In recent weeks, Italy’s government fell after losing a parliamentary vote on the country’s troop deployment in Afghanistan, while the United Kingdom and Denmark announced that they were to begin withdrawing their troops from Iraq. Whereas the Bush administration is deploying an additional 21,000 American soldiers in that country, and is pushing for more allied troops in Afghanistan, America’s allies are rejecting its Middle East policy. They are increasingly convinced that “victory will be elusive in any asymmetric conflict between states, however powerful, and religiously driven armed insurgents. Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ambition of preparing a military “transformation – the technological upgrading of the US armed forces’ capacity to achieve decisive victory with fewer troops – failed resoundingly in Iraq. Nor could Israel, with its overwhelming technological advantage, defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon. More rockets and missiles fell on northern Israel in 33 days than hit Britain during all of World War II. So the Israelis now must reckon with a new phenomenon: an asymmetric entity, Hezbollah, with a nation-state’s firepower. So the fierce debate over whether to increase the size of American ground forces in Iraq is beside the point. Neither the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s nor NATO’s experience today vindicates the claim that troop numbers are what matter most on the modern battlefield. When geostrategic military front lines are non-existent, as in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, mass no longer equals victory. The great Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz’s notion of “decisive battles as the “center of gravity of war is simply irrelevant to conflicts that have no visible “center of gravity. Indeed, while wars from the time of Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans in 216 BC to the Gulf war of 1991 had this center of gravity, with a massive concentration of force capable of bringing an enemy to its knees, such industrial inter-state wars have now become a historical anachronism. Most states nowadays lie within borders that are widely accepted as legitimate, and they increasingly abide by international norms of behavior in times of war. In fact, the obligation of states to abide by humanitarian rules of conduct while their enemies are free to barbarize warfare is what makes asymmetric wars especially insoluble. Moreover, in an era of global media and international war crimes courts, the criteria for states’ use of military force have become more complex than ever. Inter-state combat may still occur where strategic front lines can be found, such as Israel’s border with Syria, India’s border with Pakistan, and the border dividing North and South Korea. In such cases, war, as the Egyptians showed in the conflict of October 1973, might still serve as an avenue to resolving a conflict. The Syrians might be tempted to launch an offensive against Israel with the objective of breaking the deadlock over the future of the Golan Heights. However, in the case of Kashmir, the asymmetric conflict currently fought by proxies and terrorist groups might not degenerate into all-out war precisely because India and Pakistan have mutual nuclear deterrence. Indeed, such asymmetric conflicts through proxies have become a convenient way for states to avoid the price of a general war. This changing nature of the battlefield essentially means that war as a conclusive event in an international conflict has become obsolete. The facile Clausewitzian wisdom that military action ultimately leads to a political solution is no longer convincing. “Victory cannot bring peace, simply because there will always be a war after the war. Thus, for example, the conventional war in Kosovo lasted for two months, only to usher in a six-year asymmetric conflict. Likewise, America’s three-week “shock and awe campaign in Iraq in 2003 ended in “victory, but opened the gates of hell for occupiers and ordinary Iraqis alike. And six months after the merciless pounding of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is as strong as it was before. Nor does the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan six years after their overthrow now seen to be far-fetched. It is during the war after the war that the occupier’s inferiority is revealed, with constant reinforcements increasing the number of targets for the insurgents far more quickly than the occupier can adapt to the changing battlefield. The insurgents in Iraq, as the British admit, were able in just three years to cope with their enemies’ technological superiority in a way the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland was unable to do in 30 years. The Iraq war and Israel’s wars with Hamas and Hezbollah show the limits of what military power can achieve, as well as vindicate diplomacy and conflict resolution. When it comes to tackling complex political and cultural conflicts, forging international and regional alliances around a legitimate objective is more important than sheer military capacity. That said, it would be dangerously naive to believe that the exercise of power and the capacity to intimidate are unnecessary. But the objectives of the use of force need to be linked to the recognition that in today’s asymmetric conflicts, victory is no longer necessarily achieved on the battlefield. Only better-informed foreign policies that can address the genuine anxieties of civilizations in crisis will yield more sustainable results.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International Center for Peace, is the author of “Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
