JERUSALEM, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon built his massive concrete-and-barbed-wire barrier to separate Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza from Israel’s heartland and prevent suicide bombers from those areas wreaking havoc on civilian targets.
Most armchair strategists and pundits did not think it could work. Liberals were conditioned to worry about the "underlying causes" of conflicts rather than the nuts and bolts of actually winning them. And many conservatives still loved the romantic idea of bold, thrilling offensive armored and blitzkrieg strikes, such as those that won the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars for the United States.
Military planners -- and, accordingly defense contractors, too -- in the United States and Europe did not take passive defenses seriously. When the United States led coalition forces into Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Pentagon and White House planners did not take the concept of border security seriously at all. No thought was given to it.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, publicly dismissed U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's prescient warning that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be needed to maintain security in Iraq after Saddam's fall. Yet today, 160,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq along with 220,000 Iraqi army and security forces of doubtful reliability. Together, they are finally making strides in cutting down the levels of violence in the Sunni Muslim insurgency in southern Iraq. However, Iraq's borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran remain largely open, despite occasional U.S. large-scale military operations to interdict them.
It was Sharon, always ready to break or outrage liberal taboos and conventional wisdoms, who put security fences and defensible borders back on the global strategic map. Israeli right-wingers and liberal supporters of the Palestinians alike derided his concept of a security fence or barrier to cut the Gaza Strip and the Palestine Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank off from Israel in order to stop the regular attacks of Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The fence appeared to armchair strategists as a defensive move, not manly, an admission of defeat and a departure from Israel's traditionally aggressive, reactive strategy against terror attacks. But it worked.
Successful suicide bomber attacks fell from dozens a year to single figures. Hundreds of civilian lives per year were saved. And suddenly serious border defenses were back in fashion.
The Indian army was so impressed by the success of the Israeli fence that it built a similar, far longer one, along the Line of Control separating Indian-controlled Jammu & Kashmir from the much smaller part of the state held by Pakistan since 1947-1948. Soon the Indians were reporting that Islamist guerrilla incursions across the LoC had fallen by 80 percent. They followed up the Kashmir fence with an even longer one to surround the entire Muslim nation of Bangladesh. Bangladesh like India is a democracy, but it is also a nation where Islamist extremists have been much more active since they were driven out of Afghanistan by U.S. forces and their allies in late 2001.
But it was not only the Indians who took the success of Sharon's barrier, or fence, to heart: In the Middle East, the Saudis did, too.
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(Next: The lessons the Saudis learned)
