HOW
HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL PART 1: Winning the
intelligence war By Alastair
Crooke and Mark Perry
Introduction Writing five
years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, US
military expert Anthony Cordesman published an
account of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.
"Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War"
created enormous interest in the Pentagon, where
it was studied by planners for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and passed hand-to-hand among military
experts in Washington. Cordesman made no secret of
his modest conclusions, rightly
recognizing that his study was
not only "preliminary", but that it took no
account of how Hezbollah fought the conflict or
judged its results.
"This analysis is ...
limited," Cordesman noted, "by the fact that no
matching visit was made to Lebanon and to the
Hezbollah." Incomplete though it might have been,
Cordesman's study accomplished two goals: it
provided a foundation for understanding the war
from the Israeli point of view and it raised
questions on how and how well Hezbollah fought.
Nearly two months after the end of the
Israeli-Hezbollah war, it is now possible to fill
in some of the lines left blank by Cordesman.
The portrait that we give here is also
limited. Hezbollah officials will neither speak
publicly nor for the record on how they fought the
conflict, will not detail their deployments, and
will not discuss their future strategy. Even so,
the lessons of the war from Hezbollah's
perspective are now beginning to emerge and some
small lessons are being derived from it by US and
Israeli strategic planners. Our conclusions are
based on on-the-ground assessments conducted
during the course of the war, on interviews with
Israeli, American and European military experts,
on emerging understandings of the conflict in
discussions with military strategists, and on a
network of senior officials in the Middle East who
were intensively interested in the war's outcome
and with whom we have spoken.
Our overall
conclusion contradicts the current point of view
being retailed by some White House and Israeli
officials: that Israel's offensive in Lebanon
significantly damaged Hezbollah's ability to wage
war, that Israel successfully degraded Hezbollah's
military ability to prevail in a future conflict,
and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), once
deployed in large numbers in southern Lebanon,
were able to prevail over their foes and dictate a
settlement favorable to the Israeli political
establishment.
Just the opposite is true.
From the onset of the conflict to its last
operations, Hezbollah commanders successfully
penetrated Israel's strategic and tactical
decision-making cycle across a spectrum of
intelligence, military and political operations,
with the result that Hezbollah scored a decisive
and complete victory in its war with Israel.
The intelligence war In the wake
of the conflict, Hezbollah general secretary
Hassan Nasrallah admitted that Israel's military
response to the abduction of two of its soldiers
and the killing of eight others at 9:04 on the
morning of July 12 came as a surprise to the
Hezbollah leadership.
Nasrallah's comment
ended press reports that Hezbollah set out
purposely to provoke a war with Israel and that
the abductions had been part of a plan approved by
Hezbollah and Iran. While Hezbollah had made it
clear over a period of years that it intended to
abduct Israeli soldiers, there was good reason to
suppose that it would not do so in the middle of
the summer months - when large numbers of affluent
Shi'ite families from the diaspora would be
visiting Lebanon (and spending their money in the
Shi'ite community), and when Gulf Arabs were
expected to arrive in large numbers in the
country.
Nor is it the case, as was
initially reported, that Hezbollah coordinated its
activities with Hamas. Hamas was taken by surprise
by the abductions and, while the Hamas leadership
defended Hezbollah actions, in hindsight it is
easy to see why they might not have been pleased
by them: over the course of the conflict Israel
launched multiple military operations against
Hamas in Gaza, killing dozens of fighters and
scores of civilians. The offensive went largely
unnoticed in the West, thereby resuscitating the
adage that "when the Middle East burns, the
Palestinians are forgotten".
In truth, the
abduction of the two Israeli soldiers and the
killing of eight others took the Hezbollah
leadership by surprise and was effected only
because Hezbollah units on the Israeli border had
standing orders to exploit Israeli military
weaknesses. Nasrallah had himself long signaled
Hezbollah's intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers,
after former prime minister Ariel Sharon reneged
on fulfilling his agreement to release all
Hezbollah prisoners - three in all - during the
last Hezbollah-Israeli prisoner exchange.
The abductions were, in fact, all too
easy: Israeli soldiers near the border apparently
violated standing operational procedures, left
their vehicles in sight of Hezbollah emplacements,
and did so while out of contact with
higher-echelon commanders and while out of sight
of covering fire.
We note that while the
Western media consistently misreported the events
on the Israeli-Lebanon border, Israel's Ha'aretz
newspaper substantially confirmed this account: "A
force of tanks and armored personnel carriers was
immediately sent into Lebanon in hot pursuit. It
was during this pursuit, at about 11am ... [a]
Merkava tank drove over a powerful bomb,
containing an estimated 200 to 300 kilograms of
explosives, about 70 meters north of the border
fence. The tank was almost completely destroyed,
and all four crew members were killed instantly.
Over the next several hours, IDF soldiers waged a
fierce fight against Hezbollah gunmen ... During
the course of this battle, at about 3pm, another
soldier was killed and two were lightly wounded."
The abductions marked the beginning of a
series of IDF blunders that were compounded by
commanders who acted outside of their normal
border procedures. Members of the patrol were on
the last days of their deployment in the north and
their guard was down. Nor is it the case that
Hezbollah fighters killed the eight Israelis
during their abduction of the two. The eight died
when an IDF border commander, apparently
embarrassed by his abrogation of standing
procedures, ordered armored vehicles to pursue the
kidnappers. The two armored vehicles ran into a
network of Hezbollah anti-tank mines and were
destroyed. The eight IDF soldiers died during this
operation or as a result of combat actions that
immediately followed it.
That an IDF unit
could wander so close to the border without being
covered by fire and could leave itself open to a
Hezbollah attack has led Israeli officers to
question whether the unit was acting outside the
chain of command. An internal commission of
inquiry was apparently convened by senior IDF
commanders in the immediate aftermath of the
incident to determine the facts in the matter and
to review IDF procedures governing units acting
along Israel's northern border. The results of
that commission's findings have not yet been
reported.
Despite being surprised by the
Israeli response, Hezbollah fighters in southern
Lebanon were placed on full alert within minutes
of the kidnappings and arsenal commanders were
alerted by their superiors. Hezbollah's robust and
hardened defenses were the result of six years of
diligent work, beginning with the Israeli
withdrawal from the region in 2000. Many of the
command bunkers designed and built by Hezbollah
engineers were fortified, and a few were even
air-conditioned.
The digging of the
arsenals over the previous years had been
accompanied by a program of deception, with some
bunkers being constructed in the open and often
under the eyes of Israeli drone vehicles or under
the observation of Lebanese citizens with close
ties to the Israelis. With few exceptions, these
bunkers were decoys. The building of other bunkers
went forward in areas kept hidden from the
Lebanese population. The most important command
bunkers and weapons-arsenal bunkers were dug
deeply into Lebanon's rocky hills - to a depth of
40 meters. Nearly 600 separate ammunition and
weapons bunkers were strategically placed in the
region south of the Litani.
For security
reasons, no single commander knew the location of
each bunker and each distinct Hezbollah militia
unit was assigned access to three bunkers only - a
primary munitions bunker and two reserve bunkers,
in case the primary bunker was destroyed. Separate
primary and backup marshaling points were also
designated for distinct combat units, which were
tasked to arm and fight within specific combat
areas. The security protocols for the marshaling
of troops was diligently maintained. No single
Hezbollah member had knowledge of the militia's
entire bunker structure.
Hezbollah's
primary arsenals and marshaling points were
targeted by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) in the
first 72 hours of the war. Israel's commanders had
identified these bunkers through a mix of
intelligence reports - signals intercepts from
Hezbollah communications, satellite-reconnaissance
photos gleaned from cooperative arrangements with
the US military, photos analyzed as a result of
IAF overflights of the region, photos from drone
aircraft deployed over southern Lebanon and, most
important, a network of trusted human-intelligence
sources recruited by Israeli intelligence officers
living in southern Lebanon, including a large
number of foreign (non-Lebanese) nationals
registered as guest workers in the country.
The initial attack on Hezbollah's
marshaling points and major bunker complexes,
which took place in the first 72 hours of the war,
failed. On July 15, the IAF targeted Hezbollah's
leadership in Beirut. This attack also failed. At
no point during the war was any major Hezbollah
political figure killed, despite Israel's constant
insistence that the organization's senior
leadership had suffered losses.
According
to one US official who observed the war closely,
the IAF's air offensive degraded "perhaps only 7%"
of the total military resource assets available to
Hezbollah's fighters in the first three days of
fighting and added that, in his opinion, Israeli
air attacks on the Hezbollah leadership were
"absolutely futile".
Reports that the
Hezbollah senior leadership had taken refuge in
the Iranian Embassy in Beirut (untouched during
Israel's aerial offensive) are not true, though it
is not known precisely where the Hezbollah
leadership did take shelter. "Not even I knew
where I was," Hezbollah leader Nasrallah told one
of his associates. Even with all of this, it is
not the case that the Israeli military's plans to
destroy Lebanon's infrastructure resulted from the
IAF's inability to degrade Hezbollah's military
capacity in the war's first days.
The
Israeli military's plans called for an early and
sustained bombardment of Lebanon's major highways
and ports in addition to its plans to destroy
Hezbollah military and political assets. The
Israeli government made no secret of its intent -
to undercut Hezbollah's support in the Christian,
Sunni and Druze communities. That idea, to punish
Lebanon for harboring Hezbollah and so turn the
people against the militia, had been a part of
Israel's plan since the Israeli withdrawal from
southern Lebanon in 2000.
While IDF
officials confidently and publicly announced
success in their offensive, their commanders
recommended that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
approve increased air sorties against potential
Hezbollah caches in marginal target areas at the
end of the first week of the bombing. Olmert
approved these attacks, while knowing that in
making such a request his senior officers had all
but admitted that their initial assessment of the
damage inflicted on Hezbollah was exaggerated.
Qana was the result of Olmert's agreement
to "stretch the target envelope". One US military
expert who monitored the conflict closely had this
to say of the Qana bombing: "This isn't really
that complicated. After the failure of the initial
campaign, IAF planning officers went back through
their target folders to see if they had missed
anything. When they decided they hadn't, someone
probably stood up and went into the other room and
returned with a set of new envelopes of targets in
densely populated areas and said, 'Hey, what about
these target envelopes?' And so they did it." That
is, the bombing of targets "close in" to southern
Lebanon population areas was the result of
Israel's failure in the war - not its success.
The "target stretching" escalated
throughout the conflict; frustrated by their
inability to identify and destroy major Hezbollah
military assets, the IAF began targeting schools,
community centers and mosques - under the belief
that their inability to identify and interdict
Hezbollah bunkers signaled Hezbollah's willingness
to hide their major assets inside civilian
centers.
IAF officers also argued that
Hezbollah's ability to continue its rocket attacks
on Israel meant that its militia was being
continually resupplied. Qana is a crossroads, the
junction of five separate highways, and in the
heart of Hezbollah territory. Interdicting the
Qana supply chain provided the IAF the opportunity
to prove that Hezbollah was only capable of
sustaining its operations because of its
supply-dependence on the crossroads town. In
truth, however, IDF senior commanders knew that
expanding the number of targets in Lebanon would
probably do little to degrade Hezbollah
capabilities because Hezbollah was maintaining its
attacks without any hope of resupply and because
of its dependence on weapons and rocket caches
that had been hardened against Israeli
interdiction. In the wake of Qana, in which 28
civilians were killed, Israel agreed to a 48-hour
ceasefire.
The ceasefire provided the
first evidence that Hezbollah had successfully
withstood Israeli air attacks and was planning a
sustained and prolonged defense of southern
Lebanon. Hezbollah commanders honored the
ceasefire at the orders of their political
superiors. With one or two lone exceptions, no
rockets were fired into Israel during this
ceasefire period. While Hezbollah's capacity
actually to "cease fire" was otherwise ignored by
Israeli and Western intelligence experts,
Hezbollah's ability to enforce discipline on its
field commanders came as a distinctly unwanted
shock to IDF senior commanders, who concluded that
Hezbollah's communication's capabilities had
survived Israel's air onslaught, that the
Hezbollah leadership was in touch with its
commanders on the ground, and that those
commanders were able to maintain a robust
communications network despite Israeli
interdiction.
More simply, Hezbollah's
ability to cease fire meant that Israel's goal of
separating Hezbollah fighters from their command
structure (considered a necessity by modern armies
in waging a war on a sophisticated technological
battlefield) had failed. The IDF's senior
commanders could only come to one conclusion - its
prewar information on Hezbollah military assets
was, at best, woefully incomplete or, at worst,
fatally wrong.
In fact, over a period of
two years, Hezbollah intelligence officials had
built a significant signals-counterintelligence
capability. Throughout the war, Hezbollah
commanders were able to predict when and where
Israeli fighters and bombers would strike.
Moreover, Hezbollah had identified key Israeli
human-intelligence assets in Lebanon. One month
prior to the abduction of the IDF border patrol
and the subsequent Israeli attack, Lebanese
intelligence officials had broken up an Israeli
spy ring operating inside the country.
Lebanese (and Hezbollah) intelligence
officials arrested at least 16 Israeli spies in
Lebanon, though they failed to find or arrest the
leader of the ring. Moreover, during two years
from 2004 until the eve of the war, Hezbollah had
successfully "turned" a number of Lebanese
civilian assets reporting on the location of major
Hezbollah military caches in southern Lebanon to
Israeli intelligence officers. In some small
number of crucially important cases, Hezbollah
senior intelligence officials were able to "feed
back" false information on their militia's most
important emplacements to Israel - with the result
that Israel target folders identified key
emplacements that did not, in fact, exist.
Finally, Hezbollah's ability to intercept
and "read" Israeli actions had a decisive impact
on the coming ground war. Hezbollah intelligence
officials had perfected their signals-intelligence
capability to such an extent that they could
intercept Israeli ground communications between
Israeli military commanders. Israel, which
depended on a highly sophisticated set of
"frequency hopping" techniques that would allow
their commanders to communicate with one another,
underestimated Hezbollah's ability to master
counter-signals technology. The result would have
a crucial impact on Israel's calculation that
surprise alone would provide the margin of victory
for its soldiers.
It now is clear that the
Israeli political establishment was shocked by the
failure of its forces to accomplish its first
military goals in the war - including the
degradation of a significant number of Hezbollah
arsenals and the destruction of Hezbollah's
command capabilities.
But the Israeli
political establishment had done almost nothing to
prepare for the worst: the first meeting of the
Israeli security cabinet in the wake of the July
12 abduction lasted only three hours. And while
Olmert and his security cabinet demanded minute
details of the IDF's plan for the first three days
of the war, they failed to articulate clear
political goals in the aftermath of the conflict
or sketch out a political exit strategy should the
offensive fail.
Olmert and the security
cabinet violated the first principle of war - they
showed contempt for their enemy. In many respects,
Olmert and his cabinet were captives of an
unquestioned belief in the efficacy of Israeli
deterrence. Like the Israeli public, they viewed
any questioning of IDF capabilities as sacrilege.
The Israeli intelligence failure during
the conflict was catastrophic. It meant that,
after the failure of Israel's air campaign to
degrade Hezbollah assets significantly in the
first 72 hours of the war, Israel's chance of
winning a decisive victory against Hezbollah was
increasingly, and highly, unlikely.
"Israel lost the war in the first three
days," one US military expert said. "If you have
that kind of surprise and you have that kind of
firepower, you had better win. Otherwise, you're
in for the long haul."
IDF senior officers
concluded that, given the failure of the air
campaign, they had only one choice - to invade
Lebanon with ground troops in the hopes of
destroying Hezbollah's will to prevail.
Next: Winning the ground war
Alastair Crooke and Mark
Perry are the co-directors of Conflicts
Forum, a London-based group dedicated
to providing an opening to political Islam. Crooke
is the former Middle East adviser to European
Union High Representative Javier Solana and served
as a staff member of the Mitchell Commission
investigating the causes of the second intifada.
Perry is a Washington, DC-based political
consultant, author of six books on US history, and
a former personal adviser to the late Yasser
Arafat.
(Research for this article was
provided by Madeleine Perry.)
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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questions on how and how well Hezbollah fought.
Nearly two months after the end of the
Israeli-Hezbollah war, it is now possible to fill
in some of the lines left blank by Cordesman.
