"While paying tribute to his troops in Helmand province, and describing successes against insurgents, the brigadier told today's Sunday Times: ""We're not going to win this war. It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army."
NYT (op-ed): local intelligence, better targeting is necessary to prevent Afghan civilian defection
NYT (op-ed): improving governance
NYT (op-ed): rather than engaging in a manhunt
NYT: Karzai's brother, government officials suspected of involvement in the heroin trade
NYT: in Bamian province, women integrating the police and workforce
LAT: Interpol to train Afghan police
"The international police organization wants to boost police capabilities here with equipment and training and help connect police around the country with the Interior Ministry headquarters in Kabul.
Currently, no Afghan police offices in the country's 34 provinces can take fingerprints and send them to Kabul, the capital, to be entered into international databases, said B.S. Sardar Awa, the head of Afghanistan's Interpol office."
WP: US Army to release new strategy document today favoring nation-building to conventional warfare
"The doctrine, which has generated intense debate in the U.S. military establishment and government, holds that in coming years, American troops are not likely to engage in major ground combat against hostile states as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, but instead will frequently be called upon to operate in lawless areas to safeguard populations and rebuild countries.
Such "stability operations" will last longer and ultimately contribute more to the military's success than "traditional combat operations," according to the Army's new Stability Operations Field Manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post."
NYT: new US regional command established in Africa
"If deployment of fighting forces is an indicator, that historic focus north of the equator endures. But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new view has gained acceptance among senior Pentagon officials and military commanders: that ungoverned spaces and ill-governed states, whose impoverished citizens are vulnerable to the ideology of violent extremism, pose a growing risk to American security.
“Bases? Garrisons? It’s not about that,” [top commander] General Ward said in an interview. “We are trying to prevent conflict, as opposed to having to react to a conflict.'"
BBC: there was a coup in Mauritania in August, protesters arrested over the weekend
"The demonstration came ahead of the African Union's Monday deadline for Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi to be freed and restored to power."
NYT: anxiety in South Africa
"The past year has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.
The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.
Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting...
Rich and poor, black, white and mixed race: their complaints may differ, but the discontent is shared. Polls show a pervasive distrust of government, political parties and the police."
WP: but World Cup 2010 still on trackLAT: more killings in Mexico drug war - Arellano Felix cartel might be in collapse
"In all, at least 57 suspected organized crime members, a majority of them believed to be part of the Arellano Felix organization, were killed in the last week, including 12 dumped in front of an elementary school Sept. 29 and eight tossed in an industrial yard Thursday.
The carnage may be a sign that the cartel named for the Arellano Felix brothers is fractured and vulnerable to contenders, inside and outside the organization, who are looking to get control of lucrative trafficking routes into the United States, according to law enforcement sources...
The cartel came to power in the 1980s when Colombian cocaine barons, shut out of traditional trafficking routes across the Caribbean Sea into Florida, began partnering with Mexican crime groups.
The Arellano Felix brothers -- Benjamin, Ramon, Javier -- moved in from Sinaloa and provided the perfect springboard. From their Tijuana stronghold, they controlled trafficking routes into California, the biggest drug market in a country that is the biggest consumer of cocaine in the world."
Gdn: one faction of the Arellano Felix cartel appears to have aligned with Sinaloa
NYT: Colombian designer finds market for bulletproof fashion
"There are bulletproof leather jackets and bulletproof polo shirts. Armored guayabera shirts hang next to protective windbreakers, parkas and even white ruffled tuxedo shirts. Every member of the sales staff has had to take a turn being shot while wearing one of the products, which range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $7,000, so they can attest to the efficacy of the secret fabric."
NYT: Russia withdrawing from Georgia checkpoints
CSM: activist judges in Thailand?
BBC: riots in Assam between settlers and locals
"More than 100 people have been injured in the riots that have now spread to five districts of the state.
The clashes broke out on Friday between Bodo tribespeople and Muslim settlers from Bangladesh in Udalguri district, and have spread to nearby areas.
The groups have been fighting with bows and arrows, machetes and guns, and several villages have been set on fire.
Police have imposed a curfew and have orders to shoot rioters on sight."
BBC: curfew in Indian Kashmir to prevent separatist rally
"The men, a small band of Chinese Muslims who have been held for nearly seven years, are no longer considered enemy combatants by the U.S. government, but they are caught in a well-documented diplomatic bind. Unlike other captives, they cannot be sent to their home country because Beijing considers them terrorists, and they might be tortured. The government released five of the detainees, known as Uighurs (pronounced "WEE-gurz"), to Albania in 2006, but no other country wants to risk offending China by accepting the others."
WP: details on McCain's military career
WP (op-ed): Bush asked us to buy on credit, now it's time to pay up
BBC: the Weathermen (aka Barack Obama's domestic terrorist friends)
"...on 8 October 1969 a newly-formed group of left-wing extremists, dubbed the Weathermen, went on the rampage in a well-planned protest in Chicago - the so-called Days of Rage riots.
A police station in the city was bombed and protesters engaged police in combat on the streets. More than 250 of the rioters were arrested, and the FBI began to follow the movements of the Weathermen very closely.
They were a splinter group from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) - a product of the student radicalism endemic on college campuses in the late 1960s...
By the end of 1969 they decided to go underground and resort to bombing strategic targets - later changing their name to the Weather Underground Organization.
From 1970 to 1975 the group bombed police stations and patrol vehicles and court and government buildings...
The group's most audacious attacks came in 1971, when they bombed the US Capitol, and a year later when they attacked the Pentagon...
During the late 1990s, Mr Obama served on the same charity board as Mr Ayers."
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