Beating Terrorists by Violence

The Sri Lanken army has defeated the LTTE, the Tamil terrorist/rebel army. It took 25 years, and the final stage was characterized by rather indiscriminate violence against whoever was in the theatre of operation, citizens and fighters all.

All the while, the Rajapaksa administration managed to amass better weapons,
corral political support to quash the Tamil Tigers, crush dissent, and dismiss
any international criticism of human rights as pro-rebel propaganda.

So much for the accepted wisdom that popular freedom movements can't be defeated, that terrorism can be defeated only by addressing its underlying root causes, and that wars and strife will end only when grievances are redressed. Nonesense. Admittedly, this set of beliefs is extraordinarily compelling, has long since acquired the status of meta-dogma, and residual skeptics are treated as unenlightened barbarians who must be banished from polite society and certainly removed from all levers of power. The High Priests of politically correct discourse and thought, however, are exactly as fallible and wrongheaded as most of their predecessors these past 5,000 years or so; sooner or later reality intrudes to the extent that new dogmas are elevated.

I don't know enough about Sri Lanka to evaluate the moral aspects of this development. All I’m saying is that sometimes power works, and violence can achieve its goals.