Daniel Byman's "A High Price"

Gabriel Schoenfeld reviews Daniel Byman's new history of Israeli counterterrorism efforts, "A High Price," in the Wall Street Journal's Saturday book review section.  Although Schoenfeld says Byman's work is a "meticulously researched historical narrative" and "offers a fascinating account of Israel's techniques for recruiting informants in hostile territory and its evolving efforts to make its interrogation practices conform to the strictures of international law," he points out a flaw that plagues much of the social scientific work on counterterrorism:

Mr. Byman's judgment from the sidelines is both unduly harsh and contradictory. Throughout the decades of its existence, Israel has faced enemies determined to wipe it out and willing to use the most brutal attacks on civilians to accomplish that end. If Israel has not devised a strategy to solve its terrorist problem "once and for all," that fact owes far more to the incorrigible character of its neighborhood than to the lack of a "long-term plan."

In fact, the pursuit of just such a once-and-for-all long-term plan led to one of Israel's worst strategic debacles: its invitation to Yasser Arafat, under the Oslo Accords, to take power in the West Bank in 1994. Instead of getting peace, Israel found itself embroiled with a neighbor waging a double game of talking and killing.

American academics tend to underestimate the power of ideology or religion as terrorist motivations, I think, largely because of how cheaply most Americans (especially university professors) tend to hold their own beliefs.  Say what you will about an al-Qa'ida or Hamas activist, but they genuinely believe that what they are doing is for some greater good, and it is hard to push somebody with such strong beliefs off a particular course of action once decided upon.  Consequently, quantitative studies that purport to show that targeted killings or some other counterterror policy do not reduce attacks in the long run almost always fail to consider the counterfactual of what would have happened had the State not attempted offensive countermeasures at all.

Nevertheless, I look forward to reading Byman's book in the near future, and will write my own review when I do.