Ghosts in the Delta: USAID and the historical geographies of Vietnam's ‘other’ war

Abstract

This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the 'humanitarian present' through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the 'other' war for rural 'hearts and minds' through two distinct, yet related, suites of spatial interventions. First, it sought to indirectly 'conduct the conduct' of the South Vietnamese people by providing technical assistance and commodity support to the Strategic Hamlet and Revolutionary Development programs. USAID's counterinsurgency programming, however, was not only traversed by a 'will to improve': it was also marked by a 'will to police'. Here, I am specifically referring to the central role that USAID's Office of Public Safety played in helping the government of South Vietnam establish a functioning National Police whose 'internal security' mandate eventually encompassed both a biopolitics of population control as well as a necropolitics of neutralization. Over the course of this essay I will theorize these two tracks of counterinsurgency programming as the Janus faces of a broader 'war-police' nexus geared towards catalyzing the fabrication of a modern social order in the Vietnamese countryside.

Sensing, territory, population: Computation, embodied sensors, and hamlet control in the Vietnam War

“…However, hamlet-level information and analysis was insufficient for Revolutionary Development programs, despite the CIA and USAID operating in hamlets since at least Diem's failed 1962-1963 'strategic hamlet program' (Attewell, 2015). The incongruity between implementing hamlet-level security and aid programs without appropriate techniques for measuring their effectiveness frustrated CORDS officials.…”

“From factory to field”: USAID and the logistics of foreign aid in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan

“…Geographers have extended both Foucault and Mbembe's work by showing how (post)colonial populations are managed through ''neither a 'pure' politics of life or death'', but rather, ''a more complex management of the two'' that is ''achieved through the modulation of crucial life-sustaining and life-eliminating flows'' (Attewell, 2015;Bhungalia, 2012: 256;Gregory, 2008;Nisa, 2015). Logistics is characterized by a similar interplay between the biopolitical and the necropolitical.…”

‘The planet that rules our destiny’: Alternative development and environmental power in occupied Afghanistan

“…Further support was only provided on a ‘diminishing basis, calculated to engender responsibility on the part of project participants’ (DAI, 2010: 19). Drawing inspiration from USAID’s long history of doing development under conditions of counterinsurgency warfare, IDEA-NEW helped Afghan farmers help themselves (Attewell, 2015).…”

“…The brainchild of both British and American law-enforcement agencies, the Interagency Operations and Coordination Center worked alongside ISAF and CJIATF-Nexus to ‘conduct [counternarcotics] operations in non-secure, predominantly military environments while bringing together the necessary resources to conduct an effective civil-military campaign to counter the narcotics-corruption-insurgent nexus’ (DoD, 2012: 100). Much like the District Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centres established during the Vietnam War to support the Phoenix program, the intelligence collated by the Interagency Operations and Coordination Centre was used to create ‘target packs’ for CJIATF-Nexus (Attewell, 2015; Jenzen-Jones, 2011). CJIATF-Nexus, in turn, vetted these ‘target packs’ to determine which ‘high-value’ individuals needed to be added to the Target List.…”