How to cope with global jihad
The conflicts in
Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan and the global Islamist insurgency have
revealed that Western democracies and their political and military
leaders do not fully comprehend the multifaceted threats represented by
radical Muslim nonstate actors. In this, they violate the most famous
dictum of Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategic genius of2,500 years ago: “If you know yourself and understand your opponent you will never put your victory in jeopardy in any conflict.”
The broad support that al Qaeda jihadis and radical Islamist militias
such as Hamas and Hezbollah enjoy in the Muslim world and in the global
Muslim diaspora, as well as among non-Muslim anti-American political
forces around the world demonstrates that describing the global Islamic
insurgency as a fringe or minority phenomenon is unrealistic and
self-defeating. Since 9/11, democracies
have fought three wars against nonstate Islamist actors. The West needs
to draw important lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the clash between
Israel and Hezbollah to address these strategic deficits. Lack of
clarity in defining the enemy and delays in formulating political and
information strategy severely endanger U.S. national interests and the
security of the West.
Fighting the wrong enemy
The bush administration lost valuable time before it finally defined radical Islam as the premier national security threat in October2005. Initially in the post-9/11
period, the president targeted “evildoers” and “terrorism” as the
enemy. Moreover, Islam was declared a “religion of peace” and Saudi
Arabia, which has spent the last30 years
spreading its Wahhabi/Salafi gospel, was labeled as“our friend.”
Unsurprisingly, the nation and the military were somewhat disoriented.
The U.S. military quickly and successfully destroyed the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan. After that, however, the menu of enemies became
slim: Saudi Arabia, from which15 out of19 hijackers
came, was considered too important an oil supplier and too pivotal a
state in the Middle East to be engaged. Pakistan, both the parent and
the nursemaid of the Taliban, promised cooperation. Most important, the
U.S. did not know (and still does not know) how to fight nonstate
actors, be they sub-state terrorist organizations, militias, or
supra-state religious/political movements.
The jury is still out as to all the reasons for the Soviet collapse,
but it was defeated in part through an indirect strategy formulated by
the Reagan administration, and in part because it disintegrated due to
its own internal weaknesses. If we are to believe one who was “present
at the destruction” — Russian Prime Minister Egor Gaidar — a key reason
was the flooding of the world market with cheap Saudi oil. The Soviet
Union was also bankrupted by its unsustainably expensive
military-industrial complex. In addition, it was burdened with
ideological fatigue and cynicism, torn by ethnic centrifugal forces, and
being bled in Afghanistan by the U.S.-supported mujahedeen.1
For over a century, the U.S. military and other arms of the
government have been designed, nurtured, and financed to fight nation
states, from Spain in1898, to Germany in the two world wars, to Japan in1941–45.
Working with insurgencies or counter-insurgencies hasn’t been
Washington’s forte for a long time. The U.S. military did not succeed in
defeating the North Vietnamese insurgency, nor did its Cold War
guerilla allies prevail in Angola or Mozambique. Beside the Huk
rebellion in the Philippines, and support of Afghan mujahedeen, U.S.
insurgency and counterinsurgency successes have been limited and
peripheral to war-fighting. The current conflict is fundamentally
different.
The wars that went awry
The u.s. entanglements
in Iraq and Afghanistan are exactly where the jihadis want the United
States to be. According to Ayman al Zawahiri, in a taped interview at
the second anniversary of9/11, “If they withdraw, they lose everything, and if they stay they will continue to bleed to death.”2 In other words, damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
U.S. abandonment of Iraq would be seen as a major victory for
anti-American and Islamist forces in the Middle East and throughout the
Muslim world. After Iraq, jihadis may target Saudi Arabia, the Gulf
States, and eventually Egypt and nuclear-armed Pakistan for takeover. It
is the belief of al Qaeda leaders from Osama bin Laden all the way down
that Iraq is going to do to America what Afghanistan did to Russia. And
this would be a major accomplishment for a nonstate actor in a
confrontation with the mightiest state on earth.
Meanwhile, the future ofnato
operations in Afghanistan remains uncertain, with many European allies
foretelling the Alliance’s defeat there. A resurgent Taliban, supported
by al Qaeda and by elements within Pakistan, is threatening to overwhelm
thenato effort. At the same time, many
in the Middle East believe that Israel, which they see as America’s
proxy, was defeated in Lebanon by Hezbollah; and Iran remains defiant,
bringing on line batteries of3,000 centrifuges capable of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons as well as funding Shiite extremists in Iraq and Lebanon.
Islamist extremist/jihadi organizations, including movements and
militias from Egypt to Afghanistan, represent clear and present dangers
to American homeland security, our vital interests, and to our Arab and
Israeli allies. If and when victorious, today’s terrorist organizations,
global Islamist movements such as Muslim Brotherhood or al Qaeda, and
“civil militias” such as Hezbollah or the Mahdi Army, are likely to take
over countries and acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
destruction. With their implacable anti-American and anti-Western
agendas, they will represent dangers comparable to, or greater than,
those presented by the fully armed and mobilized nation states which
topped the threat hierarchies of the twentieth century. Hezbollah’s
relative success against Israel in the summer of2006 is an important case study, worth analyzing in greater detail.
The Hezbollah war as jihadi war
The Israeli-Hezbollah front, which had been relatively dormant since the hasty Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in2000, erupted as world leaders gathered for the July2006 g-8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. Hezbollah’s unprovoked killing of eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping of two resulted in34 days
of fighting. The hostilities will have long-term repercussions for
Israel and other states confronting terrorist organizations, militias
outside of state controls, and other nonstate actors.
The main lesson of the Hezbollah war is that military responses are
simply not enough. The jihadi threat needs to be defeated by a
combination of political, ideological, media, military and intelligence
measures. The good news is that the potential does exist for a broad
coalition between Western, non-Western and Sunni Muslim and Arab
nation-states to get the job done. The bad news is that these actors are
still obsessed with weakening Israel and forcing its withdrawal from
the West Bank without the foundations for durable peace and have not
fully realized the necessity of working together against radical forces.
The process of attaining this realization itself is likely to be
painfully slow and costly in blood and treasure.
The Hezbollah war is at least the third conflict in the Greater
Middle East characterized by the involvement of an advanced Western
democracy on the one hand and a sub-state actor on the other. The first
two are the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the
fighting against the Sunni and Shiite anti-American insurgencies in
Iraq. The three wars have important commonalities, as the guerilla
forces are religiously motivated, demonstrate a willingness to fight to
the end, possess superior knowledge of the local terrain; and rely on
dispersal among the local population, often utilizing systems of
underground bunkers and strongholds which they prepare in advance.
The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was hardly the first — or the last —
jihadi war. Israel is already involved in a low-intensity conflict in
Gaza, primarily against Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Resistance Committees,
the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of theplo,
elements of al Qaeda, and a bevy of other jihadi organizations. The Gaza
forces have used Qassam rockets, which are primitive compared with
Hezbollah’s Katyushas, the Zilzal1,2, and 3,
and the Fajar low trajectory short-range ballistic rockets supplied by
Syria and Iran, along with sophisticated anti-tank Russian-made missiles
andsams.3 Additionally, Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (the global Islamic Party of Liberation founded by a Palestinian cleric in the early1950s)
called for the creation of a caliphate (an expansionist
military-religious dictatorship operating under strict interpretations
of Islamic religious law) in Gaza.4 The
declaration of a caliphate anywhere on the globe would allow jihadi
movements everywhere to shift from a “defensive” jihad to an offensive
one — the jihad to impose Islam on the non-Islamic world, something only
a caliph is allowed to do.
At least two additional theaters are worth mentioning, as they are
not yet attracting as much attention. The first is Somalia, until
recently under the tenuous rule of the Islamic Courts. While the
Ethiopian Army and the provisional government defeated the Courts in
December2006, the Islamists dispersed
among the population and are in the process of making a comeback. The
international links of the Islamic Courts are clear. Chechens, Arabs,
and even British and Swedish Muslims were killed fighting in Somalia.
The second theater is Darfur, where the Arab Islamist militia
Janjaweed, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and other jihadi organizations have promised
to fight any U.N. peacekeeping contingent deployed there.5 Somalia and Sudan’s combined population is44.4 million,
thus the potential of these two impoverished countries to serve as a
base of jihad in Africa and elsewhere can be vast — as long as the oil
money from Islamist sponsors keeps flowing in to recruit, train, and
deploy their populations as jihadi shock troops. Moreover, if Somalia
reverts to Islamic rule despite the December defeat of the Islamic
Courts, its location next to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait may put this
strategic shipping lane at the mercy of suicide boat attackers operating
from Somali coastal bases.
The future of deterrence
Even the most
advanced militaries, such as the U.S. and Israeli, which relied on the
deterrent capacity and reputation they gained in conventional, twentieth
century warfare, will need to reaffirm or re-establish deterrence
against sub-state actors by successfully destroying enemies in the
future. This will not happen unless the nature of the new enemy is fully
understood and new doctrines, approaches, tactics, and procedures are
developed. Moreover, in the Israeli case, the reassertion of deterrence
will not be complete before the appropriate reforms and training have
been fully implemented in the Israel Defense Forces (idf).
In the past, the U.S. relied on the power of its combined operations
and technological and industrial superiority. Its aircraft and ships
dominated the skies and the oceans during World Warii.
In addition, the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were a clear demonstration of overwhelming force by a weapon which, for a
short time, remained exclusively in U.S. hands. The U.S. military
performed majestically in Gulf One, in Afghanistan, and during the
opening of the current conflict in Iraq. What happened after the last
two campaigns is eroding U.S. power and the perception of that power
around the world.
Israel has relied on the deterrence value of its military prowess,
earned in the hard-won victory against five attacking Arab armies in1948; the four-day defeat of the Soviet-equipped Egyptian army in the Suez campaign of1956; and the victory over the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces in1967, in which Israel lost779 soldiers while the combined Arab forces lost 21,000.
The deterrence value of Israeli military prowess, earned in hard-won victories, could not last forever.
In the1973 war, Israel was stunned by a Syrian-Egyptian surprise attack. Nevertheless, the Israeli Defense Forces (idf)
recovered in time to take back all of the Golan Heights, put Damascus
within artillery range, and surround the Third Egyptian Army at Suez,
with no effective fighting force between the Israeli troops on the
African side of the Suez Canal and Cairo, within three weeks. In1982, theidf was at the gates of Beirut within a week, forcing the evacuation of Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) to Tunis, Iraq, and Yemen and destroying a third of the Syrian airforce (86 planes) in one day. While Israel lost675 soldiers, close to10,000 Syrian andplo combatants were killed. Between1982 and2000 Israel lost over1,200 soldiers in Lebanon. But the defeat handed to Syria and the plo
in Lebanon, despite the war having been strategically bungled and the
occupation domestically unpopular, bought Israel a quarter of a century
without a major war.
The deterrence value of these victories could not last forever, however. The 1982–2000 South Lebanon conflict ended with Israel’s poorly managed withdrawal and abandonment of the South Lebanon Army in May2000.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak and then-Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz
supervised the retreat, which was primarily triggered by internal
Israeli protests and dismay over casualties being suffered by Israeli
troops deployed in the self-styled “security zone” in South Lebanon. The
fact and the form of the withdrawal generated a perception of Israeli
weakness. Shortly thereafter, Yassir Arafat unleashed the Terror War
(the Second Intifada) which lasted until2004, in which over1,100 Israelis were killed in bombings and shootings,75
percent of them civilians. Many speculated that the hasty retreat from
Lebanon contributed to Arafat’s decision to launch the Second Intifada.
However, if this was correct, the Israelis certainly failed to
internalize the lesson. Their2005
withdrawal from Gaza, including the abandonment of Jewish villages
there, did nothing to stop the volleys of short-range Qassam rockets
from Gaza into pre-1967 Israel. Many
analysts now argue that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, billed by the
Sharon government as yet another “painful concession for peace,” only
contributed to the Hamas electoral victory in January2006 and increased the Arab perception of Israeli weakness. In fact, in June2006 Hamas conducted an assault and kidnapping operation similar to Hezbollah’s subsequent attack, which triggered the latest war.
Systemic failure
Many israeli and
foreign commentators are focusing, correctly, on the failures of the
political leadership and top military to anticipate, evaluate, prepare
for, and defeat the Hezbollah threat. They cast the net broadly, to
include sociological, morale, bureaucratic and political issues — not
only narrow military ones. All these categories of analysis are valid.
They point out that the Tel Aviv-based secular leftist European elite of
Israel, including many in theidf high
command, bought into the same approach to military transformation that
had been promoted by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The
current generation of Israel’s political and military leaders had
dismissed the concept of overwhelming military victory in favor of a
dysfunctional technocratic reliance on a “Revolution in Military
Affairs,” emphasizing high-tech systems and air power.6 While
high-tech gives an important advantage to developed countries and
modern militaries, it cannot replace good old intelligence and boots on
the ground.
There clearly was a misguided belief that Israel is so powerful,
nothing bad could happen to it. The political, military, and strategic
results of this, yet another failed Israeli “concept,” are there for all
to see.
The process of self-examination, investigation, and conclusions will
be heart-wrenching. Israel went through a similar exercise after the
perceived “earthquake” of1973. However,
the current war is viewed as a limited one but an even more decisive
Israel failure than the Yom Kippur War was ever perceived to be. In1973, the Israelis believed that the Arabs would not attack after the disaster of1967 — and paid for the misconception with3,000 lives in a country of3.6 million.
Then, as now, the Israeli political class and the military became
enamored of a concept which turned out to be a self-defeating construct
rather than a valid reflection of reality.
In2006, the political and military
leadership suffered from a severe case of negligence and neglect.
Israeli government and military institutions had been focused on
“unilateral withdrawal” — first from Gaza and, with an eye toward the
future, from the West Bank — to combat the perceived “drawbacks of
occupation.” The Olmert cabinet, and especially then-Defense Minister
Amir Peretz, a former trade union leader, were busy championing social
welfare issues instead of preparing the country for the forthcoming
confrontation. At the same time, Syria and Iran were busily arming
Hezbollah. The Israeli leadership also did nothing to prepare the
country for the crucial realization that Hezbollah is not a conventional
army, and that a repeat of the lightning victories of the past was
highly unlikely.
During the period leading up to the war with Hezbollah, Israel under
then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and then under Ehud Olmert failed to
prepare ample bomb shelter space or to deploy the anti-missile defenses
it claimed to have developed. It also failed to acquire vital
intelligence (such as the location of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,
the Hezbollah leader, in the early days of hostilities; the scale of
presence of Syrian short- and medium-range missiles in Lebanon; and the
deployment ofc-801/802 Iranian-made anti-ship missiles). Most important, the idf did not implement existing plans to destroy Hezbollah through a ground operation and ad-libbed almost until the war’s end.7
Reports from the field of failures to plan and lead operations;
disasters in supply and evacuation of the wounded; missing weapons,
ammunition, fuel, and other supplies indicate that the country and the
army, which had not been engaged in fighting a major war since1982, needs a massive shake-up.8
Losing in the battlefield of perceptions
Public diplomacy/strategic
information is yet another area in which Israel utterly failed and
which requires a major revamping. Throughout the world, Islamist
insurgents masterfully use images and propaganda, relying on sympathetic
elements among Western media and nongovernmental organizations to focus
international attention on civilian collateral casualties (even to the
point of staging them). They use these images to stir the outrage that
increases recruitment for future rounds in the conflict.9
The Israelis have been particularly inadequate at perception management at least since the1982
Lebanon war, when they were attacked for allegedly high civilian
casualties. In the ensuing years, Israel was systematically smashed in
the international media and by thengo community for the “occupation” of Arab lands, the alleged incarceration of10,000 Palestinian prisoners, and other much-publicized misdeeds. In the most recent fighting, many anngo,
such as Human Rights Watch, simply refused to recognize that Hezbollah
and Hamas deliberately used civilians as human shields and practiced a
consistent policy of locating rocket launchers in civilian dwellings,
schools, mosques, and hospitals, despite ample reporting in the
mainstream, including liberal left, English language media.10
With almost astounding ease, the media fell for every Hezbollah trick and deception, including doctoring Reuters photos;11
publishing a picture of a non-existing Israeli frigate being hit by a
Hezbollah rocket (it was an Australian demolition explosion);12 falling for a sob story about an Israeli missile hitting a Lebanese ambulance right in the middle of its Red Cross;13 or
using the same ruins to claim Israeli missile hits on different dates
and deploying rehearsed “city criers” to feed tear-jerking stories to
Western correspondents. Most of these hoaxes were exposed by Western
bloggers, not by Israeli information officials, whose job it should be
to debunk enemy propaganda.
The IDF did not implement existing plans to destroy Hezbollah and ad libbed almost until the war’s end.
But, most important, in the war with Hezbollah — and in previous
conflicts, as well — the media fail to comprehend, and the Israelis fail
consistently and adequately to explain, that those who are and were
fighting Israel (including theplo’s
Yassir Arafat, Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and his Iranian
sponsors) seek genocide and the ultimate demise of the state of Israel
in its totality. Similarly, the media often compartamentalize
descriptions of jihadi atrocities and the overall strategic goal of
jihadis to force the demise of Western civilization. Representatives of
Western governments almost never explain these key points, or they
explain them without sufficient facts. Western publics are rarely
afforded coherent information through which to frame and understand
events.
Stigmatized yet again by the conflict with Hezbollah, Israel lost
what little support it enjoyed at the beginning of the conflict in
Europe, among the American left, and in many developing countries, while
the hatred of the Arab world was easily further inflamed by the daily
stream of “atrocity news” being served up by Al Jazeera and Al Manar,
the Hezbollah satellitetv network.
However, Israeli efforts to engage in strategic information operations
were and remain virtually nonexistent. The budget of Al Manar is greater
than the entire Israeli foreign ministry public diplomacy (hasbara)
budget. The architect of this failing public diplomacy/strategic
information policy under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan
Gissin, has admitted himself that Jerusalem was particularly lacking on
this battlefield.14
The Israelis aren’t facing this particular battle alone. The U.S. and
the West faced similar difficulties after the liberation of Afghanistan
and the “desecration of the Koran” allegations; and continue to
encounter a media barrage over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Prophet
Muhammad cartoons, and other perception crises, both real and
media-generated. Winning hearts and minds is and will remain the
greatest challenge for Israel — and the West — in the forthcoming wars
against the jihadis.
Lessons learned
Jihadi organizations, supported by
anti-status quo powers such as Iran and Syria, do not threaten only
individual states, but are bringing about instability and the
destruction of regimes throughout entire regions (Iraq, the Levant, the
Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf, the Indian subcontinent). At the same time,
state support is a source of sub-state actors’ vulnerability which is
not sufficiently understood, let alone exploited. As nation-states have
leaderships, assets, and interests, those need to be put under pressure
to promote a cessation of support for sub-state or supra-state actors.
The Israel-Hezbollah war, as well as conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, yielded many important lessons vital for the success in the
conflict against Islamist radicalism world wide. These include:
Do not underestimate the enemy. Not being
a conventional army, Hezbollah elicited the contempt of Israeli
political and military elites. The deputy chief of staff and Israeli Air
Force intelligence commanders referred to Hezbollah as a “terrorist
gang,” discounting its lethality.15 Hezbollah
wasted no time, putting down roots in Gaza and attempting to penetrate
the West Bank. The Pentagon leadership and the U.S. military top brass
were slow to recognize the nature of the conflict in Iraq as an
insurgency, not just a terrorist campaign.
Find sponsors and leaders. More
intelligence penetration of Hezbollah and of Iraqi militias is
necessary, both in terms of human intelligence and signal intelligence.
More scrutiny needs to be focused on the location of Hezbollah’s
leadership; the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah link, including the identities of
liaison officers; the type and volume of hardware supplied to Hezbollah;
the nature and location of the joint Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah
command-and-control center in Syria; the identities of Iranian experts
and trainers working with Hezbollah; the identities of Hezbollah
personnel trained or training in Iran; and the doctrine and tactics,
techniques, and procedures (ttp) that the Iranians are teaching Hezbollah and their allies in Iraq and elsewhere now or in the future.
Similarly, the leadership and connections to foreign states and
funders of the Ba’ath underground and the Shiite militias need to be
further mined for actionable intelligence of the kind collected in the
January2007 raid on the Iranian representative office in Mosul. Such information can assist in putting down the insurgency.
Hezbollah spied on Israel, recruited Israeli officers, and gained a deep understanding of Israeli doctrine and tactics.
Local knowledge, language skills, and
understanding of political, historical, and religious dynamics of the
theater of operations are weapons in themselves. Hezbollah spent a
tremendous amount of resources spying on Israel, including recruiting
Israeli military officers and gaining a deep understanding of Israeli
doctrine and tactics. A similar effort is afoot in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every war is a war of intelligence, of strategic and operational deceit
and subterfuge, but twenty-first-century wars will be outstanding for
their heavily reliance on and integration with intelligence activities.
Gathering and analysis of intelligence are impossible without linguistic
and cultural knowledge.
Safe havens are crucial. These wars are not local.
Just as Syria provided Hezbollah a safe haven, and Iran supplied money,
weapons and training, the Taliban and other jihadi groups are using
safe havens, such as in Pakistan, to train, equip, treat the wounded,
and learn military and technological innovations. A task for the
twenty-fist century war against radical jihad will be to render safe
havens unsafe, using diplomacy where possible and force where necessary.
The Hezbollah victory is empowering Iran and threatening to destabilize the whole Middle East.
Iranian leaders from Ayatollah Ali Khameini to President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad have called the outcome “the divine victory.” Arab
commentators have already opined that the Hezbollah success will boost
jihadis (Both Sunni and Shiite) from Iraq to Jordan to Egypt.16
Riyadh, Amman, and Cairo were deeply uncomfortable about the Iranian
involvement with Iraqi Shiites and support of Hezbollah. Sunni adicals,
however, sided with Iran. Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s top
lieutenant, welcomed Hezbollah’s resilience, opening the way to expanded
cooperation between extremist Sunnis and extremist Shiites in toppling
pro-Western regimes. Cooperation between the United States, European
powers, out-of-area actors, and the moderate/pragmatic Arab
nation-states, as well as Israel, needs to be boosted to stem the
Iranian expansion and a possible anti-American Sunni-Shiite jihadi
alliance.
The Israelis managed to snatch a public perception of failure from the jaws of potential victory.
Information warfare and perception management is paramount.
Without effective hearts-and-minds strategies that are an integral part
of the overall war strategy, the West and its allies in the area have
very little in terms of soft power to counter Iran and the jihadis. This
information strategy has to affect not just the Western and Muslim
media, but also the mosques and the education systems. Modern states and
militaries have repeatedly failed to clearly recognize, much less
effectively counter, the deliberate campaign of manipulation and
propaganda being carried out by militant Islamists/jihadis through the
mass media, especially the internet. The largely pacifist Western
nongovernmental organization (ngo) sector
is often a target of Islamist propaganda that vilifies the U.S. and its
allies. Islamists consistently score points through the media,
academia, and the ngo community in the
court of the public opinion. A case in point for an information warfare
offensive would be pressuring the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia,
to further cut support not just to al Qaeda and other jihadi
organizations, but also to radical Islamic charities and madrassahs, and
to deligitimize jihadi-supporting preachers and imams. More efforts are
needed to boost the profile of those clerics who promote a message of
tolerance and to facilitate the launch of satellitetv channels
and websites with agendas aimed at reconciliation and peace. This
should be the highest priority in the war of ideas — information warfare
that so far the U.S. has been fighting only half-heartedly, and
unquestionably losing.
TheU.N. is an unreliable agency for peace. Former un
Secretary General Kofi Annan and the permanent members of the Security
Council, especially France and Russia, did precious little to fight
terror in Lebanon or Iraq. As far as France is concerned, things are
improving under the new administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy. The
un peacekeeping force,unifil,
has collected and published detailed data about Israeli force movements
in wartime, endangering the lives of Israeli servicemen and women, and
violating its own neutrality mandate.17 Just as the unsc sat on its hands when Lebanon and Hezbollah failed to implementunsc Resolution1559, which stipulated the disarmament of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces to the South, the violation ofunsc Resolution1701,
which demanded the same and more, began the day it was signed.
Specifically, Hezbollah announced that it refused to consider procedures
to disarm, and it refuses to stop the resupply of weapons from Syria;
it considers Israeli troops legitimate targets — with no repercussions
from theun. Syria and Iran are openly defying theun
and furnishing arms supplies to Hezbollah, with no sanctions and no
calls for sanctions against these terror-sponsoring states. Those U.S.
and Israeli decision-makers who actively lobbied for Resolution1701
as the solution for the conflict now look naïve at best, and possibly
worse than that. All this is hardly surprising in view of previousun failures in the Middle East (such as the hasty evacuation from Sinai of the unef by Secretary General U Thant in1967) and theun “peacekeeping” disasters in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda.
Under-promise and over-deliver. The best
strategy is not to advise the enemy of your strategic goals.
Policymakers should not have promised “a new Middle East” safe for
democracy; they should not have proclaimed that Hezbollah would be
destroyed, disarmed, or denied the ability to fire rockets into Israel.
All Israeli leaders needed to say was “Hezbollah will pay the price” —
and strike at a time and place of their choosing. Instead, they fought
when and where Hezbollah wanted them to. Rather than under-promising and
over-delivering, the Israelis inflated expectations, articulated
maximum goals, and managed to snatch a public perception of failure from
the jaws of potential victory. Similarly, the U.S. over-promised in
Iraq by talking about turning the country into a model of democracy for
the New Middle East. Now Washington needs to find ways to exercise the
art of the possible and achieve pacification with the least number of
American and Iraqi casualties. Whether this is in fact possible remains
to be seen.
The time is now
When facing sub-state actors,
conventional, twentieth-century military doctrines aimed at wars
against nation-states and industrial-era mass armies are effectively
dead. Even the best traditional militaries, such as the U.S. and Israeli
armies, face formidable difficulties when confronted with irregular,
well-motivated, and foreign-supported forces, which enjoy media
battlefield advantages. The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was not so much a
defeat of Israel as it was a defeat of the old-style warfare by the new.
The same can be said about the U.S. military in Iraq. The best
nineteenth-century cavalry army would be impotent against small and
well-trained tank and mechanized infantry divisions. And with modern
warfare becoming increasingly political, intelligence-based, and waged
on the information battlefield, it is time to restructure the military
to answer these challenges. The time to wake up and rethink the
paradigms is now. Tomorrow may be too late.
Ariel Cohen is senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the editor and co-author of Eurasia in Balance (Ashgate, 2005.)
1 Ariel Cohen, Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Greenwood Publishers, 1998).
2 Ayman Al Zawahiri, quoted in Bruce Hoffman, “Combating Al Qaeda and the Militant Islamic Threat,” Testimony presented to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, rand Corporation ct-255 (February 2006).
3 Anthony Cordesman, “Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (August 27, 2006).
4 Julie Stahl, “Radical Group May Declare Islamic Caliphate in Gaza,” cnsnews.com (August 24, 2006).
5 Opheera McDoom, “Islamist Threaten to Fight U.N. Darfur Force,” Reuters (August 25, 2006). See also, Ariel Cohen, “Hizb ut-Tahrir: An Emerging Threat to U.S. Interests in Central Asia,” Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder 1656 (May 30, 2003).
6 Ari Shavit, “Systemic Failure,” Haaretz (August 4, 2006); Yuval Steinitz (the former chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee), “The War That Was Led Astray,” Haaretz (August 17, 2006).
7 Interview with the author, retired general, Israeli general staff (August 8, 2006).
8 Ralph Peters, “Hezbollah 3, Israel 0,” New York Post (August 17, 2006).
9 Anthony Cordesman, “Qana and the Lessons for Modern War,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (July 31, 2006).
10 Alan Dershowitz, “What are they Watching,” New York Sun (August 23, 2007).
11 “Reuters Drops Beirut Photographer,” bbc, (August 8, 2006).
12 “Hezbollah sinks Australian War Ship,” Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt’s Blog (August 22, 2006).
13 “The Red Cross Ambulance Incident. How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War” http: //www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/.
14 Raanan Gissin, “The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy in the War Against the Iran-Hizballah Axis of Terror,” Jerusalem Issue Brief, Institute for Contemporary Affairs 6:9 (August 23, 2006).
15 Gissin, “The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy.”
16 Tamim Al-Barghouti, “Two souths, one war,” Al Ahram Weekly Online (August 3–9 2006).
17 Lori Lowenthal Marcus, “What did you do in the war, unifil?” Weekly Standard (September 4, 2006).
2 Ayman Al Zawahiri, quoted in Bruce Hoffman, “Combating Al Qaeda and the Militant Islamic Threat,” Testimony presented to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, rand Corporation ct-255 (February 2006).
3 Anthony Cordesman, “Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (August 27, 2006).
4 Julie Stahl, “Radical Group May Declare Islamic Caliphate in Gaza,” cnsnews.com (August 24, 2006).
5 Opheera McDoom, “Islamist Threaten to Fight U.N. Darfur Force,” Reuters (August 25, 2006). See also, Ariel Cohen, “Hizb ut-Tahrir: An Emerging Threat to U.S. Interests in Central Asia,” Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder 1656 (May 30, 2003).
6 Ari Shavit, “Systemic Failure,” Haaretz (August 4, 2006); Yuval Steinitz (the former chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee), “The War That Was Led Astray,” Haaretz (August 17, 2006).
7 Interview with the author, retired general, Israeli general staff (August 8, 2006).
8 Ralph Peters, “Hezbollah 3, Israel 0,” New York Post (August 17, 2006).
9 Anthony Cordesman, “Qana and the Lessons for Modern War,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (July 31, 2006).
10 Alan Dershowitz, “What are they Watching,” New York Sun (August 23, 2007).
11 “Reuters Drops Beirut Photographer,” bbc, (August 8, 2006).
12 “Hezbollah sinks Australian War Ship,” Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt’s Blog (August 22, 2006).
13 “The Red Cross Ambulance Incident. How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War” http: //www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/.
14 Raanan Gissin, “The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy in the War Against the Iran-Hizballah Axis of Terror,” Jerusalem Issue Brief, Institute for Contemporary Affairs 6:9 (August 23, 2006).
15 Gissin, “The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy.”
16 Tamim Al-Barghouti, “Two souths, one war,” Al Ahram Weekly Online (August 3–9 2006).
17 Lori Lowenthal Marcus, “What did you do in the war, unifil?” Weekly Standard (September 4, 2006).
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