Since 2006, American policy has been to support the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) with money and equipment in the hope that doing so will give it the capability to restrain, and perhaps forcibly to disarm, Hizballah. But, argues Tony Badran, the Lebanese will never do anything of the sort so long as Hizballah controls the government in Beirut:

Western intelligence sources have revealed that in July and August Iran used a civilian airliner to fly arms to Hizballah directly through the Beirut International Airport. That would be right after the United States completed the delivery of light attack aircraft to the LAF in June, and right before a high-ranking [U.S military] delegation visited Lebanon in mid-August. On both occasions, American officials praised the LAF as the “defender of Lebanon’s borders.” . . . The key to solving the “Hizballah problem,” according to this line of thinking, was to assist the Lebanese state to exert control over all its territory.

This same reasoning is evident in [annual] State Department reports on terrorism, which have classified Lebanon as a “terrorist safe haven.” The U.S. government defines terrorist safe havens as ungoverned or poorly governed areas where the absence of state control allows terrorists to organize and to move about freely. Hence, in the 2015 and 2016 reports, the State Department declared that the Lebanese government “did not have complete control of all regions of the country, or fully control its borders with Syria and Israel.” . . .

But the issue in question is not a remote border region where government authority is lacking—especially since the LAF has been deployed to the south since 2006, and in recent years it has completed its deployment to the eastern border with Syria. None of this has meant anything for Hizballah’s ability to operate freely. If anything, the LAF has protected and facilitated it. . . .

Take, for example, this data point: . . . over the course of more than a decade, [the UN] has referred over 10,500 suspicious vessels to the Lebanese navy for inspection. How many vessels, out of 10,500, did the LAF find to be carrying arms? Zero. In other words, the LAF is . . . actively facilitating Hizballah’s armament. The U.S., meanwhile, foots the bill, and soaks the LAF in praise. . . . The LAF will never take action to prevent Hizballah’s arms smuggling, because it will never be asked to by the Lebanese government.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.