Reflecting on the demise of the Tamil Tigers, Christopher Hitchens writes the following:

Deciding to fight as a conventional army that belonged to a separate state, the LTTE has now been defeated as a conventional army, and its state has ceased to exist. Not since the British defeated the Malayan Communists, who were too much restricted to the Malay Chinese population, in the 1940s and 1950s, has any major Asian rebellion been so utterly defeated. [...]

It’s just not true, as some liberals tend to believe, that insurgencies, once under way, have history on their side. As well as by nations like Britain and Russia, they can be beaten by determined Third World states, such as Algeria in the 1990s and even Iraq in the present decade. Insurgent leaderships often make mistakes on the “hearts and minds” front, just as governments do, and governments are not always stupid to ban the press from the front line, tell the human rights agencies to stay the hell out of the way, and rely on the popular yearning for law and order.

Hitchens’ implicit point seems to be that even impoverished Third World countries can defeat insurgencies, so why not the militarily powerful United States? Fair enough - but that’s partially because Third World countries have a free hand to employ tactics that the United States has rightly renounced. By the same token, the Roman Republic provides at least a theoretical example of a hegemonic power that excelled at counter-insurgency, but unless the United States is prepared to start crucifying its enemies, it doesn’t provide much in the way of applicable policy examples. Chris Dierkes makes this argument:

Basically as Nir Rosen says there are two schools of counterinsurgency.

1. (practiced by US & Allies) The population-centric school of COIN. Think Gen. Petraeus, David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum, John Nagl, et. al.

2. what Rosen calls the Russian approach: go in and absolutely obliterate the enemy and any civilians who happen to be in the way. Usually followed by installing a ruthless strongman dictator in the wake of the destruction. Called The Russian Approach after the Russian campaign in Chechnya.

The Sinhalese of course practiced most awfully the second approach. They took no account of Tamil civilian life, of trying to separate insurgents out from the population. It was blank check, open season on anyone, anywhere. School #1 generally points to The British campaign in Malaya as proof of the success of their philosophy. This case is as Fabius Maximus has it, much grayer. Generally, the dirty little (god-awful) secret is that COIN Style #2 is typically more successful.

More importantly, as Hitchens points out, the LTTE’s decisive defeat was made possible because the group had evolved beyond simple insurgency and assumed the trappings of a state. States are good at defeating weaker states but struggle against dispersed networks of insurgents; the LTTE was destroyed when it became more like the former than the latter. But what about groups that don’t care about establishing political authority, and seek only tear it down? Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the Taliban - to use the most pressing example - will make the same mistakes as the Tigers.