This is a time to take stock. Due to all the wrong turns that Sri Lanka has taken, and the right ones it did not, at and since our Independence six decades ago, the country has now spent a quarter century commemorating that event in conditions of a separatist civil war. This period of Sri Lanka's history may now be about to end. The main achievement of 2008 was the shift in the balance of forces between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the maintenance of a posture of strategic offensive by the Sri Lankan armed forces. Veteran New York Times editorialist-turned-scholar Barbara Crossette, writing on 6 January 2009 in the progressive US weekly The Nation, described the LTTE as "pioneers of the suicide bomber and the cyanide capsule, and the most totalitarian and lethal guerrilla organization in contemporary Asia."
Indeed, we are winning a ground war against a ferocious insurgent foe that fields large human formations and is armed with heavy artillery, fast boats and light aircraft. And we are doing so with minimum collateral damage, despite the use of human shields by the enemy. As of mid-January, the Lankan military has succeeded in squeezing the LTTE into a single contiguous district. Furthermore, the LTTE has been unable to make any territorial gain during the past two years, nor has it been able to regain any territory it has lost. Meanwhile, the Tigers have lost thousands of valuable fighting cadres. The corresponding losses of the Sri Lankan forces are to be considered affordable, given the discrepancy in size of the two armed forces as well as the larger discrepancy in the population base of recruitment. One should note that voluntary recruitment to the Sri Lankan armed forces kept rising throughout the past year, while forced conscription in the LTTE-controlled areas brought ill-motivated fighters into the rebel ranks.
The chief challenge of 2009 is to conclude the war victoriously, and to do so in a manner that precludes, to the extent possible, a prolonged guerrilla war. A critical aspect of this is the destruction of the LTTE's fighting forces in the battles to liberate Mullaitivu. It is a myth of the misinformed that a powerful irregular force, especially one based on some collective identity or social constituency, can never be fully defeated, and that even if conventionally defeated they revert to or are reborn as guerrilla movements that are impossible to eradicate. Take three well-known examples: Chechnya, Angola's UNITA and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. All three were defeated and decapitated, never to be reborn as guerrillas.
Those in the Tamil diaspora who daydream of the inevitability of a long, drawn-out guerrilla war, such as that waged by the Vietnamese or the Taliban, simply do not know either their history or their geography. The Vietnamese waged a people's war of national liberation against a conscript army from tens of thousands of miles away, possessing no understanding of the Asian continent, let alone the local terrain. The guerrilla resistance deployed broad 'united front' tactics, mobilised the peasantry, was supported by a safe rear area (North Vietnam), had supplies coming in from socialist Russia and China, and was assisted by solidarity movements all over the world, including in the USA itself. If there is any Indo-Chinese parallel for the LTTE it is not Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese, but rather Pol Pot: the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist John F Burns once described Velupillai Prabhakaran as "the Pol Pot of South Asia". The Vietnamese won; Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge eventually lost.