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Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Mosque to be built at 'Gorund Zero' approved


US authorities have approved the building of an Islamic culture centre and mosque in New York City, despite tensions over it being located near the site of the September 11 attacks in 2001. The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously on Tuesday to deny landmark status to a building two blocks from the World Trade Center site that developers want to tear down and convert into an Islamic community centre that will include a mosque. The panel said the 152-year-old lower Manhattan building is not distinctive enough to be considered a landmark. The decision drew praise from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who called the project a key test of Americans' commitment to religious freedom. Critics appear to be small in number, but passionate, and they have gained powerful supporters recently.

Ahmadinejad attack 'was firework'


A reported attack on the convoy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, was actually a teenager throwing a firework, officials and a witness say. Khabar Online, an Iranian website, had reported earlier on Wednesday that a homemade grenade exploded near Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's motorcade in western Iran. He was unhurt in the incident, the website said. It said the incident occured as Ahmadinejad was on his way to address a gathering, and that one person had been arrested. But a witness to the incident told that a teenager threw a fire-cracker that landed near the convoy. The witness said that the youth was taken away, but did not believe that it was a genuine assassination attempt.

Suicide bomber kills head of US-backed paramilitary police force in Pakistan


Suicide bomber has killed the head of a U.S.-backed paramilitary police force battling militants in northwestern Pakistan, one of the highest ranking security officers ever assassinated. The bombing that killed Sifwat Ghayur, the head of the 25,000-strong Frontier Constabulary, was the first attack since monsoon rains triggered massive flooding over a week ago. The bomber detonated his explosives next to Ghayur's car in the center of Peshawar after waiting at a traffic light for the vehicle to approach, said the police chief's driver, Shakirullah Khan, who was injured in the attack.

The explosion engulfed several vehicles, killing the police chief and three bodyguards, said Mohammad Haris Khan, a senior police officer. The attack also injured 11 people, he said.

Devastating floods, bloodshed & suicide bombing.... this is Pakistan

After wrecking Pakistan's northwest, the worst floods in 80 years swept through the economically vital Punjab in a catastrophe that has raised doubts about President Asif Ali Zardari's fragile leadership. Zardari left for Europe this week on state visits, drawing criticism for his absence during the worst of the destruction. Ethnic violence in Pakistan's biggest city Karachi, and a suicide bombing claimed by Taliban militants in Peshawar also piled pressure on his government, widely criticized for its handling of the floods, which have killed over 1,500 and devastated the lives of more than three million people. It's too early to gauge the economic costs of the floods but they are likely to be staggering. Pakistan depends heavily on foreign aid and its civilian governments have a poor history of managing crises, leaving the powerful military to step in. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in Washington on Wednesday that Americans could text the word "SWAT" to the number 50555 to donate $10 per SMS message to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to provide tents, clothing, food, clean water and medicine to Pakistan. The United States has provided $10 million in aid to help ease the floods crisis.

Global Insights: After Dutch Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Who's Next?


According to Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadij, the insurgent group is very happy about the Dutch military withdrawal from Afghanistan that began on Sunday. "We want to wholeheartedly congratulate the citizens and government of the Netherlands for having the courage . . . to take this independent decision," Ahmadij told the Dutch daily Volkskrant, adding that, "We hope that other countries with troops stationed in Afghanistan will follow the Netherlands' example." Ahmadij's remarks, though intended to be provocative, in fact raise key questions -- namely, how many other countries will indeed follow the Netherlands' example, and how quickly. The decision by the Netherlands to become the first NATO country to withdraw its entire military contingent from Afghanistan could plausibly increase pressure on other European governments to curtail their own unpopular military deployments there. Once Spain and the Netherlands withdrew their troops from Iraq, for example, many other countries followed suit, eventually leaving American troops as the only significant foreign military presence in the country. The same pattern could easily occur in Afghanistan in coming years. In December 2005, despite considerable opposition in the national legislature and among the Dutch public, the government in the Hague decided to send combat forces to the southern province of Uruzgan to provide security and to support the region's political and economic development. The Dutch government justified its participation in NATO's first out-of-area operation -- and the Netherlands' first combat deployment since the Korean War -- by citing alliance and transatlantic solidarity. Since the spring of 2006 until this month, the Netherlands have deployed approximately 2,000 troops in Afghanistan. Some 1,400 of these Dutch soldiers, along with a smaller number of Australians, have been in Uruzgan, a small mountainous province north of Helmand and Kandahar. Uruzgan has a strong Taliban presence and is the birthplace of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. It is also one of the Afghan provinces with the highest levels of opium production. The Dutch adopted a so-called "3D" strategy of defense, development, and diplomacy. The approach stressed support for Afghan-led economic initiatives through engaging community leaders in developing and implementing local projects. The defense dimension focused on protecting population centers, in a modified version of the British "ink-blot" counterinsurgency strategy, rather than seeking out opportunities to fight Taliban insurgents. Dutch forces have generally been reluctant to engage in combat operations against the Taliban and operate under rules of engagement that typically require them to use force only if attacked and to maneuver out of enemy fire instead of staying in contact. They did not regularly patrol into Taliban-controlled territory, but instead focused on building relationships with the local population, which provides useful intelligence and some degree of force protection. 

Divide Afghanistan at your peril

Over the past 32 years, Afghans have fought a series of wars to keep their country together. For all the machinations of great powers and neighbouring states, no Afghan warlord or leader has ever succumbed to outside pressure for partition. The war in Afghanistan just got more complicated with the release of secret military files by the Wikileaks website – a big embarrassment to the US, Nato and Pakistan. Yet despite their damaging content, the leaks should not distract from some powerful positive elements that have helped Afghanistan to survive in the past. Afghanistan has been a nation state since 1761 – a good deal longer than four of its immediate neighbours (Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). Even though Afghanistan has suffered severe internal wars and coups, falling victim to the entire gambit of 20th-century ideologies, the country and its people have shown remarkable resilience. The latest attempt to suggest partition comes from an American, Robert Blackwill, a former official in the Bush administration and former US ambassador to India. Mr Blackwill wrote recently in the FT that as the US cannot win the current war in Afghanistan, it should consider a de facto partition of the country, handing over the Pashtun south to the Taliban and propping up the north and west where Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras live. Such a partition, he writes “is now the best that can realistically and responsibly be achieved’’. Really ? Not a single Afghan will ever support such a demand. In 1988-89, as the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the KGB tried hard to convince the Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum to create a buffer state to protect Soviet central Asia from the Mujaheddeen. Gen Dostum described to me how he gruffly refused. In the 1980s, and again in the 1990s, Iran tried to persuade its Shia and Hazara protégées to create a Shia corridor linking western and central Afghanistan with Iran. Afghan leaders turned Iran down. In the mid-1990s some of Tajikistan’s leaders tried, and failed, to persuade the Afghan Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud to build a Greater Tajikistan. In 1996, when the Taliban captured Kabul but initially failed to take the north, Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) suggested that the Pashtun group create their own state in the south. The Taliban refused, despite their dependence on the ISI. Twenty years ago, Gen Dostum told me that the first Afghan who suggests partition would have his throat slit. Before the attacks of September 11 2001, Taliban leaders told me the same thing. The same holds true today. The first thing to note is that Afghanistan’s ethnic mix is extremely complex, with millions of Pashtuns living in the north amidst the Uzbeks and Tajiks. Likewise, the south has its fair share of non-Pashtuns. Partition could lead to worse horrors than witnessed at India’s division in 1947. Mr Blackwill blithely writes that “small islands of non-Pashtuns in the south and east would be an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence”. Moreover, abandoning the south would betray those Pashtuns who have resisted the Taliban. Partition would relegate the Pashtuns to pariah status, ignored and forgotten except when the US finds it necessary – as Mr Blackwill suggests it sometimes will – to send in the drones. Such a policy would seriously undermine Afghanistan by fuelling inter-ethnic war. It would endanger Pakistan, encouraging some of the 40m Pashtuns in Pakistan to link up with their 15m Afghan Pashtun brothers and forge an extremist ethnic state that gives refuge to terrorists. The tragedy of the Bush administration was that for too long after September 11 all Pashtuns were treated as the enemy, and the south and east of Afghanistan became a free-fire zone for US forces. Only recently, under President Barack Obama, has there been a decisive attempt by the US and Nato to woo the Pashtuns and also to strengthen those Pashtun tribes, peoples and women who have been resisting the Taliban all this time. In Pakistan, several thousand moderate Pashtuns have been gunned down by the Pakistani Taliban. They too need to be bolstered and supported as the Pakistan army is now, finally, belatedly trying to do. Afghans and Pakistanis have seen the bloody results of 20th-century partitions – not only in India but also Korea, Vietnam, Germany, Yugoslavia, even Pakistan, with the separation of East Pakistan in 1971. To play around now with the borders of a region beset with extremism, terrorism and ethnic conflict would be to throw a match on a ready-made bonfire. Yes, the situation in Afghanistan is critical, the war against the Taliban is being lost and western forces want to pull out soon. However, the only solution is dialogue between the genuine Taliban leadership, Kabul and Washington for a power-sharing deal at both the centre and in the provinces. Mr Obama needs to move quickly. The region cannot wait for his December policy review or General David Petraeus’s attempts to inflict defeat on the Taliban before talking to them. The US and Nato must open talks with the Taliban now, forge a regional consensus among Afghanistan’s neighbours for such talks, provide Afghanistan with a long-term nation-building commitment, and slowly transfer power to the Afghan army and police. Talk of partition should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Zardari to read riot act to Cameron

The British government on Tuesday prepared for a visit by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari amid a ballooning row over Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent strong criticism of Pakistani state agencies for fuelling global terrorism. Zardari, smarting after Cameron warned Pakistan it could not afford to “look both ways” in the war against terror, is reportedly preparing to do some plain-speaking with the British leader at their meeting on Friday. While Cameron’s statement is entirely in keeping with British policy — a fact acknowledged by Labour’s ex-foreign minister David Miliband — what appears to have stung Islamabad is that he chose to make it in India and in public. There is also a fear in Islamabad that Cameron’s statement, made after his meeting with President Barack Obama, may reflect United States thinking. Zardari, under pressure to cancel his British visit, will lace his explanations to Cameron with a warning, a senior Pakistani official was quoted saying on Tuesday. “We have to tell him [Cameron] what the reality is, to educate him about what we have suffered, and that if we are not supported at this time, how things will get worse,” The Guardian quoted the unnamed official as saying. “Cameron was enamoured by so-called Indian democracy and attractive markets — he was suckered by the Indians.”