U.S. General Keith Dayton, who is one of the key American officials overseeing the training operations of Palestinian security forces, visiting the Muqata in Ramallah, Palestine during December of 2007.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently published a lengthy
justification of President Bush’s foreign policy in the American political
journal Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations. The
article devoted significant space to U.S.
policy in the Middle East, and on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically. Sec. Rice writes there that while
the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections of 2006
“most certainly complicated affairs in the broader Middle East,” it also
“helped to clarify matters” by showing Hamas to be a “violent movement” rather
than a “responsible regime.” The Bush administration, she said, believes that “Palestinians
will not achieve the better life they deserve in a state of their own until
there is a Palestinian government capable of exercising its sovereign
responsibilities, both to its citizens and to its neighbors.”
In recent years, the U.S. and other Western countries have become deeply
involved in training the Palestinian security forces, a process that has taken
place with little fanfare or scrutiny. An interview published in Ha’aretz
last weekend with U.S. Army Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, one of the key American
officials overseeing the training operation, sheds light on the efforts, which
have received logistical support from Israel and have been blamed for
provoking civil war between Hamas and Fatah.
As U.S. Security Coordinator to the Palestinian Authority since November
2005, Gen. Dayton has worked to unify and reform the various Palestinian security
services that developed under Yasser Arafat’s tenure as leader of the PLO. Dayton makes it clear in
the interview that his other objective has been to develop a viable Palestinian
military counter to Hamas. He says of his role:
“I'm an American, I'm here to advance America's interests, but I'm also here because
of the relationship between your country [Israel] and mine. The U.S. wants me here to build Palestinian
capacity, because we believe that this will facilitate a Palestinian state,
what your government and [Ariel] Sharon
and others said they wanted to see here.
We're trying to build their capacity to govern themselves, in such a way
that their territory does not become a launch pad for attacks against Israel.”
Prior to his work with the PA, Dayton directed
the team responsible for finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, following the 2003 U.S. invasion. It is there, in Iraq, that he says he realized how sensitive and
important the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the region, when he saw
graffiti in an abandoned Iraqi army barracks depicting the Dome of the Rock
being strangled by a cobra representing Israel.
The first task that Sec. Rice gave Dayton
was to develop Mahmoud Abbas’s Presidential Guard in Gaza. But the Hamas election victory in 2006 and
a U.S. travel ban on
personnel entering Gaza
prevented him from training or equipping anyone. The U.S. Congress claimed fear
that any money that Dayton’s project received
would end up “falling into Hamas hands,” as the reason that they denied Dayton the $86 million he
requested. Despite this, Dayton
says in the interview that his team thought the Palestinian Presidential Guard
could still prevail in a battle with Hamas. The events of June 2007, however,
proved them wrong, as Hamas was able to rout Fatah forces and take control of Gaza after only one week
of fighting.
Unmentioned in the Ha’aretz article is the role that the U.S. and Dayton
himself may have played in instigating the Hamas takeover. According to a
lengthy exposé in Vanity
Fair earlier this year by David Rose, Dayton met for a series of talks in November
2006 with Mohammad Dahlan, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service
and a man whom President Bush reportedly described as “our guy.” Notes from the
meetings that Rose obtained indicate that Dayton
told Dahlan, “We need to reform the Palestinian security apparatus, but we also
need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.” Documents and
reporting by Rose show that the U.S.
government, led by Sec. Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott
Abrams, pressured Mahmoud Abbas as early as October 2006 to dissolve the Hamas-led
government and replace it with an emergency government that recognized Israel and
disavowed violence.
After Saudi Arabia helped
forge a unity government between Hamas and Fatah in early 2007, the U.S. government
rejected the move and put forward new plans to arm Fatah, using funds from Arab
allies. The goal, said an internal memo that Rose obtained, was to “deter”
Hamas and give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political
decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”
The plans were formalized in a memo titled “Action Plan for the Palestinian
Presidency,” which Rose summarizes:
“The drafts called for increasing the
‘level and capacity’ of 15,000 of Fatah’s existing security personnel while adding
4,700 troops in seven new ‘highly trained battalions on strong policing.’ The
plan also promised to arrange ‘specialized training abroad,’ in Jordan and Egypt, and pledged to ‘provide the
security personnel with the necessary equipment and arms to carry out their
missions.’“
A copy of the memo was leaked to Al-Wajd, a Jordanian daily
newspaper, on April 30, 2007, causing Hamas to conclude, according to its chief
spokesman, that “there was a plan, approved by America, to destroy the
political choice,” meaning that arming Fatah was seen as a prelude to
dissolving the government and disarming Hamas. Thus, the Hamas coup, Rose
argues, was actually a pre-emptive strike against a secret Fatah coup. He
quotes John Bolton, a hawkish former member (and current critic) of the
administration, as saying of the Bush policy, “Having failed to heed the
warning not to hold the elections [for the Palestinian Legislative Council],
they tried to avoid the result through Dayton.”
Dayton has since shifted
his focus to the West Bank, and Congress has decided
to promise him funding through 2011, with $75 million budgeted this year. According
to Ha’aretz, the first of five battalions of the new Palestinian
National Security Forces (500 soldiers) has just finished a four-month training
course in Jordan and returned to the West Bank, and another 500 recruits have
been sent to be trained. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak personally
approved a request for Palestinian forces to be equipped with 200 bullet-proof
vests and 145 pick-up trucks. A Presidential Guard training facility is being
built near Jericho,
and a strategic-planning center has been established in the Interior Ministry
in Ramallah. Palestinian security crackdowns have taken place over the West Bank since last fall. The first test of the new
security forces took place in Jenin, where Dayton says that what was once the “Wild
West” has been transformed into a place where police are able to “walk the
beat” and “shops are open later.”
Despite the apparent success, Dayton
recently told a congressional delegation visiting Israel that he was “frustrated”
with the slow pace of progress on training security personnel. The Jewish
Telegraphic Agency also reported that “Dayton
is known to be unhappy with Israel
for not allowing equipment to reach the Palestinian Authority security force
and for continuing to usurp its duties through raids into areas ostensibly
under Palestinian security control.” In the Ha’aretz interview, however,
Dayton would only say that the success of his
efforts depends on his “ability to create what my government wants me to
create, but [also] on interaction between what I create and the IDF and the
government of Israel."
While recent human rights reports accuse both Hamas and Fatah of arbitrary
arrest and torturing detainees in the ongoing conflict between the two
factions, the security services under Dayton’s
tutelage, the Presidential Guard and the National Security Forces, have not
been implicated in any abuses. The primary culprits on the Palestinian
Authority side, said Human Rights Watch, are the Preventive Security Service
and the General Intelligence Service. There is still a perception, however,
that the joint security efforts directed by General Dayton are actually
intended to shut down Hamas altogether. The Palestinian security chief in Hebron wants the new
trainees to come to his city, if the Israelis will allow it. One of the nine Hamas
MPs from Hebron
was quoted by Reuters as saying in reply, "If the aim is law enforcement,
we are with it 100 percent. But if it is to eliminate the resistance or
factions opposed to the Palestinian Authority, we are against it.”
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