Rumblings on the Periphery

The war in Viet Nam has already spread in a certain fashion, to at least three other Southeast Asian nations. The Communists have been freely using both Laos and Cambodia as supply depots and sanctuaries for their troops, and in Thailand they have been support ng an insurgency in the Northeast aimed both at harassing the Thais and distracting the U.S., which uses six Thai airbases to launch raids against North Viet Nam.

Recently, allied military pressure has forced the bulk of North Vietnamese troops in the South toward or across neighboring borders. So far, they have retreated there with relative impunity. Last week ominous rumblings from all three of South Viet Nam's neighbors indicated not only that the Communist presence has become a serious problem, but that the war is approaching a new phase in which it may well spill over South Viet Nam's borders.

> In Cambodia, where the Communists have set up several camps (TIME, Dec. 1 ) to which they retreat after bloody battles in the South, the situation has become pressing. U.S. military men have advised hot pursuit of the enemy into Cambodia, but the Johnson Administration has so far declined to go along. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu insisted last week that, if allied troops were hit by enemy fire from Cambodia, hot pursuit was not only justified but "indeed a military necessity." The U.S. has launched a new diplomatic initiative to convince Prince Norodom Sihanouk and other "interested" nations, including Russia, of the North Vietnamese presence in Cambodia. It is privately circulating documents that pinpoint the evidence and calling for a strengthening of the International Control Commission.

Prince Sihanouk began the week by warning that he would call on volunteers from China, Russia and other Communist nations if U.S. or South Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia. But, in a surprising turnabout, he later told a reporter for the Washington Post that his army would not necessarily attempt to stop U.S. troops from entering Cambodia in hot pursuit. Provided, he added, that 1) Viet Cong or North Vietnamese troops had entered Cambodia illegally, a move that he now concedes they have made in the past, while continuing to insist they are not there now; 2) the U.S. launches no serious raids, bombings or actions in populated frontier areas but confines itself to "uninhabited outlying regions difficult to control;" and 3) the South Vietnamese be kept out of any hot pursuit into Cambodia. For good measure, Sihanouk offered to receive a representative from President Johnson, the first time he has done so since he broke diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 1965.

> In Laos, there has been a buildup of the North Vietnamese forces that guard and repair the vital Ho Chi Minh Trail over which supplies are funneled to the South. The U.S. State Department last week expressed "some serious concern" over this buildup, but the government of Prince Souvanna Phouma has much more reason for concern. It reported that North Vietnamese forces had launched a "general offensive" against several government villages: Ban Nam Bac, north of the royal capital of Luang-prabang, and Lao Ngam and Phalane.

Since nearly half of the divided country is in Communist hands and contains some 25,000 North Vietnamese troops and an equal number of indigenous Pathet Lao guerrillas, any Communist offensive is a serious matter, but the current one is probably not an all-out drive. This is the beginning of the dry season and the end of the rice harvest, an annual time of skirmishing and rice foraging by the Communists. Still, they are not completely safe in their sanctuary. The U.S. regularly flies bombing runs into Laos, and U.S. warplanes in the past several weeks are reported to have destroyed some 1,000 North Vietnamese trucks there.

> In Thailand, Army Commander General Praphas Charusathien reported that a Communist battalion of 600 men tried to cross the border into his country from Laos and that two more Communist battalions were poised on the border at Nan. The Thais, faced with the growing Communist insurgency threat in the Northeast, tend to over-react somewhat to any burst of Communist military activity in Laos. The battalions may consist of Thai insurgents slipping back home after training in North Viet Nam and trying to cross the border in small units. Whatever they are, however, they constitute a threat that is bound to make the Thais more nervous, and even more insistent on the validity of the U.S.'s continuing military aid to Thailand.

Reports of so much Communist activity on the periphery of South Viet Nam in a single week naturally raised considerable speculation that either Ho Chi Minh, who made a rare public appearance two weeks ago on North Viet Nam's Resistance Day, or Lyndon Johnson, or both, was on the verge of widening the war. As long as, the Communists can move supplies more or less freely through Laos and Cambodia and retreat there to lick their wounds, the U.S. will find it difficult to drive them from the field completely. Nor will the "McNamara Wall" now being built along the DMZ be effective if the Communists can end-run around it in Laos. At some point, and last week's events indicate that it may be sooner rather than later, the U.S. may decide that the idea of sanctuary is a luxury that it cannot afford, and take off after the Communists, borders or no.

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