Sharon Chadha

On second thoughts...

2010-12-17T20:51:00.000-08:00

The perils of moral fervour in the Balkans

It's official: Iraq is a democracy

2010-03-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

So the BBC pronounces: "It is reasonable now to include Iraq in the world's list of democracies."

Statement from the righteous family of the Underwear Bomber

2009-12-28T18:34:00.000-08:00

The family is righteous because they notified authorities that they feared he was preparing for some kind of terrorist action at least a month ago. Here is their statement:

Our family, like the rest of the world, were woken up in the early hours of Saturday, 26th December, 2009 to the news of an attempt to blow up a plane by a young Nigerian man, who was later identified as Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab. Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab is the son of Alhaji (Dr.) Umaru AbdulMutallab, the head of this family.

Prior to this incident, his father, having become concerned about his disappearance and stoppage of communication while schooling abroad, reported the matter to the Nigerian security agencies about two months ago, and to some foreign security agencies about a month and a half ago, then sought their assistance to find and return him home. We provided them with all the information required of us to enable them do this. We were hopeful that they would find and return him home. It was while we were waiting for the outcome of their investigation that we arose to the shocking news of that day.

The disappearance and cessation of communication which got his mother and father concerned to report to the security agencies are completely out of character and a very recent development, as before then, from very early childhood, Farouk, to the best of parental monitoring, had never shown any attitude, conduct or association that would give concern. As soon as concern arose, very recently, his parents reported it and sought help.

The family will continue to fully cooperate with local and international security agencies toward the investigation of this matter, while we await results of the full investigation.

We, along with the whole world, are thankful to almighty God that there were no lives lost in the incident. May God continue to protect us all, amen.

Finally, as the matter is being investigated by the various agencies, and has already been mentioned in aU.S. court, the family requests that the press should regard this as the only statement it will make for now.

Thank you.

Signed,

The Mutallab Family

Abuja, Nigeria

How Afghans assess the situation

2009-11-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

The BBC reports:

Oxfam's chief executive said the message from ordinary people in Afghanistan was that "all sides must stop targeting civilians".

They wanted international forces to tighten their restrictions on air strikes and night raids and to investigate properly all allegations of harm to civilians, she said.

The Afghan people interviewed also wanted insurgents to "stop taking refuge in civilian areas, which puts normal Afghans on the front lines of the conflict", she added.

Seems fair enough to me.

Afghans whup Taliban: 6-0

2009-11-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports:

American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban.

The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

Why now? Apparently, some Afghans have had enough:

In July, a long-running dispute between local Taliban fighters and elders from the Shinwari tribe flared up. When a local Taliban warlord named Khona brought a more senior commander from Pakistan to help in the confrontation, the elders in the Shinwari tribe rallied villagers from up and down the valley where they live, killed the commander and chased Khona away.

The elders had insisted that the Taliban stay away from a group of Afghans building a dike in the valley. When Khona’s men kidnapped two Afghan engineers, the Shinwari elders decided they had had enough.

“The whole tribe was with me,” one of the elders said in an interview. “The Taliban came to kill me, and instead we killed them.”

How is the tribe doing? They appear to be kicking the "stray dogs" you-know-whats.

Since the fight, the Taliban have been kept away from a string of villages in Achin District that stretch for about six miles. The elders said they were able to do so by forming a group of more than 100 fighters and posting them at each end of the valley.

Now imagine giving every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan - every school girl and her grandma - a cell phone so that every villager in trouble could call one of these local militias. How much longer do you think their fathers, sons, and brothers would allow the Taliban survive a menacing visit to their homes or schools?

Forget road and school building. Bring these people phone service and let them establish their own security and educational opportunities.

Finally some good news about Pakistan

2009-11-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

Or at least hope that at last we'll have a reliable source of information.

Pakistan Conflict Monitor, a website devoted to "research and analysis on the conflict in Pakistan" is now in the business, to paraphrase their mission statement, of systematically monitoring over 1,500 websites, as well as dozens of e-mailing lists and academic journals, to cull together the latest in academic research and insight on the conflict in Pakistan.

Here's another good analysis of the US debate on Afghanistan

2009-11-01T09:57:00.000-08:00

From Tom Ricks, who covered the US military for the Washington Post (2000-2008), and author of The Gamble, another must-read on US war strategy.

He comments on the differences between Tom Friedman, NYT's columnist and David Ignatius of the Washington Post. As he writes:

Both are centrist middle-aged white men writing for major newspapers. Both also are successful authors, though the Rousseauian Friedman produces optimistic non-fiction works, while the more Hobbesian Ignatius writes dark thrillers about intelligence. Also, I think Friedman tends to be influenced a bit more by diplomats, while Ignatius seems a bit more plugged into the worlds of intelligence and the military.

Friedman, he writes:

thinks that Iraq is more important than Afghanistan and Pakistan. I disagree, but this may be in part because he lived in Lebanon and Israel, while I lived in Afghanistan. I think the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan threatens the United States far more than anything in Iraq does. That is, I think Pakistan is deteriorating quickly and has weapons of mass destruction and Islamic extremists who are gaining ground, while Iraq is only deteriorating slowly, has no WMD (remember, Tom?) and its few Islamic extremists are on their heels.

Whereas Ignatius still believes that a surge could work in Afghanistan. But, as he goes on to say:

I wish Ignatius also had written about the need to have U.S. troops protect the people from the brutality and abuses of Afghan soldiers and police. The need for more U.S. forces isn't just about insurgents. The predatory behavior of some of them has driven Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. Having American units partnered with Afghan forces won't stop such abuses, but it will lessen them. For example, I am told there currently are five checkpoints between Spin Boldak and Kandahar, with official shakedowns of truck drivers at each. Such corruption is a tax on the stomachs of poor Afghans. Get rid of the unnecessary checkpoints, and have Americans around the other ones, and fewer Afghans will go hungry.

Must-read on the recent CIA leak

2009-11-01T09:49:00.000-08:00

The one about Karzai's "heroin-dealing" brother being a paid CIA asset. Some excerpts from the article by Robert Haddick's Foreign Policy Small Wars blog.

As Haddick notes:

The Times's sources for this [leak] included "current and former American officials" including a former CIA officer and perhaps a senior U.S. military officer in Kabul. Karzai acknowledged aiding U.S. efforts but denied receiving any payments from the CIA.''

Haddick then poses the key questions:

Did frustration and moral outrage with Karzai's illicit activities lead U.S. officials to expose him as a paid CIA asset? It would certainly be understandable, for these officials may have a low opinion of him and perhaps by association his brother the president. But this collective outburst is folly and will make a nearly impossible task for the United States in Afghanistan only that much harder.

The U.S. officials who exposed Karzai are likely hoping that with his status now public, he will no longer be useful to the CIA. Perhaps they are hoping that the CIA will be too embarrassed to continue paying him. As the Times piece discusses, some officials believe that if the U.S. really wants better governance in Afghanistan, it must begin by getting rid of types like him.

But, as Haddick goes on to observe:

U.S. officials have to deal with Afghanistan society as it is, not as they wish it might be. With no history of a successful strong central government, and not much prospect of establishing it anytime soon, U.S. officials have to deal with local strongmen. If, perhaps like Ahmed Wali Karzai, the local strongman is both very powerful and equally unsavory, U.S. military, State Department, and CIA field officers will have to weigh the feasible alternatives, if any can be found. If there are no alternatives, U.S. officials will have to quietly decide whether the mission is worth the moral consequences.

Anyway, read the whole piece.

Hillary warns Pakistan

2009-10-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

From Bloomberg News:

“Al-Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002,” Clinton told a group of editors in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”. . .

Saying that she was “more than willing” to listen to Pakistani complaints about U.S. policies, Clinton stressed that Pakistan has to be mindful of American security concerns.

“But this is a two-way street,” Clinton said. “I ask in the pursuit of mutual respect that you take seriously our concerns.”

P.S. I wouldn't take her comments lightly either.

Update: John McCreary apparently also agrees that what Hillary said needed to be said (via Tom Ricks who describes McCreary as someone "who has forgotten more about intelligence than I will ever know":

Bravo for Secretary Clinton. Either the Pakistani security services contain senior officers who know where bin Laden is and are lying or they are incompetent and ought to be dismissed. There are no other explanations for Pakistan having become the headquarters for al Qaida and the base area for international Islamic terrorism.

This explains a lot

2009-10-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

Advice to Afghans: Read the handwriting on the American wall before it is too late

2009-10-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Sample Number One:

Matthew Hoh's resignation letter. Hoh served as the Senior Civilian Representative of the US State Department in Zabul Province, Afghanistan and submitted this letter to his superiors in early September. Here some key excerpts:

Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.

If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah's reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency.

On the negative impact Americans are having:

The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government's failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifices of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastatic:

- Glaring corruption and unabashed graft;
- A President whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts;
- A system of provincial and district leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists and strongment allied to the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or geniune attempts at reconciliation;

As Hoh concludes:

I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc....to follow the logic of our stated goals, we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

While Americans would be advised to read this letter closely as well, ultimately, Afghans are the ones who are going to have to address these criticisms. Maybe it is already too late.

Saudis lining up to queue

2009-10-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press reports from inside the corridors of the UN climate talks in Bangkok:

Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations — demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels.

The head of the Saudi delegation, Mohammad S. Al Sabban explains:

We are among the economically vulnerable countries,” Al Sabban told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the talks ahead of negotiations in Copenhagen in December for a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

“This is very serious for us,” he continued. “We are in the process of diversifying our economy but this will take a long time. We don't have too many resources.”

Saudi Arabia, which sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, is seeing economic growth slide because of fallout from the global meltdown, but experts still expect the country, flush with cash from oil's earlier price spike last year, to be better able than other nations to cope with the current crisis.

Al Sabban accused Western nations of pursuing an agenda against oil producers, under the guise of protecting the planet.

“Many politicians in the Western world think these climate change negotiations and the new agreement will provide them with a golden opportunity to reduce their dependence on imported oil,” Al Sabban said. “That means you will transfer the burden to developing countries, especially to those highly dependent on the exploitation of oil.”

Al Sabban said his country wanted a new deal and was not impeding progress in talks as some activists have claimed.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, Americans already lining up for economic assistance and a reader hit by flooding in India comments: "Gee, they don't look hungry."]

Missionless fatigue

2009-10-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

“We’re lost — that’s how I feel. I’m not exactly sure why we’re here,” said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose closest friend was shot dead by a renegade Afghan policeman last Friday. “I need a clear-cut purpose if I’m going to get hurt out here or if I’m going to die.” Today's (London) Times.

As the Times report continues:

“You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia. . . .

The soldiers complain that rules of engagement designed to minimise civilian casualties mean that they fight with one arm tied behind their backs. “They’re a joke,” said one. “You get shot at but can do nothing about it. You have to see the person with the weapon. It’s not enough to know which house the shooting’s coming from.”...

To compound matters, soldiers are mainly being killed not in combat but on routine journeys, by roadside bombs planted by an invisible enemy. “That’s very demoralising,” said Captain Masengale.

Israel's Defense Minister speaks: "Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel"

2009-09-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

Reuters reports:

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted on Thursday as saying he does not view Iran as a threat to the existence of the Jewish state, a view that would seem to depart from Israeli statements of the recent past.
Israel's mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth daily quoted Barak, the head of Israel's center-left Labour party, as saying "Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel."

In response to a question about Tehran's nuclear programme which Israel has said it sees as destined to produce atomic weapons that could put its existence at risk, Barak said in an interview with the paper:

"I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel."

Is this why Artic melting paused this year?

2009-09-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

Here's the news about Arctic melting.

When not to outsource?

2009-09-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

From today's London Times:

Art Keller, a blond, blue-eyed CIA agent, sits inside a decrepit building deep inside al Qaeda territory, staring at his computer screen. He is forbidden by his Pakistani minders from venturing out into the badlands of Waziristan to help to find and kill the world’s most wanted man.

...Mr Keller was one of an estimated 50 to 100 CIA agents and special operations officers whose mission for the past eight years has been to find and kill bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders. . .

Some of these guys have been hunting bin Laden for years,” Mr Keller says. His replacement, whom Mr Keller believes is still in Pakistan, has spent eight months a year since the September 11 attacks working out of these CIA safe houses looking for the top al-Qaeda leadership.

So why haven't they been able to find him? Here's my guess:

The hunt for bin Laden is largely run by the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, an organisation for whom many CIA officials harbour deep mistrust because of its historical ties to the Pashtuns of Waziristan. . . CIA agents were rarely allowed to leave the compound by the Pakistanis. . .

“Our role in the hunt was done entirely from in front of a computer inside the base,” Mr Keller says. When he wanted to follow up a lead, he would get in touch with a local Pashtun proxy to ask him to travel to a certain area to glean information.

When a senior al-Qaeda figure was identified and located — Mr Keller said that it would take weeks, often months, to build a case for an airstrike by a US Predator drone — and even if the go-ahead was finally given by CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the Pakistanis still had to approve. “Since 9/11, with 99 per cent of these strikes, the Pakistanis were consulted and they have to approve them,” he said.

Then of course there is this:

...even if someone wanted to betray him — and collect the $25 million (£15 million) reward — there is no one to turn to. The local police know bin Laden is there. “If you report bin Laden’s location there is a good chance you will get killed,” Mr Keller says.

Gender equality in Iraq

2009-09-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Police recruit, Karbala, Iraq

Poppy culture: Update on opium

2009-09-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

From the 2009 "Afghan Opium Survey", the annual report produced by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime:

Poppy cultivation declined 22 percent from May 2008 to June 2009 from 477 acres to 304 acres (or if you prefer your statistics in hectares - from 193,000 hectares to 123,000).
20 out of 34 provinces are now poppy free.

How to explain the improvement? Two words: military operations. Here's a list of the damage they were able to do:

90 tons of the chemicals to produce heroin
450 tons of poppy seeds
50 tons of opium
7 tons of morphine
1.5 tons of heroin
19 tons of hash
27 laboratories

A Swat refugee's Sophies' choice

2009-05-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

From today's Washington Post:

"When the shelling started, my wife and I ran out to gather the children. It was like a hell outside, and we just started running," recounted Taj Mahmad, 35, a vegetable-cart puller. "I realized that my son and my smallest daughter were missing. She is only 3. But my wife cried and said the rest of us would be killed if we stayed, so we kept going. I have no idea what happened to them."

I'm trying to be sympathetic to the pressure they must have been under but all I can think of is this couple has too many children. I mean, they didn't know where their 3-year-old was?

What are we doing wrong in Afghanistan?

2009-05-10T04:03:00.001-07:00

Spending too much money on security for Westerners for starters according to a report published by Truthout. The report also gives us an idea why we've been so clueless:

There have been numerous attacks on foreigners in Kabul and suicide bombings have been effective from the Taliban's point of view in driving almost all expatriates into well-defended compounds where living conditions may be luxurious but which are as confining as any prison. This means that many foreigners sent to Afghanistan to help rebuild the country and the state machinery seldom meet Afghans aside from their drivers and a few Afghans with whom they work.

Your favorite cartoonist profiled here

2009-04-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

RAP21, which bills itself as the "African press network for the 21st century" profiled Abdul Arts, this blog's favorite cartoonist, the Somali exile who left his country because he couldn't live under the prevailing "shut your mouth, otherwise you will be killed" attitude.

Former colleagues have paid the price of staying. Mohamed Muhiaddin, his former editor at a Somali weekly, was blown up by extremists in late 2007. A former colleague, Said Tahil Ahmed, continued working as a journalist. He was gunned down in a public market. Mayow Hassan, a radio journalist was murdered on January 1.

Even in Egypt, Abdul Arts doesn't feel entirely safe. He routinely receives threatening emails everytime a cartoon is published. Nevertheless he carries on. "My goal is drawing these cartoons is to support the peace process and freedom of the press. I also use my cartoons to present the situation of my country, to show the people the crimes against the humanity, and the crisis in my country....Being a political cartoonist in my country and Africa is a dangerous career, because there isn't freedom of speech. But I am an ambitious person and I hope to continue my job as long as I can and never stop."

What peace under the Taliban looks like

2009-04-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Thousands of Islamist militants are pouring into Pakistan's Swat Valley and setting up training camps here, quickly making it one of the main bases for Taliban fighters and raising their threat to the government in the wake of a controversial peace deal.

As the report continues:

Swat now offers a glimpse of the Taliban's vision for Pakistan. They have taken control of the local government and the police, who have been ordered to shed their uniforms in favor of the traditional Shalwar Kameez, an outfit comprising a long shirt and loose trousers. They also have seized Swat's emerald mines, which extract millions of dollars a year in gemstones.
At barbershops, notices warn men not to shave their beards. Women are no longer allowed to leave their homes without their husbands or male blood relatives. Girls' schools have been reopened after initially being closed but the students must be covered from head to toe, and Taliban officials routinely inspect classrooms for violators.

The Taliban's spokesman told the WSJ that the Taliban was planning to start executing a list of people soon for "un-Islamic" activities:

The list includes senior government officials, a woman whose husband is in the U.S. military, and others. Many of them have fled or are in areas outside Taliban control
"These kinds of people should not live," said Mr. Khan, who also is a commander in the Tehrik-e-Taliban, a broader Taliban alliance focused on battling the Pakistani government.
..."It does not matter to us whether the peace deal stays or not. No one can stop us from setting up our own courts," he said.

To see how Taliban justice works, check out the video below that aired on television stations in Pakistan recently. In the video, a woman is shown being caned for the crime of having left her house unaccompanied by her male guardian.

As the WSJ reported, while the Taliban spokesman insisted the video was fake, he did acknowledge that the flogging incident depicted did in fact occur. "As a Muslim, we cannot allow a woman to violate Islamic values," he said.
Taliban Punishment of Young Girl2:27.

The Taliban in Punjab

2009-04-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Me, Sharon Chadha, sister-in-law of Punjab, doing some of my own

research at the source of the Taliban movement (Darul Uloom Deoband in India).

Photo: Courtesy of the NY Times

Today's New York Times reports:

Taliban insurgents are teaming up with local militant groups to make inroads in Punjab....
“I don’t think a lot of people understand the gravity of the issue,” said a senior police official in Punjab, who declined to be idenfitied because he was discussing threats to the state. “If you want to destabilize Pakistan, you have to destabilize Punjab.”

As the report continues:

In at least five towns in southern and western Punjab, including the midsize hub of Multan, barber shops, music stores and Internet cafes offensive to the militants’ strict interpretation of Islam have received threats. Traditional ceremonies that include drumming and dancing have been halted in some areas.

Bhanghra? Can the Taliban really be thinking they will be able to permanently ban Bhangra in Punjab???????? This I cannot believe for a second.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bhangra, it is the traditional music of Punjab. Everywhere you find Punjabis you find Bhangra. And everywhere you find anyone who has ever had a friend who is Punjabi too. Bhangra has now spread to clubs and on radio stations across Europe and North America.

Now I can imagine the Taliban finding recruits among Punjab's poor and ignorant youth. But having experienced Punjabis now for longer than I'm willing to admit here - I am married to a Punjabi -I cannot conceive of their elders or even their more serious peers ever going down this path, not even for a second. I say this is because Punjabis have to be dominant. With all due love and respect to my in-laws and darling husband, all of whom I worship, Punjabis never ever cede control, not for one minute, not even to me!

And the Times report seems to bear me out:

The Taliban here exploit many of the same weaknesses that have allowed them to expand in other areas: an absent or intimidated police force; a lack of attention from national and provincial leaders; a population steadily cowed by threats, or won over by hard-line mullahs who usurp authority by playing on government neglect and poverty.
...Locals feel helpless. When a 15-year-old boy vanished from a madrasa in a village near here recently — his classmates said to go on jihad — his uncle could not afford to go look for him, let alone confront the powerful men who run the madrasa. “We are simple people,” the man said. “What can we do?”

My conclusion: If there is any intelligent element to be found among the Punjabis who are aligning with the Taliban, it is those Punjabis who are using the Taliban as the means to their own end. That is, they are using the Taliban, just as their fellow Punjabis have used the Taliban all along.

This is not just Punjabi in-law pride on my part either. Consider the evidence. In one sentence: It is the Punjabis in the Pakistani ISI and army who created the Taliban, have made money off the Taliban via US and foreign aid, but it is the Taliban who have taken all the losses.

The Taliban might well find love and happiness among the Punjabis (as I certainly have) but if they are thinking they will ever dominate them - nope, not a chance. They will not be able to stop the Bhangra parties in Punjab. Never ever. You can't even get them to turn the Bhangra down.

Another image of Somalia

2009-04-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of Abdul Arts.

Afghanistan should be having the same debate Mexico is - and so should the US

2009-04-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports:

Mexico's Congress opened a three-day debate Monday on the merits of legalizing marijuana for personal use, a policy backed by three former Latin American presidents who warned that a crackdown on drug cartels is not working.

... three former presidents _ Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Cardoso of Brazil _ urged Latin American countries to consider legalizing the drug to undermine a major source of income for cartels.

As as another article in the Post reported California is also considering legislation to legalize marijuana:

...in California, pot is such a booming growth industry that lawmakers are being asked to consider its potential as a salve to the state's financial woes. Betty Yee, chairman of the California State Board of Equalization, citing the state's budget problems. California currently collects $18 million in sales taxes from marijuana dispensaries, and [chairman of the California State Board of Equalization Betty] Yee said a regulated pot trade would bring in $1.3 billion.

Prohibition doesn't kill demand it only enriches the criminal class - and the insurgents in Afghanistan's case.

The law suppressing women's revulsion in Afghanistan

2009-04-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about Afghanistan's new law sanctioning rape in marriage my first thought was can Afghan men really be that desperate?

In Afghanistan, as you may recall, a man can legally have as many as four wives at a time. And in the event he grows tired of any one of them, divorce is shockingly easy. Given that the deck already seems to be stacked so much a man's favor, how bumbling can Afghan men be that they also need to have what goes on in their bedrooms legislated?

Ayatollah Mohseni, the leader of the Shia community who demanded this law, tries to explain. While he remained silent on the local seduction techniques, he did suggest that the law arose out of the extreme gender inequality that prevails in the country. Due to the widespread illiteracy among Afghan women, and their lack of work opportunity (it doesn't help that they cannot leave the house without their husband's permission) a woman cannot be asked to pull her weight financially. As he poses the problem: "For all these expenses can't we at least give the right to a husband to demand sex from his wife after four nights?" (AP).

Maybe they wouldn't have to rape their wives if they freed them.

Fareed Zakaria: Allow radical Islam to defeat itself

2009-04-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Fareed concedes that radicals like the Taliban are "ugly, reactionary forces that will stunt their countries and bring dishonor to their religion." But as he since "not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world" we need to stop fighting these elements as we are only widening our war against terror (I know, we're not supposed to use that expression any longer but old habits die hard so indulge me for a moment):

We have placed ourselves in armed opposition to Muslim fundamentalists stretching from North Africa to Indonesia, which has made this whole enterprise feel very much like a clash of civilizations, and a violent one at that. Certainly, many local despots would prefer to enlist the American armed forces to defeat their enemies, some of whom may be jihadists but others may not. Across the entire North African region, the United States and other Western powers are supporting secular autocrats who claim to be battling Islamist opposition forces. In return, those rulers have done little to advance genuine reform, state building or political openness. In Algeria, after the Islamists won an election in 1992, the military staged a coup, the Islamists were banned and a long civil war ensued in which 200,000 people died. The opposition has since become more militant, and where once it had no global interests, some elements are now aligned with Al Qaeda.

As he goes on to say:

Bin Laden constantly argues that all these different groups are part of the same global movement. We should not play into his hands, and emphasize instead that many of these forces are local, have specific grievances and don't have much in common.

David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who has contributed to the success of Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, seems to agree with him:

"I've had tribal leaders and Afghan government officials at the province and district level tell me that 90 percent of the people we call the Taliban are actually tribal fighters or Pashtun nationalists or people pursuing their own agendas. Less than 10 percent are ideologically aligned with the Quetta Shura [Mullah Omar's leadership group] or Al Qaeda." These people are, in his view, "almost certainly reconcilable under some circumstances." Kilcullen adds, "That's very much what we did in Iraq. We negotiated with 90 percent of the people we were fighting."

So it seems does CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht: "What you have to realize is that the objective is to defeat bin Ladenism, and you have to start the evolution. Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s."

And for what it is worth, I think he is on to something too:

The veil is not the same as the suicide belt. We can better pursue our values if we recognize the local and cultural context, and appreciate that people want to find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license. In the end, time is on our side. Bin Ladenism has already lost ground in almost every Muslim country. Radical Islam will follow the same path. Wherever it is tried—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan—people weary of its charms very quickly. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That's the most powerful weapon of all.

The audacity of hope

2009-04-04T15:10:00.001-07:00

Or is it the audacity of asking NATO for more troops?

The (London) Times reports that only Britain offered "substantial help" in response to President's Obama's "impassioned plea" to send troops to Afghanistan or risk terror attacks in Europe.

Britain offered to send several hundred more British soldiers - but only to provide additional security for the August presidential elections - and not the thousands of extra troops the American president was hoping Britain would commit. Update: The NY Times reports that Britain is pledging 900 and Germany and Spain have agreed to each send 600 soldiers to provide security for the August elections.

The only other two "allies" that made firm committments were Belgium and Spain. Both pledged to send military trainers - 35 from Belgium and 12 from Spain.

Contrast these numbers with the 21,000 more troops President Obama has pledged (with a promise to send an additional 9,000).

“Europe should not simply expect the United States to shoulder that burden alone,” he said. “This is a joint problem it requires a joint effort.”

He said that failing to support the US surge would leave Europe open to a fresh terrorist offensive. “It is probably more likely that al-Qaeda would be able to launch a serious terrorist attack on Europe than on the United States because of proximity,” he said.

President Sarkozy stated that he would not send any more French troops. Germany, Italy, Poland, and Denmark reportedly were still considering the request.

Afghanistan for its part offered the European nations a perfect way out. As Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato Secretary-General, pointed out, new laws sanctioning child marriage and marital rape soured the mission.

“We are there to defend universal values and when I see, at the moment, a law threatening to come into effect which fundamentally violates women’s rights and human rights, that worries me,” he was reported as saying. “I have a problem to explain to a critical public audience in Europe, be it the UK or elsewhere, why I’m sending the guys to the Hindu Kush.”

So while Karzai may have won some support among the Afghan public because of these new laws - said to have been enacted to appease the Shia community - he lost most of whatever support he had in Europe.

And hear what Stephen Walt has to say even if you can't bear his position on The Lobby

2009-04-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

From his blog at Foreign Policy

Our efforts in Central Asia are confounded by two fundamental problems. First, our understanding of Pakistani and Afghan society is limited, which makes it hard to know which groups or leaders to support and makes it virtually certain that any effort we undertake will generate lots of unintended consequences. We were once confident that Hamid Karzai would be a terrific leader, for example, but he's proven to be a disappointment. If we try to engineer his replacement, however, there's no guarantee we will end up with anyone better. Ditto Pakistan, where none of the contenders for power looks particularly promising and where their own ambitions and interests are partly (and maybe substantially) at odds with ours.
Look at this way: We have enough trouble getting reliable, efficient, and corruption-free government here at home (think Rod Blagoevich, Jack Abramoff, or the State Legislature here in Massachusetts, where the past two speakers had to resign in the face of scandals).. . . To imagine that we know how to manage the politics of more than 200 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- who are themselves divided into a diverse array of clans, tribes, and sects -- is the very definition of hubris.
Second, our leverage in either society (and especially Pakistan) is limited by our own conviction that "we cannot afford to fail." If we are unwilling to walk away and leave either country to its fate, then President Obama's assurance that "we will not, and cannot, provide a blank check" is meaningless. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf diddled us for years because he knew we were so committed to his success that we would keep pouring in money even when we knew his government was still backing jihadi terrorists instead of cracking down on them.
If, like AIG, Pakistan is "too important to fail," then what’s going to be different now? Which brings me to the larger question: What is the strategic rationale for doubling down in Afghanistan and Pakistan? According to President Obama, the reason we are there is simple: We want to prevent these territories from becoming safe havens for terrorists who might attack the United States....
...while it is obvious that al Qaeda is a threat, is it of sufficient magnitude to warrant an expensive and possibly open-ended effort to re-shape the politics of this region? Although Obama denies that this is his goal, how do we "defeat al Qaeda" without doing a lot of social engineering in both places?

Will wonders never cease?

2009-04-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

I have to say, I find myself nodding in agreement as I read Juan Cole's post at Informed Comment:

An Afghan army foot patrol was attacked by guerrillas in Helmand Province on Wednesday, according to AP. US and Afghan soldiers responded, engaging in a firefight. Then the US military called in an air strike on the Taliban, killing 20 of them. On Tuesday, a similar airstrike had taken out 30 guerrillas.It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder why the Taliban (or whoever these guys in Helmand were) are considered such a big threat that the full might of NATO is needed to deal with them. They have no air force, no artillery, no tanks. They are just small bands, apparently operating in platoons, who, whenever they mass in large enough numbers to stand and fight, can just be turned into red mist from the air.

And here too:

Now thousands of private security contractors (i.e. mercenaries) will be hired in Afghanistan. But they won't be Americans for the most part. Children, can you say "Hessians"?
I don't understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that. Wouldn't it be better to expand the size of the army if you need more troops? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one line of command? Aren't these essentially high-priced MPs?

Check out what's not happening on the sun

2009-04-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

Tracking what's not happening on the sun might be even more important than what humans are doing here on earth. Begin with this article at NASA: Deep Solar Minimum. Then check around for possible scenarios.

Europe's version of shoe throwers

2009-04-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

See them on a NYT slide show: Protestors Fail to Bring Down Global Capitalism With Costumes and Puppets.

What could the Pentagon be thinking (or is it smoking)?

2009-04-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

The NY Times is reporting that the Pentagon is proposing that Americans cough up another $3 billion for Pakistan, as if they have been helpful in stabilizing Afghanistan and countering militancy at home.

As the Times notes:

The United States has [already] provided Pakistan with more than $12 billion in military and economic assistance since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including about $1 billion a year to reimburse Pakistan for fielding 100,000 forces along its border with Afghanistan. American lawmakers have complained that much of that money has disappeared into Pakistani government coffers with scant accountability and little progress to show.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged Thursday that the United States had not imposed sufficient accountability measures on the money. “There hasn’t been an audit trail, and there haven’t been accountability measures put in place, and there needs to be for all the funds,” Admiral Mullen said in an interview with the editorial board of The New York Times. “So we’re going to do that. For this counterinsurgency money, which is important, it is critical that it goes for exactly that and nowhere else.”
...Insurgents and terrorists operating in Pakistani safe havens are plotting attacks against targets in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the admiral said. “The Taliban, in particular, are going both ways now,” he explained. “They are coming toward Islamabad and they are actually going toward Kabul."

As unbelievable as this may seem, Admiral Mullen still apparently hopes that he can count on support from Islamabad. As he told the Times reporter, "I’m completely convinced that the vast majority of the leaders in Pakistan understand the seriousness of the threat.”

Really. Is he smoking opium or what?

NATO: Faking a military alliance

2009-04-03T09:16:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times:

[President Obama's] NATO allies are giving the president considerable vocal support for the newly integrated strategy. But they are giving him very few new troops on the ground, underlining the fundamental strains in the alliance.
The allies will offer more funds but no more than several thousand new personnel members, according to alliance military planners. Many of those will not be soldiers, but police trainers to meet a central pillar of the president’s new Afghan strategy, which focuses on an expansion of Afghan security forces.
But even for the small numbers of European combat reinforcements, check the fine print: Nearly all will be sent to provide security for Afghanistan’s elections this summer, and will not be permanent.

As the Times report duly notes, it does not really matter who the American president is either:

“As a candidate, Obama had expectations that Europe would make a serious increase in troop levels after he became president,” said Charles A. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “But there is a realization now that Europe’s main contribution will be police trainers, economic assistance and development assistance.”

...In many cases, European capitals have placed severe restrictions on their forces assigned to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or I.S.A.F. That has been such a hindrance to the war effort, in the view of some American commanders, that they ruefully say the alliance mission’s initials now stand for “I Saw America Fight.”
To be sure, a number of NATO and other partner nations have sent troops to Afghanistan who have fought and died in percentages larger than those of the American military. Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch and French conventional forces have shed much blood, and commando units from some of the smaller, newer NATO allies in the Baltics have punched far above their weight, according to American Special Operations commanders.

Evidence of the Asian century

2009-04-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

FT.com / Video & Audio / Interactive graphics - The decade for global banks

One animated picture has to be worth more than 1,000 words.

How to win votes in Afghanistan

2009-03-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

The London Guardian reports:

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan's presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands' permission.

Oddly, it is not the usual suspects who wanted this legislation:

A western diplomat said the law represented a "big tick in the box" for the powerful council of Shia clerics. Leaders of the Hazara minority, which is regarded as the most important bloc of swing voters in the election, also demanded the new law.

Ok Hazara, justify this.

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras.
But he said the law actually protected women's rights."Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters."
Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable "excuse". And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

And women legislators? How did they rationalize the law they just passed?

"Some female politicians have taken a more pragmatic stance, saying their fight in parliament's lower house succeeded in improving the law, including raising the original proposed marriage age of girls from nine to 16 and removing completely provisions for temporary marriages.

"It's not really 100% perfect, but compared to the earlier drafts it's a huge improvement," said Shukria Barakzai, an MP. "Before this was passed family issues were decided by customary law, so this is a big improvement."

And the West spending all that blood and treasure to right things in Afghanistan, what was their reaction to this, um, step backward?

The international community has so far shied away from publicly questioning such a politically sensitive issue.
"It is going to be tricky to change because it gets us into territory of being accused of not respecting Afghan culture, which is always difficult," a western diplomat in Kabul admitted.

Here's my suggestion on how this law can be applied to protect women. Let he who fails to comply with God's law to treat his wife in a decent, moral and merciful way be declared an apostate and punished according to Islamic law. (That is, put him to death.)

Allow husbands to lord over wives if you must but only in compliance with Islam. Then it can be reasonably argued that this law does in fact protect women. Otherwise, not.

Primer on Pakistan

2009-03-31T08:04:00.000-07:00

Here's the Idiot's Guide Pakistan to help you decipher the situation in Pakistan.

Tom Ricks wasn't impressed

2009-03-30T10:19:00.001-07:00

Here is what former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks (and author of Fiasco and The Gamble - and someone who is always worth reading) said about the new Afghan-Pak strategy:

I liked President Obama's Afghan stuff, as far as it went. Reducing American goals and training Afghan security forces makes sense. And reaching out to less extreme Taliban leaders is also worth trying. But I was surprised by how little the president had to offer on the other big problems. Sure, corruption in Afghanistan is easy to denounce, Mr. President, but what are you going to do about it? How are you going to stop the police from shaking down Afghans and so driving them into arms of the Taliban?
Finally, what about the Pakistani military? The saying is that most countries have militaries, while in Pakistan the military has a country.
Right now the Pakistani armed forces are part of the problem. Obama gave no indication of how they might be made part of the solution, and that worries me. I know it is difficult to say anything about this publicly -- but he should have said something.

Comments on Obama's new Afghan-Pak strategy

2009-03-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

Here's some reportage from Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy's The Cable on what various people are saying about the new strategy. Her blog is always worth checking out, incidentally, if you're interested in the ins and outs of US foreign policy.

Obama's plan

2009-03-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

Here's the link to the Obama administration's strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. And here is what the White House posted as a one-page summary of the plan's salient features:

What’s New in the Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan

"As President, my greatest responsibility is to protect the American people…We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists. So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future…To achieve our goals, we need a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy." President Barack Obama, March 27, 2009

An Attainable Objective
On March 27, 2009, the President announced a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that is the culmination of a careful 60-day, interagency strategic review. During the review process, we consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, partners and NATO allies, other donors, international organizations and members of Congress.
The strategy starts with a clear, concise, attainable goal: disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens. The President’s new approach will be flexible and adoptive and include frequent evaluations of the progress being made. A Regional ApproachFor the first time the President will treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as two countries but one challenge. Our strategy focuses more intensively on Pakistan than in the past, calling for more significant increases in U.S. and international support, both economic and military, linked to Pakistani performance against terror. We will pursue intensive regional diplomacy involving all key players in South Asia and engage both countries in a new trilateral framework at the highest levels. Together in this trilateral format, we will work to enhance intelligence sharing and military cooperation along the border and address common issues like trade, energy, and economic development.

Building Capacity and More Training
For three years, the resources that our commanders need for training have been denied because of the war in Iraq. Now, this will change. The 17,000 additional troops that the President decided in February to deploy have already increased our training capacity. Later this spring we will deploy approximately 4,000 more U.S. troops to train the Afghan National Security Forces so that they can increasingly take responsibility for the security of the Afghan people.
In the President’s strategy, for the first time we will fully resource our effort
to train and support the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. Every American unit in Afghanistan will be partnered with an Afghan unit, and we will
seek additional trainers from our NATO allies to ensure that every Afghan unit has a coalition partner.
Using All Elements of National Power
As the President said, a "campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone." As a part of this strategy, we will devote significantly more resources to the civilian efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President will submit a budget that includes indispensable investments in our State Department and foreign assistance programs. These investments relieve the burden on our troops and contribute directly to our safety and security. The Administration consulted with the Congress during our review and is committed to working closely together to provide the resources needed to carry out the strategy. The President supports the bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senators Kerry and Lugar to authorize $1.5 billion a year in direct support to the Pakistani people over the next five years. He also calls on Congress to pass the bipartisan bill creating Reconstruction Opportunity Zones in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan to develop the economy and bring hope to places plagued by violence.
Bringing new international elements to the effort
The President believes we need to provide more resources for the civilian aspects of the mission, working with the Afghan Government and all of our partners in NATO and the United Nations. As America does more, we will ask others to do join us in doing their part. Together with the United Nations, the Administration will forge a new Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan that brings together all who should have a stake in the security of the region – our NATO allies and other partners, the Central Asian states, Gulf nations, Iran, Russia, India and China. All have a stake in the promise of lasting peace and security and development in the region.

Financing Afghanistan

2009-03-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

According to yesterday's New York Times, President Obama is about to approve a plan that would double the number of Afghan security forces - to three times the number projected in 2002. According to the report, "even members of Mr. Obama's security team appeared taken back by the cost of the program."

The program, the Times reports, will cost up to $20 billion over seven years. Already the government in Kabul depends on the international community's largesse and the new costs are more than twice the budget of the entire government.

Nevertheless, this is a cost that it appears we will have to pay if we are interested in winning this fight. NATO, as a recent Times editorial put it, is "frighteningly close to failing" in Afghanistan.

And it is not because of the usual suspects - the terrorism, corruption and weak central government, to paraphrase the Times - that the alliance is confronting in Afghanistan. NATO is being undone by its own fecklessness. Members are compelled to come to the defense of any fellow state who is attacked - such as the U.S. was on 9/11 - but they can do so in whatever way they deem acceptable.

Germany, for example, refuses to allow its soldiers to engage in combat missions. Other nations won't eradicate opium though they acknowledge that it is now the Taliban's main revenue stream. The only states of the 26 members who have proved themselves to be mostly reliable when it comes to heavy lifting are the US, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
And no surprise to find out that many of the same NATO members that are loathe to bloody their hands are just as loathe to foot a larger bill. This, they are suggesting, is where the oil rich monarchies should come in.

While they should indeed -Al Qaeda and the Taliban love the Persian Gulf countries no more than they love the Western democracies, given all the demands about reducing carbon consumption - the source of their wealth, one wonders how eager they will be to help. Hoist yourself on your own methane gas, one can imagine them saying when Europe comes begging for Afghan alms.

Perhaps a better idea would be to let Afghanistan fund the cost. They could easily do this if they would only legalize the opium industry. Think of all the goals we could accomplish with this one step.

We could cut off the Taliban's funds, disenfranchise the criminal class, put profits in the hands of law-abiding and pro-democracy Afghans, create a tax base for the government and take Afghanistan off the international dole.

Pretending for a moment that we could even fund this new program, why lose both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror?

And on the opium front

2009-03-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports:

A suicide bomber on foot struck a police convoy about to head out on a poppy eradication mission in southern Afghanistan on Monday morning, killing 11 people and wounding 28, the police said...
Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand, said the success of recent efforts by security forces to destroy opium-poppy fields had prompted the attack on thecounternarcotics convoy, which was in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. “This was a work by Taliban and drug smugglers,” he said...

Apparently there have been many such attacks on these roads lately suggesting that the Taliban and their narcotrafficking enablers can take out whoever they want to on these roads but the ISAF and the Afghan security forces cannot take out the opium smugglers and insurgents who use the same highway.

I get why it's hard to intercept suicide attackers - who can tell what an individual is about to do? It's a logistical problem. What I don't get is why it is so hard to intercept the drug smugglers and insurgents who transit these same roads.

And I don't get why the eradication program focuses on eliminating the poppy crop itself. This only hurts the farmers who are largely subsistence and in many cases forced to grow.

Why don't they focus on the traffickers? Or at least legalize opium and then collect the taxes so Afghanistan will at least have some revenue base. Let the demand chain worry about the consequences for a change.

Pakistan: "We're watching history"

2009-03-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Thus spoke Javed Ali Khan, a Pakistani man who as the New York Times reports:

...traveled for days with his wife and six children to participate in a national march of lawyers and opposition political parties that came to an abrupt end on Monday when the lawyers demands were met....
“Justice,” said Mr. Khan’s wife, Rubina Javed, smiling broadly. “We came for justice...Justice is the solution to the common man’s problems,” Ms. Javed said, seated on a blue scarf on the grass with two daughters and four sons, ages 6 to 18, around her. “I want justice in schools, on roads, in transportation. Now the common man is speaking.”

As the Times report continued:

[In] Pakistan, the political class comes from a powerful feudal elite, which has largely avoided policies that would bring greater social equality, like land reform. With only half of the population literate, so far the strategy has worked.
“The ruling elite can get away with anything,” said Muhammad Ali, a software engineer. “They are like kings here.”
But the lawyers’ movement may be starting to change that. Though small in number, it is made up of an educated, diverse cross section of Pakistani society that includes lower middle
class professionals, whose reach may extend deeper into Pakistan’s 160 million population than initially expected.
“This movement has given an awareness to the common people in Pakistan of their rights,” said Shamoon Azhar, 26, a doctoral student at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, sitting on the lawn with a large group of his friends. “This is about awareness. It’s given people confidence. It’s shown people it can happen.”...

“The feudal system, it was in the past,” said Mazhar Iqbal, a private school manager. “There was no media then. No education. The poor were poor forever. Now is the time to wake up. It’s been 60 years and we’ve been wasting our time.”
Saif Abbas, a consultant who used to work for the Asian Development Bank in Islamabad, was more clear-eyed about the meaning of the march. Pakistan is still a poor country with a vast illiterate population, and a corrupt, unresponsive ruling class, he said.
“This country has to take control of its own future, and that’s education,” he said, holding a flag. “Unfortunately, we’re just not there yet.”
His vision for Pakistan is a “thoroughly democratic” country based on an Islamic system of governance, with a strong, powerful middle class, like that in Turkey or Malaysia. The current system will simply perpetuate the power of the mullahs on one hand, he said, and the elite, on the other, “who are totally disconnected from the people of this country.”

Cvilian versus a military regime in Pakistan

2009-03-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports on the clash that erupted today when members of the lawyers' movement and supporters of Nawaz Sharif, "the opposition leader" tried to stage a protest in Lahore.

[There is only one opposition leader in a country of _____ million????]

According to the Times, the police fired tear gas at the protestors, even bringing in armored vehicles to avoid being hit by the stones the protestors were hurling back at them. When the protestors started burning tires, the police chased them with batons.

This type of government crackdown on protests, according to the Times report, was unheard of during the eight-year military rule of President Musharraf. In fact, it was so weird that Sajjad Bhutta, Lahore's chief magistrate, told the Times that he refused to carry out what he perceived was an illegal police crackdown.

As the Times noted:

The current battle between Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif, a former prime minister, began on Feb. 25 when the president imposed executive rule on the Punjab Legislature, the stronghold of Mr. Sharif’s party.

Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its ruling disqualifying the Sharifs from holding office. To consolidate their opposition to Mr. Zardari, the brothers joined forces with the lawyers’ movement, which had called for a national protest and sit-in in Islamabad on March 16.
...
But as Mr. Zardari, the widower of Ms. Bhutto, stood firm, senior members of his party began to desert him. The minister of information, Sherry Rehman, resigned late Friday night after a prominent television news channel, Geo, was banned by the government in some parts of the country. Another senior official, Raza Rabbani, who was the party leader in the Senate, resigned from the cabinet after Mr. Zardari bypassed Mr. Rabbani and chose a more junior lawmaker, Farooq H. Naik, for the most senior post in the Senate chamber.

Sarah Chayes rethinks opium eradication

2009-03-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

A gem from her Afghanistan Policy Action Plan:

Rethinking eradication. In line with new authorities agreed upon by NATO, interdiction efforts should be aimed not at growers, but at traffickers and profiteers, even when they hold government positions. A few patient and determined well-placed ambushes on roads linking Urozgan and Kandahar Provinces, for example, could net several thousand kilos of opium paste in a single month.

The audacity of the plan to reconcile the Taliban

2009-03-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reported that the Obama administration has concluded that "most of the foot soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan are 'reconcilable' and can be pried away from the hard-core organizations of the Taliban and Al Qaeda."

The administration even has a figure in mind, according to "administration officials" says the Times, of "at least 70 percent of the insurgents and possibly more."

Now what does reconcilable mean you ask? Those that "can be encouraged to lay down their arms with the proper incentives." [The emphasis is mine.]

And what might proper incentives be? Charter schools for girls? Sub-prime mortgages for those whose houses have been bombed? National health care to replace missing limbs? Government funding so budding Taliban stem-cell researchers can eventually compete in the real world?

Apparently not. According to the Times, the Obama plan to reconcile the Taliban calls for a continuation of the CIA-orchestrated drone attacks inside Pakistan; and an increase in military and financial aid to Pakistan - with strings, however, says the Times.

Pakistan would have to spend the money "more on counterinsurgency and less on its long-running feud with India," according to the unnamed senior administration official the Times spoke to.

This condition should be easy enough for Pakistan to accept. How much can attacks like the ones in Mumbai last November cost?

As far as how much the Obama administration is thinking of giving Pakistan, if the legislation that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden sponsored when they were both still senators is any indication, Pakistan might well get triple the nonmilitary aid it got under the Bush administration.

Now it may rankle some that the Pakistanis would get even more aid but the benefits of their hoping they will appear to be already paying off. Since the Times report does not explicitly connect the dots, I will. Here is the salient dot:

...in carrying out missile strikes, the C.I.A. has steadily developed its own network of sources in the tribal areas, and combined with improved information-sharing with Pakistan’s main intelligence agency in recent months, as well as some technical advances like installing more mobile towers to intercept cellphone calls, the agency has been getting much better intelligence on its drone targets than it did just a few months ago, officials said.

Now what kind of numbers are they throwing around here? Oh just another $1 billion a year for Pakistan - not including whatever military aid, they get, the cost of the added cellphone towers, and the CIA only knows what else. It's a nice business Pakistan has carved out for itself out of Afghanistan's misery.

If there's still honor among the Mamoond tribe, this could be great news

2009-03-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that yesterday the Mamoond tribe struck a deal with Islamabad. The tribe has agreed to lay down their arms; cease harboring militants; and stop training militants. The tribe runs the Taliban in the Bajaur Agency. The tribe is also believed to have provided refuge for Al Qaeda members.

Among the senior Taliban leaders the tribe has agreed to surrender are senior commander, Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and spokesman, Maulvi Said Muhammad, otherwise known as Maulvi Omar.

If the Mamoond tribe has any honor, then Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, Pakistani commander in the area, is absolutely right in saying, "It's the peoples' victory."

Displaced by the Taliban

2009-03-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy by Emilio Morenatti, Associated Press

Contrast the image above with the photos below of women in areas where they are no longer running from the Taliban. Notice any difference?

Pakistan's "victory" in Bajaur

2009-03-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports:

After a six-month campaign, the Pakistani military is claiming victory over the Taliban in Bajaur, a northern sliver of the tribal areas, saying the militants have suffered heavy losses and have been pushed over the border into Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as the Times duly notes, the Pakistanis are alone in their assessment:

Residents and Western military experts, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the political situation, said it was likely that rather than being finally uprooted from this slice of Bajaur and a nearby stronghold in Loe Sam, the bulk of the Taliban forces had retreated to mountain enclaves, waiting to return, as they have so often, when the military eases off.

Idrees Khan, a tribal elder from the area, told the Times why he is reluctant to return to home:

He left with bad feelings and remains bitter, he said. The family tried under tremendous odds to stave off the Taliban in December, he said. When the militants attacked one of their houses near the market and his brother called for help, the army showed up late and was of little help, he said. A helicopter gunship came after the Taliban had fled, but it shot at the family house anyway, severely damaging it, he said.

His experience is apparently not unique, either:

Several residents of Inayat Kalay said they were nervous about security because they had tried to raise a volunteer army against the Taliban last fall, but had received inadequate backing from the authorities.
...He said he was reluctant to return, in part because he had no confidence in the Pakistani government. “When we returned in November they shelled us,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat that.”

The Pakistani military claims that some 1,600 militants have been killed in the six-month campaign. However, as the Times report continues, neither residents or Western military official believe this claim as Pakistan has provided no real evidence.

Moreover, as Mr. Khan pointed out to the Times reporter, the Taliban in the area seem to have come through the government's assault relatively unscathed. The main compound of Fakir Mohammed, the Taliban's main man in Bajaur, remains standing amid the rubble of everyone else's property. “Why don’t they hit his house?” as Mr. Khan inquired of the reporter.

Audacity of hope: Praying for peace in Afghanistan

2009-03-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

Photos courtesy of UNAMA

International Women's Day, Afghanistan

Reasons not to give up in Afghanistan

2009-03-05T07:36:00.001-08:00

School girls in Afghanistan. Photo by Sebastian Rich.

As the UNAMA writes in their press release:

More than six million children have enrolled in school since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
In 2008 the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) supported the enrollment of nearly 340,000 girls in grade one.

Change in Saudi Arabia

2009-03-03T09:15:00.001-08:00

From today's NYTimes.com :

Ever since King Abdullah announced a sweeping cabinet reshuffle two weeks ago, Saudi liberals have been in a rare holiday mood. Many have hailed the changes — including the replacement of some major conservative figures and the appointment of the first female deputy minister — as a “mini-revolution” and proof that the king is at last willing to tame this country’s hard-line religious establishment.

While not everyone is happy with the changes, as the Times duly notes, let's focus on those who were happy:

“The king’s message is that he is bringing new blood — legal, not religious,” said Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, a reformist lawyer who has been jailed for his advocacy. “I am very optimistic.”

More generally, the reform agenda has drawn momentum from King Abdullah’s personal popularity and a growing public dissatisfaction with radical religious figures....

The radicals’ popularity began to wane in 2003, when a series of brutal terrorist attacks here killed Saudis as well as foreigners. At the same time, public anger at the intolerance of the cane-wielding religious police has grown, fueled by a younger generation that is more exposed to the outside world.

“The sacred image of these people was destroyed,” said Awadh Badi, a scholar at the King Faisal Center in Riyadh, the capital. “Before, even the state couldn’t touch them.”

As the Times goes on to report:

To many Saudis, the issue of extremism is less important than the fact that the schools are not providing enough math and science or the broader view of the world that their children need as the country struggles to diversify its economy and oil prices fall.

“Seventy-five percent of what my 13-year-old daughter studies is religion,” said Fawziah al-Bakr, a professor of education at King Saud University. “We are all in favor of religion, but we don’t have to make all our children into clerics.”

As far as the kingdom allowing elections to be held.

“Without changing the cultural infrastructure here, there is no point in elections or anything of the kind,” said one ardently reformist member of Saudi Arabia’s appointed Shura Council, which advises the king, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The extremists here are well organized, but the liberals are not organized at all. They don’t have channels of communication with the people.”

Afghanistan's narcotics trade: Friends, foes and enablers

2009-03-02T09:09:00.001-08:00

There is a curious story about the Afghan narcotics trade in yesterday's (London) Times Online:

The troops, from a 2,000-man taskforce based in Helmand, have pushed west into Farah province to choke the Taliban's supply lines, part of an American plan to contain what they perceive as British "failures" in southern Afghanistan.

Why are the Americans so obsessed with routing the Taliban in Helmand? The report continues:

Major-General Mart de Kruif, Nato’s senior general in southern Afghanistan, said central Helmand was the Taliban’s top priority. “They see it as their heartland,” he said.
“And they are fighting hardest there because there is a clear nexus between the insurgency and the drugs trade, which they are fighting to protect.”

...Lieutenant-Colonel David Odom, of the US marines ground combat element, stationed in Farah, said the insurgents used the roads west of Helmand to move “weapons, drugs and poppy money” to and from Iran and Pakistan.

The flying drones that patrol the roads day and night have watched thousands gather at impromptu bazaars to trade guns and drugs, often within a few miles of their bases. Even the Americans do not have sufficient troops to stop them.

It's not so surprising to me that the British cannot or will not put enough troops on the ground in Afghanistan to stop this trade. What puzzles me is why than the Pakistanis and Iranians aren't more involved in stopping this flow. I get the anti-American angle to their agenda but at what cost to their people? This makes me wonder, cui bono from the narcotics trade in those countries? Which officials exactly benefit from looking the other way?

Me always thought they protested too much

2009-02-23T08:08:00.000-08:00

From a recent Wall Street Journal report:

Pakistan's leaders have publicly denounced U.S. missile strikes as an attack on the country's sovereignty, but privately Pakistani military and intelligence officers are aiding these attacks and have given significant support to recent U.S. missions, say officials from both countries.
American unmanned Predator aircraft have killed scores of Islamic militants in Pakistan in more than 30 missile strikes since August, provoking outrage in the South Asian nation.

As the report points out in no uncertain terms:

Yet, with the Taliban pushing deeper into the country, Pakistan's civilian and military leaders, while publicly condemning the attacks, have come to see the strikes as effective and are passing on intelligence that has helped recent missions, say officials from both countries.

The Pakistani military is apparently still trying to maintain its policy of plausible deniability:

Maj. Gen Akhtar Abbas, a spokesman for the military, said Pakistan and the U.S. "have a long history of military cooperation and intelligence sharing." But he said it doesn't include the missiles strikes. "We have made our opposition clear," he said. "The strikes are counterproductive."

But as the WSJ report goes on:

[

Other Pakistani] officials say President Asif Ali Zardari and top military leaders decided in recent months to aid the American effort in the hopes it will help them regain control over the tribal areas. The Taliban and al Qaeda have flourished in those areas bordering Afghanistan since 2001. The cooperation also could prove as a counterbalance to U.S. displeasure over a peace deal announced Monday with a Taliban faction in Swat Valley.
The protests are "really for the sake of public opinion," said one Pakistani official. "These operations are helping both sides. We are partners on this."
A former U.S. intelligence official said cooperation has always been strong between the two countries' intelligence services. "There's always been a double game," the former official said. "There's the game they'll play out in public [but] there has always been good cooperation."
Further evidence of the close working relationship between the two countries came last week, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Predators are flown out of a base in Pakistan, not U.S. bases in Afghanistan, as many counterterrorism analysts had believed.

...Pakistan has since denied Ms. Feinstein's account, but former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that it was accurate, lamenting the fact she stated it publicly. "It was a big mistake on her part," said one.

The Treasure Hunt in Pakistan Begins; Your First Clue

2009-02-22T06:13:00.000-08:00

Win up to $27 million if you find this guy.

Your first clue via Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew, two geographers at UCLA. In a recent study published by MIT International Review and reported by UCLA Newsroom:

...the geographers report that simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.

But you better hurry as:

They warn that if bin Laden indeed remains to this day in the tiny city of Parachinar, or even elsewhere in the relatively thinly populated tribal area of Kurram, he may move to the city of Peshawar (population 1.4 million) in the neighboring tribal area of North-West Frontier Province if Peshawar falls to the Taliban. News reports have warned of that possibility since last summer.

The geographers used distance-decay theory (of course!) and island biogeographic theory (duh!) to come up with their conclusion. "Island biology theory predicts that he would find his way to the largest but least isolated city of that area," said Gillespie. "If you get stuck on an island, you would want it to be Hawaii rather than one with a single palm tree. It's a matter of resources."

"The Pakistani side of the border is much better for hiding because of its ambiguous political status within the country and the formal absence of U.S. or NATO troops," Agnew said.

Faced with the prospect of picking from more than 1,000 structures clearly portrayed in the satellite imagery of Parachinar, the team decided to come up with a short list of the criteria that bin Laden would need for housing, based on well-known information about him, including his height (between 6'4" and 6'6", depending on the source), his medical condition (apparently in need of regular dialysis and, therefore, electricity to run the machine) and several basic assumptions, such as a need for security, protection, privacy and overhead cover to shield him from being spotted by planes, helicopters and satellites...

Only three structures fit the criteria. The buildings also appeared to be the best fortified and among the largest in Parachinar. Two are clearly residences, the study states. The third may be a prison. But whatever the third structure is, it has "one of the best maintained gardens in all of Parachinar," the study says.

While the three structures meet all six of the criteria that the researchers believe would be required for lodging bin Laden, an additional 16 structures in Parachinar appear to meet five of the six criteria. If bin Laden is not in the first three structures, the U.S. military should investigate these other buildings, the study urges.

So there you go.

Blame it on the office

2009-02-22T06:05:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press report on Friday:

The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.

The report continues:

After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself.

"They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.

As the AP duly noted:

It's not the first time that the Obama administration has used a Bush administration legal argument after promising to review it. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate legal tool it used to have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.

Who the Taliban sees as the enemy

2009-02-19T08:04:00.001-08:00

Scary, right?

All of the above photos courtesy of UNAMA.

Swat peace: Not a done deal

2009-02-19T07:52:00.001-08:00

Sherin Zada, Associated Press

Today the Washington Post reports that the peace accord announced yesteday between the Pakistani government and the Taliban who in Swat valley appears to have stalled .

As the Post report reports:

[The] proposed pact marks an unprecedented and risky attempt to disarm about 2,000 Taliban fighters, who have invaded and terrorized the once-bucolic area of 1.5 million people in northwestern Pakistan, by offering to install a str ict system of Islamic law in the surrounding district....The Taliban has ravaged the once-pristine, affluent area for months, burning schools, killing police and ordering women to remain home. More than half the populace is believed to have fled their homes.

Many Pakistanis greeted news of the accord with alarm.

Retired Pakistani brigadier and former intelligence chief in the area, Asid Munir, wrote in the News newspaper

All segments of society and the general public need to be educated that Talibanization is a real and serious threat to the country, and that if nothing is done to stop its advance, then the anarchy will spread.

Rifaat Hussain, a professor of defense and security studies at Quaid-i Azam University in Islamabad, was quoted in the Post as saying:

It legitimizes the existence of violent and armed groups and allows them to draw the wrong lesson: that if you are powerful enough to challenge the writ of the state, it will cave in and appease you.

A U.S. official reportedly told the Post "It's a surrender disguised as a truce."

But local residents who have had to live with the Taliban these last months seemed to have a different take. Many took to the streets, as the Post writes, to show their support for the accord "in a jubilant peace march."

Gul Bad Shah, a local shopkeeper in Swat, told reporters: "We want peace at any cost....We are very happy to see the hustle and bustle in the markets after a long time."

A local college student said he was hopeful that "once the law is implemented in letter and spirit" the Taliban will vanish.

Public spirits were reportedly dampened by the end of the day, however, when news was received about Musa Khan Khel, a Pakistani TV journalist who was covering the march.

"He was with us all day on the march, and then suddenly we heard he had been kidnapped and killed and his body dumped on the road," a Dawn newspaper reporter told the Post.

Maybe its the office not the man

2009-02-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

As the NYT reported yesterday:

In a little noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.

Moreover,

The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team's arguments that a lawsuit by former CIA detainees should be shut down based on the "state secrets" doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.

And nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta, as the Times report went on to say, "opened a loophole in Mr. Obama's interrogation restrictions [restricting CIA interrogators to Army Field Manual techniques]."

At his hearing, Mr. Panetta said that if the approved techniques were "not sufficient" to get a detainee to divulge details he was suspected of knowing about an imminent attack, he would ask for "additional authority."....Mr. Panetta also said the CIA might continue its 'extraordinary rendition' program, under which agents seize terrorism suspects and take them to other countries without extradition proceedings....

Margaret Satterthwaite, faculty director of NYU's human rights center, described some of the new administration's arguments as "Bush redux - exactly the same legal arguments that we saw the Bush administration present to court." And ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said there were worrisome indications that Mr. Obama is going to continue "some of the most problematic policies of the Bush presidency."

Go figure.

NATO members refuse to impede the flow of funds to the Taliban

2009-02-18T06:44:00.000-08:00

That's right. Some NATO states are excusing themselves from having to eradicate opium even though they acknowledge reports that suggest that this is where the Taliban is now getting funding in the range of $100 million to $500 million per year.

As the New York Times reports: "Each [NATO] country is allowed to state its reservations and opt out of missions that are viewed as too risky, either politically or militarily."

American commanders say that such provisions are preventing the coalition of troops from carrying out what has been agreed upon is a critical mission. Some NATO members have expressed fear that their soldiers can be prosecuted under domestic laws. Others are said to live in fear of public opinion at home.

Why not then encourage or allow (whatever the case is) Kabul to legalize opium production?

Why should the Taliban and the criminals reap all or in fact any of the benefits? It would seem to me that working on ways to reduce demand would be far easier (not to mention cheaper) than focusing on reducing the supply side of this equation.

Pakistan cedes Swat to Taliban

2009-02-18T05:52:00.001-08:00

Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press

Jane Perlez at the NYTimes reports on Islamabad's latest deal with the Taliban. In exchange for a ceasefire, Islamabad will agree to accept a system of Islamic law in Swat valley. As the NYT reports:

[the deal was] criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting. About 3,000 Taliban militants have kept 12,000 government troops at bay and terrorized the local population with floggings and the burning of schools.

As the Times continues, the U.S. isn't thrilled by this agreement either. Pakistani authorities were advised by the Americans to keep fighting the Taliban.

Pakistan may have made this deal to restore some calm as former and current ministers suggested to the Times. Or it could be that there is another angle here.

As the Times notes, "the pact echoed previous government accords with the militants [in North and South Waziristan." While Islamabad previous deals allowed, as the Times writes, "a mini-state for Qaeda and Taliban militants" to form, peace has yet to prevail in Waziristan.

The Pakistani military pulled out, it seems to me, only to let the American military - or rather its unmanned drones - step in. In fact, since the earlier peace accords, the U.S. drone attacks in Waziristan have been so unrelenting that some analysts believe they are the cause that the Taliban is now in Swat. Swat has been in the cross-hairs of the Taliban since long before the U.S. military began its campaign there so I don't think so myself.What I think is that Islamabad's move was to stop embarrassing itself and let the Americans get the blood on their hands.

And I doubt the drones are going to agree on the peace deal that Islamabad just did. To give you an idea why, consider what we know about the Taliban's concept of Islamic law:

Taliban leaders have proscribed what they call un-Islamic activities by residents, including watching television, dancing and shaving beards, and they have sometimes beheaded offenders. The penalties are regularly, and terrifyingly, announced over radio stations under the militants’ control.

Pakistan's information minister, according to another Times report, wants to play this as though it is no big change, saying, "We are only providing for an increase in the number of judges and setting a time frame for the disposal of cases." But I think he's kidding himself.

What does he think the Taliban think "disposal" means?

The Long Arm of the Taliban

2009-02-18T05:24:00.001-08:00

If you think people who hail from the tribal areas of Pakistan - now effectively ceded to the Taliban by Islamabad- can escape to, say, New York, think again.

Kirk Semple reports for the NYTimes about a New York resident who returned for the first time in three years to the Swat Valley which until the Taliban moved in, was considered a mountain paradise:

...several heavily armed Taliban fighters wearing masks appeared at the door of their house [while he and his family were celebrating his homecoming and] accused Mr. Khan of being an American spy and kidnapped him.

During two weeks of captivity in a nearby mountain range, Mr. Khan says, he was interrogated repeatedly about his wealth, property and “mission” in the United States. He was released in exchange for an $8,000 ransom. His family, threatened with death if they did not leave the region, is now hiding elsewhere in Pakistan.

Another man, the owner of a limo company in NY, told the NYT that he received an anonymous phone call in which he was told that if he didn't bring $1 million with him on his next trip to Pakistan, "you know what will happen....we know your family." Soon after his elderly father received a demand letter asking him for $200,000 in order to avoid being kidnapped. In the letter the writer referred to his son in America.

"My 97-year-old father is [now] on the run," the limo-company owner told the NYTimes.

Another NY-resident Swati's brother was held hostage by the Talibanfor 75 days last year. They made it clear he was being held because he had relatives in America who they indicated could come up with the money to buy his release.

The sense of helplessness is no doubt compounded by the fact that there is little these Swatis can do from America.

“To go to their rescue would actually make the situation worse,” said Mr. Khan....“We are the only source of income for these people. If we leave the United States, they’ll have no one supporting them.”

Real bravery

2009-01-13T21:00:00.000-08:00

Just posted on the NYTimes:

One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside Shamsia on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.
“Are you going to school?”

Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.

But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.

Today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including even Shamsia, whose face was so badly burned that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well — about 1,300 in all.

“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”

As the Times report continues:

Even as the Taliban tighten their noose around Kandahar, the girls flock to the school each morning. Many of them walk more than two miles from their mud-brick houses up in the hills.

The girls burst through the school’s walled compound, many of them flinging off head-to-toe garments, bounding, cheering and laughing in ways that are inconceivable outside — for girls and women of any age. Mirwais has no regular electricity, no running water, no paved streets. Women are rarely seen, and only then while clad in burqas that make their bodies shapeless and their faces invisible.

So, who has the - um, ah, er, would this be balls? - to attack defenseless school girls?

The Taliban denied any part in it. The police arrested eight men and, shortly after that, the Ministry of Interior released a video showing two men confessing. One of them said he had been paid by an officer with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency, to carry out the attack.

But at a news conference last week, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, said there was no such Pakistani involvement.

One thing is certain: in the months before the attack, the Taliban had moved into the Mirwais area and the rest of Kandahar’s outskirts. As they did, posters began appearing in local mosques.

“Don’t Let Your Daughters Go to School,” one of them said.

And who besides the girls has the, um cojones to fight these unarmed-small-girl attackers? Well, there is the headmaster, Mahmood Qadari; and according to the Times, most of the locals, once he gave them some small encouragement:

“I told them, if you don’t send your daughters to school, then the enemy wins,” Mr. Qadari said. “I told them not to give in to darkness. Education is the way to improve our society.”

The adults of Mirwais did not need much persuading. Neither the bus nor the police nor the bridge has materialized, but the girls started showing up anyway. Only a couple of dozen girls regularly miss school now; three of them are girls who had been injured in the attack.

And what became of the girl whose face was so badly burned in the attacks?

After class, Shamsia blended in with the other girls, standing around, laughing and joking. She seemed un-self-conscious about her disfigurement, until she began to recount her ordeal.
“The people who did this,” she said, “do not feel the pain of others."

Indeed - but that's no reason to stop learning or living. At least for the brave.

Pakistan contorts: Fire the truth teller

2009-01-08T09:50:00.001-08:00

The NYTimes reports:

Pakistan's national security adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, confirmed Wednesday that the lone surviving gunman from the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, is a Pakistani citizen. Hours later Mr. Durrani, a respected retired army general and former ambassador to the United States, was fired by the Pakistani prime minister for “irresponsible behavior.”

As the report continued:

The bizarre turn of events — which came after repeated claims by Pakistani officials that they could find no proof of Mr. Kasab’s nationality — showed how deeply the aftermath of the Mumbai siege has riven the country’s fragile government as it struggles to come to grips with what American officials have said is clear evidence that Pakistani nationals plotted the attack.

But even Pakistan has to eventually accept the evidence:

Later in the day, the Pakistani government hastily acknowledged that Mr. Kasab was a citizen and announced that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had fired Mr. Durrani for failing to take Mr. Gilani “and other stakeholders into confidence” and for a “lack of coordination on matters of national security.”...

“Supposedly, he’s unhappy that I made the statement without consulting him,” Mr. Durrani said of Mr. Gilani, noting that two government spokesmen confirmed Mr. Kasab’s citizenship.

Dream job: Letter writer

2009-01-08T09:38:00.001-08:00

UNAMA Photo by Jawad Jalali

Called areza nawees in Dari, these letter writers pen epistles for a fee for their illiterate countrymen (and women, presumably). How fun would that be?

Taliban exaggerate number of casualties they cause

2009-01-05T14:14:00.001-08:00

MSNBC reports:

The Taliban has long exaggerated its military successes, but its figures for 2008 may be the militia's most startling claims yet.

The Taliban claims its forces last year killed 5,220 foreign troops, downed 31 aircraft, destroyed 2,818 NATO and Afghan vehicles and killed 7,552 Afghan soldiers and police.

But, as the report continues

According to an Associated Press tally of those announcements, 286 foreign forces died last year in Afghanistan, including 151 American and 51 British troops.

The reason why they do this seems obvious enough not to even mention, but here you go anyway:

Vahid Mojdeh, the author of a book on the Taliban, said the exaggerated claims help the insurgents recruit new fighters.

"The Taliban needs volunteers to carry out suicide attacks, so they want to show they are killing a lot of people," Mojdeh said.

So what did the Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, have to say when confronted with the discrepancy in reporting?

Mojdeh said that some of the exaggerations likely come from false assumptions. For instance, he said, if a roadside bomb hits a U.S. Humvee, then the Taliban probably report four U.S. deaths, even if everyone inside the armored vehicle survives.

Images from Afghanistan

2009-01-05T14:07:00.001-08:00

Uzbeks playing buzhashi or polo with a goat carcass. Yes, they do eat the meat, reports the NYT, but only after it's nice and soft from all the pummeling.

The Taliban in paradise

2008-12-29T14:52:00.000-08:00

Or the Swat Valley, a place in Pakistan that some have (or used to) describe as more beautiful than Switzerland. No any more, according to this AP report:

Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive....
"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."
The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier....
Officials estimate that up to a third of Swat's 1.5 million people have left the area. Salah-ud-Din, who oversees relief efforts in Swat for the International Committee of the Red Cross, estimated that 80 percent of the valley is now under Taliban control.
Swat's militants are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric who rose to prominence through radio broadcasts demanding the imposition of a harsh brand of Islamic law. His appeal tapped into widespread frustration with the area's inefficient judicial system.
Most of the insurgents are easy to spot with long hair, beards, rifles, camouflage vests and running shoes. They number at most 2,000, according to people who were interviewed.
In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas.
They have also set up a parallel administration with courts, taxes, patrols and checkpoints, according to lawmakers and officials. And they are suspected of burning scores of girls' schools.
In mid-December, Taliban fighters killed a young member of a Sufi-influenced Muslim group who had tried to raise a militia against them. The militants later dug up Pir Samiullah's corpse and hung it for two days in a village square - partly to prove to his followers that he was not a superhuman saint, a security official said on condition of anonymity.
A lawmaker and the senior Swat government official said business and landowners had been told to give two-thirds of their income to the militants. Some local media reported last week that the militants have pronounced a ban on female education effective in mid-January....

A Swat militant boasted that "we are doing our activities wherever we want, and the army is confined to their living places."

"They cannot move independently like us," said the man, who was reached over the phone and gave his name as Muzaffarul Haq. He claimed the Swat militants had no al-Qaida or foreign connections, but that they supported all groups that shared the goal of imposing Islamic law.
"With the grace of Allah, there is no dearth of funds, weapons or rations," he said. "Our women are providing cooked food for those who are struggling in Allah's path. Our children are getting prepared for jihad."

And yet most Pakistanis will tell you it is Americans and Indians who are the really bad guys. Go figure that one out.

Taliban's education policy

2008-12-27T18:08:00.000-08:00

The BBC reports

A local Taleban commander ordered parents to stop sending their daughters to school by 15 January.
In comments broadcast on an illegal radio station, he threatened to blow up schools which enrolled female students.
This year alone, Taleban militants have destroyed more than 130 schools in the Swat valley. They want to bring in Islamic sharia law in the region.
Militant attacks on schools in the region have deprived more than 17,000 students of education.
...
Although schools for girls have come under attack on numerous occasions in the past, this is the first time Taleban militants have issued a complete ban on girls attending them, the BBC's Ethirajan Anbarasan says.
A Taleban spokesman said the prohibition would remain in place unless and until Islamic sharia law was fully implemented in the region.
...
Those who can afford it have already moved out of the region, but the poor have no other option than keeping their daughters at home, our correspondent says.

No wonder all the Pakistanis in the border region are "pro-Taliban."

A story to cheer everyone up

2008-12-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

If you read only one story this holiday season, make it this one. At least watch the video.

Recession comparisons to keep in mind

2008-12-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

Photo courtesy of Sebastian Rich (UNICEF)

Take heart from the joy of this Afghan child. According to UNICEF, 30 percent of primary school age children in Afghanistan work to support their families.

Salang pass, Afghanistan

2008-12-23T05:27:00.000-08:00

Jawad Jalali, UNAMA

A shoe-hurler connection to Saddam?

2008-12-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

Salameh Nematt, former correspondent for Al-Hayat, writes in The Daily Beast:

Reports in the Arab media indicate that the Iraqi shoe thrower, Muntather al-Zaidi may have been planning his assault on President Bush for more than a year, helped by Iraqi Baathists seeking to overthrow the U.S,-backed government. One leading Arab website said the al-Zaidi’s handlers may have been funded by Raghad, the eldest daughter of former dictator Saddam Hussein.
Raghad, who currently lives in self-exile in Jordan, is wanted in Iraq for funding terrorism and for looting billions from state funds on the eve of the 2003 war that toppled her father.
Dia’ al-Kanani, the judge investigating the shoe-throwing incident, said Thursday he turned down a request to release al-Zaidi on bail for security reasons, including fear for the suspect’s own security. He said there was a real threat he may be attacked.

He continues reporting:

Contrary to reports in the American and Arab media, readers’ comments on Elaph.com showed that eight out of 10 Arabs who responded on that site condemned the shoe attack as a shameful and unprofessional act.

The Arab world’s leading political columnist, Hazem Saghia, writing in the London-based Al-Hayat daily newspaper, said Thursday it was “ironic that after living nearly a third of a century under Saddam Hussein’s boots, an Iraqi decides to throw his shoes at the person who removed Saddam from power.”

Saghia said that after all is said and done, “Bush came to Iraq, signed the security agreement he wanted, and left after casually taking note al-Zaidi’s show size. Thus, we’re even. He got what he wanted, and we’re left with shoes that missed their target. Perhaps we deserve to be ruled by someone like Saddam Hussein.”

The shoe-hurler as Every Arab

2008-12-15T14:41:00.001-08:00

Jonah Goldberg comments:

First, the main reason "journalists" in Saddam's Iraq would never have thrown a shoe at a visiting dignitary is that they'd be tortured and executed for it. More importantly, can we just drop this fantasy-land nonsense that America was super-popular in the Mideast before George W. Bush came on the scene? I mean really, who is Reuters trying to kid?
Also, if someone throws a shoe at Barack Obama — at home or abroad — will that be used by the press to define Obama's popularity, never mind his legacy? I mean if some nutter in Holland hucks a clog at Obama, does that mean all of the Netherlands, never mind all of Europe, hates Obama? Somehow I doubt that's how Reuters et al would cover it. In a circumstance like that, we'll be told how this was an act by one lone-shoe-man.
There's a weird double standard buried deep in all of this, and I don't just mean the biases against Bush. When conservatives hold up unsavory Muslims or Arabs as representative of the region's problems, we're told how simplistic and two-dimensional we're being. But when the same sort of unsavory doofus behaves in ways that confirm liberal biases and coform to liberal passions, then suddenly this doofus speaks for millions.

And Michael Totten reminds of a point that should not be forgotten in all this (via Katherine Lopez at The Corner):

Michael Totten just got back from Iraq. So I asked him about the shoe this morning: "The Bush shoe incident made me laugh slightly. Only because of the U.S. was an Iraqi journalist allowed to throw that shoe. On some level, he knows that. Tellingly, Prime Minister Maliki stepped in the way to protect the president, and many Iraqis in the room apologized for the offense."

Michael continued: "I have briefly met many Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. They seem like decent people, for the most part, and are not as shifty as many other civilians I encounter." He added: "In the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, where journalists are credentialed by the U.S. Army, is a poster showing the faces of all the journalists killed in Iraq last year. There are dozens of faces on that poster, and almost every single one of them is Iraqi. Iraqi journalists are very brave, much braver than I am, and I'd hate to see Americans get the wrong idea about these people from one lousy incident."

Update: Iraq's permanent representative to the United Nations Feisal al-Istrabadi told a group of academics and journalists that Al-Bagdaddiya, the shoe-hurler's news station is a Baathist station. Major newspapers are finally reporting that it is based out of Cairo.

And finally, how did U.S. soldiers react to the news? Here's one account via Campbell Robertson at the New York Times Baghdad Bureau blog:

“Hey you see George was hit with a shoe?” a soldier had asked Monday morning, laughing and lumping eggs into his plate in the kitchenette of the company’s security outpost.
“George who?”
And that was mostly it for Monday. By the middle of the day most had heard about it, on the Internet, from wives back home, but it was more or less dismissed with “I can’t believe that, that’s some funny stuff” (or so paraphrased, for this is a family blog).
Midway through Monday night’s patrol, Lt. Miller, one of the sergeants and the interpreter were standing in a kitchen trying to iron out a misunderstanding with a couple of nervous looking Iraqi men, when a burst of laughter came from the soldiers in the living room. The Shoe Throwing Incident was being shown on the Iraqi evening news, frequently, and in slow motion. The soldiers were guffawing and remarking on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s impressive attempt to block the second shoe. The Iraqis in the room stood in the back, unsmiling, as the throws were replayed, again and again. Then the news moved on to another story and the soldiers moved back out into the cold streets.
A few houses later, the last stop of the night, a little confrontation broke out when the women of the houses assumed the soldiers were robbers — their house had been broken into earlier this year — and began screaming. The owner of the house was angry but Lt. Miller calmed the man’s nerves, and they began the usual chat about the neighborhood.
I stayed out in the street, talking with the soldiers, who were discussing the wars or quiet lives that awaited them on the other side of this deployment. Soon Lt. Miller appeared and we moved on.
The next day, Lt. Miller told me that, out of nowhere, the man in the last house had announced that he wanted to apologize for the Shoe Incident, insisting that it not reflect poorly on all Iraqis.
I asked Lt. Miller what he said in return. He assured the man that it was OK, that they do not consider one Iraqi’s behavior indicative of the country, that this was what democracy can look like, etc.
And, he said, “I told him that a lot of the soldiers thought it was pretty funny."

Be careful what you ask for

2008-12-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks,

at the time of his arrest. Courtesy of Abdul Arts.

Here he is depicted in a recent courtroom sketch by Janet Hamlin.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, otherwise known as KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and four co-defendants want the U.S. military tribunal to accept their guilty pleas. They told the judge that since they don't trust any of their representatives - because they are American, of course - they don't want to waste the courts time and should just be convicted.

Observers say that what they are doing here is trying to challenge the U.S. to turn them into martyrs by putting them to death.

Will this work? Will people really will be impressed by such martyrdom? If you are somebody who would buy into this program, email me and tell me why. Or alternatively, just turn yourself into your local law enforcement agency.

"Another invasion"

2008-12-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

See this special issue by South Asia Defence & Strategic Review, out of Delhi.

"A calamity has fallen on my house. What shall I do?"

2008-12-08T08:53:00.000-08:00

Thus spoke Shameem Khan, an Indian Muslim whose six relatives were shot dead by the Mumbai attackers. He was quoted by Patrick French in an op-ed in today's New York Times about the Mumbai attacks.

Mr. French, to give you some context here, is the author of "The World is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul." The book, described by George Packer as a "portrait of the artist as a monster" is also, he writes, "a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggle" of Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent who "made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century." In other words, Mr. French is not someone who blurs the hard edges of those he writes about.

So let's see what he has to say about the attacks.

AS an open, diverse and at times chaotic democracy, India has long been a target for terrorism. From the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in 1948 to the recent attacks in Mumbai, it has faced attempts to change its national character by force. None has yet succeeded. Despite its manifest social failings, India remains the developing world’s most successful experiment in free, plural, large-scale political collaboration.

Mr. French continues:

When these well-planned attacks unfolded, it was clear to anyone with experience of India that they were not homegrown, and almost certainly originated from Pakistan. Yet the reaction of the world’s news media was to rely on the outmoded idea of Pakistan-India hyphenation — as if a thriving and prosperous democracy of over a billion people must be compared only to an imploded state that is having to be bailed out by the I.M.F. Was Pakistan to blame, asked many pundits, or was India at fault because of its treatment of minority groups?
The terrorists themselves offered little explanation, and made no clear demands. Yet even as the siege continued, commentators were making chilling deductions on their behalf: their actions were because of American foreign policy, or Afghanistan, or the harassment of Indian Muslims. Personal moral responsibility was removed from the players in the atrocity. When officials said that the killers came from the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, it was taken as proof that India’s misdeeds in the Kashmir Valley were the cause.
These misdeeds are real, as are India’s other social and political failings (I recently met a Kashmiri man whose father and sister had died at the hands of the Indian security forces). But there is no sane reason to think Lashkar-e-Taiba would shut down if the situation in Kashmir improved. Its literature is much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia, and murdering those who insult the Prophet. Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, who lives on a large estate outside Lahore bought with Saudi Money, goes about his business with minimal interference from the Pakistani government.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is part of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (the Qaeda franchise). Mr. Saeed’s hatreds are catholic — his bugbears include Hindus, Shiites and women who wear bikinis. He regards democracy as “a Jewish and Christian import from Europe,” and considers suicide attacks to be in accordance with Islam. He has a wider strategy: “At this time our contest is Kashmir. Let’s see when the time comes. Our struggle with the Jews is always there.” As he told his followers in Karachi at a rally in 2000: “There can’t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them — cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.” In short, he has an explicit political desire to create a state of war between the religious communities in India and beyond, and bring on the endgame.
Like other exponents of Islamist extremism, he has a view of the world that does not tolerate doubt or ambiguity: his opponents are guilty, and must be killed. I have met other radicals like Mr. Saeed, men who live in a dimension of absolute certainty and have contempt for the moral relativism of those who seek to excuse them. To achieve their ends, it is necessary to indoctrinate boys in the hatred of Hindus, Americans and Jews, and dispatch them on suicide missions. It is unlikely that any of the militants who were sent from Karachi to Mumbai — young men from poor rural backgrounds whose families were paid for their sacrifice — had ever met a Jew before they tortured and killed Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who was several months pregnant, at the Mumbai Jewish center.

What to do? Here's what Mr. French would do:

The prime solution to the present crisis is to force the closing of terrorist training outfits in Pakistan, and apply the law to those who organize and finance operations like the Mumbai massacres. Hafiz Saeed and other suspects should be sent to India to stand trial. The remark by Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari (a man whose history of shady business dealing makes him demonstrably unfit for high, or even low, office), that he did not think the terrorists came from Pakistan would be funny if it were not tragic.
The United States gives around $1 billion a year in military aid to Islamabad; that is leverage. It does the people of Pakistan no favors for Washington to allow their leaders to continue with the strategy of perpetual diversion, asking India to be patient while denying the true nature of the immediate terrorist threat. I received this e-mail message recently from a friend in Karachi: “Nowhere can get more depressing than Pakistan these days — barring some African failed states and Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile in Pakistan there is widespread denial...but in the most unexpected places, a different reaction

2008-12-07T07:09:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports:

From Taliban commanders in the northwest to liberal businessmen in Islamabad, the capital, Pakistanis have this week been rallying around the flag. . .
"We may have a dispute with the Pakistan government, but we would set aside our differences if our homeland was threatened by outside powers," said Maulvi Nazir, head of a powerfulPakistani Taliban splinter group in the tribal area of South Waziristan. "We would raise a force of 15,000 tribal Taliban to fight on the side of Pakistan's armed forces. We would infiltrate 500 suicide bombers into India to cause havoc there."
That promise of assistance has not gone unnoticed in Islamabad.
In a briefing with reporters after the Mumbai attacks, several top officials of Pakistan'sInter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, said they welcomed the offers of support from Nazir and Taliban leaders such as Baitullah Mehsud.
Only a year ago, Mehsud, who reportedly commands thousands of foot soldiers in his native South Waziristan, was Pakistan's most wanted man. Days after the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Mehsud's name surfaced as the possible perpetrator of the Dec. 27 bomb attack that killed her.

The story does not end here (fortunately). As the Times went on to report, there's a story behind this story. Quoting one Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist based out of Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province and the administrative center of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan - a.k.a. Taliban country - the Times continued:

"Right now, these are only statements. They are offering support, but they are also saying that in return for their support the military must stop its operations in the tribal areas, in Swat and other places," Yusufzai said. "They are trying to seize the moment and say, 'Look we're not anti-state, not anti-Pakistan.' But the government has to be careful. It should not respond by pulling out troops."
Many ordinary people in northwestern cities such as Peshawar are wary of expressions of national unity and more inclined to empathize with India's position, Yusufzai said. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and wounded in insurgent attacks this year, and the mounting violence has sensitized the population to the government's failure to rein in terrorists within Pakistan.
"There is a feeling that these jihadi groups need to be cut down to size," Yusufzai said. "People here have seen up close the results of their activities, so they are probably more inclined to believe some of the Indian accusations."

Delhi vigil: Mumbai attacks

2008-12-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the New York Times

Honoring the Mumbai victims in Lucknow

2008-12-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

Reuters via the New York Times

"Unbreakable" India

2008-11-30T12:09:00.000-08:00

Both photos courtesy of http://arunshanbhag.com

Signs of hope in Afghanistan????????

2008-10-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

Pakistani Dawn News TV reports today:

The mini jirga [tribal convention] of Pakistan and Afghanistan has agreed to form a committee to make contact with, what it calls, opposition in both countries for peace and reconciliation.

The Afghan delegation to the jirga was led by Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, former Foreign Minister in the Karzai administration and Board Advisor to Kabul Center for Strategic Studies, the think tank I work for in Afghanistan.

The Dawn report continues:

Dr Abdullah Abdullah, said both sides agreed to improve cooperation in the fight against terrorism. It has recommended to governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan to deny sanctuaries for terrorists, which are a threat to both parties.
Abdullah said that the jirga delegates have also recommended to expedite the process of peace and reconciliation in the region.
Abdullah's counterpart from Pakistan, Awais Ahmed Ghani, told the media that they will form a committee to establish contacts with, what he called, opposition to bring lasting peace in the region.
When asked to clarify the term opposition, Mr Ghani said that the it includes all those elements involved in the conflict.

Let's hope the time has come that ALL parties are ready to lay down their arms and come to the table.

Note to "opposition": You have nothing to lose by negotiating but more lives. Make Allah proud (for a change.)

Kabul Center advisor leads Afghan-Pak peace delegation in tribal areas

2008-10-27T05:19:00.000-07:00

Kabul Center for Strategic Studies board member Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the former Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, is leading the Afghan delegation to the mini-jirga that began meetings today to discuss ways to bring about peace in the tribal areas that span the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Full disclosure: I serve as the American Office of Kabul Center.)
Both countries and the U.S. have indicated that they are willing to reconcile with the Taliban provided they are willing to respect basic law and lay down their arms.
As an Afghan delegate Farooq Wardak told reporters: "Those who want to fight, I think they are the common enemy of the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have to coordinate our military strategy, fight them in a coordinated manner."

Things are not that bad in Afghanistan

2008-10-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

In case you missed this report: straight from the New York Times:

Less than 12 hours after NATO troops in Afghanistan defeated an ambitious attempt by the Taliban to storm a provincial capital in the far southwest, killing dozens of the fighters, the top American commander in the country urged doubters Sunday to believe that the war against the Taliban would be won.
The commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, who leads more than 65,000 troops from about 40 foreign countries, including 33,000 Americans, said at a news conference in Kabul that there had been “too many” reports in the media recently asserting that the foreign forces and their Afghan allies were losing the war.
“I absolutely reject that idea, I don’t believe it,” the general said, adding: “It is true that there are many places in this country that don’t have an adequate level of security. We don’t have progress as even and as fast as any of us would like. But we are not losing in Afghanistan.”
At another point, he was more emphatic. There are major challenges facing the war effort, he said, “But we will win.”

Before you bet against the U.S., NATO, or the Afghan forces, you check out the full report.

Why are the Taliban blowing up the tribals?

2008-10-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

Aren't they supposed to be allies in this war?

Well, no, actually. The reality is far different: From what my Afghan colleagues at Kabul Center for Strategic Studies tell me, the vast majority of Pakistan's supposedly ignorant and extremist tribals hate the Taliban. If most people in the West still don't understand this fundamental dynamic, the Taliban certainly gets it. Hence we see the motive for their hideous bombing yesterday. From The New York Times report:

A suicide bomber detonated a vehicle laden with explosives during a meeting of elders in Pakistan’s tribal territories on Friday, killing more than 40 people and wounding more than 100, according to a government official, television accounts and witnesses.
Elders in the Orakzai tribal area, vowing to push Taliban extremists out of their area, were planning the details of how to wipe out a Taliban headquarters, said Kamran Zeb, the government’s senior official in Orakzai.

And as the Times report goes on to report:

In another harsh move, Taliban fighters kidnapped four tribal elders from Bajaur and then beheaded them after they attended a pro-government meeting in the Charmung district of Bajaur, local news reports said Friday.

And the walls came tumbling down

2008-10-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

Reporting from Baghdad, the New York Times:

Market by market, square by square, the walls are beginning to come down. The miles of hulking blast walls, ugly but effective, were installed as a central feature of the surge of American troops to stop neighbors from killing one another.
“They protected against car bombs and drive-by attacks,” said Adnan, 39, a vegetable seller in the once violent neighborhood of Dora, who argues that the walls now block the markets and the commerce that Baghdad needs to thrive. “Now it is safe.”

Tribal awakening in Pakistan

2008-09-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

According to the London Guardian, it's happening:

Moderate tribesmen in parts of militant-ravaged north-west Pakistan are challenging Taliban extremists threatening to overrun their area, in what could develop into a mass resistance movement.
Villagers in parts of North-West Frontier province and the tribal territory, faced with the violent advance of the Pakistani Taliban, are starting to organise an armed indigenous resistance in the absence of help from the state.
The resistance has parallels with the "Sunni awakening" in Iraq, where tribesmen took on al-Qaida militants in Anbar province and elsewhere.
The Pakistani movement relies on tribal customs and widespread ownership of guns to raise traditional private armies, known as lashkars, each with hundreds or several thousand volunteers.
These tribal armies cannot stop individual acts of terrorism, like the devastating suicide bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad last week that killed more than 50 people. But they aim to stop the development of an extremist mini-state in the north-west.
The lashkars are appearing in many areas, including Bajaur, in the tribal zone, and Dir and Buner in North-West Frontier province. The Taliban are heavily armed and entrenched in a line that runs along the Afghan border from South Waziristan, north through Bajaur and Mohmand, in the tribal area, and in adjacent districts in NWFP, including Swat.
"There's going to be a civil war, " said Asfandyar Wali Khan, leader of the Awami National party, which runs the provincial government in NWFP. "It will be the people versus the Taliban."

If you are wondering where the Pakistani army is, the tribes have asked them not to come:

...saying that the presence of uniformed men only galvanised the Taliban and provided them with ready targets. The army has agreed.

Hitchen's reviews the left

2008-09-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

In his review of Bernard-Henri Levi, the very public French intellectual's new book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, Hitchens offers his own critique of the left.

First he sums up what he believes is BHL's political view: he is not only anti-fascist but also anti-totalitarian. In his book, Hitchens writes, BHL shows:

...how agonized he is by leftist compromises with every disgraced regime and ideology from Slobodan Milosevic to Islamic jihadism, but the effort expended is worthwhile and shows some of the scars of political warfare from Bangladesh to Bosnia. He is much readier to defend Israel as a democratic cause than are most leftists and many Jews, but he was early in saying that a Palestinian state was a good idea, not because it would appease Arab and Muslim grievances but for its own sake. (This distinction strikes me as both morally and politically important.)

He then goes on to quote BHL directly:

“I’m convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has even, in certain cases, had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy.”

And of course he adds his own (worthwhile) comments:

If this is not precisely true, even of those nostalgic for “Fidel,” apologetic about Hugo Chávez, credulous about how “secular” the Baath Party was, or prone to sympathize with Vladimir Putin concerning the “encircling” of his country by aggressive titans like Estonia and Kosovo and Georgia, still it does contain a truth. One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islamism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe “resistance” in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: “Hitler’s speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe.”

Putting this latest work in context, Hitchens writes:

In his last book, a retracing of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” Lévy appeared in the role of mediator at a time when French-American relations were in a sorry condition. Here, too, he takes a stand against the mindless anti-Americanism that is so prevalent among the lumpen intellectuals of Europe. In his view, the phenomenon has two highly unpleasant subtexts to it. The first is envy and resentment, deriving from the fact that the United States has several times intervened to save Europe from itself and from the consequences of its ideological dementias. The second, perhaps not unrelated, is a no-less-envious perception of America as a handmaiden and vassal of the Jews.

And for those who will probably not read BHL's book (me, for example), Hitchens reveals his ultimate prescription for how the Left can fix itself. In Hitchens' words:

The left, he insists, must renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you.

A counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan that might work

2008-09-19T06:53:00.002-07:00

Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason make a compelling case for reempowering the tribal councils in Afghanistan in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

First they note an important historical detail:

As the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, noted in a blunt interview with the BBC in May, the current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.
The U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is foundering because of the endemic failure to engage and protect rural villages, and to immunize them against insurgency. Many analysts have called for more troops inside the country, and for more effort to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries outside it, in neighboring Pakistan. Both developments would be welcome. Yet neither would solve the central problem of our involvement: the paradigm that has formed the backbone of the international effort since 2003—extending the reach of the central government—is in fact precisely the wrong strategy.

Then they provide the context for why securing the cities doesn't seem to work:

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe.

And zeroing in on the heart of the insurgency, the authors write:

The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalized by the Taliban. But the elders won’t commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder, and they can hardly be blamed for that.

They then propose a plan:

... the U.S. needs to fundamentally reconfigure its operations, creating small development and security teams posted at new compounds in every district in the south and east of the country. This approach would not necessarily require adding troops, although that would help—200 district-based teams of 100 people each would require 20,000 personnel, one-third of the 60,000 foreign troops currently in the country.
Each new compound would become home to roughly 60 to 70 NATO security personnel, 30 to 40 support staff to manage logistics and supervise local development efforts, and an additional 30 to 40 Afghan National Army soldiers. The troops would provide a steady security presence, strengthen the position of tribal elders, and bolster the district police. ....regular contact at the district and village levels would greatly improve the collection and analysis of intelligence.

Perhaps most important, district-based teams would serve as the primary organization for Afghan rural development.

Local teams with on-site development personnel—“District Development Teams,” if you will—could change all that, and also serve to support nonmilitary development projects. State Department and USAID personnel, along with medics, veterinarians, engineers, agricultural experts, hydrologists, and so on, could live on the local compounds and work in their districts daily, building trust and confidence.

...As long as the compounds are discreetly sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence, and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.

Can this really be true?

2008-09-19T06:53:00.001-07:00

Are things really this bad in Saudi? Did President Bush really become a "locus of hope for Saudi women"? From today's NYT's story on how Oprah delivers daily solace to Saudi women? From a mother of five in Riyadh:

“Many of us feel that the solutions for our problems have to come from outside,” Ms. Muhammad said. When President Bush visited Saudi Arabia in January, she continued, as an example, his presence briefly became a locus of hope for Saudi women. “A lot of women were saying that they wished they could talk to Bush about problems like forced marriage, about how our children are taken away if our husbands divorce us.”

McCain on the War on Terror

2008-09-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

According to Jeffrey Goldberg in the latest issue of The Atlantic:

McCain calls Terror and Consent “the best book I’ve ever read on terrorism.

Goldberg says Henry Kissinger recommended the book. As Goldberg reports:

Kissinger, a foreign-policy “realist,” embraces [the author, Philip] Bobbitt’s argument that the so-called Bush Doctrine is “incoherent” because its call for the democratization of Arab states undermines another of its principles, the need to “preclude” states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. . .

The most controversial of Bobbitt’s assertions is that the absence of actual stores of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq does not undermine the need for America to “preclude”—he prefers preclude to preempt—certain countries from developing WMDs in the future.

As Bobbit writes in the book:

The war against a global terror network, al Qaeda, is in an early phase. Yet already owing to the Coalition invasion of Iraq, terrorists from this network or any other cannot someday call on Saddam Hussein to supply them covertly with weapons with which to attack the West when he would not have dared to have done so directly, and when he, but not they, had the resources to buy into a clandestine market in WMD.

According to Goldberg:

McCain believes strongly that the only way to ensure Saddam would never pose a threat to American interests was to remove him from power. “Is there anyone who believes that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have pursued WMD?” he asked me. “He told his interrogators he would. Is there anybody who believes that the sanction regime was going to hold, or that the status quo would hold, or that sooner or later they wouldn’t shoot down one of our planes patrolling the no-fly zone?”

Goldberg claims that this comment is identical to what McCain told him around the time he originally voted to use military force against Iraq:

“There is no such thing as containment,” he said then. “If we don’t act, we’ll pay the price later. If we ‘give peace a chance,’ Saddam will pursue his ambitions against us, but he will be more powerful, and more deadly than ever.”

As Goldberg continues:

I asked Kissinger whether he thinks that McCain can be too inflexible on the subject of preemption. He said McCain will not change his mind if he feels that the nation’s defense is at stake. Much of this, Kissinger continued, is related to McCain’s sense of national honor, and personal honor. “He will not do the easy thing,” he said. . .

McCain’s father, Kissinger said, saw the world the same way McCain sees it. “He was a military man, not a diplomat. Both men grasp the notion of consequences. From about 1967 on, we were experiencing a national trauma, with obsessive doubts about the fitness of government and with a yearning to just get out of Vietnam and get it over with, with a refusal to look at the consequences. Both of them understood that withdrawal without honor has costs. The son knows this from his own experience and from his father.”

Goldberg goes on to try and assess what McCain will do with respect to Iran:

The most plausible target of a McCain-ordered preemptive war would be Iran. In January 2006, he said, “There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option—that is a nuclear-armed Iran. The military option is the last option, but cannot be taken off of the table.”

Goldberg writes that McCain described to him, after he said this, a scenario which would, in his view, trigger a preemptive strike against the Islamic Republic:

“If we knew with absolute certainty that the Iranians were going to support Hezbollah to make sure they got a weapon of mass destruction in southern Lebanon—would we just wait until Hezbollah attacks Israel with that weapon? Well, first of all, I don’t think the Israelis would wait, but I’m not sure. The consequences, as we know, are catastrophic.” (In May, when I asked McCain why the defense of Israel was an American national-security interest, he said, “The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust.”)

McCain, says Goldberg, is aware that his position here is not necessarily popular:

“With preemption, the connotation is that the cowboy just wants to go out and attack people,” he said. “The country is in one of our occasional periods of isolationism, a reaction to what [the public views] as failure, even when we are succeeding in Iraq—and we have succeeded in Iraq. There’s still going to be a greater reluctance than there was” before the Iraq War to try to stop an adversary from gaining possession of weapons of mass destruction.

As he said this, he seemed depleted by the discussion of preemption. It’s not the first unpopular cause he’s adopted, but it might be the most difficult one to sell to the American public.

“It’s very hard to run for president on this idea right now.”

What is the Bush Doctrine?

2008-09-13T12:21:00.001-07:00

It turns out Alaskan Governor and Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin isn't such an idiot after all. Check out this Washington Post analysis - on Page One, no less.

Guide to Elections 2008

2008-08-03T11:55:00.001-07:00

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Time for a refresher course: How to avoid making mistakes in understanding events of the past

2008-07-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

From Ibn Khaldun in "An Arab Philosophy of History" translated and arranged by Charles Issawi. Though this was written sometime in the the late 1370s, it is as relevant today as it must have been then.

All records, by their very nature, are liable to error....
The first of these is partisanship towards a creed or opinion. ....should the mind...be biassed in favour of an opinion or creed, it at once accepts every favourable piece of information concerning this opinion. Therefore, partisanship acts as a blinker to the mind, preventing it from investigating and criticizing and inclining it to the reception and transmission of error.

The second factor conducive to error is over-confidence in one's
sources. Such sources should be accepted only after thorough investigation involving the criticism of falsehoods and the correction of distortion.

A third factor is the failure to understand what is intended. Thus many a chronicler falls into error by failing to grasp the real meaning of what he has seen or heard and by relating the event according to what he thinks or imagines.

A fourth source of error is a mistaken belief in the truth. This happens often, generally taking the form of excessive faith in the authority of one's sources.

A fifth factor is the inability rightly to place an event in its real
context, owing to the obscurity and complexity of the situation. The chronicler contents himself with reporting the event as he saw it, thus distorting its significance.

A sixth factor is the very common desire to gain the favour of those of high rank, by praising them, by spreading their fame, by flattering them, by embellishing their doings and by interpreting in the most favourable way all their actions.

The seventh cause of error, and the most important of all, is the
ignorance of the laws governing the transformations of human society. For every single thing, whether it be an object or an action, is subject to a law governing its nature and any changes that may take place in it. If, therefore, the historian understands the nature of events and of changes that occur in the world, and the conditions governing them, such knowledge will help him more than anything else to clarify any record and to distinguish the truths it contains from the falsehoods. . . .

. . . Another cause of error is exaggeration. . . . Thus we find that most of our contemporaries give free rein to their imagination, follow the whisperings of exaggeration, and transgress the limitations of customary experience, when speaking of the armies of contemporary states, or of states which existed in the recent past; or when discussing the troops of Muslim or Christian nations; or when enumerating the revenues of kings, or the taxes or dues levied by them; or when estimating the expenditure of the wealthy, or the fortunes of the rich....

The real cause of this error is that men's minds are fond of all that is strange and unusual, and that the tongue easily slips into exaggeration, while the investigator and critic is apt to overlook things, so that he does not try to check his statements or weigh them up in a fair and critical spirit of enquiry and investigation, but rather gives his imagination a free rein and lets his tongue loose in a pasture of falsehoods. . . .

Who could have guessed...given all the reportage

2008-07-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

Melik Kaylan, a refugee from Saddam's Iraq, writes in the Wall Street Journal:

A recent mission to Iraq headed by top archaeologists from the U.S. and U.K. who specialize in Mesopotamia found that, contrary to received wisdom, southern Iraq's most important historic sites -- eight of them -- had neither been seriously damaged nor looted after the American invasion. This, according to a report by staff writer Martin Bailey in the July issue of the Art Newspaper.

As Malik goes on to report:

Up to now, it had seemed a clear-cut case. It stood to reason that a chaotic land rich with artifacts would be easy to loot and plunder. Ergo, the accusations against the U.S., the de facto governing authority, had been taken on faith. No one had bothered to challenge the reports, the evidence or the logic, not least because many ancient sites were in hostile terrain and couldn't be double-checked.

But as Malik duly notes:

When looters attacked the Baghdad Museum in 2003, the news media put the number of destroyed and looted objects at 170,000 -- a figure equal to the entire collection. It emerged later that most of the important pieces had been successfully hidden away. Others were soon found. The number of missing objects that is cited has since fluctuated between 3,000 and 15,000, with the figure never taking into account the systematic semiofficial looting and frequent substituting with fakes that occurred in Saddam's time.

So what did archeologists find on this latest trip? According to Malik who quotes the Art Newspaper article:

"The international team . . . had been expecting to find considerable evidence of looting after 2003 but to their astonishment and relief there was none. Not a single recent dig hole was found at the eight sites, and the only evidence of illegal digging came from holes which were partially covered with silt and vegetation, which means they [were] several years old." Furthermore, the most recent damage "probably dated back to 2003," to just before and after the invasion when the Iraqi army maneuvered for the allied attack. (According to other experts, looting probably took place when the Iraqi army first moved out of areas near sites to counter the invasion.)

So how, you ask,did the facts on the ground get so distorted? According to Malik:

In phone conversations with me, both Donny George and Lawrence Rothfield argued that the eight sites were all known to be well-protected. ...But Dr. George, perhaps the world's leading authority on the subject, also conceded that the greatest damage done by looters had generally occurred in the 1990s, in
Saddam's time. Prof. Rothfield said that the no-fly zones back then had allowed illicit digging to occur...
[Or as the Art Newspaper reported:]The upshot seems to be that] "little damage was . . . caused by coalition forces." Much of it was done by Saddam's forces.

Index of good news

2008-06-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

USA Today reports:

European and Asian companies are beating their American rivals into Iraq now that security has improved the investment climate, Iraq and U.S. officials say.
"It's starting to turn … and the people who are getting in on the ground floor are not American," said Paul Brinkley, the Pentagon official who is leading U.S. efforts to help Iraq rebuild its economy. "It's ironic."

Foreign companies, including U.S. investors, have committed to deals worth about $500 million so far this year and Brinkley expects at least $1 billion in foreign investment by the end of the year.

Duh - Rand Report April 2008

2008-06-12T21:00:00.001-07:00

This Rand conclusion in the recent released "Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan" seems almost too intuitively obvious to post but given the lack of confidence in common sense -in spite of the fact is is often so much more sensible than "expert" advice - I post it anyway:

...the most successful information operations were from indigenous actors such as religious, tribal, and political leaders - often without U.S. assistance.

"Catastrophic success" in Afghanistan?

2008-06-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

That is how a recent operation by Company C of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is being characterized. Today's NYT reports:

The district of Garmser, a fertile valley along the Helmand River, had been under control of the Taliban and members of Al Qaeda for most of the last two years and much of it had become a war zone, as the Taliban traded fire with British troops based in the district center. One of the largest poppy-growing areas in the country, Garmser District has been an important infiltration route for the insurgents, sending weapons and reinforcements to the north and drug shipments to the south to the border with Pakistan.

And check this out:

But Company C served in Anbar Province, once one of the most intractably violent areas of Iraq, which quieted last year under a new strategy of empowering local groups called Awakening Councils, which now provide security.
The marines were confident they could put that experience to good use here.
Only when you win over a critical balance of the local population and empower them to stand up to the insurgents can you turn the situation around, several marines said.
First Lt. Mark Matzke led a platoon for nine months last year in the Anbar city of Ramadi, where he said he got to know every character in a small neighborhood, both the troublemakers and the power brokers. But it was only when he sneaked in after dark and listened to people’s grievances in private that he was able to work out a strategy for protecting them from the insurgents.
“Through listening to their grievances, you could figure out that the people did not like the insurgents,” he said. But their biggest fear was that the marines would pull out, he said, leaving them at the mercy of insurgents who would treat them as collaborators.
As trust was built up, the people began to side with the marines and started to tip them off about who the insurgents were and where to find them. “You just need to give them confidence,” he said.

Villagers are still skeptical about how long the situation will last as the NYT goes on to report:

“I don’t think I will go back until complete peace and security comes,” said one elder, who said he had heard his house had collapsed under bombardment. “This is not the first time we have suffered. Several times we have seen such operations against the Taliban, and after some time the forces leave the area and so the Taliban find a way to return.”
“If NATO really wants to bring peace and make us free from harm from the Taliban,” he said, “they must make a plan for a long-term stay, secure the border area, install security checkpoints along the border area, deploy more Afghan National Army to secure the towns and villages, and then the people will be able to help them
with security."

Here's an offer that bears consideration

2008-06-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

A leader of the tribal revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq told The New York Sun that he would be happy to send military advisors to Afghanistan. The NY Sun continues:

Sheik Ahmad al-Rishawi told The New York Sun that in April he prepared a 47-page study on Afghanistan and its tribes for the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Kabul, Christopher Dell.

...The success of the Anbari tribal rebellion known as the awakening spurred Multinational Forces Iraq to try to emulate the model throughout Iraq, including with the predominately Shiite tribes in the south of the country.

..."Al Qaeda is an ideology," Sheik Ahmad said. "We can defeat them inside Iraq and we can defeat them in any country."

...Of his meeting with Mr. Bush, Sheik Ahmad said he was impressed. "He is a brave man. He is also a wise man. He is taking care of the country's future, the United
States' future. He is also taking care of the Iraqi people, the ordinary people in Iraq. He wants to accomplish success in Iraq."

...In Washington, Sheik Ahmad also met with some members of Congress. He said he told them that American soldiers should stay in Iraq for at least as long as it takes to rebuild Iraq's national army. The Democratic majority in Congress has tried and failed to mandate deadlines for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq regardless of conditions on the ground.

"We have to rebuild a national Iraqi army, not built on sects, but the same way they built up the Anbar police," he said. "They must be well-armed, so they will be able to protect the country and all the American interests in the area. We also have to make a friendship treaty based on mutual respect between the two parties, and then the United States will be able to withdraw from Iraq, if they wish, and we will succeed in Iraq the same way America succeeded in Japan and Germany."

..."We fully trust the Americans. We know the United States never in its history occupied a country. On the contrary, they were occupied and they were able to fight the occupier," he said, referring to the American rebellion against the British in 1776.

Taliban fleeing Afghanistan to....Guess where

2008-06-03T01:41:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports:

Marines of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit have been clearing Taliban and foreign fighters from the district of Garmser, in southern Helmand Province, an
important infiltration and drug trafficking route used by the Taliban to supply
insurgents farther north.
“The insurgents, after experiencing these several weeks of pressure below Garmser, are trying to flee to the south, perhaps to go back to the sanctuaries in another country,” said the NATO commander, Gen. Dan K. McNeill.
He did not name Pakistan, but Helmand Province shares a border with Pakistan, and the Taliban and drug traffickers have long used refugee camps across the border as a sanctuary from American firepower.

And look:

Governor Mangal said hundreds of foreign fighters had joined the Taliban in
their fight against marines in Garmser in recent weeks.
But he said they had suffered heavy losses.
Nineteen bodies of foreign fighters were found in one location, he said.

Alas the news is not entirely good given that "close by" places have decided to appease terrorists by offering them safe haven and in Afghanistan, the opium lords still reign. As the Times report continued:

General McNeill, who hands over command of NATO forces in Afghanistan this week
after 16 months in the post, said that if the Taliban and foreign insurgents continued to enjoy free sanctuary outside Afghanistan, their numbers would continue to grow.
He also seemed to warn Pakistan to contain the threat emanating from its land.
“If there are insurgencies in places that are not in Afghanistan, but very close by, and security forces are not taking them on, I don’t think that bodes well for the whole region,” General McNeill said.
Despite the rout of Taliban forces, the general warned that they were not the only problem in Helmand Province and that the enormous opium crop and the powerful drug business posed a comparable threat to Afghanistan’s stability.