| Israeli War Plan Had No Exit
Strategy |
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| The Washington
Post |
| Saturday, October
21, 2006 |
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JERUSALEM --
Just two days after Israel launched a punishing
counterattack against Hezbollah this summer, Israeli
military and diplomatic officials were deeply split over
war strategy.
On July 14, as Israeli aircraft prepared to bomb south
Beirut, the research unit of Israel's military
intelligence branch presented a report to senior Israeli
officials that questioned the war plan's ability to
achieve the government's goals.
The analysis, according to senior Foreign Ministry
officials who read it, concluded that the heavy bombing
campaign and small ground offensive then underway would
show "diminishing returns" within days. It stated that
the plan would neither win the release of the two
Israeli soldiers in Hezbollah's hands nor reduce the
militia's rocket attacks on Israel to fewer than 100 a
day.
Those initial conclusions held true when the war ended
31 days later.
"The question we want to know to this day was why the
military chose an option that had no exit strategy,"
said a senior Foreign Ministry official who read the
report. "They never had one, as far as we could tell."
An examination of the first days of the war shows that
leaders of Israel's newly elected government launched a
broad military campaign without a clear strategy for how
it was to end. It also reveals that while Israeli
military officials anticipated an entrenched guerrilla
force, front-line officers were surprised by just how
well prepared Hezbollah was.
This account was drawn from interviews with Israeli
military commanders, senior political and diplomatic
officials and soldiers, and a visit to the site where
the war began. Several commissions are investigating how
Israel's political and military leadership managed the
war, and those conclusions could determine how long
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government remains in
office.
Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, the military's chief of
strategic planning, declined to comment directly on the
research unit's assessment. But he acknowledged that
"yes, you are right, that at one point we reached a
point of diminishing returns."
"But you never know when that crack will come," he said.
The Ambush
On July 12, two Israeli Humvees passed within yards of a
Hezbollah ambush point. It was a hollow carved in the
underbrush, just above the track used by Israeli
military patrols. The hidden Hezbollah camp was stocked
with food, water, radios, rifles, antitank missiles and
diagrams detailing the insignia and size of Israeli
military units. The Hezbollah fighters aimed and fired
at the Israeli convoy just after 9 a.m. along a remote
bend in the fence-lined road.
Lt. Col. Ishai Efroni, deputy commander of the Baram
Brigade, had for months seen donkeys carrying sacks on
the other side of the border, led by men who appeared to
be Lebanese farmers. "We thought it was fertilizer," he
said of the sacks. Later, he realized it was weapons and
equipment. "This is what you learn in guerrilla school,"
he said of the Hezbollah fighters. "You take your time."
Efroni noticed that the Hezbollah gunmen had grown
increasingly brazen walking the fence line in his sector
along the northwestern border, and on May 28 the
guerrillas fired a barrage of Katyusha rockets toward
Israel's coastal towns. "I got the feeling something had
changed," said Efroni, 41, who has spent most of his
career in the northern border area.
On July 12, the dull thump of explosions reached
Efroni's brigade headquarters as he reviewed morning
intelligence reports. Six other army posts reported
taking fire at the same time, coordinated attacks that
knocked out surveillance cameras.
Contact with the patrol was lost after the Hezbollah
team knocked out the trailing Humvee, killing the
soldiers inside. But it took 20 minutes to confirm that
Staff Sgts. Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26,
were missing from the first vehicle, a delay that gave
the gunmen a large lead as they fled through olive
orchards to the Lebanese border village of Aita al-Shaab.
Efroni sent a Merkava tank, an armored personnel carrier
and a helicopter in pursuit. But the most direct route
into the village was a dirt track lined with
explosives-filled trenches. Instead, Efroni ordered the
tank through a rocky canyon from the east. Tracking its
progress from the operations room, he watched with alarm
as it unexpectedly veered onto the road near a known
Hezbollah post.
The blast beneath the tank was enormous, killing the
four soldiers inside instantly. The fight to retrieve
the bodies lasted hours and killed the eighth Israeli
soldier of the day.
"All they wanted was some part of their bodies," Efroni
said, referring to the Hezbollah fighters. He recalled
that Israel had released hundreds of Palestinian,
Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in exchange for the
remains of three soldiers taken in 2000 and a kidnapped
civilian. "They know we go to great efforts to get our
people back."
An Evolving Response
At 9:45 on the morning of July 12, Olmert sat across
from Noam and Aviva Shalit, an unassuming couple who had
come to hear how Israel's leader intended to free their
son, captured by radical Palestinians outside the Gaza
Strip 2 1/2 weeks earlier.
There was a knock on Olmert's office door. His military
aide entered with a note.
The slip contained news of the ambush. "Hannibal," the
army code word for a captured soldier, had been passed
up the chain of command.
"I think you should read this, too," Olmert said as he
handed the note to Noam Shalit, according to his
communications director, Asaf Shariv, who watched events
unfold that morning.
The Hannibal code triggered instant aerial surveillance
and airstrikes inside Lebanon to limit Hezbollah's
ability to move the soldiers it had seized. "If we had
found them, we would have hit them, even if it meant
killing the soldiers," a senior Israeli official said.
Olmert ordered his government to assemble that evening
for an emergency meeting at military headquarters in Tel
Aviv.
Just before 6 p.m., Olmert arrived at the compound of
palms and grassy courtyards. For the next two hours, his
generals and intelligence chiefs presented him with a
plan to strike Lebanon's roads, bridges, international
airport and other infrastructure, especially in the
Shiite Muslim south that is Hezbollah's heartland. This
was followed by a government meeting, which went on
until midnight.
Several officials said there was little dissension among
ministers over the scope of the response. Within hours
it had become an air-and-sea blockade of Lebanon. But
Olmert, who was elected in March having never held a
security portfolio, expressed concern over what
Hezbollah intended to do in response.
"He wanted to know what would happen in the north," a
senior Israeli official who attended the meeting
recounted. "On that day, though, everyone was in favor
of war."
Scores of targets were hit in the first hours, including
many of Hezbollah's longer-range rocket launchers in a
single 34-minute period. But rockets launched by
Hezbollah soon began falling across northern Israel.
The conventional Israeli military plan for an attack on
southern Lebanon is called "Stones of Fire." The
doctrine has been revised over the years, but it still
relies on a ground invasion force of four army
divisions.
Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff, set that
plan aside. Instead, Halutz, the first air force general
to lead the military, emphasized air power. He hoped
aerial assaults would encourage Lebanon's Sunni Muslim
and Christian populations to turn against Hezbollah, a
radical Shiite movement that has an armed wing and a
vast social services network, and that operates as a
state within a state.
"We couldn't fight Lebanon as a country," said Nehushtan,
the military's head of strategic planning. "The only way
to stop them was to make them take the blame for their
attacks."
Given the expected rocket reprisals from Hezbollah, some
Israeli officials believed a large ground war was
inevitable and should begin sooner rather than later.
But Nehushtan, then a brigadier general, said "Stones of
Fire" had lost its relevance after Syria's military
withdrew from Lebanon last year. He said Hezbollah's
guerrilla tactics required a different approach.
According to Israeli intelligence estimates, Hezbollah
had invested $1.5 billion over the past six years
preparing for war, chiefly with material and logistical
help from Syria and Iran, whose Shiite government uses
the militia to project power in the Arab world. Weapons
had been stockpiled in tunnels, bunkers and private
homes, a nightmarish scenario for a conventional army in
the age of cable news.
Israeli military officials had watched much of the
preparation take place from ground posts and aerial
surveillance, and even knew which houses were used for
storing some of Hezbollah's rockets months before the
war began. But senior Israeli officers said the extent
of the tunnel networks, the size of the arsenal and some
of the more sophisticated weapons in it were not
anticipated.
The officers also said Israel's airstrikes on some
bunker systems and built-in short-range rocket sites
were less effective than planned. Also, the Lebanese did
not turn against Hezbollah as the Israelis had hoped.
"This was not the beginning," Nehushtan said of
Hezbollah's ambush. "This was the end of one process and
the beginning of another."
Support From Abroad
Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, was one of those
who initially supported the military assault on
Hezbollah. She was influenced by events earlier in Gaza,
when the soldier had been captured by radical
Palestinians. Some of her senior advisers had been
arguing that there were bigger issues involved -- that
Israel should strike hard at Hamas, one of the groups
involved in the soldier's capture, and attempt to focus
international attention on its radical supporters in
Syria and Iran. Livni had not fully agreed with them at
the time. But when Hezbollah struck, she readily
assented.
"I think July 12 was the day she accepted the thesis we
submitted weeks before that we were being threatened by
a radical axis," a senior Foreign Ministry official
said. "This was another in-your-face event that if we
allowed to go unpunished would lead to many more
abductions."
Livni's chief concern was avoiding the international
condemnation of a military strike that accompanied
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. She reached out to
the Bush administration, to European governments and to
moderate Arab nations, whose Sunni leaders publicly
criticized Hezbollah for the ambush and viewed Israel's
response as an opportunity to rid the region of a
menacing Iranian proxy.
The support she found, according to two senior
officials, was surprising given the international
criticism that accompanied past Israeli operations in
Lebanon. Some within the ministry interpreted the
support as encouragement to deepen the war.
"It took us more than a week to understand how the world
had changed," the senior Foreign Ministry official said.
Internal Dissent
The internal consensus, trumpeted in public by Israel's
leaders, crumbled with the military intelligence
assessment. A senior Foreign Ministry official said
Livni was briefed on the report at 2 p.m. July 14 and
immediately ordered her staff to begin devising a
diplomatic exit strategy.
Later that day in a meeting of the seven-member war
cabinet, she voted against bombing Hezbollah's urban
stronghold in south Beirut. She was concerned that the
plan would only bring an escalation in Hezbollah rocket
fire and not further the government's goals. Most of the
cabinet voted to continue the bombing, according to
Foreign Ministry officials, even though a number of
cabinet members were expressing angry surprise over the
size of Hezbollah's arsenal and tenacity on the ground.
In the days that followed, the cabinet, led by Olmert,
continued voting to expand the war as proposed by Halutz
and other proponents of the air campaign. While failing
to deplete Hezbollah's rocket fire, the Israeli
bombardment avoided heavy casualties for Israel,
casualties that a major ground invasion would have
brought.
Avi Dichter, Olmert's public security minister and a
member of the war cabinet who also opposed the bombing
of southern Beirut, said 10 days after the military
intelligence report was filed that "if there are
surprises, I think they are local surprises, not
strategic ones."
"You can do this in a very short time," Dichter said.
"But you are going to kill many more innocent civilians
and cause many more casualties among the troops. We have
no intention of doing either."
On Aug. 11, Israel finally went beyond the air campaign
and pushed thousands of troops across the border as the
debate over a U.N.-brokered cease-fire began. The goal
of the troops was to destroy Hezbollah's short-range
Katyusha rockets that the air force had been unable to
knock out.
Just three days later, the troops froze after Olmert's
cabinet accepted the cease-fire terms -- a period when
35 soldiers died, nearly a third of all Israeli troops
killed in the war. "We realized we had to do this from
the ground," Nehushtan said. "And it was left
incomplete." |
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