PRESS TV ~ Iran
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:14:26 GMT

Iran's Majlis speaker says Tehran will lodge a complaint to international circles and the United Nations against US 'illegal and criminal' attitude towards Iranian diplomats held in Iraq.

"The US committed criminal acts by exerting pressure on Iranian diplomats and keeping them in solitary prison for a lengthy period of time," said Ali Larijani in a Tuesday meeting with diplomats who were released some three months ago after being kept in Iraq under US custody without charge.

"Iran's Majlis and the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission will certainly pursue the case by lodging a complaint to the UN," he added.

"The global system allows the US to violate all international regulations.”

In January 2007, US troops stormed the Iranian consulate in the northern Kurdish city of Arbil, seizing the consulate's computers, documents and staff, including five diplomats. Two diplomats were later released.

The three remaining diplomats were released in July 2009 after two and a half years in prison, in line with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq.

Under the terms of the agreement, the US military had to deliver more than 1,500 prisoners including the non-Iraqi nationals in its custody to the Baghdad government.

At the time, US authorities claimed the men were accused of arming and training Iraqi militants but the Iranian diplomats were never charged.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has passed a $626 billion Pentagon funding bill that would bring the tab for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to more than $1 trillion.

The measure passed by a 93-7 vote. It would also ban outright any transfer of accused enemy combatants from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility into the United States. Current law permits transfer of detainees to face trial or go to prison.

Afghanistan patrol shows limits of U.S. equipment, supplies

snip

The mission seemed to be nearing a Taliban stronghold. Commanders made plans for the troops to bed down in the compound, and push forward in the morning.

After more than a dozen hours in the field, however, many soldiers had run out of water; some had been dry since midafternoon. "When you don't have water within about two hours, soldiers start going mentally and physically downhill," Rickman said.

The soldiers needed a night resupply, and that would require the Afghan army to send two small trucks into the verdant zone filled with bottled water. That was something that the Afghans weren't willing to do, given the risk of buried bombs.

Reluctantly, the commanders decided to return to the outpost where the day's mission began. The soldiers would regroup to search for Taliban on another day.

Ghaza Baba
(AFP) – 15 hours ago

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan's army Wednesday said it had killed a top aide of fugitive Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah, as they continued their hunt for militant chieftains in the northwest Swat valley.

Nisar Ahmed, also known as Ghazi Baba, one of 15 Swat insurgents commanding a 10 million rupee (120,000 dollar) bounty offered by authorities in May, was killed in a clash outside the valley's main town on Wednesday, the army said.

"After a tip from an informant, the forces surrounded the house of Nisar Ahmed to arrest him but he resisted and started firing on troops," said Major Mushtaq Khan, a spokesman for the army-run Swat Media Centre. Snip

The military says the area is clear and most of the two million people who fled their homes have returned, but sporadic outbreaks of violence continue, while some fear the Swat Taliban are regrouping elsewhere in the northwest.
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Furthest from him whom reason hath equaled, force hath made supreme above his equals.

By Waheedullah Massoud (AFP) – 3 hours ago

KABUL — A huge suicide car bomb struck near the Indian embassy in Kabul on Thursday, killing at least 12 people and injuring 83 in the latest in a wave of deadly attacks on the Afghan capital, officials said.

Windows were blown from dozens of shops and survivors staggered around the bloodied streets in the heavily fortified central diplomatic area, after the fifth suicide strike in Kabul in two months.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the blast bore all the hallmarks of the Taliban, who are battling to topple the Western-backed government.

"As a result of a suicide car bomb attack today, 12 people were martyred and 83 were wounded. Most of the casualties are civilians," interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary told AFP.

In a statement, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the perpetrators "barbaric" and said: "This is a terrorist attack, and an obvious attack on defenceless Afghan civilians."

Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said in New Delhi that his country's fortress-like embassy was "obviously" the intended target

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Few militants driven by religion, reports say

The Boston Globe, By Bryan Bender, October 9

WASHINGTON - Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes, according to summaries of new US intelligence reports.

Some of the major insurgent groups, including one responsible for a spate of recent American casualties, actually opposed the Taliban’s harsh Islamic government in Afghanistan during the 1990s, according to the reports, described by US officials under the condition they not be identified.

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’

US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

Number of Afghan insurgents grow rapidly since 2006
www.chinaview.cn 2009-10-10 04:43:25

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- The number of Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan has grown rapidly from 7,000 to 25,000 since 2006, according to a new U.S. intelligence estimate.

The estimate, presented to U.S. President Barack Obama and leaked out by the New York Times and other news outlets on Friday, includes so-called "hard-core" Taliban loyalists and other insurgents affiliated with them.

U.S. officials said the figure are not necessarily accurate, given the fact that the insurgents often operate in small units and some of them are not full-time fighters.

They also hope some moderate elements of the insurgency could break away from the "hard core" Taliban loyalists if situations change in the future.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials said the insurgency not only grows in ranks, but also remains very resilient and very flexible.

How to deal with Taliban emerges as a core question to Obama's ongoing review of his Afghan strategy.

White House aides said Thursday that the focus of the strategy is now shifting away from the Taliban in Afghanistan to al-Qaida cells in Pakistan.

That shift, analysts said, could draw stark lines between the president and his generals.

The U.S. military linked al-Qaida and the Taliban as a dual enemy, and recommends a counterinsurgency strategy to defeat them, which would require more troops.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, requested Obama to send a minimum of 40,000 more troops to that country.

However, senior White House advisors are pushing back the request, saying that the United States should focus on destroying al-Qaida cells and accelerating training of Afghan forces.

A final decision on the strategy adjustment, including troop levels, is still weeks away, according to the White House.

The Danger of Delay in Afghan Policymaking

Bernie Gwertzman | October 8

CFR - As U.S. President Barack Obama and his top aides complete a study on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, the original coordinator of that policy, Bruce Riedel, warns of the consequences of delaying new action. Riedel says at a time of squeamishness among U.S. partners and an increasingly emboldened Taliban and al-Qaeda, it is vital for the administration to avoid lengthy delays in deciding on a course of action and "convey determination" in its planning for the Af-Pak war theater. Riedel says the late spring replacement of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan delayed the release of an operational plan, and as a result, there is "some sticker shock at the size of what the operational plan calls for. That's the unfortunate reality." He also says it is a "fairy tale" to think that the Taliban can be split off from al-Qaeda. He says that "at no point is there any serious evidence that Mullah Omar and the top Taliban leadership have been willing to give up Osama bin Laden and turn him over."

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[Comment: Increasingly clear that the issue of how close the ties are between al-Qa`eda and the various flavours of the Taliban and aligned movements (and I am speaking here of the core movements, rather than the 90% surfers, or dare I say it "accidental guerillas") is central to setting effective policy. Riedel's The Search for al-Qa`eda appears to me to present the view from one end of the spectrum (that the connections are very tight indeed). I would feel a lot more comfortable with that assertion were it less of an outlier, relative to the other depictions that are out there. Not a difficult knot to tease out and if Riedel's version is closer to the truth, it suggests that the politically expedient is potentially quite problematic as strategy. ~ JPD]

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Richard N. Haass | October 11

WaPo - Why does Afghanistan matter?

We generally hear four arguments. First, if the Taliban returns to power, Afghanistan will again be a haven for terrorist groups. Second, if the Taliban takes over, Afghanistan will again become a human rights nightmare. Third, a perceived defeat of the United States in Afghanistan would be a blow to U.S. prestige everywhere and would embolden radicals. Fourth, an Afghanistan under Taliban control would be used by extremists as a sanctuary from which to destabilize Pakistan.

None of these assumptions is as strong as proponents maintain. Afghanistan certainly matters -- the question is how much.

Al-Qaeda does not require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat. Terrorists gravitate to areas of least resistance; if they cannot use Afghanistan, they will use countries such as Yemen or Somalia, as in fact they already are. No doubt, the human rights situation would grow worse under Taliban rule, but helping Afghan girls get an education, no matter how laudable, is not a goal that justifies an enormous U.S. military commitment. And yes, the taking of Kabul by the Taliban would become part of the radicals' narrative, but the United States fared well in Asia after the fall of South Vietnam, and less than a decade after an ignominious withdrawal from Beirut, the United States amassed the international coalition that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. There are and always will be opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of U.S. power.

The one issue that should be at the core of the United States' Afghan strategy is Pakistan. It is there, not Afghanistan, where the United States has vital national interests. These stem from Pakistan's dozens of nuclear weapons, the presence on its soil of the world's most dangerous terrorists and the potential for a clash with India that could escalate to a nuclear confrontation.

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

the longer they wait to release results means the chances of a recount before winter sets in are slim to none, is that their point? They can keep trying to put a happy face on the election but the Afghanis are not as dumb as everyone thinks.

Sun Oct 11, 2009 11:41am EDT

By Peter Graff and Akram Walizada

KABUL (Reuters) - The head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan denied accusations on Sunday that he had helped cover up election fraud, and said he still believed a result could be reached that Afghans would find credible.

In strongly-worded remarks at a news conference, Kai Eide said allegations by a U.S. diplomat who was fired as his deputy were false and undermined the election process.

Eide appeared at the news conference flanked by the U.S., British and French ambassadors, which he said was an "expression of international unity in the work that we are doing."

A final result is expected within days in the August 20 vote, held up for weeks by an investigation after a U.N.-backed watchdog found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud."

"That's been a difficult process. It's been marred, not least, as you know, by widespread fraud," Eide said. He added it was up to the watchdog to determine the extent of the cheating.

Investigators would still "be able to remove fraudulent votes and honor valid votes," he said. "When the result is being certified it will be a result that is being made on a solid basis, and it should be accepted by the Afghan people."

The Electoral Complaints Commission will announce results of the fraud investigation later this week, either confirming President Hamid Karzai as the victor, or -- if a large share of Karzai's votes are found to be fraudulent -- ordering a run-off.

The final weeks of the process have been overshadowed by a feud between Eide, a veteran Norwegian diplomat, and his American former deputy, Peter Galbraith, who was fired after complaining that Eide turned a blind eye toward fraud.

"ATTACK ON INTEGRITY"

"Yes, it has affected me. It's been an attack on my integrity. It's not been dignified. It's not been fair. It's not been true," Eide said. "It's had an impact on the U.N. mission; it's had an impact on the election process because it's heightened the temperature."

Because Galbraith is a senior U.S. diplomat and known to be close to the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, the feud has been widely interpreted in Western media as a sign that Washington wanted a harder line toward fraud.

U.S. officials say doubt about the legitimacy of the vote is one of the issues they are grappling with while weighing whether to send 40,000 more troops to defend the Kabul government, but they have spent the past few days signaling backing for Eide.

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Are Obama advisers downplaying Afghanistan dangers?

By Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- As the Obama administration reconsiders its Afghanistan policy, White House officials are minimizing warnings from the intelligence community, the military and the State Department about the risks of adopting a limited strategy focused on al Qaida, U.S. intelligence, diplomatic and military officials told McClatchy.

Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have found that the Taliban and other Pakistan-based groups that are fighting U.S.-led forces have much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11, would allow the terrorist network to re-establish bases in Afghanistan and would help Osama bin Laden export his radical brand of Islam to Afghanistan's neighbors and beyond, the officials said.

McClatchy interviewed more than 15 senior and mid-level U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, all of whom said they concurred with the assessments. All of them requested anonymity because the assessments are classified and the officials weren't authorized to speak publicly.

The officials said the White House is searching for an alternative to the broader counterinsurgency strategy favored by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command.

White House officials, they said, have concluded that McChrystal's approach could be doomed by election fraud, corruption and other problems in Afghanistan; by continued Pakistani covert support for the insurgency; by the strains on the Army, Marine Corps and the federal budget; and by a lack of political and public support at home, which they fear could also undermine the president's domestic priorities.

One phrase that always comes up in the administration's strategy sessions is "public opinion," one participant told McClatchy.

However, the officials said, in their effort to muster domestic support for a more limited counterterrorism strategy that would concentrate on disrupting and dismantling al Qaida, White House officials are neglecting warnings from their own experts about the dangers of a more modest approach.

"McChrystal and Petraeus are ignoring the problems their (counterinsurgency) approach would face in Afghanistan and here at home," said one intelligence official with extensive experience in South Asia and counterterrorism. "We don't have a reliable partner in Afghanistan or Pakistan; doubling the size of the Afghan army is a pipedream, given the corruption and literacy problems; and neither Congress or the American people are likely to give it the money, the troops or the decade or so it would need to work, if it would work.

"Now the White House is downplaying the dangers of doing the only thing that they think Congress and the public will support -- a limited war against the guys who hit us on 9/11. The truth is, both approaches have huge problems, and neither one's likely to work."

The White House, as well as Congress and U.S. military, "have got to level with the American people, and they are not doing it," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department intelligence analyst now with the Middle East Institute. "They are taking the easy way out by focusing on the narrow interest of protecting the homeland" from al Qaida.

Some U.S. intelligence and military officials expressed deep frustration with what they see as the administration's single-minded focus on al Qaida's threat to the U.S., saying it's not discussing publicly other, more serious consequences of a U.S. failure in Afghanistan as identified in some assessments.

A U.S. withdrawal or failure could permit al Qaida and other groups to export their violence from Afghanistan into Pakistan's heartland, the Indian-controlled side of the disputed Kashmir region and former Soviet republics in Central Asia whose autocrats have been repressing Islam for decades, the U.S. officials said.

Allowing the Taliban to prevail, the officials said, could reignite Afghanistan's civil war, which was fought largely on ethnic lines, and draw nuclear-armed India and Pakistan into backing opposing sides of the conflict.

"It is our belief that the primary focus of the Taliban is regional, that is Afghanistan and Pakistan," one senior U.S. intelligence official said. "At the same time, there is no reason to believe that the Taliban are abandoning their connections to al Qaida, which has its sights set beyond the region."

"The two groups . . . maintain the kind of close relationship that — if the Taliban were able to take effective control over parts of Afghanistan — would probably give al Qaida expanded room to operate," the official added.

Pakistan has long patronized Afghanistan's dominant Pashtun ethnic group, which constitutes the Taliban. India — whose Kabul embassy was hit on Oct. 8 by a car bomb for the second time in 16 months — supports the U.S.-backed Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. New Delhi backed the ethnic minorities who fought the Taliban before the 2001 U.S. invasion.

"The region right now is as volatile as I have ever seen it. The tension is not waning; it is on the rise," another senior U.S. intelligence official said. "The Indo-Pakistan issue looms like a dark cloud on a horizon that might look clear blue, but it is actually a tidal wave that is rushing in."

Finally, failure in Afghanistan would deal a massive blow to U.S. international standing to the benefit of Iran, Russia and China, and undermine the NATO alliance, the U.S. officials said.

The intelligence assessments and the U.S. officials' views are in stark contrast to briefings and statements made last week by administration officials who downplayed the threat al Qaida that could pose if the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan.

The administration officials said the Taliban are focused on Afghanistan and don't share al Qaida's goals of striking the U.S. and forcing its brand of extreme Islam on the Muslim world.

"There simply is a difference in intent among these groups," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday. "Our primary focus is to protect our homeland and . . . help to protect our allies."

"Anyone who . . . believes what the Taliban says today is fooling themselves," countered one senior U.S. intelligence official, referring to an Internet statement in which the Islamic militia claimed that its sole goal is driving foreign forces from Afghanistan.

The official said he's worried that the Afghanistan strategy debate isn't focused on "the rise of Islamist extremism in a way that would shadow what we saw building up prior to 9/11."

The more limited counterterrorism approach promoted by Vice President Joe Biden would require fewer than the 20,000 to 45,000 additional soldiers sought by McChrystal. In August, McChrystal submitted a 60-day assessment that called the situation in Afghanistan "dire" and said that without more troops, the mission could fail.

"Here we go again," a veteran U.S. intelligence official said. "The Bush administration ignored anything that didn't support its arguments for invading Iraq and exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein. This administration is minimizing the threat from radical Islam in South and Central Asia, which is much worse today than it was eight years ago, in order to defend a minimalist policy that it's settling on for domestic political reasons."

This official said that the White House has been "spoon-feeding distorted information" to a few news organizations in an effort to build public and congressional support for a policy that another U.S. official said "rests on the nonsensical notion that you can separate some of the Taliban from other Taliban, al Qaida and other groups, when in reality those groups are more closely allied today than they've ever been."

"I read in the paper that there are only 100 al Qaida fighters in Afghanistan," said another U.S. intelligence official, referring to an Oct. 4 CNN interview with National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired Marine general. "That might be true at a particular point in time, but an hour later there might be 200 or 250. The distinction between Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan is meaningless because as a practical matter, the border between them doesn't exist, and all the groups share sources of financing, training and weapons."

The intelligence assessments based their conclusions that the Taliban and related groups would back al Qaida's global agenda on the fact that the Afghan insurgents not only continue to greatly admire bin Laden and his Arab followers, but also are indebted to them for financial, military and technical assistance.

Moreover, the Taliban and allied groups are also indebted to the jihadists in the Middle East who've helped fund their insurgency, and they remain wedded to Pashtunwali, the centuries-old Pashtun tribal code that mandates protection of fellow Muslims.

Utterly Predictable, Yet Hotly Debated
2009 October 11

by dcrowe

Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.

The U.S. and allied forces now face insurrection all over Afghanistan. The insurgency nearly quadrupled in size since 2006, from 7,000 to 25,000 participants. Recently leaked intelligence assessments reportedly show that Al-Qaida and the jihadist Taliban groups account for only 10 percent of the insurgents.

WASHINGTON – Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes, according to summaries of new US intelligence reports.

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’
...
…But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

The nonreligious motivations give American war planners some hope that they can reduce the power of these militias, and perhaps even co-opt their support with a new set of strategies and incentives.

…

Indeed, the intelligence reports say the Taliban movement that harbored the Al Qaeda terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is responsible for only a small share of the rising attacks – mostly in southern Afghanistan, according to the officials.

Now, I hear there is some debate in the intelligence community about this picture of the Taliban. (For example, note how the Reuters interpretation describes an insurgency “dominated” by the “hard-core Taliban loyalists”.) And, like all leaks, there’s likely an attempt to influence and constrain policy choices behind the leak to the Globe’s Bryan Bender. But the real question is not whether the leaker had a motivation for leaking (they always do), but rather whether the leaker allowed their motivation to distort the truth. And it looks like the picture painted by Bender’s anonymous source fits very well with the picture painted of the Taliban in the recent DFID study on radicalization in Afghanistan. From the summary:

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Washington Post, By Ann Scott Tyson, October 13

President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized -- and the Pentagon is deploying -- at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq "surge" that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.

The deployment does not change the maximum number of service members expected to soon be in Afghanistan: 68,000, more than double the number there when Bush left office. Still, it suggests that a significant number of support troops, in addition to combat forces, would be needed to meet commanders' demands. It also underscores the growing strain on U.S. ground troops, raising practical questions about how the Army and Marine Corps would meet a request from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

The top military commander in Afghanistan is asking for up to 80,000 more American troops, according to U.S. officials.

A still-secret document by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal that requests more troops is expected to be among the topics discussed Wednesday when President Barack Obama meets with his national security team to hash out a strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/14/us-afghanistan-troops-mcchrystal711.html

At least 85,000 people have been killed in Iraq by bombs, murders and fighting from 2004 until 2008, Iraq's human rights ministry says.

The government released the figures on Tuesday in a draft report based on death certificates issued by the health ministry, the Reuters news agency reported.

It said 147,195 people had been wounded in the same four years, but the number of undocumented injuries and deaths could be far higher.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/10/2009101320124344577.html

McClatchy, By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan S. Landay, October 15

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military can send only about 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in the next three months without putting excessive strains on the Army and Marine Corps, but the top Afghanistan commander has said he needs more than twice that number to have the best chance of success, military and administration officials told McClatchy.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that even if it sent 30,000 additional troops, the U.S. would risk failure in Afghanistan under the current strategy. His resourcing plan offers President Barack Obama three options based on the estimated risk, said two U.S. military officials, who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly and because the proposal remains classified.

The low risk option, which McChrystal has said offers the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan, calls for 80,000 additional U.S. troops, while his medium risk option puts the number at 40,000 to 45,000, the officials said.

"This is a fully resourced COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy with the low-risk option," one official said. The current Army counterinsurgency manual, however, estimates that an all-out COIN campaign in a country with Afghanistan's population would require about 600,000 troops.

Ned Parker | Baghdad | October 18

LATimes - The Sunni Muslim paramilitary leader's campaign slogan holds the promise of imminent rescue: "Hold on, we are coming."

But the aspiring parliamentary candidate, Mustafa Kamal Shibeeb, may not be in a position to deliver on his slogan: He's a fugitive, with murder charges hanging over his head from events at the height of the U.S. troop buildup two years ago.

Already, police commandos have tried to grab him twice, only to be blocked by an Iraqi army unit, with tacit support from U.S. forces.

Shibeeb's story reveals the volatility of today's Iraq, where Sunni-Shiite tensions are just one of the conflicts at play. His vulnerability illustrates how the Iraqi government and security forces remain subject to competing political and tribal pressures, and score-settling, that risk igniting new violence.

If Shibeeb is jailed, it could leave a power vacuum in Dora, a region of sprawling urban neighborhoods and pristine farmland that served as a launching pad for suicide attacks into Baghdad before Shibeeb asserted control.

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

David Rohde | October 17

NYT - THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.

Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes.

It was last Nov. 10, and I had been headed to a meeting with a Taliban commander along with an Afghan journalist, Tahir Luddin, and our driver, Asad Mangal. The commander had invited us to interview him outside Kabul for reporting I was pursuing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The longer I looked at the gunman in the passenger seat, the more nervous I became. His face showed little emotion. His eyes were dark, flat and lifeless.

I thought of my wife and family and was overcome with shame. An interview that seemed crucial hours earlier now seemed absurd and reckless. I had risked the lives of Tahir and Asad — as well as my own life. We reached a dry riverbed and the car stopped. “They’re going to kill us,” Tahir whispered. “They’re going to kill us.”

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Elisabeth Bumiller | Kabul | October 17

NYT - From presidential confidants in the White House Situation Room to anchors on cable television to ruminators at the city’s think tanks, the view has settled in: Afghanistan is an ungovernable collection of tribes that has confounded every conqueror since Alexander the Great. Like a lot of received wisdom, it may well be correct.

But as President Obama debates whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, and whether, more pointedly, he might be sending them down a black hole of civic hopelessness, American and Afghan scholars and diplomats say it is worth recalling four decades in the country’s recent history, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when there was a semblance of a national government and Kabul was known as “the Paris of Central Asia.”

Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation, but one that built national roads, stood up an army and defended its borders. As a monarchy and then a constitutional monarchy, there was relative stability and by the 1960s a brief era of modernity and democratic reform. Afghan women not only attended Kabul University, they did so in miniskirts. Visitors — tourists, hippies, Indians, Pakistanis, adventurers — were stunned by the beauty of the city’s gardens and the snow-capped mountains that surround the capital.

“I lived in Afghanistan when it was very governable, from 1964 to 1974,” said Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who met recently in Kabul with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. Mr. Gouttierre, who spent his decade in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbright scholar and the national basketball team’s coach, said, “I’ve always thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

Afghans today say that the view of their country as an ungovernable “graveyard of empires” is condescending and uninformed. “Unfortunately, we have a lot of overnight experts on Afghanistan right now,” said Said Tayeb Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to Washington. “You turn to any TV channel and they are experts on Afghan ethnicities, tribal issues and history without having been to Afghanistan or read one or two books.”

“Afghanistan,” Mr. Jawad asserted, “is less tribal than New York.”

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass