Generation Recession - Nation

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When David Thyme was an even younger man than he is today, his fantasies of early adulthood did not include a 9:30 pm curfew and a bed in Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth. Then again, they also didn't include a recession so severe that his financially strapped father would ask him to help with rent--or that when he couldn't find an entry-level job to do so, his father would ask him to leave home. "He was like, Son, you got to do what you got to do. I can't have you in my house," recalled the thin-faced 18-year-old from the Bronx.

Shawn Bolden, an earnest 23-year-old from Harlem, also nursed a different vision of his youthful years. A graduate of Monroe College with a degree in criminal justice, he imagined dedicating his days to nurturing the minds of the next generation of neglected students, doing his part to solder shut the school-to-prison pipeline. But since losing his job teaching arts and college prep at a local nonprofit in June, he's been struggling to find his way back into the classroom, all the while worrying about feeding his newborn daughter.

And then there's Charles Channon. A 25-year-old graduate of George Washington University, he dreamed that his postcollege days would be devoted to an onward-and-upward career with an international development firm--or at least a job with which to pay off $65,000 in college debt. "I wouldn't pretend that there's absolutely no conceit in me, but I do want to get out there and make the best difference I can," he said.

So much for youthful fantasies.

These are not happy days for America's young and striving. Indeed, as the economy has rocked and tumbled its way through 2009, spewing jobs like a sea-sick tourist, these have become very, very bad days. In September, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 hovered morosely at 18.1 percent, nearly double the national average for that month. At the same time, the actual employment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped to a startling 46 percent, the grimmest such figure on record since 1948, the year the government began keeping track. Taken together, this same group of young people has lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the economy began deflating in December 2007, roughly one-third of all the jobs lost, making them the hardest-hit age group of the recession.

And it gets bleaker. Bad as the youth unemployment numbers are, the underemployment numbers are even more distressing, with young people once again taking the hit. During the second quarter of 2009, for instance, the underemployment rate for workers under 25 was an alarming 31.9 percent; for workers between 25 and 34 the underemployment rate was 17.1 percent.

All of which suggests that for all this country's unbridled fascination with the glories of youth; for all the teen-lusting TV dramas, wunderkind "it" kids and peewee tech moguls, to say nothing of all the industries built on making the rest of us look and feel teen-queen young--being a member of today's youth explosion isn't a particularly enviable position after all.

"Young people under 30 have been far more affected than other groups in the economy during the recession," says Andrew Sum, professor of economics and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "And the younger you are, the worse off you've been."

The reasons for this are multiple and complex, but perhaps the one that young people cite most is their desperate new job competition: adults twice their age with college degrees and decades of experience are now applying for entry-level positions. Moreover, those young people lucky enough to have found work often fall prey to the old "last hired, first fired" syndrome, putting them right back where they started. The result is that young people are not only working less than at any time since the Great Depression but could suffer the consequences deep into their individual and collective futures.

"These effects are long-lasting; they're not short and measly-lasting," explains Sum, citing several studies suggesting that a slow employment start can have long-term consequences. In the case of white male college graduates, for instance, an influential study showed that for as long as fifteen years after college, those who graduated into the recession-rocked economy of the early 1980s earned less than those who graduated into a sunny employment market. Equally disturbing: those who work only part time when younger, as so many young people must now do, see little benefit to their future wages compared with those working full time.

"We are throwing out of the labor market those kids who will benefit the most from the work experience they get, and they will lose that for the rest of their lives," Sum warns. "That's why it really is a depression for young workers. And I don't use that word lightly."

This was not the graduation party that most young folks imagined when they daydreamed about their liberation into early adulthood. It's certainly not the champagne-and-streamers rager that millennial boosters and other youth gurus anticipated when they dashed off all those messianic star charts predicting that this new wave of young folks would usher in the next epoch of dreamers and do-gooder types: the next Great Generation.

And yet, bleak as the current climate is, the story behind the statistics is also far more complicated--and, in some ways, uglier--than many of the recent apocalyptic pronouncements about a "lost generation" and "dead end kids" would suggest (see BusinessWeek's October 19 cover story and the September 27 New York Post, if you dare). Certainly there are scads of lost young souls roaming the aisles of job fairs, cluttering unemployment offices and weighing whether it's more important to pay the electricity or the phone bill. But in this generation of 80-odd million, some people are far more lost than others, while some have the luxury of not being lost at all. Quite simply, the real danger of the recession is not necessarily a lost generation of unemployed millennials so much as a Swiss cheese generation where the places once occupied by the least affluent--particularly the least affluent people of color--have simply been carved out.

"I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it's hurting the weakest," says Dedrick Muhammad, senior organizer and research associate for the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good, who has done extensive research on the recession's disparate, and decidedly racial, impact on the people of this country.

Once again, the data help tell the story. As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early October, young African-American teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have an unemployment rate of 40.7 percent, while young Latinos of the same age are unemployed at a rate of nearly 30 percent--both drastically higher than the 23 percent unemployment experienced by their white peers. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the disparity is even more dramatic: while young white workers in their early 20s have an unemployment rate of 13.1 percent, their African-American compatriots are unemployed at the rate of 27.1 percent, more than twice as high.

Or as Sum summarizes, "If you are both low-income and black or low-income and Hispanic, you have lost the most. And if you are young, affluent and a woman, in terms of just labor market studies, you've done OK... although across the board everybody has lost."

These losses have stacked up quickly, but today's great youth crisis didn't happen overnight, the sudden result of an immaculate recession. For young workers--and in particular young, low-income and workers of color--the struggle began long ago, with the changes that began refashioning the economy as far back as the 1980s: the decline of unions; the long, slow death of manufacturing; the rise of the service economy; and the near-total disappearance of proactive government policy. The last decade in particular, with its post-dot-com recession followed by a jobless youth recovery, has been particularly bruising.

The result of all this has been that many of today's young people--again, especially the poor, those with less education and people of color--have a measurably harder road to travel than their generational elders, according to "The Economic State of Young America," a report published in spring 2008 by Demos, a New York-based research and advocacy organization. Between 1975 and 2005, for instance, the typical annual income for workers between the ages of 25 and 34 decreased across all educational brackets, with the exception of women with bachelor's degrees. Men without a high school diploma suffered most, their annual income plummeting by 34.2 percent, while men with a high school diploma or the equivalent earned the runner-up slot, with an income drop of 28.5 percent. As for women, those with less than a high school diploma, as well as those possessing just a diploma, lost less ground than their male counterparts; but then again, they're still doing worse than before and, perhaps more to the point, they still fare significantly worse than men their age.

At the same time, today's young workers have had to do more with less. College tuition rates have skyrocketed--in fact, rates for four-year public universities have more than doubled since 1980--with the unsurprising result that nearly two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2008 left in debt. The cost of childcare now eats up as much as 10 percent of a two-parent family's income in many states (as much as 14.3 percent in Oregon). And young people between the ages of 19 and 34 are the most likely population to be uninsured--not because they don't want health benefits but because employers don't offer them. A case in point: 63.3 percent of recent high school graduates had employer-provided healthcare in 1979, whereas just 33.7 percent had it in 2004.

"What we're looking at is a situation where young people entered the recession already feeling the brunt of thirty years' worth of pretty gradual but nonetheless dramatic economic and social changes," says Nancy Cauthen, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos. "The recession just made a bad situation worse."

Thankfully, there's something of a pewter lining surrounding all this bleakness: not only are certain swaths of this generation among the most politically engaged in decades but the generation's politics in general trend decidedly toward the progressive. Indeed, many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy, to push for everything from green jobs to increased bank regulation to state budgets that aren't balanced on students' backs (thank you, University of California protesters!).

This is promising, since the list of much-needed solutions to young people's recession problems is long and daunting--beginning, many researchers agree, with the need to create more jobs: green jobs, Job Corps jobs, public works jobs, even tax credit-induced jobs. However, these can't be just any old jobs; they must be jobs targeted toward young people, jobs for which employers are induced to hire the youthful, inexperienced and most vulnerable, because, as Sum says, "Very few kids are being hired by the stimulus." His solution: pull them into the workforce either through direct job creation, partial subsidies or targeted tax credits to youth-hiring businesses. Moreover, he advises, these jobs also must last longer than a brief six- to twelve-week summer fling. That's how long the roughly 284,000 summer youth jobs funded by the stimulus lasted, even though there is almost no evidence that a quickie summer job has any lingering effect on a young person's long-term prospects--though there is evidence that summer jobs that extend into longer-term employment help quite a bit, according to Sum.

But above all, these new jobs have to be far more plentiful and ambitious in scope than the ones created thus far, not the least because it will take years for the country to crawl out of the vast employment hole, roughly 10.7 million jobs deep, created by this recession. And while 284,000 summer youth jobs certainly represent an important start, they not only don't meet the current need but seem downright piddling compared with the nearly 1 million government-sponsored summer youth jobs that existed during the late 1970s.

"This is classic of Obama's situation: Obama can double something or increase it 100 percent from the previous administration, but it's still so insignificant to the problem," explains Dedrick Muhammad. By contrast, he observes, "Wall Street's booming because the government took seriously their problems and did a massive intervention."

Of course, even if a slew of youth jobs materialized overnight, it would only be the beginning, since, as Cauthen cautions, "the recession could end tomorrow and that's not necessarily going to mean a bright future for young people." For that, she and others have argued, this generation needs more systemic, probing change, including easier access to the protection of unions in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act, more affordable health insurance in the form of universal health coverage, childcare that doesn't decimate their paychecks. And that's just for starters. With these policies in place, the rising generation still has a chance at the starry future that's been predicted for it. Without them, well, just imagine the way things are now--and then extrapolate.

Two recent events in New York City illustrate the way the world is trending for two very different groups of young people--the young and bailed-out versus the young and bailed-on. The first took place amid the brick-and-ivy greenery of Columbia University, in the world of the bailed-out. It was mid-September, and several hundred college students had packed into the school's Faculty House for an intimate evening with a team of Goldman Sachs recruiters. A year earlier, these recruiters probably seemed like a dying species, a herd of expensively dressed mastodons taking their valedictory spin, while the sober-suited students must have looked almost pitiable. But on this evening, the recruiters looked very much alive--downright brash--as they wooed the standing-room-only crowd of eager if anxious-looking students. Clutching brochures that urged them to "make the most of your talent," these students listened in unblinking awe as the recruiters spoke of their bank's "competitive advantage," its "global impact," the golden "opportunity" that awaited all Goldman employees, old and young.

And in case the students missed the point, there was a promotional video, starring a comely squad of young analysts (all programmed, it seemed, to repeat the word "unique!"), that ended with the cultish mantra, "I believe, I believe, I believe in Goldman Sachs." It was as if it were 2006, not 2009, as if the good old days of overpaid young analysts with Town Cars and expense accounts were back again--which, thanks to the government, they essentially are.

"If you do well and you're ambitious, you really can do well," a handsome young trader of mortgage-backed securities promised a throng of students who'd gathered around him for advice.

Meanwile, several weeks earlier, in a part of town not touched by bank bailouts, a very different scene played itself out in a Covenant House conference room. There, nine homeless New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 20--among them, David Thyme--huddled around a table topped with pizza and soda and shared their failed attempts at finding a job. All of them wanted one, but none had managed to find one despite months of scratching at the closed doors of just about every fast-food, retail and service joint in town. According to Jerome Kilbane, Covenant House New York's executive director, the organization's job training program has placed 40 percent fewer young people over the past year.

"It's kind of discouraging when you go out and you come back empty-handed every day," said Samantha, a serious-faced 19-year-old who dreams of becoming a physical therapist someday but is currently so strapped for cash she can barely afford a MetroCard to look for a job.

"I feel if I had a job I wouldn't be here," added Leonda, who is charismatic, chatty and also 19. "Not to say that this is a horrible place, but I'd be able to stand on my own two feet and live as an adult and be me."

Samantha and Leonda, who are part of a wave of homeless young folks that has swollen the ranks of Covenant House's residents by 25 percent, expressed deep anxiety about their future. But they also knew their worth. When asked what they wanted to tell the people in power, Samantha didn't hesitate.

"I say, We are your future. If we don't make it now, then who's going to take care of you when y'all is in y'all retirement phase?" she asked. "If we don't make it out of this, then basically the whole world don't make it out of this."

Obama for America's Gallup Pol - Nation

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Nadine Padilla, 25, had been doing get-out-the-vote work for the Native American Voters Alliance for two years when she was recruited by the Obama campaign, which was looking for Navajo organizers in New Mexico. She'd been an Obama fan since his 2004 DNC speech, and in August 2008 she took a position as field organizer for McKinley County, a rural area an hour from where she grew up.

"I showed up at headquarters, and the state director said, 'You need to open an office.... This is what you're gonna do. Go do it,'" Padilla recalls. She drove to Gallup, a border town of some 20,000 whites, Native Americans and Latinos. At a coffee shop she fundraised from local Democratic donors to pay the deposit on an office, and opened up shop in a space with big glass windows on Main Street.

For a while, Padilla was lonely in there--locals were skeptical about participating. "Some people would say, 'Why should I even vote? I have my own government,'" she recounts. (The Navajo nation has its own sovereign government.) But gradually, by conducting one-on-one meetings, Padilla developed a team of 130 volunteers. She says that the vast majority were working on a campaign for the first time, and most were under 30. Gallup has a small University of New Mexico campus, which turned out some college-age volunteers, and local high school students also signed up.

Padilla dropped phone sheets off in remote rural areas for less mobile volunteers. She also created a supervised kids' area at the office so parents could phone-bank. The office became like a community center, with a front area where people drank coffee, listened to music and chatted. The challenge was to move them to the back, where the phone-banking and data entry happened. But by the end of the campaign, Padilla's team was working nonstop--some volunteers were even sleeping in the office.

On election day the hard work paid off. "The volunteers did it themselves. They had come such a long way," she says. "On the first day, they were like, 'What do you want me to do? Talk to somebody about voting?' to being able to run the entire day themselves. I just brought them coffee."

On November 4 McKinley County had the highest increase in voter turnout in the state--36 percent--and Obama won it handily. Some of the volunteers are now preparing to campaign for a state representative candidate. For Padilla, that's the most gratifying part of her experience. "On the campaign we always said, 'Work yourself out of a job,'" she says. "Pass on these skills so that when you leave they'll have those tools for whatever they want."

Padilla has stayed in close touch with the volunteers, and she's helping them strategize for the state campaign. After the election, though she was tempted by DC, Padilla decided to stay close to home. "I always knew I was needed on the reserve," she says. Today she uses some of the skills she developed on the campaign in her role as a community organizer against uranium mining in northwestern New Mexico, where mining has created radioactive waste that continues to cause health problems like cancer. Padilla is the sole paid organizer for Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, a coalition of volunteer-run groups, some of which are fighting new mining-company proposals while others work against soil contamination. It's a daunting issue that has affected her community for decades, which is why she took the gig. "I was inspired to take this job after the Obama campaign, because I had this feeling that anything was possible," she says.

About Elizabeth Méndez Berry

Elizabeth Méndez Berry, an award-winning journalist, has written about culture and politics for publications including the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Vibe.

US holds military aid due to human rights issues - Manila Times

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By Frank Lloyd Tiongson, Reporter

The United States government reportedly withheld $2-million worth of military aid to the Philippines in 2009 due to concerns raised by human rights groups and churches in the US on the human rights record of the government. Rep. Neri Colmenares of Bayan Muna said the conditional aid was not released because of the failure of the administration of President Gloria Arroyo to account for the spate of human rights violations in the country.

Colmenares said officials from the US Department of State confirmed in a meeting with him in Washington, D.C. on October 27 that the conditioned amount has in fact been withheld.

However, the State Department officials, whose responsibility includes US policy toward the Philippines, admitted they were unable to report to the US Congress that the Philippine government had met the human rights conditions required for the release of the military aid. As such, the final $2 million in military assistance appropriated by the US Congress for the Philippine Government was not released.

The conditions include the (1) implementation of the recommendations of Professor Philip Alston, (2) the investigation and prosecution of military officials credibly alleged to be responsible for human rights violations, and (3) that violence and intimidation of legal organizations should not form part of the (Philippine military’s) policy.

Consequently, the US House of Representatives approved HR 3081 withholding the same military aid for the Philippines in 2010 on the basis of the same three conditions. The US Senate has approved the House spending bill, which shall form part of the 2010 Budget.

Colmenares said members of the US Congress took the cue from the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston that “the Philippine government must address the long-standing impunity for the killings, enforced disappearances, and other forms of human rights violations, and that extra-judicial executions and other human rights abuses do not form part of the policy of the military and the government.”

In 2008, following a hearing in the United States Senate on the human rights situation in the Philippines convened by Sen. Barabara Boxer (D), the US Congress voted to release the full amount of 2009 military aid to on the condition that the Philippine government was meeting the cited human rights conditions.

“Instead of heeding the conditions,” said Colmenares, “the Philippine government merely launched high-level lobbying efforts of the US Congress, led by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, President Arroyo’s Special Envoy Patricia Ann Paez and the Philippine Legislative Affairs Officer Ariel Penaranda. The failure of President Arroyo to investigate and prosecute Gen. Jovito Palparan defeated all their lobbying efforts,” said Colmenares.

The Filipino-American community and the US-based National Alliance on Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), who also met with US congressional officials, have similarly expressed outrage over the spending of their taxes to arm a repressive government.

Besides the UN report, Col-menares said that members of the US Congress are aware of the Supreme Court decision in. Sec. Gilbert Teodoro vs Manalo and the Melo Commission report implicating Gen. Palparan and other military officials in various human rights violations.

Colmenares also raised concerns with US State Department officials about progress on the US-Philippines Defense Reform Program, a large US funding for the modernization and reform of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, citing the on-going impunity for human rights abuses. He called for the end to the funding considering the human rights record of the Armed Forces and its cover up of the perpetrators of human rights abuses.

The Philippines Defense Reform Program began in 2003 in cooperation with the US military and is funded, in part, by the US Congress. The State Department committed to inquire about the said funding from the Pentagon. The Pentagon has been criticized in the US for implementing aid projects, a purely civilian function.

Colmenares was invited to the US to give a talk at the National Convention of the National Lawyers Guild.

He also met with representatives from the office of influential Democrats Sen. Barbara Boxer from California, Congresswoman Nita Lowey, head of the House Appropriation Sub-committee on Foreign Operations, Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and other offices of the US House of Representatives and Senate to express concern over the $30-million military aid to the Philippines.

He also raised the same concerns to Sen. Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the US Senate, through his representative during a meeting in his office in the US Capitol.

MIB Should Be At Heart Of All Educational Plans- BruDirect

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Bandar Seri Begawan - His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam lauded the country's outstanding educational achievements internationally, but reminded that the country's national philosophy, MIB, should not be overlooked in every educational plan and implementation.

In delivering his titah at the 19th Teach is Day celebration, which was observed yesterday, at the International Convention Centre in Berakas, His Majesty, touching on the educational quality on the whole, said, "I have witnessed our nation achieving a very good ranking internationally, for instance, the success of our nation in implementing the responsibility towards Education For All (EFA).

"In the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2009 issued by UNESCO, it indicates that Brunei Darussalam stands in the group of High EFA Development Index and in pole position among the Asean countries and 36th out of 129 countries worldwide.

"Our success in implementing EFA ascertains our population to become an educational society and brings Brunei into a group of countries with very high- human development along with developed nations such as Japan and the United States," said the ruler.

The fact is highlighted in the Human Development Report 2009 provided by UNDP. The country is in 30th position among 182 countries worldwide.

"The success cannot be solely attributed to any one entity but due to dedicated efforts from all parties. Without doubt, part of the efforts is teachers," the Sultan said.

But the monarch reminded that amidst our efforts to go after development, whatever educational plan and implementation that we carry out should not overlook our strength, which is our national philosophy Malay Islam Monarchy (MIB).

"Elements outlined in such philosophy should be upheld as our axis to prepare our generation to be knowledgeable, faithful and pious," the ruler added.

"Besides the right educational system, teachers' role is also crucial, which if neglected, would make it difficult to achieve the country's targets in an optimum way. In this regard, the effort towards producing quality teachers is appropriate."

Speaking on the theme for this year that reads "Quality Teachers, the Basis for Excellence in Education", His Majesty said quality teachers are needed to educate and enrich students with knowledge and expertise through attractive and effective methodology.

Teachers are the agents that produce innovative, outstanding, bright ideas and capable students. Such type of teachers is what we want to bring about changes to achieve the country's 2035 vision and to face the ever-changing world.

"Today's teachers are digital immigrants while students are digital natives. It means that teachers should work extra hard and be capable to face any developments and should reach the required standard. It is high time for us to have a teacher's standard which could become a benchmark for quality teachers as in other developed countries," the monarch said.

"Today developed and developing countries worldwide are thinking about the best practices for their educational system and majority of the countries have made their respective educational reformation. Praise to Allah, we are also in the same pathway where we have made a paradigm shift in our educational system.

"As a small nation, we should not isolate ourselves from making such changes that drives towards development. We should focus our effort and attention to acquire better products and frame out steps to make it a reality as time waits for no man," said His Majesty.

In concluding his titah, His Majesty congratulated the recipients of the awards and hoped it would motivate and inspire all teachers to enhance education excellence. The ruler also hoped that the teachers would receive blessings from Allah.

Also present at the ceremony were His Royal Highness Prince Hj Al-Muhtadee Billah, the Crown Prince and Senior Minister at the Prime Minister's Office, HRH Prince Hj Sufri Bolkiah, HRH Prince Hj Jefri Bolkiah, HRH Prince 'Abdul `Azim, HRH Prince 'Abdul Malik and HRH Prince 'Abdul Mateen.

The ceremony was highlighted with the presentation of awards to 29 meritorious teachers, retired teachers, excellent teachers in their respective subjects and fields as well as recipients of special appreciation.-- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin

Mexican Pot Gangs Infiltrate Indian Reservations in U.S. - WSJ.com

By JOEL MILLMAN

Washington State Patrol

Washington State Police got to this marijuana harvest before the Mexican gangs did.

WARM SPRINGS, Ore. -- Police Chief Carmen Smith says he knows three things about suspected drug trafficker Artemio Corona: He's from Mexico, prefers a Glock .40-caliber handgun, and is quite possibly growing marijuana on the Indian reservation that Mr. Smith patrols.

Last year, Mr. Smith's detectives identified Mr. Corona as the alleged mastermind behind several large marijuana plantations on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. These "grows," as police call them, had a harvest of 12,000 adult plants, with an estimated street value of $10 million. Five suspects were arrested and pleaded guilty to federal trafficking charges. But their alleged boss, Mr. Corona, who has not been indicted, remains a "person of interest" to federal authorities and hasn't been found.

On the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, tribal authorities hunt for illegal marijuana farms hidden deep in the forest. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.

Cultivating marijuana in Indian country represents a new twist in the decades-old illicit drug trade between Mexico and the U.S., the world's largest drug-consuming market. For decades, Mexican drug gangs grew marijuana in Mexico, smuggled it across the border, and sold it in the U.S. But in the past few years, they have done what any burgeoning business would do: move closer to their customers.

Illicit pot farms, the vast majority run by gangs with ties to Mexico, are growing fast across the country. The U.S. Forest Service has discovered pot farms in 61 national forests across 16 states this year, up from 49 forests in 10 states last year. New territories include public land in Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Alabama and Virginia.

The area where Mexican gangs seem to be expanding the fastest is on Indian reservations. In Washington state, tribal police seized more than 233,000 pot plants on Indian land last year, almost 10 times the 2006 figure. Pot seized on Washington's reservations accounted for about half of all pot seized on both private and public land last year. Police are finding pot farms on reservations stretching from California to South Dakota.

"These criminal organizations are growing in Indian country at an alarming rate," says Chief Smith. "The [growers] on our reservation were sent directly from Mexico."

At Chief Smith's reservation, police found trash piles that included crushed Modelo-brand beer cans and tortilla packages. They also recovered cellphones with a flurry of calls to and from Michoacán, Mexico -- an important drug-producing state. One grow in Washington state's Yakama Reservation featured a makeshift shrine to Mexico's unofficial patron saint to smugglers, Jesús Malverde, complete with votive candles and a photograph of the mythical figure.

Part of the trend is due to unforeseen consequences of stepped-up security on the U.S. border to slow the tide of illegal immigration from Mexico. Tighter borders make it harder to smuggle pot north, creating the need to produce the cash crop closer to market.

U.S. officials say the quality, and thus price, of U.S. grown weed is much higher than that grown in Mexico. The Mexican variety, typically full of stems and leaves, with a lower content of THC, the active narcotic in marijuana, brings in about $500 to $700 a pound, estimates Washington State Patrol Lt. Richard Wiley, who monitors marijuana grows on the state's public lands. By contrast, a pound of Washington-grown marijuana can command $2,500 locally or up to $6,000 on the East Coast.

Arrests for a marijuana 'grow' valued at $10 million, from top to bottom: Héctor Castillo, Oscar Castillo-Zapién, Evan Michael Nelson and Alejandro Zapién

Warm Springs Tribal Police Department

Warm Springs Police Department

Warm Springs Police Department

Warm Springs Police Department

Marijuana is a lucrative business for Mexican cartels, generating at least $9 billion a year in estimated revenues, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. Mexican gangs are relying even more on income from pot, U.S. drug authorities say, as they burn through cash fighting each other and the Mexican government, which has launched a crackdown. The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S. officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant marijuana and then several "tenders" to water them for three to four months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch about $120 million on the open market. With such impressive profit margins, a cartel can afford to have dozens of grows spotted and eradicated for every one that it harvests successfully.

The tighter U.S.-Mexican border is also prompting an unwillingness by illegal farm workers to cross back and forth. These migrants have decided to stay put in El Norte rather than return to Mexico after harvest -- creating a year-round labor force in rural areas. In a down economy, those workers face long stretches of unemployment -- leaving them easily swayed by offers to make quick cash growing marijuana.

That seems to be happening in Indian country. Chief Smith, who is a Wichita tribal member from Oklahoma but came here for the job, says the cartel growing pot on his reservation was paying tenders $2,000 a month each to water and watch their plots.

Indian reservations are full of transients, either people from other tribes whose members have married into local families, or undocumented farmworkers from Mexico. "Around here it's not easy to tell who's a tribal member and who's Hispanic," says Police Chief Keith Hutchenson of Idaho's Coeur d'Alene Tribe. That makes it easier for Mexican drug traffickers to blend in, he adds.

A decade ago, police in Washington state say most of the state's pot was grown by hobbyists indoors, using high-powered lamps. But that has changed in recent years to larger, outdoor grows that are more "corporate," run by sophisticated Mexican gangs.

At first, the Mexican growers began using remote public parkland in California, and have since expanded toward neighboring Oregon and Washington. Both states have two things gangs need: lots of unguarded forest land and lots of cheap Mexican labor.

Mexico-based cartels exploit several conditions unique to reservations, starting with chronically understaffed tribal police departments. Overlapping jurisdictions between tribal courts and outside agencies -- from the local sheriff to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration -- confuse the issue of who should take the lead in prosecuting crimes.

Federal authorities coordinate with tribal authorities on issues related to investigations, search warrants and other criminal proceedings, says Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Bickers of Portland, who prosecuted the men growing pot on the Warm Springs Reservation.

Another attraction is the sheer size of the jurisdictions. Colville Reservation is 2,200 square miles and patrolled by just 19 tribal police officers. The ancestral homes of tribes such as Oregon's Umatilla, Idaho's Nez Perce and Washington's Yakama have thousands of acres of often uninhabited land, and also abut huge tracts of public land.

The cartels often mix the marijuana plants in with other crops, such as corn, or plant them deep inside forests amid pine and oak trees to make them difficult to detect from air patrols.

The reservations aren't only home to marijuana farms but are becoming sites for gun trafficking. At the Yakama homeland, a 1.4-million-acre reservation near Toppenish, Wash., a Mexican gang allegedly has planted hundreds of acres of marijuana and run guns to Mexico. U.S. investigators say the guns have ended up in the hands of Mexico's most feared paramilitary drug group, Los Zetas.

There is enough gun trafficking that Washington state now ranks fourth as a supplier of weapons to Mexican drug gangs after Texas, California and Arizona, according to police. "A weapon bought here for $1,000 can be sold for $3,000 or even $6,000" south of the border, says Michael Akins, lead investigator for a multiagency drug task force, called Operation Green Jam. "That might buy cocaine for $3,000 a pound, which then could be sold in Washington for $20,000 a pound."

State police believe gunmen from Los Zetas, a group initially formed by deserters from Mexico's army and famed for its brutality, are already in Washington to provide security during harvests. In 2008 police recovered a small arsenal of powerful weapons near the Yakama grows.

"AR-15s and Berettas, mostly. At least a dozen," says Lt. Wiley, of the Washington State Patrol.

There is enough money involved in growing to tempt some legal residents. In September, law-enforcement officials in Benton County, Wash., busted three men working at a private ranch owned by Jose Luis Cardenas, a legal immigrant from Mexico. He allegedly earned $3,000 from a drug gang to rent his barn for eight days, the Benton County officials said. Stalks of fresh marijuana were dried and picked by workers arranged in a circle, like an old-time shucking bee, according to state police. Mr. Cardenas, who was charged with harboring and abetting illegal production of a controlled substance, is in custody, and didn't respond to requests for comment.

The operations can be elaborate. One site at the Yakama reservation sat more than a dozen miles from the nearest paved road. Tapping water from an abandoned livestock trough, growers had workers string more than 1,000 yards of plastic irrigation pipe down to a cistern that fed a primitive treetop sprinkler system.

Tribal police uncovered another irrigation network in July at the Colville Reservation, just south of the Canadian border. After damming a small spring, guerrilla cultivators strung drip irrigation pipe hundreds of yards to marijuana fields. At one spot, the gang dug a rustic cistern from the crater of a fallen ponderosa pine. Nearby, they ran a gasoline-powered generator hitched to a pump that took spring water to a second cistern almost a mile away. The jury-rigged spillway nourished a total of 24,000 plants along the mountain slope.

That grow at Colville was found deep in the backwoods, where the tribe harvests timber for two reservation lumber mills. Colville Police Chief Matt Haney suspects immigrant workers hired to replant trees end up doing reconnaissance work for drug organizations.

"We've got over a million acres and forest fires are common," the chief explains. "Mexican laborers are hired by the U.S. Forest Service to do replanting, and work for the tribe's timber operations, too. They notice where there are streams, where there aren't streams. What can be reached by road, what can't. They share that information with some very sophisticated growers."

Warms Springs Reservation police say the drug gangs planting marijuana on the reservation since 2007 may have had Mexican workers spotting sites for them. Workers are often hired by tribal enterprises, including a small company that collects pine cones and fronds to fashion into Christmas tree ornaments.

John Webb, a tribal police detective, says collecting pine cones gives outsiders an excuse to be on the reservation -- something normally not allowed -- and form friendships.

Mr. Webb doesn't know whether pine-cone collecting prompted Oscar Castillo Zapién to come to Warm Springs. But in September 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested for assault after allegedly firing his Glock semiautomatic pistol into a van departing from his home, striking one passenger in the neck. Eventually police linked him to the outdoor marijuana grows, together with at least three cousins, Héctor Castillo, Alejandro Zapién and Alfredo Olivera.

The men told authorities, as part of a plea bargain, that they reported to Artemio Corona, who was also a relative. In court papers, some of the suspects claimed to have been terrorized by Mr. Corona, who they say threatened them with his own Glock as he supervised work in the secret marijuana gardens.

At first, the Mexican suspects thought operating on tribal land shielded them from prosecution, says Mr. Webb. While the tribal court declined to prosecute, federal authorities were eager to take the case. To avoid the cost of trial, the U.S. attorney in Portland allowed the five defendants to plead guilty to a relatively minor charge of "conspiracy to manufacture marijuana," and receive sentences of up to 70 months in prison. Four are now serving time in U.S. federal prisons. One received probation.

Tribal police in Washington and Oregon say they expect Mexican gangs to keep reappearing every year during the summer harvest season. Says Chief Smith: "If we ever catch them, we'll run them off the reservation."

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com

In Northern Myanmar, a Rebel Stronghold on Alert - NYTimes.com

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By THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

MONG HPEN, Myanmar — Conquering armies of centuries past avoided this remote, mountainous area along the present-day border with China, a place once described by a British colonial official as “an unpenetrated enclave of savage hills.”

Inhabited by the Wa, an ethnic group once notorious for headhunting, neither the British colonial overlords nor the Burmese kings who preceded them saw much point in controlling the area.

But to Myanmar’s military government this rebel region is an irritating piece of unfinished business and an impediment to the long-cherished goal of national unity. Myanmar’s generals are demanding that the Wa disband their substantial army here and fully subjugate themselves to the central government, a call that has so far gone unheeded. Both sides are bracing for potential conflict.

The tensions here might be glossed over by outsiders as yet another arcane dispute in strife-ridden Myanmar between the government and a mistrustful minority, except that the Wa have a well-equipped army of at least 20,000 full-time soldiers — about twice the size of Ireland’s armed forces — and are considered by the United States government as hosts to one of the world’s largest illicit drug operations.

Conflict in the Wa-controlled areas, if it is not averted, could cause a ramping up of drug trafficking across Asia and beyond as the Wa government and other militias seek cash to buy weapons.

Northern Myanmar is very much a world apart, both lawless and heavily militarized, a medieval-style patchwork of obscure ethnic armies, borderland casinos, brothels and the walled compounds of drug lords.

Many rounds of negotiations between Myanmar’s generals and the ethnic groups arrayed like an arc across the northern reaches of the country have yielded nothing but delay for what many analysts believe is a likely showdown. Wa soldiers have been put on standby.

“We were told to be ready and to keep a careful watch,” said Ai Yee, a soldier from the Wa ethnic group who is based in Pangshang, the headquarters of the United Wa State Army. “We are on the lookout for anyone coming in — 24 hours a day.”

Mr. Ai spoke cautiously and reluctantly. Few outsiders visit the areas under Wa control, except Chinese businessmen, drug traffickers and the occasional official from the United Nations.

The Wa are the most heavily armed of about a dozen groups opposing calls by Myanmar’s military government to become border guards in time for the introduction of a new constitution next year. The generals who lead this country, formerly known as Burma, consider the constitution and the elections that will accompany it a milestone that will bring the national consolidation that has long eluded them.

Myanmar’s top two commanders, Senior Gen. Than Shwe and Vice Senior Gen.Maung Aye, now in their 70s, appear eager to finally bring the ethnic groups to heel.

But the ferocity of the Wa, their apparent lack of fear and their talent for silent, nighttime attacks remain embedded in the memories of the generals, who fought and lost many bloody battles against them in the decades after independence from Britain in 1948.

The potential scale of conflict is daunting. The Wa have a significant arsenal, including about 300 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, antitank weapons and ample assault rifles and ammunition, said Col. Peeranate Katetem of the Thai Army, who has spent a decade tracking the Wa.

Including reserve soldiers, Colonel Peeranate estimates the total troop strength of the Wa, who control two noncontiguous territories, at around 50,000 soldiers.

The Wa’s fearsome reputation comes partly from their harvest rituals involving the severed heads of rival tribe members, a practice that ceased sometime after World War II. Early foreign visitors, many of them missionaries, found “skull groves” in the jungles outside villages.

Today the mystique of the Wa persists. Young children in Myanmar are told to come home before dark lest they be grabbed by the Wa.

These are outdated images. Here in Mong Hpen, a stronghold of the United Wa State Army, Wa children play games at a downtown Internet cafe close to the market, which is dominated by Chinese merchants. There are reminders in Mong Hpen of what the Wa stand to lose if they capitulate to the demands of Myanmar’s rulers: Like many other ethnic groups, the Wa have their own schools, hospitals, electricity grid and phone services. The Internet here is fast and free of censorship by the Myanmar government.

The handful of foreign analysts who have studied the Wa, some of whom cannot be identified because of the sensitivity of their work with foreign militaries or law enforcement agencies, say the Wa are a disciplined and militaristic society. Those who do not fall into line are severely dealt with. Municipal work in Mong Hpen is partly carried out by chain gangs: prisoners in clanking leg irons hack away at the embankment of the main road near the local jail.

Older soldiers in Myanmar are inured to warfare. Fighting between the central government and Chinese-backed Communist forces, which included Wa soldiers, flared for decades until a series of cease-fire agreements beginning in 1989. All males in Wa territory are required to enter the army, and many, if not most, never leave, often pursuing dual careers as soldiers and farmers. Almost all households in the Wa and a neighboring allied fief known as Mong La include at least one man in uniform.

“We are not afraid to fight,” said Chai Saam, a soldier from the Shan ethnic group who has been in the Mong La army for 35 years and who fought frequently against the central government in the first half of his military career. “But we are afraid the air force will burn our villages.”

He added: “We are afraid they will steal treasure from our villages. We are afraid the Burmese soldiers will rape women.”

Even with their significant forces the Wa and other ethnic groups would be vastly outnumbered by the Myanmar Army, which has about 450,000 soldiers and advanced weaponry. The Wa have built a series of underground bunkers in Pangshang, according to Bertil Lintner, an expert on ethnic groups in Myanmar who is based in Thailand. But hiding might simply postpone defeat.

If they are attacked, the crucial question for all the ethnic groups in northern Myanmar is what stance China would take.

“I don’t think the Wa can sustain a prolonged campaign unless they get supplies from China — at the very least food and fuel,” Mr. Lintner said.

China has divided loyalties in Myanmar. In recent years it has supported Myanmar’s central government as a geostrategic ally, coveting the country’s reserves of oil and gas and access to the Indian Ocean. But China also has long-standing ties with all the armed ethnic groups along the border, and many ethnic Chinese live, work and have businesses inside Myanmar.

Almost all the ethnic groups — the Akha, Lahu, Kachin, Shan and Wa among them — straddle the border between Myanmar and China, and many travel across as if there were no border.

Beijing has reportedly sought assurances from Thein Sein, the Myanmar prime minister, that peace will prevail along the border. After a recent meeting of Asian leaders in Thailand, China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, quoted Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China as saying that Myanmar “could properly handle problems and safeguard peace and stability in the China-Myanmar border region.”

China has been especially concerned about the situation since attacks in August by the Myanmar military against the Kokang, a small ethnic Chinese group. That campaign, combined with another attack by government proxies against Karen rebels in June, seems to suggest that the Myanmar junta’s demands that ethnic groups yield to its control are not idle threats. The Kokang attack caused panic among wealthy ethnic Chinese families, and many fled the Wa region, according to the Shan Herald Agency for News, an online outlet devoted to news from northern Myanmar.

The northern reaches of Myanmar are playgrounds of vice for Chinese tourists and businessmen who stream across the border. The territory of Mong La is run by Lin Mingxian, a former Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution who today has a private army of about 3,000 men, separate from but allied with the Wa forces.

During daylight hours the town appears sleepy. But when night falls hundreds of prostitutes line up in orderly queues waiting for patrons who arrive in taxis. More entrepreneurial prostitutes hand out calling cards at outdoor restaurants. Hotels charge by the hour. Casinos in the nearby town of Mong Ma lure Chinese gamblers. At a morning market hawkers sell exotic animals from inland jungles — both live and skinned.

The steep hills in northern Myanmar are lined with rubber plantations that feed Chinese factories’ demand for latex. There is extreme poverty — thatch huts and farmers tending fields with buffalo — but also much unexplained wealth: modern, walled compounds and the frequent passage of Mitsubishi Pajeros and Toyota Prado Land Cruisers, vehicles that cost well upward of $100,000 in southern Myanmar because of onerous import duties. (Residents of rebel-held areas in northern Myanmar avoid the taxes because cars are imported through Laos or China and bear license plates issued either by the Wa or Mong La governments.)

United States and Thai counternarcotic officials believe that most of the Wa wealth comes from selling methamphetamine and heroin, both of which have been pouring across the border with Thailand in recent months in unusually large quantities as the Wa and other groups seek cash to buy weapons. The kingpin of the Wa drug operations is Wei Hsueh-kang, according to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. He is one of 19 Wa leaders sought by the American authorities. The United States is offering $2 million to anyone who helps arrest Mr. Wei, who was born in China but has held leadership positions in the Wa government over the past decade.

Given their isolation it seems unlikely that the Wa leadership will be arrested anytime soon. But American counternarcotics officials argue that the indictments have limited the leaders’ ability to travel and run businesses outside of their territory.

“We have shrunk their cage — immobilized them to some degree,” said Pamela Brown, an agent for the D.E.A. based in northern Thailand. “If at some point they travel into a country with whom the United States has an extradition treaty we are poised to extradite them.”

The situation in northern Myanmar presents a dilemma for the United States, which has made overtures toward Myanmar’s generals in recent months after having only very limited contact for the past two decades. The United States would like to see a crackdown on drug lords and their protectors. But military campaigns by the Myanmar government have frequently been accompanied by widespread atrocities, including the burning of villages, the use of child soldiers and rapes.

“We’re opposed to drug trafficking, but certainly we don’t want the military to go in and attack people and create human rights violations as they have in the past,” Scot Marciel, the State Department official charged with policy for Southeast Asia, said in Bangkok Thursday.

“It’s very complicated.”

To the outside world, especially countries in Asia struggling to cope with heroin and methamphetamine addictions, a critical question is how a conflict would affect the supply of illicit drugs.

Mr. Lintner is pessimistic. Even if Myanmar’s military prevails against the ethnic groups, drug trafficking will not be eradicated, he said. Much of the opium harvested today in Myanmar is grown in areas currently controlled, officially at least, by the central government, he said.

“Local militias would probably persist — and with them the drug trade,” he said. “These areas would remain lawless.”

Palestinian President Says He Won’t Seek Re-election - NYTimes.com

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By ETHAN BRONNER and MARK LANDLER

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, warned Thursday that he would not seek re-election in the January elections he called, the latest sign that the Obama administration’s drive to broker Middle East peace talks has fallen into disarray.

There is no immediate prospect of Mr. Abbas’ stepping aside, but his announcement, coming immediately after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinians, illustrated the rising tensions over the Obama administration’s failure to produce an Israeli settlement freeze or any concessions from Arab leaders.

Mrs. Clinton’s visit to the region, which she characterized as a success, sowed anger and confusion among Palestinians and other Arabs after she praised as “unprecedented” Israel’s compromise offer to slow down, but not stop, construction of settlements.

In a televised speech from his headquarters in Ramallah, Mr. Abbas, who replaced Yasir Arafat five years ago as president of the Palestinian Authority, said, “I have told my brethren in the P.L.O. that I have no desire to run in the forthcoming election.” He had spoken with the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization earlier in the day.

Mr. Abbas, considered a moderate, pro-Western leader, had called elections for January, but few expect them to take place then, if at all, because they require reconciliation between Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas, which rules in Gaza. Hamas said it would prohibit the voting from taking place in Gaza without reconciliation. Until such an election, Mr. Abbas remains in office.

It was nonetheless clear that Israeli-Palestinian talks would not resume any time soon despite intensive American diplomacy. A top aide to Mr. Abbas said a large part of the “despondency and frustration” felt by Mr. Abbas and the entire Palestinian leadership was due to President Obama’s unrealized promises to the region. He said he feared that without a stop to settlements, Islamist rivals in Hamas could triumph and violence could break out.

“There was high expectation when he arrived on the scene,” the aide, Nabil Shaath, who heads the Fatah party’s foreign affairs department, said of Mr. Obama at a briefing. “He said he would work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it would play a major role in improving the American and Western relationship with the Muslim world. Now there is a total retreat, which has destroyed trust instead of building trust.”

Mr. Shaath added that if the United States vetoed sending a United Nations report critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Security Council, “It really is like telling the Palestinians to go back to violence.”

The United Nations General Assembly was debating that report on Thursday, and the administration, backed by a House resolution, does not want it sent to the Security Council. The result of a committee headed by the South African jurist Sir Richard Goldstone, the report accuses both Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes in their war last January, which killed some 1,200 people, nearly all of them Palestinians.

The less Mr. Abbas can show he has obtained from Israel and the United States, the likelier it is that Palestinian voters will turn to Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel and enjoys extensive support from Iran.

In his comments, Mr. Abbas said, “This is not to bargain or maneuver.” But some of his aides saw his announcement as a high-stakes gamble to persuade Mr. Obama to announce a full peace plan aimed at ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and creating a Palestinian state.

For all the frustration that the Palestinians and others have over the current Israeli government’s policies — continuing settlement building on land the Palestinians want for their state, refusal to discuss the status of Jerusalem or final borders, or the return of Palestinian refugees to their original homes — Israel is facing a deeply divided Palestinian leadership incapable of agreeing to any deal just now.

The Israelis say that the way forward is threefold and that the tracks should occur simultaneously: Palestinian institution building, economic development in the West Bank and political dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians say they will not start negotiations anew but want to renew them from where they left off with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. Mr. Olmert apparently offered more than 90 percent of the West Bank and some international or shared rule over Jerusalem. The current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made it clear that Israel would wish to hold on to much more land for security purposes and that Jerusalem is off the table.

“I think he’s reached the conclusion that he’s reached a dead end,” said Qaddoura Fares, another Fatah leader, on Israel Radio, speaking of Mr. Abbas.

Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator, said Wednesday at a news conference that perhaps Palestinians should abandon the two-state approach and work toward one shared state with the Jews, something a vast majority of Israelis oppose.

He said Mr. Abbas should maybe “tell his people the truth, that with the continuation of settlement activities the two-state solution is no longer an option.”

In his 30-minute speech on Thursday, Mr. Abbas, who has not groomed a successor or young guard, addressed Israelis directly, saying, “Peace is more important than any political achievement or any government party or coalition if the results push the region toward disaster or the unknown.”

He added, “We were surprised by the United States’ closing its eyes to the Israeli position.” He said achieving a peaceful, two-state solution remained possible but that Israel had to change its policies.

Mr. Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rdeineh, said after the speech that the “American administration must force Israel to respect international legitimacy.”

Ethan Bronner reported from Ramallah, and Mark Landler from Washington.

Five British soldiers fatally shot by Afghan policeman - washingtonpost.com

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By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 5, 2009

KABUL -- Five British soldiers were shot and killed Tuesday by an Afghan policeman while they were working together in southern Afghanistan, British officials said.

The shooting occurred in the Nad e-Ali district of Helmand province, one of the most violent areas of the country. The British soldiers were working with Afghan National Police at a checkpoint when one policeman opened fire, military officials said.

The gunfire wounded six other British soldiers and two Afghan policemen. Officials said the shooter fled the scene, but it was unclear whether he was arrested later.

Deaths among British troops, the second-largest contingent in Afghanistan after the U.S. military, have risen in recent months, mirroring the growing rate of American fatalities. At least 92 British soldiers have died this year, the deadliest of the war. Tuesday's attack follows a shooting a month ago in which an Afghan police officer killed two U.S. soldiers while they were patrolling together.

The ongoing violence comes amid the conclusion of Afghanistan's troubled presidential election. Former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, who withdrew this week from a runoff vote, said Wednesday that he had no interest in joining President Hamid Karzai's second-term cabinet, which will be chosen in coming weeks.

Abdullah called the decision by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission to award Karzai a victory without holding the runoff "illegal" but made clear he would not challenge the decision. He said he will continue his efforts to bring "change and hope" from outside the administration.

"In this sort of environment, I would rather act like a pressure group in order to bring changes and reform in the system," he said.

The deaths of the British soldiers have raised fears about the extent of insurgent infiltration in the Afghan security forces, especially as the U.S. and Afghan governments rush to increase the size of both the Afghan army and police force.

Interior Minister Hanif Atmar said in a statement that Tuesday's shooting appeared "to be an isolated incident" and would be investigated by both Afghan and international officials. "We are deeply saddened for the loss of our ISAF partners and we extend our prayers to their families and those injured in this senseless attack," Atmar said, using the abbreviation for the International Security Assistance Force.

Afghanistan's defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, said in an interview this week that the army has been "very watchful because we do have the reports that [insurgents] are really trying to infiltrate."

He said the army is trying to implement a biometric system that would collect such information as fingerprints and retinal scans to build a database of all recruits. The U.S. military set up similar systems for Iraqi security forces.

Many consider the Afghan police more susceptible to insurgent infiltration than the army. Wardak said there have been "very few cases" in which insurgents have been caught within the army.

"As far as the army's concerned, we have been relatively successful. It has not been a major problem up to now," he said.

Israeli navy says it seized ship carrying arms bound for Hezbollah - washingtonpost.com

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By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 5, 2009

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli navy said Wednesday that commandos had seized a container ship carrying a huge cache of weapons that originated in Iran and was ultimately destined for the militia of the Islamist Hezbollah movement.

As part of its routine inspection of ships in the Mediterranean Sea, the Israeli navy intercepted the vessel Tuesday night near Cyprus, roughly 100 miles off the Israeli coast. There was no resistance from the ship's crew, and once Israeli special forces boarded, they found an estimated 600 tons of rockets, guns and other munitions, said Rear Adm. Rani Ben-Yehuda, deputy head of the Israeli navy.

Flying under an Antiguan flag, the ship, called the Francop, was carrying cargo loaded in Damietta, Egypt, and bound for Latakia in Syria, Israeli defense officials said. Some of the ship's 500 containers were stamped with the insignia of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, and 36 of them were found to contain arms. Other documents found on board identified the cargo as originating in Iran, Ben-Yehuda said.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, speaking from Tehran, denied that Iranian arms were bound for Syria and said "pirates" had disrupted legitimate trade between Syria and Iran, news services reported.

The incident comes as Israeli political officials defend their country in the U.N. General Assembly against allegations that Israeli forces committed war crimes during last winter's three-week war with the Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.

Israel contends that it took military action only after years in which the Iranian-backed group fired rockets at civilian targets in Israel. The country regards Hamas and Hezbollah as imminent threats -- a point highlighted when Israeli intelligence officials told the country's parliament this week that Hamas had recently test-fired an Iranian-supplied rocket able to reach Tel Aviv. Hamas denied the allegation.

"This is the state of Israel's answer to all those who call on Israel to examine itself, about how it defended its citizens," former defense minister Shaul Mofaz said on Israel Radio after the seizure of the ship was announced. "We have to act constantly, daily, to defend our citizens. This is further and emphatic proof that attempts by the other side do not stop."

Israeli officials offered no direct evidence that the supplies were bound for Hezbollah. They noted, however, that Iran is forbidden under a U.N. embargo to export arms. Iran is widely considered a major weapons supplier for Hezbollah and Hamas.

Ben-Yehuda said the nature of the supplies, including thousands of shorter-range Katyusha rockets, supported the idea that the arms were not intended for the Syrian military or some other standing force.

"We know what Hezbollah uses and what ranges they need," he said.

Israel fought an intense war with the Lebanese Islamist militia in 2006, and since then, Lebanon has been under a U.N. resolution meant to discourage the presence of armaments not under the control of the nation's military.

After the naval boarding, the ship was redirected to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where officials began to offload it and display what they say is Israel's largest haul of smuggled arms to date.

Ben-Yehuda said neither the ship's 11-person crew nor the Egyptians at the port knew about the contents of the containers, which held civilian goods layered over weapons crates.

Obama administration missteps hamper Mideast efforts - washingtonpost.com

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By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 5, 2009

President Obama came into office insisting that his administration would press hard and fast to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But after nine months, analysts and diplomats say, the administration's efforts have faltered in part because of its own missteps.

As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear during her Middle East trip, which ended Wednesday, U.S. officials are now promoting new tactics -- what they called the "baby steps" of lower-level talks -- to bring the Israeli and Palestinian leaders together for direct talks.

But the dynamics have changed since Obama named a special envoy to the region on his second day in office and tried to make a fresh start. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom the administration once would have been happy to see undermined, has been strengthened -- while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whom the administration had hoped to bolster, has been weakened.

"There was an excess of zeal at first," said Edward S. Walker Jr., who was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the Clinton administration. "It is a noble endeavor to try to hammer out peace. But you have to look at the relationships. You have to read the players. They got out in front of studying the problem and were anxious to show progress."

Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator now at the Century Foundation in Washington, summed up the administration's efforts in recent days as "amateur night at the Apollo Theater." He said the administration did not game out the consequences of its demands on the parties -- and then flinched. "They just dug deeper and deeper their own grave," he said. "All of this talk of negotiations doesn't cut the mustard in the region."

To be sure, Mideast diplomacy is always difficult; it is especially so when the Israeli government leans to the right and the Palestinian government is deeply split between a secular party in the West Bank and an Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip. A solution to end the conflict has eluded U.S. administrations for decades -- and President George W. Bush was heavily criticized for largely ignoring the problem until his final months in office.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former Abbas aide who is advocacy director for the American Task Force on Palestine, said, "The situation is so complicated that no matter what approach the administration would have taken would have led to difficulties." He said that things have improved in the past nine months, including getting a reluctant Israeli government to embrace the idea of talks. Negotiations will begin eventually, he said, because the Obama administration has signaled that it will not waver in pursuit of direct talks.

U.S. officials also insist that much progress has been made behind the scenes and that the administration remains undaunted in the face of current obstacles.

"I am not someone who is in any way affected by difficulty, who is living in a world apart from the real world in which we inhabit, where it takes just an enormous amount of effort to get to where we are headed," Clinton said in Cairo. "The two-state solution is one of the most difficult."

The administration's key error, many analysts say, was to insist that Israel immediately freeze all settlement growth in Palestinian-occupied territories. The United States has never accepted the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, but the Obama administration took an unusually tough stance. It refused to acknowledge an unwritten agreement between Israel and Bush to limit growth in settlements, with Clinton leading the charge to demand a full settlement freeze.

U.S. officials say that in the wake of the war in the Gaza Strip in the winter, they wanted to send a signal of toughness and push both sides to take positive steps to build an atmosphere for talks. By that measure, there has been some progress: Israelis and Palestinians have been deep in conversations trying to set the parameters for negotiations.

But Abbas, emboldened by the U.S. rhetoric, announced that he would not begin negotiations until settlements were frozen. Facing Israeli opposition, the administration appeared to back off the demand for a full settlement freeze, first exempting East Jerusalem and then signaling approval of an Israeli plan to exempt nearly 3,000 housing units on the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Abbas got into political trouble at home when he succumbed to U.S. pressure to delay U.N. consideration of a report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza; he later reversed himself. When Clinton met him Saturday and pressed him to accept the limited Israeli settlement plan as a basis for talks, he refused.

Hours later, Clinton met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and pronounced the Israeli offer "unprecedented" -- sparking Arab outrage, which she spent the next several days trying to dampen. She extended her trip to include a stop in Cairo to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to explain the U.S. position.

"Our policy on settlements has not changed," Clinton insisted Wednesday. The Israeli proposal "is not what we prefer," she said, "because we would like to see everything ended forever. But it is something that shows at least a positive movement."

Elliott Abrams, a former White House aide who helped negotiate the unwritten agreement on settlements in the Bush years, said there is little difference between that agreement and what Clinton claimed as unprecedented. "It really is the same deal that presumably could have been had on January 20," he said.

Instead of demanding an unrealistic freeze, Abrams said, the administration could have made the Bush deal public, noted that Israel had not consistently lived up to it and declared that it would now be enforced. "Instead, we had nine months of nonsense," he said. "Palestinians and Israelis are not sure what the United States stands for."

Administration officials dispute that critique, saying the Israeli offer actually holds the key to a real settlement freeze. If negotiations progress, Israel would come under fierce pressure not to lift the moratorium after it ends in nine to 12 months. So, once the grandfathered units have been completed, officials said, construction would end -- and a real settlement freeze would be in place.

Such nuances are lost now in the sands of Middle East rhetoric. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, mused Wednesday about the end of the dream of a Palestinian state and scoffed at the Obama administration's notion of baby steps to talks. "As to the baby steps, we begun taking them in 1990-1991, and we have been crawling for 19 years," he said. "We need youthful steps to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state."

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Cairo and correspondent Samuel Sockol in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.

Flu outrunning vaccine, experts say - washingtonpost.com

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Shots may not be widely available until December or January

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 5, 2009

Two state and city public health officials briefing Congress on Wednesday said they don't expect to have enough pandemic-flu vaccine to meet the needs of their high-priority population groups until well into December, and possibly not until January.

The officials said that their predictions are a result of maddening vaccine shortages throughout the fall but that they amount to little more than guesses.

Federal health officials at the same briefing refused to endorse the gloomy timetable -- or any other one -- although they acknowledged that the current wave of H1N1 influenza may be mostly over by the time the vaccine is abundant.

"Current projections show that 62 percent of Alabama's vaccine will not be available until after December 1," Donald E. Williamson, the state's health officer, told a House Appropriations subcommittee. Offering flu shots to people outside the five priority recipient groups "may not be possible until late December or January."

The director of the public health department in St. Paul, Minn., said he thinks it will be "sometime between Christmas and mid-January" before there is enough vaccine to fully immunize the high-risk groups -- pregnant women, health workers, parents caring for newborns, people 6 months through 24 years old and chronically ill people ages 25 through 64.

"I don't think we'll have enough before then," said Rob Fulton, adding that what's true for St. Paul is probably true for all of Minnesota.

The federal government has ordered 250 million doses of pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine. It has said that will be more than enough to satisfy demand among the country's 308 million residents. The high-priority groups include 159 million people.

As of this week, 32.3 million doses of pandemic vaccine had been made available to states and cities by the federal government, which is controlling the entire U.S. supply.

Members of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies repeatedly queried the federal officials about timelines for future supplies. While five weeks ago they were still predicting that there would be more than 100 million doses by now, none of the officials would hazard a guess.

"We have been working extremely hard with each manufacturer to make sure all of the stumbling blocks are out of the way," Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, told Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the subcommittee. "Flu is really unpredictable. We're pretty hesitant about projecting ahead more than week to week."

Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also declined to look ahead, saying, "We have been burned, quite frankly, by predictions that have not come to pass." Under later questioning, he did say that "it is quite likely that the current wave of influenza will peak, crest and begin to decline before there are ample supplies" of vaccine.

Pandemic influenza -- defined as a highly contagious strain to which virtually everyone in the world is susceptible -- tends to move through populations in waves, sometimes over several years. For example, the Asian flu of 1957, which bears many similarities to the current pandemic, was responsible for about 60,000 "excess deaths" in the United States. About 40,000 occurred in the summer and fall of 1957, and 20,000 in the late winter and early spring of 1958.

The chief reason there is so little flu vaccine is that the novel H1N1 grows slowly in fertilized chicken eggs, the medium where it is made in industrial quantities.

Normally, vaccine-makers expect to get two to three doses of vaccine out of each egg injected. At the start of production in the summer, the yield was 0.2 to 0.5 doses per egg, said Robin Robinson, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is part of HHS. After tinkering with growth conditions and other variables, it is now 1.3 to 2 doses per egg.

"If we had been getting 2.5 doses per egg [throughout the summer and fall], we wouldn't be having this hearing now," he said.

The vaccine shortage is the consequence of the virus's biology, not human laziness or incompetence, the officials told the lawmakers many times.

"I don't want people to get the impression that it is the drug companies' fault in not getting this delivered," said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Government officials have asked the four makers of injectable vaccine to put most of their current production into multi-dose vials, which can be filled about five times more quickly than single-dose vials or pre-filled syringes and may save a little time.