World View: Know your enemy, know yourself, One hundred battles, one hundred victories. This observation by Sun Tse, an ancient Chinese military strategist, is the epigraph for Thomas Ricks's just published book Fiasco, The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It echoes other prescient warnings this week about how to understand what is going on in Iraq, in Israel's war against Hizbullah in Lebanon and in the plans, reported by security services, to explode planes over US cities which British authorities thwarted on Thursday.
Senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, Ricks tells a story of how leaders of the US military occupation of Iraq failed to see a developing insurgency for what it was and so led their soldiers in such a way that the insurgency became inevitable. They could hardly have done a better job, by allowing the random arrest and imprisonment of swathes of Iraqi men in the most humiliating conditions. His book is a case study of a counter-insurgency war gone wrong.
Writing in the New York Times about a new counter-insurgency manual being prepared by the Pentagon, Richard Schultz and Andrea Dew, experts on the subject at Tufts University, say it has several shortcomings. First of all, they say, you must know your enemy. Wars can no longer be waged effectively by conventional combat forces employed by modern militaries, since in the 21st century they are dominated by irregular and unconventional ways of fighting. In Iraq those fighting the US forces include a complex mix of Sunni tribal militias, former regime members, foreign and domestic jihadists, Shia militias and criminal gangs. Each has different motivations and ways of fighting, so that tackling them requires specific customised strategies. This was where US policy failed, since it did not anticipate the several different ways in which each of these groups would respond to the occupation and tended to lump them all under the one insurgent or terrorist rubric.
They blame faulty intelligence for much of these failings and miscalculations. As an example of effective intelligence work they cite the British operation in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, when the IRA was penetrated. They quote a "former top-ranking IRA commander who later became an informer".
He told them that when he was imprisoned with higher-ranking IRA officials they lamented that "the boys can't move, can't operate, always have to be looking over their shoulders".
As a result Britain negotiated a relatively successful end to hostilities and contained most of the splinter groups which refused to go along with it.
They say the Israelis applied a similar model to the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, which contributed to the Palestinian Authority's gradual de-emphasis on terrorist acts in favour of politics - and even led Hamas to adhere to the ceasefire that held until the current crisis. This may exaggerate the role of intelligence, and underestimate the importance of politics, but it usefully underlines how necessary it is to understand your antagonists.
Another American academic, Robert Pape from the University of Chicago, has made a special exhaustive study of suicide bombers throughout the world since 1980 in a book published last year in the US, now to be issued in the UK.
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism finds most of them are secular; part of organised groups, not individuals; overwhelmingly motivated by nationalist demands for self-determination, not religious fundamentalism; and their actions are overwhelmingly directed against foreign occupations. It follows that withdrawal is the best way to avoid such atrocities. "The longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian peninsula," he said in an interview last year, "the greater the risk of the next 9/11, whether this is a suicide attack, a nuclear attack or a biological attack." Pape is no radical fellow-traveller, but a political supporter of George Bush who previously worked at the US air force's school of advanced air and space studies and in 1996 published his first book, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.
His continuing project on suicide terrorism is part-funded by the Pentagon. This week he briefed FBI executives on his findings. Writing in the New York Times and Observer about the war in Lebanon, he says: "Israel has finally conceded that air power alone will not defeat Hizbullah. 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 they misunderstand the nature of the enemy."
Hizbullah is basically a broad movement which evolved in reaction to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, both politically and militarily. Pape was shocked to find that of the 41 suicide attacks on American, French and Israeli targets from 1982-86 only eight were Islamic fundamentalists, and 27 from left-wing political groups. The movement is so deeply embedded in Lebanese society that the Israeli land offensive has little chance of destroying it, but will probably help it recruit. Unless Israel accepts a ceasefire and calls off its offensive "there are likely to be many, many dead Israelis in the coming weeks - and a much stronger Hizbullah".
Part of the comprehension problem is rhetorical. US and Israeli rhetoric routinely uses the term "terrorist" to describe their enemies in Iraq and Lebanon, rather than insurgents, resistance fighters or guerrillas. It is wrong to conflate terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Whereas guerrilla fighters reconfigure the confrontation between combatants and non-combatants by basing themselves in civilian society - fighting where they live - terrorists attack civilians indiscriminately. Surprise is the key element of guerrilla warfare and the ambush its classic tactic, as the Israelis are discovering in south Lebanon.
If Pape is right Bush's talk of Islamic fascism and Blair's of an arc of extremism are more likely to stoke conflict than abate it. They should both heed Ovid's advice as well as Sun Tse's: "He himself teaches what I should do; it is right to be taught by the enemy".
It was a wiser Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who said you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.