Lebanon (all aspects)

[goesh]

A UN relief convoy got hit trying to enter the fatah islam camp. I don't know how Intelligence keeps up with all these splinter groups

[aktarian]

Well, to be fair a lot more people have died already in this dustup, and it's not over yet.

Wasn't body count last year around 1.000 dead on Lebanese side and about 150 on Israeli?

Plus arguemnt could be made that last year's fighting led to political confrontation between Hezbollah and rest of government resulting in protests and couple of deaths.

[Granite_State]

Bibnine, Lebanon - Mustafa Borghol stares solemnly out from one of dozens of "martyr" portraits stuck to walls in this village in northern Lebanon. The 24-year-old Lebanese Special Forces soldier is the 10th resident of Bibnine to die in three months of bitter fighting between the Lebanese Army and the Al Qaeda-inspired militants of Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, just three miles from here.

"This village used to be famous for fishing and carpentry," says Mohammed Borghol, Mustafa's father, while sitting in his butcher shop. "Now it is famous for its martyrs, and we are very proud of them."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0828/p06s02-wome.html

Good to see increased esteem for a national institution there.

[Rex Brynen]

There is now doubt about the new-found esteem for the military (also related to its deployment to the south after last summer's war). One now often sees in Lebanon the entirely new phenomenon of billboards extolling the Army, put up by private companies.

However, the Lebanese Army has had a very tough job of it in Nahr al-Barid (against what are now only a few dozen Fateh al-Islam combatants), and I'm not sure that a lack of modern weapons systems is really the problem. Particularly striking has been the ability of Fateh al-Islam to fire off the occasional rocket barrage against nearby villages or the power plant, something that ought not to be happening when they're reduced to a small area, completely overlooked by Army positions.

That being said, the refugee camp is a nightmare to fight in: it is essentially a now-abandoned densely-build town of 32,000, with one road, 2-4 small lanes, and otherwise a maze of very narrow (1.5 m) zig-zagging alleyways.

Google Earth users can find a rather good view of it at 34º30'43.38" N 35º 57' 37.55 E

[Rex Brynen]

Lebanese troops crush Islamists in siege camp
2 September 2007

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (AFP) — Lebanese troops on Sunday took full control of a devastated refugee camp that had been besieged for three months and held by diehard Islamist militants of Fatah al-Islam, the military said.

The Palestinian camp, a honeycomb of tunnels and houses reinforced against possible Israeli air attack, finally fell to a mass assault on Sunday after troops killed at least 37 Islamist militants as they made a desperate pre-dawn bid to break the siege, army and security sources said.

Another 15 Islamists were arrested, some of whom had managed to make it to nearby villages but were caught in the manhunt that included troops searching roofs and watertanks.

More than 220 people, including 158 Lebanese troops, were killed during the standoff which started on May 20 near the sprawling camp outside the northern city of Tripoli.

Now the hard part starts.

More than 32,000 people were displaced from Nahr al-Barid refugee camp, most of them fleeing to nearby Baddawi camp where they've been put up in refugee homes and UNRWA and Lebanese government schools since May 20. Nahr al-Barid is, from the UNOSAT (Ikonos) satellite imagery that I've seen, very badly damaged. UNRWA will need to find space for temporary accommodation for the displaced Palestinians (a sensitive issue in Lebanon), and then will have to reconstruct the camp (another sensitive issue, complicated by a host of land ownership and other questions). The costs will be significant, with camp reconstruction possibly running well over $150 million (equivalent to about one-third of UNRWA's annual budget for all 4.5 million refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank).

The Lebanese government was at pains to signal to refugees that the camp would be reconstructed, and that (in contrast to all previous governments) it was also committed to improving their general standard of living. However, given both the costs of continued reconstruction after the Israel-Hizbullah war last summer, high levels of government debt, and a Lebanese view that responsibility for the Palestinian issue is international, the funds for doing so will have to come from external (especially Gulf) donors.

Failure to reconstruct will not only prolong humanitarian suffering of the displaced, but will also be seen as confirmation of constant rumours that the Nahr al-Barid fighting was somehow engineered by the Siniora government and the US to destroy the camp, liquidate the refugee problem, etc.

Moreover, while the current government's position on Lebanese-Palestinian relations has been much more positive than past governments, the loss of so many Lebanese Army personnel (plus Fateh al-Islam rocketing of the Tripoli power station and nearby villages) has hardly improved relations at the popular level (despite few of the militants being Palestinian, and the government's emphasis that this was NOT a Lebanese-Palestinian conflict).

[goesh]

Personally, I think they will continue to be used as pawns by all factions in the ME. From the PLO expulsion by Jordan to Sabra and Shatila, to hamas attemtping to usurp the legitimacy of the palestinian authority to the intentional squalor of the refugee camps left unchecked by palestinian officials, their pawn status continues unabated. Little of the oil wealth of the ME will be donated, save but a few token million. Rich 'donors' know all too well the graft that occurs in ME. I was reading the other day in a local paper the fiscal analysis of our own 'charities', well regulated and monitored as they are, and I was quite amazed at how very little of the donated money actually is applied to the needy. Out of every 1 million given to the ME, my guesstimate would be 50-60K of it actually gets to the needy.

[Rex Brynen]

By global standards, very few Palestinian refugee camps are truly "squalid" by global standrads--in most places (Syria, Jordan, the West Bank) only a minority of refugees live in the camps, which have simply become low-income housing areas. Refugee incomes and standards of living in those areas are equal to those of the non-refugee population.

Gaza is slightly different because it is overcrowded, much poorer, and most of the population are refugees.

Lebanon is even more different still because refugees have, in the past, been barred from using government social services, from working in most professions, and even from owning property. (The Siniora government would like to change this.) Moreover, ever since the civil wars refugees have tended to cluster in camps for security. All of this reflects the enormous demographic and political sensitivity of the refugee issue in Lebanon, where the constitution explicitly forbids permanent settlement of the Palestinians there.

UNRWA--the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees--generally does an excellent job, as the social indicators suggest. (Donors have sometimes criticized the agency for budgetary planning and management/reporting issues, but not for corruption and waste.)

Gulf money financed the reconstruction of destroyed refugee housing in Jenin and Rafah/Khan Yunis (Gaza)... I suspect it will be the same in Nahr al-Barid.

[SWJED]

31 May Washington Post - U.N. Council Backs Tribunal For Lebanon by Colum Lynch and Ellen Knickmeyer.

A sharply divided U.N. Security Council voted Wednesday to create an international criminal tribunal to prosecute the masterminds of the February 2005 suicide bombing that killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri and 22 others.

The vote will lead to the creation of the first U.N.-backed criminal tribunal in the Middle East, raising expectations that Hariri's killers will be held accountable. But that has stoked fears among Lebanese authorities and some council members that supporters of Syria -- which has been linked to the assassination -- will plunge Lebanon's fledgling democracy into a bloody new round of internal strife...

[Rex Brynen]

A new and very useful report on an understudied topic:

Aram Nerguizian (and Anthony Cordesman), The Lebanese Armed Forces: Challenges and Opportunities in Post-Syria Lebanon, CSIS, working draft 10 February 2009.

For those of you interested in the historical evolution of the LAF, I would also flag Oren Barak's forthcoming The Lebanese Army: A National Institution in a Divided Society.

[Rex Brynen]

Re-Imaging the Lebanon Track: Toward a New U.S. Policy

Executive Summary

In the Century Foundation report entitled “Re-Imaging the Lebanon Track: Toward a New U.S. Policy,” Beirut-based political analyst Nicholas Noe argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, a viable roadmap for disarming Hizbullah through domestic peace-building exists within Lebanon itself—and that it should be pursued vigorously by the Obama administration.

Recognizing the deep challenges confronting both a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement as well as any “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran, Noe suggests these efforts can and should be explored concurrent with US-led efforts in Lebanon, but that the prospects for failure on both tracks, as well as the fast approaching elections this summer, means a new, Lebanon-focused policy is needed in the immediate term.

Based on his reading of Hizbullah and the multitude of limitations it faces, Noe concludes that Obama administration policymakers can better serve U.S. and Lebanese interests by breaking with their predecessors’ inflexible, often needlessly aggressive, approach.

Instead, he urges that they work toward undermining the rationale Hizbullah relies upon to justify its independent weaponry by driving a wedge between it and its vital political alliances and soft supporters across the spectrum of Lebanon’s confessional system. To do this, Noe suggests the following steps:...

View the full Executive Summary and Webcast - released December 10, 2008 - at: http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=EV&pubid=243

[William F. Owen]

Just read the paper once, but it seems written entirely from the perspective that even a really bad plan is better than no plan at all. It might be the starting point for a discussion, but only if you have a Hezbollah that is close to the one the paper supposes.

It really starts from the view point that if my mother had wheels, she'd be a steam engine.

It also makes a number of very groundless assumptions about how Israel views it's security dynamic with both Hezbollah and the Lebanese Government. Other than that, good effort.

[Danny]

This is a perfectly logical white paper, following the demands of its presuppositions to all of their necessary conclusions. But as the saying goes, input = garbage means output = garbage. Presuppositions mean everything.

If you can ignore what Hezbollah has said about itself for the last two decades and why they do what they do and the reason for their existence, and 220 dead Marines, and all of the globalist, jihadist rhetoric, and so forth, and simply focus on the notion of them being relatively placid chaps that really just want to be heard and respected by their countrymen and have a voice in government, then the report has some salient findings. Sure, if you activate the economy and do some "reconstruction," then their rai·son d'ê·tre as a military organization will end. Presto! No more guns!

But unless you take drugs before reading it, then you're going to come to quite different conclusions.

Smith out. No more time on that report for me.

[SWJ Blog]

Palestinian Camp Wars: Memoirs of a Fatah Military Commander in Lebanon

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[SWJ Blog]

Holding Lebanon Together: The Lebanese Armed Forces

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[SWJ Blog]

Why Lebanon Will Not Fall

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[bourbon]

Lebanese officials say CIA warned them of imminent al Qaida attack on Hezbollah, by Mitchell Prothero. McClatchy, 15 July 2013.

BEIRUT — The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned Lebanese officials last week that al Qaida-linked groups are planning a campaign of bombings that will target Beirut’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs as well as other political targets associated with the group or its allies in Syria, Lebanese officials said Monday.

The unusual warning – U.S. government officials are barred from directly contacting Hezbollah, which the U.S. has designated an international terrorist organization – was passed from the CIA’s Beirut station chief to several Lebanese security and intelligence officials in a meeting late last week with the understanding that it would be passed to Hezbollah, Lebanese officials said.

Hezbollah officials acknowledged the warning and took steps to tighten security in the southern suburbs that are known locally as Dahiya.

Strange times we live in.

[jcustis]

It makes me wonder what an "al-Qaida linked group" means to the Lebanese officials referenced in the article, and what it means in true terms. Claiming you are down with AQ doesn't mean anything if you don't glean support in the way of materiel, manpower, or intel to drive operations. As Bill Nagle would often say, it's just putting a bumper sticker on it.

That moniker gets thrown around by the media wayyy to much these days, especially when the desired effect is to scare readers and mask deliberate journalistic integrity laziness. AQ has become the boogeyman catch-all.

Ambassador Stevens was a story where AQIM was thrown around before anyone even knew the scope of the incident.

[bourbon]

It makes me wonder what an "al-Qaida linked group" means to the Lebanese officials referenced in the article, and what it means in true terms. Claiming you are down with AQ doesn't mean anything if you don't glean support in the way of materiel, manpower, or intel to drive operations. As Bill Nagle would often say, it's just putting a bumper sticker on it.

That moniker gets thrown around by the media wayyy to much these days, especially when the desired effect is to scare readers and mask deliberate journalistic integrity laziness. AQ has become the boogeyman catch-all.

The story references the very specific nature of the intel – intercepts between known AQ in Lebanon and the Gulf – "al-Qaida linked group" is probably what CIA told them. I doubt we are in the practice of passing along vague threats to, or even communicating with, Hezbollah frequently.

No doubt that AQ has become a catch-all bogeyman (probably always has been), but the US government does not get a pass when it comes to fear-mongering and intellectual laziness with regard to AQ. The media does not get a pass either, but fwiw the author of the article – Mitch Prothero – is imo pretty solid with his coverage of Hezbollah and the Lebanon beat.

[Wyatt]

the big question is why alert hezbollah intentionally? are they not our enemies?

To me it shows how powerful hezbollah is. If they we're inconsequential, what would we care if they were harmed? Further, if they were weak we wouldnt care if they viewed us as partially responsible. Maybe we have added their performance in syria to their performance against Israel and have decided that we would rather not kick thats hornets nest at this time and threw them a bone in the form of this intel.

Are we knowingly siding with sunnis and accepting their AQ links because the geopolitical threat of a shia/persian victory is worse?

It seems possible to me.

[davidbfpo]

Wyatt,

From my viewpoint the decision was sensible. It is in our general interest that the civil war in Syria does not affect Lebanon even more and a bombing campaign could be the "spark" for communal violence. There have been clashes already and Lebanon is a fragile, nay brittle nation. An action that binds Hezbollah closer to maintaining the internal safety and security of the Lebanon is a plus.