Conventional and unconventional wars: The end of one and beginning of the other

by Rajan Philips

Sri Lanka’s supposedly most successful Army Commander has spoken. According to General Sarath Fonseka, the Tigers are finished as a conventional army, if not already, certainly by next year. He has also added the caveat that the LTTE will not be totally eliminated and that as an insurgent force it could go on forever, fuelled by Tamil nationalism and bankrolled by Tamil expatriates. As military declarations go, this one was rather cautious and guarded, quite unlike the “Mission Accomplished” bravado that President Bush mouthed off on the Iraq war and has been egg-faced ever since.

Even so, the cautious optimism of Sarath Fonseka is being questioned by objective observers – from the London Economist to Jane’s Defense Weekly (written by Iqbal Athas who appears to have been forced into mute mode in Colombo) among others. The difference between conventional and unconventional modes of war, according to Colonel Hariharan of Chennai, is that firepower is concentrated in the former while in the latter it is unleashed in “penny packets”. It should be obvious to any observer and all sufferers of Eelam wars over the last thirty years that the penny packets of violence have inflicted far greater havoc on our civilian populations and physical resources than the unleashing of concentrated firepower in territorial battlegrounds.

So there are question to be asked of those who make decisions to wage war and who support the war. What has been the net gain to the country in allegedly attenuating the LTTE as a conventional force while admitting that it will continue as unconventional insurgency forever? Are we marking the end of one mode of war while acknowledging the new beginning of an older mode? Are we resigned to being stuck in this vicious circle of wars, or are we mature enough as a people and a country to look for and find a political breakthrough?
Colonel Hariharan, a retired Indian officer who served in the IPKF and now writes highly credible military and political analysis of Sri Lankan affairs, has traced the sources of the LTTE’s conventional and unconventional warfare capabilities. The conventional capability is, says Hariharan, “an acquired skill egged on and abetted by skewed Sri Lankan political priorities and decisions.” The roots and sustenance of the unconventional warfare, on the other hand, are Tamil political grievances.

One dimensional presidency

It is fair to say that the LTTE’s conventional capability came about in spite of India and not because of India, the result of the most skewed of all Sri Lankan political decisions that got rid of the IPKF and frustrated the 13th Amendment. Although Hariharan avoids saying it, India certainly did have more than a hand in the development of the unconventional capability of not just the LTTE but every Tamil militant group that spawned during the 1980s. Arguably, India’s hand in that development was a botched forerunner to the currently controversial R2P paradigm.

Arguably as well, the LTTE’s conventional capability has been overplayed for opposite reasons both by LTTE supporters and their southern detractors. The former, the more loquacious of them, have apparently proclaimed that the matter of Eelam will be decided on the battlefield by the conventional armies of the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. This assertion is now being used to justify the war efforts of Sri Lanka’s “militarily most successful President.” There could not be a more inadvertent indictment of President Rajapakse by one of his more glamorous beneficiaries – as a one dimensional President! The Economist has no need to be circumspect and has dubbed Rajapakse – ‘the war President.’

The notion of conventional force and possession of territory was used by the LTTE to pretend that it had arrived at the makings of a separate Tamil state and to insist on military parity with the Sri Lankan state. The army’s claim that the LTTE’s conventional capability has been destroyed will be used by the government to pretend that the unitary state has been protected and to insist that there will be no military parity with LTTE as a basis for future negotiations.

General Fonseka’s has gone a lot further and suggested that the LTTE’s conventional capability had to be defeated because the goal of the LTTE is not just to create Tamil Eelam in a part of Sri Lanka but to capture all of Sri Lanka. He apparently vowed: “we will not allow that at any cost, we will fight them.” The truth of the matter is that the LTTE has not been able to make sustainable gains through conventional battles to support anything more than a pretension of a separate sate. Even the occasionally dramatic LTTE battlefield victories have not been cumulatively consequential towards creating Tamil Eelam, let alone capturing the whole of Sri Lanka.

The General and the President appear to have a specific southern political reason to showcase their conventional warfare success. And that is to vindicate everything that they have done in the last three years to negate all the positive efforts of the last twenty (post-13th Amendment) years to address the Tamil and Muslim nationalist grievances. Just as President Premadasa tried to show that he had stood up to India unlike his more socially privileged predecessor (President Jayewardene), President Rajapakse appears to be showing that he is boldly calling the LTTE’s bluff while his Colombo-centric detractors (Kumaratunga and Wickremasinghe) were directly or indirectly appeasing the LTTE.

The upshots of the Premadasa / Rajapakse detours are also equally damning. President Premadasa’s actions contributed to LTTE graduating from an insurgent force to adopting the trappings of a conventional army. The war efforts of President Rajapakse may or may not have put the conventional genie of the LTTE in the bottle, but its unconventional genie, by General Fonseka’s own admission, will haunt Sri Lanka forever.

The only way out of this vicious circle is to stop pretending that Eelam is a serious option and that the unitary constitution is the only basis for a political solution. Equally, it is necessary to start realizing that the matter of Eelam will not be decided in the conventional battlefield or on the basis of military parity, but by enshrining political parity in a new constitutional arrangement and thereby rendering Eelam a redundant demand except for purposes of Tamil nationalist symbolism. This is the crux of our national problem.

And it can be resolved, as Martin McGuinness, the former IRA man turned Northern Ireland politician, said recently, “only at the negotiating table”. He went on to say: "Both the government and the Tamil Tigers believe that they can have more victories over each other possibly in advance of peace negotiations. I have to say, I think both the government and the Tamil Tigers are foolish if they believe that."