A War Ended--but Not Won : RAND says U.S. strategy in El Salvador failed

After 13 years of fighting and destruction, and 75,000 deaths, the peace treaty ending El Salvador’s civil war remains more paper reality than finality. Still, the genuine emotion with which representatives of the warring factions embraced Friday in Mexico City and the celebratory mood in San Salvador offer hope that lessons have been learned on both sides and genuine reconciliation is possible.

But what of the third major player in the long and bloody Salvadoran drama? Can the United States learn anything from its costly ($6 billion), decade-long effort to keep a series of Salvadoran governments from being overrun by leftist guerrillas? A recent analysis of U.S. military strategy in El Salvador, prepared by the RAND Corp.’s National Defense Research Institute, offers answers that are sure to be controversial. In straightforward language, RAND’s military analysts conclude that U.S. strategy in El Salvador was a failure.

The report, prepared before the peace agreement but released this week, concludes that “a chasm yawns between America’s achievements and America’s objectives” in El Salvador. While U.S. military advisers improved a historically corrupt and brutal army, it still could not defeat the insurgency. According to RAND, neither the Salvadoran military nor the oligarchy it defended would make the “revolutionary” changes that U.S. policy-makers urged on them in order to win the faith of their own people.

Crediting the U.S. military group in El Salvador with an extraordinary effort, RAND’s analysts conclude that U.S. policy-makers in Washington were motivated by “a well-intentioned, but misguided assumption that techniques, technology and programs alone could fundamentally transform a violent and unjust society into a liberal and democratic one.”

The report notes, with obvious echoes of Vietnam, that “If . . . the regime must be coached by foreigners in how to treat its own people, then perhaps low-intensity conflict doctrine’s pursuit of its noble goal can only be described as quixotic.”

As noted above, the RAND report is sure to draw criticism from counterinsurgency experts who believe the strategy can work under the right circumstances. And, yes, the British did make it work in Malaysia in the ‘50s. But nobody has ever accused RAND military analysts of being peaceniks. Counterinsurgency, RAND says, won’t work everywhere, and in some places it may not work at all.

This sobering report on El Salvador will be worth pondering before the United States, however well-intentioned, commits itself again to one side or the other in a Third World guerrilla war.