No Hope for Negotiations in Cairo; No Hope for U.S. Mission in Afghanistan

The ceasefire in Arsal between the ISIS-led jihadis and Lebanese Army quickly broke down yesterday. Arsal is a Sunni town in the Bekaa Valley that is home to several refugee camps filled with people who have fled the war next door in Syria. Two of the refugee camps were reported to have been set ablaze by "indiscriminate artillery fire."

The ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas are getting underway in Cairo. David Kirkpatrick has an interview, "A Part of Hamas Negotiates, and Another May Fight Again,"
with Hamas bigwig Mousa Abu Marzook that is worth reading if only to get a sense of the futility of these bargaining sessions. Israel and Egypt are operating in lockstep. Their position is adamant: No easing of the blockade unless Gaza is demilitarized. Abu Marzook is equally adamant: Hamas' military wing, the Qassam Brigades, will remain. Abu Marzook is going to try to sell the idea of political and military separation. On the one hand, the Palestinian Authority will return to Gaza to administer the territory as the political power; while on the other, the Qassam Brigades will act as a national guard:

[A]fter more than 1,600 Palestinian deaths in Gaza from the Israeli attacks over the last month, Mr. Abu Marzook said Tuesday that Hamas had won a victory just by surviving and argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had failed to achieve any of his goals. Mr. Abu Marzook said Hamas had gained popularity, remained able to fire rockets at Israel, and could re-establish its network of tunnels under Gaza. 

For agreeing to the cease-fire, he argued that Hamas should receive relief from the blockade on its territory. “The Palestinians should gain something out of these battles,” he said. “They want the siege to end; they want all the gates to open.”

That is a nonstarter with Israel and Egypt while Hamas controls Gaza, but Mr. Abu Marzook said Hamas was prepared for the unified government to take over, including assuming responsibility in Gaza for security and the borders.

He acknowledged that some tensions remained. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Fatah, have parallel payrolls of employees to run Gaza. 

“Two people on one chair is very difficult,” Mr. Abu Marzook said. “Now it is our duty to resolve this problem and make a real unity Palestinian government.” 

But he brushed off past concerns within Hamas about the possibility that the loyal presidential guard of its chief rival, Fatah’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, might take positions in Gaza.

I don't see Israel and Egypt coming anywhere near this. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is widely unpopular, while support for Hamas has grown significantly since Israel's invasion. Abbas is a joke. PA rule in Gaza would be cosmetic. The real power would be Hamas, something Israel and Egypt will not accept. In the past, the United States might have had enough leverage to get the deal Abu Marzak suggests done, but no longer. The U.S., it appears to me, is not calling the shots but rather tagging along. The Saudis are driving events in the Middle East. This means Hamas gets nothing. So we're looking at a situation where Hamas will have to accept a return to the status quo ante, the blockade, or it will have to start sending rockets into Israel again. Not a very palatable choice.

Matthew Rosenberg and Helene Cooper have a useful postmortem, "U.S. General Is Killed in Attack at Afghan Base; Others Injured," of the green-on-blue attack at the Marshal Fahim National Defense University in Kabul that killed U.S. Army Major General Harold Greene who "had been dispatched to Afghanistan to help the Afghan military address one of its most potentially debilitating weaknesses: an inability to manage soldiers and weaponry."

The story by Rosenberg and Cooper provides a reminder to anyone who is paying attention of why U.S. involvement in Afghanistan will end in failure. Any vestigial U.S. force that remains in the country, assuming that the deal Kerry struck for a recount and power-sharing government between the Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah camps holds (and that is highly unlikely), will be there as a training force. But how can you train people if you hunkered down in your bases for fear of your life?

Yet the shooting was a blunt reminder that discipline and vetting remain a challenge, and rogue Afghan soldiers and policemen remain a threat, despite a sharp drop in insider attacks since 2012, when the violence peaked and dozens of coalition service members were killed by Afghan counterparts. 

With foreign troops having largely ceded their front-line role to Afghan forces in the past two years, training and advising Afghans is one of the few crucial roles still played here by the coalition. American soldiers largely stay out of the Taliban’s line of fire, but they must still maintain close contact with Afghan soldiers and policemen. Foreign forces have few options for protecting themselves, short of cutting off contact with the Afghans. 

But that would make the training mission impossible, as General Greene, 55, most likely knew.

*** 

The attack occurred around noon and sent shock waves through the coalition command and Afghanistan’s defense establishment, bringing nearly all other work to a halt. In the immediate aftermath, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the commander of coalition forces, ordered all foreign advisers and trainers out of Afghan government ministries and back to their bases.

The Caliphate Grows, as Does the Case Against Kiev in the Downing of MH17

Islamic State was on the march over the weekend. The jihadis routed the vaunted pesh merga in three Iraqi cities north of Mosul: Zumar, Wana and Sinjar. Tim Arango reports from Baghdad in "Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam" that

In a statement, ISIS boasted of conquering “more important areas which were controlled by the pesh merga and the secular militias.” With the new territory, which the group described as “the border triangle of Iraq, Syria and Turkey,” ISIS strengthened its hold on territory that traverses the frontiers of Iraq and Syria, giving it an even greater ability to move fighters and weapons between the front lines of the civil wars in both countries. 

According to security officials and residents in the area, the Kurdish forces were routed from Zumar, a town on the road from the Syrian border that also sits on oil fields, and then Sinjar. Sinjar, an isolated city in northwestern Iraq, has been home to a sizable community of Yazidis, Kurdish speakers who ascribe to a religion that combines elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions and who are considered apostates by Muslim extremists. 

Later on Sunday, the militants captured Wana, a strategic town near the Tigris River — putting them within striking distance of the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest and an important supplier of electricity and water. The dam is on the Tigris River about 30 miles northwest of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which fell to ISIS on June 10. 

Yazidi residents of Sinjar, who were reached by phone, were terrified. They told of kidnappings and executions of members of their sect. One resident, Sami Hassan, said he was at work at a hospital on Sunday when an injured ISIS fighter arrived and demanded to know the sect to which Mr. Hassan belonged.

Mr. Hassan said he had escaped from a window while being shot at. 

Another local, Khudhur Rasho, said he had seen two Yazidi men executed and the members of 10 families, their hands bound behind their back, being led away by militants. 

A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said Sunday that ISIS posed “a dire threat to all Iraqis, the entire region and the international community” and that the United States would continue to seek ways to support the Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish pesh merga. 

The seizing of the three towns in a triangle that stretches north and west from Mosul to the borders of Syria and Turkey allowed the extremists to expand their territory, but the capture of the Mosul Dam would be a bigger prize, and could give the militants the ability to unleash a deadly flood on large populations.

Also over the weekend, Islamic State, operating with Nusra and Free Syrian Army fighters, took the Lebanese border town of Arsal. Hwaida Saad reports in "Fighters From Syria Kill 10 Lebanese Soldiers in Battle Over Border Town" that

Islamist fighters from Syria killed 10 Lebanese soldiers and appeared to have captured more than a dozen others in an armed offensive that left them in a tense battle for control of a Lebanese border town, Lebanon’s army chief said Sunday. 

The new toll was reported one day after fighters from Syria — who included members of rebel brigades, an affiliate of Al Qaeda and the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — carried out a series of attacks on army checkpoints that left them largely in control of the town of Arsal. 

The two-day clash was the most recent spillover into Lebanon from the civil war in neighboring Syria. The two countries share a complex web of political and sectarian ties that have made the violence in Syria resonate in its smaller neighbor, where street clashes, car bombs and political deadlock related to the war in Syria have been common.

Residents, aid workers and Syrian rebels reached in Arsal on Sunday said that insurgents had seized the town but that it was surrounded by the Lebanese Army, which was shelling it.

The weekend gains by Islamic State represent acute problems for U.S. policy in the region. First, while publicly opposed to IS, as the Jan Psaki quote in the Arango story makes clear, the United States has actual done nothing to stem the caliphate's growth. In fact, overwhelming, the Obama administration's reaction to the Salafis military advance on June 10, which led to the capture of Mosul, has been to blame Iraq's Shiite prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. Now that IS has turned its aggression on the Kurds, trusted American allies, and the Kurds are crying out for military assistance, it is going to be interesting to see how the U.S. manages its allegiance to both the House of Saud, the main benefactor of Islamic State, and Kurdistan, where the United States is expanding a drone facility at Erbil.

Patrick Cockburn, who has a new book out on Islamic State, had a piece over the weekend on the Counterpunch web site that is quite bullish on the prospects of continued success for the caliphate. He sees IS as shrewd and disciplined, consolidating its territorial gains while always on the look-out to pluck low-hanging fruit. Cockburn does not have many good things to say about the Shia leadership of Iraq. He predicts a jihadi encirclement and prolonged siege of Baghdad. Things are going to go from bad to worse.

The attack on Lebanon, no favorite of the U.S. because of Hezbollah, represents trouble for Obama due to the presence of Free Syrian Army fighters among the jihadis. The FSA, presumably, remains the United States principal Syrian ally in the battle against the Assad government. Getting the FSA weapons, training and hundreds of millions of dollars is going to be difficult if it is operating in open alliance with, as State Department spokeswoman Psaki says, “a dire threat to all Iraqis, the entire region and the international community.”

So the difficulties mount for Team Obama. The presidential recount that Kerry negotiated in Afghanistan is tottering. Carlotta Gall reports in "Disputes Threaten to Derail Audit of Afghanistan Vote" that an argument between the Adbullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani camps as to what counts as an invalidated ballot brought the recount to a halt over the weekend, necessitating direct intervention by the U.S. State Departmant. The Abdullah camp revealed tape of a telephone conversation which seems to show that there was a criminal conspiracy by the Karzai government and international community to swing the runoff to Ghani:

Also on Sunday, Mr. Abdullah’s campaign manager released an audiotape on which he said Vice President Karim Khalili could be heard directing his followers to support Mr. Ghani in the runoff. An aide to Mr. Khalili has denounced the tape as fake, according to the independent television news channel Tolo TV. 

In the tape the speaker, who sounded like Mr. Khalili but had not been independently verified as such, said that the international community, the election commission and the president all supported Mr. Ghani for president. He even suggested that Afghanistan’s allies would tolerate the use of any means to achieve such a result. 

“Our international friends have promised us that by using any means and using any opportunity, the election outcome must turn in favor of this team, even if these opportunities, even if these means are against electoral mechanisms,” the voice said.

Mr. Abdullah’s campaign manager, Baryalai Arsalai, said the tape proved that the election fraud had been planned to return a victory for Mr. Ghani. 

“This evidence was released today to inform our countrymen that our president, other government elders and the so-called election commission are instruments,” Mr. Arsalai said. The election was a public process, he said, calling it the right of the Afghan people, not the president or the commission chief. “We have a responsibility to let people know that their rights are being violated,” he said.  

Mr. Arsalai vouched for the tape’s authenticity and said details proving that would be released later.

Afghanistan is not going to make it. Thus, with Lebanese territory now under jihadi control and the Taliban soon to be back in power, the caliphate rises, from the Mediterranean to the Durand Line.

Before signing off for the day, it is worth mentioning that the U.S. control of the MH17 narrative is slipping fast. Two good articles over the weekend -- Mike Whitney's "The Unanswered Questions of MH17" and Robert Parry's "Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts" -- marshal the evidence and clarify the events since July 17, and everything points to the Kiev junta. The arguments that Whitney and Parry present are compelling. There is even a possibility that their line of thinking will find its way to the mainstream.

Europe to End Arms Embargo on Syria + Wars Spreads in Lebanon

This morning Steven Erlanger has a good summary, "Europe Seeks to Press Russia and Syria on Arms," of the ongoing diplomatic struggles in the Syrian civil war. Earlier in the week, the EU, due to British and French insistence, lifted the arms embargo on Syria:

Britain and France were the prime movers in strong-arming other European Union countries to let the arms embargo on Syria lapse, while other of the union’s sanctions, aimed more specifically at the Assad government, were renewed. 

Part of the debate in a long meeting was to promise that neither Britain nor France would begin to deliver any arms, if they chose to do so, until the beginning of August, to allow the Geneva peace process to get traction, the officials explained.

The lifting of the arms embargo is widely interpreted as a Western ploy to gain leverage prior to the peace conference being planned to take place in Geneva in June. As Colum Lynch points out in his Turtle Bay blog that appears on Foreign Policy's web site:

But the decision to end the embargo in two months hasn't resulted in any immediate calls or plans for arming the opposition. Instead, Russia cited the decision today in defending its own move to deliver S-300 air defense missiles, claiming it would deter foreign intervention. "We consider that such steps will restrain some hotheads from the possibility of giving this conflict, or from considering a scenario that would give this conflict, an international character with the participation of external forces," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters, according to Interfax news agency. 

Jean Marie Guéhenno, a former French official and under secretary-general for peacekeeping who served as a top advisor to former U.N.-Arab League Syria envoy Kofi Annan, said that the decision to block the maintenance of the European arms embargo has merely provided political cover to Russia and other regime supporters to continue its arms sales. Meanwhile, there's little fresh hope that Western powers will enter the conflict on behalf of the rebels. 

"I think it backfired and exposed the weakness of the West, in general," Guéhenno told Turtle Bay. "This issue of arming or not arming is more a bluff than anything else. It's more about doing something to show you're doing something than actually doing something. It will be seen by the Russians, who are not fools, as a sign of weakness rather than strength."

The Israelis are making thinly-veiled threats of additional bombing runs should Russia make delivery of the S-300s.

Meanwhile on the ground the war spreads. There were more rockets launched on Tuesday against the pro-Hezbollah village of Hermel on the Lebanese border. The source of the rockets was likely the Lebanese town of Arsal, which is mainly Sunni. Arsal was also the source of a border checkpoint attack that left three Lebanese soldiers dead. This from today's story, "Rocket and Gun Attacks Add to Fears That Syria’s Strife Is Reaching Lebanon," by Anne Barnard and Hania Mourtada:

Arsal, which is near a porous border that has been used as a conduit for weapons, has in recent months become a hub for Syrian rebels and their supporters, as well as a temporary home for thousands of Syrian refugees. The clash Tuesday was the second in the area this year. In February, gunmen ambushed a Lebanese Army convoy near the town, killing a captain and a sergeant.

General Salim Idris, the head of the West's confected Free Syrian Army, threatened Lebanese president Michel Suleiman with more attacks inside his country if Hezbollah was not prevented from crossing into Syria. This wanton, profligate bellicosity -- you're either with us or against us -- is thoroughly Western. There should be no doubt, and I don't think there is among those who are paying attention, who is responsible for the increase in suffering as the war widens from a civil conflict to a regional conflagration.