Igor Blazevic
At this moment, in May 2024, after a series of significant defeats that the Myanmar junta has suffered in the Northern Shan, Rakhine, Kachin, Karen and Karenni states, there are four possible scenarios of how the Myanmar people’s liberation struggle could develop.
Scenario 1: Collapse of the SAC
According to this scenario, the collapse of the State Administration Council (SAC) could pave the way for positive change. Allied liberation forces will continue with successful waves of military offensives in different parts of Myanmar, taking more and more outposts, bases, territories and cities; capturing more and more weapons and ammunition; inflicting more and more demoralizing defeats on junta troops; taking control over more and more supply or trade routes, more and more revenue and production sources and more and more strategic assets. Well-prepared special operations will continue to either hit highly valuable targets such as jet fuel depots or high-profile psychological warfare targets such as the top military brass.
Junta troops will continue to be overstretched, depleted of soldiers, supplies and ammunition, exhausted and demoralized. There will be more and more defections and surrenders of individual soldiers and police officers as well as the whole units once they are put under the sustained pressure of the liberation forces and cut off from supplies. There will be more and more internal disagreements and disputes within senior officer corps. Frustration, fear and anger over the incompetence of junta leader Min Aung Hlaing will be bubbling until it reaches a boiling point.
The NUG and allied EROs will deepen and clarify their political agreement, paving the way for a unified and stable post-junta transition. This political pact will gradually include other political actors, fostering a broader alliance that will aggregate around the gravitational power of the National Unity Government (NUG) and “Three Brotherhood Alliance” (TBA). This NUG-TBA alliance, increasingly looking like the more probable winner in the struggle against the military regime, holds the promise of a brighter political future for Myanmar.
The solid political and military alliance of the liberation forces will make them appear credible vis-à-vis neighbours and international actors. So gradually, neighbours and ASEAN will grasp and accept the changing reality on the ground and will increasingly see allied forces as credible partners for talks about the political future, stability and their economic and geopolitical interests in Myanmar.
Urban underground operations will continue to make junta officers and administrators feel highly vulnerable and insecure. Anxiety and realization that they are not in control and do not have a place to feel safe will paralyze the junta’s administrative rank and file in reluctance to implement orders from the top.
The civic resistance movement will continue to agitate for broad public support for the revolution and for the federal democratic future of the country. More and more educated people will put their knowledge and experience at service of revived public services and local governance in the liberated
territories. More international assistance will flow to liberated territories to help rebuild public services and local governance.
All this together will lead to the collapse of the SAC either through the implosion of the military from the bottom up (units across the country, in a domino effect, start to lay down weapons and stop fighting for the SAC) or through an internal coup which will remove Min Aung Hlaing and accept an exit of the military from politics.
A winning alliance of liberation forces will move quickly to take over central power and form an inclusive transition government.
Scenario 2: New negative, destructive stalemate
In spite of defeats and losses on the periphery of the large country, the Myanmar military will manage to dig itself into better protected defensive lines in central and coastal parts of Myanmar. The SAC will leave the periphery of the country to resistance forces led by different Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) and will concentrate all its resources (officers, best equipped and most loyal pretorian units, pro-junta militias and forcefully conscripted soldiers, weapons, supplies, available finances and Buddhist radicals) in defense of a smaller territory in a rectangle that comprise of Monywa, Mandalay, Pin Oo Lwin, Taunggyi, and stretch down to Bagan, Meiktila, Magway, Naypyidaw and further South to Pyay, Pago, Pathein, Yangon and Mawlamyine. This is less territory but still significant enough and still the place where around 60% of the population of the country lives. This territory includes big cities, the symbolic political capital (Naypyidaw) and commercial capital (Yangon), main airfields and ports, and state prerogatives such as the central bank, telecommunications regulator, issuing passports and visas, and foreign embassies.
The resistance will try to undertake further offensives but will face painful losses by hitting defense lines that are too strong. From this new “fortress”, the military will continue to inflict as much destruction as they can on civilians and civilian infrastructure in the liberated territories. The junta will intentionally, as much as they are able, commit atrocities, burn the land, villages and livelihood, destroy whole cities and escalate the humanitarian catastrophe. Parts of the country that are beyond the junta’s control will continue to experience heavy, devastating destruction.
That destruction will be particularly fierce whenever liberation forces try offensive forays into the Magway, Mandalay and Bago regions. Any attempt of liberation forces to gain a stronger foothold in those regions will trigger an immediate counter-offensive with ruthless and excessive scorched earth tactics. Sagaing will be the next region where the junta will try to apply, as much as they can, systematic punitive destruction in order to prevent liberation forces from consolidating control and introducing functional governing. The liberated territory will be overburdened by an enormous humanitarian emergency. Big cities that remain under junta control and which lay outside of the mentioned rectangle, like Hakha, Myitkyina, Lashio, and Dawei, will be used as garrison outposts.
Liberated ethnic territories will be exposed to systematic and patient stick-and-carrot policy: either you accept a ceasefire and some sort of deal with us (junta), or we will continue to bomb in unpredictable ways your villages, cities, hospitals, schools, festivities and gatherings.
Nobody will give up, neither the junta entrenched behind its new defense lines and with whole cities taken hostages as human shields nor the resistance forces, which will not be ready to subdue themselves to the renewed military dominance once they have, with so much sacrifice liberated a significant part of the territory.
According to this scenario, Myanmar will remain stuck in further circles of destruction and suffering. Nobody will be a winner, and everybody will be a loser.
Scenario 3: Stalemate, de-escalation of fighting under outside pressure and ceasefire negotiations
According to this scenario, anti-junta revolutionary forces will significantly expand liberated territory, and by doing that, they will come under strong pressure and responsibility to govern the territory and population under their control. The task of consolidating governing control, providing law and order and basic services, and having stable financial sources for those new obligations will becoming more urgent than the task of continuing to fight with the junta, even more so because the junta itself will show little ambition to attempt counteroffensives.
Everybody will feel exhausted after a prolonged period of intensive fights that started in October 2023. Many actors will feel that they have gained a lot, so they are ready to let active military operations calm down. There is always someone who will make this pivot as the first, that will influence the second one, and others will follow suit.
Neighbours, particularly China and Thailand, are already actively persuading and pressuring both the junta and EROs to accept ceasefires and start negotiations. The peace and aid community of donors, diplomats, INGOs, and NGOs sees new opportunities for themselves, so they are also actively offering carrots to anybody who is ready to take this path.
This scenario is hard to imagine as long as Min Aung Hlaing is in charge of the junta. He is not capable of making any strategic pivot; he sees victory at all costs as his only survival option (“The Assad choice”). He and the SAC are too tainted with crimes and too hated to be acceptable partners for anybody on the resistance side.
However, it is imaginable that at one point in time, a weakened military, to save itself, will remove Min Aung Hlaing and put forward a new incarnation of the “peace and development council” with a more moderate-looking interface. Neighbours (China, Thailand, India) and the ASEAN will see this as an opportunity that should not be missed and will jump to give this new “opportunity” credibility and incentives, which it would not otherwise have. Other international actors will accept whatever comes from the ASEAN and neighbours because their only concern is not getting involved.
In some parts of the country, the lower-intensity conflict will still continue for some time, and from time to time, high tensions will erupt, but in general, fragile ceasefires facilitated under the pressure of neighbours will hold (like in the Northern Shan State nowadays).
De-escalation of conflict will be used by international and regional actors to push for further ceasefire negotiations and for some new “power-sharing pact”. People’s uprising, nationwide liberation struggle, the revolution and the NUG will be sidelined, and neighbours and internationals will manage to bring
back Myanmar politics into the familiar territories of the elite pact that is forged through the tripartite negotiations between the military, some political entity representing the Bama majority, and EAOs.
Scenario 4: New equilibrium through fragmentation of the country
According to this scenario, Myanmar will be de facto broken into 7-9 territories controlled and governed by different armed forces. The military will remain in control of a significant part of the lowlands and coastal area, but it will no longer be the dominant power capable of controlling the country as a whole. The military will be just one among several other armed-governing entities. The Myanmar borderland and a significant part of upper Myanmar will be controlled and governed by other armed forces.
There will be less conflict. All armed forces will be focused on controlling their own territories and on running different types of businesses to generate revenues for themselves and to provide some income and functionality to the population under their control.
Myanmar will nominally still be one state, but de facto, will be fragmented into several pieces that are governed autonomously one from another. Each of its pieces will have not only its own dominant and governing armed group but also one neighbour as its security guarantor and primary economic partner.
A new equilibrium will settle down, and some sort of new stability and new normality will be established, as in Syria today (with the difference that Myanmar will be fragmented in more pieces than Syria).
Probability of four scenarios
Scenario No. 1: The collapse of the SAC, is a possible one and a probable one.
However, there is no international actor who is actively advancing this scenario, no government or inter-governmental body making meaningful diplomatic, political and financial investment to give this scenario a better chance. This scenario still depends primarily on domestic actors.
Lack of outside support is a hindrance, but if domestic anti-junta actors remain committed to the goal of removing the military from political power (removing military dictatorship), this scenario is a probable outcome.
This requires the NUG and allied EROs to sustain current patient and systematic military pressure on junta troops across the country. Taking the military cooperation of allied liberation forces to the next strategic level would accelerate the fall of SAC. It is probable that without taking military pressure to the next strategic level, it will not be possible to put the junta under sufficient military pressure in the heartlands.
In addition to ongoing military pressure on the junta, the NUG and allied EROs need to be more agile and effective in deepening and clarifying political agreement on how to manage the post-junta transition. Other armed and political actors should join the alliance. Any self-interested, rigid competition over legitimacy and authority should be strictly avoided. Also, any competition, rivalry and
jostling for the territory under the control of different armed groups should be prevented or calmed down whenever it emerges as the highest possible urgency. Everybody should avoid playing hardball (making and trying to push maximalist and dogmatic demands), and everybody should make a significant effort to assure everybody else that their legitimate demands will be satisfied.
Political representatives of the allied liberation forces need to project domestically and internationally that they are a credible political alliance capable of managing the transition, and they need – through a patient and systematic international relations charm offensive – to persuade neighbours and other internationals not to meddle with the intention to help the junta survive, and instead to bet on the peace, stability and recovery that can be delivered only by the allied anti-junta forces.
Scenario No. 3: The de-escalation of fighting under outside persuasion and pressure and follow-up ceasefire negotiations, is something that Myanmar’s neighbours and the ASEAN want to achieve. Other relevant international actors (like the UN and Western and Asian democracies) do not want to get involved, and they are happy to delegate responsibility to the ASEAN.
Since the initial days of the coup, both Myanmar’s neighbours and other internationals have expected that the military junta will prevail. They opted to sit-and-wait until the junta finished its dirty job of the brutal crackdown and consolidate control so that they could resume the business-as-usual approach once the military government would remain the only game in the town.
Myanmar neighbours and ASEAN are pretending with various diplomatic initiatives. In reality, they have been avoiding any meaningful intervention, either diplomatic or humanitarian, and have restrained themselves from exercising any pressure. They have been sitting and waiting, comfortably hidden, behind different non-performing initiatives, like the Five Point Consensus, Hun Sen’s loud and self-promoting “peace facilitation”, Indonesia’s behind-the-scenes, 300-plus dialogues with “all” stakeholders, or the recent Thai “humanitarian initiative”.
In the meantime, and particularly since successive the Three Brotherhood Alliance offensive in the Northern Shan State, AA offensive in the Rakhine State, Kachin offensive in the North and Karenni and Karen offensives in the East, Myanmar neighbours and the ASEAN have understood that the junta and Myanmar military are much weaker and much more incompetent than they thought they were. They have realized that the junta cannot prevail, cannot reign in control and cannot guarantee stability.
However, Myanmar’s neighbours and ASEAN do not want the military to fall. They still cannot imagine Myanmar as a “holding-together state” without an authoritarian military at its centre. They do not want the military to fall because, in their mind, that means the break-up of Myanmar into many pieces and the chaos of state failure.
Myanmar’s neighbours and the ASEAN are also not keen on seeing the revolution succeed. They prefer to see settlement achieved through the Asian way, through an elite pact, and not through people’s power, revolution, and democracy. They prefer elite horse-trading to empowered citizens making their own choices.
These are reasons why China, Thailand and the ASEAN are eager to try to facilitate ceasefires, offer humanitarian and other incentives, and get everybody to participate in an “all-inclusive” negotiating process.
The junta is currently on the trajectory of inevitable decline and is ready to fall; however, unfortunately, neighbours and ASEAN can give it a lifeline. By doing that, they are prolonging the devastating conflict and making scenarios 2 and 4 (destructive stalemate and fragmentation of the country) more probable than they should be at this particular moment.
Under current circumstances, scenario 3 is not possible, but there is a real danger that Myanmar neighbours and the ASEAN, as well as peace-facilitating donors and INGOs, will create the illusion that this scenario is possible through their diplomatic and humanitarian initiatives and rhetoric.
Scenario 3 is not possible for two fundamental reasons. One is that Min Aung Hlaing is simply not ready and able for any moderation and compromise.
Another and even more important reason is that negotiations between the junta and resistance groups, as proposed and facilitated by either China or ASEAN, will not only help the failing and hated junta to survive but will also keep the military in a position of political dominance, impunity and economic control. What is offered to other stakeholders is a soft surrender in exchange for an end to air bombardments, humanitarian aid, junior positions in politics and a small piece of land where they can run legal and illegal businesses. Nobody on the side of anti-junta resistance has sufficient reasons and incentives to accept this kind of soft surrender at the moment when they have the upper hand over the military.
Neighbours and the ASEAN cannot succeed in their effort to turn the dynamic of conflict in Myanmar in the direction of scenario 3. However – and unfortunately – their wrongly designed initiatives can turn the trajectory in the direction of scenario 2, a negative, destructive stalemate in which the people of Myanmar will remain stuck in further circles of destruction and suffering.
This will inevitably, after some time, lead not to anybody’s victory but to total exhaustion, which will then most probably keep the country in the sad shape of scenario 4 – a broken land run by different militias.
A new warlord equilibrium and stability could emerge, but one in which Myanmar’s natural resources and its people will be easy prey to powerful local, regional, and international predators. Youth and educated people will migrate anywhere abroad as much as they can. Those whose livelihoods will be ruined by the burning heat, long droughts, or devastating monsoons and cyclones will do the same.
Conclusion
To conclude, now, in May 2024, there are four possible scenarios of how war in Myanmar can develop further. There is only one good scenario: the potential and probable fall of the embattled, seriously weakened, and completely discredited SAC and the allied liberation forces taking over the transition government, with neighbours, ASEAN, and internationals, with a long-due effort, coming to assist them in the challenging but feasible task of building a federal, democratic country.
There is also one unrealistic and improbable scenario of a negotiated settlement between the junta and resistance forces, which is unfortunately preferred and pursued by Myanmar’s neighbours and the ASEAN.
There are also two interconnected dark scenarios, with two more years of prolonged, bitter, highly destructive ongoing war between the junta and the resistance, which will end in the fragmentation of the country into different parts governed by different armed groups.
It is a really mindboggling why Myanmar neighbours, ASEAN and other internationals do not bet on what is the only positive scenario and the one which could become not only possible, but also very probable.
Igor Blazevic is a European democracy activist who has years of experience in Myanmar.
