The Post-Conflict Gaza Conundrum

February 20, senior officials from five Arab states will meet in Riyadh to discuss President Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” proposal, followed by an emergency Arab League summit in Egypt on March 4.

"On February 1, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, along with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, delivered a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejecting the administration’s Gaza proposal. “Deportation of Palestinians from their land [will] push the region towards more tension, conflict and instability,” they warned. The missive repeated the perennial demand for a two-state solution but offered no alternatives to Trump’s ideas, nor any tangible Arab role in addressing the immediate challenges posed in Gaza."

"Subsequently, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz suggested that Trump’s proposal was not a definitive U.S. commitment, but rather a starting point for discussion on Gaza’s future disposition. “The president is engaging with our key allies in the region and asking for their input,” he told CBS News on February 5, noting that Trump’s approach would spur “the entire region to come with their own solutions”."

"Tomorrow, officials from Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE will convene for a mini-summit in Riyadh; Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas may attend as well. The meeting will give them a chance to fine-tune Egypt’s purported Gaza plan before rolling it out at the Cairo summit on March 4 and eventually presenting it to the Trump administration."

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with Saudi Foreign Minister Feb.17/25, AP

 

In a counter to President Donald Trump's proposal to wholesale depopulate the Gaza Strip, with the United States prepared to take it over, Egypt is in the process, in conjunction with other members of the Arab League, of developing an alternate plan to rebuild Gaza. According to Egypt's state-operated Al-Ahram newspaper, the proposal calls for the establishment of "secure areas" within Gaza where Palestinians can live  temporarily, as Egyptian and international construction firms remove the territory's ruined infrastructure and rebuild it.

 

The plan has been shared in discussion with European diplomats, along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, according to both Western diplomats and two Egyptian officials. Discussions are also underway on how the reconstruction will be funded. An international conference on Gaza reconstruction may result, according to one of the Egyptian officials, along with an Arab diplomat. The total sum involved is unsurprisingly substantial, at a proposed $20 billion. The proposal remains in the early negotiating stage.

Central Gaza Strip, February 17/25    AP

These moves are in reflection of an international pushback over President Trump's call for the removal of the Gazan population of approximately two million Palestinians. According to Mr. Trump, the United States is prepared to take over the Gaza Strip, to rebuild it into a "Riviera of the Middle East". Palestinians, under his plan, will not be permitted to reenter the new Gaza. For their part, Palestinians have made it clear they have no intention of leaving Gaza, even as Egypt and Jordan have refused Mr. Trump's call for them to absorb the population of Gaza.

 

In Saudi Arabia on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the United States was interested in hearing alternative proposals. "If the Arab countries have a better plan, then that's great", he said. The proposal, according to Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper, is designed to "refute American President Trump's logic" and to counter "any other visions or plans that aim to change the geographic and demographic structure of Gaza Strip".  

An agreement on who will govern Gaza in the long term is one critical issue to be determined. The elimination of Hamas as a political or military force in the territory is top of the agenda for Israel, and for obvious reasons. Moreover, should there be consideration of Hamas returning to govern Gaza, international donors are hugely unlikely to contribute to any rebuilding of the Strip. And that would doubtless include both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic, who between them could handily proffer the funds for reconstruction.

 

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi attends the extended format meeting of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia on October 23, 2024. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/Pool via REUTERS

 

 

Afghanistan: What Went Wrong

"[The U.S. government was simply not equipped to undertake something this ambitious in such an uncompromising environment, no matter the budget."

"[Authorities] consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly." 

"Prioritized their own political preferences for what they wanted reconstruction to look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve."

"Billions of reconstruction dollars were wasted as projects went unused or fell into disrepair."

"Police advisors watched American TV shows to learn about policing, civil affairs teams were mass-produced via PowerPoint presentations and every agency experienced annual lobotomies as staff constantly rotated out, leaving successors to start from scratch and make similar mistakes all over again."

"[The result] could be described as twenty one-year reconstruction efforts, rather than one twenty-year effort."

Lessons Learned, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report 

Murals are seen along the walls at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. | Paula Bronstein /Getty Images

 

In 2008 the U.S. created the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Its purpose was to ensure that officials in Washington were kept informed and up-to-date on the progress of the U.S. administration's intention at rebuilding the country that had been invaded seven years earlier by a U.S./NATO-led group of Western allies whose original purpose was to capture the leader of the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, whom the ruling Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) refused to hand over to the U.S. 

Identified as the man responsible for planning and helping to carry out the audaciously threatening and ultimately violently destructive attack on the New York World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and an aborted attack on the U.S.Capitol, Osama bin Laden was an honoured guest of the Taliban and of the Pakistan Interagency Intelligence Service aligned with the Taliban. The invading forces quickly dispersed both al Qaeda and the governing Taliban to the mountains bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And the international alliance of foreign troops spent the next twenty years attempting to quell the ever-recurring guerrilla raids by the Taliban intent on returning to power, while the U.S. focused for the first ten years on capturing Islamist terrorists and confining them to a special prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While foreign diplomats and troops found themselves in Afghanistan a second purpose was worked out, to take the country from its theocratic primitive state into modernity, including gender equality and separation of church and state.

Building schools and medical clinics, educating Afghans on best governance practises, sending civil instructors in police action, prison practise, well digging, modernizing medical practices to permit women to be treated in once-men-only medical treatment centres, encouraging a free press, educating women to take their place in the workforce, persuading farmers to grow cash crops other than poppies, and instructing the Afghan military in modern warfare techniques and counter-measures to terrorism.

A Taliban fighter holds a machine gun in front of the main gate leading to the Afghan presidential palace on Monday in Kabul. The U.S. struggled to manage a chaotic evacuation after the Taliban rolled into the Afghan capital. Rahmat Gul/AP

These props were onerous to maintain while fighting an ongoing ferociously barbarian insurgency that just would not stop, that tested the efficacy of wildcat guerrilla techniques against the cumbersome weight of a traditional military apparatus. All the while the Taliban struck with suicide bombers, threatened farmers to grow poppies for the opium market, the proceeds going to fund the Taliban as they destroyed schools and health clinics and attacked foreign diplomatic missions and set IEDs to blow up foreign troops.

How efficient and effective were the Western powers in countering the Taliban, that the U.S. alone spent a whopping trillion of their treasury and lost well over two thousand American military personnel, other nations losing proportionately fewer military personnel, every one a rebuke to the West that it felt it would be capable of taming a primitive tribal compulsion to kill and terrorize to fulfill their intransigent view of force, guile and conquest. Rome's armoured phalanxes of seasoned legionnaires and siege machines in the end, failed against the savage hordes of uncivilized barbarians; an empire destroyed by its own ambition.

Taliban fighters patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

SIGAR has been diligently over the years churning out reports in great detail on the outcome of spending hundreds of billions in Afghanistan -- to determine whether effort and the effect was succeeding in taming the unruly culture that historically relied on warlords to respect each others' territory, and corruption was endemic, common to each and every fraction of societal culture. The agency seemed well aware right off that the huge mission was awry, reflecting quarterly report conclusions.

The agency scrutinized public statements and dispatches from people in  Afghanistan that appeared to be ignored by the Washington administrative elite. The SIGAR output in annual updates emphasized that the great creaking machinery at work by the West in Afghanistan was failing to achieve any of its grand state-re-making drives to turn Afghanistan in an eastern version of a western democracy. In 2015 the $83 billion spent on turning the Afghan National Security Forces into a professional fighting force concluded with no data on training, recruitment or equipment.

Strangely, the report discovered $135 million to have vanished though its purpose was for rebuilding projects that had also suddenly vanished. The final report, "Lessons Learned" was released the very day that the Taliban entered Kabul and the government fell as its prime minister fled the country. The report outlined that those projcts that did see completion failed to be of use and quickly fell into disrepair. Afghans appeared not to have been consulted or included on projects they knew nothing of where the success of a project was weighed by whether its budget was fully spent.

 

Neither the State Department nor the Department of Defence was fully engaged in oversight, and neither had the resources and expertise for large-scale reconstruction missions with significant economic and governance components. "The U.S. government -- clumsily forced western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its disputes through informal meas and often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls."

Repairing Syria : Redeeming Bashar al-Assad

"I remember people were telling us, 'Are you mad? You start planning for rebuilding now?' And my reaction was, 'It is already too late'."
"The economic damage is beyond calculation at the moment. There is no number on Earth that can be put on the loss [of] the historical, archaeological and cultural and also the business aspect of it."
Abdullah Al Dardari, deputy executive secretary, UN Economic and Social Commission, West Asia

"My heart burns every time I come to the market and see the destruction. I cry every day but there is nothing I can do."
"I informed the authorities two weeks ago [of bombs lying inside his destroyed shop] but so far they have not come to remove them."
Abdul-Qadir Homsi, shoe shop owner, Aleppo, Syria

"Any rushed reconstruction is dangerous and is likely to cut out the owners or the ex-residents as well."
AlHakam Shaa, 30, Aleppan refugee, Budapest, Hungary

In this Jan. 20, 2017 photo, Syrian children remove rubble in the once rebel-held Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood in eastern Aleppo, Syria. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

"We are not forgetting there is a war."
"But I can choose to sit under the ruins and ashes or I can choose to climb on top of the mountain and scream as loud as I can: ‘I want to rebuild'."
Luna Rajab, Damascus architect

Aleppo, that ancient city with its historical, cultural, religious and social heritage survived for thousands of years until its president reduced it to bitter rubble, claiming sanctimoniously that he had no other choice, since he was confronted by terrorism, and any government of any nation had the internationally recognized legal right to use all means at their disposal to defend the nation. In Bashar al-Assad's case he was defending his Shiite regime from the national Syrians who deplored his victimization of Sunni Syrians.

A general view shows the Old City of Aleppo as seen from the historic citadel in 2009    Reuters

Like the tribal tyrant that he and his father before him had been, he chose not to negotiate with the majority of Syrians chafing under a government that discriminated against them in a sectarian and hostile environment. He chose to label Syrian protests as terrorist threats and called out his military to destroy them and their homes, causing half the population to seek haven elsewhere. The international community and the United Nations overlooked their 'responsibility to protect' when a regime victimized its population.

In this Jan. 20, 2017 file photo, a resident walks amid the rubble in the once rebel-held Jalloum neighborhood of eastern Aleppo, Syria.  (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)

Thanks to the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran, invested in its Middle East hegemonic plan for a Shiite crescent to countermand the greater presence of Sunnis in the Middle East, and the later intervention of Moscow at a time when the Syrian opposition had gained the upper hand, the tide was reversed and although this murderous tyrant has been globally condemned for his barbaric war crimes against his people, he will remain in control of Syria to the gain of his supporting Alawite Shia minority and the detriment of Syrian Sunnis.

Despite that millions of Syrians have been displaced internally, millions more have become refugees, flooding Europe with their desperation to find haven and reconstruct their shattered lives, leaving behind the memory of countless extended family members killed by al-Assad's chemical weapons attacks, his barrel bombs, his artillery fire, his bloody massacres that have taken a half-million Syrian lives over the past six years of civil war. It has been a barbaric sectarian conflict, with Hezbollah, Iran's proxy terror group from Lebanon, and Iran's own al Quds Republican Guard Corps adding to the slaughter.

With no 'peace plan' in the near future to ensure an end to the bloodbath, the government of President Bashar al-Assad awaits the investment aid of developed nations of the world in re-building what he has willfully and with malice aforethought destroyed. Despite that under American, European and Arab sanctions no aid would be forthcoming. Whether Iran, whose economic fortunes were restored with the lifting of sanctions and restoration of billions by the United States with the signing of the infamous nuclear agreement would deign to finance reconstruction is questionable.

Russia, whose economic decline resulting from a low in gas prices and the effect of sanctions reflecting its support for ethnic Russian separatist forces in Ukraine as well as its illegal Crimean theft is unlikely to offer financial support to reconstruct what its own warplanes destroyed in bombing Aleppo as well as other areas of Syria under rebel control. Vladimir Putin's aerial display of non-recognition of hospitals, choosing to deliberately bomb them rather than allow medical staff to tend to the wounded in East Aleppo speaks volumes about Russian responsibility.

Neither Russia nor Iran balked at spending immense sums of treasury to prosecute Assad's war against his citizens, and nor did they think twice about destroying the historical, world-renowned sites of ancient heritage, let alone the homes and shops, the farms and factories, the schools and social centres that reflect a civilized country, but these architects of destruction will most certainly urge Syria to look after its own interests in repairing what has been destroyed beyond repair.

The displaced Syrians have nowhere to return to, when what they fled was the assurance that if they remained they would forfeit their lives as surely as their livelihoods had been forfeited because they practised the wrong sect of a shared religion. Should the Syrian regime be in full control of rebuilding, using international funds to reconstruct what it had destroyed, it would be to the deliberately planned advantage of Syrian Alawites; no Sunni Syrians need apply, unless by chance they agree to return to their disadvantaged, subordinate positions of fore.

The United Nations will step up to the plate. The same world body that is dedicated to world peace, stability and the unity of nations in respecting human rights for all. And which failed spectacularly to engineer a change in regime, and in so failing aided the regime in place in its unwavering intent to destroy what it could not control. According to Mr. Al Dardari representing the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, war damages across Syria rings in at $350-billion, taking into account physical wreckage and loss of economic potential.

The Old City of Aleppo as it now appears as a casualty of the six-year civil war   Reuters

It would take an estimated $52-billion to reconstruct Aleppo alone and reputedly others bringing in their estimates double that figure. Between west and east Aleppo, it was the east which housed Sunni Syrians that realized the brunt of the destruction. Residents in the west were protected by the regime since they were majority Shiite Syrians. And it was the east of the city that came under government artillery bombardment, airstrikes and barrel bombs released by helicopters hovering overhead. The 1.5 million people who populated eastern Aleppo are elsewhere now, the city deserted in its ruination.

According to UNESCO, the Old Quarters located in east Aleppo is 30 percent destroyed, while 60 percent is merely damaged. The 11th Century Umayyad Mosque and historic bazaar were heavily damaged. The government headed by the bloody tyrant speaks of its intention to restore industries and businesses at an estimated cost of a half-billion dollars. It is unknown where the funding will come from to begin reconstruction on a scale "that is going to bring 12 million displaced people back to their homes", according to a Syrian urban planner.

A general view shows Syrian pro-government forces walking in the ancient Umayyad mosque in the old city of Aleppo on December 13, 2016, after they captured the area. (AFP)