As President Obama sits down with the emir of Qatar Tuesday, he will confront a diplomatic relationship that is becoming more tangled even as the two countries move closer to an alliance against the Islamic State.
Obama’s White House meeting with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani comes just days after revelations that Doha had agreed to participate in a U.S.-led program to train Iraqi troops to fight the Sunni fundamentalist movement that now controls a large territory in Iraq and Syria as well as a “province” in Libya and parts of other countries. The White House said Obama looks forward to the opportunity to further the long-standing partnership between the two countries and “the shared interest in supporting stability and prosperity in the Middle East.”
In reality, the relationship is far more complicated, and some foreign policy experts say the tiny but influential Gulf state shows two faces in the struggle over Islamic extremism.
Publicly, the Qatari government backs the U.S.-led coalition against the militants of the Islamic State. But it has repeatedly failed to live up to promises to crack down on terrorist financiers who operate freely in Qatar.
Several Washington think tanks over the last year have taken the Qatari government to task for failing to stanch the flow of its wealthy citizens’ private donations to radical groups in Syria and Iraq, a pattern of negligence against terror finance that stretches back over two decades.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a report in December accusing the Qatari authorities of “willful negligence” in enforcing anti-terrorist financing laws in the country that has benefited al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria, Gaza, Somalia, South Asia and Iraq.
“The international community cannot successfully defeat terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, the Khorasan Group [an extreme bomb-making wing of al Qaeda] in Syria, and other manifestations of al-Qaeda ideology until terrorist finance of this sort is significantly curtailed,” David Andrew Weinberg, an FDD analyst, wrote in the paper.
Another study by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy just months earlier chronicles the frustrations the United States has on the terrorist financing front with its so-called ally.
While the U.S. has praised Qatar for developing new anti-terrorist financing regulations, it has privately chided the government for failing to enforce the laws and allowing a permissive environment to persist.
“The fundamental problem is that America’s counter-terrorism agenda sometimes conflicts with what Qatar perceives to be its own political interests,” Lori Plotkin Boghardt, a fellow in Gulf politics at the Washington Institute, wrote in the August study.
Qatar’s security strategy, she argues, has been to provide support to a wide range of regional and international groups in order to bolster its position at home and abroad — but those groups include extreme Islamist organizations, including militant ones like Hamas and the Taliban.
In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last year in September, Hamad al Thani said the Qatari government doesn’t “accept people funding terrorist groups” but noted that it depends on the definition of terrorist group.
“There is differences in some countries on who are the terrorists and who are the terrorist groups but we don’t consider them as terrorists,” he said. “Such as groups in Syria, groups in Libya, groups in Egypt as well.”
Shutting down those fundraising spigots could threaten Qatar’s own security, as well as its ability to act as a mediator for the U.S. and wield influence with groups at critical times.
Washington is well aware of the Qatari split, and President Obama has often bemoaned the stark differences between Doha’s public statements and private actions.
Speaking at a Chicago fundraiser in 2011, Obama was caught on tape dissing the previous emir’s statements about democracy on the Al Jazeera network, which his family largely funds.
“He is a big booster of democracy across the Middle East — reform, reform, reform as you’re seeing it on Al Jazeera,” Obama said to laughter. “Now he himself is not a reformer — there’s no big democracy movement in Qatar.”
Still, Obama has called on Qatar when he needed them.
Qatar played a key role in negotiating the prisoner swap between the Taliban and the United States to free Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
The Obama administration has repeatedly asserted that U.S. policy doesn’t allow for direct negotiations with terrorists, but the president circumvented that policy by having Qatar negotiate on its behalf.
Qatar’s ties to the Taliban and the Haqqani network, a militant Islamic group that was holding Bergdahl, made the swap possible.
The five senior Taliban figures the U.S. freed from the Guantanamo Bay prison were then allowed to live in exile in Doha, along with other Muslim militants, including senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood who fled there when their government was swept out of power in Egypt.
The Qatari government last year also played a key role in negotiating the release of American journalist Peter Theo Curtis, who had been missing in Syria for nearly two years.
The Obama administration tried to distance itself from the deal, noting that Curtis was released following a “direct request” by his family for Qatari assistance.
In a region of constant upheaval, the royal family of Qatar has managed a delicate balancing act between its alliances with the West and its ties to the more extreme elements of the Islamic world.
Al-Thani came to power in June 2013 when his father handed him the job amid the continued fallout of the Arab Spring.
Even before his ascension, the family decided to privately back some of the more hardline Islamic causes, including the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as militant groups fighting in Syria and Libyan.
But at times the U.S. has publicly objected to those ties. When the Taliban opened a diplomatic mission in Qatar in 2013, the U.S. and the government in Kabul bitterly complained that Doha was allowing the Taliban to operate as a government in exile. The Qatari government officially closed the office a month later, although regional experts say the office remains open.
When the Taliban Five were released in Qatar, they were picked up by the local Taliban contingent mingled with Qatari officials.
Further complicating the picture, is Qatar’s willingness to keep hosting one of the most important U.S. military bases in the world, the al Udeid Air Base. Then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel signed a 10-year military cooperation pact with the Qatari government in December of 2013.
The base is a key surveillance hub where the U.S. military tracks bomber flights into Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq and keeps tabs on a number of hot spots in the region, including Iran.
