Further Light and Knowledge

The Washington Post had a very interesting article last Sunday (or at least it was interesting to insurgency geeks like me).

Click here for the article.

Targeted killings have been used for some time by the Israelis as a way of striking back at those who are planning on attacking them. While they have been used as retribution in the past--think the highly dramatized events in the movie Munich--the current policy is to use them only as a preventative.

The most interesting part of the article, for me, was the difference of opinions held by two senior Israeli officials involved in the specific targeted killing mentioned in the article.

Both are the children of Holocaust survivors and the grandsons of Holocaust victims. But their philosophies couldn't be more different:

(Dichter was the head of Shin Bet, the agency in charge of internal security and counter-intelligence click here for more about them in Israel, the West Bank, and previously Gaza. Yaalon was the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Armed Forces).

From the article:

Immediately, Dichter and Yaalon began to argue. Dichter favored the heavy bomb; Yaalon wanted to abort the operation. They both had worked for decades in counter-terrorism, had served in the same secret commando unit and had, as Dichter put it, "traveled together without passports deep into Arab lands."

But they had emerged with different conclusions. For Dichter, "the barrel of terrorism has a bottom." If you captured or killed enough terrorists, Dichter believed, the problem would be solved. "They deserved a bomb that would send the dream team to hell," Dichter said. "I said, 'If we miss this opportunity, more Israelis will die.' "

Yaalon disagreed: "We won't get to the bottom of the barrel by killing terrorists. We'll get there through education. Dichter thinks we'll kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. That's it -- we've won. I don't accept that."

What do you think? Is terrorism, or an insurgency, a barrel whose bottom can be reached by 'draining'? Or do you let more water in by draining than you bail out? Or is it a combination?

How long have there been wars and killing? Doesn't seem to be a bottom anywhere in sight.

Learning the people you hate are actually human, with families, feelings, hopes and dreams? Makes it harder to kill them.

(That's my idealistic peace-nik answer. Nuts and bolts it's definitely more complicated than that.)

_________________

Mr B:

That's not a peacenik answer, the fact is it's a realistic one.

Yes, it feels good to kill those who kill you. Yes, it is an unfortunate reality that some people must die, period end of discussion. But in an insurgency, you have to take some basic political steps that take away people's reasons for joining--that is the only way they are ever really defeated. Israel has tried now for years, but they simply can't kill the bad guys fast enough.

I'm not sure "insurgency" is the right word to use here. "Insurgency" implies that a conflict is primarily a domestic problem, and I don't think that is the case. This makes a difference because there is a different question for a domestic insurgency: "can sufficiently repressive measures generally defeat an insurgency?" I think the general answer to this is yes. Insurgencies and resistance directed toward Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. were not particularly effective. Gandhi's advantage and success had a lot to do with the fact that he was confronting the British, who were a bit less eager to use highly repressive measures.

When there are countries that provide safe haven for training, financial support, and recruiting assistance; beyond the effective reach of a nation's control, it is a different story. Can Israel kill off the Hezbollah leadership? Of course. Can Israel prevent Iran from recruiting, training and equiping another generation of Hezbollah? Not likely.

Targetted assassination is a tool of war. In WWII America used it brilliantly in shooting down the plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto in April 1943. But no single tool of war, be it targeting leadership, strategic bombimg, or blockade, is sufficient to end a conflict. Conflicts end with either the total defeat of one side (an unusual occurance), or a political/ diplomatic solution.

_________________
"Now I troll back to my little cave where we no talk about things we no understand..." Malfalda

"Ummmm. Roadkill."

OF:
The working definition of an insurgency I was trained to use, the one that appears in official DoD publications, is the following:

"An organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict."

The movement against Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would fall under the category of insurgency as they were the constituted government at the time of the incidents described in the article. You could probably make a case that they are still the constituted government there as the Palestinian Authority doesn't have many of the powers that characterize a national government.

Hezbollah is something else entirely--its conflicts with Israel while still falling under the category of asymetric warfare aren't insurgent.

I'm hard pressed to think of an insurgency in the twentieth century that was put down by military means and military means alone--while the neoconservatives at the WSJ like to bring up the American experience in the Philippines, I don't really agree with them.

And I really can't find examples of foreign powers defeating insurgency in countries that weren't their own without significant support from within the affected country.

Again going back to the definition of insurgency, I don't think the movements in Germany, the USSR, or Mao's China rise to the level required to be truly insurgent.

A couple of my thoughts here-

1. You are dealling with people who believe God is telling them what to do. As we all know, there is very little reasoning that is possible with people like this. Sometimes, unfortunately, some situations or problems are managed, not solved.

2. If Hezbolla or Hamas or the PA or even any of the states involved (Iran, Syria, formerly Iraq) had the weapon powere of Isreal, they would of used it and wiped Isreal off of the map before the US or anyone else could even mobilize.

3. Where should the borders be? The Balfour Declaration, or the UN decisions from the 1940's, or the included captured territories from the later wars? The Arab groups we call terrorist mostly want no Isreal anywhere.

4. Yassar Arafat was a scum of a human being and did more damage to the esablishment of a Palestinian state than any Jew on earth.

5. It is time for Jordan and even Egypt to take the lead. The US or Britain cannot, and the UN is a cesspool of beaurocratic posturing who never solved a thing that I know of. We have shown that we don't understand the Semetic peoples (Arab and Jew), the Arab nations for the most part either do not or say they do not trust us, so keep it a regional issue and get us the hell out of it.

6. I am not one of these "we are at war for oil" peace-nicks, but we must find a way around our dependence on oil. Dry up the dollars and then see what happens over there.

7. These people have been fighting for thousands of years and will continue until one of them has bled enough and really wants to solve it. Along the lines of my #2 above, as soon as one of these groups is able, they will crank it up a notch with the next level of weapons they can get their hands on. And yes they will use them. If I were Isreal, I wouldn't wait. If I had the upper hand, I would unleash complete and total holy hell on Gaza and southern Lebanon, up to but not including Beruit (remember, technically Lebanon is not a Muslim nation). In the long run, fewer will die. The Gaza, West Bank state idea will never work and everyone knows it.


Just my opinion. If it was easy, it would have already been solved.

-Noah

Noah:

So I guess I'd put you into the school of thought that insurgencies have a bottom to their barrel. Or at least that's what I read into the "unleashing holy hell" in Gaza bullet point.

Leaving aside the whole Arab/Israeli conflict--it's unfortunate that the moral dilemna was posed in that context, as it tends to polarize everything--would that hold true everywhere else?

Because history tells us it doesn't--the Russians in Afghanistan unleashed total, holy hell on the population and ended up losing. The French in Algeria unleashed total hell and ended up leaving also.

I think the point that Gen Yaalon in the original article was trying to make is that while you have to kill some people, the answer isn't killing. There have to be political compromises made, sometimes even compromises that are distasteful. Why Israelis have a hard time understanding that, when the majority of their early leaders were "terrorists", some of whom blew up hotels full of British soldiers, is beyond me.

I think some do and some don't. Again, how do you argue/compromise with God or Allah? I don't think this one does. That is why I think the Isrealis are wasting time with targeted killing or limited stikes. I think it will do nothing to solve the problem and just prolong it.



Good question. I don't think it would hold true everywhere else. I think this situation is unique because of the history and involvement and "mandates" of the rest of the world (and again the "God" factor).




When I say holy hell, I mean complete and total. Make those look like a slapfest. I say this because if they don't, I believe at some point in the near future one of the groups or nations will do so to Isreal. Should they just wait around for it to happen? I wouldn't.



Neither side is ready to stop though yet. We are some violent animals.



I think all wars eventually have to have a political ending, it is just who gets the upper hand in negotiating (that's beating the shit out the opponent) first.

The Wye Rive Accords were a pretty big compromises offered on Isreal's part. The settlements issue (pretty stupid on Isreal's part IMHO) gave Arafat an excuse not to implement.




What is that famous saying..."one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".......

I think the Isreali's understand it completely. When their "enemy" says that they should not even exist and continually talks of "pushing them into the Mediterannian Sea", the Jewish state will continue to be nasty.



I wonder sometimes if we are wired to "need an enemy" and this is played on by politicians. Here in the US we had communism and now we have Islamofascism. What will replace it next?



-Noah

The only thing that would make the Russian occupation of Afghanistan look like a slapfest would be annihilation of civil populations to such a degree that it would qualify as genocide.

For a state whose existence is solely a result of genocide to then turn around and commit mass murder themselves....that's a little ironic, don't you think?

Where would the destruction end--would they be alright just nuking Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh? Or would they have to go farther afield, taking out Islamabad, Jakarta, Kabul, and any other Muslim population center, on the theory that the Mohamedan hordes would be tempted to march on Tel Aviv and avenge their fallen brethren?

While ultimately nearly all wars end with a political settlement, not all armed conflicts end with a political resolution that involves give and take, and the Shin Beth leader quoted in the source article seems to think the Hamas insurgency can be resolved without it.

I don't really want the discussion to get bogged down in Israel. I have very strong feelings about that country, and am sometimes baffled by the amount of support it seems to get from the US.

Support that another country founded by plucky outsiders determined to find a homeland, a land they considered empty because it was inhabited by people they thought to be subhuman. People who were condemned by the Old Testament to a life of slavery and service to God's Chosen Few. I'm talking, of course, about the Afrikaners of South Africa.

Back to targetted killings--are they effective in Iraq? While technically not an insurgency, would killing top al-Qaeda leaders end the group's activities? What balance should be struck between accomodation and confrontation?

I think they would be effective if they were being done by the Iraqis, or possibly other Muslim nations. Of course I also believe that that would just end their activities in Iraq, and they would concentrate efforts/activities elsewhere.


-Noah

First off, let me say I enjoy the discussion.

Last year there was some reporting done on what some called the "Salvador" option; that is having the Iraqis carry out their own dirty war.

One of the main problems with that strategy is that El Salvador didn't have the religious and ethnic divide Iraq does. So if Iraqi Interior Ministry SWAT teams kill an insurgent, unless they are both Shiite or Sunni the incident will automatically be seen as religious violence. Even within the Shiite community there are divisions, and unless both the triggerman and victim are from the same faction, the incident will be seen as a murder between rival gangs.

The only thing worse, IMO, than having Iraqis do the deed is to have Americans do it. The natives of that unhappy land rarely agree on anything, but one thing they all seem to agree on is their dislike and distrust of Americans.

Don't get me wrong: some people need killing, and among those people was the late, not great al-Zarqawi. But killing absent a serious political program that might even include amnesty for insurgents who have killed Americans is a strategy with a high likelihood of failing.

My frame of reference is my graduate school training in Soviet style economic systems with a large dose of early twentieth century history and an interest in the actual mechanisms of totalitarian states. The Phillipine example is a wretched one; it occured a century ago and was resolved primarily by political means with the United states agreeing before WWII to a plan of eventual independence.



I think there is a problem of definition here. The definition of insurgency requires military conflict, so it excludes situations such as the Indian independence movement. The plots against Hitler don't seem to rise to the level of insurgency. The generally sucessful supression of French partisans early in WWII gets subsumed in the larger struggle. Anything not ending in total victory in a total war is excluded by the requirement that the insurgency be put down by "military means alone". Thus you can exclude the British campaign against the IRA, etc. This line of thought leads to trivializing the conclusion because the number of applicable cases where military means alone are used in a high intensity conflict is vanishingly small. The conclusion is correct, but it begs the real question of the role of military means in resolving conflicts such as insurgencies.



Occupying forces will always try to find collaborators. The Nazis did in Vichy France and we did so in Vietnam. Even with "significant support" these efforts often fail. All occupying powers try to recruit domestic support ("winning the hearts and minds"); some are just more successful than others.



Hitler survived at least three high level military coup attempts and a large part of Germany's military forces were tied up in places like Yugoslavia where partisans controlled as much territory as the occupying force. Stalin and Mao emerged from full scale wars that involved continued resistance for decades resulting in millions of deaths. Maybe these aren't insurgencies simply because they involve too high a level of military resistance and ought to be civil wars?

All the best, Jamie

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"Now I troll back to my little cave where we no talk about things we no understand..." Malfalda

"Ummmm. Roadkill."

Agreed...it is nice to be able to knock around ideas that usually by this time have ended in a piss fest. Maybe we will see an abortion thread soon....the holy grail of discussions which end in fights. : )





Is there any of this division in South/Central America between those of native ancestry and those of mostly European?

You are exactly right about the factions and sub-factions, so where does it stop or do we just ignore it and let them go at each other. We have interests there as I said in my first post that we need to find a way out of. I also think that we overly support Isreal in the region because it is a democracy, not just because it is the Jewish state.

I don't know how the situation in Iraq will be resolved without a "three state" solution, a strong single dictator or king (Jordan seems to be working and he is a Hashemite so perhaps some claim to authority could be made). I have read of the idea of colonialism as a solution, but hope we are past that.

I also think that if the Sunni and Shiites can come together for awhile, smile and get rid of us, that the common focus will then turn on the Kurds. Once they are done with the Kurds, they will return to fighting each other as long as we don't get invovled to give them a common enemy.

My biggest surprize in all of this mess is not the uprising or the violence in the central and lower areas, but the relative quiet up north. I thought the Kurds would either be pushed out and inot Turkey, or lash out for their own independance.







We have a term in this society called "the loyal opposition" which is not understood in some cultures such as the middle east. Al Gore may have lost, but he was not going to stage a coup, nor was Bush upon winning going to have Gore arrested and executed or exiled no matter how bad he wanted to. Ted Kennedy and Newt Gingrich are idiots, but they are not going to persecute their opponents outside of a courtroom or news leak. When the middle eastern countries understand the idea of "the loyal opposition" the internal violence will decrease.


-Noah

Good thought,....... when is an insurgency a civil war? Is it when it leaves targeted people and goes to territorial conquest or non-limited objectives? Does it really matter except to those discussing it instead of living it?

Sort of like economically when are we in a recession verses a depression.


-Noah

Yes, I'd define what happened in China as a civil war rather than an insurgency. Re: Russia I'm assuming you're talking about the conflict after 1919 and into the 1920s, either way I'd call the Reds vs Whites a civil war.

The conflict I was actually thinking about when I mentioned local allies was El Salvador--too many on the right like to include it as a successful US counter-insurgency effort. I was also thinking of the Malaysian Emergency the British faced in the 1950s, where the insurgents were overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese and weren't really supported by the native Malays.

As far as a problem of definition, I see what you're saying. I'll change the question then: can insurgencies be won by concentrating primarily on military means and relegating political compromise to a very small portion of a government's strategy?