China’s drive southward and India’s drive both westward and eastward—to keep it from being strategically encircled by China’s navy—means that both powers collide in Burma. As China and India vie for power and influence, Burma has become a quiet, strategic battleground.
Until 2001, India, the world’s largest democracy, took the high road on Burma, condemning it for its repression and providing moral support for the cause of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who had studied in New Delhi. But as senior Indian leaders had told me on a visit to New Delhi, India could not just stand by and watch Chinese influence expand there unabated. Burma’s jungles serve as a rear base for insurgents from eastern India’s own mélange of warring ethnic groups. Furthermore, as Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, writes: India has been “aghast” to see such developments as the establishment of Chinese signals intelligence listening stations along Burma’s border with India.5 So in 2001, India decided to engage Burma comprehensively, providing it with military aid and training, including the sale of tanks, helicopters, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, and rocket launchers.
India has also decided to build its own energy pipeline network through Burma. In fact, during the 2007 crackdown of the monks in Burma, India’s petroleum minister signed a deal for deepwater exploration. Off the coast of Burma’s western Arakan State adjacent to Bangladesh are the Shwe gas fields, among the largest natural reserves in the world, from which two pipeline systems will likely emerge. One will be China’s at the nearby port of Kyauk Phru, which in the future may take deliveries of oil and gas from as far away as the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa, as well as from Shwe itself. The hope is that not every China-bound tanker will have to travel from the Middle East across the entire Indian Ocean, then through the Strait of Malacca and the Indonesian archipelago to get to China’s middle-class population centers, which lie too close for comfort to the Strait of Taiwan and the U.S. Navy. The other pipeline system is India’s. India is spending $100 million to develop the Arakanese port of Sittwe as a trade window to open up its own landlocked, insurgency-wracked northeast. This pipeline will go north through Arakan and Chin provinces, and then split into two sections: one transiting Bangladesh to Kolkata, and the other reaching Kolkata by transiting Indian territory all the way around Bangladesh.
There is nothing sinister about any of this; it is all wholly legitimate, and the consequence of the intense need of hundreds of millions of people in India and in China who will be consuming ever more amounts of energy as their lifestyles improve.
But the devil is in the details. The most direct route into the heart of China is through Burma, not through Pakistan or Bangladesh. And China’s attitude toward Burma is, as it happens, similar to its attitude toward North Korea. Beijing is both aware and uncomfortable with the demented natures of Than Shwe and Kim Jong Il. It would surely prefer less morally repulsive rulers as allies. But as we have seen in Sri Lanka, China is not like the U.S., whose leaders, both Democrat and Republican, seek the moral improvement of the world as a basis of foreign policy. China is interested in Burma and North Korea for the long term. It may even foresee democracy in those places on some distant morrow. That is why, in Burma’s case, the Chinese have initiated contacts with the ethnic hill tribes and with the democratic opposition. Beijing does not want to be caught by surprise again, as it reportedly was during the revolt of the monks in September 2007. Meanwhile, it makes do in the short term by substantially fortifying one of the world’s most repressive regimes.
The moral problem goes beyond China or India, however. For example, Chevron and its French partner, Total, are involved in the Yadana pipeline project that brings Burmese natural gas into Thailand. The problem is that the Burmese army, responsible for pipeline security, at least according to some human rights groups, had confiscated the land from villagers along the pipeline route, conscripted them as forced labor in order to grow rice and carry military supplies, and committed rape and torture. As Indian Ocean energy politics gather force in the twenty-first century, the nearly fifty million people of Burma could be the losers in this process: a victim of the evil confluence of totalitarianism, realpolitik, and corporate profits. In eastern Burma, forests are being destroyed, with truck caravans of timber rolling nonstop into China. In western Burma, whole ecosystems and cultural sites will be under attack from the new pipelines, according to Arakanese resistance sources with whom I spoke.
As indicated in Chapter Eight, Arakan has a large Muslim population composed of Rohingyas, more than 200,000 of whom have taken refuge in Bangladesh from massive military repression in Burma. Each of Burma’s many indigenous peoples, all with their own history that usually is marked by centuries of independence, have suffered like the Rohingyas in their own way under the junta, and have different demands. Thus, even if the military regime were to fall tomorrow, Burma could be a political mess for years to come.
This brings me back to the Bull That Swims, who thought a lot, as he told me, about Burma beyond the Than Shwe regime. He explained that grand lines on a map and the plans of master strategists over broad regions of the globe are often bedeviled by the minutiae of tribal and ethnic differences in one particular place. Just look at the former Yugoslavia and Iraq. This led him to talk about the struggles of the Karens, Shans, Arakanese, and other minorities, and how they will constitute the “theater of activity” for his lifetime. Burma is where the U.S. has to build a “UW [unconventional war] capability,” he said, for China’s problems are only just beginning in Burma.
The discussion went along similar lines as those with the other three Americans. The Bull talked about the need to build and manage networks among the ethnic hill tribes, through the construction of schools, clinics, and irrigation systems. Such would be the unofficial side of America’s competition with China, which might be compelled over time to accept a democratic and highly federalized Burma, with strong links to the West.
But the problem is that while the former Green Berets and other Asia hands I interviewed saw Burma as central to American strategy, the active duty Special Operations community did not, because it has been under orders to be focused on al-Qaeda. And except for the Muslim Rohingyas, whose terrorist potential still remains theoretical, Burma lacks an Islamic terrorist theme. U.S. Special Operations Command was preoccupied mainly with the Arab-Persian western half of the Indian Ocean and much less so with the eastern half. This, my acquaintances said, was an example of how America’s overwhelming obsession with al-Qaeda has warped its larger strategic vision, which should be dominated by the whole Indian Ocean, from Africa to the Pacific.
The Bull next spoke to me about the Shans, the largest of the ethnic hill tribes with 9 percent of Burma’s population but about 20 percent of its territory. A close relationship between the U.S. government and the Shans that would feature substantial amounts of cross-border humanitarian aid could be achieved through cooperation with the Thai military and royal family, which would buttress America’s aid with investment of their own in northeastern Burma. Allying with the Shans, he said, would give the U.S. a mechanism to curtail the flow of drugs in the area, and to create a balancing force against China right on its own border. In any democratic scenario for Burma, the Shans would control a sizable portion of the seats in parliament. More could be accomplished through nonlethal aid to a specific Burmese hill tribe, the Bull indicated, than many of the larger defense programs on which the U.S. spends money. The same strategy could be applied to the Chins in western Burma, with the help of India. Not just in Iraq, but in Burma, too, in the coming years, it would be about informal relationships with tribes, he emphasized.
The Bull was passionate about Burma and Southeast Asia, and about a role for people like himself there. He was of the Army Special Forces generation that was frustrated about having just missed service in Vietnam, with little to do overseas during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Outpost of Freedom, published in 1965 by Roger Donlon, was the inspirational book of his yo
uth, about Donlon’s experiences as the first Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam. Stationed at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in the mid-1970s, the Bull was mentored, commanded, and led by some of the Son Tay raiders themselves. “Dick Meadows, Greg McGuire, Jack Joplin, Joe Lupyak” are names he recited with reverence: Green Berets who stormed the Son Tay prison camp near Hanoi in 1970 in a failed attempt to rescue American prisoners of war. “Vietnam and Southeast Asia was all they ever talked about,” he told me.
But in 1978, Carter’s head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Admiral Stansfield Turner, fired or forced into retirement almost two hundred officers running agents stationed abroad, who had been providing human intelligence, and many of them were in Southeast Asia. The CIA’s clandestine service was devastated. As the Bull told the story, many of the fired officers would not simply “be turned off,” and decided to maintain self-supporting networks, “picking up kids” like himself along the way, just out of Special Forces. They sent him to learn to sail and fly, and he became a certified ship master for cargo vessels and an FAA-certified pilot. In the 1980s he became involved in operations in Southeast Asia, such as bringing equipment to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He blurred the line between such controversial and shadowy government operations and the illegal means sometimes used to sustain them. In 1988, while trying to bring seventy tons of marijuana to the West Coast of the United States with a Southeast Asian crew under his command, he was boarded by the U.S. Coast Guard. He served five years in a U.S. prison and then went back to Southeast Asia, where he has been ever since. He is older now, as he told me, with a lifetime in the region of leveraging indigenous forces. His business card defined him as a “compradore,” an all-purpose factotum with a deep cultural footprint in the region—in fact, the kind of enabler who was vital to the running of the British East India Company. He believed that America’s future competition with China will be characterized by ambiguity rather than overt hostility. Uniformed forces will be less necessary than men like himself. Whereas the heroes of his youth were focused on Vietnam, he believed that Burma and its tribes can provide the circumstances for the use of his considerable talents, which, in the case of the Shans, will emphasize both discretion and a humanitarian approach.
I was uneasy with him and with parts of his background. As subtle and responsible as his approach might arguably be, one should not easily discount the dangers of what he and these other Americans recommended. The most important relationship in the twenty-first century likely will be the one between the U.S. and China, and care has to be taken not to casually disrupt it. The U.S. saw the costs of speaking loudly and carrying a small stick in the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Thus, if we are to ramp up support of the ethnics in Burma, one cannot emphasize strongly enough that it will have to be done in a way that quietly pressures China toward better behavior in Burma, rather than quietly enrages it. The result should not be some destructive action that America is powerless to deter.
I say this as Burma prepares for national elections, which were announced in January 2010. As I write, it was impossible to know what the outcome of these elections will be and, more important, how they will be conducted and what pent-up political forces they will unleash. But the very holding of them may indicate that constructive engagement between the West and the Burmese regime will achieve more than any American adventurism with the Burmese ethnics. The ethnics are important, no doubt, and they have been relatively ignored in media analyses of Burmese affairs, so that motivates my concentration on them. Still, democracy may be even more crucial. And the decision to hold elections in the first place seemed at least partly to be the fruit of the Obama administration’s outreach to the junta.
If America is destined in some way, as these four Americans believe, to become enmeshed in Burmese politics—as it was with Afghan tribes in the 1980s, Yugoslavian ethnic groups in the 1990s, Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq in this decade, as well as Afghan tribes once again—then some historical background is in order. For “the most striking aspect of the Burma debate today is its … singularly ahistorical nature,” writes historian Thant Myint-U, who goes on:
Dictatorship and the prospects for democracy are seen within the prism of the past ten or twenty years, as if three Anglo-Burmese wars, a century of colonial rule, an immensely destructive Japanese invasion and occupation, and five decades of civil war, foreign intervention, and Communist insurgency had never happened.6
So consider the following, therefore, as a very short primer for possible headlines to come in future years.
Burmese history was affected by geographical fluidity on the one hand and by religious-cultural isolation on the other. Whereas trade routes brought Burma into contact with both China and the Indian Subcontinent, Burma’s Theravada Buddhism isolated it from both Hindu India and Confucian China.7 The result is a unique history that was, nevertheless, influenced by outsiders.
In the Middle Ages there were three principal kingdoms in the plains and jungles between India and Siam (Thailand): those of Arakan, Mon, and Myanmar, the last being the Burman word for the central Irrawaddy River valley and its environs. Myanmar eventually conquered the other two kingdoms in the late eighteenth century. Henceforth, the Mon capital of Dagon was renamed Yangon, the Burman word for “The End of Strife,” corrupted by foreigners into “Rangoon.” In addition, there were the hill kingdoms of the Chin, Kachin, Shan, Karen, and Karenni which remained independent, even as they were attacked by marauders from Myanmar. These hill kingdoms were also divided from within: for example, the strife-torn Shan States were also home to hostile Was, Lahus, Paos, Kayans, and other tribal peoples. Larger than England and France combined, this whole, sprawling crazy quilt of vaguely demarcated states was sectioned by a horseshoe of jungly mountain ranges, as well as by the river valleys of the Irrawaddy, Chindwin, Salween, and Mekong. The considerable ethnic diversity is evinced by the fact that Burma’s various peoples trace their historic migrations back to Tibet, China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Cambodia, and so, for example, the Chin in western Burma have almost nothing in common with the Karen in eastern Burma.8 Nor is there any community of language or culture between the Shans and the Burmans save their Buddhist religion. Indeed, the Shans, who have migrated often in their history, have much more in common with the Thais across the border.* As for the Arakanese, heirs to a cosmopolitan seaboard civilization with influences particularly from Hindu Bengal, they have felt themselves so disconnected from the rest of Burma that they compare their plight to disenfranchised nations in the Middle East and Africa.9 Only the Karen are spread out rather than restricted to a specific ethnic-national territory, with significant concentrations of them in both the eastern hill tracts and in the Irrawaddy delta.
In 1886 the British toppled the Burmese monarchy and annexed this whole area to their Indian empire. Though colonial rule lasted only sixty-two years, as Martin Smith writes in his comprehensive Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity, by moving the center of power from the royal courts at Ava and Mandalay in the heart of Burma to Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta hundreds of miles south on the Bay of Bengal, the British robbed the country of whatever geographic logic it had ever possessed. What’s more, the British incorporated into their territory “thousands of square miles of rugged hill tracts and loosely independent mini-states” that were home to diverse minorities.10
The destruction of the monarchy stripped the country of centuries of tradition that had fortified society in the Irrawaddy valley since before the Middle Ages. “The new Burma, British Burma, would be adrift,” writes Thant Myint-U, “suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past,” prone to bitter nationalism and extremism.11 It was as if the British in 1886 threw Burma off a cliff from which it is still falling, 124 years later.12 The British approach was classic divide and rule. They favored the hill tribes with local autonomy, and recruited Karens, Shans, Kachins, and other ethnics into the local army and police, even as they exerted direct and repressi
ve control over the numerically dominant Burmans of the valley.* Had the Tory leader Winston Churchill won the 1945 election in Great Britain, the hill peoples might have become independent principalities of their own, as a reward for defending the British Empire against the Burmans, who, having chafed under British rule, became Japanese sympathizers. But the Labour Party candidate, Clement Attlee, won the election and decided to give all of Burma independence as a single unit, without a clear-cut road map to ethnic reconciliation.
During World War II the Burmese leader General Aung San and thirty comrades had gone to Japan and raised a nationalist army that would welcome the Japanese into Burma. But when Aung San returned to Burma in the midst of the war, he soon realized that the Japanese were even worse occupiers than the British had been and fortuitously switched sides. After the war he entered into negotiations with Attlee, but the ethnics claimed that Aung San, as an ethnic Burman, could not represent them. In their eyes, he could negotiate only on behalf of Burma proper—that is, historic Mon, Arakan, and Myanmar—not the Chin, Shan, Karen, and other hill tracts. So Aung San backtracked and, in a very wise and open-minded gesture, agreed to conduct separate negotiations with the ethnics. Aung San looked next door at India and would see how inter-communal carnage following independence had led to a million refugees and tens of thousands dead in Bengal and the Punjab. As India moved toward bloody partition, he was determined that Burma avoid India’s strife.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 28