CENTCOM thinks outside the box on Hamas and Hezbollah

[Rex Brynen]

Red Team
CENTCOM thinks outside the box on Hamas and Hezbollah.

Foreign Policy Magazine
BY MARK PERRY | JUNE 30, 2010

While it is anathema to broach the subject of engaging militant groups like Hizballah and Hamas in official Washington circles (to say nothing of Israel), that is exactly what a team of senior intelligence officers at U.S. Central Command -- CENTCOM -- has been doing. In a "Red Team" report issued on May 7 and entitled "Managing Hizballah and Hamas," senior CENTCOM intelligence officers question the current U.S. policy of isolating and marginalizing the two movements. Instead, the Red Team recommends a mix of strategies that would integrate the two organizations into their respective political mainstreams. While a Red Team exercise is deliberately designed to provide senior commanders with briefings and assumptions that challenge accepted strategies, the report is at once provocative, controversial -- and at odds with current U.S. policy.

Among its other findings, the five-page report calls for the integration of Hizballah into the Lebanese Armed Forces, and Hamas into the Palestinian security forces led by Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The Red Team's conclusion, expressed in the final sentence of the executive summary, is perhaps its most controversial finding: "The U.S. role of assistance to an integrated Lebanese defense force that includes Hizballah; and the continued training of Palestinian security forces in a Palestinian entity that includes Hamas in its government, would be more effective than providing assistance to entities -- the government of Lebanon and Fatah -- that represent only a part of the Lebanese and Palestinian populace respectively" (emphasis in the original). The report goes on to note that while Hizballah and Hamas "embrace staunch anti-Israel rejectionist policies," the two groups are "pragmatic and opportunistic."

...

[Bob's World]

This is smart. It is a first step toward removing the hypocrisy of the US promoting democracy, yet rejecting democratic outcomes we disagree with. It also promises to go a long way of tearing down the true sanctuary that we have built for these organizations with our previous policies. Hamas and Hezbollah both take sanctuary in the very fact that we hold them to be outside the state, outside the law. By recognizing and incorporating them into our state engagement we deny them that sanctuary, and the entire entices and populaces of Palestine and Lebanon come to be held to account for their actions. This is the best thing we could do to help Israel as well.

Yes. Once these organizations are recognized as true parts of the states they come from, the simple rule of "strong state trumps weak state" applies. The liability of the weak states they represent will open up these organizations to tried and true tools of deterrence. Currently they have sanctuary from the same.

[Dayuhan]

the five-page report calls for the integration of Hizballah into the Lebanese Armed Forces, and Hamas into the Palestinian security forces led by Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

I have to wonder if either Hamas or Hizballah would have any interest at all in any kind of integration that would place their armed forces under someone else's command. I have doubts.

[William F. Owen]

By recognizing and incorporating them into our state engagement we deny them that sanctuary, and the entire entices and populaces of Palestine and Lebanon come to be held to account for their actions. This is the best thing we could do to help Israel as well.

Yes. Once these organizations are recognized as true parts of the states they come from, the simple rule of "strong state trumps weak state" applies.

Sorry Bob, none of that computes. Anyone thought about the Lebanese and Palestinians who are violently opposed to Hamas and Hezbollah?
Unless you get both organisations to dismantle their armed wing, and thus cease to exist, this is pure naiveté.

Dismantling the armed capability of two terrorist organisations is what helps - including equipment. Making them more dangerous by giving them access to national instruments of power does not. It does not make them more accountable either. How would it?

[Bob's World]

Sorry Bob, none of that computes. Anyone thought about the Lebanese and Palestinians who are violently opposed to Hamas and Hezbollah?
Unless you get both organisations to dismantle their armed wing, and thus cease to exist, this is pure naiveté.

Dismantling the armed capability of two terrorist organisations is what helps - including equipment. Making them more dangerous by giving them access to national instruments of power does not. It does not make them more accountable either. How would it?

Don't feel sorry that you disagree, disagreement is ok. We are all entitled to our perspectives.

The very fact that much of the populace of these two states does not condone the actions of the two "terrorist" organizations functioning within them, that are allowed the freedom of manuever that this sanctuary of status allows them, is the very point.

Once this artificial sanctuary is reduced the right minded people of these comunities will have to take responsibility for the actions of these groups and will work internally to hold them to account. Currently they have no consequences, so take little action. Once their entire state is threatened by the acts of a few, the many will hold those few to task. No longer will the fiction of Hezbollah waging war with a neighboring state be possible; the reality of the entire state being held to task is fundamental to the working of the state system.

The terrorist list actually weakens the state system and empowers these organizations in many ways. After all once outside the law, the law has no deterrent effect. Similarly a populace able to shirk responsibility for the state-like acts of war of organizations made up of their citizens has little to fear from the law either, so is less apt to restrain them.

The world is changing, and our approaches to the world must evolve as well. Dusty texts written in eras long past provide keen insights, but they are not prescriptive manuals for how to operationalize those concepts in the environment that exists today.

[William F. Owen]

Don't feel sorry that you disagree, disagreement is ok. We are all entitled to our perspectives.

Concur. Who would think otherwise?

The very fact that much of the populace of these two states does not condone the actions of the two "terrorist" organizations withing them, that are allowed the freedom of manuever that this sanctuary of status allows them, is the very point.

...but that is not true. Very large and significant portions of the populations do condone their actions.
Hezbollah is extremely popular in Southern Lebanon, far more so than many in the West want to believe, because the central government is so inconsequential to the population in the South.
Hamas is the same. Hamas is seen as the de-facto Palestinian Army and Nation, by a great many Palestinians in Gaza. West Bank is essentially another country.

Once this artificial sanctuary is reduced the right minded people of these comunities will have to take responsibility for the actions of these groups and will work internally to hold them to account.

By "right minded" you mean pro-western moderates? Sorry, but there folk have no standing or respect in the vast majority of the communities you are talking about. Fact is, in the Southern Lebanon and Gaza, peace with Israel is largely unacceptable to the vast majority of the population. Hezbollah and Hamas are defined by the cause of destroying Israel.
Saying "make them part of a bigger cause" is utterly foolish. Then you just have two more nation states who want to destroy Israel.

The world is changing, and our approaches to the world must evolve as well.

Sorry, but the world is people and people don't change that much - especially in the Middle-East. Opinions and ideas basically remain constant. Form alters, function very, very rarely.

[Bob's World]

Working through your circular arguments, first you proclaim:

"Anyone thought about the Lebanese and Palestinians who are violently opposed to Hamas and Hezbollah?"

So I suggest that by recoginizing these groups as part of the state they would more likely be held to task by such others. But then, you come back with:

"but that is not true. Very large and significant portions of the populations do condone their actions"

To which I would add "of course, all the more reason to recognize that these organizations speak for the state and that the state should be held accountable as well as the organizations for their actions."

We grant these groups sanctuary. Not just these two groups, in these two states; but ALL such groups in whatever states they emerge from. The information age (that yes, I realize you are equally dismissive of), or more importantly the knowledge age, that is fueled by the greater speed and availability of information is empowering populaces and non-state organizations in new ways. States are the last to recognize and adjust to this; as usual it is the previously disempowered (people as individuals and as organizations) that embrace the new tools first; and the ones who have power who resist it most as applied against them.

Either way you slice it, be it that these groups don't or do speak and act for the people of the state; the fact remains that they are more easily deterred from acting badly when allowed to operate within the system, and also held to task by the system. Outside the system they enjoy a tremendous sanctuary that I suspect we don't appreciate because so many still believe the simplistic cliche' that "sanctuary comes from ungoverned spaces."

Yet one more example of Fairy Tale-based COIN doctrine (the first being the Pied Piper theory of ideology, that well governed populaces will become radicalized by some seductive ideology and follow the espouser of the same to their doom.)

This one is "The Sherwood Forest theory of Sanctuary." Everyone knows how Robin Hood and his Merry Band took sanctuary in Sherwood Forest; but if the forest was destroyed or somehow denied to them, would they have no more sanctuary?? Of course not, there are other forests for what a forest provides; but more importantly the true sanctuary came from the support of a poorly governed populace (the illegitimacy and injustice of Prince John is legend as well), and their outlaw status itself. Sanctuary comes from such popular support and legal status (a sovereign border, a lack of state affiliation, an outlaw status). As an aside, we approach the AF-Pak problem like a mob of woodcutters going after Sherwood Forest. Even if you cut it down, you have only forced a change of address if you have not addressed the primary sources of sanctuary.

We need to move past fairy tale COIN and get real. We need to get real with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and the states they live in as well.

[Rick Bennett]

I am of two minds. First I find it refreshing that the explosion of communications has allowed this kind of discussion to arrive in the political sphere. Second, I find it distressing that the military establishment is having to raise the discussion point.


As for opinions, I think that our cultural bias toward nationalism and love of borders as a way of organizing social issues colors this proposal heavily. For people who are still highly resentful of the way colonial powers applied borders to disrupt their societies this might look like asking them to sign away their last hope for "justice".