What really went on in Laos
Kurlantzick tells a complex story in a compelling page turner, achieving this with masterful management of detail, from the choice of statistics to the minutiae of life on the battlefield. For example, we discover the United States paid more than 75 per cent of France’s budget to fight its 1946-1954 war to retain its Indochinese colonies.
It was Eisenhower and his “domino theory”, one country after another falling to communism, that made Laos the bulwark to stop communism engulfing Thailand and the Philippines. Eisenhower’s briefings ensured that Kennedy continued the secret CIA training and arming of Hmong tribesmen.
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Hide AdWith no oversight and with anti-war activists focusing on Vietnam, the unknown war escalated to include bombing raids, over 300 sorties per day in the 1960s, and two of the biggest battles in the whole of United States involvement in Indochina.
When the war finally ended in 1973, 10 per cent of Laos’s total population had been killed, and Laotians are still dying from antipersonnel bombs left behind.
Kurlantzick has filleted all the declassified documents, and shows how the war has echoes in the present day, with the CIA moving from spying and basic foreign intelligence analysis to full paramilitary activity with covert activities in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.