And on the Sri Lanka issue – you Western world turn your backs on them, remember? Do you expect a void you people left there won’t get filled by somebody else? It’s very simple: you people forfeited this and the Chinese stepped in to fill the gap, as would nature has it.

“b) that my point had more to do with the failure to consider the U.S. role in shifting the balance of power while looking at the Chinese government’s role. It has to do with addressing the same faults that allowed people to misconstrue the Sri lankan conflcit from beginning to end – a failure to look evenhandedly at things, a willingness to play politics with people’s lives and conflicts, and aboveall, a decision to ‘pick a side’ when there are few hands unbloodied.”

“it” in the second sentence refers to the one-sided point about China which I fond objectionable. It was that which I was saying was akin to the kind of logic that operates in Sri Lanka (in this case, a “China rising, U.S. needs to respond” geopolitical argument). It is all of a piece. I wasn’t saying that the U.S. government was responsible for “a failure to…” in Sri Lanka – at least not nearly as much as many other political actors.

Anyway, getting back to the point, I was solely saying that if we’re going to talk about geopolitics, we should do so fairly and comprehensively. Looking at just the Obama Administration and its useful if belated and minimal intervention to juxtapose it with China’s government doesn’t shed enough light. – even if the conclusion you come to is that governments like China / India / others have more of a role in Sri Lanka and other smaller countries in South Asia than the U.S.

Lastly, I agree that if you do want to understand the role of imperialism (geopolitics) whether American, British, Chinese, Indian or otherwise in the world, it always involves understanding how elites in places that have less autonomy are also complicit – this is inherent in most critiqes of imperialism going back to looking at ‘comprador capitalists.’ If I were to blame anyone for Sri Lanka’s current predicament, I would blame the British colonization and decolonization policies- because i do think the structural causes of this conflict are overdetermined and it would have taken a different kind of world and a completely amazing set of political actors to resolve a conflict that started before independence. basically, i find it unimaginable that, all else equal, something like this woldn’t have happened in Sri Lanka. Maybe I’m not imaginative enough.

but i do agree with you that blame can be spread widely and apportioned at many different levels – definitely including Sri Lankan elites, Buddhist fundamentalists, various Indian government actions, the British colonial and decolonization policies, the LTTE, the narrowmindedness of Tamil elites at various points, etc. etc. These points are well rehearsed, and I wasn’t intending to or attempting to make a thorough accounting of how the conflict developed in Sri Lanka or what might be responisble for it in my original comment – just that the comment about China was tres loaded.

B) this is completely wrong and I don’t have the time to elaborate but it is on a level with the proverbial washington post headline, “Shape of Earth, Republicans and Democrats differ.” The US role in advancing misconceptions of the conflict is negligible. Misconceptions themselves played little part in the events of the past 6 months–lest you forget that Ban Ki Moon and Barack Obama never changed the narrative or even attempted to do so–they simply continued a long-standing policy of allowing some govts to do exactly what they wished.

you ideology, methinks, leads you to fit every single episode of our human soap opera into a coherent narrative where US imperial ambition is the alpha, omega and kitchen sink. As always, I do not feel it applies in this case. Sometimes you have to blame the subalterns for subaltern crimes against themselves (including the cultivation of misleading foreign and domestic reporting) and this is one such occasion.

Fair enough to nail me for the faux-revolutionary tone – but please acknowledge that a) I am just as willing as you are to call the LTTE a bunch of f”£$kers and b) that my point had more to do with the failure to consider the U.S. role in shifting the balance of power while looking at the Chinese government’s role. It has to do with addressing the same faults that allowed people to misconstrue the Sri lankan conflcit from beginning to end – a failure to look evenhandedly at things, a willingness to play politics with people’s lives and conflicts, and aboveall, a decision to ‘pick a side’ when there are few hands unbloodied.

There was no sri-lankan tamil hawala, only a extortion and coercion-fueled fund appropriation network for terrorists. It was an unmitigated good that it became increasingly difficult to raise funds through this mechanism, whether it was due to unilateral US noise-making or int’l coordination. Although, to your tastes, they were “non-state actors” who assumed the trappings of the state and were infected by imperial ambitions, right?

by all means, go hang out with Jan Jananayagam, Arjunan Ethirveerasingham, Tamils against Genocide and MIA. They’ll be a good sounding board for your oh-so-daring revolutionary rhetoric. In fact, you should spearhead brand revitalization and rejuvenation for the TRO. Perhaps their next iteration can be even more opaque than the previous one.

I would be interested to know the effects of the U.S. led effort to shut down hawalas and brand nonstate military actors as ‘terrorist’ groups on this conflict

Boston Mahesh wrote

Without a doubt, the Taj Mahal is very much Indo-Saracenic. Saracenic only means “Islamic.”

Indo-saracenic is a British Gothic revival style of architecture. Examples include Bombay’s Victoria Terminus and Gateway to India, and the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. The Taj is an example of Indo-Islamic or Mughal Architecture, as is Humayun’s tomb and the Jama Masjid and Delhi.

And if you think that guys like Sardar Akhtar Mengal (leader ofthe Baloch National Party) looks similar to a Sudanese Janjaweed Militiamen, then you are either admirably colourblind, or just plain blind. (Makrani Baloch, like the Siddis of Gujurat, do look more African, a legacy of the slave trade)

I think, B-M, in your case, my general admonishment above (Kaplan will make you stupid) does not apply. Go ahead and read Kaplan. Sometimes middlebrow is a personal accomplishment

How long until the next uprising? 10 years? 15?

The SL civil war hasn’t been won, the fighting has just stopped again. There’s no indication real peace is anywhere in sight. China has its foothold and Sri Lanka has its temporary ‘peace’, there’s nothing definitive to hold on to here.