pulling out...

Premature pullouts cause more damage than pleasure or progress.

This morning we rode along a route that took us to the rolling roads near sderot, then over to ashkelon, back through the nachshom junction, on to Latrun and then back home. I've been riding with a new cycling team and getting lifts to the meeting point with one of my close triathlon friends who has a car. This friend used to be one of the top 10k runners in Europe and he's a serious competitive cyclist now who's trying to turn over into triathlon.

It works out well because I have someone to chase when I do runs immediately off the bike during training sessions. I love running but I always dig so much deeper when I have a mode of competitive comparison. He leaves me in the dust running but I max out trying to catch him. It's fantastic redlining and despite my low training volume I feel much better with my physical performance at this point. I think I'm starting to recover from all my previous years overtraining.

Anyway, during a point in the ride where I could tuck in to the pack, spin at 100 rpms and coast a bit for recovery, I started chatting with a rider who had served as part of the IDF intelligence in the lebanon years. I was fascinated. He spoke about his role as coordinator of intelligence in southern lebanon and how part of his role included finding jobs and opportunities for cooperating lebanese who wanted to take advantage of economic opportunities in Israel. He said that Israel actually has the largest intelligence division of any national force and that one of the largest mistakes we made in the lebanese pull out was not providing sufficient holistic support for the Lebanese who assisted us. The downfall was that many of these same Lebanese developed a strong hatred towards us for abandoning them, and turned to hezbollah and straight away offered all the intelligence that they had on Israel and the IDF.

The story sounded familiar as this is basically what happened in Afganistan in the 80's when the U.S. pulled out after fighting the soviets. Afganis who had helped the U.S. were abandoned and to avoid complete destitution they turned to the Madrassas and the Taliban and eventually towards terrorism against the U.S.

The matter of pulling out or disengaging at any level from an occupied or contested area is fraught with pitfalls and poisonous snakes. We're supposed to learn from history's tales and humanity's failures, but somehow when it comes to warfare and politics, we ignore lessons which dooms us to repetition.

The burning question then becomes.. when is premature? and is it actually possible to ever fully extricate ourselves from these situations at a win-win level?