I come not to praise Mahinda Mama, I bow down in RESPECT

Thinkfree posted something with the above title here.

His thesis was roughly that things are not really all that bad and Mahinda maama seems to be doing a good job.

My contention is that while things may appear to be normal on the surface there are many fundamental flaws that will in time wreck the country, not today or tomorrow but gradually over the next decade or (if we are lucky) two.

Coming back to Thinkfree, it is true that the armed forces have been given a mandate to go after the LTTE regardless of consequences.

However it is also true that:
1. Certain people continue to make vast sums of money through corrupt arms and other deals;
2. The excuse of "National Security" and the "war" is being used to cover up a great deal.

Thanks to the media blackout, we get only little bits of information on the East, but from what I hear, all MR has done is hand the province over to Karuna's gang. The lives of the people - at least the minorities have not improved and by some accounts have worsened. A sham election has been held to crown a Pyhrric victory and guess who will sweep the polls at the the next presidential or parliamentary polls in the east?

The LTTE was disintegrating thanks to the peace process. Karuna split because of the peace process - remove the common enemy and other differences will start to appear, more splits would have taken place and it was losing support amongst the Tamils.

Instead of letting them fall to pieces, he has decided to re-engage - which is what the LTTE also wanted-which is why they made sure that no one in the North and East could vote at the presidential election.

MR says he is winning the war, he is certainly expending a great deal of resources on it, but with no independent reports, we have only his word for it.

In the meantime, thanks to the fact that he and his crew have no grasp on finance, he has merrily expanded the public sector, (200,000-300,000 recruited in the last two years)embarked on pork laden projects and subsidies with printed and borrowed money. Currently we have inflation of 25% and interest rates of 20%+. So far, no major fall out, but if the war stalls and stretches out for over a year or two more, then, we will be broke and with nothing to show for it and nothing left to fight the Tigers with either.

Only time will tell, for sure but he has abandoned the more certain path for the LTTE destruction in favour of the less certain path, one that has not worked over the last 30 years and he has bet the farm on it. If we win, we can survive, not necessarily thrive because we have mountain of debt and huge fiscal and structural imbalances to put right; if we fail we lose all and will end up a mess, maybe a Pakistan, maybe a Kenya, a Somalia or worse.