A missing section of the Pentagon Papers, which were declassified yesterday, concludes that the United States got little in return for more than $2 billion in aid it sent to Vietnam in the 1950s, nearly 80 percent for security.
Four decades ago, Daniel Ellsberg, a young defense analyst, leaked the top-secret study packed with damaging revelations about America’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Yesterday, the study finally came out in complete form.
The declassified report includes 2,384 pages missing from what was regarded as the most complete version of the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 by Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, a Democrat.
One volume missing from the Gravel edition and released yesterday details US miscues in training the Vietnamese National Army from 1954 to 1959.
In words that echo today’s laments about money misspent in Iraq and Afghanistan, the report says, “Very little has been accomplished.’’
Bureaucratic compromises between the Pentagon and State Department also undermined the training program in Vietnam, according to the document. Increasingly, the United States was “selecting the least desirable course of action.’’
The Pentagon Papers chronicle failures of US policy at seemingly every turn. One was a focused attempt from 1961 to 1963 to pacify rural Vietnam with the Strategic Hamlet Program, combining military operations to secure villages with construction, economic aid,and resettlement.
The report concludes the United States had learned lessons of the past, namely that Vietnamese villagers would resist attempts to change their lives. The hamlet program “was fatally flawed in its conception by the unintended consequence of alienating many of those whose loyalty it aimed to win,’’ it said.
The papers have became a touchstone for whistle-blowers everywhere — and just the sort of leak that gives presidents fits to this day. And the documents show that almost from the opening lines, it was apparent that the authors knew they had produced a hornet’s nest.
0 comments:
Post a Comment