Mulling the Military Option in Myanmar

Three months since the Myanmar military’s seizure of power, the nation trembles on the brink of a full-blown economic, humanitarian, and security emergency.

Since February 1, when the military launched a coup and toppled the elected National League for Democracy government, junta forces have killed hundreds of people and arrested thousands in an attempt to quash the protests against its rule. Myanmar Air Force jets have strafed and bombed villages in ethnic minority regions of the country.

Work stoppages and civil disobedience efforts have ground Myanmar’s economy to a halt, pushing the country toward economic collapse; by some estimates, the economy will contract by as much as 20 percent this year. The United Nations World Food Program estimates that up to 3.4 million more people will struggle to afford food in the next three to six months, as the cost of basic foodstuffs rises and a broken economy hemorrhages jobs.

Meanwhile, the lines of the country’s conflict have hardened as the anti-coup movement has fallen in behind the new National Unity Government announced on April 16. In April, Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations’ human rights chief, said that Myanmar carried “clear echoes of Syria in 2011” and warned that she feared the country was “heading toward a full-blown civil conflict.”

The increasingly desperate situation has been accompanied by continued calls for international action from the upper reaches of the global humanitarian community. The longer the violence and instability worsens, the more likely it will be that frustrated international observers will begin to ponder a more forceful intervention from the outside, up to and including military options.

These calls have been made within Myanmar for some time, with many activists and protesters calling for the world to intervene on the basis of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which authorizes the United Nations to undertake a number of actions to protect civilian populations, with military force a last resort.

But until recently, outside analysts have been loath to raise the possibility of outside intervention, probably in light of the obvious political and practical challenges. Nonetheless, the case for a limited military intervention was laid out recently by Anthony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst with the defense research group IHS Jane’s.

Writing in Asia Times on April 21, Davis observed that the trajectory of the crisis in Myanmar was fast firming into two possible scenarios, both equally grim. In the first, the Tatmadaw manages to reassert control through force majeure, winning the battle only to reign over a political and economic wasteland; in the second, the country descends into a nationwide civil war pitting the junta against a coalition of forces fighting for federal democracy.

As a supplement to these unenviable options, Davis offers a third: a “foreign intervention to engage Myanmar’s generals in the only language they have ever understood or respected – military power.”

With Russia and China likely veto any United Nations intervention under the auspices of R2P, Davis argues, the only hope lies with the United States, and a quick dispatch of Tomahawk missiles against military targets. As the crisis drags on, he writes, the logic of a U.S. missile attack “is assuming a compelling momentum.”

Such an attack, “aimed at military facilities dear to the junta’s calculations,” would be intended essentially as a show of force that would push the Tatmadaw to the negotiating table. “External military intervention represents the sole option that realistically stands any chance of impressing on Myanmar’s generals the need to step back from a brink they either cannot see or prefer to ignore,” Davis argues.

“Its impact would underscore with explosive immediacy the need for Naypyidaw to turn to the good offices of the ASEAN to negotiate with representatives of the democratic opposition a cessation of violence and a new balance in the nation’s civil-military relations.”

Yet while Davis lays out a cohesive argument for a short, sharp military intervention in Myanmar, he also acknowledges the obvious limitations of his own prescription, which serve to make it considerably less compelling.

The first challenge is geopolitics in general, and China in particular. Davis argues that while Beijing is skeptical of outside military interventions, and would be likely to protest vociferously any U.S. intervention in Myanmar, behind closed doors it “might well see advantage in any move aimed at pushing a dangerously isolated and irrational Tatmadaw into political negotiations.” At the same time, he acknowledges that if China were to see U.S. missile strikes as the “first salvo” in a wider American intervention on its southern flank, it could well mount a decisive response of its own.

Given the current tensions between Washington and Beijing, and the prevailing paranoia of the Chinese leadership, it is by no means clear that the U.S. could convince Chinese leaders that an intervention would be limited and would not pose a threat to Chinese interests in Myanmar. Proceeding without an ironclad understanding from Beijing would run the risk of triggering a wider regional conflict.

The second challenge is the uncertain chance of success. While Davis cites unnamed analysts of the Myanmar military who predict that, “confronted with the progressive degrading of their military capabilities,” the junta would rush to the negotiating table, he also cites others that predict much the opposite: That missile strikes would push the Tatmadaw to bunker down in crowded urban areas, inviting the United States to risk civilian casualties and pushing Myanmar further along the road to a “Syria-like free-for-all.”

If asked about why they would choose to veto a military intervention in Myanmar, Russia and China could rightly point to the chaos that was unleashed by the disastrous Western interventions in nations like Iraq and Libya. The experience of these fiascoes, as well as the more limited intervention in Syria, suggests that the consequences are nearly always more complex and unpredictable than observers assume going in.

Moreover, the diametrically opposed readings of the Tatmadaw’s likely response by supposed security expert serve as a reminder about how little we know about Myanmar’s armed forces, and the risk calculations of its leaders. With an unclear sense of the Tatmadaw’s likely response, any such intervention would be a highly risky and irresponsible.

The third challenge – really more of an unknown – is the wider precedent it would set. Davis suggests that a U.S. missile strike on Tatmadaw assets could be justified by the spirit (though certainly not the letter) of R2P. Indeed, it would also probably be applauded within Myanmar and internationally, along the lines of the 1999 U.S. intervention in Kosovo, which an independent commission later described, with no small amount of legal inventiveness, as “illegal but legitimate.”

But undertaking this sort of mission could further taint R2P, still ailing from the mission creep in Libya, leaching it of the international legitimacy that it requires if it is to be anything more than a fig leaf for the unilateral exercise of state power.

With a crisis raging, there are always those who are tempted to do something rather than nothing, and may even view the latter as complicity. But three decades of post-Cold War nation-building adventures suggest that military interventions rarely go as planned, however limited they may be to start with and however good the intentions of those who plan and execute them. As bad as things get in Myanmar, they can always get worse, and outside powers pondering a kinetic solution to the country’s crisis should adhere to the dictum, “first, do no harm.”