Pentagon Worries Led to Command Change

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 17, 2009

In mid-March, as a White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan was nearing completion, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in a secure Pentagon room for their fortnightly video conference with Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Kabul.

There was no formal agenda. McKiernan, a silver-haired former armor officer, began with a brief battlefield update. Then Gates and Mullen began asking about reconstruction and counternarcotics operations. To Mullen, they were straightforward, relevant queries, but he thought McKiernan fumbled them.

Gates and Mullen had been having doubts about McKiernan since the beginning of the year. They regarded him as too languid, too old-school and too removed from Washington. He lacked the charisma and political savvy that Gen. David H. Petraeus brought to the Iraq war.

McKiernan's answers that day were the tipping point for Mullen. Soon after, he discussed the matter with Gates, who had come to the same conclusion.

Mullen traveled to Kabul in April to confront McKiernan. The chairman hoped the commander would opt to save face and retire, but he refused. Not only had he not disobeyed orders, he believed he was doing what Gates and Mullen wanted.

You're going to have to fire me, he told Mullen.

Two weeks later, Gates did. It was the first sacking of a wartime theater commander since President Harry S. Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for opposing his Korean War policy.

The humiliating removal of a four-star general for being too conventional reveals the ferocious intensity Gates and Mullen share over a growing war that will soon enter its ninth year. It also demonstrates their zeal to respond to President Obama's demand for rapid success in a place where foreign armies have failed for centuries.

"There are those who would have waited six more months" in order to have a less abrupt transition, Mullen said in an interview. "I couldn't. I'm losing kids and I couldn't sleep at night. I have an unbounded sense of urgency to get this right."

This account of McKiernan's tenure and departure is drawn from interviews with key participants and several senior officials, both supportive and critical of him, who have direct knowledge of the actions and conversations described. Because it involves a personnel matter, they spoke only on the condition that information provided not be specifically attributed. They are largely in consensus about the sequence of events, but they disagree whether McKiernan's leadership merited his dismissal.

The decision was not discussed at length within the White House but was endorsed by Obama. It reflects a view among senior Pentagon officials that top generals need to be as adept at working Washington as they are the battlefield, that the conflict in Afghanistan requires a leader who can also win the confidence of Congress and the American public.

McKiernan is an understated and reticent man; his 37-year career involved more than two decades of overseas deployments but less than a year at the Pentagon. He did not fawn over visiting lawmakers like Petraeus did in Iraq. He also did not cultivate particularly strong relationships with Afghan leaders. His replacement, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is regarded as a leader in the Petraeus mold: able to nimbly run the troops on the ground as well as the traps in Washington.

"Blame General Petraeus," a senior Defense Department official said. "He redefined during his tour in Iraq what it means to be a commanding general. He broke the mold. The traditional responsibilities were not enough anymore. You had to be adroit at international politics. You had to be a skilled diplomat. You had to be savvy with the press, and you had to be a really sophisticated leader of a large organization. When you judge McKiernan by Petraeus's standards, he looked old-school by comparison."

This change of command is a story of Washington's new approach to the war, one that involves not just more troops and reconstruction money but a new kind of military leader to carry out the mission. It is a story of a loyal general who, his superiors believed, was miscast for the role he had been assigned, and his intense replacements, who have been asked to win a losing war with many of the same impediments. It is also a story of the president's top military leaders, who are betting that this one personnel decision, above all others, will set in motion a process that reverses U.S. fortunes in Afghanistan.

* * *

In April 2008, two months before he assumed command in Kabul, McKiernan traveled to Afghanistan for a get-acquainted visit. Within days, he concluded that there were not enough troops to contend with the intensifying Taliban insurge ncy.

At the time, the United States had about 33,000 military personnel in the country, about a third of them assigned to combat operations. The rest were in supporting roles. About 30,000 were from the other 42 nations in the NATO-led force, but many had been deployed with onerous rules that prevented their involvement in counterinsurgency activities.

Even more worrisome was a lack of other resources needed to win a war: helicopters, transport aircraft, surveillance drones, interpreters, intelligence analysts. Troops in Afghanistan had a fraction of what they required.

"There was a saying when I got there: If you're in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it," McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. "If you're in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it."

By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush's White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country's east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan's request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops. With Washington then viewing NATO as the solution -- not the problem -- McKiernan seemed like the right general to help win over the allies. Before coming to Kabul, he had been the top Army commander in Europe, and he had been part of the NATO mission in the Balkans in the 1990s.

He deemed management of the alliance in Afghanistan one of his chief responsibilities. He met with an almost daily stream of visiting delegations from European capitals, and he sought to change some of the more Byzantine troop rules.

But back in Washington, McKiernan was increasingly seen as too deferential to NATO. By November, when it became clear that the Europeans would not be sending more troops, senior officials at the Pentagon wanted him to focus on making better use of the existing NATO forces -- getting them off bases and involved in counterinsurgency operations. Although McKiernan sought to do that, his superiors thought he was not working fast enough. Of particular concern was the division of the country into five regional commands, each afforded broad autonomy to fight as it pleased.

"He was still doing the NATO-speak at a time when Gates and Mullen were over it," a senior military official at the Pentagon said.

It was around that time that Petraeus stepped in as overall commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. He became one of McKiernan's two bosses, and he quickly assessed the regional-command situation as untenable. He suggested adding a three-star general, one rank down from McKiernan, to take charge of daily military operations -- just as he had done in Iraq. It would free up McKiernan to spend more time on high-level diplomacy with Afghan leaders and NATO members, and it would strip power from the regional commanders.

Gates and Mullen thought it was a good idea, as did two of their most-trusted advisers: McChrystal, who was running Mullen's staff, and Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, who had been Gates's chief military assistant and served as one of those regional commanders. But McKiernan had a different view. He believed that each regional command faced different challenges and that lumping all of the operational responsibility under another layer of bureaucracy would cause tension between the United States and its allies.

* * *

In February, with a new administration in power, Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, giving McKiernan much -- but not all -- of what he wanted. He planned to send most of the new forces to the south, where Taliban attacks were becoming increasingly frequent and potent.

In Washington, doubts about McKiernan were growing among Gates and Mull en and their staffs. McKiernan's plan to integrate civilian and military resources, which Gates had asked him to draw up, did not impress many who read it in the Pentagon. Once again, they faulted McKiernan's perceived deference to NATO. What the document needed, they thought, was sharp thinking from the U.S. military, not a casserole of inputs from a dozen allies.

But McKiernan did not have a reservoir of senior U.S. officers to help him with such projects. McKiernan faulted the Pentagon for not sending more people to work for him. Mullen and Gates saw it differently: McKiernan could have asked for more, but he didn't, and they were not impressed with some of the people he chose.

By mid-March, it was clear to Gates and Mullen that Obama's Afghanistan strategy, which would be announced later that month, would involve not a retrenchment but an expansion of U.S. efforts. Although the goal had become more focused -- to deny al-Qaeda a haven -- the plan was to achieve that outcome with a more comprehensive counterinsurgency effort, the likes of which, they thought, demanded a new commander.

Across the Potomac, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had hired longtime diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke to focus exclusively on Afghanistan and Pakistan. She tapped Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who had served in Afghanistan, to be the new U.S. ambassador to Kabul.

Gates had begun to regard the advice on Afghanistan he was hearing from Rodriguez to be far sharper than what he was receiving from Kabul. Mullen felt the same way about McChrystal. The secretary and the chairman batted the idea around in confidence: What if we sent both of them -- McChrystal as the top commander and Rodriguez as his deputy? Both generals are regarded as skilled practitioners of counterinsurgency strategy, and both played influential roles in internal discussions about Obama's new Afghanistan strategy.

"It was much more about getting them in than getting McKiernan out," Mullen said. "I couldn't afford not to have my A team over there."

They discussed the issue with Petraeus, to whom McKiernan reported. McKiernan had been his boss during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but Petraeus had vaulted above him in recent years, leaving a degree of awkwardness between the two generals. Petraeus agreed with Mullen and Gates, and he urged that a change occur well before the Aug. 20 Afghan presidential election.

McKiernan had been expected to stay in Kabul until the summer of 2010. By the time his successor got up to speed and brought over a new team of deputies, it would have been another six months. "I couldn't wait that long," Mullen said.

In years past, senior commanders who were not deemed to be a good fit were gracefully moved to other high-level jobs, or even promoted. But there were no vacant four-star jobs to which McKiernan could be reassigned. He would have to retire -- or be fired. It did not matter that McKiernan had not committed a firing offense. The secretary and the chairman had come to believe that the war in Afghanistan required immediate innovation and creative risk-taking, even if it meant drumming out one of the Army's most-senior leaders, a general much beloved among those who served for him.

In mid-April, Mullen made his trip to Afghanistan to remove McKiernan, hoping that he would choose to resign voluntarily.

"I suppose that would have been an easy, painless way out -- just to say, 'Well, I've been here for a year and I'm rotating out,'" McKiernan said. "But I told a lot of people that I was staying for two years. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror if I said that."

The day before he left Kabul, McKiernan spoke to several hundred U.S. and NATO troops assembled in the courtyard in front of his office. "I don't want to leave," he told them. "There's work still to be done here. . . . But I'm a soldier and I live in a democracy and I work for political leaders, and when my political leaders tell me it's time to go, I must go."

The line of soldiers waiting to shake his hand continued for 90 minutes.

* * *

I n his first two months on the job, McChrystal has moved with alacrity to shift the focus of U.S. and NATO troops from chasing the Taliban to protecting cities and towns, reasoning that expanding areas of population security would have greater impact on the insurgency than a series of raids. But there is also a recognition in McChrystal's headquarters that McKiernan had made valuable contributions: The troops he asked for are now central to counterinsurgency operations in southern Afghanistan. McKiernan also set in motion changes in training Afghan security forces that McChrystal plans to continue.

Soon after arriving in Kabul, McChrystal issued a "tactical directive" to all forces under his command: The use of airstrikes on housing compounds, which have caused hundreds of civilian casualties since 2001 and stoked deep anger among Afghans, would be restricted to the most clear and critical cases.

McChrystal said bombs could be dropped only when solid intelligence showed that high-level militants were present or U.S. forces were in imminent danger. He made it clear he would rather allow a few rank-and-file Taliban fighters to get away than to flatten a house whose occupants might include women and children.

Although McChrystal's directive was not fundamentally different from the one McKiernan issued in September 2008, what was profoundly new was the way McChrystal persuaded those under him to follow it. He spent weeks reiterating its importance at his daily morning videoconference with regional commanders.

McChrystal's relationship with Mullen has resulted in a flow of personnel that eluded McKiernan. The chairman told McChrystal he could poach whomever he needed from the Joint Staff -- a list that now extends to about two dozen senior officers, including some of the military's best-regarded colonels.

Before McChrystal left Washington, Gates asked him to deliver an assessment of the war in 60 days. Instead of summoning a team of military strategists to Kabul, McChrystal invited Washington think-tank experts from across the ideological spectrum.

The experts gave McChrystal a 20-page draft report that calls for expanding the Afghan army, changes in the way troops operate and an intensified military effort to root out corruption. There were few revolutionary ideas in the document, but McChrystal may have received something far more important through the process: allies in the U.S. capital, on the political left and right, to talk about the need for more troops in Afghanistan -- in advance of his assessment to Gates, which will probably be submitted this month.

"He understands the need to engage Washington, and he's willing do so in a creative way," said Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, who was part of the team.

* * *

When McKiernan returned to Washington to plan his retirement -- he eventually submitted a resignation to Gates rather than allow himself to be terminated -- he checked into an 11th-floor room at the Embassy Suites in Pentagon City. Dressed in a golf shirt and jeans instead of the green camouflage uniform he wore for decades, he ticked off a list of accomplishments that he maintained were not recognized by his colleagues in the Pentagon, from improving border coordination with the Pakistanis to integrating the operations of Special Forces units.

"There's been a lot of conditions that have been set in Afghanistan over the past year that are going to pay dividends in the next year or two," he said.

He said he wished he had had the same "open checkbook" to recruit senior officers from the Pentagon that has been afforded to McChrystal. And he acknowledged that he should have "done a better job of feeding the beast in Washington," even though he believed that "an operational commander needs to spend the vast majority of his energy and time and efforts focused inside the theater of operations and not on trips to Washington."

On July 15, under a bright blue morning sky, hundreds of soldiers stood at attention on the parade ground at Fort Myer as an announcer intoned: "General David McKiernan is retired."

"If you had asked me 30 days ago if I would be here today at my retirement ceremony, I would have said no -- maybe in a bit stronger terms," he told the 300 people who had gathered to see him off. "Make no mistake: I was dismayed, disappointed and more than a little embarrassed."

The war in Afghanistan, he said, "will not be decided by any one leader -- military or civilian -- from any one nation."

Japan Joins Recent Wave Of Economic Expansion

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 17, 2009

TOKYO, Aug. 17 -- Japan announced Monday that its economy has returned to growth, bouncing back from what had been the steepest slide of any industrialized nation during the global economic crisis.

Japan's gross domestic product, which last winter contracted at more than double the rate of the United States', grew at an annual rate of 3.7 percent from April to June, the government said.

Helped by a rebound in exports to China and a large government stimulus program, the world's second-largest economy was able to record its first quarter of growth in more than a year, as the GDP, a broad measure of economic output, expanded 0.9 percent over the previous three-month period.

The return to growth in Japan, where the economy had shrunk at an annualized rate of 11.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, is one of the strongest signals so far that a corner has been turned in the global economy.

It comes amid a surprisingly sprightly economic bounce across Asia, as China, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore and Hong Kong have all reported growth in the second quarter.

Japan, though, is a laggard in the region, as gains in much of Asia have galloped ahead at nearly 10 percent in the second quarter. Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan's economic and fiscal policy minister, told reporters Monday that conditions here are likely to remain severe.

Economists have attributed the rapid recovery in Asia to large economic stimulus packages (especially in China), a spurt in manufacturing, an easing of credit, and the health of Asian banks that were largely unscathed by the U.S. and European debt crisis.

In Europe, too, there are signals of recovery, with Germany and France becoming the first two major industrialized nations to officially shake off the global recession. The growth in both countries, though, was an anemic 0.3 percent in the second quarter, and economists said it is far too early to declare an end of the recession in Europe, where Britain, Italy and Spain are still stuck in their worst decline in decades.

The U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent in the second quarter, but the Federal Reserve signaled last week that it expects the downturn to ease and that it will begin pulling back this fall from its intervention in the economy.

Officials at Japanese companies largely think their country's worst post-war recession is nearly over, according to a survey released over the weekend. Representatives of two-thirds of the 108 major companies contacted by Kyodo News said they expect the economy to recover in early 2010.

Drastic production cuts and reductions in inventory have set the stage here for recovery, economists said, as wages fell sharply and unemployment jumped to 5.4 percent, which is exceptionally high by Japanese standards.

A huge government stimulus effort -- amounting to about 5 percent of Japan's GDP -- has also perked up domestic spending and slowed layoffs.

Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa warned last week that the increase in demand may lessen as the effect of government stimulus spending declines. The bank kept interest rates at slightly above zero.

News that Japan's economy is growing appears unlikely to rescue Prime Minister Taro Aso and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from what would be a historic defeat in a general election Aug. 30.

"It is too late," said Minoru Morita, a political analyst in Tokyo. "Regardless of what the numbers say, a majority of people are struggling day to day. The market will respond, but the general public will not."

Polls show that Aso's party, which has had 54 years of nearly unbroken rule, is likely to be clobbered by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which is promising to pay more attention to consumers and small businesses, rather than to the blue-chip corporations that traditionally have had the ear of the LDP.

The Democratic Party is also promising to guarantee pensions for the country's large and growing elderly population. In the past two years, the ruling party has been unable to reassure the elderly, in the wake of a scandal in which millions of government pension records went missing, that their pensions are safe.

The opposition candidate for prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, a wealthy politician who has a doctorate in engineering from Stanford University, is 10 to 20 percentage points ahead of Aso in recent opinion polls.

"The wind is still blowing for the opposition party," Morita said. "The relationship of the ruling party with the grass roots has been destroyed. People feel they can no longer support LDP, and they want change."

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles

August 17th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

Beate Marie Eriksen (born 19 October 1960) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She acts in Hotel Cæsar, a popular Norwegian soap opera. The article about her on Wikipedia is the three millionth article there; another important milestone in the history of the people’s encyclopedia.

This latest milestone was announced on the front page of the English Wikipedia, but searching Wikipedia for itself reveals other interesting stats (for even more stats, read about the history of Wikipedia). It has about 10 million registered users and over 17 million pages. For comparison, the oldest English language encyclopedia, Britannica, has 40 million words on half a million topics. And yes, I also found that on Wikipedia ().

Although the growth of Wikipedia has slowed down somewhat in recent years, it is, without question, one of the most important sources of knowledge today. The number of articles will never grow as explosively as it did in the early days, for obvious reasons: so many topics have already been covered.

It is important to note that Wikipedia actually has 13 million articles, if you count the versions in other languages, which still have tremendous room to grow. Therefore, I’m sure that the largest online encyclopedia hasn’t will reach many more milestones in the future.

Thai Protesters Gather in Bangkok

By Alastair Leithead
BBC Asia correspondent, Bangkok

Thousands of political demonstrators have gathered in Bangkok in the first mass action since the violence that erupted in the city in April.

Supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, wearing red shirts, were to present a petition to a representative of the royal household.

They say more than five million people have signed it, asking the king to pardon Mr Thaksin.

He was convicted on conflict of interest charges and now lives abroad.

The thousands of demonstrators are a reminder that the deep-rooted political divide in Thailand, which fuelled the violence of April and brought tens of thousands out on to the streets, has not gone away.

The protesters say the five million petition signatures are an indication of the huge level of support for Mr Thaksin.

He has been unable to return to Thailand since the conviction but has stirred up the crowds at anti-government political rallies through telephone calls and video links.

Many of his supporters from the poor rural north and north-east of Thailand are angry at the way their opposing yellow-shirted protesters forced political change by blockading Bangkok's international airports last year and yet have not been punished.

Current Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who came to power with the backing of the yellow shirts, has warned the protesters not to resort to violence.

But an unconnected corruption case at the Supreme Court against a senior government figure is expected to attract an opposing group of demonstrators in the same part of the city, so police have been deployed to prevent clashes between the two sides.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8204589.stm

Published: 2009/08/17 04:15:41 GMT

China Villagers Storm Lead Plant

By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing

Hundreds of Chinese villagers have broken into a factory that poisoned more than 600 children, reports say.

Villagers tore down fencing and smashed coal trucks at the lead smelting factory in Shaanxi Province.

Local authorities have admitted that the plant is responsible for poisoning the children. More than 150 were in hospital.

Air, soil and water pollution is common in China, which has seen rapid economic growth over the past few decades.

Toxic metal

The villagers broke into the Dongling Lead and Zinc Smelting Company, near the city of Baoji in western Shaanxi on Monday, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

About 100 police officers were sent to the plant to restore order.

The villagers are angry because medical tests revealed that at least 600 children under 14 from two villages near the plant have excessive amounts of lead in their blood.

About a quarter of them were taken to hospital for treatment.

Environmental officials from Baoji city government admitted on Sunday that the plant was "mainly to blame" for the children's lead poisoning, according to Xinhua.

Checks found that water, soil and waste from the factory - a major local employer - all met national environmental standards.

But the lead content in the air around the factory was more than six times the level found a few hundred metres away.

The smelting plant has now been closed down.

Local officials had promised to relocate all residents living within a 500m ( 550 yard ) radius of the factory within three years of its opening, but that plan stalled.

Xinhua said only 156 families had been moved; three times that number are still waiting.

Villages are also worried that the new homes are still not far enough away from the plant to prevent their children from getting sick.

Lead is a toxic metal that can get into the air and water supplies.

It can cause a range of health problems, from learning disabilities to seizures. Children under six are most at risk.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8204689.stm

Published: 2009/08/17 08

Anti-gay Attacks on Rise in Iraq

Gay Iraqi men are being murdered in what appears to be a co-ordinated campaign involving militia forces, the group Human Rights Watch says.

It says hundreds of gay men have been targeted and killed in Iraq since 2004.

So-called honour killings also account for deaths where families punish their own kin in order to avoid public shame.

The report says members of the Mehdi Army militia group are spearheading the campaign, but police are also accused - even though homosexuality is legal.

Witnesses say vigilante groups break into homes and pick people up in the street, interrogating them to extract the names of other potential victims, before murdering them.

"Murder and torture are no way to enforce morality," said HRW researcher Rasha Moumneh, quoted in the report.

"These killings point to the continuing and lethal failure of Iraq's post-occupation authorities to establish the rule of law and protect their citizens."

In some cases, Human Rights Watch says it was told, Iraqi security forces had actually "colluded and joined in the killing".

Witch-hunt

Recently, posters appeared in Sadr City - a conservative, Shia area of Baghdad - calling on people to watch out for gay men and listing not only their names but also their addresses.

One gay man in Baghdad described the killing campaign as a witch-hunt.

“ These killings will continue, because it has simply become normal in Iraq to kill gay men ”
Unnamed gay Iraqi man

Nearly 90 gay men have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of January and many more are missing, local gay rights campaigners say.

The report, called They want us exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, says horrifically mutilated bodies of gay men have been left on rubbish tips.

Sometimes their bodies are daubed with offensive terms such as "pervert", or "puppy" which is a hate word for gay men in Iraq.

The report contains detailed testimonies of a range of brutal treatment of gay Iraqi men.

"We've heard stories confirmed by doctors of men having their anuses glued and then being force-fed laxatives which leads to a very painful death," says Ms Moumneh told the BBC.

'Feminised men'

When questioned in the past, officials in Iraq have condemned the killings, but the BBC's Natalia Antelava in Baghdad reports that gay men there say nothing has been done to protect them.

"These killings will continue, because it has simply become normal in Iraq to kill gay men," said a gay Iraqi man who did not want to be named.

Mehdi army spokesmen and clerics have condemned what they call the "feminisation" of Iraqi men and have urged the military to take action against them.

The report said many gay men have fled to other countries in the region, despite consensual homosexual activity being illegal there, because the risk of victimisation is reduced.

HRW says the threats and abuses have spread from Baghdad to Kirkuk, Najaf and Basra, although persecution remains concentrated in the capital.

Officials say part of the problem in dealing with the attacks is that victims' relatives seldom if ever provide information to the police.

"They consider talking about the subject worse than the crime itself. This is the nature of our society," ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8204853.stm

Published: 2009/08/17

Many Killed in Russia Bomb Attack

At least 20 people have been killed by a bomb at a police station in Russia's southern republic of Ingushetia.

The suspected suicide attack in Nazran, Ingushetia's main city, injured more than 60 people, including children.

The republic borders Chechnya and has seen a spate of shootings, bombings and other attacks on police and government.

The Ingush leader blamed militants, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sacked Ingushetia's interior minister, saying the attack had been preventable.

"The police must protect the people and the police must also be able to defend themselves," Mr Medvedev said.

Escalating clashes

Monday's bomb attack was described as the deadliest strike in months in Ingushetia.

The explosion gutted the building as police lined up for a shift change.

ANALYSIS
Sarah Rainsford, BBC News This attack is part of a recent surge in violence in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus region of Russia. The large-scale separatist conflict that ravaged Chechnya has now ended after 15 years. In April, the Russian president declared Chechnya to be stable enough to ease security restrictions, and lower the number of Russian troops.

But the insurgency in the Caucasus has gradually changed form into an Islamist uprising, and spread beyond Chechnya's borders. Militants have targeted government officials and the security forces in particular, with a combination of deadly gun battles and suicide attacks.

President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was appointed by the Kremlin to head the autonomous republic of Ingushetia - and arrived vowing to end the violence and combat serious corruption. He's still recovering from an attempt on his life.

Images from Nazran showed scenes of devastation within the compound, with nearby homes also badly damaged and burned-out cars strewn nearby.

The bomber was reported to have rammed his vehicle into the gates of the police compound as officers were reporting for inspection, government spokesman Kaloi Akhilgov said.

"Practically all the cars and buildings in the yard of the police headquarters were completely destroyed," Reuters quoted him as saying.

The bomber was assumed to be among the dead, although this could not be confirmed.

Mr Akghilov told the AFP news agency that all of the dead were police, but 11 children were among those injured. Many of those hurt were living in residential buildings adjacent to the police station, he said.

Many of the injured were said to be in a serious condition. They were taken to hospitals in Nazran, but Mr Akghilov said the authorities were struggling to cope with the casualties.

"We have not had such an attack for a long time," he said, adding that hospitals did not have enough blood to treat the injured.

Much of the violence in Ingushetia has echoed the continuing unrest in Chechnya, with escalating clashes in the past year between pro-Russian security forces and armed militants.

Human rights activists and opposition politicians in Ingushetia told the BBC last year that the republic was now in a situation of "civil war".

In the most high-profile recent attack, Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was severely wounded when a suicide bomber attacked his motorcade in June. He has not yet returned to work but is said to be recovering.

In a statement, he blamed Monday's attack on militants angered by recent security operations along the border with Chechnya.

"It was an attempt to destabilise the situation and sow panic," he said.

Less than a week ago, Ingushetia's construction minister was shot dead by masked gunmen.

That followed the shooting dead of three employees of Russia's emergencies ministry.

In Chechnya, Russian forces were engaged in heavy fighting with separatist rebels until a few years ago, though the fighting has become much less intense recently.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8204670.stm

Published: 2009/08/17

The Harvard Gym Controversy is Not About Religion

Posted on June 20, 2008, Printed on August 17, 2009
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/mediaculture/309/

Almost every article I have come across on the subject of the "Harvard gym controversy," over the exclusion of men from the gym for a small period of time each week, has focused on the problem of religion and religious accommodation. Why should we accommodate them? Where will it stop? How many accommodations are we going to need? Why do Muslim women feel uncomfortable in gyms?

These are not the right questions. The question should be, why do some women feel uncomfortable working out, swimming, jogging, under the male gaze? Why do some women feel uncomfortable walking on the street at night? Why do some women feel uncomfortable taking the metro or the bus at night? Why would most women prefer to have sex-segregated bathrooms, showers and dorms? Why do women feel nervous when waiting for a bus late at night, and a man shows up? You could argue that they should “suck it up,” and “deal with it.” They do, in fact. Every day, American girls and women are raped. Worldwide, in fact, women are daily punished for being female. Whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, pagan, or atheist—they are women.

The answer is not based in religion. The problem is patriarchy and the male gaze. This gaze is often threatening to women’s physical and psychological security, no matter what they do and no matter what they wear, no matter what age they are, and no matter where they are. Women can be raped.

And women can then be accused of dressing provocatively. Women’s clothing is not a simple matter. The law itself concerns itself with women’s clothing.

Svend, my husband, can run out to the door in his shorts and in what some people refer to tellingly as a “wife-beater.” I, on the other hand, must be fully dressed, complete with appropriate underwear. There are reasons why this is so, and they are only partially based in religion.

The rules of the gym, some say, are different: people don’t bat an eye if a pretty girl shows up in short-shorts and a sports bra. Please, I respond: are you telling me that an attractive young woman wouldn’t attract a great deal of male attention in a two-piece at the pool? Are you trying to argue that it doesn’t matter what a woman wears, in the pool or the gym? That she should still feel safe and comfortable? She should, in fact, also be free of body-consciousness that is at the heart of truly exhilarating physical exercise?

Girls and women in our culture—in most cultures—grow up with an intense sense of the male gaze. We are conscious of the male gaze that evaluates women, the male gaze that judges women, the male gaze that desires women, the male gaze that lusts after women, and the male gaze that is threatening to women. Entering the gym does not make that consciousness go away. But women are supposed to pretend that the physical and psychological realities of our culture simply evaporate at the door to the gym.

When I was at Indiana University, Muslim women used to request women’s hours at the pool. It was a most delightful swimming party. Some of my non-Muslim women friends envied us the freedom of swimming with women alone. One told me how she disliked baring unnecessary lengths of flesh for the pool—whether for modesty or for self-consciousness or because she hated having to shave. The swimsuit, for instance, is after all an inherently eroticized, sexualized garment. There's a reason why Sports Illustrated has a swimsuit issue. It's also why men love to leaf through Victoria’s Secret catalogues. Let’s not pretend that undergraduate men do not check out women in the gym. Or in the pool. Or on the beach. That women should be “tough” enough to jog away at the treadmill in a state of free bounce while completely unaware of the male gaze. And why, indeed, should they be so very tough? Has society–any society–created an environment of complete gender-blind safety for them that they should give up those hang-ups once and for all?

People have wondered why Muslim men haven’t made the case for separate gym hours. Yes, it would be better for pious Muslim men to not look at women, but yes, they are less concerned about being seen. And is that because they are less pious than Muslim women? (Perhaps, I might argue). But the reason is because we live in a patriarchal world, where men are generally not at risk of physical danger from women. It is because women are objectified, raped, assaulted, bought and sold worldwide. Most women, one writer argued, are too shy to request women’s hours at the gym: Muslim women have the gall to demand it, and on the basis of religion. And why, I ask, should most women be “shy” to request women’s hours at the gym? Women are not too shy to march in the street in Take Back the Night demonstrations. But the night has not been regained. When I leave the gym, the night is still as dark and menacing as before.

Shabana Mir has her PhD in Education Policy Studies and Anthropology from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Her doctoral dissertation -- which won the Council on Anthropology and Education's Outstanding Dissertation Award -- was based on ethnographic research that examined American Muslim women's religious, ethnic, civic and gender identities. She has lived, studied and worked in the UK, Pakistan, and the US. She has an MPhil in School Development from Cambridge University (UK), and an MA in English Literature from Punjab University (Lahore). She has taught English at the International Islamic University, and Education to undergraduates at Eastern Illinois University and Indiana University. She lives in Athens, GA and blogs at Koonj.

New Stuff on the Blog

Today's Blog Tips

** The new Share gadget at the very top of the right sidebar lets you share any blog posting here on many networking sites. Let the page load a few seconds, then mouse-over the word 'Share,' and the networking site menu appears. The gadget also lets you email the posting's link, bookmark it, or print it out.

Important: To bring up an _individual blog posting_ here, you hit the posting time at the bottom of the posting you want to share. This lets you use the gadget. If you just want to share the original outside source (if there is one), hit the title of the individual posting.

** With so many postings and links here containing obscure words you may not understand, I suggest you add KallOut, as a Firefox add-on or as a downloadable program. In Firefox (where I use it, I highlight any word on the page, then up pops a very little balloon which when clicked produces a suggested menu of search options for that word. To install the add-on, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=kallout or to install the program, go to http://kallout.com/ Very helpful, very fast.

** I expanded significantly the Wikipedia links on a wide variety of global issues. Check out the Global Problems module. More dedicated websites still need to be added there and elsewhere in the right sidebar.

** I am nearing closure on Wikipedia's links on Southeast Asian ethnic groups, Chinese peoples everywhere, and American minorities. I also added many other examples of world ethnic diversity. Look in the Minority Groups module.

Downpours Flood the Camps of Sri Lankan Refugees

By LYDIA POLGREEN

NEW DELHI — Downpours in northern Sri Lanka have flooded camps housing more than 250,000 people displaced by the fighting between the government and the Tamil Tigers, according to aid officials.

The rain, which fell heavily for much of the afternoon on Saturday, sent rivers of muck cascading between tightly packed rows of flimsy shelters, overflowed latrines and sent hundreds of families scurrying for higher ground.

The flooding raised fears for the safety of the displaced, who are being held in closed camps guarded by soldiers. Monsoon rains are expected to begin in little more than a month, and many aid groups worry that the hastily built camps will not survive the inundation.

“If only three or four hours of rain cause this much chaos, only imagine what a full monsoon can cause,” said David White, country director for Oxfam.

The camps occupy vast tracts of formerly forested land near the northern town of Vavuniya. Because the ground on which many of the camps were built was cleared of trees recently, the soil is soft and porous. It turns into mud almost instantly, making it nearly impossible to get trucks through to deliver food, water and medicine, aid officials said.

Life in the camps was already tough, but the rain has made it almost unbearable, according to people who have visited the camps in the last 24 hours. The pegs holding down plastic tents have come loose, leaving some families without shelter. Latrines have collapsed, sending waste spilling into nearby rivers. Silt has clogged water treatment plants that are essential for providing drinking water and preventing the spread of waterborne disease.

Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site in Sri Lanka, published photographs that showed a grim scene of mud and squalor. Aid workers said that they were able to restore some services, like food deliveries, and get temporary shelters for families that lost their tents.

The people in the camps are displaced ethnic Tamils. Most were trapped, along with the last fighters of the Tamil Tiger separatist group, on a narrow strip of land in northwestern Sri Lanka. Government troops wiped out the senior leadership of the rebel group after a fierce battle in May. Thousands of civilians died alongside the fighters, according to the United Nations.

Those who survived fled to camps around Vavuniya, where they have been held ever since. The government has said it cannot allow the displaced people to go home because the areas they fled are sown with land mines, and because Tamil Tiger fighters remain hidden among them. Human rights organizations and several Western governments have criticized the government’s handling of the displaced, calling it tantamount to internment.

As the heavy rains approach, the government will need to move much faster to get displaced people out of the camps, Mr. White said. The government has pledged to get most of the displaced out of the camps by the end of the year.

“Really, we have run out of options and the only option that is left is to speed up the resettlement process,” Mr. White said.

Moussavi Forms ‘Grass-Roots’ Movement in Iran

By ROBERT F. WORTH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The Iranian opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi announced the formation of a new social and political movement on his Web site on Saturday, following through on a promise made last month and defying a renewed government campaign of intimidation aimed at him and his supporters.

The movement is not a political party — which would require a government permit — but a “grass-roots and social network” that will promote democracy and adherence to the law, Mr. Moussavi wrote in a statement on his site. It is to be known as the Green Way of Hope, in deference to the signature bright green color of his campaign for the June 12 presidential election, which he maintains was rigged in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The announcement was Mr. Moussavi’s first major public statement since the Iranian authorities stepped up their pressure on the opposition by opening a mass trial two weeks ago. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Moussavi’s campaign of links to a vast conspiracy to bring down the Iranian government. After he and many others denounced the trial, the chief prosecutor issued a stark warning that anyone questioning the trial’s legitimacy could in turn be prosecuted.

Since then, a stream of hard-line lawmakers and clerics have called for Mr. Moussavi and other leading opposition figures to be arrested and tried.

Mr. Moussavi said little in his statement about the mission and activities of the new movement, perhaps to avoid giving pretexts for a further crackdown and to keep its potential membership as broad as possible.

In recent weeks, outrage about the abuse of jailed protesters — including some who died in custody — has spread from opposition members to many conservatives. The controversy has grown even more volatile in the past week, since the reformist cleric and presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi first raised accusations that some male and female prisoners had been raped. Hard-line clerics and the speaker of Parliament have vehemently denied the claim, and there have been calls for Mr. Karroubi to be arrested, too.

A third session of the mass political trial was set to begin Sunday morning, with 25 new defendants, Press TV reported. Previous sessions have included confessions by prominent reformists whose friends and relatives said they had been coerced through torture. Last week, a French researcher and an Iranian employee of the British Embassy in Tehran were forced to take the stand and apologize for their efforts to report on Iran’s turmoil, prompting angry protests from Britain and France.

In his announcement, Mr. Moussavi countered efforts to portray him as a tool of secular foreigners, affirming his support for institutions like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia, despite the fact that they are widely believed to be in charge of the current crackdown. But he also lashed out at the recent threats aimed at him and his supporters, saying, “Instead of accusing this millions-strong group, you should look to those who have created a poisonous propaganda war that served the interests of the enemy.”

Also on Saturday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appointed Sadeq Larijani as the new chief of the judiciary, replacing Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a conservative. Mr. Larijani, another conservative and member of Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, is a brother of Ali Larijani, the Parliament speaker. The appointment came as Ayatollah Shahroudi’s term ended and does not appear to be related to the recent controversy over prison abuse and prosecutions of protesters.

2 Killings Stoke Kashmiri Rage at Indian Force

By LYDIA POLGREEN

SHOPIAN, Kashmir — On a sunny late spring afternoon, Asiya and Nilofer Jan left home to tend to their family’s apple orchard. Along the way they passed a gauntlet of police camps wreathed in razor wire as they crossed the bridge over the ankle-deep Rambi River.

Little more than 12 hours later their battered bodies were found in the stream. Asiya, a 17-year-old high school student, had been badly beaten. Blood streamed from her nose and a sharp gash in her forehead. She and her 22-year-old sister-in-law, Nilofer, had been gang raped before their deaths.

The crime, and allegations of a bungled attempt by the local police to cover it up, set off months of sporadic street protests here in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. It is now the focal point for seemingly bottomless Kashmiri rage at the continuing presence of roughly 500,000 Indian security forces. The forces remain, though the violence by separatist militants whom they came here to fight in the past few years has ebbed to its lowest point in two decades.

“India says Kashmir is a free part of a free country,” said Majid Khan, a 20-year-old unemployed man who has joined the stone-throwing mobs. “If that is so, why are we being brutalized? Why are women gang raped?”

India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir, and the Himalayan border region remains at the heart of the 62-year rivalry between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Settling the Kashmir dispute is crucial to unlocking the region’s tensions, something the United States hopes will eliminate Pakistan’s shadowy support for militant groups and allow its army to shift attention toward fighting Taliban militants.

Despite Kashmiri rage and the damage to India’s image, the Indian government has bridled at any outside pressure to negotiate a solution, let alone reduce its force level here. Caught in the middle are Kashmir’s 10 million people. The case of Asiya and Nilofer is only the latest abuse to strike a chord with Kashmiris, who say it is emblematic of the problems of what amounts to a full-scale occupation.

Kashmir has its own police force, but it works in close tandem with the Indian forces here and is seen by many as virtually indistinguishable from them. Four Kashmiri officers are suspected of trying to cover up the crime.

Kashmiri activists and human rights groups say that rapes by men in uniform, extrajudicial killings and a lack of redress are endemic, not least because security forces are largely shielded from prosecution by laws put in place when Indian troops were battling a once-potent insurgency here. Both local and national security forces here operate with impunity, they say.

The question for India, Kashmiris say, is whether the huge security presence is doing more harm than good.

“Maybe at some point in time when the militants were in the thousands it made sense to have so many soldiers here,” said Mehbooba Mufti, leader of a major opposition party here. “But at this point they are not helping in any way. Their mere presence has become a source of friction.”

Indian government officials point to statistics showing a decline in infiltration from Pakistan as proof that their tough methods have worked.

According to the government, 557 civilians died in 2005 in what the government calls “terrorist” violence in Jammu and Kashmir, which is India’s full name for the area. By 2008 that number had plummeted to 91. The number of militants killed has fallen by nearly two-thirds, while the deaths of security personnel in the region have been more than halved. Where tens of thousands of armed men once roamed, government officials now estimate there are as few as 500.

Analysts say that other events have also played a role in reducing militancy and infiltration. Secret talks between India and Pakistan over Kashmir made progress but broke down in 2007, when Pakistan’s president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, began losing his grip on power.

In addition, after two decades of militant separatism, in December 2008 voters ignored separatist calls for a boycott and cast ballots in huge numbers in state assembly elections. It was a hopeful sign that Kashmiris believed they could influence their destiny by peaceful means.

The election brought Omar Abdullah, the scion of Kashmir’s most famous political family, to power as chief minister of the state. He promised to roll back the laws that shielded Indian security forces in Kashmir from oversight, and to put Kashmir’s police force, rather than federal police and troops, at the forefront of securing the region. But that has not happened, and the details of the Shopian killings have fed the darkest and most personal fears of Kashmiris as the investigation into the deaths has stalled.

“Who does not see their wife in Nilofer, their daughter in Asiya?” said Abdul Rashid Dalal, who lives in Shopian.

Nilofer and Asiya Jan had walked to the orchard around 3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 29. When Shakeel Ahmad Ahanger, Nilofer’s husband, came home at 7:30 p.m., the two had not yet returned. He went to search for them but found no trace.

By 9:30 p.m. he was frantic. He went to the police station, and along with several officers scoured their route, including the shallow bed of the Rambi River. The police called off the search at 2:30 a.m., urging Mr. Ahanger to return at daybreak. After his dawn prayers, he went back to the bridge with police officials.

“Look, there is your wife,” the local police chief said to Mr. Ahanger, pointing at a body lying prone on some rocks in a dry patch in the middle of the stream.

He rushed to her, but she was dead. Her dress had been hiked up, exposing her midriff. Her body was bruised. “I knew immediately something very bad had happened to her,” Mr. Ahanger said. His sister was found a mile downstream. Their bodies were taken for autopsies, but the cause of death seemed clear to residents who have longed lived in the shadow of the security forces.

“Two girls disappear next to an armed camp,” said Abdul Hamid Deva, a member of a committee of elders set up in response to the killings. “Their bodies then mysteriously appear in a river next to the camp. It does not take much imagination to know what is likely to have happened.”

Town residents gathered at the hospital for the autopsy results. Initially a doctor said the women drowned. But the crowd rejected the conclusion; the stream was barely ankle deep. Residents pelted the hospital with stones. A second team of doctors was called in. They confirmed that the women had been raped.

“What was done to these women even animals could not have done,” the gynecologist who examined the women told the crowd, weeping as she spoke, according to witnesses.

Two men who had been at a shop near the bridge would later tell investigators they saw a police truck parked on the bridge and heard women crying for help.

Initially, the chief minister, Mr. Abdullah, also told reporters that the women had drowned. Later security officials said that advisers had misinformed him. A few days later he acknowledged that the women had come to harm and appointed a commission to investigate. But investigators say that crucial evidence has been lost and that they are no closer to finding the culprits despite the arrest of four local police officers on suspicion of a cover-up.

Kuldeep Khoda, the director general of Kashmir’s police force, admitted that his forces had made mistakes. “There is a prima facie feeling there was destruction of evidence, whether deliberate or inadvertent,” Mr. Khoda said. “The investigation is going on and the results of that investigation will come.”

Indian government officials say that the security forces here are needed to head off more insurgent violence or a Pakistani invasion. “If there would not be a war that is fought by external forces, our soldiers would not be there,” said a senior Indian intelligence official, referring to groups in Pakistan.

But residents of Shopian say the security forces are the only threat. “The only thing I can do now is hope justice will be done,” said Mr. Ahanger, Nilofer’s husband, who is struggling to care for his 2-year-old son, Suzain. “Nobody is safe in Kashmir — even a child, an elderly man, a young girl. Nobody is safe.”

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from New Delhi.

Book Review: 'China Safari' by Serge Michel and Michel Beuret

By Michela Wrong
Sunday, August 16, 2009

CHINA SAFARI

On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa

By Serge Michel and Michel Beuret

Translated from the French by Raymond Valley

Nation. 306 pp. $27.50

In 1994, when I lived in the chaotic African country then known as Zaire, I regularly drove past a magnificent sports stadium that loomed over downtown Kinshasa. Built by the Chinese in a gesture of friendship to President Mobutu Sese Seko, it sat empty for nearly a year. The Chinese had left it to their hosts to provide the finishing touch, a road giving access to the site. The Zairians had failed to deliver, so the stadium stood idle.

That memory was revived as I read "China Safari," an exploration of China's galloping involvement in Africa. Beijing, which once confined itself to grandiose yet largely symbolic African projects, has become one of the continent's most aggressive investors. Bilateral trade quintupled between 2000 and 2006. China has already replaced Britain as the continent's third largest business partner and more than half a million Chinese are estimated to be living in Africa.

It's easy to see what the Chinese -- hungry for oil, timber, uranium and other minerals lacking at home -- get from the arrangement. The question is whether ordinary Africans will draw lasting benefit from this new association, or suffer as their leaders repeat the mistakes of the Cold War and colonial era, when they were routinely outmaneuvered by foreign partners with a similar lust for the continent's resources.

Accompanied by photographer Paolo Woods, Swiss journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret put in extensive legwork trying to provide an answer. Frustrated by the empty rhetoric of the 2006 China-Africa summit attended by 48 African nations, they spent nearly two years talking to those lower down the food chain: Chinese loggers in Congo-Brazzaville, ditch-diggers in Angola, curio sellers in Egypt. The result is a work whose style may occasionally come across as peculiarly baroque -- the translator stumbles when attempting to convey the irony of the original -- but whose message is clear: Africa has much to gain but needs to be on guard.

China's sales pitch, stubbornly trumpeted despite its insincerity, is that it refuses to preach, impose conditions or interfere in the affairs of sovereign nations. In stark contrast with Africa's former partners, the line goes, China is only interested in trade.

The authors skewer that claim. If the Chinese refuse to acknowledge the political ramifications of their growing economic presence, the locals will make that link for them. In Niger, Chinese working the uranium mines are being kidnapped by Tuareg rebels, in Ethiopia's Ogaden oil fields Chinese have been attacked by separatists, and in Zambia's copper belt miners have revolted against Chinese bosses refusing to recognize the union.

One of the most worrying elements to emerge from these pages is a consistent lack of transparency in all these Chinese ventures. "Not a single Chinese official in the region would agree to meet us," the authors write. Their requests for interviews with African officials and Chinese managers were routinely ignored, access to work sites barred and information on contractual terms withheld.

Domestic parliamentarians have been similarly stymied, unable to uncover even basic details of projects they were promised would transform their countries. None of this bodes well on a continent where top-level sleaze and capital flight have already leached away billions of dollars earmarked for development. Opaque, unscrutinized contracts threaten more of the same.

Michel and Beuret are admirably even-handed, unsparing in their attacks on the cynical agendas and sad outcomes of past French, British or U.S. intervention. (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's seven-nation tour of the continent last week underscores that the United States remains engaged.) But Michel and Beuret hold out hope for this brash, colossal Chinese experiment. "If nothing checks China's momentum, its infrastructure work alone will help unify the continent," they write, pointing to planned construction of a coast-to-coast railroad, electricity and water networks and an oil pipeline. China's arrival, they conclude, has been an unexpected boon to a region forgotten by the rest of the world.

But the lesson of that Kinshasa stadium is that the gift of massive infrastructure, while important, is not enough on its own. For Africa to seize the historic chance presented by China's involvement, the continent's leaders must get their own house in order. Ministers should open the books to their own parliaments and ensure that their new partners employ Africans, pass on vital skills and respect local labor and environmental laws. If this once-in-a-century opportunity is wasted, it is they, and not the Chinese, who will rightly bear the blame.

Michela Wrong writes on Africa. Her third book, "It's Our Turn to Eat. The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower" was published in June.

The West's Sanctions on Burma Aren't Working

By Thant Myint-U
Sunday, August 16, 2009

Twenty years of sanctioning and lecturing Burma's military regime have failed. The West needs to engage with Burma's leaders, increase humanitarian aid and reopen commercial relations with the country. If it doesn't, not only will positive change remain as elusive as ever, but the country will turn quickly and irreparably into an economic vassal of China.

In a sign of just how impervious the regime is to Western pressure, last week, opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to her fourth spell of house arrest. Two thousand political prisoners remain locked up. And a transition to democracy appears nowhere in sight.

I was born in the United States in 1966 to Burmese parents. My grandfather, U Thant, was then serving as the United Nations' third secretary general. I witnessed repression in Burma firsthand when I was 8, during the violent unrest surrounding my grandfather's funeral.

In 1989, just after college, I spent a year in Thailand and along the Thai-Burmese border, working with dissidents and trying help the first wave of Burmese refugees. Thousands had been killed during a failed anti-government uprising. Suu Kyi had just been placed under house arrest. And the ruling junta, after losing relatively free elections, was refusing to hand over power. Later in Washington I argued with members of Congress and others that maximum sanctions were the best way to topple the dictatorship. It was an easy argument to make.

By the early 1990s nearly all Western aid to Burma had been terminated, and development assistance through the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had been blocked. A decade later, embargos and boycotts had cut off nearly all economic ties with the United States and Europe. None of the senior Burmese government officials or their children (these are the only international sanctions targeting children) are allowed to travel to the West.

But as the regime not only survived but began to seek trade, investment and tourism, I started having doubts. My feeling was that the West should use the opening and find a back door to change while the front door remained firmly shut.

In 2006 I published a book, "The River of Lost Footsteps," in which I argued for a shift in the West's approach. Even when, in 2007, new protests were violently crushed, I still believed greater engagement was the right way. I felt that many policymakers and journalists were missing the bigger picture.

Few seemed aware, for example, that Burma was just emerging from decades of civil war. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the government and more than a dozen different ethnic insurgent armies hammered out cease-fires, a breakthrough that went virtually unnoticed in the West. (Today, though the cease-fires remain, there is no permanent peace.) And few seemed concerned by the country's grinding poverty, the result of decades of economic bungling as well as embargos, boycotts and aid cutoffs.

In 1991, UNICEF's country director warned of a humanitarian emergency among Burma's children, arguing that more aid couldn't wait for the right government. Eighteen years later, Burma still receives less than a tenth of the per-capita aid handed out to Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Tens of thousands die needlessly from treatable diseases.

These challenges have been ignored in the hope that sanctions and tough talk would lead to political change. But that hasn't happened.

Part of the reason is that the people who fashioned the sanctions didn't consider how the rise of Asia's giants -- China and India -- would transform Burma. As American businesses pulled out in the mid-1990s, Chinese and other Asian companies poured in. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of natural gas have been discovered offshore, and massive hydroelectric and mining projects are being signed. Within two years a 1,000-mile oil and gas pipeline will stretch across Burma, connecting China's inland provinces to the sea. The U.S. trade embargo led to the near-collapse of the garment industry in the late 1990s, throwing tens of thousands of people out of work, but for the regime this has meant little.

Burma today is in no danger of economic disintegration. Without Western engagement, however, Burma's 55 million people risk becoming a virtual colony of their 1.3 billion Chinese neighbors to the east. There is no nefarious Chinese takeover scheme, but the vacuum created by Western policy is being filled.

The old Burmese generals will soon retire, and a new generation will rise to the top. Gen. Than Shwe, Burma's powerful autocrat, is 77 and ailing. Any chance for change requires support from at least some military leaders. Yet we've done nothing to try to influence the worldview of Than Shwe's possible successors. The upcoming generation of officers will be the first never to have visited Europe or America.

Last winter the Obama administration announced a review of Burma policy. I hope it will reconsider the United States' long-standing reliance on sanctions. It's not just that they don't work, but that they've been hugely counterproductive, taking away the one big force -- American soft power -- that could have played a role in reshaping the landscape.

Asia has experienced many successful democratic transitions, and none came about because of the sanctions and lectures that Western powers and advocacy groups seem to think will work in Burma. Generals don't negotiate away their power in the face of threats. You have to change the ground beneath them.

Engagement is not just about talking -- it's about dealing with the powers that be enough to get a foot in the door and create new facts on the ground, especially through economic contacts with the Burmese people. Nor is it based on the notion that economic development will automatically produce democracy, but that we must tackle simultaneously Burma's political and economic ills.

Many in America and worldwide are again outraged by goings-on in Burma. But without new thinking, 20 more years will pass and the dream of a prosperous, democratic Burma will be more distant still.

thant@post.harvard.edu

Thant Myint-U is the author of "The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma."

Fighting for Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia

By Wajeha Al-Huwaider
Sunday, August 16, 2009

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia Who is that woman who returns day after day to the border crossing, seeking to pass from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, only to be turned away? She is me.

Who am I? A native of the city of Hufuf in eastern Saudi Arabia, where the world's best dates are grown, a 47-year-old divorced mother of two teenage sons, and an employee of the vast Saudi oil company, Saudi Aramco.

I am not a dangerous person, so why do they turn me away? Because I refuse to present a document signed by my male "guardian," giving his permission for me to travel. And why do I do that?

I possess such a document, but it is humiliating to have to produce it, and I am tired of being humiliated solely because I am a woman. So I have decided to try to leave my country without following the rules. I have urged other Saudi women to do likewise, and in recent weeks several have.

Everyone knows that women are denied rights in Saudi Arabia. And you may think that our fate is the same one that women in some other developing countries face, only a little worse. In truth, we endure a status that most Americans can scarcely imagine.

The guardianship rules are only part of a bigger system of subjugating women. Even with the permission of a guardian, a woman may not drive a car (except in some isolated rural areas and within the compounds that are home to many workers from Western countries). Obviously, there is nothing in the Koran that forbids driving. No, the reason we are not allowed to drive is that the power to transport ourselves would give men much less control over us.

So, one of my other campaigns has been for the right to drive. Last year on International Women's Day I posted a video on YouTube of myself driving a car. It was filmed by another woman sitting in the passenger's seat. I explained that many Saudi women who have lived abroad have driver's licenses from other countries and would be happy to volunteer to teach our sisters how to drive. (That way they would not have to be alone in a car with a male driving instructor, lest terrible things happen.) This video has received more than 181,000 hits.

Earlier this year, while visiting my two sons at boarding school in Virginia (I send them there because I do not want them to grow up to be typical Saudi men), I staged a demonstration in front of a car dealership in Woodbridge. I addressed a message to U.S. automakers: Saudi women want to buy your cars (and many can afford to). But first, you must support our fight for the right to drive.

Women in Saudi Arabia may not go out without an abaya, an ugly black cloak that we have to wear on top of our regular clothes. You can imagine how great that feels in 100-degree heat. Saudi men, on the other hand, always wear white. In 2006, I dressed in pink when I staged a one-person protest march. It was the anniversary of the ascent of King Abdullah to the throne. By Saudi standards, Abdullah is a liberal, but he has not done nearly enough to change our situation. So I made a simple sign: "Give women their rights."

I started in Bahrain. I had a taxi drive me to the border. After crossing to the Saudi side I pulled out my sign and marched along the causeway from the island nation to the Saudi mainland. After 20 minutes, a police car pulled up and officers arrested me. After a day of interrogation in the police station, the cops were prepared to release me. But of course they couldn't release me into my own custody. I had to phone my younger brother to come act as my guardian.

Women are not allowed to participate in sports. How could you in an abaya? When I was very young, I was a tomboy. I loved to ride a bike, which my mother allowed, although most girls are forbidden because this activity might cost them their "virginity" by rupturing the hymen. When I was 7, my teacher tied my legs and beat me with a stick when she learned that I had been playing soccer with boys. Then she made me sit at my desk all day, without going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water.

While women are forced to be entirely dependent on men, men are allowed to follow their whims. A woman can get a divorce, but only by going through a laborious legal procedure in religious court. However, a man can divorce his wife merely by saying "I divorce you" three times. Although this is an ancient practice, these days the clerical authorities are debating whether the man has to say this in person, or if a text message will suffice. Already a judge in Jiddah has approved the first case of text-message divorce. The man was in Iraq to participate in jihad.

It's also legal for men to marry girls as young as 7 and 8 years old. I have campaigned on behalf of an 8-year-old girl who was married off to a 50-year-old man. I posted a video on YouTube against child marriages, showing little girls and teenagers voicing their refusal to be child brides. The video was covered by local female writers, then picked up by CNN. This campaign terminated that marriage, and the little girl is free.

Several months ago, the Saudi minister of justice announced plans to ban child marriages, but nothing has happened. A few days ago a 70-year-old man married a 9-year-old girl in Jiddah. Her father technically sold his daughter for $4,000. The day after the wedding night, the little girl was missing. She was found by her brother in a candy shop where she used to go to buy sweets.

Then there's polygamy. Saudi men are allowed to marry as many as four wives. Polygamy has destroyed many families. In my campaigns, I often feel that I am fighting for my mom.

After she married my father, she was informed by his mother that he already had another wife. When my mother confronted him, he assured her that she was his favorite and promised to divorce the first woman. For a time my mom was happy. But after a few years, she learned that my father had taken another wife. Now, my mom was no longer the favorite.

I was luckier than many. I married for love, and my former husband still holds a place in my heart, but we are no longer together. After the attacks on America in 2001, the Saudi government was embarrassed by the role of its citizens in this violence. To try to improve our country's image, the government liberalized slightly. I had been posting comments about women's rights on various Web sites, and I was invited to write a weekly column in al Watan, the nation's largest newspaper. Then, the English-language Arab News also wanted my work.

My husband chafed at my high profile, and he complained about the demands on my time. One day he announced that he was marrying a second wife. Although he swore that I was the most important one, I had watched my mother waste her life. I demanded a divorce.

My time in the limelight lasted only a year before the Saudi censors banned me. The authorities never communicated this to me directly, but one by one the editors of each publication rejected my pieces.

There are many Saudi women whose lives are marred far more than mine. Fatima Al-Azaz, for example, was lucky enough to marry for love, but her half-brothers decided that her husband's social standing was too low, so they persuaded a religious court to divorce them. The couple cannot ignore the divorce order because here people can be whipped, imprisoned and even executed for contact with someone of the opposite sex who is not their spouse or a relative. Still, Al-Azaz tried to return to her husband. To prevent that, she was first imprisoned for nine months together with her infant, then released to a women's shelter where her movements are restricted.

Or consider the story of Jamila, a wife of a relative. The eldest of 18 children by four wives of a poor date-farmer, Jamila completed high school with outstanding grades. Soon after graduation, her father agreed to marry her to a man from the city.

Jamila traveled with her mother to the city, where she met her husband for the first time on their wedding night. He turned out to be mentally disturbed. She pleaded with her mother to take her back home. Then Jamila was pushed into a room with her new "guardian," who consummated their union forcefully, while she screamed and pled for mercy.

One of my protest-video campaigns that did not succeed was a plan to post filmed testimony by women like Jamila. We were able to make one or two videos, but I found that even with their faces hidden, most Saudi women who have suffered are afraid to speak about it publicly.

There are women who don't support our cause -- rich ones whose husbands benefit from the system, and religious ones who just don't believe in change.

Why am I different? I am not sure. Perhaps because as a Shiite (who make up 10 percent of the Saudi population) I have always been somewhat marginalized. Perhaps because my mother, unlike most others, allowed me to play soccer with the boys, and I've always felt equal to them. Perhaps because I have the security of working for Aramco, the giant government oil company which depends on its largely Western workforce and therefore functions as an enclave of relative liberalism. Perhaps because I went to college in America and got to experience a life in which women are treated as people, not property.

wajeha4@gmail.com

Wajeha Al-Huwaider, a writer and an activist, is a co-founder of the Society for Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia.

Indian Actor's Questioning at Airport Draws Criticism

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 16, 2009

NEW DELHI, Aug. 15 -- One of India's biggest movie stars said he was detained and questioned at Newark Liberty International Airport early Saturday, causing outrage across his home country and reigniting discussion of the hardships many Indians say they face while traveling abroad.

Shah Rukh Khan, 43, known here as the King of Bollywood, was on his way to Chicago for a parade later Saturday to mark India's Independence Day when immigration officials at Newark pulled him aside and interrogated him. The star of scores of top-grossing films was released after Indian consular officials vouched for him.

"I was really hassled -- perhaps because of my name being Khan," he said in a text message to reporters in India. "These guys just wouldn't let me through."

Khan recently finished a shoot in the United States for his upcoming film, "My Name Is Khan," which happens to be about a Muslim's harrowing experience with racial profiling. Khan told reporters that in real life he "felt angry and humiliated."

Jen Friedberg, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, said the agency did not request that Khan be detained, the Associated Press reported.

A spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection said Khan was questioned for 66 minutes as part of the agency's routine process to screen foreign travelers and was not detained, the AP reported.

The incident followed another recent example of an Indian coming under suspicion for what talk show pundits here call "flying while brown." Last month, Continental Airlines apologized to former Indian president Abdul Kalam for frisking him at the New Delhi airport.

News of Khan's detention broke on a day of national pride, marked by parades, family picnics and girls wearing bangles in green and orange -- the colors of the Indian flag. News channels aired nonstop coverage of Khan's troubles, along with reactions from Bollywood A-listers, civil rights officials and security experts, some of whom defended the questioning in a post-9/11 world.

U.S. Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer released a statement Saturday saying the American government was "trying to ascertain the facts of the case -- to understand what took place."

"Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a very welcome guest in the United States. Many Americans love his films," Roemer said.

India's information and broadcasting minister, Ambika Soni, suggested that Americans should be treated the way Khan was when they arrive in India.

"There have been too many instances like these in the U.S. concerning Indians," Soni said on television.

Actress Priyanka Chopra, a friend of Khan's, expressed on Twitter a widely held view: "Its such behavior that fuels hatred n racism. SRK's a world figure for Gods sake. GET REAL!!" But not everyone appeared upset.

Meghnad Desai, an Indian-born economist, member of Britain's House of Lords and author of books on Indian cinema and globalization, joked in an interview in New Delhi that the whole thing seemed like a publicity stunt for Khan's new film.

"The U.S. government was an inadvertent accomplice to 20th Century Fox, which is investing millions in this movie," he said.

"This was a no-no for India-U.S. relations."

Wikipedia entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrukh_Khan

Doctored Data Cast Doubt on Argentina

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 16, 2009

BUENOS AIRES -- Workers at the government's National Institute of Statistics call it crass manipulation: Their agency, under pressure from above, altered socioeconomic data to reflect numbers palatable to the presidency. Inflation and poverty miraculously dropped, they said in interviews, and the economy boomed.

At least officially.

"They just erased the real numbers," said Luciano Belforte, an 18-year veteran at the institute. "Reality did not matter."

The alleged manipulation, which is under investigation by anti-corruption prosecutors, has angered Argentines. But in a globalized world, where a pensioner in Italy might be as likely to invest in Argentina as in Fiat, the suspected modifications are being felt far beyond this city.

In fact, an association of community college professors in New Jersey, a cattleman in Colorado and a Latino business group in California say they too are being shortchanged because they hold Argentine bonds. By underreporting inflation figures, economists say, Argentina is cheating investors of proper compensation on nearly $50 billion in debt benchmarked to inflation.

"The way these bonds work is that every month, or every six months, the principal adjusts for inflation," said Robert Shapiro, co-chair of the American Task Force Argentina, a Washington group lobbying for Argentina to pay its debt to American investors. "So if inflation is actually 30 percent, and they're only adjusting 10 percent, that's a huge loss."

Kathy Malachowski, president of the New Jersey professors group, said its pension plan invests in Argentine bonds. "We want to be able to retire and know that our money is going to be there," she said.

Officials at the Economy Ministry, the presidency and the INDEC, as the statistics institute is known, declined interview requests. A spokesman for the Economy Ministry, Sergio Poggi, said the new minister, Amado Boudou, is undertaking a review of INDEC methodology going back to 1999 and is creating a technical council of academics to advise the institute.

"This is the best way for all of us to be sure that things are being done correctly," President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said last month.

But credit-rating agencies and financial investment companies, among them Credit Suisse, say they are skeptical anything will change.

The problems at the INDEC, recounted in interviews with seven current workers and one former administrator, began in late 2006 during the presidency of Fernández de Kirchner's predecessor, her husband, Néstor Kirchner.

In accounts backed up by a 91-page complaint by prosecutors, institute employees recalled incessant phone calls from high-ranking government officials who wondered aloud whether there was a way to arrive at lower inflation numbers.

In early 2007, several statisticians, data-entry clerks and field workers who collect consumer prices were replaced, the prosecutors' investigation has shown. The institute then began to report lower inflation figures, which are used to calculate poverty rates, economic growth and other statistics, according to documents at the attorney general's office.

"It's a maneuver that brought economic consequences and a lack of credibility in the information produced by the Argentine state," said Manuel Garrido, the former anti-corruption prosecutor who brought the case.

Economists say the official inflation rate of 8.5 percent in 2007 was really about 25 percent. In the 12 months ended this June, the INDEC put the rate at 5.3 percent, but economists say it might be three times higher. Argentina's vaunted economic growth this decade might have been exaggerated, too. Credit Suisse said the 7 percent expansion the government reported last year is likely 2 to 3 percent lower.

Political analysts and economists say the allegations have hurt the country's credibility with investors and its ability to access foreign credit, a market closed to Argentina after its 2001 default on $95 billion.

"It's very difficult to analyze the country as a result of statistics that can't be believed," said Fergus McCormick, senior vice president at DBRS, a New York credit-rating agency that tracks Argentina.

The controversy at the INDEC has cast a spotlight on a vital, if little understood, practice of economic planning -- the collection of socioeconomic data. Authorities use the data to set salaries and direct social services. Companies use the information to make long-term plans.

Government critics say officials in Néstor Kirchner's administration began fiddling with the INDEC figures as his wife's campaign to succeed him gathered momentum ahead of the October 2007 election.

Even so, by the spring of 2008, months after taking office, Fernández de Kirchner's popularity had plummeted after the country's powerful agricultural sector revolted against her economic policies. Analysts here say that disbelief over the INDEC figures -- polls showed that only one in 10 Argentines trusted official inflation figures -- further tarnished her image. In June, her ruling coalition was trounced in midterm congressional elections.

Raúl Cabral, who helps run the 120-year-old Progreso food market, said skepticism about the government's data has generated antipathy toward the Kirchners. "The inflation takes away their credibility," Cabral said. "They talk of inflation of 4 percent, and a liter of milk goes from one to two pesos."

What prosecutors call the illegal and arbitrary recording of economic data is said to have first taken place in January 2007. That was when a team headed by Graciela Bevacqua, a mathematician who oversaw the collection of consumer prices, tabulated that month's inflation at nearly 2 percent. Officials, though, released a 1.1 percent rate, said Bevacqua, whose account was backed up by the prosecutors' complaint.

"It was mathematically impossible," said Bevacqua, who no longer works at the institute.

Statisticians, mathematicians and survey-takers who still work at the INDEC described how managers stopped surveying products that had recorded steep price hikes. "If something went up more than 15 percent, they'd take it off the list," said Marcela Almeida, a mathematician and one of several workers deposed by prosecutors.

Almeida said managers would obsess about certain products, such as bread, urging surveyors to come back to the INDEC office with prices that remained low. If they were not low enough, Almeida said, "the person who received their forms would change this price."

The controversy has raised questions about the government's official poverty figure. The INDEC's calculation is 15.3 percent; the Catholic Church says it is closer to 40 percent. After Pope Benedict XVI called poverty in Argentina a "scandal" this month, the government acknowledged that as many as 23 percent of Argentines might be poor.

But economists, among them Juan Bour, of the Latin American Foundation for Economic Investigations, said they expect no major changes in the INDEC's data-gathering. "It would be a recognition of significant failure," Bour said.

Bombing in Kabul's Diplomatic Quarter Signals Taliban Intent to Disrupt Election

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 16, 2009

KABUL, Aug. 15 -- A suicide car bombing outside the U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan's capital Saturday was the most serious indication yet of the Taliban's designs to disrupt Thursday's presidential election through violence.

The Islamist militia, which is fighting NATO and Afghan forces for control in wide swaths of the country, has fired rockets into Kabul in recent days, but the attack Saturday was the most brutal in the heart of the capital in six months. At least seven Afghans were killed, and more than 90 people were wounded.

If such violence succeeds in scaring voters away from the polls, Afghanistan faces a serious long-term problem. A low turnout, particularly in Taliban strongholds in the south, could cast doubts on the legitimacy of the election results.

"It is the Taliban who are trying to deny Afghans their political rights," said a senior U.S. official in Afghanistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "That's a lesson that ought to come home to all of us."

President Hamid Karzai, the front-runner in the election, said in a statement that the attack was an attempt by the nation's enemies to "create fear among the people." But he added that Afghans "are not afraid of any threats, and they will go to cast their votes."

Guarding voting sites and securing roads to the polling places has become the top priority for NATO forces. Of the 17 million registered voters, a turnout of more than 50 percent would be considered high, some U.S. officials say. In recent days, American military officials have received intelligence reports warning of suicide bombings and other catastrophic Taliban attacks, as well as quieter acts of intimidation. Insurgents issued similar threats of violence, and carried out some of them, ahead of elections in Iraq.

"Letters at night, threats and that sort of thing to try to dissuade people from going to the polls," the senior U.S. official said. "My impression is frankly there's much more in the way of intimidation than actual violence."

In the heated environment of the campaign's final days, the bombing became a political issue, with Karzai's rivals arguing that he is responsible for the escalating violence in the country.

"I'm absolutely sure that we cannot bring peace in Afghanistan when the criminals of war are in power in Afghanistan," said Ramazan Bashardost, a presidential candidate. "I believe the Taliban war is not against American or British troops as much as it is a war against the Taliban enemy, which means" Karzai.

The Taliban quickly asserted responsibility for Saturday's car bombing at the security checkpoint outside the diplomatic compound that houses the U.S. and NATO military headquarters and the U.S. Embassy. Reached by telephone, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said a fighter named Ahmed detonated his four-wheel-drive vehicle carrying more than 1,000 pounds of explosives in order to kill Americans and disrupt the election, which he described as an "American process."

The bombing occurred at 8:30 a.m. about 30 yards from the main compound entrance on a heavily guarded street. The explosion blew a hole in the road, crumbled concrete walls and shattered windows of buildings hundreds of yards away. The less-fortified row of buildings opposite the compound sustained the greatest damage, including the office of the Afghan Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation and the government television and radio station.

Mohammad Rafi, 22, a cook at Super Burger, was preparing a salad when the explosion shattered the plate glass window of his restaurant. He fell to the floor as shards rained down.

"Only God knows why they did this. I pray that God destroys them," Rafi said. "We just hate the suicide bombers."

Diplomats said that windows were shattered inside the compound but that damage was relatively light, with barriers mitigating much of the force of the blast. Indian ambassador Jayant Prasad wandered out of the compound surrounded by guards and said the windows of his residence and those of the Spanish ambassador's were blown out.

Western military spokesmen said that "several" international troops were injured but that none was killed. One U.S. military official said it appeared that no Americans were seriously injured.

Many of the wounded Afghans were taken to a nearby hospital. Raz Muhammad Alami, the technical and operations deputy minister at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, said 57 people from his ministry were injured, 36 seriously.

In the crowded recovery room for women, bombing victims moaned in pain and some appeared unconscious. One ministry employee, Freshata Nazami, 21, said she was walking along a window-lined hallway and fell to the floor when the blast occurred. "It was such a disastrous day," she said from her hospital bed, with dried blood spots on her face and shirt. "My head was injured. I was running to the basement. When I got to the basement, I lost consciousness."

"All our friends and colleagues were injured, and I don't know where they are," she said.

Officials said they expect more pre-election violence. The bombing prompted the United Nations to restrict movement of its personnel in Kabul, but the measures were lifted by the end of the day.

"Incidents like this were probably to some extent expected, although you can never predict where they will happen," said Adrian Edwards, a U.N. spokesman in Afghanistan. "This is probably one of the most complex elections attempted anywhere, and, unfortunately, insecurity is part of that complexity."

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.