Getting Out

It won't be quick or easy. But, surprisingly, there are at least some ideas
By Linda Robinson
U.S. News & World Report
December 4, 2006

James A. Baker III delights in delivering the long-ball play. In his newly released memoir, he describes the "sweet payoff" of getting Syria and other recalcitrant Arab nations to attend the 1991 Madrid peace conference. After putting together a broad Arab and international coalition to wage the first Gulf War, Baker, secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, wanted to "capitalize on the momentum of this first-ever experience with regional cooperation in the Middle East." In many ways, Baker is taking up old business again today in his job as cochair of the Iraq Study Group that is soon to present its formula for stopping the bleeding from the sucking chest wound that the Iraq war has become.

The difficulties are even more daunting this time as violence threatens to spiral out of control. The Iraq Study Group--10 former cabinet officials, senators, counselors, and retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor--is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and is "at loggerheads" in its deliberations, says a Baker aide. But Baker and his cochair, longtime Democratic legislator Lee Hamilton, remain committed to reaching a bipartisan consensus on their recommendations to find a way to end the 3.5-year-old war that has cost nearly 3,000 American lives and taken tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. President Bush has said he looks forward to the group's report, and he has launched his own review of Iraq policy. The Pentagon is also conducting a review of its military options.

The debate over Iraq has spawned a welter of proposals for new policies, but something like a consensus position has begun to emerge on some key issues, including the need for a political settlement and diplomatic overtures to Iraq's neighbors. On the hot-button issue of U.S. troop levels, however--whether, when, and how many should be withdrawn from Iraq--sharp disagreement remains. Yet even there, a middle-ground position might be fashioned to win support from moderates on both sides of the aisle and from the White House. With a new Iraq policy, almost inevitably, will come new faces. The Pentagon is getting a new boss, and replacements for the U.S. ambassador and top military commander in Iraq are being discussed. Even with a new policy, however, one sober-minded former U.S. official cautions, "it may be too late for any strategy to work."

If the Baker group fails, it won't be for lack of trying. For the past six months, dozens of academic experts provided proposals and analysis to the group. The experts lined up behind two main options and wrote papers titled "Stability First" and "Redeploy and Contain." According to experts interviewed by U.S. News, the former paper called for a focus on stabilizing Baghdad and an effort to reach an accommodation with the insurgents rather than defeating them. The latter favored withdrawing U.S. troops on a timetable and taking military and diplomatic steps to contain Iraq's violence within its borders.

When word of the two papers leaked, Baker and Hamilton reacted immediately. The experts were cut out of the loop and thereafter used as a resource to provide further information to commissioners in writing. Baker, who had been out promoting his memoir, stopped granting interviews. The rest of the panel also stopped talking to the press. The cochairs and their aides wrote their own draft report and guarded its contents closely. Nonetheless, in several dozen interviews, U.S. News has pieced together this account of the group's deliberations, the evolving search for an alternative policy, and the administration's response to the mounting pressure for an exit strategy.

Autonomy or partition. The case for increased autonomy for Iraq's Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish communities has been put forward by Sen. Joe Biden and former Council on Foreign Relations President Leslie Gelb. Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith has made the case for partition of Iraq. The premise of the two proposals is that Iraq's warring groups cannot reach an accommodation, so they should be permitted to rule over the geographic areas they dominate with a minimal central government that would guarantee fair sharing of oil revenues. The main difficulty with this is that some one third of Iraqis live in intermixed areas, and many Iraqis are intermarried. As the authors acknowledge, a neat geographic division is impossible without mass population movement.

The Iraqi ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaidaie, criticized this proposal in an interview with U.S. News. "There are some American politicians who think that they can devise a way out, sitting here in Washington or spending a few hours in the Green Zone," he said. "The idea of subdividing Iraq is very dangerous. It will create far more problems." A senior U.S. intelligence expert on Iraq believes it is "a nonstarter" for the practical reason that "the people with the guns don't accept it. ... The Shia and Sunni both still want a unified, Arab-dominated Iraq-dominated by them."

Rapid or phased withdrawal. Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, is the principal advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Others call for fixed dates for withdrawal or not replacing brigades as their rotations end. More and more Americans support withdrawal, but Hamilton, Baker's cochair, opposes both formulas. "Pulling out precipitously could cause considerable damage to U.S. interests," he wrote in the Indianapolis Star last year. "Arbitrary deadlines will not work."

The directors of both the central and defense intelligence agencies testified recently that the departure of American forces, without any other steps, would make the violence worse. A defense intelligence official described what he believes would be the Iraqi reaction to such a move. "Any attempts to draw down dramatically in the near term will be seen as a sign of weakness by Sunni Arabs and will accelerate score settling," he told U.S. News. "The Shia, in turn, will feel they have to assert themselves."

Larry Diamond, who advised U.S. officials in Iraq and subsequently wrote a book criticizing U.S. policy there, paints a stark portrait of what he believes would ensue. "Withdrawal would lead to a ghastly, all-out civil war and a sudden, cataclysmic collapse of the Iraqi government," he says. "If we just start heading for the exits, and that's all we do, all of the most extreme elements will seize power."

Troop increases. Sen. John McCain advocates sending more troops, arguing that the continued violence demonstrates that there are inadequate numbers to deal with the problem and that the Iraqi security forces aren't ready to shoulder the task. Gen. John Abizaid, overall commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, testified that Washington could temporarily increase troop levels by some 20,000-and said he is weighing all options. But he also said such an increase could not be sustained indefinitely. Retired Gen. Jack Keane, former Army vice chief and a senior consultant to the Baker-Hamilton group, believes that "the Iraqi political process has failed because the Sunnis are not participating. As far as the Sunnis are concerned, they are succeeding in their desire to create an unstable environment, fracture the Iraqi government, and drive the United States out. The evidence suggests they are right." Therefore, he argues, "for a political strategy to work, the military strategy has to enable it. The military strategy must force the Sunnis to seek a political solution, and right now there is insufficient pressure on them to seek one," he told U.S. News. "The current level of Iraqi and U.S. forces is not adequate to the task." Iraqi police and military forces now number 322,000 and U.S. troops about 140,000. General Keane advocates raising the Iraqi forces to some 650,000-which will take time-and increasing U.S. troop levels, at least in the near term.

National compact. There is growing support for the idea of making a full-bore push to reach a political agreement among Iraq's warring factions. Some see it as the only real hope for ending the violence. One of the experts advising the Baker-Hamilton group, Michele Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says: "The most important element of a new approach is a fundamentally reinvigorated political effort that would put pressure on the ... government [of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki] to do more in extending a hand to Sunnis."

Analysts differ over whether the Shiite or Sunni antagonists need to be pressured more. One intelligence official says that coercion is also required on the Sunni side, where insurgents still harbor dreams of returning to power, provoking fear among the Shiites, who turn for protection to their militias. "The Sunni have guns, recruits, motivation," the official says, "and the wherewithal to continue this for a very long time."

The administration has been trying to bring about political reconciliation for the past year, and the Iraqi government laid out a timeline for doing so in October, although it failed this month to reach agreement on allowing more Baathists to resume jobs in the government and failed to pass a new oil law, as hoped. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a Sunni Afghan-American who speaks fluent Arabic, was regarded by many as the best hope for brokering a deal. He is reportedly leaving his post in the next few months.

Some criticize the administration for having failed to reach out to Sunni antagonists before they grew so strong. One official asserts that the National Security Council's director for Iraq, Meghan O'Sullivan, blocked attempts to negotiate with key members of the insurgency and former regime officials, a charge she denies. Even now, says Diamond, "we need to talk very intensively and urgently, without any preconditions, to those elements who have been excluded-the former Baathists, Army officers, the Iraqi Islamist groups." In the past month, there have been a few small gains on this front, as secret talks with some insurgents won their promise not to attack coalition forces, and some Sunni tribes have been enlisted to go after al Qaeda insurgents.

Arm twisting. In response to the criticism that the United States has failed to put enough pressure on the Maliki government, a senior administration official said: "Some assume that all we say to the Iraqis is what we say in public." Indeed, on a recent visit to Iraq, General Abizaid told Maliki he needed to take action against the Shiite militias "very soon," and he told Congress that he believes the government has only four to six months before the violence spirals beyond its ability to rein it in. But the senior administration official acknowledged that the piecemeal approach to negotiation hasn't succeeded. "The Iraqi leadership has said it is easier to do it incrementally. The reality is that it is very hard to get without trade-offs." That recognition reflects the administration's growing willingness to embrace a new approach, to convene the parties and tell them that the time to resolve their differences is now.

Abizaid delivered a barely veiled warning in recent congressional testimony, following his visit with Maliki. "We are in danger of having civil war," he said, "if the government does not open a reasonable dialogue for national reconciliation and back its Army in its attempt to gain stability 100 percent." U.S. military officials have been frustrated by numerous incidents in which Maliki undercut Iraqi troops who were going after death squad leaders and kidnappers, apparently to shield Shiite militia figures or avoid the wrath of Shiite politicians.

If all avenues for reaching an accord have not already been exhausted, the question is whether any new inducements ought to be offered. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who will become the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in January, has called for President Bush to announce an initial troop cut within four to six months as a way of putting pressure on Maliki. Levin envisions it as a clear signal and not necessarily a prelude to further cuts, and he opposes any scheduled withdrawal as too rigid, an aide says. Levin would also leave it up to the Pentagon to decide how many troops to withdraw.

Regional diplomacy. There is wide agreement on the desirability of enlisting Iraq's neighbors to support a political accord there or reduce their assistance to insurgent and militia groups. The new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill advocates convening an international conference to gain greater cooperation. U.S. officials say that Syria is allowing Sunni insurgents across its border, and they say Iran is helping Shiite militia groups in a bid for wider regional influence. Proponents of dialogue argue that while these countries are U.S. adversaries, neither wants Iraq to become a failed state. "I believe both countries would try to bargain," says a Mideast diplomat. "The question is, should bad behavior be rewarded?"

Baker has not taken a public stand on the merits of negotiating with Syria and Iran, but as a matter of principle he said: "Personally, I believe in talking to your enemies." He recalled in an October interview that it took him 16 trips to Syria to get the government to change its 25-year-old policy and sit down with Israel in 1991. "That never would have happened," he said, "had we not made those trips and had we not talked to them."

In the past few days, the administration has appeared to open the door a crack. The State Department's David Satterfield, its top official on Iraq, said that the administration is prepared to talk to Iran but not to Syria. "We believe the Syrian government is well aware of our concerns and the steps required to address those concerns," he said curtly. But, he added, "we are prepared, in principle, to discuss Iranian activities in Iraq." This was the clearest indication to date that the administration may move soon to embrace this diplomatic gambit.

The U.S. diplomatic overtures to its friends in the region have so far borne little fruit. Satterfield acknowledged that the Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, have not forgiven Iraq's debt to them as Washington has asked and are unwilling to provide peacekeeping forces. This is partly because of these Sunni-led states' concern over the rise of Iran's influence in Iraq but also because of their pique over the lack of U.S. consultation with them. Many experts advocate bringing in Europe and the United Nations to expand the tool kit of influence; next month the United Nations is supposed to announce an international compact that will bring economic benefits if Iraq implements economic reforms. Officials say politics and a dysfunctional bureaucracy have left some $13 billion in petrodollars bottled up in Iraq's finance ministry.

The Democratic leadership's embrace of political negotiations and more active diplomacy makes it even more likely that these elements will be part of the Iraq Study Group recommendations. Another element likely to appear in the report is a call for the U.S. military mission to transition from one focused on combat to one focused on advising Iraqi forces and counterterrorism. In another sign of growing consensus on this point, a similar recommendation may be forthcoming from the reviews of military strategy now underway at the Pentagon, at the Central Command, and in Iraq.

The security compromise. Abizaid testified that the military is currently looking at ways to make the U.S. military advisers embedded with Iraqi forces the focus of the strategy. There are about 4,000 U.S. advisers in 10-to-15-man teams. Currently, there are 139 such American teams working with the Iraqi Army and 14 others staffed by coalition forces, as well as teams embedded with Iraqi police and border guards. In addition, there are special operations forces serving as combat advisers to scout platoons in about one third of the Iraqi Army.

A senior U.S. military official told U.S. News that two ways are being considered to expand the advisory effort. More advisers and supporting teams can be drawn from the existing combat brigades now in Iraq, and additional advisers can be trained and brought in from the United States. No decision has yet been reached on how large the increase will be, the official said, but it could be double the present number. He also pointed out that in some parts of Iraq, advisers already get help from the U.S. combat brigade assigned to the area, such as in Mosul, where a Training Combat Advisory Team backed up the embedded Military Transition Team. That formula may be expanded nationwide. Making the teams more "robust" also means giving them more vehicles and weapons so they can move around and protect themselves once U.S. combat brigades are withdrawn. Additional interpreters and training are also needed to make advisers more effective; the latter will include revamping the counterinsurgency courses at Taji and stateside.

Finally, plans are already being drawn up to shift more responsibility and control to the Iraqi forces. A high-level U.S.-Iraqi committee is currently negotiating the terms for a faster turnover of authority, bases, and provinces to Iraqi control. The committee is also discussing ways of making the Iraqi forces more mobile by leaving behind U.S. up-armored humvees as units withdraw and improving their heavy weaponry via foreign military sales purchases. General Abizaid suggested that this turnover package could be tied to an accord on militia demobilization and amnesty as an additional incentive.

If the expanded advisers do boost the capacity of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqis prove able to manage a faster turnover, that can open the way for an earlier drawdown of some U.S. troops than previously envisioned-possibly in less than 12 months, according to Abizaid. Flournoy, who served in the Clinton administration's Pentagon, believes that this plan might win the support of the Democratic leaders, who she says are not rigidly insisting on a fixed redeployment or withdrawal calendar. "What they really want is not a date certain so much as a sign that this is not a perpetually open-ended commitment."

Some in the Baker group are concerned that drawdown signals could make it harder to reach an agreement by raising fears that the United States will not act as the guarantor of any accord that is reached. And actual drawdowns or pullback could make the remaining U.S. advisers more vulnerable and spur more violence. But regardless of U.S. moves, if chances of an accord recede, the environment will become increasingly dangerous for any remaining forces. Within six months, one expert said, it should be clear whether Iraqis can reach agreement. The conflict's own dynamic may in effect become the timeline that everyone is looking for.

Trying to fashion a stable and unified Iraq will be a huge job, one that may in the end prove impossible, but there's at least one obvious candidate for the job. Flournoy speculates that the Iraq Study Group chief could be tapped to carry out the report's diplomatic recommendations. "It is possible that the president will say, 'Jim Baker, you just got yourself a job. Go get on a plane,'" she says. If so, the Texas lawyer might well find himself reliving his earlier days of shuttle diplomacy, described in his memoir: "Almost everywhere," he wrote, "I was met with delays, refusals, evasions, unreasonable demands, broken commitments, and endless lectures about the untrustworthiness of the other side." Hard to imagine better training than that for fixing the mess in Iraq.

Interventionism's Realistic Future

By Robert D. Kaplan
The Washington Post
Wednesday, November 22, 2006; A21

Hard-core foreign policy realists (the kind who say this country should rarely intervene again, anywhere) are hoping that in the wake of our comeuppance in Iraq things will be going their way. That is to say, U.S. foreign policy will be defined by an obdurate caution, coupled with a ruthless, almost mathematical application of balance-of-power principles. You'd think -- to hear some of them talk -- that we're about to emulate China, which seeks only energy sources and advantageous trade agreements and cares nothing at all for the moral improvement of regimes in such places as Zimbabwe, Burma and Uzbekistan.

This is nonsense. Our foreign policy is about to experience an adjustment, not a flip-flop. Neither political party will support anything else if it really wants to elect a president in 2008. Just look at the dismay in this country over our failure to intervene in Darfur, even given the burden we already carry in Iraq. To be sure, the recent evidence that our democratic system cannot be violently exported will temper our Wilsonian principles, but it will not bury them. Pure realism -- without a hint of optimism or idealism -- would immobilize our mass immigrant democracy, which has always seen itself as an agent of change.

Iraq will merely close a post-Cold War chapter in American foreign policy, one that began with the Persian Gulf War -- and with Bosnia. After the collapse of communism in 1989, idealism, the export of democracy and humanitarian interventionism were all the rage among journalists and intellectuals -- much as realism, restraint and benign dictatorship are now. Ten years ago Liberia, Sierra Leone and other countries less institutionally developed than Iraq were considered prime candidates for liberal change. Back then, people such as Brent Scowcroft and James Baker were attacked not just by neoconservatives but by liberal internationalists, too. In those first, heady post-Cold War years, to be called a "realist" was practically an insult.

The Balkan interventions, because they paid strategic dividends, appeared to justify the idealistic missionary approach to foreign policy. The 1995 intervention in Bosnia changed the debate from "Should NATO Exist?" to "Should NATO Expand?" Our 1999 war in Kosovo, as much as the events of Sept. 11, 2001, allowed for the eventual expansion of NATO to the Black Sea. It also led to the toppling of Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic, without chaos ensuing. Neoconservatives and others who had supported our actions in Bosnia and Kosovo then carried the spirit of this policy to its limits in Iraq.

And so what began in 1995 with a limited air and land campaign in the western, most-developed part of the former Ottoman Empire ended with a mass infantry invasion eight years later in its eastern, least-developed part. Not only was this last intervention far more ambitious than the first, it was also far less competently executed in its occupation phase. Thus it failed.

The lesson is not that we won't intervene again. We will, and often. But we will do so with the caution and hesitation shown in the 1990s and only as part of an authentic coalition. To wit, just as NATO's war in Kosovo had a British face and voice -- that of its spokesman, Jamie Shea -- any intervention in North Korea (should it ever come to that) will put the South Korean military front and center and will have the implicit cooperation of the Chinese army. Otherwise, we won't do it.

The expansion of our military deployments in Africa, as well as the emergence of NATO as a global constabulary force, points to an activist military presence overseas. From Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden -- across the entire Sahara -- Marines and Army Special Forces have been conducting training missions -- not only to field indigenous forces in the hunt for Islamic terrorists but also to professionalize the militaries of fledgling democracies and develop the backbone of an American-advised, pan-African intervention force to handle future Darfurs. The drawdown of our forces in Iraq, no matter how humiliating the circumstances, will eventually free up equipment and manpower for such smaller and less controversial deployments, which will always have a civil affairs element.

NATO is moving on a parallel track. What started after 1989 with train-and-equip missions to reform former Warsaw Pact military forces in Eastern Europe has expanded to the Caucasus and Central Asia under the Partnership for Peace program. NATO's current mission in Afghanistan and its restructuring under Marine Gen. James Jones to a more sea-based, expeditionary force signifies how it will be able to deploy faster and more often to deal with out-of-area emergencies.

Our military and civilian agencies will be expected to deal with many emergencies as we enter an era when more people than ever before will be killed or made homeless by natural disasters as populations rise in environmentally fragile zones. The tsunami rescue effort of 2004-05, led by U.S. Pacific Command, was a curtain raiser for deployments to come.

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.

Iraq has relegitimized realism, which is a good thing. But without an idealistic component to our foreign policy, there would be nothing to distinguish us from our competitors. And that, in and of itself, would lead to the decline of American power.

The writer is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land

By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
November 21, 2006

JERUSALEM, Nov. 20 — An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.

Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.

If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private.

The new claims regarding Palestinian property are said to come from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, which controls the civilian aspects of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plans to publish the information on Tuesday. An advance copy was made available to The New York Times.

The data — maps that show the government’s registry of the land by category — was given to Peace Now by someone who obtained it from an official inside the Civil Administration. The Times spoke to the person who received it from the Civil Administration official and agreed not to identify him because of the delicate nature of the material.

That person, who has frequent contact with the Civil Administration, said he and the official wanted to expose what they consider to be wide-scale violations of private Palestinian property rights by the government and settlers. The government has refused to give the material directly to Peace Now, which requested it under Israel’s freedom of information law.

Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Civil Administration, said he could not comment on the data without studying it.

He said there was a committee, called the blue line committee, that had been investigating these issues of land ownership for three years. “We haven’t finished checking everything,” he said.

Mr. Dror also said that sometimes Palestinians would sell land to Israelis but be unwilling to admit to the sale publicly because they feared retribution as collaborators.

Within prominent settlements that Israel has said it plans to keep in any final border agreement, the data show, for example, that some 86.4 percent of Maale Adumim, a large Jerusalem suburb, is private; and 35.1 percent of Ariel is.

The maps indicate that beyond the private land, 5.8 percent is so-called survey land, meaning of unclear ownership, and 1.3 percent private Jewish land. The rest, about 54 percent, is considered “state land” or has no designation, though Palestinians say that at least some of it represents agricultural land expropriated by the state.

The figures, together with detailed maps of the land distribution in every Israeli settlement in the West Bank, were put together by the Settlement Watch Project of Peace Now, led by Dror Etkes and Hagit Ofran, and has a record of careful and accurate reporting on settlement growth.

The report does not include Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed and does not consider part of the West Bank, although much of the world regards East Jerusalem as occupied. Much of the world also considers Israeli settlements on occupied land to be illegal under international law. International law requires an occupying power to protect private property, and Israel has always asserted that it does not take land without legal justification.

One case in a settlement Israel intends to keep is in Givat Zeev, barely five miles north of Jerusalem. At the southern edge is the Ayelet Hashachar synagogue. Rabah Abdellatif, a Palestinian who lives in the nearby village of Al Jib, says the land belongs to him.

Papers he has filed with the Israeli military court, which runs the West Bank, seem to favor Mr. Abdellatif. In 1999, Israeli officials confirmed, he was even granted a judgment ordering the demolition of the synagogue because it had been built without permits. But for the last seven years, the Israeli system has done little to enforce its legal judgments. The synagogue stands, and Mr. Abdellatif has no access to his land.

Ram Kovarsky, the town council secretary, said the synagogue was outside the boundaries of Givat Zeev, although there is no obvious separation. Israeli officials confirm that the land is privately owned, though they refuse to say by whom.

Mr. Abdellatif, 65, said: “I feel stuck, angry. Why would they do that? I don’t know who to go to anymore.”

He pointed to his corduroy trousers and said, in the English he learned in Paterson, N.J., where his son is a police detective: “These are my pants. And those are your pants. And you should not take my pants. This is mine, and that is yours! I never took anyone’s land.”

According to the Peace Now figures, 44.3 percent of Givat Zeev is on private Palestinian land.

Miri Eisin, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that Israeli officials would have to see the data and the maps and added that ownership is complicated and delicate. Baruch Spiegel, a reserve general who just left the Ministry of Defense and dealt with the separation barrier being built near the boundary with the West Bank, also said he would have to see the data in detail in order to judge it.

The definitions of private and state land are complicated, given different administrations of the West Bank going back to the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, Jordan and now Israel. During the Ottoman Empire, only small areas of the West Bank were registered to specific owners, and often villagers would hold land in common to avoid taxes. The British began a more formal land registry based on land use, taxation or house ownership that continued through the Jordanian period.

Large areas of agricultural land are registered as state land; other areas were requisitioned or seized by the Israeli military after 1967 for security purposes, but such requisitions are meant to be temporary and must be renewed, and do not change the legal ownership of the land, Mr. Dror, the Civil Administration spokesman, said.

But the issue of property is one that Israeli officials are familiar with, even if the percentages here may come as a surprise and may be challenged after the publication of the report.

Asked about Israeli seizure of private Palestinian land in an interview with The Times last summer, before these figures were available, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “Now I don’t deny anything, I don’t ignore anything. I’m just ready to sit down and talk. And resolve it. And resolve it in a generous manner for all sides.”

He said the 1967 war was a one of self-defense. Later, he said: “Many things happened. Life is not frozen. Things occur. So many things happened, and as a result of this many innocent individuals on both sides suffered, were killed, lost their lives, became crippled for life, lost their family members, their loved ones, thousands of them. And also private property suffered. By the way, on all sides.”

Mr. Olmert says Israel will keep some 10 percent of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, possibly in a swap for land elsewhere. The area Israel intends to keep is roughly marked by the route of the unfinished separation barrier, which cuts through the West Bank and is intended, Israel says, to stop suicide bombers. Mr. Olmert, however, describes it as a putative border. Nearly 80,000 Jews live in settlements beyond the route of the barrier, but some 180,000 live in settlements within the barrier, while another 200,000 live in East Jerusalem.

But these land-ownership figures show that even in the settlements that Israel intends to keep, there will be a considerable problem of restitution that goes beyond the issue of refugee return.

Mr. Olmert was elected on a pledge to withdraw Israeli settlers living east of the barrier. But after the war with Hezbollah and with fighting ongoing in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew its settlers in the summer of 2005, his withdrawal plan has been suspended.

In March 2005, a report requested by the government found a number of illegal Israeli outposts built on private Palestinian land, and officials promised to destroy them. But only nine houses of only one outpost, Amona, were dismantled after a court case brought by Peace Now.

There is a court case pending over Migron, which began as a group of trailers on a windy hilltop around a set of cellphone antennas in May 1999 and is now a flourishing community of 50 families, said Avi Teksler, an official of the Migron council. But Migron, too, according to the data, is built on private Palestinian land.

Mr. Teksler said that the land was deserted, and that its ownership would be settled in court. Migron, where some children of noted settlement leaders live, has had “the support of every Israeli government,” he said. “The government has been a partner to every single move we’ve made.”

Mr. Teksler added: “This is how the state of Israel was created. And this is all the land of Israel. We’re like the kibbutzim. The only real difference is that we’re after 1967, not before.”

But in the Palestinian village of Burqa, Youssef Moussa Abdel Raziq Nabboud, 85, says that some of the land of Migron, and the land on which Israel built a road for settlers, belongs to him and his family, who once grew wheat and beans there. He said he had tax documents from the pre-1967 authorities.

“They have the power to put the settlement there and we can do nothing,” he said. “They have a fence around the settlement and dogs there.”

Mr. Nabboud went to the Israeli authorities with the mayor, Abu Maher, but they were told he needed an Israeli lawyer and surveyor. “I have no money for that,” he said. What began as an outpost taking 5 acres has now taken 125, the mayor said.

Mr. Nabboud wears a traditional head covering; his grandson, Khaled, 27, wears a Yankees cap. “The land is my inheritance,” he said. “I feel sad I can’t go there. And angry. The army protects them.”

'War on terror' could last 30 years or more

Agence France Presse
Nov 20, 2006

The fight against terrorism could last 30 years or more, according to a report published by a British think tank that specialises in international security.

"There is every prospect of the 'war on terror' extending for 30 years or more," said the report by the Oxford Research Group.

"What is required is a complete re-assessment of current policies but that is highly unlikely, even with the recent political upheavals".

The US Democrats triumphed in legislative elections on November 7 in which they reclaimed the House and the Senate, at the expense of President George W. Bush's Republicans.

"Most people believe that the recent elections mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era but that does not apply to the war on terror," said Professor Paul Rogers, who wrote the report, in a statement.

"In reality there will be little change until the United States faces up to the need for a fundamental re-think of its policies".

The report showed that the United States is now faced with a dilemma: if it withdraws from Iraq, insurgent groups will be able to operate freely in the biggest oil reserve in the world.

"If it stays, though, then US soldiers become an increasing magnet for radical factions, with Iraq becoming a training ground for new generations of paramilitaries, just as Afghanistan was in the 1980s against the Soviet occupying forces," the report said.

It said that the "fundamental mistake" was to remove the regime of president Saddam Hussein by force, which was a "gift" for Al-Qaeda and extremist groups because the deployment of 150,000 US soldiers in the heart of the Arab world is considered by many to be "an occupation force".

At the same time, the war in Afghanistan, that has so far lasted six years, has seen "a marked increase in Taliban activity at a time of record revenues from opium production" and the insurgency there "shows no sign of ending".

The importance of oil in the region "means that it would be entirely unacceptable for the United States to consider withdrawal from Iraq, no matter how insecure the environment".

Professor Rogers has since May 2005 been studying the situation in Iraq and its impact on other countries, including Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East.