ABSTRACT
India’s counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign in Sri Lanka constitutes its only experience with waging COIN outside India. India’s intervention in Sri Lanka is generally perceived to have been a political and military failure, but, as this chapter argues, the COIN campaign in Sri Lanka had complex features that require scrutiny before arriving at definitive conclusions. The external context of the Sri Lankan intervention means that some lessons learned from this COIN campaign will not have direct relevance for COIN operations within India, but these external-context lessons may be of heightened interest for other countries, such as the United States, whose experiences with COIN occur predominantly, if not exclusively, in foreign realms. Many lessons from the Sri Lankan intervention will, however, still be important for India to consider whatever the COIN context because these lessons touch upon aspects of waging COIN that are not specific to any incident but extend across the broad scope of this field of endeavor.
