![]() ![]() ![]() Preparations for an extended campaign have been under way since at least September. Playing to the army’s strengths and allowing for flexible redeployments of troops, a more likely course of action is a rolling series of separate but interlocking offensives that will extend into the New Year and the scorching heat of central Myanmar’s dry season. Opening in earnest in late October or early November as soon as monsoon-soaked ground has dried out, Operation Anawrahta will almost certainly not be launched as a D-Day exercise in “shock and awe.” In contrast to annual forays launched against troublesome ethnic minorities in the nation’s rugged borderlands or earlier sweeps against pockets of communist insurrection in the Irrawaddy Delta and Bago Yoma hills, Operation Anawrahta reflects both a different dynamic and far higher stakes: for the first time the Tatmadaw is seeking to reassert a strategic dominance long taken for granted but which week by week through mid-2021 has been slipping away, most alarmingly in the west.Īlmost certainly not by coincidence, the impending big push has been named in honor the warrior-founder of the Burmese nation who ascended the throne of Pagan in 1014 and unified a state around the very same Irrawaddy valley heartland now in turmoil. The scale and geographical breadth of the impending campaign is striking, indeed arguably unprecedented even in the annals of an army that has been fighting non-stop since Independence in 1948. Time to spread out the maps in army headquarters for Operation Anawrahta, the Tatmadaw’s first full-bore campaign to restoring a semblance of order in a nation veering ever closer to – depending on your perspective – anarchic disintegration or a social revolution to break the military’s decades-long stranglehold on Myanmar’s national life. ![]()
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