In the wake of the shocking invasion of southern Israel by Hamas militants on October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas. “We are fighting a cruel enemy, worse than ISIS,” Netanyahu proclaimed, comparing the attack by Hamas with the Islamic State, whose caliphate was destroyed by U.S., Iraqi, and Kurdish forces in 2017. Given that the horrific terror attack killed more than 1,400 Israelis (and other nationalities) and led to the kidnapping of around 240 others, the Israeli desire to crush Hamas is understandable. Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan compared the attack to the toppling of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon in 2001, declaring, “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Indeed, the attacks by Hamas on 10/7 killed more Jews in one day than any other event since the Holocaust, and on a per capita basis they were worse than the attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States in 2001.
Israeli leaders should hope the similarities stop there. The 9/11 attacks gave rise to the War on Terror, and most significantly, the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 by the United States and its various coalition partners. President George W. Bush vowed to defeat “every terrorist group of global reach,” a goal even more expansive than that espoused by Prime Minister Netanyahu in the conflict in Gaza.
The Wars of 9/11 began with an American invasion of Afghanistan in league with the Afghan United Front, the so-called Northern Alliance. The immediate goals were to force the Taliban from power and destroy al-Qaeda. Very little thought or resources were put into what happened after those goals were attained. In a meeting of his war cabinet in late September 2001, President Bush asked the assemblage, “So who’s going to run the country [Afghanistan]” in the wake of the invasion? No one in the room knew.[1]
The invasion indeed toppled the Taliban from power by the end of the year, and although the Taliban appeared defeated, the war did not end. An interim administration headed by Hamid Karzai took power as an Afghan loya jirga fashioned a new constitution for the country. Nongovernmental and international relief efforts were underfunded and uncoordinated. Lack of funding, insufficient volunteers, and inadequate facilities hampered the creation of a new Afghan National Army. Defeating the Taliban would also require the creation of robust local police forces and buy-in from the tribes, neither of which was achieved.
The period between 2002 and 2006 was the best opportunity to create a resilient Afghan state with enough security forces to hold its own against a resurgent Taliban. Due to a lack of focus, inadequate resources, and poor strategy, the United States and the Karzai administration squandered that opportunity. As a result, the Taliban reconstituted their forces and returned to the fight. As the insurgency gained momentum after 2006, the United States and its NATO allies increased their troop levels, but they could not overcome the weakness of the Kabul government, create adequate numbers of trained Afghan security forces, or disrupt the sanctuaries enjoyed by the Taliban and the Haqqani Network across the border in Pakistan.
Despite a surge of forces to Afghanistan during the first two years of the Obama administration and the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban remained undefeated. As Western forces departed the country, Afghan forces took the lead in security operations, but their numbers and competence proved insufficient to stem the Taliban tide. Negotiations went nowhere, as the Taliban realized they could seize by force what they could not gain at the bargaining table. The Taliban entry into Kabul in August 2021 merely put an exclamation point on a campaign already lost many years before.
As the Israeli Defense Forces execute their ground invasion of Gaza, the Israeli government must plan for what comes next or risk ultimate defeat as happened in Afghanistan. Failure to consider the political end state—one that leads to stability in Gaza as well as the West Bank—will likely lead to failure, even if the immediate military goal of destroying Hamas is achieved.
Israel has invaded Gaza twice, in 2009 and 2014, but quickly withdrew its ground forces once Israeli leaders calculated they had reestablished deterrence. This strategy—“mowing the grass” with periodic punitive strikes against Hamas—has now proven to be a failure. The new goal of destroying Hamas as a military force is an order of magnitude more difficult and will require both an extensive ground invasion in a densely populated urban environment and a lengthy stability operation to root out Hamas operatives and rehabilitate the area.
U.S. military advisor to South Vietnam John Paul Vann wrote about that earlier conflict, “Security may be ten percent of the problem, or it may be ninety percent, but whichever it is, it’s the first ten percent or the first ninety percent. Without security, nothing else we do will last.” There is little desire among Israelis to reoccupy Gaza, and the ill-fated occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 provides a cautionary tale in any case. So, the first question is who will provide security after military operations conclude? The next question is who will govern the Palestinians, and will the political solution provide enough hope to the residents of Gaza and the West Bank to preclude a repeat of October 7th?
The destruction of the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017 ended with both Raqqa and Mosul reduced to rubble and thousands of men, women, and children consigned to detention camps. For a better model the Israelis could examine the operations of Multi-National Force-Iraq during the Surge of 2007–08, in which a holistic civil-military strategy resulted in the destruction of the local al-Qaeda affiliate and the stabilization of Iraq, at least until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki used violence to suppress his political enemies in the wake of the Arab Spring. But the strategy used during the Surge required finding willing partners among the civilian population, which by chance the Awakening movement provided. Finding Palestinian groups willing to work with the Israelis to stabilize Gaza in the aftermath of a devastating ground invasion will be a tall order indeed, but it must be done, or Hamas 2.0 will rise from the ashes.
The lessons of the Wars of 9/11 are instructive, and the most important of these is the same one that the Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz emphasized two centuries ago in his book On War: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.” Israeli leaders should heed that advice before leaping into the unknown.
[1] George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 197.
