SOUTHEAST ASIA BORDER WAR

Thailand’s latest escalation with Cambodia has been framed, from Bangkok, as something more precise than a

: a campaign against the scam industry — the casinos, the sealed compounds, the “special economic zones” that are not quite economies and not quite legal, where fraud is

and human beings are treated like replaceable cables in a server rack. Thailand says it is not attacking Cambodia as a nation so much as striking a criminal ecosystem embedded in Cambodian territory.

That framing is not invented out of thin air. The

is real, vast, and brutal. Along parts of the Cambodian border, online fraud operations have reportedly relied on trafficked labour — people lured by fake jobs, then locked behind gates, beaten, forced to run romance scams, investment scams, impersonation scams, day after day, under the fluorescent logic of quotas.

But when fighter jets cross a border, language becomes a

too.

Thailand’s military has presented its strikes as a kind of

: hitting scam-linked complexes that, it argues, also serve military functions — storing weapons, staging forces, launching drones.  To many Thais, that story has an internal coherence. Scam networks have bled Thai households dry, humiliated families, and corroded trust in the

. Bangkok has also been tightening its domestic crackdown — seizing assets and issuing warrants tied to scam syndicates — and the border campaign fits into that larger “state fights back”

.

From a Thai point of view, the temptation is obvious: if scams are transnational, enforcement must become

too. If Cambodian border towns host compounds that launder money,

, and target Thai citizens, then the border stops being a line on a map and becomes a membrane — porous, infected, dangerous. And in that mindset, an airstrike starts to look less like aggression and more like

.

The problem with surgery is that it still

.

Reports from the ground describe

, mass displacement, and contested claims about what exactly is being dropped and why. Cambodian soldiers interviewed from hospital beds have described symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic substances; Cambodia has alleged chemical use, while Thailand has denied it and pushed back against what it calls disinformation. Even where claims are unproven, the fog thickens fast, and in that fog the idea of a “

” war collapses.

And then there are the people inside the compounds — the trafficked workers, the coerced operators, the

of fraud. If Thailand bombs a complex that truly houses scam operations, it may also be bombing a prison. The

described captive scam workers unable to flee as bombs fell, caught between two kinds of violence: the criminal captivity that brought them there, and the

that now treats the buildings as targets.

This is where the Thai narrative, however emotionally satisfying, starts to

.

Because “we are targeting scams” can become a

. It blurs categories. It allows a state to recast an international attack as law enforcement. It moves the conversation from sovereignty to sanitation — from why are you crossing the border? to why are you protecting criminals? And once that rhetorical shift happens, escalation becomes easier to sell at home, especially when the

is not described as a neighbour but as a contagion.

Yet Cambodia is still Cambodia. A country with

— and a government that will not accept being treated as a hosting platform for someone else’s military solution. Cambodia has denied Thai claims about military use of the sites, and it has accused Thailand of endangering civilians.

Looking at all this through a Thai lens, I can understand the anger. I’ve spent enough time in Asia to recognise that particular mix of exhaustion and outrage people feel when scams become

— when friends tell you, almost casually, that a cousin lost savings to a fake investment app, that a parent was tricked by a voice on the phone, that shame keeps the story quiet. In that climate, the idea of striking the source feels almost

.

But

.

If Thailand truly wants to dismantle the scam industry, bombs are a loud instrument for a

. Scam economies survive on complicity, corruption,

, encrypted infrastructure, and the constant

. They are not defeated by dramatic footage alone. They are defeated by arrests, sanctions, financial tracing,

, and — most uncomfortable of all — the slow work of cooperation with the very neighbour you are currently bombing.

The bitter irony is that the scam compounds thrive on

and ambiguity. War

both.

And so Thailand’s message — we are fighting scammers, not Cambodia — becomes both powerful and perilous.

, because it speaks to a genuine regional plague.

, because it risks turning a criminal crisis into an interstate war, with

, and victims of trafficking trapped inside the targets.

A border conflict justified as a moral campaign is still a border conflict. The

what story was told about them.

The BBC recently aired a long, in-depth investigation into the world of online scams in Asia. China, too, has carried out harsh crackdowns in what was once the Golden Triangle of the drug trade — now transformed into a hub of the scam industry.

Photos: about ten years ago, I traveled upriver along the Ping River aboard a local boat, spending a couple of nights on a barge marked by a permanent

soundtrack. The singing would pause only when, along the riverbanks, a temple called passengers to a brief moment of faith — and to a break from the steady consumption of beer and other

.

I was eventually dropped off on a riverbank in the middle of the forest, where I spent a long time cursing as I tried to contact and meet the fixer who would later guide me even farther north, into the triangle between Thailand, Burma, and Laos. But that is another story.