Thai memoir: notes on countering insurgencies, then and now.

• Author: Virden, Dick

Text:

We Americans tend to forget that our struggles with insurgencies did not begin (and won't end) with Iraq and Afghanistan. More than a century ago, when we first became a colonial power, we fought such a war in the Philippines. Counterinsurgency was also the name of the game in the 1960s, and not only in Vietnam. Among the other places where we rallied to this banner was Thailand, where I was sent on my first Foreign Service assignment.

With the thought that an examination of what took place in Thailand back then might yield some useful insights to those contending with the insurgencies of today and tomorrow, I offer below some ground-level observations from that late '60s tour, seasoned by decades of subsequent study and experience with American engagements abroad.

I landed in Bangkok January of1967 to begin work for the United States Information Service, the field organization of USIA, an agency that has since been absorbed by the State Department. Our program in Thailand then was both unconventional and large, with a sprawling headquarters in a leafy compound in Bangkok and as many as 13 branch posts. We even briefly had one in the tiny northeastern town of Surin, which had fewer than 10,000 residents and was known mainly for its annual elephant roundup. Today we've gone to the opposite extreme, leaving mega cities in Brazil, India and elsewhere around the globe with no U.S. government representative on the scene.

We were engaged so intensively in Thailand in the '60s because we feared the communist insurgency in Vietnam would spread there. Thailand was a key ally, one of only a half dozen countries with troops on the ground in South Vietnam, about a thousand soldiers at the peak. Thailand also opened its doors to us, permitting the Pentagon to set up a string of air bases in the northeast region to help prosecute the wars in nearby Vietnam and Laos. We felt we needed to keep Thailand stable and on our side.

Thailand was governed then by the same political dynamic that had prevailed since the absolute monarchy was overthrown in 1932. Power was shared between the King and Army generals. The trappings of democracy were in place, but this was no Jeffersonian state. Those who pushed from within for greater democracy and deeper reforms made little headway.

I spent my first eight or nine months in country working in the various sections of USIS in the capital. In those days, new USIA officers rotated around different parts of the operation - press, radio and television, library, cultural center, executive office, field operations--to learn the business. Such systematic on-the-job training is rare today, considered a luxury given State's perennial staffing shortages (The Department of Defense sets the gold standard, maintaining a 15 percent "float" of more people than jobs, so officers can be spared for training).

My final three months of training/orientation was in the northern city of Chiang Mai, a wonderfully exotic place then. W.A. R. Wood, a British diplomat who arrived there as a young man and never left, wrote a book about his experience called Consul in Paradise. His charming descriptions and folk stories suggest some of the allure of the region and the diverse peoples who live in the north's mountains and valleys.

After an all-too-short time in this Shangri La, I was appointed as Branch Public Affairs Officer in the north central river town of Phitsanuloke, about half way between Chiang Mai and Bangkok. The ruined temples of Sukhothai, which had been the capital of a Thai kingdom in the early Middle Ages, lay about 20 miles to the west. I was to be the lone USIS officer with a staff of a half dozen Thai employees responsible for a five-province region bordering on both Laos and Burma.

Our job was counterinsurgency, then the focus for most of the U.S. Mission in Thailand. Already intensely engaged in Vietnam, the United States worried that a disaffected population could turn against the government here, too, as in Vietnam. There was legitimate cause for concern, since the Thai government writ rarely extended into the countryside, even in the lowland plains. That many villages still lacked electricity, passable roads and even schools was a telling indicator of long neglect.

The U.S. aim was to help bring the government and people closer together. In short, this was a battle for "hearts and minds," in the language of the day; whatever that struggle is called, winning the allegiance of the people remains the core of any counter-insurgency program.

For our part, USIS pursued this cause in the field mainly through what we called "mobile information teams," or MITs. The basic idea was to get Thai government representatives out of their offices and out among the rice...