General Petraeus Is Still Preaching the COIN Gospel. The IDF Should Politely Decline.

Despite Petraeus’s good intentions, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) should politely decline his recommendations.

General David Petraeus is still preaching the COIN gospel. Only now he’s arguing that COIN—which saw limited success in Iraq and failed miserably in Afghanistan—should now be implemented in Gaza.

Despite Petraeus’s good intentions, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) should politely decline his recommendations. Instead, they should finish their Rafah operation and continue grinding away at Hamas until they are no longer the governing power.

After nine months of grueling urban warfare, General Petraeus has some unsolicited advice for the IDF: learn from our mistakes. Writing last month in Foreign Affairs, he warned about the kind of “fateful strategic errors” that resulted in “bloody, costly, and humbling” experiences for the United States:

Today, Israel is making many of those same errors, including some of the most glaring mistakes that the United States made in the early years of the Iraq war. As the United States did in Iraq in 2003, Israel began its war without a plan to create a governing structure, in its case to replace Hamas, and no clear blueprint has emerged after months of fighting.

According to Petraeus, the IDF should pivot to population-centric counterinsurgency. He and his coauthors, Meghan L. O’Sullivan and Richard Fontaine, argue that the IDF needs to clear Hamas, hold the territory so Hamas no longer returns, and rebuild Gaza with Palestinian partners from the region.

There are numerous problems with this argument, chief among them that the IDF is not fighting an insurgency. Instead, they’re fighting a terror state. Hamas is the state. They are not insurgents. While Hamas may employ guerrilla warfare tactics, so did the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The IDF would be fighting an insurgency if Hamas were trying to topple a government in Gaza. But that’s not what’s going on here. Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization. However, they do not solely operate clandestinely because they are the de facto state in Gaza. They field a terror army consisting of over twenty light infantry battalions. Similarly, in 2014, the United States and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) fought an Islamic State terror army in Mosul. Neither the ISF nor the United States conducted COIN in that gruesome fight. Why? Because the Islamic State was the government in Mosul, so a COIN approach would be inappropriate.

Like Hamas, the Taliban is a terrorist organization. However, since the Taliban control the state in Afghanistan, they are now fielding a massive terror army. In essence, once terrorist organizations control the state, they start acting like a state, so they must be fought like a state.

Still, let’s play along with Petraeus and pretend that the IDF was fighting an insurgency in Gaza. Would population-centric counterinsurgency really be the IDF’s ticket out? COIN is messy. It requires time to build rapport with host nation security forces. That work is done at the lowest levels of the military. It’s built on the backs of privates and corporals partnering with indigenous forces. It takes time. A long time.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, that trust was built through thousands of cups of chai, gruesome dismounted combat patrols, and the shared trauma of killing each other’s enemies. Which group inside of Gaza could partner with the IDF like this and still survive?

While the IDF and Palestinian Authority have a working relationship, the PA is a weak, feeble group run by Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier who is in the eighteenth year of his four-year term as the PA’s leader. The PA is still incapable of securing the West Bank. How would they secure Gaza working shoulder-by-shoulder with the IDF?

Moreover, while there were always pockets of anti-Americanism and hostility to the West throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, many Iraqis and Afghans worked side-by-side with American forces. The United States Marine Corps had Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi in Iraq. In southern Afghanistan, American troops partnered with General Abdul Raziq. In contrast, Gazans are reared in antisemitism and, by and large, support Hamas and the October 7th attacks.

Again, let’s play along, pretending that somehow the IDF could find a partner force. How long would it take to clear, hold, and build? A year? Maybe two? Wouldn’t the international community claim that Israel is occupying Gaza? Even Petraeus admits that this would require an Israeli occupation of Gaza.

As a result, a short-term period of Israeli authority over Gaza’s security and governance may be unavoidable—and Israelis and Americans should acknowledge this reality, however distasteful. No one wants an Israeli occupation. But for the time being, the only possible alternatives are even worse.

Would the Biden administration support such a strategy two months before a pivotal election? Would Israelis support such a risky gambit after the last nine months? How would the IDF support such a long-term strategy

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