Cecil Bohanon and John Horowitz: In war, looking at wrong things can bring defeat

Fifty years ago, in 1973, the United States signed the Paris Peace Accord, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1965, Bernard Fall, a French professor and journalist, wrote about why powerful governments often lose against much weaker insurgencies.

A key part of a revolutionary war such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and other insurgencies is that they are fought in support of a religious or socioeconomic doctrine. The American Revolution was fought over socioeconomic doctrines, such as opposing additional British taxes when colonists didn’t have a voice in how those taxes were imposed. The American Revolutionary War escalated to include the Southern colonies when the British burned Falmouth and Norfolk. The rebellion leaders argued that the colonists needed to work together to survive against a ruthless enemy and fight for independence.

A second key reason governments lose is that their leaders and advisers are ignorant about what is really going on. If you look at the wrong things, such as how many enemy soldiers are killed, measures such as “cost-effectiveness” can become misleading. Government and military leaders often think they control areas they do not.

In 1953, when the French were fighting the Vietminh guerrillas, Fall suspected that French claims of administrative control were greatly exaggerated and delusional. He found a simple way to determine which villages were actually under French control: tax payments. Examination of the tax rolls in Hanoi indicated that 70% of the areas the French thought they controlled were paying no taxes to colonial authorities in Hanoi!

When he returned in 1957 after South Vietnam’s founding, he saw obituaries for Southern village chiefs on a daily basis. The Vietminh took over North Vietnamese villages by executing village chiefs who opposed them. He suspected the excess death of Southern village chiefs was leading to communist control. By 1963, he observed that the communists were collecting taxes in all the provinces surrounding the capital of Saigon and in all but three provinces in the rest of South Vietnam.

Whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or many other countries, the military aspects of an insurgency are not the most important factors. Insurgents usually win by controlling local and provincial government administration and out-administering the country with the more powerful military force. In addition to controlling the local population with raw terror, successful insurgents are also masters of propaganda and vilifying their enemies.•

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Bohanon and Horowitz are professors of economics at Ball State University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.