Center for a New American Security

I had mentioned on the blog a few weeks back that I was looking forward to reading Dan Byman's A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism. I can safely recommend the book now after having read it. A few quick thoughts:

1. If you are a geek like me who has spent a lot of time studying a group like Hizballah and the Israeli attempts to counter such a group, you are probably not going to learn a lot in terms of new details from Byman's book. Most of Byman's research leans heavily on well-known secondary sources and periodicals, so if you have read books like Sayigh's Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 or Harel & Issacharoff's 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon in addition to all the Crisis Group reports that have been published on the region over the past 20-odd years, you're probably not going to learn a whole heck of a lot that you did not already know. But ...

2. ... The reason Byman spends so much time carefully constructing a narrative of Israel's struggles to build a coherent counter-terror strategy is so that he can draw the conclusions he does in the last chapter, where he notes what the world can learn from the Israeli experience and what Israel itself still needs to learn. The last chapter of this study is must-read stuff, and the evidence for Byman's conclusions is to be found in all the chapters that preceed it.

3. In particular, Byman makes a great point about thinking counterinsurgency while fighting terrorism. I have argued ad nauseum (and for several years now) that the dichotomy between counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency is a false one, and I have demonstrated how effective direct-action special operations (which we usually associate with counter-terrorism) fit into a counterinsurgency campaign. Byman makes the equally correct case that when you are executing what you consider to be a strict counter-terror campaign, the label "terrorist" doesn't do justice to a group like Hamas or Hizballah and that simply eroding the operational capabilities of such groups does not address the things like the social services and political representation those groups provide to their constituencies. You can't just have counter-terror operations, in other words: you also have to have a political strategy. The next point Byman makes, about countering terrorist groups in the information battle, goes part and parcel with this.

In sum, this was a good book, and unless you a serious geek like me about these issues, you will learn a lot. Byman relies a lot on Israeli sources, but as the Economist noted in their approving review, he does so in a very even-handed way. Don't let the fact that Byman repeatedly cites this blogger in Chapters 16 and 17 prevent you from buying this important and well-written new book.

Americans have what the Irish scholar Theo Farrell has called a technology fetish in our strategic culture. As someone who has spent most of my life fighting in and studying low-intensity conflict, by contrast, I like to poke holes in this particular fetish, noting the way in which poorly equipped rebels have given technologically superior Western militaries fits in the nuclear age. 

I thus very rarely trumpet the news of the advent of a piece of technology as any kind of bid deal. That having been said, the big news out of Israel and the Palestinian Territories today is the successful interception of a short-range rocket by Israel's "Iron Dome" system.

In the 2006 war (.pdf), Hizballah fired an average of somewhere between 150 and 180 short-range rockets into Israel each day. (They managed to fire 250 rockets, in fact, on the very last day of the conflict.) Violent non-state actors in the region have used low-tech, short-range rockets to achieve a kind of deterrent effect with Israel. "As the bombardment of civilians is tiresome for our people," noted Hassan Nasrallah in an interview with as-Safir in 1993, "it is tiresome for others as well, and they can‘t handle it as well as we can."

If Israel can take away the ability of violent non-state actors to harrass and intimidate its populace through these rockets, though, that has the potential to be a strategic game-changer in the region. I'll be watching events in Israel with interest -- though not with as much interest, I would guess, as the boys in the Dahiyeh.

Update: Noah Pollak points out that Iron Dome knocks down $100 rockets at a cost of $50,000 a shot. He says this is unsustainable, but he probably doesn't want to know how much money we Americans have spent trying to counter low-tech IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Update II: In semi-related news, Avigdor Lieberman having to ask for French help right now is hilarious. Unless you're, you know, an Israeli diplomat in Côte d'Ivoire.

Also, I liked what Bob Baer had to say about this affair in last weekend's Wall Street Journal.

...this video, released by the police in Dubai, of the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is just amazing. Like watching Munich. But for real.

Brother Mitch passed along this story, which I have seen ... no, nowhere else, actually. David Martin is a respected reporter, though, so it's not like this is some random rumor on teh internets.

A government minister in Sudan is accusing the United States Air Force of killing dozens of people in that north African country this past January – but the semi-official American version of the story is very different.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin has been told that Israeli aircraft carried out the attack. Israeli intelligence is said to have discovered that weapons were being trucked through Sudan, heading north toward Egypt, whereupon they would cross the Sinai Desert and be smuggled into Hamas-held territory in Gaza.

Again, as I said two weeks ago, the key competition to watch in the aftermath of the Gaza War would be the fight for who gets to deliver essential services to the population of Gaza. Hamas, I argued, would fervently resist any competitors in the race to aid the people of Gaza, because the degree to which they would be seen as the victors depended on the degree to which they can now deliver social services in the aftermath of this conflict. If someone else delivers the aid, a wedge could potentially be driven between the population and Hamas. Hamas knows that. Thus...

Hamas police in Gaza broke into a warehouse full of United Nations humanitarian supplies and seized thousands of blankets and food packages, a United Nations spokesman said Wednesday, a rare public clash between the international agency that feeds much of the territory and the militant group that rules it.

The incident highlighted difficulties facing donors seeking to bypass Hamas while helping Gazans survive and rebuild after Israel's three-week military offensive.

"Hamas policemen stormed into an aid warehouse in Gaza City Tuesday evening and confiscated 3,500 blankets and over 400 food parcels ready for distribution to 500 families," said United Nations Relief and Works Agency spokesman Christopher Gunness. "They were armed, they seized this, they took it by force," Gunness said, terming the incident absolutely unacceptable.

Now this presents an information operations opportunity for Israel and, potentially, Fatah. Will either be smart enough to exploit it?

Who am I kidding? Probably not...

I was having lunch yesterday with a noted defense intellectual and retired military officer who was, among other things, giving me some hilarious career advice for when I finish my PhD. ("If I worked in the Pentagon," he told me, "I would be naked with a rifle on the roof within a week." I probably would be as well. Ah, well...) The conversation turned to Gaza, though, and he asked me what I thought.

I first said that Hizballah -- a group I know a hell of a lot more about than Hamas -- excels along three lines of operation: combat operations, information operations, and the provision of social services to the population. Hamas, it appears, is not nearly as sophisticated in any of those three lines of operation despite being almost exactly as old, as an organization, as Hizballah was in 2006.

That said, the parallel I keep drawing is not between Hizballah in 2006 and Hamas in 2009 but rather between Gaza in 2009 and southern Lebanon in both 1993 and 1996. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of Operation Accountability (1993) and Operation Grapes of Wrath (1996), let me just say this: In 1993, Israel conducted an air- and artillery-based campaign which displaced over 100,000 Lebanese and destroyed around 6,000 homes in southern Lebanon. That's about how many homes have been destroyed in Gaza. Immediately following the operation, though, UN observers in southern Lebanon began to see something they had never observed before: Jihad al-Bina, Hizballah's construction arm. For the first time, Jihad al-Bina had a major presence in the area and in fact rebuilt many of the home that had been destroyed in the fighting.

One of the Israeli goals in 1993 was to create a rift between Hizballah and the population in the naive hopes the population would "crack down" on the guerrillas in their midst. The way in which Hizballah was able to distribute aid and reconstruction services following the operation, though, ensured Israel would not be able to do that. Hamas, like Hizballah, has an interest in similarly helping the population. But unlike Hizballah, they have serious competition. Both Fatah and international aid organizations will also be attempting to help the people of Gaza. Understand that in the same way in which Hizballah does not like aid programs taking place in southern Lebanon without at least their tacit -- and public -- approval, Hamas does not want competitors in this arena either. This explains some of the fighting which has taken place between Hamas and Fatah in the past few days.

In the aftermath of the war, Fatah and Hamas are already fighting over who will distribute humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. Hamas is preventing Fatah activists from playing a role in the rebuilding of Gaza, and recently hijacked 12 trucks full of aid donated by the Jordanian government, meant for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

So this is the fight to watch next. Pay close attention to who rebuilds Gaza -- and how Hamas will seek to get credit for every bit of aid that is delivered to the people. That fight will help determine the long-term strategic effects of this latest spasm of violence.

This is the single most important question with respect to the Gaza Campaign:

Have three weeks of overpowering war by Israel here weakened Hamas as Israel had hoped, or simply caused acute human suffering?

Remember, though, that yesterday we wrote of how states consistently overestimate the degree to which the population can or has any interest in disciplining armed actors in their midst:

There are ... limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war that they will seek to rein in Hamas.

As I read this article, it occurs to me that Israel is trying to figure out what they themselves did in a kind of ex post bellum way. Not sure if that is at all healthy.

P.S. One or two readers get all precious when I use the label "Palestine." Unless those readers want me to start typing out the official UN designation for the territories in question -- "The Occupied Palestinian Territories" -- they need to relax and let me use "Palestine" as a shorthand.

[via Angry Arab] This story reminds Abu Muqawama of the way in which Hizbollah tried to ban card-playing when it first came to prominence in southern Lebanon. That didn't go over too well, and old men went back to playing cards after pragmatism overcame ideology. Islamist insurgent groups get into trouble when they put more emphasis on fundamentalist social values than the stuff people getting rocketed and living in filth actually care about. Which tends to be the fact that they're getting rocketed, and living in filth. Do you think the Israeli government visits Sderot to roll out a family values campaign?

GAZA (Reuters) - Islamist group Hamas has told the main Palestinian telecoms company to block access to pornographic Internet sites in the Gaza Strip, a Hamas government official said on Monday.

Gaza's Ministry of Communications said in a statement that telecommunications firm PALTEL has agreed to block Internet users in the Hamas-controlled coastal enclave from viewing adult websites starting this month.

It's Good Friday, and that means Abu Muqawama is off to church in a minute. But it also means the 10-year anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland (which was actually signed on 10 April, but whatever -- we'll run the risk of annoying Pope Gregory XIII and go with the lunar calendar). The UK and the IRA, it has emerged, had high-level contacts in the years prior to the agreements, and that leads some to say that Israel should cultivate similar contacts with Hamas. Should they? We here at Abu Muqawama stay out of Israel-Palestine arguments, but this debate on engagement between Rob Malley and Rob Satloff is worth listening to because it has obvious relevance to counter-insurgency strategy. When -- and under what conditions -- do you meet your enemy at the negotiating table?