discrimination [for better or worse]

NYT: Pakistani Army undertakes extra-judicial killings in Swat, uses indiscriminate violence
Beneath the surface of relative calm, there is the sense that a new and more insidious conflict may be afoot, one that could take many months to play out before the fate of this once-prosperous region is ultimately decided.

NYT: Mullahs in Punjab siding with landowners, status quo

Pakistan encompasses four provinces — Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province (which includes the Swat Valley) — each with its own languages and culture. The western mountains are tribal and so remote that in some areas, Pakistan’s Constitution does not even apply. It is from those badlands that the Taliban swept outward to neighboring Swat, itself a multi-ethnic patchwork. Baluchistan, another border area, has its own struggle for national autonomy. Sindh is mostly agrarian, with Karachi, an economic hub, at its southern tip.

Punjab, the fourth and most strategic province, is the country’s heart — home to the powerful military as well as much of Pakistan’s governing class; social upheaval here would drag the whole country with it. In my travels in this province, none of the mullahs were talking about revolution. In fact, the social justice discussions that have driven political movements in the wider Islamic world — Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Sadr Army of Iraq’s Moktada al-Sadr, for example — were notably absent.

Instead, I have found a surprisingly comfortable coexistence between the mullahs, the landlords and the political elite (the latter two are often one and the same). Even the harder-line preachers, among the sternly traditional Muslims known as Deobandis, have stuck to a bland, nonconfrontational line.

One leader of a Deobandi seminary in Kabirwala, a town in southern Punjab, told me that the land was distributed as God had intended, and that the only problem with the landlords was that some were insufficiently Islamic, though now that was improving.

History explains much of the feudal outlook of the clerics in Punjab. They tend not to oppose the establishment in part because the state itself made them powerful. In the 1980s, the military dictator Zia ul-Haq gave land and money to Deobandis, a policy the United States supported because it needed both Mr. Zia and fervent jihadists in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Mr. Zia also crushed social ferment throughout Pakistan, and the debate on class and social justice that went with it, stifling political growth. To this day, Pakistan retains a colonial-style system of patronage: I-will-vote-for you-because-you-are-important-and-I-think-you-might-be-able-to-help-me-in-my-time-of-need.

At the same time, the Zia government elevated the mullahs, once unimportant men seen mostly at weddings and funerals. They became powerful players with their own political space — a kind of middleman between state and populace, not breaking their ties to the elite that had empowered them...

This is not to say that all are nonviolent, just that their violence does not challenge the state or the social order. The leader of Sipah-e-Sohaba, an ultra-orthodox Sunni political party, whose military wing believes Shiites to be apostates and has been killing them since the 1990s, was allowed to contest an election from a prison cell in 2002. (He won.) Another militant group, Jesh Muhammed, which supports Pakistani claims to Kashmir, operates unhindered in the city of Bahawalpur. And Hafez Saeed, a cleric whose associates are believed to have carried out the attack on Mumbai, India, last year, gives weekly sermons here in Lahore...

Even in Swat, the Taliban’s takeover didn’t happen overnight. At first, some landlords lent tacit (if worried) support, donating food and money to the seminary where Fazlullah, the main Taliban leader, began his political movement. The government itself made peace deals with the Taliban. Only later did conditions worsen, with militants seizing ever more power, and eventually overrunning the landlords. The military has since fought to eject them, but it is not clear how effectively.

NYT: Christians targeted by mob violence
The attack in this shabby town in central Pakistan — the culmination of several days of rioting over a claim that a Koran had been defiled — shows how precarious life is for the tiny Christian minority in Pakistan.

More than 100 Christian houses were burned and looted on Saturday in a rampage that lasted about eight hours by a crowd the authorities estimate was as large as 20,000 strong. In addition to the seven members of the Hameed family who were killed, about 20 people were wounded.

The authorities, who said the Koran accusation was spurious, filed criminal charges in the case late Sunday and apprehended at least 12 people. Officials said a banned Sunni militant group, Sipah-e-Sohaba, was among those responsible for the attacks, the third convulsion of anti-Christian mob violence in the region in the past four weeks...

While some Christians rise to become government officials or run businesses, the poorest work the country’s worst jobs, as toilet cleaners and street sweepers.

It was the poorest class who lived in Christian Colony, a small enclave of bare brick houses where the mob struck Saturday. Its residents work as day laborers and peddlers in the market, often earning far less than the minimum wage, $75 a month...

The Hameeds were having breakfast when the mob descended, wielding guns, hurling stones and shouting insults (“Dogs!” “American agents!”) through their window. The Hameeds did not appear to have been singled out but had the misfortune of living where the mob entered the neighborhood and happened to be home at the time...

The rampage began Thursday in a nearby village when Christians at a wedding party were accused of burning a Koran. Few here believed that, and state and federal officials who looked into the case said it was false. Still, local mullahs seized on the news, filing a blasphemy case against the Christian family...

Pakistan’s blasphemy law has been criticized as too broad, and many legal experts say it has been badly misused since its introduction in the 1980s by the military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Anyone can file a charge, which is then often used to stir hatred and to justify sectarian violence.

“The blasphemy law is being used to terrorize minorities in Pakistan,” said Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minister of minority affairs, in an interview in Gojra on Sunday...

Christians here protested all day on Sunday, blocking the roads and refusing to bury the Hameeds until the authorities filed a criminal case. Late Sunday the authorities did, and the bodies were buried. That was little comfort to the Hameeds.


USAT: COIN in Afghanistan
A few miles away, but seemingly a world apart, sits another walled cluster of homes. Here, the Marines arrive the next day to a reception that may not be warm, but isn't lethal. Afghans talk with Marines; children beg them for sweets. A villager notices Marines hoisting themselves over a wall, gets their attention, and points out a shortcut.

The contrast between the two housing compounds in Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, a longtime stronghold of the Taliban militant group, illustrates the challenges facing Marines as they implement a new strategy that emphasizes winning the trust of the local population...

By providing security, rather than just focusing on killing insurgents, the Marines hope to convince locals to turn on the Taliban and eventually hand control over to the Afghan army and police — mirroring the tactics that helped turn the war in Iraq a few years ago.

"We win when the people really believe that the government is here to help them," says Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, the battalion commander. "We can't kill our way out of an insurgency. All security does is create a vacuum. It takes the Taliban out. We'll show them that our brand of security is a lot nicer than the Taliban's."...

Trouble spots can be especially hard for the Marines to identify because they often co-exist with relatively peaceful areas — as happened with the two unnamed compounds that Garrett's unit encountered near the village of Hassan Abad, about 400 miles southwest of Kabul.

In an insurgency, "every village has its own microclimate," says John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.

Nagl says control of a particular area — "even (a) neighborhood or street," he says — can hinge on a variety of factors including how long Afghan security forces have been there, whether there are any insurgent bases nearby, and even what tribe the local population belongs to.

WP: Congo conflict morphs as it drags on
For the most part, though, people in eastern Congo have not died in a blaze of bullets or in large-scale massacres. More often, the conflict has set off a chain reaction of less spectacular consequences that begins with fleeing through an unforgiving jungle and ends with a death such as Mihigo's. In eastern Congo, people die from malaria and diarrhea, from untreated infections and measles, from falling off rickety bridges and slipping down slopes, from hunger and from drinking dirty water in the hope of surviving one more day.

Arguably, people die because of the wider social impact of the conflict. Entire villages have been scattered across hundreds of miles, atomizing extended family networks that people depend upon in difficult times. The conflict has overwhelmed already-dysfunctional government hospitals and left roads rutted and overgrown, isolating people in villages like Walikale from help.

At the moment, the conflict in eastern Congo is surging once again. Since January, at least half a million people have fled a U.N.-backed Congolese army operation targeting Rwandan rebels, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss in a visit to Congo this month. The rebels are retaliating against villagers with whom they have lived for years.

BBC: Somali refugees suffering in Kenyan camp
CSM: Rwandan refugees must return from Uganda

AP: internally displaced living, demonstrating in Bogota park
Since March, more than 2,000 people displaced by violence in rural Colombia have occupied the green hillocks and red-brick squares of Third Millennium Park, which was to be a jewel of Bogota's urban renaissance as a military crackdown on leftist rebels brought greater safety to the nation's main cities.

Instead, the park and its tent city are a reminder that the five-decade-long conflict still afflicts the countryside, causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes and generating the world's worst internal refugee problem, according to United Nations statistics.

The occupants of Third Millennium Park are demanding that President Alvaro Uribe's government heed a court order to provide them with food, education and jobs...

The Bogota tent city, because it's so public, offers a certain comfort, he said.

"Here, we are safer than anywhere else."
NYT: captured FARC computer files implicate Venezuelan government aiding and abetting
Econ: Afro-Colombians fight racism

NYT: the crime rate is down in the US, defying explanation
No single lens — sociological, econometrical, liberal or conservative — seems an adequate one through which to view crime. The economy, which seems as if it should be fundamental, has never been a good predictor; the Prohibition era was far more violent than the Great Depression. Adding prison beds has not helped; the incarceration rate has marched grimly upward for decades, while the crime rate has zigzagged up and down, seemingly oblivious. Years ago, criminologists thought demographics explained a lot — remember the warnings about thousands of cold-blooded, teenage “superpredators” in the mid-1990s? — but demographics cannot shed light on what is happening now. Improved policing deserves credit for bigger declines in certain cities, but not the overall national trend...

While the decline may not have taken hold in the minds of the public, it has undermined a cherished belief, particularly among liberals, in root causes — that criminals are born of misery and the limited options of poverty. “There are people that are putting up with an awful lot of suffering, and they’re not complaining all that much,” said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
USAT: yet surge in concealed weapons permits applications 'in anticipation of crime increase'
if crime does go up, SV urges us to remember the sequence of events.


NYT: Iran takes 3 hikers into custody
SV hoping for the quick release of Josh, Sarah, and Shane

kafka in korea [they can't stop it]

WP: violence during protest 40th-day mourning of Neda, other demonstrators killed in Iran
The clashes were some of the most intense in recent weeks, suggesting that the anger that fueled demonstrations in the days after last month's disputed presidential election continues to run deep. With President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad scheduled to be sworn in for another term next week, Thursday's demonstrations showed that almost 50 days after his apparent victory, authorities have not been successful in stamping out unrest...

Security forces worked aggressively Thursday to put down the protests, knowing that any major defeat in the streets could give new energy to the opposition. Police fired tear gas, attacked demonstrators with batons and smashed car windshields. But the protesters fought back, battling hand-to-hand with security forces in some of the most violent confrontations of the summer. In one case, three members of the much-feared voluntary militia known as the Basij were beaten with their own batons after a group of opposition activists pulled them off their motorcycles near a park. The motorcycles were set on fire, witnesses reported...

Even as security forces cracked down, the government was trying to appease opponents. Police announced Thursday that they had paid damages to hundreds of people who had been mistreated during previous demonstrations, doling out $50,000 in total.

Earlier in the week, the government closed a major prison where arrested protesters had been held, citing substandard conditions. The closure came after reports emerged in recent days that three detainees had died, and it was interpreted as a gesture of reconciliation by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But opposition leaders said more was needed to heal the deep rifts in Iranian society.

NYT: meanwhile, signs of fissure within the ruling coalition
Some opposition supporters were heartened by the turnout on Thursday. “You see they never thought this many people would turn out in the heat like this,” said a 45-year-old woman at the cemetery, where thick crowds of people chanted slogans deriding President Ahmadinejad as a dictator and calling on him to resign. “They can’t stop it now.”...

Public anger is rising at a difficult time for Mr. Ahmadinejad, who won the election on June 12 in a landslide that opposition supporters say was rigged. This month Mr. Ahmadinejad refused a direct order from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to drop a contested cabinet appointment. That provoked many hard-liners, who have warned that he may not last as president if he does not show more respect for the revered Ayatollah Khamenei. The deputy ultimately withdrew, but Mr. Ahmadinejad then named him chief of staff. Some on both sides of Iran’s political divide have linked the prison abuse to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s flouting of Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority, hinting that a broader lack of accountability is the problem. Lawmakers have complained that they were not given access to the those arrested after the election, who are widely believed to be under the control of the Revolutionary Guards. Many in the opposition say the election amounted to a coup by the guards, where Mr. Ahmadinejad spent formative years.

“This is the only way that we can stop everything from falling into the hands of the Revolutionary Guards,” said a 29-year-old physiotherapist who came to the cemetery. “You see, now they don’t even take notice of the clerics, it’s gone that far.”


NYT: (dated) Kenya's electoral violence yet to be reckoned with
“If we don’t deal with the impunity from this last election, the next one will be horrible,” said Maina Kiai, a former government human rights official.

Mr. Kiai says that ethnic gangs are rearming themselves across the country, this time with guns, not machetes. He contends that unless the culprits are punished for the killings last year, which included hacking up old men and burning toddlers to death, the next time there is a disputed election, which he thinks there surely will be, people will be emboldened to wreak havoc again...

In the days following the election, in December 2007, in which the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner over Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who is now prime minister, rival gangs rampaged across Kenya’s slums, in the hillsides and throughout many towns. Initially, a lot of violence appeared to be spontaneous outrage, vented along ethnic lines, though upon closer inspection, some of it seemed to have been organized, at least by local leaders and village elders. But what remains murky, many political analysts here say, is the extent to which top politicians were directly involved.


WP: North Korea's gulags
The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate survivors' stories, showing entrances to mines where former prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention centers where former guards said uncooperative prisoners were tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show...

Nor have the camps become much of an issue for the American public, even though annotated images of them can be quickly called up on Google Earth and even though they have existed for half a century, 12 times as long as the Nazi concentration camps and twice as long as the Soviet Gulag. Although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, Western governments and human groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died in the North Korean camps...

Like several former prisoners, Jung said the most arduous part of his imprisonment was his pre-camp interrogation at the hands of the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. After eight years in a government office that handled trade with China, a fellow worker accused him of being a South Korean agent.

"They wanted me to admit to being a spy," Jung said. "They knocked out my front teeth with a baseball bat. They fractured my skull a couple of times. I was not a spy, but I admitted to being a spy after nine months of torture."

When he was arrested, Jung said, he weighed 167 pounds. When his interrogation was finished, he said, he weighed 80 pounds. "When I finally got to the camp, I actually gained weight," said Jung, who worked summers in cornfields and spent winters in the mountains felling trees...

The number of camps has been consolidated from 14 to about five large sites, according to former officials who worked in the camps. Camp 22, near the Chinese border, is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. As many as 50,000 prisoners are held there, a former guard said.

There is a broad consensus among researchers about how the camps are run: Most North Koreans are sent there without any judicial process. Many inmates die in the camps unaware of the charges against them. Guilt by association is legal under North Korean law, and up to three generations of a wrongdoer's family are sometimes imprisoned, following a rule from North Korea's founding dictator, Kim Il Sung: "Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations"...

Prisoners are denied any contact with the outside world, according to the Korean Bar Association's 2008 white paper on human rights in North Korea. The report also found that suicide is punished with longer prison terms for surviving relatives; guards can beat, rape and kill prisoners with impunity; when female prisoners become pregnant without permission, their babies are killed.

Most of the political camps are "complete control districts," which means that inmates work there until death.

There is, however, a "revolutionizing district" at Camp 15, where prisoners can receive remedial indoctrination in socialism. After several years, if they memorize the writings of Kim Jong Il, they are released but remain monitored by security officials...

An Myeong Chul was allowed to work as a guard and driver in political prison camps because, he said, he came from a trustworthy family. His father was a North Korean intelligence agent, as were the parents of many of his fellow guards.

In his training to work in the camps, An said, he was ordered, under penalty of becoming a prisoner himself, never to show pity. It was permissible, he said, for bored guards to beat or kill prisoners.

"We were taught to look at inmates as pigs," said An, 41, adding that he worked in the camps for seven years before escaping to China in 1994. He now works in a bank in Seoul.

The rules he enforced were simple. "If you do not meet your work quota, you do not eat much," he said. "You are not allowed to sleep until you finish your work. If you still do not finish your work, you are sent to a little prison inside the camp. After three months, you leave that prison dead."

An said the camps play a crucial role in the maintenance of totalitarian rule. "All high-ranking officials underneath Kim Jong Il know that one misstep means you go to the camps, along with your family," he said.

NYT: tent city governance, enforced by a chief
The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon: a boozy brawl, the wielding of a knife taped to a stick. But the community handled it, he says with pride, his day’s first cigar already aglow.

By community he means 80 or so people living in tents on a spit of state land beside the dusky Providence River: Camp Runamuck, no certain address, downtown Providence.

Because the two men in the fight had violated the community’s written compact, they were escorted off the camp, away from the protection of an abandoned overpass. One was told we’ll discuss this in the morning; the other was voted off the island, his knife tossed into the river, his tent taken down...

“I was always considered the leader, the chief,” Mr. Freitas says. “I was the one consulted about ‘Where should I put my tent?’ ”

By late June the camp had about 50 people. But someone questioned the role of Mr. Freitas as chief, so he stepped down. Arguments broke out. Food was stolen.

“There was no center holding,” recalls Rachell Shaw, 22, who lives with her boyfriend in a tidy tent decorated with porcelain dolls. “So everybody voted him back in.”

The community also established a five-member leadership council and a compact that read in part: “No one person shall be greater than the will of the whole.”

It is now late afternoon in late July, a month after nearly everyone signed that compact. The community remains intact, though the very ground they walk on says nothing is forever. Here and there are the exposed foundations of fish shacks that lined the river long ago.

Some state officials recently stopped by to say, nicely but firmly, that everyone would soon have to leave. The overpass poses the threat of falling concrete, and is scheduled for demolition.

alternatives [packing heat]

NYT: updates on protests in Iran

BBC: troops, Islamists fighting in northern Nigeria
Nigeria's security services have been flooding Maiduguri, the city worst affected by the violence, the BBC's Caroline Duffield reports.

They surrounded the area housing the headquarters of Mohammed Yusuf's group, known as Boko Haram. The group is also referred to locally as the "Taliban", though it has no known links to the Afghan militants.
AP: thousands are displaced
Soldiers in tanks and armored cars besieged the shelled compound of a radical Islamist sect and sporadic gunfire exploded as hundreds of innocents fled on the third day of fighting in Nigeria's northern city of Maiduguri.

Relief official Apollus Jediel said about 1,000 people had abandoned their homes Wednesday, joining 3,000 displaced this week in four states caught up in the violence...

Reporters on the ground say the trouble started with militants attacking a police station in Bauchi state Sunday. Then they attacked police in Kano, Yobe and Borno, of which Maiduguri is the capital.

But President Umaru Yar'Adua disputed that, saying troops struck first.

''I want to emphasize that this is not an inter-religious crisis and it is not the Taliban group that attacked the security agents first, no. It was as a result of a security information gathered on their intention ... to launch a major attack,'' the Nigerian leader told journalists before he left Tuesday night for a state visit to Brazil.

WP: meanwhile, in Niger Delta, situation tenuous
Two weeks before the government is set to begin disarming as many as 10,000 militants in a 60-day amnesty program, it has revealed little about how it will reintegrate participants into society or address the demands for increased development and oil revenue that Niger Delta militants say drive their campaign of attacking oil installations and holding foreigners hostage.

The offer's vagueness is fueling fears that it will fail to lure militants and instead trigger a full-scale military offensive that could ensnare civilians living on the remote creeks where militants keep their camps.

BBC: Taylor remembered
HuffPo: (Rob Blair): and defended
Meanwhile, to many Liberians, Taylor remains a hero. For foreigners like myself, this is not an easy thing to understand. At times, his popularity seems a byproduct of his savagery. During the Liberian civil war, recruits for Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) were often heard chanting a grim refrain: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll fight for him." A decade later, this mystique has not dissipated in many pockets of the country. While we in the international peanut gallery gape at the spectacle of the trial - a murderer defending indefensible acts - many Liberians continue to endorse Taylor and his charismatic brutality.

Why?

NYT: Islamists in the borderlands between Somalia and Kenya
The Shabab has already penetrated refugee camps inside Kenya, according to camp elders, luring away dozens of young men with promises of paradise — and $300 each. It has carried out cross-border attacks, kidnapping an outspoken cleric in May from a refugee camp 50 miles inside Kenya. Last Wednesday, in one of its boldest cross-border moves yet, a squad of uniformed, heavily armed Shabab fighters stormed into a Kenyan school in a remote town, rounding up all the children and telling them to quit their classes and join the jihad.

“If these guys can come in with their guns and uniforms in broad daylight,” said one of the teachers at the school, “they must be among us.”...

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war — with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the Shabab.
BBC: meanwhile, EU to train Somali anti-piracy force

NYT: redrawing boundaries in the Sudan
The new ruling includes important concessions for both sides, giving the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.

Both sides in the conflict — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government in the north, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which controls the semiautonomous south — said Wednesday that they would accept the ruling, which was hailed by representatives of the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

LAT: interview with Gen. McChrystal on strategy
[Q:] Do you think there has been too much focus on counter-terrorism?

[A:] I think there hasn't been enough focus on counterinsurgency. I am certainly not in a position to criticize counter-terrorism. But at this point in the war, in Afghanistan, it is most important to focus on almost classic counterinsurgency.

I don't want people to think it is inflexible; it should be uniquely adapted to the conditions in each part of the country...

[Q:] Are there safe havens in Afghanistan for insurgents?

[A:] It would be how you define a safe haven. If you said a safe haven is a location where you are never under threat, you can't be bombed, you can't be attacked, then you could define that there are no safe havens in Afghanistan.

But I would tell you practically speaking, there are areas that are controlled by Taliban forces. There are places ANSF [Afghan] and coalition forces cannot go routinely, insurgents are free to operate and free to impose a shadow government. While they are not typical safe havens, the insurgency is more comfortable than we want them to be. And so over time those are areas we intend to reduce.

[Q:] But those areas are not the first priority? If the population is sparse or rural you may wait on that.

[A:] Absolutely it is a case of prioritizing. Our intent is to prioritize first on those areas where we have significant population centers; in some cases those are also places with a heavy insurgent presence. But it is to protect the population. If the insurgents are in very remote areas with very little population, they don't have access to what they need for success, which is population. So we will seek to separate them from the population.

WP: recruiting and training police in southern Afghanistan
"It's a challenge to get people down here," said Hix, adding that units that deploy to southern Afghanistan often suffer higher rates of unauthorized absences. "The guys think there is a monster down here." Drug use in the forces is another problem, according to U.S. and Afghan officers. "We lose 5 to 10 percent of every class in the police force to opiate use," Hix said.

Training the police and army poses other challenges, he said. Police officers and soldiers -- the vast majority of them illiterate villagers -- require extensive training, but during a war only so many can be pulled away from their jobs at any one time.

Building training and other facilities for the forces and providing them with equipment remain slow because of red tape and contracting rules, he said. It takes 120 to 180 days to start work on a training facility and often more than a year to 18 months to field new equipment, such as the 1,000 Humvees on order for the Afghan army in the south. "We can't swing the money cannon quickly enough to adapt," Hix said.

Still, Hix said, the Afghan forces have made significant progress in the south. In the past year, the training capacity for regional police has doubled and the rate of those absent without leave has halved.

Despite the problems, Hix said that replacing foreign forces with homegrown ones is the only viable long-term solution, in part because the latter cost far less. "We should not be substituting U.S. troops for Afghans, which is what we are effectively doing now . . . in trying to secure and stabilize Afghanistan," he wrote in an e-mail.

AJE: Taliban distributes code of conduct
The book, with 13 chapters and 67 articles, lays out what one of the most secretive organisations in the world today, can and cannot do.

It talks of limiting suicide attacks, avoiding civilian casualties and winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the local civilian population.

Al Jazeera's James Bays, reporting from the capital, Kabul, said every fighter is being issued the pocket book entitled "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Rules for Mujahideen".

AP: ceasefire agreement reached with small Taliban unit in Afghanistan
Seyamak Herawi, a spokesman in President Hamid Karzai's office, said the agreement will allow a road construction project to move forward and permit presidential candidates to open offices in the region ahead of an Aug. 20 election...

The agreement covers the Bala Morghab district of northwestern Badghis province, an area where the Afghan government has little or no control. The cease-fire, agreed to Saturday, was reached with the help of tribal elders.

Afghan election coverage
WP: Hazaras, a minority ethnic group, may be a bloc swing vote
During various periods in history, the Shiite Hazaras have been forced from their lands and slaughtered in bouts of ethnic or religious "cleansing." In more recent times, they have often been relegated to lowly jobs as cart-pullers or domestic servants...

But the group now stands poised to play a decisive role in the Aug. 20 presidential and provincial council elections.
NPR: an interview with Holbrooke
NPR: the leading opposition: Abdullah

NYT: landowners won't return to Swat
About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords.

Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops. How many of those peasants stayed with the militants during the army offensive of the last several months, and how many moved to the refugee camps, was difficult to assess, Pakistani analysts said...

The landlords, many of whom raised sizable militias to fight the Taliban themselves last year, say the army is again failing to provide enough protection if they return.

Another deterrent to returning, they say, is that the top Taliban leadership, responsible for taking aim at the landlords and spreading the spoils among the landless, remains unscathed.

If it continues, the landlords’ absence will have lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Pakistan’s most populated province, Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining power, said Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Mr. Holbrooke, the American envoy.

“If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will in effect be property redistribution,” Mr. Nasr said. “That will create a vested community of support for the Taliban that will see benefit in the absence of landlords.”

NYT: settlements in West Bank not so militant
But appearances are deceiving. Modiin Illit and its sister community, Beitar Illit, are entirely ultra-Orthodox, a world apart, one of strict religious observance and study. They offer surprising potential for compromise.

Unlike settlers who believe they are continuing the historic Zionist mission of reclaiming the Jewish homeland, most ultra-Orthodox do not consider themselves settlers or Zionists and express no commitment to being in the West Bank, so their growth in these settlement towns, situated just inside the pre-1967 boundary, could be redirected westward to within Israel.

Their location also means it may be possible, in negotiations about a future Palestinian state, to redraw the boundary so the settlements are inside Israel, with little land lost to the Palestinians. And the two towns alone account for half of all settler growth, so if removed from the equation, the larger settler challenge takes on more manageable proportions.

WP: straddling the Arab-Kurdish conflict in Iraq
Louis Khno is a city councilman whose city is beyond his control. In his barricaded streets are militiamen -- in baseball caps and jeans, wielding Kalashnikov rifles, with the safeties switched off. They answer to someone else. Leaders of his police force give their loyalty to their ethnic brethren -- be they Kurd or Arab. Clergy in the town pledge themselves to the former. Khno and his colleagues to the latter.
WP: Iraqi troops raid Iranian camp


AJE: ceasefire in the Philippines
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) called the ceasefire on Saturday, two days after Gloria Arroyo, the Philippines president, ordered the army to suspend its offensives in the south in an attempt to restart peace talks.

An order was issued to the estimated 12,000 members Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces to "support and co-operate with efforts to revitalise and strengthen ceasefire mechanisms on the ground"...

The MILF broke a five-year-old ceasefire in August last year and launched attacks across the southern island of Mindanao, where they have been waging a bloody war since 1978...

The two sides are expected to meet next week in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to prepare for the resumption of talks and the return of about 60 monitors from Malaysia, Brunei, Libya and Japan, who pulled out in November 2008...

Mohaqher Iqbal, the head of the separatists' peace panel, told the Reuters news agency that his group would discuss government plans to return more than 300,000 displaced families to their homes before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in late August.

AJE: attack in southern Thailand blamed on separatist group
The attacks come amid a spike in violence during a five-year insurgency in the area that has left at least 3,700 people dead.

Since last month, at least 40 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in violence in the region.

The deadliest recent incident was the killing of 10 Muslims at a mosque in Narathiwat in early June.

Most of the violence in Thailand's south has been blamed by authorities on Muslim armed separatist groups.

However, no group has claimed responsibility for the latest attacks.

The fighters in Thailand's southern provinces have not specifically stated their motives, but they are thought to be fighting to establish an independent state in the three Muslim-majority provinces.

The latest rebellion in the former ethnic Malay sultanate began in January 2004 when fighters raided an army base, killing four soldiers.

WSJ: the suspension of democracy in Honduras: anticipated and actual
But in fact, a close look at Mr. Zelaya's time in office reveals a strongly antidemocratic streak. He placed himself in a growing cadre of elected Latin presidents who have tried to stay in power past their designated time to carry out a populist-leftist agenda. These leaders, led by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, have used the region's historic poverty and inequality to gain support from the poor, but created deep divisions in their societies by concentrating power in their own hands and increasing government control over the economy, media and other sectors.
NYT: Zelaya poised to return
Since Mr. Zelaya arrived [in Nicaragua] on Friday to taunt the de facto government that exiled him a month ago, hundreds of Hondurans have answered his call to join him just across the border in Nicaragua.

Arriving here in mud-caked jeans and ripped shirts, after sleeping on soaked mountaintops and hiding among the coffee plants from patrolling helicopters, they have set up camps in the border towns of Las Manos and Ocotal.

They are teachers, students, the self-employed and laborers. Many said they came to support Mr. Zelaya because his policies benefit the poor...

The de facto government in Honduras responded to Mr. Zelaya’s presence by calling for a 24-hour curfew in the border departments that began Friday. At checkpoints on major roads to the border, soldiers stopped traffic to conduct searches while more soldiers and police officers in riot gear blockaded roads before the border.

The soldiers have turned back hundreds of protesters.

LAT: Swedish rockets sold to Venezuelans found in the FARC's possession; Colombia 'angry'
Sweden has asked Venezuela for an explanation of how the weapons ended up in FARC hands.

The disclosure does not prove that the Chavez government sold or willingly gave them to rebels, said Jane's Americas analyst Anna Gilmour. Venezuelan arsenals, she said, are notorious for "seepage" by corrupt officers, who resell arms and munitions as contraband.

LAT: eh, global warming helped the Incas expand their empire?
A several-degree increase in temperature allowed the Incas to move higher into the Andes mountains, opening up new farmland and providing a water source through the gradual melting of glaciers at the top of those mountains, paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima reported online Monday in the journal Climate of the Past.

WP: at a loss for how to fight the cartels in Mexico
Mexico, nearly twice Colombia's size, faces a more daunting challenge, many officials and analysts said , in part because it sits adjacent to the United States, the largest illegal drug market in the world. In addition, at least seven major cartels are able to recruit from Mexico's swelling ranks of impoverished youth and thousands of disenfranchised soldiers and police officers...

"No one has told us what alternative we have," said Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont, gently slapping his palm on a table during an interview. "We are committed to enduring this wave of violence. We are strengthening our ability to protect the innocent victims of this process, which is the most important thing. We will not look the other way."

Drug-related deaths during the 2 1/2 years of Calderon's administration passed 12,000 this month. Rather than shrinking or growing weaker, the Mexican cartels are using their wealth and increasing power to expand into Central America, cocaine-producing regions of the Andes and maritime trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific, according to law enforcement authorities.

In Mexico, neither high-profile arrests nor mass troop deployments have stopped the cartels from unleashing spectacular acts of violence.


NYT: studying soldiers' brains to answer questions on sensing danger
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do...

Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do...

“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”...

The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.
WP: returning brigade seems exceptionally violence-prone
Soldiers returning from Iraq after serving with a Fort Carson, Colo., combat brigade have exhibited an exceptionally high rate of criminal behavior in their home towns, carrying out a string of killings and other offenses that the ex-soldiers attribute to lax discipline and episodes of indiscriminate killing during their grueling deployment, according to a six-month investigation by the Colorado Springs Gazette newspaper.

During their deployment, some soldiers killed civilians at random -- in some cases at point-blank range -- used banned stun guns on captives, pushed people off bridges, loaded weapons with illegal hollow-point bullets, abused drugs and occasionally mutilated the bodies of Iraqis, according to accounts the Gazette attributed to soldiers who said they witnessed the events. The unit's casualty rate was double the average for Army combat teams deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the paper said.

WP: (EJ Dionne) get rid of metal detectors for pro-gun senators!
Congress seems to think that gun restrictions are for wimps. It voted this year to allow people to bring their weapons into national parks, and pro-gun legislators have pushed for the right to carry in taverns, colleges and workplaces. Shouldn't Congress set an example in its own workplace?

WP: projecting nationalism back in time: Macedonians claim Alexander the Great as their own

++
GDN: come out, come out: the gay games in Copenhagen

constitutions and crises [instigators]

AJE: Micheletti, military-backed leader of Honduras, quits crisis talks in Costa Rica
Zelaya told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that he was confident that the country's military-backed interim government would be dismantled as a result of the talks...

Meanwhile, after nearly two weeks of mostly muted response from the US, Washington said on Wednesday that it had suspended $16.5m in military assistance programmes and development assistance programmes to the Honduran interim government.
CSM: Hondurans divided over coup
NYT: and the constitution
Many abroad are obsessing over the question of whether Mr. Zelaya’s ouster was legal, or a classic military coup. But this debate obscures the fact that for many years, Honduras has just been one big crisis waiting to happen.

NYT: Iranians mark 10th anniversary of student protests with another round of demonstrations: ...there have been almost four weeks of defiance [since the elections], in the face of the government’s repeated, uncompromising and violent efforts to restore the status quo. The government did succeed in keeping people off the streets in the previous 11 days, leaving many to simmer on their own as political insiders and clerical heavyweights slugged it out behind the scenes.

But there was an opening to take to the streets again on Thursday in a collective show of defiance, and many protesters seized it, even though the principal opposition leaders stayed away. Mir Hussein Moussavi, who claims he won the election; another candidate, Mehdi Karroubi; and former President Mohammad Khatami have agreed to pursue their complaints through the legal system and to protest only when a permit is issued.

But the mood of the street never calmed. One witness said that had it not been for the overwhelming show of force, it appeared, tens of thousands would have turned out.
NYT: eyewitness accounts of the mobilization and state crackdown

WP: bombings in Iraq seem to be targeting Shiites
But the nature of the attacks Wednesday and Thursday is likely to raise people's fears about further bloodshed. The bombings seem to be targeting Shiite Muslims, in what many worry is an attempt to renew the sectarian strife of 2006 and 2007 that brought the country to the verge of collapse.

There were no signs of Shiite retaliation so far, but angry residents of Sadr City inspecting the damage left by two improvised mines Thursday said it would only be a matter of time.

"They want to instigate strife, and the Shiites will not remain silent," said Kazem Zayer, a 30-year-old unemployed laborer. "They are killing us one after the other."
LAT: or Kurds? either way, further rounds of sectarian violence feared
The worst attack Thursday occurred in Tall Afar in Nineveh province in the north, where a double suicide bombing killed 34 people, prompting a senior Iraqi official to express concern that the country's security forces, now fully responsible for protecting the cities, had been penetrated by armed groups...

Militants appear focused on the north, where Arabs and Kurds are locked in a dispute over a 300-mile stretch of land where Saddam Hussein's regime expelled Kurds and settled Arabs in their place. Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region wants to annex those areas, an idea Arabs oppose...

Provincial council member Yahya Abed Majoub, a member of the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party, blamed the attack in Tall Afar on political factions as well as neighboring countries.

"There are groups who want to ignite sectarian and ethnic tensions all over Iraq. Nineveh is just the starting point," Majoub said. "There is a political agenda from inside and outside related to the election."
NYT: Kurdistan creates its own constitution
The proposed constitution enshrines Kurdish claims to territories and the oil and gas beneath them. But these claims are disputed by both the federal government in Baghdad and ethnic groups on the ground, and were supposed to be resolved in talks begun quietly last month between the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, sponsored by the United Nations and backed by the United States. Instead, the Kurdish parliament pushed ahead and passed the constitution, partly as a message that it would resist pressure from the American and Iraqi governments to make concessions.

CSM: the US military in Afghanistan trying to convert southern push into extended presence
In particular, [troops] say they are caught in a vicious circle: To win over the locals, the troops must bring development, security, and economic prospects. To do this, they have to diminish the presence of the insurgency. But this, in turn, requires that the troops win support of the population...

the clearing phase of the strategy may be the easiest. Soldiers say they will need patiently to build rapport, something that might take months or years, if at all.

"We just have to earn their trust," says Staff Sgt. Adam Kapchus of the 10th Mountain Division. "We need to support clinics and support their economy."

To do so, the troops have been making an effort to visit villages.

"How is traffic? Have cars been coming through here and bringing business?" a soldier on a typical patrol asks one merchant, who says business is "OK."

"Have you seen any bad guys here?" the soldier continues.

"No sir. The bad people stay in the mountains," the merchant says, pointing to the purple peaks in the distance.

"That's good. Is there any way we can help you?" the soldier asks.

"Your helicopters fly overhead all night," the merchant says. "No one in our village can sleep. Please stop this – it is causing major problems."

The soldier promises to tell his superiors.

Despite such patrols, the troops generally don't have enough contact with the locals to convince them that they are here for their good, says Habibullah Rafeh, policy analyst with the Kabul Academy of Sciences. Most of the troops live in small, heavily fortified outposts near urban centers. Most Afghans, however, live in rural areas – only 0.5 percent of Wardak's population is urban, for example...

In Jaghatu District, Taliban forces had run the area as a fiefdom, complete with a court and administrative apparatus. The district government had fled, leaving a cluster of four ramshackle buildings that makes up the capital, called the district "center."

In mid-May, American forces entered and occupied the district center, displacing the insurgents. They set up a makeshift camp among the devastated buildings – one pockmarked structure, ravaged by frequent mortar fire, is an abandoned school, while another is an empty office. A small contingent of Afghan police and Army took up residence in the other buildings.

Together, this combined force is able to maintain control of the district center, but the Taliban still enjoy sovereignty in the surrounding countryside, according to residents. When an American patrol visits these areas, the insurgents melt into the surroundings, sometimes waiting to ambush the soldiers, other times waiting to fight another day.
CSM: local and regional alliances complicate the effort
In one recent ‌shura held in Sayadabad district, elders asked the Americans to leave, saying that they were happy with Taliban rule, which limits crime, and complaining that the troops "cause the price of everything to increase," according to one participant of the meeting.

But such sentiments may not be universal, says Habibullah Rafeh, policy analyst with the Kabul Academy of Sciences.

"The Taliban's appeal is limited to their own ethnic group, and also has a strong tribal dimension," he says.

In some areas in the east, for example, there are anti-Taliban tribes that regularly cooperate with Western forces. Parts of Wardak made up of the Hazara minority, for example, are strongly in favor of the troops. And most in urban areas such as Kabul don't identify with the rurally based insurgents.
CSM: ...which are also perceived to affect Afghan police allegiances and efficacy
Unlike the [Afghan National Army], the ANP here tend to be drawn mostly from the southern regions, so the likelihood of Taliban sympathizers in the force is higher. In many cases, according to members of the Wardak Provincial Council, the ANP works out arrangements with the insurgents so that they won't be attacked, and in return they allow the militants to operate unmolested.

Gdn: Karzai reelection could generate more violence
Although the Taliban have threatened to disrupt polling day itself, David Haight, the US colonel who is in charge of pacifying two strategically vital provinces on the southern doorstep of the capital, Kabul, says he is far more concerned about the aftermath of the election...

"I think that apathy is going to turn into some anger because when the administration doesn't change, and I don't think anyone believes now that Karzai is going to lose ... I think there is going to be frustration from people who realise there is not going to be a change. The bottom line is they are going to be thinking: 'four more years of this crap?'" Haight said...

Widely blamed for much of the corruption in modern Afghanistan, Karzai has nonetheless succeeded in gaining the support of most of the country's most important ethnic and tribal power-brokers, including a number of unsavoury characters accused of human rights violations.

The only doubt is whether Afghanistan's tribal warlords can deliver the necessary votes to Karzai, or whether the widespread disillusion with the corrupt state of the regime will lead voters to defy tribal and clan lines and back one of the opposition candidates.

AJE: displaced civilians from Swat begin return

WP: ethnic violence in China provoking exodus
Ye's family is among the many in Urumqi that find themselves at an unexpected crossroads in the aftermath of this week's violence, which has claimed at least 156 lives. Terrified of their Han neighbors, but accustomed to the comforts of the city they have made their home, they must weigh the benefits of staying in a place where they no longer feel welcome or returning to a countryside where their salaries will probably be reduced by half. On Wednesday, Ye and his wife, Mu Heti, made the painful decision to go back to the countryside of Ili in northern Xinjiang, joining an exodus of ethnic minorities out of Urumqi that has overwhelmed bus and train stations in recent days.

Before Tuesday night, Ye said, he thought that the violence would pass quickly and that life in Urumqi would return to normal. Ye, 40, who is Kazakh, and Mu, 36, who is Uighur, and their extended families have been in the city for eight years while he worked as a Chinese-Russian translator. The family members had settled into a life they loved...

But all that now seemed distant, Ye and Mu said, in light of the violence. Tensions between China's dominant Han population and people native to Xinjiang -- mostly Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group, and Kazakhs, who are concentrated on the border with Kazakhstan, are mostly Muslim and speak their own Turkic language -- have existed since Chinese troops rolled into Xinjiang 60 years ago.

China has repeatedly said that it "liberated" the population, but many Uighurs and Kazakhs complain of government policies that they say are meant to wipe out their language, culture and religion in the name of assimilation...

The Xinjiang region in recent years has experienced a large influx of Han Chinese lured by the government's ambitious Develop the West program, which seeks to duplicate the success of the wealthier coastal areas. As a result, the region's Han population has jumped from 6 percent in 1949 to more than 40 percent in 2000, according to the last census. The initiative has boosted incomes all around, but it has also set up an uncomfortable hierarchy. Many of the new bosses are Han, while the workers are from minority groups.

The bloody riots on Sunday show just how deep the mistrust between Han Chinese and other ethnic groups runs, and how quickly a seemingly minor disagreement can escalate. The violence began with a false Internet rumor about the rape of two Han women by Uighur workers. That led to a fight in a toy factory in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan that left two Uighurs dead.

The investigation into the workers' deaths, which some Uighurs felt was inadequate, sparked a demonstration in Urumqi on Sunday. The protest spun out of control as paramilitary troops fired on protesters and rioters torched cars and businesses. A number of Han bystanders said they were attacked without provocation. Two days later, violence broke out as vigilante Han groups launched retaliatory attacks on Uighurs...

"It isn't just us who are scared of what's going on. Hans are also scared," Ye said. On Tuesday night, he said, he welcomed several Han women who needed refuge from the mob-fueled violence. As it turned out, everyone inside got lucky. The attackers moved on.
BBC: curfew reimposed in Urumqi

NYT: Al-Qaeda increasing activity in northern Africa

Gdn: Annan submits list of suspects involved in post-election violence in Kenya to ICC
The list of about a dozen people includes at least two senior cabinet ministers and will increase the pressure on Kenya's coalition government to establish a special local tribunal. Annan, who brokered an end to the crisis last year, had pledged to hand over the names if the government failed to hold accountable those most responsible for orchestrating the violence.

between the tragic and the ridiculous [just another day]

WSJ: Pakistan conflict, now in third week, creating fastest civilian displacement since Rwandan genocide
The U.N. believes around 15 to 20% of the displaced are in camps at the moment around 250,000 in some 24 camps, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said, "which means most people are either with host families, communities, in rented accommodation or somewhere else."...

Holmes said the U.N. had previously asked for an extra $150 million and had only received $50 million in firm contributions as of last week, but since then a number of countries have made pledges...

He said the U.N. is also reminding all sides to "make sure that civilians are protected insofar as is possible, that they're not targeted, that areas where they're known to be are avoided, that people are not using civilians as protection or human shields."
WT: Taliban flee from government attacks toward Pakistani capital
As the Pakistan military intensifies its attacks in the northwest and the U.S. keeps launching missiles there, more insurgents are seeking safety in Karachi and other urban areas, militants said.

"We come in different batches to Karachi to rest and if needed, get medical treatment, and stay with many of our brothers who are living here in large numbers," militant Omar Gul Mehsud, 32, told the Associated Press while strolling along the beach, astonished at the vastness of the sea, which he'd never seen before...

On the outskirts of Karachi, large settlements of Afghan and Pakistani refugees have swelled over the past year by as many as 200,000 people. These refugees are mostly Pashtun, the ethnic group that dominates the militancy. An intelligence report obtained by the AP warns that such neighborhoods have become favored hideouts for militants linked to Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's top Taliban commander.
AP: more concern that offensive may turn conflict into urban warfare
CSM: from clearing to holding in Pakistan's strategy
Pakistan is trying to wrest control of Buner from the Taliban, who seized the district – just 60 miles from the capital, Islamabad – last month. But the military Pakistan has a poor track record of holding cleared territory, leaving many experts and refugees skeptical about the long-term gains from this operation.

"The Army can clear if by clearing it means utter devastation, but it certainly doesn't seem able to hold," says Christine Fair, an analyst with RAND Corporation in Washington. "Partly they have a doctrinal problem. They don't have a lot of institutions you'd expect them to have, because they are not a counterinsurgency military."...

Pakistan does have some institutions valuable for this transition, however. One is the district coordination officer, or DCO, who acts as a bridge between military and civilian administration in a given region. It's a role that gained more power under the former military dictatorship of President Pervez Musharraf.

The DCO for Buner, Yahya Akhunzada, says he has been meeting nearly every day with the military to coordinate the return of people, police, and administration to cleared areas. Police are starting to return to Daggar and Totalai, two regions in lower Buner. Within a week, 200 police will be sent from the provincial capital of Peshawar as reinforcements, allowing routine policing to restart in these areas.... And until the police have regained their footing, it's unlikely judges will return to their courts, teachers to their classrooms, and residents such as Qamar to their homes.

Backstopping the police is where a good paramilitary force ought to step in to relieve the Army – and where Pakistan admits it has a problem.
BBC: US to give $110 million in emergency aid
The money will be used to provide generators, tents, water trucks and food to some of those forced to flee. An initial $26m will go towards the immediate purchase of wheat and other food produced in Pakistan itself...

"One of our guiding principles is that this should be more than just the delivery of supplies," Mrs Clinton said. "It should be an investment in the people of Pakistan, so we will buy locally from the bumper crop of wheat and we'll work to help create quick impact job programs that will put Pakistanis to work making goods for their fellow citizens."

NYT: Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, to become country's "chief executive officer"?
Such an alliance would benefit Mr. Karzai by co-opting a potential rival. For its part, the White House has made no secret of its growing disenchantment with Mr. Karzai, and some Afghanistan experts said that enlisting Mr. Khalilzad would have the virtue of bringing a strong, competent leader into an increasingly dysfunctional Afghan government.

The position would allow Mr. Khalilzad to serve as “a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn’t be responsible to a parliamentary system,” a senior Obama administration official said... Administration officials insisted that the United States was not behind the idea of enlisting Mr. Khalilzad to serve in the Afghan government, and they gave no further details on what his duties might be.

They said that Mr. Karzai had sought out Mr. Khalilzad, but that the idea of enlisting a chief executive had also been raised by Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.
NYT: US says Afghans killed in last week's airstrike mostly Taliban

NYT: Iraqi government arrests two influential Sunni leaders for "committing crimes against civilians" in potentially destabilizing move
The Awakening movement played a crucial role in reducing the violence in Iraq over the past two years, but some Sunni leaders have complained that the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has broken its promise to integrate their members in the country’s security forces. They also have expressed concern that the government regards them as a threat, and that it is planning attacks on Awakening members as the American military reduces its activities in Iraq.
CSM: implementing the US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) requires reimaginging Iraq's city limits
WP: Kurd-Arab conflicts continue in the north
For a few frantic minutes, Iraq's most dangerous fault line came perilously close to becoming a battlefield. As with another standoff last fall between the pesh merga [a detachment of the Kurdish government militia] and the Iraqi army in the dusty border town of Khanaqin, Bashika has emerged as a flash point in a growing test of wills over who will control land claimed by Arabs and the Kurdish autonomous government in the north of Iraq that many fear may be resolved only through violence...

In the contested region, running along a crescent in northwestern Nineveh, offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two main parties of the Kurdish autonomous government, have sprouted in almost every village in the four years of Kurdish rule... Together, the two parties control a variety of functions, including security, intelligence gathering and issuance of motor vehicle license plates. Mail from the Arab-controlled provincial council is often sent back, unopened, Kurdish officials said. Orders are ignored.

NYT: Obama says his Guantánamo plan “will begin to restore the [military] commissions as a legitimate forum,” amidst criticism
“I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference,” said Cmdr. Suzanne M. Lachelier of the Navy, the military lawyer for one of the detainees charged with coordinating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “We’re going to end up with trials with evidence that is the product of coercion and secret hearings.”...

The filing [to military judges]... said the revisions would involve the rules for the treatment of classified evidence, one of the most contentious issues at the prison at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But the filing did provide details of several changes Mr. Obama outlined on Friday. He said, for example, that “the accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel.”... It said that a detainee would be permitted a lawyer “of the accused’s own choosing.” But it added that the requested lawyer must be assigned to the Pentagon’s office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo.

Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, another defense lawyer for a Guantánamo detainee who is facing charges, said that change indicated that several of the Obama administration’s alterations to the Bush administration’s system were what he called “minor cosmetic changes.”...

The filing was part of a package of materials provided to the military judges at Guantánamo asking them to suspend cases until Sept. 17. The documents indicated that the administration had concluded that to win convictions it might need to retain the advantages the commissions were intended to give military prosecutors.
NYT: Senate rejects Obama's request for $80 million to close Guantánamo
Administration officials have indicated that if the Guantánamo camp closes as scheduled more than 100 prisoners may need to be moved to the United States, including 50 to 100 who have been described as too dangerous to release.

Of the 240 detainees, 30 have been cleared for release. Some are likely to be transferred to foreign countries, though other governments have been reluctant to take them. Britain and France have each accepted one former detainee. And while as many as 80 of the detainees will be prosecuted, it remains unclear what will happen to those who are convicted and sentenced to prison...

The House last week overwhelmingly approved the $96.7 billion spending measure after stripping the money for closing Guantánamo and inserting language barring Mr. Obama from transferring any detainees to the United States without first presenting a detailed plan to Congress, and giving lawmakers a chance to review it.

CSM: Supreme Court suit lets Mueller and Ashcroft off the hook for violating constitutional rights of Pakistani detainee, makes future cases more difficult
US Supreme Court handed a major victory to FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft on Monday when it dismissed a lawsuit that sought to hold both men personally responsible for allegedly violating the constitutional rights of post-911 detainees wrongly suspected of involvement in terrorism...

"A plaintiff must plead that each government-official defendant, through the official's own individual actions, has violated the Constitution," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. A plaintiff must "plead sufficient factual matter to show that [government officials] adopted and implemented the detention policies at issue not for a neutral, investigative reason but for the purpose of discriminating on account of race, religion, or national origin."

In a dissent, Justice David Souter said he would allow the suit to move forward. "[The complaint] does not say merely that Ashcroft was the architect of some amorphous discrimination, or that Mueller was instrumental in an ill-defined constitutional violation; [the complaint] alleges that they helped to create the discriminatory policy."

The high court decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal will help insulate high-level government officials – and former Bush administration officials – from similar war-on-terror lawsuits. At the same time, it will make it significantly more difficult for current or former terror suspects and their lawyers to obtain judicial oversight of their treatment by the US government. Similar civil lawsuits are pending in the federal courts against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Justice Department legal advisor John Yoo, among others.

In his dissent, Justice Souter said the majority decision undercuts the possibility of suing government supervisors for the unconstitutional actions of their subordinates. Such suits were authorized in a 1971 Supreme Court case called Bivens. "Lest there be any mistake," Souter wrote, "the majority is not narrowing the scope of supervisory liability; it is eliminating Bivens supervisory liability entirely."...

Many of the allegations in Iqbal's suit are consistent with the findings of an April 2003 report by the Department of Justice's Inspector General. The report criticized officials for establishing a system that punished detainees and treated them as guilty until proven innocent. The report said that many Muslim men were held under harsh conditions on baseless leads that the FBI took months to investigate and disprove.

The suit alleges systematic mistreatment, including being held 23 hours-a-day in a solitary-confinement cell with the windows painted over and the lights always on. Iqbal was given minimal bedding. The air conditioning was run in the winter, the heat turned on in the summer. He was subject to daily strip and body-cavity searches. The guards once forced him to submit to three consecutive body-cavity searches in a row. When he protested a fourth search, he was punched and kicked by the guards. By the time he was released, he'd lost 40 pounds.
WP: CIA concerned about losing right to use certain clandestine activities
Harsh interrogations were only one part of its clandestine activities against al-Qaeda and other enemies, and agency members are worried that other operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan will come under review, the officials said...

Agency officials said they will carry out any future debriefings or interrogations under provisions of the 2006 version of the Army Field Manual... But according to several past agency and military officials, the Field Manual is sometimes so broad as to be unclear...

The special task force set up by Obama in January will determine whether the Field Manual interrogation guidelines are too narrow and whether "additional guidance is necessary for CIA," according to a White House statement. A report on that study is not expected before July.
LAT: the story behind the US-led rendition and torture of an Egyptian from Italy
Lady seems a rather tragic figure at the heart of the case: a veteran spy who, after the Sept. 11 attacks, established himself as a point man in the shadows of the battle against the Islamic extremist underworld. Although he took risks to try to stop the abduction, in the end he allegedly became one of its dutiful architects.

The bearded, curly-haired Lady, now 55, spoke excellent Italian. He thrived in the convivial culture of Italian law enforcement, doing business over espresso and long lunches, hosting barbecues. He cultivated bonds with anti-terrorism units of agencies that are wary of one another: the SISMI spy service, the paramilitary Carabinieri and the national police. He passed along valuable leads from U.S. intercepts and offered cash and high-tech equipment for costly stakeouts...

Lady also developed his own agents at a mosque that was a European hub for Al Qaeda, targeting a network suspected of sending militants to training camps in northern Iraq. He helped Milan anti-terrorism police build a case against the rendition target, Abu Omar, regarded as a vehement ideologue in the group.

At a discreet sit-down with D'Ambrosio in October 2002, however, Lady said that his CIA bosses had decided to circumvent the police and abduct Abu Omar, supposedly hoping to force him to become an informant. As a result, Lady was embroiled in a feud in his own agency. The American told D'Ambrosio that he had an "awful" relationship with the CIA's Rome station chief, who resented Lady's criticisms of the planned rendition and had sent a tough deputy to Milan to make sure he followed orders...

The U.S. government has refused to comment. The Italian government has tried to scuttle the prosecution in the name of state secrecy laws. Responding to a high court decision on a government appeal, the judge here will decide Wednesday whether the trial can continue and what evidence can be used...

On the witness stand in October, D'Ambrosio summed it up: "We were between the tragic and the ridiculous."
NYT: Spanish lawmakers seek to limit judges' use of universal jurisdiction to only cases involving Spanish victims or on Spanish territory
As for universal jurisdiction laws, Belgium’s case may be instructive. Israel protested to Belgium in 2003 after survivors of the 1982 attacks on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut filed a complaint in Belgium against Ariel Sharon, who was defense minister at the time of the attacks.

But it was American pressure that made Belgium retract its law in 2003, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld threatened Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it did not rescind the law.

If Spain restricts its current broad law, it will fall in line with most European countries. Germany also has a broad form of universal jurisdiction, but the state prosecutor must approve any criminal case before it can proceed. In Spain, an investigating judge can ignore the opinion of the state prosecutor.

LAT: major figure in "the Camorra," or Naples mafia, captured in Spain
The nickname of purported boss Raffaele Amato is "the Spaniard." He partied in Marbella, a beachfront refuge of high-rolling international desperadoes and dubious fortunes. Investigators say he set up multinational cocaine deals in Barcelona...

Amato's capture Saturday was a major victory for Italian investigators. The balding 44-year-old gained notoriety for allegedly setting off a turf war with a rival clan between 2004 and 2007 that littered the high-rise slums of Naples with 70 bodies...

The Camorra's intense activity in Spain reveals evolving alliances and shifting global crime networks, investigators say... "They reorganized the routes," Laudati said. "One important route for cocaine into Spain went through North Africa. Another crossed the Balkans into Italy. And Barcelona became a hub for a land route for cocaine to Italy through France, where the Marseilles underworld has always had close ties to the Camorra. So you had a mixed operational group of bosses base itself in Spain."

WSJ: prison break in Mexico sees more than 50 cartel enforcers released in inside job
PCB: Colombian defense minister resigns in bid to seek presidency

CSM: stronger NRA as anti-Obama hysteria grows; GOP seeks to tap in
Despite these successes, Mr. Lapierre, the NRA CEO, spoke almost in doomsday terms this weekend about opponents of the Second Amendment. "The bomb is armed and the fuse is lit," he said. "They are going to come at us with everything they've got, and we are going to be ready for them. If they want to fight, we will fight."

To critics, it is rhetoric completely out of proportion to the current threat. "Despite the fact that they won their Supreme Court case, they act as if they lost," says Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center in Washington... The concern is that the amplitude of the rhetoric on the issue of gun rights is creating a certain hysteria. At a major gun show in Phoenix two weeks ago, Daniel Guier, a gun owner from Chandler, Ariz., witnessed an entry queue that snaked around an entire coliseum, people standing five abreast.

"There's a paranoia now that I've never seen before due to the unpredictability of Washington and the idea that, sooner or later, Obama will put up the fight," says Mr. Guier. "Unfortunately, that means that a lot of people who probably shouldn't be owning guns are buying guns."

WSJ: Tamil Tigers' leader is dead, but is the insurgency?
The rebel defeat echoes the experiences of other nations, from Colombia to Russia, where hard-fisted tactics defeated extremist foes. Yet as those nations also found, the political and economic turbulence left by decades of fighting suggests the limitations of such a victory.

Mr. Prabhakaran was the heart and soul of the Tamil Tigers, and security experts say he has left a profound and lasting influence on global terrorism. "The Tamil Tigers were the most creative terrorist group in the world," said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. "And they shared their expertise."

The 54-year-old Mr. Prabhakaran was shot with other senior leaders as they attempted to drive through a government security cordon in an ambulance, according to military and government officials. Troops had surrounded the last of the Tiger rebels in a slice of territory about the size of a football field, and were closing in.
LAT: Prabhakaran's innovations, and legacy
At its peak, the group controlled one-third of Sri Lanka, had its own sizable army and navy, a nascent air force, courts, tax collectors, hospitals, smuggling operations and liaison offices in 54 countries. Its innovations included the use of suicide vests lined with C-4 plastic explosives, recruiting female suicide bombers and perfecting political terror.

Tiger naval operations reportedly inspired Al Qaeda's 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole. Until the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Tigers, known formally as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, reportedly carried out two-thirds of all suicide attacks in the world...

But even as other militant groups such as the Irish Republican Army turned in their guns for a place at the negotiating table, his refusal to compromise ultimately left Tamils with little in the way of a lasting political legacy.

CSM: Nepalese peace on shaky ground as Maoists take on opposition role
Prachanda, a former rebel leader whose name means "the fierce one," quit [as caretaker Prime Minister] following a dispute with the Army over integrating his former fighters into the military as part of a 2006 peace accord that ended the insurgency. His resignation, ostensibly in "defense of civilian control over the Army" after the country's president countermanded his decision to sack the army chief on May 3, failed to ignite mass protests as the Maoists had hoped.

Instead, the Maoists find themselves increasingly isolated, with most rival parties joining hands to form a new government. Now the party looks set to take up the role of the country's main opposition, something new for the former rebels who were fighting a guerrilla war against government forces until 2006. Analysts say that the army chief row could effectively put an end to the politics of consensus that was the foundation of peace agreements signed after Maoists officially ended their war in November 2006... There are 19,702 Maoist fighters living in cantonments across Nepal monitored by the United Nations. Unless they are resettled into society, lasting peace is hard for most Nepalis to imagine.

LAT: Israeli prime minister meets with Obama, lays out his conditions for Palestinian statehood
Netanyahu has long contended that any Palestinian state would have to cede traditional sovereign powers to have a military and to control its borders and electronic communications, steps he said are necessary to give Israel "the means to defend itself."...

Though the two leaders exchanged praise and insisted they shared many goals, it was clear after the four-hour meeting that they remained separated by a wide distance on key issues. Where Obama emphasized that Israel must halt growth of Jewish settlements, Netanyahu said nothing on the subject in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office.
BBC: Israel's security leader says West Bank barrier wall not needed for security
The UN has criticised Israel, citing an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that parts of the barrier built inside Palestinian territory in the West Bank - 90% of the route - are contrary to international law... Meanwhile, Israeli police say a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza has landed in the town of Sderot, causing damage but no casualties... It was one of very few rockets launched from Gaza in recent weeks. Israeli security officials have said the Hamas movement, which controls Gaza, is trying to maintain a truce so it can re-arm following Israel's offensive earlier this year.
CSM: for Netanyahu, concessions re. Palestine risk fragmenting his coalition; Iran a priority
WT: RAND suggests change in rhetoric toward Iran


CSM: Islamists in Somalia near capital, throwing a wrench into Western stabilization plans
After a week of heavy mortar and rocket attacks that have left at least 135 people dead and sent tens of thousands fleeing, the insurgents have moved to within a half-mile of the hilltop presidential palace in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, which is being guarded by African Union peacekeepers with tanks and armored vehicles...

Despite a beefed-up African Union peacekeeping force and a UN-backed reconciliation effort, the moderate president, Sheik Sharif Ahmed, has failed to win the support of hard-liners such as Aweys or the powerful insurgent group Al Shabab, which the State Department has labeled a terrorist organization...

The top UN diplomat for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, said Friday that 280 to 300 foreigners were fighting alongside the insurgents. Somali government officials say the foreigners come from countries such as Afghanistan and Chechnya and have trained local fighters in explosives and tactics.
BBC: guess who's baaaack? Ethiopia!
On Sunday, fighters from the al-Shabab group, which is linked to al-Qaeda, took the key town of Jowhar from government forces. This is the home town of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and now that the country's rainy season has arrived, Jowhar is the only passable route into central Somalia from the capital.

Since withdrawing at the beginning of the year, Ethiopian troops have kept up a strong presence along the Somali border... About 4,300 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers from the African Union have arrived in Mogadishu, where they have taken up positions vacated by the Ethiopians in January.

But analysts say they are only in effective control of the presidential palace, airport and seaport in Mogadishu, while the Islamist guerrillas control chunks of the capital, along with swathes of central and southern Somalia.
BBC: East Africa's Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) asks for port and air blockades

WP: Sudanese rebels to be brought before the ICC on war crimes charges
It is the first time that Darfur's rebels have been charged with war crimes since the court began investigating mass violence in that Sudanese region in 2005. Until now, the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has focused on the Sudanese government's role in atrocities, and has issued arrest warrants for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a top aide and an allied militia leader...

While Darfur's rebel factions are believed to be responsible for a small portion of the killings in the region, they have frequently targeted foreign peacekeepers and aid workers, and have stolen vehicles, communications equipment and other items that they have used to bolster their capacity to fight the government.

Moreno-Ocampo wrote in November that he decided to prosecute the rebels because attacks on peacekeepers and aid workers constitute an "exceptionally serious offense" that strikes at the heart of the international community's ability to maintain peace and security in conflict zones such as Darfur.

WP: unstable power-sharing deal in Kenya, and remembering post-election violence
The gangs that carried out the massacre had come marching in a military formation, locked the church doors and shoved gasoline-soaked mattresses against the outside walls, hacking to death people who tried to escape the flames through windows.

But what newspapers and angry letters to the editors have focused on in the days since the memorial service is who did not attend the ceremony, billed by hopeful organizers as one of "healing, forgiveness and reconciliation."

Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the former opposition leader in whose name the violence was carried out -- some of the gangs called themselves "Raila's Army" -- didn't show up. Not a single leader from the local Kalenjin community, whose members made up those machete-wielding, torch-bearing gangs, came to the ceremony, a deliberate boycott. Instead, some local Kalenjin residents said that if a monument to the victims were built, as has been proposed, they would destroy it.