KNOWING THE ENEMY Part I

by Ariel Cohen

1^st part of 2  

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 of 2,500 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 October 2005. 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 last 30 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 which 15 out of 19 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 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 in 1898, to Germany in the two world wars, to Japan in 1941-45. 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 of 9/11, "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 of NATO 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 the NATO 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 of 3,000 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 of 2006 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 in 2000, erupted as world leaders gathered for the July 2006 G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. Hezbollah's unprovoked killing of eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping of two resulted in 34 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 the PLO, 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 Zilzal 1,2, and 3, and the Fajar low trajectory short-range ballistic rockets supplied by Syria and Iran, along with sophisticated anti-tank Russian-made missiles and SAMS.[3] Additionally, Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (the global Islamic Party of Liberation founded by a Palestinian cleric in the early 1950s) 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 December 2006, 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 is 44.4 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 War II. 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 in 1948; the four-day defeat of the Soviet-equipped Egyptian army in the Suez campaign of 1956; and the victory over the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces in 1967, in which Israel lost 779 soldiers while the combined Arab forces lost 21,000.

In the 1973 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. In 1982, the IDF 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 lost 675 soldiers, close to 10,000 Syrian and PLO combatants were killed. Between 1982 and 2000 Israel lost over 1,200 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 May 2000. 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 until 2004, in which over 1,100 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. Their 2005 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 January 2006 and increased the Arab perception of Israeli weakness. In fact, in June 2006 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 the IDF 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" of 1973. 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. In 1973, the Israelis believed that the Arabs would not attack after the disaster of 1967 -- and paid for the misconception with 3,000 lives in a country of 3.6 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.

In 2006, 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 of C-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 since 1982, needs a massive shake-up.[8]
 

Ariel Cohen

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.