My concerns, at present, are in the nature of the battles we are currently embroiled in against Islamic Supremacism and the fracted lines of brave souls standing against the tide.  I am certain that, in time, I will find solid ground; however, in the  war against Islamic Supremacism, one must stand and proclaim a full, consistent, radical alternative.

We are involved in two major battles in this war: the battle of ideas and the battle for influence.  We lag far behind on both fronts – it is upon these fields of battle that I will soon rise as a champion of Liberty and Reason.

Thank you for your attention.

Gary H. Johnson, Jr.

Wednesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Wednesday, 26 August, 2009 @ 12:04 PM in Beirut

Beirut – The Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad is back in action in Lebanon and is doing all it can to disrupt the formation of the cabinet through its allies the Hezbollah -led opposition. According to Syrian observers Syria is trying to make up for the loss of its allies in the polls by forcing on Lebanon’s majority the so called “ national Unity government “ in which the opposition will have the lion’s share of ministries through which they can control the country.

An Nahar political sources have reported that careful reading of the Syrian political stance towards Lebanon indicates that never before has an Arab country through its official media demanded that another Arab country should amend its constitution during the formation of a government .

An Nahar sources have also reported that Syria is allocating specific roles to its allies aimed at obstructing the formation of the cabinet unless their demands are met . While General Michel Aoun is charged with attacking the Prime minister designate and making impossible demands, Lebanon’s top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah is charged with attacking Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir who has been the most outspoken Christian spiritual leader against the obstruction of the Lebanese democratic institutions .

Yesterday Fadlallah slammed Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir over calling for a cabinet based on the outcome of the parliamentary polls. In a remark aimed at changing the constitution Fadlallah said : “We call for a popular majority and popular referendum … so that people would have their say.”

The objective of the Syrian regime according to the An Nahar political sources is to force president Michel Suleiman and the Prime minister -designate to allocate the ministries as demanded by the opposition and to include in the government individuals that cannot get along with the PM designate , such as Aoun’s son-in-law Gebran Bassil ( who has failed as the minister of communications through his corruptive management style and failed in securing a parliament seat in the election last June) . The next stage according to the sources will see the demand for a change in the constitution . The Syrian official media is already calling for strikes and disruptions in the country if the demands of the opposition are not me.

Lebanon is not the only country in which Syria is interfering . Yesterday Syria recalled its ambassador to Iraq after Baghdad demanded that Damascus hand over two suspects in last week’s deadly bombings in the Iraqi capital. The Iraqi government also asked that Syria to “hand over all those wanted [by the Iraqi judiciary] for committing crimes of murder and destruction against the Iraqi people,” Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

Iraq further demanded that Syria expel “terrorist organizations that use Syria as a headquarters and launch pad to plan terrorist operations against the Iraqi people.”
Baghdad had recalled its ambassador in Syria following last week’s deadly bombings in the Iraqi capital.

Syria is also consistently interfering in the internal affairs of the Palestinian territories through its ally the Hamas movement and the militant Palestinian factions opposed to the elected government of president Mahmoud Abbas. Just like it is doing now in Lebanon Syria had obstructed the inter Palestinian dialogue talks and the negotiations to form a national unity government.

On several occasions Jordan too had accused Syria of sponsoring terrorist organizations in order to destabilize the kingdom.

Yesterday British foreign minister Evan Lewis said : “ Syria should refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Lebanon and should stop supporting organizations such as Hezbollah. The formation of a new government in Lebanon is important for the security of the country and the region”

A senior U.S. official also told An Nahar yesterday : President Obama wants to improve relations with Syria, but it would be impossible if Syria and its friends continue to disrupt the democratic institutions in Lebanon.

Wednesday

7: 00pm Senator Edward M. Kennedy will lie in repose at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum before his funeral at a historic Boston church where he prayed daily while his daughter successfully battled her own cancer.

6:00 pm BBC : Incumbent Hamid Karzai appears to have extended his lead in Afghanistan’s presidential election, after more early results were released.

5:30pm The inhabitants of Al-Sheikh Ayash on the northern border, blocked the international highway in protest of electricity cuts.

5:25pm MP al-Jarrah called for a National Unity Cabinet capable of facing the economic crisis.

5:20pm Siniora headed a meeting on Nahr al-Bared camp and met caretaker Minister Lahoud and the UAE ambassador

5:15pm MP Zahra said that Bkirki is behind the foundation of Lebanon’s entity thus, it is not permissible to target it with strong-worded criticism

2:50pm March 14 after its meeting: The only security in Lebanon should be that provided by the state.

2:40pm MPs quoted Berri speaking of livelihood problems, such as electricity and water, that require an extraordinary government not a care-taker one.

1:40 pm Reuters: UN inspectors are set to report that Iran has slowed the expansion of its disputed nuclear program and is cooperating more with them just as major powers prepare to discuss harsh sanctions against Tehran.

1:30 VOA : U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy passed away today . U.S. President Barack Obama says the late U.S. Senator was “the greatest United States senator of our time.”California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is married to Kennedy’s niece, Maria Shriver, called him “the rock of our family,” and a champion of social justice.

1:25 Hezbollah’s Kaouk: Why is America trying to prevent the opposition from holding onto the Ministry of Communications?

1:20 Youths blocked the road in Majdal Anjar with burning tires to protest against the raids carried out by the army following the arrest of the assailants of Major Khater

1 :18 Siniora, discussed the general situation with a delegation from Western Bekaa in the presence of MPs Ghanem, Saad, Al Kadiri, Wahbi and Jarrah

1 :16 adviser of former President Amin Gemayel, Sassine Sassine said in a statement read after attending minutes of the meeting of the Secretariat-General of the March 14 that the Phalange party will suspend the attendance of such meetings pending the return of Gemayel

1 :12 the leader of the Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim has passed away

1 :07 Hezbollah Mps are meeting in the parliament building

1 :05 MP Marwan Hamada told Sawt al Mada : The obstruction against the government formation has escalated and it is foreign influenced

12:15pm Berri headed to the parliament in Nijmeh Square to meet MPs as part of Wednesday’s regular parliamentary meetings.

11:50 Berri leaves Baabda Palace without making any statement.

11:43 Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora met with UAE’s ambassador and discussed with him
bilateral ties.

11:15 Minister Mario Aoun told ANB: The PM-designate should prove that the cabinet formation decision is Lebanese by stepping up efforts to form the government. It is natural for a meeting to take place between Aoun and Hariri.

11:10 President Michel Suleiman is meeting with Speaker Nabih Berri at the Baabda palace.

11:00 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday in London that his government was making progress toward reopening talks with the Palestinians and hoped to be able to do so shortly.

10:40 MP Nabil de Freij told Future TV: The majority made as much concessions as it can for the sake of the nation. MP Walid Jumblat is still part of the March 14 forces.

10:30 The general-secretariat of the March 14 forces began its weekly meeting.

10:28 MP Emile Rahme told LBC: Even if MP Michel Aoun gives up his demand to bring Gebran Bassil back to the cabinet, we won’t give up on him .

10:00 BBC: Afghan election authorities are due to release more results from presidential polls after an early count gave incumbent Hamid Karzai a slight lead.

8:30 MP Ziad al-Qadri told VOL: Conditions should not be put on the majority. On the contrary, we should put conditions on the other party, since the majority has already made many concessions.

8:00 Washington Post: Home prices climbed in the Washington DC, region and most parts of the country in recent months, another sign that the housing market is slowly stabilizing, according to two reports released Tuesday.

7:30 A cluster of vehicle bombs exploded simultaneously Tuesday in Afghanistan’s largest southern city, flattening buildings and killing at least 41 people.

7:30 MP Ammar Houry told VDL: The meeting of the general-secretariat of the March 14 forces will witness positive developments today. Details of cabinet obstacles are no longer a secret.
Tuesday

10:12 pm PM-designate Saad Hariri said during Iftar dinner : I want to assure our enemy in Israel that Hezbollah will be in the government because it is in the interest of our nation that we all participate in the government, regardless whether Israel likes it or not

9:30pm : Last night Hariri met MP Hassan Khalil

8:21pm Health Minister Khalifa told LBC: the measures taken to combat the swine flue are similar to those of regular influenza . The quantity of vaccine available for the swine flu is not sufficient

6:22 pm Al Manar : The army arrested a person with unusual features in Aitroun south Lebanon and is now interrogating him. He entered the country illegally from the occupied territories

5:34pm Mukhtarain: I dont expect the government to be formed anytime soon.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/thursday_news_b_62.php

Thursday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Thursday, 27 August, 2009 @ 11:37 AM in Beirut
Beirut- To the outside world things may look calm inside Lebanon , but for those of us who live here it feels like being inside the eye of the hurricane… It may be quiet right now but severe storms are developing and could erupt in any moment as the process of government formation is showing us.
Lebanon does not have any hurricanes , but people who have lived in countries that have them know exactly what we mean by being inside the eye of Hurricane .
The real political hurricane in Lebanon will show up the day after the international court will issue its first indictments in the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister and the Lebanese are afraid it could spark a wave of violence between its Shiite and Sunni communities.
The Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon ( STL) has so far kept silent on who it might charge in the 2005 slaying of Rafik Hariri. The fear in Lebanon is that it will accuse the powerful Shiite militant group Hezbollah.
This is precisely why many observers believe MP Walid Jumblatt had been calling for calm ever since the German magazine Der Spiegel published its report last May , which said the court had evidence that members of Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah were behind the assassination of Hariri, who was Lebanon’s most prominent politician since the 1975-1990 civil war ended.
Many think that Jumblatt knows a lot more than what was published in the Der Spiegel report and this is why he is anticipating an uprising that could make May 7, 2008 look like a picnic . During the May 2008 uprising Hezbollah occupied the Sunni section of Beirut and tried unsuccessfully to occupy the Druze strongholds of Mount Lebanon.
Hezbollah has completely denied any role in the killing, and its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has warned of a backlash if the court implicates any of its members. In his speech following the publishing of the Der Spiegel report , he threatened a repeat of clashes that erupted in May 2008.
“Let everyone know that what we did on May 7 was only a wave of our hand. We are strong enough we can overturn 10 tables, not only one,” Nasrallah said
Former MP Mustafa Alloush, a key member of the March 14 majority alliance said if the Hezbollah elements that are indicted are not connected to the leadership, then Hezbollah should hand them over to the tribunal in order for “civil peace not to be affected,” he said.
“If they behave in a hostile way in order to cover up this matter, it will for sure lead to an outbreak of violence,” he told The Associated Press.
Following the May 2008 uprising , Hezbollah was able to achieve what it failed to secure during its sit-in from November 2006 till May 2008. The Doha accord that followed the uprising granted Hezbollah veto power in the current caretaker government that was formed following the signing of that accord.
Many observers are of the opinion that General Aoun is playing into the hands of Hezbollah and Syria . Aoun has been demanding specific sovereign ministries that are a red line for the Hezbollah-led opposition such as the ministry of interior and at the same time he has been refusing to meet with Prime Minister -Designate Saad Hariri ( son of the slain former PM Rafik Hariri) to discuss his portfolio requirements in the new cabinet.
The Lebanese department of Internal Security reports directly to the ministry of interior .
This ministry is currently included in the share of the president of the republic who is politically independent and is being headed by Ziad Baroud.
The situation in Lebanon is very similar to May , 2008 and the big question in Lebanon is not when the government will be formed , but when will the political hurricane erupt .

Thursday
8:35pm the residents of Bouiza – Nabatiyah are protesting against the installation of cellular booster stations near their homes
8:27pm Hajjar told OTV :” What we want from General Aoun is a calm speech that is based on an objective reality to explain that he has the right to claim what he wants based on the Constitution
8:26pm MP Edmond Rizk told “MTV”: The request to amend the Taif disguises the real objectives . The President has not been able to exercise his authority during the past years
8 :25pm MP Kanaan told “MTV”: The President of the Republic has suggested that the constitution should be reviewed and any amendment to the Taef accord will not affects the sectarian distribution. We are not willing to wait for 30 more years .
8:23pm Qamati told OTV :” the International Tribunal is politicized as was proven by the the international pressure on Syria and then the pressure was lifted and the question is where this will lead us and when will the politicization end ?
05:30 pm PM-designate Saad Hariri left Baabda palace after one hour meeting with president Suleiman, without making any statement
06:46 pm : The UN security council extended the term of UNIFIL for another year under UNSCR 1884 without modifying its rules of engagement

04:11pm President Michel Suleiman is meeting with PM-designate Saad Hariri
3:22pm Caretaker Tourism minister Marouni: Aoun is the cover for all the obstacles and this includes Syria and Iran. How can the government can be a national unity government if it begins with conditions and provocations ?
3:02pm Bassil told “Future News”: Communications are stalled for now awaiting an initiative from the PM designate . Note : Hariri had invited Aoun for lunch 2 weeks ago to discuss his portfolio needs but Aoun up till this moment has refused to meet with Hariri.
2:47pm MP Michel Murr: Never in the history of Lebanon could a parliamentary bloc dictate “ I want this ministry and I want this man to be in charge of it “. ( in reference to gen Aoun) . The government must be formed before President Suleiman visits Washington, he added
2:00pm President Suleiman discussed with General Aoun’s deputy Issam Abu Jamra the status of government formation and reviewed with Minister Ibrahim Najjar the latest information concerning the Baroulk illegal internet company
2:00pm Bloomberg: Tropical Storm Danny strengthened and may brush Long Island , New York and New England as a hurricane on a path for landfall in Canada at the weekend.
1:38pm Sayegh: we do not want any party to exclusively defend the country except the Lebanese army , but the others want something else ( in reference to Hezbollah and its allies)
1:25pm Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil: The Barouk issue has a foreign security aspect which is contact with Israel. It also has local aspects which we will not remain quiet about.
1:15pm Siniora headed a meeting at the Grand Serail to discuss the issue of Lebanese jails. The meeting was attended by Interior Minister Baroud, Justice Minister Najjar and Maj. Gen. Rifi.
1:16 pm Al Liwaa sources : Jumblatt told Hariri during their Tuesday night meeting that his supporters are not excited about him leaving March 14 alliance and the slogans of freedom, sovereignty and independence. The Druze leader told Hariri that for the first time ever he felt he could not convince his supporters in the Druze community and the Progressive Socialist Party to abandon March 14 in favor of a new stance that contradicts the principals and believes of the said alliance .
1;00 pm Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul-Karim Ali said after meeting former president Emile Lahoud: God willing Lebanon will be quickly able to form a government of national unity to face the challenges that are facing Lebanon
12:45 pm Forbes: The euro was steady against the dollar Thursday as more positive economic signals emerged from Germany, Europe’s biggest economy.
12:30pm Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah: Hezbollah’s contacts with Hariri are aimed at replacing obstacles with dialogue that would lead to cabinet formation.
12:00 pm NBN Television : MP Michel Aoun said in an interview Wednesday that he will not visit any politician or resume negotiations on the government. “Those who want to negotiate, let them come to my home,” Aoun said .
11:20 March 14 coordinator former MP Fares Soueid: The techniques used by the Syrian team in Lebanon are aimed at placing Hariri in front of impossible choices.
10:00 Reuters: Mourners gathered in Tehran on Thursday to mark the death from cancer of Al Hakim , a leading Iraqi Shi’ite cleric and politician, whose passing may intensify political turmoil ahead of Iraq’s national elections.
9:30 Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told an education conference that Israel “is more prepared than ever to face any Hezbollah attack.” He added “In the coming years, rocket and missile interception systems will be introduced in a gradual manner, and we are investing huge sums of money in a multi-layered system, which will help with the deterrence.”
8:32 MP Imad al-Hout told VOL: The only solution to cabinet formation is for each side to give up some of its demands for the sake of the nation.
8:30 MP Atef Majdalani told VOL: We ask for a unified opposition stance similar to the majority stance.
7:35am MP Salim Salhab told VOL: I hope the media truce will help efforts to achieve solutions through indirect talks. A meeting should be held between Hariri and Aoun.
07:05 caretaker Information Minister Tarek Mitri: what was published is not the production of al Akhbar but was “co-produced” by al Akhbar and those that want to use the church issues for political purposes . Mitri called al Akhbar’s report “ garbage’
06:48 Visitors to Baabda told Al Akhbar: President Suleiman feels that Hariri is not doing all he can as far as engaging in serious discussions regarding the formation of the cabinet
06:30 Church sources responded to Shiite Sheikh Fadlallah who earlier attacked patriarch Sfeir : his words are inaccurate and contradict the historical facts , avoids the truth and exaggerates the meaning of power
06:15 Jumblatt sources : Hariri’s last statement contributes positively to the calming climates . The escalation of Israeli threats require speeding up of consultations to form a government
06:05 opposition circles: Al-Hariri started to set up the order of priorities in line with those of MP Walid Jumblatt
05:50 sources in the majority: There is an attempt by Damascus to the evade Syrian-Saudi understanding, following the recent visit of President Bashar al-Assad to Tehran
05:38 As Safir : no government in the near future due to the absence of internal and external dynamics

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/friday_news_bri_63.php
Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 28 August, 2009 @ 7:34 AM in Beirut
Beirut- The impasse over the government formation by Prime minister designate saad harir continues in Lebanon. The president arranged for an Iftar on September 1 at the Baabda palace hoping to use the occasion for reconciling the rival parties in order to speed up the formation of the government, but General Michel Aoun who has been accused by the March 14 alliance as being the single most obstructive element in the process of government formation has turned down president Suleiman’s invitation and therefore will not be attending the Iftar .
Aoun has been accused by the majority of making unreasonable demands for specific portfolios that are considered a red line for Hezbollah- led opposition such as the ministry of interior . The majority does not trust Hezbollah with this ministry after what this militant group did in May 2008 when it it turned its guns against the Lebanese people and occupied the Sunni part of west Beirut and tried but unsuccessfully to occupy Mount Lebanon.
The Ministry of interior is responsible for the security inside the country . This ministry is currently included in the share of the president , who intends to keep it . The president is independent , meaning he is neither with March 8 nor March 14 . The ministry is currently headed by Ziad Baroud who has shown tremendous credibility during his entire term and who has been praised by all parties for the way he managed the elections last June .
Aoun’s demands have raised many questions in Lebanon, yesterday MP Michel Murr who used to be allied with Aoun before the June elections said “Never in the history of Lebanon could a parliamentary bloc dictate “ I want this ministry and I want this man to be in charge of it “.
MP and former Minister Marwan Hamada summed it up this way during an interview with Al Anbaa newspaper : “Nothing new regarding the governmental formation issue and we don’t expect a government anytime soon”

Friday
10:03pm PM-designate Saad Hariri calls President Suleiman, Speaker Berri to inform them of his initiative toward FPM leader Michel Aoun
10:00 pm Hariri : since Aoun does not want to visit me , I am ready to meet with him at the presidential palace with president Suleiman or at the parliament
7:41pm Al-Arabiya: IAEA demands clarifications from Iran on military dimensions of its nuclear program
5:35pm Solana to visit Middle East next week
04:04pm Bassil informs Suleiman that Aoun will not attend the presidential Iftar for logistical reasons
11:15 Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls for punishing opposition leaders over unrest unleashed by his disputed re-election
11:00 The mayor of Beirut Abdel Mounim al Arees denied ever sending an invitation to Haifa mayor to attend a conference on water in Leon , France . Earlier an Israeli station claimed that Arees sent an invitation and the major of Haifa accepted it
10:20 Swine flu rises at US colleges as students return. In the bathrooms they have signs that read: “Wash your hands. Swine is not fine.”
10:00 A suicide bomber slightly injured a Saudi Arabian Prince Muhammad bin Nayef who is in charge of antiterrorism, the first significant retaliation by extremists against the kingdom’s recent crackdown. The explosion took place last night at his house in Jeddah as he was receiving guests during a traditional Ramadan gathering
9;20 The reformist son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has called for closer business ties with Britain, saying it is time to move on from the argument about the decision to free the Lockerbie bomber.
09:16 Hariri met MP Hussein Khalil last evening in Quraytem to review the latest developments regarding the formation of the government
09:03 Minister Marouni: Aoun’s declining of Suleiman’s invitation to Iftar is a “new setback”
08:42 An earthquake measuring 6.2 degrees on the Rector scale erupted in China and no information about any casualties up till this moment
08:40 Council of Ministers of the GCC will meet Tuesday in Jeddah to discuss the situation in Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Sudan, Somalia and security issues
08:34 Marouni told “Voice of Lebanon”: The obstruction is external and Aoun is the internal cover and this continued bleeding will undermine the confidence in the State that we were hoping to rebuild and strengthen
08:32 Hamada told Al Anbaa : nothing new regarding the governmental formation issue and we don’t expect a government anytime soon
08:26 Sources in the majority: Hariri informed Gemayel and Geagea that the contentious issues that had prevented the meeting of the leaders of the majority have been resolved
07:20 sources of “Change and Reform”: Hariri’s visit to Aoun is not a concession, but it is his duty as PM designate
07:15 Basil: We are sticking by our demands and the ball is now in the court of the PM designate
06:48 Hariri sources: a visit by PM designate to Aoun is not on the agenda for now
06:34 Suleiman: all the parties should cooperate over the formation of the cabinet which is already overdue . Sources close to Baabda say the president is extremely disappointed with concerned parties over the delays
06:09 The leaders of the majority are questioning whether there is a regional plan to wipe out the results of the last election
05:43 The Youth and Student Affairs official of the Free Patriotic Movement has stepped down
05:32 Palmer appeal file containing the testimonies of the most powerful of the certificate of the father Akkari
05:28 Sarkozy asked the French ambassador in Beirut to go back to France , one year before his term ends . No explanations given
05:14 Aoun will not attend the Iftar dinner at Baabda palace on Sept 1 . The president was hoping to use the occasion to reconcile the various parties in order to speed up the formation of the government

 
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/saturday_news_b_57.php

Saturday News Briefs
Published: Saturday, 29 August, 2009 @ 1:42 PM in Beirut
Beirut- situation in Lebanon appeared closer to a solution to the issue of government formation when Prime minister designate Saad Hariri announced : “Since Aoun does not want to visit me , I am ready to meet with him at the presidential palace with president Suleiman or at the parliament”.
Hariri made the announcement and then called the president who welcomed the initiative

Saturday
2:50 pm FPM MP Alain Aoun: MP Michel Aoun will soon respond to Hariri’s initiative regarding a meeting in Baabda or at the parliament. He received a phone call from Suleiman regarding the initiative . His absence from the Iftar is not political and has asked FPM members to attend
1:05 pm Egyptian minister of petroleum will arrive in Beirut on Monday accompanied by a delegation to meet with caretaker energy minister Taborian. The meeting will be followed by a joint press conference
1;00 Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi has agreed not to pitch his tent in a New York suburb during an upcoming United Nations visit after heated opposition from the community, US officials said Friday. The Libyan leader, who wants to stay true to his Bedouin roots, camps in a tent when he travels, setting up his sleeping quarters everywhere from Rome’s main park to a garden across from the Elysee Palace in Paris.
12:20pm Wahhab told An Nahar: Cabinet formula to become 10-10-10 ( 10 ministries each for the majority, minority and the president ) in case government not formed soon
11:10 Sami Gemayel told VOL: Hezbollah arms are preventing Hariri from forming a majority cabinet
10:30 Financial Times: UAE seizes ship carrying North Korean arms (basic weaponry, including rocket-propelled grenades) to Iran. The ship was flying the flag of The Bahamas
09:15 An Nahar : care taker minister Gebran Bassil said Hariri initiative addresses the form of the problem , not its content. “Formalities are insignificant,” Bassil added
08:30 US: Iran is still not fully cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) despite finally granting inspectors access to a research reactor.
7:51 A decision was made to hold continuous meetings to strengthen the relationship and communication between MP Walid Jumblatt and the March 14 secretariat
07:43 Aoun will not attend the Iftar at the presidential palace but his MPs will attend
07:40 Gemayel told Hariri that the Kataeb party wants two ministries
07:38 Al Akhbar preparations are being made to improve the relations between Aoun and Sfeir
07:14 Yvonne Abdul Baqi told Al-Nahar:” I hope Lebanon will supports in getting the “UNESCO” position
07:09 Najjar: no one at this stage knows what the decision of the STL will be including Bellemare himself
06:51 Kouchner: the difficulties facing the government formation are due to regional and
domestic complexities
06:03 expanded meeting of the majority MPs will take place and Jumblatt’s Democratic gathering MPs will also attend
05:50 Jumblatt expressed his appreciation to Hariri’s confirmation of the participation of Hezbollah in the government
05:48 Jumblatt: There is no logical explanation for the delay in formation of the government
05:39 Sources: The main obstacle is Aoun’s demands and the insistence of Hariri to reject those demands
05:20 The initiative of Hariri regarding his willingness to meet with Aoun at the presidential palace or the parliament was welcomed by the President of the Republic

Friday
10:03pm PM-designate Saad Hariri calls President Suleiman, Speaker Berri to inform them of his initiative toward FPM leader Michel Aoun
10:00 pm Hariri : since Aoun does not want to visit me , I am ready to meet with him at the presidential palace with president Suleiman or at the parliament

 
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/sunday_news_bri_62.php
Sunday News Briefs
Published: Sunday, 30 August, 2009 @ 10:07 AM in Beirut
Beirut – The impasse over the government formation continues in Lebanon, but Hariri’s initiative regarding a meeting with Aoun seems to be working . Sources close to the General have revealed that he is seriously considering the initiative of the PM designate to meet him either at Baabda or the parliament and is expected to respond shortly . Soe are predicting the meeting could place as early as today.

The meeting according to al Hayat newspaper the results of the meeting will reveal the nature of the obstacles facing formation of the government .
Sunday
11:00 Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was indicted today in corruption scandals that drove him to resign last year, a long-awaited legal step that made him the first current or former holder of Israel’s most powerful office to be charged with a criminal offense
10;00 pm MP Marwan Hamadeh told Future TV: all the MPs of the Democratic Gathering bloc including the leader MP Walid Jumblatt, will attend Sunday’s March 14 meeting to confirm Jumblatt’s earlier statements that he is still part of the majority supporting Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri.
6:55 pmMouallem : Syrian-Saudi relations are going in the right path and the Saudi Ambassador to Syria
6:54 pm Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem said “ the investigation of Detlev Mehlis, the first commissioner of the UN investigation team into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was aimed at indicting Syria.”
3:00 pm Internal Security Forces Bureau for Combating Terrorism and Crime detained a Lebanese citizen identified as Hussein al-Asmar, 40, in the southern village of Odayse for allegedly spying for Israeli Intelligence.
1:10 pm After meeting with Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir in the presence of MP Nadim Gemayel Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea said “the Maronite Patriarchy is the base of the Lebanese state.” He added “ all parties to reconsider their rhetoric and embrace Sfeir’s positions which call for unity.”
12;25 pm : Jamil Sayyed attacked during a press conference Lebanese president Michel Suleiman , Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon
08:36 Awan told Future News: The 71 majority MPs will meet tomorrow in a show of unity and to show support Hariri.
08:27 MP Jarrah told Al Anbaa: “: Hariri will not bypass the Constitution and quitting for him is out of the question regardless of the obstacles
08:23 Al Anbaa sources within the majority: Aoun may use travel as an excuse to avoid meeting with Hariri
08:14 Al Anbaa sources : There is talk about increasing the number of ministers to 32 to make sure the Christian minorities and Aalawites are represented
08:08 MP Abi Nasr warns of the shrinking Christian presence in Lebanon, which has reached 34%
08:06 Al Rai: Jumblatt will attend the meeting of the majority tomorrow and his party withdrew permanently from the secretariat of the March 14
07:55 Al Hayat : Hariri’s initiative gave an acceptable solution for a meeting with Aoun and its results will reveal the nature of the obstacles facing formation of the government
07:39 Mass in Harissa in memory of the Nahr al Bared martyrs and another in Tannoureen in memory of the martyr Samer Hanna who was killed by Hezbollah
07:30 Sources within “Change and Reform”: we need to recognize each in order to form a genuine partnership
07:08 visitors to president Suleiman: the country is without institutions and the army alone can not protect the internal situation
06:30 “An-Nahar”: a meeting of the 71 MPs of the majority in the parliament tomorrow in support of the PM-designate

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/prosyrian_gener.php

Pro-Syrian general attacks Suleiman and Hariri
Published: Sunday, 30 August, 2009 @ 11:00 PM in Beirut
Beirut – The former head of the General Security Directorate General Jamil Sayyed attacked during a press conference Lebanese president Michel Suleiman , Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon
Sayyed slammed President Michel Suleiman, requesting that he act “as an honorable military general and not as a prisoner of Baabda Palace.” He also said : “President Suleiman has changed and is not the same person I knew before” , adding : “It is a shame that you have become a prisoner “
Addressing president Suleiman Sayyed added: They ( majority) brought you in to control you …you cannot be a consensus president if you are between a party that is right an wrongdoers …for this reason you should not be the president “
Sayyed along with three other senior generals who were sent to jail on Aug 30, 2005 as suspects in the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri were released from jail on April 29, 2009 on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to indict them for involvement in Hariri’s murder.
Sayyed accused Saad Hariri of covering for witnesses who “misled” the international investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri with “information obtained from officers, ministers, politicians and media figures” close to him.
Sayyed called on Hariri to apologize to the four freed officers and their families. He also demanded that Hariri “apologize to his father before discussing the STL during any of his Iftar feasts.”
Sayyed said that Hariri has “no right to claim justice that is being served by the STL, when he approved of people making baseless accusations and falsifying facts for four years.” Sayyed also alleged Hariri had protected unreliable witnesses, including as Mohammad Zuheir al-Siddiq, Hossam Hossam and Ibrahim Jarjoura.
He also accused a number of prominent figures of misleading the investigation, including MP Marwan Hamadeh; former head of the Lebanese Armed Forces Intelligence Branch, Johnny Abdo; current head of the Internal Security Forces Intelligence department Wissam al-Hassan; Hariri advisor Hani Hammoud; journalist Fares Khashan; and Judges Saqr Saqr and Said Mirza.
Sayyed called on Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar to imprison Mirza and Hassan for “crimes against the state,” as they oversaw the investigation into Hariri’s assassination, questioned witnesses and ordered the arrest of four generals, including Sayyed, without charge.
Sayyed claimed that Hariri had protected unreliable witnesses, including Mohammad Zuheir al-Siddiq, Hossam Hossam and Ibrahim Jarjoura.
He accused the Lebanese magistrate at the STL, Ralph Riyashi, of “protecting the process of making up facts.” He also said Riyashi “should be withdrawn from the tribunal and dumped.”
He urged opposition leaders not to participate in the upcoming national unity cabinet and become partners with “a bunch of swindlers”.
Sayyed’s statements according to Ali Hussein , a Lebanese political observers may reflect the thinking of the Syrian regime , because of his close association with president Basher al Assad. Hussein believes that Assad is using Sayyed to attack Suleiman and Hariri.
PM-designate Saad Hariri has been trying to form a government for the past 2 months , but has been facing difficulties with General Michel Aoun an ally of the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah militant group . A meeting may take place tomorrow between Aoun and Hariri at the Baabda palace and the results could reveal the nature of the obstacles facing the formation of the government

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Monday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Monday, 31 August, 2009 @ 11:58 AM in Beirut
Beirut- It appears that Syria through its allies in Lebanon is again trying to interfere in the Lebanese internal affairs . Yesterday the former head of the General Security Directorate General Jamil Sayyed , a close ally of the Syrian regime attacked Lebanese president Michel Suleiman, Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon., during a press conference.
Sayyed slammed President Michel Suleiman, requesting that he act “as an honorable military general and not as a prisoner of Baabda Palace.” He also said : “President Suleiman has changed and is not the same person I knew before” , adding : “It is a shame that you have become a prisoner “
Sayyed also accused the Special Tribunal for Lebanon of going after Syria.
The purpose of the Tribunal is to try the killers of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated on February 14 2005
Sayyed along with three other senior officers who were sent to jail on Aug 30, 2005 as suspects in the the assassination of former Hariri were released from jail on April 29, 2009 on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to indict them for involvement in the murder.
PM-designate Saad Hariri has been trying to form a government for the past 2 months , but has been facing difficulties with General Michel Aoun an ally of the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah militant group. The March 14 alliance have been accusing Syria of being behind the obstructions
A meeting between General Michel Aoun and Hariri is expected to take place today. The result of the meeting will reveal the real reasons behind the obstacles that are facing the formation of the government . Aoun has demanded 5 portfolios in the new government including the ministries of communication and the interior , but his demands have been rejected by the majority .
General Aoun according to early morning reports plans to leave for vacation immediately after his meeting with Hariri
Today the 71 members of the parliament majority are also expected to meet today in a show of unity to reconfirm that they are still the majority. Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt has according to morning reports said : “ We will participate in the meeting of the majority in support of the PM-designate and the Taif accord
Monday
11:00 As-Safir : Billionaire Hajj Salah Ezzedine a Hezbollah publishing executive has declared bankruptcy. He is the director of the Hezbollah-owned Dar Al-Hadi Publishing House. His bankruptcy has affected thousands of Lebanese investors who are sympathetic to Hezbollah
10:54 pm Reuters: Armenia and Turkey moved closer to establishing diplomatic ties and reopening their border on Monday, saying they would sign accords within six weeks under a plan to end a century of hostility.
05:25 pm Speaker Nabih Berri said during the 31st anniversary of Imam Moussa Sadr’s disappearance in Libya: “Libya tops the list of countries carrying out organized crime, and therefore should not preside over the Arab summit.” He added “Saudi-Syrian balance is key to stability in Lebanon”
05:00 pm Caretaker minister Wael Abu Faour said after the meeting of the majority: The majority fully support’s Prime Minister -designate Saad Hariri and his efforts to form the new cabinet based on the Lebanese constitution. The majority holds on to democracy, the Taif Accord and the equal sharing of power between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon
3:38pm Majority MPs begin first meeting since 2009 parliamentary elections in Qoreitem in presence of Democratic Gathering bloc leader MP Walid Jumblatt
3:30pm Majority MPs begin to arrive at PM-designate Saad Hariri’s residence in Qoreitem for their first meeting since 2009 parliamentary elections
3:20 Qaouk : The resistance is not looking for political gains in the new government
2:30 pm NAVTEQ, has released its first map of Lebanon. Through this map, drivers will have access to around 14,000 km of roads and over 8,000 Points of Interest (POIs) referenced to the map to support destination selection in navigation systems.
2:20 pm BBC The election defeat of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) after 54 years of nearly unbroken rule and the landslide victory of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has met a cautious welcome in newspapers around in the world.
02;10 Hariri after his meeting with Aoun :
- This was an to ice breaking meeting like the General said.
- I want to thank the president for sponsoring the meeting. There are difficulties, but there is serious dialogue to conclude the government formation.
02:05 Aoun after his meeting with Hariri: The meeting was an ice breaker, and it helped launch dialogue on the cabinet formation, but difficulties [regarding the cabinet formation] still remain. I will leave for few days, and someone will follow up the issue on my behalf if required
12:50 India’s economy expanded 6.1 % last quarter , indicating the global recession’s impact on Asia’s third-largest economy is waning.
12;40 pm The Dalai Lama has arrived in Taiwan on a visit that has been denounced by China as being likely to destabalise improving ties with Taipei.
12:37pm The meeting between PM-designate Saad Hariri and FPM leader MP Michel Aoun began in Baabda under the auspices of President Suleiman
12:35pm Aoun said prior to the meeting with Hariri: All will depend on Hariri’s response to our demands
12:28 pm PM-designate Saad Hariri arrives in Baabda to meet with FPM leader MP Michel Aoun

11:45 Najjar awaits the Higher Judicial Council’s decision before replying to Sayyed
11:29 Tourism minister Marouni says Hariri-Aoun meeting will be “useless”
11:06 Akhbar al-Yawm: Hariri-Aoun meeting will be held at 12:30 p.m. at the Baabda palace
11:01 Hezbollah calls for forcing Libya to release Imam Sadr and his two companions
10:46 Solana whoos is currently in Syria to visit Beirut on Monday
09:06 Harb: If Aoun refuses to change his positions, we will get nowhere
08:05 FPM minister Mario Aoun: We want specific answers to our demands
07:31 visit by a delegation of the army command to Nahr al-Bared had positive effect on the leaders and members of the Beddawi Palestinian Refugee camp
05:59 Walid al-Moallem: The Lebanese government is an internal Lebanese issue , we support dialogue and we hope the government will be formed soonest possible
05:58The majority Mps will meet today to confirm that they are still the parliamentary majority and are united
05:57 Future TV sources : The meeting between Aoun and Hariri will reveal the nature of the obstruction that this causing the delay in the formation of the government
05:55 Sources close to Aoun: He will listen to Hariri’s response regarding FPM’s proposal for five portfolios
05:53 Aoun will leave Beirut after the meeting for vacation abroad
05:51 a political source: The outcome of the Meeting between Aoun and Hariri will not be significant enough to overcome the obstacles
05:45 sources of opposition: Aoun-Hariri meeting should reveal whether the obstruction of the government formation is internal or external
05:43 Hezbollah encouraged Aoun to respond to Hariri’s initiative
05:21 Jumblatt: We will participate in the meeting of the majority in support of the PM-designate and the Taif accord

 
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Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 1 September, 2009 @ 3:03 PM in Beirut
Beirut – Prime Minister-designate MP Saad Hariri finally met yesterday at the Baabda Presidential Palace with Free Patriotic movement leader general Michel Aoun under the auspices of Lebanese president Michel Suleiman. Following their face to face meeting both called it an ice breaker.
According to As-Safir newspaper the meeting did not result in any agreement regarding the government formation , but both leaders agreed to stop media campaigns and foster dialogue between them .
As-Safir reported that Hariri concluded the meeting by presenting two proposals, the first to divide the Interior ministry ( a sovereign ministry) into two : Interior and Municipalities ministries , and the Foreign ministry ( another sovereign ministry) into two : Foreign and Immigrants ministries . The other proposal was to form a cabinet of “national political leaders”
Note : Hariri denied today making any proposals that call for dividing the sovereign ministries
Aoun accepted the idea of forming a cabinet composed of national political leaders, while noting that dividing sovereign ministries would need law amendments, which he said cannot be done before forming the new cabinet. However, Aoun said he will wait for Hariri to present him with a suggestion on how the issue could be pursued.
As-Safir also revealed that the FPM leader did not change his demands on being granted the Interior and Telecommunications ministries, as well as being given four Maronite ministerial seats, while Hariri insisted on not appointing any candidate who was defeated in the June 7 parliamentary elections. ( In refrerence to Aoun’s son-in-law Gebran Bassil )
During the meeting, President Suleiman stressed the necessity of speeding up the cabinet formation.
Another important event took place yesterday . 67 of the 71 majority MPs met for the first time since the election in a show of unity and to express support for Hariri . The meeting was important because the Democratic Gathering bloc which is headed by MP Walid Jumblatt also attended the meeting despite his statement early August over leaving the March 14 majority alliance .
Democratic Gathering bloc MP Wael Abu Faour was asked by Hariri to be the spokesman of the majority . Following the meeting he read the majority’s statement in a press conference on Monday . He stressed that the majority fully supports Prime Minister -designate Saad Hariri and his efforts to form the new cabinet, adding that the upcoming government should be based on the Lebanese constitution.
Abu Faour told reporters : “The majority’s openness to form a national-unity cabinet does not annul the 2009 parliamentary election results or give anyone the right to impose conditions on Saad Hariri and Michel Suleiman,”
Abu Faour said that the majority stressed during the meeting its commitment to democracy, the Taif Accord and the equal sharing of power between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon.
As suggested by MP Walid Jumblatt regarding the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) the statement stated that it (STL) should not be part of the domestic political disputes.
“Political parties must put the nation’s interests above theirs,” Abu Faour concluded

Tuesday

8:30 pm President Suleiman at the Iftar : “How could Lebanon be invited to play an effective role toward building international peace,” a reference to the country’s nomination to the non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council, “while being internally incapable of forming the long overdue national-unity government.”
07:50 pm IAEA’s Baradei : “The idea that we will wake up tomorrow, and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that is not supported by the facts as we have seen them so far,” he said.
6:4o pm Guests start arriving at the Presidential Palace in Baabda for the annual Iftar that will be hosted by the president
06:02 pm Higher Judicial Council called for distancing the judiciary from politics and condemns the recent attacks against judicial figures by Jamil Sayyed
04:30 pm Al-Arabiya TV: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad removes 40 ambassadors from their posts for supporting opposition.
4:20 pm BBC: An Iranian news agency says Mohsen Ruholamini, 25 arrested during post-election protests died after being beaten, and not from meningitis as police had first claimed.
1 :55 pm NNA: Higher Judicial Council is currently meeting and is expected to discuss accusations launched by former head of General Security Directorate Jamil As-Sayyed
12: 00 pm Following his meeting with Solana , president Suleiman stressed the importance of granting the Palestinians the right of return, “since any Mideast solution that fails to give this right” to the Palestinians “would instigate problems in the region,” , he said
10:40 President Michel Suleiman meets with EU Foreign Policy chief Javier Solana at the Baabda Palace
9:40 Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has reportedly told a meeting of the parliamentary majority MPs in Qoreitem on Monday that 90 percent of the Cabinet lineup related to the majority and the President as well as Hezbollah and AMAL movement has been achieved.
09:30 Higher Judicial Council will discuss Tuesday Sayyed’s statements. The council members are to take a position regarding the accusations launched by Sayyed against some judges, including Saqr Saqr and Said Mirza.
09:05 Fatfat told the Voice of Lebanon: Conditions do not favor cabinet being formed soon. He emphasized the need for holding another meeting soon between Hariri and Aoun
08:58 MP Alain Aoun told the Voice of Lebanon: No progress has been made on cabinet formation. He added : “Hariri did not present any new proposals, and the two leaders only held discussions,” , in reference to the Aoun – Hariri meeting
07:10 Hariri has asked his MPs to reduce media contacts
07:03 “Al Akhbar “: MP Michel Murr did not make any suggestions nor did he comment on any of issues discussed during the parliament majority meeting
06:59 Hariri has asked Abu Faour to read the final statement of the majority meeting yesterday
06:53 yesterday’s meeting reflected positively on the relationship between the Democratic Gathering bloc and of the Lebanese Forces’bloc
06:22 an Islamic Iftar in Quraytam Thursday which “Hezbollah” , Amal and Sheih Qabalan were invited
06:15 Jumblatt imposed on the majority during yesterday’s meeting the paragraph related to the International Tribunal
06:12 Suleiman notified Berri about the results of the meeting between Aoun and Hariri
06:05 Hariri proposed a “government of national leaders” and Aoun immediately accepted
05:48 Hariri told the majority at the meeting: I will continue the policy of extending a hand and to continue to communicate with all
05:35 Hariri circles: The main issues with Aoun remain unresolved
05:28 sources of “Free Patriotic Movement”: Aoun asked for four Maronite ministers and one Armenian Minister
05:15 “An-Nahar:” Aoun-Hariri meeting has not made any substantial political progress

 
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Wednesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Wednesday, 2 September, 2009 @ 8:33 AM in Beirut
Beirut – As expected Lebanese President Michel Suleiman hosted an annul Iftar at the Baabda presidential palace. During his Iftar speech Suleiman stressed the need to form a new government prior to the UN General Assembly in mid-September and warned that delay in a Cabinet lineup could have a “negative impact” on the country.
“Our duty dictates that we have a government on the eve of the UN General Assembly, particularly since we are poised to join the Security Council in the next two years,” Suleiman said
“How could Lebanon be invited to play an effective role toward building international peace,” a reference to the country’s nomination to the non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council, “while being internally incapable of forming the long overdue national-unity government.”
Suleiman urged the various political leaders to adopt “constructive initiatives” to help speed up Cabinet formation and called for the resumption of national dialogue.
Suleiman warned against “throwing accusations at each other,” saying this “will only increase the split in the country.”
“The Constitution marks the boundary of powers, and there are no boundaries for national unity,” Suleiman told his guests, among whom were Speaker Nabih Berri, PM-designate Saad Hariri, caretaker PM Fouad Saniora and MP Walid Jumblatt. General Michel Aoun and former President Amin Gemayel were absent, since both are abroad
Suleiman called on the political leaders to rise above egoism and narrow personal interests and to act in the best interest of the country
Suleiman also called for strengthening and unifying Lebanon, “to be able to confront the Israeli aggressions and to stand in the face of strife.”
Suleiman also stressed the importance of the implementation the Taif Accord “and the pursuing of national dialogue sessions to guarantee coexistence among Lebanese factions.”

Wednesday
6:03pm PM designate Saad Hariri discussed the status of governmnet formation with MP Robert Ghanem
5:58pm Nadim Gemayel invited Siniora and March 14 MPs to attend the memorial marking his father’s assassination on September 14
05:42 pm Al Markaziyah : Sfeir did not participate in the presidential Iftar due to the distance between Diman and Baabda
05:37pm Judicial source: the Higher Judicial council considers the accusations by Jamil Sayyed are personal in nature and politically motivated
5: 30 BBC : Afghanistan’s deputy chief of intelligence, Abdullah Laghmani, has been killed after a suicide attack in the east of the country.
5:25 CNN : A 7.0-magnitude tremor jolted the Indonesian island of Java earlier in the day, killing at least 34 people and injuring more than 300, according to Indonesian Health Ministry official Rustam Pakaya. Another 40 are missing and possibly trapped, he said.
4:30pm PM-designate Hariri met Army Commander General Kahwaji in Qoreitem
04;00pm Bloomberg: BP Plc, Europe’s second-largest oil company, reported a “giant” discovery at the Tiber Prospect in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that may contain more than 3 billion barrels, after drilling the world’s deepest exploration well. It was drilled to approximately 35,055 feet (10,685 meters), greater than the height of Mount Everest.
15:35 Minister Baroud issued instructions to the central security council to pursue the issue of the disappearance of Joseph Sader
3:19 March 14 coordinator Fares Soueid: The issue of the kataeb is being dealt with and it will hopefully be resolved after Gemayel returns from his overseas trip
3:11pm Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil leaves Qoreitem after meeting with PM-designate Saad Hariri, without making any statement
2:51pm Fatfat : Hariri did not propose a government of national leaders during his meeting with aoun as reported by as Safir . The meeting of the majority was to reconfirm our existence as the majority
2:40pm March 14 warns against “the renewed attempts to annul the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) by blackmailing the state and the international community.”
2:33pm MP Sami Gemayel: “No official in the Kataeb party will visit Syria before Damascus apologizes and admits to mistakes made at Lebanon’s expense.”
2:17pm PM-designate Saad Hariri meets with Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil in Qoreitem
1:42pm Speaker Nabih Berri meets with Cypriot counterpart Marios Karoyan at Nejmeh Square
12:47 MP Walid Jumblatt after meeting with Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah : We share his political views, positions on regional issues
12:37pm MP Ali Bazzi: We have to know that we “can’t clap with one hand.” We have to be optimistic in order to form a cabinet.
12:26pm MP Ali Hassan Khalil after meeting Berri: Mistaken are those who put a timeframe for cabinet formation. The only solution to overcome the crisis is for all parties to meet and agree on a single formula.
12:06pm Tawq: Love for the homeland requires an understanding among the Lebanese to face the dangers. They have to make up their minds and form a cabinet that would deal with Lebanese affairs first.
11:48 Speaker Nabih Berri arrives at Nejmeh Square to preside over the weekly Wednesday parliamentary meetings
11:37 Suicide attack kills 22 including 18 civilians and four government officials, outside a mosque in eastern Afghanistan
10:40 Al-Liwaa newspaper: Hezbollah, Amal delegations and MP Walid Jumblatt’s son Timor, who will represent his father to attend Hariri’s Iftar on Thursday .
09:38 Jumblatt to visit Shiite cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah at his residence in Haret Hreik later on Wednesday
09:26 MP Anwar al-Khalil told the Voice of Lebanon : Some Saudi-Syrian issues still unresolved. Khalil added that President Michel Suleiman’s attending of the UN meeting in September, while the government formation is still stagnant, is unacceptable.
07:35 Habib told “Voice of Lebanon”: President Suleiman’s speech was objective and we have to rise selfishness and personal interests . General Aoun has demanded share greater than his size . No disputes within the majority over the distribution of portfolios
7:31 Al Akhbar: the Army Command received a letter from the Iranian embassy inquiring about the type of weapons it needs . The Army responded with a list , focusing on the need for air-defense systems. Iran has previously made offers to sell arms to the army
07:10 a meeting between Geagea and Suleiman took place last night after the Iftar
06:59 French diplomat : a government of national unity in Lebanon could prevent an Israeli adventure
06:37 France source: The region could start witnessing significant changes starting end of September
06:04 “Free Patriotic Movement” sources : Hariri presented 2 proposals to Aoun : divinding up some ministries and a government of national leaders
05:57 Dozens of young people from the Burj al Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp cut off the airport road last night in protest against power blackouts
05:49 As Safir : Hariri will , hand over to Basil his proposal for government formation as per his discussions with Aoun
05:43 Council of Bishops will hold tenth annual meeting
05: 32 Mikati : I’m not in the March 14 alliance . I am a centrist like Jumblatt

 
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What is delaying formation of Lebanon’s government? Q&A
Published: Wednesday, 2 September, 2009 @ 8:23 PM in Beirut
By Yara Bayoumy
Beirut – Nearly three months after a parliamentary election, Lebanon is still without a government. Politicians have been wrangling, coalitions have been redrawn, and outside allies have interfered but the country is no closer to swearing in a new government.
The U.S.-backed anti-Syrian “March 14″ coalition led by Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri won the parliamentary vote on June 7. He has since said he was keen to form a “government of national unity” that will include the opposition, led by the powerful Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Here’s a look at why the process is taking such a long time.
WHAT HAS BEEN AGREED SO FAR?
The rival alliances agreed in July on the shape of the next government, including the division of 30 cabinet seats; a delicate task that incorporates Lebanon’s principle of sectarian power-sharing. Essentially, Sunni Hariri’s Saudi-backed “March 14″ alliance gets 15 seats and Shi’ite Hezbollah and its allies in the “March 8″ coalition are allotted 10 seats.
President Michel Suleiman would be given a decisive say in government by being allowed to nominate five ministers.
SO WHAT’S THE HOLD-UP INTERNALLY?
Hezbollah ally and Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun is adamant about retaining the telecommunications portfolio and its current minister, his son-in-law, Gebran Bassil.
But Hariri and others in March 14 have strong objections to Bassil heading the ministry because he lost in the election.
Hariri is also keen to gain the portfolio for his coalition in order to oversee a long-stalled plan to privatise the telecoms sector. The sale of two state-owned mobile firms is expected to garner as much as $7 billion and will go some way towards chopping Lebanon’s crippling $48 billion public debt.
Aoun, who has been allotted five seats in the next cabinet, is also insisting on getting one of the key ministerial posts. He has wants the interior ministry which is to be decided by President Suleiman. But Hariri deeply opposes Aoun’s demand.
Adding to the confusion, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, once a pillar of the “March 14″ coalition, last month distanced himself from the alliance, creating a huge rupture in the country’s political map and undermining March 14′s victory in the polls.
WHAT ABOUT EXTERNAL FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO THE STALLING?
These are slightly more opaque but there are a few possible explanations.
Immediately after the election, several rounds of talks were held between regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Syria, who back the opposing Lebanese coalitions, to come to an agreement over the government’s make-up.
The talks highlighted the two states’ influence over the March 14 and March 8 groups, whose leaders have historically allied with competing regional and international powers.
At first, the talks were credited with quickly reaching the “15-10-5″ cabinet seat-sharing formula and forcing Hezbollah to drop its demand for veto power in government.
There was an understanding that Saudi King Abdullah would visit Syrian President Bashar al-Assad once a new Lebanese government was sworn in to seal the rapprochement. There was also even talk of Hariri visiting Syria, which the billionaire politician has accused of assassinating his father Rafik al-Hariri in 2005. The Sunni leader, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, is Riyadh’s closest ally in Lebanon.
However, the talks abruptly stopped in July.
It may be because Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia was upset with U.S. overtures towards Syria, which saw Washington announce that it will return an ambassador to Damascus for the first time since Rafik’s killing. This could raise Saudi fears that the re-emergence of Syria will be another victory for its ally, Shi’ite Iran, and by extension, Hezbollah. Strong Shi’ite influence in the region is anathema to Saudi Arabia.
Another possible explanation puts the blame on Syria which may be dissatisfied with what it sees as the slow pace of U.S. rapprochement and its rehabilitation in the international arena. Sources say Syrian-U.S. talks focused on security in Iraq were not positive. The United States has long accused Syria of allowing insurgents to cross into Iraq from the long, porous border. Syria rejects accusations it is meddling in Iraq.
Regional experts say Syria, and by extension Hezbollah, may therefore be using Aoun and his various objections to the government’s make-up as a delaying tactic.
WITH ALL THESE COMPLICATIONS, IS THERE AN END IN SIGHT?
The big date to watch is the United Nations General Assembly meeting which starts on Sept. 23. President Suleiman said he wants to head a delegation that includes Hariri as prime minister when he heads to New York.
Hariri also wants to attend the opening of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology near Jeddah immediately after the General Assembly as PM.
WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF MORE DELAY?
Some fear a prolonged standoff on the government formation could revive sectarian tensions which have frequently sparked street violence in the past, scaring away investors and crippling the vital tourism sector.
The current cabinet is now only in caretaker mould so it cannot take any decisions, economic, financial or political. So for now everything is on hold from tackling privatisation to power outages and other pressing social issues.

 
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Thursday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Thursday, 3 September, 2009 @ 10:52 AM in Beirut
Beirut- It appears that the Aoun -Hariri meeting resulted in more questions than answers . Everyday we hear new speculation about various types of proposals that were presented by Prime Minister Hariri.  Hariri has denied making any such proposals.
One of the proposals according to As Safir called for splitting some sovereign ministries into 2 such as the ministry of Interior and municipalities and the ministry of foreign affairs and immigration
Another proposal according to the same newspaper called for a government of national leaders
Yesterday a new proposal surfaced after the meeting between Hariri and Gebran Bassil .
Hariri has reportedly suggested the concept of rotating the ministries.
FPM sources told An Nahar newspaper that Hariri suggested to Caretaker Telecommunications Minster Bassil during their meeting on Wednesday to swap portfolios, meaning the opposition would get the education instead of the telecommunications ministry and the labor instead of the energy ministry.
Aoun has reportedly been insisting on getting five portfolios – 4 for Maronites and one for an Armenian , a sovereign ministry and keeping Bassil as a minister despite opposition by the parliament majority.
Al-Liwaa newspaper said the Hariri-Bassil meeting was fruitless after the FPM official insisted on getting three key portfolios and rejected the PM-designate’s rotation offer.
Aoun is reportedly under pressure to be more realistic and reasonable even by some of his close allies . Speaker Nabih Berri has reportedly described some of FPM’s demands as unconstitutional.
It is not clear whether another meeting will take place between Hariri and Bassil . As Safir newspaper has reported that Hariri was awaiting Bassil’s reply, but FPM sources are claiming “that the ball is still in the PM-designate ‘s court.”
According to observers that time that Hariri should be proposing to Aoun a “take it or leave it offer must be getting very close “.
Many blame the delay in government on the Syrian-Saudi rapprochement and Iran. MP Walid Jumblatt and Speaker Nabih Berri met last night and following their meeting Jumblatt told reporters that he agrees with Berri’s emphasis on Syrian-Saudi relations, adding that he encourages the establishment of a partnership that does not target Iran in order to facilitate the cabinet formation.
” I consider the Syrian-Saudi partnership a basis that guarantees the regional atmosphere for cabinet formation.” Jumblatt was quoted as saying
In short , it does not appear that Lebanon will have a government by September 23, the day the president is scheduled to be at the UN on the occasion of naming Lebanon as a non-permanent member of the security council.

Thursday
08:40 pm The Lebanese army arrested four wanted men, including Ali Mohammed Ismail , a top criminal, in house raids in the village of Brital in the Bekaa Valley. Ismail was arrested after being shot in the leg by Lebanese troops. Drugs and weapons and 6 stolen cars were confiscated by the army
08:30 pm SANA: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived in Damascus on Thursday evening and went straight into talks with his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Al-Assad. He is expected to head to Iran from Damascus
8:20pm The Special Tribunal for Lebanon and INTERPOL have concluded an interim agreement on INTERPOL’s assistance to the international court.
8:15pm The Lebanese army arrested four wanted men in house raids in the village of Brital in the Bekaa Valley and seized six stolen cars.
7:40pm Sources told Al Manar TV on the Hariri-Bassil meeting: The atmosphere has not changed and was rather negative as Hariri did not provide anything new regarding ministerial portfolios.
7:30 pm: In China, a swine flu vaccine was approved on Thursday, which also works with one dose, according to its maker, Sinovac Biotech Ltd
07:07pm La Revue du Liban: Lebanon’s Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh announced on Thursday that there was a $16 billion cash flow into Lebanon in the last 12 months, especially during the first quarter of 2009, adding that 90% of the flow was exchanged from US dollars to Lebanese liras.
5:50pm Lebanon’s highest Shiite authority Sheikh Abdul Amir Qabalan stressed there is no enmity between Shiites and the Maronite Patriarchate. He was also quoted as saying that ties are not broken with Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir.
4:06pm The National Bloc told Maj. Gen. Sayyed: He who made a fortune from the General Security’s budget has no right to throw accusations or give lessons.
1:07pm MP Alain Aoun told NBN: We are not against rotating portfolios, but we oppose confessional or monopolizing ministries.
1:00 pm NYT: The death toll from a powerful earthquake and several strong aftershocks reached 46 and Indonesian officials said the figure was likely to increase significantly in the coming days.
12:50pm MP Mohammed Raad: Settlement doesn’t mean peace. President Barack Obama’s settlement plan in the region eradicates the Palestinian cause.
12:42pm Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir: Expatriates should encourage their young children to visit their home country Lebanon.
12:30pm MP Nadim Gemayel delivered to Berri an invitation to participate in a mass on the occasion of the anniversary marking the assassination of former President-elect Bashir Gemayel .
11:53 Former ISF chief Ali Hajj told al-Manar: The fact that the judiciary remained silent is a proof that our accusations against it are true. There is only an attempt to put the tribunal on the right track and not an organized campaign against it.
11:43 MP Abdel Latif al-Zein told Future News: Hariri is not obliged to abide by the demands of parliamentary blocs. The president and the PM-designate are aware of their constitutional powers.
11:20 AFP: Iranian parliament approves 18 nominees of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s 21-member cabinet
11:11 Miqati after visiting Druze Sheikh Akl Naim Hassan: We are in dire need of a Government of national partnership to meet the challenges
10:44 a political source: The call by Suleiman for the formation of the government before September 15 is wishful thinking
10:42 al Bayan source close to Hariri : Hariri will put forward a surprising proposal on government formation during the next few hours
10:40 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend the UN General assembly meeting later this month
10:36 Opposition sources: those concerned with the STL will not allow the repetition of the scenario of the four officers ( that were jailed and released without trial)
10:35 MP Antoine Zahra told Future News: The majority’s reiteration that it is seeking to form a national unity government has been explained by the other team as surrendering to preconditions.
9:10 Jumblatt after meeting with Berri last night : ” I consider the Syrian-Saudi partnership a basis that guarantees the regional atmosphere for cabinet formation.”
8:30 MP Ammar Houry told VOL: The possibilities of cabinet formation are linked to removal of obstacles which won’t disappear without dialogue. The majority wants the minority’s participation but without its preconditions.
7:30 PSP official Rami al-Rayyes told VOL: We have to benefit from any Arab-Arab rapprochement.

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Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 4 September, 2009 @ 8:37 AM in Beirut
Beirut – Something interesting took place yesterday. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) announced in a statement that the STL and the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) “have concluded an interim agreement on INTERPOL’s assistance to the tribunal with regard to its investigations and other proceedings that pertain to the crimes that fall under its jurisdiction.”
According to its website INTERPOL “provides law enforcement officials in the field with emergency support and operational activities, especially in its priority crime areas. A Command and Co-ordination Centre operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and can deploy an Incident Response Team to the scene of a serious crime or disaster,” in addition to many other services.
STL President Antonio Cassese signed the interim agreement on behalf of the STL, and INTERPOL’s Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble, signed it on behalf of his organization.
“The interim agreement, which entered into force on August 24, is aimed at enabling the STL to request assistance from INTERPOL for the purposes of the ongoing investigations carried out by the Office of the Prosecutor of the Tribunal and other proceedings undertaken by the Tribunal in discharging its mandate, until a more comprehensive cooperation agreement that is currently being negotiated between the two bodies is concluded and enters into force,” the STL’s press release said.
STL has come under attacks recently . According to sources of al Sharq Alawsat newspaper : The recent attacks are aimed at “hindering the work of international investigators who began settling down at the tribunal’s office in Beirut.”
“The campaign started with the arrival of a delegation from the court to lay the groundwork (for their investigation) despite obstacles facing some aspects of their mission which we are trying to overcome,” the source added.
Another newspaper Al Liwaa has reported that investigators have recently questioned around 150 people, in a move that it described as “the last checkup” on the list of names of those involved or have information on Hariri’s Feb. 2005 killing.
The sources of Sharq Alawsat newspaper are saying: “What is happening now is nothing more than the launching of war against the court .”
The purpose of STL is to find and try the killers of former prime minister Rafik Hariri , who was assassinated on February 14 , 2005 in downtown Beirut .
Until last May Syria was the primary suspect in the assassination of Hariri . But last May the German magazine Der Spiegel published a report in which it revealed that Hezbollah was behind Hariri’s murder and it tried to clear Syria’s name
The Syrian regime according to Sharq Alawsat sources has entrusted a legal office with following up developments at the tribunal . The sources have questioned Syria’s action in this regard and told the newspaper : “Would a legal office follow up on a case if the side that commissioned it is not involved in the case?”
The question is how much help can INTERPOL provide the STL if the whole issue becomes politicized , since this organization does not get involved in political issues

Friday
8:12pm one person killed and 2 wounded in gunfire as a result of a personal clash in Qebbe Tripoli
7:45pm clashes involving rockets in Hermel between the Allo and Naser Eddine neighborhoods the death of ISF officerناصرالدين Nasser eddine
6: 50 pm The White House said Friday it regretted Israel’s reported plans to build new settlements, calling it “inconsistent” with its international commitments to the peace process.
6:20 pm A NATO jetfighter blasted two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Friday, killing up to 90 people, including insurgents and dozens of civilians who had rushed to the scene to collect fuel
6;00 pm Al Markaziyah sources: Hezbollah security apparatus with help from The Lebanese communications ministry were able to pin point Ezzeddine’s location in southern Beirut . Hezbollah then raided his location arrested him and handed him over to the judicial authorities
5:00pm Unknown assailants shot and killed a policeman in Hermel in northeast Lebanon.
3:35 pm Al-Arabiya TV : Hezbollah officials MP Mohammed Raad, Amin Sherri and Hajj Wafiq Safa are all affected by Lebanese businessman Salah Ezzeddine’s bankruptcy. Hezbollah MP Hussein al-Hajj has filed a lawsuit against Ezzeddine requesting reimbursement of his $200,000 that he had invested with him.
3:30 pm CNN Unemployment in the USA jumps to a 26-year high of 9.7%, even as employers cut the smallest number of jobs since August 2008
2:51pm : Alfa cellular company sold 25 unique cellular line numbers for $600,000
1:40pm The Democratic Left Movement expressed concerns about the policies aimed at putting obstacles to cabinet formation and urged Hariri to hold on to Constitutional norms.
1:22 pm Former PM Salim el Hoss: In order to separate between the executive and legislative branches the MPs should not be in the government
1:20 pm Al-Akhbar : United Arab Emirates security authorities have expelled in the past two months more than 45 Lebanese businessmen and employees for security reasons and most of those expelled are Shiites.
1 :16 pm Caretaker Minister Talal Arslan: the government crisis is not a crisis of demands but it is a crisis of the regime and such regimes produce crises
1:10 pm BBC ‎: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will approve more construction in West Bank settlements before considering a halt to building work, officials say.
1;00 pm The case of Salah Ezzeddine has drawn comparisons in Lebanon with that of Bernard Madoff, the New York failed financier whose multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme wiped out thousands of investors and charities worldwide. Madoff was sentenced in June to 150 years in prison.
12:53pm The National Liberal Party: Continuous attempts to put obstacles to cabinet formation means there is an intentional effort to harm all the nation.
12:50 pm Al-Sharq Al-Awsat : Zahle MP Okab Sakr warned against a new round of assassinations and security breaches before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon issues its indictment in the case of the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri.
12:30pm Ministry of Communications: commemorative stamps will be in circulation starting September 17
12:16pm Siniora: It is natural the Lebanese people are upset about the waste of time that is causing the delay in the formation of the cabinet . The Lebanese are looking forward to see a strong and united coalition
12:06pm Taymour Walid Jumblatt, toured the Hasbayya district accompanied Abu Faour and met a number of PSP members and key officials of the region
12:03pm Khalifa told Sawt al Sada: neither Hezbollah nor Amal will participate in the new government without the Free Patriotic Movement and all the talk about the relationship between Berri and Aoun is just rumors
11:50 Al Manar TV: Energy Minister Alain Tabourian said that he has reached an agreement with President Michel Suleiman and outgoing Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to find a legal method to buy power generators in order to resolve the problem of electricity shortages in Lebanon.
10:55 Minister Elie Marouni told Future News: If Aoun keeps holding onto his conditions and if Hezbollah and Amal insist that their participation in cabinet should be linked to Aoun’s participation, then there is no solution to the problem . I hold the Lebanese judiciary responsible for inaction with regards to what Jamil al-Sayyed said , because its statement was more like appeasing him
10:17 Minister Aoun told “Future news:” We hope that the PM designate will show some humility and refrain from provocative rhetoric so that through dialogue will will be able to resolve the impasse facing the formation of the government
10:16 Former Tourism Minister Joe Sarkis told Now Lebanon : If the cabinet formation remains stagnant, then President Michel Suleiman might sign the cabinet decree even if Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun refuses to participate in the new government.
09:51 42 wanted people were arrested for committing criminal acts
09:45 Mikati: Betting on the time factor by exerting pressure in the formation of the new government is the wrong bet and does not achieve any results
09:38 Awan newspaper : MPs and cadres of Hezbollah have filed lawsuits against Ezzeddine because of losing their money after his declaration of bankruptcy. Some are referring to Ezzedinne’s method in dealing with his investors a “Ponzi scheme”
09:26 A Lebanese accused of embezzling 360 thousand pounds in Egypt using fake credit cards was arrested
09:20 majority sources told “Okaz”: Hariri will present to the president before he travels to New York Solomon a proposal on government formation, whatever is the outcome of the negotiations with Aoun
8:40 EU Foreign Policy chief Javier Solana told al-Arabiya: It is difficult to understand why an agreement hasn’t been reached on cabinet formation after distinctive elections.
8:30 Legal expert Hassan al-Rifai told VOL: Change in ministries can only take place legally. This would be impossible before cabinet receives a vote of confidence from parliament.
7:40 MP Robert Ghanem told VOL: The PM-designate should propose a cabinet that reflects the results of the elections and does not eliminate anyone . If any party rejects the proposal then it is its problem
07:13 MP Sami Gemayel announced at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Phalange Party cabinet that he would not attend any meeting from now on in which Jumblatt is participating
0711 one of the majority MPs revealed that Jumblatt deliberately and in a harsh manner tried to silence the Christian MPs during the last March 14 meeting in Quraytem
06:54 delay in setting a date for President Suleiman with Obama because of the overcrowding of the agenda of the latter
06:23 Emile Emile Lahoud: There are two factors that can delay the forming of a government in Lebanon an internal and external. In Lebanon we always need the regional factor which is not currently available
06:19 sources of the “Free Patriotic Movement”: if the negotiations will be like those of the Baabda ( Aoun -Hariri )and Quraytem ( Bassil Hariri ) meetings then the requirements of another Aoun -Hariri meetings have not been met
06:07 following the Quraytem Iftar Harir met privately with the representatives of Berri and Nasrallah during which Berri confirmed he will not back down from the choice of national unity government
06:01 Informed Sources: Hariri alluded to his intention to send a proposal of a cabinet line-up to President Suleiman before his Sept 23 trip to New York
05:39 “An-Nahar”: Hariri and Aoun truce is on shaky ground
05:33 On September 25 the President of the Republic of Lebanon will address the United Nations General assembly in New York
05:23 political sources : the government formation process has reached an impasse and now it is in need of quality initiatives

 
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Saturday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Saturday, 5 September, 2009 @ 12:21 PM in Beirut
Beirut – The story of Salah Ezzedine , who was nicknamed the ‘Lebanese Madoff’ is the focus of the media in Lebanon. It was confirmed yesterday that several key Hezbollah officials were financially affected by Ezzedine’s scheme and many are now suing him in the Lebanese courts .
Al-Mustaqbal daily said among those who filed charges against Ezzedine was Hezbollah lawmaker Hussein Hajj Hassan, who requested the reimbursement of his $200,000 investment
Hezbollah officials MP Mohammed Raad, Amin Sherri and Hajj Wafiq Safa are on the list of people who were affected by Ezzedine’s bankruptcy, according to a report by Al-Arabiya television.
Latest reports have revealed that 11,000 Lebanese Shiites have lost the money that they have invested with Ezzedine
Ezzedine‘s case has drawn comparisons in Lebanon with that of Bernard Madoff, the New York failed financier whose multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme wiped out thousands of investors and charities worldwide. Madoff was sentenced last June to 150 years in prison.
Ezzedine, who reportedly has very close ties with top Hezbollah officials, has declared bankruptcy, leaving thousands of citizens unemployed in Beirut’s southern suburbs as well as in south and east Lebanon.
Ezzedine, a wealthy businessman from the town of Maaroub near the southern port city of Tyre, is a prominent financier particularly among Shiite circles in Lebanon. He is the owner of Dar Al-Hadi Publishing House – one of Lebanon’s most prominent publishing houses of religious Shiite books which also prints books written by Hezbollah officials – and al-Hadi TV for children.
Preliminary investigation has revealed that Ezzedine had major business interests, particularly in oil and iron industries, in Eastern Europe and suffered substantial losses when oil prices dropped starting mid last year. He tried to make up for his losses by taking money from Lebanese investors, promising them up to 40 percent interest on their deposits which he could not repay, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
“Al-Safir” newspaper which is well known for its support to Hezbollah reported Friday that Speaker Nabih Berri, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah have been following up on this issue, especially since a large segment of Shiites has been affected by the bankruptcy.
According to Lebanese central News Agency (Al Markaziyah ) Hezbollah security apparatus with help from the Lebanese Ministry of Communications were able to pin point Ezzeddine’s location in southern Beirut . Hezbollah then raided his location arrested him and handed him over to the Lebanese judicial authorities. Earlier reports have incorrectly indicated that he has handed himself over the judicial authorities. Ezzedine’s family has reportedly fled the country to a unknown location and he was planning to unite with the members of his family when he was detained.
His wealth was estimated between 1.2 to 2 billion Dollars.
According to financial observers none of the Lebanese banks were involved in Ezzedine’s scheme and therefore won’t have any affect on the Lebanese financial situation.
Some observers have reported that Hezbollah ‘s loss as a result of Ezzedine’s bankruptcy exceeds its loss during the 2006 war with Israel . In 2006 Hezbollah was compensated by the Lebanese government, but this time this option is reportedly out of the question.

Saturday
9:01pm former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad arrived in Beirut
8:20pm Riad Salameh told “MTV:” with the delay in the formation of the government we will miss the opportunity to modernize the economy and the financing of projects . The Ministry of Finance is doing is duty in repayment of the debt, but The caretaker government can not be counted on to pay any additional debt
8:16pm Hunein told “Future News”: The prime minister-designate needs to come up with a government formula agreed upon with the President of the Republic, who will issues the decree as agreed with the prime minister-designate
8:09 pm Alain Aoun told “or TV”: Acceptance of any proposal requires it to be closer to the demands that were put forward
8:05pm Tabourian: the problem of electricity will not be solved in ten days and the amount we will get out of Egypt will not solve every problem, especially if demand increases
8:04 pm Qabbani told “LBC”: Egypt will give us enough gas for the Deir Ammar plant, but may need more energy to solve the problem
8:00pm “LBC”: Jumblatt plans to organize receptions and public gatherings for the president in Beiteddine and will set joint programs for the Druze and Christian concurrent holidays
4:05 pm WSJ: Government efforts to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into the US economy appear to be helping the US climb out of the worst recession in decades.
4:00 pm VOA: A senior British minister says trade and oil deals with Libya played a “very big part” in Britain’s decision to include the Lockerbie bomber in a prisoner transfer agreement between the two countries.
3:10pm Minister Bassil: Why the rotation of ministries would only apply in the case of the Patriotic Freedom Movement?
2:35pm MP Adwan: We will invest all our capacities to safeguard the President and the presidential position. The Lebanese Forces” does not care about positions and the fall of Lebanon can only be achieved with the fall of co-existence and the suppression of facts
2:34pm “New TV”: Lebanese in Gabon are complaining about the attacks their businesses are being subjected to by the opposition and are also complaining about the negligence by the Lebanese embassy in Gabon and are demanding the attention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
2:28pm A vehicle hit and killed a man, whose identity was not known, on the Zalka highway at dawn Saturday. The car sped away.
1:02pm The Lebanese army arrested several people involved in the Hermel and Qubbah shooting incidents.
12:01 Bassil: FPM does not want Hariri to be a photocopy of Siniora and we urge him to show us that he is different
11:52 Abi Ramaya told OTV”: We have given a lot of concessions and we have become “naked” and we cannot participate with them on their own terms
11:30 Seven were wounded in two separate road accidents in Wadi el Sitt and the Karantina
1:18 MP Mohammed al-Hajjar told New TV: The cabinet should be formed before the president travels to New York. However, the government should be based on constitutional norms. Aoun continues to be the main obstacle facing the formation of the cabinet due to his impossible demands
11:15 Shams al-Din: The only solution to the process of forming the government lies in the return to the Constitution
11:11 Alloush told “LBC”: Hariri may propose a governmental to Suleiman before he travel to New York but it will be subject the approved of the President of the Republic
11:10 MP Ibrahim Kenaan told LBC: Until now no one gave us a reply on a unity cabinet proposal that we can either reject or accept
11:05 MP Michel Moussa told Future News: It’s better to have a unity cabinet that strengthens and supports the president’s stances during the General Assembly meeting in New York.
11:02 Salloukh told “LBC”: the situation in Gabon is beginning to return to calm and stability, none of the Lebanese was affected
10:50 some Islamic fundamentalist elements are committing terrorist acts inside the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el Helweh
10:30 President Suleiman will move Saturday afternoon to the presidential summer headquarters in Beiteddine, Shouf region of Mt Lebanon , where he will stay for nine days
10:00 UAE embassy sources denied to the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper the report in al-Akhbar daily that UAE authorities forced Lebanese Shiites out of the country.
09:40 38 wanted people were arrested for committing various crimes
09:10 MP Qazzi told Radio Free Lebanon: The obstruction ( facing the government formation) is internal but those behind the obstruction are external and the disputes are not only between the 2 rival camps( March 14 and March 8) but within the alliances themselves
09:10 commander of the Israeli intelligence: the victory is certain in the next war on Hezbollah and will include access to the organization’s leadership and its major activists
08:23 Judge Mirza: The result of the investigation of Ezzedine will show if the bankruptcy is fraudulent or the result of factors beyond his control
7:28 Alloush : the sudden Syrian attack against Jumblatt during the past few days reveals that the primary objective of the Syrian regime is to destroy the parliament majority
07:15 Gebran Bassil will be visiting PM designate saad Hariri at his home in Quraithem according to informed sources

 
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Sunday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Sunday, 6 September, 2009 @ 12:57 PM in Beirut
Beirut – If it is up to the parliamentary bloc leaders Lebanon would end up with a government of 129 ministers because in addition to the 128 member parliament General Michel Aoun wants his son- in-law Gebran Bassil to be included in the cabinet even though he failed in the last election.
Aoun and Hariri met last week at the Baabda palace but no agreement was reached regarding his demands for participating in the new government
MP Robert Ghanem a key member of the parliament and a legal expert said Hariri should propose a government to president Suleiman that includes representatives of all the parliamentary blocs and if any of the blocs refuse Hariri’s offer then it is its own problem and not that of the nation ..in other words it should be a “take it or leave it offer “
PM-designate Saad Hariri who recently had a meeting with Bassil vowed to do everything possible to make sure Lebanon has a government ahead of President Michel Suleiman’s New York visit on September 23.
Hariri said he would resume talks with the various political leaders, stressing, however, that the need for every person to bear his responsibility.
“We are about to form a new government that comes in the wake of parliamentary elections in which March 14 forces emerged victorious,” Hariri told an Iftar gathering in Qoreitem.
“And we have said from the beginning that despite winning these elections, logic dictates that we stretch our hand to our partners in the nation,” he added.
Hariri emphasized the need to form a Cabinet that includes the various political leaders, saying: “Genuine partnership must be based on the logic that says: ‘After relinquishing many (privileges) during parliamentary elections, the other side should meet us with reasonable demands.”
According to Ad-Diyar newspaper sources, Hariri will present a new Cabinet to Suleiman for approval on Monday and it will be up to Suleiman to endorse it or not.
Al-Hayat newspaper reported that Suleiman in his own way has encouraged Hezbollah to facilitate Hariri’s latest initiative regarding government formation.
It said Suleiman does not mind Hariri going ahead with his initiative, although he prefers consensus over a Cabinet lineup that would not lead to the withdrawal of Hezbollah and AMAL in the event the PM-designate formed a well-balanced government that could be rejected by Aoun.
Pro-Syrian former minister Wiam Wahab defended last Friday Aoun’s demands and blamed the delay of the government formation on Hariri and warned of another “May 7″ events .
Wahab was referring to May 7 2008 ( when Hezbollah angered by a government decision 2 days earlier to dismantle Hezbollah’s telecommunication network and to fire pro-Hezbollah airport security chief Wafiq Shocair) , occupied the Sunni part of Beirut and tried unsuccessfully to occupy the Druze strongholds of Mount Lebanon. Wahab back then tried to create tension within the Druze community but was not successful because of the agreement reached between the 2 key leaders of the Druze community Walid Jumblatt and Talal Arslan .

Sunday
10:12pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri meets with PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt in Qoreitem.
9:31pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri meets Kataeb leader Amin Gemayel in Qoreitem to discuss cabinet formation.
8:40 pm Former Prime Minister Omar Karami , a key member of the opposition , described Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri during an Iftar as “promising, responsible and willing to sacrifice,” adding that he is the only leader qualified to form a cabinet because of his large support base
8:30 pm CNN : Nine people were killed and 983 rescued when a ferry capsized Sunday in the Philippines, leaving crews scouring the waters for survivors, officials said.
8:01pm “LBC”: Hariri, brought up the issue of portfolio rotation during his consultations today with the Minister Gebran Bassil
8:00pm Basil: the discussions with Hariri just like windmills do not produce any results
7:37pm Houry: the PM -designate will at the appropriate time and that is not in the too distant future, will exercise his constitutional authority and issue a decree on government formation
7:36pm al Manar : MP Hussein Khalil urged the president to complete his efforts that began and led to the Hariri and Aoun meeting
7:18pm MP Michel Aoun: No one can form the government in a moody fashion and has to be respectful of norms and standards
6:43pm FPM in response to Juzou’s statement : we won’t allow him or anyone else like him to take advantage of his religious position in undermining the dignity of the people and in distorting facts and spreading Fabrications and rumors
5:55pm Pakradonian said after meeting with Hariri’s in Center house : The PM designate started a new round of consultations and will submit a preliminary cabinet line up to the president
5:30pm Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil met PM-designate Saad Hariri at Center House in downtown Beirut for more than 1 hour and left without making any statement. Harir is also meeting Pakradonian
4:33pm Israeli minister: Netanyahu will announce within few days the construction of several hundred residential units in the west bank
2:45pm Suleiman told Jumblat: Any work toward unity is a profit to the nation and the institutions. Jumblatt told Suleiman : “Welcome home,” adding “We hope that your visit will be a long one.”
1:40 pm A secret Israeli military intelligence committee report has determined that Israeli airman Ron Arad died of unknown illness in captivity in Lebanon in mid-1990s, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.
1:00pm Press reports: A meeting is likely to take place Sunday between Hariri and Telecoms Minister Gebran Bassil.
1:00 pm Mount Lebanon Mufti Sheikh Mohammed Ali Jouzou criticized Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun, describing him as an enemy of the Maronite church, the President, the media and the Sunnis in Lebanon. He accused Aoun of blackmail and of trying to torpedo the formation of a national unity government “by any means possible.”
12:45pm President Michel Suleiman received MP Walid Jumblat in Beiteddine.
11:45am Hezbollah MP Mohammed Raad: The Opposition decided not to take part except in a unity government.
10:30 NYT: At least 2000 students at Washington State University have reported symptoms of the H1N1 swine flu virus, university and local health officials said, in what appeared to be one of the largest outbreaks of the virus on a college campus
10:25 A ferry carrying more than 900 people sank in the southern Philippines Sunday. Most of the passengers have been rescued, but more than 80 are still missing and at least three died.
10:20 Apollo 11 mission commander and famed astronaut Neil Armstrong shocked reporters at a press conference in Lebanon Ohio , announcing he had been convinced that his historic first step on the moon was part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the United States government.
10:10 Lebanese authorities have closed down Dar al-Hadi Publishing House which was owned by Salah Ezzedine who declared bankruptcy. Ezzedine promised to pay as much as 60 % interest to some of his clients
10:00 PM-designate Saad Hariri discussed overnight the latest developments on government formation with Hezbollah official Hajj Hussein Khalil.
9:45 Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir during his Sunday sermon: Lebanon’s participation in the U.N. Security Council meeting without a new government is “not something to be proud of.”
7:25 Al Hayat : A former minister was quoted as saying that Damascus is not interested in governmental deliberations in Beirut
07:20 Al Hayat parliament majority source : Including Bassil in the cabinet will lead to a problems with the Maronite representation
07:15 Opposition sources are surprised that Hariri may announce the government formation before the opposition submits a list of its ministers
07:12, a security source told Asharq al Awsat : we handed over to the courts criminals that confessed committing terrorist acts
07:01 Al Hayat : Basil al-Hariri to meet this afternoon to follow up on the issue of government formation
06:52 “An-Nahar”: Jumblatt to visit Suleiman before noon today in Beiteddine accompanied by a delegation
06:47 Al Hayat : Suleiman encouraged “Hezbollah” to facilitate Hariri ‘s role in forming the cabinet
06:33 the bodies of Bernard Fattal, Joseph Saadeh arrived from Cairo
06:30 Hariri: the people put their trust in us in the elections and genuine partnerships must be based on logic
06:20 Abu Faour told al Balad : We have not committed a coup against March 14, but we are leading a correction in their approach
06:07 al Balad : French officials are surprised that the Lebanese are urging Paris to intervene in the formation of the government

 
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Monday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Monday, 7 September, 2009 @ 9:26 AM in Beirut
Beirut- During an Iftar at his home in Quraithem last night Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri said: “All I am asking for is logic… No one should tell me that he is demanding his rights, because the rights belong to the Lebanese citizens.” In reference to Free patriotic
Movement leader General Michel Aoun, who has been calling his demands for specific portfolios in the new cabinet “his right”.
Hariri announced yesterday that he will make a “reasonable offer” within the coming days to form a national unity government with “those who need each other and without allowing any side to monopolize decision-making.” Again he was referring to Aoun who is insisting on having the lion’s share of the cabinet despite the fact that he was considered the biggest loser last elections
“I will take several steps within the coming few days to announce a Cabinet lineup through a reasonable proposal,” Hariri said
Hariri also said that the other camp [the minority] has the right to present its demands as long as they are “realistic,” and added: “We have extended our hand to them so that they will be with us in building the state and face all the challenges.”
Hariri highlighted at the Iftar his strong relations with Kataeb leader Amin Gemayel , Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea and in particular he stressed his strong relations with Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt whom he described as his “brother.”
Following the Iftar he met individually with each of the above leaders at his home in .
Yesterday afternoon Hariri received caretaker Minister of communications Gebran Bassil , who left without making any statement to the press. But later in the evening Bassil criticized Hariri when he said: “Discussions with Hariri just like windmills do not produce any results”
General Aoun is insisting on including Bassil, his son- in-law in the new cabinet despite the fact that he lost in the last elections.
Aoun came under another attack yesterday . Mount Lebanon Mufti Sheikh Mohammed Ali Jouzou criticized Aoun, describing him as an enemy of the Maronite church, the President, the media and the Sunnis in Lebanon.
“Here is Aoun who is hostile to himself if he doesn’t find someone to antagonize,” Jouzou said in a statement issued on Sunday.
“Here is Aoun, the enemy of the Maronite church, the enemy of the President, the enemy of the media, and most of all an enemy to Sunnis in Lebanon,” Jouzou added.
Jouzou accused Aoun of blackmail and of trying to torpedo the formation of a national unity government “by any means possible.”
“He (Aoun) wants to impose his son-in-law and relatives on the Cabinet … and sacrifice the nation for the sake of his family,” Jouzou went on to say.
The FPM issued a statement in response to Jouzou’s attacks : “Either he willingly stops this campaign and apologizes, or let the religious leadership or his political authority under Sheik Saad Hariri, whom we blame for what is happening, put an end to it.”

Monday
10:45pm OTV: the opposition is meeting at Gebran Bassil’s house to discuss its response to the cabinet line-up that was proposed by Hariri
10:00pm The Saudi ambassador returned to Lebanon
9:30pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri said that he presented the cabinet line-up to President Michel Sleiman “out of responsibility for the Lebanese people,” adding, “we have lost 70 days, time during which we could have implemented many projects,” and stressing that Suleiman has “the constitutional right to either accept or reject the cabinet line-up.”
8:00pm LBC TV : Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri voiced “discomfort” over the way the cabinet line-up was presented to President Michel Suleiman. His sources pointed out the opposition will meet after Hezbollah speech to respond to the cabinet line-up
7:50pm Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt told Al-Manar TV that he was satisfied with the cabinet formula proposed by PM-designate Saad Hariri
7:40pm Almanar based on majority sources: The cabinet line-up gives FPM The ministries of Education, labor and industry and names Gebran Bassil as minister of state without portfolio
7:00pm Change and Reform bloc issued a statement in which it stated that it “refused Hariri’s step in both its form and its content,” and also called for all ministers that were proposed for participation in the upcoming cabinet to announce their immediate rejection of its line-up.
5:50pm Al-Mada Radio station: Aoun calls for immediate resignation of FPM ministers from any Hariri cabinet. He stressed his belief that President Michel Suleiman would not sign the government decree however stated, “We find it necessary we make our position clear to the FPM partisans and politicians.”
5:40 pm Change and Reform bloc leader MP Michel Aoun calls for immediate resignation of all ministers representing the FPM in any cabinet proposed by PM-designate Saad Hariri upon presidential decree
3:00 pm Hariri proposes cabinet line-up of 30-ministers based on the 15-10-5 division and including all parliamentary blocs,” he told reporters after meeting with President Michel Suleiman.
3:23pm PM-designate Saad Hariri tells reporters prior to meeting with President Michel Suleiman he is going to present the cabinet proposal
02:12pm NNA: four unidentified bodies were found in the As-Shami River in Ikleem al-Kharoub. The tcause of death remains unknown.
02:10 pm President Michel Suleiman meets with PM-designate Saad Hariri at the Beiteddine summer presidential palace
2:00pm March 14 General Secretariat Coordinator Fares Soueid: Kataeb representatives to participate in March 14 General Secretariat meeting scheduled for Wednesday.
12:55pm Bassil informs Speaker Berri of smear campaigns against FPM, and said “the opposition is unified and aware of the plot against it.”
10:50 Houri: Hariri’s new cabinet proposal supports national unity, partnership
10:30 Ahmadinejad: Iran ready for “fair and logical” talks with world powers. “We have proposed a dialogue within a fair and logical framework with all the countries… which can be involved in changing matters,” Ahmadinejad said.
10:30 VOL: Christoph Hozjenn, External Security Adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, canceled his trip to Lebanon which was scheduled to start today, after he was asked to travel to Afghanistan.
10:20 An-Nahar newspaper : Kataeb Party leader Amin Gemayel emphasized the necessity of “reforming the Lebanese system, since the situation is in need of a drastic solution.”
10:15 Education Minister Bahia Hariri said there is no fear for the school year and that measures have been taken to curb the spread of swine flu.
10:10 Caretaker Telecoms Minister Gebran Bassil told As Safir following his yesterday’s meeting with Hariri: “ Hariri wants to form a government by means of pressure and blackmail all the way to threats of civil war. ” March 14 majority has been accusing Bassil’s father-in-law of blackmail
10:00 Kuwaiti newspaper al Rai said the majority in Lebanon believes that the opposition is sticking with Aoun because of a secret word from a regional power that wants to dominate the position of the opposition
09:30 Free Lebanon radio: three persons were injured in a fight that broke out between Lebanon First bloc MP Ziad al-Qaderi supporters and former MP Abdel Rahim Mrad followers in Al-Bireh village in Rashaya on Sunday night.
09:28 Al Dar Kuwaiti newspaper : Jumblatt will be visiting Cairo soon to meet with the Egyptian leadership
09:02 caretaker Minister Mario Aoun: FPM is sticking to its demand for 5 ministries in the new cabinet the circumstances are not ripe yet for a Jumblatt -Aoun meeting
7:36 March 14 coordinator Fares Soueid: The PM-designate will present a Cabinet lineup based on the 15-10-5 formula and taking into account the realities created by the elections without the exclusion of any (political) team. The President should go to New York after a new government had been announced.
7:30 Former MP Mustafa Alloush told VOL: Hariri will be very careful and will not present a Cabinet lineup that would be rejected by the President. Hariri is exercising his rights and duties.
5:55 Hariri told Hezbollah’s Hussein Khalil : I did what you recommended and met with Aoun but reached a dead end . Why don’t you pressure him to facilitate the formation of the government .

 
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Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 8 September, 2009 @ 10:05 AM in Beirut
Beirut- It is official . Prime Minister -Designate Saad Hariri met yesterday with president Michel Suleiman at the Beiteddine summer presidential palace and presented his new national unity cabinet line-up based on the 15-10-5 formula and included representatives from all the main parliamentary blocsof the majority and the opposition
“I presented President Michel Suleiman with a national unity cabinet lineup of 30 ministers based on the 15-10-5 formula,” Hariri said following his talks with Suleiman in Beiteddine.
“The formula takes into consideration the sectarian balance in the country and respects the results of the June 7 parliamentary elections,” Hairiri said.
Even though the proposed line -up was not made public Al Liwaa newspaper was able to obtain through its sources the following line-up:
1 – Sunnis : 6
Saad Hariri, Prime minister . Almustaqbal
Mohammad Safadi, minister of the economy.
Raya Haffar al-Hassan, minister of of Finance.
Ghaleb Mahmassani, Minister of State( share of the President of the Republic )
Minister of Justice ( name unknown) .
Minister of information ( name unknown) , but the name of Ammar Houry was mentioned as a possibility
2 – Shiites: 6
Yassin Jaber of minister of Foreign Affairs. Amal
Mohammed Jawad Khalifa minister of Health. Amal
Ali Abdullah, Minister of Agriculture. Amal
Mohammed Fneish Minister of industry. Hezbollah
Hussein Haj Hassan Youth and Sport. Hezbollah
Adnan al Sayyed Hussein, Minister of State of the share of the President.
3 – Druze: 3
Ghazi Aridi minister of communications. PSP
Wael Abu Faour minister of the displaced. PSP
Akram Shehayyeb , Minister of State. PSP
4 – Maronites: 6
Joe Sarkis minister of the environment. Lebanese Forces
Ziad Baroud of the Interior. share of the President.
Alain Aoun minister of public works. Change & Reform
Farid al-Khazen of minister of Education. Change & Reform
Vera Yammin minister of Administrative Development. Marada
Sami Gemayel minister of Social Affairs. Kataeb
5 – Orthodox: 4
Elias Murr, minister defense and deputy prime minister. share of the President.
Imad Wakim , minister of energy. Lebanese Forces
a person for from al Malouf family representing Zahle in our heart bloc .
And a fourth unknown person.
6 – Catholics: 3
Edgar Maalouf minister of public works. Change & Reform
Catholic woman as part of the share of the President.
Catholic Minister of Lebanon first loc .
7 – Armenian: 2
Hagop Bukradonian minister of labor ( Tashnaq party ) Change & Reform
Jean Ogassbian most likely as Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs
The opposition Follow-up Committee held a meeting last night at the house of caretaker Minister Gebran Bassil in Rabiya, in which Hajj Hussein Khalil of Hezbollah and MP Ali Hassan Khalil of Amal participated . The 3 decided to visit this Tuesday morning the president at the Beiteddine palace to voice their rejection of the proposed cabinet line-up
The new Cabinet line-up received good support from Hariri’s allies, particularly Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, LF chief Samir Geagea and Phalange Party leader Amin Gemayel.
“The president said he would study the proposal according to constitutional principles and decide whether to sign the decree. I await his final answer.” Hariri told reporters
According to the an Nahar newspaper the president will take his time to study the line-up and he may accept it , reject it or modify it .
As expected FPM leader general Michel Aoun is unhappy over the line-up and said following the announcement by Hariri , “From what we heard today, it seems Mr. Saad Hariri does not want to form the cabinet but rather, is trifling with the ministerial line-up according to his mood.”He added : No leader has the right to nominate ministers from a different party other than their own, because doing so breaches basic democratic principles.”
Aoun stressed his belief that President Michel Sleiman would not sign the government decree based on Hariri’s line-up and ordered all the FPM ministers to quit as soon as the president issues a decree confirming the cabinet line-up.
It appears Aoun will remain the main obstacle facing the cabinet formation and if this line-up is not approved as is or after modification by the president, Lebanon won’t have a cabinet anytime soon

Tuesday
11:57pm Hariri hosted an Iftar in honor of the French Ambassador to Lebanon
11:46pm Houry: Free Patriotic Movement, knoew in advance that the portfolios they will be given
10:50pm Majdalani: For the first time in Lebanon the government is being formed according to the Lebanese constitution
10:33pm Minister Aridi returned from Saudi Arabia on a private jet
9:25pm Jumblatt reconfirmed during an interview in Ain Zhalta that he is still part of the majority and an ally of Hariri
8:26pm MP George Adwan told “MTV:” We paid dearly to prevent the resettlement of the Palestinians and we all know that Lebanon has a special composition that is opposed to the naturalization ( of Palestinians ) and this issue does not affect the Christians only
8:18pm Alain Aoun of “or TV”: the essence of the problem has not been solved and we seem to be heading for more obstructions. A government of national unity cannot be formed through the logic of challenge
08:04pm Williams : I am confident that the president is looking seriously at the cabinet line up presented by Hariri
7:40 pm Al-Manar: the opposition will hold a meeting on Tuesday night at the residence of Hajj Hussein Khalil, Political Adviser to Hezbollah’s Secretary General
7:35 pm Jumblatt refuted a report published in Tuesday’s As-Safir newspaper stating that Jumblatt was willing exchange with FMP the Telecommunications Ministry for the ministry of public works. Jumblatt asserted that until now, he did not know himself which of the proposed cabinet portfolios were given to PSP.
07:24pm Mario Aoun: we are heading to a government crisis that might last forever
05:00pm Robert Fisk : Lebanese Madoff , salah ezzedine declared bankruptcy after a $200,000 check for Hezbollah bounced
04:04 pm The United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the Afghan elections announced Tuesday that it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” in a number of polling stations and ordered a partial recount …
04:00pm : Hezbollah’s Sheikh Naim Qassem: ” the experience of a national unity government after the Doha agreement is a success because it brought stability to the country “
3:39pm The ministry of communication transferred $110 million to the treasury
3:36 pm Ahmad Al Asaad : The majority should form the cabinet and govern the country , otherwise why did we hold an election ?
03:14pm Speaker Berri is currently meeting the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon in Ain el Tinah
2:25 pm In a speech that drew fire even before he delivered it, President Barack Obama will tell the US schoolchildren today he expects “great things from each of you.”
2:21pm Aoun’s OTV”: President Suleiman does not intend to sign the decree of the government line-up as presented by Hariri
2:15pm Al-Mustaqbal bloc: Cabinet formation gives a new hope for the Lebanese.
2;00 pm Kraft Foods Inc.’s 10.2 billion- pound ($16.7 billion) bid for Cadbury Plc may be a sign that Europe’s frozen takeover market is beginning to thaw after the slowest August in five years
1:56 pm Gemayel : What I read in the newspapers this morning surprised me since the cabinet line-up is not in accordance with what I was told by Hariri especially with regards to the Kataeb portfolios
1 :49pm caretaker minister Khalife : the number of swine flue cases in Lebanon has risen to 795 including 2 deaths
1:05pm Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora presides over Future bloc meeting in Qoreitem.
12:59 MP Saqr : March 8 has to accept the proposal of Hariri subject to changes in names or ministers
12:50 caretaker PM Siniora: what Hariri did yesterday is completely within his constitutional authority
12:45pm Abou Faour after meeting the president in Beiteddine: We understand what Hariri did since he did his duty. But we ask why the rejection by the opposition came so fast ? and why don’t we discuss the Hariri proposal ?
12:26pm Amal MP Ali Hassan Khalil says President Suleiman will have “major and positive” role regarding cabinet formation
12:25pm caretaker minister Safadi: There have been clear attempts recently to undermine the Presidency of the Republic, sometimes in form and sometimes in content
12:03pm MP Ahmad Karami: Hariri acted within his authority and in accordance with the constitution . The objections and reservations expressed so far are strictly political
11:50pm Bassil from Beiteddine: We informed the president about our rejection in both form and substance of the cabinet line-up that was imposed by Hariri
11:47 caretaker minister Arslan after meeting with President Suleiman: We have informed the president about the position of the opposition which rejects the line-up that was put forward by Hariri and he has the wisdom to act as required
11:44 “LBC” presidential sources: Suleiman has reservations until this moment over giving his opinion on the proposed government line-up and he will not sign off on any issue that is extremist in nature and could create division within the country
11:40 President Suleiman is meeting caretaker minister Abu Faour after having met with Arslan
11;00 Reuters ; A suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle outside a NATO military base at Kabul’s main airport on Tuesday killing at least two civilians,
10:20 Zahle MP Oqab Saqr told LBC: Statements made by some opposition members are aimed at obstructing cabinet formation.
11:15 Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora: Hariri’s move was within his full authorities. I am in continuous contact with the president and I will visit him in the next couple of days.

11:00 As Safir: Jumblatt said that Hariri suggested the “reshuffling of portfolios” to look for a way out of the stalemate, because “apparently part of the problem lies with allocating the sovereign ministries.”
11:02 Minister Ibrahim Najjar told Future News: Hariri’s line-up is based on Constitutional norms. The president has no specified time frame to reply to Hariri’s proposal.
10:52 Former PM Najib Miqati: Hariri’s move should be dealt with based on constitutional norms.
10:40 President Suleiman is meeting with opposition delegation, including Amal MP Ali Hassan Khalil, Hezbollah political adviser Hajj Hussein Khalil and Telecom Minister Gebran Bassil in Beiteddine
An-Nahar newspaper: President Michel Suleiman said that he “wants to save Lebanon,” emphasizing the necessity of forming a “balanced cabinet,” since an “extremist government” would instigate a crisis, “which would in turn make way for foreign interference.”
09:20 During an Iftar speech last night Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah rejected the prime minister-designate ‘s proposed cabinet line-up:”I don’t think that the method employed today takes Lebanon out of the government formation crisis. On the contrary, it further complicates the problem,” he said
9:10 Caretaker Social Affairs Minister Mario Aoun told VOL: Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has created a “cabinet-crisis” by presenting the cabinet line-up to President Michel Suleiman without the approval of the opposition with the purpose of a “graceful exit,” in which he would step down from his post.
8:30 MP Ahmed Fatfat told VOL: Hariri performed his constitutional duty. It is now up to the president to accept the line-up or reject it.
7:35 MP Antoine Saad told VOL: The cabinet line-up includes all blocs and is based on the 15-10-5 formula. There are internal as well as external obstacles to the government formation.
7:30 Caretaker Minister Elie Marouni told VOL: Hariri proposed a harmonious cabinet that includes all parties. I believe the president won’t approve the line-up following the opposition’s rejection.
07:29 Jumblatt sent Aridi to Riyadh , Saudi Arabia on a quick working visit
07:16 Abu Jamra: Saad Hariri is the one who chose the minister and should be held responsible
06:57 “al Akhbar “: Berri promised Kanaan the chairmanship of the Finance and Budget Committee in the Parliament
06:41 Riffi and Hassan in Saudi Arabia on a security related visit
06:26 “al Akhbar ” published the cabinet line-up as proposed by Hariri
06:17 visitors to Presidential palace : Suleiman is not acting as if he is bound to sign the decree on the proposed line-up
05:59 “As Safir”: Jumblatt is ready to give up the ministry of communications if he could keep the ministry of public works
05:48 Jumblatt: Hariri felt he was wasting his time and proposed the re-distribution of portfolios
05:39 the opposition Follow-up Committee held a meeting last night at the house of caretaker Minister, Gebran Bassil, in Rabiya, in which Hajj Hussein Khalil and MP Ali Hassan Khalil participated . The 3 decided to visit this Tuesday morning the president at the Beiteddine palace to voice their rejection of the proposed cabinet line-up
05:30 sources of PM designate : if the President won’t sign off on the cabinet line- up then Hariri is expected to quit

 
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Ezzedine declared bankruptcy after his cheque to Hezbollah bounced
Published: Tuesday, 8 September, 2009 @ 6:33 PM in Beirut
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
Everyone trusted Salah Ezzedine. A billionaire Shia Muslim businessman and financier from southern Lebanon, he organized pilgrimages to Mecca, ran a major Beirut publishing house and a children’s television station, held major investments in east European oil and iron conglomerates, and – much more to the point – was a close personal friend of very senior leaders of the Hezbollah. Indeed, many members of the world’s most powerful and successful guerrilla movement, along with the families of their “martyrs” in the war against Israel, placed both their faith and their inheritance in Mr Ezzedine’s hands.
To the deep embarrassment of the Iranian-financed and Iranian-armed militia, however, Mr Ezzedine turns out to be an “Abu Madoff”, declaring himself bankrupt, to the tune of $1.195bn (£760m), after promising his trusting investors an astonishing 40 per cent interest on their deposits – which, according to judicial officials in Lebanon, he eventually could not pay.
The Hezbollah have remained as silent as the grave – of which there are a lot in Lebanon – as well they might. For both Mr Ezzedine’s radio station and his publishing business were named after Hadi Nasrallah, son of Hezbollah’s general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed leading a brave but suicidal attack on Israeli occupation troops in southern Lebanon.
But things were worse than this. It now appears that Mr Ezzedine’s financial collapse became inevitable after he wrote a $200,000 cheque to Hussein Haj Hassan, one of Nasrallah’s closest political advisers and a Hezbollah member of parliament. The cheque bounced. The response to this within Hezbollah’s bunkers can only be imagined.
The movement, created in 1982 as a result of Israel’s Lebanon invasion, had built up its prestige in the Arab world on its squeaky-clean reputation for financial and political probity. Middle East dictatorships and the third-rate leadership of the Palestinian Authority may salt their millions away in foreign bank accounts, but not the incorruptible Hezbollah. Or so the world thought, until the scandal that burst around Salah Ezzedine.

He is now being interviewed by the Lebanese judiciary, and is allegedly being held in the grim old prison at Roumieh, north of Beirut.
The story seems a familiar one. Flushed with massive profits in the oil business, Salah Ezzedine – so say economists in Beirut – began investing the savings of Lebanon’s Shia population, rewarding them with 40 per cent interest on their deposits – with the money from yet newer investors attracted by the rewards of his scheme. Whether Salah Ezzedine did this with the calculation of a Bernard Madoff or with a charitable desire to spread his own wealth among the largest single community in Lebanon, we do not know.
The Hezbollah – the “Party of God” in Arabic – has been strangely silent this past week, an unusual characteristic for such a publicity-conscious movement whose own millions – faithfully shipped in US currency bills to Beirut from Tehran – rebuilt dozens of Shia Muslim villages destroyed in Israel’s bombardment of southern Lebanon in 2006.
Hezbollah members could be seen handing out bundles of newly minted hundred-dollar bills to villagers and thousands of home-owners in the Dahiya area of Beirut whose property was “rubble-ised” in Israel’s bombing. Many of these civilians, Lebanese newspapers are reporting, have now lost their money with Salah Ezzedine’s collapse.
While traditionally ignored by the country’s government and living in the stony hills of southern Lebanon – many grow tobacco crops – as well as the Bekaa valley, members of the Shia Muslim community have been emigrants to west Africa, Brazil and Holland and have made fortunes abroad (especially on the Antwerp diamond market). The size of their remittances home is made manifest in many of their ancestral towns. Villas of unseemly conspicuous wealth – replete with marble colonnades, Greek pillars and manicured lawns – sit on desolate hillsides, sometimes only metres from the Israeli border.
Of course, there is another reason why Hezbollah might want to keep quiet just now.
Many Muslims believe that bank interest is un-Islamic, which is why the Lebanese Shia put their money in businesses run by Salah Ezzedine, who was known as a “pious” man – an optional extra for all friends of the Hezbollah – and whose Haj pilgrimages had become an essential element of that fixed part of the Muslim calendar in Lebanon.
Independent

 
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Wednesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Wednesday, 9 September, 2009 @ 8:12 AM in Beirut
Beirut- FPM leader General Michel Aoun may think he did not get his fair share in the proposed cabinet line-up of PM designate Saad Hariri, but his Christian opponents Lebanese Forces’ leader Dr Samir Geagea and Kataeb leader Amin Gemayel think he got far too much.
Both Geagea and former president Amin Gemayel criticized the proposed cabinet line-up
Gemayel’s son MP Sami Gemayel was offered the ministry of Tourism and this was the only ministry offered to the Kataeb party. Gemayel thinks this is too little for such a powerful party as the Kataeb. Sami Gemayel said yesterday he will refuse to serve in such a cabinet
The Lebanese Forces were offered 2 ministries : the ministry of Industry and the Social affairs ministry and Geagea is not happy about this : Geagea according to reliable sources fears that once given the education, labor and public works ministries, Aoun would get the upper hand in universities, schools, trade unions and social security services as well as roads, major projects, urban planning and infrastructure in a way that would allow him to exploit the state’s potentials to reinforce his political position among Christians.
Progressive Socialist party leader is not complaining about the line-up but thinks the objections by the opposition are due to the reconciliation problems between Saudi Arabia and Syria. Jumblatt, who refers to this as the SS problem dispatched yesterday his close aid Minister Ghazi Aridi to Jeddah with a message to the Saudi leaders urging them to continue with their reconciliation effort with Syria and to avoid any confrontation.
Jumblatt is concerned that Syria is again interfering in the internal Lebanese affairs and is trying to prevent the formation of the cabinet just like it did 2 years ago when it tried to prevent the election of the president of the republic
Both Speaker Nabih Berri and MP Walid Jumblatt are reportedly seeking to avoid a government crisis.
President Suleiman who is independent has reportedly been telling the opposition leaders that Hariri’s proposed cabinet line-up is not set in concrete and urged the opposition to deal with it on the basis that it is subject to discussion and development. The opposition is reportedly planning to bring a list of proposed amendments to the Beiteddine palace , the presidential summer residence .
The president is heading to New York on September 23 to address the UN general assembly on September 25 and wants to resolve the cabinet issue before leaving, but judging from the response to Hariri’s proposal it will be “wishful thinking since both the majority and the opposition are hardening their positions. Many are predicting that Lebanon won’t have a cabinet before year end

Wednesday
9:30 pm Hariri said during an Iftar Wednesday that he will not form a cabinet that does not fairly reflect the outcome of the 2009 parliamentary elections. He also said he will not succumb to “blackmail.” He added that in the coming two or three days, he will take “further steps to serve the nation’s interests.”
8:35pm Future News: PM-designate will visit President Suleiman either tomorrow or the day after to discuss the response to the proposed cabinet line-up

.
8:30 Speaker Berri met Minister Ghazi Aridi in Ain el-Tinah.
8:00pm PM-designate Hariri will meet tonight Hezbollah’s Hussein Khalil and Amal’s Hassan Khalil.
7:50pm Jumblatt told Al Manar TV: The Cabinet lineup does not show good signs and discussions with President Suleiman continue.
6:42pm Kenaan accused Hariri of proposing a Cabinet far from the National Unity Consensus and in defiance to the opposition and criticized him “for not respecting the constitutional norms and principles” in forming Cabinet.
5:55 pm AFP: Iranian foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki handed over to the envoys of six world powers on Wednesday, Iran’s new package of proposals for its controversial nuclear program
4:45pm Lebanese Forces’ leader Samir Geagea met with caretaker PM Siniora at the Grand Serail.
3:55pm The Opposition delegation left Beiteddine Presidential Palace without making any statement.
3:05pm The opposition delegation arrived in Beiteddine to meet with Suleiman.
2:45pm Soueid after the March 14 general-secretariat meeting: Due to the quick development of events, the general-secretariat will leave its meetings open-ended.
2:20pm MPs following their talks with Berri: The Speaker called for lowering tension and said he was making efforts with Suleiman and Jumblatt to deal with the cabinet crisis.
2:10pm MTV: Following their meeting, March 14 secretariat-general members headed for talks with Hariri on the latest developments on cabinet formation.
1:58pm OTV: Opposition delegation will meet with President Suleiman in Beiteddine at 3:00pm today
1:45pm A hand grenade was found near al-Hadi Minimarket in Ouzai. It was taken to a military base for fingerprints to identity the assailants who threw the grenade.
1 :35pm Torsarkissian from Nejmeh Square : the position of Basil, after meeting Suleiman in Beiteddine was less aggressive than usual and opened the door for further dialogue
1 :27pm Kaouk: What happened was the transfer from Lebanon ‘s railway of reconciliation to another railway and whoever wants to get out of the current impasse has to complete the dialogue with Aoun
1 :15pm Hassan Khalil from Nejmeh Square after meeting with Berri: The dialogue is open with regards to the subject of government formation and there is great opportunity for a breakthrough
1:10pm Zahle MP Fattoush denounced the non-representation of Zahle in the Cabinet lineup. Zahle residents were shocked after their rights were ignored.
1:10 Al Akhbar : MP Walid Jumblatt said the feedback of Minister Wael Abou Faour after meeting with the President indicates that the opposition, or at least part of it, is ready for serious dialogue.
1 :06pm “MTV”: Suleiman asked Hariri to exercise prudence in visiting Beiteddine until he obtains the final answer from the opposition with regards the cabinet line-up he presented
1:00 pm Reuters: An ally of Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi has been detained, a reformist website said, in the latest move signalling increased pressure by the authorities on pro-reform foes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
12:17 Jumblatt after meeting Vice president of the Higher Shiite Council Skeikh Abdel Amir Qabalan called for “patience in order to reach a proper solution since we have all agreed on being partners in a national unity government “
12:02 pm Al-Mustaqbal newspaper : UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged Israel to provide the Lebanese government with immediate compensation for the oil spill that it caused after bombing the Jiyeh power plant in South Lebanon during the 2006 July War.
12:00pm Eid al-Fitr falls on Sunday, September 20th, according to Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
11:45 Speaker Nabih Berri arrived at Parliament as part of the weekly Wednesday meetings with MPs.
11:40 AFP : Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the Middle East peace process
11:30 Reuters – Kraft Foods Inc plans to cut its supplier base in half, a move that would affect more than 30000 companies, as the largest North American food maker looks to save more than $300 million a year. Kraft bid yesterday for Cadbury but its bid was rejected.
11:20 AP : Well over half of nearly 1400 Palestinians killed in Israel’s Gaza war were civilians, including 252 children younger than 16, a leading Israeli human rights groups said Wednesday.
11:19 Alloush told Al Jumhurriah : the situation is back to zero , the crisis would last much longer and the government will not be formed anytime soon soon since we have reached an impasse
11:00 MP Ahmed Fatfat: Hariri will not take any initiative unless it is in agreement with President Suleiman.
10:40 Israeli Jerusalem Post newspaper quoted on Wednesday Russian reports as saying that the four MiG-31E fighter jets, which Moscow will send to Syria, lack offensive capabilities and are only used for intelligence purposes. Two of the jets “would be operational, and the other two would be used for spare parts, ” since Russia will not provide effective after-sale services.
9;40 As-Safir : Lebanese Armed Forces-Intelligence Branch arrested on Tuesday five Lebanese involved in the Barouk internet station, which allegedly has connections with an Israeli station in Haifa.
8:30 LF official Fadi Saad told VOL: We are willing to accept the Cabinet lineup proposed by PM-designate Saad Hariri as a show of support for Hariri.
07:15 a change and reform MP: Aoun will today through the media launch a fiery response to the government line-up proposed by PM- designate Saad Hariri and which the opposition has rejected
07:05 Christian source in March 14 told al Akhbar: the cabinet line-up proposed by PM- designate Saad Hariri will create a major political crisis within the March 14 alliance
06:55 al Akhbar: The main objective of the visit to Jeddah by Minister Ghazi Aridi, is delivering a message to the Saudi leaders urging them to continue with their reconciliation effort with Syria and to avoid any confrontation
06:45 Jumblatt: the most recent speech of Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah “was not convulsive and left a window open for a solution “
06:18 Al Akhbar: Suleiman urged the opposition to deal with the proposal Hariri on the basis that it is subject to discussion and development
06:10 Geagea sources: If we stop and think about the crisis that Lebanon is going through, perhaps we will then have a totally different position
06:00 Hariri circles: If the answers of the opposition are negative with regards to the cabinet line-up then all options become possible including the quitting by the PM designate
05:49 “As Safir “: the opposition has indicated that any change in the political formula will make it stick to its original demand of a blocking one third and reject the 15 +10 +5 formula
05:35 sources of “As Safir “: Saudi Arabia has advised the Lebanese to take it easy and subject themselves to deadlines and conditions

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Thursday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Thursday, 10 September, 2009 @ 11:58 AM in Beirut
Beirut- The million dollar question in Lebanon is : Will Hariri quit ? Many March 14 MPs are predicting that Prime Minister-Designate Saad Hariri could step down as early as today because they claim that the opposition is not yet ready to commit to the formation of the cabinet .
Even if Hariri quits chances are he will be reappointed by the president to form the cabinet. Speaker Nabih Berri , a key member of the opposition has according to As Safir newspaper told members of Hezbollah and Amal that visited him yesterday in Ain el Tinah that if Hariri quits and the president initiates new consultations he will only name Hariri as the PM designate.
During an Iftar last night in Qoreitem, Hariri said that in the coming two or three days, he will take “further steps to serve the nation’s interests,” adding that the constitution grants him certain powers that he will practice, “because we take our responsibilities toward the Lebanese people seriously.” He did not elaborate on what he meant by “ further steps” nor the powers he will practice. “ Ali Hussein a Ya Libnan analyst thinks that what Hariri meant by further steps is that he may scrap the line-up of the national unity cabinet that he proposed to president Michel Suleiman and instead form a cabinet of March 14 majority members only .
Many blame the delay in government formation on the Saudi -Syrian reconciliation effort . Progressive socialist Part leader MP Walid Jumblatt has been working on this . He sent Monday his close aid Minister Ghazi Aridi to Jeddah with a letter to the Saudi Arabian leaders in which he has reportedly urged them to accelerate their reconciliation effort because such a step will help resolve Lebanon’s impasse
MP Nadim Gemayel, son of the former president-elect Bashir Gemayel said this morning : “Both Suleiman and Hariri know that what is behind the obstruction of the formation of the cabinet are Hezbollah arms and the Special International Tribunal for Lebanon (STL).” The STL was established to try the killers of former Prime minister Rafik Hariri , father of the PM-designate . Last spring the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that Hezbollah was behind the assassination of Hairi Hariri.

Thursday
9:50 pm Qatari Prime and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jaber al-Thani announced on Thursday that Qatar is ready to host another session of inter-Lebanese talks after MP Saad Hariri stepped down from forming the cabinet.
9:40 pm UN chief Ban Ki-moon regrets the Lebanese parties’ failure to reach an understanding over the formation of a national-unity cabinet, according to UN Spokesperson Mary Okabi
9:00 Hariri said at the Iftar : “We are all Lebanese, we are partners, and not enemies. You are negotiating with us, not with your enemies,” Hariri said, in reference to the opposition. He added : The opposition wanted the majority to do all the sacrificing
8:40pm MP Saad Hariri: The majority is the one entitled to name the PM. Designate to form the cabinet
08:20 pm MP Ahmad Fatfat said the majority will reappoint MP Saad Hariri as prime minister-designate for the second time, adding that he does not expect outgoing PM Fouad Siniora to be nominated for the post.
8:15pm LBC: President Michel Suleiman will announce the schedule of the new consultations within 48 hours and Hariri would be renamed as PM-designate.
8:10pm An eighteen-year-old Mohammad Jaffal had his leg amputated at Nabatieh’s state-run hospital after stepping on a hidden cluster bomb near Ansar village.
8:08pm Basil’s told New TV in response to Hariri’s quitting : Whoever fails in forming the cabinet cannot return even if the constitution allows him because he should apply on himself what he applied on others when he refused to include in the cabinet those that failed in the election
7:44pm Abu Jamra told “Al-Manar”: whoever fails in forming the cabinet should not be asked again to do it
7:41pm Jumblatt told “Al-Manar:” I wish Hariri thought it over before stepping down , but I also wish the opposition was less harsh with him and what is required now is the acceleration of the consultations and the slowing down of speculation
7:40 Marouni: Hariri’s resignation was expected, opposition torpedoed every consensus approach
7:39 PSP leader Jumblatt to Al-Manar TV: I wish the opposition’s demands were not so difficult to meet
7:10pm North Lebanon’s Ministers and MPs are to meet this evening at the house of Tripoli’s mufti Malek Shaar to discuss the latest Cabinet lineup developments.
6:45pm caretaker PM Siniora from Beiteddine after meeting President Michel Suleiman: I will rename Saad Hariri as PM-designate and delaying Cabinet lineup will not obstruct our regular activities.
6:18pm Presidential statement: Hariri’s resignation falls within democratic framework, president to call for new consultations
6:08pm Chamoun regrets Hariri’s resignation, calls for opposition to shoulder responsibilities
5:37 pm President Michel Suleiman meets with caretaker PM Fouad Siniora in Beiteddine
05:09pm Fneish: Hezbollah regrets Hariri’s resignation, opposition wants guaranteeing-third (veto power)
04:05 pm Geagea after meeting the Italian ambassador: The March 8 team is covering up for a bigger movement outside Lebanon. It doesn’t want a government for several reasons, including Iran, the tribunal and tense relations between Syria and the west. LF to nominate Hariri again based on new criteria
3:48pm Outgoing PM Fouad Siniora meets with US Ambassador to Lebanon Michele Sison at Grand Serail
15:44 NOW exclusive: Official source says Hariri stepped down due to Iran’s propositions, opposition’s demands
2:55 pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri resigns from his post at a press conference following his meeting with President Michel Suleiman
2:02 pm President Michel Sleiman meets with Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri in Beiteddine
1:48pm OTV: Hariri left for Beiteddine for talks with Suleiman
1:16pm MP Jumblatt visited the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia Aram Keshishian at the Patriarchate headquarters in Antelias.
1:05pm Salah Ezzedine” Lebanon’s Madoff” was referred to the Public Prosecution for taking the necessary legal action against him
12:30pm Lebanese National Bloc: If Hezbollah will govern the country the same way it handled Ezzeddine’s case, then good luck to the state!
12:00pm Tourism Minister Elie Marouni: The current Cabinet lineup proposal will not see the light at the end of the tunnel and Hariri will have to step down as PM-designate.
12;00 The recession is ending and the US economy is finally growing again. That’s the message implicit in the Federal Reserve’s latest survey of businesses around the country, which found economic activity stabilizing or improving in most regions
11:50am MP Ammar Houri told OTV: An apology will be Hariri’s next move if the Cabinet crisis persists.
11:15 MP Nadim Gemayel,: “Both Suleiman and Hariri know that what is behind the obstruction of the formation of the cabinet are Hezbollah arms and the Special International Tribunal for Lebanon (STL).”
9:00 MP Samir Al-Jisr told VOL: There’s some leniency on the dialogue. Any new consultations will lead to re-assigning Hariri as PM designate.
7:30 FPM MP Salim Salhab told the VOL: the absence of Gebran Bassil from Wednesday’s meeting between the opposition and the PM-designate is insignificant as the presence of the Amal Movement and Hezbollah representatives “means FPM was indeed represented.”

 
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Hariri , Lebanese PM-designate quits

Published: Thursday, 10 September, 2009 @ 8:28 PM in Beirut
By Bassem Mroue
Beirut – Lebanon’s prime minister-designate abandoned efforts Thursday to form a new government, throwing the country into more political uncertainty after the Hezbollah-led parliament minority rejected his proposed Cabinet.
Saad Hariri’s move — two days after his proposed 30-member Cabinet list was turned down — prolongs the paralysis in the country, with President Michel Suleiman now forced to restart consultations with lawmakers to name a new premier.
It also highlights the continuing deadlock between Lebanon’s U.S.-backed camp headed by Hariri and the pro-Syrian bloc led by the militant group Hezbollah. Hariri’s coalition — a predominantly Sunni alliance with Christian and Druse supporters — won a slim majority in June parliamentary elections, which were viewed by many observers as a struggle between U.S. and Iranian-backed forces for influence in the Middle East.
The Western-backed bloc fell short of the needed number of lawmakers in parliament to rule on its own. And while the Hezbollah camp also is not in a position to run the country, the two factions have not found a way to work together.
“I apologized to his excellency the president about (not being able to) form the government, hoping that this decision will be in Lebanon’s interest,” Hariri said after a meeting with Suleiman.
Suleiman issued a statement saying he considered Hariri’s step-down “part of the democratic process” and would call for further consultations.
Hariri tried since June to form a government but disputes over the distribution of top ministries scuttled his efforts. After making no headway with rival factions, he named his own picks for the Cabinet posts.
Hezbollah and its allies denounced this move, saying they must be allowed to name their own members in the unity Cabinet, which is to be made up of rival Lebanese factions.
Hariri accused the Hezbollah-led bloc of seeking to undermine the entire election, saying it had proposed “impossible conditions” and “had no wish to advance one step forward.”
Samir Geagea, a Christian leader and an ally of Hariri, accused the Hezbollah-led minority of obstructing the government formation upon orders from Iran and Syria.
Hezbollah officials were silent Thursday but in the past have accused Hariri of taking orders from Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The Lebanese constitution requires that Suleiman consult with lawmakers again before choosing another prime minister. He is expected to meet with representatives of the parliament blocs as early as next week to sound out their proposals in the coming days.
There has been speculation the U.S.-backed outgoing premier, Fuad Saniora, would be named, although opponents who clashed with him over the past four years said such a choice would be considered “provocative.”
Fadia Kiwan, a political science professor at Beirut’s St. Joseph University, said Hariri could be named once again by the majority but that the president is more likely to tap a neutral person to form a technocratic government.
The only thing the factions agreed on during the negotiations over a Cabinet makeup was a formula that gave Hariri’s parliamentary majority 15 seats, the Hezbollah-led minority 10 seats and the president five seats to fill.
One of the most contentious points was the demand by Hezbollah and its allies that Jibran Bassil, of the Hezbollah-ally Christian Free Patriotic Movement, stay on as telecommunications minister, a sensitive post for security reasons.
Hariri rejected this, reportedly choosing a politician closer to his own bloc for the post, Ghazi Aridi of the Druse politician Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party.

 
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Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 11 September, 2009 @ 11:08 AM in Beirut

 
Beirut – As was widely expected Lebanon’s prime minister-designate Saad Hariri, quit Thursday, plunging the nation deeper into a political crisis over failed efforts to form a government. Hariri blamed his failure on the Syrian- and Iranian-backed opposition, saying it made unreasonable demands.
“After a final round of negotiations, it became clear to me that some, with their impossible demands, are in no way going to allow the proposed Cabinet lineup to pass,” Hariri, a key member of the March 14 majority alliance and leader of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim community, said in a televised statement after meeting with President Michel Suleiman. “I announce to all Lebanese that I informed his Excellency , the president, today that I am unable to form the government.”
The Lebanese political system is based on a power-sharing formula involving the Christian, Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim and Druze religious communities.
Lebanese President Michell Suleiman must now designate a new prime minister, and Hariri will most likely be re-nominated. In Lebanon the Prime minister should be a Muslim Sunni and Hariri is the leader of the largest parliamentary bloc besides being a key member of the parliament majority .
According to morning reports president Suleiman will start the consultations on Tuesday .
All the majority parliamentary blocs have already indicated that Hariri is their choice. Even speaker Nabih Berri told his Hezbollah and his Amal MPs that he intends to re-nominate Hariri as the next prime minister if he decided to step down.
While most March 14 MPs are calling for a government of the majority , Jumblatt told as Safir newspaper: “ I will not be part of any government that is not a Government of National Unity . I will not be participate in any government of one color that is being promoted by some “
“The opposition team doesn’t want a government for several reasons, including Iran, the tribunal and tense relations between Syria and the West,” said Samir Geagea, leader of the Christian Lebanese Forces party
The big question in Lebanon : Will there be a Doha 2 accord ? Yesterday Qatari prime minister offered to host a new round of talks to resolve the impasse.

Friday
10:20 pm  The number of Americans without health insurance reached 46.3 million in 2008, up from 45.7 million a year earlier, according to figures released Thursday by the US Census Bureau.
10:10 pm VOA : The European Union wants an urgent meeting with Iran to talk about Tehran’s controversial nuclear program. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Friday EU officials had contacted Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator regarding the country’s nuclear program.
9:55pm The US condemned Friday’s rocket attack on Israel from southern Lebanon. “We strongly condemn these attacks, which were in clear violation of the cessation of hostilities called for in UN Resolution 1701,” said Assistant US Secretary of State PJ Crowley.
8:42pm Saad Hariri at al- Makased’s Iftar: Cabinet formation as the minority sees it, means to comply with its conditions and I refuse to see it from that angle.
8:20pm Jumblatt on Berri’s wave length supports a National unity Cabinet based on the 5-10-15 formula.
08:20 pm The Army Command : An unknown party fired from Qulailah 2 Grad 122mm rockets towards Israel and the Israeli enemy fired back 12 shells 155m each . No casualties were reported and material damages are being assessed
8:15pm General Michel Aoun condemned Hariri’s position as it makes the PM- designate “the absolute ruler”.
8:10pm The state-run agency NNA reported that Israel has taken exceptional military measures at the border line with Lebanon after Katyusha rockets were fired on Israel.
8:05pm The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL are searching for hidden rockets in Southern Tyre.
7:32pm The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kee- moon condemned rockets attack on Israel from Lebanon.
7:05pm President Suleiman followed up the latest developments in the South and confirmed Lebanon’s commitment to 1701 UN resolution.
6:30pm The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL found the base used to fire the Katyusha rockets in a grove in Qulaileh.
6:07pm Presidential sources stated that Parliamentary consultations will take place next Tuesday and Wednesday.
6:05pm UNIFIL deployed additional forces in Southern Lebanon following Katyushka rockets and Israeli retaliation.
5:10pm IDF: We hold Lebanon government responsible, Haaretz reported
5:04pm UNIFIL says it did not receive any reports on casualties in Israel or in Lebanon, urging both countries to remain calm
5:00pm Lebanese army : At least 8 Israeli retaliatory artillery shells hit Qulaileh
4:58pm Israeli helicopters are circling over the town of Marwahayn
4:51pm NBN security sources: UNIFIL was notified by Israel that it has stopped shelling southern Lebanon
4:43pm Israeli warplanes fly over the Lebanon-Israel border.
4:31pm MP Saad Hariri headed to Saudi Arabia on private jet
4:30pm UNIFIL has taken security measures along the southern coast
4:22pm Future News: Israel fired more than 10 artillery shells at Qulaileh. Other reports indicated as many as 15 shells landed in Qulaileh
4:20 pm AP: Mourners in New York City are observing a second moment of silence on the eighth anniversary of Sept.11
4:18pm Al-Arabiyya: Missiles fired from Qulaileh landed in Nahariya
4:15pm Al-Manar TV: Israel fired four rockets on the outskirts of Qulaileh in response to the rocket attack from southern Lebanon .
4:11pm AFP: Explosion heard, rocket shrapnel found in northern Israel: witnesses
4:09pm Series of explosions heard in northern Israel, no report of casualties
4:05pm New TV : Israel responded by launching artillery shells at the source of fire in southern Lebanon.
3:45pm Unconfirmed press reports: Three missiles launched from Qulaileh near the southern port city of Tyre landed in Israel.
2:30pm MP Nicolas Fattoush dismissed MP Elie Marouni from “Zahle in the heart” bloc for his “latest misleading positions”. Marouni condemned the decision.
2:05pm President Michel Suleiman met with Defense Minister Elias Murr to discuss the current situation and its ramifications. National security and military issues were also discussed.
1:50pm Former minister Joseph Sarkis: The Lebanese Forces will rename Hariri as PM-Designate and will support the 15-10-5 government formula.
1:00pm The International Atomic Energy Agency has transported powerful radioactive sources, which could have been “vulnerable to malicious acts,” from Lebanon to Russia end of last month, the IAEA announced Thursday. The sources comprised 36 Cobalt-60 sources, with a combined activity of 3.500 curies. A single source is powerful enough to kill a person within minutes, if directly exposed, it added. The Cobalt-60 sources were from an irradiator that was once used for an agricultural project 10 years ago
12:45pm The Military Examining Magistrate, Rashid Mezher, referred to Judge Nabil Wehbe the Military prosecutor’s charges against the five detainees in the Barouk Network case.
12:08 Khamenei said during Friday prayer that opponents of Iran’s regime will be strongly “confronted”
12:pm AP: Iran’s new proposal for talks with the West promises wide-ranging negotiations but does not provide details of the country’s disputed nuclear program, according to a copy of the document published by an investigative group.
11:21 MP Ahmed Fatfat told New TV: The National unity government project was brought down by the parliamentary minority. Hariri is now stronger than he ever
11:05 MP Ibrahim Kanaan told LBC: Hariri’s decision is within constitutional rights . We didn’t nominate him the first time and we will not reconsider his nomination .
10:47 Patriarch Sfeir meets US ambassador Michele Sison in Diman
10:38 MP Mashnouq : We will overcome this crisis with courage and vision of Jumblatt and the steadfastness and wisdom of Hariri and they will not succeed in the assassination of the election results
10:17 Moussa told “future news”: It is assumed that the parliamentary blocks will meet and nominate whoever they want to form a government , knowing that the majority have deciding vote
10:11 De Freije told “LBC”: Hariri stepped down in order to preserve the democratic system in Lebanon and disruption of the government formation is not the work of one person but the entire March 8 team is responsible
09:49 Al Qabas: The presidential Palace tried to speed up the return of Aoun from abroad to resolve the Gebran Bassil impasse
09:28 Sources for Al Awan : Lebanon has entered a new phase of persistent government crisis which could lead to renewed unrest and security problems
09:19 Salim Aoun told “Saut al Mada “: Hariri failed in the task assigned to him and should not be reappointed unless the task has changes since the opposition is insisting on its demands
09:14 Al Anbaa: Jumblatt advised not to think of stepping down because the majority will bring him back to form a government which means he will be back in the same situation
09:11 a source close to Hariri: the majority will not prejudge things and will consider that things are back to square one and thus all previous understandings will reevaluated and will be discussed from A to Z
09:08 Ezzedine repeatedly tried to blame Hezbollah as being equally responsibility for the loss of the money of the investors
08:59 51 wanted people arrested for committing criminal acts
08:56 the car of journalist Jean Aziz was attacked twice during the past 5 days and thelast attack took place last night
08:48 al Anbaa sources: Whatever happens, Saad Rafik Hariri will be the head of the new Government of Lebanon and the next government will be a Government of national unity
08:43 Franjieh: Hariri may mean not giving me a bag for me on the reaction used in his campaign against the opposition and accused of obstruction
08:32 French diplomat : Neither Fouad Siniora nor any other political figure will be returned as PM . Only Saad Hariri will be returned
08:24 Hunein told Voice of Lebanon”: The only solution is the Lebanese solution and the Lebanese solution is the constitutional solution and that means the majority must govern
08:16 Kanaan : the road to the Serail will be the same whether the new prime minister-designate is Saad Hariri, Fouad Siniora, Najib Mikati, or Abdul-Rahim Murad
08:10 Judge Mirza: The value of Ezzedine’s bankru???????????

 
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Saturday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Saturday, 12 September, 2009 @ 2:44 PM in Beirut

 
Beirut – Two rockets were fired yesterday into northern Israel from the village of Qulailah, near the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre, and Israel responded minutes later, launching 14 missiles and scrambling fighter jets across the border, Lebanese and Israeli news media reported.

No casualties were reported on either side of the border, a frequent flash point between Israel and Lebanese or Palestinian militant groups. It was the first such exchange of fire since February.
Israeli police said the two rockets landed in northern Galilee, one just outside the town of Nahariya. The Israeli military said it fired back at the source of the rockets in Qulailah
The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL found the base used to fire the rockets in a grove in Qulaileh.
The Lebanese Army Command made the following announcement following the exchange of fire : “An unknown party fired from Qulailah 2 Grad 122mm rockets towards Israel and the Israeli enemy fired back 12 shells 155m each . No casualties were reported and material damages are being assessed”
No one took responsibility for the attack but according to weapons experts the Grad 122mm rockets are made in Iran and are shipped through Syria to Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups that are loyal to the Syrian regime
The US condemned Friday’s rocket attack: “We strongly condemn these attacks, which were in clear violation of the cessation of hostilities called for in UN Resolution 1701,” said Assistant US Secretary of State PJ Crowley.
The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki – Moon also condemned the rocket attack on Israel from Lebanon.
President Suleiman followed up yesterday the latest developments in the South and confirmed Lebanon’s commitment to 1701 UN resolution.
The attack took place a day after PM Designate Saad Hariri quit the task of government formation . He blamed his resignation on the unreasonable demands by the Hezbollah-led opposition
Many March 14 leaders are wondering if Syria’s allies fired the rockets to put pressure on the Lebanese parliament majority just as they did on May 7 2008 when they occupied west Beirut and tried to occupy the Druze strongholds of Mount Lebanon.

Saturday
10:27 pm Aoun told Al Jazeera TV: I insist on holding onto the ministry of Communication and Gebran Bassil . The issue has become the subject of a challenge against us and my allies are also insisting on Bassil and won’t participate in the cabinet without me
8:30 PM Saad Hariri at Qoraitem’s Iftar: I did not ask anybody to re-designate me as PM . “Those who do not want to nominate me as Prime Minister-designate are free to choose whoever they find suitable.”
8;23pm MP Butros Harb questioned the timing of firing the rockets vs the Cabinet lineup obstruction.
8:18pm: Jumblat told Press TV: “Lebanon’s unity is in danger, and we have to form the national unity cabinet as soon as possible to protect it against any possible Israeli aggression.”He added : ” Saad Hariri is still for the 5-10-15 formula “. He called on all parties to “give concessions because forming a national unity cabinet is in everybody’s interest .” He also said : “I don’t mind Iran arming Lebanon since the Americans do not want to provide the Lebanese military with weapons because they fear Israel’s reaction to such a move.”
8:05pm LBC : Jumblatt met President Suleiman privately away from the media, MP Wael Faour said
7: 40pm al Manar TV: MP Jumblatt would ask for a meeting with Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah who will also meet MP Hariri to discuss Cabinet formation.
7:33pm In response to MP Habib’s statement, the Internal Security directorate referred the Lebanese Forces’ demand regarding the “exceptional security measures “to the Central Security Council.
6:50 pm AFP: UNIFIL spokesperson Milos Strugar said on Saturday that extremists tied to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon may have been behind the latest rocket attack from the Qulailah village in South Lebanon into Israel on Friday that triggered retaliatory artillery fire.
6:15pm Loyalty to Resistance bloc’s MP Raad criticized “the superiority spirit” that discriminates between “majority and minority” as it rules out the National Unity Cabinet.
5:00pm MP Habib demanded Interior minister to maintain the application of security measures on Lebanese Forces’ MPs.
5:00pmAP : Gertrude Baines, who lived to be the world’s oldest person on a steady diet of crispy bacon, fried chicken and ice cream, died Friday at a nursing home. She was 115.
4:50 pm Afghan’s Independent Election Commission says it plans to announce complete results from the August 20 presidential election Saturday.
4:45 pm AFP: Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Saturday renewed Tehran’s readiness for negotiations over its nuclear proposals but made no direct response to calls from the major powers for urgent talks.
4:40 pm Berri’s bloc will nominate a PM-designate committed to the formation of a national-unity cabinet. This changes the position preciously stated by Berri that he will only nominate Saad Hariri
3:30pm MP Safadi: The majority will rename Saad Hariri as Cabinet PM.
3:30pm Israelis soldiers start a fire in the settlement of Mutilah on the Lebanese border that spreads till Marjeyoun and burnt stocks of wheat and hay.
3:27pm President Suleiman expressed his satisfaction over the openness and ongoing communications among the political parties to reach Cabinet line-up.
3:02pm MP Saad Hariri discussed the latest political developments with MP Boutros Harb.
3;00 pm The sporadic flare ups between Israel and Lebanon on Friday have aroused international reactions. Russia on Saturday voiced “particular concern” and warned against any actions that could raise tensions in the Middle East.
2:55 pm VOA: News South Korea says it would not oppose the United States holding direct talks with North Korea to persuade Pyongyang to rejoin stalled nuclear disarmament talks.
2:50 pm BBC: The US says it is willing to accept an offer from Iran for talks on a wide range of issues. Tehran offered “comprehensive and constructive negotiations” on Wednesday, but did not mention the key issue of its nuclear program
2:45pm Caretaker Fouad Siniora received a call from Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa: They discussed the current situation in Lebanon and the region.
1:53pm UNIFIL spokesperson Bouziane: Lebanese-Israeli border “calm” after rocket attacks
12:30 Six civilians were killed as a roadside bomb struck their car in Taliban former stronghold Kandahar of southern Afghanistan, a press release issued by provincial administration Saturday said.
12:19 Fatfat: Is it right that family relations become more important than the parliamentary elections and the formation of the government. ( In reference to Aoun’s insistence that Gebran Bassil should be allocated a portfolio in the cabinet even though he failed in the last election )
1:40pm Judge Fawzi Adham charged detainees Salah Ezzeddine and Youssef Faour with money fraud.
11:35 Phalange Party Leader Amin Gemayel on the occasion of Butros Khawand’s kidnapping: Relations with Syria can only be straightened if the ‘Detainees’ File’ is closed.
10:56 March 14 coordinator Fares Soueid: No repetition of May 7, no ‘Doha II Summit’
10:40 Mario Aoun: Only alternative to 15-10-5 formula is to not form a cabinet at all
9:35am MP Nidal Tohme to Free Lebanon Radio: The 15-10-5 formula must be discarded
09:01 South Lebanon residents receive threatening phone calls from Israel
8:35am Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah will address the Cabinet crisis during Laylat el-Qadr speech at 10:00pm Saturday.
07:33 US envoy George Mitchell will be in Lebanon next Wednesday and will hold a meeting with President Suleiman

 
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Sunday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Sunday, 13 September, 2009 @ 12:38 PM in Beirut
Beirut- Fawzi Adham , a Lebanese prosecutor formally charged on Saturday Salah Ezzedine a prominent Shiite businessman and his partner, Youssef Faour , both linked to Hezbollah with fraudulent embezzlement, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison, a court official said.
Ezzedine, is suspected of depriving investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. He was handed over to Lebanese authorities last month by Hezbollah after declaring bankruptcy and has since been held in custody.
Ezzedine is suspected of creating a Ponzi scheme that promised investors returns of up to 40 percent a year. The case has drawn comparisons in Lebanon with that of Bernard Madoff. Madoff was sentenced for 150 years in prison.
Adham charged Ezzedine and Faour, with fraudulent embezzlement, issuing bad checks and violating the Lebanese monetary and loan laws.
Five others have also been charged with involvement in the case, but are on the run, the official said.
Ezzedine and Faour have been referred to an investigating magistrate for further investigation before a date is set for their trial.
Throughout the interrogation Ezzedine attempted to involve Hezbollah in the responsibility towards the investors. About 11000 investors , mostly Shiite Muslims have reportedly been involved in the scheme .
Key Hezbollah officials have reportedly been involved in Ezzedine’s financial scheme and one of the Hezbollah officials MP Hussein Hajj Hassan has reportedly filed a lawsuit against Ezzedine asking for the reimbursement of his $200, 000 investment.
The charges against Ezzedine coincided with the crises in Lebanon over the government formation . The Hezbollah-led opposition has reportedly made unreasonable demands which prompted PM designate Saad Hariri to quit the task of government formation.
Hariri will most probably be re-nominated as the PM designate . According to al Hayat newspaper Hariri could be re-nominated with as many as 86 votes ( out of 128 MPs). The consultations by the president with parliamentary bloc leaders to determine their choice for PM designate will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday
Hariri is expected to head to Paris today to review a French -Qatari initiative aimed at resolving the Lebanon crisis . Qatar last year hosted a gathering in Doha that led to the election of the president and the formation of a national unity government. Qatari PM has offered to host Doha II accord to help in the formation of a government

Monday
6:10 The Press Association : German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger emerged from their only television debate two weeks before elections much as they entered it — seeming more comfortable working together than fighting each other.
6: 00 Reuters: Osama bin Laden apparently issued a new audio message on an Islamist Web site on Monday, warning the American people about their government’s close ties to Israel.

Sunday
10:23 pm Hariri : “Wining the parliament majority is a trust that we will protect” . He stressed that he stepped down because “there were some that did not want a government to be formed but instead wanted to waste the time of the Lebanese people”. If opposition truly wants a cabinet, we can form one in 48 hours!
10:10 pm AP: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on the eve of a key meeting with the White House Mideast envoy, said Sunday that differences remain with the U.S. over resuming peacemaking with the Palestinians.
10:00pm LAT : MP Walid Jumblatt : Washington refuses to give Lebanon any weapon that could harm Israel. “They will tell you these weapons will be used against Israelis,” Jumblatt said. “OK, but my enemy is Israel.” He added “We need anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft weapons… I think we can find such weapons in Iran , Russia or China.”
9:00 pm: Iran has dealt a blow to one of President Barack Obama’s most ambitious diplomatic initiatives by dismissing demands to put its nuclear program at the heart of direct talks with the United States.
8:20pm Baroud’s told OTV: perhaps I may have made a mistake somewhere, but I am very satisfied with what I did as if I am on the first day of my job at the ministry. He added; ” My conscious is clear because I did the best I could “
08:10 pm MP Mohammad Qabbani : “General Aoun considers his son-in-law Gebran Bassil a genius , but I think he is nothing special “
8:06pm Pakradonina told “LBC”: The Tashnaq still views MP Saad Hariri as the most appropriate and most likely to form a government
8:05pm Fatfat told “LBC”: the opposition will name “vacuum” and “Lebanon first” will name its candidiate for PM designate
8:04pm Kanaan told “LBC”: the situation is still the same and we were not offered any new proposals by anyone
7:43pm “Change and Reform Bloc”source told “Al-Manar”: we will not name Hariri and we are discussing the possibility of naming someone else
7:42pm PSP sources told Al-Manar : Our Coalition is continuing with Hariri, with emphasis on forming a government of national unity
7:41pm Speaker Nabih Berri’s bloc to meet Monday to choose its candidate for PM-designate
7:32pm “Al-Manar”: the same number of MPs , who named Hariri during the previous consultations will rename him tomorrow during the new consultations as the PM designate
7:22pm Netanyahu arrives in Cairo to hold talks with Mubarak
5:57pm MP Boutros Harb: Their fake national-unity cabinet slogan will not lead to uniting the Lebanese
3:15pm MP Walid Jumblatt: Utmost concessions must be made to form national-unity cabinet
2:25pm Iranian president Ahmadinejad: Iran ready for talks but not on nuclear issues
12:25pm Wiam Wahab told al-Manar TV: Hariri plunged Lebanon into an adventure and he will pay a price for that.
12:00pm Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel holds the Lebanese government responsible for rocket fire from its territory, following the latest attacks from southern Lebanon into the Jewish state.
11:00 Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah issued a religious fatwa, banning normalization of relations with Israel whatever the outcome of the actions of Arab political regimes.
11:28 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Lebanese government responsible for rocket launch, warns that Israel will not respond lightly to such incidents
10:30 MP Dori Chamoun told VDL: I suggest the formation of a technocrat government that would give key ministries to four political leaders.
10:25 MP Ahmed Fatfat told Future News TV: Hezbollah wants the majority to succumb to Opposition demands or obstruct to the formation of a government. We totally reject this.
10:20 Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir: Christian faith does not claim to be a political power, but rather recognizes the legitimate authority.
10;10 MP Marwan Hamadeh told Voice of Lebanon that the majority has agreed to nominate Future Movement leader MP Saad Hariri as the PM designate
8:43am Geagea told Voice of Free Lebanon: “The majority has unanimously agreed to re-renominate Hariri to form a government. Hariri was serious about the 15-10-5 Cabinet lineup. He worked until the last minute to find a solution to the government formation.” He accused a “certain political party” of not wanting to form a government in Lebanon.
08:13 Jengenian told al Balad newspaper : the citizens should play their role, by putting pressure on forming a government
8:00 Reuters: Israeli war movie “Lebanon” about the 1982 war with Israel, won the Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice film festival on Saturday.
07:57 European diplomat: No one believes

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Monday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Monday, 14 September, 2009 @ 11:33 AM in Beirut
Beirut – If MP Saad Hariri wants his former job of Prime Minister-designate , he can have it. According to morning reports 86 MPs are predicted to rename Hariri as their choice for prime minister to form the new government. This number includes the 71 Mps from the March 14 majority alliance, the lawmakers from Speaker Nabih Berri’s Development and Liberation bloc and two from the Tashnag party .
“Lebanon First” parliamentary bloc will meet in Qoreitem at 2:00 pm Monday to rename their leader (Hariri ) as the Prime Minister-designate.
Speaker Nabih Berri’s Development and Liberation bloc will also be meeting later today to confirm that their choice is Hariri for PM-designate
MP Michel Aoun’s Change and Reform bloc and Hezbollah’s Loyalty to the Resistance bloc will not be naming Hariri as PM-designate , but are studying the possibility of naming someone else
During an Iftar last night in honor of families and dignitaries from north Lebanon Hariri said : “He who wants to name Saad Hariri, let him do so and he who doesn’t want to name him (Hariri), let him also do so. I will deal likewise with those who don’t want to name me.”
Hariri reiterated his commitment to the “logic of majority and minority.”
He pointed out that the majority March 14 coalition has stretched a hand to the minority March 8 alliance “so we could be together in the government, and not impose conditions on us in the government.”
The president is expected to hold the consultations with the parliamentary bloc leaders choice for PM -designate Tuesday and Wednesday .
The president returned yesterday to Baabda from the summer presidential palace of Beiteddine , in the Shouf region of mount Lebanon.
There was some speculation this morning that the president may delay the consultations till after the Eid el Fitr holiday which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan
Hariri stepped down as Premier-designate last Thursday after the opposition rejected his Cabinet lineup proposal.

Monday
22:10 Pharaoun told “Future news”: the majority is committed to Hariri , rejects the preconditions of the minority and Speaker Berri is awaiting the password to decide which way to go and there is a group that does not want the government to be formed
20:54 One Palestinian was sentenced for 3 years in jail because he tried to bomb UNIFIL
8:40pm Examining Magistrate Jean Fernaini issued an arrest warrant for Salah Ezzeddine and Youssef Faour.
08:00pm Aoun: “Either we take our full rights, or no one takes their rights at all,”
6:52pm MP Nabil Nicholas: We hold onto Bassil and will not accept to be marginalized.
5:40pm Solange Gemayel following the mass: What we see today is an obstruction to the state to prevent it from imposing its sovereignty on all its territories. In the name of the absolute majority of steadfast Lebanese, I say: We won’t let anyone to take Lebanon back into a new crisis to bring back hegemony
4:50 pm France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, beckoning other countries to join in a “revolution” in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis
4:10pm A mass to commemorate the 27th assassination anniversary of President-elect Bashir Gemayel is being held in Ashrafiyeh.
04:05pm LF leader Samir Geagea arrived at the church in Ashrafiyeh to participate in the mass that commemorates the 27th assassination anniversary of President-elect Bashir Gemayel
3:53pm MP Zahra: Democracy does not give the opposition the right to impose their conditions on the PM-designate and they will not get back the veto power.
3:46 pm VOA : Iranian state media say Iran has agreed to start talks with six world powers on global economic and security problems in early October.
3:45pm ‘Lebanon First’ bloc said it will rename Hariri for the PM’s post and lauded his efforts to form a national unity cabinet.
3:40 pm NYT: A British judge sentenced three men to life in prison on Monday for plotting to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles,
3:27pm Lebanese Army Command revealed that the Israelis opened fire yesterday on a fishing boat inside Lebanese territorial waters.
3:21pm Lebanon First bloc holds a meeting in Qoreitem headed by MP Saad Hariri.
3:20pm The Lebanese foreign ministry told U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon in a letter that Israel should coordinate with UNIFIL over any future incident on the Blue Line rather than taking a unilateral action.
3:10 pm Al-Anbaa : Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt called on all the Lebanese parties to “unify their ranks” and facilitate the formation of the new cabinet because any “possible political or security incidents may lead to negative consequences that no party can handle.”
2:55pm Lebanese judiciary set anchorwoman Ghada Eid free on bail that was set at 6 million Lebanese pounds.
3:00pm The Liberation and Development bloc said it would take its time before deciding who to name for the premier’s post.
2:10pm The Liberation and Development bloc is holding a meeting headed by Speaker Nabih Berri to decide on the name of the new premier-designate.
1:32pm A Renault went off track on Shekka highway killing the driver Nader Nader and his wife Cicilia Jomaa
1:25pm TV presenter Ghada Eid surrendered herself to authorities. She was taken to the investigating judge office in Mount Lebanon for questioning regarding the slander and defamation case against Judge Shahid Salameh.
1:15pm French ambassador Andre Parant denied from Bkirki any French-Qatari initiative to solve the Cabinet crisis, saying there is no crisis but only difficulties.
1:14pm Syrian citizen Abdullah Ahmad Al-Mousawi died after falling from an apartment, still under construction in Rafid, Rashaya. His body was taken to Syria and police started an investigation.
12:30pm Siniora discussed current situation with MP Nicolas Fattoush and his brother Pierre.
11:34 MP Elie Marouni told LBC: We back Hariri despite our reservation regarding Kataeb’s share (in Cabinet). No one but MP Hariri is nominated to form a new Cabinet and he will be reassigned as PM-designate. We believe he is capable of playing a leading role in Lebanon’s development.
11:20 MP Ibrahim Kanaan told Future News: Our decision not to rename Hariri as PM-Designate is not personal but political. The dispute with Hariri is that neither he nor we decide on this matter. It is the political reality that decides.
11:14 Siniora from Baabda: I rename Hariri to form a new Cabinet and I call on everybody to adhere to the Constitution. I will leave for Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah.
9:30 President Michel Suleiman received MP Fouad Siniora at the presidential Palace in Baabda to discuss the current situation.
08:51 Saraya Ziad Jarrah of Abdullah Azzam Brigades linked to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for firing rockets from southern Lebanon
08:51 spokesman for the British government: Damascus and Baghdad have to work together and we are examining proposals Iran
08:48 a possible delay of consultations with parliamentary blocs until after Eid al-Fitr
08:47 A Qatari envoy has made an unannounced visit to Beirut on Friday
08:46 sources of the majority: Hariri will not accept the assignment without guarantees
08:41 MP Atef Majdalani,: There is an intention to keep Lebanon as a battle ground and a regional mail box
08:36 Minister Qabbani: if the impossible preconditions continue then the only way to save the country is through a government of technocrats
08:36 MP sources: Beri is linking between his choice for PM designate and a unity government
8:32 MP Michel Moussa told VOL: The Development and Liberation bloc( Speaker Berri’s bloc) stands firm in its position on re-appointing Saad Hariri as PM-designate to form a national unity government
07:55 Abu Nader: Geagea is in the process of forming a new party
07:49 As Safir : During his visit to Beirut Zalmay Khalilzad, asked a prominent member of March 14 “How do you extend your hands to those who killed Rafik Hariri and all the martyrs of the Cedar Revolution? Wait for some time and you could be alone forming a Government of the majority that truly reflects the results of the parliamentary elections.”
07:05 centrists representatives : It seems that the Lebanese want every time to prove their incompetence
06:51 Maarab community (LF) : We reject the weapons outside the framework of legitimacy

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Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 15 September, 2009 @ 11:34 AM in Beirut
Beirut – The consultations regarding the designation of a Prime Minister to form the new cabinet will start at 11 am today at the Baabda palace with a meeting between President Michel Suleiman and Speaker Nabih Berri. Berri who had initially confirmed that he plans to unconditionally nominate Saad Hariri later changed his mind and stipulated that his vote is subject to the condition that Hariri should form a national unity government .
Berri’s change of heart created tension between him and Hariri
Hariri stressed on Monday that he has the right to adopt a “different” negotiations approach
“I have kept my hand extended but they (the opposition) have always rejected our open approach,” Hariri said during an iftar at his residence in Qoreitem. “In face of such rigid stance, it then becomes my constitutional right to adopt a different strategy.”
He said he would reveal such a strategy if he is reappointed as PM-designate. “We would then see how much the other parties would cooperate on cabinet formation.”
“No one tells me what to do as long as I am working within my constitutional authorities that allow me to form the cabinet in cooperation with the president,” he stressed.
Hariri said that his alliance had agreed to include Hezbollah in the cabinet, despite Israeli threats and he was ready to make sacrifices “in order to preserve Lebanon’s interests.”
The Development and Liberation bloc headed by Berri said following their yesterday’s meeting that its members awaited a declaration by Hariri regarding his commitment to the 15-10-5 cabinet formula before nominating him again as premier.
Regardless whether Berri ‘s bloc will nominate him or not Hariri is expected to get at least 73 votes out of 128 ( the votes of the 71 majority and the votes of the 2 opposition MPs from the Tashnag party .
MP Walid Jumblatt has been trying to reconcile Berri with Hariri during the past couple of days. For this reason Minister Ghazi Aridi was shuffling between Berri’s residence and Hariri’s residence until late Monday, according to media reports
Hariri’s supporters are mad at Berri for imposing conditions on their leader . De Freije told “future news”: “When Berri was elected as a speaker he refused the imposition of any conditions so why he is now imposing conditions on Hariri ?”

Tuesday
6:10pm MP Saad Hariri met with British MP Newmark and a delegation from Arslan’s Lebanese Democratic Party.
5:00 pm Reuters: Several mortars or rockets were fired at Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone government district on Tuesday shortly after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden flew in to keep pressure on Iraq’s leaders to make political compromises.
4:50 pm Asia one: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday brushed off US threats of possible sanctions on Iran’s petrol imports, saying Tehran’s oil industry could overcome any such challenge.
4:45 pm AFP: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday that sanctions might be needed to keep Iran’s nuclear program in check but described this as “not very effective” and urged continued negotiation instead
4:25pm ‘Zahle in the Heart’ bloc visited President Suleiman without its leader MP Fattoush and announced their support for Hariri’s re-nomination.
4:20pm MP Sami Gemayel named Hariri as PM-designate.
4:12pm The Democratic Gathering bloc re-named Hariri as PM-designate.
3:55pm The Lebanese Forces re-named Hariri as PM-designate.
3:40pm Three wounded in a dispute in Ramel el-Aali in Ouzai area that developed into a gunfight.
3:30pm MP Nicolas Fattoush re-named as PM-designate.
3:20pm MP Michel Murr renamed Hariri as PM-designate.
2;30 pm Minister Bahia Hariri is meeting with the directors of Beirut and Mount Lebanon public schools to discuss the measures that should be taken with regards to the swine flu
2:19pm Gracciano : we renew our full commitment to the Lebanese governmnt and compliance with UNSCR 1701 by all parties and security in the south
2:13pm Hezbollah’s MP Hajj Hassan: the country needs calm dialogue and not escalation and without the 15-10-5 formula there will not be true partnership
1:54 pm MTV: Syrian Social Nationalist Party bloc MP Marwan Fares said that he expects Future Movement leader MP Saad Hariri “to fail” in forming the new cabinet, adding that Syria would have “nothing to do with it, since it does not interfere in Lebanon’s political affairs.
1 :38pm the consultations at Baabda palace were postponed to 3 pm today because of a lunch meeting between Aoun , Suleiman and Gebran Bassil
1 :35pm Sison’s visit to Baabda was to coordinate tomorrow’s meeting between George Mitchell and the president
1 :30pm Suleiman is currently meeting with The Democratic Gathering bloc headed by MP Walid Jumblatt
1;30 pm Hezbollah’s ( loyalty to the resistance) bloc does not nominate anyone for PM- designate
1 :15pm Suleiman is meeting with Hezbollah’s ( loyalty to the resistance) bloc headed by MP Mohammad Raad
1:11 pm General Aoun said at the end of the consultations that he did not name Hariri as PM designate
1: 10pm Al Manar : The US ambassador has arrived at Baabda palace in a surprise visit .
1 :02 pm The consultations continue and Suleiman is currently meeting with change and reform bloc headed by MP Aoun
1 :01 pm MP Hubeish said on behalf Future ( al Mustaqbal) parliamentary bloc: we nominated Hariri as PM designate
12:48 President Suleiman is currently meeting the Future ( al Mustaqbal) parliamentary bloc headed by MP Saad Hariri
12:50pm Contrary to what OTV has reported earlier , the Development and Liberation bloc headed by Berri did not name Hariri as PM designate . Following the consultations with Suleiman MP Hassan Khalil made a statement in which he confirmed that their bloc did not name anyone , but promised to cooperate with Hariri if he is nominated and if he plans to form a cabinet based on the 15-10-5 formula
12:30 pm OTV : The Development and Liberation bloc headed by Berri will name Hariri as PM designate following positive assurances received from president Suleiman . Hariri is now expected to receive 86 votes
12;20pm The Development and Liberation bloc headed by Berri is currently meeting with president Suleiman
12:20pm Al Manar : Berri’s bloc will not nominate anyone if Hariri will not issue a clear commitment regarding the new government formula
12;15pm : Makari : I have nominated Hariri as the PM designate hoping the government will be formed soon and without any obstructions
12:07pm Marouni told OTV : I am in the heart of Zahli in the Heart bloc. We either agree to attend altogether the consultations or we should agree on another form
12:04pm Suleiman is meeting deputy Speaker Makari
12;03 pm As Iran agrees to hold the much-anticipated negotiations with the West on October 1, the United States says it will send its third-ranking diplomat William Burns to the talks.
12;00pm US military officials say American special forces staged an attack in southern Somalia Monday and killed a Kenyan-born terrorist suspect wanted by the FBI
11:58 Mikati : I have nominated Hariri as the PM designate hoping the government will be formed soon
11:48 NYT: Norwegian voters have returned their Labor-dominated government to office, narrowly endorsing Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s pursuit of expanded public services and rejecting angry demands by some of his opponents
11:45 Suleiman is currently meeting with Miqati after meeting with Aoun who left without making any statement
11:42 The Iraqi journalist Muntazar el Zubaidi who threw his shoes at former president Bush was released from jail today
11:37 Alloush : If Aoun will not make concessions , then the prospects of government formation will be difficult
11:31 Berri left baabda palace without making any statement
11:29 MTV : preliminary indications reveal that Hariri will get 73 votes as PM designate
11:29 FPM leader MP Michel Aoun arrives in Baabda for parliamentary consultations
11:25 Former PM Miqati arrives at Baabda palace
11:10 Siniora’s appointment for consultations was postponed till tomorrow because he is out of the country
11:00 Speaker Nabih Berri arrived at Baabda Presidential Palace at start of parliamentary consultations .
10:48 Israeli mock air strikes over Nabatiyah , Iqlim and Marjayoun
10:45 a loud explosion was heard near Dahr al-Baydar caused by the detonation of old munitions by the army
10:32 Majority sources told al Anbaa”: the circumstances of the birth of the formula 15 +10 +5 are no longer valid and the idea of the Government of technocrats is no longer an option for the majority
10:25 President Suleiman will resume parliamentary consultations at 11 am in Baabda and will start with a meeting with Berri
10:20 Quraytem circles: Hariri’s resignation was not a retreat but simply a leap forward towards the formation of a cabinet
10:18 De Freije told “future news”: when Berri was elected as a speaker he refused the imposition of any conditions so why he is now imposing conditions on Hariri ?

09:53 Abu Jamra told al Rai: the country’s interest requires that Hariri should include all the parties in the cabinet
09:16 38 wanted people were arrested for committing criminal acts
09:10 majority sources told al Hayat : Hariri did not confirm his continued commitment to the formula 15 +10 +5, but did not say he was also abandoning it
09:05 Saqr: the difference between Fattoush, Maroni is the result of differences in views within the bloc with regards to representation in the government
09:03 al Liwaa: Sarkozy decided to send a senior aid to Beirut before the end of the month
08:58 STL registrar : The Lebanese has no choice but to cooperate with the special Tribunal because of the pledges and commitments made by the Lebanese state itself
08:37 al Hayat: a telephone conversation took place between Suleiman and Assad that dealt with regional developments and bilateral relations and the internal Lebanese situation
8:32 MP Robert Ghanem told VOL: we want all parties to Lebanonize the cabinet formation process more than before. Priority lies in clearing the situation again and coming up with a government which abides by the constitution.
8:30 MP Ahmed Fatfat told VOL: We do not reject a national unity government on condition that the other party makes concessions. Renaming Hariri as PM-Designate does not mean the birth of a government.

 
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Wednesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Wednesday, 16 September, 2009 @ 1:46 PM in Beirut
Beirut- Yesterday president Michel Suleiman kicked of the Parliamentary consultations at the Baabda Palace for the nomination of a Prime minister to form the new cabinet. 54 out of the 97 MPs that showed up during the first day of consultations voiced their support for Future Movement leader MP Saad Hariri.
The president will resume the consultations today.
Based on the most recent predictions Hariri is expected by the end of the day to have the vote of 73 MPs out of the 128 . This number includes the 71 members and the two Mps from the Armenian Tashnag party
Speaker Nabih Berri’s refusal to endorse Hariri was the most disappointing development , since he had already promised last week to endorse him
All the key opposition parties , Hezbollah , Amal and the Free Patriotic Movement refrained from renaming Hariri or anyone else as PM designate
Both Hezbollah and Amal promised to cooperate with Hariri over the formation of a national unity government based on the 15-10-5 formula( 15 portfolios for the majority – 10 for the opposition and 5 for the president)
Both Deputy Parliament Speaker Farid Makari and former Premier Najib Miqati named Hariri as PM -designate
“Reaching national consensus does not mean that the losing party should get the priority in forming a Cabinet; that decision should be taken by the majority,” Makari said.
Miqati, hoped that various politicians would exert every effort to “remove all obstacles and conditions because the country needs a government that stands up to challenges.”
The president took a noon break and invited General Aoun and his son-in-law caretaker Minister of Telecoms Gebran Bassil for lunch in an attempt to solicit the cooperation of the FPM leader over the formation of a cabinet but the “Outcome of the lunch was negative as no breakthrough was reached,” according to VOL Radio station .
Al Mustaqbal MP Hubeish , Lebanese Forces’ MP Streada Geagea, Zahleh’s MP Fattoush and Democratic Gathering leader MP Walid Jumblatt endorsed Hariri as PM designate
The majority was extremely disappointed in the positions taken by the opposition .MP Riad Rahal told “Voice of Lebanon:” If they really want a government of national unity , they should be giving Hariri 128 votes. As long as there is no solution to the problem of weapons , the weapons will rule the country . This was in reference to the Hezbollah arms
PSP leader MP Jumblatt is concerned that the country is heading in the wrong direction . He told Al Anbaa newspaper : “ All I know is that the country is not moving in the right direction”

Wednesday
9::19pm MP Ogassbian : No cabinet in Lebanon without the Shiites and for this reason the crises could continue if the situation remains as is
9:21 pm George Mitchell left Beirut for Cairo after a short visit to Lebanon that lasted few hours
08:27 pm Mitchell conveyed the greetings of President Obama to president Suleiman and renewed his country’s support for Lebanon and its institutions and its assistance at every level: the issue of refugees a priority and are careful on making sure that any solution will not be at the expense of Lebanon or its interests , said Mitchell
8:25pm Mitchell briefed President Suleiman briefed about his efforts concerning peace negotiations: We hope his efforts will lead to the re-launch of peaceful negotiations for the sake of a just and lasting peace , Suleiman said
8:15pm first lady Wafaa Suleiman told “MTV”: It is natural for women to join the government and it is easy to find many qualified Lebanese women for ministerial positions, but unfortunately our sectarian system limits our choice
8:10 pm STL’s Bellemare told Future news : Progress has been but “conspirators and perpetrators are still at large.” He added: “When political attacks against the tribunal increase, I realize I am approaching the truth.”
7:19pm Lebanese Security forces have deployed in Burg el Barajneh to control the situation
7:10pm U.S. special envoy George Mitchell leaves Baabda without making any statement
6:30pm U.S. special envoy George Mitchell is meeting with President Suleiman in Baabda.
18:26 OTV: gunfire shots were heard in Burg el Barajneh and unknown gunmen were spotted on the streets
6:21pm U.S. Special envoy George Mitchell arrived in Beirut coming from Amman on a private jet
5:30pm Military Commander Kahwaji met Police Chief Rifi for a roundup of the latest security
5:20 pm Afghan President Hamid Karzai won 54.6 percent of the preliminary result released on Wednesday from controversial elections, but his victory is not secure until claims of massive vote fraud are resolved.
5:10 pm FPM leader MP Michel Aoun following the Change and Reform bloc meeting accuses Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir of no longer being neutral and of having joined the Lebanese Forces party. He also said ““If our presence (in the cabinet) is not necessary, then let them form the government without us.”, but if they want us they have to pay the price
3:45pm following his designation as PM-designate Hariri said : “The Lebanese want a Cabinet able to run the country and to solve the accumulated problems not to handle the ongoing political bickering.”. He vowed to hold on to dialogue as a steady base for communication and to adhere to the Constitution. He also said he will start consultations with all political parties right after the Eid al-Fitr and will be open to new ideas
3:10 Speaker Berri leaves Baabda palace without making any statement
3:00pm President Michel Suleiman renamed MP Saad Hariri as PM designate and asked him to form the new government.
2:57pm MP Saad Hariri joined the meeting between Speaker Berri and President Suleiman at the Baabda Palace.
2:32pm Speaker Nabih Berri meets with President Suleiman at Baabda Palace to discuss results of the Parliamentary Consultations
2:30pm MP Saniora: I rename Hariri as PM-designate and I call everyone to stick to the Constitution.
2:20pm 73 MPs named Saad Hariri to form a government at the end of two days of parliamentary consultations with the president.
2:15pm A huge fire broke out in Zouk Powerplant. Causes are still unknown.
2:00pm MP Fouad Siniora arrived to Baabda Palace to meet with President Suleiman.
1:56pm NNA: Fatah al-Islam inmates in Roumieh prison announced they are going on a hunger strike.
1:57pm President Suleiman is awaiting the arrival of caretaker PM Foad Siniora for concluding the consultations over the naming of a PM designate who will form the cabinet
1:40pm Security source told Future News: Security forces are trying to quell a riot attempt inside the high security Roumieh prison.
1:32pm MPs Robert Abu Fadel, Dory Chamoun, Michel Pharaon, Robert Ghanem, Butros Harb and Nayla Tueni nominated Hariri for premiership.
1;30 pm Reuters: The United States and Israel ended another round of talks on Wednesday with no sign yet of a deal on a West Bank settlement freeze, but a US envoy planned to meet again with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
1:12pm Lebanese Army: Israeli troops opened fire on a fishing boat on Tuesday inside Lebanese territorial waters in a clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701.
12:59pm Sfeir: Naming deputies who failed in elections would be contrary to the nation’s will.
12: 30 pm Al-Jamaa al-Islamiya MP Imad al-Hout announced named MP Saad Hariri the PM-designate
12:10pm MP Mohammed Safadi speaking on behalf of the Tripoli bloc: We named Future Movement leader Hariri as PM-designate.
11:58 MP Assaad Hardan, on behalf of the SSNP bloc, did not name anyone for the premiership.
11:57 President Suleiman called Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir to wish him a safe flight to Rome on Thursday.
11:56 Telecom minister Gebran Bassil told LBC: My reappointment was not discussed during lunch at Baabda with President Suleiman.
11:52 Unknown assailants robbed a U.N. French patrol while taking pictures at an archeological site in Hanin village.
11:02 Baath Party parliamentary bloc refrained from naming a premier but offered full cooperation to achieve a national unity government.
11:00 MP Ahmad Karami nominated Future Movement leader Hariri as PM-designate.
10:55 MP Serge Tor Sarkissian announced that the Armenian bloc nominates Future Movement leader MP Saad Hariri as PM-designate.
10:30 MP Talal Arslan refrained from renaming a premier but promised to cooperate in efforts for dialogue.
10:02 Parliamentary Consultations kicked off at 10:00am with a meeting between President Suleiman and MP Talal Arslan.
08:26 MP Riad Rahal told “Voice of Lebanon:” If they really want a government of national unity should be giving Hariri 128 votes. As long as no solution to the problem of weapons , the weapons will rule the country
08:21 Al Liwaa: Berri told Hariri in a message sent through Jumblatt that neither he nor anyone else can undermine his leadership role in the political arena
08:15 a parliamentary source of “future”: Hariri will not quit and won’t begin his consultations with parliamentary blocs from where previous negotiations ended
08:08 Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah will deliver a speech this Friday afternoon on the anniversary of Jerusalem Day
07:53 Al Hayat : Syria informed Qatar that any new Doha conference requires the approval of Saudi Arabia otherwise no need for a Doha – 2
07:42 The Lebanese security arrested Palestinian citizen W.Z. , brother-in-law of detainee Hassan Nabah who was accused of being the head of al Qaeda in the Levant region . He is an explosives expert
7:30am MP Nidal Tomeh told VDL: There is a regional decision to turn government formation process into an explosive crisis. Hariri did not reject the 15-10-5 Cabinet formula, but the Opposition has to make concessions and assume responsibilities . It is not right that Bassil ‘s inclusion in the cabinet becomes a red line like the Hezbollah arms
07:01 Hariri sources : The options available are very few and therefore forming a government of technocrats would be the only political solution in this atmosphere in which we are searching for unconventional solutions
06:49 Jumblatt told Al Anbaa : All I know is that the country is not moving in the right direction
06:38 As Safir : Suleiman told Aoun that he has no objection against including basil in the cabinet and for the Telecommunications ministry to be included in the share of the opposition
06:05 Jumblatt: I will do all I can with speaker Berri and with anyone else who wants to cooperate
05:53 Suleiman: Hariri is still committed to the formation of a Government of National Unity and he is at the same time aware that I will only sign the decree of a Government of National Unity
05:45 President Suleiman will meet at six this evening with U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell to discuss the results of his latest talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

 
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Thursday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Thursday, 17 September, 2009 @ 7:22 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Yesterday Lebanese president Michel Suleiman has renamed Future Movement leader MP Saad Hariri as the prime minister – designate and asked him to try again to form a new government. Hariri was first designated prime minister last June but stepped down last week, blaming rival politicians— including those from Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and Syria — for thwarting his attempts to forge a unity government .
The rival Lebanese factions had agreed on the broad outline of a cabinet, but failed to resolve disputes about who would head which ministries
Following his re-designation Hariri said he was open to all ideas about how to make progress. Hariri said he would launch consultations with all parties following Eid al-Fitr holiday to form an “effective and harmonious” cabinet that respects the constitution and the results of the parliamentary polls.
The 39-year-old Future leader is the son of the assassinated billionaire and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
In his acceptance speech at Baabda palace Hariri hinted that he would take a tougher stand in dealing with his rivals’ demands while insisting he was open to dialogue.
“The conditions they set in the first phase blocked the possibility of forming a national unity government,” Hariri told reporters. “We now face a new challenge, and I do not want to make empty promises.
“The promise I make to myself, before God and before the Lebanese is to respect the constitution, work to ensure the widest participation possible in government and continue dialogue,” he added.
All the opposition MPs except for the Armenian Tashnag party, refrained from naming anyone for the premiership during the two days of parliamentary consultations at the Baabda palace.
Berri promised last week to endorse Hariri like he did last June , but later changed his mind , reportedly because of pressure from Hezbollah, Syria and Iran
Diplomatic observers were quoted by the local media as saying: “If March 8 sticks to its demands then the government formation crises will be around for a long time “

Thursday
8:15pm Parliamentary sources warned of troubles and riots beginning to show in Beirut districts.
5:30pm Michel Aoun after meeting PM-designate Hariri: We agreed on the necessity of calmness and keeping away from tension.
3:45pm PM-designate Hariri confirmed the necessity of Taef’s implementation and the dialogue with all parties without prior conditions.
3:43 pm PM-designate Saad Hariri meets with caretaker PM Fouad Siniora at his house
3:10pm Former PM Karame: The actual situation demands a speeding up in Cabinet lineup.
3:08pm Caretaker Minister of defense Elias Murr meets wit army chief Kahwaji to discuss the security situation
2::25pm MP Fatfat : A government of technocrats may have been difficult to form , but the government of national unity was much more difficult
2:10 pm Reuters : Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Thursday fraud claims in last month’s presidential poll were exaggerated ,
2:05 pm Indonesia’s most wanted Islamist militant, Noordin Mohammad Top, was killed in a police shoot-out in Central Java, police said on Thursday, lifting a major security threat ahead of a planned visit by US President Barack Obama
2:00pm Six Italian soldiers were killed and four seriously injured when a suicide bomber crashed a car into a military convoy in central Kabul in the worst attack against the country’s forces
1 :42pm PM-designate Hariri did not make any statement after meeting with MP Michel Aoun in Rabiyeh.
1:00pm MP Fouad Siniora headed the meeting of Francophone Games’ Committee with Minister Tamam Salam and CNJF members.
12:40pm PM-designate Hariri, is meeting with former PM Selim el Hoss.
12:15pm PM-designate Saad Hariri started his traditional visits with former PMs, His first meeting is with former PM Rachid El Solh.
11:00 Abdullah Oussama , a Lebanese-born Swede was sentenced to life in prison for plotting to open a terrorism training camp in Oregon in 1999 to help al-Qaida. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Kassir “trained men to become terrorists on American soil.”
10:51 MP Antoine Zahra told Future News: MP Michel Aoun should not ridicule the Patriarch because he has not joined any political party.

10:30 Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz received former PM Najib Miqati last evening in al-Safa Palace in Mecca.
10:10 MP Hubeish told LBC : It is very rude to accuse Patriarch Sfeir of belonging to a specific political party . The formula of 15 -10-5 is no longer the base for forming a government
9:09 The army intelligence arrested Mohammad H. , the 6th suspect in the Barouk internet company issue
8:50 Cardinal Sfeir at the Beirut airport on his way to Rome : I am with a cabinet that manages people’s affairs. The cabinet crisis will not be solved if there is no willingness to save the country.
8:30 MP Anwar al-Khalil told VOL: Hariri’s speech on Wednesday was vague. Does he want to give up the 15-10-5 formula? Or he wants to form a majority cabinet?
7:25 Minister Elie Marouni told VOL: Hariri’s reappointment freed him from previous commitments on cabinet formation based on the 15-10-5 formula.
07:22 “An-Nahar”: the meeting between Berri and Hariri was characterized as cold
07:00 al Akhbar : the latest positions of the Safir, has blown up any chances for meetings between Aoun and the Church
06: Fattoush’s close associate : He has been an independent and will remain so
06:40 a security source informs General Rifi that there is a plot to assassinate him
6:30 al-Akhbar : Damascus has filed a complaint with the U.N. against former chief UN investigator Detlev Mehlis and his aide Gerhard Lehmann accusing them of trying to frame Syria in the assassination case of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri. The complaint says Mehlis “fabricated, forged and created politicized information to hit at Syria and its reputation,” according to the source.
06:28 Diplomatic sources: if March 8 sticks to its demands then the government formation crises will be around for a long time
06:15 “As Safir “: A yacht was launched from Lebanon , stopped at the port of Haifa and then headed to the commercial port of Ashkelon
06:00 Jumblatt: Let the regional powers deal on issues within the Government

 
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Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 18 September, 2009 @ 10:19 AM in Beirut
Beirut – Armed with the Der Spiegel report which revealed that it Was Hezbollah and not Syria that was behind the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, Syria filed a complaint with the United Nations against former chief investigator Detlev Mehlis and his aide Gerhard Lehmann accusing them of trying to frame Syria in the assassination case Hariri.
The Syrian letter asked UN chief Ban Ki-moon and President of the Security Council, US ambassador Susan Rice, to launch an official investigation into the case according to the pro-Syrian Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
The letter claims that Mehlis “fabricated, forged and created politicized information to hit at Syria and its reputation,” according to the Al-Akhbar sources.
During a press conference Thursday U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejected the Syrian request : “This is not within my domain,” Ban told reporters when asked to clarify the request by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem for him to investigate Mehlis and Lehmann.
Ban stressed that he had “full confidence” in Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare.
“He has been doing a great job, with a strong sense of integrity. This is what I believe he will continue to do,” Ban said of Bellemare.
Mehis was the first UN chief investigator charged with probing the murder of Hariri who was assassinated on February 14, 2005 in downtown Beirut . Mehis concluded in his report that the assassination could not have taken place without the full knowledge of the Syrian leaders and their intelligence apparatus, specially because Lebanon at the time was occupied by Syria.
But last May a report by the German Der Spiegel report revealed that the vehicle used in the assassination of Hariri was owned by a Hezbollah official and that it was Hezbollah and not Syria that was behind Hariri’s murder .
According to a Lebanese legal observer who declined to be named for security reasons , “both Syria and Hezbollah could be involved in the assassination. There are many issues involved here he said : “Who ordered the assassination , who planned it, who financed it and who executed it? “ adding a “crime of this nature requires substantial logistical preparations” . The observer stressed that “ Syria needed Hezbollah for the logistical part and Hezbollah needed the Syrian security cover “
Commenting on the Syrian letter to the Security Council, during an interview with al Hayat newspaper , Judge Detlev Mehlis declared that he has “ full confidence in Special the International Tribunal for Lebanon”, stressing that what his” team and International Committee found and reported was based on evidence, which is included in the reports to the Security Council. “ Mehlis refused in the interview to get into the details of the Syrian, saying:” I understand the increase in their ( Syrian ) anxiety with the continuation of the investigation and the establishment of the International Tribunal.

Friday
4:03pm Kahwaji: The recent rocket fire incident is aimed at keeping the south an arena for exchange of messages , which we won’t allow it because it affects the interest of the nation and provides a free service to the enemy
4:00pm Army chief General Kahwaji met General Webster to discussed US aid .
4: 00 pm BBC US envoy George Mitchell’s latest round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East has ended without agreement, Palestinian officials said.
3:52pm caretaker minister of Finance Chatah: The interest rates will be to declining and the level of public debt may fall to 151% of GDP after it reached more than 160%
3:00 pm NATO proposed a new era of cooperation with the United States and Russia on Friday, calling for joint work on missile defense systems after Washington scrapped a planned anti-missile system.
2:00 pm Russia will not deploy new missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave now that the United States has dropped plans to build an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia’s envoy to NATO said on Friday.
1:15pm Caretaker Foreign minister Fawzi Salloukh discussed current Lebanese affairs with Syrian ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul Karim Ali.
1;00pm Three Iranian opposition politicians have asked the International Monetary Fund to investigate the appearance of more than 11 billion British pounds (over $18 billion) in Turkey’s treasury, alleging that the money was illegally taken out of Iran, the Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.
12:20 pm An-Nahar : A senior U.S. official said: “Washington will not dispatch any senior official to Syria as long as Syrian behavior in Lebanon remains the same.”
12:15pm PM-designate Hariri left for Saudi Arabia to spend the Eid el-Fitr holiday with his family.
12:05 pm A group of Iranian hard-liners have attacked Mohammad Khatamia, a reformist former Iranian president while he was marching with opposition supporters at an anti-government rally in Tehran. Witnesses said the attackers pushed the ex-President Khatami to the ground.
12:20 pm Dallas News: President Barack Obama’s decision to abandon a Bush-era missile defense system in Europe and establish a partly ship-based shield against Iranian rockets could tighten U.S. pressure on the Islamic republic and ease a simmering rift with Russia.
12:00pm A suicide car-bomber killed at least 25 people in northwest Pakistan on Friday in an explosion on a road that brought down nearby shops, police and witnesses said.
11:42 MP Ali Khalil: We should work together to build a political front capable of facing the challenges threatening the region. It’s in our interest and in that of the PM-designate to solve crises in Lebanon.
11:26 Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora met with Police Chief General Ashraf Rifi to discuss security situation.
11:25 MP Ahmed Fatfat told LBC: We’re facing a governance crisis. There’s a serious intention to change the regime in Lebanon and end sectarianism. There’s no solution to the whole crisis in Lebanon.
11:12 PSP: speeding up the formation of the government prevents the exploitation of the political vacuum in the country and blocks the way for any attempt that is aimed at destabilizing and undermining the national unity
11:00 Iran opposition leader Mousavi had urged participation in the Quds Day rally as a show of strength after a three-month post-election crackdown.
10:49 caretaker minister Marouni: any government formulation based on the conditions set by the March 8, will hit a wall . The only possibility of forming a government is forming a Government of political leaders
10:24 Sujaan Qazzi : We are concerned that Hezbollah will obstruct Hariri’s task with the aim of having him replaced by someone else
10:00 As-Safir : PSP leader MP walid Jumblatt said forming a national-unity government should be the top priority adding “that the call for a national dialogue cannot replace the call for a cabinet that would be able to handle Lebanese affairs”
9:55 As-Safir : Jumblatt will be sending his foreign affairs officer, MP Dureid Yaghi, to represent him in the Jerusalem “Al-Quds” Day ceremony that Hezbollah is holding in Dahiyeh
09:54 Informed sources told al Rai : Syria is behind the refusal by the opposition to rename Hariri as PM designate
9:20 The Lebanese internal security arrested 62 wanted in various crimes
08:30 Speaker Nabih Berri and PM- designate Saad Hariri agreed to begin deliberations on cabinet formation starting next Thursday
8:25am Phalange party leader Amin Gemayel told VOL: Talks are now focused on the political issues in the country. President Suleiman and PM-designate Hariri should launch an initiative at the national level.
7:30am Former MP Mustafa Alloush told VOL: The 15-10-5 Cabinet formula is still valid. If the Opposition did not provide names, then the premier-designate will propose a technocrat government.

 
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Saturday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Saturday, 19 September, 2009 @ 11:48 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah told Friday his local and Arab foes on the occasion of Jerusalem Day “to get off the resistance’s back” . He said Israel may wage a war but he does not want this war and threatened Israel that his fighters would “shatter” its army if the Jewish state attacks Lebanon
“We do not need to open a war front with Israel. The strategy that should be adopted in Lebanon is to preserve the resistance.” He said
Commenting on Nasrallah’s speech, Zahle MP Oqab Saqr told VOL this morning : The resistance should also get off the back of some Lebanese. The March 8 forces have always a plan to put obstacles to the March 14 project
Nasrallah called Israel “a malignant illegal entity” and said making deals and normalization with Israel is religiously forbidden. He added “ We will not recognize Israel, neither succumb to it, and we will not normalize or make peace with this malignant cell that should be terminated, even if the whole world recognizes its existence.”
He accused the “US administration of tricking the Arabs to get more concessions and push the Arab world toward normalization with Israel.”
He also accused the Arab regimes of “ confiscating the resistance’s arms while facilitating the smuggling of weapons used in internal strife among the Palestinian factions.”
Nasrallah warned Israel “Harming Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem will lead to an unexpected and unprecedented response regardless of any regional and international considerations.” He said
Many politicians in Lebanon are predicting that Israel may launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah before attacking the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Saturday
11:00 Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Sistani announces that Monday, will be the first day of Eid al-Fitr in Iraq
10:23 pm : Vice President of the Higher Shiite Council Sheikh Abdel-Amir Qabalan announces that Sunday, will be the first day of Eid al-Fitr in Lebanon
10:00pm PM designate Saad Hariri extends greetings to Muslims and Arabs celebrating Eid al-Fitr
8:33pm President Obama extends greetings to Muslims celebrating Eid al-Fitr
7:35pm Dar al-Fatwa announces that Sunday, will be the first day of Eid al-Fitr in Lebanon
6:54 Saudi Arabia and Jordan announce that , Sunday, is the first day of Eid al-Fitr marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan
3:00 pm VOA : Russia says it has scrapped plans to deploy missiles in a region near Poland after US President Barack Obama canceled plans for a missile defense system in Central Europe.
2:10 pm al-Akhbar: MP Walid Jumblatt has accused the US neocons of rejecting formation of the unity cabinet in Lebanon
2:00pm Grand Mufti of the Lebanese Republic Sheikh Mohammad Rashid Qabban to deliver Eid al-Fitr’s speech at Al Amin mosque in central Beirut tomorrow morning at 7:10 am
1:40 pm President Michel Suleiman’s press office issued a statement on Saturday on the occasion of Eid Al-Fitr, wishing the Lebanese in general and Muslims in particular a “Happy Fitr”.
1:39pm Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah will deliver Eid al-Fitr’s speech tomorrow morning at a mosque in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
1:19pm The governor of the South informed Minister Bahia Hariri that 5 people were arrested in Sidon’s dump fire case.
1:17pm President Suleiman discussed with his top aides preparations for his visit to New York to attend the General Assembly meeting.
12;45 pm An Arab resolution expressing concern about Israel’s nuclear weapons was narrowly passed ( 49 to 45 ) at the IAEA Friday, in a vote exposing a rift between developing and industrialized countries.
12:30 pm CNN: Indonesian police say they have DNA evidence identifying the man they killed this week as Noordin Top, the nation’s most-wanted terror suspect.
12:24pm MP Farid al-Khazen told OTV: The opposition doesn’t have any insurmountable demands. Any attempt to form a majority cabinet is a formula for creating a crisis in the country.
11:37 Minister Bahia Hariri: All public schools will be closed during Eid al-Fitr holiday.
11:27 Minister Jean Oghassabian: We won’t compromise on our principles, the constitution and the division of power between Muslims and Christians.
10:46 MP Robert Fadel told VOL: I expect that the 15-10-5 formula would be kept. The majority’s stance urges Hariri not to make more concessions.
10:18 MP Antoine Zahra told Future News: The LF suggested a technocrat cabinet when it realized that the formation of a national unity government was impossible. Nasrallah’s tone yesterday was better than before.
8:45 Fares Soueid told Free Lebanon radio : MP Michel Aoun is eying the presidency and not the finance or any other ministry. Hezbollah doesn’t want to eliminate the state but it doesn’t want it strong either.
8:30 MP Oqab Saqr told VOL: The resistance should also get off the back of some Lebanese. The March 8 forces have always a plan to put obstacles to the March 14 project.
08:12 MP Antoine Zahra: Hariri is not thinking of a government of the majority only because it is impossible for any a Shi’ite to participate under the current tension
08:08 Lebanon approved the appointment of the new French ambassador to Lebanon
08:01 Suleiman travels next Tuesday before noon to New York to head Lebanon’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly session
07:54 Al Akhbar : Hariri to brief the Saudis on his intention to form a government of technocrats
07:35 Syrian ambassador to the UN rejects Ban Ki- Moon’s reply to Damascus’s request for probing Detlev Mehlis and his aide Lehman for manipulating the investigation into Hariri’s assassination,
07:05 harb : Suleiman told me when I met him during the consultations that he did not announce that he will not sign except a decree of a national unity government
06:58 Sources: The formation of a cabinet is heading towards a dead end
06:49 Alain Aoun: whoever was given a new mandate should have new ideas and the ball is now in the court of Hariri

 
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Sunday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Sunday, 20 September, 2009 @ 8:48 AM in Beirut
Beirut- the Muslims of Lebanon , like other Muslims in most of the Arab and the Muslim counties will be celebrating Eid al-Fitr holiday today which marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting and the beginning of the month of Shawwal .The top Shiite and Sunni Muslim clerics in Lebanon made the announcements about the end of the lunar month of Ramadan last night after confirmation by the moon sighting panels .
The decision to celebrate the end of Ramadan is usually made by the top religious leaders in each country. In Lebanon both the Sunni and the Shiite clerics agreed that it should be today , while in Iraq for example the Sunnis will celebrate today while the Shiites will have to wait till Monday
All the leaders of the Arab and Muslim worlds will be exchanging greetings .
PM designate Saad Hariri who left for Saudi Arabia to celebrate the holiday with his family issued a statement last night in which he congratulated the Arabs and Muslims on this occasion . He is expected to start consultations with parliament bloc leaders next Thursday on the formation of the government .
President Michel Suleiman who issued a similar statement yesterday is expected to head to New York on Tuesday to address the General assembly meeting of the United nations on September 25 th
Lebanon is still without a government and it looks like it won’t have one very soon either . The rival camps are both calling for a unity cabinet, but never been more disunited . The cabinet is expected to be based on the formula of 15 – 10 – 5 ( 15 portfolios for the majority , 10 for the opposition and 5 for the president ) but the opposition and the majority disagree on the types of portfolios each party should have . The opposition is demanding certain portfolios like the ministry of Interior and the ministry of communications , but the majority and for security reasons prefer not to have these 2 ministries in the hands of the Iranian and Syrian backed Hezbollah-led opposition
If it wasn’t for Hezbollah’s arms the March 14 majority which won last June 71 out of 128 seats in the parliament , would have most probably formed a government on its own, just like all the democracies of the world . But Hezbollah in May 2008 used its arms against the Lebanese in West Beirut and Mount Lebanon and there is concern that it will use its arms again against its fellow citizens if it is excluded from the cabinet. Such an action according to politicians like PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt could spark another civil war… which the country could do without … and for this reason he has been calling for a government of national unity and threatening to boycott any cabinet that is formed by the majority only

Sunday
11;00 pm Russia began to signal a small thaw in relations with the West on Friday in the wake of the US cancellation of an antimissile defense system in Eastern Europe, as NATO offered a reset of its own thorny ties with Moscow.
10:30 pm Barack Obama’s efforts to revive peace talks in the Middle East will come under scrutiny on Tuesday when he hosts a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
7:00 pm MP Abi Ramya : We will have no problem if we will be given the ministry of finance and 4 state ministries
2:00 pm BBC President Obama has rejected a request by seven former heads of the CIA to end the inquiry into allegations of abuse of suspects held by the agency.
1 :14pm During a special ceremony at the vocational school in Batloun , Shouf honoring the students that passed the national exams Jumblatt called for paying special attention to vocational education because it provides more job opportunities in countries that needs such qualifications
1:03 pm During phone calls to president Suleiman and PM designate Saad Hariri Sarkozy voices support for Lebanon and for forming a cabinet
11;00 King Abdullah II of Jordan and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas cautioned that not seizing the opportunity at hand to bring about peace threatens the security and stability of the whole ME region.
10:59 AFP: An Israeli Army spokesperson said Sunday that some rockets were fired in the morning from the Gaza Strip and landed in Israel without causing any injuries, the army said.
10:50 Mike Huckabee in 2012? If conservative value voters have their way, Former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee may be at the top of the GOP ticket in 2012. Huckabee Won the Values Voter Straw Poll.
10:40 Wiam Wahab told “New” TV: Hariri is responsible for inciting his Mps , and if he is sincere he should return after the eid el Fitr with a new spirit and remove the instigators around him
10:24 MP Yousef Khalil told “Al-Manar:” No prejudice against the third presidential power , unless it does not recognize its own powers . We want to cooperate with the PM designate but we reject the imposition of names on us
10:17 Minister Maroni told “Future News”: We are concerned that about the transition of the political to a security crises and what is required is the redoubling of efforts to protect Lebanon
10:10 Sujaan Qazzi told “LBC”: The government of national unity is an invention aimed at concentrating all contradictions in a government so that the disruption is from within at a time when we are in a critical need for a properly functioning state
10;00 CNN: US Federal agents arrested a 24-year-old Colorado resident, his father and another man on charges of making false statements as part of an investigation into an alleged terror plot, the Justice Department said Sunday.
9;30 Reuters: President Obama has asked New York Governor David Paterson to withdraw from the state’s 2010 governor’s race for fear that the embattled fellow Democrat cannot regroup from a series of political setbacks.
9;20 Reuters: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama will unveil a plan to support developing countries in technology and funding to fight climate change at a UN meeting this week, Japan’s environment minister said
9:17 French sources : France has changed its strategy for Lebanon and will no longer be involved in every little detail
9;15 Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said during his Eid al-Fitr speech in Tehran on Sunday that the “Zionist cancer” is chewing into the lives of Islamic nations.
9:00 The White House has announced in a statement that the US president will host three-way talks with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Tuesday.
8:30 BBC: US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has rejected the claim that a decision to shelve a plan for missile defense in Europe was a concession to Russia.
08:23 Al Hayat : French Prime Minister will be in Beirut next Sunday to meet with Suleiman , Siniora Berri and Hariri
08:17 Syrian-backed Palestinian PFLP -GC leader Ahmad Jibril warned the Lebanese government against talking about his weapons or any attempts to disarm his militants by force
08:15 Al Balad: The Lebanese Forces will hold a general assembly conference in the spring of 2010 and the party is expected to will change its rules
07:57 Ayatollah Fadlallah delivered his Eid el Fitr speech and called for ending the cycle of political verbal duel
07:45 Mufti Qabbani al-Fitr delivered his Eid el Fitr speech : Why resort to the language of threats and intimidation and the imposition of conditions? He said in reference to the demands by the Hezbollah-led opposition
07:07 Tomeh : Jumblatt will begin after the end of Eid el Fitr holiday intensive contacts to assist in the formation of the government
06:45 contacts are continuing in order to arrange a meeting for President Suleiman with President Obama in New York
06:35 on Sunday marks the first day of Eid al-Fitr in Lebanon
06:25 consultations over government formation will start next Thursday after the Eid el Fitr holiday ends and Hariri returns from Saudi Arabia
06:20 The weather today is overcast and rainy, accompanied with a drop in temperature
06:14 President Suleiman heads to New York on Tuesday to participate in the General assembly meeting of the United Nations , while caretaker PM Siniora heads to Riyadh on Wednesday
06:10 Siniora told an Nahar : everyone should contribute to the pacification and cooperation for the sake of stability in the country

 
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Monday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Monday, 21 September, 2009 @ 10:09 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Assassinations may be back in Lebanon! According to the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Anbaa, the Lebanese intelligence foiled the assassination attempt of the Grand Mufti of the Republic of Lebanon Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Qabbani that was to take place on the first day of Eid el-Fitr on Sunday.
The assassination was planned to be executed by means of a suicide operation inside al-Amin Mosque during the Eid prayers, according to information obtained by the paper from the Lebanese intelligence
The newspaper did not reveal how the assassination attempt was foiled
Eid el Fitr marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan
Qabbani,67, the highest spiritual authority within the Muslim Sunni community criticized Sunday attempts at splitting the nation and slammed politicians who speak in a threatening tone.
“If we realize that our strength is in our unity, then why divide?” Qabbani asked in his Eid el-Fitr sermon.
“If we are aware that the loss of the nation is everybody’s loss, then why work on losing it?” he wondered.
“Why resort to the language of intimidation and put conditions? Why don’t we resort to the Constitution, instead of each one having his own constitution?” Qabbani said
Like his counterpart in the Christian community , Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir , the outspoken Qabbani has been very critical of the Hezbollah-led opposition accusing its leaders of undermining the state institutions, to serve the interests of regional powers such as Iran and Syria.
In 2005 Rafik Hariri , the most popular Prime minister in Lebanese history was assassinated in downtown Beirut . His assassination was followed by several others of anti-Syrian leaders. Syria was blamed for these assassinations but Syria denied any involvement . Last May a report by the respected Der Spiegel German magazine revealed that Hezbollah was behind the assassination of Hariri and the vehicle used in executing his assassination was owned by a Hezbollah official
Qabbani succeeded Grand Mufti Sheikh Hassan Khaled who was assassinated on May 16, 1989. A 300 pound (136 kg) car bomb was detonated next to Khaled’s car as he drove through Beirut. Khaled and 21 others were killed. Some suspected Syrian intelligence agents were behind the assassination.
Many Lebanese leaders have been warning of a new wave of assassinations.

Monday
5:10 pm Reuters – US crude oil futures fell on Monday as the dollar strengthened, global equities slipped and concerns about tepid demand even amid signs of and expectations for economic recovery.
5:00pm AP: Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin lashed out French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday at the start of a slander trial involving alleged dirty tricks by top politicians and businessmen.
2:22 pm : FPM’s MP Hikmet Deeb denied during an interview with al Noor station that General Michel Aoun had visited Syria secretly earlier this month . He called report about Aoun’s visit “ lies and fabrications aimed at creating excuses for delay in government formation”
2:04 pm General Aoun’s office denied he visited Syria earlier this month
1:00 pm MP Sami Gemayel told the Lebanese community in Montreal, Canada: A new democratic concept called consensual democracy was created in Lebanon. It means that the results of the parliamentary elections are null and void
12:40 pm AFP: Israeli and Palestinian leaders headed on Monday for a summit with US President Barack Obama, with both sides skeptical the “photo-up” encounter will lead to a resumption of stalled peace talks.
12;30 pm Reuters: China has quietly eased restrictions on its citizens traveling from Guangdong province to Macau, sending casino stocks soaring on Monday as industry executives bet on record October earnings
12:15pm President Suleiman called for a new election law based on proportional representation during his meeting with Salafranca at Baabda palace
12:12pm Suleiman is meeting with Salafranca at Baabda palace in the presence of Minister Baroud and the ambassadors of the EU and Spain . Salafranca presented his final report on the June 7 polls to President Suleiman.
12:00pm Reuters: The Dollar rose broadly on Monday, extending its pullback from a one-year low against the euro as traders continued to trim short positions in the US currency following broad losses so far this month.
11:56 Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Qabbani received greeting calls from President Suleiman, Speaker Berri, PM-designate Hariri and other officials and clergymen.
11:35 MP Hassan Yaqoub urged president Suleiman to raise the issue of the disappearance of Imam Moussa el Sadr during his UN visit
11:28 FPM’s MP Simon Abi Ramia also denied during an interview with LBC that MP Michel Aoun had visited Syria earlier this month.
11:15 Salafranca kicked off his visit to Beirut with a meeting with Interior Minister Ziad Baroud. He will later meet with president Suleiman. Salfranca will hold a press conference on Friday to talk about his report on the June 7 polls
10:40 Former MP Samir Franjieh told LBC: The balance of power changed since the Doha accord particularly after the results of the elections.
9: 00Reuters: The top US commander in Afghanistan says in a confidential assessment of the war that without additional forces the mission “will likely result in failure,” the Washington Post reported on Monday.
8:50 The Dollar advanced to a two-week high against the pound on speculation US policy makers will this week signal they may withdraw economic stimulus measures, boosting the appeal of the nation’s assets.
08:46 MP Alain Aoun denies that general Michel Aoun visited Syria secretly this month and stressed that FPM this time will be positive during consultations
8:45 Jose Ignacio Salafranca, head of the European Commission set up to monitor Lebanese parliamentary elections, is expected to arrive in Beirut to present his final report on the June 7 polls to President Suleiman.
08:41 Zahra: Hariri’s first proposed line-up exposed the real intentions of the opposition
08:01 president Suleiman will emphasize in his UN speech that Lebanon will continue to abide by the United Nations resolution 1701
07:39 Obama’s speech at the United Nations would keep the situation in Lebanon on hold

 
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/09/_beirut_lebanes.php
Gemayel: Lebanon invented a new concept of democracy
Published: Monday, 21 September, 2009 @ 2:02 PM in Beirut
Beirut- “Lebanese people have become divided into two categories, ‘first class’ who have the right to bear arms and to declare war and peace and negotiate with States and another large ‘second class’ category of Lebanese citizens committed to respecting the state laws and seeking the protection of the state “, said MP Sami Gemayel during his meeting with the Lebanese community at Deir Mar Antonios in Montreal, Canada.
Gemayel said in Lebanon they have invented a new concept of democracy , which they call the” consensus democracy “ . This means that the results of the elections are null and void because the winning majority has to negotiate with the losing minority its demands for key ministerial post in a new cabinet . He said what we are witnessing in Lebanon is a complete confusion over the building of a state and its institutions
Gemayel told the Lebanese community that” no party should take advantage of the freedom and democracy of Lebanon to impose a system of fear and intimidation that the Lebanese completely reject “. This is in reference to the Iranian and Syrian backed Hezbollah organization , which is the only armed group in Lebanon.
Hezbollah claims that its arms are for protecting Lebanon against Israel but in May 2008 Hezbollah it used its arms against the Lebanese people when it occupied the Sunni part of the capital Beirut and unsuccessfully tried to occupy the Druze strongholds of Mount Lebanon

 
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/09/_many_analysts.php
Could Israel strike Iran over nuclear concerns? Q & A
Published: Monday, 21 September, 2009 @ 4:09 PM in Beirut
Beirut – Israel has not given up the option of a military response to Tehran’s nuclear program, Israel’s deputy foreign minister said on Monday, after Russia had said Israel’s president gave an assurance Israel would not attack
Many analysts believe the risks of a strike by Israel, even one not endorsed by its ally the United States, are significant.
Here’s where matters stand:
COULD ISRAEL LAUNCH A STRIKE AGAINST IRAN?
It’s a poker game with high stakes and a degree of bluff. Israeli leaders refuse to rule out any option. They do not believe Iran’s assurances it wants only nuclear energy. Noting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated assertions that Israel has no future Israel has said an Iranian bomb would be a threat to its very existence that it simply would not tolerate.
Last year, however, it emerged officials were making plans for how Israel might live with a nuclear Iran in a state of mutual deterrence. And a June poll showed Israelis would not expect a nuclear Iran to attack . Last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said even a nuclear Iran could not destroy Israel, stating: “Israel can lay waste to Iran.”
Since becoming prime minister in March, Benjamin Netanyahu has, aides say, made ending threats from Iran a defining element of what he sees as his personal role in Jewish history.

A 1981 Israeli air strike that destroyed Iraq’s only nuclear reactor, as well as a strike in Syria in 2007 that is cloaked in mystery, set precedents. Despite a policy of silence, few doubt Israel has nuclear weapons and missiles that can hit Iran.
WHAT MIGHT HOLD ISRAEL BACK?
It is not clear how Israel would define achieving its goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But a pledge from Iran to forswear such arms, backed by some form of supervision and intelligence data, might be a minimum. Much will depend on Iran’s actions and on U.S. President Barack Obama and others, who are pressing Iran through sanctions and diplomacy.
While many analysts doubt Iran’s denials of military intent, some say Iran may be content with showing it has the potential to go nuclear quickly, without actually arming itself.
Israel, however, might not accept that level of potential threat.
In the meantime, were Israel to consider a unilateral strike on it Iran it would have to weigh several major risks:
– of retaliation, not just from Iran but its allied guerrilla groups, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas

– of economic and diplomatic backlash from U.S. and allies

– of a failed attack still triggering the above reactions
WHAT ARE THE KEY ELEMENTS IN TIMETABLE?
First, Iran’s technology: Israel’s national security adviser said in July it had passed a “red line” in terms of being able to make its own nuclear explosive but could not make significant amounts nor yet put viable nuclear warheads on its missiles.
Mossad chief Meir Dagan, seen as a key figure in Israel’s Iran policy who has just had his mandate unusually extended to 2010, said in June Iran could have a viable warhead in 2014.
Second, diplomacy: Iran is to meet on Oct. 1 with six major powers concerned about its nuclear plans. In May, Obama told Netanyahu that “by the end of the year” he expected to judge whether diplomacy was succeeding. Last week, a former senior official said that if the West did not agree crippling sanctions by the end of the year, Israel would have to strike
Russia, a veto-holding member of the Security Council and potential arms supplier to Iran, has a major role

WOULD ISRAEL GO IT ALONE, WITHOUT U.S. BACKING?
Obama, at odds with Netanyahu over Jewish settlement in the West Bank and peace moves with the Palestinians, said in July he had “absolutely not” given Israel a green light to attack. He was responding to his vice-president saying that Israel had a right to act if it felt “existentially threatened”. Israel would be reluctant to anger its key ally. It would not wish Washington to be surprised, might even want U.S. help. But many analysts believe Israel might yet go it alone.
Some question whether Israel’s U.S.-armed military has the range and firepower to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without U.S. help. Analysts say Israel might be content with slowing any nuclear arms program, hoping for political change to end it.
Talk of an Israeli unilateral strike may also be part of a tactic of deterrence, or a bid to ensure U.S. cooperation.
HOW MIGHT ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN?
Overt or covert? Israel has been developing “cyber-war” capabilities that could disrupt Iranian industrial and military control systems. Few doubt that covert action, by Mossad agents on the ground, also features in tactics against Iran . An advantage of sabotage over an air strike may be deniability.
Militarily Israel can also deploy the following forces:
AIR — 500 combat aircraft, including F-15s and F-16s able to bomb Iran’s west, and further with aerial refueling, a technique for which the air force has been training. Planes can overfly hostile Arab states using stealth technology. Armed with “bunker buster” bombs that can be released with accuracy outside Iran’s airspace. Israel is also assumed to have dozens of Jericho missiles designed to carry conventional or nuclear warheads to the Gulf. An Israeli nuclear strike is unlikely.
LAND — Special forces could be deployed on the ground, to spot targets, and also possibly destroy them with sabotage.
SEA — Israel sailed one of its three German-made Dolphin submarines into the Red Sea through Suez in June, opening a way to the Gulf. The submarines are believed to be capable of firing nuclear and conventional cruise missiles.
MISSILE DEFENCE – Israel is upgrading its Arrow missile interceptor, which is underwritten by Washington, and can also expect to avail itself of American Aegis anti-missile ships deployed in the Mediterranean. X-band, a U.S. strategic radar stationed in Israel, further cements the alliance .

 
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/09/tuesday_news_br_59.php
Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 22 September, 2009 @ 12:01 PM in Beirut
Beirut – Lebanese President Michel Suleiman headed to New York this morning to participate in the General Assembly meeting of the United Nations , where he will deliver a speech in which he is expected to emphasize the importance of compliance with UN security council resolution 1701.
Minutes after he left the country , Israeli fighter jets violated the Lebanese airspace when they flew over the western part of the country in violation of 1701.
Israel has been consistently violating the Lebanese airspace ever since 1701 resolution was issued , despite the complaints of the UNIFIL and the Lebanese government
While at the UN Suleiman was planning to promote Lebanon for the temporary UN security council seat because of the prestige such a position will bring to Lebanon . But
Lebanon was reportedly advised not to seek this seat because of Iran: The security council is expected on several occasions in the near future to vote on sanctions against Iran and if Lebanon votes for these sanctions it will create domestic trouble with Hezbollah , and it votes against the sanctions it will get in trouble with its Arab and western allies.
Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri is scheduled to return from Saudi Arabia on Thursday, to launch the parliamentary consultations for a new national unity government
According to al-Hayat newspaper, parliament majority leader Hariri intends this time to engage in a meaningful, “lengthy” dialogue rather than negotiation or debate.
Parliamentary sources told al-Hayat that Hariri is determined to engage in “open and honest dialogue” that would tackle various issues, including the sensitive ones .
Hariri gave up on the formation of the cabinet during the first round reportedly because of the unreasonable demands of the opposition in general and General Michel Aoun in particular

Democratic Gathering parliamentary bloc leader MP Walid Jumblat is reportedly annoyed at the stubbornness of some opposition political leaders, particularly Speaker Nabih Berri who failed to convince his allies in the Hezbollah-led March 8 opposition of the need to soften their demands with respect to the formation of a new government.
According to al-Hayat sources within the opposition , Hezbollah could have tried to persuade its ally, Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun to soften his stance and be more reasonable in his demands.
Jumblatt , who has angered his allies when he tried to position himself as a centrist to reduce the political tension in Lebanon , is reportedly extremely disappointed in speaker Berri ‘s failure in assuming a similar role within the opposition and in persuading his allies to soften their stands . Berri was described by the majority as the weakest link within the opposition. “Jumblatt has obviously bet on the wrong horse “ one analyst told Ya Libnan, in reference to Berri

Tuesday
11:45 pm President Suleiman arrived in New York to participate in the UN summit
10:00 pm President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday that Israel must honor agreements on borders and Jerusalem which he says its government made in 2008 talks with the Palestinians if stalled peace negotiations are to resume.
8:30 pm Bulgarian former FM Irina Bokova won as UNESCO’s chief against Egyptian rival Farouk Hosni
8:26 Reports of gunfire between Jabal Mohsen and Qubbah in Tripoli , LAF deploys to contain situation
8:20 MTV : there are 2 theories about the attempt to assassinate Mufti Qabbani : One theory says the planners belong to Alqaeda, the other theory says they are from our northern border ( Syria)
3:32pm “central news agency “: six members of Fatah al-Islam were arrested , Palestinian sources say that terrorist groups are trying to infiltrate the camps
3:30pm Lebanese Banks Association’s President Joseph Tarabay: Isolating Lebanon from the global economic crisis is a brilliant achievement and banks have sufficient capabilities to face any development on the financial level.
3:05pm tight security in the vicinity of Dar Al-Fatwa since Sunday following reports of an attempt to assassinate Lebanon’s Grand Mufti Qabbani
2:20 PM Al Jazeera : As Barack Obama, the US president, prepares to meet Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, a recent poll in the Jerusalem Post suggests that just four per cent of Israelis believe the Obama administration supports their country.
2:00 PM Iran’s influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Tuesday that foreign media were using “psychological warfare” to create discord among Iranians, state media reported.
1:50 minister Aridi to hold an expanded meeting tomorrow with sewage contractors and operators to clean up sewage pipes and rain water drainage to take the necessary measures to avoid repetition of what happened in the past two days
1 :47 MP Harb briefed PM Siniora and Maj. Gen. Raad over the damages due to heavy rains and floods in the villages of Batroun
1:45pm The Water Authority of Beirut and Mount Lebanon announced that malfunction occurred in the majority of the existing pumps in the Jaita station
1:34pm MP Sami Gemayel in Montreal: We are now at a stage that could lead to either of one of these two situations : a new Lebanon that meets our ambitions or a Lebanon of extremism and war.
1 :27pm Beirut Water Authority : severe rationing in the central towns of Metn due to storms storms and will return to the normal schedule within 48 hours
12:37pm Military Examining Magistrate Fadi Sawan questioned 5 Fatah al-Islam members detained in the south for belonging to an armed group for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities.
12:32pm Parliament’s secretariat announced the 5-day program of the PM-designate’s consultations with parliamentary blocs starting Thursday.
12:19pm Heavy rains over the weekend polluted fresh water in Dinniyeh because of mud
12:18pm Al-Sheikh Ayyash and Borj al-Arab citizens burned tires on the international highway to protest severe power cuts.
12:02pm Minister Ziad Baroud told OTV: The issue of the prisoners’ escape is unacceptable. We ask for Lebanese unity to prevent such security mishap. Some preliminary arrests were made.
11:15am Former MP Mustafa Alloush told Net TV : The present situation, both at the regional and external political levels, appears to be heading toward lack of agreement. This is what makes everybody worried about the situation.

10:43 Israeli aircraft violated the Lebanese airspace in the western part of the country and broke the sound barrier
10:36 Jabir: We hope the consultations will be launched Thursday with open hearts and the willingness for dialogue
10:33 sunny weather , higher temperature and lower humidity expected today after the heavy rain of the past few days
10:33 President Suleiman left for New York to attend the UN general assembly meeting
10:28 Houry: The objective of blocking the formation of the government is to eliminate the entity of Lebanon
10:07 Aoun told al Binaa “: if the suspicious campaign against me continues , I will revert to the courts
09:37 internal security forces arrested 69 people for committing criminal acts
09:34 Amin Wehbe told Saout al Mada : ask ( Iranian FM ) Manouchehr Mottaki about the fate of the government in Lebanon
09:32 sources for the al Watan : Suleiman will meet in New York a number of international and Arab key political figures
09:12 Al Rai : New cells of “Fatah al-Islam” in several camps are preparing for terrorist acts
09:00 opposition circles told Al Rai : the ball is now in the court of al-Hariri and his team
08:56 sources the majority told Al Rai : Hariri will not give more than he gave the opposition last time and the opposition will not facilitate the formation of the cabinet
08:49 Saad: Some are undermining the Constitution for political reasons
08:48 Sami Gemayel: We reject the bid of some who consider themselves above the Lebanese state , and above the law and the Constitution
08:48 source in the March 8 told al Anbaa : either the 15-10-5 formula or the return to the blocking third and Gebran Bassil
08:42 sources for the majority told al Anbaa : Hariri considers the proposed line up he submitted to Suleiman is no longer a basis for discussion
08:35 Anbaa : Lebanon was tipped not to seek the seat of the Security Council , specially because of the vote on the Iranian sanctions
07:51 STL prosecutor Bellemare met UN special representative for ME Larsen a few weeks ago in the Hague
07:39 “News: tension continues in Akkar region
07:31 a security source s told al Akhbar : the security forces cannot prevent the transfer of prisoners to hospitals
07:20 Geagea, is engaged full-time in the preparation of his speech for memorial day
07:00 a source close to Hariri: One of the opposition partners is only committed to Hezbollah arms but is free to act on other issues
06:48 al Akhbar : “: Abbas Zaki and Sultan Abul-Einein will be removed from Fatah
leadership in Lebanon. Ashraf Dabbour will replace temporarily ambassador Abbas Zaki until a replacement is found while Khaled Arif or Fathi Abu al Ardat will replace Sultan Abul-Einein
06:35 UNICERAMIC has declared bankruptcy and the Beirut stock exchange stopped trading in its stock. UNICERAMIC is the largest ceramic tile factory in Lebanon
06:20 caretaker Finance minister Chatah: the delay in formation of a government will reflect negatively on the economy
06:12 central bank governor Riad Salameh : the delay in forming a government affects the element of trust in Lebanese economy
05:57 a source of security: security is a priority during the holidays due to concern over terrorist attacks
05:50 Mufti Qabbani: The information about the attempt to assassinate me was part of the political disruption
06:13 “collusion” was behind the escape of the two prisoners
05:42 possibility of a meeting between Preside??????????

September 6, 2009

Gary,

I too found the Allawi quote quite interesting.

From a standpoint of Western understanding, the tolerance that exists between differing Muslim sects could signify that the sects coexist while neither side prohibits the religious practices of the other. Accommodation seems to be more hospitable, perhaps even representing a reconciliation of differences. But the quote shows that there is a vast difference between Eastern and Western understanding.

One thing to bear in mind is that we are dealing with a religion which literally means “submission.” Attempting to comprehend Islam with a Western framework of understanding will prove very misleading, and I believe is what has lead to the crisis Western civilization is in. As Allawi implied: Tolerance assumes supremacy. We are dealing with supremacists, and as a country that founded itself on principles meant to eliminate supremacy, that too can be a roadblock to our understanding of the nature of the conflict.

Since the commandments found in the Qur’an contradict themselves so frequently, it is difficult for someone who hasn’t devoted years of study to make sense of what the final say is. If Sunni Muslims are to “acknowledge the legitimacy and rights of minority groups” as Allawi states, how can it be that the concept of the “invitation,” or Dawa, holds sway? I understand the concept of abrogation decides which of Muhammad’s contradicting commandments are lawful. Which then is the right one: The “invitation,” which commands that Non-Muslims are to convert to Islam, be subjugated, or killed – or the acknowledgment of legitimacy and rights of minority groups?

But in addressing the differing East/West mindsets: The “permanent arrangement which implies the creation of a recognized and legitimate space for other religious and doctrinal groups” that Allawi mentions gives me the impression of Muslims setting aside space for Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc. with the religions coexisting peacefully. I don’t see many examples of such space in Africa, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia – where non-Muslim places of worship are burned accompanied by the persecution and brutal murders of their worshipers. In fact, dozens of countries are either completely Muslim, like Saudi Arabia, or are approaching complete Muslim occupation. It is also worth noting that Islam is neither accommodating nor tolerant of the nation of Israel.

The conclusion I have come to is that perhaps the accommodation Allawi mentions is actually the Da’wa itself.

Unfortunately, it seems that there is a great – and perhaps unbridgeable – gap between Muslims and the West. Western cultures – the United States in particular – desire freedom, while Muslims by nature are pre-programmed for submission to the will of Allah. We embrace tolerance while Islam rejects it. We believe that all men are created equal, while Islam has its dhimmitude. While we recognize the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that too stands in direct opposition of Islam. Our Civil War was fought in part to eliminate slavery.  America then continued the fight against supremacist groups for a hundred years.

This leaves me with the question: Where is the room for compromise between liberty and tyranny? Where is the room for compromise between submission to Allah and freedom of religion?

It seems clear to me that the clash of civilizations has reached fever pitch after centuries of differences have become unavoidable. Rather than a legal system and government of the people, by the people, and for the people, we are to live under a legal system set forth fourteen hundred years ago in which rape victims are to be stoned, enemies are to be mutilated, and non-believers are to be crucified.

If Americans are to be free and equal, if we do not wish to depart from the inalienable rights codified at this nation’s founding, then we are left with no choice but to defend our principles, as we had to fight supremacy and tyranny at the hands of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the 1940′s.

Chris Carter

P/S: Although you did give mention to the Barbary Wars, you overlooked my question posed to you in our previous letter regarding Islamic piracy. I also would like to discuss the issue of slavery.

______________________________

September 12, 2009

Chris,

I apologize for taking so long to respond.  I have been building a new website where I am focusing on creating a baseline for researching the Afghanistan/Pakistan sphere.  I call it The AfPak Reader, and right now I am in the process of “boxing Roggio”.  I am studying the Bill Roggio Archives from the Long War Journal, specifically the Summer 2009 work he has put forward on the web.  I am taking his Afghanistan and Pakistan work, which is filled with useful links, and breaking out the links that give a full picture of the situation.  More or less, the links within his works are a source index, but it takes those who are researching forever to click on a link, read it, then return back and click another one, repeating the process eight or nine times in a story.  As far as researching the phenomenon of the Taliban and al Qaeda, because the topic is so involved, the internet is bogged down by load times – perhaps I just prefer books. 

The reason I have broken out the links and categorized them into “mini AfPak readers” called “Mainlines” is to establish a narrative of the topic, grounding the complexity in concrete events with contextual explanation, that we might identify and profile our enemies with precision instead of levying generalities that are received across the Atlantic as stereotyping.  Once I have compiled Roggio’s LWJ Summer 2009 work, I will have a baseline of research from which anyone can begin the process of building an understanding of the situation our troops are facing in the AfPak.  

In your letter of August 2nd, you stated that the first thing America should have done in the wake of 9/11 was to assess and define the enemy we were facing.  In terms of defining, mapping and identifying the threats to America, the process I am putting forward on The AfPak Reader wordpress blog is a necessary surge in the challenging task of defining our enemy and understanding the terrain.

Your September 6 letter deserves a full response. 

I was pleased to see your quick grasp of Islamic Accommodation between the sects of Islam.  In your September 6 letter, you state, “the tolerance that exists between differing Muslim sects could signify that the sects coexist while neither side prohibits the religious practices of the other. Accommodation seems to be more hospitable, perhaps even representing a reconciliation of differences.”  I found it remarkably astute, considering that the Allawi passage continues in sync with your reading. 

Following the sufferance of toleration, Allawi talks of the relation of the Sunni and Shia, saying “The Sunni-Shia relationship throughout most of Islamic history was one of accommodation rather than toleration, in spite of important theological differences.”  Indeed, the majority Sunni did “accommodate” the Shia with a legally recognized space throughout Islamic History; albeit, the differing sects and schools under the Sunni veil also slaughtered the Shia regularly when the Shia were perceived by the Sunni to have violated the sovereign space arrangement. 

Islamic Accommodation demands the reasoning mind to re-evaluate internally accepted truth.  Though you once believed that mutual tolerance was the way to achieve peace, you must now take it on faith that an accommodation is necessary. The purpose of Jihad is to destabilize reason’s ability to properly gage the magnitude of the threat it is facing – conquest is achieved through deception, war.  Sacrificing pawns is the nature of Chess – pawns can’t retreat. 

You ask, “Where is the room for compromise between Liberty and Tyranny?”  To this I would respond that there is not room for compromise between the free and the slaver; however, there is room for an intellectual exchange, in which Liberty enumerates its reasoned grievances, mental and social, lists its verifiable damages, material and psychological, and issues a sovereign challenge, exposing the moral failings and ethical precedents of the offending Tyranny.  In terms of reason, the proper relation between Liberty and Tyranny is one of well-measured resentment.

Having said this, I would note that your reading of Israel as a state which is not accommodated or tolerated by its Muslim neighbors is also correct; though, this does not say that Islam is not willing to accommodate the Jews in an Islamic Palestine. 

The Arabs and Muslims reject what they refer to as the “Zionist Entity.”   The nature of the narrative against the Zionist entity (the Little Satan) holds that Israel was created to give Jews a homeland without concern over the Palestinians who were pushed off of their land.  The narrative continues with the charge that the Jewish leaders are plotting to dominate the region from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates through imperial means, with Western backing, particularly the United States (the Great Satan).  However, I think it best to reserve judgment on this score…until a more opportune time, when we might have space enough to discuss at length the narrative which accuses the sovereign state of Israel of being an imperialist Bulwark of Western interests in the Muslim world.  

What is important to note, now, is the fact that the sovereignty – the borders, laws, rights and liberties – of Israel is under challenge. 

Beyond Israel, world peace, itself, hinges on confronting and defying Islamic Accommodation.  

On June 10th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at the commencement exercises of American University in Washington D.C.  The specter in JFKs era was Communism and the red menace out of the Soviet Union; but, what plagued our young president was the realization that Total war in a nuclear age meant mutually assured destruction.  In the charged environment, at the height of the Cold War, he spoke of peace.  “World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor,” Kennedy said, “it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.”  

The act of compromise can mean (1) to settle by concessions, (2) to expose or make liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute, or (3) to pledge mutually.  This, my American Heritage has taught me. 

When presented under the bedoui tent of accommodation, compromise does not hold a mutual pledge as a possible outcome.  Indeed, without the incentive of a mutual pledge, no compromise can be profitable.  Therefore, for those who hold to individual liberty as the natural state of humanity (for the defenders of Liberty) to enter into a negotiation or engagement with a Muslim or a Community of Islam with the intention of achieving a just compromise, the result will inevitably expose liberty to the dangers inherent in the supremacy of Allah’s Rights – cultural, ethical, individual, and national sovereignty is overthrown in an instant. 

The attitude of Islamic accommodation is evidenced in Dore Gold’s release The Fight for Jerusalem.  In a discussion about the 1993 meeting of the minds between Israel and the Palestinians, a local Palestinian leader named Faisal al-Husseini states happily, “in the Oslo Accords it was established that the status of Jerusalem is open to negotiations on the final arrangement, and the moment you say yes to negotiations, you are ready for compromise.”  What is up for grabs?  In Oslo, the destiny of Jerusalem’s sovereign arrangement was placed back on the negotiation table 45 years after Israel declared and won her sovereignty.  Why is he happy?  Future Israeli leaders, who seek negotiations on Jerusalem’s sovereign arrangement, must aim for a compromise to achieve what they will perceive to be a just and beneficial settlement…while Palestinians, with full religious support, will reject mutual tolerance and demand that Shariah Law be adhered to in all future legal arrangements  and discussions – this, as a merciful accommodation. 

In this light, what just and peaceful settlement is possible for Israel in a negotiation with those who would reject mutual tolerance?  Knowing what you now know about Islamic accommodation, what are the prospects of world peace in an age of Islamic (demographic) ascendancy, if we are met to set about the immoral task of compromising on the necessity of mutual tolerance?  Compromising tolerance in the face of Islamic accommodation is the act of accepting dhimmitude.  In what Shariah Court will the disputes of the dhimmi find justice, I ask? 

Reason is murdered when compromise rejects tolerance. 

A great unequal battle faces those who would forge a new daybreak, struggling for peace against such accommodation.  In the war of perception, accommodation is an attractive deception.  But he who chooses by his own volition to barter away sovereignty for peace, will awaken darkly to the recognition of his chains. 

Islamic accommodation is attractive precisely due to language and the form of its Da’wa.

 Da’wa, in general, is the missionary activity of Islam.  It can mean “to call” or “to summon” or “to invite” when found in the Koran.  Missionary activity in the modern age has ramped up with the rise of the internet and mass communication.  Da’wa as an Arabic term tends to mean “to call upon” as in a prayer to a god.  In this sense, the da’wa is a vital and vibrant part of Muslim piety, for it is the invocation of a prayer to Allah.  However, fundamentalist Muslims tend to see da’wa as a proselytizing activism, and their mosques and madrassas are actually tools of outreach and social welfare designed to spread the influence of Muhammad’s teachings and Allah’s Laws. 

Matthew Levitt, in his book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad notes that “social service institutions function as an ideal tool used by Islamists to radicalize and recruit Muslim youth.”  In this vein, da’wa, in practice, delivers a message of sectarian purity which can be molded to meet the propaganda needs of identity politics and to radicalize a ready crop of listeners.  Indeed, in conflict zones or in poorly governed, corrupt or failed states, the social welfare found in the da’wa of the Mosque network provides what the defunct power cannot – food, clothing, housing, opportunity and education – leading naturally to declarations of illegitimacy for the power of the state and cries of Allahu Akhbar as the sovereignty of Allah is championed, politically, by the disaffected communities.  

In terms of Islamic accommodation, when the Da’wa of Islam is issued toward an infidel, it is a “summoning” to the supreme truth of Allah’s pen, which taught men what they knew not.  Supreme truth, ultimate knowledge, the source of true power and law, the source of sovereignty – these all – are what the Mother Book miraculously provided the world according to Islam.  All law and order and sovereignty that came before the Koran’s perfect message are part of the age of ignorance, the age of jahali.  So, in terms of the principle of abrogation, the Koran overrides all previous scriptures in value, including the Torah and the New Testament, which were corrupted by Satan over time, through improper translation of God’s laws and through the imperfect interpretation of the fallible leaders of the faiths – Satan is the great disorderer of Muhammad’s straight path. 

According to the invitation to Islam, Muhammad was the final prophet in the Abrahamic prophetic tradition, the seal of the prophets, the last of Allah’s messengers to humanity.  He was prompted to “Read” or “Recite” directly from Allah’s Mother Book by the Angel Gabriel.  And, though Muhammad was an illiterate man, he could read the words of Allah’s Supreme guidance…and the words of the scribes, who wrote down his revelations, were written in plain Arabic, the celestial language of Allah’s final revelations to mankind – a complete Warning to humanity of the coming final Hour of judgment. 
 
But in truth, if you really want to understand the true nature of the language and form of the invitation to Islam, the Call, the Da’wa, you must allow your reason to find itself in a foreign setting, devoid of the comforts of cell phones and internet links, automobiles, processed foods and air conditioning.  9/11 was said by many to be the result of a failure of imagination.

Therefore, in this triumph of imagination, you must become, in your mind, a farmer living in a village of some 300 souls over 500 years ago.  Your imagination must place you into the position of a spokesman and elder of a village on the edge of Christendom.  For generations the Christian faith of your lineage has been unchallenged.  Your village is twenty miles from the nearest garrison; and, as night is falling, you hear the pounding of hooves and the chain-chink of battledress beyond your citrus grove to the South. 

____________

Dogs begin to whine aimlessly in distress; horses grow restless in their stables; more and more villagers come to your side as you stand on the edge of the unknown.   Cut off, due to simple geography, without communication with your primary source of protection – aware of your situation – you face the horde approaching your village with a tight hold on your fear. 

Addressing the crowd, you say “we know not who is upon us or what legion.  But we will meet them with kindness and hospitality…with so few to fight by my side, God help us if they are set upon battle.  Prepare the horses.  Three riders must speed North to the garrison.  Hail the village elders along the way and tell them…a force of a thousand or more advances from the South.  Slaughter ten goats and set the fires.  We will feast with our southern neighbors and learn of their cause and master.”

In the amber light of a dying sun, the slope of your land allows you to see hundreds of warriors riding toward your village at a confident pace, thirty abreast along a road designed for no more than three riders side by side…and the column stretches and widens upon the horizon.  

Signs of concern had already awakened you to the impending possibility of danger.  The previous night, a young boy, bloody and tired, arrived at your door.  He was mumbling the word “Mohamedans” over and over.  Unable to pry information out of the shaking, feverish lad, you had sent riders south to inquire as to trouble, but none had returned.  The farmers from the East and the West had not arrived to the market in over a week.

Terror grips you as the near grove comes to life with flaming torches and horses, glinting spear tips, and rows and rows of bows.  The tales of slaves who escaped Islam colored council fire meetings throughout your life with the ruthless exploits of the Mohamedans in battle.  

“Light the torches and prepare yourselves for a celebration.  Draw water and break out the feed.  Their horses will need care.”  You feign control in your instructions, though chance’s fickle wand will wield your destiny, you fear.  The pounding of the hooves is an echo within you now and it grows and grows.

Abruptly, the column of Muslim riders halts just outside the village.  From the wall of men, one solitary rider removes the cloth wrapped over his nose and mouth, nudging his steed forward.  With a downward gaze, the rider nods to you, “Peace be upon you.  With respect, who is the leader of this…village of Rum?” 

Though you respond clearly, the halting of the ranks in succession, and the rumbling earth drowned out your response.  “Peace unto you.  I am the chieftain.  We are but a small village, but I have ordered a feast for your generals.”

“Where are your guards?  Does Rum not keep you well defended?”

“We trust in God, to safeguard our passage, sir.  Praise be to Him, indeed.  It is not every day one is allowed the grace of learning the mind of one’s neighbor.  Your presence is a blessing to us.  I have long yearned to learn of your Master and Faith.”

“Allahu Akbar.  Allah is the greatest source of defense.  You are indeed people of the book.  The Prophet Muhammad, Peace be upon Him, has taught us this lesson in word and deed.   I would be honored to attend your feast, Christian.” 

Cut off, with no defense, you have said “Yes” to negotiations.  But you are not proud.  Your faith has taught you humility in all things.  If need be, to save the lives of those who have been entrusted to your keeping and care…you will convert as an example…and pay any price that you might worship Christ in the private keeps of your heart, even if you submit to Muhammad, publicly, due to circumstance. 

The Muslim spokesman smiles as he drinks and eats with his Generals in your dining hall…his men encamped across the countryside.  He looks upon you with a level gaze and says, “I command 3,000 men.  If I were a bandit, I could control your village with less than 30.”

“We are well suited to defend ourselves from raids.”

“Do you pay taxes to Rum?”

“Why yes, Rum is our protector, a quarter of our yield is presented as tribute.”

“That is why I am here, Christian.  It is puzzling that a master would impose himself on a subject without offering the security promised in the acceptance of an annual duty.  By the prophet, I am here to offer you and your village protection…and security.  This small contingent of men under my command is nothing compared to the Army of Islam; yet, I would wager you have never witnessed one so massive nor one so obedient to command.  I would extend to you my protection, and Allah’s protection.”

“Can Muhammad’s god protect a Christian?”

“We worship the same God.  His name is Allah.  Al Quran says that Allah made men and angels solely to worship Him.  Do your scriptures not teach this truth, Christian?”

“Our scriptures teach us that Christ died for the sins of all Mankind, that God sacrificed his only son that we might all achieve the Kingdom of Heaven.  In Jesus, we pray.  In remembrance of Jesus do we break bread and drink wine.  God created Mankind that we might glorify his law, that we might inherit the kingdom through His grace.”

“Do you speak the language of Jesus?  Do you speak the language of Abraham?  Is it not then a truth that you do not know what Jesus actually said upon his cross?  For hundreds of years your Christian Councils have argued over the nature of divinity in Christ, yes?  Your faith in Christ is admirable – Muhammad revered Jesus.  When Muhammad smashed all of the idols in the Kaaba, he did not destroy the image of Jesus, for it was dear to him as a fellow prophet.  The tragedy of the world is the fact that all of Allah’s prophets were tormented for their desire to warn the people of their transgressions against Allah’s laws.  However, Al Quran teaches us that those who claim that Allah is made of three – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – disorder the straight path in Allah’s sight.  Allah is One.  There is no god but Allah.  Allah has never begotten a son.”

“Christ taught that men should treat others as they wish to be treated.   I have not traveled South to your door to deny the divinity of Muhammad’s teachings, have I?”

“Did Jesus not chase the money changers from the house of prayer?  He warned of sinning against the laws of God.  Al Quran of Muhammad, too, is such a warning.  Would you wish Jesus had not traveled to the Temple to cleanse it of sin?  Christian, your scriptures guide you to treat others as you would want to be treated.  We, in Islam, follow a similar teaching.  Muhammad, peace be upon him, in the early years of Medina said ‘And from among you there should be a party who invite to good and enjoin the right and forbid the wrong.  And these are they who are successful.’  (3:104) Al Quran is a warning for those who would disobey the laws of Allah, for the ‘Lord is most Generous, Who taught by the pen, Taught man what he knew not.’”

“Thank you for the warning, my Muslim neighbor.  Enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong seems a noble pursuit.  But why do you travel with a contingent of warriors if this is your message?” 

“My party has come to invite you to Good, Christian.  Your current masters are not able to provide you with protection, yet Rum charges you a quarter of your yield.  If you were to convert to Islam, the levy for protection would be one tenth of that under your current terms with Rum.  Since there is no compulsion in religion in Islam, we will accommodate your right to remain Christians if you declare allegiance to the Caliph at a similar rate to your current levy.  Your allegiance to the Caliph would allow you a contingent of protection such as that encamped throughout your countryside.  Now, I ask, can Rum’s garrison to your North provide one tenth such security for your family?  We are both people of the book.  I offer you and your people protection and accommodation.”

_____________

So, Chris, when you ask, “Where is the room for compromise between submission to Allah and freedom of religion?”  I would have to respond, the room for compromise is based on the level of support you have in terms of communication.  In the example narrative above, protection was offered.  This protection tax becomes the dhimmitude.  Nothing is mentioned about the fact that if the affronted Christians or Jews do decide to accept the terms of Islamic protection and pay the Jizya tax, they will become second class, sub humans who recognize the supremacy of Allah but refuse to accept Submission and therefore deserve to be treated with enmity and contempt.  Nothing is mentioned about the fact that the strong sons of every village are whisked away into what is called dervishme in which they are trained as Janissary conscript warriors and brainwashed to accept the supremacy of Jihad.

The above example is a triumph of imagination, for it represents the language and form of Da’wa and Islamic accommodation.  This methodology is the gateway to dhimmitude, the gateway to slavery.  Converting to Islam is a way to save ten to twenty percent in taxes.  So, on the subject of the history of the conquests of Islamic Empires, the reason our Western textbooks claim that the conquests were relatively peaceful was due to the fact that communication and travel times were so primitive.  Cut off, the tribal and village leaders facing a massive horde were more likely to surrender and submit than to fight.  And those that surrendered and harbored in their heart their traditional fate became hypocrites and were butchered with Koranic legal backing if they ever attempted to resist the dictates of Shariah Law.

Dawa, the summons to Islam, forced those who stood in the path of the Muslim advance through the centuries to make a fateful choice.  Those who were headstrong and retained their faith would, after years of discrimination and abuse, find their numbers dwindling as more and more of their congregation accepted the Islamic faith.  Two or three generations would pass, and the grandchildren of those early converts who relented control of their reason and integrity would know nothing other than the blessings of Allah and the security of the collective Umma, effectively breeding out the dissenters. 

The Dawa, the Islamic Accommodation, lays the groundwork for a totalitarian takeover of the socioeconomic system of a culture which submits to Islam or, docile, accepts dhimmitude.  Jihad is waged on those who refuse the options of converting or paying the jizya tax.  Why?  Jihad is waged on the holdouts, because they arrogantly refuse to accept the Supremacy of Allah and the Koran as their constitutional benchmark of justice and truth, preferring to remain in a state of jahaliya; that is, in a state of rebellion against the limits ordained by Allah. 

In the war of perception, accommodation is an attractive deception.  But he who chooses by his own volition to barter away sovereignty for peace, will awaken darkly to the recognition of his chains. 

In the modern era, mass communication has slowed the advance of the literalist Muslims who seek to wage jihad against the West.  In this regard, the freedoms of the press and of speech are paramount in creating a unified response from the Western intellectual world, declaring independence from the tyranny of Shariah law.  The Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution guarantees no law will be made respecting the establishment of a religion; and since this law is absolute, and the freedoms of press and speech are protected, the only thing slowing a full sail intellectual revolt against the injustices of Shariah Law is the multicultural whitewashing of Islam’s slaver past by the Free Media. 

The economic history of Islam is a black hole.  Those who hold the freedom of speech must demand the right to communicate their findings on the slaver past of Islam as findings present themselves to the researchers, studying the intricacies of the past and present.  At present, with the rise of the internet, twenty four hour news programs, daily, weekly and monthly periodicals and journals, mass communication has closed the necessity of “compromising” on the freedom of religion in the face of Islamic Accommodation.  However, the rules of the game can change quickly if the freedom of speech or the press is augmented by the intellectual elite waging a cultural jihad against Liberty and Reason.

Unfortunately, since those who are fighting for the implementation of Shariah Law are well funded and well organized in their academic posts, influential think tanks, and Non-Governmental Organizations, the press in the West has been assaulted by the narratives of the apologists and dhimmis for so long that when those who would rise as free men and women of reason against the specter of Shariah Law in Europe or America and attempt to gain an intellectual foothold for the espousal of their countercultural ideas, their reasoned efforts are omitted from the published record and forwarded to the trash bin. 

The Power of Omission is the chief obstacle in defying Islamic Supremacism in the age of mass communication.  The deafening silence of the omission is the most damaging aspect of Islamic supremacism’s current onslaught on Western Liberty to those who would mount a defense of Western sovereignty.  The editors of major newspapers rationalize not publishing material of new thinkers because they are not sufficiently qualified with a PHD or have an extensive background in Arab or Middle Eastern studies in the folds of the current collegiate MESA environment. 

At the same time, the deck is stacked against gaining entry to the mix, since the graduate schools offering the courses necessary to achieve a modicum of expertise are unavailable for those who are not well versed in either Hebrew or Arabic.  That Jews represent a large contingent in the frontlines of the intellectual battle against Islamic supremacism is not a mystery – graduate schools accept Hebrew as a gateway language to the study of the region.  In full, the prerequisite requirement of proficiency in a Middle Eastern language for entrance in graduate studies programs of the United States places Westerners, newly awakening to the threat, at a disadvantage in terms of competing in the realm of academic ideas, since the Arabic and Islamic attendees to Western universities dominate the tenor and direction of the debates and place this effort directly into campus activism from UCLA to Georgetown to Columbia to Harvard via organizations like MSA.  The voices of the people face a wall, silenced by a discriminating media standard. 

Western engagement with the Muslim world is dominated by think tanks and NGOs which hold political agendas.  Magazines like Newsweek become agenda and influence mouthpieces of foundations and institutions which are gaining in government backing and financing.  Try to get published in the National Interest or Foreign Policy magazines…try to get published on the topic of Islam – it won’t happen unless you are tied to an influence peddling NGO or juiced in to the MESA academic scene and touting the talking point line. 

Voiced dissent, then, in the confrontation with Islamic Supremacism and contemporary Jihad, is an exercise in rejection for the intellectual vanguard of the West.  The deck is stacked, marked, and juiced.  The man of reason on the street is short stacked, left hoping for a miracle card down the river.

The form of the Da’wa is telling.  In the triumphant example above, it should be reckoned that the first step in the process of summoning infidels to Islam was not to say “Convert, pay the jizya or die”.  The first step was claiming that the Christian God and Allah were one in the same.  In this first step, Islam and the advocates of Shariah Law have won the day completely. 

This complete victory can best be seen in modern translation of common speak.  When Arabic or Islamic writers speak of Allah, the word Allah is immediately translated into English as God.  There is zero moral equivalence of the God of Islam and the God of the Old and New Testaments.  Yet, the translators of today continually accept the interchangeable nature of the words “Allah” and “God”.  This is tragic.  Moreover, to Muslims, it is considered a sin to translate the Koran from the plain Arabic into any other language.  The supremacy of plain Arabic is a tenet of Islam.  Therefore, when Western translators fail to maintain the separation between the words “Allah” and “God” they are committing intellectual treason, submitting their will and reason to the supremacy of Allah and Islam.

Now, as to your post script, you are correct – I did leave piracy and slavery in the shadows.  In your second letter of this Elemental Struggle you asked if piracy, as found in the Gulf of Aden, today, could be seen as a fundamentalist type of jihad.  To this, I would remind you that in your letter of August 2nd, you stated that “terrorism is a tactic, not a target.”  Piracy, too, is a tactic.  Terrorism and Piracy are both tactics of Jihad.  Moreover, in terms of conquest, enslavement is also a tactic, until it becomes a custom.  Terrorism, piracy and slavery are all tactics of Jihad. 

The United States of America, since its founding and before was affronted by Islamic Pirates and the slave trade, which had its nucleus in Muslim lands.  The Barbary Wars was waged by President Thomas Jefferson and his successors against the Berber pirates of the Mediterranean.   And without the slave markets of Islam, the United States would not have inherited slavery. 

The geopolitical realities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were bound by the state-sponsored Piracy of Islam’s Caliphs.  The word “passport” was derived from the “protection” tax levied by Muslim lands, which allowed travelers and ship owners to pass from port to port throughout the Mediterranean without fear of being accosted by pirates.  All of the European countries which wanted access to the Silk Road were willing to pay exhorbitant fees to Muslim Pirate Warlords to make sure that its ships and citizens would not be enslaved or kidnapped for a ransom.  

What most people don’t understand in the West today is that the American trade and diplomatic vessels had to contend with the Berber pirates following the American Revolution precisely because Britain’s protection fees no longer applied to American ships.  Europe, in effect, due to its inability to police the waters of the Atlantic and Mediterranean fell victim to a massive extortion and racketeering ring.  The United States, founded on the principles of individual liberty, property rights and capitalism, rejected the notion that Europe had accepted – piracy was a threat to free trade.  War, therefore, was levied against piracy in a variety of ways in the name of Liberty and Sovereignty, beginning with the exploits of William Eaton, the first covert operative in America’s history, who, with eight Marines, responded to the Pasha of Tripoli’s kidnapping and extortion tactics with a covert assault mission.  The 1805 mission of William Eaton is chronicled admirably well by Richard Zacks in his book The Pirate Coast.  The text should be required reading in History classrooms across our country, for it exposes the grievances and damages that led to the United States’ first stand against Islamic Mercantilism.

Islam is a chiefly mercantile faith; yet, the economic history of Islam is notably absent in studies of World History.  Since Muslims emulate Muhammad, the socio-economic realities of the faith are based on the economic system of Arabia in the age of Muhammad. 

Geopolitically, Mercantilism ruled socio-economics from the age of Muhammad through the age of Enlightenment and the birth of the United States.  Mercantilism holds that the nation which amasses the most wealth can put to field the biggest and most well resourced army.  Wealth, in Mercantilism, is, a static thing, scarce; so, the Mercantilist, in order to acquire an ever expanding source of wealth must hold to an ever expanding colonial empire.  There is only so much wheat, so much timber, so much salt, so much metal…and whoever owns the most territory can amass the most wealth and power. 

The mercantilist mentality led to the colonial systems of the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the British, and eventually the Japanese.  Imperialism based on mercantilism naturally gives birth to Piracy as a weapon of statecraft, since the philosophy of Mercantilism bases its morality on taking wealth via expansion rather than creating wealth via property laws of the free market.  The English had privateers, no?  In the subjugated lands, sovereignty is in flux, boundaries are in question.  Law and order in the colonies and prospective acquisitions of an empire, then, were flexible; and, in that libertine environment, pirate raids and activity were sponsored by the head of the imperial state to instill terror and to guarantee that the colonials would eventually fully submit to the public good of taxation out of the sovereign protection afforded to the colonies by the empire.  Socialism, Fascism, Communism are each modern variants of the Mercantile Economic system.  

Mercantilism and Piracy are enshrined in the Islamic faith.  Year 1 of the Muslim calendar is called the year of the Hegira.  The Hegira (or hijra) represents the birth of the Islamic Empire, for Muhammad broke away from the Mecca tribes and established a base for his followers in Medina.  By year 3, the Muslims were considered outlaws for their raiding of Mecca’s Caravans.  For a decade, Muhammad preached the initial verses of the Koran in Mecca.  The fact that Muhammad was preaching monotheism was seen as a threat to Meccan trade.

Mecca was home of the Kaaba, which played host to as many idols as days in the year.  Mecca, was a place of pilgrimage for worshipers of all faiths, who sought to both pay homage to their idol Gods and trade goods.  Muhammad began preaching about an idolless God and began scolding pilgrims for their false worship and idolatry.  The elite leaders of Mecca were annoyed by this – Muhammad was bad for business.  365 different idols in the Kaaba represented 365 tribal faiths which could come and trade and worship. 

Since the Meccans were in the middle of the desert and the Kaaba was their main claim to fame, the elites felt that the idol worshipers were their main market.  Muhammad had to be silenced.  So, after years of taunts and harrassment, the elite tribal leaders shucked him and his followers into a ghetto on the outskirts of town – an ancient Gaza – effectively quarantining the poisonous message which could threaten trade from the market place of ideas.  Muhammad sent envoys out to surrounding kings and cities to find a benefactor who was not so worried about the idol trade and was willing to accept Islam.  It was not long before the leaders of the tribes of Medina (a city made up of Jewish and Arab tribes) sent Muhammad a message, informing him that they would accept his Kingship if he could come to Medina and settle the disputes and stop the tribal feuds of the city.

The leaders of Mecca found out about the entreaty and were alarmed at the possibility of Muhammad rising to the head of a city such as Medina.  The tribal leaders of Mecca plotted to kill Muhammad, yet he and his friends escaped Mecca’s scheming assassination attempts and made it to Medina…in a flight from the danger of the Meccan political scene.  In Arabic, the word hijra means “flight”.  Out of anger, the Meccan leadership imprisoned and tortured the Muslims who did not make it out of Mecca, and burned and looted the houses and property of the Muslims who had left, including Muhammad’s. 

Learning of the destruction of the property of his followers, and firmly established as the patriarch of Medina, Muhammad determined that the best way to achieve satisfaction would be to raid the caravan routes of the Meccans. 

In Muhammad’s day, caravan raiding was considered a sport.  In Arabia, opportunists would cut off a caravan that was not well defended and force the caravan leader to submit to the theft.  The most gallant and chivalrous raiders of the desert were the ones who could achieve a piece of the cargo without the shedding of blood.  In time, a system of “protection taxes” were developed by caravan leaders that claimed to be able to navigate the deserts and at the same time protect the cargo from raids, through reputation or through agreements with tribal chiefs. 

Often times, wealthy Meccan elites would pool their money into a caravan from Syria or surrounding markets.  When Muhammad’s band of followers descended on the caravans of Mecca, the wealthy elites were literally up in arms to defend their source of income as well as their dominance in the region.  The verses of the Koran which originated in the post Hegira Medina period laid down the religious justification for piracy and war on the idolaters of Mecca’s mercantile system.  Jihad, then, was born of Allah’s sanction of piracy as a just cause.   And in effect, Muhammad’s Jihads laid siege to the market of Mecca, and Allah would demand a Monopoly on religious authority. 

What is Jihad?  Jihad is an ideological nexus of deceitful concepts like Da’wa, Jahaliya, and Abrogation.  Its methodology is bound by the limits laid down in the Koran and Shariah Law. Its tactics include terror, piracy, enslavement, and taqiya (dissembling truth). To Muslims, the Koran is the source of all knowledge and truth.  All authority in Islam is designed to usher in an age in which Allah’s Word is all high.  Jihad has a trigger – and that trigger is the Institution of al Hisba, derived from the injunction “enjoin good and forbid evil”. 

The concept of abrogation seems like a temporal construct in Islamic Supremacy – the latter Medina verses seem to abrogate the Meccan verses of the Koran.  Muslim scholars have long held that Muhammad’s last word on a subject is the final word of Allah.  However, since no chronological Koran exists, Western readers without a full understanding of the contexts of Muhammad’s Jihads are at a loss to determine the temporal value of the Sword verses of the Koran as they relate to Jihad’s modern face.  

As to slavery, it is hard for Westerners, today, to see how the slave trade inherited by America originated in the caravan mentality of the Mercantile age.   But what must be understood about slavery is that it is inextricably linked with Shariah Law.  Last year, I read the book Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.  In Part 7, subtitled Jihad Slavery, K.S. Lal notes that according to T.P. Hughes’ Dictionary of Islam (produced in the 1890s), “Slavery is in complete harmony with the spirit of Islam…That Muhammad ameliorated the condition of the slave, as it existed under the heathen law of Arabia, we cannot doubt; but it is equally certain that the Arabian legislator intended it to be a permanent institution.”   Later in the treatise, Lal continues with Hughes, “The Slavery of Islam is interwoven with the Law of marriage, the Law of sale, and the Law of inheritance, of the system, and its abolition would strike at the very foundation of the code of Muhaminadanism.”

The Muslim nations of Mauritania and Saudi Arabia did not officially end slavery until the 1960s; and, the practice of slavery is still strong, though now unmentionably underground in Islamic society.

The United States of America has been at war with Islam’s Shariah Law since its founding.   Following the Barbary Wars, we experienced the Civil War in which the slavery brought to America from the Muslim slave markets found itself stopped cold with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.  America then fought the Ottomans in World War I, whose defeat trumpeted the abolition of the Caliphate by Ataturk in 1923.

The abolition of slavery and the abolition of the Caliphate were equivalent acts, stripping Allah of Sovereignty.  The modern Jihads we are seeing are a rejection of both acts.  America is the Great Satan to the Islamic Supremacists of the world precisely because it fought piracy and abolished slavery and ushered in an age of disorder to the communities of Islam. 

It is no coincidence that Hassan al Banna began the Muslim Brotherhood in 1923.

-Gary H. Johnson, Jr. (September 21, 2009; 4:00pmEST)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/27/AR2008082703628_pf.html
Only a Two-Page ‘Note’ Governs U.S. Military in Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 28, 2008; A07

For the past six years, military relations between the United States and Afghanistan have been governed by a two-page “diplomatic note” giving U.S. forces virtual carte blanche to conduct operations as they see fit.

Although President Bush pledged in a 2005 declaration signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to “develop appropriate arrangements and agreements” formally spelling out the terms of the U.S. troop presence and other bilateral ties, no such agreements were drawn up.

But after a U.S.-led airstrike last week that United Nations and Afghan officials have said killed up to 90 civilians — most of them children — Karzai has publicly called for a review of all foreign forces in Afghanistan and a formal “status of forces agreement,” along the lines of an accord being negotiated between the United States and Iraq.

The prospect of codifying the ad hoc rules under which U.S. forces have operated in Afghanistan since late 2001 sends shudders through the Bush administration, which has struggled to finalize its agreement with Baghdad. “It’s never been done because the issues have been too big to surmount,” said one U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the subject on the record. “The most diplomatic way of saying it is that there are just a lot of moving parts,” the official said.

The Afghan government “is not the most streamlined and efficient system,” he said. “So you’d have a multiplicity of players on that side.” Less diplomatic U.S. officials frequently describe elements of Karzai’s government as deeply corrupt and incompetent. Although most civilian war deaths in Afghanistan are caused by Taliban forces, those resulting from the highly visible airstrikes are a particular cause of public outrage that neither Karzai nor the administration can afford to ignore.

The other side of the equation is even more complicated. Of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 19,000 operate under U.S. Central Command, while 14,000 form the largest single component of a 40-nation force led by NATO under a U.N. resolution.

The disparate command structures have frustrated every government involved in the effort, but according to Afghan officials, they have also allowed diffused responsibility for civilian casualties, such as those of last week in the western part of the country. U.S. forces operate up to 90 percent of all strike aircraft in the country, and it is rarely clear whether an individual strike has been conducted as part of a NATO or U.S. operation.

The U.N. mandate for NATO serves as a de facto status-of-forces agreement. The protection and authority it gives, however, do not apply to the separate U.S. force, which is covered under the diplomatic note exchanged between the United States and a non-elected, interim Afghan government in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks and the launch of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.

The note delves into arcane issues such as customs duties and driver’s licenses. It devotes only a few sentences to “the conduct of ongoing military operations,” giving U.S. troops “a status equivalent” to diplomatic immunity and exempting them from any Afghan “disciplinary authority” or legal jurisdiction.

Similar legal immunity is included in U.S. status-of-forces agreements with more than 80 countries. But it has become the biggest roadblock to the conclusion of an accord with Baghdad, and U.S. officials say Karzai has taken his cues from the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Civilian casualties, long a recurring problem in Afghanistan, tripled last year as thinly spread U.S. and NATO forces grew more dependent on air power against a resurgent Taliban. Although the number of civilian deaths attributed to international forces during combat on the ground has remained relatively static at fewer than 100 each year, casualties due to airstrikes have reached more than 200 through the first eight months of this year, compared with 321 in 2007 and 116 in 2006.

According to the U.S. Air Forces Central Combined Air and Space Operations Center, the number of strikes this year in which munitions were dropped totaled 2,368 as of Aug. 4. The equivalent number for the same period in Iraq was 783. The statistics for Afghanistan do not distinguish between strikes on behalf of NATO and those part of separate U.S. operations, usually air support called in by Special Operations teams during engagements with Taliban forces.

U.S. military and intelligence officials have said that the Taliban has become adept at drawing U.S. fire to civilian areas as an increasingly effective propaganda move.

Although U.S. command headquarters on the ground and the Tampa-based Central Command normally respond to Afghan charges of civilian casualties by announcing an investigation, the results of their probes are rarely made public.

Last week’s bombing, however, was the largest single incident of reported non-combatant casualties. An investigation by a U.N. human rights team found “convincing evidence” that 90 civilians, including 60 children, were killed in the Aug. 21 military operation led by U.S. Special Operations forces and the Afghan army in Herat province.

An initial U.S. military release acknowledged that five civilians and 25 militants had been killed in an operation the Pentagon later described as “a legitimate strike on a Taliban target.”

The U.N. report, released Tuesday, added pressure for a U.S. investigation, which is underway. In a media briefing at the Pentagon yesterday, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway said that, if the U.N. report is accurate, it would be a “truly unfortunate incident.”

“We need to avoid that, certainly, at every cost,” Conway said. Still, he said, air power remains a critical military tool, offering the ability to strike insurgents in hardened compounds and reducing the risk for U.S. troops. Still, he acknowledged, “you don’t always know what’s in the compound.”

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090300523.html?nav=emailpage
U.S. Troops Crossed Border, Pakistan Says
20 Locals Reported Killed in Assault

By Candace Rondeaux and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 4, 2008; A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 3 — Helicopters carried U.S. and Afghan commandos many miles into Pakistan on Wednesday to stage the first U.S. ground attack against a Taliban target inside the country, Pakistani officials said. At least 20 local people died in the raid, according to the officials.

Pakistan filed a formal protest with the U.S. government, which had no comment on what appeared to be a new escalation of U.S. pressure on Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s mountainous border regions.

As the Taliban insurgency escalates in Afghanistan, U.S. officials have increasingly turned their attention to those havens. Pakistan has committed to securing the borders, but has been beset with rising violence, both in the frontier region and in its cities.

In another example of eroding security, the limousine of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was ambushed Wednesday in the capital, Islamabad. Two bullets struck the side window of his black Mercedes-Benz as it sped toward an airport. Gillani was not in the vehicle at the time.

U.S. forces based in Afghanistan have periodically conducted air and artillery strikes against insurgents across the border in Pakistani territory, and new hot-pursuit rules provide some room for American troops to maneuver during battle. But the arrival of U.S. helicopters in the village of Musa Nika, deep in undisputed Pakistani territory, would constitute a new tactic.

Mohammed Sadiq, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, condemned a “gross violation of Pakistan’s territory” and “a grave provocation.” In a written statement, he said his office lodged a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

“Such actions are counterproductive and certainly do not help our joint efforts to fight terrorism,” Sadiq said. “On the contrary, they undermine the very basis of cooperation and may fuel the fire of hatred and violence that we are trying to extinguish.”

U.S. military officials in Afghanistan, at the Central Command in Tampa and at the Pentagon maintained a wall of silence, saying they had no comment on the Pakistani reports. Lou Fintor, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, also declined to comment.

Pakistani sources gave varying accounts, including on the number of troops and helicopters involved, and on whether U.S. troops were among those who left the helicopters and conducted a ground operation in the village. There were also differing versions of how far inside Pakistan the helicopters flew, because the border’s location is disputed. By one count, the target village lay about 20 miles from the border.

According to Pakistani military sources, the raid began about 3 a.m. Wednesday when two or possibly three U.S. Army helicopters carrying American and Afghan troops landed in Musa Nika village in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan.

The raid was apparently in response to a rocket that fighters fired at a convoy inside Afghanistan, according to one senior Pakistani official. “By the time they got there,” the official said, “the guy with the rocket had moved.”

According to another Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to give out information, several of the troops left the helicopters and launched an assault on three houses.

One of the homes belonged to local tribesman Pao Jan Ahmedzai Wazir, according to Anwar Shah, a resident of a neighboring village. Several women and children who were inside Wazir’s house and two other homes nearby were killed when U.S. and Afghan troops fired on the buildings, he said. “The situation there is very terrible. People are trying to take out the dead bodies,” Shah said.

The reported attack comes at a time of debate over the rules of military operation along the 1,500-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Pakistani military appears to have acceded to U.S. pressure to step up attacks on extremists in its border areas. In the past two months, it has launched major offensives on Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in two of the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Analysts in Islamabad say that the incursion into South Waziristan could augur a tactical turn aimed at cutting off an insurgency that threatens to engulf large swaths of Pakistan and reverse gains made by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has never acknowledged a case of hot pursuit into Pakistan. Wednesday’s incident “doesn’t fit that bill,” the senior Pakistani official said. There was no indication U.S. forces had begun a ground pursuit inside Afghanistan that led them into Pakistani territory.

A Pakistani military liaison unit at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan, Bagram, is under military procedures to be informed of any incursion. Pakistani officials insist there was no such notification.

Last week, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a meeting with the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean after several serious setbacks for Western and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

U.S. and Pakistani officials have released few details about the meeting, which was also attended by Gen. David D. McKiernan, NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan.

But a senior Pakistani military official with knowledge of the meeting said that Mullen and Kiyani focused in large part on the threat to international forces in Afghanistan emanating from insurgents operating inside Pakistan’s borders. The Pakistani military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the meeting touched on a possible agreement to allow U.S. Special Forces to begin ground operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, denied that there was any agreement for U.S. troops to operate on Pakistani territory.

A NATO spokesman in Afghanistan said foreign forces are generally prohibited from mounting cross-border attacks into Pakistan. The spokesman, who gave his name only as Sgt. Yates, said NATO forces occasionally use artillery or missiles to target insurgents who attack foreign troops from Pakistani territory, but the rules of engagement are very precise. “Our area of operations stops at the border. We don’t go over the border, period,” Yates said.

In Afghanistan, NATO and U.S. military operations have recently come under scrutiny because of an airstrike that Afghan and U.N. officials said killed 90 civilians two weeks ago. On Wednesday, McKiernan said that he concurred with a U.S. military investigation that found that five civilians died in the incident.

McKiernan expressed sorrow at the loss of civilian lives in the strike, which began late on Aug. 21 in the village of Azizabad and continued into the early morning of Aug. 22. He said NATO would work to better coordinate with the Afghan government and the U.N. mission in Afghanistan to respond to incidents involving civilian casualties.

DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson at the Pentagon and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090800633_pf.html
U.S. Team to Reinvestigate Deadly Strike In Afghanistan

By Candace Rondeaux and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 9, 2008; A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 8 — The U.S. Central Command will send a senior team, headed by a general and including a legal affairs officer, to reinvestigate a U.S. air attack last month that U.N. and Afghan officials say killed 90 civilians, amid mounting public outrage in Afghanistan and evidence that conflicts with the military’s initial version of events.

The U.S. decision to again probe the Aug. 21 attack in Azizabad, near the western city of Herat, came at the urging of Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. McKiernan said he was prompted by “emerging evidence” that threw into question the finding of a U.S. investigation that five to seven civilians died. McKiernan had earlier said he concurred with that finding.

The attack and the widely divergent accounts of its toll have exposed long-standing tensions between U.S. forces in Afghanistan and other major players in the war there, including the government of President Hamid Karzai, the U.N. assistance mission and the NATO military command. Underlying the dispute over civilian casualties are a lack of communication, a diffuse command structure and differing military rules of engagement.

Military officials said the new evidence included a cellphone video showing dozens of civilian bodies, including those of numerous children, prepared for burial in Azizabad after the attack. McKiernan was shown the video Friday by Kai Eide, the chief U.N. representative in Afghanistan.

“The footage that is there on this shows horrendous pictures of these bodies and clearly identifies women and children. In some cases, the bodies are not in one piece,” a U.N. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Whether you say it was 76 or 82 or even 92 — it was clearly not seven who were killed there.”

Said a senior U.S. military official: “Whatever information McKiernan got that was shared by Afghan and U.N. representatives led him to believe there was good cause to want to look at all of this more deeply.”

In a statement , McKiernan said: “The people of Afghanistan have our commitment to get to the truth.”

The U.S. military official said the general in charge of the new investigation, to be named Tuesday, will come from inside the Central Command but outside Afghanistan. The team, including a military legal representative and a colonel with Afghan ground experience, will “immediately deploy” and will review the initial investigation before visiting the area of the attack. There, the official said, the team will speak with family members of victims and with others to determine “who, in fact, was there and who has died,” the official said.

In an atmosphere of local antagonism and without being able to exhume bodies, “it’s going to be pretty challenging,” he said.

Karzai visited the bomb site in Azizabad last week. He has been increasingly critical of the rising civilian death toll from aerial bombing this year, calling for a halt to aggressive raids on Afghan villages. Last month, he called for a full-scale review of the agreements that govern NATO and U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

Witnesses and Afghan officials from the area have said that many of those killed had traveled to the town for a memorial ceremony for a local villager who was killed last year. By these accounts, most of the villagers were sleeping and were awakened by the sound of heavy gunfire about midnight. Shortly after the ground skirmish erupted, U.S. planes flew overhead, then unleashed a torrent of bombs on a compound in the village.

U.N. officials subsequently made several visits to Azizabad, traveling from Kabul and from their regional office in Herat, a 45-minute drive away. They said they found “convincing evidence” that 90 civilians had been killed.

Results of a U.S. military investigation released Sept. 2 said a ground patrol by U.S. Special Forces and Afghan army troops came under heavy fire from the village as it led a midnight raid on the compound of a suspected Taliban commander known as Mullah Siddiq. Patrol members called in an airstrike when they were unable to repulse the gunfire. The accounts said the five to seven civilians killed were believed to be related to Siddiq. The report also found that 30 to 35 Taliban militants were killed.

Investigators interviewed 30 U.S. and Afghan participants in the operation, the military said.

U.S. military officials who examined topographic photos of the village and searched the area after the attack found only a few new grave sites, according to one official interviewed a week after the incident.

A U.N. official said Eide was “very satisfied he is on solid ground” in the U.N. investigation results and believed he had “no choice” other than to go public with them.

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan has the dual job of helping to coordinate the international assistance effort there and to “be an advocate for human rights and for the Afghan people,” the official said. He added that Eide saw little point in joining a new U.S. investigation. “The discrepancies are so huge, it’s hard to believe a joint investigation would settle anything,” the official said.

Some NATO officials expressed irritation that the United Nations did not consult them before making its report public. “How we handle civilian casualties — the follow-up and investigation — is now becoming a strategic issue,” one NATO official said. Both the United Nations and non-U.S. NATO forces have complained about a lack of U.S. transparency in investigating previous incidents of civilian casualties.

The international force in Afghanistan includes troops from nearly two dozen NATO members, with 14,000 Americans as the largest contingent. The United States also fields a separate, 19,000-member force under U.S. command, leading to frequent confusion and increasing tension. Small units of U.S. Special Forces are known to operate in areas technically under NATO European command, sometimes conducting operations with Afghan army units they are training — as was the case in Azizabad.

“We find that some of these [U.S. units] are very good at coordinating with the people in whose areas they are working,” said a senior European military officer. “Others are less good. When they’re good, we have no problems and we have very little collateral in terms of civilian casualties. When they don’t coordinate, they tend to end up doing these operations with too little strength on their own, and their only alternative is to call in air power.”

The area where the Azizabad attack took place is under the command of the Italian contingent of NATO. “It’s very difficult having two organizations under two separate commands, uncoordinated, and working in the same battle space,” the European military official said. “It’s always a recipe for, at the very least, misunderstanding, and potentially worse.”

U.S. military officials have expressed their own concerns about European forces in the past, saying that they are less adept at the kind of aggressive counterinsurgency tactics necessary to defeat resurgent Taliban fighters.

According to a report on airstrikes and civilian deaths released Monday by New York-based Human Rights Watch, NATO and the United States have differing rules of engagement governing the use of airstrikes, with NATO requiring an “overwhelming” threat and the United States allowing “anticipatory self-defense.”

The vast majority of deaths caused by international troops come from airstrikes requested by Special Forces units, the report said. Using statistics provided by the U.S. Central Command Air Forces, the report noted that the number of bombing sorties has increased exponentially over the past two years, with U.S. aircraft dropping about as many tons of bombs in June and July this year as during all of 2006.

At least 1,633 Afghan civilians died in fighting last year, the report said, with about 950 killed by insurgent forces and at least 321 killed in NATO or U.S. aerial raids — triple the number in 2006. In the first seven months of this year, at least 119 Afghan civilians were killed in 12 airstrikes, according to the report, which did not include the Azizabad bombing.

Aggressive tactics employed by U.S. Special Forces last year in Taliban-dominated Helmand province in the south prompted a senior British commander of NATO forces in the region to ask U.S. Special Forces to leave his district, according to the Human Rights Watch report and the NATO official.

The tactics have resulted in several major setbacks for the Taliban, the NATO official said, but civilian deaths resulting from U.S.-led operations and airstrikes in particular have taken a toll on the overall war effort. “U.S. Special Forces are doing a brilliant job, but at the same time, most of the really controversial things seem to be happening in that area,” the official said.

DeYoung reported from Washington.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091103811.html?nav=emailpage
Pakistan Did Not Agree to New Rules, Officials Say

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; A10

New rules of engagement authorizing U.S. ground attacks inside Pakistan, signed by President Bush in July, were not agreed to by that country’s civilian government or its military, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, the Pakistani army’s chief of staff, was informed last month by senior U.S. defense officials that if Pakistan failed to stem the flow of Taliban and other militant fighters into Afghanistan, the United States would adopt a new strategy, one allowing ground strikes on targeted insurgent encampments. A senior Pakistani official said that Kiyani believed the strategy was still under discussion and that Pakistan’s counterinsurgency performance was improving.

News of Bush’s order, following a strike last week by helicopter-borne U.S. commandos on a village about 20 miles inside Pakistan, brought denunciation yesterday from Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, who echoed Kiyani’s earlier charge that the attack had violated Pakistani sovereignty.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said at a news conference in Kabul that he approved of the new U.S. strategy, citing the need to “remove and destroy” insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. But NATO said it had no intention of sending any of the 48,000 troops under its command in Afghanistan across the border. NATO’s U.N. mandate does not include “ground or air incursions . . . into Pakistani territory,” said spokesman James Appathurai.

Nearly 31,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, divided between the NATO command and a separate force under the U.S. Central Command.

A senior European official said that the NATO allies shared U.S. concern over the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and were aware new U.S. rules were under consideration, but that they were unaware the rules had been approved. Bush’s July order, first reported yesterday by the New York Times, was confirmed by several U.S. officials.

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, said U.S. officials assured him yesterday that “no such order had been given.” The United States, he said, “respects Pakistan’s sovereignty.”

The senior European official called the implementation of the new strategy “peculiar,” since its timing coincided with this week’s inauguration of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

“If you’re going to invade another country . . . without their permission, after you’ve just spent eight years trying to get a democratic government in place, it strikes me as kind of confused politics,” the official said.

Zardari plans to meet with Bush this month, either in Washington or in New York at the U.N. General Assembly, U.S. officials said.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that he had called for an overhaul of U.S. strategy, including greater U.S. military involvement in Pakistan’s tribal areas, but gave no indication that orders had already been given.

“I’m not convinced that we’re winning it in Afghanistan,” Mullen told the House Armed Services Committee. But, he added, “I’m convinced we can.”

“That is why I intend to commission and have looked — are looking — I’m looking at a new, more comprehensive military strategy for the region that covers both sides of that border,” Mullen said. “That is why I pressed hard on my counterparts in Pakistan to do more against extremists and to let us do more to help them.”

Mullen and other senior U.S. military officials have met repeatedly with Kiyani to urge a more robust offensive to roust Taliban, al-Qaeda and other militant fighters from safe havens in the rugged Pakistani border region.

Gillani, who heads Pakistan’s first democratic government since 1999, told Bush during a Washington visit in July that he needed more time to implement an economic development strategy to pacify the border region.

But with rising troop deaths in Afghanistan, U.S. patience has run thin. On Tuesday, Bush announced he would send an additional Army combat brigade to Afghanistan early next year.

Previous military rules of engagement, agreed to by Pakistan, allowed U.S. forces to travel up to six miles across the border if they were in “hot pursuit” of fighters chased from inside Afghanistan. The senior Pakistani official said that Kiyani was told last month that failure to increase the tempo of Pakistani military operations and provide better intelligence for American cross-border air attacks could result in new rules.

“There was a conditionality,” the Pakistani official said. “If we take care of certain things on our side, then the rules don’t change.” Improvements were “already being put into place,” he said, attributing several recent U.S. strikes with Predator unmanned aircraft to Pakistani intelligence, and citing an attack this week by Pakistani security forces in the tribal region of Bajaur that reportedly left 100 fighters dead.

But a U.S. official, one of several who discussed the sensitive situation on the condition of anonymity, said that as far as the United States was concerned, “most things have been settled in terms of how we’re going to proceed.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903820.html?nav=emailpage
Karzai Agrees To Meet With Palin

By Michael D. Shear and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 20, 2008; A06

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will meet next week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in New York, on the sidelines of the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, according to Afghan officials in Washington.

The meeting is part of a broader effort to demonstrate the Alaska governor’s ability to handle foreign policy issues, at a time when she has come under fire for a lack of experience on the international stage. The opportunity to speak before the United Nations annually draws the world’s leaders to Manhattan, and the GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), plans to use the occasion to introduce Palin to those officials, McCain aides have said.

“It’s a great opportunity for Governor Palin to meet and interact with some of the world leaders she will deal with as vice president,” said one McCain adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her U.N. schedule had not been made public. “She’ll talk about the issues facing the world.”

Palin will meet with Karzai, and possibly other foreign leaders, during a midweek campaign swing through New York.

“Unfortunately, a few meetings at the U.N. won’t change the fact that John McCain is promising four more years of the same cowboy diplomacy that has shredded our alliances and set back our ability to fight international terrorism,” said Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

Palin, governor of Alaska for two years, has had limited experience abroad. She took one trip to Germany, Kuwait and Iraq in 2007, but barely crossed the Iraq border. She has also traveled to Canada. Democrats have mocked Palin for citing knowledge of Russia because she can see the nation from her home state.

While acknowledging her lack of a long foreign policy portfolio, McCain advisers have described Palin as a smart and decisive executive who has spent much of her time in office dealing with worldwide energy issues.

The request to Karzai for a sit-down came from Palin’s team early this week and Karzai sent his agreement yesterday, officials at the Afghan Embassy said. Karzai, who will travel to Washington later in the week for a White House meeting with President Bush, expects to have separate telephone conversations with McCain and with Obama during his U.S. stay.

Palin’s Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), who has traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, will also travel to New York for the General Assembly’s opening. He plans to meet there with new Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Obama sent Zardari a message of congratulations following his election early this month but has not spoken to him directly. McCain called Zardari to offer his congratulations, as well.

Zardari will spend most of the week in New York. A source close to the Pakistani president said there is a possibility that he might see McCain, but that if Palin requests a meeting, he will see her.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092903065.html?nav=emailpage
Pakistan Picks New Chief For Intelligence Agency

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 30, 2008; A15

The Pakistani government has selected a new chief for its powerful intelligence service, the ISI, replacing a figure the Bush administration has long suspected of ties to Taliban extremists and other militant groups in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

An army statement released late yesterday announced the appointment of Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha to the ISI post, according to the Associated Press. Pasha, said to be close to army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, will replace Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, who was chosen for the post by retired Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president.

Bush administration officials expressed cautious optimism about the appointment of Pasha, the director general of military operations for the Pakistani army since 2005. “It is a chance for the new government to work out a set of new directions for the ISI,” one official said. The administration and Congress have repeatedly expressed concern that ties between the Pakistani intelligence service and the Taliban have undermined U.S. and NATO efforts to stem cross-border attacks by Pakistan-based extremists.

U.S. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, said last month that he was certain there was “a level of ISI complicity” with the Taliban and other extremist organizations. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has raised similar complaints. The Pakistani government acknowledged that rogue intelligence officers might be involved with extremists but denied allegations of high-level support from the ISI, which stands for Inter-Services Intelligence.

Beginning with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani’s visit to Washington in May, the administration has pressed his government to take control of the ISI, a message also conveyed during repeated visits to Pakistan this year by high-level U.S. military and intelligence officials. Last week, President Bush met with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari at the United Nations.

The decision to replace Taj comes as the administration is conducting a widespread review of its strategy in the faltering Afghanistan war. In July, Bush approved an order allowing U.S. commandos to conduct ground operations in Pakistan’s western tribal areas, a mountainous region where the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups are thought to operate. The Pakistani government vigorously protested an incursion by U.S. forces this month and its forces fired last week at two U.S. helicopters in the border region.

Diplomatic and administration officials said that the opportunity to remove Taj came with a regular military rotation and that several other senior ISI officials are expected to be transferred. Taj will retain his military rank and be given another assignment, they said.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/09/AR2008100900019_pf.html
U.S. Urgently Reviews Policy On Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 9, 2008; A01

The White House has launched an urgent review of Afghanistan policy, fast-tracked for completion in the next several weeks, amid growing concern that the administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for the foundering war there and as intelligence officials warn of a rapidly worsening situation on the ground.

Underlying the deliberations is a nearly completed National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan and the Pakistan-based extremists fighting there. Analysts have concluded that reconstituted elements of al-Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban are collaborating with an expanding network of militant groups, making the counterinsurgency war infinitely more complicated.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, senior officials have expressed worry that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so tenuous that it may fall apart while a new set of U.S. policymakers settles in. Others believe a more comprehensive, airtight road map for the way ahead would limit the new president’s options.

Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, President Bush’s senior adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has told Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials to return to the basic questions: What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What can we hope to achieve? What are our resources? What is our allies’ role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?

Alarms were first sounded early this year, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returned from a trip to Afghanistan in early February — her first in two years — convinced that the war there was heading downhill. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates shared her pessimism, telling Congress that same week that Taliban insurgents had adopted more dangerous tactics, that the U.S.-led military coalition was disorganized, and that international development efforts were failing because “there is no overarching strategy.”

But seven months would pass before the administration, distracted by issues as serious as the Iraq war and as far afield as the Olympics, was seized with the urgency to put a new strategy in place. Although stopgap measures were taken during the spring and summer — the temporary deployment of 3,500 more Marines, an appeal for more NATO troops and presidential authorization for U.S. commando raids into Pakistan — the downward spiral continued.

U.S. military deaths and enemy attacks this year have risen to the highest levels of the nearly seven-year war. Hopes have faded that a new Pakistani government would seize the initiative against extremist sanctuaries, and that a new U.N. coordinator would bring order to the chaos of the multibillion-dollar Afghan reconstruction program.

Heading into the review, Gates has already determined that the United States must take a more forceful lead in strategy and combat from NATO forces in Afghanistan. Bush has pledged thousands more U.S. troops and last week the long-bifurcated command structure in Afghanistan was changed to put NATO and U.S. forces under the same American general.

But these and other initiatives still lack a broad strategic framework. Military Special Operations forces and CIA operatives, now conducting regular secret incursions into western Pakistan, need to be incorporated into the larger effort, along with new Iraq-tested intelligence and surveillance platforms. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. David H. Petraeus, incoming head of the U.S. Central Command, have undertaken their own strategy reviews.

“We’re not sure how they all interrelate,” a defense official said. The White House review, he said, “is an attempt after the fact to have them all feed into the NSC [National Security Council] product.”

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are unlikely to question a major new U.S. commitment; both have called for an increase in U.S. troops. And unlike Iraq, where lawmakers have argued for years over funding and troop levels, there is bipartisan backing for doing more, and doing it quickly, in Afghanistan.

Senior officials involved in the intelligence assessment and the White House review declined to discuss the issue on the record during conversations over the past two weeks.

Officials described the Pakistan-based extremist network, which the Pentagon calls “the syndicate,” as a loose alliance of three elements. Kashmiri militants, constrained by recent agreements between Pakistan and India, have “leaned over” to assist a domestic terrorist campaign launched by homegrown extremists often referred to as the “Pakistani Taliban,” one official said. The Afghan Taliban — itself divided into several groups — is based in Pakistan but focused on Afghanistan, as are the forces led by warlords Jalauddin Haqqani and his son Siraj, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, among others. Traditional tribal groups in Pakistan’s western, Federally Administered Tribal Areas — FATA — are a third element. Those groups are said to be focused primarily on keeping the Pakistani military and government out of their areas, and assisting the Afghan-oriented parts of the network.

Al-Qaeda, composed largely of Arabs and, increasingly, Uzbeks, Chechens and other Central Asians, is described as sitting atop the structure, providing money and training to the others in exchange for sanctuary. “They are oriented to just keeping the Pakistani military and government out of their areas,” the intelligence official said. “They help the groups who are interested in Afghanistan.”

“There is competition between and among them,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said. But their interests increasingly overlap and “they understand the need to support one another.”

Intelligence officials said that cooperation among the militant groups was bolstered by the hands-off attitude Pakistan’s new civilian coalition government initially adopted toward the FATA last spring. When urgent U.S. appeals to the military and government failed and the coalition moved to oust President Pervez Musharraf, Washington’s main Pakistani ally, those who had long advocated stronger U.S. action inside Pakistan finally prevailed with Bush.

Authorization for commando raids coincided with stepped-up attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft flown across the border from Afghanistan. The administration concluded that the ground raids were legal under the self-defense provisions of the U.N. charter, an interpretation that a U.N. official said was questionable.

“The tempo is pretty steady and they want to keep it up,” said an individual with close contacts among the U.S. Special Forces units participating in cross-border operations.

The intelligence assessment is also highly pessimistic about the prospects that Afghan President Hamid Karzai can or will move forcefully to stem corruption inside his government or that the flourishing drug trade can be significantly reversed.

Despite the commitment to increase U.S. troop levels, Gates has publicly warned that a larger foreign military “footprint” in Afghanistan may prove counterproductive. Afghanistan hopes to double the size of its army — to 134,000 — in the next two years. But maintaining such a force, Gates told Congress, would cost $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year — at least three times Afghanistan’s total revenue for 2008.

In recent months, the Pentagon has sent emissaries around the world with a proposition: If they do not want to fight in Afghanistan, they should at least be prepared to pay for those who do. “There is a real effort made to figure out which among the nations not contributing forces can pony up,” a defense official said.

Just before the recent change in government in Japan, he said by way of example, “our Asia guys went over there and said: ‘You don’t want to send forces? We understand. How about contributing $20 billion over the next five years?’ “

The Japanese, he said, “swallowed their chopsticks.”

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/08/AR2008100803876_pf.html

Military Justifies Attack That Killed at Least 33 Afghan Civilians

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 9, 2008; A15

A military investigation has concluded that U.S. forces acted in legitimate self-defense in launching an August air assault against Taliban militants in Afghanistan that it said left 33 civilians dead, including at least 12 children.

A summary of the classified report, released yesterday by the U.S. Central Command, said the military’s initial conclusion that only five to seven civilians died in the Aug. 21-22 raid was erroneous. The Afghan government and human rights organizations, as well as the United Nations, have said at least 90 civilians were killed by U.S. and Afghan ground forces and a U.S. AC-130H gunship in the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan.

The discrepancy led to sharp tensions between the U.S. and Afghan governments and resulted in a decision by Central Command to send a senior officer from outside Afghanistan to reinvestigate the initial military findings.

But while the new inquiry, headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan, found a higher civilian death toll, it also concluded that “the use of force was in self-defense, necessary and proportional based on the information the On-Scene-Commander had at the time.” The report said that, “unfortunately and unknown to the U.S. and Afghan forces,” the militants who were the target of the raid “chose fighting positions in close proximity to civilians.”

Callan’s report, which said 22 “anti-coalition militants” were also killed in the attack, recommended that the military conduct more comprehensive, transparent investigations in the future and called for improved coordination with the Afghan government. Unlike the initial investigation, which relied solely on U.S. military reports, Callan’s team took testimony from village elders, U.S. and Afghan soldiers, and Afghan government, human rights and U.N. officials.

The civilian deaths in Azizabad came in a year in which enemy attacks and U.S. military casualties have reached the highest levels of the seven-year war. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who commands both NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has called for four more combat brigades to bolster more than 60,000 U.S. and NATO troops.

Government and independent reports have said that Taliban fighters and other extremists are responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths — estimated by Human Rights Watch at more than 1,600 in 2007 — but repeated incidents of civilians killed in U.S. airstrikes have brought criticism from the government of President Hamid Karzai.

In a visit to Afghanistan last month, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged the human and public relations damage caused by such incidents. He promised additional measures to minimize them and to conduct more transparent investigations. He also said that in the future, the United States will compensate the families of alleged victims even before completing its investigations.

The Central Command report said that “no condolence payments have been made by U.S. Forces” to Azizabad victims, although the Afghan government has paid $2,000 to “each family of the alleged 90 civilians killed, $1,000 for each person wounded, plus government sponsored trip to the Haj.”

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, traveling with Gates in Hungary, said in a statement last night that “the report shows that although no military in history has gone to greater lengths to avoid civilian casualties, we clearly still need to operate with more care.”

 
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In Scramble for Cash, Pakistan Turns to China’s Deep Reserves

By Anthony Faiola and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 16, 2008; A01

Pakistan has reached a critical new phase in its long-deteriorating financial situation, as investor flight and bleeding of national reserves force the country to scramble for international funds to shore up its economy. With the global financial crisis draining coffers in the United States and Europe, the key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism is seeking help from an old friend newly flush with cash: China.

President Asif Ali Zardari arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for a four-day state visit as concern has surged over a possible debt default by Pakistan that could cripple its economy and spark more civil unrest. While the amount of money Pakistan needs in the short term is relatively small — $4 billion to $6 billion — analysts say the climate of crisis and public anger over domestic bailouts in the United States and Western Europe have made even a modest infusion from its Western allies politically difficult.

Pakistan’s bid for Chinese cash underscores the potential of Beijing’s $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves, the largest in the world, to boost its global influence. The government is now seeking as much as $3 billion in emergency assistance from China, as well as assistance from oil-rich Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a senior Pakistani official. Pakistan’s central bank governor, Shashad Akhtar, is in Washington this week to review a draft plan for overhauling the country’s finances with the International Monetary Fund, potentially paving the way for future aid.

U.S. military and intelligence officials fear that Pakistan’s increasingly precarious economy will compound an already unstable political situation and undermine military cooperation. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership are located in the rugged, economically depressed region along Pakistan’s western border with Afghanistan. The Bush administration and Congress have been shaping a long-term economic and military assistance package for Pakistan, but there is no indication the United States is able to step in with a short-term financial lifeline.

Pakistan is going to the Chinese now “because you go to the guys with the money,” a senior International Monetary Fund official said. “And right now, the Chinese are the ones with the money.”

Securing as much as $6 billion would buy the government the breathing room it needs, analysts say, to begin a desperately needed overhaul of its budget to sustain Pakistan’s battered economy in the longer term.

Pakistan’s financial problems go back at least a year, with current and past administrations borrowing from the central bank to sustain generous state subsidies on gasoline and diesel. As global oil prices surged, the government of former President Pervez Musharraf curried favor with average Pakistanis by having the state absorb the shocks. Musharraf ousted a democratically elected government in 1999 and ruled until a civilian coalition was voted into office last spring, headed by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. The government forced Musharraf from the presidency in August, electing Zardari as his replacement in September.

Analysts and IMF officials say the current government has made notable progress in lifting those subsidies in recent weeks to ease the budget. Yet the global credit crunch and concerns over security have worsened investor flight, with as much as $1.2 billion a month fleeing Pakistan during the summer. National reserves over the past year have fallen 67 percent, to $8.3 billion, leaving the country ill-prepared to deal with financial turbulence as more investors pulled out in recent weeks as the U.S. crisis spread globally.

That has fed two major fears. First, that Pakistan may not be able to secure the funds to avoid a debt default early next year. And second, that investor concern over its potential insolvency could grow into a panic in coming weeks, leading to a far broader capital pullout that could jeopardize the country’s financial system.

Unprecedented inflation, political instability and the growing threat from Islamist insurgents have all had sharply negative effects on investor confidence, said Sakib Sherani, chief economist at ABN Amro Bank Pakistan.

“It is clear that Pakistan is facing challenges in its balance of payments. Without cash inflows we are losing about $1 billion a month, which is untenable,” Sherani said. “On the one hand, you are paying more for imports in Pakistan; on the other, you have less cash inflows.”

On Oct. 6, both Standard & Poors and Moody’s downgraded Pakistani bonds. “Only Seychelles has a lower rating, and it has already defaulted on its debt,” said John Chambers, managing director with Standard & Poors in New York.

To curb losses, Pakistan in recent weeks has set new rules on stock trading aimed at preventing even sharper sell-offs of Pakistani companies. Some analysts are concerned that the new government may resort to freezing foreign capital, a measure Pakistan took in the 1990s after being slapped with global sanctions for conducting a nuclear test.

The Pakistani government is seeking to ease those fears by bolstering its central bank reserves with funds from China and Gulf states. China and Pakistan have a long history of economic cooperation, based partly on decades of weapons sales, and a lifeline now, particularly so small a sum, would not be seen as unusual. “The Pakistanis like to call the Chinese their all-weather ally, and the U.S. their fair-weather friends,” said Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This kind of loan could be seen as self-serving by the Chinese, and continue that impression.”

A senior Pakistani official said the government requested in July that Saudi Arabia chip in with an “oil facility” — or an agreement that would grant Pakistan concessionary terms and delayed payments and on roughly half the oil it imports. One reason investors are more concerned about Pakistan now is that Saudi Arabia has not yet responded.

Analysts say the Pakistanis may have better luck at a meeting early next month in the United Arab Emirates of the “Friends of Pakistan” — a group of countries including the United States and Britain that are considered close allies. They are counting, sources close to the talks said, on countries seeing the danger of an economic collapse in Pakistan and the threat that poses to the war on terror as worth the relatively small price of financial assistance.

A last option might be seeking a lifeline from the IMF, though such an agreement is seen as politically difficult for the new government. Pakistan paid off the last of several IMF loans in 2005, with Musharraf hailing the accomplishment as a breaking of the nation’s beggar’s bowl. By seeking IMF help now, analysts say, the new government may find itself in the difficult position of explaining to the population why it needs to glue that bowl back together.

Pakistani officials, however, are meeting with IMF officials in Washington now, seeking their “seal of approval” on the plan to rein in runaway spending threatening to bankrupt the government. Although IMF officials say the Pakistanis are not seeking a loan, IMF approval of their economic plans could pave the way for other institutions, including the World Bank and Asian Development Banks, to offer lending. It could also make approval of an IMF loan at a later date happen faster.

“What they want is an endorsement in principle,” a senior IMF official said, “something that would make financial support go more smoothly if they decide they do need to ask for it.”

Correspondent Candace Rondeaux contributed to this report.

 
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Pakistan Will Give Arms to Tribal Militias
Plan Bolsters U.S. Faith In Ally’s Anti-Extremist Efforts

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 23, 2008; A01

Pakistan plans to arm tens of thousands of anti-Taliban tribal fighters in its western border region in hopes — shared by the U.S. military — that the nascent militias can replicate the tribal “Awakening” movement that proved decisive in the battle against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The militias, called lashkars, will receive Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles and other small arms, a purchase arranged during a visit to Beijing this month by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistani officials said.

Many Bush administration officials remain skeptical of Pakistan’s long-term commitment to fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups ensconced in the mountains near the border with Afghanistan. But the decision to arm the lashkars, which emerged as organized fighting forces only in the past few months, is one of several recent actions that have led the Pentagon to believe that the Pakistani effort has become more aggressive.

Since early August, the Pakistani army has launched several offensives in Bajaur, one of seven regions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and in the nearby Swat Valley. According to Pakistani military assessments, more than 800 insurgents died during fighting in Bajaur in August and September, along with nearly 195 government soldiers and 344 civilians.

Last week, after months of Pakistani delays, about 30 U.S. military trainers were permitted to set up operations north of the region, a U.S. official said. The trainers will provide counterinsurgency instruction to Pakistani army soldiers, who in turn will train members of the Frontier Corps, the government’s paramilitary force in the FATA.

“We are very encouraged by what we’re seeing from the Pakistani military in the tribal regions,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. Pakistani offensives in the FATA over the past two months are “making a difference on the other side of the border,” where U.S. forces are fighting in Afghanistan, he said.

Pakistani officials insisted that arming the lashkars was their own idea and that they are paying for it, although the United States has provided more than $10 billion in relatively unrestrained counterterrorism funds to Pakistan’s military over the past seven years. “The Americans are not giving us a bloody cent” for the program, one Pakistani official said. “This is us, doing it ourselves.”

Zardari and the government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani have been at pains to balance their support of U.S. objectives with a recognition of widespread Pakistani distrust of the United States — among the population as well as the political class. In the wake of Gillani’s visit to Washington in July, and a meeting in New York last month between Zardari and President Bush, the Pakistani Parliament yesterday passed a resolution calling for the immediate development of an “independent foreign policy” and a new attempt at dialogue with Islamist insurgents.

Much distrust also remains on the U.S. side, particularly within intelligence agencies that have long been suspicious of ties between the Pakistani intelligence service and the Taliban. The CIA has increased its operations against resurgent extremist forces in the FATA, with at least 11 missile attacks launched by Predator unmanned aircraft against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in August and September, compared with six in the previous eight months, according to knowledgeable officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence issues.

In its talks with the Bush administration, Gillani’s government maintains that its counterterrorism cooperation surpasses that of retired Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was ousted from the presidency in August. Last month, Gillani and army chief of staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani replaced the head of the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) agency with an army general considered more responsive to civilian leaders and more palatable to the Americans.

New ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha will arrive in Washington this weekend for meetings with CIA head Michael V. Hayden.

A number of U.S. officials cautioned that Pakistan has made little progress in other aspects of a wider counterinsurgency strategy needed to make long-term gains against the extremists. “There is a significant, but not a comprehensive, bump up in the security element,” one official said. While there are more soldiers on the ground, he said, the military strategy is not sustainable because Pakistan “is still doing virtually nothing about extending the government’s political authority into the tribal areas, and virtually nothing about economic development” in the region.

“The secret to success in this kind of operation is tea,” the official said, referring to the need to establish a positive presence in local villages, sit down with tribal leaders over tea and ask them what it would take to make their lives better. Unlike Pakistan’s four provinces, the FATA are only nominally controlled by the central government and are largely ruled by tribal elders.

U.S. military officials warn, however, that expanding the movement will be more difficult than it proved in Iraq, where the Awakening began in 2006 among Sunni tribes in Anbar province. Unlike the Iraqi tribes, the FATA Pakistanis are poorly armed with aging rifles and little else — although the provision of new, Chinese-made AK-47s and other small arms will increase their firepower.

Extremist groups are widespread throughout the poverty-stricken region and are entrenched in social and economic structures; many of the tribes receive regular financial support from al-Qaeda in exchange for providing sanctuary, a senior U.S. military official said.

Most important, the extent to which the program is perceived to be coordinated with U.S. aims in western Pakistan is likely to help determine its effectiveness. In Iraq, tribal security forces readily accepted an alliance with the U.S. military as well as direct U.S. payment for their services. U.S. officials see neither as likely in the FATA.

Despite the newly aggressive U.S. military posture — reflected in the Predator attacks as well as Bush’s authorization last summer of ground commando raids on extremist targets inside Pakistani territory — U.S. officials say they are acutely aware of the need to tread carefully with Pakistan.

Early this month, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson and Adm. Michael LeFever, the senior U.S. military officer in Pakistan, sent a joint cable to Washington criticizing the overall U.S. effort in Pakistan as disjointed and uncoordinated. It recommended a comprehensive new strategy that would better meld the same three counterinsurgency “legs” — military, political and economic — that the United States has pushed the Pakistani government to adopt.

The proposal, one U.S. official said, offered examples of current U.S. aid programs that have little relationship to political aims, and political objectives that dismiss military concerns. “It said things like, ‘If you really want to understand Pakistan, you’ve got to understand food security as something a lot of people are worried about,’ ” especially in the tribal areas, the official said. “Where is the initiative on agriculture?”

The cable quickly circulated through the administration and caught the attention of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who next week will become head of the U.S. Central Command, or Centcom, in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South and Central Asia. Petraeus, who plans to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan two days after he takes over Centcom on Oct. 31, hopes to replicate in both countries elements of the strategies employed in his previous command in Iraq. Among them, officials said, is the close coordination he enjoyed with Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador, and the development of local security units akin to the Awakening movement.

The emergence in Pakistan of the lashkars, headed by tribal elders who are said to resent the intrusion of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, began in earnest over the summer. So far, three lashkar militias, totaling as many as 14,000 men, have been established in Bajaur, according to Pakistani military estimates. In the FATA region of Orakzai, tribal leaders have amassed an estimated 4,000 indigenous fighters; an additional 7,000 are said to have enlisted in Dir, a tribal region just outside the FATA boundary.

The fighters have skirmished with extremists, at times in coordination with the Pakistani military. They have already begun to pay a price, with at least eight beheadings this month and a suicide bombing in Bajaur two weeks ago that killed more than 50 tribesmen gathered to enlist in a militia.

 
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Obama to Explore New Approach in Afghanistan War

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2008; A01

The incoming Obama administration plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan — including possible talks with Iran — and looks favorably on the nascent dialogue between the Afghan government and “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, according to Obama national security advisers.

President-elect Barack Obama also intends to renew the U.S. commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a priority the president-elect believes President Bush has played down after years of failing to apprehend the al-Qaeda leader. Critical of Bush during the campaign for what he said was the president’s extreme focus on Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, Obama also intends to move ahead with a planned deployment of thousands of additional U.S. troops there.

The emerging broad strokes of Obama’s approach are likely to be welcomed by a number of senior U.S. military officials who advocate a more aggressive and creative course for the deteriorating conflict. Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties this year are the highest since the war began in 2001.

Some military leaders remain wary of Obama’s pledge to order a steady withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq, to be completed within 16 months — an order advisers say Obama is likely to give in his first weeks in office. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called a withdrawal timeline “dangerous.” Others are distrustful of a new administration they see as unschooled in the counterinsurgency wars that have consumed the military for the past seven years.

But conversations with several Obama advisers and a number of senior military strategists both before and since last Tuesday’s election reveal a shared sense that the Afghan effort under the Bush administration has been hampered by ideological and diplomatic constraints and an unrealistic commitment to the goal of building a modern democracy — rather than a stable nation that rejects al-Qaeda and Islamist extremism and does not threaten U.S. interests. None of those who discussed the subject would speak on the record, citing sensitivities surrounding the presidential transition and the war itself.

As Obama begins to formulate his Afghan war policy, some senior military strategists have begun to question the U.S. commitment to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is expected to run for reelection next year but is widely considered weak and ineffective. Some European and NATO officials have suggested that an assembly of tribal elders should select the country’s next leader, an idea the State Department has rejected.

Obama advisers have emphasized that a sharper focus on al-Qaeda does not mean pulling back on the Afghan ground war. Obama called early in the campaign for deploying two or three additional U.S. combat brigades to Afghanistan. Bush has already approved such an increase, although the timing of the deployments, likely to begin next spring, depends on the drawdown of forces from Iraq.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mullen, frustrated by the performance of NATO allies whose troops make up more than half the total foreign force in Afghanistan, have already planned for a more overt and forceful U.S. leadership role in the war, as well as more direct involvement by U.S. forces in fighting the Taliban in southern and western Afghanistan.

Some NATO military officials said enhanced U.S. leadership would be welcome, as long as it was not seen as a “takeover bid,” said one senior European officer whose country has troops fighting as part of the NATO coalition in Afghanistan. While the U.S. military has long criticized some NATO members for lacking combat zeal and expertise in Afghanistan, many European officers resent what they see as U.S. arrogance.

The NATO officer suggested that Obama, whose election was greeted with wide approval in Europe, may have more success than Bush in persuading other alliance members to increase their fighting forces in Afghanistan. “I think you’ll find the new president would then be able to persuade a number of European nations who have not liked this administration’s way of doing business to come in behind them,” he said.

At Mullen’s direction, the map of the Afghanistan battle space is being redrawn to include the tribal regions of western Pakistan. U.S. military and intelligence leaders have delivered forceful messages to Pakistani officials on the need to step up attacks against Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in their territory.

Obama, advisers said, plans to intensify the U.S. military and intelligence focus on al-Qaeda and bin Laden. Intelligence officials say the search is already as intensive as ever, even as they emphasize that the decentralized al-Qaeda network would remain a threat without him. Bush administration officials have publicly played down the importance of a single individual in the broad sweep of their anti-terrorism offensive.

One week after the election, the Obama team is far from fleshing out how it will bring bin Laden closer to the forefront of the U.S. counterterrorism agenda, both rhetorically and substantively. Although Obama last week received his first high-level intelligence briefing as president-elect, members of his national security transition teams are still studying briefing materials the Bush administration has prepared for them. They have yet to fully examine available military and intelligence resources and how they are currently being used, and have not yet plotted their diplomatic approach to Pakistan, where U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden is hiding.

While emphasizing the importance of continuing U.S. operations against Pakistan-based Taliban fighters who attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the incoming administration intends to remind Americans how the fight against Islamist extremists began — on Sept. 11, 2001, before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and to underscore that al-Qaeda remains the nation’s highest priority. “This is our enemy,” one adviser said of bin Laden, “and he should be our principal target.”

Obama said during the campaign that his administration would explore talks with countries such as Iran and Syria, rejecting bedrock Bush policy and rhetoric that some U.S. military officials believe may have outlived their usefulness.

Iran, on Afghanistan’s western border, has played a mixed role over the years, at times indirectly cooperating with U.S. objectives and at times assisting the extremists. The Bush administration has kept Tehran at arm’s length, but “as we look to the future, it would be helpful to have an interlocutor” to explore shared objectives, said one senior U.S. military official. The Iranians “don’t want Sunni extremists in charge of Afghanistan any more than we do,” he said.

Advisers also said Obama is open to supporting discussions between the Afghan government and “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, a nascent effort of which the State Department has been fairly dismissive. Although it supports the terms the Afghan government has laid down — abandoning violence and accepting the Afghan constitution — the Bush administration sees “no serious indication from anybody on the Taliban side that they’re interested,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher said. “They keep hijacking buses, killing people and chopping their heads off. These are not people who have shown any serious desire to negotiate.”

But the Pentagon, at least rhetorically, has left the door open wider. Senior officers describe a substantial portion of Taliban foot soldiers as more opportunistic than ideologically committed. Gates has spoken openly about the possibility of reconciliation, saying, “at the end of the day, that’s how most wars end. . . . That’s ultimately the exit strategy for all of us.” Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said during a recent visit to Washington that the idea of “reconciliation, I think, is appropriate, and we’ll be there to provide support within our mandate.”

At the White House, presidential adviser Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute is leading an interagency assessment of the Afghanistan war, scheduled to be finished this month, that administration officials said will focus on enhancing support for provincial and local governments and building the Afghan police. Lute plans to travel to Brussels to summarize the review for NATO.

At the Pentagon, Mullen is overseeing an Afghanistan and Pakistan transition strategy and force-structure review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former Iraq commander sworn in last month as head of the U.S. Central Command, is drawing up plans for his wider new responsibilities, which include Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mullen and Petraeus will remain in place when the Bush administration’s civilian policymakers leave office in January. Petraeus, a senior Defense official said, has indicated he agrees with Obama’s more regional approach to Afghanistan and welcomes “a debate about goals and how much is enough” in terms of nation-building there. “We are not going to seize the flag there and go home to a victory parade,” this official said.

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Pakistan and U.S. Have Tacit Deal On Airstrikes

By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 16, 2008; A01

The United States and Pakistan reached tacit agreement in September on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that allows unmanned Predator aircraft to attack suspected terrorist targets in rugged western Pakistan, according to senior officials in both countries. In recent months, the U.S. drones have fired missiles at Pakistani soil at an average rate of once every four or five days.

The officials described the deal as one in which the U.S. government refuses to publicly acknowledge the attacks while Pakistan’s government continues to complain noisily about the politically sensitive strikes.

The arrangement coincided with a suspension of ground assaults into Pakistan by helicopter-borne U.S. commandos. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said in an interview last week that he was aware of no ground attacks since one on Sept. 3 that his government vigorously protested.

Officials described the attacks, using new technology and improved intelligence, as a significant improvement in the fight against Pakistan-based al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Officials confirmed the deaths of at least three senior al-Qaeda figures in strikes last month.

Zardari said that he receives “no prior notice” of the airstrikes and that he disapproves of them. But he said he gives the Americans “the benefit of the doubt” that their intention is to target the Afghan side of the ill-defined, mountainous border of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), even if that is not where the missiles land.

Civilian deaths remain a problem, Zardari said. “If the damage is women and children, then the sensitivity of its effect increases,” he said. The U.S. “point of view,” he said, is that the attacks are “good for everybody. Our point of view is that it is not good for our position of winning the hearts and minds of people.”

A senior Pakistani official said that although the attacks contribute to widespread public anger in Pakistan, anti-Americanism there is closely associated with President Bush. Citing a potentially more favorable popular view of President-elect Barack Obama, he said that “maybe with a new administration, public opinion will be more pro-American and we can start acknowledging” more cooperation.

The official, one of several who discussed the sensitive military and intelligence relationship only on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S-Pakistani understanding over the airstrikes is “the smart middle way for the moment.” Contrasting Zardari with his predecessor, retired Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the official said Musharraf “gave lip service but not effective support” to the Americans. “This government is delivering but not taking the credit.”

From December to August, when Musharraf stepped down, there were six U.S. Predator attacks in Pakistan. Since then, there have been at least 19. The most recent occurred early Friday, when local officials and witnesses said at least 11 people, including six foreign fighters, were killed. The attack, in North Waziristan, one of the seven FATA regions, demolished a compound owned by Amir Gul, a Taliban commander said to have ties to al-Qaeda.

Pakistan’s self-praise is not entirely echoed by U.S. officials, who remain suspicious of ties between Pakistan’s intelligence service and FATA-based extremists. But the Bush administration has muted its criticism of Pakistan. In a speech to the Atlantic Council last week, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden effusively praised Pakistan’s recent military operations, including “tough fighting against hardened militants” in the northern FATA region of Bajaur.

“Throughout the FATA,” Hayden said, “al-Qaeda and its allies are feeling less secure today than they did two, three or six months ago. It has become difficult for them to ignore significant losses in their ranks.” Hayden acknowledged, however, that al-Qaeda remains a “determined, adaptive enemy,” operating from a “safe haven” in the tribal areas.

Along with the stepped-up Predator attacks, Bush administration strategy includes showering Pakistan’s new leaders with close, personal attention. Zardari met with Bush during the U.N. General Assembly in September, and senior military and intelligence officials have exchanged near-constant visits over the past few months.

Pakistan’s new intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, traveled to Washington in late October, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, installed on Oct. 31 as head of the U.S. Central Command, visited Islamabad on his third day in office. On Wednesday, Hayden flew to New York for a secret visit with Zardari, who was attending a U.N. conference.

Zardari spoke over the telephone with Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a conversation Pakistani officials said they considered an initial contact with the incoming Obama administration. Although Kerry has been mentioned as a possible secretary of state, the officials said he indicated that he expects to continue in the Senate, where he is in line to take over Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s position as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Despite improved relations with the Bush administration, Zardari said, “we think we need a new dialogue, and we’re hoping that the new government will . . . understand that Pakistan has done more than they recognize” and is a victim of the same insurgency the United States is fighting. Pakistan hopes that a $7.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, announced yesterday, will spark new international investment and aid.

Pakistan, whose military has received more than $10 billion in direct U.S. payments since 2001, also wants the United States to provide sophisticated weapons to its armed forces, Zardari said. Rather than using U.S. Predator-fired missiles against Pakistani territory, he asked, why not give Pakistan its own Predators? “Give them to us. . . . we are your allies,” he said.

Last month, officials confirmed, Predator strikes in the FATA killed Khalid Habib, described as al-Qaeda’s No. 4 official, and senior operatives Abu Jihad al-Masri and Abu Hassan al-Rimi. Three other senior al-Qaeda figures — explosives expert Abu Khabab al-Masri, Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi and senior commander Abu Laith al-Libi –were killed during the first nine months of the year.

Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said improved intelligence has been an important factor in the increased tempo and precision of the Predator strikes. Over the past year, they said, the United States has been able to improve its network of informants in the border region while also fielding new hardware that allows close tracking of the movements of suspected militants.

The missiles are fired from unmanned aircraft by the CIA. But the drones are only part of a diverse network of machines and software used by the agency to spot terrorism suspects and follow their movements, the officials said. The equipment, much of which remains highly classified, includes an array of powerful sensors mounted on satellites, airplanes, blimps and drones of every size and shape.

Before 2002, the CIA had no experience in using the Predator as a weapon. But in recent years — and especially in the past 12 months — spy agencies have honed their skills at tracking and killing single individuals using aerial vehicles operated by technicians hundreds or thousands of miles away. James R. Clapper Jr., the Pentagon’s chief intelligence officer, said the new brand of warfare has “gotten very laserlike and very precise.”

“It’s having the ability, once you know who you’re after, to study and watch very steadily and consistently — persistently,” Clapper told a recent gathering of intelligence professionals and contractors in Nashville. “And then, at the appropriate juncture, with due regard for reducing collateral casualties or damage, going after that individual.”

Two former senior intelligence officials familiar with the use of the Predator in Pakistan said the rift between Islamabad and Washington over the unilateral attacks was always less than it seemed.

“By killing al-Qaeda, you’re helping Pakistan’s military and you’re disrupting attacks that could be carried out in Karachi and elsewhere,” said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Pakistan’s new acquiescence coincided with the new government there and a sharp increase in domestic terrorist attacks, including the September bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad.

“The attacks inside Pakistan have changed minds,” the official said. “These guys are worried, as they should be.”

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

 
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Naming National Security Team Will Be a Priority for Obama

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; A08

If President-elect Barack Obama follows the pattern of most of his modern predecessors, one of the first documents to bear his signature after he takes office will be a directive laying out his administration’s national security structure. Bill Clinton signed one his first day in office; George W. Bush during his first month.

The directive traditionally sets the membership of the National Security Council, determining who has a seat at the table where the highest-level defense and foreign policy decisions are made. Most important, it determines the person who schedules meetings of the NSC principals and writes the agendas, who sits at the head of the table in the absence of the president and who has the president’s ear on national security matters on a daily basis.

For most chief executives, that person has been the White House national security adviser. Obama has announced no selection yet and, according to several sources, has made no decisions, although three names have circulated widely.

The heaviest betting is on James B. Steinberg, the former Clinton deputy national security adviser and State Department official who is currently dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander and current executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has been an informal foreign and defense policy adviser to Obama and is highly respected.

A third possibility is Susan E. Rice, a State Department veteran who signed on early with Obama as a senior foreign policy adviser. Although she has been close to Obama much longer than the others — Steinberg joined the campaign after the primaries — Rice is considered a more likely choice as deputy national security adviser.

Among Obama’s earliest decisions will be whether to retain the separate National Economic Council created by Clinton, as well as Bush’s Homeland Security Council, and whether to establish new White House-level panels on policy priorities such as energy and the environment. Sources close to the Obama team said neither will be determined until the national security team — the adviser and the secretaries of state and defense — are chosen.

Like his predecessors, Obama will have no shortage of immediate national security problems to address, not least the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or advice on how to organize his team. In addition to many upcoming think tank and university reports, Congress has funded the Project on National Security Reform, which will recommend more legislative oversight and amendments to the 1947 National Security Act.

The act set up the NSC structure: a “principals” committee including the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense, with a small White House staff. But each president since then has established his own national security apparatus, and the structures have varied as widely as the balance of power among competing national security voices in each administration.

Clinton officially added the Treasury secretary, the U.N. ambassador, his economic adviser and chief of staff to the council; Bush removed them all. Both included the CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at principals meetings but did not put them on the principals list.

Structure is inevitably overtaken by personalities, and informal processes develop as the president turns his attention to one adviser over another. Beyond Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose strong foreign policy credentials ensured his place on the Obama ticket, possibilities mentioned for secretary of state, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, are far from shrinking violets. With the two wars and mushrooming resources, the Defense Department inevitably will have a large say in decision-making.

Some national security advisers such as Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have been more powerful than the secretaries with whom they served. In some administrations, the White House national security staff has been large — 74 people under Dwight D. Eisenhower and more than 100 during Clinton’s second term — and in others it has been small.

John F. Kennedy slashed it to 12 members and relied on his own council of “wise men.” Richard M. Nixon wanted to “run foreign policy out of the White House,” he said in his memoirs, and adviser Kissinger assembled a 50-person staff to do it. Jimmy Carter cut that number in half.

In the wake of the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal, Ronald Reagan stripped his White House national security council staff of the unprecedented “operational” responsibility it had assumed.

There was nothing in Bush’s Organization of the National Security Council System directive, signed on Feb. 13, 2001, that previewed the power assumed by Vice President Cheney. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s first national security adviser, won an early battle with Cheney when Bush rejected the vice president’s suggestion that he — not she — chair the NSC principals’ meetings in the president’s absence.

But Rice’s influence was weakened by the warring first-term troika of Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Many analysts believe she failed at one of the national security adviser’s primary responsibilities — serving as an honest broker for the president among competing Cabinet points of view. Others, however, have argued that it is the president’s job to make sure his team acts in concert.

When the going gets tough, Lyndon B. Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, once told the Brookings Institution, “it takes a very strong president to insist these people get along.”

 
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Characteristics of Plot Suggest Outside Help, Analysts Say
Official Says Two Attackers Were British Citizens of Pakistani Origin

By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 28, 2008; 1:06 PM

BERLIN, Nov. 28 — Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Meanwhile, British officials said they were investigating the possibility that two of its citizens were involved in the attacks.

In India, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, told reporters that two of the captured gunmen were British citizens of Pakistani origin. He gave no details.

The British government said it was investigating but unable to confirm the report.

“I would not want to be drawn into early conclusions about this,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters. “There is so much information still to be discovered and made available.”

“But obviously when you have terrorists operating in one country they may be getting support from another country or coming from another country,” Brown added. “It is very important that we strengthen the cooperation between India and Britain in dealing with these instances of terrorist attacks.”

British security officials said they were studying photographs of some attackers but were still trying to establish their nationalities. A team of counterterrorism investigators from Scotland Yard has been sent to Mumbai to assist in the investigation.

“We obviously will want to work very, very closely with the Indians on that, but it is too early to say whether or not any of them are British,” David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said of the suspects.

British intelligence officials have warned for years that scores of Britons Muslims have gone to receive training at militant camps inside Pakistan, including at least three of the bombers in the July 7, 2005, London transit attacks.

Other officials in London, however, denied that there were any links between British citizens and the Mumbai attackers.

“The British deputy high commissioner has spoken to Indian authorities who say there is no evidence that any of the terrorists are British,” said a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office, speaking on condition of anonymity, as is customary for government spokesmen.

Analysts said this week’s attacks surpassed previous plots carried out by domestic groups in terms of complexity, the number of people involved and their success in achieving their primary goal: namely, to spread fear.

“This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book “The Search for Al Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.”

Several analysts and officials said the attacks bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, two networks of Muslim extremists from Pakistan that have targeted India before. Jaish-i-Muhammad was blamed for an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

Both groups have carried out a long campaign of violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir, which India and Pakistan have fought over for six decades. The roots of the long-running conflict are religious: A majority of India’s population is Hindu, while most Pakistanis are Muslim.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Lashkar-i-Taiba, which means “Army of the Pious,” and Jaish-i-Muhammad, or “Soldiers of Muhammad,” are “the thing people are starting to look at. But I can’t caution enough to treat it as a theory, a working assumption. It’s still too early for hard and fast” conclusions.

“What the Indians have in their favor,” the official added, “is that they’ve got some of these guys. It seems logical that they can expect to work their way back reasonably quickly.” Indian officials said several gunmen were captured.

In its Friday editions, the newspaper the Hindu reported that at least three of the suspects held by police were members of Lashkar-i-Taiba and that the assailants had arrived in Mumbai on a ship from Karachi, Pakistan.

Earlier, Pakistan’s government condemned the attacks and warned India against jumping to conclusions about who was responsible. Lashkar-i-Taiba issued a statement denying involvement.

India has been plagued by a wave of terrorist attacks in recent years, many sparked by friction between Hindu nationalists and minority Muslim groups. The shootings in Mumbai were far from the worst to strike India’s financial capital; bombings in 1993 and 2006 each killed more than 180 people.

A group calling itself the Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility for the attacks in e-mails sent to Indian media organizations Wednesday. Officials said they had never heard of the group.

Television footage showed the assailants carrying automatic rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and grenades. Analysts said the fact that the gunmen quickly fanned across the city and were able to hold off Indian security forces over three days suggested that they had received training at organized camps.

“What is striking about this is a fair amount of planning had to go into this type of attack,” said Roger W. Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “This is not a seat-of-the-pants operation. This group had to receive some training or support from professionals in the terrorism business.”

Some experts said the operation bore resemblances to plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda, in that it involved multiple, simultaneous attacks targeting foreigners. In this case, according to witnesses, the gunmen sought out Americans and Britons, and also took hostages at the local headquarters of an Orthodox Jewish group.

Others said they were dubious of a connection to Osama bin Laden’s organization. They said al-Qaeda has relied on suicide bombers, not gunmen, and is not known to have cells in India.

David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, told reporters that it was “premature to talk about links to al-Qaeda” and that it was still unclear who the intended targets were. “This is only the latest in a series of attacks in India over the last year or two,” he said, adding, “Terrorism is not just a war against the West.”

Peter Neumann, a terrorism analyst at King’s College in London, noted that dozens of gunmen were involved. “This doesn’t mean it’s al-Qaeda, or they take orders from bin Laden, but I’m pretty sure it’s not some leaderless, grass-roots thing.”

On Wednesday, al-Qaeda’s propaganda arm released a video on the Internet featuring an interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the network’s deputy leader. He made no mention of the attacks in Mumbai; it was unclear when the video was produced.

Other experts warned that there is a long list of suspects who could have played a role. For instance, Indian officials have blamed the 1993 bombings in Mumbai, which killed 257 people, on Dawood Ibrahim, an organized crime figure who remains on the run.

“Anything could be in the cards,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism analyst at the Swedish National Defense College. “With most terrorist attacks, it’s relatively clear-cut who is involved. In this case, it could be all sorts of constellations that are at work.”

DeYoung reported from Washington. Special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

 
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Pakistani Militants At Center Of Probe
India, Its Archrival Vow to Cooperate Amid High Tension

By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 29, 2008; A01

BERLIN, Nov. 28 — Pakistani militant groups on Friday became the focus of the investigation into the attacks in Mumbai as India and its archrival Pakistan jousted over who was responsible. Both sides pledged to cooperate in the probe, but tensions remained high amid fears the conflict could escalate.

Pakistan initially said Friday that it had agreed to send its spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, on an unprecedented visit to India to share and obtain information from investigators there. Later Friday, however, Pakistani officials changed their minds and decided to send a less senior intelligence official in Pasha’s place, according to a Pakistani source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It was unclear what prompted the reversal, but the Pakistani source said the Islamabad government was “already bending over backwards” to be cooperative and did not “want to create more opportunities for Pakistan-bashing.” Pakistan’s defense minister, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, told reporters in Islamabad, “I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents.”

Meanwhile, Indian authorities ramped up their accusations that the plot had Pakistani connections. “Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved,” Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said at a news conference in New Delhi. Other Indian officials echoed the statement, but none provided details.

Evidence collected by police in Mumbai, along with intelligence gathered by U.S. and British officials, has led investigators to concentrate their focus on Islamist militants in Pakistan who have long sought to spark a war over the disputed province of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over Kashmir, the battleground between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan that each country claimed soon after India’s partition in 1947.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said additional evidence has emerged in the past 24 hours that points toward a Kashmiri connection. “Some of what has been learned so far does fall in that direction,” the official said, declining to offer specifics.

“We have to be careful here,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “When you posit a Kashmiri connection, that puts Pakistan on the table. That is huge, enormous, but what does it mean? It can be anything from people who were [initially] in Pakistan, to maybe people who used to be associated with someone in the Pakistani government, to any gradation you could find.”

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has sought a rapprochement with New Delhi, rejected widespread suspicions in India that Pakistani intelligence services may have supported the Mumbai gunmen. “The germs of terrorist elements were not produced in security agencies’ labs in Pakistan,” he said Friday.

Analysts said Pakistan’s pledge to assist in the investigation and send its spy chief to India was a sign of the high stakes involved. When armed Kashmiri militants tried to take over the Indian Parliament in December 2001, the fallout was immediate, as both countries responded with a massive military buildup along their shared border.

“A Pakistani link here would be so utterly damaging, all the way around, to Indo-Pakistani relations,” said Shaun Gregory, a professor of international security at the University of Bradford in England and a specialist on Pakistan. The decision to dispatch Pasha to India, he said, “does signal a determination on Pakistan’s part to clarify that even if there’s a Pakistani link here, that it had nothing to do with the government.”

A senior Pakistani official said the idea for Pasha’s visit came during a telephone conversation Friday between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. Singh, who had previously blamed the Mumbai attacks on groups “based outside the country,” offered to provide evidence to Gillani.

“One way to ensure that” was to send Pakistan’s intelligence chief, the Pakistani official said. “If there is evidence, share it.”

Although privately angered by the implication of Singh’s public remarks that Pakistan may have been involved, Gillani’s government has emphasized that Pakistan, too, has been victimized by terrorists and that the two countries should work together against the threat.

Tensions between India and Pakistan have remained raw since July, when a suicide bomber targeted the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 58 people, including the Indian defense attache to Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials later said there was evidence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had sponsored the attack. Pakistan’s government denied involvement.

Gregory, the British analyst, said Pakistan had a clear motive for the embassy bombing because it has grown alarmed at rising Indian influence in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that Pakistan’s military or intelligence services would have foreseen any benefit from what has transpired in Mumbai. “I cannot see, at this point, any conceivable advantage for the Pakistani state in this attack,” he said.

U.S., British and Indian counterterrorism officials and analysts said that Lashkar-i-Taiba, an Islamist network based in Pakistan, remained a primary suspect in the Mumbai disaster. They cautioned, however, that any number of other groups, including Muslim radicals from India, could have played a role.

Shortly after the attacks began, an organization calling itself the Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in e-mails to Indian media. But authorities said they had never heard of the group and questioned whether it was a front for others.

Lashkar-i-Taiba, which means Army of the Pious, was founded as a guerrilla group to fight the Indian army in Kashmir and received support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies as a proxy force. Under pressure from the United States, the Pakistani government banned the group after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but analysts said it continues to enjoy the backing of some Pakistani politicians and security officials. It also has operated joint training camps in Pakistan with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The tactics involved in the Mumbai attacks have been embraced before by Lashkar-i-Taiba. The group has routinely trained gunmen — called “fedayeen,” or fighters who volunteer to sacrifice themselves in battle — to carry out operations in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.

Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who formerly served at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, said if India can prove Lashkar-i-Taiba was culpable, “then the stress on the relationship becomes really acute.”

Lashkar was one of the groups that Pakistani intelligence “favored for all its dirty work in Kashmir and elsewhere,” Tellis said. “The whole question of Pakistan’s involvement itself is difficult because there are so many ‘Pakistans.’ . . . There is the intelligence agency, the army, the civilian government. I cannot imagine that the civilian government would have anything to do with an operation like this.”

Indian officials said that at least some of the gunmen arrived in Mumbai by boat and that the group included Pakistani nationals, although they did not offer firm evidence to back up that assertion.

Other Indian officials said Friday that two of the gunmen were British citizens of Pakistani descent. British officials said they were investigating the report but had been unable to corroborate it. Meanwhile, a team of counterterrorism officials from Scotland Yard left for India to assist in the investigation.

The FBI has also sent a team of about half a dozen investigators to India, although government sources said it was not clear the extent to which the Indians would allow the U.S. agents to participate. The FBI maintains a permanent office at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, and the agents will operate as part of the existing “country team.”

DeYoung reported from Washington.

 
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Joint Chiefs Chairman ‘Very Positive’ After Meeting With Obama
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By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 30, 2008; A01

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went unarmed into his first meeting with the new commander in chief — no aides, no PowerPoint presentation, no briefing books. Summoned nine days ago to President-elect Barack Obama’s Chicago transition office, Mullen showed up with just a pad, a pen and a desire to take the measure of his incoming boss.

There was little talk of exiting Iraq or beefing up the U.S. force in Afghanistan; the one-on-one, 45-minute conversation ranged from the personal to the philosophical. Mullen came away with what he wanted: a view of the next president as a non-ideological pragmatist who was willing to both listen and lead. After the meeting, the chairman “felt very good, very positive,” according to Mullen spokesman Capt. John Kirby.

As Obama prepares to announce his national security team tomorrow, he faces a military that has long mistrusted Democrats and is particularly wary of a young, intellectual leader with no experience in uniform, who once called Iraq a “dumb” war. Military leaders have all heard his pledge to withdraw most combat forces from Iraq within 16 months — sooner than commanders on the ground have recommended — and his implied criticism of the Afghanistan war effort during the Bush administration.

But so far, Obama appears to be going out of his way to reassure them that he will do nothing rash and will seek their advice, even while making clear that he may not always take it. He has demonstrated an ability to speak the lingo, talk about “mission plans” and “tasking,” and to differentiate between strategy and tactics, a distinction Republican nominee John McCain accused him of misunderstanding during the campaign.

Obama has been careful to separate his criticism of Bush policy from his praise of the military’s valor and performance, while Michelle Obama’s public expressions of concern for military families have gone over well. But most important, according to several senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials who would speak about their incoming leader only on the condition of anonymity, is the expectation of renewed respect for the chain of command and greater realism about U.S. military goals and capabilities, which many found lacking during the Bush years.

“Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders,” said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid,” Nash said. “In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting.”

Obama’s expected retention of Robert M. Gates as defense secretary and expected appointment of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser have been greeted with relief at the Pentagon.

Clinton is respected at the Pentagon and is considered a defense moderate, at times bordering on hawkish. Through her membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee — sought early in her congressional career to add gravitas to her presidential aspirations — she has developed close ties with senior military figures.

Some in the military are suspicious of “flagpole” officers such as Jones, whose assignments included Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, Marine commandant and other headquarters service, and who grew up in France and is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. But Jones also saw combat in Vietnam and served in Bosnia.

“His reputation is pretty good,” one Pentagon official said. “He’s savvy about Washington, worked the Hill,” and at a lean 6-foot-4, the former Georgetown basketball player “looks great in a suit.”

Although Jones occasionally and privately briefed candidate Obama on foreign policy matters — on Afghanistan, in particular, as did current deputy NATO commander Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry — he is not considered an intimate of the president-elect.

But as Obama’s closest national security adviser, or at least the one who will spend the most time with him, Jones is expected to follow the pattern of two military predecessors in the job, Brent Scowcroft and Colin L. Powell, who injected order and discipline to a National Security Council full of strong personalities with independent power bases.

Although exit polls did not break out active-duty voters, it is virtually certain that McCain won the military vote.

In an October survey by the Military Times, nearly 70 percent of more than 4,000 officers and enlisted respondents said they favored McCain, while about 23 percent preferred Obama. Only African American service members gave Obama a majority.

In exit polls, those who said they had “ever served in the U.S. military” made up 15 percent of voters and broke 54 percent for McCain to 44 percent for Obama. “As a culture, we are more conservative and Republican,” a senior officer said.

Obama has said he will meet with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as well as the service chiefs during his first week in office. At the top of his agenda for that meeting will be what he has called the military’s “new mission” of planning the 16-month withdrawal timeline for Iraq. Senior officers have publicly grumbled about the risk involved.

“Moving forward in a measured way, tied to conditions as they continue to evolve, over time, is important,” Mullen said at a media briefing four days before his Nov. 21 meeting with Obama. “I’m certainly aware of what has been said” prior to the election, he said.

The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, clashed with the chiefs during his first sit-down with them when they opposed his campaign pledge to end the ban on gays in the military. The chiefs, some of whom held the commander in chief in thinly veiled contempt as a supposed Vietnam draft dodger, won the battle, and Clinton spent much of his two terms seen as an adversary.

But Mullen came away from the Chicago talk reassured that Obama will engage in a discussion with them, balancing risks and “asking tough questions . . . but not in a combative, finger-pointing way,” one official said.

The president-elect’s invitation to Mullen, whom Obama previously had met only in passing on Capitol Hill and whose first two-year term as chairman does not expire until the end of September, was seen as an attempt to establish a relationship and avoid early conflict. While some Pentagon officials believe an Iraq withdrawal order could become Obama’s equivalent of the Clinton controversy over gays, several senior Defense Department sources said that Gates, Mullen and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the military’s Central Command, are untroubled by the 16-month plan and feel it can be accomplished with a month or two of wiggle room.

These sources noted that Obama himself has said he would not be “careless” about withdrawal and would retain a “residual” force of unspecified size to fight terrorists and protect U.S. diplomats and civilians. The officer most concerned about untimely withdrawal, sources said, is the Iraq commander, Gen. Ray Odierno.

Even as the Iraq war continues, defense officials are far more worried about Afghanistan, where they see policy drift and an unfocused mission. With strategy reviews now being completed at the White House and by the chairman’s office, an internal Pentagon debate is well underway over whether goals should be lowered.

Although Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has requested four more U.S. combat brigades, some Pentagon strategists believe a smaller presence of Special Forces and trainers for Afghan forces — and more attention to Pakistan — is advisable.

Bush’s ideological objective of a modern Afghan democracy, several officials said, is unattainable with current U.S. resources, and there is optimism that Obama will have a more realistic view.

A number of senior officers also look with favor on Obama’s call for talks with Iran over Iraq and Afghanistan, separating those issues from U.S. demands over Tehran’s nuclear program.

One of the biggest long-term military issues on Obama’s plate will be the defense budget, currently topping 4.3 percent of gross domestic product once war expenditures are included.

Obama has said he will increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, finding savings in the Iraq drawdown and in new scrutiny of spending, including on contractors, weapons programs and missile defense.

“They know the money is coming down,” a Pentagon official said of the uniformed services, and many welcome increased discipline.

But it’s neither the military’s nature nor its role to volunteer the cuts, the official said. “It’s for Congress and the administration to say ‘Stop it.’ “

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

 
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Obama Names Team to Face A Complex Security Picture

By Karen DeYoung and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 2, 2008; A01

President-elect Barack Obama’s high-powered national security team, introduced yesterday at a Chicago news conference, faces the challenge of managing two wars and various ongoing foreign policy crises even as it helps the president-elect shape what he called “a new beginning, a new dawn of American leadership” in the world.

In announcing his choices of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to be secretary of state, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to continue in office and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones to serve as national security adviser, Obama laid out a vision of an America whose global stature is restored and whose military, diplomatic and economic power are balanced with one another and with “the power of our moral example.”

But he acknowledged that “grave” and “urgent” national security issues, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, potential conflict between Pakistan and India, and economic crisis at home and abroad, require immediate attention. The challenge will be balancing those immediate priorities handed over by the Bush administration — what the Obama camp calls the “inheritance issues” — with national and international expectations for the longer-term changes he pledged during the campaign.

The members of his new team, Obama said yesterday, “share my pragmatism about the use of power, and my sense of purpose.” Three other Cabinet selections announced were Eric H. Holder Jr. as attorney general, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security and Susan Rice as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Obama repeatedly emphasized his intention to expand U.S. diplomacy while buttressing the size and capabilities of the military, and he stressed the interconnectedness of national security and economic issues. Rice, who served as a senior foreign policy aide to Obama during the campaign, listed an ambitious global agenda — “to prevent conflict, to promote peace, combat terrorism, prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons, tackle climate change, end genocide, fight poverty and disease.”

But “you have to manage the legacy” of the Bush administration “while trying to move forward on priorities,” one Obama adviser said. “The balance is showing that you’re serious about what’s important — what you said during the campaign — without overloading the agenda. It’s more important to have success that shows you’re making progress than a long, uncompleted pass.”

In addition to the pressing issues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, Obama must quickly decide whether to continue negotiations begun by President Bush on North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how to deal with Iran, and what to do about the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Preparations must be made for three major summits — NATO, the Group of 20 and the Summit of the Americas — scheduled within three months of the inauguration.

At yesterday’s news conference, however, questions focused less on policy than on how the eclectic personalities standing behind Obama and in front of American flags — particularly Clinton, Gates and Jones — would mesh. Asked how he would avoid having a “clash of rivals” rather than the smoothly functioning team he portrayed, Obama said he expected “vigorous debate” and described himself as “a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions.”

“One of the dangers in the White House, based on my reading of history,” Obama continued, “is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there’s no discussion and there are no dissenting views.”

Obama turned playful when a reporter reminded him of the sharp criticisms he leveled at Clinton during the campaign, including equating her travels as first lady to having tea with foreign leaders. Obama waved off the question, saying the press was merely “having fun” by stirring up quotes from the campaign.

“Differences get magnified” during campaigns, Obama said. “I did not ask for assurances from these individuals that they would agree with me at all times. I think they understood and would not be joining this team unless they understood and were prepared to carry out the decisions that have been made by me after full discussion.”

“On the broad core vision of where America needs to go,” he said, “we are in almost complete agreement. There are going to be differences in tactics and different assessments and judgments made. That’s what I expect; that’s what I welcome. That’s why I asked them to join the team.”

“But understand, I will be setting policy as president,” he added. “I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out, and I expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made.”

The announcements confirmed weeks of speculation and secret negotiations. Gates had never closed the door on staying in office but repeatedly insisted that he wanted to retire to his home in Washington state. Discussions with Clinton were not solidified until agreement was reached over public release of the names of donors to the foundation established by her husband, the former president.

Jones was said to have resisted repeated entreaties from Obama until early last week. His concerns, according to a source who discussed the matter with the former NATO commander, centered on avoiding the problems that plagued Bush’s first term, including a weak National Security Council and end runs around national security adviser Condoleezza Rice by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney.

Another Obama adviser said the president-elect’s team has studied Bush’s attempt to put together a first-term team of national security heavyweights, only to see discipline collapse among warring factions. With Jones, the adviser said, Obama felt he had found “a very substantial person who can make the system work.”

“Obama kept coming back,” the source said. “Everything [Jones] told him about the reasons he didn’t want the job, [Obama] said, ‘I can fix that.’ ” Jones is said to have emerged with guarantees that he would have Cabinet rank and be the main foreign policy conduit to and from the president.

Clinton stood without expression yesterday as Obama, the former rival she once called “naive” on some aspects of foreign policy, praised her “extraordinary intelligence and remarkable work ethic.” Obama continued: “She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world’s leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world. Hillary’s appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances.”

Clinton cracked a smile when Obama described her as a “tough campaign opponent.” In her own remarks, she said that “if confirmed, I will give this assignment, your administration and my country my all.”

A source close to the transition and familiar with discussions between Clinton and Obama described her as confident that she will have the president’s ear when she needs it, and as unconcerned about the potential for rivalry with Jones and Gates. “She knows how the White House works,” the source said of the former first lady.

Gates was brief and businesslike, declaring himself “deeply honored” to be asked to continue his service. Referring to the American troops at war, he said: “I must do my duty as they do theirs. How could I do otherwise?”

During the campaign, Gates publicly questioned Obama’s plan to set a timetable for withdrawing most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office, saying it would undermine recent security gains there. Since then, however, the Bush administration has signed a security agreement with Iraq pledging a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011, and senior U.S. military officials who have spoken with Obama have said they think they can strike a compromise on the number and timing of withdrawals. In recent months, Gates has given a series of speeches dovetailing with Obama’s emphasis on the importance of diplomacy and “soft power” along with military force.

Noting it would likely be necessary “to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq,” Obama said yesterday that he thinks “16 months is the right time frame. But, as I’ve said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders.”

Shear reported from Chicago. Staff writer Michael Abramowitz in Washington contributed to this report.

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U.S. Hopes to Quiet Indian-Pakistani Tensions

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 3, 2008; A11

Senior U.S. officials converged on South Asia yesterday, hoping to persuade India and Pakistan to lower the tensions between them after the Mumbai attacks, and to avoid an escalation that could jeopardize U.S. war efforts in neighboring Afghanistan.

Their most urgent message is directed toward India, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to appeal to the government to accept Pakistan’s offer to jointly investigate the assault with U.S. assistance, a senior Bush administration official said.

“The goal is to say, first, this is really serious,” the official said. “It is qualitatively different for us,” because six Americans were among nearly 200 killed by terrorist gunmen believed to have traveled to the Indian seaside metropolis by boat from Pakistan. “But more important, we want to work with you and the Pakistanis. The only way we’re really going to deal with the terrorist threat is to get the Pakistanis to cooperate in the investigation.”

In Pakistan, the administration hopes to persuade the newly elected democratic government to move forcefully against domestic terrorist groups that initially were formed with the assistance of Pakistani intelligence to attack India along the two countries’ disputed border in Kashmir. India has charged — and U.S. intelligence believes — that the Mumbai attacks were carried out by one of those groups, Laskhar-i-Taiba, or Army of the Pious.

Adding his voice to the calls for calm, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke yesterday of the importance of “restraint” on the part of both nations.

“But it’s also important to find out who was responsible,” Gates said at a news briefing. “I think what we would like to see is both countries work together to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.” Gates added that he was unaware of any request by India for U.S. training or equipment to help with its counterterrorism efforts, or any U.S. offer to provide such aid.

President-elect Barack Obama announced Monday that he would retain Gates as defense secretary. Asked twice about an Indian response to the attacks, Obama first demurred, citing “delicate diplomacy” and the reality of “only one president at a time” in the United States. Pressed on whether India has the same right as the United States to respond to terrorist threats, he said he thinks that “sovereign nations obviously have a right to protect themselves.”

Although U.S. relations with India rarely came up during the presidential campaign, Obama told Outlook India magazine in an interview in July that “we are both victims of terrorist attacks on our soil.” Among many shared interests, he said, is “our common strategic interests” that call for “strengthening U.S.-India military cooperation.”

On counterterrorism, India’s skepticism of Pakistan and the United States draws on recent history. The last threatened India-Pakistan war, following a Lashkar attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, was averted by strong U.S. intervention with both governments. As the two countries massed hundreds of thousands of troops at the disputed border, the administration pushed then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to publicly pledge to combat militants inside Pakistan, and persuaded India to accept the promise.

Although a number of militants were arrested, most were quickly released. “What the administration is trying to do now is to influence the Pakistanis to finally bring these guys under control, while working to convince the Indians that the commitment to working with the Pakistanis is credible,” said Ashley Tellis, a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington.

The United States has “made a series of such commitments to India going back to 2001, and simply could not or would not deliver,” Tellis said. “The Indians are now asking why it is they should believe the administration when it says it’s going to redouble those efforts.”

U.S. leverage with India is largely limited to goodwill and the promise of continued economic and diplomatic ties. “There is a lot of good faith from the Indians on the nuclear deal,” last year’s U.S.-Indian agreement on nuclear energy cooperation, the administration official said. “We’ve been with them on a whole lot of things recently, and I think we can be with them on terrorism, too.”

Rice and Mullen hope to convince their Indian counterparts that the difference this time is that Musharraf, an army general who seized power in Pakistan in a 1999 coup, has been replaced by a democratic government committed to moving against all extremist groups within its borders.

In recent months, the new Pakistani government had reached out to India, offering to begin discussions about resolving the Kashmir issue and cracking down on militant camps along the disputed northeastern frontier.

To the gratification of the Bush administration, Pakistan’s military had turned its attention away from India toward the western border with Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are ensconced. U.S. officials have praised a Pakistani offensive in the mountainous west, and they have concluded a secret agreement with the Pakistani government allowing them to fire missiles from unmanned Predator aircraft based in Afghanistan at Taliban fighters inside Pakistan’s territory.

Gates said yesterday that he had seen no indication that Pakistan’s military was diverting its forces from the west toward the east. But U.S. officials fear that is inevitable if tensions are not quickly resolved.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

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Correction to This Article
This article incorrectly described current and former intelligence officials as believing that the CIA suffers from incompetent leadership and low morale. The sentence should have said that the officials expressed resentment about such suggestions.
Obama Is Under Fire Over Panetta Selection
Current, Ex-CIA Officials Criticize ‘Opaque’ Process

By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; A01

President-elect Barack Obama said yesterday that he has selected a “top-notch intelligence team” that would provide the “unvarnished” information his administration needs, rather than “what they think the president wants to hear.”

But current and former intelligence officials expressed sharp resentment over Obama’s choice of Leon E. Panetta as CIA director and suggested that the agency suffers from incompetent leadership and low morale. “People who suggest morale is low don’t have a clue about what’s going on now,” said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield, citing recent personnel reforms under Director Michael V. Hayden.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were still stewing over Obama not consulting them on the choice before it was leaked Monday and continued to question Panetta’s intelligence experience. Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. acknowledged that the transition team had made a “mistake” in not consulting or even notifying congressional leaders, and Obama telephoned committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her predecessor, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), yesterday to apologize.

“Obama trusts [Panetta] — that’s a huge plus,” committee member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said, citing Panetta’s management expertise as Clinton White House chief of staff and budget director. But “after the past 24 hours, Leon Panetta is likely to get a good grilling” at his confirmation hearing, Wyden said. Several committee Democrats made clear that they expect CIA Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes and Intelligence Director Michael Morell, the agency’s No. 3 official, to be retained for continuity and experience. An Obama transition official confirmed that both will be invited to stay.

The Panetta uproar starts Obama off on the wrong foot with the committee and intelligence professionals and was the latest glitch in what has largely been an unusually smooth and carefully choreographed transition.

“It’s always good to talk to the requisite members of Congress,” Biden said. “I think it was just a mistake.”

In a news conference at his transition headquarters, Obama defended Panetta, even as he emphasized that he has still made no formal announcement about his intelligence team. “I have the utmost respect for Leon Panetta,” he said. “I think he is one of the finest public servants that we’ve had. He brings extraordinary management skills, great political savvy, an impeccable record of integrity.” Obama is expected to publicly name Panetta, as well as retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence, this week. Panetta began making introductory calls to lawmakers yesterday, Obama aides said.

Although several top CIA officials who have interacted with Obama since the election expressed admiration for his grasp of the issues, the transition process has clearly left a bad taste. One senior official said that “the process was completely opaque” and that the agency was neither consulted nor informed. The official was among several who discussed the subject on the condition of anonymity.

A second official who had worked with President Bill Clinton’s national security team while Panetta was chief of staff said he had no recollection of Panetta taking an active role in intelligence briefings or discussions of CIA policy and practice.

“He just didn’t make an impression,” said the official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could discuss the matter freely.

An official who participated in the Obama team’s deliberations dismissed concerns about Panetta’s lack of experience, saying that a number of previous directors had little or no “inside-the-intelligence-community experience. Most of them were from the outside . . . What you need is someone who can represent the agency well in the corridors of power in Washington.”

Several of Panetta’s former White House colleagues also said yesterday that he appreciated and engaged in national security issues during the Clinton years.

In a clear reference to harsh interrogation policies, including waterboarding, that were used against CIA terrorism detainees, Obama said his team would be “committed to breaking with some of the past practices and concerns that have, I think, tarnished the image of . . . the intelligence agencies as well as U.S. foreign policy.”

Almost as an afterthought at the end of his remarks, Obama noted that “there are outstanding intelligence professionals in the CIA” and other intelligence agencies, “and I have the utmost regard for the work that they’ve done.”

A widely held view among intelligence officials was that Obama’s team had decided to automatically disqualify any candidate who might have been seen as tainted by association with the controversial interrogation and detention policies of the Bush presidency — essentially anyone who held a management job in the past eight years. Former senior CIA official John O. Brennan, who headed the transition intelligence team, withdrew his name from consideration over concerns that his association with interrogation and rendition policies under President Bush and then-CIA director George J. Tenet would taint Obama.

A number of Tenet-era officials have argued that they were simply carrying out orders that the president and the attorney general, as well as Congress, had approved. Hayden, the outgoing director, defended interrogation policies, including waterboarding, that many have labeled torture, saying they were necessary to break some terrorism suspects. Although he has told Congress that waterboarding has not been used recently, Hayden publicly supported Bush’s decision to retain the option to use “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

But one former senior intelligence official noted that many of the people Panetta will be expected to lead would have participated in implementing the interrogation policy. Obama and Panetta “should think twice about pledges they make now” about the handling of terrorism detainees, another former senior official said, “because they may come back to haunt them in the future if some dire circumstances occur.”

The desire to retain Kappes and Morell, both of whom held senior positions under Tenet as well as with Hayden, however, indicated that Obama does not intend to clean house beyond the top leadership level.

Obama has said that he plans to close the detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that he would “make sure we do not torture.” Feinstein introduced legislation yesterday to do both.

The bill provides for “a legal, effective, and humane system of gathering intelligence and holding suspected terrorists.” It would close Guantanamo Bay and require detainees either to be charged and tried in this country, transferred to an international tribunal or another country or held “in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”

It would also restrict the CIA and other intelligence agencies to 19 interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual, “creating a clear, single standard across the U.S. government.”

Staff writers Walter Pincus and Paul Kane contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Thwarted Israeli Plan to Bomb Iranian Nuclear Facility

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2009; A10

President Bush last year rejected an Israeli request to provide sophisticated, deep-penetration bombs to attack Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facilities, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

The administration also rebuffed Israel’s plan to fly through U.S.-controlled Iraqi airspace to reach the Iranian site, officials said. The Israelis had not proposed a specific date for an attack, and it was not clear how far along the planning was when the requests were made, officials said.

The Israeli requests were first reported on the New York Times Web site yesterday. The Times also said that President Bush, seeking to deflect the Israelis and to soften his refusal, told the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he had authorized a new covert action program to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program. The report quoted U.S. officials as saying that some actions had been taken as part of what it described as an ongoing covert program, but that they had not seriously affected Iranian operations. Israel and the United States and principal European allies have charged that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, a charge Tehran has denied.

Officials with the Israeli Embassy and the CIA declined to comment last night. A White House spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Some factions within the Bush administration have long advocated a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but military leaders and others have argued against it on the grounds that it could endanger U.S. troops in the region and spark a broader war in the Middle East, and that it would probably only temporarily set back Iran’s efforts.

The Natanz complex in central Iran houses several underground structures containing gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. The Iranian government has said it is interested in peaceful nuclear energy only, but its failure to cooperate fully with international verification efforts has led to increasingly strict Western economic sanctions.

Israel has long considered Iran the main threat to its long-term security and has pressed a series of U.S. administrations to take stronger action against it.

The Times said its information was developed during reporting for an upcoming book by reporter David E. Sanger on global challenges awaiting the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Pentagon officials said that they were disturbed when Israeli air and naval exercises in the Mediterranean last summer appeared designed to test-fly distances equal to those between Israel and Iranian sites. The exercises briefly reawakened U.S. concerns that Israel was moving ahead with its attack plan. It could not be determined yesterday whether the Israeli plan had been abandoned or postponed.

Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

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Afghan Conflict Will Be Reviewed
Obama Sees Troops As Buying Time, Not Turning Tide

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2009; A01

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like “surge” of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama’s national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the “central front on terror.”

With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year — including record levels of extremist attacks and U.S. casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India — Obama’s campaign pledge to “finish the job” in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.

Since the November election, Obama has been flooded with dire assessments of the war. A National Intelligence Estimate warned that a reconstituted al-Qaeda leadership, dug into the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border, continues to plan attacks against the United States and Europe. The Bush White House delivered a major review of Afghanistan last month that echoed that judgment, acknowledged that a modern Afghan democracy — stable and free of extremists — may be both unattainable and unaffordable, and said that the United States may have to accept trade-offs among priorities.

“We have no strategic plan. We never had one,” a senior U.S. military commander said of the Bush years. Obama’s first order of business, he said, will be to “explain to the American people what the mission is” in Afghanistan. The officer is one of a number of active-duty and retired officers, senior Obama team members and Bush administration officials interviewed for this article, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the presidential transition.

The military is as concerned about the mission of additional troops as it is about the size of the force and is looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates, including the relative merits of conducting conventional combat vs. targeted guerrilla war. With limited resources, should the military concentrate on eliminating a Taliban presence — a task for which most think the United States and its allies will never have enough troops — or on securing large population areas?

What is the plan for training an Afghan army expected to double in size — from 84,000 troops — in the next few years, when less than half of current U.S. trainer slots are filled? How will resources be shifted to the State Department and civilian development experts Obama has said must assume more responsibility? Can the new president do what his predecessor could not and impose order and a shared strategy on the 41 nations and countless international and nongovernmental organizations operating in Afghanistan? Will he follow through on pledges for more diplomacy with Iran, to the west of Afghanistan, and a more aggressive plan for Pakistan to the east?

“This is not a Shinseki versus Rumsfeld debate between 125,000 or 500,000 U.S. troops,” a Pentagon official said, referring to the differing views of then-Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld before the Iraq invasion in 2003. “It’s a real debate about what the correct answer is.”

Obama has offered few public comments on Afghanistan since the election. “We haven’t seen the kinds of infrastructure improvements; we haven’t seen the security improvements; we haven’t seen the reduction in narco-trafficking; we haven’t seen a reliance on rule of law in Afghanistan that would make people feel confident that the central government can, in fact, deliver on its promises,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We’ve got to ramp up our development approach,” he said, without providing details.

The president-elect set out a “very limited” objective of ensuring that Afghanistan “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” He cited the need for “more effective military action” — even as he warned of fierce Afghan resistance to the presence of foreign troops — and said the “number one goal” is to stop al-Qaeda.

In the current vacuum, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have made their own assessments and recommendations, as has Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of both U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the Central Command chief, who has regional responsibility for the Middle East and much of South Asia, has set up what a Pentagon official only half-jokingly described as a “shadow government,” assembling a team of more than 200 military and civilian experts to supply him with a comprehensive plan for the region by mid-February.

The Army is already spending $1.1 billion to provide facilities for additional troops in Afghanistan and plans to start an additional $1.3 billion in construction next year. But it remains unclear what kinds of forces, with what assignments, will be sent beyond the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Combat Brigade, departing this month. Smaller “enabler” units with helicopters and other equipment are also readying for deployment, and significant training must begin soon for other units selected to go during the spring and summer. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, has pressed for a major Marine presence in Afghanistan once the Marine force has drawn down substantially from Iraq.

On the civilian and economic development front, Obama officials have been noncommittal about a $2.5 billion supplemental spending plan for 2009 that the State Department hopes the new administration will quickly submit to Congress for approval. Although Obama co-sponsored a Senate bill to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion over five years, introduced last summer by his vice president-elect, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the proposal never left the chamber.

“At some point,” said a retired senior officer with long Afghan experience and ties to the Obama team, “this is going to have to converge into a set of options and a decision on a strategy instead of 40 different ones. . . . It’s going to require a much more complex assessment by Obama. One of the problems is you don’t really know what kind of forces, and how many, until you know what strategy you’re going to have.”

With its “Day One” plate already overflowing with the economic crisis at home, the Hamas-Israel war in the Gaza Strip and Obama’s stated goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, the new administration says it will not be rushed on Afghanistan. “We are taking a long, hard look at these issues now,” a transition adviser said.

The parameters of a new strategy are unlikely to emerge before early April, when Afghanistan and Pakistan will top the agenda at a NATO summit in France. By presenting its NATO allies with a comprehensive plan and demonstrating the leadership to implement it, Obama hopes to capitalize on his overwhelming popularity in Europe with requests for increased military and financial contributions.

“What they’ve got to say is ‘Okay, if you love Obama, show us how much,’ ” said another retired senior military officer.

Some senior members of the new administration are already deeply knowledgeable about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including holdover Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, commanded NATO when it took over the coalition of international forces in Afghanistan in 2003 and last year chaired a major Atlantic Council study that concluded that “the international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”

Jones remains committed to the study’s recommendation of a complete reappraisal of the war; a campaign plan that integrates all security, reconstruction and governance efforts; and a regional approach that includes diplomatic collaboration with Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia and China.

But other designated policymakers have been less intimately involved with the issue, including Secretary of State-designee Hillary Rodham Clinton; retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the nominee for director of national intelligence; and Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s choice to head the CIA. There is a deep-seated belief among Obama advisers that no matter how many pre-inauguration diplomatic, military and intelligence briefings they receive, they will not have a full picture of the depth of the problems in Afghanistan or the options for fixing them until Obama reaches the Oval Office.

 
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On First Full Day, Obama Will Dive Into Foreign Policy

By Michael D. Shear and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 20, 2009; A12

President-elect Barack Obama will plunge into foreign policy on his first full day in office tomorrow, finally freed from the constraints of tradition that has forced him and his staff to remain muzzled about world affairs during the 78-day transition.

As one of his first actions, Obama plans to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his Middle East envoy, aides said, sending a signal that the new administration intends to move quickly to engage warring Israelis and Palestinians in efforts to secure the peace.

Mitchell’s appointment will follow this afternoon’s expected Senate vote to confirm Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. And tomorrow afternoon, aides said, Obama will convene a meeting of his National Security Council to launch a reassessment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By the end of the week, Obama plans to issue an executive order to eventually shut down the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to lay out a new process for dealing with about 250 detainees remaining at the prison.

The actions — to be taken before the entire White House staff has found their desks — reflect the frenetic activity among Obama’s national security advisers that has been taking place behind the scenes since Election Day.

Following his noon inauguration, Obama will spend a brief time at the White House before heading to a series of dinners and inaugural balls. Aides said the work of being president will begin in earnest tomorrow morning.

That work has already been in full view with regard to the economic crisis and other domestic issues. Obama has not been bashful, giving speeches and dispatching aides to work with Congress on an $825 billion stimulus package. He will meet with economic advisers tomorrow and is expected to quickly issue an executive order demanding a new level of transparency and ethics in government.

But the new president will for the first time assume the responsibility for an Iraq war that he opposed from its inception and a series of international crises that will quickly test his mettle as commander in chief.

Publicly, the president-elect has deferred to President Bush and has declined to comment on the recent fighting in the Gaza Strip and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But privately, he and his aides have been preparing to dramatically reshape the country’s foreign policy, starting with the broad conflict zone from Israel to Pakistan.

Last Thursday, in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, Obama criticized Bush for treating Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as “discrete” problems. Under his watch, Obama said, policy in that region will be treated as a single, unified one.

“One of the principles that we’ll be operating under is that these things are very much related and that if we have got an integrated approach, we’re going to be more effective,” he said.

Incoming officials were still debating yesterday how involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis should proceed during the first week. With a fragile Gaza cease-fire in place, the new administration plans to tread gingerly, working behind the scenes while allowing Egyptian and European initiatives to play out before taking a highly visible role.

Obama transition officials are acutely aware that the world — and especially the Israelis and Palestinians — will be watching to see what tone the new president takes. Sources said the initial emphasis will likely be on stepped-up presidential engagement rather than the specifics of a U.S. role, and empathy and aid toward humanitarian suffering.

The first concrete evidence of a new foreign policy approach will begin with the meeting tomorrow. Obama will instruct the Pentagon to prepare for a stepped-up withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, to be completed within 16 months, and will hear proposals for turning around the deteriorating war in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, will attend, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of Central Command, and Gen. Raymond Odierno, U.S. commander in Iraq, will weigh in via live video connection.

Senior officers began late last year to prepare options for withdrawing from Iraq. Obama has said he will listen carefully to their recommendations before approving a plan that meets his specifications. He has said he expects to maintain a “residual force” in Iraq but has not indicated how many troops will remain over what period.

He has also indicated he will move ahead with existing plans for deployment of as many as 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan this year.

After returning to the White House following his swearing-in today, Obama is expected to visit the Oval Office, aides said.

A handful of senior staff members will ride in Obama’s motorcade to the White House today and enter their offices for the first time as they brace to confront the economy, the Middle East, overseas wars and a raft of domestic policy controversies.

Aides said only about 15 White House staffers were pre-screened to enter the West Wing today. The rest will arrive tomorrow morning, after partying at inaugural balls.

Gates will not attend inaugural festivities, having been designated to stay away from the president and other national leaders in case of a catastrophic event.

Mitchell, who led a Middle East peace commission in 2000, is highly regarded as a negotiator for his work in the successful Northern Ireland peace process. An Obama adviser said the exact timing of Mitchell’s appointment will depend on Clinton’s confirmation vote, which is scheduled to take place by “unanimous consent” and so cannot be stopped by filibuster.

But a Republican senator could demand a voice vote, thus delaying Clinton’s confirmation by another day. “If any Republican holds her over, they are stalling the entire administration from hitting this problem,” the adviser said.

The Guantanamo order is being crafted by Obama White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig. Its timing is expected to preempt a Guantanamo trial scheduled to begin Monday under the current “military commission” proceedings.

Staff writer Anne E. Kornblut contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. to Be Allowed New Routes To Supply Troops in Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2009; A04

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said yesterday that the United States had reached agreements to open “additional logistical routes into Afghanistan” through its Central Asian neighbors to the north, reducing dependence on Pakistan as the main transit route for supplies to U.S. and NATO troops.

Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, spoke to reporters in Pakistan before heading to Afghanistan, his last stop on a six-nation tour of the region. He is due in Washington today to attend a national security meeting this afternoon with President Obama.

The White House meeting will mark Obama’s first formal engagement with the most immediate foreign policy issues he faces, including Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, are expected to attend, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, assuming the Senate, which yesterday delayed a vote on her nomination as secretary of state, votes to confirm her today.

Petraeus, whose command stretches from the Mediterranean to Pakistan’s border with India, will provide an update on the region and his trip. Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, will join at least part of the meeting via live videoconference. Their participation leaves open the question of whether Obama will follow former president George W. Bush’s practice of consulting directly with military commanders in the field — Petraeus in particular — rather than following the formal chain of command through Gates, with Mullen as the president’s chief military adviser.

Obama is expected to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his special envoy to the Middle East. He has promised quick and emphatic presidential involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but advisers are hesitant to upset a fragile cease-fire begun by Israeli and Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip over the weekend, as well as delicate, ongoing initiatives by Egypt and European governments.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Egypt for a summit designed to seal the Gaza cease-fire, told reporters on his way back to Paris that the truce should be used as a stepping stone to a wider Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and that he hoped to host a broad international conference in Paris “in a matter of weeks” to launch a new round of negotiations. French diplomatic sources expressed hope that the Obama administration will be willing to play a major role in that effort, once Israel selects new leaders in elections next month.

About three-quarters of “nonlethal” supplies for the 64,000-strong U.S. and NATO force in Afghanistan — food, fuel, construction materials and other goods — travel by road from the Pakistani port of Karachi and across the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border through the Khyber Pass. Pakistani transit convoys have repeatedly been attacked in recent months by Taliban fighters.

During an eight-day trip, Petraeus stopped in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan. “There have been agreements reached” over new transit routes, he said, although he offered no specifics. One possible route includes train and truck convoys through Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Correspondent Edward Cody in Paris contributed to this report.

 
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As Obama Visits State Dept., Clinton Announces Two Special Envoys

By Karen DeYoung and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 23, 2009; A05

President Obama traveled to the State Department yesterday afternoon for a visit that was as rich in symbolism as in substance, underscoring his pledge to give top priority to diplomacy as he outlined an activist policy in the Middle East and warned that “difficult days lie ahead” in Afghanistan.

Obama and Vice President Biden stood to one side as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced new special emissaries on the most intractable national security problems — Richard C. Holbrooke for Afghanistan-Pakistan and George J. Mitchell for the Middle East — to an invited gathering of several hundred, including State Department officials. Just hours earlier, about 1,000 cheering civil service and Foreign Service employees had packed the building’s lobby to welcome her on her first day at work.

Clinton called the appointments of Holbrooke and Mitchell “a loud and clear signal . . . that our nation is once again capable of demonstrating global leadership in pursuit of progress and peace.” Obama said the two statesmen would “convey our seriousness of purpose” in dealing with challenges he described as complex and urgent.

The new secretary, and the new president’s choice to make State his first Cabinet department stop — even before his maiden trip to the Pentagon — buoyed a workforce that often felt disdained and relegated to the back seat behind the military over the past eight years. “People were just elated that the president came here and said all the right things about strengthening diplomacy,” one official said.

“It is my privilege to come here and to pay tribute to all of you, the talented men and women of the State Department,” Obama said. “I’ve given you an early gift, Hillary Clinton,” he said, adding that she has “my full confidence.”

Both the new appointees are experienced negotiators. Holbrooke, a former Foreign Service officer who led the U.S. team that brokered the 1995 Dayton peace accords in the Balkans, was a leading supporter of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Mitchell, a former Maine senator, chaired negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement ending decades of conflict in Northern Ireland, and a high-level commission on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2000-01.

Obama has criticized the Bush administration as lacking high-level involvement in the Middle East, but he broke little new policy ground in his first extensive remarks on the situation yesterday. He said he was “deeply concerned by the loss of Israeli and Palestinian life . . . and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs” in the Gaza Strip, where three weeks of fighting between Hamas militants and the Israeli military halted last weekend with a still-fragile cease-fire.

He called on Hamas to renounce violence, abide by past agreements and recognize Israel’s right to exist, and said Israel should open the territory’s borders. He cited “constructive elements” in an Arab peace initiative but said “now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative’s promise” by supporting the Palestinian Authority government, ousted from Gaza by Hamas in 2007, normalizing relations with Israel and “standing up to extremism that threatens us all.”

Palestinian activists noted that Obama made no reference to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank but said they were ecstatic over the selection of Mitchell, who is well remembered for firmly recommending an end to Israeli settlement activity in his 2001 report.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said “the policies are the same” but “Obama signaled early engagement and an energetic approach.” Mitchell proved in his earlier engagement with the issue that “he is not a pushover,” Omari said. “He was tough on the Palestinians but tough on the Israelis too.”

Mitchell, who plans to travel to the region the first week of February, said he did not “underestimate the difficulty of this assignment.” But his Northern Ireland experience, he said, had convinced him that “there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended.”

Clinton said Holbrooke’s broader mandate, centered on Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be to “coordinate across the entire [U.S.] government an effort to achieve United States’ strategic goals in the region.” He, too, plans to travel to his new area of responsibility early next month.

Calling it a “daunting assignment,” Holbrooke said that “nobody can say the war in Afghanistan has gone well.” Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, praised the appointment, saying Holbrooke “brings tremendous experience and knowledge, and proven diplomatic skills.”

Obama has said that President George W. Bush spent too much attention and resources on Iraq at the expense of the Afghan war, and yesterday he described the situation in Afghanistan as “perilous.” He said his administration has begun an overall strategic review of policy in the region and will “set clear priorities in pursuit of achievable goals.”

At a Pentagon news conference yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the “goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future. We need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years, in terms of reestablishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after al-Qaeda, preventing the reestablishment of terrorism.”

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared with Gates, also said Obama had been provided with several options for withdrawing troops from Iraq, including implementation of a 16-month timeline for the departure of combat troops.

At Clinton’s State Department arrival ceremony early yesterday, she told cheering staffers that she was “absolutely honored and thrilled beyond words to be here.” She was flanked by Steve Kashkett, the State Department representative for the Foreign Service union, and William J. Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs and the highest-ranking career officer.

Kashkett did not mince words on his feelings about the previous administration, telling Clinton that “both you and the president have decried the neglect that the Foreign Service and the State Department as a whole have suffered in recent years. No one knows better than the people in this room and their colleagues posted all over the world how true that is.

“So far,” Kashkett added, “we are thrilled to have you here.”

To laughter, Clinton thanked him for his candor, adding, “This is not going to be easy.”

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

 
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Obama Extends Hand To Arabs and Muslims
He Says U.S. Has ‘Not Been Perfect,’ Gets a Generally Positive Response

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 28, 2009; A06

President Obama has launched a determined effort to change the tone, if not yet the substance, of U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, saying he is eager to listen to their concerns and acknowledging that Americans “have not been perfect” in their dealings with them.

The early appointments of presidential emissaries to the Middle East and to Afghanistan and Pakistan; the announced closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the choice of Arab satellite network al-Arabiya for the first formal interview of his presidency; first-week National Security Council meetings on Iraq and Afghanistan; and telephone calls to regional leaders on his first full day in office were reflections both of the seriousness of the issues and a message to governments and the public, administration officials said.

Obama’s initial conversation with one Middle Eastern leader conveyed little of substance, that country’s Washington ambassador said: “He just wanted to reach out on the first day as a sign and demonstration of his determination to engage.”

Although Obama told al-Arabiya that “we’re going to follow through on our commitment for me to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital,” the 100-day deadline he initially set for the speech is unlikely to be kept, an official said. A venue has not been chosen, Obama’s schedule is focused on pressing domestic concerns, and a flurry of must-attend international summits are scheduled for April.

The White House is hoping that its energetic early days — and the rapid dispatch of Middle East envoy George J. Mitchell and Afghanistan-Pakistan representative Richard C. Holbrooke on their own first regional trips — will send the desired message about relations with the Muslim world at home and abroad while the new administration begins to determine what its actual policies will be on the ground.

“My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives,” Obama said in the interview. “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.”

In a meeting with Jewish leaders early last year, candidate Obama described communications as “the battlefield we have to worry about . . . where we have been losing badly over the last seven years” of the Bush administration.

“We’re not going to wait until the end of my administration to deal with Palestinian and Israeli peace,” Obama told al-Arabiya, “We’re going to start now. It may take a long time to do, but we’re going to do it now.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday declined to characterize the new outreach as a complete rejection of the Bush administration’s policies. “Where continuity is appropriate, we are committed to doing that,” she told reporters. “In areas of the world that have felt either overlooked or not receiving appropriate attention for the problems that they are experiencing, there’s a welcoming of the engagement that we are promising. So it’s not any kind of repudiation or indictment of the past eight years so much as an excitement and an acceptance of how we’re going to be doing business.”

Asked for details about how the administration would simultaneously address the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s right of self-defense, Clinton said: “I think we’ve said all we’re going to say about the Israeli-Palestinian situation as we send our envoy out. . . . We’re going to wait and let him report back to us about the way forward.”

As Mitchell held his first meetings yesterday in Cairo — with E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit and the head of Egypt’s intelligence service — violence erupted again in the Gaza Strip with attacks by both Hamas and Israel, the worst since an uneasy cease-fire was declared more than a week ago after 22 days of fighting. Mitchell is scheduled to meet today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak before moving on to Israel, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Responses so far to Obama’s outreach have been largely positive, but further action is awaited. Obama’s desire for “a strong and fruitful relationship with the Arab world” was a “positive development,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told Saudi-owned al-Arabiya. Obama has praised a 2002 Saudi peace plan calling for normalized Arab ties with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from territory occupied since 1967. Arab states, Saud said, are waiting to answer the administration’s questions.

Hamas, which initially dismissed Obama’s pledge of new initiatives in the region as identical to Bush administration policies, appeared to temper its verbal assault yesterday. Hamas official Ahmed Yousef said in an interview with al-Jazeera television that there had been “some positive things” in Obama’s statements, the Associated Press reported from Cairo.

In a statement posted on sympathetic Web sites yesterday, the Taliban called the Guantanamo closure a “positive step” but said it was an insufficient change in Bush’s “satanic” policies in the region and the world, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist sites.

Iran has made no response to Obama’s public offer of a diplomatic handshake. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Monday that he is open to a dialogue with the Obama administration but that he would not accept any preconditions to talks.

 
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Iraq Auditor Warns of Waste, Fraud In Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 2, 2009; A06

After five years of investigations and 250,000 pages of audits, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wishes he could say that the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.

“But that’s just not happened,” Bowen said.

Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history — most of it done by private U.S. contractors — was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an “ad hoc-racy” of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.

And despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion and counting.

“It’s too late to do the structural part and make it quickly applicable to Afghanistan,” Bowen said in an interview last week. None of the substantive changes in oversight, contracting and reconstruction planning or personnel assignments that Congress, auditors and outside experts proposed as the Iraq debacle unfolded has been implemented in Afghanistan.

But President Obama could take several steps to mitigate future damage, Bowen said. They include devoting more attention to military and civilian personnel and to reconstruction and relief assignments, and taking advantage of the expertise developed through hard-won experience in Iraq. Instead of the “multiple versions” of the federal acquisition regulations adopted and amended by “multiple agencies” operating in Iraq, Obama “could just issue a FAR regulation applicable to Afghanistan that everyone will follow” in issuing and supervising contracts, he said.

“To bring this all together,” Bowen said, “the president should order a Red Cell,” a high-level group drawing from the departments of State and Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development that would turn Obama’s orders into action.

Bowen’s office, known as SIGIR, is releasing a book today that recounts the Iraq experience and suggests how to avoid future mistakes. “Hard Lessons” is being published as the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting holds its first public hearing. Created by Congress last year, the commission will examine expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan and propose solutions for “systemic” problems that waste taxpayer dollars.

Legislation to create the commission was introduced by Democratic Sens. James Webb (Va.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and was inspired by the “Truman Committee,” which conducted hundreds of hearings and investigations into government waste during and after World War II.

“Hard Lessons,” a draft of which was leaked to the news media in December, concludes that the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it. Goals shifted from “liberation” and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004. Many of those projects — over budget, poorly executed or, often, barely begun — were abandoned as security worsened.

In a preface to the 456-page book, Bowen writes that he knew the reconstruction was in trouble when he first visited Iraq in January 2004 and saw duffel bags full of cash being carried out of the Republican Palace, which housed the U.S. occupation government.

Security was a constant problem, not only for military and civilian officials serving in Iraq but also for SIGIR. Auditor Paul Converse was killed in March during a rocket attack in Baghdad, following a year in which five other SIGIR employees were wounded.

The book recounts, in colorful detail based on SIGIR interviews with nearly all the principals, the deep divisions during the same period between the Pentagon, under Donald H. Rumsfeld; the State Department under Colin L. Powell; and the White House office of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage recounts an argument between Rumsfeld and Rice in the fall of 2003 during which each said the other was in charge of supervising the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The book also includes numerous demonstrations of the Bush administration’s lack of preparation to run Iraq after the March 2003 invasion. In one previously publicized case recounted in “Hard Lessons,” Bowen’s auditors discovered a cash disbursement of $57.8 million by the CPA to the U.S. comptroller for south-central Iraq. “Pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” were removed from the CPA vault in Baghdad and driven to the regional office in two unarmored SUVs. There, the local acting comptroller, Robert J. Stein Jr., who later was convicted for money laundering and fraud, had himself photographed with mountains of cash.

Overall, SIGIR and other law enforcement agencies have obtained 35 convictions, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 million solicited by U.S. military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq.

SIGIR also reported on the inability of Iraqi firms to compete with U.S. contractors, due in part to the complicated U.S. bidding system: “Online contracting, which frequently entailed bids of more than a hundred pages, bewildered Iraqi contractors who were used to sealing a business deal with just a handshake.”

When he took the job five years ago, Bowen said, “I didn’t know that we didn’t have a system to protect our interests abroad in post-conflict or contingency operations. . . . It would have been a much funner job to issue 250 reports on how well our rebuilding program went . . . and that the money was well accounted for and that we’re leaving Iraq a peaceful and democratic place and nonviolent country.”

Given that $4 billion in appropriated U.S. reconstruction funds remain unspent in Iraq, Bowen’s work is not likely to end anytime soon.

 
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Obama Seeks Narrower Focus in Afghan War
Situation Is Much Worse Than New Administration Realized and Will Take Time to Address

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 4, 2009; A12

As President Obama prepares to formally authorize the April deployment of two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, perhaps as early as this week, no issue other than the U.S. economy appears as bleak to his administration as the seven-year Afghan war and the regional challenges that surround it.

A flurry of post-inauguration activity — presidential meetings with top diplomatic and military officials, the appointment of a high-level Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy and the start of a White House-led strategic review — was designed to show forward motion and resolve, senior administration officials said.

But newly installed officials describe a situation on the ground that is far more precarious than they had anticipated, along with U.S. government departments that are poorly organized to implement the strategic outline that Obama presented last week to his National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

With a 60-day deadline, tied to an April 3 NATO summit, Obama has called for a more regional outlook and a more narrowly focused Afghanistan policy that sets priorities among counterinsurgency and development goals. “The president . . . wants to hear from the uniformed leadership and civilian advisers as to what the situation is and their thoughts as to the way forward,” a senior administration official said. “But he has also given pretty direct guidance.”

The problem confronting the administration is how to fill in Obama’s broad strokes while fighting a war that, by all accounts, is going badly. “It could take quite a long time to look at all the various aspects of this,” the senior official said. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates predicted last week that the war will be “a long slog” with an uncertain outcome. Richard C. Holbrooke, the new Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy, who left yesterday for his first visit to the region, expects to spend weeks gathering information before he has much advice to give.

Meanwhile, the senior official acknowledged, “the world moves, obviously.”

The two new U.S. brigades are set to arrive in Afghanistan in late April, with another planned to depart in August. But even with what is expected to be more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops this year — bringing the U.S.-NATO total in Afghanistan to nearly 90,000 — the international force will be insufficient to secure much of the country.

With the spring combat season near, the Taliban has rapidly increased its sophistication and reach. Neither the money nor the manpower is currently available to train and maintain an Afghan National Army that is expected to begin taking over security missions. Afghan elections are scheduled for summer, but U.S. officials see few viable alternatives to the ineffectual president, Hamid Karzai. Efforts to stem cultivation of opium poppies and the narcotics trade that lines Taliban and government pockets have made little discernible progress.

Nearly $60 billion ($32 billion of it from the United States) has already been spent on reconstruction programs in Afghanistan — more than during five years of failed reconstruction in Iraq — but such efforts remain “fragmented” and “lack coherence,” according to U.S. government auditors. “I fear there are major weaknesses in strategy,” retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Fields, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in a report released Friday.

Across the border in Pakistan, meanwhile, U.S. military officials are anxiously eyeing a map on which extremist gains are rapidly spreading eastward, toward major population centers, as the Taliban and al-Qaeda solidify their hold on the western frontier and form alliances with domestic terrorists. Islamabad’s relations with neighboring India, a fellow nuclear power, remain tense after November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Officials described Obama’s overall approach to what the administration calls “Af-Pak” as a refusal to be rushed, using words such as “rigor” and “restraint.” “We know we’re going to get [criticism] for taking our time,” said a senior official, one of several in the administration and the military who would discuss the issue only on the condition of anonymity.

While acknowledging the difficulties that the Bush administration faced, Obama officials dismiss the first seven years of Afghanistan war policy, when that conflict took a back seat to the war in Iraq, as reactive, ad hoc and without what one called “a very keen sense of what the goal was.”

Obama has ordered up a plan for diplomatic outreach to Iran and others in the region. Afghanistan and Pakistan are to be treated as a single theater of war and diplomacy, even as stability becomes a higher priority than democracy in Afghanistan and as the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is expanded and deepened.

The administration will also seek a new compact with hesitant European and other partners in the war effort, promising new leadership and focus and expecting more resources and commitment. And Obama wants to get beyond the lip service long paid to balance and coordination between the U.S. diplomatic and military services.

Senior administration officials described their approach to Pakistan — as a major U.S. partner under serious threat of internal collapse — as fundamentally different from the Bush administration’s focus on the country as a Taliban and al-Qaeda “platform” for attacks in Afghanistan and beyond. But the officials acknowledged that a comprehensive Pakistan policy will take time and money. The administration will seek early congressional action on a “rebalanced” assistance program — introduced in the Senate last summer by then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama — that will triple economic aid and condition military assistance with benchmarks for progress in combating extremists.

The president will get little pushback on his broad goals from the military or civilian leaders. A newly completed review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff echoes his call for a broader approach to the region and better-defined objectives in Afghanistan. “We need a comprehensive strategy, not just the military side,” Adm. Michael Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said in an interview Monday. “What has to be different is how we approach the future.”

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. Central Command chief whose military responsibilities stretch from the Mediterranean to Pakistan, is compiling strategic recommendations based on reports from his own team of dozens of military and civilian experts. Although less immediately concerned about the fine points of a comprehensive new strategy than the need to move quickly to secure Afghan population centers, Petraeus has already visited central Asian states bordering Afghanistan and supports more extensive diplomatic outreach. He has ordered the Afghanistan-Pakistan portion of his Centcom review to be completed by next week, when it, too, will be given to the White House.

Holbrooke, who reports directly to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was said to be appalled not only at the walls that still separate military and civilian efforts but also at compartmentalization within the department itself, where separate task forces deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Provincial Reconstruction Teams that are on the front lines of U.S. assistance in Afghanistan are run and still largely staffed by the military.

Obama’s deadline for a new overall strategy, set at a Jan. 23 meeting of the National Security Council, coincides with the NATO summit at which he will “come face to face” with allies “looking at him for his perspective on where he’s taking the U.S. effort,” a senior official said.

National security adviser James L. Jones is in charge of the effort, aided by Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute. Lute has been retained in the post of White House coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq that he occupied in the Bush administration, to ensure that “we were not going to drop any balls,” an official said.

“The policies will change — that’s the purpose of the reviews,” he said, “but the mechanisms had to be in place” for ongoing operations. “This wasn’t coming into office in 1993, when the world was a much calmer place. We’ve got two active wars and 200,000 people serving overseas. . . . It’s very hard in a transition from the outside to know what is moving.”

To keep the balls in play, the official said, “it makes sense to think about tranches of decisions that have to be reached” sooner rather than later on the road toward a comprehensive new strategy.

The administration has already given a green light to continuing CIA-operated attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft against “high-value” al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in western Pakistan. The Pakistani government has agreed to the strikes, despite overwhelming public disapproval. But after the first Obama-authorized Predator attack last week, Pakistani officials said, Islamabad complained in a private diplomatic note that U.S. intelligence was bad and that civilians were the primary casualties.

Officials would not comment on whether Obama has reissued a covert action “finding,” signed by President George W. Bush last summer, that authorized ground raids into Pakistan by military Special Operations units working with the CIA. There has been no known ground operation since September, however, and the advisability of such raids is a point of disagreement between Petraeus — who considers any tactical gain on the ground to be not worth the strategic risk of a massive popular backlash in Pakistan — and the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Meanwhile, the approach of the warm weather “fighting season” in Afghanistan imposes its own decision deadlines. “I worry a great deal about how much time we have,” Mullen said. Additional U.S. and NATO efforts this spring may be able to hold the line against new Taliban advancement, but “if you’re just staying flat,” he said, “the situation is getting worse.”

 
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Obama’s NSC Will Get New Power
Directive Expands Makeup and Role Of Security Body

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2009; A01

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a “dramatically different” NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. “The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful,” he said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the “back channels” that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president’s office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.

“We’re not always going to agree on everything,” Jones said, and “so it’s my job to make sure that minority opinion is represented” to the president. “But if at the end of the day he turns to me and says, ‘Well, what do you think, Jones?,’ I’m going to tell him what I think.”

The new structure, to be outlined in a presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones, will expand the NSC’s reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet and departmental seats at the table — historically occupied only by the secretaries of defense and state — determined on an issue-by-issue basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week.

“The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community — which, historically has been, let’s face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things — especially in the moment we’re currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership,” he said.

New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House.

Over the next 50 days, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves as presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones’s deputy, will review options for the homeland council, including its responsibility for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related domestic disasters. In a separate interview, Brennan described his task as a “systems engineering challenge” to avoid overlap with the new NSC while ensuring that “homeland security matters, broadly defined, are going to get the attention they need from the White House.”

Organizational maps within the government will be redrawn to ensure that all departments and agencies take the same regional approach to the world, Jones said. The State Department, for example, considers Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together as South Asia, while the Pentagon draws a line at the Pakistan-India border, with the former under the Central Command and the latter part of the Pacific Command. Israel is part of the military’s European Command, but the rest of the Middle East falls under Central Command; the State Department combines Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it in its Near East Bureau.

“We are going to reflect in the NSC all the regions of the world along some map line we can all agree on,” Jones said.

The national security process, he said, will also be “transparent to its clients” inside the administration, with meeting agendas and outcomes made available to “the whole community” in real time. Each department will appoint someone to monitor the NSC process, enabling senior officials across the government to be ready to jump into issues without steep learning curves.

Directorates inside Jones’s NSC staff will oversee implementation of decisions. “It doesn’t mean that we micromanage or supervise,” he said. “But you have to make sure, . . . particularly if it’s a presidential decision, that the president is kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn’t just fall off the end of the table and disappear into outer space.”

Most modern chief executives have issued an early directive outlining a structure for making national security decisions. Although the 1947 National Security Act created the NSC and listed its membership — including the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense — each president has redefined it to fit his own needs and style. In recent administrations, the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at times the Treasury secretary have regularly attended principals meetings. At the same time, the role and power of the president’s national security adviser, and the size of his staff, have grown larger or smaller depending on the president’s wishes.

But initial presidential intentions have often been waylaid by personalities and events. George W. Bush criticized Bill Clinton’s NSC style as rambling and indecisive. Over the next eight years, however — as first-term Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice was outmaneuvered by Vice President Richard B. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and as Bush’s second term became mired in an unpopular war and a failing economy — decision-making quickly became more reactive than strategic, and deliberations were opaque to all but a small inner circle.

The Obama administration — with powerful figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — appears crowded at the top of the national security pyramid and heavy with military officials, including Jones himself and retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence. Special envoys to trouble spots — former diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and former senator George J. Mitchell to the Middle East — have been given broad presidential authority.

Although Jones said he strongly supports increased resources for the State Department, which is increasingly dwarfed by the size and expanding missions of the Defense Department, he has long been an outspoken proponent of a “pro-active military” in noncombat regions. He has advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with nongovernmental organizations abroad.

But Jones said he sees an administration filled with colleagues rather than competitors. Since Jan. 20, “I’ve had more meetings with the secretary of state and the secretary of defense than I’ve had in my entire lifetime,” said Jones, who served as Marine Corps commandant, NATO military chief and, under Bush, a special Middle East envoy.

During a midafternoon interview last Thursday, Jones said he had already spoken face to face with Gates and had four telephone conversations with him that day. He has set up a standing Wednesday morning meeting with Gates and Clinton together in his office.

“I believe in collegiality . . . in sounding out people and getting them to participate,” Jones said. “I notice the president is very good at that.” But he made clear he plans to apply military-like discipline to the NSC. “The most important thing is that you are in fact the coordinator and you’re the guy around which the meetings occur. When we chair a principals meeting, I’m the chairman.” One of the first of many internal Bush administration clashes occurred when Cheney proposed that he, rather than Rice, chair NSC meetings.

In his initial conversations with Obama before taking the job, Jones confirmed, he insisted on being “in charge” and having open and final access to the president on all national security matters. “We engaged in about an hour-long discussion about what I was already thinking about the NSC; it happened, I think, to mesh pretty well with what his instincts were. He was clear about the role of the national security adviser,” Jones said of Obama.

The NSC will take on all national security matters that are strategic in nature and “of such importance that the president of the United States would care” about them, he said. Action groups from various departments and agencies will be formed around specific issues for as long as it takes to resolve them. “Some of these things will be very short-term. When the problem goes away, the group goes away.” Others will be ongoing. “An Afghan strategic review, that’s going to take a while,” Jones said. “The policy that is generated from that review, and the implementation, is going to take a while.”

Some principals will be regulars at the NSC “just by force of issues,” he said, and “you can’t just designate the whole government as being there.” But everyone should be kept aware of “what’s going on” and given an opportunity to say, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got something to say here.’ “

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U.S. Skeptical About Pakistan’s Restrictions on Nuclear Scientist

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 9, 2009; A18

Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was released Friday from five years of house arrest for selling nuclear secrets, faces a new set of restrictions on his movement and contacts, according to Pakistani officials.

Under an agreement reached among Khan’s lawyers, the judge who ordered him released and the government, officials said, the Pakistani Interior Ministry will limit and monitor Khan’s telephone calls, visitors and activities. The ministry will also prohibit his travel outside the country.

U.S. officials, who last week sharply objected to Khan’s release, expressed skepticism yesterday about the new arrangement, which they said had been reported to them by the Pakistani government.

“We’re very concerned,” a U.S. official said yesterday. Pakistan has “given us some initial commitments but we’re going to be following [the situation] very closely. The important thing is that they know we are still very serious about this individual.”

Asked yesterday about Khan, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that the government had decided not to appeal the court ruling on Khan’s release, but had “taken all measures” to ensure that he would be unable to resume the spread of nuclear secrets or technology. “We have broken the network and we will not let that happen again,” he said. “We simply cannot afford that.”

Qureshi, who spoke at an international security conference in Munich, did not elaborate on the “measures” taken, and the government made no public mention in Pakistan of any new restrictions.

Khan, 72, is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear weapons program. Although never charged, he has admitted selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. His secret network collapsed in 2003, after more than a decade of investigation by the CIA and other agencies.

Then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, confronted with evidence of his guilt, persuaded Khan to make a public confession but then publicly pardoned the scientist and refused to allow U.S or international officials to question him.

The house arrest, imposed for the past five years by Pakistan’s Defense Ministry, was a compromise that collapsed last week when a judge ordered Khan released. Surrounded by Pakistani news media on the front lawn of his Islamabad home Friday, Khan claimed complete vindication.

The case has long been a political football in Pakistan, with opposition parties and elements of the judiciary citing Khan’s detention as evidence of President Asif Ali Zardari’s obeisance to the United States.

“The proof is in the pudding,” said the U.S. official, who added that Washington would be watching carefully to determine whether the new Interior Ministry restrictions were real.

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Pakistan Wants More From U.S.
During Envoy’s Visit, Islamabad Presses for Aid, Cooperation

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2009; A12

Inside the warm welcome and promises of a “new beginning” that Pakistan extended U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke yesterday was a warning that Pakistan expects more from the United States in return for its cooperation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Statements issued by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani after meeting with the envoy, who is in Islamabad on the first stop of a regional tour, emphasized the need to “expedite” a new, multi-billion dollar U.S. aid package, and “the importance of enhanced cooperation in defense and intelligence sharing.”

Holbrooke said only that he was there “to listen and learn the ground realities of this critically important country.”

The visit is the first step in what the Obama administration sees as a complex and delicate effort to stabilize Pakistan’s civilian democracy even as it strengthens the Pakistani military and brings it more in synch with U.S. counterterrorism goals in the region, including the war effort in Afghanistan. Although his writ does not officially extend beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke will also visit India as the administration tries to improve Pakistan-India relations and allay the tension between the two nuclear powers.

The administration is formulating a more regional strategy it hopes will arrest the deterioration in the seven-year Afghan war and allow it to move more aggressively against al-Qaeda. But while administration officials said the strategy will acknowledge Pakistan’s crucial role, they said that developing a new relationship with Islamabad is likely to be a years-long process, with intertwined challenges making it time-consuming and costly.

“Not having patience makes all the sense in the world in terms of the Afghanistan threat,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said in a recent interview. But in Pakistan, he said, “there is not a quick answer,” and any new U.S. strategy will have to “recognize the tension” between near- and far-term objectives.

The next step, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, will be a visit to the United States later this month by Pakistani army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. In late 2007, Kiyani replaced Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who also served as Pakistan’s president under the military government that took over in a 1999 coup that led to congressional restrictions on U.S.-Pakistani military contacts.

Since last year, senior U.S. military officials have assiduously courted Kiyani as the key to making up lost ground in the relationship and persuading the Pakistani military to turn its attention away from the perceived threat from India and toward extremist sanctuaries on the Afghan border.

Pakistan’s weak civilian government is doing its own balancing act. The Pakistani public is increasingly anti-American and Zardari’s political opponents charge that he is too close to Washington. Increased U.S. military and civil assistance, the government has argued, will improve Pakistan’s counterterrorism performance, make it easier to cooperate with U.S. goals, and ensure the survival of the civilian government.

Kiyani will press existing requests for increased military aid in several categories, including Cobra attack helicopters, night vision equipment, and equipment to jam extremist radio transmissions, intercept satellite telephone communications, and improve communication among Pakistani military units in the extremist-ridden mountains of the western Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. Pakistan would also like at least to “be in the room” when targeting decisions for CIA aerial drone attacks in the FATA are made, a senior Pakistani official said.

Pakistan also wants more funding stability and recognition of the leading role it plays in U.S. counterterrorism campaigns. “We are a front-ranked state,” the official said. “We want government money to come in the same way it is given to Afghanistan and Iraq.” Congressional funding for war and development costs in those countries has been approved outside of normal budgetary channels through supplemental appropriations subject to fewer restrictions.

Mullen cited a number of positive steps Kiyani has taken, including: replacing the former head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, who was widely mistrusted by the CIA, with a close army ally; appointing a new chief for the Frontier Corps, the local force in the FATA; and doubling Frontier Corps salaries.

Although more than half of the 10,000 additional troops Pakistan sent to the FATA over the past year were redeployed to the Indian border after Pakistani-based terrorists attacked the Indian city of Mumbai last fall, new Pakistani deployments to the west are planned, another senior U.S. military official said.

In a news conference following a meeting with Holbrooke, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Pakistan and the United States would have “to sit together to understand the implications” of a planned doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this year, and what he said would have to be an accompanying “civilian surge” in Pakistan.

“By civilian surge,” he said, “I mean greater focus on socioeconomic development and greater political engagement with the reconcilable elements” among extremists. Qureshi said the United States and Pakistan had agreed to form teams to examine all elements of their bilateral relationship, including “what went wrong in the last seven years.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is reformulating a massive U.S. development assistance program for Pakistan, including at least $1.5 billion annually for the next five years, most of it focused on development aid for the FATA and surrounding regions. The bill is likely to have strong support from President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who co-sponsored it in the Senate last year before it died after committee passage.

Committee chairman Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass) said the amount of aid may be increased in legislation he said was likely to be completed “in a matter of days.” The committee, he said, is still trying to determine the relationship between military and non-military aid packages “and how does one leverage the other.”

The legislation will include benchmarks allowing Congress to judge Pakistani military and civil performance. “We have no problems with greater transparence and accountability,” the Pakistani official said. “But the funding cannot stop.”

Staff writer Joby Warrick and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Envoy Indicates Flexibility With Russia on Missile Defense

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 14, 2009; A08

A more cooperative relationship with Russia that helps reduce the nuclear threat from Iran would be “one of the factors” influencing the Obama administration’s decision on when and whether to install a missile defense system in eastern Europe, a senior U.S. diplomat said this week.

“The United States is quite open to the possibility of new forms of cooperation” on a defense shield, and is “interested in a thorough discussion of the whole range of security issues with Russia,” Undersecretary of State William Burns said on a visit to Moscow.

“If through strong diplomacy with Russia and our other partners we can reduce or eliminate that threat, it obviously shapes the way at which we look at missile defense,” Burns said.

His comments followed an offer last week by Vice President Biden to push a “reset button” on relations with Russia following a lengthy period of contention over missile defense and a range of other issues. In an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency at the end of his visit late Thursday, Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said the administration hopes to take advantage of “this moment of opportunity . . . to try to translate those good intentions and that positive rhetoric into practical progress.”

An administration official in Washington called Burns’s remarks, which were posted on the U.S. Embassy Web site in Moscow, “entirely consistent with the way we’ve been talking about missile defense and trying to engage the Russians. If we’re able to work with the Russians to diminish the threat from Iran, we need to consider how to proceed with potential deployment of the systems.”

Russia sharply protested agreements signed by the Bush administration to install missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, charging that the program was a threat to its own security. Obama has said he is reviewing the Bush-initiated defense shield to determine if it is technologically feasible and affordable.

Burns extended the olive branch even further than Biden in the wide-ranging interview. He said President Obama is looking forward to what will be his first meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a G-8 summit in London in early April, and that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will meet with her Russian counterpart “in the very near future,” before the London summit.

Among the range of issues on which the United States was interested in cooperating with Russia, Burns mentioned nuclear proliferation, Afghanistan, global economic issues and “ways in which we can structure our relationship in ensuring that we work together more systematically.”

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CIA Helped India, Pakistan Share Secrets in Probe of Mumbai Siege

By Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 16, 2009; A01

In the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters, according to U.S. and foreign government sources familiar with the arrangement.

The exchanges, which began days after the deadly assault in late November, gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way for Islamabad’s announcement last week acknowledging that some of the planning for the attack had occurred on Pakistani soil, the sources said.

The intelligence went well beyond the public revelations about the 10 Mumbai terrorists, and included sophisticated communications intercepts and an array of physical evidence detailing how the gunmen and their supporters planned and executed their three-day killing spree in the Indian port city. Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks with gleanings from its networks, the sources said. The U.S. role was described in interviews with Pakistani officials and confirmed by U.S. sources with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The arrangement is ongoing, and it is unknown whether it will continue after the Mumbai case is settled.

Officials from both countries said the unparalleled cooperation was a factor in Pakistan’s decision to bring criminal charges against nine Pakistanis accused of involvement in the attack, a move that appeared to signal a thawing of tensions on the Indian subcontinent after weeks of rhetorical warfare.

“India shared evidence bilaterally, but that’s not what cinched it,” said a senior Pakistani official familiar with the exchanges. “It was the details, shared between intelligence agencies, with the CIA serving mainly as a bridge.” The FBI also participated in the vetting process, he said.

A U.S. government official with detailed knowledge of the sharing arrangement said the effort ultimately enabled the Pakistani side to “deal as forthrightly as possible with the fallout from Mumbai,” he said. U.S. and Pakistani officials who described the arrangement agreed to do so on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic and legal sensitivities. Indian officials declined to comment for this story.

“Intelligence has been a good bridge,” the U.S. official said. “Everyone on the American side went into this with their eyes open, aware of the history, the complexities, the tensions. But at least the two countries are talking, not shooting.”

The U.S. effort to foster cooperation was begun under the Bush administration and given new emphasis by an Obama White House that fears that a renewed India-Pakistan conflict could undermine progress in Afghanistan — and possibly lead to nuclear war. The new administration sees Pakistan as central to its evolving Afghan war strategy, and also recognizes that it cannot “do Pakistan without doing India,” as Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it in a recent interview.

“In an ideal world, the challenge associated with Mumbai — handled well, led well — would lead to the two working together,” he said.

There is little public support for rapprochement, and domestic politics in both countries often dictate hostility rather than cooperation.

Mullen said he hoped the countries could restore some of the goodwill lost in the Mumbai case.

Despite public and political criticism, the two governments had taken “significant steps” in the months preceding Mumbai to diminish the tensions between them over the long-standing Kashmir territorial dispute. But after Nov. 26, “a lot was put aside [and] suspended.”

The Mumbai attack was staged by 10 heavily armed terrorists who rampaged through the city for three days, killing more than 170 people and wounding more than 300. Nine of the terrorists were killed, but the lone survivor confessed that the assault had been planned in Pakistan by Lashkar-i-Taiba, a group that seeks independence for Indian-controlled Kashmir. India has asserted that elements of Pakistan’s government or intelligence services provided logistical support for the attack, an accusation that Islamabad flatly denies.

In recent days, Pakistan has moved aggressively against Lashkar-i-Taiba and allied groups, and has signaled its intention to work more closely with India. A Pakistani government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, insisted that Islamabad’s commitment was genuine.

“Any Pakistanis who are shown to have been involved will be treated as the criminals they are,” he said. He predicted that the two governments would cooperate to an unprecedented degree in upcoming prosecutions and trials, which he said will occur separately in the two countries with participation from both sides. He described Pakistan’s response as decisive and “proof that we will not tolerate” groups that support terrorism.

Such policies pose clear risks for the embattled government of President Asif Ali Zardari, who faces a domestic backlash for cracking down on groups that Pakistan helped establish years ago as part of its anti-India strategy. Zardari also has come under fire for tolerating occasional U.S. missile strikes against suspected terrorists inside Pakistan’s autonomous tribal region near the Afghan border. A strike Saturday reportedly killed 27, most of them foreign fighters.

“This is a dangerous path for him,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council of the United States. A sustained clampdown would require a sustained commitment by the civilian government and the army, and far more arrests than the 124 already announced, Nawaz said.

India, meanwhile, has been eager for the United States to pressure Pakistan on terrorism in general and Mumbai in particular. But it has long rejected any attempt to interfere in Kashmir.

Early this month, a senior Indian official recalled that Barack Obama had suggested a linkage during the presidential campaign, saying in a foreign policy essay that he would “encourage dialogue” on Kashmir so that Pakistan could pay more attention to terrorists on its border with Afghanistan.

If Obama “does have any such views,” Indian National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told Indian television, “then he is barking up the wrong tree.” Narayanan said India had made clear to Washington when Richard C. Holbrooke was appointed the administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan that India-Pakistan relations should not be part of his portfolio.

Holbrooke, who plans a stop in New Delhi at the end of his tour of the region, appeared to agree in a report last month by the New York-based Asia Society, where he was chairman before his appointment. The report called for Obama to continue the “de-hyphenation” of U.S. foreign policy toward India and Pakistan practiced by the Bush administration.

Concerned about China and searching for a positive new foreign policy headline at a low point in the Iraq war, Bush policymakers tried to elevate India to the status of major U.S. partner. The centerpiece of the policy was a bilateral civil nuclear agreement signed by Bush last year but still awaiting final action by Obama.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked last week about the agreement, responded vaguely that “I don’t have the specifics of where we are on this particular day with regard to implementation, but it is certainly something that we want to see happen, and nothing more beyond that.”

 
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More Troops Headed to Afghanistan
Obama Boosting U.S. Force by Nearly 50% to Address ‘Deteriorating Situation’

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 18, 2009; A01

President Obama has ordered the first combat deployments of his presidency, saying yesterday that he had authorized an additional 17,000 U.S. troops “to stabilize a deteriorating situation” in Afghanistan.

The new deployments, to begin in May, will increase the U.S. force in Afghanistan by nearly 50 percent, bringing it to 55,000 by mid-summer, along with 32,000 non-U.S. NATO troops. In a statement issued by the White House, Obama said that “urgent attention and swift action” were required because “the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda . . . threatens America from its safe-haven along the Pakistani border.”

Taliban attacks and U.S. and NATO casualties last year, including 155 U.S. deaths, reached the highest levels of the seven-year war. War-related civilian Afghan deaths — most blamed on Taliban insurgents but many on U.S. airstrikes — increased nearly 40 percent to 2,118 in 2008, according to a U.N. report released yesterday. Extremist groups have expanded their hold on western Pakistan and launched terrorist attacks in major Pakistani cities.

Months ago, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, requested more than 30,000 additional troops this year, and an initial 6,000 arrived last month under orders signed by the Bush administration. But a senior White House official said that no other deployment decisions will be made until the Obama administration completes a strategic review of the Afghan war in late March.

Obama has said he wants to limit U.S. objectives in Afghanistan, and administration officials have spoken of a more “regional” counterinsurgency strategy, including expanded assistance to Pakistan and diplomatic outreach to India, Iran, Russia and other neighboring countries.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was informed of the new deployments in a telephone call from Obama yesterday. Karzai, whose government Obama criticized last week as “detached” from what is going on in Afghanistan, publicly complained over the weekend that he had not yet heard from the new U.S. president.

The first additional U.S. contingent, the 8,000-strong 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade from Camp LeJeune, N.C., will arrive in late May. The Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Lewis, Wash., will arrive with 4,000 troops in late July, along with an additional 5,000 troops in still-undesignated smaller units.

The new troops will move into southern and eastern Afghanistan for combat expected to increase with the arrival of warmer weather, in addition to providing additional training for the Afghan army and security for national elections scheduled for August. Obama also plans to ask NATO to supply additional resources this year.

The administration sought yesterday to couch the orders as what the senior official called “the beginning of the drawdown of troops in Iraq,” where both units had been scheduled to deploy. While that is technically true, White House decisions on Afghanistan and Iraq are proceeding on parallel but not necessarily overlapping tracks.

During the presidential campaign, Obama pledged to drawn down the U.S. presence in Iraq — currently at 146,000 troops — at a rate of one brigade a month for what he said would be a complete combat withdrawal within 16 months, with an unspecified “residual force” remaining.

During his first week in office, he instructed military planners to present options for withdrawal under various conditions on the ground and at various speeds. Those options have not yet been presented to the White House, although the senior official said yesterday that Obama expects to receive them and make a decision on a timeline “in the near future.”

The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been discussed in separate presidential meetings with top national security and military officials who are contributing to the strategic review. In the meantime, however, commanders warned that deployment decisions would have to be made now if troops were to arrive in Afghanistan in time to meet urgent security needs.

Obama recognizes that “there is a grave situation in certain parts of the country,” the White House official said. “We know . . . how negative it would be if the elections didn’t come off. It’s also well acknowledged that the effort in Afghanistan suffered [under Bush] from being under-resourced, with a lack of attention and strategic direction.”

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday that the deployment decision “does not prejudge the outcome of the review process but . . . allows us instead to meet an urgent need for more troops.”

Beginning his first week in office, Obama held a series of meetings on the subject with civilian and military officials, including McKiernan; Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command; Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Feb. 10, Gates recommended that Obama authorize the 17,000-troop deployment. The recommendation was discussed at a National Security Council meeting Friday, and Obama informed Gates of his decision Monday. Gates signed the deployment orders for the 12,000 troops of the two brigades yesterday, with designation of the additional 5,000 still to come.

“This administration has a different way of doing business,” said a Pentagon official who also served under Bush. “The Obama White House wants to go about this in a much more methodical way than its predecessor, with decisions about troop levels to be evaluated by more than the military chain of command.”

Obama’s deployment decision came without clear majority support from the public. While most Americans consider winning in Afghanistan essential to victory in the broader fight against terrorism, in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, barely more than a third, 34 percent, said the number of U.S. military forces in that country should be increased. About as many would opt for a decrease (29 percent) or no change at all (32 percent).

In Afghanistan, public opinion is even more unwelcoming. In a recent ABC-BBC-ARD poll of Afghans, just 18 percent said the United States and NATO should increase their troop levels, and more than twice that number, 44 percent, wanted fewer outside forces.

Yesterday’s U.N. report, along with a separate report on Afghanistan by the independent Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), noted that rising civilian casualties are the source of deep resentment among the Afghan public. Although the United Nations said that “anti-government elements” were responsible for 55 percent of last year’s civilian deaths, CIVIC reported that “the international coalition in Afghanistan is losing public support, one fallen civilian at a time.”

The CIVIC report noted that the United States and NATO governments all pay compensation to some civilian victims of their actions — although there is no coordinated system, and many families receive nothing — and recommended that such efforts be improved and expanded.

Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

 
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Pakistani Accord Appears Stalled
Government, Extremists Make No Move To Formalize Their Pact on Islamic Law

By Pamela Constable, Karen DeYoung and Haq Nawaz Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 19, 2009; A09

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 18 — A controversial, closely watched peace agreement designed to end Taliban violence in the scenic Swat Valley hung in limbo Wednesday amid criticism in Pakistan and rising concern in Washington.

Neither the Pakistani government nor the Islamist extremists were willing to formalize the accord, announced by Pakistani officials Monday. The proposed pact marks an unprecedented and risky attempt to disarm about 2,000 Taliban fighters, who have invaded and terrorized a once-bucolic area of 1.5 million people in northwestern Pakistan, by offering to install a strict system of Islamic law in the surrounding district.

Supporters see the offer as an urgently needed bid for peace and a potential model for other areas ravaged by Pakistan’s growing Islamist militancy, which controls areas 80 miles from the capital of this nuclear-armed Muslim nation. Critics say it would make too many concessions to ruthless extremist forces and provide them with a launching pad to drive deeper into the settled areas of Pakistan from their safe haven in the rough tribal districts along the border with Afghanistan.

“This is a bad idea that sends a very wrong signal,” said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of defense and security studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the capital. “It legitimizes the existence of violent armed groups and allows them to draw the wrong lesson: that if you are powerful enough to challenge the writ of the state, it will cave in and appease you.”

In Washington, where the Obama administration has been conspicuously silent about the agreement, officials said privately that they considered it a major setback for U.S. goals in the region. “It’s a surrender disguised as a truce,” one official said, describing it as an admission that the government lacks the capacity to defend the crucial western part of the country.

Several officials said the proposed pact was evidence that the Pakistani government has no coherent plan for combating militancy. One noted that Pakistan had offered no comprehensive package of economic aid or outlined a long-term structure for the region. “This is signing a deal and calling it done,” this official said. “What comes next?”

In December, Pakistani troops attempting to roust the Taliban from the Swat Valley were defeated by the far smaller extremist force. The military “met resistance that they and we didn’t expect,” a U.S. official said, citing sophisticated Taliban tactics, command and communications and participation by extremists from Chechnya and Afghanistan. The military, he said, “won some tactical victories; they didn’t win their strategic objectives.”

Monday’s proposed peace accord took the Obama administration by surprise, U.S. officials said. They received no advance notice of the deal and remained uncertain of what was happening on the ground. “We’re not even sure if it’s a real deal,” a senior U.S. military official said.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic and military sensitivities, said they hoped for clarification by next week, when senior Pakistani and Afghan delegations are due to arrive in Washington for high-level talks that are part of the administration’s strategic review of the Afghan war effort and its policy toward Pakistan and the region.

The delegations will be headed by the foreign ministers of the two countries and will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, among others.

Holbrooke, who set up the visits during a tour of the region last week, said Wednesday that the administration expected two things from the meetings. “One, a sense of both countries that they are participating actively in shaping our strategy toward their countries, that it’s not just a unilateral dictat. Secondly, ” he said, “to stimulate them to do similar strategic thinking.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose government faces an identical challenge from Taliban insurgents controlling large portions of the Afghan countryside, plans to travel to Islamabad on Thursday for talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and other officials.

In the Swat Valley, a second day of confusion and uncertainty about the pact passed Wednesday, with rising hopes and a jubilant peace march among the local population, followed by the brutal killing of a Pakistani TV journalist, Musa Khan Khel. He was apparently seized and shot by fighters while covering the peace march, despite a Taliban offer of a 10-day cease-fire while elements of the accord are implemented.

Thousands of people turned out Wednesday morning in Swat to cheer and follow a delegation of religious and political leaders who entered the Taliban-controlled territory to persuade the extremists to sign the pact and put down their weapons. The Taliban has ravaged the once-pristine, affluent area for months, burning schools, killing police and ordering women to remain home. More than half the populace is believed to have fled their homes.

Leaders of Pakistan’s secular Awami National Party, which orchestrated the deal, insist that it will bring a better justice system to the region and that they can reason with the Taliban because they are from the same ethnic Pashtun tribe. But other prominent Pakistanis assert that civilian leaders underestimate the danger posed by the insurgents.

“All segments of society and the general public need to be educated that Talibanization is a real and serious threat to the country, and that if nothing is done to stop its advance, then the anarchy will spread,” Asad Munir, a retired brigadier and former intelligence chief in North-West Frontier Province, wrote in the News newspaper Tuesday. Pakistan’s intelligence service once helped create Islamist militias to fight other wars.

In Swat, where followers of a nonviolent Islamist leader named Sufi Mohammad have been demanding the enforcement of Islamic law for years, the announcement of the agreement Monday was greeted by relief and hope. Shops reopened and people flooded the streets after months of hurrying home in fear. Preparations were made to welcome Mohammad, who had offered to come to Swat and persuade the fighters to lay down their arms.

On Wednesday morning, Mohammad’s “caravan of peace” made its way into the valley, and thousands of well-wishers rallied in the central town of Mingaora. Many people seemed nervous and uncertain, however, and black-turbaned Taliban fighters were seen patrolling the outskirts of the city with weapons and walkie-talkies.

“We want peace at any cost,” Gul Bad Shah, 46, a shopkeeper in one town said as the marchers passed. “We are very happy to see the hustle and bustle in the markets after a long time.” A college student named Rehmanullah, 22, said the Taliban movement in Swat “will evaporate once the law is implemented in letter and spirit.”

All day, Mohammad and his delegation moved from town to town, chanting for peace and hearing the cheers of supporters. Senior provincial officials and legislators, who rarely dare to venture into Swat these days, accompanied them. But a negotiating committee from the Taliban met in an undisclosed location and made no public comment.

The government’s position on the deal also remained unclear, creating further anxiety. President Zardari, reportedly under pressure from the West, went a second day without signing the pact or making public the details of the law system. Several leaders in Swat told Geo television that they could co-exist with the Taliban and blamed the government for sabotaging their chance for peace.

But by late afternoon, news that Khan Khel had been slain while covering the march seemed to mock public hopes that the extremists’ word could be trusted. Videos on the evening news showed him interviewing smiling people along the route, interspersed with images of colleagues carrying his corpse.

“He was with us all day on the march, and then suddenly we heard he had been kidnapped and killed and his body dumped on the road,” said Irfan Ashraf, a reporter for Dawn television, speaking from Swat. “He was a journalist to the core, a sweet guy, and now he is no more here with us.”

DeYoung reported from Washington. Khan reported from Mingaora. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

 
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Correction to This Article
This article gave an incorrect figure for U.S. legislative proposals of non- military aid to Pakistan. The correct figure is $1.5 billion annually for five years, not $1.5 million.
Drone Attacks Inside Pakistan Will Continue, CIA Chief Says
Panetta Calls Strikes ‘Successful’ at Disrupting Insurgents

By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 26, 2009; A10

CIA Director Leon Panetta said yesterday that U.S. aerial attacks against al-Qaeda and other extremist strongholds inside Pakistan would continue, despite concerns about a popular Pakistani backlash.

“Nothing has changed our efforts to go after terrorists, and nothing will change those efforts,” Panetta said in response to questions about CIA missile attacks, launched from unmanned Predator aircraft. Although he refused to discuss details of the attacks — and the CIA will not confirm publicly that it is behind the strikes — Panetta said that the efforts begun under President George W. Bush to destabilize al-Qaeda and destroy its leadership “have been successful.”

“I don’t think we can stop just at the effort to try to disrupt them. I think it has to be a continuing effort, because they aren’t going to stop,” Panetta said in his first news briefing since taking the job. The CIA has launched about three dozen Predator strikes in Pakistan since late last summer, two of them during the Obama administration.

Panetta’s comments came as senior Pakistani and Afghan leaders held lengthy talks here with each other and with their U.S. counterparts. Obama administration officials said that the unprecedented consultations were as important as any substantive agreements that may emerge from them.

The talks, quickly arranged during the first overseas trip of special U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke this month, include the foreign and defense ministers of both countries, along with Afghanistan’s interior minister and Pakistan’s intelligence chief. The Pakistani army chief of staff is also here on a separate visit to his U.S. military counterparts.

In addition to bilateral sessions, the Afghan and Pakistani delegations met jointly yesterday with the National Security Council and attended a dinner hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. They will hold another trilateral session today.

“We have two goals,” a senior administration official said. One is to receive their input for the Obama administration’s ongoing strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said. “But it’s also to hear commitments — the Pakistanis on taking on terrorists themselves, and the Afghans on cleaning up their government.”

“There are not too many brand-new ideas,” the official said. “But our expectations of what they have to do are not just based on what we want them to do, but what they say they’re going to do. It gives us a different basis for going back to them in the future.”

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been marked by mutual suspicion. Pakistan believes Afghanistan is too close to India, Islamabad’s historical adversary to the east, while Afghanistan suspects that Pakistan has continued its traditional support for the Taliban. In addition to urging a stronger counterterrorism effort from Islamabad and less governmental corruption in Kabul, the administration seeks better cooperation between the two to stop cross-border infiltration by Pakistan-based extremists fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The difference between the Obama and Bush administrations, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said, is that “the present administration is willing to listen. They are very frank. They’re saying, ‘We do not have a magic formula. . . . Let Pakistan, let the U.S., let Afghanistan — let’s all stick together and find a solution,” Qureshi told CNN.

The meetings have not been without conflict. Panetta, who has participated in the sessions, said he had voiced concerns about Pakistan’s recently announced truce with local Taliban leaders in that country’s Swat Valley region, and noted that similar agreements with militant groups in the past had allowed al-Qaeda to strengthen its base. “They assured me that this is not the same as past agreements,” Panetta said. “I remain skeptical.”

In a series of interviews yesterday, Qureshi said that Pakistan objected to the Predator strikes and that he has asked the United States to supply his country with drones to carry out its own missile attacks against extremists. Pakistan has also requested other sophisticated weaponry, including Cobra attack helicopters, communications and night-vision equipment. Although the drones are unlikely — and both U.S. and Pakistani officials say they are privately in agreement on continuation of the CIA strikes — the administration and Congress are likely to approve more military assistance along with a multibillion-dollar aid package.

Legislation introduced in the Senate last year by Vice President Biden, and soon to be sponsored by his successor as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), and Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), ranking Republican, calls for about $1.5 million a year in economic and development assistance for Pakistan over the next five years.

A report released yesterday by the Atlantic Council said that at least double that amount is needed from the United States and the international community if Pakistan is to be brought back “from the brink.” Pakistan, it said, “is on a rapid trajectory toward becoming a failing or failed state.”

In a report last year, under the leadership of James L. Jones, who is now the national security adviser, the Atlantic Council warned that the West was “not winning in Afghanistan.” Those words were repeated yesterday by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in his first major foreign policy speech since losing the presidential election to Obama in November. “Let us not shy from the truth,” McCain said in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, “but let us not be paralyzed by it either.”

McCain chastised “some [who] suggest it is time to scale back our ambitions in Afghanistan — to give up on nation-building and instead focus narrowly on our counterterrorism objectives, by simply mounting operations aimed at killing or capturing terrorist leaders and destroying their networks.”

Obama, while calling for improved governance in Afghanistan, has publicly suggested that the United States adopt the “very limited goal” of ensuring that “Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for launching terrorist attacks” against the United States.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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National Security Structure Is Set
Under Obama, Council Will Grow

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 2009; A03

President Obama’s first presidential directive, outlining the organization of his national security structure, adds the attorney general, the secretaries of energy and homeland security, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to the formal National Security Council.

The four-page directive sketches wide input to NSC meetings, providing for “regular” inclusion of senior trade, economic and science advisers.

The document puts national security adviser James L. Jones firmly in charge of setting the NSC agenda and communicating Obama’s decisions to the others. Jones will determine when to call White House meetings of policymaking “principals” and will police implementation of assigned tasks.

All post-World War II presidents, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in his first term, have begun their administrations with similar documents. Although most have contracted or enlarged the list of senior officials included in the formal structure — usually by one or two officials either way — Obama’s is by far the most expansive, in keeping with his definition of national security to include economic, climate, energy and cyber-threats.

Few presidents have followed the letter or often even the spirit of their national security directives under the pressure of crises and internal power struggles. President George W. Bush’s six-page directive set out an orderly policymaking system that was thwarted early on by the relative weakness of his initial national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the supremacy of Vice President Richard B. Cheney among his advisers, and clashes between Donald H. Rumsfeld and Colin L. Powell, his first secretaries of defense and state. The upheaval of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks created a more narrow structure.

Obama also has divided his national security orders into two categories: presidential policy directives, and presidential study directives, designed to initiate and direct policy reviews. A copy of Policy Directive 1, the NSC directive signed on Feb. 13, was obtained by The Washington Post.

Study Directive 1, dated Feb. 23 and made available this week by Secrecy News, orders an interagency review of the White House homeland security and counterterrorism structure. Headed by counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, the review will recommend whether to retain the separate the Homeland Security Council established under the Bush administration, or to incorporate some or all of its functions within the NSC.

Obama’s security directive also establishes an elaborate system of interagency policy committees to coordinate analysis and reviews of issues “for consideration by the more senior committees . . . and ensure timely responses to decisions made by the President.”

Under the 1947 National Security Act that created it, the National Security Council included only the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense. The CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been added by most presidents.

Obama’s directive includes all of these and new members from Energy and Homeland Security, as well as the attorney general. He follows in the footsteps of President Bill Clinton by including his U.N. ambassador — although Bush did not — and mandating that his White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, “shall be invited to attend every NSC meeting,” along with Tom Donilon, his deputy national security adviser.

International economic, homeland security, counterterrorism, science and technology advisers are to become “regular members” when their issues are “on the agenda of the NSC,” the directive says.

 
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Obama Sets Timetable for Iraq
Withdrawal Is Part of Broader Regional Strategy, President Says

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 28, 2009; A01

President Obama yesterday fulfilled a campaign promise by setting a date for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, declaring that while the country they will leave behind will not be perfect, the United States will have reached its “achievable goals” and must move on.

By the August 2010 deadline he set, American troops will have been at war for nearly 7 1/2 years in Iraq, a duration surpassed only by that of the Vietnam War, at more than eight years, and the ongoing Afghanistan conflict, which began in 2001.

Just a day after he transformed the domestic political landscape with a breathtakingly bold budget plan, Obama chose a far more cautious approach to his administration’s most momentous foreign policy decision thus far, adopting a timetable that positioned him squarely on the side of military commanders wary of pulling out too many troops, too soon.

“There are some Americans who want to stay in Iraq longer,” Obama acknowledged in a speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., “and some who want to leave faster.”

Those who had sought a speedier withdrawal included many in the Democratic Party and, at one time, Obama himself, who pledged during the campaign that combat troops would depart Iraq at the rate of one brigade a month and would all be home within 16 months of his inauguration.

Not only will the timetable be longer and the pace less even — with major reductions unlikely to begin until after Iraqi elections in December, according to senior military officials — but about a third of the current U.S. force of 142,000 will remain in Iraq until the end of 2011. Their new mission, Obama said, will be to train and advise Iraqi security forces, protect diplomats and civilians working in Iraq, and continue the counterterrorism fight against al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups.

The final decision rested on what senior administration officials called a military calculus of “risk management” and “mitigation,” as well as on the judgment that it would be better to be known as the president who got out of Iraq, even if it took too long, than the one who was in such a rush that he imperiled a safe and orderly exit. With so many other bold changes in motion, not every risk was seen as worth taking.

In his first speech as commander in chief to assembled U.S. troops on their home turf, Obama provided his most comprehensive description to date of what he called “a new era of American leadership” in “the broader Middle East,” including the pursuit of “principled and sustained engagement with all the nations in the region, and that will include Iran and Syria.”

He and his national security team see military withdrawal from Iraq, and Baghdad’s establishment as a sovereign regional player, as part of a broad and interconnected regional strategy being rolled out even as it is formulated. Special envoy George J. Mitchell is about to begin his second visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Obama has promised direct presidential involvement in forging a lasting peace.

Last week, Obama announced the deployment of 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. His budget pledged significantly more money for Pakistan, and the administration has launched a high-level review to formulate one overarching strategy toward both countries.

In Washington last week, special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke orchestrated the most sustained and substantive dialogue between top officials of the two often-estranged countries that they have ever had with each other or with the United States.

Under Obama, the CIA is serving as hopeful midwife to a new intelligence relationship between Pakistan and India, designed to end their distraction with each other and refocus Islamabad’s attention on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another new envoy, Dennis Ross, has been named to explore ways to begin a dialogue with Tehran, even as Obama yesterday pledged to “use all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.”

But full realization of those expansive plans depends on cleaning up the Iraq problem that has drained U.S. troops, treasure and attention for so many years.

In describing the administration’s goals for Iraq, Obama touched all the bases, saying the United States will work with the United Nations to support upcoming elections, help improve local government and “serve as an honest broker in pursuit of fair and durable agreements on issues that have divided Iraq’s leaders.” U.S. troops will continue training Iraq’s security forces. Assistance will be rendered to millions of Iraqis displaced and exiled by the war.

“What we will not do,” he said, “is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals. We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries. We cannot police Iraq’s streets until they are completely safe, nor stay until Iraq’s union is perfected. We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars.”

Despite its historical and political resonance, the date for ending the U.S. combat mission was perhaps destined to fall in the relatively narrow window between Obama’s initial 16-month pledge and the December U.S.-Iraqi agreement that the last U.S. soldier would leave by Dec. 31, 2011. In selecting August 2010 — 19 months after his inauguration — Obama followed the recommendations of his senior military advisers.

A senior military official said yesterday that troops remaining after 2010, while not officially designated as “combat brigades,” would remain “in harm’s way,” embedded with Iraqi combat forces and in U.S. counterterrorism missions. The official said that U.S. commanders hope to maintain a presence in Kirkuk, the northern, oil-rich city claimed by both Iraqi Arabs and Kurds and whose status has yet to be decided, and in Mosul, where al-Qaeda forces remain active.

Under the plan, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, will assess the overall situation every six months to allow Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to provide guidance to Obama. Although some U.S. units will leave Iraq between now and early next year, the bulk of the combat force is expected to remain, under Odierno’s recommendation, at least until national elections take place in December and their outcome is decided.

The military official recalled that the last time Iraqis went to the polls to elect a national government, in December 2005, the nation’s fractious political parties did not settle on a prime minister until the following April — a timeframe that also marked the beginning of an explosion of violence that led to the buildup of U.S. forces in early 2007.

“This is not a question of how fast you can withdraw,” the official said, but rather of how large a force is required “to do what you said you were going to do. . . . Ray Odierno is not a wild-eyed optimist. He went through the dark years. He is not going to write a report to the president of the United States that is all sun and roses.”

 
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Obama Team Seeks to Redefine Russia Ties
U.S. Aiming at Strategic Goals With Proposals on Arms Reduction, Missile Defense, Economic Support

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 4, 2009; A11

The Obama administration is preparing a wide-ranging set of initiatives designed to put shaky relations between the United States and Russia on a more solid footing, including resumption of strategic arms control talks as early as this spring, reactivation of the moribund NATO-Russia Council and possible U.S. reconsideration of plans to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, senior administration officials said.

The proposals, which President Obama plans to present to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when they meet for the first time next month, will also offer enhanced economic cooperation.

The administration hopes that the offer of a comprehensive new strategic relationship will encourage Russia to be more helpful in achieving U.S. goals in Afghanistan and Iran. At the same time, the White House is eager to give Medvedev a chance to put his stamp on the U.S.-Russia relationship, dominated for the past decade by former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

But as Obama’s national security team rushes to put the package together, officials remain unsure of the reception it will get. An exchange of public comments and private letters between Obama and Medvedev over the past five weeks has left the administration optimistic but uncertain about whether the Russian president is willing or able to deliver.

So far, both governments have spoken in generalities, each prodding the other to move toward substance. Medvedev said yesterday that a discussion of missile defense contained in a lengthy letter Obama sent him last month was “a disappointment” and that he was looking for more “specific proposals” when they sit down together at an April 2 economic summit in London.

Obama yesterday disputed news reports that his letter — a response to a missive from Medvedev — offered to abandon plans to deploy missile defense components near the Russian border in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Moscow’s help in stopping the Iranian nuclear program. He said he had merely repeated a previous, public observation that removal of the Iranian threat would eliminate the need to defend against it.

His message to Medvedev, Obama said, addressed “a whole range of issues, from nuclear proliferation to how we are going to deal with a set of common security concerns along the Afghan border, and terrorism. . . . My hope is that we can have a constructive relationship where, based on common respect and mutual interest, we can move forward.”

Despite the attention paid to missile defense, the most urgent task before the administration is putting in place a negotiating team to begin work on a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to replace the 1991 agreement with Moscow that expires at the end of this year. Although Obama has voiced strong support for additional sharp reductions, he has not specified any numbers. The Russians are likely to favor a relatively slow additional drawdown, but both sides are anxious to begin the process.

Medvedev also touched on other issues in comments made during a visit this week to Spain. “As to our cooperation on Afghanistan,” he said, “we are interested in stepping it up rather than stopping it. . . . It is my understanding that this issue is high on the foreign policy agenda of the new U.S. president. We share this approach.” Yesterday, the Russian government informed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that the first shipment of American supplies to Afghanistan crossing Russian territory under a new agreement had reached the border of Kazakhstan.

Some experts say the administration may find itself disappointed by the intractability of the issues involved, while others are critical of what they see as Obama’s over-willingness to make concessions. Moscow “will use our desire to bring the temperature down” to its advantage, on issues such as Russia’s desire for hegemony over the former Soviet republics on its borders, said Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Russia’s response to the overall U.S. package, officials and nongovernmental experts said, will depend on several intangibles. First is the government’s calculation on whether rising public unrest over deteriorating economic conditions in Russia — including riots in the western city of Vladivostok last month that resulted in the government dispatch of special forces units — is better countered by blaming the West, or seeking its political and economic support. Putin and other senior Russian officials have drawn parallels between growing domestic opposition in Russia and Western-backed “revolutions” that led to the installation of pro-Western governments in Georgia and Ukraine.

The second consideration is the still-unclear power relationship between Putin and Medvedev, his hand-picked successor. The Obama administration thinks its chances of long-term rapprochement are better with Medvedev, viewed as a member of Russia’s new, post-communist generation, than with Putin, a former party member and KGB agent.

“It depends on their domestic political assessment,” said Klaus Scharioth, Germany’s ambassador to the United States. “I think none of us really knows.” He said Russia gave “some positive signals” last month at a security conference in Munich, where Vice President Biden said the Obama administration planned to “push the reset button” on its relations with Moscow, which had sharply deteriorated last year. “But there was no statement saying, ‘Yes, we will,’ or ‘No, we won’t,’ ” Scharioth said of Russia’s response. “Just some positive noises.”

The NATO-Russia Council, a proven avenue of cooperation between the East and the West whose operations were suspended in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer, is likely to be revived at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers this week. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will then hold her first meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

NATO and the Obama administration are hopeful that an active council will lessen Russia’s insistence on maintaining a regional “sphere of influence.” NATO’s major European players, including Germany, are anxious to move beyond the upheavals of last year resulting from the Georgia conflict and Russia’s protests over consideration of alliance membership for Georgia and Ukraine. They would like to make clear to Moscow that both countries are years away from NATO admission, a point the Obama administration, unlike its predecessor in the White House, quietly concedes.

The administration is also open to the possibility of considering missile defense within the council — a move that would probably be met with protests from Poland and the Czech Republic, both NATO members that view their selection as sites for system components as insurance against Russian influence.

Although looking forward yesterday to dealing with Russia on “common security concerns,” Obama was quick to note that any changes in U.S. missile defense plans would “in no way . . . diminish” American security support for Poland and the Czech Republic.

Staff writer Philip P. Pan in Moscow contributed to this report.

 
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Afghan Envoy Assails Western Allies as Halfhearted, Defeatist

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 12, 2009; A14

Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States attacked Western governments fighting in and providing billions in aid to his country, saying that those who claim the international community is not winning the war against extremists there “should know that they never fully tried.”

“We never asked to be the 51st state,” Ambassador Said T. Jawad said, a reference to a suggestion last month by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) that the United States should concentrate on “realistic goals” and its “original mission” of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

“To suggest that Afghans do not deserve peace, pluralism and human rights is wrong and racist,” Jawad said.

He said negotiations with the Taliban should be conducted by the Afghan government and should be withheld until it was in a “position of strength.” President Obama, in a New York Times interview last week, echoed numerous administration and U.S. military officials in suggesting that the United States seek negotiations with “reconcilable” Taliban elements.

Obama also said the United States and NATO were not winning the war in Afghanistan and spoke favorably of U.S. military plans to bolster Afghan tribal forces to participate in the war against extremists — a policy seen as successful in Iraq and being tried in pilot programs in Afghanistan. Jawad said yesterday that such plans “will not work” and would undermine the country’s stability.

Jawad’s remarks, in an address last night at Harvard University, were a forceful public expression of issues privately raised here last month with the Obama administration by a top-level national security delegation from President Hamid Karzai’s government.

Jawad accused those aiding Afghanistan of “total negligence” in building the Afghan police force and judicial system, “under-investment” in the national army, and providing “meager resources” devoted to helping the Afghan government deliver services and protect its citizens.

U.S. military expenditures in Afghanistan have totaled more than $173 billion since 2001, with an additional $35 billion spent in reconstruction aid. U.S. military deaths total more than 660, with 431 NATO troops killed.

Many of Jawad’s complaints echo assessments made by the Obama administration, which lays much of the blame for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan on what it sees as its predecessor’s obsession with Iraq at Afghanistan’s expense. But the ambassador’s tone and rejection of any Afghan responsibility for the situation reflected an escalating tension between the Obama and Karzai governments as Obama’s national security team forges a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Karzai “doesn’t seem to be ready to take any responsibility for the problems,” an administration official said.

Obama officials have made little secret of their concern that Karzai — installed as Afghanistan’s interim leader in 2001 and elected president in 2004, both times with U.S. backing — is incapable of providing the leadership needed to extend government control and services. They believe corruption is rife within his government, although they have not accused Karzai himself.

U.S. hopes of replacing him in elections this year have foundered on the lack of a viable opposition candidate. Meanwhile, the near-term future of Afghanistan’s government hangs in the balance as Karzai’s term expires in May, while the independent electoral commission has scheduled the ballot for August, a delay that administration officials hope will allow other possibilities to emerge.

Jawad’s speech came the day the administration announced its nomination of Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. The selection of an active-duty officer — Eikenberry is deputy chairman of NATO’s military committee and the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — appeared to be an exception to the administration’s stated goal of increasing the civilian and diplomatic profile of the military-heavy U.S. regional presence.

Afghanistan appreciates Obama’s deployment of 17,000 more American troops to the country, Jawad said. But he couched his praise in terms of casualty levels, saying increased U.S. ground operations that “will allow for surgical operations instead of relying on aerial bombings that lead to unacceptable levels of civilian deaths.”

“We welcome President Obama’s plan to unveil a new comprehensive U.S. strategy by the end of this month,” Jawad said, adding that Afghanistan was “grateful for being officially consulted” in the Washington talks last month.

Jawad also praised Pakistan’s civilian government as “sincere in fighting extremism and terrorism,” but said it “lacks the capacity to wage this fight.” The Pakistani military, “on the other hand, has the capacities to do so but not the commitment” and considers Islamist extremists “an ally” in Pakistan’s conflict with India, he said.

Although Afghanistan “welcomed President Obama’s remarks about talking with the Taliban,” Jawad said, the government would handle the negotiations. “In fact,” he said, “the process of talking with individual Taliban commanders has been going on for the past six years, and about 600 mid-level Taliban commanders have joined the peace process.”

He outlined three major Taliban groups — the “ideological” forces affiliated with Pakistan-based al-Qaeda and regional terrorism networks; the mid-level commanders who “can be reconciled through dialogue, buying off, bribery and coercion”; and the “paycheck Taliban” made up of “unemployed, uneducated and brainwashed” young foot soldiers who need “employment and education, not too much dialogue.”

Citing “defeatist and reductionist media statements and policy recommendations in the U.S. and European capitals,” Jawad noted that “NATO and U.S. forces are saying that we are not winning in Afghanistan, implying that the Taliban are not losing.

“If they are not losing,” he said, “why should they talk to us?”

 
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Clarification to This Article
This article said that a directive from Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, ordered all military units to cut the number of U.S. contractors by 5 percent each quarter. The Jan. 31 directive referred both to U.S. contractors and to those from foreign countries other than Iraq.
U.S. Moves to Replace Contractors in Iraq
Blackwater Losing Security Role; Other Jobs Being Converted to Public Sector

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 17, 2009; A07

The decision not to renew Blackwater Worldwide’s security contract in Iraq when it expires in early May has left the State Department scrambling to fill a protection gap for U.S. diplomats and civilian officials there.

Two other U.S. security contractors with a far smaller presence in Iraq — DynCorp International and Triple Canopy — have been asked to replace the ousted company, according to State Department and company officials. To meet time, training and security-clearance pressures, officials said, one or both of the firms are likely to undertake the task by rehiring some personnel now working for Blackwater.

The Iraqi government refused to issue Blackwater a license to perform security services after a 2007 incident in which company guards on a diplomatic protection mission shot and killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. U.S. prosecutors have indicted five of the guards on charges of manslaughter. Blackwater (which recently changed its name to Xe) still has State Department contracts for air transport in Iraq and security for U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, fallout from the shootings — including a new U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement that places contractors under Iraqi legal jurisdiction for the first time — has led both the Pentagon and the State Department to create new categories of “full-time, temporary” federal jobs to handle some tasks currently done by contractors.

The Blackwater incident helped fuel a wider debate on the overall cost and conduct of contractors. President Obama last week ordered a government-wide review of federal contracting procedures, saying that his administration “will stop outsourcing services that should be performed by the government.”

Nowhere has that outsourcing been larger or more contentious than in Iraq, where contractors have long outnumbered the U.S. military presence, even at its peak of 160,000 troops.

The days of massive U.S. reconstruction contracts in Iraq are over, with little to show for tens of billions of dollars spent, according to government auditors. While the military continues to outsource much of its supply chain, contracts for services such as transport and food will diminish as combat forces begin to draw down.

In a commandwide directive issued Jan. 31, Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, ordered all military units to start cutting U.S. contractors at a target rate of 5 percent each quarter and to hire more Iraqis to do their jobs. “As we transition more responsibility and control to the government of Iraq, it’s time to make this change,” he added.

However, some contracted activities, from training Iraqi forces to strategic communications, are likely to increase as troops withdraw, and certain U.S. contractors are seen as irreplaceable. “Human terrain” experts — civilian social scientists and linguists hired to help the military better understand Iraq and Iraqis — have been told that they must accept newly created government jobs, at potentially lower salaries, or leave. The highly touted human terrain program, which fields 20 teams of five to nine specialists in Iraq and six in Afghanistan, was begun by Odierno’s predecessor, Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Program head Steve Fondacaro said that when hazardous-duty, locality and other government pay benefits are added, total compensation will be competitive with the private sector at $147,000 to $236,000 a year. He estimated that at least 60 of about 100 currently contracted specialists would accept the year-long government jobs, with annual renewal options for up to four years, even though some have complained anonymously on blogs that the new arrangement constitutes an unacceptable pay cut.

Avoiding legal problems in Iraq, Fondacaro said, was more of an impetus for the move than cost-cutting. Although no U.S. contractor has been arrested under the new status-of-forces agreement, which became effective in January, he said the risks were too great in a country whose legal system is “a shambles.” He is also putting the same program in place for human terrain specialists in Afghanistan.

“I had to take action to protect our people and protect our mission,” Fondacaro said.

Fondacaro pointed to the Rockville-based contractor BAE Systems, which he said has informed employees that it would no longer accept liability for any legal problems they might have in Iraq and suggested they stay inside U.S. military installations at all times. “So here I am, paying exorbitant contractor wages for people whose company is not going to provide them any legal defense, and is recommending they don’t go outside” to make contact with Iraqis, he said. “Which is mission failure.”

By making the specialists into government employees, Fondacaro said, “this all goes away in one fell swoop. . . . They are protected under U.S. law and have the same rights and privileges as U.S. troops,” including immunity from Iraqi taxes and arrest.

Lucy Fitch, BAE Systems senior vice president for communications, said the “government has told us they wish to convert contractor positions in Iraq and Afghanistan to government positions” when the company’s contract expires in August, but she called Fondacaro’s description of company instructions “inaccurate.”

BAE employees were advised during December and January to stay inside U.S. military installations “until we could figure out . . . the legal implications and personal risk” under the new status-of-forces agreement, Fitch said. In a clarification last month, she said, employees were told that the company would “assist them in finding in-country legal representation” if they were prosecuted or sued for any reason in Iraq. If problems were related to “actions properly undertaken for BAE Systems,” she added, “we will provide them counsel at the company’s expense.”

The State Department has also created new temporary government jobs in Iraq, but for a different purpose. Following the 2007 Blackwater shooting, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered that a federal security agent ride along on each of the contractor-protected convoys that carry U.S. diplomats, aid and other civilians — including provincial reconstruction team members based in Baghdad neighborhoods and around the country — outside their official compounds.

State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security not only handles security for embassies and other civilian outposts around the globe but also protects foreign officials visiting the United States. With only 1,600 highly trained special agents in the bureau, the Iraq mandate has severely stretched the service. “You’d need the entire [Diplomatic Security] workforce just to do Iraq,” a senior State Department official said, “leaving nothing for Afghanistan, nothing for anywhere else in the world.”

In postings on government job sites last month, State solicited “Protective Security Specialists,” a new job category offering lower pay — $52,221 with guaranteed employment for 13 months, renewable for up to five years — and requiring less training than full-fledged agents.

Riding along on convoys and making sure that security contractors follow the rules, the official said, does not require “all that training and experience. . . . We had a lot of applicants.”

Listed qualifications, seemingly designed for former security contractors, included “at least three years of specialized experience conducting overseas protective security operations within the last five years. Experience in Iraq, Afghanistan or Israel is particularly desirable.”

 
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Russia Signaling Interest in Deal on Iran, Analysts Say
Still, Obama Effort Faces Obstacles

By Philip P. Pan and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 18, 2009; A10

As President Obama seeks to recast relations with Russia and persuade it to help contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he must win over leaders who are deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions and who have long been reluctant to damage what they consider a strategic partnership with Iran. But the Kremlin has indicated it is willing to explore a deal with Washington, and analysts say it may be more open to new sanctions against Iran than expected.

The Obama administration has all but decided not to make a new push for sanctions until after it tries engaging Iran diplomatically and improving ties with Moscow, according to administration officials and Russia analysts. If the overture to Iran fails, as many expect, administration officials believe they will be able to make a stronger case for sanctions to Russian leaders they hope will be more invested in a new relationship with the United States.

In a meeting last week with a bipartisan commission studying U.S. policy toward Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev expressed alarm in “very graphic language” over Iran’s successful test launch of a satellite last month, linking it to Tehran’s nuclear program, said Dmitri Simes, director of the commission.

“Medvedev said it demonstrated how far-reaching Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, and that he was very concerned,” said Simes, who is also president of the Nixon Center in Washington. “He felt it was a clear challenge to both Russian and American interests and said he would like both countries to work on this challenge together.”

In another sign of Russian concern, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar traveled to Moscow last month for talks that were expected to focus on delivery of Russia’s advanced S-300 antiaircraft missile system, which Iran says it has signed a contract to buy. But Russian media reported that the Kremlin informed him it was putting the deal on hold. Both the United States and Israel have objected to the sale.

In remarks during Najar’s visit, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denied that Russia was toughening its stand toward Iran, but called for intensification of international efforts to settle the nuclear standoff. He appeared to accept the Obama administration’s argument that progress on the Iranian issue could help remove another major problem in U.S.-Russia relations — American plans to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.

Simes said Russian leaders appear to be signaling their interest in striking a strategic bargain with Washington. “They want to send a message to the Obama administration that they’re prepared to have a new relationship, but it will have to be quid pro quo,” he said. “If they have to sacrifice their special relationship with Iran, they want to see a change in their relationship with the United States.”

Russia has backed three rounds of sanctions against Iran in the U.N. Security Council but blocked a fourth set of sanctions last summer as relations between Washington and Moscow soured after the Russian-Georgian war in August. In the meeting last week, Simes said, Medvedev indicated that Russia was willing to consider “serious sanctions” against Iran but argued that sanctions alone would not be enough and should be accompanied by a new package of incentives for Iran to cooperate.

What Obama is willing to offer to either Russia or Iran is unclear. The administration is conducting separate internal reviews of U.S. policy toward Iran and Russia, and administration officials declined to discuss the strategy on the record while the reviews are ongoing.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has already said Iran will be invited to an international conference on Afghanistan in The Hague on March 31. Other moves under consideration in the policy review include low-level contacts in countries where both the United States and Iran have embassies, further discussions on cooperation in Afghanistan and a proposal for each country to open a representative office in the other’s capital.

Meanwhile, the administration has said it plans to “reset” relations with Russia and quickly engage Moscow in nuclear arms control talks. After meeting in Geneva this month, Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed to make a priority of negotiating a pact to replace the landmark Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in December. Clinton said she wanted Obama and Medvedev to have a general plan for a new treaty before they meet for the first time at the Group of 20 summit in London on April 2.

Administration officials believe putting the arms control talks at the top of the agenda will reinforce Russia’s self-image as an equal partner that shares the same goals as the United States. At the same time, the administration appears to be playing down high-profile issues that angered Russia during the Bush administration, including the missile defense shield and the push to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Other moves under discussion include a drive to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, the Cold War-era measure imposing trade sanctions on Russia and other countries because of human rights violations.

But Russian analysts said the administration’s approach faces several hurdles. Russia does not want Iran to build a nuclear weapon, but it sees the problem with less urgency than the United States and believes the prolonged standoff with Tehran gives it leverage over Washington. In addition, analysts said, Russia’s leaders will be wary because previous administrations promised better relations but then ignored Russian concerns on issues such as missile defense and NATO expansion.

Russian leaders may also prefer to continue demonizing the United States to divert public anger as Russia weathers a severe economic crisis, said Georgy Mirsky, a foreign policy scholar at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.

Vladimir Sotnikov, a research fellow at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said U.S. officials overestimate Russia’s influence on Iran and underestimate the Islamic republic’s strategic value to the Kremlin. Russia sees Iran as an important partner in a volatile neighborhood, and it appreciates, and worries about, Iran’s influence on Muslim populations in southern Russia and in the neighboring countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia, he said.

At the same time, Russia can apply only limited economic pressure on Iran, he said. With less than $3 billion in bilateral trade annually, far behind Japan, China, Germany and Italy, Russia doesn’t make the list of Iran’s top 10 trading partners.

Alexander Pikayev, a top arms control scholar in Moscow, said Russian policy toward Iran will be determined by competing interest groups and political factions. Defense manufacturers and the atomic energy industry oppose tougher sanctions, for example, but the United States could win over the latter by reviving a bilateral pact on civilian nuclear cooperation that was frozen after the Georgian war, he said.

Pikayev said Medvedev may be more likely to support sanctions because a breakthrough in U.S. relations would boost his political stature at home and set him apart from his powerful predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin might resist, but his relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is said to be strained and he surprised Russia’s foreign policy establishment by endorsing earlier U.N. sanctions, Pikayev said.

“The consensus for improved relations with the United States is wider than for any Iran policy,” Pikayev said. “That gives the U.S. some room to maneuver.”

Pan reported from Moscow, and DeYoung reported from Washington.

 
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Civilians to Join Afghan Buildup
‘Surge’ Is Part of Larger U.S. Strategy Studied by White House

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 19, 2009; A04

A civilian “surge” of hundreds of additional U.S. officials in Afghanistan would accompany the already approved increase in U.S. troop levels there under a new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy being completed at the White House, according to administration officials.

President Obama is expected to make final decisions next week on that strategy, proposed by his top national security advisers and based on recommendations from senior military, diplomatic and intelligence officials and intensive consultations with NATO and United Nations partners.

Officials said the proposed strategy includes a more narrowly focused concentration on security, governance and local development in Afghanistan, with continued emphasis on rule-of-law issues and combating the narcotics trade. U.S. and British troops in the southern part of the country will attempt to oust entrenched Taliban forces, with an influx of reinforcements enabling them to retain control — and help protect enhanced civilian operations — until greatly expanded and sufficiently trained Afghan army and police forces are able to take their place.

In Pakistan, a senior defense official said “the jury is still out” on proposals to increase covert operations and missile strikes against insurgent sanctuaries in that country’s western tribal areas, and to expand them into the southern province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership openly operates in the provincial capital of Quetta. With the Pakistani government teetering and anti-American sentiment rising, “we have to be realistic about how this could all play out,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“You may feel good about killing more bad guys, but the costs may just be too high,” he said.

More likely in the short term, officials said, are expanded efforts to aid the Pakistani military with training, new equipment and advice to improve its counterinsurgency performance, along with a massive increase of development aid to try to stabilize the country and wean tribal leaders away from insurgent groups. One problem yet to be solved is how to supervise the distribution of aid and reconstruction funds in an environment considered unsafe for U.S. officials to work in most areas.

Some of the proposed new civilian force in Afghanistan — diplomats, specialists from federal departments such as Agriculture and Justice, and hundreds of new “full-time, temporary” hires — would work at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, officials said. Others would be assigned to U.S. provincial reconstruction teams, or PRTs, located primarily in eastern Afghanistan, and to other efforts to build Afghan civilian capacity around the country. Patterned on a program first established in Iraq, the PRTs assist and advise Afghans in economic and local governance development.

The United States currently operates 12 of the 26 PRTs in Afghanistan. But unlike the others, run by NATO partners under civilian control, the U.S. teams are led and dominated by the military: Only a few of the 1,055 U.S. staffers on the teams were civilians, according to a government audit in January. A congressional oversight investigation last year said that “finding qualified individuals with applicable skills and experience poses a significant challenge to staffing.”

The additional 17,000 U.S. troops scheduled for deployment this year — bringing the total to about 55,000 — will increase the combat imbalance between the United States and NATO, and scheduled withdrawals of Canadian and Dutch troops over the next two years will make Afghanistan even more of a U.S.-dominated war.

Obama has pledged to improve the civil-military balance in U.S. operations, and to put more of a civilian face on development and governance efforts. Although the overall civilian deployment plan for Afghanistan awaits Obama’s approval, the State Department has already solicited applications for 51 new positions it expects to fill by July. Up to 300 additional civilians are anticipated under the strategy proposals.

Many are expected to be hired under a provision established by the Bush administration for special employment in Iraq. Unlimited, year-long hires were permitted, with authority to renew them for up to four years. Bush extended the provision to Afghanistan under an executive order he signed Jan. 16.

In addition to increasing its own civilian component, the administration seeks better coordination among the many other governments and international and nongovernmental agencies operating in Afghanistan, often with different rules and objectives. The strategy proposals include a strengthening of the United Nations as a clearinghouse and overall coordinator of nonmilitary efforts, including the appointment of veteran U.S. diplomat Peter W. Galbraith as deputy to Norwegian Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

“This is a big deal,” said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the appointment is announced. “The Bush administration undermined and ignored the U.N., and we minimized our influence. But imagine, with all the money we pay and American troops on the line, not to have a senior person” at the top level of the U.N. effort. A U.N. official said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will announce Galbraith’s appointment in “a matter of days.”

Galbraith served in senior U.S. and U.N. positions in the Balkans, East Timor and other conflict areas. Sharply critical of Bush administration policy in Iraq, he resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 and served as an adviser to Iraq’s Kurdish regional government.

Francis J. Ricciardone, one of the State Department’s most senior Foreign Service officers and a former ambassador to Egypt and the Philippines, is expected to be named “deputy ambassador” to boost the diplomatic heft of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Obama last week nominated Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, as ambassador to Kabul.

Another diplomatic veteran, Timothy M. Carney, has begun work as head of a U.S. team assisting in preparations for national elections in Afghanistan in August. Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan and Haiti, worked on the Iraq reconstruction effort in Baghdad in 2003 but eventually became a critic of that operation. He was named Iraq coordinator for economic transition in 2007 under a vastly reduced U.S. reconstruction effort.

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

 
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Foreign Service Jobs in Afghanistan to Grow

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 24, 2009; A04

The State Department will significantly expand its presence in regional capitals in western and northern Afghanistan in coming months, part of the Obama administration’s plans for a “surge” in civilians going to the country.

“As part of our expanding efforts in Afghanistan,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a cable sent Saturday to all Foreign Service officers, “the Department intends to create 14 additional FS positions in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.”

The cable called the jobs “priority” assignments and “new opportunities” for diplomats about to bid on new postings for later this year.

President Obama’s senior national security officials have proposed a new overall strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he is expected to approve this week. It includes sending hundreds of U.S. civilian officials to Afghanistan, increasing the size of the embassy and its outposts by about 50 percent — to about 900 personnel.

Obama has authorized the deployment of 17,000 additional troops, with most headed to southern Afghanistan, where British, Canadian and U.S. forces are battling a resurgent Taliban.

The proportion of U.S. civilian officials to military forces in the country is small, compared with the ratios for other NATO members with troops in Afghanistan. Each of the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams outside Kabul, the capital, includes 50 to 100 military and Defense Department contractors, but none has more than a half-dozen civilian officials, even though the teams are charged with traditionally civilian tasks in fields such as development, agriculture and education.

The U.S. civilian presence in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where NATO troops are under Swedish command, has numbered one or two. The American presence in the western province of Herat, under Italian command, is similarly minuscule.

“We want to stand a little on our own” in “these critical places,” said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

An initial group of seven officials will be sent to each of the cities, including public diplomacy, security, management and administrative personnel, as well as “reporting” officials. A State Department official said that Clinton had “personally approved” establishing the offices.

Still to be determined is whether the provincial reconstruction team offices will be redesignated, either as consulates, which require congressional approval, or as regional embassy offices.

The new posts, and other expanded civilian operations, will probably require expanded security. Xe, the private security company formerly known as Blackwater, holds the State Department contract for diplomatic security in Afghanistan.

The senior U.S. official said the department does not anticipate in Afghanistan a repetition of the difficulties encountered by the Bush administration in finding volunteers to go to Iraq. In addition to Foreign Service officers, the expanded civilian presence in Afghanistan will include recruits from other government departments and “full-time, temporary” government hires for special development tasks.

 
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In Afghan War, U.S. Dominance Increasing
With More American Troops and Civilians On the Way, NATO Is Likely to Lose Clout

By Karen DeYoung and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 26, 2009; A16

After years of often testy cooperation with NATO and resentment over unequal burden-sharing, the United States is taking unabashed ownership of the Afghan war.

President Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan this year will bring the number of foreign troops there to nearly 90,000, more than two-thirds of them Americans. Although many will technically report to NATO commanders, the U.S. force will increasingly be in charge.

Even as the U.S. military expands its control over the battlefield, the number of American civilian officials will also grow by at least 50 percent — to more than 900 — under the new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy Obama will announce as early as tomorrow, according to administration officials. American diplomats and development experts plan to spread into relatively peaceful western and northern regions of Afghanistan that until now were left to other NATO governments. New U.S. resources and leadership also will be brought to bear over critical issues such as counter-narcotics efforts and strengthening local government institutions.

U.S. policy in Pakistan, a major component of the new strategy, is largely unilateral. The European Union has an aid and trade relationship with the country, but few European governments outside of Britain have strong involvement there.

In Afghanistan, the administration “will continue to characterize the effort as multinational. There will continue to be thousands of troops and people” from NATO and elsewhere, said a former senior Defense Department official with a lot of experience there. “But the center of gravity is going to shift toward the Americans.”

Obama’s national security team has taken pains to consult with allies as it has put the new strategy together. The Washington announcement, and the presentation Obama will make at an April 3-4 NATO summit in Europe, will emphasize shared threats and common purpose, officials said.

But the increasing U.S. dominance is both by default and by design. The United States has far more troops, equipment and money — and more willingness to use them — than the rest of NATO. Even before Obama took office, his holdover defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, had largely given up pressing the allies for more combat forces, with fewer restrictions on their activities.

Although European governments have been asked to send up to four additional battalions of 800 to 1,000 troops each to boost security for Afghan elections in August, they will be temporary additions. Britain, whose 8,000 combat troops make it the second-largest NATO contributor, is considering whether it can send more after its withdrawal from Iraq this year. Germany, the third largest, has authorized 4,500, although they are restricted from certain combat areas and duties; France fields nearly 3,000 unrestricted troops.

The Netherlands plans to end its 1,700-troop combat mission in Afghanistan next year; Canada will bring its 2,800 troops home in 2011. With the arrival of new forces this year, U.S. troops will number more than 55,000.

“It’s great to have our allies here,” a U.S. commander in Afghanistan said. “But we recognize that when crunchtime comes — and that’s what we’re in right now — we have to be the ones to step up and get it done.”

“Crunchtime” arrived for Obama in a series of military, diplomatic and intelligence assessments warning that no time remains for the niceties of negotiating over who will do what in Afghanistan. Taliban attacks and both U.S. and NATO casualties rose last year to their highest levels of the war, now in its eighth year, and the numbers are expected to further increase this year.

“This is the new reality,” the former Defense Department official said. “We tried the essentially decentralized approach, where every country kind of does its own area and does what it thinks is right. That has essentially fallen down. . . . We want our allies to still be there. We don’t want NATO to fail. But in order for NATO to succeed, the U.S. has got to take the lead.”

Rather than expecting more combat forces, the U.S. administration has asked the allies to tell it what more they can contribute in terms of financing, training for Afghan forces, and civilian experts in every sector, from agriculture to governance — “essentially whatever you can give us to free up an American to do something else,” the former official said.

The results of those entreaties remain to be seen. A NATO trust fund established last year to pay for equipment and transportation for Afghan security forces set a goal of about $1.5 billion; contributions to date total less than $25 million, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Bantz J. Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. Plans to double the size of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2011 will require an additional 29 NATO training teams. “The U.S. provides them when NATO doesn’t,” Craddock said. American trainers outnumber their NATO counterparts three to one.

Because some NATO members restrict their troops to certain areas of the country, trainers often cannot move with redeployed Afghan forces, leaving U.S. forces to “pick up the responsibility” to transport the Afghans and their equipment from one region to another, Craddock said.

The Americanization of the war is visible in the turbulent south, where the regional NATO command, led by a Dutch general, with Dutch, British, Danish and U.S. troops, faces the primary Taliban threat. Most of the additional U.S. troops will deploy there, and dozens of C-130 transport aircraft land at the Kandahar air field every day with pallets of supplies. In a dusty parking lot not far from the main runway, more than 200 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, await the supplementary U.S. troops. When they arrive, there will be more American personnel at the Kandahar base than at the current largest U.S. facility — at Bagram, north of Kabul, the capital.

A British general will take over the southern command this fall, but U.S. and NATO military officials said they expect the No. 2 commander, U.S. Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, to be the real decision-maker.

“This will become an American headquarters,” one non-U.S. military officer in southern Afghanistan said of Kandahar. “They’re going to have almost three times as many troops as any other NATO member here. And that’s going to mean they’ll be in charge.”

 
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Obama Plans More Funding For Afghan War
4,000 Additional Troops to Deploy

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 27, 2009; A01

President Obama’s new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy will require significantly higher levels of U.S. funding for both countries, with U.S. military expenses in Afghanistan alone, currently about $2 billion a month, increasing by about 60 percent this year.

“The president has decided he is going to resource this war properly,” said a senior administration official of the plan Obama is set to announce this morning. Along with the 17,000 additional combat troops authorized last month, he said, Obama will send 4,000 more this fall to serve as trainers and advisers to an Afghan army expected to double in size over the next two years.

In outlining his plan after a two-month review that began the week of his inauguration, Obama will describe it as a sharp break with what officials called a directionless and under-resourced conflict inherited from the Bush administration. Far from al-Qaeda being vanquished and the threat to the United States diminished, the official said, “seven and a half years after 9/11, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has moved from Kandahar, in Afghanistan, to a location unknown in Pakistan . . . where we know they’re plotting new attacks” against this country and its allies.

Obama plans to announce a “simple, clear, concise goal — to disrupt, dismantle and eventually destroy al-Qaeda in Pakistan,” said the official, one of three authorized to anonymously discuss the strategy. The president will describe his plan in a White House speech to a group of selected military, diplomatic and development officials and nongovernmental aid groups.

The officials declined to put dollar figures on aspects of the strategy other than the cost of U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan. Initial funding requests for hundreds of additional U.S. civilian officials to be sent there, as well as increased economic and development assistance to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, will come in a 2009 supplemental appropriation that the administration has not yet outlined.

The officials said the administration, working with Congress, will develop new “benchmarks and metrics to measure our performance and that of our allies,” including the Afghan and Pakistani governments. Lawmakers and the administration itself have questioned the ability and will of the Afghan government to fight corruption and the narcotics trade, and have criticized the Pakistani military’s performance against al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups. U.S. intelligence officials believe that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence service continue to actively collaborate with the Taliban.

“We are looking for performance and changes in behavior on the Pakistani side,” an official said, adding that Obama had “made very clear there are no blank checks.”

Obama will deliver the strategy to NATO allies fighting with U.S. forces in Afghanistan at an April 3-4 alliance summit. But officials made clear that the administration — with the United States bearing most of the cost of the conflict — expects to take the lead in both the civilian and military aspects.

The administration plans to expand regional diplomatic outreach to Russia, China, India and the Persian Gulf states, the officials said. Initial overtures to Iran, one said, will begin at an international meeting next week in The Hague attended by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the conference, the administration will seek indications that Iran “wants to be a productive player” in Afghanistan, he said.

Iran yesterday accepted an invitation to the gathering, although U.S. officials said the Iranian foreign minister is not likely to attend. The administration has not yet determined whether Clinton, or a lower-level U.S. official, would attend any talks with Iran. Special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke will also be at the conference.

Obama briefed House and Senate leaders on the strategy at the White House yesterday afternoon, while Holbrooke and other officials met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The president also telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart, President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The situation in Afghanistan is increasingly difficult, and time is of the essence,” Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, Obama’s nominee as ambassador to Afghanistan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at his confirmation hearing yesterday. “There will be no substitute for more resources and sacrifice.”

While additional U.S. combat troops will enhance the ability of the multinational coalition force to hold ground in southern Afghanistan’s Taliban strongholds, increased training and equipping of Afghan security forces is the ultimate exit strategy for the United States and NATO, administration officials said.

Afghanistan’s defense minister has said he plans to double the size of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2011, but coalition forces until now have been unable to provide trainers and mentors, equipment and transport for the existing force.

The extra 4,000 U.S. troops, expected to deploy in early fall, are to fill that gap. In a sign of the new importance the administration is placing on the mission, a brigade of the Army’s vaunted 82nd Airborne Division is being broken up into 10-to-14-member advisory teams, a Pentagon official said. Until now, the military has relied heavily on inexperienced National Guardsmen to fill out the teams.

“The change couldn’t be more dramatic,” said retired Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan defense think tank. “The 82nd Airborne Division is the nation’s shock force.”

“We want to move as aggressively and as quickly as possible to build up the Afghan national army,” one administration official said. “It’s much cheaper in the long run to train Afghans to fight” than to send U.S. forces “halfway around the world.”

The total of 21,000 new troops, added to a combat brigade authorized by the Bush administration and deployed in January, will exceed the 30,000 that Gen. David D. McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander, had requested for this year in Afghanistan and will bring the total U.S. force to more than 60,000. Non-U.S. NATO troops there currently total about 32,000.

The new strategy will also include efforts to draw low-level Taliban fighters — but not the insurgent leadership — into reconciliation talks with the Afghan government. “We’re not in the business of negotiating with Mullah Omar, and Mullah Omar doesn’t want to negotiate with us,” an official said. “But we think there are fractures” in the Taliban forces, he said. The goal is to “break the momentum of the Taliban in the next fighting season” that begins this spring and begin to exploit the fractures.

The administration’s director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, estimated yesterday that as many as two-thirds of the Taliban groups are motivated by local concerns and might be defeated or pacified through addressing problems such as inadequate water supplies or access to education.

Staff writers Greg Jaffe and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

 
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Obama Outlines Afghan Strategy
He Pushes Stability and Regional Partnerships

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 28, 2009

President Obama introduced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday with a threat assessment familiar from the Bush administration. “The terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks,” he said, are continuing to devise plots designed to “kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

Elements of the Obama plan to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda in Pakistan and vanquish its Taliban allies in Afghanistan also struck notes from the past. More U.S. troops, civilian officials and money will be needed, he said. Allies will be asked for additional help, and local forces will be trained to eventually take over the fight. Benchmarks will be set to measure progress.

But Obama sought to separate his approach from what he has described as years of unfocused, failed policy while President George W. Bush directed his attention and U.S. resources toward Iraq. Obama pledged to tighten U.S. focus on Pakistan and build a better “partnership” with its government and military. Beyond stepping up the ground fight against the Taliban, he said, he plans to target far more resources toward a narrower set of Afghan problems: government incompetence, opium cultivation and heroin trafficking, and a poorly equipped and trained army.

Bush spoke regularly of establishing a “flourishing democracy” in Afghanistan. But Obama, flanked during a White House speech by his top national security Cabinet members and advisers, made clear that his primary objective is to create a country stable and strong enough to prevent al-Qaeda from reoccupying Afghan territory.

“To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. . . . Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people,” Obama said.

He indicated that the United States expects to continue to carry the bulk of the combat load and will seek other forms of assistance from allies, a departure from the Bush administration’s effort over the past two years to persuade NATO partners to send more combat troops to Afghanistan. “We seek not simply troops,” Obama said, “but rather clearly defined capabilities: supporting the Afghan elections” scheduled for August, “training Afghan security forces, and a greater civilian commitment to the Afghan people.”

Obama said that he would send 4,000 U.S. troops — beyond the additional 17,000 he authorized last month — to work as trainers and advisers to the Afghan army, and hundreds more civilian officials and diplomats to help improve governance and the country’s economy. When currently scheduled deployments are completed late this summer, U.S. troops in Afghanistan will total more than 60,000, twice as many as the non-U.S. NATO contingent.

While Bush rejected any contact with Afghan neighbor Iran, Obama said that he plans to bring together “all who should have a stake in the security of the region,” including Iran, Russia, China and India, as part of a new international contact group he said he will form with the United Nations.

Obama said events in Pakistan are “inextricably linked” to success in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, “needs our help in going after al-Qaeda,” whose leadership, along with a network of other insurgent groups, is located in the rugged mountains on the Afghan border. The Islamabad “government’s ability to destroy these safe havens is tied to its own strength and security,” Obama said. He pledged support for a new $7.5 billion aid package, new military equipment, and a constancy and concentration of effort.

But “after years of mixed results, we will not provide a blank check,” he said. “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken — one way or the other — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

Although the administration has accelerated missile attacks from unmanned Predator aircraft on insurgent targets in western Pakistan, it is not believed to have resumed ground attacks by military Special Forces and CIA operatives. Bush authorized such missions last summer.

Other elements of Obama’s strategy have been tried before, but administration and intelligence officials think that the sharper U.S. focus on the region will give leaders renewed resolve as well as political cover for going after extremist groups. In the past, Pakistani leaders have been reluctant to support U.S.-backed counterterrorism efforts because of public opposition to what many Pakistanis consider Washington’s war.

Congressional reaction to the announcement was largely positive. “We’ve said for some time that we must refocus our resources on threats like al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement saying: “I support the strategy the president unveiled today because it reflects the advice of our commanders on the ground.”

Obama said of the additional resources his policy will require: “I do not ask for this support lightly. These are challenging times, and resources are stretched. But the American people must understand that this is a down payment on our own future.”

Neither Obama, nor the senior officials who fanned out yesterday to brief reporters on the plan, provided cost details.

“This strategy is not intended to be a campaign plan or a straitjacket,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who headed an intense 60-day White House policy review that led to Obama’s announcement. It was designed to be flexible, he said, and criteria outlined by Obama and others — levels of violence and casualties in Afghanistan, Pakistani attacks against insurgents and accounting for U.S. aid — would be used to determine whether course corrections were needed.

Afghanistan, Obama said, “will see no end to violence if insurgents move freely back and forth across the border” with Pakistan. But details on how the movement would be stopped, and how al-Qaeda and other groups would be rousted from their havens in Pakistan, were similarly scarce.

That is “the most daunting” problem, said Richard L. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to the region, because Pakistan is “a sovereign country and there is a red line . . . unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: no foreign troops on our soil.”

“The short answer,” Riedel said, “is that the combination of aggressive military operations on the Afghan side, and working energetically with the Pakistani government to shut down these safe havens, creates the synergy which we hope will then lead to their destruction.”

Holbrooke and Riedel sought to sell the strategy to a small group of influential South Asia scholars and analysts, among them James Dobbins of the Rand Corp. and Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a White House meeting yesterday. The attendees reacted favorably to the Afghanistan recommendations, but several were deeply skeptical that the United States would be able to achieve its policy goals in Pakistan, according to one person who attended the meeting.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) similarly praised the Afghan elements of the policy and welcomed “the new focus on Pakistan.” But he said in a statement that he is “skeptical that the Pakistanis will secure their border” and warned against tying Afghanistan’s future “too tightly to Pakistan’s governmental decisions.”

Asked about the campaign against Afghan corruption, Holbrooke said, “We’re not going to lay out how we’re going to deal with it. To some extent, we don’t know yet.”

Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Ann Scott Tyson and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

 
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AFGHANISTAN POLICY, PAST AND PRESENT

Saturday, March 28, 2009; A05

President Obama’s announcement yesterday of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan marked a distinct shift in how the war in Afghanistan is framed. In contrast to former president George W. Bush, Obama makes no mention of bringing democracy to the war-torn country and does not dwell on the Taliban’s ideology; he even suggests some Taliban members could be reconciled to the Afghan government. Obama is also much tougher on the failures of that government. Below are excerpts from Obama’s remarks yesterday and Bush’s remarks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, a month before he left office, with key phrases highlighted.

– Glenn Kessler
President Obama, March 27
“To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. . . .

“Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency. The people of Afghanistan seek the promise of a better future. Yet once again, we have seen the hope of a new day darkened by violence and uncertainty. . . .

“We cannot turn a blind eye to the corruption that causes Afghans to lose faith in their own leaders. Instead, we will seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behavior, and sets clear benchmarks for international assistance so that it is used to provide for the needs of the Afghan people. In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies. . . .

“There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course.”
President Bush, Dec. 15
“In 2001, the Taliban were brutally repressing the people of this country. I remember the images of women being stoned, or people being executed in the soccer stadium because of their beliefs. There was a group of killers that were hiding here and training here and plotting here to kill citizens in my country.

“The interest is to build a flourishing democracy as an alternative to a hateful ideology. . . .

“It’s difficult because extremists refuse to accept the beauty of democracy. They’ve got a different vision, and so therefore they’re willing to kill innocent people to achieve their objectives.

“There has been a lot of progress since 2001 — after all, girls are back in school. I happen to believe that’s important. As a father of twin girls, I couldn’t imagine living in a society where my little girls couldn’t have a chance to realize their God-given potential. . . .

“There’s been good progress made, but there are a lot of tough challenges. One of the great, interesting things that I’ll be watching — since I believe so strongly in democracy — are the upcoming elections. . . . It’s in our interest that Afghanistan’s democracy flourish.”

 
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3 Detained in Afghanistan Can Take Challenges to U.S. Court
Habeas Ruling Is a Blow to Administration

By Del Quentin Wilber and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 3, 2009; A01

A federal judge ruled yesterday that three detainees at a U.S. military prison in Afghanistan may challenge their confinement before a U.S. court, handing the Obama administration one of its first legal defeats on a claim of executive power.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates rejected the government’s argument, first made by the Bush administration and later adopted by the Obama Justice Department, that it could detain prisoners indefinitely in a “war zone.”

In a 53-page ruling, Bates said that the situation of the three detainees at Bagram air base — who were captured elsewhere and transported to Afghanistan by U.S. forces — is “virtually identical” to that of prisoners held by the military at Guantanamo Bay. A landmark Supreme Court ruling last year accorded habeas corpus rights to detainees at that facility in Cuba.

The ruling is likely to complicate the administration’s ongoing review of detainee policies. President Obama criticized his predecessor’s denial of rights to and treatment of alleged terrorists and during his first week in office ordered Guantanamo Bay to be closed this year. A high-level administration task force is studying what to do with detainees deemed too dangerous to release.

For the moment, the ruling lays to rest some of the concerns voiced by human rights groups that Bagram, a secretive prison that has generally escaped public scrutiny, could become a replacement destination for suspected terrorists. A Justice Department spokesman said no decision has been made on whether to appeal the decision.

The government has more than 600 prisoners at Bagram, and the military is building a new prison there designed to hold more than 1,000, four times the number held in Cuba. The ruling yesterday potentially applies to only a few dozen detainees: Afghan citizens and those captured on the Afghan battlefield are not included.

“The only reason the [prisoners] are in an active theater of war is because [the government] brought them there,” Bates wrote in denying a government motion to dismiss lawsuits brought by the detainees in D.C. federal court. He ruled that the detainees — two Yemenis and a Tunisian — have a right to habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal doctrine that permits prisoners to go to court to challenge their detention.

Human rights groups and attorneys for the detainees hailed the ruling as a major victory in their efforts to ensure judicial oversight of such prisons.

Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for one of the men, said: “This is a great day for American justice. Today, a U.S. federal judge ruled that our government cannot simply kidnap people and hold them beyond the law.”

Legal scholars said the opinion is significant because it challenges the government’s long-held position that it can detain people without cause in active combat zones.

“It raises the possibility that there can be judicial involvement elsewhere in the world,” said Robert Chesney, a professor of national security law at Wake Forest University. “Whether this is a good or bad thing it’s not entirely clear.”

Bates emphasized that his decision to grant habeas rights to those at Bagram is limited and that it applies only to prisoners captured outside Afghanistan. The detainees’ attorneys say the three men were picked up outside the country and later imprisoned at Bagram. They have been held there since at least 2003.

Most other Bagram prisoners were captured in Afghanistan during fighting, and Bates took pains to avoid addressing legal issues linked to them.

“It is one thing to detain those captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram,” the judge wrote. “It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries — far from any Afghan battlefield — and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”

Referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo Bay, Bates wrote: “Such rendition resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power the Supreme Court sought to guard against in Boumediene — the concern that the Executive could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

The government has not disclosed how many Bagram detainees were captured outside Afghanistan, though government sources have put the number at about 20.

Bates deferred ruling on whether a fourth detainee who was part of the habeas petition can also challenge his detention. Lawyers for that prisoner said he was captured in the United Arab Emirates. But he is also an Afghan citizen. The judge said he did not think he had the authority to grant the Afghan the right to habeas corpus because it could cause “friction” with the Afghan government, which leases the base to the United States. He asked lawyers to submit further legal briefings in that case.

The question of what to do with suspected terrorists considered too dangerous to release, or too difficult to try, is a vexing one for the Obama administration. “The truth is, this is a huge challenge,” a senior defense official said.

In an interview with the New York Times last month, Obama said his administration would “have to think about” how to deal with a clearly “dangerous person” captured by U.S. forces. He said any decision would have to match international law and “my very clear edict that we don’t torture, and that we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer charges.”

Yet when given an opportunity by Bates to change the Bush administration’s position on the then-pending Bagram case, the Obama Justice Department told the court it would “adhere” to the Bush administration’s contention that the men were not eligible for habeas review.

Staff researcher Julie Tate and staff writer Candace Rondeaux contributed to this report.

 
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Congress Moves to Set Terms for Pakistan Aid
White House Wants to Draft Its Own

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A04

Just as it did with Iraq, Congress is moving toward imposing benchmarks that the Pakistani government must meet to qualify for billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance. But the proposed restrictions, introduced in House legislation Thursday, have made both the White House and the Pakistani government uneasy.

A bill sponsored by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) would authorize $3 billion in aid to train and equip the Pakistani military over the next five years, along with $7.5 billion in economic and development assistance. It would also limit the kinds of military equipment Pakistan could receive and the ways in which it could be used, and require regular audits and presidential certification of counterinsurgency progress.

A bill with similar aid amounts is being drafted in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, although Senate discussions with the White House on benchmark provisions are ongoing. Introduction of that legislation is not planned until after the two-week congressional recess.

The administration plans to ask for $500 million for the Pakistani military in a supplemental war-funding proposal next week, and to spend the same amount during each of the next four years. In a speech unveiling his Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy last month, President Obama said the United States must “demonstrate through deeds as well as words a commitment [to Pakistan] that is enduring.” He called on Congress to pass the still-unseen Senate bill.

At the same time, Obama pledged, there would be no “blank check.” Recalling “mixed results” from previous billions in aid, he said that “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.”

But the White House and U.S. military commanders, citing Pakistani political sensitivities and the need for flexibility, would like to set their own metrics. “I would say we are still in the process of developing sort of strategic-level metrics and benchmarks” for both Pakistan and Afghanistan, Defense Undersecretary Michelle Flournoy told Congress on Thursday. Lawmakers would be consulted, Flournoy said, and the administration hoped “to be able to bring those forward to you in the not-too-distant future.”

Berman said Congress should be in on the ground floor of the benchmark determination. The administration, he said, “talks about wanting to write benchmarks, but I think we need to be involved in doing that.” The White House would make the initial determination on Pakistani performance, he said, but his bill creates “a process, as cumbersome as it is, to review the basis of that determination.”

The bill would set up a program to monitor Pakistani progress in a number of areas, including defeating extremists and protecting human rights, and require Obama to provide specifics underlying his own assessments. It would also prohibit additional U.S. spending on Pakistan’s F-16 jet fighter fleet, which the Bush administration agreed to upgrade. Lawmakers have argued that the planes are part of Pakistan’s defense strategy against neighboring India but that they have little use in counterinsurgency efforts against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.

Legislation imposing benchmarks for political and military progress in Iraq were largely dismissed by the Bush administration and ultimately disregarded even by Congress as violence increased and then diminished following an increase in U.S. troop numbers.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Berman also questioned the administration’s plan to channel the Pakistan military assistance program — including funding for training and the purchase of U.S. helicopters and a range of counterinsurgency weaponry — through the Pentagon rather than through the traditional route of the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program.

The direct military control has been used only in situations where U.S. troops are involved in combat, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This gets very bureaucratic,” Berman said, “but we think there’s an important oversight there. The military are obviously very involved in what equipment is going through, but at the end of the day it is part of a relationship with Pakistan that should be channeling . . . through the FMF program,” with “our State Department on top of it.”

Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said his government welcomed Berman’s initiative “to create a framework for enhanced and long-term partnership. We look forward to engaging members of the U.S. Congress on some of the specific provisions of the proposed bill.

“At the same time,” Haqqani said, “it might be prudent not to restrict security assistance. Because Pakistan’s armed forces will be the spearhead in the actual fight with the terrorists.”

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Obama to Host Talks With Afghan, Pakistani Presidents

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan will travel to Washington early next month for meetings with President Obama as the administration struggles against daunting hurdles to implement its new strategy for the region.

The visits, on May 6 and 7, will elevate to summit level a trilateral exchange begun by the administration with senior aides from each government in late February. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will meet separately with Obama, and the three will also sit down together, officials said yesterday.

The administration considers cooperation between the two often-estranged governments crucial to the success of its Afghanistan-Pakistan policy. The Pakistani side of their shared border harbors a growing network of extremist groups, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, providing sanctuary for fighters combating U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and launching terrorist attacks inside Pakistan itself.

Obama has emphasized that the two countries should be considered in a single strategic framework. But administration officials have made clear that their deepest and most immediate concern is Pakistan, where the stability of the civilian government and its ability to withstand the extremist onslaught is increasingly in doubt. Worries were heightened last week when Zardari approved an agreement authorizing sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley — just 100 miles west of the capital, Islamabad — after the Pakistani military failed to rout Taliban fighters there.

With no U.S. military forces on the ground in Pakistan, the administration has fashioned a policy based on diplomatic backing for the civilian government, close mentoring and support of the Pakistani military, aerial-drone-launched missile attacks on terrorism targets, and vastly increased economic assistance focused on the western Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

At a Pakistan donors conference in Tokyo on Friday, the administration pledged $1 billion in economic aid in anticipation that Congress will approve a $7.5 billion, five-year package of assistance along with $3 billion in military equipment and training. A bill authorizing the aid has already been introduced in the House, although with conditions that the administration and the Pakistanis find too restrictive.

In what administration officials considered a bright spot at the conference, Iran also pledged $350 million. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the gathering that his country was worried about the deteriorating situation in the region, echoing the Obama administration’s charge that its predecessor failed to develop a coherent strategy for the Afghan war. “We would not have been witnessing the current situation in Pakistan if appropriate policies had been pursued in Afghanistan over the last seven years,” Mottaki said.

The administration is facing the beginning of the spring fighting season against Taliban forces in Afghanistan, as well as presidential elections there in August. Obama has already authorized the deployment of 21,000 additional U.S. troops and hundreds of new diplomatic and other civilian officials.

In an effort to centralize control over uncoordinated U.S. development, counter-narcotics and governance efforts in Afghanistan, the administration also plans to appoint an overseer of all U.S. civilian assistance programs there. The choice for the post, Earl Anthony Wayne, is currently the U.S. ambassador to Argentina and previously served as assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week also ordered her department to review all U.S. Agency for International Development contracts in Afghanistan before they can be signed. Last week, the department opened an investigation of its largest Afghanistan contractor, Falls Church-based DynCorp International, following allegations of drug abuse among its employees.

 
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Reservists Might Be Used in Afghanistan To Fill Civilian Jobs

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 23, 2009

Military reservists may be asked to volunteer to fill many of the hundreds of additional U.S. civilian positions in Afghanistan called for in the Obama administration’s strategy for that nation and neighboring Pakistan, officials said yesterday.

Although the State Department is still recruiting agronomists, engineers, accountants and other experts for Afghanistan, “pressure coming from the president for action is making us consider that some of the people might come from the reserves,” one senior administration official said.

In announcing his plan last month, Obama called for a “dramatic” increase in civilian aid and development workers, and the goal is to send several hundred by the end of this fiscal year. The administration’s supplemental funding bill submitted to Congress last week requested $80 million to pay for transferring some State Department employees from other postings, recruiting volunteers from other government agencies such as the Agriculture and Justice departments, and hiring others in newly established “fulltime, temporary” government positions.

But while those efforts are proceeding, “there has been widespread, legitimate concern that AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] and other civilian agencies would not be able to put enough people there fast enough,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week discussed the possibility of identifying reservists in civilian fields and inviting them to volunteer for the jobs provided certain conditions could be met.

The State Department, officials said, wants the reservists to dress in civilian clothes and to report up a civilian chain of command reaching to an overall civilian coordinator who would supervise all nonmilitary U.S. programs in Afghanistan. Clinton plans to name Foreign Service officer Earl Anthony Wayne, currently U.S. ambassador to Argentina, to the post.

State has also asked the Pentagon to consider a flexible rotation schedule that would allow for assignments longer than the several months that mark many reserve tours. Officials said that it was not yet clear whether any of the State Department’s requests were possible within military reserve rules and that Gates had assigned a study of the issue.

Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal yesterday presented the administration and the World Bank with a 40-page plan requesting at least 700 new civilian experts from the United States and elsewhere to work on government capacity-building. “To assist the United States and other allies in deploying a ‘civilian surge,’ ” Zakhilwal wrote in a cover letter to the plan, his government had compiled its own list of needed “technical advisers,” included in the document.

Although the administration expects to increase overall investment in U.S. “capacity to deploy civilian expertise abroad . . . we’re going to be playing a game of catch-up” until that is accomplished, Michelle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, said Tuesday in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For now, she said, “we are going to be looking to a whole host of stopgap measures.”

 
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Taliban Advance, Pakistan’s Wavering Worry Obama Team

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 24, 2009

The Obama administration reacted with increasing alarm yesterday to ongoing Taliban advances in Pakistan, warning the Pakistani government that failure to take action against the extremists could endanger its partnership with the United States as well as American strategy in neighboring Afghanistan.

“The news over the past several days is very disturbing,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, adding that the administration “is extremely concerned” and that the issue was taking “a lot” of President Obama’s time.

Obama held a White House meeting on the subject with Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative to the region, officials said, and also brought it up in a separate session with congressional leaders. Holbrooke spoke by telephone to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates publicly expressed frustration with reports that Taliban forces had moved eastward into two new districts of the country this week with no apparent resistance from government forces, bringing them within 60 miles of the Pakistani capital.

While “some” Pakistani leaders recognize the threat, Gates told reporters during a visit to Camp Lejeune, N.C., “it is important that they not only recognize it, but take the appropriate actions to deal with it.” Pakistani stability is central to U.S. efforts in neighboring Afghanistan, Gates said, “and it is also central to our future partnership with the government in Islamabad.”

During a second day of congressional testimony, Clinton tried to calm anxious lawmakers while acknowledging she shares their worries. “We have made these concerns abundantly clear” to Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, she said.

For the past several months, Zardari’s government has been enmeshed in other domestic political turmoil; his popularity has dropped to the low double digits while ratings for his principal political opponent, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, rose to 83 percent in recent polls. The administration has urged the resolution of those problems so that more attention can be paid to the rising extremist threat.

It has called on Zardari to come up with his own strategic plan, with integrated economic and military components, to match Obama’s, and is pressing the Pakistani military to refocus the bulk of its attention away from the eastern border with India, its traditional adversary, toward the Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the west.

But there is little direct action the administration can take beyond exhorting the Pakistanis and redoubling efforts to quickly implement key elements of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy Obama announced late last month.

Holbrooke and Jacob J. “Jack” Lew, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, spent much of yesterday meeting with members of Congress to build support for the plan to quickly and significantly increase development and military assistance to Pakistan, and to reassure them the administration is on top of the fast-moving situation.

The president is also “pressing” his national security team, “making sure we’re updating our policy and strategy to reflect the changing situation,” one senior administration official said.

The administration is recalibrating the schedule drawn up for a May 6 and 7 meeting here among Obama and the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The trilateral summit, Holbrooke said yesterday, “was conceived in an atmosphere that has now changed significantly, and the focus is increasingly on Pakistan.”

Another administration official acknowledged some concern over Zardari’s planned week-long absence from home for his visit here, given Pakistan’s history of military coups and government overthrows while the head of state was outside the country.

“We inquired twice” whether Zardari was concerned about leaving Pakistan, this official said. “Both times we were told no.” Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, will remain in Pakistan during Zardari’s trip, the official said.

The Pakistan government has downplayed U.S. concerns that the situation is spinning out of control. “In any counterinsurgency effort, there are changing ground realities,” said Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani. “The important thing is the overall picture, and in Pakistan, as a whole, the government remains firmly in control and Pakistan continues to have the military capability of dealing with the threat.”

When Zardari arrives in Washington early next month, Haqqani said, “he will share Pakistan’s national counterterrorism strategy and will also list the areas where Pakistan looks forward to American support and cooperation in implementing that strategy.” Included in the expected support is U.S. provision of helicopters, night-combat equipment and communications gear with which Pakistan says it can better fight the extremists.

In a visit to Marine units preparing to depart for Afghanistan from Camp Lejeune, Gates emphasized the urgent need for congressional support for a defense budget that shifts billions in spending toward equipment designed for counterinsurgencies. He repeated his call for cuts in weapons systems as part of the Pentagon’s proposed $534 billion 2010 defense budget.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

 
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Taliban Advance in Pakistan Prompts Shift by U.S.

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The Pakistani government’s inability to stem Taliban advances has forced the Obama administration to recalibrate its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy a month after unveiling it.

What was planned as a step-by-step process of greater military and economic engagement with Pakistan — as immediate attention focused on Afghanistan — has been rapidly overtaken by the worsening situation on the ground. Nearly nonstop discussions over the past two days included a White House meeting Monday between Obama and senior national security officials and a full National Security Council session on Pakistan yesterday.

A tripartite summit Obama will host here next week with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will center heavily on the Pakistan problem rather than the balance originally intended, officials said.

New consideration is being given to a long-dormant proposal to allow U.S. counterinsurgency training for Pakistani troops somewhere outside the country, circumventing Pakistan’s refusal to allow American “boots on the ground” there. “The issue now is how do you do that, where do you do it, and what money do we have to do it with?” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity yesterday.

On Capitol Hill, anxious lawmakers proposed breaking $400 million out of the administration’s pending $83 billion supplemental spending request in order to fund immediate counterinsurgency and economic assistance to Pakistan. “We could pass it really quickly, in just a matter of days,” said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who just returned from Pakistan. Waiting for debate and approval of the entire supplemental, Kyl said, “could be too little, too late.”

“Certainly, we are discussing with the administration what is needed, and I think that all of us are very concerned about what’s happening in Pakistan,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters.

The administration shares that concern, even as it is struggling to retain control of its own policy and its full spending request, including money for the Iraq and Afghan wars and other issues. “Our position is that if, in fact, some money would be able to be fast-tracked so that we could get started earlier [in Pakistan], given the urgency of the situation, that’s a good idea,” the senior administration official said. “But we wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize” the rest of the supplemental. “We do not support anything that derails that.”

The breakout proposal, the subject of a meeting of national security deputies at the White House yesterday, appeared to have lost steam by the end of the day. But administration officials said they were hopeful that some provision could be agreed on to make funds more quickly available for Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, returned last weekend from his 11th trip to Pakistan “more concerned than I’ve seen him after any prior visit,” a Pentagon official said, adding that at a meeting with senior aides Monday, “the word [Mullen] used was ‘alarmed.’ “

“We’re not saying the sky is falling,” the official said, “but it’s raining pretty hard in Pakistan.”

The level of concern — always high where nuclear-armed and politically tumultuous Pakistan is concerned — began to rise two weeks ago, when the Pakistani Parliament passed an agreement to authorize sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley, about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad. Taliban forces had expanded in the area, and the agreement was part of a deal in which the government said the extremists would lay down their arms.

Instead, the Taliban advanced farther east, to within 60 miles of the capital, with no apparent government resistance. On Sunday, after increasingly stern public statements from the administration and some Taliban withdrawal, the government launched a military offensive in the area, backed yesterday by helicopter gunships.

But on the eve of Obama’s first meeting with Zardari, tensions were running high between the two governments. “We see more duplicity than ambivalence” about the fight against extremists, one participant in the administration’s strategic review of the region said of Pakistani authorities.

Other officials expressed skepticism that the Pakistani offensive would continue. “The test of all these Pakistani military operations — because we’ve seen them from time to time in the past — is always their sustainability,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said.

Beyond this week’s combat, officials said they were still looking for Pakistan to begin moving large quantities of its half-million-strong military away from the eastern border with India, its historic adversary, and toward Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the west.

Staff writers Scott Wilson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Options in Pakistan Limited
Nation Rife With Security Issues, Infighting, Anti-American Sentiment

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 4, 2009

As Taliban forces edged to within 60 miles of Islamabad late last month, the Obama administration urgently asked for new intelligence assessments of whether Pakistan’s government would survive. In briefings last week, senior officials said, President Obama and his National Security Council were told that neither a Taliban takeover nor a military coup was imminent and that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was safe.

Beyond the immediate future, however, the intelligence was far from reassuring. Security was deteriorating rapidly, particularly in the mountains along the Afghan border that harbor al-Qaeda and the Taliban, intelligence chiefs reported, and there were signs that those groups were working with indigenous extremists in Pakistan’s populous Punjabi heartland.

The Pakistani government was mired in political bickering. The army, still fixated on its historical adversary India, remained ill-equipped and unwilling to throw its full weight into the counterinsurgency fight.

But despite the threat the intelligence conveyed, Obama has only limited options for dealing with it. Anti-American feeling in Pakistan is high, and a U.S. combat presence is prohibited. The United States is fighting Pakistan-based extremists by proxy, through an army over which it has little control, in alliance with a government in which it has little confidence.

The tools most readily at hand are money, weapons, and a mentoring relationship with Pakistan’s government and military that alternates between earnest advice and anxious criticism. As criticism has dominated in recent weeks — along with reports that the administration is wooing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s principal political opponent, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif — the partnership has grown strained.

“What are the Americans trying to do, micromanage our politics?” a senior Pakistani official said testily. “This is not South Vietnam.”

As Zardari arrives this week for his first official visit with Obama — part of a tripartite summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai — the administration has asked Congress to quickly approve hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency military aid for Pakistan. That money, and billions more over the next several years, is to come with new authority for the Defense Department to decide what to spend it on.

Obama has also backed a five-year $7.5 billion economic assistance package and is resisting congressional efforts to impose strict conditions on any aid to Pakistan. Last month, the administration orchestrated an international donors’ conference in Tokyo that netted $5.5 billion in pledges for Pakistan.

When he sits down with Zardari on Wednesday at the White House, Obama will urge him to put more effort into building domestic support by meeting critical public needs and to resolve his differences with Sharif and others so that he can concentrate on governing, according to officials who discussed sensitive and fluid Pakistan issues on the condition of anonymity.

Of particular concern are hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who have been displaced by fighting in the North-West Frontier Province, U.S. officials said.

Security proposals up for discussion with Zardari and other members of his high-level delegation include counterinsurgency training for Pakistani army troops at U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, the United States or elsewhere. The administration wants to expand a small, in-country training force — now limited to about 70 Americans — that is working with the Frontier Corps, the local, poorly armed force in the border regions.

As 17,000 additional U.S. troops deploying to southern Afghanistan this spring and summer begin to push Taliban fighters toward the Pakistan border, there are hopes the extremists can be trapped in “hammer and anvil” operations with Pakistani forces in the southern province of Baluchistan. Right now, however, Pakistan fields only one army brigade and about 40,000 minimally trained and equipped Frontier Corps members in the vast region, according to U.S. officials.

In deference to Pakistani objections, the administration has not initiated covert ground attacks, approved by the Bush administration last year, in mountain villages farther to the north, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where it believes high-value al-Qaeda figures are located. But Obama authorized stepped-up attacks on the area by missiles launched from unmanned drone aircraft.

Although the missile attacks are privately approved by the Pakistani government, despite its public denunciations, they are highly unpopular among the public. As Zardari’s domestic problems have grown, the Obama administration last month cut the frequency of the attacks. Some senior U.S. officials think they have reached the point of diminishing returns and the administration is debating the rate at which they should continue.

Always simmering, administration concern about Pakistani governance rose sharply last month when the Parliament approved an agreement between regional authorities and the Taliban to authorize sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley, located about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad. Rather than lay down their arms in exchange, Taliban forces began moving eastward. By the third week in April, they had established a presence in Buner district, 60 miles from the capital, with no apparent government resistance.

The day after the Buner reports surfaced, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton infuriated the Pakistani government by telling Congress it was “abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists” and that the situation posed a “mortal threat” to the world.

“Absolutely, they’re getting irritated,” a senior U.S. official said of the Pakistanis. Clinton, he said, “knows she went too far” in her unscripted testimony. “But on the other hand,” he said, “it was that kind of statement that helped wake up the Pakistanis.”

A Pakistani military offensive in the Buner region was underway Tuesday, even as Obama’s national security team met at the White House, and continued through the weekend. Administration officials said they were watching to see whether the military followed through or would simply stop without finishing the job, as it has in the past.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s government says it is in no mood for criticism or conditions on aid. After “billions of dollars were poured into Pakistan under the dictatorship” of Gen. Pervez Musharraf by the Bush administration, Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani said yesterday, the Obama administration has produced little but promises and disapproval of the democratically elected government.

“It is unfair to blame the civilian leadership that is bravely mobilizing the nation against terrorism when it is our American partners who have also slowed us down in the war effort by slowing down the flow of assistance,” Haqqani said. “We trust that President Obama’s emphasis on Pakistan will also translate promises into deliverables.”

“You can’t spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “and then wonder why the effort in Pakistan is lagging behind.”

 
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U.S. Stresses Support For Pakistan’s Zardari

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Obama administration “unambiguously” supports Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, even as it puts “the most heavy possible pressure” on his government to fight extremists in the country, Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Congress yesterday.

“We do not think Pakistan is a failed state,” Holbrooke testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But, he added, “we think it’s a state under extreme test from the enemies who are also our enemies.”

Holbrooke spoke as Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed publicly and privately yesterday for increased U.S. aid and understanding. The two leaders are in Washington this week for a two-day summit, during which they will meet separately and together with President Obama.

When the three sit down today, Obama will tell Zardari and Karzai that they “have to work together, despite their issues and their history. That’s just what has to be done,” said one of two senior administration officials who briefed reporters at the White House about the visits on the condition of anonymity.

The administration is anxious for Pakistan and Afghanistan, often less than friendly neighbors, to cooperate more on preventing extremists from crossing their joint border. But it has serious, separate issues with each government.

In Pakistan, Zardari and the military have balked at undertaking an all-out offensive against Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries along the country’s mountainous western border, from which attacks are launched on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Pakistani troops and aircraft have attacked Taliban fighters occupying territory within 60 miles of Islamabad, the capital, in recent days [Story, A6], but U.S. officials have worried that the military will ultimately be unable or unwilling to hold recaptured areas and establish government control.

On CNN yesterday, Zardari dismissed the seriousness of the threat to his government. “My government is not going to fall because this one mountain is taken by one group or the other,” he said.

Holbrooke and other officials were at pains yesterday to voice strong support for Zardari as the administration sought to strike a balance between shoring up his government and pressuring it. The administration wants Zardari to stop bickering with his domestic political opponents, to pay more attention to governance and to display more counterinsurgency zeal.

“We are working very hard to help the Pakistani government in its moment of need,” the senior administration official said. “We are not abandoning it, nor are we distancing ourself from Asif Ali Zardari.”

The administration has asked Congress to quickly approve hundreds of millions of dollars for economic and military assistance for Pakistan this year.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, spoke at length Sunday with Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, urging him to continue the anti-Taliban offensive in the areas northwest of Islamabad.

“Their expectation is to consolidate [their gains] in the next 48 hours or so,” a second administration official said of the Pakistan military. Beyond that, the official said, “we will watch intently in the weeks ahead and months ahead” to assess whether the government is able to move into extremist-held areas.

Zardari and his government have grown irritated with U.S. criticism, and have questioned the slowness of American assistance. Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer whether he was concerned about the level of U.S. support, Zardari said, “I am thankful for the support that I got and thankful to the people of America to give their tax dollars to us. But I need more support.”

Officials offered less enthusiastic backing for Karzai in Afghanistan and have left the door open for a competitor in elections scheduled for August. But they acknowledge that the emergence of new political leadership is unlikely.

 
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In Frenetic White House, A Low-Key ‘Outsider’

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 7, 2009

President Obama’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, looks for rare opportunities to ride his bike from his McLean home to work at the White House. On occasion, he has pedaled back across the Potomac River for lunch. He tries to end his workday at 7 p.m.

In recent weeks, Jones has been portrayed in foreign policy articles and blogs as too measured and low-key to keep pace with the hard chargers working late hours in the West Wing. Some senior White House officials questioned early on whether Jones, 65, a retired four-star Marine general who barely knew Obama before the election, would succeed among younger staffers whose relationships with the president were forged during the long and arduous campaign.

“He’s not very visible,” said I.M. Destler, co-author of a recent book on national security advisers. “I’m a skeptic on whether Jones has the sort of flexibility and ability” required by Obama, Destler said.

White House officials who cited early misgivings, more stylistic than substantive, insisted they have now disappeared. But Jones acknowledges that the road has not always been smooth, and he appears more comfortable than some of his administration colleagues in saying they still have some distance to travel.

It is “absolutely” fair to say that it has taken some time for him and his colleagues to get used to each other, Jones said in an interview Tuesday. “From this West Wing, in particular, because this is Obama Nation, right? True? This is where the Obama election campaign came, landed, en masse.”

Jones, reserved and ramrod straight, with a steady, blue-eyed stare, is the unquestioned odd man out at the White House in both background and personality. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, is known as hyperactive and hyperbolic. On the National Security Council (NSC), chief of staff Mark Lippert and strategic communications director Denis McDonough are intense, stay-late-at-the-office foreign policy experts whose ties to Obama are long and deep. Deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon has an extensive history with the Democratic Party and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’m not only an outsider, but

I’m a 20-years-older-than-anybody-around outsider,” Jones said. “I’m a former general. And it took me a while to get the president to call me by my first name. Now, I’m ‘Hey, you,’ ” he said with a laugh.

“But there is a generational thing here. There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to a certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.”

“My calculus was that it would take six months,” Jones said. “We’re about halfway there, and I think every week gets a little better.”

Despite early predictions that Obama’s “team of rivals” would clash, Jones by all accounts has facilitated smooth relations among high-profile Cabinet members.

In the White House, Jones said he has had to adjust to the relatively free flow of advice that Obama encourages. “When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the NSC to go with me,” he said. Now, he said, “I think the president and I are very comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be the shadow. I don’t have to be there all the time. I really have great people. I want them to be trusted.”

Jones has a distinguished résumé: Marine Corps commandant, supreme allied commander in Europe and, after his military retirement, a Bush administration envoy on Israeli-Palestinian security issues.

He has appeared at Obama’s side during trips overseas — and was instrumental, according to European officials, in resolving a potential blow-up during last month’s NATO summit over appointment of the new secretary general.

He regularly chairs meetings of the national security “principals,” which include the secretaries of state and defense. Yesterday, he conducted an unusual on-camera briefing for reporters after Obama’s meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Although the administration is barely more than 100 days old, Jones has launched an ambitious restructuring of the White House national security apparatus so it can focus on modern issues such as energy and climate change. He has emphasized the “bottom up” approach to decision-making that both he and Obama favor, Jones said, in which issues are first discussed in working groups, then brought to the “deputies committee” of representatives from Cabinet departments.

“If you want things to go beyond your tenure,” Jones said, “you’d better get a lot of buy-in into the big things.”

Jones said he feels no hesitation in differing with Cabinet members and offering both solicited and unsolicited advice, with others and privately, to the president.

As Obama was mulling his first major foreign policy decision in February — whether to increase U.S. military deployments to Afghanistan this year — Jones said he intervened with questions about the information supplied by the Pentagon.

The numbers were “out of whack,” Jones recalled. Beyond the requested 17,000-strong combat force, the military had included additional “enablers” that it said were required for logistical and other support functions. “I understand these ratios and what they ought to look like, and when they seemed a little high, I pushed back on it,” he said. The numbers were reduced.

When Obama was under pressure to review the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay service members, Jones said he went “to see him personally on it” and advised him not to add another controversy to his already-full plate. The president, Jones said, took his advice.

Jones “is not over-excited over sudden crises and problems; he has a sort of steady strategic perspective,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. But Brzezinski questioned whether anyone at the White House can “get the president to exploit what is unique about the presidency, which is the ability to take grand initiatives.”

Jones said he is “not used to being in the center of these things. . . . But if I’m not living up to other people’s views of what the national security adviser should look like he’s doing . . . like my hair is on fire all the time,” so be it. “I did that in my life, a couple of generations ago, I was a gung ho major, and a gung-ho lieutenant colonel, and I sacrificed my family life for my career.”

If he can reform the NSC’s structure and process, he said, “then everybody can go home and have dinner with their families. Because they’ll have enough depth and robustness so that we can tee up issues — not constantly in a crisis mode.”

Staff writers Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.

 
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Presidents of Pakistan, Afghanistan Meet With Senators Weighing Aid

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 8, 2009

Senators who will shortly be voting on massive aid packages for Afghanistan and Pakistan grilled the presidents of both countries yesterday about their dedication to the fight against extremists and the capabilities of their democratic governments.

“The focus has not been as intense as it ought to be,” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, who co-hosted a closed-door lunch for the presidents attended by 24 of his colleagues. After listening to the two leaders, Kerry told reporters, “We’re very, very hopeful now that that is going to change.”

Others were less enthusiastic. Compared with their usual meetings with heads of state, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said in an interview, it was “very, very frank.” But “my guess is they left the room with a lot less support than they came into the room with,” Corker said of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Both leaders, Corker said, gave “vague” answers and seemed less committed to the counterinsurgency fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda than the United States is.

The guest list for the lunch included the large delegations of cabinet ministers and other officials accompanying the presidents on their two-day summit here with President Obama and other U.S. officials, including CIA Director Leon Panetta, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary of State Jacob J. “Jack” Lew. Also attending were Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to the two countries.

Holbrooke, who has shepherded the leaders to meetings with Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that the summit had been a “huge step forward” and that “people are working more closely together.” Many of the ministers from neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan “had never met each other before. Working operations are beginning.” Yesterday’s lunch, Holbrooke said, “helps increase the critical communication between President Zardari, President Karzai and members of Congress.”

Kerry and Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, have co-sponsored an administration-backed bill to triple civilian U.S. aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion over the next five years. The administration has also asked for significantly increased development assistance to Afghanistan and stepped-up military funding for both, in addition to deploying 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan this year.

Kerry described the lunch as “unprecedented” and the questions as “very pointed and very direct.” According to several participants, there was significant back and forth, although Corker said he is “going to want to know a lot more” before voting to approve the requested aid. Karzai responded flippantly to a question about women’s rights from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), saying he had picked a running mate who would please female voters. This week, he announced that former defense minister and warlord Mohammed Fahim would be his vice presidential running mate for elections this summer.

Asked about Pakistan’s porous border with Afghanistan, which allows Taliban fighters to easily pass through, Zardari pushed back, Corker said, noting that the United States was unable to control its border with Mexico.

In response to a question about the Pakistani intelligence service’s support of the Taliban, another attendee recalled, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, gave an impassioned defense of the service and its history and said its only current contact with extremists was through intelligence sources.

At the news conference after the lunch of chicken, salad and raspberry tart, Karzai referred to Zardari as “my dear brother” and said of the summit that he was “very, very happy with this engagement.”

Zardari, who has pressed the Obama administration for increased aid, said: “I think the realization in the world that we have to form more cooperation, to defeat this enemy that we all jointly face, is coming home. And we are taking advantage of this position.”

 
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Pakistan Reinforcing Army in Taliban Battle

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 9, 2009

Pakistan has told the Obama administration that it is sending an additional six army brigades to join a major government offensive against Taliban forces in the northwestern part of the country, and it has pledged to hold territory where extremist forces are dislodged, Pakistani and U.S. officials said yesterday.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said domestic support for the offensive, combined with U.S. assistance, would allow the effort to succeed where two previous military drives into the Swat Valley and surrounding territory failed.

In an interview yesterday with Washington Post reporters and editors, Zardari did not confirm the movement of the brigades, some of which were said by others, on the condition of anonymity, to be moving from Punjab province and the country’s border with India.

But the United States and Pakistan, Zardari said, had “gotten to an understanding where we will be supported in all fields.” During a White House meeting with Zardari on Wednesday, President Obama said, “I think we agreed that Pakistan needs more help.” Congress has questioned whether Pakistan will effectively use the billions in economic and military assistance Obama has requested.

To aid in the attacks, the Pentagon is speeding spare parts, ammunition and other equipment for Pakistan’s fleet of aging Cobra attack helicopters. An earlier Pakistani request for more Cobras, to add to its existing fleet of two to three dozen, has been slowed, officials said, by the fact that the helicopters are no longer in production and aircraft must be located and refurbished.

Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai traveled to Washington this week for separate meetings with Obama and for a tripartite summit that the administration hoped would improve relations between the South Asian neighbors. Their mutual suspicion has undercut their overlapping fight against extremists.

Administration officials pronounced the White House meetings — and separate sessions among senior Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, agriculture and other Cabinet-level officials — a success. But they cautioned that they would await follow-through on promises made by both leaders.

“The tension has gone. Reality has set in,” Karzai told reporters yesterday. Volubly upbeat during public appearances, Karzai repeatedly referred to Zardari as his “brother.”

Administration officials said the two governments agreed to strengthen cooperation on a number of fronts, including trade and transit, as well as monitoring the traffic of Taliban fighters across their joint frontier. They said they would add two border coordination centers to the one currently in existence.

U.S. military and intelligence officials worry that Taliban forces pushed out of Afghanistan by reinforced U.S. troops this summer will flow unimpeded into Pakistan, as they did during U.S. operations in Afghanistan in 2001. The Pakistanis, a senior Obama administration official said, need to “get ready for the influx . . . into western Pakistan, particularly Baluchistan” province.

In the interview, Zardari described the $15 billion sent to Pakistan over the past decade in counterterrorism reimbursements and direct assistance as only a small fraction of the funds provided recently to failing U.S. financial institutions, adding that “the situation in Pakistan is much more important.” The Pakistani economy needs to be boosted, he said, with “some form of a permanent stimulus.”

Zardari said that no one in the U.S. government had asked him for more information about the location and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. “By and large, we’ve always had a relationship that is quite comfortable in the sense that people who need to know, know.” Asked if any American officials knew “everything” about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, he responded: “Every country has a right to their own sovereignty. We don’t ask you personal questions, and you don’t ask us.”

He said he continued to request that Pakistan be given its own fleet of U.S. aerial drones to attack Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries.

“Maybe some people here would not like to go to that direction,” he said, “but . . . I keep asking.”

Zardari said his first meeting with Obama since the U.S. inauguration was “a very good start.”

 
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Khalilzad Said to Be in Talks With Karzai
Former U.S. Envoy Reportedly Seeking Key Advisory Role in Afghan Government

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who served as ambassador to Afghanistan in the Bush administration, has been holding discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about becoming a senior adviser to his government, U.S. officials said.

If the two men were to reach agreement on such a role, it could complicate the Obama administration’s tense relationship with Karzai, injecting a savvy veteran diplomat with a deep understanding of the U.S. government into the mix on the Afghan side. At the same time, if Khalilzad were able to make Karzai’s government more effective, it would help the White House achieve its objective of increasing stability in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad and Karzai have exchanged memoranda outlining the job, according to one senior U.S. official. The official described the position as akin to a chief executive officer, who would work with Karzai to improve the management of his government, which is widely regarded as ineffective and corrupt. But Khalilzad disputed that characterization yesterday, saying in a brief telephone interview that he is “not a candidate for the CEO of Afghanistan.”

Khalilzad and Karzai held inconclusive talks about ways to improve the effectiveness of the Afghan government during Karzai’s visit to Washington this month, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Describing Khalilzad’s possible role as that of a chief executive, the source said, “exaggerated what took place.”

For Karzai, bringing Khalilzad into his tent would neutralize him as a political rival. Khalilzad had considered running for Afghan president in elections scheduled for August, but he ruled out a bid, in part because he would have to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Nevertheless, he had been considering whether to work with Karzai’s political opponents before starting talks about a government position.

Karzai has struck deals with several of his rivals in recent weeks. He recently named Mohammed Fahim, a former warlord who had been a leading member of the principal opposition coalition, one of his two running mates.

The Karzai-Khalilzad discussions were first reported in yesterday’s editions of the New York Times. Khalilzad’s advisers said U.S. government officials divulged details of the talks to scuttle any deal.

Among the ideas discussed by Karzai and Khalilzad, said the source with knowledge of the meeting, was a proposal first floated by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to create the post of an unelected chief executive officer to help Karzai run the government. The two men also discussed other options, including forming executive councils to focus on domestic issues and the delivery of basic services.

“There’s no commitment yet, only an agreement to look at all the options,” the source said. “Karzai needs to consult with his cabinet and his advisers in Kabul before making any decision.”

Khalilzad said he has not met face to face with Karzai since his trip to Washington. Although Khalilzad traveled to Afghanistan this year, he said he has not been there in the past two months.

Khalilzad has held two meetings with the U.S. government’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and Karzai raised the idea with Holbrooke and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during his visit to Washington, according to U.S. officials.

Although Holbrooke and Clinton did not raise objections, saying the decision was Karzai’s to make, several U.S. officials involved in Afghanistan issues expressed little support yesterday for the proposal. They noted that it has received a chilly reception from Karzai’s ministers, who could see their influence attenuated under a deal with Khalilzad.

“This idea doesn’t have much enthusiasm at all within the administration,” a U.S. official said. “The administration’s approach to shoring up the Afghan government doesn’t involve Zal as the CEO.”

The U.S. officials questioned whether Khalilzad, who speaks the two principal languages in Afghanistan, possesses the management experience to restore order to Karzai’s dysfunctional government. Khalilzad, they said, was regarded as an effective ambassador to Kabul because he could sometimes solve problems by employing his direct access to President George W. Bush, an advantage he would not have under the new administration.

 
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Al-Qaeda Seen as Shaken in Pakistan
U.S. Officials Cite Drones, Offensive

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 1, 2009

Drone-launched U.S. missile attacks and Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in and around the Swat Valley have unsettled al-Qaeda and undermined its relative invulnerability in Pakistani mountain sanctuaries, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.

The dual disruption offers potential new opportunities to ferret out and target the extremists, and it has sparked a new sense of possibility amid a generally pessimistic outlook for the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although al-Qaeda remains “a serious, potent threat,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said, “they’ve suffered some serious losses and seem to be feeling a heightened sense of anxiety — and that’s not a bad thing at all.”

The offensive in Swat against its Taliban allies also poses a dilemma for al-Qaeda, a senior military official said. “They’re asking themselves, ‘Are we going to contest’ ” Taliban losses, he said, predicting that al-Qaeda will “have to make a move” and undertake more open communication on cellphones and computers, even if only to gather information on the situation in the region. “Then they become more visible,” he said.

It remains unclear whether U.S. intelligence and Pakistani ground forces can capitalize on such opportunities before they vanish. Chances to intercept substantive al-Qaeda communications or to take advantage of the movement of individuals are always fleeting, according to several officials of both governments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterinsurgency operations and the bilateral relationship.

Since last fall, the Predator drone attacks have eliminated about half of 20 U.S.-designated “high-value” al-Qaeda and other extremist targets along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials said. But the attacks have also killed civilians, stoking anti-American attitudes in Pakistan that inhibit cooperation between Islamabad and Washington.

“The need to establish a trusting, mutually beneficial U.S.-Pakistan partnership is pressing, yet the ability to do so is severely challenged by current events,” Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, wrote in a secret assessment on May 27. Petraeus’s statement was declassified late last week so it could become part of the Obama administration’s federal court appeal to block the release of detainee photographs showing abuse. The administration argues that the images would promote attacks against the United States worldwide.

“Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan . . . especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties,” Petraeus wrote. Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis oppose counterterrorism cooperation with the United States, he said, and “35 percent say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time.”

Judging by reports from the region through late April, the Obama administration authorized about four or five Predator attacks a month, maintaining a pace set by the Bush administration in August. The CIA, which does not publicly acknowledge the attacks, operates the aircraft, chooses the targets — ideally with the cooperation of Pakistani intelligence on the ground — and has White House authority to fire the missiles without prior consultation outside the intelligence agency. A senior Pakistani official said the rate has not diminished in recent weeks, although “you don’t hear so much about it” because the strike areas have been more isolated.

“There are better targets and better intelligence on the ground,” the Pakistani official said. “It’s less of a crapshoot.”

A second U.S. military official agreed, saying, “We’re not getting civilians, and not getting outrage beyond the usual stuff.”

The CIA considers the Predator the most effective tool available in a conflict in which the U.S. military is barred from conducting offensive operations on land or in the air. “We’re not at the point yet where there’s a sense that there’s anything that could replace that,” the second military official said of the drone attacks.

The Bush administration last summer also authorized covert U.S. ground raids inside Pakistan, but Pakistani outrage after a single attack in September led to their suspension. Although U.S. Special Operations teams are on continuous alert on the Afghan side of the border, the Obama administration has not authorized any ground operations in Pakistan, and the military is divided over their advisability. “We ask all the time,” said a military official who favors such raids. “They say, ‘Now is not a good time.’ “

The Special Operations ground teams do, however, have what this official called “standing orders” for an attack against the “big three” extremists thought to be in Pakistan — al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar — if conclusive intelligence became available and the timing was right.

The Pakistani military has its own problems maintaining the delicate balance between popular approval and public outrage over its counterinsurgency actions, even without the U.S. component. The ongoing offensive in Swat and surrounding areas has displaced more than 2 million citizens and destroyed homes and entire towns. U.S. officials have stressed that the Pakistani government must not only sustain the offensive but also win the loyalty of its people by resettling and rebuilding areas it has damaged and guaranteeing their future security.

The United States has contributed $110 million to assist Pakistanis displaced by the Swat fighting, and President Obama is dispatching special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke there this week to assess the situation. Obama “remains very concerned . . . and is pressing internally to make sure we are doing all we can, in concert with our Pakistani friends, to address this in an aggressive way,” according to a senior White House aide.

Beyond unease over public perceptions, a hesitant and often mistrustful relationship between the U.S. and Pakistani military and intelligence services continues to limit collaboration. Intelligence relations remain tense, officials from both governments said. Although the military cooperation has improved, “the Pakistan army still believes [the Americans] have ulterior motives,” the Pakistani official said, including undermining Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

Pakistan has accepted U.S. money, weaponry and limited training, but has rebuffed further U.S. efforts to assist its forces. Although the U.S. military flies Predators — separate from those directed by the CIA — along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is prohibited from overflying Pakistani territory. Thus far, the United States has turned down Pakistani requests for its own Predators.

This spring, U.S. forces offered a compromise: Pakistan could direct U.S. military Predators over areas of its choice, transmitting images directly into its own intelligence channels, according to officials from both governments. After Pakistan refused to allow a downlink to be established on its side of the border, the ground equipment was set up at a joint cooperation center on the Afghanistan side. Pakistani officials were taken to Turkey to observe a similar program.

“It was somewhere between March 10 or 15 that we flew the first ‘proof of concept’ mission for the Pakistanis and said, ‘Here’s how the system would work. Here’s how we can push data through your own networks so you would have capability available to you,’ ” said a U.S. military official familiar with the program. Although the Predators were armed, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, no offensive operations beyond intelligence-gathering were contemplated or authorized.

Twelve missions were flown over the tribal regions near the border. But in mid-April, the Pakistanis abandoned the project, the official familiar with the program said. “They just did not ask for additional flight information. Any time we have asked them if they need anything, they’ve come back and said, ‘No, thank you.’ “

The Pakistani official said that his government expected the program to continue eventually but that its attention was now focused farther east, on the ongoing Swat offensive. U.S. overflights there were not wanted, he said. “We don’t want the American UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] going so deep” into Pakistani territory, he said.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060103732_pf.html
McChrystal to Face Questions on Plans for Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee today to answer questions about the future — including his plans for reshaping U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan — and a past marked by both acclaim and controversy.

McChrystal’s confirmation hearing follows the abrupt dismissal three weeks ago of Gen. David D. McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. In announcing McKiernan’s replacement, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he wanted “fresh thinking” and “fresh eyes” on a conflict that has been spiraling steadily downward with the increase of Taliban attacks and U.S. and NATO casualties.

McChrystal, who serves as director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, led the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 until last year, overseeing the military’s elite counterinsurgency units in their search for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. Although most of the command’s activities remain cloaked in secrecy, JSOC forces were publicly praised by President George W. Bush in 2006 for tracking down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

At the time of McChrystal’s nomination for the Afghanistan command, Gates praised his “unique skill set in counterinsurgency,” and his appointment marks what Gates has outlined as a shift away from conventional military doctrine toward counterinsurgency tactics.

President Obama’s strategy, announced last month, expanded U.S. policy to treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theater and enlist support from other governments in the region. It set the goals of stabilizing Afghanistan and preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing a presence there. Filling in those broad strokes, however, has been left to McChrystal and his diplomatic partner in Kabul, new U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired Army general.

Senior military officials said they expected McChrystal to make rapid changes in the way U.S. and NATO forces are deployed in Afghanistan, in the command and control structure, and in the U.S. rotational structure that for years has depended largely on what forces remained available after military needs in Iraq were accommodated.

The current campaign plan, drawn up in October, leaves in place the division of Afghanistan into separate commands in the east, south, west and north, each assigned to a NATO country. U.S. forces are in charge in the east, although the 17,000 additional combat troops Obama authorized this year will be sent primarily to the south, the area with the most Taliban members and the most fighting.

A number of NATO and other countries participating in the multinational coalition in Afghanistan have prohibited their troops from performing certain combat duties. One option before McChrystal, a military official said, “is to lay out resources by tasks” rather than geography, allowing most non-U.S. forces to concentrate on training and other tasks, while U.S. combat forces deploy wherever they are needed. “You do a function, not a territory,” the official said.

McChrystal may also try to change rotational structures to build familiarity and expertise within a force that is likely to be fighting in Afghanistan for years to come. This would involve an effort to maintain continuity by assigning regular combat units to the same regions of Afghanistan where they have previously served, a practice now common only among Army Special Forces units.

Although the committee’s concentration in questioning McChrystal will focus largely on the new Afghanistan strategy, Senate aides said members are likely to raise questions about his earlier command of JSOC in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During his confirmation hearings for his current position, lawmakers probed McChrystal’s knowledge of alleged abuse of detainees by Special Operations task force members at a secret facility in Iraq known as Camp Nama and at other locations. According to a report released this spring by Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the Special Operations task force preparing to go to Iraq in February 2003 obtained a copy of interrogation procedures approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld for Afghanistan — where McChrystal had served as head of military operations between 2001 and 2003 — and “adopted [the procedures] verbatim.”

The procedures included stress positions, sleep deprivation and use of dogs and were the rule until October 2003. In May 2003, CIA general counsel Scott W. Muller told Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II that techniques used by the Special Operations unit interrogating detainees in Iraq were “more aggressive” than those used by the CIA on the same prisoners, according to Levin.

“There were concerns,” said one former Senate staff member familiar with last year’s McChrystal confirmation, adding that the committee “looked very closely at what he might have known about abuses that were occurring.” In the end, however, investigators were unable to find anything conclusive about McChrystal’s knowledge. “There was no trail leading back to him, but you couldn’t tell whether he knew something or not,” the former staff member said.

Ultimately, such concerns were overridden because McChrystal had an outstanding military record and was viewed as highly professional. “We felt confident he was not willy-nilly running around getting caught up in advocating these tactics” as some other officers had, the staff member said.

McChrystal was also in charge of JSOC when Army Ranger Pat Tillman was accidentally killed by his fellow soldiers during an ambush in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. That April 28, McChrystal approved the awarding of a Silver Star to Tillman. But the next day, while the U.S. public and Tillman’s family were still being told he had been shot by enemy fighters, McChrystal sent a high-level memo to his superiors to warn Bush and the Army secretary that it was “highly possible” that Tillman had in fact been killed by friendly fire.

The memo was controversial because it placed less priority on setting the record straight than on sparing the president and other officials embarrassment “if the circumstances of Cpl. Tillman’s death became public.” An investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general blamed McChrystal for making “inaccurate and misleading assertions” in awarding the Silver Star.

The Army decided not to sanction McChrystal, although several officers were punished for their role in the incident, including Lt. Gen. Phillip R. Kensinger Jr., head of the Army’s Special Operations Command, who was later demoted in rank. Within Army Special Operations circles, some officers felt it was unfair that Kensinger took the brunt of the blame while McChrystal escaped unscathed.

Others disagreed, however, saying that McChrystal deserved credit for being one of the first to alert military and political leaders to the likely friendly fire.

Staff writers Walter Pincus and Josh White contributed to this report.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303762_pf.html
Obama Seeks More Aid For Displaced Pakistanis

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 4, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 3 — President Obama has asked Congress for an additional $200 million in emergency aid for 3 million Pakistanis displaced by their government’s ongoing military offensive against Taliban extremists, U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke said Wednesday.

The new funding, to be added to Obama’s pending supplemental spending request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would nearly triple the amount of U.S. emergency aid for Pakistan. The administration authorized $110 million three weeks ago and is spending an additional $20 million for transportation and other purposes.

Speaking at a news conference with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari within hours of his arrival, Holbrooke said the “dramatic increase” in aid was “symbolic of our commitment and support.”

Holbrooke emphasized that his hastily arranged three-day visit was “at the personal instruction of President Obama” and reflected White House concern about Pakistanis fleeing heavy fighting in the Swat Valley and surrounding regions northwest of Islamabad, the capital.

The trip also reflects U.S. concern that the Pakistani government is unable to reestablish control, services and security in the areas it says have been cleared of Taliban fighters during the offensive, which began early last month. Administration officials say they worry that the Pakistani military will repeat past patterns in which extremists are pushed out of an area but quickly return after government forces withdraw.

In a meeting with officials from about three dozen international and nongovernmental aid organizations following his session with Zardari, Holbrooke pointedly asked, “Does the government have its act together on this?”

While avoiding direct criticism of the government’s effort, the aid workers described towns and cities in Swat and beyond that remain without electricity and water; severe shortages of food and medicine; and shuttered police stations. They said that many local officials have fled the fighting and that destruction in some areas is heavy.

Some residents who relied on military assurances that the Taliban had been cleared from the area have returned to find continued fighting and were forced to flee again. “They have issued statements saying the militants are not a problem anymore,” a representative of Save the Children said of the military. He and others suggested that an independent verification system be established to ascertain security situations in areas the military has pronounced cleared of the Taliban.

Humanitarian workers also said that up to 40 percent of the 200,000 people who have registered for assistance in displacement camps — and the millions who have been given refuge in the homes of friends, relatives and even strangers — have signed up twice and even three times for benefits. The World Food Program has said it will suspend food distributions for at least several days this week to institute a new registration system.

Holbrooke plans to visit several camps south of the Swat Valley on Thursday, and the Mardan region to the north, where hundreds of thousands are living in often squalid conditions with overburdened “host” families.

When Holbrooke leaves Pakistan late Friday after a day of government meetings, he will travel to the Persian Gulf states to try to persuade them to contribute to the emergency. At the news conference and in remarks to reporters traveling aboard his aircraft en route to Pakistan, he was sharply critical of regional governments that have not responded to urgent appeals for assistance from the United Nations and the United States.

At the same time, Holbrooke is eager to ensure that U.S. assistance — more than half of the aid Pakistan has received in the current emergency, assuming Congress approves the new funding — contributes to lessening anti-American sentiment here.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060404541_pf.html
Pakistan Says Tide Has Turned in Swat; Refugees Not So Sure

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 5, 2009

SWABI, Pakistan, June 4 — Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, declared Thursday that the tide had “decisively turned” in the military’s battle against Taliban extremists in the Swat Valley, but displaced Pakistanis in a sprawling tent city here said it was still unsafe for them to return home.

The Shah Mansour camp was one of two that Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, visited Thursday. Located south of Swat in North-West Frontier Province, its population has swelled to more than 20,000 in the three weeks since it was set up.

In a message he repeated several times, Holbrooke told the Pakistanis here that President Obama and the people of the United States cared about them and were helping their government to aid them. Even as he spoke, he said, Obama was reaching out to Pakistanis and other Muslims around the world in a major address in Cairo.

More than 3 million Pakistanis have fled their homes in fighting that began with a government offensive in the northwest early last month. Most have taken refuge with relatives, friends or strangers, but at least 200,000 are in hastily erected camps. The Obama administration is concerned that Pakistan’s leaders will risk a Taliban return by failing to permanently secure and reconstruct areas devastated by the fighting.

Holbrooke is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the camps, and he spent several hours meeting with aid workers and refugee representatives and walking among the rows of room-size tents baking in the 110-degree heat. When someone looked out of a tent, he asked whether he could come in, then stooped to enter amid staring children and their nervous parents.

He asked refugees where they had come from and what had happened to them. All told more or less the same story: They had fled their cool mountain towns and villages in a rush, bringing nothing but the clothes on their backs, as the army began its air and ground offensive against entrenched Taliban forces.

They had eventually arrived in this broad, arid flatland between the Indus and Kabul rivers, where Pakistani and international relief organizations established camps for them. They hated the heat and the food and had nothing to do but worry about what they had left behind.

“Are you glad the army came in, even though you were driven out of your homes?” Holbrooke asked a group of men gathered to greet him.

“We will be happy when there is peace,” one answered. A gray-bearded elder shouted from behind him, “We want this thing to end so we can go back to our own land. We are fed up with living like this.”

“America has given a lot of assistance and food,” Holbrooke said. “But it’s up to the Pakistan army to give you security. That’s not our job.”

On Wednesday, Holbrooke met with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on arriving in Islamabad, the capital, and announced that Obama had asked Congress for an additional $200 million in emergency aid for the crisis.

The army issued a news release Thursday quoting Kiyani as saying that “major population centers and roads leading to the valley have been largely cleared of organized resistance by the terrorists,” but that “isolated incidents of violence will continue and will have to be managed.”

But the people Holbrooke spoke to said the word from home was that the fighting was not over. There was no electricity, gas or food, they said, and they would not return until their safety was assured.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/08/AR2009060804267_pf.html
U.S. Troops Erred in Fight With Taliban That Killed Dozens of Civilians

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

U.S. military personnel on the ground in western Afghanistan and in the air failed to follow established procedures in a battle with the Taliban early last month that killed dozens of Afghan civilians, Pentagon and other Obama administration officials said yesterday.

During the battle, a Marine “quick-reaction” force came to the aid of an Afghan army unit attacking Taliban forces. Among the rules violated or poorly followed were poor initial planning for combat in a populated area and the dropping of a 2,000-pound bomb from a B-1 bomber on a building without proper visual and ground confirmation of the target, officials said.

Afghan government officials and human rights organizations have variously estimated that between 97 and 140 civilians were killed in the battle, in Farah province. Results of a major military investigation, presented yesterday to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, are to be released in summary form later this week, one Pentagon official said.

Civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes have been a major concern of Gates and other officials and are “one of the most dangerous things we face in Afghanistan, particularly with the Afghan people,” Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal told the Senate last week in his confirmation hearing as the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces there.

“We’ve got to recognize that that is a way to lose their faith and lose their support,” McChrystal said of the Afghans, “and that would be strategically decisive against us.” McChrystal said that he would review tactics and the use of air power upon his arrival in Afghanistan and would probably change procedures.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said yesterday that “there were some problems with the tactics, techniques and procedures” in the battle, including “the way in which close air support was supposed to have been executed,” including the fact that the B-1 bomber “had to break away from the target at least for a period.”

But Morrell said that there was “no indication” that the targeting gap itself “resulted in civilian casualties,” adding that it was just “one of the problems associated with these events.”

The number of civilian deaths, Morrell said, was “greatly outnumbered by the Taliban killed in this incident.” That conclusion appeared to be at odds with statements from other U.S. officials, including Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who have said the number of civilian deaths may never be known. The military initially estimated Taliban deaths at 60 to 65, along with 20 to 30 civilians.

Another Pentagon official said that the targeting lapse may not technically have caused civilian deaths — noting that Taliban forces had been seen running to and from the building and on its roof — but acknowledged that there was no ground confirmation of who was inside. “What caused civilians dying,” the official said, “was dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on them.”

Several officials who were not authorized to publicly discuss the results of the investigation spoke about the matter only on the condition of anonymity.

According to accounts they provided, the battle began when Afghan army forces — accompanied by embedded U.S. Army advisers — decided to move into a group of rural villages after receiving reports that several local officials had been beheaded by Taliban fighters. Although the “quick-reaction” force in the vicinity advised against the operation, its commander, an Iraq combat veteran, agreed to provide backup if the Afghan force encountered difficulties.

“The Afghans were going to do it anyway, come hell or high water,” one U.S. military official said.

When the Marines went to assist the Afghan force and came under fire themselves, officials said, they called in air support.

As the battle continued for several hours, initial air support from F-18 Hornets was supplanted by the arrival of a B-1, armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Such ordnance is standard but is normally used against groups of insurgents located in open areas, such as hillsides and fields.

Although the principal combat had ended by that time, observers aboard the aircraft spotted what appeared to be Taliban massing at a different building some distance away for a new assault. The large plane required what Morrell called an “elongated approach,” executing a U-turn and returning to the target to drop its bomb.

Following a similar incident last fall in neighboring Herat province, Gates and the current U.S. ground commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, put new procedures in place for the use of air power.

But in the Farah attack, “there were some procedures that weren’t necessarily completely followed or followed to the letter,” a Pentagon official said. “It was not a deliberate ignorance of existing rules but certainly a lack of knowledge of certain procedures” in planning and executing such operations. Another official said no senior-level U.S. commander was aware of the operation before it began.

Regardless of the procedures that are used, however, a senior administration official said, “if you’re in a fight in a built-up area, in a village or a populated area, you can say at that point in time, you’re not in a winning position.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/15/AR2009061503236_pf.html
Seeking Truth and Trust in Pakistan
Envoy Tries to Convince Refugees That U.S. Is on Their Side

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 16, 2009

SHAIKH SHAHZAID CAMP, Pakistan — U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, red-faced and sweaty, sat on the dirt floor of a stifling tent as Aslam Khan, a 38-year-old laborer, spoke haltingly of his family’s panicked flight from a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban forces in their mountain village, three hours north of here.

Holbrooke asked some questions about the Taliban but got few answers. “Are these all your children?” he asked with a smile. Yes, Khan said, he had nine.

“Your daughter is beautiful,” Holbrooke continued, nodding toward a young woman who sat quietly at the edge of the family. Her head was covered in a royal-blue scarf that revealed only her stunningly dark eyes.

“That’s not my daughter,” Khan said abruptly. After an awkward silence, the woman explained that she was a Pakistani police officer. It was unclear whether she was there to protect Holbrooke from the refugees, or to monitor what they told him.

In the conflict between Pakistan and Islamist extremists, a fight that has drawn in the United States, trust is in short supply. Holbrooke’s visit to this refugee camp and another earlier this month was an attempt to build confidence on all sides, and to seek some ground truth for the administration in a situation where it is sometimes as scarce as good faith. In the end, his presence boosted America’s image in Pakistan but brought the refugees no closer to home.

Pakistani authorities appear distrustful of the refugees, wary of their loyalties and of the possibility of Taliban infiltrators. The government and military, while ostentatiously grateful for U.S. aid and concern, continue to mistrust American motives and staying power.

The Obama administration says it is pleased with the Pakistani army’s progress but suspects that the government will not follow through on its pledges to quickly rebuild and protect the communities shattered by its six-week-old anti-Taliban offensive in the Swat Valley region. Without a plan to bring more than 2 million war-displaced Pakistanis safely home and a comprehensive strategy to push the offensive into al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries near the Afghan border, administration officials openly fret that the war both here and in Afghanistan will be lost.

The refugees seem to trust no one — not their government, which had left a vacuum of security and services in the northwest mountains that the Taliban filled; not the Taliban, which brutalized them and destroyed their schools; and certainly not the United States, seen by many of them as the instigator of the war and a threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty.

As part of its new strategy for the region, the administration considers Afghanistan and Pakistan a single theater of war and diplomacy. Yet circumstances in the two countries are vastly different. In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of U.S. troops, under new commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, are fighting the Taliban directly, and there are hundreds of American diplomatic and aid personnel to directly deliver U.S. assistance and expertise.

But Pakistan — a nuclear power where the anti-extremist battle is far more complicated and critical — is an arms-length operation. U.S. ground troops are not allowed, and the senior American military official in Pakistan, Rear Adm. Michael A. Lefevre, is largely restricted to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

Holbrooke’s foray into the camp was an attempt to convince the refugees that the United States was on their side but had no larger designs on their country.

“They do not have enough international assistance, by a long shot,” he told a local journalist trailing him through the camps. “The United States is providing more than half the aid. That’s not right. Where are the Europeans? Where is the OIC?” he said, referring to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The United States would give all it could in monetary and material aid, he told the refugees, but would send no troops. “It’s up to the Pakistani army to give you security,” he said. “It’s not our job.”

In interviews and at news conferences with the Pakistani media, Holbrooke parried questions about U.S. Predator drone attacks — he said he would not discuss them or Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — and Osama bin Laden’s charge of U.S. responsibility for destruction and deaths in Swat. “He’s living in a cave,” Holbrooke retorted, “so maybe he hasn’t seen the damage he’s done.”

In meetings with Pakistan’s government, military, judiciary and political opposition leaders, he pressed the message that getting the refugees back home safely was as crucial, and perhaps even more immediately important, as the ongoing military offensive. Temporary refugee camps tend quickly to become permanent, he argued. They are breeding grounds for public dissatisfaction and recruitment centers for extremists; getting people out of them is key to building confidence in the government.

“This has got to happen,” he told a senior U.S. official in an aside at a dinner for international relief workers during the trip. “Figure out whatever we need to do. Don’t worry about how much it costs.”

Holbrooke is no stranger to refugee camps. He toured them in Southeast Asia, where he began his career as a junior Foreign Service officer in South Vietnam. In the 1990s, as chief U.S. negotiator for the Dayton peace accords, he walked the camps in Bosnia. As United Nations ambassador in the Clinton administration, and an activist official and board member for nongovernmental organizations during the George W. Bush years, he saw refugee squalor across Africa.

The Pakistani refugees, from their tent cities on the hot, dry plain west of the Indus River, can see the high mountain ridge to the north, the gateway to their homes in the Swat Valley and the neighboring districts of Buner and Dir. If they are still here when the summer monsoons arrive next month, the camps will become muddy swamps.

For now, the parching heat and the absence of refugee possessions gives the canvas settlement a veneer of tidiness. There is little inside the tents, other than a bare light bulb, a plastic bucket, a few blankets and those who live there. Outside, there is no shade or vegetation; the white cloth, the hard ground and the people are all covered in the same monochromatic dust.

No one appeared to be starving or seriously ill, but no one had anything to do but wait. “I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse,” Holbrooke said as he stalked the orderly tent rows with a bottle of water in his hand, leaving heavily armed police commandos and shouting Pakistani journalists in his wake.

Facing a group of unsmiling, tired-looking men gathered under a communal meeting tent, he prodded for information to take home to U.S. intelligence analysts and White House policymakers. “The Taliban who came to you, were they people you knew? . . . Why do people join the Taliban? . . . Who was protecting you before the Taliban came? The army? The police? The Frontier Corps? . . . Why did all of this happen, in your opinion?”

A young, cleanshaven man answered warily. Many people welcomed the Taliban “for justice, to decide the cases” that languished, ignored, in government courts, he said. It was “mostly weak people in the community” who joined the extremists. “They were unemployed, and the Taliban paid them.” The others nodded.

But the refugees had more immediate concerns. They all wanted to go home, the men agreed, but it was not safe. Crops were ready for harvest, but there were still reports of fighting; there was no electricity, no water and much destruction in their villages. Local police and officials had fled; government threats to fire anyone who did not return to work had gone unheeded.

They were given meals in a communal dining tent, but they wanted to cook their own food. They had no pots and pans. The U.N. World Food Program supplied only wheat and oil — what could they make with that? Why were some families given electric fans and others not?

“Where is our government stipend?” one man shouted, referring to the 25,000 Pakistani rupees (about $300) the government has promised each displaced family.

“Where are our leaders?” asked another man. “Why aren’t they here?”

Holbrooke, his shirt sodden and a U.S. Agency for International Development cap on his head, waited patiently. “Thank you for being so honest and open,” he said. “We come from the United States. President Obama has sent us to see how we can help you.

“The most important thing is for you to go home. . . . I talked to your president yesterday. I will see him tonight. I will tell him what you said. . . . I wish we could do more.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002975_pf.html
U.S. General Sees Afghan Army, Police Insufficient
Obama Strategy May Need More Funds, U.S. Troops

By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 11, 2009

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama’s strategy for winning the war is to succeed, according to senior military officials.

Such an expansion would require spending billions more than the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. troops as trainers and advisers, officials said.

Obama has voiced strong commitment to the ongoing Afghan conflict but has been cautious about making any additional military resources available beyond the 17,000 combat troops and 4,000 military trainers he agreed to in February. That will bring the total U.S. force to 68,000 by fall.

Instead, Obama has emphasized the need to pay equal attention to other aspects of the U.S. effort, including bolstering Afghanistan’s economy and governance. Announcement of any additional military resources this year would raise questions from Congress and the American public about whether his overall strategy is working as intended.

McChrystal has not yet completed a 60-day assessment of the war due next month. But Defense Department officials here and in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said he has informed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in weekly updates, of the need to increase the Afghan force substantially, as was first reported yesterday on washingtonpost.com. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss findings that have not yet been made public.

The Afghan army is already scheduled to grow from 85,000 to 134,000, an expansion originally expected to take five years but now fast-tracked for completion by 2011. Several senior Pentagon officials indicated that an adequate size for the Afghan force may be twice the expanded number.

“There are not enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police for our forces to partner with in operations . . . and that gap will exist into the coming years even with the planned growth already budgeted for,” said a U.S. military official in Kabul who is familiar with McChrystal’s ongoing review.

Without significant increases, said another U.S. official involved in training Afghan forces, “we will lose the war.” Gates would have to agree to any request from McChrystal for additional funding or troops, and recommend it to Obama.

U.S. commanders in southern Afghanistan told National Security Adviser James L. Jones late last month that additional Afghan forces are needed. But Jones made clear to them that Obama wants to give the nonmilitary elements of his strategy the time and resources to progress before considering new troop requests.

In a telephone interview Thursday from Italy, where he was traveling with Obama, Jones said, “It was never my intention to stifle anybody in the future, but to remind everyone that we have a strategy. . . . And it would be good to see how we’re doing on all aspects of the strategy before we start focusing, as we always seem to do, on how more troops are going to solve the problem.”

Jones and others agreed, however, that both reconstruction and competent governance cannot be achieved until the Afghan people are secure. The strategy calls for U.S. and Afghan forces to clear areas of the Taliban and then hold them. Commanders leading a Marine operation launched last week to drive Taliban forces from Helmand province in southern Afghanistan are already asking: “Where are the Afghan troops? Where’s the economic plan? Where is the government?” Jones said.

About 4,000 Marines are involved in the current offensive, along with about 650 Afghan soldiers.

Despite concerns that too large a U.S. military presence would undermine efforts to eventually put the Afghans in charge of their own security, Jones said McChrystal is “perfectly within his mandate as a new commander to make the recommendation on the military posture as he sees it. We have to wait until he does that. There was never any intention on my visit [to Afghanistan] to say, ‘Don’t ever come in with a request or to put a cap on troops.’ “

The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Michael Mullen, told reporters Wednesday that the White House and the Pentagon are “committed to properly resourcing this endeavor.”

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declined to comment on any discussions Gates has had with McChrystal. “The secretary is waiting for General McChrystal to present his overall evaluation of the situation on the ground,” Morrell said. Gates, he said, “will review it thoroughly and consult a number of people before he goes to the president.”

The exact size of any request for additional money and troops will depend on how quickly U.S. commanders and Afghan government officials determine they can expand the Afghan forces and how much of the financial and personnel burden U.S. allies are willing to shoulder. The relatively high illiteracy rates in Afghanistan and the need for new training facilities and living quarters could also constrain efforts to accelerate the growth of the force. Another factor is the Afghan government’s limited ability to pay for the larger force over the long term.

“It would not surprise me if the ceiling for the Afghan army request was raised,” Jones said. “But what the new ceiling might be, and where the money comes from — there’s an international responsibility here, too. There are 47 countries” working in Afghanistan, he said, “and if there are additional expenses, it doesn’t mean all of it has to come from the United States.”

If Obama approves a request for more training resources, he will probably have to contend with sharp questions from Congress about whether his new strategy is working as intended. Many of his constituents on the left would like to see the Afghan war ended rather than expanded.

But McChrystal’s “argument, and ultimately the argument of the Defense Department,” will be that “if you only have one or two years to change the opinion of the people” of Afghanistan then “let’s get on with it,” one defense official said. McChrystal now has what the official called a “halo effect,” similar to that of Gen. David H. Petraeus when he arrived in Iraq in early 2007 to preside over a major troop expansion and change in strategy that ultimately succeeded in turning the tide of that war.

Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan. “If you’ve got Stan’s word . . . and Petraeus standing behind him” in requesting more resources, the official said, Obama can stress the need for a “marginal adjustment” based on advice from commanders on the ground.

The 21,000 deployments already approved for this year will not be completed until fall. If new deployments are approved, “generating that force, identifying it, training and organizing it will take time,” the official said. That would probably extend their arrival into early 2010 and could mitigate any political problems the White House might foresee in authorizing additional troops.

Several officials said McChrystal’s assessment of shortfalls in Afghanistan will be outlined in broad terms, citing the need to expand and train the Afghan force along with proposed solutions to make that happen.

In addition to trainers and advisers, he is also expected to outline organizational changes for U.S. troops and the need for enhanced language, intelligence and other skills.

McChrystal, who has spent most of his career in special operations units, is backing a proposal by Adm. Eric T. Olson, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, to replace the current Navy and Air Force commanders of at least half of the 12 U.S. provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan with Special Operations officers who served previous tours in Afghanistan and have training in at least one of its two languages, Dari and Pashto.

Olson and McChrystal believe that the Navy and Air Force officers, who typically have backgrounds as pilots, navigators or ship commanders, lack the necessary experience. “We want to have the smartest and most culturally aware officers in charge of the reconstruction teams,” said the senior military official in Kabul.

But the other services have been reluctant to give up the PRT mission, and Mullen and the four service chiefs are scheduled to meet next week to discuss the issue.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071703634_pf.html
Iraq Restricts U.S. Forces
American Officials See Link Between Limits, Spate of Attacks

By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 18, 2009

BAGHDAD, July 17 — The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops.

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 — the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers — Iraq’s top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to “stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to “notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement.”

The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond.

If extremists realize “some of the limitations that we have, that’s a vulnerability they could use against us,” a senior U.S. military intelligence official said. “The fact is that some of these are very politically sensitive targets” thought to be close to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.

The June 30 deadline for moving U.S. troops out of Iraqi towns and cities was the first of three milestones under the agreement. The U.S. military is to decrease its troop levels from 130,000 to 50,000 by August of next year.

U.S. commanders have described the pullout from cities as a transition from combat to stability operations. But they have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.

The Americans have been taken aback by the new restrictions on their activities. The Iraqi order runs “contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations,” Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.

“Maybe something was ‘lost in translation,’ ” Bolger wrote. “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.” He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

“This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe,” he wrote. “We’ll do that, preferably partnered.”

U.S. commanders have not publicly described in detail how they interpret the agreement’s vaguely worded provision that gives them the right to self-defense. The issue has bedeviled them because commanders are concerned that responding quickly and forcefully to threats could embarrass the Iraqi government and prompt allegations of agreement violations.

A spate of high-casualty suicide bombings in Shiite neighborhoods, attributed to al-Qaeda in Iraq and related Sunni insurgent groups, has overshadowed the increase of attacks by Iran-backed Shiite extremists, U.S. official say.

Officials agreed to discuss relations with the Iraqi government and military, and Iranian support for the extremists, only on the condition of anonymity because those issues involve security, diplomacy and intelligence.

The three primary groups — Asaib al-Haq, Khataib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades — emerged from the “special groups” of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which terrorized Baghdad and southern Iraq beginning in 2006. All receive training, funding and direction from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

“One of the things we still have to find out, as we pull out from the cities, is how much effectiveness we’re going to have against some of these particular target sets,” the military intelligence official said. “That’s one of the very sensitive parts of this whole story.”

As U.S. forces tried to pursue the alleged leaders of the groups and planned missions against them, their efforts were hindered by the complicated warrant process and other Iraqi delays, officials said.

Last month, U.S. commanders acquiesced to an Iraqi government request to release one of their most high-profile detainees, Laith Khazali. He was arrested in March 2007 with his brother, Qais, who is thought to be the senior operational leader of Asaib al-Haq. The United States thinks they were responsible for the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala that year.

Maliki has occasionally criticized interference by Shiite Iran’s Islamic government in Iraqi affairs. But he has also maintained close ties to Iran and has played down U.S. insistence that Iran is deeply involved, through the Quds Force, in training and controlling the Iraqi Shiite extremists.

U.S. intelligence has seen “no discernible increase in Tehran’s support to Shia extremists in recent months,” and the attack level is still low compared with previous years, U.S. counterterrorism official said. But senior military commanders maintained that Iran still supports the Shiite militias, and that their attacks now focus almost exclusively on U.S. forces.

After a brief lull, the attacks have continued this month, including a rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers.

The acrimony that has marked the transition period has sowed resentment, according to several U.S. soldiers, who said the confidence expressed by Iraqi leaders does not match their competence.

“Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover,” Bolger noted in the e-mail.

A spokesman for Bolger would not say whether the U.S. military considers the Iraqi order on July 2 valid. Since it was issued, it has been amended to make a few exemptions. But the guidelines remain far more restrictive than the Americans had hoped, U.S. military officials said.

Brig. Gen. Heidi Brown, the commander overseeing the logistical aspects of the withdrawal, said Iraqi and U.S. commanders have had fruitful discussions in recent days about the issue.

“It’s been an interesting time, and I think we’ve sorted out any misunderstandings that were there initially,” she said in an interview Friday.

One U.S. military official here said both Iraqi and American leaders on the ground remain confused about the guidelines. The official said he worries that the lack of clarity could trigger stalemates and confrontations between Iraqis and Americans.

“We still lack a common understanding and way forward at all levels regarding those types of situations,” he said, referring to self-defense protocols and the type of missions that Americans cannot conduct unilaterally.

In recent days, he said, senior U.S. commanders have lowered their expectations.

“I think our commanders are starting to back off the notion that we will continue to execute combined operations whether the Iraqi army welcomes us with open arms or not,” the U.S. commander said. “However, we are still very interested in and concerned about our ability to quickly and effectively act in response to terrorist threats” against U.S. forces.

DeYoung reported from Washington.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080703678_pf.html
Correction to This Article
The headline on previous versions of this article incorrectly said that farmers would be paid to not grow the crop under new programs. They will not be paid. U.S. and British government programs would provide vouchers for farmers to purchase seeds for other crops, in addition to extending loans and offering construction jobs to those who agree not to plant poppy. This version has been corrected.
U.S. and Britain Again Target Afghan Poppies
Incentives Offered to Farmers Not to Grow Crop

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 2009

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country’s most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan’s harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

“We need a way to get money in [farmers'] hands right away,” said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan.

The program replaces the Bush administration’s focus on crop eradication, which “wasted hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Destroying the crops succeeded only in “alienat[ing] poor farmers” and “driving people into the hands of the Taliban,” he told reporters last week.

But many previous U.S.-funded crop-substitution programs have failed as well, from Asia to Latin America. A similar plan in Colombia, begun in the late 1990s, has barely made a dent in the level of cocaine production, although the country began to stabilize in recent years as its U.S.-trained military adopted new strategies against armed insurgents and civil institutions were strengthened.

Officials maintain that the new Afghan plan differs from unsuccessful “alternative” plans because it is an integral part of a military-development strategy that includes tens of thousands of U.S. troops to keep the Taliban and traffickers at bay while Afghan security forces are being trained. Plans call for hundreds of U.S. and international aid experts to work directly with farmers and local officials until the Afghan government has matured.

“The way [the assistance] is offered is important,” said the senior U.S. military official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program on the record. “We are not providing subsidies . . . we are not just handing out cash.” Farmers will have a “stake” in the program, he said, buying vouchers for seeds and fertilizers for about 10 percent of their value. Cash will be distributed only as credit or for work performed, the official added.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan have long debated whether they should simply pay farmers for not planting poppy, a short-term fix that experts have deemed counterproductive. Farmers probably would take the money and “grow it anyways,” said another U.S. official in Afghanistan. “We would likely drive the price up,” he added, “as there would now be competition between the narcotics trade and the government. More farmers would therefore plant more poppy next year.”

The epicenter of the overlapping wars against opium production and the Taliban is southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province, where more than two-thirds of the country’s poppy is grown. Thousands of Marines and British troops are in the midst of a major offensive there against entrenched insurgent forces and are providing security in villages as they are cleared.

“By this time next year,” the senior military official said, “what we want to see is decreased poppy harvest. For us, that will be a metric of success. If we don’t get conditions set now, in the next 60 days, we’re not going to get the results we’d like.”

The timeline is daunting. A planned “civilian surge” of hundreds of U.S. aid officials and agriculture experts has been slow to arrive. A micro-finance loan program is in the planning stages, and although $300 million in aid has been set aside for “rapid response” initiatives, including voucher programs for seeds and fertilizer, distribution has been sluggish. Mohammad Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand, whom U.S. officials have praised for encouraging local communities to turn away from poppy, held the first of eight scheduled outreach meetings only last week.

The plan also includes stepped-up efforts to interdict drug shipments and destroy stockpiles. The Drug Enforcement Administration expects to increase its manpower on the ground from 13 agents in 2008 to 81 by the end of this year. The Marine assault in Helmand, a DEA official in Kabul said, has “greatly enhanced” the agency’s ability to take action there, he said.

The DEA is also training Afghan police in counternarcotics investigations, and the Justice Department is developing a program for Afghan prosecutors, although those efforts are said to be moving slowly. Officials disagree over how much of the profit from Afghanistan’s opium exports goes directly into Taliban coffers. According to Holbrooke, most Taliban funding comes from wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf region. But there is widespread agreement among U.S. officials that drug traffickers, warlords, corrupt government officials and insurgents work cooperatively to continue cultivation, processing and exports.

Some of the greatest challenges to the new strategy are at the level of farmhouse economics. More than 365,000 Afghan farm households earned about $730 million from poppy last year — a fraction of the $3.4 billion earned from opium exports, according to the United Nations, but an amount nearly equal to the national government’s $750 million in official revenue.

“The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing households,” the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey reported, and “farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income,” 70 percent of which came from poppy.

The average Helmand farmer cultivates less than an acre of land, with about half an acre planted in poppy yielding a gross income of about $2,000. After paying 45 percent of that in production costs, and 10 percent in local taxes, he nets about $900, more than twice what he would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices.

Spring opium is harvested in May, after the plant flowers and seed capsules develop. The capsules are lanced and a latex-like opium gum oozes out and is gathered by hand. In Helmand, where production per acre is highest, capsules are lanced an average of four times in a labor-intensive process.

Extra workers travel from all over Afghanistan for the harvest, and the pay is higher than it is for virtually all other forms of unskilled labor. The average daily wage for construction work, the United Nations reported, is $3.60. Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, and opium “lancing/gum collection” pays $9.50. Wages in Helmand for lancing, $15 a day, are the highest in the country.

“What we’re looking for is a way to compete with that,” the senior military official said of the opium economy. “This is not easy. . . . There is no silver bullet.”

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul and staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103341_pf.html
U.S. Ambassador Seeks More Money for Afghanistan
Funds Requested For Development

By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The United States will not meet its goals in Afghanistan without a major increase in planned spending on development and civilian reconstruction next year, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul has told the State Department.

In a cable sent to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry said an additional $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending will be needed for 2010, about 60 percent more than the amount President Obama has requested from Congress. The increase is needed “if we are to show progress in the next 14 months,” Eikenberry wrote in the cable, according to sources who have seen it.

Obama has asked for $68 billion in Defense Department spending in Afghanistan next year, an amount that for the first time would exceed U.S. military expenditures in Iraq. Spending on civilian governance and development programs has doubled under the Obama administration, to $200 million a month — equal to the monthly rate in Iraq during the zenith of spending on nonmilitary projects there.

The State Department has reacted cautiously to Eikenberry’s assessment, sent to Clinton in late June, even as senior officials say the administration is prepared to spend what is needed to succeed. The 2010 budget includes about $4.1 billion in State Department funding for nonmilitary purposes.

With massive amounts of money already flowing into Afghanistan, there are concerns about the country’s ability to absorb it and the administration’s ability to implement its programs, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew.

“Right now, there is about $6 billion in the pipeline,” including 2009 appropriations and a supplemental war-spending bill passed in June, Lew said in an interview. “We have a lot of money to spend right now. . . . We’re not running out anytime soon.”

Congress, currently on its August recess, would probably have similar concerns about whether the money could be effectively used.

“We’ve spent a lot of money there, not to great effect,” a senior Senate staffer said. “We need to have a much clearer idea of what our goals are and what we can realistically achieve. It’s premature to talk about dramatically increasing the budget.”

Eikenberry, the staffer noted, is a retired three-star Army general and a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan who is used to working with far larger sums of Pentagon money.

Since 2001, the United States has spent $38 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan, more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces.

Obama’s strategy will bring the U.S. military force in Afghanistan to 68,000 troops by the end of this year and will almost certainly include further troop increases next year. But the president has described U.S. military involvement as only one leg of a “three-legged stool” that includes development and competent governance.

Although spending on civilian programs pales beside the military budget, Obama has pledged substantial increases in U.S. civilian personnel and development funds, focusing on agricultural development and rule of law. The size of the U.S. Embassy is scheduled to grow this year to 976 U.S. government civilians in Kabul and outside the capital, from 562 at the end of 2008.

Eikenberry’s $2.5 billion request includes an additional $572 million for the expanded agriculture program. U.S. Marines, who this summer launched an offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, are working with civilian officials to try to persuade farmers there not to plant opium poppy this year. The program includes the supply of seeds and fertilizers for alternative crops, loans to farmers, and payment for work on roads and irrigation ditches.

Among the other elements of the request are an additional $521 million for stabilization efforts in conflict zones; $450 million in economic assistance funneled through the United Nations in Afghanistan; $190 million for roads, schools and civil aviation; $194 million for local government development; and $106 million in economic grants.

Lew said the State Department is working closely with the embassy to parse the request. “Frankly, at the level at which a request is made,” he said, “we often go through this back-and-forth, adjusting to realities, the timing . . . in terms of absorptive capacity and all the issues around getting money out and used. Congress has to approve it.

“If the question is, did [the embassy] do a lot of good, thoughtful work, the answer is yes,” Lew said. “Do we at this point have a definitive view of what their needs are? We’re still working on it.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302770_pf.html
More Pakistanis View Al-Qaeda, Taliban Negatively, Poll Finds

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 13, 2009 4:48 PM

Pakistani views of al-Qaeda and the Taliban have shifted markedly since last year, with unfavorable opinions doubling to about two-thirds of those surveyed in a new Pew Research Center poll.

Condemnation of extremists did not coincide with a more favorable view of the United States, held by only 16 percent of the Pakistanis surveyed. Only 13 percent said they had confidence in President Obama, a stark contrast to his overwhelming popularity in much of the rest of the world. A hefty 64 percent said they regard the United States as an enemy of Pakistan.

But more than half said that improved relations between Pakistan and the United States were important, and large majorities supported U.S. efforts to provide aid and intelligence to the Pakistani military. U.S. military assistance to Pakistan has totaled about $11 billion since 2001, and the Obama administration has requested an additional $2.5 billion for 2010.

Public displeasure with the United States focused on the war in Afghanistan — with seven in 10 Pakistanis calling for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops — and on missile attacks by U.S. Predator drones on al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in the western Pakistani mountains near the Afghan border.

Only 22 percent said the United States takes Pakistani views into account when making foreign policy decisions, a number largely unchanged since 2007.

The face-to-face survey of about 1,200 adults, largely in urban areas, took place in late May and early June, about a month after the Pakistani army began a major offensive against entrenched Taliban forces in the Swat Valley region in northwest Pakistan. The military last month declared victory in the operation, although the return of more than 2 million people displaced by the fighting has been slowed because of ongoing security concerns.

Military operations have also produced at least a temporary lull in suicide bombings that swept Pakistan this year. More than 87 percent said such attacks are never justified, the highest percentage in the poll.

Public support for the Pakistani military remains high, with 77 percent saying it is having a good influence on their country. But President Asif Ari Zardari has dropped sharply in popularity, with 32 percent saying they had a favorable view of him, down from 64 percent in a similar survey last year. By contrast, 67 percent said they approved of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and 79 percent had a favorable view of the leader of the government’s main political opposition, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

India remains a prime concern for most Pakistanis, with 88 percent saying they viewed it as a threat, compared with 73 percent for the Taliban and 61 percent for al Qaeda.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303855_pf.html
With Karzai Favored to Win, U.S. Walks a Fine Line
Criticism Tempered To Avoid Hostility

By Joshua Partlow and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 14, 2009

KABUL — The last time Hamid Karzai ran for president, in 2004, he was clearly America’s man in Afghanistan. U.S. military helicopters shuttled him between campaign stops. At his inauguration, Vice President Richard B. Cheney was there to hail the day as a major moment “in the history of human freedom.”

With a new round of voting one week away — and Karzai favored to win another term — a less-enamored Obama administration is looking for ways to lessen U.S. reliance on the Afghan president by working more closely with favored ministers and bolstering the authority of provincial and local leaders, according to American and Afghan officials.

The goals reflect frustration among U.S. officials over Karzai’s performance in the past five years, particularly his seeming indifference to the widespread corruption within his government. But as it increasingly appears that Karzai will be its partner over the next five years, the United States has also sought to preserve a relationship with him.

“Because they couldn’t construct a plan to replace Karzai, I think they toned down the criticism and kept the option open of working with Karzai, should he get reelected,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. “I think some administration officials realized that by being so openly critical of Karzai, they faced the risk that they could get a Karzai who was not only reelected but was hostile to the U.S. because of how he had been treated.”

The United States is “actively impartial” in the Aug. 20 vote, said Jane Marriott, a senior adviser to U.S. special representative Richard C. Holbrooke. But according to Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, U.S. officials back the idea of a new chief executive position under Karzai to add coherence and competence to his struggling bureaucracy.

“I know that in Washington this idea has strong supporters,” Spanta said in an interview, adding that installing a “shadow prime-minister” would pose constitutional problems.

U.S. officials have discussed the proposal with a key Karzai challenger, the technocratic former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, though they have not endorsed him for the job.

Rather than “just pouring money into building the government,” Holbrooke adviser Barnett R. Rubin said, the administration is focused on “rebuilding the relationship between subnational authorities and local communities.” Rubin stressed that such activities were being undertaken in cooperation with the central government in Kabul.

Critical of some of Karzai’s cabinet choices, the administration has praised the competence of presidentially appointed local leaders such as the governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal. Plans by the U.S. Defense and State departments call for installing American “mentors” and liaisons in Afghan ministries in Kabul, a policy that was heavily used during the early years of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

President Obama has called the Afghan election, the second since the Taliban regime’s ouster in 2001, the most important event of the year in this country. Originally scheduled for April, the vote was postponed during what Holbrooke called a “crisis” period of Afghan constitutional and security upheaval. As a result, Holbrooke said, the Obama administration was forced to defer other priorities in Afghanistan and spend “most of the spring” sorting out the electoral crisis.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. military commander here, has postponed completion of his review of the security situation, originally due to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates this weekend, in part because of the upcoming presidential and provincial council elections. “This is our main effort. I don’t want anybody to think we’re not anything but completely focused on this,” McChrystal said.

“Until the election legitimizes the government, whoever wins, we have to focus on that,” Holbrooke said. Holbrooke, Marriott and Rubin spoke at a media event in Washington on Wednesday.

U.S. officials here said their primary interest now is a fair and free election campaign in which the candidates — 3,324 people have registered for 420 provincial council seats, and 41 are vying to be president — debate the issues. The officials also say they want a vote unmarred by fraud or violence, results that Afghans accept as legitimate and a government that responds to the needs of the people.

“We’re very careful not to conjecture. What we’re clear about is regardless of who comes into power, there needs to be much greater demand for accountability,” said a U.S. official involved in the election process.

Of the leading presidential candidates, Karzai remains the clear favorite. A U.S.-funded poll released this week found that 45 percent of decided voters favored him, compared with 25 percent for his closest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister. The margin is significant because Karzai, who won in 2004 with 55 percent of the vote, would need to clear 50 percent to forestall a runoff.

The question of who, if anyone, the United States backs has been important from the beginning, although candidates have had to walk a fine line in simultaneously portraying themselves as acceptable to Americans and able to keep U.S. funding flowing, but distant enough not to be seen as an American puppet. Four prominent Afghan politicians, including Abdullah and Ghani, the former finance minister, attended Obama’s inauguration in January. Karzai, however, was absent, and a narrative developed early on that Obama was eager for a change at the top in Afghanistan. Ghani and Abdullah have told people privately that the United States gave them the green light to run for president, according to a former U.S. official here.

Karzai was angered when U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry appeared beside Ghani and Abdullah at news conferences in June, although Eikenberry stressed impartiality in his remarks. A week and a half after Karzai failed to show up at Afghanistan’s first televised debate, against Abdullah and Ghani, Eikenberry published an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for “serious debate among the candidates.”

Despite the administration’s denials, many in Afghanistan view these developments as a message that the Americans favored Karzai’s rivals.

“The U.S. has certainly tried to undermine Karzai’s leadership,” said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan’s Center for Research and Policy Studies. But the failure of rival candidates to unite on a ticket dashed what appeared to many observers to be a U.S. hope of an opposition coalition.

“I think the greatest pressure on the United States has been to convince Afghans and all the candidates that it is not interfering in the election one way or another,” Vali Nasr, a senior Holbrooke aide, said in an interview. “What the U.S. has consistently said is that it wants an election that is free and fair, and does not lead to indecision, confusion or violence, that the elections would be followed quickly by getting back to business.”

Concerns persist about Karzai’s leadership on many levels, including his ability to address corruption, to project his power nationwide, to help stem rising Taliban violence and to outline a clearer plan for a peace process. U.S. officials have been critical of his decision on the campaign trail to surround himself with infamous commanders such as his running mate, the powerful Tajik leader Mohammed Fahim, and several others Karzai has courted in an attempt to secure ethnic and regional voting blocs.

Karzai has at times been critical of the U.S. presence, especially over the issue of civilian casualties in U.S. military operations. But in a speech this week, he said that he valued American sacrifices in the war and that “we will not only keep this strategic partnership with the U.S., but we also will improve it.” At the same time, he demanded that coalition troops stop arresting Afghans and close all foreign prisons here.

Karzai’s rivals describe him as paranoid about foreign intrigue.

“He considers everybody part of that big plot,” Abdullah said. “In the meetings with elders and political leaders who have talked and spoken to me, he says this, ‘We should unite. You know, there are plots, Americans, British,’ and so on and so forth.”

“His relations with the Americans?” Abdullah said. “What do you think? Everybody is stuck with him.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303763_pf.html
Gates: No Troop Request In Afghanistan Review

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 14, 2009

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan will not make a specific request for more troops when he submits a review of the situation there in the coming weeks, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday.

Instead, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will assess conditions on the ground and make recommendations based on whether the mix and number of forces he has been allotted — 68,000 by the end of the year — is sufficient to execute U.S. strategy there, Gates told reporters at a Pentagon briefing held with Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright.

“We’ve made clear to General McChrystal that he is free to ask for what he needs,” Gates said. But “any future resource request will be considered separately and subsequent to his assessment of the security situation.”

At a recent meeting with McChrystal in Brussels, Gates told the commander to concentrate on tasks that needed to be performed and the type of troops necessary to accomplish them rather than specific numbers, according to senior military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal Pentagon deliberations.

With a focus on “troops-to-task” ratios, McChrystal is expected to provide a breakdown of future strategy — including increased training requirements for Afghan forces — that officials said could require at least 15,000 additional U.S. troops next year. Obama approved the deployment of 21,000 troops this year, 6,000 of whom have not yet arrived in Afghanistan.

“What he’s assessing is, have I — have I got it laid down right?” Cartwright said of McChrystal, who took command in Afghanistan two months ago.

Cartwright indicated that there might be a need for a more immediate change in tactics or a request for additional resources because of an increase in casualties among U.S. forces in roadside bombings, including in the southern province of Helmand, where Marines have been deployed recently.

Gates said an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq — which he has raised as a possibility — could also be a factor in making resources available for Afghanistan.

Gates previously expressed concern that the size of the international force in Afghanistan — including about 30,000 non-U.S. troops from NATO and other allied countries — could reach a “tipping point” whereby Afghans will turn against them. “I think that most Afghans see us as there to help them and see us as their partner,” Gates said Thursday. “I just worry that we don’t know what the size of the international presence, military presence, might be that would begin to change that.”

Gates said that coalition forces “have to show progress over the course of the next year.” Asked how long U.S. combat forces would be needed in Afghanistan, he said it was “unpredictable” and “perhaps a few years,” and he emphasized plans to sharply increase recruitment and training of Afghan security forces so they could take over.

Over the longer term, Gates said that even if security is achieved, progress in building Afghanistan’s economy and government institutions remains “a decades-long enterprise in a country that has been through 30 years of war and has as high an illiteracy rate as Afghanistan does and low level of economic development.” The United States and international partners, he said, “are committed to that side of the equation for an indefinite period of time.”

The administration has said that it considers Pakistan, where Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have established sanctuaries in the border region, a joint theater of operations with Afghanistan. No U.S. troops are deployed in Pakistan, but the U.S. military provides training and supplies, and the United States has given $15 billion in military and economic aid since 2001.

Asked Thursday about a new poll of Pakistanis indicating that 64 percent view the United States as an enemy, Gates said, “The Pakistanis probably — and with some legitimacy — question . . . how long are we prepared to stay there?” He said that “we walked away from them” after the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989 and that assistance was restricted in the 1990s because of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

Although a close relationship was developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “it’s going to take us some time to rebuild confidence” with the Pakistani people, he said.

The poll, released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, found that 16 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States. Thirteen percent said they had confidence in President Obama, a stark contrast to his overwhelming popularity in much of the rest of the world. But more than half said improved relations between Pakistan and the United States were important.

The survey also found that Pakistani views of al-Qaeda and the Taliban have shifted markedly since last year, with unfavorable opinions doubling to two-thirds of about 1,200 adults questioned, largely in urban areas. The poll was conducted in late May and early June, about a month after the Pakistani army began a major offensive against Taliban forces in the Swat Valley region.

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/22/AR2009082202501_pf.html
Correction to This Article
This article and its headline incorrectly describe U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq as “secret.” The identity of the prisoners temporarily held at the facilities has been secret, but the existence of the facilities has not.
Red Cross to Get Data on Prisoners Held in Secret at U.S. Camps

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 23, 2009

The U.S. military has agreed for the first time to provide information to the International Committee of the Red Cross about prisoners held in secret at detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it will continue to deny the ICRC access to them, military officials said Saturday.

The facilities are “short-term places” operated by U.S. Special Forces for newly captured alleged insurgents considered to have valuable information or to be serious threats, according to an official familiar with the subject, who was not authorized to discuss it on the record. It is usually in “the early hours” of detention that interrogators “are able to gain the freshest and most valuable intelligence,” the official said.

The military’s agreement early this month to provide the ICRC with at least the names of detainees in the Iraq and Afghanistan camps was first reported Saturday on the New York Times’s Web site.

The Red Cross has long requested information about, and access to, such prisoners held at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, and in Balad, Iraq. Only a few dozen detainees are believed to be at each location at any time, usually for several weeks until they are transferred to longer-term prisons.

In Afghanistan, that normally means the main prison at Bagram, where the military holds about 600 detainees. Although the ICRC has access to that facility, prisoners there have protested their continuing detention by refusing since last month to see Red Cross workers or participate in videoconference visits with their families.

Unlike the large U.S. military prisons that once operated in Iraq — where military panels reviewed individual cases for release or transfer to Iraqi-run facilities — there is no review or adjudication process at Bagram. The military has delayed establishing one because Afghanistan lacks a functioning judicial system.

ICRC spokesman Bernard Barrett declined to comment Saturday.

The Defense Department has refused to make public the list of prisoners held at the main Bagram base. The Pentagon last month denied a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to provide names and other information about the detainees, citing national security and privacy concerns.

Except for the Special Forces detention facility, all U.S. prisons in Iraq have been turned over to the Iraqi government.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/23/AR2009082300660_pf.html
Afghan War Conditions ‘Deteriorating,’ Mullen Says
Joint Chiefs Chairman Expresses Concern About Declining Support for War in U.S.

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 24, 2009

The situation in Afghanistan is “serious and deteriorating,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday, as the Obama administration awaits an assessment by the new U.S. commander there and a possible request for more troops.

Mullen also expressed concern over recent opinion polls indicating that for the first time a majority of Americans do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. President Obama has described the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the central front against international terrorism and has pledged to give it all necessary resources.

With violence again on the rise in Iraq, Obama faces pressure from the public and within the Democratic Party to provide a fuller explanation of his Afghanistan strategy. Support for more troops has been strongest within Republican ranks.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who just returned from Afghanistan, said the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is under “great pressures” from “people around” Obama to reduce his estimate of troop needs.

Mullen and retired Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, acknowledged widespread allegations of fraud in last week’s Afghan elections. But they described the elections as an important step toward what Eikenberry called a “renewal of trust” by the Afghan people in their government.

Eikenberry and Mullen spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” McCain appeared on ABC’s “This Week.”

With Afghan President Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah both claiming victory, “we’re not really going to know for several more weeks exactly where do we stand in this process,” Eikenberry said. Official results are not due until Sept. 17; a mid-October runoff will be required if no candidate won more than half the vote.

In Iraq, where bombings last week killed at least 100 people, “the key is whether this is an indicator of future sectarian violence,” Mullen said. “And certainly, many of us believe that one way that this can come unwound is through sectarian violence.”

Future deployments to Afghanistan, where the U.S. troop presence is expected to reach 68,000 by the end of the year — including 21,000 that Obama authorized this year — depend in part on the rate of withdrawal from Iraq. Remaining troops in Iraq total 130,000 and a sharp decrease, to 50,000 or less, is due after Iraqi elections in January. Under an agreement with the Iraqi government, U.S. troops are to have departed by the end of 2011.

Since the bombings, senior military officials said, the Iraqi government has requested stepped-up U.S. intelligence, including increased overhead imaging. Many of those resources have been transferred to Afghanistan under orders of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is in charge of both war theaters as head of the U.S. Central Command.

Overhead surveillance platforms, including aerial drones, are split between the two theaters, with 70 percent located in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, said one official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss intelligence on the record.

McChrystal took command in Afghanistan in June and was scheduled to deliver an assessment to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates within 60 days. Mullen said the report is now due in the next two weeks.

“We’re not at a point yet where he’s made any decisions about asking for additional troops,” Mullen said, adding that McChrystal’s orders are to separately “assess where you are, and then tell us what you need.”

“My recommendation to the president will be based on getting the resource strategy matched absolutely correct,” Mullen said. “And so we’ll see where that goes once the assessment is in here. And I’ve had this conversation with the president, who understands that whatever the mission is, it needs to be resourced correctly.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/29/AR2009082902402_pf.html
U.S. Sets Metrics to Assess War Success

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The White House has assembled a list of about 50 measurements to gauge progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan as it tries to calm rising public and congressional anxiety about its war strategy.

Administration officials are conducting what one called a “test run” of the metrics, comparing current numbers in a range of categories — including newly trained Afghan army recruits, Pakistani counterinsurgency missions and on-time delivery of promised U.S. resources — with baselines set earlier in the year. The results will be used to fine-tune the list before it is presented to Congress by Sept. 24.

Lawmakers set that deadline in the spring as a condition for approving additional war funding, holding President Obama to his promise of “clear benchmarks” and no “blank check.”

Since then, skepticism about the war in Afghanistan has intensified along with the rising U.S. and NATO casualty rates, now at the highest level of the eight-year-old conflict. An upcoming assessment by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new military commander in Afghanistan, is expected to lay the groundwork for requests for additional U.S. troop deployments in 2010.

The administration’s concern about waning public support and the war’s direction has been compounded by strains in the U.S. relationship with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Facing their own public opinion problems, both appear increasingly resentful of U.S. demands for improved performance in the face of what they see as insufficient American support.

At a dinner in Kabul with Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy for the region, and retired Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, after the Aug. 20 presidential election, President Hamid Karzai made clear his displeasure that the administration did not endorse his candidacy or his claimed victory, according to one U.S. participant.

The participant denied media reports that the dinner had erupted into a shouting match but acknowledged that Karzai “may have been unhappy with the fact that the United States did not immediately congratulate him on his victory.” Amid widespread reports of fraud, and with only a fraction of the vote tallied, Holbrooke told Karzai that the administration would wait for official results confirming that a candidate had won a majority or whether a runoff was needed before commenting.

“There is a pretty intense atmosphere in Kabul right now,” said the participant, one of several senior officials who agreed to discuss the deteriorating war situation, and the evolving administration strategy, only on the condition of anonymity.

Relations with Pakistan have grown similarly tense, with complaints from Islamabad about the pace of deliveries of U.S. military equipment and rising resentment over congressional attempts to impose restrictions on its supply and use.

“We are fighting this war today,” a senior Pakistani military official said in describing U.S. assistance as slow and stingy. “What good is it two years from now?”

That official and others said there have been long delays in the delivery of helicopters, night-vision equipment and other supplies requested for the army’s ongoing offensive against Pakistan-based insurgents.

In recent interviews, civil and military officials in Pakistan drew a sharp contrast between the billions of dollars in assistance that George W. Bush’s administration gave, with few strings attached, to then-President Pervez Musharraf — a general who came to power in a military coup — and what they see as efforts to condition assistance to the democratically elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

“Our soldiers wear less armor, their vehicles are less armored, and they have suffered more casualties” in the fight against the Taliban than the United States and NATO combined, the official said. Pakistani combat deaths since 2003 surpassed 2,000 this month as the military engaged Taliban forces in the Swat Valley.

“The only area where there is a tangible improvement is in training,” the Pakistani military official said. Training aid has increased from $2 million to $4 million over the past year, he said, along with a doubling to 200 of the number of Pakistani army officers brought to the United States for courses.

Several Pakistani officials cited as particularly galling Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent visit to neighboring India — where she reached agreement on a defense pact that will provide major quantities of sophisticated U.S. arms to Pakistan’s traditional South Asian adversary. Clinton has scheduled a visit to Pakistan in October.

U.S. defense officials, anxious to repair what they have repeatedly acknowledged is a “trust deficit” with Pakistan, bite their tongues in response to the criticism. But they insist that Pakistan is getting everything it has asked for, at unprecedented speed.

“What you have is, frankly, an effort by the Pakistanis . . . to generate all the resources, all the assistance that is possible, and we would do the same thing if we were in their shoes,” a senior U.S. defense official said. “But to make a statement that folks aren’t moving rapidly, or that they’re not getting more than they used to get, is just contrary to the facts.”

The administration has asked for $2.5 billion in direct security assistance funds for Pakistan in 2010 — 25 percent more than what has been approved for this year.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, “personally gets a daily update — daily, mind you,” on supplies shipped to Pakistan, the U.S. defense official said. “That should give you some sense of how riveted we are on this.”

Although some Republican leaders in Congress have said that they would support adding troops to the 68,000 the United States will have in Afghanistan by the end of this year, many leading Democrats have questioned whether the administration’s strategy of expanded economic and military support for both countries is working, and whether the likely increased toll in U.S. lives is justified.

Opposition to congressional efforts to legislate conditions on war funding and aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan is one area of agreement among the three governments. Iraq’s failure to achieve benchmarks mandated by Congress provided an easy target for opponents of that war and contributed to the loss of public support in the United States.

Both the House and Senate versions of the pending 2010 defense spending bill include metrics and reporting requirements for the administration. Obama’s strategy is “still a work in progress,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who co-sponsored an amendment in the legislation setting conditions on aid to Pakistan.

In the absence of strict guidelines from the administration, Menendez said in an interview, “we are definitely moving to a set of metrics that can give us benchmarks as to how we are proceeding” and whether Obama’s strategy “is pursuing our national security interests.”

The White House hopes to preempt Congress with its own metrics. The document currently being fine-tuned, called the Strategic Implementation Plan, will include separate “indicators” of progress under nine broad “objectives” to be measured quarterly, according to an administration official involved in the process. Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S. performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts.

The White House briefed staff members of key congressional committees this month on an initial draft of the plan and invited comments. The “test run” will indicate whether final “tweaks” are needed, the administration official said.

“Ideally, it’s a combination of objective and subjective” measurements, he said. “Obviously, not everything is 100 percent quantifiable, and we don’t want to just get sold on the number. If you train 100 troops, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how effective they are.”

He added: “We don’t want to hold ourselves to indicators that aren’t going to show us anything. We want to make sure this is not just a paper exercise.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/01/AR2009090103908_pf.html
Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics
Obama Facing Major Strategy Decisions

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Taliban has become a much more potent adversary in Afghanistan by improving its own tactics and finding gaps in the U.S. military playbook, according to senior American military officials who acknowledged that the enemy’s resurgence this year has taken them by surprise.

U.S. rules of engagement restricting the use of air power and aggressive action against civilians have also opened new space for the insurgents, officials said. Western development projects, such as new roads, schools and police stations, have provided fresh targets for Taliban roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The inability of rising numbers of American troops to protect Afghan citizens has increased resentment of the Western presence and the corrupt Afghan government that cooperates with it, the officials said.

As President Obama faces crucial decisions on his war strategy and declining public support at home, administration and defense officials are studying the reasons why the Taliban appears, for the moment at least, to be winning.

In the spring, Obama outlined a broad new direction for the war that he said his predecessor had starved of attention and resources. He changed the military leadership on the ground, asked Congress for additional money and authorized more manpower. The administration has said that it expects the strategy — still barely off the ground — to show results in a year to 18 months.

But many U.S. officials and their allies feel that they are in a race against time and the determination of a battle-hardened enemy that has learned from its own mistakes and those of U.S. and NATO forces over nearly eight years of combat. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, gave Obama an assessment this week of what he described as a “serious” situation.

“The point is that the Taliban, who have had a very clear aim and means from the very beginning, have been able slowly and steadily to get better at what they’re doing,” said a European official whose country’s troops are fighting alongside U.S. forces. More U.S. and NATO troops have been killed in 2009 than in any year since the war began in late 2001; U.S. deaths in August reached an all-time monthly high of 47.

Although McChrystal’s report has not been publicly released, officials said it calls for further significant strategic revisions. In the coming weeks, Obama will weigh the merits of McChrystal’s recommendations and decide whether to provide whatever additional troops are necessary to implement them.

About a dozen military officials in Washington and at regional command headquarters here and abroad discussed Taliban capabilities and battlefield trends on the condition of anonymity. Most expressed optimism that with time the U.S. strategy could prevail, but said that the Taliban has gained psychological, as well as actual, ground.

“There are periods when an enemy does well and seems better trained and fights harder,” one senior defense official said. “The number one indicator we have out there now is that they think they’re winning. That creates an attitude, a positive outlook, and a willingness to sacrifice.”

The positive outlook has a basis in fact, the official said, as areas of Taliban influence have expanded. “They have enough of the landscape that they control to be able to train more and in closer proximity to where they’re fighting. And the people [living] there actually believe the Taliban can do something.”

U.S. military officials differ on the extent of Taliban success and the reasons for it. Senior U.S. commanders in eastern Afghanistan, where insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani’s network is dominant, said that the sophistication of the insurgents’ attacks had increased markedly, beginning with bloody battles along the Pakistani border last summer. To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.

“In some cases . . . we started to see that enhanced form of attack,” said one Army general who oversaw forces in Afghanistan until earlier in the summer. As attacks in the east have increased this year, some officers have speculated that the insurgents are getting more direct help from professional fighters from Arab and Central Asian countries. These embedded trainers, the officers said, play almost the same role as U.S. military training teams that live with and mentor Afghan government forces.

In recent months, the Taliban fighters have used mortars to force U.S. troops into defensive positions, where they are then hit with rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and machine guns. Insurgent units have learned to maintain “radio silence” as they move and to wet down the ground to prevent dusty recoil that would make them targets. They have “developed the ability to do some of the things that make up what you call a disciplined force,” including treating casualties, the Army general said.

The insurgents have largely abandoned the large-unit attacks they used several years ago. “In 2005, Marines and Army units were having pretty decisive engagements” against massed Taliban fighters, another senior officer said, adding that “every time, we killed them in very large numbers.” Small bases and checkpoints manned by Afghan national security forces have become preferred targets for the Taliban, he said, because they are “isolated and easy to kill,” and the Afghan units are relatively easy to infiltrate for intelligence.

Remote areas where the Taliban has been fighting U.S. forces for years, such as the Korengal Valley near the border with Pakistan, “are a perfect lab to vet fighters and study U.S. tactics,” said a Pentagon officer. The insurgents have learned to gauge the response times for U.S. artillery cannons, as well as fighter jets and helicopters. “They know exactly how long it takes before . . . they have to break contact and pull back,” the officer said.

U.S. officers in southern Afghanistan, where thousands of Marines and British troops are fighting long-entrenched Taliban forces, attributed insurgent gains less to sophisticated tactics than to increased use of roadside bombs — improvised explosive devices, or IEDs — laid along U.S. convoy routes in the desert or roads built with foreign aid money.

“They do tend to play to the areas that they’re strongest in, the hit-and-run tactics and the employment of IEDs,” said Col. George Amland, deputy commander of the Marines in Helmand province.

The Taliban has also taken advantage of changes in U.S. air and artillery tactics, adopted to decrease civilian casualties that have alienated the population. U.S. airstrikes and culturally offensive night ground raids are authorized far more selectively than they were. The Taliban has also adjusted its own tactics, gathering in populated areas and increasing its night operations, and “the playing field is leveled,” one U.S. officer said.

A number of officials and experts, within and outside the military, said that while the Taliban was able to regroup militarily while U.S. attention was diverted to Iraq, its widening influence has as much to do with Afghan government corruption, tensions among regional ethnic groups, lack of state service and justice in rural areas, and high rates of unemployment as it does with insurgent efforts.

Military officials expressed confidence in the evolving U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, but also concern about whether there is time to make it work. “I’m not one myself to believe it’s a zero-sum game of winning and losing,” said an official with long experience in Afghanistan.

“To the Taliban, winning is, in fact, not losing,” he said. “They feel that over time, they will ultimately outlast the international community’s attempt to stabilize Afghanistan. It’s really a game of will to them.”

Correspondents Pamela Constable, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Joshua Partlow and Greg Jaffe in Afghanistan contributed to this report.

******

August 18, 2009

Gary,

Thank you for laying out your understanding of the different terms used to describe our enemy in your response of the 11th.  I am interested to see where you would categorize the different Islamic Supremacist groups.

As I currently see it, on one end of the spectrum the Muslim Brotherhood claims to have denounced violence (despite the fact that the Palestinian chapter of the Brotherhood is the terrorist group Hamas).  The Brotherhood seems to have enacted a plan of cultural invasion, infiltrating the United States government through academic channels and framing public opinion over their subversive activities through their many NGO front groups like the Council for American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association. On the other end, there are groups like al Qaeda who seek to expand their ideology through violence, and give no quarter for those who do not participate in violent jihad.

Recently, I read in Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad that Islam’s Prophet was a caravan raider. American History is filled with the exploits of Muslim pirates – from the Barbary Wars of the early 19th Century to today where ships are routinely hijacked in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. Considering Muhammad’s raider roots, can modern piracy be seen as a “fundamental” type of jihad in Islam?  Is there a connection between the pirates of today and Islamic Supremacy?

-Chris Carter

_____________________

August 26, 2009

Chris,

In his 2008 release, The Confrontation, Walid Phares posited that “The major missing component in the Western War on Terror is undoubtedly: public action and knowledge.  The man or woman on the street is strangely absent from the raging debates on the conflict, whether in New York, Paris, or London.”  This said, those with knowledge of Islamic Supremacism’s works must teach themselves to act as intuitive bridges between the source of the knowledge and those who would otherwise not have the time, energy, motivation, skill or guidance necessary to properly enter into the wager of our generation as the claimant of aggrieved status.  In light of your current perceptions, it is more than tempting to dive right in and bang away at the intricacies of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, the Taliban(s), Jamaat al Islamiya, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and al Shabaab to determine the threat each poses, in their turn and in their twisted combinations, to Western Civilization.   However, in the interests of our audience, in this public intellectual struggle, it must be understood that framing the battle of ideas in terms of a spectrum of violence and non-violence does not skewer the core of the resentment beheld by free men and women, the world over, when facing the ultimatums of Islam’s faithful terrorists.  

We are no doubt in agreement that, in the United States of America, the freedom of religion is a sacrosanct right and freedom – inviolable, inalienable.  But what happens to that freedom when a religion’s doctrines and tenets and spokesmen command its adherents to wage holy war upon non-believers, demand the capitulation and diplomatic vassal-dom of independent state actors,  prohibit individual liberties, enslave women, commit piracy, murder reason, and subject the freedom of thought and inquiry to a predetermined authoritative source of knowledge and truth?  What then?  Does the freedom of religion, in America’s Constitution, exist (then) as a readymade gateway to supremacist militants, stealth subversives, and suicidal cultists?  It is an uncomfortable discussion – particularly as it relates to the religion of Islam – and it is only just beginning. 

There are many barriers to a proper engagement on the matter of Islamic Supremacism: none so obvious and visible as language, none so insidious as our own ignorance as to the nature of the cultural divides which shape and often scuttle the discourse.  

But make no mistake, my friend, the rejection of Tyranny in all of its forms, the rejection of slavery in its various guises, the rejection of the death of reason inherent in the natural dictatorship of socio-economic totality – these rejections and certainties – will shape the principled character of this discourse and, by virtue of our heritage, will muster and project the full force and power of our natural inalienable rights.  The reasoned rejection of those unconscionable bonds, which for far too long have hunted freedom ’round the globe, forge the heavy resentment and stinging grievances in the intellectual case we are set to levy against Islamic Supremacism.  

Declaring independence from the tyranny of Allah is no small matter; and, it is a journey which should not be embarked upon lightly.  Toppling the supremacist Jihad Pillar, in the end, will be the result of a distinct determination, en masse, the world over, by those souls which proclaim the right to achieve a full measure of reasoned self-esteem in dignity without being terrorized by Theocratic diktat or a supremacist faith’s frenzied fanatics in a timeless, cosmic, perpetual war with reason.  The Establishment Clause is absolute – not negotiable.  The spears and arrows of Political Islam are no matter when wearing such a worthy armor with integrity.  Therefore, let us as American citizens, bound by our Constitution, clearly, reservedly, without malice, seeking justice in our age and for our families and countrymen, resolve to be Free! And let not our generous sense of humility and tolerance be blinded by the deceits of Shariah Law…for in “tolerance” is a demonstrable failing of our current engagement on the matter at hand.

As I stated in our first public exchange, definitions matter.  Awareness of the power of language and translation, too, is crucial in this intellectual revolt.  For instance, it will come as a surprise to you and to most Americans that the Western use of the word “tolerance” in conjunction with religious freedom is considered a slight on the whole of Islam.  Recently, I picked up a book entitled The Crisis of Islamic Civilization by the Princeton visiting fellow Ali A. Allawi, who sheds light on this enormous cultural wall.  In Chapter 5, “The Reformation of Islam”, the following passage stopped me in my tracks:

“Mutual tolerance between the varieties of Islamic faith and practice and accommodation of the non-Muslim populations who lived alongside Muslims formed an important element of Islamic civilization.  Necessarily, the lead had to come from the majority religious group – the Sunni orthodoxy in most cases – which acknowledged the legitimacy and rights of the minority groups.  The operative word in Islam is accommodation, not tolerance.  Accommodation is a permanent arrangement which implies the creation of a recognized and legitimate space for other religious and doctrinal groups.  Toleration on the other hand assumes the supremacy of one over the other but allows the other to exist on sufferance.”

Read it again.  Look up the words “accommodate” and “accommodation” and read it again.  Look up the words “tolerance” and “toleration” and read it again.  Look up the word “sufferance” and read it again.  This is the presentiment of a wall.

The frame of the wall is set in stone as follows:  in Islam, when considering mutual tolerance, accommodation is the measure of “respect” since it provides permanent legitimacy through a recognized “space” of worship as a testament to the rights of minority faiths; toleration, on the other hand, arrogantly assumes condescension privileges of supremacy.  Now, as disturbing as the cultural invasion of radical jihadists and covert Islamist into America is to me, I find this one passage far more violent in its attempt to overthrow and destabilize reason.  Through this lens, Western respect for the freedom of a Muslim to practice his religion as a right is translated and cast as an arrogant presumption.  In effect, a Westerner can say, “The United States has granted freedom of Religion to all of its citizens.  America is a land of tolerance for all faiths.”  And, the Muslim mind reflexively responds, “It is arrogant, indeed, for an infidel Westerner or his limited state government to feel so high and mighty as to give me leave to practice Islam.  That right is Allah’s alone to give; and, all limits not originating with Allah’s Mother Book are disorders in Muhammad’s straight path (a jahaliyya), stemming from the age of ignorance before the Koran, the supreme source of both knowledge and authority.”  Moreover, in this mis-taken respect, Islam’s adherents pounce on a perceived condescension in tone and immediately claim the authority of Shariah Law’s writ concerning the right of Allah’s dominion over all other faiths in a complete rejection of all internationally recognized laws, limits and borders. 

When an offered respect is translated as an insult, and then immediately used as a weapon of control in feigned offense, the prospects of mutual tolerance are dim indeed…  Remember, always, Allawi’s words: the operative word in Islam is accommodation, not tolerance.  What does accommodation mean?  What does toleration mean?  This is not the picture of a zero sum engagement.  This is a marked case of a negative sum engagement.  The framework for engagement, in this case, is an imprisoning submission.  Just as Ralph Peters noted that the West is in the unique position of denying that its enemies really know what they themselves are up to, the flipside of the coin must also be noted – Islam is in the unique position of claiming that those non-believers, who deem it a worthy pursuit to be tolerant of the religious rights of Muslims to practice Islam, must be charged with exhibiting blasphemy and arrogantly trespassing on Allah’s Rights. 

Indeed, the first grievance which must be levied toward Islam by the free man of reason is the stark certainty that the Islamic notion of accommodation commands, naturally, as an immutable truth, that Allah’s sovereignty extends beyond the mosque.  A corollary grievance must follow – Muslims refusing to accept (on good faith) that tolerance is a measure of mutual respect have dismissed an offered peace and judged  honorable intentions as having zero intrinsic value when engaging with non-believers.  This wall will not stand!  The intellectual revolution against Islamic Supremacism, presently kindling in an awakening generation, will take sledgehammers to this wall over and over until it crumbles; before all, Islam’s inclination to delineate the bounds and comforts of accommodation is not a legitimate right, just as assuredly as the accommodation of slavery is not a legitimate right.  The right to create a recognized “space” for slaves and the right to extend the protection of dhimmitude are poisonous formulas drawn from the elixir of accommodation.  

Allawi, the ex-Iraqi statesman and senior visiting fellow at Princeton, in a simple exposition on the history of Islam, has captured the Crisis of Islam in stunning relief.  Accommodation and toleration are at the core of conflict and tension found in the activity and rhetoric of the Muslim Community (the Umma).  It must be noted that these trappings of accommodation are moral shortcomings in the arena of peace.  For in dealings of mutual tolerance, Islam rejects tolerance.  Therefore, in the interests of justice, how can it be possible that Islam is a religion of peace if the grievances laid at Islam’s door on the matter of accommodation are legitimate?

Naturally, reasoned grievances without remedy engender resentment.  Is there remedy for Islam’s attitude of accommodation?  When tolerance is rejected, war, by design, seems an ever present specter.  No remedy currently exists for the establishment of this wall of separation and it is questionable whether one can be had.  Moreover, Islamic Accommodation holds doctrinal legitimacy to Muslims from the Koran, itself.  The Da’wa, the call of Islam, the invitation to Islam, gave birth to this loaded account.  When considering the religion of Allah, infidels have a choice – Convert to Islam, Pay the jizya tax for the right to live as a “protected” second class citizen (classified as a dhimmi) or die by the sword of Islam.  Generally read “convert, pay alms or die,” Muslims demand that Westerners understand the full context of the invitation before arrogantly asserting that this jihad injunction is war-like.  But upon inspection, can it be said that there is any difference in the form of the call to Islam and the accommodation of Islam?  Da’wa is the ethical ground of the morality and mentality of Islamic Accommodation.  Peace is not found in an accommodating ultimatum.  What man of reason worth his salt would accept the status of a second-class citizen?

Western history texts are wary to accuse Islam’s conquering caliphs and imams through the ages of trespassing on the rights of those peoples which came under the control of Islam’s Empire, asserting that for the most part the conquered peoples were peacefully assimilated.  Seen through the prism of accommodation, Jihad is the striving to assert the supremacy of Allah’s Law.  And while adherents of Islam can hold that jihad is an internal spiritual struggle, it cannot be dismissed that the coercive threat of force jades the minds and mores of Allah’s slaves.  For, to the reasoning mind, in what possible context can the ultimatum “convert to Islam, pay the protection tax, or die by the sword of Islam” ever be considered a peaceful invitation?  No peaceful context exists for this grievous advance; rather, since tolerance is rejected, the trap of submission is set to snare.  The reason for this wariness on the part of Western scholars is simple:  the economic history of Islam has not yet been accurately cast for Western consumption.  It is hard to talk about the history of slavery and dhimmitude, when records of the slave trade and dhimmitude are not yet fully accessible to the Western critical eye.  It must be reckoned that slaves in America had origins in the Muslim controlled slave trade.  It must also be reckoned that piracy in the name of Allah kicked off the Barbary Pirate Wars.   Slavery and Piracy have always figured into the economic history of Islam.

Accommodation demonstrates a key problem in the morality of Islam.  It generates a mindset and mentality in Individual Muslims which defines peace in terms of dominance rather than mutual tolerance.  The replacement of tolerance, in this case is willful dominance.  When the operative word in Islam is accommodation, the operative peace is not mutual – it is coerced.  When the operative word in Islamic peace is accommodation, the operative goal is dominance.   Peace under threat is not peace – it is the seed of war.  For what else can the rejection of tolerance guarantee?

Islamic Accommodation is the declaration of Allah’s sovereignty in the crystal clear tones of the Koran’s song.  What I refuse to dismiss is the tone of the song.  I resent the tone.  I object to the servile manner in which the infidel world is currently meeting this offensive and grievous assault on reason.   And I reject, categorically, with the full force of my reason, that Allah holds even one solitary mote of dominion over my rights of passage on this planet.  The god of the Koran does not hold the right to order my passage, to accommodate me with terms of surrender, not when I have such worthy stewards for my keeping as the framers of the U.S. Constitution.  As an American citizen, it is within my natural rights to declare independence from Tyranny.  And I declare it now, as a free man!  My resentment of the tyranny of Islamic Supremacism holds the selfsame veracity and strength displayed when America’s founding fathers rejected the tyranny of the Crown.  What is dhimmitude if not the ultimate in taxation without reasoned representation?  I will never submit to the terms of Islamic Accommodation.  Allah is not the god of the Torah.  Allah is not the god of the Christian Scriptures.  Allah, in His display of accommodation, is the god of Tyranny.  For when dominance presents a more virtuous path than tolerance, what other ultimate lesson and path is possible save that of punishment to those who would oppose and resist the supremacist push?  Why strive to create an uncertain peace when establishing dominance by the threat of the sword guarantees a resolution with advantage?  When threatening to swing the sword of Allah offers such rewards, what rewards will swinging it bring? 

Islamic Accommodation, if it is accepted as a proper framework for the presentiment of the terms of engagement, is…in a word…a step in the dark.  

Suffice it to say, that Islam, as a monolith, has historically advanced by denouncing the validity of tolerance.  Therefore, the lesson that must be drawn from Islamic Accommodation must be that our enemy is a discriminating one.  The infidel, the kafir is, by Shariah Law, a second-class citizen of Allah’s umma to be afforded protection and space.  The Legacy of Dhimmitude is with us to this very day.  Slavery, piracy, and terror all hold Koranic justifications which undermine individual and state sovereignty.  Therefore, let us, as friends, in light of the material injuries incurred through the ages in the name of Allah, unravel the supremacist ideas of Islam, properly laying forth reasoned grievances, declaring our independence from the Tyranny of Allah’s Law and enumerating our legitimate resentments in a case of concern, that our perceived offenders might answer our heavy challenge without resort to coercion – that they might offer up apology and restitution, admitting our natural rights as men and casting dhimmitude to the Jim Crow bonfires of segregation and racism.  And again, let us, as free men, retaining our moral prejudices without constraint, remain dedicated to the sovereignty of our nation, our souls, our reason, and our liberties as we define the threat at hand

Engaged,
Gary H. Johnson, Jr.

“My statement was misunderstood . I did not and will not abandon Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri. I have stated that our coalition with the March 14 alliance cannot continue, but this does not mean leaving March 14, rather searching for new slogans. All I did was try to deal with ramifications of the May 7 events”.

But on Monday PSP media spokesman Rami Al-Rayyes told New TV : “Jumblatt’s departure from March 14 is final , will not be joining any other alliance and intends to play a centrist role.” He added ” The PSP MPs are committed to Jumblatt’s decision but non PSP members of the Democratic Gathering bloc are free to decide on their own.”

May 7, 2008 date that Jumblatt referred to was the day when Hezbollah invaded and occupied the Sunni part of Beirut and tried unsuccessfully to occupy the Druze stronghold of Mount Lebanon. The Druze leader at the time was in Beirut under siege but the Druze people fought on their own, defended Mount Lebanon and inflicted heavy losses on Hezbollah.

Jumblatt for some time has been trying to reconcile with Hezbollah to prevent a repeat of May 7.

Jumblatt has also been trying to create an atmosphere of calm in the country since the report of the German magazine Der Spiegel was issued last spring. Der Spiegel revealed that it was Hezbollah that was behind the assassination of Lebanon’s former PM Rafik Hariri. Jumblatt’s concern stems from the belief that once the Special Tribunal for Lebanon confirms what was stated in the Der Spiegel report then this could ignite an all out war between the Sunnites and Shiites that could involve many countries in the region.

The pro-Syrian media is of course having a ball

Many stories are reportedly being fabricated about Jumblatt and the March 14 alliance leaders to add fuel to the turmoil that has taken place since Jumblatt’s announcement last Sunday.

Pro- Syrian leaders are also having a ball too

Wiam Wahhab a pro-Syrian former minister said after visiting Syria and meeting with Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa in Damascus Wednesday :”MP Walid Jumblatt’s visit to Syria does not require any mediation. The road to Damascus is open for Walid Jumblatt. This is his home.”

General Michel Aoun couldn’t hide his pleasure yesterday when he said during a press conference:

“Jumblatt has not joined the opposition, but he will be more than welcome if he does.”

Jumblatt should make up his mind quickly whether he is still in or out . March 14 leaders and Jumblatt’s constituents are eager to know if he is still with them or he is flip flopping like general Michel Aoun.

Hariri who according to Asharq al Awsat newspaper has stopped taking any calls from Jumblatt since last Sunday has reportedly told Jumblatt through an intermediary :

“You cannot remain my ally and be independent at the same time …you are either with me or against me”
Thursday

11;00pm US Sen. Al Franken announces the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Sotomayor won confirmation Thursday afternoon on a 68 to 31 vote.

10:16pm Suleiman Franjieh said on LBC : Hezbollah will be politically charged with the assassination of Hariri. Jumblatt read and understood the international situation and specifically the issue of Syria and Iran in the region

9:40 pm MP Antoine Saad said the PSP leader wanted “a positive shock, which was aimed at changing and evolving the March 14 alliance. He added that his bloc is still in the parliamentary majority and , MP Walid Jumblatt fully supports Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s efforts to form a 15-10-5 cabinet.

07:40pm PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt meets Wiam Wahhab at his home in Clemenceau. Wahab said later :Syria appreciates Jumblatt’s new stance

07:30pm President Suleiman meets caretaker PM Siniora to discusses latest developments

07:24pm NBN : Speaker Nabih Berri says he refuses to talk about politics until cabinet is formed

06:22 pm Mubarak, Hariri discuss Lebanese developments during a phone conversation

06:20 pm UPI : Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah has stockpiled more than 40,000 rockets and has ground missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv, The Times of London said

06;00pm AP: Sonia Sotomayor stands on the verge of making history as the US Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice, despite staunch opposition from Republicans who call her ill-suited for the bench.

05:05 pm Reuters: US sanctions against suppliers of fuel to Iran would drive up the price the Islamic Republic has to pay for imports and provide a big money-making opportunity for oil traders

05:00 pm Bloomberg: The number of Americans filing claims for jobless benefits fell more than economists predicted, a sign some employers have stopped paring staff as the recession eases.

04:56pm March 14 alliance is wondering why Berri is insisting on formation of the cabinet at any cost

04:50 pm Human Rights Watch: “Palestinian militant groups including the armed wing of Hamas are committing war crimes when they fire rockets into Israel.”

04:45pm PM designate Saad Hariri is expected back in Beirut within hours with some changes in the names of ministers

04:40pm British Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis said Britain is very concerned about Hezbollah rearming

02:24 pm Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak threatens to destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure and state institutions in case of war

11:54 Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora meets with PSP MP Wael Abu Faour at the Grand Serail to discuss current developments

11:57 New TV : we support our colleague Eid in rejecting the arrest warrant

11:53 Democratic Gathering MP Terro : we did not withdraw from march 14 to join the opposition and we will not abandon our ally PM designate Saad Hariri

11:20 Russian FM Lavrov: Russia supports Lebanon’s sovereignty , independence and its institutions

11:14 The European Union condemned the mass executions in Iran

11:06 Saudi minister Khoja : The situation in Lebanon is on its way to be resolved and all will be OK

11:00 Hezbollah violates the most important archaeological and historic landmark in Lebanon “Baalbak ” and turns it into another Tehran Square where Khomeini , Khamenei , Nasrallah and Hezbollah posters welcome the tourists at the entrance of Baalbek Temples

10:40 The Jordanian ministry of health has reported that the number of swine flue cases in the country has risen to 99

10;30 CNN: Judge Sonia Sotomayor was expected to easily win US Senate confirmation Thursday as two more Republican senators announced their support for the country’s first Hispanic high-court pick.

10:20 AP :The renovation of Lebanon’s oldest and most important synagogue has begun.

10:10 Al-Sharq Al-Awsat : Hezbollah MP Hussein al-Hajj Hassan said that “fruitful” meetings are being held between Hezbollah officials and PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt.

10:08 21 killed in an explosion is south Afghanistan

9:53 Mitchell called on Israel to freeze the settlements for 1 year

9:37 Iranian authorities arrested a key aid of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hussein Mousawi

9:25 The security forces arrested 80 wanted people for committing various crimes throughout the country

9:22 al Anbaa: The US Defense Department is monitoring the Israeli drill aimed at launching an attack at Lebanon

9:03 Venezuelan president Chaves imposes trade sanctions against Columbia

8:47 MP Jisr : Hariri will not quit as PM designate and Jumblatt did not leave March 14

8:41 Soueid told Kuwait newspaper al Seyassah : the causes that divided Lebanon between March 8 and 14 still exist and that the error that Jumblatt committed in his repositioning came at the expense of his friends and allies

8:40 PSP media spokesman Rami Al-Rayyes: Jumblatt did not turn on his allies, and we will be at equal distance from everyone

8:27 Saudi Arabia told Jumblatt that he needs to understand the concerns of others in Lebanon

8:22 Asharq al Awsat revealed that there are disputes with the PSP over Jumblatt’s new stance

8:13 Hariri told Jumblatt: You cannot remain my ally and be independent at the same time …you are either with me or against me

8:04 Al Hayat Source : the relationship between Jumblatt and Hariri must be settled, despite the deep wound which was inflicted

7:57 Al-Diyar newspaper reported that Speaker Nabih Berri spoke by telephone yesterday with PM designate Saad Hariri and kept the phone lines open with Jumblatt to heal the rift between the two men.

7:47 The preparations for a meeting between Jumblatt and SSNP chief Asaad Hardan are reportedly complete and the meeting could take place before the end of the week, could include dinner and will be attended by key officials from both parties

7:29 As Safir : MP Saad Hariri met Saudi King Abdullah in Morocco

7:29 An Nahar: Saudi Minister Abdel Aziz Khoja visited Baabda and met with president Suleiman and also met caretaker PM Fouad Siniora

7:15 Jumblatt : I didn’t leave March 14 and stressed to Khoja the importance of the Saudi Syrian rapprochement

7:12 Hariri is still on vacation. No constitutional limit on how long he can be a prime minister designate

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/friday_news_bri_60.php
Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 7 August, 2009 @ 12:46 PM in Beirut
Beirut – The reaction to Jumblatt’s U-Turn continues to dominate the news and there is no shortage of advice or speculation. Last night Democratic Gathering MP Antoine Saad a member of Jumblatt’s parliamentary bloc said the PSP leader wanted “a positive shock”, which was aimed at changing and evolving the March 14 alliance.

Saad said that his bloc is still in the parliamentary majority and PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt fully supports Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s efforts to form a 15-10-5 cabinet.

Jumblatt told Saudi Information and cultural Minister Abdel Aziz Khojah that it is unthinkable for him to ever disrupt Hariri’s efforts in forming a government, Al Watan newspaper reported this morning

According to MP Dory Chamaoun Jumblatt’s problem is with the March 14 slogan. He told PSP newspaper al Anbaa : ” Jumblatt’s problem is not with the Christians of March 14, or with al Mustaqbal but with himself because he had to adopt the slogan of « Lebanon First » which is against his own convictions”

Despite the claims by Jumblatt and some of his key MPs that he is not leaving March 14, things will never be the same for either party. Jumblatt reportedly has had enough of extremist groups like March 14 and March 8 and prefers moderation. He is reportedly planning to set up a centrist bloc with speaker Nabih Berri that will be supporting the president.

Jumblatt’s rival former minister Wiam Wahab has been paving the way for a Jumblatt – Syrian reconciliation. Last night they both met at Jumblatt’s residence for the third time. Following their meeting Wahab said the doors of Damascus are open for Jumblatt and that the Syrian leaders are very pleased with his new stance.

Jumblatt’s newspaper al Anbaa is claiming that the Druze leader also wants to prepare his son Taymour for a greater role by involving him in his future political meetings and public gatherings.

PM Designate Saad Hariri who is still vacationing in France is trying hard not to alienate Jumblatt. He reportedly instructed all his MPs and close associates to refrain from commenting on Jumblatt’s new stance.

March 14 coordinator Faris Soueid was very careful when he talked about Jumblatt during his interview with LBC this morning : “Jumblatt is not alone in being scared of what is taking place in the region … all the Lebanese are scared ” . Soueid however rejected Jumblatt’s claim that the last election campaign of March 14 was based on tribal and sectarian divide. He said ” Our election platform was agreed to by all members of March 14 and was signed by all including Jumblatt”.

Talking about the region Israel has been threatening Lebanon on a daily basis. Israel’s defense minister said Thursday that Hezbollah has stockpiled 40,000 rockets and warned the Jewish state would get tough in case of a conflict with Lebanon.

“We cannot accept that a neighboring U.N. member state should have in its government representatives of a militia that has more than 40,000 rockets,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli public radio.

“If there is a conflict on our northern border, we will use all necessary force,” Barak said.

Fadi al Habr, the Kataeb MP for the Aley district who ran on Jumblatt’s electoral list summed it up this way : “If the reconciliation with Hezbollah to protect the mountains and Lebanon is important the preservation of the strength of March 14 is also important specially after the spectacular victory achieved last June elections.

Friday

08:00 pm Press reports on Friday uncovered that US President Barack Obama has sent a three-page letter to Syrian leader Bashar Assad that tackled the situations in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Contents of the letter were not revealed.

07:50 pm In an Interview with Hezbollah’s al Manar TV Jumblatt said that he “misses visiting Damascus” but reiterated his decision not to visit the Syrian capital before Hariri does.

07:45 pm MP Walid Jumblatt criticized the Christians of March 14 in an interview to “Al-Manar”: The one whose hand is in water is not like someone whose hand is in fire and I am sure I will have soon a bilateral meeting with Hariri

07;40 pm New Kerala : A team of archaeologists has recently unearthed 13 burial sites, temples and personal items dating to the Canaanite period ( between 1800 BC and 1500 BC ) in Sidon in Lebanon, which are missing links in the city’s historic legacy. Other burial sites from 1900 BC and 15000 BC were also discovered)

07;30 pm The residents of Jib Jennin of Western Beqaa protested today against the continued power blackouts. MPs Ziad al Qadiri , Jamal Jarrah and key officials of the town participated in the protest.

07:10 pm A series of bomb attacks against Shiites on Friday near the northern city of Mosul and in Baghdad killed at least 36 people and wounded nearly 100 others, Iraqi officials said.

06:32pm Minister of Health Mohammad Khalife: the situation with the swine flue in Lebanon is satisfactory specially since the number of people infected did not increase significantly, and we remain vigilant and take actions as needed

05:12pm American embassy in Beirut : The US is committed more than ever to supporting Lebanon

5:00 pm CNNMoney: Wall Street advances after a smaller-than-expected number of jobs lost and a surprise drop in the unemployment rate

04:30 pm Al Markaziyah : caretaker Minister Talal Arslan is preparing to leave the March 8 alliance because he feels he is being undermined by his allies in the opposition . His allies have reportedly refused to allocate a ministry for him and for this reason he is planning to join MP Walid Jumblatt in a new Druze alliance that could result in the allocation of ministry for him from Jumblatt’s share

04:00 pm Reports from Lebanon’s mountain resorts indicate that power blackouts are at an all time high and today was one of the worst this summer. “General Michel Aoun promised change and reform but the only change seen under his energy minister Taborian is more blackouts and water shortages ” an energy observer told Ya Libnan

04:00 pm AP: When Sonia Sotomayor is sworn in Saturday to the US Supreme Court, she’ll be able to claim two firsts: first Hispanic justice and first high court member to have her oath-taking made available to TV cameras.

04:00 pm Reuters: NATO’s new secretary-general made a direct call for more troops in Afghanistan on Friday and said training of Afghan forces also needed to be escalated.

03:17pm Army chief Kahwaji: Ain El Helweh Palestinian refugee camp will not be a base for criminals

3:00 pm AFP Pakistan said Friday it believed that wanted Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone attack, which if confirmed would score a coup in the US-led fight against Islamist militants.

03:00pm Vice-Chairman of the Higher Islamic Shiite Council Sheikh Abdul Amir Qablan urged Lebanese politicians in his Friday prayer to form the government quickly and refrain from harassment stressing that the interest of the people should be their first

11;00 Lebanon Files: A Maronite Church in the Shouf region will be the venue of the meeting between Aoun and Jumblatt

09:37 Al Watan newspaper: Jumblatt told Saudi minister Khojah that it is unthinkable for him to ever disrupt Hariri’s efforts in forming a government

09:28 Sources in the majority and the opposition: 15-10-5 cabinet formula is final ( 15 seats for the majority , 10 for the minority and 5 for the president in a 30 seat cabinet)

09:14 Al Anbaa: Jumblatt is to give a greater role for his son, Taymour during the next phase of the political meetings and public gatherings

09:10 20 people were arrested for committing various crimes including theft and counterfeiting and many goods were confiscated

09:05 Chamoun told al Anbaa”: Jumblatt’s problem is not with the Christians of March 14, or with al Mustaqbal but with himself because he had to adopt the slogan of « Lebanon First » which is against his own convictions

09:03 53 wanted people were arrested for committing various criminal acts

08:42 Haroun told “Voice of Lebanon”: The warning by the Ministry of Health that it will void contracts with hospitals that refuse to receive patients is a precautionary measure

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/saturday_news_b_54.php
Saturday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Saturday, 8 August, 2009 @ 8:34 AM in Beirut
Beirut – According to Al Diyar newspaper the following five MPs have decided to leave the Democratic Gathering parliamentary bloc headed by MP Walid Jumblatt in protest against his recent stance and in the event he decides to join the opposition or attack Prime Minister Designate Saad Hariri .
They are:

Fouad Saad, Henri Helou, Alaeddine Terro, Elie Aoun and Marwan Hamadeh

The paper also reported that the above MPs are expected to issue a statement in this regard or may hold a joint press conference to denounce Jumblatt’s stance and announce publicly their withdrawal

But according to the sources of the newspaper U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman has Contacted the Christian leaders of March 14 alliance one by one and urged them to refrain from any public debate through the media with Jumblatt over his recent stance and that the US fully understands his recent U-turn.

Meanwhile speculation continues in Lebanon about Jumblatt’s next moves.

Al-Liwaa newspaper quoted a senior Mustaqbal official as saying that Hariri will meet Jumblatt upon arrival to listen to him firsthand.

Hariri’s vacation in France was the subject of a lot of speculation too

There were several media reports of contacts between Hariri and the leaders in the majority and minority but the Al Mustaqbal Movement has denied these reports and stated that Hariri is strictly on vacation

Hariri will most likely return to Beirut this weekend to resume talks on government formation, according to media reports

Naturally next week will be a crucial one for Hariri and Jumblatt and the future of March 14 alliance

Marada Movement leader Suleiman Franjieh thinks that Jumblatt’s new position is “aimed at safeguarding the Druze community and this is his right.”

“His (Jumblatt’s) mind is focused in this direction only,” Franjieh said during his interview with LBC’s Kalam el-Nass talk show late Thursday.

Franjiyeh attempted to justify Jumblatt’s recent move :

“There is a Syrian and Iranian reality in the region and the United State has changed its policy toward them,” Franjieh noted.

“There is also recognition that the Syrian regime is there to stay and will not change. Jumblatt has seen this fact and he is more daring than others to decide to return to his previous positions,” Franjieh added.

To confirm Franjiyeh’s point, reports from Damascus revealed that president Basher al Assad has received yesterday a 3 page letter from US president Barack Obama. The contents of the letter were not disclosed ,but there was a lot of speculation about a warming of relations between Damascus and Washington.

Did I mention anyplace that Feltman ( who may have written Obama’s letter to Assad) is very close to Jumblatt ???

Al Hayat newspaper reported this morning that Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has already set the stage for Jumblatt’s visit to Damascus after the government is formed and after Hariri’s visit.

Saturday

10:04pm Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas received firm endorsement from his Fatah party on Saturday to remain its leader but Hamas said Fatah willnot be in a better shape after this endorsement

10:00 pm Reuters: The French government demanded on Saturday that Iran immediately release French teaching assistant Clotilde Reiss and Tehran embassy staff member Nazak Afshar,

9:06pm One Syrian and one Lebanese farmer were killed during a clash in Arsal

9:00 pm LAT : Sonia Sotomayor became the 111th Supreme Court justice in the US history today. She became Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice and only the third woman in the court’s 220-year history.

8:37pm Gemayel : some of the steps taken by Jumblatt do not reinforce the Mountain reconciliation ( between the Christians and Druze) and the 15-10-5 formula is no longer valid

8:22pm Aoun : I do not allow the Patriarch ( Sfeir ) or anyone else to accuse me of threatening Lebanon’s entity . The Kataeb and Lebanese Forces will become the minority

08:12pm Former President Gemayel told LOBC : We want to open a new page with Syria, but through the Lebanese State

8:04pm Fatfat told “MTV”: the formation of the government is related to the response of some parties to the policy of openness

7:38pm MP Adwan told “Al-Manar:” 15-10-5 is no longer the political reality and we have to devise a new formula

6:14pm Al Thaher MP: the powers of the President of the Republic adequate and it is enough that he is the referee and the protector of the Constitution

06:00 pm King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has reportedly decided to cancel his trips to The US and Morocco because of internal irregularities . The second VP of the Prime Minister , Internal minister prince Nayef Bin Abdel Aziz has reportedly illegally transferred a huge amount of money

5:33pm U.S. Ambassador Michele Sison, will visit the city of Zahle on Monday and was invited by the head of Zahle in our the heart Nicola Fattoush Fattush for lunch on at Al Bardaouni river area

5:16pm Lebanon’s basketball team qualified for the second round in the Asian Cup Basketball Championship after winning a landslide victory of 123-36 against the Indonesian team

4:28pm Saudi ambassador to Lebanon Ali Alosairi : “The government is an internal matter for the Lebanese and the Lebanese should be left alone to resolve it

3:21pm media official OF Suleiman Frinjieh told MTV: We agreed with the Kataeb on several issues despite our disagreement regarding the arms of the resistance

3:13pm Minister Aoun: We have the right to know why the cabinet has yet to been formed and after a month and a half have passed

2:31pm Arslan’s Democratic Party: It is in the interest of the opposition that our party should be represented in the government and we have proposed several names for ministers and all they have to do is choose an appropriate one

2:15pm VOL: The vehicle of head of the chamber of commerce and industry in the north Abdullah Ghandour, who disappeared on Friday, was found near Haykaliyeh hospital in Tripoli.

12:00pm Hezbollah condemned Mosul explosions: Stop the blood bath and preserve the unity of Iraq.

10:50 CNN : Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President Kennedy, is in critical but stable condition in a Massachusetts hospital with her family at her side, her family said Friday

10: 45 NY Times : In a sign of persistent divisions in Iran’s hard-line political camp, a coalition of major conservative parties issued an unusually blunt open letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday, warning him not to disregard the supreme leader and other senior figures as he chooses his new cabinet.

10:41 MP Adwan told LBC: there is an effort to isolate the Lebanese Forces and we are being accused of rearming. We are innocent of any attempt to rearm and call on the courts to pursue any arming by any group

10:40 AP: A deputy to Baitullah Mehsud claimed Saturday that the Pakistani Taliban chief was not killed by a CIA missile strike, contradicting another aide who confirmed Mehsud’s death a day earlier.

10:30 Sawt al-Mada radio : MP Michel Aoun compared himself MP Walid Jumblatt in their decision to leave the March 14 alliance. “What Jumblatt did is similar to what we did in 2005,” he said, adding that Jumblatt found himself in the same situation within the March 14 alliance and the time is ripe now to meet with him without any present conditions” . Aoun declared: “There is no majority but a group of minorities that needs to agree to form a majority,” and added : “The March 14 alliance’s project is over.”

10:00 National Liberation Party secretary general Elias Abu Assi told VOL: I insist on calling March 8 a rebellious movement, backed by weapons and money. There is an obvious denial of elections results.

09:04 MP Harb told VOL: we were not surprised by Jumblatt’s move but were all shocked everyone by his timing . I don’t see him leaving March 14 but has specific observations with concerning this alliance

08:50 Al Hayat newspaper : Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has already set the stage for Jumblatt’s visit to Damascus after the government is formed and after Hariri’s visit.

08:47 PSP sources told Al Anbaa : our alliance is with Hariri and there will be no return to the secretariat of March 14

08:39 Al Anbaa : Jumblatt and Nasrallah had another meeting away from the media

07:55 Saudi newspaper Okaz: most probably the government formation will be postponed till after Ramadan

07:00 al Diyar :” MPs Fouad Saad, Henri Helou, Alaeddine Terro, Elie Aoun and Marwan Hamadeh will leave the “Democratic Gathering bloc ” in protest against the new positions of Jumblatt

06:47 British FM Ivan Lewis told As Safir: No new development in the dialogue talks with “Hezbollah” and Damascus did not convince us that this is a resistance group and Lebanon should not be the last country to establish peace with Israel

06:33 Patriarch Sfeir’s visitors have reported his surprise and dismay about the continuous delays in government formation …”every week they say next week” he was quoted as saying

06:10 Speaker Berri sources: he is still fasting with regards to political talk , and he will only break the fast once the government is formed and a decree is issued

06:06 An Nahar: Renewed effort to restart the government formation process …results expected within 48 hours

06:02 visitors to President Suleiman have sensed that the issue of the distribution of portfolios has almost been resolved , no particular problems or obstacles and the names of ministers and their portfolios are almost known

05:48, political sources: Lebanese army intelligence has raided a communication station in the Barouk mountain area and found out that it was directly connected to an Internet provider that has been illegally active in selling subscriptions for years in both Lebanon by Israel . The station was closed and is under investigation

05:36, “the ambassador:” My source to go to the Government supported the “technocrats” separating the issues of people living on the policy that could be discussed at the dialogue table

05:23 Al Mustaqbal sources: We are not sure when Hariri will be back from vacation but we know for sure that the formation of the cabinet is his top priority

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/sunday_news_bri_60.php
Sunday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Sunday, 9 August, 2009 @ 8:53 AM in Beirut
Beirut- It appears that the process of government formation is back to square one. Prior to Jumblatt’s change in position, the agreed formula for government formation was 15-10-5 but the leaders of March 14 are now saying that this formula is no longer valid and a new formula has to be devised.

The formula allocates 15 ministries for March 14 majority , 10 for March 8 minority and 5 for president Michel Suleiman

Democratic Gathering parliamentary bloc leader MP Walid Jumblatt announced a week ago that he will be leaving the March 14 alliance

Jumblatt’s bloc is usually allocated 3 ministries.

If Jumblatt is no longer in the majority and if he decides to vote with March 8 on key issues then the majority will end up with 12 ministers and the minority with 13.

This is why the majority wants to renegotiate a new formula. Yesterday former president Amin Gemayel , a key member of March 14 alliance stressed that the “15-10-5 is no longer valid and a new formula has to be devised”

On the other hand the key March 8 leader Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah , Amal chief Speaker Nabih Berri and FPM leader MP Michel Aoun are acting on the basis that Jumblatt has already left the March 14 alliance but at the same time are insisting on keeping the same 15-10-5 formula because it suits them perfectly according to al Hayat newspaper .

Prime Minister designate Saad Hariri has not returned from vacation yet and his first priority upon his return is to have a frank meeting with Jumblatt according to An Nahar newspaper.

Saudi newspaper Okaz reported yesterday that the government formation could be postponed till after Ramadan .

Ramadan in 2009 is expected to start around Friday, the 21st of August and will continue for approx 30 days until approx Saturday, the 19th of September. Ramadan ends with the festival of Eid al-Fitr which could also last several days

Hariri was appointed by the president as the prime minister designate just over six weeks ago and many MPs are already complaining about the delay in forming the government.

It appears that Lebanon will not be seeing white smoke for a while and instead will be witnessing a battle of math formulas that could last for weeks and possibly months

Sunday

11;00 pm Reuters: The United States said on Sunday the evidence was “pretty conclusive” that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud is dead

10:24pm Minister Mario Aoun: the attack against the PFM center reflects the political bankruptcy of some groups

10:04pm MP Boutros Harb : The new stance of MP Walid Jumblatt, has weakened the principles of the March 14 alliance

9:53pm MP George Adwan : the Lebanese Forces will not comment on the Jumblatt’s in order to preserve the mountain reconciliation

09:43 NNA: Fawzi Chahrour, a prison inmate, started a riot in the maximum security Roumieh Prison on Sunday. He attacked a prison guard and took 21 prison cell keys, released their prisoners and asked them to set their mattresses on fire. Internal Security Forces entered the prison, extinguished the fires and regained control the prison . An investigation is ongoing. Interior Minister Ziad Baroud was monitoring the situation

8:59pm President Gemayel: the position of Jumblatt will result in re-shuffling of the cards

6:59pm One Lebanese and one Syrian were killed and 2 were wounded at the border due to personal conflict

6:44pm Soueid : The relationship between March 14 and Jumblatt did not reach the stage of political divorce.

05:20 pm Bloomberg: An earthquake measuring 7.1 magnitude shook Japan’s Izu islands, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement. The temblor struck at 7:55 p.m. local time at a depth of 188.3 miles (303 kilometers) about 200 miles south-southwest of Tokyo, the agency said

05:17 pm Zahle MP Jenjinian: Unless concerned parties will be willing to cooperate and offer concessions to speed up the government formation , the government will not see the light before Ramadan

5:00 pm Reuters : Israel’s deputy foreign minister said Sunday: “Israel will hold Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah and Lebanon itself responsible for any attempt to assassinate Israelis abroad, and will retaliate”. This was in reference to an Egyptian newspaper report of a plot by Hezbollah to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Cairo.

03:02 pm Minister Ghazi Aridi : No matter how much we disagree politically our eyes should remain focused on common interests

2;40 WHO : As of July 31, 2009 the grand total number of swine flu cases was 162380 and the total number of deaths was1154. The majority of the cases and deaths are in the Americas

2:35 Bloomberg: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip four years ago was a mistake that will not serve as a model for future peace efforts.

2;30pm The EU has lashed out at Tehran, over the trial of the British and French embassy staff, who were arrested in connection with Iran’s post-election riots.

2:22 pm Almost a million people have been evacuated from southeastern China as authorities prepare for the arrival of Typhoon Morakot

2:20 pm WSJ: A small plane collided with a sightseeing helicopter carrying a group of Italian tourists over the Hudson River in New York City Saturday, plunging both aircraft into the water and apparently killing all nine people

02:15pm Minister Lahoud: President Suleiman is following the footsteps of the great independent presidents

02:02pm Nawaf Musawi, expressed his surprise at the delay in forming the national unity government

1:43pm Mir’ebi called for cooperation with the PM designate with open hearts and sincere intentions

1:38pm a “Hezbollah” official in the south: the next few days will witness the announcement of the new government

1:23pm Hezbollah’s Sheikh Yazbek: we hope Hariri will return to Lebanon soon to resume his role and implement what was agreed to

1:20pm SSNP’s Hardan: what is required is the formation of a national unity government

1:18pm Shiite Sheikh Fadlallah called for real partnership away from sectarian and ethnic fragmentation

12:54pm Hezbollah’s sheikh Qawooq: the beneficiaries of the delay in forming a government are those abroad that are affected by the internal realignment

12:39pm Deputy speaker Farid Makari : Aoun is weakening the presidency and a landmine that is blocking the progress of the constitutional institutions

12:21pm MP Al-Hajj Hassan called for speeding up the formation of the government in order to address the problems of the country

12:00pm type of Kfrezibian: If we abandon our values we become goods for sale. Lebanon cannot absorb resettlement of the Palestinians

11:53 Kayrouz reconfirmed after meeting with Sfeir the strength of the relationship between the Bcharri and the Maronite Patriarchate

11;40 Future News: MP George Adwan said that the Lebanese Forces will propose to Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri to form a technocrat cabinet, since “Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt’s realignment has forced us to reconsider the 15-10-5 cabinet formula,”

010;00 FPM leader MP Michel Aoun arrives at Kfar Zebian in Kesrouan to participate in a mass on the occasion of St. Frem Day

8:55 Al-Hayat newspaper: Speaker Nabih Berri said that the new cabinet will be a coalition-unity cabinet rather than a national-unity cabinet that combines two major parties, since a 12-10-5-3 cabinet formula that grants the majority 12 ministers, the opposition 10, the president five and Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt three, will be adopted after the latter decided to split from the March 14 alliance.

08:53 Al Anbaa: An Arabian authority is questioning why the Canadian embassy in Lebanon is not requiring the Palestinians that want to immigrate to Canada to deposit twenty thousand dollars in a Canadian bank while this requirement continues to apply to the Lebanese.

08:40 Syrian financial newspaper Al Khabar : “Jumblatt’s house in Damascus is for sale at about 1 billion Syrian pounds ( approx $20 million )… The area of the house is 2500 square meters ( about 27,000 square feet) and is located in Qaymariyah in the old district of Damascus and registered in the name of his wife Nora who is a Syrian national.”
08:05 The Imam of the Lebanese community in Ivory Coast was sacked after being accused of financing Hezbollah

07:39 Al Anbaa: an Islamic spiritual summit will be hosted by Dar Al-Fatwa in on September 8 n the form of a Ramadan Iftar

07:20 Mystery surrounds the fate of the President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Tripoli folloing his disappearance Friday afternoon after and the discovery of his his car in Koura . The security forces are investigating the incident

07:14 Radhia Ashouri, spokeswoman for Daniel Bellemare chief prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon denies Wahab’s claim that Bellemare is sick with cancer and stressed that he is in good health and will soon resume his activities

07:05 Wahab told Asharq al Awsat : We will soon witness intensive visits to Syria beginning with Hariri’s first

06:59 Sison will be in Zahle tomorrow to get acquainted with the conditions of the city

06:55 informed sources: The Patriarch does not blame Jumblatt and his statements do not affect the reconciliation of Mount lebanon between the Christians and Druze

06:53 Al Hayat : “Hezbollah” is acting on the basis that Jumblatt left March 14 and that there should be no change in the composition of the government

06:51 Berri told his visitors: Jumblatt’s departure from March 14 will not change the 15-10-5 formula for government formation

06:47 LBC ‘s office in Jeddah was shutdown

06:17 source from majority: the atmosphere within the Christian community is in favor of dialogue between Hariri and Jumblatt

06:11 “An-Nahar:” The atmosphere is conducive to a frank meeting between Hariri and Jumblatt

06:08 Last night shelling between Bab al Tabbanah and Jebel Muhsin

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/monday_news_bri_58.php
Monday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Monday, 10 August, 2009 @ 7:09 AM in Beirut
Beirut- The focus in Lebanon continues to be the reaction to Jumblatt’s announcement about leaving the March 14 alliance, Hariri’s absence from Lebanon, the government formula that should be used in the event Jumblatt really leaves the March 14 alliance and the timing of the cabinet formation Aug 7 was reportedly the first time there was a direct contact between Prime Minister -designate Saad Hariri and Democratic Gathering leader MP Walid Jumblatt, since the latter made the bombshell announcement on Leaving March 14 alliance. As Safire newspaper reported that on that day which happened to be Jumblatt’s birthday Hariri sent him a rose Bouquet to his house in Clemenceau and called him to congratulate him. Jumblatt responded by saying : “I miss you” and Hariri jokingly responded by saying :”What for ? more harassment?”

As expected March 14 leaders are angry at Jumblatt, but are being careful in their reactions not to alienate him. Yesterday former President Amin Gemayel said : “The position of Jumblatt will result in re-shuffling of the cards”

Another key member of march 14 MP Boutros Harb said: “The new stance of MP Walid Jumblatt, has weakened the principles of the March 14 alliance”

Lebanese Forces MP George Adwan who ran on Jumblatt’s electoral list said : the Lebanese Forces will not comment on the Jumblatt’s statements in order to preserve the mountain reconciliation

March 14 coordinator Faris Soueid said : The relationship between March 14 and Jumblatt did not reach the stage of political divorce.

On the other hand March 8 leaders are thrilled with Jumblatt’s U-Turn and their allies in Damascus and Tehran couldn’t be happier.

Wiam Wahab , Syria’s staunch ally is predicting that many March 14 leaders will be visiting Damascus starting with Hariri

Tehran has reportedly sent a message to Jumblatt that as soon as he visits Damascus he will be welcome in Tehran and that Tehran is pleased that he returned to his “old and moderate position”

Hariri continues with his vacation in France despite the reports that he will be back in Beirut during the weekend. As expected his vacation is fueling anger within the March 8 camp , since it is resulting in delays in government formation . Many are now forecasting that the cabinet wouldn’t be formed before Ramadan.

March 14 leaders are now saying that cabinet formula 15-10-5 that was agreed on before Jumblatt’s announcement is no longer valid and a new formula has to be devised

The formula allocates 15 ministries for March 14 majority , 10 for March 8 minority and 5 for president Michel Suleiman

Yesterday Speaker Nabih Berri said that the new cabinet will be a coalition-unity cabinet rather than a national-unity cabinet that combines two major parties, a 12-10-5-3 cabinet formula that grants the majority 12 ministers, the opposition 10, the president five and Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt three, will be adopted after the latter decided to split from the March 14 alliance.

The Lebanese should expect to hear many more formulas between now and the fall, unless the rival parties cooperate and concessions are made

One final note: March 8 is also beginning to witness cracks within its ranks. Caretaker Sports and Youth Minister MP Talal Arslan a key member of March 8 alliance attacked the coalition claiming they have refused to allocate for his parliamentary bloc a ministerial position . A switch by Arslan could complicate matters for the opposition since his bloc includes 4 MPs and this could reduce the number of MPs of the opposition to 53 from 57 in the 128 seat parliament

Monday
11:30 pm A magnitude 7.7 earthquake has struck the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. A tsunami warning is in effect for India, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh, according to the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

8:08pm Arslan criticized the opposition and told New TV: There is a red line as far as I am concerned and I will not allow anyone to cross it , ignore us and monopolize the representation and I hope that Prime Minister Hariri will try and form the cabinet as soon as possible

8:06pm Wiam Wahab : Jumblatt’s issue has been finalized . I have already forwarded to him the Syrian letter and I believe Hariri will be the first to to visit syria after the government is formed

8:02pm Allouch told MTV: I don’t think it will be possible to change the 10-15-5 formula and the internal and external obstacles are still there

7:37pm Hezbollah MP Mohammad Raad told “Al Manar”: The 15-10-5 formula ensures balance, and the prime minister designate knows very well what pushed Jumblatt to adopt the new positions

7:32pm Jumblatt told al Manar : arrangements are being made for a meeting with Hariri as soon as possible

7:22pm Al Kataeb: Regardless of the difficulties and challenges , nothing will force us to drop our believes

7:20pm Siniora met with Minister Khalifa and Jean Obeid

5:06pm Qumati: We want real and effective participation in a government of national unity, not a Government of Décor

4:03pm Wahab said from Rabiyah: Aoun and Jumblatt will soon be meeting and all the arrangements have been taken care of

3:32pm Jumblatt: I am the only who will decide on the date of my visit to Damascus, the PSP will not enter into argument with any party

02:20pm US Ambassador to Lebanon Michele Sison arrives in Zahle and meets with Zahle in our Heart MP Nicholas Fattouch

1:53 pm Truck overturns and causes oil spill, heavy traffic

1:07 pm Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora meets with Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Awad Assairi at Grand Serial

12:22 pm Wiam Wahhab: Hezbollah repaired Jumblatt-Syria relationship and Jumblatt promised Khoja to protect Hariri politically

11:31 The Islamic Action Front warned of the dangers of what’s happening in the Palestinian territories and called for reconciliation.

11:18 MP Naji Gharios: Aoun is not hindering cabinet formation process. The meeting between Aoun and Jumblatt will be held sooner or later.

10:25 MP Nihmatallah Abi Nasr told Future News: Aoun is not an obstacle to cabinet formation. Jumblatt’s stances are the direct cause of the delay.

10;20 Qatari newspaper al Watan: Jumblatt is preparing a message of “greeting and apology” to the Syrian people and is planning a visit to Damascus that will be independent of the government formation or Hariri’s visit and will be accompanied by his son Taymour and PSP MPs Wael Abou Faour and Akram Shehayeb

10;01 Syrian newspaper al Watan : Jumblatt has canceled several meetings with key Arab officials that have asked for urgent meetings for clarifications of his repositioning statement

Reported, “homeland,” the Syrian President of the “Democratic Gathering,” MP Walid Jumblatt, canceled several meetings, especially with large Arab figures, the latter requested to urgently step after announcing the return of political Tamodah.

09:54 PM Designate returned from Paris to Beirut on a private jet

9:30 NY Times : At least 39 people were killed and more than 209 were wounded early Monday morning as a series of bomb attacks struck Baghdad and a village near the northern city of Mosul.

9:21 : Al Rai newspaper : The Shiites are following the equation : “We do not want to win Jumblatt and lose-Hariri,”

09:14 Al Rai newspaper : 14 March is seriously considering a change to the agreed Government formula

09:06 Wiam Wahab: the Saudi – Syrian kitchen is cooking a plan that will influence the situation in Lebanon for a long time

08:53 Soueid: Jumblatt wants to obtain an insurance policy that will protect the Druze and the relation with him hasn’t reach the political divorce stage

08:44, Al Liwaa newspaper : Suleiman is making contacts away from the limelight in order to facilitate the formation of the government

08:40 MP Rahhal : The governmental formula is dependent on Jumblatt’s position

08:38 Sources: the opposition is stepping up its demands to take advantage of the re-positioning of Jumblatt

08:32 Arslan: the opposition should recognize that the leadership of Khaldah is in the national interest and it should change its attitude in dealing with us

08:04 Sources: The Syrian leadership has delegated the Lebanese file to FM Walid Mouallem

06:18 sources of the opposition are questioning the real reasons for the delayed return of Hariri to Beirut and are wondering he is making contacts to reach a final government formula of coexistence following the new realities?

06:00 Opposition warns against retreat from the formula 15 – 10-5

05:54 Hezbollah leader Nasrallah Nasrallah to make a televised speech on August 14 which marks the ” divine victory day”

05:52 Berri ruled out any Israeli aggression on Lebanon in 2009

05:45 Israel has threatened “Hezbollah” and Lebanon following the revelation of a plot to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in Egypt

05:43 “Al Mustaqbal “: Hariri is still within the “grace period” of government formation and the 15-10-5 formula should be revaluated

05:38 Opposition sources: Government of technocrats is out of the question since the country’s political situation is not normal

05:33 Iranian source: Jumblatt received a message that he is welcome in Tehran as soon as he visits Damascus and the relationship of Iran with the Druze has not and will not be affected

05:26 Hariri sent Jumblatt a rose Bouquet on his birthday ( Aug 7) and called him to congratulate him. Jumblatt responded by saying : “I miss you” and Hariri jokingly responded by saying :”What for ? more harassment?”

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/tuesday_news_br_53.php
Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 11 August, 2009 @ 11:07 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Prime minister designate Saad Hariri is back from his 1 week vacation which seemed to have taken forever and immediately started making contacts to finalize the formation of the cabinet. “Hariri is determined to complete his mission and it is unthinkable that he will give up or quit”, according to An Nahar newspaper.

Now that Hariri is back the issue of government formulas will be the focus

The issue of Jumblatt’s share is the main issue as far as the opposition and the majority is concerned

The formula of 15-10-5 was already agreed upon between the majority and the opposition before the change in Jumblatt’s position.

Yesterday Jumblatt stated: ” It is natural that my share of ministers should be included in the majority”

The formula allocates 15 ministers for the majority, 10 for the minority and 10 for the president

The opposition is insisting on maintaining the same formula , but the majority is not convinced and sees a dramatic change in Jumblatt’s position that could turn the majority into a minority and visa versa

The other issue is Aoun’s share . Yesterday Hariri told his visitors : “No serious obstacles facing the formation of the cabinet except the impossible demands of General Aoun”

Tuesday

08:40 pm NY Times : The Kuwaiti authorities said Tuesday they had arrested six jihadists who were planning to attack the main United States military base in the country and other sites.

08:35pm Xinhua: At least 62 people were killed and 57 others are missing in Taiwan as of 8 pm Tuesday local time after Morakot, the worst typhoon to hit the region in nearly five decades, swept across the island.

08:33pm PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt says he is “fully committed to the agreed upon” 15-10-5 cabinet formula. He told Hariri “the formation of the government should respect the will of the electorate”

8:11pm Alloush told OTV: Jumblatt positioned himself between March 8 and March14 and Prime Minister al-Hariri will not form a government without the consent of his Allies

08:06pm LBC: Following his meeting with PM-designate Saad Hariri, PSP leader MP Walid Jumblatt will receive a Hezbollah delegation at his residence in Clemenceau

07:40pm Al-Manar TV: prior to meeting with Hariri Jumblatt said “the atmosphere is and will continue to be positive,” adding that his sit down with Hariri “will clarify a lot of issues.

06:55 pm Hariri meets with Jumblatt in downtown Beirut who was accompanied Ministers Ghazi Aridi and Wael Abu Faour and MP Marwan Hamadeh.

06:25pm France announces that French embassy staffer Nazak Afshar, on trial for charges related to post-election protests in Iran, has been released from Tehran prison

03:02pm US ambassador: we are trying to provide for the needs of the Lebanese to improve their living standards and we want to be partners to the fullest extent

03:01pm Dutch ambassador : “Holland does not get involved in any way with the International Tribunal and the delay in formation of the government in Lebanon does not concern us

03:00 pm The Chevrolet Volt, GM’s electric car that’s expected to go on sale in late 2010, is projected to get an estimated 230 miles per gallon, the automaker will announce Tuesday.( approx 97 km per liter)

02:51pm former PM Najib Miqati urged the security officials and the courts to speed up the investigation of the disappearance of the president of the Chamnber of Commerce of Tripoli Abdallah Ghandoor

02:45pm Speaker Berri reviewed with the Kuwaiti ambassador Abdel Aal al Qanaee the situation in general

02:30 pm hariri may visit Baabda today to update the president on the formation of the government

1:30 pm Seven of the detainees of Aisha Bakkar violence were released

12:55 pm AP: Hundreds were feared dead in Taiwan and Japan, and flooding affected China, including Zhejiang Province

12:50 pm Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of President John F. Kennedy and a champion of the disabled who founded the Special Olympics, died Tuesday, the Special Olympics said.

12:44 pm Hariri said Tuesday that As Safir report is completely unfounded and urged media outlets “to seek accurate information from the right sources.” The report stated that Hariri considered Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun’s “unreasonable” demands to be the “only serious obstacles” impeding the cabinet formation.

12:34 pm Future bloc is holding a meeting in Qoreitem headed by caretaker PM Fouad Siniora

12:10 pm Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Mohammad Reza Shibani said after meeting with Berri: “Israel’s threats against Lebanon and Hezbollah are empty,”

11:57 Iran says 4,000 were initially arrested in the disputed vote unrest

08:29 As-Safir: Jumblatt says preparations are ongoing to hold a meeting with Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, “which is likely to take place within the coming two days.” Jumblatt voiced support for the 15-10-5 cabinet formula saying that it is “the only formula”

07:23 Fatfat: formula 15 + 10 + 5 needs to be reviewed

07:12 Al Akhbar: attitudes of Fatfat and Alloush towards Jumblatt are not personal but they feel he has destroyed a successful project that took years to build

07:00 Phalange official: we have nothing to do with the company suspected of involvement in the international internet network that was raided recently

06:48 Alloush: the relationship between Jumblatt and the March 14 public is very bad

06:12 As Safir : a meeting took place last night that included Hussein Khalil and Ali Hassan Khalil at Bassil’s home

06:04 “Change and Reform Bloc:” we are waiting for the offer of prime minister designate

06:00 MP Mohammad Raad: 15-10-5 formula reflects true partnership

05:54 Jumblatt: It is natural that my share of ministers should be included in the majority

05:45 Hariri told his visitors: No serious obstacles facing the formation of the cabinet except the impossible demands of General Aoun
05:37 As Safir :” Hariri has not contacted the opposition since his return

05:28 “An-Nahar:” Hariri seems determined to complete his mission that is unthinkable that he will give up or quit

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/wednesday_news_59.php
Wednesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Wednesday, 12 August, 2009 @ 11:31 AM in Beirut
Beirut – As expected Prime Minister designate MP Saad Hariri and Progressive Socialist party Leader MP Walid Jumblatt met yesterday in downtown Beirut for the first time since the latter announced that his ‘alliance with the March 14 coalition was out of necessity and needs to be terminated’.

Hariri described the meeting with Jumblatt as excellent.

Hariri also told reporters that progress was achieved in the cabinet formation adding that he is “ready to overcome all obstacles and difficulties to complete the mission of forming the new government.”

Jumblatt told reporters during a press conference following the meeting with Hariri that his last Sunday statement was “blown out of proportion by the media ” adding “all that exaggeration could have been avoided.”

“There were those, who made the PSP’s conference in the Beaurivage Hotel more important than Iran’s nuclear issue,” said Jumblatt.

Jumblatt stressed that he is “fully committed to the agreed upon” 15-10-5 national unity cabinet formula. He told Hariri “the formation of the government should respect the will of the electorate”.

The formula allocates 15 ministers for the majority, 10 for the minority and 10 for the president.

Jumblatt was accompanied by Ministers Ghazi Aridi and Wael Abu Faour who are PSP members and MP Marwan Hamadeh who is a member of Jumblatt’s Democratic Gathering Parliamentary block.

Hamadeh told Voice of Lebanon this morning The Jumblatt Hariri meeting gave new impetus to the issue of government formation, kept the same agreed government formula and the share of the Democratic Gathering Parliamentary block will be included in the share of the March majority

Later last night Jumblatt hosted at his house in Clemenceau a Hezbollah delegation headed by MP Mohammad Raad. According to As Safir newspaper Raad delivered a message of appreciation to Jumblatt’s new stance that will “help reactivate the Palestinian issue”

Following their meeting Raad told reporters ” that there are no obstacles facing the cabinet formation” and called for accelerating the process.

During his meeting with Hezbollah delegation which included in addition to MP Raad, MPs Ammar and Mousawi Jumblatt was accompanied by Ministers Abou Faour and Aridi , MPs Terro and Shehayeb , his son Taymour , Media advisor Rayyes and Yagi deputy chief of the PSP

Wednesday

08:22pm MTV: The other killer of Ghandoor is another Iraqi national Adnan Mohammad Adnan who left the country last Sunday . His name and particulars were given to the Interpol to arrest him and extradite him to Lebanon

6:45pm Reuters: Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in an interview: Israel under Netanyahu will not resume Turkish-mediated peace talks with Syria, insisting that any new negotiations be direct

6:35 Bloomberg: The US and Switzerland settled a Justice Department lawsuit against UBS AG seeking the names of Americans suspected of evading taxes through 52000 secret Swiss accounts.

6:31pm Former President Gemayel received the Ambassador of Australia

6:20 pm U.S. Ambassador Michele J. Sison, along with Dr. Francois Bassil, Chairman of Byblos Bank and Walter Siouffi, General Manager for Citibank in Lebanon, announced today that the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) has signed a new $40 million, 15-year term loan facility with Lebanon’s Byblos Bank

6:15 pm Sheikh Minqara: The rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia and the International hand extended to Syria will facilitate the formation of the government

6:01 pm Tripoli Mufti Sha’ar offered his condolences for the death of Ghandoor attributed deaths: “justice will prevail,” he said

5:12 pm a security source told “AFP:” Ghandoor was found dead with his throat slit in Batroun and the causes of the crime are financial

5:03 pm Baabda – Aley MPs discussed with al Jisr the projects planned for their electoral district

4:57 pm Delegation of “change and reform,” visited interior Minister Baroud : There are irregularities that are being addressed without the knowledge of the judicial authorities

4:53 pm MP Adwan after meeting with Hariri: We want a government that is inclusive but not one that will not honor the decision of the Lebanese electorate during the last election

4:43 pm Grand Mufti Qabbani: “We will not allow the blocking and the obstruction of the mission of PM -designate Saad Hariri

03:52 Iraqi national Mohammad Raafat al Tahanni has confessed that he has employed torture methods ranging from drugging to severe beatings to electric shocks that knocked Abdallah Ghandoor unconscious and eventually died from a heart attack .

03:40 pm Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea and his wife, MP Strida Geagea, returned from their summer vacation

03:04pm LBC : the ministers of Jumblatt’s democratic gathering will remain within the majority

03:01pm LBC: there is another killer involved in the murder of Ghandoor security forces are trying to search for him amidst reports he fled the country

02:35pm New TV: Ghandoor’s other killer fled and search is ongoing to find him

02:32pm OTV: The killer of Ghandoor is Mohammad Raafat al Tahanni, an Iraqi national

02:30pm president Suleiman met with ministers salloukh , Harb and Abou Faour to discuss the political situation in the country and also met with the security chief to discuss the security situation in the country

02:24pm MP Antoine Zahra after the parliamentary meeting : If the country is dependent on what Happens to Gebran Bassil , then good luck !

02:08 : MTV : PM- designate Hariri is expected to visit Baabda today to meet with president Suleiman

02:04 pm According to media reports the body of the former president of Tripoli Chamber of Commerce Abdallah Ghandoor was found near the Musailaha castle in Batroun . The security forces are at scene to investigate his death and to confirm his identity… His killer was identified and arrested

1:45 pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri said that his meeting with Berri was “excellent”

1;20 Reuters: The vote count for the parliament of the Fatah party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was set to begin on Wednesday after long delays, an election official said.

1:15pm PM-designate Saad Hariri meets with Speaker Nabih Berri at Nejmeh Square

12:56pm David Issa : Jumblatt in his new stance is trying to spare the Druze another May 7 problem

12:45pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s Press Office issued a statement on Wednesday denying As-Safir report that a meeting was held in France between Hariri and Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea.

12:12 Al Ahram : Jumblatt’s shock was absorbed and Hariri will soon declare his commitment to the 15-10-5 government formula

11:49 Aoun there will be no government without Gebran Bassil ( Aoun’s son-in-law) and the 15-10-5 is a done deal

11:39 Speaker Nabih Berri arrives at Nejmeh Square to hold his weekly parliamentary meetings

11:15 Two children from the Awali family were injured by a cluster bomb explosion in Yunin village in South Lebanon

10:13 Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora meets with US Ambassador to Lebanon Michele Sison at Grand Serail

08:00 Gasoline prices up 800 LL Per 20 liters or 10 US cents per US gallon

07:40 MP Marwan Hamadeh told Voice of Lebanon: The Jumblatt Hariri meeting gave new impetus to the issue of government formation, kept the same agreed government formula and the share of the Democratic Gathering Parliamentary block will be included in the share of the March majority

7:20 Al Akhbar : The Lebanese Forces party will file a lawsuit today against Wiam Wahab because he accused it of forming security cells that will be headed by its leader Dr Samir Geagea

6:45 sources: Bassil told Nader Hariri that FPM is sticking to its demand for 5 portfolios including the interior ministry

6;10 As Safir: Raad delivered to Jumblatt a Hezbollah message of appreciation of his new stance that will “help reactivate the Palestinian issue”

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/thursday_news_b_60.php
Thursday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Thursday, 13 August, 2009 @ 11:19 AM in Beirut
Beirut : Now that Prime Minister Designate Saad Hariri is back from vacation and having met Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt, the key focal point in Lebanon is the government formation based on the agreed upon formula of 15-10-5. The key obstacle facing the formation of the cabinet is General Michel Aoun according to media reports.

According to Al Hayat newspaper President Michel Suleiman called on all parties to cooperate in order to speed up the formation of the new cabinet as well as to deal with Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun’s demands, which are to re-appoint Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil and to have a sovereign portfolio, since “delaying the government formation would harm Lebanon.”

Bassil who failed in the last election is comparing himself to Clinton : He said “the Secretariat should send a message to President Obama demanding the dismissal of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State because she failed in the presidential election.”

Aoun has proposed to the parliament in 2005 that MPs that fail in the election should not be included in the cabinet . The majority has adopted Aoun’s proposal but Aoun now wants to change the rules of the game because Bassil is his son-in-law.

Zahle in our heart MP Oqab Saqr said Aoun remains the main obstacle in forming the government because he is insisting on including Bassil . “If Bassil is included then the whole cabinet could become a cabinet of failures” Saqr said hinting that other candidates that failed could insist on being included . He accused Aoun of insisting on the ministry of interior as a leverage to force the inclusion of Bassil . He said “Aoun’s use of big words is a cover up for his narrow personal interests which have nothing to do with the needs of the Christians nor ending the corruption, as Aoun claims

Aoun is insisting on having 5 ministerial portfolios including a sovereign ministry such as the ministry of Interior , but this ministry along with the Defense were allocated in the outgoing cabinet to the president who intends to keep them in the new cabinet for security reasons. According to political observers , Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah makes it impossible for the majority to allocate to him the ministry of Interior specially after what Hezbollah did on May 7 2008, when it occupied the Sunni part of Beirut and tried unsuccessfully to occupy the Druze strongholds of Mount Lebanon.

Aoun’s ministers in the outgoing cabinet did not fare well in the election. All his 4 ministers that ran in the last election failed..it is not clear whether they failed because of their poor performance or because Aoun’s drop in popularity or both .

Yesterday a preliminary version of the cabinet was leaked to the press . Hariri included for Aoun the Ministry of culture as a sovereign ministry, a ministry of state plus three other cabinet portfolios. No reaction so far from Aoun, but we are sure we will hear more from Aoun in the coming days , weeks and possibly months

Thursday

11;00 pm NY Times : Two bombers wearing suicide vests blew themselves up in a popular cafe crowded with young people in northwestern Iraq on Thursday evening, killing 21 and wounding 30 others, according to local hospital officials.

10:22pm Minister Aridi said on LBC’s Kalam el Nas program : “The ministry of public works will remain Jumblatt’s share” .He added ” Jumblatt does not need any intermediaries with Hariri even though he was sad when the words “shameful history” were used “

9:37 pm Israeli authorities said on Thursday they were investigating the possible abduction of a soldier near Ben Gurion International Airport.

09:25pm One Syrian was killed and 2 were wounded when an Israeli Hand Grenade ( that was left from the 2006 war) exploded in Rachayya

9:00pm UN envoy Williams says Israeli war on Lebanon is “unlikely”

8:20pm security source told OTV: General Fadel has informed former president Gemayel that there was a terrorist plot to blow up the Kataeb headquarters in Saifi using a booby trapped UNIFIL truck . MP Sami Gemayel was the target

8:10pm Aoun accuses Hariri of intentionally delaying cabinet formation due to foreign pressures.

08:00pm Hezbollah responded to March 14 statement : There is no General Aoun problem but there are natural rights for Aoun as the head of the second largest parliamentary group

4:42pm following a meeting with President Michel Suleiman in Baabda Hariri said : Progress has been made in cabinet formation, but not as fast as desired

3:34pm President Michel Suleiman meets with PM-designate Saad Hariri in Baabda to discuss latest developments on cabinet formation

2:39pm UN envoy Williams says he hopes the cabinet would soon be formed

12:16pm former president Amin Gemayel said during his press conference : the elections did not provide the desired results .. the losers are acting as if they are the winners

12:00 pm NY Times:Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a 57-year-old Libyan national who is serving a 27-year term in a Scottish prison, was sentenced in 2001 for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, in which 270 people died , the majority of them Americans. He has appealed the conviction and has sought early release to return to Libya because he has been diagnosed with a terminal case of prostate cancer. The Scottish authorities are considering the request to set him free on compassionate grounds because of his poor health and the decision is expected soon. Libya’s leader Ghaddafi has accepted the responsibility for the bombing an paid several billion dollars in settlement

11:45 Jumballt met US ambassador Sison to discuss current situation

11:41 Harir sources: Progress is being made regarding the government formation , Jumblatt is no longer the obstacle but Aoun is

11:37 Al Bayan newspaper based on Jumblatt sources: Aoun and Jumblatt will be meeting soon and this meeting will pave the way for a memorandum of understanding between the 2

11;35 11:18 Democratic Gathering MP Terro said it is impossible for the PSP to join March 8, adding we do not want STL to cause any upheaval

11:33 AFP : Two bomb blasts have killed up to 14 Afghan civilians, including 11 members of one family, authorities said Thursday, as extremist attacks increased ahead of elections next week.

11:30 BBC :Taiwan has appealed for international technical assistance to help rescue more than 2000 people stranded after Typhoon Morakot caused major mudslides.

11:25 Jumblatt told Hariri his decision is irrevocable ( because of fundamental issues with some members of March 14 ) but will never stab Hariri in the back

11:16 Informed sources told the Kuwaiti newspaper “al Dar” that PM-designate Saad al-Hariri told President Suleiman he has a draft for a new cabinet with the names of cabinets allocated to various parties but lacking the names on the ministers

09:30 LBC: Three injured in a bomb explosion in the in Jabal Mohsen neighborhood of Tripoli , north Lebanon

08:37 Alloush told Al Liwa: the explanations provided by Jumblatt to Hariri during their last meeting did not convince Hariri but the meeting did not reach a dead end

08:28 Sources: Hariri-Jumblatt meeting foiled the attempt by the opposition to force Hariri to quit and to hold him responsible for failing to form a government

08:23 a future source told Al Liwa: Hariri discussed with Jumblatt his return to the ranks of the March 14 forces

08:19 Minister Najjar told “Voice of Lebanon”: Bassil ‘s issue ( including him in the cabinet or excluding him ) became the focal point for either solving the government formation issue or obstructing it .

08:10 Abdallah Ghandour will be buried today in Tripoli

08:00 former President Amin Gemayel will hold a press conference today at noon in Bikfaya to deal with the political arena

07:55 MP Khalid Zahrman told a Sharq al Awsat: The majority is still insisting on having the lion’s share of sovereign, and service ministries. Jumblatt’s change in position is tactical… he is not divorcing March 14 nor there is a change in the political line of the majority. Adding : I cannot see any serious centrist bloc emerging anytime soon

07:20 Zahle in our heart MP Oqab Saqr said Aoun remains the main obstacle in forming the government because he is insisting on including Gebran Bassil his son-in-law who has failed in the election. “If Bassil is included then the whole cabinet could become a cabinet of failures” Saqr said hinting that other candidates that failed could insist on being included . He accused Aoun of insisting on the ministry of interior as a leverage to force the inclusion of Bassil . He said “Aoun’s use of big words is a cover up for his narrow personal interests which have nothing to do with the Christian needs nor ending the corruption

06:45 Al Akhbar: Hariri’s leaked a preliminary composition of the government which allocates the Ministry of and reform or the Christian communitPublic Works for Jumblatt in addition to secondary portfolio and a ministry of state portfolio . Aoun was allocated 5 portfolios including the Ministry of State and 4 portfolios including the ministry of culture, but excluding the ministry of communication . There was a big question mark about Bassil’s participation .

06:13 “News”: branch information was had stopped two people on charges of espionage

06:00 FPM sources: the insistence of Aoun on a sovereign portfolio stems from his belief that Change and Reform bloc represents the majority of the Christian and therefore was entitled to sovereign portfolio. During the last election Aoun secured about 42 % of the Christian vote

05:50 Basil: We recommend that the Secretariat should send a message to President Obama demanding the dismissal of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State because she failed in the presidential election .

Note: Bassil who failed in the last election is comparing himself to Clinton. Aoun has proposed to the parliament in 2005 that MPs that fail in the election should not be included in the cabinet . The majority has adopted Aoun’s proposal but Aoun now wants to change the rule because Bassil is his son-in-law

05:45 Jumblatt: A delegation from PSP will attend the Aug 14 festival marking Hezbollah’s divine victory and Iam Studying the possibility of my own personal participation

05:40 As Safir : Jumblatt told Hariri during his Tuesday meeting that his main concern was about sectarian tension, “which we all know where that could lead in the absence of containment” and his recent realignment is a step towards containing the situation.

05:30 Future TV sources : the consultations to form the government did not reach any conclusion so far and the meeting between Hariri and Berri, took place in the context of exchange of views after his return from vacation

05:20 Ba’abda circles: the President of the Republic continued the ongoing contacts, which focused on the need to respect the Constitution and the will and choices of the Lebanese people by facilitating the formation of the government

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/friday_news_bri_61.php
Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 14 August, 2009 @ 8:18 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Hezbollah is planning today a major ceremony to mark the third anniversary of the end of its 2006 war with Israel. In that war Israel killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, displaced over a million most of them Shiites and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure,

including many roads and bridges, and a great swathe of Beirut’s southern suburbs.

On the other hand 158 Israelis were killed in that 33 day war

At the end of the war Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah declared a “divine victory” and today like the past 2 anniversaries he will be delivering a prerecorded speech on giant screens to tens of thousands of supporters who usually attend the festival.

Hezbollah considered its survival as the basis of the victory declaration.

For security reasons Nasrallah has been hiding in an undisclosed location ever since the 2006 war started.

Hezbollah’s victory in the 2006 war resembles the victory of the opposition in the 2009 elections. Last June 7 elections Hezbollah-led alliance which was predicted to win, lost big time to its rival March 14 alliance. Hezbollah secured 57 seats out of the 128 seat parliament while March 14 secured 71 seats.

Despite its defeat in the election the opposition in Lebanon has been acting as the winner.

General Michel Aoun who was the biggest loser in the election is a key member of the Hezbollah led alliance. But you couldn’t tell he was the loser from the demands he has been making. Aoun is insisting on having a minimum of 5 ministries including the ministry of communication for his son-in-law Gebran Bassil and the ministry of Interior.

Bassil lost the parliamentary election last June and the majority is insisting that winners in elections cannot be included in the cabinet ( As proposed by Aoun in the parliament in 2005 and accepted by the majority) . Bassil also reportedly mismanaged the ministry which is one of the biggest sources of income for the treasury… For example prepaid cellular lines for MTC touch were only available on the black market because the ministry played favors with distribution which reduced the supply and led to big time corruption. For all these reasons the majority wants this ministry back. Incidentally General Aoun’s bloc is called Change and reform, but according to observers familiar with the telecommunications industry the only reforming at this ministry was an increase in corruption

In the outgoing cabinet president Michel Suleiman’s share includes 2 key ministries : The Interior and Defense. This was decided at the Doha accord to make sure that security in Lebanon is in the hands of an independent, following the May 7 , 2008 experience . Suleiman was praised by all leaders on the right and the left for the way he managed the security of the country during the life cycle of the outgoing cabinet and naturally he wants to keep both ministries as part of his share in the new cabinet.

Aoun attacked PM designate Saad Hariri yesterday and accused him of delaying the formation of the cabinet due to foreign pressure, but it is obvious the problem is local and it is called “Aoun” …Aoun and Hezbollah have to learn that you can’t lose and act as if you are the winner!

It appears that Lebanon is the last concern for Aoun and Hezbollah…. God save Lebanon from another war in 2010 which our enemy Israel promised it will be a lot tougher than the 2006 war.

Former president Amin Gemayel summed it up this way yesterday during a press conference :” The elections did not provide the desired results .. the losers are acting as if they are the winners.”

Friday

1:40 pm Israeli President Shimon Peres said Hezbollah is destroying Lebanon through its subservience to Iran adding that there is no reason for enmity between Lebanon and the Jewish state. “We never were and never will be enemies of Lebanon,” Israeli media quoted him as saying .

1:30pm Interior minister Ziad Baroud : I have submitted a draft proposal to the cabinet that will allow Lebanese women who marry foreigners to pass on the Lebanese nationality to her husband and children . This privilege is only available to Lebanese males under the present law

12;32 pm Zahle in our Heart bloc MP Okab Sakr told Sawt al-Mada on Friday that Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has finalized the distribution of portfolios and will submit his proposal to all parties and will ask them to name their ministers.

12:29pm Ministry of Health: The number of swine flu cases in Lebanon has reached 476 most of them youngsters and children

12:17pm Former president Gemayel met with US ambassador Michele Sison at his home in Bekfaya to discuss current developments . She later left without making any statement

11:47 : Lebanese forces’ leader Samir Geagea sues Wiam Wahab in the Lebanese criminal court for slander and fabrication of lies

11:46 Opposition MP Michel Aoun: We hope that Israel will understand from the last July War that its strategy of using , aircraft and all types of advanced weapons to resolve disputes did not benefit it then and won’t benefit it this time

11:12 Opposition MP Al-Khazen told NBN : There are some who are not accustomed so far to General Aoun’s participation in governance and the issue of Bassil ‘s inclusion in the cabinet is artificial and is easy to overcome

11:10 “The Lebanese Association for Communications:” We have nothing to do with illegal Internet company that has Israeli connections and was recently raided

11:08 March 14 MP Houry told New TV: PM designate Saad Hariri will not quit for as a long as it takes to form the government and it is not logical that the delay should be because of Aoun’s son-in-law

11:07 Hezbollah MP Raad: millions of unexploded cluster bombs still in need of a sustained effort and continued funding for equipment and machinery

11:00 mercy of the “Republic”: General Aoun is not putting obstacles in the wrong who said that public opinion and Idillon

10:50 Opposition MP Sahili told New TV: Nasrallah’s speech today will be a surprise, and Jumblatt has returned to where he belongs and the surprise is not where he is now but where he was

10:45 opposition MP Ali Bazzi traveled to Tehran to represent Speaker Nabih Berri at a rally held on the occasion that will be marking Hezbollah’s so called ” divine victory “over Israel.

10:26 Sawt Al-Mada : MP Michel Aoun will hold a news conference Monday morning to reply to the March 14 accusations against him on cabinet formation.

10:20 March 14 MP Antoine Zahra told Future News: The opposition is seeking to annul the results of the polls. This will never happen.

8:30 March 14 MP Dory Chamoun told VDL: The major obstacle to cabinet formation is as usual Michel Aoun. MP Walid Jumblat’s stances will not affect the shape of the government.

7:30 March 14 MP Ammar Houry told VDL: Personal interest is the main reason behind the cabinet problem. MP Michel Aoun is insisting on giving a portfolio to his son-in-law Gebran Bassil despite his mistakes in his ministry.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/saturday_news_b_55.php
Saturday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Saturday, 15 August, 2009 @ 11:46 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the end of the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Appearing on a giant screen from his hiding place Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah addressed thousands of supporters waving yellow Hezbollah flags who gathered for the rally in south Beirut. He said recent Israeli warnings against Lebanon do not signal that Israel is planning to attack soon.

“When Israelis talk a lot, it means that they will do nothing. However, when they are silent like a snake we have to be cautious.” Nasrallah said

Nasrallah warned Israel that his fighters would hit Tel Aviv with rockets if Israeli forces attack Beirut or Hezbollah stronghold in its southern suburbs.

“We do not want war, but we are not afraid of it and we say to you: if you bomb Beirut or its suburb, we will bomb Tel Aviv,” Nasrallah said in his televised speech, stressing that Hezbollah is now capable of striking any Israeli city

In 2006, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah attacked an Israeli post on the Israeli – Lebanese borders killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two which triggered the 33 day war . Israeli warplanes destroyed entire blocks in Beirut’s southern suburbs, including Nasrallah’s office and Hezbollah’s headquarters, killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, displaced over 1 million people mostly Shiites and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including many roads and bridges. Hezbollah rocket s reached as far as the port of Haifa inside Israel and about 158 Israelis were killed mostly military .

Israeli President Shimon Peres said yesterday there is no reason for enmity between Lebanon and the Jewish state. “We never were and never will be enemies of Lebanon,” Israeli media quoted him as saying . But the Lebanese know the real Peres very well and will never forget the way he used to bomb Lebanon as a former defense minister and a prime minister , even before there was a Hezbollah .

None of the top leaders were present at the ceremonies, but all were represented . MP Walid Jumblatt who said Thursday that he was studying the possibility of attending the ceremonies did not show up and instead he attended a ceremony in honor of the students that passed state exams at the Irfan school in Simqaniyah , Shouf region. He was represented at the Hezbollah ceremony by his son Taymour .

Nasrallah said the best way to respond to Israeli threats is to form quickly a government of national unity in Lebanon , but his ally general Michel Aoun continues to be the primary obstacle , according to PM – designate Saad Hariri sources .

Both March 14 and March 8 opposition are blaming each other for the delay

It does not appear Lebanon will have a new cabinet soon

Something important took place yesterday. Interior minister Ziad Baroud said that he has submitted a draft proposal to the cabinet that will allow Lebanese women who marry foreigners to pass on the Lebanese nationality to her husband and children . This is a step in the right direction because this privilege is only available to Lebanese males under the present law.

Saturday
10:10 A shootout at a mosque in the southern Gaza city of Rafah between Hamas security men and a more extreme Islamist group called the Warriors of God ended early Saturday with 22 dead, including Abdel Latif Moussa the group’s leader and a senior Hamas security officer.

10:00 pm Lebanon Files: When the illegal internet company in Barouk was raided and shut down the internet connection at the home of Communications minister Gebran Bassil was disconnected.
For this reason many reportedly believe that Bassil had something to do with that illegal company

09:51pm Former MP Najah Wakim called for the formation of a non -sectarian national unity cabinet to confront sectarianism

08:40pm FPM MP Nabil Nicolas: the majority is no longer the parliament majority after Jumblatt pulled out .
Note: The majority has 71 MPs while the opposition has 57 MPs. The Democratic gathering bloc of MP Walid Jumblatt has 11 MPs . If you subtract all Jumblatt MPs from the majority then the new breakdown will be 60 Mps for the majority and 57 for the opposition. It is not clear what kind of logic Nicolas used in issuing his statement

7:00 pm China made four free-throws in the last minutes to beat Lebanon 72-68 Saturday to enter the final of the Asian men’s basketball championship.

4:43pm Hezbollah MP Hussein Hajj Hassan : The presence of Taymour Jumblatt last night at the Aug 14 celebrations completes the reconciliation with the PSP

11:42 MP Oqab Saqer told OTV: no disputes within March 14 over the distribution of portfolios . The main obstacle is General Michel Aoun . The refusal to include in the cabinet the losers in the elections is not targeting Gebran Bassil

11:25 Minister Aoun told New TV: FPM is not the obstacle , it is the other side and we are still waiting for Hariri’s response regarding the distribution of portfolios

10:40 MP Michel Moussa told Future New TV: Speaker Nabih Berri is admonished for the lack of exploiting existing conditions to come out with a solution.

10:22 Zahra: I hope MP Oqab Saqr would leave the task of government formation to Hariri.

10:20 MP Antoine Zahra to ld Voice of Free Lebanon: The Lebanese Forces insists its role is not to put conditions on Premier-designate Saad Hariri. Our duty is to facilitate his task and not hinder it.

10:02 Mitri: Aoun’s demands hinder government formation. Attacks against the President’s shares in Cabinet weaken the presidency.

10:00 Information Minister Tareq Mitri told VOL: Hezbollah’s participation in Cabinet is an internal Lebanese affair. Neither Israel nor external powers have anything to do with it.

9;50 Judge Howard Morrison has resigned from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon effective 14 July 2009.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/analysis_israel_2.php
Analysis: Israel and Hezbollah waging war of words
Published: Saturday, 15 August, 2009 @ 10:23 PM in Beirut
By Nicholas Blanford
Israel and its arch foe Hezbollah are waging an increasingly heated war of words, fanning concerns about another bruising encounter between the two enemies who fought a devastating but inconclusive conflict in 2006.

In a keynote speech Friday night marking the third anniversary of that war’s end, Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah outlined his strategy for Lebanon to deter Israel from launching another offensive. Responding to Israeli threats to flatten southern Lebanese villages and infrastructure, he vowed to attack Tel Aviv if Israel targeted Beirut or its southern suburbs, where Hezbollah’s headquarters are.

“We are now capable of attacking any city or village throughout Israel,” he said, dismissing recent Israeli threats against Hezbollah as psychological warfare. “When Israelis talk a lot, it means that they will do nothing. However, when they are silent like a snake we have to be cautious.” Nasrallah’s comments, delivered via a live video feed to a crowd of flag-waving supporters and invited politicians, were the latest in a month-long barrage of threats from both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border.

The saber-rattling, touched off in mid-July by explosions near an alleged Hezbollah weapons cache here in the hills of south Lebanon, seems driven more by a fear that the other side will take action, than a desire to launch a fresh round of fighting, say analysts and United Nations peacekeepers here.

“Contrary to the talk, the situation on the ground in our area of operations is generally quiet,” says Milos Strugar, senior advisor to the UN peacekeeping force known as UNIFIL, which patrols the southern Lebanon border district. “In our contacts with all the parties, they reiterate to us their interest in upholding the cessation of hostilities.”

Israel fears retaliation for assassination

That Israeli media has reflected concerns that Hezbollah may be planning an attack against Israel in revenge for the slaying of Imad Mughniyah, the group’s top military commander, in a car bomb assassination in Damascus in February last year. There was no claim of responsibility for the assassination, but Hezbollah has blamed Israel. There have been reports over the past year of foiled revenge attacks against Israeli targets in Central Asia and Africa.

The warnings have cast a cloud over what has been a bumper summer tourist season for Lebanon with more than 1 million visitors recorded in July in a country with a population of only 4 million.

On Thursday, Israeli President Shimon Peres called Hezbollah a “curse” and accused it of “destroying” Lebanon and “bringing calamity” upon the Lebanese through its subservience to Iran.

Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that in the next war Israel would bomb Lebanese infrastructure. Sheikh Hisham Safieddine, a top Hezbollah official, responded that if Barak commits a “foolish act” in Lebanon, the next war would make the 2006 conflict “look like a joke.”

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has made little effort to disguise the fact that it has rearmed and expanded its military capabilities in anticipation of a fresh conflict.

Hezbollah No. 2: We’re stronger than in 2006

In a recent interview with the Monitor, Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s No. 2, said the group has absorbed and implemented the lessons learned from the 2006 war and has been “getting ready and prepared in case Israel launches an aggression against us.”

“This is the shape of the Resistance at this stage,” the white-turbaned cleric said. “Hezbollah is in a better condition than it was in July 2006. And if the Israelis think they will cause more damage against us, they know that we also can inflict more damage on them.”

Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, on Sunday expanded the geographical scope of the threats.

“If, God forbid, one hair falls off the head of any Israeli representative abroad, or of even an Israeli who is not an official representative, tourists etc., we will consider Hezbollah responsible,” he said.

It is not the first time both sides have engaged in a flurry of cross-border threats, however.

“We have witnessed many times Israeli threats and Hezbollah counter threats and then nothing happens,” says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese expert on Hezbollah.

Active weapons cache sparked saber-rattling

Tensions began to mount in mid-July when a series of powerful explosions shook this village set among steep hills in south Lebanon, 10 miles north of the border with Israel. The explosions emanated from a suspected Hezbollah arms cache in the basement of a two-story building on the side of a valley outside Khirbet Silm.

UNIFIL counted up to 60 separate blasts that caused extensive damage to the building, hurled unexploded ordnance up to 200 yards away, and sparked a brush fire on the valley slopes.

The explosions hardened a long-standing Israeli belief that Hezbollah has been stashing weapons in southern Lebanese villages in contravention of UN Resolution 1701. The resolution, which helped end the 2006 war, forbids “any armed personnel, assets and weapons” in the southern border zone other than those of the Lebanese state and UNIFIL.

Hezbollah said that the blasts were caused by an old stock of Israeli munitions left over from the 2006 war, and noted that Israel flouts Resolution 1701 on a near daily basis by flying jets and reconnaissance drones in Lebanese airspace – actions the UN has repeatedly criticized.

Exclusive details from forthcoming U.N. report

The Monitor has learned that the preliminary findings of a UNIFIL investigation into the incident, which is expected to be completed next week, concludes that the arms were generally old and had been stored there before the 2006 war. They included large quantities of 60mm, 81mm, and 120mm mortar tubes and rounds, a few 107mm Katyusha rockets and heavy machine gun rounds – all of which are used by Hezbollah. The cache additionally included old Israeli 155mm and 152mm artillery shells. Hezbollah does not possess artillery capable of firing those shells.

Still, UNIFIL found evidence that the facility was being guarded by Hezbollah militants, who control the surrounding area. Among the debris in the building, according to a UNIFIL officer, were mattresses, a military boot, a forklift truck for loading pallets of ammunition, a flatbed truck, and a sports utility vehicle.

In the past three years, UNIFIL on many occasions has discovered and removed old munitions, such as mortar shells and rockets, abandoned by Hezbollah after the 2006 war in rugged valleys along the border. But the incident in Khirbet Silm is the first evidence of an active arms cache in the UNIFIL area.

“The difference between the previous findings of arms is that this was, according to preliminary reports, an actively maintained ammunition depot,” UNIFIL’s Strugar says, adding it was a “serious violation” of Resolution 1701.

The Christian Science Monitor

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/_in_south_beiru.php
Sunday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Sunday, 16 August, 2009 @ 8:23 AM in Beirut
Beirut- General Michel Aoun continues to insist that Gebran Bassil should be named as a minister, even though this reportedly contradicts an agreement reached between prime minister-designate Saad Hariri and President Michel Suleiman to bar from the cabinet candidates who failed to win a parliamentary seat.

This also contradicts Aoun’s own rule which he proposed in 2005 ( and the majority accepted) to oppose the inclusion of Nassib Lahoud in the cabinet because he failed in the election.

From the logical point of view failure in an election should have nothing to do with being included in or excluded from the cabinet. According to observers Bassil failed in Batroun because of the drop in Aoun’s popularity following the killing by Hezbollah of Batroun’s son Lebanese officer Samer Hanna.

In addition to his failure in the elections , Bassil’s performance as the minister of communications is being questioned. The cellular service has reportedly never been worse especially with regards to the black marketeering of the prepaid cellular lines. The normal price of a prepaid MTC line was supposed to be $25.00 but was selling at the black market for $45 -$50. The supply of the lines was intentionally restricted by the ministry and hence the demand forced the prices to go up.

Moreover , Bassil’s relations with the Israeli internet network that was based in Barouk is being questioned by Mustaqbal Movement member MP Ammar Houry. Houri claims that the company manager is a supporter of Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and is “very close to one of the parties that belong to this bloc.” According to a report by Lebanon Files when the Israeli internet company was raided and shut down by the army the internet connection at Bassil’s home got disconnected.

The issue of this internet company was initially raised by Marada Movement leader MP Suleiman Franjiyeh during an interview with Marcel Ghanem’s Kalam el-Nass talk show on LBC last Thursday.

According to observers General Aoun does not have any sons and this is why he is trying to promote Bassil who is his son-in-law to succeed him. Aoun’s keen interest in Bassil is reportedly angering many in the FPM ranks who think they are much more qualified to succeed Aoun than Bassil.

Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir accused the politicians of “seeking personal gains, and in doing so are obstructing the formation of the government.”

During the Sunday ceremony in Diman, Sfeir said that “political differences show that a lot of politicians do not wish well for this country and its people.”

Sunday

10:50 pm Iran has freed on bail Clotilde Reiss, 24, a French teaching assistant charged with spying, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said in a statement on Sunday.

10:20 pm WSJ International aid started trickling in to Taiwan on Sunday, a week after the worst typhoon in half a century killed hundreds of people in mountain villages.

10:10 pm VOA: Iranian media report that 28 more people have been put on trial for their alleged involvement in the unrest following the presidential election in June.

10:00 pm VOA: Three candidates in the Afghan presidential election, including incumbent President Hamid Karzai, former finance minister Ashraf Ghani and former planning minister Ramazan Bashardost have faced off in a nationally broadcast debate.

9:43pm MP Marouni , Minister of tourism told New TV : I will be leaving for the ministry a complete program to develop tourism in Lebanon. The Kataeb ministers will be setting examples for others in Lebanon

08:33pm Minister Aridi told “future news”: the increase in speed and the overloading of the trucks need to be under control because they are contributing to an increase in traffic incidents and the problem of street lighting is not helping either

08:10 pm DPA: Palestinian human rights organizations on Sunday condemned the bloody clashes between Hamas security forces and Al-Qaida-affiliated militants who seized control of a Gaza Strip mosque Friday night.

8:00pm AFP : Finnish authorities dismissed talk Sunday that the Arctic Sea was bearing a cargo of nuclear material, as Russia and NATO joined forces in an international hunt for the missing vessel.

7:30pm Wiam Wahab visited Suweida, Syria : On the next visit I will be accompanied by all the Druze leaders of Lebanon to affirm that we must not forget some of the irregularities that had prevailed in previous years

5:23pm MP Fadlallah: We are keen on maintaining the climate of calm and stability and the new page of reconciliation and for the resumption of dialogue and communication between the various political forces in Lebanon

5:11pm The father of Minister Tarek Mitri passed away

5:02pm An Army helicopter participated in the extinguishing a major fire in Shekka – Hamat

4:48pm Saudi Ambassador Alasiri from Majdelyoun: Saudi Arabia wants what is good for Lebanon . We are very interested in its security and stability and in the quick formation of the government

04:15pm MP Dory Chamoun told al Liwaa: Aoun is using Hezbollah’s strength to twist the arms of the prime minister designate and if the Syrian-backed Hezbollah continues with its support for Aoun’s demands then this will lead to further obstruction of the formation of the cabinet

4:00 pm About half of a recently constructed 8 floor building has collapsed in the Deira area of Dubai. The building is located next to the Ramada Continental hotel on Galadari Road. Several injuries were reported

3:50 pm Japanese News agency Kyodo: Two scud missiles were test fired from southwestern Syria in the second half of last May. Syria and Iran jointly developed the short-range Scud missiles. The test was not only a failure but also killed 20 people and injured over 60 others. The failure was due to a problem with the missile’s guidance system

3:10pm Minister Ghazi Aridi reiterated that the ministry of Public Works will remain within the share of Jumblatt in the new cabinet . Aridi stressed that as the PW minister he was not biased and was equally fair to all parties

2:50pm Hassan Hussein Awada Alyan, 36, died while diving off the coast of Bayyada-Naqoura.

1:50pm Speaker Nabih Berri: Choosing not to make statements on the cabinet issue does not mean remaining silent on the living conditions of Lebanese, stresses the right of southerners to be compensated

1 :33pm Mufti Jouzo: Does “Hezbollah” want to drag Lebanon into a new tragedy, to paid for by all the Lebanese?

1:13 MP Houri told MTV: “We are not worried about Jumblatt’s position, especially after he justified his recent stances to us,” he said, adding he is still counted within the parliamentary majority.

1 :01pm MP Ammar al-Musawi : Someone is trying to obstruct the formation of the cabinet with the hope that it will be formed under conditions that are more favorable to him

12:38pm Sheikh Ailani denounced the reception of the ballet group with the start of Ramadan

12:19pm Bishop Attallah, presided over a mass at the request of the President of the Republic in the Deir Al-Ahmar

12:17pm MP Fadlallah: Any delay in the formation of the government will lead to the increased suffering of the Lebanese people and to the accumulation of their problems

11:50 Mario Aoun told NBN: There will be no government without the “Free Patriotic Movement” and we insist on reappointing Telecom Minister Gebran Bassil. I am aware of Hariri’s invitation to Gen Aoun for lunch.

11:25 Hubaish: The opposition are the main obstacle facing the formation of the cabinet

11:00 Former MP Samir Franjiyeh told Future News: Jumblatt’s motives behind his realignment are clear. I understand his motive and it is a valid reason but the method he used to reach his target is questionable .

10:47 al Mustaqbal MP Nohad Mashnouq said that Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has no choice but to go on with his efforts and form the cabinet, and this will be achieved eventually because Hariri has the will to form a national coalition government.

10:19 Patriarch Sfeir accuses politicians of seeking personal gains, which is leading to the delay in forming the cabinet

08:39 Mubarak’s arrived in Washington his first visit after a break of four years. He will meet with Obama Tuesday

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/_parliamentary.php
Monday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Monday, 17 August, 2009 @ 8:47 AM in Beirut
Beirut – While the politicians in Lebanon have almost reached a dead end with regards to the formation of a new national unity government , there is some good news out there. Lebanon’s ministry of tourism has reported a record 1,007,352 visitors for the month of July, a number equal to quarter of the country’s population.

“It’s enormous – we have never seen this before,” Tourism ministry director Nada Sardouk remarked.

Reservations for the holy month of Ramadan, which starts around August 22, are ‘very strong,’ the Sardouk added

What is interesting about the new record is its composition

About 325, 000 Lebanese expatriates
An equal number of Syrians
About 79,000 Europeans from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
A substantial rise in the number of Saudi Arabians and tourists from other Arab states

According to observers this number shows that all Lebanon needs is peace for its tourism industry to flourish

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt who recently upset many in the west by announcing that he will be pulling out from the pro-western March 14 alliance commented about the last speech of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah :

“The most important point in Nasrallah’s speech is the ruling out of a war in the near future”

Meanwhile the bickering between the opposition and the majority alliance continues

Each side is blaming the other for the delay in government formation

It has been 8 weeks since Hariri was appointed as the PM -designate by the president and asked to form a government, but this government won’t see the light anytime soon. Free Patriotic Movement leader General Michel Aoun appears to be the main obstacle for now . Hariri has invited him for lunch a week ago and so far Aoun has not responded. Aoun wants 5 cabinet portfolios , including the ministry of interior and is insisting on including his son-in-law Gebran Bassil in the cabinet.

The ministry of interior is a red line because of Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah and besides the president wants this ministry along with the ministry of defense for security reasons

Bassil is also a red line because he failed in the parliamentary election and performed poorly as a minister of communication

Since Aoun derives his power from Hezbollah and its arms the majority has been urging Hezbollah to put pressure on Aoun to cooperate

No one now expects a government before Ramadan, but they don’t tell you which Ramadan…. 2009 or 2010 ?

Governments don’t do much in Lebanon anyway …so as long as the whole process of government formation remains peaceful; Lebanon should be ok and should be able to reclaim its title as the “Switzerland of the Middle East”.

Monday

10:40 pm Times Online: A suicide bomber rammed a truck loaded with explosives into a police station in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia today, killing 20 people and wounding 138 more, including several children.

10:30 pm VOA : Voters in Afghanistan go to the polls Thursday to decide whether to re-elect President Hamid Karzai to another five year term or choose one of about than 30 other candidates who say they have a plan to lead the impoverished country

10:10 pm Telegraph.co.uk :The missing cargo ship Arctic Sea and its crew have been found by a Russian warship off west Africa, but mystery still surrounds its disappearance as it was not under the control of armed hijackers or pirates.

10:06pm Hezbollah MP Hajj Hassan: The present US administration is a poor copy of the Bush administration

08:43pm The Saudi cabinet issued a statement in which it stated that it has full confidence in the ability of the Lebanese to form a cabinet of national unity

08:31pm Central News Agency : a meeting between Hariri and Nasrallah is expected this week

08:13pm MP Oqab Saqr told New TV: The one that demands an important role for the president should never ask for the ministry of interior. If Aoun wants a sovereign ministry he should try to get it from his allies in the Hezbollah-led oppoistion and I advise the general to distance himself from his son-in-law

08:08 pm MP Boutros Harb: “It is shameful that someone responsible like FPM leader Michel Aoun would utter such low level disrespectful words as he did this afternoon that insulted the Lebanese people. His state of anger (in reference to Aoun’s medical condition )needs treatment stressing that family affairs should not be at the interest of the nation( in reference to Gebran Bassil) . Harb added the Lebanese people deserve better and should never have been undermined and insulted in such a manner

06:30 pm Hariri’s press office : “Every political party has the right to make its demands regarding its government share, however, the formation of the cabinet falls strictly under the responsibility of the PM-designate in cooperation with the president.”

5:25 Jumblatt supports 15-10-5 cabinet formula, will refrain from media talks and Iftars during Ramadan

05:06 pm Minister Ghazi Aridi : “MP Nuhad al Mashnouq’s statement on LBC opens old wounds , is contrary to the spirit of reconciliation and damaging to the relations between Hariri and Jumblatt “

3:41pm Deputy speaker Farid Makari said: A government, headed by Hariri, will be formed soon and will satisfy all the Lebanese.

3:26pm Speaker Nabih Berri is heading a meeting of his parliamentary bloc to discuss current developments.

3:14pm Sayyed Fadlallah is meeting the Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Awad al-Ossairi and are discussing current affairs.

03;00 pm BBC :Japan has become the latest major economy to take a tentative step out of recession. The world’s second-largest economy grew 0.9% in the second quarter from the first three months of the year, figures showed on Monday.

2:30pm PM designate Saad Hariri met Syriac Catholic Mar Ignatius Youssef III.

02:22pm Wiam Wahab : the Lebanese want a solution and don’t care who goes with whom for lunch. ( in reference to Hariri’s invitation of Aoun for lunch ) . He added : There is no more majority and minority and the 15-10-5 formula may not be valid anymore ( in reference to Jumblatt’s announcement that he is leaving the majority)

2:07pm MP al Jisr told “MTV:” If Each group wants to demand a certain number of portfolios and insist on receiving specific portfolios then this makes Lebanon, a sectarian federation

1:55pm Top Shiite cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah said: Friday Aug 21 is the first day of the holy month of Ramadan

1:31pm president Suleiman said after meeting ministers Arslan and Khalife and general Kahwaji : Lebanon with its population mix and geographic location is the address of culture, so lets protect this strategy

1:15pm The Ministry of Tourism invited parties interested in setting up Ramadan tents to apply for a license from the Ministry

1:14pm MP Samir Jisr quoted Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir as saying that the cabinet should be quickly formed.

1:12 pm Speaker Nabih Berri meets with a delegation from the Iranian parliament,accompanied by Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Mohammad Reza Shibani in Ain al-Tineh

11:35 MP Michel Aoun said during a press conference : “Everyone was surprised when I said that the cabinet will not be formed before September. We have a mandate from the people to name our ministers and I am proud of my son-in-law Gebran Bassil. If they don’t accept them to hell with them”

10:49 The body of Tony Abdo al Butaish, 20 was found after he reportedly drowned in Qaraoun lake on Aug 9

10:48 Israel removed its army post from Kfar Shouba Hills

10:15 MP Alaeddine Terro told Future News: Everyone knows that Aoun is obstructing the cabinet formation. Some parties in the opposition are supporting him.

08:32 Al Anbaa: Sudden deterioration in the relations between Aoun and Arslan . Arslan may be leaving Aoun’s change and reform alliance but some are intervening to prevent this from happening

8:30 MP Assem Araji told VOL: It is obvious that there is no serious pressure on MP Michel Aoun by his allies despite Hezbollah’s promises.

7:35 MP Youssef Khalil told VOL: MP Michel Aoun will unveil today where the real cabinet obstacle lies. Each team has the right to demand any key ministry. The president is not insisting on the interior ministry.

06:53 Al Mustaqbal sources : We call on Hezbollah to seriously put pressure on Aoun

06:49 Source: There is an understanding between Hariri and President of the Republic not to include losers ( in the last election) in the cabinet

06:39 sources “the future”: Hezbollah’s proposal that each party should name its ministers is not practical because Hariri is not just a mail box . As a prime minister he should have the last say over who he wants in his cabinet

06:07 Jumblatt: The most important point in Nasrallah’s speech is the ruling out of a war in the near future

05:49 March 14 sources: The opposition MPs are either attempting to achieve additional gains, or obstructing the government formation

05:46 opposition sources: it is necessary for Hariri to hold direct dialogue Aoun

05:33 “An-Nahar:” There is no mediation by “Hezbollah” between Hariri and Aoun

05:21 Hariri is still waiting since last Friday for a response from General Aoun, regarding an invitation for lunch at his home

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/tuesday_news_br_54.php
Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 18 August, 2009 @ 6:55 AM in Beirut
Beirut – The negotiations over the allocation of Cabinet ministers in the new Lebanese national unity government hit a snare in part due to demands made by Free patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun

Lebanese Lawmakers had agreed to a power-sharing agreement in the next government, allocating 15 seats to March 14 majority alliance , 10 to March 8 Hezbollah -led opposition and five for allies of Lebanese President Michel Suleiman.

That formula was disrupted when Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt abruptly left March 14 recently, saying his “necessary” alliance with the Western-backed alliance had ended.
During a press conference yesterday Aoun said: “Jumblatt torpedoed the 15-10-5 cabinet formula … You do the math, and you will see that the formula has become 12-10-5-3,” , with the last three being Jumblatt’s share taken from the majority.

Saad Hariri secured the position of Prime Minister-designate following his March 14 alliance victory in the June parliamentary elections over the Hezbollah -led opposition

Hariri has been trying to meet with Aoun over lunch , with the hope that such a meeting would lead to some Cabinet developments, but Aoun has refused to meet with him so far . During his press conference yesterday he said: “I will not meet with Prime Minister-designate MP Saad Hariri, unless he stops his crazy MPs from attacking me.”

March 14 lawmakers are reportedly upset over Aoun’s insistence, along with Hezbollah, that his son-in-law and caretaker Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil retain his position despite losing in the June vote and his performance at the ministry

Aoun fiercely defended Bassil yesterday saying that “if they criticize him, then they are criticizing me.” Aoun listed Bassil’s accomplishments and expressed his pride in his son-in-law, who “put an end to stealing and stopped the black market mafia within the Telecom Ministry.”

Aoun said yesterday ” the people gave us a mandate to name our ministers and if they don’t accept them then to hell with them “
Aoun’s use of abrasive language yesterday prompted a response from MP Boutros Harb, a key member of the March 14 alliance: “It is shameful that someone responsible like FPM leader Michel Aoun would utter such low level disrespectful words as he did this afternoon that insulted the Lebanese people. His state of anger (in reference to Aoun’s medical condition )needs treatment stressing that family affairs should not be at the interest of the nation( in reference to Gebran Bassil) . Harb added the Lebanese people deserve better and should never have been undermined and insulted in such a manner”

Many within March 14 believe that Hezbollah is the one that wants the ministry of communication and the ministry of Interior and is using Aoun as the front man.

Hezbollah has its own independent communications network and wants to make sure whoever is in charge of the ministry will not try to interfere with its network, like what happened on May 5, 2008 when the government declared the network “illegal”. Hezbollah also wants the ministry of interior because it is the ministry that is in charge of internal security in the country.

March 14 considers the ministry of interior as a red line for Aoun because of his association with Hezbollah and what that party did last May 7, 2008

The Holy month of Ramadan is here and will start this Friday according to the top Shiite cleric Sayyed Fadlallah and as many have correctly predicted
Lebanon does not have a government yet.

Tuesday

11:42pm Hezbollah ‘s Sheikh Naim Qassem told “World” channel: Hezbollah is committed to its promise of responding to the murder of Mughniyeh and this promise is not linked to any particular time or place. All our investigations point to Israel as the villain

10:20 pm Speaking following an Oval Office meeting with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, president Obama said that a climate had developed for “positive steps” in the ME region

10:09pm Egypt’s ambassador to Lebanon, Ahmed El Bedawi received at his residence Sunday evening, MP Walid Jumblatt, to discuss the latest developments

9:54pm Bassil told”MTV:” Hariri did not respond to our demands on the government formation issue

20:40 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s spokesperson says President Barack Obama told Mubarak that US hopes to present a new Mideast peace plan next month

8:33pm General Rifi told “future news”: The incident of prison fleeing is important but not catastrophic and I assure our citizens that our capabilities are no longer modest and we are committed to arrest the fugitive

8:16pm Moussa told OTVthe best way to resume the formation of the government is through communication with the opposition and we believe that a meeting between the PM designate and the General Aoun is essential at this stage

8:10pm Minister Najjar told New TV: Minister Baroud should not be held responsible for the fleeing of the prisoner

8:05pm Baroud told New TV: we have nothing positive to report about the search for the fugitive so far. I look at the issue as being technical in nature and not personal and if the investigation shows any complicity by the wardens , corrective measures will be taken

07:00 pm NBN : No contacts whatsoever between Aoun and Hariri and no one is intervening in this matter

06:00 pm Interior minister Baroud orders the arrest of the staff that was on duty when the Fatah al Islam prisoner escaped from Roumieh prison

05;55 pm : Interior minister Baroud at the Roumieh prison to follow up on the case of Fatah al Islam prisoner who escaped from the prison

2:00 pm UPI : Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and defeated candidate Mehdi Karroubi will join the political party of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi ” “Green Path of Hope”.

1:22 pm US Ambassador to Lebanon Michele Sison meets with Speaker Nabih Berri in Ain al-Tineh, left without making any statement

12:00pm VOA : Russia’s defense minister says his country’s forces have arrested eight people suspected of hijacking the cargo ship that disappeared after leaving the English Channel late last month.

11:50 BBC Russian officials have warned it is unlikely any of the 64 workers trapped within Russia’s largest hydro-electric power plant after a blast will survive.

09:40 Judicial police and LAF started destroying hashish fields in Baalbek as of 9 a.m.

09:31 Hariri sources told Al Liwaaa: The meeting between Aoun and Hariri should take place soonest possible because it is the only way to resolve the current impasse

9:00 NNA: Taha al-Hajj Suleiman, a Fatah al-Islam member flees the high security Roumieh Prison. The security services, in cooperation with the Lebanese Air Force , launched a search and believe Suleiman is hiding near the prison

08:10 March 14 coordinator Soueid told VOL: “Aoun has set himself up as the ‘obstructer,’ adding if Hezbollah knows about Aoun’s intention to obstruct the cabinet formation, then that is problematic, since the party would be hiding behind Aoun.”

07:13 March 14 Sources: Aoun is insisting on the ministry of communications at the request of Hezbollah

06:55 Al Akhbar: Christians, reconciliation is the only winning card in Bkirki’s hand

06:50 Visitors to Diman: the Patriarch of the very troubled with state of standstill in government formation

06:44 Al Akhbar: Marada named Salima Abdallah al Rasi as its representative in the government

06:41 Al Akhbar: Siniora is opposed to keeping the Ministry of Public Works with the Progressive Socialist Party, because Jumblatt is opposed to privatization

06:23 Sources close to Jumblatt: What he said in the Borivage had been misrepresented and he does not want to repeat the experiment

06:19 a reference in the opposition: what type is a very strong argument and persuasion

06:12 March 14 leaders have asked PM designate not to give in to blackmail

06:06 As Safir sources:” It is natural that the Aoun Hariri encounter by the current rhetoric

05:59 “An-Nahar”: the leaders of the March 14 are planning to have an expanded meeting

05:53 majority sources: Hezbollah and Amal are distancing themselves from the confrontation between t

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/wednesday_news_60.php
Wednesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Wednesday, 19 August, 2009 @ 8:40 AM in Beirut
Beirut – Two issues are the main focus of the media today in Lebanon : 1- The escape of a Fatah al Islam prisoner from the high security Roumieh prison 2- The obstructions facing the formation of the cabinet and all the fingers are pointed at Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun

According to political observers General Michel Aoun has been targeting the ministry of Interior for a long time and yesterday his supporters saw a window of opportunity to blame Interior Minister Ziad Baroud for what happened at the Roumieh prison, but the caretaker minister of Interior sensed what he was up against and said : “If some people assume that I could be used as the scapegoat, because I am not backed by a foreign country , a political party or a financier are very mistaken. My integrity is above the ministry and my professionalism is above all political considerations and this is why I may have set a record in the speed with which I acted in taking the appropriate disciplinary measures “

Baroud took immediate disciplinary action against the prison wardens and the security officers that were on duty at the time of the escape. Some were fired and some others were reassigned to other locations and durties

According to security sources several inmates that planned to escape from the prison formed a ladder that helped Fatah al Islam prisoner Taha al-Hajj Suleiman escape , but their plan was foiled by the prison security forces.

Meanwhile the search for the fugitive continues . General Ashraf Riffi, chief security officer assured the Lebanese citizens yesterday that the security forces has the full capabilities to find him and bring him to justice

The issue of the invitation of General Michel Aoun by prime minister-designate Saad Hariri for lunch to discuss the formation of the cabinet and to help resolve the obstacles resurfaced again

As Safir newspaper reported that Hariri is no longer insisting on his invitation of Aoun for lunch after what Aoun said during his press conference last Monday. Aoun insulted Hariri by saying ” I will not go for lunch with him before he stops his crazy MPs from attacking me “. Aoun also insulted Hariri by saying that he should not be called Prime Minister-designate but MP designate.

Aoun continues to insist on having the ministries of communication and the interior

The March 14 forces are accusing Aoun of targeting the president by his insistence on having the ministry of interior and are urging the opposition to contain Aoun if they really want a government of national unity

If this scenario continues Lebanon should not expect a government anytime soon

Even Speaker Nabih Berri who predicted that the government will be formed before the end of last July is no longer optimistic about the cabinet formation: His visitors have reported that he is “very pessimistic” now.

Wednesday

8:15pm Mohammad al Hajjar told LBC: what is Hezbollah’s position when General Aoun demands the ministry of interior as his share instead of being the share of the president ?

6:00 pm Al Manar :Lebanese security forces detained Wissam Thaybish a suspect in the murder of four Lebanese judges in the Saida’s Palace of Justice in 1999. He was arrested at the entrance of the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon

5:36pm Military Judiciary issues arrest warrant for negligence against two officers and six security staff on duty duringthe escape of Fatah al-Islam member from Roumieh prison

05:00 pm MP Michel Aoun said during a press conference that he will accept Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s invitation to lunch “if the Future Movement stops its lies and defamation against us.”

04:15pm Amal and Hezbollah supporters clash with Aisha Bakkar residents. Lebanese Armed Forces intervened to restore calm to the area and to begin tracking down the culprits.

03:45pm Saudi Arabia arrests 44 Al-Qaeda suspects

03:40 VOA : Iraqi police say a series of explosions near high-profile targets across Baghdad killed at least 75 people and wounded more than 310 others.

03:20 pm Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah: the Lebanese politicians are still far from the path of true national unity, because the crisis of confidence is still intact

03:11 PM designate Saad Hariri updated Arslan on the latest in government formation and had lunch with him

02;30 pm SANA: Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad arrived in Tehran to hold discussions with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the Presidential Palace.

11:50 LAF arrested Fatah al-Islam fugitive Taha al-Hajj Suleiman, who escaped on Tuesday from Roumieh Prison

11:40 Cardinal Sfeir to head to the the Vatican on September 19 then to Paris to Meet French president Sarkozy

11:30 Siniora inspects the second phase of Batroun Highway works.

11:06 Speaker Berri meets President Suleiman in Baabda

10:18 Minister Najjar told future TV: everything is politicized in Lebanon and the prisons are like the Ali Baba cave , but we are in complete coordination with minister Baroud

09:43 MP Robert Ghanem : The title of the prime minister-designate is correct because it was specified in a decree following the resignation of the government ( this was in response to Aoun’s claim that the title should be MP-designate and not PM-designate)

09:36 Hariri source : Aoun’s invitation for Aoun to be delayed until his allies will do something, to persuade him to change his position and to start negotiating on reasonable basis

09:28 March 14 told al Qabas: the opposition is maneuvering with the aim of changing the agreed upon formula of 15 +10 +5

9:09 : 44 were arrested for committing various crimes

8:30 prices of gasoline went up between 700 and 800 LL per 20 liters or roughly about
10 US cents per US gallon

8:00 Wall Street Journal : Gunfire and explosions reverberated through the heart of the Afghan capital Wednesday on the eve of the presidential election and a day after insurgents fired at the presidential palace and unleashed a suicide car bomb on a NATO convoy

7:45am MP Antoine Zahra during the LF’s annual expatriates’ dinner: The cabinet will be formed after Syrian demands to put obstacles on the formation are withdrawn.

07:35 Moussa told “Voice of Lebanon:” the process of government formation of th is being obstructed , the formula of 15-10-5 is still valid and a meeting between Hariri and Aoun, is the key to get the wheels of cabinet formation moving again

07:20 Wahab: sfeir’s position towards Syria’s is the same and that is Syria is up there and we are here, and his main priority is the respect to Lebanese sovereignty

06:55 Al Akhbar : King Abdullah’s son contacted the Syrian capital and Khojah visited Beirut secretly last Sunday

06:45 Williams: Saudi Arabia and Syria have made considerable effort in the past six months towards improving their relations and to provide the right climate to help the Lebanese people achieve progress and prosperity

06:30 “The Free Patriotic Movement source”: Hariri’s credibility is at stake and he has to ask his people to stop attack on against the FPM leader as a proof of good faith

06:25 Al Mustaqbal sources: It is the responsibility of the opposition s to contain Aoun and not to follow his steps

06:25 As Safir: Hariri is no longer insisting on his invitation of Aoun for lunch after what Aoun said during his press conference

06:20 Minister Najjar: : the Ministry of Justice is not liable or responsible in any way to what happened at the Roumieh prison

06:12 Minister Najjar: the prisons will remain for the next four and a half years under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior but after that they will be managed by the Department of Justice

06:07 Baroud: If some people assume that I could be used as the scapegoat, because I am not backed by a foreign country or a political party are very mistaken

05:53 security sources : the group that tried to escape from the Roumieh prison had coordinated their plan with someone from the outside

05:47 Rifi: The prisoner that escaped is not dangerous

05:39 Security sources: the relaxed measures in the Roumieh prison facilitated the escape

05:31 “An-Nahar:” Aoun did not respond to Hariri’s invitation for lunch

05:26 Visitors to Speaker of the parliament : Berri is pessimistic

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/thursday_news_b_61.php
Thursday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Thursday, 20 August, 2009 @ 11:46 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Despite the problems facing the formation of the cabinet, Lebanon is doing a lot better than expected. Lebanese troops arrested Wednesday Fatah al Islam fugitive Taha Ahmad Haji Suleiman after escaping a day earlier from the high security Roumieh prison and also arrested Wissam Thaibesh
of Jund al-Sham an Islamist militant group linked to al Qaeda.

All this happened in one day

Examining magistrate Saqr Saqr ordered the arrest of eight ISF officers and soldiers, who worked in Roumieh, on charges of “negligence and failure to perform duty,” the National News Agency reported.

Taha Ahmad Haji Suleiman who holds dual Syrian and Palestinian citizenship was arrested near the prison

In 2007, the Lebanese army defeated Fatah al-Islam militants in a 15-week battle at Nahr el Bared a Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon. More than 440 people, including 170 soldiers, were killed in the fighting. Suleiman was one of the militants that were arrested at the end of the battle

Wissam Thaibesh a Palestinian citizen was arrested as he was trying to enter the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in south Lebanon

Thaibesh is implicated in the June 8, 1999, murder of four Lebanese judges at the Justice Palace in Sidon. It has been widely believed that the killers were hiding in Ain al-Hilweh camp. The camp, which is off-limits to Lebanese security forces, is a stronghold for several small militant groups and is known as a hideout for several wanted terrorists

Another piece of good news

Lebanon defeated India yesterday in the Nehru Cup football ( soccer) championship 1-0 . The lone goal came from a booming free kick by Ali Al Saad in the fourth minute. According to witnesses Lebanon bombarded India in the first five minutes. The attacks were planned and carried out in a flash, giving the home team many anxious moments. The Lebanese were described as “relentless” and the Indians “aimless”. The spectators became restless as they were unable to fathom why their heroes could not even put foot to the ball.

India, the defending champion hosted the game at the Ambedkar Stadium.

Now the bad news

The obstruction facing the formation of the cabinet continues and all fingers are pointed at MP Michel Aoun for being the primary cause behind the delay . Aoun yesterday came under attack by former PM Omar karami, a key member of the opposition because he called Hariri MP designate instead of PM- designate…. Aoun was accused of provoking the Sunni Muslims.

“Aoun’s statement that there is only one chief in Lebanon provokes the Sunnis. Following the Taef accord there are 3 chiefs in Lebanon : The presidency , the Speakership and the Premiership….. Aoun’s statement that Hariri should be called MP designate is wrong and should be called PM designate whether he is able to form a government or not .” Karami said

Aoun continues to insist on having the ministries of communication and the interior and wants his son-in-law Gebran Bassil to return to the ministry of communication despite the fact that he failed in the elections last June and performed poorly at the ministry.

Aoun has been blaming the formation of the cabinet on foreign countries but the president told visitors yesterday: ” The obstruction that is preventing the formation of the government is not foreign..it is local”, in reference to Aoun

Thursday

9:21 pm Dar al-Fatwa announces Saturday will be the start of the holy month of Ramadan

9:10pm Al-Arabia: Saudi Arabia and Egypt announced Saturday will be the start of the holy month of Ramadan

9:00 pm BBC The Libyan man jailed in Scotland for blowing up a US airliner over Lockerbie in 1988, has arrived home in Libya after being set free. The Scottish government released Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who is 57 and has terminal cancer, on compassionate grounds.

8:31pm Sugaan al Qazzi told MTV: The Pahalange party will not leave march 14 alliance and wont fall into the March 8 game plan , will not join Jumblatt or the centrist bloc and it is not true that a Phalange representative visited Syria , as reported in pro-Syrian newspapers

6:24pm caretaker PM Fouad Siniora is meeting with president Suleiman at the Baabda palace to discus the latest developments

5:37pm OTV: an apartment was raided in Zahiriyah- Tripoli. Weapons confiscated and one man was arrested

4:38pm Minister Safadi: Nothing can justify the high prices, we need 250 inspectors to cover all regions

4:15 pm Reuters: A former Libyan agent jailed for life for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, most of them Americans, is to be freed on Thursday, the Scottish government said.

3:48pm Abi Nasr: 71000 Palestinians have been naturalized in Lebanon on the basis of a 94 decree and when the naturalization is completed the Christians will be 22% of the population

02:25 pm Sheikh Naim Qassem: Hezbollah is only committed to the 15-10-5 cabinet formula

12:50 pm The British government is open to talks with the political wing of Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a minister said on Wednesday.

12:45pm State Minister Wael Abu Faour said he conveyed a message of respect from Jumblatt to Patriarch Sfeir and stressed the PSP’s commitment to the mountains’ reconciliation

12:45 Lebanon’s annual inflation rate fell to 2.4 percent in July from 3.3 percent in June, central bank statistics released to Reuters on Thursday showed.

12:35pm Caretaker PM Saniora during the inauguration of the criminology laboratory congratulated the Lebanese army Internal Security Forces for their “great achievements.”

12:35pm Sunnite Mufti Qabbani called for the Ramadhan- crescent sighting at sunset today and send a letter addressed to those that will be fasting , but Shiite Sheikh Qablan called for Ramadhan- crescent-sighting at sunset on Friday and will send a letter as well

12:16pm MP Nuhad Mashnouq: Aoun’s speech is “non constitutional.” The U.S. does not encourage the Cabinet formation based on an understanding between the majority and the opposition, particularly Hezbollah.

11:45 Justice minister Ibrahim Najjar confirms Wissam Thaibesh ’s involvement in the 1999 assassination of four judges in Saida. ” It appears to be that Wissam Thaibesh was the direct executor of the murder of the four judges in 1999 and is directly responsible for the assassination,” he said

11:15: patriarch Sfeir is currently meeting a delegation form the Democratic Gathering parliamentary bloc. The delegation has delivered a letter from DG leader MP Walid Jumblatt

11:35 one bomb exploded in a tractor and another one was found during the destruction the hashish plantations in the Beqaa valley

10:00 Al-Mustaqbal newspaper: A delegation from the Democratic Gathering parliamentary bloc will visit Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir at his summer residence in Diman. The aim of the visit is to reassert the “bond” between the bloc and the Church

09:00 MP Fadi al-Aawar told VOL: caretaker minister of youth and sports MP Talal Arslan, did not deliver any messages from the Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun to Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri during his Wednesday meeting.

08:10 UN rep Williams: Nasrallah analyzed the situation carefully and in detail during his last speech

08:09 sources: Saudi Information minister Khojah brought the key to the solution of the government formation during his last visit to Beirut

08:01 Rifi: but there is no complicity but negligence resulting from the reality of the prisons as a whole

07:57 United Nations: the tension is easing in the south

07:32 Eddy Abillamaa: the non-participation of a representative of the Phalange Party in the March 14 meeting is an administrative detail

07:29 Phalange sources: The Phalange Party stated that it is still a key member of the March 14 and will be the last to leave the alliance , but has a problem with the March 14 secretariat.

07:09 “Al Akhbar : Phalangist VP Joseph Abu Khalil visited Damascus following the meeting between Gemayel and Franjiyeh. He had to wait for 6 hours at his hotel in Damascus before Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem showed up

06:42 Arslan sources: Arslan sensed during his meeting with Hariri openness and willingness to cooperate

06:35 Hariri and Karami will be having a working lunch today or tomorrow

06:13 Karami: Aoun’s statement that there is only one chief in Lebanon provokes the Sunnites. Following the Taef accord there are 3 chiefs in Lebanon : the presidency , the speakership and the premiership. Karami said Aoun’s statement that Hariri should be called MP designate is wrong and should be called PM designate whether he is able to form a government or not .

06:08 As Safir: Hariri stressed to Karami his commitment in protecting the dignity and power of the position of prime ministers

05:59 Hezbollah sources: : the party is not acting as an intermediary between Aoun and PM-designate

05:48 opposition sources: Aoun may be willing to drop his demand for a sovereign ministry if his son-in-law Basil is allowed to join the cabinet

05:40 President Suleiman told his visitors: the obstruction that is preventing the formation of the government is not foreign..it is local

05:33 “An-Nahar:” Arslan did not deliver any message from any party to Hariri

05:32 a shell landed on a house in Jabal Mohsen , Tripoli and injured a child

05:07 Baroud: the situation in Lebanese prisons is like a “time bomb”

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/friday_news_bri_62.php
Friday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Friday, 21 August, 2009 @ 7:38 AM in Beirut
Beirut – MP Walid Jumblatt is quietly trying to repair the damages caused by his August 2 statement when he declared that he plans to pull out from the March 14 alliance. Last night he reportedly met secretly with March 14 secretariat and yesterday afternoon he sent a delegation to meet with Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir in al Diman

According to morning reports the meeting with the March 14 secretariat, the first since Aug 2 went well …both parties were very frank and could be the start of a new dialogue

Informed sources reported that the Patriarch ( Sfeir) expressed his understanding of the explanations submitted by the delegation of the Progressive Socialist Party . In a letter addressed to Sfeir and which was delivered by the delegation Jumblatt told the patriarch that his recent efforts are aimed at removing the sectarian barricades.

The March 8 media is having a ball with Jumbaltt’s “U Turn” and is now trying for another one by the Phanlange party by fabricating lies about a meeting in Damascus between a Phalange representative and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, which was completely denied by the Phalange party. The pro-Syrian newspaper al Akhbar went as far as claiming that the Phalange rep had to wait for 6 hours for Mouallem to show up for the meeting.

Meanwhile the delay in government formation continues. The opposition is blaming the foreign countries specially the US and the neighboring pro-western Arab countries while the majority is blaming Syria and Iran. President Suleiman thinks the delay is locally generated and ruled out any foreign interference.

The holy month of Ramadan is here now and many have correctly predicted the government will not see the light before Ramadan

President Suleiman is reportedly concerned about the delay in government formation and for this reason he may call for a meeting of the caretaker cabinet to deal with some of the country’s outstanding issues if Hariri is not able to form the cabinet soon , but the opposition is opposing the idea on constitutional and political grounds.

The majority has been pushing Hezbollah to intervene and end the impasse with MP Michell Aoun who is reportedly making impossible demands by Hezbollah stated this morning ” : It is unacceptable to deal with Hezbollah as if it is a tool to pressure General Aoun” . Many in the majority are of the opinion that Aoun is acting as a front for Hezbollah and it is Hezbollah that is really after the 2 ministries that Aoun has been demanding : Interior and communication

Friday

9:45pm Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri leaves to Saudi Arabia for a personal visit

9:30 pm The British government has condemned the hero’s welcome Libya gave to the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988

9:00 pm Russian authorities say the death toll from the accident at the country’s largest hydroelectric power station has risen to 47

08:40 Obama; “I want to reiterate my commitment to a new beginning between America and Muslims around the world.” He said in a videotape message in which he wished Muslims around the world a Ramadan Mubarak

5:49pm Al-Arabiya: Obama Administration says Iran not cooperating fully on its nuclear program

2:01pm Patriarch Sfeir: There are many difficulties, but these could be overcome through good will and consensus among the Lebanese people and we must be on good terms with our neighbors on the basis of ” what is yours is yours and what is mine is mine to keep and protect”

1:54pm President Suleiman: Any solution to the crisis in the Middle East that is not based on giving the Palestinians their rights especially the right of return will be inadequate

12:50 AFP: members of the Hezbollah cell that was reportedly planning attacks against tourist resorts and on ships in the Suez Canal, will go on trial in an Egyptian security court starting this Sunday.

12:25pm Aoun delivered to the president of the Constitutional Council a statement on his assets as stipulated in the Illicit Wealth Law.

12:18pm The Romanian senate president meets with Speaker Nabih Berri.

11:00 AFP: Mahmoud Qassem Rafeh, a 62-year-old retired Lebanese Internal Security Forces official, confessed to having “collaborated with Israeli intelligence agents” between 1993 and 2006

10:52 Minister Aoun told “New TV”: No government without the Change and Reform Bloc and General Aoun is insisting on retaining the Ministry of Communications and does not accept pressure from anyone

10:46 Former PM Mikati: The Continued derailing of government formation drags the country into a state that is not acceptable

10:42 President Suleiman met with the Romanian Senate President, who left the Baabda Palace, without making any statement

10:29 Nicolas told “Al-Manar:” If the formation of the government is awaiting a decision by the Special International Tribunal for Lebanon , it means that the obstacle is not Aoun and the STL decision will be a surprise for them and not for us. Observers are questioning what he meant because according to Der Spiegel report Hezbollah is behind the assassination of Hariri …does Niocolas mean this is no surprise for the opposition?

10:20 PSP’s Sherif Fayyad told “future news”: Jumblatt is still in the team of the parliamentary majority and there are positions within March 14 that should be reviewed . We stress the importance of our relationship with the Bkirki

10:17 Egyptian “Today”: Hezbollah cell had set up a travel agency in Cairo, with the direct financial support of the party with intention of facilitating in and out travel for terrorists

10:13 “Al Anbaa “: Jumblatt met SSNP chief Hardan few days ago away from the spotlight and is planning another meeting shortly and this time the media will be informed

10:10 MP Ali Bazzi: Lebanon’s security is a red line. We won’t allow anyone to tamper with it.

10:00 Soldiers found around midnight a bomb without a detonator left near a gas station in Tripoli’s al-Mallouleh area.

9:30 Al Liwa sources : The saw blade that was used by Fatah al Islam inmates to cut the bar of their window cell was smuggled into the prison inside 2 pages ( that were glued together ) of the Koraan

9: 00 Reuters: President Hamid Karzai’s campaign manager claimed victory on Friday in the country’s presidential election, saying preliminary results showed there would be no need for a second round run-off

7:30 PSP media representative Rami al-Rayyes told VOL: The latest stances of officials brought things to square one. No one has an interest in having a cabinet vacuum.

06:23 a secret and frank meeting was held last night between Jumblatt and the Secretariat of March 14. This is the first meeting since Aug 2 .

06:22 Sources: The Patriarch ( Sfeir) expressed his understanding of the explanation submitted by the delegation of the Progressive Socialist Party in terms of Jumblatt’s efforts to remove the sectarian barricades

06: 21 Jumblatt told Hariri: either Jumblatt or Geagea . Hariri picked Jumblatt and Geagea understood why

06:20 opposition sources: Ambassador Badawi’s move came after the opposition commented about the passive International and Arab role over the formation of the government

06:16 Hezbollah sources :It is unacceptable to deal with Hezbollah as if it is a tool to pressure General Aoun. The party has facilitated the agreement on the formula but will not get involved in the allocation of portfolios. Many in the majority are of the opinion that Aoun is acting as a front for Hezbollah and it is Hezbollah that is really after the 2 ministries : Interior and communication

06:12 source: “Fatah al-Islam” prisoners may be relocated from Roumieh to another prison

06:09 Security forces seized a large quantity of weapons ( almost truckload ) including, “RPG” bombs and rifles from the house of recruiter P. J in Zahriyeh in Tripoli

06:05 political source : the obstacle ( facing the government formation) is 90 % foreign and despite the noise surrounding this issue it did not reach a dead end road yet

05:58 Karami advised Hariri to start dialogue with the opposition and all parties

05:50 The escalation between Aoun and Hariri may result in the cancellation of their encounter

05:43 President Suleiman may call for a meeting of the caretaker cabinet to deal with some of the outstanding issues if Hariri is not able to form the cabinet soon , but the opposition is opposing the idea on constitutional and political grounds

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/saturday_news_b_56.php
Saturday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Saturday, 22 August, 2009 @ 11:32 AM in Beirut
Beirut- Signaling that the obstruction over the government formation is not over yet, Prime Minister -Designate Saad Hariri took a break yesterday and headed to Saudi Arabia on a private visit. Sources close to Michel Suleiman have reported that the president is concerned that the delay could take forever.

Accusations between the majority and the opposition continue over the obstruction of government formation ..each blaming the other for the delay.

A centrist minister whose name was withheld due to his connection to the president said : “In theory Michel Aoun is the one obstructing the formation of the government , but in reality he is just the cover up of something much bigger …a much more complex foreign obstruction.

Today marks the first day of the holy month of Ramadan. During this fasting month, Muslims all over the world abstain from food, drink, and other physical needs during the daylight hours
Ramadan for Muslims is much more than just not eating and drinking. Muslims are called upon to use this month to re-evaluate their lives in light of Islamic guidance. They are to make peace with those who have wronged them, strengthen ties with family and friends, do away with bad habits . … essentially to clean up their lives, their thoughts, and their feelings. The Arabic word for “fasting” (sawm)literally means “to refrain” … and it means not only refraining from food and drink, but from evil actions, thoughts, and words.

Fasting in Islam is not merely physical, but is rather the total commitment of the person’s body and soul to the spirit of the fast. Ramadan is a time to practice self-restraint; a time to cleanse the body and soul from impurities and re-focus one’s self on the worship of God.

At the end of the day the Muslims break their fasting and get together for breakfast ( Iftar) .

Ya Libnan wishes all the Muslims in the world a Ramadan Mubarak

Saturday

11: 00pm Times-on-line: They are expecting a magnificent party in Tripoli on Tuesday when Libya marks the 40th year in power of Muammar Gadaffi and pays tribute to the deft diplomatic footwork of Saif al-Islam, his son

10:00 pm Sri Lanka defeated Lebanon 4-3 in the Nehru Cup international football tournament at Ambedkar stadium in Delhi on Saturday. Lebanon earlier defeated India 1-0

9:22pm March 14 coordinator and former MP Fares Soueid fell off his horse and a broke a hip

8:18pm “Future news”: the of the advisers PM designate are advising him to invite the political leaders for Iftar or to round table dialogue meeting

7:31pm “Central News agency “: Jumblatt expressed his willingness to participate in an expanded meeting of the March majority Alliance

02:26pm Minister Safadi warned against exploitation of the month of Ramadan and price increases and called for citizens to register their complaints using hotline No. 1739

02:18pm Samir Franjieh told “future news”: the March 14 meeting with Jumblatt put things on the right track and signaled the beginning of dialogue on key issues

2:00 pm CNN : Making good on a threat of election day violence, the Taliban sliced off the index fingers of at least two people in Kandahar province, according to a vote monitoring group.

02:00pm President Suleiman met with ministers Lahoud and Qabbani and also met Nasri Khoury, PLO’s Zaki and Qandil

1:45pm Nadim Gemayel: it is important not to surrender to the obstacles placed by March 8 and Hariri should go ahead and form a government

1:25pm Salloukh reviewed the living conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon with PLO’s Zaki and met Rahmet

1:13pm Abu Faour: Jumblatt did not set up a coup against March 14 and we refuse to allow anyone to take advantage of the situation during the formation of the cabinet at our expense

12:31pm Shimon Peres told Al Rai : Hezbollah will always find an excuse reason to continue its belligerent policy towards Israel, even if it withdrew from the Shebaa Farms and Ghajar village

12:10pm a security element that works in Roumieh prison told AFP: Fatah al-Islam inmates get a very special treatment in the jail

12:00 pm Ya Liban exclusive: The ministry of energy headed by FPM minister Taborian is creating an artificial Diesel fuel shortage in the market by banding with the traders against the gas pump retailers. The ministry is forcing the retailers to sell the fuel at a fixed price of 18000 LL per 20 liters while allowing the traders ( wholesalers ) to sell at much higher prices( 19000 LL per 20 LL and more ) . Knowing they will be losing a lot of money the retailers have stopped buying the fuel. If this is the change and reform General Aoun is promising then good luck to the car owners who need diesel fuel to power their cars and the homeowners who need diesel fuel to power their standby generators because of the consistent power blackouts in the country

9:20 Al-Liwaa: Kataeb leaderd former Lebanese president Amin Gemayel met March 14 General Secretariat Coordinator Fares Soueid on Friday, before travelling to Brazil. They discussed the reasons why the Kataeb party is no longer participating in the March 14 Secretariat meetings

8:40 An-Nahar: President Michel Suleiman is expected to hold an Iftar dinner at the Presidential Palace in Baabda on September 1, to which all political parties will be invited. His aim is to end the impasse over the government formation

07:20 The Hariri-Karami meeting opened a new page and several consultation meetings will be held in the future away from the spotlight

07:12 Source: Directorate of Army Intelligence did not directly handle the investigation of the Barouk internet station , this was handled by the Office for Combating Financial Crimes and money laundering

06:57 Egypt: The Trial of the Hezbollah cell could last for months

06:34 Hariri advisors studying the possibility of not setting up a Ramadan Iftars

06:21 Sources: Geagea has been claiming that Saudi Arabia has decided to rely on him after the withdrawal of Jumblatt from March 14

06:18 source in the “Change and Reform”: They cannot form a Government without the Free Patriotic Movement
Are obstructing

06:16 Lebanese Forces denied that U.S. or Egypt for the formation of the government and al Mustaqbal rejects the accusation against Saudi Arabia

06:09 Centrist minister “: In theory Michel Aoun is the one obstructing the formation of the government , but in reality he is just the cover up for a much more complex foreign obstruction

05:43 Sources: The President is concerned that delay in cabinet formation could take forever

05:37 Hezbollah official “: all the talk about the party pledging to persuade General Aoun regarding the portfolios is just fabrication

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/sunday_news_bri_61.php
Sunday News Briefs
Published: Sunday, 23 August, 2009 @ 12:59 PM in Beirut
Beirut- With Prime Minister Designate Saad Hariri in Saudi Arabia, it is difficult to expect a government in Lebanon anytime soon. According to al Anbaa newspaper he is expected back in Lebanon latest September 1 to attend the Iftar at the Baabda republican palace, which will be hosted by the president.

Lebanese president Michel Suleiman has reportedly invited all the key politicians in Lebanon for Ramadan dinner “Iftar” on September 1 to try and initiate dialogue between them in order to speed up the formation of the government

Sunday

11:30 pm NYT Independent election observers say that the turnout by women in the recent presidential election in Afghanistan was depressed by intimidation and other factors

11;00 pm Thousands of Greeks were battling to save their homes from forest fires raging out of control on the outskirts of Athens as authorities declared a state of emergency and mobilised the army today

8:15pm “MTV: Azzi said in memory of the election of the late Bashir Gemayel as President:” His dream was building a state of freedom, sovereignty and equality…if he was here today we won’t have the problems we are now experiencing

8:14pm Maroni told “LBC”: Ministry of Tourism sent warnings to a number of hotels and cafes that violated the laws, after receiving complaints from some tourists

8:10pm Gen. Aoun told OTV : I want to remind the Patriarch that the most important organization in the world is the Security Council which is based on consensus . We are not at war with Jumblatt, but currently we don’t plan to meet each other. Adwan did not ask me for an appointment but the doors of Rabiah are open to all without an appointment

8:07pm Minister Harb told LBC: the supreme national interest demands that the government should assume its responsibility and continue to function as needed until a new government is formed

7:43pm Naaman told “Al-Manar:” The Government is not entitled to meet in order to conduct business except in emergencies and special cases

6:48pm SSNP: “a fire in the hut of Anton Saadeh in Thhur Shweir

5:05pm “Arab”: The appointment of MP Emile Rahme by Hezbollah to defend Sami Shehab angered Egyptian lawyer Montaser Al-Zayat, who could decide not to represent Shehab and allow the other Lebanese lawyer Salim Al-Awa to defend him

4:18pm 16 cases of food poisoning were reported in a summer camp in Beit Monzer in Bcharri and all were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment

3:04pm Minister Baroud told “LBC”: No political cover for anyone, and no scapegoats as far as the issue of prisoner that escaped from Roumieh prison is concerned . we are however investigating the claim that Fatah al Islam prisoners were receiving preferential treatment

3:02pm “LBC”: The trial of the members of the Hezbollah cell was delayed in Egypt till October 24

1:40 pm Reuters: Wildfires burned scores of homes and thousands of acres of forest near Athens as flames raged out of control for a second day on Sunday, sending huge clouds of smoke over the Greek capital

1;20 pm AP: Charges of fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential election are extensive enough that they could sway the final result, the commission investigating the complaints said Sunday

1:00 pm Bloomberg: Scotland’s decision to release Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi from prison gives comfort to terrorists around the world and makes a “mockery of the rule of law,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said

12:17pm “Voice of Lebanon”: an explosion near a gas station in Anjar and only material damage were reported

12:11pm Hubeish: we can not wait forever for some leaders of parliamentary blocs to make up their minds and in case Aoun maintains his position then the only remaining option before the PM-designate is to form a government in agreement with the President of the Republic

12:05pm One killed and 3 wounded from the Nepalese battalion of UNIFIL when their patrol car overturned

10:30 State Minister Khaled Qabbani told Future News that “the opposition or any political party has the right to inform the prime minister-designate of their demands, but they cannot force him to accept them and threaten to obstruct the process of the cabinet formation if he does not respond.”

10:25 FPM MP Alain Aoun told LBCI that a deadline is needed for the cabinet formation process because the country cannot remain without a cabinet.

08:22 Youssef Khalil told Al Anbaa: no government in Lebanon at the moment due to regional and international considerations

08:19 Sources at the Ministry of Tourism told al Awan : Lebanon received the largest number of Kuwaitis in its history this year

07:50 Al Anbaa sources :It is not true that Lebanon file was absent from the Iranian-Syrian summit talks

07:42 Al Anbaa : Hariri will return to Beirut to attend the Ramadan breakfast in Baabda on September 1

7:40 Lebanon might be the new property hotspot with many UAE-based developers going there with big plans for development. Developers Emaar, Al Habtoor, Damac and Rakeen have plans to develop in Lebanon.

07:37 Al Hayat: Hariri will renew his contacts after his return next week

07:13 Alloush during an interview with Asharq al Awsat accused “Hezbollah” of forming and arming militia groups in Tripoli

06:58 Zahra told al Balad : The Lebanese forces facilitated the task of PM designate Saad Hariri starting from day one

06:55 Christian Opposition sources: the situation in Lebanon now is similar to the situation before the presidential election

06:51 sources told Al Anbaa: a Kuwaiti – Qatari road map to speed up the consultations over government formation

06:39 Twenty-six men accused of plotting attacks on behalf of Hezbollah group on tourist resorts and on ships in the Suez Canal will go on trial in an Egyptian security court starting today.

6:30 CNN: Taliban official Hakeemullah Mehsud has been selected the new head of the Pakistani Taliban, a local Taliban commander in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas said.

06:27 Al Balad: Soueid is making many contacts far from the spotlight with key members of March 14 to revive the alliance

06:17 “An-Nahar”: Suleiman discussed with Saudi ambassador Asiri his participation in the opening ceremony of the King Abdullah University

06:07 “An-Nahar”: the majority stressed the importance of respecting the election results and not to succumb to blackmail and intimidation

6:00 Argentina expressed outrage Friday over Iran’s nomination of Ahmad Vahidi, a man wanted in connection to a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing that killed 85 people as the next defense minister

5:50 Reports of hundreds of cases of cholera spreading in northeastern Syria have sparked fears of an epidemic in this poor and drought-stricken area, Syrian analysts and media reports said

5:40 Syria has a daily shortfall of up to 1,000 megawatts (MW) in its electricity supplies, the official daily Ath-Thawra reported on August 9, and this has led to power cuts sometimes lasting several hours.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/monday_news_bri_59.php
Monday News Briefs
Published: Monday, 24 August, 2009 @ 5:38 PM in Beirut
Beirut- The focus of the media today is on security and the delay in government formation. The head of the General Security at the Masnaa border crossing, Maj. Wadih Khater, was beaten up by a group of young men in four cars who intercepted his car and assailed him in Majdal Anjar near the borders with Syria, the state-run National News Agency reported

Prime Minister designate Saad Hariri is still in Saudi Arabia on a private visit and speculation continues about who is behind the obstacles facing the formation of the cabinet

Monday

7:40 pm Al Manar: one of the people who attacked Maj. Wadih Khater is called Hussam Abu Haykal from the town of Majdel Anjar

7:19 pm Reuters: Bernard Madoff, convicted of swindling $65 billion through the biggest-ever Ponzi scheme, has told fellow prison inmates that he is dying of cancer, the New York Post reported on Monday, citing unnamed prison sources.

7:00pm NY Times: Crews battling wildfires in Greece made progress overnight during a lull in high winds but were still struggling Monday afternoon to contain blazes that swept through the northern suburbs of Athens.

06:50 pm NY Times: Malaysian authorities on Monday gave a last-minute, temporary reprieve to a Muslim woman sentenced to whipping for drinking alcohol in a case that has stirred passions over the increasingly strict enforcement of Islamic law

06:40pm president Suleiman reviewed the current situation with the former minister Boutros and Kuwaiti businessman Nasser Al-Kharafi

06:35pm PM-designate Saad Hariri arrived in Beirut following a private visit to Saudi Arabia

05:17pm opposition sources told al Markaziyah : Hariri did not make any formal proposal formula for discussions

05:10pm sources told al Markaziyah: The fact neither Hezbollah nor Amal Aoun’s objected the stances of Aoun shocked Hariri

05:04 pm Jumblatt, sent his wife to the hospital to visit March 14th coordinator Fares Soueid, whos is being treated for a broken hip

04:56 pm National security : A group of wanted men from the town of Majdal Anjar attacked Maj. Wadih Khater

04:47pm Wahab: “The premier-designate to be somewhere in line with the Syrian – Saudi Arabia agreement

04:20pm AP Australia: Diplomat Jean Dunn will be Australia’s next ambassador to Lebanon,

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith announced Monday. Smith said Dunn would replace Lyndall Sachs who had served as ambassador in Beirut since March 2006

04:16pm: Saudi Arabia donates 12 tons of dates to the Palestinian refugee camps

03:15pm Judge Saqr transferred the file of the illegal internet company of Barouk to the intelligence department

12:11 pm former MP Mustapha Alloush told LBC: Two military groups in Tripoli claim to be affiliates of Hezbollah

11:43 Al-Hayat newspaper: ISF detains one of its members for hiding arms at his residence

10:46 Al-Watan: Stalling cabinet formation could turn into governance crisis

9:45 NNA: Head of the General Security at the Masnaa border crossing, Maj. Wadih Khater, was beaten up by a group of assailants who intercepted his car in Majdal Anjar

9:00 Al Sharq radio: Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said that Israeli president Shimon Peres’ allegation over Hezbollah’s rockets stockpile was baseless.”How did the number jump from 40,000 rockets to 80,000 in a few days?” said Salloukh, adding “Peres’ statement is political connivance and totally baseless.”

8:28 MP Antoine Zahra told VOL: The premier-designate will make a new suggestion to all parties upon his return to Beirut. He has already consulted several opposition leadrs on his new plan which is still based on the 15-10-5 formula.

7:35 MP Jamal al-Jarrah told VOL: Cabinet could be formed any minute after the local and foreign obstacles have been removed. The Hariri-Aoun meeting could have taken place last week had the FPM leader not made his latest statements.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/tuesday_news_br_55.php
Tuesday News Briefs & Editorial
Published: Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 @ 9:43 AM in Beirut
Beirut – Tourism is a great source of income for Lebanon, but experience has shown there is no such thing as a ‘ free lunch’ and somehow the Lebanese people will end up paying for it. Lebanon’s ministry of health has reported last week that the number of cases of swine flu has risen to 500 and most of those infected are tourists .

The number as it stands now may not be alarming but the fact that during the last 2 weeks the number has doubled should definitely be of serious concern for the Health authorities .

Lebanon should be guided by what is happening in the rest of the world and act accordingly specially since the kids will be going back to school very soon :

A report by a panel of scientific advisers to President Barack Obama on Monday presented a “plausible scenario” in which 60 million to 120 million Americans — or 20% to 40% of the U.S. population ….contract H1N1 swine flu this fall and winter, and 30,000 to 90,000 people die of the disease.

These numbers are alarming. If converted for Lebanon, with a population of 4 million this could potentially mean 800,000 to 1.6 million cases of H1N1 swine flu this fall.

The question is are we prepared to handle such a large number of cases in this country ?

According to the US study such a large number of patients would put a strain on any health-care system, because those patients could occupy between 50% and 100% of available intensive-care beds at the peak of the epidemic in affected regions, while ICU units normally operate close to capacity.

The US panel recommended that enough vaccine be ready as early as mid-September to vaccinate high-risk groups such as pregnant women, health-care workers, and children and young people with underlying medical conditions.

Some may think Ya Libnan is exaggerating the danger of this flu , but since we have used the US as a guideline lets look what happened in the US and how fast this flu has spread there . On April 26, 2009 the United States Government had reported 20 laboratory confirmed human cases of swine flu A/H1N1 (8 in New York, 7 in California, 2 in Texas, 2 in Kansas and 1 in Ohio. No deaths were reported back then . As of Aug 21 , 2009 the number of reported deaths in the US was 522.

Perhaps Lebanon’s ministry of health should plan ahead and contact vaccine manufacturers to make sure we are ready to deal with this potential crises when and if it arises and at the same time should alert the health-care system ( hospitals , clinics, etc ) to be prepared to deal with it.

Tuesday

10:12 pm PM-designate Saad Hariri said during Iftar dinner : I want to assure our enemy in Israel that Hezbollah will be in the government because it is in the interest of our nation that we all participate in the government , regardless whether Israel likes it or not

9:30pm : Last night Hariri met MP Hassan Khalil

8:21pm Health Minister Khalifa told LBC: the measures taken to combat the swine flue are similar to those of regular influenza . The quantity of vaccine available for the swine flu is not sufficient

6:22 pm Al Manar : The army arrested a person with unusual features in Aitroun south Lebanon and is now interrogating him. He entered the country illegally from the occupied territories
5:34pm Mukhtarain: I dont expect the government to be formed anytime soon.

5:00 pm CNN: Syria and Iraq recalled their ambassadors from each other’s countries Tuesday, after Baghdad demanded that Damascus hand over two suspects in last week’s deadly bombings in the Iraqi capital. As Syria and Iraq engaged in a diplomatic tit-for-tat, the Islamic State of Iraq, the umbrella group for al-Qaeda in Iraq, released a statement claiming responsibility for the bombings

4:16pm British minister Evan Lewis : Syria should refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Lebanon and should stop supporting organizations such as Hezbollah. The formation of a new government in Lebanon is important for the security of the country and the region

3:45pm A Lebanese – American is on trial in Abu Dhabi on charges of belonging to al Qaeda

3:06pm MP Salam discussed with US ambassador Sison latest developments in Lebanon and the region

2:45pm PSP’s media adviser Rami al Rayyes : The PM designate is not a PO Box for rejecting names of minister and Aoun’s stance is not contributing in any shape or form to the formation of the cabinet but on the contrary it is obstructing it.

2:22 pm Arslan’s media office denied al Akhbar’s statement following his meeting with PM designate Saad Hariri

02:20 Franjiyeh: Aoun is entitled to his demands and including his son-in-law Bassil is not the real obstacle facing the formation of the cabinet

02:11pm The army command announced that retired General Sami Youssef al Ahmadiyah has passed away . Funeral arrangement will take place today at al Ahmadiyah Hall in Sofar , Mount Lebanon.

2:10pm Minister Marouni: Aoun’s demands contradict the spirit of partnership the opposition has been calling for

12:27pm MP Fadi al-Aawar told NBN: The Opposition has facilitated government formation, but the other political camp is trying to hide its problems by accusing others. Unless consensus is reached, the 15-10-5 formula will become invalid.

12:15pm MP Ghassan Mkhaiber told OTV: We are living in a Constitutional vacuum.

11:50 Caretaker PM Fouad Siniora holds a meeting to discuss the issue of the health ID card and ways to activate it.

11:38 A BMW-X5 driven by Lebanese citizen Ghazwan Abdel Fattah Halawani was intercepted and seized by Gunmen in Kfar Hbab.

11:20 Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun told Al Akhbar : “Any government that fails to address our rights will not see light,” adding that “we represent the bulk of Christians.”

11:10 Three Palestinian brothers were killed and nine others were wounded on Tuesday when Israel bombed smuggling tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, medics said.

10:24 Jumblatt has informed Egypt and Saudi Arabia that his exit from March 14 does not mean the end of his alliance with Hariri

10:15 Tourism minister Maroni told “Future News”: Aoun is acting as a front for Hezbollah in obstructing the formation of the government

10:10 Sources close to Karami : Both Hariri and Karmai have become aware and increasingly concerned about the dangers facing the premiership in Lebanon

10:05 “Al Anbaa “: The leaders of the parliament majority are proposing that Jumblatt’s share of 3 ministers in the new cabinet should be included in the share of the President of the Republic

09:49 Ammar al-Musawi told Al Anbaa: Hezbollah does not put pressure on its allies to force them to take positions that do not represent their aspirations are Hariri cannot impose the names of ministers on the parties

09:40 sources of the majority told al Awan : Aoun’s escalation of his demands is making Hariri careful about conducting direct consultation with the concerned parties on government formation

09:33 47 wanted people arrested for committing various criminal acts

09:25 Al Rai: Salloukh said in response to Israeli president Peres: his claim that Hezbollah has 80 thousand rockets is all lies and fabrications and if he really wants peace let him convince his government to implement resolutions 425 and 1701

8:30 MP Mohammed al-Hajjar told VOL: MP Michel Aoun is seeking to play on “sectarian cords” by insisting on getting a ministry for a candidate who had lost the elections and a key ministry from the president’s share.

08:10 Fuels and oil accounted for 30.7 percent of VAT receipts, making them the biggest source VAT revenues in 2008. They rose by 52.8 percent to $405 million in 2008. They were followed by VAT from vehicles

08:01 CNN: President Obama is expected to announce Tuesday morning that he will nominate Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to another four-year term.

08:00 WSJ: A report by a panel of scientific advisers to President Barack Obama on Monday presented a “plausible scenario” in which 60 million to 120 million Americans — or 20% to 40% of the U.S. population — contract H1N1 swine flu this fall and winter, and 30,000 to 90,000 people die of the disease.

7:35 MP Michel Moussa told VOL: Dialogue is the only solution to cabinet formation problems.

06:35 General Aoun: I am ready at any time to meet with Jumblatt, but we should agree that we have to look at many things, including the strengthening of mechanisms of co-existence in the mountain but he does not want that, why should we meet then ?

06:10 Interior minister Baroud: The Roumieh prison is a time bomb and this problem cannot be resolved by the Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Justice but the solution is the responsibility of the whole political system

06:00 An official security source told As Safir “: General Rifi told President Suleiman that all what the internal security forces in the Roumieh prison is doing is postponing the explosion of the time bomb

05:40 a senior U.S. official told An Nahar: President Obama wants to improve relations with Syria, but it would be impossible if Syria and its friends continue to disrupt the democratic institutions in Lebanon

05:30 Hezbollah MP Mohammad Raad: We do not see any local person seriously disrupting the formation of the government and for this reason we are concerned about the delay

05:20 Majority MPs told An Nahar : the statement of the Progressive Socialist Party would have direct implications on ruling out a meeting between Aoun and Jumblatt

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2009/08/syria_pulls_amb.php
Syria pulls ambassador from Iraq in diplomatic tit-for-tat
Published: Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 @ 7:58 PM in Beirut
Baghdad – Syria and Iraq recalled their ambassadors from each other’s countries Tuesday, after Baghdad demanded that Damascus hand over two suspects in last week’s deadly bombings in the Iraqi capital.

Syrian state-run news agency SANA reported that the government was ordering its ambassador home after the Iraqi government summoned its envoy from Syria and demanded that Damascus turn over two Iraqis living in Syria who played “direct roles in the execution of the terror attack,” last Wednesday, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

The Iraqi government also asked that Syria “hand over all those wanted [by the Iraqi judiciary] for committing crimes of murder and destruction against the Iraqi people,” al-Dabbagh’s statement said.

It further demanded that Syria expel “terrorist organizations that use Syria as a headquarters and launch pad to plan terrorist operations against the Iraqi people.”

SANA reported that the Syrian government rejected the statements made by the Iraqi government.

A string of bombings struck Iraq’s capital last week, with two truck bombings ripping through the Iraqi Finance Ministry and Foreign Ministry. At least 100 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in Baghdad’s bloodiest day since U.S. troops handed over security control to Iraqi forces and moved outside of Iraqi cities nearly two months ago.

As Syria and Iraq engaged in a diplomatic tit-for-tat, the Islamic State of Iraq, the umbrella group for al-Qaeda in Iraq, released a statement claiming responsibility for the bombings.

CNN

******

August 2, 2009

Gary,

We are fighting an enemy that does not believe in borders. Islamic terrorist groups take full advantage of the fact that we largely limit our warfare to certain areas. In the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States engages in limited attacks such as Predator strikes against targets in the safehavens of tribal Pakistan, yet our military has not crossed the border.

When Iran took over our embassy in 1979, that should have been a wake-up call for the U.S..

Fast forward thirty years – we are still struggling to identify our enemy. 

Has our nation’s leadership failed us?   

A great portion of Americans could probably name most if not all winners of the “American Idol” television show, but what percentage do you think have even heard of the Muslim Brotherhood?

Due to media and information distortions, the U.S. population believes that the so-called Global War on Terror is a war for oil and that Islam is the “religion of peace.”

This is what we are up against.

Islam can only destroy our civilization if we are not made aware of the threat the religion poses to our freedom and security. That is precisely why the Muslim Brotherhood engages in a cultural invasion rather than a stand-up fight. Our enemies have already said that Islam and its Shariah Law are not compatible with democracy, and as we see in Saudi Arabia, there is no such thing as coexisting with other religions.

The first thing we should have done is identify our enemy. Considering the Islamic roots of the threat, to say that we are at war with “extremism” is patently ridiculous. It is equally ridiculous to say that we are at war with terrorism.  We are in a global struggle, but terrorism is a tactic, not a target.  

Analysts and commentators have come up with many names for the ideology of our enemies: Islamism, Jihadism, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, Islamofascism, and Islamic Supremacism.  To your mind, what is the meaning of each?  And which provides the most accurate depiction and definition of the threat we face?

Engaged,

Chris Carter

_____________ 

August 11, 2009 (3:00pmEST)

Chris,

I apologize for taking so long to respond to your letter of the 2nd.  My schedule sometimes gets hectic over at United Against Islamic Supremacism.  I am interested in your Victory Institute, and your effort to Unite the Blogs demonstrates a desire to generate a unified response to the legitimate grievances of U.S. citizens against terroristic threats to the Sovereignty of the United States.  Thank you for your determined effort to engage.  It is a frustrating thing to become a bridge.

You are right to point out that our enemy does not respect or recognize borders.  Sovereignty is what Shariah Law destroys.  

Bracketing the 30 years since the fall of the Shah in Iran and today is a vital recognition – Contemporary Jihadism is a full fledged field of study.  Examining the manner in which Jihad has shaped the last 30 years has become a cottage industry – thousands of books have crammed the shelves of bookstores since the events of 9/11, exposing the extreme nature of the threat of jihad from various positions.  Thousands more have focused on pieces of the problem, from Muhammad the founder to the historic, diplomatic, geopolitical and perceptual challenges the threat entails.  Managing the constant stream of new books and daily internet updates is a challenge in these times of multiplying chaos.  How many books does the average American read in a year, afterall?  

As to whether the nation’s leaders have failed us – reserve judgment in the interests of objectivity and liberty.  Let us help one another understand the nature of our foe that we might earn victory by building a case of resentment, planked with legitimate grievances.
Make no mistake, Islam need not destroy our American Civilization to earn victory. 

Islam’s nature is to weaken the integrity of manmade law and force the submission to an alternative.  Islam holds the capacity to destroy the foundations and bedrocks of law and order in the United States.  Islam generates fluidity into the concept of U.S. Sovereignty due to its insistent faith that it is interpreting the final words of Abraham’s god via the seal of the Prophets – this faith is the basic root of supremacist thought in Islam.  

The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of our land – it is a man made law.  The supreme law of Islam is Shariah Law.  Shariah Law is based on the ethical lessons of the Koran, the Hadith, the sira, and the ijma.  The definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, good and evil…are at stake in the elemental struggle we have engaged.  U.S. Sovereignty must have champions in this intellectual battle.  For Shariah Law prophecizes doom for all man made laws and borders.  Tactics to achieve the supremacy of Islamic Law (Shariah) are carried out in a variety of ways on multiple levels.  

You are right – our enemies have time and again told us that Islam and Democracy are incompatible.  “We are,” as Ralph Peters recently noted, “in the unique position of denying that our enemies know what they themselves are up to.  They insist, publicly, that their goal is our destruction (or, in their mildest moods, our conversion) in their god’s name.  We contort ourselves to insist that their religious rhetoric is all a sham, that they are merely cynics exploiting the superstitions of the masses.”  Ralph Peters’ article “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars” in The Journal of International Security Affairs demonstrates the difficulty America’s intellectual community is having in defining the enemy.  It is one of the best articles of 2009.  

Walid Phares, one of the foremost experts in contemporary jihadist studies, in his book The Confrontation, notes that we are still struggling to define “jihad” in the West.  This at the end of a trilogy which begins with a book entitled Future Jihad.  Our U.S. Government, under Bush’s last term began moving toward banning the word “jihad” in its official documents and discussions.  Obama’s administration is institutionalizing this evasion.  So, your concerns on defining the problem are well met.  Therefore, let us, as free men, with no constraints, retain our moral prejudices, dedicated to the sovereignty of our nation, our souls, and our liberties as we define the threat at hand.   The experts, policy makers, diplomats, and representatives of Western Civilization are conflicted and fracted over their understanding of the threat.  Without a unified definition of the threat, the moral response and grassroots effort to generate awareness are falling to the public without unity.  It is our responsibility, as concerned citizens, to meet this threat without evasion. 
As to your final questions – all are relevant terms, each with its slant on the threat. 
 

Islamism is a term which references Political Islam.  The goal of Political Islam is to establish an Islamic State beholdened to the dictate of Shariah Law.  Typically, demography determines the type of Islamist activity on display in a given area.  Some Political Islamists advocate the use of democracy and diplomacy as means to an end, while others reject the manmade roots of the Western-styled political process and demand its overthrow for the sake of the global caliphate.  Bill Warner’s Center for the Study of Political Islam is fast making a science of the study of Islamism.  
 

Jihadism is the militant activity of dutifully terrorizing infidels and, on behalf of Allah’s Will, laying siege the sovereignty of individual rights.  Contemporary Jihadism has given birth to the suicide bomber martyr factories.  Contemporary Jihadism relies on indirect funding by donorsthrough a network of brokers called Hawaladars, who literally purify money for the mosque and the madrassa.  When considering Al Qaeda, jihad is its “base” activity.  When considering Hezbollah and Hamas and Fatah, jihad is framed in resistance rhetoric while legitimizing the movements is based on establishing Islamist political parties in parallel to the militant branch.  Jihadists make up the bulk of terrorism’s end players throughout the world, since their fingers are on triggers or detonators when they shout “Allahu Akbar” and become the sword of Allah.   Some modern Western thinkers have coined the phrase “bin Ladenism” to describe the holy warriors of this stripe.
 

Radical Islam is an understanding of the threat which presupposes the validity and existence of “moderate Islam”.  As the term suggests, Radical Muslims teach a “perverted” or “extremely radical” version of Islam, which distorts the true nature of Islam.  However, an analysis of the Islamic Trilogy (the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sira) renders all arguments for the existence of moderate Islam to the position of “theory”.  Brigitte Gabriel’s books and Act for America is built around defeating the threat of Radical Islam.

Islamic Fundamentalism is the puritan form of Islamic Thought.  When the term “literalist” or the term “revivalist” is used in reports, describing the enemy, Islamic Fundamentalism is the breed being discussed.  There are many schools of thought within the purist interpretations of Islamic Fundamentalism.  Islamic Fundamentalism presupposes a “golden age” narrative of Islamic conquest and expansion made up of the days of Muhammad and the first four Caliphs of Islam.  Sectarianism within Islam is found at the fundamentalist level.  To an Islamic Fundamentalist, the golden age of the ideal society (Muhammad’s Umma) must be revived and emulated in order to restore the former power and glory of Islam and achieve victory over the corruptions that have destroyed Muslim dominance.

IslamoFascism is a Western term which groups all of the above concepts into an organized movement bent on regional and world domination.  In 2005, President Bush described the terrorist threat to America as “Islamofascist”.  This reading of the threat by the “neoconservative” White House caused a backlash in the Muslim World.  The phrase was widely condemned by Muslim groups like MPAC, MSA and CAIR, who immediately embarked on a public relations campaign on American airwaves.  The leadership of the Muslim American communities developed a set of bumper-sticker slogan talking points and marched on CNN and FOX and NBC and ABC to make their case for why “Islam is a religion of Peace”.  Day after day, news broadcast after news broadcast featured the mantra, and within a year the indoctrination method became gospel to the liberal leaning media.  Soon phrases like “Islam is not a monolith” were added to the soundbite war of perception in the Western main stream media.  When Geert Wilders, a publicly elected official in Europe remained outspoken about the “fascist” nature of the Koran, the international Muslim community went on the offensive, lobbying to reverse the tables and silence Wilders. 

In short, the term IslamoFascism denotes an enemy which holds an ethical worldview based on – disregarding borders and manmade law in a transnational expansion mentality with an economic outlook based on the mercantile rules of Muhammad’s age – an age of piracy, slavery, monopoly, adventurous barbarism and a jihadist driven Shariah Law.

Islamism, Jihadism, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, and IslamoFascism each hold a particular definition and connotation.  More or less, they are approaches to understanding the scope and depth of the threat the West faces.  The most accurate depiction of the threat we face is found in Islamic Fundamentalism and Islamism.  State Fundamentalists like the Saudi Wahhabist and the Iranian Khomeinists export their fundamentalist interpretations of the Islamic Trilogy and the ijma consensus into the elite educational system of Muslim thought, which then trickles down into the Madrassa instruction, Mosque prayers, and political players.  This methodology has yielded what is known as “strategic depth”. 

Iran’s strategic depth is felt in the agitations of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army in Iraq, and the support streams for the Palestinians from Damascus through Gaza.  Saudi Arabia’s strategic depth is felt in the Pakistani Taliban Frankensteins, the Yemeni constructs; even the Northern African belt is held by the influence.  The ISI has followed a similar forma through the Deoband Wahhab and seek strategic depth throughout all surrounding states of the AfPak region.   

At present, with three years of intense independent research on the topics of Islam, Jihad, the terror rings of the Levant, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, Europe and the Americas, what has become abundantly clear to me is that the enemy we face is Islamic Supremacism.  The chief weapon of Islamic Supremacism is not jihadist terror – the chief weapon is Shariah Law.  It is evident that Islam, made up of literally dozens of sects, hundreds of tribal and nationalist camps, and thousands of local cultural interpretations of world and regional events, is not a monolith.  However, it is also clear that Islam is a Supremacist Faith, drawn from the rockhard belief in the fundamental “new knowledge” of the Koran and its Prophet as the only valid and logical source of Authority.

Islamic Supremacism is an umbrella term.  The Jihadists, Islamists, Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Radicals all fall under this umbrella.  It is chiefly a term which designates the human rights aspect of the struggle against the threat.  In the Iraq, Afghan, and Pakistani Constitutions, Shariah Law is the source of legislation.  That is to say, right and wrong, legal and illegal, good and evil, the values and virtues of the societies at play in those nation states are determined by Shariah Law.  Back in 2000, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was considered by the OIC nation states of the Muslim World to be incomplete – the 57 states put forward the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights which appended Shariah Law as the arbiter of Human Rights in the Muslim World. 

Shariah Law is attacking the Sovereignty of each individual country, the world over, in its push to reserve the final word and judgment on human rights, internationally. 

The reverberations of the seemingly diplomatic attack were recently felt in London, when the Archbishop of Canterbury went to bat for the Muslims in London, saying that Shariah Law should be allowed in Muslim Communities, a complete trump of British Sovereignty by a Clerical Fascism, described well by Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan.  How long will it be before a Catholic, Anglican, Black Liberation Theologist or liberal elite leader in the United States decides to make the rights of Muslims to their own form of Law in complete subversion of the US Constitution into an ACLU bonanza?  

Islamic Supremacism is actually a redundant term.  Islam means submission; only those who are in a position of supremacy can force or coerce submission.  On the economic front, Shariah Compliant Finance is on the rise and has been steadily advancing its regulatory mechanisms and governance methodology by consulting with groups like Ernst & Young or McKinsey & Company for the past decade – the entire MENASA region is ripe for Shariah Compliant Finance takeover.  The threat is not just political or military as the above terms and categories suggest – Islamic Supremacism is a complete socio-economic attack on the national and individual sovereignty of the kuffar (blaspheming infidels).  The chief weapon in that battle is Shariah Law.  The first victim in the offensive will be limits of law, the second victim will be national borders.  Why?  Because they are man-made limits and do not submit to the laws of Allah.  Interestingly, at the end of the day – Americans are fighting for their individual rights and liberties, while Islamic Supremacists are fighting for Allah’s Rights and the Umma’s collective liberties framed in the crucible of jihad.  

Definitions matter.  Defining the enemy is a primary task that we cannot take lightly.  It is certain that the American people are not prepared to mount an ideological offensive against the threat since it cannot even identify it through the untouchable veil of Islam.  And though time is ticking against us in this ever changing battle of ideas, we must walk with the faith that we have enough time left to mount an intellectual revolt against the threat of Islamic Supremacism.   The revolt is only beginning.  We, the intellectual front runners and bridges must frame the battle in a way that guarantees victory.  We must tackle the definition of “jihad” and push forward to “see” the global map of terrorism, that we, a more clairvoyant generation, might defeat the supremacist dreams of our offenders.  

Sovereignty is based on – the supreme source of law – authority.  The chief enemy of the U.S. Constitution in this regard is Allah.  Luckily, our Framers saw fit to include an Establishment Clause as a check on the supremacist aims of ideological movements such as Islamic Supremacism.  

Actively Engaged,
Gary H. Johnson, Jr.

-Gary H. Johnson, Jr. 8/13/09, 10:20pmEST)

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com

Clinton hosts video conference with State Iran hands worldwide
Mon, 08/03/2009 – 1:36pm
This morning, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a secure video conference with 20 State Department officials worldwide, at about a half dozen locations.

Much of the substance of the 45-minute video conference is classified, but broad strokes were provided to Foreign Policy. Though the locations of the State Department officials participating in the call from abroad weren’t disclosed, the United States has in recent years opened Iran “watching” stations at U.S. embassies in Dubai, Azerbaijan, Berlin, Turkey, and London, among key foreign locations with large Iranian expatriate populations and traffic.

Participating in the call from Washington, beyond Clinton as host, was acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman. (The State Department’s point person on the international talks regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns, was traveling and did not participate.) Also thought to participate from Washington was Jillian Burns, the former head of the Iran-watching post at the U.S. Embassy in Dubai, who is now an Iran advisor in the State Department Office of Policy Planning, and Todd Schwartz, the director of the State Department’s Iran office, and other members of that office.

(Clinton’s former special advisor on the Gulf and Southwest Asia, Dennis Ross, who moved last month to the National Security Council to assume a job as the senior director for the central region, is taking four of his State Department staff with him to the NSC: Iran expert Ray Takeyh, assistant Ben Fishman, diplomat David Bame, and translator turned longtime Ross counselor Gamal Helal, officials said, while four former Ross aides will be absorbed elsewhere in the Department.)

Though Clinton has communicated with all of them before, getting everyone at State involved in the Iran effort together is something Clinton has wanted to do for a long time, an official said.

First, she thanked them for being the eyes and ears of the U.S. government on Iran, especially in the extraordinary weeks and months since the election.

The folks abroad gave her their take on the current situation. The consensus was that the administration’s calibrated remarks on the election and its aftermath have been just the right tone, and right balance.

One participant called the election a “tectonic” shift in Iran. The consensus was also that the election and its aftermath have basically led Iran to focus on its internal politics rather than any of its bilateral or multilateral relationships, including with the United States.

Asked about Iran policy at a press appearance with the Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh Monday, Clinton said, “We’ve made it very clear that we wish to engage with the Iranians in accordance with President Obama’s policy to discuss a broad range of issues.  That would be a bilateral channel, which we have communicated to the Iranians.  And we continue to engage in multilateral channels … ” including an invitation to participate conveyed by the European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana that Clinton said Iran has not yet responded to.

“I held a videoconference this morning with a number of our diplomats around the world who have expertise with respect to Iran,” Clinton added.  “And we discussed what they saw happening, what they thought would be the responses coming from the Iranian Government, what was going on inside Iran.  So we’re not prepared to talk about any specific steps, but I have said repeatedly that in the absence of some positive response from the Iranian Government, the international community will consult about next steps, and certainly next steps can include certain sanctions.” 

The remarks add to numerous recent signs that the Obama administration thinks prospects for Iran responding to its engagement offer in the near term have dimmed if not been entirely extinguished. Several U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Israel last week, have recently telegraphed the administration’s envisaged timeline, which would give Iran roughly until the United Nations General Assembly in mid-September to respond positively to the offer to engage in multilateral or bilateral talks on its nuclear program, or be subjected to an effort to impose more severe sanctions, including a possible ban on Iran’s import of refined petroleum products.

However, U.S. officials have indicated that they do not think Russia is likely to support tougher sanctions until after December (when the U.S. and Russia are supposed to sign a new strategic arms reductions treaty). Some outside administration Iran hands have indicated they are skeptical Russia will be helpful even then, and also that China, concerned about energy costs, can be persuaded to support a tougher sanctions route that targets Iran’s energy sector. Legislation being debated in Congress proposes U.S. sanctions on international energy companies that would violate such a ban from selling petroleum to the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve. But some Iran experts are concerned that unilateral American sanctions could end up splitting up the international coalition, rather than bolstering the multilateral pressure on Iran. Nonetheless, the administration has recently reportedly expressed support for the more aggressive sanctions legislation, perhaps as a way to turn up the heat and try to prompt Iran to respond to the engagement offer, as well as to avert Israel from acting unilaterally against Iran.

It’s not clear the administration’s hopes for engagement have totally faded. In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, columnist Roger Cohen noted in a detailed article about U.S. Iran policy that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had allegedly responded in writing to a letter from U.S. President Barack Obama, the existence of which was first reported by the Washington Times. Cohen described the alleged response to Obama as being viewed as somewhat disappointing.

Foreign Policy has previously been told that Obama had received a letter from the Supreme Leader’s office, and that it came into the United States government through unspecified but proper channels in May or early June before Iran’s June 12 elections. The letter’s translation from Farsi to English was said to have been arranged by the State Department. It was described as being not a definitive “yes” or “no” to the engagement offer. It was so closely held that no Iran hands contacted at the department acknowledged being aware of it. The Swiss embassy declined to comment about whether the Swiss foreign ministry had been the channel for any such letter.

Several White House officials, contacted by Foreign Policy last month about the alleged letter from Khamenei to Obama, said, “We do not comment on private correspondence,” rather than confirming or denying its existence.

-Laura Rozen

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/world/middleeast/03nuke.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=print
August 3, 2009
U.S. Weighs Iran Sanctions if Talks Are Rejected
By DAVID E. SANGER
The Obama administration is talking with allies and Congress about the possibility of imposing an extreme economic sanction against Iran if it fails to respond to President Obama’s offer to negotiate on its nuclear program: cutting off the country’s imports of gasoline and other refined oil products.

The option of acting against companies around the world that supply Iran with 40 percent of its gasoline has been broached with European allies and Israel, officials from those countries said. Legislation that would give Mr. Obama that authority already has 71 sponsors in the Senate and similar legislation is expected to sail through the House.

In a visit to Israel last week, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, mentioned the prospect to Israeli officials, they said.

The White House refused Sunday to confirm or deny the contents of Mr. Jones’s discussions. But other administration officials said that they believed his goal was to reinforce Mr. Obama’s argument that the Israeli government should stop dropping hints about conducting a military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities if no progress is made this year, and to give the administration time to impose what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls “crippling sanctions” that might force Iran to negotiate.

The Bush administration considered, and rejected, trying to engineer a cutoff of gasoline to Iran, which produces oil but does not have enough refining capacity to meet its own needs for gasoline.

But enforcing what would amount to a gasoline embargo has long been considered risky and extremely difficult; it would require the participation of Russia and China, among others that profit from trade with Iran. Iran has threatened to respond by cutting off oil exports and closing shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, at a moment that the world economy is highly vulnerable.

Mr. Obama has said nothing in public about the possibility since a presidential debate last October with Senator John McCain of Arizona. “If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need, and the refined petroleum products, that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis,” Mr. Obama said at the time. “That starts putting the squeeze on them.”

Now, the White House will not discuss the issue at all. Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser, said the administration would not comment on any of its private discussions with allies. But European diplomats confirm that in recent weeks they have held private talks with administration officials about whether to move toward such a sanction if Iran ignores Mr. Obama’s deadline to begin talks by the opening of the United Nations session in mid-September.

Assessing how effective such a cutoff might be — even if Russia, China and most of Europe went along — has been complicated by the political turmoil inside Iran.

Some analysts have argued that the action could further destabilize a weakened regime; others say it could be exploited by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to change the subject from the still-challenged presidential election to Iran’s confrontation with the West.

“Draconian sanctions did not make sense in 2005 and 2006,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who led the Bush administration’s Iran strategy as under secretary of state for policy. “But given the new weakness and vulnerability of the Ahmadinejad government, much tougher sanctions make sense now, with one caveat,” he said in an interview. Congress, he said, must give Mr. Obama complete flexibility to threaten, impose or waive the sanctions, if he has any hope of holding together a coalition of countries.

Mr. Burns and other Iran experts testified last week at a hearing held by the Senate Banking Committee, whose chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, declared that “our job is to arm the president with a comprehensive set of tough sanctions designed to ratchet up pressure on the Iranian regime.”

Some of the co-sponsors say the Senate bill, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, is a more prudent way to deal with Iran’s nuclear program than authorizing the president to use military means if necessary, as the Senate did for President George W. Bush when he was confronting Saddam Hussein.

There is similar legislation in the House, and Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat active in intelligence and national security issues, said over the weekend that “most people think that this is how you really hurt Iran.” She predicted the bill would “breeze through” both houses of Congress.

But easy passage would not make the sanctions any easier to carry out. As the Bush administration discovered as it pushed through three mild sanctions resolutions at the United Nations, Iran has enormous leverage over companies and countries dependent on its oil production. As Mr. Burns warned, “If Americans are the only ones sanctioning, those sanctions will not succeed.”

One of the Iran experts who testified last week, Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, cautioned that Iran was so porous it could circumvent an oil cutoff, and that the potential for confrontation would be high. “The Iranians are not terribly good at capitulation,” Ms. Maloney said. “This is a regime that tends to believe the best defense is a good offense.”

The legislation would impose sanctions on any company that sold or delivered gasoline to Iran, cutting it off from selling to the United States government and seeking to freeze its financing or shipping insurance. But many experts fear that true enforcement would require patrols off the Iranian coast, and that could lead to confrontations with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The White House has been extraordinarily tight-lipped about its Iran strategy, and has not publicly discussed the legislation. But already it has become part of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering with Israel. Israeli officials have argued in recent weeks that the American unwillingness to confront North Korea more forcefully as it develops a nuclear program was evidence that the United States might be willing to tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

Mr. Obama’s aides, in return, worry that the Israelis are trying to force action too soon by shortening their estimate of how long it would take Iran to manufacture a weapon. In fact, no one knows how quickly it might be able to do so, but it has already solved many of the technological problems.

“The question we have to face,” one American diplomat said, “is whether any sanction at this point can really deter them, given how close they are now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02Iran-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
August 2, 2009
The Making of an Iran Policy
By ROGER COHEN
The silent protest began in Imam Khomeini Square in front of the forbidding Ministry of Telecommunications, which was busy cutting off cellphones but powerless to stop the murmured rage coursing through Tehran. Six days had passed since Iran’s disputed June 12 election, but the fury that brought three million people onto the streets the previous Monday showed no sign of abating. “Silence will win against bullets,” a woman beside me whispered. Her name was Zahra. She wore a green headband — the color adopted by the campaign of the defeated reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi — and she held a banner saying, “This land is my land.” The words captured the popular conviction that not only had President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stolen votes, but he also had made off with Iran’s dignity. Slowly the vast crowd began to move north. No chant issued from the throng, only distilled indignation. A young man asked me where I was from. When I told him New York, he shot back: “Give our regards to freedom. It’s coming right here!”

In those giddy postelectoral days, anything seemed possible, even the arrival of liberty, or at least more of it, in the 30-year-old Islamic Republic. Through the swirl of events — the huge crowds, the beatings and the sirens, the tear gas and black smoke — the core issues were simple. Iranians felt cheated. They wanted their votes to count. They knew that no genuine victor with two-thirds of the vote need resort to brutality or fear a recount. Sometimes they asked me if the United Nations would help them; often they asked if America would. It was their way of saying, with fierce emotion, that the morality of the Iranian story, its right and wrong, was plain.

But it was precisely emotion, and notions of good and evil, that the Obama administration had spent the previous months trying to drain from the charged U.S.-Iranian relationship. Sobriety dominated the ideas of the president’s Iran team, as I’d learned before I left in conversations with senior officials at the State Department and the National Security Council. The Bush administration’s ideologically driven axis-of-evil approach to Iran had failed. Tehran had prospered by expanding its regional influence and was accelerating its nuclear program. The Obama administration believed it was time to seek normalization through a new, cooler look at a nation critical to U.S. strategic interests — from advancing Israeli-Arab peace negotiations to a successful withdrawal from Iraq.

“Who they select as leader in Iran is their prerogative, and there’s nothing we can do to control that,” Ray Takeyh, an Iranian-born adviser to Dennis Ross, the veteran Mideast negotiator who has been working on Iran for the Obama administration, told me before the election. “We’re trying to deal with Iran as an entity, a state, rather than privileging one faction or another. We want to inject a degree of rationality into this relationship, reduce it to two nations with some differences and some common interests — get beyond the incendiary rhetoric.” Takeyh’s words reminded me of Ross, who in his book “Statecraft” defined the term’s first principles as, “Have clear objectives, tailor them to fit reality.”

But now, as the crowd streaming before me demonstrated, Iran’s reality had changed. In his inaugural address, President Obama said: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Seldom had a fist been clenched more unequivocally, dissent silenced more harshly or deceit practiced with more brazenness than in Iran after June 12.

Still, Obama’s Iran team — Ross; the courtly under secretary of state William Burns; the dapper deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon; the studious senior N.S.C. official Puneet Talwar (the only one, other than Takeyh, who has been to Iran); the hard-charging organization man Denis McDonough, who controls strategic communication at the White House — faced a difficult choice between sticking with strategic outreach to the regime and questioning its legitimacy in the name of human rights. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose instincts on Iran have always been more hawkish than the president’s, “was pushing for a harder line sooner after the June 12 vote,” a Mideast expert close to her told me last month. She was supported by her friend Joe Biden, the vice president. They did not prevail. The tone was cautious; although Obama’s denunciations of the clampdown grew stronger as it worsened, the extended hand, which had proved more unsettling to Iran than all the Bush administration bluster, was not withdrawn.

When I returned from Iran, I went to see one of these senior officials to ask what it had been like making that call. Painful, was the response. Every day, in the election’s aftermath, the team met and conference-called. “It is difficult to weigh all the different considerations,” this official told me. “But given the profoundly serious consequences of an Iranian regime that acquires a nuclear-weapons capability, the judgment in the end was that it was important to follow through on the offer of direct engagement.” He noted that this offer had been “signaled clearly in the course of the campaign” by Obama, and developed since. In other words, this goes deep with the president. He’s driving Iran policy. The Iran gambit lies close to the core of his refashioned global strategy, America’s “new era of engagement.”

Just how far Obama is ready to go in engagement’s name has become clearer in Iran. At the time of that Thursday demonstration, almost a week after the election, the toughest thing he had found to say about the turmoil was that the suppression of peaceful dissent “is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people.” He had also equated Ahmadinejad with Moussavi, from the U.S. national-security standpoint, because both support the nuclear program, even as people died for the greater openness that Moussavi espoused.

A sobered America is back in the realpolitik game. A favored phrase in the Iran team goes, “It is what it is.” Now the question is whether such an approach can yield results. Can Ross honor his own precept to match objectives with “available means”? To the nuclear clock has been added a democracy clock, complicating every diplomatic equation. An Iran of mullahs and nukes has morphed, for many Americans, into the Iran of beautiful, young Neda Agha-Soltan, cut down with a single shot while leaving a June 20 demonstration, a murder caught on video that went viral. Whatever Obama’s realism — and it’s as potent as his instinct for the middle ground — a president on whom so much youthful idealism has been projected can scarcely ignore the Neda effect.

The Obama administration’s strong conviction, as several officials told me, is that Ahmadinejad’s election was fraudulent. But in the American interest, it is ready to overlook that and to talk. Restored relations with the Soviet Union came in 1933 at the time of the Great Terror, and with China in 1972 in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But of course the bloodshed then — of an altogether different dimension — was not being YouTubed around the globe.

One of the first people I saw in Iran was Saeed Leylaz, an economist close to Moussavi. (Like many of Iran’s reformist intellectuals, Leylaz is now in jail.) He told me Obama’s outreach — his recognition of the Islamic Republic and pledge of “mutual respect” — had affected the campaign, unsettling hard-liners. “Radicalism creates radicalism,” Leylaz said. He was referring to the way President Bush’s talk of Iran as evil opened the way for Ahmadinejad to build a global brand of sorts through lambasting U.S. arrogance.

By contrast, a black American president of partly Muslim descent reaching out to the Islamic world — and demonstrating, by his very election, the possibility of change — had placed the Iranian regime on the defensive. One conservative Iranian official put it this way to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “If Iran can’t make nice with a U.S. president named Barack Hussein Obama who’s preaching mutual respect and sending us greetings, it’s pretty clear the problem lies in Tehran, not Washington.”

Tom Donilon, the deputy national-security adviser, told me in Washington: “Engagement was pressure. There’s no doubt about it.”

The Obama administration — as Donilon, Takeyh and others made clear to me — had been deliberately agnostic on the election outcome and had tried to finesse electoral uncertainty by directing its diplomatic overture chiefly at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In early May, Obama sent Khamenei a secret personal letter, as The Washington Times reported. The letter proposed a framework for talks on the nuclear issue (which Khamenei is believed to control) and regional security. I was reliably informed by more than one knowledgeable American that Khamenei had answered in writing, but the reply was disappointing. Still, it was a response — and Khamenei had already replied in March to a conciliatory message sent by Obama on Nowruz, the Persian new year, by saying, “Should you change, our behavior will change, too.” The administration was geared to bring its engagement policy to fruition after the June 12 election.

The two things it had not planned for, however, were a situation of near-insurrection and Khamenei’s shift out of the arbiter’s lofty cover into explicit alignment with Ahmadinejad. Yet here, all of a sudden, was a situation where Obama’s outreach may have helped throw the Islamic Republic into crisis, leaving it more divided than at any time since immediately after the revolution in 1979. So it’s perhaps no wonder that Obama responded cautiously, clearly trying, with difficulty, to adapt a set strategy to an explosive situation, not wanting to cut the slender thread established to Khamenei but increasingly outraged by what he saw.

Some protesters I met on the streets of Tehran pointedly asked me, “Where’s Obama?” Trying to rethink things, it seems. Khamenei’s own shift was cemented in his ferocious sermon a week after the election, when he embraced Ahmadinejad and tried to blame the whole bloody fiasco on “evil” Western agents. This stance undermined the thinking Ross and others had put forward in their thorough pre-election review of Iran policy. “The theory was always that you deal with the supreme leader because Ahmadinejad is not the ultimate decision maker,” said a senior official who has been instrumental in formulating Iran policy. “But then he takes Ahmadinejad’s side. You still have to make the effort, the ground has to be covered, but it’s hard to be very optimistic.”

How long Iran’s disarray will persist is unclear — certainly weeks, probably months, perhaps longer. It is possible that Khamenei, come the fall, may see in outreach to the United States a means to regain support in a country where whoever delivers normalization with Washington will be a popular hero. It is possible that Ahmadinejad will bring moderates into his government, to be formed in August, with a similar conciliatory aim. One key indicator will be whether he keeps Saeed Jalili, described to me as a chief architect of the clampdown, as his nuclear negotiator. If he does, talks are probably a waste of time. It is even a remote possibility that Ahmadinejad will be removed in the name of reconciliation. But one thing is certain: Iran’s upheaval has made Obama’s already ambitious goal of engagement far more arduous, and it reinforced the darkest views of Iran’s true nuclear ambitions, even as it chews up limited time.

There was always an orphaned feel to the Office of the Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia. It was located just past the main entrance to the State Department in a string of tawdry rooms, a long way from the gilded mirrors and chandeliers up on the seventh floor, where top officials congregate. For four months starting in late February, Dennis Ross made this dun-colored warren his home. Then, in late June, he forsook one opaque title for another: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region.

The “central region,” a U.S. diplomatic neologism, includes the central locus of American concerns for war and peace: the danger lands between Israel and Pakistan. In his new post, Ross is moving from State to the National Security Council, from Hillary Clinton’s universe to Obama’s. For now he’s shuttling between the two. That’s a familiar form of motion for a go-between who devoted years to knocking Israeli and Palestinian heads together in a vain quest for peace. As he goes, Ross, who is 60, nurses a late-life obsession that never surfaced — indeed, was artfully hidden — in the descriptions of his two jobs: Iran. But beneath the White House and Foggy Bottom circumlocutions, Iran is Ross’s new thing.

Ross, like almost every serving U.S. diplomat, has never set foot in Iran. Thirty years of severed relations since the 1979 Iranian revolution have put any firsthand experience at a premium. But Ross is skilled at circumventing obstacles. With his mild, blue-eyed gaze, he is a survivor. In fact he’s one of the ultimate Washington survivors, having glided from Republican to Democratic administrations for more than a quarter-century. As it became clear in recent years that Iran, still marginal during the Camp David negotiations in 2000, had moved toward the hub of Middle Eastern matters, Ross moved with it. He has his finger to the wind. He also has a deep intellectual commitment to peacemaking and Israeli security, issues on which an Iran with a fast-growing nuclear program now impinges with centrifugal intensity.

“Iran is sucking up the oxygen, it’s everywhere in town, to the point that even Arab-Israeli issues seem somehow derivative,” Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat who worked for many years alongside Ross, told me. “And Dennis saw the handwriting on the wall.”

Part of that handwriting was that nonengagement had failed. Iran, for nigh on two generations of U.S. diplomats, has been the great black hole. “Diplomacy is conducted face to face between human beings, but I worked for three years, day in, day out, on Iran and never got to meet an Iranian diplomat,” Nicholas Burns, who was under secretary of state from 2005 to 2008 (and is no relation to his successor as under secretary, William Burns), told me. “The policy did not work.”

Over eight Bush years, Iran became stronger. American intervention had rid it of its Taliban enemy to the east and the hated Saddam Hussein to the west. Iran installed 7,200 centrifuges, produced more than a ton of low-enriched uranium and made a decisive step toward the threshold nuclear status that could prompt an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations. The hawks of the Bush administration threatened, but their aims, in Ross’s phrase, were not matched to means. Already at war in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had no stomach for a third front in the Muslim world — a calculus not lost on Iranian leaders.

I went to see the Ross team, still in the State Department warren, on my return from Tehran. Ross talks in an even patter that bears a laid-back trace of his native California. He has a penchant for intricate phrases like: If they’re not responding, nonresponse would become a response. An engaging sincerity and a smile offset this highfalutin streak. His message to me in March was: we have a ticking clock to armed conflict; our former policy has failed; so let’s see if we can’t identify a set of their objectives not completely incompatible with ours. Now he wanted to hear all about the tumult I had witnessed. His response was measured: the president has laid out a path, we have to be judicious, not make a leap in one direction or another, and so put the onus on Iran. (Ross declined my request for an on-the-record interview.)

Balance is something this meticulous diplomat prizes. But a recurrent issue with Ross, who embraced the Jewish faith after being raised in a nonreligious home by a Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather, has been whether he is too close to the American Jewish community and Israel to be an honest broker with Iran or Arabs. Miller, after years of working with Ross, concluded in a book that he “had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point rather than that of the Palestinians.” Another former senior State Department official, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his relationship with the administration, told me, “Ross’s bad habit is preconsultation with the Israelis.” Ross earned $421,775 from speeches last year, of which more than half came from Israeli and Jewish groups, according to a financial-disclosure statement.

But Ross has argued in his books that his passion for peace guides him in an evenhanded attempt to pursue every possible diplomatic avenue. “He’s the most intellectually flexible, thoughtful and pragmatic person I have met,” Takeyh told me. “I’ve never had a conversation with him where he says we shouldn’t consider something because it would cross some Israeli red line. That’s just not where we are. The idea that he’s just looking for engagement with Iran to tick some box before moving to harsh measures is just wrong and fraudulent.”

Israel, which sees an existential threat in a nuclear Iran, has made clear that its patience is limited. The Ross team does not think Israelis are bluffing. They believe Israel views Iran in life-and-death terms. Israeli officials have argued that they don’t believe Iran would ever be crazy enough to nuke them but do believe the change in the balance of power with a nuclear or near-nuclear Iran could be so decisive that Jews would begin to leave Israel.

So Ross’s old and new obsessions — Israel and Iran — have merged in a perilous countdown. As he moves to the N.S.C. to work alongside his old friend Tom Donilon, he faces a fundamental question: can this baggage-encumbered veteran who wrote an 800-page tome on Israel-Palestine called “The Missing Peace” overcome ingrained habits and sympathies to uncover what’s been missing? Obama is trying to reinvent Middle East thinking. He’s questioning America’s uncritical stance toward Israel, drawing Syria in and pursuing the Iran gambit against great odds. Conventional thinking will not deliver what the president seeks.

The odyssey that has now led Ross to the N.S.C. has been bizarre. His original appointment at State was a fiasco. Weeks before the inauguration, an internal memo from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was working, was leaked. It said Ross “has accepted an invitation to join the Obama administration as ambassador at large and senior adviser to Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton. In that seventh-floor job, designed especially for him, Ambassador Ross will be the secretary’s top adviser on a range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process to Iran.”

Clinton was displeased. The no-drama Obama team felt jostled. But Obama owed Ross one. He was influential during the campaign in bringing around the American Jewish community.

For a month after the inauguration, Ross hovered in limbo. The eventual fudge was the Iran dossier at State, disguised in a broader job description, and communicated in a stealth nocturnal announcement. But William Burns, the former ambassador to Moscow, whom Obama had met and liked in Russia on his first overseas trip as a senator, had already taken on Iran as under secretary of state.

The situation was uncomfortable. When I asked at the White House in April if Ross was the point man on Iran, I met with the retort that the address for Iran at the State Department was clear: Bill Burns. When Burns — who worked under Ross on Middle East issues during James Baker’s tenure as secretary of state and now found himself senior to him — went to London in April to brief allies on the new U.S.-Iran policy, he did not take Ross with him. Instead, he traveled with Talwar, the National Security Council official working on Iran. One Iranian-American sometimes consulted by the administration told me he’d had calls from the White House, asking, “Will the Iranians be prepared to meet with Ross?”

That was a reasonable question given Ross’s well-known ties with the American Jewish community and the sometimes hawkish views on Iran — including endorsing a report that called for Obama to “begin augmenting the military lever right away” — that he expressed before his appointment. (Ross also argued at other times for unconditional engagement backed by the threat of draconian sanctions.) When I was in Iran in February, a conservative newspaper editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, told me, “If you want to signal a hard line and no change toward Iran, nobody does that better for you than Ross.”

At State, there were also issues. Ross, who assembled an eight-member crew in his first-floor office, was far from Clinton’s inner circle up on the seventh floor. She made it clear from the outset she wanted a fresh Mideast team. “He was not a happy camper,” Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel, told me, referring to Ross.

But tensions were contained within the no-drama collegiality that is Obama’s diktat. Clinton has worked hard to bury her own Iran differences with the president, to avoid getting Powellized and to be what Indyk calls “the good, disciplined lieutenant.” While calling Iran’s postelection actions “deplorable and unacceptable” in a foreign-policy speech on July 15, Clinton said: “We remain ready to engage with Iran, but the time for action is now. The offer will not remain open indefinitely.”

Her Iran role, however, is clearly ancillary. Policy is being driven from the White House. McDonough told me the president asks about Iran “on a very regular basis and is very personally involved in this policy.” Now Obama will have Ross close by. The clincher to the move came when Obama’s June visit to Saudi Arabia proved disappointing. He got neither the Saudi help on Israel-Palestine nor the Saudi acceptance of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay that he had hoped for. The conclusion: more heft and Middle East experience, of the Ross variety, was needed at the N.S.C. Obama called Clinton personally to tell her Ross was moving.

The transfer was a neat solution. It took Ross out of the front line in any eventual bilateral talks with Iran — a role that Ross had hoped to play but that the White House never saw him in. It got him out of Clinton and Burns’s immediate orbit, where his role was uneasy. Sure, the move marooned some new recruits in the first-floor State Department warren, irritated some National Security Council staff members who got a superior they didn’t feel they needed and worried the Mideast envoy, George Mitchell. But whoever said government, even Obama government, was not messy?

In Tehran, just before the election, I sat down with Nasser Hadian, who once taught at Columbia and is now at Tehran University. He’s an influential thinker on foreign affairs who got to know Ross while he was in the United States. Hadian told me that Iran has taken Obama’s outreach seriously. Hadian has been part of a group of foreign-policy experts, convened by Mahmoud Vaezi at the Center for Strategic Research in Tehran, who have been meeting every two weeks to review how to respond to the U.S. offer. Vaezi prepares reports that are submitted to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformist former president who has been bitterly critical of the June 12 vote, and to Khamenei himself.

The discussions, I was told, have been detailed, including a review of who might lead any eventual bilateral negotiations from the Iranian side. One name that has been proposed is Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister who is a top adviser to Khamenei. In this light, the fact that Velayati praised Obama after the election for remaining quiet about it is interesting. Velayati also said, “America accepts a nuclear Iran, but Britain and France cannot stand a nuclear Iran.” This is a new language, however wide of the truth. The bizarre official lambasting of Britain — and demonizing of the BBC rather than the Voice of America — can be seen as the Iranian authorities trying to keep their U.S. options open.

“My argument in all the meetings has been: You have to go for full normalization and comprehensive engagement on all the issues,” Hadian told me. “Not a U.S. consulate in Tehran, or the nuclear issue in isolation; that won’t work. And because I know we cannot normalize unless Israeli concerns are addressed, I’ve argued that Ross would be an important assurance, someone able to convince the American Jewish lobby that any eventual agreement is workable.” That view, he suggested, had gained some traction in Tehran.

Hadian said Iran has looked at everyone in the policy mix — Burns, Ross, Talwar, Vali Nasr (an Iranian-American aide to Richard Holbrooke, the State Department envoy), Gary Samore (a nonproliferation expert at the N.S.C.), Tony Blinken (a national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden) — and the general feeling was positive. “What Obama has already done for the United States in the Muslim world is unbelievable,” he said. “It is not easy for anyone here to attack him.”

But Hadian is a reformist who backed Moussavi. The Iran he talked about has not disappeared postelection — Velayati is as influential as ever — but it’s shaken. Khamenei, who just turned 70, knows he is vulnerable right now; it’s far from clear he’d be ready to negotiate from vulnerability. His suspicion of the United States is deep; anti-Americanism has worked for him over a 20-year rule. “Khamenei still believes the United States wants to go back to the patron-client relationship and the nuclear issue is being used for that,” Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment, told me. Even if he chooses to talk, would it not be in pursuit of a familiar Iranian tactic — stringing things out, as the centrifuges spin, until cracks appear among the Western allies, or China and Russia come to Tehran’s defense?

One thing is clear: Iran is no position to talk right now. It has no functioning national-security apparatus as its leaders scramble to shore up the regime. The republican pillar of the Islamic Republic has been destroyed to salvage a hard-line rightist order, but the price of this violent gamble in terms of lost support, internal division and external criticism has been immense. Iran has morphed in the global consciousness, to the point that U2 and Madonna have adopted the cause of Iranian democracy. With oil down and opposition up, Iran’s regional ascendancy is stalled or already in reverse.

On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

The exchange was a useful reminder that the Obama administration is going to have to work very hard, even with its allies, to present a united front to Iran. Saudi Arabia may be full of millennial Arab suspicion of the Persians, and Ross may have all sorts of ideas about how the Saudis could use their petropower to undermine the Iranians (including by selling more oil to China), but the fact is the Saudis have had normal relations with Iran since 1991 and will always be more comfortable making life difficult for a Jewish state than for a fellow Muslim nation.

If the Saudis are difficult, they pale by comparison with the Russians and Chinese, who are partners with the U.S. in the six-power effort (known as P5+1) to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Indeed, what looms for the Obama administration is a core test, over Iran, of its new foreign-policy doctrine. This was defined by Hillary Clinton as follows: “We will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world.”

But for all Obama’s efforts to multipartner — by reviving the relationship with Russia and a similar outreach to the Chinese — it is far from clear that Moscow and Beijing do not still see America’s Iran problem as a useful tool in building a multipolar world less dominated by Washington. Getting them to impose sanctions that really bite will be difficult. Iran is awash in Chinese products — trade has boomed in recent years — and it supplies 15 percent of China’s oil.

“It’s going to be very tough,” one senior administration official told me. “The Russian calculus about Iran is only partly about their relationship with Iran and partly about their view of us. Everyone agrees it’s not a great idea for this Iranian regime to acquire a nuclear weapon, but there’s not the same urgency we have, and certainly not the same as the Israelis have.”

There has always been what Donilon called a “back end” to Obama’s effort to talk with Iran, whether in the multilateral framework or in the dialogue he wants to establish to take the poison out of U.S.-Iranian relations. The back end is punitive sanctions, in the event engagement fails, that would change the Iranian calculus on further uranium refinement: cutting off Iranian banks’ access to credit; extending that isolation to insurance and shipping; stopping refined petroleum products from reaching Iran. For all that to happen, Obama will need to prove his outreach is more than rhetoric and that other nations have bought into the notion that a near-boycott of Iran should be imposed.

The administration seems to believe that Iran, as one official put it, “is not 10 feet tall right now” and that means of suasion short of this dubious sanctions route still exist. It’s working to prize Syria away from the Iranian orbit, adopt a more pragmatic tone toward Hezbollah and Hamas and change Tehran’s risk calculus by talking of a sharp upgrade of the defense capacities of allies in the region — all with the objective of further unsettling and isolating a shaken government. Clinton has returned to talk of “crippling action” against Iran — not heard since April, when she spoke of “crippling sanctions” — and late last month introduced the notion of a “defense umbrella” in the region that would make Iran less secure, even with a nuclear weapon.

The latter phrase displeased the Israelis: they viewed it as suggesting that the administration is now more focused on deterrence than prevention. What Obama’s precise tolerance threshold is for the Iranian nuclear program is in fact unclear. Officially, the administration still insists on the “zero option” — no enrichment, no reprocessing, no sensitive technology. But I heard talk of nonzero options — say a small enrichment facility for research operating under intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency inspection — if Iran makes a convincing effort to gain Western confidence and can demonstrate that a fuel cycle it controls will have only peaceful ends. It is also clear to me that a military strike on Iran by Israel is Obama’s least-favored outcome: it would inflame the region he’s trying to quiet and sabotage his outreach to the Muslim world, while perhaps only delaying Iran’s nuclear program a year or two. So deterrence may indeed be the administration’s reluctant bottom line. The president also has at his disposal a covert program inherited from the Bush administration aimed at sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program by penetrating its supply chain and undermining its computer systems. This has been under review, but could, if pushed forward, be used as an argument to the Israelis to hold off any military action.

Would Israel attack Iran against express U.S. objections? Opinion is divided. The Ross team does not rule that out. Indyk thinks not. “Remember, Israel has second-strike capability,” he told me. “It wouldn’t be easy to live with an Iran that’s a virtual nuclear power, but at the end of the day, it’s not a complete disaster.”

Normalization with Iran is a heady idea, comparable to the China breakthrough of 1972. It would create a far less dangerous world. The history-making idea captivated Obama, and it lingers still. Engagement remains on the table, and its unsettling effect on Iran’s domestic politics seem likely to endure. But since June 12, prospects of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement have darkened. The possible explosion that now looms in Iran, were Israel to attack, could assume devastating proportions and expose America to heightened danger. Obama has staked a lot — arguably his whole “smart power” doctrine — on preventing that.

For Ross, diplomacy is not just about realized goals, but about what you prevent, what you limit, what you contain, what you defuse. Successful diplomacy will take more than Obama-doctrine outreach. It will require a new form of American power to work, in avoiding the worst even if it cannot attain the dream.

Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.

Short takes: HRC in Kenya, Holbrooke-Petraeus Pakistan powwow, Brennan speech
Tue, 08/04/2009 – 8:27am
7 countries in 11 days. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives in Kenya at noon, kicking off her longest trip yet in the job: Kenya, South Africa, Angola, DRC, Nigeria, Liberia, Cape Verde: 21,200 miles. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), the chair of the House Foreign Ops subcommittee, and Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, are accompanying Clinton on the trip.

Former President Bill Clinton arrived in North Korea on a private visit to try to gain the release of two American journalists. “While this solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans is on the ground, we will have no comment,” White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement. “We do not want to jeopardize the success of former President Clinton’s mission.” Politico’s Mike Allen reports the exclusive back story to the Clinton trip: “North Korean officials told relatives that they would release the women to Clinton, and the family then approached the former president. The White House approved the mission. Secret preparations went on for week.” The WSJ adds: “According to a report from South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, North Korean radio stations late Tuesday reported that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il hosted a dinner for former President Bill Clinton. The White House said Mr. Clinton did not carry a message from  President Obama to Mr. Kim, contrary to North Korean state media reports.”

Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus and Special Rep Richard Holbrooke hosted an 11 hour Pakistan policy discussion at Ft. McNair Monday. “Everyone who works Pakistan policy” from the under secretary/assistant secretary level was there, a source said. Holbrooke has a meeting scheduled this morning with Vice President Joseph Biden, who has expressed his opposition to sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

The Wall Street Journal reports that White House counsel Greg Craig’s job is at stake. “Mr. Craig has come under criticism from inside the administration and in Congress for a perceived failure to manage the political issues that have originated from Mr. Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo, according to officials in the administration and in Congress. … One administration official involved in Guantanamo matters defended Mr. Craig, saying he has been responsive and helpful when consulted. One member of Congress who has worked with Mr. Craig on detainee issues, called Mr. Craig ‘a smart guy who understands Congress very well.’”

White House Counterterrorism advisor John Brennan is scheduled to give a counterterrorism speech at the Center for Strategic and International  Studies Thursday, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reports. “The speech will focus on the CT challenges facing the administration and the institutions the administration is building to contain them,” he reports. “Aides say that Obama appreciates Brennan’s blunt-speaking manner and his direct experience with the controversial issues with which Obama has had to contend, including renditions, detention policies and interrogations.” It will be Brennan’s first public address since Obama’s inauguration.

The Los Angeles Times reports: “Iranian authorities are questioning three American nationals who strayed across the border into Iran from Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region last week, Iranian state media reported today. The deputy governor of Iran’s Kordestan province, Iraj Hassanzadeh, told the Fars news agency that the three were still being held in the border town of Marivan, after being arrested Friday in the Malakh-Khor border area. … However, the State Department says it has still received no official confirmation from Iran that it is holding the Americans. … Kurdish officials have identified the three as Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, all University of California- Berkeley graduates. Bauer and Shourd are reportedly freelance journalists from the Bay area who left their homes last fall to embark on a year of travel and reporting in the Middle East. Fattal had been living in Cottage Grove, Ore., and was also traveling in the region, news reports said.”

-Laura Rozen
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124938154079404323.html#printMode
ASIA NEWS AUGUST 5, 2009 North Korea Frees Americans

By EVAN RAMSTAD and JAY SOLOMON
Former President Bill Clinton won the release of two U.S. journalists held by North Korea in a diplomatic stroke fraught with promise and potential pitfalls for the Obama administration’s drive to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Associated Press
 
The announcement followed a face-to-face meeting between Mr. Clinton and North Korea’s often irascible dictator Kim Jong Il — the first such high-profile U.S. mission to the so-called “hermit kingdom” since Mr. Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, visited the country in 2000.

Euna Lee and Laura Ling of Current TV LLC left North Korea with Mr. Clinton Wednesday morning local time and were en route to Los Angeles to meet their families, according to a spokesman for Mr. Clinton. The former president and a small entourage arrived in Pyongyang unexpectedly on Tuesday morning local time.

The mission took root in early July after one of the the reporters told relatives in a phone call that North Korea would grant them amnesty in exchange for a visit from Mr. Clinton, according to a senior Obama administration official. A North Korean court convicted the pair in June of illegally entering the country when they filmed a report on the border region with China on March 17.
 
The trip and its diplomatic theatrics represent a sudden moment of goodwill and compromise between two countries with nearly 60 years of fractious relations that grew even more antagonistic over the past year.

Mr. Clinton’s discussions could place the Obama administration in a difficult position as it seeks to keep humanitarian and strategic issues separate. Former U.S. officials note that no matter what parameters the White House sought to set for Mr. Clinton’s mission, the discussions appeared to have moved beyond the issue of the journalists.

In a statement, North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency said the meeting “featured candid and in-depth discussions on the pending issues between the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] and the U.S. in a sincere atmosphere.”

“It’s already clear they’re discussing broader issues,” said Selig Harrison, a Washington-based academic who’s made numerous trips to North Korea to discuss the nuclear issue, including one this January.

The senior administration official said that the North Korean government had agreed in advance that the two jailed American journalists would be released to Mr. Clinton, and that the visit wouldn’t involve any broader issues.

Mr. Clinton spent about three hours and 15 minutes with Mr. Kim, the administration official said, including a two-hour dinner and a meeting that lasted for an hour and 15 minutes. Mr. Clinton spoke briefly with the White House on his return flight but didn’t provide details of his talks with Mr. Kim, the official said.

No one in an official capacity in the U.S. government accompanied Mr. Clinton, but Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta, was one member of the delegation. Mr. Podesta served as President Barack Obama’s transition chief after the November election.

Former President Bill Clinton, barely in North Korea for 24 hours, has managed to orchestrate the release of two jailed U.S. journalists. Jay Solomon says this could pave the way for nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington to resume.

The two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, jailed by North Korea were freed following a personal visit by former president Bill Clinton. The journalists will be flying home on a private plane with Mr. Clinton. Video courtesy Fox News.

North Korea has long preferred direct talks with the U.S. because it views such one-on-one interaction as more prestigious. Since 2003, nearly all the interaction between the two countries has taken place in a diplomatic process known as the six-party talks that also involved China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. North Korea chafed at the process, which was designed by Washington to put more pressure on the North, and it declared after being penalized for undertaking a missile test in April that it would no longer participate in them.

Yet analysts watched for signs that the potential goodwill generated by Mr. Clinton’s visit and the release of the reporters may improve relations between U.S. and North Korea. “This invitation of Clinton can possibly serve as a bridge to the place where the U.S. and North Korea can successfully launch bilateral conversations that are more significant,” said Park Chan-bong, a former South Korean official who has been involved in many talks with North Koreans.

Indeed, analysts noted that North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Kang Sok Joo, a key architect of the initial nuclear-disarmament agreement reached between the Clinton administration and Pyongyang in 1994, attended a banquet for Mr. Clinton Tuesday night. Another participant, Kim Yang Gun, oversees intra-Korean relations as well as the issue of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula.

Tensions escalated after North Korea tested missiles and a nuclear explosive this year. In response to those tests, Mr. Obama took a harder line on Pyongyang. In recent weeks, the U.S. and United Nations have enacted sanctions on a wide range of North Korean arms companies, as well as senior North Korean officials involved in its nuclear program.

Mr. Clinton’s trip to Pyongyang followed months of deliberations in the State Department on how to secure the journalists’ release. The Obama administration had initially discussed sending former Vice President Al Gore, a co-founder of Current TV, to Pyongyang, according to officials briefed on the deliberations. In a statement, Mr. Gore and Current TV co-founder Joel Hyatt thanked the Obama administration and Mr. Clinton.

The U.S. and North Korea gave no advance notice of Mr. Clinton’s visit. The first word of it came from South Korean officials, who were notified that Mr. Clinton was on the way, and China’s official news agency, which was among the group of reporters who were present for the arrival of the Clinton entourage at the Pyongyang airport.

Mr. Kim’s willingness to greet Mr. Clinton shows the North Korean leader’s health might not be as dire as it seemed from images of his recent public appearances and speculative news reporting in Asia. Mr. Kim is widely believed to have suffered a stroke last August. But senior U.S. officials have said in recent weeks that they didn’t believe he suffered from pancreatic cancer, as some have speculated, and appeared to be in control of North Korea’s leadership decisions. Mr. Kim smiled and appeared more robust in the photos with Mr. Clinton than he has in other photos taken in recent months.

The Korean Central News Agency said Mr. Clinton “expressed sincere words of apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists.”

Korean Truce Hopes: Truman Advisers See Failure, But U.S. Will Make 30-Day ‘Last Try’ (Feb. 2, 1952)Truce Tactics: U.S. Officials Shape New Scheme Aimed at Cease-Fire in Korea (March 31, 1952)Sit, Bomb and Hope: That’s Washington’s Strategy as Korean Talks Break Down (May 10, 1952)After Mr. Kim pardoned the reporters, Mr. Clinton conveyed a message from Mr. Obama “expressing profound thanks for this and reflecting views on ways of improving the relations between the two countries,” the North Korean news agency said.

Relatives of the reporters issued a statement thanking Mr. Clinton and U.S. officials for their work. “We are counting the seconds to hold Laura and Euna in our arms,” the relatives said.

—Geoffrey A. Fowler, Janice Lee and Laura Meckler contributed to this article.
Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com and Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124935604510503669.html#printMode
AUGUST 4, 2009 White House Counsel’s Job at Stake
By BY EVAN PEREZ
WASHINGTON — Obama administration officials are holding discussions that could result in White House counsel Gregory Craig leaving his post, following a rocky tenure, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Craig, the top lawyer at the White House and a close aide to President Barack Obama, has helped lead the administration’s efforts on several national-security issues that once enjoyed popularity but have since become become political liabilities for Mr. Obama.

These include the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the release of Bush administration-era national-security documents, and efforts to find legal ways to indefinitely hold some detainees who can’t be put on trial.

The decision to close the Guantanamo facility became a political problem for Mr. Obama when concerns arose that some of the detainees would be released into the U.S. and the public soured on the move.

Mr. Craig didn’t respond to questions about his job as White House counsel for this article.

The people familiar with the matter said a final decision hasn’t been made.

In a statement, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina said: “We’ve addressed these rumors before. They are nothing more than typical Washington parlor games. It’s disappointing that while we are focused on reviving the economy and fighting two wars, others spend their time pointing fingers in an attempt to promote their own status.”

Mr. Craig has come under criticism from inside the administration and in Congress for a perceived failure to manage the political issues that have originated from Mr. Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo, according to officials in the administration and in Congress. This criticism has drawn focus away from president’s priorities, such as health care and energy.

One administration official involved in Guantanamo matters defended Mr. Craig, saying he has been responsive and helpful when consulted. One member of Congress who has worked with Mr. Craig on detainee issues, called Mr. Craig “a smart guy who understands Congress very well.”

As an example of the difficulties Mr. Craig faced, the officials cite the president’s move in May to reverse a decision that would have led to the release of photos showing abuse of terror detainees during the Bush administration.

Weeks earlier, Mr. Craig brought Mr. Obama plans to release Justice Department memorandums detailing the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism detainees. Some Obama national-security officials complained they hadn’t been consulted, people familiar with the matter said, and the objections prompted weeks of debate inside the administration.

Mr. Craig and Attorney General Eric Holder won the fight to release the memorandums, with minimal redactions, but the White House had to move quickly to limit political damage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney sharpened criticism of Mr. Obama during a televised speech that followed Mr. Obama’s own address intended to explain his national-security vision.

At around the same time, the administration was running into trouble with plans to move to northern Virginia at least some Chinese Muslim Uighurs who remain detained at Guantanamo despite being cleared for release. The furor over the possible release of former suspects in the U.S. led Congress to overwhelmingly pass new restrictions, including barring spending to close the Guantanamo prison.

Mr. Obama signed executive orders during his first week in office to close the Guantanamo prison, to review the cases of the more than 200 detainees there and to draw up possible changes to detention and interrogation policies.

At the time Mr. Obama enjoyed public support for his Guantanamo plans, polls showed. Six months later that public support has dissipated, polls show.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), one of the administration’s allies on the Guantanamo closure, faulted the White House handling of Guantanamo. “Announcing the closure without a plan has put in jeopardy the ability to close Guantanamo. Now public opinion has turned,” Mr. Graham said Monday.

Mr. Craig, 64 years old, was with Williams & Connolly, a prominent Washington law firm, before joining the Obama campaign. President Bill Clinton tapped him in 1998 to lead his defense during congressional impeachment proceedings against the president.

Mr. Craig has built a White House counsel’s office of formidable size, with 41 lawyers, according to the administration’s most recent filings. Mr. Bush left office with about 30 lawyers in his counsel’s office.

In response to earlier questions about why he had built such a large office, Mr. Craig said: “We have the best new law firm on the planet.” He noted that the Obama administration faced an economic crisis and major national-security issues.

—Jess Bravin contributed to this article.
Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/08/brennan_to_give_counterterrorism_speech.php
Aug 4 2009, 6:40 am by Marc Ambinder

Brennan To Give Counterterrorism Speech
John Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser and a survivor of the Bush-era Central Intelligence Agency, will speak in public for the first time since the inauguration. On Thursday, he’s slated to deliver a speech on counterterorrism in the Obama era at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.  The speech will focus on the CT challenges facing the administration and the institutions the administration is building to contain them. Brennan’s portfolio at the NSC includes the Department of Homeland Security, disaster coordination and cybersecurity. Brennan was Obama’s first choice to be CIA director, but he withdrew in the face of congressional and public pressure over his ties to the Bush administration, where he served in key CIA operational positions and was the founding director of the government’s terrorist threat integration center. Aides say that Obama appreciates Brennan’s blunt-speaking manner and his direct experience with the controversial issues with which Obama has had to contend, including renditions, detention policies and interrogations. Brennan has served as the NSC’s chief liaison to the president’s detainee review task forces.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-americans5-2009aug05,0,7413818.story
Shane Bauer, a freelancer working in Iraq for New America Media, is a careful planner, his editor says. Iranian officials consider Bauer and two friends with him to be U.S. spies.
By Maria L. La Ganga and Liz Sly

August 5, 2009

Reporting from Baghdad and San Francisco

To some Iranian officials, Shane Bauer is a spy, one of three young Americans who strayed across the border from Iraq’s Kurdistan region late last week and is being held for questioning.

To Sandy Close, the 27-year-old is a passionate photojournalist, an intrepid explorer and a careful planner who would never expose himself and his friends to unnecessary danger.

Close is executive editor of New America Media and, nearly a year ago, Bauer began freelancing for her organization, writing more than two dozen stories from Syria.

On July 27, he e-mailed Close to tell her he was “going to Kurdistan to get a feel for the region and to cover the elections, which he saw as the big story in Iraq,” she said Tuesday.

“His focus was always on the Arabic Middle East,” she said. “The idea that he would have wandered into Iran on a fool’s errand was not in his makeup. He told us where he was going. He wouldn’t take a girlfriend and another friend off on a misadventure.”

Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, all UC Berkeley graduates, were hiking along the Iran-Iraq border when they apparently strayed into Iranian territory, according to Iranian state media. On Tuesday, an Iranian lawmaker said the three were “definitely” spies.

Mohammed Karim Abedi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee, said it would be up to the “relevant authorities” to decide how to handle the case. But his comments suggested that some Iranians would take a hard line on an incident that threatened to complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to reach out to Tehran.

“This issue is condemnable, and an apology from the U.S. side will not be acceptable, because the area is a very sensitive one,” Abedi told Al Alam, Iran’s state-run Arabic language TV channel. “We can definitely say that they have come as spies.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood dismissed the suggestion that the trio were spies and said the U.S. had received no formal confirmation that they were being held in Iran. Because the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, Switzerland has been asked to help locate the Americans.

Close said she wasn’t worried when she heard that Bauer, a fluent Arabic speaker, was going to Kurdistan, and she was anticipating his dispatches on the election. On Tuesday, she rued the fact that “more and more people getting into trouble are like Shane, without large news institutions behind them.”

Ken Light, director of the Center for Photography at UC Berkeley, agreed. Light taught Bauer, who graduated in 2007, and described him as enthusiastic, committed and intense.

“The whole new way we’re looking at journalism, we have become dependent on these young, entrepreneurial journalists,” he said. Unattached to big media companies, they are “young enough to travel and passionate enough to tell these stories.”

Shourd, 30, who graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in English, has published travel stories online. She is described on bravenewtraveler.com as a “teacher-activist-writer from California” who “loves fresh broccoli, Zapatistas and anyone who can change her mind.”

Three years ago, Shourd tutored and mentored children at a program called Classroom Matters in Berkeley. Director Lisa Miller said Shourd was “very passionate and devoted to working with young children.”

“She had a sort of desire to go out and see the world,” Miller said. “She had a sense of adventure, and she was a very life-loving person who wanted to make the most of her experiences.”

Fattal, 27, graduated in 2004 with a bachelor of science degree in environmental economics and policy. According to news reports, he recently worked and lived at a sustainable-living research center in Oregon.

The Fattal family lives in Pennsylvania and has been counseled by the State Department not to comment, said Don Craig, who works with Fattal’s father.

The family is praying for their son’s return, Craig said Tuesday. “He’s a good kid.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com

liz.sly@latimes.com

Behind Bill Clinton’s rescue mission (UPDATED)
Tue, 08/04/2009 – 7:00pm
As the office of former U.S. President Bill Clinton announced that the two American journalists whose release he gained today from North Korea were allowed to fly out with him and were en route to Los Angeles, Washington Korea hands said the arrangement for their release was likely worked out in advance through the “New York” channel.

“It was a done deal before he stepped on the plane, otherwise he would never have gone there,” a Hill foreign-policy staffer said, after news reports Tuesday that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il had pardoned the women.

Clinton’s spokesman Matt McKenna issued a statement Tuesday night saying, “President Clinton has safely left North Korea with Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are en route to Los Angeles where Laura and Euna will be reunited with their families.” Clinton’s chartered aircraft from Pyongyang was due to arrive in Los Angeles early Wednesday morning, and was expected to be met by the journalists’ families. 

The North Koreans made it clear “that they wanted a high level political figure” to come negotiate the journalists’ release, said Korea specialist and former Clinton-era counselor of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Donald Gross. “They have been insisting for a long time on a high-level [envoy],” he said. “It gives them a lot of face and … prestige. It demonstrates a high-level commitment by the U.S. of working with North Korea. They wanted someone who could meet Kim Jong Il at his level.”

There had been several contenders for the job, said Chris Nelson a veteran Washington foreign-policy watcher who covers Asia policy extensively in his daily newsletter, the Nelson Report. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “has been trying to send [U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy] Stephen Bosworth since March,” Nelson said. “I know Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has been trying to go. [Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations] Bill Richardson has been trying to go. They have been talking with and through the NY connection. … So there was a lot of back and forth using the New York channel. [Senate Foreign Relations Committee Asia staffer] Frank Jannuzi was involved in a lot of this stuff on Kerry’s behalf. So this goes back. They wanted to go and bring those girls home.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “always wanted to send Al Gore,” Nelson continued, noting the two detained journalists worked for Current TV, a media company connected to the former vice president. “And apparently that was OK with Hillary and Obama, [whose wish was to] just get this out of the goddamned way.”

“But here’s where it gets interesting,” Nelson continued. “I do not know how it was delivered. But 10 days ago, North Korea sent the U.S. a list of acceptable names. And I am very authoritatively told that not on that list was Al Gore. And Bill was on the list.”

“This was the crystallizing event,” Nelson said. “After they got the list, the White House decision at the end of last week was to send Bill.”

Some reports have suggested Pyongyang’s short list of acceptable envoys was conveyed by the North Koreans to the detained journalists who communicated it back to their families.

Secretary Clinton “was quoted a couple days ago saying there are many ways of communicating with North Korea,” said Gross. “Their normal channel is the New York channel”  — the North Korean mission to the U.N. in New York. “Normally, the Korea desk at State is in regular contact with that office.”

What to make of the fact that just two weeks ago, North Korea was publicly insulting Secretary Clinton after her tough remarks on North Korea in Thailand late last month?

“It’s a classic double-track strategy for North Korea,” Gross said. “A week ago Monday, there was a report that North Korea wanted to talk to the U.S. And the U.S. said it would be happy to have bilateral talks in the context of the multilateral [Six-Party] talks, which has been the U.S. position.”

Both Nelson and Gross noted that accompanying Clinton to Pyongyang today was David Straub, a retired U.S. diplomat who served as head of the Korea desk and head of the political section at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, and is now the associate director of the Korea Studies Center at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. “My supposition is that, since this was a private visit, they couldn’t send a current U.S. diplomat,” so they brought Straub, Gross said.

Also among Clinton’s delegation were former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, who headed the Obama-Biden transition team and currently runs the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank.

“Jeff Bader has a very firm grip” on this mission through Podesta and Straub, said Nelson, referring to the National Security Council’s senior director for Asia. The White House attempted to portray the trip today as a private mission, and adamantly denied North Korean press reports that Clinton had conveyed a message from the Obama administration.

Any significance for U.S.-North Korean relations going forward? “One thing to watch in the current situation is that Clinton and Kim Jong Il agreed today that they could settle issues through negotiations,” Gross said. “Hopefully this will lead to North Korea coming back to the Six-Party talks,” which Pyongyang has rejected in recent weeks.

“I am hopeful this may be a thaw in the overall relationship and we can get back to progress on the nukes stuff,” the Hill foreign-policy hand said.

-Laura Rozen

Paul Farmer out for USAID?
Tue, 08/04/2009 – 10:33pm
Several Hill and Washington foreign policy hands say they are hearing from the White House that Paul Farmer is out as a candidate to lead USAID, a decision that was said to have been made at the White House. It wasn’t clear what the reason was, and a representative of Farmer’s group, Partners in Health, couldn’t immediately be reached.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had sought White House permission to announce Farmer as the candidate to lead USAID when she appeared at the development agency last month, but said she wasn’t given the nod to do so. She drew applause there and later in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations complaining about the lengthy and excruciating vetting process for administration candidates.

Given his resume as a pioneering health care visionary who has worked to bring health care to the poor in Haiti, Peru and elsewhere often railing against conventional bureaucratic practices and doctrine, Farmer was said by an associate and an administration official to have been daunted by the vetting paperwork for the prospetive job, including a form requiring him to list every foreigner he had come into contact with the past several years. But it wasn’t clear if Farmer ran into a snag clearing the vet, grew disillusioned with the prospective job over the process, or rather, was a victim of the complaints about the vetting process.

Some foreign policy hands have noted that for Farmer’s visionary and inspiring career, the MacArthur genius, medical doctor and anthropologist wasn’t necessarily an easy fit for running a large government bureaucracy. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query on the matter. One official said when Clinton discussed with the White House whether it would be possible to announce Farmer when she spoke at USAID last month, she was told there was an issue and that is what led to her public expression of frustration with the process.

-Laura Rozen
http://blogs.govexec.com/fedblog/2009/08/paul_farmer_manager.php
Paul Farmer, Manager?
By Alyssa Rosenberg Monday, August 3, 2009 2:40 PM
Laura Rozen, over at Foreign Policy, reports in on the long wait for Paul Farmer, head of the Third World health organization Partners In Health, to be tapped to head the U.S. Agency for International Development. Anyone who has read Tracy Kidder’s excellent, highly readable 2003 biography of Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, can see how Farmer might be, um, complicated to vet, since he lives a fairly nomadic existence, has been scathing about U.S. policy towards the third world, etc.

But I think it’s interesting to consider for a moment what kind of manager Farmer might be like if he survives a vetting and confirmation process and ends up at USAID. Certainly, he would be like few other government appointees anywhere, ever. First off, there’s the work ethic question. Kidder describes Farmer as a guy who sleeps four or five hours a night, can sleep anywhere, and travels hundreds of thousands of miles a year, and skips across continents every month. In other words, he’s someone who wouldn’t have to ramp up his work ethic to take a government job; he probably could slow down, and might even be forced to, because he’d be required to be in Washington a certain amount of the time simply to administer the agency and attend meetings.

Second, Farmer is THE model of an inspirational leader. He takes an incredibly difficult task–working incredibly long hours, for incredibly poor people, sometimes in incredibly poor working conditions, for not very much money–and manages to make people excited about and devoted to the work. In a way, Farmer might have an easier sell at USAID, where the salaries are probably larger than they are at Partners In Health, and the resources available are larger. But I also think that Farmer would be able to recruit people who are inspired by him to make significant and substantial sacrifices. And I think it would be an interesting test case for that kind of leadership model in a federal agency. Most department and agency heads are rib-rock competent people, but they’re not necessarily fire-starters. Kathleen Sebelius seems like a very nice, very smart person, but she isn’t necessarily the kind of person who inspires other people to throw over their life plans, question their priorities, and go work in impoverished Peruvian communities to combat highly infectious multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Farmer is. Maybe his enthusiasm and the bureaucracy of USAID would clash horribly. Maybe government needs those competent but less firey people who can work the system. But Farmer’s presence at USAID could be a useful model to examine to see how far a leader can shake up a bureaucracy, and how far he can inspire people to make things different.

Obama “extraordinarily relieved” at safe return of U.S. journalists from North Korea
Wed, 08/05/2009 – 10:22am
American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee arrived in Burbank, California this morning with former U.S. President Bill Clinton who had made a 20 hour visit to Pyongyang yesterday to secure their release from North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Awaiting them in California were former Vice President Al Gore, co-founder of the media company for which they worked, and their families.

President Barack Obama spoke briefly this morning on the South Lawn about their safe return, expressing gratitude to Clinton, with whom he said he had spoken, and Gore for their help securing the women’s release, and extraordinary relief at the positive outcome of the mission. Notably, his remarks avoided any mention of North Korea or its leader, and he did not take any questions. From his statement:

Good morning, everybody.  I want to just make a brief comment about the fact that the two young journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, are safely back with their families.  We are obviously extraordinarily relieved.  I had an opportunity to speak with the families yesterday once we knew that they were on the plane.

The reunion that we’ve all seen on television I think is a source of happiness not only for the families but for the entire country.

I want to thank President Bill Clinton — I had a chance to talk to him — for the extraordinary humanitarian effort that resulted in the release of the two journalists.  I want to thank Vice President Al Gore who worked tirelessly in order to achieve a positive outcome.

I think that not only is this White House obviously extraordinarily happy, but all Americans should be grateful to both former President Clinton and Vice President Gore for their extraordinary work.  And my hope is, is that the families that have been reunited can enjoy the next several days and weeks, understanding that because of the efforts of President Clinton and Gore, they are able to be with each other once again.

So we are very pleased with the outcome, and I’m hopeful that the families are going to be able to get some good time together in the next few days.

Thank you very much.

Clinton also issued a statement this morning: “I am very happy that after this long ordeal, Laura Ling and Euna Lee are now home and reunited with their loved ones. When their families, Vice President Gore and the White House asked that I undertake this humanitarian mission, I agreed. I share a deep sense of relief with Laura and Euna and their families that they are safely home.”

Clinton was accompanied to North Korea by “counsel” and longtime top aide Doug Band; Justin Cooper, another longtime aide who worked with Clinton on his autobiography, joins him on most trips, and is usually with him; his former White House chief of staff John Podesta; and David Straub, a retired U.S. diplomat, former head of the State Department’s Korea desk, and political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Seoul.

-Laura Rozen

Gibbs walks back Ahmadinejad recognition
Wed, 08/05/2009 – 12:44pm
During a press gaggle aboard Air Force One this morning en route to South Bend, Indiana, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs walked back his seeming recognition yesterday of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president. Gibbs said today that it is not for the U.S. to determine Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy:

MR. GIBBS:  Well, let me correct a little bit of what I said yesterday.  I denoted that Mr. Ahmadinejad was the elected leader of Iran.  I would say it’s not for me to pass judgment on.  He’s been inaugurated, that’s a fact.  Whether any election was fair, obviously the Iranian people still have questions about that and we’ll let them decide that.  But I would simply say he’s been inaugurated and we know that is simply a fact.

Q    Do you recognize him as the leader, elected fairly or not?

MR. GIBBS:  It’s not for — it’s not for me or for us to denote his legitimacy, except to acknowledge the fact.

Q    Does the White House believe the election was fair?

MR. GIBBS:  That’s not for us to pass judgment on.  I think that’s for the Iranian people to decide, and obviously there are many that still have a lot of questions.

Yesterday, when asked if United States does not recognize the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad as Iran’s elected president given his inauguration, Gibbs said, “We have said through this that this was a decision and a debate that was ongoing in Iran by Iranians” and he described Ahmadinejad as “the elected leader” of Iran. The seeming recognition of Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy troubled some Iranian Americans, and provoked a firestorm of online criticism.

“Why this rush?” the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi said by e-mail. Citing recent news reports, he said, “Iran watchers told [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton Iran is too consumed with internal stuff [and] can’t negotiate [now]. Then why push for talks now? To secure failure?” Writing for ForeignPolicy.com last week, Parsi urged the Obama administration to take a “tactical pause” in its outreach to the Islamic Republic.

Parsi said the White House had acknowledged to him yesterday that Gibbs’s statement had “come out wrong.”

Parsi said he is fearful that the Obama administration may be committing itself to a timetable for engaging with Iran that is unrealistic given internal political turmoil there. Issuing “red lines” that it may not follow through with could lead to a situation similar to that faced by the Bush administration, Parsi said, “which brought a large number of unimplemented red lines with the final outcome of the U.S. losing credibility as a result.”

Administration sources have indicated its timeline is being influenced in part by Washington’s efforts to try to make sure that Israel does not act unilaterally against Iran.

-Laura Rozen
Veteran South Asia hand joins Holbrooke’s team as Pakistan aid coordinator
Wed, 08/05/2009 – 6:18pm
 
Robin Raphel, who under the Clinton administration was the first U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, is joining Richard Holbrooke’s team to become the coordinator for nonmilitary aid to Pakistan, State Department officials confirmed to Foreign Policy.

Working out of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Raphel will be teaming up with USAID, the USDA, Treasury, DoD, and other assistance-implementing agencies to ensure that all programs support U.S. goals in the region, a State Department official said.

Raphel was part of a group that included Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Ann Patterson, and Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robert Blake, all of whom Holbrooke convened for a hush-hush, 11-hour policy discussion on Pakistan Monday at Ft. McNair, the U.S. Army base in Washington that houses the National Defense University, where Raphel was a vice president from 2000 to 2003.

Glamorous and blond, Raphel has something of a storied career in the vein of Charlie Wilson’s War. Appointed by former President Bill Clinton to be assistant secretary of state, Raphel started her career as a lecturer in history in Iran, worked for two years as a CIA economics analyst and then as a USAID analyst in Islamabad before going on to a 30-year career in the State Department, serving in Pakistan, London, South Africa, India, and later as U.S. ambassador to Tunisia.

Journalist Steve Coll reports in Ghost Wars that Raphel was roommates in England with Bill Clinton’s Oxford girlfriend, and she is also said by associates to be close to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several HRC advisors, including ambassador at large for women’s issues Melanne Verveer. A former husband from whom she was then divorced, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, was killed in a plane crash also carrying Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq in 1988.

Since retiring from the State Department in 2000, Raphel has served as coordinator for Iraq reconstruction and the deputy inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. In 2007-2008, she worked as a lobbyist and consultant for Cassidy and Associates, where Raphel was a vice president. Raphel is coming on board in a “call back” capacity, an associate said, a status for a certain rank and number of years in the Foreign Service. She couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. “She’s an inspired choice and we are pretty thrilled,” one South Asia hand said. “We wanted someone who could really handle a significant (Congress-willing) increase in civilian assistance to Pakistan.”

-Laura Rozen
State moving to resolve Kyl hold on nominees
Thu, 08/06/2009 – 5:51pm
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has placed a hold on some State Department nominees, pending Foggy Bottom turning over to him the U.S. government negotiating record on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Hill sources say.

The U.S. has signed the CTBT treaty, which bans the testing of nuclear weapons, but the Senate has not ratified it. Kyl was central to the effort in 1999 to prevent Senate ratification, and it was defeated overwhelmingly. Obama said in a speech on nonproliferation in Prague in April that he would like to seek the advise and consent of the Senate on CTBT. Kyl’s current documentation demands seem to be an indication that he will move to try to prevent Obama from doing so, as he prevented Senate ratification of the CTBT treaty a decade ago under President Bill Clinton.

“Kyl thought he got an agreement” when he agreed to lift the hold on the nomination of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher last month, one Hill foreign policy hand explained. “But he was apparently not happy with what he got afterwards, and he’s asking for more documentation.”

The State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Rich Verma is said to be handling the matter, the Hill aide said. “There are certain precedents about what the executive branch can give Congress, they don’t necessarily give them everything.” So that needs to be worked out, he said.

One official thought that a handover to Kyl of documents on the CTBT negotiations – apparently all already in the public domain – was being arranged for Friday, and that the whole matter might be resolved then. 

A spokesman for Senator Kyl didn’t immediately respond to queries.

The official said it was his understanding that Kyl’s hold did not apply to ambassador nominees (it did however seem to be affecting the long suffering acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, who finally had a hold lifted by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) last week.)

Obama met with his nominee to be US ambassador to Japan John Roos at the Oval Office today.

Tauscher was traveling in Brazil this week with other U.S. officials.

-Laura Rozen

FP’s exclusive guide to Congress’s summer junkets
Thu, 08/06/2009 – 7:21pm
It’s August, and the capital is clearing out as many Washingtonians head for vacation. And Congress is no exception.

Foreign Policy has obtained a list of planned Congressional delegations — or CODELs for short — over the August recess.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) plans to lead a delegation including his friends Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), and Susan Collins (R-ME), on what looks to be a gritty, six-country, seven-day tour of post-war zones and forward operating bases, including Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iceland. One sign the trip is tough? No spouses signed up to come along.

Similarly, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is scheduled to lead a no-frills CODEL including Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), to Amman, Jordan; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Kabul, Afghanistan, where they will be observing Afghanistan’s presidential elections. [UPDATE: A Kerry spokesman e-mails: "Kerry's travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan was canceled on Wednesday. He's now not going anywhere over recess."]

But for every workhorse CODEL such as McCain’s or Kerry’s, there are those that look to rival Club Med.

For instance, there will be no flak jackets required for Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) when he leads a large congressional delegation on an around-the-world trip to Ireland, Switzerland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and Canada. And the trip looks to be more spouse-friendly: All of the seven House members on the Boehner-led trip — Dan Boren (D-OK), Jo Bonner (R-AL), Dave Camp (R-MI), Tom Latham (R-LA), and Greg Walden (R-OR) — say they are bringing their spouses (at “no cost to the DoD,” the CODEL itinerary states).

What is the purpose of the Boehner-led CODEL? “To discuss issues of mutual interest with government and private sector officials on issues related to global and regional economic performance and energy security,” the confirmed itinerary says. Boehner’s office didn’t respond to a query. (Perhaps that’s because the CODEL schedule indicates his delegation already departed for Europe July 31 and is expected back by way of Asia and Canada August 13.)

Similarly, one wouldn’t need to rough it on Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX)’s planned trip to Britain, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Among Cuellar’s Mediterranean destined delegation are Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA), DC’s Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Rep. John Carter (R-TX), Rep. Michael McCaul (T-TX), and Rep. Charles Dent (R-PA), all save Norton accompanied by their better halves.

What’s the purpose of the Cuellar-led trip? “To investigate the critical security measures in place within these countries,” the unconfirmed itinerary says. But of course. [UPDATE: A Cuellar spokesman e-mails: "Congressman Cuellar’s codel was cancelled before August recess."]

Fresh from Judge Sonia Sotamayor’s confirmation as Supreme Court Justice, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is scheduled to lead a delegation to England early next month to “conduct official British-American Parliamentary Group meetings,” the unconfirmed CODEL itinerary says.

But who gets the award for planning what looks to be the cushiest trip? Rep. Jerry Costello (D-IL) is scheduled to lead a CODEL to Germany, Italy, and Spain later this month through the first week of September. Among the House members scheduled to travel with him and Mrs. Costello to Europe: Rep. John Duncan (R-TN), Harold Rogers (R-KY), Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), Rep. Tim Holden (D-PA), Rep. Henry Brown (R-SC), Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA), Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), and Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL). Most of the delegates save Ortiz and Bernice Johnson are planning to bring their spouses.

What’s the purpose? “To meet with State and local officials to discuss port security and aviation maintenance issues,” the itinerary says. Costello’s office told Foreign Policy Thursday the trip has not been confirmed.

Bon voyage!
-Laura Rozen

Confirmations
Fri, 08/07/2009 – 2:03pm
The Senate today confirmed the following nominees, the State Department has announced (I’ll spare you the usual bolding):

Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs
Philip Verveer, coordinator for international communications and information policy
Maria Otero, under secretary for global affairs
Carlos Pascual, U.S. ambassador to Mexico
Ertharin Cousin, U.S. representative to U.N. agencies for food and agriculture
Kerri-Ann Jones, assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific Affairs
David Killion, U.S. representative to UNESCO
Glyn Davies, U.S. representative to the U.N.-Vienna and the IAEA
Michael Battle, U.S. representative to the African Union
Martha Campbell, U.S. ambassador to the Marshall Islands
John Bass, U.S. ambassador to Georgia
James Foley, U.S. ambassador to Croatia
Kenneth Gross, U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan
Teddy Taylor, U.S. ambassador to Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu
John Roos, U.S. ambassador to Japan
Judith Garber, U.S. ambassador to Latvia
James Knight, U.S. ambassador to Benin
Karen Kornbluh, U.S. representative to the OECD
Bruce Oreck, U.S. ambassador to Finland
Jon Huntsman, U.S. ambassador to China
Douglas Kmiec, U.S. ambassador to Malta
Jonathan Addleton, U.S. ambassador to Mongolia
Matthew Barzun, U.S. ambassador to Sweden
William Eacho, U.S. ambassador to Austria
Philip Murphy, U.S. ambassador to Germany

The above report notes how 50 “Nexus Targets” have been placed on the “capture or kill” list by the Pentagon.  It does not list the targets; however, it indicates a huge shift away from business as usual and a ramped up understanding of the narco-war of Afghanistan in the eyes of our top representatives on the Hill.   Interestingly, the report downgrades the amount of money supporting Taliban and Al Qaeda in the AfPak region.  UN reports estimated 400 million dollars…Gretchen Peters estimates in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars, and the report here is closer to a $100 million.  Faced with the uptick in violence in Afghanistan, and the “triage” mentality of the coalition aiming to turn the momentum away from the Taliban with a successful August 20th election, Obama’s team scrapped the Bush Era poppy eradication policies for a more nuanced approach.  With a focus on blending counternarcotic intelligence and counterinsurgency efforts, the Obama Administration aims to take out the traffickers and powerbrokers tied to the Opium trade in Afghanistan… 

Below, I have placed a brace of articles surrounding the report…

GHJJ (8/13/09, 2:27pmEST) 

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/us-drug-agency-spies-on-afghan-kingpins-20090812-eief.html
US drug agency spies on Afghan kingpinsGreg Miller in Washington
August 13, 2009
THE CIA and the US Defence Intelligence Agency have concluded that the amount of drug money flowing to the Taliban in Afghanistan is far lower than widely estimated but remains critical to the insurgents’ ability to survive, according to a Senate report.

The two spy agencies believe Taliban leaders receive about $US70 million ($84 million) a year from Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop – far lower than the latest $US400 million estimate by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Al-Qaeda’s dependence on drug money is even smaller, according to the report by the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which found ”there is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds go to al-Qaeda”.

The lower estimates suggest other avenues of funding – including money flowing from wealthy donors in the Gulf – remain important sources of support for insurgent and terrorist networks straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Nevertheless, the report notes that ”the insurgency is a relatively cheap war for the Taliban to fight”, meaning that the militants do not need significantly larger subsidies from narcotics trafficking to finance their operations.

The report comes at a time when the US is revamping its approach to combating the lucrative narcotics trade in Afghanistan, whose poppy fields account for more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin.

After focusing mainly on crop eradication during the Bush administration, the US is shifting to targeting drug kingpins and the criminal networks that control narcotics activities in Afghanistan, from harvesting to processing and export.

To combat corruption and improve intelligence gathering on opium networks, the US has assembled a new intelligence cell at Bagram air base that is led by Drug Enforcement Administration operatives.

A senior DEA official quoted in the report said authorities in Kabul recently began employing new electronic eavesdropping equipment to monitor the mobile phone communications of drug barons and corrupt government officials.

The British have also been involved in a more intelligence-based counter-narcotics effort.

In February, Haji Abdullah, the man behind the country’s third biggest drugs network, was arrested in a dramatic swoop by Afghan police at Herat. Unprecedented use of telephone intercept evidence ensured that he became the first ”high-value target” to be convicted in the corrupt Afghan judicial system.

The British Ministry of Defence announced this week that its Black Watch Battalion had seized 250 kilograms of opium in Helmand last Friday.

http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/congress/52904292.html?page=1&c=y
Senate report details Afghan strategy for targeting druglords, questions deeper US involvement
By LARA JAKES , Associated Press

Last update: August 10, 2009 – 3:50 PM
WASHINGTON – The U.S. military is targeting major drug traffickers in a new strategy to kill or capture Afghan militants, according to a Senate report that also questions the Obama administration’s deepening involvement in the war-torn country.

An estimated 50 drug lords who help finance the Taliban are on the military’s target list, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report says. It cites two unnamed U.S. generals in Afghanistan who said the “kill list” was the result of a new interpretation of military rules governing how much force can be used on the battlefield.

“The change is dramatic for a military that once ignored the drug trade flourishing in front of its eyes,” concluded the 55-page report, which will be released Tuesday. A copy of the document was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

“No longer are U.S. commanders arguing that going after the drug lords is not part of their mandate,” the report found. “In a dramatic illustration of the new policy, major drug traffickers who help finance the insurgency are likely to find themselves in the cross-hairs of the military.”

At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman said the military only targets known extremists who are involved in drug trafficking — and not traffickers who have minor interaction with the Taliban.

“Where terrorists do interface with the drug networks, that produces a security threat, a force protection threat, and is a legitimate target in those regards,” Whitman told reporters.

Whitman would not discuss the specifics of the Senate report, which was first reported in Monday’s editions of The New York Times.

For years, the United States has focused on destroying poppy crops that produce more than 90 percent of the world’s opium, which is used to make heroin. Earlier this summer, the Obama administration announced it was abandoning widespread poppy eradication, which the Senate report said has proven “an expensive failure.”

U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Taliban nets about $70 million annually from the drug trade, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates it could be closer to $125 million. Outside experts peg the Taliban drug profits as high as $500 million.

Despite NATO approval last year to attack drug labs, some U.S. allies are signaling they are uneasy with targeting traffickers.

Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, said that while there are good reasons for going after narcotics dealers, such a campaign could carry some “highly undesirable side-effects.”

“Because there is not an exact coincidence between insurgents and drug-smuggling experts, targeting them aggressively might drive the smugglers into the hands of insurgents,” Giustozzi said. “It might … give them an incentive to further weaken the government hold in certain areas.”

NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero would not comment on the report. “NATO policy is that if there is a direct nexus between drugs and funding the insurgency, then NATO has a role,” she said.

The Senate report concluded that NATO allies operating in Afghanistan agree that “the Taliban cannot be defeated and good government cannot be established without cutting off the money generated by Afghanistan’s opium industry.”

The report said key questions remain about the growing U.S. role in Afghanistan after eight years of war, including:

_Whether any amount of effort will change Afghanistan’s politics and society.

_Why the U.S. is becoming more involved now.

_Whether the American public understands, and supports, what will be needed to win in Afghanistan.

_How the U.S. will define success. The possibilities could include nation-building and keeping extremists from using Afghanistan as a safe haven.

“The administration has raised the stakes by transforming the Afghan war from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counterinsurgency,” the report concluded. “These core questions about commitment and sacrifice can be answered only through a rigorous and informed national debate.”

U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Taliban nets about $70 million annually from the drug trade, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates it could be closer to $125 million. Outside experts peg the Taliban drug profits as high as $500 million.

Despite NATO approval last year to attack drug labs, some U.S. allies are signaling they are uneasy with targeting traffickers.

Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, said that while there are good reasons for going after narcotics dealers, such a campaign could carry some “highly undesirable side-effects.”

“Because there is not an exact coincidence between insurgents and drug-smuggling experts, targeting them aggressively might drive the smugglers into the hands of insurgents,” Giustozzi said. “It might … give them an incentive to further weaken the government hold in certain areas.”

NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero would not comment on the report. “NATO policy is that if there is a direct nexus between drugs and funding the insurgency, then NATO has a role,” she said.

The Senate report concluded that NATO allies operating in Afghanistan agree that “the Taliban cannot be defeated and good government cannot be established without cutting off the money generated by Afghanistan’s opium industry.”

The report said key questions remain about the growing U.S. role in Afghanistan after eight years of war, including:

_Whether any amount of effort will change Afghanistan’s politics and society.

_Why the U.S. is becoming more involved now.

_Whether the American public understands, and supports, what will be needed to win in Afghanistan.

_How the U.S. will define success. The possibilities could include nation-building and keeping extremists from using Afghanistan as a safe haven.

“The administration has raised the stakes by transforming the Afghan war from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counterinsurgency,” the report concluded. “These core questions about commitment and sacrifice can be answered only through a rigorous and informed national debate.”

___

Associated Press writers Raphael G. Satter in London and Robert Wielaard and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/09/adds-afghan-drug-lords-kill-capture-list/?test=latestnews
U.S. Targets Afghan Drug Lords With Taliban Ties
The Pentagon reportedly has created a target list of 50 Afghan drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban to be captured or killed as the White House refuses to rule out sending more U.S. troops.

FOXNews.com

Sunday, August 09, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has created a target list of 50 Afghan drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban to be captured or killed, The New York Times reported on Monday.

Citing interviews with two U.S. generals in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report to be released this week, the Times said the strategy is aimed at disrupting the flow of drug money used to finance Taliban insurgents.

The addition of drug lords on the “joint integrated prioritized target list” reflects a major shift in counternarcotics strategy and means the traffickers will be given the same target status as militant leaders.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” a general reportedly told the committee staff, the Times said.

On Sunday, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser did not rule out adding more U.S. forces in Afghanistan to help turn around a war that he said is not now in crisis.

James Jones, a retired Marine general with experience in Afghanistan, said the United States will know “by the end of next year” whether the revamped war plan Obama announced in March is taking hold.

The administration is redefining how it will measure progress, with new benchmarks that reflect a redrawn strategy. An outline is expected next month.

Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Jones did little to dispel the growing expectation that Obama soon will be asked to supplement the 21,000 additional forces he already approved for Afghanistan this year.

“We won’t rule anything out,” but the new strategy is too fresh for a full evaluation, Jones said. “If things come up where we need to adjust one way or the other, and it involves troops or it involves more incentives … for economic development or better assistance to help the Afghan government function, we’ll do that.”

The Obama plan is supposed to combine a more vigorous military campaign against the Taliban with a commitment to protect Afghan civilians and starve the insurgents of sanctuary and popular support. It envisions a large development effort led by civilians, which has not fully happened, and a rapid expansion of the Afghan armed forces to eventually take over responsibility for security.

“If we can get that done … we will know that fairly quickly,” Jones said.

The system to measure progress in Afghanistan is several weeks from completion. It reflects creeping congressional skepticism about the war and its costs. The United States has spent more than $220 billion since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, plus billions for more toward aid and development projects. By the United States’ own admission, much of the aid money was wasted.

Members of the House Appropriations Committee wrote recently that they are worried about “the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics.”

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday he does not know how Congress would react to a new request for additional troops.

“It depends on what the facts and the arguments are,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. “It depends what our commanders in the field say. It depends also I think in part what our NATO allies are willing to do.”

Appearing with him, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned against repeating what he called the mistake of committing too few troops to Iraq at the start of the war.

“My message to my Democratic colleagues is that we made mistakes in Iraq. Let’s not ‘Rumsfeld’ Afghanistan,” Graham said, referring to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld resisted sending a very large U.S. force at the outset of the Iraq war in 2003.

“Let’s don’t do this thing on the cheap,” Graham said. He said he will “be shocked if more troops are not requested by our commanders.”

Violence has spiked this year, with roadside bombs the militants’ weapon of choice. There are relatively few direct firefights. There are signs the Taliban is pursuing a classic tactic of a smaller, weaker enemy waiting out a larger, militarily superior one.

Deaths among U.S. and other NATO troops have soared. With 74 foreign troops killed — including 43 Americans — July was the deadliest month for international forces since the start of the war in 2001.
There are currently 62,000 U.S. troops and 39,000 allied forced in Afghanistan, on top of about 175,000 Afghan soldiers and police. Some NATO countries plan to withdraw their troops in the next couple of years, even as the U.S. ramps up its presence.

The newly installed top U.S. general in Afghanistan is preparing an interim assessment that is expected to be a sober accounting of the difficulties of fighting an entrenched and technically capable insurgency eight years into the war. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is expected to identify shortfalls that should be filled by more forces — perhaps a mix of Afghan, NATO and U.S.

His report had been expected this week but is now delayed at least until after the Afghan national elections on Aug. 20.

U.S. officials have said they are neutral on the election’s outcome so long as voting comes off smoothly and with a minimum of irregularities. Jones cited the elections as evidence of progress.

He rejected the idea that a secret, hastily arranged gathering of the top U.S. defense officials in Europe last weekend carried a whiff of desperation.

“No, I don’t think we’re at a crisis level … or that there’s going to be any movement on the ground by the Taliban that’s going to overthrow the government. We’re going to have, I think, a good election,” Jones said.

Jones appeared on “FOX News Sunday,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Levin and Graham were on CBS.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/world/asia/10afghan.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimes
By JAMES RISEN
Published: August 9, 2009
WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff. The generals were not identified in the Senate report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The shift in policy comes as the Obama administration, deep into the war in Afghanistan, makes significant changes to its strategy for dealing with that country’s lucrative drug trade, which provides 90 percent of the world’s heroin and has led to substantial government corruption.

The Senate report’s disclosure of a hit list for drug traffickers may lead to criticism in the United States over the expansion of the military’s mission, and NATO allies have already raised questions about the strategy of killing individuals who are not traditional military targets.

For years the American-led mission in Afghanistan had focused on destroying poppy crops. Pentagon officials have said their new emphasis is on weaning local farmers off the drug trade — including the possibility of paying them to grow nothing — and going after the drug runners and drug lords. But the Senate report is the first account of a policy to actually place drug chieftains aligned with the Taliban on a “kill or capture” list.

Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, would not comment on the Senate report, but said that “there is a positive, well-known connection between the drug trade and financing for the insurgency and terrorism.” Without directly addressing the existence of the target list, he said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

Several individuals suspected of ties to drug trafficking have already been apprehended and others have been killed by the United States military since the new policy went into effect earlier this year, a senior military official with direct knowledge of the matter said in an interview. Most of the targets are in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where both the drug trade and the insurgency are the most intense.

One American military officer serving in Afghanistan described the purpose of the target list for the Senate committee. “Our long-term approach is to identify the regional drug figures,” the unidentified officer is quoted as saying in the Senate report. The goal, he said, is to “persuade them to choose legitimacy, or remove them from the battlefield.”

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing delicate policy matters.

When Donald H. Rumsfeld was defense secretary, the Pentagon fiercely resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting counternarcotics efforts. Top military commanders feared that trying to prevent drug trafficking would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords whose support they needed, and might turn more of the populace against American troops.

It was only in the last year or two of the Bush administration that the United States began to recognize that the Taliban insurgency was being revived with the help of drug money.

The policy of going after drug lords is likely to raise legal concerns from some NATO countries that have troops in Afghanistan. Several NATO countries initially questioned whether the new policy would comply with international law.

“This was a hard sell in NATO,” said retired Gen. John Craddock, who was supreme allied commander of NATO forces until he retired in July.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary general of NATO until last month, told the Senate committee staff that to deal with the concerns of other nations with troops in Afghanistan, safeguards had been put in place to make sure the alliance remained within legal bounds while pursuing drug traffickers. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is also informed before a mission takes place, according to a senior military official.

General Craddock said that some NATO countries were also concerned that the new policy would draw the drug lords closer to the Taliban, because they would turn to them for more protection. “But the opposite is the case, since it weakens the Taliban, so they can’t provide that protection,” General Craddock said. “If we continue to push on this, we will see progress,” he added. “It’s causing them problems.”

In a surprise, the Senate report reveals that the United States intelligence community believes that the Taliban has been getting less money from the drug trade than previous public studies have suggested. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency both estimate that the Taliban obtains about $70 million a year from drugs.

The Senate report found that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda, which instead relies on contributions from wealthy individuals and charities in Persian Gulf countries, as well as aid organizations working inside Afghanistan.

But even with the new, more cautious estimates, the Taliban has plenty of drug money to finance its relatively inexpensive insurgency. Taliban foot soldiers are paid just $10 a day — more if they plant an improvised explosive device.

Not all those suspected of drug trafficking will end up on the Pentagon’s list. Intelligence gathered by the United States and Afghanistan will more often be used for prosecutions, although American officials are frustrated that they still have not been able to negotiate an extradition treaty with the Afghan government.

A major unresolved problem in the counternarcotics strategy is the fact that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains wide open, and the Pakistanis are doing little to close down drug smuggling routes.

A senior American law enforcement official in the region is quoted in the report as saying that cooperation with Pakistan on counternarcotics is so poor that traffickers cross the border with impunity.

“We give them leads on targets,” the official said in describing the Pakistani government’s counternarcotics tactics, adding, “We get smiles, a decent cup of tea, occasional reheated sandwiches and assertions of progress, and we all leave with smiles on our faces.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6789142.ece?print=yes&randnum=1250146270353

From The Times August 10, 2009

Another 45,000 US troops needed in Afghanistan, military adviser says

Michael Evans, Defence Editor
The United States should send up to 45,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, a senior adviser to the American commander in Kabul has told The Times.

Anthony Cordesman, an influential American academic who is a member of a team that has been advising General Stanley McChrystal, now in charge of Nato forces in Afghanistan, also said that to deal with the threat from the Taleban the size of the Afghan National Army might have to increase to 240,000.

If Mr Cordesman’s recommendation reflects the view of General McChrystal, who recently presented the findings of a 60-day review of Afghanistan strategy to Washington, it would mean sending another nine combat brigades, comprising 45,000 American troops, in addition to the 21,000 already approved by President Obama. This would bring the total American military presence in Afghanistan to about 100,000, considerably closer to the force that was deployed for the counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq.

If General McChrystal believes that America should send nine more brigades — Mr Cordesman suggested it should be between three and nine brigades — there is bound to be pressure on Britain to send reinforcements as well. The British strength now is 9,000.

Writing in The Times, Mr Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: “The insurgents may have lost virtually every tactical clash [against Nato troops], but they have expanded their areas of influence from a presence in some 30 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts in 2003 to one in some 160 districts by the end of 2008, while insurgent attacks increased by 60 per cent during October 2008 to April 2009 alone.

“Nato must change its strategy and tactics after years in which member countries, particularly the United States, failed to react to the seriousness of the emerging insurgency,” he added.

The US reinforcements already approved by Mr Obama include 8,000 Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade who have arrived in Helmand province, replacing the British troops in the south of the province, and 4,000 US Army soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade, who are also arriving in the region.

Mr Cordesman appeared to confirm the strategy expected to be outlined by General McChrystal relating to the Afghan National Army. He says that the existing plan to increase numbers to 134,000 soldiers is inadequate. He says that it should be doubled to 240,000 by 2014, and the Afghan National Police should rise from 82,000 to 160,000.

To reach such levels, however, Nato would need to contribute thousands more troops to train the Afghans.

On Saturday in The Times, General Sir David Richards, who becomes Chief of the General Staff — the head of the British Army — on August 28, said he thought that Britain’s commitment to Afghanistan could last between 30 and 40 years, although he envisaged that troops would have to stay only for the medium term. He is expected to repeat the call made by General Sir Richard Dannatt, whom he is succeeding, for more British troops for Helmand.

Tonight a former head of the British Army said it would not be possible for Britain to meet its commitment to support Afghanistan for decades if ministers approved a proposal to cut three infantry battalions.

As part of a current internal Ministry of Defence review, a reduction in the size of the infantry, from 36 to 33 battalions, has not yet been ruled out, because of the short-term savings that would ensue from cutting back on manpower — a total of £60 million a year for the loss of the three battalions.

However, General Sir Roger Wheeler, Chief of the General Staff from 1997 to 2000, said that it was illogical to reduce the size of the infantry at a time when there were so many casualties in Afghanistan and when it was now accepted that the mission in Helmand province was going to continue for decades. “And the MoD would be saving peanuts,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/08/AR2009080802283.html
Analysts Expect Long-Term, Costly U.S. Campaign in Afghanistan

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 9, 2009

As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago, the United States has spent $223 billion on war-related funding for that country, according to the Congressional Research Service. Aid expenditures, excluding the cost of combat operations, have grown exponentially, from $982 million in 2003 to $9.3 billion last year.

The costs are almost certain to keep growing. The Obama administration is in the process of overhauling the U.S. approach to Afghanistan, putting its focus on long-term security, economic sustainability and development. That approach is also likely to require deployment of more American military personnel, at the very least to train additional Afghan security forces.

Later this month, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is expected to present his analysis of the situation in the country. The analysis could prompt an increase in U.S. troop levels to help implement President Obama’s new strategy.

Military experts insist that the additional resources are necessary. But many, including some advising McChrystal, say they fear the public has not been made aware of the significant commitments that come with Washington’s new policies.

“We will need a large combat presence for many years to come, and we will probably need a large financial commitment longer than that,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the “strategic assessment” team advising McChrystal. The expansion of the Afghan security force that the general will recommend to secure the country “will inevitably cost much more than any imaginable Afghan government is going to be able to afford on its own,” Biddle added.

“Afghan forces will need $4 billion a year for another decade, with a like sum for development,” said Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine who has chronicled the Iraq and Afghan wars. Bing said the danger is that Congress is “so generous in support of our own forces today, it may not support the aid needed for progress in Afghanistan tomorrow.”

Some members of Congress are worried. The House Appropriations Committee said in its report on the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill that its members are “concerned about the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics.”

The Afghan government has made some political and military progress since 2001, but the Taliban insurgency has been reinvigorated.

Anthony H. Cordesman, another member of McChrystal’s advisory group and a national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters recently that even with military gains in the next 12 to 18 months, it would take years to reduce sharply the threat from the Taliban and other insurgent forces.

The task that the United States has taken on in Afghanistan is in many ways more difficult than the one it has encountered in Iraq, where the U.S. government has spent $684 billion in war-related funding.

In a 2008 study that ranked the weakest states in the developing world, the Brookings Institution rated Afghanistan second only to Somalia. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product in 2008 was $23 billion, with about $3 billion coming from opium production, according to the CIA’s World Factbook. Oil-producing Iraq had a GDP of $113 billion.

Afghanistan’s central government takes in roughly $890 million in annual revenue, according to the World Factbook. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pointed out that Afghanistan’s national budget cannot support the $2 billion needed today for the country’s army and police force.

Dutch Army Brig. Gen. Tom Middendorp, commander of the coalition task force in Afghanistan’s southern Uruzgan province, described the region as virtually prehistoric.

“It’s the poorest province of one of the poorest countries in the world. And if you walk through that province, it’s like walking through the Old Testament,” Middendorp told reporters recently. “There is enormous illiteracy in the province. More than 90 percent cannot write or read. So it’s very basic, what you do there. And they have had 30 years of conflict.”

Unlike in Iraq, where Obama has established a timeline for U.S. involvement, the president has not said when he would like to see troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.

White House officials emphasize that the burden is not that of the United States alone. The NATO-led force in the country has 61,000 troops from 42 countries; about 29,000 of those troops are American.

Still, military experts say the United States will not be able to shed its commitment easily.

The government has issued billions of dollars in contracts in recent years, underscoring the vast extent of work that U.S. officials are commissioning.

Among other purposes, contractors have been sought this summer to build a $25 million provincial Afghan National Police headquarters; maintain anti-personnel mine systems; design and build multimillion-dollar sections of roads; deliver by sea and air billions of dollars worth of military bulk cargo; and supervise a drug-eradication program.

One solicitation, issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, is aimed at finding a contractor to bring together Afghan economic, social, legal and political groups to help build the country’s infrastructure. The contractor would work with Afghan government officials as well as representatives from private and nongovernmental organizations to establish a way to allocate resources for new projects.

“We are looking at two decades of supplying a few billion a year to Afghanistan,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and military expert at the Brookings Institution, adding: “It’s a reasonable guess that for 20 years, we essentially will have to fund half the Afghan budget.” He described the price as reasonable, given that it may cost the United States $100 billion this year to continue fighting.

“We are creating a [long-term military aid] situation similar to the ones we have with Israel, Egypt and Jordan,” he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/12/2653487.htm
Afghanistan: Fuelling the narco-economy
By Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran

Posted Wed Aug 12, 2009 11:36am AEST
Updated Wed Aug 12, 2009 1:06pm AEST

A key security factor often overlooked in the Afghanistan debate is the simple indisputable fact that it is a narco-state, says Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran in this second instalment of a two-part series. The correspondent has been visiting Afghanistan since 1998, and says half of all economic activity is derived from narcotics.

I recently spent some time back in Kabul after an absence of five years, catching up with old acquaintances in “leadership circles” as American diplomats so quaintly put it. What surprised me was not so much the scale of the narcotics trade – Afghanistan has long supplied the bulk of the world’s opium and heroin – but that so many of Afghanistan’s potential leaders are compromised by direct involvement or corruption fuelled by this narco-economy. It felt as though sections of the government were no longer running a country but a vast criminal enterprise.

The narcotics industry has created interdependence between “legitimate” political leaders, the Taliban they claim to be fighting, and the drug barons/warlords. A few powerbrokers in Afghanistan somehow manage to fit into all three of these categories.

A new book by US journalist Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror – How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban, does a brilliant job of explaining this interdependence between the “legitimate” political class, the various insurgent groups that have been labelled with the generic Taliban brand, and of course the drug lords.

Peters has been barnstorming the US on her book tour, and it appears some senior US military officers and key figures in the Obama Administration may have been listening to her – given recent shifts in US Afghanistan policy.

Of course the US has known all along about these narcotics linkages – and in some cases encouraged them. Since 2001 sections of the US military and intelligence community have been prepared to turn a blind eye to the drug trafficking of favoured warlords and politicians in return for information on the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership.

This was particularly prevalent in 2002-03. There’s evidence suggesting that these US sponsored ‘Blind Eye’ deals enabled the drug syndicates to not only survive the critical transition of power from the Taliban to the US led invasion, but thrive under the new leadership – ultimately becoming part of the hydra-headed insurgency problem the coalition faces today. Old American Afghan hands have another term for it: blowback. See “Afghanistan – America’s Blind Eye”

I’ve seen detailed Pentagon intelligence reporting on the issue – and broadcast excerpts in a recent Foreign Correspondent report called “Afghanistan: The Bulldozer”, broadcast in Australia in June 2009.

This report highlighted the exploits of Washington’s favourite warlord, Nangarhar Provincial Governor Gul Agha Sherzai, and why the US is prepared to ignore his links to the drug trade. The US chooses not to make this information public, because if it was released, there wouldn’t be too many political leaders left untainted. But in Afghanistan, different rules apply – and US leaders again turn a “blind eye”. At the US Embassy in Kabul they call it pragmatism.

When then-Senator Barack Obama made his first visit to Afghanistan last year he bypassed President Karzai and headed straight for a briefing from “the Bulldozer” as Governor Sherzai is known, for the way he “bulldozes” his way through political problems – Afghan style.

Only now, nearly eight years into this conflict are the linkages between drugs, the insurgency and corruption finally being factored in by US commanders.

Earlier this year I visited the bustling US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) base near Kabul Airport. The DEA is ramping up paramilitary operations in Afghanistan to the point where now it even overshadows their presence in Colombia.

When I met senior DEA agents they were preparing to change strategy from targeting poppy farmers and middle men and go for the “kingpins”. But even some veteran DEA agents privately conceded that if they started rigidly applying the rule of law – as they enforce it elsewhere – Afghanistan wouldn’t have too many political leaders left.

President Hamid Karzai is one of the very few Afghan political figures I’ve met with a reputation for standing above the bog of corruption. But even Karzai’s own brother, a leading political figure in Kandahar, is tainted by alleged links to the drugs trade.

In 2003, I spent two weeks inside the Presidential Palace in Kabul filming a profile of Karzai, attempting to get a sense of the Afghanistan he was trying to build. (See “Afghanistan: Karzai’s War”) I accompanied Karzai when he first flew to Islamabad to confront Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf over the initial cross border incursions.

Unfortunately Karzai’s credibility was immediately undermined by the “form” – to use police parlance – of some senior members of his delegation. It was difficult watching Karzai stand there in Musharraf’s headquarters, attempting to read the riot act to the Pakistani leadership when everyone in the room knew that members of his own team were heavily involved in cross border drug trafficking and moving millions of dollars around on behalf of the Taliban.

Of course Pakistan’s intelligence agency the ISI was – and still is – heavily implicated, but that’s another story. Perhaps the US-led coalition can press on and achieve a costly military victory over the Taliban. But unless this recent shift in US political strategy works, once the victory parade is over, the American generals will still be handing over control of the country to a political leadership indelibly stained by the past.

As Thomas Schweich, US Ambassador for Counternarcotics in Afghanistan 2007-08 told me, “you can’t look for lilywhite purity in Afghanistan; it doesn’t exist by our standards”.

Since 2001, many thousands of Afghans have died, as have nearly 1,300 coalition troops, including 11 Australians. The tragedy for Afghanistan is that it’s taken nearly eight years for America’s generals to acknowledge what was obvious from the first day their troops marched through the opium poppy fields – that drugs, the Taliban and the corrupt Afghan leadership are all linked.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/13+taliban+cant+be+defeated+if+drug+money+continues+us+report-za-06
Taliban can’t be defeated if drug money continues By Our Correspondent
Wednesday, 12 Aug, 2009 | 05:05 AM PST
WASHINGTON: Senior US military and civilian officials believe the Taliban cannot be defeated and good government in Afghanistan cannot be established without cutting off the money generated by Afghanistan’s opium industry, says a US Senate report released on Tuesday.

The report notes that the illegal Afghan drug industry supplies more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin and generates an estimated $3 billion a year in profits.

The report also includes, what it describes as ‘an overdue acknowledgement’, that ‘the drug situation has deteriorated sharply under the stewardship of the government of President Hamid Karzai, the United States and Nato-led International Security Assistance Force.’

The report titled ‘Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link between drug traffickers and insurgents,’ was issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, examining the new US counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan.

The report points out that in 2004 and 2005 the US helped negotiate an agreement for aerial spraying in southern Afghanistan. President Karzai agreed tentatively to a pilot project.

But the Afghan cabinet rejected the idea outright, banning all forms of aerial spraying. ‘Some of them were protecting the source of their own wealth,’ the report quotes a State Department official, identified only as Charles, as saying.

The report notes that ‘nowhere is the corruption worse than in the huge payoffs from drug traffickers’. A frequent target of accusations of drug dealing is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the powerful head of the Kandahar Provincial Council and one of the president’s brothers, the report adds.

The US Senate panel notes that stories about him are legendary – how Afghan police and military commanders who seize drugs in southern Afghanistan are told by Ahmed Wali to return them to the traffickers, how he arranged the imprisonment of a US drug informant who had tipped the Americans to a drug-laden truck near Kabul, how his accusers often turn up dead.

The report points out: ‘Questions have been raised in the past about whether the United States has the political will to go after influential members of the government.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/10/afghan-drug-traffiker-hitlist
Pentagon puts Afghan drug-traffickers on hitlist
Targets to be ‘captured or killed’ in attempt to disrupt Taliban finances
Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 August 2009 11.24 BST
Fifty Afghans who are suspected of drug trafficking and have ties with the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, according to a congressional study to be released this week, the New York Times reported yesterday .

The move, reflecting a shift in US counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan, is certain to provoke controversy.

US commanders, who described it an essential part of a plan to disrupt the flow of drug money helping to finance the Taliban insurgency, are reported to have told Congress they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law.

However, targeting individuals in a deliberate assassination policy is regarded by many Nato countries, and by many lawyers and military advisers in Britain, as unlawful.

“This was a hard sell in Nato,” said retired General John Craddock, Nato’s supreme allied commander until he retired in July, the New York Times reported.

In interviews with the Senate foreign relations committee, two US generals serving in Afghanistan said major traffickers with known links to the insurgency had been put on the “joint integrated prioritised target list”. That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.

Currently, they said, there were about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff.

The question of how to deal with the opium poppy harvest and drug trade in Afghanistan, the source of 90% of the world’s heroin, has been a highly controversial issue for years. European allies, and Britain in particular, opposed America’s initial plan to destroy poppy crops – a policy British military commanders argued would simply drive more Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, was opposed to targeting drug barons on the grounds that it would anger warlords he wanted as allies.

More recently, the US and Britain have come round to the view that their special forces and intelligence agencies should target drug barons and their laboratories.

Several individuals suspected of ties to drug trafficking have already been apprehended, and others have been killed by the US military since the new policy went into effect earlier this year, a senior military official told the New York Times.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/10/afghanistan-40-years
The military’s message to Afghanistan
In saying we could be there for 40 years, Sir David Richards is trying to tell Afghans foreign troops won’t leave them in the lurch

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 August 2009 14.12 BST

“The army’s role will evolve, but the whole process might take as long as 30 to 40 years. There is absolutely no chance of Nato pulling out.” So says Sir David Richards, the new head of the army.

He cannot mean that British soldiers will still be engaged in fighting the Taliban in 30 or 40 years’ time. More likely, he means that Britain, and British officials, if not armed troops patrolling the towns and villages, will then be in Afghanistan engaged in civil projects – economic, societal, administrative.

Richards, like Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, his predecessor who stands down at the end of this month, believes, in common with US defence chiefs, that more forces are needed now to fight the Taliban. He also knows that the message that must get out – to all Afghans as well as the Taliban – is that foreign forces won’t leave them in the lurch.

Britain is involved in a war in Afghanistan, he says, echoing warnings expressed recently by Dannatt. But it is a multi-faceted conflict. “It will take time,” he told the Times newspaper in an interview. He added: “This is nation-building – not the starry-eyed type, but nation-building nonetheless. It is not just reconstruction; jobs and simple governance that works are key, and there has to be a strong reconciliation element to the latter.” It is in that context that he spoke of the process taking up to 40 years.

Richards is no stranger to Afghanistan. He was head of the Nato-led international security assistance force, Isaf, in 2006. In that role, he was already trying to work with tribal leaders.

“The country and its people have entered my bloodstream,” he told me earlier this year when I interviewed him for The Great Game, a series of plays and verbatim interviews at London’s Tricycle Theatre.

He added: “It’s the people, with their exotic blend of great kindness through to terrifying savagery, and everything else in between, that makes this country so fascinating, almost intoxicating, to the outsider. It is a place that historically has lured adventurer and intellectual alike and, misunderstood, has been the cause of many a great nation’s military catastrophe.”

He continued: “And do not forget that these people, in and since inflicting the last of these defeats – on the Soviet Union – have been through hell and back over two complete generations. This, their reward for playing a key role in the collapse of communism and the liberation of hundreds of millions of people in eastern Europe; something for which they got precious little credit then or since.”

Richards said the Taliban ranged from hardline militant Islamists through to drug barons and alienated tribal chiefs, but composed a very small part of the population; probably around 5% at most and they are all from one ethnic group.

Military commanders repeatedly say there is no military solution to the conflict. They have been pulling their hair out at what they regard as the failure of others – including other British government departments such as the Foreign Office and Department for International Development – to get a grip and contribute to a settlement, if not a solution, in Afghanistan.

The message appears to be getting across. But there are likely to be many more military deaths before we will be able to tell the difference.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/22/afghanistan-helicopters
Time for honesty over Afghan missionThe wonder is not that army top brass are now openly calling for more resources, but that they have not done so before

Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 July 2009 13.00 BST

“We definitely don’t have enough helicopters,” said Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister, in a parting shot before he leaves the government at the end of the week (although he later backtracked).

So what’s new? For years, British generals in London and British commanders in Afghanistan have been calling for more helicopters, just as they have been saying Land Rovers are not robust enough to withstand the impact of roadside bombs, and that Nato is not deploying enough troops there.

The wonder is not that Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the army, and Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the defence staff, are now openly calling for more resources, but that they have not done so before.

Ever since Britain deployed thousands of troops in Helmand province in 2006 in a so-called peacekeeping mission, they have been frustrated by a mixture of wishful thinking and penny-pinching. Helicopters are hitting the headlines now because more British soldiers are being killed.

Gordon Brown says Afghanistan is the vital front line against terrorism. The message is that British soldiers are dying in the defence of Britain’s national security. Ministers have admitted privately their concern that if they said soldiers were dying to give the Afghans a better life, it would not cut much ice with public opinion (and anyway, there is no evidence that it is the case).

The government is not prepared to back up its rhetoric about front lines and terrorism with practical support. Brown said more helicopters would not have saved the lives of those who were killed last week. He was correct in that five soldiers were blown up while on foot patrol – part of the “hearts and minds” mission being carried out with Afghan troops. He was at it again during his Downing Street press conference today – referring only to the current operation, Panther’s Claw, and the deaths last week. But the fact remains, as commanders repeatedly point out, more helicopters would provide British troops with greater maneuverability, give them more options, and avoid moving by road, and therefore avoid roadside bombs.

Alistair Darling, the chancellor, is equally disingenuous. “You’ve got to listen to what the chiefs of staff tell us,” he said without a hint of a smile. He suggests in an interview with Tribune magazine that he had given everything the army had asked for. Yet, his officials had just been insisting that the MoD must now pay for urgent equipment needed for Afghanistan orders previously paid for by the Treasury’s contingency reserve.

It is time for more honesty and straight talking. In a few days’ time, Gen Sir David Richards, will take over from Dannatt.

He is unlikely to give ministers an easier time than Dannatt has of late. He was at the forefront of those asking for more helicopters when he commanded Nato forces in Afghanistan back in 2006.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6788062.ece?token=null&print=yes&randnum=1250150369196
August 8, 2009

Troubleshooter: General Sir David Richards
In a few weeks, General Sir David Richards takes over as head of the British Army – and the challenges he faces could not be greater. A self-confessed “seat-of-the-pants” soldier with a strong humanitarian streak, he discusses nation-building, terrorism and military shopping lists, and explains why Britain cannot afford to walk away from Afghanistan
Janine di Giovanni

David Richards loves Afghanistan. The soldier who, at the end of this month, takes over as head of the British Army as Chief of the General Staff, is meeting and greeting on a whirlwind three-day tour of British troops and training facilities. If he is exhausted, he does not show it: he has not slept in 24 hours, but he shakes hands, visits old friends in the Afghan ministries, and speaks to young Afghan cadets with the sort of focus that commanders-in-chief rarely have time to give. He has form here, having been commander of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force in Kabul in 2006, the first British officer to command American forces since the Second World War.

“What time do you get up in the morning?” he asks one cadet. “4am to pray? Really? British soldiers don’t get up at that time.” He once said, “Afghanistan and its people have entered my bloodstream”, and it is clear that his bond with this country, which will define his years at the helm, goes beyond the purely professional. “Why should we care about Afghanistan?” he says, climbing into his armoured car. “Because we have to. The Afghans have been to hell and back, and we have made promises.” He mentions a recent play at the Tricycle Theatre in London, called The Great Game. A David Richards character spoke up about how to save the country. “The actor was very good, but he was a little short,” he says wryly.
Man of action

On August 28, Richards, who is 57 and calls himself “a seat-of-the-pants soldier”, inherits a massive, politically charged­ campaign in Afghanistan. He is no pen-pusher; he believes in troop surges, in action, in making things happen. He is a field soldier, beloved by his men, journalists, aid workers and, most importantly, the people on the ground. He is outspoken, honest, politically astute, chatty (in Sierra Leone, journalists nicknamed him “Gabby Richards”) and effective. He has a sense of humour. He also has a big heart.

I have seen him in action numerous times, but perhaps Sierra Leone was the most dramatic. There, in 1999-2000, during the bloody attack by rebels on the capital of Freetown, Richards, then a brigadier and commander of a joint task force, almost single-handedly convinced Tony Blair to restore order to the West African country. Reportedly, the Sierra Leoneans were so keen on him, there was talk of “David Richards for President”. In East Timor in August 1999, while Australian UN forces fumbled over how to handle the outbreak of violence and killing following the referendum, Richards and a small band of soldiers (including Gurkhas, of whom he is the Colonel Commandant) instilled a calm and confidence within the terrified population. That is where I first met him, living with his men in a run-down house by a mountain path.

“I genuinely care about these people,” he said at the time. “They are terrified. We are soldiers. We should protect them.”

David Richards never expected to become a general. He has always been thought of as something of a risk-taker, and risk-takers don’t go very far in institutions like the Army. He got the nickname Gabby Richards among reporters for his willingness to brief them. But he did so in a smart way; he needed us and we needed him. And he did “put his neck on the line” as he calls it, in Sierra Leone, where he was sent in January 1999.

It was a terrible, brutal time. The rebel Revolutionary United Front soldiers had nearly taken Freetown. Government forces were running amok. Richards arrived and, within weeks, restored order to the country. “Why did I fall in love with Sierra Leone? It was a perfect little war,” he says one morning when we meet for breakfast at the Wolseley in London with his wife, Caroline, who runs the Afghan Appeal Fund (“She is my conscience”).

“We did not lose a single soldier. There were clearly defined goodies and baddies. In the end, we did good.” Richards was sent to run a simple evacuation of civilians, but after a few weeks of witnessing child soldiers, mutilated civilians and burnt-down villages, the torment of the people of Sierra Leone “had got into my blood”.

He went back to Britain, cornered Tony Blair and Robin Cook, and convinced them to let him run a bigger intervention. He got £10 million, subsequently doubled, and went back to West Africa to finish the job properly. As a reporter who was covering the conflict, one who had spent years in Bosnia seeing the West do nothing to help civilians, I found this unthinkable: a military official had fought to help restore order to a small West African country that had no strategic significance. It was a purely humanitarian act.

“I went back like a conquering hero,” he says today. He is only half joking. “There are times in your career when things work out and that was one of them.”

Richards did not have much to work with, but he ended up securing Freetown and brokering an umbrella alliance between all the weakened opposition forces, including an infamous, rowdy paramilitary unit called the West Side Boys, the hopeless Sierra Leonean army, and the Kamajors, a mystic tribe of hunters/soldiers who believed that bullets bounced off them. They were a motley crew, to say the least. Richards called them “the Unholy Alliance”.

Caroline Richards has often had to remain in England while her husband has been away, involved in some of the most dangerous conflicts in the world. “You worry like an invisible person behind a wall of glass,” she says. She remembers sitting at home one day during the Sierra Leone crisis, listening to the radio. “The BBC had someone on the news, a professor of West African studies, saying it would be impossible to secure Sierra Leone; the jungles were impenetrable.”

I was on the outskirts of Freetown when Richards and his men did, in fact, secure the city, as well as the airport, and restored calm to the terrified civilians.

During the civil war, these Africans had witnessed their fellow villagers getting their arms hacked off at the wrist or the elbow, and their children being abducted, raped and driven into warfare as child soldiers. It was one of the most miserable wars I have seen.

I remember sleeping in a bush with a family who had got word that they could go home to Freetown. One of them grabbed my hand: “Is it true there is this Englishman there, a soldier, and they say he is going to save us?” That is when the “Richards for president” motto started going around. “Six weeks after we started,” Richards says proudly, “we saved a nation.”
Politically savvy

Saving Afghanistan will take a little longer than six weeks. Since Richards’ visit there in May, the British Army has suffered terrible losses – 22 soldiers were killed in July alone – and a row has rumbled through Whitehall and erupted beyond as the outgoing Army chief, General Sir Richard Dannatt, went noisily public with his criticisms of Government funding and the implicit suggestion that the shortage of equipment – the “helicopter issue” – was leading to loss of life. Dannatt, who has not enjoyed the smoothest of relationships with government, broke the unspoken rule of keeping such arguments behind closed doors, no doubt with the slash-and-burn forthrightness of one who is leaving office.

General Sir David Richards’ approach is likely to be different. Although he is an action soldier, with a string of highly successful campaigns to his name, he is also a politically savvy operator. Of this conflict, which so needs to retain the support of the British public, he says: “It will take time. This is nation-building – not the starry-eyed type, but nation-building nonetheless. It is not just reconstruction; jobs and simple governance that works are key, and there has to be a strong reconciliation element to the latter. The Army’s role will evolve, but the whole process might take as long as 30 to 40 years. There is absolutely no chance of Nato pulling out.”

Richards strongly believes in his soldiers, “and, most importantly, they believe in what they are doing”, he says. “I’m in regular contact with our troops in Afghanistan. Knowing them well, I am not surprised, but their morale is high. What they want to do is succeed in their mission. Firstly, because they believe in it. Secondly, to ensure those who have made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our nation have not done so in vain. The last thing they want is for us all to go wobbly on them.

“Nor should you think the Taleban are finding it easy. We know they are not. We can and are out-fighting them.”

When asked about the charges of Army under-resourcing, Richards picks his words carefully. “Casualties, self-evidently, are caused by one’s enemy. It is impossible to say whether having more equipment of a particular kind would lead to less casualties, and pretty fruitless speculating about it. The enemy’s tactics will always reflect, and try to exploit, how we operate – my American comrades first taught me the adage ‘The enemy has a vote’ – and our own tactics must reflect the equipment and troop numbers we have. It is a truism to state that the more we have, the more we can do.”

Asked if he’ll be presenting a “shopping list” for military equipment on his first day in office, he answers: “I will not be presenting a ‘shopping list’,” and goes on to describe in highly diplomatic terms how he is looking forward to working with his fellow chiefs, under the Chief of the Defence Staff, and with government ministers “in ensuring we continue to respond flexibly and quickly to the evolving requirements of our campaign in Afghanistan”.
Afghan loyalties

Kabul is a mess. I have not been back since the fall of the Taleban in 2001 and touring the city with Richards and his team, I am shocked by the lack of progress in the infrastructure, in the roads, in the security. Where is all the development money going? But Richards is pretty loyal to his Afghan friends in the ministries (he is especially close to the minister of defence, Abdul Rahim Wardak, and when we go to visit, he gets a red carpet laid out and a military parade).

Part of his campaign is to train Afghans to fight their own war. “We all need to continue to resource the campaign properly,” he says, “and understand that this war – and be quite clear, it is a war, but we have not collectively understood this because it does not fit Second World War stereotypes – will continue to require single-minded commitment from us all. As we build the Afghan army and police, so our military involvement will decline, but we are not yet at that stage.”

We go to numerous official visits in Kabul, doing the Afghan thing of drinking green tea and eating nuts and dried fruit. Richards carries himself with a lack of grandeur, and chats to drivers, cleaners, young soldiers? everyone. I am not surprised when a high-ranking officer tells me later that evening at a party for the general: “Richards is more than a soldier. He is a statesman, in the finest tradition. He should go into politics. In fact, he should be prime minister.”

“He’s a rare breed,” agrees Daoud Sultanzoi, an Afghan MP and friend, who met Richards in Kabul in 2006. “The thing about David is he has skills with real life. He really is interested in making a difference here. He was forward-looking on Afghanistan long before it became fashionable to think of Afghanistan.” He also points out that Richards is much “warmer” than the average Brit, possibly one of the reasons he is regarded so highly there. President Karzai once told him: “You think like an Afghan; you are one of us.”

“I have a moral shred, maybe it’s a vulnerability,” Richards says later at the British Embassy, where he is staying. Now he is drinking a regular cup of English tea, with milk, and the exhaustion is beginning to show on his face. One of his aides urges him to take a break before his next round of meetings, but he brushes it off. “I believe in realpolitik, but you can combine it with being a soldier.” He pauses, and seems, for an instant, to grow emotional. “I feel for these people.” Also, he adds: “If Nato fails in its first ground operation, then moral authority and confidence would certainly be undermined.”

But there is no doubting the toughness of the mission. Operation Panther’s Claw, the five-week campaign that saw 3,000 coalition troops drive 500 Taleban from one area of Helmand province, has been completed successfully, but at great human cost. Tim Radford, the brigadier leading Task Force Helmand, has said that the existing troops cannot mount further significant operations without reinforcements.

But we can win, Richards says. “I believe strongly that it is winnable. Demanding, certainly, but winnable. And when people say, ‘How can you use the term “win”?’ I retort, ‘Well, I will certainly know if we have lost.’ Can you imagine the intoxicating effect on militants if we were defeated? Can you be certain there would not be an export of terrorism to the streets of London? It’s a risk we should be very wary of taking.

“But, of course, the end will be difficult to define; it won’t be neat and clear-cut like the end of some old-fashioned inter-state war might have been. And, as I have said many times, everyone involved needs to realise it will take a long time and considerable investment. We must remember, though, that we are not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland. ”
Always on the ground

Richards follows the counterinsurgency theories of the Australian scholar-soldier, Colonel David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla and an adviser to General David Petraeus. Kilcullen believes that terrorists recruit local people by default, not by ideology: by infiltrating their villages, living with them, marrying into their tribes? thus earning their loyalty.

“People are not born guerrillas, they become so by accident,” Richards says, and adds that the Taleban is not a “Che Guevara movement where people fight for liberation. They are fighting simply because they are in an area where there is fighting.”

So Richards’ work in Afghanistan has always been on the ground, not from a desk in Kabul or London. It is widely regarded that his past mission in Afghanistan came at a very difficult time. And he left having done what the Americans failed to do: work from the inside, with the Afghan people, in the Kilcullen mode.

Ariane Quentier, an expert on the region and author of the upcoming book, Afghan Chronicles, was working for the Afghan government, disarming tribal leaders, when Richards arrived in Kabul in May 2006. “Richards did not inherit an easy mission,” she says. “In fact, the spring of 2006 was the worst time of fighting, particularly in the south.” Richards was also presiding over a significant increase in troops, as well as Nato taking over the entire country. This included the south and Helmand, where British troops were to be deployed.

It was a time of military re-grouping, and during the Nato takeover, Richards decided to take the opportunity to change the strategy. “This was not altogether popular with the Americans,” says Quentier. “The British view of how to conduct a war was very different to theirs. Richards adopted a softer approach: talks with tribes versus massive use of force and special forces.”

According to off-the-record reports in Kabul, Richards’ work with tribal leaders – particularly in Musa Qala, where he brokered negotiations between the Taleban and Nato – was highly “innovative”, if controversial. “I was talking to Pashtun elders as well as Afghan officials,” he says. “The elders wanted to be trusted. They wanted us to distinguish between them and the warlords.” He also established the Joint Afghan-Pakistan Action Group in December 2006, getting Presidents Karzai and Musharraf to sit down together. “This is why he is considered a statesman,” one diplomat told me. “Like MacArthur in Japan or Mountbatten in India.”

However, Quentier says that, ultimately, Richards was too honest and outspoken to get along with the Americans. “The British Foreign Office was also trying not to undermine its relationship with Pakistan, in order to fight terrorism in the UK hand in hand with the Pakistanis,” she says.

Quentier adds that when Richards left, he was replaced by an American general, Dan McNeil, “so Washington’s views could not be disputed any more”. But Richards did not go away. He always said he would come back to Afghanistan, and now, as chief of the Army, and at a very crucial time, he will.
A military family

David Richards was born in Egypt in 1952. “It was,” he says, “a military background, a stable background.” His father, Jim Richards, was an officer, as were most of his family: brother, cousins, nephews. As a child, he grew up travelling with his parents throughout Egypt and Cyprus, which perhaps gave him his first taste of wanderlust; anyone who knows Richards will say he is happiest not sitting behind a desk pushing paper, but in the field.

He was brought up to treat everyone the same way. “My parents were not wealthy, but compared to the people in the villages where we lived, they were. But everyone sat at our table for coffee: labourers, workers? It’s the reason, perhaps, why I really like people.”

Richards says, in a sense, he was born institutionalised. “I started in a military family, then was sent to boarding school at 10.” At 13, he went to Eastbourne College, where “I was one of those sad bastards who learnt to lead at school.” He went through a brief “rebellious” period during which his schoolmaster took him by the ear and told him, “Richards, you will either rise to the challenge or you’ll get the sack.” He rose to the challenge. He ended up becoming head boy, captain of the rugby team and senior under officer in the Cadet Corps.

“I was not academic,” he says drily, “but not stupid. In that era, being a good chap mattered more than university.” However, he briefly bucked the family tradition and toyed with being a tree surgeon (“I like wood”), a journalist or a racing-car driver, before finally choosing to study international relations at Cardiff University. But it wasn’t long before he reverted to the military. “I thought hard about it and decided the Army was all I wanted to do.” At Cardiff, he met Caroline, who was studying fine art, and they married on April Fool’s Day, 1978. They have two daughters, Joanna and Pippa.

“We were both riding,” she recalls, “and someone said, ‘You must meet the Colonel’ – that was his nickname then, the Colonel.” Richards looks embarrassed: “Don’t tell her that,” he says.

Over breakfast, I ask Caroline if Richards ever had long hair. She laughs into her orange juice. “God, no! He missed the Sixties counterculture completely. Everyone had hair down to here” – she points to her shoulders – “and David had sideburns.” Richards adds, “My sister Jan always said I went directly from childhood to adulthood and missed adolescence entirely. Except for one day on Carnaby Street in the Sixties.”

But then, he was focusing on something else. His career was always stellar. He was first commissioned into the Royal Artillery while still only 18, before going to university. From there he gained his Green Beret at the Commando Training Centre, attended Sandhurst and was posted to his first regiment: 29 Commando Regiment RA.

“I finished on a Friday and by Monday, I was on a plane to Singapore.” He was, he says, the “last serving soldier to have served in the tail end of the colonial era”. Then came postings which gave him the experience to work in Afghanistan, Timor and Africa. Among them was Northern Ireland. Perhaps it was those old wars that gave Richards the ability to trust his judgment – vital qualifications for a commanding officer tackling what he calls “the new wars”. These are the conflicts following 9/11, where counterinsurgency tactics are of the utmost importance. “If I were fighting the Cold War now,” he says, “I would do it over the internet.”

At a party for Richards I attended in Kabul, someone said to me: “He would be a great politician. But don’t write that. In fact, don’t write a hagiography of him. The Army won’t like it.” (Richards was due at a British Embassy dinner for Afghan ministers, but he later said, shyly, that he stayed late at the party with us because he was happiest being with “my men”.)

A diplomat told me: “Richards believes in what he does. He has passion, and he works with the people on the ground. So obviously, after this, he should go into politics.”

But first, he has three years as chief of the Army. It is a role coming at a crucial time for the world, and for Britain. We are in the midst of a global recession; Afghanistan is growing more perilous; British troops are weary, and the tax-paying public are anxious about funding a seemingly never-ending conflict. Iran and Pakistan are flaring. Terrorism is not contained. And it is a highly political job.

But Richards loves challenges. As he told me once in Sierra Leone, after he got his orders from London to go ahead with the intervention: “There is nothing better than being a troubleshooter.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124986154654218153.html
ASIA NEWS AUGUST 10, 2009 Taliban Now Winning
U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN in Kabul and PETER SPIEGEL in Washington
 
Associated Press
 
U.S. soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade take position next to Sari Ghundi village as they patrol near the Pakistani border in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency’s spiritual home.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he is to deliver to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to better protect Afghan civilians from rising levels of Taliban violence and intimidation. The coming redeployments are the clearest manifestation to date of Gen. McChrystal’s strategy for Afghanistan, which puts a premium on safeguarding the Afghan population rather than hunting down militants.

Gen. McChrystal said the Taliban are moving beyond their traditional strongholds in southern Afghanistan to threaten formerly stable areas in the north and west.

The militants are mounting sophisticated attacks that combine roadside bombs with ambushes by small teams of heavily armed militants, causing significant numbers of U.S. fatalities, he said. July was the bloodiest month of the war for American and British forces, and 12 more American troops have already been killed in August.

“It’s a very aggressive enemy right now,” Gen. McChrystal said in the interview Saturday at his office in a fortified NATO compound in Kabul. “We’ve got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It’s hard work.”

In an effort to regain the upper hand, Gen. McChrystal said he will redeploy some troops currently in sparsely populated areas to areas with larger concentrations of Afghan civilians, while some of the 4,000 American troops still to arrive will be deployed to Kandahar.

 The Obama administration is in the midst of an Afghan buildup that will push U.S. troop levels here to a record 68,000 by year end. There are roughly an additional 30,000 troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and other allies.

Gen. McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, had a request outstanding for 10,000 more troops. Gen. McChrystal said he hadn’t decided whether to request additional U.S. forces. “We’re still working it,” he said.

Several officials who have taken part in Gen. McChrystal’s 60-day review of the war effort said they expect him to ultimately request as many as 10,000 more troops — a request many observers say will be a tough sell at the White House, where several senior administration officials have said publicly that they want to hold off on sending more troops until the impact of the initial influx of 21,000 reinforcements can be gauged.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers about $4 billion a month.

Gen. McChrystal also said he would direct a “very significant” expansion of the Afghan army and national police — which would double in size under the plans being finalized by senior U.S. military officers here — and import a tactic first used in Iraq by moving U.S. troops onto small outposts in individual Afghan neighborhoods and villages.

One person briefed on the assessment said it will call for boosting the Afghan army to 240,000 from 135,000 and the Afghan police to 160,000 from 82,000.

One official noted the emerging plans to double the size of the Afghan army and police will require thousands of additional U.S. trainers. The U.S. will also need more troops if security conditions in north and west Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, the official said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the math,” he said. “The demand and the supply don’t line up, even with the new troops that are coming in.”

In earlier phases of the assessment process, Gen. McChrystal’s staff conducted a “troop-to-task” analysis that weighed increasing U.S. troop levels by two brigades — each such unit has 3,500 to 5,000 troops — or by as many as eight brigades, according to officials familiar with the matter. A middle option of four to six brigades was also considered, these people said.

The prospect of more troops rankles some of Gen. McChrystal’s advisers, who worry the American military footprint in Afghanistan is already too large.

“How many people do you bring in before the Afghans say, ‘You’re acting like the Russians’?” said one senior military official, referring to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. “That’s the big debate going on in the headquarters right now.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said publicly during his campaign for the approaching Aug. 20 elections that he wants to negotiate new agreements giving the Afghan government more control over the conduct of the foreign troops currently in the country.

Gen. McChrystal, however, says too many troops aren’t a concern. “I think it’s what you do, not how many you are. It’s how the force conducts itself.”

Regardless of how he resolves the internal debate on troop numbers, Gen. McChrystal’s coming report won’t include any specific requests for more U.S. troops. Those numbers would instead be detailed in a follow-on document that is set to be delivered to Washington a few weeks after the assessment.

The timing of Gen. McChrystal’s primary assessment remains in flux. It was initially due in mid-August, but the commander was summoned to a secret meeting in Belgium last week with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told to take more time. Military officials say the assessment will now be released sometime after the Aug. 20 vote.

The shift came amid signs of growing U.S. unease about the direction of the war effort. Initial assessments delivered to Gen. McChrystal last month warned that the Taliban were strengthening their control over Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan.

 American forces have been waging a major offensive in the neighboring southern province of Helmand, the center of Afghanistan’s drug trade. Some U.S. military officials believe the Taliban have taken advantage of the American preoccupation with Helmand to infiltrate Kandahar and set up shadow local governments and courts throughout the city.

“Helmand is a sideshow,” said the senior military official briefed on the analysis. “Kandahar is the capital of the south [and] that’s why they want it.”

Gen. McChrystal said in the interview that he planned to shift more U.S. troops to Kandahar to bolster the Canadian forces that currently have primary security responsibility for the region. Hundreds of American troops equipped with mobile armored vehicles known as Strykers are already in the province.

“It’s important and so we’re going to do whatever we got to do to ensure that Kandahar is secure,” he said. “With the arrival of the new U.S. forces we’ll have the ability to put some more combat power in the area.”

Moving forces from neighboring Helmand is nearly impossible, because those troops have already set up forward bases and recruited help from local tribal leaders, who have been promised American backing. As a result, the additional American troop deployments to Kandahar have only begun in recent days, with the arrival of new reinforcements that will continue into the fall.

Gen. McChrystal defended the decision to focus first on Helmand. The current operation, one of the largest since the start of the war in 2001, was meant to disrupt the Taliban’s lucrative drug operations there, he said.

The armed group reaps tens of millions of dollars annually from the sale of opium from Helmand, and the commander said he wants to have troops on the ground before local farmers start to plant their next batch of poppies in November. The U.S. is working to persuade Helmand’s farmers to replace their poppy fields with wheat and fruit.

The roughly 4,000 Marines in Helmand have been charged with putting Gen. McChrystal’s thinking about counterinsurgency into practice. They are trying to build local relationships by launching small development and reconstruction projects.

Gen. McChrystal said his new strategy had to show clear results within roughly 12 months to prevent public support for the war from evaporating in both the U.S. and Afghanistan.

“This is a period where people are really looking to see which way this is going to go,” he said. “It’s the critical and decisive moment.”

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com and Peter Spiegel at peter.spiegel@wsj.com
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/taliban_winning_in_afghanistan.asp
Taliban Winning in Afghanistan?
Yesterday’s article in the Wall Street Journal with the attention-getting headline “Taliban Now Winning” in Afghanistan has generated a lot of controversy, and according to some people I’ve spoken to, some anger in the Pentagon. Jim Hanson at Blackfive rightly noted yesterday that there was little to back up the headline.
They quote McChrystal directly many times throughout the piece but somehow this bit is absent quotes and I think they may be mischaracterizing what he actually said. If he actually believes they have gained the upper hand, that would be quite significant, but it seems more likely he said they have gained ground.
Hanson smartly followed up his suspicions about the WSJ article with an email to the ISAF Public Affairs team, and here is what he got back from Lieutenant Colonel Tadd Sholtis, McChrystal’s public affairs officer:
Jim–I sat in on the interview, and the Journal article overstated Gen McChrystal’s position. The Commander did not say the Taliban was winning in his interview, as suggested by the headline. Asked by the reporter if the Taliban had the upper hand, he explained that International Security Assistance Forces are facing an aggressive enemy, employing complex tactics, that has gained momentum in some parts of Afghanistan. During the course of the interview he also observed that ISAF has had some success in reversing the initiative, and that insurgents in Afghanistan face their own long-term problems in terms of public support, group cohesiveness and their ability to sustain morale and fighting capacity. There was much more nuance to his analysis than made it into the Journal article.

Tadd

TADD SHOLTIS, LTC, USAF (OF-4)
Public Affairs Officer for the Commander, ISAF
Headquarters, International Security Assistance Force
There are plenty of problems in Afghanistan, but the public is done a disservice when attention-grabbing headlines misrepresent the severity of the problem. A more accurate description of the situation would be a stalemate, but that wouldn’t grab your attention in a headline.

Posted by Bill Roggio on August 11, 2009 01:39 PM