An advisor to the Saudi Arabian leadership told the Los Angeles Times that his government had warned its Lebanese allies against trying to build an armed force to combat Hezbollah, but to no avail.

For months, Lebanon's Sunni-led Future Movement sought to build an armed force under the guise of a security firm, called Secure Plus, in part to counter the Shiite militia Hezbollah's growing strength, according to Lebanese officials, security experts and Sunni fighters themselves cited in a Times report last week.

But at least some in the Saudi leadership — the primary international patron of Lebanon's Sunnis — thought it was a bad idea from the inception.

"The whole concept of these militias was wrong from the start and we never took the idea seriously," said the advisor, who asked that his name not be published because of the sensitivity of the topic.

"We had never directly got involved in the arming of this so-called militia, which was doomed to failure from the beginning due to how it was created and who was leading it up," said the Saudi advisor.