An article by Tom Ricks on Afghanistan: http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts..._wrong_in_iraq led to several comments on the war in El Salvador, especially by David Ucko. He particularly cited a RAND paper:

I would recommend Benjamin Schwarz's study on El Salvador for RAND (www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R4042/), written in 1991. What Schwarz does is illustrate the critical weaknesses of the U.S. approach in El Salvador, most of which centre around its limited leverage: its inability to get the armed forces of El Salvador (ESAF) and the government (GoES) to do what the U.S. reforms asked of them.
I know John Fishel does not agree with Schwarz or Ucko's viewpoint:

The war was never a stalemate. It proceeded as a series of shifting equilibria where first one side had the advantage and then the other would catch up. Then the initiative shfted and the process repeated. In the end, however, the Chapultepec Accords terminated the war on almost exactly the terms offered by President Duarte in 1984. That, I call, a win for the govt! An unspoken term of settlement, however, was that the govt could not publicly claim victory and was wise enough not to do so.
davidbfpo