ANTHONY DAVIS
Amid the last torrential storms of the 2023 monsoon, the fog of war is thickening over Myanmar. And growing numbers of observers monitoring the country’s unfolding implosion are in danger of getting lost in the gloom.
No one doubts that hostilities between the country’s embattled State Administration Council (SAC) coup regime and a plethora of armed opposition forces are escalating sharply, punctuated by a steady string of atrocities visited on the civilian population by the military.
But against the backdrop of a bitterly fought information war playing out in social and mainstream media, making sense of the daily rash of clashes, raids and airstrikes is proving more challenging than at any time since the February 2021 coup.
In response, many in newsrooms, embassies and foreign ministries around the region and beyond are increasingly falling back on an interpretation of events beguiling in its overarching simplicity: the war is locked in an inevitably extended “stalemate” that denies either side any prospect of military victory and sooner or later will require a negotiated settlement.
Viewed from these echo chambers, the plausibility of the stalemate narrative rests on some indisputable realities: Myanmar’s military faces unprecedented challenges, but remains ruthless, disciplined and well-resourced.
And its monopoly of air power and heavy artillery appears to ensure its indefinite grip over urban areas and the essential levers of state power: civilian ministries, airports, seaports, and, crucially, the central bank and army headquarters.
Born of a national uprising that followed the coup, the armed opposition has now grown too large to be crushed in line with the military’s preferred playbook. But it remains fragmented between a seemingly anarchic patchwork of people’s defense forces (PDFs) and ethnic armed groups, and is conspicuously lacking in charismatic leaders, strategic cohesion or external support.
There is no denying these baseline facts. However, the now widespread interpretation of a stalemated conflict that they have encouraged remains conceptually facile, analytically lazy and, in terms of encouraging shoulder-shrugging inaction on the part of regional governments, dangerously flawed.
It confuses a purported military stasis with what attention to ground detail and historical precedent indicates is something entirely different and far more complex: an inevitably protracted but dynamic conflict in which the current imbalance in armaments imposes – unsurprisingly – a temporary military stand-off around major urban centers.
Such stand-offs litter the histories of guerrilla conflicts in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and other old Cold War theaters.
Serious analysis indicates that in Myanmar today, as in those struggles, rural-based insurgency involves a wider and constantly shifting interplay of military, political, economic and ultimately psychological factors. That fluid mix translates into an overarching trajectory of conflict in which one side is gaining advantage, however incremental, over the other.
In this sense, the war’s trajectory through 2023 has become clear in a manner that was not apparent in the first two years of the conflict, but which should now serve to dispel any analytical fog. In most key respects, it is a trajectory that favors forces opposed to the Naypyidaw regime.
Guns galore
Three facets of opposition strength driving this shift have grown in salience this year. One, reported in Asia Times in May, has been the striking transformation in the availability of modern small arms and light weapons now in the hands of anti-SAC forces when compared to 2021 and 2022.
The consequences of this change have proved critical over the rainy season now ending. Even though supplies of ammunition often remain inadequate, the improved tactical organization demanded by greater firepower has driven significant new offensive capabilities.
Opposition forces have overrun a growing number of outlying regime positions, thereby capturing more and heavier weaponry. And, as importantly, they have also eroded the SAC’s hold on urban areas.
One Western intelligence analyst monitoring daily conflict at the level of Myanmar’s 330 townships and below noted to Asia Times that in the bitterly contested region of Sagaing, approximately 30% of PDF operations are now taking place inside urban areas, rising from 20% at the beginning of the year. He added that in neighboring Magwe in September 2023, 28% of attacks occurred inside towns.
Well-armed People’s Defense Force members are seen on a front line in Kawkareik, Myanmar, December 31, 2021.
In short, in key swathes of central Myanmar near the national and commercial capitals, regime control is now less about urban areas as a whole and more about strongpoints inside towns that are vulnerable to PDF attacks using small arms and mortars and, increasingly, drones operated from suburbs.
Against the backdrop of the strategic stand-off visible from embassies in Yangon, at the tactical level, SAC control over many township centers is crumbling.
Unity is the emerging second facet of opposition resilience. From the earliest months of the war, much has been made of the fragmentation among hundreds of local PDFs and of the purported distrust among ethnic armed groups of the anti-coup National Unity Government (NUG) perceived as dominated by mainly ethnic Bamar National League for Democracy (NLD) figures that won the elections of 2020. Both issues miss essential points.
Remarkable in the Myanmar context when set against numerous other post-World War II guerrilla conflicts has been precisely the absence of organized infighting between factions opposed to the incumbent military regime.
This striking unanimity of purpose provides no guarantees for the future but for the time being, it is a dynamic that sees PDFs – some affiliated with the NUG, others independent – forming loose operational coalitions against the regime that are not squabbling among themselves.
Equally, notwithstanding predictable divide-and-rule efforts by the SAC aimed at breaking the Bamar-ethnic compact, the core Kachin, Karen, Karenni and Chin ethnic allies of the NUG – the so-called “K3C” – have remained steadfastly committed to the anti-coup “Spring Revolution.”
To imagine that decades of ethnic distrust of Myanmar’s dominant Bamar have been overtaken by newfound affection would be naive. Clear, however, is that each ethnic resistance organization (ERO) has made a cold calculation that active participation in the dismantling of military dictatorship serves its fundamental interests and, indeed, that the war is being won.
There is little reason to suppose SAC blandishments might prompt a revision of these assessments, least of all as regular regime air strikes massacre ethnic civilian communities.
Finally, 2023 has brought clear evidence of strategic planning underpinning a new level of operational effectiveness. This shift has turned largely on joint operations between EROs and PDFs at the regional rather than national level.
Targeted nationwide on key arteries of communication and supply, these campaigns are clearly not happening by accident and almost certainly imply a high degree of strategic liaison.
The most striking of these campaigns has been the latest: a joint offensive launched October 27, 2023, by the so-called Brotherhood Alliance across northern Shan state.
The Brotherhood allies, namely the Kokang Chinese Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the ethnic Palaung Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Rakhine Arakan Army (AA), overran the Kokang town of Chin Shwe Haw on the Chinese border simultaneous with a rash of attacks along the highway between Mandalay and the border hub of Muse that has severed traffic on Myanmar’s main land link with China.
TNLA soldiers march to mark the 51st anniversary of Ta’ang National Resistance Day in Homain, Nansan township, in northern Myanmar’s Shan state.
Probably not by coincidence, the same day saw heavy fighting in the town of Kawkareik on the Asia Highway linking Yangon to Myawaddy on the Thai border where a powerful alliance of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and PDF forces it has trained and mentored has stepped up attacks dramatically this year.
In recent months, the same KNLA-PDF alliance has also extended operations into Mon state interdicting the highway between Yangon and the port city of Mawlamyine, while to the northwest another KNLA-led campaign has targeted the Sittang river valley along which lie the road and rail lines connecting Yangon and central Mandalay.
At the northern end of the Sittang Valley, operations have also extended into the Naypyidaw Capital Region. In August, air force jets conducted close air support missions for regime troops under pressure from joint KNLA-PDF forces probing the NCR in strength for the first time and unlikely the last.
Further north, on the border of Sagaing and Kachin state, a Kachin Independence Army-PDF alliance continues to tighten its stranglehold along the Ayeyarwady River lifeline linking regime forces in the north to their Mandalay logistics hub.
On the other side of Myanmar’s divide, it is difficult to see what additional strategic assets a regime already fighting a defensive war can marshal to halt, let alone reverse, the conflict’s current trajectory.
The SAC’s essential strength rests on the institutional centrality it derives from control over key loci of state power. But politically, a widely despised regime appears trapped in a cul de sac, its exit strategy via a military-managed election and purported return to democracy now pushed back from 2023 to 2025.
Economically, the SAC faces an unprecedented crisis characterized by rising commodity prices, chronic electricity shortages and a banking sector crippled by sanctions.
Diplomatically, meanwhile, the SAC’s sole committed ally remains Russia, which is fully bogged down in Ukraine and neither willing nor able to rescue a floundering protege as it did in Syria in 2015.
On the military front, the army, while still operationally cohesive, remains beset by a shrinking manpower pool and stark recruitment shortfalls.
In 2023, understrength force levels stretched everywhere too thin have driven a notable drop in large-scale offensives, growing reliance on untrained militias and a well-documented resort to airpower and artillery that is hardly winning any hearts and minds.
When in August the army attempted an offensive to box in the Kachin “capital” of Laiza on the Chinese border, the concentration of forces it managed to muster was an underwhelming 1,000–1,500 troops drawn from several commands. Against a daily hemorrhaging of casualties, the regime’s Kachin campaign has had little, if any, strategic impact.
More typically, recent ground operations have involved hastily devised counteroffensives to retake positions lost to the resistance – south of the Thai border town of Myawaddy and in Kayah state in July, in northern Shan state in September, and around Mogok in Mandalay division earlier in October.
The current desperate struggle to respond to the setbacks in northern Shan state and reopen the roads to China will stretch army resources to the hilt.
Expecting black swans
Against this backdrop, Myanmar’s near- to medium-term future hinges on one central question: how long can the current stand-off between an increasingly aggressive resistance coalition and a hollowed-out military defending a political and economic house-of-cards be sustained?
The answer is impossible to predict. But a “black swan event” – an unforeseen incident with cascading consequences – that will impact an increasingly fragile edifice and terminate today’s strategic stand-off is all but certain.
By definition, a “black swan event” defies prediction. But in Myanmar of late 2023, it is not difficult to imagine a range of credible and possibly overlapping scenarios. A return to war by the powerful Arakan Army in Rakhine state culminating in a disastrous loss of territory and body-blow to regime morale arguably sits at the top of the list.
Myanmar’s insurgent Arakan Army could turn the war’s tide.
The complete loss of northern Shan state to the Brotherhood is now also plausible, compounded conceivably by a sudden coup de main by the hitherto neutral but powerful United Wa State Army aimed at extending its control over eastern and southern Shan state.
After any one of these “Stalingrad” disasters, the possibility of violent conflict in the upper echelons of the military triggered by the successful or attempted removal of SAC chairman and coup-maker Senior General Min Aung Hlaing scarcely stretches credulity.
Equally, it is impossible to know at what point in time the edifice of SAC control will have become sufficiently fragile to succumb to an event that it might earlier have survived.
It could be three months from now, or six, or even 24; though given the speed with which the trajectory of conflict has shifted over 2023, a timeframe stretching out over another three years or longer is difficult to envisage.
What is not in doubt at the end of 2023 is the trajectory itself, and the near inevitability of a black swan event that may well catch opposition forces themselves off-guard.
Myanmar’s neighbors and the international community more generally would be well-advised to prepare diplomatic, humanitarian and judicial responses for a morning-after in which a smooth transition to a new federal-democratic order would hardly be guaranteed.
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