Quotes from Joshua Kurlantzick

The foreign leaders with whom Nixon got along best, like President Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan, were almost always authoritarian strongmen.

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.

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.