BBC -|Attack shuts all Pakistan schools

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All schools and universities have been closed across Pakistan a day after suicide bombers attacked an Islamic university in the capital, Islamabad.

Four people died and at least 18 were wounded in the twin blasts at the International Islamic University.

The Taliban claimed the attack and said there would be more violence unless the army ended its offensive in the tribal areas of South Waziristan.

Meanwhile, at least four people died in more intense fighting in that region.

Pakistani troops are battling to gain control of the key Taliban-held town of Kotkai, but say they are meeting fierce resistance.

A Taliban spokesman said 40 soldiers had been killed in an attack on a security post near the town, but the army gave a much lower figure.

The army said it had killed 90 militants since beginning its offensive on Saturday.

Because of reporting restrictions, it is extremely hard to find out what is going on in South Waziristan.

The fighting has caused tens of thousands of civilians to flee the area.

'Sense of loss'

Wednesday's attack was the first since the army launched its offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan.

The militants have threatened more such attacks if the army continues its offensive.

Following the attack, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that Pakistan was now in what he called a state of war.

The government has ordered the closure of schools, colleges and universities to prevent them from being targeted by suicide bombers.

Some students said they were scared to go to classes.

"It's really a tragedy for us and there's a real sense of loss with the acts of terrorism," Islamabad student Shehzeen Anwar told the BBC.

"Students are terrified and they're afraid to go out. Roads are almost empty and people are staying at home."

Earlier, schools run by the armed forces and the government - and some public schools - closed for a week as a result of the South Waziristan operation.

The BBC's M Ilyas Khan, in Islamabad, says the present closure is indefinite.

However, schools, colleges and universities may reopen next week if the security threat decreases, he says.

A wave of attacks on Pakistani cities has killed more than 180 people during the month of October alone.

For African Immigrants, Bronx Culture Clash Turns Violent - NYTimes.com

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By SAM DOLNICK

The storefronts on a stretch of Webster Avenue in the South Bronx tell the story of local shifts as well as any census: a Senegalese-run 99-cent store, an African video store, an African-run fast-food spot, a mosque, several African restaurants.

The owner of Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., named for the coalition of West African nations, envisioned it as a community hub in the Bronx neighborhood of Claremont, where Americans would try his wife’s cassava soup and realize it’s not so foreign after all. But a year in, the owner, Mohammed M. Barrie, said he could count the number of American patrons on one hand.

Meanwhile, he and his customers have been taunted, he said, and his restaurant’s window urinated on. Someone tried to break into a diner’s car. Then there is the bullet hole in the front window, a mark from a gunshot through the window late one night last summer.

“Those people, they don’t respect African people,” said Mr. Barrie, a Sierra Leone native who settled in the United States in 1998. “I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, they still ...” He trailed off.

Down the block, Muhammed Sillah sat in front of the tiny Al Tawba mosque, eyeing the jungle gym across the street and remembering when he used to let his children play outside.

“Spanish kids, American kids — but no African kids,” said Mr. Sillah, a Gambian mechanic raising five children in Claremont. “We’re scared.”

Their fear and frustration are shared by many local West African immigrants, whose fast-growing presence in the neighborhood — and in the city over all — has been accompanied by increasing tensions with the local black American residents.

“They think they’re better than black people,” James Carroll, a retired Army specialist standing in front of a busy convenience store, said of the West African immigrants. “We’re supposed to be one community — we’re supposed to be able to get along — but they don’t give it a chance.”

Some of the tension can be attributed to cultural differences that all immigrants face, though the West Africans in Claremont, as conservative Muslims, have the added challenge of adjusting to a post-9/11 New York. But resentment and mistrust has escalated to actual violence, and, they say, left them feeling under siege.

After reports of nearly two dozen attacks on West African immigrants in the last two years, community leaders reached out to the police, who interviewed 17 Africans in the neighborhood and filed 11 criminal complaints. Two of those were deemed hate crimes, including an attack in June that left a Gambian immigrant hospitalized for eight days. They have made no arrest in either bias case, but a police mobile truck with a video camera now stands outside the mosque.

Claremont straddles the 44th and 42nd Precincts, two of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. This year, there have been 319 robberies in the 44th Precinct and 237 assaults in the 42nd. At the Butler Houses, part of a complex of housing projects that loom over the neighborhood, police sirens provide a background soundtrack, and residents of all colors and nationalities caution against walking around at night.

But the West Africans say the attacks on them are calculated. “It’s prejudice,” said Dembo Fofana, who said a beating in June by 10 to 15 men left him with broken ribs and internal bleeding. “It’s because we’re African, and we’re Muslim.”

Mr. Fofana, who came to this country 21 years ago, has not returned to his job at a bakery since the assault. He stays home, recovering, receiving disability checks and caring for his five children.

“There’s a lot of tension,” he said. “Just yesterday, someone said, ‘What would you think if I came to Africa and tried to take your property?’ I told him, ‘Brother, I’m not taking anything from you. I’m just trying to live my life.’ ”

The African population in the Bronx has grown considerably in recent years: the census reported 12,063 sub-Saharan Africans in 1990, while the most recent census estimate was 61,487.

In the community district that includes Claremont, black Americans made up 44 percent of the population, according to 2000 census figures, with 52.9 percent of the area Hispanic. African immigrants were nearly 10 percent of the population, a number likely to be much higher in the 2010 census.

The Africans in Claremont hail mainly from poor, French-speaking countries: Guinea, Mali, Senegal. Like immigrants across New York, many are here illegally, working long hours for little pay. Many work as taxi drivers, convenience-store clerks, fast-food cashiers — jobs that keep them on the street late at night.

But some say the Muslims deliberately hold themselves apart. A 37-year-old American man who gave his name as Dre pointed to the pavement in front of the mosque where the African men, easily identifiable in their beards and skullcaps, gather each afternoon. “If you don’t give praise to Allah, don’t go there,” he said. “It’s just like Afghanistan.”

Kantara Baragi, the imam of the Al Tawba mosque, acknowledges that insularity is part of the problem. “We don’t hang around,” said Mr. Baragi, whose delicate frame nearly disappears inside his long, flowing robes. “We just go to work. We don’t have a relationship with people here. They don’t know us.”

So community leaders organized two meetings this summer with police officials, politicians, community board members and housing association leaders. The goal, Mr. Baragi said, was “to let them know us so they don’t look at us like strangers.”

Zain Abdullah, an assistant professor of religion, race and ethnicity at Temple University in Philadelphia, says it is common for African immigrants to suffer harassment when they settle in traditionally black neighborhoods in big cities, like Detroit, New York and Philadelphia.

“Many African-Americans feel that the influx of Africans coming in represents a kind of invasion,” he said. “Culturally, African-Americans have always imagined themselves as Africans, or at least of African descent, but they might have never encountered Africans from the continent. The actual encounter is shocking.”

Mr. Baragi, the imam, says he tries to accommodate his neighbors. His mosque, which blends in with the other storefronts, does not sound the call to prayer through speakers because “we don’t need to force everyone to hear what we’re doing.”

Instead, five times a day, from the sidewalk or, when it is cold, from behind the front door, a man from Al Tawba sings the call in a voice drowned out by the rumbling traffic.

Down the block at Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., a young man walked in last week wearing a Yankees hat tilted askew, an oversize military-style jacket and baggy pants. He looked like any member of the crowd hanging out in front of the Butler Houses, but Fofana Alhusane’s outfit was calculated, a camouflage to hide his Gambian roots.

“African clothes are dangerous,” he said. “I used to wear them, but I saw a few people get beat up, so now I wear New York clothes.”

Wall St. Giants Reluctant to Donate to Democrats - NYTimes.com

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By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — The Wall Street giants that received a financial lifeline from Washington may have no compunction about paying big bonuses to their dealmakers and traders. But their willingness to deliver “thank you” gifts to President Obama and the Democrats is another question altogether.

Mr. Obama will fly to New York on Tuesday for a lavish Democratic Party fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel for about 200 big donors. Each donor is paying the legal maximum of $30,400 and is allowed to take a date. Four of the seven “co-chairs” listed on the invitation work in finance, and Democratic Party organizers say they expect that about a third of the attendees will come from the industry.

But from the financial giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup that received federal bailout money — and whose bankers raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama’s election — only a half-dozen or fewer are expected to attend (estimated total contribution: $91,200).

Part of the reason, several Democratic fund-raisers and executives said, is a fear of getting caught in the public rage over the perception that Wall Street titans profiting from their government bailout may use their winnings to give back to Washington in return. And the timing of the event, as the industry lobbies against proposals for tighter regulations to address the underlying causes of last year’s meltdown on Wall Street, has only added to the worry over public appearances.

“There are sensitivities there,” said Scott Talbot, a lobbyist for the industry’s Financial Services Roundtable. Political contributions “can make a donor a target,” Mr. Talbot said. Many involved, though, say the low attendance from those Wall Street giants also reflected a broader disenchantment with Mr. Obama over the angry language emanating from the White House over the million-dollar bonuses and anti-regulatory lobbying.

“There is some failure in the finance industry to appreciate the level of public antagonism toward whatever Wall Street symbolizes,” said Orin Kramer, a partner in an investment firm who is a Democratic fund-raiser and one of the event’s chairmen. “But in order to save the capitalist system, the administration has to be responsive to the public mood, and that is a nuance which can get lost on Wall Street.”

Dr. Daniel E. Fass, another chairman of the event who lives surrounded by financiers in Greenwich, Conn., said: “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.” Dr. Fass added, “How much that will be reflected in their support for the president remains to be seen.”

Mr. Obama remains a potent fund-raising draw. Plunging into the 2010 midterm campaigns last week, he raised more than $3 million in one night in San Francisco, speaking at a similar $30,400-a-couple dinner and a larger rally with tickets at $1,000 and under.

In addition to the big-ticket dinner on Tuesday, Mr. Obama will also address a more small-d democratic event at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, where roughly 2,500 donors paying $1,000 or less will also make cellphone calls to promote his health care overhaul. Over the next five days he will appear at fund-raisers for Bill Owens, a candidate for a House seat in New York; Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey (himself a former Goldman Sachs banker); Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts; and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut.

Democratic fund-raisers say the economic slump has dampened fund-raising across every industry. Wall Street has lost Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers to consolidation in last year’s credit crunch. Some former Obama fund-raisers on Wall Street have ascended to jobs in the administration, like Michael Froman, a former top Citigroup executive who is now an adviser on economics and national security.

Current Democratic fund-raisers say their 2008 take from Wall Street may also have benefited from the personal connections of the party’s chief fund-raiser that year, Philip D. Murphy, a former top executive at Goldman Sachs. (He is now ambassador to Germany). And as in recent years, Democrats are raising far more from Wall Street executives than Republicans, according to campaign finance data sorted by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democrats, including House and Senate party committees and the party itself, have raised about $5.4 million through the first eight months of the year, while the Republicans took in just $2.7 million.

So far in the current election cycle, though, Wall Street accounts for less than half as much of the Democratic Party’s fund-raising as it did in 2008: 3 percent, or about $1.5 million out of a total $53.6 million in the eight-month period, compared with about 6 percent, or $15.3 million out of $260.1 million during the last election. (Republicans relied more heavily on their party to support their presidential candidate in 2008, and the party’s Wall Street fund-raising has fallen even further.)

Fund-raisers say that smaller but lucrative businesses like hedge funds and private equity firms now account for more of Wall Street’s political contributions than the big banks that received bailout money, with the possible exception of the famously generous executives of Goldman Sachs.

Employees associated with the financial firms that received bailout money from the federal government contributed almost $70,000 to the Democratic Party in the first half . Most of that, $60,800, came from one couple who each contributed the legal limit. At the time of the donation, the husband, John M. Noel, had recently retired as head of a unit of the insurance giant AIG called AIG Travel Guard.

Mr. Obama, though, still has the loyalty of other powerful friends on Wall Street. Among the other chairmen of the Tuesday dinner in New York is Robert Wolf, head of the American investment banking division of the Swiss giant UBS Group. Mr. Wolf raised more than $500,000 for Mr. Obama’s campaign and sits on a White House panel of outside economic advisers.

Mr. Wolf does not have to worry about the same appearance problems as Wall Street rivals, however. His firm was bailed out by the government of Switzerland, not the United States.

Griff Palmer contributed research from New York.

Hopes Fade for Comprehensive Climate Treaty - NYTimes.com

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By JOHN BRODER

WASHINGTON — With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it now appears there is little chance that the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December will produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming.

The United States and a number of other major emitting countries have concluded that it is more useful to take incremental but important steps toward a global agreement rather than to try to jam through a treaty that is either too weak to address the problem or too onerous to be ratified and enforced. Instead, representatives at the Copenhagen meeting are likely to announce a number of interim steps and agree to keep talking next year.

“There isn’t sufficient time to get the whole thing done,” Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who heads of the United Nations climate secretariat and serves as the de facto overseer of the negotiations, said late last week. “But I hope it will go well beyond simply a declaration of principles. The form I would like it to take is the groundwork for a ratifiable agreement next year.”

Negotiators have accepted as all but inevitable that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks will not resolve the outstanding issues in the brief time remaining before the Copenhagen conference opens in mid-December. The gulf between rich and poor nations, and even among the wealthiest nations, is just too wide.

Yet expectations remain high for a meeting that carries important weight not just for the environment but for a broad range of international issues, including trade, security, economic development, energy production, technology sharing and the very survival of some vulnerable island nations.

So officials are now narrowing expectations and defining the areas where there is agreement, such as the need to halt and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, although how and by whom remains the subject of intense dispute. Negotiators are also discussing what form any declaration that emerges from Copenhagen might take and how to ensure that any promises made there are kept.

Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen is Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.

The chief American climate negotiator, Todd Stern, has said that he will not go beyond what Congress is willing to endorse. His deputy, Jonathan Pershing, affirmed this last week at a negotiators’ meeting in Bangkok. “We are not going to be part of an agreement we cannot meet,” he said.

Administration officials and Congressional leaders have said that final legislative action on a climate bill will not occur before the first half of next year.

European officials have been pressing hardest for some form of binding treaty modeled on the Kyoto protocol of 1997, which the United States refused to ratify because it imposed emissions limits on developed nations while demanding nothing of rapidly growing economies like China and India.

American officials have said that no agreement at Copenhagen is better than a bad deal that cannot be ratified or enforced. And they note that it took four years after the initial negotiation of the Kyoto accord to complete it.

There is general agreement among international negotiators and knowledgeable observers that the parties to the Copenhagen talks, held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, will agree to continue discussions next year, and perhaps set a deadline for reaching a final agreement by mid-year or December 2010 at the latest.

The rest of the outcome, even the form it may take, remains uncertain. The world’s biggest economies agreed at a meeting last summer in D’Aquila, Italy, on a goal of limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius, though they did not agree on the means to get there or on how to enforce it. Such a goal is expected to be part of any declaration from Copenhagen.

Also likely to be included is a statement that wealthy nations should cut their emissions below certain benchmarks and that emerging economies should reduce their rate of emissions growth below a business-as-usual curve. No numbers were attached to either of these pledges and that remains the stickiest of issues.

Also unresolved is the financial structure of any international climate accord. The wealthy nations have agreed in principle to support low-carbon growth in the developing world and to help those countries hardest hit by climate change to adapt. But the amounts of money, the programs and the countries that would qualify for that support and for cost-sharing among donor nations are highly contentious issues unlikely to be settled at Copenhagen.

There will probably also be a promise to create an international system to monitor, report and verify emissions reductions, although there is no consensus yet on who would perform these tasks and what penalties would be assessed be for failure to comply.

There is also likely to be a commitment by most nations to produce and publish economic growth plans based on lower carbon emissions and an agreement by advanced nations to share clean new energy technology with developing countries.

“The most likely form any agreement will take will be a political declaration,” said Nigel Purvis, a former State Department climate negotiator in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “It could be a statement by senior leaders, or it could be adopted by the parties as a formal decision. That does not make it legally binding, but it sends a signal to the world of the direction the negotiations are going and give guidance to negotiators as they continue their work.”

Justices to Decide if Detainees Can Be Released Into U.S. - NYTimes.com

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By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether federal courts have the power to order prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay to be released into the United States.

The case concerns 17 men from the largely Muslim Uighur region of western China who continue to be held although the government has determined that they pose no threat to the United States.

Last October, a federal judge here ordered the men released. But a federal appeals court reversed that ruling in February, saying that judges do not have the power to override immigration laws and force the executive branch to release foreigners into the United States.

An appeal from the Uighurs has been pending in the Supreme Court since April, and it is not clear why the justices acted on it now. The Obama administration has sent some of the prisoners to Bermuda, and Palau has said it will accept most of the rest. But one prisoner apparently has nowhere to go.

The prisoners have said they fear they will be tortured or executed if they are returned to China, where they are viewed as terrorists.

The case presents the next logical legal question in the series of detainee cases to reach the court. Last year, in Boumediene v. Bush, the court ruled that federal judges have jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus claims from prisoners held at Guantánamo.

Lawyers for the Uighur prisoners say the Boumediene ruling would be an empty one if it did not imply giving judges the power to order prisoners who cannot be returned to their home countries or settled elsewhere to be released into the United States.

The new case, Kiyemba v. Obama, 08-1234, is likely to be argued early next year. But if the administration is successful in settling all of the Uighur prisoners abroad, it may turn out to be moot.

The Obama administration has so far avoided confrontation with the court over its detention policies. After the court agreed last year to hear the case of Ali al-Marri, a Qatari student held as an enemy combatant, the administration transferred him to civilian court, mooting his appeal. Mr. Marri later pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.

In urging the court not to hear the new case, the Justice Department said that the Uighurs were “free to leave Guantánamo Bay to go to any country that is willing to accept them, and in the meantime, they are housed in facilities separate from those for enemy combatants under the least restrictive conditions practicable.”

But, the Justice Department’s brief continued, “there is a fundamental difference between ordering the release of a detained alien to permit him to return home or to another country and ordering that the alien be brought to and released in the United States without regard to immigration laws.”

Lawyers for the Uighurs, who were captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, argued that the appeals court’s ruling rendered the writ of habeas corpus an empty gesture. It made courts “powerless to relieve unlawful imprisonment, even when the executive brought the prisoners to our threshold, imprisons them there without legal justification, and — as seven years have so poignantly proved — there is nowhere else to go,” the Uighurs’ brief said.

North-south conflict to be emphasis of new U.S. policy on Sudan - washingtonpost.com

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Focus on restoring accord seen as helping resolve Darfur situation

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The Obama administration's new policy toward Sudan, formally announced Monday, turns the spotlight back on where the troubled nation's problems first began: the split between the Islamic north and the largely animist and Christian south.

Although the world's attention has been focused on the tragedy in the Darfur region of western Sudan, administration officials argued Monday that a faltering peace accord that ended Africa's longest-running conflict is under increasing strain and needs to be repaired. If that deal -- brokered by the Bush administration in 2005 -- collapses, officials and analysts say, then hope will be lost for a solution to Darfur. The two-decade conflict between north and south led to the deaths of 2 million people.

Alex de Waal, a Sudan analyst with the Social Science Research Council, said the emphasis on the north-south conflict is significant.

"What this document is saying is, it was a mistake to lose that focus [on the peace agreement]. And we must get our priorities right," he said. "Darfur is part of Sudan, and if the rest of Sudan falls apart, you're never going to solve Darfur."

Still, many analysts think the Darfur conflict spiraled out of control in 2003 because the United States was so focused on resolving the north-south civil war that it ignored signs that the government in Khartoum was secretly behind brutal clashes in Darfur that ultimately led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people. Now the Obama administration hopes to avoid making the same mistake.

A senior administration official, briefing reporters under ground rules of anonymity, said that "for quite some time, policy has been understandably focused on the urgent crisis in Darfur, and [north-south peace agreement] implementation fell behind."

The official added: "We're dealing with a different timeline in this administration. There are a set of fundamentally different dynamics that have to be addressed in a very short period of time."

During last year's presidential campaign, Obama campaigned on the promise of getting tough with the Sudanese government, particularly over Darfur. But activists and lawmakers complained that his administration has offered conflicting signals in recent months. On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a policy that will feature rewards and punishments for Sudanese leaders based on whether they meet benchmarks in three areas: Darfur, the north-south agreement and counterterrorism.

The policy appeared less accommodating toward the Sudanese government than the approach suggested by the U.S. envoy, retired Air Force Major Gen. J. Scott Gration, who has pushed for normalizing relations. However, the new strategy adopted his emphasis on the north-south agreement and on engaging, rather than isolating, the government, analysts said. The policy document also emphasized that Gration will play the "leading role in pursuing our Sudan strategy," despite calls from some humanitarian groups for his replacement.

The 2005 peace agreement gave southerners religious and political autonomy and a role in a unity government until 2011, when a referendum is supposed to be held in the south on whether it will secede. The accord also called for national elections next year.

But activists and officials say the Sudanese government, loath to lose the oil-rich south, has dragged its feet on preparations for the votes. Inter-tribal fighting has increased in the south, and some observers say it is abetted by the government.

Among the benchmarks Sudan will be expected to achieve are progress on election preparations, passage of a law to hold the 2011 referendum and finalizing the boundary between north and south, officials said.

Officials did not describe the punishments or rewards in store for Sudan, saying they were in a classified document. But Sudan has been seeking normalization of relations with the U.S. government, an end to economic sanctions and removal from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Officials said the U.S. government will continue to refuse to deal with Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court in the Darfur killings. Instead, it has held talks with one of his senior advisers and other officials in his government.

U.S. officials emphasized that Sudan would not be rewarded if it simply made progress in one area, such as counterterrorism, but would have to show advances across the board.

The policy got a positive reception from many Sudan advocates and members of Congress.

"We now have a Sudan-wide policy . . . instead of shifting back and forth and allowing Khartoum to play the south off against Darfur," said John Prendergast, head of the Enough anti-genocide project at the Center for American Progress.

The emphasis on the north-south agreement "is very important, because the south was beginning to feel abandoned," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), a leading force in Congress on Sudan.

Even the Khartoum government seemed relieved to see a policy in place, although some of its officials criticized the continued emphasis on sanctions.

"We hope that this will end the debate among U.S. officials, and we hope that now they will think with one mind and speak with one tongue," Ghazi Salah Eddin Atabani, a senior adviser to the Sudanese government, told Sudanese television, according to the Associated Press.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Election law stalls in Iraqi parliament - washingtonpost.com

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By Anthony Shadid and Nada Bakri
Tuesday, October 20, 2009

BAGHDAD -- The Iraqi parliament failed for a second time Monday to vote on an election law crucial for organizing elections in January that will choose a new parliament and serve as a milestone in American plans to withdraw combat troops from the country.

As is often the case in Iraq, deadlines come and go. But election officials face a logistical challenge ahead of the Jan. 16 vote, the first national election since 2005. They say they need the law passed now to give them roughly three months to prepare for the vote, although they could gain a week or two if the election is delayed. But after that, parliament's term expires, throwing Iraq's nascent political system into an unconstitutional limbo, just months before the U.S. military wants to begin withdrawing troops in earnest.

"If they don't pass a new law, a curse is going to fall on the political parties," warned Safia Sahhal, a secular lawmaker. "Why? Because this is what Iraqis want."

"We don't know what we're going to do," added Faraj al-Haidari, the head of the Independent High Electoral Commission, which organizes the election.

In a statement, U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill and Gen. Ray Odierno, the American military commander here, had pushed lawmakers to pass the legislation last week. But lawmakers postponed Thursday's vote until Monday. Some predicted the vote could come again as early as Tuesday. Others said it might be weeks away.

Lawmakers resumed negotiations into the evening, as U.N. officials and representatives of the American Embassy lingered on the sidelines. As each hour passed, confidence receded that any quick compromise would cut through a Gordian knot of issues as arcane as the number of seats in a new parliament and the way an election would be organized in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq contested by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens.

"Parliament is doing its best," said Hassan al-Suneid, a lawmaker and adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "Meetings are going on around the clock."

The debate over the law is perhaps most remarkable for how it intersects with some of the most intractable issues in the country today. In many cases, one will have a bearing on another, making it difficult to resolve one without solving the other.

These days, the most contentious issue has become Kirkuk, where parties fear the results could be used to reinforce their rivals' claims over the city.

A direct vote would probably reflect a significant Kurdish majority in the province, whose oil reserves make it strategically important. Kurds maintain this reflects the return of their people who were displaced by an Arabization campaign carried out under the former government of Saddam Hussein. Arabs and Turkmens accuse the Kurds of manipulating demographics, bringing Kurds to Kirkuk who did not originate there.

Arab lawmakers have insisted on using an older voter roll from 2004. Kurds have insisted on using the most up-to-date voter registration, reflecting the new reality.

As a compromise, lawmakers have debated a proposal in which Kurds would be given a simple majority of seats, with smaller quotas for Arabs, Turkmens and Christians. Kurdish lawmakers say they are opposed. If quotas are guaranteed for Kirkuk, they ask, why won't other quotas be guaranteed for provinces with Kurdish minorities?

"If we give Kirkuk a special status, then we have to give the same to the other provinces in the country," said Ahmed Anwar, a Kurdish lawmaker.

Arabs and Turkmens, on the other hand, have threatened to boycott the vote if the province isn't granted some kind of special status. U.S. officials see that as especially dangerous because it could deprive the election of legitimacy and aggravate tensions.

"We won't have our rightful share there, so not participating is better," said Abdel-Motleq Jabboui, an Arab lawmaker from Kirkuk.

Another issue is how to organize the ballot -- whether voters will choose a single electoral list, individual candidates or a mixture of both.

At least publicly, most parties have backed a ballot of individual candidates -- a demand of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric. That plan is popular, too, among a public growing more disenchanted with government ineffectiveness and corruption. But in private, many of the parties are thought to back a ballot of electoral lists, in which they would exercise far more control over who entered parliament.

If lawmakers cannot agree on new legislation, the election will be organized under a 2005 law by which voters chose only an electoral list, not individual candidates.

"I think there are some blocs who are probably happy with this," said Haider al-Abadi, a lawmaker and Maliki adviser. "They're just sitting in the back seat, they're not doing anything. They're not helping solve the issue. In actual fact, they're adding proposals to delay the issue, complicate the issue so that the old law will remain."

In that potentially grim scenario, some parties might boycott the election in Kirkuk. In predominantly Shiite areas, where Sistani commands great influence, there would be popular disenchantment with the election, possibly dampening turnout.

"The most dangerous route is to delay the election," Abadi said. He called a ballot organized around electoral lists "the second-worst one."

Rift between Obama and Chamber of Commerce widening - washingtonpost.com

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Health-care reform and economy are points of contention

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The White House is moving aggressively to remove the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from its traditional Washington role as the chief representative for big business, the latest sign of a public feud ignited by disagreement over the administration's effort to overhaul the health-care system.

Instead of working through the Chamber, President Obama has reached out to business executives, meeting repeatedly with small groups of CEOs in his private White House dining room. He also has dispatched top aides Valerie Jarrett and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to corporate boardrooms. Since the summer, the three have met with some of the biggest names in the business community, including the heads of IBM, Wal-Mart Stores, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak, Starbucks, Amazon.com and Coca-Cola.

In the process, Obama is attempting to rewrite the rules of the game in Washington, where the Chamber and other business lobbying groups have long held a highly visible, and powerful, place at the intersection of policy and politics.

"The question we have is: Does the Chamber really represent the business community the way they used to?" said Jarrett, the president's chief business liaison. "It seems as though their members are disengaging."

Meanwhile, the Chamber is fighting back with its own public relations agenda, launching multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to resist several of Obama's top priorities. Passage of the president's plan could depend in part on how this battle plays out.

R. Bruce Josten, the Chamber's longtime lobbyist, said he has less real access to Obama's chief aides than he had during any previous administration. He said the business events Obama holds at the White House are just for show.

"Going to the Reagan center with 150 people, where the president gives prepared remarks -- I'm sorry, I don't consider that a consultative outreach," Josten said. "That's an event, designed by the White House, for the White House."

Quitting in protest

The quarrel obscures that the White House and the Chamber had a relatively warm relationship when Obama took office. Disagreements about a broad swath of the president's economic agenda soured relations, though.

The Chamber of Commerce was already embroiled in controversy over its opposition to climate change legislation. In recent weeks, high-profile businesses have quit the Chamber in protest of that position, most notably Apple Inc.

Chamber officials hint that they think the White House has been encouraging the defections. Jarrett denied that vehemently, saying, "They have to be responsible for their own membership, not us."

On Monday, climate change activists orchestrated a hoax in which Chamber officials appeared to reverse their opposition to energy legislation in Congress.

The event, complete with fake handouts on Chamber letterhead, at least a couple of phony reporters and a podium adorned with the Chamber logo, broke up when a spokesman from the real Chamber burst in.

The pretend Chamber of Commerce official was a member of the activist-prankster group called the Yes Men, which has staged several hoaxes to draw attention to what it believes is slow progress in fighting climate change.

"These irresponsible tactics are a foolish distraction" from the real work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Thomas J. Collamore, the Chamber's senior vice president for communications and strategy. He added that his group will ask authorities to investigate.

Obama and CEOs

Since taking office, Obama has held three private lunches with chief executives. On Oct. 8, he met with Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. Lewis Hay III of Florida Power & Light, Antonio M. Perez of Eastman Kodak and Irene B. Rosenfeld of Kraft. The next day, before reporters in the East Room, Obama upbraided the Chamber of Commerce for its effort to defeat or water down new consumer protections.

"They're very good at this, because that's how business has been done in Washington for a very long time," he said. "In fact, over the last 10 years, the Chamber alone spent nearly half a billion dollars on lobbying -- half a billion dollars."

Josten said previous presidents sought to work with groups such as the Chamber, even when they disagreed on policy matters, in an attempt to improve legislation or neutralize potential concerns. But he said Obama's dislike of lobbyists has robbed the White House of the chance to craft legislative compromises that businesses can live with.

"Does he get some probably good input from CEOs? I'm sure he does," Josten said. "Are they going to actively go up to the Hill and lobby? I'm sure they're not."

Josten and other Chamber officials participated in more than two dozen "issue meetings" during Obama's transition, and the group backed the president's early efforts to fix the economy. They supported his economic stimulus plan and some of his first nominees for economic positions in the administration.

That goodwill ended abruptly this past summer, when the Chamber announced its opposition to a public insurance option as part of a broad health-care reform effort. The group ran ads in 20 states warning of higher taxes, inflated deficits and "government control over your health."

The Chamber followed up with public statements against the president's climate control legislation and his push for new regulation of the financial sector in the wake of the economic collapse. (Politico first reported Monday on the dispute.)

Chamber officials describe their change in attitude as a result of the president's ambitious agenda, which they said contrasts sharply with their long-standing belief in smaller government, lower taxes and less regulation. Jarrett and others in the White House say the Chamber became an all-out adversary less interested in working to find solutions.

White House officials say they remain open to meeting with the Chamber and its officials, but Jarrett said that discussions so far have been contentious.

Iranian-American academic gets 12 years in unrest - washingtonpost.com

Image by harrystaab via Flickr

By NASSER KARIMI
The Associated Press
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 5:22 PM

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran ignored appeals by Hillary Rodham Clinton and even rock star Sting and sentenced an Iranian-American academic to 12 years in prison Tuesday for his alleged role in anti-government protests after the country's disputed presidential election.

The sentence for Kian Tajbakhsh was the longest prison term yet in a mass trial of more than 100 opposition figures, activists and journalists in the postelection turmoil.

At the same time, Iran allowed another defendant to leave the country - Canadian-Iranian Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek journalist arrested in the same crackdown who had been freed on bail over the weekend.

Bahari joined his British wife, who is in the last days of her pregnancy, in London, Newsweek said on its Web site Tuesday. It was the first word that Bahari had left Iran.

The circumstances of his return to London were not immediately known, but it is unlikely he could have left without the consent of Iranian authorities. Newsweek refused further comment, and Iranian officials could not be reached for explanation.

"We can only imagine what Mr. Bahari has been through during the past months and the anguish that his wife has experienced during this difficult period," Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. "Canada commends all journalists who risked their lives by reporting on the Iranian elections from within the country."

Bahari's release could be a concession by Iran to international pressure. But Tajbakhsh's heavy sentence signaled that Tehran was sticking to a tough line overall on the political unrest. It came amid calls in Iran for the prosecution of the most senior opposition figure and suggestions that three American hikers, detained after accidentally crossing into Iran, could face charges.

Tajbakhsh, a social scientist and urban planner, was arrested by security forces at his Tehran home July 9 - the only American detained in the crackdown that crushed giant street protests by hundreds of thousands of people after the June 12 election. The opposition claims the vote was rigged in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The security sweep went far beyond protesters on the streets, snatching up rights activists and journalists, as well as pro-reform politicians. The government accused them of organizing the protests on behalf of Iran's foreign enemies to foment a "velvet revolution" to overthrow the Islamic leadership.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian C. Kelly said Tajbakhsh should be released immediately, saying he poses no threat to the Iranian government or its national security.

Washington has repeatedly denounced his arrest. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed in August for his release, and he was specially named in a call by the British rock star Sting to free all political prisoners in Iran.

"Family and friends of Iranian-American detainee Kian Tajbakhsh are shocked and outraged by the news," said Pam Kilpadi, a friend of Tajbakhsh who is working on a book with him. She described the charges as "baffling."

"As an independent scholar Kian is neither a member of the Iranian reformist movement nor in contact with any foreign headquarters inside or outside Iran, and has had no involvement in pre- or postelection unrest," said Kilpadi, a doctoral researcher at Britain's University of Bristol currently based in Cambridge, Mass.

Tajbakhsh's lawyer, Houshang Azhari, told the official IRNA news agency that he would appeal the conviction on charges of "acting against national security." He said the law prohibited him from divulging the full details of the sentence and would only say it was "more than 12 years."

The appeal could open an avenue for freeing Tajbakhsh. An Iranian-American journalist who was arrested this year, Roxana Saberi, was convicted of espionage but freed on appeal in what was widely seen as a political decision to defuse tensions with Washington.

Tajbakhsh, 47, had been targeted by Iranian authorities before. In 2007, he was arrested on similar charges while working for the Open Society Institution, a pro-democracy organization run by American philanthropist George Soros - a figure Iran has often cited as part of the anti-government plot. He denied the charges and was released after four months in prison.

Afterward, Tajbakhsh left the Open Society Institution and remained with his family in Iran, working on a book.

Weeks after his arrest in July, Tajbakhsh appeared in the mass trial of opposition figures. Many of the defendants delivered courtroom confessions to a plot to topple the government - admissions that opposition groups said were forced from them.

At his turn to speak during an Aug. 25 court session, Tajbakhsh appeared to try to speak only vaguely about foreign interference in Iran, saying that "undeniably this was a goal of the U.S. and European countries to bring change inside Iran" - although he said he had no direct knowledge of any plot.

The court has issued convictions against a few Iranian opposition figures, sentencing them to five or six years - all far shorter than Tajbakhsh's, although three others accused of belonging to what Iran considers terrorist groups were sentenced to death.

"It's obviously completely politically motivated," said Arien Mack, a psychology professor at The New School in New York City, where Tajbakhsh taught urban policy until 2001. She said that since his 2007 arrest, Tajbakhsh had focused on his academic work, avoiding politics.

"As far as I know, he did not even vote in the last election" in Iran, she said.

In addition to Tajbakhsh, Iran holds three American hikers - Joshua Fattal, Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd, who were detained in July after straying across the border from Iraq.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Tuesday that investigators are still questioning the three and that their fate rests with judicial authorities.

Mottaki gave no other details on the case. But his comments suggested that formal charges could still be possible against the Americans, although Ahmadinejad said in an interview with The Associated Press last month that could ask the judiciary to "take a look at the case with maximum leniency."

They three have been visited by Swiss diplomats who oversee U.S. interests in Iran, and earlier this month, their relatives presented a petition to Iran's U.N. mission in New York asking for their release.

Despite the crackdown, the government has stopped short of indicting the most visible leaders of Iran's opposition reformists, presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, but there have been signs in recent weeks that could change.

Last week, authorities opened an investigation into Karroubi, a possible first step to bringing charges.

On Tuesday, a third of the 290 members of parliament demanded Mousavi be prosecuted. The opposition claims Mousavi is the rightful winner of the election, and his arrest would sharply escalate the confrontation between the reform movement and the government.

According to IRNA, 100 hard-line lawmakers sent a letter to State Prosecutor Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi saying Mousavi should go on trial because his statements and actions had damaged the "reputation of the Islamic system."

In Pakistan's Punjab region, mixed opinions over army effort - washingtonpost.com

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By Pamela Constable
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 4:44 PM

Lahore, pakistan -- Police Superintendent Mobashir Ullah was en route to a graduation ceremony Thursday when word reached him that armed men had stormed a training academy under his command. Just seven months before, terrorists had seized the same compound near this provincial capital, taking 800 recruits hostage before being overpowered.

"This time they came straight from the main road, firing and trying to climb the walls. Our police acted fast and kept shooting until they finally killed themselves," Ullah said. "The survival of our country is at stake now, and we have to fight it out. When a man has been trained and mentally prepared to blow himself up, nothing on Earth will stop him."

The brazen daylight assault, quickly followed by two other terrorist attacks on security facilities that killed 39 people in Lahore that day, sent a fresh wave of panic through the city known for its willow-lined canals, kite festivals and sandstone monuments to 19th-century British rule. Elementary schools have been shut down; parks and shopping centers are empty.

Yet public and official reaction here has been very different from the gung-ho support Pakistanis are giving to their national army as it embarks on a crucial campaign to oust Taliban forces from South Waziristan, the embattled tribal region near the Afghan border that has served as the extremist group's sanctuary for years.

Here in Punjab province, political reality is more complex. The region is home to the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, and an influential religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami. It is also the base for several militant Islamist groups, such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, that are now officially banned but were once sponsored by the state to fight India and other foes.

As a result, officials here tend to shy away from harsh condemnations. Instead, their explanations for the growing wave of terrorism are a mix of anti-government rhetoric and insinuations that outside forces, especially India and the United States, are conspiring to weaken Muslim-ruled Pakistan, in part by forcing it into armed conflict with local militants.

"Pakistan continues to fall into the U.S.-laid trap of using the military option alone," warned a lead editorial this week in the Nation, a newspaper based in Lahore. By jumping onto the U.S. bandwagon in a "misdirected war on terror," it said, the government only generated more violence. American pressure to use military force against militants in Punjab, the editors added, points to "a larger hidden anti-Pakistan agenda" and is a "recipe for civil war."

Nationally, public opinion has turned decisively against the tribe-Pakistani Taliban forces in the northwest. After a series of negotiations failed to rein in the Taliban, the army won praise for driving the group from the Swat Valley in the summer. Military officials hope to repeat that success in the larger, more intimidating Waziristan region, where they have been fighting for the past week.

After the spurt of terrorism across Pakistan this month, experts called it a clear indication of the growing alliance between northwestern Taliban forces and various banned jihadi groups in the heartland. Yet Punjab officials rejected that, insisting that police could handle the situation and saying that the attackers were serving unnamed "foreign masters."

Not surprisingly, public opinion here is just as confused and contradictory. Residents of Lahore, unnerved by the unaccustomed violence, frustrated by ubiquitous police roadblocks and fearful for their children's safety, are looking to old wars, new allies and long-dead causes for explanations.

Some people blame the Reagan years, when the United States built up local Islamist groups to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and later abandoned the region. Others blame the Obama administration and Congress, conflating concerns about the ongoing war in next-door Afghanistan with current U.S. plans to shower $7.5 billion in economic -- not military -- aid on Pakistan.

"These are all militants that America left us," Mohammed Ahmad, 43, a travel agent, said bitterly. "Islam is a peaceful and respectable religion. These Taliban have no religion, no education. They just brainwash young boys to fight. Maybe they fought jihad against the Russians, but what they are doing now is not jihad at all. It isn't even Islamic."

Opinions are also mixed among religious groups in the Lahore area, largely depending on their sect or leadership. Some express sympathy for the Taliban-style campaign to impose strict Islamic law but stop short of publicly condoning the group's violent methods. Others have been victimized by the extremists and regard them with suspicion.

"The terrorists are enjoying making people nervous," said Raghib Naeemi, the director of a moderate Islamic seminary whose father, its founder, was assassinated in June. "The war we are fighting now is between terror and Islam," he said. "These groups were banned, and now they are joining together against the state. We can try and negotiate with them, but in the end they must be punished or killed."

The peculiar political situation in Punjab has further muddied the waters. It is the stronghold of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N and a bitter rival of President Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan People's Party. The tougher Zardari sounds on Islamist extremism these days, the more Sharif's party deems him an American puppet, hoping eventually to force him from power.

Analysts said that despite Zardari's growing public focus on the terrorist threat, and the army's latest thrust into Taliban territory, many Pakistanis remain hesitant to criticize anything Islamic, ready to blame outsiders for their problems and bewildered by the official shift from patronizing to persecuting domestic Islamist militias.

"At the top levels, I think everyone gets it now, but below that there is a whole range of attitudes towards the militants within Pakistani society," said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a political analyst in Lahore. "Nobody likes the Taliban, but they don't much like the Americans or their government either, and they aren't convinced that using force is the right thing to do. What prevails is mass confusion."

Karzai agrees to runoff - washingtonpost.com

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Investigation strips Afghan president of a third of his votes

By Joshua Partlow, Karen DeYoung and Debbi Wilgoren
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 1:09 PM

KABUL -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that he accepted a finding of widespread fraud in the August presidential elections and endorsed a runoff vote scheduled for Nov. 7.

The announcement came a day after the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission invalidated nearly a million votes for Karzai, stripping him of close to a third of his tally. Officially, Karzai won 49.67 percent of the vote, barely below the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. That finding triggered a constitutionally mandated second round of voting between him and the runner-up, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

President Obama praised Karzai's decision to acknowledge the fraud finding and participate in a runoff, calling it "an important step forward in ensuring a credible process for the Afghan people which results in a government that reflects their will."

Obama telephoned Karzai Tuesday morning to congratulate him personally for agreeing to a runoff election. In brief remarks in the Oval Office after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Obama pledged U.S. support for the new round of voting.

"President Karzai, as well as the other candidates, I think, have shown that they have the interests of the Afghan people at heart, that this is a reflection of a commitment to rule of law and an insistence that the Afghan people's will should be done," Obama said. "And so I expressed the American people's appreciation for this step."

Obama praised Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for interceding with Karzai during a visit to Afghanistan, calling Kerry's efforts "extraordinarily constructive and very helpful."

The president called the Afghan elections "difficult" but did not comment about his upcoming decision on sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to battle a resurgent Taliban movement.

"We have seen the candidates expressing a willingness to abide by constitutional law, and there is a path forward in order to complete this election process," he said.

Karzai's acceptance of another round of voting, after weeks of resistance and months of political turmoil, should allow the Obama administration to proceed with a high-level review of its faltering Afghanistan war strategy, a process that has been hamstrung by the delay in determining who its Afghan government partner will be. The White House has been under increasing congressional and public pressure to make a decision on whether to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, as requested by the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country.

"I congratulate the Afghan people on the patience and resilience they have shown throughout this long election process," Obama said in a White House statement issued Tuesday morning. He said it was "a testimony to the bravery of the Afghan people that so many of them did come out to vote in the first round under tremendously difficult circumstances."

Karzai had come under relentless international pressure to accept the findings of the complaints commission and pursue a path that allowed the results to be viewed with legitimacy.

Speaking at a news conference in the presidential palace -- flanked by Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry; the U.N. special envoy and ambassadors from Britain and France -- Karzai emphasized that the United States and the international community need to help provide better security in the runoff, "so that when they vote, that vote is not called fraud."

Kerry, who met at length with Karzai Monday, said "the international community is 100 percent committed to helping to carry out this election."

Throughout the political storm, Karzai's office cast doubt on the credibility of the investigation, citing foreign interference and holding out the possibility that Karzai would use his influence with the Afghan election commission to reject the fraud findings.

Even as the results of the fraud investigation began to leak last week, Karzai continued to insist he had won legitimately, based on a preliminary tally announced in September by a government-allied election commission.

Endorsing a new round of balloting "means that the country is going forward to security and stability in the country, and that builds the trust of the people in the election," Noor ul-Haq Ulumi, a parliament member from Kandahar, said Tuesday. "The people who are in favor of a stable Afghanistan will definitely go and vote for a second time."

The decision earned accolades from around the globe. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Karzai "has made it clear that the constitutional process must be fully respected." Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he was "very encouraged" that Karzai had given the green light to "an important second chance for the people of Afghanistan to have their voices heard." And British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Karzai had been statesmanlike and made clear "that due constitutional process must be followed."

Before Karzai announced he accepted the commission's finding, Afghan officials close to him had been split over what he would do. One said that Karzai would be amenable to a runoff election but that there must be a better public explanation for why more than a million votes -- including nearly 200,000 for Abdullah -- were tossed out.

"These people will need to be told why their votes were canceled," the official said.

Parliament member Mohammad Moin Marastyal said a second round would deepen ethnic rifts in the country, with Pashtuns lining up behind Karzai and Tajiks behind Abdullah, potentially bringing more instability and violence.

"The same problems we have now will be far worse than they are today," he said.

In an interview Monday with National Public Radio, Abdullah said acceptance of the revised results and agreement to a runoff "will restore the faith of the people in the process."

DeYoung and Wilgoren reported from Washington. Staff writers Michael D. Shear in Washington, Colum Lynch in New York and special correspondent Javed Hamdard in Kabul contributed to this report.