[Kabar-indonesia] NYT Analysis: Perceptions: Defining ‘Victory’ Before the World [4 articles]

[Joyo at aol.com]

4 articles:

- NYT front page: 200 Missiles Hit Israel as Battle
  Rages in Lebanon

- NYT: News Analysis: Perceptions: The Long-Term
  Battle: Defining ‘Victory’ Before the World

- Analysis: Tactics of Hezbollah Insurgency

- NYT: Ground to a Halt [by the author of “Dying 
  to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”]

------------

The New York Times
Thursday, August 3, 2006
-front page-

The Overview

200 Missiles Hit Israel as Battle Rages in Lebanon

By JOHN KIFNER and WARREN HOGE

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 2 — Hezbollah guerrillas fired
the largest number of rockets yet into Israel — more
than 200 — on Wednesday as thousands of Israeli troops
faced fierce fighting in Lebanon, and sought to
establish a buffer zone under their control.

Battles raged in a half-dozen pockets, and Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would fight until an
international force moved into southern Lebanon.

At the United Nations, France, Britain and the United
States said they were nearing agreement on such a
force. Diplomats from the countries, who asked not to
be named because they were not authorized to speak
publicly, said they had converged on a two-resolution
approach. The first resolution, expected in the coming
days, would establish a cessation of hostilities and
lay out a political framework for the future.

The second, to follow within two weeks of the first,
would create a buffer zone in the south and authorize
an international force to patrol it, and set out terms
for a sustainable cease-fire, including disarming
Hezbollah, establishing the borders of Lebanon,
preventing arms shipments into the country and
extending the authority of the Lebanese Army over all
its territory.

At issue was what military force would remain in the
buffer zone to enforce the truce after passage of the
first resolution. The two likeliest options were an
enhanced version of the existing United Nations force,
or Israeli troops who would remain until the new
international force was in place, the diplomats said.
Either option could face resistance, the first from
Israel, which considers the existing force to be
impotent, and the second from Lebanon and others,
unhappy that Israeli soldiers would be permitted to
stay in Lebanon.

In interviews on Wednesday, Mr. Olmert said that
Hezbollah’s infrastructure had been “entirely
destroyed” and that some 770 command and control
centers had been taken out of action. As he spoke,
Hezbollah fighters, flitting between villages and
underground bunkers, were showering Israel with the
biggest barrage of rockets in the 21-day-old war.
While Israeli artillery has been pounding the Lebanese
village of Kafr Kila, separated from the Israeli town
of Metulla by a fence, at midmorning there was a
swoosh overhead as more than a dozen missiles flew
from the hills northwest of Merj ’Uyun into Israel. An
Israeli man was killed by one rocket and dozens of
others suffered various injuries. One longer-range
missile landed in the West Bank, the farthest any has
been sent from Lebanon.

[Early on Thursday, the Israeli military said, tanks
and troops moved back into southern Gaza, closing the
entrance to the town of Rafah, The Associated Press
reported. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at militants
who were about to launch rockets at Israeli forces,
the military said. Palestinian and hospital officials
said four militants were killed. After daybreak,
security officials said, an Israeli tank fired a shell
at residents gathering in the area, killing an
8-year-old boy.

[Separately, the Israeli Army said Thursday morning
that the air force launched airstrikes on 70 targets
in southern Lebanon and Beirut overnight, Reuters
reported.]

The past two days had been relatively quiet,
apparently in response to the announced pause in
Israeli airstrikes. On Sunday, 156 rockets fell, the
second-highest number.

Helicopter-borne Israeli commandos penetrated some 60
miles into Lebanon in the middle of Tuesday night,
striking a hospital financed by Iranian money in the
Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek, near the Syrian
border. Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of
staff, said that the commandos had focused on a
“remote logistics base” operated by Hezbollah where
“some of their leaders” were meeting and that Israeli
troops captured 5 Hezbollah members and killed more
than 10.

In Lebanon, the speculation was that the raid was
aimed at capturing a prominent local Hezbollah leader,
Mohammad Yazbek, who is the personal representative of
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Locals
said his entourage had passed through before the raid.
They said at least 15 civilians were killed during
Israeli airstrikes providing cover to the commandos,
including seven members of one family.

Much of southern Lebanon was a landscape of
destruction on Wednesday, with smoke rising from
shelled villages. Israeli soldiers clawed less than
four miles into Lebanon, meeting stiff resistance from
guerrillas.

[The Israeli military’s inquiry on the bombing of a
building in the Lebanese village of Qana on Sunday
that killed more than two dozen civilians admits a
mistake, but charges that Hezbollah guerrillas had
used civilians as human shields for their rocket
attacks, The Associated Press reported, citing a
statement issued early on Thursday. The statement
summarizing the inquiry’s findings said Israel did not
know there were civilians in the building. It said
more than 150 rockets had been launched from Qana and
the area around it since July 12, when the conflict
began.]

Mr. Olmert said in several interviews that the
offensive was severely degrading Hezbollah’s military
capacity. But in Lebanon, an expert on the militia
said Mr. Olmert’s description of a traditional, formal
military structure did not fit with the way Hezbollah
was organized.

“The command structure of Hezbollah — show me one,”
said Timor Goksul, a longtime adviser to the United
Nations peacekeepers in south Lebanon and now a
university professor here. “They don’t work that way.
There are three regional commands that have full
autonomy, and under them districts and then cells in
villages, with a maximum of 20 men. “They know their
job,” he said. “Their uniforms, their weapons are in a
cave somewhere. They do their jobs and then they’re
home watching television.”

Mr. Olmert said the Israeli attacks had isolated
Hezbollah from the rest of the Lebanese population by
inflicting widespread damage for which its radical
tactics would be blamed. There was initial criticism
by many Lebanese, but this appears to have subsided
because of the havoc caused by the Israeli attacks. In
an event that would have been unthinkable a few months
ago, in this country where politics is locked into
religious lines, the Maronite Catholic patriarch — the
spiritual leader of the most pro-Western populace —
convened a meeting this week of religious leaders of
other communities, Shiite and Sunni Muslims and
several varieties of Christians, resulting in a
statement of solidarity and photographs in Wednesday’s
newspapers. Their joint statement, condemning the
Israeli “aggression,” hailed “the resistance, mainly
led by Hezbollah, which represents one of the sections
of society.”

Even the Lebanese Army, which has stood apart from the
battles, was taking casualties. An Israeli airstrike
at a base near Sidon killed 3 Lebanese soldiers on
Wednesday, for a total of 24 during the conflict.

The negotiations at the United Nations focused on a
proposal originating in Washington, according to a
senior American official. France and the United States
have been divided over whether a political settlement
between Israel and Hezbollah should be set out before
or after an international force is sent in. The
two-resolution approach seems to offer a way of
meeting both countries’ objectives by prescribing
separate forces for separate moments.

For the second time this week, the United Nations on
Wednesday postponed a meeting of countries that might
contribute troops to a new stabilization force in
southern Lebanon. France had already announced it
would not attend the session, scheduled for Thursday,
saying it was too early to discuss the force.

“It seems clear that it remains premature for such a
meeting to be held because of the absence of an agreed
political framework for ending the conflict,” said
Ahmad Fawzi, a United Nations spokesman. “If you don’t
have a mandate, how can you decide what kind of force
you need?”

The French resolution has until now been the subject
of negotiations involving just Britain and the United
States. The two other permanent Security Council
members, China and Russia, and the 10 other Council
members were given briefings on the measure on
Tuesday.

John Kifner reported from Beirut for this article, and
Warren Hoge from the United Nations. Richard A. Oppel
Jr. contributed reporting from Metulla, Israel, Hassan
M. Fattah from Baalbek, Lebanon, and Jad Mouawad from
Kafr Kila, Lebanon.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The New York Times
Thursday, August 3, 2006

News Analysis: Perceptions

The Long-Term Battle: Defining ‘Victory’ Before the
World

By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, Aug. 2 — As Israeli troops press the ground
offensive in southern Lebanon and commandos make an
unexpected raid far to the north in Baalbek, Israel is
fighting now to win the battle of perceptions.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wants to ensure that when a
cease-fire is finally arranged, Israel is seen as
having won a decisive victory over Hezbollah. It is
important for him politically, especially after a slow
and fumbling start to this war. In part, Israel wants
to recover from an image of an unimpressive military
venture against a tough, small, but well-trained group
of fighters.

Israel also wants to send a message to the
Palestinians, and to Hezbollah and its sponsors, Syria
and Iran, that attacks on Israel will be met with
overwhelming force, and that the cost is not worth the
effort. How soon that message is perceived will play a
central role in its decision to stop the war.

As with all wars, however, any victory must be
consolidated in political and diplomatic arrangements,
which remain uncertain, like the insertion of a
multinational force along the border.

For Hezbollah, victory means simply avoiding defeat.
It will be perceived by many Muslims to have won by
keeping the capacity to fire even short-range rockets
into Israel.

Gidi Grinstein, a former Israeli negotiator and
director of the Reut Institute, a research group,
calls it the “90-10 paradox.” Israel can eliminate 90
percent of Hezbollah’s fighting capacity, but
Hezbollah can still declare victory and claim that it
fought the mighty Israeli Army to a draw.

“At the end of the war, they’ll have a narrative, and
so will we,” he said. “It’s all about perception.”

Hezbollah will argue that it withstood three to five
weeks of fighting with the region’s most powerful
army, supported and equipped by the world’s most
powerful army, that of the United States. In that
sense, a long war is better for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah and its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, will
be hailed by many in the Arab and Muslim worlds as
heroes and new Saladins, whose religious faith was
transmuted into astounding bravery rarely shown by the
huge Arab armies of the secular Arab states that
fought Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Shlomo Avineri, a former Foreign Ministry official and
professor of political science at Hebrew University,
said Israel could never prevail in an Arab narrative.
“If Israel had won in the first week, Hezbollah would
say that it was a victory of the United States, which
provided Israel the time, weapons and money.”

Israel’s problem is much more complicated, Mr. Avineri
said, because “everything is likely to end in grays.”
What will help define the real results, he said, is
the mandate of any multinational force and whether it
calls for disarming Hezbollah.

An Israeli cabinet minister, who spoke anonymously
because of the delicacy of the topic, said, “The
narrative at the end is part of the problem.” He
added: “That’s why we’re making up this balance sheet
of accomplishments. Olmert said it very well in the
cabinet: ‘Ask Nasrallah and his colleagues if they
would like to return to the situation of three weeks
ago, and they will say yes.”

But the end will be a far cry from Israel’s original
intent, which Mr. Olmert stated as the destruction or
dismantling of Hezbollah.

“Israel is trying to frame its narrative now around
the most minimal achievement, which is a major setback
to the fighting capacity of Hezbollah,” Mr. Grinstein
said. “But the question and the challenge is to frame
a narrative of victory around more ambitious
objectives.”

To “win,” Israel must be able to alter Hezbollah’s
decision-making and remove the aura of the invincible
fighters who drove the Americans and French out of
Beirut in 1983 and the Israelis out of Lebanon in
2000. Israel must also create enough distance between
Lebanese and Hezbollah interests to ensure that the
Lebanese also press the militia group not to provoke
Israel to another round of costly warfare.

“Hezbollah serves two masters: Lebanon, where it
lives, and Iran and Syria and the camp of permanent
resistance to Israel,” Mr. Grinstein said. “Most
Lebanese don’t like the second master, but if the two
overlap, as they did before July 12, Hezbollah is
comfortable.”

Israel is trying to underline the contradictions. Mr.
Nasrallah is widely considered to have miscalculated
when he authorized the raid into Israel on July 12,
when two soldiers were captured. He said he thought
Israel would respond as in the past, with token tank
fire.

“Israel’s most significant accomplishment from this
war will be if it can severely compromise Hezbollah’s
ability to fight Israel from inside Lebanon,” Mr.
Grinstein said.

Giora Eiland, Israel’s national security adviser under
former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, predicts a
solution in the next week or so “that is far from
Israel’s original intent.”

He sees a political package negotiated at the United
Nations that includes an exchange of Lebanese
prisoners, with Israel regaining its two soldiers; a
security zone in southern Lebanon under the control of
a multinational force; an Israeli promise not to
violate Lebanon’s sovereignty; and “a general
understanding or commitment by the Lebanese government
to be responsible for Hezbollah’s behavior.”

But “the most important thing will be missing from a
deal,’’ he said, “the dismantling of the military
capacity of Hezbollah.”

Israel also wants to get its message across to
Hezbollah’s Sunni cousin in the camp of permanent
resistance — Hamas, which leads the Palestinian
Authority.

Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet
counterterrorism organization, told the cabinet that
Israel needed to deepen its gains against Hezbollah so
that the Palestinians could feel them. “In the Middle
East it is important to show the potential terrorist
in Balata,” a Palestinian refugee camp, “not only the
strategic victory, but the army’s achievements, in
order to effect deterrence.”

When Israel pulled out of Gaza last summer, Hamas
controlled the narrative, arguing that its fighters
had expelled Israel the way Hezbollah expelled Israel
from Lebanon in 2000. Israel’s withdrawal, in both
cases, was perceived not as a gesture for peaceful
coexistence, as Israel had hoped, but as a sign of
weakness.

Jonathan Fighel, a former colonel who fought in
Lebanon and was the military governor of Jenin, said
that in Lebanon, “the army is breaking the idea that
Hezbollah has superiority on the ground, as the
resilience of Israelis in the north is breaking
Nasrallah’s claim that we’re a bunch of nobodies that
will crack.”

Much will depend on the diplomatic solution and what
follows on the ground, Mr. Avineri said. “If Hezbollah
continues to have freedom of movement and operation,
the outcome is a failure for Israel. But if you have a
regime that makes it very hard for them to operate
militarily, it’s a different narrative.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Guardian
Thursday August 3, 2006

Tactics of insurgency

Amyas Godfrey

By expanding ground operations into southern Lebanon
the Israeli military is taking on a challenge which
has troubled armies for generations: how to
successfully wage war against an insurgent enemy.

The difficulty inherent with asymmetric warfare - the
military term for fighting irregular forces with
conventional forces - is that your enemy is able to
"move among the people like a fish in water". This
description of the nature of revolutionary war by Mao
Zedong in the 1920s does well to define the aim of
counter-insurgency as the need to "separate the fish
from the water" or the insurgent from the people.
Israel is now facing this problem in southern Lebanon.

What insurgents lack in military capability they make
up for in different ways. Good insurgent leaders
balance their advantages against their disadvantages
in what is often an unequal fight. They have three
distinct advantages over the conventional military.

Firstly, they have a chameleon-like ability to shift
back and forth across the divide from insurgent to
civilian; recognising when it is best to fight and
when to walk away, downing tools when continued
resistance would result in their own futile
destruction.

The insurgent's second advantage is propaganda. The
media, when used skillfully by the insurgent, can have
far greater effect than any amount of bullets or
bombs. The current conflict in Lebanon is not
militarily equal, but Hizbullah abides by no laws or
treaties, nor is it burdened by accountability. Well
managed, an insurgent group can portray itself as
"freedom fighters". Additionally, Hizbullah can turn
every dead fighter into a hero, and every civilian
death into a recruiting tool. It is unlikely to run
out of recruits for the foreseeable future.

The final area where any insurgent campaign is likely
to have an advantage is in its knowledge and use of
the ground. It is reported that Hizbullah has been
preparing for this conflict for six years. It has
constructed a network of tunnels, selected its
ambushes, and prepared the local population.

Israel, for its part, is pursuing a conventional,
straightforward approach. It can do little else. The
Israeli army is a mixture of professionals, national
service conscripts and reservists. The last two
categories by their very nature have limited military
training and are less capable of complex operations.

Once the decision had been made to destroy Hizbullah,
a four-phased operation was put into action. Phase one
called for widespread air strikes against Lebanese
infrastructure, crippling the country and dishing out
collective punishment on the people for supporting
Hizbullah. It was presumably hoped that an early
settlement could be achieved through pressure on
Hizbullah. This did not work.

Phase two has seen more direct targeting of Hizbullah
fighters and its capabilities, by disrupting
communications and supplies and safe houses.

The Israeli forces are now moving into phase three:
the land offensive. The aim is to "mop up" pockets of
resistance and seize ground from rocket teams. It is
potentially the bloodiest phase for Israel - and the
one Hizbullah has been waiting for.

Phase four would be the occupation of Hizbullah's
ground, southern Lebanon. However it is too early to
say whether this will be done by the Israeli army or a
UN force. Whichever way it ends up, this most recent
conflict in the Middle East is following a now
recognisable pattern: insurgent conflicts are never
short, nor benign in destructive power.

· Amyas Godfrey is Associate Fellow of Royal United
Services Institute

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The New York Times
August 3, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

Ground to a Halt 

By ROBERT PAPE

Chicago

ISRAEL has finally conceded that air power alone will
not defeat Hezbollah. Over the coming weeks, it will
learn that ground power won’t work either. The problem
is not that the Israelis have insufficient military
might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the
enemy.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Hezbollah is
principally neither a political party nor an Islamist
militia. It is a broad movement that evolved in
reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982.
At first it consisted of a small number of Shiites
supported by Iran. But as more and more Lebanese came
to resent Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah — never
tight-knit — expanded into an umbrella organization
that tacitly coordinated the resistance operations of
a loose collection of groups with a variety of
religious and secular aims. 

In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less
comparable to, say, a religious cult like the Taliban
than to the multidimensional American civil-rights
movement of the 1960’s. What made its rise so rapid,
and will make it impossible to defeat militarily, was
not its international support but the fact that it
evolved from a reorientation of pre-existing Lebanese
social groups.

Evidence of the broad nature of Hezbollah’s resistance
to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of
its suicide attackers. Hezbollah conducted a broad
campaign of suicide bombings against American, French
and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether,
these attacks — which included the infamous bombing of
the Marine barracks in 1983 — involved 41 suicide
terrorists. 

In writing my book on suicide attackers, I had
researchers scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr
videos, pictures and testimonials and the biographies
of the Hezbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the
names, birth places and other personal data for 38.
Shockingly, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists.
Twenty-seven were from leftist political groups like
the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist
Union. Three were Christians, including a female
high-school teacher with a college degree. All were
born in Lebanon.

What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today —
shared was not a religious or political ideology but
simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation.
Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did
not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven
to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is
withdrawal by the occupying force. 

Thus the new Israeli land offensive may take ground
and destroy weapons, but it has little chance of
destroying the Hezbollah movement. In fact, in the
wake of the bombings of civilians, the incursion will
probably aid Hezbollah’s recruiting.

Equally important, Israel’s incursion is also
squandering the good will it had initially earned from
so-called moderate Arab states like Egypt and Saudi
Arabia. The countries are the court of opinion that
matters because, while Israel cannot crush Hezbollah,
it could achieve a more limited goal: ending
Hezbollah’s acquisition of more missiles through
Syria. 

Given Syria’s total control of its border with
Lebanon, stemming the flow of weapons is a job for
diplomacy, not force. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan,
Sunni-led nations that want stability in the region,
are motivated to stop the rise of Hezbollah. Under the
right conditions, the United States might be able to
help assemble an ad hoc coalition of Syria’s neighbors
to entice and bully it to prevent Iranian, Chinese or
other foreign missiles from entering Lebanon. It could
also offer to begin talks over the future of the Golan
Heights.

But Israel must take the initiative. Unless it calls
off the offensive and accepts a genuine cease-fire,
there are likely to be many, many dead Israelis in the
coming weeks — and a much stronger Hezbollah. 

Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at
the University of Chicago, is the author of “Dying to
Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.”

------------------------------------------
Joyo Indonesia News Service
------------------------------------------