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Can a Conventional Army Vanquish a Terrorist Insurgency?

[Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs] Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror - Total victory is not the sole model of victory which history recognizes. Israel enjoyed a temporary victory over Palestinian terror in Gaza in the beginning of the 1970s, when Ariel Sharon was head of the IDF Southern Command. The terror did indeed return to Gaza, but this was after fifteen years of quiet. Historically, successful counterinsurgency campaigns were waged by the U.S. in the Philippines (1899-1902) and by the British in Malaya (1948-1960). It is necessary to adopt an alternative concept of victory, which should be called "minimal victory," in which terror is not destroyed, but is contained at a minimal level, and one must invest constant energy in order to prevent its eruption. Temporary victory and minimal victory do not provide a solution to the ideological conflict. Nonetheless, a political solution is not the affair of the army, and efforts to obtain it cannot be divorced from the obligation to fight determinedly against any attempt by the enemy to secure achievements through violence, as in the case of the present attempt by the Palestinians to attain political achievements through terror. This "minimal victory," in which terror is contained and checked before it strikes, becomes more significant if, due to the terror organizations' prolonged lack of success, they consciously or not decide to reduce the number of their terror attempts. Such an achievement is possible, for example, when the terror bodies are too busy protecting their own lives instead of planning terror and carrying it out. Israel went to war in the West Bank in April 2002 in Operation "Defensive Shield" after it counted 132 dead, the majority civilians, in the preceding month (meaning the equivalent of 1,400 deaths a year). In a continuous and uninterrupted effort since that campaign, Israel's terror casualty rate declined to 11 civilians for all of 2006. This is the type of victory over terror that one can demand of the army. If the decision on the battlefield does not lead the political bodies to an understanding that the situation permits them to withstand the demands of the terror organizations, and they elect for one reason or another to compromise or surrender, withdraw or concede, then all the work invested by the military echelon will be in vain.
2007-01-18 01:00:00
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