When one drives along the length of the barrier, or flies down its winding route, as this reporter did last week, it actually looks deceptively frail to do the job. It is clearly a fence for most of its route. The Israeli government says no more than 6 percent of it is concrete walls or solid barriers to prevent snipers shooting at roads or inhabited areas in Israel close by, and there are none of the minefields, barbed wire, guard towers or other fortifications that marked the borders of every communist nation during the Cold War.

Most armchair strategists and pundits around the world did not think it could work. Liberals were conditioned to worry about the "underlying causes" of conflicts rather than the nuts and bolts of actually winning them. And many conservatives still loved the romantic idea of bold, thrilling offensive armored and blitzkrieg strikes, such as those that won the 1991 and 2003 Gulf War military campaigns for the United States.

Military planners -- and, accordingly defense contractors too -- in the United States and Europe did not take passive defenses seriously. When the United States led coalition forces into Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Pentagon and White House planners did not take the concept of border security seriously at all. No thought was given to it.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, publicly dismissed U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's prescient warning that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be needed to maintain security in Iraq after Saddam's fall. Yet today, 160,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq with around 220,000 Iraqi army and security forces of doubtful reliability. Together, they are finally making strides in cutting down the levels of violence in the Sunni Muslim insurgency in southern Iraq. However, Iraq's land borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran remain largely open, despite occasional U.S. large-scale military operations to interdict them.

It was tough old Sharon, always ready to break or outrage liberal taboos and Conventional Wisdom, who put security fences and defensible borders back on the global strategic map. Israeli hard-line right wingers and liberal supporters of the Palestinians alike derided his concept of a security fence or barrier to cut the Gaza Strip and the Palestine Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank off from Israel in order to stop the regular attacks of Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad that killed more than a thousand Israeli civilians, a large proportion of them women and children, in the Second Intifada.

The fence appeared to armchair strategists as a defensive move, not manly, an admission of defeat and a departure from Israel's traditionally aggressive, reactive strategy against terror attacks. But it worked.

Successful suicide bomber attacks fell from dozens a year to single figures. Hundreds of civilian lives per year were saved. And suddenly serious border defenses were back in fashion.

The Indian army was so impressed by the success of the Israeli barrier, or fence, that it built a similar, far longer one, along the Line of Control separating Indian-controlled Jammu & Kashmir from the much smaller part of the state held by Pakistan since 1947-1948. Soon the Indians were reporting that Islamist guerrilla incursions across the Line of Control had fallen by 80 percent. They followed up the Kashmir fence with an even longer one to surround the entire Muslim nation of Bangladesh. Bangladesh like India is a democracy, but it is also a nation where Islamist extremists have been much more active since they were driven out of Afghanistan by U.S. forces and their allies in late 2001.

As we have noted in these columns before, Sharon's fence transformed strategic calculations about how to control borders around the world. But there are many practical and tactical reasons why it remains a fence for most of its length, and not a wall.

(Next: Why a fence, not a wall)

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