NEW DELHI — Sri Lanka's victory this week after a 25-year battle against the Tamil Tiger rebels represents a rare success story for governments fighting insurgencies.
Even as leaders in Colombo, the capital, declared a national holiday and citizens danced in the streets, military planners and analysts around the world began scrutinizing the war for lessons on how to fight Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups.
For more than two decades in the conflict in Sri Lanka, neither side was strong enough to overcome the other. That changed three years ago, when the army adopted more mobile tactics, overhauled its intelligence system, promoted young commanders and steadily hemmed in one of the world's most ruthless and innovative rebel movements.
At its peak, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as the rebels are formally known, controlled one-third of the country, had their own army, a sizable navy and nascent air force, and served as a role model for insurgencies worldwide with their pioneering use of explosives vests and female suicide bombers. This week, the army displayed in triumph what it said was the portly, bullet-riddled body of Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in his signature fatigues.
What may be the most important factor in ending the stalemate was the political will to do whatever it took. In a supreme irony, President Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected in November 2005 by a 1.9-percentage-point margin after Prabhakaran urged Tamils to boycott the election. Rajapaksa made military victory over the Tigers a cornerstone of his administration and signaled to the military that it could get whatever resources it wanted simply by asking.
"They did everything a general dreams of," said retired Indian Maj. Gen. Ashok Mehta, a commander of the Indian peacekeeping forces in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s. "Unfettered resources and no political interference."
The military budget grew by 40% a year, and the army exploded by 70% to 180,000 troops, adding 3,000 a month compared with 3,000 a year previously, drawing largely from rural Singhalese attracted by relatively high wages in a struggling economy.
With more soldiers, the army was able to hit the Tigers on several fronts simultaneously, breaking with years of hit-or-miss operations.
"Before, the army would take territory, then move on, allowing the LTTE to come back," said military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara. "That changed and we hit them on all four fronts so they could no longer muster all their resources into one place."
