Was It Worth It?

IN the blackboard-crisp terms favored by its Pentagon planners, the Laotian operation is deep into its third and final phase. Having slashed across some tendrils of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and choppered into Tchepone, South Viet Nam's troops are beginning to pull back to the border. As the withdrawal gathered speed last week, the question was increasingly asked: Was it worth it? The answer will not be known in full until the operation is over, but it can be partly determined by comparing the ARVN struggle in Laos with the invasion's original goals.

Spoiling the Communist infiltration routes was only one duty assigned to the ARVN troops sent into Laos. Another important, though unstated task was to draw much larger North Vietnamese forces into massing along the trail so that they could then be hammered by U.S. airpower. For obvious reasons, neither Washington nor Saigon has greatly stressed that a key feature of Lam Son was to use ARVN as bait in order to kill North Vietnamese troops.

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The immediate purpose of Lam Son 719 never was to "protect" withdrawing U.S. troops, even though that has been the longer-range justification advanced most often by the Administration. From the start, Richard Nixon's own top advisers described Lam Son--and the parallel thrust by 20,000 ARVN troops into Cambodia--mainly as an opportunity to reap some short-term gains. One important objective was to shore up the embattled regime in Cambodia by taking further pressure off the Cambodian army to the south. Another was to blunt Communist capability to wage offensives in South Viet Nam, particularly any attack that might upset two approaching presidential elections: Nguyen Van Thieu's in October and Richard Nixon's in November 1972.

However Lam Son comes out, the results--as with so much in Southeast Asia--are unlikely to be clear-cut and decisive. Some objectives and how they have fared in the battle so far:

BUYING TIME. According to the U.S. Command, more than ten of the 30 North Vietnamese battalions in the Laotian panhandle have been annihilated; the enemy is said to have lost 11,176 men. General Creighton Abrams has said that he does not think that the North Vietnamese can now mount a major offensive in 1971, and possibly not until the spring of 1972. That, unfortunately, is the kind of expectation the Communists have explosively upset in the past, notably during Tet 1968. Even if Lam Son has slowed the Communist supply effort, it has done so only temporarily. If South Vietnamese forces do stay in Laos until mid-April, the Communists will still have several weeks to recoup before the monsoon completely closes the trail. To win this temporary advantage, the allies have paid dearly. Though the U.S. toll has been relatively light--69 dead or missing, 64 wounded, 73 helicopters destroyed--the South Vietnamese suffered considerable casualties. Saigon admits to 918 ARVN dead, but unofficial estimates put the toll closer to 2,000 crack troops dead or missing and another 4,000 wounded. Compared with Cambodia, Lam Son has so far yielded only one-fourth as many captured enemy weapons, one-half as much ammunition, one-fifth as much rice and about the same number of enemy dead--at a cost of about seven times as many ARVN troops dead.

VIETNAMIZATION. President Nixon recently quoted Abrams as saying that, in Laos, ARVN has proved it can "hack it." It is true that battles like last week's bloody struggles at Fire Base Lolo and Landing Zone Brown show that South Vietnamese troops can summon considerable courage, even when outnumbered 3 to 1 or more. Yet it is also clear that the key to ARVN survival in Laos has been the lavish use of U.S. airpower. For their part, senior South Vietnamese officers say that Laos has exposed some leadership problems even in crack ARVN units, and the lesson, they judge, is that Vietnamization has proceeded "too fast." Moreover, it may be six months or more before the seven first-rank ARVN Ranger, Marine and 1st Infantry battalions put out of action so far (another four battalions have endured moderate to heavy casualties) can be brought back to strength.

MORALE. The drive into Laos has left South Viet Nam sullen, uneasy and distrustful of government casualty figures and claims of victory. Clearly concerned, the Thieu regime has launched a morale-boosting effort. Thieu has been telling newsmen that Saigon's troops "will feel 10 ft. tall" when it is all over; government radio stations broadcast newly minted tunes of glory (sample title: Tchepone Victory). But in a more accurate reflection of the popular mood, Saigon's daily Tin Sang last week replied to Nixon's recent remark about the U.S.'s "last war." It editorialized: "For the Vietnamese people this is the last war--to last until the death of the last Vietnamese."

POLITICS. South Viet Nam's unhappiness over the operation may well hurt Thieu at the polls this fall. For Nixon, too, Laos may turn out to be a political liability. The divergence of Washington's optimistic assessments and on-the-scene reports have saddled the Administration with a credibility problem once again. Should Lam Son run into really serious trouble, Nixon would have a tough time justifying the decision to go into Laos. And, though China has not been drawn into the war, the Laotian incursion has, at the very least, done violence to the Administration's stated goal of a rapprochement with the Chinese.

In most capitals of Asia, where the long view prevails, Laos is regarded as a brief episode in a long, drawn-out struggle, in which the U.S. is, in the G.I. vernacular, "short" and getting shorter all the time. Over the past year or two, in fact, a new, calmer view of the whole Indochina war has spread through Asia, in part the result of a reassessment in the light of U.S. withdrawal. Many sophisticated Asians, including the leaders of some of the nations once regarded as dominoes, are now privately convinced that Hanoi will prevail, and have come to the conclusion that the outcome no longer greatly affects their fate.

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When it is all over, the Lam Son affair may well appear of limited value at best, though filled with great hazards. Just how great the hazards were will not be clear until the rest of the South Vietnamese make their way out.

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