Why Isn’t Qatar Named as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

On Saturday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis visited the Gulf emirate of Qatar, home to a large and sophisticated American air base crucial for U.S. operations in the Middle East. Jonathan Schanzer hopes that Mattis exerted pressure on Qatar to crack down on the terrorist financiers who operate in its borders with impunity. And, serious as this problem is, it is not the only one:

Qatar harbors the bad guys, too. In 2015, two senior Taliban officials traveled in and out of Qatar to meet members of the notorious Taliban Five—high-level prisoners from Guantanamo Bay who were traded to Qatari custody by the Obama administration for the American prisoner Bowe Bergdahl. The Qataris facilitated the swap through the Taliban embassy they helped set up in Doha. Leaked cables show U.S. officials have long worried about how the Taliban and others may “exploit Qatar as a fundraising locale.”

There is also the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which enjoys safe haven in Qatar and also raises plenty of cash. Outgoing leader Khaled Meshal has long operated out of Doha. The Hamas military official Saleh Arouri—suspected of masterminding the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, sparking the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel—is [also] now reportedly in Qatar after being booted from Turkey. . . .

Despite all this, officials in Washington often turn a blind eye. . . . Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama punished the Qataris for terrorism finance. Indeed, Qatar should have been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department. It never was.

Read more at New York Post

More about: Al Qaeda, Hamas, Politics & Current Affairs, Taliban, U.S. Foreign policy, War on Terror

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF