KLERDEY, Myanmar — For a repressive police state, Myanmar has borders that are curiously porous.

Here along the eastern border with Thailand, legions of displaced farmers, smugglers and army deserters slip back and forth with little trouble and no paperwork.

Quite unlike the dictatorship in North Korea, Myanmar is a dog's breakfast of ethnic insurrection, cross-border criminality and massive refugee flight.

To halt peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmarese cities in September, the generals who run this country had only to order soldiers to club, shoot and detain Buddhist monks. Taming the mountainous eastern frontier has not been so brutally simple.

The army periodically launches scorched-earth offensives, razing villages, enslaving farmers and raping women, according to human-rights groups. Alternatively, it cuts lucrative deals with ethnic leaders, encouraging them to grow opium, manufacture methamphetamine and clear-cut teak forests.

Still, armed resistance boils on — and the border continues to leak.

Consider Gen. Johnny, commander of the 7th brigade of the Karen National Liberation Army, military wing of the largest of the 20 ethnic groups that for more than half a century have intermittently fought insurgency wars against the government.

From a hut perched on bamboo stilts, he says, he commands about 1,000 guerrillas here in this tiny village on the west bank of the Moei River, a lazy waterway that separates Myanmar from Thailand.

In the past year, he said, the Myanmar army has not mustered the resolve to force him to move.

"The order from headquarters is to attack us, but the battalion commander who is responsible in this area does not follow the order," said the general, who gives his name only as Johnny. "He doesn't want to fight."

Military in shambles

Myanmar's army is among the largest in Asia, with about 400,000 soldiers. But parts of it are a shambles, with poor morale, an officer corps that drinks to excess and an acute desertion problem, according to diplomats, human-rights groups and the army itself.

Desertion grew by 8 percent last year, according to a report by the London publication Jane's Defence Weekly. During a four-month period in 2006, the army lost 9,497 people, mostly from desertion, Jane's said.

Diplomats and human-rights officials also say the army's ability to deploy soldiers has been eroding.

"On paper they have 400,000 soldiers, but in the field it is more like 250,000," said Shari Villarosa, charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar.

To find soldiers, army recruiters often abduct or buy children as young as 10, according to a recent report by the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch. It said that children are grabbed at train and bus stations and that some are beaten until they agree to volunteer.

The army expects many of its soldiers, especially those stationed here in the wild eastern frontier, to live off the land. That means they compel farmers and villagers at gunpoint to give them food.

"I was very ashamed of taking food from the people in the villages," said Si Thu, 22, who said he was forced to join the army last spring but deserted in October.

By sneaking across the countryside at night, he said, he found his way here to territory controlled by the Karen rebels.

Deals with 17 groups

Back in the early 1990s, a senior Myanmarese general decided that the army would never have the resources, manpower or discipline to put down insurgencies up and down the eastern border.

So Gen. Khin Nyunt, then in charge of military intelligence, negotiated 17 cease-fire deals with armed ethnic organizations.

Nyunt has since been put under house arrest — and the government's ability to negotiate with ethnic groups is said to have deteriorated.

The Karen National Liberation Army represents one of three ethnic groups never to agree to a deal. Over the past 15 years, it has paid a high price.

With the government able to focus military force on Karen territory (thanks to cease-fires in other regions), the KNLA has been reduced from about 20,000 to about 4,000 soldiers, according to Karen military leaders. A 2006 offensive by the government displaced 27,000 civilians and destroyed about 232 villages, Human Rights Watch has said.

The Karen rebels fight on as a much-diminished but still-not-defeated guerrilla force, holding small pockets of territory such as Gen. Johnny's camp beside the river.

For the 17 ethnic groups that have made deals with the government, there are widespread reports that the trickle-down benefits to farmers and villagers have been mixed, at best. While the cease-fires have brought large-scale fighting to an end, they have also resulted in the widespread recruitment of civilians into criminal enterprises.

Drug problems

In Shan state in northern Myanmar, it has been 15 years since the Palong rebels signed a cease-fire with the government. During that time, with the active encouragement of army soldiers, opium production and heroin addiction have percolated deep into village culture, according to Lway Aye Nana, a Palong who now lives in exile in Thailand.

"After the cease-fire, the government deployed their troops in every Palong village," Nana said. adding that the soldiers ordered villagers "to grow opium so they can collect taxes on it."

"A lot of young Palong have ended up being drug-addicted, " she said. "Most of them are boys and men. They don't want to work on their farms. They rely on incomes from their families, their daughters and their wives. If they don't get money to buy drugs, they will sell all their belongings."

In recent years, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the military has cracked down on opium production in some parts of eastern Myanmar. But the DEA says that as cultivating opium has declined, production and distribution of methamphetamine have surged.

In Thailand, methamphetamine accounts for 70 percent of all addictions, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.