Questioning strategic logic: US military support to Israel…Dr Muhammad Ali Ehsan
Strategic logic comes from strategic minds, and at the national level all strategies are backed by strategic logic. These logics explain why a given strategy is most suitable to further national and state interests. Strategic logic is actually the intellectual foundation on which a given national strategy rests. The practitioners of statecraft, the heads of governments and states and their team of experts would not give a go-ahead for operationalising a strategy unless they are convinced about the veracity of strategic logic that backs a strategy. In the public domain what comes out and dominates is not the strategic logic which creates the strategy but the action plan which implements it.
Israel’s security will be ensured at all cost. This is the strategic logic of American strategy of providing unlimited military and security assistance to Israel. So much is being spoken, written, read and shown about the action plan of the strategy — bombing of Gaza and the death of innocent Palestinians. But so little is being said and written about the strategic logic of America’s unlimited military and security assistance to Israel. Is the logic based on the right assumptions? If the US doesn’t enhance Israel’s capability and capacity to fight war what would become of Israel? It will stand capitulated. So, at the strategic level, we will do a world of good to all the minds that want to seek an end to this war to focus more on its cause and not the symptoms — the US strategic logic and not Israel’s action plan of the war.
The end that any strategy seeks is driven by national interests. Defending Israel as a nation state and its territorial integrity under a joint security posture is an important US national interest. Without a territorial base no state can defend its national power or its people. Terrorist organisations are themselves a big example of this reality. They resort to terrorism because what happens in response as a punishment doesn’t happen to their state but the safe havens where they live — for instance, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Kurds are also a living example of this historical reality. Jews were also a big example until they had a state to themselves. The strategic logic of the US strategy doesn’t permit it to allow Jews to ever again become homeless and stateless. Any solution to the Palestinian problem stems from understanding this logic.
The biggest threat that most of the European countries believe to face today is terrorism, with jihadist terrorism being its most significant variant. The developed world, the core of the world, feels threatened from extremist ideologies and the variant world views emanating from the unstable states in the gap. Considering that all strategies are long term, for the US to give up on the strategic logic of standing up to Israel’s security is similar to giving up on achieving the ideological control of the entire world. Ideological control not in the sense of Capitalist, Communist, Marxist or Islamist control but in the context of creating more stable countries through promotion of rule of law and democracy.
We have been brought up reading that defeat is a mind’s construct and there is no such thing as physical defeat, and as long as you retain the will to fight you are never defeated. Innovation in military technology has turned this thesis upside down. The standoff precision guided weapons keep the aggressor in a comfort zone and out of range of the defensive fire from the adversary. So, the enemy’s military power is degraded and destroyed, thus decreasing its ability to fight. Employed against terrorist organisations, these weapons and the damage they cause decrease the possibility of terrorist attacks in future. Twenty first century has seen many deaths in the war fought against terror. One can question the means employed by the developed world to fight this war and achieve the end, but global terrorism has been defeated to a large extent.
The terrorist thesis is a US and European thesis that has a gap. It fails to define and condemn state terrorism. The anti-thesis from the gap countries is that terrorists always use safe havens in weak and failed states. Targeting terrorists or the will of the terrorists is not enough, the conditions and the environment that produce terrorism must also be understood. Why not shape the right environment to prevent the destabilised geographic spaces from producing terrorism? Not in how France armed the forces of its former colonies in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad, but by the great powers stopping from creating pre-revolutionary conditions, executing failed state building experiments, building false pre-interventionist narratives and giving unreasonable post interventionist excuses. Imposing destruction by fighting war on terror and later reverting to post-war reconstruction and development. There is no strategic logic for a common man to find in it, as these are not logics but strategies of blunders committed by the great powers.
In the ‘means justify the end’ or ‘end justifies the means’ debate, a strategist must always be conscious that in power politics and in international relations, end generally justifies the means. But since strategy is a long-term business, one must always remember that the ‘means chosen’ always affect the end. Which means the end goal perceived may not be the end objective achieved. Creation of a stable Afghanistan was an end goal but achieving this end remained an illusion — for 20 years, the means employed to achieve this end gave nothing but embarrassment and failure to the US.
If there is a strategic logic of the unlimited US military and security assistance to Israel then the world needs to question this strategic logic. Sit down to thin-slice Israel’s insecurities so that the US logic of this military and security support to Israel may gradually end. Israeli insecurities stem from the insecurities of the people of Palestine and that is why whenever this mayhem is over the world must sit down to implement the two-state solution.
Lastly, in Pakistan the Mullahs Convention on Palestine had Mullahs and few journalists giving their strategic logic on an issue that they only see from a religious lens. I hope their words fall on the deaf ears of policymakers and IR students in Pakistan. There is no sin and no crime in supporting the two-state solution in Palestine. What is a greater sin is that media in Pakistan failed to question and challenge the poor construct of their Palestinian thesis which was devoid of any objectivity. One benchmark of determining when the age of reason has dawned on Pakistan is to see where the Mullahs are, sent back to where they belong — mosques.
Courtesy The Express Tribune, December 10th, 2023.