07/12/12 – Douglas Hartwick – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is Douglas Hartwick.
He served as U.S. Ambassador to Laos from 2001 to 2004.
And here, this headline from CBS News reads, Clinton Vows More Help to Laos As Vietnam-Era U.S. Bombs Continue Wrecking Lives.
Ambassador Hartwick has this piece at Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org, A Bomb-Free Future for Laos.
And this one in The Washington Times, Clinton Visits a Chance to Make Up with Laos, U.S. Support Needed to Clear Old Bombs from Tiny Nation.
Very important.
Oh, and this has a whole host of co-authors' names on it as well.
I hadn't noticed.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm doing all right.
Thanks very much.
Good morning.
Well, I appreciate you joining us.
I think here's a story that most people have probably never heard of at all, that the legacy from the Vietnam War way back from the late 60s and early 1970s in the wars against, I guess, Vietnamese rebels, supposedly, anyway, in Laos and Cambodia, that these bombs, many of them were duds then and are still sitting around, are still dangerous, and that many people are still affected by them in a very negative way all the time.
Let me take you back a little bit.
I mean, I think people haven't heard too much about Laos or about bombing in Laos, but most people have heard of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, even people who were not born at that time.
A little bit of study about the Vietnam War and the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a major factor for Vietnamese supply of South Vietnam and other activities they were doing, and something like two-thirds of the Ho Chi Minh Trail went through Laos, and it basically went across the mountains in northern Vietnam and then down the western side of the mountain chain that separates Laos and Vietnam.
And then the trail itself sort of broke up into lots of different sort of exits into different parts of South Vietnam.
So, in fact, that was one of the principal reasons that the United States tried to interdict the supply lines going south from North Vietnam to South Vietnam during the war, and they did that really by bombing.
It was tough to see what was going on underneath the canopy of the jungle down below.
They did their best to try to figure out where the various portions of the trail were going and changing, because they were changing all the time, too.
And then, consequently, the approach to take care of it was sort of an awful lot of scatter bombing and doing the best you could to try to hit something from many, many thousand feet up, which, in the end, that was one of the major problems.
The other area was that you had North Vietnamese working with the communist rebels of Vietnam, actually of Laos, generally known as the Patet Lao.
And there you had ground fighting that really came from North Vietnam and the border down into the Plain of Jars area, which is sort of central Laos.
And that was ground troops from the Vietnamese and the Patet Lao confronting the Royal Lao government forces.
A lot of them supplemented by U.S.
-paid-for Hmong guerrilla fighters who confronted those kind of onslaughts that would come in during the dry season from up north.
And there, again, you had a lot of bombing going on, and in that case you had a lot of anti-personnel bombing going on, trying to stop the advance of the Vietnamese troops and the Patet Lao troops working together.
All right, now, is there any kind of estimate that you could cite about what percentage of the bombs didn't go off then but are still dangerous now, or at least maybe estimates of how many are still laying on the ground there?
Even the rule of thumb today, probably, in some of the bombing that we've done in war situations in other countries as recently as the last three or four years in Iraq and Afghanistan is that anti-personnel bombs are sort of notorious for a number of them falling and not necessarily going off.
And the number there is about 30%, I think, quoted frequently in the Vietnam War period, and I don't think it's changed a lot.
Wow, 30%.
And now when you say anti-personnel bombs, you mean cluster bombs?
Those are cluster bomb units.
Anti-personnel bombs, right.
So often referred to in Laos as bombies, B-O-M-B-I-E, they'd be dropped by the thousands in areas to basically deny territory to infantry on the ground, and they could explode in many different ways or not.
I mean, they could explode in the air when they're being dropped.
They arm themselves by spinning in the air, and then they could land on the ground and explode upon impact, or they could land on the ground and not explode but be armed.
And over time, when you're talking seven, eight years of different munitions being dropped, you end up having quite a few bits of munitions sitting around that potentially are still very dangerous, and that's exactly the problem.
You should also note, too, that some of the ground fighting that went on involved lots of artillery shells, lots of mortar shells, lots of bazooka kinds of rocket-propelled grenades, and this was done by both sides.
So during my period, I witnessed a number of cases where you saw they had come across caches of arms in the ground of two or three dozen grenade launches and airborne grenades and so forth that had still basically stuck in the ground waiting to be picked up.
All of those were perfectly good.
So you had quite a bit of that, and unfortunately Laos suffered.
Its countryside took a terrible beating over the course of about eight years between the bombing and then the interdiction of the ground forces up above.
Most of that would have been American, not all of it.
I mean, the stuff that the Vietnamese were using in rocket-propelled grenades and that kind of stuff would have been Russian-made or Chinese-made and so forth, but it's all out there.
And Laos is a fairly rugged country, except for the flat areas on the ground where they try to grow rice.
And for that reason, plus the fact that it took place so long ago, it's very hard to make fast progress in clearing these kinds of still-dangerous munitions in the ground.
Yeah.
Now I guess desert sand like in Iraq can blow and can bury things like this, and that will be a problem, but from what we've seen watching Platoon or whatever, what we know of Vietnam and that area in Laos, Cambodia, that area of Asia, it's just, you know, jungle.
The most difficult terrain of all, so if there's a cluster bomb anywhere, it's covered in dirt and vegetation of some kind.
Sure, you know, you've got monsoon rains that happen, and you've got floods, and you've got the whole, you know...
You say in the article sometimes they're even lodged in trees, and sometimes they fall out of trees on people's heads.
Well, you can imagine when you're dropping cluster bombs from 3,000 or 4,000 feet and you're going into a forest, a jungle forest area, a number of things get stuck in all kinds of places, and that certainly would have happened too.
But I think the biggest threat for people today is the fact that many of these munitions are underground, sometimes not very far.
But even when I was there in 2001, 2004, and I went out into the field to kind of watch the UXO personnel very systematically trying to both discover and then dig up as necessary and then destroy, I mean, you could see cluster bombs that were really on the surface.
And, you know, some areas were worse than others, but it was a, you know, quite a serious problem.
It still is.
Well, and you know, comfortable people like myself, we have to just use our imaginations or remember that one time when we saw how these things work on the Discovery Channel or something, where, you know, what a way to die.
You know, these aren't just a big explosion, bang.
This is not a very big explosion tearing you apart with, you know, superheated shrapnel, basically.
This is, you know, a horror movie.
This is absolutely insane.
Well, there's that, and then there's the reality that the little country of Laos is one of Southeast Asia's poorest countries.
And, you know, people are eking out a living as best they can, and one of the things that over the past decades they've continued to do, and that was is if they could find scrap metal.
Oh, no.
I'm sorry.
We have to hold it right here.
We know where you're going with that, though.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
It's Ambassador Doug Hartwick, formerly ambassador to Laos, and we'll be right back after this.
Sorry about the heartbreak there.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ambassador Doug Hartwick, who was George W. Bush's ambassador to Laos, 2001 through 2004.
We're talking about this piece.
Well, the one I read is the one at Foreign Policy and Focus, A Bomb-Free Future for Laos.
It says in here, one ton of bombs was dropped for every man, woman, and child in Laos at the time, making it the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.
And the place is still just littered with them, and when we were going out to break, you were talking about how anybody who's not a rice farmer, i.e., employed digging in the dirt, is employed collecting scrap metal, which means literally risking their lives for the pieces of these bombs to resell.
Is that how dire it is over there right now?
Yeah, I'm afraid it's still that bad.
It's one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, and the people that live out in the villages and out in the rural areas, they're desperate to earn money in any which way they can to supplement their meager diet of rice and vegetables and so forth.
And so it's been a common practice now for decades for them to go up into the mountainsides and places that have not been cultivated and go with small, cheap metal detectors and see what they can find.
And so there have been a lot of injuries like that.
Other set of injuries have been really trying to clear more land to be irrigated and plowed.
Many a buffalo has been blown up, or people who are out behind buffaloes being killed at the same time by striking with a plow bomb that might be a foot under the ground that they had never known about.
It just takes a very long time, and the United States has been helping with this effort along with a number of other countries for at least two decades, but we haven't put many resources toward it.
Because it's so slow-going, the reality is that there's an enormous amount of area that still is quite dangerous, and people are vulnerable to further injury.
Well, is it a real effort, or is it just a PR stunt at this point where they're doing enough that they can say they're trying to do something?
No, it's a real effort, but I think that, you know, it's tough to be arguing before the U.S. Congress and elsewhere the need to be spending tens of millions of dollars per year in an effort of a war that took place 40 years ago.
And, you know, different people might have different views about how important that is, but that just is the reality.
During my period, we were probably doing somewhere in the area of $2 million a year, which I argued at the time that was inadequate.
But, you know, you just do the best you can.
And I think that should be the entirety of our foreign policy is cleaning up the dud bombs from all of our wars since World War II.
How about that?
Well, I'll tell you, there's a lot out there, and, you know, the Lao villagers out there today have nothing to do with that war 40 years ago, and most of them have nothing to do with the war anyway.
And they continue to be maimed and killed.
And so, you know, I was very pleased to see Secretary Clinton visit Laos.
This was the first visit by a Secretary of State in 57 years.
And I think it's a strong signal that our bilateral relationship is really on the mend, moving in a much more constructive direction than it has ever been.
And many of us and my colleagues who supported the letter or the op-ed piece that was done in The Washington Times have all worked hard to try to see how we improve our relationship so that, you know, the United States and Laos can work together on a number of issues, including unexplored ordnance.
And so her visit, I think, is very important, and it's sort of symbolic.
But with that symbolism comes a strong signal to the Lao people that the United States is prepared to step up its assistance in this whole area.
But it's still going to be a long haul.
There's just no doubt about that.
But it will be helped by increased support in Congress in terms of monies, and then that allows us to hire different support groups that can both improve the education of the danger of UXO in addition to cleaning up the UXO that are out there.
These are all very important aspects.
If you tell a little kid in a school, if you come across one of these yellow crazy things out there, don't pick it up and throw it.
You know, that might prevent a lot of injury.
And in years past, that's the kind of education that's been missing.
Yeah, well, that's too bad.
At least, yeah, get the word of mouth going.
But I guess, you know, it's that kind of poverty and illiteracy where there's not much history of the 1960s and 70s being passed around most days, right?
No, I mean, that's one of the tragedies of this whole thing, and that's why I'm so pleased to see, one, that Secretary Clinton visited Laos after all these years, and then, two, she's made the unexplored ordinance problem a feature of her visit in that, you know, 40 years later, to bring attention to a problem that has been going on all these decades is actually very helpful to step up assistance again.
And, you know, I think if we step our assistance up, then you've got the United Nations helping out more, you've got other countries helping out more, and I think all of that is very important.
And, frankly, Laos could never, it's too poor a country, it could never take care of it by itself, even remotely.
But there is a safe and effective way to really get this done, assuming it's finance, huh?
Well, it's slow.
I mean, the reality is it's dangerous work, and so finding out where the bombs are in tough terrain, including jungle, I mean, you remember the pictures of the movies of Platoon and that kind of thing in Vietnam?
This is the same kind of terrain.
So going out through that area and clearing an acre of land systematically in a safe manner is a very difficult, slow job.
And you can throw a lot of people out there to try to do it, but you have to have trained people, because it's damn dangerous to do it if you aren't trained properly.
And some of the problems the Lao have had is that money has sort of come and more of the money has gone, and so sometimes it might be up to $3 or $4 million in help, and then two years later it would be down to a million.
And people who had been trained had to be let go and basically go off and find a living doing something else.
And so it's been a very sort of episodic effort over the past two decades, and you need a sustained funding to get it going, and over a 10-year period you'll make some real headway.
And that's, I think, I'm very hopeful, as are my colleagues, that the Secretary's visit there and her statements about the United States support is something that can be sustained in Congress.
Obviously she can't promise money five years from now, but between whatever administration is in charge and Congress, to step up and do the right thing is extremely important.
And the fact that it's 40 years ago makes it very easy to kind of be forgotten, and that's why I'm really pleased to see the attention of all of you, including the U.S. media page that's on this kind of stuff, and we want to see that turn into action on the ground.
Well, now, when we were talking before about the reality of the situation there, I forget if we ever really did get around to numbers.
You had some kind of percentage of 30% of the bombs didn't go off and how that can add up, obviously, over a long-term bombing campaign to a lot.
But did you have numbers about how many actual civilians are killed and or wounded there every year at this point?
Yeah, there's pretty good statistics on that, and the good news is a lot of those injuries, either killed or badly injured and maimed, have come down steadily over the years, in part because the most intensely bombed and areas used by rural villagers, a lot of those have been cleaned in a careful manner, or that area that has not been cleaned, education has sort of told the villagers, don't go in that area, that's actually very dangerous.
So those numbers have come down.
I think when you get back to the late 80s and early 90s, you were talking 200, 250 people injured or killed per year.
During my period, it was probably more like 120.
That was in the early 2000s, and today it's probably in the 80 to 100 people injured.
And so the numbers have come down, but you're still talking scores of people every year, many of them kids, because the kids are out scooting around with very little of these little metal detectors that I was describing, trying to earn a buck, if you will.
How far do you get into the rural area?
Just like in any country, including the United States, you get into situations where the people's education is lower, it's harder to make a living, and so there's pressure to do the best they can to survive.
And certainly in a poor country like Laos, that's a serious problem.
You were saying when you were ambassador, the number was how many million a year was spent?
It was a little million somewhere, right?
Yeah, I think somewhere in the area between 1.5 and 2 million is what we were spending around that time.
See, I was trying to remember.
Maybe you had said 20, but no, I mean come on.
No, no, no, no, no.
You could multiply that.
You could make that 2 million, 20 million, without it even amounting to a drop in the bucket of our foreign aid or State Department budget, right?
Of a lot of supporters, yeah, exactly.
With a lot of hard work of a lot of supporters and a little NGO that took on the name The Legacies of War, there was a fair bit of effort to bring the attention to Congress of this problem and this past year, to our great both surprise and pleasure, Congress stepped up and allocated $9 million for this effort for the next year.
Wow.
Well, that's a start.
We at least matched over the 5 to 10 years going forward for exactly the reasons I described earlier.
I'm sorry, we've got to leave it right there, but everybody please go read Ambassador Hartwig and Friends at the Washington Times and Hartwig's piece at foreignpolicyandfocus.org, a bomb-free future for Laos.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
All right, Scott.
Thank you.
Take care.