Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Page A

Vietnamese. Each failure led to a bolder initiative, which in turn led to a greater failure. The first of these was the strategic-hamlet program, which aimed to herd village populations into government-controlled areas; then followed search-and-destroy operations, each concluding with a public announcement of a grisly “body count” of the number of Vietnamese Communists killed; and then came the pacification program, designed to go beyond targeting one village at a time to controlling the civilian population as a whole. When the pacification program, too, was found wanting, it was supplemented by Operation Phoenix, “a CIA-inspired South Vietnamese campaign aimed at identifying and liquidating the Viet Cong political apparatus in the villages.” Each successive failure led to a more ambitious effort, and finally the Tet offensive in 1968. After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, “Americanization” gave way to “Vietnamization.”
    The war in Laos had developed as a consequence of the expanding war in Vietnam. As the Vietnam War intensified, troops and supplies from the north made their way to battlefields in the south, often via the jungles of southern Laos. The American strategic objective was to close this route—dubbed Ho Chi Minh Trail by the U.S. military. Toward this end, the United States cultivated a proxy of local mercenaries and reinforced them with massive airpower. For more than a decade, the CIA led a secret army of thirty thousand Hmong mercenaries against Communist guerrillas in the mountains of northern Laos. As opposition to the Vietnam War mounted back home, the advantages of proxy warbecame clear: waged in secret, it was at the same time removed from congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy. Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the U.S. Air Force had fought “the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation—the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.” The Laos model combined proxy war on the ground with a fierce and relentless American air war. Whereas proxy war became the order of the day throughout the late Cold War, the air war came into its own only after that war’s end.
    Financing Proxy Wars
    If one advantage of proxy war was that its conduct could be hidden from public scrutiny, the disadvantage was that it was not easy to finance from public funds. This explains why covert wars have often tended to go hand in hand with illicit trade, usually in drugs. There has been a long-established link between the drug trade—whether licit or illicit—and the financing of colonial wars. In the early nineteenth century, the British empire set up an official monopoly for the cultivation of opium seed in its Indian colony and exported the harvest to China. When the Chinese emperor objected, the British claimed he was in violation of freedom of trade. To defend the freedom to trade opium, the empire sent gunboats up the Yangtze River and fought the ignoble Opium War. Similarly, in neighboring Indochina, the French used officially sanctioned opium revenues to pay the cost of their colonial occupation.
    In a monumental historical study of the link between the drug trade and counterinsurgency, The Politics of Heroin , University of Wisconsin scholar Alfred McCoy has traced the global expansionof drug-production centers—in Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Colombia, and Afghanistan—to the political cover provided by CIA-sponsored covert wars. At the heart of the global drug trade after the Second World War has been trade in opium, the raw material base for the industrial manufacture of high-grade heroin. When the CIA began its alliance with drug lords, the global opium trade was “at its lowest ebb in nearly two centuries.” The war had disrupted international