Starting Points

Dec 14, 2009

Pakistan Rebuffs U.S. on Taliban Crackdown

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Demands by the United States for Pakistan to crack down on the strongest Taliban warrior in Afghanistan, Siraj Haqqani, whose fighters pose the biggest threat to American forces, have been rebuffed by the Pakistani military, according to Pakistani military officials and diplomats.

The Obama administration wants Pakistan to turn on Mr. Haqqani, a longtime asset of Pakistan’s spy agency who uses the tribal area of North Waziristan as his sanctuary. But, the officials said, Pakistan views the entreaties as contrary to its interests in Afghanistan beyond the timetable of President Obama’s surge, which envisions drawing down American forces beginning in mid-2011.

The demands, first made by senior American officials before President Obama’s Afghanistan speech and repeated many times since, were renewed in a written demarche delivered in recent days by the United States Embassy to the head of the Pakistani military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, according to American officials. Gen. David Petraeus followed up on Monday during a visit to Islamabad.

The demands have been accompanied by strong suggestions that if the Pakistanis cannot take care of the problem, including dismantling the Taliban leadership based in Quetta, Pakistan, then the Americans will by resorting to broader and more frequent drone strikes in Pakistan.

But the Pakistanis have greeted the refrain with official public silence and private anger, illustrating the widening gulf between the allies over the Afghan war.

Former Pakistani military officers voice irritation with the American insistence daily on television, part of a mounting grievance in Pakistan that the alliance with the United States is too costly to bear.

“It is really beginning to irk and anger us,” said a security official familiar with the deliberations at the senior levels of the Pakistani leadership.

The core reason for Pakistan’s imperviousness is its scant faith in the Obama surge, and what Pakistan sees as the need to position itself for a major regional realignment in Afghanistan once American forces begin to leave.

It considers Mr. Haqqani and his control of broad swaths of Afghan territory vital to Pakistan in the jostling for influence that will pit Pakistan, India, Russia, China and Iran in the post-American Afghan arena, the Pakistani officials said.

Pakistan is particularly eager to counter the growing influence of its archenemy, India, which is pouring $1.2 billion in aid into Afghanistan. “If American walks away, Pakistan is very worried that it will have India on its eastern border and India on its western border in Afghanistan,” said Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who is pro-American in his views.

For that reason, Mr. Fatemi said, the Pakistani Army was “very reluctant” to jettison Mr. Haqqani, Pakistan’s strong card in Afghanistan. Moreover, the Pakistanis do not want to alienate Mr. Haqqani because they consider him an important player in reconciliation efforts that they would like to see get under way in Afghanistan immediately, the officials said.

Because Mr. Haqqani shelters Qaeda leaders and operatives in North Waziristan, Washington was opposed to including Mr. Haqqani among the possible reconcilable Taliban, at least for the moment, a Western diplomat said.

In his reply to the Americans, the head of the Pakistani military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, stressed a short-term argument, according to two Pakistani officials familiar with the response.

Pakistan currently had its hands full fighting the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan and other places, and it was beyond its capacity to open another front against the Afghan Taliban, the officials said of General Kayani’s response.

The offensive has had the secondary effect of constraining the Haqqani network in North Waziristan and driving some of its commanders and fighters across the border to Afghanistan, senior American military officials in Afghanistan said.

But implicit in General Kayani’s reply was the fact that the homegrown Pakistani Taliban represent the real threat to Pakistan. They are the ones launching attacks against security installations and civilian markets in Pakistan’s cities and must be the army’s priority, General Kayani argued, the officials said.

For his part, Mr. Haqqani fights in Afghanistan, and is considered more of an asset than a threat by the Pakistanis. But he is the most potent force fighting the Americans, American and Pakistani officials agree.

He has subcommanders threaded throughout eastern and southern Afghanistan. His fighters control Paktika, Paktia and Khost provinces in Afghanistan, which lie close to North Waziristan. His men are also strong in Ghazni, Logar and Wardak provinces, the officials said.

Because Mr. Haqqani now spends so much time in Afghanistan — about three weeks of every month, according to a Pakistani security official — if the Americans want to eliminate him, their troops should have ample opportunity to capture him, Pakistani security officials argue.

As a son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a leading mujahedeen fighter against the Soviets who is now aged and apparently confined to bed, Siraj Haqqani is keeper of a formidable lineage and history.

In the early 1970s, the father attended a well known madrassa, Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqaniya in the Pakistani town of Akora Khattack in North-West Frontier Province.

In the 1980s, Jalaluddin Haqqani received money and arms from the C.I.A. routed through Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence, to fight the Soviets, according to Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the Afghan Taliban and the author of “Descent Into Chaos.”

In the 1990s, when the Taliban ran Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani served as governor of Paktia Province.

The relationship between the Haqqanis and Osama bin Laden dates back to the 1980s war against the Soviets, according to Kamran Bokhari, the South Asia director for Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company.

When the Taliban government collapsed at the end of 2001 and Qaeda operatives fled from Tora Bora to Pakistan, the Haqqanis relocated their command structure to North Waziristan and welcomed Al Qaeda, Mr. Bokhari said.

The biggest gift of the Pakistanis to the Haqqanis was the use of the North Waziristan as their fiefdom, he said.

The Pakistani Army did not appear to be assisting the Haqqanis with training or equipment, he said. More than 20 members of the Haqqani nuclear family were killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan last year, showing the limits of how far the Pakistanis could protect them, Mr. Bokhari said.

Today Siraj Haqqani has anywhere from 4,000 to 12,000 Taliban under his command. He is technically a member of the Afghan Taliban leadership based in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.

That leadership is headed by Mullah Omar, the former leader of the Taliban regime. But Mr. Haqqani operates fairly independently of them inside Afghanistan.

Siraj Haqqani maintains an uneasy relationship with the Pakistani Taliban, said Maulana Yousaf Shah, the administrator of the madrassa at Akora Khattack.

Mr. Haqqani believed the chief jihadi objective should be forcing the foreigners out of Afghanistan, and he had tried but failed to redirect the Pakistani Taliban to fight in Afghanistan as well, he said.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan; Pir Zubair Shah from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt from Kabul, Afganistan.

Manila Eases Crackdown

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Martial Law Lifted in Philippines, but Violence Persists

By PATRICK BARTA

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo lifted martial law in a southern province where 57 people were massacred late last month, but unrest in the southern Philippines continued.

A group of armed men stormed a jail on the southern island of Basilan on Sunday morning, smashing through a wall to free at least 31 inmates, authorities said. One attacker and a guard were killed.

Some of the escapees were believed to be members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf, Muslim rebel groups linked to past violence in the region, police said.

The jailbreak -- which occurred more than 60 miles from last month's massacre -- underscored the lawlessness in a region tormented by bandits, private armies and insurgents, including Communists and al Qaeda-linked Muslim separatists.

There was some good news Sunday: Officials said gunmen released 47 hostages who had been held in a jungle hideout elsewhere in the south. A group of around 15 abducted the hostages from a village on Thursday, but freed them after government negotiators agreed not to arrest the gunmen for the abductions or for past criminal activities, the Associated Press reported.

The decision to lift martial law late Saturday in another zone of the southern Philippines also suggested tensions there may be easing. But the area's problems are far from resolved, and analysts warn there could be further outbreaks of violence in the months ahead.

Mrs. Arroyo declared martial law in Maguindanao province earlier this month to enable the military to disarm suspected militia members after an apparent feud between rival political clans erupted into a massacre on Nov. 23. The move allowed police and soldiers to make arrests without warrants.

Opposition politicians criticized the decision to impose martial law, which they feared could lead to widespread civil-rights violations and hand too much power to Mrs. Arroyo's government ahead of national and local elections next May.

The Philippines Supreme Court had ordered the government to respond by Monday to several petitions challenging the legal basis for the move.

On Sunday, government officials said they felt they had made enough progress to relax their grip after executing several missions in Maguindanao in recent days.

Soldiers raided properties controlled by members of the Ampatuan clan, which is accused of leading the Nov. 23 massacre that killed 30 journalists and others linked to the rival Mangudadatu family. The government also uncovered large supplies of arms, including assault weapons and armored personnel carriers.

Associated Press

Prison guards cover a hole after armed men knocked down a concrete wall and barged into a jail, freeing at least 31 inmates.

In the past several weeks, authorities have replaced the province's entire 1,000-person police force, and have arrested as many as 600 suspected militants, including some the government said may have been plotting a rebellion.

Prosecutors have filed multiple murder charges against Andal Ampatuan Jr., a local mayor, for allegedly leading the massacre. His father, former Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr., and other clan members have also been arrested and charged with rebellion.

The family maintains its innocence.

"We set specific objectives and we felt we had accomplished those objectives," said Cerge Remonde, a spokesman for Mrs. Arroyo, of lifting martial law.

He said a state of emergency, which allows security forces to set up road checkpoints and seize weapons from civilians, would remain in place in the zone.

The region remains restive. Officials have been targeting as many as 2,400 armed Ampatuan loyalists, many of whom may still be at large.

Analysts have said it could take months, if not years, to pacify a region where the government has long supplied weapons to family-based militias to help them hem in Communist and Muslim insurgencies.

Write to Patrick Barta at patrick.barta@wsj.com

Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation

Image by jimmywayne via Flickr

By ERIK ECKHOLM

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least five of his “homeboys” in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.

One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.

“We all got drunk after Gaylord’s burial, and I started rapping,” said Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. “But I teared up and couldn’t finish.”

Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.

This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.

Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson’s, offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.

Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.

Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted siblings and partners in his mother’s ramshackle house, without running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye. “It’s just like living in a ghetto,” he said. “Someone’s getting beat up every other night.”

The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average.

If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected places.

While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults — including sexual assaults — and rising property crime over the last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car windows are routinely smashed out.

“Tenants are calling in and saying ‘I’m scared,’ ” Paul Iron Cloud, executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on the increase of gang activity.

“It seems that every day we’re getting more violence,” Mr. Iron Cloud said.

Perhaps unique to reservations, rivals sometimes pelt one other with cans of food from the federal commodity program, a practice called “commod-squadding.”

As federal grants to Pine Ridge have declined over the last decade, the tribal police force has shrunk by more than half, with only 12 to 20 officers per shift patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island, said John Mousseau, chairman of the tribe’s judiciary committee.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has proposed large increases in money for the police, courts and juvenile programs, and for fighting rampant domestic and sexual violence on reservations.

Christopher M. Grant, who used to head a police antigang unit in Rapid City, S.D., and is now a consultant on gangs to several tribes and federal agencies, has noted the “marked increase in gang activity, particularly on reservations in the Midwest, the Northwest and the Southwest” over the last five to seven years.

The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang units, up from 75 in 1997.

One group that reaches across reservations in Minnesota, called the Native Mob, is more like the street gangs seen in cities, with hierarchical leadership and involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, Mr. Grant said.

Many of the gangs in Pine Ridge, like the Tre Tre Crips, were started by tribal members who encountered them in prison or while living off the reservation; others have taken their names and colors from movies and records.

Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.

“We’re trying to give an identity back to our youth,” said Melvyn Young Bear, the tribe’s appointed cultural liaison. “They’re into the subculture of African-Americans and Latinos. But they are Lakota, and they have a lot to be proud of.”

Mr. Young Bear, 42, is charged with promoting Lakota rituals, including drumming, chanting and sun dances. He noted that some Head Start programs were now conducted entirely in Lakota.

Michael Little Boy Jr., 30, of the village of Evergreen, said he had initially been tempted by gang life, but with rituals and purifying sweat lodges, “I was able to turn myself around.” He is emerging as a tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote native traditions.

Mr. Grant said a survey of young men in South Dakota reservations found that the approach might be helping.

Mr. Wilson, the 24-year-old gang member, said he regretted not learning the Sioux language when he was young and now wondered about his own future.

“I still get drunk and hang with my homeboys, but not like I used to,” he said.

His car, its windows shattered, sits outside his house, so he cannot get to the G.E.D. class he says he would like to attend. His goal is to run a recording studio where his younger half-brother, Richard Lame, 18, could make rap songs. Mr. Lame is finishing high school and says he wants to go to college.

But he admits that he still joined 30 or so homeboys in town to party any chance he got — “for the rush, the thrill.” As he spoke, he was dressed in the dark colors of his set, the Black Wall Street Boyz; his tiny bedroom was decorated with movie posters of Al Pacino as the megalomaniacal drug dealer Tony Montana in “Scarface,” and he wore a black bandanna.

He pulled out a thick sheaf of his rap lyrics and gave an impromptu performance.

Ever since birth

I been waitin’ for death ...

As thousands flee regime, Eritrea goes it alone

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Facing the prospect of U.N. sanctions and increasing 'brain drain,' young nation's authoritarian president chooses defiance

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 14, 2009

ASMARA, ERITREA -- With the threat of U.S.-backed sanctions looming over this isolated Red Sea nation, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki recently summed up his defiant attitude toward the United States, and indeed most things he deems foreign -- a free press, certain religions, electoral democracy, political parties, global warming.

"Leave us alone," said the commandingly tall former guerrilla leader who became Eritrea's first and only president in 1993, after a 30-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia. "We don't want to be pushed around."

Over the past year, the United States and other nations have accused Eritrea of sending money and weapons to al-Qaeda-linked Islamist rebels in nearby Somalia, and a draft resolution calling for sanctions is now circulating at the U.N. Security Council.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Isaias, 63, dismissed the charges as "fabricated," blamed the United States for pursuing years of failed policies in the region and said of the threatened sanctions: "It will be a regrettable move if it's meant to blackmail or intimidate Eritrea."

But Eritrea's alleged spoiler role in Somalia is only one facet of a country that many observers say should be drawing attention for another, glaring reason: While striving to be an egalitarian, self-reliant utopia, Eritrea has become one of the most unapologetically repressive countries on Earth.

In the name of national security and unity in this nation of 5.5 million people, the government controls all media, officially allows only four religions ("We have enough religions," Isaias said), and so tightly controls the economy that the only Coca-Cola factory here had to close because its owners could not import syrup.

According to Eritreans interviewed here, house searches, arbitrary arrests, and a repertoire of torture that includes stuffing prisoners in tires and rolling them around in the desert are part of a vast system of social control that extends from this petite art deco capital to the tiniest village.

The country's extensive prison system of shipping containers and pits in the desert is by some estimates holding tens of thousands of people without trial, including journalists, Jehovah's Witnesses and citizens who tried to flee the country.

Even so, one young Eritrean said the defining feature of the system is not how brutal it is but how "normal" it now seems. He said he has been arrested without explanation 10 times, once while reporting a crime.

"The first time I was kind of worried," said the young man, who, like most people interviewed here, was afraid to give his name. "But eventually I was like, 'Okay, I'll be out in a few days. Let me get my jacket.' "

Indefinite conscription

The centerpiece of the system is mandatory national service, which forces all 18-year-olds into military training, then duty in the army or ministry for as little as $30 a month. It is a sacrifice many here said they would willingly make, were it not indefinite.

Instead, many young people have a secret motto these days: "Leave to live!" Despite what human rights groups say is a shoot-to-kill order on the border, more than 62,000 Eritreans sought asylum last year, the second-highest number in the world, according to the United Nations.

"I'd say 90 percent of my peers have left," said one young man who is planning his own exit. "All the best brains are leaving."

Observers say Eritrea's leadership still clings to its rebel ideology, which enforced Marxist and egalitarian values in opposition to imperial Ethiopian rule. Largely abandoned by the world during their fight for independence, the rebels made do with weapons they captured, diaspora funding and a strict discipline that helped them pull off a stunning victory against a far better-armed enemy.

"They won their struggle on their own," said Tasier Ali, a Sudanese peace activist who lives in Asmara. "I think, in a way, time stopped for them there."

Since independence, Eritrea has had a bloody border war with Ethiopia that ended with a U.N.-sponsored border demarcation that Ethiopia, a U.S. ally, has not recognized. More recently, Eritrea has been in a tense standoff with neighboring Dijibouti, where the United States has a military base, over a sandy patch of disputed land at the mouth of the Red Sea.

Isaias, often referred to here simply as "the man," said that national security and economic planning have made national service a harsh necessity. The young Eritreans who are leaving, he said, are simply "weak."

"We are not at all bothered," he said, referring to the swelling diaspora that sends home money totaling about a third of the economy. "The best brains do not make the wrong choice for their lives."

Fierce independence

It was a typically bright morning in Asmara, a palm-tree-lined capital where pale yellow, green and gray buildings are detailed with circles, diamonds and lines that lend an air of fantasy. The controlled economy creates a listless mood. Cafes stay fairly full. Shopkeepers close for three hours at lunch. But these days, there is another sight: skinny women and children from the countryside, where a hunger crisis is worsening, begging on the streets.

Isaias, who said he enjoys "Star Wars" films and Tom Clancy novels, walked to his interview at a presidential guesthouse. Though he qualifies as a dictator, he prefers a humble style. In contrast to African leaders who speed about their capitals in long motorcades of Mercedes-Benzes, his consists of an old BMW and a Toyota.

Isaias said that Eritrea is in the midst of a "social transformation" aimed at self-reliance -- which excludes most outside aid for the country -- and dissolving tribal and religious differences in the mostly Muslim and Orthodox Christian country. The process is also aimed at dissolving tribal and religious differences. Elections held too soon would invite divisive tribal politics, he said. Asked how long it would take until Eritreans are ready to vote, he said: "A long, long, long time."

If there is a sense of quiet submission here, some young Eritreans say they are true believers in a system that has produced, by basic measures, one of the healthiest populations in Africa. There is a sense of pride at places such as Medeber, a massive, clanking workshop on the edge of town where hundreds of workers in blue coveralls hammer scraps from old tanks, trucks, beds and bikes into new items: an Orthodox cross, whose circle is made out of an old tank gear; a hair comb made from a mortar.

"We must do it ourselves," said Isak Ybaye, offering a mantra others repeated. "We are preparing something to serve the people!"

During a rare drive with foreign journalists to the port city of Masawa, Information Ministry worker Raffaele Giuseppe marveled at the beauty of his country.

"This road, we are proud of it -- we built it with our own hands," he said. "That's freedom!"Asked about the tens of thousands of people who apparently wish to be free from Eritrea, Giuseppe said the statistics are propaganda.

"We have the same ideology, we have the same perspective, the same mind," he said, allowing that some might disagree "only if they have the perspective of foreign elements in their mind."

"Only until they get enlightened in the cause," Giuseppe added. "The greater Eritrean cause."

Afghan promises to insurgents often empty

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Incentives to fighters to switch sides are key to U.S. plan

By Griff Witte
Monday, December 14, 2009

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN -- His path marked by moonlight, with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back, Feda Mohammed hiked the well-worn trail through the mountains of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. He had traveled the route dozens of times before to attack U.S. soldiers. But this time, Mohammed was on a secret mission to surrender.

Lured to quit the insurgency by the government's promise of a job, land for his family and an end to the misery of fighting, Mohammed illustrated the hope of the top U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for ultimately bringing about an end to the eight-year-old war. Programs to reintegrate former fighters into Afghan society, and perhaps even turn them against their brothers in the insurgency, are at the core of the Obama administration's new strategy.

Yet Mohammed's experience offers a cautionary tale: Four months after he gave himself up, the Afghan government has reneged on all its commitments, leaving him unemployed and his family of 10 with nowhere to live. Hunted by the Taliban and fearful of the U.S. military, he spends much of his time in hiding.

In a war in which everyone must pick a side, Mohammed regrets his choice.

"I'm stuck," he said one day last week, huddled beneath a tattered blanket to ward off the winter chill. "I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go."

Such cases are a major reason the United States and its allies are planning significant investments in programs aimed at using jobs and other incentives to peel Taliban fighters away from their cause.

"This touches every part of McChrystal's plan," said British Maj. Gen. Richard Barrons, who arrived last month to lead NATO's reintegration efforts. "I am absolutely convinced it can be done, and that the time is right. This is an opportunity the Afghan people aren't going to get again. Most of them realize that, and are keen to take it now."

Mohammed, thin and balding at 36, first picked up a Kalashnikov in the late 1980s when Soviet troops still occupied Afghanistan, and like many of his countrymen he has hardly stopped fighting since. For the past eight years, his enemy has been the Americans.

But this summer he was feeling exhausted by war, and he wanted to return to his native Afghanistan after years of living among insurgents-in-exile in Pakistan. One night in August, he tricked his commanders into believing he was traveling to Afghanistan to attack a U.S. base, and ended up defecting along with five of his brothers and their father. He thought the decision would give his family a fresh start.

"Now my children ask me why we can't go back to the way it was when I was fighting," he said, saying his family lived better while on the Taliban payroll. "I don't have an answer."

The men who recruited Mohammed to the government's side said they feel sorry for him, and for the dozens of other insurgents they have persuaded to stop fighting this year through promises they knew to be false.

"We have nothing to offer these people," said Haji Jan Mohammed, director of the government's reconciliation program for Nangarhar and Laghman provinces, in Afghanistan's volatile east. "We don't get any kind of assistance from the central government, so we promise them jobs but there are no jobs, and we promise them land but there is no land."

When the former fighters learn they have been deceived, the results are predictable.

"In a lot of cases, they go right back out and pick up their weapons again," said Haji Sana Gul, a senior adviser to the reconciliation campaign here.

Najibullah Mojadidi, the Kabul-based deputy director for reconciliation, acknowledged the program's flaws but said it gets virtually no support -- either from the Afghans or from foreign governments. Over the past 4 1/2 years, he said, the program's total budget has been less than $3 million.

Barrons, the British general, said that is about to change.

The Bush administration displayed little enthusiasm for Afghan reintegration efforts, preferring to fight insurgents over trying to make peace with them, but Obama's strategists on Afghanistan have bet heavily on the idea. A recent Japanese government pledge of $5 billion in aid for Afghanistan is expected to be applied largely to reintegration efforts, and the United States has also vowed to commit money.

But the effort could be limited, since U.S. and allied officials here say the Afghan government will need to take the lead on the project. "We're not going to put one tiny foot ahead of where the Afghan government wants to go with this," Barrons said.

Still, Barrons and other international officials here have definite ideas of what they want the program to look like. Their vision is inspired by the example of Iraq, but not directly modeled after it.

There, the United States paid Sunni tribal leaders to rise up against al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent groups. Here, officials said, the situation is more complicated because of the many motivations for insurgents, including religion, ethnicity, poverty, illiteracy, the weakness and corruption of the central government and support from powerful elements in neighboring countries, especially Pakistan.

Barrons said the plan is not to pay former fighters directly, but rather to focus on cash-for-work programs that could give them an alternative source of income to the Taliban, which compensates its fighters relatively well.

Barrons also said the United States and its allies will work with the government to facilitate the creation of village-defense forces, which could be used locally to guard against Taliban encroachment and to supplement Afghan national security forces. But he said the groups would not receive direct military assistance.

The hope is that such efforts could, by this time next year, put a significant strain on the Taliban and ultimately lead to high-level reconciliation between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Taliban leaders such as Mohammad Omar.

For the moment, such talks are considered unlikely because the Taliban has the momentum, and some here worry that it is too late for reintegration efforts to have any meaningful impact. If anything, the flow of fighters today appears to be toward the Taliban, not away from it.

Still, three decades of nonstop war in Afghanistan have created a desperate desire for peace, and U.S. planners are betting that some may respond to any offer they get to leave the battlefield behind.

Mohammed Abid, 24, abandoned the Taliban and joined the government's reconciliation program this fall. He represents, he said, a test case for about 70 other insurgents who are also sick of war, but want to know whether the government is serious about its promise to welcome former fighters back home.

So far, Abid said, he feels tricked, and no less resentful of the U.S. forces he thinks are occupying his country.

"History teaches us that all the other religions are against Islam, so as a Muslim, when I see the foreign troops, I can't help but feel hate," said Abid, his glare icy. "I feel it in every inch of my body."

With that, he wrapped a gray scarf tightly around his face, stepped out into the manic traffic of a Jalalabad morning and slipped away.

Dec 13, 2009

A sharp turn toward another Vietnam

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By George McGovern
Sunday, December 13, 2009

As a U.S. senator during the 1960s, I agonized over the badly mistaken war in Vietnam. After doing all I could to save our troops and the Vietnamese people from a senseless conflict, I finally took my case to the public in my presidential campaign in 1972. Speaking across the nation, I told audiences that the only upside of the tragedy in Vietnam was that its enormous cost in lives and dollars would keep any future administration from going down that road again.

I was wrong. Today, I am astounded at the Obama administration's decision to escalate the equally mistaken war in Afghanistan, and as I listen to our talented young president explain why he is adding 30,000 troops -- beyond the 21,000 he had added already -- I can only think: another Vietnam. I hope I am incorrect, but history tells me otherwise.

Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all believed that the best way to save the government in Saigon and defeat Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Cong insurgents was to send in U.S. troops. But the insurgency only grew stronger, even after we had more than 500,000 troops fighting and dying in Vietnam.

We have had tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan for several years, and we have employed an even larger number of mercenaries (or "contractors," as they're called these days). As in Vietnam, the insurgent forces are stronger than ever, and the Afghan government is as corrupt as the one we backed in Saigon.

Why do we send young Americans to risk life and limb on behalf of such worthless regimes? The administration says we need to fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But the major al-Qaeda forces are in Pakistan.

The insurgency in Afghanistan is led by the Taliban. Its target is its own government, not our government. Its only quarrel with us is that its members see us using our troops and other resources to prop up a government they despise. Adding more U.S. forces will fuel the Taliban further.

Starting in 1979, the Soviets tried to control events in Afghanistan for nearly a decade. They lost 15,000 troops, and an even larger number of soldiers were crippled or wounded. Their treasury was exhausted, and the Soviet Union collapsed. A similar fate has befallen other powers that have tried to work their will on Afghanistan's collection of mountain warlords and tribes.

We have the best officers and combat troops in the world, but they are weary after nearly a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why waste these fine soldiers any longer?

Even if we had a good case for a war in Afghanistan, we simply cannot afford to wage it. With a $12 trillion debt and a serious economic recession, this is not a time for unnecessary wars abroad. We should bring our soldiers home before any more of them are killed or wounded -- and before our national debt explodes.

In 1964, Johnson asked several senators who were not running for reelection that year if we would campaign for him. He assured those of us who were opposed to the war in Vietnam that he had no plans to expand the U.S. presence. Johnson won the election in a landslide, telling voters he sought no wider war. "We are not about to send American boys nine or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves," he assured during his campaign.

But once elected, Johnson began to pour in more troops until American forces reached exceeded 500,000. All told, more than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and many more were crippled in mind and body. This is to say nothing of the nearly 2 million Vietnamese who died under U.S. bombardment.

Johnson had a brilliant record in domestic affairs, but Vietnam choked his dream of a Great Society. The war had become unbearable to so many Americans -- civilian and military -- that the landslide victor of 1964 did not seek reelection four years later.

Obama has the capacity to be a great president; I just hope that Afghanistan will not tarnish his message of change. After half a century of Cold War and hot wars, it is time to rebuild our great and troubled land. By closing down the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can divert the vast sums being spent there to revitalizing our own nation.

In 1972, I called on my fellow citizens to "Come home, America." Today, I commend these words to our new president.

George McGovern, a former senator from South Dakota and a decorated World War II combat veteran, was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.

A Nobel winner who went wrong on rights

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By Joshua Kurlantzick
Sunday, December 13, 2009

In accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday, President Obama talked about the quiet dignity of human rights reformers such as Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, the bravery of Zimbabwean voters who "cast their ballots in the face of beatings" and the need to bear witness to "the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran." Earlier in the week, thousands of Iranians did just that, gathering at university campuses in the most substantial demonstrations in the country since the summer, when hundreds of thousands protested Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed presidential election.

But back in June, even as much of the world cheered the Iranian protesters, Obama seemed reluctant to weigh in. "It is not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling," he said at the time. The White House may have feared that public support from Obama would allow the regime to paint the demonstrators as American stooges or might undermine U.S. efforts on Tehran's nuclear program. Such fears seemed to paralyze the administration.

The irony of Obama's Nobel Prize is not that he accepted it while waging two wars. After all, as Obama said in Oslo: "One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek." The stranger thing is that, from China to Sudan, from Burma to Iran, a president lauded for his commitment to peace has dialed down a U.S. commitment to human rights, one that persisted through both Republican and Democratic administrations dating back at least to Jimmy Carter. And so far, he has little to show for it.

The reasons for this shift are complicated. After a number of conversations with current Obama advisers and former White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, I've concluded that the president's reasons for demoting human rights may have been well intentioned -- even if the strategy isn't working out as he planned.

For one thing, Obama clearly wants to distinguish himself from George W. Bush, who badly tainted the human rights agenda by linking it to the war in Iraq and by adopting an overly moralistic, evangelical tone about democracy. According to administration officials, this desire may have led Obama, early on, to be reticent about forcefully advocating democracy abroad, even as he boosted funding for democracy-promotion programs. But they believe the administration has reversed course, and they say the president is now talking more aggressively about democracy and human rights.

Some officials believe negotiating about human rights behind the scenes works better than bullying in public, since it permits nasty regimes to save face while, at least theoretically, allowing them to quietly make concessions. And some of the administration's top human rights advocates came into office focused, not unnecessarily, on cleaning up America's own abuses, from Guantanamo Bay to our rendition program -- believing that human rights advocacy starts with setting a better example at home.

In other cases, Obama seems to have decided that winning support on challenges such as nuclear proliferation and climate change means treading quietly around human rights. With China, the president may also be hesitant to risk alienating our $800 billion banker. Finally, the president seems to believe that, no matter how brutal a government he is dealing with, he can find common cause.

Yet there is little evidence that his strategy will succeed. Obama may have toned down U.S. rhetoric, but who's to say whether this will propel Iran and North Korea to halt their nuclear programs, or whether China will prove to be an effective partner on climate change. "The harder-to-fathom thing for me is why they think that cutting off support -- rhetorical or material -- to democrats and dissidents in repressive societies will gain the U.S. anything on the other agendas," said Tom Melia, deputy executive director of Freedom House, a global democracy watchdog.

On occasion, the administration has diminished the focus on democracy at some basic institutional levels. Though the Bush administration established a deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy, Obama's National Security Council structure has explicitly downgraded the role of democracy specialists. And some parts of the government seem to be backing away from even the word "democracy." "The USAID Mission in Amman called in all its implementers (grantees and contractors alike) to announce, among other things, that the Democracy and Governance portfolio (and the titles of people in the Mission) would no longer be 'democracy & governance,' " Melia wrote in an e-mail. The United States Agency for International Development did not respond to a request for a comment.

These subtle signals have emerged even from the highest levels of the government: In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton highlighted "three Ds" that would allow the United States "to exercise global leadership effectively": defense, development and diplomacy. Democracy apparently did not make the cut.

The extent of the administration's shift is also visible on the ground -- even if the payoffs aren't. In Egypt, a critical arena for democratization efforts, the United States has cut funding to independent civil society groups that promote democracy and is instead working more closely with government-linked nonprofits, according to several human rights activists who closely follow Egypt. "The administration doesn't want to antagonize Egypt, a major Middle East ally, now that they might need Egypt's help if there is going to be action against Iran," said David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who previously worked on Middle East issues in the Bush administration.

In Sudan, a country whose leader is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, U.S. policy now involves closer dealings than in recent years, and the administration's special envoy to the region, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, has deemphasized human rights abuses there. In September, he told The Washington Post that the United States should be "giving out cookies" to Khartoum, offering inducements for good behavior rather than punishment for bad -- as if a regime accused of genocide were a misbehaving child.

Obama has changed the U.S. approach toward Burma, too. For more than a decade, Washington emphasized the use of sanctions, visa bans and other tools to isolate the Burmese junta, which is accused of overseeing forced labor, mass rape campaigns and other abuses. But the Obama administration has called for direct dialogue with the junta. And although the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, Kurt Campbell, has noted in congressional testimony that the administration maintains sanctions and is not writing the regime a blank check, it's not clear exactly what further bad deeds the junta would have to commit to warrant a more severe reprimand.

Of course, the administration's approach toward China has attracted the most notice. On his recent trip there, Obama was conspicuously silent about human rights in his public statements. At a town hall forum in Shanghai, he responded to a question about the Internet by saying, "I'm a strong supporter of noncensorship" -- a strangely twisted phrase from a normally masterful communicator.

Later, in a joint news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao (in which the two men took no questions from journalists), Obama said that he "welcomes China's efforts in playing a greater role on the world stage," but he did not criticize Beijing's human rights record or mention its recent crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang. "We were told that the administration privately brought up Uighur issues, but that's it," said Omar Kanat, vice president of the World Uighur Congress, an activist group.

And in October, Obama's administration became the first since 1991 not to meet with the Dalai Lama, even privately, when the Tibetan leader was in Washington. According to Kanat, the administration has also refused any high-level meetings with Rabeeya Kadeer, the most prominent Uighur dissident and a woman welcomed to the White House by Bush. "We've asked for meetings with senior people at the NSC, State, but they always just say they are too busy," Kanat said.

When asked about these points, one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, replied that the White House has welcomed other dissidents, including several Zimbabwean activists, and said administration officials will try to meet with Kadeer soon.

"Advancing human rights and promoting democratic principles are key tenets of this Administration's foreign policy," said the National Security Council's spokesman, Mike Hammer, in an e-mail. "The Obama Administration will meet with dissidents any time those meetings can serve to advance a just cause. The President spoke in Shanghai to an on-line audience of millions of Chinese about human rights and democratic freedoms as universal values. The President has been interviewed by a Cuban dissident blogger as well as the progressive Chinese Southern Weekly, and he will meet with the Dalai Lama."

On matters of democracy and human rights, past presidents have wielded the bully pulpit to impressive effect, sometimes winning the release of high-profile dissidents. After Bush highlighted the case of Ayman Nour, the most prominent Egyptian dissident, in early 2005, Hosni Mubarak's government released him from jail -- but when attention faded, the regime locked him up again.

Conversely, Obama's approach to Sudan may be encouraging the regime to use even tougher tactics in war-torn southern regions of the country. According to Michael Green, an NSC senior director for Asian affairs under Bush, "Authoritarian states take what leaders say more seriously than what bureaucrats say." In other words, when the president does not make human rights a priority, it becomes easier for Beijing or Khartoum to ignore requests by lower-level American officials.

For all Obama's compromises, the choice between human rights and other priorities may be a false one. Obama may not need to pick between criticizing regimes like those in China and Iran and working with those governments on other challenges. "You can see the Dalai Lama and rhetorically push on human rights and still have the other elements of the relationship with China," said Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

Obama's speech in Oslo reminded us why the Nobel committee decided to honor him with the peace prize: This was Obama at the height of his oratorical powers, speaking of war and peace and, yes, human rights, and calling upon mankind to "reach for the world that ought to be." But the committee didn't set out to merely applaud Obama's great rhetoric; it bestowed this honor on him as an aspirational prize, one that would inspire him to even greater actions.

"The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone," Obama said in his speech. ". . . We must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time."

Let's hope he follows through.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A changing future for foreign coverage

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By Andrew Alexander
Ombudsman
Sunday, December 13, 2009

The Post recently announced plans to close its remaining domestic bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Are the foreign bureaus next?

For a money-losing newspaper with a "for and about Washington" focus, expensive overseas bureaus would seem endangered. If The Post can't afford correspondents in its own country, how can it justify them around the globe? Recently, the paper has quietly decided that bureaus will go dark in Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin. Some Post staffers fear the beginning of the end of a storied commitment to foreign news.

Top editors insist it isn't. There's good reason to believe them. Readership data show strong demand for foreign news. And Washington has a large and literate international community.

"I wouldn't have come here if I didn't believe that the paper was committed to it," said Foreign Editor Douglas Jehl, who came on board in August from the New York Times to supervise the foreign operation, including its 13 bureaus. Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli said, "I don't see us reducing that staff."

But the focus of coverage is changing, geographically and conceptually.

"We're making some hard choices and we're not covering all parts of the world equally," said Jehl. "We're throwing more resources into those parts of the world that we think matter most."

A bureau is opening in Islamabad to expand Afghanistan-Pakistan coverage that had been provided by a sole Kabul-based reporter. Next year, a bureau will open in Beirut to increase coverage of the Arab world. Bureaus remain in Baghdad, London, Paris, Jerusalem, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, Moscow, Nairobi, Mexico City, Kabul and Bogota. Reinforcements from Washington will continue to be assigned temporarily to overseas hot spots.

Jehl said readers will see fewer Post bylines on routine news stories already provided by wire services, fewer "touristic" features, less "stenographic" coverage and more emphasis on brevity.

"There were too many long stories in the past," said Jehl. "Too many stories took too long to unwind." He wants coverage that is "urgent and delivered at a length that is digestible, and in a form that's digestible." He added: "We're spending less time writing enormous, lengthy projects aimed at prize juries and fellow journalists."

Foreign coverage is expensive. Brauchli will say only that it costs The Post "somewhere between" $5 million and $10 million annually. With salaries, travel, war zone insurance, relocation expenses, cost-of-living adjustments, security personnel and local support staff, the total cost is probably near the high end of that estimate. At the peak of the Iraq war, yearly expenses for The Post's Baghdad bureau were roughly $1.5 million. The Post has sent more than 80 staffers to cover the war. For foreign coverage, it can draw on about 90 staffers who, combined, are fluent or conversational in 30 languages.

Post newspaper readership surveys in recent years have shown high interest in the world news pages. It is less than for the front page and the Metro section, but about equal to the Style section and comfortably more than in Sports, the opinion pages and Business. On The Post's Web site, the order of interest is somewhat different, and world news tends to rank behind those other sections.

Many of these readers are part of Washington's unique international constituency. Hundreds of thousands work for the State Department, the intelligence agencies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Pentagon, the diplomatic corps, and groups and corporations with global interests. A Brookings Institution report this year said the region has more than a million foreign-born residents.

The challenge is providing coverage that fits The Post's "for and about Washington" mantra. Jehl said this doesn't mean going hyper-local, such as covering local members of Congress on foreign fact-finding trips. Rather, it means focusing on "issues that matter most" in Washington. "It's not all about conflicts" like Iraq or Afghanistan, he said. It's also about economic or military matters in China or India that have special resonance with The Post's foreign news consumers.

Many newspapers have sharply reduced or abandoned foreign coverage, prompting a myth that it's becoming extinct. In reality, it's evolving -- and thriving. Much of the coverage is now specialized. Bloomberg News, which began providing financial news in 1990 with a six-person staff, currently employs 1,500 people in 145 bureaus worldwide. And news organizations are sharing correspondents (The Post does this with NPR in Bogota) or have "bartered" to swap stories from parts of the world where one or the other needs coverage.

Jehl expects further modest budget belt-tightening through 2011. If The Post's financial fortunes worsen, of course, everything will be on the table. But for now, foreign coverage seems safe.

Andrew Alexander can be reached at 202-334-7582 or at ombudsman@washpost.com.

U.S. firms lag in bids for Iraqi oil

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Russians, Europeans and Chinese win most contracts for developing major fields

By Ernesto Londoño
Sunday, December 13, 2009

BAGHDAD -- Chinese, Russian and European companies won the right this weekend to develop major oil fields in Iraq, while U.S. firms made a paltry showing at auctions that represent the first major incursion of foreign oil companies into Iraq in four decades.

The companies that secured 10 contracts in auctions held over the weekend and in June stand to profit handsomely, but they are taking a significant gamble.

Iraq has the third-largest proven crude reserves in the world, but the country remains perilous; it suffers from chronic corruption and acrimonious politics that have prevented the passing of new laws to regulate the sector.

Of the seven U.S. companies that registered for the auctions, only one emerged as the leading partner in a consortium that won a contract. Another U.S. company has a minority stake in a contract.

China's state-owned oil company has a major stake in two contracts. Russian firms are parties in two others.

European firms made a strong showing. Royal Dutch Shell, Italy's Eni, British Petroleum and Norway's Statoil got deals.

Companies from Malaysia and Angola were parties to five winning bids.

Oil analysts say the outcome was surprising, considering that U.S. oil companies have long yearned to work in Iraq.

The analysts said it is ironic that U.S. companies do not appear poised to cash in on the aftermath of a war that many in the United States and the Middle East argued was motivated by a desire to tap into Iraq's oil reserves.

After the invasion, the United States paid oil executives to advise Iraq's Oil Ministry and set up large military and civilian task forces to boost the country's ailing energy sector.

"American oil executives provided free training to the ministry," said Ben Lando, bureau chief of Iraq Oil Report, a trade news outlet. "It is quite strange that after wanting access to Iraqi oil for so long, U.S. companies have largely remained on the sidelines."

Security concerns, underscored by coordinated bombings Tuesday, and the threat of political instability as the U.S. military withdraws probably gave American oil executives pause, analysts said.

In some cases, U.S. companies were at a disadvantage because their rivals, particularly the Chinese and Russians, have lower labor costs and do not answer to shareholders, which might allow them to take more risks.

"U.S. companies report back to their shareholders, not to public opinion," said Ruba Husari, editor of Iraq Oil Forum, another trade news site. Nonetheless, she said, "their low profile is intriguing," considering that the auctions are widely seen as the last major opportunity for years for international oil firms wanting to do business in Iraq.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill called the opening of Iraq's oil industry to foreign investment an achievement of "historical significance" and said he was encouraged by how transparent the process had been.

Hill said the embassy advised U.S. companies as they weighed the pros and cons of doing business in Iraq, as diplomats do around the world.

"I'm not in a position to express disappointment," he said of the American showing at the auctions. "They had to make a decision based on what they're prepared to pay."

Exxon Mobil was the only U.S. company that led a winning consortium. Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Inc. got roughly a 25 percent share in another.

The state-owned Chinese National Petroleum Corp. bid on more contracts than any other company.

In marked contrast to the Americans, Chinese diplomats in Baghdad have kept a low profile in recent years, working out of a hotel and drawing little public attention. But Iraqi officials say they have been struck by the caliber of Chinese diplomats, many of whom speak flawless Arabic and have developed a nuanced understanding of Iraqi politics.

"We all know that China is on track to become a major economic as well as technological power," said Assam Jihad, a spokesman for the Oil Ministry.

Under the 20-year service contracts, the Iraqi government will pay companies a set fee for each barrel produced above the current output level at each field.

The contracts also position the companies to play major roles in Iraq if the government loosens restrictions on foreign investment. The contracts awarded at the auctions are service contracts, which do not give companies a share of profits.

This weekend's auction was far more successful than the one in June, when the ministry awarded one contract out of the 10 on the auction block. Two other deals from that auction were reached later.

Of the 10 fields up for grab in the second round, the ministry awarded seven contracts.

Iraq's oil revenue, the backbone of its economy, has dipped below target this year as a result of lower prices and export volumes. Officials hope the refurbished fields could pump as much as 11 million barrels per day in eight years. The country currently pumps 2.4 million a day.

A dispute over federalism between politicians in Baghdad and their counterparts in the autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq is one of the biggest challenges oil companies entering Iraq are likely to face.

The chairman of the Iraqi parliament's oil and gas committee, a Kurd, has warned executives that the contracts are illegal. He has called for the resignation of Oil Minister Hussain Shahristani.

"These companies should think twice before signing contracts," said the lawmaker, Ali Hussein Belo.

Meanwhile, deals the Kurds have signed with foreign companies for fields in northern Iraq have come under fire in Baghdad, which banned those companies from participating in the auctions.

The fight could draw oil companies into one of the most protracted battles over power in Iraq. "We have faith in the government," Mounir Bouaziz, a vice president for Shell, said after his company won a coveted field. "The government is behind these contracts."

Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim and Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.

Cuba detains contractor for U.S. government

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American was handing out mobile phones, laptops to activists

By William Booth and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 13, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- The Cuban government has arrested an American citizen working on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development who was distributing cellphones and laptop computers to Cuban activists, State Department officials and congressional sources said Saturday.

The contractor, who has not been identified, works for Bethesda-based Development Alternatives. The company said in a statement that it was awarded a government contract last year to help USAID "support the rule of law and human rights, political competition and consensus building" in Cuba.

Consular officers with the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, the capital, are seeking access to the contractor, who was arrested Dec. 5. The charges have not been made public. Under Cuban law, however, a Cuban citizen or a foreign visitor can be arrested for nearly anything under the claim of "dangerousness."

The detention of an American contractor working for the U.S. government may raise tensions between the Castro brothers' communist government in Cuba and the Obama administration, which has been taking a "go-slow" approach to improving relations with the island.

The new U.S. policy stresses that if Cuba takes concrete steps such as freeing political prisoners and creating more space for opposition, the United States will reciprocate.

A senior Republican congressional aide said the American contractor was being held in a secure facility in Havana.

"It is bizarre they're just holding him and not letting us see him at all," said the aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record. Attempts to reach Cuban government officials to discuss the case were unsuccessful.

Cellphones and laptops are legal in Cuba, though they are new and coveted commodities in a country where the average worker's wage is $15 a month. The Cuban government granted ordinary citizens the right to buy cellphones just last year; they are used mostly for texting, because a 15-minute phone conversation would eat up a day's wages.

Internet use is extremely limited on the island. It is available in expensive hotels, where foreign visitors stay, and at some government facilities, such as universities. Cubans who want to log on often have to give their names to the government. Access to some Web sites is restricted.

A person familiar with the detained American's activity said he was "working with local organizations that were trying to connect with each other and get connected to the Internet and connect with their affinity groups in the U.S."

The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the case, said Cuban authorities were aware of the project. "Why they picked on this situation," the person said, "is a bit of a mystery."

Cuba has a nascent blogging community, led by the popular commentator Yoani Sánchez, who often writes about how she and her husband are followed and harassed by government agents because of her Web posts. Sánchez has repeatedly applied for permission to leave the country to accept journalism awards, so far unsuccessfully.

"Counterrevolutionary activities," which include mild protests and critical writings, carry the risk of censure or arrest. Anti-government graffiti and speech are considered serious crimes.

"It should come as no surprise that the Cuban regime would lock up an American for distributing communications equipment," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), a Cuban American and the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The detention of an American in Cuba is rare. The handful of U.S. citizens behind bars in Cuba are there for crimes such as drug smuggling, said Gloria Berbena, the press officer at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

"An activity that in any other open society would be legal -- giving away free cellphones -- is in Cuba a crime," said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas program of Human Rights Watch. The group recently issued a critical report on freedoms in Cuba called "New Castro, Same Cuba," a reference to installing Raúl Castro as president in place of his ailing older brother Fidel.

Human Rights Watch highlighted 40 cases, including that of Ramón Velásquez Toranzo, who was sentenced to three years in prison for "dangerousness" in 2007 after setting out on a peaceful protest march across Cuba.

Vivanco said that the accused in Cuba are often arrested, tried and imprisoned within a day. He said that any solution to the contractor's case would probably be political and that the Cuban government often provokes a negative reaction in the United States just as both countries begin to move toward more dialogue.

"Our prime concern is for the safety, well-being and quick return to the United States of the detained individual," said the contractor's boss, Jim Boomgard, chief executive officer of Development Alternatives.

Sheridan reported from Washington.

Mexico's drug cartels siphon liquid gold

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Bold theft of $1 billion in oil, resold in U.S., has dealt a major blow to the treasury

By Steve Fainaru and William Booth
washington post foreign service
Sunday, December 13, 2009

MALTRATA, MEXICO -- Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.

Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to U.S. companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.

The widespread theft of Mexico's most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderón's war against the drug cartels, and it shows how the traffickers are rapidly evolving from traditional narcotics smuggling to activities as diverse as oil theft, transport and sales.

Oil theft has been a persistent problem for the state-run Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, but the robbery increased sharply after Calderón launched his war against the cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006. The drug war has claimed more than 16,000 lives and has led the cartels, which rely on drug trafficking for most of their revenue, to branch out into other illegal activities.

Authorities said they have traced much of the oil rustling to the Zetas, a criminal organization founded by former military commandos. Although the Zetas initially served as a protection arm of the powerful Gulf cartel, they now call their own shots and dominate criminal enterprise in the oil-rich states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas.

"The Zetas are a parallel government," said Eduardo Mendoza Arellano, a federal lawmaker who heads a national committee on energy. "They practically own vast stretches of the pipelines, from the highway to the very door of the oil companies."

The Zetas earn millions of dollars by "taxing" the oil pipelines -- organizing the theft themselves or taking a cut from anyone who does the stealing, according to Mexican authorities. The U.S. Treasury Department this summer designated two Zeta commanders as narcotics "kingpins," which allows authorities to seize assets.

The Zetas often work with former Pemex employees, according to Ramón Pequeño García, chief of anti-drug operations at Mexico's Public Security Ministry. The former employees "are highly skilled people who have the technical knowledge to extract oil from the pipelines. They are now under the control of the Zetas," Pequeño said.

Across the border

This year, executives of four Texas companies pleaded guilty to felony charges of conspiring to receive and sell millions of dollars worth of stolen petroleum condensate. U.S. law enforcement officials said in interviews that they have no evidence showing that the men were connected to drug traffickers.

During his September arraignment in Houston, Arnoldo Maldonado, president of Y Gas & Oil, pleaded guilty to receiving about $327,000 to coordinate at least three deliveries of tankers filled with stolen condensate to another Texas company, Continental Fuels, according to a court transcript of the hearing.

Asked by U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. how the condensate had been stolen from Pemex, Maldonado replied: "I have no idea on that, sir."

Donald Schroeder, a former president of Houston-based Trammo Petroleum, pleaded guilty in May to buying $2 million worth of stolen Mexican condensate, according to a transcript of the hearing. Schroeder re-sold the condensate to another company, BASF, for a $150,000 profit, prosecutors told the court.

A spokesman for BASF, which has not been implicated in the case, said the company was unaware that the material was stolen and is cooperating with the investigation.

In August, U.S. authorities presented the Mexican government with an oversize check for $2.4 million as a repayment.

A sophisticated operation

Pemex reported losing $715 million worth of oil to theft last year. The company said it discovered 396 clandestine taps. This year, Pemex projects it will lose at least $350 million to oil pilfering. Nearly half of the thefts occur in the rugged hills around Veracruz, a largely rural state situated in a region with 2,136 miles of pipeline running from the Gulf of Mexico to refineries in other parts of the country.

To steal the oil, Mexican authorities said, thieves sometimes use safe houses from where they build extensive tunnel networks leading to the pipelines. They fabricate powerful drills that enable them to puncture the highly pressurized steel pipes and extract the oil without causing spills or suspicious drops in pressure. Pemex officials said they have found clandestine taps with as many as five spigots.

In Maltrata, in central Veracruz, Pemex officials showed a reporter a four-foot-deep, six-foot-wide trench ringed by yellow police tape that they said had been dug by thieves to reach an underground pipeline in a clearing near a federal highway last month.

After perforating the exposed two-foot pipeline using a hand-tooled drill and connecting valves to regulate the pressure, the officials said, the traffickers ran a 300-yard hose through the brush to a tanker and filled it with about 200 barrels of crude oil.

"They are very sophisticated -- in some cases, it's three kilometers from the pipeline to the tanker where they deposit the oil," said Mauro Cáceres, who oversees the pipeline network in the region. "It is just constant. They take, and they take, and they take, and they take."

Pemex lost 140,141 barrels of oil to theft last month in the Veracruz region alone, the company reported. At $75 a barrel, the current market price for Mexican oil, the loss comes to $10 million. The company reports that oil rustlers are stealing from the pipelines in all 31 Mexican states.

Defending the pipelines

"When they steal this oil, it's not just a regular crime," said Mendoza, the federal deputy. "It becomes a crime against society, because the people who steal this oil the next day are using it to kidnap us. Tomorrow, with that oil money, they are shipping drugs."

The theft is both a symbolic and financial blow to the Mexican government. Taxes paid by Pemex account for 40 percent of the federal budget. Pemex still owns and operates almost every gas station in Mexico. Juan José Suárez, Pemex's chief executive officer, said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Mexico City that the oil theft is a crime against all Mexican citizens: "This is not taking from Pemex; it's taking from the owners of Pemex. This is the net worth of everybody."

Mexico has launched an all-out campaign to defend the pipelines, drawing in the army, the attorney general's office, the Interior Ministry and the customs service. During the past two years, the government has conducted helicopter overflights, installed electronic detection devices inside the pipelines and beefed up Pemex's private security force.

Suárez estimates that Pemex will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three years defending its pipelines. With the company's maintenance staff overwhelmed, Pemex assembled 20-man teams this year to repair breaches caused by theft.

"The teams are working day and night," Cáceres said.

Pemex sent out a call for help to the federal government in 2007. In June that year, Mexican customs officials informed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that they had discovered dozens of Mexican companies that appeared to be conspiring with U.S. firms to export stolen petroleum products across the border.

Working closely with the Mexican customs service, ICE investigators said, they soon uncovered a network of Mexican and American companies that shipped stolen oil to the United States in tankers, stored it in aboveground containers in Texas and then shipped it in barges to end users in the United States.

With oil prices then at record highs, the scheme allowed U.S. companies to buy petroleum products at below-market value. The scam involved hundreds of people, according to Jerry Robinette, special agent in charge of the ICE office of investigations in San Antonio, which is overseeing the probe.

"The folks that made the most amount of money are the people who are going to harm us the most, and that was the organized crime in Mexico," Robinette said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.