The Secret War: Hillary Clinton Visits Laos, Where Hidden Bombs Still Burst

Hillary Clinton landed in the Southeast Asian country of Laos on Wednesday, becoming the first U.S. Secretary of State to do so in 57 years.

Meeting with officials, Clinton discussed the diplomatic relationship between Laos and the United States. The small nation has strengthened its alliance with nearby China of late, though that fact went unmentioned during Clinton's meetings.

A new multimillion-dollar trade and aid initiative with several Southeast Asian countries is expected to be announced by the United States later this week, according to the Associated Press. Clinton's visit established Laos as a probable recipient of increased aid as part of the U.S. administration's pivot towards Asia during the coming years.

The visit was over in a matter of hours; Clinton next flew to Cambodia for a new round of meetings. The brevity of her stop-over shows that small, poor Laos is low on the list of American priorities moving forward.

But the story of U.S. involvement in Laos is much more complex than it seems -- the country once played a vital role in one of the most regrettable U.S. military interventions of the 20th century.

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A Country Forgotten

In an essay written last year for Foreign Policy, Clinton spent almost 5,600 words describing the U.S. administration's new policy toward Asia. She laid a blueprint for U.S. diplomacy on the continent and detailed her intentions in terms of establishing trade partnerships and protecting U.S. national security.

Laos is mentioned only once, for its ! status a s aid recipient in the context of the Lower Mekong Initiative. This 2009 plan involved commitments to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam to facilitate improvements in education, water management and health care.

It is true that Laos is in dire need of international assistance. The landlocked country, which relies mostly on agriculture for revenue, suffers high poverty rates and a woefully underdeveloped infrastructure. In 2010, according to the U.S. Department of State, a full 90 percent of the government's budget came from foreign assistance.The economy suffered for years under a strict Communist government and command economy system, but has seen piecemeal liberalization since 1986. Today's market-based economy remains subject to strong central planning, which is in turn hampered by endemic corruption. Still, growth is apparent and the country's entry into the World Trade Organization is pending.

U.S. aid to Laos is tricky since the local government, based in the capital city of Vientiane, runs according to a restrictive one-party system and has long been accused of human rights violations. People of the Hmong ethnicity, who make up about 8 percent of the population, are frequent targets of discrimination, imprisonment and harassment.

But despite the literal and figurative distance between Laos and the United States, the two countries are linked by a shared history, going back several decades to the bloody wars in Indochina preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And the Hmong people are at the center of that history.

Deeply Entrenched

When then-U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles visited Laos in 1955, the country was in the primary stages of a bloody civil war that would last until 1975. A Communist group called the Pathet Lao, which was allied to the North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong, struggled during those long decades -- and eventually succeeded -- to overthrow the royalist government, which was supported by Thailand, South Vietnam and the West.