WASHINGTON Ñ The United States is questioning Israel's
military capability in wake of what some analysts term the
failed offensive against Palestinian insurgents in the West Bank.
The analysts, who include U.S. government consultants, asserted that
Israel's military was unprepared for the intensity of Palestinian
resistance. They said the advance of Israeli troops in West Bank cities was
slow in contrast to the lightning capture of the area in the 1967.
The result appears to be a bloody stalemate that is leading an
increasing number of U.S. officials to conclude that the best
solution is the deployment of a U.S.-led
international peacekeeping force, Middle East Newsline reported. The officials said even President George
Bush is slowly coming to that realization.
"Civilian casualties and collateral are relatively high, IDF [Israeli
Defense Forces] discipline has often been poor and trigger happy, and
contact between the IDF and ordinary Palestinians has been alienating,"
Anthony Cordesman, a former senior Pentagon official and now senior fellow
at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said
in an analysis. "No one seems cowed or deterred."
Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week,
that the Israeli military appears to be "a little bit stretched at the
present given the circumstances in the Middle East." Krepinevich said the
Israelis are focusing on their urban warfare capabilities, a move that he
recommended the United States to follow.
Senior officials and military commanders have not publicly commented on
the Israeli operation in the West Bank. Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S.
Central Command, which covers most of the Middle East, said his staff has
not studied the Israeli military campaign against the PA.
"My people, my staff, and I have not done the study on the approach
being used by Israel in terms of this current ongoing operation," Franks
told a briefing for foreign reporters last week. "I have pretty good
familiarity with what's going on in Operation Enduring Freedom, but I don't
have the same degree of familiarity with the approach being taken inside
Israel, and so I just can't comment on it."
But analysts interviewed by the U.S. media agreed that the Israeli
operation ranged from merely ineffective to outright failure. They said Bush
gave the Israelis a week until he assessed that the military would be stuck
in a long campaign.
"I think Bush got it right. Seven, eight days, hit them hard, you cannot
sustain these kind of suicide bombings," Fareek Zakaria, a leading Middle
East analyst and writer at Newsweek, said. "But now it is at a point where
Israel is in deep danger of creating more problems than its solving."
But some analysts said the Israeli military operation has been
underestimated. Col. Nitsan Alon, a visiting fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, said in a report that the Israeli military
made inroads in the war against the Palestinian insurgency.
"The IDF operations have succeeded in inflicting fairly serious direct
damage to terrorist infrastructure," Alon said.
"On the level of material,
large amounts of weapons and ammunition were captured, including: dozens of
explosive devices; several ready-to-use suicide explosive devices and
electronic devices for detonating them; over a dozen workshops for the
manufacture of explosives; several thousand rifles and hand-held guns,
including hundreds of sniper rifles, dozens of telescopic sights, and
night-vision equipment; dozens of antitank rocket-propelled-grenade
launchers; several mortars; and dozens of heavy machine guns."
