Founder member of PLO dies at 77

BEIRUT (AFP) – Shafiq al-Hout, a founding member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, died in Lebanon on Sunday at the age of 77, Palestinian officials said.

Hout, a politician and writer who was a prominent figure in the Palestinian struggle for self-rule, died of cancer at the American University Hospital, an official at the Palestinian embassy in Beirut told AFP.

He is to be buried in the "Palestine Martyrs" cemetery in western Beirut on Monday.

Hout fled from his native Palestine to Lebanon in 1948 when the state of Israel was created, and remained there throughout the Lebanese civil war and until his death.

In 1964, he founded the PLO alongside its late chairman Yasser Arafat and was appointed the organization's first representative to Lebanon.

He was a member of the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, from its founding in 1964 until his death and served as the PLO's delegate to the United Nations from 1974 until 1992.

In 1993 he resigned from the PLO's executive committee alongside poet Mahmud Darwish in protest at Arafat's acceptance of terms of the Oslo interim peace accords which recognised the state of Israel.

Israel opens West Bank road to Palestinian traffic

HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) – Israel on Sunday eased travel restrictions on Palestinians in a major West Bank city, opening a road to Palestinian traffic for the first time in nine years, Israeli security officials said.

The officials said the route -- known to Palestinians as Jaber Road and to Israelis as Tsir Hebron --- would be open only to Palestinian motorists who live in the Hebron area.

Hebron governor Hussein al-Araj said the measure was an attempt by Israel to cover up for its continued settlement activities, which its main ally, the United States, wants stopped. He called on Palestinians not to use the road.

"This decision is an Israeli ploy designed to divert attention from settlement activity," Araj said. "I call on Palestinians not to use the road because this would amount to helping Israel campaign to improve its image."

Israel has been easing travel restrictions for Palestinians the West Bank in a declared bid to shore up pro-Western President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian economy.

Palestinian officials say a network of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks still limits economic growth in the West Bank.

Israel closed off Jaber Road to Palestinian traffic in 2000 after a violent uprising. It restricted travel on the road to Israeli settlers.

The road stretches from Hebron's highly sensitive Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site revered by both Muslims and Jews, to the settlement bloc of Kiryat Arba.

50 Palestinians evicted from their Jerusalem homes

By BEN HUBBARD, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM – Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families in east Jerusalem on Sunday, then allowed Jewish settlers to move into their homes, drawing criticism from Palestinians, the United Nations and the State Department.

Police arrived before dawn and cordoned off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah before forcibly removing more than 50 people, said Chris Gunness, spokesman for the U.N. agency in charge of Palestinian refugees.

U.N. staff later saw vehicles bringing Jewish settlers to move into the homes, he said.

Israeli police cited a ruling by the country's Supreme Court that the houses belonged to Jews and that the Arab families had been living there illegally.

Gunness said the families had lived in the homes for more than 50 years.

The status of east Jerusalem is one of the most explosive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel took control of east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it, a move not recognized by any other country. Since then, Israel has to boosted the Jewish presence there, building neighborhoods where about 180,000 Jews live. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state.

Organizations linked to the Jewish West Bank settlement movement also have bought properties inside Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem and moved Israelis in.

About 270,000 Palestinians live in east Jerusalem, or 35 percent of the city's total population of 760,000.

The international community has pressured Israel to refrain from evicting Palestinians and building new homes for Jews in east Jerusalem, saying such moves hamper peacemaking efforts.

State Department spokeswoman Megan Mattson said such actions in east Jerusalem constitute violations of Israel's obligations under U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan.

"Unilateral actions taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations and will not be recognized by the international community," she said in a statement.

Robert Serry, the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, called Sunday's evictions "totally unacceptable."

"These actions heighten tensions and undermine international efforts to create conditions for fruitful negotiations to achieve peace," he said in a statement.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat also condemned the move.

"While Israeli authorities have promised the American administration that home demolitions, home evictions and other provocations against Palestinian Jerusalemites would be stopped, what we've seen on the ground is completely the opposite," he said in a statement.

Khawla Hanoun, 35, who lived in one of the homes, said police ordered her and 16 family members to leave the house before dawn and forced them out at gunpoint when they refused.

"Now our future is in the streets," she said. "We will remain steadfast until we return home. By any method, we must go back home."

Nigerian military ignored warnings of violence

By KATHARINE HOURELD, Associated Press Writer

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria – Nigerian authorities ignored dozens of warnings about a violent Islamist sect until it attacked police stations and government buildings last week in a bloodbath that killed more than 700 people, Muslim clerics and an army official said.

More than 50 Muslim leaders repeatedly called Nigeria's police, local authorities and state security to urge them to take action against Boko Haram sect militants but their pleas were ignored, Imam Ibrahim Ahmed Abdullahi said.

He spoke Saturday to The Associated Press along with several other Muslim scholars in the battle-ravaged city of Maiduguri.

"A lot of imams tried to draw the attention of the government," Abdullahi said, drawing nods from other scholars sitting with him in a Maiduguri slum. "We used to call the government and security agents to say that these people must be stopped from what they are doing because it must bring a lot of trouble."

Government officials did not respond Sunday to repeated requests for comment.

On July 26, militants from the sect attacked a police station in Bauchi state, triggering a wave of militant violence that spread to three other northern states. Nigerian authorities retaliated five days later by storming the group's sprawling Maiduguri headquarters, killing at least 100 people in the attack, half of them inside the sect's mosque.

About 700 people were killed in days of violence last week in Maiduguri alone, according to Col. Ben Ahanotu, the military official in charge of a local anti-crime operation. A relief official said thousands fled the city.

The death toll in other northern areas from the violence was not known and authorities did not say how many suspected militants have been arrested. Rights groups have claimed that innocent civilians were being slain during the government hunt for sect members.

The imams were not the only ones to raise the alarm. Ahanotu said he recommended several times that action be taken against the group but received no orders to do so.

"I complained a lot of times," he said. "I was just waiting for orders."

The allegations of authorities dismissing the warnings raise serious questions about the West African nation's capacity to monitor and defend itself against terrorist groups.

International concern is growing over the ability of al-Qaida affiliates to cross the porous desert borders of north African countries such as Niger, which shares a border with Nigeria.

Abdullahi said he had known Boko Haram's charismatic leader Mohamed Yusuf for 14 years before the 39-year-old was killed Thursday while in police custody. Several human rights groups have urged an investigation into the killing, the details of which remain murky.

Abdullahi and Yusuf were friends for 14 years but had a falling out four years ago, the imam said, when Yusuf drifted toward extremism, rejecting Western education and urging followers to commit violence.

Yusuf's sect, Boko Haram — which means "Western education is sacrilege" — seeks the imposition of strict Islamic Shariah law in Nigeria, a multi-religious country that is a major oil producer and Africa's most populous nation.

Most sect members are young, unemployed and angry that the introduction of moderate Shariah law in 12 northern states 10 years ago has not halted the corruption that keeps most Nigerians in desperate poverty.

In the meantime, Yusuf, a Western-educated member of the country's elite, encouraged his followers to rid themselves of all material wealth while he was chauffeured around in a Mercedes.

Abdullahi said calls to violence were not the way to end poverty in Nigeria.

"I tried to show him and many of our Islamic scholars tried to show him that this is totally wrong," Abdullahi said, adding that he had asked friends to tape Yusuf's sermons to keep tabs on his violent rhetoric.

"They wanted to draw the attention of the world," he said. "Only Allah knows how many lives have been lost."

Abdullahi said he made his final call to security agencies two days before the sect attacked police stations with guns, bows and arrows and homemade bombs.

It was not clear why authorities didn't act sooner. Yusuf had been arrested several times before, most recently in 2008 after his followers attacked a police station. Nine days ago, two sect members were killed when the homemade bomb they were making went off prematurely.

Borno state's governor, Ali Modu Sheriff, said he wasn't sure he could bring enough evidence to court against the sect.

"It's not that people did not hear or that our government did not know that these followers of Mohamed Yusuf did exist. They did exist, but we don't know what they stand for," he said.

Ahanotu, the military official, blamed Nigeria's notoriously inefficient bureaucracy, while Abdullahi said the fact that many sons from prominent families had joined the sect may have helped slow the government response.

Recent government attention has focused on the country's cash lifeline: the oil-rich Niger Delta, plagued by a series of militant attacks. Little heed has been paid to the tens of millions living in the impoverished, mainly Muslim north.

"These attacks show the danger of that neglect," said Tom Cargill, an Africa analyst at London-based think-tank Chatham House.

Rival sides criticize Iran's opposition trial

By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran – A conservative who ran in Iran's disputed election and a former president allied with the opposition criticized the government's prosecution of opposition supporters, saying those who killed protesters must be brought to justice.

Conservatives have increasingly joined reformists in criticizing the government's response to the unrest that followed the June 12 election as allegations have surfaced of violent abuse against opposition supporters detained by authorities.

Mohsen Rezaei, who was the only conservative challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the election, sent a letter to the head of Iran's judiciary demanding the government put people on trial who attacked opposition supporters and tortured detainees. He said the trial must include those responsible for the death of the son of one of his top aides.

"Otherwise, justice will not be realized and it is possible that unrest will not end," said Rezaei, according to a report posted on his Web site Sunday, a day after Iran began its first trial against activists and protesters following the election.

While Rezaei focused on the need for a parallel trial for those who attacked protesters and detainees, former President Mohammad Khatami criticized the current proceeding as a sham that would further erode confidence in the ruling Islamic establishment.

Khatami said he hoped the "show" trial of more than 100 people, including his former vice president, that started Saturday would not "lead to ignorance of the real crimes" carried out by authorities following the election.

At least 30 people were killed in the unrest that followed the election as hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets to protest Ahmadinejad's victory, according to Iran's parliament. Human rights groups believe the number is likely far greater, and at least one person, Mohsen Rouhalamini, has died in detention.

Mohsen is the son of Rezaei's top aide, Abdolhossein Rouhalamini. He was arrested during a July 9 protest and taken to a hospital two weeks later where he died within hours. Reformist Web sites said his jaw was broken when his father received his body.

Hundreds of family members of detainees, including those on trial, gathered in front of the judiciary Sunday to express concern about their relatives, a reformist Web site reported. It said the protest ended peacefully after three hours.

The government's mass trial is part of its efforts to choke off the protest movement by targeting key supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who claims he was the true election winner. The defendants include some of the most prominent reformist politicians, including Khatami's former vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi.

The government used Saturday's hearing to press its claims that the opposition was a tool of foreign countries seeking to topple the Iranian government.

State media quoted Abtahi and others as confessing to working together to foment unrest. But rights groups have said such confessions are often obtained under duress in Iran.

"Relying on claimed confessions expressed in this specific situation has no credit," said Khatami, according to a report posted on his Web site, Baran, late Saturday.

The former president, who held office from 1997 to 2005 and is Mousavi's close ally, criticized the court for not allowing defendants' lawyers access to the courtroom or the case files.

"As far as I have learned, what happened in the trial was contrary to the constitution and law, as well as citizens' rights," said Khatami.

A closed trial of 10 of the suspects continued Sunday, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency. None of the prominent defendants was present, it said.

State TV announced Sunday that it would broadcast the trial live if the judge agreed. The comments came in response to calls by hard-liners for such a move.

Instead of a show trial, Khatami said the public expected the government to "confront the problems and tragedies that happened in some detention centers and apparently led to murder."

Rezaei said failure to bring those people to justice would prevent peace and "damage the Islamic system."

The growing criticism comes only days before Ahmadinejad is to be sworn in to a second term. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is scheduled to officially endorse the president on Monday in accordance with the constitution.

Khamenei, who has the final say over all state matters, has supported Ahmadinejad in the election dispute. But the growing criticism about how the government has handled the crisis has compounded the biggest challenge the cleric-led system has faced since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The turmoil has complicated President Barack Obama's efforts to step up diplomatic engagement with Iran to reduce tension over the country's nuclear program. The relationship became even trickier Saturday as Iranian state TV confirmed it has detained three Americans who crossed the border from northern Iraq.

Kurdish officials from the self-ruled region in northern Iraq said the three — two men and a woman — were tourists who had mistakenly crossed into Iranian territory Friday while hiking in a mountainous area near the resort town of Ahmed Awaa.

"This case will be reviewed based on its natural trend," Iran's official IRNA news agency quoted the head of the parliament's foreign policy committee, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, as saying Sunday.

Russia Moves to Boost its Role in Central Asia

By ISHAAN THAROOR

On July 30, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev sat down for talks with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries that sit in the crosshairs of the U.S.-led war on terror. The meeting with Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Zardari, took place in Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan. Reportedly on the table were plans to beef up trade ties as well as improve cooperation in the fight against Islamist extremism - clear signs, experts say, that Moscow is bolstering its role in the "Af-Pak" theater, a region Russia had largely retreated from after the scarring decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Russian-orchestrated meeting comes amid fears that ongoing battles with Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan are spilling over into Central Asia - particularly Tajikistan, which shares a porous 800-mile-long (1,300 km-long) border with Afghanistan. Over recent months, Tajik security forces have been involved in an extensive campaign to combat local militants and supposed drug gangs operating in its mountainous borderlands, but there are also rumors of the return of Tajik Taliban fighters who have traded one rugged frontier for another. As if on cue, while the premiers were in discussion, a car bomb blast rocked Dushanbe. No deaths were reported, but the bombing has been linked to suspected militant activity.

Few details of the leaders' conversation have been disclosed, though it's believed deals on energy and infrastructure development were authored. Earlier in the week, both Karzai and Zardari had met with Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon to work out a joint strategy on fighting terrorism. Whether this will bear much fruit remains to be seen. "The people of Afghanistan [and] the people of Pakistan are looking up to the leadership of the region to help with problems," said Zardari, alluding to Moscow's significant presence in Central Asia.

Behind the handshakes and platitudes lies a deeper political calculus. Karzai and Zardari began their presidential terms with staunch support from Western capitals - now both have fallen out of favor, faulted for not doing enough to rein in extremists amid accusations of corruption and misrule. A warmer relationship with Russia could be the counterbalance to the West's increasingly frosty and frustrated attitude toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Moreover, as the U.S. deepens its ties with Pakistan's historical rival, India, foreign policy experts suggest Islamabad may be trying to expand its relationship with Moscow. Since the Soviet days, India has always been Russia's traditional South Asian ally. Now Pakistani defense officials have mooted possible deals for Russian military hardware, moving away from the tacit understandings of a Cold War past. "Russia is trying to find a foothold in the region," says Brahma Chellaney, a strategic affairs analyst at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. "There's no reason why it shouldn't start selling arms to Pakistan to gain some influence."

All the parties who met in Dushanbe must also deal with the social powder keg that is Central Asia. The recession has badly hit the region, with shrinking job markets in richer nations like Russia and Kazakhstan sending thousands of migrant workers home to poorer ones, such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. What promises to be a very bleak year for many Central Asian households has only amplified questions over the stability of the region as a whole.

Some analysts suggest social unrest may mix with the turmoil of Taliban insurgencies further south. In Tajikistan, the fragile status quo that has existed since a civil war between Russian-backed forces and an Islamist opposition ended in 1997 looks to be unraveling. Observers point to a possible influx in recent months of Tajik and Uzbek militants, returning to their homeland after fighting alongside Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. Since May, the Tajik government has locked down the country's Rasht Valley, ostensibly as part of an anti-drugs operation, but also, say experts, in a bid to crack down on local Islamist-leaning warlords. In some parts of Central Asia, the ruling autocratic regimes exercise only a frail reach beyond their capitals. "You get outside Dushanbe," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist at George Mason University in Virginia, "and anything goes."

Medvedev will chair another Central Asian security summit on Saturday in Kyrgyzstan, with delegations from seven other former Soviet republics. An increased American interest in the region - if only as a logistical hub for its war effort in Afghanistan - has driven Moscow to reassert itself in its backyard. After the U.S. secured its lease of an air base in Kyrgyzstan this month, Russia now intends to persuade the Kyrgyz government to allow the building of a second Russian base on its soil. Moscow sees its pervasive influence, both economic and political, in the region as a stabilizing force.

Yet Moscow is also part of the problem, says McGlinchey of George Mason University. The legacy of Soviet rule - from gerrymandered borders and dislocated populations to regimes of censorship and corruption - shapes Central Asia's politics to this day, and lingers in the cozy dealings between Russia's rulers and those ensconced in power throughout the region. Moreover, human rights advocates claim that Central Asian governments often raise the specter of terrorism to mask the abuses of their rule and the legitimate protests of their citizens.

On July 31, Medvedev attended the opening of a massive Russian-backed hydroelectric plant that will eventually power 12% of Tajikistan. Moscow has promised further aid to Dushanbe and its neighbors, a move that has been privately encouraged by Washington. But good governance is needed to ensure those contributions make a difference. When seeking progress in one of the world's most war-ravaged regions, the symbolism of joint statements can only go so far.

Why a Man Let 2,000 Malaria-Infected Mosquitoes Bite Him

By Ben Harder

Some people will go to extreme lengths to avoid mosquito bites. They'll wear long sleeves and pants in the heat of summer, surround themselves with citronella candles and torches, and spray foul-smelling chemicals all over their bodies--or simply not set foot outside when they know the bugs are biting.

Stephen Hoffman isn't quite like those people. In fact, he has gone out of his way to get bitten. Years ago, he let 2,000 mosquitoes feast on his arm and inject perhaps 200,000 parasites into his bloodstream. Why? Well, for one thing, it made him immune to malaria.

He's also the CEO of Sanaria, a Rockville, Md.-based company that aims to develop and commercialize a malaria vaccine. But he doesn't plan on subjecting all of us to as many bites as he has suffered. Receiving the vaccine that Hoffman hopes to create, in fact, wouldn't involve any mosquito bites at all. "It would have to be delivered by needle and syringe," he says. Creating the vaccine is another matter, however, and it calls for more brave volunteers willing to serve as mosquito fodder.

Progress toward a malaria vaccine, including a major new advance that European scientists reported this week, has already demanded a blood sacrifice from hundreds of people. Some, like Hoffman, have had scientific reasons for getting involved. Others have been regular citizens with good initial health, a tolerance for inconvenience and risk, and perhaps either a deep sense of altruism or an acute need for cash. The 15 volunteers in the new European study, most of whom were students at Radboud University in the Netherlands, got paid 1,500 euros (about $2,100) in compensation. Ten of them also gained immunity to malaria, through the infected mosquito bites they got. The other five, assigned to a control group that didn't develop immunity, came down with bad cases of the parasitic disease.

"The control group got full-blown malaria," says study leader Robert Sauerwein, a medical microbiologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center. "They got grade 3, quite severe symptoms."

While Hoffman didn't participate in that study, he too has developed malaria in the line of duty. It happened in the late 1980s when an early immunization effort he was testing on himself failed to work. Not knowing he was unprotected, he let five infected mosquitoes bite him--and came down with symptoms. In the subsequent trial, where he received bites from 2,000 mosquitoes, the bugs had first been zapped with radiation to weaken the parasites.

Hoffman's and Sauerwein's teams are now collaborating on malaria vaccine development, and they have the backing of some deep-pocketed sponsors, including two global health organizations supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But all the money in the world can't prove that a vaccine works unless a few folks are willing to play guinea pig. That's why volunteers are so important, the researchers say.

"Almost 1,400 volunteers have been exposed to malaria in the context of vaccine development," Sauerwein says. (He adds that tens of thousands of other people willingly got malaria--as a therapy for syphilis--from the 1920s through the 1950s. But that's another story.) Sauerwein and his colleagues recruited their group of volunteers by publishing informational leaflets and advertising the trial around campus. They gave curious respondents a short interview, then sent them more details about the study and invited them to a series of "information evenings" that featured slide shows and additional explanations of the study.

After all that, Sauerwein says, "we had about...45 people who really wanted to participate." A thorough medical checkup and psychological evaluation disqualified some of them, leaving about 25 qualified volunteers, from which they selected the 15. "You have to have an absolutely blank medical history," he says. For scientific and ethical reasons, his team turned down people with asthma, for example, and those who had abnormal psychological profiles or seemed to have a financial neediness that might make them willing to take undue risks with their health.

During the study itself, the final squad of 15 took the antimalaria drug chloroquine while being exposed on three occasions to bites from a dozen or more mosquitoes. While 10 of the volunteers fed malaria-infected mosquitoes, the chloroquine protected them from getting sick. Meanwhile, the exposure trained their immune systems to kill the parasite. So when these volunteers were exposed to a fourth round of mosquito bites after they'd stopped taking chloroquine, they stayed healthy. The mosquitoes that bit the other volunteers weren't carrying malaria, which is why those five people didn't develop immunity. Sauerwein's team reported their findings in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Aside from the risk of getting sick, volunteering has several drawbacks, including inconvenience and the discomfort of being subjected to numerous medical tests. "Participation is quite time-consuming," Sauerwein says. Over the course of the five-month study, each volunteer had to visit the medical research facility about 50 times. Toward the end of the study, when volunteers had to be closely monitored because they were most likely to come down with malaria, "they had to appear three times a day for two weeks or so," he says.

So why did people step forward? Sauerwein says many of the selected volunteers expressed idealism, a sense that a malaria vaccine would represent an important achievement for human health worldwide. Some had personal or academic connections to countries where the disease is endemic, he adds. Malaria kills nearly 1 million people each year, most of them children in Africa.

Hoffman, the head of Sanaria, had additional reasons for stepping up to the plate. "It was most appropriate for me to volunteer," he says. "We were studying the first vaccine.... If I wasn't willing to volunteer, how could I ask someone else to volunteer?"

"I suppose," he adds, "I also wanted to be able to say I'm one of the handful of people in the entire world that is totally protected against malaria."

Pashtun ethnic agenda at heart of Afghan war

By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer

KABUL – In a recent debate leading up to the presidential elections here, the first question was not about terrorism, or violence, or even opium. It was about how candidates viewed a jagged line casually drawn on a map 115 years ago by British colonial rulers.

For the West, this border separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, and it is a source of great frustration that neither country seems able or even willing to enforce it. But for many Pashtuns, the most powerful ethnic tribe here, the line runs through what they call "Pashtunistan" and is no more legitimate than the border that once divided East and West Germany.

The Pashtuns and their ethnic agenda are in many ways at the center of the upcoming elections and the armed conflicts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, many Pashtuns who have not taken up arms still share the dream of a united Pashtunistan. This dream grows stronger as the Pashtuns on both sides of the border get more disgruntled.

If the Pashtuns vote in large numbers in the Aug. 20 election, it will help current president Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun. If their turnout is low, possibly because of violence or Taliban threats, his rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, stands a better chance. Although half-Pashtun, Abdullah is identified with the ethnic Tajiks, and some analysts are concerned that Pashtuns would not accept his victory.

"Pashtuns are critical to the Afghan election," says Hassan Abbas, research fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "Pashtuns are at the heart of insurgency in both Pakistan and Afghanistan because they have been used and abused in the last three decades by regional as well as international players. Their social fabric has been torn to smithereens and their tribal ethos has been under severe stress and strain due to the rise of fanatical religious elements. Pashtuns today are a victim of circumstances."

The Pashtuns number about 42 million people — 42 percent of the population of Afghanistan and 15 percent in Pakistan. They support and, indeed, largely make up the Taliban.

"Pashtuns on both sides of the border are feeling that all the world is against them," says Moabullah, a burly six-foot bearded Pashtun.

From a pocket inside his dark brown vest, Moabullah pulls out an election registration card. He laughs. It shows his picture and identifies his father, his district, his village, but it does not say that he is Taliban.

Moabullah got the registration card when he marked his ballot in Afghanistan's 2004 presidential elections. He won't be voting this time around. Instead, Moabullah uses the card to slip safely through government-run checkposts. "If I get stopped outside my area, on the highway, I show this card."

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Moabullah was a reluctant fighter, who says he often hid to avoid being sent to the northern front lines. In 2001, when the Taliban were routed, Moabullah returned to his home in Ghazni, south of the Afghan capital. He even sought international money to build some wells and irrigation ditches in his district.

He says he didn't get any. He says the victors __ mostly non-Pashtuns of the Northern Alliance, dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks ___ hounded him, demanding weapons and money, with threats to turn him over to their U.S. allies as a Taliban unless he capitulated.

Eventually he fled to Iran.

In 2007 he came home and returned to the Taliban.

"The people were suffering. Pashtuns were feeling their life was tough," he says. "Slowly, slowly Mullah Omar began organizing and we all went back...We are one tribe in Pakistan and Afghanistan. There is no difference. We are the same culture, the same turban, the same language. Our people are coming and going. Pashtuns on both sides of the border have to help Taliban."

Moabullah's story reflects the resentment that many Pashtuns feel, which makes them all the more open to the Taliban.

In Pakistan's northwest, Pashtun tribesmen are still bristling at the Pakistani military's incursion into their tribal areas, starting in 2003. Since then they have killed 1,800 Pakistani soldiers. President Pervez Musharraf tried to make peace with them in 2006 but failed.

Under the banner of fighting for Shariat or Islamic law, the Taliban is sweeping through Pakistan's frontier, offering an alternative to a weak state that has been stingy with amenities. Electricity is sporadic, and the literacy rate is about 10 percent among men and less than two percent among women, say local politicians.

Hamid Gailani, deputy head of the Afghan Senate and a member of one of Afghanistan's revered religious families, says: "Taliban are advancing because of frustration with the situation."

The Taliban play to this sense of siege and also to a strong Pashtun pride.

In the early 18th century, Afghanistan was born as a Pashtun nation, with its borders stretching deep into what is present-day Pakistan and its capital in Southern Kandahar. Pashtuns on both sides of the border still long for those glory days.

It irks the Pashtuns that they, descendants of kings who have ruled from Iran to New Delhi, feel relegated to secondary citizen status by Tajiks and other tribes who led the resistance to the Taliban. They are eyed with suspicion by their non-Pashtun brethren and targeted by international forces.

The Taliban stoke the Pashtun dream. A few years ago, Mullah Mohammed Omar wrote a Pashtu-language letter to his senior military commander Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani, making it clear that the Taliban on both sides of the border were operating as one.

"The Pakistan Taliban are part of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and they should be under the command of Jalaluddin Haqqani," Omar said in the letter provided to the AP, referring to a powerful Taliban commander with an elaborate network of fighters and suicide bombers on both sides of the border.

This ill-defined border is called the Durand line, after colonial British representative Sir Mortimer Durand. Under a treaty, the line originally marked where British rule in India ended and that of Afghanistan began. The treaty expired in 1993 after 100 years.

Pakistan wants the border to be reinforced with a fence to stop unhindered crossings of militants and supplies. But many Pashtuns on both sides believe a new border should be established that would give Afghanistan all the Pashtun lands, including those in Pakistan. Even Afghanistan's pro-West government was not ready to accept the Durand Line, saying a grand council would have to be called to decide where a border could be established.

"Pashtun and Afghan mean the same thing really," says Lateef Afridi, a former Parliamentarian of the secular Awami National Party in Pakistan, who reviles the Taliban but shares their dreams of Pashtunistan.

The Taliban made the point in a colorful map of Afghanistan drawn at a school in Kandahar.

The word "Pashtunistan" runs the entire 2,430-kilometer (1,520-mile) border with Pakistan.