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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: counter-terrorism

Mischief in Gaza

15 Tue May 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Israel, Middle East

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counter-terrorism, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, Israeli Defence Forces, Kerem Shalom, Nakba, Palestine, terrorism

It has been a bus couple of weeks in the world: the two Koreas are finally talking peace, the United States hopes to talk Pyongyang into at least curtailing if not abandoning its nuclear programme, US president Donald Trump has abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action his predecessor signed with Iran to bring its nuclear programme under greater international scrutiny, the US embassy in Israel shifted from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and elections were held in the Indian state of Karnataka that many see as make-or-break for the Congress party before the general elections next year. In the midst of this, Gaza has been on the boil as thousands of Palestinians have attempted to charge the border fence into Israel and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have, predictably, responded with strength.

The Gaza protests, dubbed the Great March of Return by Hamas, started on March 30 and are supposed to last until May 15, the day Palestinians commemorate as Nakba (catastrophe) Day. The purpose is manifold – to demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to their lands in Israel, to protest the moving of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and to draw attention to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians participating in the protests have varied in number from around 5,000 to 15,000 except on the first day which saw a turnout of 30,000.

Approximately 110 Palestinians have died so far in the protests. On May 14 alone, the 70th anniversary of the proclamation of the State of Israel, 58 Palestinians were killed and approximately 2,700 injured at the border fence in what many are calling a massacre. While the world paints the protests as peaceful and accuses Israel of using disproportionate force, the IDF maintains that the Palestinian demonstrations have been anything but peaceful and are a cynical and bloody ploy by Hamas to gain international sympathy and headlines by paying in Palestinian corpses. Interestingly, the loud international outcry has been drowned out in the muted response from Arab capitals.

The international version of the Gaza protests does not add up. For starters, the Palestinian protesters have been photographed in possession of Molotov cocktails and machetes, flying swastika flags – which can have only one meaning to a Jew – and been arrested trying to breach the border fence into Israel. This has been accompanied by the usual stone pelting and colourful calls to slaughter all Jews and wipe out all Zionists. In the early days of the demonstrations, Palestinians set fire to large mounds of tires in the hope that the smoke would damage Israeli agriculture; a sudden change in the direction of the wind foiled that plot. Undeterred, kites were used to carry tear gas and bombs into Israel to set crops on fire. These attempts have been slightly more successful but also largely failed thanks to an alert citizenry and the emergency services.

There is also the question of what the intentions of this unruly, violent mob were had they succeeded in crossing over into Israel. The locus of the protests was barely 500 metres away from the border fence but protesters attempted to approach the fence at several locations. Is it plausible that the mob, with inflamed passions, calmly turn around and head back to Gaza? The tactics of the crowds suggest otherwise. The IDF was, then, acting in a purely preventive manner.

The claim of peaceful gathering does not hold for yet another reason – nowhere in the world would security services allow such a large gathering of clearly incited people to accumulate so close to a high security zone. Areas such as borders, nuclear facilities, military bases, and the prime ministerial residence are not the same as roads and parks which are open to the common public. Any suspicious activity, let alone mass gatherings, near such restricted areas are viewed as a security threat and dealt with accordingly. Hamas’ call for Gazans to gather at the border must therefore be seen as at least provocative if not outright aggressive in its nature in the challenge it posed to Israeli security.

It is also telling that Kerem Shalom, the only crossing for goods from Israel to Gaza, was attacked. In three separate attacks, mobs torched the border crossing and damaged depots containing building material destined for Gaza and fuel infrastructure. This would only worsen the electricity shortage in Gaza and slow international aid coming into the Strip. Hamas has also refused to accept Israeli humanitarian aid for the Palestinians injured in the clashes, reiterating their noxious brand of politics: the Gaza circus would only get international attention if there are enough casualties to merit a place in Western newspaper columns.

Finally, there is the old argument that Israel uses disproportionate force against terrorists. This is not the first time that accusation has been made but it is as unjustified as it has been in the past. The nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is fundamentally asymmetric – Palestinian terror organisations by design operate around non-combatant zones like civilian population centres, schools, and hospitals; they ensure the presence of women, children, the handicapped, and old people to manipulate the sympathies of the international audience in case of an Israeli strike against their bases; they do not wear uniforms and their targets are civilian structures rather than military assets. It is virtually impossible to strictly follow the rules of engagement reserved for inter-state conflict in such a scenario. The best that can be hoped for is the minimisation of collateral damage, civilians who have been put at risk by the terrorists’ strategy than by Israeli counter-attacks.

Moreover, deterrence contains an element of psychological warfare, of fear, and relies on disproportionate damage. If Israel is proportionate in its counter-terrorism strategy, it loses its advantage of power in the asymmetric struggle while the terrorists retain theirs. Furthermore, as a democratic country – that happens to be under demographic pressure – Israel cannot the tolerate casualties as casually as Hamas. Expectations also contribute to this – Hamas’ sympathisers do not expect it to be able to inflict equal damage upon Israel while the Israeli mainstream opinion remains in favour of punitive action to demoralise and humiliate the enemy.

Responsibility for the loss of life in Gaza over the past six weeks lies entirely at the feet of Hamas. It cannot be reasonably expected that the IDF sit back and allow tens of thousands of demonstrators to approach the border and breach the security fence, attack farms, crossing points, infrastructure, and Israelis. Anyone saying otherwise is either naïve or performing for a select audience.

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That Longest War

17 Sat Jun 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on That Longest War

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A High Price, Charles Orde Wingate, counter-terrorism, Daniel Byman, David Ben-Gurion, Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, Khaled Mashal, Moshe Dayan, Palestine, Palestine Liberation Organisation, PLO, Raed Karmi, Ze'ev Jabotinsky

A High PriceByman, Daniel. A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 496 pp.

Think of Israeli counter-terrorism and you are likely to conjure up an image that rivals any Hollywood blockbuster action film. The tiny Middle Eastern country is admired and looked up to by security professionals the world over from India to the United States for its grit, boldness, and methodical approach to counter-terrorism. Israel’s intelligence elite have maintained and even encouraged this myth for its psychological effect. The reality of this David and Goliath story, however, is closer to A Bridge Too Far than Raid on Entebbe. In his extensive study, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Counterterrorism, Daniel Byman details the unending challenges, grinding successes, and mixed impact of Israeli counter-terrorism operations on its security and the national psyche.

Byman, a professor at Georgetown University, takes Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means seriously and looks at the political fallout of Israel’s counter-terrorism strategies rather than a tactical or operational analysis. Israel’s foes have also been varied over the years – some terrorist groups have been disciplined and methodical, others were rag-tag militia; some are state-backed, others independent. Some terrorist groups are militant branches of a larger social movement while others are small radical cells. The Jewish community has faced virtually every type of terrorist that has been imagined.

It is not surprising then, that most counter-terror tactics have also been pioneered in Israel and have been implemented by other law enforcement forces around the world. Although some analysts scoff at Israel’s record, claiming that its methods have not solved the terrorist plague even after decades of conflict and thousands dead, Byman’s research indicates that the world has much to learn from even the imperfect solutions.

A High Price starts in the pre-independence era when the Yishuv were threatened by Arab terrorism in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration. Byman argues that Israeli counter-terrorism strategy is broadly based on the experience of British administration in Mandatory Palestine. The legacy of one pro-Zionist officer in particular, Charles Orde Wingate, is visible in Israeli security doctrine to this day.

Israeli strategy has essentially three components. One aspect is deterrence: the belief that Israel’s enemies would cease and desist from hostile operations against it out of fear of retribution. Another component is offensive operations: Israel’s small size means that it cannot risk fighting wars on its own soil. Furthermore, fighting on Israeli soil would mean damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties. Therefore, the conflict must be taken to the enemy. The third feature of Israeli security thinking is preemption and speed: like Napoleon Bonaparte preferred, strike first, strike fast, and maintain the element of surprise; keep the enemy off-balance until he capitulates.

Israeli politicians often felt restricted and cornered in their response to Arab violence. Besides national morale, Israeli leaders found it difficult to advocate restraint to people who had just escaped the Holocaust. Their new country was founded specifically on the premise that it would defend Jewish lives at all costs and it was not possible to appear to renege on that promise. Their only hope was to bludgeon their neighbours into inaction.

Ironically, Israeli actions also put Arab leaders in a corner: their retaliatory operations against the Israeli military humiliated the very militaries on which their power depended, and it outraged the Arab people. Arab capitals were very quick to embrace the idea of asymmetric warfare.

For their part, Israeli leaders – military and political alike – understood the Arab hatred towards them. “Can we argue with their intense hatred for us?” Moshe Dayan asked, “before their eyes we are turning the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our inheritance.” Similar warnings had been uttered by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other luminaries of Zionism decades before Israel became a reality. The harsh choice was, according to Dayan and these others, “to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, otherwise the sword will fall from our hands and our lives will be obliterated.” As Golda Meir would say later, Israel’s secret weapon against the Arabs was that they had nowhere else to go.

Byman explains how the nature of warfare that Israel faced shifted rapidly from inter-state to non-state agents. This altered the rules of the game dramatically. Suddenly, the media became immensely important and the military could not use indiscriminate force in civilian-populated areas. Terrorists also improved over the years – from the early fedayeen who were essentially unskilled, angry, displaced Palestinians crossing back into Israel to retrieve as much of their belongings as possible to cool and zealous individuals who had received professional training from Arab and Communist armies or other terrorist groups. While Israel was able to deter the Arab states, particularly Egypt and Jordan, from supporting cross-border terrorist raids, non-state actors proved much harder to deter.

Of most value to readers should be the attention A High Price pays to the self-goals Israeli security services have scored in their war on terror. As Washington and its partners are learning now after their invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, military victory does not matter if you lose the battle over public perception. Israel has experienced this bitter lesson first-hand several times and years earlier as its leaders bought into the false dichotomy of physical security and perception. Wingate’s methods gave psychological satisfaction but did not always produce satisfactory results. David Ben-Gurion had realised this even in the 1940s and used it against the British but countries – not just Israel – seem doomed to repeat this error.

Byman argues that the Knesset has often ignored the political consequences of their counter-terrorism. The assassination of terrorist leaders, Raed Karmi for example, have sometimes unleashed cycles of violence that resulted in the loss of several lives. Some operations, such as the attempted assassination of Khaled Mashal in Amman, jeopardised important alliances. The IDF’s success in demolishing a group has usually been only temporary – in some cases, several splinter groups emerge in the place of one or space is made for more radical (Islamist) terrorists.

Israel is also guilty of underestimating the importance of the media and public narrative. Its opponents, be they state on non-state actors, have excelled at manipulating domestic, regional, and international fora, think tanks, and news organisations to portray an image of the conflict that is slanted, incomplete, exaggerated, and, at times, blatantly false. Israeli engagements in Lebanon, for example, were overwhelmingly successful militarily if losses of men and materiel were to be tallied. However, the perception of victory and defiance holds more water than the reality. What have often been successful Israeli operations are sometimes perceived as failures even by Israeli citizens.

Byman also notes that while Israel excels at the tactical and operational levels, a long-term strategy for the region is sorely lacking. Israelis are still debating whether they have temporarily occupied the territory that in the end belonged to Arabs or liberating historic land that really belonged to the Jews. A banal, vacuous, and unconsidered desire for peace is a sufficient strategy only if you are building a graveyard. Many of Israel’s problems arise from predictable long-term consequences of its ad hoc decisions. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, for example, turned into a gruelling occupation that gave birth to a far more dangerous threat in the Hezbollah. Eventually, it led to the collapse of the very state that Israel was trying to pressure into curtailing the PLO. Similarly, some of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza, though they may have succeeded in stemming the tide of terrorist attacks, have altered the situation on the ground so much that peace talks have become difficult; both sides claim to a different stunde null as the basis of negotiations.

One of the astute observations in A High Price is that there is a growing expectation in the media and its poorly uninformed subscribers of proportionality in military operations against terrorists. The very nature of deterrence, however, is the threat of disproportionate force against the enemy. While this doctrine may work well against the militaries of Israel’s neighbours, it does less so against terrorists who hide in civilian areas with the expectation that either propriety will spare them or an opportunity for propaganda will present itself.

As Byman contends, with no considered policy in place, day-to-day counter-terrorism is sometimes not conducive towards achieving the broader goal. However, he is also quick to admit that most often, the choice before the IDF or Knesset is between different shades of bad. Israeli security officials have been fully aware of this but see no escape. Collective punishment, for example, was not justified or moral but effective, admitted Dayan. The IDF’s organisational ethos gives commanders tremendous autonomy with the understanding that there could be occasional mistakes. “I prefer initiative and excessive action, even if they’re accompanied by the occasional mistake, over passivity”, Dayan is supposed to have said.

It is also true that the IDF’s harsh measures have the support of the Israeli people. House demolitions, cross-border strikes, targeted assassinations, and the refusal to recognise the PLO have many supporters. Each time there was a terrorist attack or peace talks broke down, the uncompromising Israeli Right gained supporters. Continuing talks under terrorist activity was unacceptable to Israelis for whom the very purpose of talks was to end terrorism. Additionally, the assassination of senior operatives did hurt terrorist groups in that they lost valuable experience in bomb-making, logistics, money laundering, arms acquisition networks, and other aspects of the terrorist’s craft. The number of warm bodies that Hamas or Hezbollah can throw up is not nearly as much a concern as the skills some of these bodies may possess.

Byman walks a fine line between the Israelis and the Palestinians and presents an objective study of Arab terrorism against Israel. He does not shirk from calling out the IDF’s excessive policies even if he admits they may bring immediate gains while at the same time pointing out that there is much that the Palestinians have done to hurt their own cause. The civil war between Fatah and Hamas in 2006 is but one example. It also goes unacknowledged that in the first five years after the Six-Day War, Israeli assistance in terms of fertiliser, irrigation, and farming techniques tripled the agricultural production of the West Bank. Yet although violence diminished, support for violence did not.

It is disconcerting to note that over the years, support for talks has reduced and both Israelis and Palestinians appear more unwilling to compromise, readier to shed blood, and accepting of atrocities against the other. Decades of living in terror has, as many psychologists have suggested, caused a nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel. This does not bode well for the peacemakers, for their efforts will be viewed with suspicion and the bar of acceptability has inched that much higher.

A High Price is an indispensable read for anyone interested in counter-terrorism and its pitfalls. Furthermore, there can be no no better case study than Israel where citizens have lived experience first as conscripts in the IDF and then as civilians or politicians. A High Price is chronologically packed with events as well as interviews with senior officials that gives readers a view from the cockpit, so to speak. Byman’s ability to present facts and arguments dispassionately is an incredible achievement for a topic that is not known for calm and rational discussion. In the Age of Terror that we live in, I do not see how A High Price is a book that can be skipped.

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The Nation and Counter-Terrorism

17 Fri Mar 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

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Anis Amri, counter-terrorism, India, Internal Security Act, Jamaludeen al-Harith, K Shanmugam, Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, SGSecure, Singapore, terrorism

With the world’s attention on counter-terrorism firmly held in the Middle East and Central Asia by ISIS, al Qa’ida, and the Taliban, Singapore appears an unlikely and distant theatre in the global struggle against terrorism. Yet globalisation has come to terrorism too, and the tiny Southeast Asian city-state sits amidst a sea of threats from several regional and international groups. To combat this emergent danger, Singapore has evolved its own unique procedures that are philosophically interesting and may hold lessons for the rest of the international community.

K ShanmugamAt a conference on counter-terrorism hosted by the India Foundation in Delhi last week, Singaporean Minister of Home Affairs Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam explained some of the novel methods his country employs to counter the scourge of terrorism to an audience of experts and dignitaries from Israel, Russia, France, Britain, and several other countries. Shanmugam does not see the response to terrorism as neatly bifurcated into governance and enforcement, nor does he see the two as an either/or choice. Of course, Singapore broadly applies the carrot-and-stick principle but the degree to which the city-state demands its citizens to take responsibility and be partners in counter-terrorism is astonishing…at least in an era of irresponsible blame games, scare-mongering, and increasing anomie.

The core value for any Singaporean government, from which all policies derive their legitimacy, is that they are all Singaporeans. The state guarantees the safety, security, and freedom of religion to all citizens and treat them with equality, accepting differences and manage ethnic and religious differences; citizens are taught from school that xenophobia and majoritarianism cannot be allowed to override the guarantee of protection to the minorities. So far, these sound like the tenets of Western liberalism but for these principles to succeed, Shanmugam reminds us, there must be active integration of all communities into the national whole. Among the foremost harbingers of terrorism, the Singaporean home minister, argued, is polarisation in societies due to segments within minorities attempting to create exclusive socio-cultural fiefdoms.

Singapore has population that is 15 percent Muslim and 74 percent Chinese; preferential treatment would fracture national solidarity and kindle the flames of majoritarianism. After a while, the home minister warned, you will get segregated communities, neighbourhoods, schools, a lessening of a national public sphere and the consequent reduction of opportunities to minority communities without active state intervention.

Singapore’s balance between individual freedoms and state intervention is an interesting one that has received much flak from the West. The city-state’s view is, however, that it is unhealthy to have such a doctrinaire adherence to anything – even liberty. Shanmugam’s views – shared by his government – are not new to anyone with a dharmic worldview in which all systems have limitations and rules are subject to time, place, and situation. They do, however, gently chide Anglo-American (fundamentalist) modernity in their implication.

The home minister was not shy to call out Islam as one of the most problematic ideas of the day even as he insisted that terrorism has no religion. Shanmugam stressed that radicalisation occurs when communities feel estranged from the national mainstream. Singapore strives to ensure that its core values are implemented evenly and politicians must resist the urge to play the divisive and corrosive game of racial or religious politics for power. It is the state that has to ensure that its racial and religious leaders move beyond only promoting their respective groups. Minorities cannot be allowed to become more exclusive but must be encouraged – forced, if necessary – to work towards enlarging the national public sphere and push back against polarisation; they must champion the cause of integration and interaction.

While the Singaporean state takes direct responsibility to foster a healthy pluralism in its body politic, Shanmugam was clear that this was not possible unless it received cooperation from the public. Towards this end, certain liberties were liable to be partially curtailed. A Muslim preacher from southern India, for example, was denied a visa to Singapore because he taught that even greeting the kaafir on their holy days was blasphemy. Though this may seem a minor point, Shanmugam drew attention to the Muslim man who was stabbed to death in Glasgow for wishing his friends and neighbours a happy Easter.

Singapore SOTFIn terms of balancing tolerance and risk, Shanmugam gave the example of an Islamic cleric in Singapore who was under investigation under the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act for preaching death to all Christians and Jews. The Internal Security Act empowers the government to approach, question, counsel, and even detain an individual for uttering or repeatedly accessing extremist literature. The home minister accepted that this was an institutionalised exception to the rule of law but added that there was wide public support for it. Referring to Anis Amri, the Tunisian who was responsible for the Breitscheidplatz attack in Berlin on Christmas day in 2016, Shanmugam said that Amri would have been detained far earlier in Singapore given his acquaintances and questionable past, whereas German police had to call off surveillance on Amri three months prior to the attack as they had no legal grounds under German law to arrest him.

In another case that raises doubts whether there is too much liberty in the West, Jamaludeen al-Harith, a British citizen behind a suicide attack on Iraqi forces in Mosul in February 2017, was found in a Taliban prison in Kandahar in 2002 by US forces and held at Guantanamo Bay for two years under suspicion of being an enemy combatant. Repatriated to the United Kingdom in 2004, he received £1 million in compensation from the British government. However, with discovery of his role in the Mosul attack, it is difficult not to wonder whether the London did not inadvertently finance terrorism.

Singapore counter terrorismShanmugam is charitable with these instances of catastrophic counter-terrorism failure, allowing that each nation has to find its own way, its own balance between security and liberty, in the war on terror. Despite the harsh methods available to Singaporean law enforcement, the home minister cautions that a purely kinetic approach to terrorism will not work – like globules of mercury slither away when a larger block is struck hard, survivors from known terrorist organisations disappear and reappear later in other outfits. Singapore’s strategy is called SGSecure, which seeks to train average citizens how to respond in the event of a terrorist attack. The policy works at three levels: first, it passes legislation hardening buildings to withstand explosions, making first aid kits easily accessible in public areas, and composing a team of psychologists to counsel trauma victims; second, the government hopes to train at least one person in every household to respond to terrorism in terms of reporting strange packages, administering first aid, or quick notification of suspicious activity via an app – in essence, develop psychological resilience in the populace through knowledge; third, the composition of special counter-terrorism units, rapid action teams, intelligence gathering, and international cooperation.

Not all of Singapore’s methods can be applied universally – it is a city-state and its size gives it certain features that are harder to replicate in larger and more populous states. Of course, the implicit assumption is that all policies will be implemented satisfactorily if not perfectly. Yet it is interesting to note how often Shanmugam stressed the importance of national unity and not alienating any community. Ultimate loyalty must be to peace, stability, and law & order in society, the minister argued, and intolerance, whether it takes the form of violent action or speech, cannot be brooked. It is certainly possible for democracies to devolve due to excessive tolerance stemming from a slavish adherence to principles without context.

A critical point left unstated is that strong nations make stable states. Singapore works hard to forge its Tamils, Malays, and Chinese into Singaporeans that they and the country with them may mutually prosper. India’s incomplete nation-building project, seen by many as somehow less important than roti, kapda, aur makaan, hamstrings its statist and institutional functions because of the shoddy way in which national unity has been promoted. Between the primacy of the nation and a deeply considered and contextualised approach to our core values, there is much policy makers can learn from Singapore on the philosophical plane of counter-terrorism.

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