The Strategy

 CHAPTER 12

The Strategy

THE NIXON DOCTRINE proposed that the United States could provide the material and counsel for an Asian country to withstand internal or external attack while remaining politically detached.

In this spirit, the White House professed the Cambodian government to be independent, a friendly power whom Washington was helping to help itself. But from the start the United States attempted to control events there. In the fall of 1970, the administration debated just what sort of war Cambodia should fight. This discussion helps to establish that the "limits" implicit in the declared Nixon Doctrine had little place in the real relationship.

The debate began over interim aid. By September 1970 there was a financial crisis. The military, despite Ladd's caution, had already spent almost all the forty million dollars that had been intended to last until July 1971. More money was required at once. Both the White House and the State Department had hoped to continue the surreptitious funding by Presidential determination, which evaded Congressional approval. Laird, however, refused to divert more funds from other Pentagon programs; he was concerned about arousing further Congressional ire and there was not very much left in other programs anyway. "State and the NSC staff began to think that Defense has all kinds of ways to finance the Cambodia operations," he complained to his staff one morning in early September. They agreed that Indochina policy was now a shambles; everyone had a hand in Vietnam, CIA and State ran Laos, and now the NSC was running Cambodia. Any coordination was quite impossible.

On September 11 Laird sent a memo to Kissinger: “We are involved in a real crisis in military aid programs.” The resources currently available and now being requested from Congress were “inadequate to support ongoing implementation of the Nixon Doctrine and to assist in maintaining adequate balances of power throughout the world . . . I strongly urge immediate action” (emphasis in original). Congress must be asked “now” for an extra $260 million for military-assistance programs, $60 million of it for Cambodia. Another $130 million was needed in support assistance. Otherwise Lon Nol might fall and then, Laird warned, “Our already significant investment in terms of military equipment and prestige could be lost.” Just four months after the invasion the “credibility” scare was being invoked to obtain more support for Lon Nol. Eventually, Laird had his way. A supplemental aid request was put to Congress.

Laird was less successful in trying to influence Washington's decisions as to what kind of army Cambodia was to have, and what kind of war Cambodia was to fight. Part of the argument took place within the framework that Mort Halperin had devised back at the Pierre Hotel in December 1968; its vehicle was National Security Study Memorandum 99, "U.S. Strategy for Southeast Asia." One of the main questions it addressed was the correct mix of direct American military aid (and American air power) and South Vietnamese armed assistance. Should Lon Nol be given South Vietnamese men and American matériel, or just one or the other? What should be done in the case of a real Communist threat to Phnom Penh? On this last, three “strategies” were discussed.

Strategy One, supported by the Secretary of Defense's office, called for reliance principally on Cambodian troops to defend Phnom Penh, but would allow the South Vietnamese to intervene in a crisis.

Strategy Two represented the State Department's view, and it was more cautious. It proposed that Lon Nol should be given American aid, and argued that if Phnom Penh still were in danger of falling, this would show that conditions in Cambodia had deteriorated "beyond hope." State argued that involving the South Vietnamese with a regime that could not defend itself would only widen the scope of the defeat.

Strategy Three was more elaborate. It suggested that the defense of Phnom Penh was essential to United States policy, but it would be largely a matter of deterrence: the Communists were unlikely to attack so long as they were convinced that the South Vietnamese and United States air power would come to the city's defense. This sounded reasonable, but if demanded a much greater commitment of both American and South Vietnamese resources; the deterrent effect of the ARVN and the U.S. Air Force could be established only if they were both active in Cambodia before any Communist assault on Phnom Penh was mounted. Strategy Three, the most ambitious, was opposed by both Laird and Rogers. It was Dr. Kissinger's choice.

Strategy Three contained three subordinate possibilities, known as "Variants." These offered three answers to the concurrent question of how much of Cambodian territory should be defended. By now there was consensus in Washington that the old strip of border that had contained the Communist "sanctuaries" was a free-fire zone and that the South Vietnamese would continue to sweep it regardless of the fate of the Lon Nol government. The question was how far out of Phnom Penh Lon Nol's forces should try to extend their control.

The most modest proposal was Variant One. It called for the defense of a small southeast triangle of Cambodia between Phnom Penh, Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) and the Vietnamese border. Variant Two added to this triangle a corridor northwest from Phnom Penh through Battambang to Thailand. Variant Three spread that corridor much wider. Each of the Variants called for a progressively larger Cambodian army and the commitment of more Vietnamese forces and American air power.

Even before any decision was made, Laird's aides were concerned about the extent to which the South Vietnamese were involved in Cambodia. By early September 1970, there were twenty-one South Vietnamese battalions scouring the country and fully one quarter of all airstrikes and troop lifts flown by the Vietnamese Air Force were committed to them. Even so, the Cambodians had lost the northeast quarter of the country. A "Top Secret" talking paper prepared for Laird, dated September 14, warned that "at a time when U.S. units are redeploying, ARVN may not be able to support a strategy which requires successively more ARVN to offset a fixed number of enemy." The Secretary's Office was anxious. "It appears that the more ambitious Variants are justified by the productive, tying down far more ARVN forces than justified by the enemy threat." Laird agreed; he considered that NSSM 99 should be rewritten to include a much cheaper, less ambitious plan. Once more he and the State Department were overruled.

On September 15 the Senior Review Group, Chaired by Kissinger,met.Under his pressure, it recommended that the United States should adopt Strategy Three, Variant Three. Washington would build up a Cambodian army that with South Vietnamese and Thai ground and air support and American air power, must try to hold about half of Cambodia against the Communists.

To Laird's office it was evident that Kissinger had pushed through the policy without proper examination of its feasibility or expense. Although this was a two- or three-year program, no financial costs for the United States beyond July 1971 had been assessed, and neither the financial nor the opportunity costs of dispatching more South Vietnamese battalions into Cambodia had been considered. Philip Odeen, now Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Systems Analysis, told Laird it was a very disturbing decision; he was doubtful it would work at all and was sure it could not be paid for. Previous studies had shown that at least two years would be needed to build the Cambodian army up to the size now required, and in April the NSC itself had concluded that a crash expansion would be counterproductive, because the Cambodians "lacked the leaders and training necessary."

At least thirty-five South Vietnamese battalions would be needed for the new strategy, and if the Communists concentrated their forces against a limited number of targets, this could rise to 67, an enormous force. The Joint Chiefs themselves were unhappy with it, and even Admiral McCain, not a man to underplay his hand, warned that if more than twenty-five South Vietnamese battalions were sent to Cambodia “this would adversely affect Vietnamization.” Systems Analysis agreed. To many of Laird’s advisers it seemed horrifyingly clear that history was repeating itself. Kissinger was dragging the United States into another ill-advised and ill-considered conflict. One of Laird’s civilian deputies complained in a memo to Colonel Pursley, “I have not seen a clear statement of the basic U.S. interest in Cambodia. Why should we be willing to pay to keep Cambodia afloat? Most disturbing to me is that an explicit decision on our Cambodia strategy will probably never be made. Events will make it for us.”

In theory, Kissinger’s decision of September 15 was provisional. A final binding decision was to be taken at another Senior Review Group meeting on October 16. In the interim Laird attempted to get a more modest strategy adopted. He failed totally—in part, as he discovered to his fury, because various agencies had already informed the field that the decision had been made and the Cambodians themselves had been given the news. Nothing now could be changed lest it appear that the United States was indecisive and unable to stand by its “commitments.” On October 16 Strategy Three, Variant Three, was confirmed as United States policy.

On October 26 Kissinger disppatched into the bureaucracies National Security Decision Memorandum 89, “Cambodian Strategy,” a document that was to govern American policy for the foreseeable future. It informed the government that the President had reviewed the first phase of NSSM 99 and approved Strategy Three, Variant Three. “In implementing his decision, special attention is to be given to the development of capable Cambodian light-infantry forces with supporting weapons as appropriate and to the establishment of effective GKR [government] control in the countryside.”

Kissinger understood what America’s most valuable asset was. “In all cases,” he wrote, “our policy will be to capitalize on Cambodian nationalism. . . .”

The United States would support Cambodian "neutrality" and promote the country’s "self-sufficiency"; at the same time, cooperation with Bangkok and Saigon must be encouraged and international support must be aroused. The South Vietnamese army and air force would operate "mainly (but not exclusively)" in the eastern half of the country. Plans for the use of Thai troops would also be drawn up. Kissinger outlined a way of securing additional funds if Congress should fail to meet the administration’s request for a Cambodian Supplemental on time. He wrote that the President had authorized the Defense Department to use Section 506 resources to cover the balance of the fiscal 1971 program and aid to divert Development Loan funds either to Cambodia directly or to third countries "so as to free supporting assistance for Cambodia." Both State and AID felt that such use of development loans for security assistance as Kissinger proposed, was "contrary to Congressional intent and the administration’s new foreign-policy approach." Laird’s office, moreover, had already warned that Kissinger’s proposed use of the Section 506 funds would be seen as a "circumvention of Congressional intent" unless there was a Presidential determination that their use was necessary for the security of the U.S." Kissinger gave the orders nevertheless.

And so, only a few weeks after Fred Ladd was sent to Cambodia to administer a discreet aid program designed to emphasize Special Forces and guerrilla-type operations. Kissinger and Nixon began to impose the logic of a fully equipped main-force army upon the Cambodians, and to demand that the Lon Nol government pursue a strategy for which, most of their own advisers agreed, it was totally unequipped. This was almost exactly what their predecessors had done in Vietnam in NSDM 89, and the policy was designed not, as Kissinger claimed in NSDM 89, to support Cambodia’s "neutrality," but, rather, to eliminate that concept once and for all.

This was all accomplished with little attention to the underlying problems. There was almost no consideration of the impact of “Strategy Three, Variant Three” on either Vietnam or the United States Congress, let alone upon Cambodia itself. One of Laird’s senior officials wrote, “I don’t want to appear overly pessimistic but I must admit some concern that the best interests of the nation are not being served by the NSSM 99 study.” And in Cambodia, the application of this first phase destroyed the government it was supposed to help and nurtured its enemy.

After it all was over, administration officials maintained that the United States had had no alternative but to aid Lon Nol, because when the program began in 1970 he was immensely popular and there was no reason to doubt that he was the best man to carry the country. In fact, the disintegration of his government and his support occurred very early on and was related, as it took place, to Washington. By the fall of 1970 Kissinger knew exactly upon what manner of regime he was pressing “Strategy Three, Variant Three.”

There had been Mike Rives’s reports. These had shown that Lon Nol lived in a fantasy world in which the achievements of the Kings of Angkor had more importance than threats from Hanoi. Through the summer of 1970, Rives consistently warned Washington about the General’s inflated hopes and “over-grandiose dreams,” and in one cable he begged for help to bring him “out of the clouds of his planning.” Rives’s concern was echoed not only in Laird’s office but also in the CIA. The Agency, as is now better known, had never been popular in the Nixon White House. Recent events in Cambodia had further damaged its credibility with the President. Documents captured during the invasion showed that it had consistently underestimated the use that the Communists had made of Sihanoukville for transporting supplies into South Vietnam. During the summer of 1970, senior CIA officials urged that the Agency be given control of Cambodia as it had been given control of Laos. William Colby explained later that the strategy he had suggested to Lon Nol was, “Arm the population. Like an oil spot gradually spreading out. Don’t worry about killing the enemy. Get your own people involved. Build a political base in communities anxious to defend themselves.” The White House had rejected this idea in favor of a conventional military approach. The Agency's role in Cambodia was restricted but its reporting was often very good.

In August 1970, the station chief reported on the political situation to Washington. He concluded that “there are several reasons for pessimism.” about the situation in Cambodia. Among them was the inability of the government to communicate at all with the people. Sihanouk had accused Cambodians of not being able to sustain the revolutionary spirit. (He noted that Lon Nol "is a poor speaker and he lacks the oratorical talent to persuade, encourage and sustain the revolutionary spirit.") Altogether he believed "the initial enthusiasm generated by the overthrow of Norodom Sihanouk has dissipated to a large extent." The blame, he was sure, lay with Lon Nol, who did not have any idea that such problems existed. At one meeting when subordinates attempted to point out the problems, he said, Lon Nol "did not seem to grasp the points being made, giving the impression that they were above his head." The only solution he could offer was appropriate enough - a propaganda campaign in which "the government should even resort to making promises it knows it cannot keep simply in order to raise the spirits of the people." Sihanouk got away with this for fifteen years.

But times had changed. By now Phnom Penh was clearly at war, and promises would arouse skepticism. When Sihanouk was overthrown it had been a comfortable residential city of around 600,000 Khmers, Chinese and Vietnamese. As the fighting and the bombing spread in April and May, refugees had begun to flee toward its shelter and that of the provincial capitals the government still held. By August hundreds of thousands had arrived; when the war ended, Phnom Penh was ragged and bursting and had a population of somewhere between two and three million; no one really knew how many.

By the fall of 1970 the traditional economy had almost vanished. Rubber production was at a standstill, rice production was slowing too. Other produce was still reaching the city, and the stalls in the huge covered central market were still stacked with fresh fruit and fish and vegetables. But as prices rose, more of the traders switched to a new line of business and began to sell surplus American equipment—C rations, huge boots and that no Khmer could ever wear, enormous green uniforms—smuggled in by South Vietnamese troops.

Harsh plank barricades had been nailed in front of government buildings, sandbags (often filled with only husks) were stacked up against the walls of schools, ministries and banks. The anti-Sihanouk posters plastered onto walls in March and April were peeling and tattered now, faded under the monsoon rains, but new wooden bunkers, covered with fresh paint and plastic sheets, filled with earth, were placed at major crossroads.

Along the boulevards and in the parks and gardens the flame trees,the teak, the frangipani, the jasmine and the hibiscus were being hacked away by soldiers—sometimes for firewood, sometimes on the grounds that Viet Cong snipers might hide in the branches. (Later in the long war, the trees would die as the starving population stripped their barks for food.)

The small square in front of the Post Office, where journalists, diplomats and Cambodian civil servants ate couscous and sipped Chablis at La Taverne, was no longer picturesque; it was decorated with barbed wire. Business there and at the best restaurants, the Café de Paris and La Cyrene, was changing. The old French trading firms were closing down; planters had fled their rubber groves in the eastern half of the country, driven off by air attack and ground assaults.

Filipino, Australian, Indonesian, American, Australian contractors, lured by the aroma of war and the influx of American aid, began a five-year descent into the city. They rented the best rooms at the Hotel Monorom or at the journalists’ favorite hotel, the Royal (which had been renamed the Hotel Phnom) and they hired large cars and cruised around the capital hawking airlines, trucks, training programs, medicines, obsolete weapons, drugs. Diligently they paid their respects to Fred Ladd and those other American embassy officials they considered most important, and generously (but often crassly) they tried to entertain senior and underpaid Cambodian bureaucrats.

The civil service had degenerated since Sihanouk’s removal. Most officials, denied responsibility for so many years, now refused to take it, and often there was no discipline or order at all. Ministries worked from 7:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M., with an hour off for coffee in midmorning. Whole rows of desks were empty almost all the time, with many of their occupants moonlighting to earn enough to live on. The station chief reported a little later that the situation was leading to discontent among “youth and intellectual elements, who see the same old faces in the same old jobs performing at their usual level of inefficiency and continuing to pocket essentially the same payoffs that were previously customary.” He saw no prospect for improvement.

New frictions between military and civilian officials were developing. He noted that the civilians felt that the military were generally incompetent, overconfident, and careless of civilian needs, while the civilians were often envious of the greater opportunities for corruption enjoyed by the soldier. These opportunities were a function of army expansion; by now no one had any idea how many troops there were. It seemed that government forces had tripled by the end of July and grown five times—to about 150,000—by the end of the year. But each battalion did its own recruiting.and records were informal. In the early, rather carefree months of the war groups of students would try out one battalion after another to see which suited them best. Battalion commanders quickly realized that submitting to the paymaster inflated figures on troop strength was an easy way of providing themselves with a large surplus of riels—an ideal material with which to line the pocket.

Training was not very extensive. Civil servants spent hours each day marching outside their ministries, a few in berets or khaki shirts, most not, some with old rifles, most not, a few in step, most not. Students were drilled up and down their campuses or schoolyards, and the city's golf course was now converted into a simulated battlefield. (Later it became an ammunition dump.) In order to circumvent Congressional restrictions on American training in Cambodia itself, the United States began to arrange for Khmer units to be sent to South Vietnam and to Thailand. Even so, few of the boys who were carried off to war in Coca-Cola trucks and buses had any idea of combat.

It was haphazard, and by fall the station chief was concerned. There was an alarming lassitude in Phnom Penh particularly among the rich, who till now had been largely cushioned against the worst effects of war. At the same time discontent was growing generally. The station reported that one could hear complaints around town that the generals ran the war from their Mercedes cars and restaurants, while the young people, civilians and soldiers, are dying each day. It warned that the excesses of the South Vietnamese army had caused "grave physical and moral suffering" and that "it will be difficult to hold down the rising tide of hatred and rancor." An economic crisis was looming, and "the possibilities of an internal political explosion cannot be discounted."

Some of these problems were inevitable in any war, but Lon Nol exacerbated them and it was reported that he had absolutely no understanding of the real world. Sihanouk had always considered Lon Nol a fool, according to Charles Meyer, Sihanouk's long-established French counselor. But Lon Nol also had a certain guile. The combination did not make him very effective, but it rendered him rather more dangerous.

Lon Nol's greatest assets were the many loyalties he had bought over the years in the officer corps. To preserve them, he tolerated and indeed encouraged military corruption. But he did not always use associates in the most sensible manner. Convinced that, since he had replaced the God-King he must rule in a similar manner, he insisted on maintaining personal control over the war effort. He bypassed the army's general staff and called unit commanders whom he knew directly by field telephone.

He instructed them to conduct maneuvers that were often absurd in the face of enemy dispositions he knew little about. His tactical advice depended on his mood, which could be gauged at the daily military briefings he insisted on giving. If he was cheerful, he would launch into long monologues—sometimes lasting two or three hours—on ancient Khmer history. If the news from the field was bad, he would close down the briefing abruptly. A CIA station report noted that none of his generals ever questioned his interpretation of the past, because “no other participant has any interest in it.”

General Abrams too was concerned. Early in 1971 Laird reported to Nixon himself that on his recent trip to Vietnam “Abrams confided that Lon Nol and the Cambodian leadership did not fully comprehend the military situation in their own country. . . . Of special concern is General Abrams’ assessment that Lon Nol and his key leaders are strangely detached from the implications of the immediate military situation.”

The quality of Lon Nol’s leadership and the reality of the war were brought home to inhabitants of Phnom Penh on January 22, 1971. In the early hours of the morning Viet Cong sappers crept up to the perimeter of Phnom Penh’s airport, Pochentong, and fired hundreds of rounds of mortar and 122-mm. rockets. The government was caught by surprise; although the attack lasted four hours, no attempt whatsoever was made to send reinforcements the two and a half miles from the city. The entire air force, an admittedly ramshackle affair, was destroyed.

The assault caused a panic in the capital and raised doubts as to whether the government could defend the city at all. Information was replaced, as it often was in Phnom Penh, by rumors; the most widespread was that the assault had been arranged by the South Vietnamese. The American Ambassador Emory Swank cabled home to say it was psychologically the most sobering event since his arrival in September; he asked for stand-by authority to evacuate embassy dependents.

Washington’s response showed the extent to which the war was controlled from afar. The planes Lon Nol was promised would all be replaced. In the meantime Swank was instructed by the State Department to order Lon Nol to write to President Thieu and to the Thai prime minister to ask for a loan of T-28 fighter planes. Lon Nol was also to ask Thieu if he would increase the number of Vietnamese air force missions flown over Cambodia. Despite its justified hatred that almost all Cambodians now felt for Vietnamese pilots, Lon Nol did as he was told his letter to Thieu asked him, "to amplify and intensify cover and support provided by your Air Force, within the framework of cooperation between our two countries for common defense against Communist invasion."

A few weeks later Lon Nol suffered a stroke. He was dispatched to Hawaii for treatment (the Pentagon and State Department later squabbled over the bill) and recuperated in Admiral McCain's guesthouse. When he returned to Phnom Penh he suffered from a serious limp, a slur in his speech and his grasp upon reality seemed more tenuous than ever. Swank informed the State Department that even Lon Nol's partner in the coup against Sihanouk, Sirik Matak, now felt that the general had to go. "He said that Lon Nol is obviously not in physical or emotional state to bear burdens of his office; his articulation is uncertain, and his emotional anxieties are acute, precluding his exposure to multiple decisions which would be demanded of him."

In April 1971 Lon Nol did resign, and the title of Marshal was conferred upon him. But he was not long deprived of power. Thanks to the machinations of his younger brother, Lon Non, no other government could be formed, and Lon Nol hobbled back to office. Well before his illness, senior army officers and officials had complained to the United States Embassy that his romantic visions and impetuous interventions were jeopardizing the war effort. Such tendencies were now far more pronounced. And yet Lon Nol would remain in power, sustained by Washington and in particular by the White House, for four more years, the symbol of the American policy that President Nixon called "the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form."