Israel continues to reel from a massive and well-coordinated Hamas terror attack on Saturday. Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel, while hundreds of Hamas terrorists penetrated the Gaza Strip’s heavily fortified border with Israel. Some used bulldozers to break down fences. Others paraglided into Israel. Terrorists may also have tunneled into Israel. The terrorists rampaged through nearby communities, grabbing hostages and going door-to-door, executing entire families.
The attack represents Israel’s greatest intelligence failure in 50 years. Just as the intelligence failure surrounding the 1973 Yom Kippur War brought down Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir the following year, the current crisis puts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s career on life support. While Israel is no stranger to terrorism, the current attacks will scar Israeli society as September 11, 2001, branded itself on American society and the November 2008 Mumbai attacks imprinted themselves onto India’s consciousness.
While India is not a party to the Israel-Palestine dispute, the attack will nevertheless affect India. Terrorists crave headlines and they seek to outdo previous attacks to maintain a shock factor. The 1985 Air India 182 bombing and the Pan Am 107 downing over Lockerbie set a new standard for terrorist bombings, at least until Al Qaeda turned passenger jets into flying bombings over New York and Washington in 2001. Taking down a single aircraft might have been horrific, but by comparison, it seemed a quaint tactic from the distant past.
Terrorists then tried to take the tactic to a new level. In January 2005, Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwait-born Pakistani involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, launched Operation Bojinka, an elaborate plot to bring down 12 airlines almost simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean. Had the terror plot succeeded, it would have surpassed the death toll of the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
The terror threat from the Gaza Strip was well-known. In theory, alongside the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas, the Gaza border is one of the most heavily monitored locations. Israel collects extensive signals intelligence, penetrates Gaza with human intelligence, and watches the area with satellites; yet, Hamas has managed to take Israel completely by surprise. So too did Iran. Videos released of Hamas grabbing Israeli hostages recorded Persian language commands suggesting the presence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operatives.
India should be on high alert, not from Iran and certainly not from Palestinian groups but rather from the many groups Pakistan nurtures, cultivates, and sponsors. Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan, various Khalistan extremists, and the Islamic State Khorasan will each seek the limelight by upstaging the Hamas attack in audacity and scale. The India-Pakistan border and Line of Control is more than 3,300 km long, more than 500 times the length of Israel’s border with Gaza.
An attempt at a massive, multipronged cross border attack in Kashmir or Punjab is almost inevitable, as is another Mumbai-style attack on other cities, perhaps simultaneously. Just as Israel faces simultaneous attacks from ground, sea, and air, might India face missiles, suicide operatives, and drone swarms? What might Pakistan-supported terrorists do to kill more than 1,000 Indians or take hundreds hostage? Rather than focus counter-terrorism on stopping the last attack, it is essential to tackle something new and completely different. This is where Israel failed.
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and has no desire to return to the densely packed territory or police its inhabitants; that was the job in theory of the Palestinian Authority, even though Hamas purged Palestinian Authority forces from the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Israel, however, also could not tolerate a terror safe haven.
Israeli generals and strategists therefore began to talk about “mowing the grass,” the idea that every so often, Israel would launch a counter-terror operation to take out Hamas weapons factories and disrupt terror infrastructure.
The mass attack on Israel suggests that strategy has failed. Rather than mow the grass, Israel must uproot the entire lawn. The question for India now becomes whether it will mow the grass when Pakistan-based terrorists try to infiltrate Kashmir and Punjab, or whether Indian forces will be prepared for the inevitability of addressing the terror nexus inside Pakistan in a much more permanent way.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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