Negotiating with Hamas Can’t Work
... any more than negotiating with the Taliban worked.
I WAS MISERABLE DURING America’s final year in Afghanistan. We were losing the war. The Taliban was playing the United States like a fiddle at the negotiating table in Doha. There was a strong sense of impending catastrophe. It was demoralizing.
Yet there were some signs of hope. A few parts of the country were doing better than others. Under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Haibatullah Alizai, the Afghan National Army Special Operations Corps (ANASOC) was fighting with devastating effect across the battlefield. In Helmand, Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat was trading blows with the Taliban in a brutal fight. The Afghan Air Force, led by a generation of young American-trained pilots, was flying nonstop operations to support those in the field. They never took days off; there were no rest days for pilots.
The Afghan diplomats and generals I spoke with repeatedly told me that the Doha agreement was a farce and that the United States was making a huge mistake. “Brother, you’re the diplomat,” Lt Gen. Sadat told me. “The Taliban that I’m killing are not interested in peace. They are just whispering what you want to hear into your ears. Don’t fall for it.”
We did, of course, fall for it.
Despite the Taliban making it perfectly clear that they were not interested in peace, we decided to sell out our Afghan allies by signing the Doha Agreement. The Trump administration in 2018 had arranged for the release of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the cofounder of the Taliban—he had been “in prison” in Pakistan since 2010—under the delusion that he would be easy to work with. Mullah Baradar thanked us for our good deeds and took U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the cleaners.
We gave away so much at the negotiating table—and the Taliban never intended to abide by much of what they agreed to, anyway. The Taliban agreed not to attack coalition forces, and in return, the Afghan forces were not allowed to conduct offensive operations but could only defend their checkpoints, something we euphemistically called “active defense.” The Taliban attacked coalition forces anyway, and they also launched an assassination campaign targeting ANASOC and Afghan Air Force pilots—and their families. While the Afghans had their hands tied, the Taliban crept in for the kill shot.
We kept telling ourselves that there wasn’t a military solution to our Afghan problem. The Taliban, on the other hand, executed their military strategy with stunning efficiency—and their patrons, Iran and Pakistan, never left the battlefield.
The same thing is happening in Gaza.
Over the last four months, Hamas has been playing the same game the Taliban played in 2019–2020. While Israel’s battlefield progress has been slowed by U.S. government pressure, Hamas has further obstructed the IDF by toying with negotiations, signaling interest in deals to free hostages in exchange for ceasefire agreements before turning around and claiming the deals are dead.
How many times and in how many ways must Hamas tell us they’re not interested in peace before we believe them? How many times must their leaders insist that they are willing to sacrifice Palestinian civilians before we understand that they’re not a legitimate governing entity concerned for the welfare of its people, but a genocidal terrorist organization that wants to kill Jews?
We continue to project our values onto Hamas at our peril. Hamas isn’t interested in reconstructing Gaza. They’re interested in using Gazans as shields while they themselves hunker down in the most complex underground tunnel system anybody has ever seen. I recently spoke with a Vietnam veteran who did two tours as a “tunnel rat”—one of the soldiers who worked to explore and clear Viet Cong tunnels. “I’ve seen the pictures,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Both Israel and Hamas have repeatedly reminded the world that they’re locked into an existential war that both sides believe they must win to survive, but the Biden administration, backed by much of the international community, has decided to halt the fighting in the hopes of securing a peace deal.
Hamas isn’t really interested in that, so we see the same pattern again and again: They will leak word that they are “studying the proposal” seriously or view it “positively.” Hamas, just like the Taliban, knows precisely the right words to make us excited about the prospects for peace. Every time we fall for this, we end up pressuring Israel to make more and more concessions to Hamas—just as Trump did in Afghanistan.
I SERVED ON TWO PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS in Iraq and Afghanistan, which provided hundreds of millions of dollars in projects throughout Diyala, Kapisa, and Parwan. Some of my troops paid the ultimate price to give reconstruction projects to Iraqis and Afghans. It was important work, and I’m very proud of what we did. I remember those smiling Afghan children’s faces very well.
However, most of the time, it didn’t work. In Afghanistan, the Taliban intimidated our contractors, took our money, and then used it to kill our troops. In Iraq, it was a little bit different. When I served in 2010 in Diyala, the surge provided stability, which allowed some of our reconstruction projects to do some actual good. But all that good went out the window when we voluntarily left, allowing the Islamic State to destroy all that we had built.
This is the second reason to greet Hamas’s overtures with suspicion: If they aren’t using misdirection to gain time to rearm and improve their military odds in the current conflict, they are trying to secure an agreement that will make it possible for them to prepare to launch the next one. War with Israel is the only reason they exist. Count on it: If Hamas were to sign any deal allowing them to survive, they will take all the reconstruction money and turn it into a way to kill more Jews. They will rebuild their army. They will also emerge from the tunnels as conquering heroes among the jihadist community—both al Qaeda and the Taliban have already praised Hamas for their October 7, 2023 pogrom—and they will attack again.
Americans want quick fixes, and our enemies are counting on us to play to type. That’s because jihadists don’t have the same conception of time that we do. There’s an old Pashtun proverb, “The Pashtun who took revenge after a hundred years said, ‘I took it too quickly.’” The Taliban’s patience, combined with resilience, persistence, and willingness to die, made them formidable opponents. Hamas takes a similarly long view. They don’t need a first-world military to defeat the West. Instead, aided by their deep study of Western values, they will continue their cynical guerrilla war until we grow tired, relent, and retreat.
We’ve seen scenes like this play out before, and we’ll see them again. Since the Israeli government removed every Israeli from Gaza at gunpoint in 2005, Israel and Hamas have fought major battles in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and now since October 7, with sporadic rocket fire and airstrikes in between. The result of every previous ceasefire has been more terrorism. There’s a reason governments don’t negotiate with terrorists.
And if you think what Hamas did in Gaza is shocking, wait until the world sees what is in store in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al Qaeda are building a similar terror state.
WAR IS A HIDEOUS THING. I’ve experienced it up close and personal. The trauma that it inflicts scars generations. I bear those scars. But sometimes the enemy must be killed, especially when the enemy repeatedly tells you he just wants to kill you. The destruction of Hamas, pursued while striving to minimize civilian deaths, is the only realistic hope of preventing many more civilian deaths in the future. If Hamas can be defeated, the prospect of a future peace, however distant, may become real once more.
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