In many respects--its entrenched religious and ethnic conflicts, its festering guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings, its seamless interchange between civilians and combatants--the war prefigured any number of later conflicts. Where it differed was in the government's brutal effectiveness in putting down the insurgency. To the extent that a counter-insurgency campaign can be successful, Sri Lanka is a grisly test cast for success in modern warfare.To the extent that a COIN campaign can be successful, of course. One wouldn't want readers to think that we're labeling the Iraq war a "success" or holding out hopes for a favorable outcome in Afghanistan. Heavens no! It's far more fashionable to insist that counterinsurgencies never work... unless, that is, they're executed in some way that's completely unreproducible -- whether for circumstantial, practical, or moral reasons -- by the U.S.
Anderson's basic summary of the campaign is useful for its brutal honesty about the tactical measures employed by the Sri Lankan military. I'm summarizing here:
- Direct civilians to assemble in safe zones where they'll be free of military reprisals
- Heavily shell these areas
- Force remaining insurgents and associated (?) civilians into a geographically isolated space
- Cut off all transportation, resupply, and communications to this space
- Heavily shell this area
- Kill everyone who doesn't succeed in fleeing and/or is not killed by insurgents during efforts to flee
- Kill insurgent leader
- Declare victory
Each of these steps is to be concluded in an atmosphere of media blindness, and with a firm and steadfast resistance to the corrosive effects of international opinion. Here's how Anderson describes it:
In military circles around the world, the "Sri Lanka option" for counter-insurgency was discussed with admiration. Its basic tenets were: deny access to the media, the United Nations, and human rights groups; isolate your opponents, and kill them as quickly as possible; and separate and terrify the survivors--or, ideally, leave no witnesses at all.
All of which leads one to wonder, if one is a member of those "military circles" discussing the Sri Lankan job with "admiration" (and I'm not quite sure which circles those are, if I'm honest): how in the hell is all that supposed to work?
The Sri Lankan "insurgency" differed in character so significantly from the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies as to scarcely justify the same label (just as, to be fair, the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies differ/ed from those in Colombia, El Salvador, Vietnam, Malaya, Kenya, Algeria, and from one another). Only its character as a geographically isolated ethnic separatist insurgency made such tactics both possible and largely effective. One can draw parallels with Malaya, where forced relocation and isolation of an ethnic minority-based insurgency were also successful, but the process of forcing both guerrilla and civilian alike into successively smaller boxes and killing everyone who doesn't surrender is simply not a viable approach to countering a broad-based national insurgency. And that's leaving aside, of course, the fact that such tactics are FUCKING REPREHENSIBLE.
But that seems to be the point that a number of commentators are trying to make about counterinsurgency these days: you can't really do it well, and if you want to do it as well as possible, you're going to have to kill a shitload of people. Well, true and false. Violence is inarguably a part of effective COIN, just as it's a part of effective military operations of nearly all kinds (and certainly all kinds of war). But sustaining a high rate of fires and an aggressive, patrol-heavy force posture is not the same thing as packing all the living humans into a free-fire area and letting slip the dogs of war. 3-24 might soft-pedal the firepower bit (though not quite so much as its critics on either side suggest), but it's not covering for a Rajapaksa reality.
Just the same, read the whole New Yorker piece if you have access. Anderson is an excellent reporter and an easy storyteller; you can't blame him for the zeitgeist.
UPDATE: Niel Smith helpfully links to his piece on the subject in the 4th Quarter 2010 issue of JFQ. It's worth repeating his conclusion here:
UPDATE: Niel Smith helpfully links to his piece on the subject in the 4th Quarter 2010 issue of JFQ. It's worth repeating his conclusion here:
Those who wish to use the LTTE’s [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil Tigers] defeat as a foil for criticizing U.S. COIN doctrine have adopted an overly simplistic narrative of the LTTE’s defeat. These critics have missed the larger picture of what occurred in Sri Lanka. Appropriate and legitimate debate continues as to the significance of population centric tactics practiced by the U.S. military during the surge to the successful reduction of violence [in Iraq]. Without doubt, numerous changes in the wider internal and external dynamics of the conflict coincided with the tactical shift and accelerated the turnaround in Iraq. Likewise, by 2009, the LTTE was a shadow of its former self, bankrupt, isolated, illegitimate, divided, and unable to meet an invigorated government offensive of any kind. At almost every turn, the LTTE made profound strategic miscalculations in the post-9/11 environment by continuing its use of terror tactics despite a fundamentally changed global environment. Failing to realize this shift, [LTTE leader] Prabhakaran made poor strategic and tactical choices that doomed his movement long before the government began its final offensive. Taken together, these conditions proved essential to the collapse of the LTTE after nearly 30 years of conflict.N.b.: the Tigers didn't do themselves any favors while becoming one of the most well-known terrorist outfits on the globe. Things might not have shaken out the same way had they not so effectively worn out their welcome with patron and undecided alike.
