Why Ho keeps Saying No

LONDON JOHNSON stated the major question of the day. "I would hope," he said at his press conference last week, "that the adversary would see the utter futility of continuing this confrontation and would agree to go from the battlefield to the conference room . . . They refuse to do that. Now I don't know why."

Many Western military and political observers wonder why the Vietnamese Communists are not getting ready to negotiate. They should realize by now that they cannot win the war, cannot drive out the U.S., and are bogged down in considerable trouble besides.

It was just a year ago that the Communist command resolved to test the newly landed U.S. troops. The result was the siege of Plei Me and the ensuing battle of la Drang Valley, which were resounding defeats for the Reds. Historian Bernard Fall suggested recently that these defeats may well be considered by future historians "the First Battle of the Marne of the Vietnamese War," recollecting that "the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 halted the seemingly irresistible onslaught of the Kaiser and thus foreclosed the possibility of an immediate end of the war through the collapse of the French."

Their Troubles

The Communists have never regained the momentum that they possessed before the U.S. arrived in force, nor is there any longer serious talk of South Viet Nam's once imminent political collapse. In the past year, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops have achieved not a single victory worth writing home to Hanoi about, while the Communist homeland absorbs an ever-increasing rain of American bombs. U.S. manpower and firepower poured into the conflict since the summer of 1965 have made the Allies largely master of the battlefield.

The enemy's plans for a major monsoon offensive in the Central Highlands last summer were aborted by such U.S. spoiling operations as Paul Revere and Hawthorne. Operation El Paso broke up an attempted Communist onslaught along the central coast. Most recently, Hanoi began massing for an invasion straight south across the demilitarized zone: some 8,800 U.S. Marines and four battalions of South Vietnamese troops are now in place to prevent it. Hanoi covets a victory over some isolated American unit for its psychological and propaganda value, but this hope has proved elusive. Already this year, the Communists have suffered 48,000 men killed in combat, probably twice that many wounded, some 8,000 captured and 10,000 defected.

Hanoi's home problems mirror its frustration on the battlefield. The relentless bombing of the supply lines leading south, while not stopping infiltration, have made the logistics of feeding, clothing and arming the 279,000 Red soldiers below the 17th parallel more difficult. So, too, have B-52 bombings of base camps, way stations and tunneled redoubts, and the concerted drive to deny the guerrillas rice from South Vietnamese paddies. Hungry, wet and hurting, the Viet Cong have turned from wooing to coercing the local peasantry to get food, money and fresh recruits. For lack of visible progress, and thanks to day and night harassment, Viet Cong soldiers are more and more presenting morale problems for the enemy. Some close observers think that the Communists' main problem these days is "doctrinal": finding a formula for victory that the rank and file can understand and believe.

For the North Vietnamese soldiery, the problem is particularly difficult, since most came south in the belief that the war was won and that they would arrive as welcomed liberators. Increasingly, interrogated defectors and prisoners assess the war as a stalemate. In North Viet Nam, reported one recently captured regular, "our lives are the same as buffaloes." With men aged 18 to 47 called for military duty, much of the civilian economy is carried on by women, which has inspired the government's "Three Postponements" program: postponement of education, marriage, children. In the South, Ho's pledge to continue the war until victory, with the promise that "if we don't win, our sons and grandsons will," has produced a widespread Red jest. "We're down here," it goes, "and our wives are up there. Where are the sons going to come from?"

Myth & Realism

Ho Chi Minh's strategy is clouded by yet another factor: the growing reluctance of other Communist countries to help him. Peking is critical of Hanoi's tactics in the South, arguing that Ho and General Vo Nguyen Giap should never have moved to the vulnerable open warfare of Mao's Phase Three, instead should have continued their guerrilla tactics. Russia and the Eastern European Communist nations are restive over the high cost of aiding North Viet Nam. There is little doubt that Moscow is pressing Hanoi to negotiate, and would like to use economic assistance as a lever to nudge North Viet Nam toward the conference table.

Yet the overwhelming evidence is that, despite all his frustrations and problems, Ho is not about to budge. His response to the Manila Conference proposals for peace talks was blunt: "Our people are resolved to continue the fight even if it will last five, ten years or longer."

Even assuming that such public statements do not wholly reflect his real attitude, the intransigence seems genuine, and it rests on a compound of myth and shrewd realism. Ho and Giap, as General Westmoreland once said, "look out on the world through very small windows." They are convinced that the U.S. does not have the will and patience to wage a protracted, highly expensive war and seize upon every scrap of U.S. domestic protest to prove it. In captured enemy bunkers, G.I.s have found New York Times stories of antiwar demonstrations duplicated and translated into Vietnamese. While Hanoi probably no longer believes that it can drive out the Americans, it still believes that it can wear them down to the point of quitting.

The North Vietnamese trust no Western accounts of what is happening in the South, only the self-serving reports from their own commanders in the field that are sometimes two months in transit back up the Ho Chi Minh trail. Thus, for months Hanoi has been trumpeting its nonexistent "dry season victories," and last week reported that shelling of Saigon by the Viet Cong on National Day almost leveled the city (in fact, only 28 shells fell, mostly in open squares and courtyards). Even within South Viet Nam, the enemy often deceives himself. In the northern provinces, the troops believe that their armies are holding the Delta and pushing past Saigon. In the Delta, the guerrillas believe that the highland Viet Cong are readying a Dienbienphu for the Americans.

Their Assets

Still, for all their troubles and all their delusions, one overriding fact remains: the Communists are far from defeated. They are hurting, but their main forces are intact. By impressing an average of four battalions of fresh soldiers in the South per month, and continuing the infiltration from the North, the enemy's strength has actually increased in the South from 240,000 last December to the present level of 279,000 fighters. Most important of all, the Viet Cong's control of the villages, where four out of five Vietnamese live, has hardly been touched. If anything, say U.S. observers, the local Red cadre of headmen, police, tax collectors and schoolteachers may be stronger than ever, particularly in the rich Mekong Delta. The "other war" of revolutionary reform in South Viet Nam, to which the U.S. is so eagerly committed, has so far made negligible headway.

Even the high battlefield losses the Communists are taking must be placed in a context of nearly 20 years of continuous war and a way of life that has always been hard, dangerous and marginal. In one sense, it has conditioned them to fight on--and on a time scale in which a few more years does not very much matter. The mood is summed up in the song currently tops on Radio Hanoi:

Yankee, I swear to you

With words sharp as knives

Here in Viet Nam, it's either you or me

And I am already here So you must go!

Ho also undoubtedly reasons that a guerrilla war cannot be readily turned on and off because a sense of momentum and inevitability is essential. Once Hanoi goes to the conference table, Ho is well aware that the Viet Cong morale may collapse. Besides, Hanoi may well feel that intransigence is already reaping its rewards. Under international and domestic pressures, Washington continues to modify and codify in advance the Allied conditions for peace, making real or apparent concessions to the Reds. Ho may feel that he must not negotiate precisely because the U.S. seems to want to so badly.

Next Moves

Far from defeated, though admittedly not winning, with his armies and political cadres still substantially intact, convinced that he can outwait the U.S. in the war, why should Ho, from his point of view, come to the negotiating table now?

The U.S. will attempt to answer that question in a variety of fresh pressures on Ho. The Pentagon is pressing for--and likely to get after the elections--presidential authority to expand the list of targets for air raids around Hanoi, adding new power plants, railroad junctions and freight yards, and defense factories. American troops are likely to move into action in the Delta, hitherto the province of the South Vietnamese army, where scant progress against the enemy has been made and where live half of the nation's people.

Most important of all, both U.S. and South Vietnamese troops will put 50% of their numbers next year into guaranteeing security for areas wrested from the enemy--thus giving the Vietnamese pacification teams the shield they have lacked so far in getting on with the business of nation-building. That alone, in the long run, can defeat the Communists as no series of battlefield setbacks seems likely to. As it was in the beginning, so the Viet Nam conflict remains today, for all its bristling clashes of armies, primarily a political war for the allegiance of people. If and when the Communist control of the countryside begins to crumble, most Saigon observers think the long awaited signal for peace from Hanoi will not be far behind.

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