Hamas’ landslide victory in last week's Palestinian Aauthority (PA) elections is a disaster. [Counterterrorism Blog has a reactions roundup from last week, but all you really need to know is this: it's a disaster.]
And with Hamas’ democratic takeover of the PA government we now have Hamastan, a sharia-based radical Islamist country, closer to Europe and the US than ever before. Al Qaeda's been attempting to take over a country since losing Afghanistan. Their assassination attempts on Musharraf failed, and their attacks in Saudi Arabia intended to rally the mujahid backfired more or less. Bin Laden is probably stunned with joy to see a sympathetic government voted into office, and so close to Israel! If this isn't a gift from Allah...
Hamas is a radical Islamist group on par with the Taliban. The same funding sources that supported the Afghan and Pakistani madrassas that produced the Taliban are the same funding sources streaming into the PA for Hamas: it’s Gulf oil cash and western “charities.” The Taliban, however, we couldn’t control. Afghanistan was chaos for too long, and we probably didn’t expect those Stone Age goatherds to pull it off. With Hamas we have no such excuse. We’ve been watching the flow of money into this group since its inception in the late 1980s. We know who funds it; who runs it; we know the bank accounts; the ulema; their school curricula. And we’ve known where they stand since the very beginning. They haven’t kept that secret.
When I was an analyst I tried to avoid the sort of “tipping point” analysis typical in the IC and the news media. In “tipping point” analysis every bomb or political move becomes an earth-shattering event that will change the course of whatever forever. Quite frankly, most acts of terrorism (9/11 was an exception) have little if any impact on regional stability, let alone have any long-term, international influence.
However, this past week was a disaster. We’ve seen this before. When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, Western governments took a “wait and see” approach. The Clinton administration originally saw the Taliban as a possible influence against Iranian hegemony. They were an unknown commodity, an opportunity, not a threat according to this NY Times article (not available online) from September 28, 1996:
Reports from the Afghan capital suggested that the Islamic rebel group had consolidated control over the city after driving out the leaders of the Iranian-backed coalition government and executing former Afghan president Najibullah, the country's last Communist ruler. By U.S. estimates, the Taliban now controls the southern two-thirds of the country, with the remainder in the hands of Uzbek and Tajik ethnic groups.
The lightning offensive against Kabul is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Taliban, a secretive organization that began as a group of seminary students in Pakistan, to reunify the country on the basis of Islamic ideology. Widespread war-weariness and disgust with the ineffectiveness and corruption of the previous regime enabled the Taliban to enter Kabul just two weeks after seizing the city of Jalalabad.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Glyn Davies called on the new authorities in Kabul to "move quickly to restore order" and form a "representative interim government" to begin the process of reconciliation. He said that the United States could see "nothing objectionable" to the steps so far taken by the Taliban movement to impose Islamic law in the areas that it controls.
From the U.S. point of view, a Taliban-dominated government represents a preferable alternative in some ways to the faction-ridden coalition headed by President Baharunuddin Rabbani, which was unable to impose its authority on the entire country. American analysts describe the Taliban as "anti-modern" rather than "anti-Western," and note that it seems bent on restoring a traditional society in Afghanistan, rather than exporting an Islamic revolution.
At the same time, however, U.S. officials acknowledge that their knowledge of the Taliban is extremely limited. Practically nothing is known about the top Taliban leader, Mohammed Omar, a mullah who served as a low-level commander in the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan before attending religious school in Pakistan. Taliban officials refused to take part in a hearing on Afghanistan in July organized by Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.) and attended by representatives of all the other Afghan factions.
"These fellows are deeply religious and strongly anti-Soviet," said Brown, who has visited areas of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban and talked to lower-level Taliban leaders. "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a government in Afghanistan. The worrisome part is that we don't know a lot about their policies. We don't know what direction they will take the country."
There were even a few deluded leftist reporters who hoped that Taliban governance would moderate over time. The assumption was that outside influences and the pressure to run a country as diverse as Afghanistan would force them to join the international community. Like this from the Guardian, October 2, 1996 (not available online):
THE rope is still there, trailing limply from a traffic post. Bloodstains disfigure the kerbstones beneath it. But the body of Mohammed Najibullah, Afghanistan's former president, has been cut down, handed over to the leaders of his tribe, and buried.
As if to wipe away a little more of the shock of his execution, which was widely condemned around the world, the victorious Taliban movement sought yesterday to present a more moderate face.
"We won't export fundamentalism. We won't support terrorism and we want good relations with all countries in the world," Sher Mohammed Stanakzai told a press conference.
Described as deputy foreign minister in a government which has yet to be named, Mr Stanakzai is a 37-year-old graduate of Kabul University who became a field commander in the resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
With electricity supplies restored and the first commercial flight arriving yesterday at the reopened international airport, he promised foreign relief agencies that they were welcome to stay, and said the city was back to normal.
He also appeared to soften Taliban's harsh line on women, which has sent tremors of worry through Kabul, particularly among the estimated 30,000 war widows who are their families' only breadwinners.
At the weekend they were told they had to stay at home. But Mr Stanakzai said: "We're drawing up regulations under which women will be able to work and girls will go to school." He did not say when the rules would be ready.
AH, the delusions. The Taliban learned what all psychotic dictatorships learn quickly: talk about moderation, and it will quiet the “concerns” of the world community; eventually the people go away. Intimations of moderation become like cold hard cash to bribe the “world community” into accepting your rule. I have no doubt that Hamas will play this game, and purchase of few more useful idiots among the diplomatic and analytical communities. They already own the “world community.”
It doesn’t really matter. Hamas is the Taliban 2, better funded with closer ties to the West. And they’ll be responsible for a large-scale CONUS attack sooner than we may think. If Al Qaeda could plan and execute 9-11 from Afghanistan, just think about what Al Qaeda v 2.0 is going to be able to do from the safety of Bethlehem.
