Abbas's Not Ready For Prime Time Police Force

Aaron Klein writes that in reality, there is less to the US-trained Palestinian police force than meets the eye:

They are billed as the most professional Palestinian police force ever assembled.

They received advanced U.S. training and were deployed last year amid much fanfare and claims they would fight crime and terrorism.

They are upheld as the force capable of assuming law and order in the place of the Israeli army during the creation of any Palestinian state.

And this week they couldn't even secure a few stages at a music festival – marking the latest in a series of largely unreported, massive failures of the new elite police unit of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah. [emphasis added]

General Dayton has been upbeat all along about the men he has been training. He did an interview with the Jerusalem Post at the end of last year, and was full of reassurances:

Dayton is charged with supervising what he calls "the transformation and professionalization of the Palestinian security forces."

To that end, the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) hierarchy that he heads, with some three dozen American, Canadian and British personnel, is overseeing the training, in Jordan, of battalions of young new recruits to the Palestinian Authority's National Security Forces - an enhanced "gendarmerie" for the intended state of Palestine.

The general, with typical care, has prepared for our interview by typing out, in considerable detail, what he wants to say. The theme can perhaps best be summed as: This time, it's different. This time, the Palestinian forces will prove genuinely capable - of taking on Hamas and other extremists... and of refraining from taking on their Israeli counterparts.

...He acknowledges wide expanses of Israeli skepticism, and then marches decisively across them. These are Palestinian fighters Israel can trust, Dayton insists. And you can bet that this highly credible three-star general is delivering the same upbeat message to his superiors in Washington.

No doubt he has been, but the true caliber of this Palestinian police force has not be widely publicized--and for good reason:

Earlier this week, the Palestinians attempted to hold a music festival in the center of Nablus set to include rap, rock and pop shows.

The [Fatah] militants threatened to stop the festival, which was being protected by Dayton's forces.

Halfway into the festival, the militants burned down the stages, bringing the event to a screeching halt.

In May, 200 members of General Dayton's crack team were assigned to Cabatiya, just south of Jenin to confront members of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigages--the 'military' wing of Abbas's Fatah party. After 30 minutes:

"The security men ran away scared. They didn't arrest anyone," said one witness

The early incompetence of the US-trained Iraqi forces were a point of contention, pointed to by critics as evidence of how unready Iraq was to be a self-governing state, and of the failure of US policy there.

The silence of the White House, and the lack of media coverage of the failure of the Palestinian police, is deafening--but not unexpected. There is little that will not be overlooked in the process of pushing to create a second Palestinian state. After all, there is nothing wrong with the "peace process" that throwing more money at the Palestinian leadership won't cure, right?

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Technorati Tag: General Keith Dayton and Palestinians.