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  • Apocalypse then: America’s secret war in #Laos
    https://www.ft.com/content/9a8c737c-e3d1-11e6-9645-c9357a75844a

    As many as 200,000 Laotians, or one in 10 of the population, were killed in a conflict where US bombing raids in some parts of the country almost never ceased, writes Kurlantzick in A Great Place to Have a War. Four decades on, unexploded ordnance still litters the countryside, endangering everyone from rice farmers to curious schoolchildren, despite US-funded clean-up efforts.

    [...]

    A Great Place to Have a War also charts the role the Laos war played in empowering the #CIA as a paramilitary force, rather than simply a spy agency. Kurlantzick describes how the US built a “vast proxy army of hill tribes” numbering tens of thousands of fighters, in a strategy that echoed through later conflicts from Central America to Afghanistan. The book takes its title from a quote by Robert Amory Jr, a former CIA deputy director, about the enthusiasm in the agency for the fight in Laos as part of the effort to beat Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese Communists.