It is an uncomfortable thought that growing international pressure on Sri Lanka's government to halt its military offensive against the Tamil Tigers may have actually precipitated this week's lethal, all-out push to end the war once and for all. President Mahinda Rajapaksa was under fire from all sides – the UN, the Red Cross, India, key western aid donors. He needed to finish it, fast. He seems to be doing so.
But the illusion that final, lasting victory has been, or can be, secured will not survive long. Even if the Tigers' leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, swallows the cyanide capsule that is said to hang from his neck, the cause he violently hijacked and distorted – justice, equality and self-government for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority – will not suddenly evaporate.
Even if the few hundred Tiger diehards in the cruelly mis-named "safe zone" surrender or succumb to superior army firepower, the memory of the horrors visited upon many tens of thousands of civilians trapped alongside them will not dissipate quickly, or perhaps at all. Even if Rajapaksa gains the acclaim of Sinhalese voters, and wins the early presidential election he is rumoured to be contemplating, he will struggle to win the peace.
Sri Lanka's government, however much provoked, has made fundamental mistakes from which it will find it hard to recover. One is that, by and large, legitimately elected and constituted governments are expected to behave better than the insurgent or terrorist groups that confront them. This means acting legally, humanely, and proportionately. On this their authority rests.
George Bush's administration forgot this basic tenet when it covertly slipped into the illicit world of enemy combatants, waterboarding and domestic surveillance. Israel's government, enraged by rocket attacks on civilian centres, responded in January with a massive assault on the citizens of Gaza. It did not stop the rockets, and whatever moral justification it might lay claim to was shredded in the eyes of most of the world.
Another Rajapaksa mistake was to believe a military solution was possible and even desirable. From Northern Ireland to Cyprus to Nepal, this canard has been exposed again and again. Assuming the current fighting in the north ends, Sri Lanka still faces a bitter harvest in the months and years ahead seeded with revenge and resentment, political unrest and and social alienation and, as matters stand now, the prospect of resuming, low-level violence, including suicide bombings.
The government's recent record on post-conflict reconciliation does not inspire confidence. According to the independent International Crisis Group, "violence, political instability and reluctance to devolve power to provincial administrations" continue to characterise the situation in Eastern province, where the Tigers' strongholds were captured in 2007.
In a report this month, the ICG said the international reconstruction and development assistance that Sri Lanka will soon be seeking should be made conditional on Colombo providing a basic level of human security, ending impunity for human rights violations, and empowering provincial councils as part of a genuine "democratic political transformation in both the north and east." Such an opening up would also entail limiting current curbs on media access and reporting.
A third basic government mistake was believing that somehow Sri Lanka could go it alone, that it could do as it saw fit in defiance of international opinion and law. Human Rights Watch is leading calls for a UN commission of inquiry to investigate alleged war crimes. "Since January, both sides have shown little regard for the safety of civilians ... The [Tigers] have violated the laws of war by using civilians as human shields ... The Sri Lankan armed forces have indiscriminately shelled densely populated areas, including hospitals," HRW said.
The US, Britain, France, UN agencies and other traditional friends and allies of Sri Lanka have all seen their repeated calls for a permanent halt to the hostilities scorned by Rajapaksa. They have been made to look and sound impotent – yet it is their goodwill the president now needs. Assuming the fighting ends, a daunting task awaits of resettling tens of thousands of displaced people, of supplying the makeshift camps where many have been concentrated, of clearing minefields and weapons caches, and more broadly, of reviving Sri Lanka's damaged economy.
Rajapaksa is said to be counting on at least $1bn in foreign aid for the north alone. But with growth rates tumbling, export prices falling and tourism in a slump, Sri Lanka is also looking for short-term help from the IMF to head off a balance of payments crisis, as well as long-term donor assistance. In other words, others will be asked to help clean up the mess – what the Red Cross calls the "catastrophe" – that the government's destructive "military solution" has created. If Colombo's leaders expect such help to be forthcoming, they will have to start listening to their friends.