Lebanon
Two weeks ago today I was in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, another country that’s going to make an appearance in the next book. The Bekaa has a reputation for being lawless and anarchic; a lot of hashish is grown there, though I wasn’t looking for any, not with Saudi Arabia, which regularly puts drug traffickers to death, as my next stop.
In fact the Bekaa is a pleasant enough place to visit, with farms, vineyards and a couple of major Roman ruins. Snow-covered mountains rise to the west, standing between the valley and the Mediterranean — Lebanon, like California, is a place where one can ski in the morning and surf in the afternoon.
Unlike California, Lebanon is the home of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia Muslim group that has been making Israel miserable for a couple of decades now. The roads are lined with posters for Hezbollah, and billboards for Ashura, a Shia holy day that commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, whom Shiites consider Mohammed’s proper successor. In 2006, during their invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis bombed the Bekaa, but Hezbollah’s power remains intact.
Proof — as if any more proof were needed — of the limits of air power against guerrillas who have the support of the local population. We learned this lesson in Vietnam and we’re seeing it again today, in Pakistan. Boots on the ground are the only way to win a war, to eradicate a hostile force permanently. I don’t mean to say that boots on the ground are always the right answer. What I do mean is that we have to get past our facile belief that technological advances — laser-guided missiles, drones — will somehow allow us to defeat our enemies easily and cheaply. They can help us avoid losing American lives, yes. But they can’t change the political equation in a place like the Bekaa, or the Northwest Frontier.
What can? Maybe our soldiers. Maybe not. And maybe it’s not worth the cost — in lives and money — even if we’re certain we can remove a hostile group like Hezbollah or the Pashtun warlords in the Northwest Frontier from power. And if we can’t, what then? Do we try to reach some compromise? Fence these groups off so they can’t touch us?
But whatever decide, we need to realize that using drones is a temporary solution at best, a temporary solution that has lasted far too long.