In Sri Lanka, anger over fate of ethnic Tamils held in camps - washingtonpost.com

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Many languishing in camps months after war's end

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA -- Six months after Sri Lanka's decades-old civil war ended with a final assault, about 200,000 people remain trapped in overcrowded government-run camps that were once safe havens for those fleeing the conflict.

Facing pressure from the Obama administration and the European Union, the Sri Lankan government last month launched a campaign to resettle tens of thousands of the minority Tamil detainees. But interviews in the country's war-ravaged north reveal that many civilians have merely been shuffled from the large camps to smaller transit ones and are being held against their will. Others have been released, only to be taken from their homes days later with no indication of where they have gone.

After the army defeated the Tamil rebels in May, top government officials paraded their success on the streets of Colombo, the capital, and the country's leaders made noble promises about ensuring national harmony. Now analysts say the real test of Sri Lanka's success in building a stable, post-conflict society lies in the fate of these scores of thousands of detainees.

Human rights groups say the government is lying about its resettlement efforts; authorities concede they are using the camps as a tool to uncover any remaining Tamil militants but deny they are deliberately stalling civilians' return home.

"We thought this war was over. But for Tamils, it's like going from the frying pan and into the fire," said Devander Kumar, whose brother was released, only to be taken away by police without explanation, one of 30 men in this seaside city who have disappeared soon after their homecoming. "Do we Tamils have to prove every second of the day that we are not terrorists?"

Tamil leaders worry that if civilians end up languishing in the camps indefinitely, the situation will only breed more resentments and risk spawning another generation of rebels. But the government says it needs more time to de-mine vast stretches of land in the north, as well as to repair infrastructure damaged by war. Authorities also say they continue to root out rebels who have blended into the civilian population.

"History will prove us right," said Basil Rajapaksa, who is leading the resettlement process. Rajapaksa is a U.S. citizen and an adviser to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his brother.

"We need the transit camps to weed out any underground rebels. The Tamil people have had a lot of hardship," he said. "So the last thing we want is to sacrifice their security for the sake of risking even one more sleeper cell or one more attack."

After a fierce military offensive in May, the government declared victory over the rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a well-funded militia that for 26 years fought for a separate homeland in northern Sri Lanka. The United States and other governments have labeled the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organization. The group pioneered the use of suicide bombings and is said to have orchestrated bombings that killed a Sri Lankan president, six cabinet ministers and, in 1991, former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The U.S. State Department has called for an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by both sides during the war's final days. After the fighting stopped, the president commissioned patriotic pop songs extolling the virtues of a prosperous Sri Lanka united under one flag. In the new Sri Lanka, he said, the Sinhalese Buddhist majority would embrace its Tamil compatriots, who are mostly Hindu and make up 15 percent of the nation's 20 million people.

But there is growing frustration among Tamils over the camps, ringed by razor-wire fencing and patrolled by armed guards. There is also anger over the unexplained arrests of military-age men.

On a recent day at a camp set up inside a school here, soldiers held back a group of weeping women who rushed to the gates to greet family members they had not seen in more than a year because they had gotten separated during the fighting.

"The most worrying part of the transit camps is that nobody is allowed to even meet them inside, not even religious leaders or desperate relatives," said V. Kalaichelvan, head of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies in Trincomalee. "It's like a wound on the psyche of the already damaged Tamil community."

Mano Ganesan, a Tamil member of Parliament, has filed a lawsuit against the government to allow him and other Tamil leaders to visit both the transit and the relief camps.

"Tamils feel like inmates in their own country. . . . The irony is that the root causes of this conflict are being ignored yet again. That can only mean more Tigers in the future," Ganesan said.

On a 10-hour trip by car from the capital to Trincomalee, one encounters frequent checkpoints, abandoned villages and fields of weeds where once rice and cashew were grown. The transit camps appear overcrowded, with families spread out under trees.

"In the last few weeks, there has been a sincere effort to release more people from the detention camps," said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect diplomatic efforts. "But we have so far been unable to track where exactly they are going. We are hoping to see evidence soon that they have actually been resettled."

Sri Lankan officials say the government has begun relocating nearly 42,000 people from the camps. The government also says it will dedicate a large amount of development money to the Tamil-dominated north.

But mistrust prevails. In one village, residents said police had taken away several of their neighbors, who they said were innocent. "One of the major problems with the camps is that the government is not telling people when or why they are arresting relatives," said Gordon Weiss, a spokesman for the United Nations in Sri Lanka. "In a country with a long history of disappearances, just snatching people creates an incredible atmosphere of fear. At the same time, the sinister nature of this war was that so many civilians were militarized, which legitimized them as targets by the other side. That is the tragedy of this conflict."

N.Y. elections reflect city's shifting racial landscape - washingtonpost.com

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For first time, whites will be in the minority on the City Council

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

NEW YORK -- When the newly elected New York City Council convenes in January, for the first time in its history white council members will be in the minority, as whites are in the city.

Also for the first time, an Asian American will serve in an elected citywide office -- as comptroller -- and the council will include two new Asian American members, giving three key posts to the city's constituency of roughly 1 million Asian Americans.

There was another first in the campaign for the post of the city's public advocate: the eventual winner, a white candidate, using images of himself with his black wife and their biracial children -- pictures that attracted national attention.

In some ways, slow-moving New York City politics are catching up with the changing dynamics of the city itself, as the number of immigrants continues to rise and the idea of dividing the political pie three ways, among blacks, whites and Latinos, seems obsolete.

This is old news elsewhere in the country, as immigrants and other minority groups have gained prominence in the politics of the West Coast and the South.

Though New York is perceived as cosmopolitan, it has long been "a very prejudiced city," said the Rev. Al Sharpton, noting that tensions broke into ethnic riots as recently as the 1990s. "We were sectioned off, people kind of lived in their own turf, we kind of practiced tribal politics. Those walls are coming down."

Part of it could be an Obama effect. George Arzt, a political adviser to John C. Liu's successful campaign for comptroller, said young Asian Americans inspired by President Obama's election last year came out to volunteer for Liu.

Bill de Blasio, who was elected public advocate, said he was encouraged by Obama's election to use images of himself with his wife, Chirlane, and their children in his campaign literature and commercials, though he was not sure how they would be received.

"I did feel there would be more receptivity than there had been in the past," said de Blasio, who has written and spoken about his decision with national media outlets. "And this is who I am."

Others said some of the changes come simply from the city's demographics. The number of Asian Americans, for instance, has increased dramatically in recent decades, and more immigrants have become citizens.

"I'm just part of the community coming of age," said Liu, the comptroller-elect, who was born in Taiwan but spent his childhood in the Flushing section of Queens. "It means that the policy decisions and budgetary allocations will more closely reflect the people of this city and will, in fact, hold more credibility."

Still, those close to the campaign say Liu was able to pull together a remarkable coalition of support from Chinese, Korean and South Asian communities, essentially creating an Asian American vote. He also had strong African American support.

New York still falls short in political representation of minorities. In a city of about 2 million Latinos, none has been elected to citywide office. There has not been a Latino borough president outside of the Bronx. There has been just one mayor of color, David N. Dinkins, and he was in office only four years. Before Liu, the only other person of color elected to citywide office was Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., who is black and who just lost his bid for mayor.

For years, the City Council was a bastion of white incumbents who rarely gave up their seats to newcomers. And racial tensions were high as recently as the mayoralty of Rudolph W. Giuliani. A few weeks ago, Giuliani was campaigning with current Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and warned an audience of Orthodox Jews that if Bloomberg were not reelected, New Yorkers could return to an era of fear and danger in the streets.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about," said Giuliani, whose remarks were interpreted by many as equating Thompson with Giuliani's black predecessor, Dinkins.

Police are investigating an Election Day incident in which a group of white people allegedly shouted ethnic slurs and attacked two campaign volunteers for a Korean American City Council candidate in Queens, where the campaign had ethnic overtones.

At first glance, it appears that many New Yorkers voted in this election along racial lines. Bloomberg, an independent who is white, had the strongest support among high-income whites and had the backing of two-thirds of white voters. His Democratic rival, Thompson, took most votes from Bloomberg from among middle-class blacks, and about 73 percent of black voters chose him.

Yet analysts say this is more than a simple racial divide, as economic categories often overlap: The areas where the mayor's support dropped most precipitously since the election of 2005 have some of the highest foreclosure rates, as well as working-class and middle-class families of color.

"My opinion is the city's politics are becoming more international, and that is very American," said Se-Suk-Cook, 41, a nail salon worker walking in Union Square Park.

Muslims in the military seek bridge between worlds - washingtonpost.com

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By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

U.S. Muslim service members say they stand out in both their worlds.

Among fellow troops, that can mean facing ethnic taunts, awkward questions about spiritual practices and a structure that is not set up to accommodate their worship. Among Muslims, the questions can be more profound: How can a Muslim participate in killing other Muslims in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan?

Just 3,557 members of the 1.4 million-member U.S. armed forces describe themselves as Muslim, and followers of Islam said the military is just starting to accommodate them by recruiting Muslim chaplains, creating Muslim prayer spaces and educating other troops about Islam.

Active and retired Muslim service members recalled difficulties concerning their religion but said they cannot relate to the extreme isolation and harassment described by Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the suspect in last week's Fort Hood slayings. They also said they hope the killings do not roll back the progress they have seen.

Joshua Salaam, 36, said superiors told him when he joined the Air Force that he could not take time for regular prayer. He remembered being warned at a briefing for a posting in Qatar not to go to mosques because of potential violence. Once he arrived, other service members told him that Muslims there wore baggy clothes because Islam calls for them to avoid public bathrooms.

"They are the enemy," is how Muslims were sometimes characterized, he said.

But Salaam said he received many awards in the Air Force. He wore his "kufi" -- a rounded cap popular with some African American Muslims--on base and came to like being a "cultural translator" for both sides.

"As a Muslim growing up in America, we've been doing that our whole lives anyway," he said.

Interviews with Muslims revealed a range of experiences. Some choose to keep their faith private; others seek out superiors and chaplains who can help them worship even on duty. Some blamed other Muslims for not working to fit into military culture.

Sgt. Fahad Kamal, 26, attended the same Texas mosque as Hasan, the Islamic Center of Killeen, and reenlisted at Fort Hood after serving as a combat medic in Afghanistan. He said he experienced the rare insult from other soldiers about his religion and described one occasion during basic training when someone called him a "terrorist."

"I knew he was just kidding, but the drill sergeant overheard him. He made him apologize in front of the entire company" and do push-ups. "I felt guilty, because I knew he was just joking. But I was also happy to see how seriously they took it."

Kamal, whose family left Pakistan for Texas when he was a boy, said he didn't find the Army anti-Muslim. "We've got a president whose middle name is Hussein. He comes from a Muslim background. Our soldiers are from every race and culture," he said.

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said this weekend that he was worried about a possible backlash against enlisted Muslims. "It would be a shame, as great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well," he told CNN.

In a broadcast Monday night, Virginia Beach religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said the military overlooked Hasan's troubles because of a politically correct refusal to see Islam for what it is. "Islam is a violent -- I was going to say religion -- but it's not a religion. It's a political system. It's a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination."

One of the best-known allegations of anti-Muslim harassment in the military involved James Yee, a former Muslim Army chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was accused of spying and held in solitary confinement in 2003. The charges were dropped, and Yee wrote a book contending that they were a result of anti-Muslim sentiment among intelligence officials at the military prison.

An Army spokesman said complaints of religious discrimination are rare: 50 across the entire Defense Department in the past three years. But the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which works for religious pluralism in the military, said it had received 16 complaints since Thursday from enlisted Muslims.

Saleem Abdul-Mateen, a Washington native who was in aviation electronics in the Navy from 1975 to 1995 and is a national leader of a veterans group, said he straddles two worlds. "Today, a [Muslim] brother said to me, 'You know, if we're about peace, why are we fighting another country?' And that's valid. But you have to support the country when it's right and when it's wrong," Abdul-Mateen said.

Doug Burpee, who took the call name "hajji" as a helicopter pilot, said he "never had a problem in 26 years." Although he loves to engage in academic discussions about religion, he said, he kept his prayer invisible and thinks that Muslim service members, like others, have to compromise to fit into military life.

"There are Muslims who stop in their footprints to pray, and those people might have a problem," he said. "But if you're going to join -- join. If Muslims don't fit in, it's their fault."

Shareda Hosein, who is a Muslim chaplain at Tufts University and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, said being a Muslim is easier in the military in some ways than in general society because of the rules governing behavior. That said, she described a double existence of a sort.

"When I'm in uniform, I feel totally relaxed. I look like every other person. I get thank-yous at the supermarket, the gas station. But when I'm in civilian clothes, my hijab, I get scrutiny. Sometimes looks and stares speak loudly. Little do they know who I am."

Staff writer William Booth contributed to this report from San Antonio.

In Afghanistan, Taliban leaving al-Qaeda behind - washingtonpost.com

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Shifting power dynamic could influence where U.S. focuses firepower

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

KABUL -- As violence rises in Afghanistan, the power balance between insurgent groups has shifted, with a weakened al-Qaeda relying increasingly on the emboldened Taliban for protection and the manpower to carry out deadly attacks, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

The ascendancy of the Taliban and the relative decline of al-Qaeda have broad implications for the Obama administration as it seeks to define its enemy in Afghanistan and debates deploying tens of thousands of additional troops.

Although the war in Afghanistan began as a response to al-Qaeda terrorism, there are perhaps fewer than 100 members of the group left in the country, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official estimated that there are 300 al-Qaeda members in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the group is based, compared with tens of thousands of Taliban insurgents on either side of the border.

Yet officials and observers here differ over whether the inversion of the groups' traditional power dynamic has led to better or worse relations. Indeed, it may be bringing al-Qaeda closer to certain Taliban factions -- most notably, forces loyal to former Taliban cabinet minister Jalaluddin Haqqani -- and driving it apart from others, including leader Mohammad Omar's Pakistan-based group. The shifting alliances, analysts say, could have significant bearing on where the U.S. military chooses to focus its firepower.

Although President Obama has said the United States must remain in Afghanistan because a Taliban victory here would mean a rapid proliferation of al-Qaeda fighters as they return to their pre-2001 sanctuary, Omar's faction seems to have distanced itself from al-Qaeda in recent months.

The shift appears to reflect Omar's growing confidence that his group can operate on its own, without al-Qaeda as its patron. "The Taliban have got the expertise, they have got the resources, they have got the momentum," said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N. Taliban and al-Qaeda Monitoring Team.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The Taliban, composed primarily of ethnic Pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan, has offered haven to the Arab-led al-Qaeda in exchange for money, weapons and training. When Omar ruled nearly all of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, he sheltered al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and refused to turn him over to the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan forced Omar and bin Laden to flee to Pakistan.

Agendas diverge

Omar's mission is to force U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and to recapture the country. His group is particularly active in attacking U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, his home base.

This year, Omar's military committee published a rule book for followers, calling on them to protect the population and avoid civilian casualties -- much like U.S. counterinsurgency principles. He has railed against the corruption of President Hamid Karzai's government, an issue that resonates with Afghans. He has also solicited support from other Muslim countries. But al-Qaeda's agenda of global holy war and taste for mass-casualty attacks, no matter how many Muslim civilians are killed, complicate that goal.

In a February interview with al-Samoud magazine, Taliban political committee leader Agha Jan Mutassim praised the Saudi Arabian government, called for Muslim unity and said the Taliban "respects all different Islamic schools and branches without any discrimination" in Afghanistan.

Such positions may put Omar's Taliban at odds with al-Qaeda's extremist Sunni agenda of overthrowing what it sees as corrupt Muslim governments and targeting Shiites. Analysts said that Omar, who leads a council of Taliban commanders based in or around the Pakistani city of Quetta, wants such countries as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government if it regains power and that he has little interest in fomenting war elsewhere.

"We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others," Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a "revolution," said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. "Al-Qaeda's path is now different from the Taliban's path, and they are growing more separated."

Other, closer ties

Although that may be true of Omar's faction, observers here say that other segments of the Taliban have become more closely entwined with al-Qaeda than ever.

The Haqqani-led faction, which is blamed for many of the deadliest attacks on U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, works so closely with al-Qaeda that distinctions between the groups may be irrelevant, officials said.

In the lawless border town of Miran Shah in Pakistan's North Waziristan region, where insurgents hold sway and experience little interference from the Pakistani army, Haqqani's Taliban works side by side with al-Qaeda. Haqqani developed close ties with Arab fighters during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, during which he received funding from the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. One of his wives is Arab. When bin Laden fled the U.S. invasion in 2001, he took refuge with Haqqani in a safe house between the Afghan city of Khost and Miran Shah, according to Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid.

Haqqani's network, which experts say maintains links with Pakistani authorities, fights in eastern Afghanistan. But the group is also blamed for much of the violence in Kabul. After an attack on a U.N. guesthouse last month that killed eight people, Afghan officials said Haqqani's fighters planned the assault with the help of an al-Qaeda operative.

On the battlefield, insurgents from al-Qaeda and a broad spectrum of Taliban factions still communicate and coordinate attacks, officials said. United by a common enemy, they share explosives and use the same suicide-bomber networks. A foreign fighter who travels to the Pakistani tribal lands to join al-Qaeda may end up working with the Taliban.

"Al-Qaeda is the teacher of the Taliban. They're still very close partners," said Maj. Gen. Abdul Manan Farahi, director general of the Afghan Interior Ministry's anti-terrorism department. "It's very clear, the ideological connection they have."

Despite its weakened state, there is little doubt that al-Qaeda remains a potent international force, and there is reason to believe that cooperation with Pakistani Taliban groups is deepening.

As the world's premier terrorist brand, al-Qaeda "still has an iconic value, an emulation value," a senior U.S. military official said.

And yet, Omar's Taliban, at least, may not want to repeat recent history, when his group's loyalty to al-Qaeda spoiled the Taliban's opportunity to defeat rival Afghan factions and rule the entire country.

"If you debrief senior Taliban guys, they'll tell you that al-Qaeda stole the victory, because they were going to win prior to the World Trade Center attacks," the U.S. military intelligence official said. "The more they connect themselves to al-Qaeda, the less the population's going to welcome them back."

Ezra Klein - The $900 billion mistake

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by Ezra Klein

Barack Obama has not given much in the way of specifics for health-care reform. Few policies have been nonnegotiable and virtually none have been dictated. The exception is a number that was neither nonnegotiable nor dictated, but was received on the Hill as if it was both, and has come to dominate the health-care reform process: $900 billion.

The number sprang from Obama's September speech laying out his own plan on health-care reform. "Add it all up," he said before a joint session of Congress, "and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years." The plan he proposed, however, did not mention the price tag, and the president did not include any specifics about how that price tag was reached. Nor did the president's language actually set a hard ceiling. "Around $900 billion," when you're talking about internal modeling for a plan that the Congressional Budget Office hasn't seen, is not the same thing as a $900 billion limit.

This was not like Bill Clinton waving his pen and promising to veto any bill that did not reach universal coverage. But that's how it was understood on the Hill. "It made things complicated," sighed Rep. George Miller. "We were working off of one track and then we had to switch." The Senate isn't having an easier time of it. Reid's office is waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to return an official score of their health-care reform bill. If it's under $900 billion, they will move forward with it. If it's over $900 billion, they will revise it, and send it back to CBO for a new, and hopefully lower, score.

There are three questions here. The first is how the Obama administration came up with the $900 billion estimate. The second is why they included it in their speech, after so relentlessly avoiding specifics until that moment. And the third is why the Hill embraced it as a hard limit rather than a general proposal.

The answer to the first is a mixture of policy and politics. Health-care reform was embattled. The Gang of Six was breaking apart. There were those in both the White House and the Senate who wanted to radically scale back the ambitions of the bill. Amidst this, members of the White House's policy team managed to model a plan that they considered pretty good and that came in at about $900 billion -- a bit lower than what the House had proposed, but a bit higher than what the Senate Finance Committee was considering. Further, there didn't look to be support for revenues that reached much beyond $900 billion, at least in the Senate. This wasn't a new limit so much as an articulation of a boundary that already existed.

It was, they hoped, something of a political sweet spot. It calmed some moderates by showing that the White House was willing to push back on the ambitions of more liberal members of Congress and pleased some liberals by showing that the White House wasn't letting the chaos of August distract them from the need for an ambitious bill.

But once that number entered the process, it began guiding the process. Sources on the Hill aren't really clear how the sum transformed from an estimate of the president's plan to a hard limit for their plan. Few recall that the original language included the qualifier "around." Even so, the number stuck. It strengthened the hand of moderates in both chambers and allowed them to create a ceiling. It also seemed clear that if the White House was comfortable with $900 billion, then it wasn't going to fight to protect the spending in any bill that exceeded that cap, so there was no point in the liberals bothering to push the issue.

The problem is that the number, which was chosen at a point of political weakness for health-care reform and the Obama administration, is too low. Most experts think you need closer to $1.1 trillion for a truly affordable plan. Limiting yourself to $900 billion ensures that the subsidies won't be quite where you need them to be, and means that virtually every spare dollar has to be spent strengthening them. If you want to add $30 billion to the bill creating coordinated care teams across the country -- a project that could transform chronic care in this country and eventually save many times its start-up cost -- there's little budgetary flexibility even if you could find the revenue, because each dollar is in a zero-sum competition with each other dollar so the entire plan comes in under the limit.

The second problem is that it's not clear what the number includes. Obama's plan, for instance, didn't say a word about the Medicare payment fix, which will cost more than $200 billion, and which many commentators argue should be included in the cost of the plan (I don't agree with them, incidentally). It didn't include specific delivery system reforms. It didn't show its own modeling, so it's hard to say whether the subsidies it envisioned were sufficient, or whether CBO would score the proposal at a higher, or lower, cost.

The reason for this ambiguity is that the limit was never really a limit. It wasn't attached to a plan that was scored by the Congressional Budget Office. It didn't refer to an actual number, or define how big of a boundary was meant by the qualifier "around." It didn't specify what it included. But to the detriment of the bill, it has become a hard ceiling, reducing both the potential affordability of the legislation and the flexibility of Congress to add delivery system reforms that could save money or improve health in the long run. For that reason, Congress should go back to Obama's original speech and follow the president's original lead. A process working towards a bill that's "around $900 billion" is a lot better than a process that's arbitrarily decided to produce a bill under $900 billion.

The Iraqi Elections: Same Names, Different Teams - At War Blog - NYTimes.com

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By RAZZAQ AL-SAIEDI

After much delay, the Iraqi Parliament finally passed a law on Sunday allowing for national parliamentary elections — the third since the American invasion in 2003. Voting is scheduled to take place in the second half of January.

For Americans, the elections will be a crucial test of how secure Iraq has become, and thus how quickly U.S. soldiers can leave. The stakes will also be high for Iraqis, who will be putting in place a political infrastructure that, in theory, will outlast the American presence in their country.

As the elections approach, one major worry will be how much ethnic and religious allegiances, which plunged Iraq into deep violence in 2006, influence voters’ choices. The early 2009 provincial elections, in which the two main Shiite and Sunni Islamic Parties lost their ground to nonreligious parties, have given much hope that sectarianism will play a lesser role this time, too. But while the coalitions look different than they did during the last national vote in December 2005, many of the same candidates remain on the lists. Are voters less likely to vote along religious lines? How many Shiites will vote for Sunni candidates?

In addition to the question of religious allegiances is the fragmenting of what were essentially Iraq’s Big Three voting blocs — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — in politics. Voters have new options in the upcoming election. Secular Shiites, for instance, have a choice beyond the National Iraqi Alliance that most Shiite Islamic parties have joined. Most prominent is the State of Law slate formed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite. Sunnis have similar alternatives to the Iraqi Islamic Party, the most powerful Sunni party since 2003. Even with this diversification, though, voters will probably support their sects’ parties.

The number of new choices may actually make forming a new government much harder. At best, the strongest coalition seems likely to gain less than 20 percent of the total voters, too weak to dominate the process of choosing the prime minister and president. After the previous elections, just three Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish coalitions dominated Parliament, occupying more than two-thirds of the seats.

Four years ago, the American government played a significant role in pushing the Iraqis to form the current governments. Most significantly, they succeeded in halting Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s bid to become the prime minister in 2006. Now, however, United States officials have limited influence in Baghdad. If the debate over the long-awaited electoral law took several months, how much longer will it take to pick the next president, the prime minister, speaker and the cabinet? How effectively would a lame-duck government be able to rule in the interim? Would delay and infighting make Iraq less stable?

Finally, there is the thorny issue of the Kurds. Since 2003, they have been the kingmakers, so to speak. How much time and political capital should the Arab coalitions spend on the Kurds? It is not likely that any coalition can form the majority without them.

Much attention has been paid to the issue of security in Iraq prior the election, yet I would be much more worried about tensions after the election.

Afghan and U.S. Forces Find a Vast Cache of Bomb-Making Materials - NYTimes.com

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By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — With fertilizer bombs now the most lethal weapons used against American and NATO soldiers in southern Afghanistan, the bomb-making operation in Kandahar was something close to astonishing.

In a pair of raids on Sunday, Afghan police officers and American soldiers discovered a half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that is used in the overwhelming majority of homemade bombs here. About 2,000 bomb-making devices like timers and triggers were also found, and 15 Afghans were detained.

With a typical homemade bomb weighing no more than 60 pounds, the seizure of that much fertilizer — more than 10 tractor-trailer loads — removed potentially thousands of bombs from the streets and trails of southern Afghanistan, officials said.

“You can turn a bag of ammonium nitrate into a bomb in a matter of hours,” said Col. Mark Lee, who leads NATO’s effort to stop the bomb makers in southern Afghanistan. “This is a great first step.”

The operation in the southern city of Kandahar, which was announced Tuesday, is by far the largest of its type. Ammonium nitrate is illegal in Afghanistan; farmers here are allowed to use other types of fertilizer, like those that are urea-based, on their crops. Most of the ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Afghanistan is believed to be imported from Pakistan.

Ammonium nitrate has long been used as both a fertilizer and an explosive. Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols used a 600-pound ammonium nitrate bomb, mixed with fuel oil, to attack the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The attack killed 168 people.

The seizure in Kandahar came on the heels of a number of initiatives aimed at taking the fertilizer out of the hands of Taliban insurgents. Until this month, Afghan and NATO officials could seize ammonium nitrate only if it was clearly associated with insurgent activity. Now, they can seize it regardless. If the police or soldiers seize ammonium fertilizer from farmers, they are legally obliged to compensate them for it.

On Sunday, Afghan police officers and American soldiers, acting on intelligence, went first to a compound in the southern part of the city and found 1,000 100-pound bags of ammonium nitrate and 2,000 bomb-making components. They detained 15 people there. They were then led to a second compound a short distance away, where they found 4,000 100-pound bags of the fertilizer.

On Tuesday, Afghans and Americans were still carting away the ammonium nitrate; so far, officials said, they had filled 10 40-foot-long shipping containers with the bags.

The statistics related to homemade bombs tell much of the story of the Afghan war.

The use of homemade bombs has been skyrocketing. Last year, 4,100 bombs either exploded or were discovered beforehand in Afghanistan. So far this year, 6,500 bombs either have been found or have gone off, military officials in Kabul said.

About 60 percent of homemade bombs are discovered here before they explode, officials in Kabul say.

An overwhelming majority of homemade bombs here, about 75 percent, are in southern Afghanistan, in places like the provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. Most of the 17,000 additional troops sent to the country this year by President Obama went to those places.

While homemade bombs are the leading killer of American and other NATO soldiers, about 70 percent of those killed and wounded in such attacks are Afghan, officials said.

“It’s the Afghans who are bearing the brunt,” Colonel Lee said.

Afghan Future Threatened by Ex-Warlords in Gov't - NYTimes.com

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KABUL (AP) -- Warlords helped drive the Russians from Afghanistan, then shelled Kabul into ruins in a bloody civil war after the Soviets left.

Now they are back in positions of power, in part because the U.S. relied on them in 2001 to help oust the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks. President Hamid Karzai later reached out to them to shore up his own power base as America turned its attention to Iraq after the Taliban's rout.

With the Taliban resurging, the entrenched power of the warlords is complicating Karzai's promises to rid his new government of corruption and cronies, steps seen as critical to building support among Afghans against the insurgents.

''You can't build a new political system with old politicians accused of war crimes,'' said lawmaker Ramazan Bashardost, who finished third in the country's fraud-marred August election. ''You can't have peace with warlords in control.''

Two of Karzai's vice presidents -- Mohammed Qasim Fahim and Karim Khalili -- are ex-warlords. His outgoing military adviser, Abdul Rashid Dostum, has been accused of overseeing the suffocation deaths of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners during the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

The term warlord is applied to the commanders of the Afghan resistance who fell out with each other after the defeat of the Soviets. They see themselves as political figures and patriots who defend their people in areas of the country where the central government has little or no control. They often refer to themselves as ''mujahadeen,'' which means holy warriors.

Karzai sought support from those branded as warlords to bolster his weak power base, win re-election and build alliances with ethnic groups. He has defended those ties publicly, pointing out that the U.S. backed the same people eight years ago when it engineered the war to oust the Taliban and brought Karzai to power.

But the U.S. and its allies fear that the continued strength of the warlords undermines government authority. It is hard to convince ordinary Afghans to obey the laws, pay their taxes and support the government when it is dominated by men who flounted the rules to amass power and fortunes.

International pressure is mounting on Karzai to rid his government of corruption and sideline the warlords. Leaders of the U.S., Britain and other troop-contributing countries cannot ask their own soldiers to risk their lives for a corrupt government.

''I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm's way for a government that does not stand up against corruption,'' Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday.

Last week, Kai Eide, the U.N. mission chief in Afghanistan, suggested time was running out. ''We can't afford any longer a situation where warlords and power brokers play their own games,'' he said. ''We have to have ... significant reform.''

And Obama told the Afghan leader last week that assurances of reform had to be backed up with action.

Presidential spokesman Humayun Hamidzada defended Karzai, saying he has appointed to government posts Afghans from all walks of life and from all political backgrounds. He said ''the path of inclusivity'' was crucial for stability.

A survey by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, however, found a majority of Afghans believe security will improve if war criminals are brought to justice.

Removing them from government is ''by far the most important issue facing the country today,'' said Brad Adams, the Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

The New York-based rights group has called for several senior officials in Karzai's administration to be tried for war crimes alongside some of Washington's biggest enemies, like Taliban leader Mullah Omar and insurgent chief Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Faction leaders defend their roles in the civil war of the 1990s, which broke out when the pro-Soviet government collapsed following the departure of Moscow's troops. Some of them held out against the Taliban after the Islamist movement seized Kabul in 1996. The Bush administration supported them in the 2001 attack against the Taliban, enabling the U.S. to oust the Islamists from power without committing large numbers of U.S. ground troops.

But some of the alleged crimes attributed to the warlords were so odious that Washington could not ignore them. Witnesses claim Dostum's forces placed Taliban prisoners in sealed cargo containers and suffocated them to death before burying them en masse, according to a State Department report. Dostum denies involvement in the deaths.

The U.S. and its allies pressured Karzai into firing Fahim, his new vice president, as defense minister and dropping him from the ticket in the 2004 election. He tapped him again as his running-mate this year, a move that helped split the opposition vote.

All that has encouraged a climate of impunity that has trickled down through Afghan society. Rights groups accuse soldiers and police loyal to warlords of kidnapping, extortion, robbery and the rape of women, girls and boys.

In the countryside, local commanders ''run their own fiefdoms with illegal militias, intimidate people into paying them taxes, extract bribes, steal land, trade drugs,'' said John Dempsey of the U.S. Institute of Peace. ''They essentially rule with impunity and no government official, no judge, no policeman can stand up to them.''

Karzai has tried to rein in warlords before, dispatching his finance minister to haul back sacks of cash from governors reluctant to pay tax to the central government.

But removing strongmen from power or putting them on trial is risky: it could inflame ethnic tensions and alienate regional commanders whose support both Kabul and Washington need to contain the burgeoning insurgency.

A September report released by New York University's Center on International Cooperation said the NATO-led coalition is fueling the problem by relying on militias loyal to local commanders -- some involved in rights abuses and drug trafficking -- in an effort to bolster security.

The war plan advanced by America's top Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, mentions ''regional power brokers'' with ''loyal armed followers,'' but does not advocate removing them. The U.S. used local armed groups in Iraq to fight al-Qaida and similar militias in Afghanistan have been successful in providing intelligence about the Taliban.

Karzai has been pressured to take action before. In 2005, he was pushed to approve a reconciliation and justice plan that included a vetting system to keep grave rights abusers out of government. But almost none of it was implemented, Dempsey said. Even building a monument or declaring a holiday for war victims was deemed too controversial because Afghanistan and its international backers feared examining the past too closely could destabilize the fragile government.

Sima Samar, chairwoman of the country's human rights commission, said warlords do not necessarily have to be tried. They could face truth commissions, or start by simply apologizing.

There is a lack of political will in bringing them to justice, she said. ''We will never have sustainable peace until we tackle our past.''

Another presidential spokesman, Hamed Elmi, said commanders like Fahim should be praised. They ''played a vital role defending our country against the Soviet occupation and the Taliban. And for the last eight years, they've supported the U.S. in the war on terror.''

He said Afghanistan's criminal justice system is ready to try anyone for rights abuses, ''but so far, we've seen no proof they've done anything wrong.''

Human Rights Watch has documented the indiscriminate killing of civilians by militias loyal to both Fahim and Khalili during the 1990s, which it says constitute war crimes. The group interviewed scores of witnesses accusing militias of murder, pillage and the abduction of ethnic rivals in violation of international humanitarian law.

Akbar Bai, a leader of the country's Turkmen minority -- who Dostum beat and briefly kidnapped last year after storming his Kabul home with 100 armed fighters -- said the U.S. and its Afghan allies are ''fighting the wrong war.''

''Karzai's No. 1 problem is the warlords,'' said Bai, who was released only after government troops surrounded Dostum's mansion. ''If you don't remove these people from power, you'll never see peace in Afghanistan.''

3 Obama Advisers Favor More Troops for Afghanistan - NYTimes.com

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By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan, but President Obama remains unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama is to consider four final options in a meeting with his national security team on Wednesday, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters. The options outline different troop levels, other officials said, but they also assume different goals — including how much of Afghanistan the troops would seek to control — and different time frames and expectations for the training of Afghan security forces.

Three of the options call for specific levels of additional troops. The low-end option would add 20,000 to 25,000 troops, a middle option calls for about 30,000, and another embraces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly 40,000 more troops. Administration officials said that a fourth option was added only in the past few days. They declined to identify any troop level attached to it.

Mr. Gates, a Republican who served as President George W. Bush’s last defense secretary, and who commands considerable respect from the president, is expected to be pivotal in Mr. Obama’s decision. But administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not yet made up his mind, and that other top advisers, among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, remained skeptical of the value of a buildup.

In the Situation Room meetings and other sessions, some officials have expressed deep reservations about President Hamid Karzai, who emerged the victor of a disputed Afghan election. They said there was no evidence that Mr. Karzai would carry through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade or that his government was capable of training enough reliable Afghan troops and police officers for Mr. Obama to describe a credible exit strategy.

Officials said that although the president had no doubt about what large numbers of United States troops could achieve on their own in Afghanistan, he repeatedly asked questions during recent meetings on Afghanistan about whether a sizable American force might undercut the urgency of the preparations of the Afghan forces who are learning to stand up on their own.

“He’s simply not convinced yet that you can do a lasting counterinsurgency strategy if there is no one to hand it off to,” one participant said.

Mr. Obama, officials said, has expressed similar concerns about Pakistan’s willingness to attack Taliban leaders who are operating out of the Pakistani city of Quetta and commanding forces that are mounting attacks across the border in Afghanistan. While Pakistan has mounted military operations against some Taliban groups in recent weeks, one official noted, “it’s been focused on the Taliban who are targeting the Pakistani government, but not those who are running operations in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Obama himself seems to be hedging his bets, particularly on the performance of Mr. Karzai, who is considered by American officials to be an unreliable partner and is now widely derided in the White House. Mr. Obama told ABC News during an interview on Monday that given the weakness of the Karzai government in Kabul, his administration was seeking “provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now.”

Officials said that while Admiral Mullen and Mrs. Clinton were generally in sync with Mr. Gates in supporting an option of about 30,000 troops, there were variations in their positions and they were not working in lock step. Admiral Mullen’s spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said that the admiral was providing his advice to the president in private and would not comment. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, would not comment on Mr. Gates’s position.

A focus of Mr. Obama’s meeting on Wednesday with his national security advisers, officials said, will be to discuss some of their differences as well as those of the president’s other advisers. Officials also said there was a possibility that Mr. Obama might choose to phase in additional troops over time, with a schedule that depended on the timing of the arrival of any additional NATO troops and on how soon Afghan security forces would be able to do more on their own.

Officials said that no decision was expected from Mr. Obama on Wednesday, but that he would mull over the discussions at the meeting during a trip to Asia that begins Thursday. Mr. Obama is not due back in Washington until next Thursday. Officials said that it was possible that he could announce his decision in the three days before Thanksgiving, which is on Nov. 26, but that an announcement in the first week of December seemed more likely.

Should Mr. Obama choose to send about 30,000 troops, a military official said, brigades would most likely be sent from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. In addition, 4,000 troops would be sent as trainers for the Afghan security forces, the military official said. A brigade is about 3,500 to 5,000 soldiers.

Senator Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat who has been an influential adviser in the Afghanistan debate, said that one of the most difficult issues was determining the effects of a large American troop presence on the country.

“It’s more about, hey, are we creating such a large footprint that it’s easier for the Afghans to walk way from their responsibility?” Mr. Reed said. “I don’t think that’s one that can be resolved. You’re making a judgment about that one, and not one you can solve with arithmetic.”

Peter Baker, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler contributed reporting.

Brazil Looks for Answers After Huge Blackout - NYTimes.com

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By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

RIO DE JANEIRO — Officials were searching for answers early Wednesday after a power failure blacked out large swaths of Brazil and Paraguay for more than two hours late Tuesday.

The failure of three transmission lines at Itaipu, the world’s largest operating hydroelectric plant, created a domino effect that cut energy to 18 of 26 states in Brazil, including the country’s two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and affected an estimated 60 million people. Airports in several cities were briefly shut down, and passengers had to be pulled from subway cars in São Paulo when the system lost power.

Electricity system operators were quick to dismiss the possibility of sabotage at the Itaipu dam and assigned initial blame to an unexplained atmospheric event possibly exacerbated by heavy rains. It was the first time that Itaipu had failed so completely in its 25 years of operation, energy officials said late Tuesday.

Energy experts in both countries said Wednesday that the major blackout was a cautionary sign of the dangers of interconnection and showed the vulnerability in Brazil’s transmission system.

“The interconnection system is necessary in a country that uses a lot of hydroelectric plants, but it needs to better managed,” said Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, a physics professor at the Federal University of Rio, speaking on television.

The power failure recalled the blackout of August 2003 in the northeastern United States, the country’s most widespread electrical blackout in history, which affected 10 million people in southeastern Canada and 45 million people in eight American states.

For Brazilians, Tuesday night’s blackout brought back painful memories of energy shortages in 2001, which led the country to step up its push for more natural gas and hydroelectric power generation. The president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, instituted nine months of energy rationing, and the country’s perceived energy fallibility was blamed for a considerable decline in Mr. Cardoso’s popularity as he ended his second term in office.

But since then Brazil has diversified its energy supply and has avoided widespread shortages.

Tuesday night’s blackout hit at 10:13 p.m. local time. It affected the southeast of Brazil most severely, leaving São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo completely without electricity. Blackouts also swept through the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, the interior or Bahia and parts of Pernambuco, energy officials said.

By 12:30 a.m. power had been restored to most areas.

Itaipu, which straddles the border between Brazil and Paraguay along the Paraná River, supplies about 20 percent of Brazil’s power and 90 percent of the energy consumed by Paraguay.

As of 7 a.m. Wednesday, 18 of the 20 generators at Itaipu were producing energy for Brazil and Paraguay, according to Itaipu’s Web site.

The Stupak Stupor

Image by ge'shmally via Flickr

by Emily Douglas

We know that the House healthcare reform bill passed after an eleventh-hour compromise (you might say betrayal) on abortion access. We know the compromise, the Stupak-Pitts amendment, is bad. But do we know exactly how it's bad for women (and their partners)? Here's a quick primer on what the amendment actually means for any woman accessing healthcare through the newly-created health insurance exchange.

Over the summer, legislators struck an agreement on abortion funding in which private plans offered through the health insurance exchange couldn't use federal dollars to cover abortion care. They could, however, cover abortion care with funds from individuals' premiums, and the agreement, the Capps Amendment, required at least one plan in every region to offer abortion care, and at least one not to. As many observers predicted, the Capps Amendment didn't mollify anti-abortion crusaders, namely the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which commands an outsize role in the debate over healthcare reform.

So what we ended up with was drastically worse. After the initial compromise fell apart, Rep. Bart Stupak introduced the eponymous amendment, under which any plan purchased with any federal subsidy cannot cover abortion services--even with private funds. Plus, the public plan won't cover abortion care. While plans participating in the health insurance exchange are legally permitted to offer a version of the plan that does cover abortion--enrollment limited to those who pay for the entire plan without any subsidy--it's unlikely plans will go the extra mile to offer that coverage, Planned Parenthood's Laurie Rubiner said this morning on the Brian Lehrer Show. That would be "awfully complex," Rubiner explained. Because the majority of Americans purchasing insurance through the exchange would be using affordability credits, the plan without abortion coverage will become the "standard plan." Rubiner also cited privacy concerns over purchasing abortion-inclusive coverage. The Wall Street Journal observed, "Insurers may be reluctant to [set up abortion-inclusive plans] because it could complicate how they pool risk and force them to label policies in a way that could draw attention from abortion opponents."

At Change.org, Jen Nedeau pointed out that even women who currently have employer-based insurance that does cover abortion care (and 87 percent of employer-based plans do) may ultimately be affected. "Since the plan for the uninsured is designed to open up to everyone over time, including large employers, it is likely that women will lose access to abortion coverage as part of any health insurance plan available for purchase," Nedeau explains.

In defending his amendment, Stupak made one misleading and one outright false claim. He argued that women could purchase "abortion riders" on top of their insurance, much like they might purchase a dental or vision rider. Such an abortion rider doesn't exist now, and the legislation does not provide for its creation. Rubiner pointed out that in states where private coverage of abortion care is outlawed, riders don't exist either. Besides, they defy logic: "Women would have to plan for their unplanned pregnancy," Rubiner added. "It's illogical to think they would look for a plan that includes abortion."

And for the falsehood: Stupak claimed that his amendment "goes no farther than Hyde," the amendment banning federal Medicaid funding for abortion care except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the woman's life. In fact, the amendment goes farther than Hyde in stipulating what kind of coverage a woman can purchase with private dollars. "It's the equivalent of arguing that women who receive abortions should not use public buses or highways to travel to the abortion clinic," Igor Volsky at Wonk Room points out.

In the Stupak amendment, the exceptions to the coverage ban read as follows: rape, incest or "where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death." The Center for American Progress's Jessica Arons writes, "Given insurance companies' dexterity in denying claims, we can predict what they'll do with that language." And in case you wonder what that leaves out entirely: "Cases that are excluded: where the health but not the life of the woman is threatened by the pregnancy, severe fetal abnormalities, mental illness or anguish that will lead to suicide or self-harm, and the numerous other reasons women need to have an abortion."

What Does a World With 1 Billion Facebook Users Look Like?

by Justin Smith

Facebook started the year with just under 150 million active users worldwide, crossed 300 million in September, and we estimate it’s on track to end the year with just over 375 million. It’s hard to comprehend that kind of growth, but to put it in perspective, there are only about 1.65 billion active internet users in the world. If you exclude the 350 million active internet users in China, where Facebook is blocked, that means that about 29% of the total worldwide internet population will be active Facebook users by the end of 2009.

With estimates calling for the global internet population to grow to 2.1 billion in 2012, potentially to 2.5 billion by 2015, could Facebook reach 1 billion active users in the next five years? In order to achieve that mark, Facebook would need to achieve nearly 50% penetration of Internet users in almost every country outside of China.

In order to get there, Facebook will need to show strong growth in all regions of the world. Today, Facebook continues to increasingly saturate some western markets, where in many cases over 30% of the entire national population is active on Facebook (in Iceland it’s 51%; Norway is at 45%; the UK is at 36% and the US is at 32%). At the same time, Facebook is beginning to tip major international markets where it is unseating popular incumbent social networks.

For example, the user growth curve is concave up in Brazil and India, where Orkut has been dominant for years, and Facebook continues to gain ground in Germany, where StudiVZ sites have been the most popular for a while. In southeast Asia, Facebook has exploded in recent months, which doesn’t bode well for Friendster and other networks in the region. However, growth has been slower in Russia, where Vkontakte has maintained local dominance – Facebook has only 670,000 active users in the whole country.

Note: all data sourced from Facebook’s advertiser tools.

Of course, Facebook’s approach to crowd-sourced translations of its web service and, more recently, any website through Facebook Connect, has played a major role in Facebook’s international growth over the last couple of years. Today, Facebook is available in more than 70 languages, with dozens more on the way. While we still hear complaints from some users that translations in localized versions of Facebook are not quite up to snuff, the quality does seem to be improving overall.

Facebook’s mobile efforts have played a significant role in the company’s international growth over the last couple of years as well. Facebook has quietly built apps for many mobile devices and struck deals with dozens of local carriers to facilitate Facebook’s spread around the world. While we don’t know exactly how many of Facebook’s active user count comes from its variety of mobile platforms and apps, we do know stats on some mobile apps and that overall, Facebook’s mobile audience has tripled in the last year. The company had 65 million mobile users as of early September, according to internal numbers it made public then.

While we expect Facebook to continue pushing both of these efforts forward in the years ahead, Facebook’s growth will still be fundamentally driven by the viral nature of the product. As more people join Facebook, the service becomes increasingly valuable to those already on Facebook, making it increasingly difficult for competitors to stop Facebook in its tracks. We are not seeing any signs of decreases in Facebook’s total audience size in any country that we track (except China of course and, last month, Cyprus). Thus, we believe it’s quite possible that the rate at which Facebook approaches 1 billion active users will be most affected by the growth rate of the Internet population overall.

If Facebook does reach that point, it will be in a position to shape a number of other industries, and it will also be subject to a number of other pressures. Search, media, entertainment, telecom, shopping, and payment companies will all be watching Facebook closely, as the company’s continued growth will likely mean significant things for their future. Facebook will also become subject to new kinds of international regulations and political pressure, particularly as it is increasingly used in ways that national governments would like to have more control over.

channelnewsasia.com - Huis ethnic group in China moderate in outlook

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NINGXIA, China : The Hui minority is one of the largest ethnic groups in China.

Channel NewsAsia finds out what makes them stand out from other ethnic groups in the country.

In China's Ningxia autonomous region, nearly four in 10 inhabitants are Hui minorities. And virtually all Huis are Muslims.

One of them is 67-year-old Ma Xiuyun. Ma said: "We pray five times a day. I have not been to Mecca. I hope to go, but I don't have the means. It's too costly."

Descendents of Arab and Persian traders who came to China during the Yuan dynasty, there are now nearly 10 million Huis scattered cross the country.

Their lives are deeply influenced by Islam. And like other Muslims worldwide, they abstain from drinking, gambling and eating pork.

Famous Huis include Admiral Cheng Ho or Zheng He, and Ming dynasty official Hai Rui, known for his righteousness and fearlessness in standing up to the emperor.

The community's progress is attributed to their adoption of the Han language, and living with Han Chinese.

Lei Runze, a Hui minority scholar and former director of Hui Minority Museum, said: "The Islam that ethnic Huis believe has largely taken on Chinese characteristics. The teachings and doctrines of Islam have been combined with Confucianism. These include harmony between universe and man, love, righteousness and benevolence."

A major rebellion in the 19th century led to a short-lived independent Islamic state. And for a period, ties soured between Hui and the rulers.

Current policies now ensure ethnic equality, and favourable social and economic treatment for minorities. Benefits such as regional autonomy and fiscal benefits have allowed ethnic Huis to be more moderate in their outlook.

Lei Runze added: "Islam as practiced by the ethnic Huis has no connections with overseas Sunnis, Shiites or terrorist groups. As you can see, there are no problems within Hui-dominated areas and other ethnic groups. Most of the problems are internal, and nothing to do with other ethnic groups."

The Huis have been able to live with other ethnic groups. Their practice of moderate Islam has given Muslims a favourable image in China.

Even though religious freedom exists in China, it is expected to - like religions elsewhere - contribute to the country's overall development.

In the case of China, it is also expected to work hand in hand with the authorities to help achieve a more peaceful and harmonious society.

Analysts say Islam is undergoing a modest revival, given the setting up of more mosques and Islamic associations in the country. - CNA/de