Pakistan's ISI supporting Taliban

Another article describing how Pakistan's ISI (Section S) supports the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Karzai legalises rape

The Independent reports:
"Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has signed a law which "legalises" rape, women's groups and the United Nations warn. Critics claim the president helped rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections in August.

In a massive blow for women's rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent.

A report by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, Unifem, warned: "Article 132 legalises the rape of a wife by her husband"."

US war spending $685.7 billion since 2001

Pentagon spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to fight terrorism elsewhere has reached $685.7 billion since 2001, the GAO said (the Iraq war accounts for $533.5 billion).

Global development assistance rises

NYT reports that development aid reached a new high in 2008: $120 billion. The US gave $26 billion in net overseas aid (a 17% increase in real terms). But still, this is nothing compared to say US military spending which reaches about $700 billion a year.

Taliban finances

The FT has an article saying that Richard Holbrooke, US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, stated that the Taliban now get more money from private donors from the Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia than from drugs.
Holbrooke also suggested that much of the funding from poppy production appeared to go to individuals linked in some way to the Afghan government.

Troops in Afghanistan

A breakdown of troops under ISAF in Afghanistan is given here. Obama just ordered 21,000 to Afghanistan, and there are also the US troops not acting under ISAF (about 10,000) to be added to the total.
In total, there are about 70,000 troops in Afghanistan (62,000 of which under ISAF). With Obama's newly announced deployments the total would reach some 90,000.

Saudi crackdown on Shiites

The Saudi government is cracking down on dissident shiites in the eastern part of the country, where a lot of Saudi oil is located. One shiite cleric warned that if the discrimination against shiites is not ended they will secede from Saudi Arabia.

Europe in Afghanistan

A ECFR report on Europe's role in Afghanistan notes the "silent surge" of European troops into Afghanistan over the last two years. European troops have gone from 17,433 (November 2006) to 26,389 (March 2009). There are 7 Irish troops in those.
Considering all foreign troops in Afghanistan, Europe accounts for 43% and the US for 47%.

Europe also continues to provide aid. Since 2002, the European Commission (EC) pledged about €1.5 billion and has so far disbursed €1 billion. Ireland has pledged €16 million and disbursed €8 million.

In addition, since 2007, the EU has had in place a European security and defence policy (ESDP) mission known as EUPOL Afghanistan, which advises and trains the Afghan National Police (ANP). EUPOL Afghanistan has set up emergency teams to deal with kidnapping, organised crime, intelligence and anti-corruption. In May 2008, EU foreign ministers decided to double EUPOL’s staff to 400.

Israeli conscientious objectors give salary to Gaza

9 Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Israeli military and were jailed will give their military salaries to Gaza.

Cluster bombs

Article on global efforts to ban cluster bombs, which are progressing. Also discussed is the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama's recent new policy to ban the export of more categories of cluster bombs.

Obama plans additional troops in Afghanistan

In addition to the 17,000 troops President Obama has already committed to add to the war effort in Afghanistan, his new “comprehensive strategy” will reportedly include another 4,000 troops and hundreds of “civilian advisers,” bringing the US military presence in Afghanistan to nearly 60,000.

Jewish and Palestinian resistance groups in Israel

An excellent article on counterpunch.org describing the various peace and anti-occupation groups within Israel, Jewish, Palestinian and mixed.
Those groups have consistently opposed the latest attack on Gaza, for example, but are rarely if ever mentioned in the Israeli and Western mainstream media.

$5 billion in aid for Iraq wasted

$3 to $5 billion in aid for Iraq was wasted on ill-designed or failed projects in Iraq, which translates into 15-20 % of the $21 billion Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund set up by Congress after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to SIGIR. The figures were the result of about 135 audits conducted by SIGIR in recent years.

Ethnic cleansing in Baghdad

Juan Cole provides new data supporting his assertion that the Iraqi capital is now only 10-15% Sunni (in 2003 it was roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shiite), following the civil war.

HRW on Israel's use of white phosphorus in Gaza

WP reports that "New York-based Human Rights Watch, a frequent critic of Israeli military practices, says its review of the Gaza fighting found instances in which white phosphorus rounds were used in urban areas under circumstances that had no clear military rationale. The group calls it a violation of the international laws of warfare." "Israel's use of white phosphorus artillery shells led to the deaths of at least 12 Palestinian civilians and destroyed millions of dollars in property during the recent three-week war in the Gaza Strip, the organization Human Rights Watch says in a report released Wednesday."

Private US money underwrites Israeli settlements

The issue is that some charities in the US fund Israeli settlements but are tax-exempt. So taxpayers are in a way financing the settlements, writes David Ignatius in the WP.

Pakistan supporting Taliban insurgency

The NYT reports that some elements of Pakistan's ISI (intelligence services) are supporting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. The Taliban was partly created by the ISI in the 1990s to assert influence in Afghanistan and today is also being supported to ensure Pakistan will fill the power vacuum in Afghanistan once the US/NATO leave and prevent rival India from filling this vacuum with its own allies.
The article is based on both American and Pakistani sources. American officials said that the ISI's S Wing provided direct support to three major groups carrying out attacks in Afghanistan: the Taliban based in Quetta, Pakistan, commanded by Mullah Muhammad Omar; the militant network run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; and a different group run by the guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Pipelines and energy wars

Read Pepe Escobar's article on energy wars in Central Asia. He makes many points, but one in particular is that if Washington could just stop isolating Iran with the ridiculous nuclear crisis, Europe's energy problems could be much improved. Indeed, Iran's oil and gas resources could be sent to Europe, and also, a pipeline could have been built through Iran to bring Central Asia's energy resources to the West. Instead, the West built the BTC pipeline which runs through Turkey and makes much less sense financially:

" From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing - and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe."

Using Iran to a greater extent would also have reduced Europe's dependence on Russia for energy... this is one of the costs associated with Washington's policies of militarism. Now we have mainstream commentators saying that we need a strong NATO to make sure the West gets reliable energy supplies, as if this was the only option. There are at least two options that don't require any NATO or military solution: 1) the West should reduce its energy consumption, and 2) Iran's resources should be used.

Obama on nuclear weapons

A NYT editorial calls on Obama to fulfill his election promises and reduce the number of nuclear warheads held by the US and drag Russia into this process. Of course, that makes sense; as the NYT notes, Russia and the US together still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. That's 20,000 too many: according to the NPT, the main international treaty that regulates those matters, states that have nuclear weapons must eliminate them as soon as possible. Well that was signed in 1968. So the US and Russia are basically 40 years late. But that's not such a problem for the NYT apparently. The "21st-century threats" are "states like Iran building nuclear weapons": again, there is no evidence Iran is trying to get nukes, and even if it is, they still don't have any. So the big culprit in nuclear matters are the US, Russia, France, UK and China, none of which have yet eliminated their nukes.

Central Asia now Nuclear Weapon Free Zone

Central Asia is now a nuclear weapon free zone, which prohibits it from researching, testing, manufacturing and possessing nuclear weapons. The countries are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

IDF troops used 11-year-old boy as human shield in Gaza

IDF troops used 11-year-old boy as human shield in Gaza, reports Haaretz:

"Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday.

IDF troops ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the UN secretary-general's envoy for protecting children in armed conflict."

Eating red meat increases chances of death

Large study out on red meat consumption. Eating red meat daily increases the risk of death, just like eating processed meat.

Gap between whites and blacks increasing

A very good article on the increasing gap in wealth between whites and blacks in the US. It says: "The gap between the wealth of white Americans and African Americans has grown. According to the Fed, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family has only one dime. In 2004, it had 12 cents. This is not just a gap. It's a deepening canyon."
So the average white family is about 10 times more wealthy than the average black family.

US sells $2.1 billion in arms to India

Asia Times online reports that last week, the Obama administration approved a US$2.1 billion sale to India of eight Boeing Co P-8I maritime patrol aircraft, the biggest US sale to the country to date. This shows that Obama is moving to cement the Indo-US defense relationship.
India's defense modernization plans are estimated to cost over $50 billion in the next few years and will include a mega-fighter jet deal valued at over $11 billion, for which US firms Boeing and Lockheed are bidding alongside several others.
In January 2008, Washington and New Delhi inked what was at the time India's largest US arms purchase: six Lockheed Martin Corp C-130J Super Hercules military transport planes at a price of $1 billion.
India has also been looking at joint efforts with the US to build a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system.

Drugs in Afghanistan implicate both Taliban and government

The Globe and Mail has a good article on how Afghan government officials are involved in the drug business, and also in smuggling weapons into Afghanistan, many of which make their way to the insurgents.
The drugs problem in Afghanistan is always blamed on the Taliban, but in fact some important government officials are also involved and reap profits from the trade. The article above documents the case of General Daud, a warlord in government who is also active in the drugs trade.

Another article makes similar points, written in 2005 in the LA Times (pasted below). The key point is that the drugs trade has been booming in Afghanistan partly due to the strategy used by the US of supporting warlords in the invasion and occupation. Those warlords were supported to oust the Taliban, but the problem is that a number of warlords are also involved in the drugs trade. Washington neglects to act forcefully against them as they are used as allies.
This is nothing new: the CIA for example has been involved in the drugs trade in a similar fashion throughout the Cold War, basically letting local allies reap profits from drugs because they were allies.

The Lure of Opium Wealth Is a Potent Force in Afghanistan
Western officials warn of a nascent narco state as drug traffickers act with impunity, some allegedly with the support of top officials
By Paul Watson Los Angeles Times May 28, 2005
Kunduz, Afghanistan. Like a frustrated hunter, the head of the local anti-drug squad keeps snapshots of the ones who got away.

One photo shows a prisoner wearing a flat, round pakol hat, standing in front of 10 pounds of opium packaged in plastic bags laid out on a table. Lt. Nyamatullah Nyamat took the picture on the February day he arrested the suspect. Hours later, the man was freed.

The stocky, plain-spoken cop glumly tossed another photo onto a desk in his basement office as if playing a losing hand of cards. In this one, a man in a white pillbox cap is handcuffed to a police officer and standing next to 62 pounds of opium. A local judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. A higher court ordered his release.

One of Nyamat's biggest catches, arrested with 114 pounds of heroin, a derivative of opium, hadn't even appeared in court when the local prosecutor let him go in late March.

Nyamat said that was normal in Kunduz, a hub on one of the world's busiest drug-smuggling routes.

Three and a half years after the United States led an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, the United Nations and the U.S. government warn that the country is in danger of becoming a narco-state controlled by traffickers. The State Department recently called the Afghan drug trade "an enormous threat to world stability." The United Nations estimates that Afghanistan produces 87% of the world's opium.

For decades, poor farmers trying to make a living in Afghanistan's mountain valleys have harvested the opium poppies that feed the world's drug pipeline. Now the trade is booming, partly the result of the U.S. strategy for overthrowing the Taliban and stabilizing the country after two decades of war.

U.S. troops forged alliances with warlords, who provided ground forces in the battle against the Taliban. Some of those allies are suspected of being among Afghanistan's biggest drug traffickers, controlling networks that include producers, criminal gangs and even members of the counter-narcotics police force. They are willing to make deals with remnants of the Taliban if the price is right.

The U.S.-backed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has brought some of those warlords into his popularly elected government, a recognition of their political clout and a calculated risk that keeping them close might make it easier to control them.

"Drug money is absolutely supporting terrorist groups," said Alexandre Schmidt, deputy head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan. And regardless of their allegiance, Schmidt said, most suspects are released within 48 hours because of intervention by higher authorities.

Kunduz, in northeastern Afghanistan, is one of the front lines in what Karzai calls a holy war on drugs. It is just a 90-minute drive from the border with Tajikistan, where low-grade smack starts the next leg of its journey to the streets of Europe.

Nyamat says that as fast as he and his men can catch the smugglers, corrupt officials spring them. Many others are untouchable because they have important friends.

Nyamat carries a handwritten list, four neatly folded pages held together with a pin, to record his losing score. Reading it recently, he shook his head in disgust. Only three of 17 suspects arrested this year were still in prison.

"We have the complete ID list of all smugglers ... but we cannot arrest them because they have the power now, not us," he said.

The list of those suspected of involvement in the drug trade reaches high into Karzai's government.

Nyamat and an Afghan trafficker singled out Gen. Mohammed Daoud, a former warlord who is Afghanistan's deputy interior minister in charge of the anti-drug effort.

An official of a human rights commission in eastern Afghanistan said police in Nangarhar province routinely ignore drug traffickers and other well-connected criminals, even though they take a strict stand against poppy growing. The provincial police are under the command of Hazrat Ali, a warlord who provided the bulk of the Afghan ground force that aided U.S. soldiers in the attempt to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in late 2001.

Daoud and Ali deny the charges.

U.S. allies are not the only ones reaping the drug bonanza. Taliban guerrillas also have a share in the opium and heroin trade, which the United Nations estimates is worth $3 billion a year. Warlords who once fought them collect a tax on drug shipments heading to Iran, Pakistan or Tajikistan. As long as the Taliban pay cash, they are pleased to let bygones be bygones, said police and two drug traffickers who claimed to have done business with the militants.

Some drug barons have changed their ways because they have already made millions of dollars and now see their self-interest in reform and politics, said a senior Western official involved in the anti-drug effort.

"Others are still involved in drug trafficking and today are part — at the highest level — of government," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The idea is not to leave them in the provinces anymore, but to bring them on board in official positions in order to better control them."

But the official said he doubted the strategy would work.

Still, the U.N. and the Afghan government predict that this year's opium harvest will be at least 30% smaller than the record 4,200 tons in 2004, partly because of a more aggressive eradication effort. The law of supply and demand has helped too. A glut has driven down prices and profits. But this year's smaller harvest is expected to push prices back up and encourage more planting and trafficking.

It is crucial for the Afghan government and foreign donors to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to farmers before the next planting season this year to make it unnecessary for them to grow opium poppies, said Schmidt, the U.N. official. Sufficient money has been pledged, but some governments have failed to make good on their promises, he said. And continuing insecurity in large parts of the country makes development work difficult.

Schmidt said he was certain that the poppy crop this year would be smaller than last year's. "But the question is 2006."

More than 2,000 years ago, much of Kunduz was a swamp. Alexander the Great stopped here for fresh horses as he pressed south in 329 BC in his conquest of much of the known world.

Today it's a dust-blown smugglers' paradise.

As they have for generations, horses decorated with small pompoms and bells clip-clop through the city, pulling carts that are used as taxis. The police chief of Kunduz province, former militia commander Gen. Mutaleb Baig, is also a throwback to the old Afghanistan. Instead of a police uniform, he prefers a green quilted coat, which he drapes over his shoulders like a chieftain's cloak.

In late 2001, U.S. Special Forces and Central Intelligence Agency operatives worked with the Northern Alliance rebel group to besiege thousands of Taliban soldiers in Kunduz. The fight to take the city helped form close ties between U.S. forces and warlord Daoud, who had been finance secretary to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated two days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Before the attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, State Department officials had often cited Northern Alliance drug trafficking as one reason the U.S. should not publicly support the anti-Taliban militia.

But police and traffickers interviewed in Kunduz said Daoud did more than use narcotics to help fund the fight against the Taliban: He made drug smuggling a family business. They said he continued to profit from the opium and heroin trade even after Karzai brought him into the central government last August.

Nyamat, a former intelligence agent who has been on the police force for 25 years, accused Daoud's brother, Haji Agha, of handling the family drug business for Daoud, and he said that when his men arrested small-scale smugglers, the deputy minister had them released.

Nyamat, whose almond-shaped eyes are reminiscent of Genghis Khan's Mongols, who swept through Afghanistan in the 13th century, said four of his own officers moonlight for drug traffickers. Even counting them, his unit is 15 officers short of full strength.

He got up from his desk in a basement office of the Kunduz police station, closed two small windows, and lowered his voice. He said he couldn't trust anyone, least of all provincial chief Baig, a former deputy to Daoud.

Nyamat alleged that Baig's officers had undermined his efforts by rationing gas and refusing to provide armed backup during drug raids. Baig has fired him four times. The commander of the anti-drug force in Kabul keeps reinstating him.

Nyamat said he had reported his suspicions several times to his superiors, and in November he approached American officials working with the counter-narcotics police in Kabul. When nothing resulted from the discussions, he sent a trusted deputy to the Afghan capital to complain again in late February.

Daoud denied involvement in the drug trade but said other senior government officials, police and militia commanders were guilty of it.

He said in an interview that he and his brother had never had anything to do with opium or heroin, and said no Northern Alliance commander had ever trafficked narcotics, because Massoud did not tolerate it. He accused enemies of spreading lies about him.

"If there is even one [drug] case that I'm involved in, I am ready to be punished," Daoud said.

Western officials involved in the anti-drug effort said privately that Daoud was once a trafficker but that they now trusted him as a committed leader in the fight against narcotics.

"Gen. Daoud is absolutely a key element in the eradication effort," said Schmidt, the U.N. official.

The United Nations estimates that Afghan opium, morphine and heroin feed the habits of 10 million addicts, or two-thirds of the world's opiate abusers. Afghan narcotics kill about 10,000 people a year, it says. Europe is the most lucrative market.

Until last year, Afghanistan was known as an opium exporter, not a major heroin producer. But with the poppy boom, and post-Taliban instability, small heroin labs sprang up in hundreds of villages. Even if police find them, they are easily replaced.

One Kunduz trafficker, a man in his late 20s with a wool hat resting high on his head, said an average lab had 10 barrels, a pressing machine, cotton filters and acetic anhydride, an acid, to refine opium paste into heroin powder.

The trafficker estimated that there was enough opium stashed in village wells and other hiding places to keep labs and smugglers working for 10 to 15 years, even if poppy cultivation stopped entirely. Schmidt said that was probably an underestimation.

Early last year, Karzai set up the paramilitary Special Narcotics Force, which answers only to him and his interior minister. Officials refused to provide details on its size and capabilities.

The Interior Ministry says the force carried out 12 operations in three of the country's 34 provinces last year, destroying 70 labs and 88 tons of opiates — about 2% of Afghanistan's production.

In late February, Afghan forces and American advisors from the Drug Enforcement Administration delivered 1.5 tons of heroin, opium and hashish to the counter-narcotics police headquarters in Kabul. The drugs were seized from homes and shops during three months of raids in southern Helmand province, said Muhibullah Ludin, a senior official in the newly formed Counter-Narcotics Ministry.

"It wasn't very well hidden because it's so common there," he said. "Right now they're trying to make it a bit more secret because so many people are being detained."

In the lobby of the police station, officers laid out a long row of burlap and plastic sacks, several stained with gooey black opium gum, and weighed each sack on a freight scale in the corner. They also spilled out individual plastic bags packed with almost pure heroin, an off-white powder that looks like flour, to count them on the floor. There were 559 one-kilo bags — more than 1,200 pounds.

It seemed an impressive haul, but DEA advisors watched the count skeptically.

"Trying to get rid of drugs in Afghanistan is like trying to clear sand from a beach with a bucket," said an American counter-narcotics agent.

The three-month operation resulted in charges against only one trafficker, Ludin said. A Western diplomat involved in the effort said that the special force had not gone after the people behind the drug networks yet because the justice system was too weak.

"We find it difficult to get any successful prosecutions of any significant traffickers, basically because people pay bribes," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

With foreign assistance, the Afghan government is setting up special courts to try traffickers, with added security to protect investigators, prosecutors and judges. They will start with low-level cases and gradually move up the drug trafficking chain as they gain confidence, the Western official said.

Judges are easily bribed because they earn only about $100 a month, Schmidt said.

"We'll be monitoring it very, very carefully in order to respond to any problems in the prosecution of these cases," he said. "But I cannot tell you today that everything will be utterly beautiful and perfect."

The Kunduz trafficker said he wasn't worried.

He counts Daoud as one of his connections. Late in the summer of 2003, he said, Daoud helped him retrieve heroin worth $200,000 that had been seized at the Salang Tunnel, a link between southern and northern Afghanistan that is 11,000 feet up in the Hindu Kush mountains. Daoud denied this, saying drugs were never seized at the tunnel and that the trafficker was lying.

The trafficker also said he had sold a large consignment of heroin last year that had yet to be smuggled into Iran from the southwestern province of Nimroz. Premium Afghan heroin going to the West through Iran fetches a higher price and is less likely to be seized.

He predicted that the government crackdown would be good for business. Increased arrests and interdiction would cut competition and reduce the glut that forced down prices by two-thirds last year.

"The more restrictions, the more the business will boom," the trafficker said. "The price will go high, the number of dealers will go down, and my income will go up. The professional businessmen will remain. They have good connections. Whoever works hard in a business wins."

No matter where Afghan narcotics are headed, most of them pass through Kabul, a transit point on the main route linking poppy fields and labs in east and north to border smuggling routes.

Each day, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., police set up checkpoints on the edge of the capital. They ask drivers the "Seven Golden Questions," taught by British advisors, which include where are they coming from, where are they going and who owns the vehicle. They try to form a hunch about whether they should conduct a search.

A sniffer dog named Warsola, a German shepherd trained in Kazakhstan to take commands in Pashto, stands by in a cage, eager to root out hidden drugs. The police also have a camera probe, a long black hose with a tiny lens on the tip, which allows them to peer into gas tanks and radiators.

But at the end of the day, the outmatched police, paid $60 a month, lock up their weapons, go home and wait for death threats. They worry about their families.

"When I leave my house I tell my children, 'Please don't go out.' And I tell them, 'If you need anything, please tell me. I will bring it to you,' " Mohammed Nazir said. "We are afraid.

"Even if a cat jumps into my house, I get scared and I think that there is somebody in the house to kill me."

Nazir's 13-member team has arrested more than 30 suspected drug traffickers since it started work nine months ago. The team's first bust was of uniformed police officers armed with hand grenades and guns. They were caught with 24 pounds of opium in a knapsack in a civilian car. They said they had no idea that the drugs were there, Nazir said.

One of the unit's most dangerous arrests was last summer, when it discovered more than 400 pounds of opium concealed in the cabin of a gas tanker coming from northern Afghanistan. The smuggler had tried to mask the musky opium smell with piles of melons.

When police confronted the driver, he used his cellphone to call for help. Then he offered a bribe, and when that didn't work, he invoked the name of Gen. Haji Mohammed Almas, a Northern Alliance warlord, whose forces are suspected in many robberies and killings in the capital.

On the way to jail with their suspects, the police noticed that they were being followed by two SUVs full of gunmen. They kept their distance when the drug squad officers pulled into the jail, said Shamsuddin, a member of Nazir's unit. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.

That night, about 1 a.m., a phone call woke him. Lying next to his wife, Shamsuddin began sweating in anger as a voice on the phone threatened him, he recalled.

"I was sweating just because he wasn't next to me," the cop snarled. "Otherwise I would have beaten him to death."

A few days later, when Shamsuddin was sitting with other officers at the drug squad's headquarters, the same man called and repeated the threat.

Nazir said traffickers had no trouble finding phone numbers to harangue counter-narcotics police at any hour. "All of these people have friends inside the government," he said.

A week after their arrest, the truck driver and his assistant walked free and drove off in their tanker.

Almas, the warlord, denied that he trafficked in drugs and declared that the police were hopelessly corrupt.

"In reality, the police are very sleepy in Kabul," he said. "And that is because all the thieves and criminals have joined the National Police. Whenever they commit a crime ... they name a [militia] commander and say that his men did this."

Like many in the front-line drug squad, Shamsuddin, a 23-year police veteran, is angry that warlords with a long record of crimes and abuses in the country's wars have been promoted to top police positions, putting uniformed officers at their mercy.

"I can only trust these 12 people in my team," he said. "Our government is not a real government. I pray and hope for a day that we have a foreigner as a boss, and he is standing over our heads and controlling us. There is no management in our government and there is no authority from the Afghans."

East of Kabul, in one of Afghanistan's oldest opium-producing regions, Karzai has tried to resolve the police-warlord conflict by melding the two in the person of Hazrat Ali.

Western officials praise the Nangarhar police chief for his strict stand against poppy growing. Cultivation has been cut drastically in a region where spring usually brings fields full of red and white opium poppy flowers.

But Jandad Spin Ghar, who leads the eastern regional office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said Ali's police routinely arrested innocent people and committed other serious abuses while letting drug traffickers and other well-connected criminals go free.

"He only stopped the cultivation and he has done nothing to stop the trafficking," Spin Ghar said. "I don't understand why the U.S. and the central government are supporting him."

Daoud, the deputy interior minister, said he had summoned Ali to Kabul to answer such allegations, and was satisfied that they were false. Ali accused enemies of spreading lies about him.

"I told him, 'Look, General, I have never been in the drug business my whole life,' " Ali recalled. "I hate drugs more than anything else and neither I nor my men are involved in the drug business."

Part of the solution to Afghanistan's drug problem may lie in the soft petals and sweet scent of the Bulgarian rose. A German aid group has persuaded a dozen farmers in one Nangarhar village to grow them to see whether they can provide the essence for fine French perfumes.

Janaan Khan, a village leader in Dara-e-Noor, planted 150 rose seedlings on half an acre. They poke just a few inches out of the wet soil, which once provided bumper harvests of premium red opium. He earned about $4,000 from his last poppy crop in 2002, a fortune in a country where per capita income in 2003 was about $200, putting it among the bottom 20 nations.

It's more difficult to produce high-quality rose oil than high-grade opium, and German experts told Khan that it would take three years to find out what, if anything, their Bulgarian roses are worth.

A stiff wind can bruise the blossoms, rendering them worthless. At harvest time, farmers have just one day to gently pluck the flowers and process them into rose oil, Khan said. At most, he expects to earn a quarter of what he did from opium. But he says that would be enough for an honest living.

"I told the farmers that if this thing succeeds, then Afghanistan will be famous for flowers and perfumes, not for war and opium, and Dara-e-Noor will be as famous as Paris," Khan said, his eyes lighting up with the dream.

"I told them that these flowers will have great smell and foreigners will come from all over the world for a picnic. And they will enjoy being here. And everywhere you look there will be foreigners, and we will build guest houses and take money from the foreigners who stay here. And we will all be rich."

Despite his outward confidence, Khan acknowledged that he was worried he might be wrong. The German aid group has promised a small cash subsidy to tide the farmers over, but Khan said it was far less than the thousands of dollars they were used to earning. They probably will wait only a year or two before they start growing opium poppies again, he said.

It's easy to see why. The village doesn't have electricity, running water or a proper school. The only road is a dirt track dotted with sharp rocks. There are too many people living on too little land; most of the farmers are sharecroppers who rent small parcels from a few wealthy landlords.

"Name a problem and these people have it," said Khan, who supports two wives and four children. "Our lives have not moved forward. They have gone backward because no matter how much aid money they have spent, we don't have any money now."

In villages across Afghanistan, powerless people such as Khan say they want to be rid of the warlords once and for all, and they wonder why Karzai is giving them more power.

"Democracy means freedom and people's government," he said. "But in Afghanistan, if you tell a [militia] commander, 'You have made these mistakes. Please quit your job,' the commander will take out a gun and kill you."

Khan's neighbor Sayyed Alam Khan lost his 6-month-old daughter, Najeda, in late February. Like many of the area's children, she lived with her family in a mud-brick house with a leaky ceiling that dripped cold water day and night. A simple cold proved fatal. Six feet of snow closed off the valley, so Khan couldn't get her to the nearest hospital in Jalalabad.

She wasn't the first of Khan's children to die. He has lost two other daughters and a son. And he has seven children left, ages 2 to 13. They huddled next to him in the smoky half-light beside a cooking fire, trying to keep warm on a cold dirt floor.

Three years ago, after his oldest son died at age 6, Khan borrowed about $5,000 from relatives. He planned to pay it back with the profit from the next year's opium harvest. But when their poppies were nearly ready, police came and ordered Khan and other villagers to destroy the plants. They were paid $5 for a day's work that wiped out their livelihood, and any hope Khan had of paying his creditors.

He has no interest in planting roses. "I will die by the time the flowers bloom," said Khan, 61. He is trying to support his family by selling firewood, but he is not earning enough to keep his creditors at bay. According to local custom, they can soon claim his eldest daughter as compensation.

Israeli military fashion

A detailed look by Haaretz at Tshirt insignia designed by some Israeli soldiers for their units. Things like "1 shot, 2 kills" below a drawing of an Arab pregnant woman... crazy.

Jerusalem's mayor on city's status

Nir Barkat, Jerusalem's mayor, talks about his vision that Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal and indivisible capital.

Israeli soldiers confirm Gaza atrocities against civilians

Aljazeera has a good video on this topic.

Obama's "new" policy on detainees

Another article on Obama's policy on detainees, which turns out to be not that different from Bush's. Indeed, Human Rights Watch noted that "Rather than rejecting the Bush administration's ill-conceived notion of a 'war on terror,' the Obama administration's position on detainees has merely tinkered with its form."
In short, as J.D. Tuccille argues, detainees, although they are not called "enemy combatants" anymore, anybody said by the U.S. government to give "substantial" support to al Qaeda or the Taliban will still be held without charges or a trial in which American authorities have to prove their accusations.

Gaza toll could be 1,400+

The final tally of Palestinians killed in Israel's recent war on Gaza's Hamas rulers is 1,417, including 926 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a Palestinian human rights group. Among the dead were 926 civilians, including 313 minors under the age of 18 and 116 women. The PCHR counted 236 combatants and 255 members of the Hamas security forces.

Israeli soldiers confirm Gaza atrocities against civilians

The NYT reports on Israeli soldiers' own accounts of the atrocities in the recent attack on Gaza.

Obama toes Bush line on torture

A detailed look at Obama's legal policies on torture and court cases against Bush administration officials.

Iraq reconstruction waste: $ billions; $13 million returned to Iraq

The scandal of Iraqi reconstruction continues, as detailed by Iraq Oil Report.
Stuart Bowen, head of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), said that between 15 percent and 20 percent of the $21 billion in Iraq Reconstruction and Relief Funds, appropriated by Congress, was lost due to waste. The blame falls on U.S. leadership, he said. A much smaller number was chalked up to fraud, though he called the instances “egregious” and touted the 35 people convicted.
The $13 million Bowen said he returned to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during a recent trip to Iraq was found by SIGIR staff following a tip. The $13 million was found as a place-holder, awaiting future reconstruction contracts. Bowen said it was not criminal, but still should not have taken place. Bowen said he hopes to return “tens of millions of dollars in DFI (Development Fund for Iraq) dollars improperly held by the United States,” as his caseload increases.
Ben Lando notes that "Nearly $9 billion was lost by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority to the black hole of the early days in Iraq, highlighted in a January 2005 audit, the most explosive of SIGIR’s findings." See the report by CNN in January 2005.

Iraq summary

Juan Cole has a good summary of the consequences of the invasion of Iraq:

-4 million Iraqis displaced from their homes out of a population of 27 million--that's 15% of the population.
-Dead Iraqis: estimates vary from hundreds of thousands to over a million. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that the US killed directly. For the rest, the US only set in train their deaths by our invasion.
-Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent.
-Hundred of thousands of women have been widowed by the war--something to keep in mind next time you hear that the invasion improved Iraqi women's lives.
-$32 billion were allocated for reconstruction in Iraq, but a lot of it was wasted and can't even be traced.

More US military waste on missile defense

USA Today has a good article on the costs and (in)effectiveness of the American Missile Defense system that might be deployed in Eastern Europe. It would cost anywhere between $9-13 billion to deploy the system in Europe, and since 1985, the system has cost $144 billion.
One of the main issues in mainstream commentary is whether the system is effective or not. Critics say it is not and point to the fact that in recent tests, interceptors failed to hit airborne warheads 5 times in 13 tests; supporters say this record will improve.
But no matter what the effectiveness of the system is, it should be scrapped. Europe does not face a missile threat--or if it does, it is because other countries will be reacting against aggressive attempts to put interceptors in Europe in the first place.

Left and Right in Latin America

Good review of electoral developments in Latin America over the last 4-5 years at counterpunch.org.

Pakistan crisis background

Good recent history background on the crisis in Pakistan.

Left wins in El Salvador

The FMLN won the presidential elections in El Salvador. The electoral tribunal said that with votes from 92 percent of polling places counted, the F.M.L.N. had won 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent for Arena.

White House deleted emails

NYT editors note that the Bush administration deleted hundreds of days’ worth of official White House e-mail from the public record. Also gone missing are messages from top Bush appointees who improperly used private Republican Party e-mail accounts to conduct public business.

US won't cut military aid to Israel

The US won't cut military aid to Israel. In 2007, the US had promised $30 billion to Israel in military aid for the next 10 years. But the financial crisis won't affect this.

Obama Justice Dept defends Rumsfled in torture case

Raw Story reports that in a brief filed Thursday evening, Obama Justice Department lawyers extended many of the same arguments made by Bush attorneys -- that top government officials have qualified immunity from prosecution and that Guantanamo detainees do not have constitutional rights to due process.

Pakistan

Al Jazeera has a good summary of what led to the current protests in Pakistan.

Obama renews sanctions against Iran

Obama renewed US sanctions against Iran. The sanctions, which ban US companies from investing or trading with Iran, have been renewed annually since 1995. They come on top of the three rounds of sanctions applied to Iran by the UN Security Council over Iran's nuclear program.

1000+ US overseas military bases

The US maintains over 1,000 military bases in other countries. That's 95% of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory. That show the US is still the leading world power and by a substantial margin. This costs $102 billion a year excluding bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hersh on "executive assassination ring"

Seymour Hersh characterized the JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) as an executive assassination ring, reporting directly to Cheney's office and conducting targeted assassination in foreign countries:

After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. ...

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

Iraqi women

Oxfam just released a report on the conditions faced by Iraqi women. It concludes:
"In summary, now that overall security situation, although still very fragile, begins to stabilize, and as the Iraqi government is now benefiting from tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues (despite falling global prices), countless mothers, wives, widows and daughters of Iraq remain caught in the grip of a silent emergency. They are in urgent need of protection and – along with their families – are in desperate need of regular access to affordable and quality basic services, and urgently require enhanced humanitarian and financial assistance."
And:
"The women of Iraq have been caught in the grip of a silent emergency for the past six years.
Despite fragile security gains and a decline in indiscriminate and sectarian violence over the
past months, the day-to-day lives of many women in Iraq remain dire. Over the past several
years, women have increasingly been targeted with acts of violence, threats and abduction.
Indirectly, continued insecurity has also greatly degraded the quality of women’s lives across the
country, no matter their religious, economic or cultural identities."

Some of the main findings:

- As compared with 2007 & 2006, more than 40% of respondents said their security situation worsened last year & slightly more than 22% said it had remained static compared to both years

- 55% had been a victim of violence since 2003; 22% of women had been victims of domestic violence; More than 30% had family members who died violently.

- Some 45% of women said their income was worse in 2008 compared with 2007 and 2006, while roughly 30% said it had not changed in that same time period

- 33% had received no humanitarian assistance since 2003

- 76% of widows said they did not receive a pension from the government

- Nearly 25% of women had no daily access to drinking water & half of those who did have daily access to water said it was not potable; 69% said access to water was worse or the same as it was in 2006 & 2007.

Israeli settlements and the "peace process"

Very good article on the history of Israeli settlements at Counterpunch.org showing that their expansion has remained constant even under the so-called "peace process" years since 1993, i.e. Oslo and Bush's Road Map.

1000 overseas US military bases

David Vine writes about US overseas military bases:
In 2003 and 2004, President George W. Bush announced his intention to initiate a major realignment and shrinkage of what his administration described as an economically wasteful and outdated U.S. overseas basing structure.
Rather than shrinking since the announced reorganization, the overseas base network has for the most part expanded in scope and size, as a result of the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its broader efforts to assert U.S. geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, Central Asia, and globally. Since the invasions of 2001 and 2003, the United States has created or expanded bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there may be upward of 100 and 80 installations, respectively, with plans to expand the basing infrastructure in Afghanistan as part of a troop surge.
In total, the Pentagon claims it has 865 base sites outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C. Notoriously unreliable, this tally omits bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other well-known and secret bases. A better estimate is 1,000.

Juan Cole on Pakistan

Juan Cole has an excellent recap of the current Pakistani crisis and says that tensions between the Muslim League and the PPP (Pakistan People's Party) are much more threatening than conflict between Pakistani Taliban and the government.

400 children died in Gaza conflict

UNICEF says 400 children died in Gaza and more than 1,700 were injured during Israel's January attack.

Israel's exploitation of mines in Occupied Territories

An Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, accuses Israel of breaking international law by exploiting the occupied territory's resources for its own gain.

Yesh Din cites military documents which show nine million of the 12 million tonnes of rock and gravel mined in the West Bank each year are sold in Israel - and says Israel is "addicted to the exploitation".

It says its High Court petition addresses "the illegal practice of brutal economic exploitation of a conquered territory to serve the exclusive economic needs of the occupying power".

Long-term Israeli construction plans show the authorities intend to rely on the continued use of materials taken from the West Bank over the next 30 years, says the group, leaving the territory "empty of natural resources".

Fatah still most populat, but Hamas's popularity increases among Palestinians

A new opinion poll in the West Bank and Gaza Strip reveals that Hamas's popularity has increased in the aftermath of Israel's recent attack. If an election were held today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would beat Mahmoud Abbas by 47% to 45%. Three months ago, Abbas received 48 percent and Haniyeh 38 percent. But if the competition were between Haniyeh and Marwan Barghouthi, the popular Fatah leader currently imprisoned by Israel, Barghouthi would win by 61 percent to 34 percent, the survey showed. Fatah, however, remains the most popular faction with 40 percent of overall support, compared to 42 percent last December, it said. The popularity of Hamas in the same period increased from 28 percent to 33 percent in the latest poll. The most important priority for Palestinians today, in the eyes of 46 percent of the sample, should be the unification of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Hamas won a Palestinian parliamentary election in 2006 and seized control of the Gaza Strip the next year after fighting with Fatah. Israel responded by tightening its blockade of the coastal enclave, increasing hardships for its 1.5 million residents.

Will El Salvador go left?

The WP reports on the possible leftist victory in El Salvador's elections:
" A win by Funes would put another Latin American country firmly on the political left, joining the "pink tide" of governments in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay and Nicaragua. The question about Funes in the minds of El Salvador's voters, according to interviews and polls, is what kind of left? Will it be the democratic, globalized, pro-business, moderate left that is friendly toward the United States, like Brazil? Or the populist, hard-line, nationalistic left that is antagonistic toward United States, like Venezuela?"

Justice Department defends Yoo

SF Chronicle reports that "President Obama's Justice Department defended former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo in a San Francisco federal court Friday, arguing that a prisoner formerly held as an enemy combatant had no right to sue Yoo for writing legal memos that allegedly led to his detention and torture."

Democrats boost military spending

So you thought Democrats fought to reduce Bush's military spending excesses? Think again. According to the Washington Post, "It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate... since 2006, Democratic lawmakers have presided over a 10 percent increase in the Pentagon's budget -- it now amounts to 46 percent of the government's total discretionary spending -- and have also voted repeatedly to keep funding weapons systems that have had hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns."

One problem is that weapons systems' contractors are spread in almost all states, ensuring wide political support: "Tens of thousands of jobs directly related to the F-22, for example, are spread among 44 states, a point emphasized in a letter of support for the program signed by 194 House members on Jan. 21. The fighter was conceived in the mid-1980s, and even though Gates said last year its production should end at a fleet of 183, a bipartisan group of lawmakers appropriated $523 million as a down payment on parts to build 20 more in 2010."

The defense industry has lobbied Democrats intensively: "Since Democrats took control of the defense appropriations process in 2006, the defense industry has shifted gears: During the 2008 election cycle, more than half of the industry's estimated campaign donations of $25.4 million went to Democrats, marking the first time in 14 years the party had come out on top, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that monitors campaign spending."

Afghanistan resources and Iran

Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation gives some good publications on Afghanistan.

Dreyfuss also has a good article on Dennis Ross and Iran policy.

Women in Afghanistan

A UN report says that the condition of women in Afghanistan has not much improved since 2001.

Bush legal memos

William Pfaff at Trutdig.com discusses the release of Bush memos and says that these memos "claimed presidential powers to unilaterally abrogate international treaties; suspend constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press; and order warrant-less searches, wiretaps and seizures of documents and indefinite imprisonment inside the U.S. without trial or criminal charges. The memorandums claimed that Congress has no overriding authority in these matters. The authors of all but one of these documents were John Yoo and Jay Bybee (both then of the Justice Department but now, respectively, a member of the University of California at Berkeley Law School faculty and a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). They were also the authors early in the Bush administration of two special memorandums defining torture much more narrowly than in the United States code of military justice or U.S. civil law."

Bagram/Guantanamo

Karen Greenberg writes on Bagram, the US prison in Afghanistan which is in many respects worse than Guantanamo, but won't be closed by Obama--he is expanding it at the cost of millions of dollars. Bagram was where some detainees were first incarcerated before being shipped to Guantanamo: "many of those eventually transported to Guantanamo were originally held under even worse conditions at Bagram and, from early on, they had reported beatings, abuse and a startlingly wide range of other forms of mistreatment there." Moreover, she writes that "two Afghans, Dilawar and Jullah Habibullah, had been beaten to death by US Army interrogators" at Bagram in December 2002 and that "beatings, as well as various other forms of torture, had been normalized at Bagram at the very beginning of the Bush administration's long march of pain that led to Guantanamo and then on to Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq as well as foreign torture chambers."

CIA agents won't be prosecuted

CIA Director Leon Panetta said CIA employees having participated in harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects will not be prosecuted.

Clinton, Israel/Palestine

Israel has plans for 73,000 settlement homes, Reuters reports. If this is fully carried out, the number of settlers in the territories will be doubled to 600,000, according to Peace Now. This would destroy whatever chance remains of achieving a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Related, Hillary Clinton told Israel that its plans to destroy 88 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem were "unhelpful". East Jerusalem is Occupied Territory. Of course it is not like if Clinton's statement was a sign of her progressive politics, but as Juan Cole said, in an excellent post on the issue today, we should consider supporting Clinton's statement as the right will not, and progressives have a tendency to brush the issue aside, resulting in them being overwhelmed by conservatives--who WILL write to Clinton to tell her she should not have said that. Write to Hillary here.

Al Jazeera has a good video report on the destruction by Israel of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.

A good article at Counterpunch.org on US aid to Israel.

Bush's legal memos

Good NYT editorial about the memos from the Bush era being released saying what the legal arguments they used to "legalize" illegal actions were.

Marjorie Cohn adds:
"Seven newly released memos from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.

Who wrote these memos? All but one were crafted in whole or in part by the infamous John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the so-called “torture memos” that redefined torture much more narrowly than the U.S. definition of torture, and counseled the President how to torture and get away with it. In one memo, Yoo said the Justice Department would not enforce U.S. laws against torture, assault, maiming and stalking, in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants... Meanwhile, John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law School and Jay Bybee is a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. These men, who advised Bush on how to create a police state, should be investigated, prosecuted, and disbarred. Yoo should be fired and Bybee impeached."

Contractors in Iraq

The US employs more contractors in Iraq than the number of US troops there. There are about 150,000 contractors now in Iraq, who will have to leave with the withdrawal.
Most of those contractors (54%) provide support on bases (cooking meals, etc.); only 6% work in security-related fields but we mostly hear about this category (e.g. employees of Blackwater).
The contractors comprise about 39,000 Americans, 70,000 "third country nationals," and 37,000 Iraqis.

Tariq Aziz acquitted

The acquittal was on charges of responsibility for a brutal crackdown against Shiite protesters that followed the assassination of a revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, in 1999.
The court on Monday convicted Ali Hassan al-Majid, a former Hussein aide known as “Chemical Ali” for ordering poison gas attacks against the Kurds in the 1980s, for his role in the killings for which Mr. Aziz was acquitted. For a third time, he was sentenced to death.

US-Russia deal on Iran and missiles

Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, American officials said Monday.
We'll see what happens; at least that's positive relative to the Bush administration.

Putin also a danger to his own population

Just like Obama, Putin is investing more money in Russia's military, even though Russia faces its worst economic crisis in more than a decade.
Russia is modernizing its nuclear forces, which is illegal under the NPT--it's even illegal to maintain nuclear arsenals, which should be destroyed. But just like the US, Russia doesn't care and is upgrading its nuclear forces.

More troops in Afghanistan could mean more hardship for civilians, Red Cross says

Read the article here.

Obama same as Bush on issues

Associated Press has a good list of issues on which Obama's policies are the same as Bush's:

-White House records: The Obama administration sided with Bush in trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails from the Bush years, reasoning that plenty had already been spent and done to recover the messages.

-Enemy combatants: The administration filed a legal brief that echoed Bush in maintaining that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights and arguing that enemy combatants held at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention.The brief said that if the Bagram detainees got access to U.S. courts, it would allow all foreigners captured by the United States in conflicts worldwide to do the same.

-State secrets: Even as Obama officials promised a thorough review of its use of state secrets protections, government lawyers continued to invoke the state secrets law in a federal appeals court in San Francisco. That case involves a suit over the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, in which U.S. operatives seized foreign suspects and handed them over to other countries for questioning.

Some former prisoners subjected to the process contend they were tortured. Proving that in court has been difficult, as evidence they have sought to corroborate their claims has been protected by the president's state secrets privilege.

The Obama administration is supporting Bush's use of the state secrets privilege in another case, this one involving suits against telecommunications companies by people and organizations alleging that the companies violated wiretapping and privacy laws.

The Bush administration had invoked the state secrets privilege to keep a judge from reviewing government documents laying out the program under which the companies allowed the government to eavesdrop on their customers without a court's permission after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dennis Ross and Iran

Dennis Ross has been named “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia,” a portfolio which includes Iran.
An article gives a critical account of his background. Ross is close to Israel and to WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), which have adopted a hard line against Iran. Ross's appointment is therefore bad news.