There's a huge "but" coming.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have earned their extinction, and today it apparently arrived as Sri Lanka declares victory after a half-century of hideous civil war. The Tamil Tigers are one of the most reprehensible guerrilla groups on Earth. They pioneered modern suicide bombing, refining a technique later imported to the Mideast by Hizbullah with such hideous consequence. They have proudly assassinated hundreds and massacred thousands. They have inducted child soldiers by the thousands and committed acts of grave ethnic cleansing against ethnic Sinhalese living in the territory that the LTTE claims as intrinsically Tamil. They have used the very Tamil people whom they claim to represent and defend as human shields, even into the last hours of this terrible war. The Tamil Tigers deserve to vanish.

But.

In pressing towards a deserved victory over the Tigers, I fear that the Sri Lankan military and President Rajapaksa have accepted its own rhetoric about the finality of military triumph. The LTTE earned their end, but many of the grievances that animated them are inconveniently legitimate and will outlive them. Ethnic Tamils face religious and cultural discrimination, a painful shortage of economic opportunities and, particularly in the wake of the war, a gruesome humanitarian crisis. If the Sinhalese majority fails to address these issues, then Sri Lanka's crises will continue. The Tamil Tigers (or whoever claims their name) will wage a quiet war of bombings and assassinations much as they did in the 1980s, with the support of enough Tamils to sustain their efforts indefinitely, and Sri Lanka will not have peace.

I'm not optimistic. The Sri Lankan military was no more restrained in the latest round of fighting than the Tigers themselves; both sides have almost certainly committed war crimes in recent weeks. The government has shown, in its moment of triumph, painfully few signs of a serious effort at national reconciliation. The end of the Tamil Tigers presents a rare opportunity, a necessary but not sufficient condition for lasting peace. It must be paired with genuine and effective programs to extend opportunity and cultural protections to ethnic Tamils, or peace in Sri Lanka will be short-lived indeed.