Joshua Kurlantzick > Quotes

“The CIA found in Laos a country where it already had amassed influence, in the heart of a Cold War battlefield, and which had been largely ignored by the American military. These CIA leaders saw that an inexpensive—in American money and lives, at least—proxy war could be a template for fights in other places around the world, at a time when presidents were looking for ways to continue the Cold War without going through Congress or committing ground troops.”
― Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

“The foreign leaders with whom Nixon got along best, like President Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan, were almost always authoritarian strongmen.”
― Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

“In the most heavily bombed part of the country—a high, strategically located plateau in the middle of Laos, called the Plain of Jars, the American bombing runs almost never paused. Of the roughly 150,000 people who lived on the Plain of Jars before the 1960s, only about 9,000 remained at the end of the decade.37 After the war, one-third of the bombs dropped on Laos remained in the ground and undetonated.”
― Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

“So instead of giving up fighting and settling reluctantly into American life, Poe followed the current of Cold War American policy in Asia. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, and the Truman administration sent US forces to the Korean Peninsula, Poe signed up for a job training Korean saboteurs and other infiltrators to slip into the North and attack infrastructure. Then when Korea settled into a cold peace, he spent three years training Tibetan and Muslim insurgents who were fighting Beijing as part of a CIA program to harass Mao Tse-tung’s regime. Next, Poe helped train guerillas trying to overthrow the left-leaning (though not communist) postindependence government of Indonesia.”
― Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA