The Beginning of the End for Myanmar’s Military Junta?

As the monsoon rains begin to set in across Myanmar this month, soaking the country’s battlefields, the generals in Naypyidaw will have a moment to look back on a dry season of disastrous defeats. The reversals have flowed inexorably since late October, when the Three Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armed groups launched Operation 1027, a broad offensive against junta positions in northern Shan State. The offensive made lightning progress, leading to the seizure of key border crossings with China, and the defeat of a military-aligned Border Guard Force in the Kokang region.

The successes of Operation 1027 emboldened armed groups to go on the offensive in other parts of the country. The following month, the Arakan Army, a member of the Three Brotherhood Alliance, launched a military campaign in Rakhine State in the country’s west. It experienced similarly rapid success: As of last month, the AA had captured eight of Rakhine State’s 17 townships, and one township in neighboring Chin State, with its leaders promising to continue their offensive until they had liberated the rest of the ancient kingdom of Arakan from military control.

The dry season campaigns culminated last month with the Karen National Liberation Army’s capture of the last military base in the city of Myawaddy, an important trade hub on the border with Thailand. While junta forces recaptured the base and were holding out in Myawaddy as of press time, the central state arguably now faces a greater threat to its existence than at any point since the late 1940s.

The dizzying speed of the events over the past six months, and the nearly unprecedented losses experienced by the military, have inevitably given rise to predictions of the junta’s impending fall. Last month, the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that the military “is now seeing its losses snowball faster and faster – with a possible endgame looming quicker than many imagined.” In February, on the third anniversary of the 2021 coup, the United States Institute of Peace claimed that the resistance “now genuinely threatens” the junta. 

“The stark truth for the military is simple and becoming bleaker day by day,” Matthew B. Arnold wrote in The Irrawaddy in November. “It faces too much resistance in too many places and doesn’t have the depth to recover.” 

This confidence has been particularly prevalent on social media, where faith in the righteousness of the revolutionary cause, and the inevitability of its victory, have become almost a moral obligation for those commenting on Myanmar’s conflict. This confidence is also reflected in the tone of exile media outlets, which, to some extent understandably, function now as a sort of de facto collective state media agency for the resistance.

There is indeed ample grounds for optimism. The junta is reeling. Its forces, the strength of which has probably been overestimated by outside observers for years, are demoralized and thinly spread. Expected counteroffensives have failed to eventuate, and it is clear that the army will be unable to prevail in a multifront war against a determined host of opponents. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the military’s desperation was its decision in February to begin enforcing a 2010 conscription law, which risks fanning popular anger into an untamable conflagration.

However, it is hard to predict whether this string of losses represents the first stage in the collapse of the military, or merely the prelude to a new phase of stalemate. The military probably can’t win the war, but its defeat is less determined.

The junta’s losses have been humiliating, but its withdrawal from peripheral areas may arguably improve its chances of survival over the longer term. Without the need to expend resources on holding remote areas of the country, the military may have the ability to consolidate a new perimeter of defense around the country’s central plain. Here its remaining forces could be concentrated with greater effectiveness, while its key advantages – its unified command structure and significant edge in firepower – could be brought more effectively to bear on the conflict.

At the same time, for resistance groups, dry season success has brought fresh challenges – the need to consolidate their hold over conquered territories and establish the institutions necessary to administer them effectively – that in certain ways run counter to the imperatives of armed struggle. 

One good example is trade. The recent seizures of key border crossings by armed groups and anti-regime militias have been among the most significant signs of the junta’s weakening hold on power. But the only way that resistance groups can benefit from this, and maintain good relations with governments on the other side of the border, is to ensure the continued passage of goods through their territories, and on into areas still held by the military junta. This requires a degree of cooperation between the two sides, however informal, that may work toward the hardening of a new status quo. 

This is more or less what has happened in northern Shan State in recent months, where a China-brokered ceasefire agreement mostly brought the fighting to an end and allowed cross-border trade to resume.

This brings another question to the fore: that of ethnic unity. As Bertil Lintner argued in The Irrawaddy late last year, Myanmar’s 20-odd ethnic armed groups have a range of overlapping but sometimes divergent political goals. As he writes, “Kachin, Palaung, and Shan armies claim more or less the same areas in northern Shan State, and there are also territorial disputes between the Shan and the Wa, and the Shan and the Pa-O.” At the same time, the most powerful of the ethnic forces, the United Wa State Army, “still adheres to the ceasefire agreement it struck with the Myanmar military in 1989 and could not be considered part of some overall resistance.” 

Lintner concluded, “By no stretch of the imagination could it be claimed that Myanmar’s many ethnic armies are a unified force, or even have common interests.”

To be sure, many of the major ethnic armed groups, such as the Karen National Union and Kachin Independence Organization, have expressed public support for the National Unity Government, worked closely with anti-regime People’s Defense Forces, and declared publicly that their goal is the overthrow of the military. It is also true that the three years since the 2021 coup have seen a remarkable – indeed, unprecedented – unity of purpose between the Bamar majority and the country’s various ethnic minorities. 

However, it remains unclear whether this unity will persist as certain ethnic armed groups come closer to achieving their individual aims. Once its dream of an independent Arakan is within reach, will the AA be as willing to continue the broader struggle against the military junta?

This caveat applies with greater force to more mercenary groups, such as the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), which took part in the Operation 1027 offensive with its two partners in the Three Brotherhood Alliance. In early January, the MNDAA succeeded in seizing back control of the Kokang Self-Administered Zone, a crescent of territory along the Chinese border. The MNDAA had controlled Kokang from 1989 until 2009, when it was driven out of power by the military.

While the MNDAA has been all too happy to don the vestments of “resistance,” its relation to the wider revolutionary agenda is ambiguous. Like the UWSA, this family-run organization has never operated on anything approaching democratic principles, and has a history of involvement in the narcotics trade. Having achieved its core political goal, it remains to be seen whether the MNDAA will continue to expend blood and treasure to bring about the defeat of the military regime as a whole. The group’s history suggests grounds for considerable doubt.

The future is unknowable, and the predictions of the Myanmar junta’s collapse could well come to pass – especially if there are significant fissures in the upper ranks of the army. But the situation on the ground remains in flux, and with the current campaign coming to an end under the drenching monsoon rains, it is equally likely that the conflict will grind on into a new phase – to the detriment, once again, of the country’s long-suffering population.