How to beat the Tigers

by Dayan Jayatilleka

Yes, we can beat the Tigers, and no, we ain't headed that-away. The way to beat the Tigers has been pointed out by one man who has studied every single suicide terrorist attack, suicide bomber and suicide terrorist organisation on the planet from 1980 to 2003, paying considerable attention to the LTTE.

That is the University of Chicago's Professor Robert A. Pape who produced the volume Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism a year back. Scott McConnell writing in The American Conservative (June 18, 2005) says that "in his [Pape's] office is the world's largest database of information about suicide terrorists" and describes Prof Pape as "the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American".

Before joining the University of Chicago, Bob Pape taught air power strategy at the US Air Force's elite School of Advanced Airpower and Space Studies. In a book on airpower he reaches conclusions that are of considerable relevance to Sri Lankan military planners today: air-strikes used as punitive measures are almost always unsuccessful and counterproductive.

Airpower

Airpower is successful when it is used in one of two ways: to prevent the enemy from attaining a specific military objective, and in conjunction with ground forces. Pape suggests using air and land forces as 'hammer and anvil'.

When used in conjunction with ground forces, airpower confronts the enemy with a dilemma: either to mass forces to deal with the ground attack, and by so doing, expose itself to air-strikes, or disperse to avoid air-strikes and thus be vulnerable to superior (or concentrated) ground forces. Pape's Point of immense importance to Sri Lanka today is Prof Robert Pape's path breaking research on suicide terrorism.

He argues that these terrorists are not religious fanatics motivated by irrationalism, but are striving, in a context of asymmetric warfare, to attain a rational goal, namely the eviction of a perceived occupier.

He concludes that suicide terrorism is the tactic of choice in asymmetric warfare waged in a situation marked by the confluence of three factors: a perceived occupation, chiefly military, of a homeland thought to be theirs by an identity-based (ethnic or national) community; the occupier being a democratic state; and the existence of a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied.

His research cuts through much of the prejudice and propaganda: he correctly emphasizes that the world's leading suicide terrorists are the non Islamic, secular Tamil Tigers. His work though, is not without its flaws and blind-spots.

It begs a vital question. Why is it that in earlier liberation wars, with no less markedly asymmetric a balance of forces, liberation movements eschewed suicide terrorism i.e. the targeting of civilians by suicide missions? Vietnam fitted all three criteria of occupation, a democratic occupier and a religious difference, and yet suicide terrorism was conspicuously absent.

Though Pape himself does not make the point, his argument could be reinforced by a modification. Terrorism in general and suicide terrorism in particular is more in evidence when the occupation is not only military, as it was in Vietnam, but involves a civic component, i.e. settlers, and is a settler-colonial situation.

Significant exceptions

Even in such a context though, there are significant exceptions, such as the armed liberation struggles in the Portuguese colonies of Africa - Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau - in which national liberation struggles were waged of such an enlightened nature, devoid of terrorism, that they impacted on the Portuguese armed forces, radicalizing young officers and catalyzing a revolution within the colonial 'mother country' Portugal itself. Part of the explanation for their conduct and the eschewing of terrorism resides in the character of the leaderships concerned - Frelimo's Samora Machel, the MPLA's Agostinho Neto and above all, the PAIGC's Amilcar Cabral, but note must also be made of the sustained Fidelista input, the prolonged involvement of Cuban forces as trainers, advisors and fellow fighters in these liberation struggles.

Unfortunately Pape's study does not observe a distinction between the use of suicide bombing as a tactic in general, and the use of suicide bombing against soft, i.e. non-combatant targets. This lacuna results in twin errors: either all suicide attacks are seen as terrorism or they are all seen as implicitly legitimate resistance to occupation.

However, Pape's own case studies and empirical data show a considerable difference between the suicide attacks of the Lebanese resistance movement - chiefly Hezbollah, but also by many leftist and Christian elements - which were almost exclusively directed at military targets (US, French, Israeli, South Lebanese Army), and organizations such as Hamas and the Tamil Tigers which have directed suicide bombers against civilian targets (and in the case of the Tigers, unarmed political rivals such as Neelan Tiruchelvam) as well. The former's use of suicide attacks could not be classified as terrorist while the latter could.

None of this detracts from the pioneering and scientific nature of Robert Pape's work, which is why, around this time last year he was a man much sought after in the more important parts of Washington DC.

What is most pressingly relevant to the Sri Lankan policymaker is chapter 12, the final chapter in Pape's book, on whether or not it is possible to defeat movements which deploy suicide terrorism, and if so, how to do it. He concludes clearly in the affirmative saying "a strategy for victory is available".

Strategy for victory

The chapter itself is entitled 'A New Strategy for Victory'. While recognising the legitimacy of military offensives and counter-offensives against terrorists, he says that the evidence shows that military offensives alone are counterproductive and tend to increase recruits to the rebel cause.

He argues for a combination of military operations with an even more important initiative; a thrust which Robert Pape sees - on the basis of all available evidence - as the only effective way to defeat terrorism of this variety.

Pape's discovery will discomfit both doves and hawks in Sri Lanka. Most doves want negotiations with the Tigers and a political solution which is arrived at with them or is acceptable to them, while the hawks want a resolute military offensive with no political concessions to Tamil regional identity, and a unilateral rollback of the North-east merger.

Some doves think that 'home rule' - without military action - can cause the Tigers to convert to peaceful politics or evaporate. By contrast here is Pape's two-pronged solution rather bluntly summed up by a reviewer, Michael Scheuer: 'kill as many of this generation of terrorists as possible while simultaneously beginning to terminate the ... policies and presence that motivate our present enemies and, if continued, will motivate greater numbers in the next generation.'

Concessions

Pape's recommended course of action is not to arrive at agreements with terrorists or even to negotiate with them, but to make far reaching concessions to the nationalist grievances that reside at the root of insurgencies characterised by suicide terrorism.

The terrorist armies or groups may not accept these concessions and may even intensify violence in the short term, but a package of such concessions will slash support, including recruitment, for the terrorist cause and thereby make it possible for the military to defeat the armed insurgency.

The policy prescription then is to cut the taproot of the terrorist campaign by cutting a deal with the underlying nationalism and building local alliances. Pape goes onto argue that the concessions must not be piecemeal because then the terrorists may be able to stymie them. The reforms must be deep-going, once and for all, and made in a single swift move.

Some would say that President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga made an unsuccessful effort to implement a political solution bypassing the LTTE. This is specious argumentation. What was unsuccessful was not her idea of bypassing the LTTE and going for a political solution, but the content and contours of her proposed solution which was more than the traffic could bear. CBK's abiding error was to waste a decade producing reform packages (1995 up to the P-TOMS of 2005) which could not be passed into legislation with the simple majority she had in Parliament.

Had she acted on the suggestion of her Minister Devananda and his advisor (at the time) Dr. Wigneshwaran, and produced an enhanced version of the 13th amendment - 13th Amendment Plus - she would have had a set of reforms which provided the perfect political corollary of the liberation of Jaffna in December '95 or its successful defence in 2000.

President Kumaratunga had other ideas. She sought to use the reforms on the ethnic issue as a battering ram against the Constitution, so that she could put in place a brand new basic law which would ensure her incumbency beyond the two term limit.

Thus the larger the package, the better for her, or so she thought. She was encouraged in her monumental miscalculation by two types: flunkeys who had a vested interest in a lifelong Bandaranaike incumbency, and LTTE agents-provocateurs who knew that overly ambitious reforms would be rejected by the public and the courts, thus proving to the world the Tigers' case that the Sinhala polity is incapable of granting autonomy. (One cannot help but wonder at the role this second element played in the reconnaissance and setting up of Lakshman Kadirgarmar for the Tigers' kill.)

If we were to translate Prof Robert Pape's solution into Sri Lankan terms, then the (only) way to defeat the Tigers is obvious: speedy devolution which takes the Indo-Lanka accord and the 13th amendment as the irreducible minimum. This would simultaneously undercut support for the Tigers, neutralise Tamil Nadu pressures and leverage external support (including military assistance) for us.

The simplistic 'pure militarist' approach advocated by the Sinhala hawks ("unleash the military, stop mollycoddling the terrorists") has to reckon with the fact that Velupillai Prabhakaran has had five years to hone his military plans for a Blitzkrieg.

A 'dirty war' (with grenades thrown into churches packed with civilians); rejecting any notion of a distinct, autonomous (not 'separate') Tamil-majority area; calling for the unilateral de-merging of the North and East and thus rolling back the Indo Lanka accord: these would constitute the exact opposite of Prof Pape's recommendation.

They attack the psychological basis of the Tamil community, and generate a perception of a collective and existential threat. There were similar steps on the road to the end of Yugoslavia.

Fallout of Dirty War

Remember the early to mid 1980s? The policy of the Sri Lankan state, or, more correctly, the practice of the Sri Lankan state under JRJ and Lalith Athulathmudali, was a composite of the legitimate and the illegitimate: military operations; state terror which targeted innocent civilians by way of retaliation/deterrence ('terror for terror'); the countenancing of Sinhala mob attacks on Tamils; and zero- to-minimum devolution (our stance in Thimpu).

If we behave as we did in that Dark Age (and worse still, in combination with the ideology of '56), so too will others. In the past week, the world media spotlight shifted from an indictment of the Tigers over the Kebitigollawe atrocity to stinging condemnations of the Sri Lankan armed forces emanating from quarters as diverse as the UTHR-J, Amnesty International, the website of the US Catholic Bishops' Conference, the BBC and the mainstream political leaders of Tamil Nadu.

It is a criminal folly that the Sri Lankan state has blotted its human rights copybook so soon after the triumph of the EU ban on the Tigers. While the Tigers aren't winning the moral high ground, we are losing it.

The Indian Factor

Watch the Indian scene. In the '80s, India's change of stance took place before July 83, and was manifested in an 'expression of concern', in the context of regulations in Sri Lanka which permitted the disposal of bodies without inquiry by a magistrate.

Last week, in an act of competitive bi-partisanship reminiscent of the MGR-Karunandhi days of the '80s, both Karunanidhi and his rival Jayalalitha have urged the Delhi to move in the matter of Sri Lanka's growing violence which is causing casualties among Tamil civilians. Karunandhi belongs to India's ruling DPA coalition and the resolution on Sri Lanka was not only by his DMK but was endorsed by six parties in Tamil Nadu, including the two Communist parties.

This in and of itself is significant, but the fact that Jayalalitha felt that she should not be outdone and issued a slightly more strident statement implies that Sri Lanka has become, as in the 80s, a theme in Tamil Nadu politics and therefore of inescapable concern to the Central government.

Of course the early 21st century is radically different from the early 1980s. India has a better assessment and fewer illusions about the Tigers. As India bids for both the UN Secretary General-ship and a seat on the Security Council, the world will watch how the newly emergent sub-superpower manages a challenge to regional security: the strife on her southern periphery.

That management cannot but involve two challenges: (a) the reform of Sri Lanka's over-centralised unitary system which is inadequately accommodating of the collective identities of national minorities and (b) the settling of accounts with the man who murdered the father of India's modernity, economic miracle and shining new status - Shri Rajiv Gandhi.

In Foreign Minister Samaraweera's most recent discussion with him, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasised the imperative of a 'devolution package', just as his predecessors did in the '80s. And that may be but a prelude.

However India for its part must understand that to be implementable and sustainable, there must be a 'nexus' (Delhi-speak of the '80s) between federalism or quasi-federalism and US and Indian security guarantees for the Sri Lankan state. To switch to Washingtonese, federalism of any sort must be under an Indo-US security umbrella, and embedded in defence arrangements which can assuage historic fears, provide incentives for the Lankan military, and contain the extremists of North and South.