The crisis began as two uncoordinated kidnappings of Israeli soldiers. Now foreigners flee Beirut, Israeli troops move into southern Lebanon and it has become a small war. It is a typical asymmetric war — of the guerrilla army against a state, the politically cunning against an exasperated government — with a natural tendency to spin out of anyone’s control.

On one side Hezbollah mixes the tactics of the terrorist, the guerrilla and the victim. The overall strategy is political: to provoke the Israelis into overreaction, to cement local support and international condemnation for their attackers and to be nimble enough to survive the onslaught.

So Hezbollah launches hundreds of Katyusha and Fajr-3 rockets into Israel, as far south as Haifa and Nazareth, killing more than 30 civilians and soldiers, and provoking Israel to hit some 1,200 targets in Lebanon, killing more than 300.

This grisly 1:10 casualty ratio generates exactly the international reaction that Hezbollah wants. A guerrilla army will never beat a good conventional army, but it can prevent the conventional force from winning on the battlefield while its government is beaten politically in capitals around the world.

This is what happened during 18 years of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon which ended in 2000. Hezbollah is confident that it can make that happen again if the Israelis try to stay in Lebanon. They are always in danger of overplaying it, of course, making the Lebanese weary of devastation. But so far there are few indications of that.

Why has Israel been sucked into this asymmetric war? One reason is that Israeli military and intelligence services have been achieving real successes targeting Hamas terrorist leaders in Gaza and the West Bank. Dramatic increases in Israeli intelligence have allowed their security forces to target individuals much more precisely, to penetrate terror networks and intercept a number of plots.

The Israelis felt confident that at last they were making a success of it against Hamas and have taken the fight directly to them. They might have felt they could extend this success to their Hezbollah enemies in the north.

They knew where rocket sites were, knew the location of some stockpiles and transit routes and knew a lot of what went on in the Haret Hreik district of south Beirut where Hezbollah had its headquarters.

However, not much has been achieved in 12 days of fighting and now the Israelis are drawn into deep “search and destroy” operations on the ground in Lebanon. The dynamics of the fighting may overtake the strategic calculations behind it.

It leaves the Israeli government grasping for the higher political ground in the battle for world opinion. The original kidnappings and attacks, the Israelis insist, are all manifestations of America’s war on terror. The Israelis are on America’s front line in that war and the real adversaries are Hezbollah’s backers, Syria and Iran.

There is certainly some truth in this: the number and sophistication of Hezbollah’s rockets are hard to explain otherwise. There is growing evidence that Iran encouraged Hezbollah to attack now so as to widen the diplomatic struggle over its nuclear ambitions. A Shi’ite front against Israel and its western friends would put extra cards into Iran’s diplomatic hand.

Nevertheless, Israel is having trouble convincing the rest of the world that it is manning a front line in some grand civil war raging across the Islamic Middle East. It is actually facing the old military conundrum: that there is no silver bullet for governments facing a skilful asymmetric opponent.

Michael Clarke is professor of defence studies at King's College, London

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