Please tell me the ‘right lesson’ we learned from Sri Lanka after the IPKF phase? We sacrificed blood and treasure for a good cause- the unity and integrity of SL-although the LTTE fought us bitterly -and we quit before the mission was completed.
https://twitter.com/constantinox/status/1425112495350505475
History has to judge whether that withdrawal was the right decision. The civil war in SL intensified after 1990 and the country’s suffering was profound.
The more important question is why like family planning policies during the Emergency, intervention in the cause of peace and an end to conflict in our neighbourhood where our neighbours want it has become a third rail we don’t want to go near again?
What America’s intervention in Afghanistan says is that intervention in the cause of fighting terrorism and addressing human suffering in the face of radicalism and fundamentalism becomes inevitable under some circumstances. It was by no means a mistake.
But in SL after the IPKF went home, we as a country never NEVER introspected about this phase in our history - we turned our backs to it and even more tragically, corralled the supreme sacrifice of the officers and men of the IPKF by walling it off. A classic state of denial.
However fatally flawed the IPKF intervention may have been, a tragedy capped by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the lessons to be drawn are that when you are fighting terror and separatism the struggle is a protracted one with no easy solutions.
But as long as we as a nation do not introspect fully and frankly about our involvement in SL the catharsis will never occur and this why also we are in some default position of never wanting to ‘touch’ the idea of intervention even when the world around us collapses.
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