Laos: The Country America Razed

Laos continues to be crippled by the savage bombing campaign carried out during the Vietnam war, where the U.S. dropped more bombs on Laos than it had during all of World War II.

Americans often wonder why much of the world seems not to like us. Often it is no great mystery; when a country stages brutal coups and bombing operations of epic proportions, it’s no surprise that they’re not greatly loved. Perhaps the country whose hatred of America is the least mysterious is Laos. The United States carried out really horrifying crimes in Laos—crimes that eviscerated any chance of a flourishing society, crimes so brutal that they make much of Laos uninhabitable today. Laos is perhaps the most thoroughly decimated victim of U.S. foreign policy—what we did to Laos is something that must never happen again.

The horror of Laos is so extreme that it should reshape how we view our government. A just government that occasionally blunders does not do what we did in Laos. Laos wasn’t just an error; it was a crime of historic proportions. We ruined an entire country in our Cold War fervor. The story requires a bit of background, which I shall provide.

Laos decolonized from France in 1954. After the decolonization of Laos, the aim of U.S. policy was to stop communism in Laos. The U.S. engaged in various unethical activities to do this including backing rightist forces who broke various ceasefires, training Meo tribesmen for war against the communists, strategically cutting off aid to stop the communists, and rigging elections.

By 1960, there was significant infighting. The U.S. provided support for those fighting the communists in three ways:

1. It provided support for the government Royal Lao army, fighting against the communists, providing training, supplies, and air cover.

2. The American CIA also recruited and supplied Hmong and other ethnic minorities to fight a guerilla war in the jungles behind enemy lines.

3. “To circumvent the Geneva Agreements, the CIA hired private contractors — Air America, Continental Air Services, and others — and temporarily reclassified military pilots as civilians. The United States maintained that the planes were delivering humanitarian aid, whereas in truth they were delivering arms and supplies and carrying out bombing missions.”

In addition, in 1964, the U.S. dropped its first bomb on Laos in exchange for a plane being shot down. The bombing continued and lasted until 1973. This bombing was extreme; it “equated to a planeload of bombs dropped every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years, and all in a country the size of the state of Utah.” In 1968, when the U.S. temporarily stopped bombing Vietnam, we dramatically escalated the bombing of Laos. One official said “We couldn’t just let the planes rust.” Channapha Khamvongsa and Elaine Russell report:

The U.S. military made a conscious decision to bomb civilian villages, crops, and livestock in addition to military targets in the Pathet Lao-held areas. The goal was to remove all means of livelihood for the communist troops. U.S. strike data reveals that 52.8 million cluster bomblets, or 20 percent of all bombs, were dropped within one kilometer of villages. Hundreds of firsthand accounts by survivors tell of bombs dropping on civilians as they ran for cover. There are no reliable figures on the casualties of the war, but it is estimated that tens of thousands of civilians died.

The justification for the bombing was that the U.S. wanted to limit the reach of the Viet Cong in Laos, while disrupting their supply lines and limiting the spread of communism. Yet the bombing was indiscriminate; James Pasley reports:

The bombings were indiscriminate. They killed about 200,000 people in Laos, which was around 10% of the country's population. Another 400,000 people were wounded and 750,000 people were forced to flee due to the devastation.

Kurlantzick notes, in a review of a book on the subject, “80 percent of all bombing casualties in Laos were civilians; the war killed 10 percent of the population.”

In addition “one third of the bombs dropped on Laos remained unexploded after the war ended in 1975, and those bombs killed 20,000 Laotians in the three decades that followed.” It takes a truly incredible level of bombing to kill around as many people as 7 9/11s, even after the bombs have stopped.

As of 2023, about a third of the land is uninhabitable because it’s so filled with bombs. The U.S. dropped more bombs on Laos than it had during all of World War II. While the U.S. claimed that most people left because of opposition to the Pathet Lao, the reality was quite different from the propaganda line; about 49% of refugees said they fled to leave the bombing behind. It was apparently inconceivable that the people of Laos would have any desire to flee death falling from the sky that reduce the country to ash.

During this time, the press, supposed to bring to bear U.S. atrocities failed; there was, during the height of these attacks, no full-time American reporter in Laos. As Laos was eviscerated, the U.S. populace remained mostly ignorant, resulting in the attack on Laos being widely referred to as a secret war. The secret war in Laos was finally acknowledged by Nixon, who, in the press conference announcing this, lied about everything else. For example, he claimed that “The level of our air operations has been increased only as the number of North Vietnamese in Laos and the level of their aggression has increased." But this was totally false; as mentioned before, the main escalation in the U.S. bombardment came when, in 1968, the U.S. stopped using the bombs in Vietnam and didn’t want the bombs to “go to waste.” Apparently a bomb that does not kill people is wasted and as such, bombing campaigns should be carried out frequently to prevent waste. Perhaps Al Qaeda was justified in the September 11th attacks—they couldn’t just let the planes go to waste!

Laos became the most heavily bombed country in history as a result of our relentless bombing campaign. A report compiled by interviewing many refugees noted:

some survivors dwelt on more profound issues, notably their remembrance of the period as a ‘Dark Age’ characterized by a loss of their humanity. Silences—untold or absent memories—are also present in the villagers’ accounts, which we view not as an obstacle to the telling of their stories, but as an integral constituent of their recollections.

Not only was 10% of the population killed, another 20% was injured and about 37% was displaced. The New York Times reported U.S. bombs “turned more than half the total area of Laos to a land of charred ruins where people fear the sky.” Belgian UN ambassador Georges Chapelier noted, after interviewing many refugees:

Prior to 1967, bombing was light and far from populated centers. By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing climax reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. All of the interlocutors, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the material basis of the civilian society. Harvest burned down and rice became scarce.

Take a moment to really appreciate the scale of the destruction. Imagine something so devastating that it kills 10% of the population, injures 20%, and displaces 37%. To this day, the cluster bombs littering Laos continue to hamper development. The scale of destruction was so immense that even today, in the North, the calamity that took place in the 1970s hampers economic development, as a study on the topic notes. And that’s not even taking into account the devastating effects on the economy of having a country in which a third of it is uninhabitable because it’s littered with bombs.

For a bombing campaign to kill 10% of a country, it must be one of truly unthinkable proportions. When people are bombed, they flee however they can; they live in holes and caves rather than cities. A bombing campaign so devastating that even after it warps all parts of life, making them centered only around avoiding the aerial bombardments, claims 10% of a population and injures another 20% is one of truly unthinkable proportions. Death from the sky being reigned down to a degree that we can’t even imagine. In Laos, it was America, the most powerful country in world history that reigned down death and destruction on one of the world’s poorest countries. The U.S. didn’t care much about this; we were a bit concerned about communism and had some extra planes, so we decided to eviscerate organized life in a country and murder hundreds of thousands of people.

Very few people today who have looked into the issue without being caught up in the Cold War bloodlust of the time seem to think the U.S. bombing operations were defensible. Those who do would probably say that it was worth it to stop the spread of communism in Laos. But this is wrong:

First, much of the U.S. bombing didn’t stop the communist Pathet Lao. Chomsky notes:

Refugees as well as captured prisoners report that the bombing had little military significance in the narrow sense. This is quite understandable. PAVN and Pathet Lao soldiers remain hidden in the forests, far from visible targets. A Staff Report of the Kennedy Subcommittee (Sept. 28, 1970) concludes that the purpose of the bombardment was "to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas and to interdict North Vietnamese infiltration."

Second, covert operations mostly fail. The reason for this is not hard to guess, especially in the case of activities like we carried out in Laos; U.S. policies generate extreme blowback. When the U.S. allied with, at various points, both the neutral and right-wing parties in Laos, it’s no surprise that the communists gained popularity. If communist China allied with the U.S. Democratic party and then destroyed all of the United States’s infrastructure while killing 10% of people, would it be any surprise if the response was a rightward shift? We failed in Laos; it is, to this day, a communist country (albeit one growing quite fast) and this is one reason. Does anyone think that the Chinese Communist Party allying with the Democratic party would be good for stopping a Rightward shift? Would this be aided if they carried out about 66 9/11s worth of bombing, killing 200,000 people?

Third, there are worse things than being a communist country. One of them is being a country where all the infrastructure is wiped out and where a foreign power practices “systematic destruction of the material basis of the civilian society.” Being a communist country is bad for a country’s economy, but the U.S. intervention in Laos was so devastating that it’s a major reason why Laos is poor today. While I’m obviously not a communist, communism can produce rapid growth in the short term, enabling industrialization. Until 1980, the Soviet Union grew pretty fast. Does this mean communism is ideal? No. Does it mean that it’s not worth demolishing a country in a bid to prevent it from becoming communist the fails, such that it still becomes communist? Yes. Is it obvious that the right-wing forces in Laos would have been much better? Despite Laos’s communism, it has grown relatively quickly, in some years maintaining a growth rate over 10%. The communist government that took over implemented various important social reforms. While countries can rebound from bad governments, it is hard to rebuild in the wake of destruction that unfathomable. Much of the farmland cannot grow food because of the extent of the bombing.

What we did to Laos was a major crime. We bombed the country to smithereens in a failed bid to stop communism. If one looks at the bombing of Laos in terms of the percent of the population killed and compares it to 9/11, the U.S. bombing of Laos would be 10,000 9/11s. And even that fails to underscore the unfathomable scope of the devastation that effectively wiped out organized society, reducing the infrastructure to dust and forcing people to live in holes and caves. Laos continues to struggle today, children continue to die from unexploded bombs, because of the U.S.’s cruel and wicked cold-war policy.