Captured Pakistan Taliban commander dies in jail

By ROBERT KENNEDY, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD – A feared Taliban commander known for beheading opponents died in custody Sunday from wounds sustained during a fierce firefight with Pakistani security forces last week, the military said.

Sher Muhammad Qasab died after being critically wounded in the gunbattle in Swat Valley, the army's media center said in a statement. Qasab's three sons were killed when he was captured.

Qasab is an Urdu-language word meaning "butcher." He was given the title because of his ruthlessness toward enemies.

The arrest of Qasab — who had a $121,000 bounty on his head — was the third from the army's list of 10 most-wanted Swat militants. Qasab allegedly decapitated many Pakistani troops in Swat when the Taliban was in control.

The Pakistan Taliban has been on the run since being cleared from the scenic valley, once a tourist hotspot, and surrounding areas in July after the military launched a major offensive to retake the region in April.

The military announced Sunday that security forces killed eight militants in search operations throughout Swat since Saturday. Twenty-three insurgents were also apprehended and another 22 surrendered, it said in a statement. One of the militants killed was a Taliban commander identified as Chamtu Khan, it said.

A Pakistani patrol also killed 10 Taliban attempting to infiltrate Swat Valley's main city of Mingora on Thursday.

The army offensive against Taliban fighters in Swat has killed more than 1,800 alleged militants, according to the military. It says 330 Pakistani troops also died in operations in the valley.

U.S. missile attacks have played a significant role in neutralizing the insurgency. Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed in an Aug. 5 CIA missile strike, plunging the group's leadership into disarray. Officials said Thursday they believed the al-Qaida operations chief for Pakistan and a top Uzbek militant died in missile attacks in the northwest earlier this month.

Despite recent successes against extremists, attacks continue. On Friday, a suicide bomber plowed his explosives-laden vehicle into a hotel in the northwestern town of Kohat, killing more than 30 and wounding dozens of others.

About 2 million civilians were forced to flee the fighting in Swat, though 1.6 million have since returned home. Aid efforts carried out by the military continue in the region.

President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will hold a meeting this Thursday in New York to step up international efforts — including aid and investment — to stabilize Pakistan and help people displaced by the conflict in Swat and surrounding areas. The "Friends of Democratic Pakistan" grouping was launched last year promising to help build dams, power stations, schools and clinics.

CIA buildup in Afghanistan rivals peaks during Vietnam, Iraq wars

WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency is in the midst of a major buildup in Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence "surge" that will make the agency's station there among the largest in CIA history, according to U.S. officials.

When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the CIA already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.

The influx of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives parallels the U.S. military expansion, and it comes as the nation's spy services are under pressure from Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal to improve intelligence on the Taliban and find ways to reverse a series of unsettling trends.

Among them are a twofold increase in the number of roadside bombs, a growing sophistication in the kinds of assaults aimed at coalition troops, and evidence that a Taliban group has developed an assembly line-like approach to the recruitment and grooming of suicide bombers, who then are sometimes assigned to other organizations.

The push also comes as the Obama administration is under pressure to show progress in Afghanistan, calculating it has only until next summer before public support for the war effort collapses.

The intelligence surge goes beyond the CIA to involve every major spy service, officials said, including the National Security Agency, which intercepts calls and e-mails, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which tracks military threats.

The deployments come amid fresh warnings from U.S. spy services that the insurgency in Afghanistan has continued to gain territory and strength.

"The Taliban is at its most capable level since 2001, when it was ejected from the country," said a Defense Department official who has access to classified intelligence estimates. The official, and others, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Overall, officials said the insurgency is believed to have 15,000 to 20,000 fighters. The estimates are imprecise, officials said, because there are loose affiliations among the groups, each of which is composed of fighters with varying commitments to the cause.

"You're not talking about fixed formations that rely solely on full-time combatants," a U.S. counterterrorism official said. "Numbers ebb and flow. Bands of fighters appear and vanish."

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on the scope of the agency's presence in Afghanistan.

But a U.S. intelligence official said that spy agencies "anticipated the surge in demand for intelligence." The official said the intelligence community "has, for some time now, been deploying more officers to Afghanistan."

The CIA's buildup is the latest in a series of escalations there. After having only a handful of operatives in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency's presence climbed to an estimated 150 by the end of 2001, and 300 at the close of 2005.

McChrystal is expected to expand the use of teams that combine CIA operatives with soldiers from U.S. special operations forces.

The agency's role is likely to shift under McChrystal, who has placed a greater emphasis on protecting the Afghan population and rooting out government graft.

U.S. spy agencies have already stepped up their scrutiny of corruption in Kabul. A recent Senate report described a new wiretapping system activated last year that is aimed at tracing ties between government officials and drug kingpins in the country.

Officials said allegations of election fraud in the recent presidential race in Afghanistan were a significant setback, aiding the Taliban's efforts to portray the U.S.-backed government as illegitimate.

"The process has basically handed (the Taliban) a perfect propaganda theme to use," the Defense Department official said.

Russia's Putin brings leopards back to Caucasus

By Gleb Bryanski

SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin released two leopards into the wild on Saturday in a bid to revive the fortunes of the rare cats in the Caucasus and soothe ecological worries over 2014 Sochi Games.

Caucasian or Persian leopards disappeared from the Caucasus in the 1920s due to excessive hunting. Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov sent two male leopards caught in Turkmenistan by plane to Sochi. Female leopards are to follow.

"We are standing here and admiring your animals. Glorious animals, very beautiful," Putin, surrounded by International Olympic Committee members, told Berdymukhamedov by telephone as he stood by the cage in the Sochi national park.

Russia won the right to host 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and major construction works are about to begin.

Critics say huge construction projects may harm the environment. They question the need for spending billions of dollars on the games during a financial crisis and say they do not believe all the infrastructure would be ready by 2014.

"I think Russia is on its way to organizing an exceptional Olympic Games," French Alpine skiing legend and IOC member Jean-Claude Killy told reporters.

Russia's most popular politician, Putin, enjoys a tough guy image, being photographed riding bare-chested on horse back, fishing in Siberia or saving tigers in Russia's Far East.

On Saturday, Putin stared in silence at one of the leopards, which initially refused to abandon his traveling cage, visibly stressed after its long journey.

"Good boy," Putin said as the cat snarled at him and jumped out while guards and reporters pulled back. "We have found common language, they understand me," said Putin.

The leopards will gradually move to a larger fenced area of the park before they are released into the wild. Scientists plan to bring female leopards at a later stage and hope some 30-50 cats will be living around Sochi in six years.

India's China Panic: Seeing a 'Red Peril' on Land and Sea

By ISHAAN THAROOR

In recent weeks, public attention in India has reached feverish levels over what is perceived to be the growing threat lurking north of the border. Tensions along the Himalayan frontier with China have spiked noticeably since a round of Sino-Indian talks over long-standing territorial disputes this summer ended in failure. In their wake, the frenetic Indian press has chronicled reports of nighttime boundary incursions and troop build-ups, even while officials in both governments downplay such confrontations. Elements in the Indian media point almost daily to various signs of a Beijing plot to contain its neighbor's rise, a conviction aided by recent hawkish editorials from China's state-run outlets. This week, leading Indian news networks loudly cataloged Chinese transgressions under headlines such as "Red Peril" and "Enter the Dragon."

India and China fought a war in 1962 whose acrimonious legacy lingers even while economic ties flourish (China is now India's biggest trade partner). Beijing refuses to acknowledge the de facto border - demarcated by the British empire - and claims almost the entirety of the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of its own territory. Indian strategic analysts believe Beijing's stance has hardened in recent years, perhaps as a consequence of its increasing economic and military edge over India as well as growing Chinese influence in smaller South Asian countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. Comments made last month by India's outgoing navy chief that the country could not hope to match China's hard power capabilities set off a bout of national hand-wringing. "There's a nervousness among some policy makers that the Chinese see India as weak and vulnerable to coercion," says Harsh Pant, professor of defense studies at King's College, London, and author of a forthcoming book on India's China policy. "Indians feel they can't manage China's rise and that they are far, far behind."

But the real arena for future confrontation, say most Indian strategists, lies not in standoffs on remote, rugged peaks, but in the waters all around the Indian Subcontinent. The Indian Ocean is the thoroughfare for nearly half of global seaborne trade, its coastal states home to over 60% of the world's oil and a third of its gas reserves. Traditionally, India has imagined the ocean as part of its backyard without investing serious resources in its navy - much more still goes to an army and air force perched by the land boundaries with the old enemy Pakistan. And that gap between India's maritime hubris and real power has been exposed in recent times by China, which is buoyed by its own sense of historical revival - dating back to the days when the eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed his medieval trade fleets to India and Africa, bringing back, among other things, a giraffe.

To safeguard its vast appetite for oil and other natural resources, particularly drawn from Africa, China has embarked upon a "string of pearls" strategy, building ports and listening posts around the Indian Ocean rim. Beijing's projects span from the Malacca Straits to the Cape of Good Hope, and many places in between, including countries that were once in India's sphere of influence. A massive deep-sea port being built by Chinese funds and labor at Hambantota, at the southern tip of Sri Lanka, has in particular riled Indian analysts. With a $1 billion facility also under construction in Gwadar, in Pakistan, China will eventually possess key naval choke points around the Subcontinent that could disrupt Indian lines of communication and shipping. Reports of a tense standoff earlier this year between Indian and Chinese warships on anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden - though dismissed by both governments - did little to subdue the sense of distrust brewing between policymakers on both sides.

In response to China's gains, India's navy aims to modernize its own fleet. It launched the country's first nuclear submarine in July and purchased new destroyers from Russia and the U.S., yet China's plans to build aircraft carriers and boost its own submarine fleet far outstrip that of New Delhi. India has expanded defense contacts and exchanges with a host of strategic Indian Ocean countries and archipelago nations such as Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar and the Maldives, as well as engaging in naval exercises with other East Asian and Southeast Asian nations that are wary of China's growing stature, such as Japan and Vietnam. But China also maintains solid relationships with many of these countries - ties that, in most cases, bind far tighter and offer much more than what poorer India can muster.

Conflict, though, is not inevitable. It's natural for rising powers to extend their reach and rub up against each other. China and India, says C. Uday Bhaskar, director of the National Maritime Foundation, a think tank attached to the Indian navy, need to "evolve some kind of modus vivendi as they establish themselves in the Indian Ocean." But few can divine what that may look like. Part of the problem is that despite booming trade between India and China, there is little political understanding between their governments. "They engage very superficially," says Pant. "There's rarely consensus on any of the fundamental issues." Comparisons have even been made linking India and China's current rapport to the ill-fated understandings between the U.S. and Japan in the early 20th century. Though in a vastly different context, the two countries, says Pant, are clandestinely probing and feeling out each other's geo-political intentions in an eerily similar fashion.

An article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs by Robert Kaplan, a prominent American writer and strategic thinker, suggested that the U.S., far and away still the world's preeminent military power, could be the chief "balancer" and "honest broker" in the Indian Ocean. But that idea has been received icily in Asia, with many governments seeing the U.S. as a nation in decline, marooned in costly adventures abroad and led by an Obama administration less willing to confront the aggressive posturing of a rising giant like China. It would be better, says Bhaskar, for India and China to slowly forge a constructive pan-Asian consensus and do away with the "post-colonial baggage" that animates the current Sino-Indian border dispute. But as talk of a new Asian "Great Game" gains favor, history and geography may not be so easy to overcome.

EDITORIAL COMMENT | Unrest In Urumqi

8 July 2009

In some ways, China's reaction to the worst ethnic violence to erupt between the Han Chinese and the Muslim Uighurs in the troubled Xinjiang province in a decade stayed true to the copybook for repressive regimes. Authorities blamed western agencies for inciting and organizing the riots while clamping down on the dissemination of information. The state media has been saturated with the official version of events, while online services like Twitter have been blocked. Access to mobile phones and the internet has been cut off, ostensibly to prevent the riots from spreading.

The spark that ignited decades of accumulated ethnic tension into a full-blown riot seemed to have come from the recent deaths of two Uighur men during a dispute between factory workers in Guangdong. Although there have been scattered reports of unrest in Xinjiang before, more information is leaking out this time. That may be due not only to the advent of new media, but also to a change in strategy by Beijing itself. Rather than banning foreign media and journalists from the region entirely, Beijing invited some foreign journalists to Urumqi, to see first-hand where the riots happened. But there are divergent stories of whether the initial protests were peaceful. The official story suggests that the Uighur protesters violently attacked innocent passers-by. But footage circulating on the internet even before the state media acknowledged there was a problem seems to show a peaceful protest.

We may never know who really started the violence, or what the truth of the matter is. The official story, however, suggests that the violence is the handiwork of Uighur separatists with Islamist leanings. If that is the case, Xinjiang could be developing into China's Kashmir. That would have interesting strategic implications, as Beijing has so far given New Delhi little sympathy on Kashmir. It has also refused to join Washington in pressuring Islamabad to turn decisively against international jihadists based in its tribal territories, leaving an escape hatch that Islamabad adroitly exploits.

Since public opinion in Pakistan tends to be anti-American and pro-Chinese, pressure from Beijing could be very effective in persuading Islamabad to commit the bulk of its forces to fighting the Taliban instead of squaring off against India. That's what both Washington and New Delhi should be telling Beijing now. China should no longer be in denial about what its skewed South Asia policy is doing to its own interests.

Source: Times of India.
Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/opinion/edit-page/EDITORIAL-COMMENT-Unrest-In-Urumqi/articleshow/4749834.cms.

Fracture healed by US forces, Afghan boy goes home

By KEVIN MAURER, Associated Press Writer

DAY KUNDI PROVINCE, Afghanistan – The Afghan father left the mountains on foot, carrying his 2-year-old son, but the health clinic could not treat the skull fracture that blinded the toddler and immobilized his left side. By chance the next day, two American medics stopped by the clinic in Day Kundi Province to check on another patient.

The rooftop fall that cracked Malik's skull Aug. 19 set in motion a chain of events that took the boy from his remote village to the U.S. military hospital in Kandahar, where doctors patched the tear in his brain and replaced the bone. On Saturday, his crescent-shaped wound healed, Malik — the baby in the family of five children — headed home with his father, Khodadad.

Khodadad carried Malik out to the gray truck hired to drive the rocky roads of central Afghanistan back to Ashtarlay, a northern district of Day Kundi. But for Khodadad, who traveled 50 miles (80 kilometers) in the first futile effort to reach the Afghan clinic, the return was worth every uncomfortable bump.

"God answered our prayers," said Khodadad, who like many Afghans uses only one name. "God sent someone to save my son."

Josh, one of the medics who treated Malik and arranged to evacuate him to Kandahar, said the boy's father lights up every time he sees the Americans. The medics only give their first names for security reasons and as part of the Special Forces embed rules.

Lt. Col. James Miller, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, said the resolve of the U.S. medics to treat the child "demonstrates we mean what we say."

"And at the end of the day, the boy needed help," Miller said.

On Friday, his vision and movement restored, Malik was kicking around a soccer ball — and using both sides of his body as he played.

Josh and Khodadad shook hands Saturday — and Josh got a high-five from Malik. The father touched his heart and thanked Josh repeatedly before climbing into the truck, driving away as the medic looked on from the front gate of the team's base in Day Kundi.

"When Malik goes home, that is a village of mainly poor people. This will be their only memory of Americans," he said. "At some point somebody will be working in that village and hopefully they will say these are the guys that helped that baby."

Yemen ceasefire 'not respected'

Fighting in Yemen is reported to be continuing despite a conditional ceasefire called by the government in its conflict with northern Shia rebels.

The government had called the ceasefire to coincide with the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The UN has appealed to both sides to allow humanitarian corridors to be opened so that aid can be delivered to those displaced by the fighting.

About 150,000 people have been displaced in the five-year conflict.

On Saturday, statements from both the military and the rebels accused the other side of continuing attacks in spite of the ceasefire.

The combat area has been cut off from journalists, and correspondents say it has been hard to verify conflicting reports from both sides.

Air strike

It is the second recent ceasefire that appears to have quickly collapsed.

The government had proposed that it begin late on Friday and run during Eid, the three-day holiday that starts on Sunday and marks the end of Ramadan.

The government's five conditions included removing road blocks, the withdrawal of rebel forces, the release of detained military personnel, and abiding by the constitution and Yemeni law in general.

But the rebels have asked that the ceasefire be unconditional.

The BBC's Paul Wood reports from Yemen that people at a camp for the displaced said rebels had been steadily winning territory from the army.

International concern about the conflict has intensified after witnesses said that more than 80 people were killed in a government air raid on a camp for displaced people on Wednesday.

The rebels, known as Houthis, complain of discrimination. They say they want greater autonomy and a greater role for their version of Shia Islam.

Both sides see unwelcome influences from abroad, with government accusing rebels of having Iranian backing and being accused itself of being influenced by Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia.

The Yemeni government is also battling secessionists in the south and has been criticized by the US for its failure to tackle al-Qaeda militants in the east and pirates off the coast.