From today's Wall Street Journal Asia.
The war on terror scored a big victory this weekend with the Sri Lankan army's battlefield defeat of the terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The event ends one of the world's longest running civil wars. It also vindicates one of the major lessons of September 11: Most of the time, terrorists have to be defeated militarily before political accommodation is possible.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced yesterday that the army had routed the Tigers from their last redoubt in the island's Northern Province, killing Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and several hundred other top militant leaders too. Prabhakaran's apparent demise is the Sri Lankan equivalent to killing Osama bin Laden. Now that the Tiger leadership has been eliminated, it's much less likely the cadres will continue a low-level terrorist insurgency.
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