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Must Counterinsurgency Wars Fail?

[FrontPageMagazine] Daniel Pipes - When it comes to a state fighting a non-state enemy, the impression widely exists that the state is doomed to fail. Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli major general, disagrees. In a recent study published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Winning Counterinsurgency War: The Israeli Experience, he convincingly argues that states can beat non-state actors. This debate has the greatest significance, for if the pessimists are right, Western powers are doomed to lose every current and future conflict not involving conventional forces. Victory over insurgencies is possible, Amidror argues, but he postulates four conditions of a mostly political nature required to defeat insurgencies. Two of them concern the state, where the national leadership must understand and accept the political and public relations challenge involved in battling insurgents; and appreciate the vital role of intelligence, invest in it, and require the military to use it effectively. Another two conditions concern counterterrorist operations, which must isolate terrorists from the non-terrorist civilian population, and control and isolate the territories where terrorists live and fight. If these guidelines are successfully followed, the result will not be a signing ceremony but something more subtle - what Amidror calls "sufficient victory." By this, he means a result "that does not produce many years of tranquility, but rather achieves only a 'repressed quiet,' requiring the investment of continuous effort to preserve it." That war entails "fitting together bits of intelligence information, drawing conclusions, putting into operation small forces under difficult conditions within a mixed populace of terrorists and innocent civilians in a densely-populated urban center or isolated village, and small tactical victories." The writer, director of the Middle East Forum, is the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
2008-09-11 01:00:00
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