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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011

A.

The Vietnamese Communist apparatus can be expected to maintain a pressing and diversified campaign of guerrilla-terrorist and subversive warfare in South Vietnam. The principal immediate Communist objectives will continue to be the demoralization of the public, weakening and supplanting of government authority in countryside, and precipitation of a non-Communist coup effort. There are strong indications that Communists will attempt a greater armed effort after the rainy season later this year although they may continue to avoid any large-scale engagement with the increasingly effective Vietnamese army, except in places and at times of their own choosing. Statistics indicate that the total number of casualties among military-security personnel and local officials during 1961 is likely to exceed the total for 1960. In the meantime, the Communists will continue to place considerable importance on political, propaganda, and economic activities, in order to strengthen their controls in the countryside, encourage a popular front opposition, and disrupt further the economy.

In the short run, the Communist apparatus in South Vietnam does not appear to have the capacity to foment a large-scale insurrection or to seize control of the government without considerable assistance from North Vietnam, which would necessarily be of such magnitude that it would be tantamount to overt military aggression. Barring such a development and given effective implementation of the government' s counterinsurgency plans, reinforced by substantial US aid, the government should be able to reduce somewhat the level of Communist insurgency during the next year or so and conceivably even reverse the trend against the Communists. In the longer run, Communist insurgency can be substantially reduced but the government probably cannot, within the foreseeable future, eliminate it entirely, principally because of the government's inability to seal completely South Vietnam's frontiers with North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

However, security prospects over the next year may well be influenced by developments in neighboring Laos than by the extent to which the Diem government can improve the effectiveness of its military and security forces. If Laos comes under predominantly Communist control, Communist capabilities in South Vietnam would almost certainly be strengthened to a degree unprecedented since the end of the Indochina hostilities. Southern Laos could be expected to become a major, if not the most important, base for directing, supplying, and expanding Communist operations in South Vietnam. In this event, the level of Communist insurgency might assume the proportions of widespread guerrilla warfare and some areas (including portions of the central highlands) would probably come under complete Communist control, within which Hanoi might attempt to establish a Communist but ostensibly independent government with both military and political support from the bloc. South Vietnam's urban centers probably would be increasingly subjected to Communist guerrilla and terrorist acts insightinginciting [sic] much anxiety in the centers of government power and spark a non-Communist coup Rh