World: LAOS: Four Phases to Nonexistence

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Phase Four: Back to Coalition. There have been bitter complaints in the U.S. that Washington let Phoumi down. In an effort to force him to accept a coalition government, the U.S. stopped paying Laos $3,000,000 a month in economic aid, but there has never been any skimping in U.S. equipment and the training of Phoumi's Royal Laotian Army. The grim truth—as shown again last month at Nam Tha—is that Phoumi's men simply will not fight. Some observers suggest Phoumi actually wanted his army to collapse in order to force U.S. intervention—perhaps relying on President Kennedy's March 1961 telecast, when he said that a Red takeover in Laos would "quite obviously affect the security of the U.S."

At any rate, two-thirds of Laos is now in Communist hands. The only middle way between either sending U.S. troops into Laos or letting the country go to the Reds by default, Washington holds, is to bring about Laotian neutrality, however precarious or short-lived it may be. Theoretically, the Russians are committed to the same policy. But the U.S. has now clearly set up main lines of resistance in Thailand and South Viet Nam, and has let the Red bloc know that any further advance in Southeast Asia will be met by U.S. troops as well as U.S. equipment.

In Laos, however, Washington finds itself in the discouraging position of striving to achieve what already existed four years ago.