Lessons from Sri Lanka

The war is over. But a tone of solemnity reigns over Sri Lanka. Many civilians died, and the country remains highly divided.

But there are things to be learned, even right away. Much of this is speculation, but I think it's good speculation.

I believe the Tigers gave up long after they should have, if military was the only factor. In the past few years, the Sri Lankan military became more competent, and the Tigers failed to revert to an effective insurgency--they fought the Sri Lankan military face-to-face, and lost handily. Cornered for months in a tiny, destitute section of the country, starving and out of ammunition, they held on. They dragged the war on. People continued to die.

I believe the blame lies in part with the international community. The United Nations, the EU, and even the US levered increasing pressure upon the Sri Lankans to pay more attention to civilians, to be more cautious. And the Tigers took advantage of this--one of the reasons so many civilians died was that the Tigers hid among them, and the Sri Lankan government had the domestic political capital necessary to largely ignore this. But increasing international pressure over these civilians may have convinced the Tigers that the tactic would eventually force the Sri Lankans to break and fight much more conservatively.

Moreover, the international community began to advocate strongly for a ceasefire, rather than a surrender. And ceasefires seem to be the knee-jerk reaction of the UN and EU (at least--the US is often responsible). It is a fair knee-jerk; we want the fighting to stop, the dying to stop, as we "sort things out." But the Tamils and the Sri Lankan government had had many ceasefires--and often, they are (quoth a great professor of mine, Barry Posen) "the pause that refreshes" for the losing side. If you are getting beat up badly by your adversary, there's nothing you want more than a ceasefire in order to rearm, reorganize, treat your wounded, recruit, etc. The momentum of the winning side falls apart. Both sides move back--which often means the winning side gives up strategic gains. Sometimes, UN peacekeepers show up to make sure that the winning side can't effectively police the losing side and make sure they don't build up. Such a ceasefire was clearly the last hope of the Tigers, and the incessant calls for it by the international community likely bolstered their confidence in a situation where they would have otherwise felt doomed.

Sometimes, wars must end in surrender. In fact, they often must. Ceasefires lead to lasting peace in very few of the circumstances they are implemented. War does not happen for fun, or out of irrational whim--war is a product of rational security concerns, over competition for naturally scarce security resources that often cannot be allocated well for both sides. The Tigers wanted a homeland to protect themselves as a minority; they were willing to fight, bleed, die, kill, and terrorize for it, for a quarter-century. A ceasefire would not have convinced them to lay down their guns and join the Sri Lankans--not without what is called a "hurting stalemate" (in which both sides have suffered enough and have seen few enough prospects for progress in fighting that a compromise eventually becomes compelling), but a UN-imposed ceasefire typically comes long before that.

The lesson in Sri Lanka is that war sucks, but it cannot be ended by pieces of paper and prayer alone. There are real structural factors at work, and sometimes the best way to change those structural factors to the point that the war ends is to let it run. By pressuring the Sri Lankan government with such zeal, the international community prolonged the war, leading to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of Sri Lankans. We must not let misguided altruism become an ally of the scourge of war. We must be more conscientious in our statements, in our pressure, in our policy. We must, always, think.

Sri Lanka Breaking Stalemate With Tigers

Current civil war theory suggests that civil wars are tough to end with negotiated settlements; victory tends to stick better. Attempts to intervene from outside have largely failed to end the 25-year-old Sri Lanka civil war, in which the LTTE (popularly known as Tamil Tigers) have fought for independence from Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka's not a big state, nor a rich one--the disruption has been devastating to its population, and quite a thorn in the side of India (who has a large Tamil minority in its southeast). The rebels, who claim a large swath of northern coastal territory in Sri Lanka as "Tamil homeland," are on the US and EU terror lists for their treatment of civilians during the conflict. But to be truly fair, the Colombo government hasn't been much nicer.

The rebels have been surprisingly well-armed during the entire ordeal, able to strike Sri Lankan military installations multiple times in the last year with a fighter-bomber wing that the Sri Lankans have struggled to destroy. But a renewed offensive, in which the Sri Lankan military has taken heavy casualties, recaptured the central-eastern part part of the country and the critical Jaffna Pennensula at the northernmost part of the island. The rebels have been collapsed to a defensive pod (the pink shown in the picture to the right), and have held strong. But a recent three-day battle with heavy casualties has broken the rebel front lines on the north-facing side of the Tamil stronghold.

The territory is jungle, and thus very friendly to the local Tamils, who are likely able to move rather freely throughout the area; this will make fighting here not only tought, but a Vietnam kind of tough. The government may have to resort to seriously heavy-handed tactics througout the last phases of the operation to smoke out the Tigers once and for all--even if this will make reconstruction and reintegration more difficult.

I mean to emphasize that there will not be a quick and easy victory in store for the Sri Lankan military-- but the momentum is certainly theirs, and their casualty-acceptance has gone up significantly as morale increases. The ability of the Tigers to launch air strikes or move in major formations without being hit by Sri Lankan air power has diminished significantly, and the Sri Lankan military should begin to assume flanking operations on one side of the front if it has kept reserves properly ready. It must sieze the initiative.

If it does not, the Tamils may resort to trying to stretch the conflict out through a Maoist insurgency--of the style used by the Chinese Red Army in the 1930's, the Viet Cong in the 1960's. Such a style of asymmetric warfare has a surprisingly high rate of success against local governments when the purpose is to stretch their supply lines, decrease their morale, and generally increase costs.

That said, the likelihood that the Tigers will be able to turn the tide in full at this point is very low. They do not have a large population to continually draw fighters from, and their area of operation has shrunk so low that they will struggle to avoid decisive battles like this most recent one--Maoist-style insurgencies can only succeed if the rebels have the ability to continually retreat and regroup--hit-and-run tactics against patrols between long-term rests in relatively friendly territory are essential in being able to carry out a protracted conflict. The Tamils' ability to do that is quickly shrinking; the Sri Lankan military's superior manpower, training, and resources should bring them victory in the next few months.

The Tamil Tigers, and a Note on Terror

Recently, the Sri Lankan government's military captured a satellite base from the Tamil Tiger rebels, prompting analysts all over the world to ask, "why the heck did the Tamil Tigers have a satellite base?"

The US, EU, and India all put the Tigers in their lists of official terror groups, but nobody seems to care too much about the group, as they're mostly nobody's problem but Sri Lanka's (who nobody cares too much about).

Ultimately, the Tigers are a separatist movement that uses terror tactics, which makes them fundamnetally different from Islamic Extremists in a few ways (that have been sadly conflated by the wanton use of the word "terror" in the past 7 years). The first is that they have a limited and well-defined political agenda (the separation of a certain geographical area from a government), which makes them plausibly reasonable to deal with at negotiating tables. The second, is that they're a problem for a very limited number of people (in this case, Sri Lankans), so it's very easy for other countries to ignore them. This is in contrast to, say, Al-Qaeda, which seeks revenge on innocent non-Muslims for the deaths of any Mulsim at the hand of non-Muslims in history; or Hamas, which seeks to irradicate the Israeli people. "religious genocide" is not a goal that one can negotiate with.

The Tigers may be on their way out, thanks to the persistence of the Sri Lankan military and token help from a few friendly countries like India. They are definitely bad dudes that do bad things to good people. My primary worry is that cases like the Tigers are going to increase the terrorist-separatist conflation, allowing countries like China to brutally crack down on anyone in Xinjiang or Tibet thinking about waving a flag of their own.