Sounds like a case for Unconditional Surrender Man!

Tamils in this country have been camping out on Parliament Hill for the last few weeks, and the political angles on this just get more and more acute. There is nearly zero chance that our current government will change its’ policy toward the LTTE, but India and the UN are making noises now. Canada has no pull in that part of the world, so I leave it to your imagination the reaction of any Sri Lankan government officials to us telling them how to run things.

I get annoyed when we try to tell other countries (that aren’t attacking us or our allies) how to run their affairs. I may be some Westphalian dinosaur, but I wouldn’t stand for China (for example) telling us how to treat Quebec. If things are so bad that you think you need to intervene, e.g. massacres, ethnic cleansing, etc., send in the army. If you won’t put your money where your mouth is, shut up.

As already mentioned, the Canadian Government is staying out of it, which is the only appropriate action. What I’d like to do here is simply put the political manoeuvring in context with the military situation.

War is messy; things get broken and people get killed. The (many, anyway) Tamils were happy as clams when their side was sticking it to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and they’d carved out an autonomous zone in the north. Now the underdogs are getting their asses handed to them and Tamilland (or whatever) is being rolled up and pulled back by the government.

Napoleon said something to the effect that in war the Moral is to the Physical as is 3 to 1. This is the same man who used the levee en masse to create the “Grande Armée” so I hold more with the old saw “Quantity has a Quality all its’ own” for him. In modern conflicts, Information Operations (IOs) are designed to work the morale angle, and the UN is helping the Tamils as much as it can in this regard.

The UN is claiming 6500 dead and 13000+ civilians killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, but then refuses to say from whence came these figures. It’s not quite “Highway of Death” in scope, but this has no proof and is quite possibly arbitrary. The great thing about making up numbers is that you can make up whatever ones you want to.

What does have the ring of authenticity to it however, is what the ubiquitous “rights groups” are claiming:

International rights groups have accused the government of shelling densely populated civilian areas in the war zone and accused the rebels of holding the civilians as human shields. Both sides deny the accusations.

Asymmetric warfare pretty much guarantees that both of these things will happen. The weaker side will use any advantage it can get, and the stronger side will try to kill the opposition wherever they hide. Again, the Laws of Armed Conflict (LoAC) have no problem with attacking a military target, wherever it may be as long as reasonable force is used. There is a lot of grey in the idea of what’s “proportional”, and the media really doesn’t like any sort of area weapon like artillery or bombing in a civilian area.

Here is the disjoint between the military and political imperatives. Politically the omelette has to be made, but rare is the (democratic) government that can take the media/political heat that will result from all the eggs that need to be broken by the military to that end.

I have no doubt that the Sri Lankan field commanders are not trying to kill civilians, and will avoid it where possible. I am equally certain that the LTTE are willing to incur some friendly deaths to make the security forces look bad. This is used to get the media, certain organizations, etc. on your side and/or applying pressure to the other side. The LTTE are on the ropes, and after all the fighting, bombing and bloodshed in Sri Lanka since this started, the government has a chance to knock the military threat on the head.

The time for political considerations to take the forefront is after your military objectives have been met. There is no ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres (at least not big or official ones; these fights can be nasty), it’s just a fight to the finish. The fighting will stop the day that the LTTE surrender, not when they need a breather to recover. At least that’s the direction things are going, and it’s the way I’d do it.