And the students, who were pretty quiescent a couple of years ago. are apparently quite radical and organized now. The schools were all closed down last spring. I don't know if they've opened yet; I doubt it. There's a tremendous amount of student action. There are war veterans demonstrations. There's no doubt that the NLF is very active there. A CIA report issued a couple of weeks ago said that the NLF has about 30,000 agents in the government. Probably something like that is right.

So they've sort of driven the population into these urban centers where they're supposed to be controlled, but then that raises the question of whether they can do anything with this chaos they have created or whether it will explode in the urban centers- which may very well happen.

To what extent do you think people like Sam Huntington are responsible for the policy of driving people into the urban centers?

I don't know any reason to think that they're responsible- I think he's commented on it accurately. Nobody can know from the outside just what policy-making function these people have. They claim that they're just doing research, but I've read the minutes of one meeting of the Vietnam Studies Committee of SEADAG [Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group], the thing that Huntington headed, which purports to be just a scholarly outfit where people come do research on Southeast Asia.

But the minutes of the meeting I read were all concerned with how to deal with the situation I just described- that is. if the United States is driven into elections, how they can manage to control them or manipulate them, given the fact that the NLF is the most powerful politically-organized force in the country which everybody concedes.

He has a paper which he presented to this meeting- it's an interesting paper- a study of how to manipulate, cheat, and coerce in such a way that you can win the elections even though you don't have any popular force on your side, and the minutes of the meeting are really quite amusing. Most of the people are sort of skeptical whether we can do it and they suggest other ways.

So I don't know- there are government representatives present at these meetings and they clearly have a policy-making orientation. Whether that has any effect on policy I can't judge.

Do you think the U.S. has finally found a counterinsurgency strategy that they think will work, that they think they can use everywhere? There used to be theorizing about such things as counter-guerilla groups, now they have this theory of just bombing the hell out of everything.

This is obviously an outsider's impression- I have no access to anything but public documents- but reading the reports of the Senate hearings and other things of that sort you get the impression that everyone agrees that Vietnam has been a disaster.

They say you can't learn anything from it except not to do it that way, but that Laos has been very successful, and that that ought to be the kind of model that we ought to follow.

In the Symington Committee hearings, Senator Symington- who's a very strong opponent of the war in Vietnam, incidentally-and Senator Javits- who again, has a reputation as a dove- say that the war in Laos is very successful. In fact, Javits says at one point this is one war that is successful, so let's not keep it a secret.

And Symington made a statement that in Vietnam- especially North Vietnam- the bombing was really not very fair because there were too many restrictions and it wasn't fair to the pilots because they couldn't bomb the center of Hanoi. But, he says, in Laos we've used the military without shackles- it's his phrase- and we've shown what air power can really do.

And then he says we ought to advertise this. We shouldn't keep it a secret because it would help overcome the frustration of American youth- which he thinks is due to the fact that we weren't able to win in Vietnam.

But it's not really going that well.

They're losing on the ground, but it's a question of whether they care. They're keeping the Mekong Valley. Suppose the Pathet Lao took over Vientiane. It's fairly clear what would happen- the city would just be wiped out. Nothing they can do about it- if not by American bombardment, then by Thai artillery across the river.

There are a lot of open questions; for example, in the population of Thailand, which is about 33 million, there are about 8 million Lao, mostly within the Northern areas. I would assume that the Pathet Lao are organizing there. I don't have any facts, but they'd be crazy if they're not, and if something happens in the areas of Thailand bordering Laos, then it's a different story. But short of that, I don't see how they could move into the Mekong valley. They'd be wiped out.