Fifteen men were convicted. The headlines celebrated justice delivered. The conventional narrative cheered a court bringing closure to the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter Sunday bombings that killed over 260 people across three churches and three luxury hotels.
That narrative is comfortable. It is also an intellectual fraud.
Focusing entirely on the courtroom endgame lets the real architects off the hook. Courts prosecute actors; they rarely prosecute systemic paralysis. When investigators and media treat a terrorism trial as the final chapter of a security failure, they mistake the trigger-puller for the loaded gun. The lazy consensus says a few radicalized operatives got what they deserved and the state performed its duty. Look closer at the intelligence logs, the bureaucratic turf wars, and the geopolitical negligence, and a much darker truth emerges. Justice was served to the foot soldiers while the institutional rot that allowed them to operate remains entirely unpunished.
The Illusion Of Closure
We love the theater of criminal convictions because they provide a neat narrative arc. Bad men plan violence. State catches bad men. Court sentences bad men. Roll credits.
Real-world security catastrophes do not work that way. The 2019 attacks were not an isolated lightning strike by an impenetrable clandestine cell. They were the predictable outcome of an intelligence apparatus completely paralyzed by political infighting, administrative vanity, and sheer incompetence. Warnings from foreign intelligence agencies were sitting in inboxes while officials were too busy playing petty political chess to read them.
When a court hands down sentences to fifteen individuals, it creates a comforting psychological boundary between the state and the atrocity. It tells the public that the system works, that the rot was excised. But holding a trial for the executors without reckoning with the structural negligence of the protectors is like blaming the match while ignoring the puddle of gasoline the government spilled across the floor.
The Cost Of Bureaucratic Turf Wars
Let us look at the mechanics of the failure. Months before the attacks, specific intelligence warnings arrived from foreign counterparts detailing the exact targets, the radical networks, and the impending timeline. These were not vague whispers in the dark. They were actionable blueprints.
Why did nothing happen? Because the heads of state and defense were engaged in a bitter cold war. The president and the prime minister belonged to opposing political factions. Their respective security details and intelligence chiefs treated information as currency in a domestic political struggle rather than a shared asset for national survival. When security briefs become weapons to undermine a political rival, intelligence ceases to be intelligence. It becomes gossip that gets people killed.
The fifteen convicts deserved their prison terms. But imprisoning them does not fix an institutional culture where career preservation trumps civilian safety. If the same bureaucratic structure faced an identical foreign warning tomorrow, the outcome would look uncomfortably familiar. Bureaucracy does not learn from trials; it learns from structural accountability, and accountability stops the moment a scapegoat is locked away.
Radicalization Is A Symptom Not The Disease
We spend an enormous amount of energy analyzing the theology of the attackers, hunting for ideological purity tests, and mapping out every ideological deviation of local extremist groups. This is a distraction.
Extremism fills a vacuum. When governance collapses, when economic desperation hollows out communities, and when marginalized populations lose faith in the rule of law, radical networks step in with certainty, purpose, and funding. The local cell leaders did not operate in a vacuum of ideas; they operated in an ocean of state neglect.
Focusing purely on the radical mindset lets the economic and political architects of state failure off scot-free. You can jail every extremist preacher in the country, but if you leave the underlying governance failures untouched, new preachers will simply step into the pulpits. Terrorism is often the violent symptom of a chronic state infection. Treating the symptom while ignoring the infection is a recipe for a recurring fever.
The Geopolitical Blind Spot
There is another uncomfortable layer to this tragedy that mainstream reporting glosses over: the regional and international blindness. Modern transnational terrorism does not respect national borders, yet counter-terrorism agencies remain hopelessly chained to provincial turf.
Intelligence sharing across South Asia has historically been hindered by historic mistrust, diplomatic posturing, and data hoarding. When warnings cross international boundaries, they often get lost in diplomatic red tape or dismissed because they came from the wrong regional partner. The Easter bombings were a failure of international cooperation just as much as domestic competence.
Until regional security frameworks move past archaic rivalries, cross-border threats will continue to exploit the seams between nations. Every time we frame an attack as a purely domestic criminal justice issue, we blind ourselves to the global networks that fund, inspire, and enable modern violence.
Stop Celebrating Hollow Victories
A verdict is not a victory when it leaves the underlying conditions that caused the tragedy entirely intact. Fifteen men are behind bars, but the systemic vulnerabilities of the state remain fully operational.
If we truly want to honor the victims of 2019, we must stop accepting courtroom theater as a substitute for institutional reform. We need absolute transparency regarding who ignored the intelligence warnings, why bureaucratic vanity superseded human life, and what structural changes have been made to ensure it never happens again.
Until we demand accountability from the top of the chain of command down, every terrorism trial is just a performance designed to help the powerful sleep at night.
