From the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been divided by a clash of counterinsurgency visions. Israel has been determined to destroy Hamas at all costs, while U.S. officials have worried that Israel was inflicting too many civilian casualties, was not doing enough to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and lacked a “day after” plan to stabilize Gaza after Hamas’s defeat. As one U.S. official told me, “The Israelis are showing how not to do counterinsurgency.”
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Netanyahu has been loath to listen. That led Biden last week to threaten to cut off the delivery of offensive weapons if the Israel Defense Forces proceed with a major assault on Rafah, the city where Hamas’s four remaining battalions are hiding among more than 1 million civilians.
In his dismissal of U.S. counsel, Netanyahu has been influenced not only by his own right-wing coalition allies but also by senior IDF officers, many of whom, to be candid, don’t have much respect for U.S. military advice. IDF officers privately argue that the U.S. military, after suffering defeats from Vietnam to Afghanistan, does not have the standing to lecture them on how to fight a guerrilla foe. Moreover, they point out, neither U.S. troops nor any other counterinsurgents have ever faced an enemy hiding in such a formidable subterranean fortress: Hamas has built 350 to 450 miles of tunnels beneath Gaza.
The Israeli criticisms are well taken — the U.S. list of counterinsurgency failures over the decades is long and galling — but there is at least one U.S. military force that has enjoyed impressive counterinsurgency success. That would be the U.S. troops, led by Gen. David H. Petraeus (now retired), who implemented “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
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When the surge began, Anbar province appeared to be lost to al-Qaeda in Iraq (at the time, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on the planet), and Iraq seemed to be heading for an all-out civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. By the time the surge ended, sectarian violence had fallen by more than 90 percent and al-Qaeda in Iraq had largely been defeated. (After the outbreak of the Syrian civil in 2011 and the ill-advised pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq the same year, this terrorist organization would be reborn as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.)
There are many reasons the surge worked so well, from an increase of 30,000 U.S. troops to the decision of prominent Anbar sheikhs to abandon al-Qaeda, but underlying the U.S. success was a change in strategy. Previously, U.S. troops had been focused on killing and capturing as many insurgents as possible, only to discover that the military’s heavy-handed use of firepower and large-scale roundups of military-age males created more enemies than they eliminated. Petraeus and his brain trust went back to counterinsurgency 101 by implementing a “clear, hold and build” strategy modeled on past counterinsurgency victories such as Britain’s mid-century war in Malaya and the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the previous century.
They abandoned the previous model of having U.S. troops “commute” to the fight and return every night to sprawling, heavily fortified bases. In the new approach, after clearing neighborhoods of insurgents in heavy fighting, U.S. troops would stay in the area 24/7 to provide security and prevent insurgents from reinfiltrating. They also helped locals rebuild from the ravages of war. This was not a humanitarian impulse but a hardheaded military calculation that the only way to win a guerrilla war is to secure the population.
In recent days, I reached out to Petraeus and a couple members of his brain trust to ask, in light of their own experience in Iraq, what they thought of the Israeli way of war in Gaza. They are all staunch supporters of Israel, but they are highly critical of the IDF strategy — or lack thereof.
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Netanyahu has been loath to listen. That led Biden last week to threaten to cut off the delivery of offensive weapons if the Israel Defense Forces proceed with a major assault on Rafah, the city where Hamas’s four remaining battalions are hiding among more than 1 million civilians.
In his dismissal of U.S. counsel, Netanyahu has been influenced not only by his own right-wing coalition allies but also by senior IDF officers, many of whom, to be candid, don’t have much respect for U.S. military advice. IDF officers privately argue that the U.S. military, after suffering defeats from Vietnam to Afghanistan, does not have the standing to lecture them on how to fight a guerrilla foe. Moreover, they point out, neither U.S. troops nor any other counterinsurgents have ever faced an enemy hiding in such a formidable subterranean fortress: Hamas has built 350 to 450 miles of tunnels beneath Gaza.
The Israeli criticisms are well taken — the U.S. list of counterinsurgency failures over the decades is long and galling — but there is at least one U.S. military force that has enjoyed impressive counterinsurgency success. That would be the U.S. troops, led by Gen. David H. Petraeus (now retired), who implemented “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...d=mc_magnet-opmiddleeast_inline_collection_20
When the surge began, Anbar province appeared to be lost to al-Qaeda in Iraq (at the time, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on the planet), and Iraq seemed to be heading for an all-out civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. By the time the surge ended, sectarian violence had fallen by more than 90 percent and al-Qaeda in Iraq had largely been defeated. (After the outbreak of the Syrian civil in 2011 and the ill-advised pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq the same year, this terrorist organization would be reborn as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.)
There are many reasons the surge worked so well, from an increase of 30,000 U.S. troops to the decision of prominent Anbar sheikhs to abandon al-Qaeda, but underlying the U.S. success was a change in strategy. Previously, U.S. troops had been focused on killing and capturing as many insurgents as possible, only to discover that the military’s heavy-handed use of firepower and large-scale roundups of military-age males created more enemies than they eliminated. Petraeus and his brain trust went back to counterinsurgency 101 by implementing a “clear, hold and build” strategy modeled on past counterinsurgency victories such as Britain’s mid-century war in Malaya and the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the previous century.
They abandoned the previous model of having U.S. troops “commute” to the fight and return every night to sprawling, heavily fortified bases. In the new approach, after clearing neighborhoods of insurgents in heavy fighting, U.S. troops would stay in the area 24/7 to provide security and prevent insurgents from reinfiltrating. They also helped locals rebuild from the ravages of war. This was not a humanitarian impulse but a hardheaded military calculation that the only way to win a guerrilla war is to secure the population.
In recent days, I reached out to Petraeus and a couple members of his brain trust to ask, in light of their own experience in Iraq, what they thought of the Israeli way of war in Gaza. They are all staunch supporters of Israel, but they are highly critical of the IDF strategy — or lack thereof.