Massive U.S. Air Attacks Are Not New in Laos War

To the people of Laos, there must be very little new about the events of the last several days.

Laos has been deeply involved in the war for more than a decade now, and this week's Allied incursion into the remote southern part of the country-an area already reduced to a cratered wasteland by nearly four months of round-the-clock ?aids by U.S. B-52 bombers-can hardly make things much worse.

NEWS ANALYSIS

There are already two separate wars in Laos. One, the one which flared again this week, is confined to the jungle region in the southern end of the country. This is the area through which the North Vietnamese bring supplies and reinforcements to South Vietnam and Cambodia, and the United States has been bombing the region for several years in an effort to halt this flow.

The apparent failure of the U.S. bombing raids to cut the Communist supply lines produced the necessity for this week's ground invasion of the region. It is not clear, however, how a brief Allied strike into Laos will curtail troop and supply movements for any length of time.

If the Saigon troops leave Laos soon the flow of men and material will quickly resume, and if they decide to stay, the Thieu regime will be gambling on the already thin patience of the South Vietnamese urban population, which has been turning increasingly antiwar in the past year.

A third option, of course, remains open: this is the planting of tactical nuclear land mines to create a permanent barrier in the region. Some public discussion of these weapons has already been quietly encouraged from Washington, and the possibility that they will be used may provide some ofthe reason for the unusual secrecy surrounding the Allied operations in Laos.

The other war in Laos is the war between the Pathet Lao guerilla forces and the central government in Vientiane. In some respects this war resembles the conflict in South Vietnam, pitting a right-wing army that is virtually a creation of the United States against a popular leftist insurgency with a strong nationalist identification. There is a stark difference between American strategies in Laos and Vietnam however; in Laos, the single basic element of U.S. policy has been and continues to be massive aerial bombardment of the civilian population.

When President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam in November 1968, the U.S. bombers were diverted to Laos. U.S. officials, with the co-operation of the press, created the impression that the target of this new bombing was the Communist supply network in southern Laos.

But most of the bombing missions in Laos were directed at targets in the northern part of the country-hundreds of miles from the North Vietnamese supply routes. The actual target of the new air war in Laos was, as a staff report of the Kennedy Subcommittee on refugees noted last September, "the economic and social structure of the rebel-held areas of the country."

During the early months of the Nixon administration the bombing of Pathet Lao villages and installations was further intensified, until U.S. bombers were making as many as 800 raids per day against what appears to have been primarily civilian targets. Predictably, a massive flow of refugees began heading out of the rebel zones towards the safety of the Government-held areas.

As much as one-quarter of the entire population of the country has been forced to flee to Government-held zones during the last two years. American officials in Laos still claim that the refugees are fleeing from "Communist terrorism," but the stories told by refugees indicate the U.S. bombing has been the real reason for the exodus.

It's worth noting that this bombing policy, besides being genocidal, is one of the few U.S. military tactics that can also be called successful. Economic and social life in much of the rebel areas of northern Laos has been kept in a state of chaos, lessening the opportunities for further military action by the insurgents.

Thus the Laotian experience suggests one important element of U.S. strategy for the whole of the Indochina war: as public pressure at home forces further troop reductions, air power is the one cheap and reasonably effective way of stemming the revolutionary tide in the countryside.