I am sure the US intelligence community knows how to end all their conflicts. To illustrate, they eradicated terrorism in Sri Lanka by an international intelligence collaboration. They won the bloody war by eliminating the “cephalothorax” of the Tamil Tigers.
Although it did work in Sri Lanka, when the US removed Al Qaeda’s “cephalothorax” in the FATA region, the remnants of Al Qaeda operatives, dispersed throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Consequently, they reorganized and formed Daesh. This was only possible because of the geostrategic porous borders, caves and tunnels that spread from Central Asia, Persian Gulf and to Greater Middle East, even some parts of North Africa.
The Tamil Tigers didn’t have this geostrategic advantage since they operated from pockets of a tiny island, their first and foremost FDL happened to be the Indian Ocean and thus the Tamil Tigers’ survival essentially depended on their marine unit for logistics. When the Sri Lankan Navy was assisted by the global powers on taking control of the territorial waters and established sea denial, the terrorist organization was paralyzed.
Equally important is that during last years of the conflict, the Tamil Tigers were isolated form the rest of the world. There was no state support/sponsor for them other than the weak and divided Tamil diaspora, whereas Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas and now Daesh all have always been sponsored by multiple nation states.
As such, like the Japanese Samurai dictum reminds us that “to kill an enemy, shoot his horse first”, we must first eliminate the support bases of all the terrorist organizations to obliterate them. This can only be done through a fusion of soft diplomacy and hard military might. As Roosevelt put it: "speak softly, and carry a big stick".
