WP: behind recent military gains
[The two rice farmers] are among an estimated 45,000 largely Sinhalese villagers who have joined what is known here as the Civil Defense Forces, Sri Lanka's version of the National Guard, a paramilitary civilian group whose job is to defend villages, often in areas that have been attacked by ethnic Tamil separatist rebels in Asia's longest-running insurgency. After a few weeks of weapons training, the villagers are given uniforms, guns and a monthly salary of about $140.
"We know our roads. We know the jungle. And we are the most successful when it comes to saving our villages," said Kanthi, 36, wearing a uniform top over her skirt, a rifle slung across her chest. The mother of two is among 400 civilians in Periyaulukkulama, 15 miles west of Vavuniya, some of whom joined forces after their village was attacked on the Sinhalese New Year in April 2007, reportedly by rebels, who killed four female civilian officers...
The government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who came to power in 2005 amid a wave of Sinhalese nationalism, has had a free hand to crush the separatists, diplomats here said. The majority of Sri Lankans were apparently fed up with the war that has killed at least 70,000 people and seemed willing to give the new president any powers necessary to bring about its end.
In just two years, the country enlarged its military by 40 percent, adding as many as 7,000 recruits a month. Officials sent text messages to youths and put patriotic pop hits on the radio. Sri Lanka's military now has about 300,000 troops, military officials said.
The country's defense minister, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a brother of the president who once lived in California, is seen as the main architect of the government's new strategy.
"We gave clear instructions: no cease-fires, no negotiations until we defeat the LTTE completely," he said in an interview. "The LTTE would use cease-fires and peace talks to reorganize and resupply weapons. There have been five presidents, eight governments, different political parties and different personalities, dozens of negotiations and more than 10 cease-fires. Everything failed. After every period of negotiation, they came back stronger. We decided enough was enough."...
Some say the Tamil Tigers, as the group is commonly known, has grown weaker and lost popularity among civilians for its practice of forcing every family to send at least one fighter, often a child, into battle.
...the Sri Lankan government forged new relationships with China and Pakistan after the United States cut off direct military aid last year, mainly because of alleged human rights abuses and the use of children by a breakaway rebel faction now under the control of the government in the east, according to a State Department human rights report.LAT: recruitment another factor, despite high casualties
...it's the rice- and coconut-growing areas such as Kuliyapitiya district with its 150,000 population that have paid the highest toll. The government's all-volunteer army has found fertile ground for recruiting in rural areas where job prospects are limited and the army offers adventure, a uniform and a decent paycheck of about $200 a month. "Join the winning side," says a nationwide radio advertisement.
Recently, funerals in these parts have been running about two or three a week, said Chandana Bulathsinhala, an aide to the local opposition lawmaker, adding steadily, relentlessly, to the area's estimated 5,000 casualties since the war's inception -- a staggering one in 30 people.
Bulathsinhala estimates that 99% of the recruits sign up for economic reasons, with many schoolchildren now wanting to be soldiers rather than doctors or lawyers.
"War is always cruel, but the media has promoted good war news, so more people are encouraged to join," he said...
Nationwide, the missing number in the thousands, the result of desertions, front lines that have shifted repeatedly and dense jungle that can decompose a body in rapid order.
WP: Burma begins releasing thousands of prisoners, though few seem to be political
State media said that those who had been released were freed because of good conduct and so they could vote in elections due to be held next year.
New Yorker: secret talks between India and Pakistan over Kashmir failed; were ongoing over 3 years
NYT: US Special Forces more involved in Pakistan than previously acknowledged
More than 70 United States military advisers and technical specialists are secretly working in Pakistan to help its armed forces battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the country’s lawless tribal areas, American military officials said...
They make up a secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command...
A new Pakistani commando unit within the Frontier Corps paramilitary force has used information from the Central Intelligence Agency and other sources to kill or capture as many as 60 militants in the past seven months, including at least five high-ranking commanders, a senior Pakistani military official said...
Officials from both Pakistan and the United States agreed to disclose some details about the American military advisers and the enhanced intelligence sharing to help dispel impressions that the missile strikes were thwarting broader efforts to combat a common enemy.
Slate: (but SV wonders if it wasn't the drone base spotting by Google Earth that forced their hand)
SWJ: US issues new COIN guide
NPR: Kilcullen urges new approach in Afghanistan
Kilcullen says the militants are elusive, and don't have to hold and defend territory. He says that instead of hunting the extremists, the U.S. would do better to focus its efforts on providing the local population with better security as a way to gain their cooperation and trust...
Kilcullen says the U.S. needs to isolate the militants from the rest of the population — in large part by creating links with the local people by learning their ways, their relations with other tribes and trying to provide justice. He says that often it is the Taliban that has filled that vacuum. The best way to build those links, Kilcullen says, is to deploy in the communities.
Locals will begin to feel safe, he says, if there is a unit that lives in their village that they see every day, that they know will protect them and ensure that assistance programs work.
NPR: civilian advisers trying to cobble together an approach
NYT: Russia's interests in the outcome not quite favorable for US
LAT: Sunni parliamentarian linked to bombing, string of violence
Ind: clashes seem to be on uptick between Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga in the north
Khasro Goran, the Kurdish deputy governor of Nineveh province, who operates from heavily-fortified headquarters in Mosul, said it was “not acceptable” for non-Kurdish military units to move into disputed areas. “If they try to do so we will stop them.” On the streets outside Mr Goran’s office, once a Baath party office and now the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, an array of competing military forces holds power.
WP: tracing a released Guantánamo detainee's path from Kuwait to suicide bombing in Mosul
...there is also a view in some quarters of the U.S. government that cases such as Ajmi's are the inevitable result of locking up 779 foreigners in an austere military prison, without access to courts or consular representation, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques that detainees say amount to torture. Some of them are bound to seek revenge, these officials believe. The challenge is figuring out which ones.
NYT: war widows need aid in Iraq
As the number of widows has swelled during six years of war, their presence on city streets begging for food or as potential recruits by insurgents has become a vexing symbol of the breakdown of Iraqi self-sufficiency.
Officials at social service agencies tell of widows coerced into “temporary marriages” — relationships sanctioned by Shiite tradition, often based on sex, which can last from an hour to years — to get financial help from government, religious or tribal leaders.
Other war widows have become prostitutes, and some have joined the insurgency in exchange for steady pay. The Iraqi military estimates that the number of widows who have become suicide bombers may be in the dozens.BBC: National Museum reopens
BBC: investigating weapons use in Gaza
LAT: 11 peacekeepers killed in Mogadishu suicide bombing
Insurgents from the Shabab militia, which claims links to Al Qaeda, took responsibility and vowed to continue assaults against AU soldiers who have been helping shore up Somalia's shaky transitional government.
Newly appointed Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamist alliance that once included Shabab, has been calling upon his former partners to join the government, which was expanded in January to incorporate a major Islamist faction.
On Saturday, a clerics group in Somalia urged insurgents to halt their attacks against African Union soldiers and allow peace to return to the capital, Mogadishu.
AJE: Rwanda announces troop pullout from Congo
IHT: Belgium takes Senegal to court in the Hague, in attempt to extradite and try Habré, ex-leader of Chad on charges of war crimes, torture, and crimes against humanity
A Chadian truth commission said in 1992 that his government had killed up to 40,000 opponents and tortured many others. Survivors of the prisons run by the political police have described atrocities, including the torture and killing of fellow prisoners.
Habré's government received extensive support from Western countries, including the United States and France, which saw Chad, a former French colony, as a bastion against neighboring Libya. The Reagan administration provided covert support to help Habré take power in 1982 and continued to provide him with military aid.
BBC: lingering tensions in Kenya
BBC: Colombian secret police, the DAS, embroiled in wiretap scandal
What started as allegations that some rogue agents of the Das (Department of Administrative Security) could have intercepted the phone calls and e-mails of judges, politicians, government officials and journalists, appear now to be accepted as fact.
The information garnered from their wire taps could have been passed on to criminal elements, drug-traffickers, paramilitaries and even Marxist rebels.
WP: MIT Poverty Action Lab conducting police training in Rajasthan, IndiaResearchers conducted a survey in 2005-2006 in the western state of Rajasthan and found that more than 70 percent of crime victims never reported incidents because many felt that the police would either do nothing or ask for a bribe to file a complaint. More than 80 percent said no constable had ever visited their neighborhood. The survey also found that an average of 64 percent of police officers were transferred every year.
The MIT economic researchers launched a two-year pilot project to try to fix the widespread distrust and hostility that Indians nurse about the police and to rev up the morale of the police in 162 stations in Rajasthan.
Under the program, they gave police officers one day off each week, froze transfers, invited a community volunteer every day to the station to observe the police work, rotated work among officers and trained the police in etiquette, stress management and scientific investigation skills...
The trials created such a buzz that local police officers refer to these police stations as "MIT-thana," or "MIT-station."...
"We are not experts in policing, but we in the economics department wanted to provide Indian officials with rigorous evaluation of policy interventions," said Daniel Keniston, a PhD candidate at MIT who coordinated field research for the project. "The project is not about a feel-good, public relations exercise. It impacts issues like national security. Terror plots are foiled by the police very often because of the cooperation of the community and its network of informers. Local people should feel comfortable working with the police, and the police's familiarity with the area is critical."
Ind: police anticipating labor demonstrations in China
BBC: policing and peackeeping in the Solomon Islands
Fifteen Pacific countries responded to a neighbour in need, and an intervention force of only about 500 foreigners has led to major changes in this nation of 500,000 people.
In the late 1990s, rival militias tried to take advantage of ethnic tensions in order to secure greater political power.
Scores of people were killed. The violence was fuelled in part by the problems created by the resettlement of ethnic Malaitans on the main island of Guadalcanal.
In July 2003, the Solomons government got the intervention force it had asked for...
The warlords have been captured, and brought to justice. But ethnic mistrust remains.
Australia and its neighbouring island countries only want to leave the Solomons in the hands of a trusted, professional police service.
Solomon Islanders know that when the peacekeepers go, their own police will be their only protectors, once again.
Five years on, it's not clear whether the Solomon Islands police are ready.BBC: policing pirates (or trying to) in the Gulf of Aden
Salon: the entrenchment of contractors in the US military
NYT: media blackout policy at coffin arrivals reviewed
NPR: back pay: Philippine veterans of WWII finally get their due from the US
NYT: contemplating democracy promotion post-Bush
CSM (op-ed): the US should learn from Latin America and create a truth commission
What Specter and the rest of the US can learn from Latin America is this: If we are to control our own destiny, we must reclaim our past. A truth commission, along the lines suggested by Leahy, would be a good means of beginning that process. The alternative – to turn the page without knowing what is on it – could doom us to a haphazard and unpredictable future in which individual consciences and other nations' courts control our destiny.
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LAT: save the chinguiros!
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