SOP RUAK, Thailand — Basket loads of fish, villagers bathing along the banks of the river, a farmer’s market selling jungle delicacies — these are Pornlert Prompanya’s boyhood memories of a wild and pristine Mekong River.
Mr. Pornlert — now 32 and the owner of a company that organizes speedboat outings for tourists in this village in northern Thailand, where Myanmar and Laos converge — peers across the Mekong today at a more modern picture: a newly constructed, gold-domed casino where high-rollers are chauffeured along the riverbanks in a Bentley and a stretch Cadillac limousine.
The Mekong has long held a mystique for outsiders, whether American G.I.’s in the Delta during the Vietnam War or ill-starred 19th-century French explorers who searched for the river’s source in Tibet. The earliest visitors realized the hard way that the river was untamed and treacherous, its waterfalls and rapids ensuring it would never become Southeast Asia’s Mississippi or Rhine.
But today the river, which courses 3,032 miles through portions of China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South ChinaSea, is rapidly being transformed by a rising tide of economic development, the region’s thirst for electricity and the desire to use the river as a cargo thoroughfare. The Mekong has been spared the pollution that blackens many of Asia’s great rivers, but it is no longer the backwater of centuries past.
China has built three hydroelectric dams on the Mekong (known as the Lancang in Chinese) and is halfway through a fourth at Xiaowan, which when completed will be the world’s tallest dam, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
Laos is planning so many dams on the Mekong and its tributaries — 7 of about 70 have been completed — that government officials have said that their ambition is to turn the country into “the battery of Asia.” Cambodia is planning two dams.
At the same time, the dashed dreams of French colonizers to use the river as a southern gateway to China are being partly realized: After Chinese engineers dynamited a series of rapids and rocks in the early part of this decade, trade by riverboat between China and Thailand increased by close to 50 percent.
The cargo passes through increasingly populated areas, erstwhile sleepy cities in Laos that are now teeming with tourists and defying the economic downturn with swinging construction cranes. Many parts of the Mekong were once a star-gazer’s dream; now nights on the river are increasingly aglare with electric lights.
Environmentalists worry that the rush to develop the Mekong, particularly the dams, is not only changing the panorama of the river but could also destroy the livelihoods of people who have depended on it for centuries. One of the world’s most bountiful rivers is under threat, warns a series of reports by the United Nations, environmental groups and academics.
The most controversial aspects of the dams are their effects on migrating fish and on the rice-growing Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where half of that country’s food is grown. The delta depends on mineral-rich silt, which the Chinese dams are partially blocking.
Experts say the new crop of dams will block even more sediment and the many types of fish that travel great distances to spawn, damaging the $2 billion Mekong fishing industry, according to the Mekong River Commission, an advisory body set up in 1995 by the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Of the hundreds of fish species in the river, 87 percent are migratory, according to a 2006 study.
“The fish will have nowhere to go,” said Kaew Suanpad, a 78-year-old farmer and fisherman in the village of Nagrasang, Laos, which sits above the river’s great Khone Falls.
“The dams are a very big issue for the 60 million people in the Mekong basin,” said Milton Osborne, visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and the author of several books on the Mekong. “People depend in very substantial ways on the bounty of the Mekong.”
Some analysts see the seeds of international conflict in the rush to dam the river. Civic groups in Thailand say they are frustrated that China does not seem to care how its dams affect the lives of people downstream.
In August, the Vietnamese province of An Giang began a “Save the Mekong” campaign that opposes the construction of the dams in the lower part of the river, according to Carl Middleton, the head of the Mekong program at International Rivers, an organization campaigning against the Mekong dams.
Neither China nor military-ruled Myanmar, the two northernmost countries through which the river passes, are members of the Mekong River Commission, freeing them from the obligation to consult other countries on issues such as building dams and sharing water.
And yet, for now, the dams are not national preoccupations in any of the countries along the river.
“Most of the voices that are shouting in the wilderness about these dams are still very little heard outside of academic circles,” Mr. Osbourne said.
There have been no major protests and for many people in the region the dams are the symbol of progress and avenues to greater prosperity. The development of the Mekong is also an affirmation of a new Asia that is no longer hidebound by ideological conflict.
Jeremy Bird, the chief executive officer of the Mekong River Commission, says the dams are likely to even out the flow of the river, mitigating flooding and making the river even more navigable.
“You could have launches like you have on the Rhine,” Mr. Bird said. He added: “With dams there are always negatives and positives.”
For Mr. Pornlert, whose boyhood village of Sop Ruak has now grown into a town with five-star resorts and restaurants catering to tourists, the negatives seem to outweigh the good.
He says the river behaves unpredictably, it is more difficult to catch fish, and he is uneasy about swimming in the river because there is “too much trash and pollution.”
“The water level used to depend on the seasons,” Mr. Pornlert said. “Now it depends on how much water China wants and needs.”
By Sudarsan Raghavan Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, December 17, 2009; 3:32 PM
SANAA, YEMEN -- Yemeni forces, backed by airstrikes, killed at least 28 al-Qaeda militants and captured 17 others Thursday in a pre-dawn assault on an alleged training camp and other areas in this Middle East nation, where al-Qaeda's presence is of growing concern to U.S. officials.
The operation targeted militants planning suicide bomb attacks against Yemeni and foreign sites, including schools, according to a statement on 26Sept.net, a Yemeni Web site linked to the government's military. Several civilians were also apparently killed and homes destroyed, witnesses told local news agencies.
Yemen's government is under pressure from the United States to step up efforts to dismantle al-Qaeda's network in this volatile country, the Arab world's poorest. Thursday's operation was one of the biggest counterterrorism efforts by the nation's weak central government in recent memory.
It has been struggling with a civil war in the north, a secessionist movement in the south and a crumbling economy. In this void, al-Qaeda has steadily grown, using the nation's vast lawless, rugged terrain as a haven. U.S. officials are concerned that al-Qaeda could use Yemen, strategically located in the heart of one of the world's lucrative oil and shipping zones, as a launching pad for attacks against neighboring Saudi Arabia and in the Horn of Africa.
Mohammed Albasha, spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, said that the dead included Mohammed Saleh Al-Kazemi, a leading al-Qaeda figure in Yemen.
President Obama called Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to praise this country's efforts to fight terrorism, saying Thursday's raids "show Yemen's determination to face the threat of Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network of Al Qaeda," according to Yemen's Saba state news agency.
Obama, the agency reported, gave assurances that the United States would support Yemen in the realms of security, politics and development.
It was unclear what role the United States played in Thursday's operations. American drones and operatives have targeted al-Qaeda sites in Yemen, Somalia and the Horn of Africa in the past. When asked by reporters Thursday if the United States was involved in any operations in Yemen, State Department spokesman Robert Wood declined to speak specifically about Thursday's operation, saying "we cooperate with the government of Yemen and other governments around the world in fighting al-Qaeda and others, you know, practicing terrorism."
Thursday's operation targeted the alleged training camp in Al-Maajala, 300 miles south of the capital Sanaa, in the southern province of Abyan, a longtime haven for Islamic jihadists. The attack "led to the killing of between 24 to 30 militants of Al Qaeda, including foreign members, who carried out training," the military statement said.
An opposition Web site, quoting sources in Abyan, claimed that as many as 53 people were killed and that most of the victims were women and children.
The military did not specify the nationalities of those arrested. Nor did it indicate which foreigners were being targeted.
Four would-be suicide bombers were killed in a raid in Arhab district, northeast of Sanaa, and four other militants were arrested, according to the statement. Thirteen other alleged al-Qaeda members were arrested in the capital.
Bin Laden has close ties to Yemen: He married a Yemeni woman, and his father was born here. In 2000, al-Qaeda bombers attacked the USS Cole in the southern city of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. Since then, militants have carried out a string of attacks on U.S. missionaries, foreign tourists and Yemeni security forces. Last year, heavily armed gunmen targeted the U.S. Embassy with a car bomb and rockets. The attack killed 16, including six assailants.
By Anne Hull Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 17, 2009; A01
WARREN, OHIO -- All day long the front door buzzes at Uptown Gems & Jewels. The people come in with their trinkets wrapped in tissue or velvet boxes. They say their hours have been cut or they've been laid off. Some have their first names stitched in cursive on their uniforms, others wear safety-toe boots.
At campaign time, they are celebrated as the people who built America. Now they just want to know how much they can get for a wedding band.
"Let me show you something," says Dallas Root, standing behind the counter with a jeweler's loupe strung around his neck. He holds up a gallon-size Ziploc bag that's two-thirds full of gold -- engagement rings, class rings, promise rings, serpentine chains, St. Christopher medals, bracelets, anklets and earrings.
Uptown Gems & Jewels doesn't offer the refined science of Wall Street or Washington. But when Root puts the loupe to his eye, he peers into the lives of the working class and sees how badly the recession has knocked them to the ground.
The same week he holds up the sack of gold is the same week that Ford Motor Co. posts third-quarter profits of $1 billion, news that sparks optimism that a national recovery is underway. But a good week for some is still a terrible week for others.
In this corner of northeast Ohio, from Warren to Youngstown, where the old steel mills along the Mahoning River stand like rusted-out mastodons in the weeds, the recession was a final cruelty piled on top of three decades of disappearing jobs.
The recession here wasn't a black hole at the end of a sustained boom, or downgrading from Target to Wal-Mart or cutting out $3 drinks at Starbucks. It was a confrontation with survival.
As other areas of the country start to revive, the recession's full force is still on display here. Winter has descended. Unemployment benefits are running out. New jobs have not appeared. And the door keeps swinging open at Uptown Gems & Jewels.
Dallas Root tries to describe the moment when a person parts with his last glint of prosperity.
"They don't want to look desperate," he says. "They say, 'I've had this stuff lying around and I was thinking about getting rid of it.' There's a lot of pride in Warren."
But the pride is mixed with 15 percent unemployment and a sickening worry that the recovery might never touch this place.
'A final erasure'
The road from Warren and Youngstown is a graveyard of silent machines behind chain-link fences. Near the Pennsylvania border, this 25-mile stretch along the Mahoning River was the world's fifth-largest producer of steel until the late 1970s, when more than 50,000 jobs vanished in a decade. The General Motors plant in Lordstown, which employed 14,000 in the 1970s, is down to about 2,500 workers.
The ladies at Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church still sell pierogies every Friday, and Youngstown's classic rock station still bows its shaggy head before playing "Crystal Ball" by Styx, but the grit and grime of industrialization has mostly gone overseas.
Since January 2008, another 10,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to recent Ohio employment figures.
In Warren, the once-mighty Delphi Packard Electric is a ghostly presence after the auto-parts maker cut 260 more employees. The $2 million in income tax revenue the city received from Delphi in 2003 has dropped to $70,000. Smaller casualties abound: Ohio Lamp laid off 80, Mahoning Glass announced the closure of its 100-worker plant and the list goes on.
"It's a final erasure," says John Russo, a labor studies professor at Youngstown State University, describing the lethality of job losses and plant closures.
Here is what the recovery looks like in the land of the working class:
Grown women in hairnets are working alongside teenagers at drive-through windows, and college graduates are loading bread trucks.
"A 48-year-old Youngstown man was charged, accused of stealing $14 worth of food from Rite Aid Pharmacy," reads an entry in the weekly police report published in the Vindicator. "A Youngstown woman, 21, was charged with filling a shopping cart with $154 worth of groceries and leaving an Aldi food store without paying."
In a place defined by work, there is little to be had.
One gray morning, a man named George Tomlin is grateful to be driving to his job.
Tomlin, 41, has worked in an aluminum foundry, a meatpacking house and a vinyl fabricator, each job paying a little less than the one before. Two years ago, he found temp work in a factory that made flowerpots. He received $7.50 an hour and jolts to his belt buckle from static electricity coming off the assembly line.
"There were other places that were dirtier, but you didn't get shocked every 15 minutes," Tomlin says with resignation. "This is what people around here without union jobs have to do to survive."
Tomlin found his own version of economic recovery last year when he landed a $10-an-hour job that seems like it might last.
Just before 8 a.m., he pulls into the company parking lot where hundreds of cars are already parked and more are arriving. Carrying his lunchbox and Thermos, he walks toward the bright lights of the 82,000-square-foot facility.
Behold the new factory: a mega-call-center that employs 1,280 workers who field incoming customer-service calls for a wireless phone company and a satellite television provider. The center is operated by the Omaha-based West Corp., lured to the area by tax credits and an abundance of low-skilled workers.
Tomlin is soft-spoken and tries to use the human touch. He's supposed to limit customer calls to five minutes but often goes longer.
"You got a 65-year-old woman whose husband is just out of the hospital with a stroke," he says. "The only thing he's got is a TV and hospice. She's having trouble paying her bills. I say, 'I'm gonna give you a $15 credit and we are going to get through this.' "
Another company violation. Tomlin loves this job and wants to keep it, so he reminds himself to stick to the rules.
At 4:30 p.m., he takes off his headset and walks out to the parking lot. When Tomlin was a kid, the air glittered with black from the blast furnaces at the steel mills. Now the skies are spooky clean, and all that moves in the wind is the call center's recruiting banner that says, "We Don't Hire Robots."
'There's nothing for them'
Two miles from the call center that doesn't hire robots, Sgt. Carmen Sagnimeni is sitting in a county office building wondering if anyone is hiring soldiers.
A poster in the Trumbull County Veterans Service Commission announces that November is "Hire a Vet Month," but prospects are bleak for those returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. In wars being disproportionately fought by the working class, the reward for coming home to this part of Ohio is "The Deer Hunter" with an Olive Garden.
Sagnimeni is just back from his second tour in Iraq with the Pennsylvania National Guard. He is 30, with a weary smile and a jiggling leg. He already has orders to go to Afghanistan in 2012. Until then, he has a mortgage and three kids to feed. His only lead so far is a $9-an-hour security guard job he found while surfing Monster.com in Iraq.
He goes in to see Herman Breuer, a veterans affairs officer and fellow Iraq vet whose spotless desk is appointed with a mini-tombstone paperweight chiseled with the words "headstone marker and burial benefits desk." Sagnimeni listens as Breuer patiently explains his options, urging him to consider using the Post-9/11 GI Bill to go to college until the economy gets better. As far as decent jobs, Breuer is unusually blunt. "My best advice is to look into moving," he tells the young sergeant.
Things were different for the last generation that came home from war to this valley. In 1969, a soldier back from Vietnam was greeted by a landscape roaring with manufacturing jobs that provided blue-collar ascendancy to the middle class.
The proof is right down the street at VFW Post 1090, where two dozen Vietnam veterans are eating the $4.95 lunch special of cabbage rolls. One by one, the men name the companies where they spent their lives: GM, Delphi, General Electric, Halsey Taylor, Rockwell International.
John Stefan recently retired after 32 years at GE, earning $35 an hour at the end.
"I see the young ones, there's nothing for them," says Stefan, who draws a monthly pension. "Why go to a vet center for a job you know doesn't exist? They are all probably just hiding in their basements."
One of the vets here recently brought in a young female Iraq vet who'd been living under a bridge in Warren. Cmdr. Jack Hilles fed her hot meals for two weeks, and another vet helped her find work at an injection molding plant.
"We even found her some clothes," says Hilles, anger in his voice. "She didn't have any goddamn civilian clothes."
They are everywhere in this Ohio -- under bridges, in basements, at the vast Eastwood Mall complex that sprawls between Warren and Youngstown with a dented vitality.
There is a gym attached to the mall, and one night a 25-year-old Marine named Rob Townsend comes out and tosses his gear in his car. He pops his trunk and, measuring powder and water, mixes a high-protein shake called Monster Milk. Eleven months back from Afghanistan, and Townsend can feel himself diminishing in size and strength. In the glow of the Save-A-Lot sign, he drinks the muscle juice.
Townsend was a cook with the Third Marine Division at a forward operating base in Helmand province, working in 150-degree heat surrounded by blast walls to protect him from mortars. After getting out last year, he moved back into his parents' house in Hubbard. He drank too much. At a party, the cops showed up with sirens, and he found himself in a low crouch, crawling through the neighborhood. He went to the VA clinic in Liberty to talk to someone.
"I wasn't the way I was," Townsend says.
Neither was Ohio. His two younger brothers had work -- one painting cars and the other at a grinding mill -- but Townsend's old construction job vanished. He decided to enroll at Youngstown State on the GI Bill, where he's taking 15 hours this semester next to kids in red "Go, Penguins!" hoodies. The classes are hard, but he is trying.
Outside the mall, Townsend shuts his trunk. With his desert camouflage Marine cap in the rear windshield, he rolls out, no longer in an armored vehicle but a dented Chevy Cavalier, moving past the retail outcroppings of the Hobby Lobby and Burlington Coat Factory.
'We've been thrown away'
The last of the leaves have fallen on Trumbull Avenue, a street of square lawns and American cars where neighbors are dutifully raking. If steel is dead and manufacturing is going overseas and new-wave economists say brain hubs such as Portland and Raleigh are the future, what becomes of Trumbull Avenue?
Before there was a so-called creative class, there were people who made light bulbs, water fountains, aluminum siding and electrical harnesses for cars. This is what held Trumbull Avenue together.
Tom Szykulski finishes raking and comes inside. Dinner is in the crockpot and the furniture smells faintly of lemony wax. Debbie Szykulski must clean as maniacally as her husband rakes. But the order is deceptive. The Szykulskis have lost their jobs and are down to Tom's unemployment benefits check. He is 53 and she is 55. They have just joined the ranks of Americans without health insurance.
"I feel like we've been thrown away," Debbie says, sitting at the kitchen table. Tom is quiet. He adjusts his cap. The company where he worked for 24 years, Indalex Aluminum Solutions, shut down last year, and he lost his $40,000-a-year union job. He was lucky to pick up work as a laborer at Wheatland Tube Co. for $12 an hour, but when business slowed, he was laid off from there, too.
"He's a hard worker," Debbie says, looking at her husband. "He worked 12-hour days. In 11 months, he never missed a day of work."
Tom corrects her. "Now, I did leave early that one day."
"That's all we know," she says. "He's not a school person. He's not a book person."
Debbie became unemployed when the roofing company she worked for went out of business. She has gone all over Warren filling out job applications. "I've tried the drugstore, the mall, the pet store," she says. "I applied for a nursing home job, in the kitchen. They paid $7.95 an hour."
Nothing.
"I have a shining work record," she says. "I'm not computer-savvy. I'm smart. I can learn quick."
Tom stands up. He is a big man. He wears a Cleveland Cavs T-shirt. His son will soon ship out to Afghanistan. He pushes the kitchen chair in. He doesn't know what to do with himself. He drives downtown to pay the water bill. Debbie watches him go. The small house is a still life of what a union job and hard work once afforded. No second mortgage here or big vacations on the credit card. Their weekly splurge was driving 10 miles outside Warren on Friday nights to their favorite diner.
"I get angry," Debbie says. "Not out of jealousy, but that I can't find a job. I don't want a big fancy house. I want to be able to go out to dinner on a Friday night. I'd like to be able to send my grandson a little something in the mail. I would be happy with a minimum-wage-paying job, 40 hours a week, come home, spend time with my husband. And know that the next day, I can go into my job."
She pauses. "I just want the simple pleasures."
Both her grandfathers worked at Republic Steel, and her father retired from Packard Electric. Her house has been in the family since 1936, when Trumbull Avenue was more pasture than street. Her parents still live a block away. If outsiders wonder why she has stayed in a Rust Belt city on the endangered list, the answers are all around her.
But she doesn't know how they will survive if Tom doesn't find work soon.
She has already done the unthinkable.
One afternoon, Debbie -- nice, responsible Debbie, Book-of-the-Month Club member and fan of "Masterpiece Classics" -- gathered up her gold jewelry and put it in the red vinyl lunch bag she used to carry to work when she had a job. She drove to Uptown Gems & Jewels and unloaded everything she had for $876. The money is long gone.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN -- The night his 11-year-old son escaped from kidnappers, Abdul Aziz bundled a few belongings into a car and drove his family 18 miles north across the Afghan border into Tajikistan. "It is too frightening to live in Afghanistan anymore," he said, standing in the bare, unlit room he now rents outside Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. "We are never going back."
A growing number of refugees are fleeing escalating violence and lawlessness in Afghanistan for safety in Tajikistan, the most visible sign yet that the fallout from the Taliban insurgency is threatening to undermine Central Asia's security, too.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says that more than 3,600 Afghans have fled to Tajikistan since January 2008.
Until recently, Tajikistan, Central Asia's poorest country, attracted little international attention. A violent, six-year civil war after the Soviet Union's demise stymied development. Unlike its post-Soviet peers, Tajikistan has insufficient oil resources to attract major investors. Its economy is kept afloat by aluminum and cotton exports and remittances from migrants working abroad that account for about 40 percent of its gross domestic product.
But as the Taliban has advanced north this year into the previously peaceful Afghan province of Kunduz, Tajikistan has become the front line between the insurgency and Central Asia.
In Dushanbe, a sleepy city built as the last outpost of the Soviet empire in Central Asia, the only obvious reminder of the conflict a few hundred miles away is the sight of European soldiers relaxing in hotel lobbies en route to and from Afghanistan.
But, as even profiting hotel managers admit, cooperation with NATO forces carries risks. After Central Asian countries agreed this year to allow the U.S. military use of roads to transport non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan as an alternative to routes from troubled Pakistan, the Taliban warned of reprisal.
Meanwhile, military experts have said that the security crackdown in Pakistan is forcing members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda, to return to their homelands in Central Asia, heightening the risk of regional instability.
Security forces in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have reported clashes this year with Islamist terrorists, opposition warlords and drug traffickers from Afghanistan.
But human rights organizations and some analysts say dictatorial governments in the region exaggerate the threat of Islamist unrest to justify harsh treatment of opponents.
Close links between terrorists and increasingly violent drug trafficking gangs pose a greater threat to central Asian security than the Taliban, said Rashid Abdullo, an independent analyst in Dushanbe. "The Taliban would want to create a stable state with good neighborly relations," Abdullo said. "They don't need to build an empire."
All Central Asian countries are officially secular, but poverty and the spiritual vacuum left by the collapse of communism have created fertile ground for the growth of religious fundamentalism.
In Tajikistan, a law adopted in the summer allocates a special role for Hanafi, the moderate Sunni school of Islam, in the nation's religious life. "It's a more cultured, intellectual way of dealing with extremism than violence," said Davlatali Nazriev, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. "We have to change the image of Islam as the religion of terror."
After a campaign to close unauthorized mosques, Tajikistan accepted an offer this year from Qatar to build a new mosque in Dushanbe. With room for 150,000 worshipers, it will be the biggest mosque in central Asia and, Nazriev said, will help bring religious practices into the open.
By Griff Witte Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, December 17, 2009; A12
ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan'sSupreme Court nullified on Wednesday a controversial deal that had given President Asif Ali Zardari and thousands of other government officials amnesty from prosecution on corruption charges, a decision likely to further weaken Zardari's shaky hold on power.
The ruling could open the door to additional legal challenges against Zardari. Although he still has immunity from prosecution under the constitution, opponents plan to contest that by arguing that Zardari is technically ineligible for the presidency.
The court decision comes as the United States pushes for an expanded strategic partnership with Pakistan to help combat the growing threat from Islamist extremist groups, including the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The United States is sending 30,000 additional troops to neighboring Afghanistan and wants Pakistan to step up efforts on its side of the border to keep militants from finding refuge there.
But Zardari's ability to make decisions about the level of Pakistani cooperation with the United States has been compromised by his struggle to simply hold on to his job -- a task likely to be made more difficult by the court ruling.
The ripple effects
The decision to overturn the amnesty deal had been expected, but the 17-member Supreme Court panel went further, requesting that Swiss authorities open years-old corruption cases against Zardari that had been set aside.
It was unclear whether the ruling Wednesday would have any bearing on the decisions of the Swiss courts. Zardari is suspected to have received millions in illegal commissions from two Swiss companies, and he was convicted in 2003 on money laundering charges by a Swiss magistrate. The conviction was later suspended. Zardari has denied the allegations and has said they are politically motivated.
The Pakistani court's ruling had the immediate effect of reopening cases against thousands of politicians and bureaucrats that had been frozen under the amnesty deal. Four government ministers had been protected under the amnesty. One, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, had been convicted and may now be forced to appeal his conviction.
The amnesty deal, known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, was forged in 2007 as part of an agreement between former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and then-President Pervez Musharraf. The U.S.-backed deal allowed Bhutto and her husband, Zardari, to return to Pakistan without facing prosecution over long-standing corruption allegations.
Bhutto was assassinated months later, and Zardari succeeded her as leader of the Pakistan People's Party. After the PPP won elections last year and Musharraf stepped down, Zardari became president.
President vs. the people
In the hearings leading up to the court's decision, the government had not defended the unpopular deal. But the ruling is likely to be a major distraction for the government as prosecutors dust off old cases. The Supreme Court said it would establish a special commission to ensure the cases are prosecuted vigorously.
Zardari spokesman Farhatullah Babar said the government would respect the court's decision, but he reiterated that the president, by virtue of his office, remained immune from prosecution under the constitution. "We believe this does not affect the president of Pakistan," he said.
Others had different ideas. Roedad Khan, a retired civil servant who was one of the petitioners who had challenged the amnesty, said the decision would "destroy" Zardari.
Khan called Zardari "a man who has looted and plundered this poor country. Is there one law for Zardari and one law for the 160 million people of Pakistan? No, there is one law for everyone."
Zardari is deeply unpopular in Pakistan, in large part because of persistent rumors of corruption. He spent 11 years in prison in Pakistan but was not convicted.
Still, opponents argue that he is not eligible for the presidency because of the suspended Swiss conviction and because he fled Pakistan rather than appear in court to face charges. Under the constitution, a person convicted of a crime is ineligible to be president.
Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, a veteran lawyer who argued that the amnesty deal should be nullified, called the decision "a victory for truth" and "a victory for the country." He predicted that "many public office holders will be relieved of their services" because of the ruling.
Wednesday's decision deepens the divide between Zardari and the Supreme Court, particularly its independent-minded chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. The chief justice had been removed from his job by Musharraf, and Zardari angered many lawyers because he took months to reinstate Chaudhry.
In addition to facing judicial challenges, Zardari's weak civilian government has had an uneasy relationship with the military, which has run this country for about half its history. On a visit to Pakistan this week, Gen. David H. Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command, told Pakistani journalists that he saw no reason to think that the military intended to seize power. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.
By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, December 17, 2009; A09
The Department of Homeland Security improperly gathered intelligence on the Nation of Islam for eight months in 2007 when the leader of the black Muslim group, Louis Farrakhan, was in poor health and appeared to be yielding power, according to government documents released Wednesday.
The intelligence gathering violated domestic spying rules because analysts took longer than 180 days to determine whether the U.S-based group or its American members posed a terrorist threat. Analysts also disseminated their report too broadly, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.
The disclosure was included in hundreds of heavily redacted pages released by the Justice Department as part of long-standing FOIA lawsuits about the government's policies on terrorist surveillance, detention and treatment since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It marks the latest case of inappropriate domestic spying under rules that were expanded after the terror attacks to give intelligence agencies more latitude.
In a written statement, Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman Matthew Chandler said the agency has since implemented "a strong and rigorous system of safeguards and oversight to ensure similar products are neither created nor distributed."
The agency, he said, "is fully committed to securing the nation from terrorist attacks and other threats, and we take very seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people." The 2007 study, titled "Nation of Islam: Uncertain Leadership Succession Poses Risks," was recalled by agency lawyers within hours. The lawyers said it was not reviewed by the department's intelligence chief before release.
Charles E. Allen, who was DHS undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the time, said that although violations were unintentional and inadvertent -- only publicly available information was collected -- the report should never have been issued.
"The [Nation of Islam] organization -- despite its highly volatile and extreme rhetoric -- has neither advocated violence nor engaged in violence," Allen wrote in a March 2008 memo. "Moreover, we have no indications that it will change its goals and priorities, even if there is a near-term change in the organization's leadership."
DHS clarified its intelligence collection rules in April 2008, and last December, then-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey issued new terrorism and other domestic investigation guidelines.
Telephone messages for Ishmael Muhammad, a spokesman for the Nation of Islam in Chicago, were not immediately returned.
Allen, now a consultant with the Chertoff Group, said it was important for U.S. authorities not to limit unnecessarily their ability to monitor people who are moving from extreme ideas toward ideologically motivated violence, noting that al-Qaeda in 2006 shifted its strategy to train North Americans to engage in attacks.
"It's a fine line," Allen said. "We should not make the rules absolutely rigid, and they should be reviewed from time to time."
Nathan Cardozo, a legal fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the documents "extremely disturbing."
Newly released documents also indicate the Justice Department considered bringing treason charges against John Walker Lindh, the Californian who became known as "the American Taliban" after he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. That was contained in a December 2001 memo by John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general, and was released as part of FOIA litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. In the memo, Yoo wrote that "treason cases have been rare in the Nation's history," but that Lindh's conduct "may fit the elements."
Staff writer Peter Finn and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Sitting in the Boone County jail, the Chinese woman didn’t look like a criminal to Kelley Lucero. She looked like a middle-aged mom.
Soon, Lucero learned that the woman had indeed come to America to scout out a college for her teenage son. She had come, legally, as part of a cultural exchange program, but her life had taken an unexpected and terrifying turn here in Middle America.
Forced to work in a one-room massage parlor, she ended up being arrested for prostitution at a truck stop between Kansas City and St. Louis.
Only an experienced eye like Lucero’s could see something that Boone County, Mo., deputies appeared to miss. What so many in law enforcement all over the nation still are not trained to see.
And yet, the Chinese woman sat in jail for five months.
When the United States took a global stand on human trafficking in 2000, lawmakers wanted to rescue foreign-born women turned into American sex slaves. In too many cases, though, that hasn’t happened.
In its six-month investigation into America’s effectiveness in the war on human trafficking, The Kansas City Star found that the system orginally designed with sex trafficking in mind is often unsuccessful in reaching those victims.
Some are mistakenly identified as prostitutes and end up either lost in the criminal justice bureaucracy or back on the streets. Even when victims are identified by law enforcement, some are reluctant to go through the gantlet that accompanies the prosecution of their trafficker, too untrusting or scared to reveal the horrible things that happened to them. Critics complain that the U.S. law is inherently flawed because it connects victims’ aid with their willingness to help make cases.
“No one is seeing the situation for what it is,” said Karen Stauss, an attorney with Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization based in Washington, D.C. “It’s like we’re saying, ‘We blame you for what you are suffering.’ ”
The government also has been slow to recognize an emerging class of new victims: young American girls. While millions are spent each year to combat international sex trafficking, lawmakers have yet to approve funding for domestic victims — perhaps the fastest-growing class of those trafficked in the United States.
Anti-trafficking experts say that the current federal and state laws are blunt legal instruments in trying to address the complexity of an ever-evolving global criminal enterprise and do not account for the trauma of women forced into sexual abuse. Of all human trafficking crimes, The Star found, the ones involving sex slavery have proved to be the most difficult when it comes to catching and prosecuting the traffickers.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act “is not creating the legal environment we worked so hard to create so we can prevent human trafficking,” said Norma Ramos, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. “It’s a federal law that’s really not that useful for what it was supposed to do — end human trafficking.” All in the Approach
When the mother from China was arrested, deputies in Boone County hadn’t been trained to recognize human trafficking. They didn’t know what questions to ask.
Or that the crime requires a victim-centered approach, much different from what officers are traditionally schooled in.
Boone County Assistant Prosecutor Merilee Crockett said she couldn’t discuss specifics of the case, but generally cases that may involve human trafficking are a “conundrum” because if victims are released they could end up back with their traffickers. And sometimes there is no safe place to keep them other than jail.
“Where is the rescue? What do we do for them? How do we protect them?” Crockett said.
Law enforcement authorities also have different priorities, explained Ivy Suriyopas, staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “They focus on catching perpetrators, making sure the public is safe from additional crimes. That doesn’t necessarily correlate with the needs of the victims.”
Some police officers get it and know how to work human trafficking cases, advocates acknowledged. Yet many don’t. At least not at this point.
But experts say that’s not surprising.
“They are being asked to take off their glasses and put on a slightly different prescription,” said Bill Bernstein of Mosaic Family Services, which works with human trafficking survivors in Dallas. “They’re having to view some people who we think might be victims in a slightly different light. That’s beginning, but it will take time.”
Further complicating anti-trafficking efforts is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are supposed to not only screen victims for possible human trafficking, but also root out illegal immigration — what some see as a conflict of interest.
At the very least, that creates an “inherent challenge,” according to Kristyn Peck Williams, screening and field coordinator of the anti-trafficking services program for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“ICE would do the raid, but they would also be the ones in the position to identify trafficking victims,” Williams said.
The initial contact with potential victims is crucial, advocates maintain. If agents use the same hard demeanor they use investigating other crimes, it can further traumatize a victim and destroy the case.
In one instance, a federal agent in the southern region of the United States interviewed a foreign-born woman picked up in a brothel raid. “So you were a prostitute?” the agent asked during the investigation.
An immigration attorney in the room told The Star that the woman instantly clammed up. Later, she was deported.
“I’ve seen a lot of women who were helped, but I see a lot of women who slipped through the cracks,” said the attorney, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of retribution by law enforcement.
In routine prostitution cases, officers are usually only interested in the money generated by the ring and the people involved. But human trafficking cases require more sensitivity and different questions.
“We now ask, ‘Where do you live? Who do you live with? Where did you come from? How are you paid?’ ” said Capt. Ken Bergman of the Independence Police Department, who works with the local anti-trafficking task force and has six “very trained” detectives who know how to identify victims.
The local task force has trained more than 2,000 officers throughout Missouri and Kansas about trafficking.
Still, that’s only a fraction of the officers in both states.
“You have to know what you are looking for or you will miss it,” Bergman said.
Without the right approach, a sex trafficking victim can be recycled into a lifetime of slavery. Help us, we’ll help you
From the outset, the system set up to help trafficking victims had a major flaw, advocates found. Especially when it came to helping sex trafficking victims.
The protection act concentrated on three Ps: preventing trafficking, protecting victims and prosecuting the traffickers. Some critics, however, believe that the United States has put too much emphasis on prosecution.
Victims are required to show reasonable cooperation with law enforcement before they receive all the benefits intended for them, such as food stamps, shelter and the opportunity to stay in America.
In effect, victims are told, they may not get help from the government unless they help the government prosecute the trafficker.
“It is very wrong to have this condition,” said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, appointed last year as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on human trafficking. “Countries must avoid that.”
Victims are not given enough time for reflection or counseling, Ezeilo said, before they have to agree to cooperate. Given time to heal, some victims may be more likely to help prosecute their trafficker.
Kelly Heinrich, who has studied human trafficking and the laws addressing it, said the federal law is more witness-centered.
“It’s the way it was designed to begin with and implementation made it worse,” Heinrich said.
Many victims aren’t stable enough to immediately tolerate having to relive what they went through, said Judy Okawa, a licensed psychologist specializing in the evaluation and treatment of survivors of severe trauma.
One sex trafficking survivor Okawa has worked with said she relives her abuse every time the sun goes down. She told Okawa it’s then — when the quality of light is at a certain level — she’s reminded of the time she was forced to have sex.
Other survivors have different triggers. But the last thing they want to do is speak of the abuse. Or look into the eyes of the perpetrator.
It brings it all back, Okawa said. The fear. And the threats.
“If that trafficker is not in jail or dead, there’s always a chance he or she will hurt them,” Okawa said. “(The trafficker) says, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide from me. I will find you and I will kill your family.’ ”
One trafficking victim reached out to a domestic violence advocacy program in Kansas. Her trafficker was forcing her to work long hours for little pay, stopping her from leaving the country, and frequently sexually assaulting her.
Pregnant with his baby, she wanted help.
But she was afraid to pursue a trafficking visa designed for victims because it would mean having to report her trafficker, which could put her, and her baby, in more danger.
“Although she may have had a remedy available … she didn’t feel like she could do that. She was too afraid,” said Pamela Jacobs, immigration project attorney for the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.
“Being asked to testify against a person you’ve been afraid of for a long time, and someone who could still hurt you, and your child, is very difficult. Just having a visa does not guarantee a victim’s safety.”
The woman did not see a way to escape, and advocates do not know what happened to her.
Consensual Arrangement?
In the late spring of 2007, Johnson County authorities undertook the first major human trafficking investigation in the Kansas City area. Law enforcement at the time said they “rescued” 15 women from strip-mall Asian massage parlors — one called China Rose — and there could be many more victims.
Originally from China and Korea, the women worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week, performing sex acts. Sometimes they slept on the same bed where they serviced customers.
For investigators, on paper they looked like human trafficking victims.
But as time went on, and the case wound through criminal court, more information surfaced. Some women came to Kansas City knowing they would work as prostitutes. One woman, according to statements made by one of the defendants, made about $15,000 in a month.
Others said they had no idea they would be prostituted when they got here.
Ultimately, prosecutors didn’t charge the four main defendants with human trafficking. Instead, they were charged with and pleaded guilty to coercing females to travel for prostitution.
Court testimony and other information prompted the federal judge hearing the case to dismiss the notion that there were “vulnerable victims.”
“The victims were more participants than victims,” said Chief U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan in sentencing the lead defendant, Ling Xu. “They appeared to be professionals.”
Defense attorney Melanie Morgan, who represented Ling, said she believes prosecutors tried too hard to make the case into something it wasn’t.
“This wasn’t human trafficking,” Morgan said. “This was a very consensual arrangement.”
The case provided a small window into the complexity of sex trafficking investigations. Prosecutors across the country are filtering through scenarios where the water is muddy regarding what is coercion and what is consensual.
In the China Rose case, federal prosecutors said evidence supported the charges filed, and the government still contends that some of the women met the definition of a human trafficking victim.
Those women were offered trafficking visas, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Cordes, who specializes in trafficking cases.
“But they wanted to return home to their families,” Cordes explained.
Our Own Backyard
Ever since passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act nearly a decade ago, foreign-born victims have been the law’s focus. They get extensive counseling, visa assistance and help with food and housing costs as they rebuild their lives.
For victims born in the United States, however, state governments were expected to take care of children prostituted by pimps or family members.
But that rarely happens, The Star found.
“You talk about frustration,” said Thomas Egan of Catholic Charities in Phoenix. “We found hundreds of prostituted kids and no funding available to help them.”
Kristy Childs sees it every day.
As founder and director of the nonprofit Veronica’s Voice, Childs works to help Kansas City area women and girls escape the commercial sex industry.
That’s what Childs did this summer when she and her staff searched the streets for a 12-year-old girl. Day after day, they heard from sources on the street, the junior-high-school girl was forced to prostitute herself.
“Every day she’s out there, she’s in more danger,” Childs said one day as they went out to search again. “…We’re trying to save the world and we can’t. We can’t even save the victims in our own backyard.”
With American-born victims, it becomes a maddening game of catch and release.
Most welfare programs require recipients to be at least 18 to receive benefits. Since many young domestic trafficking victims are considered unaccompanied minors, they don’t qualify.
Critics said this is another area where the law is deeply flawed.
“They (lawmakers) messed up,” said Theresa Flores, who was sex trafficked as a teenager growing up in Michigan and now works as a victim advocate. “They didn’t include Americans, and they should have.”
Four years ago, Childs and other advocates lobbied U.S. legislators to make it clear that domestic victims should be protected under the act. They specifically wanted American-born girls under the age of 18 who are sex trafficked to be considered victims entitled to services and benefits.
Lawmakers included that provision in the 2005 reauthorization of the protection act.
But they didn’t fund services for domestic victims, leaving thousands of young girls vulnerable to further abuse.
“We’re going to point the finger at other countries for how they deal with their domestic trafficking, but then we’re not doing enough for our own citizens?” asked Colette Bercu of Tennessee’s Free for Life International, a nonprofit organization that supports trafficking survivors. “We’ve got a problem.”
At a national symposium in July, social workers and health care experts pointed out that resources available to help domestic victims don’t come close to what’s available for foreign-born victims.
Near the top of the list is housing. Police and community organizations are having a tough time finding somewhere to take domestic victims lucky enough to have escaped their pimps.
“As a result, many domestic minor victims are housed in juvenile detention centers, which often do not recognize or treat these youth as victims of a crime, but rather as perpetrators,” a symposium report said.
Cordes said she prosecutes domestic sex trafficking cases with the same fervor as cases with international victims but it can be challenging.
“We have a duty to protect our own citizens and children,” she said. “Because the domestic victims are ineligible for funding under the (protection act) each case demands extra effort and creativity to obtain services.”
More than 1,800 Las Vegas youths under the age of 18 were in juvenile lockup on prostitution-related charges between 1996 and 2007, according to a study released this year by Shared Hope International, which rescues victims of sex trafficking. In Dallas, 165 youths were in police custody on prostitution-related charges in 2007 alone. Shared Hope officials believe all of these kids were victims and should not have been thrown in jail.
“We have to stop criminalizing, arresting the kids,” said Shared Hope founder Linda Smith.
For the 12-year-old in Kansas City, police were more understanding. Especially after Childs called them when her search came up empty.
Within a day, law enforcement had found her. But only after two officers spent a night doing nothing but looking for her. She was taken to a local hospital and examined.
Authorities tried to connect her with Veronica’s Voice and Childs, to get her the counseling she needed. But somehow she slipped away.
Now, Childs worries she’s back on the streets.
A Long Way Home
With foreign-born human trafficking victims, the line between victim and criminal isn’t always clear, either.
Consider the Chinese woman Lucero met in jail.
The woman paid $13,000 — her family’s life savings — to enroll in what she thought was a cultural exchange program that would bring her to the United States. Her teenage son planned to go to college in America, and someone in their family had to come in advance to get a job and earn money.
She made the trip on a six-month visa, Lucero said. But when she got off the plane in Los Angeles, she was taken to a Chinese restaurant where she went to work washing dishes.
Next, she thought she’d get a job as a nanny for a wealthy family. But then she met a man who said he was from her province in China. He told her about the massage business, how she could get a license and make good money.
She believed him. With what the woman thought was a legitimate license in hand, she traveled with several other women to the Midwest.
Twelve of them worked 12 hours a day inside cramped parlors set up inside truck stops across Middle America.
“They gave her half of what she was making,” Lucero said, noting that she still knows very little about the traffickers.
The woman ended up with a couple of hundred dollars a week. Most she’d send to family back in China.
Then police got a tip about a one-room massage parlor operated out of a Boone County truck stop along Interstate 70. The night she was arrested, police didn’t have a translator and she couldn’t tell her story.
The Chinese woman never told Lucero all she was forced to do. She even denied having sex.
“It would be too humiliating,” Lucero explained.
The woman spent Christmas 2007 behind bars.
“My parents are old and sick,” she later wrote Lucero. “My mother knows I’m in jail and she’s had a heart attack and is in the hospital. My husband (still in China) … can’t work because of my situation.”
Eventually, charges were dismissed. The woman went to California and got her temporary visa extended. Then she headed east to work, she said, in a market.
But before she left the Midwest, she wrote Lucero about missing her homeland.
“The only thing I wish for is to leave America and go to my loved ones,” she said. “I feel like America is a place where they talk a lot about human rights, and I know I have the right to go back to China. Can you please help me?”
For almost a year, Lucero didn’t hear from her and wasn’t sure where she ended up.
Then last week, Lucero received an e-mail. The woman is on the East Coast waiting for her green card.
“She just wanted to say merry Christmas to me and tell me that she loves me,” Lucero said. “And that we have a special connection.”
The Barack Obamaadministration is refusing to acknowledge an offer by the leadership of the Taliban in early December to give "legal guarantees" that it will not allow Afghanistan to be used for attacks on other countries.
The administration's silence on the offer, despite a public statement by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressing scepticism about any Taliban offer to separate itself from al Qaeda, effectively leaves the door open to negotiating a deal with the Taliban based on such a proposal.
The Taliban, however, has chosen to interpret the Obama administration's position as one of rejection of its offer.
The Taliban offer, included in a statement dated Dec. 4 and e-mailed to news organisations the following day, said the organisation has "no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan".
The statement did not mention al Qaeda by name or elaborate on what was meant by "legal guarantees" against such "meddling", but it was an obvious response to past U.S. insistence that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al Qaeda from having a safe haven in Afghanistan once again.
It suggested that the Taliban is interested in negotiating an agreement with the United States involving a public Taliban renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, along with some undefined arrangements to enforce a ban al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan in return for a commitment to a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.
Despite repeated queries by IPS to the State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley and to the National Security Council's press office over the past week about whether either Secretary Clinton or President Obama had been informed about the Taliban offer, neither office has responded to the question.
Anand Gopal of The Wall Street Journal, whose Dec. 5 story on the Taliban message was the only one to report that initiative, asked a U.S. official earlier that day about the offer to provide "legal guarantees".
The official, who had not been aware of the Taliban offer, responded with what was evidently previously prepared policy guidance casting doubt on the willingness of the Taliban to give up its ties with al Qaeda. "This is the same group that refused to give up bin Laden, even though they could have saved their country from war," said the official. "They wouldn't break with terrorists then, so why would we take them seriously now?"
The following day, asked by ABC News "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos about possible negotiations with "high level" Taliban leaders, Clinton said, "We don't know yet."
But then she made the same argument the unnamed U.S. official had made to Gopal on Saturday. "[W]e asked Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden before he went into Afghanistan after 9/11," Clinton said, "and he wouldn't do it. I don't know why we think he would have changed by now."
In the same ABC interview, Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested that the Taliban would not be willing to negotiate on U.S. terms until after their "momentum" had been stopped.
"I think that the likelihood of the leadership of the Taliban, or senior leaders, being willing to accept the conditions Secretary Clinton just talked about," Gates said, "depends in the first instance on reversing their momentum right now, and putting them in a position where they suddenly begin to realise that they're likely to lose."
In a statement issued two days after the Clinton-Gates appearance on ABC, the Taliban leadership, which now calls itself "Mujahideen", posted another statement saying that what it called its "proposal" had been rejected by the United States.
The statement said, in part, "Washington turns down the constructive proposal of the leadership of Mujahideen," and repeated its pledge to "ensure that the next government of the Muhajideen will not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries including the neighbours if the foreign troops pull out of Afghanistan."
The fact that both the State Department and the NSC are now maintaining silence on the offer rather than repeating the Clinton-Gates expression of scepticism strongly suggests that the White House does not want to close the door publicly to negotiations with the Taliban linking troop withdrawal to renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, among other issues.
Last month, an even more explicit link between U.S. troop withdrawal and a severing by the Taliban of its ties with al Qaeda was made by a U.S. diplomat in Kabul.
In an article published Nov. 11, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin, who was then visiting Kabul, quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying, "If the Taliban made clear to us that they have broken with al Qaeda and that their own objectives were nonviolent and political - however abhorrent to us - we wouldn't be keeping 68,000-plus troops here."
That statement reflected an obvious willingness to entertain a negotiated settlement under which U.S. troops would be withdrawn and the Taliban would break with al Qaeda.
A significant faction within the Obama administration has sought to portray those who suggest that the Taliban might part ways with al Qaeda as deliberately deceiving the West.
Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, who headed the administration's policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan last spring, recently said, "A lot of smoke is being thrown up to confuse people."
But even the hard-liner Riedel concedes that the Pakistani Taliban's attacks on the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) threaten the close relationship between the Afghan Taliban and ISI. The Pakistani Taliban continue to be closely allied with al Qaeda.
The Taliban began indicating it openness to negotiations with the United States and NATO in September 2007. But it began to hint publicly at its willingness to separate itself from al Qaeda in return for a troop withdrawal only three months ago.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar's message for Eid al-Fitr in mid-September assured "all countries" that a Taliban state "will not extend its hand to jeopardise others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardise us... Our goal is to gain independence of the country and establish a just Islamic system there."
But the insurgent leadership has also emphasised that negotiations will depend on the U.S. willingness to withdraw troops. In anticipation of Obama's announcement of a new U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar issued a 3,000-word statement Nov. 25 which said, "The people of Afghanistan will not agree to negotiations which prolongs and legitimises the invader's military presence in our beloved country."
"The invading Americans want Mujahidin to surrender under the pretext of negotiation," it said.
That implied that the Taliban would negotiate if the U.S. did not insist on the acceptance of a U.S. military presence in the country.
The day after the Taliban proposal to Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a public plea to the United States to engage in direct negotiations with the Taliban leadership.
In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Karzai said there is an "urgent need" for negotiations with the Taliban, and made it clear that the Obama administration had opposed such talks.
Karzai did not say explicitly that he wanted the United States to be at the table for such talks, but said, "Alone, we can't do it."
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