The Age of the Unthinkable (23 page)

Begun as a Lebanese Shia opposition group in 1982, Hizb’allah established itself by mixing the Lebanese national distaste
for external interference with the political and religious spirit of the Iranian revolution. At the time Lebanon was overrun:
Americans, Israelis, Syrians, and a mosaic of peacekeeping forces and Arab-world military adventurers were all jockeying for
influence and power. And though the Party of God (or “the Party of Allah,” as Hizb’allah can be translated) was ensnared by
the domestic violence of Lebanon’s civil war, it was the attacks against outside powers that brought out the group’s particular
talents. Hizb’allah’s first military innovation was the so-called linked suicide bombing, in which several targets are hit
at nearly the same time, a tactic now familiar to Americans since 9/11, which originated on October 23, 1982, when Hizb’allah
bombers hit the U.S. marine compound at the Beirut Airport and the French Foreign Legion camp in central Beirut minutes apart.
The group is probably best remembered in the United States for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight from Athens to Rome, but
it also played a role in the kidnappings that plagued Beirut during the Lebanese civil war.

In the late 1980s, after it had forced the United States out of Lebanon, Hizb’allah turned its attention to Israel, which
held a ten-mile-wide buffer strip in southern Lebanon, just wide enough, Jerusalem officials hoped, to stop rocket attacks.
From time to time Israel would launch dramatic raids or probes aimed at the Hizb’allah leadership, but the Israel Defense
Forces and their partners in the South Lebanese Army never upset the group’s operations for long. It was a slow, grinding
sort of struggle. At times the back-and-forth strikes almost appeared to be a carefully managed, if unusually violent and
creative, chess match. After Israel assassinated the Hizb’allah founder Abbas al-Musawi in 1992, for instance, Hizb’allah
retaliated by suicide-bombing the Israeli embassy and then a synagogue in Buenos Aires — demonstrating a willingness and ability
to strike overseas if need be. Eventually, Israel decided the price was too high and, in the spring of 2000, exhausted by
the political strain, withdrew its forces, in one night, from Lebanon. Hizb’allah had done what Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had
failed to do for forty years. It had beaten the Israelis.

As a condition of its survival during the years of its fight against Israel, Hizb’allah had become a machine for innovation,
as much terror lab as terror group. Backed by Iranian cash and training — some Israelis insisted Hizb’allah was little more
than the unofficial “fourth division” of the Iranian army — the group was constantly developing new ways to communicate, attack,
or train. They were among the first to develop improvised explosive devices of the sort that later made Iraqi roads into a
nightmare for the Americans, then the Brits and other U.S. allies. They perfected camouflage techniques that made remotely
fired mines along roadsides indistinguishable from rocks or trash. Hizb’allah ran a world-class smuggling network, acquiring
arms while UN “truce” officials watched helplessly. (Among other things, they smuggled decryption chips inside PlayStations.)
Hizb’allah found ways to quickly assemble and use Soviet Katyusha rockets, which caused little damage in Israel but tremendous
frustration; then they stockpiled 10,000 of them. They also loaded up on state-of-the-art antitank missiles. “We knew they
had the best antitank missiles in the world,” General Halutsi Rudoy of the IDF said after one in ten of his tanks was hit
in the 2006 war. “But we were surprised by the amount, which at times seemed endless.”

Calling Hizb’allah’s feeling for innovation a “passion” was perhaps a bit strong, but the group had a vigor that seemed to
transcend the mere brutal demands of survival. You might, for instance, chalk up their obsession with learning to night-fight
to raw survival instinct — a reaction to the Israel Defense Forces’ historical preference for attacking on a black night with
a new moon. But they did much more than train under the Lebanese stars. They built their own telephone network to keep it
secure from Israeli penetration; they devised a clever surveillance camera system and installed it surreptitiously at Beirut
Airport so they could keep track of planes coming and going. In 2004 and 2005 they conducted test flights of small, home-built
unmanned aerial vehicles, cheap versions of the multimillion-dollar drones that Israel and the United States used for overhead
monitoring and, occasionally, for sending missiles into bedrooms or offices or front seats of terrorists’ cars. This was more
than an instinct for survival. It was a will to invent, loaded into the Hizb’allah genetic code. The group didn’t simply react,
they learned and even anticipated. It was Gell-Mann’s complex adaptation at work. And they empathized: “We understand Israelis,”
a Hizb’allah fighter told me. “You look at me and you need to know I am already dead. I am just here now temporarily. If I
die, it does not matter. Israelis are not like that. They fear death.”

Shortly after the Israeli withdrawal of 2000, Hizb’allah turned to its dream of political legitimacy. In the spring of 2001,
the Party of God offered a slate of fifty-eight candidates for the national parliament. But when only nine won, Hizb’allah
found itself forced into some soul-searching. Lebanon, it seemed, wasn’t quite ready for an Islamic state. So, like some company
that had launched a failed product (say, New Coke), the group had to answer the question “What is our core competency?” And
while they didn’t abandon their dream of one day becoming a political force, they began looking for ways to do in other places
what they had done so well at home: kill Israelis.

The natural, convenient location for such an effort was inside Israel, where Hizb’allah trainers and supplies began appearing
among various Palestinian militant groups. When word got around the streets of Gaza or Ramallah that Hizb’allah had come to
help the Palestinians, it was an electric jolt to the balance of Palestinian militant power. Hizb’allah showing up was like
Google arriving in a town and opening an office: the most innovative, ambitious, and curious young minds all wanted to join.
Established groups such as Hamas watched as their best bomb makers and planners were drawn into Hizb’allah’s orbit. The turf
war, Israeli intelligence later discovered, was resolved only by the stern mullahs in Tehran, who ruled that Hizb’allah could
instruct the Palestinians but must back off the franchise strategy. It was too effective.

All of which might have made you wonder, as you sat in the back of a car making high-speed squirts through the towns of the
Litani River valley — land that seemed destined to pass back and forth between Israel and Lebanon in perpetuity, land that
wore its exhaustion like a blanket of dust — why Hizb’allah was building houses. If their core competency was devising cutting-edge
ways to kill Jews, if their political future would likely be measured out for them in the streets of Beirut or the mosques
of Tehran or the palaces of Damascus, then why were Hizb’allah forces throwing up slab-sided houses one after another here?
For that matter, why were they building schools and running hospitals? Why was it that when people in southern Lebanon had
a problem with plumbing or noisy neighbors or a child who wasn’t interested in the Koran, their first call was to Hizb’allah?

The answer was that by living in the places where Lebanese Shia most needed help and support, Hizb’allah had become inseparable
from daily life — and deeply connected to the slow variables in Lebanon. They drew no distinction between plumbing and making
bombs; often the same fighters did both jobs. They had gone deep, and this gave them everything from information to gratitude
to quiet spaces where they could engineer their latest terror gadgets or bounce back from Israeli poundings. As much as Hizb’allah
owed its survival to roadside bombs, they probably owed just as much to unclogged toilets and primary schools. What had kept
the group alive for more than two decades, under intense pressure both within and outside of Lebanon, was this obsession with
innovation and an instinct for slow-variable resilience.

This created a dangerous problem for Israel, a problem whose lethal irony Farkash had pointed out: direct attacks on Hizb’allah
made the militants
more
resilient, not less. Small perturbations in natural systems — and, on the Hizb’allah timetable, most of Israel’s actions
were small perturbations — are usually the best way to build resilience. Swallowing antibiotics at the first sign of a cold,
in the same fashion, destroys your chance to build a healthy immune system. At some point you need to get a little sick so
that in the long term you become a lot healthier. In Lebanon every bombed house was replaced by one built via the reconstruction
fund; every destroyed school meant a chance to build a madrassa that would produce future Hizb’allah fighters. The group wasn’t
some magical self-creating force. It would have evaporated quickly if it hadn’t been for the strong support of Iran. But
how
they used that support was what mattered. They could have spent all the money on munitions and fake documents. But Hizb’allah’s
greatest survival secret had nothing to do with cracking Israeli codes or smuggling missiles or building up a leadership hierarchy.
It was in creating a system that allowed them to shift and learn and change — and that did all of those things even better
when they were under attack.

“I don’t see how they are resilient,” an Israeli officer said to me one day after the 2006 war. “We destroyed most of their
buildings and communications. And every time we tried to kill them they just ran away.”

Exactly.

Construction of a resilient society need not be complex. The aim is simple enough: to withstand the surprises that await us;
to absorb the worst nightmares and walk away with the core attributes of our freedom intact. The best way to do this is not
to chase our enemies around the globe (making them angrier and cleverer) or to invest only, as we do now, in what are essentially
resistance strategies. Resistance is very different from resilience. It is an attempt to prepare for every possible contingency,
which is of course impossible and exhausting. As we check off a near-infinite list of boxes — harden nuclear reactors; develop
road-monitoring systems; toughen border security — resistance also leaves us in a state of unnerving psychological weakness.
It forces us into a reactive mode, waiting to be hit. It drains us, and when resistance policies fail, they leave us more
afraid, insecure, and vulnerable. How is it, we wonder, that our expensive and extensive resistance systems can’t protect
us? The fact is they never had a chance. When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security describes its mission as “deterrence,
prevention, and preemption of, and defense against, aggression,” it fails, item by item, to touch the true nature of resilience.
As we’ve seen, much of what we face can’t be deterred or prevented. Often it can’t be predicted, which makes much of the mission
of Homeland Security the stuff of fantasy. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to harden our nuclear reactors; in
fact, certain defensive efforts make a great deal of sense. Hizb’allah isn’t just unclogging toilets, after all. But an obsession
with building walls blinds us to the chance that someone might tunnel under such bulwarks.

It might be best to rechristen Homeland Security as the Department of Resilience (a twin to the Department of Defense). The
recognition that we need a major commitment to fostering real resilience would in turn elevate ideas like national health
care, construction of a better transport infrastructure, and investment in education to a new level of importance. Universal
health coverage makes sense not only because it is decent but because building a medical system that touches everyone in the
country prepares us to better deal with the unknown. Resilience acknowledges that we can’t possibly anticipate or prevent
all future dangers any more than you can look at your beautiful newborn child and be certain that it will never catch a cold
or break a leg.

Resilience expands the virtue of slow-variable policies beyond their traditional domains. Such efforts are valuable for what
they accomplish in and of themselves, and they are also a way to bind Americans into a compact of responsibility and a network
of personal relationships sealed by working hand in hand. Government alone can’t ever construct a system fast and flexible
enough for our modern world. So we should begin with what can be done with our own hands. We should start with the sorts of
questions we
can
control and answer, reaching for the places where the slow variables of our own society are within easy grasp: how do we
consume? educate our children? run our businesses? invest our money? In the end government can’t make us fully resilient.
It’s a process that has to include — and ideally
start with —
each of us at home.

Resilience isn’t just a passive virtue, it’s also something we have to be able to incorporate into the way we act in the world,
whether it is regulating financial markets that change faster than we can think or, as we’ve often done in the Middle East,
stepping into unstable landscapes of ethnic and religious fury. You might recall that earlier I mentioned something about
Holling’s work on what he called “maladaptive systems,” which were doomed because they couldn’t change or adjust fast enough
in the face of surprise. Well, that can happen to policies, too. If they are based on bad information or old ideas, they may
snap when confronted with the real world. Ecologists call this situation “lock-in,” which captures the way in which inflexibility
and mistakes become a prison of sorts as time goes on. Probably nowhere have our own maladaptive policy twitches been on clearer
display in recent years than in the U.S. war in Iraq. The war was begun with a set of highly inflexible policies based on
flawed assumptions — and then updated and changed far too late. The American failure to adapt in Iraq was primarily a postwar
error, but lock-in started well before the conflict even began, with a whole set of war-thinking habits that were dangerously
hardened by overconfidence and by an “input soldiers, output democracy” set of ideas. It’s not that there was no advance planning
for postwar Iraq. In fact, parts of the Pentagon and State Department had been planning for such an eventuality for a couple
of years before the first shots were fired. But the worries of those policy groups about managing a postwar order were largely
steamrollered, replaced with a system that was incapable of the speedy refiguring that life in a war zone would inevitably
require. And in that error there are tremendous lessons for the future.