Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  The result was an agreement he made in February 1947 in the little Shan town of Panglong with the local sabwas (feudal leaders), which helped produce the Union of Burma. It was based on three principles: a state with a decentralized federal structure, recognition of the ethnic chieftaincies in the hills, and their right of secession after a number of years.

  But that July, Aung San was assassinated, and attempts at ethnic reconciliation came to a halt just as the British departed in January 1948. A new constitution was promulgated, featuring more central control, and the Karens and others consequently revolted. As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains:

  Imposing a European model of the linguistically and ethnically homogenous nation-state upon such a diverse country as Burma would have been difficult in any circumstances. It was made more arduous by Japan’s prolonged occupation and its ferocious battles with the British, which dispersed the authority of the old colonial state, leaving the country awash with political and ethnic groups with postcolonial ambitions—and guns—of their own.13

  Indeed, Burma’s ethnic morass was made worse by having become a maelstrom of jungle warfare between the British and Japanese. Burma was the theater of battle for the famed irregular warfare campaigns of 1943 and 1944 that the British launched from the northeastern Indian border town of Imphal, their rear base. These campaigns featured the legendary unconventional warrior Major General Orde Wingate, the son of Christian missionaries, who led long-range penetration units known as Chindits (an anglicized corruption of a mythical Burmese lion) deep behind Japanese lines in the Burmese jungles, supported by gliders. Before Wingate’s daring missions, the Japanese were at the gates of British India, about to invade. Wingate helped turn the tables on them. He operated in the same area that the Chinese would now have to pacify for the sake of their pipelines, were the junta to collapse. (The Father of the White Monkey, a sort of Wingate figure in his own right, had given me a 1946 first edition of the wartime memoirs of one of Wingate’s officers in Burma, with an inscription from the prophet Isaiah.)14

  The Cold War introduced new actors into the Burmese chaos, even as the warmhearted and charismatic civilian prime minister U Nu tried, ultimately in vain, to unite the country in the wake of Aung San’s death. In 1950 more than ten thousand retreating troops of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Army (Kuomintang), run out of China by Mao Zedong’s victorious communist soldiers, ensconced themselves in the Shan States. And in the next decade, Mao’s China armed a communist guerrilla insurgency against the Burmese government that operated from the hill tracts. In response to these challenges, civilian power in Rangoon floundered as the Burmese military, now dominated by ethnic Burmans (in which minorities could rise only to the rank of major), grew to 100,000. In 1961 this army under General Ne Win managed to expel the Kuomintang out of Burma and into neighboring Laos and Thailand.

  The same year in Taungya, the capital of the Shan States, non-Burman ethnic groups came together and demanded that the constitution be amended according to the spirit of the 1947 Panglong Agreement. The issue was debated in parliament and U Nu was sympathetic to the plight of the Shans in particular. Yet the response to this, and to the generally deteriorating security situation in the country, was a military coup that brought General Ne Win to power in 1962. The coup was a mercy killing for a well-meaning though increasingly ineffectual civilian administration, but it ushered in more than four and a half decades of catastrophic rule, with thus far no sign of abatement. The economy was both mismanaged and nationalized, the entire state apparatus both militarized and Burmanized, while ethnic conflict raged.

  Civil conflict boiled over in the streets of Rangoon in 1988 just as Ne Win stepped down. Coincidentally, the late general Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, had come from England to Rangoon at this time to care for her ailing mother. Aung San Suu Kyi ended up leading a spontaneous rising of hundreds of thousands of Burmese, mainly ethnic Burman students, in a freedom movement. But a new military junta, the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), quickly replaced Ne Win and in 1989 renamed the country Myanmar, after the Burman term for the central valley—a name that the ethnic hill tribes, as well as many liberal Burmans, never accepted. When the freedom movement was crushed, many of the Burman students fled to the ethnic areas. Though they had difficulty adapting to the rough physical conditions there, they established a precedent for cooperation between Burmans and the minorities.

  In 1990 the military allowed elections that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won in a landslide, even though she was now under house arrest. The military then abrogated the results. Worse, the end of the Cold War brought an end to covert Thai military support for the hill tribes who were fighting the vaguely socialist SLORC. This led to Thai business interests signing deals with the junta for logging and hydropower concessions in the ethnic borderlands. At the same time, China began to funnel billions of dollars of aid to the junta, which was further helped by the opium business in the Golden Triangle. Soon Singapore, Indonesia, and India began to embrace the regime, lured by the country’s natural resources. Thus, while military regimes were falling the world over, Burma continued to suffocate under military tyranny. In 1992, Than Shwe, the current dictator, came to power.

  Tellingly, the 2007 Saffron Revolution, which saw large demonstrations and consequent brutal repression of thousands of monks in Rangoon, Mandalay, and nearby Pakokku, went unsupported in the hill tracts. Although the uprising caught the West’s imagination, Burma’s own ethnics remained unmoved. Burma remains not only one of the most tyrannized countries in the world, along with North Korea and Zimbabwe, but also one of the most divided. Everyone substantially involved in the Saffron Revolution is now in prison, exiled, or in hiding.

  Burma today is a country where the government spends $1.10 per capita on health care and 40 cents on education, while maintaining one of the largest standing armies in the world. The Burmese army has cut through its own territory like the army of Alexander the Great through the Near East, plundering the populace while making short-lived peace deals with the Wa and splinter factions of the other tribes. Soldiers bayonet peasants’ pots in ethnic areas so that they cannot cook and will go hungry.15 Hundreds of thousands of Burmese troops are sprawled over the hilly borderlands, where thousands of villages have been destroyed and sown over with land mines, even as hundreds of thousands of people are displaced within the country, and more hundreds of thousands sit in refugee camps in Thailand. Risks of infection from HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis “are among the highest in the world.”16 Despite the energy pipeline and hydropower projects, electricity cuts and gasoline shortages plague Burmese cities. Burma may be a more miserable place now than it was during the heaviest fighting of World War II. The regime, while lacking the chilling, bureaucratic evil of Stalin or Saddam Hussein, is, nevertheless, characterized by a benightedness and careless indifference to its people, which it treats as subjects rather than as citizens.17

  Meanwhile, U.S. policy toward the Burmese regime has remained more or less unchanged over the course of several administrations. Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have all embraced the principle of Burmese democracy, even as they have demonstrated little appetite for aggressively supporting the ethnic insurgencies, however covertly. This feeds the argument that American policy toward Burma is more moralistic than moral, and that former president George W. Bush in particular, despite the intense interest in Burma of former first lady Laura Bush, was prone to the same ineffectual preachiness of which former president Jimmy Carter has often been accused on other issues. According to this logic, the U.S. should either open talks with the junta (as Obama’s State Department has recently done) rather than risk being ejected from the whole Bay of Bengal region by India and China, and leaving Burma open to mass exploitation, or support the ethnics in the effective but quiet manner that my American acquaintances in the region recommend. “Right now, we get peanuts from the U.S.,” Lian Sakh
ong, general secretary of the Burmese Ethnic Nationalities Council, told me.

  American officials responded that there is, indeed, teeth in their pronouncements. There has been a ban on investment in Burma since 1997 (though it is not retroactive, thereby leaving Chevron, which took over its concession from Unocal, free to engage in pipeline construction). New layers of sanctions were added in 2003 and in 2007, and humanitarian aid is provided through certain NGOs operating from Thailand. Moreover, the U.S., from the standpoint of realpolitik, would rather not get too deeply involved in Burma and is, therefore, happy to see its allies India and Singapore indirectly defend its interests against China. As for any form of cross-border operation in support of the Karen and Shan fighters, officials noted that the moment the word of such a policy got out, America’s embassy presence in Burma would be gutted.

  Nevertheless, according to Jack Dunford of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, the United States is the only major power that sends the junta a “tough, moral message, which usefully prevents the International Monetary Fund and World Bank from dealing with Burma,” and thus allowing it to build even more dams and infrastructure to further rape the landscape. U.S. policy, Dunford went on, “also rallies Western and international pressure that has led to cracks in the Burmese military.” The regime will collapse one day, according to this line of thinking, maybe sooner than later, and that will put America in excellent stead with the Burmese people.

  The regime could founder in a variety of ways. Though the specter of another mass uprising excites the Western imagination, perhaps more likely is another military coup, or something more nuanced—a simple change in leadership, with the septuagenarian Than Shwe, in poor health, allowed to step aside. Then, new generals would open up talks with Aung San Suu Kyi, while releasing her from house arrest. Of course, this, by itself, even with elections, would not solve Burma’s fundamental problems. Aung San Suu Kyi, as a Nobel Peace laureate and global media star, could provide a moral rallying point that even the hill tribes would accept. But the country would still be left with no infrastructure, no institutions, and a growing but still frail civil society and NGO community, and with various ethnic groups waiting in the wings that fundamentally distrust the dominant Burmans. The National League for Democracy lacks any managerial skills, according to foreign observers, while the ethnic groups are themselves weak and divided. In this regard, Burma bears comparison with Iraq and Romania after their Stalinist regimes collapsed. Iraq fell into chaos for years, whereas Romania experienced only two weeks of chaos because another branch of the Communist Party, more liberal, wrested power from the demonstrators and led the country through a half-decade transition before finally departing. The lesson, as one international negotiator told me, is: “There will be no choice but to keep the military in a leading role for a while, because without the military there is nothing in Burma.” In power for so long, however badly it has ruled, the military has made itself indispensable to any solution.

  “It’s much more complicated than the ‘beauty and the beast’ scenario put forth by some in the West—Aung San Suu Kyi versus the generals,” said Lian Sakhong. “After all, we must end sixty years of civil war.”

  In sum, Burma must find a way to return to the spirit of the Panglong Agreement of 1947, which provided for a decentralized Union of Burma. Unfortunately, the agreement was never implemented, and thus was the cause of all the problems since.

  Even within the central Irrawaddy valley and delta, away from the hill tracts, large Karen and Mon minorities demand equality with the Burmans, promised to them by Aung San before he was assassinated. While the world demanded relief assistance for the delta inhabitants worst affected by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008, the generals, who in any case have little regard for the Karens living there, were more concerned with the preservation of civil order in nearby Rangoon. For the international community the cyclone was a humanitarian crisis, but for the generals it was only a potential security one.

  In the jungle capital of Naypyidaw, the junta may represent the last truly centralized regime in Burma’s post-colonial history. Whether through a peaceful, well-managed transition or through a tumultuous or even anarchic one, the Karens and Shans in the east and the Chins and Arakanese in the west will likely see their power increased in a post-junta, democratic Burma. That means the various pipeline agreements may have to be negotiated or renegotiated, at least to some degree, with the ethnic peoples living in the territories through which the pipelines would pass. The struggle over the Indian Ocean, or at least the eastern part of it near the top of the Bay of Bengal, may come down to who deals more adroitly with the Burmese hill tribes.

  * By appointing special envoys for Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan-Pakistan, and North Korea, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been freed up to concentrate on the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific regions. Structurally, the State Department is now better organized than in decades for adjusting to a rising China and India.

  * “Burmese” signifies a nationality, “Burman” an ethnicity.

  * For example, the Ahoms, a Shan people, migrated down the Brahmaputra and clashed with the Mughals in the early seventeenth century.

  * In Brigadier Bernard Fergusson’s memoir of World War II in Burma, The Wild Green Earth (London: Collins, 1946), he writes (p. 133): “I can do no more than commend that gallant race [of Kachins] to my countrymen, who are mostly unaware of its heroics and unsupported war against the Japs. To carry on their own, independent way of life, they will need our protection … like that other splendid race the Karens.” This was typical of the favorable British attitude toward the hill tribes.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  INDONESIA’S TROPICAL ISLAM

  In early 2005, I was embedded on a United States Navy destroyer conducting relief work in the aftermath of the December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami, when the waters off Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra jutting out into the Bay of Bengal were, in one officer’s words, like a “floating cemetery.” Shoes, clothes, and parts of houses were in the sea; “it was like whole lives were passing by.” The tsunami marked the first time that these officers and sailors had seen dead bodies. In the spring of 2003 some of them had fired Tomahawks into Iraq from another destroyer, and then run over to a television to learn from CNN what they had hit. For them Iraq had been an abstraction. But going ashore by helicopter at Banda Aceh they had observed trees, bridges, and houses laid down in an inland direction, as if by high-pressure firehoses. It was a natural disaster, not a war, that had matured these young men and women in uniform.1

  Whereas the former Special Forces officers I met on the Thai-Burmese border represented the unconventional side of American power projection and relief assistance in the Bay of Bengal, these officers and sailors represented the conventional end of the spectrum. Yet as we shall see, the influence of the United States is limited when set against the vast, deep, and complex array of environmental, religious, and social forces impacting this region.

  The earthquake that measured 9.3 on the Richter scale caused a tsunami that traveled at nearly 200 miles per hour at a height of more than 60 feet. It killed close to 250,000 people in Indian Ocean littoral countries: perhaps comparable to the number of people who have died violently in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. The tsunami, which destroyed 126,000 houses in northern Sumatra alone, brought about damage over a radius of thousands of miles in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, the Seychelles, Madagascar, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and other nations. Its impact was a demonstration of the fragility of our planet and the natural forces that may be poised to reshape history.

  Four years later I returned to the epicenter of this destruction, to an unreal landscape in Banda Aceh of mass graves holding tens of thousands of bodies under mute, empty fields; brand-new mosques, asphalt roads, and little iron-roofed housing communities; and wholly intact ships still stranded far inland where the great wave had deposited them. More than
three miles from the beach, in the midst of a field with roosters running through the tall grass, improbably stands the Ltd. Bapung, a 2600-ton ship once used for generating 10.5 megawatts of electricity. It is over 200 feet long with a rusted red hull towering 60 feet, atop which is the much taller superstructure and filthy smokestack—like a massive industrial age factory. Close by, almost as an afterthought, is a 70-foot-long fishing boat resting on the roofs of two houses, where it came to settle.

  I saw a mosque with buckled pillars—as if a mighty Samson had stood in their midst and pushed them apart—that had somehow survived. Another miracle was the waters that had swept up to the steps of the palatial Grand Mosque itself, only to recede. This is more than local lore. Photos show the truth of these events. The tsunami, like the great natural occurrences of the Bible, has had deep religious—and, therefore, political—significance in the region. The tsunami has clarified northern Sumatra’s historically unique and contentious relationship with Indonesia’s central government located on the main island of Java, even as it has, more significantly, affected the extraordinarily complex struggle for the soul of Islam itself in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, and the fourth most populous country in the world.

  The future of Islam will be strongly determined by what happens in Indonesia, where Middle Eastern forces from puritanical Saudi Wahabi groups to fashionably global Al Jazeera television compete for people’s hearts and minds against local forest deities and the remnants of polytheism. Nothing impacts religions as much as incomprehensible and destructive natural events. Indeed, religion came about as a reaction to the world of nature. All of Indonesia’s 240 million people live inside a ring of fire: amid continental fault lines, shifting tectonic plates, massive deforestation, and active volcanoes. Half the people in the world who live within seven miles of an active volcano live in Indonesia. “After the tsunami, Islam here became more self-conscious, more self-aware almost,” observed Ria Fitri, a women’s activist and law professor.