BBC: ...and drugs - that is, use of opium and marijuana by Afghan police
WP: McKiernan estimates 60,000 US troops will be deployed for 3-4 more years
McKiernan said violence is likely to escalate in Afghanistan as fresh troops expand into insurgent-held areas where the military has little or no presence. "When we do put additional security forces, I would expect to see a temporary time where the level of violence might go up," he said.
WP: 'Human Terrain' researcher killed
Loyd's mission this time, as a researcher on contract to the Pentagon, was to get to know the villagers and their problems, to help the military map out what it called the "human terrain" of Afghanistan and thus improve its ability to fight Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents. With two interpreters at her side, she began to ask shoppers about the cost of fuel. One Afghan man, carrying a jug of gasoline, lingered to chat and thanked her for the visit. It was a bright winter day, and the mood in the market seemed relaxed and cordial.
Suddenly, the calm was shattered: According to court documents and government accounts, the man holding the jug abruptly hurled the gasoline at Loyd's face and chest, set her on fire and bolted. She fell to the ground in a fetal position, groaning, in flames. One guard took off after the attacker while the other rolled Loyd into a stream to douse the flames. Police began firing their guns in confusion. One guard, Don Ayala, had cuffed the man and pinned him to the ground when an Afghan interpreter ran over, screaming hysterically that Loyd was burning to death. Ayala turned and shot his prisoner in the head.
That brief flurry of violence has left a lingering trail of tragedy. The attacker died instantly, unable to shed light on his motives or possible conspirators. Ayala, one of three people in Loyd's tight-knit field team, was charged with murder in U.S. federal court and could face 15 years in prison. And Loyd, who had become deeply attached to Afghanistan, died 10,000 miles away in a San Antonio Army hospital, finally succumbing to her burns Jan. 7..
Although the Human Terrain System was designed by an anthropologist, it was ardently opposed by groups of social scientists who believe the military should not use scholars as collaborators in combat. After the program started in 2005, it generated an avalanche of heated debate in academic circles and online, which has intensified since Loyd's death.
"In theory, it is a good idea. . . . In practice, however, it has been a disaster," the magazine Nature said a recent editorial, noting that Loyd was the third civilian casualty on a Human Terrain mission in the past year. While conceding that scientific insights "have much to offer strategies in a war zone," the editors added that unless the program can be revamped to lessen "deadly mistakes, it needs to be closed down."...
"Paula died, and others will die. It is very hard to accept, but we need more people like her," [Brig. Phil Jones, an officer at the British Embassy] said. "Otherwise we will just be out there, blundering around in our diving boots and stomping on eggshells."
abu muquwama: an interview with Craig Mullaney on his new book
I had not expected to find the common ground in my interactions with local Afghans to be Bollywood pop culture. The larger value of graduate school and travel for me was changing my perspective. Traditionally, lieutenants and NCOs were handed missions / problems and they were expected to solve them within given parameters. "Answer this question. Solve this problem." In today's operating environment, and particularly in a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the hard part is defining the question and problem in the first place. Studying and traveling abroad continually exposed me to ambiguous, uncertain, and unscripted environments. I couldn't have asked for better preparation for the unfamiliarity of rural Afghanistan.
CSM: adjusting to new dynamics in Iraq
Ind: real estate booming in Baghdad; segregation sticking
Until recently anybody wanting to sell a house in Baghdad avoided putting up “for sale” signs because they were closely watched by gangs who would wait for the purchase to go through and then kidnap the seller or one of his children so they could demand the selling price as ransom.
House prices have risen by 50 per cent in many parts of central Baghdad during the past year, and rents have almost doubled. Mr Hadithi says that this is explained primarily by the end of the war. “Refugees are returning, but not to the places where they once lived,” he says. “A Shia who owns a new and expensive house in a Sunni area will want to sell it and buy a cheaper one in a Shia-majority district for safety reasons.”
Baghdad has become wholly divided into sectarian enclaves since the Sunni-Shia civil war of 2005-07. Long grey concrete walls snake through the city, cutting off neighbourhoods from each other. Exits and entrances are closely guarded. Checkpoints every few hundred yards create horrendous traffic jams. There is far less violence than two years ago, but there are still daily bombings and assassinations.
The property market reflects the outcome of the Sunni-Shia war, in which the Shia were by and large the winners. Baghdad is today probably about 75 per cent Shia. The Sunni – traditionally the richer community – have been pushed into smaller enclaves.WP: shoe-thrower defends himself; trial postponed
"I did not mean to kill the leader of the occupation forces," Muntadar al-Zaidi said, speaking clearly and forcefully from a wooden cage before a packed courtroom. "I was expressing what's inside of me and what's inside the Iraqi people from north to south and from west to east."
Throwing his shoes, fastball style, at the leader of the free world was not, Zaidi argued, a crime.
Zaidi, 30, who is charged with assaulting a foreign head of state, posited that Bush's Dec. 14 trip to Baghdad was not an official visit by a foreign dignitary because he arrived in the country without prior notice and didn't leave the Green Zone, which at the time was still under U.S. control.
"I am charged now with attacking the prime minister's guest," he said stoically, making his first public remarks since the incident. "We Arabs are famous for being generous with guests. But Bush and his soldiers have been here for six years. Guests should knock on the door. Those who come sneaking in are not guests."
Roughly an hour into the hearing, Presiding Judge Abdul Amir al-Rubaie announced that he would postpone the proceeding until March 12 to seek an opinion from the Iraqi government about whether Bush's swan song visit to Baghdad was, in fact, an "official" one.
AJE: leader that brokered deal to impose Sharia law in Swat organizes march
Mohammad, who served six years in prison for leading thousands of local men across the border into Afghanistan to fight US-backed foreign forces there, intends to persuade Pakistani Taliban leaders to lay down their arms for the long term.
"I ask you to remain peaceful. We have reached an agreement with the provincial government and Nizam-e-Adl (Islamic system of justice) will soon be enforced here," he told his supporters.
"People will soon start getting justice and there will be a durable peace."
However, news of Monday's ceasefire agreement between the Pakistani government and pro-Taliban fighters has alarmed Nato, the US and other Western powers.
BBC: journalist covering the story abducted and killed
New Yorker: will the Obama administration advocate a form of 'preventive' detainment?; weighing how to play the case of the last enemy combatant held in the US
NYT: this case a piece of the broader anti-terrorism legal picture, which doesn't look so different from Bush admin policies so far
The administration has also put off taking a stand in several cases that present opportunities to embrace or renounce Bush-era policies, including the imprisonment without trial of an “enemy combatant” on domestic soil, Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking legal opinions about interrogation and surveillance, and an executive-privilege dispute over Congressional subpoenas of former White House aides to Mr. Bush over the firing of United States attorneys.
Ind: a former Guantánamo guard offers a look inside the prison (and how he found himself there)
Did you get any briefing on who the soon-to-arrive prisoners were?
The only thing I can recall being told about the detainees that would arrive was that they were captured fighting the Americans in Afghanistan. And that they were known terrorists. And that many of them helped in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. We would be coming face-to-face with the worst people the world had to offer. Our mission would be to guard these terrorists so the United States could get more info on attacks and, possibly, stop more terrorist attacks.
As to us, we talked a lot about the detainees before they arrived. About them and what they had probably been involved in. A lot of us, including myself, were pissed off, and many people were out to get revenge for the havoc the United States had been through in recent months by these people.
But, as the months went on, one or two of us would question what was going on here, the way the detainees were being treated, and if they were actually terrorists or not, but being no ones, and young, and dumb, we never questioned anything further; just did our time until we went home.
NYT: political dissident released in Egypt
AJE: France sends police force to Guadaloupe after death of a union leader, injury of police
LAT: Colombian ex-paramilitary leader confesses to killing, money laundering
Fierro spent his first days on the stand last year meticulously reviewing hundreds of killings, a litany that included university professors, union leaders, peasants accused of giving aid and comfort to leftist guerrillas. Family members of victims, many of them in tears, watched via closed-circuit video.
Now the former Colombian army captain is just as scrupulously detailing how paramilitaries bled dry not just businesses and landowners, large and small, but public officials who either turned over chunks of their government budgets and revenue or were killed...
Foreign multinational companies apparently weren't exempt from paying the "war tax." Jose Gregorio Mangones Lugo, a leader of a neighboring paramilitary group, testified last year that both Chiquita Brands International Inc. and Dole Food Co. paid a 3-cents-per-50-pound tax on bananas shipped through Caribbean ports.
BBC: thousands protest deployment of military against drug violence along US-Mexico border
Many of the protesters said border towns had become more dangerous since President Felipe Calderon sent the army in.
But the governor of one state - Nuevo Leon - said he believed the Gulf drugs cartel and its armed wing, the Zetas, were behind the border protests.
BBC: militarization in Cancun
NYT: militias form to defend villages from the LRA in the Congo
A terrible mismatch may be shaping up in this lush, isolated patch of northeastern Congo. Thousands of teenage boys and their farmer fathers are grabbing machetes, slingshots, axes and ragtag shotguns, wading into the bush to confront a band of experienced killers.
They bang on drums to signal to one another. They patrol at night in shifts. Already, several members of these so-called self-defense forces have been killed. And in Congo’s recent past, the advent of local militias has only led to more bloodshed and abuses.
But here, the people feel they have no choice...“They took me on Christmas,” Mrs. Yebiye said. Several dozen villagers squeezed around. Her story was one of the first inside accounts of the rebel army Faradje had ever heard.
She said the rebels had dreadlocks and wild eyes. They believed in witchcraft and dabbed themselves with palm oil. They marched in seemingly endless circles, often through elephant grass as high as their heads, but never seemed to get lost. Sometimes, they liked to dance.
“The rebels would eat their marijuana and turn up their radios in the middle of the jungle,” she said. “If you didn’t dance with them, you got killed.”
It is stories like these that have sent the farmers and the other civilians out on loosely organized search-and-destroy missions. But in mid-January, in a village not far from here, it did not work out so well. Some farmers crossed paths with a band of rebel fighters, Mr. Dalafada said. The rebels killed four farmers and fled.
BBC: meanwhile, FDLR 'on rampage' further south
BBC: arrests made in Equatorial Guinea of alleged gunmen who fired on presidential palace last week; officials claim they have ties to Nigerian rebels
Gdn: Zimbabwe to pay soldiers and bureaucrats in dollars
BBC: India offers haven to Tamil civilians
WP: Obama administration considers new approach to Burma
"Clearly the path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn't influenced the Burmese junta," [Sec of State Clinton] said, adding that the route taken by Burma's neighbors of "reaching out and trying to engage them has not influenced them either."
WP: protests in China over Tibet prompt crackdown
Zhou Xiujun, owner of a grocery store, said that she witnessed a small protest near the county's main vegetable market Sunday that escalated into a much larger one about lunchtime Monday. On the second day, she said saw several hundred Tibetans gathered downtown, shouting "Long Live the Dalai Lama," the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists who lives in exile in India. In just a few minutes, she said, squads of police arrived and melee ensued.
NYT: Kosovo celebrates its one-year anniversary: a photo essay
++
Econ: the Bloody White Baron (book review)
A PSYCHOPATHIC Buddhist warrior-king hardly sounds plausible in fiction, let alone in modern history. But the story of Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, an Estonian-raised, ethnically German, tsarist officer, who became the last khan of Mongolia amid the chaos of the Russian civil war, has so many bizarre elements that the reader will soon believe almost anything.
Econ: animals! decisions! how we social ones make them
But exactly how do bees reach such a robust consensus? To find out, Dr List and his colleagues made a computer model of the decision-making process. By tinkering around with it they found that computerised bees that were very good at finding nesting sites but did not share their information dramatically slowed down the migration, leaving the swarm homeless and vulnerable. Conversely, computerised bees that blindly followed the waggle dances of others without first checking whether the site was, in fact, as advertised, led to a swift but mistaken decision. The researchers concluded that the ability of bees to identify quickly the best site depends on the interplay of bees’ interdependence in communicating the whereabouts of the best site and their independence in confirming this information.
++
LAT: a new kind of nationalism? some African-Americans tracing DNA trail to contemporary African states
Ind: hip hop and political participation in Kenya
At a time where a political power struggle was inflaming tribal and ethnic divisions some of the finest voices in Nairobi's ghettos decided to see whether MCs could do a better job for their communities than MPs and the parliament was born.
No comments:
Post a Comment