How Sri Lanka defeated the LTTE

[davidbfpo]

Reviewed in the IISS journal Survival 'The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers' by Gordon Weiss, Pub. Bodley Head 2011. The author wasa UN officilA with the Tamil Tigers at the end and the reviewer is impressed:

..vivid and well researched...Sri Lanka has done important things right, including a health and education record that are almost unmatched in the developing world.

I was struck by the reviewers comments on political violence generally:

When everyone in a country believes his community risks annihilation at the hands of a desperate and implacable foe, the result is a widespread willingness to use whatever means that can the threat.

An aside. There is a RFI on the LTTE:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9697

[TDB]

So it looks like Channel 4 are back with some more damning evidence, next week, Wednesday. Should be interesting.

(Added by Moderator)

Link to cited programme, it hopefully works beyond the UK:http://www.channel4.com/programmes/s...ing-fields/4od

[davidbfpo]

The title of a KoW comment by David Ucko, the catalyst appears to be a WaPo article, although other links are embedded:http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/07/sri...liberal-peace/

Two key points:

The broader point is that the West was not needed nor was its approval sought.....we ought also to consider the declining currency of our professed Western ‘values’ – not least through our own actions, but also because of the wide variety of viable alternatives.

[Bob's World]

A tragedy for the people of Sri Lanka, but can't say I was surprised by the article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...XhW_story.html

[Bill Moore]

The misleading emotionalism in this Washington Post article is exactly what alienates the press in Sri Lanka, not only with the Government, but the citizens that endured decades of terrorism.

Examples of journalism rag wording that one would expect to find in the National Enquire or similiar rags.

scorched-earth campaign

The United States and India, Sri Lanka’s two main trading partners, had largely looked the other way as the government crushed the Tamil Tiger rebels

President Mahinda Rajapaksa took the war to the Tigers with unprecedented ruthlessness and single-mindedness.

Then this dispassionate statement:

At the height of their power, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ran vast swathes of Tamil-dominated northern and eastern Sri Lanka as a virtual mini-state. But they had also turned a struggle for the rights of the island’s Hindu and Christian Tamils into a terrorist campaign involving suicide bombers and child soldiers — assassinating anyone who stood in their way, including thousands of moderate Tamils, a Sri Lankan president and, in 1991, former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The article fails to address the LTTE didn't represent all Tamils, there were several opposition Tamil grops that the LTTE targeted, and they repeated used Tamil human shields in combat, and had what we now call a sophisticated and robust radicalization process that produced a number of suicide bombers long before it became the norm in the Arab world. The other side of the LTTE was their sophisticated global information campaign, that many reporters fell for hook, line and sinker.

It is understandable the Government is tired of this one way reporting. There are definitely problems with the government that the government and its citizens need to address, which can probably be done more effectively without outside interference that puts the government in a defensive posture.

[Bob's World]

Like most militant arms of an active insurgency, it is probably true to say that the LTTE did not represent the majority of the Tamil populace.

Equally true, I suspect, that the major reasons that led Tamils to join the LTTE and to fight the government were largely shared throughout the populace, and that those reasons are stronger now than ever before. Just because a group does not represent the populace does not means its reasons for fighting are not widely shared.

The government has imposed an artificial state of stability through force of arms, and now sustains it in the same manner. The government of Sri Lanka waged counterinsurgent or counter guerrilla operations, not COIN. A defeated insurgent organization is in no way a resolved insurgency - regardless of what our history books say.

My advice to the government of Sri Lanka is to reconcile with the Tamil populace and to work to fully integrate them into the nation with the same equity, respect and justice offered to all. And to ensure that the entire Sri Lanken populace perceives they possess trusted, certain and legal means to shape their governance. Once they work to do this they will be conducting COIN. States that do this enjoy a true stability, states that do not are either unstable or artificially stable.

What is the role for the US military in engaging with states in any of these three forms of stability? Well first, don't follow US military Stability doctrine, as that is simply about imposing a system of artificial stability. Stability is not a "phase" or an "operation", it is in truth the ultimate goal. Once we gain a clear sense of that fact, then we can tailor our approaches so as to help someone else in their efforts to attain natural stability, but in large part it isn't a mission demanding a great deal of US military activity. Military forces are not very good at creating natural stability (though are necessary to protect such stabile societiies from those internal and external parties who would seek to destroy the systems and trust that make such stability possible)

The path to true stability is not all that difficult, the problem is that so many governments pointedly refuse to take it. Such governments (and many of these are ones we are supporting vigorously in our little war on terrorism) simply prefer the status quo and accept the associated friction and violence as a cost of holding onto what they have.

[davidbfpo]

In a bizarre twist and undoubtedly some Sri Lankan "spin" here:

Former Tamil Tiger snipers have been selected to represent Sri Lanka in shooting sports at national level. They are among 16 picked at a talent-spotting camp held for ex-fighters last month. Others will represent Sri Lanka in swimming, athletics and cricket.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18831958