Quote Originally Posted by Granite_State View Post
Would you say that COIN has to be based on a hearts-and-minds approach? Isn't "counter-insurgency" simply seeking to defeat the insurgents? What the Russians in Afghanistan or Israelis in the Territories did may have been brutal, and maybe ineffective, but how is it not COIN?
I think its a fair question, whether we define COIN as all military operations aimed against insurgencies, or whether we consider only FM 3-24-type operations to be COIN. I would use the broader definition.

That having been said, Tom points to an important characteristic of IDF operations in Lebanon on the 1980s: they were very much driven by a military security/deterrence/killing the opponent approach, and weren't anything that the modern US or British Army would consider appropriate. The actual, informal ROEs used by the IDF in south Lebanon were very loose indeed, a point that Jim Ron makes in both his academic book and in his op ed account of being an IDF paratrooper. Indeed, I believe that the IDF even shot at Tom on multiple occasions

Practice in the WBG has been rather more constrained for a variety of reasons (including more intense media coverage), and the nature of Israeli operations rather different. No one who has ever seen a checkpoint in operation or been at the back of a collective taxi as young men are hauled out for ID checks would consider it consider it akin to anything the British Army did to the general population in northern Ireland, however (although I'm sure that some elements of the RUC did to Catholics, on occasion--at considerable sectarian cost). Instead, it is all control/occupation, and no hearts-and-minds (which are, frankly, never likely to accept occupation). The few Israeli efforts to preserve, coopt, or cultivate a cooperative Palestinian elite (support for pro-Jordanian notables after 1967, the Village Leagues in the 1980s) were spectacular failures.

Perhaps, therefore, the best distinction is between colonial/foreign occupation-type COIN (where the locals will never really accept the legitimacy of your rule), and support-for-local-authorities type COIN (where a government may indeed be able to win genuine public support).