The rise & fall of imperial democracies: from the Beltway to Bangkok, Moscow to Manila, elected leaders are using the threat of terror to grab more power--and making the threat worse.

• Author: Kurlantzick, Joshua

In most parts of Thailand, it's difficult to avoid the vibrant nightlife. At dusk, food vendors wheel their carts out into public squares and start cooking phat thai, stir-fries, and grilled fish. Thais nibble until late: Night markets stay open until the early morning, and people shop for essentials close to midnight. Even Thailand's smallest towns usually have one or two nightspots, and Bangkok has a reputation as one of the world's after-dark capitals.

But in Yala, a small city in the deep south of Thailand, the situation is far different. As the sun sets around 6:30 in the evening, shopkeepers frantically draw metal gates over the front of their stores. Traffic exits the center city, and people hurry home as quickly, as they can, rarely walking alone. When I try to stop someone to ask for directions, he shrugs me off and walks quickly in the other direction, a coldness rare in normally friendly Thailand. Even the brothels that used to cater to visiting Malaysians don't open at night. At army checkpoints set up across the town, Thai soldiers dressed in camouflage and carrying heavy assault rifles stop locals and search them from head-to-toe. Every few hundred meters, groups of soldiers set up heavy machine guns, surrounded by sandbags, at intersections. The entire town seems cloaked in fear.

There's reason to worry. Over the past two years, the deep south of Thailand--the three Muslim-majority provinces abutting the Malaysian border--has been hit with a wave of brutal violence. Encouraged by al Qaeda's Southeast Asia affiliates, some Muslim Thais have engaged in terror attacks, and the Thai government has reacted with deadly force. Though the bloodshed has received almost no attention in the Western media, nearly 1,000 people have died during the past year. Almost every day, soldiers, schoolteachers, provincial officials, policemen, and monks are shot, knifed, or attacked with bombs. With foreign assistance, southern Thai insurgents are beginning to form into groups and launch more sophisticated attacks.

Just five years ago, southern Thailand was relatively peaceful. The army had only a limited presence in the region, and no one feared walking on the streets at night. Tourism flourished, and Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian religious leaders maintained close contacts. In fact, many political scientists cited southern Thailand as a model of how a government could successfully promote interfaith harmony and integrate a Muslim minority.

It's no surprise that the change is partially due to al Qaeda, whose networks have pressed to politicize and make more violent a growing Thai Islamism. But the ratcheting-up of the conflict also owes much to derisions made by the government itself. The leadership of the aggressive, autocratic, self-aggrandizing Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has exacerbated the insurgency problem. But though Thaksin's heavy-handed tactics--repressing independent voices in the media and bureaucracy in times of crisis, locking up members of Islamic opposition parties, and cracking down on institutions that gave the country's Muslim minorities a role in their own governance--seem like the work of a tyrant, they're not. When the most sweeping of the prime minister's actions came to light, the electorate endorsed them, returning Thaksin to office with huge majorities in Parliament.

In times of conflict, this is how even democracies tend to behave: Leaders consolidate executive power and punish dissension, while the electorate rewards them--at least initially--for such shows of strength. The war on terror has given cover to governments around the globe--from Italy. and Russia to the Philippines and Thailand to even the United States--that have followed this pattern, becoming imperial democracies. But as the example of Thailand vividly shows, heavy-handed efforts in the name of taking on terror have succeeded only in making violent Islamism a more profound and urgent threat.

Thais love Thais

Up until the turn of the twentieth century, much of southern Thailand was an independent Muslim sultanate called Pattani. When Bangkok annexed the region in 1902, anger in the Muslim population began to slowly simmer. By the 1960s and 70s, it was boiling over, and southern separatists formed a group called the Pattani United Liberation Organization, or PULO. In response, the military governments that ruled Bangkok dispatched battalions to the South, leading to constant skirmishing over the course of two decades. Still, even in the midst of the worst violence, PULO never had a strong religious component--it was instead a Malay nationalist organization. After the end of the Vietnam War, the Thai government finally focused on its problems in the south. And as the country moved to democracy in the 1980s and 90s, Bangkok utilized wise policies to pacify its southern citizens.

Thai prime ministers during this period promoted decentralization, investing local and provincial officials with more decision-making power. They also created an institution called aw baw taw, a task force comprised of local officials, military and policy commanders, and citizen representatives that provided an outlet for grievances--the aw haw...