Myanmar’s faltering junta in a do-or-die offensive

After six disastrous months of serial defeat, Myanmar’s military has finally swung back onto the offensive with a high-stakes campaign already teetering precariously between success and further failure.

Troops have been locked for the past three weeks in the army’s single largest operation in decades aimed at pushing back insurgents of the Karen National Union (KNU) and its People Defense Force (PDF) allies and reasserting full control over the economically vital Thai border trade hub of Myawaddy.

Named Operation Aung Zeya in honor of Alaunghpaya, founder of then-Burma’s 18^th-century Konbaung dynasty, the campaign comes as the fortunes of the military are arguably at their lowest ebb since the years following Independence in 1948.

The bid to restore the military’s State Administration Council (SAC) regime’s revenue and reputation will have immediate repercussions in Karen state, situated in the country’s eastern region bordering Thailand.

That includes for the military’s fraught relations with its former Border Guard Force (BGF) auxiliaries, now rebranded in “neutral” ethnic colors as the Karen National Army (KNA). In both guises, the force has been focused primarily on profiting from protection offered by its commander Saw Chit Thu to a string of casinos and industrial scam centers run in the Moei River border region by Chinese mafia groups.

Beyond Karen state’s fractured politics, however, the upshot of the current campaign will provide an important bellwether of the SAC’s broader military capabilities following its loss of huge tracts of national borderlands and whether its survival should now best be measured in months or perhaps still years.

Initial objectives of the big push that opened in mid-April were retaking