Government's war of 'attrition'

Travel advisories come thick and fast after airstrike

PM to announce military casualties in parliament

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Govt. war strategy primitive by international standards

By Ranjith Jayasundera

In an obscure page on the Defence Ministry website, the Ministry explains its 'strategy' for defeating the LTTE, tightly defining it as a war of attrition.

Specifically, the Ministry says their "strategy in achieving the mission is to defeat terrorists through attrition warfare." They were also kind enough to define attrition warfare. "It is to reduce the effectiveness of a force by causing losses to personnel and materiel. The strategy is a radical departure from earlier strategy of expanding land domination or engaged in 'land grabbing' operations."

It should not take The Sunday Leader to point out to the government that waging wars of attrition is unheard of in this day and age, especially when fighting against a guerrilla organisation such as the LTTE. Before this document was made public, counter-terrorism expert Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, in a telephone interview with this newspaper last year, pointed out the folly of racking up the kills as a primary strategy.

The military's current 'attrition warfare' strategy is one of three recognised forms of waging war. It involves a raw assault of one side's manpower and gunfire against that of the other, with the straightforward equation that the side with more "men and materiel" will eventually triumph.

Manoeuvre warfare

The other common type of military campaign is manoeuvre warfare: avoiding the enemy's main battle formations, sneaking past them to take out strategic targets behind enemy lines. The idea here is to effectively cripple the enemy's willingness to fight. Such strategies tend to reduce the casualties of the belligerent side-in this case, the Sri Lankan Army.

Military Analyst William S. Frisbee Junior has written extensively about the various types of warfare, and he has little praise for those engaging in wars of attrition in this day and age. He says it doesn't require "brilliant commanders to execute, just a lot of firepower and cooperation between the units. Very simple and straightforward, you don't need smart troops, just troops that will follow orders."

The third type of warfare is the one familiar to all of us used to LTTE barbarism, revolutionary warfare. "Attrition war does not work against someone practicing revolutionary war," Frisbee wrote. "The enemy," in this case accurately the LTTE, "is not interested in staying and fighting, they thrive on ambushes. If the enemy cannot stand up and fight, it fades away, disappearing into the local population."

Attrition strategies

See  separate box on this page for Frisbee's very relevant observations on using attrition strategies to fight a revolutionary group. But the officer did allow that victory in such a situation is possible. "A practitioner of Attrition War can win against a revolutionary if the Attritionist is willing to completely depopulate a country. It will make for a very bitter and bloody war but in theory an Attritionist could win."

With 300,000 IDPs and counting from the northern battlefields, foreign aid cut off to the war theatre, and daily aerial bombings of populated areas, it is clear that the Rajapakse defence establishment has no bones about following such a strategy to take on the Tigers, and the Tamil population of the north with them.

After all, Cabinet Defence Spokesman Minister Keheliya Rambukwella is on record saying that northern Tamil civilians will have to make "sacrifices" in the form of their lives and limbs, towards the liberation of their homelands. This followed Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse's Orwellian observation that "not all Tamils are Tigers" but "nearly all Tigers are Tamil," thus his callous attitude about bussing them to Boossa, detaining them for months without charge and harassing them at every checkpoint around the country.

Traumatised and terrorised

The army commander too chipped in recalling how he could "never" forget how he was traumatised and terrorised by those evil Tamils when he was a young boy. With so many axes to grind against the Tamils as a 'race,' it is little wonder that the government is not pursuing a wiser strategy to destroy the LTTE.

The British and the Brazilians have both defeated revolutionary wars. In Burma, British forces, while targeting insurgents, went the extra mile to win the hearts and minds of possible insurgent recruits, just as the Brazilian government did when they were faced with a guerrilla insurgency. "Instead of trying to fight a war of attrition, the government forces sought to isolate the guerrillas by offering the locals more than the guerrillas, and protecting the locals from guerrilla terror tactics," says Frisbee.

Ultimately, these governments turned the locals against the terrorists, and without local support, the revolutionary movements naturally collapsed. But for as long as the war against the LTTE is perceived locally, in the eyes of everyone from the international community, down to the policeman or army soldier inspecting National Identity Cards on the streets of Colombo, as a war between Sinhalese and Tamils, such coups of brilliance against the LTTE are next to impossible.

Humanitarian plight

Interestingly enough, whenever any foreign country other than India raises concerns about the humanitarian plight of the northern civilians, the government turns its guns on that country. Most recently when Senior Presidential Adviser Basil Rajapakse was asked by the BBC whether "western countries have been helping the LTTE," the president's brother answered with a point blank "yes."

"The west has been supporting the stronger side whenever it suits them. It is witnessed in our history that the west has supported the LTTE," Rajapakse said, raising the question of whether the LTTE was in fact the stronger side in his eyes.

The signs that the tide may be turning in the LTTE's favour have been mounting in recent days. Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse in a October 19 interview with the Sunday Observer fired another salvo at media freedom. "It is good to talk about media freedom, but media freedom comes after the freedom of the country... Without jeopardising the thing media should help the Security Forces to defeat the LTTE," Rajapakse said.

"Collective decision"

Just days later, the government took what MCNS Chairman Lakshman Hullugalle termed as a "collective decision" to stop reporting casualty figures of both the military and the LTTE until further notice, due to the "need for operational security" and to prevent such reportage from "imped(ing) the successful accomplishment of the mission."

Both Hullugalle and Military Spokesman, Brigadier General Udaya Nannayakara refused to elaborate on the reasons for the blackout on even LTTE casualty figures. The government has previously reported several hundred LTTE cadres killed per week, a figure that has reduced to just the odd incident where two LTTE bodies are reported found during "clearing operations" every other day or so.

In the 37 days since Army Commander Sarath Fonseka announced that there were only 4,000 Tigers remaining, the Defence Ministry has only claimed that 1,190 have been killed, despite the heavy fighting raging in the north. In the last two weeks the military has only claimed 21 LTTE cadres killed, remarkably lower than any other week this year. In no week this year has the army claimed less than 100 Tigers killed.

 Military casualties

Brigadier Nannayakara however confirmed that Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayake will provide details of military casualties during this week's emergency debate in Parliament although he was unsure of whether government statistics of LTTE casualties will also be made available.

The LTTE for its part has placed its tail between its legs and assumed a rather un-feline 'puppy-dog-faced' front to the outside world. Apart from bombastic comments by Velupillai Pirapaharan pledging that the army would never take Kilinochchi, the Tiger propaganda machine has focused on reporting not of the military's or their own casualties, but on the plight of civilians under siege from the government in their areas.

Even last week when the army reported that over 30 soldiers were killed over the weekend, there was not a hum about these unusually large battles from the usually ferocious pro-LTTE TamilNet news website.

What the LTTE have done to their merit is, left the military red-faced once again with twin deep penetration airstrikes into the heart of Colombo and a main military base. Although the attacks did barely any damage, the psychological impact is undeniable. Several commercial aircraft in flight on Tuesday night en route to Colombo were diverted to Chennai as the Air Force took control of the skies to try to find the LTTE aircraft, which under all accounts, returned safely home.

Panic firing

The Katunayake Airport was sealed off for several hours as police officers and military-men went into panic firing into the sky, lighting up searchlights and barking orders, causing far more terror and hype than the LTTE's paltry little 'air force' is worth.

In the wake of the latest air attack several countries updated their travel advisories for Sri Lanka, warning their citizens not to travel to the country at all unless it was "absolutely necessary." What effect such negative publicity will have on the tourism industry with the Christmas peak season just weeks away, remains to be seen.

The government, however, seems content with following the advice of a former German government official, who described how to drive a country to war. The statesman was quoted by U.S. Army Captain Gustave Gillbert as saying that people don't usually take well to war.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along," the official said.

Voice of the people

To this Captain Gillbert replied that in the U.S. Congress alone has the authority to declare war, and therefore it is not easy to arbitrarily engage in hostilities articulating the voice of the people.

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country," scoffed Senior Nazi Herman G”ring, before being sentenced to death for war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Given the pro-war hysteria that has engulfed the south in three years of Rajapakse government, and the many elections it has won them since November 2005, and the terror campaign on all those persons, groups or media outlets perceived to be anti-war, it appears that this government has been able to put the words of one of Hitler's most trusted deputies to good use.