Global News Journal

from Afghan Journal:

UPDATE- A glimmer of hope in Afghanistan

(Amending the article with the correct name of the organisation which conducted the research as also with more details on the survey itself}

The Asia Foundation has released its annual survey of Afghanistan and a key finding is that the Afghan people are a bit more optimistic about their country than the rest of the world is, at this point of time.  The survey found that 42 percent of the people felt Afghanistan was heading in the right direction, up from 38 percent in 2008, and mainly because of better security conditions.

In fact each year the number of respondents who think security has improved has gone up, even though the Taliban insurgency is at its worst in 2009.  Some 44 percent of those surveyed this year said they felt safer, up from 31 percent in 2006. More respondents in 2009 also mentioned reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

It may not be such a disconnect as it seems. Security remains the main worry for the people  of Afghanistan with some 42 percent saying that was the most important reason for pessimism.  It is just that an increasing number of people - and the number is rising very slowly - believe things are starting to get better.

The survey was carried out among 6,408 adult in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan between June 17 and July 6, 2009.

Some more key findings :

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Bombs and tipping points: Pakistan and Northern Ireland

When Northern Ireland's Omagh bomb exploded, killing 29 people, I was in England, by cruel coincidence attending the wedding of a young man who had been badly injured in another attack in the town of Enniskillen more than a decade earlier.

I had just switched my phone on after leaving the church on a glorious, sunny Saturday afternoon when my news editor called. "There's been a bomb. It sounds bad. We're trying to get you on a flight."

Memories of Omagh returned this week when a massive car bomb ripped through a market in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

Will the Taliban's bloody assault on Pakistan's cities deprive them of popular support and ultimately lead to their defeat?

The BBC's Urdu service had reported earlier this month that sympathy for the Taliban in Peshawar -- where many are deeply hostile to the United States -- was waning due to the violence being unleashed on the border city since the Army began its assault on the militants' South Waziristan stronghold.

Was this a sign the Islamists were overreaching themselves on their war against the Pakistani state, much as they had done in Swat?

Against that, as others have pointed out on this blog, a coherent leadership that might unite a stricken country against its attackers has yet to emerge.

A day with a hyperactive leftist leader, Bolivia’s Morales

    Spending a whole day with Bolivian leftist president Evo Morales requires a great deal of stamina.     Morales, an Aymara Indian who has introduced a battery of controversial reforms to give Bolivian Indians more power and has put the state in the driving seat of the economy, is hyperactive, to say the least.     He tends to start the day meeting diplomats or government officials at about 6 a.m. and often wraps up after midnight.     In the three years I have been living in Bolivia he has not been on vacation, and it is not unusual for him to visit three or four far-away places in a day.     Today is one of those days.     Morales, who herded llamas as a child, lost four siblings to poverty and never finished high school, became the country’s first Indian president in early 2006. He is revered by poor Indians, who identify with his moving underdog story and are benefiting from heavy social spending.     But he is frowned upon by the middle classes who fear he may try to install a Cuban-style socialist regime in the country.     Critics see Morales, an ally of Venezuelan leftist President Hugo Chavez and Cuban revolution leader Fidel Castro, as a dangerous socialist.     The day we spent together, he was wearing jeans, a wrinkled short-sleeve shirt and unbranded sports shoes. He was good humored and cared little for protocol; addressing me as “comrade” or “brother” and once simply with a “What’s up, boss?”     “I don’t know how he does it. I can’t keep up sometimes. I’ve got soroche — high altitude syndrome,” said a close Morales’ aide, when I asked about the president’s hectic schedule, which often includes trips from the Andean plateau to the lowlands and back.     I met Morales, a clear favorite to win a presidential election in December, at a campaign rally at 7 a.m. in El Alto, a sprawling shantytown in the outskirts of La Paz.     “Evo governs and plays but does not get tired,” chanted hundreds of supporters while he played soccer after the rally.     Then we took a plane to the country’s constitutional capital, Sucre, to catch a helicopter to Tinguipaya, a tiny Quechua village of adobe houses in the central Potosi region, where no Bolivian president had ever visited before.     After a campaign event in Tinguipaya we flew to the southern town of Tarija, where he presided over an award ceremony for a soccer tournament, and then off to the northern town of Cobija.     On the plane Morales bragged about a penalty he scored in an impromptu kick about.     “I fooled the goalkeeper. Did you see?,” he said.     By 4 p.m. we had visited four places all over Bolivia — a country of 10 million that is roughly the size of France and Spain combined — traveling by car, plane and helicopter. At one point I tried to take a nap but Morales woke me up listening to loud Bolivian pop music on his cell phone.     At times during the day he looked over papers handed to him by a military officer and he also had private meetings with the defense minister and a governer during our travels.     Morales, a bachelor with a mop of thick black hair and copper skin, was going to turn 50 the day after our trip.     “How are you going to celebrate your birthday?” I asked.     “I can’t,” he said. “It’s forbidden. I’ve got to work. I have a meeting at 5 a.m. … you have to be there, let’s see whether you can keep up with me.”

   “I don’t think I can. I’m already exhausted,” I told him.     Morales ate little during the morning and early afternoon, just drinking water and popping propolis lozenges, a health food made of resin from beehives. I told him I was hungry, that I could not believe he agreed to take us around for a day but failed to offer us food.     He called a flight attendant, who brought out a take-away plastic container with lukewarm chunks of beef and potatoes.     In no time Morales, Reuters’ photographer David Mercado, an army official and myself were all picking food from the container with our fingers. It was a working-class feast inside a presidential plane.     In Cobija Morales met government officials, dined with supporters and presided over a second sports ceremony.     After 14 hours of traveling throughout the country Morales, a keen soccer fan, was still going strong and decided to play soccer with a local team.     On the flight back to La Paz he finally dozed off for an hour or so. We arrived in El Alto after 1 a.m.     “Comrades, I see you at 5 a.m. at the presidential palace. Don’t let me down,” he said before waving goodbye.

(Photograph by David Mercado/REUTERS, October 25, 2009)

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan’s slow path to salvation in Waziristan

Pakistan's militants have unleashed a guerrilla war in cities across the country in retaliation for a military offensive against them in their South Waziristan stronghold. But while they have seized all the attention with their massive bomb and gun attacks, what about the offensive itself  in their mountain redoubt ?

Nearly two weeks into Operation Rah-e-Nijat, or Path of Salvation,  it is hard to make a firm assessment of which way the war is going, given that information is hard to come by and this may yet be still the opening stages of a long and difficult campaign.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan whose uncharacteristically low profile over the past few weeks has spawned speculation, said at the weekend that it was too early to make a call on the operation. and that he had asked his intelligence officers and they had no definitive information. Pakistan's Dawn quotes him as telling reporters in Washington "‘it’ll take a while before we know whether the enemy they’re fighting has been dispersed or destroyed or some mixture of the two."

Looked at in another way and judging purely by what has not happened so far, this hasn't shaped up into the mother-of-all battles that many had predicted it to be. No major ambushes or a tribal uprising has happened as the Pakistani army inches deeper into the Taliban mini-state,  taking the village of Kotkai, the home of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

As the BBC and the military-focused Strategy Page blog note, the Pakistani army appears to be moving slowly and deliberately.  "This is a campaign of small battles. The soldiers are advancing from three directions, often along a single road,"  the Strategy Page  says.

"The army is advancing slowly, to insure that the troops win all these little battles. It's important for troop morale that the tribesmen do not pull off many of their traditional ambushes and surprise attacks that have, for centuries, killed and demoralized invaders. This has largely been successful, with one soldier dying for every ten or so Islamic radical fighters killed."

Some people think the Mehsud fighters are doing  a tactical retreat to draw the Pakistani military deeper into South Waziristan, an arid land of mountains, dried-up creeks, sparse forests and rocky plains. Local administration officials have told the BBC that the Mehsud fighters are not fighting by holding ground against the military. Instead they are ceding territory to the security forces and then counter-attacking when the military starts to secure the area.

from Afghan Journal:

Choppers, the Achilles’ heel in the Afghan war

Back in 2002 during a reporting assignment in Afghanistan, a U.S. helicopter pilot told me that it was important to send a message early on that "we own the skies, night or day".  So at any given point of time if you were at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul, you could see aircraft, mostly choppers taking off, landing or simply idling  in the skies above in what became the region's busiest airfield.

Seven years on, the U.S. military is holding on to the skies ever more tightly as the ground below slips away to a Taliban insurgency at its fiercest level. And because they fly more and because the terrain and weather are difficult, the chances of things going wrong increase, as happened earlier this week when 14 Americans, including 11 soldiers, were killed in two separate chopper crashes.

U.S. soldiers were twice as likely to die in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan than in Iraq, Time magazine reported. It quoted Michael O' Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who is keeping a rolling count of U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying that it wasn't hostile fire that was bringing down the choppers. "The main issues have to do with terrain, weather and of course frequency of use," he says.

While 5% of U.S. deaths in Iraq have been caused by helicopter crashes — 216 out of 4,348 — the total is 12% in Afghanistan — 101 of 866 — even before Monday's losses, Hanlon says.

Afghanistan, roughly the size of Texas, has few major roads, and they are being increasingly monitored and mined, forcing the U.S. to rely more on aircraft to move troops and supplies. Indeed many of the U.S. outposts in the country can only be reached by helicopters.

Noah Schachtman writes in Danger Room, a blog on national security, that helicopters are the "irreplaceable connective tissue of the Afghanistan war effort — and its potential Achilles’ heel."  When the U.S. military wants to haul gear, supply outposts, reposition forces, or evacuate wounded troops, the first, best and only option is to do so by helicopter.

Death-Defying Doha

Just as the World Trade Organisation is organizing an intensive push to complete the Doha round trade talks, the atmosphere among negotiators is as pessimistic as it ever has been. 

“Gloom” and “frustration” are just two of the more printable words circulating at the WTO’s headquarters by Lake Geneva.

Merkel’s 2nd term off to a bumpy start

After spending the last four years trapped in a loveless grand coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats, Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel is looking forward to happier, more productive days in a cosy new centre-right coalition with her preferred partners, the pro-business Free Democrats.

However, rather than smooth sailing with her new, more like-minded coalition partners, it’s turned out to be one turf battle after another between Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on the one side and the Free Democrats on the other.

Weeks of unseemly arguing over tax cuts, healthcare, conscription and other issues in coalition talks has earned the new coalition the nickname Fehlstart” (false start) in the German media.

That awkward beginning was confirmed in a most embarrassing fashion for Merkel on Wednesday when at least nine deputies in her own coalition withheld their support.

Merkel was easily re-elected chancellor with 323 votes in the 622-seat parliament, 11 more than she needed. The nine deputies who either abstained or voted against her in the secret ballot served as a tangible reminder that the CDU/CSU and FDP might not be the marriage made in heaven some had expected. It was a political kick in the shins that Merkel did not need.

Four years ago she got 397 of the 612 votes, 51 less than the CDU/CSU and SPD had together. That, however, was not surprising because the grand coalition had an enormous majority in parliament and because the two camps had long been such arch enemies. This time around it was nine deputies in her own preferred coalition who stabbed her in the back. Is that a harbinger of things to come?

“Let’s try forget about this,” said Volker Kauder, CDU parliamentary floor leader. Several conservatives are already picking holes in the coalition deal, which is only a few days old. Kauder said he was sure all the CDU/CSU deputies voted for Merkel. The FDP’s parliamentary floor leader, Birgit Homburger, said the same of her party.

from FaithWorld:

Will Queen Elizabeth give the pope a warm welcome next year?

One can guess what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will say to Pope Benedict when the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion travels to the Vatican later this year. The more interesting question might be what  Queen Elizabeth is likely to say when she hosts the pope next year.

The timing of the trips couldn't be more intriguing, especially the second one. The pope is due to visit Britain in September 2010 and is expected to preside there over the beatification of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, a famous 19th-century convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

The queen is, after all, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, many of whose flock the pope is seeking to poach with his offer last week allowing Anglicans to convert en masse while keeping many of their traditions. And among her honorifics is "Defender of the Faith." While that sounds impressive, it pales in comparison to Benedict's long string of titles including "Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church." But oneupmanship is a British sport, so one never knows how these things can turn out.

It is unclear how many CofE traditionalists, upset at moves to ordain women bishops and the issue of homosexuality, will move over to Rome, but the conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith suggested 12 Church of England bishops may switch - more than a quarter of their total.

It was suggested by the Daily Telegraph newspaper earlier this month, before the Vatican effectively sabotaged decades of dialogue between the two churches, that the pope would receive a warm welcome at Buckingham Palace. "The warmth of her welcome will come as no surprise to the pontiff," it said.

Citing sources speaking to the Catholic Herald weekly, the Telegraph said the queen has "grown increasingly sympathetic" to the Roman Catholic Church over the years while being "appalled," along with her son and heir Charles, at developments in the Church of England.

The Sunday Telegraph in July said the queen had told the heads of a traditional group that she "understood their concerns" about the future of the 77 million-strong global church.

from Afghan Journal:

Denying Afghanistan to al Qaeda; is that really the key ?

Much of the rationale for the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has to do with making sure that it doesn't become a haven for militant groups once again. As President Barack Obama weighs U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal's recommendation for 40,000 more troops at a time of fading public support for the war in Afghanistan, some people are questioning the basic premise that America must remain militarily committed there so that al Qaeda doesn't creep back under the protection of the Taliban.

Richard N.Haass, the president of the Council for Foreign Relations, kicked off the debate this month, arguing that al Qaeda didn't really "require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat". Terrorists head to areas of least resistance, and if it is not Afghanistan, they will choose other unstable countries such as Somalia or Yemen, if it hasn't  happened already, he argues. And the United States cannot conceivably secure all the terrorist havens in the world.

Some experts argue that physical space isn't really the key to militant groups survival anymore in the age of the Internet. Paul R Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said in a piece for the Washington Post that safe havens were usually used by militants to hold basic training for recruits. The operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not require such a home, and he cites the Sept 11, 2001 attacks as an example. "The preparations most important to the attacks took place not in camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States," he says.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens. it's not that a sanctuary such as Afghanistan will not help al Qaeda; or other militant groups; the issue is whether denying them the space will prevent an attack, and that, Pillar says, is no longer guaranteed.

But Jim Arkedis, director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former Pentagon counter-terrorism official,  argues that the value of physical space cannot be underestimated and that a "homeless al Qaeda is the best guarantee against large-scale attacks."

It is certainly true that militants can accomplish much online, he concedes in a piece for Foreign Policy. Individuals can maintain contact with groups via chat rooms, money can be transferred over the Web (if done with extreme caution), and plotters can download items like instruction manuals for bomb-making, photographs of potential targets, and even blueprints for particular buildings.

But all the e-mail accounts, chat rooms, and social media available will never account for the human touch. "There is simply no substitute for the trust and confidence built by physically meeting, jointly conceiving, and then training together for a large-scale, complex operation on the other side of the world," Arkedis, who spent the last five years studying terrorist plots, says.

British foreign minister tries to revive Blair candidacy for EU job

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has launched a rearguard action to revive Tony Blair’s candidacy to be president of the European Union.

For weeks, the former British prime minister was the front-runner for the post which will be created in the 27-nation bloc’s Lisbon reform treaty, which is still awaiting the signature of the Czech president.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, his initial sponsor, said he would have a hard time getting the job because Britain had not joined the euro single currency.

In a television interview on Sunday, in a speech on Monday and at a briefing with reporters in Luxembourg, Miliband set out his vision for a strong Europe that needs a leader like Blair.

“There is a precedent to be set about whether or not we want a strong leadership figure,” Miliband said. “My own view, in that context, is that Tony Blair, if he is a candidate, would be a very good choice.”

He said the changes set out in the Lisbon treaty offered an opportunity for the EU to renew its foreign policy.

“I genuinely believe that unless Europe does so, we will find … that a G20 informally, if not formally, emerges as the key decision making axis in the world – the U.S. and China,“ Miliband said.