Pakistani Army Captures Taliban Stronghold - NYTimes.com

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By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After a week of fighting Taliban and Qaeda militants in the mountains of South Waziristan, the Pakistani Army said Saturday that it had captured a town important for both its symbolic and strategic value.

The town, Kotkai, most of whose 5,000 residents had already fled, is the home of the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, and one of the most feared Taliban commanders, Qari Hussain. Mr. Hussain is believed to be the organizer and trainer of the group’s suicide bombing squads.

The army has been struggling in the treacherous terrain in South Waziristan, long a militant sanctuary. Military officials said Saturday that Kotkai had been taken only after “intense fighting.” Four days ago, the militants repulsed the first army attempt to capture the town and killed nine soldiers, according to a military intelligence officer.

It was the first notable sign of progress in what military analysts say will be an arduous slog for the army against a resilient enemy. And it came as Pakistan has been enduring a withering series of terrorist attacks over the past three weeks.

At a military briefing Saturday, the information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, acknowledged that the attacks, which have focused on police and government sites and have killed about 200 people, had taken a serious toll. But he insisted that “the nation will not be terrorized.”

The farther the army tries to penetrate South Waziristan, the harder the fighting will get as soldiers encounter defensive positions dug into the sides of mountains that the guerrillas will battle hard to keep, military analysts and residents of the area said.

For example, on the southeast axis of the army’s attack into the Taliban stronghold, soldiers will soon encounter the defensive positions leading to Kaniguram, a village about 6,700 feet high that serves as the hide-out of Uzbek fighters, some of the most battle-hardened around, a former resident of the area said.

“The military’s movement is faster than in their previous campaigns,” a former government official from North Waziristan said, referring to three short-lived army campaigns that ended in negotiated settlements with the Taliban. “But the more they get inside the sanctuary, the more they will be bogged down.”

Time may also be working against the army. In past years, many of the Taliban militants fighting American and NATO forces in Afghanistan have come to Waziristan as winter approached to train and prepare for the next year’s fighting.

Although there is evidence that the seasonal fighting in Afghanistan has become a more year-round affair, the concern is that any Taliban fighters who do cross the border into Pakistan could be used against the army in South Waziristan. One militant organizer in the region, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the migration had already started, potentially swelling the number of active militants in the region well beyond the present estimates of 7,000 to 10,000.

Reinforcements for the militants were also coming from other parts of the Pakistani tribal region, the militant organizer said.

Still, Pakistani soldiers are receiving more support than they did in past campaigns, including better winter gear and air support from fighter jets, the former Waziristan official said.

American officials have praised the Waziristan offensive, after months of pressure on Pakistani officials to begin. But at the military briefing, the army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said that the fight was a purely a Pakistani enterprise, unaided by the United States or anyone else.

There have been no reported missile attacks by American drones in South or North Waziristan against Qaeda targets since the beginning of the Pakistani Army offensive a week ago. Both South and North Waziristan have been the focus of the more than 40 drone attacks in the region this year.

Pakistan had asked the United States to refrain from drone attacks while the army operation was under way in South Waziristan, a senior Pakistani government official said Saturday.

Families continued to flee South Waziristan, and Mr. Kaira said the government was granting the refugees a month’s supply of food and a monthly stipend worth about $50.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it still had no access to North or South Waziristan to care for civilians. “We are concerned by the lack of access granted to humanitarian organizations like the I.C.R.C. whose role it is to protect and assist victims of fighting,” the committee said in a statement.

Elsewhere, in the tribal belt in Bajaur, a missile fired from a drone killed 22 people in the town of Damadola on Saturday, two Pakistani officials said.

The strike appeared to be aimed at a senior Pakistani Taliban leader, Faqir Mohammad, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They said two relatives of Mr. Mohammad were killed.

Jane Perlez reported from Islamabad, and Pir Zubair Shah from Peshawar, Pakistan.

In Yemen, War Centers on Authority, Not Terrain - NYTimes.com

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By ROBERT F. WORTH

SANA, Yemen — For almost seven weeks, Khasan Muhammad Abdullah and his family cowered in their house in northern Yemen while a war raged outside and their food slowly ran out. He could hear government fighter jets screaming across the sky, and he knew the Houthi rebels by their distinctive logos and headbands. But he could not understand what the two sides were fighting about.

“What do they want, what are they thinking?” Mr. Abdullah said wearily, sitting on a friend’s floor here a week after escaping the war zone, along Yemen’s remote northwestern border with Saudi Arabia.

Those questions are being asked across the Arab world and beyond. More than two months of fierce fighting have left thousands dead. Whole villages have been pounded to rubble. The conflict has forced tens of thousands to flee their homes, fueling a humanitarian crisis and worsening the chaos that has already made Yemen a new haven for Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

Yet this mysterious war seems to have more to do with the crumbling authority of the Yemeni state than with any single cause. The Houthi rebels, after all, are a small group who have never issued any clear set of demands. They have been fighting the government on and off since 2004, and it is not clear why President Ali Abdullah Saleh decided in August to force an all-out war.

Many in Yemen’s own government say the conflict is less about controlling terrain — always a tenuous prospect in this tribally splintered country — than about Mr. Saleh’s struggle to reassert his military powers, in the face of widening insurgencies and intensifying political rivalry in the capital.

“Saleh started this war mainly because he wants his son to succeed him, and many in the military and government do not accept this,” said one high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, echoing an analysis that is often heard here. “With a war, people rally around him, even the United States, because they fear chaos in Yemen if he falls.”

Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, dismissed that view as idle speculation. He said the Houthis had forced the government’s hand by terrorizing the population in the north, assassinating local leaders and rearming, in violation of a cease-fire reached last year. He added that the war had a regional and sectarian dimension: the Houthis belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaydism, and he said they received support from Shiites across the region, including in Iran. (The Houthis have denied all this in their official statements.) Yemen is mostly Sunni.

“There were some efforts by the government to mediate, but finally we felt we had to take action,” Mr. Qirbi said during an interview in his office.

Much about the war remains uncertain, because the Yemeni government has strictly barred journalists and independent observers from entering Saada Province, the center of the fighting.

Yet it is clear that the conflict has spread across much of Yemen’s lawless north, swamping the few aid groups operating there. As many as 150,000 people are now homeless, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Many more remain trapped in Saada, where aid groups have no access at all, and supplies of food, water and fuel are growing scarcer. The area is also flooded with weapons, which are so uncontrollable that the government used a major arms dealer as an intermediary with the Houthis.

Those who have escaped the war zone say the crisis is worsening.

“If we had not fled our house, we would have been finished,” said Mr. Abdullah, a lame and beaten-looking 60-year-old who left his home in late September. “The house was in the middle of the fighting. We came with the clothes on our backs, nothing else.”

On the road south, Mr. Abdullah and others said, they were surrounded by other desperate families seeking safety. Some are staying in temporary camps where aid groups are supplying food and water, but even those camps are being rapidly overwhelmed. Many donors have been reluctant to give money, in part because of concerns about poor access and government corruption, according to aid officials in Sana, the capital.

It also seems clear that the Houthis’ influence has steadily grown since the conflict first broke out in 2004, largely because of the government’s mistakes. The Houthis began as a small band of mountain insurgents loyal to Hussein al-Houthi, a former member of the Yemeni Parliament. They belong to a quasi-aristocratic subgroup of Zaydis who claim to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and who ruled the country for much of the past thousand years until 1962.

The government’s bombing raids, and its use of thuggish tribesman as a proxy force, infuriated the local population in Saada. They began fighting alongside the Houthis after Mr. Houthi was killed in 2004, and the battlefield extended to neighboring provinces. Even more civilians have been killed in the latest round of fighting. An airstrike last month left more than 80 people dead in the Harf Sufyan area, most of them reportedly women and children.

The fighting in Saada has also provoked tribal and sectarian animosities that threaten to further destabilize the region. The Houthis formed in part to fight back against the influence of hard-line Sunni Islamists, who received support from neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni government has often used these extremists (usually known as Salafists) as proxy warriors against the Houthis.

“The government never respects your human rights unless you are a Salafist,” said Neshwan Yahya Ahmed, another exile from Saada now living in miserable conditions in a crowded house on the edge of Sana.

Mr. Ahmed, who gave his age as 38 or 39, said he had fought in a government-organized “popular army” against the Houthis, who had arrested and released him four times. Although he seemed hostile to the Houthis, he also deeply resented the government’s policy of using sectarian and tribal animosities to further its goals.

Several Saada residents, and aid workers who have spent time there, said the Houthis had extended their influence over the past year in part because they had worked hard to resolve local tribal conflicts. This effort, they say, stands in stark contrast with the government’s policies, which have long involved setting tribal and political groups against one another.

In addition to its scorched-earth campaign against the Houthis, Yemen’s government is facing other serious challenges. A southern secessionist movement that has been brewing for years flared up into open violence earlier this year and gained the support of one of Mr. Saleh’s important allies. Al Qaeda has regrouped in Yemen and is using the country as a base for attacks throughout the region.

“Many Yemenis fear that this war will continue until the army is really tired,” said Majid al-Fahed, the director of a private group called the Civic Democratic Foundation, who spent time in Saada late last month. “Then who will defend the rest of the country?”

First day of ASEAN summit hits snags on human rights, other issues - washingtonpost.com

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By Tim Johnston and Kevin Brown
Saturday, October 24, 2009

HUA HIN, THAILAND -- Leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were supposed to celebrate the inauguration of the group's new human rights body as they met Friday, but rifts over human rights, trade and politics marred the first day of the region's annual summit.

Five member states -- Burma, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Singapore -- refused to meet the five individuals chosen by civil rights groups to represent their countries.

"I am very disappointed, and I see this as not only a rejection of me personally and the organization I represent, but as a rejection of the democratic process in the region," said Sister Crescencia Lucero, the Franciscan nun who was to have been the Philippines representative.

The association's Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, one of the central elements of the legally binding ASEAN Charter signed last year, disappointed many rights advocates when it was limited to the promotion rather than the protection of human rights.

Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Thai prime minister and current ASEAN chairman, tried to put a positive gloss on the dispute.

"For members of civil society, you should be assured that you now have a partner with which to work," he said.

Nongovernmental groups have portrayed the disagreement as a struggle for the soul of ASEAN: Is it, as Vejjajiva described in his opening statement, a "people-centered" community or, as its critics allege, an uncritical club for regional governments, some of which, such as Burma and Cambodia, are regularly accused of human rights abuses?

ASEAN is caught between its drive for greater integration and international relevance, and the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other member states, but bilateral relations are a recurrent problem.

Regional politicians sometimes cite the European Union as their model, but their ambitions risk running aground on the vast political and social differences between the states, which range from the absolute monarchy of Brunei to the communist governments of Vietnam and Laos.

U.S. hit list of suspected Afghan drug lords draws protests - washingtonpost.com

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PUBLIC OUTRAGE FEARED Justice system will be undermined, officials say

By Craig Whitlock
Saturday, October 24, 2009

KABUL -- A U.S. military hit list of about 50 suspected drug kingpins is drawing fierce opposition from Afghan officials, who say it could undermine their fragile justice system and trigger a backlash against foreign troops.

The U.S. military and NATO officials have authorized their forces to kill or capture individuals on the list, which was drafted within the past year as part of NATO's new strategy to combat drug operations that finance the Taliban. The list is thought to include people with close ties to the Afghan government and others who have served as intelligence assets for the CIA and the U.S. military, according to current and former U.S. and Afghan officials.

Afghan counternarcotics officials expressed frustration that U.S. and NATO military leaders have refused to divulge the names on the list, a decision that they said could undercut joint operations to hunt down opium traffickers.

Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.

"They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own."

For years, the NATO-led military coalition in Afghanistan ignored the opium trade, saying their mission was to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not drug dealers. Afghanistan's poppy fields supply about 90 percent of the world's opium.

At a meeting in Budapest last October, however, NATO defense ministers reversed their strategy and authorized their forces to confiscate narcotics and target drug labs as well as kingpins who provide monetary or other support to the Taliban.

Target list of 50

Since then, the U.S. military has developed a target list of about 50 drug kingpins thought to support the insurgency and has ruled that they can be killed or captured "on the battlefield," according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report released in August.

Two unnamed U.S. generals in Afghanistan told the committee's staff members that the list complies with international law and the U.S. military's rules of engagement because it contains only drug lords with "proven links" to the insurgency. To add someone to the list, the Pentagon requires "two verifiable human sources and substantial additional evidence," according to the Senate report.

U.S. Army Col. Wayne M. Shanks, chief of public affairs for coalition forces in Afghanistan, declined to answer questions about the list or to say whether anyone on it has been killed or captured.

The military "is concerned when we see a nexus between insurgent activity or financing and drug trafficking in Afghanistan," he said in an e-mail. "We regularly conduct operations to limit the insurgents' ability to intimidate, or otherwise threaten the Afghan people."

Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own.

"There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?"

Need for secrecy

At the same time, Jalali said he could understand why U.S. and NATO officials would want to keep their target list a secret from their Afghan counterparts. Corruption in the Afghan government is widespread, and some high-ranking officials are suspected to be involved in the drug trade.

Jalali said the Afghan government once kept its own secret list of drug traffickers. The list was considered highly sensitive, he said, because many of the suspects had ties to influential Afghan leaders, while others had served as intelligence assets for the CIA or the U.S. Defense Department.

"Many of these people were empowered by the international community when they were fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda after 9/11," said Jalali, now a professor at the National Defense University in Washington. "There was no political will to go after them."

In general, NATO forces have taken a more aggressive approach against Afghan drug operations in recent months, particularly in southern poppy-growing provinces.

In Kandahar, U.S. and British troops are joining a new task force consisting of Afghan police officers, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and officers from Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency. The task force's mission is to seize heroin stockpiles, blow up drug labs and investigate corrupt Afghan officials.

New approach praised

U.N. officials, who closely monitor the drug trade in Afghanistan, praised the new cooperative approach. They said the joint police-military operations were especially timely because opium production has dropped by more than one-third since 2007 because of a supply glut on the global market.

Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan director for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said the decline represented a one-time opportunity to make a permanent dent in production levels. He said NATO's help in going after drug labs and stockpiles had proven effective, but he cautioned the military against taking the fight a step too far.

"Extrajudicial killing is not something you want to see," Lemahieu said. "Let's be very, very clear. Don't expect the military to do the job of a police officer. It won't work."

Afghanistan's nascent judicial system, however, has struggled to enforce the law against traffickers. And when it does win convictions, cases can still fall apart.

In April, five traffickers who had been sentenced to long prison terms received pardons from President Hamid Karzai, who said he intervened "out of respect" for their family members. One defendant was the nephew of Karzai's campaign manager.

"We have some people, powerful people, inside and outside government, who can freely smuggle drugs," said Nur al-Haq Ulumi, a member of the Afghan parliament from Kandahar. "If we had an honest government, the government could track down and arrest these people -- everybody knows this."

But Ulumi said it would make things worse if coalition troops began to kill drug dealers. "Already, people feel that foreigners didn't really come here to reconstruct our country," he said. "They think the foreigners just came here to kill us."

Ahmad Big Qaderi, director general of prosecutions for the Criminal Justice Task Force, which oversees narcotics cases and is financed largely by the U.S. government, said NATO forces needed to trust his agency to prosecute drug dealers.

"We should go through the Afghan legal channels to convict criminals," he said. "We have professional staff here and all the mechanisms to prosecute the big fishes."

Iranian site prompts U.S. to rethink assessment - washingtonpost.com

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Tehran set to open Qom nuclear facility to inspectors amid concerns over its role

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 24, 2009

VIENNA -- Early Sunday, if all goes as planned, U.N. nuclear inspectors will travel to a military base near Qom, Iran, for a first look at one of the country's most closely guarded nuclear secrets. Inside bunkers dug into the side of a mountain, the visitors will be escorted through a nearly completed uranium plant that Iran's president has termed "very ordinary."

But less than a month after its existence was publicly revealed, many U.S. and European intelligence officials say they are increasingly convinced that the site was intended explicitly for making highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

The Qom site has undermined one of the U.S. intelligence community's key assessments of Iran's nuclear program: the assumption that Tehran had abandoned plans to enrich uranium in secret, according to two former senior U.S. officials involved in high-level discussions about Iran.

A landmark U.S. intelligence assessment in 2007 concluded that any secret uranium-processing activities "probably were halted" in 2003 and had not been restarted. Other key judgments of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, including the view that Iran has suspended research on nuclear-warhead design, are also being reevaluated in light of new evidence, the two former officials said.

"Qom changed a lot of people's thinking, especially about the possibility of secret military enrichment" of uranium, said one of the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the assessments remain classified.

In interviews, intelligence officials from the United States and allied nations said their scrutiny of the Qom site was longer and deeper than previously acknowledged, and included acquiring detailed plans on how the facility would be outfitted and operated.

Intercepted communications revealed a key piece of data: Iranian plans to place only 3,000 centrifuge machines in the plant. That number is too small to furnish fuel for a civilian power plant, but just big enough to supply Iran annually with up to three bombs' worth of weapons-grade fuel, the former officials said.

Insights into the spy community's evolving views about Qom were provided by current and former intelligence and government officials in interviews in the United States, Central Europe and several Middle Eastern countries. In nearly all cases, the officials spoke on the condition that their names and nationalities not be revealed, citing the secrecy of the ongoing assessments of Iran's nuclear program.

The officials acknowledged that the Qom complex is not yet operational and that no uranium had been enriched at the time the site was revealed last month. They also acknowledged there is no "smoking-gun" evidence that Iran plans to make bomb-grade uranium. But the officials said the Qom site was structurally suited for that purpose, and they concluded that there is no plausible role for the plant in Iran's civilian nuclear power infrastructure.

Iran officially notified the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency about the existence of the Qom site in a letter on Sept. 21. U.S. and European officials say Iranian officials learned that the United States was aware of the site andrushed to disclose the facility's existence to head off accusations that it was running a covert nuclear program.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the Qom site is part of Iran's legitimate, civilian nuclear power program, contending that he planned all along to disclose the facility to the U.N. nuclear watchdog and to allow international oversight.

Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads Iran's civilian Atomic Energy Organization, said the facility was built underground at a military installation to shield it from foreign attack, and also to save money. The intention was "to safeguard our nuclear facilities and reduce the cost of an active defense system," Salehi told reporters in Tehran.

Chipping away at a secret

For at least the past five years, the complex at Qom has been both a closely guarded secret and one of the heavily scrutinized pieces of real estate on Earth.

It is, in some ways, a perfect spot for a hidden nuclear facility. The nearby city of Qom has been known since medieval times as a Shiite religious center; it contains notable religious schools and shrines but no known nuclear facilities. The country's other uranium-enrichment plant, near Natanz, is 60 miles away. Two military bases for medium-range Shahab missiles and antiaircraft batteries lie just beyond the outskirts, and one of these, in a mountainous area about 10 miles north of town, is pocked with tunnels and bunkers used for storing rockets.

Exactly when the order was issued to build the Qom facility is unclear, but intelligence officials say they have studied the site at least since 2004.

An exiled opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, first publicly revealed the existence of Iran's much larger uranium facility at Natanz in 2002. It highlighted Qom's tunnels at a December 2005 news conference and later supplied details to U.N. officials, according to a spokesman for the group. Iran said the site was a closed military property, and no nuclear inspections were permitted.

But from the air and ground, Western satellites and spies scoured its every portal and ventilator shaft, collecting terabytes of data about the facility, including communications intercepts. The CIA teamed up with intelligence operatives from U.S.-allied countries for sophisticated eavesdropping operations, officials confirmed. By last year, a series of breakthroughs confirmed that the Iran was building a secret uranium-enrichment plant, and also yielded precise details about how it would be operated, including the number of centrifuges Iran planned to use and how much electricity the facility would consume.

A retired senior U.S. intelligence official who followed the case closely said the evidence was unusually good, with many "verified sources" providing data "beyond the visible light spectrum," or beyond satellite images and spy-plane photos. "It was truly a multi-discipline effort, and it went on for a long period of time," the retired official said. "The more we learned, the more confident we became."

CIA Director Leon Panetta, in response to questions from The Washington Post, said in a statement that the agency was able over time to "draw a clear picture of Iran's activities and intentions at this site."

Better centrifuges

Iran has revealed that it planned to use a more sophisticated centrifuge machine at Qom -- one that can produce enriched uranium at twice the rate as the older-model machines it uses at the Natanz plant. Even so, the amount of uranium eked out annually by Qom's 3,000 centrifuges would be far short of the quantity needed to fuel a commercial nuclear reactor.

Intelligence analysts calculated that it would take Qom's high-end centrifuges at least 20 years to produce enough low-enriched uranium to meet the needs of a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactor for a year.

If configured for weapons, however, Qom could produce enough bomb-grade fuel for two to three bombs annually, intelligence officials said.

"There is no Iranian document saying the facility is designed for a military program, but what else can it be good for?" said a senior Middle East-based intelligence official involved in Iran analysis.

The official, and other intelligence officers interviewed, said they rejected the possibility that the Qom site was intended as a pilot plant or testing facility for new types of centrifuges. Iran already has two such facilities, at Natanz and in Tehran, and neither runs at anything close to capacity, they said.

Intelligence officials say it is unlikely that Iran will try to manufacture weapons-grade uranium at Qom, now that the site has been revealed . But Western spy agencies say they do not know where Qom's supply of uranium feedstock -- uranium hexafluoride, or UF6 -- was supposed to come from. If Iran were to try to divert UF6 from its existing stockpile to a secret facility, U.N. inspectors would almost certainly detect the change.

"Is there another secret facility somewhere? said the senior MiddleEast-based intelligence officer. "I'd now have to say yes, almost certainly."

China steps up, slowly but surely, to address emissions issue - washingtonpost.com

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Driven by climate concerns and a desire to modernize its economy, Beijing has begun addressing the emissions issue

By Steven Mufson
Saturday, October 24, 2009

LANGFANG, CHINA -- At a gleaming new research center outside Beijing, about 250 engineers and researchers from the ENN Group are trying to figure out how to make energy use less damaging to the world's climate.

In a large greenhouse, hundreds of tubes hold strains of algae being tested for how much carbon dioxide they can suck from the air. Outside, half a dozen brands of solar panels are being matched for performance against the company's own. Next door, large blocks of earth, carved out of Inner Mongolia, have been trucked in to test for new methods of gasifying coal underground.

The private company is part of a growing drive by China to work out a way to check the rapid growth of its massive emissions of greenhouse gases. Seeking to transform an economy heavily dependent upon coal for electric power and industrial production, the government has closed down old cement and coal plants, subsidized row upon row of new wind turbines and taken other measures.

Among members of the U.S. Congress and negotiators preparing for a December climate summit in Copenhagen, China is often considered an obstacle because it has not committed to imposing a ceiling on its emissions of the gases that most scientists blame for climate change. China produces the most carbon emissions in the world, and the output is likely to continue growing for two decades. When President Hu Jintao pledged at the United Nations last month to lower the country's carbon intensity "by a notable margin," that was regarded as a step forward.

Yet, in visible and less visible ways, China has begun to address its emissions problem. The steps are driven in part by the parochial concern that climate change could worsen the flooding that plagues the country's low-lying coastal regions, including Shanghai, and cause water shortages in western areas as glaciers in the Himalayas melt away.

But China has also begun to see energy efficiency and renewable energy as ingredients for the type of modern economy it wants to build, in part because it would make the nation's energy sources more secure.

"We think this is a new business for us, not a burden," said Gan Zhongxue, who left a job as a top U.S. scientist for the giant ABB Group to head up research and development at ENN, the Langfang company that made its fortune as the dominant natural gas distributor in 80 Chinese cities.

In the right direction

For China, the challenge is immense. On average, a Chinese person emits one-fifth as much greenhouse gas as an American; an overwhelming majority of Chinese do not own cars; and half the population in China still lacks access to winter heating. But its economy is growing so quickly and prosperity is spreading so rapidly that China's demand for energy is destined to increase even if it uses less for every dollar of economic output. The State Grid's economic research institute forecasts an 85 percent increase in electricity demand by 2020.

Still, China has taken significant steps in the past five years. It removed subsidies for motor fuel, which now costs more than it does in the United States; its fuel-efficiency standard for new urban vehicles is 36.7 miles per gallon, a level the United States will not reach for seven years. It has set high efficiency standards for new coal plants; the United States has none. It has set new energy-efficiency standards for buildings. It has targeted its 1,000 top emitters of greenhouse gases to boost energy efficiency by 20 percent. And it has shut down many older, inefficient industrial boilers and power plants.

"Regardless of whether the United States passes its own legislation, China will take positive measures because this is a requirement for our own economy to conserve resources," said Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission and China's point man in international climate talks. If China mimics the West's wasteful modernization path, he said, the environment would not be livable.

In climate talks, China has argued that industrialized nations should do more to slow the pace of climate change compared with developing nations, where raising living standards is the priority. China has also noted the cumulative emissions of advanced economies since the Industrial Revolution. And some Chinese commentators have accused Western nations of using a carbon cap as a way to contain China's advancement.

Nonetheless, the government has set ambitious targets for renewable energy, which is supposed to account for 15 percent of the country's fuel mix by 2020, and for tree planting, to boost forest cover to 20 percent of China's land mass by the end of next year. China plans to quadruple its nuclear power; by the end of next year, it may have 18 nuclear energy plants under construction, half of the world's total under construction.

Smaller details are getting attention, too. Xie said forcing supermarkets to charge for plastic bags reduced the use of the bags by two-thirds, saving the equivalent of about 30,000 barrels of oil a day.

Last week, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said the efforts are starting to pay off. The agency lowered its estimate of future Chinese greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, for all of China's efforts, its greenhouse gas emissions are likely to head upward.

Challenges remain

Hitting its renewable and nuclear energy targets will be challenging. The explosion in the number of wind turbines has created a transmission bottleneck; many turbines stand idle in Inner Mongolia and northeast China, awaiting new transmission lines and connections with the main power grids. The country lacks the skilled manpower to effectively construct, operate or regulate nuclear power stations. Key components might be in short supply, too.

All that contributes to China's continued reliance on coal -- and its reluctance to guarantee a ceiling on its emissions at the Copenhagen summit.

Another problem for China is energy inefficiency in buildings. Electricity and gas used by buildings account for a third of the country's emissions and 7 percent of the world's. Over the next decade, China is expected to add commercial real estate space far in excess of the existing commercial space in the United States.

China has passed new requirements, but enforcing them is difficult. Only 10 buildings have applied for recognition under a two-year-old green-building rating system, though more than 200 buildings have applied for certification under the U.S.-based LEED standards for energy efficiency, said David Hathaway, managing director of the consulting firm ICF International.

Hathaway said U.S. agencies and nongovernmental organizations are encouraging China's biggest property developers to adopt tough standards, and higher Chinese standards for appliances are helping. He said his firm had helped Jin Mao Tower in Beijing, the capital, shave 20 percent off its energy use.

In the United States, China's drive to rein in its carbon emissions has prompted some people to switch from worrying about "the China threat" to the global climate to worrying about the threat of China soon seizing the lead in clean-energy technology. Many people cite this new threat in order to spur U.S. climate efforts as well as bilateral cooperation.

"If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they will win," said David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the Energy Department, who recently visited Beijing to explore areas for agreement during President Obama's trip here next month.

Unexpected revival breathes new life into public option - washingtonpost.com

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By Dan Balz
Saturday, October 24, 2009 12:56 PM

The resurrection of the public option is the latest and one of the most surprising turns in the long battle over legislation to overhaul the nation's health care system. Under assault for months, declared on life support repeatedly in recent weeks, the provision for a public insurance option is unexpectedly alive as House and Senate leaders prepare to send their bills to the floor.

That doesn't mean it's a done deal. Whether it survives the final battles, and in what form, are still the unanswerable questions. Multiple versions of a public option provision are on the table. Liberal and moderate-conservative Democrats are still at odds and drawing lines in the sand in hopes of exercising maximum influence on the outcome.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are still scratching for the votes to pass bills with some kind of public option included. But by next week, both hope to have bills ready either for unveiling or to send to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis and scoring.

What encourages some of those who have followed this debate closely from the inside is the degree to which Democrats are in sight of a compromise on the public option and other remaining differences -- though many may have to accept some measure of disappointment to get a bill to President Obama's desk.

What brought the public option back to life?

Conservative opposition nearly sank the public option over the summer. Many Republicans called it a government takeover of health care. Some conservatives see it as the first step toward a single-payer system (as do some liberals). At the height of the town hall and Tea Party activity, the White House appeared to be running for cover. Officials worried that the public option had become a proxy for more pervasive concerns about the amount of government intervention Obama was calling for in his economic and domestic policies.

Administration officials sent equivocating signals. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, driven by a pragmatic desire to get some kind of bill through Congress, appeared willing to sacrifice the public option, if necessary, to reach the larger goal. The president maintained that he still preferred to see a public option in the legislation, but told one town hall audience that this was merely "a sliver" of the overall health care debate. In other words, if it sank into obscurity, he wouldn't weep for long over its disappearance.

The conservative opposition and the administration's apparent wobbliness prompted a counterattack by liberal advocates of the public option, who saw it as the holy grail of the health care debate. Few experts see it that way and there are no doubt far more important provisions that would have a more direct effect on coverage, on how individuals are treated by their insurance companies and in controlling costs (still the weakest element of the bills under consideration). But the grassroots support had an effect.

When Congress returned to Washington in September, the debate's focus shifted to the dynamics of the Senate Finance Committee, where Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) had labored for months to produce a bipartisan consensus. To that end, he joined several other Democrats in opposing two versions of a public option in the committee's bill, saying he saw no way to get 60 votes in the full Senate.

That seemed to spell the end for the public option. Baucus, however, managed to get just one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine), to join with the Democrats in approving the legislation. Snowe opposes a public option but has advocated the use of a trigger mechanism that would allow a government insurance plan if private competition proves inadequate. Snowe's future votes remain conditioned on what is in the final bill.

With virtually unanimous Republican opposition likely, Democrats reevaluated the politics of the public option. Two recent events contributed to their renewed push to include it. One was the insurance industry's decision to attack the legislation and to issue a report warning of higher insurance premiums. The report triggered a backlash among liberal Democrats, who decided to push even harder for the inclusion of a public option.

Then last week, new polls, one from the Washington Post and ABC News and the other from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, found clear majority support (57 percent) for a public option. The Post-ABC News poll showed that support had risen five percentage points since August. The new numbers emboldened public option supporters to press harder, even though the same polls continued to show the public divided over the overall shape of health care legislation.

National polls are one thing. But getting the votes in the House and Senate is quite another. For red-state senators or House Democrats from marginal districts, perceptions of public opinion at home are another, which is why rounding up the necessary votes for a bill that includes a public option remains a challenge.

Pelosi long has been a determined advocate for the public option. The most robust version, which would pay on the basis of Medicare rates, appears not to have enough votes to get through the House. As of this weekend, Pelosi's fallback appears to be a provision that pays on the basis of negotiated rates, still a relatively robust approach.

Reid is trying to attract 60 votes for a bill with a more qualified public option, one that would let states opt out of the system. Even if he is a few votes short, Reid is inclined to include the option in the bill that goes to the floor. Snowe's trigger mechanism may be the fallback position in the Senate if there aren't 60 votes for an opt-out plan.

On Friday Pelosi signaled her receptivity to the opt-out approach as a possible compromise between House and Senate, a sign that despite her advocacy for a robust public option she doesn't want to jeopardize the reelection prospects for the moderate-conservative members of her caucus.

There is much negotiating and posturing ahead. Obama told Senate leaders late last week he still sees value in trying to keep Snowe in the coalition. But liberal Democrats will be unhappy if the Senate bill includes Snowe's trigger mechanism rather than something stronger.

That will then test Democrats' cohesiveness and Obama's leadership and persuasiveness. That battle could be weeks away. The fact that the House and Senate now appear likely to receive health care bills with a public option provision is surprise enough.

Electronic medical records not a cure-all - washingtonpost.com

Image by Quiplash! via Flickr

CRITICS CITE RISE IN ERRORS Expanded use could save billions, president says

By Alexi Mostrous
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 25, 2009

In a health-care debate characterized by partisan bickering, most lawmakers agree on one thing: American medicine needs to go digital.

When President Obama designated $19.5 billion to expand the use of electronic medical records, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said it was one of only "two good things" in February's stimulus package.

But such bipartisan enthusiasm has obscured questions about the effectiveness of health IT products, critics say. Interviews with more than two dozen doctors, academics, patients and computer programmers suggest that computer systems can increase errors, add hours to doctors' workloads and compromise patient care.

"Health IT can be beneficial, but many current systems are clunky, counterintuitive and in some cases dangerous," said Ross Koppel, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who published a key study on electronic medical records in 2005.

Under the stimulus program, hospitals and physicians can claim millions of dollars for IT purchases, and will be penalized if they do not go digital by 2015. Obama has said the changes will save billions in health-care costs and will minimize medication errors.

But health IT's effectiveness is unclear. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found in March that electronic records prevented only two infections a year. A 2005 report in the journal Pediatrics found that deaths at the children's hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center more than doubled in the five months after a computerized order-entry system went online. UPMC said the study had not found that technology caused the rise in mortality and maintained that medication errors were down 60 percent since computers were introduced in 2002.

Others studies have concluded that health IT saves time and reduces errors. It has been used successfully in organizations such as the Veterans Administration and Kaiser Permanente.

However, the Senate Finance Committee has amassed a thick file of testimony alleging serious computer flaws from doctors, patients and engineers unhappy with current systems.

On Oct. 16, the panel wrote to 10 major sellers of electronic record systems, demanding to know, for example, what steps they had taken to safeguard patients. "Every accountability measure ought to be used to track the stimulus money invested in health-information technology," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the panel's ranking Republican.

Anonymous reports sent to the Joint Commission, the body charged with certifying 17,000 health-care organizations; Grassley's staff; and the Food and Drug Administration disclose problems, including:

Faulty software that miscalculated intracranial pressures and mixed up kilograms and pounds.

-- A computer system that systematically gave adult doses of medications to children.

-- An IT program designed to warn physicians about wrong dosages that was disconnected when the vendor updated the system, leading to misdoses.

-- A software bug that misdiagnosed five people with herpes.

David Blumenthal, the head of health tech at the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledged that the systems had flaws. "But the critical question is whether, on balance, care is better than before," he said. "I think the answer is yes."

Over the next two months, Blumenthal will finalize the definition of "meaningful use," the standard that hospitals and physicians will have to reach before qualifying for health-IT stimulus funds. He would not say whether applicants would have to submit adverse event reports, a safety net that many doctors and academics have called for but that vendors have resisted.

"If you look at other high-risk industries, like drug regulation or aviation, there's a requirement to report problems," said David C. Classen, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah who recently completed a study on health IT installations. "That just doesn't happen in health IT."

Today, barely 8 percent of hospitals have even a basic electronic medical system. Only 17 percent of physicians use electronic records, and many of those are uninstalling them, including 20 percent of physician groups in Arizona, according to a June survey by HealthLeaders-InterStudy.

Outside the United States, countries further along the digital curve have experienced major problems with American-made health IT systems.

In Britain, a $20 billion program to digitalize medicine across the National Health Service is five years behind schedule and heavily over budget. A British parliamentary committee in January criticized the vendor, Cerner, as "not providing value for money."

Sarah Bond, a Cerner spokeswoman, said patient safety had improved and errors had dropped at U.S. hospitals that used Cerner products.

Cerner's stock price has risen 122 percent since February. It is not unique. Shares in Allscripts, another major health IT player whose chief executive, Glen E. Tullman, served on Obama's campaign finance committee, rose by 126 percent over the same period.

But rising share prices have not always translated into better care.

"It's been a complete nightmare," said Steve Chabala, an emergency room physician at St. Mary Mercy Hospital in Livonia, Mich., which switched to electronic records three years ago. "I can't see my patients because I'm at a screen entering data."

Last year, Chabala's department found that physicians spent nearly five of every 10 hours on a computer, he said. "I sit down and log on to a computer 60 times every shift. Physician productivity and satisfaction have fallen off a cliff."

Other doctors spoke of cluttered screens, unresponsive vendors and illogical displays. "It's a huge safety issue," said Christine Sinsky, an internist in Dubuque, Iowa, whose practice implemented electronic records six years ago. "I can't tell from the medical display whether a patient is receiving 4mg or 8mg of a certain drug. It took us two years to get a back-button on our [Electronic Health Record] browser."

She emphasized, however, that electronic records have improved her practice. "We wouldn't want to go back," she said. "But EHRs are still in need of significant improvement."

More than one in five hospital medication errors reported last year -- 27,969 out of 133,662 -- were caused at least partly by computers, according to data submitted by 379 hospitals to Quantros Inc., a health-care information company. Paper-based errors have caused 10,954 errors, the data showed.

Between 2006 and 2008, computer errors also contributed to 31 deaths or serious injuries -- twice as many as were caused by paper errors, although numbers of these serious cases were decreasing, Quantros said.

Legal experts say it is impossible to know how often health IT mishaps occur. Electronic medical records are not classified as medical devices, so hospitals are not required to report problems. In fact, many health IT contracts do not allow hospitals to discuss computer flaws, according to Koppel and Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"Doctors who report problems can lose their jobs," Hoffman said. "Hospitals don't have any incentive to do so and may be in breach of contract if they do. That sort of secrecy puts the patient at risk."

For one senior internist at a major hospital, who requested anonymity because he said he would lose his job if he went public, a 2006 installation provoked mayhem.

"The system crashed soon after it went online," he said. "I walked in to find no records on any patients. It was like being on the moon without oxygen."

While orange-shirted vendor employees "ran around with no idea how to work their own equipment," the internist said, doctors struggled to keep chronically ill patients alive. "I didn't go through all my training to have my ability to take care of patients destroyed by devices that are an impediment to medical care," the internist said.

China, India Border Stokes Rivalry - WSJ.com

By PETER WONACOTT

LEH, India -- In the brewing discord between two giant, ambitious nations, even a remote meadow in the Himalayas is worth fighting over.

Some two-dozen Chinese soldiers converged earlier this year on a family of nomads who wouldn't budge from a winter grazing ground that locals say Indian herders had used for generations. China claims the pasture is part of Tibet, not northern India. The soldiers tore up the family's tent and tried to push them back toward the Indian border town of Demchok, Indian authorities say.

Increasing Friction

View Interactive

Comparing China and India's most crucial statistics.

Chering Dorjay, the chairman of India's Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, says he arrived on the scene with a new tent and Indian intelligence officers and urged the herders to stay put. "The Chinese, it seems, are gradually taking our territory," he says. "We will feel very insecure unless India strengthens its defenses."

Dueling territorial claims along this heavily militarized mountain border, coupled with economic tensions between the two nations, are kindling a 21st-century rivalry. The budding distrust has created a dilemma for the U.S. about how to court one nation without angering the other.

China and India cooperate occasionally. But in recent years, they have competed vigorously over trade, energy investments, even a race to land a man on the moon. Some Indians want their nation to move closer to the U.S. as a hedge against a rising China -- a strategic shift that's likely to complicate ties among all three.

"China is trying to become No. 1," says Brajesh Mishra, a former national-security adviser for India. "This is the seed of conflict between China, India and the U.S."

Walk the Line

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Peter Wonacott/The Wall Street Journal

A sign in the village of Spangmik in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir marks the last stop for tourists.

The prime ministers of India and China are expected to meet this weekend at a summit of Asian leaders in Bangkok, following several weeks in which their nations traded barbs over trade and disputed territory. "Both sides will exchange views on issues of mutual concern," China's assistant foreign minister, Hu Zhengyao, told reporters Wednesday.

Next month, after a planned visit to China, President Barack Obama will host a U.S. visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a meeting meant to highlight what the White House says is a "growing strategic partnership." Commercial and military ties between the two countries have been getting stronger. Last year, the U.S. loosened restrictions to allow India to buy sensitive technology and nuclear equipment for civilian use. Soldiers from both countries are participating this month in a joint defense exercise.

Indian defense analysts say India needs closer U.S. ties to hedge against potential hostilities with China. "If China's rise is peaceful, and it integrates into the global economy, everything should be fine," says retired Indian Brig. Gen. Gurmeet Kanwal, director of the Center for Land Warfare Studies, an army think tank. "Should China implode, it's better to have a friend like the U.S."

In addition to the defense concerns, trade friction is growing between India and China. India leads all members of the World Trade Organization in antidumping cases against China. India has banned imports of Chinese toys, milk and chocolate, citing safety concerns, and has launched investigations into export surges of Chinese truck tires and chemicals, among other products.

On Oct. 15, Indian heavy-industries minister Vilasrao Deshmukh asked the finance ministry to impose taxes on imports of inexpensive Chinese power equipment. "We don't want India to be turned into a dumping ground," he told reporters.

At the moment, the biggest threat to India-China relations may be their competing claims for big swaths of territory along their border. In recent years, China has settled border disputes with a host of nations, including Russia, as part of what it calls its "good neighbor policy." But China and India have made little progress, despite 13 rounds of meetings since 2003.

China says the eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is historically part of southern Tibet. India wants China to hand back territory it calls Aksai Chin, desolate high-altitude salt flats that residents of Ladakh claim as part of its ancient Buddhist kingdom. India's discovery of a Chinese-built road in the region helped spark a border war in 1962.

Earlier this month, China objected to a visit by Indian Prime Minister Singh to Arunachal Pradesh to campaign for local elections, saying it was disputed territory. "We request India to pay great attention to China's solemn concerns, and not stir up incidents in the areas of dispute," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters.

India's foreign minister countered that Arunachal Pradesh is Indian territory, and demanded that China stop investing in infrastructure-related projects in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan claim the whole of Kashmir.

The 1962 border war, which India lost, complicated the boundary between the two countries. These days, Chinese and Indian forces in some border areas have agreed to go out on different days to patrol contested territory. "We want to avoid an eyeball-to-eyeball conflict," says Gopal Pillai, India's secretary for the home ministry, which oversees the border police.

India and China are intent on turning fast economic growth into national strength. When their interests have converged, they have proven a powerful combination. On Wednesday, they announced plans to cooperate at December's climate-change talks in Copenhagen, a pact likely to see both fighting carbon-emission caps proposed by industrialized nations. During global-trade talks, they both resisted Western pressure to open farm markets.

"China's economic and military growth is not a threat to India. And India's shouldn't be a threat to China," says Cheng Ruisheng, a former Chinese ambassador to India. "We should be an opportunity to one another."

But many Chinese resent any comparison with India, still a largely poor agrarian nation with only about one-third of China's per-capita income. And they're generally wary of India's warming ties with the U.S.

Indians, for their part, bristle over the flood of Chinese imports and China's increasingly cozy ties with India's neighbors, including Nepal, Sri Lanka and arch-rival Pakistan. In a speech last November, Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, then its foreign minister, identified an expansionist China as one of India's top challenges. "Today's China seeks to further her interests more aggressively than in the past," he told the National Defense College in New Delhi.

The Indian government has closely scrutinized proposals by Chinese companies to invest in India. It recently demanded that thousands of Chinese citizens in India convert short-term business visas into employment visas -- a move that effectively boots unskilled Chinese workers from the country.

The Chinese government has objected to a proposed Asian Development Bank program that India hoped would help fund a water project in the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh. This year, the Chinese embassy began issuing visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir in a manner that Indian officials say leaves China with a way to later claim that it isn't recognizing the visa recipients as Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the Chinese embassy in New Delhi says "every country has the right" to set its own visa policies.

U.S. defense contractors could benefit from India's desire to modernize its military. While the U.S. has banned weapons sales to China, it has ramped up such sales to India. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. are among the defense contractors competing to supply India's air force a new fleet of jet fighters -- a deal that could be valued at $10.4 billion.

Some Chinese analysts say friction between India and China are playing into what they say is a U.S. wish to contain China. "If border tensions between India and China continue to simmer, I can't say the U.S. will be displeased," says Shi Yinhong, a specialist in Sino-U.S. ties at People's University in Beijing.

The contested territory in northern India lies in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The region abutting China, known as Ladakh, consists largely of rocky mountain terrain with isolated green pastures grazed by yaks, goats and horses. Many of the herders and traders living on both sides of the blurred border share the same Tibetan heritage and Buddhist faith. The main town on the Indian side, Leh, was an ancient caravan stop.

Today, the area crawls with Indian soldiers. Indian border police tightly regulate visitors traveling east toward China.

Peter Wonacott/The Wall Street Journal

The Indian army built this road in Ladakh, near the China border, where there have been disputes over territory.

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• Opinion: Bordering on Danger

The Indian army has accelerated a road-building program in the region.

The roads, which run beside Indian army camps and over a pass above 17,000 feet, are dotted with offbeat signs: "I'm curvaceous, be slow," warns one. "I like you darling, but not so fast," says another.

India intends to use the new mountain roads in part to move military supplies. In September, an Indian cargo plane landed at a new high-altitude airstrip near the border.

Indian villagers near the border have been caught in the middle of the conflict. When villagers were constructing an irrigation canal a few years ago, Chinese soldiers tried to wave them off, says Rigzin Spalbar, chairman at the time of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council.

The villagers hurled abuse at the soldiers, but were angry at Indian soldiers for doing nothing, he says. The Chinese "are pestering us to test India's reaction," he says.

Indian residents of the area claim Chinese soldiers have painted Chinese characters on rocks in territory that India claims as its own. The residents say the border has never been as tightly patrolled as it is now.

Konchok Gurmet, 70 years old, lives in Spangmik, a village ringed with Tibetan prayer flags on Panggong Lake, beside the border with China.

He says that until a few years ago he was able to smuggle horses and wool across the border in exchange for Chinese crockery, clothes and thermos bottles.

These days, locals say, border forces on both sides turn smugglers back. After violent protests in Tibet last year, China has been sensitive about who crosses over. Indian police worry that herders and smugglers may be offering the Chinese information on military positions and infrastructure projects, locals say.

According to Mr. Pillai, the Indian home secretary, infrastructure development on both sides of the border has heightened interest in establishing an exact line.

The confrontation between the Indian goatherds and Chinese soldiers, which occurred in January, began after the herders crossed a river to reach a pasture they'd used for generations, Mr. Pillai says.

The Chinese viewed the river as the border line. Indian security forces haven't pressed the claim, he says, because the pasture now is encircled by Chinese sentry posts. "We'd find it difficult tactically to hold that land," he says.

China's ministry of defense declined to comment on the incident, and the Chinese foreign ministry has denied any incursions into Indian territory. "China's border patrol is always conducted in strict accordance with rules," said a foreign ministry spokeswoman last month.

Mr. Pillai says more troops are moving to the border with China, which he describes as a "gradual" buildup of "defensive positions."

Some residents of Arunachal Pradesh -- the Indian state that China claims -- say it's about time.

"India needs to wake up. China is going to flex its muscles," says Kiren Rijiju, a former member of parliament from Arunachal Pradesh. "Being one of its largest neighbors, we are a soft target."

—Vibhuti Agarwal in New Delhi and Sue Feng in Beijing contributed to this article.

Report Shows Afghan Drugs Reach Deep in the West - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

UNITED NATIONS — The Afghan opium harvest is feeding a $65 billion global trade in heroin each year, which now kills many more people in NATO countries in a year than the number of NATO soldiers who have died on the battlefield in Afghanistan since 2001, Antonio Maria Costa, the senior United Nations official on drugs and crime, said Thursday.

“If we do not address this, it will be hard to solve all the other problems in Afghanistan,” Mr. Costa said, adding that the lucrative nature of the heroin trade is creating a “narco-cartel” in Afghanistan that includes corrupt government and security officials.

It is easier to try to uproot the heroin trade at its source, where opium is grown, than its destination, he said, particularly because heroin trafficking is disrupted less effectively in affluent Western countries, despite their financial and police resources.

Mr. Costa was summarizing a report from the office he heads, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which was released on Wednesday.

The opium crop from Afghanistan is refined to produce 375 tons of heroin, which makes up the bulk of the trade worldwide.

Drawing on figures supplied by the countries themselves, the United Nations report says that Iran intercepts 20 percent of the 105 tons of heroin that flows through its territory, Pakistan 17 percent of the 150 tons that comes in and Central Asian countries only 5 percent of the 100 tons that enters these nations.

Europeans consume about 88 tons of heroin per year, and the authorities seize only 2 percent of the heroin that enters Europe, mostly through Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, according to the report.

The annual death toll in all NATO countries from heroin overdoses is estimated to be more than 10,000, an annual total that is about five times higher the number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan in the past eight years, the report said.

The proceeds from the heroin trade help fuel the Taliban insurgency. When the Taliban were in power a decade ago in Afghanistan, heroin produced $100 million a year in taxes, the report said. The insurgents are now estimated to be gaining $160 million a year from trafficking in the drug.

Mr. Costa recommended that NATO forces concentrate on trying to dismantle the drug cartels in Afghanistan, instead of striking at individual farmers and crops.

By bombing drug laboratories, along with attacking traffickers and open drug markets, NATO troops have had limited success, he said, but they need to extend their reach.