Sticks and Stones: Living with Uncertain Wars

The Costs of Covert Warfare: Airpower, Drugs, and Warlords in the Conduct of U.S. Foreign Policy

41 The Costs of Covert Warfare Airpower, Drugs, and Warlords in the Conduct of U.S. Foreign Policy ALFRED W. MCCOY In his address to Congress after the events of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush told the nation that America’s current war against terrorism would be like no other our nation had ever fought. On this point Mr. Bush seemed ill-advised. Our ongoing war in Afghanistan is the logical outcome of a succession of covert wars that the United States has fought along the mountain rim of Asia since the end of World War II. Looking back on the long history of American intervention in highland Asia, there are two particularly troubling aspects: first, the rise of a problematic doctrine of covert warfare; and, second, a contradictory relationship to the global drug trade. Through four secret wars fought over the span of fifty years, the United States has developed a covert-warfare doctrine that combines special-operations forces with airpower. In the thirty years since the end of the Vietnam War, this use of airpower as a substitute for infantry has placed the United States at increasing variance with international law in a way that one day risks outright violation. More broadly, the conduct of foreign policy through covert operations removes these secret wars from both congressional oversight and conventional diplomacy, leaving their battlegrounds black holes of political instability—with profound regional and global ramifications. In highland Asia, opium has proven the most sensitive index of such instability. While these covert wars are being fought, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) protection transforms tribal warlords into powerful drug lords linked to international markets. In the wasteland that is the aftermath of such wars, only opium seems to flower, creating regions and whole nations with a lasting dependence on the international drug traffic. Laos in the 1960s Under its Cold War doctrine of containing communism, the United States, through its CIA, fought a succession of secret wars in highland Asia. In the late 1940s, the Iron Curtain came crashing down across the Asian landmass. To contain Soviet and Chinese expansion, the United States mounted covert operations 42 UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AS WE HAVE KNOWN IT along communism’s soft underbelly—a highland rim that stretched for five thousand miles across Asia from Turkey to Thailand. Along this strategic frontier, geopolitics has produced recurring eruptions at two flash points—Burma and Laos in the east and Afghanistan in the west. For forty years, the CIA fought a succession of covert wars at these two points—at Burma during the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In one of history’s accidents, moreover, the Iron Curtain had fallen along Asia’s historic opium zone, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region’s highland warlords. In Laos from 1960 to 1974, the United States fought the longest and largest of these covert wars, discovering new military doctrines that have since become central to its foreign policy. Since this war was classified then and is, even now, little studied, most Americans are unaware of the lessons we learned in Laos and their lasting influence on the later conduct of U.S. foreign policy. The CIA’s secret war in Laos was an unplanned byproduct of America’s bipartisan foreign policy during the Cold War. At the start of U.S. intervention in Indochina in 1955, the Eisenhower administration, mindful of the region’s geopolitical imperatives, had made Laos its primary bastion against communist infiltration into Southeast Asia. Unwilling to continue Eisenhower’s Cold War confrontation over Laos, President John Kennedy pulled back by signing a treaty with Moscow in 1962 to neutralize Laos and relied instead on counterinsurgency inside South Vietnam to contain communism. In effect, Kennedy withdrew conventional forces from Laos in favor of his new special warfare doctrine of using American advisers to train the South Vietnamese in counterinsurgency. In retrospect, Kennedy’s withdrawal from Laos was a strategic miscalculation.1 When the Vietnam War started two years later, in 1964, there was no longer any restraint on North Vietnamese infiltration through Laos into South Vietnam. Washington was treaty-bound to respect Laos’s neutrality and thus found itself in an ambiguous , even contradictory, position—forced to intervene in a country where it could no longer intervene.2 Ambiguity forced improvisation, leading the United States to develop a new military doctrine that substituted tribal mercenaries and massive airpower for...