Starting Points

May 10, 2010

Fueling the Afghan War

Image by kahunapulej via Flickr

Aram Roston | April 21, 2010

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

In Napoleon Bonaparte's day an army may have marched on its belly, as the French emperor famously quipped, but the modern-day American military campaign in Afghanistan needs not just food but also fuel. Diesel for the MRAPs and Humvees, aviation fuel for the planes and helicopters--that's the fodder for the military surge under way in Afghanistan. Fuel is precious there--they call it liquid gold--and the effort to keep it flowing has created an array of bizarre monopolies, strange alliances and allegations of corruption entangling the US government.

This is the story of two interlinked and secretive offshore companies run by a former Army intelligence officer. The firms run a specialized monopoly of massive proportions. Their niche: supplying aviation fuel for US military operations in Afghanistan--enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools each and every day of the year.

The companies' names are Red Star Enterprises and Mina Corp. In Afghanistan, Red Star Enterprises has a sole source contract worth more than $1 billion, won without competition, to deliver fuel to Bagram Air Base, that central hub of the war effort. The Nation has obtained an unusual "memorandum of agreement [1]" between Red Star and the US military authorities, giving the firm exclusive ownership of a fuel pipeline that feeds directly into the base.

Similarly, in nearby Kyrgyzstan, a staging ground for the Afghan war, Mina has another sole source contract, awarded without any announcement, to provide fuel to a huge and controversial base. The contract has been at the center of corruption and kickback allegations, and the companies have been accused of enriching the families of two successive heads of state, both of whom presided over kleptocratic and repressive regimes--an arrangement that fostered great resentment in the country. Violence exploded on the streets in early April, leaving eighty protesters dead, and President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was forced to flee. The new, provisional government sees Red Star and Mina in a very specific light. The chief of staff, Edil Baisalov, tells The Nation that the firms have served as "an indirect way for the Pentagon to bribe the ruling families of Kyrgyzstan." (These allegations are the subject of a Congressional hearing tomorrow, convened by the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.)

Baisalov's charge is a serious one but not new, nor as outlandish as it may seem, although the companies deny it. The eight-year saga of high-stakes contracts and secretive deals raises serious questions about how the Afghan campaign has been run, not only by the Bush administration but also under President Barack Obama. Sole source contracts have continued under the current administration, and if the Kyrgyz authorities are correct, the Pentagon contractors are still doing what they did under Bush. After all, the thirst for oil and fuel can only grow as President Obama's Afghan surge ramps up.

The man in charge of Red Star's and Mina's operations is a good-natured retired Army lieutenant colonel named Chuck Squires, now 56 years old. A lanky and broad-shouldered fellow with a good sense of humor, he has a graduate degree in Russian studies from Harvard. Before 9/11, he was the defense attaché at the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Back then, when he was still in the military, the Republic of Kyrgyzstan was just another impoverished and mountainous ex-Soviet republic, with a per capita income a little higher than that of Cambodia. It was just one pawn in the Great Game between Russia and the United States, and it was not easily accessible, bordered by Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on the south, west and north, respectively, and by China on the east. Nor was it strategically important, although its huge inland lake did serve as a testing site for advanced Russian torpedoes.

Squires, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, had left Bishkek by September 11, 2001. One source says he was gone from the military by then too, but his experience there would serve him well in the private sector in the future.

That is because shortly after 9/11, Kyrgyzstan agreed to host a US air base. At the time, Kyrgyzstan's president was Askar Akayev, who presented himself as an innovative reformer and economist. The United States did not pay much for the base rights, although this was a source of controversy within the country and a matter of concern for the State Department. At the time, Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon was holding sway over Colin Powell's State Department. The Defense Department insisted it was in charge of all negotiations, and the State Department's input wasn't wanted. "You stay out of it" is how a former State Department official remembers the Pentagon's tone.

The Manas base, dubbed the Ganci base, after a firefighter killed on 9/11, was like the FedEx hub through which the US military flies material and people to Afghanistan from around the world. The base hosts tankers and other planes, and operates as a transfer facility for troops.

Red Star Enterprises and Mina Corp. soon appeared on the scene like mysterious strangers. They had a rather ethereal, offshore quality and some intriguing connections. For example, Red Star had the same London address and phone number as Iraq Today, a purportedly independent and short-lived newspaper launched in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. The paper had been set up by a former journalist who worked with Mina Corp.--which, of course, was connected to Red Star.

Over the years neither Red Star nor Mina seems to have even bothered to put up a website. They both have offices in London, but they are both incorporated on the island of Gibraltar, a British territory off Spain with impenetrable secrecy laws for corporations. Various private investigators have been unable to determine who really owns them.

Though Red Star had no apparent track record, it was hired by the Pentagon to supply the base's massive fuel needs. Red Star's director of operations: the now retired Lieutenant Colonel Squires. Squires returned to Bishkek as a civilian, coordinating Red Star's contract work. The Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center hired Red Star to supply its fuel. It was a huge contract, totaling $240 million over three years.

Even if the Kyrgyz government wasn't getting paid much for the base, the Akayev family was reaping tens of millions. It was heavily involved in business at the airport, running the two companies that operated as Red Star's subcontractors. One of them was run by Akayev's son, and the other by his son-in-law, and from 2002 to 2005 Red Star, operating on its US government contract, paid the firms about $120 million.

It may have just been business, but the way Kyrgyz investigators later saw it, Red Star, the prime contractor, was the cut out for funneling funds to the Akayev family.

It was all cozy until violence hit the streets of Bishkek in 2005, foreshadowing what was to come five years later. The "Tulip Revolution" forced Akayev to flee and abdicate, and then the secrets of the Akayev regime began to tumble out, in scandal after scandal. The new government, headed by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, even asked the US government for help investigating the former regime. The FBI's Eurasian Unit churned out an extraordinary report that laid bare a "vast amount of potential criminal activities associated with the Akaev Organization." The president and his family were accused of "siphoning off at least $1 billion from the Kyrgyz state budget." It was as if the Kyrgyz government had been some kind of criminal enterprise within which the United States ran a military base.

After the revolt, people thought things might be different. The new government seemed to bring a fresh sense of integrity for a short while, before it began to stack its own skeletons in the closet. Despite his claims to be a reformer, Bakiyev appeared to go about replicating the patterns of his predecessor in a deliberate manner. "He really didn't think twice. They inherited this," says one consultant who dealt with Bakiyev shortly after the revolution. "We really in great detail uncovered the scheme. And I think the moment they figured out how it worked, they went and did it."

Peter Zalmayev of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative puts it this way: "Bakiyev came in under the premise he would clean [the government] up and make it more transparent. But he replaced the structure they had with Akayev and his son with his own family." Word quickly spread that Bakiyev's youngest son, Maksim, was in business too. The insiders said he was taking over "Manas International"--through frontmen.

Meanwhile, Bakiyev's associates were making powerful US connections. For example, one of his allies set up a bank called AsiaUniversalBank (AUB) in Bishkek. On its board were two august former US senators: former US Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, currently associated with the lobbying firm Alston & Bird, and J. Bennett Johnston, the longtime Louisiana senator, who has his own firm. Dole was paid several hundred thousand dollars for his role, which included one trip to Bishkek and a few board meetings in Washington.

Meanwhile, what mattered to the United States was the base at Manas. There, the airfield was still lined with squadrons of KC-135 Stratotankers, which needed constant filling for their missions over the skies of Afghanistan.

Red Star kept up its work, supplying fuel.

But Red Star was also busy elsewhere at the same time. Chuck Squires and Red Star were now focused not just on Kyrgyzstan but directly on Afghanistan. To do business with the US military in Afghanistan usually means operating at Bagram Air Base, the sprawling compound--a virtual military city--about an hour north of Kabul.

Col. Jonathan Ives was then the base commander at Bagram. Red Star, he says, was synonymous with aviation fuel, trucking it down from Uzbekistan along an old and treacherous route through the mountains from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul, passing at one point through the Salang Pass, a 1.5-mile tunnel through a mountain. Ives says Red Star trucked in more than 250,000 gallons of the precious stuff each day--a staggering amount. Each tanker truck can carry a maximum of 9,000 gallons, so Red Star would have had convoys of about thirty tractor-trailers per day.

In October 2007 Red Star scored a remarkable coup. Squires signed a deal with Ives that allowed Red Star to build and own a pipeline that ran from the base for all that fuel. Ives says that Red Star had purchased land near Bagram Air Base. "It was farmland, so they purchased the land and the rights." In the memorandum of agreement between Red Star and the military, obtained by The Nation, Red Star promises it "will install, at no cost to the United States Government (USG), a petroleum pipeline for transfer of TS-1 jet fuel." Significantly, the agreement says, "Red Star will retain ownership of the pipeline."

It is intriguing that the firm signed such a document rather than an ordinary contract. "It is very unusual--very unusual," said professor Charles Tiefer, an expert on contract law at the University of Baltimore School of Law who sits on the US government's eight-member Commission on Wartime Contracting. I asked him who would regulate such an agreement. "Nobody," he answered. "There is no regulation of it because it's not supposed to happen, because it is trying to create a loophole where there is none in the Competition in Contracting Act."

Whatever the legal basis for the contract, not only the fuel pipeline but the land underneath it was owned by Red Star. Indeed, trucks would be able to gain access to the pipeline only through Red Star property. Red Star, in other words, controlled all access to the pipeline that would bring fuel to the thirsty US air base. It was as if the company offered to build a door to a US base and then controlled anything that went through the door. "I think it is pretty clever, if you want to say that," says Ives. "It is shrewd business," he added, a bit ruefully. He says he thought the pipeline was a good idea because it limited fuel trucks' access to the base and made things safe. He didn't realize, he says, that the pipeline Red Star built would give it a monopoly.

But that's what it did. Within four months of that memorandum of agreement, the United States announced it planned to offer a sole source contract to Red Star for 194 million gallons of fuel over two years. There were some complaints by a potential competitor, but it had no access to the pipeline. That summer, in August 2008, Red Star was awarded the contract for $720 million. It had locked in the monopoly.

On March 4, 2009, barely six weeks in office, Barack Obama pledged to crack down on government procurement waste and fraud, and "to dramatically reform the way we do business on contracts across the entire government." Standing next to Senator John McCain, his adversary in the election but an advocate of contract reform as well, he said, "We need more competition for contracts and more oversight as they are carried out." That day he sent out a memo asking all federal agencies to work on a way to end sole source contracts.

But when it came to Red Star and Mina, things stayed very much the same. On July 29, about five months after the president's speech, the Defense Department did not bother issuing a solicitation or requesting bids for the fuel contract. Instead, it quietly issued a new, $243 million contract to Mina to keep selling fuel to the base at Manas. The government used an unusual clause in the federal rules to justify this: the "national security" exemption. Under that provision, "Full and open competition need not be provided for when the disclosure of the agency's needs would compromise the national security."

"It went from competitive to sole source," says lawyer Ronald Uscher, who represents a competitor to Red Star and Mina called IOTC. In 2007 Mina had actually won the contract through a process that ostensibly included competitive bidding--though it beat out IOTC, whose bid had been almost 3 percent lower. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Uscher tried to obtain information about Mina's bid, but the Defense Department refused to tell him how Mina and Red Star gauged their price changes. Normally these are based on worldwide fuel prices, but not in Kyrgyzstan. Here it would be kept a secret. "There is nothing secretive about the price of jet fuel in 99.9 percent of the world," says Uscher, "except at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, apparently!" Then, in 2009, Uscher complains, "You have a sole source secret contract to supply fuel to Manas awarded to Mina with no other competitors having oversight and no citizens having oversight."

Why the secrecy? And what was the national security requirement that dictated avoiding competition? Did Mina's source for fuel have anything to do with it?

Officials in Kyrgyzstan's provisional government say it straight out: Mina Corp., the affiliate of Red Star, was paying funds to Maksim Bakiyev, the president's son. The new government's chief of staff Baisalov says that in order to keep the air base secure and supplied with fuel, the United States essentially "bribed the Kyrgyz ruling family. First it was Akayev and then it was Bakiyev. On one hand, the White House and the US State Department, they announce these noble goals, democracy, good government, and on the other hand, the military comes in and overrides everyone else." The Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees the Defense Energy Support Center, wouldn't comment specifically on that, even to deny it. "We can't speak to that," said DLA spokesman Dennis Gauci. "You'll have to speak to Mina Corp."

A representative of Mina, who asked not to be named, denied any wrongdoing. "There was no consideration given to the ownership interests of any supplier." If Maksim Bakiyev did have any ownership interest, he said, Mina didn't know about it. The company, he told me, was reaching out to the interim Kyrgyz government to try to explain it to them. (Mina emphasizes it does vital work "by providing mission-critical fuel supplies to the troops and civilians that are carrying out the mission in Afghanistan.")

With the collapse of the Bakiyev regime, a whole web of money and power has been exposed. That bank, AUB, on whose board sat ex-Senators Dole and Johnston? Its accounts have been frozen, and the new government says it was laundering money.

The provisional government in Kyrgyzstan says it will leave the base open for now. And the United States, with the Afghan surge under way, needs that base now more than ever. But the Kyrgyz government is making a new demand: it is launching a criminal investigation of the Bakiyev regime and its profits--and it wants the US government to help.

May 9, 2010

As election nears in Philippines, Aquino scion seems to be heavy favorite

Benigno Aquino III has a 20-point cushion in recent polls. If he does not win, he has said that supporters would take to the streets in another "people power" uprising. (Nicky Loh - Reuters)

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 9, 2010; A08

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES -- Benigno Aquino III, who appears likely to win the Philippine presidency on Monday, is unmarried and has no children. By his own account, he has been unlucky in love.

"All the plans I have had with respect to that field have not materialized," Aquino said in an interview. With an impish smile, he added that his romantic disappointments have a political upside: "You don't have the attendant problems of a first lady like Imelda Marcos."

That jab at the widow of former president Ferdinand Marcos fits neatly into the good-vs.-evil campaign narrative that has catapulted Aquino far ahead of eight other candidates in opinion polls. Voters here often see politics as melodrama starring rich families -- and their all-time favorite is the feud between the Marcos and Aquino clans.

Benigno Aquino Jr., father of the bachelor who would be president, was fatally shot at Manila's international airport when he returned from exile in the United States to challenge Marcos in 1983. Taking up the cause of her martyred husband, Corazon Aquino led a "people power" uprising that overthrew Marcos, exposed the shoe-buying excesses of his wife and captivated much of the world. Corazon Aquino served as president until 1992.

When she died of cancer in August, a mass outpouring of grief fired up the dynastic machinery of Philippine politics. As a result, her only son became the chosen one. He's a low-key personality who shoots pool, enjoys jazz and says he had never seen himself as a national savior.

"I wasn't thinking of running," Aquino, known as Noynoy, said during the interview in his mother's modest house on the edge of Manila, where he has lived most of his life. "I wasn't clamoring to be the person responsible for solving all the problems."

But since his mother's death, the 50-year-old has come to embody a national yearning for decent leadership in this Southeast Asian country, where poverty, violence and corruption have surged in recent years. During his campaign stops, thousands upon thousands of Filipinos jump with joy and rush to touch him.

A legacy candidacy

Aquino is not a dynamic speechmaker, nor is he possessed of an impressive résumé. He ran a company that sold Nike shoes. He worked at his family's 11,000-acre ranch. He helped his mother cope with several coup attempts and was badly wounded during an attack on the presidential palace. (He still has a piece of shrapnel in his neck, and a gunshot wound causes him to walk with a slight limp.) As a lawmaker since 1998, he has had no major legislative achievements.

Aquino readily acknowledges that his candidacy was an invention of voters nostalgic for the moral clarity they associate with his parents.

"It became the entry point," he said. "All of this became possible because of the people."

Although his record is regarded as thin, it is apparently clean. Unlike so many politicians here, he has not been linked to scandal. His honest image -- combined with his mother's legacy of personal probity -- has become the essence of his campaign. "Without corrupt politicians, there are no poor people," says his ubiquitous campaign slogan.

Aquino said that if he were elected, he would aggressively investigate President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, whose nine years in power have been marked by major corruption scandals. Term limits prevent Arroyo from running again for president, although she is seeking a seat in the House of Representatives.

"The message has to be sent that if you commit a crime, there has to be punishment," Aquino said.

With a 20-point cushion in recent polls and an expert consensus that he is likely to win, Aquino says that only electoral fraud can stop him from becoming president. If he does not win Monday, he has told reporters, his supporters would take to the streets in another "people power" uprising.

'A level playing field'

As for what he will do as president, Aquino said tax collection would be a priority. Economists here estimate that tax evasion deprives the government of about a third of its annual operating budget.

"We already have a list of people we will be investigating for tax avoidance," Aquino said, adding that he is prepared to send "people to jail on a fast-track basis."

A potential hiccup in the tax-enforcement scheme is Aquino's blue-blood background. He comes from one of the country's most prominent landowning families. His campaign supporters include families that have dominated the nation's economy for centuries. Economists here say many of these families have gotten away with egregious tax fraud for decades, while pushing the legislature to grant them tax exemptions.

"How beholden am I?" Aquino said, when asked about possible conflicts with moneyed supporters. "Each time I talk to one of the groups, I tell them, 'You will have a level playing field.' Our obligation is to develop the entire economy, not just to develop certain key players."

Doubts about ability

Away from the campaign, there is considerable doubt about Aquino's competence.

"He has the genius of the below-average, looking and sounding like someone who does not know how to govern a country," said Homobono A. Adaza, a lawyer who worked for Aquino's mother before she prosecuted him on charges of involvement in a coup attempt.

"He doesn't have a clue," said Victor A. Abola, an economist at the University of Asia and the Pacific. "We may have a replay of the failures of his mother's government."

Although Corazon Aquino's honesty was never doubted, her leadership was often feckless, bouncing from crisis to crisis, and many remember her tenure for chronic power outages. Her signature issue was land reform, but her relatives resisted -- and some continue to resist -- state efforts to distribute the family estate to 10,000 farmers.

As the election nears, it appears that a plurality of voters has decided to trust Benigno Aquino. "They know his achievements are not inspiring," said Arsenio Balisacan, a professor of economics at the University of the Philippines. "But they are tired of corruption. They are willing to take a gamble."

Special correspondent Carmela Cruz contributed to this report.

Obama makes personal diplomacy part of Afghan strategy

President Obama with, from left, Vice President Biden, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan. (Bill O'leary/the Washington Post)

By Scott Wilson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 9, 2010; A01

President Obama has bluntly instructed his national security team to treat Afghan President Hamid Karzai with more public respect, after a recent round of heavy-handed statements by U.S. officials and other setbacks infuriated the Afghan leader and called into question his relationship with Washington.

During a White House meeting last month, Obama made clear that Karzai is the chief U.S. partner in the war effort -- which will be reflected in his visit to Washington that begins Monday, according to senior administration officials. In doing so, Obama is seeking to impose discipline on an administration that has sent mixed signals about Karzai's legitimacy and his value to the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign. As a result, Karzai threatened to join the Taliban just days after Obama concluded his first presidential trip to Kabul in late March.

After a two-hour palace meeting that advisers to both leaders described as productive, Karzai grew bitter after receiving a copy of comments made by Obama's national security adviser on the way to Kabul that struck him as insulting. Days later, Karzai read in a newspaper article that an unnamed U.S. official was threatening to put Ahmed Wali Karzai, his half brother, on the military's kill-or-capture list.

Karzai had been led to believe months earlier that his brother -- the leader of Kandahar's provincial council -- would remain in his post despite persistent accusations of corruption and ties to drug trafficking. Karzai erupted in anger soon after, stunning the White House.

"There has been a rough patch," said a senior administration official who participates in Afghanistan policy development. "Frankly, some of what Karzai said needed to be responded to. But the bottom line is that there has been an improvement since then in the atmospherics and in the substance of our dealings with President Karzai and his team."

Managing the relationship with Karzai is part of the far broader challenge of maintaining political support for a nearly nine-year-old war, which a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found is once again opposed by a majority of Americans. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the war is not worth fighting, which means the bump in support for the war that followed Obama's announcing his new Afghanistan strategy in December has disappeared.

Karzai's meeting with Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday will be the centerpiece of a rare extended visit. Over the next four days, Karzai and many of his senior cabinet ministers will be publicly embraced and privately reassured by Obama of the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, which officials say will endure long after American forces begin leaving in July 2011.

Karzai has been frightened by the deadline, U.S. officials acknowledge. Obama intends to devote much of his meeting with him to spelling out a long-term relationship that includes far fewer U.S. troops but deeper diplomatic and economic support.

It is not certain whether the message discipline will be able to reset what has long been a complicated relationship. Despite Obama's edict that the Afghan leader receive public support, deep policy differences remain inside the administration, including among top U.S. officials in Afghanistan, over Karzai's commitment to the government and security reforms essential to the U.S. mission.

Some of the mixed signals in recent months appear to be a direct result of the president's actions. In contrast to George W. Bush, Obama established more of an arm's-length personal relationship with Karzai. He also raised questions about Karzai's viability as a partner during a White House strategy review of the Afghanistan war last fall.

But Obama now wants his administration to close ranks, senior officials said.

Karzai's visit has been designed to be "a manifest demonstration of the relationship and the issues we are working on," the senior administration official said. Karzai will be hosted at dinners by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he trusts perhaps more than any other U.S. official, and Vice President Biden, with whom he has had a stormy relationship.

The administration has encouraged Karzai to bring a large delegation of senior Afghan officials, giving them a chance to meet their U.S. Cabinet counterparts and influential congressional leaders. Among them are ministers Obama recommended to Karzai during the Kabul visit, based on their competence rather than the tribal or ethnic affiliations that can complicate government reforms in Afghanistan.

"We want to emphasize that this is not a relationship with just one person," said a second senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe White House thinking about Karzai. But, the official hastened to add, "we do not look at this as a zero-sum situation or as a way of working around Kabul."

'Spiral of events'

Karzai's most recent tirade was set off by what one White House official called "a spiral of events" surrounding Obama's visit -- some within the administration's control and some beyond it.

According to senior administration officials, the circumstances that angered Karzai included remarks made by national security adviser James L. Jones before the meeting even began.

Jones told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One that Obama intended to "make [Karzai] understand that in his second term there are certain things that have not been paid attention to almost since Day One." Those remarks were viewed by Afghan officials as condescending, but Karzai did not learn of them until after Obama left Afghanistan.

Three days later, Karzai was enraged to read a report in The Washington Post that quoted an unnamed U.S. official threatening Ahmed Wali Karzai with a spot on the military's Joint Prioritized Engagement List, better known as the kill-or-capture list. The next day, Afghanistan's lower house of parliament rejected Karzai's proposal to change the national election law to give him more control over the body that investigates voter fraud, a move the Obama administration had opposed.

"We have our own national interest in the country," Karzai told a gathering of Afghan election officials the next day, accusing the United Nations and the international media of conspiring against him. "They wanted a servant government."

Within days, Karzai called Clinton to clarify his comments. But days later, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs still declined to call Karzai an ally.

"At the end of the day for Karzai, this is very much a question of respect," said a third senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy. "He tends, like any head of state, to conflate an insult against me as an insult against my people. We tend to try to separate the two."

'Apply that touch'

Karzai was not the only leader who was angry. Obama was, too, particularly at the way U.S. officials had spoken about the Afghan president.

Obama made clear in a meeting with his senior national security team that Karzai is "someone we're going to have to work with for the next 4 1/2 years." Therefore, "high expectations should be set for [Karzai], and he should be held to them," but Obama would not tolerate any more public criticism.

On April 8, a note from Obama was delivered to Karzai in Kabul, thanking him for arranging his recent visit. Three days later, Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows to praise Karzai.

Obama's decision most reflected the position of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the military commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal had been arguing during monthly Situation Room review sessions that U.S. officials needed to show more public deference to Karzai.

The chief U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, has been on the other side of that argument, pushing to identify leaders outside Kabul to work with, rather than relying so heavily on Karzai.

In Afghanistan, much of Karzai's handling has fallen to McChrystal, who often takes the Afghan leader on his travels inside the country. According to diplomats in Afghanistan and analysts who travel there often, Karzai does not think he can trust Eikenberry or Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the region, who has had a long and bitter relationship with the Afghan leader. A senior foreign diplomat in Kabul called Holbrooke a Karzai "bete noire," but both Holbrooke and Eikenberry say they have a productive relationship with the Afghan president.

Ryan C. Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, said the troop surge in Iraq succeeded in part because of the unity he and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander there at the time, showed in dealing with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, another complicated leader. But Crocker said the troop surge's success was also made possible by Bush's personal relationship with Maliki, with whom Bush spoke often via videoconference.

"So there was confidence at the top," said Crocker, who is now dean of Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. "President Obama certainly has the touch, there's no doubt about it. And now is the time for him to apply that touch."

'Designed to focus us'

In his December speech at West Point, Obama announced that U.S. troops would begin to leave Afghanistan in July 2011.

"The date was meant to focus the mind of the Afghans, certainly," a senior administration official said. "But it was also designed to focus us back here. It enforces discipline on a project that really had been adrift for years."

Diplomats in the region say the date has sometimes had the opposite effect on Karzai, causing him to weigh every U.S. demand against its potential implications for his political life after the troops leave. Those fears lay behind his comments about joining the Taliban, officials say.

Obama is mindful of Karzai's anxieties, and he began describing the long-term U.S. role in Afghanistan in a videoconference with Karzai a few weeks before his Kabul visit, a senior administration official said. Obama will spend much of his Wednesday meeting with Karzai addressing those same concerns.

"President Karzai wants to have a sense of the enduring nature of the commitment, of his relationship with the president, and where he stands -- and that's natural," the senior official said. "What we'll be doing coming out of this is to talk in more detail about what the long-term relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan will look like. And that isn't about having 100,000 troops there forever."

Staff writers Al Kamen and Anne E. Kornblut and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this story.

Tensions between Eikenberry, McChrystal will be focus of their Washington visit

Image via Wikipedia

By Joshua Partlow
Sunday, May 9, 2010; A01

They are both decorated generals, West Point graduates who studied at Harvard University and earnest taskmasters who would rather work than sleep.

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, and the top U.S. military commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, assumed their posts amid lofty expectations that they could re-create the hand-in-glove partnership that Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker had while leading the war effort in Iraq.

But the Eikenberry-and-McChrystal team that returns to Washington this week, alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has a much different dynamic.

Both men said in interviews that they enjoy a productive relationship and have built stronger bonds between troops and civilians across Afghanistan. Still, they have had significant disagreements over the course of the Afghanistan war and have struggled to align their visions for how to work with Karzai's government, according to interviews with U.S., NATO and Afghan officials.

Few critics suggest that those differences have harmed U.S. interests in Afghanistan. People who have worked with both men said, however, that clear tensions exist at the top of the Obama administration's most important military and foreign policy endeavor.

Image by talkradionews via Flickr

At times their differences over strategy have been public, particularly after two of Eikenberry's cables to Washington last year were leaked to the news media. The cables warned that McChrystal's request for new troops might be counterproductive as Karzai was "not an adequate strategic partner." McChrystal's staff members were particularly upset that they weren't made aware of Eikenberry's position before he sent the cables to Washington, they said in interviews.

Eikenberry has resisted some of McChrystal's wartime experiments. The ambassador refused to release funds to expand a military effort to turn villagers into armed guards. He opposed one Army brigade's plan to form an anti-Taliban alliance with a Pashtun tribe and funnel it development money. He criticized the military's proposal to buy generators and diesel fuel for the energy-starved city of Kandahar and supported a longer-term hydroelectric dam project.

Their views have diverged despite shared experience: Eikenberry served 18 months as the NATO commander in Afghanistan, the job McChrystal now holds, before retiring from the military and returning as ambassador. As McChrystal has overhauled the war strategy, some of the legacy he is undoing is Eikenberry's.

Eikenberry wanted to become NATO's senior civilian representative, in addition to his job as ambassador, but McChrystal recommended against it, according to diplomats in Kabul. A British diplomat, Mark Sedwill, got the job.

"You have two generals of similar rank who don't agree on the policy, who apparently don't like each other. It makes for a difficult relationship," said Peter W. Galbraith, who served as the top U.S. official in the United Nations' mission to Afghanistan during last year's contested presidential election.

Both men have tried to dispel notions that they disagree on strategy and don't get along.

"The best metaphor I can give you is of an athletic team," Eikenberry said. "We play different positions. We have different but complementary roles. Of course, sometimes we're going to disagree on what's the best play to call, but we're absolutely committed as teammates to see the president's strategy is well-executed."

McChrystal said that he and Eikenberry cooperate effectively and that their relationship should not be measured against the Petraeus-Crocker pairing in Iraq.

"We've known each other for many years. We talk through all the things we deal with," McChrystal said. "Some people are looking for an Iraq model. But Iraq wasn't a 46-nation coalition."

Civil-military integration

The two generals first crossed professional paths in 2002, when McChrystal, who had worked as chief of staff under Gen. Dan K. McNeill, then coalition commander, helped prepare Eikenberry for a job in Kabul building the fledgling Afghan National Army. Later, McChrystal ran the Joint Special Operations Command when Eikenberry held the top military job in Afghanistan.

They now work more independently because their roles aren't perfectly aligned, they said, with McChrystal in charge of the 130,000-strong NATO coalition, not just the American contingent.

Some disagreements between the men may reflect growing pains, as the military makes room for the greatly expanded U.S. Embassy in Kabul. When President Obama took office last year, there were 360 American civilians in Afghanistan. Now there are more than 1,000 and counting, the most rapid growth of a U.S. civilian mission since the Vietnam War.

Military field commanders who once may have had political advisers now share authority with co-equal civilian representatives backed by growing staffs. The result is a more forceful civilian voice in decision-making.

When Eikenberry has resisted a military proposal, the rationale is often that he does not want to undermine the Afghan government and the development of its security forces. He says that he must take into account factors beyond short-term stability and that programs without Afghan government ownership won't be sustainable.

"I think that both of us are very proud of the degree of civil-military integration we've been able to achieve in the year that we've been here together," Eikenberry said. "So, of course, there's going to be different perspectives, there's going to be robust debates, and you really want that. You've got to encourage that."

Divided over Karzai

Perhaps the most visible difference in approach is how the men work with Karzai.

McChrystal has adopted a role akin to chief diplomat, building a close partnership with Karzai. In monthly White House review sessions, McChrystal has argued that U.S. officials should show more public deference to Karzai, who he frequently reminds others is "the elected leader of a sovereign country," administration officials said.

In the interview, McChrystal called Karzai a "great partner" who has been "absolutely straightforward with me and been reliable."

Some officials said he has built his relationship with Karzai at the expense of candor. In some instances, he has chosen a less politically controversial path, U.S. officials said, citing his decision to work with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's half brother, rather than stress his alleged criminal activity.

"If I don't have credibility with President Karzai, then I think I can't be an effective commander here," McChrystal said. "And it doesn't mean just getting along with him and telling him what he wants to hear. It's convincing him that I'm being a reliable and honest interlocutor with him."

Eikenberry, meanwhile, has had to deliver tougher messages about corruption and governance that often upset Karzai, and his rapport with the mercurial president has seemed to suffer.

During a lengthy policy review in the fall, Eikenberry argued against sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. And U.S. officials said he continues to think that the United States should find other Afghan figures, including provincial leaders, to work with rather than rely so heavily on Karzai. Eikenberry's position infuriated Karzai, who often views U.S. support for "sub-national governments" in Afghanistan as a threat to his authority.

Karzai is a cunning politician who has tried to play Eikenberry and McChrystal off each other and exploit any political differences, U.S. officials said. In recent months, when Karzai has come under U.S. pressure to reform his corrupt government, he has often lashed out publicly.

Since McChrystal took command in June, he has met Karzai more than 45 times, mostly one-on-one, including a regular Sunday morning chat in the presidential palace. In an effort to present Karzai as commander in chief, McChrystal has flown him across the country on five "battlefield circulations."

McChrystal has done more than his predecessors, including Eikenberry, to minimize civilian casualties, such as restricting the use of air power and night raids. He has regularly apologized to Karzai for civilian deaths and shown him video and slide presentations to explain how such mistakes occur.

"He was the first military man to really show that he respected and would respond to Karzai's agenda, civilian casualties, of course, being the biggest issue," one senior NATO official said. "In a sense, Karzai said, 'Here's a soldier that finally I can deal with.' "

Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, said he and Petraeus rarely differed over policy or approach and carefully calibrated their relationship with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, another complicated leader. The two almost always saw Maliki together. When meeting him alone, they would brief each other before and after.

Of McChrystal and Eikenberry, Crocker said: "They need to resolve any differences among themselves or take it back to Washington because the stakes in Afghanistan are too great not to have a unified effort."

Partlow reported from Kabul. Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Scott Wilson in Washington contributed to this report.

The Demise of Datebooks - NYTimes.com

Image by Yes, i'm guccio via Flickr

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

I miss my Filofax datebook, with its six rings and dark red leather binder. I had a green one first, with a calendar that cast each week across two cream-colored pages. Back then, at age 30, I was not busy enough to need a whole page per day, which some Filofax calendars provide, but far too busy, or so I liked to imagine, to fit a week’s activities on a single page. I left that green one in a taxi and replaced it with a red one. Old reddie is still around, with my life during half of 2007 memorialized. Even when I started half-heartedly to use iCal, Apple’s personal-calendar program for the Mac, I lugged around the Filofax in case I needed — I don’t know — the address book? The dry-measure equivalent for “bushel”? The dialing code for Saudi Arabia? The size conversions for tailors (“Glove sizes are the same in every country”)? The centigrade temperature in Accra in May?

Image via Wikipedia

Something, surely. Carrying a Filofax, with all the inserts that came standard with it, made me feel substantial, cliquish and secretive. British. Like a person who keeps close at hand many bankers’ private lines and Mandarin phrases and measurements for handmade shoes. The apparatus of the Filofax circumscribed and elevated my identity. It also liberated my imagination by allowing for such elegant expression of it; various sketches and coded notes-to-self, in blue ink, pervade the pages of the 2007 book. When I had time on a train or at Starbucks, I used to make lists, often plans for self-improvement.

Image by Spinstah via Flickr

Google Calendar, the online scheduling tool that I turned to after iCal, does none of this for me. I share mine with my husband, whose calendar is now superimposed on mine, so that we can sync up our trips, meetings and doctors’ appointments. I find plenty of room for error and irritation in the entering of appointments and synching of devices. My appointments — or “events,” as Google Calendar calls them — are also freighted with reminders, so much so that the many e-mail prompts it sends me in the days before an event sometimes eclipse the event itself.

But I rely on the e-mail reminders because I dislike consulting the calendar itself. It shows, by default, a week per screen and requires, when I’m on my laptop, that I scroll down if I want to see the hours after noon. I find I’m not close to busy enough to pack those long hours with events. At a glance, then, my week looks like a wide gray sea with the odd piece of flotsam in it. It does not look — as did the Filofax week, which always had some things furiously circled or underscored like “deadline” or “birthday!!!!” — like a manuscript, a memoir, a diary.

As a committed user of the BlackBerry, Kindle, MacBook Pro and World Wide Web, I rarely get nostalgic for print — for broadsheets or magazines or even books. So I surprised myself by bridling at Steve Jobs’s boast, when introducing the Apple iPad in January, that the device has “a great calendar.” It never occurred to me that people liked digital calendars; these things lack personality, except as nags. As I discovered after trying the iPad, what Jobs must have meant was that you can get a horizontal view of the iPad calendar to see a whole week, no scrolling. You can also tap on an event to see it up close. As on the iPhone, you can also send information from an e-mail invitation straight to the calendar, and tap the name of a location noted on the calendar to bring up Google Maps, which promptly shows you where to go. I’m not sure all that “at your service” is personality, or maybe it’s the personality known as officious.

But what else can a calendar do? It’s hard to remember, surveying my dull Google version (“parents in town,” “book club”), that a Filofax was also a place for plot arcs, self-invention and self-regulation. It was, in every sense, a diary — a forward-running record, unlike backward-running blogs. The quality of the paper stock, the slot for the pen, the blank but substantial cover, the hints of grand possibilities that came with the inserts — all of these inspired not just introspection but also the joining of history: the mapping of an individual life onto the grand old Gregorian-calendar template.

In 1994, Nicholson Baker published an essay, “Discards,” lamenting the destruction of library card catalogs. “Nobody is grieving,” he wrote. I know I wasn’t. Even when he compared the card catalog to a literary agent’s Rolodex — bulging with cards that should be entries in literary history — I was unmoved. Catalogs and address books seem made to be digitized. But now that I’ve shelved my Filofax in favor of a calendar program that seems somehow to flatten existence, I realize that another year is passing without my building up the compact book of a year’s worth of Filofax pages that, every December, I used to wrap in a rubber band and put on a shelf, just as my new refills came in the mail. Nobody is grieving. Well, I’m grieving now, Baker. You never know what you’re going to miss.

Points of Entry: This Week's Recommendations

LEATHER-BOUND APP
Beautiful Filofaxes — alligator-bound for $2,300! — chronicle experiences, not events. Why not undigitize one part of your life? Filofax.com.

DAY JOB
An Aztec calendar, engraved in ceramic tile, by woodbyderaud. An abstract one, quilted, by Cactus Rose Quilts. A Mayan one, hand-tooled on a purse, by Izachel. Watch your life pass by the handmade way: find a calendar on Etsy.com.

GETTING THINGS DONE
Organization fanatics love SmartTime Pro, which, while arranging scheduled events to your liking, can also “find time for your tasks” — including minor errands like, as SmartTime proposes, “unjam paper in copy machine.” Demo at leftcoastlogic.com.

The Post-Hispanic Hispanic Politician - NYTimes.com

Sarah Wilson for The New York Times

NATIVE SON Castro at a meeting in January about the rebuilding of the east side of San Antonio.

By ZEV CHAFETS

In early December, Julián Castro, the newly elected mayor of San Antonio, visited the White House to attend President Obama’s national jobs-and-economic-growth forum. Castro was one of only five mayors in attendance and, at 35, the youngest. When his turn came to speak — the subject was the creation of green jobs — the president looked at him, midway down the long conference table, and said: “I thought he was on our staff. I thought he was an intern. This guy’s a mayor?” The other participants — world-famous economists, environmentalists and politicians — burst into laughter.

“Of San Antonio, Tex.,” Castro said evenly.

Obama grinned. “I’m messing with you,” he said. “I know who you are.”

Castro was neither flustered nor flattered by the president’s bantering familiarity. Of course Obama knew who he was — gate-crashers might make it into White House social events, but they don’t get to the table of high-level West Wing policy meetings led by the president himself. Castro smiled politely at Obama’s jest and then proceeded to the business at hand, delivering prepared remarks about employment and the energy market in San Antonio. He is cerebral, serious, self-contained and highly efficient. If he were an energy source, he’d be zero-emission. A video of the event shows the president listening intently to Castro’s presentation and nodding occasionally, Harvard Law ’91 silently encouraging Harvard Law ’00.

A few days before the meeting, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood visited San Antonio and told the mayor that he was “on the radar in Washington.” The morning of the meeting, Castro was included in a small working breakfast hosted by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; Valerie Jarrett, one of the president’s closest advisers, was there, too. Castro was being noticed and auditioned. It had been about a dozen years since another brilliant young man from San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, regarded by many as the emerging national leader of the Hispanic wing of the Democratic Party, lost his political future in a sex-and-money scandal. Cisneros’s implosion left an opening. For a while, Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, and Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, were Great Hispanic Hopes, but scandals eventually knocked them out of contention too.

A lot of very smart people, not all of them in Texas, see Julián Castro as the favorite to fill the leadership void. “Julián really stands out,” says Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, an associate professor of Chicano and global studies at U.C.L.A. “There are other talented young Hispanic politicians around, but few have his stature or national potential. He’s from San Antonio, but he’s very much admired in California. He’s like Obama — one of us, but someone who also comes out of a broader American experience.”

Castro “has all the assets to become the next favorite son,” is how John A. Garcia, a political-science professor at the University of Arizona, puts it. “He has an elite education, which has given him a national network, and a quiet, serious public persona that appeals to a lot of younger Hispanic voters,” Garcia says. “People look at him and say, ‘Finally, we have somebody who won’t screw up.’ Of course, he’s still young, and he might be too good to be true, but if I were betting on the next national Hispanic political leader, I’d bet on Julián.”

In 1984, Mexican-American political activists were thrilled when Walter Mondale publicly considered Cisneros for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. But second place no longer seems such a great prize. “In 1984, there were 20 million Hispanics in America,” according to the political activist Antonio Gonzalez, who heads the William C. Velasquez Institute. “Today, we are 50 million, and more and more people are registering to vote.” Who they will vote for and what issues will cement their party loyalty is one of the great questions of American politics. This year Democrats hope to exploit the ire among Hispanics over the new G.O.P.-inspired law in Arizona that empowers local police forces to crack down on illegal immigrants.

Mark McKinnon is prepared to be more explicit about the long-term stakes. An early member of George W. Bush’s inner circle in Austin, he knows Texas political talent when he sees it. “Julián Castro has a very good chance of becoming the first Hispanic president of the United States,” he says flatly.

Julián Castro is the son of Rosie Castro, a well-known ’70s firebrand who was among the leaders of La Raza Unida, the radical movement in Texas that was dedicated to defending the civil rights of Mexican-Americans and promoting a strong “Chicano” identity. One of Castro’s first acts as mayor was to hang a 1971 La Raza Unida City Council campaign poster, featuring his mother, in his private office. But this was a gesture of filial loyalty, not of ideological solidarity. A Democrat, Castro is a pragmatist, sometimes unpredictably so. He supports free trade, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, advocates an energy policy that includes fossil fuels, believes in balanced budgets and refers to David Souter as his ideal Supreme Court justice. Like a large plurality of his fellow San Antonians, Castro is a Roman Catholic, but he was the first San Antonio mayor to be grand marshal when he marched in the annual gay rights parade, and he is pro-choice. “We disagree on this, the pope and I,” he says with a smile.

Nothing seems to ruffle him. Recently, after Arizona passed its tough immigration law, most Hispanic politicians reacted with fury. Some even compared the decision to apartheid. Castro, through a spokesman, phrased his own opposition to the decision in characteristically understated and inclusive language, saying, in part: “Texas has long been an example of how two neighboring countries can co-exist in a mutually beneficial way for the American economy. A law like Arizona’s would fly in the face of that history.”

Julián Castro seems entirely comfortable expressing views on national and international matters normally outside the purview of first-term mayors. He and his identical twin, Joaquín, are scions of the west-side barrio political machine their mother helped build, and they were raised with the expectation that they would be leaders, young men of personal excellence and public spirit. They were the undisputed stars of Jefferson High School, where they played on the tennis team, earned top grades and skipped 10th grade. In their spare time they accompanied their mother to political events and strategy sessions, where they were exposed to her fiery style of radicalism (which, in any case, was softening over time); met the key figures in the Chicano political world; became practiced community organizers on political campaigns; and learned to make the system work for them.

“Joaquín and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action,” Julián says. “I scored 1,210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student. But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquín. I’m a strong supporter of affirmative action because I’ve seen it work in my own life.”

In college, Julián majored in communications and political science and tied his brother for most votes in the student senate election their junior year. During the summer of 1994, he was a White House intern. (“You think I look young now, you should have seen me then,” he says.) When Joaquín did not get into Yale Law School, the brothers settled for Harvard. Julián joined Alianza, an Hispanic organization at the school, and served on the Law School Council, but his thoughts were on San Antonio politics. In his last year at Harvard, he decided to run after graduation for the City Council seat that had eluded his mother, and he was so eager to get going that he held his first fund-raiser among his fellow students in Cambridge. He won that race and took a seat on the council in 2001. The following year, Joaquín was elected to the Texas State House of Representatives from a district that includes San Antonio. The Castro boys were back in town.

“Julián and Joaquín were young but not new,” Jim Dublin, a veteran San Antonio political consultant, says. “We’ve been reading about their exploits in the paper since they were at Jefferson High.”

A place on the San Antonio City Council doesn’t come with a salary, and the Texas State House of Representatives, which meets only 140 days every two years, pays what averages out to be about $16,000 annually. The Castro brothers already had day jobs at the local branch of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a major law firm with offices around the world. Later they started their own practice. A celebrated personal-injury case, in which they represented victims of a fatal drunken-driving accident, earned them enough to comfortably continue their political careers.

In 2005, Julián ran for mayor. His opponent was the retired judge Phil Hardberger, a Democrat who was a decade older than the combined ages of Julián and Joaquín. Rosie Castro cast a shadow; Julián found it hard to raise money in the Anglo business community, and he worked hard to reassure voters that he was not just a barrio candidate. “When I represent, I represent everyone,” he said. He won a plurality in the first round of balloting but narrowly lost the runoff to Hardberger. It wasn’t just the Rosie factor that hurt. Hardberger’s predecessor, Ed Garza, was widely regarded as lackluster, and voters weren’t in the mood for another boy wonder from Jefferson High, as Garza had been. Four years later, Hardberger retired from office, and Castro captured City Hall in the first round of balloting. At 34, he was the mayor of the seventh-largest city in the United States.

SAN ANTONIO is located in south central Texas, about 150 miles from the Mexican border. Like Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, San Antonio swallows its suburbs and expands as it goes. You can fit Chicago, Boston and Miami into the city limits and still have room for Manhattan. At the center of this sprawl is the old town of San Antonio, built by the Spanish in the early 18th century. And at the heart of the old town is the Alamo. When I visited in September, the small mission and the plaza surrounding it were full of tourists of all ages. “This place means so much to so many people,” says Bruce Winders, the curator and historian of the Alamo, who, with spontaneous Texas hospitality, had volunteered to serve as my guide. “Folks come here as pilgrims. They want to see the cradle of Texas independence. To those from around the country, it reinforces their identity as Americans. To Texans, it says, ‘You are part of this story.’ The Alamo is a place that helps parents pass their history along to their children.”

The Alamo, where a small band of volunteers held off the Mexican Army for 13 days, inspiring the ultimately successful fight for Texas independence, is run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. For a decade, according to Winders, the Daughters have been trying, in vain, to get permission from City Hall to put up some explanatory signs on municipal property bordering the plaza. He attributed this failure to “ideological hostility” in a city where some people take a dimmer view of the Alamo. People like Rosie Castro.

I met the mayor’s mother in her office at Palo Alto College, where she runs a student-services center. She was born in San Antonio in 1947 to an immigrant mother who didn’t get past fourth grade; she didn’t meet her father till she was 34. To Rosie, the Alamo is a symbol of bad times. “They used to take us there when we were schoolchildren,” she told me. “They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up I learned that the ‘heroes’ of the Alamo were a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them. But as a little girl I got the message — we were losers. I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”

That evening I dined with the mayor and his wife, Erica, at Rosario’s, a large, upscale cantina favored by young businesspeople and political types. Erica is a consultant to math teachers, four years Julián’s junior, who grew up on the south side hearing tales of the amazing Castro brothers. Julián and Erica met one summer when he was home from Harvard, and then dated, mostly long distance, for eight years.

The mayor asked about my session with his mother. “She hates the Alamo,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” he said with what might have been a slight smile.

“What about you? How do you feel about it?”

“The Alamo?” he said. “It’s the largest tourist attraction in Texas. And tourism is one of San Antonio’s major economic engines.”

I mentioned that the Alamo’s curator complained that the city wouldn’t give permission to put up signs on municipal property.

“I’ve never heard that before,” Castro said. “I’ll look into it.”

“The curator called it a shrine.”

Castro considered that briefly, then nodded. “There are people for whom the Alamo is a sacred place,” he said without any discernible emotion.

ROSIE CASTRO proudly calls herself a “Chicana,” a term that connotes political activism and ethnic pride, but she says her son is different. “I don’t think Julián would call himself a Chicano,” she told me. “A Latino maybe.” When I relayed this to the mayor, he didn’t disagree. “I consider myself Mexican-American, both parts of that phrase,” he said. “I don’t want to turn my back on my mother’s generation. But we are less burdened.”

Historically, Mexican-Americans have generally been considered “white” in Texas; they served in white units of the segregated military, including the National Guard, and were allowed, during the Jim Crow years, to marry white (but not black) partners. In the early ’40s, the Texas Legislature even passed a “Caucasian Race Resolution,” which affirmed their status as white. Today the U.S. Census treats “Hispanic,” “Latino” and “Spanish origin” — terms that apply to anyone of Spanish-speaking background — as an ethnic category. Race is a separate category, with various options, including a nonspecific “some other race.” In 2000, about half of all Hispanics checked “white” for race. Castro told me that he was planning to check “some other race” in 2010. He is uncomfortable referring to himself as “brown,” and he doesn’t use the term “people of color” when he discusses Mexican-Americans.

Whatever their racial and geographic differences, Americans from Spanish-speaking cultures in different parts of the country increasingly see one another as sharing a common identity and interests. Partly this is a result of astute marketing by Spanish-language mass media. But politics plays a major role. “The pan-Latino process in the U.S. encompasses everyone, though the Cubans lag behind,” says Antonio Gonzalez of the William C. Velasquez Institute. “And the biggest single unifier among subgroups across the Latino community is compatibility on issues.” Roughly 60 percent of Hispanics identify themselves as Democrats. And because Mexican-Americans dominate the national pan-Latino community through sheer numbers — they make up about 60 percent of the total Hispanic population — and they are concentrated in key electoral states like Texas and California, simple arithmetic and political logic make it very likely that one of the next national political leaders of Hispanic America will be a Mexican-American Democrat.

In 2000, while Castro was still in Cambridge, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington argued that mass immigration from Mexico poses an existential threat to the United States. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote, “is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.” At the heart of Huntington’s critique, which many Americans share, is the sense that Mexican-Americans will form a permanent, unassimilated superbarrio across the Southwest and elsewhere. Julián Castro’s San Antonio is one place that counters that concern.

“San Antonio is the city of the future, the avatar,” says Karl Eschbach, until recently the official demographer of the state of Texas. “The Mexican-American population is about 60 percent of the city, but it is now several generations old. There is comparatively little immigration these days. Mexican-Americans in San Antonio experience a continual drift” into a blending with non-Hispanic whites and others.

Arturo Madrid, a professor of humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, agrees with Eschbach’s assessment. “The power of America is undeniable,” he says. Like Rosie Castro, Madrid is a proud product of the Chicano movement, but he has no illusions about the shape of the future. “People may check ‘Hispanic’ on the census, but in San Antonio they are Tejanos, Texans of Mexican ancestry,” he told me. “This is the model of what America will look like in other cities. English will be the dominant language. Young Mexican-Americans may display minor symbols of their ethnicity — ‘I eat spaghetti, therefore I’m Italian,’ that sort of thing — but their kids will consider themselves American. We are already your neighbors and fellow workers, and are or soon will be your in-laws.”

Madrid considers it only natural that the young mayor of San Antonio is seen as the new man in Hispanic politics. “We were the first big city with Hispanic political leadership,” he says.

Paradoxically, Julián Castro’s appeal to fellow Hispanic voters may be limited by his own assimilation. Although he pronounces his name “HOO-lee-un,” he doesn’t really speak Spanish — a fact he isn’t eager to advertise. La Raza put a high premium on the mother tongue, but Rosie Castro spoke English to her sons, and Julián studied Latin and Japanese in school, while Joaquín studied Latin and German. A lack of Spanish fluency isn’t unusual in San Antonio, especially among Castro’s generation, but in the immigrant barrios of Houston and the colonias south of Interstate 10 down to the border, Spanish is the first and often only language. A Mexican-American with statewide political aspirations needs to be able to do more than pronounce his name correctly. Early in his administration, Castro assigned his chief of staff, Robbie Greenblum — a Jewish lawyer from the border town of Laredo whose own Spanish is impeccable — to discreetly find him a tutor. Rosie Castro’s son is now being taught Spanish by a woman named Marta Bronstein. Greenblum met her in shul.

IT’S NOT CLEAR what Castro can accomplish as mayor. His executive clout is limited. The daily business of San Antonio is conducted by a professional city manager. The mayor’s power derives from being the senior elected official in the city and his role as chairman of the City Council, the body that wields ultimately authority over municipal affairs. He gets an office, a car and driver, a secretary, police protection and the same per-meeting stipend paid to other members of the council. Some of his predecessors have treated the mayoralty as a part-time job, but Castro is at his desk every day. He has also surrounded himself with a high-powered staff that includes Greenblum, who was a prominent local attorney before signing on with the mayor; the spokesman Jaime Castillo, a former political columnist for The San Antonio Express-News; and Manoj Mate, a friend from Harvard Law and a Ph.D. candidate in political science who serves as senior policy adviser. This is not the sort of team you put together if you are planning to settle in for a nice long career as a politician in San Antonio.

Castro knows that his future is a matter of constant speculation; given his age and his meteoric career path, it could hardly be otherwise. But talking about it is dangerous. “There’s a push-and-pull here,” he told me. “I’ve read about Bill Clinton, how he rose. Even Arkansas people who didn’t like him took pride in his success.” But in San Antonio, he added, “nobody likes people with big heads.”

Still, in his quiet way, Julián Castro is fiercely competitive, and he keeps score. In our first conversation he rattled off the names of his Harvard Law contemporaries who have already been elected to public office around the country. Most, like Joaquín, are still in state legislatures. And being in the House of Representatives “means being one of 435 Representatives,” he told me. “You can’t really get that much done on your own. I prefer executive positions.” (Joaquín is considering a Congressional run in 2012 if there is an open seat. He is a minute younger than Julián and, for now, defers to his elder twin.) Julián conceded that the Senate might be a slightly more interesting job, but there remained the problem of being one in a crowd.

“Would you accept a cabinet position?” I asked. That was the route taken by Cisneros.

“Not likely, no,” Castro said in a way that suggested he had been considering it.

I asked what that left: “President?”

“It is way too early to be thinking about that,” Castro said.

“TO BE HONEST, I can see a path to Washington for Julián,” Joaquín Castro says. “That path leads through the governor’s mansion in Austin. A Democrat who can win the governorship of Texas would automatically be under consideration for a spot on the national ticket.”

For the moment it seems a distant goal. Texas is Republican territory — Republicans hold every statewide elected office — and polls show Gov. Rick Perry running ahead of his Democratic opponent, the former Houston mayor Bill White. But if White loses in November, it will present Castro with an opportunity. Mexican-Americans already make up a third of the state’s population, and they are registering to vote in increasing numbers.

The majority of the Mexican-American vote in Texas (and beyond) went to Obama in 2008, and it is widely assumed by Democratic strategists that their party will continue to benefit from Latino voters. This, however, is not settled political science. “The Democrats are way ahead of the Republicans,” John Garcia says, “but there isn’t a complete buy-in. The attitude is, They are better than the Republicans, but not great.”

This year, Marco Rubio is making a strong run for the open U.S. Senate seat in Florida. Rubio, the favorite son of the Cuban community, is an attractive young Republican, but his appeal doesn’t extend to the broader Hispanic community. Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based political consultant, predicts that Rubio would lose the non-Cuban Hispanic vote to Kendrick Meek, the African-American Democratic candidate.

Rubio’s problem is not simply ethnic; it is not very likely that any Republican will make strong inroads with Mexican-American voters as long as the G.O.P. remains hawkish on border control, supports Arizona-style policing of illegal residents and calls for fewer government entitlements. If Republicans hope to compete nationally, they will need more flexible policies and candidates as appealing as Julián Castro. The name that most often arises is George P. Bush, son of Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and nephew of President George W. Bush. As governor of Texas, W. was popular with Mexican-Americans, and in the 2004 election he won more than 40 percent of the national Hispanic vote. His nephew George P. (whom George H. W. Bush famously described as “one of the little brown ones”) is now all grown up and living in Texas. He is a graduate of Rice University in Houston and the University of Texas law school and recently helped found a political-action committee in Austin to recruit Hispanic Republicans. He has all the tools — good looks, fluent Spanish, ethnic bona fides on his Mexican-American mother’s side, instant name recognition and access to a network of political and financial connections on his father’s — that could make him a formidable vote-getter. Mark McKinnon, who helped put Bush 43 in the White House, half-jokingly refers to George P. as “47.”

Julián Castro and George P. Bush have been aware of each other for some time. “We have mutual friends,” Castro told me. “They introduced us in Austin, three or four years ago. George worked for Akin Gump after law school, just like Joaquín and I did. He’s a reserve officer in the Navy. There’s a lot to admire about him. And of course, he has a lot going for him.”

Still, the Castros are not intimidated by the Bush pedigree or by other contemporaries in the Anglo establishment. “Julián and I are just two guys from the bad side of San Antonio,” Joaquín told me. “When we went away to school, we didn’t know what to expect. At Stanford and Harvard, we were among all these people from the leadership class, people with fancy educations and pedigrees, and very often we were the only Hispanics in the classroom. But we listened to the people at Harvard, and I have to say, we were never overwhelmed.”

ON SEPT. 16, the Castro brothers celebrated their 35th birthday as they always do, together. This time, though, they were joined by a thousand or so of their best friends and voters at a gala held in Sunset Station, an old railroad depot near the Alamo that has been remade into an ornate party space. A long line of people waited for the chance to have their pictures taken standing between Julián and Joaquín, who were dressed in nearly identical suits and ties. In the 2005 mayoral race, the brothers caused a minor scandal when it was discovered that Joaquín substituted for Julián at a campaign event. Some voters were amused by this, others infuriated, claiming it raised questions about the mayor’s maturity.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Julián and his younger brother is that Joaquín is still single and known to enjoy his status as San Antonio’s most eligible bachelor. During the course of the evening, a number of very attractive young women posed between the brothers. Erica, who can tell them apart, kept a watchful eye, although probably unnecessarily. From an early age Julián and his brother have been taught by their mother that bad company — especially bad female company — is Kryptonite to young politicians.

The party was loud and eclectic, a mélange of Mariachi, cool jazz, R&B and country music performed by locals. A parade of men in black shirts, playing drums, whistles and maracas, and women decked out in gold lamé snaked through the party. The boys took the stage and thanked everyone for coming. Julián announced that the Senate had just confirmed Sonia Sotomayór for a seat on the Supreme Court, which elicited a loud cheer.

Rosie Castro was working the room that night, and I was on her to-do list. She introduced me to old comrades from the movement, made sure I got a piece of cake and reminded me that, while I may have come to San Antonio to write about Julián, Joaquín was just as talented. “There is a potential for them both to go much further,” she said. It was hard to disagree. When Barack Obama was their age, he was still only on the cusp of entering the Illinois State Senate.

About two months later I got a call at home from Julián. He was in Boston attending a conference, but there was something on his mind. “I looked into the problem you asked about,” he said. “The signs for the Alamo? I think there might have been some misunderstanding about that in the past.” City officials could find no record of a request for signage. “But of course we’ll allow them to put up their signs on city property. I’ll see to it personally.”

I can’t say I was surprised. You don’t get where Julián Castro is — or where he intends to go — by forgetting the Alamo.

Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He writes often about politics and religion. His new book is “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”