Israel begins carving buffer zone

Against a backdrop of more than 200 rockets raining down on northern communities like this one, the Israeli military pushed deeper into Lebanon Wednesday making its objectives in the three-week-old war clearer.

Israel wants to force Hizbullah beyond the Litani River, seen by Israelis as a crucial geographical and historical boundary, and will continue working to degrade Hizbullah's fighting capabilities. That effort also includes audacious raids as far north as Baalbek, which Israeli commandos entered by helicopter in the early hours Wednesday morning, taking five Hizbullah fighters prisoner and killing 10.

Israel hopes that by gaining control of a major swath of the south, even wider than the strip Israel occupied until 2000 as part of its "security zone," it can "clean out" the Hizbullah guerrillas and make way for a still-to-be-formed international peacekeeping force.

In interviews Wednesday, Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that Israel will continue to wage war in Lebanon until a strong international force is deployed across the south of the country. And Israel's chief of staff, asked at a briefing Wednesday how long he expected the task to take, responded: "What does it matter if it's weeks, months, or hours?"

But amid this expanded ground offensive and the official resumption of air attacks, which had been partially on hold for 48 hours following the visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, many analysts here say that Israel is moving its own goal posts too often.

While the Israeli public overwhelmingly supports the war effort, defense specialists have begun to question whether the Israeli military took the wrong approach by avoiding sending in more ground forces until now and relying instead on airstrikes. The exit strategy, some of these observers say, remains unclear.

"In the last few weeks, we've seen that the government had rolling objectives which would change every day," says Michael B. Oren, a military historian and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. "They went from saying we have to defeat Hizbullah to we can't defeat Hizbullah. They wanted help from the Lebanese Army until they realized that half the Lebanese Army is Shiite and is helping Hizbullah."

Mr. Oren, the author of "Six Days of War," says Israel has indicated to Syria that Israel has no intentions of involving Damascus in the war, even though, he argues, Syria is allowing the two enemies Israel is currently doing battle with – Lebanese Hizbullah and Palestinian Hamas – to operate on their soil.

"The government is speaking in multiple voices, and some of the effect is to broadcast weakness," Oren says.

Israel's perception abroad hardly seems one of weakness, but rather, of taking advantage of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict between Israel – which has the most advanced military in the Middle East – and Hizbullah, which is a guerrilla group. But domestically, critique of the war effort has grown in the other direction, with some analysts charging that Israel's military capabilities have not been put to their best use, with the operation goals perpetually shifting.

On Wednesday, Israeli forces struck deeper into Lebanon, hitting the Hizbullah stronghold of Baalbek and killing at least 19. In Israel, Hizbullah rockets landed farther than they have since fighting began July 12. Hizbullah fired Khaibar-1 rockets that landed near Beit Shean and in the West Bank city of Jenin. Israel says the Khaibar-1s are supplied by Iran.

So far, Hizbullah rockets have killed 19 Israelis, including one man who was killed Wednesday on a kibbutz close to Nahariya. The toll in Lebanon has been at least 540, mostly civilians.

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