The BBC reports that a conventional victory against the Tamil Tigers may be in sight. “The Sri Lankan army has captured Elephant Pass, the strategic causeway linking the Jaffna peninsula with the mainland, the president has said.”
Analysts say the government is now in control of the A9 highway and can supply troops and the residents of Jaffna by land. The rebels had held a 100km (60 mile) stretch since 2000, forcing the government to use expensive sea and air routes. … The focus now falls on the sole remaining major Tiger base, at Mullaitivu in the east. …
Separately, the military said a roadside bomb set off in the east by rebels had killed seven people. The blast took place at Morawewa, outside the city of Trincomalee, on Friday morning as a convoy escorted by troops passed by, a statement on the defence ministry website said.
The IED attack on the Sri Lankan convoy may suggest what the Tigers plan to do when they can no longer resist conventionally. But every insurgency needs a secure place for its leadership. Where will the Tigers get theirs? The BBC thinks the Tamil Tiger leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran will either try to find a sanctuary in another country or hide in the jungle.
Some argue that he may choose to flee to India. But that would have to be under cover because he is wanted by the Indian authorities for his role in the murder of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi while election campaigning in 1991.
Another option would be for him to remain hiding in the thick jungle of northern Sri Lanka – but that too would be risky as the Sri Lankan military presence grows stronger in the area.
A third possibility is the rebel leader re-starting a guerrilla war in the south as well as the north. Whatever option he chooses, it is unlikely that Mr Prabhakaran – who advises his cadres to swallow cyanide capsules if they are captured – will be taken alive.
My guess is that Prabhakaran will prefer to find sanctuary across an international border — maybe even in the West. From there he can keep things stirred up in a low-level way indefinitely.
Well, he could always go to Argentina.
Prabhakaran could find a safe have in a professor’s position at, say, Columbia University.
He’s got the requisite resume. All he’ll need is an honorary “degree’ and a change of clothes. It could be a lucrative gig.
Those university credentials mean sooo much these days.
One should not forget that the Tamil Tigers pioneered the technique of suicide bombing; this tactic was not originally indigenous to Islam. Victory against the Tamil Tigers (if it can last) should be considered as a major rollback of the custom of suicide bombing. More progress needs to be made, but stamping out the custom in its principal non-Islamic stronghold is a good start.
This might be of interest! Leftists want this forgotten. At the end of the conflict, if I recollect properly, the last remaining communist leaders (4???), dressed in rags, starving, and defeated, came out of the jungle and surrendered.
British in Malaysia
Re: Tamil Tigers pioneering suicide bombing. And here I had thought it was the Japanese who did that–adding words like “kamikazee” to the English language. And then I remember wretchard’s post a couple of years ago about the Philippine Moro insurgency and the blade-equivalent of suicide bombing.
Sounds mainly like Solomon’s observation that “There is nothing new under the sun.”
With I hope everyone’s kind indulgence I shall repost a comment that sat unread at the bottom of the last LTTE thread. Also the Tamils did contribute the explosive vest, the explosive fake pregnancy prosthetic and the explosive brassiere to cutting edge fashion.
If the Indians reconcile with the Sinhalese at the expense of the Tamils it would be a strategic shift of consequence. The equivalent in the Middle East would be the Arabs dropping the Palestinians so that they and the Israelis could face Iran without entanglements or everybody screwing the Kurds. Of course that last is a perpetual given. If India does focus on the Islamic threat in partnership with China and Israel then this war becomes winnable. The problems with that scenario are 1) Indian politics, Delhi issued a statement of support for Hamas yesterday that needs explanation by someone who understands more than I do and 2) Obama who is almost guaranteed to snatch defeat for the West from the jaws of victory.
Is the weakening of the Tamil forces due to the tightening up on money transfers to terrorist organizations?
If so, that is a major victory.
Derek
Between this story, Colombia, Iraq, and (hopefully) Gaza, there have been some pretty positive developments lately. Hopefully the fallout from the Mumbai attack will lead to more.
It does make you wonder why the Indian government would have anything good to say about Hamas. Considering the underlying similarities between the “Palestinian” cause for fighting Israel and the “Pakistani” cause for fighting India over Kashmir.
Since Hamas is comfortably distant from India, it costs them little to pose for the world public forum. They do want a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, after all. To actually take a principled stance against the tactics of terror and militant Islam EVERYWHERE might cost them something tangible, like the good opinion of the BBC.
Hopefully for them, Israel will be successful in this campaign, and the wolves of Hamas and Hezbollah will remain comfortably distant from the Punjab, as militant Muslims seem to hate Hindus almost as much as they hate Jews.
Lowell:
Technically, you may be correct. On the other hand, the notion of strapping a bomb onto one’s self started with the Tamil Tigers; the Tamil Tigers pioneered suicide bombing on land. The Japanese had kamikaze planes, which used in naval warfare. For that matter, Russian aviators sometimes rammed enemy aircraft.
I tend to argue that the suicide bomber derives from western and specifically American theology (People’s Temple). Yes, Islam does have a tradition of the assassin who would come into court, stab a monarch, and then expect to get tortured to death (and he usually was). Pro-suicide Muslim theologians typically look for legal precedent, but they typically use mental gymnastics to do so.
Still, I would argue that explosives existed for over five hundred years in the Middle East. Yet, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Muslim warriors for all of that time to strap on a bomb to kill anybody. Yes, there were suicidal charges in battle; “banzai charges” were standard in the history of Islamic warfare. However, there were no suicide bombers. Think about it. In 1453, the Ottoman Empire had some of the best artillery in the world to batter down Constantinople’s walls, and yet nobody strapped a bomb to himself. Throughout all of my researches, at no time during the entire Ottoman Empire’s history did any Muslim strap a bomb to himself to kill anybody. That’s quite a record.
And then, all of a sudden in the late twentieth century, with the Tamil Tigers pioneering the suicide bomber, the IRA pioneering the car bomb, and People’s Temple advertising the ideal of “revolutionary suicide”, Muslim suicide bombers sprout out like weeds. Yes, there is something wrong with Islam. The suicide bomber is a recent innovation in Islamic theology.
@Alexis, Well argued.
Regarding the suicidal cavalry charge that was a staple of most pre-mechanized armies, it is good to remember that the prime mark of a cavalry officer was that he had to be slightly smarter than his horse.
I really like the real world notion that Union Army General Sherman and others believed that there were 300,000 or so hard cases that would rather be dead than see their privileged lives in a slave owning society end and that you had to kill them before you could have peace.
Lo and behold, they killed 300,000 of them, the ones that tended to be at the front, and there was peace.
And we have the selective weapons to pick out and kill or capture the die hards.
And a target rich environment. Just where is the real world problem? Only in the minds of our cultural self loathers.
Oh, well if we blow it, India and China will eventually sort the jihadists out smartly, and permanently. They’re not as squeamish.
Bob Murphy: Usual figures given are 356,000
dead for Union, 262,000 for Confederates.
And as near as I can estimate Sherman’s March to the Sea and his subsequent march through the Carolinas resulted in a total loss of life of less than 5000. Directly, indirectly, civilians, military, et al.
As this almost has to be the most decisive campaign of the war, it was not loss of life that settled things. Rather, it was loss of logisitics. There was no way to support a
confederate army in the field after Uncle Billy was done.
BTW: Stonewall Jackson before his death had persuaded Robert E. Lee of the necessity of doing the same thing to the North. That is
why Marse Robert was so anxious to break through the middle at Gettysburg. So he could hit the Philadelphia, New York, Boston
axis.
Fortunately he failed. While such a campaign would have caused Lincoln to accept secession, it would still have left the North with plenty of wherewithal with which to fight. In time, that would have led to a sense of betrayal amongst Yankees and in turn have given us a history a lot worse than the one we have had.
In contrast, Johnny Reb had nothing left and it was a case of surrender or perish of malnutrition. No sense of betrayal so no subsequent Schickelgruber.
The War of Northern Aggression was not settled by body count. The excessive casualty rates were primarily (IMO) a failure to adapt to the fact that the Minie ball had made the rifled arm the general issue weapon.
But in and of themselves appear irrelevant in determining the outcome.
BTW: Later on, Sherman was instrumental in allowing various and sundry “Trooper Smiths” to enlist without taking the damnnasty oath;
in the re-establishment of the Texas Rangers;
and in springing the Navajo from Bosque Redondo.
Quite a record he wrote. He was also the founder of what is now known as LSU. He resigned from there knowing full well he would have to fight his own cadets. He did so not because he believed secession was treason but because of a principled opposition to slavery.
His opposite number? George McClellan (best General the South ever had!) He was pro-slavery and anti- secession. And came awfully close to replacing Lincoln in 1864.
Hate to think what the outcome of that would have been.
Why did McClellan fail in the Electoral College? Sherman took Atlanta in the nick of time. We owe that high-strung Ohioan quite a bit. (The whirring sound you hear are my Confederate ancestors spinning in their graves.)
@Dave,
In the ironies that almost were file you have that both Sherman and Lee almost fought for the other side. Both were under oath when South Carolina seceded. Lee was bound to defend his army post in Texas until he received word that his resignation had been accepted by the Dep’t of the Army in Washington. Sherman was an officer of the State of Louisiana until he was released from that position. Both I believe made it clear to concerned parties that they would not betray the oaths they had sworn. Nobody abandoned their post and nobody was expected to. Fortunately the dissolution of the Union was a slow process that accommodated the delays of communications. Today the very rapidity of information flows would produce a possibly bloodier and certainly less honorable result.
Nice one, Dave.
My Civil War history is rusty.
But Sherman’s belief that the hard cases had to be killed and his acceptance of that as a goal for the Union was very interesting.
I think our challenge in the Long War is to keep killing off the hard cases everywhere we find them while waging a more strategic positive and inclusive struggle to win the cultural war, or the war for modernity.
We need to strengthen secular education in countries where the only schools tend to be brainwashing madrassahs and that sort of thing.
“”"”"”"”"One should not forget that the Tamil Tigers pioneered the technique of suicide bombing; this tactic was not originally indigenous to Islam”"”"”"”"”"
In the 20th century perhaps. I read that, supposedly, Afghan tribesmen used suicide bombers against British occupiers in the 19th century.