{"id":94176,"date":"2019-10-21T14:53:44","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T21:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=94176"},"modified":"2019-10-21T14:53:44","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T21:53:44","slug":"who-won-the-war-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/10\/21\/who-won-the-war-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Who won the war?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editorial\u00a0Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

October 21, 2019, 8:58 pm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0It is said that victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. Everybody now wants to take the credit for defeating terrorism. Those who opposed the war tooth and nail and condemned the military, during the height of the Vanni conflict, are now using former war-winning army commander Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka to score political points.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fonseka has sought to settle old scores with SLPP presidential candidate and war-time Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa by claiming that the latter was not involved in planning military operations, which were prepared and executed by service commanders, according to him. Earlier, he claimed that the Navy had made no contribution whatsoever to the war victory, and it was only operating a fleet of \u2018fishing boats.\u2019 He seems to have changed his attitude towards the Navy, which was led by his bete noire Vice Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda during the war.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who really won the war? Was it Fonseka or the Rajapaksas or Karannagoda or the war-time Air Force Commander Roshan Goonathilake? We believe that it was the right combination that worked. Fonseka, no doubt, played a pivotal role in defeating the LTTE. So did other service commanders and their officers and men. The credit for that feat should also go to the police, who foiled many a terrorist bid to blast nerve centres in the city, and the Civil Defence Force personnel, the unsung heroes.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war would never have been over but for the bold political leadership. Several army commanders before Fonseka failed to defeat the LTTE because governments under which they served lacked the courage to fight the war to a finish. Fighting was still on when Fonseka reached the retirement age and the then President Rajapaska gave him an extension in service at the instance of the then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. That proves that the then government leaders had recognised Fonseka\u2019s outstanding contribution to the war and wanted him to continue as the army commander. One can also argue that but for that extension, Fonseka would not have been the war winning army chief.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the Navy, under Vice Admiral Karannagoda\u2019s command, had not destroyed the LTTE\u2019s naval wing, Prabhakran would have taken delivery of many more consignments of sophisticated weapons to match the army\u2019s fire power, and the supplies to the North would have been crippled. It was the naval intelligence that revealed in early Noughties that under the UNP-led UNF government, the LTTE was using a fragile ceasefire to move its big guns to the East and North so as to have the Trincomalee harbour and the Palali airstrip within their range; it was preparing to mount simultaneous attacks on those facilities to cripple the supplies to the North. Had that plan worked, the troops would have been trapped in the North. When the LTTE pulled out of the ceasefire, it successfully targeted the Trinco harbour and the Palali airstrip but precautions had been taken to meet the threat.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The manner in which the Navy with the help of its meagre assets accomplished extremely difficult tasks such as destroying the LTTE\u2019s floating armouries on the high seas may have made the commanders of the blue water navies turn green with envy. The Air Force neutralised the LTTE positions for the ground troops to advance. The STF kept the LTTE at bay, especially in the East.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody would have been able to brag about the war victory if the political leadership had buckled under international pressure in 2009. The then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner rushed here in a bid to stop the war, days before its conclusion. The army would have had to stop its advance if President Rajapaksa had given in to them.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, Field Marshal Fonseka has undertaken to protect national security as a member of a team that went all out to scuttle the country\u2019s war effort and ridiculed him as a person unfit to lead even the Salvation Army. Those who praised him as the best army commander in the entire world now claim that they would have been able to win the war without him!
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fonseka\u2019s contention that the political leadership and the Defence Secretary had no role to play in preparing the strategy to defeat terror is counterproductive. He aspires to be the Defence Minister in case of NDF presidential candidate Sajith Premadasa\u2019s victory. Going by his aforesaid argument, he as the Defence Minister would have no role to play in preparing military plans in case of terrorism raising its ugly head again; that task would have to be left to the future military commanders, according to Fonseka\u2019s own logic. In other words, in the event of Premadasa winning, to ensure national security, his government would need good military commanders and not a former army commander as the Defence Minister.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fonseka should be asked whether he, as the Defence Minister of a future government, led by a group of opponents of war advocating appeasement, would be able to fight a war in case of terrorism re-emerging. The Rajapaksas need to be asked whether they would be equal to the task of countering terrorism again without military commanders of Fonseka\u2019s calibre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editorial\u00a0Courtesy The Island October 21, 2019, 8:58 pm \u00a0It is said that victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. Everybody now wants to take the credit for defeating terrorism. Those who opposed the war tooth and nail and condemned the military, during the height of the Vanni conflict, are now using former […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}