I read Bernard Fall’s The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency — which was originally published in the April 1965 issue of Naval War College Review — a few years ago, and one passage stuck with me:
When I arrived I checked in with the French briefing officer and asked what the situation was in the [Red River] Delta. He said:
Well, we hold pretty much of it; there is the French fortified line around the Delta which we call the “Marshal de Lattre Line” — about 2200 bunkers forming 900 forts. We are going to deny the communists access to the 8 million people in this Delta and the 3 million tons of rice it produces. We will eventually starve them out and deny them access to the population.
In other words, this was the strategic hamlet complex seen five thousand times bigger. There were about 8,000 villages inside that line. This fortified line also protected the rice fields then, whereas now the individual strategic hamlets do not protect the same fields.
“Well,” I said, “do the communists hold anything inside the Delta?” The answer was, “Yes, they hold those five black blotches” [on a map]. But at the University of Hanoi, which was under national Vietnamese control, my fellow Vietnamese students just laughed. They said that their home villages inside the Delta were communist-controlled and had communist village chiefs, and just about everybody else said the same thing: that both the French and the Vietnamese Army simply did not know what was going on.
Most of these villages were, in fact, controlled by the communists and I decided to attempt to document that control. It was actually very simple. To the last breath a government will try to collect taxes. So I used a working hypothesis; I went to the Vietnamese tax collection office in Hanoi to look at the village tax rolls. They immediately indicated that the bulk of the Delta was no longer paying taxes. As a cross-check on my theory I used the village teachers.
The school teachers in Viet-Nam were centrally assigned by the government. Hence, where there were school teachers the government could be assumed to have control. Where there were none, there was no government control. [I produced a map that showed] the difference between military “control” and what the communists controlled administratively, which was 70 percent of the Delta inside the French battle lines!
This was one year before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in May 1954. In fact, the [official military situation maps — showing only small, isolated areas believed to be less than 30 percent French-controlled — were] complete fiction and had absolutely no bearing on the real situation inside the Delta. Of course, when regular communist divisions became available to attack the Delta in June 1954, the whole illusion collapsed…. The last French battle line before the ceasefire [lay deep in a zone that was, in fact, solidly] communist-infiltrated and, of course, it collapsed overnight. That is revolutionary warfare.
Keep that anecdote in mind as William Dalrymple explains why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan:
The Taliban have now advanced out of their borderland safe havens to the very gates of Kabul and are surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahedin once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late 1980s. Like a rerun of an old movie, all journeys by non-Afghans out of the capital are once again confined largely to tanks, military convoys and helicopters. The Taliban already control more than 70 per cent of the country, where they collect taxes, enforce the sharia and dispense their usual rough justice. Every month, their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai’s government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.
(Hat tip to Cameron Schaefer.)