civil war, crime, and ungoverned spaces

With Burmese characteristics

“Yuck, seen this movie and did not like it” was my initial reaction to an article this morning discussing the explosion of crime in war-wracked Myanmar. I was lucky I had the chance to make it to Nay Pi Daw, the strange, manufactured capital in the south central portion of a startlingly beautiful country, for an ASEAN multilateral conference. I was privileged interact with several impressive women academics in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) on an official delegation in 2015. I had always wanted to go, particularly after reading about the country’s peculiar devotion to the written word in Emma Larkin’s masterful, Finding George Orwell in Burma. It’s rare a book brings a place to life as her 2006 descriptions did, meaning Burma was a must do for me.

Larkin described networks of people who resisted against the decades of military rule in innovative ways. A country replete with far more education than I knew before reading her book, the subtext of a society determined to carry on to advance itself despite the onerous military presence was inspiring. Additionally, reading of the shards of hope still resident in Burmese citizens, at least in urban areas, helped explain why the country had a brief renaissance and still holds some hope for the future.

A brief opening between 2011 and 2018, when the military (so prone to complete hostility to everyone as they ironically controlled all of the levers of power) stepped back for a few years to let a more representative form of government experiment transpire. Ultimately, the armed forces eventually became too frightened of accountability, of loss of so much money, of the outside world interfering with the fragile balance of the place so they yet again jailed the country’s most prominent figure, Aung San Sui Kyi. A further narrow attempt at participatory, elected government still tried to revamp the country until a coup snuffed out the pro-democracy experiment early in February 2021.

It’s been a chaotic civil war since. The people of Myanmar are willing to fight oppression in ways few countries do. That internal upheaval is further tragedy for a people who suffered under British colonialism, then the pain of Japan’s Imperial troops on the ground in the furthest westward expansion of World War II in Asia, followed by the assassination of the primary independence leader (Aung San Sui Kyi’s father) within months of ending Britain’s colonial hold in 1947. The next five decades of a merry-go-round of military ruler were harsh, leaving Burma one of the most isolated places in the world before the surprise of change in 2011.

The point of the aforementioned article is that Myanmar, as the generals so carefully renamed the country in hopes of forgetting the indignities and cruelties they wrought as earnestly as any foreign colonizing force, is becoming a world center for transnational crime, sex trafficking and drugs. It’s one further indignity on top of generations of them.

If this sounds like Afghanistan in the 1980s after the Soviets departed, it probably should. Ominously, Afghanistan and Myanmar share a number of common challenges that are really what matters as I look at the country.

For all of our fractions, distrust, and violence, the United States and any other western country is decades ahead of Myanmar which is something we take for granted—and yet that’s a great deal of the problem for the citizens there. That liberal international order, built after World War II on the sanctity of nation-states is hard to find in this fascinating, geostrategically-placed land. We assume if a “country” gained the recognition to enter the United Nations and be part of the international system, that is the country we expect to see continue in its current configuration.

Yet this place doesn’t really exist in a meaningful configuration, as the article indicates.

It was the same in Afghanistan.

But, the swirl of civil war rarely remains entirely contained within the confines of political boundaries recognized by the international community. Things are often, as here, much messier than that.

One of the most fascinating parts of this country is its ethnic make up. Note I use country which is a legal term of a land, governed by a central regime who control the policies and trajectory (in theory) of those who live there.

Burma, named after a major but hardly the only ethno-linguistic group, is truly the epitome of a multi-ethnic place, one where it’s impossible to use the term nation (people with a common religion, ethnicity, culture, language, and other social attributes) with any fidelity. Burma simply has too many differing groups—always threatening to rip the place apart— because the topography of the place, like Afghanistan, is so fractured as to invite small, exclusive bands or communities to operate at will. One frequently hears of the Shan State, a de facto autonomous area within the country. If a government isn’t sovereign, meaning no one is above it, then it is bound to have trouble setting rules for these smaller groups. Not a good thing for a sovereign government in control.

Even if Myanmar’s borders were strong, which they are not, too many of those small religious or ethnic or animist populations cross back and forth at will into neighboring states, depending on how the Thais to the east, the Laotians to the northeast, the Chinese to the north, or the Bangladeshis to the west are feeling about border crossings. This means they set their own policies, in effect, with definite consequences.

Here is a link to an ethnic map of Burma (courtesy of the Perry Casteneda Library at the Univeristy of Texas), retrieved at https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/thailand_ethnic_1974.jpg

Similarly, a topographical map of the same country (courtesy of the International Institute for Strategic Studies), retrieved at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cia+map+of+burma+ethnic+groups&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fmyanmar.iiss.org%2Fimg%2Fthumbnail-light.png

The central government in Nay Pi Daw, this peculiarly isolated Potemkin’s village serving as capital that makes one wonder how a regime could be so craven as to spend money on the aspiration rather than isolated villages affected by monsoons at times, simply doesn’t control a great deal of the country. The same was true for Kabul governing Afghanistan and, at times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bogota’ could not control whole swaths of Colombia. Alternate groups too often controlled the economy, carried out civilian government functions, and played a greater role in people’s lives than did the central government in the capitals.

The military in Myanmar simply does not have that genuine sovereign control in Maymar. As Dr. Zach Abuza of the National War College has written repeatedly about the war in this country over the past four years, this civil war is a complete mess because so much of it is driven by petty economic interests trying to shut out other interests. Dr. Abuza’s work tracks this chaos better than anyone in English so never pass up reading him.

Factions within the military, as occurring in Myanmar, pit themselves with one local criminal group against others—and definitely against any whole of nation interests. This further undermines predictability that would endorse the rule of law by the “government”. This leads too often to applying rule by law against the “outs” at the hands of the “ins”. But the Burmese citizens continue fighting against the military as do the other smaller, more autonomous groups. Oh, boy.

The ethnic divisions, the competitions, the historic experiences make for an impossible place when the central government cannot de facto control the country. Illegal activity, whether gun-running, drugs (consumption, trading, or merely growing), targeted violence, sex and people smuggling, and other non-traditional societal behaviors become the norm in areas where the government cannot promise its citizens security, safety, equal justice under the law. In a place like Myanmar, where too many miscreants escape across trans-borders makes keeping control even harder.

This particular country, bordering resource voracious China, also sees an illegal proliferation of mining operations at the hands of criminal factions who Chinese interests exploit. These mines can perpetuate toxic run off into communities attempting to generate legitimate income and maintain a decent standard of living for the next generation. But, the incentives to deviate from the norms of a coherent, cohesive society too often overwhelm those trying to keep to the straight and narrow path.

With the ruling military so inbred in its illegitimacy over virtually the whole of the country’s independence period, bad results ensue. Similarly tragic fighting to become the central government or at least protect these ethnic micro-territories leads to an ungoverned if not ungovernable state. The degraded transparency rewards illicit deals with domestic and international consequences. In short, Myanmar’s trajectory is as pessimistic, at the heart of the age-old Golden Triangle of opium, as one can imagine despite glimmers of hope a decade ago.

It was these very types of forces that opened Usama bin Laden’s route into Afghanistan thirty years ago, with disastrous effects we all remember. There is no guarantee that same outcome would occur in this Asian country (where Islam is a fall smaller portion of the equation) but the conditions on the ground seem eerily reminiscent of Afghanistan and its inability to function as a modern traditional nation-state. If anything, perhaps the challenge posed by Myanmar is even greater with a population of greater than 51 million in so many cross cutting segments of society.

The relative stability of continental Southeast Asia depends on territorial integrity, whether east or west of Myanmar. But the turmoil it roils affects its neighbors more all of the time as illegal activities proliferate through the region.

Worrisome also is China’s role as an interlocutor with various groups involved. Beijing’s concern rarely seeks to support any groups advocating norms or policies that could inhibit the Middle Kingdom’s objectives. The CCP has worked tirelessly encourage the regime in Nay Pi Daw to favor China’s acquistion of long-term commitments to the abundant natural resources. Beijing refuses to condemn illicit trade in people or drugs or money-laundering, some of which bleeds north into southern China. Beijiing also keenly cultivates transportation links through Myanmar to assure access to the Indian Ocean to avoid any possible blockages at the Strait of Malacca which could lengthen any of China’s transits from the Pacific west into the Indian Ocean and beyond. China, in short, sees all sorts of possible advantages with the unstable, weak governance now at work in Burma.

Is my point that the Trump or any subsequent U.S. administration should aggressively move into Myanmar to make it into a western-style democracy? NOTHING could be further from my mind. As the Council on Foreign Relations scholar, Ray Tayekh, concluded this week in discussing Jimmy Carter’s overall actions against the Ayatollahs following the November 1979 seizure of 44 U.S. hostages, “In this sense [not entirely grasping how his policies from Washington would play in Teheran—cw], Jimmy Carter was quintessentially American, a president who thought he could determine outcomes in a faraway country that he knew little about.”

We don’t pay enough attention to this country to choose where to put a commitment in the on-going civil war as it’s a shifting one. We know the military does bad things but with whom and for how long remains unclear.

Or, paraphrasing a former career U.S. ambassador recently on our policy towards Cuba (observing that after seven and a half decades in a country nearby), we have yet to figure out that we cannot remake societies but what we can do is incentivize them choosing policies more aligned with our interests. It is that incentivizing that we confuse with fixing problems in other places.

So, what is the meaning of the current turmoil in Myanmar? It matters for the region as neighbors watch carefully to assure the conflict remains as contained with that regime’s borders as humanly possible. The neighborhood realizes that Nay Pid Daw’s inability to address the myriad of conflicting interests, objectives, and parties can easily spill into other multi-ethnic states, particularly Thailand where the opium and illegal smuggling networks already extend.

And autonomous communities within the country yet connected to the global crime syndicates is a dangerous complexity. Opium, like cocaine three decades ago, is a worldwide business with its tentacles and money influencing Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and certainly North America. Those tentacles can have serious effects on the streets of Dubuque as well as the heroin heaps of Seattle. Yet we have yet to solve those problems so we would not likely do much better in Myanmar short term.

We can reinforce our commitment to the rule of law as a vehicle to build trust across the world but we need also recognize that we are not likely to put boots on the ground in these places because we don’t have the knowledge, the staying power, or the priority to address the Myanmar civil war contingencies viz a viz other security concerns. But we could make the choice to do so if we evaluated the threat to raise to the level of meriting a full commitment to a meaningful strategy, something we are nowhere near today. Instead, we are still talking in terms of Myanmar’s status as a civil war which we don’t think is healthy.

Yet to ignore these problems is akin to saying “magic happens here”, a particularly belittling term we used to use at the War College when we could not create a meaningful set of policy objectives or ways and means to do much in regard to threats like Myanmar. What do we think is important about this place, if anything, that is worth putting any investment of time or resources? We need figure that out if we might confront a danger from this civil war and its web of international crime in many forms.

A fine line exists between identifying dangers and seeing how they genuinely affect our interests. Not everything does affect us yet we found out in 2001 that hithertofore ignorance can allow dangers to reach our shores. But being surprised when things continue deteriorating strikes me as daft thinking for our security so it behooves us to study through cultivating scholarship on the country, to put diplomats on the ground to engage with the multitude of voices, and to listen to the neighbors who are living the threats day in and day out. But ignoring deteriorating conditions doesn’t strike me as all that smart.

I welcome your thoughts on this as I don’t have all the answers. Please feel free to weigh in or to circulate this if you find it valuable. I appreciate your time. I also appreciate those of you who put your financial support behind this column.

It was a water color Friday morning after a fiery dawn.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Zach Abuza, “Still Standing”, InsightMyanmar.org, 28 December 2024, retrieved at https://insightmyanmar.org/quotes/2024/12/28/still-standing

Hannah Beech, “War Drives Myanmar’s Rise as a Crucible for International Crime”, NewYorkTimes, 3 January 2025: A1, A6-A7.

Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell in Burma. New York: Penguin 2006.

Ray Tayekh, “The Untold Story of Jimmy Carter’s Hawkish Stand on Iran”, WallStreetJournal, 2 Janaury 2025, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/jimmy-carter-vs-iran-the-untold-story-revealed-in-the-archives-052d4c5d?mod=latest_headlines