Jakarta Police Investigate Killing

By TOM WRIGHT

JAKARTA -- Police are investigating whether a man they killed over the weekend is one of Southeast Asia's most-wanted terrorists, following a pair of dramatic raids that may have foiled a plot to kill Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Indonesian police killed three suspected terrorists -- including one who a senior antiterrorism official said was Noordin Mohamed Top, the main suspect behind last month's deadly suicide bombings at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta -- and uncovered a large bomb cache for future attacks. Police said they believe the deaths and five arrests unraveled a plan to blow up the private residence of Mr. Yudhoyono, who has made fighting terrorism a hallmark of his administration since coming to power in 2004.

Some experts on Sunday questioned whether police had killed Mr. Noordin, the self-proclaimed representative of al Qaeda in Southeast Asia.

Residents of Beji village in Java look at a bullet-riddled farmhouse on Sunday, a day after police ended a 17-hour siege on the suspected terrorist hideout.

The uncertainty surrounding the fate of Mr. Noordin, who has eluded capture several times, underscores how difficult it has been to stamp out terrorism in the world's largest Muslim-majority country, despite significant strides earlier in the decade.

Police Chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri declined to confirm Mr. Noordin's death Saturday afternoon, saying police would wait for DNA tests on the body, which should take about a week. Later, pictures began to circulate of the man shot dead in the bathroom of a farmhouse near Temanggung, a town in central Java, a province on Indonesia's main island where Mr. Noordin is believed to have spent most of the past six years on the run. Those pictures didn't look like Mr. Noordin, according to people who have seen them.

Sidney Jones, an expert on Indonesian terrorism with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict-resolution body, said police were sure Mr. Noordin was in the farmhouse based on information from two people arrested on Friday in Temanggung, and had confirmed his death after the siege ended. But she now doubts they killed Mr. Noordin, citing the photographs.

If Mr. Noordin is not dead, it would be the latest in a number of near-miraculous escapes and could add to his stature among Indonesian jihadis. "I think he probably was in the house at some point," but may have escaped, Ms. Jones said.

Other intelligence sources continue to believe Mr. Noordin was in fact killed, and even if not, that other aspects of the weekend raids were successful enough to deal a major blow to the embattled network of terrorists in Indonesia. Authorities in recent years have made great strides in combating terrorism in Indonesia, a secular Muslim country of 240 million people, arresting hundreds of alleged militants, and Mr. Noordin's network is now believed to number only around 30 people.

The live television coverage of the police offensives captivated Indonesian audiences. Local news channel tvOne showed live pictures of black-clad antiterrorism police carefully entering the farmhouse near Temanggung after they had riddled the dwelling with a volley of shots and sent in robots to sweep for bombs.

Earlier, police had set off controlled explosions in the house, shaking the building and sending plumes of smoke into the sky. The tvOne news channel reported that a man inside the building at one point called out "I am Noordin M. Top." After the siege ended, ambulances arrived and men carried coffins into the ruined house while police shook hands and congratulated one another, television pictures showed.

At the other raid, before dawn on Saturday near Jakarta, the capital, police uncovered 1,000 pounds of bombs and a car specially modified to carry them. Police opened fire on the car that returned to the house before dawn, killing two people and leading to the arrest of three others. Local media reported that the men tried to hold out, throwing pipe bombs at the police. The car, which had fake plates, had been driven from central Java, police said.

Police said that the target of the bomb was Mr. Yudhoyono's private residence, located about three miles from the house, and that terrorists planned to hit the residence two weeks from now.

"I extend my highest gratitude and respect to the people for their brilliant achievement in this operation," Mr. Yudhoyono said on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.

Police also said the dwelling was used as a safe house by Mr. Noordin and his associates two days after the Jakarta hotel bombings last month. One of the men arrested had reserved a room in the JW Marriott that the terrorists used as their command center.

Police said one of the men killed at the house was Aher Setyawan, a terrorist involved in a 2004 truck bomb attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta, which killed nine people including the suicide bomber. He was arrested in July 2004 before the embassy bombing but was released two months later, just after the attack, due to lack of evidence and didn't go to trial, according to Ms. Jones, the expert on Islamist groups in Indonesia.

Despite those successes, the ultimate value of the weekend's missions could hinge upon whether police really did bring down Mr. Noordin.

The 40-year-old former Malaysian accountant emerged as Asia's most wanted terrorist in recent years, especially after recent arrests of Islamic militants hobbled Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian terrorist network linked to al Qaeda that was responsible for the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 mostly Western tourists.

After that, the senior leadership of Jemaah Islamiyah renounced violence and Mr. Noordin and some hard-core followers struck out alone. His hallmark has been to hit symbols of Western power. Last month's attack on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton, which killed nine people including two suicide bombers, hit a breakfast business meeting of Western businessmen.

Existing photos of Mr. Noordin, believed to date from his 30s, show a well-groomed Malaysian man with a goatee and short dark hair. In other photos, he wears glasses and parts his hair down the middle. But he has also adopted a number of disguises, posing as an itinerant Muslim cleric, a beggar and a well-heeled businessman.

Police have at times been close on Mr. Noordin's tail. In October 2003, Indonesian police tracked Mr. Noordin to a building in the city of Bandung in west Java. When police raided the house, Mr. Noordin had vanished, leaving behind some tattered identification cards and six unexploded bombs.

Police came close again in September 2005, following his path to a safe house in Java before he escaped the search. Then, in November 2005, Indonesian police tracked Mr. Noordin and an associate to another safe house in central Java. His associate died in a hail of bullets after refusing to surrender, according to police officers at the scene, but only after Mr. Noordin had left. Mr. Noordin avoided the police yet another time in 2006 in a raid on a house in Wonosobo, a central Java town not far from Temanggung.

More recently, in June, police arrested a man in Cilacap, central Java, called Syaefuddin Zuhri, alias Sabit, who was believed to be a close associate of Mr. Noordin. That arrest came too late to stop the Jakarta hotel bombings the following month, which police believe were organized from Cilacap. But the detention gave police information they used to further their investigations.

Soon after the attacks, they raided an Islamic boarding school in the town run by Mr. Noordin's father-in-law and found explosives similar to an undetonated bomb in Room 1808 of the JW Marriott, which the bombers had used as a command center before the blasts. Police also arrested Mr. Noordin's wife in Cilacap.

Authorities then put a $100,000 bounty on Mr. Noordin. Early on Friday, their search led them to arrest two people in a market in Temanggung in connection with the hotel attacks. It was unclear what evidence drew the police to Temanggung, but questioning of the two arrested men led them to the farmhouse, which is owned by their uncle, an elderly Islamic school teacher.

Hundreds of police arrived at the farmhouse on Friday and began shooting at whomever was holed up inside at around 5 p.m. local time. The standoff lasted through the night with sporadic automatic gunfire and bomb explosions.

Around dawn on Saturday, a major explosion was heard in the house and later police snipers on a nearby wooded hill intensified their attack on the property, which is surrounded by rice paddies. After the siege ended, police cleared the house, bringing out the dead body that police and antiterrorism officials later said they believed to be Mr. Noordin.

Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com

Taliban Now Winning

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN in Kabul and PETER SPIEGEL in Washington

Associated Press

U.S. soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade take position next to Sari Ghundi village as they patrol near the Pakistani border in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency's spiritual home.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he is to deliver to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to better protect Afghan civilians from rising levels of Taliban violence and intimidation. The coming redeployments are the clearest manifestation to date of Gen. McChrystal's strategy for Afghanistan, which puts a premium on safeguarding the Afghan population rather than hunting down militants.

Gen. McChrystal said the Taliban are moving beyond their traditional strongholds in southern Afghanistan to threaten formerly stable areas in the north and west.

The militants are mounting sophisticated attacks that combine roadside bombs with ambushes by small teams of heavily armed militants, causing significant numbers of U.S. fatalities, he said. July was the bloodiest month of the war for American and British forces, and 12 more American troops have already been killed in August.

"It's a very aggressive enemy right now," Gen. McChrystal said in the interview Saturday at his office in a fortified NATO compound in Kabul. "We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."

In an effort to regain the upper hand, Gen. McChrystal said he will redeploy some troops currently in sparsely populated areas to areas with larger concentrations of Afghan civilians, while some of the 4,000 American troops still to arrive will be deployed to Kandahar.

The Obama administration is in the midst of an Afghan buildup that will push U.S. troop levels here to a record 68,000 by year end. There are roughly an additional 30,000 troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and other allies.

Gen. McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, had a request outstanding for 10,000 more troops. Gen. McChrystal said he hadn't decided whether to request additional U.S. forces. "We're still working it," he said.

Several officials who have taken part in Gen. McChrystal's 60-day review of the war effort said they expect him to ultimately request as many as 10,000 more troops -- a request many observers say will be a tough sell at the White House, where several senior administration officials have said publicly that they want to hold off on sending more troops until the impact of the initial influx of 21,000 reinforcements can be gauged.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers about $4 billion a month.

Gen. McChrystal also said he would direct a "very significant" expansion of the Afghan army and national police -- which would double in size under the plans being finalized by senior U.S. military officers here -- and import a tactic first used in Iraq by moving U.S. troops onto small outposts in individual Afghan neighborhoods and villages.

Outside experts are giving Gen. Stanley McChrystal an assessment of what the war in Afghanistan looks like on the ground, as WSJ's Peter Spiegel reports.

One person briefed on the assessment said it will call for boosting the Afghan army to 240,000 from 135,000 and the Afghan police to 160,000 from 82,000.

One official noted the emerging plans to double the size of the Afghan army and police will require thousands of additional U.S. trainers. The U.S. will also need more troops if security conditions in north and west Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, the official said. "At the end of the day, it's all about the math," he said. "The demand and the supply don't line up, even with the new troops that are coming in."

In earlier phases of the assessment process, Gen. McChrystal's staff conducted a "troop-to-task" analysis that weighed increasing U.S. troop levels by two brigades -- each such unit has 3,500 to 5,000 troops -- or by as many as eight brigades, according to officials familiar with the matter. A middle option of four to six brigades was also considered, these people said.

The prospect of more troops rankles some of Gen. McChrystal's advisers, who worry the American military footprint in Afghanistan is already too large.

"How many people do you bring in before the Afghans say, 'You're acting like the Russians'?" said one senior military official, referring to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. "That's the big debate going on in the headquarters right now."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said publicly during his campaign for the approaching Aug. 20 elections that he wants to negotiate new agreements giving the Afghan government more control over the conduct of the foreign troops currently in the country.

Gen. McChrystal, however, says too many troops aren't a concern. "I think it's what you do, not how many you are. It's how the force conducts itself."

Regardless of how he resolves the internal debate on troop numbers, Gen. McChrystal's coming report won't include any specific requests for more U.S. troops. Those numbers would instead be detailed in a follow-on document that is set to be delivered to Washington a few weeks after the assessment.

The timing of Gen. McChrystal's primary assessment remains in flux. It was initially due in mid-August, but the commander was summoned to a secret meeting in Belgium last week with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told to take more time. Military officials say the assessment will now be released sometime after the Aug. 20 vote.

The shift came amid signs of growing U.S. unease about the direction of the war effort. Initial assessments delivered to Gen. McChrystal last month warned that the Taliban were strengthening their control over Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan.

American forces have been waging a major offensive in the neighboring southern province of Helmand, the center of Afghanistan's drug trade. Some U.S. military officials believe the Taliban have taken advantage of the American preoccupation with Helmand to infiltrate Kandahar and set up shadow local governments and courts throughout the city.

"Helmand is a sideshow," said the senior military official briefed on the analysis. "Kandahar is the capital of the south [and] that's why they want it."

Gen. McChrystal said in the interview that he planned to shift more U.S. troops to Kandahar to bolster the Canadian forces that currently have primary security responsibility for the region. Hundreds of American troops equipped with mobile armored vehicles known as Strykers are already in the province.

"It's important and so we're going to do whatever we got to do to ensure that Kandahar is secure," he said. "With the arrival of the new U.S. forces we'll have the ability to put some more combat power in the area."

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Despite the mounting concern about the Taliban's infiltration of Kandahar, there are clear limits to how soon additional U.S. forces can be sent to the city.

Moving forces from neighboring Helmand is nearly impossible, because those troops have already set up forward bases and recruited help from local tribal leaders, who have been promised American backing. As a result, the additional American troop deployments to Kandahar have only begun in recent days, with the arrival of new reinforcements that will continue into the fall.

Gen. McChrystal defended the decision to focus first on Helmand. The current operation, one of the largest since the start of the war in 2001, was meant to disrupt the Taliban's lucrative drug operations there, he said.

The armed group reaps tens of millions of dollars annually from the sale of opium from Helmand, and the commander said he wants to have troops on the ground before local farmers start to plant their next batch of poppies in November. The U.S. is working to persuade Helmand's farmers to replace their poppy fields with wheat and fruit.

The roughly 4,000 Marines in Helmand have been charged with putting Gen. McChrystal's thinking about counterinsurgency into practice. They are trying to build local relationships by launching small development and reconstruction projects.

Gen. McChrystal said his new strategy had to show clear results within roughly 12 months to prevent public support for the war from evaporating in both the U.S. and Afghanistan.

"This is a period where people are really looking to see which way this is going to go," he said. "It's the critical and decisive moment."

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com and Peter Spiegel at peter.spiegel@wsj.com

News Site Keeps Focus on Town’s Recession

By BRIAN STELTER

Like other media organizations this year, MSNBC.com wanted to show the wrath of the recession at the kitchen table level. So it began what is one of the most unusual experiments in online journalism to date: it ensconced itself in one city in Indiana and documented how that city grappled with the economic downturn.

For the Elkhart Project, which is entering its fifth month, MSNBC.com assigns one staff member to Elkhart, Ind., at almost all times to ensure a regular output of blog posts, slide shows, videos and Twitter messages. In Elkhart, readers and viewers see the effects of job losses, foreclosures and stimulus money projects — what MSNBC.com calls “stories of struggle and recovery in America.”

The project has won over some residents who were initially upset about the media’s portrayal of the manufacturing city of 53,000, which has an unemployment rate twice the national average and is sometimes treated as a national symbol of distressed middle America. The project has also been recognized by other journalists for its storytelling; last week it received the National Press Club’s online journalism award.

The project is not exactly a model of hyperlocal journalism (a term for Web-powered neighborhood news) because it leaves most of the day-to-day reporting to the local newspaper, The Elkhart Truth, which it counts as a partner.

Instead, “we’re focused on the themes that are familiar to all Americans and using our reporting in Elkhart to deal with those universal issues,” said Jennifer Sizemore, the editor in chief of MSNBC.com, which is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.

Vikki Porter, the director of the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California, called the project an excellent example of how a classic journalism model “can be mashed up with the 2.0 storytelling tools of the Web.”

Ms. Sizemore declined to say whether the Elkhart Project was a profitable enterprise, saying “our best news projects serve the consumers’ needs and interests first.”

According to Web measurement firms, MSNBC.com’s Web sites are among the most popular in the country, with about 40 million visitors a month. MSNBC.com would not say how many visitors the project has attracted, but put its audience in the millions.

The project’s genesis was in MSNBC.com’s desire to relate the economic recession to lives of ordinary Americans. “The adage that all news is local is absolutely true,” Ms. Sizemore said, adding that personal reporting humanizes a story.

The Web site had focused at length on a town before: in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, MSNBC.com employees tracked the recovery of two Mississippi towns in a series called “Rising From Ruin.”

Ms. Sizemore said that the hurricane was a local story with national interest, and the Elkhart Project is in many ways the inverse: “It is coverage of a national story through the lens of one location, and includes tools and data that are relevant no matter where you live.”

Elkhart was chosen after President Obama visited the town in February and, as Ms. Sizemore put it, “staked his administration’s credibility on the success or failure of the town’s recovery.” He had already visited twice as a candidate.

A deputy editor suggested that staff members visit Elkhart the next day on an exploratory trip, and MSNBC editors eventually decided that it would serve as the soul of the Web site’s coverage.

The project, at ElkhartProject.MSNBC.com, includes several strands of reporting, including the causes of the somber unemployment statistics, the impact of the federal stimulus funds and the views of young people about the economy.

At the outset in April, the Web site intended to report from Elkhart through the one-year anniversary of Mr. Obama’s February visit. Ms. Sizemore now says the site will stay to track whether stimulus funds show up, and whether they have the intended effect.

“It may be a story that we never really drop from our radar,” she said.

Seemingly every day, an Elkhart article appears on MSNBC.com’s home page, often illustrated by a photo of a local citizen. When Mr. Obama visited Elkhart last week, an NBC correspondent asked him questions submitted by local residents.

Residents seem to have warmed up to the project. In the spring, Jennifer Holderread worried in blog posts and on forums that the city was “in danger of becoming nothing more than a media plaything.”

But her outlook has changed. “I think the people who were initially sent here to cover the economy had the forethought that they were going to cover nothing but poverty and despair,” she said in an e-mail message. Now, though, they are covering events like the county fair and new businesses, showing a more nuanced view of the city.

Dan Gillmor, who runs a center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, praised the project’s ambition, but suggested that MSNBC.com should encourage genuine collaboration with the people of Elkhart, perhaps by incorporating local blogs and videos more fully. “The people of the community could contribute a lot more if they weren’t being seen as sources for interviews or anecdotes, or, to put it less kindly, as journalistic lab rats,” he said.

To buttress its big-picture coverage, MSNBC.com shares reporting with The Elkhart Truth. Ms. Porter said she was most intrigued by the collaboration of the national news organization and the local one.

Rather than merely parachuting into a local story, she said, “this is a commitment model, integrating the local news resources with the national perspective over the long haul

E-commerce Fever Makes Taobao China’s Newest Internet Darling

By DAVID BARBOZA

YIWU, China — In the months leading up to his college graduation in June, Yang Fugang spent most of his days away from campus, managing an online store that sells cosmetics, shampoo and other goods he often buys from local factories.

Today, his store on Taobao.com — China’s fast-growing online shopping bazaar — has 14 employees, two warehouses and piles of cash.

“I never thought I could do this well,” said Mr. Yang, 23, who earned $75,000 last year. “I started out selling yoga mats and now I’m selling a lot of makeup and cosmetics. The profit margins are higher.”

Taobao fever has swept Mr. Yang’s school, Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College, where administrators say a quarter of its 8,800 students now operate a Taobao shop, often from a dorm room.

Across China, millions of others — recent college graduates, shopkeepers and retirees — are also using Taobao to sell clothes, mobile phones, toys and just about anything else they can find at neighborhood stores and wholesale markets or even smuggle out of factories.

Internet analysts say this booming marketplace — reminiscent of the early days of eBay, when Americans started emptying their attics for online auctions — has turned Taobao into China’s newest Internet darling.

Though just six years old, Taobao (Chinese for “to search for treasure”) already has 120 million registered users and 300 million product listings. Its merchants produced nearly $15 billion in sales last year.

The company claims that sales through its Web site are already larger than any Chinese retailer. And, Internet analysts say, sales on its site this year will surpass Amazon.com’s expected sales of about $19 billion.

“This is the next big segment for China’s Internet,” said Jason Brueschke, an Internet analyst at Citigroup in Hong Kong. “It’s their Amazon and eBay combined.”

Like eBay, Taobao does not sell anything itself; it simply matches buyers and sellers. It has a firm foothold in China because many parts of the country still have poor transportation and some local authorities favor their own government-owned outlets, making the retailing system inefficient.

The global recession also left once-booming factories overflowing with goods the rest of the world does not seem to want.

The so-called Taobao addicts are helping to pick up the slack in a sluggish economy. “I can’t live without Taobao,” said Zhang Kangni, a graduate student in Shanghai. “First, it’s cheaper. I found a dress at a store in Shanghai. It’s a Hong Kong brand that sells for $175. I found it on Taobao for $33.”

But skeptics ask: Can Taobao actually make a profit and emerge as a true Web powerhouse?

The company is not publicly traded and therefore does not disclose financial information, but listings are free on Taobao and the company makes no money from online transactions. Almost all Taobao’s $200 million in revenue comes from advertising, which the company says covers virtually all its operational costs.

The company has been criticized, however, for contributing to a flourishing trade in counterfeit goods. Taobao brushes aside such criticism, saying it has a new program that is effectively cracking down on counterfeits.

Company executives also say Taobao is poised to earn huge profits, but that their first priority is creating an online community.

“Our vision for Taobao is to build a consumer’s paradise, where people can shop online and have fun,” Jonathan Lu, Taobao’s president, said. “If you make the company better and better, profits will naturally follow.”

His confidence in Taobao’s future comes from the company’s lineage. It is a division of the Alibaba Group, which was founded by Jack Ma. In the past decade, Mr. Ma has created an Internet conglomerate with strong financial backing from Yahoo, Goldman Sachs and the Softbank Group of Japan. Yahoo owns about 40 percent of Alibaba.

Alibaba.com — the conglomerate’s flagship Web site — connects small businesses from around the world with Chinese exporters. Taobao.com does something similar for consumers who want to sell to other consumers.

When Taobao was founded in 2003, it appeared to have no chance. EBay and its Chinese partner, EachNet, controlled 90 percent of China’s online shopping. But Mr. Ma, a former English teacher, quickly undermined eBay’s fee-based service by offering free listings on Taobao, essentially giving away ads to anyone who wanted to sell.

At the time, eBay executives ridiculed the strategy, with many repeating that “free is not a business model.”

But almost immediately, the site took off, and in 2006, eBay pulled out of China, citing dwindling market share and large losses. Today, it is Taobao that commands 80 percent of China’s e-commerce market, according to iResearch.

“Taobao is dominant,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. “They’re like an online Wal-Mart.” Mr. Ji says Taobao is a threat not only to traditional retailers but also to big Chinese Internet companies, like Baidu, a leading search engine, because they are competing with Taobao for many of the same advertisers.

Taobao has thrived, Internet analysts say, because people do not need much capital to start online stores. This year, Taobao says its site could help create half a million new jobs, mostly among young people opening new online stores.

Bao Yifen, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, opened her clothing shop with a $5,000 investment in 2007. Today, her Taobao store has sales of about $4,000 a month.

“Three times a week I go to the wholesale market,” Ms. Bao said. “It’s a huge market. About 70 to 80 percent of the stuff is factory leftovers. There are even some brands, but they just cut the labels off.”

Items smuggled into China from Hong Kong, Europe or the United States are also sold on Taobao, evading high import duties and enabling sellers to profit by undercutting the prices of merchandise in regular stores. An Apple MacBook Air that sells for $2,225 in Beijing, for instance, costs just $1,508 in Hong Kong, a difference of 33 percent.

Counterfeit goods are also readily available, even though Taobao claims to have removed two million “fake branded goods” from the site.

Nevertheless, many Taobao sellers acknowledge dealing in illegal goods.

“I work in an O.E.M. factory that produces laptops and electronic devices for Sony,” said one such seller, who identified himself Mr. Feng, referring to an original equipment manufacturer that produces goods for global companies. “We have Sony’s core technology and exactly the same raw materials and components, so we set up our own store selling netbooks and laptops on Taobao.”

A spokesman for Sony, Takashi Uehara, said the company had no comment but was looking into the matter.

Here in Yiwu, which claims to be the site of the world’s biggest wholesale market, Taobao has started to change the look of Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College.

The school’s vice dean, Jia Shaohua, points out an area designated as a start-up site for students seeking to get rich. He points to students taking orders by computer, packaging products, sorting inventory and taking photos of the items for display online, then adds, “Around the school now, there is a whole Taobao industrial chain.”

Every afternoon, even this summer, when the school should be relatively empty, one can hear the ripping sounds of tape being wrapped around boxes in a building that could pass for a United Parcel Service shipping terminal.

“The students don’t need a lot of money,” Mr. Jia said. “They just get orders and go find the items at local factories.”

Mr. Yang, the cosmetics seller, has become a campus hero. He operates his own warehouses a few miles from the school, in the basements of a pair of residential buildings.

Standing in his crowded warehouse, near boxes of Neutrogena sun block, hairpins, toothbrushes and a wide assortment of cosmetics, Mr. Yang says business could not be better.

“Soon, I’ll reach $150,000 a month in sales,” he said, flashing a big grin.

Seattle Times Finds Resurgence as Solo Act

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

SEATTLE — When The Seattle Times became this city’s only surviving daily newspaper in March, even The Times itself could not muster much optimism about its chances.

Frank A. Blethen, the publisher, said then that the demise of the rival Post-Intelligencer, known as The P-I, was no guarantee that his money-losing paper would make it. In an article in March on Seattle’s becoming “a one-newspaper town,” The Times asked, “will it become a no-newspaper town?”

But less than five months later, a nearly forgotten word has crept back into Times executives’ vocabulary: profit. “On a month-to-month basis, we are starting to operate in the black,” Mr. Blethen, who is also chief executive of The Seattle Times Company, said in an interview last week.

How much black ink and by what measure, the privately held company will not say, and amid a sharp advertising downturn, no one denies that its situation remains precarious. But The Times has improved its prospects by picking up most P-I subscribers and managing to keep them so far. It says its daily circulation rose more than 30 percent, to more than 260,000 in June, from about 200,000.

Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.

Industry analysts called it a long-shot experiment, but SeattlePI.com has kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. Hearst will not say whether it makes money, but it says that audience and revenue are ahead of projection.

The Times and The P-I had a joint operating agreement, sharing production and delivery expenses, an arrangement that is meant as a life raft for failing papers but that has often turned into concrete shoes for the stronger partner. The Times had been fighting for years to get out of its pact with Hearst, arguing that it drained resources and artificially kept a weaker competitor afloat.

Joint operating agreements “delay the inevitable death of the second newspaper, which becomes a drag on the operation,” said John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst. “It’s not too surprising that The Times is doing better on its own.”

The Times, long seen as one of the best regional papers in the country, has had an unusually big newsroom for its circulation, and a devotion to time-consuming investigative work. Mr. Blethen resisted cutting the staff or the size of the paper long after most big papers started to shrink.

But cuts became unavoidable, and the newsroom has dropped to 210 people, from about 375 five years ago. Now, Times executives have an unexpected hope that the cutting has stopped, at least for a while.

“We’re about at the floor of what we feel we can have and still put out a Seattle Times we can be proud of,” said David Boardman, the executive editor. “We’ve had to be more thoughtful in choosing what we do, but I’m not one to claim that less is more. Less is less.”

SeattlePI’s news staff of 20 people, down from The P-I’s 165, covers only a few subjects closely, like crime, the aerospace industry and transportation, while offering links to news on other sites. Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer, said the site, rather than resembling a traditional news organization, “is trying to be Seattle’s home page.”

Other news sites populated by former P-I staff members have also cropped up, expanding Seattle’s already-vibrant range of alternative news choices, and turning the city into something of an online news laboratory.

“There’s still a lot of competition, but only in certain niches,” said David Brewster, publisher of Crosscut.com, a two-year-old news site. “The Times is weaker than it used to be, but a lot of the people who said the loss of The P-I was the end of the world, now they’re reading The Times and saying it’s better than they expected.”

The Times has repeatedly defied the odds just to get to this point.

It dominated its market as an afternoon paper, decades after conventional wisdom had pronounced afternoon papers dead. The Times switched to mornings in 2000, going head to head with The P-I, and suffered a seven-week strike less than a year later, without a significant circulation loss from either trauma.

The Times was more staid, more suburban and more polished than The P-I, often making it seem as if the arm of an international media giant was the scrappy underdog. But for years, the guessing in the industry was that the Blethen family, which controls the Times Company, would sell to Hearst, which would then close one of the papers.

But the family held on, turning down lucrative offers from Hearst and others. And in the decade before The P-I closed, its circulation dropped sharply, to 117,000, while weekday sales of The Times barely changed.

The Times is one of the last family-run papers in the country, controlled since 1896 by the Blethens. They own 50.5 percent of the company (the McClatchy Company owns the rest), and eight family members work in it.

But if the family’s commitment to journalism has been admired, its business acumen is another matter. The company borrowed more than $200 million in 1998 to buy three Maine newspapers, and it sold them this year, reportedly for less than $40 million. Its biggest mistake may have been the joint operating agreement struck with Hearst in 1983, before Frank Blethen, 64, took control of the company.

Under the arrangement, The P-I’s only operation was its newsroom. The Times printed and delivered The P-I, sold its subscriptions and ads, and paid all nonnewsroom expenses for both papers. Whatever revenue was left was split, 60 percent to The Times and 40 percent to The P-I, a division that Times executives came to see as deeply unfair.

But the joint operation had advantages when The P-I stopped printing, because The Times was able to simply switch P-I subscribers to The Times. Subscribers were free to cancel, but not many did. Times executives say that of those former P-I subscriptions that have expired, 84 percent have been renewed; time will tell whether it can sustain that rate in the long run.

The paper also raised its prices in March, increasing circulation revenue.

With most P-I readers on board, Times executives say they have been able to maintain the ad rates they charged for space in both papers. The volume and revenue were down sharply, but Mr. Blethen said the decline was consistent with what had happened across the industry.

“We’re cautiously optimistic that we’ve been bouncing along the bottom for the last couple of months,” he said.

For Families Today, Technology Is Morning’s First Priority

By BRAD STONE

Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.

That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.

“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”

Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

“It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,” said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. “But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.”

The Gudes’ sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr. Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up.

“We use texting as an in-house intercom,” he said. “I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts.” The Gudes recently began shutting their devices down on weekends to account for the decrease in family time.

In other households, the impulse to go online before getting out the door adds an extra layer of chaos to the already discombobulating morning scramble.

Weekday mornings have long been frenetic, disjointed affairs. Now families that used to fight over the shower or the newspaper tussle over access to the lone household computer — or about whether they should be using gadgets at all, instead of communicating with one another.

“They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”

The surge of early risers is reflected in online and wireless traffic patterns. Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.

Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.

Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.

Both adults and children have good reasons to wake up and log on. Mom and Dad might need to catch up on e-mail from colleagues in different time zones. Children check text messages and Facebook posts from friends with different bedtimes — and sometime forget their chores in the process.

In May, Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, N.J., bought her 14-year-old daughter, Moriah, an Apple laptop for her birthday. In the weeks after, Moriah missed the school bus three times and went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside.

Moriah concedes that she neglected the bus and dog, and blames Facebook, where the possibility that crucial updates from friends might be waiting draws her online as soon as she wakes. “I have some friends that are up early and chatting,” she said. “There is definitely a pull to check it.”

Some families have tried to set limits on Internet use in the mornings. James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that deals with children and entertainment, wakes every morning at 6 and spends the next hour on his BlackBerry, managing e-mail from contacts in different parts of the world.

But when he meets his wife, Liz, and their four children, ages 5 to 16, at the breakfast table, no laptops or phones are allowed.

Mr. Steyer says he and his sons feel the temptation of technology early. Kirk, 14, often runs through much of his daily one-hour allotment of video-game time in the morning.

Even Jesse, 5, has started asking each morning if he can play games on his father’s iPhone. And Mr. Steyer said he constantly feels the tug of waiting messages on his BlackBerry, even during morning hours that are reserved for family time.

“You have to resist the impulse. You have to switch from work mode to parenting mode,” Mr. Steyer said. “But meeting my own standard is tough.”

Activist’s Detention Shakes China’s Rights Movement

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China’s nascent legal rights movement, already reeling from a crackdown on crusading lawyers, the kidnapping of defense witnesses and the shuttering of a prominent legal clinic, has been shaken by the detention of a widely respected rights defender who has been incommunicado since the police led him away from his apartment 12 days ago.

Xu Zhiyong, 36, a soft-spoken and politically shrewd legal scholar who has made a name representing migrant workers, death row inmates and the parents of babies poisoned by tainted milk, is accused of tax evasion. The accusation is almost universally seen here as a cover for his true offense: angering the Communist Party leadership through his advocacy of the rule of law.

If convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison.

“We’re all shocked by his detention, because Xu Zhiyong has always tried to avoid taking on radical and politically sensitive cases,” said Teng Biao, a colleague. “His only interest is fighting for the rights of the vulnerable and trying to enhance China’s legal system.”

Mr. Teng helped Mr. Xu establish the Open Constitution Initiative, a six-year-old nonprofit legal center that the authorities closed last month, charging that it was improperly registered and that it failed to pay taxes.

Mr. Xu is not the first rights advocate in China to face the wrath of the authorities in recent years. Gao Zhisheng, a vocal lawyer, vanished into police custody six months ago, and Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer, was beaten and then jailed after exposing abuses in China’s birth-control program.

Although rights lawyers and grass-roots social organizations have always been tightly controlled here, the pressure has intensified in recent weeks. More than 20 lawyers known for taking on politically tinged cases were effectively disbarred, and the police raided a group that works to ease discrimination against people with Hepatitis B.

Last week, China’s justice minister gave a speech saying lawyers should above all obey the Communist Party and help foster a harmonious society. To improve discipline, the minister said, all law firms in China would be sent party liaisons to “guide their work.”

But given Mr. Xu’s international stature and reputation for working within the law, legal scholars both in China and abroad say his prosecution suggests a new level of repression.

“What makes his detention particularly disturbing is that he’s a special figure in so many ways,” said Paul Gewirtz, director of the China Law Center at Yale Law School, which helped Mr. Xu establish his legal center, known here by its Chinese name, Gongmeng. “He’s at the forefront of advancing the rule of law, which is something everyone agrees China needs for its ongoing development.”

After 30 years of reform, China’s legal system is at a critical juncture. Law schools continue to pump out thousands of graduates each year, and the courts, even if imperfect, have increasingly become a forum for resolving disputes. Late last month the Supreme People’s Court announced reforms intended to markedly reduce executions.

But as lawyers here discover, there are limits to China’s embrace of judicial reform.

The Constitution, which includes guarantees of free speech and human rights, is unenforceable in court. Judges routinely ignore evidence, making determinations based on political considerations. And when it comes to vaguely defined offenses like “subversion of state power” or the invoking of “state secrets” laws, even the best-trained lawyers are powerless to defend the accused.

He Weifang, a law professor and legal adviser to Gongmeng, said conservative forces in the Communist Party were increasingly wary of lawyers, who they suspect are ultimately seeking to challenge one-party rule. Their greatest fear, Mr. He said, is that advocacy lawyers and civil society organizations could one day lead a pro-democracy movement among the poor and disenfranchised citizens they represent.

“What the authorities don’t appreciate, though, is that lawyers are leading these people to the courts, where their complaints can be resolved by rule of law,” he said. “People like Xu Zhiyong can only help the government solve some of the problems it faces.”

According to Gongmeng, Mr. Xu is being held at the Beijing No. 1 Detention Center, although public security officials have not confirmed that he is in their custody. Peng Jian, a lawyer who is advising Gongmeng, said the authorities had imposed a $208,000 penalty for nonpayment of taxes due on funds received from Yale for cooperative research projects.

A day after the raid on Gongmeng’s office, Mr. Xu held a news conference to say that the accusations were baseless. He described the attack on his research center as a battle between corrupt officials and society’s most vulnerable citizens. “We believe conscience will surely triumph over the evil forces,” he said.

A week later, police officers came to his door and led him away. Another employee of the research center, Zhuang Lu, was also taken away the same day.

Soon after graduating from Peking University law school, Mr. Xu became immersed in the case of a graphic artist who was beaten to death in 2003 in police custody in the southern city of Guangzhou. The artist, Sun Zhigang, 27, had been arrested under vagrancy laws that allowed the police to detain people for traveling outside their registered hometowns without a permit.

Mr. Xu led a campaign to end the practice, which gained widespread media attention. A few months later, the State Council abolished the system.

That same year Mr. Xu rose to the defense of a muckraking editor jailed in Guangzhou after his newspaper, Southern Metropolis, ran a series of articles about Mr. Sun’s death. The editor, Cheng Yizhong, said Mr. Xu helped rally lawyers and journalists, leading to his release five months later. “Only Xu had the courage to take on my case,” he said.

More recently, he was preparing a challenge to black jails, the illegal holding cells that some officials use to silence persistent critics. Last year, friends say, he was roughed up several times while gathering evidence from petitioners who had come to Beijing to press their grievances to the central government.

Although he was less outspoken than some other rights activists, Mr. Xu did not shy away from cases that were bound to upset China’s power elite. Last May Gongmeng published a study challenging the official verdict that blames the Dalai Lama for the 2008 riots in Tibet. The report, disseminated online and sent to government leaders, said legitimate grievances born from failed government policies were largely responsible for the unrest.

Raised in a Christian home in Henan Province, Mr. Xu was fond of noting his birth in a county called Minquan, which translates as “civil rights.” In an interview last year with The Economic Observer, a Chinese weekly, he said this had a profound impact on his social consciousness.

“I strive to be a worthy Chinese citizen, a member of the group of people who promote the progress of the nation,” he said. “I want to make people believe in ideals and justice, and help them see the hope of change.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff. The generals were not identified in the Senate report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The shift in policy comes as the Obama administration, deep into the war in Afghanistan, makes significant changes to its strategy for dealing with that country’s lucrative drug trade, which provides 90 percent of the world’s heroin and has led to substantial government corruption.

The Senate report’s disclosure of a hit list for drug traffickers may lead to criticism in the United States over the expansion of the military’s mission, and NATO allies have already raised questions about the strategy of killing individuals who are not traditional military targets.

For years the American-led mission in Afghanistan had focused on destroying poppy crops. Pentagon officials have said their new emphasis is on weaning local farmers off the drug trade — including the possibility of paying them to grow nothing — and going after the drug runners and drug lords. But the Senate report is the first account of a policy to actually place drug chieftains aligned with the Taliban on a “kill or capture” list.

Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, would not comment on the Senate report, but said that “there is a positive, well-known connection between the drug trade and financing for the insurgency and terrorism.” Without directly addressing the existence of the target list, he said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

Several individuals suspected of ties to drug trafficking have already been apprehended and others have been killed by the United States military since the new policy went into effect earlier this year, a senior military official with direct knowledge of the matter said in an interview. Most of the targets are in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where both the drug trade and the insurgency are the most intense.

One American military officer serving in Afghanistan described the purpose of the target list for the Senate committee. “Our long-term approach is to identify the regional drug figures,” the unidentified officer is quoted as saying in the Senate report. The goal, he said, is to “persuade them to choose legitimacy, or remove them from the battlefield.”

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing delicate policy matters.

When Donald H. Rumsfeld was defense secretary, the Pentagon fiercely resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting counternarcotics efforts. Top military commanders feared that trying to prevent drug trafficking would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords whose support they needed, and might turn more of the populace against American troops.

It was only in the last year or two of the Bush administration that the United States began to recognize that the Taliban insurgency was being revived with the help of drug money.

The policy of going after drug lords is likely to raise legal concerns from some NATO countries that have troops in Afghanistan. Several NATO countries initially questioned whether the new policy would comply with international law.

“This was a hard sell in NATO,” said retired Gen. John Craddock, who was supreme allied commander of NATO forces until he retired in July.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary general of NATO until last month, told the Senate committee staff that to deal with the concerns of other nations with troops in Afghanistan, safeguards had been put in place to make sure the alliance remained within legal bounds while pursuing drug traffickers. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is also informed before a mission takes place, according to a senior military official.

General Craddock said that some NATO countries were also concerned that the new policy would draw the drug lords closer to the Taliban, because they would turn to them for more protection. “But the opposite is the case, since it weakens the Taliban, so they can’t provide that protection,” General Craddock said. “If we continue to push on this, we will see progress,” he added. “It’s causing them problems.”

In a surprise, the Senate report reveals that the United States intelligence community believes that the Taliban has been getting less money from the drug trade than previous public studies have suggested. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency both estimate that the Taliban obtains about $70 million a year from drugs.

The Senate report found that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda, which instead relies on contributions from wealthy individuals and charities in Persian Gulf countries, as well as aid organizations working inside Afghanistan.

But even with the new, more cautious estimates, the Taliban has plenty of drug money to finance its relatively inexpensive insurgency. Taliban foot soldiers are paid just $10 a day — more if they plant an improvised explosive device.

Not all those suspected of drug trafficking will end up on the Pentagon’s list. Intelligence gathered by the United States and Afghanistan will more often be used for prosecutions, although American officials are frustrated that they still have not been able to negotiate an extradition treaty with the Afghan government.

A major unresolved problem in the counternarcotics strategy is the fact that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains wide open, and the Pakistanis are doing little to close down drug smuggling routes.

A senior American law enforcement official in the region is quoted in the report as saying that cooperation with Pakistan on counternarcotics is so poor that traffickers cross the border with impunity.

“We give them leads on targets,” the official said in describing the Pakistani government’s counternarcotics tactics, adding, “We get smiles, a decent cup of tea, occasional reheated sandwiches and assertions of progress, and we all leave with smiles on our faces.”

Barracks and Burger King: U.S. Builds a Supersized Base in Afghanistan

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- Anyone who thinks the Afghanistan troop "surge" is a temporary, one-time deal should watch the construction here of a vast new $17 million barracks building.

It's not temporary. It's three stories of concrete.

Eight years after American forces scattered the Taliban and effectively conquered Afghanistan, the United States is embarked on a frenzied $220 million building campaign at this sprawling and still expanding military air base. Just to meet the base's demand for fresh concrete, it has two of its own cement factories working full time.

There's plenty of guessing these days about whether Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, will recommend a large troop increase here, and if so, how many, and if he does, whether President Obama will agree. But perhaps the construction of the new troop barracks, and permanent new facilities such as water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms and power generating plants says more about the size and duration of this war than any White House press conference or Pentagon power-point presentation.

When I first visited this war-battered former Soviet base in January 2002, the military was erecting canvas tents for incoming troops. Infantrymen of the 10^th Mountain Division were hammering together plywood outhouses; hot showers were a cruel rumor, and the few buildings left intact from the Mujaheddin war with the Russians were getting a cursory remodeling (i.e., windows).

"Low profile" was the directive coming down from Washington, senior officers told me then. That meant no big construction. Wartime living conditions. Nothing could be built that couldn't be turned over to and used by the Afghans themselves in a year or two, they vowed. Mornings, we shaved outdoors.

Well, that was then.

Today, Bagram sports a Burger King and Pizza Hut, five mess halls, and living quarters for 20,000 people (so far), office spaces for the command, Joint Task Force-82, and for dozens of other headquarters and agencies. A well-stocked PX sells everything from potato chips to vacuum cleaners.

Russian minefields on the south and east sides of the long runway have been cleared for freight yards, aircraft aprons, bulk fuel storage, hangars and maintenance sheds. New logistics warehouses bake in the sun amid acres of parked armored vehicles. A network of new roads connecting it all is jammed with dusty SUVs, fuel and water tankers, troop buses, cement mixers, dump trucks full of crushed rock and tractor-trailers piled with steel girders and concrete pipe.

Bagram's air facilities, its supersized runway, parking aprons, cargo handling machines and maintenance bays are sized for the stream of intercontinental and local cargo aircraft, aero-medical evacuation planes, bombers, strike fighters, unmanned drone aircraft and cargo and attack helicopters that roar in and out of here day and night.

Although all this would presumably belong to the Afghans, should the U.S. someday pull out, it's hard to see how this air base could be used efficiently by Afghanistan alone. Its civilian air hub, Kabul International, is barely 40 miles away. And Afghanistan's air force of seven medium cargo planes and 13 helicopters would be dwarfed here.

Still, the work continues. Long dust plumes mark where armored bulldozers are plowing up old minefields. Behind them come earth movers leveling off small hills. Gangs of turbaned Afghans lay steel pipe in deep, newly dug trenches. Lines of cement mixers stand ready to pour.

"The whole landscape is changing rapidly – every time I come out here it's something new," Army Capt. Scot R. Keith, a staff officer, told me on a drive around the base.

I recently had a lengthy conversation about Afghanistan's future with Army Col. Scott Spellmon. This combat-decorated counterinsurgency expert, finishing up a 15-month tour here as a brigade commander, said he thinks that in northeast Afghanistan, at least, American involvement will become less military, more civilian. As security improves, with forces hunting down the last pockets of insurgents and Afghan army units and police improving, the work can shift more toward development.

He already sees signs that this is happening, he said, with Afghans taking over security completely in some large areas and the State Department sending out civilian reinforcements. That's the plan for the rest of Afghanistan, too. Just don't look for it to happen anytime soon. The concrete suggests otherwise.

Howard Kurtz on Politics Daily, AOL's Fledgling Web Site

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 10, 2009

After a quarter-century as a military correspondent, David Wood knew the drill as he reported from Afghanistan last week, in helmet and flak jacket, on the intricacies of the U.S. war effort.

But this time he was writing for a fledgling Web site, one that -- unlike the thousands that specialize in commentary, snark or recycling other people's reporting -- is willing to pony up to send an old-school journalist on a six-week foreign assignment. Wood was picked up by AOL's Politics Daily in May, shortly after the Baltimore Sun laid him off.

"As the newspaper business declined, I felt hemmed in by smaller news pages, demands for tighter copy, growing stinginess with travel money," Wood says. "It just seemed harder and harder to do quality, in-depth journalism on my beat. None of those restrictions exist at Politics Daily."

The three-month-old venture has become a reemployment program for middle-aged journalists who lack the flash and dash of young bloggers -- and that is by design. Melinda Henneberger, the former Newsweek and New York Times reporter who runs the site, says her goal is "to preserve the values of the mainstream media." And in doing so, she is flouting several conventions about what works on the Web.

First, she is slowing things down, rather than posting every traffic-generating tidbit.

Second, she believes Web surfers have the patience to read pieces that run as long as 5,000 words.

Third, she is challenging "the assumption that to get a lot of hits you have to be hyperpartisan."

The result is a text-heavy site, with pieces that range from provocative to pedestrian. On many days Politics Daily seems on top of the news; on others, columns that linger on the home page give it a dated feel. And it may be a tad high-minded: On Friday afternoon, when Politico and other sites rushed to post stories on Jenny Sanford moving out of the South Carolina governor's mansion occupied by her philandering husband, Politics Daily had nothing.

The veteran staffers -- "they have asked me to stop calling them old pros!" Henneberger says -- are being lured by the startup's six-figure salaries. They include former USA Today political writer Jill Lawrence, former Washington Post columnist Donna Britt. Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet, a part-timer, writes a column on Michelle Obama.

It is hard to discern an office culture; Henneberger got approval to rent a Washington office but decided to save the money for future hiring. One "advantage to working with grown-ups is that there's no need for me to keep a literal eye on anybody," she says. So everyone works virtually from home, including two Denver editors hired from the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News.

"I don't know what the future of print is -- I hope it survives -- but we're all having to hedge our bets a little bit," says Deputy Editor Carl Cannon, a veteran of six newspapers who was hired after Reader's Digest eliminated the Washington bureau he headed. Cannon, too, talks about maintaining "cherished" values: "Not everything the old media did was right, but some things were right: getting both sides of the story, making sure the quotes are right, and using official documents instead of rumor."

Wood, a veteran of Time and the Los Angeles Times, says he relishes the chance to mix straight reporting with personal observation, such as in this dispatch from Afghanistan: "Civilian-world is casual, easy, a place filled with friends and family and many choices. Maybe I'll amble down to Starbucks. Nah, Caribou this time. War zone is a hard, unforgiving, chaotic place of fewer choices, where friendships have to be earned. Seen from civilian-world, it's daunting. But intriguing."

The site is also making room for opinion. The latest addition is liberal blogger David Corn of Mother Jones magazine; Henneberger says she plans to hire a conservative columnist to balance him.

Says Walter Shapiro, a left-leaning former columnist for USA Today and Salon: "We don't deal in epithets, we don't deal in invective. We really adhere to things that have been proven true, as opposed to jumping on Sarah Palin rumors because some Web site in Alaska is running something."

For AOL, which is being spun off from Time Warner after their disastrous merger nine years ago, launching Politics Daily is part of a larger strategy to regain its lost cachet. The battered company announced plans in March to lay off 10 percent of its staff.

Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL Media, says his company wants to be "the Toyota of content . . . the largest mainstream content publisher on the globe." He says Politics Daily is designed for a mass audience, not as "an inside-baseball site."

In raw numbers, it is off to a fast start, drawing 3.6 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore. Its busy neighborhood helps; Politics Daily draws nearly half its traffic from users already on AOL.

In the battle against other big portals, AOL drew 106 million unique visitors in June, trailing Yahoo (154 million) and Microsoft Network (127 million). AOL has hired journalists and bloggers for a slew of sites, including TMZ, Moviefone, Fanhouse and Engadget.

Yahoo offers little original content in news -- a "Good Morning Yahoo!" video, for instance, provides a recap of the past 24 hours -- but is boosted by its signature search engine. Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo's head of media, says that the site has hired nearly 80 staffers to chronicle sports, and that close to 10 percent of its material overall is homegrown.

"It's super-important for us to maintain that balance between content we're creating and content we're licensing," Pitaro says. "It helps establish our voice. . . . We don't just throw stuff up against a wall and hope it sticks. We're much more selective."

So far, Politics Daily rarely breaks through the media static with pieces that are widely linked and debated elsewhere. One exception was Cannon's recent denunciation of the media for their coverage of the former governor of Alaska.

"In the 2008 election," he wrote, "we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. . . . We simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession."

This drew a sharp rebuttal from another contributor, Jeffrey Weiss, who called Cannon's argument "horsepucky. . . . To claim that Sarah Palin is the victim of leftist journalism gone unusually amok is to cherry-pick the record and ignore the circumstances of her candidacy."

That is the kind of attention-grabbing argument that Politics Daily needs if it is to compete with the likes of the Huffington Post, Politico, the Daily Beast, Slate, Salon and other sites that offer speed, original writing and higher production values. With Henneberger calling the operation a "preservation society" dedicated to "respectful" arguments, Politics Daily remains defiantly out of step with the online ethos.

"If there isn't a market for this kind of Web site, that takes politics seriously, that is politically eclectic and journalistically conservative," Shapiro says, "we're all in a lot of trouble."

Presidential Endorsement?

The full-page newspaper ad is filled with images of President Obama.

"Who does the man everyone listens to, listen to?" the Financial Times asks. The answer: "If anyone needs a global perspective it's Barack Obama. No wonder he reads the FT."

Isn't it a tad tacky to use the president as an endorsement prop? Financial Times did not respond to several requests for comment. Administration spokesman Bill Burton was diplomatic: "The White House discourages the use of the president's name or likeness for commercial purposes."

As Dubai's Glitter Fades, Foreigners See Dark Side

By Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 10, 2009

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Herve Jaubert, a French spy who left espionage to make leisure submarines for the wealthy, was riding high.

Bankrolled by Dubai World, a government-owned conglomerate, he built a submarine workshop on the Persian Gulf, lived rent-free in a villa with a pool and tooled around town in a red Lamborghini. He had two Hummers. He vacationed with local plutocrats.

Jaubert said he heard whispers about Dubai's darker side -- the abuse of desperate laborers from impoverished Asian lands, the jailing of the occasional Westerner who crossed a sheik -- but "I brushed it all off. I saw glamour. I saw marble columns, mirrors and money."

Today, the former intelligence operative, who fled Dubai last summer in a rubber dinghy, is a wanted man. In June, a Dubai court convicted him in absentia on charges of embezzling $3.8 million and handed down a five-year sentence, plus a big fine. Jaubert, speaking recently at his new home near West Palm Beach, Fla., said he stole nothing and vowed never to set foot in Dubai again. He said he fled because of gruesome threats by interrogators to stick needles up his nose and what he described as constantly shifting, and all bogus, accusations relating to bullets, murder and the finances of Dubai World's now-defunct luxury submarine subsidiary.

"If I hadn't escaped, I'd be in the same hell as everyone else," said Jaubert, one of scores of expatriate business people in this gleaming city-state who have been accused of crimes -- and, in some cases, jailed for long periods without being charged.

Jaubert's troubles began two years ago when Dubai's then-booming economy was showing the first faint signs of strain. Local stock and property prices have since swooned, and the tempo of arrests for alleged business misdeeds ranging from a dud check -- a criminal offense here -- to serious fraud has picked up sharply.

Dubai's government declined to comment on Jaubert's allegations of mistreatment. But it has targeted what it sees as dodgy dealmakers and deadbeat debtors, and has declared "no tolerance" of "anybody who makes illegal profits." For many expatriates, however, the crackdown smacks of a hunt for foreign culprits to blame for the sheikdom's sliding economic fortunes.

'It's All a Bit Scary'

A haven of stability in a region of tumult, Dubai is usually a place people flee to, not from. Foreigners, lured by what President Obama in a June speech in Cairo hailed as the "astonishing progress" of this autocratic but vibrant Persian Gulf metropolis, account for more than 90 percent of the population, and 99 percent of private-sector workers.

But a severe economic slump has reversed the flow. Those who came to Dubai seeking fortunes in property, banking and luxury goodies for the rich now face a less alluring prospect -- a prison cell or furtive flight. Only a tiny minority has been picked up by police but, says a longtime foreign resident who runs a company here, "It's all a bit scary. They are looking for people to carry the can." The foreign resident, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, said a British neighbor was picked up last year.

The turbulence is a blow to a place that promoted itself as the Middle East's answer to Hong Kong or Singapore. It is also a setback for Washington, which has for years touted Dubai as a model of a modern, prosperous Muslim land that, though far from democratic, seemed anchored in the rule of law and committed to basic rights.

Among those who have been locked up are a JPMorgan investment banker; American, British and other foreign property developers; a German yachtmaker; and two Australians who worked as senior executives of what was to be the world's largest waterfront development. The gigantic project had been launched by Nakheel, the crisis-battered property arm of Dubai World and builder of Dubai's signature palm-tree-shaped resort islands.

A few have been convicted, mostly for bouncing checks. Those still awaiting trial often waited many months in jail before being charged: The two Australians, for instance, were arrested in January, held in solitary confinement for seven weeks and then finally charged, with fraud-related offences, last month, said their Melbourne lawyer, Martin Amad.

A banker who headed JPMorgan's Dubai office and its Islamic banking business was first jailed in June last year but was charged, also in connection with fraud, only this spring. JPMorgan said the alleged crimes do not relate to his work at the bank, which he joined in 2007 and quit in April this year while in detention.

Some have complained through lawyers of being deprived of sleep, denied food for days and routinely menaced. "We will insert needles into your nose again and again," a security officer can be heard telling Jaubert, the spy turned submarine-maker, on an audio recording, which the Frenchman said was made on his cellphone during an interrogation before he fled. "Do you know how painful it is to have needles put inside your nose repeatedly and then twisted around? Do you think you can resist this kind of pain?"

Jaubert said the interrogation was conducted by two men in long white robes in a bare, windowless room on April 22, 2007, at Dubai's Al Muraggabat Police Station. On the recording, the interrogators described themselves as state security officers, with one warning Jaubert that "we are above the police, we are above the judges. We can keep here you forever."

Dubai's Media Affairs Office said the emirate "prides itself on a well-established system of law and order and judicial fairness." It did not respond to repeated and detailed questions, and said that officials who could "are physically not here."

A Developing Chill

Released unharmed but without his passport, Jaubert, who is married to an American, began to plot his escape. Last summer, four years after he arrived Dubai on a business-class ticket, he slipped away by sea. "They picked the wrong guy," said Jaubert, 53, a former naval officer who, according to a confidential French report, left France's DGSE intelligence service in March 1993. "With my background, I don't need a passport to travel."

The French Consulate in Dubai, which is the business, business and tourism hub of the United Arab Emirates, said it could not comment. France in May opened a naval facility in Dubai's sister sheikhdom, Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital. Western diplomatic missions have mostly avoided public criticism of the legal system.

Dubai is still far more free and more predictable than most of its neighbors, but a chill has taken hold as property values tumble, jobs vanish and businessmen are detained. Tensions long masked by prosperity have burst into full view -- tensions between a foreign majority and locals, known as Emirati; between a city studded with shiny modern skyscrapers, including the world's tallest now in the final stages of construction; and Dubai's antiquated political and legal foundations.

Washington counts the UAE as one of its best friends in the region. U.S. warships dock at Jebel Ali, a huge Dubai port area where Jaubert had his luxury submarine venture, Exomos, which promised rich clients "the ultimate underwater experience." Big U.S. companies, including General Electric, Boeing and Microsoft, have their regional headquarters in Dubai, which has around 20,000 American residents.

These intimate relations include a deal that will allow the UAE to develop a nuclear-power program with U.S. know-how. The relationship came under scrutiny in Washington this year after the release of videos that showed a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family torturing an Afghan grain dealer he accused of cheating him. Abu Dhabi authorities are investigating.

The number of expatriates jailed in Dubai for alleged economic crimes is not known. The government issues no figures. "All I can say is that it is definitely on the rise," said Samer Muscati, a lawyer with New York-based Human Rights Watch. The main concern, Muscati said, is not that all those arrested are necessarily innocent but that Dubai's legal system is so opaque, fickle and often heedless of due process.

A vivid example of this is the plight of Zack Shahin, an American businessman of Lebanese origin. A former Pepsi-Cola executive who headed a Dubai property company called Deyaar Development, he was arrested in March last year in connection with a corruption probe involving the Dubai Islamic Bank. Shahin was held incommunicado for 16 days and was not charged for over a year. A Web site set up by his family in the United States alleged that Shahin had been tortured, and it pleaded for his release. The UAE blocked the Web site. U.S. diplomats asked that the case be handled in "an expeditious and transparent manner," and complained that a delay in granting access to Shahin violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Early this summer, it looked as if Shahin might finally get his day in court and be allowed to go home to await trial. His family took out an ad praising Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, Dubai's ruler, took down the Web site, and scratched together $1.1 million to meet bail. Just as Shahin was about to be released, state security officers arrived and hauled him away for questioning on new charges. He is still in detention. The bail money has not been returned, his lawyers said. Dubai officials said no one was available to comment on the case.

Uneasy Foreigners

Locals have been picked up, too, and some complain of being unjustly detained. But well-connected Emirati rarely spend long in jail for economic crimes. Wary of debtors' prison, a growing number of foreigners simply run away.

Simon Ford, a British entrepreneur, skipped town this summer after his company, a specialty gift service, was hit by the crisis and couldn't pay its bills. He wrote an emotional "letter to the Dubai public" to apologize for bailing out. He acknowledged that he owed money, and said he had fled because Dubai "drives people to make horrible decisions." He promised to pay back creditors.

Jaubert, the ex-French spy, said he fled because he feared getting stuck in Dubai's penal twilight zone. A keen amateur marksman, he was first called in for questioning in 2007 after bullets were found at his submarine company offices. Interrogators told him that someone had been shot in the head and that he might be involved. Jaubert replied that he didn't have a gun: his rifle, which he had declared at Customs, was still stuck at the Dubai airport. His bullets got through.

Security officers accused him of lying. Warning him that Dubai "is not France; there is no democracy here," an interrogator heard on Jaubert's tape threatened to put him "in a cave 300 meters underground, away from the world and your family, and I will keep you there until you tell the truth." Jaubert said authorities later accused him of fraud because "they were just looking for something to nail me with."

Jaubert blamed his woes on pressure on Dubai World to rein in some of the wilder investment projects launched by Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the company's chairman, who had first invited Jaubert to Dubai. "It was a palace struggle over money," Jaubert said.

The Escape

Reached on his cellphone, Sulayem declined to comment. Dubai World's internal audit chief, Abdul Qadar Obaid Ali, said Jaubert and his submarine venture ran into trouble for other reasons: His submarines didn't work, and auditors uncovered evidence of fraud involving overbilling for equipment purchases. Jaubert denied this, saying all the transactions were approved and paid for by Dubai World managers.

Fired from Exomos, the submarine company, and unable to get his passport back, Jaubert hatched an elaborate escape plan. He sent his wife and their two boys to Florida. He had diving equipment shipped out from France -- broken down into small bits to avoid arousing suspicion. Then, using a phony name, he bought a Zodiac dinghy and sailboat. Using Google Earth, he surveyed the UAE coastline for an escape route. He found an isolated beach and arranged for a friend to take the sailboat out into international waters.

On the eve of his escape, the former spy checked into a hotel near the beach, put on his diving equipment and donned a long abaya, the body-covering cloak worn by strictly observant Muslim women. He said he then went down the beach and swam underwater to a nearby harbor, where the only patrol boat in the vicinity was moored. He clambered aboard and sabotaged the fuel line to make sure the craft could not give chase, he said.

Jaubert then set out to sea in the dinghy to the boat his friend had positioned just outside the UAE's territorial waters, and they sailed toward India. After eight days at sea, the pair arrived in Mumbai -- an account corroborated by his traveling companion. With a new passport issued by the French consulate, Jaubert flew to join his wife in Florida, where he is writing a book he has titled "Escape From Dubai."