Sri Lanka: Terrorists with an Air Force !!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: eXile
July 6, 2006 Author: Gary Brecher




...... "Kinda reminds me of an old joke you get in websites about terrorism:

Q: How do you define terrorism?

A: Violence by people who don't have an air force. "

Pop quiz: Who were the first suicide bombers?

It's sort of a trick question. Depends on the style of suicide you're talking about. If you count kamikazes, then the Japanese air force gets the honor, if it is one. If you mean vehicular mass-manslaughter--guys in trucks or cars bumping over the curb to double park'n'explode outside US embassies, then the real trendsetters were those Shiites who drove their truck into American, French and Israeli bases in Lebanon in the early eighties.

But if you're talking about simple pedestrian suicide-bombers, the kind who stroll around wearing those fashionable TNT vests, the ones who drift into fast-food strip malls in Jerusalem and pull their instant-hamburger string...well, it's pretty clear who gets the credit for that. That distinction goes to those underrated killers, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE for short. The LTTE did its first walking suicide-bomb in 1987, killing 40-odd government soldiers in some hellhole called Nelliyadi.

Nobody's heard of the LTTE. I'm not sure why. They're big enough, and lethal enough, to deserve more coverage. Maybe it's because most of the people I see around Fresno are too damn stupid to even know where Sri Lanka is, never mind figuring out who's fighting who over there. I have to interrupt myself here to curse out Fresno a little.

You know, when it's cool and rainy I can almost stand the place. But the heat -- I just can't take it. It's bad enough being fat in cool weather, but when the heat comes on, it's fat people who suffer the worst. Sweating all the time, folds and wads of greasy skin. You make yourself sick. I make myself sick. Every store window you go past turns into a mirror and you see yourself waddling past like a jerk in that stupid white acrylic XXL dress shirt, with the tie choking your fat red throat, big armpit stains -- and skinny joggers go by and they're not even sweating.

But it's not just me. I swear to God, everybody in Fresno gets about 20 IQ points stupider as soon as the hot weather starts. Yesterday I spent 40 minutes trying to get home, just sweating onto the plastic carseat. I'm ready to kill somebody and I look around--everybody's sitting there all patiently, listening to Christian pop on the radio and humming along. Bunch of smiley-face morons.

Then I look past the cars and right where the tract homes stop it's nothing but desert. Like a line: one side housing, other side wasteland. I start realizing, Nobody should be living here. It's worse than a desert. At least a desert has some integrity. A desert you could respect. Fresno doesn't even make it as a desert. It gets about five lousy inches of rain a year, just enough to keep us out of Desert rating. It's "semi-arid." No class at all.

That's why I get all enthused about my job in the summer. The hotter it gets the more I want to hear about war and death, and the bigger the better. That's why Sri Lanka sounds good to me right now. It's a good, big war and went on for a good long time. Good graphics, too. I'll try to send the eXile some of the post-suicide bomber pictures -- like the one with the guy's head all by itself on the ground, looking happy.

Sri Lanka's one of those tropical hellholes that changed its name when the Brits left. Burma turned into Myanmar and Ceylon -- like the tea -- turned into Sri Lanka. It's a little droplet-shapes island off the southeast tip of India. And it's one of those wonderful multi-ethnic countries where people spend most of their time killing each other. The players here are the Sinhalese, who are maybe two-thirds of the population, and the Tamils, who are the other third. The Sinhalese hang out in the South and West of the island and the Tamils stick to the northeast. The Sinhalese are Buddhists, the Tamils are Hindus.

The Brits did their best to **** the place up, naturally. They picked the Tamils to be their little helpers, and that made the Sinhalese majority hate the Tamils more than they already did. Naturally when the Brits pulled out in 1948, the Sinhalese jumped at the chance for some payback. They made their language the "official" one and stomped on the Tamils every way they could. The Tamils started getting pissed off. The LTTE were founded in 1976 with the goal of setting up a separate Tamil state in the northeast of the island, and by the late eighties, they had a booming business in suicide bombers.

One of the theories on why the Tamil were so good at suicide bombing was that Hindus just don't mind dying that much, since they expect to be back, reincarnated as a Newport Beach surf rat, real soon. That sounds like bullshit to me. Fact is, nobody minds dying till it happens to them. Nothing easier than getting high-school age idiots to put on a uniform and walk into bullets -- doesn't matter whether they're Muslims or Hindus or Baptists.

But Buddhists...that's different. Funny thing about Buddhists. They've been losing out all over the world. It's too bad, too. If I had to respect any religion, it'd be theirs. For starters, their God is a fat guy. I like that. And they're quiet at least. The Sinhalese are the only Buddhist-majority tribe in India. The Tamils, though, they've got lots of relatives in South India, where there are hundreds of millions of other Tamils. And lots of these mainlanders send money to the LTTE to buy bombs and guns to help "liberate" their "homeland" in the North and East of the island. Too many Tamils and not enough tigers. There's not a single actual four-legged tiger left in Sri Lanka.

It's like the California Grizzly: they put it on the state flag right around the time they wiped out the whole species. I'd trade the whole population of Fresno to have a few Grizzlies wandering around the Sierras. I'd throw in the whole population of Bakersfield in exchange for a few more tigers in India.

But the population of Sri Lanka doubled in just 35 years, and they wiped out the tigers. Now the only Tigers are the ones in camo fatigues who prowled around the island ambushing government troops from the early eighties to the truce of Feb. 2002.

That's 20 years of war. Something like 60,000 dead and a lot more hurt, blinded or maimed. Big doin's -- till you remember the population doubled in one generation. The higher the birth-rate, the easier it is to write off five-digit casualty figures.

The LTTE has a huge pool to draw from. They get a dozen volunteers for every soldier they take. Even so they're huge by guerrilla standards. They've got at least 7,000 soldiers and 15,000 fulltime civilian auxiliaries.

But that's not the most amazing part. What blows me away is that they've got an air force. No kidding, they're the only guerrilla army in the world with an air force. It's not much, a few helicopters and some prop planes, but it still counts. Kinda reminds me of an old joke you get in websites about terrorism:

Q: How do you define terrorism?

A: Violence by people who don't have an air force.

They've got a navy too, and this one's for real, medium-sized by world standards and world-class in terms of morale. The navy is more impressive. They're called the "Sea Tigers," and they've got at least 2,000 people. They've got a dozen fully armed freighters, hundreds of small fiberglass boats with tiny radar signatures, and a special frogman squad.

You get the feeling these guys are serious? Well, this is how serious they are: they've got a tank brigade of their own. About a dozen T-55s. OK, that's a pretty old tank, but it's a damn good one. Imagine going up against a couple of them if you were a Sri Lankan army patrol with nothing but rifles. If you're a Nam war fan, you might remember that one thing small US units strung out in the jungle feared most of all was the NVA coming in with tanks. They did it a few times and wiped out several small outposts. You just don't expect the guerrillas to come in with heavy armor, so it can be devastating when they do.

One more little indication that these guys don't play around: every Tamil Tiger carries a cyanide capsule into battle. You're supposed to take it if you're captured -- and these guys actually do. There's only two armies I know of in the world where they actually use cyanide capsules: the Tamil Tigers and the North Korean People's Army. That's some serious company to be keeping.

Up against the Tigers is the Sri Lankan army. It's nothing special. On paper it's bigger: 150,000 troops, 70 MBTs, 500 APCs (a weird mix of M113s and BMPs), a decent-size navy and small air force. The tanks are mostly T-55s, which means the army doesn't even have a technological edge in tank battles against the Tigers.

The air force uses a sad Argentine CI ground-attack plane called the Pucara. The Pucara had a pretty sorry record in the Falklands War: every single one the Argentines had was either shot down, destroyed on the ground, or captured. In exchange, the entire fleet of Pucara shot down...one British helicopter. I bet those Tamils are just quakin' in their boots every time they hear those heavy-duty Argentine engines getting closer.

The mainline fighter is the Kfir. This is a weird hybrid Israeli design. Basically, the Israelis stole everything they could from Mirage, then stole the rest from US designers, and called the result a new Israeli-produced fighter, the Kfir ("Lion" in Hebrew). It's the sort of big steal the Israelis seem to get away with time after time, and it's made them a lot of money in sales to third-world air forces.

But the air force can't win a CI war. Nam proved that pretty damn clearly. It's the morale of the army that makes or breaks a CI campaign, and the Sri Lankan army...well, it's not the worst, but it's not the best, either. The war was mostly fought on the Tamils' terms, with the army just trying to keep up.

The Tamils started ambushing army patrols around Jaffna, their key city, in 1983. By 1987 the Indian Army landed and pretty much forced the Tigers to sign a peace deal. The Tigers decided that they were better off not trying to fight the Indian Army, so they did. The Indians, who knew they'd gotten into a real bad mess, paddled home before the ink was dry on the peace treaty. The Tamils only waited till the Indian Army sailed home before restarting the war.

This was their high point: the early 1990s. They did a classic bit of power projection across the straits by assassinating Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 just when he was about to become Prime Minister of India, because they didn't like his anti-Tiger policies. Just to keep things fair and not show any favoritism, they also assassinated the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 1993.

The Sri Lankan army had its best moment when it captured Jaffna in 1995. This wasn't guerrilla warfare, it was classic massed armor attack against fortified positions. The US had a hundred-odd military advisors helping the Sri Lankan army by this time, and it showed. But the Tigers are cold-blooded, flexible fighters. Once they realized they'd lost the conventional war, they went back to unconventional warfare, setting off suicide bombs in the Sinhalese cities down south and ambushing army patrols. Soon they had the army bottled up in the Jaffna peninsula and were pressuring the long supply lines all the way down the island.

In 1996 they set off what was one of the bloodiest single terrorist attack in history, a big huge truck bomb they drove right into the Central Bank in Colombo. At least a hundred people died, and 1,500 were injured. This was the kind of thing that made your ordinary Sri Lankan real tired of the whole damn war.

By 2002 even the Tigers were tired. They couldn't destroy the army, and the army sure as Hell hadn't destroyed them. The Indians were getting tired of taking care of a half-million Sri Lankan refugees, the CIA wanted the whole mess done with, and there was a new peacenik administration in power in Sri Lanka. All around the world, guerrilla ethnic armies were winding down and switching to politics. The Tamils saw the way things were going and got the best deal they could.

Since then it's been a lot of yelling and walkouts, but not war. Not yet. But groups like the Tigers think in terms of decades, not months. They're committed to the Long War theory, just like the VC were. In that strategy, peace is just a break between rounds.