But if you accept the general definition of a civil war as one fought within internationally recognized borders, then throughout history civil conflicts have tended to outlast international wars by a factor of about 20, according to Paul Collier...
Civil wars can be ended by outside intervention, as in the Balkans. But according to Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, such intervention may in fact only prolong wars. “It leads to congealed wars,” he said. “In Bosnia now there is very little economic development or reconstruction, because actually it’s a frozen war. The best way is when people just exhaust themselves and run out of energy to fight.”
[sv wants to exhaust herself fighting this guy]
Sopika is one of at least 250,000 Tamil civilians being held in Menik Farm in the north of the country. Barbed-wire fences encircle the endless rows of white tents, preventing civilians from getting out and journalists from getting in, as the government continues to prevent the stories of Sopika and thousands like her from being told...
Her story is testimony to the brutality of both the Tamil Tiger fighters and the government during the final stages of a 26-year conflict, during which each side accused the other of acts of unspeakable cruelty. Both, it seems, were telling the truth and it is the Tamil civilians who paid the price....
The government has denied using heavy weapons. But by the time the family reached Mullaitivu, Sopika said she found the noise of the jets and artillery overwhelming. Her parents decided they had to make a break for it. It was 2am when they set off with several other families.
"As we were walking, the Tigers started to fire and the young boy walking in front of me got shot," she said. "My face and clothes were splattered with the blood of this boy. He died.
"We turned back because we were afraid of more death," she said.
LAT: ...and other lessons from Sri Lanka
The military budget grew by 40% a year, and the army exploded by 70% to 180,000 troops, adding 3,000 a month compared with 3,000 a year previously, drawing largely from rural Singhalese attracted by relatively high wages in a struggling economy.
"Before, the army would take territory, then move on, allowing the LTTE to come back," said military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara. "That changed and we hit them on all four fronts so they could no longer muster all their resources into one place."...
Other lessons are either unique to Sri Lanka or would be politically unpalatable in other societies, including the high civilian and military death tolls and alleged human rights violations...
Because Rajapaksa's base was the nation's Sinhalese majority, there was relatively little domestic pushback over the deaths and displacement of ethnic Tamil civilians...
"A military precept the world over is that you can't win militarily against an insurgency, which is essentially a political struggle," said Maj. Gen. Mehta. "They turned that on its head."
WP: these high costs of the war
WP:...will not involve wars crimes charges, if government gets its way
After getting ripped off in Turkey and staggering through waist-deep snow in Iran, the little band arrived in Al Qaeda's lair in Pakistan last year, ready for a triumphant reception...
Wary of spies, suspicious Al Qaeda chiefs grilled the half-dozen Belgians and French. They charged them $1,200 each for AK-47 rifles, ammunition and grenades. They made them fill out forms listing next of kin and their preference: guerrilla fighting, or suicide attacks?
Then the trainees dodged missile strikes for months. They endured disease, quarrels and boredom, huddling in cramped compounds that defied heroic images of camps full of fraternal warriors...
Beyayo is about 5-foot-5, chubby and bespectacled. Like the others, he is of North African descent. He grew up in the tough Anderlecht neighborhood of Brussels, and his brothers have done time for robbery and arms trafficking. But he does not have a criminal record. He interspersed college courses with fundamentalist Islam...
After several men called their mothers from Iran, the group entered Pakistan via Zahedan, an Iranian border town that is a hub for militants and smugglers, the Belgian anti-terrorism official said. As they approached the tribal zone dominated by the Taliban, military patrols looked the other way and diners at a roadside restaurant seemed to know exactly where they were headed...
Fearful of the drones as well as informants spotting them and targeting hide-outs for missile strikes, the trainees hunkered inside during the day. They moved frequently among crowded, squalid houses shared with local families in mountain hamlets.
The suspects say they wanted desperately to fight American troops in Afghanistan. To their dismay, the chiefs made them cough up more cash for weapons. They were assigned to train with an Arab group numbering 300 to 500, but spread out in small units for security. Religious and military instruction took place indoors, with firearms and explosives sessions confined to courtyards for secrecy.
A Saudi chief named Mortez assured the Europeans that they would go to the Afghan front. But idle weeks followed...
Late last year, Beyayo, Othmani and two others finally came home and into the clutches of police, who had monitored them closely. A central question: the extent of their involvement in terrorist activity.
Their defense lawyers insist that they are failed holy warriors.
"They just weren't tough enough," Marchand said.
Investigators have doubts. French police point out that the explosives instruction described by Othmani is far more extensive than that received by many previous trainees.
Police think the Europeans may have exaggerated their haplessness to conceal a dark purpose.
AJE: 60 Taliban militants reported killed in Helmand province of Afghanistan, drug loot seized
WP: the military tries to regain its footing in Swat
The battle for Swat, which is seen as a crucial test in Pakistan's war with radical Islamist insurgents, has forced about 2 million civilians to flee the area. The vast majority of Mingora's residents have left, and they may not be able to return to their homes for months or longer. The military estimates that as many as 20,000 residents remain trapped in the city and has said it will move carefully to avoid civilian casualties as well as the mines that Taliban fighters are thought to have laid to destroy advancing vehicles...
The Taliban has controlled Swat off and on since late 2007. Under a peace deal with the government, its fighters were supposed to lay down their weapons this spring in exchange for the institution of Islamic courts in Swat. But the truce collapsed when Taliban fighters overran the adjacent areas of Buner and Dir, putting their forces within 60 miles of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. For nearly a month since the deal's demise, 15,000 Pakistani troops have fought about 3,000 to 4,000 Taliban fighters up and down steep mountain passes...
The people of Swat have long been known for their moderation, but the valley was vulnerable to Taliban advances because of its proximity to the Afghan border and the ineffectiveness of the government in exerting local control. During their reign in the valley, the militants have instituted a severe interpretation of Islamic law, one that features public lashings for petty crimes and beheadings for those who dare to challenge Taliban authority. The militants are led locally by Maulana Fazlullah, a charismatic young preacher who spreads his message of armed insurrection against the state through pirated radio transmissions.
NYT: military captures 'slaughter square', or nearly does
The army’s capture of the central square, known as Green Square, carried symbolic weight. Under the Taliban, it had gained notoriety as “Slaughter Square.” Beheaded bodies — often of people accused of spying or of un-Islamic behavior — were thrown in the square to intimidate residents.
However, Mehmood Shah, a defense analyst and a retired brigadier in Peshawar who used to be in charge of security in the tribal regions of the North-West Frontier Province, said most of the captured neighborhoods were suburbs and the troops had not moved into the city in a “major way.”...
On Sunday morning, helicopter gunships struck multiple targets in the Orakzai tribal region, including a religious school, The A.P. reported, citing a local government official, Mohammad Yasin.
At least 6 civilians were among the 18 dead, Mr. Yasin said, adding that the targets were strongholds of Hakimullah Mehsud, a deputy to the Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud. Hundreds fled the area amid the fighting, he said.
The Pakistani military said curfew was relaxed from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Matta and Khawazakhela, two towns that have been cleared of militants.NYRB: but Pakistanis are clearly not sufficiently exhausted
"According to the Islamabad columnist Farrukh Saleem, 11 percent of Pakistan's territory is either directly controlled or contested by the Taliban. Ten percent of Balochistan province, in the southwest of the country, is a no-go area because of another raging insurgency led by Baloch separatists. Karachi, the port city of 17 million people, is an ethnic and sectarian tinderbox waiting to explode. In the last days of April thirty-six people were killed there in ethnic violence. The Taliban are now penetrating into Punjab, Pakistan's political and economic heartland where the major cities of Islamabad and Lahore are located and where 60 percent of the country's 170 million people live. Fear is gripping the population there...
The insurgency in Pakistan is perhaps even more deadly than the one in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there is only one ethnic group strongly opposing the government—the Pashtuns who make up the Taliban—and so fighting is largely limited to the south and east of the country, while the other major ethnic groups in the west and the north are vehemently anti-Taliban. Moreover, more than a few Pashtuns and their tribal leaders support the Karzai government. In Pakistan, the Pashtun Taliban are now being aided and abetted by extremists from all the major ethnic groups in Pakistan. They may not be popular but they generate fear and terror from Karachi on the south coast to Peshawar on the Afghan border."
BBC: remembering Swat's idyllic period
WP: Iraqi displaced waiting for a permanent settlement
The camp illustrates some of the problems Iraq faces as it attempts to build the institutions of a modern state: Although there is a semblance of peace, the country remains riddled with fault lines of sect and ethnicity, and saddled with competing authorities...
WP: car bomb in Baghdad
WP: another on friday
AJE: fighting in Mogadishu intensifies
AJE: and thousands leave the city
NYT: ...as the cleavage shifts to a religious one inland
Their shrines were being destroyed. Their imams were being murdered. Their tolerant beliefs were under withering attack.
So the moderate Sufi scholars recently did what so many other men have chosen to do in anarchic Somalia: they picked up guns and entered the killing business, in this case to fight back against the Shabab, one of the most fearsome extremist Muslim groups in Africa.
“Clan wars, political wars, we were always careful to stay out of those,” said Sheik Omar Mohamed Farah, a Sufi leader. “But this time, it was religious.”
In the past few months, a new axis of conflict has opened up in Somalia, an essentially governmentless nation ripped apart by rival clans since 1991. Now, in a definitive shift, fighters from different clans are forming alliances and battling one another along religious lines, with deeply devout men on both sides charging into firefights with checkered head scarves, assault rifles and dusty Korans...If Mogadishu falls, Somalia will be dragged deeper into the violent morass that the United Nations, the United States and other Western countries have tried hard to stanch, and the country will fragment even further into warring factions, with radical Islamists probably on top.
But out here, on the wind-whipped plains of Somalia’s central region, it is a different story. The moderates are holding their own, and the newly minted Sufi militia is about the only local group to go toe-to-toe with the Shabab and win...But the Sufis have achieved what the transitional government has not: grass-roots support, which explains how they were able to move so quickly from a bunch of men who had never squeezed a trigger before — a rarity in Somalia — into a cohesive fighting force backed by local clans.
CSM: Somaliland attempts secesion by order
If this doesn't feel like Somalia, residents say that's because it's not. This is Somaliland, a northern former British protectorate that broke away from chaotic southern Somalia in 1991, established an admirably stable government, and hoped never to look back.
No country has recognized Somaliland's independence, however. The argument has always been that to do so would further destabilize Somalia, even as Somalia seems to be destabilizing well enough on its own...
A territory of 5 million people, Somaliland is trying to be a good regional citizen, hosting tens of thousands of refugees from southern Somalia and, lately, trying and imprisoning pirates, which few governments anywhere have been eager to do.
At least 26 men are serving time in Somaliland prisons for piracy. Last month, a European warship stopped nine men who were attempting to hijack a Yemeni vessel but allowed them to flee in a lifeboat. The would-be pirates washed ashore in Somaliland, where police and the scrappy coast guard, which patrols a 600-mile coastline with two speedboats and a tiny fleet of motorized skiffs, chased them down...
Yes, the territory has a foreign minister, along with liaison offices — don't call them diplomatic missions — in a handful of countries including the United States. It has a president and a bicameral legislature, as well as feisty opposition parties. It issues its own currency — crisp bills printed in the United Kingdom — and its own passports and visas...
From colonial times, Somaliland took a different path. In the 19th-century scrum over Africa, Britain acquired the territory mainly to supply its more important garrison in Aden, across the sea in Yemen.
Relatively few British expatriates settled here, leaving tribes and institutions intact, while southern Somalia became a full-fledged colony of Italy, complete with Italianate architecture and banana farms to supply the home country.
The British and Italian territories were joined at independence to form the Somali Republic, but in 1991, with the southern-based regime verging on collapse, a rebel government in Somaliland declared itself autonomous. After two years of fighting, a new government emerged that melded traditional clan structures with Western-style separation of powers, a hybrid system that some experts have called a prototype for the rest of Somalia.
TNR: the war on terror
Slate: send Cheney back to the bunker
LAT: the FARC ventures into Panama
The heavily armed rebels usually show up in groups of 20 or more, dressed in green fatigues and seeking food.
"Of course you have to give it to them," said one resident of this isolated village 35 miles west of the Colombian border. "People don't like that they're here, but with few police and many informants around, they keep quiet."
Then just as suddenly, the rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, melt back into the jungle.
Over the last decade, the leftist insurgents have regularly spilled over into Panama, seeking rest and respite from pursuing Colombian armed forces. But rarely have they appeared as frequently or penetrated so deeply into Panamanian territory as in recent months, say residents and officials here in Darien province...
U.S. counter-narcotics officials believe that the FARC and other Colombian traffickers are shipping more drugs from Colombia overland across Panama to avoid tighter control of Pacific and Caribbean coastal waterways by the Panamanian and U.S. naval forces...
"In the last year or two, you really notice them more," another El Real resident said this month. "They come around to buy necessities -- rice, beans, salt and milk -- and they always pay. They don't involve themselves in local disputes and other issues. But they have their informants who tell them if the police are coming."
Like others interviewed for this story, El Real residents spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of FARC reprisal.
They have good reason. In early April, rebels killed a Colombian refugee in nearby Boca de Cupe in front of his three children, leaving a note pinned to his chest inscribed with the word sapo -- Spanish slang for "snitch."...
A recent census turned up the presence of 108 gangs in the country, a revelation to authorities who thought Panama was immune to a problem that has spawned crime waves in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Many of the gangs are thought to have links to the FARC.
In reaction, the U.S. Embassy has launched a $4-million anti-gang program that is funded from the Merida Initiative, the anti-drug aid package that was passed by Congress mainly to help Mexico fight the cartels.
WP: meanwhile, in the land of futile policymaking, trying to get crop substitution to stick
DLC: report on the 'narcoinsurgency' in Mexico
LAT: Mexico prison break was an inside job, caught on camera
BBC: Bolivia celebrates 200 years of independence, and hangs on to some of its colonial legacy
But in Sucre, the festival has a sombre side. There is still a huge split between the city's European descendents and the indigenous people - a split which is repeated in many countries of the region...
"There are many myths saying Indians are dangerous. From when they are very young, children in the cities are told "don't go there or the Indian will get you". In cities like Sucre, people panic if you say 'Indians are coming to take over'," [a priest] said.
"In the past, people were told Indians would come, rape the women and steal everything. Actually, it is the other way round. Even today young Indian girls working as maids are still sexually abused. It's common for young men to be allowed to use them to get sexual experience."
BBC: presidential elections in Mongolia
Last year, five people died and hundreds were hurt in protests over alleged fraud in general elections.
President Enkhbayar of the former Communist Party campaigned on law and order.
Mr Elbegdorj of the Democratic Party pledged to fight corruption and reform control of Mongolia's natural resources.
In 1990, Mongolia abandoned its 70-year-old Soviet-style one-party state and embraced political and economic reforms.
AJE: Nepal settles on a communist prime minister, after days of negotiating; Maoists boycotted Though Dahal attempted to block parliamentary proceedings for Saturday's vote, he did put an end to protests several days ago that made Kumar's election possible. Both Dahal's and Kumar's parties are communist but differ in policies and beliefs.
Kumar's predecessor Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the leader of the [Maoist party] UCPN-M, resigned on May 4 after the country's president stopped him from firing the army chief.
Munyaneza was living in Toronto when he was arrested in October 2005 after reports that he had been seen circulating among Canada's Rwandan community. At the time, African Rights, a Rwandan group that has documented the genocide, linked Munyaneza to key figures indicted by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
AP: Naxalites kill 16 police officers near Nagpur
++
WSJ: ask and tell already
NPR: it's just business, arrgh
That surprising call marked another step in an unusual working relationship, between a bargainer for pirates demanding a $7 million ransom and the businessperson trying to save sailors' lives. "We started talking because I was curious about the inner working of the system ... and he was very forthcoming with that," Gullestrup says.
Over the course of their conversations, Gullestrup asked about the pirates' thinking when they lowered the ransom figure. Gullestrup won't say exactly how much the company paid, only that it was between $1 million and $2 million.
For his part, Mohammed says he was curious about the shipping company's bargaining strategy, and that the men have continued to e-mail back and forth — two or three times a day.
"We talk about the issues of piracy or this or that," Mohammed says...
Pirates, meanwhile, are colluding, sharing intelligence in an unregulated environment. Economists would say the dynamic centers on market power. The situation makes it hard for a shipper like Gullestrup to figure out the market rate for ransom.
"The owners are escalating the ransom payments because they're not coordinating how to deal with pirates," Gullestrup says. "The pirates are extremely good at sharing information. We know for a fact from Ali the pirates have piracy workshops. Pirates of various clans, [their] elders are getting together and they will exchange information."...
Mohammed says he gets something out of the relationship, too. He doesn't see himself as a pirate. He says he agreed to negotiate for pirates so he could learn enough about their business to start his own.
"If I become an expert on piracy and try to milk that, I think it is a legit business," he says. "The news media and global news media will need someone who is going to be an authority, to report from the inner feelings of a pirate, and to report whether pirates are going to stay around for a long time or not, and how to eliminate piracy."...
The executive expresses a certain appreciation for Mohammed's character. "He's a very kind person, and he has a wife and a son," Gullestrup says. "He has a large herd of camels. He sent me an e-mail that said he allocated three camel babies to me, for which I'm honored."
Mohammed called the gift a good gesture. "It's those little things that count."
WP: US trains coast guards in Africa
NYT: remembering perpetrators in a horrific, and (relatively) human light
MR. LU’S fascination with war came from eight years of service in the Chinese Army. That period began when, at 18, he enrolled in the People’s Liberation Army Institute of International Relations, in Nanjing. It was an unusual move for the elder of two sons from an intellectual family; Mr. Lu’s father is a prominent novelist. But it was one that his father insisted on, Mr. Lu said, because he did not want him to get caught up in the chaos of 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square student protests and massacre.
OI: Jack Bauer vs Barack Obama
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