Another nasty little war
Roger Warner
Bangkok
Traditional warfare in South East Asia follows a pattern. Among the many ethnic groups spread over the landscape, at least one group at any given time will try to expand at the expense of its neighbours. There will always be battles. The winners will gain territory. But the losers are never wiped out. In this pattern, the losers can neither be eradicated nor make comebacks to their former positions. They hang on, by their fingernails, to their jungle redoubts. Generations pass, and the ethnic eccentricities of the losers — a shape of homemade knife, a headdress style — will be noticed in a population into which the losers have merged. The patchwork changes, has always changed.
In Laos, as in the rest of Indochina, this traditional pattern of warfare was temporarily distorted by outside powers, first France and later the United States, China and the USSR. In the mid-19th century, Laos, which is landlocked and mountainous, had split into patches, some controlled by Vietnam to the east, some by Thailand to the south, some autonomous. By colonising Laos a little later France united it, if only to the extent of establishing a boundary around it. France withdrew from Indochina after being trounced at the battle of Dien Bien Phu just a few miles from Laos in northern Vietnam, in 1954, and the United States took France's place as the Western power in the region. Ten years later US jets were roving over the rice paddies. The United States gave old conflicts new labels — the Free World versus Communism, and the like — that had a surface validity. But in Laos, the old ethnic struggles were always underneath, giving shape to the new: the Thais wanted to control the Lao, the North Vietnamese wanted to control the Lao, and those of the lowland Lao ethnic group allied themselves with or against the midlanders and highlanders — distinctly different peoples — whose misfortune it was to live in Laos's technical but pertinent boundaries. The war in Laos had big-power pretensions. It had big-power supplies. It was an adjunct to the big-time war in Vietnam. But it was always, at bottom, a rather nasty local conflict, improbably magnified.
By any standards the United States military involvement in Laos was extraordinary. It was the largest, longest and most expensive clandestine American military involvement in any foreign nation. Overt military aid began when the French were still doing the fighting, and then grew. By Eisenhower's second term, Laos was a greater worry to the US than Vietnam. John Kennedy inherited a 'Laos problem' of political instability as well as Pentagon plans for a conventional military invasion by US forces. Stung into wariness by his Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy asked his brother to examine US options in Laos. Robert Kennedy reported back, according to Arthur Schlesinger, that 'the only way really that we could win in Laos was to drop the atomic bomb'. As a result, the public and symbolic fight against communism that America sought in South-East Asia — the Pentagon Papers makes clear the conflict was sought — would take place next door in South Vietnam rather than in Laos as had been planned earlier. And with atomic weapons deemed excessive for a country as small and unimportant as Laos, a sort of laboratory experiment in warfare was tried instead: an anti-communist guerrilla force of hill-tribesmen, formed under Eisenhower, was built up, and an amalgam of unconventional warfare, conventional warfare and aid programme was to be directed to a large extent by the CIA. The laboratory conditions were made complete by the discouragement or prohibition of news reporting from the field in Laos and from related US airbases in Thailand. When the war was at its peak, with US allied combatants and support personnel totalling perhaps 100,000, next to nothing was known about it in the States.
Of the three-pronged American attempt to hold on to Laos, the unconventional warfare was the most remarkable. The CIA directed strategy and training and controlled the payroll. The tactical commander for ground troops was Vang Pao, formerly the highest-ranking officer from the Hmong minority group in the royal Lao army; technically he remained in the Lao army but he reported only to the CIA. Not all the Hmong people in Laos had allegiance to Vang Pao — in fact, because of a feud going back to the French days, a sizeable number of Hmong fought for the communists. Vang Pao's men, however, were the only ground troops to put up effective resistance to the North Vietnamese. Apart from the natural abilities and inclinations of Hmong to fight as guerrillas, one of Vang Pao's motivations for working for the CIA was to establish his own patch in the South-East Asian patchwork. The Hmong were discriminated against by the lowland Lao, and Vang Pao hoped to get, if not independence, some sort of regional autonomy for his people.
Between the unconventional warfare effort and the other two prongs of American policy there was an underlying similarity: a bottomless budget. The clandestine army was supported with rice and ammunition drops by a well-run CIAowned airline, Air America, and by another civilian contract airline as well. Battle plans were coordinated with the Lao government air force, to greater effect, with the US Air Force based nearby in Thailand. The aircraft ranged fron tiny spotter planes to the giant B-52s. Some of the equipment was right out of the laboratory workshops: there were 'mother bomb' canisters that opened in mid-air and released hundreds of bomblets that exploded later, when stepped on; and there was an electronic detection system involving ground sensors, continuously-airborne signal relay planes, and far away computers that digested the data and spat back coordinates for other planes to bomb or strafe. Thus an enemy platoon — or a herd of water buffalo — might be trudging along in the darkness in utterly remote regions of Laos and suddenly find themselves under attack by American planes who had been informed of their location electronically and could see them on infra-red television screens. The civilian aid programme included the importation of high-technology agricultural equipment and a communications network that surpassed anything the Lao government had. There was no inherent reason why the US effort should have failed, except that the overabundance of technology seems to have kept strategists from coming to grips with realities of the situation. When the bombing slopped over into civilian sectors and no one was held responsible, and when new-model tractors were thrust at peasants who would have done better with steel tips for their water buffalo-drawn ploughs, the gimmickry and surplus money were counter-productive.
On the other side of the conflict were the Lao communists and nationalists and the North Vietnamese. Indispensable to their efforts was material from both China and the USSR, such as the anti-aircraft guns used in the Laos theatre and in the separate theatre on the Ho Chi Minh Trail near the Vietnamese border. But the budget for their warfare was lower, more in scale with the impoverished surroundings. The relative lack of technology meant greater reliance on the civilian population to provide food and act as porters. Having to hide from planes, the communist side made use of caves and camouflage. In another sense the North Vietnamese camouflaged their entire presence: their troops and advisers wore uniforms identical to the Pathet Lao communists and many of the Vietnamese spoke fluent Lao, making them harder to detect. In combat, crack North Vietnamese units usually led the assaults, then pulled back as Pathet Lao units with North Vietnamese advisers mopped up. The Pathet Lao troops were not as effective as the North Vietnamese — few anywhere are — but with time and training, they improved.
Even more than its neighbour Cambodia, which only entered the conflict in 1970, Laos was (to use the term William Shawcross has popularised) a sideshow of the Vietnam war, and its settlement also happened in Vietnam's shadow. After the Paris peace talks of 1973, there was a ceasefire of sorts and a coalition government was formed. In 1975, after Saigon and Phnom Penh had fallen, Laos went communist too. It was a bloodless event, though, and in the atmosphere of amnesia for Indochinese matters into which America had willed itself the takeover was barely noticed in the West. Vang Pao left for the United States, where he remains today, and others went to the US or France. From the ranks of former government soldiers and officials who remained, thousands — ten thousand is a minimum figure, and the actual figure may have been much greater — were sent to reeducation camps. Unlike Pol Pot's Cambodia, however, there was no systematic severe cruelty towards re-educatees; the Lao, and particularly the lowland Lao, are a forgiving and un warlike people.
Though the change of governments was initially popular — middle-class Lao returned from the United States and France to take part in it — the new regime found that like revolutionary regimes elsewhere it could not sustain the glow of enthusiasm or live up to its promises. Sending people off to re-education camps without telling them where or for how long was the beginning of the disaffection. The institution of taxes (the us had subsidised the previous government to such a degree that taxes had been unnecessary) and clumsy attempts to establish agricultural collectives were a turning point, and brought about popular resentment. The continued presence of 40,000 to 50,000 Vietnamese troops may have been necessary for the new regime' security — not least for coping with determined armed resistance by remnants of Vang Pao's army. But at the same time the Prolonged Vietnamese presence was a cause of the formation of other resistance groups by communist-trained soldiers who were now adamant that all foreigners, including Vietnamese, should leave the country. Inept supervision of civilian projects either by Vietnamese advisers or by Lao whose qualifications were political rather than technical alienated some of the educated Lao who had chosen to stay. The new regime has since eased its taxation and collectivisation programme, but it may have been too late. It has already lost many of the people who might have helped its experiment succeed, if the experiment had been guided by the correct vision in the first place.
Small countries sometimes have an ignominious fate: to suffer from the programmes of large countries even when the large countries have not even accorded the small country the dignity of intending harm. That is what has happened with the United States sponsored, United-Nationsrun refugee programme, which grew in response to the more publicised fate of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees and was extended to the Lao as a sort of afterthought. Though there is no evidence, yet, that the US intended to destabilise Laos with the refugee programme that has been the result; Laos has lost nearly a tenth of its population and most of its educated and entrepreneurial classes.
There is a running debate in the back offices of bureaucracies that concern themselves with this sort of thing over how much of the Lao exodus is due to 'push' and how much to `pull.' Both are real but the pull, or attraction, of the refugee programme has been underestimated. Educated lowland Lao — in fact all Lao associated with the former Americansupported government — need only remember how much money there is when Americans are around. They need not all be released from 're-education', feel resentment towards the Vietnamese presence in Laos or disappointment in the revolution to become refugees. Times are lean, and all they need to do to better their situation is to cross the Mekoag river, which forms the border with Thailand, and enter the refugee camps. There they are given free food and some of them are offered a chance to resettle abroad. A cycle is at work here: the loss of capable administrators makes conditions worse in Laos, which prompts more people to leave.
With highlanders the pull is weaker, the push stronger. Though some leave for economic rather than military reasons, such as being asked to move to other places inside Laos, and then not being given the farm equipment offered as an incentive, the push for the rest has been more like a violent shove. A few of yang Pao's Hmong fight on, and tens of thousands of others have left because they had no choice.
The war has never really stopped in Laos. Though the US recently sent reconnaissance teams in to look for POWs it has not — and quite oddly, considering the length of the CIA's partnership with the Hmong — contributed so much as a bullet (so far as is known) to anti-communist forces since 1975. The current Lao government claims, however, without anyone contradicting it vigorously, that both Hmong and lowland Lao resistance groups use the refugee camps in America's ally Thailand for rear base support, for recruitment and for hospital facilities, and that the Thai military gives the resistance groups a limited supply of arms. China is supposed to have trained hill-tribesmen near its border with Laos, and its recent military clashes with Vietnamese troops argue that something larger is in store. For the most part, however, the armed opposition to the present regime comes from the dwindling survivors of the Vang Pao army and from factionalised lowland Lao who either are disappointed with the revolution or resent the presence of their Vietnamese former mentors.
Everything could change if the superpowers decided to return to the arena. They may have already so decided. But for the moment the pattern of warfare is one familiar to South-East Asia. Ragtag troops enter villages at night, asking for food and volunteers. They stay in bases difficult for the government to find. For now in Laos the fighting is on the scale to which it traditionally aspired. It's just another nasty little war.
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