During our first conversation he sat erect and cross-legged on a raised platform, wearing a traditional Burmese longyi in his home. He was gray haired, with a sculpted face and an authoritative Fred Thompson voice that gave him a courtly bearing: very much the wise elder statesman tempered by a certain oriental gentleness. Around him were a few books and photos: of butterfly wings, of the king and queen of Thailand, and of himself as a muscular young man with a bandolier and machete in Vietnam.
“Chinese intelligence is beginning to operate with the anti-regime Burmese ethnic hill tribes,” he told me. “The Chinese want the dictatorship in Burma to remain, but being pragmatic, they also have alternative plans for the country. The warning that comes from senior Chinese intelligence officers to the Karens, the Shans, and other ethnics is ‘to come to us for help—not the Americans—since we are next door and will never leave the area.’ ”
At the same time, he explained, the Chinese were beginning to reach out to young military officers in Thailand. In recent years, the Thai royal family and the Thai military, particularly the special forces and cavalry, have been sympathetic to the hill tribes fighting the pro-Chinese military junta in Burma; whereas Thailand’s civilian politicians, influenced by various lobbies wanting to do business with resource-rich Burma, have been the junta’s best allies. In sum, democracy in Thailand has been at times the enemy of democracy in Burma.
But the Chinese, he implied, are still not satisfied: they want both Thailand’s democrats and military officers on their side, even as they work with both Burma’s junta and its ethnic opponents. “A new bamboo curtain may be coming down on Southeast Asia,” he worried. If such a thing were to happen, it would not be a hard and fast wall like the iron curtain; nor would it be part of some newly imagined Asian domino theory, similar to what was believed in the Vietnam era. Rather, it would be a discreet zone of Chinese political and economic influence fostered by, among other factors, relative American neglect, which was somewhat the case during the administration of George W. Bush. While the Chinese are operating at every level in Burma and Thailand, top Bush administration officials had periodically missed summits of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). And while China has launched twenty-seven separate ASEAN-China mechanisms in the past decade, the U.S. has launched only seven in thirty years.3 My friend wanted the U.S. back in the game. And thus far the Obama administration has obliged him.*
“To topple the regime in Burma,” he said, “the ethnics need a full-time advisory capability, not in-and-out soldiers of fortune. This would include a coordination center inside Thailand. There needs to be a platform for all the disaffected officers in the Burmese military to defect to.” Again, rather than a return to the early Vietnam era, he was talking about a more subtle and clandestine version of the kind of support the U.S. provided the Afghan mujahidin fighting the Soviets from bases inside Pakistan during the 1980s. The pro-Karen Thai military could yet return to power in Bangkok, and even if it did not, if the U.S. signaled its intent to provide serious support to the Burmese hill tribes against a regime hated the world over, the Thai security apparatus would find a way to assist.
“The Shans and the Kachins near the Chinese border,” he went on, “have gotten a raw deal from the Burmese junta, but they are also nervous about a dominant China. They feel squeezed. And unity for the hill tribes of Burma is almost impossible. Somebody from the outside must provide a mechanism upon which they can all depend.”
Burma should not be confused with the Balkans, or with Iraq, where ethnic and sectarian differences simmering for decades under a carapace of authoritarianism erupted once central authority dissolved. The hill tribes have been at war with successive Burmese regimes for decades. War fatigue has set in, and the tribes show little propensity to fight one another were the regime to unravel. They are more disunited than they are at odds. Even among themselves, as he told me, the Shan have been historically subdivided into states led by minor kings. Thus, there might be a quiet organizing role for Americans of his ilk.
He mentioned Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew’s warning that the U.S. must stay engaged in the region as a “counterbalance to the Chinese giant”; the U.S. being the only outsider power with the wherewithal to slow down Beijing’s advance, even though it has no territorial designs of its own in Asia. Southeast Asian nations in general, and Vietnam in particular, with its own historic fear of China, wanted Washington to counter Beijing in Burma. Thailand, with a monarchical succession ahead of it that could usher in an era of unstable politics, fears falling further under Chinese influence. Not even the Burmese junta, my friend said, wanted to be part of a Greater China. There are memories still of the long, grueling, and bloody Manchu invasion in the eighteenth century. It is just that the Burmese generals have had no choice, if they want to remain in power.
Burma is destined to be an energy conduit for China in any event. But it need not become a de facto province of China, and be eternally governed by one of the world’s most brutal regimes: raped of its natural resources as the generals line their pockets, and veritable slave labor builds its pipelines—financed in part by multinationals in an example of the dark, unconscionable side of globalization. Much may still depend on how the U.S. acts. And my elderly acquaintance, who believes in quietly working in the shadows, armed less with guns than with area expertise, needs people to carry on his life’s work, and, more specifically, people to whom he can hand over his networks deep inside Burma.
Another American working inside Burma was Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, “the Father of the White Monkey” in Burmese, a sobriquet that came from the endearing nickname he calls his daughter. He, too, is the son of Christian missionaries in the region, originally from Texas. Except for nine years in the U.S. Army, including time in Special Forces from which he retired as a major, like his parents he had been a missionary in one form or another his whole adult life. He also spoke a number of the local languages. He was much younger than my other acquaintance. And unlike him, he was very animated, with a ropy, muscular bullet-like physique that is in perpetual motion, as if his system is running on too many candy bars. Whereas my other contact had concentrated his life’s work on the Shan tribes near the Chinese border, the Father of the White Monkey worked, for the most part, with the Karen and other tribes in eastern Burma abutting Thailand, though the networks he operated have ranged as far as the Indian border on the opposite side of the country.
In 1996 he met the Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon, during a brief period when she was not under house arrest. The meeting inspired him to initiate a “day of prayer” for Burma, and to work for ethnic unity within the country. During the 1997 Burmese army offensive that displaced hundreds of thousands of people, he was deep inside Burma, alone, going to the “worst places,” from one burned-out village to another, handing out medicine from his backpack. He told me about this and other army offensives that he has witnessed, in which churches were torched, children disemboweled, and whole families killed. “These stories don’t make me numb,” he said, his eyes popping open wide, his facial muscles stretched in emotion. “Each is like the first one. I pray always that justice will come and be done.”
In 1997, after that trip inside Burma, he started the Free Burma Rangers, which has more than three hundred volunteers working in forty-three small medical teams among the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Chin, Kachin, and Arakanese, virtually the whole of highland Burma that embraces on three sides the central Irrawaddy River valley, home to the majority Burmans.* The Free Burma Rangers are a very unique kind of relief group, or nongovernmental organization.
“We stand with the villagers, we’re not above them. If they don’t run from the government troops, we don’t either. We have a medic, a photographer, and a reporter-intel guy in each team that marks the GPS positions of Burmese government troops, maps the camps and takes pictures with a telephoto lens, all of which we post on our website. We deal with the Pentagon, with human rights groups.… There is a hig
her moral obligation to intervene on the side of good, since silence is a form of consent.
“NGOs,” he went on in a racing voice, “like to claim that they are above politics. Not true. The very act of providing aid assists one side or another, however indirectly. NGOs take sides all the time.” There was ample proof of this in recent history. In the 1980s, NGOs working among Afghan refugees in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province essentially helped the Afghan mujahidin in their struggle against the pro-Moscow Afghan government, just as aid workers in Sudan during the same period helped ethnic Eritreans and Tigreans in their military struggle against the Marxist Ethiopian government. And here on the Thai borderland, an underground railway for guns was mixed in with relief supplies.
The Father of the White Monkey had taken this hard truth several steps further. Whereas the Thais host Burmese refugee camps on their side of the border and the ethnic insurgents run camps inside Burma for internally displaced people—even while the Karens and other ethnics have mobile clinics in forward positions near Burmese army concentrations—the backpacking Free Burma Rangers actually operated behind enemy lines. The Father of the White Monkey was, like my other acquaintance, a very evolved form of special operator: the kind that the U.S. security bureaucracy can barely accept, for he was taking sides and going native to a degree. Yet these special operators command the level of expertise that the U.S. desperately needs if it is to have influence without being overbearing in remote parts of the globe. Here is the Father of the White Monkey talking about the Wa, to whom he had been exposed relatively little, compared to his years of living in the jungle with the Karen and other tribes:
“The Wa were the muscle of the Burmese communists. They were armed by the Chinese. In 1989, around the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising, they declared independence and kicked the Chinese out. They were willing to give up their opium production in return for a crop substitution program and arms to fight the Burmese military government with. But they found no takers in the West for their offer. The Free Burma Rangers now have a small-scale medical aid program for the Wa. The Wa are in bed with Than Shwe [the Burmese junta leader] only because they have nowhere else to turn.”
One might suspect that the Free Burma Rangers are on some government payroll in Washington. But the truth is more pathetic. “We are funded by church groups around the world. Our yearly budget is $600,000. We were down to $150 at one point, we all prayed and the next day got a grant for $70,000. We work hand to mouth.” On some of his missions inside Burma, the Father of the White Monkey took his wife and three small children along. Like my other acquaintance, Burma was not a job for him, it was his life obsession.
“Burma is not Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,” he told me. “It’s not genocide. It’s not a car wreck. It’s a slow, creeping cancer, in which the regime is working to dominate, control, and radically assimilate all the ethnic peoples of the country.” I was reminded of what Jack Dunford, executive director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, said to me in Bangkok. The Burmese military regime is “relentless like clockwork, building dams, roads, and huge agricultural projects, taking over mines, laying pipelines,” sucking in cash from neighboring powers and foreign companies, selling off natural resources at below-market value, all in order to further entrench itself in power. Burma is a land of mass rape, child soldiers, and large-scale narcotics trafficking, with Wa armies mass-producing amphetamines.
Once, not long ago, the Father of the White Monkey was sitting on a hillside at night in Burma, in an exposed location between the Burmese army and a cluster of internal refugees whom the army had made flee their homes. The Karen soldiers he was with had fired rocket-propelled grenades at the Burmese army position, and in response the Burmese soldiers began firing mortar rounds at them. At this point he got a message from a friend at the Pentagon on the communications gear with which he was equipped asking him why the U.S. should be interested in Burma.
He tapped back a slew of reasons that ranged from totalitarianism to the devastation of hardwood forests, to religious persecution of Buddhist monks, to the use of prisoner labor as minesweepers, and much else. But he did not touch much on strategic or regional security issues. As I said, the Father of the White Monkey is very much the missionary. When I asked him his denomination, he responded, “I’m a Christian.” As such, he was doing God’s work, engaged morally first and foremost, especially among the Karen, among whom number many Christians, converted by people like his parents.
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Army Colonel Timothy Heinemann (Ret.) of Laguna Beach, California, did think strategically. He was also a veteran of Special Forces, whom I met in 2002 at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leaven-worth, Kansas, where he was the dean of academics. He now ran an NGO, Worldwide Impact, which helped ethnic groups, primarily Karens; as well as a number of cross-border projects, with a special emphasis on sending media teams into Burma to record the suffering there. Another evolved type of special operator, Heinemann, in his flip-flops and engaging manner, embodied the indirect approach to conflict emphasized in the 2006 “Quadrennial Defense Review,” one of the Pentagon’s primary planning documents. Heinemann told me that he “privatizes condition setting.” He explained: “We are networkers on both sides of the border. We try to find opportunities for NGOs to collaborate better in supporting ethnic group needs. I do my small part to set conditions so that America can protect national, international, and humanitarian interests with real savvy. Our work is well known to various branches of the U.S. government. The opposition to the Burmese military dictatorship has no strategic and operational planning like Hezbollah does. Aung San Suu Kyi is little more than a symbol of the wrong issue—‘Democracy first!’ Ethnic rights and the balance of ethnic power are preconditions for democracy in Burma. These issues must be faced first, or little has been learned from Afghanistan and Iraq.” Heinemann, like the Father of the White Monkey, lives hand to mouth, grabbing grants and donations from wherever he can, and is sometimes reduced to financing trips himself. He found Burma “exotic, intoxicating.”
But Burma is also, he went on, a potential North Korea, as well as a perfect psychological operations target for the U.S. military and other agencies. He and others explained that the Russians were helping the Burmese government in the Kachin and Chin regions in the north and west of the country to mine uranium, with the North Koreans waiting in the wings to help them with nuclear technology. The Burmese junta craves some sort of weapons-of-mass-destruction capacity to provide it with international leverage, in order to help perpetuate itself in power. “But the regime is paranoid,” Heinemann pointed out. “It’s superstitious. They’re rolling chicken bones on the ground to see what to do next.
“Burma’s got a 400,000-man army [the active-duty U.S. Army is 500,000] that’s prone to mutiny,” Heinemann continued. “Only the men at the very top are loyal. You could spread rumors, conduct information warfare. It might not take much to unravel it.” Indeed, Burmese soldiers reportedly were getting only a portion of their salaries, and their weapons at major bases were locked up at night. On the other hand, the military constituted the country’s most secure social-welfare system, complete with hospitals and schools, and that bought a certain amount of loyalty from the troops.4 Yet, “there is no trust by the higher-ups in the lower ranks,” said a Karen resistance source. The junta leader, Than Shwe, a former postal clerk who has never been to the West, was known along with his wife to consult an astrologer. “He governs out of fear, he is not brave,” noted Aung Zaw, editor of The Irrawaddy, a magazine run by Burmese exiles in the northwestern Thai city of Chiang Mai. “And Than Shwe rarely speaks publicly, he has even less charisma than Ne Win,” the dictator from 1962 to 1988.
Heinemann and Aung Zaw each recounted to me how the regime suddenly deserted Rangoon one day in 2005 and moved the capital north to Naypyidaw (“the abode of kings”), halfway between Rangoon and Mandalay, which it built from scratch, with funds from Burma’s natural gas revenu
es. The new capital lies deep in the forest and is marked by underground bunkers against an American invasion, which the regime fears. The date of the move was astrologically timed. Heinemann viewed China, India, and other Asian nations jockeying for position with one of the world’s worst, weirdest, wealthiest, and most strategically placed rogue regimes, which all the while is prone to a coup or disintegration even, if only the U.S. adopted the kind of patient, low-key, and inexpensive approach advocated by him and my other two acquaintances.
Heinemann’s last job in the military was as a planner for the occupation phase of the Iraq war, and he was eyewitness to the mistakes of a massive military machine disregarding local realities. He saw Burma as the inverse of Iraq, a place where the U.S. could do itself a lot of good, and do much good besides, if it fought smart.
Another American I met who was consumed by Burma saw me in his suite in one of Bangkok’s most expensive hotels. A staff sergeant in Special Forces in the 1970s, he was now a resident of Singapore, where he worked in the security business, and preferred to be identified by his Burmese nickname, Ta Doe Tee (“The Bull That Swims”). His expensive black, tailored clothes barely masked an intimidating muscular physique. He put on reading glasses and opened a shiny black loose-leaf notebook with a map of the Indian Ocean. There was a line drawn on the map that went from Ethiopia and Somalia across the water past India, and then north up the Bay of Bengal, through the heart of Burma, to China’s Yunnan Province. “This map is just an example of how CNOOC [the China National Offshore Oil Corporation] sees the world,” the Bull explained.
He showed me another map, which zoomed in on Ethiopia and Somalia, with grid marks on the significant reserves of oil and natural gas in the Ogaden basin on the Ethiopian-Somali border. A circle was drawn around Hobyo, a Somali port visited in the early fifteenth century by the Chinese admiral Zheng He, whose treasure fleets plied back and forth across the Indian Ocean along the same sea-lanes as today’s energy routes. “In this scenario, the oil and natural gas would be shipped from Hobyo direct to western Burma,” the Bull told me, where the Chinese are building a new port at Kyauk Phru, on Ramree Island there, in Arakan State. It is capable of handling the world’s largest containerships. According to the Bull, the map showed how easy it will be for the Chinese to operate all over the Indian Ocean, “tapping into Iran and other Persian Gulf energy suppliers.” Their biggest problem, though, will be cutting through Burma. “The Chinese need to acquire Burma, and keep it stable,” he said.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 27