By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 6, 2010; A08
The highest-ranking U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan has called for a major restructuring of the intelligence gathering and distribution in that country, arguing that the present system "is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy."
Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, called for a shift from collecting information to help with capturing or killing insurgents, and said more resources should go toward gathering facts about the political, economic and cultural environment of the population that supports the insurgency.
"Lethal targeting alone will not help U.S. and allied forces win in Afghanistan," Flynn wrote in a published report. He said that although the insurgents are worthy objectives, "relying on them exclusively baits intel shops into reacting to enemy tactics at the expense of finding ways to strike at the very heart of the insurgency."
He said little is being done to fully understand the support for insurgents, declaring that U.S. intelligence efforts are "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects . . . and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers."
Too often, Flynn said, intelligence analysts are assigned at the regimental and brigade levels, away from the grass roots, where the most valuable information can be gathered. As a result, there are not enough intelligence officers in units close to the population who can accurately assess critical information such as census data.
Flynn praised some Afghanistan-based units that bucked his overall conclusions. He cited a Marine battalion in the Nawa district of Helmand province whose commander used regular riflemen when he lacked enough ground-level intelligence analysts, because he "decided that understanding the people in their zone of influence was a top priority" and was able to create an effective information network.
But such instances have been rare. Criticizing the tendency for intelligence to flow from the top down in wartime, Flynn said the process should be reversed in a counterinsurgency. "The soldier or development worker on the ground is usually the person best informed about the environment and the enemy," he wrote.
Flynn reported that when President Obama made his request in the fall for an analysis of pivotal Afghan districts, "analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments."
He described many intelligence analysts in Kabul, at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa and at the Pentagon as so starved for information from the field that they say their jobs "feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work."
The report focused on Defense Department intelligence activities and was unrelated to other U.S. agencies, such as the CIA, which lost seven employees last week in a suicide bombing by an al-Qaeda double agent who breached a secret intelligence facility in Afghanistan.
Flynn took the unusual step of publishing his report, "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan," through the Center for a New American Security, a think tank co-founded by Michèle A. Flournoy, who is now undersecretary of defense for policy.
Flynn said he did so to reach "not only officers in his command but also other intelligence officials and instructors in the field, including those outside of Afghanistan."
He also directly addressed some of the military intelligence community's shortcomings.
"The secretiveness of the intelligence community has allowed it to escape the scrutiny of customers and the supervision of commanders," Flynn wrote. "Too often, when an S-2 [intelligence] officer fails to deliver, he is merely ignored rather than fired. . . . . Except in rare cases, ineffective intel officers are allowed to stick around."
By Sudarsan Raghavan Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, January 6, 2010; A01
SANAA, YEMEN -- When he served in the Afghan mountains as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, Nasser al-Bahri said, he was known as "The Killer." Today, Bahri is a business consultant in Yemen who favors Western-style pinstriped shirts, crisp slacks and black loafers. But his ideas are still radical: Ask him whether jihadists should kill Americans on U.S. soil and he replies without hesitation, "America is a legitimate target."
The arc of Bahri's life helps to explain why Yemen was an attractive place for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who allegedly tried to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, to be indoctrinated into the Islamist world of jihad. Thousands like Bahri, who have returned from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and other Muslim lands, are disengaged from the fight against the West, yet express sympathy for al-Qaeda's violent core philosophies.
As the United States steps up its engagement here, it faces the delicate task of fighting terrorism without alienating Yemen's highly tribal and religiously conservative society. Like Pakistan and Afghanistan, Yemen has abundant weapons and men experienced in guerrilla warfare who resent U.S. policies and have tribal, social and inspirational ties to al-Qaeda. Many fear that such men could become perfect recruits, especially if anti-American sentiments grow or Yemen plunges deeper into chaos.
"These people are already angry and many are unemployed," said Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst. "The only option they will have if fighting starts is to join al-Qaeda. Where else will they go?"
He added that Yemen is a place where "you cannot prevent contacts between young impressionable men and their jihadist heroes."
Some of al-Qaeda's best-known figures, many with strong connections to bin Laden, live in this Middle Eastern nation led by a weak government and beset by multiple emergencies, from civil war to soaring poverty and dwindling oil reserves.
Abdul Majid al-Zindani, bin Laden's former spiritual adviser, whom the United States has classified as a terrorist, is the most powerful religious figure here today. Senior Yemeni officials both fear him and seek his support. Nasser al-Wuhayshi -- bin Laden's former personal secretary -- is the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which U.S. officials believe trained Abdulmutallab and equipped him with chemical explosives.
U.S. and Yemeni investigators are also looking into a possible relationship between Abdulmutallab and Anwar al-Aulaqi, the extremist Yemeni American cleric who U.S. and Yemeni officials allege is one of the emerging spiritual leaders in al-Qaeda.
Aulaqi has also been linked to the man charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5.
In an interview in a sunny room filled with computers at a business conference where he was working, Bahri, 37, said he has kept a relatively low profile in Yemen since 2002, when he was released from prison.
He said Yemeni authorities held him for nearly two years without charge.
He said he is no longer an al-Qaeda member and has no desire to return to a life of jihad. But he said he still admires bin Laden and his cause.
"He is a man of substance," said Bahri, oval-faced and bald with piercing black eyes. "Whatever mistakes he has made, he has a very pure personality. He's simple, holy and sacred."
'I decided to join'
Bahri, who was interviewed a few days before the failed bombing on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, was born in 1972 in Saudi Arabia to Yemeni parents. He grew up in the kingdom and earned a business degree in college. But like so many young Saudis, Bahri was deeply influenced by Sunni fundamentalist preachers and the Palestinian struggles against Israel.
In 1993, he said, he traveled to Bosnia to join Muslims fighting the Serbs. Bahri was following a well-worn path. Thousands of Yemenis went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets. They were welcomed back as heroes. President Ali Abdullah Saleh dispatched many to fight in the south during Yemen's 1994 civil war.
Bahri said he had no desire to return to Saudi Arabia or Yemen. After Bosnia, he traveled on fake passports to Somalia and then Tajikistan, eventually arriving in 1996 in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. There, he heard bin Laden rail against U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf War and preach that Muslims needed to be unified against the West.
"I decided to join," recalled Bahri, who was sent to a training camp in Khost province. A year later, he said, he took an oath of loyalty to bin Laden.
One night, a group of armed defectors from the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that ruled Afghanistan, entered bin Laden's compound seeking to kill him. Bahri picked up his gun and shielded bin Laden.
"After this, every time Osama bin Laden moved, he would say, 'Abu Jandal should be with us,' " recalled Bahri, using his nom de guerre.
Nine months later, Bahri was shot in his left leg during a battle against Afghan rebels seeking to oust the Taliban. Bin Laden brought him food, changed his bandages and nursed him while he healed.
"He would pour honey into my injury," Bahri recalled.
Failed 'dialogue'
In 2000, Bahri said, he had a falling-out with other al-Qaeda members and decided to visit Yemen with his Yemeni wife. Two months later, al-Qaeda militants bombed the USS Cole in the southern city of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. Bahri said he was not involved in the attack.
But he said he was on a Yemeni security list of al-Qaeda operatives, so he went into hiding. When he tried to flee to Afghanistan, Yemeni intelligence agents captured him at the airport.
Bahri said he was imprisoned without charges. Seven months later, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI agents arrived to interrogate him. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in May, former FBI agent Ali Soufan said interrogators obtained from Bahri "a treasure trove of highly significant actionable intelligence," including extensive information on bin Laden's terrorism network, its structure and its leadership. Bahri, he added, also provided "explicit details" of the Sept. 11 plot.
Bahri said that although he fed the FBI lies, he believes his former al-Qaeda comrades view him as a traitor.
After his prison term, including 13 months in solitary confinement, Bahri entered a prison rehabilitation program. Run by a prominent judge, Hamoud al-Hitar, it focused on using theological "arguing" as a tool of reform. It is now widely considered a failure. Bahri, along with two al-Qaeda militants convicted by the United States in the Cole bombings, were released after three sessions of "dialogue" over four months.
"Hitar said he changed our minds," Bahri said. "But he did not."
A latent danger
After Bahri's release, employers were reluctant to hire him. He has had eight jobs in the past six years and earns a meager income. He said he once considered returning to Afghanistan but found it too risky. He was under surveillance by Yemeni intelligence and had to report to its officials every month.
Those who know Bahri say he has given up militancy. Iryani, the political analyst, said Bahri has talked young Yemenis out of going to fight in Iraq.
Iryani said former militants like Bahri need more support from the government. Without it, he said, "if they find the country to be under attack from outside, they will find a legitimate reason to go back to jihad."
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
As the threat from extremists appears to be growing in Yemen, there's a temptation to point to the small country on the Arabian Peninsula as the next place the U.S. will have to fight al-Qaida.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut jumped at the chance to do that during an appearance Sunday on ABC.
"Iraq is yesterday's war, Afghanistan is today's war, and if we don't act pre-emptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war," he said, adding that he was quoting a line he had heard from a U.S. official while on a recent trip to Yemen. But he made clear he bought the analysis.
The parallels are indeed compelling, especially between Yemen and Afghanistan: both poor countries with weak governments and long histories of Islamist militancy. But where the analogy breaks down is in the role their neighbors — Pakistan in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia in Yemen — play in the fight against al-Qaida.
"The U.S.-Pakistani relationship is extremely strained, particularly on this issue," says Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk research firm. "The U.S.-Saudi relationship has been quite strained, but won't be on this issue. The Saudis are absolutely of one mind with the United States on going in and dealing with this threat of al-Qaida in Arabia."
Pakistan sees its traditional rival, India, as its top threat, and Pakistani intelligence has long had close ties to the Taliban, al-Qaida's ally. So the Pakistanis haven't been helpful in the fight against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. But the Saudis, who must protect their oil and the royal family, do worry about al-Qaida — and so now does the government of Yemen.
"Saudi Arabia feels very threatened by the rising threat of al-Qaida," says Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East specialist at Oxford University. "Saudi Arabia and Yemen share a very strategic objective in preventing al-Qaida from becoming a potent force either in Yemen or Somalia or in the Arabian Peninsula as a whole."
Incentives To Fight Terrorism
Saudi military forces have actually moved into Yemen on occasion — with the full support of the Yemeni government. Potentially, this means there would be less need for U.S. troops to join the fight.
The Saudis are absolutely of one mind with the United States on going in and dealing with this threat of al-Qaida in Arabia.
- Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group
But the situation in Yemen is complicated; there are anti-government rebellions right now in both the north and the south. Gerges says that makes the fight against al-Qaida there far more challenging.
"We're not just talking about 100 or 300 al-Qaida operatives in Yemen," he says. "What al-Qaida has been able to do in the last two years is try to submerge itself, embed itself, within local conflicts in the south, in the north, and also in the eastern provinces."
Al-Qaida in Yemen now portrays itself as the vanguard of opposition to the government, which is a smart move: The Yemeni government is widely seen as corrupt, unjust and ineffective. Bremmer wonders how much help the Yemenis can be in the fight against al-Qaida.
"They'll certainly take money and help to the extent that they get it. But how much they're going to be willing to actually do the heavy lifting themselves is another question," he says. "They are on the brink of being a failed state."
If the Saudis are seen as intervening in Yemen in collusion with an unpopular government, it may not be all that helpful. Analysts say a more valuable Saudi role would be to promote Yemen's political and economic development.
That'd be primarily a nonmilitary approach. Maybe the Yemen comparison should be not to Afghanistan but to Iraq, where Sunni extremists in the end were essentially bought off, not beaten on the battlefield. Maybe some of the anti-government forces in Yemen could be turned against al-Qaida with the right political and economic incentives. And in that regard, oil-rich Saudi Arabia could certainly be helpful.
WASHINGTON — One of them, an Army Ranger who served three tours in Afghanistan, led a team into a treacherous mountain ravine to recover the remains of 16 American commandos shot down in a helicopter crash. He still remembers how only their boots had been taken off their bodies by the Taliban.
Another, a captain in the Oregon National Guard, held a town in the southern Afghan province of Helmand with a ragtag Afghan Army unit for three chaotic weeks in 2006, only to see the Taliban sweep back in after he got orders to move on.
A third, a supply sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division, spent more time than she ever expected saluting coffins as they left Bagram Air Base near the Afghan capital, Kabul, for the last trip home.
Such are the experiences of some of the soldiers who have lived through the American policy permutations of an Afghan war now entering its ninth year, from the deployment of the 2,000-strong force that helped oust the Taliban from power in 2001 to President Obama’s decision to escalate a stagnating conflict to 100,000 American troops in 2010.
As the first of Mr. Obama’s 30,000 reinforcements arrive in Afghanistan, four men and women, whose lives have been shaped by the war — grass-roots experts as opposed to big-picture policy makers — expressed mixed feelings in recent interviews about the president’s new strategy. They said that they supported sending additional troops, that time had been wasted and the buildup was overdue. But some were skeptical, particularly about the value of training the Afghan security forces.
Even the most optimistic said there was no guarantee that Mr. Obama’s plan would work.
Maj. Kevin Remus, 33, arrived in Helmand in the summer of 2006 when the southern Afghan province was, in his words, “no man’s land” — a Taliban stronghold where British and Canadian troops were stretched thin. A 1998 West Point graduate, Major Remus had left active duty and joined the Army Reserve in 2004. He was called back two years later to lead an 11-man Oregon National Guard training team responsible for fighting alongside a 35-man unit of the Afghan Army.
There were 20,000 American troops in Afghanistan at the time and almost none in Helmand. “We didn’t know what we were up against,” said Major Remus, then a captain in the Guard.
He spent part of that July and August with his unit, holding as best it could the town of Garmsir, on the Helmand River. The Taliban had captured it when the local Afghan police fled. The Canadians had just retaken it, and Major Remus was left with confusing orders from the top. “Somebody in our chain of command said, ‘You guys stay and work with the Afghan police,’ but they had just run away,” Major Remus said. “That’s the reason the Taliban had the town to begin with.”
Major Remus and his small band of Americans and Afghans made a circle of Humvees in a walled area near the town’s government center, which consisted of a few partly burned buildings. They stayed there for three weeks, aware that the Taliban had retreated only about 500 feet to the other side of a nearby canal. Once Major Remus was ordered to leave, fighting over the area resumed. It was not until United States Marines swept through in May 2008 that Garmsir was out of Taliban hands. Today, a fragile calm has taken hold.
Major Remus, now a student at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that he did not consider his effort in Garmsir futile — “we did a good job on a tough mission” — and that the bigger frustration of his yearlong deployment was getting members of his Afghan unit to show up and fight. Mr. Obama’s focus on building up the Afghan Army and police is misguided, he said.
“When they talk about the Afghan security forces, they make it sound so easy,” Major Remus said. “I don’t think people understand the difficulty. You don’t trust them like you would another American soldier.”
Feeling Forgotten
First Lt. Kristen L. Rouse, 36, of Brooklyn, was at Bagram Air Base in the spring of 2006 keeping track of equipment and supplying body armor to troops when Iraq was grabbing all the headlines.
“To tell you the truth, we felt really forgotten,” said Lieutenant Rouse, who was a supply sergeant in the 10th Mountain Division at the time.
That June, a soldier in her unit was killed in a convoy, “which really stopped all of us in our tracks,” she said. It turned out to be the worst month in 2006 for American casualties in Afghanistan: 18 Americans killed, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. Lieutenant Rouse knew firsthand because as the coffins arrived at Bagram en route to the United States, announcements would come over the loudspeakers for anyone available to line the main drive and salute.
“It was a regular feature of our lives,” she said. “It didn’t happen every day, thank God, but I can’t tell you how many fallen comrade ceremonies I stood there and saluted at. And all of that is going on, and you see nothing of the reality we lived reflected in the news.” At the time, she said, “the U.S. really had a very cheap commitment to Afghanistan.”
Now, she said, “for people to wake up and say, ‘Hey, we haven’t accomplished anything in Afghanistan, let’s pull out,’ my gut response is, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
Lieutenant Rouse is now training with a unit of the Vermont National Guard at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and will be heading back to Afghanistan sometime in the coming months to provide support for an infantry battalion. She said she believed the president’s plan was “very doable,” but “had we done it right the first time, we wouldn’t have had to do it a second time.”
‘No Guarantees’
Maj. Pat Work, 36, a member of the elite Army Rangers, helped build a remote base on the Afghan border with Pakistan in early 2002, moved on foot in the bitter cold of the northeastern mountains trying to gather intelligence about insurgents in late 2004 and was part of the recovery team for a failed mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader in the summer of 2005.
Three of four members of the Navy Seals died in that mission, a story told in a best-selling book by the lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell. Eight more members of the Seals and eight other Special Operations personnel who were trying to rescue the original four were killed when their helicopter was shot down. When Major Work and his team found the bodies of the 16 after searching a heavily forested mountainside, he had a grim insight into the resourcefulness of the Taliban.
“What I learned that day was that the Taliban took nothing off of our deceased other than their boots,” he said. “Boots was something very practical they could use at 10,000 feet in August.”
Throughout his three tours, he came to see the Taliban as “a violent extremist movement that provides jobs.” He also learned how hard it was to get villagers to divulge information about insurgents to American troops. “There’s very little incentive for a local who knows you’re going to leave to talk,” he said.
Major Work, who also served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, is now working full time on a graduate thesis at Georgetown. He wants to go back to Afghanistan, and said that the president’s new plan finally linked the kind of small-unit commando operations in which he took part to a larger strategy of intelligence-gathering and protecting the Afghan population. But will it succeed? “There are no guarantees,” Major Work said.
A Soldier’s Journal
Sgt. First Class Jeff Courter, 52, spent much of 2007 on a remote base in Paktika Province, hard on the edge of Pakistan, where he was the chief officer of a small Illinois National Guard unit charged with training the Afghan border police, or A.B.P. At the time, he called the conflict the “Kmart War” because he felt the United States was fighting it at a discount.
He taught the border police how to use weapons, went on joint patrols, held meetings with Afghan elders and gave away hundreds of pounds of food to villagers. But as he wrote in a journal he self-published on his return, “We didn’t get rid of the Taliban; we didn’t elevate the A.B.P. to a much higher level than they were before we arrived; we didn’t get schools or clinics built.”
Sergeant Courter concluded that his progress had been in “baby steps,” and did some soul-searching as he left for home. “I am still trying to figure out what we are trying to do here, what we have accomplished, what is or should be our goal and whether or not we can succeed,” he wrote in his journal on Jan. 17, 2008.
Sergeant Courter, now a National Guard recruiter in Kankakee, Ill., said that Mr. Obama had finally given American commanders in Afghanistan the tools to do their jobs, although he predicted no quick victory.
“I believe that progress is inevitable and the Taliban are doomed because they’re on the wrong side of history,” he said. “The question is, how long will that take?”
SARGODHA, Pakistan (AP) -- One of five Americans detained in Pakistan said their aim was to go to Afghanistan to wage jihad against Western forces, defending their intention as justified under Islam.
But he denied any links to al-Qaida or plans to carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan, as alleged by Pakistani authorities.
Monday was the first time the young Muslims from the Washington, D.C., area have addressed a court after being arrested in early December in the eastern Pakistani city of Sargodha. The case has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to Pakistan to join militant groups. Pakistani police have said they plan to seek life sentences for the men under the country's anti-terrorism law.
''We are not terrorists,'' one of the men, Ramy Zamzam, told The Associated Press as he entered a courtroom in Sargodha on Monday.
''We are jihadists, and jihad is not terrorism,'' he said.
Jihad has several different meanings in Islam, but Zamzam seemed to be referring to the duty to fight against foreign forces viewed as occupying a Muslim country.
The men, aged 19 to 25, denied they had ties with al-Qaida or other militant groups during a court appearance Monday in Sargodha, said their attorney, Ameer Abdullah Rokri.
''They told the court that they did not have any plan to carry out any terrorist act inside or outside Pakistan,'' said Rokri. ''They said that they only intended to travel to Afghanistan to help their Muslim brothers who are in trouble, who are bleeding and who are being victimized by Western forces.''
The Americans arrived amid tight security. About a dozen police cars escorted the prison van inside the court premises as officers manned the rooftops of surrounding buildings. The men wore handcuffs as they walked into the courthouse for their hearing.
The court remanded the men to prison for 14 days to give police time to prepare their case, said Rokri.
''We have told the court that police have completed their investigation and have enough evidence against the five suspects to try them under anti-terrorism law,'' said police officer Matiullah Shahani.
Police have not said what the group's intended target was, but authorities say the men had a map of Chashma Barrage -- a complex located near nuclear power facilities that includes a water reservoir and other structures. It lies in the populous province of Punjab, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Islamabad.
The court ordered the release of one of the suspects' fathers, Khalid Farooq, because of a lack of evidence that he had committed any crime, said police officer Tahir Shirazai.
It was unclear if Farooq, also a U.S. citizen, was still in custody since authorities said they had released him more than two weeks ago.
Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory allegations about the men's intentions, while U.S. officials have been far more cautious. The U.S. is also looking at charging the men -- Umar Farooq, Waqar Khan, Ahmed Minni, Aman Hassan Yemer and Ramy Zamzam.
Officials in both countries have said they expect the men to eventually be deported back to the United States, though charging them in Pakistan could delay that process.
The U.S. Embassy has declined to comment on the potential charges the men face in Pakistan.
LANCASTER, CALIF. -- The asylum seeker from Somalia hung his head as an immigration judge grilled him about his treacherous journey from the Horn of Africa. By air, sea and land he finally made it to Mexico, and then a taxi delivered him into the arms of U.S. border agents at San Diego.
Islamic militants had killed his brother, Mohamed Ahmed Kheire testified, and majority clan members had beaten his sister. He had to flee Mogadishu to live.
The voice of the judge, beamed by videoconference from Seattle, crackled loudly over a speaker in the mostly empty courtroom near the detention yard in the desert north of Los Angeles. He wanted to know why Kheire had no family testimony to corroborate his asylum claim.
Kheire, 31, said he didn't have access to e-mail in detention and didn't think to ask while writing to family on his perilous trek.
It seemed like the end of Kheire's dream as he waited for the judge's ruling. He clasped his hands, his plastic jail bracelet dangling from his wrist, and looked up at the ceiling, murmuring words of prayer.
Kheire is one of hundreds of Somalis in the past two years to have staked everything on a wild asylum gamble by following immigration routes to the United States traditionally traveled by Latinos.
With the suspension of a U.S. refugee program and stepped-up security in the Gulf of Aden and along Mediterranean smuggling routes, more overseas migrants from Somalia are pursuing asylum through what one expert calls the "back door."
"The U.S. has closed most of the doors for Somalis to come in through the refugee program, so they've found alternative ways to get in," said Mark Hetfield, senior vice president for policy and programs at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. "This is their new route." About 1,500 people from around the world showed up in U.S. airports and on the borders seeking asylum during the 2009 fiscal year, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Somalis were the biggest group to make the journey, with most arriving in San Diego. More than 240 Somalis arrived during that period -- more than twice as many as the year before.
Most Somalis have reached the United States -- there are about 87,000 here -- through U.S.-sponsored refugee-resettlement programs. But the State Department suspended a family-reunification program for refugees in 2008 over fraud concerns. The number of Somalis admitted by refugee programs dwindled to about 4,000 last year.
Those now traveling through Latin America are taking a path well worn by asylum seekers from other countries. Immigration lawyers say they have worked with clients from Ethiopia and Iraq who also reached the United States through Mexico.
"To get a flight from Africa to Europe is very hard. The easiest place to go is America," said Yahya Idardon, an asylum seeker who fled Somalia last year after his father and brother were killed. "Africa to Latin America is easy. . . . When you are going to Latin America, no one is concerned about you, no one is asking, so it is easy to go there and cross all these countries." Once reaching the U.S. border in San Diego, Somalis are frisked, fingerprinted and screened by an asylum officer to gauge whether they have a credible fear of returning home.
They are then shuttled to an immigration detention center until their cases go to court.
About 80 Somalis are being held in Lancaster, a detention center 50 miles north of Los Angeles. Dozens more have been held in San Diego and the remote border town of El Centro, immigration lawyers said.
On Jan. 4, the government plans to start releasing many asylum seekers while they wait for their immigration cases to be heard. It is unclear how many Somalis will be let out; they must prove their identity and many don't have documents. And still others say they have nowhere to go even if they were freed, their attorneys said.
Compared with asylum seekers from other countries, Somalis have been more likely to win their cases, according to immigration court statistics.
But in the courtroom in Lancaster, Kheire spent the last moments of his hearing worried that the judge would send him back to Mogadishu to face the threat of death -- even after he had survived such a harrowing journey.
The attorneys for Kheire and the government sat quietly in the courtroom, listening to the judge read the ruling as Kheire prayed.
A Somali interpreter whispered urgently into Kheire's ear. He broke into a hesitant smile. He would be allowed to stay.
Kheire left the courtroom in his black, laceless sneakers and jail jumpsuit, escorted by sheriff's officials. Later that night, he was dropped off by authorities at a nearby train station. He had $5 in his pocket.
"They said, 'This is America. Welcome to the United States of America,' " Kheire said.
By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, January 4, 2010; A05
KARACHI, PAKISTAN -- When a bomb exploded during a Shiite religious procession here last Monday, killing 44 people and touching off hours of violence that left hundreds of shops burned to ashes, it shattered the sense that Pakistan's largest city and financial hub was immune to the plague of Islamist violence that has swept this nuclear-armed nation.
With one strategic blast, the attackers added a volatile new ingredient to the cauldron of ethnic and sectarian tensions, political brawls, business mafia rivalries, and street crime that simmers in this metropolis of 18 million. Although these conflicts periodically erupt into violence, they have rarely disrupted the purposeful hum or resilience of city life.
This time, the destruction triggered by the explosion was so shocking and affected so many interest groups that the entire city went on strike Friday, uniting in an act of peaceful protest. The normally clogged boulevards and teeming bazaars were silent; the swank seaside eateries were empty. Even the Karachi stock exchange shut down instead of grandly opening for New Year's Day.
"They came in and destroyed everything," said Akbar al-Habib, 38, standing amid heaps of charred cloth from his garment shop in Lighthouse Market, where dozens of stalls had burned all night while armed men blocked anyone from entering. "Who would do this to us?"
Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the bomb that exploded on Jinnah Avenue as several hundred thousand Shiites marched in mourning for a martyred seventh-century imam. For many here, the more important questions are who orchestrated the spree of destructive economic violence that followed and why thousands of police deployed to protect the Shiite procession were unable to stop it.
Instead of answers, the six-hour rampage and 48-hour inferno, which caused more than $400 million in damage, have produced a week of confusion and finger-pointing between the Karachi city government, which is run by the urban Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), and the Sindh provincial government, which is controlled by the rural-based, nationally ruling Pakistan People's Party.
With few solid facts emerging, the devastation has also provided tinder for conspiracy theories to suit the agendas of every religious, ethnic and political group in the complex, fragile mosaic of Karachi society. They range from accusations of economic sabotage by property owners to wild speculation of international plots by Western and anti-Muslim powers.
Some groups have accused Shiite militants of using their holy day to create chaos, saying fire accelerants were hidden inside religious cloths. Shiite leaders insist that most mourners continued with their procession after the bombing, while the looting and arson broke out many blocks behind. They assert that the attackers were trying to provoke sectarian divisions among Shiites and Sunnis, backed by a conspiracy of Western interests.
"We were mourning peacefully, and I followed the procession to the end," Mohammed Hussain, 21, said after Friday prayers at a Shiite mosque. "We could not even bring a cigarette lighter into the march, and we were surrounded by police and barricades. How could we think of such violence?" A few minutes later, he joined a group of Shiite protesters shouting: "Down with Israel. Down with America! Yes to Sunni-Shiite Unity!"
Several other theories circulated among merchants from the medicine, cosmetics, plastics and clothing markets that went up in flames. One was that the government or real estate mafias had the shops torched to drive tenants from valuable property. Another was that Pashtun thugs, from the same ethnic group as the Taliban, destroyed the markets to help the extremists and weaken the MQM, which is ethnically Mohajir and ardently anti-Taliban.
At Bolton Market, the epicenter of the fire, clusters of angry merchants watched glumly Friday and Saturday while workers shoveled mounds of burned goods from shops. Several multistory concrete buildings had collapsed from the intense fire, fueled by perfume, cotton and other flammable goods.
"These people were highly organized. They had weapons, cutters for the locks and chemicals to spread fire. This was not the work of emotional Shiite mourners," said Wasim Qureshi, 40, a perfume importer. "Our country is in the middle of a war on international terror. Only the terrorists will benefit from this disaster, and whoever did it was working on their behalf."
Pashtun political leaders dismissed accusations that Taliban supporters carried out the violence. Shahi Sayed, provincial president of the major Pashtun party, flatly accused the MQM of staging the violence to tar his community as a terrorist base.
"The MQM is like a mafia of thugs who rig elections, blackmail businesses and get support from the army," said Sayed, a hulking politician whose house is protected by tribal police. "They would destroy their own community to divide the Sindhis, drive out the Pashtuns and keep people away from Islam."
Similar accusations came from the Jamaat-e-Islami religious party, which set up tents near the damaged markets to assist victims of the fire. Local leaders of Jamaat, which is sympathetic to the Taliban, also blamed a plot by the MQM to malign Islam. They published photos in their party newspaper showing alleged MQM loyalists engaged in looting.
For MQM officials, Friday's events were a major political blow. The party has campaigned publicly against the "Talibanization" of Karachi. But now, with the terrorist threat squarely confronting the city, and the business community up in arms over the inadequate response by police and firefighters, Karachi's leaders are struggling to restore public confidence, tamp down the swirling conspiracy theories and ensure that the incident does not create dangerous new fissures.
"Karachi is the jugular vein of our economy, and a complex city with many fault lines. If Karachi is destabilized, then Pakistan is destabilized," said Farooq Sattar, an MQM leader and former Karachi mayor, who denied suggestions that his party fomented the violence. "We cannot allow either to happen."
By Ernesto Londoño Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, January 4, 2010; A01
BAGHDAD -- The banner appeared mysteriously this fall on a railing along Abu Nawas Street, the hub of nightlife on the banks of the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad, where the atmosphere in recent months has grown markedly more subdued.
"Damned is he who sits at a table with alcohol," the handwritten sign said.
Posted near a strip of nightclubs recently raided by police, the unsigned missive spoke to a new fight being fought across Iraq as government officials attempt to assert greater control over the country's moral and social norms.
The March 2003 U.S. invasion and subsequent violence have made Iraq's moral compass swing wildly for the past six years. It has been a time of lax government authority; power struggles among armed groups including the Mahdi Army and al-Qaeda in Iraq, which imposed strict norms; and mass migration, which has changed the makeup and character of entire towns and cities.
In recent months, the pendulum has veered toward conservative mores. Government officials, including many competing in the upcoming parliamentary election, have sought to impose stricter limits on alcohol consumption and coeducational schools.
In some ways, whether the Iraq that emerges from the U.S. occupation becomes more conservative or more permissive than its neighbors will depend greatly on which politicians are chosen in that election, scheduled to take place March 7. But it is far from clear whether the upcoming contest will affirm or buck the current trend.
"Unfortunately, the democratic system in Iraq has led to the rise of undemocratic parties and movements that don't believe in the concept of human rights or personal freedoms," said Mithal Alousi, a secular Sunni lawmaker. "These parties are trying to leave an impression among the uneducated and the simple-minded people that they are the guardians of religion and proper behavior, and conversely, that secular parties are the ones promoting alcohol consumption and the opening of nightclubs, and thus are un-Islamic."
Alcohol is relatively hard to come by in Iraq's southern provinces, which are predominantly Shiite and tend to be more conservative than the rest of the country. Baghdad has several liquor stores, most owned and operated by Christians. Owners say they are afraid the government will drive their business underground by refusing to renew licenses.
Hazim al-Araaiy, a Shiite lawmaker who heads the conservative Sadrist bloc in parliament, said banning alcohol is long overdue to protect families and live within the tenets of Islam.
"Our policy on alcohol is firm -- we have always opposed it," he said. "We do not need such practices to win votes or leave the impression that we are faithful Muslims."
Few have as much riding on the outcome of the debate as Kamal Suleiman, owner of a prominent liquor store on Abu Nawas Street.
The strip, he recalled recently, was abuzz with nightlife during most of Saddam Hussein's regime. Parties sometimes lasted until dawn. Liquor-store owners had no trouble renewing yearly licenses.
During the 1990s, in an effort to appease conservative tribes whose support he desperately needed after uprisings by Shiites and Kurds, Hussein tightened social norms.
The party life suffered, Suleiman said, but liquor stores and some bars remained in business.
During the sectarian war that began in 2006, insurgents targeted liquor stores, which they deemed sinful, and they burned trucks transporting booze.
"During the sectarian years, we closed because we were a target," said Aziz al-Azidi, one of the managers at the liquor store. "They threatened us, and they threw grenades to destroy liquor stores."
As security improved in 2008 and dogmatic groups lost sway in Baghdad and other key cities, Suleiman opened his store again and began importing truckloads of wine, beer and spirits from neighboring Turkey.
In recent weeks, he and other liquor-store owners across Baghdad were told they would not receive new licenses after theirs expired at the end of the year.
"The citizens want their stores open," Suleiman said. "The people of Iraq need an open, secular country. But the government is trying to take a conservative route."
Radi Hassan, who owns a fish restaurant across the street from the shuttered bars, said he was pleased to see them raided.
"These places were operating without a license," he said, standing outside his restaurant on a chilly afternoon. "They even had dancing women inside, women of the night."
So far, security has been the dominant issue among politicians vying for votes in the election. But politicians have increasingly addressed issues of morality and social norms in parliamentary debates, articles in newspapers and on the campaign trail. Some have argued that the current government is overly influenced by religion; others have defended the government's right to set strict societal norms.
The Baghdad provincial council received numerous complaints about the nightclubs before ordering the raids, said council member Mohammed Rubaie.
Rubaie, among the most secular members on the council, suggested that the establishments be allowed to reopen in a nonresidential area, but his initiative got little backing.
"Don't forget -- the Baghdad provincial council is led by an Islamic party and most of its members are Islamic party members," Rubaie said.
Similar debates are taking place in the teeming Sadr City district, miles from Abu Nawas Street and among the most conservative in the capital.
On a recent afternoon, at the end of the school day, a small group of educators debated the recent enforcement of a policy that bars coed middle and high schools.
The rule is a burden in places such as Sadr City, where fighting left many schools in shambles and qualified teachers are scarce.
"We are a tribal society," said Ahmed Ghata Saber, an Islamic studies teacher at a middle school in Sadr City who opposes mixed-sex education.
"There is nothing more important than to keep our society safe."
Colleague Mohammed Salim Gati, who teaches English, disagreed, saying the division creates misunderstandings about the opposite sex.
"Mixed schools are a better idea for us," he said. "Their level of intelligence and understanding would be better."
Principal Zaid Ruhaim Mohammed said the policy was misguided and useless.
"When they leave school," he said, "they find ways of playing together."
Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim and Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.
The informant had been working undercover in eastern Afghanistan for weeks, and had already provided U.S. spies with what one official described as "actionable intelligence" when he set the trap, the sources said.
In addition to the seven operatives, the bomb blast at a CIA base in Khost province killed a Jordanian intelligence official who had been assigned to work with the informant, the officials said.
The alleged bomber, identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was picked up in a vehicle a distance from the CIA base and apparently was not thoroughly searched before being brought into the compound, said one of the former officials, a veteran counterterrorism officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the incident remains under investigation.
"He was someone who had already worked with us," said the official, adding that the informant had been jointly managed by U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agencies.
The name of the alleged bomber was first reported by al-Jazeera, which described Balawi as a physician from the Jordanian town of Zarqa, also the home of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the slain former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Jazeera reported that Balawi had been recruited to help track down Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician and No. 2 leader of al-Qaeda. MSNBC also reported that Balawi was the bomber.
The role of Jordanian intelligence at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman was tacitly acknowledged over the weekend when the body of the dead Jordanian intelligence operative was flown home for a military burial in the capital city of Amman. The man, identified in Jordanian press accounts as Sharif Ali bin Zeid, was assigned to work as a "handler" for Balawi, the former U.S. counterterrorism official said.
Jordan is a key ally in the U.S. fight against al-Qaeda, and its intelligence operatives have been integrated into missions in the Middle East and beyond, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
"They know the bad guy's . . . culture, his associates, and more [than anyone] about the network to which he belongs," said Jamie Smith, a former CIA officer who worked in the border region in the years immediately after U.S.-backed Afghan forces drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Jordanians were particularly prized for their skill in both in interrogating captives and cultivating informants, owing to an unrivaled "expertise with radicalized militant groups and Shia/Sunni culture," said Smith, who now heads a private security company known as SCG International.
Yet, despite Jordan's critical role, officials from both countries have insisted that its participation remain virtually invisible, in part to avoid damaging Amman's standing among other Muslim nations in the region, former intelligence officials said.
U.S. intelligence officials declined to comment on the death of the Jordanian officer or to specify the role Jordanian agents were playing in the region. "We have a close partnership with the Jordanians on counterterrorism matters," acknowledged a U.S. counterterrorism official, who agreed to discuss the sensitive relationship on the condition of anonymity. "Having suffered serious losses from terrorist attacks on their own soil, they are keenly aware of the significant threat posed by extremists."
Bin Zeid was on one of the CIA's most sensitive listening posts in eastern Afghanistan when a suicide attacker exploded a bomb in the middle of a group of CIA officers and contractors. The seven Americans killed included the CIA base chief.
The base, in Afghanistan's eastern province, is at the heart of the CIA's operations along the Afghan-Pakistan border. It provides critical intelligence for strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban positions, including targeting information for CIA unmanned aircraft, which carried out more than 50 strikes in Pakistan's autonomous tribal region in the past year. The base also is frequently a setting for debriefing of informants, current and former officials said.
Jordan's official news agency, Petra, said bin Zeid was killed "on Wednesday evening as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces in Afghanistan" and provided no further details about his death. Local news reports quoted family members as saying bin Zeid had been in Afghanistan for 20 days and had been scheduled to travel home on the day of the bombing.
His coffin's arrival in Amman on Saturday was handled with unusual pomp, with Jordan's King Abdullah II and his wife, Rania, personally presiding over a funeral and burial in a military cemetery.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the special relationship with Jordan dates back at least three decades and has recently progressed to the point that the CIA liaison officer in Amman enjoys full, unescorted access to the fortress-like headquarters of the Jordanian spy agency, known as the General Intelligence Department. The close ties helped disrupt several known terrorist plots, including the thwarted 2000 "millennium" conspiracy to attack tourists at hotels and other sites. Jordanians also provided U.S. officials with communications intercepts in summer 2001 that warned of terrorist plans to carry out a major attack on the United States.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Jordan agreed to create a bilateral operations center with the CIA and helped in interrogations of non-Jordanian suspects captured by the CIA and transferred to Jordan in now-famous "rendition" flights. Jordan's role was criticized at the time by human rights groups, and a United Nations inquiry in 2007 concluded that security officials had committed acts of torture, an accusation denied by Jordan.
Critics of the country's pro-U.S. policy say the closeness stems in part from Jordan's receipt of about $500 million worth of economic and military aid from the United States each year and from Jordan's status as one of only two Arab states to have signed a peace agreement with Israel. But Jordanian officials say the cooperation with the CIA is motivated by a mutual understanding of the danger posed by al-Qaeda and the religious extremism and violence it espouses.
"If al-Qaeda targets America, it also targets our stability and the peace of this region," a Jordanian intelligence said in a recent interview. "Based on this stance, we have had many successes countering terrorism."
Staff writer Dana Priest and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
By Jenna Johnson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 3, 2010; C01
The first 570 members of George Washington University's Class of 2014 found out they had been accepted one day in early December. Within hours, they began to network on Facebook -- making friends, debating dorms, discussing "Real World: Washington D.C." and organizing a Wiffle ball team.
"Let the friend requests begin lol. Congrats again guys, 2014 all the way!" a high school senior from New Jersey posted late that night. A few days later, a senior from Illinois wrote, "The senioritis has definitely begun."
College classes don't start for eight months, senior year of high school is barely half over and most deadlines for general admission still haven't hit, but students who committed to attending selective universities through early decision programs have gotten a jump on their virtual college life.
"I already have a sense of having a class of close-knit friends," said Ryan Counihan, a high school senior from Boston who turned 18 last week and received online birthday wishes from several future GWU classmates. "We definitely have a leg up. . . . We have an extra four months or so to get to know each other."
At several colleges across the country, early decision has become an online clique, an opportunity to become a leader at a school they do not yet attend. The University of Chicago Class of 2014 Facebook group proclaims: "Well, we've gotten a head start on everything else. Let's meet each other!" A group at Brown University boasts, "The rest of the masses will find out if they'll be joining us early April."
GWU has a half-dozen Class of 2014 groups on Facebook, and the largest has more than 325 members. (Anyone can join, and there is no guarantee that all members have been accepted.) Together, the students have watched the mail for their acceptance packages, compared financial aid offerings, debated the pros and cons of living in a dorm known for having a "party culture," and marveled at how cool it will be to live in the District.
"Umm we'll be in DC for the next presidential inauguration . . . WHAT," a girl from New York posted. Fourteen others hit the "like" button, and a girl from Chicago responded, "I was thinking about that today and freaked out ahhh!"
And there are plans for non-virtual contact: More than 60 students in the New York area will meet this month or next, and a smaller group in Boston will do the same. A handful of Chicago students met last month.
Students who apply for early decision tend to be devoted fans of the school, said Steve Roche, director of GWU's freshman orientation program, Colonial Inauguration. And that makes them more likely to plunge into networking once they are accepted.
Being accepted into college begins the transition from high school, Roche said, and often a Facebook profile metamorphosis: Besides adding friends and joining college networks, students might remove prom photos and ditch their loyalty to the Jonas Brothers.
Going through that transition in the middle of senior year, rather than right before graduation or over the summer, can be jarring. So when students or their parents called Roche last week asking for orientation information, he gently told them: "Here's the information. But worry about your high school career. . . . It's December, heading into January. Don't forget that you have that extra semester."
GWU received 70 percent more early decision applications this fall than two years ago. The university is holding a second early decision round this month. The deadline for that and general admission is Jan. 10.
Occasionally, the early deciders remind each other that they aren't the only members of the Class of 2014 -- and that others will quickly join the groups they've set up. The real test of their Facebook friendships will come when they meet each other.
These days, students increasingly come to freshman orientation knowing 30 or 40 people rather than being just vaguely acquainted with their roommate from the awkward phone call in which they decide who is bringing the microwave, Roche said. Still, most of those Facebook-forged friendships won't last.
"It's good because it makes them feel more comfortable," Roche said. "Just in my experience, those friendships don't last more than a week or two into the semester."
Max Hoffman, 17, broadcast the news of his acceptance on GWU's main Facebook page but has resisted joining the Class of 2014 group, friending future classmates or replying to the guy who wants to be his roommate.
"I don't want to push the whole process," said Hoffman, who lives outside of Boston. "I want to enjoy high school."
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