from the host nation, but these regimes are likely to subvert the reforms that threaten the existing power structure.”9 Similarly, Ben Connable and Martin Libicki find in their study of numerous COIN cases that, “with a few exceptions, lasting endings are shaped not by military action but by social, economic, and political change.”10 This purported relationship between counterinsurgency and domestic reform, however, raises a deeper theoretical question: What determines whether a government is likely to engage in a reform process? I hypothesize that reform is a function of a country’s elite structure, in particular the concentration and diversity of assets controlled by elites. When assets are immobile and highly concentrated in the hands of the local elite, as in Vietnam (where the elite earned most of their incomes from growing and selling rice) or El Salvador (which had a coffee-based ), redistributive reforms will prove difficult to enact, and counterinsurgency efforts will struggle as a result.11 William Colby, a career Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who served as director of the agency in the mid-1970s, put the reform problem in these

8. Orme, Political Instability and American Foreign Policy; and MacDonald, Adventures in Chaos. 9. Byman, Going to War,p.4. 10. Connable and Libicki, How Insurgencies End, p. 154. 11. See Fabrice Pothier, “Opium in Afghanistan: A Reality Check,” in Afghanistan: Now You See Me? IDEAS Strategic Updates, LSE Ideas, London, 2010, which states that opium is responsible for 50 percent of the country’s export earnings. On Vietnam, see Robert Sansom, The of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). On El Salvador, see Benjamin Schwartz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Illusions of Reform and Frustrations of Nation-Building (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1991). On the natural resources curse argument that posits a relationship between economic structure and governance outcomes, see Michael Ross, “The Political Economy of the Resource Curse,” World , Vol. 51, No. 2 (January 1999), pp. 297–321. For a contrasting view, see Gavin Wright and Jesse Czelusta, “The Myth of the Resource Curse,” Challenge, Vol. 47, No. 2 (March/April 2004), pp. 6–38. On the consequences of elites and economic structure for domestic conflict, see North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders. Foreign itself can become an elite resource. If elites are or become dependent on aid flows as a major source of their rents (as occurred in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan), they will fight hard against reforms that would dilute this income stream. One might suppose that in such countries the United States could simply turn off the spigot, but the problem in corrupt authoritarian societies often is that any compelling alternatives have been sidelined (or imprisoned or killed) by the corrupt ruling elites, leaving U.S. officials “stuck with” those elites. This policy of sticking with the leaders in power, the “devils we know,” is an old theme in U.S. foreign policy toward the developing world.

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terms: “unless the threatened government can reform itself, the task of an assisting nation is Augean.”12 By contrast, when an economy’s assets are relatively less concentrated in a few hands, and when are more diversified between agriculture and industry (or becoming more diversified, giving both elites and the tenant farmers who work their land alternative sources of income), as was the case in the Philippines in the 1950s and Venezuela in the early 1960s (a time when the country was actually diversifying away from its dependence on oil), reforms that stave off insurgency become politically feasible. This is either because the elites are less financially threatened by targeted economic reforms (e.g., land reform), or because the elites themselves are more divided and thus less capable of mobilizing a unified front of opposition to a reform program.13 Relatedly, with economic change over time (e.g., the shift away from agriculture and toward industrialization), traditional elites such as landowners may lose their relative political power.14 As George Tsebelis hypothesizes, reform is more likely when no single elite group can act as a “veto player.”15 To be sure, the composition of elite assets and the overall structure of an economy will not necessarily remain static during an insurgency, and the fighting itself could provide the impetus to engage in a strategy of eco- nomic diversification. Furthermore, exogenous changes in the global economy could alter the financial returns on elites’ holdings. In El Salvador, for exam- ple, the economy began diversifying away from agriculture and into higher

12. William Colby, “Preface,” in Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. xii. This theory of elite structure can also help to explain the differing fates of counterinsurgency campaigns within the same country, with the Philippines being a prominent example of a country that has faced rebellions by diverse groups over its history. The Communist-led Huk rebellion of the 1950s could be largely undermined by economic policies (e.g., land reform) in a way that the Muslim-separatist movements in could not. In the Philippines, Muslim insurgents confronted Catholic elites who were not prepared to give full access to the “commanding heights” of politics and society to them. In this case, it was the rigid, religious structure of the Philippine elite—its structure as a “limited access order” (to use the phrase of North, Wallis, and Weingast in Violence and Social Orders)—rather than their economic assets that made “reform” a non-starter. As a consequence, the Muslim insurgency dragged on for decades, with a deal—which would eventually give Mindanao considerable autonomy (the only feasible solution if Muslim political integration was off the table)—signed only in March 2014. 13. For formal models along these lines in the context of the transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes, see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of and (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 14. For the classic analysis along these lines, see Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 15. George Tsebelis, “Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parlia- mentarism, Multicameralism, and Multipartyism,” British Journal of ,Vol.25,No.3 (July 1995), pp. 289–325.

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value–added industry such as textiles in the mid-1980s, a shift that reduced the political importance of the old coffee oligarchy and its landholdings, which had been at the center of the civil war.16 A foreign power such as the United States could play a crucial role in motivating this change in elite assets by, for example, providing foreign aid to support industrialization or by enacting free-trade agreements that induce entrepreneurs to invest in export-oriented industries. This line of argument suggests a response to the Gates epigraph that opens this article: U.S. foreign and national security policy has become “too militarized” (then-Senator John F. Kennedy had already complained in 1957 that U.S. foreign policy was “exaggeratedly military”) not because the use of force is “easy”—Gates himself describes the presidential and bureaucratic struggles over decisions to send U.S. troops to foreign lands in painful, 600- page detail—but because the United States is often engaged in countries such as Afghanistan where the possibility of progressive and inclusive reform is slim, leaving Washington seemingly no policy alternative but to try to impose its will through force in those places deemed vital to its peace and security.17 The critical lesson from the study of the Cold War COIN episodes discussed in this article is that victory in a counterinsurgency campaign is extremely difficult, or even impossible, when the local government is incapable of engaging in a far-reaching reform process—a process that, in turn, depends heavily on the structure and degree of concentration of the elite’s economic assets. I pursue the argument through the use of focused case studies, drawn from (the Philippines and Vietnam) and Latin America (Venezuela and El Salvador).18 Although these cases (with perhaps the exception of Venezuela) will be well known to most students of the Cold War, thus permitting cursory treatment of the military aspects, the article’s focus on elites and their economic assets adds a new dimension to the COIN literature. These structural aspects have been much less explored to date. In the most successful cases—defined as a rapid and decisive defeat of an insurgency (the definition normally used

16. See Mark Peceny and William D. Stanley, “Counterinsurgency in El Salvador,” Politics and Society, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 67–94. The CIA continued to stress the role of coffee in El Salvador’s economy throughout the 1980s, even as the country’s dependence on that crop was diminishing. See CIA, “El Salvador: Facing Coffee Losses,” 17 October 1989, in CIA Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000807804.pdf. I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this document to my attention. 17. John F. Kennedy, “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 1 (October 1957), p. 50. 18. I hope that other scholars will be motivated to extend this line of analysis by using a greater number of cases (observations), which, in combination with proxy measures of economic and political reform, could perhaps be used for the econometric testing of the key propositions presented here.

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by U.S. officials)—the local government, spurred on by the United States and supported with economic and military assistance, responded to the internal conflict by introducing crucial political and economic reforms. In the unsuc- cessful cases, no such reforms were adopted.19 Thisisnottodownplayahostof other country-specific factors that necessarily play a role in any rebellion and the government’s response to rising levels of violence.20 Instead, my purpose is simply to highlight a set of structural conditions rarely emphasized in the security studies literature. The article is divided into seven sections. Following this introduction, I look at how scholars and policymakers have conceptualized the causal forces that spark insurgency movements, contrasting the “greed-based” and “grievance-based” theories. Next, I examine the Philippines, which U.S. of- ficials took as the paradigmatic case for how to fight a Communist-led rural insurgency. Section four looks at how the United States struggled to advance a reform agenda in Vietnam, and sections five and six compare two counterin- surgency campaigns in Latin America; namely, Venezuela and El Salvador. The concluding section suggests lessons from this Cold War history for both foreign aid and counterinsurgency policy, as well as for scholarship in these fields, in light of most U.S. officials’ hope that ground troops will not be such a prominent feature of counterinsurgency doctrine in the future.21

Insurgency and Reform

Within the contemporary academic literature on insurgency, scholarly opin- ion is divided over whether internal conflicts are fundamentally driven by “grievances” of the population, by “greed,” kleptocracy, or banditry on the part of the insurgents, or by some interaction between the two.22 The grievances

19. My definition of “success” is admittedly a narrow one. I do not make claims, for example, about the long-run stability of the country. The Philippines provides an interesting case in point. Although Manila, with U.S. support, was successful in defeating the Huk insurgency in the early 1950s, it has grappled with a variety of insurgencies to the present day. This is consistent with my thesis. The Huk campaign focused mainly on rural economic grievances that a reformer could address, whereas the Muslim separatists in Mindanao have fought a Catholic-majority society that has shown little interest in opening its “commanding heights” to them; thus, the policy solution that gradually emerged was greater autonomy for Mindanao. 20. These country-specific factors are emphasized by Eisenstadt, and the Transformation of Societies. 21. Department of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership. 22. For the classic statement of the “grievances” argument, see Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance.” For the greed

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literature holds that particular social groups (e.g., ethnic groups or tenant farmers) suffer relative deprivation or exploitation (e.g., the landlord-tenant relationship) at the hands of the elite, which provides the catalyst for revolu- tionary activity. This deprivation can take the form of , inequality, or . U.S. policymakers took this theory extremely seriously during the Cold War, believing that Communist-led insurgents successfully leveraged rural tensions between landlords and tenant farmers to rally people to their cause. In contrast, the greed literature, drawing heavily on collective action theory, rejects (or, more accurately, eliminates) the grievance-based explanation because of the allegedly overwhelming impediments to mass mobilization that rebels face (the Chinese revolution being the exception that proves the rule).23 The argument presented in this literature is instead that rebellion is primarily about rent-seeking activity or predation on the part of a relatively small or concentrated number of armed insurgents and is aimed at extracting cash from the economic activities undertaken by government or the sector, or from both. In the mid-1960s two RAND Corporation analysts, Charles Wolf and Nathan Leites, rejected the Maoist notion that insurgents (or even counterinsurgents) require any degree of popular support. Instead, they can depend on coercion to earn a living.24 As these bandits succeed, they win the allegiance of fellow travelers, and over time a large and powerful enough group may form that is capable of seizing a government. The greed or predation theory relies heavily on Jack Hirshleifer’s notion that individuals and groups face a fundamental economic choice between engaging in productive and predatory activities.25 In more recent years, however, some analysts have rejected the idea that greed and grievance should be conceptualized as mutually exclusive approaches

argument, see Hershel Grossman, “Kleptocracy and Revolutions,” Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1999), pp. 267–283; and Paul Collier, “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 44, No. 6 (2000), pp. 839–853. For an example of work that combines the two positions, see Patrick Regan and Daniel Norton, “Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 49, No. 3 (2005), pp. 319–336. The Huk rebellion in the Philippines drew its forces from both “Communists and criminals.” On this point, see Harvey Averch and John Koehler, The Huk Rebellion in the Philippines: Quantitative Approaches (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1970). 23. For an important corrective, see Elizabeth Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 24. Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf, Jr., Rebellion and Authority: Myths and Realities Reconsidered (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, August 1966). 25. A collection of his articles on the economics of conflict is found in Jack Hirshleifer, The Dark Side of the Force (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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to understanding an insurgency. In this view, insurgents can engage in rent- seeking activity against their targets but then redistribute those rents in the form of collective goods to their constituents, a` la Robin Hood. Arguably, this has been the route taken by groups such as Hezbollah in and Hamas in Gaza.26 Related to the grievance-based insurgency literature and, in some respects, a formalization of it are the social conflict models found in the modern political economy literature, which attempt to show that political and economic reform is primarily driven by the fear of social unrest.27 As Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, and Tricia Olson put it: “although details differ, such models are typically characterized by a bargaining environment in which an excluded group has the ability to impose a costly settlement in the event that bargaining breaks down. Reform ...reduces the likelihood that this option is exercised— the only other alternative to the elite being repression, which is itself costly.”28 Yet this body of research, which looks at social relations through a bar- gaining framework, may fail to illuminate important aspects of how local governments respond to an insurgent movement. As students of reform in the developing world have pointed out, one barrier to policy change is uncer- tainty over its distributional consequences. A country’s elite might be willing to engage in a reform process that does not fundamentally alter its dominant position in the economy but is hesitant to do so because of uncertainty about whether the reform might launch a dynamic process that would ultimately undermine its privileged position.29 Because of the high degree of uncertainty, elites will fight any reform, and thus violent conflict may ensue. Illuminating as this academic debate on the causes and necessary condi- tions of insurgency may be, it obscures at least one significant question that scholars also need to address: What theory of rebellion was dominant within the U.S. government during the Cold War? How did and military leaders sitting in Washington conceptualize the causes of violent conflict, and what did they think the United States could do about them? In short, what

26. Hezbollah has been called a “ within a state.” See Casey Addis and Christopher Blanchard, Hezbollah: Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2011); and Kim Murphy, “Hamas Victory Is Built on Social Work,” Los Angeles Times, 2 March 2006, p. 7. 27. Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins; and Boix, Democracy and Redistribution. 28. Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, and TriciaOlson, “Does Reform Prevent Rebellion? Evidence from ’s Emancipation of the Surfs,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol.48, No. 8 (2015), pp. 984–1019. 29. Allan Drazen, Political Economy in Macroeconomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 214–219. One example of a “partial” elite reform that could mollify social criticism without fundamentally altering elite rank and privilege is the opening of leading universities (e.g., Ivy League or Oxbridge universities in the case of the United States and ) to women and minorities.

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ideas about the developing world and its sources of instability shaped postwar thinking? A look back upon the historical record of the Cold War era suggests policymakers generally held a grievance-based view of insurgency. They saw a world of great economic and political inequality and perceived a global Communist movement that was anxious to seize on and exploit the differences between the haves and have-nots. During the height of the Vietnam War, Samuel Huntington wrote of postwar U.S. foreign policy: “The economic gap ... was the target of sustained attention, analysis, and action. Aid programs and loan programs ... all shared in a massive effort to do something about the problem of economic development.”30 It was in the context of this world- view—that poverty and inequality were driving factors behind social unrest— that the policy response to developing world instability during the Cold War was shaped.31 The emphasis on population grievances is found in the earliest statement of U.S. policy toward Communist aggression, the eponymous doctrine that President Harry S. Truman announced before a joint session of Congress in March 1947. With embroiled in internal conflict, the president said that an exceptional program of military and economic assistance to that coun- try was warranted because, “As a result of [the] tragic conditions [in Greece], a militant minority exploiting human want and misery was able to create political chaos which, until now, has made economic recovery impossible.”32 A few months later, in his address at Harvard University on 5 June 1947, Sec- retary of State George Marshall justified his proposal of increased economic aid to in part because of “the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people.”33 Reflecting in 1950 on the growing Huk rebellion in the Philippines, the U.S. counterinsurgency expert Edward Lansdale argued that it was “the ills in Philippine society that provided soil

30. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Press, 1968), p. 5. 31. Diplomatic historians are giving increasing attention to the role of in U.S. foreign and national security policy. For examples, see David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Against Hunger in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 32. “President Harry S Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress,” 12 March 1947, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp. 33. Secretary of State George Marshall, “Address at Harvard University’s Commencement,” 5 June 1947, transcribed in Forrest C. Pogue, ed., George C. Marshall,4vols.,Vol4:Statesman, 1945–1959 (New York: Viking, 1967), pp. 113–116.

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for the rebellion to flourish.”34 The U.S. ´ in Manila wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson that same year, explaining that “the need for agrarian reform lies at the roots of the problem of armed unrest in the Philippines.”35 In assessing the origins of the insurgency in during the post- Geneva era, the authors of the came to the conclusion that “enough evidence has now accumulated to establish that peasant resentment against Diem was extensive and well founded.”36 In an influential account of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy during the early Cold War era, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Douglas Blaufarb argues that the “cardinal principles” of Communist-led insurgency movements included “development of ...peasant support by focusing on economic and social grievances.”37 For his part, President Kennedy, in launching the Alliance for Progress aimed at Latin American development, expressed concern that “Communists could ex- ploit discontent and misery” in a region in which the per-capita income might be “$60 or $70 a year.”38 Blaufarb called the Alliance for Progress, with its emphasis on economic, political, and social reform, nothing less than a “broad counterinsurgency program” for Latin America.”39 This line of grievance-based analysis led to the conclusion that military intervention should not be the primary instrument for responding to the Com- munist threat.40 Kennedy had even said that military aid to fight insurgencies went “down the drain in a military sense,” and that its main purpose was to buy the support of the officer corps for U.S. policy.41 In the 1950s and early 1960s, having become skeptical about a military solution to Communist-led insurgencies, U.S. officials in the CIA, National Security Council (NSC), and Departments of State and Defense forged a civilian-led approach to

34. Edward Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to (New York: Harper & Row, 1991), p. 47. 35. Charge Chapin to Secretary of State, 7 March 1950, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. VI, 1950, p. 1433 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year and volume numbers). 36. U.S. Department of Defense and the House Committee on Armed Services, United States–Vietnam Relations,Vol.V1945–1967 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 242– 269. 37. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. 11. 38. Cited in Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 11. 39. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. 282. 40. A point also made by Jeffrey Michaels, “Managing Global Counterinsurgency: The Special Group (CI), 1962–1966,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (February 2012) pp. 33–61. 41. Rabe, Most Dangerous Area, p. 12.

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counterinsurgency that might be labeled “Cold War” or “classic” COIN un- der the umbrella of an organization called “Special Group (CI).” The Special Group (CI) attempted to respond to Communist movements across the devel- oping world by emphasizing political and economic reform instead of military action.42 Jeffrey Michaels has described Special Group (CI)’s approach: Masterminding counterinsurgency around the world forced these policymakers to confront a wide variety of problems, and also compelled them to employ numerous tools to solve, or perhaps more accurately, to “manage” these prob- lems. The broad remit of counterinsurgency included sending military and trainers to assist friendly governments to deal with actual or potential insurgency situations, re-orientating the U.S. intelligence apparatus to monitor the devel- oping world for signs of insurgency and to work with the governments of these countries to enhance their own capabilities, dealing with political, economic, and land reform issues, and so forth.43 Special Group (CI)’s work was guided by the Overseas Internal Defense Policy, promulgated as National Security Action Memorandum 182 in 1962 and revised in 1964.44 In preparing the revision, which delegated tasks to different U.S. government agencies, an adviser stressed that the purpose of American counterinsurgency strategy should be “to minimize the likelihood of direct U.S. military involvement in internal war.”45 Accordingly, as U. Alexis Johnson of the State Department put it, the government would have “to employ every asset we could muster, from better information work abroad to intensified economic development, to training local police in non-violent crowd control.’”46 A central role for the U.S. armed forces in Cold War counterinsurgency operations was not just to provide military assistance but, equally important, to engage in “civic action,” including the building of roads, hospitals, and schools, and to teach this approach to COIN to developing world . Such civic

42. For more on the origins of U.S. COIN doctrine, see Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era;Mac- donald, Adventures in Chaos;Shafer,Deadly Paradigms; and Michaels, “Managing Global Counterin- surgency.” 43. Michaels, “Managing Global Counterinsurgency,” p. 36. 44. National Security Action Memorandum 182, 24 August 1962, in The Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, National Security Files, Meetings and Memoranda Series, National Security Action Memoranda, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. 45. “Memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs (Kitchen) to the Counselor and Chairman of the Policy Planning Council (Rostow),” 12 March 1964, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. 10, Doc. 19. 46. See Michael, “Managing Global Counterinsurgency.”

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action was crucial to winning the population’s allegiance to the government side, which is ultimately what a COIN campaign had to achieve. In the words of French counterinsurgency expert David Galula, “The population ... becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent.”47 Trumpeted among American forces by Edward Lansdale, civic action was defined as “any action which makes the soldier a brother of the people, as well as their protector.” Accordingly, civic action was meant to serve two related purposes: first, to win “hearts and minds” by channeling the local military’s energies into befriending rather than alienating the people. (Lansdale, for example, was extremely critical of the military’s use of violence against its own citizens, which he believed drove them into the arms of the Communists.) Second, civic action would impede Communist efforts to gain the people’s “support and to hide among them.”48 Lansdale used the civic action concept both in the Philippines, where the military played (and has continued to play) an active role in economic development, and in Vietnam, where he established a Civic Action Program in January 1955 specifically to engage in rural development, in the hope of tracking Communist activities among tenant farmers.49 From this grievance-based line of analysis, it was but a short step to em- phasize economic and political reform as the answer to local, Communist-led insurgencies. The plight of rural tenant farmers seemingly provided a great opportunity for the Communists in such countries as Vietnam and the Philip- pines, where tenant farmers paid exorbitant rents to local landlords who left them with barely enough rice to survive and no hope of future land ownership given their lack of surplus to sell on the market.50 This type of exploitation, in the view of U.S. policymakers, provided Communist movements around the

47. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 55. 48. Edward Lansdale, “Civic Action,” Lecture to the Counter-Guerrilla School, Fort Bragg, 24 February 1961, in Hoover Institution Archives, Edward Lansdale Collection, Box 74, Speeches Folder. For a more recent argument for civic action, see John De Pau and George Luz, eds., Winning the Peace: The Strategic Implications of Military Civic Action (New York: Praeger, 1992). 49. On the Civic Action Program’s anti-Communist role in Vietnam, see Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of Press, 2005), pp. 89–90. 50. For background on postwar rural insurgencies, see Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Ronald J. Herring, Land to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); and Al McCoy, “Land Reform as Counter-Revolution: US Foreign Policy and the Tenant,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1971), pp. 14–49. Much of the analysis in these works about the politics of landlord-tenant relations was inspired by Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

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world with attractive opportunities to defy local governments and mobilize support for their cause. U.S. officials generally accepted the thesis that land inequality was a leading cause of the insurgencies in such countries as , the Philippines, and Vietnam, as well as of ongoing social conflict in several Latin American states.51 Not to be outdone by Communist on the subject of land reform, President Truman created an interagency committee in 1951 whose purpose was to examine ways to “lessen the causes of agrarian unrest and political instability” around the world.52 The following year, Secretary of State Acheson proclaimed that “land reform is absolutely foremost in our whole international policy.”53 But the United States was in a political bind that the Communists did not face. After the war, Washington had thrown its lot in with developing world governments that were, in many cases, authoritarian in nature. The basis of their power was often in the landlord class and in a military whose officers were landlords themselves or from landowning families. By what strategy could Washington convince these elites that reform was in their interest? This was the basic question underlying U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine and practice. Tragically, in cases when local elites were unwilling to engage in reform but U.S. national security interests were at stake, the United States turned to a military solution for problems that, ultimately, the use of force could not easily resolve. Why U.S. policymakers were unprepared to walk away from such regimes is a crucial question and will be taken up in the article’s conclusion.54

Philippines

During the Second , many insurgent groups that fought the Japanese occupation in Asia had Communist affiliations. This was true in Vietnam, China, and the Philippines. With the war’s end, these groups turned their attention to local political and economic grievances that they could leverage as part of a renewed campaign for political power, hoping as well to attract support from the and, later, Communist China in the process.

51. U.S. Department of State, Land Reform: A World Challenge (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1952). 52. US Inter-Agency Committee on Land Reform Problems, United States Policy Regarding Land Reform in Foreign Areas (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1951). 53. “Wide Land Reform Laid to U.S. Urging,” , 3 December 1952, p. 10. 54. I thank the anonymous reviewers for emphasizing this point.

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Ta b l e 1 . Structure of the Philippine Economy, 1950–1960 (Sectoral Share of GDP)

Sector 1950 1955 1960

Agriculture 50.6 41.4 34.0 Manufacturing 7.3 13.1 18.0

Source: National Economic Council, Manila, “Re- vised National Accounts: 1946–1966” (unpub.).

(These hopes were often dashed, despite incessant U.S. propaganda to the contrary.55) Like many Asian countries, the Philippines had been devastated by ’s wartime policies of economic exploitation. Although economic power at the war’s end was still largely concentrated with large landowners, as it had been for centuries, this was slowly beginning to change as the country launched a program of import-substituting industrialization after it gained from the United States on 4 July 1946.56 This change in economic structure had important consequences for the reform program launched by President Ramon Magsaysay in the early 1950s (see Table 1). But in rural areas, small tenant farmers continued to be caught between the grips of landlords on one hand and local moneylenders on the other, and any group that promised to break this hold would surely get a hearing from those who worked the land.57 The group that took up this fight was the Hukbalahaps (Huks) or “Peo- ple’s Liberation Army.”58 According to a U.S Joint Chiefs of (JCS) anal- ysis of 1950, “This movement stems mainly from the long-standing agrarian

55. For an excellent introduction to these issues, see Douglas J. Macdonald, “Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War: Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism,” , Vol. 20, No. 3 (Winter 1995), pp. 152–188. 56. On elite structure in the Philippines, see David Wurfel, “Elites of Wealth and Elites of Power, the Changing Dynamic: A Philippine Case Study,” Southeast Asian Affairs, 1979, pp. 233–245. 57. ’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989) remains a wonderfully readable introduction to the bilateral U.S.-Philippine relationship. On the conditions facing tenant farmers, see David Wurfel, “The Development of Post-war Philippine Land Reform: Political and Sociological Explanations,” in Antonio Ledesma, Perla Makil, and Miralao, eds., Second View from the Paddy (Manila: Institute of Philippine Culture, 1983). 58. Numerous secondary accounts of the Huk rebellion have been written over the years, including Shafer, Deadly Paradigms;Moyar,A Question of Command; and Andrew Lembke, Lansdale, Magsaysay, America and the Philippines: A Case Study of Limited Intervention Counterinsurgency (Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, 2001). Many such accounts rely heavily on the comprehensive study written by Benedict Kerkvliet, who interviewed many participants: The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977). For an earlier

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discontent in the agricultural provinces of Luzon. ... The existence of these guerrilla bands reflects the unsatisfactory socio-political situation in the Philip- pines.” The Communist-led movement, allegedly supported by China, posed a significant “threat to the United States,” especially in light of the and heightened need for Philippine military bases. Accordingly, the JCS ap- proved “assistance to the Philippine armed forces ...without further delay.”59 Yet the JCS was dubious about the efficacy of military power in this situation. “Military measures,” the Chiefs wrote, can only be a temporary expedient. Remedial political and economic measures must be adopted by the Philippine Government in order to eliminate the basic causes of discontent among the Philippine people. ... [T]the basic problem involved in maintaining the United States strategic position in the Philippines against internal aggression is primarily political and economic. Military action should not be an alternative for a stable and efficient government based on sound economic and social foundations.60 The JCS went on to assert that “remedial action” by the Philippines government “would go further toward removing the immediate threat to the United States ...than military action.”61 This document outlines many aspects of the fundamental U.S. approach to counterinsurgency during the Cold War era—with the painful exception of Vietnam. In the Philippines, economic and social reform was deemed by U.S. policymakers to be the essential ingredient in meeting the challenge of the Huk rebellion, with military assistance to local ground forces a secondary element. The United States pursued three types of reform: military reform aimed at curbing the use of violence and intimidation of by the armed forces, economic reform to spur growth and increase wages, and political reform resulting in free and fair elections.62 U.S. strategy in the Philippines was greatly assisted by the presence of a supremely capable and charismatic leader, Magsaysay, who during his stint as minister of defense under President Elpidio Quirino (1949–1953) became a “brother” to the U.S. COIN advisor, Edward Lansdale. Magsaysay represented

analysis, see Averch and Koehler, The Huk Rebellion in the Philippines. For an account that relies more heavily on the U.S. government’s archival record, see MacDonald, Adventures in Chaos. 59. Memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense (Johnson), Subject: The Philippines, 6 September 1950, in FRUS, 1950, Vol. 6, pp. 1485–1489. 60. Ibid., p. 1489. 61. Ibid. 62. For details of the American reform package and bargaining with the Philippine government over its implementation, see MacDonald, Adventures in Chaos, pp. 135–159.

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a “new breed” of politician in the Philippines. He came from a lower-class background and, after World War II (in which he fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese) operated a bus company, developing closer ties to the country’s emerging industrial elite than to the traditional landed oligarchy. Magsaysay’s understanding of the plight of the country’s lower classes made him a powerful advocate for reform, and the reforms he implemented in the early 1950s are widely credited with playing a key role in the defeat of the Huk insurgency, which lost not only recruits but also general support among the population.63 Lansdale recalled his own role during the Huk rebellion as being the “ideal way for American advisers to be of help in a counterinsurgency.”64 Fundamentally, his approach consisted of bringing together U.S. and local specialists from the fields of public administration, community organizing, journalism, and the military in what he called a “coffee klatsch” to share ideas for defending “human liberty in the Philippines.” As a former advertising executive, Lansdale was particularly attentive to “what would sell”; that is, which policy measures would win the support of the rural population and undermine Huk propaganda. Among the “notable ideas” (Lansdale’s phrase) this group developed were the establishment of legal services to aid tenant farmers and the empowering of poor citizens so that they could send cheap telegrams to government officials to report abuses by government officials or the military. Of greatest significance, perhaps, was the creation of an Economic Development Corps, which worked with former Huk rebels to resolve their economic-based grievances, primarily in the form of turning over fallow land to members of the insurgency who wished to farm their own plots. The Philippines may be the country in which the link between counterinsurgency and economic development has been most self-consciously forged.65 During Magsaysay’s term as president (1953–1957), an Agricultural Tenancy Act was passed that “provided for the redistribution of public lands,” further undermining radical appeals for land reform.66 One student of these programs has concluded that although the actual amount of

63. Ibid.; and Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars. 64. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, p. 46. 65. However, in the Muslim-majority province of Mindanao, although economic development was pursued there by Manila, political reform aimed at giving the Muslims greater power repeatedly stalled, and a peace agreement that gave that region considerable autonomy was signed only in March 2014 after decades of conflict. For recent reporting, see Floyd Whaley, “Philippines and Rebels Agree on Peace Accord to End Insurgency,” The New York Times, 25 January 2014, p. A15; and Simone Orendain, “Philippines, MILF Rebels Sign Historic Peace Deal,” Voice of America, 27 March 2014, http://www.voanews.com/a/philippines-govt-milf-rebels-sign-historic-peace-deal/1880267.html. 66. Aurora Almeda Martin, “Philippine Land Reform Cycles: Perpetuating US Colonial Policy,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1999), p. 196.

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land made available to tenants was small, it “did prove effective in wearing down the of the guerrillas.”67 To be sure, the military side was not neglected. Lansdale’s group debated, for example, the effectiveness of cash payments to those who provided in- formation that led to the “capture or death of principal Huk leaders.” Still, the thrust of his efforts was “to eradicate the causes of rural support for the Huks.”68 This was effectively done by 1953, when the rebellion no longer threatened the central government. That same year, Magsaysay was elected president, defeating the incumbent Quirino. Tragically, Magsaysay died in office in an airplane crash in 1957. Important as Lansdale was during the counterinsurgency campaign, espe- cially in light of his extremely close relationship to Magsaysay, the role of the U.S. State Department and its embassy in Manila should not be overlooked. U.S. officials were adept at spotting cleavages among Philippine elites and understood that although the grip of the landlords remained strong (especially in the powerful Congress), it could be loosened through targeted appeals. Economic missions were conducted that pointed out the need for land reform among other structural changes in the economy, and these findings were widely publicized in the local press. Among landowners, for example, conflicts arose between those who owned mills and those who sold raw materials such as sugar for processing. Agricul- tural price policies (which could favor either raw materials or processed food producers) could thus be modified to split any monolithic agricultural vote. Similarly, support for protectionist industrial policies won the allegiance of the growing numbers of urban business leaders. (Nonetheless, U.S. officials including Ambassador Raymond Spruance were skeptical of the role that in- dustrialization could play in local development given the difficulties associated with conducting business. As a consequence, some thought land reform alone should be the main U.S. policy objective.) U.S. aid would thus be used care- fully to divide elites (or, more precisely, to weaken the landholding oligarchy) as the United States pursued, with local allies such as Magsaysay, a set of re- form measures that undermined the Huks’ political and economic appeal to the population.69

67. Orme, p. 27. 68. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, p. 48. 69. A good summation of U.S. policy toward the Philippines as the Huk Insurgency declined is found in “Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State () to the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Lay), 16 July 1953,” in FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. 12, pp. 539–544.

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U.S. officials such as Lansdale took the Philippines counterinsurgency as the paradigmatic case of how to run a successful operation. Unfortunately, the United States did not find reformers like Magsaysay so easily in every developing country that faced a local insurgency, nor would it necessarily find the dynamic structural conditions or the rapid shift from agriculture to industrialization that created space for new elites to emerge, giving leaders like Magsaysay some political room to maneuver. These impediments to re- form would emerge in painful relief in next major U.S. counterinsurgency operation—in Vietnam.

Vietnam

U.S. officials who adopted a grievances-based view of developing world rebel- lions strongly believed that deploying U.S. troops to eliminate an insurgency was the last thing any president should do, for the simple reason that the use of physical force did not address the underlying forces that fueled revolu- tionary movements. As Kennedy administration adviser Walt Rostow argued when warning the president in 1961 about the possibility of direct military intervention in Vietnam: “An outsider cannot ...win a guerilla war.”70 U.S. officials believed that in Vietnam—as in the Philippines before it—the insur- gency could again be successfully countered with a propitious mix of political, military, and economic reform. As the authors of the Pentagon Papers stated: “U.S. counterinsurgency policy ...proceeded from the premise that U.S. na- tional interests required the U.S. to provide political support, economic aid, and military assistance to the GVN [Government of Vietnam] to preclude its domination by Communists.”71 U.S. advisers, Lansdale among them, arrived in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s with an acute sensitivity to local demands for a dilution of economic power in general and for land reform in particular. The situation seemed to echo important themes from the Philippines, where U.S. authorities had urged the government to adopt redistributive policies intended to undercut the insurgents’ momentum. Such policies, like those enacted earlier in Japan, South , and , have been widely viewed by scholars as generally

70. See Blaufarb, p. 58. This quote now seems ironic given Rostow’s subsequent involvement in the war’s escalation. For a review of the conflicting views of American social scientists on nation building in South Vietnam, see Jefferson Marquis, “The Other : American Social Science and Nation Building in Vietnam,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 79–105. 71. Department of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations,p.26.

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Ta b l e 2 . Structure of the South Vietnamese Economy, 1960–1970 (Sectoral Share of GDP)

Sector 1960 1965 1970

Agriculture 40 32 25 Manufacturing 12 12 12 Government and Defense 16 25 34

Source: Douglas Dacy, Foreign Aid, Warand Economic Development South Vietnam, 1955–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 41.

successful in meeting the political objectives of calming rural grievances—with the glaring exception of South Vietnam.72 As with many developing countries, contemporary Western observers of Vietnam shared a view that tenant farming and land inequality were major sources of that country’s internecine tensions.73 Writing to the State Depart- ment in 1954, U.S. Ambassador Douglas Heath stated: “An honest land reform program ... may offer one of the best means available for meeting the Viet Minh challenge.”74 More than a decade later, the authors of the Pentagon Papers argued that “the core of rural discontent was the large land holdings” in the country and the inability of tenant farmers to make a decent living.75 But unlike the Asian countries in which industrialization could act as a partial safety valve and release at least some political pressure from the agricultural sector as rural workers found alternative urban employment at much better pay (which suggests that industrial policy can in some sense also be a counterinsurgency policy), Vietnam had almost no alternative to the land (see Table 2). Following the Geneva Accords and before the “American” war, nearly all the country’s workers belonged to the agricultural sector. Out of some

72. See Peter Dorner and William Thiesenheusen, “Selected Land Reforms in East and South-East Asia: Their Origins and Impact,” Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1990), pp. 65–95; Susan Greehalgh, “Land Reform and Family Entrepreneurship in East Asia,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 15 (1989), pp. 71–118; and Herring, Land to the Tiller. Lansdale’s views on the Vietnam situation can be found in his In the Midst of Wars. Many of his reports can also be found in Department of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations. 73. Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); William Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam, 1962–1965 (Washington, DC: Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1966); and Roy Prosterman, “Land Reform as Foreign Aid,” Foreign Policy, Vol. 6 (Spring 1972), pp. 128–141. 74. Ambassador at Saigon (Heath) to Department of State, EMBTEL 386, 30 July 1954, in FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. 8, pt. 2, Doc. 1099. 75. Department of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations,p.25.

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6.3 million workers, only 600,000 found employment beyond the farm gate during the years 1960–1963, with being the main alternative as the war intensified.76 Of the 5.7 million Vietnamese who farmed, almost all worked as tenant farmers, and Vietnam’s elite lived off their labor; the vast ma- jority of elite income (other than the government incomes and foreign aid flows they could capture) consisted of the rent imposed on tenants. Manufacturing, in contrast, occupied only a small and, perhaps even more important, static share of economic activity. In addition, the Vietnamese (with U.S. backing) adopted a strong local currency to induce imports of cheap consumer goods from Japan, which could help maintain domestic consumption despite the worsening conflict. These imports further discouraged local industrialization and alternative sources of income for elites and workers alike.77 The available evidence suggests that the plight of South Vietnam’s tenant farmers was quite dismal. Those who had the resources might rent one hectare of land from a landlord’s middleman at the price of 35–40 percent of the crop and a fee equal to about fifteen days’ wages. Because a typical hectare might produce 1,400–1,600 pounds of rice per year, this would leave the tenant and his family with somewhere above 1,000 pounds or around three pounds per day. Given a typical family size of 5.5 members and the fact that a pound of rice provides about 1,500 calories, this would equate to something like 820 calories per person per day—clearly an insufficient level of sustenance that needed to be supplemented. Supplementing the rice, however, would require expenditures that would put families into debt.78 As in the Philippines, the tenant farmer was caught between the landlord and the moneylender. The Communist rebels again promised to break that yoke. The struggle for land reform was a near-constant theme in post-Geneva Vietnam. Shortly after the accords were signed, President Ngo Dinh Diem began a land reform program in 1956, urged on by the United States and designed with the help of Wolf Ladejinsky, the U.S. adviser who had played a prominent role in the design of Japan’s postwar land reform program.79 Diem’s reform allowed landlords to keep up to 100 hectares of their property

76. Douglas Dacy, Foreign Aid, War and Economic Development South Vietnam, 1955–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 48. 77. Dacy writes that Vietnam had a “grossly overvalued” currency during the war. Ibid., p. 174. 78. These calculations are based on Wolf Ladejinsky, “South Vietnam Revisited,” in Louis Walinsky, ed., The Collected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Ladejinsky was a leading authority on Asian land reform, holding positions at the and as an advisor to the U.S. government during the 1950s and 1960s. 79. Ladejinksy’s appointment is mentioned in Ambassador in Vietnam (Reinhardt) to Department of State, 15 June 1955, in FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. 1, Doc. 210.

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(or 284 acres, which still made for a significant spread), with the rest being sold by the government in Saigon to tenant farmers, who in turn would pay the government over a six-year period; in this way, landlords would be com- pensated. Rents on tenant farmers were decreased (or at least were supposed to decrease) from 35–40 percent of the crop on average to a maximum of 25 per cent. During the life of the program, which was effectively halted “by 1958 or 1959,” approximately 300,000 hectares were sold to 121,123 tenants, representing a small fraction of the tenant farmer population in Vietnam.80 Even Diem’s modest reforms were ineffective, in part because those called on to administer them—from the minister of agrarian reform on down— were “themselves landowners.”81 In fact, the minister “refused to sign leases [reflecting the lower rents] with his own tenants, as the new law required.”82 More generally, a U.S. observer in the early 1960s found that “rent controls have not been enforced. Landlords have been able to make arrangements on the side of higher rents in some areas, and the Viet Cong have forced rents below the specified levels elsewhere.” Further, the courts that were established to monitor the land reform process were quickly captured by landlords who continued to demand high rent payments, and the Tenant Farmers Union was repeatedly “harassed or repressed.”83 The promise of land and low rents was one of the major enticements the Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong held out to the tenant farmers.84 As the war intensified and the security situation in the South deteriorated, the United States put land reform on the back burner. This puzzled some close observers of the conflict, who wondered “why the United States ...did not make land reform a centerpiece of its Vietnam policy.”85 One explanation is that U.S. officials, in reviewing the experience of the failed Diem reforms, simply decided that changing the structure of land tenure in Vietnam was

80. Department of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations, pp. 24, 26. A description of the program is found in Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam. 81. Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam; and Department of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations, p. 26. See also Ambassador in Vietnam (Reinhardt) to Department of State, 21 July 1956, in FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, Vol. 1, Doc. 340, for a full description of U.S. skepticism about the land reform program. 82. Orme, p. 28. 83. Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam, p. 52. On repression of the farmers union, see Orme, p. 28. 84. A point stressed in Sansom, Economics of Insurgency. 85. Ibid., p. 228.

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too difficult given local elites’ objections to the policy. As land reform expert William Bredo wrote in 1970,

any real progress in ...land redistribution ... would entail losing the political support of the landlords and their affiliates and sympathizers, the high level government officials in Saigon and the countryside, and the army officers who came largely from the landed class. It was assumed [by American officials] that alienation of their support would cause the Saigon Government to fall, and that the struggle against Communist penetration and control in South Vietnam would fail.86

During the early years of its military engagement, the United States also turned its attention to providing security to rural Vietnam through its , modeled in part on a British strategy used during its success- ful Malayan counterinsurgency campaign. The motivating belief behind this program was that the provision of security in areas that could be “held” would provide the cornerstone for renewed rural prosperity and, in turn, support for the government. Further, the zones designated for such “treatment” by U.S. war planners were provided with schools, hospitals, and other public goods. However, this program was met with widespread peasant dissatisfaction from the outset and soon abandoned.87 Even if a limited number of strategic hamlets had proved successful, more generalized rural prosperity could not be achieved so long as farmers faced high rents and little prospect of owning their own land. Under these conditions, the Viet Cong’s credible message that they would reduce rents (they had already done so in the areas under their control) and provide tenants with land continued to resonate across the countryside. Accordingly, in 1970, a new, sweeping land reform measure was launched by President Nguyen Van Thieu as a final effort aimed at countering the insurgency. Even at this late date, observers believed it might still change the course of the war, bringing the peasants over to the government’s side.88 But with the security environment continuing to degrade, the United States found it more difficult to oversee

86. William Bredo, “Agrarian Reform in Vietnam: Vietcong and Government of Vietnam Strategies in Conflict,” Asian Survey, Vol. 10, No. 8 (August 1970), p. 744. 87. See John Donnell and Gerald Hickley, The Vietnamese “Strategic Hamlets”: A Preliminary Report (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1962); and Peter Leahy, “Why Did the Strategic Hamlets Fail?” Master’s Thesis, U.S. Army Command and General , Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1990. 88. Roy Prosterman, “Land to the Tiller in South Vietnam: The Tables Turn,” Asian Survey, Vol. 10, No. 8 (August 1970), pp. 751–764. Orme writes that Thieu’s program “nearly eradicated the Vietcong.” Orme, p. 29.

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and support economic assistance programs in rural areas.89 Soon, events on the battlefield overtook any last-minute realization by Saigon’s elite that its exclusive strategy of relying on U.S. forces to safeguard their wealth and power would not succeed.

Venezuela

After Fidel Castro’s far-left guerrillas seized power in in 1959, the country became a major irritant first for the Eisenhower administration and then for the Kennedy administration, which feared the Soviet Union would turn Cuba into “a base for military and intelligence activities against the United States” and for “opportunistic in Latin America.”90 No less important, U.S. officials worried that Castro’s declaration of independence from U.S. domination could easily resonate with the millions who were disaffected throughout the region, spreading revolution.91 In a major address of March 1961, President Kennedy announced that he would launch an Alliance for Progress whose purpose would be “to satisfy the basic needs of the Latin American people for homes, work, land, health, and schools.”92 Blaufarb aptly referred to the Alliance as a “broad counterinsurgency program,” which combined elements of political, social, and economic reform with military assistance.93 Surveying the Communist threat to Latin America in 1961, Kennedy adviser Adolf Berle called Venezuela “the point of greatest attack,” the vital “hinge” in that region.94 Like most Latin American countries, Venezuela was sharply divided between rich and poor, and U.S. officials feared the ability of Communist-led organizations to mobilize urban workers and rural peasants alongside restive university students. Venezuela was an especially crucial test case for the United States because it combined an active leftist movement (the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion´ Nacional, FALN) with a charismatic reformer as president, Romulo´ Betancourt. If Betancourt could forge ahead on his path

89. David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 222. 90. Comments of National Security Adviser Walt Rostow are from Kimber Charles Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001), p. 88. 91. Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 26. 92. See ibid., pp. 12–13. 93. Blaufarb, p. 282. 94. Cited in Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World,p.63.

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of social and economic reform, it would give the lie to Communist propaganda that revolution was necessary to bring about social justice. Like Magsaysay in the Philippines, Betancourt exemplified the new kind of developing world leader the U.S. government hoped to nurture and support, the kind of reformer who posed the greatest threat to Communist movements everywhere.95 Not surprisingly, Castro had aimed much of his ample verbal firepower at Betancourt, and the CIA alleged he had provided to the Venezuelan insurgents.96 The CIA warned that Castro “cannot afford to allow such an important democratic reformist regime to succeed.”97 For its part, the United States could not afford to see Betancourt fail. Venezuela at this time exemplified one of Huntington’s “changing soci- eties,” in which internal debates over the future trajectory of modernization helped to fuel the insurgency by attracting recruits, including university stu- dents from the lower classes who doubted their chances for social mobility even at a time of economic growth. Despite the changing fortunes of the country’s landed aristocracy, they still sat atop the country’s “commanding heights,” and it was uncertain whether men and women from lower class backgrounds could achieve economic and political power, no matter their level of or ac- complishment. Further, they doubted that Betancourt could break the power of the military, which loomed ominously behind him as the ultimate veto power. With Castro as their role model, Venezuelan radicals, united by their opposition to the country’s power structure, sought to bring about another Latin .98 The Venezuelan insurgency began in 1960 on the heels of a contested election the previous year in which Betancourt had been elected president on a reformist platform. The Communist Party, which had won 100,000 votes, now realized that electoral victory was beyond its grasp. The party turned to armed struggle, joining other leftist organizations such as the FALN. According to Richard Weitz, the FALN initially pursued “a policy of urban terrorism in the futile hope that they could engender a military coup” against

95. See “Editorial Note: Venezuela,” in FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. 5, p. 919, which cites U.S. embassy views toward Betancourt (though Betancourt’s refusal to condemn Castro irked American officials). 96. Director of Central Intelligence, “Prospects for Political Stability in Venezuela,” National In- telligence Estimate 89–64, 19 February 1964, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document _conversions/89801/DOC_0000013611.pdf. Rabe, in Most Dangerous Area, cites skepticism on the part of historians about the veracity of these allegations. 97. Director of Central Intelligence, “Prospects for Political Stability in Venezuela.” 98. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.

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Betancourt’s government.99 By inducing the military to seize power (which was not that far-fetched an idea, given its opposition to Betancourt’s economic and social reform agenda), the FALN hoped to galvanize a widespread insurgency movement.100 As part of this campaign, in 1962 the FALN took responsibility for killing or wounding “more than eighty police officers,” burning “seventy-five buses,” and trying “several times to sabotage operations at the country’s vital oil installations.” The following year, the insurgents “shifted their operations to the countryside in an attempt to wage a protracted guerrilla war.”101 Soon, however, they were defeated, and by 1964 the CIA reported that “the Communist and Castroist insurgents [in Venezuela] almost certainly will be unable to force their way to power.”102 What was U.S. counterinsurgency strategy during these years of trouble in Venezuela, and how did the United States support the Betancourt admin- istration? According to Stephen Rabe: “The Kennedy Administration vowed to do anything ‘within reason’ to support Betancourt. ... Kennedy person- ally oversaw the defense of Betancourt’s government.” This entailed the usual combination of political, economic, and social reform combined with military assistance. In addition, Kennedy used his office to cajole Venezuelan politi- cians and military leaders into backing their president, and he provided the government with generous financial support for its programs. In 1961, for example, Kennedy provided “an emergency aid package of $100 million to help Betancourt calm impoverished ...areas where leftist or- ganizers flourished,” and it supported additional loans from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The United States also pro- vided military assistance, although Kennedy himself was, at best, ambivalent about such support. Although Kennedy feared that a well-trained officer corps would be likelier to seize power, he hoped that exposure to the U.S. military, with its respect for civilian authority, might rub off. From 1961 to 1965, “the United States supplied over $60 million in credits and grants for military equipment and training,” including support for Venezuelans to attend a spe-

99. Richard Weitz, “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Latin America: 1960–1980,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 3 (1986), pp. 397–413. 100. Director of Central Intelligence, Political Stability in Venezuela; and David Burks, “Insurgency in Latin America,” in U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Survey of the Alliance for Progress (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1969), p. 220. 101. A good secondary account is provided in Weitz, “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Latin America.” 102. Director of Central Intelligence, Political Stability in Venezuela.

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cial warfare school at Fort Bragg and counterinsurgency training in the Canal Zone.103 In addition, the U.S. military mission in Caracas played an active role not just in training Venezuelan forces but also in uniting and advising them “in combat operations against insurgents.” To coordinate the economic and military activities, the United States established a in Venezuela headed by a former ambassador to Afghanistan. Its purpose was “to save President Betancourt, defeat the Communists, and build a nation.”104 Important as these economic and military aid packages may have been to the government, at the core of Kennedy’s strategy was support for Betancourt’s social reforms, which included increasing access to education, improvements in housing and public works, and agrarian reform. According to contem- porary observer David Burks, these programs “actually moved Venezuela to the forefront of social reform in Latin America,” and they “cemented the loyalty” of the peasants to the Betancourt government.105 In his analysis of the Betancourt program, Orme concurs, stating that “it served its political purpose very well.”106 All of these measures required money and technical assistance to accomplish—inputs the United States helped to provide so that Venezuela would not face a budget crunch. Again, to cite Orme, “Venezuela is one of the ... unambiguous [counterinsurgency] successes for American policy.”107 Betancourt recognized that he had to advance his agenda within the context of an elite structure that included the landed gentry, the military, the church, and the oil barons, and he tried to placate each group as he advanced a program aimed at co-opting the far left’s social program.108 These elite-oriented gestures included subsidizing educational and other social activities led by the , weapons modernization for the army, support for higher oil prices through the establishment of the Organization of Exporting Countries, and an agrarian reform program that included compensation to landowners and continued subsidies to those who farmed on a commercial scale.109

103. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area, pp. 104–105. 104. Ibid., p. 106. 105. Burks, “Insurgency,” p. 220. 106. Orme, Political Instability and American Foreign Policy, p. 37. 107. Ibid., p. 38. 108. Burks, “Insurgency.” 109. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area, p. 102.

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Ta b l e 3 . Structure of Venezuela’s Economy, 1951–1962 (Sectoral Share of GDP)

Sector 1951 1962

Agriculture 8.1 7.1 Petroleum 23.5 22.2 Manufacturing 10.2 16.2

Source: Foreign Areas Studies Division, Ameri- can University, Country Handbook for Venezuela (Washington, DC: American University, 1968).

Betancourt was able to advance his reform measures in part because of the evolving structure of the Venezuelan economy and polity. Tradition- ally, Venezuelan power had been concentrated in the hands of a landowning oligarchy, allied with the military.110 Later, oil would begin to alter the econ- omy’s structure. By the early 1960s, the large landowners no longer had a position of absolute power in the economy, and the manufacturing sector concurrently began to rapidly rise. Its annual rate of growth was much higher than even that of the country’s impressive petroleum sector (see Table 3). Unlike many developing countries, Venezuela had a relatively balanced economy, and the elite were drawn from several sectors, none of which (other than perhaps the military) was a “veto player.” Betancourt proved adept at giving each powerful group at least something it wanted. Foreign direct in- vestment, particularly from the United States, also played an important role in the development and growth of the Venezuelan economy, especially in its petroleum sector where the Rockefeller family had been among the earliest investors. U.S. investment totaled some $3 billion, placing Venezuela behind only and the United Kingdom as a destination for U.S. flows.111 Given their importance in mobilizing international finance for domestic in- vestment, these business interests were also accounted for in policymaking circles. Through timely acton, Betancourt brought about a quick end to the Venezuelan insurgency, making it a Cold War success story. The historian David Burks noted in a 1967 report to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on

110. Foreign Areas Studies Division, American University, Country Handbook for Venezuela (Washing- ton, DC: American University, 1968), p. 264. 111. Director of Central Intelligence, Political Stability in Venezuela.

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Foreign Relations that “ war does not seem to have any future” in Venezuela.112 This episode gave U.S. officials confidence that Communist insurgencies in Latin America could be defeated when a reform agenda was allowed to take root. But what would happen in countries in which reforms were stifled? The United States would unfortunately find out in several other Latin American cases, including El Salvador, which suffered a long, bloody, and “dirty” civil war.

El Salvador

Speaking before his colleagues about the situation in El Salvador in 1983, Congressman Michael Barnes (D-MD) lamented that “it should be clear to anyone ...that our side is not winning this war ...the political and economic situation is getting worse.”113 That grim assessment, though voiced at a time of acute political partisanship, could not be dismissed as just an ad hominem or partisan attack on the Reagan administration. A 1981 CIA assessment of the conflict had dolefully concluded, “we see little chance of change in the present stalemate.”114 From the late 1970s until a negotiated settlement was finally reached in 1992, El Salvador was one of the biggest insurgency challenges for the United States. The U.S. government provided the small country with more than $4 billion during the 1980s, making it among the largest beneficiaries of U.S. for- eign aid.115 In the process, Washington sought to defeat a Communist-inspired insurgency even though its partner in that undertaking, the government and military of El Salvador, was clearly complicit in severe violations that were undermining both regime and continued U.S. domestic support for the campaign.116 To this day, the coding of El Salvador as a U.S. success or failure remains contested among scholars. Most analysts who have reviewed the archives from

112. Burks, “Insurgency,” p. 208. 113. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings on Presidential Certification on El Salvador, 98th Cong., 1st Sess., 4 February 1983. 114. CIA, “Near-Term Military Prospects in El Salvador,” 6 May 1981, p. 1, in CIA, Elec- tronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC _0000801603.pdf. 115. Schwarz, El Salvador. 116. Michael Hennelly, “US Policy in El Salvador: Creating Beauty or ?” Parameters, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 1993): pp. 59–69; and Mark Peceny and William Stanley, “Counterinsurgency in El Salvador,” Politics and Society, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2010), pp. 67–94.

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the period conclude that it was a failure insofar as the stated U.S. objective was to defeat the Salvadoran insurgency movement (the Frente Farabundo Mart´ı la Liberacion´ Nacional) militarily, and Washington eschewed a negotiated settlement until the very end of the conflict. Interestingly, this pessimistic view was also widely held at the time of the negotiations by most analysts. Writing in 1991, for example, the RAND Corporation’s Benjamin Schwarz concluded that “America has failed to reach its goal there—a clear win for the Salvadoran regime.”117 But more recently some U.S. policymakers have trumpeted it as a triumph, as does the U.S. Army’s COIN manual. During the George W. Bush administration, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney cited the electoral process that unfolded in El Salvador as a model he confidently expected Iraq and Afghanistan to emulate.118 No matter which side one ultimately takes in this debate, it is probably fair to say that the El Salvador campaign was costlier in blood and treasure than the U.S. government expected or desired. The question is, why? Like many Southern Hemisphere insurgencies, the conflict in El Salvador was deeply rooted in what the State Department called “decades of misgovern- ment during which a small oligarchy, allied with a corrupt military, exploited the nation.”119 More simply, scholars seem to agree that “agrarian inequality was a root cause of the .”120 When Elizabeth Wood inter- viewed a former FMLN guerrilla what the war had been for, he responded: “For the solution to the land problem.”121 At the time of the outbreak of the violence in 1979, El Salvador was highly dependent on its agriculture, particularly its coffee sector. Cotton and sugar were other leading crops. Agriculture made up more than 27 percent of the (GDP), and coffee was responsible for more than a third of that amount and more than 50 percent of the country’s exports. Manufacturing, in contrast, made up less than 18 percent of the economy

117. Schwarz, El Salvador, p. 5. TwoNational Defense University analysts in 1990 declared the conflict at an “impasse.” See Max Manwaring and Court Prisk, A Strategic View of Insurgencies: Insights from El Salvador, McNair Paper No. 8 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, May 1990), p. 4. For an assessment based on a careful reading of the available documentation, see Hugh Byrne, “The Problem of Revolution: A Study of Strategy of Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in El Salvador, 1981–1991,” Ph.D. Diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1994. Byrne concludes that U.S. strategy was a “failure.” In “US Policy in El Salvador,” Hennelly, in contrast, labels the transition to a democratic regime a “success.” 118. Cheney’s views are cited in Peceny and Stanley, “Counterinsurgency in El Salvador.” 119. U.S. Department of State, “Insurgency in El Salvador.” 120. Jeffrey Paige, “Land Reform and Agrarian Revolution in El Salvador: Comment on Seligson and Diskin,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1996), pp. 127–139. 121. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action,p.1.

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Ta b l e 4 . Structure of El Salvador’s Economy, 1970–1990 (Sectoral Share of GDP)

Sector 1970 1979 1990

Agriculture 31.0 27.5 17.4 Manufacturing 17.6 17.5 22.1

Source: Economic Commission for Latin America, Economic Survey of El Salvador: 1979 (Santiago, : Economic Com- mission for Latin America, 1980); and World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog /world-development-indicators.

(see Table 4). Coffee and cotton were grown on large estates—which had expanded during the twentieth century at the expense of customary farming arrangements—whereas many staple crops, such as sorghum, were grown by smallholders. Still, only a fraction of El Salvador’s land was owned by these smaller farmers, and the rest was highly concentrated. By 1971, according to Hugh Byrne, 3,000 families controlled 43 percent of the country’s land, and the top 8 percent of the income ladder controlled 50 percent of the country’s GDP, making El Salvador one of the most unequal countries on earth.122 At the same time, the number of landless peasants continued to grow as they were displaced from the plots they had customarily owned.123 Unfortunately, these peasants could not be absorbed by a growing indus- trial sector. Although the landed elite did invest in some agricultural processing facilities, these tended to be capital- rather than labor-intensive. The elites also invested in the financial sector, but banking, too, was not a labor-intensive activity. Despite these modest efforts at economic diversification, the cash cow that funded these activities continued to be agriculture. Not until the 1980s would the industrial sector begin a fresh period of labor-intensive growth, with the development of a local textile industry. This economic structure had profound political consequences. As Byrne writes, the state was “subordinate” to the landholding elite in El Salvador. The occasional calls for land reform were quickly stifled because the elite had put into place a highly repressive military regime. Even as rural tensions heightened

122. Byrne, Strategy of Insurgency,p.78. 123. See Mitchell Seligson, “Thirty Years of Transformation in the Agrarian Structure of El Salvador, 1961–1991,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1995), pp. 43–74; and Paige, “Land Reform.”

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in the 1970s and the government proposed a modest land reform that would have redistributed 4 percent of the country’s arable land and fully compensated the landowners (the so-called Molina reform), this trial balloon was promptly shot down.124 In the face of these extractive elites, violent Marxist movements first became active in the early 1970s. They were given aid and succor first by Cuba and later by after the overthrow of the Anastasia Somoza regime, with arms coming from several Communist countries via these channels. The movement swelled to the point that it could engage in major combat operations a decade later, but this proved an unsuccessful strategy (as did its shift from a rural to an urban insurgency), and from the 1980s onward it emphasized the use of guerrilla and terrorist techniques. Throughout this period of conflict, the United States stuck to its policy of Cold War or classic COIN, urging the government to adopt political (i.e., ), economic (i.e., land reform), and military (i.e., respect for human rights) reforms that would respond to the population’s acute grievances while providing the armed forces with technical assistance and equipment, including (most prominently) helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.125 Despite training programs for Salvadoran officers, however, the United States proved incapable of curbing the military’s human rights violations, and Ambassador even suggested that if the Department of Defense and CIA were not actively encouraging such abuses, they were at least indirectly complicit in the use of extreme violence.126 A pillar of the economic reform process urged on by the United States was, unsurprisingly, land reform. According to Mitchell Seligson, “the 1980 El Salvador land reform was the most extensive non-socialist reform ever undertaken in Latin America, except in .” Paige calculates that this reform, had it been seriously enacted, would have redistributed 20 percent of the nation’s land.127 How can such a revolutionary reform be explained in this oligarchic polity alongside the fact that the conflict endured another twelve years following its announcement and roll-out? These questions pose enormous challenges for the thesis advanced in this article.

124. For the background to the Molina reform, see Byrne, Strategy of Insurgency. 125. Descriptions of U.S. assistance programs can be found in Schwarz, El Salvador;andByrne,Strategy of Insurgency. 126. For White’s views, see Peceny and Stanley, “Counterinsurgency in El Salvador.” 127. See Seligson, “Thirty Years”; and Paige, “Land Reform.”

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Current research indicates that the reform was a cynical maneuver on the part of the landed elites, perhaps similar to Diem’s reforms two decades earlier in Vietnam. Although they agreed to the reforms on paper, the elites also used the military to block tenant farmers from realizing their claims. Furthermore, the reforms did not target the main cash crop, coffee, thus greatly reducing the potential economic impact of the redistribution scheme. The general lack of application to the tenant farming population and the specific failure to redistribute income generated from coffee help to explain why the reform did little to quell the conflict. In addition, even if the reform had been fully carried out, it would still have left a large number of Salvadorans without land.128 However, crucial economic changes were ongoing in El Salvador that, along with the end of the Cold War, may help to explain why a negotiated settlement eventually proved politically feasible. First, the landless population dispersed, either to urban areas or overseas. Foreign remittances thus became a major source of cash for the Salvadoran economy, spreading at least some wealth to those who stayed behind. Relatedly, the economy gradually diversi- fied away from agriculture, in part because of the rural insurgency. In particular, the manufacturing sector began a period of growth in the 1980s, and with it emerged industrial elites who were less beholden to the traditional oligarchs.129 Writing in the early 1990s, Jeffrey Paige argued that the landed oligarchy “has never broken with ‘the rigid framework of land concentration and low salaries’ that is the basis of its wealth, and it remains wedded to the authoritarian order that sustained it.” But, he continued, “events of the last decade have moved” the industrial faction “toward a kind of .”130 The economic environment in El Salvador was changing during the 1980s and, with it, the relative power of the landed elite. As the country drew less rent from the land, and as the “people” found alternative employment either abroad or in Salvadoran industries, the underlying dynamic that drove the insurgency and the government’s response to it faded. That provided an opening for a negotiated settlement, an opening again catalyzed by the collapse of Soviet . That this outcome was achieved only after many years of bloody struggle reflects, at least in part, both the time needed for the

128. Schwarz, El Salvador; and Paige, “Land Reform.” 129. This development resonates with the history presented in Moore, Social Origins,whoargues that political transitions to democracy require a deterioration in the relative power of the agricultural elite. 130. Jeffrey Paige, “Coffee and Power in El Salvador,” Latin American Research Review,Vol.28,No.3 (1993), p. 40.

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economic structure of a country to change and, with it, the relative positions of local elites.

Conclusions: Toward a Political Economy of COIN

The most successful U.S. counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War eschewed direct military intervention by U.S. ground forces. Instead, pol- icymakers emphasized a mix of political and economic reform along with technical assistance to local . The underlying theory was grievance based: If the deep concerns that drove people to take up arms against the gov- ernment could be satisfactorily addressed, the insurgency would lose its ability to “win hearts and minds” and would collapse as a force for revolutionary change. That theory, however, depended crucially on the willingness of local gov- ernments to engage in a reform process. Why the United States chose to engage militarily in countries in which regimes proved unwilling to reform is a ques- tion that scholars continue to debate.131 Such willingness was, at least in part, a function of elite structure and the assets they controlled. When the assets controlled by elites were concentrated and immobile (e.g., land), they fought hard against redistributive schemes. Reform, as CIA Director Colby noted, was unlikely if it meant “shaking apart the structure upon which incumbent power rests.”132 To some degree, the “Cold War” or “classic” COIN theory fell into dis- repute in the 1980s not only because of the U.S. failure in Vietnam but also because of the long, violent civil wars in Central America. Gross human rights violations carried out by local governments and militaries in El Salvador and Guatemala prompted congressional inquiries and demands for more robust reporting of counterinsurgency activities. The -contra scandal, which in- volved a contorted trade of U.S. weapons to Iran with the profits flowing to the Nicaraguan contras, put these wars into sharp political relief, blemishing the waning years of the Reagan administration.133 COIN had become toxic. Even more consequential, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union rendered moot the global Communist threat, casting doubts on the COIN mission, which had been based on that menace. The

131. I thank an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point. 132. Colby, “Preface,” p. xii. 133. Schwarz, El Salvador, discusses some of the disillusionment with COIN operations in Latin America.

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promise of an end to COIN was a great relief for the U.S. armed forces, which had never embraced that way of war. As Michael O’Hanlon has written, “one lesson” drawn by the post-Vietnam military generation has “probably trumped all others—these kinds of counterinsurgencies were not what the American military wanted to engage in, and should not be repeated, or even prepared for.”134 Following the launch of the Global in 2001, however, the U.S. military (along with the CIA, which greatly expanded its arm) emerged as the bureaucratic player that took the lead in defeating enemies of the United States—terrorists and insurgents (often the same groups) that were holed up in some of the most inhospitable places on earth. The issuance of a new COIN field manual in 2006 established the intellectual framework for fighting the types of war that were then being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq.135 Although a comprehensive analysis of modern U.S. COIN doctrine is beyond the scope of this article, one set of beliefs expressed in the manual bears directly on the arguments made here. As Stephen Biddle emphasizes, “the manual presupposes a powerful alignment of interest between the United States and host government.” But, he continues, “many threatened governments are more committed to the existence of their own subgroup’s interests than they are to some abstract idea of national well-being. The existence of an insurgency in the first place is often a signal of an illegitimate government with strong leadership interests in an unrepresentative distribution of wealth and power.”136 Karl Eikenberry, who served as both a military commander and U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, makes a similar point based on his hard-won experiences. “By taking the legitimacy of the Karzai government as a given,” he writes, U.S. officials “jeopardized” their own efforts in that country insofar as the Afghan people saw the United States as nothing more than the vehicle for a “weak and predatory” regime.137 What do such reflections suggest for U.S. counterinsurgency policy in the future? Perhaps the most powerful lesson the U.S. government can draw is that it must be prepared to walk away from regimes that are unwilling to engage

134. Michael O’Hanlon, “America’s History of Counterinsurgency,” Brookings Counterinsurgency and Paper Series, No. 4, , Washington, DC, June 2009, p. 3. 135. US Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). This version is based on the original field manual issued in December 2006. 136. Stephen Biddle, “The New US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 2008) p. 348. 137. Karl Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan: The Other Side of the COIN,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 5 (September/October 2013), pp. 59–70.

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in the reforms needed to help win support from local populations.138 Even before launching a COIN campaign, an analysis of elite structure in fragile and conflict-affected states might provide some guidance about the art of the possible; that is, what a reform agenda might realistically achieve. When elites’ economic assets are concentrated and immobile, they will fight hard against policies that smack of redistribution, making a rapid defeat of the insurgency all the more difficult to achieve.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their com- ments on an earlier draft of this article. Partial funding for the project was provided by the Office of Naval Research to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which sponsored the Philippines fieldwork.

138. I thank an anonymous reviewer for insisting on the importance of this point.

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