self-defense [protect the chick peas]

BBC: village in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan weighs collaboration and resistance
"Less than two weeks ago, a couple of pro-Taleban activists from a nearby village made an appearance at night prayers in one of the village mosques. They appealed for donations and manpower for what they described as the "holy war" in Afghanistan.

The people in the mosque contributed some coins towards their cause. But no one volunteered for the war.

Since then, there has been a general unrest among the villagers about the Taleban's intentions. They want government help if they decide to resist a possible Taleban takeover...

Until last year, the people of this village were generally supportive of the Taleban's movement in the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) which border Afghanistan.

But that support has undergone a change since the Taleban's recent forays into Peshawar, the capital of NWFP where a number of educated young men of the village hold jobs...

Reports of tribal militia fighting to evict the Taleban from some areas in the Bajaur and Kurram tribal regions - as well as in the Buner district of NWFP - have also affected their earlier view of the Taleban as a godly force...

Nearly every village from one end of the province to the other has had someone working in Kabul - where wages have been several times higher than in Pakistan - for the past few years...

Likewise, before that, nearly every village had someone who worked for the Taleban in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

There are a dozen trained and semi-trained former Taleban foot soldiers in this village alone.

From 1996 to 2001, nearly all of them spent time in training camps and did sentry duty on check-posts or even participated in active combat for the Taleban.

Going to Afghanistan for the Taleban was almost a rite of passage for young men here. Some were recruited through the Pakistani madrassa (religious school) system and have now come back to run their own madrassas.

Until 2004, this village had no madrassas. Now it has four.

Villagers fear these ex-Taleban members might become harbourers of a larger Taleban force of outsiders.

If the Taleban take hold of the village, people fear they will persecute those who work in Afghanistan, or transport material to Kabul for Western troops or work for the Pakistani army and the police...

It appears the new NWFP government is encouraging local people to form their own self-defence militias and has even promised to issue them weapons, if available.

"But government weapons are in short supply, and we may get none, in which case we will have to use our own weapons," the lawyer tells the gathering of village men.

Almost every home in the village has a couple of Kalashnikov rifles kept for self-defence or because they are so fashionable. All are unlicensed as the weapon is prohibited...

This raises several questions in the minds of the villagers.

Will the police allow them to use these weapons? What if the wrong people get killed in the heat of the moment? Will villagers be put on trial and their weapons confiscated? What if people start settling personal scores under the guise of fighting the Taleban?

A major issue is the credibility of the government. What if someone high in the government orders the police to pull back and leave people at the mercy of the Taleban?

The situation is complicated, but the drift is obvious. The Taleban are getting closer to the village, and people's knee-jerk reaction has been one of resistance.

"If the government provides leadership and support, the people can easily deny the Taleban a foothold in the village. But if the government fails to offer them support, those 10 or 12 Taleban out there have the organisation and the will to overrun the place," says the lawyer.

If that happens, trigger-happy young men of the village - who could have fought alongside the village force - will instead be manning the Taleban check-posts.

That has already happened in some places, such as the regions of Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu and Tank. People opposed the Taleban but they had no government support. The Taleban moved in and the young men joined them. Their families sanctioned the move as it meant that they got protection."

BBC: Gates endorses negotiations with segments of the Taliban
AP: US airstrikes kill 47 in southern Afghanistan

BBC: Al-Qaeda assessment

NPR: Christian self-defense forces form in Iraq
"Qaraqosh is a peaceful town of 50,000 people. But because it's just a few miles east of the northern city of Mosul, one of the most dangerous places in Iraq, security is high.

Every vehicle is stopped, most drivers are questioned, and many cars are searched by members of the Qaraqosh Protection Committee, an all-Christian security force that is spreading to Christian villages across the north.

Father Daoud Suleiman says the once-Christian village [nearby Bartulla] is now evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, and that tensions are getting worse. He says if the church hadn't stepped in and helped create these protection committees, Bartulla would be just another formerly-Christian village...

[The groups are bankrolled by] Sarkis Aghajan Mamendu, and while his supporters may portray him as a wealthy independent benefactor, he does have a day job that suggests to some where the money may be coming from. He is the finance minister for the Kurdish regional government, and he is a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party believed to be close to Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani...

This is where the stories of the tiny Assyrian minority and the much larger Kurdish minority begin to converge — perhaps a bit too closely for some Assyrian nationalists...

Many Christians, as well as Turkmen, Yazidis and other minorities recall bitterly how the Kurdish Peshmerga forces prevented thousands of non-Kurds from voting in 2005, and Christians have no desire to see Assyrian autonomy reduced to a footnote in a Kurdish drive for independence."

BBC: Kenya apparently co-signed for the tanks on board the Ukrainian ship held for ransom by Somali pirates - destined for Southern Sudan
AP: gun-runners on trial for organizing over $700 million in weapons shipments to Angola

AP: suicide bomber kills 27 in Sri Lanka

BBC: deadly rioting continues in Assam
Gdn (op-ed): India apparently unwilling to target Hindu fundamentalists

WP: Thai army and police move in on protesters
"The trouble started Monday night when some 8,000 protesters gathered outside parliament, vowing to prevent the lawmakers' from convening Tuesday morning. Police moved in shortly after dawn with a volley of tear gas canisters and stun grenades, sending the crowd running."

BBC: 20 die in Mogadishu market shelling

BBC: Yemen arrest suspected militants, links them to Israeli intelligence forces

WP: Venezuelan government criticized for failing to provide health care to Amazonian indigenous tribe
"Some leaders of the Yanomami, one of South America’s largest forest-dwelling tribes, say that 50 people in their communities in the southern rain forest have died since the expulsion of the missionaries in 2005 because of recurring shortages of medicine and fuel, and unreliable transportation out of the jungle to medical facilities...There are about 26,000 Yanomami in the Amazon rain forest, in Venezuela and Brazil, where they subsist as seminomadic hunters and cultivators of crops like manioc and bananas...They remain susceptible to ailments for which they have weak defenses, including respiratory diseases and drug-resistant strains of malaria."

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Gdn: let's litigate: Lebanon to sue Israel for claiming hummus as its own