[Senate Prints 109-74]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
109th Congress S. Prt.
COMMITTEE PRINT
2d Session 109-74
_______________________________________________________________________
LEBANON: ASSESSING THE CEASE-
FIRE AND PROGRESS ON STABILIZATION
AND RECONSTRUCTION
__________
STAFF TRIP REPORT
TO THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
One Hundred Ninth Congress
Second Session
December 15, 2006
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
31-564 WASHINGTON : 2006
_____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana, Chairman
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware
LINCOLN CHAFEE, Rhode Island PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland
GEORGE ALLEN, Virginia CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin
LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee BARBARA BOXER, California
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire BILL NELSON, Florida
LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska BARACK OBAMA, Illinois
MEL MARTINEZ, Florida
Kenneth A. Myers, Jr., Staff Director
Antony J. Blinken, Democratic Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Letter of Transmittal............................................ v
Political Context................................................ 1
Fragile Cease-fire Holding....................................... 1
Slowly Rebuilding Lebanon........................................ 3
Humanitarian Phase........................................... 3
Reconstruction Phase......................................... 4
The Problem of Cluster Bombs................................. 5
Extending the Government's Reach................................. 5
What Next? Recommendations....................................... 6
(iii)
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
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United States Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC, December 15, 2006.
Dear colleagues: The committee sent Mr. Christopher Stevens
of the professional staff to Beirut, Damascus, Tel Aviv, and
Jerusalem in the fall of 2006 to assess the status of the
cease-fire between Israel and Hizballah and evaluate the
effectiveness of international and Lebanese efforts to help
affected civilians and re-build damaged infrastructure.
There is some good news. The cease-fire has continued to
hold, Israeli forces have withdrawn from Lebanon, and the
Lebanese army and U.N. peace-keeping forces have deployed to
the areas in the south long controlled by Hizballah. In
cooperation with the Lebanese government, international donors,
including the United States, have directed hundreds of millions
of dollars in relief and reconstruction assistance to Lebanon.
On the other hand, other aspects of the cease-fire agreement,
codified in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701,
are not being fully implemented.
As this report went to publication, the Lebanese government
faced a serious challenge from Hizballah, which demanded a
greater role in the cabinet for itself and its allies, on the
basis of their representation of the large Shi'ite population.
This report points to the need for continuing U.S. diplomatic
engagement with relevant parties inside and outside Lebanon,
both to help the government reach an accommodation that will
give it broad support, and to avert civil strife that could
lead to another conflict with Israel.
The report also recommends substantially increasing U.S.
security and economic assistance to the Lebanese government.
Finally, echoing the views of U.S. regional allies and the
Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, it proposes a renewed effort
to forge peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors in order
to bring stability to the region and reduce strong anti-U.S.
and anti-Israeli sentiment among Arabs and Muslims.
I hope you will find this report helpful.
Sincerely,
Richard G. Lugar,
Chairman.
LEBANON: ASSESSING THE CEASE-FIRE AND PROGRESS ON STABILIZATION AND
RECONSTRUCTION
----------
From October 31 to November 9, 2006, a member of the
professional staff of the United States Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations traveled to Beirut, Damascus, Tel Aviv, and
Jerusalem to assess the status of the cease-fire between
Hizballah and Israel and evaluate the effectiveness of
international and Lebanese efforts to help affected civilians
and re-build infrastructure damaged during the conflict. Staff
met with U.S. embassy officers, government officials, U.N.
officials, and local policy analysts, academics and
journalists.
Political Context
In mid-August, the government of Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora, backed by a U.N. Security Council resolution and the
United States, France, and Saudi Arabia, among others, moved to
secure the cease-fire between Israel and Hizballah by sending
its army to the south and providing humanitarian assistance to
the affected local population. Siniora was soon challenged by
Hizballah, whose leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to
topple his government unless he agreed to increase the number
of Hizballah-allied ministers in the cabinet.
Despite the political challenges posed by Hizballah, the
Siniora government achieved some early successes in carrying
out the terms of the cease-fire, reasserting the government's
authority in the south and channeling assistance to civilians.
On the other hand, it lacked the power to make progress in
important areas, such as freeing the Israeli soldiers held by
Hizballah or forcibly disarming Hizballah.
By late November, the political tensions in Lebanon had
risen even further, with the resignation of the remaining
Shi'ite members of the Siniora cabinet, and the assassination
by unknown gunmen of the Minister of Industry, a prominent
Christian. Nasrallah and his allies continued with their
threats to bring down the government, organizing mass
demonstrations outside the Prime Minister's office.
Fragile Cease-fire Holding
The August cease-fire between Hizballah and Israel, which
ended the conflict that began on July 12 when Hizballah
kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on the border, continues to hold
but remains fragile and dependent on the acquiescence of
Hizballah. According to the U.N. envoy charged with overseeing
implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 (August
11), which codified the cease-fire and spelled out other
obligations for Lebanon and Israel, there has been some
progress. Most important, the cessation of hostilities between
Hizballah and Israel has held. Israel withdrew all its forces
from south Lebanon while the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF),
supported by an enlarged U.N. peacekeeping force (UNIFIL),
deployed to the area for the first time in several decades. The
local population has largely welcomed the LAF and UNIFIL,
viewing them as a stabilizing force. Relations between the LAF/
UNIFIL and Hizballah, while tense, are reportedly correct;
Hizballah fighters have been instructed by their leadership not
to display their weapons in public and to stay away from the
border with Israel. UNIFIL and the LAF have reported seizing
some illegal weapons. The U.N. is mediating talks between
Hizballah and Israel over a prisoner exchange.
On the other hand, there has been no progress in disarming
Hizballah--a key requirement of Resolution 1701 and previous
resolutions. Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who in the
aftermath of the conflict enjoys immense popularity--his
photograph appears everywhere on billboards and bumperstickers
in Lebanon and Syria--has publicly vowed that his
``resistance'' fighters will never relinquish their arms.
Nasrallah points to continuing Israeli military overflights and
Israel's ``occupation'' of Sheba'a Farms--a small patch of
territory occupied by Israeli forces that Hizballah and the
Lebanese government claim is Lebanese territory but that the
U.N. considers to be part of Syria--as justification for
maintaining an armed militia. According to the U.N. envoy,
neither the LAF nor UNIFIL is prepared for a confrontation with
Hizballah over its weapons. In the short term, Hizballah has
kept its weapons out of public view, thus avoiding a
confrontation with UNIFIL or the LAF. Both the U.N. envoy and
the Lebanese government consider a political arrangement under
which Hizballah voluntarily gives up its arms or integrates its
fighters into the LAF as the only viable long-term solution.
Similarly, there has been little progress in policing
Lebanon's border with Syria. Israeli officials maintain that
Hizballah is re-arming itself in preparation for another
conflict by importing rockets and other weapons from Syria with
financial backing from Iran. The U.N. envoy did not dispute
this claim, but said that Israel had not provided the U.N. with
specific evidence of smuggling that would enable U.N. forces to
follow up. The LAF has deployed an additional 8,000 troops to
the border area, and claims to have intercepted some arms
shipments, but Israeli officials say that these efforts fall
short and that weapons smuggling continues on a large scale.
UNIFIL will not deploy to the border unless the Lebanese
government asks it to do so, as stipulated in Resolution 1701.
So far, the government has declined to make this request,
probably because it fears a negative reaction from Syria, which
has publicly warned that it would consider the positioning of
foreign troops along its border to be a hostile act. A number
of prominent Lebanese businessmen said that Syria has the
ability to cause serious economic harm to Lebanon by closing
the border, which it had done in the recent past.
Israeli air force jets and drones have continued to make
frequent overflights of Lebanese airspace, provoking protests
from the Lebanese government and Hizballah and private
admonitions from Washington and EU capitals. Israeli officials
contend that these overflights are necessary for intelligence-
collection purposes related to arms smuggling, but concede that
they are problematic politically (the U.N. considers such
overflights to be violations of Resolution 1701) and say that
they are considering less visible and provocative means for
collecting the required information. The U.N. envoy is working
with the Israeli and the Lebanese governments to address the
overflight and smuggling issues.
The envoy has also begun to address the Sheba'a Farms/
border demarcation issue, inviting U.N. cartographers to
Lebanon to inspect the disputed areas. Some Lebanese observers
contend that ``returning'' Sheba'a Farms to full Lebanese
sovereignty would remove Hizballah's justification for
maintaining an armed militia and facilitate the organization's
transformation into an unarmed political party. Others,
however, consider Hizballah's claim to Sheba'a Farms to be a
groundless pretext for perpetuating armed conflict with Israel,
and believe that Hizballah will find another pretext even if
Sheba'a Farms' fate is resolved to its satisfaction. This
skepticism is well-founded, as Hizballah officials in October
were already publicly pointing to the border village of Ghajjar
as another area worthy of liberation from Israeli occupation.
According to the United Nations, however, Ghajjar is actually
divided, with one-half of the village in Lebanon and the other
half inside the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Slowly Rebuilding Lebanon
The United Nations and other international aid
organizations divide the recovery and re-building tasks into
two stages--an early humanitarian phase, which for the most
part ended in October, and a longer-term reconstruction phase,
which is expected to last several years. An August fact-finding
mission to Lebanon led by Brookings Institution Vice President
Carlos Pascual assessed Lebanon's total post-conflict needs at
$5.1 billion: $600 million for humanitarian aid; $3.5 billion
for reconstruction; and $1 billion for budget support,
refinancing public debt, and restructuring the heavily
subsidized electricity sector.\1\ Donors meeting in Stockholm
in August pledged approximately $940 million; a follow-on
conference in Paris, focusing on economic reform, is scheduled
for January. The United States has so far pledged approximately
$250 million for humanitarian, reconstruction and security
assistance.\2\
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\1\ Testimony of Ambassador Carlos Pascual, Vice President and
Director of Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution, U.S.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, September 13, 2006.
\2\ Press briefing by Ambassador Randall Tobias, Director of U.S.
Foreign Assistance and USAID Administrator, November 16, 2006.
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Humanitarian Phase
International relief efforts in the early relief phase
focused on providing food, health, water sanitation, job
creation, oil spill clean-up, and unexploded ordnance removal.
The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA) coordinated donor activities with the Lebanese
government. In a positive sign, as of late October, 774,000
(out of one million) Lebanese who fled the south during the
conflict had returned to their villages.\3\
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\3\ U.S. Government Situation Report, Lebanon Humanitarian
Emergency, October 27, 2006.
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The USG contribution to the humanitarian phase was
approximately $100 million. Most of these funds have been spent
or are obligated, according to USAID staff in Beirut. To
coordinate USG assistance, the U.S. Ambassador in Beirut
established an interagency team, which was augmented by an
officer from the State Department's Office of Stabilization and
Reconstruction (S/CRS) and a six-person USAID Disaster
Assistance Response Team (DART). The DART worked effectively
with the U.N., the Lebanese government, and major U.S. NGOs to
identify the needs and direct assistance where it was required.
The S/CRS officer played an important role in coordinating the
Embassy team's activities with Washington offices.
Reconstruction Phase
The Lebanese government is coordinating international
assistance for reconstruction through the Prime Minister's
office. According to the Prime Minister's reconstruction
coordinator, Ghassan Taher, the principal tasks are re-building
damaged and destroyed homes, roads, bridges, schools, and other
public infrastructure. The cost of re-building homes alone will
be $1.5 billion, he said, and Arab Gulf states (Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Qatar) have pledged $1.1 billion to this effort.
As of early November, however, the government had only
dispersed $2 million for rebuilding homes in 10 villages in the
south, out of a total of 270 villages that had qualified for
assistance, leading to heavy criticism of the government in the
press. As a result, the government was seen by many Lebanese as
ineffectively competing with Hizballah, which was also
delivering aid to a number of villages in the south, including
some Christian villages. Reconstruction coordinator Taher
acknowledged that the government needed to do a better job and
that Hizballah was winning the public relations battle, even if
its largesse was not proving to be as extensive as its leaders
had promised. Indeed, the government is so unpopular in the
south that the Prime Minister had not even visited the area
since the conflict ended, out of fear for his safety, according
to Taher.
Taher said that the government had taken steps to guard
against corruption--a long-standing problem--and ensure that
assistance would be delivered in a fair and transparent manner.
His office had hired an outside auditor to monitor the
distribution and ultimate disposition of assistance funds, and
reached decisions on assistance on the basis of recommendations
from a regional council in the south. One political dilemma he
faced, he said, was that a number of communities in northern
Lebanon were also seeking assistance, arguing that, while their
homes and public infrastructure had not been directly damaged
by Israeli military action, their economic plight had
nevertheless worsened as a result of the conflict. Tourism, for
example, had plummeted.
Other international donors have pledged funds to address
needs beyond the re-building of damaged houses. For example,
the U.S., through USAID, will spend roughly $59 million to re-
build bridges and roads, rehabilitate schools, assist with the
clean-up of an oil spill and the disposal of unexploded
ordnance, and support small loans for entrepreneurs. Much of
the U.S. assistance is dedicated to projects in Beirut and the
north, according to USAID staff in Beirut, in part because
unstable security conditions in the south make it unsafe for
U.S. NGOs to operate there.
Despite these efforts, a Lebanese political analyst
commented that U.S. assistance was ``a drop in the bucket''
compared to the massive needs, and would not affect the
Lebanese public's strongly negative view of U.S. policy in the
region. Many Lebanese remain angry with the U.S. for refusing
to join the EU and regional capitals in calling for an
immediate cease-fire and accuse the U.S. of prolonging the war
and contributing to the loss of life and destruction.
The Problem of Cluster Bombs
The presence in southern Lebanon of a large number of
unexploded cluster munitions fired by Israeli forces in the
final days of the conflict presents a continuing danger to
Lebanese re-settling to the area and to humanitarian relief
workers. According to the U.N.'s Mine Action Coordination
Centre, which has assumed responsibility for the clean-up,
there are an estimated one million unexploded sub-munitions, or
``bomblets,'' out of a total of four million fired.\4\ Most of
these are of U.S. origin, according to the U.N. The unexploded
bomblets are located in a 32 square kilometer area, in towns,
fields, and orchards. Israel has provided the U.N. with maps
indicating where its forces fired the cluster munitions.
Between the mid-August cease-fire and November 2006, unexploded
cluster bomblets had killed or injured over 150 civilians. As
of November 2006, the U.N. had removed 47,000 bomblets, and
expects to complete the job by December 2007 at a cost of over
$40 million. The principal donors funding the U.N. clean-up are
the U.S., UAE, U.K., Netherlands, and Japan.
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\4\ Quarterly Report, July to September 2006, U.N. Mine Action
Coordination Centre.
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Extending the Government's Reach
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 calls on the Lebanese
government to deploy its forces ``throughout the South'' and to
extend its control over all of its territory. To that end, the
U.S. and other international donors have significantly
increased their level of assistance to the Lebanese Armed
Forces (LAF) and other security entities. According to a 2006
assessment by USCENTCOM, properly training and equipping the
LAF would require an investment of $400-500 million.
The U.S. Embassy's Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC) has
worked with the LAF to identify and prioritize areas requiring
investment, geared to helping the LAF ``move, shoot and
communicate.'' U.S. assistance alone has increased from
$700,000 in FY05 to over $44 million in FY 06.\5\ Most of the
initial U.S. funding will go towards providing the LAF with
logistical support in the form of vehicles and spare parts for
vehicles and helicopters, as well as individual soldier
equipment and training, and small arms ammunition.
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\5\ Information Sheet, Office of Defense Cooperation, U.S. Embassy,
Beirut.
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Other international assistance is harder to identify
because donors have failed to agree on a mechanism for
discussing and cross-checking their assistance, preferring to
deal with the Lebanese government on a bilateral basis instead.
The U.S. Embassy, however, has informally coordinated security
assistance with the U.K., Belgians and others.
What Next? Recommendations
While the cease-fire reached between Israel and Hizballah
in August has held, Prime Minister Siniora and his ruling
``March 14'' coalition are facing a serious challenge from
Hizballah and its allies, who demand a greater role in the
government. Unless an accommodation is reached, Lebanon could
enter a dangerous period of civil strife, which could in turn
lead to a renewed conflict with Israel.
In the view of a number of experts and Middle Eastern
leaders friendly to the United States, the current U.S.
approach of backing the Siniora government and boycotting Iran
and Syria is not succeeding and is in fact exacerbating
tensions in Lebanon and in the region. Four suggestions for a
change in the U.S. approach merit serious consideration:
Help the parties in Lebanon come up with a formula
that will grant greater representation to the Shi'ite
population.\6\ The Arab League is already engaged in
such an effort, which the U.S. could support and/or
augment with other efforts. A successful negotiation
would not only resolve the immediate political crisis,
it would also give the government a broader base of
public support.
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\6\ Testimony of Dr. Paul Salem, Director-Designate, Carnegie
Middle East Center, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
September 13, 2006; see also, Robert Grenier, ``If You Love Lebanon,
Set it Free,'' OpEd, New York Times, December 17, 2006.
Significantly increase U.S. security and economic
assistance to Lebanon.\7\ The needs are still great,
and in the competition with Hizballah for the public's
support, the government must be seen to be delivering
law and order and essential services to the people,
particularly in the historically under-served Shiite-
populated south. U.S. generosity would set a positive
example for other international donors.
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\7\ Testimony of Ambassador Carlos Pascual, U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, September 13, 2006.
Explore in a direct dialogue with Tehran and
Damascus whether it would be possible to reach a modus
vivendi in Lebanon and, perhaps, also in Iraq and
Israel/Palestine.\8\
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\8\ The Iraq Study Group Report, Recommendation No. 9: ``. . . The
United States should engage directly with Iran and Syria in order to
try to obtain their commitment to constructive policies toward Iraq and
other regional issues.''
Re-start peace talks between Israel and its Arab
neighbors.\9\ A broad effort that included
Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon would take the
initiative away from Iran and Syria, diffuse Arab and
Muslim anger toward Israel and the United States, bring
hope to the majority of Israelis and Palestinians who
desire peaceful co-existence, and help avert King
Abdullah of Jordan's sobering scenario of three
simultaneous civil wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel-
Palestine.
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\9\ The Iraq Study Group Report, Recommendations No. 13-17.
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