Qatar has helped the Taliban seem legitimate to the rest of the world and may try to do the same with Hamas.
SETH J. FRANTZMAN
SEPTEMBER 5, 2021 13:41
One of the major surprises of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was the speed with which the Taliban conquered the country and the degree to which the Taliban, previously seen as an extremist terrorist group, received some international legitimacy.
Anyone watching closely shouldn’t have been surprised. The Taliban had been hosted by Qatar in Doha where the US had already legitimized them through talks. They had sent high-level delegations to China, Russia, Iran and other countries and had long-term backing from Pakistan. This model, whereby an extremist group takes power easily, might be one that backers of the Taliban want to replay among Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Afghan model for turning an extremist group into a ruling party that unifies a chaotic state is worth examining, because Hamas has spent years trying to present itself as more legitimate and “moderate” through its backers in places like Doha, Ankara and Tehran.
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Hamas was once known for suicide bus bombings and then graduated to using missiles and rockets to target all of Israel. This would usually make a group appear unpalatable to the international community, and Hamas was mostly sidelined after the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006. In June 2007, Hamas brutally seized control of the Gaza Strip, where it had more support than in the West Bank. It threw rival Fatah members off buildings and put in place a Taliban-like religious, thuggish rule.
Over time, however, Hamas began to try to present itself as a group that Israel and others could deal with. Qatar was key to this, especially via funding to rebuild Gaza after each round of conflict, from 2009 to 2012 and 2014. In October 2012 the then Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, came to Gaza with a pledge of $400 million for support. He was the first head of state to make such a visit.
Hamas leaders have also gone on globetrotting trips, much like the Taliban, before they came to power. In June, Ismail Haniyeh went to Lebanon, Mauritania and Morocco. Hamas leaders also met Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in December 2019 and in August 2020. Haniyeh also went to Malaysia in January 2020, during his globetrotting. He went to Moscow in March 2021 and communicated to the Russians in May 2021 that Hamas was ready for a ceasefire with Israel amid fighting.
It’s important to note that Hamas has backing from Turkey and Iran and that it also enjoys good relations with Qatar and countries like Malaysia, Russia and others. Qatar has been a key funder of Gaza. Over the last few years, this cash for Gaza has been approved by Israel, which has increasingly seen Qatar as a key go-between with Hamas and a stabilizing force. We must bear in mind that back in 2018, Hamas, which had appeared isolated and cut off from the world, and which wasn’t able to use rockets or tunnels to harm Israel, launched the Great March of Return. After that, it mobilized arsonists to use incendiary balloons against Israel.
Qatar’s $50 million transfers of funds in 2020 ostensibly helped buy quiet in Gaza and in January, Qatar promised $360 million. Via the UN, a new method was designed to move the funds to some 100,000 poorer families in Gaza, through a method that is supposed to prevent Hamas using the money to fund terror.
What matters here is not just the Qatari cash but also Israel’s signaling in recent months that Qatar is an important partner in the work being done with Gaza.
Qatar has done the same thing with Hamas that it did with the Taliban in discussions with the US. Qatar presents itself as a meeting place, a neutral party, where it can serve as a conduit for discussions with extremist groups. At the same time, it works with countries that tend to support the groups. The government is sidelined.
In Afghanistan’s case, it was the government in Kabul and in Gaza’s case, it is the Palestinian Authority that is sidelined. With each international trip, Hamas is treated as the government of the Palestinians and Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah and the PA are sidelined. This is a zero-sum game in a sense. Each meeting Hamas gets internationally is one that must be weighed against support for the PA.
Qatar has become expert at threading this needle. It portrays itself as merely hosting groups and enabling conversations but it also has its foot on the scales and its weight was behind the Taliban, and is behind Hamas. Yet it also gets plaudits and congratulations for its role in Afghanistan in serving as a conduit for evacuating Afghans fleeing the same Taliban that Qatar hosted and legitimized. Qatar was a midwife in a sense to the new Taliban government. The US enabled this through the Trump administration’s discussion and subsequently the Biden administration’s decisions.
The question now is whether a similar process may play out with Hamas and the West Bank. Abbas has eschewed elections since 2006 because of the fear that Hamas will seek to take over Ramallah. There have been discussions about a unity government, often brokered by Cairo. But Hamas has proven recalcitrant to enable any PA role in Gaza or allow rival groups like Fatah to hold rallies. Meanwhile, the PA has cracked down on dissent. Hamas used the uptick in violence in May to push for a war with Israel, which it launched on May 10. It launched the war with Iran’s backing and did so to get more popularity in the West Bank. The PA had postponed elections on April 29. It’s not a coincidence Hamas launched a war against Israel ten days later.
The Trump administration sidelined the Afghan government in favor of talks with Hamas in Doha. It also sidelined the Palestinian Authority and, despite early close work with the Jordanians, stopped listening to the advice of Amman. This came as the administration pushed for the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem and later for the Abraham Accords. The problem here was that the PA appeared weakened and far-right voices argued that the PA and Jordan could be ignored entirely. This had the result of strengthening Hamas. Back in 2006, the US had increased its support for the Palestinian Security Forces via the USSC. Termed “Dayton’s army” after US General Keith Dayton.
This is an aside, but Dayton was brought in to improve the PA security forces and in essence to stabilize the PA so Hamas couldn’t take over by force. He was successful. He had come from European Command whereas his successor in 2010, Michael Moeller came via Central Command, of which Israel is now a part. The US dialed back this support for the Palestinian security forces during the Trump administration.
One could see this as part of the broader US agenda of dialing back support for various train and equip programs, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria and the PA and what this means is that the Palestinians are linked in a way to what happened in Afghanistan. First of all, Qatar is involved in both places. In addition, Hamas and groups like it have celebrated the Taliban victory.
Hamas has worked at times not just to sideline the PA but also to enable Israel to strike at groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a small group backed by Iran that Israel fought a short conflict with in 2019. One might compare that with how the Taliban solidified control and created special units like the “Red Units” that even fought ISIS. When the Taliban rolled into Kabul last month it appeared to have special forces kitted out with proper uniforms, night vision, M-16s and all the trappings of a modern army. Someone helped fund, train and equip the Taliban.
How the Taliban engineered their victory through attrition and international support may represent the Hamas strategy as well. Could Hamas hope that one day Qatar and other countries will broker a deal with the US and the West, and dangle a carrot in front of Israel to enable Hamas or a version of it, to waltz into the West Bank and into the halls of power in Ramallah? How might that occur?
Qatar and others might be laying the groundwork in the West Bank for the day after Abbas, a collapse of governing authority, protests and then the emergence of pro-Hamas or openly Hamas members, to suddenly take control. It could happen quickly if the security forces in the West Bank might be convinced to accept this rather than a battle. It’s not entirely clear how this could transpire, but the methodology has been seen in Afghanistan where what appeared to be governing authorities melted overnight and fled, and were easily replaced without chaos. Local governors and others accepted the new normal.
Countries that didn’t back the Taliban found themselves suddenly shut out from Kabul. This has implications for those countries that prefer the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. Those may include Jordan but also Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states and Egypt. However, there are different angles here because there are Palestinians close to Muhammad Dahlan who are critical of the recent Abbas meeting with Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
Dahlan has been based in the United Arab Emirates, which is a peace partner of Israel since the Abraham Accords last year. Until recently, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as Bahrain, were involved in the Gulf crisis with Qatar and they tend to be on opposing ends of the spectrum when it comes to various groups in the region. Whereas Qatar has preferred groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, the UAE and its friends have preferred more moderate groups.
The Palestinians fit into this puzzle because any contest for power in Ramallah inevitably will revolve around not just Fatah and Abbas, but other players, including those that Hamas will want to forward and those that Dahlan and others will prefer. At the moment, the goings-on in Ramallah are not center stage, rather the Qatari transfers of cash to Gaza are being worked out. But some might wonder, what about the needs of the West Bank. Has Hamas shown, through its conflict in May with Israel, that it is the “resistance” and if so, who might try to benefit from that to increase Hamas standing in the West Bank?
After Afghanistan, the lesson is that anything is possible, and still waters run deep, more maneuvering might be going on behind the scenes than is apparent.
Content retrieved from: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/will-qatar-use-an-afghan-model-for-hamas-in-west-bank-analysis-678745.
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