Bangkok, Thailand ? Thousands of serious people gathered last week in this Southeast Asian capital at the 15th international conference on AIDS.

Scientists, public health officials and community organizers exchanged valuable ideas on how to control the deadly disease, now spreading into the huge population centers of Asia.

Unfortunately, some came to play out the culture wars of American politics. Activists railed at the Bush administration for using its new AIDS initiative to promote a fundamentalist religious agenda of sexual abstinence. Conservatives assailed those who advocate the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS as promoters of promiscuity.

But the one message that came through to me at this gathering is that there’s no magic bullet in the war against AIDS, and no effective method that we can afford to ignore.

Consider two cases that are widely cited as success stories in AIDS prevention — Uganda and Thailand. Uganda is the poster child for conservatives. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who spoke here, is credited with authoring the “ABC” approach that the Bush administration touts as its model in the fight against AIDS: “Abstain from sex or delay having sex if you are young and not married; Be faithful to your sexual partner; or use a condom properly and consistently if you are going to move around.”

Uganda’s experience Museveni talks of love and commitment and the need to change behavior, and he worries that an emphasis on condom use prevents societies from doing something about the root causes of the disease.

Uganda has had a dramatic reduction in HIV infection rates, down from a high of 18 percent to around 6 percent, a sharp contrast to the rest of Africa. But even Museveni cited data showing that one cause of this improvement is a sharp increase in condom use.

Thailand, the host of this conference, offers a different example. The main transmission belt for the spread of AIDS, beginning in the 1980s, is the country’s ubiquitous sex industry. Researchers cite data showing that as many as one out of five Thai men paid for sex. In downtown Bangkok, massage parlors are easier to find than grocery stores.

Known affectionately here as the “Condom King,” Mechai Viravaidya led a campaign beginning in the early 1990s to promote condom use by sex workers. He distributed condoms in Bangkok’s red-light districts and forced the government to face up to a problem it initially derided as a foreigners disease. Thanks to his efforts, infection rates also showed a huge decline.

Talk of abstinence and faithfulness alone to prevent AIDS prompts derisive laughter from Mechai. “It’s very naive and very backward,” says Mechai, now a member of Thailand’s Senate.

Neither case, however, addresses the reality, a subject of much discussion here, that women are increasingly the ones on the receiving end of this epidemic. Women, unlike men here, tend to be largely faithful. But they have difficulty controlling their husbands.

“A sex worker can tell a client ‘Use a condom or get lost,”‘ said Dr. Suniti Solomon, a pioneer in treating AIDS in India. “A housewife in India can never do that.”

That is why there is growing interest in preventive methods that can be controlled by women, such as microbicides.

What is crucial is political leadership. The universal pattern with AIDS, whether in the United States or Africa, is initial denial, along with stigma and discrimination. Progress only comes when leaders face the truth and create public awareness. That’s why Uganda brought its infection rate down but South Africa did not. And why Thailand confronted the problem while India and China denied, until recently, that it even existed.

There are real issues about how the Bush administration has chosen to spend its money on AIDS. Much of the $15 billion pledged over the next five years will go to countries whose approach is favored by the administration, rather than through the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which does not pick programs based on ideology.

But Bush, too, has shown leadership in ramping up American funding to fight this global killer. It is time to stop the culture wars over AIDS and focus on its victims.

Daniel Sneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.