As senior Prospect correspondent Mark Goldberg pointed out at TNR last week, the Obama administration recently delayed a $1.9 billion IMF loan to Sri Lanka in an attempt to dissuade the government from continuing a scorched-earth strategy which has killed upward of 1,000 Tamils in the past few weeks. Goldberg hails this as good news for humanitarians:
So far, the Obama administration's response to the crisis in Sri Lanka is encouraging to those who believe that human rights--in name and deed--should enjoy a prominent place in American foreign policy.Though this action is surely an encouraging sign of diplomatic life, I remain skeptical. Not of the tactic itself -- for the leveraging of IMF and World Bank funds has often been used to good effect in international politics -- but rather its potential efficacy in the context of a three-decade-long struggle that has seen more than its share of bloodlust on both sides. The Sri Lankan civil war has endured five failed attempts at ceasefires, multiple unsuccessful Western-led negotiations, and one catastrophic military intervention by India in 1987. The Tamil Tiger cadre is trained to choose death over surrender, a hardened devotion matched only by its Sri Lankan counterpart. And U.S. diplomats expect money to deter further military operations?
This strikes me as naïve at best, dangerous at worst. While it's certainly true that monetary ultimatums are efficacious for protracted problems, this crisis no longer fits that standard. The Sri Lankan Army can see the finish line, meaning that withholding IMF funding is unlikely to moderate the government's aggressive position. It's also entirely possible that Sri Lankan officials will not only ignore the threat but also interpret it as a sign that the U.S. has tacitly accepted the current path toward resolution, however destructive it may be. With the Tigers' operational strength diminishing daily, and their remaining territorial stronghold barely the size of a small college campus, the outcome is no longer in doubt. U.S. engagement will not affect the balance of power, nor solve the ethnic strife between the Tamils and Sinhalese. But it can help shape the terms of a settlement between the warring factions, and perhaps spare tens of thousands of civilians from what the UN recently termed a "bloodbath." Simply weaponizing the IMF appears to be more of a head-fake toward intervention, a face-saving maneuver that requires few resources, and may unfortunately yield fewer results.
--Josh Linden