Shawn McHale : "Learning the Wrong Lessons About Pacification: The First Indochina War, 1945-54"

What if our understanding of "modern" counter-insurgency is all wrong?

This talk, based on extensive research in Cambodian, French, and Vietnamese archives and libraries, focuses on a neglected part of the First Indochina War (1945-54), the struggle for the southern Vietnamese countryside. Professor McHale argues that a particular genealogy of counter-insurgency, linking French intellectuals of the 1950s like Hogard, Lacheroy, Galula, and Trinquier to American counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, is all wrong. It often focuses on where the French failed and ignores where they seemed to "succeed." 

The French attempt at "pacification" in southern Vietnam, unlike that discussed by the leading French intellectuals of modern counter-insurgency, was successful at denying victory to the Resistance. It did not, however, lead to consolidation of central state power against the Resistance. Instead, it fractured sovereignty among numerous parastates and militias, leading the rural south to be balkanized by the end of the war.

Examining this process helps us understand not simply the local complexity of asymmetric war, or the odd end to the First Indochina War, but also the failures of the anti-communist Republic of Vietnam to consolidate control after 1954.