Digging in in Lebanon: sanctuary for radical nationalists, a grave for American foreign policy. Plus: the coming assault.

Robert Fisk, The Independent:

Stories that just don’t seem to make it into print.

Did you know that the Hizbollah “Party of God” has installed its own private communications network in the south of Lebanon, stretching from the village of Zawter Sharqiya all the way to Beirut? And why, I wonder, would it be doing that? Well, to safeguard its phones in the event that the Israelis immobilise the public mobile system in the next war. Next war? Well, if there’s not going to be another war in Lebanon, why is Hizbollah building new roads north of the Litani river, new bunkers, new logistics far outside the area of operations of the Nato-led UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon?

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s leader, boasts of new weapons. The Lebanese suspect that these include anti-aircraft missiles. … Since the Israeli army is incapable of fighting the Hizbollah on its own ground – its collapse when faced by Hizbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon last year proved this – what happens if their awesome air power is also neutered?

But there’s more.

• The Lebanese army is at war with non-Hezbollah guerrillas in the Palestinian Nahr el-Bared refugee camps.
• The Syrians have accepted and treated well between half a million and a million refugees from Iraq, refugees who have very grateful relatives in Lebanon.
• These facts have engendered considerable sympathy for Hezbollah and Syria inside Lebanon, since the Fouad Siniora government is now seen as an American puppet.

Fisk continues:   

So what else do the Americans have up their sleeve for us out here? Well, an old chum of mine in the Deep South – a former US Vietnam veteran officer – has a habit of tramping through the hills to the north of his home and writes to me that “in my therapeutic and recreation trips … in the mountains of North Carolina over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of F-16 and C-130 activity. They are coming right through the passes, low to the ground. The last time I saw this kind of thing up there was before Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan”

The friend adds other observations that lead him to conclude that there will be a major assault in Pakistan. Fisk adds:

A few days after my friend’s letter arrived in Beirut, the Pakistanis reported that the Americans were using pilotless drones to attack targets just inside Pakistan. But it seems much more ambitious military plans may now be in the works. An all-out strike inside the North West Frontier province before President Pervez Musharref steps down – or is overthrown? A last throw of the dice at Bin Laden before “democracy” returns to Pakistan?

Or Iran, Robert. Or Iran.