HOW THE WAR IN VIET NAM MIGHT END

PERHAPS nothing is more baffling about the complex war in Viet Nam than trying to imagine how it will end--foretelling the specific shape and nature of the final peace that somehow, some day must be made. How the U.S. extricates itself from Viet Nam is, for Americans and, in particular, for both political parties, the most important piece in the overall puzzle. Many lives and large issues of policy are at stake. Far more than was the case with the Korean War, how the Viet Nam conflict ends is apt to affect for years both the image Americans have of themselves and the image that the world has of the U.S. The U.S. should not leave Viet Nam in a way that divides the nation bitterly at home, gives excessive comfort to its enemies or undue doubts to its friends and allies.

So far, the Paris talks, bogged down on the issue of a total bombing halt, have produced little illumination about the means to the end. Nor can the ingredients of a final settlement be found in the publicly stated goals of the principal antagonists. Hanoi demands the complete withdrawal of all U.S. and other foreign forces from South Viet Nam, the reorganization of the South according to the National Liberation Front's political program, and reunification with North Viet Nam. For its part, the U.S. wants an end to all armed aggression against the government of South Viet Nam and assurances that the South Vietnamese can go their own way in freedom. These goals are so far apart that many would agree with the judgment of Edwin Reischauer, Asian scholar and diplomat, who says in Beyond Vietnam: "It is hard to envisage at this stage a negotiated settlement that is not virtually a surrender by one side or the other:

Both Hanoi and Washington may be at least partially paralyzed by that view. In a captured Communist directive released last month by the U.S., the Viet Cong command told its men that "only when, we have successfully accomplished the general offensive and general uprising will the negotiations demonstrate their significance, which consists of creating conditions for the enemy to accept final defeat and withdraw in an 'honorable' manner." In the U.S., government policy planners have done hardly any staff work on the actual nuts-and-bolts details of a settlement cease-fire arrangements, means of inspection for troop withdrawals, stages of reducing the fighting. One reason for the lack stems from the realization that such wargaming would probably become known and would add to the uneasiness that already besets South Vietnamese rulers and other U.S. allies in Asia. The more fundamental explanation is the assumption by many U.S. policymakers that the North Vietnamese are unlikely ever to accept a deal that preserves South Viet Nam's sovereignty and self-determination.

Agonizing Compromises

That assumption may well be correct, but it does not go far enough. In diplomacy, "essential negotiations," as the Hudson Institute's Herman Kahn points out, mean "agonizing compromises on both sides" before any settlement can be reached. Not all the basic goals of either U.S. or North Vietnamese policy are likely to survive a genuine settlement. Furthermore, the nature of the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia has undergone considerable change, as French Political Scientist Raymond Aron has astutely pointed out. Initially, the issue in Viet Nam was blunt, says Aron: "Either the Viet Cong will rule in Saigon tomorrow or they won't." But, he adds, "Fortunately, diplomacy can, under certain circumstances, outwit logic." As the war has progressed, the struggle has created a fresh issue partly superseding the old one. The primary issue in Paris today is not who will eventually rule in South Viet Nam but "the credibility of the American commitment."

What the U.S. seeks to demonstrate in Viet Nam is that armed aggression cannot be permitted to succeed, and it is still possible to imagine a settlement that accomplishes at least that much. The Viet Cong might lay down their arms, for example, compete with ballots rather than bullets, and eventually take over South Viet Nam by democratic means. The U.S. would not like that, but it could live with it because it would not represent a defeat for the U.S. stand against armed aggression or a victory for the Maoist doctrine of wars of liberation.

All this would require elections, perhaps a series of them, and how these could be kept free and fair in Viet Nam, corroded by war and ill-trained in the disciplines of democracy, is a staggering problem. "You exercise your ingenuity," says a U.S. diplomat, "trying to find some formula by which everyone thinks he would have some chance to win a nonviolent competition. But somebody's going to be wrong." Outside the Government, a great deal of ingenuity has been applied in recent months to devising "scenarios" of how the war might be ended, the peace structured and the U.S. presence in Viet Nam reduced. Considerably more agreement exists about how to end the war than about how to shape the peace.

Buffer Forces

There are, after all, relatively few steps that need be taken to lower the level of violence in Viet Nam, however difficult each may prove to be in practice. Speaking not as a candidate for President, Hubert Humphrey has called for an immediate cease-fire in Viet Nam. A good many Viet Nam experts question whether a cease-fire ought to be the first step in reducing hostilities since, like the oft-violated Jet truces, it would provide no assurance against local violence or massive Communist resupply and buildup in contested areas. Some allied military men nonetheless favor the idea, arguing that it would provide an ideal opportunity for the forces freed from combat to root out Viet Cong political agents in rural areas. The Viet Cong, of course, might see exactly the same opportunity to clean out government representatives.

Another plan comes from Arthur M. Cox, a congressional candidate in New Hampshire, who at various times has pondered the problems of Viet Nam for the State Department, the CIA and the Brookings Institution. His scheme calls for a cease-fire only after thorough negotiations have settled all the ground rules of deescalation. The sequence would then be a ceasefire, the withdrawal of all external forces, both allied and North Vietnamese, and the substantial demobilization of Viet Cong and South Vietnamese army forces. The process, he believes, would require at least two years. Overseeing it would be an international peace-keeping force of at least 30,000 men, including Communist elements from Eastern Europe, headed by a commander in chief acceptable to both the U.S. and Russia.

Nelson Rockefeller has proposed a plan for peace in Viet Nam that calls for a pullback by North Vietnamese forces toward the Demilitarized Zone, Cambodia and Laos, coupled with a withdrawal by U.S. forces from such remote areas as the Central Highlands and a shift into heavily populated areas. A peace-keeping force, "Asian, if possible," would then be positioned between the two forces as a "security buffer," to be followed by the gradual withdrawal from Viet Nam of all foreign forces. Rockefeller's plan then calls for free elections, the results of which he would presumably accept even if the Communists won.

Herman Kahn, who popularized the notion of scenarios for plotting world events, has written a large number of scripts for ending the war. One, which he clearly does not think very likely or desirable, contains a grim extension of Rockefeller's pullback proposal. It is nothing short of further partition of Viet Nam, in which Hanoi would be given South Viet Nam's northernmost province of Quang Tri and part of Thua Thien south of it. Another involves the creation of a third, more or less independent buffer state between North and South Viet Nam, carved out of both their provinces along the DMZ. A major drawback to these schemes is U.S. assurance to Laotian Prince Souvanna Phouma that the U.S. will also try in Paris to obtain withdrawal from Laos of North Vietnamese troops.

Some experts, including William Pfaff of the Hudson Institute, are convinced that any durable settlement for Viet Nam must sooner or later embrace all the countries of Southeast Asia, providing for the neutralization of not only Viet Nam but also Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and perhaps even Malaysia. Pfaff would include Thailand (and to a lesser extent Malaysia) to balance off North Viet Nam's presence in the neutralist bloc with a prospering, pro-Western nation.

Ingenious Way

Through some combination of a ceasefire, withdrawal and supervision, the guns will eventually fall silent in Viet Nam. Then will come the infinitely more difficult task of resolving who will rule and how. One set of plans would start at the top, with the formation of a conciliatory central government in Saigon. The National Liberation Front has, of course, its own design for a coalition government representing a broad segment of South Vietnamese society but excluding members of the present government of President Nguyen Van Thieu. Thieu, in turn, so far refuses to countenance any coalition with the Front or the Viet Cong, and has jailed prominent South Vietnamese, including former Presidential Candidate Truong Dinh Dzu two weeks ago, for even daring to suggest the notion.

Arthur Cox proposes a national caretaker regime approved by both sides--a kind of interim government--until elections can be held. The problem with a coalition or a caretaker regime is the division of key jobs, particularly those responsible for South Viet Nam's internal security, such as the Interior Ministry and the chiefs of police and defense. Whichever side got the key jobs would have a head start in influencing the outcome of any election and eventually ruling the country. Some analysts think that a solution might be found in the creation of an election commission in which the Front would be strongly represented along with the Saigon government. The commission would run the balloting for a new government, committing both sides to abide by the results. Another ingenious, if unlikely, scheme has been suggested by Buddhist Nationalist Thich Nhat Hanh: an interim government made up of those South Vietnamese who reject the leadership of both the National Liberation Front and the Saigon government.

There is a possibility of integrating the Communists into South Vietnamese politics at a slightly lower level: by legitimizing the Front as a political party so that its members could vie for seats in the National Assembly like any other group. Cabinet seats would be denied them until they had demonstrably earned them at the polls. But, from the U.S. viewpoint, there are grave dangers in such a course. The Communists are far and away the best-organized, most cohesive political force in South Viet Nam, and in a free election could probably attract more votes than the population they currently control--perhaps getting as much as 35% of the vote in an early election. That might very well prove to be a plurality and, as the Saigon constitution is now written, would give them the country overnight--an outcome that would be hard for the U.S. to accept. If South Viet Nam ever does go Communist, the U.S. hopes that it would be only after a long political struggle.

What many of the current academic and think-tank plans recommend is a reconciliation in Viet Nam beginning at the very lowest levels: hamlet, village, province. This approach is variously described as federal, pluralistic or decentralized. Kahn bluntly calls it Balkanization. It would begin with what the Asia Society's Kenneth T. Young calls a "patchwork of local negotiations" in which warring Communists and non-Communists in a small area would come to terms, make their own local truces and work out their own modus vivendi for governing their localities. Viet Nam is in fact less a nation than an assembly of separatist, often fiercely competitive sects and peoples, such as the Hoa Hao, the Cao Dai, the Montagnards and, of course, the Catholics and Buddhists. Granting such subsocieties home rule would strengthen local government and security and also give them a larger stake in supporting a central government tolerant of their autonomy.

Shift to the Cities

Localizing the conflict would tend to cool down the war even if the process were begun before formal cease-fire or withdrawal arrangements. Perhaps both the North Vietnamese and the U.S. would have little to say in any village arrangements honestly arrived at. Indeed, as agreements were reached, all foreigners might well be asked to leave the areas involved. Thus a system based on this new oil-spot theory might work to gradually lower the level of violence. It would have the liability of confirming Viet Cong control in areas they already own. By the same token, the government would have its rule in clearly held areas validated. And as Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the department of government at Harvard, points out in the current Foreign Affairs, one of the most dramatic and little-remarked impacts of the war has been the shift in population from the countryside to the cities. A decade ago, only 10% to 15% of the people lived in cities; today some 40% do. The cities are controlled by the government, and presumably would continue to be in any federal configuration of power that emerged.

The critics of this kind of pluralistic solution to the conflict in Viet Nam argue that it would be too fragile to be sustained, much less built up into an eventual national compromise. What would happen if U.S. and North Vietnamese units clashed in an area where local accommodations had been reached? How could village or district elections in contested areas be supervised? When would the U.S. know that it was safe or opportune to begin withdrawing troops, and how many to retain in South Viet Nam? It would be splendid, of course, to have clear-cut answers to such questions. But the war itself has been messy and formless, and the from-the-ground-up solution might reflect Vietnamese realities to a much greater extent than the alternatives. At this juncture, it is difficult to imagine the Thieu government or the Communists agreeing to work together in a larger political process. One of the two might do so if it felt that the odds of settlement were clearly tilted in its favor--and the other might accept such an outcome if it clearly felt that it had lost the war. Part of the difficulty of the Viet Nam war is that, though it may be a war neither side can win, it remains a conflict that each side is convinced it has not yet lost. Any settlement must reflect that lack of decision on the battlefield and translate it into a probably ambiguous peace.

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