In recent weeks, government forces have broken through the rebels' front lines, forced them out of much of their de facto state in the north and cornered them in a shrinking pocket of northeastern jungle.
Top officials predict the imminent demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and its dream of creating a breakaway state for the country's ethnic Tamil minority in the north and east.
While terror will continue, the government is about to destroy the effective control of territory that the Tamils had enjoyed for years.
The war looked hopeless a quarter century ago:
The war that led to the murder of a former Indian prime minister erupted in 1983 after a rebel ambush in the northern Tamil city of Jaffna killed 13 soldiers. Vengeful Sinhalese mobs rampaged through Colombo, the capital 190 miles to the south, leaving more than 2,000 Tamils dead, according to human rights groups.
The army of about 40,000 was unprepared for the brutal fighting that ensued, said Wanasinghe."Our army was mainly for containing internal unrest. It was not trained for war," the ex-military chief said.
It soon realized that the rebels, with their rocket-propelled grenades and makeshift armored tractors, were better armed than the troops, he said. The air force was reduced to bombing the rebels with barrels of explosives rolled out the doors of transport planes, he said.
For years the Sri Lankan military was inept. There was not a commitment to fight and negotiations were tried, too.
Eventually the military and government made a supreme effort and the result is that the Sri Lankan military has driven the Tamils back.
I'm sure the Sri Lankans are grateful they didn't face domestic opposition to their war of the caliber we faced this war. How much easier would it have been for Sri Lankan lefty-equivalents to argue they were doomed to defeat? For years it would have seemed all too true.
And then the Sri Lankans began to win. So there you go.
