How The U.S. War In Laos Was Key To The 'Birth Of A Military CIA'

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Laotian Gen. Vang Pao, seen here calling in air strikes against suspected Communist positions from the Long Cheng Command Post in January 1972, led an army of Hmong tribesmen to fight against Communist insurgents backed by the North Vietnamese. A CIA-led effort that started in 1961 tried to help him in that fight. Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

January 30, 20172:58 PM ET
NISHANT DAHIYA

Last fall, President Obama, on his final trip to Asia, stopped in Laos for the annual ASEAN summit of Southeast Asian leaders. While there, he pledged millions to help clean up a legacy of U.S. involvement in Laos: unexploded bombs. They were from the 1960s and 1970s — bombs the U.S. dropped in during its campaign to prevent the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

Vietnam was the most visible part of that war. Over half a million U.S. forces fought there at one point; over 50,000 were killed. Cambodia got coverage – and protests – during the 1969-1970 U.S. bombing campaign there. But Laos, sandwiched between Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, and with a population no greater than Los Angeles, received relatively scant attention.

Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, paints a vivid portrait of America's decade-and-a-half war in Laos in his new book, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA.

As the title suggests, the war in Laos got relatively little attention, in part, because it was handed over to a newly formed CIA to run. It started off small, with a few CIA officers training and arming allies from the Hmong hill tribe and ethnic minority to act as a guerilla force. By the end, some 14 years later, the Hmong were fighting pitched battles against the Communist insurgents and their North Vietnamese allies. To help them, the U.S. dropped more bombs in Laos than it had during all of World War II.

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/30/512449534/how-the-u-s-war-in-laos-was-key-to-the-birth-of-a-military-cia