A savage
crackdown on Rohingya civilians in northern Rakhine State has underscored
Myanmar's lacking counter-insurgency capabilities
Myanmar’s new
national security adviser Thaung Tun announced on February 15 that the major
military operation launched in western Rakhine State in response to an
insurgent attack on border police is now over and that security
responsibilities have reverted to the police.
Following the
savagery of the security force crackdown on the Rohingya community over the
last quarter of 2016, any suggestion of a restoration of normalcy in the
restive region would be welcome news to the international community.
Western governments
have been torn between public outrage over the atrocities reportedly visited on
the Rohingya population on the one hand, and on the other their own
unwillingness to criticize or isolate the democratically elected government of
Aung San Suu Kyi — an administration which remains conspicuously unwilling or
unable to criticize or call to account the country’s errant military.
As observers in
Yangon are aware, the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, will continue to
call all the shots in Rakhine. Under the 2008 Constitution, the military
retains autonomous control over the defense, border affairs and home
ministries, not to mention a 25% block in parliament.
If, as now seems
likely, a low-intensity Rohingya insurgency develops in the coming months, army
units will undoubtedly be on hand to intervene rapidly in any flash points.
Exactly how many security forces are now operating in the sprawling western
state is unclear but independent analysts estimate somewhere in the region of
over 20,000 troops.
Normally, the army’s
Western Command based at An in the center of the state controls three Military
Operations Commands (MOCs) – each comprising 10 under-strength battalions –
based at Taungup in the far south, Kyauktaw in the center and Buthidaung in the
now volatile north.
Already contending
with a Rakhine Buddhist insurgency in central parts of the state, the army and
state police have been significantly reinforced since October, including with
elements from the Tatmadaw’s strategic fire-fighting reserve of Light Infantry
Divisions (LIDs). Battalions of the 66th LID are now understood to have
reinforced local units in the area.
Unusually, the
recent counter-insurgency campaign in
the mainly Rohingya townships of Maungdaw and Buthidaung has often involved
joint operations. These have brought together military, police (both
para-military Border Guard Police and state police) and naval marines under
army command and control, probably reflecting a lack of local intelligence in a
region where the army has not conducted major counter-insurgency operations for
decades.
The result, however,
has arguably been the most serious public relations debacle suffered by the
Myanmar military since its massacre of pro-democracy protestors in 1988. Against the backdrop of nearly 70,000 Rohingyas
fleeing into Bangladesh, a force whose human rights record faced Western
sanctions for decades now stands again in the dock of international public
opinion for what the United Nations has reported were likely “crimes against
humanity.”
The prospects of a
military of this caliber successfully containing an embryonic insurgency are
not good. At a basic level, the doctrinal challenges of an overwhelmingly
ethnic Burman Tatmadaw adapting to a politically sensitive and necessarily
carefully calibrated counter-insurgency mission in a majority Muslim region
inhabited by the widely disparaged ethnic Rohingya are daunting.
“Doctrinally they’re
back in the Dark Ages,” noted one foreign military official, adding bluntly:
“They’ve got no idea about counter-insurgency.”
At one level, the
counter-insurgency operations that have molded the Tatmadaw over the decades
emerged from a range of essentially colonial brush-wars across the country’s
northern and eastern borderlands. Those conflicts have never been about winning
hearts-and-minds but rather about the imposition of centralized state control
by an ethnic Burman majority and an overwhelmingly Burman army over minority
peoples.
Military campaigns
in those regions have generally involved semi-conventional operations against
well-armed, uniformed rebels operating at platoon, company and even battalion
levels. In those conflicts — including the ongoing wars in northern Shan
and Kachin States — the Tatmadaw has
deployed a full panoply of military power, including infantry, artillery, armor
and, more recently, air power.
Where control of civilian
populations has been required, the military has typically relied on the
so-called “four cuts” doctrine – a strategy first developed during
counter-insurgency campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s against communist rebels in
ethnic Burman regions that aimed at cutting insurgents off from food, funds,
intelligence or recruits from potentially sympathetic local villages.
In the rugged
minority-dominated north and east, where the focus of conflict has shifted
since the 1970s, standard operating procedure has typically relied on brutal
“area clearance campaigns.” These have typically involved the burning of
villages, persistent reports of women raped and men forced to serve as porters,
and the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians driven across international
borders.
The response to the
October attacks on Border Guard Police posts in Rakhine State has predictably
fallen back on these time-tested methods – with the salient difference that in
northern Rakhine the enemy consists of
the Rohingya, Muslims many ethnic Burmans consider illegal immigrants in
Myanmar. That has apparently encouraged a level of indiscriminate savagery that
has been unusual even by Tatmadaw standards.
Compounding the
doctrinal weaknesses in a racially and religiously charged conflict is an
equally serious crisis surrounding operational intelligence. This, again, is
hardly unique to Rakhine State: security crises in northeast Kokang in early
2015 as well as in northern Shan state in November 2016 both revealed
disastrous failures of military intelligence.
“Compounding
the doctrinal weaknesses in a racially and religiously charged conflict is an
equally serious crisis surrounding operational intelligence”.
These intelligence
shortcomings permitted large guerrilla forces operating in the hundreds to
catch the military entirely off-guard and inflict major reverses before
Tatmadaw reinforcements could wrest back lost ground.
If these failings
have been true with regard to well-organized standing units of insurgents,
whose order of battle and areas of operation should be closely monitored by
local Tatmadaw commanders, they will inevitably pose a far greater problem for
security forces facing an essentially clandestine militancy in northern
Rakhine.
In this new security
environment, government forces will have to combat small cells of insurgents,
likely based in villages and operating in plain clothes, with an organizational
structure and logistical support networks which to date have remained largely
opaque.
Anthony Davis is a
Bangkok-based analyst and security consultant