WIKIPEDIA: Federally Administered Tribal Areas(FATA)

WIKIPEDIA: Federally Administered Tribal Areas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_Administered_Tribal_Areas

Demographics

The total population of the FATA was estimated in 2000 to be about 3,341,070 people, or roughly 2% of Pakistan's population. Only 3.1% of the population resides in established townships.^[4] It is thus the most rural administrative unit in Pakistan.

...According to a 2009 BBC survey, categorized as "grossly exaggerated" by the Pakistan Army which was fighting the militants there, the Taliban were present in all FATA agencies, and in full control of Waziristan, Orakzai and Bajaur.^[8]

Rise of the Taliban

In 2001, the Taliban and al-Qaeda began entering into the region.^[9] In 2003, Taliban and al-Qaeda forces sheltered in the FATA began crossing the border into Afghanistan , attacking military and police.^[19] Shkin, Afghanistan is a key location for these frequent battles. This heavily fortified military base has housed mostly American special operations forces since 2002 and is located just six kilometers from the Pakistani border. It is considered the most dangerous location in Afghanistan.^[20][21] With the encouragement of the United States, 80,000 Pakistani troops entered the FATA in March 2004 to search for al-Qaeda operatives. They were met with fierce resistance from the Taliban.^[19] It was not the elders, but the Taliban who negotiated a Truce with the army, giving an indication of the extent to which the Taliban had taken control.^[19] Eight more times between 2004 and 2006 troops entered the region, into South Waziristan and North Waziristan, and faced further Taliban resistance. Peace Accords entered into in 2004 and 2006 set terms whereby the tribesmen in the area would stop attacking Afghanistan and the Pakistanis would halt major military actions against the FATA, release all prisoners and permit tribesmen to carry small guns.^[19]

[edit] Pakistan’s new Waziristan strategy

On June 4, 2007, the National Security Council of Pakistan met to decide the fate of Waziristan and take up a number of political and administrative decisions to control "Talibanization" of the area. The meeting was chaired by President Pervez Musharraf and it was attended by the Chief Ministers and Governors of all four provinces. They discussed the deteriorating law and order situation and the threat posed to state security. To crush the armed militancy in the Tribal regions and the NWFP, the government decided to intensify and reinforce law enforcement and military activity, take action against certain madrassahs, and jam illegal FM radio stations.^[22]

Education

The FATA does not have a university. A system of reserved seats is kept in universities in Pakistan. There is no concrete plan to make a full-fledged university there to benefit them.

The FATA's literacy rate is 17.42%, which is well below the 43.92% average in Pakistan. 29.51% of the males, and only 3% of females receive education whereas on average throughout the nation 32% of women do.^[2][24]

[edit] Health

There is one hospital bed for every 2,179 people in the FATA, compared to one in 1,341 in Pakistan as a whole. There is one doctor for every 7,670 people compared to one doctor per 1,226 people in Pakistan as a whole. 43% of FATA citizens have access to clean drinking water.^[24] Much of the population is suspicious about modern medicine, and some militant groups are openly hostile to vaccinations.

In June 2007, a Pakistani Doctor was blown up in his car "after trying to counter the anti-vaccine propaganda of an imam in Bajaur", Pakistani officials told the New York Times.^[7]

---------------------

Washington Post: In new video, CIA bomber says he lured targets with doctored intelligence (balawi)

In new video, CIA bomber says he lured targets with doctored intelligence

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022803286.html

The suicide bomber behind the Dec. 30 attack on a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan claims in a posthumously released recording that he lured U.S. and Jordanian intelligence officers into a trap by sending them misleading information about terrorist targets as well as videotapes he made of senior al-Qaeda leaders.

The bomber, a Jordanian physician named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, also claims that he intended to kidnap only a single Jordanian intelligence officer, but then stumbled on an unexpected opportunity to attack a large group of Americans and their Jordanian allies at once.

"It wasn't planned this way," Balawi says in an undated, 44-minute videotape released Sunday by as-Sahab, the media arm of al-Qaeda. He attributes the change to "the stupidity of Jordanian intelligence and the stupidity of American intelligence" services that invited him to Afghanistan to help set up a strike against al-Qaeda targets.

The video, if authentic, would be the second recorded statement to surface in which Balawi talks of his plan to penetrate Forward Operating Base Chapman, a highly secure CIA base in eastern Afghanistan's Khost province. A Taliban group in January released a taped message in which Balawi says he was avenging the death of Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban commander killed last year in a CIA missile strike. U.S. officials have acknowledged that Balawi was a double agent who provided valuable intelligence over several months before being allowed to meet with U.S. operatives at Chapman. Six Americans and three others were killed in the deadliest attack on the U.S. intelligence agency's staff in a quarter-century.

In the new video, the 32-year-old Balawi gives an animated account of his journey from doctor to suicide bomber, at one point brandishing what he says is a block of C4 military explosive that he intended to use in the attack. Wearing military garb and holding a rifle in his lap, he mocks his Jordanian handlers for thinking that he could be lured into spying on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

"They tried to entice me with money and offered me amounts reaching into the millions of dollars," he says, according to an English translation by IntelCenter, a private intelligence company that monitors jihadist Web sites. The Arabic-language video was provided to The Washington Post by SITE Intelligence Group, another private intelligence firm.

Balawi says the Jordanians spent thousands of dollars to settle him in Pakistan, and claims he intended from the beginning to strike a blow against the pro-U.S. Jordanian government. Balawi says he initially planned to capture or kill the Jordanian officer who served as his handler, but called off the plan. Meanwhile, he was enticing the Jordanians with videos. "The bait fell in the right spot, and they went head over heels with excitement," Balawi says.

To further solidify his handlers' trust, he sent coordinates of Taliban and al-Qaeda positions to the CIA, he says. Some of the information was erroneous, but Balawi says he would "throw in some accurate information which we thought the enemy probably already had knowledge of."

The CIA declined to comment publicly on the video. One U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with its contents suggested that Balawi's account overstated the damage that the spy inflicted on U.S. capabilities in the region.

"The fact that Balawi was a murderer and a terrorist is already well known, as is the fact that he did not stop -- not even for an instant -- precise and effective operations against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their violent allies," the official said.

Washington Post: Once seemingly impregnable, Hamas shows signs of vulnerability

Once seemingly impregnable, Hamas shows signs of vulnerability

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/26/AR2010022604257.html

BEITUNIA, WEST BANK -- Struggling to maintain its strength in the West Bank amid a crackdown by Israel and Palestinian police and suffering after the assassination of one of its top leaders, Hamas has sustained another blow with news that the son of one its founders had been spying on it for Israel.

This week's revelation that Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father, Sheik Hassan Yousef, is in an Israeli prison, provided intelligence to Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service was the latest setback to Hamas's image. The organization seized control of the Gaza Strip from the ruling Fatah Party in 2007 and had once been viewed as all but impregnable.

The news comes amid fighting between Hamas and Fatah that has split Palestinians and hampered U.S. efforts to restart peace negotiations with Israel, which has sealed off the Gaza Strip to pressure Hamas into releasing Gilad Shalit, a captured Israeli soldier.

Hamas has been reeling from the assassination of one its leaders, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai on Jan. 19. His killing by what authorities say was a hit team suspected of being part of Israel's Mossad spy agency has become an international espionage drama that now has a sequel in Yousef's story.

In his soon-to-be be published memoir, "Son of Hamas," Yousef, 32, says his code name was "Green Prince" and that he helped Shin Bet operatives kill Hamas leaders and arrest his own father, according to an interview in the Haaretz newspaper.

Shin Bet's high-level penetration of Hamas, if true, is a "catastrophe for Hamas," said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al Azhar University in Gaza. It is not clear whether the report will cause Hamas to target other suspected informants or if the movement's leaders will simply regard it an isolated incident, Abusada said.

Retired Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, a former army intelligence officer and adviser on Palestinian affairs in Israel's Defense Ministry, said Yousef's spying and Mabhouh's killing make Hamas appear vulnerable.

The news of Yousef's spying was no less painful for his family.

On Friday at his father's home here in Beitunia, outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, Yousef's 22-year-old brother, Mohammed, expressed concern about the effect of the revelations on his father's reputation and emphasized his family's contributions to the Palestinian cause.

"It's painful to hear this,'' said Mohammed, a history and political science major at Birzeit University. "We are a family that has sacrificed, a family that fought. And we're a family that is known for its patriotism. Sheik Hassan Yousef brings respect to the Muslim nation.''

Sitting next to a portrait of his father, who was elected to the Palestinian legislature in 2006 and is serving a six-year prison sentence for belonging to an organization deemed illegal in Israel, Mohammed Yousef alternated allegations that the United States and Israel were defaming his family with acknowledgments that his brother may have gone astray.

Another brother, 23-year-old Uwais, who joined the conversation, said he hadn't spoken to Mosab in several months and didn't have his phone number. He said that since Mosab's conversion to Christianity, the family has been focused on trying to bring him back to Islam. The family also said it was surprised by the story of Mosab, who now lives in California.

"He said he wanted to publish a book, but we didn't know what it would be about,'' Uwais said.

Mosab Yousef was jailed by Israel at one time. It was during his imprisonment, he said, that he became motivated to help Shin Bet. He said he saw Hamas members torture other Palestinian prisoners who they suspected of collaborating with Israel. "It was there that I lost my faith in Hamas,'' Yousef said in the interview with Haaretz. "They killed people for no reason.''

In his memoir, Yousef details how he went on to help Shin Bet prevent dozens of suicide-bombing attempts against Israelis and uncover terrorist cells plotting to kill senior Israeli political figures.

From his prison cell, Yousef's father said he did not accept the news about his son's activities.

In a statement published on a Hamas Web site, Hassan Yousef said, "What was published about his activities against the Hamas movement and its fighters is a blatant lie and it was not possible.''

Washington Post: Former IAEA chief ElBaradei greeted with hero's welcome in Egypt

Former IAEA chief ElBaradei greeted with hero's welcome in Egypt

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021905213.html

CAIRO -- Hundreds of supporters greeted former U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei at the airport upon his return to his native Egypt on Friday, singing songs, chanting pro-reform slogans and calling on the Nobel Prize winner to run for president.

ElBaradei touched down in Cairo for the first time since leaving his post as head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency after 12 years in office. Supporters hope to use the publicity to boost speculation about his potential candidacy for a presidential election in 2011.

Egypt has been ruled for nearly 30 years by Hosni Mubarak, who appears to be trying to set up a political dynasty by grooming his son to succeed him.

ElBaradei, who is respected worldwide and is untouched by the corruption tainting much of Egypt's current regime, could be the most credible opposition leader to emerge as the U.S.-allied country prepares for the presidential election.

Many Egyptians hope ElBaradei's international standing will make it difficult for the government to persecute him for trying to bring reform to the country.

The crowd at the airport -- made up of actors, intellectuals, opposition leaders and ordinary Egyptians -- broke into loud applause when word of ElBaradei's arrival spread and then sang the Egyptian national anthem.

Many supporters carried large posters bearing ElBaradei's images and the word "Yes," signifying their desire to see him run for president. Bloggers and activists followed his arrival with a live stream on the Internet of what was happening at the airport.

ElBaradei, who won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, tried to leave the VIP lounge at the airport shortly after his arrival, but the sheer size of the crowd blocked the exit and delayed his departure. He was briefly glimpsed getting into a car and driving off, waving to his supporters through the car window.

Despite the enthusiasm his return has sparked among many Egyptians hungry for change, ElBaradei has been guarded about a potential presidential run.

In an open letter responding to an effort by young Egyptians urging him to contest in the election, he said he would join the race only if guaranteed that the election would be free, fully supervised by the judiciary and monitored by the international community.

He also wants the constitution amended to remove restrictions on who is eligible to run.

Washingtonpost:In Afghanistan, U.S. seeks to fix a tattered system of justice

In Afghanistan, U.S. seeks to fix a tattered system of justice

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022703516.html

KABUL -- Behind the combat troops and military trainers, alongside the aid workers and agriculture experts, come the lawyers.

U.S. State Department legal experts and contractors are fanning out across the capital and throughout the provinces, trying to build a functioning legal and correctional system in a broken country where justice is too often delayed, denied or nonexistent.

The widespread sentiment that there is no justice in Afghanistan is one of the principal causes of popular disillusionment with the government of President Hamid Karzai. The feeling has been exploited by the militant Taliban, which dispenses its own brutal version of summary justice in areas under its control.

The U.S.-led effort is already showing signs of having an impact. Near the end of a seven-month American training course for prosecutors and police officers, a prosecutor from Takhar province, Abdul Zaher, said: "In this country, Afghans are used to torturing suspects. In this course, we've learned to stop, because it's illegal. If we have a suspect in custody, we've learned how to treat him."

The problems here affect every level of the justice system, from police to courts to prisons.

Because there are not enough attorneys, many arrested suspects are sentenced to prison without ever seeing a defense lawyer as required by the Afghan constitution. Many prisoners languish in jail past the time they can be legally held without a trial. Others have remained in prison for months after their sentences, because their cases fell between the cracks.

Some of the problems were on display during a recent court session at the country's main intelligence office, the National Security Directorate, which tries terrorism suspects. In a cramped room, the prosecutor read out the charges while one of the three judges talked on his cellphone and another sent text messages.

There was no computer, telephone or electricity. The prosecutor carried court documents in a green plastic shopping bag. Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtiari told one suspect he was being sentenced to six years in prison for belonging to the Taliban but said the man could appeal. The defendant angrily demanded a copy of the charges against him, and the judge burst out: "We don't have a photocopier! You want the judge to pay for this out of his own salary?"

Judges complain they have no equipment, no cars to travel to court, no government-issued phones and, most importantly, no security -- many are threatened, some have been kidnapped, others killed. Bakhtiari said that during a sensitive trial, he had to move his family to a hidden location for six months and take his children out of school.

"All of this causes injustice," Bakhtiari said. "Justice cannot be implemented in the country."

Nearly everyone agrees the system is awash in corruption. The wealthy, or those with connections, rarely face punishment. Judges and prosecutors -- whose salaries are barely $200 per month -- routinely accept payments to drop charges, lose case files or let suspects walk free.

"People who have money can go free," said Harum Mutmaeen, 22, who was on his way to visit his cousin at Pul-i-Charkhi prison outside Kabul. His cousin had been imprisoned there for a year and a half after being implicated in a kidnapping. "The people who don't have money -- nobody cares about them," Mutmaeen said.

U.S. officials recognize those doubts about the system here.

"This is one of the most important challenges that we face," said David T. Johnson, assistant secretary for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. "People have to be confident that justice is being done."

The bureau is working with police and prosecutors to develop a computerized case management system for the courts. Its $100 million budget is projected to nearly double next year.

The challenge is daunting. Afghanistan is divided into 34 provinces and 400 small districts, and fewer than a hundred of those districts have an assigned prosecutor. Most have no defense lawyers and no courts.

In an effort to bring some order to a system with 15,000 active criminal cases nationwide, a U.S. contractor developed a relatively simple system in which each case was assigned a number and a colored folder with a form for such basic information as the defendant's name, arrest date, arresting police officer, prosecutor and judge. About a third of the cases have entered the new system -- in the process of reviewing cases to create the files, authorities found that 128 prisoners were incarcerated beyond their sentence term.

Even before suspects are arrested, investigations must be improved, U.S. officials have said. They have created training sessions for police officers and prosecutors -- in many cases, the sessions mark the first time the two Afghan groups have ever trained together.

The training includes staged crime scenes with wooden dummies for corpses, marked off with red and white tape to keep onlookers at bay. The sessions also include providing officers with copies of the Afghan constitution and penal code, fingerprint kits and digital cameras -- and having them watch videos of American TV crime shows such as "CSI: Las Vegas" and courtroom movies such as "My Cousin Vinny."

Ghulam Mohammed has been a police officer in Takhar province for 25 years, dealing with hundreds of cases. But before coming to one of the training sessions, he said: "I didn't know anything about fingerprints or DNA or whatever. . . . I've learned a lot of new things."

CNN.com:Suspected CIA suicide bomber calls American team 'gift from God'(balawi)

Suspected CIA suicide bomber calls American team 'gift from God'

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/02/28/afghanistan.cia.bomber/

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The man believed to be the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees and contractors last year appears in a newly released video, claiming to have tricked Jordanian intelligence officers as a double agent.

The 43-minute video, posted on various Islamic radical Web sites Saturday, shows Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, whom a former U.S. intelligence official identified as the suicide bomber.

Family members have said that the man in the video, who uses the alias Abu Dajana Al-Khorasani, is al-Balawi. A much shorter version of the video was posted online in January.

The December 30 bombing at a U.S. base in Khost, in southeastern Afghanistan, killed seven CIA operatives and a Jordanian army captain. The video posted Saturday is dated "Safar 1431" on the lunar calendar, which includes any day between January 16, 2010 and February 13, 2010.

In the video, al-Balawi says killing the CIA team wasn't part of the initial plan. "We planned for something but got a bigger gift -- a gift from God -- who brought us ... a valuable prey: Americans, and from the CIA."

The video opens with a montage of images -- including clips of torture and meetings of world leaders, such as former President George W. Bush with Jordan's King Abdullah and President Obama. A narrator criticizes the "infidel West," and talks of crimes against Muslims.

Al-Balawi then appears on the video, vowing to bring down the CIA and saying how he deceived Jordanian officials into believing he worked for them.

"Look, this is for you," he says to the camera, while sitting in a vehicle. "It's not a watch. It's a detonator to kill as many as I can, God willing."

Later in the video, al-Balawi gives an interview to As-Sahab Media, the production wing of al Qaeda. He says he had tried to join "jihad" in Iraq after the start of the U.S.-led war there. He began to write on online forums about jihad, he tells an unidentified interviewer in a room.

He says he found his opportunity to join the militant mission after being recruited by Jordanian officials as a spy in Afghanistan.

Al-Balawi was recruited by Jordanian authorities as a counterterrorism intelligence source, a Jordanian official told CNN last month.

"Actually, Jordanian intelligence -- may God send consecutive curses on it -- is the one who gave me a large amount of money, it is the one who paid for my ticket, and it is the one who helped me to forge some documents I needed to get a Pakistani visa," the man in the video says.

Jordanian and U.S. intelligence agencies apparently believed al-Balawi had been rehabilitated from his extremist views and were using him to hunt Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 figure, a former U.S. intelligence official said.

Al-Balawi claims in the video that the Jordanian authorities paid him and that the money went to support the Mujahedeen.

"So this is a new era for the Mujahedeen, God willing, in which the Mujahedeen will use intelligence-based tactics and methods which rival or even exceed those of the security apparatuses of the strongest of states, like Jordan and America, with the permission of Allah, Lord of the worlds," he says.

Al-Balawi said he initially targeted a Jordanian official, referred to as Sharif Ali bin Zaid. The narrator said that Zaid, an army captain, was killed in the attack.

"So it wasn't planned this way," al-Balawi said. "The target was Abu Zaid, but the stupidity of Jordanian intelligence and the stupidity of American intelligence is what has turned it into a valuable prey. It's a blessing from Allah."

The man explained why he was choosing a suicide mission, or "martyrdom," for his attack on the U.S. base in Khost.

"You can only get a maximum number of kills for a minimum number of martyrs and losses in the ranks of the Mujahedeen with a martyrdom operation," he said.

Yahoo News: AP Enterprise: How nuclear equipment reached Iran

AP Enterprise: How nuclear equipment reached Iran

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_taiwan_iran_nuclear

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Early last year, a Chinese company placed an order with a Taiwanese agent for 108 nuclear-related pressure gauges. But something happened along the way. Paperwork was backdated. Plans were rerouted, orders reconfigured, shipping redirected.

And the gauges ended up in a very different place: Iran.

The story behind the gauges shows how Iran is finding its way around international sanctions meant to prevent it from getting equipment that can be used to make a nuclear bomb. At least half a dozen times in recent years, the Persian Gulf nation has tried to use third countries as transshipment points for obtaining controlled, nuclear-related equipment.

In the case of the pressure gauges, it succeeded. In the process, the Swiss manufacturer and the Swiss government were duped, a Chinese company went around its own government's prohibition on moving nuclear-related equipment to Iran, and Taiwanese authorities showed themselves unwilling or unable to get into step with the international community.

The deal was a huge victory for Tehran, which had been seeking the gauges for months, said nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. It also reflected the uneven enforcement of international sanctions against Iran, at a time when the U.S. and other Western countries are pushing hard to expand them.

"The (Iranian) government looked everywhere — Russia, Europe, the U.S., and they were being thwarted by the international community," Albright said. "It's really unfortunate they succeeded in using this Taiwan-China connection...This case is a wake up call of the importance of universal and timely application of sanctions on Iran."

Iran says it wants to enrich uranium to generate nuclear power, but the West fears that it actually seeks weapons capabilities.

It's impossible to verify how Iran is using the gauges, also known as pressure transducers or capacitance diaphragm gauges, which have numerous commercial applications in machines that employ pneumatic or hydraulic pressure. But experts say the large size of the order suggests very strongly that they are for centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium.

As of last November, Iran had 8,692 centrifuges, of which 3,936 were running, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each centrifuge normally requires a transducer, though a single gauge can also serve up to 10 linked centrifuges.

"The gauges are extremely useful to them," said Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a physicist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. "It's a very big deal."

At first, the transaction seemed above board.

A Jan. 24, 2009, purchase order shows that Roc-Master Manufacture & Supply Company ordered the gauges for delivery to its Shanghai base. The order — in the amount of $112,303.72 — was placed with Heli-Ocean Technology Co. Ltd., the Taiwanese agent for Swiss manufacturer Inficon Holding AG. Inficon, together with MKS of Andover, Mass., produces most of the world's supply of this type of transducer.

On Feb. 6, Heli-Ocean received an initial payment from Roc-Master and placed an order with Inficon for the transducers, documents show.

Then the situation changed.

Roc-Master issued a revised purchase order, backdated to Jan. 24, instructing Heli-Ocean to ship the transducers not to Shanghai, but to the Tehran airport. The consignee is named as Moshever Sanat Moaser, an Iranian company described on its Web site as a provider of specialty alloys and industrial parts.

The second purchase order also increased the amount to $145,800, almost $33,500 more than the original, without explanation.

Apparently the change in destination and the nature of the shipment alarmed Heli-Ocean, because in a Feb. 18 e-mail seen by the AP, Roc-Master assured the Taiwanese company that the 108 transducers were not for Iran's nuclear industry. It also said that Chinese law barred the shipment of the transducers from China to Iran.

None of this was revealed to the Swiss manufacturer and authorities.

Inficon CEO Lukas Winkler told the AP that had his company known the end-user was Moshever Sanat Moaser, it would never have sold the transducers to Heli-Ocean. He said the gauges fall within Swiss sanctions on exports to Iran.

"The end-user certificate we got did not say Iran," he said. "The deal was done via a Chinese company. And we have a certificate with the name of a Chinese end-user on it."

Winkler said that before the goods were sent, Inficon reported the transaction to Switzerland's State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, because the number of transducers raised its suspicions.

"We always have the goods checked when it is a big order," he said. "If someone wants one single device it's not delicate. But if someone wants 100 at once, that's very unusual for this type of product."

In a statement, the Swiss secretariat said the transducers did not require an export license, because "the exporter was not aware that those goods were destined for Iran."

"Otherwise an approval of the Swiss export control authorities would have been necessary," the statement continued. "Switzerland would not grant any license for the export of such transducers to Iran."

European governments have been stopping nine out of 10 Iranian attempts to get pressure transducers, according to European intelligence, Albright said. One European country witnessed 40 procurement attempts from Iran for pressure transducers from August 2008 to August 2009.

Taiwan, however, let the shipment go through.

For more than 30 years, the island has been the orphan of the international community, denied membership in organizations like the United Nations because of China's insistence that it has no sovereign status of its own. The result has been a gaping lack of familiarity with push-button issues for the West — Iran among them — and a strong interest in building up the trade links that define its place in the world.

Taiwan, unlike Switzerland and China, does not belong to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an alliance of 46 countries that seek to limit the spread of nuclear-related equipment. However, Taiwan says it enforces export control lists based on NSG protocols.

The transducers arrived in Taiwan on March 9, 2009, three days after they were shipped from Switzerland, according to a Taiwanese freight forwarder's document obtained by the AP. They were reported to Taiwanese Customs on March 10, the document shows.

A Taiwanese official with intimate knowledge of the deal told the AP they were shipped from Taipei airport to Iran sometime in March. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The official said Heli-Ocean broke no laws. He said the transducers sent to Iran were not sensitive enough to be placed on the island's control list and, as such, did not need a special customs declaration.

However, three experts who examined the specifications of the transducers for the AP confirmed that they were on the NSG watchlist. Their movement to Iran should have been stopped, said researcher Stephanie Lieggi of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute's Martin Center.

"Any country adhering to the NSG lists would likely deny this export to Iran," she said in an e-mail to the AP.

Taiwan may not be so quick to allow such transactions in the future. The Taiwanese official said the government has decided to require Heli-Ocean to declare any further sales to the Iranian company before they are carried out.

"Taiwan had contacts with a foreign intelligence agency after the transaction," the official said. "The agency provided us with intelligence that it suspected an Iranian entity could be procuring pressure transducers from a company in a third country and using them for nuclear proliferation purposes."

Taiwanese companies have been caught exporting sensitive items before. In January, a freight forwarder employee was indicted for helping Taipei-based Axiomtek Co. move industrial computers to Iran. In 2008 a court convicted Taipei-based Trans Merits Co. Ltd. of exporting proscribed computing equipment to North Korea.

Albright said Heli-Ocean should never have gone through with the sale to Moshever Sanat Moaser.

"Because of Inficon's status as a major producer of pressure transducers, an Inficon agent like Heli-Ocean should have known about the problematic nature of their export to Iran," he said.

Added Dalnoki-Veress: "This deal is definitely a red flag. If (Heli-Ocean) gets an order for 100 units they have to check if it's legitimate."

Steve Lin, the Heli-Ocean boss, declined to answer specific questions about the deal but insisted he had done nothing wrong.

"I don't support terrorists," he told the AP in January. "I don't want to hurt people."

Officials at Moshever Sanat Moaser in Tehran did not respond to several requests for comment.

As for China, the incident will likely fuel suspicions about its commitment to nonproliferation. The oil-hungry nation is heavily invested in Iran's energy industry and has opposed tougher sanctions on Tehran. A blog on Roc-Master's Web site highlights its role in supplying equipment for a natural gas project on Iran's Kharg Island in March 2008.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said he was unaware of the pressure gauge deal.

However, he wrote in a fax: "I would be glad to reaffirm China stands firm and clear on the issue of preventing nuclear arms proliferation. We have already established comprehensive regulations for export control and an effective system to administer them. All illegal exports are forbidden."

In Shanghai, Roc-Master official Liu Xiaofeng initially said he didn't recall the transaction. But when pressed, he replied, "It's our company's secret information, so I don't think we need to tell the media anything about it."

Los Angeles Times Op-Ed:America, the fragile empire

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,2697391.story?track=rss

Opinion

America, the fragile empire

Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast?

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.

In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.

As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse.

Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that are by definition outside the norm and that therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy."

In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system.

All these complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." Causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation are of little use. Thus, when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.

There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": It is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is nearly impossible to predict. The key point is that in such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate disruption.

Any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years.

Yet, less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin.

If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion -- about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II.

These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis.

One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the radical monetary and fiscal steps that were taken in response.

Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece.

Ask Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20 years ago is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.

Washington, you have been warned.

Niall Ferguson is a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His latest book is "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World." A longer version of this essay appears in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. foreign.affairs.com

Los Angeles Times(LA Times): Taliban militants find breathing room in slums of Karachi, Pakistan

Taliban militants find breathing room in slums of Karachi, Pakistan

Insurgents use the city to regroup and raise funds. Telling friend from foe is a challenge for police.

February 28, 2010

Reporting from Karachi, Pakistan - In Karachi's Baldia neighborhood, a working-class mix of Pashtun and other Pakistanis, it took an accidental explosion amid piles of suicide vests and grenades to unearth a cell of Taliban militants in a house that neighbors believed sheltered a quiet Pashtun family.

"We thought they were fruit sellers," said Mohammed Zahid, 24, who lives across the path from the heavily damaged house. Police said the Jan. 8 blast killed seven Taliban militants who had been planning to attack a Baldia police training center.

"They appeared to be good Muslims. We had no idea they were involved in anything like this," Zahid said.

The dense warrens of cinder-block huts in Karachi's sprawling ethnic Pashtun neighborhoods make ideal hide-outs for Afghan and Pakistani Taliban militants looking for a break from the fighting or for a base from which to strategize and muster up new financing. The Taliban are Pashtun, and they easily melt into the teeming masses that choke dusty swaths of bazaar storefronts and alleyways.

The arrest of the Afghan Taliban's second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Karachi in late January spotlighted this vast, chaotic city's role as a Taliban refuge. And because military offensives in Pakistan's Swat Valley and South Waziristan regions have led Taliban militants to flee in growing numbers to Karachi, in Sindh province, authorities' focus on Pakistan's largest city as a hunting ground for extremists is also likely to grow.

"We don't deny their presence here, and our search for them goes on," said Collin Kamran Dost, special home secretary for Sindh province. "But the city is so huge, and there are so many slums. The face of a Taliban is the same as the face of a Pakistani Pashtun. And we have more than 1.5 million Afghanis living here. So it's difficult to determine whether someone is a Taliban member or a peaceful citizen."

A recent spate of high-profile arrests -- including Baradar's capture, raids that nabbed nine Al Qaeda-linked militants Feb. 17 and Thursday's arrest of Abdul Aziz, a militant with ties to Qari Hussain Mahsud, the Pakistani Taliban's top trainer of suicide bombers -- points not only to improved Pakistani cooperation with the U.S. but also to hope in Washington that Pakistan will show new vigor in looking for Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders on its soil.

The arrests indicate how key militant commanders have tried to embed themselves deep in the slums of Karachi, a city of more than 16 million people.

Baradar, who was the Taliban's military chief, is believed to have had more responsibility for the insurgency's overall operations than the Taliban's supreme leader, the reclusive Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Among the nine people arrested in raids in Karachi this month was an alleged Al Qaeda-linked militant responsible for overseeing foreign fighters deployed to Pakistan's tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

Members of the Pakistani Taliban have used Karachi as a haven for years, slipping into the city for a month or more to rest or seek medical treatment before returning to their stronghold in the northwestern tribal belt.

Lately, as the southern city of Quetta has become increasingly unsafe for the Afghan Taliban leadership, its members have also been making the trek to Karachi, to establish new cells that can provide refuge, experts say.

Militants had spared the city of the suicide bombings and other violence seen in major Pakistani cities. However, authorities believe that bombings that hit Karachi in December and February suggest that the Pakistani Taliban has added the city to its list of targets.

A bomber killed 43 people on Dec. 28 when he blew himself up in the middle of a procession observing the Shiite Muslim holy day of Ashura. Five weeks later, two bombs targeting a hospital and a bus filled with Shiites killed at least 22 people. The Pakistani Taliban, which is made up of Sunni Muslims, claimed responsibility for both attacks.

"They're reacting to the loss of [South] Waziristan," Dost said. "It's as simple as that."

A primary reason the Taliban comes to Karachi is to build up supplies of cash to help fund the insurgency. Bank robberies, kidnappings and extortion have become staples of the militants' fundraising, authorities say. But they also rely heavily on cash solicited through the hundreds of madrasas, or religious schools, that dot the city.

Kamran Akhtar, the nazim, or administrative chief, of the Baldia neighborhood, said that of his district's 166 madrasas, 112 support the Taliban.

"To a large extent, the militants raise funds through Baldia madrasas," Akhtar said.

He believes the Taliban fighters in Baldia number in the hundreds. As nazims have done in other neighborhoods that are heavily Pashtun, Akhtar has organized a network of street informants -- a Karachi version of a Neighborhood Watch group -- who relay tips to police about suspected militants and their activities. Many of the tipsters are Pashtun.

"There are Pashtuns giving us information, and other Pashtuns providing the Taliban shelter," Akhtar said.

In Sohrab Goth, another dirt-poor Karachi neighborhood with a high concentration of Pashtuns, the Taliban extort money from construction equipment and trucking companies whose owners have tribal ties to Waziristan, police and residents said.

"The Taliban come here mostly to raise funds, and yes, they have their financiers here, wealthy Pashtun businessmen who help finance the insurgents," said Ismail Khan Mahsud, president of the local student wing of the Awami National Party, a Pashtun political party.

New York Times: Iran’s Leader of Opposition Assails ‘Cult’ of Rulers

Iran’s Leader of Opposition Assails ‘Cult’ of Rulers

One of Iran’s opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi, said Saturday that a dictatorial “cult” was ruling Iran — one of his most critical statements against the country’s rulers since disputed elections last summer.

“This is the rule of a cult that has hijacked the concept of Iranianism and nationalism,” Mr. Moussavi said in the interview posted on his Web site, Kalameh. “Our people cannot tolerate such behavior under the name of religion.”

The statements appear to be part of a renewed campaign by the opposition’s leadership to prove that they are still vital, despite a brutal crackdown by the government and their inability to bring masses of people to the streets in a recent planned protest.

Last week, another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, called for a national referendum to gauge the popularity of the government. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, followed with a statement dismissing the possibility of any compromise with the opposition, saying those who refused to accept the results of the June 12 election had no right to participate in politics.

Both Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi ran in the election, which the government says was won by the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The authorities claimed recently that the poor showing by the opposition at its planned rally on Feb. 11 showed that the government had managed to end the mass protests that had continued sporadically since the summer.

The opposition had difficulty mobilizing in good part because the government had undertaken a widespread clampdown starting weeks before, and bused in tens of thousands of government forces. But the relatively small showing by antigovernment protesters also led to some soul- searching among the opposition, which has been re-examining its tactics and struggling to find a new catalyst for its movement.

Newsweek: Mullah Baradar Likely to Remain in Pakistan’s Custody for a While

Mullah Baradar Likely to Remain in Pakistan’s Custody for a While

Mark Hosenball

The Obama administration is playing down suggestions that it is close to reaching a deal for Pakistani authorities to transfer captured Afghan Taliban deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar to Afghan government custody.

Speculation about such a move has been building over the last several days. A senior administration official, who briefed Washington reporters on condition of anonymity due to foreign-policy sensitivities, said that earlier this week the interior ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan had held discussions about working out some kind of mechanism for extraditing suspects between the two countries.

The official said there were indications that the two countries may well be on the verge of an agreement in principle to establish such a mechanism. However, the official indicated, it is too early to suggest that this could produce a transfer of Baradar from Pakistan to Afghanistan any time soon. Such a transfer was not “imminent,” the official said.

The suggestion that Baradar might be shipped fairly quickly from Pakistan to Afghanistan appears to have first been floated in this Los Angeles Times story, which said that the CIA was pushing for Baradar to be transferred to a U.S.-run prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Such a transfer would make it much easier for U.S. experts to question Baradar, who remains under control of Pakistani authorities. U.S. and Pakistani officials both insist that whatever intelligence he is giving up is being shared thoroughly between the governments, but U.S. officials also concede that, so far, Baradar hasn’t been talking much. As we reported earlier on Friday, the Obama administration, for reasons that remain murky, has not deployed what is supposed to be its ace interrogation unit, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), to Pakistan to question Baradar.

Earlier this week, London’s Financial Times reported from Kabul that the Afghan president’s office claimed Pakistan had agreed to transfer Baradar and other captured militants to Afghanistan. But it now appears that such stories may have been overly expansive interpretations of what happened at the bilateral meeting between the two countries’ interior ministers.

U.S. officials say they don’t rule out the possibility that Baradar, an Afghan, might eventually be transferred to his native country. But already, according to a follow-up Financial Times report, legal obstacles have surfaced in Pakistan that may ensure that such a move is not likely soon.

aip.org: Seeing Through Walls ENGINEERS DEVELOP TECHNOLOGY TO SEE THROUGH WALLS (2007)

2007 with VIDEO news story - this version must be placed right against the wall...

http://www.aip.org/dbis/IEEE/stories/17077.html

Seeing Through Walls

ENGINEERS DEVELOP TECHNOLOGY TO SEE THROUGH WALLS

July 1, 2007

Computer scientists and engineers have developed a new technology for the purpose of seeing through walls. The new technological gadget boasts visual penetration through wood, plaster, brick and reinforced concrete. The device uses sound waves at a particular frequency and a series of algorithms in the computer software to capture images through a wall or door and create 3D images. The military and law enforcement agencies hope to incorporate the device into their projects.

Science Insder

BACKGROUND: New technology that will be used by law enforcement and the military can look through walls. It is available now, and is being tested by a handful of police departments, before it could move into widespread use.

HOW IT WORKS: The Xaver800 technology provides 'Through the Wall' vision, allowing the user to rapidly and reliably observe one or more people in a room and monitor their movements, while positioned outside the room's walls. The system uses sound waves at a particular frequency -- ultra-wide radio waves, which pass through wood and concrete -- to capture images, much like ultrasound imaging captures the image of a fetus through the mother's skin. Sensors detect the reflected waves. That mechanical motion is translated into electrical signals. Then the computer software algorithms process the signals and create a 3-D image of the people or objects concealed by solid barriers made of cement, plaster, brick, concrete and wood. The system operates on very low power signals; the total energy transmitted is less than that emitted by a standard cellphone.

WHAT ARE RADIO WAVES? Like visible light, radio waves are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, only with much longer wavelengths. They can be as long as a football field, or as short as a football. This wide range makes them ideal for transmitting information, because different frequencies can be assigned to specific devices. We use radio waves not just in AM, FM, and police and fire department radios, but also in television, radar, cellphones, baby monitors, TV remote controls, and garage door openers, to name just a few. Each type of device has its own frequency range to avoid overlap with others.

SOUND SCIENCE: Sound waves are pressure waves: the result of a vibrating object that creates a disturbance in the surrounding air. The vibrations disturb the molecules that make up the air. The air molecules push closer together as the object moves one way -- an effect known as compression -- and then create a space between themselves and the vibrating object as it moves the other way, called rarefaction. The motion disturbs the neighboring molecules in turn, creating an outward ripple effect, much like a stone cast in a quiet pond will cause waves to ripple outward from the spot where the stone hit. So sound waves travel in repeating patterns of compressions and rarefactions. The distance between compressions determines the wavelength. Objects that vibrate very quickly create short wavelengths because there is very little space between the compressions, creating a high-pitched sound. Objects that vibrate very slowly create long wavelengths because the compressions are spaced further apart. This creates a low-pitched sound. Frequency measures how many crests, or compressions, occur within one second. A sound wave's amplitude, or range of movement, determines its volume.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

New York Times: Ex-Jihadist Defies Yemen’s Leader, and Easy Labels

Ex-Jihadist Defies Yemen’s Leader, and Easy Labels

IT is not often that you see an old comrade in arms of Osama bin Laden hoisting the American flag outside his home.

Yet there on the videotape was Tareq al-Fadhli, the hero of jihadist campaigns in Afghanistan and South Yemen, raising Old Glory in the courtyard of his house, not far from here, earlier this month. As the tape continues, Mr. Fadhli can be seen standing solemnly at attention, dressed in a khaki shirt and a cloth headdress, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” blasts from a sound system nearby.

The videotape, disseminated on the Internet, has helped to redefine the public persona of a man who, as a onetime Islamist guerrilla, loyalist politician and now would-be American ally in South Yemen, has been at the center of this country’s turbulent recent history. It has also profoundly irritated the Yemeni government, which labels Mr. Fadhli one the country’s most dangerous terrorists.

Reminded of the accusation, Mr. Fadhli chuckled dryly. No one ever accused him of terrorism until last year, he said, when he joined a rising southern Yemen independence movement and became an opponent of the country’s longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“I was in the ruling party of this country for 15 years,” he said. “I was in the highest authority — I walked into the Republican Palace without an appointment — and nobody ever accused me of such a thing. But now that I have joined the Southern Movement, they say it. And it is not true.”

The flag-raising episode has illustrated once again the murkiness of terrorist labels in this troubled patch of southern Arabia, where the government has used former jihadists — including Mr. Fadhli — to fight its internal enemies and negotiate with militants. Now that global attention has focused on the Qaeda threat in Yemen, the government is smearing its domestic rivals as Qaeda members, Mr. Fadhli said.

“When I fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, there were no bombings of civilians, and I would never have supported them,” he said. “The Americans were our allies back then, and what I am doing now by raising the American flag is a continuation of this old alliance.”

BUT Mr. Fadhli, 42, added that the Yemeni president had enlisted him in a failed effort early last year to negotiate a truce with Qaeda members here. And he made a somewhat brazen offer to put his own jihadist connections in the service of the United States, saying the Yemeni government was too corrupt and compromised to fight Al Qaeda successfully.

“I can be a mediator between America and Al Qaeda,” he said. “We can be allied with the United States against terrorism, and we will achieve the interests of the United States, not those of the regime” in Sana, Yemen’s capital.

Mr. Fadhli’s defection to the southern secessionist movement in April was something of a landmark in Yemeni politics. Few men have publicly challenged Mr. Saleh, who has governed since 1978 and is famous for his ability to disarm or seduce potential enemies.

But Mr. Fadhli is the scion of one of the south’s most prominent families, and he says he could no longer bear the Yemeni government’s unfair treatment of his homeland. He and other Southern Movement leaders accuse the government, based in the north, of systematically discriminating against the south and plundering its oil wealth.

The president is said to be personally furious at his former ally, who now lives in a walled compound surrounded by armed tribesmen in Zinjibar, the capital of his family’s ancestral realm, less than an hour’s drive from here.

Yemeni soldiers laid siege to the compound in July, leaving at least 12 people dead and dozens wounded, according to Mr. Fadhli and other witnesses. He was interviewed for this article by phone because government soldiers at checkpoints on the road from Aden would not allow journalists through.

Mr. Fadhli appears in photographs and videotapes as a lanky, distinguished-looking man with large, mournful eyes; a jutting nose; and a thin beard and mustache. For all his jihadist past, several acquaintances say, he is an easygoing fellow with a taste for Scotch and little sympathy for extremists.

He was born in 1967 to a powerful family that had excellent relations with the British, who ruled southern Yemen from 1839 until 1967, when they withdrew under attack by an armed independence movement.

Soon afterward, a radical Marxist faction took power in South Yemen, which was still independent of the north. The government appropriated the land of the old feudal families, and Mr. Fadhli and his clan escaped to Lebanon and then to Saudi Arabia, where he grew up.

IN 1987, at the age of 19, he left to fight in Afghanistan. Like many Yemenis, his war was less about religion than a desire to punish Communists for the takeover of South Yemen. Over the next three years, he fought, befriended Mr. bin Laden and was wounded at Jalalabad, he said.

In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union broke apart, North and South Yemen unified, and Mr. Fadhli returned home to begin the long process of recovering his family’s ancestral land holdings in Abyan Province.

Relations between north and south soon soured, and in 1994 a brief civil war broke out. Mr. Fadhli, who had been in prison on suspicion of having tried to kill a Socialist official, was released in the middle of the night on the condition that he gather his old jihadist friends to help fight the southern Socialists.

He did so, and got plenty of help from his old friend Mr. bin Laden, who used his own family’s vast fortune to supply weapons, ammunition and fighters from abroad. (Both Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Fadhli have been suspected of playing roles in a 1992 terrorist attack on two tourist hotels in Aden; Mr. Fadhli said this was not true.)

Mr. Fadhli was well rewarded for his wartime contributions, regaining much of his family’s land and eventually becoming a confidant of the president.

After the northern victory, he flew to Sudan in late 1994 for one last visit with the Qaeda leader.

“I thanked him for his support,” Mr. Fadhli said, and the two men said goodbye.

Although he deplores the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and terrorism in general, Mr. Fadhli retains some affection for his old comrade.

“I personally like this man, this legendary personality, who is facing the world in a universal war even now,” he said.

Mr. Fadhli himself clearly remains something of an insurgent at heart. His defection last spring was a risky move: he and his family — including 16 children and other relatives — cannot leave their compound for fear of being detained or shot, he said.

Yet some in the movement remain suspicious of him, in part because of his long alliance with the president, and the fact that his sister is married to one of the country’s most powerful military leaders up north. In Yemen, it is never too late to make a deal.

Mr. Fadhli waves away all talk of divisions, saying his loyalty to the south is supreme. Of all the roles he has played, that of hereditary sultan seems closest to his heart, and that may be the reason he chose to throw in his lot with the southerners.

“My land is my identity,” he said.

New York Times: U.S. Eyes New Target: Heartland of Taliban (kandaha, afghanistan)

U.S. Eyes New Target: Heartland of Taliban

WASHINGTON — Even as it presses its campaign to run insurgents out of the Taliban stronghold of Marja in Afghanistan, the United States military is looking ahead toward taking the fight to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual and political heartland, White House officials said Friday.

A senior administration official said the United States was planning a major offensive this year in Kandahar. The announcement confirms what military officials have been saying for weeks: that the Marja offensive, in which intermittent fighting continued even as the Afghan government symbolically claimed control of the city on Thursday by hoisting the Afghan flag, was a forerunner for a much bigger battle ahead.

“I think the way to look at Marja, it’s the tactical prelude to larger, more comprehensive operations later this year in Kandahar city,” the official said at a background news briefing arranged by the White House under ground rules of anonymity. “If our overall goal for 2010 is to reverse the momentum and gain time and space for the Afghan capacity, we have to get to Kandahar this year.”

The public announcement that the military intends to try to push the Taliban out of Kandahar is part of an administration approach that includes warning both residents and insurgents — sometimes months in advance — that a big force led by American troops is on its way. American, NATO and Afghan officials talked openly about the Marja offensive in advance, even going so far as to announce at a news conference in Kabul that an offensive involving thousands of troops would begin “in the near future.”

The deliberate publicizing of these offensives, administration officials said, is meant to accomplish two goals: to reduce the number of military and civilian casualties by giving insurgents the opportunity to withdraw in advance, and to reassure the local population that a return to control by the central government is looming.

For both sides, Kandahar is a much bigger prize than Marja. The city is the second largest in Afghanistan, and it is the spiritual heart and birthplace of the Taliban movement. During President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy review, White House officials outlined a plan to try to clear insurgents out of major population centers in Afghanistan; Kandahar was at the center of that plan.

As early as last August, American military officials in the Kandahar region were giving aerial tours of the area to visiting administration officials, describing the terrain as a “future kinetic area” — military jargon for a Taliban-held stronghold that the military would eventually have to enter and clear out with brute force.

guardian(2006):The drone, the CIA and a botched attempt to kill bin Laden's deputy(zawahiri)

The drone, the CIA and a botched attempt to kill bin Laden's deputy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/15/alqaida.pakistan

In the hunt for al-Qaeda, a missile attack on a mountain village killed women and children. The attack was precise, the intelligence was flawed, and the strained relation between Pakistan and the US has been pushed to breaking point

• Sunday 15 January 2006
• 
  

The missiles were deadly accurate. In the pitch dark of a night in Pakistan's sparsely populated North West Frontier Province, they not only located the three targeted houses on the outskirts of the village of Damadola Burkanday but squarely struck their hujra, the large rooms traditionally used by Pashtun tribesmen to accommodate guests.

Yesterday some of the results of the strike were very clear: three ruined houses, mud-brick rubble scattered across the steeply terraced fields, the bodies of livestock lying where thrown by the airblast, a row of newly dug graves in the village cemetery and torn green and red embroidered blankets flapping in the chilly wind. Four children were among the 18 villagers who died in the brutally sudden attack on their homes.

Yet evidence emerging appeared to indicate that, though the technology that guided the missiles to their targets at 3am on Friday was faultless, the intelligence that had selected those targets was not. Even as American military and intelligence sources spoke of the possible death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command of al-Qaeda and the man considered to be the brains behind the militant group's strategy, Pakistani officials said that there was no evidence any 'foreigners', shorthand locally for al-Qaeda fighters, were among the 18 victims, though they said that 'according to preliminary investigations there was foreign presence in the area'.

In a bid to distance themselves from what was looking like a tragic and counter-productive tactical error that had cost many innocent lives, Pakistan announced it would file a formal protest with the Americans. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told a news conference that the Pakistani government wanted 'to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to recur,' adding that the government had no information about al-Zawahiri.

'We deeply regret that civilian lives have been lost in an incident. While this act is highly condemnable, we have been for a long time striving to rid all our tribal areas of foreign intruders who have been responsible for all the misery and violence in the region. This situation has to be brought to an end,' he said.

But his words did little to calm the anger in and around Damadola, a bastion of conservative religion and tribal chauvinism, and elsewhere in Pakistan. The village lies in the semi-autonomous Bajur tribal region around 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. It is a rugged and desperately poor region, until recently a centre of opium cultivation, where local men habitually go armed and government authority is limited to main roads. Thousands of local men marched in a series of protests yesterday, one crowd attacking the office of a US-funded aid group. In another incident, police were forced to fire tear gas to disperse as many as 400 protesters chanting anti-American slogans and waving banners condemning the Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf, who came to power in 1999, has maintained a difficult and domestically unpopular alliance with Washington since 2001 and has deployed unprecedented numbers of troops on bloody operations to capture senior al-Qaeda figures. However, to the Americans' intense annoyance, he has not granted US forces in Afghanistan the right to cross the border into Pakistan, even in pursuit of militants. American-led coalition forces clashing with militants in the mountainous province of Kunar, immediately adjacent to Bajaur which lies a mere four miles from the frontier, say they have often been frustrated by their enemies' use of Pakistan as a sanctuary. Yesterday the Pakistani Foreign Ministry took pains to point out that 'in all probability [the village] was targeted from across the border in Afghanistan'.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have grown in recent weeks as American troops have stepped up operations against militants. Pakistan has already lodged a protest with the US military six days ago after a reported US airstrike killed eight people in the North Waziristan tribal region, an almost deserted area of mountains 300 miles south of Damadola. In Damadola itself, locals said they had never sheltered any al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders, let alone al-Zawahiri, an instantly recognisable 54-year-old Egyptian-born ex-doctor.

'This is a big lie... Only our family members died in the attack,' said Shah Zaman, a jeweller who lost two sons and a daughter in the attack. 'They dropped bombs from planes and we were in no position to stop them... or to tell them we are innocent. I don't know [al-Zawahiri]. He was not at my home. No foreigner was at my home when the planes came and dropped bombs.' Haroon Rashid, a member of parliament who lives in a village near Damadola, told The Observer that he had seen a drone surveying the area hours before the attack.

'A drone has been flying over the area for the last three, four days, and I had a feeling that something nasty was going to happen,' he said in a phone interview. 'There was no foreigner there - we never saw a single foreigner here. They were all local people, jewellers and shop-keepers, who used to commute between Bajaur and their village. We knew them.'

The dead were reported to include four children, aged between five and ten, and at least two women. According to Islamic tradition, they were buried almost immediately. One Pakistani official, speaking anonymously, told The Observer that hours before the strike some unidentified guests had arrived at one home and that some bodies had been removed quickly after the attack. This was denied by villagers.

US and Pakistani officials have also said that the missiles were launched from American pilotless predator drones, which have previously been used to target senior al-Qaeda figures. A man alleged to be al-Qaeda's third-in-command was killed in a 'stand-off' missile attack around a month ago. However, several eyewitnesses spoke of seeing planes and illuminating flares over the village, which if true would indicate the use of missiles from planes guided in by special forces teams on the ground rather than CIA-operated drones.

Obaidullah, a local doctor, said he saw the airstrike from his home about five to six kilometres away. 'There was one plane flying (overhead). Then more planes came. First they dropped light and then bombs,' he said. If US troops have crossed the frontier from Afghanistan in pursuit of militants, it would be a major diplomatic incident and a domestic disaster for Musharraf.

The Americans have become increasingly frustrated by their inability to catch al-Zawahiri, whom analysts see as the strategic mentor of Osama bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was already a hardened Egyptian militant when he joined bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian six years younger, in the late 1980s to form the al-Qaeda group out of the remnants of Arab 'mujahideen' who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan. After masterminding a series of attacks, culminating in the 11 September atrocities, from camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, al-Zawahiri has been on the run. However, this has not stopped him providing broad strategic direction for the international Islamic militant movement and, through appearing in frequent propaganda videos, becoming almost as well known as bin Laden himself. Despite a huge manhunt and a $25m reward, he has escaped capture. Strong local sympathy for al-Qaeda fugitives in the harsh hills that line the Afghan frontier with Pakistan has been a major advantage.

'The Americans are really not much closer to finding him than they were years ago,' said one intelligence analyst. 'They are hunting in an area that is about a thousand miles long and two hundred miles wide. That is a tough job by anyone's standards.' The carnage at Damadola indicates that the hunted is still a step ahead of the hunters.

The Al-Zawahiri file

· Born 1951, Cairo. Son of a chemistry professor. A trained paediatrician.

· Travelled to Pakistan in 1985 after being arrested, imprisoned and tortured in sweep of militants following killing of President Sadat.

· Spent 1991-1996 in Sudan with Osama bin Laden before moving to Afghanistan.

· A key theorist of modern Islamic militancy, he developed strategy of using spectacular violence against American interests to 'wake up the masses'.

· From series of mountain hideouts along Pakistan -Afghanistan frontier he has issued videos and communiqués aimed at inspiring militants

washintonpost: Pakistan to deliver suspected insurgents to Afghanistan

Pakistan to deliver suspected insurgents to Afghanistan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022501119.html

KABUL -- The Afghan government said Thursday that Pakistani authorities have agreed to hand over several suspected insurgents whom Pakistan has taken into custody, including the Taliban's No. 2 commander.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a member of the Taliban's high leadership council, and others in custody will be extradited under a prisoner-exchange agreement between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Afghan officials said. Lawyers in both countries are negotiating the deal and prisoner lists are being drawn up, officials said.

The prisoner swap would give Afghanistan access to several top Taliban leaders who could provide a treasure trove of information about the insurgency that U.S. troops are battling in southern Afghanistan. Once the prisoners are in Afghan custody, U.S. officials would probably be able to interrogate them.

"We asked the Pakistani authorities to hand over all Afghan prisoners that have been arrested by Pakistan, including Mullah Baradar," Hamid Elmi, deputy spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said in an interview. "They agreed, but they are working on the mechanisms -- how to handle it, how it will happen."

The agreement represented the latest twist in Pakistan's shifting approach to the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan has rarely helped Afghanistan target Taliban fighters. Elements of Pakistan's security establishment, in fact, have long nurtured or turned a blind eye to Afghan insurgents who have found sanctuary in Pakistan. Although Pakistan's army has launched offensives against its domestic Taliban offshoot, it has been reluctant to battle those fighters who stage attacks across the border.

But a recent string of arrests, including the U.S.-Pakistani capture of Baradar in the southern port city of Karachi, seems to mark a change. In addition to Baradar, the Taliban's military commander, Pakistani authorities have confirmed the recent capture of two Taliban "shadow governors," or provincial leaders.

Other Taliban leaders are rumored to be in Pakistani custody, but Islamabad has not confirmed their arrests. Another Karzai spokesman said Thursday that one on that list, Mullah Abdul Kabir, a top commander in eastern Afghanistan, has been detained, Reuters reported.

Zamaray Bashari, spokesman for the Afghan interior ministry, said it had not been determined when the handovers would happen, or how many prisoners from each country would be extradited. But he called the swap "comprehensive," meaning it would include recently captured prisoners, such as Baradar, as well as those who might have been in custody for years.

Pakistani officials could not be reached to comment. But a foreign ministry official said it "has been decided" that Baradar will be handed over to Afghanistan after Pakistan completes a probe into whether he committed crimes on Pakistani soil. That is likely to happen within days, the official said.

Pakistan is eager to gain custody of several militants who have been involved in a separatist insurgency in the western province of Baluchistan and are now in Afghanistan, the official said.

A senior Pakistani interior ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Thursday that at least seven senior Afghan Taliban leaders had been detained in Pakistan since January. A Pakistani intelligence official said Kabir is among them, as is Mullah Abdul Zakir, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who is also in the Taliban's leadership circle. Those arrests could not be independently confirmed.

The arrests have come as the Afghan government seeks to persuade Taliban foot soldiers to defect and also to negotiate a political settlement with some higher-level Taliban figures. Baradar, some Taliban experts say, had begun talks with the government and could facilitate negotiations while in captivity. Others say his arrest and those of others may have eliminated that possibility by tainting them in the view of other Taliban leaders.

"They are not 100 percent helpful," Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network said about the arrests. "They might be a step forward . . . or it can be counterproductive, because it can shut down channels of communication."

washingtonpost: Officials: Taliban leader killed by missile strike

Officials: Taliban leader killed by missile strike

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022502713.html

ISLAMABAD -- A Taliban commander wanted in the deadly 2006 bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi was killed in a suspected CIA missile strike in northwest Pakistan, officials said Thursday - the latest blow in a crackdown on militants in the region.

Mohammed Qari Zafar was among at least 13 people killed Wednesday when three missiles slammed into a compound and a vehicle in the Dargah Mandi area of the North Waziristan tribal region on the border with Afghanistan, two Pakistani intelligence officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

It was the latest strike in an intensified U.S. campaign to take out Taliban and al-Qaida leaders believed to be sheltering in the lawless border region with missiles fired from unmanned drone aircraft. At the same time, Pakistani intelligence forces have cracked down on Afghan Taliban in the country, arresting more than a dozen top leaders in the past few weeks.

The increased pressure on the Taliban in Pakistan comes as U.S.-led forces are fighting their biggest offensive of the eight-year-old war in neighboring Afghanistan in what Western official are hoping will be a turning point in the conflict.

Zafar, a senior member of the banned al-Qaida-linked militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is one of Pakistan's and Washington's most wanted men.

The U.S. government alleges Zafar was a key figure the March 2006 suicide car bombing of the U.S. consulate in the commercial metropolis of Karachi that killed U.S. diplomat David Foy and three Pakistanis, and has posted a $5 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture. He is also suspected in Pakistan of being involved in the September 2008 truck bomb blast at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed 54 people.

Senior Karachi police official Mazhar Mishwani said Qari Zafar was among his force's most wanted terrorists for his role in the consulate attack.

"If the man killed is the same Qari Zafar, it is a very big success," Mishwani said.

Nazirullah Khan, a local government official in Parachinar, near North Waziristan, confirmed Wednesday's suspected missile strike and said it killed 13 people, including three Taliban commanders. Khan said he did not the identities of those killed.

Earlier Thursday, Pakistani officials said that nearly 15 senior and midlevel Taliban figures have been arrested in the country in recent weeks. The top prize has been Afghan Taliban No. 2 Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and information he has provided to interrogators has led to the detention of some other leaders, the officials said.

Baradar's arrest has been hailed by U.S. officials and analysts as a major blow to the Taliban in Afghanistan, though they caution that the group has rebounded from the death or detention of previous leaders.

Opinion is divided, however, on whether the crackdown on Afghan Taliban in Pakistan signals that the country's government and powerful intelligence forces are adopting a harder line against the militants, who have long enjoyed relative sanctuary in Pakistan. Some experts say the arrests may be linked to Pakistani attempts to influence possible conciliation talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, a top Pakistani general said Thursday that three U.S. soldiers killed in a bombing in northwest Pakistan this month were not the intended targets of the attack.

The militants who blew up a car bomb as a security convoy passed aimed for the "most prominent" vehicle in the apparent belief that a local paramilitary commander would be inside, Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan told The Associated Press in a brief telephone conversation.

There had been speculation in the aftermath of the Feb. 3 blast that the attackers had specifically targeted the Americans, raising the specter of an informant close to the U.S. mission training members of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps.

Khan, who heads the Corps, said five militants linked to the attack had been killed and others arrested, but gave no more details.

The killings were the first known U.S. military fatalities in nearly three years in Pakistan's Afghan border region.

They drew attention to the training program, which officials from both countries rarely discuss because of opposition to American boots on Pakistani soil. There are around 100 U.S. special operations forces trying to strengthen the ill-equipped and poorly trained outfit's ability to fight militants.