Israel Gets Its Surge On!

Back in 2008, Michael Totten explained how Israel was unable to implement a 'surge' in Lebanon:

American General David Petraeus proved counterinsurgency in Arabic countries can work. His surge of troops in Iraq is about a change of tactics more than an increase in numbers, and his tactics so far have surpassed all expectations. The “light footprint” model used during former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but American soldiers and Marines had no chance of defeating insurgents from behind barbed wire garrisons. Only now that the troops have left the relative safety and comfort of their bases and intimately integrated themselves into the Iraqi population are they able to isolate and track down the killers. They do so with help from the locals. They acquired that help because they slowly forged trusting relationships and alliances, and because they protect the civilians from violence.

The Israel Defense Forces did nothing of the sort in Lebanon.

Lebanon no, but what about in the West Bank?
Evelyn Gordon writes that Israel has successfully implemented a war against terror in the West Bank that would make General Petraeus proud:

Yet as Israel’s experience in the West Bank shows, terrorist organizations can be defeated — if their opponents are willing to invest the requisite time and resources.

In March 2002, Israel was at the height of a terrorist war begun in 2000 that ultimately claimed more victims — mainly civilians — than all the terror of the preceding 53 years combined. Every day saw multiple attacks, and a day without fatalities was rare. But then Israel launched a multi-year military campaign that steadily reduced Israeli fatalities from a peak of 450 in 2002 to 13 in 2007.

Last month, Haaretz published two other statistics reflecting this success: the number of wanted terrorists in the West Bank, once in the hundreds, is now almost zero. And Israeli troop levels in the West Bank are lower than they have been since the first intifada began in 1987.

This is a success that is due to Israeli efforts--though Palestinian apologists insist that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Dayton's American-trained security forces are the reason. But Gordon points out that those troops took over in May 2008--and the previous year the number of casualties was already down to 8, on a par with the 5 and 6 casualties over the last 2 years.

What made Israel's success against Palestinian terrorism possible is the same philosophy that went into the surge--the philosophy that could not be implemented in Lebanon, what has been applied in the West Bank:

What produced this victory was the grunt work of counterterrorism: intelligence, arrests, interrogations, military operations, and, above all, enough boots on the ground long enough to make this possible. That wasn’t obvious in advance: as Haaretz reported, many senior Israel Defense Forces officers accepted the dogma that terrorist organizations can’t be defeated, because they have an infinite supply of new recruits. But then-Shin Bet security service chief Avi Dichter, who insisted that “the ‘terror barrel’ had a bottom,” proved correct.

...Most terrorists aren’t die-hard fanatics, and non-fanatics respond to cost-benefit incentives. When terrorist organizations rule the roost, recruits will flock to their banner. But when the costs start outweighing the benefits, they will desert in droves. And then the “unwinnable” war is won.

Read the whole thing.

When Major-General Yaakov Amidror wrote Winning Counterinsurgency War:The Israeli Experience [PDF], drawing in part on the success of the surge in Iraq, he delineated the steps necessary to defeat terrorism:

An examination of many terrorist events throughout the world (but especially the Israeli experience in fighting Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorism) shows that six basic conditions can be defined which, if met, provide the foundation for defeating terrorism:

• A political decision to defeat terrorism, stated explicitly and clearly to the security forces, and the willingness to bear the political cost of an offensive.
• Acquiring control of the territory in and from which the terrorists operate.
• Relevant intelligence.
• Isolating the territory within which the counterterrorist fighting takes place.
• Multi-dimensional cooperation between intelligence and operations.
• Separating the civilian population from the terrorists.

These conditions are necessary but insufficient; they do not ensure victory over
terrorism, but without them victory is impossible.

Unfortunately, what is working in the West Bank was not possible in Lebanon--and will not be possible at this point in Gaza either.

But the war on terrorism in the West Bank is being won.

Technorati Tag: West Bank and War On Terrorism.