Winged Victory of Samothrace
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Can a Conventional Army Vanquish a Terrorist Insurgency?
- Maj.-Gen. Yaakov Amidror
Total victory is not the sole model of victory which history recognizes. It is necessary to adopt an alternative concept of victory, which should be called "minimal victory"...
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 reduce the number of 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.
(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
2 comments:
This is certainly a justification for preemptive war, however, that does not make it true. Our failure to finish the job in Afghanistan and to even know what our job was in Iraq has only inflamed passion, rhetoric, and by all objective measures, increased the risks and acts of terrorism around the world. The subjective measure "no attacks in America since 9/11" is fallacious. The successful attacks in America were 8 years apart ('93 and '01). While, in theory, we need to modify the rules because it is clear we cannot wipe out all the terrorists, that has never been the way wars were won either. If you look at the large decisive wars in the past, when an enemy was overwhelmingly defeated, they capitulated. While the rules certainly seem different combating terrorism, and as Israel saw recently in Lebanon, if the victory is not decisive, it is no longer a victory, I believe decisive victories will still be what they say: Victories. Afghanistan was almost decisive, but for some reason we stopped before the end there, and focused elsewhere. Even so, regardless of the rhetoric coming from the mideast, no terrorist organization is pointing to Afghanistan for recruitment, or as an example. They point to our monumental failure in Iraq. This is because Afghanistan was still most convincingly a loss for the Taliban. The rules are changing, and the fighting is changing, but the risk of a strike first doctrine, is that you will do terribly stupid and tragic things, like Iraq. Better, when confronted, you fight the actual fight, and don't stop until you are done. More completed Afghanistans, and fewer Iraqs would elad to a safer world.
The debate on the nature of victory in the terror war is fascinating. No one seems to agree whether old fashioned victory is possible in a war battling an army without uniforms, and one where acquisition of land is not decisive.
The recent Lebanon War seems to warn that the absence of old fashioned victory can be dangerous. But reconfiguring victory is compelling.
If WW2 is an example, an imperial force with suicide bombers [Japan] can indeed by made to relent.
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