Intelligence

July 30, 2006

"Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets," he said

Photos that damn Hezbollah | Herald Sun

Chris Link

July 30, 2006 12:00am
Article from: Sunday Herald Sun

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THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon's battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia.

The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons.

Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.

The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

They emerged as:

US President George Bush called for an international force to be sent to Lebanon.

ISRAEL called up another 30,000 reserve troops.

THE UN's humanitarian chief Jan Egeland called for a three-day truce to evacuate civilians and transport food and water into cut-off areas.

US SECRETARY of State Condoleezza Rice returned to the Middle East to push a UN resolution aimed at ending the 18-day war, and:

A PALESTINIAN militant group said it had kidnapped, killed and burned an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

The images include one of a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun metres from an apartment block with sheets hanging out on a balcony to dry.

Others show a militant with AK47 rifle guarding no-go zones after Israeli blitzes.

Another depicts the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block blown up in an Israeli air attack.

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

"Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets," he said.

"Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated.

"It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more."

The release of the images comes as Hezbollah faces criticism for allegedly using innocent civilians as "human shields".

Mr Egeland blasted Hezbollah as "cowards" for operating among civilians.

"When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children," he said.

July 30, 2006 at 03:48 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 29, 2006

Arab leaders fear rise of Hezbollah

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Arab leaders fear rise of Hezbollah

By Roger Hardy
BBC Middle East analyst
Hezbollah is riding a wave of popularity on the Arab street. Not since it played a role in forcing Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 has it enjoyed such adulation.

Its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is enjoying something akin to a personality cult.

At a time when Arab governments are seen as largely powerless to influence events, Hezbollah is seen as taking on the Israelis - and behind the Israelis, the American superpower.

This has put Arab leaders - in particular those allied to the United States - in a difficult quandary.

At the start of this crisis the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan did not hide their view that Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers was "reckless adventurism".

This was unusual enough, but they also openly directed their displeasure at the group's backers, Syria and Iran.

Their stance pleased the Bush administration but was roundly criticised at home.

They were seen as siding with the Israelis against the new champions of the Palestinian cause.

Dark warnings

Now there is a distinct shift.

Washington's Arab friends are pressing urgently for an immediate ceasefire.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned darkly of the danger of a wider regional war.

Saudi television this week organised a day-long appeal - or "telethon" - which raised some $29 million (£15.55 million) for Lebanon.

Jordan protest
Protestors in the Arab world have shown support for Hezbollah

The Saudi media made much of the fact that the king and the crown prince made handsome personal donations.

In addition the Saudi state has given $1.5 billion (£800 million) to support the Lebanese pound and help rebuild the shattered country.

It is not that these rulers have changed their minds.

They fear the growing influence of Iran and Hezbollah.

They believe the regional balance of power is shifting in Iran's favour.

They think Iran and Hezbollah are trying to hijack the Palestinian cause.

Some Saudi religious figures have gone much further. For them the issue is not so much political as sectarian.

One well-known sheikh, Abdullah bin Jabreen, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, declaring it illegal for Muslims to join, support or even pray for Hezbollah.

This reflects the view of conservatives in the Saudi religious establishment that the Shia are not proper Muslims and are not to be trusted.

Joining the bandwagon

But the critics of Hezbollah find themselves in the minority.

Al-Qaeda does not want to be upstaged

The predominant view in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world is overwhelmingly supportive of Hezbollah.

For most people, the Palestinian cause transcends sectarian differences.

Even al-Qaeda, no friend of the Shia, has felt obliged to speak out.

The group's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has issued a video saying no Muslim can stay silent in the face of events in Lebanon.

Al-Qaeda does not want to be upstaged.

July 29, 2006 at 03:36 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 26, 2006

The Hezbollah perspective: We are defending our sovereignty

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | We are defending our sovereignty

Ali Fayyad, Hizbullah leadership
Tuesday July 25, 2006
The Guardian

For nearly two weeks Israel has been waging a war of terror and aggression against Lebanon. Its stated justification is the capture by the Islamic Resistance (Hizbullah) of two Israeli soldiers with the aim of exchanging them for Lebanese prisoners. The war has already resulted in the killing of around 400 and wounding of more than 1,000 Lebanese. Most are civilians (a third children), crushed in their homes or ripped to pieces in their cars by Israeli bombs and missiles.

In reality, the Israeli escalation is less about the two soldiers and more about its determination to disarm the Lebanese resistance. According to the US, Israel and some other western states, this would implement UN security council resolution 1559, which led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon last year.

Most Lebanese, however, do not regard the resistance forces of Hizbullah as militias, as referred to in the UN resolution, let alone any kind of terrorist organisation. Our resistance accomplished a major national mission by forcing Israeli troops to withdraw from most Lebanese territory in 2000 after 22 years of occupation. Since then there has been intense national debate about how Lebanon can defend itself in future once the resistance has achieved the liberation of the remaining occupied Lebanese land (the Shaba'a farms area) and the release of Lebanese detainees.

The Lebanese people's support for the resistance was demonstrated by the fact that Hizbullah and its allies won more seats in the 2005 elections, following the Syrian withdrawal, than when Syrian troops were still in the country. That is why Israel is now targeting civilians.

In the context of the continued occupation, detention of prisoners and repeated Israeli attacks and incursions into Lebanese territory, the capture of the Israeli soldiers was entirely legitimate. The operation was fully in line with the Lebanese ministerial declaration, supported in parliament, that stressed the right of the resistance to liberate occupied Lebanese territory, free prisoners of war and defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression. International law also allows peoples and states to take action to protect their citizens and territory. The Israeli onslaught is aimed not only at liquidating the resistance and destroying the country's infrastructure but at intervening in Lebanese politics and imposing conditions on what can be agreed.

There is now a clear national consensus on the need to maintain the military power necessary to prevent Lebanon from being subjugated by Israel's war machine. Popular resistance is a way of redressing the huge imbalance of power, defending Lebanon's sovereignty and preventing Israel from intervening in Lebanese internal affairs, as has happened repeatedly since 1948. It is also - as has been the case in the prisoner-capture operation - dictated by an entirely local agenda, rather than reflecting any Syrian or Iranian policy.

The aggression against Lebanon, which has primarily targeted civilians and failed to achieve any tangible military objectives, is part of a continuing attempt to impose Israeli hegemony on the area and prevent the emergence of a regional system that might guarantee stability, self-determination, freedom and democracy.

Hizbullah has tried from the start of this crisis to limit the escalation by adopting a policy of limited response while avoiding civilian targets; its aims were restricted to freeing the prisoners of war held in both camps. However, Israel's systematic destruction of entire civilian areas in Beirut and elsewhere and perpetration of scores of horrific massacres prompted Hizbullah to shift to an all-out confrontation to affirm Lebanon's right to deter aggression and defend its territorial integrity and its citizens, just as any sovereign state would do.

Thus far, Hizbullah has had surprising military successes, while maintaining its position in the face of Israel's superior fire power, and preserved its capacity to wage a long-term war. But Hizbullah is still ready to accept a ceasefire and negotiate indirectly an exchange of prisoners to bring the current crisis to an end.

This is what Israel has so far rejected, with the support of the US. For this is also a war of American hegemony over the Middle East, and the US - supported by the British government - is fully complicit in the Israeli war crimes carried out in the past two weeks. It would appear that the peaceful option will not be given a chance until Hizbullah and the forces of resistance have demonstrated their ability to confront Israel's aggression and thwart its objectives, as happened in 1993 and 1996. That is why resistance is not only a pillar of our sovereignty but also a prerequisite of stability.

· Ali Fayyad is a senior member of Hizbullah's executive committee
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July 26, 2006 at 09:06 PM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

UN and Hezbollah flags are seen at a UN post

Canadian Jewish News

Canadian parliamentary assistants gather at UN post (top) as UN and Hezbollah flags are seen at a UN post (above).

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/07/26/what_happens_in_war.php

Courtesy of Harrys place

July 26, 2006 at 06:51 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Osama's olive branch to Shi'ites

Osama's olive branch to Shi'ites - The Boston Globe

By Rita Katz and Josh Devon | July 26, 2006

AFTER THE RELEASE of Osama bin Laden's latest audio message, some media reports indicated that bin Laden was calling for renewed attacks against the Shi'ite s of Iraq. However, a careful analysis of bin Laden's message demonstrates that the Al Qaeda leader is instead toning down Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi's venomous rhetoric toward the Shi'ite s .

Prior to Zarqawi's rise to prominence as head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the leadership and ideologues used a shared enmity toward the West as a way of uniting disparate jihadists. The Shi'ite s were an issue to address only after repelling the West from the lands of Islam.

Zarqawi, however, viewed the jihad in Iraq and elsewhere primarily as a war against the Shi'ite s and attacked them mercilessly with both language and weapons. In a letter discovered in Iraq in February 2004, Zarqawi called the Shi'ite s ``the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom." Declaring war on the Shi'ite s in an audio message released on Sept. 14, 2005, Zarqawi dictated that Al Qaeda ``has decided to launch a comprehensive war on the Shi'ites all over Iraq, wherever and whenever they are found." In his last audio message published on June 1, Zarqawi claimed, ``the main purpose of the Shi'ite faith was to destroy Islam," and argued that ``fighting them is also a must according to the Kitaab [the Koran] and the Sunnah" [tradition]. Zarqawi accused the Iranians of conspiring with the Americans to harm the position of Sunnis in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, where, Zarqawi argued, ``the Shi'ites are being represented by Hezbollah where they received their orders from Iran, the axis of evil and the crib of the expected Mahdi, the Anti-Christ."

While many jihadists rallied to Zarqawi's cause against the Shi'ite s , some of the Al Qaeda leadership remained skeptical of this tactic. In his intercepted letter to Zarqawi from July 2005, Zawahiri, who shares a hatred of the Shi'ite s with Zarqawi, attacked Zarqawi's strategy of targeting the Shi'ite s , asking, ``And is the opening of another front now in addition to the front against the Americans and the government a wise decision? Or does this conflict with the Shi'ite s lift the burden from the Americans by diverting the mujahideen to the Shi'ite s , while the Americans continue to control matters from afar? And if the attacks on Shi'ite leaders were necessary to put a stop to their plans, then why were there attacks on ordinary Shi'ite s ? Won't this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth?"

In what may be an effort to refocus Al Qaeda in Iraq on the Americans, Osama bin Laden called the Shi'ite s ``cousins" in his most recent audio message released July 1, nearly three weeks after Zarqawi's death. Substantially moderating Al Qaeda's tone toward the Shi'ite s , bin Laden's language was a marked departure from Zarqawi's customary derogatory epithets. In the message, bin Laden directs Al Qaeda's attention on the Americans and their collaborators, relieving the general Shi'ite population of direct culpability.

Speaking directly to the mujahideen in Iraq, bin Laden said, ``I tell you that the first step needed to stabilize Iraq is to get the Crusaders' armies out by fighting, then to punish the parties' leaders . . . who lied to the people and told them that the way to get the Crusaders out is to participate in the political process." Specifically addressing Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Zarqawi's successor in Iraq, bin Laden reiterated, ``I also advise him to concentrate his fighting on the Americans, as well as their allies and supporters, in their war against Islamic people in Iraq."

While ultimately bin Laden's beliefs likely afford no room for Shi'ite Islam, the terrorist leader recognizes that the Shi'ite s are a far weaker foe than the Americans and that the mujahideen must first concentrate on expelling America from Iraq. Attacking the Shi'ite s and the Americans simultaneously necessitates that the mujahideen fight two wars at the same time. By recasting the role of the Shi'ite s in Iraq, even if only temporarily, bin Laden can concentrate the jihad on the Americans more effectively. The Americans, devoid of their Shi'ite allies, may find the occupation of Iraq even more intractable.

Rita Katz and Josh Devon are co-founders of the SITE Institute, an international terrorist-investigation and information group.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

July 26, 2006 at 06:14 PM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 24, 2006

Why I believe David Kelly's death may have been murder, by MP

Why I believe David Kelly's death may have been murder, by MP | the Daily Mail

By DAN NEWLING, Daily Mail 11:17am 24th July 2006
David Kelly did not commit suicide and may have been the victim of a murder and subsequent coverup, according to a campaigning MP.

Norman Baker has spent six months investigating the death of the Government weapons expert, found dead in an Oxfordshire wood three years ago.

Mr Baker - who stepped down from the Liberal Democrat front bench to carry out his investigation - published his preliminary results and called for a new public inquiry.

His concerns begin with the method of Dr Kelly's supposed suicide, cutting a minor artery with a blunt gardening knife.

He would have been the only person that year to have successfully killed themselves that way in the UK.

The scientist's family and friends insist he had shown no sign of feeling suicidal. Emails and the minutes of meetings he attended also showed him behaving perfectly normally - and he was looking forward to his daughter's wedding.

Mr Baker also questions the painkillers Dr Kelly is said to have taken, not least because the levels found in his stomach were incompatible with his supposed consumption.

There are also basic questions about the police investigation - including the appearance beside Dr Kelly's body of a bottle of water, knife and watch which the people who found him say they did not see.

On the Hutton Inquiry itself, Mr Baker - whose conclusions were outlined in the Mail on Sunday - says Lord Hutton was completely out of his depth.

He had never chaired such an important inquiry and had a history of making pro-Government decisions as a judge. The MP claims Hutton was personally selected for the job by Tony Blair's close friend Charles Falconer, the Lord Chancellor.

The tragic story began in May 2003 when BBC radio journalist Andrew Gilligan alleged that the Government had deliberately 'sexed up' a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion.

The Government went on the offensive and eventually exposed Dr Kelly as the BBC man's source, a move which thrust the publicity-shy scientist into a media storm.

Days later, the 59-year-old father of three was found slumped under a tree five miles from his home in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

'More than enough cause to reopen the inquest' - Baker

The Government immediately set up an inquiry under Lord Hutton to investigate the death. The two-month probe concluded that the scientist had taken his own life.

Mr Baker has consistently been a thorn in the Government's side. He previously revealed former minister Peter Mandelson's links to the Hinduja brothers, who were granted British passports shortly after investing money to the Millennium Dome.

He claimed that since the Hutton Inquiry concluded, there has been 'growing public disquiet' about Dr Kelly's death.

He said: "Any reasonable person looking at the evidence would, at the very least, agree that further investigation is necessary.

"If it wasn't suicide, then clearly Dr Kelly was bumped off. My aim is to find out exactly what happened. Frankly, there is more than enough cause to reopen the inquest."

Mr Baker's investigation comes after three senior doctors claimed the official cause of death - a severed ulnar artery in the wrist - was extremely unlikely to be fatal.

David Halpin, Stephen Frost and Searle Sennett said: "Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss."

Mr Baker said that, according to the Office for National Statistics, Dr Kelly was the only person in 2003 to kill themselves that way. He says a scientist would have cut a larger artery, ensuring a swift death.

Although Dr Kelly was facing intense pressure over his exposure as the BBC source, Mr Baker produces evidence that he did not appear depressed.

Two days before his death, he made jokes at a Government committee meeting. On the day he disappeared, he spoke of returning to Iraq in the future.

He was a member of the Baha'i faith, which forbids suicide, and one of his daughters was about to marry. Dr Kelly's sister Sarah Pape, a consultant plastic surgeon, told the Hutton Inquiry: "In my line of work I deal with people who may have suicidal thoughts, and I ought to be able to spot those even in a phone conversation.

"But I have gone over in my mind the two conversations we had and he certainly did not betray to me any impression that he was anything other than tired.

"He certainly did not convey to me that he was feeling depressed and absolutely nothing that would have alerted me to the fact that he may have been considering suicide."

An inquest into Dr Kelly's death was opened, but never concluded as the Hutton Inquiry was deemed to have served the same purpose. Mr Baker criticises this decision, arguing that, unlike an inquest, the Hutton Inquiry did not have the power to subpoena witnesses or make them give evidence under oath.

He says: "What was the point of setting up an inquiry to look into the circumstances of Dr Kelly's death when the facts had, it appeared, already been decided?"

Peter Jacobsen, solicitor for Dr Kelly's widow, said the family would not comment.

July 24, 2006 at 07:54 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 23, 2006

“The Fog of War”: An Examination of the United Kingdom’s and the United States’ “Special Relationship”, 1990 – 2003, with reference to “Friendly Fire” Incidents

“The Fog of War”: An Examination of the United Kingdom’s and the United States’ “Special Relationship”, 1990 – 2003, with refe

British foreign policy in the post-Cold war period accords neatly with an expanded, pluralistic agenda as British leaders have pursued “subjective preferences” formed “periodically both in response to the domestic political process itself and in response to shifts in the international environment”21. As McNair surmises, “[i]n one key sense, of course, international relations are a domestic matter, since a government’s conduct in this area can sharply affect its popularity with the voters... In the pursuit of a state’s international relations, a government has the opportunity to perform on the world stage, before a global audience of billions”22. Consequently, the frontiers between international and domestic affairs have become indistinguishable, but the misnomer ‘national interest’ persists as a hyperbolic tool intended to imbue prime ministerial goals with loftier values.

July 23, 2006 at 12:17 AM in Special Relationship | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 20, 2006

Brutal one-legged fanatic who loves the limelight

Telegraph | News | Brutal one-legged fanatic who loves the limelight

By Michael Hirst
(Filed: 02/07/2006)

The camera pans in on a black-turbaned mullah, who solemnly signs a slip of paper and hands it to the young fighter sitting beside him. It turns out to be the recipient's own death warrant: the slip identifies him as "Suicide bomber 116".

Off goes yet another volunteer to die in the Taliban's increasingly savage campaign against coalition troops in Afghanistan, but the cleric who sends him on his way remains alive and very dangerous. Mullah Dadullah Akhund, the ruthless fanatic in charge of the Taliban's new campaign, is fast becoming to Afghanistan what Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was to Iraq.

Just like Zarqawi, his starring role in propaganda DVDs has successfully drawn in scores of suicide bombers and thousands of fighters to the cause. And just like Zarqawi, his fondness for beheadings means his followers fear him almost as much as his enemies.

Dadullah has developed almost mythological status among his compatriots, which is partly why he was dispatched by the Taliban leadership to front the current recruitment campaign for jihad in the seminaries of northern Pakistan's Baluchistan province.

Recruitment DVDs on sale across Afghanistan and Pakistan show the one-legged guerrilla commander in various poses - blasting a target with a heavy machine gun, dishing out blessings and ordaining a succession of would-be "martyrs". The success of his recruitment campaign can be seen in the surge in suicide bombings, school burnings and guerrilla ambushes that have killed more than 100 Afghan civilians and at least 40 coalition soldiers this year.

Dadullah boasts that he has 200 suicide bombers awaiting his orders as well as 12,000 fighters on the ground. So effective is his campaign that Taliban guerrillas have for the first time captured government installations in Afghanistan's remote south, if only for brief periods.

Afghan villagers testify that increasing numbers of Taliban fighters are roaming the countryside with impunity, warning locals not to cooperate with coalition troops, on pain of death.

To emphasise the point, one of Dadullah's videos shows his fighters slitting the throats of six men accused of spying for the Americans.

Dadullah is aged about 40 and is said to come from the Kakar tribe, from the Kandahar region, which is renowned for its fighting prowess. He lost one of his legs after stepping on a landmine shortly after joining the Taliban in 1994.

Despite the disability he became renowned as a fearless fighter, leading major battles against the rival Northern Alliance forces throughout the

1990s.

So vicious was he that during one particularly brutal assignment in 1998 to "pacify" ethnic minority Hazaras, a Shia group in Bamian province, he massacred hundreds of civilians. It was too much even for Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's one-eyed spiritual leader, who relieved him of his command.

Soon he was back in battle though, his reputation so fearsome that Taliban radio would often report his presence on the front lines even when he was days away from the fighting, to unnerve opposition fighters. He also has a propensity for killing subordinates who disobey his orders.

Having escaped to Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban in November 2001, he helped rebuild the movement from there and was recently promoted to overall commander of the Taliban's military wing, enjoying complete operational freedom.

Unlike other Taliban leaders who never allow themselves to be photographed for religious and security reasons, Dadullah seems to crave the attention, giving television interviews and calling foreign journalists on his satellite phone.

He now operates mostly out of Afghanistan's Helmand province, where Britain has about 3,300 troops. He never spends the whole night in one place, fearing coalition air strikes.

He is a shrewd strategist whose current plan is not to regain control of Afghanistan, but to turn it into a graveyard for foreign troops, forcing their retreat.

"We have the strength to take over Kabul in a single day, but what we lack is the strength to sustain this control," he said.

July 20, 2006 at 07:58 AM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

"For each Taliban you kill, I can find 20 more to fill his place"

Telegraph | News | 'For each Taliban you kill, I can find 20 more to fill his place'

By Massoud Ansari
(Filed: 02/07/2006)

With his neat moustache and casual clothing, Hafiz Ihsanullah is the new face of the Taliban. The 28-year-old former fighter has eschewed the trademark turban and prayer beads of the ultra-conservative Islamic group since he took on a new and powerful role.

He has switched from being a frontline warrior to front man for Mullah Dadullah Akhund - the one-legged Taliban commander in Afghanistan, renowned for his viciousness and cruelty.

Dadullah is believed to be spearheading the Taliban's biggest offensive since they lost Kabul in 2001, killing at least 100 Afghan civilians and 40 coalition soldiers this year, including two SAS troops during a fierce firefight in southern Afghanistan last week. After the leaders of al-Qaeda itself, Dadullah is at the top of the coalition's wanted list.

Yet, just across the border in neighbouring Pakistan, a supposed ally of the West in the war on terror, Ihsanullah is leading an apparently untroubled life, beating the drum for new Taliban recruits, co-ordinating volunteers and supervising the flow of dead -Taliban fighters as their bodies are returned for burial as heroes in their home villages.

"Every time you bring one dead, you will find 20 more volunteers willing to join the fighting," he boasted to The Sunday Telegraph.

An 11,000-strong, US-led force - including 3,300 British soldiers, newly based in the restive southern province of Helmand - are battling to re-assert control across southern Afghanistan as part of operation Mountain Thrust. More than 1,000 fresh Taliban fighters have reportedly poured in from the Pakistani province of Balochistan in recent weeks to face them.

Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, has accused Pakistan of failing to curb the Taliban militia operating from within its borders, and of not doing enough to control the frontier with its neighbour.

Pakistan's insistence that it has cracked down on cross-border activity is hard to square with the ease with which Ihsanullah, acting as Dadullah's "chief co-ordinator", shuttles regularly between Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Balochistan, where the Taliban have found safe haven since they were routed five years ago.

He visits religious seminaries in Balochistan, in effect the main enlisting centres for insurgents, and collects lists of new recruits whom he subsequently dispatches to the front line. His only concession to his own security is his insistence that he must not be photographed.

As the fighters go one way across the border, the bodies of their predecessors, killed by coalition troops, go the other, brought by Ihsanullah's men to be buried in their Pakistani home towns.

In the Balochi district of Pasheen alone, 24 corpses have been returned for burial in the past two months, according to Ikramullah Khan, a local resident. They included the body of Molvi Azizullah Agha, a Taliban commander who was among several dozen killed by a US airstrike on their Kandahar safe house in May. His funeral was attended by several thousand Taliban supporters, including six local and national Pakistani politicians from Balochistan, all of whom vowed to avenge Agha's "martyrdom".

"Mountain Thrust", the joint coalition and Afghan operation aimed at smashing the extremist presence in Afghanistan's four southern provinces, has chalked up more than 90 militants killed since it was launched in May - but has met a fierce surge in Taliban violence.

"It was a do-or-die situation for Taliban," said Ihsanullah. "Had we not responded to their call, the volunteers who were ready to join the Taliban's ranks in the last few months might have dubbed us cowards, and switched over to other groups. It was a must for the Taliban to respond to the fresh call."

He outlined the Taliban's propaganda campaign, aimed at galvanising potential recruits. Markets across the region have been flooded with cheap DVDs, sold for as little as 30p, in which Taliban militia are shown fighting Americans. Meanwhile, Taliban preachers have stepped up their promotional strategy through broadcasts on low-frequency FM radio, inciting listeners to take up the fight against the "infidel army".

Much of the recruitment propaganda is aimed at Pakistani recruits, he said, and it has had an immediate impact. Many of the 34 suicide bombers who have struck targets in Afghanistan this year have been Pakistani.

Taliban insiders also claim that Arab and central Asian militants, who had earlier left Afghanistan to join compatriots fighting in Iraq, have now returned to resume the original -struggle.

"Dozens of Arabs have returned to Afghanistan to reinvigorate the militia's fight against coalition troops," said Nawabzada Haji Lashkari, a tribal chieftain in Quetta.

Consequently, some of the training videos show Arab militants in Afghanistan demonstrating to new recruits how to make explosives. In one, a masked man - believed to be the Egyptian militant Abu Ikhlas - explains in Arabic how to turn a pressure cooker into an improvised explosive device (IED), and how to convert a washing machine timer into a detonator.

"They want to keep the momentum alive," said Lashkari. "Even if the number of these militants who die during the insurgency is more than the coalition troops, they know they are causing dents against the West's economy." He added that part of the Taliban's strategy was to force the West to spend billions of dollars defending its ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pakistan intelligence officials admit that "Pakistani Talibs" have joined Afghan and Arab fighters for "suicide squads".

A senior counter-terrorism official told The Sunday Telegraph that a group of militants planning to join these units had recently been arrested in Karachi. Under interrogation, the men disclosed that would-be suicide bombers are taken to seminaries in the lawless tribal areas of Balochistan, or southern Afghanistan, where they are mentally fortified for the task ahead.

President Karzai claims that he has handed over extensive intelligence dossiers to Pakistan leader Gen Pervez Musharraf, detailing how suicide bombers who attack targets in Afghanistan are recruited, trained and equipped in Pakistan, but little is being done to clamp down on their Pakistani strongholds.

Pakistani officials, though, claim it is impossible to monitor radical activity across the northern region.

"There are thousands of seminaries across the country which they are using as a shelter and it is no easy job to monitor every seminary," said one. "These schools look very ordinary. They do not impart any kind of physical training, but make them mentally strong in order to cause maximum impact when they strike their targets."

He added that many of the militants' safe houses were in the lawless tribal belts, where it was almost impossible for the intelligence agencies to operate effectively.

"These tribal areas have always acted as a harbour for the militants," he said.

July 20, 2006 at 07:57 AM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 17, 2006

Wider war in Middle East? Not likely

Wider war in Middle East? Not likely. | csmonitor.com

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – Of the dangers presented by the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, the possibility of a broader Middle East war is among the less likely.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war - and repeatedly since - Israel has shown its clear military supremacy. So dominant has been Israel's advantage in both technology and tactics that former foes such as Jordan and Egypt sued for peace in those wars, while Tel Aviv's avowed enemies - Syria and Iran - have turned to backing terrorists.

At this moment, the calculus doesn't appear to have changed. There is no coalition of Arab governments willing to unite militarily against Israel. Syria's military prowess has crumbled since the fall of the Soviet Union - its greatest benefactor - while Iran remains too geographically remote to strike effectively.

The result is a new paroxysm of the proxy war that has existed in the region for a generation - ebbing and flowing as Hizbullah, armed and financed by Iran and Syria, harass Israel without provoking a major Middle East war, military analysts say.

"No state is willing to deal with Israel conventionally," says Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp.

The shape of the conflict so far - sparked by Hizbullah's raid into northern Israel and capture of two Israeli soldiers - reveals both the capabilities and limitations of each side.

Historically, Hizbullah has been able to do little more than nip at Israel's northern border with incursions and sporadic rocket attacks. By and large, its arsenal is primitive, comprising various short-range rockets that can destroy buildings only with a direct hit, yet are difficult to aim with any precision. It has continually fired rockets into northern Israel.

Hizbullah's longer-range rockets

Yet there are signs of increasing sophistication, perhaps due to help from Iran, experts say. On Friday, Hizbullah launched a more advanced missile, which struck an Israeli warship. Hizbullah rockets are also penetrating deeper into Israel than ever before, with several striking Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, on Sunday. Israel claims that four of the missiles were the Iranian-made Fajr-3, with a 28-mile range.

For its part, Israel has so far relied mostly on air strikes as its military response. Monday, Israel acknowledged that its forces had invaded Lebanon, though they returned shortly after. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1982. Its army occupied the territory for three years, then withdrew because of the strain of the occupation and broad international condemnation.

History also offers a note of caution to Israel's foes. In 1967, Israel responded to Egyptian aggression by taking the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Years later, when Syria and Israel fought over control of Lebanon in 1982, Israeli jet fighters reportedly shot down 80 Syrian planes without losing any of its own.

Israel's military superiority is built on American support and a skill honed by decades of fighting for the very existence of the nation. Israel receives the best equipment that the United States can offer its allies. "They have some of the most highly advanced weapons systems in the world," says Dr. Jones.

Israel's air force, in particular, has no rival in the region, which makes air strikes the most effective - and most probable - means of Israeli retaliation and aggression. Yet Israel has so far focused most of its attacks on Lebanon, despite Hizbullah's links to Syria and Iran. Indeed, both sides have long used Lebanon as a way to harass the other, since Lebanon's military is almost irrelevant, analysts say.

Even though Israel accuses Syria and Iran of backing Hizbullah's attacks, it hesitates to attack them directly. The reason is simple: Though Syria's aging military is no match for Israel's, it has missiles that could strike any part of Israel, as well as stocks of chemical weapons. Moreover, the 60 miles from the Israeli border to the Syrian capital of Damascus is one of the most heavily fortified zones in the world.

"Syria doesn't have the capacity to win [a war against Israel], but it can cause lots of suffering," says Nadav Morag, former senior director for domestic policy in the Israel National Security Council.

Iran more formidable than Syria

By contrast, Iran presents a far more formidable challenge - but one that is so remote from Israel geographically as to make hostilities difficult. As with Syria, Iran's greatest threat lies in its missiles. Yet the prospect of firing missiles at America's greatest ally - at a time when it is surrounded by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan - is decidedly risky.

Likewise, the notion of an Israeli air strike against Iran presents enormous logistical hurdles. Although Iran does not possess a credible air force and has only mid-grade Russian air-defense systems to contend with Israeli jets, Israel would surely be denied overfly rights by the Arab countries that surround them, meaning it would have to take a circuitous and difficult oversea route to Iran.

It would probably be a measure taken only as a last resort., Mr. Morag says.
(Map)
SOURCE: STRATEGIC FORECASTING INC.; RICH CLABAUGH - STAFF

July 17, 2006 at 09:36 PM in Iran | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The threat of war

The threat of war | Economist.com

Jul 17th 2006
From Economist.com
Israel’s campaign in Lebanon is supposed to defeat Hizbullah, but risks destabilising Lebanon and the region as a whole

FOR days the pictures from both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border have been unremittingly familiar: buildings bombed to rubble, corpses and grief, refugees fleeing to safer areas. Since Hizbullah, the Shia militant party that controls southern Lebanon, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid last week, Israel has been bombing targets across Lebanon, while Hizbullah rockets have fallen on Israel’s northern towns, including the large port city of Haifa. At least 140 Lebanese and 24 Israelis have so far died.

Israel’s goals are to destroy Hizbullah’s military capabilities and, through the civilian population, to put pressure on the Lebanese government, of which Hizbullah forms part, to disarm Hizbullah. Though Israel has aimed most of its bombs at Hizbullah’s rocket launching facilities in southern Lebanon, it has also hammered a residential neighbourhood of Beirut where Hizbullah leaders live and work, hit the airport and highway to Damascus and blockaded the ports. The idea is both to make it harder to get the kidnapped soldiers out of the country and to make ordinary Lebanese feel the consequences of Hizbullah’s actions.

Some European countries have condemned Israel’s response as “disproportionate”, though the United States has largely stuck by it. One question is whether Israel will achieve its goals. In Gaza, where Palestinian militants are holding a soldier they captured late last month, Israel has been adopting a similar strategy: simultaneously trying to secure his release and stamp out the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. It has attacked militant leaders, shelling the areas where rockets are launched, while also bombing public infrastructure and government buildings in an attempt to put pressure on the Palestinians’ Hamas-run government. So far it is showing little result: although nearly 90 Palestinians have been killed, more Qassams are falling, the soldier remains in captivity, public support for Hamas is steady if not growing, and the government (or what is left of it after a wave of arrests in the West Bank) remains defiant.

The Lebanese, unlike the Palestinians, can at least clearly blame Hizbullah for lighting the fuse after several years of relative calm. But Israel is treading a fine line between alienating the Lebanese from Hizbullah and uniting them against their outside aggressor. And if Israel cannot achieve a decisive victory against Hizbullah with air power, and has to add ground forces, it risks getting bogged down in southern Lebanon once again.

A second question is whether Israel has fallen for a Hizbullah trap. There is much speculation about whether Hizbullah expected Israel’s fierce response. There are reasons to think it did not. Israel had responded to previous kidnappings by agreeing to prisoner exchanges. Hizbullah may have been hoping to secure the release of three prisoners held in Israel. Since 2000 Israel had kept its responses to Hizbullah encroachments on the border somewhat restrained, not wanting to open up a war on its northern border while it was fighting against the Palestinians’ intifada.

Perhaps, with the help of both domestic pressure in Lebanon and a new international peacekeeping force—something that world leaders meeting in St Petersburg agreed to ask the UN to look into—Hizbullah will be beaten back, at least from the south, restoring a fragile calm.

On the other hand, the timing of Hizbullah’s kidnap may have been designed precisely to trigger an Israeli backlash: having gone in so heavy in Gaza in response to the first kidnapping, Israel could hardly stand by and watch as two more soldiers disappeared. Many suspect Hizbullah wants to drag Israel into a war on two fronts, perhaps with the backing of Syria and Iran. These two countries provide financial and material help to both Hamas and Hizbullah and they benefit from chaos and instability in the region. If the fighting prompts not Hizbullah’s capitulation but a breakdown in the fragile balance of power in Lebanon, triggering another of the country’s periodic civil wars, the conflict could spread wider.

July 17, 2006 at 02:42 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Hizbullah aims to shift power balance

Hizbullah aims to shift power balance | csmonitor.com

Israel, Hizbullah both hope to gain edge in changing war.
By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIRUT, LEBANON – The operation to kidnap Israeli soldiers took months of planning with Hizbullah's battle-hardened fighters staking out the Lebanese border looking for weaknesses.

Evidently they found one. Five days after they blasted through a border fence and seized two soldiers, Hizbullah is in a rapidly escalating conflict with Israel. It's a climactic struggle between two bitter foes which has become a "defining moment" for the Middle East, says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, author of "Hizbullah: Politics and Religion."

"This is a showdown for both sides in which Israel is attempting to neutralize Hizbullah, and Hizbullah is attempting to impose its will on Israel and [say to] the international community that it's here to stay," she says.

By striking Haifa with a barrage of rockets that killed at least eight Israelis yesterday, Hizbullah has transferred the Arab-Israeli conflict to Israeli territory for the first time in more than 50 years, overturning Israel's long-standing military doctrine of defeating its enemies on foreign soil.

"If the Israeli public begins clamoring for a cease-fire, then the Israeli army will have been neutralized," says Ms. Saad-Ghorayeb, who is also a professor of politics at the Lebanese American University. "It will shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility, proving Hizbullah's point that military force is not the same as power. This will change the shape of the region."

In response to the Haifa attacks, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday there would be "far reaching consequences." Much of Beirut's southern suburbs lay in ruins after multiple Israeli air strikes had destroyed Hizbullah's headquarters and television station.

The roots of the current conflict go back to 2000, when Hizbullah fighters advanced as Israel withdrew from an occupied strip of Lebanese territory along the Israeli border. Over the following months, Hizbullah established a military infrastructure along the frontier, and its fighters occasionally attacked Israeli positions in the Shebaa Farms, a strip of mountainside running along Lebanon's southeast border.

The clashes followed certain unwritten rules. If Israel was to react disproportionately to Hizbullah's needling attacks, it ran the risk of incurring a massive rocket bombardment by Hizbullah. On the other hand, if Hizbullah overstepped its boundaries in attacking Israel, the resulting heavy retaliation against Lebanon could backlash on the group's domestic popularity. The rules ensured a tense, but stable, calm along the border.

Yet Hizbullah's preparations along the border were in anticipation of an eventual showdown with Israel, which Hizbullah officials believed was inevitable. "This will happen and we are constantly preparing for it," a Hizbullah official told The Monitor as long ago as February 2002.

Similarly, the Israeli military drew up its own contingency plans.

The status quo began to change in 2004 when Syria, which dominated Lebanon politically, began facing pressure to disengage from its neighbor. The US and France co-sponsored UN Security Council resolution 1559, which demanded a free and fair Lebanese election and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. But the US pressed for additional clauses calling for the "dismantling of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias," a reference to Hizbullah and armed Palestinian groups, and the deployment of Lebanese army troops to replace the Shiite group's fighters.

The effect of the resolution was to polarize the Lebanese into pro- and anti-Syrian camps, a divide aggravated by the murder in 2005 of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister, which was blamed by most Lebanese on the Syrian regime.

With Syria's disengagement from Lebanon two months after Hariri's death, Hizbullah lost its political cover and was forced to defend its interests more directly.

It struck an alliance with its Shiite rival, the Amal movement, which effectively turned the attempt to disarm Hizbullah into one perceived as disarming the Shiites. The alliance strengthened Hizbullah politically but at the expense of exacerbating sectarian tensions between Shiites and Lebanon's other communities, the Christians, Sunnis, and Druze.

"The country is split one-third, two-thirds very simply," says Chibli Mallat, a presidential aspirant. "Unfortunately, the Shiites are on their own."

By the end of 2005, an anti-Western alliance was crystallizing in the Middle East, linking Iran, under the newly elected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Syria, Hizbullah, and the Damascus-branch of the Hamas movement. By closing ranks, the alliance felt emboldened to challenge the US in the Middle East.
(Graphic)
RICH CLABAUGH - STAFF
Click here to enlarge the image

Hizbullah had made it known for months that it was interested in kidnapping Israeli soldiers to exchange for prisoners. It even launched a well-planned assault on an Israeli position last November with the intention of snatching soldiers. The bid failed, however.

Although a fresh kidnapping was bound to incur a massive response from Israel and the wrath of non-Shiite Lebanese, analysts believe that Hizbullah and its Iranian patron calculated that the Shiite group would prevail.

"Quite frankly, they don't care" about the views of non-Shiite Lebanese, says Saad-Ghorayeb, as long as they have the support of their own constituency.

In June, the Israeli government became embroiled in the Gaza kidnap crisis, and for Hizbullah and its allies it appeared an opportune moment to strike again, opening a new front and placing additional pressure on Mr. Olmert.

Israel's response has knocked out roads, bridges, and power stations, and left more than 100 people dead in the airstrikes. With Israel telling residents of south Lebanon to leave their homes, a senior UN officer in the south says that much of the district had become "a free-fire zone."

"This is a pure intimidation campaign," says Timur Goksel, professor and former UN officer in south Lebanon. "If these hardships continue, people will begin to support Hizbullah against Israel again."
Hizbullah leader Nasrallah

• Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is secretary-general of Hizbullah, a Lebanese political party and military group that is classified as a terrorist organization by the US and Europe.

• He became Hizbullah's leader in 1992 after Israel assassinated his predecessor.

• Under Nasrallah, Hizbullah is widely credited in the Arab world with causing Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.

• He is believed to have passed intelligence to Palestinian groups and has praised Palestinian suicide bombers.

• After last year's assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, Nasrallah led Hizbullah to win 14 parliament seats and to join the government for the first time.

Sources: AP, BBC.

July 17, 2006 at 02:39 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Hearts and minds of muslims

Policy Exchange

On July 12, Policy Exchange launch a new report, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British State's flirtation with radical Islamism. Authored by Martin Bright, Political Editor of the New Statesman and with a preface by Jason Burke, Europe Editor of The Observer and author of an acclaimed book about al-Qaeda, it argues that the British State continues to spurn moderate Muslims, preferring to deal with more unsavoury partners.

After 7/7, the Prime Minister rightly stated that the rules of the game had changed. Earlier this year, in an address at the Foreign Policy Centre, he specifically identified the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Wahabbism as sources of the poisoning of the discourse between Muslims and non-Muslims. Martin Bright's work shows that whatever Tony Blair may say, inside the Government which he heads, little has changed.

July 17, 2006 at 12:14 AM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 16, 2006

Israel's Hezbollah headache

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Israel's Hezbollah headache

By Jonathan Marcus
BBC diplomatic correspondent

The confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah is clearly unbalanced. Israel is a significant military power with sophisticated land, sea and air forces at its disposal

Hezbollah began as a guerrilla force but over the years it has evolved a complex military infrastructure. Nonetheless it has few of the types of weapons available to the Israelis. Its only long-range punch comes from an assorted arsenal of missiles.

Most of these are relatively short-range systems, generically known as Katyushas, capable of striking targets out to about 25km (16 miles).

But the Hezbollah missile strikes on Israel's northern port city of Haifa demonstrate that it also has an unknown quantity of longer-range systems in its arsenal.

Most of these are Iranian-manufactured systems like the Fajr-3, with a 45-km range; the Fajr-5, with a range of some 75km; and the more potent Zelzal-2 with a range of up to 200km.

See the rockets' range

This would bring much of Tel Aviv - Israel's largest population centre - within range.

None of these are guided or accurate systems but if the target is an urban area, accuracy is not needed.

In addition, as the successful attack on an Israeli naval vessel demonstrates (an Egyptian freighter was also hit and abandoned by its crew), Hezbollah also has relatively sophisticated Iranian-supplied anti-shipping missiles at its disposal.

Air war limitations

This missile build-up has worried the Israeli military for some time.

Israeli planes return from mission over Lebanon on 12 July
Israeli strategists know an air war has its limits

No surprise then that Israeli leaders have taken the opportunity of the Hezbollah raid which captured two of their men, to set about the full-scale weakening of Hezbollah's infrastructure.

Headquarters, television stations, and missile storage bunkers have all been hit.

But the Israelis have also sought to blockade Lebanon - closing Beirut's airport, striking the Beirut-Damascus highway, and hitting various key transport links, especially bridges.

The Israelis explain all this by saying that they are acting to prevent Hezbollah bringing in or moving up additional missiles to the border. Inevitably, such attacks, however precise, cause civilian casualties.

Israel's long-term goals are obvious. It wants to end the cross-border missile threat to its towns and cities by applying a blunt lesson in deterrence.

It would like to see Hezbollah disarm and the Lebanese Army extend its control down to the international frontier. That is what UN Security Council Resolution 1559, of 2004, also demands - but it is hard to see how it can be enacted.

Israel's tactics are to some extent puzzling. The bludgeoning of Lebanon's transport infrastructure will hinder, but will probably not stop, missile movements.

Indeed, Hezbollah has shown remarkable resilience, and the rockets are still flying across Israel's northern border. It is very hard to deliver a body blow to Hezbollah from the air.

So is this all a prelude to some significant Israeli incursion on the ground?

On the face of things Israel has not yet mobilised sufficient troops for such an operation. And a comprehensive assault on Hezbollah would require a move into the strategically important Bekaa Valley, a step that would send alarm bells ringing in Syria, risking an even wider confrontation.

Dangers of complacency

Israel's own military performance raises several questions.

Damaged Israeli missile ship enters Israeli port of Ashdod on 15 July
A deadly missile attack on one of its warships shocked Israel

Even Israeli commentators have pointed to the fact that the capture of Israeli soldiers, first by Palestinian militants and now Hezbollah, shows clear signs of laxness and a lack of vigilance on the part of the reserve units involved.

Hezbollah has clearly signalled its desire to carry out such operations and it has attempted similar things in the past. Has reserve training been reduced too far? Has a certain complacency set in?

The attack on the Israeli missile boat - one of its most sophisticated warships, a Saar-5 class corvette - also raises many questions.

It was hit by a Chinese-made, radar-guided C-802 missile.

Did Israeli intelligence not know that these anti-shipping missiles had been given to Hezbollah by Iran?

Israel's naval electronics and defensive systems are among the best in the world, defensive systems intended to counter just such a threat. Some reports suggest that they were not even operating on board the vessel that was hit.

Proportionality

But most of all there is the question of the new Israeli government's relationship with the military.

Much has been made of the limited military experience of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz.

Mr Olmert is in a tight spot. He has to act to protect Israel's citizens. But ask a general what action can be taken in response to a threat and he will generally supply a long list of targets.

Israel seems to be working through just such a list. But the real strategic calculation is to weigh up military advantage against wider political and diplomatic considerations.

Has Israel got the balance right?

Clearly there are many views. But the overwhelming international consensus - not least from the G8 summit in St Petersburg - is that disproportionate military force has been used.

President George W Bush - who has strongly backed Israeli action - nonetheless put this point rather neatly.

"Defend yourself," he said, "but be mindful of the consequences."

July 16, 2006 at 12:35 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 12, 2006

Bow Street bows out after 271 years

Telegraph | Expat | Bow Street bows out after 271 years

by Ben Fenton
(Filed: 12/07/2006)

As the first step on the treadmill of justice, Bow Street magistrates' court has played host to every hue on the spectrum of humanity.

From the trivial to the most serious, from the pacifist to the sadist, from the traitor to the betrayed, its oak-panelled Number One Court has heard some of the least known and best known stories of the past quarter of a millennium.

Casanova, Casement, Crippen - the letter C alone provides enough fascinating names to keep criminologists happy for an age.

And for each one of those, there have been 10,000 Smiths and Joneses "up and down" before the beak for begging, vagrancy, picking pockets or driving under the influence, for knocking a Pc's helmet off, murdering their wives or husbands or lovers or for doing almost anything in between.

But after Friday, there will be no more new names to add to the roster of justice at Bow Street. It is to be sold, along with most of its history, to an Irish property developer who is believed to want to turn it into a hotel.

There has been a magistrates' court in Bow Street since the system came into being, the first established on a site across the road from the current Victorian building in 1735.

When the first cases bound for Bow Street transfer to Horseferry Road, on the other side of Westminster, it will be the cause of great regret for Senior District Judge Timothy Workman, the Chief Magistrate for England and Wales.

"I did my best to see whether there was an opportunity to redevelop the courthouse on this site, but I'm afraid I lost that," he said yesterday.

"The Lord Chancellor tried hard to find a way of preserving the heritage but financially the figures did not add up. Unfortunately there is no value to be placed on history and heritage.

"This is probably the most famous magistrates' court in the world and it would have been nice to be able to preserve that heritage."

Among his predecessors in the great seat from which magistrates have dispensed more or less recognisable justice for 271 years were Henry Fielding, the novelist, who was the second magistrate in charge of the court. Judge Workman believes he is the 33rd. Fielding was succeeded by his half-brother Jack, blinded by a surgeon's incompetence at the age of 19 and, as Sir John, known as "the Blind Beak of Bow Street".

Between them, the Fieldings were chief magistrates in a much more European style than the current members of the bench, interviewing victims and suspects, and investigating crimes.

From their home in the same crime-ridden London avenue, they instigated the red-coated Bow Street Runners, ancestors of the modern Metropolitan Police.

So it is the whole gamut of crime and punishment that can be traced back along the road that runs downhill from Long Acre, past the Royal Opera House to the Strand.

Casanova made his appearance before Sir John Fielding in 1760 on charges of assaulting a prostitute and was bound over to keep the peace. Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour for committing "indecent acts".

Sir Roger Casement, the Irish diplomat and humanitarian who was hanged as a traitor for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising, began his tortuous legal process in that same dock, as did Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, hanged for the murder of his wife in 1910.

The gallows journey of William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, another famous traitor, also started in that oak-panelled room.

Judge Workman said: "Court One has great atmosphere, and it is a place where you never know what you are going to be dealing with next - somebody for treason or somebody for begging.

"You don't get too many treasons, and unfortunately you get too many beggings. But all human life is there, a lot of it very sad."

A mere half-hour's worth of human failing yesterday threw up the typically mundane and depressing: a man with obvious mental problems fined for swearing at community support officers; a 21-year-old banned for drink-driving in Soho; a couple of search warrants sworn out for the police.

Bow Street also has jurisdiction over extradition and terrorism cases - although the recent stream of high-profile hearings, such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed radical cleric convicted of soliciting to murder, have been heard by magistrates sitting within Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London.

Back in Bow Street itself, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken stepped on the same, uneasy few square feet of floor as the Kray twins and numerous IRA suspects.

In future, their like will find justice staring down at them from the new City of Westminster magistrates' court, which Judge Workman described as "bland and plastic".

"It's horrible," he said. "It has got none of the ambience of the present courtroom. But I suppose it is adequate for its job."

July 12, 2006 at 08:17 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 09, 2006

West mounts 'secret war' to keep nuclear North Korea in check

West mounts 'secret war' to keep nuclear North Korea in check - Sunday Times - Times Online

Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent
A PROGRAMME of covert action against nuclear and missile traffic to North Korea and Iran is to be intensified after last week’s missile tests by the North Korean regime.

Intelligence agencies, navies and air forces from at least 13 nations are quietly co-operating in a “secret war” against Pyongyang and Tehran.

It has so far involved interceptions of North Korean ships at sea, US agents prowling the waterfronts in Taiwan, multinational naval and air surveillance missions out of Singapore, investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of Macau and a fleet of planes and ships eavesdropping on the “hermit kingdom” in the waters north of Japan.

Few details filter out from western officials about the programme, which has operated since 2003, or about the American financial sanctions that accompany it.

But together they have tightened a noose around Kim Jong-il’s bankrupt, hungry nation.

“Diplomacy alone has not worked, military action is not on the table and so you’ll see a persistent increase in this kind of pressure,” said a senior western official.

In a telling example of the programme’s success, two Bush administration officials indicated last year that it had blocked North Korea from obtaining equipment used to make missile propellant.

The Americans also persuaded China to stop the sale of chemicals for North Korea’s nuclear weapons scientists. And a shipload of “precursor chemicals” for weapons was seized in Taiwan before it could reach a North Korean port.

According to John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations and the man who originally devised the programme, it has made a serious dent in North Korea’s revenues from ballistic missile sales.

But the success of Bolton’s brainchild, the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), whose stated aim is to stop the traffic in weapons of mass destruction, might also push North Korea into extreme reactions.

Britain is a core member of the initiative, which was announced by President George W Bush in Krakow, Poland, on May 31, 2003. British officials have since joined meetings of “operational experts” in Australia, Europe and the US, while the Royal Navy has contributed ships to PSI exercises. The participants include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Spain and Singapore, among others.

There has been almost no public debate in the countries committed to military involvement. A report for the US Congress said it had “no international secretariat, no offices in federal agencies established to support it, no database or reports of successes and failures and no established funding”.

To Bolton and senior British officials, those vague qualities make it politically attractive.

In the past 10 months, since the collapse of six-nation talks in Beijing on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, the US and its allies have also tightened the screws on Kim’s clandestine fundraising, which generated some $500m a year for the regime.

Robert Joseph, the US undersecretary for arms control, has disclosed that 11 North Korean “entities” — trading companies or banks — plus six from Iran and one from Syria were singled out for action under an executive order numbered 13382 and signed by Bush.

For the first time, the US Secret Service and the FBI released details of North Korean involvement in forging $100 notes and in selling counterfeit Viagra, cigarettes and amphetamines in collaboration with Chinese gangsters.

The investigators homed in on a North Korean trading company and two banks in Macau. The firm, which had offices next to a casino and a “sauna”, was run by North Koreans with diplomatic passports, who promptly vanished.

The two banks, Seng Heng bank and Banco Delta Asia, denied any wrongdoing. But the Macau authorities stepped in after a run on Banco Delta Asia and froze some $20m in North Korean accounts.

Last week the North Koreans demanded the money as a precondition for talks but the Americans brushed off their protest.

Kim told Hu Jintao, the Chinese president in January that his government was being strangled, diplomats in the Chinese capital said. “He has warned the Chinese leaders his regime could collapse and he knows that is the last thing we want,” said a Chinese source close to the foreign ministry.

The risk being assessed between Washington and Tokyo this weekend is how far Kim can be pushed against the wall before he undertakes something more lethal than last week’s display of force.

The “Dear Leader” has turned North Korea into a military-dominated state to preserve his own inherited role at the apex of a Stalinist personality cult. Although he appears erratic, and North Korea’s rhetoric is extreme, most diplomats who have met him think Kim is highly calculating.

“He is a very tough Korean nationalist and he knows exactly how to play the power game — very hard,” said Professor Shi Yinhong, an expert in Beijing.

But the costly failure of Kim’s intercontinental missile, the Taepodong 2, after just 42 seconds of flight last Wednesday, was a blow to his prestige and to the force of his deterrent. Six other short and medium-range missiles splashed into the Sea of Japan without making any serious military point.

The United States and its allies are now preoccupied by what Kim might do with the trump card in his arsenal — his stockpile of plutonium for nuclear bombs.

“The real danger is that the North Koreans could sell their plutonium to another rogue state — read Iran — or to terrorists,” said a western diplomat who has served in Pyongyang. American officials fear Iran is negotiating to buy plutonium from North Korea in a move that would confound the international effort to stop Tehran’s nuclear weapons programme.

The prospect of such a sale is “the next big thing”, said a western diplomat involved with the issue. The White House commissioned an intelligence study on the risk last December but drew no firm conclusions.

Plutonium was the element used in the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945. It would give Iran a rapid route to the bomb as an alternative to the conspicuous process of enriching uranium which is the focus of international concern.

American nuclear scientists estimate North Korea is “highly likely” to have about 43kg and perhaps as much as 53kg of the material. Between 7kg and 9kg are needed for a weapon.

Siegfried Hecker, former head of the US Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, has warned that North Korea’s plutonium would fit into a few suitcases and would be impossible to detect if it were sold.

For the first time since the crisis over its nuclear ambitions began in 1994, North Korea has made enough plutonium to sell a quantity to its ally while keeping sufficient for its own use.

North Korea is known to have sold 1.7 tons of uranium to Libya. It has sold ballistic missiles to Iran since the 1980s. American officials have said Iran is already exchanging missile test data for nuclear technology from Pyongyang. The exchanges probably involve flight monitoring for Scud-type rockets and techniques of uranium centrifuge operation.

Relations deepened between the two surviving regimes in Bush’s “axis of evil” after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s military and scientific links with North Korea have grown rapidly.

Last November western intelligence sources told the German magazine Der Spiegel that a high-ranking Iranian official had travelled to Pyongyang to offer oil and natural gas in exchange for more co-operation on nuclear technology and ballistic missiles. Iran’s foreign ministry denied the report but diplomats in Beijing and Pyongyang believe it was accurate. At the same time evidence emerged through Iranian dissidents in exile that North Korean experts were helping Iran build nuclear-capable missiles in a vast tunnel complex under the Khojir and Bar Jamali mountains near Tehran.

So while one nation, North Korea, boasts of its nuclear weapons and the other, Iran, denies wanting them at all, the world is on edge. If the stakes are high in the nuclear terror game, they are equally high for the balance of power in Asia and thus for global prosperity.

North Korea’s aggressive behaviour and a record of kidnapping Japanese citizens have created new willpower among politicians in Tokyo to strengthen their military forces. To China, Japan’s wartime adversary, that signals a worrying change in the strategic equation. Nationalism in both countries is on the rise. Relations between the two are at their worst for decades.

One scenario is that Japan abandons its pacifist doctrine and becomes a nuclear weapons power. “The Japanese people are very angry and very worried and, right now, they will accept any government plan for the military,” said Tetsuo Maeda, professor of defence studies at Tokyo International University.

The mood favours the ascent of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s hawkish chief cabinet secretary, the man most likely to take over from Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister, who steps down in September. “He will be far more hardline on Pyongyang and I’m firmly of the opinion that he intends to make Japan into a nuclear power,” Maeda said.

The government is already committed to installing defensive Pac-3 Patriot missiles in co-operation with the Americans. But radical opinion in Japan has been fortified by Kim’s adventures.

“The vast majority of Japanese agree that we need to be able to carry out first strikes,” said Yoichi Shimada, a professor of international relations at Fukui Prefectural University.

“I spoke to Mr Abe earlier this week and he shares my opinion that for Japan, the most important step would be for Japan to have an offensive missile capability.”

Such talk causes severe concern to Washington, which has sheltered Japan under the umbrella of its nuclear arsenal since forging a security alliance after the second world war.

Divisions within the Bush administration — which even sympathisers concede have paralysed its nuclear diplomacy towards the North — also served to undermine Japanese confidence in America, as have the well-documented failings of American intelligence.

Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute, a think tank with ties to the Pentagon, says: “There’s no human intelligence in North Korea. Zero. Zippo. It’s like looking at your neighbour’s house with a pair of binoculars — and they’ve got their blinds shut.”

Last week Bush was working the phones to the leaders of China and Russia. But British officials think it unlikely that either will support a Japanese proposal for UN sanctions on the North Koreans.

That leaves the Bush administration with the same unpalatable choices that existed a week, a month or a year ago. The military option, to all practical purposes, does not exist. “An attack is highly unlikely to destroy any existing North Korean nuclear weapons capability,” wrote Phillip Saunders of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, in a paper analysing its risks.

“The biggest problem with military options is preventing North Korean retaliation,” Saunders said. He believes half a million artillery shells an hour would be rained on Seoul in the first day of any conflict from North Korean artillery hidden in caves. The North Koreans could fire 200 mobile rocket launchers and launch up to 600 Scud missiles. American and South Korean casualties, excluding civilians, are projected at between 300,000 and 500,000 in the first 90 days of war.

Like former president Bill Clinton’s team, the Bush administration has therefore realised that a diplomatic answer is the only one available.

But years of inattention, division and mixed messages robbed the US of diplomatic influence. One observer tells of watching the US envoy Christopher Hill sit mutely in an important negotiation because policy arguments in Washington had tied his hands.

Yesterday Hill compromised by offering the North Koreans a private meeting if they came back to nuclear talks hosted by China. But American faith in China’s powers of persuasion may have been misplaced.

“China is the source of the problem, not the source of the solution,” argued Edward Timperlake, a defence official in the Reagan administration and author of Showdown, a new book on the prospect of war with China.

Kim ignored Chinese demands to call off the missile tests and some American officials now think Beijing is simply playing off its client against its superpower rival.

The clearest statement of all came from the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (DPRK) itself. The state news agency said America had used “threats and blackmail” to destroy an agreement to end the dispute. “But for the DPRK’s tremendous deterrent for self-defence, the US would have attacked the DPRK more than once as it had listed it as part of an ‘axis of evil’.”

The lesson of Iraq, the North Koreans said, was now known to everyone.

Additional reporting: Sarah Baxter, Washington; Julian Ryall, Tokyo

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We oppose the reactionary policies of the US government but we do not oppose the American people. We want to have many good friends in the United States

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July 9, 2006 at 01:11 PM in Japan | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Special forces to strike at Taliban

Special forces to strike at Taliban - Sunday Times - Times Online

MORE than 200 SAS and SBS troops are being flown to Afghanistan this weekend to mount a search and destroy operation against the Taliban, writes Michael Smith.

The reinforcements will double the number of British special forces on the ground and commanders hope that they will be able to deal the Taliban a crippling blow.

Senior defence sources said: “We need to break the back of this offensive now in one fell swoop.”

Des Browne, the defence secretary, is expected to tell MPs tomorrow that at least one additional battle group of about 700 infantry soldiers, extra transport helicopters and more ground attack aircraft are also being sent.

The move is in response to intelligence indicating that fighting in which six British soldiers have died may be the prelude to a much larger Taliban offensive.

The only frontline British soldiers on the ground in Helmand are one infantry battalion and a company of Gurkhas. The rest of the 3,300-strong British taskforce is made up of support troops.

July 9, 2006 at 01:07 PM in SAS | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Death trap

Death trap - Sunday Times - Times Online

Christina Lamb has spent 20 years covering Afghan wars and was lucky to escape with her life after a firefight 10 days ago. Afghanistan is littered with the debris of invading empires – so why do we refuse to learn from history?
When you twice stare death in the face in ditches in southern Afghanistan, first with Afghans and then fighting Afghans, you start to wonder what it is about this country that keeps drawing us back.

The first time I was 22, in and out of love, and thought I was indestructible. I was with a young, chubby and then unknown Hamid Karzai and a band of turbanned mullahs who would later go on to become founding members of the Taliban.

Armed and funded by the Americans and British, they had gone on an ill-conceived operation to attack a Russian base at Kandahar airport that had ended with us pinned down in a trench by Soviet tanks with hot dust and rubble raining on us and several dead.

Had anyone told me then that 18 years later Karzai would be the president of Afghanistan and I would end up under fire in a similar ditch with British soldiers in the neighbouring province of Helmand fighting Afghans, I would never have believed it.

Yet 10 days ago in the mud-walled village of Zumbelay, I accompanied British paratroopers on a hearts and minds patrol and ended up in a Taliban ambush. This time, crouching in an irrigation ditch, surrounded on three sides, with bullets pinging just past my ears and mortars landing nearby, and by now a wife and mother, I thought I was going to die.

It was impossible not to wonder whether any of those attacking us could be the same men as those I was with back in early 1988. And how, when Moscow had got such a bloody nose in Afghanistan, losing more than 15,000 men in what is seen as Russia’s Vietnam (and a defeat that had played a crucial role in the collapse of communism), had the British ended up taking on the same enemy?

It’s not as if we don’t have a history. When the paras moved into Camp Price just outside Gereshk in May and their commander had his first meeting with local officials, it took the Afghans just 10 minutes to bring up the battle of Maiwand. One of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British Army in which more than 1,000 men were slaughtered by the side of the Helmand River, the battle may have happened in 1880 but Afghans in Helmand talk about it as if it were yesterday and all claim that their forefathers were there.

If any further reminder were needed that one gets involved in Afghanistan at one’s peril, the Kabul headquarters of the Nato-led peacekeeping force is on the site of the old British cantonment. Its entire strength fled from here in January 1842 after a tribal revolt against the British-imposed ruler.

Of the 16,000 soldiers, wives, children and camp followers who left, only one got away; the rest were massacred or taken prisoner by Ghilzai tribesmen. Only Dr William Brydon was deliberately left alive to tell the tale and warn people back home of the consequences of getting involved in Afghanistan.

In a country that has ended up as a graveyard for so many thousands of British soldiers, why don’t we learn from history?

This time the politicians tell us that we have gone to make peace, not war — to “secure the area so that development can take place and extend the reach of the Karzai government”. But we are woefully underequipped for either: already six British soldiers have lost their lives within 24 days, victims once more of the Ghilzai Pashtuns.

Last month saw 53 “TICs” — troops in contact, in other words under Taliban attack — and last week there were two nights during which all but one of the British bases and outposts in Helmand came under attack.

How did it all go so wrong? Why does a senior British military officer talk despairingly of “military and developmental anarchy”?

AFGHANISTAN was supposed to be the success story. Two months of precision bombing by American B52s — in revenge for the Taliban’s refusal to throw out Al-Qaeda after the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001 — soon had the Taliban fleeing over the border into Pakistan.

By December 2001 the Taliban had been ousted and a new English-speaking, westernised Afghan was president. The fact that most Afghans outside Kandahar had never heard of Karzai, that he dared not venture outside his palace and even inside had to be protected by US soldiers, and that he had once been chief fundraiser for the Taliban were all conveniently ignored.

By August 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was describing events in Afghanistan as “a breathtaking accomplishment”. He pointed to Afghanistan as “a successful model for what could happen to Iraq if individuals were liberated, allowed to vote freely and to work”.

In some ways there has been remarkable progress from the days when women were forced to wear burqas and were banned from working, studying or laughing out loud.

Last year a parliament was elected in which a quarter of the MPs are women, including a voluptuous gym instructor from the city of Herat. They sit side by side with mullahs and former Taliban commanders to the astonishment of Afghans watching the proceedings on television. Their first debate was over their own pay.

An estimated one-third of the male MPs are warlords, gross violators of human rights or drug smugglers; but, as Karzai says, “better to have them inside rather than outside doing damage”.

But while George W Bush and Tony Blair insisted on declaring Afghanistan a success — and a model for the pacification of Iraq — they apparently forgot one crucial lesson that the British had learnt years before. “Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over” were the sage words of Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of North West Frontier Province.

Far from Afghanistan being a model for Iraq, Iraq has become a model for Afghanistan. There have been 41 Afghan suicide bombings in the past nine months, compared with five in the preceding five years. IEDs — improvised explosive devices — have become a fact of life. Three were left in roadside handcarts in Kabul last week to detonate as buses went past.

According to United Nations officials, not a day passes without a school being burnt down or a teacher being murdered, often in front of schoolchildren.

If there is one factor most responsible for the Taliban resurgence it is the war in Iraq, which distracted the attention of London and Washington at a critical time. While US marines were toppling statues of Saddam Hussein and then finding themselves fighting a bloody insurgency, the Taliban regrouped and retrained in Pakistan.

From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Mullad Dadullah, the Taliban commander, now claims that he has 12,000 men under arms in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan.

The southern third of the country, which British troops are supposed to “secure for development”, has long been ungovernable and a no-go area for aid agencies. It is all too easy here for the Taliban to tell local people that the West — and the pro-western government in Kabul — promised aid but has done nothing for them. Where the Taliban are not openly controlling districts, they have set up shadow administrations that assume power as soon as dusk falls.

More alarmingly, the Taliban are no longer just in the south but have even moved into the province of Logar, 25 miles from Kabul. Among their Afghan victims they particularly target police and their relatives as well as guards, road builders and interpreters for western contractors. About 1,500 Afghans were killed by the Taliban last year; 400 have died this year.

Last week an Afghan friend travelling from Kandahar to Kabul on a bus was shocked when a bearded passenger got up, walked to the front and replaced the music cassette that had been playing with a tape of Taliban chanting: “For the next 2½ hours we all sat listening to this terrible stuff and nobody said a word. Two years ago that would have been unthinkable.”

So confident are the Taliban that leaders of the once secretive group have started giving interviews on Afghanistan’s new US-funded Tolo television station. This prompted Karzai last month to impose reporting restrictions that he was forced to rescind by the international community, which felt “censorship” did not sit well with attempts to showcase Afghanistan as a liberal democracy.

“People are scared when they see the Taliban on TV,” said Jamil Karzai, MP for Kabul and a nephew of the president. “Every day I get constituents coming and asking: what does this mean, are the Taliban coming back? We could never have imagined we would get in a situation where such a thing was conceivable.”

“We need to realise that we could actually fail here,” warns Lieutenant-General David Richards, British commander of the Nato-led peacekeeping force. “Think of the psychological victory for Bin Laden and his ilk if we failed and the Taliban came back. Within months we’d suffer terror attacks in the UK. I think of my own daughters in London and the risk they would be in.”

UNLIKE Iraqis, most Afghans welcomed foreign troops, seeing them as the only guarantee of peace after years of civil war. Also, unlike the war in Iraq, Afghanistan has been an international effort involving soldiers from 36 countries.

Right from the beginning, however, there have been conflicting objectives. Commanders and politicians talk loosely of “coalition” forces but there are two command structures with different goals.

By far the largest contingent of forces is from the United States, which recently increased its numbers from 19,000 to 23,000 to pursue Operation Enduring Freedom, a key part of the global war on terror. Its main objective is to hunt down and destroy Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, even though they are believed to have long fled across the border into Pakistan. It is commanded by Karl Eikenberry, an American general who takes his orders from home.

Then there is the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, now under Nato control and the command of Britain’s Richards. Its main purpose, as the British government keeps telling us, is to make Afghanistan safe for development.

Until two years ago ISAF was only 4,000 strong and was limited to Kabul where it was widely derided as the International Shopping Assistance Force for its tendency to hang around Chicken Street, centre of carpet shopping. Even now, with 9,700 troops, it is far smaller than the peacekeeping missions in Liberia or Kosovo, countries with a fraction of Afghanistan’s 25m population.

To add to the confusion, ISAF has no control over troops in the south, including the British in Helmand, who come under a Canadian general in Kandahar.

Some of this will change at the end of this month when Nato/ISAF will take control of all operations in Helmand and the south. But the strategic contradiction will endure.

One crucial point of conflict is over warlords and militias, a symptom of Afghanistan’s old agony.

The Karzai government is so worried about the deteriorating security situation that it is allowing local Afghan commanders to re-create militias, even though it was popular anger over child abductions and extortion by these private armies that first led to the emergence of the Taliban a decade ago.

Foreign diplomats are trying to put a gloss on this retreat by referring to the militias euphemistically as “community police”, but there is no doubting the alarm of Richards and others who see it as undermining their efforts to create a national army and police.

To British dismay, one of those forming a militia is Sher Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand, who was forced out by the British because of his alleged links with the drugs mafia.

“He and around 100 people, including the former chief of police and some district chiefs who were sacked went to Kabul for a big meeting to demand to form a militia,” said Engineer Mohammed Daud, the new governor. “They say they need to protect themselves.”

Failure to deal with the warlords has been one of the biggest criticisms of the Karzai administration. Back in December 2001 the warlords were running scared, discredited because of the damage they had wrought on the country.

Karzai and his elder brother Qayyum joked about what to do with them, the latter suggesting they could run guided tours of Kabul, each showing the destruction for which he was responsible.

“I will not tolerate warlords,” insisted the new president to me in 2002, adding jokingly, “I’ll hang them all!” Yet they have found themselves named as ministers, governors and police chiefs.

Yet while ISAF commanders regard the warlords as part of the problem, the Americans have seen them as the best source of local intelligence and paid them millions of dollars.

Just as damaging have been the continuing air raids across Afghanistan, sometimes on wedding parties or innocent villagers, which have led to the loss of thousands of civilian lives. In May this year there were an astonishing 750 bombing raids, according to American Central Command.

Karzai has repeatedly complained to the Americans about the bombers and the lack of cultural sensitivity of raids on the ground — doors kicked down in the middle of the night, male soldiers entering women’s quarters or taking in dogs which are considered unclean.

Another bitter complaint is of American convoys driving too fast and not stopping when they run someone down. It was such an incident in Kabul that provoked a six-hour riot last month — yet two weeks later a US truck ran over a child in exactly the same place.

“How can we go in offering school sets and candy to people when the Americans have just bombed someone’s family or run over their daughter?” asked an exasperated senior ISAF officer.

Few Afghans see any difference between ISAF activities and America’s Operation Enduring Freedom. The result is that even in the mosques of Kabul, mullahs have started preaching that ISAF are “infidels here to destroy Islam”.

Against such a backdrop, it seems hopelessly naive for the British to hope that locals in Helmand will differentiate between them and the Americans. At every meeting I attended, para commanders started off by telling local elders, “we’re British, not Americans”, an odd comment for such close allies.

At a shura or traditional meeting in Gereshk, elders complained about soldiers bursting into their women’s quarters.

“It’s not us, we’ve had endless cultural training about this,” said Major Paul Blair, the local British commander. “But of course they don’t see the difference.”

“You don’t even differentiate between Pashtuns and Tajiks, let alone different Pashtun tribes,” replied a local teacher. “Why should we?”

Back at the camp after this discussion we found that a convoy of Americans had arrived. They were laughing about running over some goats on the way in. “Now I’m going to have to make another phone call to the district chief to sort it out,” grumbled Blair.

To add to the confusion, while the men of Blair’s C company of the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment are pursuing hearts and minds in Helmand, their fellow paras in A Company are taking part only a few miles away in a US-led offensive called Operation Mountain Thrust.

This is actively seeking out the Taliban, something British ministers have never said was part of the mission. Three members of A Company were killed in the small town of Sangin last week.

I was with the paras a few days after they first went in to Sangin late last month after a Taliban massacre of local people. The paras were on patrol by foot and in soft hats, yet the hostility to them was palpable. This is the heartland of the country’s narcotics industry — which is encouraged by the Taliban — and nobody wants to be seen as a friend of the British.

The soldiers set up base in the local district commissioner’s mud-walled house. It has been attacked almost every night since.

British commanders in Helmand admit that they have been taken by surprise by the Taliban’s numbers and sophistication. “In every contact they lose maybe 15 or 20 yet they just keep coming,” said Colonel Charlie Knaggs, commander of the Helmand taskforce.

The greatest shock for me in the two-hour firefight in which I found myself in the village of Zumbelay — south of Sangin — was the cunning employed by the Taliban to outflank and surround us.

My memories of travelling with the mujaheddin in the 1980s were mostly of disorganisation and chaos. I always felt that one of the reasons why the Russians found it so difficult to outwit them was that the Afghans had no idea themselves of what they would do next.

Last week was different. “They used the tactics we would use,” said Captain Alex Mackenzie, commander of C Company’s fire support group, when we finally escaped from the ambush.

“Maybe they learnt them in the same place,” said a fellow officer, pointing out that many senior Pakistani officers have been trained at Sandhurst.

Karzai himself has repeatedly insisted to Blair and Bush that the Taliban are once again receiving training from Pakistani military intelligence, ISI, which was behind the creation of the movement in the 1990s.

Foreign journalists have long been barred from going to Quetta, the Pakistani border city, where local people report that the Taliban stroll in the streets. “If you British really wanted to end insecurity in Helmand you would do something about Pakistan,” a white-bearded man insisted last week to Knaggs. “The fact that you don’t makes us think you are not interested in solving the problem.”

Western intelligence on Helmand is also seriously flawed. “The British don’t have good field intelligence,” said Zia Mojadeddi, one of Karzai’s national security advisers.

“The past formulas do not work. You have to know every village and who is in the village, otherwise they are doomed to failure.”

THERE are few even among the most on-message British senior officers who do not privately concede that the mission in Helmand is two years too late. Not only has the distraction of war in Iraq allowed the Taliban to regroup, but the British forces are telling locals that they have come to help the Afghan government at a time when the credibility of the Karzai administration is at an all-time low.

Just as the international community has not been committed or consistent enough in its military support, so there has been chaos in aid for economic development. The amount of aid has not been enough. At about £5 billion, it is far less than that spent in East Timor, Haiti or Kosovo; yet Afghanistan has a much bigger problem.

There has also been a lack of co-ordination and a focus on First World priorities such as gender rights rather than basic health or infrastructure. There has been an endless stream of American feminists intent not only on sweeping away the tyranny of the burqa but also on introducing western concepts of sexual equality. Yet in a country where children regularly die of malnutrition, all the Afghan mothers I know are far more interested in food, clinics and security. Liberation can wait.

More than 1,000 NGOs have pushed up rents and put a lot of concrete blocks around their offices, but it is hard to see where else the aid money has gone.

Not a single new dam, power station or water system has been built in the five years since the Taliban fell. Only one important highway has been completed. Kabul still has no sewerage system. Its streets remain piled high with rubbish and running with green effluent. Only 6% of the population has electricity and Afghanistan remains at the bottom of all social indicators.

There may be 5m children at school, as the politicians like to say, but many have their lessons in tents which they attend in shifts for just one or two hours’ tuition a day. This is not just in rural areas but also in Kabul where the Saluddin Ansari school has 3,700 children sharing a cluster of tents and one pit as a toilet.

“People just treat the children like garbage,” complained Asadullah, a Pashto teacher. “Every so often some foreigner comes by and says how shocking, but they don’t do anything.”

“The international community must start working better together to deliver,” warned Richards. “The West has been guilty of applying western precepts on an almost post-medieval economy. We need to address a basic economy with basic solutions. The lack of amenities is staggering. A quarter of children die by the age of five. Worrying about civil service reform and gender rights are really tomorrow’s problems.”

In recognition that development was failing, the so-called Afghanistan Compact was signed in London in February, agreeing that far more aid would be channelled through the Afghan government. Contractors say this has simply resulted in widespread corruption, with ministries regularly demanding a “gift” of between 20% and 30% of a contract. One deputy minister refused a $120,000 armoured vehicle paid for by USAID, demanding instead the $230,000 model with the latest electronic windows and DVD player.

The irony is that there has been a private financial boom. Kabul now boasts shiny blue-glass office blocks. But officials say most of the new money is from drugs. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Afghanistan earned $2.8 billion from opium production last year — more than it received in aid.

Given the international community’s failure to create any alternative economy, it is not surprising that the people of Helmand, who depend on the poppy and grow a quarter of the country’s total, will fight to safeguard their income.

It did not have to be this way. Just as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda would never have taken hold if the West had not abandoned Afghanistan after the Russians withdrew in 1989, so we would not be in the mess we are today if London and Washington had focused on Afghan nation-building after 2001 instead of pursuing other foreign adventures.

If only they had remembered their history, maybe British blood would not once again be spilt on Afghan fields and I would not have once more ended up in a muddy ditch cowering from a rain of fire.

Christina Lamb’s memoir of Afghanistan, The Sewing Circles of Herat, is published by HarperCollins

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July 9, 2006 at 03:03 AM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 07, 2006

For US military, few options to defang North Korea

For US military, few options to defang North Korea | csmonitor.com

Any US action risks nuclear reprisals against American troops and allies in the region – and a renewed Korean conflict.
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – As was surely intended, North Korea's July 4 test launch of a long-range missile that, by some estimates, could reach American shores, fastened attention on the most overlooked member of President Bush's "axis of evil."

Yet the clearest message to the United States came from the six other missiles fired that day, not from the now-infamous Taepodong-2. Its apparent failure suggests that the threat to the American homeland remains remote. But the flexing of North Korea's midrange missile muscle confirms that it is probably able to deliver nuclear weapons to Japan or South Korea - or to US forces stationed there.

The result is that the US finds itself in a stalemate militarily, relying on a missile-defense shield that is at best unproven. Any military action - such as a precision strike against a launchpad - risks not only nuclear reprisals against American troops and their allies in the region, but also a resumption of the Korean War on the peninsula.

"North Korea has the capability to inflict significant harm on immediately neighboring states," says Jonathan Pollack, an East Asia expert at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "That's what constrains any thought being given to any preemptive kind of force."

In truth, the July 4 missile test hasn't yet told experts much that they didn't already know. They expected that North Korea was making progress on its mid- and short-range missiles; the launches appeared to support that. At the same time, experts remain skeptical about the capabilities of the Taepodong-2. It was only the second time that North Korea had launched a long-range missile. The other was in 1998, and both were failures.

"I'm going to want to see eight to 12 flights before I say that's an existing capability," says John Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.

Moreover, others caution that the Taepodong-2 itself - its actual capabilities or range - remains mostly a mystery. Nor does the US know why it failed. "All this is supposition," says Mr. Pollack. "Until we see some additional clarification, it behooves us to wait."

Few other options are available at this point. The secrecy that shrouds North Korea not only makes it difficult to locate key targets such as nuclear facilities or other missile sites, but it also makes it difficult to gauge North Korea's response to an attack.

Former Defense Secretary William Perry suggested in a recent Washington Post opinion article that the US destroy any North Korean long-range missile before it launched. This would be possible because long-range missiles take a long time to fuel, making them relatively easy to spot. The danger, however, is how a beleaguered regime desperate to survive might respond.

"How will North Korea perceive an attack on any given day?" asks Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here. "The options tend to be ones of provoking general war."

For Japan and South Korea - both strong US allies and home base to thousands of American troops - this makes the military option a nonstarter. South Korea knows that its northern neighbor keeps artillery batteries trained on Seoul and has massive ground forces at its disposal. Japan knows that North Korea launched a missile over Japanese territory in 1998.

While the North Korean army is sizable, many experts suggest that the threat presented by these forces, which have not been used since the 1950s, is not the main concern. "As long as the war was conventional, I don't think North Korea would do much better than Iraq did," says Pike.

Rather, experts worry what North Korea would do with its nuclear material if it were attacked. Some say the regime could make sure that its material fell into the hands of other American foes, like Iran or Syria. Others suggest it might be put on top of a rocket heading for Tokyo or Okinawa.

Even before this week's launches, Japan had agreed to work more closely with the US on missile defense. Now, Japan says it will allow Patriot missiles - which are defensive missiles designed to destroy incoming enemy missiles - at US bases in Japan.

On the regional level, missile-defense tests have had some success. Interceptors fired from US Navy ships have worked well, but they are relatively slow, making it hard for them to destroy missiles not launched directly at their ship.

The Patriot missile, first used in the Gulf War, has had more mixed results. The military claims that Patriots destroyed "a number" of Iraqi missiles at the beginning of the current war. But critics counter that many also missed, and at least one shot down a British fighter jet.

As for defense of US territory against long-range missiles, missile defense is still struggling. In the two most recent tests, in late 2004 and early 2005, the missile failed even to launch.

"We've been trying for 45 years" to build a reliable missile-defense shield, says Philip Coyle, who oversaw missile testing for the Pentagon as director of operational test and evaluation from 1994 to 2001. "Unfortunately, it's still not something we can rely on."

July 7, 2006 at 07:21 PM in Japan | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Were bombers linked to al-Qaeda?

BBC NEWS | UK | Were bombers linked to al-Qaeda?

By Gordon Corera
BBC security correspondent

The video of London bomber Shehzad Tanweer shown on al-Jazeera TV on the eve of the attack's first anniversary provides more evidence linking the bombers to al-Qaeda.

But questions still remain, and the answers to many of those questions lie in Pakistan.

In the wake of last July's bombings, it did not take long for Pakistan to become almost as much a focus of attention as the Yorkshire base of the bombers.

Were the men really home-grown terrorists or were they directed by al-Qaeda? What was the significance of their time in the country where much of the remaining al-Qaeda leadership is thought to operate?

Officials have been cautious in confirming that a direct link exists between the men and those around Osama Bin Laden.

"It is not easy to find out what happened... such information as we do have does suggest there is probably a link to al-Qaeda," Peter Clarke, head of anti-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, told the BBC earlier in the week.

What evidence is there linking the bombers to al-Qaeda in Pakistan?

Suspicion

We know, from official reports, that two of the bombers - Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan travelled together to Pakistan between November 2004 and February 2005.

No one knows for sure what they did out there but the suspicion will be that this is when both men made their videotaped testimonies.

Khan also travelled to Pakistan on at least one earlier occasion and may have been to Afghanistan in the late 1990s or soon after.

British intelligence agencies believe some form of operational training is likely to have taken place while Khan and Tanweer were in Pakistan together and that it is likely they did have contact with al-Qaeda figures.

Shehzad Tanweer at Karachi airport
Shehzad Tanweer was pictured leaving Pakistan
Pakistani intelligence sources have suggested the men may have met with al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Pakistan's tribal areas sometime in January 2005. British officials say they have no evidence confirming the meeting but they don't discount the possibility that it took place.

Whoever the bombers met, straight after their return, Khan and Tanweer began putting in place the key elements of their plan. They both left their jobs, rented a place in which to build the bombs and began purchasing material.

And in the three months leading up to the bombing, the men were in contact with an individual or individuals in Pakistan who may have been giving them advice and direction.

It is not known who it was or the exact nature of the contacts but the methods used, designed to make it difficult to identify the individual, makes the contacts look suspicious.

Mastermind

When I met some of Pakistan's top counter-terrorist officials during a visit earlier in the year, they declined to speak on the record.

The notion that it was Pakistan rather than the UK that was responsible for the bombers' radicalisation raises particular ire

But they did say they had been given 299 telephone numbers in Pakistan linked directly or indirectly to the bombing - but had not found a mastermind.

They argued that al-Qaeda's leadership did not have the capability to plan or direct operations because it was under pressure.

But in recent months Western intelligence agencies have begun shifting away from the notion that al-Qaeda has largely become an ideology rather than a structured operation, to once again believing that there remains some capability for direct operational planning within al-Qaeda's leadership.

There are sensitivities in Pakistan over any links to 7 July. Pakistani officials strongly reject the notion that they are not co-operating fully in fighting terrorism and point to the deaths of soldiers fighting in the wild border region of Waziristan.

And the notion that it was Pakistan rather than the UK that was responsible for the bombers' radicalisation raises particular ire.

"If an individual commits an act who was bred and brought up and educated not in Pakistan but elsewhere and since he visited Pakistan for a few days or weeks (it) does not mean that it is Pakistan that is responsible in his conversion as (a) terrorist," Major General Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's military spokesman explained.

Another problem is the growing complexity of al-Qaeda.

Tracking difficult

"There is very much an integration between the Pakistani jihadi community and al-Qaeda's leadership and I think this is the galaxy that spawned the 7 July bombings," explains Alexis Debat, a counter-terrorism expert.

"But it's very hard for investigators to find out where the Pakistani jihadi community stops and al-Qaeda starts. And it's much more difficult for the Pakistani government to go after the Pakistani jihadis."

The coincidence of al-Qaeda basing itself in Pakistan, increasingly overlapping itself with Pakistani jihadist groups and the high transit of people from Britain's Pakistani community back to the country makes investigating links and travel particularly difficult.

There were 400,000 visits by UK residents to Pakistan in 2004 - and the average length was 41 days.

There is considerable intelligence liaison between Pakistan and countries such as the US and UK. But it is always on Pakistan's terms.

Shehzad Tanweer
Shehzad Tanweer warned of further attacks

According to Pakistani officials, when someone is picked up, Pakistani interrogators will talk to them first and begin by asking them about any threat within Pakistan.

If they later divulge any information about threats to another country, officials from that country are told and may be invited to become "actively involved" in the investigation.

This may involve watching an interrogation take place through video monitors.

If the Pakistani officials decide to allow direct interrogations to take place by a foreign intelligence service then this will be done jointly, with Pakistani officials present.

This might involve officers from the CIA or FBI in the US or MI6 or MI5 in the UK (MI5 is the domestic security service but tends to push to take the lead in foreign investigations where there is a possible threat to UK security).

A year on, the exact role of the bombers' travels to Pakistan in the run-up to the attack remains unclear but the evidence pointing to a major role for al-Qaeda is mounting.

July 7, 2006 at 08:05 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

July 06, 2006

Analysis: Tanweer video gives credence to al-Qaeda link

Analysis: Tanweer video gives credence to al-Qaeda link - Britain - Times Online

By Sean O'Neill

The release of Shehzad Tanweer's martyrdom video is the clearest indication yet that the July 7 suicide bombers were tied into the global Islamist terrorist movement.

The film has been cleverly edited by al-Qaeda's in-house technicians and its release was trailed on Islamist websites yesterday. The footage features a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second-in-command, as well as film of people mixing explosives in a laboratory.

The media-savvy terror organisation has held onto this film for a year - finessing and re-editing - in order to gain the maximum propaganda impact by releasing it on the eve of the first anniversary of the bombings, which killed 52 Tube and bus passengers.

Tanweer seems to have recorded his video in Pakistan or Afghanistan on his last visit there with Mohammad Sidique Khan in the months before 7/7.

Khan also made a video which was released in the aftermath of the attacks. Both men wear the same red-and-white headgear - a scarf worn, tradition has it, by jihad warriors - and are filmed against the same backdrop. Looked at together, the films suggest a level of co-ordination, direction and leadership from outside the UK.

We know that Tanweer and Khan went to terrorist training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan and that they met inspirational radicals in the UK and abroad. The videos add weight to the belief that they received detailed instruction in bombmaking, reconnaissance techniques and other skills of terrorist warfare.

Al-Qaeda has long prized English speaking recruits who could travel the world without hindrance on Western passports. Richard Reid, the would-be shoebomber who tried to blow up a transatlantic airliner in 2001, is a prime example. Before setting out on his suicide mission Reid,