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News archives for the week ending 17th April 2009

Official: more US troops will mean more violence

As the Obama Administration prepares to send additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, a top US military official has warned that violence in the war-torn country is likely to go up.

"I want to be clear that my expectations are as we add more troops, the violence level in Afghanistan is going to go up," Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC news.

Even as he expects an increase in violence in Afghanistan, he said the surge in troops would put the US in a position to start to turn the tide and provide security for Afghan people in addition to training to the Afghan forces.

The Hindu, India, 15/4/09

Summit of the Americas will challenge Obama

President Obama plans to take his message of partnership to Latin America and the Caribbean this week, but he will face a group of leaders far less forgiving than their European counterparts were about the United States' central role in the global financial crisis.

Over the past five years, the region has posted the fastest economic growth rates in the world, lifting millions of Latin Americans out of poverty. Now, those gains are threatened by a downturn that, as Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno said, "is the hemisphere's first economic crisis not made in Latin America."

At the fifth Summit of the Americas, hosted by Trinidad and Tobago, Obama will encounter several Latin American leaders who have long criticized the economic mix of free trade, privatization and public-debt reduction known as "the Washington consensus."

Washington Post, 15/4/09

US air raids kill mainly women and children

Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead.

Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those killed in air raids by the US-led coalition were children and 46 per cent were women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government forces as well as insurgents, were 42 per cent children and 44 per cent women.

Growing anger over civilian casualties caused by air raids in another front of the “war on terror”, Afghanistan, has led to the US, UK and their Nato partners reviewing their policy of using warplanes. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, recently said this had become the most contentious issue between him and Western powers.

From 2004 to 2007, the overall tonnage of munition dropped from planes in the Afghan conflict rose from 163 tonnes a year to 1,956 tonnes, an increase of 1,100 per cent. Since 2001 the US air force has dropped 14,049 tonnes of bombs in Afghanistan and 18,858 in Iraq.

Professor John Sloboda, of Royal Holloway, co-author of the report, said: “Our weapon-specific findings have implications for a wide range of conflicts, because the patterns found in this study are likely to be replicated for these weapons whenever they are used.

Independent, 16/4/09

Taliban makes peace deal in Pakistan...

A pro-Taliban group pledged peace in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat Valley after President Asif Ali Zardari approved Islamic law in the area under an accord the U.S. says undermines the fight against terrorism in the region.

“We guarantee peace, we guarantee that the Taliban will accept the writ of the government,” Rizwanullah Farooq, the son of pro-Taliban leader Sufi Muhammad, said in a phone interview from Swat today. “We got what we wanted.”

Zardari approved the so-called Nizam-i-Adal, or Justice System, regulation last night hours after lawmakers approved a resolution to introduce Islamic law in Swat. Under a peace accord reached in February, the government accepted the demand of pro-Taliban militants for Islamic law in return for ending two years of fighting in the valley.

Bloomberg.com, 14/4/09

...and Afghanistan fears consequences

Afghanistan said on Tuesday it was concerned its own security could be hurt by a deal between Pakistan and Taliban guerrillas to impose Islamic law on a Pakistani valley. Afghanistan, fighting its own insurgency against the Taliban, has long worried that success by the Taliban in Pakistan could embolden the militants on both sides of the border.

The strict Islamist Taliban, with roots in ethnic Pashtun tribes that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, have been waging insurgencies in both countries. Afghanistan has in the past accused Pakistani security forces of tacitly supporting militants who infiltrate across the border into Afghanistan, an accusation that has soured ties between the two key allies of Washington.

Reuters, 14/4/09

Murky origins of Iraq attacks stir foreboding

A series of bombings and clashes between Sunni militias and Shi'ite-led government forces have stirred a sense of foreboding in Iraq ahead of a national election and the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Violence in Iraq remains sharply down on past years, when most attacks were blamed on al Qaeda or Shi'ite militias, but uncertainty about the origins of the recent violence has led to an incendiary mix of conspiracy theories and accusations. Many fear too much emphasis has been placed on grooming Iraq's security forces and too little on forging political compromise between ethnic and sectarian groups.

A spate of bombings in Baghdad last week included an apparently coordinated series of seven blasts that killed 37 people. In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Friday, a truck bomb was the deadliest attack for U.S. forces in over a year. On Saturday a suicide bomber killed 12 U.S.-backed Sunni militiamen south of Baghdad as they collected paychecks.

The bombings occurred just after clashes between one of the Sunni militias -- set up to fight al Qaeda -- and Iraqi forces aiming to arrest one of the militia's leaders in Baghdad. Analysts say there is a mistaken focus on the readiness of Iraq's security forces to take over from the U.S. military, whose combat troops are due to leave Iraq by Aug. 31 next year, when a peaceful future for Iraq depends as much on efforts to seek a viable political framework.

Reuters, 14/4/09

US to boycott UN conference on racism

The Obama administration appears to be standing by its decision to boycott the World Conference Against Racism next week in Geneva, despite efforts to focus and tone down language in a draft conference document viewed as hostile toward Israel.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said that although progress has been made in revising the draft text, concerns remain. "We hope that these remaining concerns will be addressed, so that the United States can reengage the conference negotiations in the hopes of arriving at a conference document that we can support," he said.

The week-long conference is expected to bring together delegations from countries around the globe and representatives of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations to take stock of the progress made in fighting bias since the last World Conference Against Racism was held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.

At that gathering, much of the discussion focused on Israeli treatment of Palestinians. The United States walked out of that meeting to protest an effort to compare Zionism to racism. The United Nations has been working on next week's conference for the past three years, mostly without input from the United States.

Washington Post, 14/4/09

US planning attacks on Somalia

Pentagon officials said planning is underway to determine how US and allied military forces, using troops, ships, and aircraft, could disrupt the pirate's safe havens in coastal villages of Somalia. Despite the impoverished nation that surrounds them, the villages are thriving from the tens of millions of dollars in ransom money extorted from shipping companies.

But some analysts expressed concern that the drumbeat for a more muscular US approach - repeated yesterday by some members of Congress - focused too narrowly on a mere symptom of a much larger problem: the failed state of Somalia.

"The idea that you are going to bomb the pirates into the Stone Age is completely naive and it won't work," said Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who has traveled extensively in the region. "It is a much broader problem that has to do with Somalia itself."

Feingold called on the Obama administration to use the current crisis to strengthen the Somali government's ability to provide economic opportunities to its destitute people, some of whom have turned to piracy in desperation.

But military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were acting on orders from the White House to come up with a more aggressive approach to combat piracy, which they believe is emanating from the semi-autonomous Puntland region of Somalia.

Boston Globe, 14/4/09

Brown will delay Iraq inquiry results until after election

Gordon Brown will announce by the autumn a "long" inquiry into the Iraq war, indicating that the potentially embarrassing report will be delayed until well after the general election expected next year.

Ministers have decided that the inquiry should be wide-ranging, possibly dating back to Margaret Thatcher's tacit support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Its main focus will be on the conduct of the 2003 war and the breakdown of law and order afterwards.

David Lidington, the shadow foreign minister, said: "I think the government are determined to avoid the report being published before the general election. But they do not have even a figleaf of an excuse for a further delay."

Guardian, 14/4/09

Pakistan warns US against aid conditions

Pakistan accused the United States and the West on Monday of generating "ill will" and warned US Senator John Kerry against attaching conditions to a massive aid package.

The chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has backed a bill that would triple economic assistance for Pakistan, a key US ally in the fight against Islamist militants, to 7.5 billion dollars over five years. But Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani criticised conditions attached to the package.

Although the bill meets some long-standing requests for military equipment, it requires the White House to certify that Pakistan is fighting terror and that its military and intelligence services do not support extremists. Pakistan must also close all terror camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and work to prevent cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

But a statement from Gilani's office quoted the prime minister as saying: "The US should not attach conditionalities to the assistance package being presented to the US Congress, as aid with strings attached would fail to generate the desired goodwill and results in Pakistan."

AFP, 13/4/09

Female rights activist shot

Taleban gunmen murdered one of Afghanistan's leading female rights activists yesterday as she stood on the pavement outside her home.

Two men on a motorbike shot Sitara Achakzai at close range, by her home in the southern city of Kandahar. Officials said the attack happened in broad daylight. The Taleban, who offer 200,000 Pakistani rupees (£1,700) to anyone who murders a councillor, claimed responsibility.

Friends said Mrs Achakzai, who previously lived in Germany before returning to Afghanistan in 2004, was returning from a provincial council meeting, and that her assassins were lying in wait.

The killing comes less than a fortnight after Mrs Achakzai suffered shrapnel wounds to her face in a Taleban attack that left 13 people dead. She was in Kandahar's provincial council building when a Taleban suicide squad stormed in, killing seven civilians and six policemen, before detonating suicide vests.

Scotsman 13/4/09

UK should distance itself from US drone attacks in Pakistan

Sadiq Khan, the minister for community cohesion, said Britain needed to rebuild its reputation in Pakistan where anger is mounting over the attacks launched by unmanned drones.

Mr Khan, who was in Pakistan on an official visit when counter-terrrorism raids took place in Manchester and Liverpool last week, said many young men there were angry with the attacks which have been blamed for killing innocent people as well as terrorists.

Mr Khan said the Government needed to make clear that Britain's foreign policy was different from Washington's. The minister said: "I listened to the anger and pain over the challenges that young Pakistanis growing up in Pakistan face, including the anger and frustration over US drone attacks.

"It is clear, in many Pakistanis' eyes, the UK is considered in the same terms as the US.

"One of the lessons of the Iraq war is that we need to ensure we are better at explaining our foreign policy, especially when it is distinct and different from [policy in] the US."

Mr Khan was later forced to clarify that he believed Britain needed to “stand shoulder to shoulder with those who are fighting terrorism” including both the US and Pakistan.

Telegraph, 12/4/09

China develops arms industry

Long reliant on Russia for advanced military hardware, China has invested heavily in its domestic defense industry in recent years, notching up breakthroughs such as the J-10 jet fighter and DF-31 intercontinental ballistic missile. China already makes licensed versions of the Russian S-27 fighter jet, but claims to have mastered the technology to make its own advanced aircraft.

Progress has been spurred by the steady growth of military spending - last year the budget jumped 17.6 percent to 417.8 billion yuan ($61 billion) - drawing concern over China's intentions from the U.S. and neighbours like Japan. Beijing insists it intends no aggression and says much of the spending has gone into upgrading weapons, uniforms, training and living standards for the 2.3 million-member People's Liberation Army.

As an arms exporter, China has long serviced customers in the developing world, including isolated dictatorships like Sudan and Zimbabwe, with simple, cheap technology such as China's version of the Kalashnikov rifle and the JL-8 jet trainer developed jointly with Pakistan.

Advances in technology may allow it to expand that customer base at lower prices than similar technology sold by Russia, France, Britain or the U.S.

With most of China's perceived threats to its sovereignty emanating from the ocean, the navy has been a particular beneficiary of modernization. Chinese officers have stated that the addition of one or more aircraft carriers is simply a matter of time.

China imports large amounts of oil for its booming economy, and is worried about keeping sea lanes open. It also has disputes with several countries over islands, many in the South China Sea.

AFP, 13/4/09

Taliban destroy supplies bound to Afghanistan

Taliban militants set fire on Sunday to 10 container trucks carrying supplies to Western forces in Afghanistan in a pre-dawn attack near the Pakistani city of Peshawar, police said.

Islamist militants stepped up attacks on supplies trucked through Pakistan into land-locked Afghanistan last year, exposing the vulnerability of a vital transport link for U.S. and other foreign troops battling the Taliban.

The attacks have also highlighted the Pakistani government's loss of control to the Taliban of a growing part of the northwest.

Reuters, 12/4/09

US reinforcements will escalate war in Kandahar

Combat operations will soon be ramped up in the hotly contested region of Afghanistan where Canadian troops play a major role.

A show of force is planned for southern Afghanistan when the bulk of fresh American troops promised by U.S. President Barack Obama earlier this year finally arrive. Dutch Maj.-Gen. Mart De Kruif, the current NATO commander for the region, said Sunday that the new American soldiers will reinforce their Canadian counterparts on the ground.

"We will go into areas we've never been before," he told a news conference at the Kandahar military base. "There will be an increase in operations"

Canadian Press, 13/4/09

Turkey and Iraq meet on Kurdistan

A Turkish media report says Interior Minister Besir Atalay traveled to Iraq Saturday to discuss the fight against Kurdish rebels who operate on both sides of the Turkey-Iraq border.

The Anatolia news agency says the talks are part of a cooperation deal Turkey, Iraq and the United States reached last year. Atalay says he expects Iraq to take tangible steps to work with Turkey to eradicate rebels from the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider the PKK a terrorist group. The rebels have been fighting for autonomy in southeastern Turkey since 1984. Tens of thousands of people have died in the conflict.

Voice of America, 11/4/09

Horn of Africa beset by troubles

The pirate standoff with the U.S. Navy has burned Somalia into the West's consciousness as a base for lawlessness and terror, but the hostage crisis illuminates a potentially dangerous picture confronting a far greater area.

Much of the Horn of Africa, which is made up of six countries covering roughly half the area of the United States, is beset by a rare set of disadvantages that makes it ripe for chaos. Poverty, hunger, corruption and lawlessness has made the region a haven not only for pirates, but for arms smugglers and Islamic insurgents.

"The situation in the Horn is the most explosive on the continent," said Francois Grignon, head of the Africa program for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think tank.

Home to about 165 million people, the six countries that make up the Horn - Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Djibouti - are seen by many as the next possible front in the war on terrorism.

Americans have been targeted in the region in the past, although it is not clear if the pirates who launched a failed effort to capture the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama on Wednesday knew they were attacking an American ship. U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were the targets of deadly twin bombings by al-Qaida in 1998. An Israeli airliner and hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, were targeted by terrorists in 2002.

The attacks emanated from neighbouring Somalia, which has had no effective central government since 1992 and has a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement.

The U.S. has stationed 1,800 troops in Djibouti to keep terror networks in the Horn of Africa in check. The country, which has close ties to the West, is located at a strategic point where the Red Sea opens into the Indian Ocean.

AP, 11/4/09

The costs of war

If Congress approves the supplemental funding request submitted this week by the Obama administration, the cost of the Iraq war will rise by $87 billion for 2009. Added to the amount spent through 2008, it would mean the Iraq war will have cost taxpayers a total of about $694 billion.

The Iraq war is the second-longest modern war ever fought with an all-volunteer U.S. force, behind the smaller-scale effort in Afghanistan. Volunteer forces are more expensive because of the higher salaries and related costs needed to retain people. "This is a volunteer military, which is pretty unusual in an extended war," said Stephen Biddle, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank. "And people cost more."

U.S. officials in Iraq also have relied heavily on private contractors, used to protect diplomats and defend bases, transport provisions and staff essential services such as providing food. A Congressional Budget Office report last year estimated there were 190,000 contract workers employed by U.S. agencies in Iraq - more than the number of U.S. military personnel at the peak of the buildup in forces in 2007, about 160,000 to 170,000 troops. The salaries earned by the contractors were far higher than those of soldiers.

Medical care in Iraq has also been expensive, Biddle noted. Combat doctors have been able to save soldiers, sailors and Marines who in earlier conflicts would have died. Both the initial treatment and long-term care are costly.

Although the cost of the war in 2009 will shrink compared with 2008, the cost of the Afghanistan war has begun to increase. The U.S. spent $34 billion in Afghanistan in 2008. This year, the Obama administration, which is sending additional forces to the country, plans to spend $47 billion.

President Obama intends to withdraw most U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of August 2010, but that plan would leave 35,000 to 50,000 in the country in largely supportive roles.

Los Angeles Times, 11/4/09

Miliband's praise for Saudi Arabia

Mr. Miliband commended the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia led by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and what it has provided over the last seven years including its introduction of the Arab Initiative and its efforts to advance the Middle East peace process.

Then, the British foreign minister delivers a speech in which he highlighted the strong relations between the two fraternal countries, noting the development of those relations in a way serving their two peoples in the political and economic fields.

He stressed the great status the Kingdom enjoys at the global arena, and its contributions in the world stability and in the international economic field, in addition to the growth and prosperity the Kingdom witnesses in a lot of economic cities, infrastructure, diversity of its economic base, and in the educational and health fields .

The event was attended by a number of Saudi princes, high-ranking officials, and Saudi-British dignitaries as well as a number of British representatives of private and public sectors.

Isria, Saudi Arabia, 9/4/09

US kills family of five

The US military has admitted that its troops killed five civilians in Afghanistan, including a child, not fighters as was earlier reported. A 13-year-old boy who survived the night-time raid on his home told Al Jazeera that his mother, brother, uncle and another female family member were killed. A woman who was nine-months' pregnant was wounded and lost her baby.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in operations by Afghan and foreign forces, an issue that has angered residents and increased pressure on Hamid Karzai, the country's president. The casualties have also been a major source of friction between the Afghan government and the West.

Al Jazeera, 10/4/09