NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
central question vas whether he would -- or could -- do so. Among those who responded to this question in the negative, J. Kenneth Galbraith was most trenchant:
In my completely considered view … Diem will not reform either administratively or politically in any effective way. That is because he cannot. It is politically naive to expect it. He senses that he cannot let power go because he would be thrown out. 72/
The U.S. decided that Diem could make meaningful reforms and that he would do so -- or at least it decided that it was likely enough that he would do so and that support for his administration constituted the best available policy alternative.
E. The Problem of Assessment
The differences in perspectives and expectations outlined above are important in their own right. They loom even larger, however, when one considers the difficulty of assessing progress in the program about to be undertaken. These groups were about to embark upon a long, arduous joint voyage. Their only chart had never been to sea. This was the newly-articulated and imperfectly understood doctrine of counterinsurgency which stressed the interaction and interdependence of political, military, social, and psychological factors. It posited the necessity for certain actions to follow immediately and successfully behind others in order for the process of pacification to succeed. Above all -- and this point cannot be overstressed -- while this doctrine recognized the need for both the carrot and the stick (for coercive control and appealing programs) it made gaining broad popular acceptance the single ultimate criterion of success. Neither kill ratios nor construction rates nor the frequency of incidents was conclusive, yet these were all indicators applicable to phases within the larger process. The gains of doing well in one phase, however, could be wiped out by inactivity or mistakes in a subsequent phase. It was, in shorty very difficult to know how well one was doing until one was done.
VI. THE NATIONAL PLAN EMERGES
A. Awareness of the Unifying Potential
Before examining the quality of execution of the operational programs for which some detailed record is available it will be useful to outline the process by which the strategic hamlet program became -- by late 1962 -- a comprehensive national program embodying the major effort of GVN in pacification.
"Operation Sunrise" in Binh Duong Province was launched on 22 March 1962 in what was initially called the "Ben Cat Project." 73/ The Delta project, however, languished in a "planning stage" until May, when it first became known that Diem was considering incorporating it into the Strategic Hamlet Program. 74/ By August the IMCSH proposed a priority plan for the construction of strategic hamlets on a nation-wide basis.
