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How to Defeat Insurgencies: Sri Lanka's Bad Example
This article was addressed in one of our comments, and discussed more fully at Belmont Club. I have a few words to spend on it, too. The conflict in Sri Lanka has long provided lessons for militant groups around the world. The Tamil Tigers taught terrorists everywhere the finer (or more savage) points of suicide bombing, the recruitment of child soldiers, arms trafficking, propaganda and the use of a global diaspora to collect resources. The Tigers "were the pioneers in many of the terrorist tactics we see worldwide today," says Jason Campbell, an Iraq and Afghanistan analyst at the Brookings Institution. So let's admit, right off the bat, that we're talking about terrorists. They conducted guerrilla warfare, conventional military and naval operations, they established and ran a state-within-a-state, and the tools they relied on were fundamentally illegitimate: murder, coercion, hostage-taking, and all the other things that civilized governments either forswear or hang about with such controls that conditions don't quite cross the line into oppression. But now that the Tigers have been defeated, governments and security forces around the world may try to learn from the success of the Sri Lanka government.  It's called empirical observation. The military's very big on it, politicians not so much. You'd think that reporters, like Time magazine purports to employ, would rely on empirical observation pretty much exclusively, especially since they don't, for the most part, have a deep knowledge of most anything else.President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his army have turned the conventional wisdom on fighting insurgencies on its head, adopting strategies and tactics long discredited, both in the battlefield and in the military classroom. That statement right there should have instructors and students at Leavenworth and St. Cyr and Sandhurst looking closely to see precisely why the received wisdom standeth upon its head. We will now watch Mr. Reporter change the sheets and fetch fresh blankets for Procrustes' bunk. Since they appear to have worked against the Tigers, other countries wracked by insurgencies -- from Pakistan to Sudan to Algeria -- may be tempted to follow suit. Since they actually worked you'd expect so, wouldn't you?  But Rajapaksa's triumph has come at a high cost in civilian lives and a sharp decline in democratic values -- and he is no closer to resolving the ethnic resentments that underpinned the insurgency for decades. Lesson 1: Given a ruthless enemy for whom human life is dirt cheap, there is likely to be a high cost in human lives. Lesson 2: Given that same ruthlessness on the part of the enemy, a certain amount of ruth is required on the side of the good guys. The nonsense about how Churchill never stooped to waterboarding remains nonsense. The sterling qualities of my father's generation didn't include squeamishness. What's exemplary about them is the fact that even after Coventry, while they were willing to smash Hamburg and Dresden to cinders they didn't dehumanize the enemy to the extent today's exemplars of ostentatious squeamishness dehumanize the rest of us. Sri Lanka doesn't have whatcha call a deep tradition of "democracy." It's the home of Lesser Vehicle Buddhism, the gentler, less superstitious sort, as opposed to the Mahayana flavor that flowered in in Vietnam, China, and Japan. Post-independence, I believe they actually had a Trotskyite president. So Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus would probably have gone unremarked, maybe even unnoticed in Lanka. It's the innate kindliness inherent in the Pali version of Buddhism that kept Tamils from being slaughtered in droves or herded into concentration camps. Perhaps Sri Lanka's success should come with a warning label for political leaders and military commanders elsewhere: Do not try this at home.  "There is a Better Way! It is embodied in received wisdom! If you only do the same things over and over, eventually you will receive the results you're looking for." That makes sense. Not a lot of sense, but sense. Of a sort.Rajapaksa's campaign has a bit in common with the one General David Petraeus deployed so successfully in Iraq, and is rolling out in Afghanistan. It does in the sense that it involved looking at the facts on the ground and building plans that addressed the facts. Mr. Reporter, I believe, is merely insinuating that Petraeus is a ruthless bastard. Just as the American general was able to use Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, Sri Lanka's President turned a splinter group of Tigers into allies.  Turning Colonel Karuna (and protecting his person during the subsequent attempts to assassinate him) squashes the assumption that the Sinhalese majority is wiping out the Tamil minority. There's been a Tamil presence in northern Lanka since people starting making boats. It's the setting of the stories about Rama and Hanuman, among others. To my uneducated eye there's no physical difference to be seen between the two peoples -- the result, I think of 2500 years of the way of a man with a maid and probably vice versa. The Tamils of the past, with their Hindu ways, have been absorbed over time into Lanka's Buddhist society, given sufficient time. Tamil kingdoms, particularly in the north, were pretty common. The differences we're discussing are linguistic and cultural. Over 2500 years this hasn't been a problem, but with the advent of radio, teevee and the internet it's been easier to hang on to the differences. Even without change in the immigration rate, it takes longer, perhaps even forever, for the smaller culture to be absorbed into the larger. Colombo and Washington (and other Western capitals) also cooperated in cutting off funding to the Tigers from a global network of sympathizers. Lesson 3: Cut off the money flow. Money's fungible. It'll buy butter, guns, or politicians and it won't care a whit. Beyond that, however, the Rajapaksa counterinsurgency doctrine seems ripped from a bygone era. The main principles are: Here's the real meat of the article, of course. Brute Force Works Modern military wisdom says sheer force doesn't quell insurgencies, and that in the long run political and economic power-sharing along with social reconciliation are the only ways to end the fighting. I think the "modern military wisdom" being quoted here is that taught in journalism school. It's kinda-sorta true in the Clausewitzian sense: "war is the extension diplomacy." But there's much to be said for the suggestion that "grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." Oderint dum metuant works, too. Diplomacy, you might say (Clausewitz actually did) is the extension of war. The idea is to achieve national objectives. It doesn't have anything to do with getting a passing grade in Journalism 200 or impressing the cute blonde with the freckles. If there weren't practical limits to the amount of political and/or economic power sharing the state was willing to do there wouldn't really be anything to fistificate about, would there? But the Sri Lankan army eventually broke down the Tigers in an unrelenting military campaign, the final phase of which lasted more than two years. That sort of sustained offensive hasn't been tried anywhere, in decades.  Actually it has. The Lankans have been watching the rest of the world, probably a lot more closely than the rest of the world has been watching them. One of the things they saw was Paleostine, a confict that's now been going on for 60 years, and the evolution of the PLO, where Yasser Arafat grew old and died standing foursquare in the way of any resolution that didn't involve Jews meeting seawater. Regardless of the proposals, regardless of any agreements, nothing really changed. Lesson learned: Many of these affairs are personality-based. Had Yasser managed to shoot himself through the femoral artery and keel over dead while addressing the UN General Assembly the course of history would have pivoted, whether a lot or a little we don't know. But things wouldn't be the same. The same principle of intransigience in the face of talks applied to the Algerian revolution where de Gualle surrendered in a war that was won, and in Vietnam, where the U.S. Congress showed that its idea of "long term" commitment corresponded to the approximate gestation period of the hippo.  So the Lankans would have had to look for something that actually did work. How about Chechnya? Faced with an adversary whose wrapping were decidedly loose, the Russers flattened much of Grozny, rode roughshod over the Chechens, who deserved the experience, and one by one picked off the leadership of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. The key to victory lay not with Djokar Dudaev, the subsequent line of big turbans up through and beyond Maskhadov who were supposed to be running things, the succession of Arabs who were supposed to be powering behind the throne, but with Shamil Basayev. Once Shamil was reduced to his component parts the festivities fizzled. The element of chance there was that either "head" of the Chechen movment, Doku "Count Dooku" Umarev is incompetent or that he prefers to meet his maker later rather than sooner. Is there another exemplar they could have examined? How about Iraq? The carnage there was "horrible" by non-military standards. We've lost 4300 or so dead and I don't know how many maimed since 2003. This is 2009, which makes it six years, or an average of 716 dead per year. Zhukov would have considered 4300 dead a good day. The religious numnutz swarming to Iraq from all over the world were controlled by one personality, who was not only well-funded and skilled at working out agreements among like-minded groups, but also probably clinically insane, which made him damned hard to predict. But once we rendered Zarqawi into meat, the quality of the resistance against us went down. The stage was set for the behind the scenes negotiations and temporary alliances that brought things under control. The same thing didn't happen when we caught Sammy, nor when we hung him, though something similar might have had we caught and hung Izzat Ibrahim. Negotiations Don't Work  After numerous attempts at mediation -- most notably by Norway -- led to nothing, Rajapaksa basically abandoned the pursuit of a negotiated solution. Once the military had the upper hand, there was little effort to treaty with the Tigers.That was a pretty bald statement of fact. In fact, as President Rajapaksa would probably admit, sometime negotiations work, sometimes they don't. They really don't work with people who have no intention of adhering to the agreements they make, or who make those agreements only as stepping stones to grabbing further concessions after rearming and regrouping. What's the sense of "confidence building measures" if the other side's out to get you? Both diplomacy and military action are tools. Sometimes the choice isn't between peace and war, but between war and total war. Collateral Damage Is Acceptable  In the final months of fighting, the Sri Lankan military offensive hardly differentiated between civilian and Tiger targets. Refugees fleeing the fighting said thousands of innocents were being killed in the army's bombardments. Modern militaries typically halt hostilities when large numbers of civilians are killed. I'm going to let that statement go unrebutted, but I can't off the top of my head think of when that's actually happened. Civilians aren't intentionally targeted by civilized armies, but if they get in the way there are only minimal actions that can safely or effectively be taken. And a commander who endangers his mission because of civilian presence is doing something other than his duty.
Because we're empathetic folk, we grieve over civilian casualties. We were empathetic in the Civil War, too, where we'd get large numbers of men and throw them at each other at places like Antietam. Winfield Scott -- Old Fuss and Feathers -- who commanded the Union forces at the beginning of the war, drew up a plan that involved chopping up and squeezing the component parts of the South, rendering it incapable for continuing the war. It was ridiculed in the press, command passed to McClellan, and it wasn't until Grant adopted a similar plan three and a half years later that the Confederacy was forced into checkmate -- and not, we might add, before Sherman went Marching Through Georgia. War should not be undertaken lightly -- I think Clausewitz mentioned that, too, as did Sun Tsu and Jomini. Once undertaken, though, it can be pursued as a half measure, with casualties spread out over time and victory by no means certain, or pursued quick and hard, with the casualties concentrated in time. The press's boilerplate on the Lanka war keeps saying that there have been 70,000 dead over the course of the war. But if the Lankan government had stomped the Tigers with both feet in 1984 at a cost of 7000 dead they'd be better off now, wouldn't they? If they'd stomped the Tigers in 1984 at a cost of 70,000 dead -- and I think they'd have been hard put to kill that many -- the reconstruction would be over by now and Lanka might even be one of the Asian Tigers, like Malaysia. The lesson might be termed "pay me now, or pay me later." This "Collateral Damage is Acceptable" sumrise is ironic; these same people have no problem with a 'reasonable level of violence' that produces the same or more causualties. It's just the the slow drip-drip-drip of dead and wounded doesn't disturb these folks' continental-breakfast the way Sri Lanka's bloody finale did. Critics Should Shut Up -- Or Else For a democracy, Sri Lanka's recent record on press freedom is an embarrassment. To reiterate, Lanka's formally a democracy, in practice a formerly functional oligarchy that I suspect will reemerge in a slightly different form as the war recedes into the past.  Journalists who dared question the government (and not just over the military campaign) have been threatened, roughed up, or worse. The Jan. 8 murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge, a crusading editor -- and TIME contributor -- was an especially low point. In recent months, as the fighting intensified, journalists and international observers were kept well away, ensuring very little reporting on the military's harsh tactics and the civilian casualties.Military-press relations in wartime can be pretty complicated. The military, as a simple matter of self-preservation, doesn't want those whose goals are inimical to achieving the war's objectives holding their collective elbow. Tamilnet wasn't distinguished by any favorable reporting about the government forces, was it? So what the author's suggesting is that the Tigers, with their controlled propaganda arm churning out atrocity stories about the government forces day and night, weren't counter-balanced by Lanka's relatively free press. A relatively free press means that not all the stories produced are going to favor one side. The non-free Tamil Tiger press did favor only one side. Therefore Mr. Time Report is cheesed that the government side didn't allow and facilitate reporting that would have been about 2:1 biased toward the Tigers, part of it on the "government" side being supplied by guys with cyanide pill talismans around their necks.. Lack of accurate reporting from the war front was one reason why the international outcry against the military's heavy-handedness was so muted -- especially in the U.S. I'm wondering if the writer is wearing one of those talismans.
They were fighting for the freedom of the Tigers, not of the Tamils. The Tamils were cannon fodder. The Colombo government, I suppose, could be worse than the Tigers, but it's hard to imagine how: child impressments, corvee labor, the sacrifice of self for the good of the state. They'd have to do all that before they could surpass the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. That may be one lesson insurgencies worldwide can learn from the Tigers' downfall. Lesson 4: Some organizations are truly evil, to the root and the branch, and need to be wiped out ruthlessly.
Posted by: Fred 2009-05-22 |
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