Drawing The Line: India And Myanmar’s Unfinished Border – Analysis

Myanmar (Burma) on the left and India on the right bank of Tio River. Rihkhawdar is the busy trading broader town on the Chin State of Burma side and Zokhawdar on Mizoram State of India side. Photo Credit: Ericwinny, Wikipedia Commons


September 25, 2026
Observer Research Foundation
By Sreeparna Banerjee

Key Takeaways:

The piece frames a 2 Sept. 2026 Manipur home-minister update—about 55 km of the state’s 398-km Myanmar border fenced, rest aimed at 2028—plus a 26 May 2026 document (The Diplomat, July) on a possible ~1.4 sq mi / 3.5 sq km exchange between pillars 65–68 (Chandel / Kabaw Valley). MEA on 4 Aug. said some sectors remain unsettled and talks continue; it did not confirm a swap.

History: colonial Pemberton Line after Yandabo (1826) and 1834 Kabaw restoration; 1967 India–Myanmar agreement; ~1,472 of 1,643 km pillar-marked, ~171 km still open. After Myanmar’s 2021 coup, New Delhi treats an undemarcated line as a barrier to fencing, patrols, and crime control. FMR (1968/2018, 16 km) was suspended then ended (MHA, 8 Feb. 2024); Dec. 2024 protocol: 10 km with biometric border passes.

A swap, if ever agreed, is compared to the 2015 India–Bangladesh LBA and Berubari (1960): surveys, a treaty, Article 368 amendment, then pillars, records, and residents’ rights. Civil-society worries over villages and farmland.

The India-Myanmar border is back in the spotlight, not because the boundary itself is new, but because questions over how it should be demarcated are once again attracting attention. On 2 September 2026, Manipur’s home minister stated that, of the state’s 398-km border with Myanmar, around 55 km has been fenced, with the entire stretch targeted for completion by 2028.

Meanwhile, a reported government document dated 26 May 2026, cited by The Diplomat in July, has fuelled speculation over a possible territorial exchange. The document refers to the unresolved stretch between Boundary Pillars 65 and 68 in Manipur’s Chandel district and reportedly proposes exchanging around 1.4 square miles (3.5 sq km) of territory with adjoining Myanmar’s Kabaw Valley in the Sagaing Region. The reported proposal has not been confirmed as a decision. On 4 August, a Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson acknowledged that “there are certain areas on the border which are yet to be settled” and that “discussions on those sectors are ongoing,” but stopped short of confirming any territorial adjustment.


The issue cannot be understood without examining how the boundary came into existence. The 1,643-km frontier is largely an inheritance of the colonial era, shaped by the Treaty of Yandabo (1826) and subsequent boundary arrangements. In 1834, the British restored the Kabaw Valley to the Kingdom of Burma and tasked Major F.J. Grant and Captain Robert Boileau Pemberton with defining the Manipur-Burma boundary, giving rise to what became known as the Pemberton Line. These successive boundary-making exercises did not always correspond with pre-existing patterns of social, cultural, and economic interaction, and communities such as the Nagas, Kukis, and Mizos subsequently found themselves living on either side of an international frontier.

After independence, India and Burma sought to regularise the inherited boundary through the 1967 India-Myanmar Boundary Agreement, which established the modern alignment and created a Joint Boundary Commission for its physical demarcation. Around 1,472 km has since been demarcated through boundary pillars, leaving approximately 171 km unresolved. The present debate, therefore, is not about reopening the entire frontier, but about addressing the specific pockets where the boundary has yet to be conclusively demarcated on the ground.

A New Urgency for Demarcation

The renewed push for demarcation needs to be understood against a much wider transformation in India’s approach to its eastern border with Myanmar. For decades, the frontier was managed as a relatively porous border in which security considerations coexisted with considerable cross-border social and economic interaction. The situation has changed considerably since the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021. The intensification of conflict in Myanmar, the movement of armed groups and displaced nationals, and the expansion of transnational criminal networks have heightened India’s concerns about maintaining effective control over the frontier.

Border infrastructure has consequently become a central component of India’s security policy. India has been pursuing fencing in identified stretches of the 1,643-km boundary, alongside efforts to strengthen patrolling and surveillance. An unresolved boundary line creates an obvious practical difficulty: where stretches remain undemarcated, the construction and alignment of permanent border infrastructure becomes more complex. Demarcation is therefore not simply a cartographic exercise; it is increasingly central to the effective planning and implementation of a comprehensive border-management system.

The changing security environment also includes insurgency, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, and other forms of transnational crime. The India-Myanmar frontier connects India’s Northeast with Myanmar’s conflict-affected areas and, further east, the wider Golden Triangle. Undemarcated stretches can complicate surveillance and coordination between the two sides. For New Delhi, clearly established boundary coordinates can strengthen the legal and administrative basis for fencing, patrolling, and monitoring movement.

The FMR Question

The debate over demarcation is closely connected to India’s decision to end the Free Movement Regime (FMR). The FMR, which has existed since 1968 and was formalised in 2018, was designed to recognise the distinctive social and ethnic character of the India-Myanmar border, where communities on either side of the international boundary have longstanding familial, cultural, and economic ties. Under the earlier arrangement, eligible residents living close to the border could cross up to 16 km into each other’s territory without following normal visa or passport procedures, subject to specified conditions.

This arrangement reflected a reality the colonial boundary had never erased. Communities such as the Nagas, Kukis, and Mizos have long maintained social, familial, and economic ties across what later became an international border. The border, then, has never been merely a line separating two sovereign states; for many communities, it has also been a shared space of livelihood, education, healthcare, kinship, and marriage.

Security concerns over unrestricted movement have gained greater prominence in New Delhi’s approach to border management in recent years. The Manipur border with Myanmar has faced tighter movement restrictions since 2022, when the FMR was suspended amid Myanmar’s deteriorating security situation and concerns over a growing influx of Myanmar nationals. The porous border has also remained a major route for narcotics trafficking, compounding New Delhi’s border-security concerns.

On 8 February 2024, the Ministry of Home Affairs announced its decision to scrap the FMR, citing internal security and the need to preserve the demographic structure of India’s northeastern states bordering Myanmar. The MHA also recommended its immediate suspension while the Ministry of External Affairs undertook the formal process of ending the arrangement. However, in view of the familial ties on either side of the border, the Centre introduced a stricter replacement protocol in December 2024, allowing movement within 10 km with biometric screening through border passes issued to residents at designated crossing points.

Fencing the border has consequently become a key component of New Delhi’s border-management approach. The shift towards a more regulated movement regime marks a significant departure in India’s handling of a historically porous frontier, and makes physical demarcation considerably more consequential: greater regulation of movement and stronger physical border controls increase the need for clarity and precision in the boundary’s alignment.

At the same time, eliminating the FMR cannot by itself resolve the socio-economic consequences of a hardened border. Communities that have traditionally crossed the frontier for agriculture, trade, religious activities, medical treatment, or family reasons could face higher costs and administrative barriers. A successful border-management policy will therefore have to reconcile security requirements with the legitimate interests of border communities.

Is a Land Swap on the Table?

The possibility of a territorial exchange has attracted particular attention because of the proposed arrangement in the Molcham sector. Reports suggest that a territorial adjustment involving approximately 1.4 square miles has been discussed in connection with the disputed stretch between Boundary Pillars 65 and 68.

It is important, however, to distinguish between a proposal under examination and an agreed territorial settlement. The available reporting indicates that the proposal is being considered as a means of resolving a difficult section of the boundary; it does not establish that India has agreed to any transfer of territory, nor does it suggest that a final land swap has received the necessary governmental approvals.

The rationale for considering an exchange is essentially practical. If the existing boundary alignment produces an awkward or contested configuration on the ground, a mutually negotiated adjustment could, in theory, establish a clearer and more manageable boundary. Any such adjustment would, however, carry wider legal and administrative implications, and would bear directly on local communities and their customary land-use practices. Civil society organisations have already raised concerns on this front, particularly over the potential impact on villages, agricultural land, and established land-use patterns.

What Would a Territorial Swap Require?

India already has a precedent for negotiated territorial adjustment in the 2015 India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (LBA), under which the two countries exchanged enclaves and settled outstanding boundary issues. Its implementation required the Constitution (100th Amendment) Act, 2015, demonstrating that any transfer of sovereign territory involves more than a bilateral administrative decision.

A similar India-Myanmar arrangement would likely require joint surveys and precise demarcation to establish the territory involved, followed by a formal bilateral agreement defining the revised boundary, boundary pillars, and implementation arrangements. Given the principles set out in the Berubari judgment (1960), any proposal to transfer Indian territory would need to proceed through Article 368, the constitutional amendment procedure, rather than through ordinary legislative or executive action.

The final stage would involve ground-level implementation: relocating or installing boundary pillars, updating maps and land records, and determining the status of affected residents, including their residence, land and property rights, documentation, and, where applicable, compensation or rehabilitation.

The process would ultimately have to balance strategic border management with the rights and livelihoods of communities living along the frontier. The broader challenge, therefore, is to clarify and secure the boundary while accounting for the social and economic interests of communities that have long lived across it.

About the author: Sreeparna Banerjee is an Associate Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme.

Source: This article was published by Observer Research Foundation

About Observer Research Foundation
ORF was established on 5 September 1990 as a private, not for profit, ’think tank’ to influence public policy formulation. The Foundation brought together, for the first time, leading Indian economists and policymakers to present An Agenda for Economic Reforms in India. The idea was to help develop a consensus in favour of economic reforms.
View all posts by Observer Research Foundation →

Trump Threatens to Rename Strait of Hormuz for Himself as War Pushes Diesel Prices Toward Record High

One petroleum industry analyst now projects potential record-breaking prices for diesel fuel by Labor Day.



US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with travel industry executives in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on September 2, 2026.
(Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Brad Reed
Sep 02, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


More than six months after starting an illegal war with Iran, President Donald Trump is now threatening to rename the Strait of Hormuz, whose closure at the start of the conflict led to a global spike in energy prices.

In a Wednesday social media post, Trump falsely claimed that the strait is “under USA control” and then mused on whether to “change the name... to TRUMP STRAIT???”

“Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before!” the president added. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

In reality—despite Trump’s previous threats to declare the vital commercial waterway a US territory—the US does not have control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply travels.

Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday that Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait authority has added eleven more ships to its list of more than 50 vessels that are banned from traveling in the strait.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Wednesday also claimed that two oil tankers that were traversing the strait caught fire after striking sea mines, according to Al Jazeera.

The price of Brent crude petroleum rose once again during Wednesday trading, climbing up over $95 per barrel. Data released Wednesday by the American Automobile Association (AAA) showed that the price of gas in the US has risen to $4.12 per gallon, while the price of diesel fuel has risen to $5.69 per gallon.

While most Americans deal with the price of gasoline on a daily basis, the price of diesel fuel might have an even larger impact on the overall economy given that diesel is used to power the vehicles that ship consumer goods in the US.

In a Wednesday social media post, petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan wrote that diesel prices are rising so quickly that “we could even break the all-time diesel record ($5.819/gal) by Labor Day.”

Last month, Trump responded to collapsed trade talks with Canada by renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” Much like the illegal war with Iran, Trump’s trade war with Canada is raising prices on goods paid for by US consumers.

Facing the Crooked of Hormuz

During the Reign (Rain?) of Donald Trump

by Tom Engelhardt | Sep 1, 2026 |

Reprinted with permission from Tom Engelhardt’s Substack: 

I was born on July 20, 1944, in the midst of World War II. My father had just returned from Burma where he had been operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos in the China-India-Burma Theater. I, of course, remember nothing about that war – except that my father (on extremely rare occasions) would barely mention what he had gone through but would sometimes take me to World War II movies like The Caine Mutiny and Merrill’s Marauders at local movie theaters.

In a country that has never stopped fighting wars, however, that’s certainly the last one that any American could truly be proud of, the global defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

In fact, we’re talking about a country that, between 2001 and 2024, spent an estimated $21 trillion on its military, which, it turns out, was equal to the military spending of the next 18 – yes, 18! – countries combined (if you can even believe it). And in those years, of course, like the 55 preceding ones, the United States managed to never – no, never – actually win a significant war (or, in truth, even come close). In short, Donald Trump’s present disastrous war with Iran is anything but out of the ordinary when it comes to American military power destroying all too much, but sooner or later finding itself in a remarkably dead-end situation (with an emphasis on dead, of course).

Just imagine for a moment that you had been asked in 2001 to invest $21 trillion taxpayer dollars in a military that would fight wars across the planet without a success in sight after World War II (other than perhaps the invasion of the helpless Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983). It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the Korean War of 1950, the nightmarish Vietnam War that engulfed the 1960s and early 1970s, the Afghan and Iraq wars of this country’s calamitous War on Terror early in this century, or more recently Donald Trump’s wars, which have proven to be one disaster after another, from Somalia to Iran at this very moment.

And that should be considered strange indeed. I doubt there’s another example in history of a great imperial power that, for a significant part of its rise (and potential fall) simply couldn’t win a war.

It certainly gives that old song “War (What Is It Good For?)” with the response “absolutely nothing” new meaning. Of course, if you happen to be Donald Trump and you’re the president who simply can’t win a war (which certainly leaves you in good company among American presidents of the last 80 years or so), then the least you can do, when it comes to Iran, is declare that the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global oil and even more natural gas used to pass and which was closed down by the Iranians in response to his warring acts (distinctly harming the global economy), is now actually U.S. property, or, to be specific, a potential “territory of the United States.” (Phew, that was exhausting!)

And hard as it might be to believe, he really did say that recently. How logical, right? After all, it’s only perhaps 6,500 miles or so from Washington, D.C. So, what could possibly make more sense?

Of course, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded that, whatever Trump might think, the Strait “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech.” He added, “This strait will only be opened and closed under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade.”

Defeat Donald Trump? In what world could that possibly happen? How delusional could the Iranians be about our distinctly delusional president?

Oh, but in case you think that’s just so much enemy blather, the fact is that, in the ongoing war with Iran, the U.S. has already lost about one quarter of its crucial Reaper Drones, valued at $30 to $50 million each (or more than $1.3 billion worth of them), mainly around – yes, of course! – the Strait of Hormuz. And many of them have been taken down by Iranian drones valued at $20,000 to $50,000 each.

And while losing so many of its drones, the Trump administration has also been losing other things as well, including its previous insistence that a complete Iranian surrender was the order of the day. No longer, it seems. Now, all that it appears Donald Trump wants (whatever he’s said) is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the free flow of oil and natural gas globally. In other words, what he now yearns for is essentially a return to the very situation that existed six months ago just before he launched his disastrous war.

Or as Vice President J.D. Vance put it recently, all the Trump administration now wants is to ensure “that the Gulf countries continue to send oil and gas to the world economy so that we have energy price stability,” and, of course, to ensure as well that the Iranians won’t ever have a nuclear weapon. No matter that, as far as anyone knows, they are not faintly close to having, no less possibly even trying to develop such a weapon.

On the other hand, the Iranians are now threatening to continue the state of war with the U.S. until the end of Trump’s second term in office in 2028 (and his approval ratings are, of course, already plunging to new lows). As a senior adviser to the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard put it, “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost… We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security.”

And let’s not forget that, lest you think Donald Trump has learned anything from all of this, he has only recently been threatening to “bomb the shit out of” long-time American ally Oman, if it “gets in the way” of his Iranian plans – and what, I ask you, could possibly go wrong with that? (I can’t even imagine.)

Of course, we’re talking about the rule (or do I mean reign – or perhaps I actually mean rain, or even thunderstorms or tornados?) of Donald Trump, a president for whom, according to a recent poll, only 29% of potential voters in the coming midterm elections approve of how he’s handling the situation with Iran.

And yet, sad to say, what’s new? Not much, it seems. After all, Trump, who may indeed be unique in so many ways, is proving anything but unique as president of the greatest power on planet Earth (in certain ways, perhaps the greatest in history) when it comes to making war all too miserably, even disastrously. In fact, give him a certain amount of credit. After all, despite what anyone, including him, might have learned from American history since 1945, he decided to go to war with Iran anyway in 2026. It evidently mattered not at all to him that the most obvious and self-evident fact about American warmaking since 1945 is that defeat (or minimally nothing faintly approaching victory) would essentially be guaranteed. And yet, he still managed to launch another disastrous all-American war on this distinctly embattled planet of ours.

At the very least, the Iranians should consider renaming the Strait of Hormuz, the Crooked of Donald Trump, and let me just hope that I’ll never have to take one of my grandchildren to a movie about his disastrous war.

Tom Engelhardt created and ran the website TomDispatch.com for nearly 25 years. He was also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, “The End of Victory Culture.”

Annals of the Covert World: How Nixon Brought the CIA Into His War on Drugs

Jeffrey St. Clair

 August 7, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

US Huey Helicopter in Laos. Photo: Captain Billie D Tedford, USAF.

At 7:30 a.m., on March 16, 1968, Task Force Barker descended on the small hamlet of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of South Vietnam. Two squads cordoned off the village and one, led by Lieutenant William Calley, moved in and, accompanied by US Army Intelligence officers, began to slaughter all the inhabitants. Over the next eight hours, US soldiers methodically killed 504 men, women and children. As the late Ron Ridenhour, who first exposed the massacre, said years later, “Above My Lai were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force. All three tiers in the chain of command were literally flying overhead while it was going on. It takes a long time to kill 600 people. It’s a dirty job, you might say. These guys were flying overhead from 7:30 in the morning, when the unit first landed and began to move into those hamlets. They were there at least two hours, at 500 feet, 1000 feet and 1500 feet.

The cover-up of this operation began almost from the start. The problem wasn’t the massacre itself: polls right after the event showed 65 percent of Americans approved of the US action. The cover-up was instead to disguise the fact that My Lai was part of the CIA killing program called Operation Phoenix. As Douglas Valentine writes in his brilliant book, The Phoenix Program,

the My Lai massacre was a result of Phoenix, the ‘jerry-built’ counter-terror program that provided an outlet for the repressed fears and anger of the psyched-up men of Task Force Barker. Under the aegis of neutralizing the infrastructure, old men, women and children became the enemy. Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree. The ammunition was faulty intelligence provided by secret agents harboring grudges – in violation of the agreement that Census Grievance intelligence would not be provided to the police. The trigger was the blacklist.

The My Lai operation was principally developed by two men, the CIA’s Paul Ramsdell and a Colonel Khien, the Quang Nai province chief. Operating under cover of the US Agency for International Development, Ramsdell headed the Phoenix program in Quang Nai province, where it was his task to prepare lists of suspected NLF (called by the Americans “Viet Cong”) leaders, organizers and sympathizers. Ramsdell would then pass these lists on to the US Army units that were carrying out the killings. In the case of My Lai, Ramsdell told Task Force Barker’s intelligence officer, Captain Koutac, that “anyone in that area was considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn’t survive in that area unless they were sympathizers.”

Ramsdell had acquired this estimate from Col. Tôn Thất Khiên, who had his own agenda. For one thing, his family had been hit hard by the Tet offensive launched by the NLF earlier in the year. In addition, the NLF had seriously disrupted his business enterprises. Khien was notorious for being one of South Vietnam’s most corrupt chieftains, an officer who had his hand in everything from payroll fraud to prostitution. But Khien apparently made his really big money from heroin sales to US soldiers.

For the CIA, the need to cover its involvement in the My Lai massacre became acute in August 1970, when Sergeant David Mitchell, a member of Task Force Barker, was put on trial for killing dozens of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Mitchell claimed that the My Lai operation had been conducted under the supervision of the CIA. The Agency’s lawyer, John Greaney, successfully prevented Mitchell’s lawyers from lodging subpoenas against any Agency personnel. But despite such maneuvers, high CIA and army brass were worried that the truth might trickle out, and so General William Peers of US Army Intelligence was given the task – so to speak – of straightening out the furniture. Peers was a former CIA man whose ties to Agency operations in Southeast Asia dated back to World War II, when he supervised the OSS’s Detachment 101, the Burma campaign that often operated under the cover of Shan opium trafficking. Peers had also served as CIA station chief in Taiwan in the early 1950s, when the Agency was backing the exiled KMT supremo, Chiang Kai-shek and his henchman Li Mi.

Peers had helped design the pacification strategy for South Vietnam and was a good friend of Evan Parker, the CIA officer who headed ICEX (Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation), the command structure that oversaw Phoenix and other covert killing operations. It’s not surprising, then, that Peers’ investigation found no CIA fingerprints on the massacre and instead placed the blame on the crazed actions of the enlisted men and junior officers of Task Force Barker.

In the immediate aftermath of My Lai, the polls may have shown 65 percent approval by Americans, but it’s doubtful whether such momentary enthusiasm would have survived the brute facts of what Operation Phoenix involved. As Bart Osborn, a US Army Intelligence officer collecting names of suspects in the Phoenix Program, testified before Congress in 1972,

I never knew in the course of all of these operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.

One of the more outlandish efforts to protect the true instigators of My Lai came during the 1970 congressional hearings run by Senator Thomas Dodd (father of the present US senator from Connecticut). Dodd was trying to pin the blame for My Lai on drug use by US soldiers. He had seized on this idea after seeing a CBS news item showing a US soldier smoking marijuana in the jungle after a firefight. The senator forthwith convened hearings of his subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, and his staff contacted Ron Ridenhour, the man who had first brought the massacre to light prior to Seymour Hersh’s journalistic exposé. Ridenhour had long made it his quest to show that My Lai was planned from the top, so he agreed to testify on the condition that he would not have to deal with any foolishness about blaming the murder of over 500 people on dope.

But no sooner had Ridenhour presented himself in the hearing chamber than Dodd began to issue pronouncements about the properties of marijuana so outlandish that Harry Anslinger himself would have approved. Ridenhour got nowhere, denounced the proceedings and expostulated outside the hearing room that “Dodd is stacking the evidence. Nobody mentioned drugs at My Lai after it happened and they would have been looking for any excuse. Many, many Americans are looking for any reason other than a command decision.”

Although Dodd had simply wanted to blame My Lai on drugs and move on, the press now began to take an interest in the whole question of drug use in Vietnam by US forces. The attention prompted a congressional delegation to travel to Vietnam headed by Rep. Robert Steele, a Connecticut Republican, and Rep. Morgan Murphy, a Democrat from Illinois. They spent a month in Vietnam talking to soldiers and medics and returned with a startling conclusion. “The soldier going to Vietnam,” Steele said, “runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.” Times reckoned that the count might be even higher – perhaps as many as 80,000.

The Pentagon naturally preferred a lower figure, putting the total number of heroin addicts at between 100 and 200. But by this time President Nixon had begun to mistrust the flow of numbers out of the Defense Department and dispatched his White House domestic policy council chief, Egil Krogh Jr., to Vietnam for another look. Krogh didn’t spend time with the generals, but headed out into the field where he watched soldiers openly light up joints and Thai sticks and brag about the purity of the grades of heroin they were taking. Krogh came back with the news that as many as 20 percent of the US troops were heroin users. The figure made a big impression on Richard Nixon, who readily appreciated that although Americans might be prepared to see their sons die on the front lines battling communism, they would be far less enthusiastic at the news that hundreds of thousands of these same sons would be returning home as heroin addicts.

CIA officer Lucien Conein and Vietnamese military officers involved in the assassination of the Diem brothers.

Partially in response to these findings, Nixon recruited the CIA into his drug war. The man the Agency chose to put forward as coordinator with the White House was Lucien Conein, a veteran of the CIA’s station in Saigon, where he had been involved in the coup in 1963 that saw South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem assassinated along with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. (The Diems were regarded by President Kennedy and his advisers as insufficiently robust in pursuing the war. What the CIA proposed, local South Vietnamese generals disposed, and the Diems died in a hail of machine-gun bullets.) At the time of his death, Nhu was one of the largest heroin brokers in South Vietnam. His supplier was a Corsican living in Laos named Bonaventure Francisi.

Lucien Conein himself was of Corsican origin, and as part of his intelligence work had maintained ties to Corsican gangsters in Southeast Asia and in Marseilles. His role in the White House drug war team appears to have been not so much one of advancing an effective interdiction of drug supplies as in protecting CIA assets who were tied to the drug trade. For example, one of the CIA’s first recommendations – an instinctive reflex, really – was a “campaign of assassination” against global drug lords. The CIA argued that there were only a handful of heroin kingpins and that it would be easy to eliminate all of them. A White House policy memo from 1971 records this piece of Agency advice: “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.” On that list were relatively small-time players and those without any links to the CIA-backed KMT forces that controlled the crucial supply lines out of the Shan States. This discretion was nothing new, since there had been an agreement between Harry Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the forerunner of the DEA) and the CIA not to run any of Anslinger’s agents in Southeast Asia, lest it discommode the CIA’s complex living arrangements in the region.

Another tactic advanced by Conein was to contaminate US cocaine supplies with methedrine, the theory being that users would react violently when dosing themselves with this potion and turn violently on their suppliers. There’s no evidence that either of these schemes – assassination or methedrine adulteration – was ever put into play. But the Agency was able to convince the Nixon administration that its eradication effort should be directed at Turkey rather than Southeast Asia, said effort culminating in an attempt at export substitution, with opium growers in Anatolia being helped to set up a factory to produce bicycles.

The CIA was well aware that Turkey provided only between 3 and 5 percent of the world’s supplies of raw opium at that time. In fact, the Agency had prepared an internal survey that estimated that 60 percent of the opium on the world market was coming from Southeast Asia and noted the precise whereabouts of the four largest heroin labs in the region, in villages in Laos, Burma and Thailand. This report was leaked to the New York Times, whose reporter relayed the main conclusions, without realizing that these villages were all next to CIA stations, with the labs being run by people on the CIA’s payroll.

This article is adapted from a piece in the print issue of CounterPunch and a chapter in Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

Peace Means We’re Not Alone

Robert Koehler

July 27, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Breathe deep, sigh, embrace the next word: W-A-R.

It doesn’t go away. I write about it far too often, and every time I do I feel torn inside . . . even though I remain personally safe from it (at least for now). Words can so easily turn the actions and consequences of war into abstractions, while failing to question why it exists at all. War is simply who we are. This is a hard certainty to shatter. But . . .

“Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.”

So wrote Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail recently in the Nation. Their words start opening a deeper level of understanding, one that I’m groping for. They go on:

“It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.”

The logical conclusion, as far as I can tell, is to declare victory and then start looking for the next enemy . . . the next evil that threatens us. This is “peace”: that brief moment of silence while everyone reloads, as someone once put it. In other words, war is inevitable and ongoing. It solves nothing. It changes nothing, except to intensify people’s hatred, toward “someone,” and their desire for revenge. It shatters connection. It shatters healing.

War’s primary function is to perpetuate itself. It’s a collective addiction to power: power over others, not with them. The enemy is always present and always dehumanized. And war doesn’t always manifest itself through militarism. Consider the criminal justice system, a.k.a. the prison system, for instance.

So let me restart this column. The word I want to embrace is: P-E-A-C-E.

Peace equals evolution. Peace means power with others, not over them. And it manifests in numerous, and often unnoticed, ways. Peace is complex and rarely produces great headlines. Over the years I’ve written about many different peace organizations, which exist in many different contexts.

In essence, peace means embracing conflict, understanding it – through non-judgmental communication between everyone involved – and looking for ways to heal, rather than punish, any harm that has occurred.

Here’s part of a column I wrote about 10 years ago, after I had attended a conference on “soul repair” in Des Moines, Iowa:

“The community was out of control – the children, oh my God, the children, were sniffing gasoline and pretty much abandoning any pretense of a future – and the social and criminal-justice systems were just adding to the problem. Nothing was working.

“‘Our children slammed us against a brick wall,’ Burma Bushie said.

“This is the story of a culture in shambles. It was the early ’80s. Bushie’s community is called the Hollow Water First Nation Reserve, a village of about 900 people in eastern Manitoba, more or less at the end of the highway. There was one road in and one road out.

“They may have felt utterly isolated in their troubles, but what a few of them started to do – in synchronicity with people in other indigenous communities – has spread hope and awareness across the planet. They began reaching beyond the known (i.e., Western) world, deep into their souls and into the roots of a lost way of life, to save their children and the future. . . .

“‘Our children were acting out – not learning. That was our beginning,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t hide anymore. The Indian reservation-school system, the child welfare system – all these systems that came to help us more or less became our enemies.’

“The committed team of change-bringers began talking to one another about their own lives, as well as the troubles around them. They began addressing the issue of alcoholism, an obvious surface manifestation of far deeper matters. ‘Each time we cleared up one level, we found another,’ Bushie said. “When we got to sexual abuse – we knew that’s what we had to deal with. . . .’”

And it became a community process. When someone has been harmed, people sit in a circle as equals – victim, perpetrator, any others who are affected – and everyone has a chance to talk. When they’re not talking, they listen. There is only one goal: healing

Rupert Ross, who was at the conference with Burma Bushie, wrote about all this in his remarkable book, Returning to the Teachings. He had been a Canadian crown (i.e., prosecuting) attorney, and Hollow Water was part of his coverage area. His job was to prosecute offenders, send them to prison. He began to realize all this was doing was creating more damage to the community, and that Western “justice” had nothing to do with healing. It broke connections. It created bad guys and proceeded to dehumanize them.

He wrote, in his book: “The word ‘healing’ seems such a soft word, but, as I will show later, Hollow Water’s healing process is anything but soft. In fact, jail is a much easier alternative, because it does not require the victimizer to face the real truths about abuse.”

And this is peace: not a simplistic lull while enemies reload – that is to say, nothing at all – but the ongoing creation of a world that belongs to all of us. It’s also known as evolution.

Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.