TAIBE, Lebanon (June 14, 2009) — What’s next for the Party of God? We might expect a period of cooler rhetoric, but barring a tectonic shift in regional power, Hezbollah will probably keep its formidable arsenal cocked and ready to fight Israel and anyone who threatens to disarm its very powerful militia. And though American and Israeli boosters of Lebanon’s governing coalition saw a victory for the West in the recent Lebanese election results, they ought to remember that Hezbollah’s power and legitimacy remain undiminished. Even Hezbollah’s most staunchly pro-American rivals have publicly disavowed any further efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

That’s not to say that Hezbollah doesn’t face major challenges. Hezbollah had predicted victory for its coalition in Lebanon’s elections. It dismissed Obama’s address to the Muslim World as mere words. Its powerful militia depends almost entirely on Iranian largesse. Despite Iran’s own presidential elections, Tehran could bargain away its support for Hezbollah in talks with the West, and Lebanon’s election left Hezbollah and its rivals with essentially the same share of power they had in the previous parliament. So it’s no surprise that Hassan Nasrallah’s militant Shi’ite party assumed a conciliatory tone after Lebanon voted for a new parliament on June 7.

Nasrallah urged his supporters to accept the results of the vote, even as he pointed to its flaws, including a vote-buying and a historically skewed system built on sectarian gerrymandering. Lost in the declarations of victory and the political maneuvers of the defeated are some important realities that should interest anyone paying close attention to the “Resistance Axis” that includes Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas:

• Hezbollah and its allies ended up with almost the same number of seats in parliament as they did in 2005 and are likely to win control of the same number of government ministries, belying any claims that the tide of support has turned against the Lebanese Resistance.
• In the popular vote Hezbollah and its allies unequivocally won, with more than 50 percent of the total ballots. Only about 46 percent cast their votes for the pro-Western March 14 group.  It is only Lebanon’s anachronistic sectarian electoral rules that gave America’s preferred coalition a parliamentary majority.
• Finally, Hezbollah draws its veto power over Lebanon from its autonomous militia, which appears far stronger than the Lebanese state’s official military, and from the vast secret budget it gets from Iran. Sure Hezbollah wanted an electoral victory, but its stranglehold over Lebanese politics never depended on the size of its parliamentary delegation, and it doesn’t now.

Ali Fayyad, one of Hezbollah’s newly elected members of parliament, summed up his party’s new approach. Essentially the position is: Hands off our weapons; everything else is negotiable. In a lengthy interview at his country house on the Israeli border, while guests smoked waterpipes and munching on walnut-filled cookies on his terrace, the veteran leader of Hezbollah’s think-tank outlined a careful two-pronged platform for Hezbollah in the “new political era.” Hezbollah’s commitment to armed resistance against Israel would not waver in the least, Fayyad said, but the Party needed to work harder to refine its wider political appeal.

“Hezbollah has taken a decision to improve its foreign relationships and foreign ties,” Fayyad said. The Party also was ready to make compromises with other Lebanese parties on the rest of its platform, especially its quest to reform Lebanon’s sectarian political system and stand – at least symbolically – against corruption.

“If we want to achieve our goals, we must operate in reality,” said Fayyad, who himself represents a moderated image of Hezbollah – the trilingual academic comfortable bantering in French and English with foreigners. He wears tailored, monogrammed dress shirts, and has spent three short sabbaticals at Oxford University in recent years. His children speak French and English, and several of his siblings teach at university. Hezbollah’s parliamentary slate this year represents a significant turn toward greater engagement. The party’s top diplomat, Nawaf Musawi, was also promoted to parliament, and the new director of international media relations, Ibrahim Mousawi, is fluent in several languages and far more polished and comfortable than his predecessors.

“When we were a small militant group, resistance group, it was different,” Fayyad said. “We are now one of the biggest political parties and players, with strategic effects in half the region.”

The March 14 coalition has been crowing about its victory ever since the results were announced. Supporters set off fireworks for the better part of a week and the prince of the coalition, Saad Hariri, has been positioning to form a government. The triumph has a couple of warts that should at the least mute any sense of triumph in Washington or Tel Aviv. Hariri has essentially taken off the table any effort to disarm Hezbollah, capitulating to the Islamic Resistance’s core demand. So long as Lebanon remains at war with Israel, as it has technically since 1948, Hariri’s coalition will no longer try to dismantle Hezbollah’s army.

Hezbollah has never refrained from provoking a crisis when it feels threatened. When it comes to street power, Hezbollah wields more than any of its Lebanese rivals. It also poses the most serious military threat on Israel’s borders. As Fayyad put it, “We live in a world that respects only power and the strong player.” It will be interesting to learn what Hezbollah hopes to achieve through political dialogue, but it’s best to remember that the Party of God’s first order of business remains armed resistance.

TAIBE and BEIRUT, Lebanon (June 14, 2009) — After 15 years directing Hezbollah’s in-house think tank, Ali Fayyad stood for parliament and won one of Hezbollah’s 11 seats in the June 7, 2009 election. I sat with him the day before the election and again five days later. The 46-year-old political scientist spoke about the prospects for war, political compromise, the election results and Hezbollah’s new strategy. Close observers of Hezbollah or the Lebanese scene might find his comments an interesting overview of Hezbollah’s current public position.

Thanassis Cambanis: Why did you stand for parliament after 15 years running Hezbollah’s think tank?

Ali Fayyad: I think it’s time for a change.

What kind of change?

Hezbollah considers the next era a very important political era, and Hezbollah needs to organize a lot of discussion with the other Lebanese groups. And I think Hezbollah will make a dialogue with foreign countries. I have long experience in dialogue with other Europeans and other Lebanese.

What would Hezbollah discuss with Western governments?

Hezbollah has taken a decision to improve its foreign relationships and foreign ties. We need to dialogue with the foreign players who are concerned with Hezbollah. I think we will never lose if we make dialogue with the European countries. We need to explain how we are moderate with our internal Lebanese issues. We have a constant position to resistance, but on other issues we are reacting to make compromises. You see how European and Western propaganda makes problem for our image. We need to do a lot of things and focus about our image, to clarify our reality.

What about Hezbollah’s militia?

We have to keep our strength.  We live in a world that respects only power and the strong player. But at the same time we have to work politics, and we believe that public opinion in Europe is strong and could play a strong role to change European policies. We cannot overestimate public opinion. We have to consider politics as a main part of our battle, and we have to use it defend ourselves.

Why does Hezbollah have problems with so many Arab governments?

They hate Hezbollah for many reasons: Because Hezbollah is resistance, because the success of Hezbollah embarrassed them. Hezbollah is a small party and defeated Israel. They are big countries with a lot of money, but despite that they had no success supporting the Palestinian people. They have problems with their societies. I think the experience of Hezbollah enlarged this gap between the official Arab regimes and their peoples.

Would Hezbollah support the Arab peace initiative with Israel?

There is a very bad point in the Arab initiative. The article concerning the right of return is not clear and not strong, and opened the gate to give up the real right of the Palestinian people to return to their land. We don’t mind if the Arab regimes want to try the diplomatic ways to support the Palestinian people. We have our role as resistance. They have tried the diplomatic role for 15 years, since 1992, and gained nothing. The Israelis are eating the Palestinian land. The Israelis negotiate to buy time.

Would Hezbollah take part in negotiations with Israel?

We imagine our role as resistance. We don’t imagine our role as to find a political solution.

What becomes of Hezbollah if there is peace with Israel?

I think this is a virtual question. We fight the Israeli occupation. If there is no occupation, there is no resistance. We are in a defense position. We are in a reaction position. The Netanyahu-Lieberman government is a crazy government, and they are ready at any moment to attack in the region.

What are Hezbollah’s relations with other Islamist groups in the region?

We have no direct relations with Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. Regarding Hamas, we are in alliance with Hamas as part of our strategy to liberate [Israeli-occupied territories]. They have a specific role in Palestine and we have a specific role in Lebanon. At the same time we support them on the logistical level. Egypt accused Hezbollah of trying to smuggle weapons to Gaza. This is not true. This cell was working on the logistical level. No weapons. And the Egyptians know this well. We have no practical relations with the other resistance. We are not involved at all with the Iraqi organizations.

What about reports that Hezbollah trained Iraqi fighters?

This is not true – Hezbollah is not involved in the Iraqi platform.

How has Hezbollah’s political platform evolved?

We need now, after the election, to improve our agenda to include details and have a complete program. It is not enough now to base our approach to Lebanese issues on general principles. We need to compose the details of our program toward administrative reform in Lebanon, how to face corruption. This will be the main challenge of the next phase.

If you really attack corruption, won’t it alienate some of your political allies like the Amal Party, which has a reputation for endemic corruption?

We have not to be a utopian party. This is Lebanon. If we want to achieve our goals, we must operate in reality. Politics have a special logic. When we were a small militant group, resistance group, it was different. Now we are now one of the biggest political parties and players, with strategic effects in half the region. We have to take this new reality into account.

Have you moderated your approach toward Lebanese rivals?

No one side can control the country. Hezbollah thinks we need to find a balance. We have to distinguish between political reform and administrative reform. We should not wait for permission from anyone before we make administrative reform. But we will never achieve the political reform by civil war or hegemony. We have to agree with the other sects and parties.

Why do your supporters vote for you?  

They are voting for Hezbollah based on two pillars. First of all the supporters for the resistance and second of all as a confrontation against deprivation. People in remote areas are poor. There is no development, no opportunity to work, a lot of problems in electricity, water. Our core focus is the resistance. The belief of Hezbollah in the resistance, you can consider a constant.

What is the likelihood of another war with Israel?

We don’t know about the problem of water. We need to increase our usage of water from the Hasbaya and Wazani Rivers, which Israel opposes. You can consider this is a time bomb that could explode at any minute.

Why did Hezbollah only contest 11 seats in parliament? The Lebanese saying is “We are the mother of the son.” We are ready to keep the opposition solid, so we are ready to give our allies more seasts.

What do you make of the election results?

We have to look forward, not backward. We have a good opportunity to use the elections to create stability in Lebanon. The initiative is in the hands of the 14^th of March [the governing coalition].

Were you surprised by the outcome?

The whole world was surprised, not just us. I think the 14^th of March also was surprised. The secret of the 14^th of March was all the Lebanese from abroad who came to vote. This process requires a lot of funds. Let us say that political money is one of the main factors in this outcome.

In your estimation, how much of a difference does this outcome make?

Even if the opposition had won a majority, nothing would change in Lebanon. It would not be a sea change, just a change in the balance of power. No one can transcend the Lebanese particularities, or change the Lebanese political criteria. The 14^th of March have four years experience running the country, but what have they done? They couldn’t control the country without the participation of the 8^th of March [Hezbollah’s coalition].

What do you think will happen now?

I believe the situation is less complicated than in the past era, especially with regards to the issue of the resistance and disarming the resistance. Saad Hariri in his speech about the resistance said that the resistance is beyond discussion, and that no one is talking about disarming the resistance. This is a big, important evidene about the direction of the next government.

Some people say that a victory would have been worse for Hezbollah, because then the party would have faced responsibility for governing, and would have to deal with international backlash.

I have heard this analysis. Maybe these people who say this take into account the Lebanese economic crisis, and the failure of our institutions and the Lebanese state, and the deep problems in Lebanese administration, and how Lebanon will need to get a lot of funds and economic support from the Arab countries and Europe and the International Monetary Fund. By winning, March 14 has taken away the responsibility of Hezbollah for running and controlling the country. The role of opposition is easier than the role of running the country.

We can see all this, but we must also say that we have done our best to win a majority and we failed.

It’s unusual in this region for political movements to admit failure.

If you want success and you want to learn from the results, you have to look at what really happened and assess the whole situation. We have to make a deep revision.

Why did your coalition lose?

In addition to the political money and the expatriate vote, there are other reasons. One is the sectarian discourse of some leaders of the 14^th of March, which provoked some sects and awakened sectarian fears. And maybe, maybe we weren’t successful enough in clarifying the aims of our political projects. We didn’t successfully criticize the other side. Most of the people know how the 14^th of March is drowning in corruption. We had to focus on this weak point of the 14^th of March, but we didn’t do this effectively.

BEIRUT, Lebanon (June 5, 2009) – Hezbollah already won what they called a “Divine Victory” in the war with Israel in 2006; by comparison their success at the polls in the 2009 elections seems like a sideshow – and a foregone conclusion.

The Lebanese vote on Sunday in some of the most loudly contested elections in the Arab world. Problem is, the governing alliance already lost power a long time ago in everything but name. The government is running scared, while Hezbollah and its allies have steadily expanded their share of real power for the last three years. Almost no conceivable outcome of this election will change that inexorable reality, which on the surface at least looks sad for Lebanon’s liberals and a exciting for the group of parties that brands itself “the Axis of Resistance.”

The governing coalition looks like a moderate and tolerant bunch, secular, pluralistic, willing to live and let live, and to do business with the United States. They have staked this election as a black-and-white referendum on the future: return the government to power and propel Lebanon out of the grip of extremism – or vote for Hezbollah, and drive the little country that could into the embrace of Iran’s ayatollahs.

“Hassan Nasrallah wants to make this an Islamic state! They consider us Christians visitors in our own country! They will carry this country into an abyss!” one of the pro-Western candidates screamed at a rally this week. Nayla Tueni is an attractive young scion of an intellectual dissident dynasty, but her nearly hysterical pitch to the voters in the Christian part of Beirut amounted to bald fear-mongering: vote for us, or else this place will look like Tehran.

Hezbollah might be a lot of things, but they’re not anti-Christian; their biggest political ally is former General Michel Aoun’s Christian party, and in the current government they’ve given his movement more cabinet positions than they kept for themselves.

Only a few seats in the parliament are up for grabs, and by most estimates the balance of power will shift only by a few seats. A “decisive” victory for Hezbollah’s coalition means they will win a slim majority in parliament; if the governing parties win, the best they’ll be able to do is maintain a status quo in which they share power with Hezbollah’s coalition and must avoid advancing any bold or controversial policies.

The governing majority (a loose alliance that calls itself March 14) has allied itself with Washington and Riyadh, and has promised to resist Syrian domination. But it has done little to improve Lebanon’s moribund economy and calcified political system. Most of its major leaders are warlords with epic reputation for graft and corruption. They have little left to galvanize their followers but fear – in particular, fear that Lebanon’s dwindling Christian population will wither to nearly nothing.

March 14 television ads show gunmen storming well-appointed flats during dinner, and fireballs hurtling into placid homes. The warning: Hezbollah’s allies will ruin your lives and bring on everlasting war.

Throngs of Christian voters pump their fists at the rallies, swearing to stand against an Islamic onslaught. When asked what they think will happen, though, grim reason prevails. “I’m afraid we will lose these elections, and even more of us Christians will leave Lebanon,” said Salim Halabi, 44, hoisting his daughter on his shoulders to watch Tueni speak.

Across town at a Hezbollah event, slightly calmer tempers prevail. The Party of God already acts like the sheriff in town, in part because it managed to bring the current ruling majority to its knees after a nearly two-year showdown, forcing its choice of president and winning veto power over all decisions in a 2008 cabinet reshuffle after Hezbollah-backed gunmen briefly took over West Beirut (Shi’ite gunmen carefully avoided Christian neighborhoods).

A few days before the election Hezbollah is co-hosting a celebration with the Iranian embassy of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic revolutionary who overthrow the Shah and helped found Hezbollah. But the Shi’ite Islamists have taken care to invite onto a stage a Maronite Christian Bishop and a Sunni Imam, and to pay respects to the Lebanese President and Prime Minister, neither of whom is in Hezbollah’s camp.

Unapologetically, Hezbollah embraced its ties to Iran. “Hezbollah has taken everything it has from Iran, while Iran never asked for anything in return,” declared Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s number two. “Lebanon is defended only by the canon and the rockets and mighty hearts.”

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has already suggested that if the United States cuts off military aid to Lebanon, in the event of a Hezbollah election victory, Tehran would happily step in.

Hezbollah expects to call the shots in the next government as it has, effectively, in the current one. Right now Hezbollah has only one cabinet minister, while its allies control a third of the ministries – enough to block any major decision. But this seemingly modest power-sharing arrangement masks the real, raw power calculus. Hezbollah has the power to declare war on Israel without the government’s input, as it did in July 2006. Hezbollah can vanquish its domestic rivals by force in a matter of days, as it demonstrated with the Beirut takeover in May 2008. Hezbollah’s constituents are willing to die for their leaders.

Hezbollah most certainly is a totalitarian party with an Islamist agenda. Unfortunately, the liberal and secular parties are run in a similarly authoritarian style, often by corrupt family dynasties. Hezbollah might rule the Shi’ites with an overtly religious iron fist, but in dealings with other sects it’s as (reluctantly, perhaps) tolerant and pluralistic as the rest of Lebanon’s sectarian parties.

Meanwhile the government’s supporters might abhor Hezbollah, but the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” notwithstanding, they seem just as likely to take to the beach or café as to the streets.

Once Sunday’s votes are counted, it’s likely that long, painful months of political negotiations will follow, and that in the end – maybe sometime this fall or winter – a unity government will take office that looks strikingly like the current one. The Paris of the Middle East won’t look any more like Tehran (or like Paris, for that matter) than it does today; it will remain dysfunctional, divided Beirut.

Thanassis Cambanis is writing a book about Hezbollah that will be published by Free Press in 2010.

In a city of fat cats and streetwise Area Boys, Lagos journalist Kirk Leigh performs a professional balancing act.

LAGOS, NIGERIA — Lagos is famous for its Area Boys. They are not boys at all, but actually young men from the masses of Lagos’ under- and unemployed. Other city residents admire Area Boys for surviving on their wits, even as they also fear the idle men for their roughness. Area Boys run all kinds of hustles, legal and illegal: providing muscle for heavy lifting jobs, selling odds and ends, flagging cabs for tips and providing security services that sometimes seem more like protection rackets.

What kind of professionals would Lagos produce, one wonders, if Nigeria’s lopsided economy ever found a way to absorb its teeming human capital?

The career of Nigerian business journalist Kirk Leigh, a Lagos native through and through, offers some idea. Leigh has combined knowledge of Lagos street corners with a college education to gain a reputation as one of Nigeria’s top young journalists. He is immersed and at ease in his surroundings yet still connects them to the forces outside of Lagos, and outside Nigeria.

Leigh has displayed his abilities in stories like the one he wrote about the market for smuggled Nigerian artifacts in Europe. Or his regular efforts to involve the perspectives of foreign economists—a rarity in Lagos’s dailies—in his stories about the Nigerian banking sector.

When I meet Leigh on the street in a deteriorating Lagos suburb to do an interview for a research project I’m completing for my Masters in International Affairs, I get the impression that he is someone who possesses Area Boy street smarts, a pundit’s grasp of politics and the manners of a polished professional. He stands in front of the Business Day newspaper offices in the sun with his suit coat hanging from a hand. After introducing himself, he turns to greet a security guard in the local dialect of English—I have trouble understanding it—and they share a laugh.
Later on, Leigh cements his glad-handling image when he approaches a group of taxi drivers sitting under a broad-leafed tree on rickety chairs, next to a gutter full of stagnant water. They jump at the chance to drive another colleague and me back to central Lagos—since we’re foreigners, they reckon that they can squeeze top dollar from us. But with a few doses of sternness, cajoling and charm, Leigh has convinced a taxi driver to transport us for a rock bottom price. It’s clear he’s in his element.

I ask Leigh if he ever dreams of leaving the chaos of Lagos’s sweaty millions—eight million, according to the Nigerian government, though many Lagosians think the real figure is much higher—and daily two-hour traffic jams. He laughs. “No way,” he says. “Lagos is where everything is happening.”

But partly, Leigh’s acumen as a journalist is a result of his having traveled abroad. In 2007, he participated in a training program in Germany hosted by the International Institute for Journalism. At a café serving Nigerian fast food and blaring R&B music, Leigh tells me about his awakening as a journalist when he traveled to Berlin.

“From within, you don’t get to see the broad picture—until you step out.” The training, he says, taught him to think of the “So what?” in his reporting. He came back to Business Day, and the newspaper promptly offered to promote him to assistant editor. In typical Leigh fashion, he declined.

“I didn’t consider that a promotion” Leigh says. He wanted to remain on a beat, reporting from banks and about the people the banks’ business affected. His stories regularly appeared on the front page of Business Day.

Had Lagos’ son outgrown his hometown?

“I remember having an argument with my editor here, on how you report,” he says. The editor didn’t want him to get into analysis in his stories. “When I ask them, ‘Why are you guys doing it this way?’, their reply is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.”
Soon, Leigh left the newspaper to strike out as a freelancer. After a brief stint doing public relations for a Lagos-based bank, he’s still struggling to find his way. The product he has to offer Nigerian newspapers may simply be more than they are prepared to publish.

The big shots in Nigeria are politicians, bankers and oilmen. Journalists are neither widely known nor very well paid. In a country that is one of the world’s largest producers of oil, the lifeblood of the richest economies in the world, there never seems to be enough money to go around.

Leigh has the skills and training to move to a more lucrative career, one a little closer to the industries that keep some Lagosians well fed while the vast majority piece together income from different sources. For the time being, though, he remains passionate about journalism. He says he loves the honesty of reporting.

Lagos produces numerous newspapers, but journalists on political and financial beats that have a commitment to producing unbiased work are not so easy to come by.

“Paying off journalists happens every day,” he says. “It’s the norm. Matter of fact, they come looking for the journalist: ‘Here’s my story. Here’s your money.’ So most of what you read is PR.”

The vast gap between Area Boy and well-to-do in Lagos is sparsely populated and short on opportunity. Still, Leigh is undaunted in his desire for a career that negotiates these two extremes.

Before our meeting is through, Leigh takes me to some Internet cafés near his house to help me with a story I’m writing on Nigerian Internet scammers. It’s a touchy subject, and as we cross the threshold of the first café, he whispers to me over his shoulder not to take pictures or mention I’m a journalist until he’s broken the ice.

I hang behind while Leigh chats with a young woman behind the counter at the café. In a couple of minutes, her expression of suspicion has melted into an easy smile. Soon, she’s talking, relaxed, about the impact on the café of a government crackdown on scammers, happy to grant an interview to a foreign journalist. Leigh has worked his magic again.

Back in the streets of Lagos, Area Boys keep trying to spin charm and cleverness into gold. At intersections, they hawk everything from plantain chips to toilet seats. Occasionally, the window of an air-conditioned, late model sedan slides down, and a well-dressed arm holds out a few Naira. Mostly, the cars drive on.

It’s hard to imagine anyone walking the line between these two extremes of Lagos. But journalists like Leigh just might be able to, by chronicling the economic and political forces that have created a tableau of such disparity.

Bilo plodded back into the living room, his hacking cough announcing his arrival. One arm was carefully wrapped around a folder of dress sketches, dating from the 1960s to 2000. Just a handful sketches remained now of the thousands he had burned before returning to Egypt.

After landing in Cairo in 1997, Nabil Jamal – Bilo to most everyone he meets – went straight to a small hotel in Zamelek and never left. A good friend owned the hotel and allowed Bilo to live there at no cost, leaving him with no desire to look for his own house. Without any savings, Bilo resigned himself to spending his retirement in Cairo after decades in Paris and New York. His few sketches and pictures remained the only material evidence of his past lives, for even Egypt had changed under years of post-revolution.

“It was like I had walked out of a beautiful house and came back and found it all beaten up and tattered. The streets have gone dirty. Look at the traffic. We didn’t have one-tenth of the cars we have now,” Bilo said.

The Cairo that Bilo remembered was of dressing the Queen and actresses. Nightly parties, ballets, and the English theater company were regular rituals, and at the Opera House, he would stand alongside his friends when the national anthem played to honor King Farouk’s entrance.

Bilo pulled out a carefully preserved black and white photograph, as if presenting evidence. A young group of seven smiled from the midst of a party, and in front sat an Arab James Dean, fully aware of his good looks. The face across from me had now turned wrinkled and spotted, hoisting up thick glasses.

The hostess’s husband, Bilo told me nonchalantly, had suddenly disappeared. Ahmed Kamal had been politically active, and had spoken against Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. He left his house in Al-Maadi one day in 1956 and never returned.

But Bilo had grown impatient with the conversation. After all, the topic at hand was the Cairo of his youth, filled with theater, parties, and…

“Finola O’Shannon!” he said the name with excitement and careful enunciation as he discovered a photograph.

He spent every night in the club with the actress while she was visiting Cairo. The last time he saw her was when he had surprised her in London after leaving Egypt in 1963. She died from cancer a few years later.

Finola was one of Bilo’s two loves. Both brief, and both lost. “The one girl I wanted to marry was so much in love with me that she said ‘I’ll marry you when your father gets your money back.’ That’s what her love was like.” His bitter tone lingered in the silence as he glanced away from me.

Bilo’s father had come to Egypt in 1923 from Palestine, where he had met Bilo’s Lebanese mother. Although living in Egypt, he had refused to sell the land in Palestine that he owned with his two brothers. When Israel was formed in 1948, the Jamal brothers lost all their property.

It was the only time that Bilo’s father’s history directly affected Bilo’s own life. Otherwise, he never questioned his father about Palestine, and his father never spoke of it.

But war had shaped Bilo’s entire life: wars that were personal and never spoken of, wars that raged outside his front door, and wars that were seemingly far, but that still left damage in their wake.

During World War II, Bilo’s father closed down his travel agency since his only client was a German company. “And the Germans that came in came without a visa,” Bilo said with a laugh. “They came in with their guns and their tanks and their airplanes. They came into Alexandria, because there were a lot of Egyptians who were very Nazi and they had pictures of Hitler in their apartments. In fact, even the King was pro-Hitler.”

But it would not be long before the King himself was ousted from power. King Farouk’s downfall, the revolution and subsequent Nasserism, while changing Egypt, had changed the course of Bilo’s life as well. There was no more royalty to dress. “All the millionaires were trying to sell their stuff to live on, especially the royal family. [Nasser] was giving them pennies to live on.”

Unemployment took Bilo to London where his friends found him work, then to a chance job as a fashion designer in Paris for 17 years, and finally to New York City for 16 years until he no longer had a job or money. He returned to Cairo after having spent his savings over the years on cashmere sweaters, Parisian theater and travels with friends. And when he came back, he found Cairo more impoverished than it had been immediately after the revolution. There was no money left, no jobs for the youth, and no way to get out.

From the hotel in Zamelek now, Bilo hears the call to prayer five times a day. “I think they’ve come to a point where they are desperate,” he said quietly. “They think by praying, they are going to go straight upstairs. They pray and pray and pray…”

Was he not religious, having grown up in a devout Christian household and living in a country where every hour was a reminder of God? “I don’t go to church, but I have to pray every single night,” Bilo said. “I pray for the souls of my parents, and mostly for the friends that passed away, and some of them passed away pretty young.”

His remaining friends visit him at the hotel as they pass through Egypt, bringing him beer that inevitably offend the Muslim receptionist, or shirts that he refuses to wear, claiming his friends have little fashion sense.  His weeks are booked with dinners with relatives of once good friends – prominent families in Zamelek, younger generations of the Sadat family and former royalty who now reside in Alexandria.  But he returns, always, to his room at the hotel to watch the world affairs on television that once bored him. Egypt. Lebanon. Gaza.

As he stood up, he looked down at his swollen feet peeking from his black sweat pants. “This is the only thing I inherited from my father,” he said with a quiet laugh. “I refused to take insulin until 6 years ago. Now I can hardly walk. Look at me. I walk like a penguin.” He waited for no answer as he plodded down the hallway to his room.

The 28-year soldier refused to allow his name to be published – for security concerns, he said, since he intends to continue working in intelligence. But it is his name that points out that he is Pakistani-American, that he is Muslim, and that for him September 2001 was the beginning of a different type of war. “I knew my country was going to be at war, and so was my religion,” he said. “And we are.”

For the past few months, he has been watching the news intently, following the Taliban’s movements and America’s strategy as an intelligence analyst for the military. His uniformed service ended in the spring and he was transitioning into a job as a defense contractor. Throughout our conversation, he closely followed with one ear President’s Obama’s words about and U.S. strategy in the region.

            “All this is personal. Since 2001, I’ve been at war. As a Muslim, as an American, I’m at war,” he said. “Whether I’m here in America, or waiting my discharge from the army, whether I become a defense contractor. Or whether I’m in a war zone, rifle in hand, actively doing an engineering mission or in a cubicle watching news. I take it personally.”
            U.S. foreign policy hadn’t always been personal for him. He grew up in small-town, Pennsylvania, the son of Pakistani parents who were doctors. He called himself a typical Pakistani: He attended meetings at the Association for Pakistani Physicians in North America with his parents; he was active in the Islamic Society of North America; he was planning to follow the rest of his family in the medical profession.
            But during his sophomore year of college, he had convinced his parents that joining the U.S. army reserve was the best choice for him. College had been a four-year stepping stone to get to medical school, but by year two, he had grown bored. He had not excelled in his classes, and according to him, had wasted too much of his father’s money on tuition. He called himself undisciplined, and the U.S. Army offered the best solution – regulation, life experience, and college tuition.
            That was May 2001.
            Two years later, he was shuttling between Kuwait and Southern Iraq as an Arabic translator until, until he joined the engineering unit near Umm Qasr, Iraq. It was late 2004, one of the better times in the war, in his opinion.
            “It was as hot as hell. Not because of heat and sandstorms, but because of the engineering. We built roads while we were there, paving asphalts – paving asphalt in 150 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “I spent my time washing my vehicle and looking bored as hell.”
            Except, he said, when insurgents fired bullets at him, or rocketed the camp. He recalled one day when he had been driving his bulldozer through the mounds of dirt outside the barbed wire perimeter of Camp Bucca, ignoring the “cling-cling” of the explosives against the blade. His team routinely found unexploded ordinance on the edge of the camp. Military explosives experts were too busy defusing roadside bombs, so engineers would clear them with bulldozers. On that day, he worked obviously until military police shouted at him to retreat inside the wire. Only then did he realize the pinging sounds coming from bullets being fired at him.
            After the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal surfaced in 2004, the camp closed down and inmates were transferred to Camp Bucca, making the camp the largest detention facility in Iraq. During the transfer, some detainees had fled, and riots had broken out among prisoners in the camp. But the soldier had not spoken to any of them, nor would he ever before his unit left the camp and he was transferred to an intelligence unit in Kuwait.
            “I didn’t want to stay,” he said. “It would’ve been a very morally questionable territory for me.”
            Before he was deployed to Iraq, he had spoken to an Iraqi family at his community mosque. They had spoken to him as an American. They had assured him they were happy that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, that America was finally fighting Saddam Hussein. “It’s about damn time,” they had told him. After the first Gulf War, they said, “you owed us. You left us hanging, you left us to die.”
            He could not easily explain to his parents that going to war was ultimately his choice. Surrounded by doctors, it would have been easy for him to be discharged from the army by faking a medical condition. When he was first deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, his father wrote a letter without his knowledge to the army, declaring his son mentally unstable.
            “My father was going to do whatever he could,” he said. “I could have gotten out of it with a medical excuse. Maybe I would have if the Iraq family I talked to said this was horrible, that I was going to kill Muslims if I went to Iraq. But it was a commitment I made. I’m a soldier. I have to do that, as being one of the few people who makes the choice in their life to know.” He was referring to knowing what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.
            He didn’t tell his parents he had been in Iraq until he returned back home in 2006. He laughed as he remembered the welcome he received: his mother slapped him for lying.
            Only later did hear snippets from his family, his friends and his community members about how his mother had dealt with his absence. “I put her through too damn much,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t fathom or quantify…”
            He used silence as another mechanism to avoid recalling Iraq. It was difficult to explain a war, he said, to people who didn’t really understand it, especially a war he himself could not understand. “In hindsight, all I do know is that there was a lot of innocent life that was lost, needlessly,” he said. “Things have stabilized there. But what they call a surge, it’s just allocating the right amount of troops we should have had there in the first place.”
            He had divulged little about his experience in Iraq to his parents, not just because he wanted to avoid discussing the life threatening situations he had been in, but also because he could not quite explain the “ugliness of war” that he discovered while there.            
            “Civilian casualties, that’s something most no one who has never been to war would ever understand. As a Muslim, I absolutely think that innocent Muslims dying, or innocent anybody dying, is completely unacceptable. Maybe this is a horrible thing to say. But when you go to war, and when you understand what forces are at work, you realize it’s completely impossible…unfathomable to prevent completely the loss of innocent life when war goes on,” he said.
            All that Muslims in the United States saw, he said, was a body count of the Iraq War on television. 50 Iraqis killed here. A suicide bomber dead there. But it hadn’t been that simple: Sunnis were killing Shias. Shias were killing Sunnis. Kurds were trying to gain independence. When word came that his unit was leaving Iraq early, he was ready to leave.
            Unlike Iraq, he had been more forthcoming about his service in Afghanistan with his parents. He had been deployed there in 2008 to work with military intelligence, working harder than he ever had in his life, he said.
            “My life was building up to that moment since 9/11,” he said. “That’s where Al Qaeda and Taliban were at the time. They are the enemies we’ve been at war with since 2001. That’s where Islam’s enemies were.”
            He traveled around Afghanistan, never revealing he was Pakistani. He told Afghans he was Indian, which was only a half-lie. His mother’s family had been from India. He collected intelligence, he analyzed atrocities committed by Muslims, he tried to differentiate between the threatening Afghans and the merely conspiratorial ones who blamed the U.S. for all their ills. At one point, he ran for shelter when a rocket hit 200 meters away from him while he was washing for prayer in a nearby mosque.
            He had thought of himself as Muslim only in name until he was deployed to Afghanistan and he discovered people’s convictions in their religion and in their culture. It was in Afghanistan that he came to a conclusion: “Islam,” he said, “was in a war with itself.”
            That realization had been enough to convince him when he returned home that his time in war would never end, not when he left the U.S. military and not when he started a new profession. “My sworn enemies are those who have political motivations, politically minded people who use Islam to justify atrocities and crimes against humanity,” he said.
            After working for military intelligence, he was further convinced that it was not Iraq, but Afghanistan and Pakistan that were “the front lines of Islamic extremism and terrorism.”
            But the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan was not so simple either – both nations suffered from failed political systems that were beyond the control of the people. He left for Pakistan to study medicine in 2002, before he was deployed to Iraq, to save money, to avoid spending another year doing his bachelors, and to learn more about his culture. Ironically, it had been in Pakistan where questioned his faith in God – the scariest time in his life, he said. . He fell into in deep depression. He found medicine unsatisfactory, and he found his country to be barely surviving.
            “I describe my time in Pakistan to some people as my first deployment – being sent overseas to a war zone,” he said. “There, I was completely burst out of my sheltered upbringing to see the ugliness in the world – to see the fundamentalism, the drugs, the corruption. Now, everyone knows Pakistan is a war zone. But I discovered that then. Pakistan has been a war zone at least since 2001.”
            His military service had given him a different purpose altogether: to encourage Muslims to join politics, journalism, and the public policy debate in order to tackle misconceptions about the War – misconceptions that resonate among Muslim Americans as well. “So, you kill Muslims for a living?” someone had once asked him.
            Now, he carries pictures of Afghanistan with him during large gatherings, when Pakistani acquaintances will inevitably ask him about his experience. But explaining his service in this war as a Muslim, let alone explaining war itself, has not been easy.
            Before he had been deployed, the Vice President of the Islamic Society of North America had tried to resolve his moral qualms about being deployed in a Muslim country: “If we knew that it was [Bin Laden] or Al-Qaeda that did 9/11, not only should you, but you would be obligated to, according to Sharia, punish him with death.”
            But he had not been able to resolve being in Iraq with this moral justification, because in Iraq, he could not answer the simple question: who was the bad guy? Nor could he quite make Muslims back home understand that it was not just the Americans but also Muslims who were killing other Muslims.
            “When we say sectarian violence, do you think most Muslims buy that? That Sunnis are killing Shias? I don’t think most Muslims do. I think most Muslims think its Muslims versus the West, when in actuality, its more hard-line political actors bending religion to justify their political agenda, or maybe it is ethnically motivated violence,” he said. “But war is just that…it’s a hyper-paced materialization of world issues trying to be resolved.”
            At times, he feels exiled from his fellow Muslims, when he is convinced that he cannot make them understand the necessity of War in Afghanistan. For him, it is imperative that the United States stabilizes Iraq and focuses on Afghanistan to keep from creating future generations of extremists. And for him, it is imperative that both the U.S. intelligence community and Muslim Americans understand that this war has never been about the West versus Islam.
            “This lifestyle is a very lonely one. Lonely from your family, lonely from other Muslims,” he said matter-of-factly. His eyes gazed down. “But I feel confident knowing that what I do is in the name of God.”

Rozina Ali graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2009.

Long after the terms of a cease-fire are hammered out, the answer to this underlying and persistent question will determine whether the offensive was successful for Israel and fatal for Hamas.

President Obama’s foreign policy team is grappling with the same nagging quandary as it shifts the U.S. military’s focus from Iraq to Afghanistan: How to wage an effective struggle against groups that often employ terrorist tactics? Obama’s White House seems to have abandoned a conventional one-size-fits-all military approach, but it must confront an array of militants that includes Al Qaeda, the Mahdi Army in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

They’ll be looking for lessons from Israel’s latest conflicts. And they’ll find a warning of sorts in the thriving and resurgent community of Hezbollah supporters on Israel’s northern border. The state of Hezbollah, two-and-a-half years after its own punishing encounter with the hard end of Israel’s military, offers a cautionary tale for those who hope to thwart the emboldened axis of Islamist, anti-Israel militant movements through brute strength.

As it has just attempted to do in Gaza, Israel tried in 2006 to emasculate Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Islamist group that has since come to dominate Lebanese politics. Then, Israel hoped to sap popular support for the group by bombing infrastructure targets, as well as to decapitate the leadership and decimate Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.

On all those counts, most military analysts would agree Israel ultimately failed. Less than three years after the war, observers say Hezbollah wields a more formidable military arsenal than in 2006, including anti-aircraft batteries that could reduce Israel’s battlefield advantage. The group has secured more political influence than ever before, including veto power over all Lebanese government decisions. And the increasingly radicalized rank-and-file Shiites, Christians and Palestinians who support Hezbollah are exhibiting a startling thirst for a new confrontation with Israel.

All this despite a war in 2006 that ravaged Lebanon’s infrastructure, killed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, and by traditional measures of military success was a victory for Israel.

Hezbollah’s most important asset

A military balance sheet of the war fails to take into account Hezbollah’s most important asset: the fervent ideological support of its Shiite base, motivated in equal measure by the cause of anti-Israeli resistance and by religious devotion.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s supreme leader, says he is in regular contact with his backers in Iran, and with Hamas — presumably swapping ideas on tactics, strategy and ideology. It’s hard to imagine that Hamas isn’t drawing on Hezbollah’s 2006 playbook.

Hezbollah’s brightest tactical move in 2006 was to declare at the outbreak of conflict that all it had to do to win was to survive. With its decentralized hierarchy, bevy of technocrats, and a million or more supporters, Hezbollah is likely to persist after an armed conflict, no matter how bruising. So on its own terms, it can’t be defeated no matter what losses it sustains. Hamas seems to have adopted a similar rhetorical stance in its fight with Israel.

Israel might have waged these campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah, but in the Muslim world and among many of America’s allies, Washington is perceived as inextricably linked to them. The United States rushed extra bombs to Israel during its 2006 war with Lebanon. And in one of its final foreign policy acts the Bush Administration gave the green light to the aerial bombardment of Gaza. Israeli officials rushed to execute the offensive in Gaza before Bush left office in part because they weren’t confident that an Obama White House would approve such military moves.

Contemplating the wreckage in Gaza and the failure to de-fang Islamist movements across the Middle East, Obama’s team, like Israeli policy-makers, will have to forge a new, strategic, comprehensive approach. Smart power, perhaps; smart bombs, not so much.

But more to the point in terms of lessons learned — and more chilling for Obama’s policy team and military planners — is how Hezbollah capitalized on the 2006 war to recruit new members and redouble the passion of its inner cadres. By its own account, membership in the party and its militia has doubled, as have the ranks of its youth scout program, which trains future Hezbollah fighters and bureaucrats.

Border villages hard hit during the war have been quickly rebuilt. Ayta al-Chaab, the frontier town from which Hezbollah launched its cross-border raid, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and sparking the 2006 conflict, was ravaged by bombing and then ground fighting: About 90 percent of the town’s buildings were ultimately damaged or destroyed. Now, it’s been almost completely reconstructed, and expanded. There are several hundred new houses, built by Hezbollah supporters who were encouraged by the party to relocate to the sensitive border region, to counter a perceived Israeli desire to depopulate southern Lebanon.

For Hezbollah’s supporters, the question isn’t if they’ll fight Israel again, but when. “Now is not a good time for the people. We have just recovered from the last aggression. And the Islamic resistance does not want to be seen provoking a war,” says Faris Jamil, 52, a Hezbollah supporter whose house was destroyed in 2006.

Jamil and his family live in the basement of their half-completed home, an ornate three-story structure accented with Grecian marble columns and floral stone cornices. From his front door, he watches the sun set behind the next line of hills, a mile away in Israel.

“We are ready to respond if attacked,” Jamil says, warming himself by a wood stove. “But otherwise, we should expect the next war in two or three years.”

Israel Alarmed by Rising Calls for its Destruction

Equally alarming to Israel and its friends — and more energizing to the “resistance axis” that spans Tehran, Damascus, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and a panoply of smaller Palestinian, Iranian and Arab Islamist groups — is the swelling rhetoric about “liberating Jerusalem,” sending Israel’s Jews “back to Europe and America where they came from.”

Such words are nothing new in the Middle East; but the conviction that a total military defeat of Israel is a realistic possibility is. One hears echoes of it in the words of Iran’s supreme leader — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the speeches of Nasrallah, the statements of Hamas, and in the bubbling ferment of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish hatred roiling the region’s mosques, television channels and cafe chatter.

This belief, that an Islamic resistance can eventually disestablish Israel as a state, is in part an outgrowth of an approach that has prioritized the law of the strongest above all else. Israel, at its peak, extended a tight grip over the West Bank and Gaza, building homes for hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers.

Now, the Islamists see their own star rising and believe Israel’s is waning; Hezbollah drove Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon in 2000, after 18 years of occupation. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, and Hamas successfully sold the pullout to its constituents as a victory for its fighting brigades. Hezbollah’s successful reemergence from the 2006 war only strengthened the Islamist bloc’s narrative of growing prowess.

Critics inside Israel’s political and military establishment have consistently bemoaned the rise of an Islamist axis and have decried the vain effort to quash it by force. Only months before the Gaza conflict, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a candid exit interview, harshly derided his own tactics, declaring that Israel could only achieve peace through political negotiation, not by conquering hilltops.

Israeli analyst Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz at the close of the Gaza conflict that Israel had failed all its aims, and had increased popular support for Hamas. “Deterrence, my foot,” he wrote. “The deterrence we supposedly achieved in the Second Lebanon War has not had the slightest effect on Hamas, and the one supposedly achieved now isn’t working any better… Their [Hamas’] war has intensified the ethos of resistance and determined endurance.”

There are certainly differences between Israel’s two most recent campaigns, against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2009. Hezbollah benefits from unimpeded access to armaments supplied by Iran and transferred through Syria. Hamas smuggles in some weapons through tunnels from Egypt, and relies primarily on the locally manufactured Qassam rockets, which cause more terror than actual damage and death in Israel. Hezbollah is larger and better-funded than Hamas; its fighters operate in wide expanses of hilly and mountainous terrain, which offer cover and room for maneuver not to be found in the flat, claustrophobic, urban Gaza Strip.

And Israel appears to have learned at least some lessons from its failures in 2006, this time around acting with decisive force. Israel’s military and political leaders have acted more in concert, and have avoided setting impossible goals like the elimination of Hamas.

Tel Aviv strikes, but leaves room for negotiation

The Islamist axis commands real power and is a force to be reckoned with. Israel has never stopped negotiating with Hamas and Hezbollah. European diplomats are quietly talking to Hezbollah officials, and looking for ways to initiate contacts with Hamas without violating European law. American intelligence services and diplomats find they have less and less leverage and understanding from their increasingly isolated stations and embassies; they’ll need to craft new channels through which to speak to groups in the Islamist axis.

Military force surely will continue to play a central role in the Middle East, a region where competing well-armed groups frame every conflict as a question of survival and are quick to shoot back when provoked. But Israel’s conflicts failed to decisively turn the popular tide against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Israel, like the United States, wants to shift the balance of power in the Middle East away from militant Islamist groups. To accomplish that end, the Obama administration and its allies will have to forswear an approach built around military force. Bombs alone will not eliminate popular ideological movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

(Originally published in Global Post, January 29, 2009)