Sri Lanka: COIN or Civil War?

I’d like to thank Amb. Marks for his thoughtful and enlightening commentary on my article, and I will attempt to respond/explain some of my reasoning below.

I plead guilty to simplifying the complex history of Sri Lanka, and I make no pretensions to be an expert on the country. The article’s purpose was to expound on the myriad of factors behind the collapse of the LTTE within an article-length framework. Amb. Marks’ context is crucial for those wishing to understand the deeper political-social interactions and drawing larger conclusions about the conflict’s end.

Addressing the central issue, I agree with Amb. Marks that Sri Lanka was involved in a civil war, but this does not preclude it from being considered in an insurgency context. Neither the military or academic community, has, to my knowledge, provided a clear definition that separates intra-state warfare between terrorism, insurgency, and civil war. This is largely because all encompass the use of violence to political ends; the difference is one of scale and organization, as well as the response required by the regime. Indeed, one could claim that by definition all civil wars are insurgencies but not every insurgency is a civil war. The U.S. Government COIN Guide, published in January 2009, defines insurgency as, “the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify or challenge political control of a region … in which both sides use armed force to create space for their political, economic and influence activities to be effective.” The Department of Defense definition similarly defines insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.” Clearly, Sri Lanka’s conflict is in line with both definitions of insurgency. Alternately, one can use Mackinlay’s definition, where insurgency is defined by the type of government response required, i.e. police/law enforcement or whole of government interaction. In the political science field, civil wars are usually defined by sustained intra-state conflict with more than 1000 battle deaths. In either context, Sri Lanka can be categorized as an insurgency and a civil war. Indeed, one of the common criticisms leveled at the LTTE’s strategy was that it tried to wage Mao’s Phase III (war of movement) insurgency/civil war without the resources or support to sustain it.

Discussing conflict labels does not change that the anti-population centric COIN crowd are regularly citing Sri Lanka as an example of successful counterinsurgency. The origins and purpose of this paper was to respond an overly simplified narrative being repeated – that Sri Lanka’s victory was a model of successful COIN that undercut our population centric counterinsurgency model. Far from only appearing in Indian Defense review, articles have appeared regularly in print, blogs, and sites such as Small Wars Journal citing Sri Lanka as a “COIN success” we should learn from. In some ways, Amb. Marks makes my point when he argues the nature of the conflict as a conventional civil war limits the COIN lessons that can or should be drawn regarding COIN doctrine. I would agree. My desire was to illustrate the role of the strategic miscalculations of the LTTE, combined with governmental and international changes that set the conditions for the LTTE’s rapid collapse.

Finally, while the LTTE is defeated and the civil war has ceased, there is little assurance that the insurgency has ended due to the lack of political progress and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. It is quite possible, even likely, that another Tamil group will rise from the ashes of the LTTE and resume the conflict. Amb. Marks is right to highlight the suffering of the population that resulted from three decades of conflict, and to caution us on the future direction of Sri Lanka.

Ambassador Marks (no relation, though we are acquaintances) has hit the nail on the head in both large and small terms.

Errors in the article are numerous, right down to mis-statement of just who the Sri Lanka Tamils are (the Ambassador is correct). Not only are Sri Lanka Tamils a different community altogether from the Indian Tamils who work the tea plantations (Sri Lanka’s leading source of foreign exchange), but intra-Sri Lanka Tamil divisions proved a game-changer, when disgruntled Batticaloa Tamils broke with the Jaffna-Tamil dominated LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and enlisted on the government side. There followed the clearing first of the Eastern Province, then the systematic reduction of the North.

One could quibble with terminology and take a position that insurgency and separatism are not mutually exclusive categories, but the Ambassador’s comparison of the Sri Lanka fight to the American Civil War is appropriate in highlighting that counterinsurgency should not be the subject of the analysis so much as simply “warfighting.” In Sri Lanka, tactical innovation under competent military leadership, increasingly able to comprehend operational and strategic imperatives, was enabled by national mobilization under determined civil authorities. “Ruthless” is not a particularly useful term for examining this process.

More appropriate is the “civil war” framework. For some years, as the Ambassador correctly highlights, LTTE controlled a liberated “Eelam” (essentially, the north and east of the island) and then chose to defend it against a revitalized, re-equipped Sri Lankan military and state. What followed was major combat with all the inevitable collateral damage that one associates with any regular fight occurring in populated areas. There was no “counterinsurgency” but an Anaconda Plan, to use the American Civil War comparison. The “brown water” innovation discussed in the article was complemented by a blockade, complete with a “blue water” effort that destroyed the LTTE merchant fleet on the high seas. An air defense grid secured critical infrastructure even as an air campaign sought out and destroyed LTTE air arm facilities and planes. An increasingly formidable ground component was officered by a cadre promoted consequent to battlefield competence.

At the end of several years, compressed to its “Stalingrad,” LTTE sought to use human shields and Diaspora/advocacy-group mobilization (particularly in the EU and Canada, but also in the US) to create a situation that would demand international intervention as per Bosnia or Kosovo. Framing the final battle as “genocide” and constructing a narrative of slaughter (illustrated by images of human suffering) was central to this campaign. It was unsuccessful in redeeming a tactically hopeless situation, but the “collateral damage” remains at the heart of the critique of Sri Lankan victory and continues to poison EU and American relations with Colombo.

If what occurred has (as the Ambassador and I agree) little to do with COIN, it does have a great deal to do with how irregular warfare is to be conducted in the human and geographic spaces of the 21st Century.

At the heart of any analysis of the Sri Lankan conflict are the same issues dealt with so poorly in the flawed Goldstone Report (which purports to demonstrate Israeli disregard of international law and attendant war crimes in Gaza): how can a state defend itself strategically in the face of tactical assault tangibly, on the ground by armed groups, and intangibly, on the virtual fields of legitimacy and the mind? Have we reached a point where tactical and non-contextual application of an increasingly anachronistic and dysfunctional “laws of war” regime denies to the state the right of self-defense?

Dr Thomas A. Marks is head of the War and Conflict Studies Department at CISA/NDU and reported extensively on the Sri Lankan conflict as a journalist.

Thanks to Dr. Marks for his comments. I apologize for any misrepresentations or inaccuracies in the historical background of the article – I socialized it heavily with people who had direct experience in Sri Lanka both from personal contacts and on the Warlord Loop, and those comments did not appear. The errors are obviously mine.

To the central point, I think we are in violent agreement and/or talking past each other. I concur that the conflict has limited COIN lessons, and is problematic to be characterized as an insurgency.

The larger point is that Sri Lanka’s government itself has characterized its efforts as COIN, and more importantly the “cointra” crowd have seized on the conflict as a foil for our counterinsurgency doctrine, employing it whenever needed to show that “brutality works”. The point of my article was simply to show the multifaceted (mostly conventional)reasons for the LTTE’s collapse in article-length form for the non-Sri Lankan expert crowd, which no one had done to present. To any errors I apologize and plead guilty, but I do not shy from the central premise of the article, which was that the campaign was far more complex than the arguments the “cointras” use it for.

Expanding, the larger lesson is that to defeat an irregular enemy you must isolate him militarily, physically, and morally, which was relatively easy for the island nation of Sri Lanka. Doing so in land-locked Iraq (mostly) and Afghanistan is a far more daunting challenge.

I thank the above for their comments, and appreciate their insight. Hopefully they can expand upon my writing and improve our picture of what actually occurred in Sri Lanka, of which there is little written in the west outside of think tank and human rights reports.