Category: Israel and Palestinians

Israel has set a deadline for the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel’s right to exist and agree to negotiate for a permanent settlement and the two-state solution. Otherwise, Israel’s new prime minister warns, Israel will set the final borders unilaterally:

Israel will give the Palestinians until the end of the year to prove they are willing to negotiate a final peace deal, and will unilaterally set its final borders by 2008 if they don’t, Israel’s justice minister said Wednesday.
The statement by Justice Minister Haim Ramon, a close associate of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s, was the first by an Israeli official to set a deadline for the Hamas-led Palestinian government to disarm and recognize the Jewish state. …
“Through the end of this year, 2006, there will be honest attempts to talk to the other side,” Ramon told Israel’s Army Radio.
“If it becomes clear by the end of the year that we really have no partner, and the international community is also convinced of this, then we will take our fate into our own hands and not leave our fate in the hands of our enemies,” he added.

The Israelis have tired of the occupation game, waiting for the Palestinians to produce viable negotiators for peace. Hamas will only commit to a “long-term truce’ if Israel returns to the borders that Arab nations found so attractive for attacks twice in twenty years. The Palestinians won’t even negotiate for a formal end to hostilities or recognition of Israel. They want to keep their primary goal alive, which is the destruction of the “Zionist entity” and the acquisition of all the land to the Mediterranean.
The Israelis will not establish the long and nearly indefensible border positions that almost saw them pushed into the Mediterranean, nor should they. Israel occupies the West Bank because of the offensive war that Arab nations staged through that territory; they risked that territory and lost it. The Israelis have every right to reset its borders accordingly to ensure that they have a more defensible frontier, and if the Palestinians refuse to negotiate the terms, then Israel should set them, pull back behind them, and end the occupation and the debate.
While Israel remains firm in its defense, the Quartet has backpedaled on its own resolve. Faced with global cries over the plight in which the Palestinians placed themselves by electing Hamas, the US and EU have agreed to start sending money again, although they claim the funds will bypass the Palestinian government:

THE United States, facing a possible humanitarian crisis, last night agreed with its Quartet partners to set up a “temporary international mechanism” to channel aid directly to the Palestinians, despite its boycott of Hamas.
In an agreed statement, the Quartet of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN said that the mechanism should begin operating “as soon as possible”, and ensure “direct delivery of any assistance to the Palestinian people”.
The statement was issued after Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia predicted a civil war if the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority was left to collapse.
Diplomats said that it was not yet decided how many of the 160,000-plus Palestinian Authority employees, including 70,000 security personnel, would receive their salaries through the arrangement. The government salaries, which support about one third of Palestinian families, have not been paid for two months.

I have no objection to sending food and medicine to the Palestinian people for humanitarian purposes. However, sending money and paying the salaries of those with Fatah and Hamas government sinecures undermines the entire purpose of isolating the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians voted these people into power, primarily because they believed that they would not have to suffer the consequences of electing unreconstructed terrorists as their representatives. Just when that decision started to make a personal impact on the people who made that decision, the Quartet has performed their normal Deus ex Machina role, rescuing the Palestinians once again from their own folly.
And what will be the result of handing cash over to these government employees? The Hamas government will collect taxes from the salaries, and probably in large amounts. The commerce it restores will also generate tax revenues for the Hamas-led government. Freed from the responsibility of paying salaries, just where will all those tax dollars go? It won’t get earmarked for Bridges and Trains to Nowhere. And that assumes that Hamas (and Fatah as well) won’t simply confiscate a large part of that money up front.
If anyone wonders why this situation still has no resolution, this fecklessness on the part of the West is a prime example. The Palestinians have no stake in negotiating a final settlement in a two-state framework they don’t support. They want one state — theirs. They know that they can defy the West and still get their funding and sympathy. The Palestinians never have to face consequences for their decisions, and so continue to make bad decisions. When that pattern stops, they may finally have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Until then, we can expect a continuation of the post-Oslo dynamic in the West Bank.

Jimmy Carter, writing in the International Herald-Tribune, demonstrates the knack for foreign relations that got us the Iranian hostage crisis and limited him to a single, embarrassing term in office. He argues that the suspension of foreign aid to the Palestinians not only hurts innocent citizens but damages prospects for peace by failing to fund terrorists:

Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.
Overwhelmingly, these are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, shopkeepers, and their employees and families who are just hoping for a better life. Public opinion polls conducted after the January parliamentary election show that 80 percent of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel based on the international road map premises. Although Fatah party members refused to join Hamas in a coalition government, nearly 70 percent of Palestinians continue to support Fatah’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as their president. …
With all their faults, Hamas leaders have continued to honor a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months, and their spokesman told me that this “can be extended for two, 10 or even 50 years if the Israelis will reciprocate.” Although Hamas leaders have refused to recognize the state of Israel while their territory is being occupied, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for peace talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. He added that if these negotiations result in an agreement that can be accepted by Palestinians, then the Hamas position regarding Israel would be changed.
Regardless of these intricate and long-term political interrelationships, it is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians. Although some Arab nations have allocated funds for humanitarian purposes to alleviate human suffering, the U.S. government is threatening the financial existence of any Jordanian or other bank that dares to transfer this assistance into Palestine.

It’s almost impossble to excerpt this silliness; one has to read the entire essay to get a sense of Carter’s capitulation on terror. However, we can at least make a couple of specific points about the former president’s argument.
First, Carter uses the Arabic hudna completely without any sense of its context. A hudna has never been understood as a prelude to a lasting peace, but a temporary cease fire of no more than ten years that allows Muslims a chance to gain the upper hand against an enemy. At any time during a hudna the Muslims can end it without warning in order to destroy their infidel enemies. It is a term that arises from the Prophet himself, and has specific meaning and limits. The hudna proposed by Hamas in any case does not carry any promise of recognition for Israel; it appears Carter just made this up out of whole cloth. Perhaps the Hamas spokesman told this to Carter, as he alleges, but Hamas has yet to make this statement publicly — and to commit to a permanent cease-fire.
Second, the $55 million in tax transfers that the Israelis continue to withhold only belong to the Palestinians as a consequence of the Oslo accords. Those taxes did not exist prior to those agreements, and the Palestinians have never fulfilled their end of the bargain. The Palestinian Authority, founded at Oslo, never disarmed the militias and terrorist groups, nor did they even attempt to do so. Hamas took office and promptly rejected all previous treaties with Israel, including Oslo, and refused to even recognize Israel’s right to exist. Since they have explicitly rejected the treaty which produced the revenue in the first place, the money does not belong to the Palestinians. Furthermore, the Israelis have no moral or legal obligation to fund a group or protostate that refuses to recognize Israel and plots for its destruction.
Overall, the essay boggles the imagination. On one hand, Carter acknowledges that the Palestinian people voted to put a known Islamist terrorist group in charge of its protostate in free and fair elections, and in the same breath says that we should not treat that decision as legitimate. If the Palestinians want peace so badly, why did they elect terrorists to office? Just as with the Israelis, we have no obligation to fund Islamist terrorists, no matter who votes for them or how legitimately they do so. If the Palestinians cannot make decisions any better than this, our continued rescuing of them from the consequences of their actions will not teach them any differently.
People like Carter and James Wolfensohn seem to believe that we can buy peace by paying for terrorism. That explains a lot about the Carter presidency and the rise of Islamofascism. Carter once again proves that his ex-presidency only marginally improves on his presidency, but only in the sense that he has less power to keep affairs as screwed up as possible.

Hamas faces a dangerous situation in the Gaza Strip, once its base of power, as Palestinians went on strike and staged demonstrations over their overdue paychecks. The ruling party in the Palestinian Authority has rapidly dissipated its mandate as its support for terrorism has isolated it from the nations that had been paying civil servant salaries in the territories:

Hundreds of Palestinians staged strikes and demonstrations Saturday in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to demand payment of overdue salaries to government workers — the first public signs of discontent with the Hamas-led Cabinet’s handling of a growing financial crisis.
The unrest occurred ahead of a meeting in Gaza late Saturday between Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and moderate President Mahmoud Abbas. The two, involved in a power struggle since Hamas defeated Abbas’ Fatah Party in January’s legislative elections, failed to resolve their differences during four hours of talks but agreed to meet again Sunday. …
Until now, the Palestinian public had heeded calls for patience, largely following the government in blaming the crisis on Western hostility to Hamas.
On Saturday, however, teachers at five schools in the West Bank city of Hebron cancelled classes Saturday — a strike that affected only a small number of the city’s schools but marked a change in attitude.
“I haven’t received a salary for 66 days. Of course I’m not happy with the government,” said one teacher. “I need to live and I need to feed my children.” The teacher, a father of six, asked not to be identified, fearing he could lose his job.

This actually represents progress. The Palestinians have ceased to enjoy protection from the folly of their own choices and have to deal honestly with the consequences of electing terrorists to represent them. At first they blamed Israel, and then the West, for two reasons: habit and pride. None of them want to acknowledge that they made the mistake of pushing an Islamist terror organization into government at the same time that other such organizations had declared war on the people sending them money.
The West needs to continue its policy of isolation. The only way to convince the Palestinians that war will bring either their starvation or destruction is to allow them to experience it. If we pay them to make war, why would they bother with peace? For the first time we see a glimmer of hope that the Palestinians may actually grasp why their government has forced them into abject poverty and turned the world against them. If we do not continue this path, we will do nothing but reinforce that the Palestinians will never have to face any consequences for their actions, allowing them to do whatever they please against the Israelis.
Of course, not everyone thinks killing Jews is a bad thing to do, and a collection of them will meet in Doha to urge Muslims to support Palestinians by sending them money to defy the West:

Islamic scholars are to meet in Doha next week to draw up a fatwa, or religious edict, obliging the Muslim faithful to help the internationally isolated Palestinian government headed by Hamas. …
Ulemas (scholars) as well as other Muslim and Palestinian leaders will “draw up a fatwa on the duty of the ummah (Muslims) and of governments” toward the Palestinians and the Hamas cabinet, Qardawi told a press conference Saturday.
The fatwa will refer to financial aid to the Palestinians as well as offering them moral support, Qardawi said.
He slammed what he called “the duality of the West, which rejects Palestinian democracy after encouraging such a democracy just because it doesn’t suit them.”
“This is political hypocrisy and we reject it,” he said.

Once again, Muslim scholars prove they know nothing about democracy and less about responsible government. Apparently they believe that all democracies agree with each other and that anything produced by a democratically-elected government gets a pass from any criticism. Before the death of Yasser Arafat and the holding of elections in the Palestinian Authority, the West could dupe itself into believing that the terrorist policies of the PA represented only a small fraction of the peace-loving Palestinian people, and that groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade amounted to nothing more than small groups of agitators. However, after the Palestinians voted in free elections to have terrorists run their protostate and to continue supporting attacks on civilians in Israel, that illusion got stripped from the last of the rose-colored-glasses crowd.
Other nations have no obligation to support terrorism simply because a twisted populace votes for it, and the Palestinians have no right to our money under any circumstances. Nor should they receive a red cent while they actively support the same brand of lunacy that has launched terrorist attacks in the US and Europe. Democracy is about choices, and in the end we show respect to the Palestinians by taking them at their word. They want war, and we’re not going to pay for it.
The ulemas should focus their wrath at the Islamic world. For sixty years, the various Islamic nations in the area have used the Palestinians to excuse their own internal and external policies while relegating the Palestinians to camps and degradation. They used the Palestinians’ territory to launch two wars against Israel, which forced Israel to grab the West Bank and Gaza Strip so that it could hold the Jordan River as a much smaller frontier against attack in the future. If any nations are the cause of the Palestinian misery, it isn’t Israel and the US but Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. None of them have ever accepted responsibility or told the Palestinians to make peace withe Israel and return to normalcy.
Let the imams issue their fatwas. The Islamic world will respond as it always has — with lots of talk and little else. They need the Palestinians poor and degraded in order to prop up their own regimes. The Palestinians may start to recognize this as well, and rethink who exactly their friends really are.

An integral part of democracy and free elections is the responsibility one assumes for the government that results. If an electorate lifts idiots to power, then they need to experience the consequences of that choice, or otherwise they will keep electing idiots without regard to the results. Unfortunately, former Quartet envoy James Wolfensohn doesn’t agree and insists that the West must bail out the Palestinians from the consequences of electing a terrorist group to govern them:

JAMES WOLFENSOHN, the international envoy to the Middle East, has resigned and issued a warning of the dangers ahead if the West cuts everything but humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
Mr Wolfensohn, a former head of the World Bank, also cautioned that the UN, charities and humanitarian organisations will not be able to fill the gap if the Palestinian Authority collapses under financial pressure. Speaking in Washington after he ended his posting as envoy to the Quartet on the Middle East — the UN, the US, the EU and Russia — Mr Wolfensohn said: “It would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians. And I don’t think anyone in the Quartet believes that to be the policy. I think that’s a losing gambit.”
Mr Wolfensohn stepped down on Sunday because of restrictions in dealing with the Islamic militant group Hamas, which dominates the Palestinian Government. He said that recent promises of aid from Arab states would provide only temporary relief to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, which has been unable to raise the $130 million (£71 million) a month it needs to pay 160,000 civil servants and keep services going.
He cautioned that if Israel continued to withhold authority tax revenues and maintain its restrictions on the movement of Palestinian trade and workers, by 2008 74 per cent of Palestinians would be living in poverty and 47 per cent would be unemployed. He echoed earlier warnings that fortifying NGOs could not replace the apparatus of the Palestinian Authority if it collapsed.

One has to question why Wolfensohn regards the PA as a structure worth keeping in the first place. Since its inception after the Oslo accords, it has primarily acted as a diplomatic cover for Yasser Arafat and a means in which to steal vast sums of foreign aid from the Palestinians. In one way, the election of Hamas had a rational basis — Fatah had stolen so much that the Palestinians demanded someone else’s hand on the cash. Unfortunately, since Hamas actively engaged in and supported terrorist attacks, no one in the West wants to give them money, and for good reason.
The tax revenues are a good example of this. Israel started paying these tax revenues as part of the Oslo accords, to which Fatah only paid lip service through two intifadas and numerous other breaches of the agreement. Israel only stopped paying this protection money when the duly elected Hamas government announced that it would no longer even pay lip service to Oslo. It refused to recognize Israel, a key provision, and refused to renounce violence, another key provision. It also applauded the recent suicide bombing n Tel Aviv which killed a number of people and injured scores more. The Palestinians made Oslo a dead letter — so why should Israel continue the payments required under that agreement?
It’s thinking like Wolfensohn’s that extends the problem rather than solves it. He wants Israel and the West to continue to fund Palestinians despite their rejection of all agreements reached over the past fifteen years. If they can reject all agreements and treaties and not pay any price, why would they ever bother to honor one at all?
The Palestinians elected these people, and before that enthusiastically supported Arafat and his own band of somewhat more secular thugs. They support the abrogation of existing agreements and the use of terrorist tactics against civilian targets in Israel. Polls consistently show strong support for suicide bombing, and the elections proved that they would rather be led by terrorists than statesmen. Perhaps they felt free to make these choices, assuming that they would pay no price for them, thanks to well-intentioned but hopelessly paternalistic people like James Wolfensohn.
These are not children; they made their choice, one they have affirmed for years. It’s time to allow the Palestinians to experience the true consequences of those choices. They have impoverished themselves, and the West has no obligation to rescue them from their self-made misery.
UPDATE: Fixed a typo. Also, I agree with David in the comments — Wolfensohn has led a life of sacrifice and service and does not deserve to be demonized. He is, however, specatcularly wrong and a good example of where the liberal impulse goes off the rails in dealing with issues such as these.

The new Israeli political party founded by Ariel Sharon before his stroke cemented its parliamentary majority and announced its plans to erect a security barrier around Jerusalem. Ehud Olmert and his Cabinet agreed on the route for the wall, separating thousands of Palestinians from their jobs and paying Hamas back for their support of the terror attack in Tel Aviv:

Israel modified the route of its West Bank separation barrier on Sunday, moving forward with Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to quickly define the country’s final borders as his Kadima Party secured a parliamentary majority.
The Israeli Cabinet voted to reroute an area near the major settlement of Ariel deep in the West Bank and approved putting temporary fencing around areas of Jerusalem abutting the West Bank. The moves will put thousands of Palestinians on the “Palestinian” side of the enclosure, officials said. …
“We must make a supreme effort to complete the security barrier wherever possible,” Olmert told the ministers. “The decisions we take today will allow us to complete the construction of the fence very quickly in critical areas, and therefore improve our ability to thwart attempted attacks.”
Israel began construction of the barrier four years ago, saying it needed to keep suicide bombers out of the country. Olmert says the barrier will serve as the basis for Israel’s final border with the West Bank, which Israel won from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.
Olmert, whose Kadima Party won March 28 elections, says he hopes to reach an agreed settlement with the Palestinians but will move forward unilaterally if he concludes there is no negotiating partner on the other side.

Kadima reached an agreement with Shas to form a majority government, which will complicate this decision. Shas opposes any withdrawal from the West Bank, one of the predicates for establishing the final position of the wall. Shas apparently didn’t have much to say about that issue today, but it will likely not remain silent if the Olmert government begins to pull settlers out of the West Bank.
Beyond that, Olmert will probably find his plan for Jerusalem very popular among the Israelis as a whole. The gap in their security barrier has been the focus of speculation on how the latest bomber made entry into Israel. With the success of the barrier in other areas, Israelis have to wonder why it took so long for their government to get it finished.
It also puts Hamas in a bind. When most Palestinian government employees have stopped receiving paychecks thanks to their diplomatic incompetence, their support for the terror attack will throw more of their people out of work. So far, Hamas has not given Palestinians any reason to believe that they can govern capably, and it doesn’t appear that their track record has any chance of changing in the near future.

As I predicted after the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last week, Israel has decided on its response to the attack and the Hamas response praising it by finishing the security barrier through Jerusalem and shutting out the Palestinians, apparently permanently. Hamas gave the Israelis all the justification they need to complete the project with its endorsement of suicide bombings on Israeli civilians:

Israel’s prime minister-designate, Ehud Olmert, told top security officials today to swiftly plug the gaps in the separation barrier around Jerusalem. His order came nine days after a Palestinian suicide bomber struck again in Israel.
Israel’s separation barrier still has numerous openings around Jerusalem, and Israeli security officials consider the city one of the places most vulnerable to attack. …
Mr. Olmert ordered “all gaps be closed immediately by means of temporary fences until they are permanently closed by the security fence,” according to the prime minister’s office.

The Israelis have wanted to close off the barrier through Jerusalem for some time, but the West has opposed it, considering it too provocative and a potential negotiation-killer for peace talks. Israeli courts have also held up progress on the security wall, although they have given the green light to everything but its route by now. Ariel Sharon probably figured the proposed wall had more effect as a threat than as an actuality in getting the Palestinians to take peace talks seriously.
All of that flew out the window when Islamic Jihad conducted its last bombing, but especially when Hamas praised the operation as “self defense”. Rather than conduct a military strike on Hamas and bolster their popularity among the Palestinians, Olmert has shrewdly selected a tactic that will stab at the heart of their enemy and create a backlash against the incompetent terrorists who govern them. Not only will Hamas and its intransigence on adhering to previous treaties and recognition of Israel left the Palestinian Authority completely bankrupt, but now their diplomatic fecklessness has lost them Jerusalem. The barrier will complete their humiliation.
The Palestinians might finally wake up once they realize that their government has left them even more poor and even more isolated than Fatah could have dreamt. They will have no one to blame but themselves. Their insistence on supporting terrorism and war has brought them international scorn and abject poverty, and now they will watch as the security wall separates them from the one supposedly overriding goal of their struggle. Thanks to Hamas and their own benighted support, they may never see Jerusalem again.

How incompetent is the new Hamas leadership that now runs the Palestinian Authority? Apparently, they can’t even hire a decent bagman any more:

Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar has had $450,000 stolen from his hotel room during his current visit to Kuwait, the Itim news agency quoted the Kuwaiti media as saying Wednesday.
According to the report, al-Zahar had asked the Kuwaiti authorities to keep the theft under wraps, but the incident was confirmed by a security official at the hotel.
The foreign minister, a senior member of Hamas, is on a tour of Arab and Muslim countries to drum up funds after Israel suspended the transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority and Western donors cut off aid to the Hamas-led government.

He wanted the theft kept a secret? Understandable; I suppose that the Palestinians who elected Hamas will not be too thrilled to find that their new government isn’t smart enough to refrain from leaving a half-million dollars laying around a hotel room. Supposedly they elected Hamas to fight the corruption in the Fatah-run PA, but whether they steal money or carelessly leave it out for people to pilfer, the end result is that the money isn’t getting to the Palestinians. At least with Fatah, they had an income stream.
This looks like a strange attempt to get around the banking blockade that has kept pledged donations from transferring from Arab benefactors to the PA. Diplomats normally would not bother with cash, especially in this amount, for a diplomatic mission. Hamas apparently cannot rely on lines of credit while their assets are frozen. That’s what happens when a government openly applauds terrorism and refuses to commit to peace.

The Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority has claimed that it does not need American and European cooperation to survive, requesting and receiving pledges for stop-gap financing from Arab nations as well as Russia to avoid complying with the conditions necessary to do business with the US and the EU. Having refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to honor previous commitments made by the PA, Hamas has instead gone the route of full defiance, relying on their brethren in the Middle East to sustain them. However, the terrorists have underestimated the extent of a Western crackdown on finances during wartime:

Banks fearful of U.S. retribution are preventing millions of dollars in foreign aid from reaching the Palestinians, the Palestinian finance minister acknowledged Tuesday.
Since a Cabinet run by the militant Islamic Hamas was sworn into office last month, financial pressure by
Israel and Western countries has left the government broke. It was unable to pay 165,000 workers on April 1 and paychecks are due again in less than a week.
Hamas turned to Arab and Muslim countries for help. But the money raised remains stuck in an account in Egypt, said Finance Minister Omar Abdel Razek of Hamas. Arab banks that do business in the Palestinian territories fear that by transferring the money they will run afoul of U.S. anti-terrorism laws, he said.

Hamas apparently forgot about the squeeze on terrorist banking since 9/11, and their fellow Arabs do not seem terribly interested in defying the US to help them out. After all of the pledges Hamas received in the last two weeks, they now find that the real trick will be in collections. One wonders if the Arab kleptocrats understood this obstacle all along and felt free to pledge all they could in order to please their subjects, knowing that the money would go nowhere as long as Hamas remained intransigent.
That puts the Palestinians in a real bind, and Hamas in the crosshairs in a big way. They came to power on promises to end corruption, spread the wealth of Western aid to everyone, and to push the Israelis into the sea. Hamas expected to get assistance in all of these efforts from their cousins across Southwest Asia, and now they discover that the other nations care more for their lucrative financial interests with Europe and America than they do for green-kerchiefed lunatics in Ramadi.
Welcome to the neighborhood, Hamas.
The new government will rapidly face a breaking point. If they cannot pay the workers in the government, the people will soon grow completely disenchanted with Hamas’ rule. If they capitulate and agree to negotiations with Israel, the fanatics will kill them. If they vacillate, Fatah will take control by force. In almost all of these scenarios, Hamas suffers crippling political defeats. The Palestinians will have to face the literal as well as figurative bankruptcy of their political choices.

It turns out that the man killed by Pakistani forces near Khaar two days ago had a key role in what is left of al-Qaeda, and also had information that more clearly shows the connection between the bin Laden network and the Iraqi foreign insurgency:

Documents found on an operative for Al Qaeda who was killed by Pakistani forces showed that he was an explosives expert and a money carrier who appeared to be distributing cash to the families of Qaeda members, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the organization’s leader in Iraq, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.
The operative, Marwan Hadid al-Suri, 38, also known as Abu Marwan, was shot to death on Thursday during a gunfight outside Khaar, a tribal area close to the Afghan border, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao said.
A notebook found on Mr. Suri contained details and diagrams of bomb circuits and chemicals used to manufacture explosives, including TNT and C-4, said the intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “This is a big achievement because he was Al Qaeda’s explosives expert,” Mr. Sherpao said.
A diary written in Arabic contained a list of families of senior Qaeda operatives who received regular cash payments from the organization, including relatives of Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The list did not give the whereabouts of the families, but it described paying $2,500 per family every three months. According to the list, each family was also paid $500 per child every three months.

One interesting aspect of the Marwan case is his assignment to two very distinct tasks, which indicates that AQ may have some trouble getting higher-level competency. Normally an organization like AQ would not use one of its explosives experts as a bagman; the risk of exposure heightens dramatically when someone has to interface so often with others in the network and at banking institutions. Ideally the terrorists would want someone with specialized operational knowledge to remain hidden as much as possible. The fact that one of their explosives experts had to double as the paymaster tends to imply that they do not have enough reliable people to handle each task separately.
The notes on cash disbursements puts an end to the speculation that the leader of the Iraqi foreign insurgency, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, assumed the role of an AQ leader as a public pose. The regular payment of $2500 per quarter to his family indicates that AQ indeed accepts him as a leader and in fact pays him a salary commensurate with his assignment. That kind of money goes a long way in Jordan, Iraq, and other places in the Middle East. This gives yet another indication that the fight against the Zarqawi network in Iraq is no distraction from the war on terrorism but instead gives us another front on which to fight al-Qaeda.
The final irony in this story is that Marwan didn’t get killed as a result of a raid, although his home was the target of the earlier American attack on Bajaur that initially generated reports of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s death, which later was shown as a near-miss. His bus in Khaar got stopped at a regular security checkpoint, and Marwan shot a soldier trying to get away. He knew the value of the information he carried with him — the pay receipts, plans for explosives, and four grenades for good measure — and apparently panicked. The other soldiers at the checkpoint shot him while he tried to run away, providing an ignominious end to this Islamofascist lunatic.