From the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been divided by a clash of counterinsurgency visions. Israel has been determined to destroy Hamas at all costs, while U.S. officials have worried that Israel was inflicting too many civilian casualties, was not doing enough to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and lacked a “day after” plan to stabilize Gaza after Hamas’s defeat. As one U.S. official told me, “The Israelis are showing how not to do counterinsurgency.”
Netanyahu has been loath to listen. That led Biden last week to threaten to cut off the delivery of offensive weapons if the Israel Defense Forces proceed with a major assault on Rafah, the city where Hamas’s four remaining battalions are hiding among more than 1 million civilians.
In his dismissal of U.S. counsel, Netanyahu has been influenced not only by his own right-wing coalition allies but also by senior IDF officers, many of whom, to be candid, don’t have much respect for U.S. military advice. IDF officers privately argue that the U.S. military, after suffering defeats from Vietnam to Afghanistan, does not have the standing to lecture them on how to fight a guerrilla foe. Moreover, they point out, neither U.S. troops nor any other counterinsurgents have ever faced an enemy hiding in such a formidable subterranean fortress: Hamas has built 350 to 450 miles of tunnels beneath Gaza.
The Israeli criticisms are well taken — the U.S. list of counterinsurgency failures over the decades is long and galling — but there is at least one U.S. military force that has enjoyed impressive counterinsurgency success. That would be the U.S. troops, led by Gen. David H. Petraeus (now retired), who implemented “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
When the surge began, Anbar province appeared to be lost to al-Qaeda in Iraq (at the time, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on the planet), and Iraq seemed to be heading for an all-out civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. By the time the surge ended, sectarian violence had fallen by more than 90 percent and al-Qaeda in Iraq had largely been defeated. (After the outbreak of the Syrian civil in 2011 and the ill-advised pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq the same year, this terrorist organization would be reborn as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.)
There are many reasons the surge worked so well, from an increase of 30,000 U.S. troops to the decision of prominent Anbar sheikhs to abandon al-Qaeda, but underlying the U.S. success was a change in strategy. Previously, U.S. troops had been focused on killing and capturing as many insurgents as possible, only to discover that the military’s heavy-handed use of firepower and large-scale roundups of military-age males created more enemies than they eliminated. Petraeus and his brain trust went back to counterinsurgency 101 by implementing a “clear, hold and build” strategy modeled on past counterinsurgency victories such as Britain’s mid-century war in Malaya and the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the previous century.
They abandoned the previous model of having U.S. troops “commute” to the fight and return every night to sprawling, heavily fortified bases. In the new approach, after clearing neighborhoods of insurgents in heavy fighting, U.S. troops would stay in the area 24/7 to provide security and prevent insurgents from reinfiltrating. They also helped locals rebuild from the ravages of war. This was not a humanitarian impulse but a hardheaded military calculation that the only way to win a guerrilla war is to secure the population.
In recent days, I reached out to Petraeus and a couple members of his brain trust to ask, in light of their own experience in Iraq, what they thought of the Israeli way of war in Gaza. They are all staunch supporters of Israel, but they are highly critical of the IDF strategy — or lack thereof.
Petraeus acknowledged in an email that Gaza is “vastly more challenging than Fallujah, Ramadi, Baqubah and Mosul combined,” referring to cities in Iraq where U.S. forces fought under his command. But, he argued, “the correct approach is a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign that features the traditional tasks of Clear (areas of Hamas terrorists), Hold (keep the civilians secure from Hamas reinfiltration), and Build (provide ample humanitarian assistance, restore the basic services to the people, and then rebuild the many damaged and destroyed areas so that the population can return).”
The problem, in Petraeus’s view, is that “the Israelis are not performing the ‘hold’ and ‘build’ elements” of a counterinsurgency campaign. “They are just clearing and leaving to fight in other areas. And that inevitably means that they will have to go back and reclear endlessly.” Recent experience confirms his warning: On Nov. 15, Israeli troops stormed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which they described as a Hamas stronghold. Then they left. After reports that the complex was once again being used a terrorist base, the IDF returned on March 18 for another two-week operation.
A couple of Petraeus’s former officers, both noted students of counterinsurgency, focused (as he also did) on the lack of a viable political end-state for Israel’s military campaign. “The United States failed to properly consider what sort of peace it wanted to build in Iraq and Afghanistan before it invaded those countries,” said retired Lt. Col. John Nagl, now a professor of warfighting studies at the Army War College. “Without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish, operations tend to be disjointed and counterproductive. It’s past time for Israel to learn from our mistakes and think hard about a two-state solution with capable Palestinian security forces policing both Gaza and the West Bank.”
In a similar vein, retired Col. Peter Mansoor, author of the definitive history of the surge and a professor of military history at Ohio State University, told me, “The Israelis in Gaza are committing the same primary mistake as the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq: Seeking a military solution to what is fundamentally a political issue. By pursuing the destruction of Hamas and ignoring the root causes of the conflict, the Israelis by their actions are creating more future combatants than they are eliminating in the near term. Inevitably, Hamas 2.0 will rise from the ashes of the current fighting.”
The concerns raised by Petraeus, Nagl and Mansoor about Israel’s perverse “clear and leave” strategy are valid and compelling. The implication is that, even if the IDF goes into Rafah, doing so won’t result in a lasting victory against Hamas. Truly winning this war would require creating some sort of government in Gaza that could gain the support of the people and prevent Hamas from returning after Israeli soldiers pull out. But no such solution appears to be in the works.
Netanyahu refuses to countenance any role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza or to accept any road map for the creation of a Palestinian state. That makes it unlikely that moderate Arab states would send peacekeepers or make a major contribution to rebuilding efforts. In the short term, the only way to avoid complete chaos — Mogadishu on the Mediterranean — is for Israeli troops to take over the responsibility of security and governance themselves. But the IDF, scarred by memories of Israel’s costly two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon, has zero desire to become an occupying force.
That’s understandable, but the consequence is that Israel is waging a war in which tactical success is likely to result in strategic failure. Researchers for Rand found that, while “clear, hold and build” strategies require lengthy commitments and don’t always work, an “iron fist” approach of the kind that Israel is employing — focused almost exclusively on killing insurgents — was far less successful historically. (The “iron fist” strategy worked only 32 percent of the time in the cases studied by Rand, compared with a 73 percent success rate for population-centric counterinsurgency.)
That is what the Biden administration has been trying to tell Netanyahu and his war cabinet. The essential U.S. message is that Israel has every right to defend itself, but it needs to be smarter about how it does so. Netanyahu thinks he knows better. Hence the impasse between U.S. and Israeli officials over the Rafah operation. However this disagreement gets resolved, Israel will eventually need to figure out who will govern Gaza, because otherwise Hamas or some other radical group will simply emerge out of the rubble and Israel will find itself right back where it started.
