Chicken Little Goes to Europe

Stephen Holmes | August 17, 2009

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell, Doubleday, 422 pages, $30.00

What will be the consequences for Europe of decades of immigration, much of it from the Muslim world? In the eyes of Christopher Caldwell, a culturally conservative columnist at the Financial Times and an editor at the Weekly Standard, Europe is being remade, or rather unmade, from the ground up. As a result of the growing "nation of Islam" in Europe -- including 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Great Britain -- societies that used to be homogeneous and therefore coherent have become multicultural and internally divided.

But multiculturalism may be merely a halfway house. Echoing Edmund Burke in his title, Caldwell suggests that Europe is undergoing a "revolution" vaguely analogous to what happened in France in 1789. In his first letters on those events, Burke claimed to see a human society being dissolved and replaced by a world of monsters. This isn't far from how Caldwell portrays Europe today. The monstrosities he parades before us include honor killings, "menacing North African slums," anti-Semitic outrages, European police who "are petrified of Muslim men," vandals rampaging through the banlieues, and young zealots marching through European streets with signs reading "Death to anyone who insults Islam!"

You may doubt that a socially marginalized, economically impoverished, politically disorganized, and territorially dispersed minority could pull off a revolution, seizing the commanding heights from native Europeans who dominate their countries' institutions and own virtually all of Europe's wealth. After all, the groups in question are trapped in pockets of violent weakness where smoldering anger does not translate into significant power. But Caldwell mocks such doubts: "There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today."

Once the book gets under way, however, the concept of "revolution" plays virtually no role in the analysis. Instead, Caldwell wants us to see Muslim immigration into Europe as a kind of reverse colonization that may lead, you guessed it, to the Islamification of Europe. Because Europe's population is imploding and its territory is being reoccupied by non-Europeans, the homeland of Western civilization may be destined to vanish into the mists of time, in the manner of the Byzantine Empire.

If Caldwell and his fellow doomsayers are to be believed, Muslims have now done what they failed to do at the gates of Vienna in 1683. They have breached Europe's defenses and created "beachheads" behind enemy lines, "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street." We shouldn't view Muslim immigrants merely as seeking better lives for themselves and their families, Caldwell says. They should be seen instead as the avant-garde forces of a long campaign of cultural replacement.

Some may object that this way of seeing Europe's immigration problem is inflammatory, but the more serious problem is that it makes no sense. Given the huge numbers of non-Muslims mixed into Europe's immigrant population, Caldwell can only sustain his thesis by the gratuitous assertion that Romanian, Chinese, Dominican, and other immigrant groups will rally behind the banner of Islam in a campaign to blot out traditional European civilization.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept this fringe-conservative way of framing the issue, it leaves us wondering: Why are the Europeans, with so many material resources, losing this war? Caldwell's answer is that theirs "is a civilization in decline." Unlike Americans who often seem to love themselves uncritically, Europeans are mired in "self-loathing" and "hand-wringing self-detestation." He explains, "Whether or not [Europe] can defend itself, it has lost sight of why it should."

A "guilt-based moral order" took root in Europe, according to Caldwell, when shame and remorse about both the Holocaust and colonialism threw Europeans into spasms of "moral self-flagellation." Ashamed of their past persecution and oppression of non-Christian peoples, European elites began to espouse an "ideology of tolerance." You might suppose that an "ideology of tolerance" would be ethical and principled, but in Caldwell's telling, it is actually an expression of unprincipled self-disgust.

Supposedly, it is this self-loathing that has led Europeans to see the admission of Muslim immigrants as "a moral duty." In other passages, Caldwell argues more reasonably that Europe opened its doors to immigration in a fit of absentmindedness, when its own work force had been decimated by war and the reconstruction of a devastated continent required laborers from abroad. So why, after arguing persuasively that Europe opened its doors to mass immigration without thinking through the consequences, does he go on to argue, inconsistently and implausibly, that Europe invited mass immigration because of its guilt-stricken conscience?

The second idea is important to him, it turns out, because it helps him unmask humanitarian universalism. He wants to reveal to the world the ugly reality hidden behind the pretty ideology of universal human rights. His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants. After World War II, Europeans abandoned their traditional intolerance of non-Christian peoples in the name of universalism. Their inability to turn away immigrants who "present themselves in suffering humanity's name" may look like a moral choice, but it is actually a refusal to defend their own values and traditions.

And the cultural malady that allowed the Muslim invasion, as Caldwell sees it, goes back even further than postwar guilt. The true source is "Europe's spiritual void," the product of "ideological secularism, which aims to break every link between religion and public life, shepherding people out of religion altogether." As Europeans lost their Christian faith, they also lost their "anchor" (one of his favorite words). Skepticism eroded the moral justification for cultural self-preservation because "all European cultures depend for their stability on certain ethical survivals of Christianity, and would have a difficult time defending their 'values' without them."

Readers may be forgiven for feeling lost at this point. Isn't Christianity one of the cultural sources of humanitarian universalism? After all, Christ allegedly died for all mankind. That is obviously what a secular philosopher such as Jürgen Habermas has in mind when he writes, in a passage cited by Caldwell, that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization." So how can Caldwell apotheosize Christianity for its contribution to European culture and then go on to unmask the moral decay and self-loathing that motivates the universalism that is said, in his own book, to be Christianity's most inspiring legacy?

The simplest answer, again, is that his book contains some strange contradictions. But we can untangle the yarn a bit by pointing out that Caldwell's Christianity has less to do with universalism than with dignity and a certain kind of spiritual vigor.

Once they had lost their Christian faith, Europeans were bound to become what Caldwell sees them as today -- promiscuous consumerists without souls. Such an unqualified generalization may seem cartoonish; and, indeed, Caldwell has a jolly time defending it. The principal characteristics of today's Europe are "its atomization, its consumerism, its sexual wantonness." What is the chance that the European civilization we discover in "the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and high rate of anomie and self-loathing" could defend itself against the Muslim advance? Very little: "The spiritual tawdriness Islamic immigrants perceive in the modern West is not imaginary. It may be Europe's biggest liability in preserving its culture."

This is why Caldwell refers to poverty-stricken Muslim enclaves as "the strongest communities in Europe" -- strong, that is, in the context of a pitifully weak post-religious and post-nationalist Europe. "Islam is not the second religion of Europe but the first," he says, because it has maintained its "vital energy," while there is nothing left to European Christianity but a superficial "lifestyle." He even ends up agreeing with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, that Europe's "materialist civilization" is "on the verge of collapse." Caldwell feels more at home with Muslim values than with the values of contemporary Europe -- as, he says, would Dante. And Caldwell also values women's chastity more than women's autonomy because chastity (not to mention virginity) "can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect." You may think that burqas and niquabs demean women, he ironizes, but what about "jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack"?

And that is not all. "The closer one gets to European culture, the farther one gets from family and its raison d'être, children." While Muslim women living in Europe have an average of 2.34 children, nonreligious European women have an average of less than one (only 0.86), thereby doing everything in their power to insure that the descendants of native Europeans will be radically outnumbered by the offspring of immigrants. This is apparently how cultural self-loathing is put into practice.

Caldwell's unexpected embrace of Islamist criticisms of the West comes to an even less expected culmination. Europe's "most recent encounter with Islam" has been "painful and violent," he says. But it has also been "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialistic intellectual life of the West. It is a liberation to be able to talk about God once more, even in someone else's language."

Having inhaled this blast of oxygen, Caldwell is ready to turn to that old neoconservative hobbyhorse, the unbridgeable gulf between Europe and the United States. One difficulty with this analysis is that Caldwell himself asserts that Europe's national cultures have been eroded by "a homogenized, one-size-fits-all mass consumer culture" originating in America. "Europe is being taken over culturally," he suggests, not only by Islam but simultaneously "by a (market) liberalism that accords no particular value to Europe's most cherished traditions."

Unlike Europe, however, America will not be flushed down history's drain. At least not yet. For one thing, America "has not yet had any mass immigration of Muslims" and "scale matters." In addition, America has retained the moral fiber that Europe has lost. It is more Christian and more convinced that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. It is also less squeamish about using force to defend itself abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) or at home. When Caldwell remarks that "a quarter of the prison inmates in the world are held in the United States," he means this not as criticism but as praise. Reflecting on U.S. "policies that are distasteful to most Europeans," such as the death penalty, he observes that such toughness means that "American cities and suburbs are extremely inhospitable places for immigrants who are criminally inclined." This is one of the principal ways in which America, unlike Europe, "exerts Procrustean pressure on its immigrants to conform." Most important, the United States believes in itself, while "Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations." No wonder they can neither defend their borders nor distinguish clearly between members and nonmembers of their community.

Near the beginning of his book, attempting to explain why Europeans have lost faith in their traditions, Caldwell quotes a remarkable passage from the French sociologist Raymond Aron: "Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood." This brings us to the heart of the matter. Unlike the post-nationalist Europeans, Americans remain willing to write history in the letters of blood. Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America's culture strikes the editors of the Weekly Standard as less drab than Europe's. America shares nationalist bellicosity with some parts of the Muslim world, and this is a good thing. European Muslims, he informs us, have "kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans' universalism because they were beyond the reach of Europeans' understanding." But thanks to America, equivalent dreams of patriotic (even "racial"?) glory have not entirely vanished from the West. Despite its sometimes-tawdry consumerism, America is pumped for war and is therefore well-positioned to take on the Islamic threat.

Yet it turns out that Caldwell has not entirely abandoned hope for Europe. While Europe's elites despise their own culture, the average, love-it-or-leave-it, tabloid-reading man in the street believes correctly that "Islam itself" is "dangerous" and understands simple truths, such as: Muslims living in Europe make life crummier. The "smoldering rage among working-class voters," moreover, suggests that at least these Europeans have not yet been drained of moral vitality.

But what can they do "to stem the implantation of Muslim culture" in Europe? Caldwell holds out three possibilities. One is deportation, an option that he broaches when he asks about rioters in the French banlieues who shout "Fuck France!": "Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?" A second possibility is conversion: "It no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their parents." About the third possibility, Caldwell does not speak so directly, but he raises it in a parable about the fate awaiting guests who overstay their welcome: "The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred."

I do not suppose Caldwell is seriously encouraging Europeans to return to their venerable tradition of mass murder. But readers may be forgiven for wondering what he really thinks about writing history in letters of blood.

To be fair, I need to add that Caldwell weaves into his work a number of more reasonable claims that, while not especially original, remain instructive. Although his general argument is that "Islam itself" is responsible both for the failure of Muslims to integrate successfully in Europe and for the rise of jihadist violence, he also dwells more usefully on the role of modern communication technology, bad city planning, and the trauma of displacement -- none of which has anything to do with "Islam itself." By discussing the hostile reaction of 19th-century Boston Protestants to the arrival of "the violent and crime-prone Irish," and the mutual misunderstandings between American whites and blacks caused by lack of social contact, he manages to de-exoticize the European experience. And when he describes "Islam itself" not as a cause of political violence but rather as "an idiom useful for rallying the disgruntled," he is speaking common sense. I have omitted these and other thoughts from my discussion of his book not because they are uninteresting but because they are random flashes of sobriety at odds with, and unintegrated into, the main argument.

I have tried to dive beneath the jibes and anecdotes and to restate, as clearly as possible, Caldwell's central thesis. Spelling it out, I believe, is a sufficient refutation. Few of his audacious generalizations can survive serious scrutiny. European elites are not uniformly "self-loathing." (His own examples of their complacency and snobbery suffice to refute this claim.) Europe is not a "spiritual void." "Islam itself" is not a unified actor capable of formulating aims and carrying out strategies. Islamist criticisms of the market economy are, at best, half-truths. Non-Muslim immigrants in Europe will not rally behind the Islamist flag. "Racial glory" is not a worthy aim. Societies were not healthier when the norm of female chastity was enforced (while male philandering was allowed). Life does not become colorless and petty when metaphysical questions are no longer in the air.

And, above all, immigrant communities in Europe are not "beachheads" for a likely Islamic takeover. Caldwell's suggestions to the contrary are sophomoric fantasies, contributing little to the understanding and nothing to the resolution of the very real problems surrounding immigrant communities in Europe today. About his half-veiled thoughts on how a post-post-nationalist European public should confront its immigrant communities, the less said the better. If you like this sort of exercise, you may read it for the author's wit. For wisdom, look elsewhere.

Whose Religion Is This, Anyway?

Gershom Gorenberg | August 13, 2009 | web only

The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- one state or two -- and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon to interview me, he was wearing a beret. His wife and producer wore a maxi skirt; a scarf covered her hair. Their attire showed they were Orthodox Jews. Hers, in particular, fit the stereotyped look of the Israeli religious right, of settlers and their supporters, including some Jews abroad. I was surprised. Maybe, I thought, I was the token leftist interviewee in a project by settlement backers aimed at showing that there is no exit from the conflict and that Israel must hold the West Bank forever.

I was also painfully aware of an irony: My own skullcap identifies me, correctly, as an Orthodox Jew. Countless times, my appearance has also caused people to assume, incorrectly, that I belong to the religious right. One look has been enough for them to assign me to the camp that regards Israel's establishment and its conquests in 1967 as part of a divine plan for final redemption and has made settlement and Israeli control of the West Bank into principles of faith. I'm weary of being prejudged and could feel the reflex was to prejudge my visitor. I gently asked him about the purpose of his project. His concern, he said, was to "see a just and equitable solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Once the cameras were running, he asked if I thought the theological right was distorting Judaism. Yes, I said, realizing he'd come to record me saying what he felt himself. Afterward, I told him of my initial concern, and we laughed.

It was another reminder that being an Orthodox dove in Israel is a complicated business. The tension, I should stress, is not between my religious and political commitments. I have no doubt that the pursuit of peace is the most basic of Jewish obligations, that the first lessons of Judaism's sacred texts is that all human beings are created in the divine image and deserve freedom. The first religious figure who inspired me was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the European-born American theologian who returned from marching at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. and declared, "Our legs were praying." That is, seeking social justice was not only a religious requirement, it was an act of worship. Heschel protested the war in Vietnam though it meant challenging the polices of the country that gave him refuge during the Holocaust. His kind of faith did not allow him to stay silent. I can’t know for sure what Heschel would be doing were he alive today, but I believe strongly that he would be working for peace in Israel.

The tension of being an Orthodox dove is partly sociological. Most Israeli Jews with whom I could pray don't share my political views. Most Israelis who share my politics do not understand why I enter a synagogue. More basically, the presumption of the society in which I live is that one cannot be an Orthodox critic of the occupation. That matching up of the political divide and the secular-religious one is a mistake. For a religious dove, however, there is an additional dimension to the argument about territories, settlements, and peace: The stakes are not only the future of one's country but also of one's religion.

One of the most accepted historical narratives in Israeli society is that since the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights in 1967, the driving force for keeping the "Whole Land of Israel" has come from the country's religious minority, while opposition has come from secularists. That's part of the real story, but not all of it. The victory of '67 did create a wave of messianic excitement among those known as religious Zionists -- the segment of the Orthodox community that is integrated into general society, unlike the ultra-Orthodox. The victory was seen as part of a divine plan to bring final redemption.

Since the mid-1970s, the most vocal proponents of settlement in occupied territory have been Orthodox. Religious Zionists dominated the protests against the Oslo process and the Gaza withdrawal. The most shocking event in Israeli political history was the assassination of secular Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious extremist. Today the settlements deepest in the West Bank -- the ones most certain to be evacuated in any two-state solution -- are almost all small religious communities.
On the other hand, settlements wouldn't exist without the support of every Israeli government since 1967. Nor would the two-tier legal system of the West Bank, in which settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens and Palestinians do not. Ariel Sharon, architect of settlement under successive Likud governments was not Orthodox. Nor were Likud prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, nor is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Going further back, the original decisions to settle Israelis in the West Bank after 1967 came under Labor governments, which followed the secular Zionist left's gradualist strategy from pre-independence days: settling land to establish a Jewish claim to it. In reality, the religious right has created a dangerous synthesis: It has adopted Labor's settlement ethos and the secular right's intransigence and transformed them into theological principles.

Part of what obscures the secular role is that the secular-Orthodox fissure dates back to the beginning of the Zionist movement and still runs deep among Israeli Jews. It shapes debate not only on social issues but on the meaning of Jewish identity, as an ethnic or a religious category. It's convenient to adopt a unified field theory of politics, to map all other divisions onto this one.
Besides that, the range of views among secular Israelis is easier to ignore because opinion appears one-sided among religious ones. "It is completely and unequivocally obvious that the majority of religious Zionists position themselves on the right," Bar-Ilan University political scientist Asher Cohen has written – though he stressed that many are "pragmatic hawks" rather than radical rightists.

And yet, there has always been a dovish religious minority. One of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the occupation was Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a scientist and theologian who began warning almost immediately after the 1967 conquest that ruling over the Palestinians would lead to the "corruption characteristic of every colonial regime" and eventually erode the ties between Israel and Diaspora Jews. The religious right's view of the Land of Israel and the state of Israel as inherently sacred was a form of idolatry, Leibowitz argued. Holiness, he said, could not be imputed to soil or to human institutions. Members of the dovish religious minority today include – just as one example – the leader of Breaking the Silence, the organization that recently published soldiers' testimony challenging the official version of last winter's war in Gaza.

Leibowitz, who died in 1994 at the age of 91, is remembered as a strident, raging man -- a rationalist philosopher with the impatient fury of a prophet. Going back to his early writing against the occupation, it seems clear that he feared not only the corruption of the state but also the corruption of Judaism.

Today it's clear that his fear was well-founded. In the public sphere in Israel, Judaism is identified with the worship of land, not with the pursuit of peace. For those of us in a half-visible minority of a minority, that's one more pressing reason to end the occupation.

Bin Laden's Driver Talks

Salim Ahmed Hamdan opens up to the Star about putting his past lives — as an Al Qaeda insider and Guantanamo's most famous detainee — behind him and starting over as a taxi driver raising two young daughters in Yemen

August 17, 2009

Michelle Shephard
National Security Reporter

SANA'A, YEMEN–Salim Ahmed Hamdan opens the arched blue door to his home, sending a shaft of light outside that illuminates the evening street life of stray cats and young boys kicking stones.

The electricity has just come back on following the regular blackouts that occur after sunset.

Ducking inside, Hamdan slips off his sandals as two girls in identical outfits, thick red plastic belts cinching their tiny waists, step forward, extending their hennaed hands. The youngest, Selma, tries to keep her mouth closed to hide the gap where a baby tooth just fell out.

Hamdan smiles: "These are my daughters."

It is odd to see Guantanamo's most famous prisoner, the former chauffeur to terrorist Osama bin Laden, in such a prosaic domestic setting. Captured in Afghanistan in 2001, the former Al Qaeda insider who rubbed shoulders with those plotting to bomb Western targets is now simply a father of two young girls and husband to Umm Fatima.

Over three days last week, Hamdan gave a Star reporter and photographer a glimpse into his new life and talked about his desire to move past his former ones – with Al Qaeda and as the Gitmo prisoner who appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won.

He doesn't want to talk about working for bin Laden and would prefer to stay out of the headlines. "Hamdan this, Hamdan that, Hamdan all the time," he says in English with a wave of his hand.

But the 39-year-old knows that the international focus on Gitmo prisoners like him will not fade while closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base remains an issue for the Obama administration. And he agreed to talk publicly for the first time since being captured in November 2001 and shipped off to Cuba, because he says he cares about many of the nearly 230 remaining detainees, including Toronto-born captive Omar Khadr and the Yemenis he befriended while in custody.

They need a chance to rebuild their lives as he is trying to do, he says.

As he talks, reclining on cushions in his sitting room, his gaze often lingers on Selma. She's almost 8 years old but didn't get to know her father until he was released from prison eight months ago.

HAMDAN LEFT Guantanamo the way he had arrived – as a captive, handcuffed and shackled, his eyes covered with goggles and his ears with headphones. The military aircraft flew him directly from the Caribbean naval base to this southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, refuelling midflight. When he finally landed, an immigration official asked for his passport. Hamdan turned to his American escort and said, "Ask him."

Of the nearly 800 detainees who have been held at Guantanamo, only a few cases or names have gained international recognition like Hamdan's. Aside from Khadr, there is Australian David Hicks, the kangaroo skinner turned Talib, who returned home two years ago after his government lobbied for his release. In Britain, former prisoner Moazzam Begg has become a well-known human rights advocate and public speaker. Then there are the four Uighur detainees who were sent to Bermuda and are now working on a golf-course grounds crew.

But when Guantanamo recedes into history, it is the legal case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that will be remembered as the beginning of the end for the notorious prison. The landmark ruling concluded that president George W. Bush had abused his executive power and that Guantanamo was not beyond the reach of the U.S. courts.

The case was fodder for a bestselling book. George Clooney is reportedly planning a film in which he will play former navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Hamdan's Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer.

Hamdan's military commission last year also made history as the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II. A panel of six military officers convicted him of providing material support to terrorism, but acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy. His lawyers depicted him as a lowly foot soldier who needed a job but felt "betrayed by bin Laden" when he learned of the 9/11 attacks.

A psychiatrist testified Hamdan was disturbed by the images of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon being attacked by planes manned by his Al Qaeda colleagues. It "was hard on his soul," the psychiatrist recalled him saying. Hamdan told her he felt "that his head was going to explode."

SO HOW did a man with such seeming empathy end up as a chauffeur for Osama bin Laden?

Hamdan's indoctrination into Al Qaeda began when he was 26. He was poor and had nothing to do, so he left his home in picturesque Wadi Hadramaut and sought work in the capital, Sana'a. One day, lingering outside a mosque, he was asked if he would travel and was seduced by stories of jihad. Along with about 35 others, he agreed to go fight the Soviet occupation of Tajikistan but was eventually turned away at the border and travelled instead to Afghanistan in 1996, where bin Laden was bolstering Al Qaeda's ranks.

With his fourth-grade education and little promise of a decent life at home, Hamdan embraced becoming a holy warrior. As the years went on, he began scouting locations for meetings or driving bin Laden for a salary of $200 a month.

At his military trial his lawyers contended he was never fully committed to the life of a terrorist, or part of the inner group that knew of the 9/11 attacks. And once in Al Qaeda, it was hard to get out. He was part of the brotherhood.

Prosecutors countered that Hamdan was nonetheless a cog in Al Qaeda's machine and they repeatedly invoked the victims of the 9/11 attacks to persuade the military jurors. The Pentagon wanted Hamdan imprisoned for a minimum of 30 years. Instead, he was sentenced to 5 1/2 years with credit for time served.

The judge, navy Capt. Keith Allred, told Hamdan: "I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you're able to be a provider, a father and a husband in the best sense of all those terms."

Hamdan replied, "Inshallah" – God willing.

CONSIDERING YEMEN is one of the most desperate countries in the Middle East, with a 35 per cent unemployment rate, a Shiite rebellion raging in the northwest and a separatist movement in the south, Hamdan is fortunate.

Of the 15 Guantanamo detainees repatriated in Yemen over the past seven years, Hamdan is surviving better than most. He gets by with the only skill he knows well – driving.

It's not easy. Tourism has all but dried up due to the recent violence and it is rare to see a foreigner who isn't an embassy official with restrictions on where he or she can travel due to security concerns. Some days Hamdan's taxi fares do not cover the 3,000 Yemeni rials (roughly $15 U.S.) he pays for the car's use.

But he is a good taxi driver – an essential asset here in the late afternoons when the effects of the leafy narcotic khat take hold and the streets morph into what seems a violent video game with glazed-eyed masters at the controls. The Star paid him $70 to pick up another interviewee because so many people testified to his superb driving skills.

Recently, Hamdan's team of lawyers came here to visit him, along with the defence team's Baltimore translator, Towson University professor Charles Schmitz. ("He's Yemeni, not American," Hamdan says of his U.S. advocate and friend Chuck).

As the team emerged from the airport, they recognized Selma and her older sister Fatima from pictures Hamdan had shown them in Guantanamo. The girls ran to hug them before Hamdan strolled across the street. "You don't get many moments like that," said Harry Schneider, a lawyer with Seattle firm Perkins Coie. "It was something special."

Hamdan's name might be well-known in the country where he was born, but his face is not. As he walks along the market's narrow cobblestone pathways packed with vendors, their cheeks bulging with khat, what draws attention is the presence of foreigners, not Hamdan. He says that's why he invited the Star to take pictures of his daughters on the condition that he not be photographed himself.

Many prisoners who return from Guantanamo, or any jail for that matter, come back to a place they no longer know. But not when home is Yemen, the poor southern neighbour of Saudi Arabia, with a history that reaches into antiquity and where large swaths of the countryside abide by tribal laws of justice and retribution. Local magazine Yemen Today recently published a photo retrospective comparing historic pictures from decades ago to the same shot today. The only difference in most of the photos was that the modern images were in colour.

Hamdan agrees that it's not the daily routine here that is hard. It's getting over the memories of Guantanamo. "Everyone needs time to adjust" is all he will say, preferring not to talk in detail about those years spent in the U.S. prison.

As U.S. President Barack Obama focuses on closing Gitmo, he will have to consider where to send the nearly 100 remaining Yemeni detainees, some of whom are considered dangerous but cannot be prosecuted due to insufficient or tainted evidence.

There is a fear that after seven years in custody, even the innocent may harbour a deadly grudge.

WASHINGTON UNDERSTANDABLY views Yemen as a problem country, doubting the government's ability to control a burgeoning Al Qaeda movement, which claimed responsibility for last fall's deadly attack on the American embassy.

It's not unusual for Yemenis to say they support Al Qaeda's ideology, and discussions over the daily afternoon khat-chewing sessions often turn to the oppression of Muslims and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or, increasingly, Somalia. And the ungoverned, autonomous tribal regions in the north have long made the country an attractive sanctuary for extremists.

Negotiations are reportedly ongoing with Saudi Arabia to send the Yemenis who will not be prosecuted to the neighbouring kingdom's rehabilitation program. But cultural, political and religious differences may make the program's effectiveness doubtful.

"Sending them to Saudi Arabia is illogical and probably counterproductive," argues Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador in Yemen from 1997 to 2001. "Saudis and Yemenis are no more interchangeable than French and the Swiss, possibly less. Common language and common border do not equate to common culture."

The past success of the Saudi program, says Bodine, was mainly due to lavish incentives – houses, cars, arranged marriages – and threats to comply or risk consequences to their family. "It is doubtful the Saudis would want to provide that level of incentive to Yemenis, and how useful are they if the Yemenis are to return home?"

There is no doubt Obama's effort to mend relations between the U.S. and the greater Muslim community have had an impact. But there is a time limit to that goodwill, and in Yemen the fate of the Guantanamo prisoners is critical.

Hamdan is not among the optimists who believe Obama is dramatically different from his predecessor. "Every day, every day, they say he can't do something," he says sipping coffee on the rooftop terrace of the Burj Al Salam hotel, as the muezzins' cries from the city's dozens of mosques reverberate in a cacophony below.

When asked if he believes Guantanamo will close its doors by the deadline of Jan. 22, 2010, and if dozens of his former cellmates will be repatriated, Hamdan pauses before answering.

"Inshallah."

Toronto Star

Somalis Gather to Discuss Racism, Alienation in Australia

By Phil Mercer Sydney 17 August 2009

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Young Somali immigrants say they face racism and feel unwanted in Australia. Their problems have drawn more attention since four men from Somali backgrounds were charged with planning a suicide attack on an army base in Sydney.

Community groups say that Somali refugees often are stuck in a kind of "no-man's land" between their own culture and mainstream Australia.

The Somali immigrant community suffers high unemployment. Many refugees have problems learning English or experience the lingering effects of torture and trauma. Alienation can leave some vulnerable to the influence of criminals and extremists.

Others complain of racism from mainstream Australia.

Young Somalis wrapped up a meeting Sunday to discuss these issues in Melbourne, where a series of counter-terrorism raids were carried out earlier this month.

Kamal Mohamed, who is a student, says the arrest of four Somali-born Australians in the raids will only heighten society's suspicions of him and his peers.

"Before this issue happened, terrorism claims and all that, we were slowly integrating, but now we're not integrating, it's just full stop now, there's no integration, because people have already judged us," he said.

Police also are investigating allegations that some young Somalis have traveled back to Africa from Australia to fight for radical Islamic groups.

Tens of thousands of African refugees have resettled in Australia - most arriving from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Liberia and Somalia.

This year about 13,500 refugee visas will be issues and while millions of dollars are spent by the government helping newcomers to adapt to life in a strange, new country.

Despite efforts to help the transition, some African refugees have been accused of forming gangs, harassing women and committing violent crime.

Community leaders admit that a small minority has gotten into trouble but they say the majority has nothing but respect for Australian laws and customs.

Israeli Ministers Pay Solidarity Visit to Settlements

By Robert Berger Jerusalem 17 August 2009

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Israel's leader is coming under growing pressure from hardliners in his coalition to reject American demands for a halt to settlement expansion.

Jewish settlers and Ultra Orthodox Jewish men pray to support Israeli settlements in the West Bank (File)

A delegation of four hawkish Israeli Cabinet ministers toured controversial settlement outposts in the West Bank Monday in solidarity with Jewish residents there.

It was a direct challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed to dismantle about two dozen outposts in response to pressure from the United States. Washington has demanded a complete freeze on settlement expansion, saying Israel is creating facts on the ground on territory the Palestinians seek for a future state.

There are about 100 outposts in the West Bank, most of them consisting of makeshift structures and trailer homes. Residents are young, religious settlers, who seek to expand the Jewish presence in all the biblical Land of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu has declared the outposts illegal, but the Cabinet delegation denied that, saying they are legitimate because previous Israeli governments had approved them.

Cabinet Minister Yuli Edelstein of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party noted that Israel just marked the fourth anniversary of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, where 21 Jewish settlements were dismantled and 8,000 settlers evacuated. He said there should be no further evacuations because, when Israel pulled out, the Islamic militant group Hamas took over.

"We removed all the settlements out of the Gaza Strip. We have a terrorist entity there, shooting rockets at the Israeli civilians. The whole area is insecure," Edelstein said.

While Mr. Netanyahu supports the settlements ideologically, he is prepared for concessions because he wants to heal a growing rift with Washington. Edelstein is hoping that Israel and the U.S. can find common ground.

"There are misunderstandings, there are disagreements on certain issues; and at the same time, we always have to keep in mind that it's still possible to bridge the gaps," said Edelstein.

But bridging the gaps won't be easy as long as Mr. Netanyahu's nationalist coalition partners try to tie his hands and prevent any significant action against the settlements.

Head of Banned Pakistani Militant Group Shot Dead

Pakistani police say the leader of a banned Sunni Muslim militant group was shot dead Monday during an attack in the south.

A Pakistani paramilitary soldier stands guard at a tense area after the killing of an Islamic religious leader Ali Sher Haideri, in Karachi, 17 Aug 2009

Officials say gunmen killed Ali Sher Haideri and one of his companions as they were driving in Sindh province, northeast of Karachi. One of the attackers was also killed when Haideri's guards returned fire.

Police said the killing appeared to be related to a personal dispute - not sectarian violence.

Haideri led Sipah-e-Sahaba, a Sunni extremist group blamed for attacks against Pakistan's minority Shi'ites. The group was banned in 2002.

In a separate incident Monday, a truck bomb exploded at a fuel station in the northwest, killing at least six people. The blast hit the town of Charsada, near Peshawar. Officials say two women and at least two children were among the dead.

Pakistan banned Sipah-e-Sahaba in 2002 after joining the U.S.-led fight against terrorism following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The U.S. State Department has labeled the group a terrorist organization.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.

Engage Iran on Human Rights, not Nuclear Weapons

By ALEXANDER BENARD

With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now inaugurated for another four-year term, President Barack Obama is surely tempted to go back to seeking negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. But these negotiations will not yield results and will only strengthen Ahmadinejad's hold on power. Instead, the United States should try a radically different policy: It should propose a conversation with Iran about human rights.

Since the rigged presidential election, Tehran has continued its ruthless crackdown on political dissent. The regime initiated mass trials against more than 100 people associated with the post-election protests. Convictions would carry a death sentence.

Other members of the opposition have already been imprisoned, tortured and forced to provide false confessions that they were acting as foreign spies. All of this comes on the heels of the violent suppression of the massive protests that left at least 26 people dead.

In this context, negotiations about Iran's nuclear program would not only be inappropriate, they would also be counterproductive. Events in the last few months have revealed serious fault lines in Iran—both within the regime, as well as between the regime and the opposition. Nuclear talks would allow Ahmadinejad to divert attention away from these fault lines and the grievances that caused them. The Iranian people, proud and patriotic as they are, would in large part rally behind Ahmadinejad as he defends Iran's right to nuclear power and weapons—a right in which even many Iranian moderates believe.

But a conversation about human rights would do just the opposite. Under such a plan, Mr. Obama would announce that recent developments in Iran have sparked such concern about the basic rights of the Iranian people that he is setting aside talks about the nuclear issue to focus on talks about civil rights. He would propose a framework in which the U.S. would offer incentives—such as the gradual lifting of sanctions—in exchange for concrete steps towards greater protection of Iranian basic rights. The idea is similar in principle to Sen. Henry ("Scoop") Jackson's push for introducing human rights as a component of our negotiations with the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

The effect on the political dynamics inside Iran would be profound. Ahmadinejad would face a clear choice: Accept the framework and risk providing Iranians with the very freedoms that could undermine his totalitarian regime; or, more likely, reject the framework and incur the wrath of Iran's democrats.

A majority of the Iranian people want greater protection for human rights and better relations with the West. Here would be an opportunity for them to have both. Proposing these talks would shine a spotlight on the fundamental thuggishness of the regime, whether Ahmadinejad agrees to them or not.

Ironically, by declining to talk about nuclear weapons, the U.S. actually stands a better chance of resolving that very issue. The regime will never voluntarily give up its nuclear program, no matter how many carrots Mr. Obama offers. A nuclear weapon would go a long way toward inoculating the Iranian regime from outside threats, leaving it better-positioned to bully its neighbors and conduct its domestic affairs as it sees fit.

And if the Iranians have learned anything from North Korea's experience over the past decade, it is that the international community is too feckless to prevent rogue regimes from going nuclear. In fact, nuclear weapons would only make the world even more inclined to shower the regime with inducements.

So the nuclear issue will go away only when this regime does. Shifting the focus to human rights is helpful in that respect, since it weakens the mullahs and accelerates real democratic change.

—Mr. Benard, a New York attorney, has worked at the Department of Defense and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Afghanistan's Army Braces for Election Violence

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and ANAND GOPAL

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan -- Thursday's presidential elections will be the biggest test to date for the Afghan army and police, which will have primary responsibility for protecting nearly 7,000 polling places from Taliban attack.

Afghan Anti-Corruption Candidate

Ramazan Bashardost, a popular candidate who runs his campaign out of a nomad's tent, may force Afghan elections into a second round. Courtesy of Reuters.

U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan have hit a record high of 62,000, but senior American commanders say their forces will stay in the background on Election Day. U.S. troops will function primarily as "quick response" units charged with reacting to large-scale attacks and preventing Afghan police and army outposts from being overrun.

Reuters

Afghans attend an election rally in support of President Hamid Karzai, who is seeking a second term in the upcoming presidential election.

"They'll be the ones out front and in charge," said Col. George S. Amland, deputy commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which oversees more than 4,000 Marines in volatile southern Afghanistan. "We'll help if needed, but security on Election Day will be an Afghan operation."

The hands-off U.S. approach means Afghan security forces will be charged with preventing attacks like Saturday's deadly car bombing outside the gates of the main North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Kabul.

The suicide attack, the worst in the capital in months, killed at least seven and wounded nearly 100. U.S. military personnel said that the death toll would have been higher if Afghan security personnel hadn't stopped the car and prevented it from drawing closer to the compound.

The attack comes as the Taliban step up their efforts to disrupt the elections, which the armed group sees as illegitimate. The Taliban have pledged to close roads in the areas they control to make it harder for Afghans to vote, and have threatened to harm those who manage to cast ballots.

Qari Yussef Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman in southern Afghanistan, said in an interview Sunday that the armed group will shift to "new tactics" on Election Day that will involve specifically targeting individual polling centers.

Earlier

• Two British Troops Die in Afghanistan
• Suicide Blast Rocks NATO's Kabul Base

With Taliban violence and intimidation on the upswing, the elections will be a referendum of sorts on the capabilities of the Afghan security forces, which are emerging as key components of the new U.S. strategy for pacifying the country.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is finalizing a plan to increase the Afghan army to 240,000 from 135,000 and to boost the police to 160,000 from 82,000, according to officers familiar with his thinking. The general is likely to ask the Obama administration for thousands of additional U.S. trainers, the officials said.

The Afghan government plans four levels of security on Election Day. Afghan police will guard the immediate vicinity of each polling site, while the Afghan army will provide perimeter security around individual villages. Afghan officials expect suicide-bombing and car-bombing attempts by the Taliban.

U.S. and NATO forces will have backup forces on high alert in volatile areas of the country, but the foreign troops are being deliberately kept away from polling sites to avoid giving the impression that they are interfering in the process.

The fourth tier of security will come from newly formed tribal militias, who will be stationed on highways and roads leading to individual villages and polling places. The militias will be paid by the government, but will be responsible for providing their own weapons and ammunition.

Taliban Fears Hamper Afghan Election

A spike in attacks and threats by the Taliban cloud the prospects for Afghanistan's election, which are less than a week away. Courtesy of Reuters.

Still, the plan may not be enough to protect all polling sites. Internal Afghan government documents seen by The Wall Street Journal suggest that up to 15% of polling places won't open because of inadequate security.

The majority of those sites are in the south and east of the country, the Taliban's main regional strongholds. In Kandahar, for instance, 40% of provincial polling stations are in areas of Taliban control, according to the documents.

"We won't have an idea about how many of these we will be able to secure until Election Day," said Zekria Barakzai, deputy electoral officer with the Independent Elections Commission, the Afghan body that is conducting the polls.

Three of the leading presidential contenders appeared in a televised debate Sunday, the first attended by President Hamid Karzai, the front-runner. They answered questions from a moderator and didn't address each other.

Mr. Karzai reiterated his pledge to expand nascent talks with the Taliban. The two other candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Ramazan Bashardost, vowed to improve security and fight the corruption that plagues the Karzai administration. Noticeably absent was Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, who is running second, according to a pair of recent polls.

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com

Hackers Stole IDs for Attacks

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON -- Russian hackers hijacked American identities and U.S. software tools and used them in an attack on Georgian government Web sites during the war between Russia and Georgia last year, according to new research to be released Monday by a nonprofit U.S. group.

In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit found. While the cyberattacks on Georgia were examined shortly after the events last year, these U.S. connections weren't previously known.

The research shows how cyber-warfare has outpaced military and international agreements, which don't take into account the possibility of American resources and civilian technology being turned into weapons.

Identity theft, social networking, and modifying commercial software are all common means of attack, but combining them elevates the attack method to a new level, said Amit Yoran, a former cybersecurity chief at the Department of Homeland Security. "Each one of these things by itself is not all that new, but this combines them in ways we just haven't seen before," said Mr. Yoran, now CEO of computer-security company NetWitness Corp.

The five-day Russian-Georgian conflict in August 2008 left hundreds of people dead, crushed Georgia's army, and left two parts of its territory on the border with Russia -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- under Russian occupation.

The cyberattacks in August 2008 significantly disrupted Georgia's communications capabilities, disabling 20 Web sites for more than a week. Among the sites taken down last year were those of the Georgian president and defense minister, as well as the National Bank of Georgia and major news outlets.

Taking out communications systems at the onset of an attack is standard military practice, said John Bumgarner, chief technical officer at the USCCU and a former cyber-sleuth at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The USCCU assesses the economic and national-security implications of cybersecurity threats and briefs top U.S. officials, officials in key industries and international institutions.

"U.S. corporations and U.S. citizens need to understand that they can become pawns in a global cyberwar," said Mr. Bumgarner, who wrote the report.

The White House completed a review of cybersecurity policy in April. Among the issues Obama administration officials are now studying is how laws of war and international obligations need to be reworked to account for cyberattacks.

Homeland Security department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said she couldn't comment on a report that she hadn't seen and hadn't been released yet.

Last year was the first time such cyberattacks were known to have coincided with a military campaign.

The Georgian attacks, according to the group's findings, were perpetrated by Russian criminal groups and had no clear link to the Russian government. However, the timing of the attacks, just hours after the Russian military incursion began, suggests the Russian government may have at least indirectly coordinated with the cyberattackers, Mr. Bumgarner's report concluded.

"Russian officials and the Russian military had nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the Georgian Web sites last year," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy in Washington.

The USCCU plans to release a nine-page report on the attacks to the public on Monday.

Mr. Bumgarner traced the attacks back to 10 Web sites registered in Russia and Turkey. Nine of the sites were registered using identification and credit-card information stolen from Americans; one site was registered with information stolen from a person in France.

The 10 sites were used to coordinate the "botnet" attacks, which harnessed the power of thousands of computers around the world to disable the Georgian government sites as well as those of large Georgian banks and media outlets. The botnet attack commandeered thousands of other computers and instructed them to try to access the target Web sites all at once, overwhelming them.

The Russian and Turkish computer servers used in the attacks had been previously used by cybercriminal organizations, according to the USCCU.

Early reports last year pinned the attacks on the cyber equivalent of the Russian mafia, known as the "Russian Business Network." Mr. Bumgarner said it wasn't possible to connect the attacks directly to that group. Security experts disagree on whether the group still exists.

Some of the software used to carry out the attacks was a modified version of Microsoft code commonly used by network administrators to test their computer systems, Mr. Bumgarner found. The code remains freely available on Microsoft's Web site, he said, declining to name it.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the finding because he hadn't seen the report.

Once the botnet attacks had launched, Mr. Bumgarner said, other would-be attackers noticed them and started to collaborate on various Web forums, including Twitter and Facebook.

Mr. Bumgarner used data-mining tools to review Facebook pages (which some people don't keep private) and Twitter for certain Russian words that indicated they were likely involved in the attack. He saw users on those sites and others swapping attack code and target lists, and encouraging others to join.

"It's a difficult problem to handle," said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, because it is impossible to detect such collaboration without monitoring conversations. Facebook has mechanisms to verify user identities and users can report inappropriate activities on the site, he said, but it doesn't monitor communications of its users.

Twitter didn't respond to requests to comment.

—Jessica E. Vascellaro contributed to this article.

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

Afghan Road Project Shows Bumps in Drive for Stability

By PETER WONACOTT

GHORMACH DISTRICT, Afghanistan -- Khalid Khan's small construction firm was supposed to build a road here that would open his strife-scarred land to commerce and improve its prospects for peace. Instead he wound up in the hands of the Taliban, hanging upside down.

On an April evening, says Mr. Khan, about 20 armed militants broke into his home and marched him and 14 of his employees to a remote village. The 30-year-old contractor says he was accused of helping the Americans and shoved into a well waist-deep with water. At other times during his two-month captivity he was chained to a roof by his feet. Ultimately, relatives raised a $100,000 ransom.

"I lost my money, my health," says Mr. Khan, who estimates he shed more than 60 pounds in captivity. "I lost everything for this project."

View Slideshow

Kate Brooks for The Wall Street Journal

Construction workers on the Shomali Plains paved a road that links to the ring road.

The project in question: paving 3.7 miles over a dusty donkey trail traversing the wheat fields and parched riverbeds of impoverished northwest Afghanistan. It's a tiny piece of a 1,925-mile rim of asphalt -- called the national ring road -- that aims to connect Afghanistan's cities.

The highway has become a litmus test of President Hamid Karzai's ability to govern the country. The final links of the $2.5 billion project -- or roughly 10% of the total length -- are being held up in part by the Taliban's attacks on construction sites and workers. In the face of a hardened insurgency, Mr. Karzai has struggled to show he can build and defend the infrastructure needed for a viable state.

Ramazan Bashardost, a popular candidate who runs his campaign out of a nomad's tent, may force Afghan elections into a second round. Courtesy of Reuters.

"The government of Afghanistan needs to demonstrate it can have a road network and can keep it open. The insurgents recognize that and are working against it," says Brig. Gen. Frank McKenzie, a staff member for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The ring road, adds Gen. McKenzie, "is a symbol of governance."

The attacks on the road, including bombings, kidnappings and drive-by shootings, reflect broader security woes underlying Afghanistan's shaky transition to democratic rule ahead of the Aug. 20 national election, which Mr. Karzai is favored to win. According to internal government estimates, about 14% of the country's polling stations are considered too dangerous for people to vote.

A reminder of the volatile situation came Saturday morning, as a Taliban suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden car near the heavily fortified headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Afghanistan task force in Kabul. The bomb killed at least seven people.

One of Mr. Karzai's challengers, Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister, says if it had been completed earlier, the national ring road could have been a potent counterinsurgency weapon -- by generating trade, employment and support for the government. Instead, says Mr. Ghani, "it's become a road of broken promises."

Project backers say insurgents have stepped up attacks on the road to sow discord between foreign donors, who are mostly funding construction, and Afghan officials, who are responsible for the police guarding the road.

"We are eager to work in places where we don't get shot at," says Craig Steffensen, country chief for the Asian Development Bank, the single largest donor for Afghanistan's ring road. "We aren't eager to work in places where we aren't sure we can go home the next day."

Since the 1960's, Afghan planners have dreamed of a ring road to transport the country out of poverty. A highway system encircling the poor and landlocked nation could help farmers, factories and the country's resource-rich mines get goods to the market. It could ultimately position Afghanistan as a bridge between its Central Asian neighbors and the big markets of Iran, India and China. That would make trade in copper, coal, oil and gas, as well as fruits, nuts and wheat, viable alternatives to opium, now the country's biggest export.

Yet three decades of war prevented that dream from being realized. It wasn't until after the 2001 U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban regime that the country mustered the money from foreign donors and expertise to refurbish the parts that had been built and finish the rest. The U.S. government, whose aid arm estimates that two-thirds of Afghanistan live within 31 miles of the road, pumped $492 million into rehabilitating the southern arch from Kabul in the east to Herat in the west. The ADB has contributed an additional $900 million.

Construction came with heavy costs. Between 2003 and early 2008, 162 contractors lost their lives building the southern half of the highway's ring, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog that has studied the U.S. Agency for International Development's projects in Afghanistan. The report didn't specify how the workers were killed, only that the death toll made it the most dangerous of any other USAID-funded project in the country.

Parts of the road have had to be rebuilt after they were completed. In May, USAID announced it had rebuilt a strip between Kabul and Kandahar that had been "mined, bombed and pockmarked by neglect." The section, which goes through the heart of Taliban territory, remains one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan to drive.

The northern half of the ring has proved just as perilous and costly. The ADB says it has confronted repeated security-related delays and cost overruns. After a string of kidnappings and killings, the bank recently agreed to pay an additional $2.5 million to train and dispatch nearly 500 police to guard road crews.

Top Afghan officials maintain security is good enough for the road to speed ahead. In an interview, the minister of finance, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, blamed a contractor, China Railway Shisiju Group Corp., for the two stalled sections in north Faryab Province.

"We need to apply pressure on the Chinese," said Mr. Zakhilwal, who is also the chief economic adviser to the president. "They are going awfully slow."

In an indication of the security woes bedeviling the roadways, Mr. Zakhilwal arrived at the interview late -- after the Taliban blew up an oil tanker ahead of him, he says, and fired down from a mountain at his convoy. The finance minister dismissed the attack with a wave of the hand.

China Rail executives didn't respond to faxed and emailed questions about the status of the ring road or the April kidnapping of its contractor, Mr. Khan. In 2004, China Rail lost 11 employees in a late-night attack on its compound in northeastern Kunduz Province. The company has estimated that it's been targeted in 10 other terrorist attacks.

The ring road's potential benefits are on display in Maimana, the capital of Faryab. With a new portion of the road from the east connecting the town with the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, goods have poured in from abroad: shampoos from Iran, soap from Ukraine, rice from India and knockoff British perfumes made in China.

Fruit prices have fallen by half from a year ago, say merchants, mainly due to a drop in transport costs. Mullah Mohammed Latif, a Maimana vegetable salesman, says he used to take at least four days to make the round trip by truck to Mazar-e-Sharif. En route, he says, he would lose large amounts of his melons and grapes to the sun and the hands of hungry thieves. Now he hires a taxi to do the trip in a day.

The brisk produce sales have filtered down to farmers in the area, so that local stall owners are now adjusting to a novel phenomenon: disposable income. "People are coming to Maimana to spend money," exalts Sakhi Mohammed, sitting inside a roadside store selling Chinese-made electric kettles and children's clothing.

The road going west from Maimana, skirting the border of Turkmenistan, is a different story. Much of it remains unpaved and construction on the China Rail sections has slowed to a standstill.

In July, Mr. Steffensen, the ADB's 51-year-old country chief, led a small team to the China Rail compound in the town of Qaisar to try to kick-start construction. An armored convoy of Norwegian troops escorted the team past the rusted carcasses of Soviet tanks, the relics of an earlier war.

At the Chinese camp, the ADB team sat around a conference table with the China Rail executives. In the middle: a map showing the project's torpid progress.

Chen Zhe, a China Rail manager, said his company underestimated costs and the level of security needed. He said the road sections that were supposed to be finished by the end of last year are only 20% complete.

Mr. Steffensen said top Afghan officials were angry as they watched the nearby South Korean crew working feverishly and not China Rail. ADB was now paying $50,000 a week for the extra Afghan police, he said, apparently to guard idle construction equipment. Build the road and worry about money later, advised Mr. Steffenson. "Everybody wants to see action, big action," he said. "We need to haul a -- ."

Mr. Chen cleared his throat. "We will try our best to finish this project," he said.

Mr. Khan's kidnapping had been a major setback. The crew's abduction stalled a crucial 3.7-mile stretch in Ghormach district, roughly 70 miles from Maimana, and sent shivers of anxiety through the entire project team. Barricaded in their compounds, Chinese executives complained they could hear gunshots at night.

In Ghormach, Mr. Khan said, he had been living in a house next to a police checkpoint, but the Taliban were able to move into his house and then march his crew into the hills without a shot being fired.

Asked about the lack of police response, Abdul Khalil Andarabi, Faryab's police chief, said investigators later found that the kidnappers had help from inside the police force. He says the police arrested two suspects as well as some relatives of the kidnappers.

In interviews, Mr. Khan recounted his two-month ordeal, the broad outlines of which were confirmed by the ADB, the China Rail team and Muhammad Ajmal Jami, an engineer who was also kidnapped. Mr. Khan says he knew he was a ripe target -- reviled for working on a foreign-backed project and seen as rich enough to afford a big ransom. Yet he says he almost fooled his captors into releasing him. He told them his name was Abdullah and that he drove a gravel truck. They initially demanded a relatively paltry $8,000 ransom.

But just before his uncle arrived with the money, the Taliban discovered Mr. Khan's real identity. He says they took the $8,000 and then asked for $300,000 more. Mr. Khan was forced into the well. After 10 days, Mr. Khan says, the Taliban chained him up by his feet to the roof. When he asked for water, they poured it down his throat, choking him.

Mr. Khan was later marched to a spot where another engineer had been executed. He was told to say his final prayer and then someone fired a shot at the ground between his legs. Another evening, he knelt down in the same spot and felt a bullet pass his cheek. Both times, he was ordered to call his mother afterward and plead to hurry up with the money.

Mr. Khan recalls his mind going numb. "Because I worked for the Americans," he remembers the young men telling him, "Islamic law permitted them to kill me."

The Taliban eventually reduced the ransom to $100,000 and a Toyota Land Cruiser. Borrowing from friends and family, Mr. Khan's uncle handed over the cash and the car in June.

His problems weren't over after the release. Hoping to extract another $100,000, the Taliban has held onto another of his engineers.

Despite the dangers, Mr. Khan's team has resumed construction near the site of their kidnapping. Mr. Khan himself remains in Kabul, wavering over whether to return to the site, or leave the country. Even in Kabul, he says, he fears he is a target.

"It's not difficult to shoot me or send a suicide bomber to Kabul," says Mr. Khan. "There are still plenty of Taliban here."

—Habib Zahori, Anand Gopal and Sue Feng contributed to this article.

Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com

Mubarak to Tell U.S. Israel Must Make Overture

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — In White House meetings beginning Monday, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is expected to tell the Obama administration that Arab nations want peace, but are unwilling to abide Mr. Obama’s call to make good-faith concessions to Israel until Israel takes tangible steps like freezing settlements, an Egyptian official said.

As part of its effort to resuscitate the peace process, the Obama administration has asked Arab countries to make small but symbolic gestures to normalize relations with Israel, like allowing planes to fly through their airspace or improving cultural ties. The administration has also asked Israel to freeze all growth in settlements.

So far, neither side has agreed to Mr. Obama’s proposed first steps, and so the president is expected to look to Mr. Mubarak for help in breaking the latest Middle East deadlock, regional analysts said.

Mr. Mubarak flew from Cairo to Washington on Saturday for his first American visit in five years, accompanied by Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Gen. Omar Suleiman, chief of Egypt’s intelligence service. He was scheduled to meet Monday with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other officials, and is to meet with Mr. Obama on Tuesday.

Mr. Mubarak will tell Mr. Obama that from the Arab perspective, the best way to build confidence is to press Israel to freeze settlements, implement an economic plan to improve life in the West Bank, ease pressure on Gaza and agree to negotiate with all issues on the table, including the status of Jerusalem and refugees, said Ambassador Hossam Zaki, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry.

“If they do this and engage immediately in negotiations with Abu Mazen, this is a recipe for openness and the Arabs will make the gestures needed,” Mr. Zaki said, referring to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. “But they don’t want to make this first step. They are demanding the Arabs make the first step. The Arabs should not make the first step. They are the occupying power. The occupation must end.”

In many ways, Mr. Mubarak’s visit to Washington signals a new beginning to an old script, as Arabs and Israelis argue which side should go first, Arab states revert to their old roles in the region, and the United States tempers its criticism of Egypt’s political and human rights record in return for Egypt’s regional cooperation.

During the Bush years, the region’s more radical forces, those against the peace process, had the upper hand, including Iran, Syria and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that now controls the Gaza Strip.

But while the dynamics of the region are always fluid, the tone, at the moment, appears to favor those in the peace camp, regional analysts said. That shift has been attributed in part to Iran being distracted by the internal political tumult over its disputed presidential election, and Mr. Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, especially his speech in Cairo, which has won the president, if not the United States, popular good will.

“The extremist forces now in the region are to some extent receding,” said Abdel Raouf al-Reedy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States and chairman of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. “If you notice for instance Hamas, Hamas’s discourse has begun to soften a bit. If you notice Syria, now Syria is actually cooperating with the United States.”

Mr. Mubarak’s visit also signals an effort to re-establish Egypt as the United States’ chief strategic Arab ally after years of tension and animosity between Washington and Cairo. Mr. Mubarak had refused to visit Washington in protest over President Bush’s Middle East policies, the invasion of Iraq and the public criticism of Egypt’s political and human rights record.

The Bush administration effectively sidelined Egypt, turning more to Saudi Arabia as a regional force to counter the growing influence of Iran and push forward a peace initiative that the Saudi king initially sponsored, political analysts here said. But today, the Saudis have stepped back.

Political analysts said that Mr. Obama was pressing Saudi Arabia to take the lead in offering so-called confidence-building measures to Israel, but the Saudis flatly refused, saying they had already produced a peace initiative endorsed by all 22 members of the Arab League.

“Saudi Arabia will not accept to take any steps before Israel shows that it wants peace to be its first choice,” said Anwar Majid Eshki, chairman of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, a research center in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. “President Mubarak will listen to the demands of the United States and then present the Arab point of view in this regard.”

Egypt remains weighed down by domestic problems, including high unemployment, widespread poverty and uncertainty over who will replace Mr. Mubarak, who is 81 and in his 28th year in office. But the White House appears to have calculated that Egypt, as the largest Arab nation with regional goals similar to Washington’s, remains the best place to turn.

“The United States has to have a regional power to coordinate its policies with and Egypt cannot be a regional power without the United States,” said Mr. Reedy, the former Egyptian ambassador. “So there is some kind of a complementary relationship.”

Mordechai Kedar, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and now a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that the meeting between Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Obama was important, but that their discussion should focus on what Israel insists is the primary problem in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and its regional ambitions.

“The issue is Iran and what seems to be an American reluctance to take care of this problem, which is much more meaningful for Mubarak than Israel,” he said.

Ambassador Zaki, of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said that the presidents would address many issues besides the peace process, including Iran, Sudan and extremism.

But on the peace process, he said, Egypt’s opinion is unshakable.

“We think this huge gap of confidence requires movement from the Israelis first,” he said. “Then the Arabs are willing to make gestures. This is the way Arabs see it.”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.

North Korea to Reopen Its Border to the South

By MARK McDONALD

HONG KONG — North Korea said Monday that it would open its highly militarized border with South Korea to allow periodic family reunions and group visits by tourists from the South.

The conciliatory move, coming just after the high-profile releases of two American journalists and a South Korean worker detained by the North, seemed likely to ease the growing anxiety on the Korean peninsula.

Tensions had escalated since spring, beginning with the imprisonment of the Americans, the North’s second nuclear test in May, a series of missile tests and North Korea’s refusal to re-engage in six-nation talks over its nuclear weapons.

But the North, in the announcement Monday by its official news agency, also warned the United States and South Korea about their joint military exercises, which the North said were “obviously maneuvers for a war of aggression.” It said an “annihilating” retaliation could be one consequence. Still, that kind of bellicose language is almost standard from the North and was eclipsed by its outreach about the border and tourism.

Analysts have said North Korea is eager to re-establish contacts with Washington and Seoul in hopes of undermining the United Nations’ sanctions over its nuclear program.

The North said it would allow reunions of Korean families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, with visits taking place at Mount Kumgang, or Diamond Mountain, during the three-day Harvest Moon Festival, when Koreans traditionally visit their hometowns. This year the festival begins Oct. 3.

Regular visits to Mount Kumgang on North Korea’s eastern coast will start “as soon as possible,” the official North Korean news agency reported, as well as visits to the ancient border town of Kaesong.

Programs allowing tour groups — predominantly South Koreans — to visit the North were expanded in October 2007 but were stopped last year when a South Korean tourist at Kumgang who apparently entered a restricted zone was fatally shot by a North Korean guard.

The announcement on Monday followed a meeting Sunday between the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, and the chairwoman of the Hyundai Group, the South Korean conglomerate, which is the biggest investor in the North.

The chairwoman, Hyun Jung-eun, had successfully negotiated the release of a Hyundai worker whom the North held for several months on charges of denouncing the government and encouraging defections.

Fear of the Taliban Discourages Afghan Voters

By DEXTER FILKINS

TARAKAI, Afghanistan — A group of Taliban fighters made their announcement in the bazaar of a nearby village a few days ago, and the word spread fast: anyone caught voting in the presidential election will have his finger — the one inked for the ballot — cut off.

So in this hamlet in southern Afghanistan, a village of adobe homes surrounded by fields of corn, the local people will stay home when much of the rest of the country goes to the polls on Thursday to choose a president.

“We can’t vote. Everybody knows it,” said Hakmatullah, a farmer who, like many Afghans, has only one name. “We are farmers, and we cannot do a thing against the Taliban.”

Across the Pashtun heartland in eastern and southern Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents hold sway in many villages, people are being warned against going to the polls.

In many of those places, conditions have been so chaotic that many Afghans have been unable to register to vote. In many areas, there will not be any polling places to go to.

The possibility of large-scale nonparticipation by the country’s Pashtuns is casting a cloud over the Afghan presidential election, which, American and other Western officials here believe, needs to be seen as legitimate by ordinary Afghans for the next government to exercise real authority over the next five years.

Doubts about Pashtun participation are particularly injecting uncertainty into the campaign of the incumbent, Hamid Karzai. Five years ago, Mr. Karzai rode to an election victory on a wave of support from his fellow Pashtuns, who make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan’s population.

Polls show that Mr. Karzai is leading the other candidates. But those predictions could be overturned if a large number of Pashtuns stay away from the polls.

The threats against the local population in villages like Tarakai show a change in the Taliban’s tactics from previous years. Five years ago, the insurgents largely allowed voting to go forward. At the time, Afghan and American officials believed that the prospect of voting was so popular among ordinary Afghans that Taliban commanders decided that opposing it could set off a backlash.

But things are different now. The Taliban have surged in strength since 2005. Mr. Karzai, though he is the leading candidate, is vastly more unpopular than he was then. As a result, Taliban leaders are actively trying to disrupt the candidates’ campaigns and preparations for the vote.

“Afghans must boycott the deceitful American project and head for the trenches of holy war,” said a communiqué released by the Taliban leadership last month. “The holy warriors have to defeat this evil project, carry out operations against enemy centers, prevent people from participating in elections, and block all major and minor roads before Election Day.”

In other messages released since then, Taliban insurgents have claimed responsibility for killing campaign workers for Mr. Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, another major candidate, in provinces across the country.

In Tarakai, a village of about 50 families, some local men gathered outside their homes when a group of American Marines approached on foot. Some 10,000 Marines, sent here by President Obama, have fanned out across Helmand Province over the past six weeks and are pressing an offensive against Taliban insurgents.

The local men appeared relaxed and friendly in the presence of the Marines. But they said they were too frightened of the Taliban to go to the polls on Thursday and doubtful that the Marines could protect them. The Americans stationed here, part of the Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, have been in combat with Taliban insurgents nearly every day since arriving in the area on July 2.

“When you leave here, the Taliban will come at night and ask us why we were talking to you,” a villager named Abdul Razzaq said. “If we cooperate, they would kill us.”

Even if the villagers in Tarakai were inclined to cast ballots, they would be hard-pressed to do so. The nearest polling station will be in the town of Garmsir, the capital of the district of the same name, 12 miles up an unpaved road pockmarked with craters from homemade bombs. Afghan officials considered setting up polling places across Helmand Province, but concluded that many areas were not safe enough. In the district, which straddles the Helmand River, there will be seven voting precincts in the capital, but none elsewhere.

“It’s too insecure in those places,” said Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, the Second Battalion’s commander.

What is more, anarchic conditions have prevented many Afghans from registering to vote. Earlier in the year, when the government was registering voters, there were no Marines in the area and the Taliban were in control. The Afghan Independent Election Commission sent no officials to the area to sign up potential voters.

In their six weeks here, the Marines have succeeded in chasing many Taliban fighters from the area. But the Taliban, and the fears of them, linger.

One farmer said the Taliban regularly imposed a tax on the crops in the area.

Another, an elderly man with a long white beard, said the Taliban fighters were sure to deal harshly with people who talked to the Americans.

“We’re afraid you’re going to leave this place after a few months,” he told First Lt. Patrick Nevins, an officer from Chapel Hill, N.C., who led the Marine unit into Tarakai.

“I promise you,” Lieutenant Nevins said, “we will be here when the weather gets cold, and when it gets hot again.”

The Marines walked back to their base, and the Afghans back into their homes.

Afghans in U.S., Unable to Vote in Presidential Election, Campaign From Afar

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 17, 2009

Late at night, after he gets home from his job managing an Afghan restaurant in Alexandria, Mir Farid Hashimi makes long-distance calls, trying to convince relatives in Afghanistan that despite the hard times there, Hamid Karzai should keep leading the country.

Humira Noorestani, who runs an Afghan economic development organization in Centreville, has used e-mail, Facebook and phone calls to lobby voters in Afghanistan, including her mother's 500 cousins, to vote for one of Karzai's rivals.

Hashimi and Noorestani are among an estimated 250,000 Afghans in the United States who, because they live outside Afghanistan, will not be able to cast ballots in Thursday's presidential election. But although they can't vote in the second election since the Taliban's defeat eight years ago, they can campaign, even from 7,000 miles away. This summer they have organized fundraising events, held meetings in support of candidates and spoken on U.S.-based Afghan television, which is beamed to Afghanistan. Some have traveled there to help educate people about voting, and others are working the phones and social networking sites to push for a candidate.

"Most Afghans in the U.S. are upset because they're not able to vote," said Ajmal Ghani, an Afghan American who lives in Springfield and is a representative for his cousin, presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani.

Afghans who live abroad couldn't vote in the last presidential election either. The polling infrastructure isn't in place to allow voting outside Afghanistan, although it is something the government would like to set up, said a spokesman for the Afghan Embassy here.

More than most expatriates, many Afghans in the diaspora, including about 35,000 in the Washington area, have deeply personal connections with the politics of their homeland. This is partly because most of the country's political and economic elite fled during the war-torn 1980s. People who in calmer times might have been leading the country found themselves driving taxis in Northern Virginia or selling hip-hop clothing in Northern California -- two of the biggest U.S. Afghan enclaves.

After the rout of the Taliban, many returned to Afghanistan to enter politics or business but retained close ties to the United States. Among those who remained here, plenty have family members who returned or have spent time themselves in Afghanistan, aiding in its reconstruction or seeking investment opportunities. Afghans from the United States have invested almost $500 million in the country's infrastructure since 2002, according to the embassy.

For this election, Ghani supporters held a fundraiser this month at the Afghan Restaurant (where Hashimi, the Karzai supporter, works). Ghani, a candidate U.S. officials have promoted as a possible chief executive for the country, lived for many years in Bethesda, taught at Johns Hopkins University and worked for the World Bank. James Carville is advising his campaign.

Local supporters of Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister, held an event this month at George Mason University during which the candidate addressed attendees live remotely via speakerphone; they say they have raised about $30,000.

It is hard to know how much clout Afghans in the diaspora have with voters. At times, those who live in Afghanistan have resented Afghans coming in from abroad and trying to direct things. But many in Afghanistan also receive financial support from relatives in the United States.

A call from the United States can carry weight, said Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States. "It's received well, because [the recipient] thinks, 'Maybe he knows something we don't.' " Sometimes the callers abuse that power, he added, claiming that their recommendations are "the United States' position." The U.S. government has not endorsed a candidate.

Candidates, too, like to feature their American backgrounds. "Any kind of association or affiliation with the U.S. is regarded as an asset," Jawad said. "So if they have it, they use it prominently."

Those living outside Afghanistan might also seem more credible because they are less subject to pressures from local tribal leaders, said Mariam Atash Nawabi, co-founder of the Washington-based Afghanistan Advocacy Group, a networking organization.

"What the diaspora think actually has a reverberating effect on their families in Afghanistan," she said. "They can say more what people in Afghanistan can't say because they're afraid of the warlords there."

Many Afghans say they are frustrated seeing Afghanistan mired in corruption, ethnic partisanship and violence despite their efforts and those of the U.S. and other governments.

"In my personal opinion, anyone is better than Dr. Karzai, because unfortunately he has failed to deliver," said Atiq Panjshiri, a former president of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce who lives in Springfield and calls himself "a full supporter of Dr. Abdullah and also Dr. Ashraf Ghani."

Phone lines to Afghanistan have been jammed in the days leading up to the election, Hashimi said, but when he can get through, he urges family members to vote for Karzai, who he said has worked hard to modernize the country despite taking over at a difficult time.

"Most of them were going to Dr. Abdullah Abdullah," he said of his relatives, including an uncle he talked to for more than an hour. "But I changed a lot of them to go for Hamid Karzai."

Noorestani said her mother, who recently visited Afghanistan, was taking cabs several times a day. "She would ask the taxi driver, 'Are you voting?' " Many said they were not because they felt the outcome was predetermined or feared violence at the polls; she encouraged them to vote.

Noorestani's mother has 500 cousins who had been inclined to vote for Karzai because, like them, he is Pashtun. Ghani is also Pashtun, and Abdullah is Tajik. "She would tell them, 'Vote for Dr. Abdullah, don't you want to see change in Afghanistan?' "

Although she can't know how they will act on election day, she said, "they would tell my mom, 'Now you're telling us to, we're voting for Dr. Abdullah.' That's how politics works in Afghanistan. It's all about family ties."