The government is on the verge of crushing the last remnant of the Tigers in Sri Lanka. The leader of the LTTE, Velupillai Prabhakaran, appears to have been killed in the latest government offensive. Sri Lanka's prime minister will announce victory tomorrow.
The military defeat of the Tigers won't exactly solve the political issues in Sri Lanka, as the Tamil minority continues to have serious, legitimate grievances with the government. Those grievances may eventually result in the development of a new insurgent organization, or in the re-emergence of the Tigers organization from its base in the diaspora and in ethnic Tamil areas of southern India.
Organizational dynamics matter, however, and the idiosyncratic set of strategies that the Tigers used probably won't be replicated. These strategies included a focus on maritime power and suicide attacks. Hopefully, the latter will not be a primary tactic of any future Tamil politico-military strategy. The former probably will be, if only because of the dependence of any Tamil insurgency on support from the diaspora in southern India. The Tamil Tigers built a substantial maritime capability, developing a navy that could outfight the Sri Lankan government, engaging in a variety of maritime terrorist attacks, and maintaining supply lines with southern India. The Tiger's failure is in large part the result of alienating India; the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 certainly didn't help.
Ten years ago, Edward Luttwak published an essay in Foreign Affairs called "Give War a Chance." The argument was that wars produce peace, in the sense that they resolve important political disputes by establishing the power and will of the players involved. UN and Western intervention prevents wars from ending, meaning that political disputes never get resolved, and conflicts smolder on for extended periods of time. I think it's fair to say that, in this case, war has been given its chance.
--Robert Farley
