Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Nonetheless, India, pointed out Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, is itself compromised in its relations with Sri Lanka, less because of its failed intervention in 1987 than because of the signal fact of Tamilnadu, the Indian state practically adjoining Sri Lanka, which is the ethnic homeland of Sri Lanka’s embattled minority Tamils. Because of political pressure from Tamilnadu exerted on politicians in New Delhi, India must strive to support Sri Lanka’s Tamils, even as it competes with China and Pakistan for friendship with Colombo’s Sinhalese authorities. But as Saravanamuttu went on to say, India’s very tangled and troubled relationship with the island makes a solution to the Sinhalese-Tamil dispute crucial to its interests. True ethnic reconciliation in Sri Lanka is an Indian goal more than a Chinese one.

  In the spring of 2009, the methodical government offensive intensified in take-no-prisoners style. The war was declared over on May 18, when Prabakharan’s body was displayed on television, as the last few hundred yards of Tamil Tiger territory were taken. The next morning, safely out of jail from my trespassing scrap, I drove through the southern coastal heartland of the Sinhalese. Everywhere there were parades and flag-bedecked, horn-honking rickshaw convoys, with young men, many of them unemployed, shouting and setting off masses of firecrackers. Posters of President Rajapaksa were everywhere. Villagers lined the roads offering free food served on palm leaves to passersby. Prabakharan’s body was dragged and burned in effigy. In the case of the young men, I sensed a scary and wanton boredom in their actions, as if the same crowds, under different circumstances, could be setting fire to Tamil homes, as had happened in earlier decades. It was noteworthy that the closer I got to the ethnically mixed population center of Colombo, the demonstrations were less in evidence.

  Yet it truly was an event to celebrate. Prabakharan had been causing death and destruction to a much greater extent and for a much longer period than Osama bin Laden in the case of the United States. This was the kind of clear-cut, demonstrable victory that any American administration could only hope for, even as the methods used by the Sri Lankan government to attain it could—and should—never be replicated by the U.S.

  That same morning I stopped in the town of Tangalla to watch Rajapaksa’s victory speech to the parliament broadcast on national television. Gathered before a large screen especially arranged for the event were hundreds of people waving the distinctive Sri Lankan flag: a lion against a maroon background symbolizing the Sinhalese, with smaller orange and green stripes for the Tamil and Muslim communities. It seemed at first a brilliant Machiavellian performance: be absolutely ruthless in war and generous in victory. After gutting the rights of ethnic Tamils and of the media for years, Rajapaksa spoke repeatedly of national reconciliation. He began his speech not in Sinhala but in Tamil. He talked of an ethnically united country: “We must all live as one.” Moreover, he mentioned development, education, and health care for the Tamil minority. In the past he had spoken thus in international forums, but never so humanely and comprehensively before a domestic audience. Though no specific programs were announced, there seemed more hope than there had been in years that Sri Lanka was on the path to national recovery.

  On the other hand, he had no apologies or remorse for the victims of the war. He would promise the Buddhist monks in Kandy several days later that “our motherland will never be divided [again].” Furthermore, he told them that there were only two types of Sri Lankans, those who love the motherland and those who do not. And yet democracy, as imperfect as it is, has a way of working wonders. Months later, in order to win a national election, Rajapaksa had no choice but to court the Tamil minority. And that, in turn, led the Buddhist leader to do such things as offer public prayer at a Hindu temple. The religious divide in Sri Lanka was never as wide as the ethnic one, and the ethnic one could be bridged, it turned out. With the Christian Prabakharan dead, Sri Lanka now looked set to enter a new and productive phase of history. The diplomats and NGO officials I had met during my visit were by and large skeptical about Rajapaksa’s ability to reform himself. But one hoped that their pessimism was misplaced. And if it was, we can thank democracy for it.

  As we’ve seen, it was the Chinese who had partly allowed this victory to happen, since for the West, to its credit, not even the most desirable of ends could justify certain means. Yet, as morally uncomfortable as it may be to countenance, the Chinese aid model does have its logic. In his 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington points out what Thomas Hobbes and Walter Lippmann had observed earlier, that authority, even of a brutal kind, is preferable to none at all. Oh, how we have learned that lesson in Iraq! While we in the West scan the developing world for moral purity, decrying corruption in backward societies, the Chinese are content with stability, no matter how illegitimately conceived. Our foreign aid emphasis is on democracy, human rights, and civil society; theirs is on massive infrastructure projects and authority, civil or not.

  We should keep in mind that our goals have been determined by our own unique historical experience, which, as Huntington notes, has been about limiting the power of authority, since our institutional practices were imported easily from seventeenth-century England, whereas much of the rest of the world has had to build a legitimate authority from scratch.19 Thus, America’s historical experience is not always irrelevant to many of the very countries that will be at center stage in the new century. Weak, unresponsive, or nonexistent government institutions define significant swathes of geography, as we are still living, and will be for some more decades, with the aftermath of the dismantlement of European empires that have exposed regimes in Eurasia and Africa to the rigors of modernity.

  The competition between the development models of America and China is, of course, most pronounced in Africa, at the western end of the Indian Ocean, but it is Burma where I next want to turn, a place where not only the United States and China, but India, too, is deeply involved. Burma will be as pivotal to the Bay of Bengal region as Pakistan will be to the Arabian Sea. Whereas Pakistan is akin to the Balkans, with its tendency for dissolution, Burma is like early-twentieth-century Belgium, with its tendency to be overrun by great contiguous powers.20

  * During the entire period I was detained I was well treated, a testament to the professionalism of the local police, at least in my case, and the intercession of the United States Embassy in Colombo.

  † Hambantota means “sampan-harbor,” a reference to the flat wooden boats used here in ancient times, and still used in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam; Hamban being a corruption of sampan. Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, Rhythm of the Sea (Hambantota, Sri Lanka: Hambantota District Chamber of Commerce, 2007), p. 23.

  * Though India also enjoys close relations with the Maldives and Bhutan, these are micro-states in their own category.

  † Sri Lanka’s largest export market is the United States, to which it supplies finished textiles such as lingerie.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BURMA

  WHERE INDIA AND CHINA COLLIDE

  Monsoon clouds crushed the dark, seaweed green landscape of eastern Burma. The steep hillsides glistened with teak, coconut palms, black and ocher mud from the heavy rains, and tall, chaotic grasses. When night fell, the loud buzz saw of cicadas and the pestering croaks of geckos competed with the downpour. I stumbled on three bamboo planks over a fast-moving stream into Burma, guided by an ethnic Karen soldier with a torchlight attached by naked copper wires to an ancient six-volt battery slung around his neck. The danger was less Burmese government troops than the Thai military. Because of logging and other commercial interests, the democratically elected government of Thailand at the time was a close friend of the military regime in Burma. The Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej had said that the ruling Burmese generals are “good Buddhists” who like to meditate, and that Burma is a country that “lives in peace.” Thus, the Thai military was on the lookout for Karen soldiers who
as a minority hill tribe have been fighting successive Burmese regimes since 1948.

  “It ended in Vietnam, in Cambodia. When will it end in Burma?” asked Saw Roe Key, a Karen I met as soon as I had crossed the border, who lost a leg to a toe-popper anti-personnel mine. It was the kind of mine with which the military regime has littered villages throughout the hill tracts of Burma, which cover 40 percent of the country, and where more than a half dozen ethnic groups, including the Karen, have long been in some stage of revolt. Of about two dozen Karens I met at an outpost just inside Burma, four were missing a leg from a mine. They were otherwise a motley collection. Some wore green camouflage fatigues, and were armed with M-16s and AK-47s; most were in T-shirts and traditional skirts (longyis). The outpost was a jumble of wooden plank huts on stilts, roofed with dried teak leaves, and built into a hillside under the forest canopy. It was continually being devoured by beetles, malarial mosquitoes, and other insects, yet was equipped with a solar panel and an ingenious water system. Beyond it beckoned perfectly rugged guerrilla country at a strategic junction of the Indian Ocean world. Here in this jungle was not only where anti-regime ethnic guerrillas and the Burmese government collided, but where an India looking eastward and a China looking southward did, too.

  Sawbawh Pah, fifty, a small, stocky man with a tuft of hair on his scalp, ran a clinic for wounded soldiers and people uprooted from their homes, of which there have been 1.5 million in Burma. With three thousand villages razed in Karen State alone, the Washington Post calls Burma a “slow-motion Darfur.”1 Pah told me, with a simple, resigned expression, “My father was killed by the SPDC [State Peace and Development Council, the Burmese junta]. My uncle was killed by the SPDC. My cousin was killed by the SPDC. They shot my uncle in the head and cut off his leg while he was looking for food after the village was destroyed.” During a meal of fried noodles and eggs, in which a toilet roll substituted for napkins, I was inundated with life stories like Pah’s whose power lay in their grueling repetition.

  Major Kea Htoo, the commander of the local battalion of Karen guerrillas, had reddened lips and a swollen left cheek from chewing betel nut his whole life. He saw his village burnt, along with his family’s “paddy,” or rice. “They raped the women, they killed the buffalo.” They were the SPDC or, if the event occurred before 1997, the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), the menacing acronym by which the Burmese junta previously was known. He, like the others I met, including the four with missing limbs, all told me that they saw no end to the war. They were not fighting for strictly a better regime in Burma, composed of more enlightened military officers, nor for a democratic government that would likely be led by ethnic Burmans like Aung San Suu Kyi, but for Karen independence. Tu Lu, missing a leg, had been in the Karen army for twenty years. Kyi Aung, the oldest at fifty-five, had been fighting for thirty-four years. These guerrillas were paid no salaries. They received only food and basic medicine. Life for them had been condensed to a seemingly unrealistic goal of independence, mainly because nobody since Burma first fell under military misrule in 1962 had ever offered them anything resembling a compromise.

  For the moment, the war in Burma was on an exceedingly low boil, with the military junta trapping the Karens, Shans, and other ethnics into small redoubts of territory near the Thai border. Yet the regime, beset by its own problems—a corrupt and desertion-plagued armed forces—seemingly lacked the strength for the final kill. And the ethnics were tough, with a strong sense of historical identity that had little connection to the Burmese state. So they tried to fight on.

  Burma’s agony could be reduced to the singular inconsequential fact that because of endless conflict and gross, regime-inflicted underdevelopment, it is still sufficiently primitive to maintain an aura of romance. Thus, it joins Tibet and Darfur in a trio of causes, whose moral urgency in each case is buttressed by an aesthetic fascination for its advocates in the post-industrial West. In 1952 the British writer Norman Lewis published a book about his travels throughout Burma, Golden Earth, a spare and haunting masterpiece in which the insurrections of the Karen, Shan, and other hill tribes hover in the background, helping to make the author’s travels dangerous and, therefore, extremely uncomfortable. Only a small region in the north, inhabited largely by the Kachin, was “completely free of bandits or insurgent armies.” He spent a night tormented by rats, cockroaches, and a scorpion, yet woke none the worse in the morning to the “mighty whirring of hornbills flying overhead.” Indeed, his bodily sufferings were a small price to pay for the uncanny monochromatic beauty of a country of broken roads and no adequate hotels where “the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock markets as a topic for polite conversation.”2 What is shocking about this more-than-half-century-old book is how contemporary it seems. Think of all the places where because of globalization even a ten-year-old travel book is already out of date.

  But Burma is more than a place for which to feel sorry. And its ethnic struggles are of more than obscurantist interest. For one thing, with a third of the country’s population composed of ethnic minorities in its friable borderlands—accounting for seven of Burma’s fourteen states—the demands of the Karens and other minorities truly will come to the fore once the regime does collapse. Democracy will not solve Burma’s dilemma of being a mini-empire of nationalities, even if it does open the door to a compromise. More than that, however, Burma’s hill tribes are part of a new and larger canvas of geopolitics. Burma fronts on the Indian Ocean, by way of the Bay of Bengal. It is bordered by India and China, both of which covet Burma’s abundant reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, zinc, copper, precious stones, timber, and hydropower. China, especially, desires Burma as a vassal state for the construction of deep-water ports, highways, and energy pipelines that will provide China’s landlocked south and west access to the sea, from where China’s ever-burgeoning middle class can receive deliveries of oil from the Persian Gulf. And these routes must pass from the Indian Ocean north through the very territories plagued historically by Burma’s ethnic insurrections.

  In short, Burma provides a code for understanding the world to come. It is a prize to be fought over, as China and India are not so subtly doing. Recognizing the importance of what Burma and its neighbors represent at a time of new energy pathways, unstable fuel prices, and seaboard natural disasters like Burma’s 2008 cyclone and the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the U.S. Navy has suggested that it will no longer be forward-deployed permanently in the Atlantic, but instead will concentrate in the coming years and decades on the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. For the navy and the marine corps, too, Indian Ocean states like Burma are now, or should be, central to their calculations.

  Strategic, romantic, and a moral catastrophe, Burma is a place that tends to consume people. And a very interesting group of Americans are consumed by it. In some cases, I cannot identify them by name, because of the tenuousness of their position in neighboring Thailand, which they use as a base (and where I interviewed them); in other cases, because of the sensitivity of what they do and for whom they work. But their story is worthwhile to tell because of the expertise they bring to bear, and what their own goals say about the geopolitical stakes in Burma.

  Lately, it has become fashionable to extol the virtues of cultural area expertise given how the lack of it contributed to the mess in Iraq, even as it is forgotten that America’s greatest area experts have been Christian missionaries. American history has seen two strains of missionary-area experts, the old Arab hands and the Asia, or China, hands. The Arab hands were Protestant missionaries who traveled to Lebanon in the early nineteenth century and ended up founding what was to become the American University in Beirut. From their lineage descended the State Department Arabists of the Cold War era. The Asia hands have a similarly distinguished origin, beginning, too, in the nineteenth century and providing the U.S. government with much of its area expertise through the early Cold War, when a number of them were unjustly purged during the McCarthy-era hear
ings on China. The American who counseled me on Burma was the descendant of several generations of Baptist missionaries from the Midwest who ministered to the Burmese hill tribes beginning in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the Shan States and across the Chinese border in Yunnan. His father was known as the Blue-eyed Shan. Escaping Burma on the heels of the invading Japanese, his father was conscripted into Britain’s Indian Army in which he commanded a Shan battalion during World War II. Thus, my acquaintance had grown up in India and postwar Burma. Among his earliest memories was the sight of Punjabi soldiers ordering work gangs of Japanese prisoners of war to pick up rubble in the Burmese capital of Rangoon. With no formal education, he spoke Shan, Burmese, Hindi, Lao, Thai, and the Yunnan and Mandarin dialects of Chinese. He had spent his life studying Burma, though the 1960s saw him elsewhere in Indochina aiding America’s effort in Vietnam.