Real-Life Rambos
Robert Kaplan's piece in this month's Atlantic is ostensibly about Burma, but what it says about US power in today's world is much, much more interesting.
The piece presents the views of a missionary and three former US Special Forces who have moved into the NGO sector in Burma and Thailand. These are not your traditional civil society folks though. The usual model for international aid and development groups is to set up a field office or two, disburse some funds, teach some classes, and issue some reports. The institutions usually try to stay out of domestic politics and draw a bright line between themselves and governments and militaries.
Kaplan's interlocutors, on the other hand, seem to be explicitly working to strengthen separatist militias and bring down the Burmese junta. One group, the Free Burma Rangers, operates in tandem with some of the ethnic militias, according to its founder:
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 Web site. We deal with the Pentagon, with human-rights groups …
This group and the others Kaplan mentions are shadowy organizations that funnel funds and humanitarian relief to hard-pressed ethnic groups, assist the militias, attempt to organize disparate tribal groups with little in common, spread information among resistance groups within Burma and from Burma to the outside world, and liaise with US government officials and military planners. Were there to be clandestine US government activity in Burma, the smart money would be on these groups being involved in some way.
Most of the funding for these groups seems to be much less interesting, though: church donations and grants, mostly. One of the people profiled was caught smuggling weed into the US to fund his activities, but the other three seem to rely on fundraising drives and grant proposals just like those more traditional NGOs use.
It's quite a testament to the strength of US civil society that is willing and able to fund all this (not to mention the better well-known groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that are also active there). It's an example of amazing private initiative and the wealth necessary to support it that few other countries' populations are both willing and able to produce. Leveraging this commitment are the Americans in the region themselves - highly competent people, often former military, who know the local languages, have dense networks of local connections, and know how to access the support of constituencies back in the US. As Kaplan points out, the US has long produced lots of these regional operators, largely via missionary movements. The global commitments that the Cold War led the military and intelligence communities to make created a whole new breed of on-the-ground operator.
It's a strange but important example of the ways US leadership in the world functions in a different way from that of many former world powers. It's not quite soft power, but not quite hard power either; and while these groups seem, at times, plugged into the US government, it doesn't look like they take orders from it. These guys bear an eery similarity to Rambo, who, in his most recent film incarnation was hanging out in the Thai jungle until summoned to wage one-man war against the Burma's military rulers. Except the real-life examples don't operate with machetes, grenade launchers, and assault rifles (at least, not as far as I know); they fight their battles by posting evidence of human rights violations online and raising funds from American churches.
Networks of independent operators like this twine through countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They don't quite run their own foreign policy, but neither can they be discounted completely by the US or other countries who are setting policy towards these regions. They could be a help, could be a hindrance, depending on how effective the US and other governments can coordinate with them and how much their policies are in line. (The Burma-focused groups Kaplan profiled seem to be at odds, for instance, with hopes for more engagement and less confrontation from the US expressed by Burmese city-dwellers to the Economist this week.) Regardless, these freelancing groups are just one of the many ways that, despite the much-heralded decline of relative US power, Americans will continue to exercise a disproportionate influence on the rest of the world for a long time to come.
