Laos Post-Mortem: Error Of Vietnamization Is Clear

The ground invasion of southern Laos ended yesterday, but in Washington the verbal struggle to transform the abortive Laos incursion into some kind of victory continues unabated.

The credibility of the optimistic official Pentagon and White House assessment of the Laos campaign received a jolt yesterday when the U. S. Command in Saigon quietly revealed that nearly half of the Saigon troops sent into Laos are now dead, wounded or missing in action. The figure was twice that given by the official South Vietnamese spokesman.

NEWS ANALYSIS

The U. S. Command also revealed that it believes Saigon's estimates of North Vietnamese troops killed by U. S. air action in Laos to be nearly four times higher than the actual figure. Saigon officials had been claiming that U. S. planes and helicopter gunships flying in support of ARVN troops had killed some 14,000 rebel troops in Laos. President Nixon had been emphasizing the importance of these North Vietnamese "losses" in recent statements, and Joseph Alsop, the ever-obliging hawk columnist, went so far as to treat his readers of two days ago to a lurid description of how some 500 North Vietnamese troops were incinerated in a single air strike recently.

The task of U. S. public relations warriors is made easier by the vagueness with which the goals of the Laos mission were originally defined. When the South Vietnamese troops first crossed the Laotian border on or about Feb. 8, their announced mission was to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines in the area. U. S. officials clearly hoped that the South Vietnamese would be able to create a barrier through the area that would halt the flow of communist reinforcements and supplies until the monsoon rains begin in early May.

Changing Standards

But now that North Vietnamese counterattacks have driven the invaders out of Laos with enormous losses, Defense Department and U. S. military spokesmen are explaining that the mission was successful because it disrupted the supply routes for as long as it did. And, then, of course, there are always thefamous caches of enemy weapons, ammunition and food, all lovingly enumerated for the benefit of the American TV-viewing public.

The truth appears to be that the South Vietnamese disrupted the supply routes for as long as the North Vietnamese allowed them to do so, and no longer. Once the North Vietnamese counterattacks began in earnest this month, the Saigon troops were quickly forced to retreat to the relative safety of South Vietnam. Even Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird had to admit Wednesday that the South Vietnamese had been forced to cut short their invasion because of North Vietnamese resistance, which he curiously described as "vicious and violent."

Official lies are nothing new in this war, but the current crop have a special significance. For the Laos invasion was the first real test of Nixon's Vietnamization strategy, and any admission in Washington that the South Vietnamese troops were utterly unequal to the "enemy," which they were, would be an admission of the bankruptcy of the entire Nixon strategy.

Under Vietnamization, as I. F. Stone noted recently, the idea is that the little yellow fellows fight it out down on the ground while American bombers and helicopters fly overhead and guarantee victory for our side. The Saigon troops suffer all the casualties, American troops can keep dribbling home, and the U. S. antiwar movement is reduced to an handful of hardcore moralists, too weak to pose much of a threat to the Administration. Such a policy can theoretically be extended forever.

But everything depends on getting the Vietnamese to fight each other with the same enthusiasm that Americans once fought the Vietnamese. And the Laos campaign, which tested the very best troops that the Saigon regime could muster, has demonstrated that the Saigon troops just can't or won't fight effectively. Thus the whole Vietnamization strategy may be disintegrating. The U. S. Command in Saigon evidently thinks so: its revelation of yesterday's disastrous casualty figures appears to have been intended to created pressure on Nixon to slow the withdrawal of U. S. troops from Vietnam.

But the administration is too deeply committed to continuing the withdrawals, and so other "solutions" will have to be found. As in the past, these solutions will probably add up to more bombing of North Vietnam. As the remnants of the Saigon invasion force retreated back to the border this week U. S. planes were already staging the heaviest air raids over North Vietnam since last November. And now that North Vietnamese long-range artillery is reportedly moving into position in the Demilitarized Zone near the U. S. base at Khe Sanh, Nixon has another pretext for resumed air raids.

While Washington's public optimism may be maintained for the next little while, it should be assumed that the administration is privately assessing further escalations in Indochina.