R3.11 The Cold War in Asia (1949–2002)

Between 1950 and 2001 three of the most destructive wars of the Cold War were fought in Asia: in Korea, in Vietnam and its neighbours, and in Afghanistan. The superpowers never fought each other directly, but their support for rival local forces turned struggles over who should rule these countries into long wars that killed millions of people and shaped the region for decades.

The timeline of the three conflicts shows that they overlapped little. Korea was the first of the three, Vietnam the longest, and Afghanistan the last, ending as the Soviet Union itself broke up. Comparing them shows how the pattern of the Cold War in Asia changed: from conventional armies fighting across a line in Korea, to guerrilla war against a superpower in Vietnam, to a superpower defeated by guerrillas in Afghanistan.

The Cold War comes to Asia, 1945–1950

The Cold War began in Europe, but by 1950 its centre of danger had moved to Asia. Japan’s defeat in August 1945 left a power vacuum across East and Southeast Asia: its empire in Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan and Southeast Asia collapsed, and European colonial powers tried, with mixed success, to return. In China the civil war between Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek)’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists resumed in 1946 and ended with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The Nationalists retreated to Taiwan.

Three events in 1949–1950 made Asia more dangerous. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, ending the American monopoly. Mao travelled to Moscow and signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with Stalin on 14 February 1950, so the two largest communist states were now allies. In the United States, the “loss of China” led to fierce attacks on the Truman administration, and a secret policy review, NSC-68 (April 1950), called for a massive military build-up to meet a worldwide communist threat. The US policy of containment, first designed for Europe, was about to be tested in Asia.

Korea divided: two states and the dispute over elections, 1945–1950

Korea had been a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. In August 1945 the United States proposed, and the Soviet Union accepted, that Soviet forces would take the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel and American forces south of it. The line was meant as a temporary military convenience, but it became the border between two occupation zones with opposite political systems. The regional study of Korea follows the occupation and the founding of the two states in detail; here they matter as the starting point of the war.

Both occupiers built Korean governments in their own image. In the north, the Soviet authorities backed Kim Il Sung and carried out land reform and the nationalisation of industry in 1946. In the south, the US military government kept many officials and police who had served Japan and favoured conservative anti-communists. Left-wing people’s committees and strikes were suppressed, and by 1948 there was guerrilla war in parts of the south.

The United Nations and the elections of 1948

A US–Soviet Joint Commission met in 1946 and 1947 to plan a united Korean government but could not agree on which Korean parties should be consulted. The United States then took the question to the United Nations. On 14 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to hold elections across Korea under the supervision of a United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK). The Soviet Union argued that the General Assembly had no authority over Korea and refused to let UNTCOK enter the north.

Elections were therefore held in the south only, on 10 May 1948. The left boycotted them, and so did two leading nationalists, Kim Gu and Kim Kyu-sik, who argued that separate elections would make division permanent. The new National Assembly chose Syngman Rhee as president, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) was proclaimed on 15 August 1948. The north answered with its own elections, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was proclaimed on 9 September 1948 with Kim Il Sung as premier. Each government claimed to be the only legitimate government of all Korea.

In December 1948 the General Assembly declared the ROK the lawful government of the part of Korea where UNTCOK had observed elections, which left the north outside its recognition. Soviet troops left the north by the end of 1948 and US combat troops left the south in June 1949, leaving about 500 military advisers. The withdrawal of the occupiers did not reduce the danger: it left two armed Korean states, each determined to unify the country on its own terms.

Kim Il Sung, Syngman Rhee and the drift to war

Kim Il Sung

Kim Il Sung (1912–1994) had fought as a communist guerrilla against the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s and spent the Second World War in the Soviet Union as an officer in the Red Army. Brought back by the Soviets in 1945, he built a disciplined party-state in the north. His Korean People’s Army (KPA), formally founded in February 1948, was trained and equipped by the Soviet Union with tanks, artillery and aircraft. In 1949–1950 its strength grew sharply when tens of thousands of Korean soldiers who had fought for the Chinese Communists in the civil war returned home with their units.

Kim’s goal was to unify Korea by force. He expected the southern population to rise against Rhee as soon as the KPA crossed the parallel, and he repeatedly asked Stalin for permission to attack. Stalin refused in March 1949, worried that the KPA was not strong enough and that the United States would intervene. Soviet documents released in the 1990s show that he changed his mind in early 1950. In April 1950, when Kim visited Moscow, Stalin approved the plan on condition that Mao Zedong agreed. Mao gave his consent when Kim visited Beijing in May 1950.

Syngman Rhee

Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) had spent most of his adult life in the United States campaigning for Korean independence and held a doctorate from Princeton. He was a fierce anti-communist and an authoritarian ruler. His government crushed the Jeju uprising (from April 1948) and an army mutiny at Yeosu and Suncheon (October 1948); tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians, were killed on Jeju alone. The National Security Law of December 1948 allowed the arrest of anyone suspected of communist sympathy, and suspected leftists were registered in the Bodo League, a “re-education” organisation.

Rhee also spoke openly of a “march north” to unify the country. In 1949 both sides launched raids across the parallel, and battles on the Ongjin peninsula and elsewhere killed thousands of soldiers. The United States, fearing that Rhee would start a war, refused to give his army tanks, heavy artillery or combat aircraft. By June 1950 the ROK army was smaller and much more lightly armed than the KPA. Rhee was also politically weak: in the National Assembly elections of 30 May 1950 his supporters lost ground to independents.

The table of the two leaders shows why historians who stress the Korean origins of the war call it a civil war waiting to happen. Both leaders wanted unification by force and both were ready to fight; the difference in June 1950 was that only Kim had the army and the foreign approval to act.

The roles of the USA, the USSR and China

The United States: containment and the defensive perimeter

The United States saw Korea as of limited strategic value. Military planners judged in 1947 that it was not worth defending in a general war, and US troops were withdrawn in 1949. On 12 January 1950 the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, described America’s “defensive perimeter” in the Pacific in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington.

The defensive perimeter runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus. … The defensive perimeter runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands. … So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack. … Should such an attack occur … the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations.

Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State, speech to the National Press Club, Washington, 12 January 1950. Acheson was speaking to American journalists about the whole of Asia after the communist victory in China, and his main purpose was to argue that US policy should rest on economic and political strength, not only military bases. Korea was left out of the perimeter, but the speech promised that the UN would respond to an attack. Critics later argued that it encouraged Stalin and Kim to think the United States would not fight; Soviet documents suggest that Stalin was more influenced by the communist victory in China and the Soviet atomic bomb, so the speech is better evidence of how Washington ranked Korea than of why the war began.

The Soviet Union: approval and planning

Stalin’s approval was essential. Without Soviet weapons the KPA could not have attacked, and Soviet officers helped draft the invasion plan. Historians have suggested several reasons for his change of mind in early 1950. The communist victory in China meant Chinese troops could help if needed and made a US intervention seem less likely; the Soviet atomic bomb reduced the risk of an American nuclear threat; and a quick victory would bind both Korea and the new China more closely to Moscow and put pressure on Japan, which the United States was rebuilding as an ally. Stalin was careful, however, to keep Soviet forces out of sight: he insisted that if things went wrong, China, not the USSR, would have to help.

Since January 1950 the Soviet Union had been boycotting the UN Security Council in protest at its refusal to give China’s seat to the People’s Republic. This mistake, or calculation, meant that the Soviet delegate was absent when the Council voted in June 1950 and could not use the Soviet veto to stop UN action.

China: consent and the priority of Taiwan

Mao’s first priority in 1950 was to complete the civil war by invading Taiwan. He agreed to Kim’s plan in May 1950 partly because Stalin had already approved it and partly from revolutionary solidarity with Korean communists who had fought alongside the Chinese. China’s contribution before June 1950 was mainly the transfer of Korean soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army to the KPA. Its own decision to send troops in October 1950 is examined from Beijing’s side in the study of the People’s Republic of China.

The invasion of South Korea and the UN response, June–July 1950

Before dawn on 25 June 1950 the KPA attacked across the 38th parallel at several points. Its army, of about 135,000 men by most estimates, led by Soviet-built T-34 tanks, broke the ROK defences within days. Seoul fell on 28 June. The ROK army blew up the main bridge over the Han River while it was crowded with refugees and retreating soldiers, killing hundreds of people and trapping much of its own army north of the river.

The United Nations acted with unusual speed because the Soviet Union was absent from the Security Council. On 25 June the Council passed Resolution 82, which called the attack a breach of the peace and demanded that North Korean forces withdraw to the 38th parallel. On 27 June Resolution 83 recommended that UN members furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area. On 7 July Resolution 84 created a unified command under the United States, the United Nations Command, with General Douglas MacArthur as its commander.

President Truman had already acted. On 27 June he announced his decision.

The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war. It has defied the orders of the Security Council of the United Nations issued to preserve international peace and security. In these circumstances the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area … Accordingly I have ordered the 7th Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa.

Harry S. Truman, Statement by the President on the Situation in Korea, 27 June 1950. In the same statement Truman ordered US air and naval forces to support the ROK, sped up military aid to the Philippines and to the French in Indochina, and sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait. The statement shows that Washington read the attack as a test of the whole policy of containment, shaped by the memory of the 1930s, when aggression by Japan and Germany had gone unpunished. It treated the attack as communist aggression directed from outside, and said nothing about the civil conflict inside Korea.

On 30 June Truman committed US ground troops. Sixteen UN member states, the United States among them, eventually sent combat forces, including Britain, Canada, Australia, Türkiye, the Philippines and Colombia, and five sent medical units, but the United States provided most of the troops and directed the war. Two decisions of late June had consequences far beyond Korea. Sending the Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan put off a Chinese communist invasion of the island indefinitely, and the extra aid to France began the US commitment to Indochina.

The course of the war, 1950–1953

The course of the war explains much of its impact. In three phases the front swept the length of the peninsula and back, and then settled near where it had started.

By August 1950 UN and ROK forces held only the Pusan Perimeter in the south-east. On 15 September MacArthur landed troops at Inchon, near Seoul, behind the KPA lines, and the North Korean army collapsed. The UN then changed its aim from restoring the 38th parallel to unifying Korea. ROK troops crossed the parallel on 1 October, a General Assembly resolution of 7 October endorsed the advance, and UN forces took Pyongyang on 19 October and pushed towards the Yalu River, the border with China.

China had warned, through India, that it would intervene if US troops crossed the parallel. From 19 October some 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese People’s Volunteers under Peng Dehuai crossed the Yalu, and in late November they launched a massive offensive that drove UN forces back to and beyond the parallel. Seoul changed hands for the third time in January 1951. When MacArthur publicly demanded the right to attack China itself, Truman dismissed him on 11 April 1951. From mid-1951 the war became a stalemate of trenches and hills near the parallel, while truce talks began at Kaesong in July 1951 and moved to Panmunjom.

The talks lasted two years, mainly because of the prisoners of war. The United States insisted on non-forcible repatriation: no prisoner would be sent home against his will. China and North Korea demanded that all prisoners be returned. In the end about 22,000 communist prisoners, two-thirds of them Chinese, refused to go home, and most of the Chinese went to Taiwan. The deadlock was broken in 1953 after Stalin’s death in March, the new Soviet leaders’ wish to reduce tension, and warnings by the new US president, Dwight Eisenhower, that he might widen the war. Rhee, who opposed any armistice that left Korea divided, tried to wreck the talks by releasing about 27,000 anti-communist prisoners in June 1953.

Political impact: the armistice and the two Koreas, 1953–1963

The armistice and the DMZ

The Korean armistice was signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953 by the UN Command, the KPA and the Chinese People’s Volunteers. Rhee’s government refused to sign. The armistice ended the fighting but was not a peace treaty, and none has been signed since. It fixed a Military Demarcation Line along the front line, which ran slightly north of the 38th parallel in the east and slightly south of it in the west.

Two bodies were set up to supervise the armistice: a Military Armistice Commission of officers from both sides, which met at Panmunjom, and a Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission of Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Geneva Conference of April–June 1954, which was meant to settle Korea’s political future, failed when the two sides could not agree on how all-Korean elections should be held, the same dispute that had divided the country in 1947–1948. Meanwhile the United States signed a Mutual Defense Treaty with the ROK on 1 October 1953 and kept tens of thousands of troops in South Korea, partly to deter a new attack and partly to restrain Rhee.

North Korea: Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship

Kim Il Sung’s war had failed to unify Korea and had brought his country close to destruction, yet he emerged stronger. He blamed the failure on rivals. Leaders of the former South Korean Workers’ Party, who had promised that the south would rise, were put on trial from 1953; their leader Pak Hon-yong, the DPRK’s former foreign minister, was arrested in 1953 and sentenced to death in December 1955. In August 1956 members of the pro-Chinese “Yan’an” and pro-Soviet factions criticised Kim’s personality cult at a Party meeting, inspired by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. Kim defeated this August Faction Incident, and although Moscow and Beijing intervened briefly on the critics’ behalf, the purges continued. By the early 1960s Kim had no serious rivals.

Kim also developed an ideology that justified his independence from both allies. In a speech to Party propaganda workers in December 1955, he called for juche.

It is important in our work to grasp revolutionary truth, Marxist-Leninist truth, and apply it correctly to the actual conditions of our country. There can be no set principle that we must follow the Soviet pattern. Some advocate the Soviet way and others the Chinese, but [is] it not high time to work out our own?

Kim Il Sung, speech “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work”, 28 December 1955, in Kim Il Sung: Selected Works, vol. 1 (Pyongyang), English text via the Marxists Internet Archive. Kim gave the speech after the war and before the August Faction Incident, when Party members linked to Moscow and Beijing were his main rivals. Its attack on copying foreign models was also an attack on them. Its message of self-reliance became the basis of North Korea’s official ideology, and the published text comes from official North Korean collections, which were edited later to strengthen Kim’s claim to have invented juche at this date.

Chinese troops stayed in North Korea until October 1958. In July 1961 Kim signed treaties of alliance with both the Soviet Union and China, playing the two against each other as the Sino-Soviet split deepened.

South Korea: from Rhee to Park Chung-hee

In the south the war strengthened Rhee’s authoritarian rule. In 1952, in the temporary capital of Busan, he declared martial law and forced the National Assembly to accept direct elections for the presidency, which he was sure to win. In 1954 another amendment, passed by a disputed rounding of the vote count, lifted the two-term limit for him alone. His main opponent in 1956, Cho Bong-am, was executed on spying charges in 1959. Anti-communism, enforced by the National Security Law, made almost any opposition dangerous.

Rhee’s rule ended in the April Revolution of 1960. The presidential and vice-presidential elections of 15 March 1960 were openly rigged. In April the body of a student, Kim Ju-yeol, was found in the harbour at Masan with a tear-gas shell in his head, and protests spread to Seoul. On 19 April police fired on demonstrators, killing about 180 people. When university professors joined the protests and the United States withdrew its support, Rhee resigned on 26 April and went into exile in Hawaii.

The democratic Second Republic, led by Prime Minister Chang Myon, was divided and unable to control continued protest or the economy. On 16 May 1961 Major General Park Chung-hee seized power in a military coup. Park justified the coup by the need for order and anti-communism, launched the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan in 1962, and in October 1963 was narrowly elected president. The pattern of the next quarter-century, an authoritarian state that used the northern threat to justify itself while driving rapid economic growth, was set.

Social impact: death, displacement and divided families

The Korean War was one of the deadliest wars of the twentieth century for civilians. No exact count exists, and figures for the KPA and Chinese forces are especially uncertain, but most historians estimate that between 2.5 and 3 million Koreans died, about a tenth of the population. The table of estimated deaths gives the figures most often cited for each group.

Data: ROK Ministry of National Defense; US Department of Defense; Chinese official figures; other figures are estimates from historians, which vary widely.

Civilians died from bombing, from fighting that passed through their villages two or three times, from hunger and cold, and from massacres by both sides. In the summer of 1950 the ROK police and army executed tens of thousands of political prisoners and Bodo League members as the KPA advanced; South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission later confirmed thousands of killings of Bodo League members and other detainees, and researchers estimate the total at between about 60,000 and 200,000. North Korean forces killed officials, landlords, police and their families in the areas they occupied. In July 1950 US troops fired on refugees under a railway bridge at No Gun Ri, killing many civilians. These events were long silenced in both Koreas and only investigated from the late 1990s.

Millions of Koreans became refugees, some more than once. Hundreds of thousands fled south in the summer of 1950 and again in the winter of 1950–1951, when about 100,000 civilians were evacuated by sea from Hungnam in December. Estimates of the number of northerners who settled permanently in the south between 1945 and 1953 range from about 650,000 to more than a million. Because the front then froze, families were split along the DMZ with no way to contact each other; Korean organisations speak of about 10 million people with relatives on the other side. War orphans numbered in the tens of thousands, and from 1955 the first organised adoptions of Korean children by families in the United States began, the start of large-scale international adoption from South Korea.

The photograph of refugees at Pyongyang shows the scale of this flight and why the division of families was so complete: people left in haste, expecting to return when the fighting ended. For many, the armistice of 1953 meant they never saw their relatives again.

Economic and environmental destruction and reconstruction

North Korea

North Korea suffered the heavier physical destruction because of US bombing. According to US Air Force figures cited by the historian Bruce Cumings, about 635,000 tons of bombs, including about 32,500 tons of napalm, were dropped on Korea, mostly on the north, more than the US dropped in the whole Pacific war. Most towns and cities were largely destroyed, and people lived and worked in caves and underground shelters. In May 1953 US aircraft bombed irrigation dams such as Toksan, flooding farmland and threatening the rice harvest.

Reconstruction was rapid. The Soviet Union, China and the Eastern European states gave aid, cancelled debts and sent engineers; East Germany rebuilt the city of Hamhung. A Three-Year Plan (1954–1956) restored industry, and a Five-Year Plan (1957–1961) was declared fulfilled early. Agriculture was fully collectivised by 1958. From 1958 the Chollima Movement, named after a mythical winged horse, mobilised workers to raise output through mass campaigns. North Korea’s growth rates in the late 1950s were among the highest in the world, and most economists estimate that its income per person stayed above the south’s until about the 1970s.

South Korea

In the south, much of Seoul and the industrial base were destroyed, and a large share of housing was lost. The economy depended on the United States: American aid, UN relief through the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) and spending by US forces financed most of South Korea’s imports in the 1950s. Rhee used aid to support import-substituting industries such as flour milling, sugar refining and cotton textiles, the so-called “three whites”, run by businessmen with political connections. Land reform, begun in 1950, broke the power of the landlord class and created a society of small farmers, which later helped economic growth. Real growth began only under Park’s plans in the 1960s, when the state directed credit to exporting firms.

The war also changed Korea’s landscape. Hills were stripped of trees for fuel and building, and forest cover took decades to recover in the south. An unintended result was that the DMZ, closed to people since 1953, became a refuge for rare animals and plants.

The diagram of consequences groups the war’s impact by type. Weighing them, the political impact was the most lasting: the war fixed the division that it had been fought to end and gave both regimes an external enemy that justified dictatorship. The economic impact, by contrast, was reversed within a decade in the north and two decades in the south.

Impact on the regional positions of China and Japan

China

For the People’s Republic of China, the war was both a triumph and a heavy cost. Chinese forces had fought the United States to a standstill only a year after the founding of the state, which raised China’s prestige in Asia and in the communist world. At home, the “Resist America, Aid Korea” campaign rallied support for the new regime and was used to launch campaigns against “counter-revolutionaries”; how Mao used the war to tighten control is examined in the thematic study of authoritarian states.

The costs were large. Official figures give about 180,000 Chinese dead, among them Mao’s son Mao Anying, and the war consumed a large share of the budget and left China in debt to the Soviet Union for its weapons. Above all, the Seventh Fleet and a US–Republic of China Mutual Defense Treaty (December 1954) protected the Nationalist government on Taiwan, so China’s civil war was never completed. The UN General Assembly condemned China as an aggressor in February 1951, the United States imposed a trade embargo, and the China seat at the UN stayed with Taiwan until 1971. The war made China more dependent on Soviet aid in the 1950s, but the Soviet demand that China pay for its weapons was one of the grievances that fed the later split.

Japan

Japan gained more from the war than any other country in the region. US orders for supplies, vehicles and repairs, known as “special procurement”, brought billions of dollars into the Japanese economy between 1950 and 1953 and are often seen as the start of Japan’s post-war boom; the study of Japan’s politics and economy examines this from Tokyo’s side. The war also changed Japan’s political position. The occupation’s reverse course was reinforced: in July 1950 MacArthur ordered the creation of a 75,000-strong National Police Reserve, set up in August, which grew into the Self-Defence Forces in 1954. In September 1951 Japan signed the Treaty of San Francisco, which restored its sovereignty, together with a Security Treaty that allowed US forces to stay. Japan became the main base and workshop for American power in Asia.

The war also produced a network of US alliances across the region: with the Philippines and with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS) in 1951, with South Korea in 1953, with Taiwan in 1954, and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954. Containment in Asia now meant permanent American military commitments, which would draw the United States into Vietnam.

YouTube

The legacy of French colonialism and Japanese occupation

The war in Vietnam after 1954 grew out of the struggle against colonial rule, and both sides drew on that history. France conquered Vietnam between 1858 and 1885 and ruled it, with Cambodia and Laos, as French Indochina. Colonial rule brought rubber plantations, rice exports and railways, but most Vietnamese experienced it as heavy taxation (including state monopolies on salt, alcohol and opium), land concentration in the Mekong delta, forced labour and the repression of every nationalist movement. Educated Vietnamese were excluded from real power. By the 1930s the best-organised opposition was the Indochinese Communist Party, founded by Hồ Chí Minh in 1930.

The Japanese occupation from 1940 weakened France fatally. Japan left the Vichy French administration in place until March 1945, then overthrew it. Japanese and French requisitioning of rice, together with floods and wartime disruption, caused a famine in the north in 1944–1945 that killed about one million people, and some Vietnamese estimates say two million. The communist-led Viet Minh, founded in 1941, organised resistance and famine relief. When Japan surrendered in August 1945 it seized power in the “August Revolution”, and on 2 September 1945 Hồ declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi.

France returned to the south with British help in late 1945, and talks with Hồ broke down. After French forces bombarded Haiphong in November 1946, the First Indochina War began in December 1946. It is followed in detail in the study of the emergence of independent states in Southeast Asia. Three of its legacies shaped what came after 1954. The Viet Minh had become the leading force of Vietnamese nationalism, with an army and a network of cadres in every region. The French-backed State of Vietnam under the former emperor Bảo Đại (from 1949) was widely seen as a colonial creation. And from 1950, when China and the Soviet Union recognised the DRV and the United States began to pay for the French war, the anti-colonial struggle had become part of the Cold War.

Điện Biên Phủ, the Geneva Accords and the division of Vietnam

Điện Biên Phủ, March–May 1954

In late 1953 the French commander, General Henri Navarre, placed a fortified base of paratroopers and the Foreign Legion in the valley of Điện Biên Phủ, near the border with Laos, hoping to draw the Viet Minh into a battle where French firepower would destroy them. General Võ Nguyên Giáp instead surrounded the valley with about 50,000 troops and, with tens of thousands of porters, dragged artillery supplied by China onto the surrounding hills. The siege began on 13 March 1954. The Viet Minh guns closed the airstrip, so the garrison could be supplied only by parachute, and its outposts fell one by one. The base surrendered on 7 May 1954; about 11,000 French Union soldiers were taken prisoner, many of whom died in captivity.

France had asked the United States to intervene with air strikes. Eisenhower refused to act without Congress and allies, and Britain would not take part. He explained in public why Indochina mattered to the United States.

You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. … But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, answer at a presidential news conference, 7 April 1954. Eisenhower was answering a journalist’s question in the middle of the siege, when his administration was deciding whether to intervene. The domino theory he set out explains why later presidents saw South Vietnam as a test of US credibility far beyond its own importance. As a source it shows the reasoning of American leaders, not the situation in Vietnam: it treats the countries of Southeast Asia as pieces to be won or lost and gives no place to the nationalism that drove the Viet Minh.

The Geneva Conference, April–July 1954

An international conference at Geneva, attended by Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, the United States, the DRV, the State of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, produced the Geneva Accords on 20–21 July 1954. The military agreements provided for a ceasefire and divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel into two zones, a northern zone for the Viet Minh and a southern zone for the French Union forces, with 300 days for forces and civilians to move between them. An International Control Commission of India, Poland and Canada was to supervise. Laos and Cambodia became independent and neutral. The conference’s Final Declaration then set out the political future of Vietnam.

The Conference recognizes that the essential purpose of the agreement relating to Viet-Nam is to settle military questions with a view to ending hostilities and that the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary. … general elections shall be held in July 1956, under the supervision of an international commission …

Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference on the Problem of Restoring Peace in Indochina, 21 July 1954, paragraphs 6 and 7. The declaration was not signed by any delegation; it was simply read out and approved by voice. The United States “took note” of it and promised not to disturb it by force, and the State of Vietnam rejected it. The wording shows the compromise that made the settlement possible: the communists accepted a line they were assured was temporary, in return for elections they expected to win.

The settlement was a disappointment to the Viet Minh, who controlled much more than half of the country. They accepted it because China and the Soviet Union pressed them to. China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, wanted to keep the United States out of Indochina and to secure a buffer on China’s southern border; the Soviet Union wanted a settlement to improve relations with France. Hồ’s government expected to win the elections of 1956 and so unify the country peacefully.

Division, 1954–1956

The 300-day period of free movement produced one of the largest population movements of the period. Between about 800,000 and one million people moved from north to south, about two-thirds of them Catholics who feared persecution under communism, many carried by the US Navy in Operation Passage to Freedom. Tens of thousands of Viet Minh soldiers and cadres, often put at about 90,000 with their families, moved north, but many cadres stayed in the south and hid their weapons. The northern Catholics became one of the main bases of support for the southern government.

The elections planned for July 1956 never took place. Ngô Đình Diệm, prime minister of the State of Vietnam since July 1954, declared in a radio broadcast on 16 July 1955 that his government was not bound by the accords.

We did not sign the Geneva accords. We are in no manner bound by these accords reached against the will of the Vietnamese people. … We do not reject the principle of elections as the peaceful and democratic way to achieve such unity. However though elections constitute one of the bases of true democracy, they can have no justification unless they are genuinely free.

Ngô Đình Diệm, radio broadcast, 16 July 1955, in the draft text sent by the US ambassador in Saigon to Washington the same day. Diệm was speaking to Vietnamese nationalists, to Hanoi and to his American supporters at once, and he presented his refusal as a defence of democracy. Many contemporaries, including American officials, believed that Hồ would have won a free national vote; the north also had the larger population. The source therefore shows both the genuine argument that free elections were impossible under a communist dictatorship and the political interest of a government that expected to lose.

The timeline of 1954–1965 shows how quickly the temporary line became a frontier. Diệm deposed Bảo Đại in a rigged referendum in October 1955 and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam. The United States, which had refused to sign the Final Declaration, supported his refusal to hold the elections. By 1956 there were two Vietnamese states, each claiming the whole country.

Hồ Chí Minh and Ngô Đình Diệm: leadership and ideology

Hồ Chí Minh and the leadership in Hanoi

Hồ Chí Minh (1890–1969) was both a communist and a nationalist. He had worked for the Communist International in Moscow and China in the 1920s and 1930s, but his appeal in Vietnam rested on his leadership of the struggle for independence; his Declaration of Independence of 1945 quoted the American one. To his followers and many other Vietnamese, the war against the southern government and the United States was the continuation of the war against France, aimed at a single, independent Vietnam.

The DRV was a one-party communist state. Its land reform campaign of 1953–1956 redistributed land but used mass denunciation meetings and quotas of “landlords” to be punished; thousands of people were executed, with estimates ranging from several thousand to about 15,000. In 1956 Hồ admitted errors and the campaign’s director, Trường Chinh, was removed as Party leader. From the late 1950s power shifted to Lê Duẩn, who had led the Party’s organisation in the south and became first secretary of the Party in 1960 and pressed for war to unify the country. Historians now see Lê Duẩn, more than the ageing Hồ, as the driving force behind Hanoi’s strategy in the 1960s.

Hanoi’s first priority after 1954 was building socialism in the north. Southern communists, hunted by Diệm’s police, demanded permission to fight. In January 1959 the Party’s Central Committee approved Resolution 15, which authorised armed struggle in the south alongside political struggle. In May 1959 a special army unit, Group 559, began to build the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of paths and later roads through Laos and Cambodia for sending men and supplies south. On 20 December 1960 the National Liberation Front (NLF) was founded in the south as a broad front of communists and other opponents of Diệm. Its enemies called it the Viet Cong (“Vietnamese communists”).

Ngô Đình Diệm and the southern state

Ngô Đình Diệm (1901–1963) came from a Catholic family of court officials. He was a nationalist who had refused to serve the French or the Viet Minh, and an anti-communist whose brother had been killed by the Viet Minh. His ideology, worked out with his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, was personalism (Nhân Vị), a doctrine drawn from French Catholic thinkers that rejected both communism and Western liberal individualism and stressed a moral community led by a strong state.

Diệm’s early successes surprised his critics. In 1955 he defeated the private armies of the Bình Xuyên crime syndicate and the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious sects, which had controlled parts of the south. With US aid and the support of the northern Catholics, he built a state. His rule, however, rested on a narrow base. Power was concentrated in his family: Nhu ran the secret Cần Lao party and the police, another brother governed central Vietnam, and Nhu’s wife, known as Madame Nhu, acted as the regime’s spokeswoman.

Repression drove many southerners into opposition. The Law 10/59 of May 1959 set up special military courts that could sentence communists and their helpers to death. Diệm’s land reform was limited: an ordinance of 1956 capped holdings at 100 hectares, far above the size of most farms, and many peasants who had received land from the Viet Minh were now made to pay rent again. The resettlement of peasants into fortified “agrovilles” (1959) and then the Strategic Hamlet Program (1962), designed to separate villagers from the guerrillas, forced families to leave their ancestral land and build fences without pay.

The comparison of the two leaders shows why the conflict was so unequal politically. Hồ’s movement could present itself as the heir of national independence and had deep roots in the villages. Diệm was a genuine nationalist, but his reliance on Catholics, his family and American money made him easy to portray as a successor to the French.

The Buddhist crisis and the fall of Diệm, 1963

The crisis that destroyed Diệm began over religion. In May 1963 government forces in Huế fired on a crowd protesting against a ban on flying Buddhist flags on the Buddha’s birthday, killing nine people. Buddhists, the majority of the population, accused the Catholic-led government of discrimination. On 11 June 1963 a monk, Thích Quảng Đức, burned himself to death at a Saigon crossroads; photographs of his death were published around the world. Nhu’s special forces raided pagodas across the south in August, arresting more than a thousand monks.

The Kennedy administration concluded that the war could not be won with Diệm. In late August 1963 a cable from Washington told the new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, that the United States would not oppose a coup if Diệm refused to remove Nhu. On 1 November 1963 South Vietnamese generals seized power, and the next day Diệm and Nhu were murdered. Instead of stability, the south went through a series of military governments until Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Nguyễn Cao Kỳ took control in 1965. Meanwhile the NLF expanded its control of the countryside.

The roles of the USA, the USSR and China, 1954–1975

The United States: from advisers to war

By 1954 the United States was paying for most of the French war. After Geneva it took France’s place as the protector of the south. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), formed in September 1954, extended its protection to South Vietnam through a protocol, which later presidents cited as a legal basis for intervention. Under Eisenhower, a Military Assistance Advisory Group trained Diệm’s army, and US aid paid for most of the southern state’s budget. Kennedy increased the number of US military advisers from about 900 in 1961 to about 16,000 by late 1963, sent helicopters and defoliants, and backed the strategic hamlets. The defeat of an ARVN force by a smaller NLF unit at Ấp Bắc in January 1963 showed that this was not working.

Lyndon B. Johnson, president after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, faced a collapsing southern government. In early August 1964 the destroyer USS Maddox clashed with North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin; a second attack reported two days later almost certainly did not happen. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 August 1964 by 416 votes to 0 in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate, authorising the president to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any SEATO member or protocol state. After NLF attacks on US bases, Johnson began the sustained bombing of the north, Operation Rolling Thunder, in March 1965, and on 8 March the first US combat troops, two battalions of Marines, landed at Đà Nẵng. By the end of 1965 there were about 184,000 US troops in Vietnam, and by 1968 more than half a million.

US motives combined the domino theory, the credibility of American commitments around the world, and domestic politics: no president wanted to be blamed for “losing” Vietnam as Truman had been blamed for China. The domestic effects of the war in the United States, from the draft to the anti-war movement, are covered in the study of the Americas during the Cold War; the focus here is on what US decisions meant in Vietnam.

The Soviet Union and China

Both communist powers supported North Vietnam, but as rivals. China had supplied the Viet Minh since 1950 and gave large quantities of weapons, food and equipment. Between 1965 and 1968, according to Chinese figures, about 320,000 Chinese engineering, railway and anti-aircraft troops served in North Vietnam, freeing Vietnamese soldiers to go south. The Soviet Union, more cautious at first, became the larger supplier after 1965, providing surface-to-air missiles, MiG fighters, tanks and the heavy weapons that the North Vietnamese army used in its conventional offensives of 1972 and 1975.

Hanoi used the Sino-Soviet split to win aid from both while keeping its own freedom of action. Chinese warnings that it would intervene if the United States invaded the north, as it had in Korea, were one reason why Johnson never sent ground troops north of the 17th parallel. From 1971–1972, however, both powers moved towards détente with the United States: Nixon visited Beijing in February 1972 and Moscow in May 1972, while American bombs were falling on North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese leaders felt betrayed, but the shift helped Nixon to withdraw US troops without a collapse of the south in 1973.

The diagram of the sides shows that the war was a contest between two Vietnamese states, each dependent on outside allies, fought largely on the territory of one of them. It explains why historians disagree about whether to call it a civil war, a war of national liberation, or a war of aggression by the north: each label emphasises different links in the diagram.

YouTube

The impact of US and communist tactics

The war in Vietnam was fought in two ways at once. The NLF and the North Vietnamese army combined guerrilla war in the villages with conventional offensives by regular units. The United States, with overwhelming firepower but no front line to advance along, tried to wear the enemy down. The table of tactics sets out the main methods of each side and their effects.

“Search and destroy” and the body count

The US commander from 1964 to 1968, General William Westmoreland, followed a strategy of attrition. Large American units would find enemy forces in “search and destroy” operations and kill them faster than North Vietnam could replace them. Because there was no territory to capture, success was measured by the “body count”, the number of enemy dead reported. This created pressure to count any dead Vietnamese as enemy soldiers. Large sweeps such as Operation Cedar Falls (January 1967) emptied whole areas: the village of Bến Súc was evacuated and bulldozed, and areas declared free-fire zones, where anyone could be treated as an enemy, spread across the countryside.

The worst known atrocity by US troops took place at Mỹ Lai on 16 March 1968, when soldiers of an infantry company killed between about 350 and 500 unarmed villagers, most of them women, children and old men. The army covered it up until a soldier’s letters and a journalist’s reports revealed it in November 1969; one officer, Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted in 1971. The killings were the extreme result of a strategy that made it hard to tell civilians from combatants.

Bombing campaigns

The United States dropped about 7 to 8 million tons of bombs on Indochina between 1964 and 1973, roughly three times the tonnage it used in the Second World War. Rolling Thunder (March 1965 to November 1968) dropped more than 600,000 tons on North Vietnam to break its will and cut supplies to the south. It destroyed bridges, factories and fuel depots, but North Vietnam dispersed its industry, rebuilt roads at night with mass labour, and received replacement supplies from China and the Soviet Union. Within South Vietnam, where most of the bombs fell, B-52 strikes devastated rural areas held by the NLF. In Laos, the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail made the country, per head, the most heavily bombed in history.

Under Nixon, bombing replaced ground troops. The Linebacker campaigns of 1972 used new laser-guided bombs against the north’s transport system, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong by B-52s from 18 to 29 December 1972, Linebacker II, killed more than 1,600 civilians according to Hanoi. It pushed both Vietnamese governments to accept the Paris agreement in January 1973.

Chemical warfare

From 1962 to 1971, in Operation Ranch Hand, US aircraft sprayed herbicides over South Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia to strip the jungle cover from enemy bases and supply routes and to destroy crops that fed the guerrillas. A study published in the journal Nature in 2003 estimated that about 77 million litres were sprayed, more than half of it Agent Orange, which was contaminated with dioxin, a highly toxic chemical. US forces also used napalm, a jellied petrol that burns on contact, from aircraft and in flamethrowers. The photograph of a nine-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running from a napalm strike in June 1972 became one of the best-known images of the war.

Guerrilla warfare

The communist side relied on guerrilla warfare. NLF fighters lived among the villagers, fought at night, and used ambushes, mines and booby traps that caused a large share of US casualties. At Củ Chi, near Saigon, they dug more than 200 kilometres of tunnels with living quarters, hospitals and storerooms. To neutralise American air and artillery power, they fought at close range, which they called “grabbing the enemy by the belt”. They also used terror: thousands of village chiefs, teachers and officials linked to the Saigon government were assassinated, and during the Tet Offensive of 1968 communist forces executed civilians in Huế, where mass graves containing about 2,800 bodies were later found.

The Tet Offensive was a turning point. On 30–31 January 1968, during the lunar new year truce, about 80,000 NLF and North Vietnamese troops attacked more than 100 towns and cities across the south, including the US embassy in Saigon. Militarily it failed: the expected popular rising did not happen, and the NLF lost so many fighters that northern regulars took over most of the fighting. Politically it succeeded, because it showed Americans that the war was far from being won. The American side answered the loss of the NLF’s networks with the CIA-run Phoenix Program (1967–1972), which aimed to identify and “neutralise” NLF cadres; by US figures about 20,000 people were killed under it, many of them on the basis of poor intelligence.

Political impact: US withdrawal and the reunification of Vietnam

Richard Nixon became president in January 1969 promising “peace with honor”. His policy of Vietnamisation handed the ground war to the South Vietnamese army, which the United States expanded and re-equipped, while American troops were withdrawn: from about 543,000 in April 1969 to about 24,000 at the end of 1972. The Nixon Doctrine (Guam, July 1969) told Asian allies that they must provide the soldiers for their own defence in future. To protect the withdrawal Nixon widened the war, bombing Cambodia in secret from March 1969 and sending US and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia in 1970 and South Vietnamese troops into Laos in 1971.

In March 1972 North Vietnam launched the Easter Offensive, a conventional invasion of the south with tanks. It was stopped by South Vietnamese troops supported by massive US air power. The Paris Peace Accords, signed on 27 January 1973, provided for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of all US forces within 60 days and the return of American prisoners. They allowed North Vietnamese troops, about 150,000 men, to stay in the south. The last US combat troops left on 29 March 1973. In the United States, Congress banned further military action in Indochina from August 1973, passed the War Powers Resolution in November, and cut aid to Saigon in 1974.

Without US air power and with shrinking aid, the South Vietnamese army could not hold. In March 1975 North Vietnam attacked Buôn Ma Thuột in the Central Highlands, and President Thiệu’s order to withdraw from the highlands turned into a rout. Huế and Đà Nẵng fell in late March. On 30 April 1975 North Vietnamese tanks entered the presidential palace in Saigon, and the last southern president, Dương Văn Minh, surrendered. On 2 July 1976 the country was formally reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Saigon was renamed Hồ Chí Minh City.

Vietnam after 1975

Reunification brought peace from foreign war but not reconciliation. Hundreds of thousands of former officers, officials and others linked to the old regime were sent to re-education camps, some for more than a decade. Urban families were moved to New Economic Zones in the countryside, private trade in the south was abolished in 1978, and pressure on the ethnic Chinese community grew as relations with China worsened. These were the main causes of the mass flight of “boat people” and other refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which is examined in the focused study of the Indochina refugee crisis (1975–1990). In Laos, the communist Pathet Lao took power in December 1975.

Victory soon led to new wars. Vietnam joined the Soviet-led economic bloc, COMECON, in June 1978 and signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in November 1978. After repeated border attacks by the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978, took Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979 and occupied the country until 1989. China, the Khmer Rouge’s ally, attacked northern Vietnam from 17 February to 16 March 1979 to “teach Vietnam a lesson”; both sides suffered heavy losses. The Cold War in Asia had become a conflict between communist states, with Vietnam backed by the Soviet Union and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge by China and, indirectly, the United States.

Economic and environmental destruction and reconstruction, 1965–1985

The bar chart of military deaths shows where the burden fell. In 1995 the Vietnamese government estimated that the war from 1954 to 1975 had killed about 1.1 million communist soldiers and about 2 million civilians in north and south; these figures are not broken down and are disputed, but no estimate puts total Vietnamese deaths below one million. About 58,000 Americans died. Millions of southern villagers were displaced into camps and city slums by bombing, defoliation and search-and-destroy operations; estimates of people made refugees inside South Vietnam at some point run to about 10 million.

The physical damage was immense. The north’s industry, transport and many towns were badly damaged by bombing; in the south, huge areas of forest and most of the mangroves of some coastal provinces were destroyed by herbicides, and bomb craters and unexploded bombs and mines made farmland dangerous for decades. The health effects of dioxin remain contested: Vietnamese organisations estimate that millions of people were exposed and link it to cancers and birth defects; the US government recognised some illnesses among its own veterans as connected to Agent Orange, and from the 2010s it paid to clean up dioxin “hot spots” at former air bases such as Đà Nẵng.

Reconstruction after 1975 failed. The Second Five-Year Plan (1976–1980) tried to impose collective farming and state control on the south, where farmers resisted and output fell. The United States extended its trade embargo to the whole country in 1975, and Western aid was cut off after the invasion of Cambodia. The occupation of Cambodia and the defence of the Chinese border took a large share of the budget. By the late 1970s Vietnam faced food shortages, rapid inflation and dependence on Soviet aid. Limited reforms in 1979–1981, such as allowing farm families to sell surplus output, were the first steps towards the wider market reforms of Đổi Mới, adopted in December 1986.

The destabilisation of Cambodia, 1954–1975

Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953 and was recognised as neutral at Geneva in 1954. Its ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had been king since 1941; in 1955 he gave up the throne to lead his own political movement, the Sangkum (People’s Socialist Community), which won every seat in the National Assembly in the elections that followed. Sihanouk dominated politics and tried to keep Cambodia out of the war next door by balancing between the sides.

Neutrality under strain, 1955–1970

Sihanouk believed that the communists would win in Vietnam and that Cambodia’s survival depended on staying on good terms with China and North Vietnam. He broke off relations with the United States in May 1965, and from 1966 he secretly allowed North Vietnamese and NLF forces to use bases along the border and to receive supplies shipped through the port of Sihanoukville. At home he repressed the left as well as the right. In 1967 a peasant revolt against forced rice collection at Samlaut, in the north-west, was crushed by the army, and in 1968 Cambodia’s small communist party, which Sihanouk had named the Khmer Rouge (“Red Khmers”), began armed struggle under its secretary, Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot.

From 18 March 1969 the United States bombed the North Vietnamese bases in eastern Cambodia in secret, in Operation Menu, falsifying its own records to hide it. The bombing drove the North Vietnamese forces deeper into Cambodia rather than destroying them.

The coup of 1970 and civil war, 1970–1975

On 18 March 1970, while Sihanouk was abroad, the National Assembly voted to remove him, and the prime minister, General Lon Nol, took power with the backing of the urban elite and the army; the monarchy was abolished and the Khmer Republic proclaimed in October. Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnamese troops leave, and his government encouraged anti-Vietnamese violence in which thousands of ethnic Vietnamese civilians were killed. Whether the United States encouraged the coup is still debated; there is no clear evidence that it planned it, but it welcomed it at once.

Two responses widened the war. In late April 1970 US and South Vietnamese troops invaded eastern Cambodia to destroy the communist bases; the North Vietnamese withdrew westwards and began to arm and train the Khmer Rouge. In Beijing, Sihanouk, furious at his overthrow, joined his former enemies the Khmer Rouge in a front and a government-in-exile, the GRUNK, and called on Cambodians to fight Lon Nol. Many peasants who revered Sihanouk as their king now joined the communists, whose army grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands of fighters.

The civil war of 1970–1975 devastated the country. American bombing, continued as Operation Freedom Deal until Congress stopped it on 15 August 1973, was heaviest in 1973, when it was used to prevent a Khmer Rouge assault on Phnom Penh. The usual estimate is about 500,000 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia; in 2006 the historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, using newly released US Air Force data, argued that the total from 1965 was about 2.7 million tons, a figure others have questioned. Estimates of deaths in the civil war vary widely, from about 250,000 to 500,000. Refugees from the countryside swelled Phnom Penh from about 600,000 people to perhaps two million.

On 17 April 1975, two weeks before Saigon fell, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Within days they forced the entire population of the capital and other towns into the countryside, abolished money and markets, and began to build a radical agrarian communist state, Democratic Kampuchea, from what they called “Year Zero”. Its rule until 1979 caused the deaths of an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people; the flight of Cambodian refugees that followed is part of the focused study of the Indochina refugee crisis.

Afghanistan before 1978: ethnic, religious and political tensions

Afghanistan was a landlocked kingdom of perhaps 13–15 million people in the late 1970s, most of them farmers and herders living in villages far from the capital, Kabul. It had never been colonised, but its borders had been drawn by the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century as a buffer between them. The state was weak outside the towns. Authority in the countryside lay with tribal elders, landowners and religious leaders, and loyalty went first to the qawm, the solidarity group of family, clan, tribe or village.

A multi-ethnic society

No reliable census was ever taken, so the population figures in the table of ethnic groups are approximate. The groups differed in language, region and sometimes religion, and they had unequal access to power.

Pashtuns had provided the kings and most of the elite since the eighteenth century. The Durand Line, the border agreed with British India in 1893, cut the Pashtun lands in two, leaving millions of Pashtuns in what became Pakistan in 1947. Afghan governments refused to accept the line and called for an autonomous or independent “Pashtunistan”, which poisoned relations with Pakistan and gave Pakistan a motive to back Afghan opponents of Kabul. The Hazaras, as Shia Muslims in a mainly Sunni country, had faced land seizures and discrimination since their conquest in the 1890s.

Modernisation, aid and new ideologies

From the 1950s Afghanistan modernised with foreign money. Muhammad Daoud Khan, the king’s cousin and prime minister from 1953 to 1963, accepted military aid and training from the Soviet Union and development aid from both superpowers, which competed to build its roads, dams and airports. Much of the state’s revenue came from foreign aid and from sales of natural gas to the Soviet Union, making it close to a rentier state that did not depend on taxing its own people. Thousands of officers trained in the Soviet Union, and students returned from Western and Soviet universities with new ideas.

Two radical movements grew among the educated young in Kabul in the 1960s. The communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), founded in 1965, split in 1967 into two factions: Khalq (“the people”), led by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, more radical and mainly drawn from Pashtuns of rural origin, and Parcham (“the banner”), led by Babrak Karmal, more moderate and more urban and Persian-speaking. At the same time an Islamism movement, the Muslim Youth, formed at Kabul University around the lecturer Burhanuddin Rabbani and students such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, who wanted a state based on Islamic law and opposed both communism and the monarchy’s secular reforms.

In July 1973 Daoud overthrew King Zahir Shah with the help of Parchami officers and declared a republic. He repressed the Islamists, whose attempted uprising in 1975 failed; their leaders fled to Pakistan, where the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gave them refuge and training as a weapon against Daoud’s Pashtunistan policy. Daoud then turned against the communists too, removed Parchamis from his government, and sought aid from Iran and the Gulf states to reduce his dependence on Moscow. By 1978 he had alienated both the left and the Islamists.

The Saur Revolution and the communist government, 1978–1979

On 17 April 1978 a leading Parchami, Mir Akbar Khyber, was murdered in Kabul. His funeral became a large anti-government demonstration, and Daoud ordered the arrest of PDPA leaders. On 27 April communist army and air force officers attacked the presidential palace; Daoud and most of his family were killed. The PDPA proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) with Taraki as president and prime minister. The coup became known as the Saur Revolution, after the month in the Afghan calendar in which it took place.

The coup was carried out by a small party with a few thousand members, almost all in Kabul and the army. The Soviet Union had not planned it, though it quickly sent advisers and aid. Within months the Khalq faction purged the Parchamis: Karmal and other leaders were sent abroad as ambassadors, and many who remained were arrested.

Revolution from above

The Khalqi government set out to transform rural society by decree. Decree No. 6 cancelled the debts of poor peasants to landlords and moneylenders. Decree No. 7 limited the bride price, set a minimum age for marriage and banned forced marriage. Decree No. 8 limited landholdings and redistributed land. A compulsory literacy campaign brought girls and women into classes alongside men. The national flag was changed to a red flag without Islamic symbols.

Many of these aims were shared by reformers in other Muslim countries, but the way they were imposed provoked resistance. Land was redistributed without water rights, seed or credit, and without the agreement of the community; many peasants refused land they saw as taken unlawfully. Marriage reforms struck at family honour and Islamic law. Party cadres from Kabul, often young and contemptuous of religion, enforced the decrees with arrests. Tens of thousands of people were imprisoned, and thousands of religious leaders, tribal elders, teachers and officials were executed, many at Pul-e-Charkhi prison near Kabul. Lists released by Dutch prosecutors in 2013 named about 5,000 people killed in 1978–1979, a fraction of the total.

The Herat uprising and the Soviet refusal

Revolts spread across the country in 1978–1979. The most serious began in the western city of Herat on 15 March 1979, when townspeople and villagers, joined by much of the army division stationed there, rose against the government and killed officials and Soviet advisers. Taraki telephoned the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, to ask for Soviet troops.

Taraki: … I suggest that you place Afghan markings on your tanks and aircraft and no one will be any the wiser. Your troops could advance from the direction of Kushka and from the direction of Kabul. In our view, no one will be any the wiser. They will think these are Government troops.

Kosygin: I do not want to disappoint you, but it will not be possible to conceal this. Two hours later the whole world will know about this. Everyone will begin to shout that the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan has begun.

Transcript of a telephone conversation between Alexei Kosygin and Nur Muhammad Taraki, 17 or 18 March 1979, from Soviet archives, published in English in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, 1996–1997. The conversation was secret, so neither side was speaking for an audience, which makes it valuable evidence of what both leaders thought. Earlier in the call Taraki admitted that there was no active support for his government among the population of Herat. In March 1979 the Politburo decided against sending troops, fearing the international cost; the same document helps explain why the decision of December 1979 was taken so reluctantly.

The uprising was crushed with Soviet-supplied aircraft; estimates of the dead range from about 3,000 to 25,000. The regime then fell apart from within. In September 1979 Amin seized power, and in October Taraki was murdered on his orders. Amin increased the terror and the Soviet leaders, who had tried to protect Taraki, came to distrust him, suspecting him of seeking contacts with the United States.

The mujahideen insurgencies

The opponents of the communist government called themselves mujahideen, “those who wage jihad”, presenting their struggle as a religious duty to defend Islam and their communities against an atheist government and, after 1979, a foreign invader. The resistance was never a single movement. It had three main parts.

• The Peshawar parties. Seven Sunni parties based in Peshawar, in Pakistan, received recognition and foreign aid through Pakistan. Four were Islamist, including Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, mostly Pashtun and the most radical, and Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami, mostly Tajik. Three were more traditionalist, led by religious and Sufi families linked to the old order.

• Local commanders. The fighting inside Afghanistan was done by thousands of local groups, linked to the parties for arms but loyal to their own qawm and commander. The most famous, Ahmad Shah Massoud of Jamiat, held the Panjshir valley north of Kabul against repeated Soviet offensives.

• Shia groups. In the Hazarajat, Shia parties, several backed by the new Islamic Republic of Iran, fought the government and each other; in 1989 most united as Hezb-e-Wahdat.

Foreign Muslim volunteers also came, mostly from Arab countries. The Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam set up a Services Bureau in Peshawar in 1984 to recruit and support them, helped by a wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden. They were few in number and militarily marginal, but their networks later formed the basis of al-Qaeda.

The roles of the USSR, the USA and Pakistan

The Soviet Union: the decision to invade

On 12 December 1979 a small group of Politburo members, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov (head of the KGB), Dmitry Ustinov (defence minister) and Andrei Gromyko (foreign minister), approved military intervention. Their reasons were mainly defensive. They feared that the collapse of the Afghan revolution would bring an Islamist government, like the one that had taken power in Iran in February 1979, onto the border of Soviet Central Asia, or that Amin would turn to the United States. They also believed that a socialist revolution, once made, should not be allowed to fail, the logic of the Brezhnev Doctrine, and they expected a short operation.

Soviet troops crossed the border on 25 December 1979. On 27 December special forces stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and killed Amin. Babrak Karmal, the Parcham leader, was brought back from exile and installed as president. The Soviet 40th Army took over the cities, airfields and main roads.

The United States

The United States had begun to help the rebels before the invasion. On 3 July 1979 President Jimmy Carter authorised the CIA to give them non-lethal aid such as money and radio equipment. In 1998 Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, claimed in an interview that this aid had been intended to draw the Soviets into an Afghan trap, but historians treat the claim with caution, because the aid was small and the documents from 1979 show little sign of such a plan. After the invasion Carter announced the Carter Doctrine (23 January 1980), that the United States would use force to defend the Persian Gulf, imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union and led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The CIA began to send weapons to the mujahideen through Pakistan.

Under Ronald Reagan, aid grew into Operation Cyclone, one of the largest covert operations in CIA history. Supporting anti-communist rebels became part of the Reagan Doctrine. In 1985 a presidential directive set the aim of driving Soviet forces out by all available means, and by 1987 US aid had risen to about US$600–700 million a year, matched by Saudi Arabia. From September 1986 the mujahideen received American Stinger shoulder-fired missiles, which made Soviet helicopters and low-flying aircraft much more vulnerable.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s military ruler, General Zia-ul-Haq (in power 1977–1988), made his country the base of the war. Almost all US, Saudi and other aid passed through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which trained the mujahideen and decided which parties received weapons. It favoured Islamist Pashtun parties, above all Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, which it saw as most likely to give Pakistan a friendly government in Kabul and to bury the Pashtunistan claim. In return Zia’s regime, isolated before 1979, received large US economic and military aid, and the United States turned a blind eye to its nuclear programme. Pakistan hosted more than three million Afghan refugees, whose camps became recruiting grounds and whose children were often educated in religious schools (madrasas).

The diagram of causes groups the reasons for conflict. Afghan society explains why a revolution from above met resistance; the communist regime’s methods explain why the resistance turned into war; and the outside powers explain why the war lasted so long and was fought on such a scale. Neither superpower created the conflict, but each turned a civil war into a proxy war that it could not control.

The impact of the Soviet invasion, 1979–1989

Guerrilla war

The Soviet army had been trained for tank warfare in Europe, not for mountain guerrilla warfare. The 40th Army, usually between 100,000 and 120,000 strong at any time (about 620,000 Soviet soldiers served in all), held the cities, the airfields and the main roads, such as the route from the Soviet border through the Salang tunnel to Kabul. The mujahideen controlled most of the countryside. They ambushed convoys in the mountain passes, mined roads, attacked outposts and then withdrew to villages or across the border to Pakistan. The Soviets answered with offensives into rebel areas, such as nine operations in the Panjshir valley against Massoud between 1980 and 1985, and with growing use of airborne and special forces and helicopter gunships.

Neither side could win. The Soviets could take any valley but not hold it, and the mujahideen could make the countryside ungovernable but could not take a major city. The arrival of Stinger missiles from 1986 raised the cost of Soviet air power, though historians disagree about how far it changed the military balance, since the decision to leave was being taken in Moscow at the same time.

Effects on civilians

Because the guerrillas depended on the villages for food and shelter, Soviet and Afghan government forces attacked the villages themselves. Bombing, the destruction of crops and irrigation, and reprisal killings emptied whole regions of the countryside. Millions of mines were laid, many scattered from the air, and they went on killing and maiming civilians for decades. The Afghan secret police, the KhAD, led until 1985 by Mohammad Najibullah, arrested and tortured suspected opponents. The mujahideen also killed civilians who worked for the government, attacked schools as symbols of the communist state, and fought each other.

The human cost was enormous. Estimates of Afghan deaths between 1978 and 1992 range from about 1 million to 2 million. By 1990, according to UNHCR, about 6.2 million Afghans were refugees in Pakistan and Iran, the largest refugee population in the world, and about another 2 million were displaced inside the country. The official Soviet death toll was about 15,000 (14,453 in the figure released in 1989), and tens of thousands of veterans returned wounded, ill or addicted.

Data: UNHCR; official Soviet figures; historians’ estimates as stated.

Economic and environmental destruction

The war destroyed the rural economy. Afghan farming depended on irrigation, including underground channels (karez) that carried water from the mountains, and many were destroyed or abandoned as villages emptied. Livestock herds fell sharply, and large areas of farmland went out of cultivation. Forests in the east were cut for timber, much of it smuggled to Pakistan. The Kabul government survived on Soviet aid and on gas exports to the Soviet Union, and the mujahideen on foreign aid and on smuggling. Opium poppy, easy to grow and to transport, spread as a cash crop, and commanders taxed it to pay for their war. By the 1990s Afghanistan had become one of the world’s two largest producers of opium.

The Soviet withdrawal

Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in March 1985. At the 27th Party Congress in February 1986 he called Afghanistan a “bleeding wound”. He gave the military a year to win, then decided to leave. In May 1986 Babrak Karmal was replaced as Party leader by Najibullah, who in January 1987 announced a policy of National Reconciliation: ceasefire offers, power-sharing with opponents willing to join the government, and a retreat from communist language and symbols, including restoring Islam’s place in public life. The mujahideen rejected it.

The Geneva Accords of 1988, signed on 14 April 1988 by Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the United States and the Soviet Union as guarantors, provided for Soviet withdrawal within nine months and for non-interference by Pakistan. The mujahideen were not party to the agreement and did not accept it, and both superpowers kept supplying their allies. In a statement of February 1988 Gorbachev explained the decision to the Soviet public.

The military conflict in Afghanistan has been going on for a long time now. It is one of the most bitter and painful regional conflicts. … Any armed conflict, including an internal one, can poison the atmosphere in an entire region and create a situation of anxiety and alarm for a country’s neighbors, to say nothing of the suffering and losses among its own people. … And now about our boys, our soldiers in Afghanistan. They have been doing their duty honestly, performing acts of self-denial and heroism.

Mikhail Gorbachev, statement on Afghanistan, published by the Soviet news agency TASS, 8 February 1988. The statement was written for Soviet citizens and for foreign governments as the Geneva talks ended. It presents withdrawal as a principled act of “new thinking” and praises the soldiers, without admitting defeat or explaining why troops had been sent. Its silence about the cost of the war to Afghans, and about its unpopularity at home, is as revealing as what it says.

The withdrawal began on 15 May 1988 and was completed on 15 February 1989, when the commander of the 40th Army, General Boris Gromov, walked back across the bridge at Termez into Soviet Uzbekistan. The photograph of soldiers with carnations shows how the Soviet state presented the withdrawal: as a homecoming, not a retreat.

Civil war and ethnic and tribal factionalism, 1989–1992

Most observers expected Najibullah’s government to fall within months. It lasted three more years. In March 1989 a mujahideen attack on Jalalabad, organised by the ISI to capture a city for a government-in-exile, failed with heavy losses, showing that the guerrillas could not yet fight a conventional battle and were divided among themselves. Najibullah’s army and militias, paid and supplied by the Soviet Union, held the cities. He survived an attempted coup by his own defence minister, the Khalqi Shahnawaz Tanai, in March 1990. Moscow continued to send arms, fuel and food on a large scale.

What ended his government was the loss of outside support. In September 1991 the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to stop supplying weapons to both sides from January 1992, and in December 1991 the Soviet Union itself was dissolved. Without Soviet fuel and money Najibullah could no longer pay his militias. The most powerful of them, the Uzbek militia of General Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north, changed sides in early 1992 and allied with Massoud. Najibullah agreed to resign and, in April 1992, took refuge in the UN compound in Kabul, where he stayed for four years.

The fall of the communist state did not bring peace, because its enemies were divided along ethnic, sectarian and personal lines. Massoud’s Tajik-led forces and Dostum’s Uzbeks entered Kabul first. The Peshawar parties’ agreement of 24 April 1992, the Peshawar Accord, created an Islamic State of Afghanistan with a rotating leadership; Rabbani became president in June 1992. Hekmatyar, the Pashtun leader backed by Pakistan, refused to accept a government dominated by Tajiks and shelled Kabul with rockets. Shia Hazara forces of Hezb-e-Wahdat and Dostum’s militia changed sides as their interests required. In February 1993 Massoud’s and Sayyaf’s forces killed Hazara civilians in the Afshar district of Kabul. Between 1992 and 1996 tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the fighting for the capital, much of which was destroyed.

Outside Kabul the country broke into regions held by commanders and warlords, who set up checkpoints, taxed trade and allowed or committed looting and rape. The historian Barnett Rubin describes this as the fragmentation of a state that had depended on foreign money: once the aid stopped, power returned to the qawm and the armed men who could protect or prey on it.

The emergence of Taliban rule, 1994–2001

Origins and rise

The Taliban (“students”) emerged in the Kandahar region in the autumn of 1994 under Mullah Mohammad Omar, a village cleric and former mujahideen fighter. Most of its early members were young Pashtuns who had grown up in the refugee camps and studied in Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan, which taught a strict, conservative form of Sunni Islam. Its first aim was to end the abuses of local commanders, and many people in the south welcomed it for restoring order and safe roads. Pakistan’s ISI, disappointed by Hekmatyar, soon gave it arms, money and advice, and Pakistani transport interests wanted the trade routes to Central Asia opened.

The movement grew with astonishing speed. It took Kandahar in November 1994, Herat in September 1995 and Kabul on 27 September 1996, after which Massoud withdrew to the north. Taliban fighters seized Najibullah from the UN compound, tortured and killed him, and hung his body in a public square. They declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognised. By 2001 they controlled about 90 per cent of the country; the opposition, the Northern Alliance led by Massoud with Dostum and the Hazara parties, held only the north-east.

Taliban rule and Sharia law

The Taliban imposed their own interpretation of Sharia, shaped by Deobandi teaching and by the customs of rural Pashtun society. A religious police, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, enforced its decrees in the streets. Women were banned from work outside the home, except in some health care, and girls from school; women had to wear the full-body burqa in public and travel with a male relative. Men had to grow beards and attend prayers. Television, music, photography of living beings and kite-flying were banned. Punishments included public executions and amputations, some carried out in the Kabul sports stadium.

The Taliban were also responsible for mass killings of Hazaras. When they took Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998, Taliban forces killed at least 2,000 people, most of them Hazara civilians, according to Human Rights Watch. In March 2001 they destroyed the two giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, carved in the sixth century, as idolatrous, despite international appeals. In 2000–2001 a ban on poppy growing sharply cut opium production for one year.

Al-Qaeda and the fall of the Taliban

In May 1996 Osama bin Laden, expelled from Sudan, returned to Afghanistan, and the Taliban gave his organisation, al-Qaeda, a base for training camps. After al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the United States fired cruise missiles at camps in Afghanistan, and from 1999 the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on the Taliban for refusing to hand bin Laden over. On 9 September 2001 al-Qaeda agents posing as journalists assassinated Massoud. Two days later al-Qaeda attacked New York and Washington.

When the Taliban refused to surrender bin Laden, the United States and Britain began bombing on 7 October 2001 in Operation Enduring Freedom, supporting the ground forces of the Northern Alliance with air power and special forces. Mazar-i-Sharif fell on 9 November, Kabul on 13 November and Kandahar in early December. At a UN conference near Bonn, Afghan anti-Taliban groups signed the Bonn Agreement on 5 December 2001, which set up an interim administration under Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a leading Kandahar family, sworn in on 22 December. The UN Security Council authorised an International Security Assistance Force to help secure Kabul. In June 2002 an Emergency Loya Jirga, a traditional grand assembly, chose Karzai to head a transitional administration. In 2002 alone, according to UNHCR, more than 1.8 million refugees returned home.

The timeline of 1989–2002 shows two collapses of the state in Kabul, in 1992 and 2001, each following the loss of outside support. The Taliban’s rise and fall followed the same pattern as the regimes before them: Pakistan’s support helped bring them to power, and their alliance with al-Qaeda brought the intervention that removed them.

Comparing the three conflicts

The three conflicts were fought in different decades and different kinds of country, but they followed a similar pattern. In each, a local struggle over who should rule became a war when outside powers armed one side, and the outside powers found that their local allies had aims of their own. The table of the three conflicts compares them under the same headings.

Three differences stand out. First, the kind of war changed: Korea was largely a conventional war of armies, Vietnam combined guerrilla and conventional war, and Afghanistan was a guerrilla war against an occupying army. Second, the superpowers swapped roles: in Vietnam the United States fought a communist insurgency backed by the Soviet Union, while in Afghanistan the Soviet Union fought an Islamist insurgency backed by the United States. Third, the outcomes differed. Korea ended in a frozen division, Vietnam in the victory of the side with deeper local roots, and Afghanistan in the collapse of the state itself. In each case, governments that depended on outside powers for their survival, such as South Vietnam after 1973, Lon Nol’s Cambodia and Najibullah’s regime after 1991, fell once that support ended.

Perspectives and debates: the Korean War

The debate about the origins of the Korean War has gone through three main phases, shaped by the sources available to historians.

The Soviet documents settled one question: Kim Il Sung, not Stalin, was the driving force behind the decision to invade, and Stalin’s approval was essential. They did not settle the deeper question of how far the war was a civil war. Cumings’s argument that the war had Korean roots, in the violence of 1945–1950 and the rival claims of two Korean states, remains influential even among historians who reject his view of the events of June 1950. Stueck adds a further perspective: by fighting in Korea, the superpowers may have avoided a wider war, so that Korea served as a substitute for a third world war. For the impact of the war, Cumings stresses the destruction of the north by US bombing, while Andrei Lankov and Charles Armstrong use East European archives to show how Kim used the war and its aftermath to remove his rivals and play Moscow against Beijing.

Perspectives and debates: Vietnam and Cambodia

The newer work moves the focus from Washington to Vietnam itself. It treats the southern state as a real Vietnamese political project and not merely an American creation, and the northern leadership as a divided group whose decisions were not dictated by Moscow or Beijing. This is useful for questions about the reasons for conflict, because it allows an answer to weigh Hồ, Lê Duẩn and Diệm as decision-makers alongside the superpowers.

On Cambodia, William Shawcross in Sideshow (1979) blamed US policy, and above all the bombing and the support for Lon Nol, for destroying Cambodia’s neutrality and creating the conditions for the Khmer Rouge victory. Ben Kiernan, in How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985) and later work, also stresses the bombing as a cause of Khmer Rouge recruitment, together with the movement’s own organisation. David Chandler, in The Tragedy of Cambodian History (1991), gives more weight to Cambodian politics: Sihanouk’s personal rule, the elite’s divisions and the coup of 1970. Most historians now combine these perspectives.

Perspectives and debates: Afghanistan

These perspectives differ in where they place the main cause of Afghanistan’s wars. Westad and Coll stress outside powers: the Soviet decision of 1979 and the American and Pakistani response. Rubin and Barfield stress the structure of Afghan society and the state, which made a durable central government impossible once foreign money stopped. Afghan perspectives were varied: for many rural Afghans the war was a jihad against an atheist government and a foreign army, while for some urban Afghans, especially educated women, the communist years brought schooling and jobs that the Taliban later took away. A strong evaluation combines the outside and inside explanations and asks which mattered most at each stage.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Watch the dates in the question. Impact questions on Korea run to 1963, on Vietnam to 1985 and on Afghanistan to 2002; reasons questions on Vietnam cover 1954–1975 and on Afghanistan 1979–1992. Examiners have criticised answers on Korea’s impact that stopped in 1953 and answers on the Afghan civil war of 1989–1992 that described the invasion of 1979.

Paper 3: the outbreak of the Korean War

Paper 3: the impact of the Korean War

Paper 3: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

Paper 3: from Soviet withdrawal to Taliban rule

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how Korea was divided in 1945–1948 and why the elections of 1948 were disputed.

• To do:

  I can compare the leadership and aims of Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee.

• To do:

  I can explain the roles of the USA, the USSR and China in the outbreak of the Korean War, and the UN response to the invasion.

• To do:

  I can outline the course of the Korean War and explain why it ended in an armistice.

• To do:

  I can assess the political, social, economic and environmental impact of the war on both Koreas to 1963.

• To do:

  I can explain how the Korean War affected the regional positions of China and Japan.

• To do:

  I can explain the legacy of French colonialism and Japanese occupation for the conflict in Vietnam.

• To do:

  I can explain how Điện Biên Phủ and the Geneva Accords led to the division of Vietnam.

• To do:

  I can compare the leadership and ideology of Hồ Chí Minh and Ngô Đình Diệm.

• To do:

  I can explain the roles of the USA, the USSR and China in Vietnam from 1954 to 1975.

• To do:

  I can assess the impact of search and destroy, bombing, chemical warfare and guerrilla warfare.

• To do:

  I can explain the US withdrawal, the reunification of Vietnam and the economic and environmental consequences to 1985.