US and Pakistan alliance feels strain over scope of militant crackdown

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By Associated Press, Saturday, April 16, 2:14 PM

ISLAMABAD — When U.S. President Barack Obama inherited Washington’s partnership with Pakistan, he kept the money flowing in hopes that stronger ties would help end the Afghan war and give Pakistan more tools to keep its nuclear arsenal from falling into extremists’ hands.

What Washington has gotten for its billions, however, is limited progress on clearing militant strongholds on the Afghan-Pakistan border and a souring relationship that included threats this month to limit CIA drone strikes and require Pakistani clearance for Washington spy operations.

Adding to the complications is the narrow nature of the relationship. America’s interests in Pakistan — transformed by the 9-11 attacks — are built almost entirely around high-stakes security issues and the bonds between the CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency.

Washington expects its massive aid to Pakistan should buy it broad cooperation and wide latitude to strike at Islamic militants, including those backing the Taliban in Afghanistan. But in Pakistan, there are growing calls to rein in U.S. operations, particularly in the wake of a bitter diplomatic dispute after a CIA contractor fatally shot two Pakistanis in January.

Pakistan also sees the U.S. alliance in practical terms: a way to keep pace with rival India and prop up its flagging economy.

“Ultimately, both sides will suffer an unhappy relationship because we oddly need each other,” said Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Center for Peace and Strategic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, who closely follows Pakistan’s military and intelligence affairs.

“They need our money and our weapons to keep up with India and to maintain their rentier state economy,” she added. “We need them because we are scared about their nuclear weapons, the militants and the intersection of the two.”

Both sides make no secret of their gripes.

Pakistan is frustrated by stepped up drone attacks and accusations it is weak against Islamic militants despite nearly 3,000 dead soldiers, a five-year war in its tribal areas and dozens of arrests of suspected al-Qaida operatives or affiliates.

Washington grumbles that Taliban-backed groups still find sanctuaries in Pakistan and other jihadi factions — some with links to al-Qaida — are growing in strength.

Obama’s policies also are on the line. He abandoned the U.S. protocol of engaging almost solely with Pakistan’s military. He chose instead to embrace a costly program of support for Pakistan’s civilian political system, expecting it would lead to efforts to wipe out domestic extremists. They include Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks and has suspected links to the Pakistan’s intelligence service.

In Pakistan, newspapers express near daily outrage over an “arrogant” America allowed to kill Pakistanis with impunity and pulling the strings of the weak government of President Asif Ali Zardari. They also claim Pakistan is being made the scapegoat for U.S. and NATO military shortcomings in Afghanistan.

But it was the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis that exposed the fissures in the critical relationship between CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, known by the acronym ISI.

Davis claimed the shootings were in self defense and was freed last month after blood money was paid to the dead mens’ families.

Western officials familiar with the events said there were heated exchanges between the CIA and ISI when Pakistan refused to consider him covered by diplomatic immunity and release him immediately.

ISI Director Gen. Shuja Pasha even temporarily severed communications with the CIA, according to a Western diplomat who asked not to be identified because it would compromise his relationship with the ISI.

The fallout, however, may not be over.

The ISI has warned it could expel dozens of suspected CIA operatives, whose missions may include assessing the security of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Other punishments could be halting direct U.S. contacts in the tribal areas along the Afghan border, where Americans have handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars for tips, said an ISI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity according to standing rules at the spy agency.

Both Pakistan’s government and military also want fewer drone strikes, say ISI and government officials. A March 17 attack — the day after Davis was released — drew a rare public condemnation from Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. Dozens of tribesmen died in the strike along with a handful of insurgents, said U.S. and Pakistani officials.

“Now the onus is on America to do more to build this relationship on the basis of trust and equality. Treat us as allies that you say we are,” said the ISI official.

Pasha’s meeting this week with CIA chief Leon Panetta was about setting new rules, said Georgetown analyst Fair.

“For the first time, (Pasha) laid down the red lines. He reckoned that in this game of chicken (America) will blink because we are freaked out by the nukes and we won’t do anything that will keep us from having some eyes on,” she said.

Still, Washington officials say they are reducing their dependence on Pakistan by rerouting supplies to its troops in Afghanistan through Central Asia after relentless attacks by insurgents in Pakistan. Although nearly half of all supplies still transit Pakistan.

“The two sides distrust each other as they should, but it’s about managing that distrust,” said a U.S. official in Washington on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

While U.S. officials have expressed a deepening sense of frustration over the growth of jihadi groups that could threaten the United States and the continued sanctuaries in the tribal regions, none have publicly or privately advocated Washington cut and run.

Marc Grossman, U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a U.S. audience this week that the Obama administration was committed to building an enduring partnership with Pakistan.

“There’s always been tensions in the relationship. There’s been tensions with the military, the defense, and even on development aid.I think we have to work through it and continue to support the civilian government,” said U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the U.S. State Department and foreign operations.

“It’s in the interest of the national security of the United States that we continue to work with them. They are an important ally.

Yet some say Washington’s support for Pakistan’s transition to democracy has taken a back seat to security concerns.

Samina Ahmed, who heads the International Crisis Group in Pakistan and Afghanistan, said the Pakistani military still appears to seek to appease some militant groups and differentiate between “good and bad militants.”

“If indeed it is a partnership then you (Pakistan) have to deliver on your side of the bargain,” said Samina Ahmed, who heads the International Crisis Group in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Fair said both countries are studying how to move forward in a relationship with “starkly divergent strategic interests.”

“Both sides wonder if the other is a pain-in-the-ass ally or an outright foe,” she said. “This conversation is happening on both sides.”

___

Kathy Gannon is special regional correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Associated Press writers Adam Goldman, Bradley Klapper, and Donna Cassata in Washington contributed to this report.

In southwest Va., as more need help, aid organization has less to give

By Eli Saslow, Saturday, April 16, 8:22 PM

PULASKI, Va. — The destitute people who line up outside her office are asking for more help than ever. The organization where she works has less than ever to give. It falls on Denise Hancock to navigate the chasm in between, so she rubs her forehead, opens her office door and calls out into the waiting room. “Come on in,” she says.

The first client this morning at the Pulaski Community Action office is a young woman with tangled hair and smudged eyeliner, a single mother of two who lost her job at Shoney’s restaurant. “You’re my last resort,” she says, handing over a piece of paper stamped, “Urgent: Termination Notice.” It is an electric bill for $510.15 with full payment due immediately. “Can you help me?” she asks.

Hancock purses her lips, already knowing what will come next. She punches numbers into a calculator and then begins the same conversation she will have 14 more times on this day alone.

“I’m really sorry,” she says. “All we can afford to give right now is $35.”

This is how Hancock spends her days: caught in a constant tug-of-war between competing economic disasters. She works for an emergency assistance program in a town where one-third of people live in poverty and a record number rely on food stamps. While the talk in Washington and on Wall Street is about signs of economic recovery, people here in southwest Virginia come to Hancock’s office seeking the basics for survival: Food. Shelter. Work. Formula for a newborn. Medication for a failing heart.

At a time of such high demand, poverty-assistance programs across the country are facing a financial crisis of their own. Hancock’s organization, which totals four employees in a rundown, two-story house, is almost out of money. Local businesses that once donated thousands each month have yet to donate a single dollar this year. As the national deficit continues to skyrocket, federal and state governments are proposing the most severe budget cuts to social service programs in decades, threatening to reduce spending by 50 percent or more.

Now Hancock, a 43-year-old single woman with no savings account, worries about much more than how much money is left to give. She also worries about losing her own job.

But she is still employed on this day, at least, and now the young mother in her office begins to plead.

“Ma’am, only $35?” she says. “That’s not gonna make a dent. How can we survive with no heat, no stove, no washing machine, no microwave?”

“Okay, honey. Okay,” Hancock says. “Let’s take a look and see what we can do.”

She logs onto her computer, which contains a database of all 2,799 people who have come into this office for help in the last six months. The emergency assistance program has existed in Pulaski for almost 50 years, but only recently has the caseload started to grow by a few hundred people each month.

“I have a few standard questions that I have to ask for our records,” Hancock tells the young mother. “Is your income still zero?”

“Yes.”

“Still getting food stamps?”

“Yes.

“Still providing for all three people in the house?”

“Yes.”

Hancock studies the woman’s file. Outside the door, she can hear other voices in the waiting room, where the characters change but the conversation never does. The only topic that matters in Pulaski, a town of 9,000, is what has been lost: 3,000 textile jobs in the last decade, the Wal-Mart, the Main Street barbershop and all eight restaurants downtown. What remains are mostly vacated furniture factories with busted-out windows, churches, pawnshops and a food kitchen for the poor where Hancock herself eats lunch because it helps cut back on expenses. Only a year ago, the emergency assistance office routinely handed out $1,000 in vouchers each week. Now it has less than $1,000 total in its bank account until more donations come in.

“I’m sorry,” Hancock says, finally. “But $35 is the best we can do.”

“We’re going to be out on the street,” the woman says.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Hancock says. “But we’re hurting, too.”






Twenty miles away, at a coffee shop in Blacksburg, Va., Hancock’s boss works on a math problem of her own. Terry Smusz, the executive director of New River Community Action, runs 11 poverty-assistance organizations in southwest Virginia on an annual budget of $7 million. Now she studies a pie chart illustrating the sources of her 2010 funding, three-quarters of which is in doubt. “All these pieces of the pie are just disappearing,” she says.

Fifteen percent of her budget is federal stimulus money, a one-time influx that will be spent by this summer.

Seven percent is state funding, which the Virginia General Assembly voted to cut by more than 60 percent a few weeks earlier.

Two percent is private donations, which have declined to record lows.

Forty-eight percent comes from the federal budget, all at stake as Democrats and Republicans make proposals to Congress that would drastically change how the country fights poverty.

For 30 years, the federal government has funded poverty-assistance programs through the Community Services Block Grant, which distributes money to individual states that divide their share among thousands of local organizations. The grant demands minimal federal oversight, and some politicians have long disparaged it as wasteful or inefficient. But never before has it been targeted like this.

“This is the hardest time we’ve ever had financially,” Smusz says. “Everyone is tightening up, which creates a huge trickledown effect.”

The trickledown began in January, when President Obama, confronted with a staggering $14 trillion in national debt, announced during his State of the Union address that his 2012 budget would include “cuts to things I care deeply about, for example community action programs in low-income neighborhoods.” A former community organizer in Chicago, Obama proposed eliminating the $700 million block grant program and replacing it with $350 million in competitive grants, meaning some programs would receive nothing as early as next year.

That news spread to a network of 1,065 community action agencies across the country, where directors said they would be forced to lay off employees, close job training centers and shutter homeless shelters if Obama’s budget cuts are approved by Congress later this year. In existence since 1964, the Community Action Partnership worked with more than 20 million people last year when a record 15 percent of Americans lived in poverty.

One of those 1,065 directors, Smusz, called a meeting with her financial advisers to discuss worst-case scenarios, including one that would involve closing the entire agency within two years. “This would fundamentally change who we are and what we do,” she says. Already she has sent an e-mail to her staff warning that “cuts will need to be made to personnel — possibly positions, hours and/or fringe benefits.”

Finally, the trickledown effect reached the two-story house in Pulaski, where people gather around a tray of day-old bread in the lobby, share the grim details of their finances and come away with $35 vouchers that cover a tiny fraction of their bills. Food prices here have jumped 8 percent in the last year; electricity bills are up an average of 20 percent.

The office’s four employees are all local women, each with more than a decade of community action experience. Hancock is the only one who works on the first floor of the house, which means she sees the most traffic, sometimes counseling 30 people per day. She is a college graduate who has devoted 15 years to social service, but she still makes less than $26,000 per year.

It has always been a hard job, but lately there are days when it feels untenable. People here seem more desperate than ever, she says, and more likely to snap. Now the police sometimes drop by the office to make their presence known, and management has installed an emergency buzzer on the side of Hancock’s desk in case she feels threatened. Now bosses distribute training manuals on how to defuse “emotional situations” and industry experts talk about increased risks of burnout and “vicarious traumatization” for social service workers dealing with the ruins of a historic recession.

Hancock doesn’t much believe in any of that. Sometimes her day ends with a headache or a little back pain, and lately she needs a cigarette on the porch between appointments to calm her nerves. But it’s the people she counsels who are really suffering, she says. And for every one who is likely to snap, there are all the others.

Those are the ones she remembers from earlier this year, when, as a last resort, the emergency office placed an advertisement in the local newspaper asking for donations. The results began arriving in the mail a few days later: envelopes filled with $1 bills and sent from addresses listed in the agency’s database, a surge of donations from the very welfare recipients who come to the office for help.






Hancock is supposed to spend about five minutes with each client. Her job, officially, is to distribute vouchers and ask a few basic questions for record­­­-keeping — income amount, food stamp status and number of residents in the house.

But she also believes it is her job to listen, which means her sessions stray off script and last 20 minutes or more. “People who are suffering need to be heard,” she says, and that much she knows. Five years ago, her only son, Buck, committed suicide at 15. Hancock found him hanging from a tree in the backyard early the next morning. She wanted to sell the house or at least cut down the tree, but she couldn’t afford to do either. So instead she mounted a quilt made of Buck’s old T-shirts on the wall in her living room, put his name on her license plate, adopted eight dogs to keep her company and tore through mystery novels to occupy her mind. She saw a counselor and joined a support group. Being with other people kept the loneliness at bay. Talking helped.

So now, when people come into her office, she speaks in a constant hum even as she listens. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I know. Oh, honey. Oh, Lordy.” She makes eye contact. She never looks at the clock. She tells them: “I shop at Family Dollar. I know what it’s like to be poor.” Mostly, she nods in affirmation and listens to their stories.

Into her office comes a 56-year-old named Sam: “I’ve been calling into the radio station, putting an ad on the air looking for work — any work — but there ain’t nothing. Nothing in this damn town. We’ve been staying out in the street three nights, then sleeping over with my nephew and them. Now we’ve found a place real cheap out in Newbern. Good news is, we’ve got either the security deposit or the rent. Bad news is, we don’t got both.”

Next is Cari, with long black hair and a too-small T-shirt: “I used to work over at the foundry, melting liquid iron, but that’s been a year and a half ago at least. My husband and me are living with a friend now. He’s real good to us, but food goes fast.”

Next is a 29-year-old who wants gas money to visit a sick grandfather: “I need a tank and some Tylenol.” Next is a woman with an electric bill for $422.13 who bounces her right knee compulsively and adds the numbers on the bill again and again: “This can’t be right, can it? No, this can’t be right.” Next is a regular client, an ex-convict who comes each month for food, and Hancock walks next door to the pantry and fills four Save-A-Lot plastic bags with chicken gizzards, canned beans, cheese, peanut butter, tuna, ramen noodles and generic-brand cereal. “This is great,” the man says, rifling through the bags to see what’s inside. “This is my grocery shopping.”

Next is a woman with a $210 water bill . . . and a homeless teenager carrying his belongings in a duffel bag . . . and a father of two hoping to pick up some cereal. Hancock gives him three boxes and watches him head out the door. The waiting room is empty. The office is quiet. Finally.

“I can’t take no more today,” Hancock says. “I need a cigarette.”

She walks out to the sloping front porch and lights up a Pyramid 100. A battered Ford truck pulls up across the street. The driver climbs out and starts walking toward the porch. “Oh no,” Hancock says. “Another.”

It’s almost 4:30 p.m., a full hour after she is scheduled to stop seeing clients. Two of her co-workers have already gone home for the day and the other is about to leave. But Hancock stubs out her cigarette, smiles at the woman and holds open the front door. The client follows her into the office, and Hancock sits down at the computer. For now, she still has a little money left to give out. For now, this is still her job.

“Okay,” she says, looking across the desk, beginning the same conversation again. “Income still zero, honey?”



saslowe@washpost.com

In Syria, protesters push to end decades of isolation

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By Tara Bahrampour, Saturday, April 16, 8:36 PM

BEIRUT — When Samer, a university student in Damascus, joined in the largest anti-government demonstrations so far in the capital Friday, he felt something he had never felt before. It was not fear, though he was afraid in the first few seconds.

“After the first yelling, the first shout, you feel dignity,” said Samer, 24, who like many protesters did not want his surname used for fear of reprisals. “You feel that you are a real citizen, a real Syrian citizen.”

They are still a minority, but every day more Syrians are stepping out of the house and into the streets, breaking the barrier of silence that has gripped them for decades. Many are young men, propelled as the young often are by adrenaline and bravado.

But in a deeper sense, they are ordinary people who say they feel linked for the first time to a wider world, one in which democracy movements in Tunisia and Egypt led to the departure of autocratic leaders, showing them that such things are possible.

It is a world in which they no longer feel alone. For decades one of the Middle East’s most isolated societies, Syria has in recent years allowed its people access to the Internet and satellite television. Now, technology is playing a crucial role in their democracy movement, as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype help them evade government detection as they communicate with one another and disseminate information.

Being in touch with so many fellow Syrians inside and outside the country has galvanized them in a way that eluded their parents’ generation.

“I knew well about the arrests in the past years, but I couldn’t go to the streets by myself,” said Bahaa, 25, an art student in the city of As Suwayda who joined protests last week for the first time since they started. After seeing YouTube footage of earlier demonstrations, he and his friends decided it was time to do more than just watch from the sidelines. “I was so happy,” he said, speaking via Skype like others in Syria interviewed for this story, “because for the first time I was demanding my freedom.”

In countries caught up in the Arab Spring, single events have become catalysts for revolution. In Tunisia it was the self-immolation of a distraught fruit-seller, in Egypt the beating death of a young man arrested in an Internet cafe, pictures of whose disfigured corpse went viral. In Syria, it was the arrest and torture of teenagers for writing anti-regime graffiti in the town of Daraa. Each time, the people involved became symbols of a society’s pent-up frustration.

“They’re like Rosa Parks,” said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. “Individuals who, at moments of rage and anger and refusal to be dehumanized any longer, they stood up. And they spoke for the millions of others.”

But for Syrians, whose population includes Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds and Druze, the thirst for revolution has been slower to take root, in part because of an appreciation for what the regime has given them: security in a region where sectarian violence has plagued their neighbors.

Syria’s leaders have exploited fears of sectarian strife, hanging up banners reading “Security and Stability,” and now, in the face of protests, warning that greater freedoms will lead to civil strife along the lines of Lebanon or Iraq.

When Bashar al-Assad, 45, became president in 2000 after the death of his father, president Hafez al-Assad, there were hopes that he would usher in political reforms. But he has been criticized by rights groups for continuing his father’s repressive tactics and crushing dissent in this country of 22 million.

On Saturday, in response to protests, he promised the end to emergency laws that have for the past five decades allowed the state to arrest people without charge and control dissent. But the announcement came with the caveat that protests would not be tolerated once the laws were lifted, and it was followed by more protests.

Still, Assad has had more support than the Egyptian or Tunisian presidents had “because there has been stability,” Khouri said. “If you don’t foment revolution, you can live your life.”

Watching and waiting

Most Syrians have yet to join the protests, because they support the regime or they fear reprisals if the movement fails — or chaos if it succeeds.

“Syrians are rightfully fearful that this call for peace and freedom is a chimera, a phantom, a mirage,” said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “That’s why Syrians have been so slow, that’s why it’s been gaining momentum, but step by step. Because the middle class, the silent majority, are still sitting on the fence. But the more they see these videos [of crackdowns,] the more it repulses them.”

Razan Zaitouneh, a lawyer and human rights activist in Damascus, said it is a matter of time. “They are watching, and waiting, to break this fear wall. Many people are saying ‘God bless you,’ but they haven’t participated yet.”

Many Syrians, and experts, say Assad could have prevented the explosion of rage by making democratic concessions early on rather than firing at protesters. More than 200 people have been killed in the demonstrations, according to human rights organizations.

“The bastard started at the end,” said a 30-year-old Syrian activist who recently fled to Beirut to escape arrest in Damascus. “He started by shooting at people. So people have nothing more to be afraid of. People got killed, their neighbors got killed, their friends, their family members got killed. What else could happen?”

At the same time, in a country where the government survived in part by isolating people, Assad helped make the uprisings possible by legalizing the Internet and satellite television, Landis said. “He was trying to modernize his country, and to modernize the country meant engaging the world, and that ultimately undermined this isolation,” Landis said.

So did programs installed by the Bush administration to bring technology to Syria and other countries through democracy-promoting organizations such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, Landis said.

Cyber activism

Such technology allows Rami Nakhla, 28, to spend his days holed up in an east Beirut apartment where he collects accounts from Syrians via Skype and passes them on to international news organizations, which were expelled from Syria early in the uprising. A political science student and journalist who fled Syria in January, he gives protesters tips such as planning escape routes and using a buddy system (he also retweets threats he receives from the Syrian government).

Nakhla sat hunched over a laptop this week with the recently arrived activist, both still in hiding from Syrian security forces who in the past have kidnapped Syrian dissidents on this side of the border.

As the “bloops” of Skype messages punctuated the sparsely furnished room, Nakhla explained to one protester how to upload a video on YouTube and exclaimed over news coming in of women in the streets of one town, demanding the release of their detained male relatives.

“They don’t really have experience with cyber activism,” said Nakhla, who subsists these days on cigarettes and mate, a highly caffeinated South American tea popular in Syria. “So we’re trying to help them, to connect people on the ground.”

His friend looked up from his laptop with news: “There’s a student protest in front of SANA [the state news agency] in Damascus.”

“Really? Wow,” Nakhla said. “They were trying to make students not political at all. So people are really surprising us with their awareness.”

In another way, though, he is not surprised. The recent crackdowns differ from mass killings in 1982 under Assad’s father, he said. “No one knew really what was happening there, and to this day we don’t know the numbers. But today, after opening fire, in five minutes we will have it in the news. Today you cannot get away with it.”

Even in areas that are rural — and less connected — indignation seems to have trumped fear.

“There is a dramatic change in my village,” said a Syrian driver in Beirut who recently visited his village in Ar Raqqah province, where he said residents have been emboldened by recent events. “Before, people would sit in a cafe and they were careful because they would know there were pro-government people listening. But now everyone is talking freely, even though they know they are still listening.”

As in Egypt and Tunisia, protesters in Syria insist their movement is secular and grass-roots. “Nobody is leading us, nobody is making us go to the street,” said Alaa, 24, an English student in As Suwayda who joined the demonstrations for the first time last week. The authorities “are trying to make it religious. But we are not moved by religion. We are moved by freedom, by our sense of humanity.”

Now that he has demonstrated once, he said, he will keep going. “Maybe I will get killed, maybe my brother will get killed,” he said. “But we will not stop.”



bahrampourt@washpost.com

In Afghanistan’s south, signs of progress in three districts signal a shift

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By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Saturday, April 16, 8:11 PM

SANGIN, AFGHANISTAN — Signs of change have sprouted this spring amid the lush fields and mud-brick villages of southern Afghanistan.

In Sangin, a riverine area that has been the deadliest part of the country for coalition troops, a journey between two bases that used to take eight hours because of scores of roadside bombs can now be completed in 18 minutes.

In Zhari district, a once-impenetrable insurgent redoubt on the western outskirts of Kandahar city, residents benefiting from U.S.-funded jobs recently hurled a volley of stones at Taliban henchmen who sought to threaten them.

And in Arghandab district, a fertile valley on Kandahar’s northern fringe where dozens of U.S. soldiers have been felled by homemade mines, three gray-bearded village elders made a poignant appearance at a memorial service last month for an Army staff sergeant killed by one of those devices.

Those indications of progress are among a mosaic of developments that point to a profound shift across a swath of Afghanistan that has been the focus of the American-led military campaign: For the first time since the war began nearly a decade ago, the Taliban is commencing a summer fighting season with less control and influence of territory in the south than it had the previous year.

“We start this year in a very different place from last year,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top coalition commander in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview.

The security improvements have been the result of intense fighting and the use of high-impact weapons systems not normally associated with the protect-the-population counterinsurgency mission.

In Sangin, Zhari and Arghandab — the three most insurgent-ridden districts in the south — the cost in American lives and limbs since the summer has been far greater than in any other part of the country. More than 40 Marines have been killed in Sangin in the past nine months, and three dozen more have lost both legs. The Army brigade responsible for Zhari and part of Arghandab has lost 63 soldiers since July.

The question of the moment for Petraeus and his subordinates is whether the gains will hold as Taliban commanders, laden with cash and munitions, stream across the desert from Pakistan, where there has been considerably less progress in denying them sanctuary.

Senior U.S. officers said they expect the insurgents to shift tactics: Instead of trying to take on American troops directly, as they did in Sangin and Zhari in the fall, the Taliban will attempt to plant more homemade explosives, recruit a new cadre of suicide bombers and assassinate Afghan government officials — as it did late last week, killing the police chief in Kandahar province. The result, according to an internal military projection, could be a far more violent summer for both Americans and Afghans.

Petraeus and other U.S. commanders say they are hopeful that Afghan civilians will feel confident enough to report Taliban activity to U.S. or Afghan troops. They also are optimistic that improvements in the quality of the Afghan army and of U.S. battlefield intelligence will provide a significant boost to counterinsurgency efforts.

For now, however, President Obama, who has pledged to begin pulling out troops in July, faces a complex and risky challenge. Within the next three months, he must decide whether the tenuous but promising changes in southern Afghanistan merit a significant reduction of forces or a more token drawdown.

That calculus also will be complicated by a deterioration of security in eastern Afghanistan. Because senior officers had long assumed the east was more secure than the south, the bulk of the surge forces were sent southward to Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Now some of those officers are hoping to shift more troops east if the improvements in the south hold.

Petraeus has not provided his withdrawal recommendation to Obama. The four-star general said the progress across southern Afghanistan remains “fragile and reversible,” although he also has made it clear to his subordinates that he thinks it can be cemented with enough time and military pressure.

Other U.S. military officials and some diplomats regard the transformation as unsustainable. They doubt Afghan government officials, police officers and soldiers will be able to take control of cleared areas by 2014, the year by which the United States and its NATO allies have pledged to cede responsibility for security to the Afghans.

“It’s great that the Taliban has been pushed out of these areas, but then what?” said a senior U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Once we leave these places, it’s hard to imagine that the Afghans will really be able to hold on to them.”

Officers across southern Afghanistan say the changes that have taken place during the fall and winter — the result of a gloves-off pummeling of insurgent strongholds, deals with tribal elders and changes in local government — have increased the chances that this shift might be different from so many earlier proclaimed successes. And even if the Taliban makes some gains, military officials maintain that the destruction of numerous insurgent bunkers, the seizure of tons of munitions and the removal of thousands of homemade bombs will put the group at an unprecedented disadvantage this summer.

Intercepted Taliban communications suggest insurgent commanders are increasingly demoralized, according to military intelligence officers. In Kandahar province, levels of Taliban activity were lower this March than a year ago, the officers said.

“We’ve changed the battlefield,” said Lt. Col. Jason Morris, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment. His unit took 29 fatalities during its seven-month deployment in Sangin, more than any other battalion in Afghanistan. “They’re not going to be able to fight the way they used to.”

SANGIN

The killing fields

For the Marines in 3/5’s Kilo Company, their very first patrol led them into the horrors of Sangin.

On the afternoon of Oct. 14, 1st Platoon exited its new home, a spartan outpost in a belt of farmland between the Helmand River and Route 611, the district’s main north-south road. Walking single file, scanning the shoulder-high cornfields for signs of insurgents, the platoon set out for a nearby village.

The Marines had not traveled more than 250 yards when the shooting started. First a few pops. Then a volley. And then a fusillade from not just AK-47 rifles but belt-fed machine guns as well.

Pinned down amid the corn, the platoon radioed for help. A reinforced machine-gun squad from 2nd Platoon threw on its gear and left the outpost to set up a blocking position so the Marines from 1st could withdraw. But as soon as the backup squad neared the scene, it was ambushed by a dozen insurgents.

Within minutes, the squad’s leader was shot in the leg. The only place his comrades could take cover was an adobe compound to the southwest marked on their maps as Building 3.

It was then that those Marines — and soon the rest of Kilo Company — would come to understand why Sangin had become the killing fields of the war in Afghanistan.

As the squad rushed toward the compound, one of the machine gunners stepped on a homemade mine on the southern corner. He was blown into a nearby canal.

On the north side of the building, a Marine seeking cover behind a wall was struck by a bomb planted in it. When the squad’s medic rushed over to help him, he stepped on a pressure-triggered makeshift bomb. He lost both his legs, and the Marine he sought to save died before the medevac helicopters arrived.

There were so many explosions, so close together, that others in the platoon assumed fellow Marines were firing mortar rounds at the Taliban. Only later would they understand that the sound was from their buddies stepping on mine after mine.

“It opened our eyes,” said Sgt. Joel Bailey, a machine gunner in the squad who jumped into the canal and tried unsuccessfully to save the first Marine felled by the explosions. “It was then that we realized that it was going to be a slugfest for a while.”

By the time 1st Platoon and the response squad from 2nd Platoon made it back to their outpost, they discovered another challenge. They were desperate for more ammunition, but the Taliban had dammed up nearby irrigation canals, flooding the sole dirt road leading to the outpost and rendering it impassable to armored U.S. vehicles. The Marines eventually were forced to wade through the muck on foot, hoisting the ammunition on combat stretchers, under the cover of darkness.

“This was Day One,” said Capt. Nikolai Johnson, the commander of Kilo Company.

The rest of the year would prove to be just as arduous and bloody. Johnson and his troops learned that, like Building 3, canal embankments and tree lines that seemed like natural points of defense throughout Sangin were lined with mines by the Taliban.

By the end of December, Taliban attacks had claimed the lives of eight men from Johnson’s company of about 120 Marines. Two dozen more were injured so severely that they had to be sent home, several as double or triple amputees.

But Johnson’s company refused to hunker down in its posts. Almost every day, the Marines would set out on another mission, often in the direction of buildings flying white Taliban flags, even if it meant stepping on a mine. Their goal was to get in fights and kill as many insurgents as they could.

“We developed a hunter mentality,” he said. “This was a great place to be if you’re a Marine infantryman.”

ARGHANDAB

Flattening a village

When Lt. Col. David Flynn brought his 800-strong battalion from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to northern Arghandab in July, he expected to wage the sort of counterinsurgency mission that has become vogue in the U.S. military. He would win over the locals by building schools and clinics, providing agricultural assistance, and sipping tea in weekly shuras with village elders.

But as soon as his soldiers arrived, they faced the same reception as the Marines in Sangin. Mines fashioned from plastic jugs of homemade explosive and crude, pressure-sensitive triggers were everywhere — on dirt paths, under culverts, in the branches of pomegranate trees.

Sometimes the bomb-sniffing dogs caught them. Sometimes the soldiers spotted them. And sometimes they stepped on them. Blown-off limbs quickly became the signature injury for America’s surge troops in the south.

In the battalion’s first 100 days on the ground, it lost seven soldiers. Another 70 were wounded.

So instead of sipping tea, Flynn decided to strike back.

An initial target was the village of Tarok Kolache, a collection of about a dozen mud-brick, multi-family housing compounds surrounded by pomegranate orchards. Video from surveillance aircraft indicated that the village had been vacated, save for insurgents who were manufacturing homemade explosives in the walled-off courtyards.

“The place was completely riddled with evil,” he said.

Officers in Flynn’s battalion had the aircraft fly overhead for a few weeks to ensure there were no signs of civilians who had returned. He also consulted a local leader who confirmed that all the residents had left Tarok Kolache.

Then he requested and received permission to flatten the village.

U.S. B-1B Lancer and A-10 Warthog jets conducted repeated bombing runs. A new ground-launched artillery rocket system also pelted the enclave. All told, almost 25 tons of ordnance was dropped on Tarok Kolache.

When it was over, the village was a giant patch of dirt, save for a few mud walls that survived the onslaught.

Flynn described the bombed-out village as “a parking lot.” But he insisted he did not bomb a village. “We bombed an enemy stronghold,” he said.

His unit went on to flatten parts of three other nearby villages.

Such aggressive measures, far harder-edged than how the U.S. military has traditionally operated in Afghanistan, became a critical component of operations across the south. In Zhari, soldiers fired more than 400 high-explosive line charges — small rockets that pull a wire embedded with C4 and can clear a truck-wide path for 110 yards. Everything in the way was pulverized, including roadside bombs, crops and homes.

In Sangin, the Marines used 24 line charges to tear up a 1,600-yard stretch of road embedded with 52 bombs. In another part of the district, they used multiple charges to demolish tall compound walls that insurgent snipers employed for concealment; Marine officers have told residents that if they want to rebuild, their walls must be lower than four feet.

The Army has changed the landscape in even more unusual ways in Zhari. Soldiers have sought to block off the western side of the district by building a five-mile-long sand berm topped with razor wire. Taking a page out of the military’s Iraq playbook, they also have installed more than 10 miles of tall concrete walls along roads in the southern half of the district that cut through flat farmland. While some residents find the sight of cement walls running alongside wheat fields to be overly penal, the unsightly measures are aimed at restricting insurgents’ ability to drive back into the area with munitions-filled vehicles.

The tactics have not fueled a groundswell of anger, in large part because the destroyed compounds were largely empty and no civilians were killed. The military also has been doling out compensation, in the form of cash payments or, in the case of Tarok Kolache, a U.S.-supervised rebuilding of a village.

Flynn’s battalion established an outpost in the village and hired contractors to resurrect the structures. The local mosque, once a mud-walled edifice, has been rebuilt with brick and concrete; it features colorful minarets and a large prayer room. Laborers are working on a series of long brick buildings to replace the adobe housing compounds.

Flynn also is planning a change to the tall mud walls that Afghans typically use to mark their property. Instead of establishing a height requirement, he has purchased rolls of chain-link fencing. He is hoping to persuade the Afghans to give it a try.

Residents appear generally supportive of Flynn’s effort, in part because they are getting a construction upgrade and payments for three years of lost crops. The cost of the overall reconstruction effort in Tarok Kolache, including compensation for damaged fields and culverts, is about $1.3 million. Flynn regards it as a small price to pay to evict the Taliban and save the lives and limbs of his soldiers.

Since the village was razed, Flynn said, there has been almost no insurgent activity in the area. The presence of U.S. troops has made it an inhospitable place to reestablish bomb factories. Residents also are expressing a greater willingness to provide information about Taliban infiltration.

Flynn thinks they are motivated by a new sense of security — as well as a new deterrent in the form of Tarok Kolache’s destruction.

“People understand that if the Taliban come back again, that could happen again,” he said.

ZHARI

Getting a new leader

Nothing seemed to be breaking Col. Art Kandarian’s way in Zhari this past summer.

The Taliban had mined the dirt paths through the district’s agricultural belt, forcing his troops to scale row after row of chest-high mud mounds farmers use to grow grapes. It reminded him of the hedgerows in Normandy that so challenged the American soldiers in the weeks after D-Day.

The Afghan army battalion assigned to fight alongside his soldiers was fresh out of basic training and had no combat experience. Only one of the 500 soldiers was from Kandahar province. The rest had no local knowledge.

But perhaps the most vexing problem was the local government in Zhari. It consisted of one man, Karim Jan, the district governor. And Kandarian’s soldiers quickly learned that the official was not much of a leader.

He rarely left the district’s main town, and he had little interest in convening assemblies of village elders. He steered jobs and resources to his fellow Alizai tribesmen, and he seemed beholden to the local power broker, Haji Lala.

The Americans wanted Karim Jan out, but there was little they thought they could do about it. His presence in the district was the direct result of political deals made by President Hamid Karzai.

Then Kandarian finally got lucky. When American officials learned that Karim Jan was trying to spring two men from police custody who were implicated in the deaths of three U.S. soldiers, they pounced. The pressure led the governor of Kandahar province to move Karim Jan to another district and anoint a well-regarded Zhari resident as the new district leader.

The change in leadership, Kandarian said, has been “instrumental in Zhari’s transformation.”

The new district governor, Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi, has built a staff of two dozen municipal employees, including education and agriculture officials. He convenes regular community meetings and travels through the district. And he has been persuading Zhari residents who fled to Kandahar city to return to their homes.

The impact has been profound. On a recent Friday morning, Kandarian’s deputy, Lt. Col. Joseph Krebs, headed to a village three miles south of his base for a gathering of elders. The trip there took 15 minutes — and not a shot was fired. This past fall, soldiers would have been pelted with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades within minutes of moving south from the base.

When he arrived at a combat outpost near the village, Krebs walked about in awe.

“Just being able to stand here is amazing,” he said. “Six months ago, if you were here, you were in a gunfight.”

At the meeting, held in an Army tent, 45 elders sat in a circle, munching on apples provided by the soldiers. Much of the session was devoted to complaints — the lack of a doctor, the poor flow of water in irrigation canals, the need for a new school.

Krebs and his fellow officers deemed the meeting a success. The fact that residents were willing to gather, even if to complain, was a major step forward.

Before the participants left, Lt. Col. Ghulam Hazrat, the Afghan army battalion commander in the area, implored them to seize the opportunity afforded by the American-led push to evict the Taliban over the past several months. He urged them to stand up to the insurgency by reporting any suspicious behavior, and he told them to take advantage of U.S.-funded day-labor programs.

Hazrat did not delve into the politics of the war playing out in Washington, but it was clear he understood the slim prospects of the U.S. military expending so much blood and treasure over another year if residents again acquiesced to the Taliban.

“This is a golden chance,” he said. “You’ll never get it again.”

SANGIN

Cutting a peace deal

Leaders of the Alikozai tribe in the upper Sangin valley had spent a year talking to Afghan government officials about a peace deal.

But the discussions never progressed beyond preliminaries. The Alikozai were scarred by a previous attempt to oppose the Taliban, in 2007, that collapsed when they failed to receive assistance from Afghan and coalition forces. The Taliban tied one Alikozai elder to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him out of the district.

There also was the problem of Alikozai involvement in large-scale opium processing in the valley. The tribe did not seem ready to give up its hand in the lucrative drug trade.

Then, in the fall, an elite Marine reconnaissance battalion pushed into the Alikozai area, about five miles north of where Kilo Company was operating. The unit’s initial mission was to secure Route 611. Opening that road through Sangin, and north to the Kajaki Dam, is a critical priority for U.S. commanders because they want to repair the dam’s hydropower generators.

But the recon Marines also served as a cudgel. They were attacked by young Alikozai fighters who had been egged on and paid off by Taliban commanders. So the Marines fought back. In October and November, the reconnaissance battalion killed about 200 Alikozai militants in the valley. The 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment, the unit in Sangin that suffered devastating casualties, killed several hundred more insurgents to the south over the same period, many of them Alikozai as well.

“We started stacking bodies like cordwood,” said an officer in Sangin, who like other Marines asked for anonymity to speak frankly. “And they came to a point where they said, ‘Holy [expletive], there aren’t that many of us left.’ ”

On New Year’s Day, Alikozai elders agreed to a security pact with the governor of Helmand province that calls for the tribe to forsake the Taliban and rein in its young men from joining the insurgency. In exchange, the Afghan, U.S. and British governments will fund development projects in the 15-mile-long Alikozai area and the Marines will consider releasing some Alikozai detainees.

Afghan officials and U.S. diplomats hailed the deal as a sign of how the promise of reconstruction aid can lead to reintegration, but Marine officers have a different view of why the Alikozai came to the table.

“You can’t just convince them through projects and goodwill,” another Marine officer said. “You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That’s how you start convincing them.”

Since the deal was struck, violence has dropped significantly in the valley. But the real test will occur later this spring, after the vast tracts of opium-producing poppies are harvested in Sangin. Will the Alikozai remain good to their word? And will the tribe be able to fend off an expected onslaught by Taliban commanders eager to recruit young men to reclaim territory they lost to the Marines last fall?

“Do they have the will and the capacity?” said Morris, the commander of the 3/5. “It remains to be seen.”

Marines and Afghan officials now are trying to replicate the Alikozai deal with other tribes in the area. On a recent morning, Morris and the governor of Sangin, Mohammed Sharif, traveled to southern Sangin to meet with men from the Ishakzai tribe, a historically marginalized group that has been embraced by the Taliban.

Standing under camouflage netting on a dusty Marine base, the gray-bearded Sharif, a former schoolteacher, implored 50 men seated before him to renounce the insurgency.

“Dear brothers, it’s enough,” he said. “The things you have done, it’s enough. Come back to the government. If you have done bad deeds, God will forgive you.”

But none of the Ishakzai expressed any interest in reconciling. Many in the tribe continue to grow poppies on their land and fear a deal with the government would interfere with their livelihoods.

After brief speeches from the police chief and Morris, the elders got up to leave. As they departed, several thrust claims for property damage at the governor and the Marines.

“The people are still scared,” a one-legged, white-turbaned elder named Abdul Haq said as he hobbled away. “If we unite, the Taliban will come to each of our homes and kill us.”



chandrasek@washpost.com

U.S. and Allies Seek Possible Refuge for Qaddafi

By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has begun seeking a country, most likely in Africa, that might be willing to provide shelter to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi if he were forced out of Libya, even as a new wave of intelligence reports suggest that no rebel leader has emerged as a credible successor to the Libyan dictator.

The intense search for a country to accept Colonel Qaddafi has been conducted quietly by the United States and its allies, even though the Libyan leader has shown defiance in recent days, parading through Tripoli’s streets and declaring that he has no intention of yielding to demands that he leave his country.

The effort is complicated by the likelihood that he would be indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, and atrocities inside Libya.

One possibility, according to three administration officials, is to find a country that is not a signatory to the treaty that requires countries to turn over anyone under indictment for trial by the court, perhaps giving Colonel Qaddafi an incentive to abandon his stronghold in Tripoli.

The move by the United States to find a haven for Colonel Qaddafi may help explain how the White House is attempting to enforce President Obama’s declaration that the Libyan leader must leave the country but without violating Mr. Obama’s refusal to put troops on the ground.

The United Nations Security Council has authorized military strikes to protect the Libyan population, but not to oust the country’s leadership. But Mr. Obama and the leaders of Britain and France, among others, have declared that to be their goals, apart from the military campaign.

“We learned some lessons from Iraq, and one of the biggest is that Libyans have to be responsible for regime change, not us,” one senior administration official said on Saturday. “What we’re simply trying to do is find some peaceful way to organize an exit, if the opportunity arises.”

About half of the countries in Africa have not signed or ratified the Rome Statute, which requires nations to abide by commands from the international court. (The United States has also not ratified the statute, because of concerns about the potential indictment of its soldiers or intelligence agents.) Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, suggested late last month that several African countries could offer Colonel Qaddafi a haven, but he did not identify them.

As the drama over Colonel Qaddafi’s future has intensified, new details are emerging of the monthlong NATO bombing campaign, which, in the minds of many world leaders, has expanded into a campaign to press the Libyan military and Colonel Qaddafi’s aides to turn against him.

That effort has gone more slowly than some expected; after the defection of the former intelligence chief and foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, no other senior officials have broken with the man who has ruled Libya for 42 years.

Six countries — Britain, Norway, Denmark, France, Canada and Belgium — have provided more than 60 aircraft that are conducting airstrikes against Libyan targets that attack civilians. But NATO commanders say they are still struggling to come up with at least eight more warplanes to ensure the alliance can sustain a longer-term operation and relieve strain on pilots now flying repeated combat missions.

The United States, which carried out the largest share of strike missions before handing off control of the operation to NATO on April 4, has promised additional fighter-bombers and ground-attack planes if NATO requests them. While some European officials have privately complained that the United States should resume a leading role in the attack missions, American officials say they have not received any formal requests for additional aircraft.

Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama, asserted that in a month’s time the coalition has accomplished three major objectives: saving the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi from becoming the site of a civilian atrocity, setting up an international command to protect civilians and clear the skies of Libyan aircraft, and providing modest amounts of humanitarian assistance.

Still, the NATO countries flying ground-attack missions operate under different degrees of caution when striking targets that could hurt civilians or damage mosques, schools or hospitals, complicating the campaign, a senior American military official said. Some pilots have refused to drop their bombs for this reason, the official said, but allied air-war planners cannot predict which pilots will be matched against particular targets.

“Without a doubt, it is frustrating working through all this to get maximum effect for our efforts and dealing with all these variants,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting coalition partners.

American officials concede that the rebel leaders have not settled on who might succeed Colonel Qaddafi if he is ousted, and some fear that tribal warfare could break out if there is no consensus figure who could bind the country together.

White House officials say that while they would have liked to see Colonel Qaddafi depart already, they believe that pressure is building.

“There are aspects of the passage of time that work against Qaddafi, if we can cut him off from weapons, material and cash,” Mr. Rhodes said. He added that “it affects the calculations of the people around him. But it will take time for the opposition group to gel.”

Earlier this month, an American envoy, Chris Stevens, was sent to Benghazi to learn more about the Transitional National Council. The group has pledged to work toward new presidential and parliamentary elections after Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster, uphold human rights, draft a national constitution and encourage the formation of political parties. Mr. Stevens is expected to stay as long as a month, security permitting, State Department officials said.

The United Nations special envoy to Libya, Abdelilah al-Khatib, a former Jordanian foreign minister, is also meeting with opposition figures, as well as with members of Colonel Qaddafi’s government to explore possible diplomatic settlement.

Perhaps the most prominent member of the government in waiting is Mahmoud Jibril, a planning expert who defected from Colonel Qaddafi’s government. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has met twice with Mr. Jibril, who American diplomats say is the group’s most polished and savvy public figure. He also spoke to several NATO, Arab and African ministers who gathered in Doha, Qatar, last Wednesday to discuss the Libya crisis.

Another leading council member is Ali Tarhouni, who was appointed finance minister of the rebels’ shadow government. Mr. Tarhouni, who teaches economics at the University of Washington, returned to Libya in February after more than 35 years in exile to advise the opposition on economic matters.

“With respect to the opposition, we are learning more all the time,” Mrs. Clinton said in Berlin on Friday. “We are pooling our information. There are a number of countries that have significant ties to members of the oppositions, who have a presence in Benghazi that enables them to collect information. Our envoy is still in Benghazi and meeting with a broad cross-section of people.”

Mrs. Clinton told NATO ministers that the coalition had acknowledged the transitional council was “a legitimate and important interlocutor for the Libyan people.” She added: “We all need to deepen our engagement with and increase our support for the opposition.”

Gaddafi presses siege of Misurata as civilians beg NATO to prevent massacre

Image via Wikipedia
By Simon Denyer, Saturday, April 16, 3:22 PM

TRIPOLI, LIBYA — Libyan government forces rained scores of rockets into residential districts of Misurata for a third consecutive day Saturday as ground troops tried to cut the city’s access to the port, its lifeline for food, water and medicine, rebel groups in the city said.

Civilians enduring a weeks-long assault that Western leaders have described as a “medieval siege” pleaded with NATO to intervene to prevent what they said was an impending massacre by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

“Our lifeline is the port, and he is going for it,” said Mohammed, a city council spokesman who for security reasons uses only his first name. “If he is able to do that, then we really are in trouble.”

“If a massacre occurs in Misurata, what will be NATO’s position?” added Mohammed, who spoke via Skype. “It is now or never. Either they intervene immediately and bring in ground troops to protect the port or we will all regret this.”

NATO’s mandate under U.N. resolution 1973 is to protect Libyan civilians, a mission that appears to be going unfulfilled in Misurata. The city, which lies 131 miles east of the capital, Tripoli, is the only one in western Libya under rebel control and a major strategic prize in the conflict.

Doctors reached through Skype said five people died in Misurata on Saturday, bringing the death toll there to 36 in the past three days alone and at least 276 since the siege began in late February.

Farther east, rebels said that four days of NATO airstrikes had helped them advance toward the strategic oil town of Brega, a city that has already changed hands half a dozen times.

But in Misurata, there was no respite, with NATO citing the difficulty of identifying clear targets within the city.

The fighting intensified Thursday when forces loyal to Gaddafi shelled Misurata’s port, forcing it to close for the day and interrupting the flow of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of civilians. Five Egyptians sheltering in a refugee camp for foreign workers were among the dead that day.

On Friday, there was evidence of cluster bombs being used by the government, according to Human Rights Watch, and further shelling and heavy fighting took place on the city’s main thoroughfare, Tripoli Street, and on the main road between the port and the city.

Rebels said government troops had been seen on foot in the city center Friday, an unusual sight as most usually stay in their tanks and armored cars.

On Saturday, government forces shelled a dairy factory and bakeries in the city, rebels said.

The Libyan government has strenuously denied using cluster bombs and has blamed civilian deaths on the “armed gangs” occupying Misurata, an assertion contradicted by UNICEF and foreign aid workers.

Every day, men, women and children are admitted to the hospitals and clinics of Misurata with head, chest and leg wounds from sniper fire and shrapnel, said Morten Rostrup of Doctors Without Borders who visited the city Friday to bring in supplies and help evacuate civilians.

Local doctors told Rostrup they were managing but could easily run out of supplies if casualties keep coming in, he said, adding that many patients were being discharged too early, to make room for others.

“If the port was cut off and there was no way to get supplies in, it would create a very dire humanitarian situation,” he said, speaking by phone from Tunis, where he had just arrived.

Misurata’s port is also a conduit for guns and ammunition sent to the rebels from their stronghold in Benghazi, 500 miles to the east.

Rostrup said thousands of foreign workers were sheltering in a makeshift camp by the port hoping to be evacuated. They had plastic sheets and blankets for shelter, not enough water and were facing an epidemic of gastroenteritis, he said.

Residents of Misurata say they are grateful for the help NATO has provided, but as the shelling continues, they say they need more.

“They are shelling a factory today that makes milk and dairy products for children,” said Aiman Abushahma, a doctor, who spoke via Skype. “We are at war, under siege, and it seems like no help is coming from NATO or anybody.”

“They are firing Grad rockets,” he added, referring to Russian truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers. “Surely they are big enough to be seen by NATO and to be destroyed?”



denyers@washpost.com

Ivory Coast detained strongman held in northern town under UN protection, says former minister

Image via Wikipedia

Communes of Abidjan

By Associated Press, Saturday, April 16, 11:10 AM

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Shooting erupted Saturday in a sprawling Abidjan neighborhood where fighters loyal to Ivory Coast’s arrested strongman Laurent Gbagbo have sought refuge, residents of the area said.

The shooting appeared to be between residual forces of a pro-Gbagbo militia and forces that fought to install democratically elected President Alassane Ouattara, said two residents of Yopougon suburb that includes several ghettos of shacks as well as middle-class homes. The residents spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Also Saturday, Gbagbo’s former foreign minister said Gbagbo is under United Nations protection in a northern town. Ivory Coast’s northern half is a Ouattara stronghold.

Alcide Djedje said Gbagbo is being held in the northern town of Korhogo with at least three ministers and several legislators. He said they are being protected by U.N. peacekeepers after an agreement was reached Thursday with Ouattara’s government. Pro-Ouattara forces arrested Gbagbo Monday after a four-month standoff sparked by Gbagbo’s refusal to cede power after losing a November poll.

Djedje was prevented from saying more to an Associated Press journalist by a member of the pro-Ouattara forces, who said Djedje was not allowed to speak to journalists.

The rest of Ivory Coast’s commercial capital has been largely calm for two days, with some people venturing out of their homes Saturday for the first time in two weeks. But Yopougon residents say they have been assailed by forces loyal to Ouattara, who on Wednesday went house to house searching for former soldiers, whom they shot and killed. On Thursday, residents said the pro-Ouattara forces were shooting into the air to frighten people into fleeing, and then pillaging their homes and shops.

Abidjan had been a city under siege as pro-Gbagbo forces took a last stand and turned heavy weapons on civilians in their fight to keep in power the man who has governed since 2000, delayed elections for five years and then refused to accept his November defeat. Thousands of people have been killed and wounded, the International Federation of the Red Cross has said.

On Saturday, residents of Adjame neighborhood burned bodies and trash in a cleanup effort.

An AP photographer saw two burning bodies and residents said there were other bodies in a huge pile of flaming trash.

“There are too many bodies to count,” one resident said, when asked how many bodies had been burned.

Some said it was the first time they were venturing out in two weeks.

Scores of women in the Treichville neighborhood came out wearing white T-shirts bearing images of Ouattara and his French wife, Dominique. They carried sachets of drinking water, boiled eggs and fried rice, which they offered to pro-Ouattara forces who had taken over the headquarters of Gbagbo’s feared Republican Guard.

“We’ve come out to show our joy. They have liberated us. Until this week, you couldn’t come within 100 meters of that building without being shot at,” said Mariam Anne-Marie Sylla, gesturing at the headquarters.

The women staged a celebratory march through the streets of the neighborhood, shouting Ouattara’s nickname and saying “he is our president and he is the solution,” to Ivory Coast’s crisis.

Pro-Ouattara fighters captured Gbagbo Monday after U.N. and French forces bombed the presidential residence where he had taken refuge in a fortified underground bunker.

Meanwhile, state radio reported that Gbagbo’s interior minister, Desire Tagro, died on Tuesday after being badly beaten by fighters who captured him Monday along with Gbagbo.

Ouattara has said that Gbagbo’s safety is assured and that he wants the former strongman tried by both national and international courts for his alleged crimes. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has said it is conducting a preliminary examination into crimes perpetrated by all sides in the conflict in this West African nation.

Friday night state television broadcast video of the capture earlier in the day of Gen. Brunot Dogbo Ble, head of the Republican Guard that stood beside Gbagbo and fought fiercely in Abidjan, the seat of government.

Saturday’s fighting broke out as officials in Ivory Coast are drawing up a list of ministers, generals and journalists to be charged with blood crimes, corruption and hate speech, the justice minister responsible for human rights told The Associated Press.

Top of the list is Charles Ble Goude, youth minister in Gbagbo’s disgraced government, who organized a violent anti-French and anti-U.N. gang that has terrorized foreigners and ordinary civilians.

On Friday, a government spokesman said Ble Goude had been arrested. But Justice Minister Jeannot Ahoussou said that was a case of mistaken identity.

Ble Goude is known as the “street general” for organizing the violent gang that terrorized Ivory Coast’s foreign population between 2004 and 2005. More recently he incited his Young Patriots, a militia-like gang of thugs, to attack foreigners as well as Ouattara’s supporters.

“We are investigating every member of the Cabinet of Mr. Gbagbo for blood crimes, money crimes, buying guns and other arms,” Ahoussou told the AP in a telephone interview.

He said he also was investigating journalists who broadcast hate speech. Gbagbo had turned the state Radio Television Ivoirienne into a propaganda organ that broadcast statements inciting violence against tribes loyal to Ouattara.

Former rebel forces that fought to install Ouattara also are accused of atrocities, including the slaughter of hundreds of civilians in western Ivory Coast, a stronghold of Gbagbo’s Bete tribe and allied Guere people.

The telephone line broke as a journalist was asking the minister whether he also would be investigating pro-Ouattara forces that perpetrated crimes. Telephone communications are poor throughout the country including in Abidjan.

State television on Friday night also broadcast an appeal by French Ambassador Jean-Marc Simon for witnesses to come forward in the April 4 kidnappings of two Frenchmen, a Malaysian and a citizen of Benin from the downtown Hotel Novotel. They were seized by pro-Gbagbo troops.

Simon asked for anyone with knowledge of their whereabouts or where they might have been taken to let him know.

___

Associated Press photographer Rebecca Blackwell contributed to this report from Abidjan.

Rebels Hijack Gadhafi's Phone Network

• APRIL 13, 2011

A Group of Expatriate Executives and Engineers Furtively Restore Telecommunications for the Libyan Opposition

By MARGARET COKER in Abu Dhabi and CHARLES LEVINSON in Benghazi, Libya



WSJ's Margaret Coker reports on efforts by telecommunications executives to restore cell phone service to rebels in eastern Libya, allowing them to communicate without interference from government personnel loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications.

The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.

That March cutoff had rebels waving flags to communicate on the battlefield. The new cellphone network, opened on April 2, has become the opposition's main tool for communicating from the front lines in the east and up the chain of command to rebel brass hundreds of miles away.

While cellphones haven't given rebel fighters the military strength to decisively drive Col. Gadhafi from power, the network has enabled rebel leaders to more easily make the calls needed to rally international backing, source weapons and strategize with their envoys abroad.

To make that possible, engineeers hived off part of the Libyana cellphone network—owned and operated by the Tripoli-based Libyan General Telecommunications Authority, which is run by Col. Gadhafi's eldest son—and rewired it to run independently of the regime's control. Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim, asked about the rebel cellphone network, said he hadn't heard of it.

Ousama Abushagur, a 31-year-old Libyan telecom executive raised in Huntsville, Ala., masterminded the operation from his home in Abu Dhabi. Mr. Abushagur and two childhood friends working as corporate managers in Dubai and Doha started fund-raising on Feb. 17 to support the political protests that were emerging in Libya. By Feb. 23, when fighting had erupted, his team delivered the first of multiple humanitarian aid convoys to eastern Libya.

But while in Libya, they found their cellphones and Thuraya satellite phones jammed or out of commission, making planning and logistics challenging.

Security was also an issue. Col. Gadhafi had built his telecommunications infrastructure to fan out from Tripoli—routing all calls through the capital and giving him and his intelligence agents full control over phones and Internet.

Charles Levinson


On March 6, during a flight back to the United Arab Emirates after organizing a naval convoy to the embattled city of Misrata, Mr. Abushagur says he drew up a diagram on the back of a napkin for a plan to infiltrate Libyana, pirate the signal and carve out a network free of Tripoli's control.

What followed was a race against time to solve the technical, engineering and legal challenges before the nascent rebel-led governing authority was crushed under the weight of Col. Gadhafi's better-equipped forces. After a week of victories in which the rebels swept westward from Benghazi toward Col. Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte, the rebel advance stalled and reversed on March 17, when the United Nations approved a no-fly zone and government forces kicked off a fierce counterattack.

In a sign of deepening ties between Arab governments and the Benghazi-based administration, the U.A.E. and Qatar provided diplomatic support and helped buy the several million dollars of telecommunications equipment needed in Benghazi, according to members of the Libyan transitional authority and people familiar with the situation.

Meanwhile, rebel military commanders were using flags to signal with their troops, a throw-back that proved disastrous to their attempts at holding their front lines.

"We went to fight with flags: Yellow meant retreat, green meant advance," said Gen. Ahmed al-Ghatrani, a rebel commander in Benghazi. "Gadhafi forced us back to the stone age."

Renewed signal jamming also meant that rebel leaders and residents in Benghazi had little warning of the government forces' offensive across east Libya and the March 19 attempted invasion of Benghazi, which sparked panicked civilian evacuations of the city.

Mr. Abushagur watched the government advances with alarm. His secret cellphone operation had also run into steep problems.

The Chinese company Huawei Technologies Ltd., one of the original contractors for Libyana's cellular network backbone, refused to sell equipment for the rebel project, causing Mr. Abushagur and his engineer buddies to scramble to find a hybrid technical solution to match other companies' hardware with the existing Libyan network. Huawei declined to comment on its customers or work in Libya. The Libyan expats in the project asked that their corporate affiliations be kept confidential so that their political activities don't interfere with their work responsibilities.

Without Huawei, the backing from the Persian Gulf nations became essential—otherwise it is unlikely that international telecom vendors would have sold the sophisticated machinery to an unrecognized rebel government or individual businessmen, according to people familiar with the situation.

"The Emirates government and [its telecommunications company] Etisalat helped us by providing the equipment we needed to operate Libyana at full capacity," said Faisal al-Safi, a Benghazi official who oversees transportation and communications issues.

U.A.E. and Qatari officials didn't respond to requests for comment. Emirates Telecommunications Corp., known as Etisalat, declined to comment.

After 42 years under Moammar Gadhafi's rule, it's hard to imagine what Libya could look like without the dictator in power. WSJ's Neil Hickey reports from Washington on the cloudy outlook for the north African nation.

By March 21, most of the main pieces of equipment had arrived in the U.A.E. and Mr. Abushagur was ready to ship them to Benghazi with three Libyan telecom engineers, four Western engineers and a team of bodyguards.

But Col. Gadhafi's forces were still threatening to overrun the rebel capital and trying to bomb its airport. Mr. Abushagur diverted the team and their equipment to an Egyptian air base on the Libyan border. Customs bureaucracy cost them a week, though Egypt's eventual approval was another show of Arab support for rebels. Egypt's governing military council couldn't be reached for comment.

Once in Libya, the team paired with Libyana engineers and executives based in Benghazi. Together, they fused the new equipment into the existing cellphone network, creating an independent data and routing system free from Tripoli's command.

The team also captured the Tripoli-based database of phone numbers, giving them information necessary to patch existing Libyana customers and phone numbers into their new system—which they dubbed "Free Libyana." The last piece of the puzzle was securing a satellite feed through which the Free Libyana calls could be routed—a solution provided by Etisalat, according to Benghazi officials.

On April 2, Mr. Abushagur placed a test call on the system to his wife back in Abu Dhabi. "She's the one who told me to go for it in the first place," he said.

International calling from Libya is still limited to the few individuals and officials in eastern Libya who most need it. Incoming calls have to be paid for by prepaid calling cards, except for Jordan, Egypt and Qatar.

Domestic calling works throughout eastern Libya up until the Ajdabiya, the last rebel-held town in the east. An added bonus of the new network: It is free for domestic calls, at least until Free Libyana gets a billing system up and running. —Loretta Chao, Shireen El-Gazzar and Sam Dagher contributed to this article.

Write to Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com and Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com