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An excellent article in Frontier Myanmar on the growing battles as the AA moves east:

“The AA offensive into Ayeyarwady followed the group’s capture of Gwa Township in late December. After seizing the southernmost part of Rakhine State, AA forces began pushing over the foothills of the Rakhine Yoma mountain range into the delta, thrusting east into Yegyi Township, and south into Pathein Township. 

The AA has since attacked numerous points along the Pathein-Monywa highway, a 750-kilometre two-lane road that runs north-south between the Rakhine Yoma and the west bank of the Ayeyarwady River. The military has responded by increasing security and restricting traffic flows, as it seeks to retain control of the critically important route. . . .

The highway is integral to the functioning of the military’s defence industries, most of which are on the west bank of the Ayeyarwady River in Bago and Magway, according to a January 2023 report by the Special Advisory Council-Myanmar. . . .

For almost 18 months after the coup, the AA avoided confronting the military, instead focusing on consolidating control in rural areas of Rakhine. Publicly, the group gave the impression that it had little interest in supporting the broader revolutionary movement against the regime. 

Quietly, however, the AA was providing training and weapons to resistance groups that had sprung up on the border of Rakhine. Each April, when the AA marks its anniversary, more and more resistance groups send it messages of appreciation, including several groups from Magway. . . .

While the AA’s resistance partners are effusive in their praise, the same cannot be said for some residents of western Ayeyarwady, Bago and Magway. Until the AA-led offensives, these areas had seen few clashes, largely insulating locals from the worst of the country’s civil war. “Sometimes we would hear reports of PDF groups targeting and assassinating military council officials, such as administrators or Pyusawhti members. But actual fighting only began recently,” said a Padaung resident.”

The US has regularly had to deal with allies and partners whose interests clash with it. I’ve previously highlighted the problem America faced with South Vietnamese (and Thai) interference in Cambodia in the late 1950s – at least some parts of the USG wanted GVN and the Thais to back off on their border disputes with Sihanouk’s Cambodia and links with anti-regime dissidents, but Saigon and Bangkok were crucial to other American interests.

Another version of this dilemma can be found in Taiwanese backing for anti-CCP forces in northern Burma/Myanmar in the 1950s. The Taiwanese pulled forces out under pressure in 1953-54, but got back to it in the late 1950s (also with Thai backing), much to American chagrin. This is a useful analytical paper by the State Department in February 1961 laying out the leverage problem and a possible way forward (which ultimately mostly worked):

This is a fairly grim, important assessment from the Kathmandu Post:

There could not have been a bigger contrast. As the country marked the 18th Republic Day last Thursday, pro-monarchy forces were banding together in Kathmandu for a rally to restore the Hindu kingdom. On the same day, the CPN-UML, the party of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and a solidly pro-republican outfit, took out its own rally, with Oli calling on his UML party cadres to ‘seize Kathmandu’. While both the gatherings were sparsely attended, the consensus was that the pro-monarchy rally was much bigger, with around 5,000 participants. The inability of the UML, the biggest elected communist force in the country, to summon even a couple of thousand protesters is perhaps a sign of its declining popularity. The common perception is that other big pro-republican parties like the Nepali Congress and the CPN (Maoist Centre) are also on a decline. The first Constituent Assembly elected in 2008 had formally abolished monarchy and established the new republican order. The assembly elected Ram Baran Yadav as the country’s first President, thereby ending the centuries-old tradition of the head of the state’s position being occupied by a hereditary monarch. Later, the 2015 national charter institutionalised the republic.

Yet people are increasingly disillusioned by the republican system and its political backers. A complaint one gets to often hear is that a single king is preferable to 10 entitled politicians with monarchical ambitions. For many Nepalis, this is more a sign of frustration with the new political class than it is a yearning for the return of monarchy. And yet, if the chief proponents of republicanism were capable of even a little reflection, they would ask why the monarchists have of late become so active. But these leaders, and Oli most notoriously, appear keener to demonise the pro-monarchy forces than to earn the public’s trust through their own action. The politicians of major parties argue that Nepal has achieved a lot under the new republican system, including greater representation of marginalised groups in state organs. This is true. But the country’s achievements under the republican order have also been undercut by our political leaders’ sense of entitlement. More and more people are (rightly) judging them based on what they do today, not the role they played in this or that revolution in the past. . . .

The growing (though still limited) popularity of the pro-monarchy forces also owes to people’s tendency to hanker after a ‘benign dictator’ who can seemingly solve all of the country’s problems. In this quest conveniently forgotten is the erstwhile monarchs’ egregious suppression of democratic rights. Again, a big argument in favour of the republic was that no one should have a divine right to state power. In this egalitarian spirit, the sons and daughters of common folks have since served as heads of state, while the heads of governments and chiefs of executive and legislative bodies are directly or indirectly elected through popular vote. This is something to be celebrated. But people are dismayed when they see the kind of unaccountability, exclusion and corruption they blamed on monarchy being repeated by their elected representatives under the republican order. As the implementers of the order are being discredited, the system they helped bring about too is being questioned. Thus the biggest threat to the republic are not the resurgent pro-monarchy forces. It is the republican forces that have forgotten their solemn pledge to the people.”

This is a useful resource from CSDR in Delhi giving a timeline of the Pahalgam/Sindoor crisis.

I spent the last several weeks very intently following India-Pakistan tensions and then clashes; I even seriously re-engaged with Twitter/X, which is the only social media game in town for South Asia.

Stepping back a little bit, I want to recommend two podcast episodes from different parts of the Carnegie Endowment universe that try to give a big picture on different aspects of Indian foreign policy in this new era:

1. Grand Tamasha – just out, Milan Vaishnav interviews Chris Clary on what happened in the India-Pakistan clashes of May 2025, what we might be able to learn from them, and possible futures for the subcontinent.
2. Interpreting India – from October 2024, Vijay Gokhale and D.B. Venkatesh Varma offer an overview of how India will try to navigate its “multi-alignment” strategy in a rapidly changing world. It’s a little out of date obviously, but highlights key questions that have come into sharp relief as India tries to deal with a Trump foreign policy that seems, at least in recent weeks, to be embracing unpredictability and fluidity (including, unexpectedly, on India-Pakistan relations at least rhetorically).

A grim, thoughtful piece by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express after the Pahalgam terrorist attack. Some excerpts:

“The horrific killing of tourists that has left the meadows of Pahalgam stained with the blood of more than two dozen corpses produces a sickening sense vertigo — like the fall of the falcon, “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” to borrow W B Yeats’ metaphor. The moral issue in this attack is clear. There are no root causes, no mitigating circumstances, that can contextualise its enormity. People were targeted for their religion. . . .

But the tragedy of the moment is that the bloody frontier this act in Pahalgam has drawn will still shadow our political destiny, whichever way we act.. . .

The Pakistani army has not, for a long time, had an even minimally imaginative view of the country’s future. Its greatest strength is not honourable negotiation with adversaries. It is proxy wars, the use of chaos and terror to substitute for its strategic failures and dalliance with religious fundamentalism. The problem with such a state is that it is not clear what counts as deterrence or punishment. At best, it positions itself for tactical reprieves . . . .

ut the point of the attack seems to be to underscore Kashmir’s vulnerability: How fragile any sense of normalcy will be so long as a combination of Pakistan and some home-grown militancy remains a feature of the political landscape. Speaking in instrumental terms, the securitisation of Kashmir will again deepen, pushing the state towards the vicious circle out of which it has struggled to emerge . . . .

what it more subtly does is reinforce the idea that so long as India remains besieged by states like Pakistan, with weaponised religious identities, the 1947 modus vivendi of a secular India is no longer viable. Either the logic of 1947 must be completed, or it must be undone. This is the dominant mood in contemporary India. The consequences of either option are too dire to contemplate. The falcon of peace and secularism is in free fall, and there is no falconer to whose call it can respond”