World: THE STRATEGY AND TACTICS OF PEACE IN VIET NAM

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Thieu—or anyone else in authority—can possibly prepare for that time with appropriate urgency is another matter. Thieu has been able to take only elementary steps toward building a government that will soon be able to stand on its own. The President has proved overzealous, if anything, in silencing his critics. Last week the government ordered the closing of a newspaper that had objected to the prison sentence of a Buddhist monk, Thich Thien Minh. Perhaps his most signal failing has been an unwillingness to get out and organize a true national front. Nothing less than that is needed to implant real government roots throughout the countryside, and to bury Saigon's blithering proliferation of political parties (which currently number more than 80) forever. Far and away, South Viet Nam's most necessary future asset is national unity, for without that, in the final, acid test of political loyalties, all of Thieu's skill in management and streamlining will count for little.

A good part of that skill has gone toward building up the program that is nearest to Thieu's heart: the vital pacification effort aimed at creating the sinews of nationhood among the peasants and hamlet dwellers of the countryside. Long known as "the other war," pacification is increasingly part of "the one war," as Abrams calls it. In the largest sense, nearly all allied military operations are now conducted in support of pacification—because the goal is partly military. The usual method, called a "cordon and search," is to widely encircle an unpacified village with U.S. troops, through which South Vietnamese soldiers, police and pacification teams pass to deal directly with the villagers. As the noose is gradually tightened, Viet Cong cadres are often flushed out and captured, thus depriving Communist troops of their indigenous source of aid and comfort.

In theory, of course, pacification is supposed to provide the poorest and least-educated segment of Vietnamese society with much more than just security against Communists. After the soldiers, medical teams and other forms of aid should follow. In practice, however, all too often the men who come to visit village elders are interested in picking up the local Viet Cong representative, running up the national flag —and little else. Those objectives, in fact, became absolutely paramount in the so-called Accelerated Pacification Campaign mounted last fall. The A.P.C. was, in effect, a candid race with time to throw federal control over 1,000 more hamlets before the Paris peace talks yielded a ceasefire. By its own standards, it was highly successful: the government claims that slightly more than 80% of the population now live in pacified areas of "relative security"—and "relative" can still mean a Viet Cong visit in the night. The actual total is probably nearer to 60%. But progress was encouraging enough for Saigon to target a new and perhaps somewhat unrealistic figure by the end of this year: 90%.

The gains, in the words of U.S. Pacification Chief William E. Colby, are fragile. "But if you can keep the enemy out of most of the hamlets most of the time, it's wrong not to try," he maintains. Unfortunately, the priorities in doing so involve establishing strict security, recruiting for a local "popular force" militia and holding a