Starting Points

Jan 7, 2010

Britain's Labor Party shaken by challenge to Gordon Brown

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A10

LONDON -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Wednesday sought to fend off a surprise challenge to his leadership from within his own ranks, a blow to him and his ruling Labor Party just months before general elections.

The revolt marked Brown's toughest challenge since the summer, when a flurry of senior cabinet officials abandoned him and rumors swirled that he would be forced to step aside. The man viewed as Washington's closest ally in Europe survived that confrontation, and Brown supporters took heart in signs that the call for a vote on his leadership by two senior Labor lawmakers appeared to be gaining only limited traction.

Labor officials dismissed any notion of an internal vote, saying there was no legal precedent to change the party's leader so close to general elections, which must be held by early June. Most leading members of Brown's cabinet lined up behind him, though some waited until evening before issuing statements of support.

Even if Brown quells the rebellion -- most analysts here think he will -- the public display of discord could further damage Labor's chances in upcoming elections against Britain's recast Conservative Party, now tantalizingly close to ending Labor's 13-year-old rule.

"Labor is turning the gun on itself with this," said Jonathan Tonge, head of politics at the University of Liverpool. "Instead of talking about how they're going to beat the Conservatives, they're showing deep divisions just as there were some seeds of hope that they might be getting back into the race."

At stake is the future of a man who took office from Tony Blair in 2007 through an internal party process -- as opposed to a general election -- that left many rivals and Blair loyalists bitter. Brown has had a stormy tenure. In recent weeks, however, his administration has appeared to win at least a measure of new public support after slapping fresh taxes on bankers' bonuses. Now, analysts said, Brown's ability to manage rising public opposition to the war in Afghanistan and cope with a deep recession and runaway budget as a result of the financial crisis may be diminished.

Two of Blair's former senior ministers launched the revolt. Geoff Hoon, Britain's defense minister in the buildup to the Iraq war, and Patricia Hewitt, a former health secretary, sent a letter to fellow Labor lawmakers calling for a secret ballot on Brown.

"We're very concerned that we're simply not getting our message across," Hoon said in an interview with the BBC. "Going into a general-election campaign, there are continuing questions [about Brown's] leadership."

One of Brown's closest allies, Children's Secretary Ed Balls, said the cabinet was "fully behind" Brown. Some Brown loyalists decried the maneuver as vindictive grandstanding by two lawmakers whose careers are on the downswing, with one of them set to step down in the coming months.

British political parties have turned on their own before. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was pushed from power not by British voters but by her own Conservative Party about two years before she was set to face elections. But analysts said there has never been an internal revolt like this in modern British politics so close to an election.

If Brown is forced out, the Labor Party will grapple for a leader with almost no time to spare. Possible contenders include Foreign Secretary David Miliband; his brother, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband; House of Commons Leader Harriet Harman; and Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

The Conservative Party expressed delight at Labor's public division, with its chairman, Eric Pickles, telling the BBC: "It's irresponsible to have such a dysfunctional, faction-ridden Labor Party running the country."

U.N. envoy Eide warns U.S., allies not to ignore civilian goals in Afghanistan

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By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A10

UNITED NATIONS -- The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan on Wednesday delivered a gloomy assessment of the U.S.-led effort to restore stability in the country and warned "we will fail" if the strategy there relies too heavily on military force.

In a presentation to the U.N. Security Council, envoy Kai Eide called on the United States and its Western allies to invest heavily in Afghanistan's economy and its civilian institutions. He said the Obama administration's "military surge must not be allowed to undermine" those goals.

"What we need is a strategy that is politically and not militarily driven," Eide said in his final briefing to the council before he steps down in March. "If we do not take these civilian components of the transition strategy as seriously as the military component, then we will fail."

Eide's assessment comes just three weeks before the United States and its military allies meet in London for a conference on security in Afghanistan. His remarks, which stressed greater investment in education, agriculture and infrastructure, marked one of his final efforts to leave an imprint on Afghanistan policy.

He also advocated for better salaries for Afghan government administrators, and a peace and reconciliation process that would allow the integration of Taliban insurgents who renounce violence.

After Eide's remarks, Rosemary A. DiCarlo, the U.S. representative for special political affairs, sought to underscore the Obama administration's avowed commitment to beefing up civilian participation in the Afghanistan transition. She said the United States, which is preparing to send 30,000 additional troops there, will soon triple its civilian presence in Afghanistan, from 320 last year to nearly 1,000.

"U.S. experts are also working with their Afghan partners to help rehabilitate Afghanistan's key economic sectors so that Afghans themselves can defeat the insurgents, who promise only more violence," she said. "To help reverse the Taliban's momentum, we are focusing our reconstruction effort in areas where we can quickly create jobs, especially agricultural ones."

The United States also has supported Afghan calls for integrating reformed Taliban insurgents into society if they lay down their weapons. Afghanistan's U.N. ambassador, Zahir Tanin, asked the council to lift sanctions on Taliban members "willing to renounce violence and join the peace process."

The United States and European countries have sought to drop sanctions against former Taliban members who have cooperated with the government, but Russia has resisted such a move.

Eide said that he is "deeply worried" about waning public support in the West for the mission in Afghanistan, the failure of Western forces to counter the Taliban insurgency and the growing frustration among Afghans over what they see as the failure of the international community to improve their lives.

"If these negative trends are not soon reversed, then there is a risk that they will become unmanageable," he told the 15-nation council.

Eide said the Western alliance operates "in a way that Afghans perceive as disrespectful and sometimes arrogant." Such behavior, he said, "fuels suspicions of unacceptable foreign interference and breeds a sense of humiliation."

The United Nations is concerned that billions of dollars in foreign assistance for Afghanistan have not been used to strengthen the nation's institutions. Less than 10 percent of foreign aid has gone directly to the Afghan government, and most of that is earmarked for projects supported by donors.

U.N. officials said they think Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has settled on a replacement for Eide, Staffan di Mistura, a dual Italian and Swedish national who headed the world body's mission in Iraq. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, a French national who headed the U.N. peacekeeping department, and Ian Martin, a former U.N. representative in Nepal and East Timor, also have been under consideration for the job.

U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan kill Taliban militants

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By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A08

Back-to-back missile strikes on a training camp in Pakistan's lawless tribal region killed at least 13 militants Wednesday, the latest in a string of apparent U.S. attacks on Taliban targets in the wake of last week's suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

Pakistani sources said both missiles were fired by what appeared to be remote-controlled drone aircraft. The CIA has staged more than 50 such strikes in the past year in Pakistan's autonomous tribal belt, long a sanctuary to Taliban militants and, U.S. officials believe, al-Qaeda's top leadership.

Wednesday's attacks brought to five the number of strikes against Taliban targets since Dec. 30, when a suicide bomber killed eight U.S. and allied intelligence operatives at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan.

The CIA declines to comment on such missile strikes, and U.S. counterterrorism officials cautioned Wednesday against linking the latest attacks to last week's bombing. However, the five strikes within a week were extraordinarily unusual. Moreover, most of the recent attacks -- including Wednesday's in a village called Sanzali -- have occurred across the border from the Afghan province of Khost, home to the Chapman base.

News of the drone attacks came as an al-Qaeda group issued a new claim of responsibility for the bombing of the CIA base. A statement posted on extremist Web sites by Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, head of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, said the attack was intended to avenge the deaths of three al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, according to a translation of the statement by SITE Intelligence Group. All three named were killed in previous drone strikes. Yazid hailed the penetration of a U.S. intelligence stronghold as a "successful epic."

Some counterterrorism experts have urged American commanders to refrain from an overly aggressive response to the attack on the CIA base. Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, said an expansion of drone strikes could stir a backlash in Pakistan.

"Public sentiment in the hinterland is dead set against these strikes in the first place," Nawaz said.

U.S. analysts were exploring possible links between the Haqqani network, a Taliban group closely allied to al-Qaeda, and suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian who attacked the CIA base.

Relatives of Balawi, interviewed Wednesday in Jordan, said he was pressured to become an informant after Jordanian authorities arrested him because of his support for extremist causes.

"He got called in and interrogated," a man who identified himself as Balawi's brother said when reached by phone in Amman, Jordan's capital. "After that, he was under a lot of pressure."

Special correspondent Ranya Kadri in Amman contributed to this report.

In Pakistani port city of Karachi, a new resolve to turn against Taliban

Image by Swamibu via Flickr

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A08

KARACHI, PAKISTAN -- The bearded clerics who run Jamia Binoria, a large seminary in a shabby industrial zone, might seem to have much in common with the Taliban. They come from the same Deobandi strain of Islam, which rejects Western values and seeks to create a pure Islamic state. They require students to memorize the Koran and live an austere, regimented life steeped in religion.

But the leaders of Jamia Binoria insist that they want nothing to do with the Taliban and regard its members as barbaric extremists. They say the recent surge in Taliban suicide bombings across the country have only complicated their lives, leading Pakistani and Western officials to brand seminaries such as theirs as potential terrorist schools and making it harder for them to chart a course between modern education and traditional faith.

"They say we all teach Kalashnikov culture, but that is a wrong image," said Mufti Muhammad Naeem, the seminary director, who expressed pride in its new computer lab and its large number of female students. "The hard-liners accuse me of being a front for American interests, and the Americans harass me at the airport," he said. "We reject Talibanization and we want to be a model for the future, but we get pressure from all sides."

Karachi, a cosmopolitan port city in far southern Pakistan, seems a far cry from the rugged Taliban sanctuaries of the northwestern tribal belt, but officials say it has often served in recent years as a financial conduit, immigration safety valve and religious pipeline for extremists.

Image by Swamibu via Flickr

Now, however, the city of 18 million is finding new motives and means to turn against the Taliban, especially after a bombing late last month killed 44 people during a Shiite religious procession. The strong secular party in city hall has made it a priority to rid the area of Taliban influence. And Pashtuns, a large ethnic minority, are facing social and political ostracism because they share linguistic and tribal roots with the Taliban.

"Karachi has been on a fast track to Talibanization," said Farooq Sattar, a former mayor from the ruling Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM). "They already had a base here from the Afghan war. There were a lot of sleeper cells, and they used the city for rest, refuge and raising money." More recently, he said, Taliban gangs have carried out dozens of robberies and kidnappings for ransom and have begun seeking new urban recruits.

Sattar and others said local officials have employed a variety of methods to track and curb Taliban support. They have rewarded moderate seminaries such as Jamia Binoria, to which they donated the computer lab, and have registered more than 2,000 seminaries in the area, many of which had never been catalogued or monitored by the government.

Police investigators have moved aggressively to uncover and crack down on underground networks that commit crimes for extremist groups, and experts have worked with local banks to better scrutinize informal, large or frequent money transfers, especially to small businesses, individuals or organizations in the tribal northwest.

Internal documents from one bank, made available by Sattar, spoke of the "urgent need to strengthen due diligence" on suspicious cash transfers "to and from areas considered prone to financing illegal activities including terrorism." The documents listed a dozen bank branches in the northwest as being "higher risk" and included a long list of large money transfers to localities where there is little business that could warrant them.

Public support for the Taliban in Karachi, a modern city full of office towers and wealthy entrepreneurs, has generally been limited to conservative religious groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami and gritty enclaves of Pashtuns, including hundreds of thousands who have migrated from the Taliban-plagued northwest.

Pashtun leaders here denied supporting the extremists and said their community has been unfairly tarred with the Taliban brush. They said the problem has exacerbated ethnic discrimination by the Mohajir majority, which dominates the corridors of power in Karachi under the MQM, often denying Pashtuns jobs, education and health benefits.

Some local Pashtuns acknowledged sympathy for the original Taliban movement in Afghanistan, which helped restore order after a chaotic civil war in the 1990s, but others said they had fled from the abuses of the Taliban-run Afghanistan. Many recent migrants moved to Karachi to escape conflict in the Pakistani northwest, where government troops have been fighting Taliban forces intermittently for several years.

"The Taliban are brutal and barbaric, and it is their fault we suffer so much discrimination," said Hazrat Hussain, 32, a cellphone dealer in a poor Pashtun district of Karachi who migrated from the Swat area of northwest Pakistan a decade ago. "They are killing innocent Pashtuns with suicide bombs, and they are destroying the image of our community."

Among the aboveground religious groups in the region, only Jamaat-e-Islami remains openly supportive of the Taliban, regularly holding rallies that denounce the West as orchestrating attacks blamed on the Taliban. But other established Islamic groups said Jamaat, which is based in Punjab province, has limited public support in Karachi and surrounding Sindh province.

Although numerous Deobandi mosques and seminaries operate in Pashtun enclaves, moderate versions of Islam, including Sufi mysticism, are more deeply rooted among Karachi residents. One moderate group, Sunni Tehrik, lost two top leaders to Taliban attacks.

"Many of us have been victims of the Taliban, and we are all against their agenda," said Sarwat Qadri, the leader of Sunni Tehrik, whose father was assassinated in 2006. He said there are signs of a growing public rejection of the Taliban.

"A year ago, probably 70 percent of Pakistanis accepted them. Now it is less than 20 percent," he said. "But we need to keep making people aware of what they really are, until terrorism is eradicated."

Hazaras Hustle to Head of Class in Afghanistan

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KABUL, Afghanistan — For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pashtun rulers.

But increasingly they are people like Mustafa, a teenager who has traveled a rough road but whose future now looks as bright as any in this war-ravaged country. His course reflects the collective effort of the Hazara, who make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, to remake their circumstances so swiftly that by some measures they are beginning to overtake other groups.

Like many Hazaras of his generation, Mustafa, now 16, fled Afghanistan with his family in the mid-1990s. They settled in Quetta, Pakistan, living with other Hazara refugees outside the Taliban’s reach and getting a taste of opportunities long out of their grasp.

After the 2001 American invasion, his family returned, not to their home in impoverished Daykondi Province, but to Kabul, where his uneducated parents thought Mustafa and his siblings would get better schooling. “There was no opportunity for studying in Daykondi,” he said.

Mustafa is now a top student at Marefat High School in Dasht-i-Barchi, a vast, poor Shiite enclave in western Kabul of potholed dirt streets, unheated homes and tiny shops. Nearly every one of his graduating classmates will go on to college. Mustafa, an 11th grader who favors physics and mathematics, wants to study nuclear physics at a Western university.

“The Pashtun had the opportunities in the past, but now the Hazaras have these opportunities,” said Mustafa, whose school director asked that his last name not be published. “We can take our rights just by education.”

The Marefat school is a refuge for 2,500 Hazaras, many from families like Mustafa’s who fled their homeland in central Afghanistan for Pakistan and Iran in the 1990s and returned after the fall of the Taliban, which had massacred thousands of Hazaras, to make their lives in Kabul.

Since the 2001 invasion, an influx of Hazaras has changed the composition of the capital. More than a million Hazaras now live here, making up more than a quarter of the city’s population.

With a new generation of Hazaras attending school in relative security and motivated by their parents’ dispossession, their success could alter the country’s balance of ethnic power.

Image by Benjamin...B via Flickr

“The Hazara always wanted an open atmosphere to breathe, and now we have that,” said Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a Hazara member of Parliament from Bamian Province.

If there is a recent parallel it is the Kurds of northern Iraq. Once dispossessed and abused, they created a thriving new society after the imposition of no-fly zones in the 1990s and the ouster of Saddam Hussein almost seven years ago.

The Hazara resurgence is not so geographically concentrated. The principal Hazara provinces, while relatively safe, remain impoverished and, their leaders complain, are bypassed by the foreign aid sent to Pashtun areas as a carrot to lure people from the insurgency.

Instead, it is a revival built largely on education, an asset Hazaras could carry with them during their years as refugees.

“With education you can take everything you want,” says Qasim, one of Mustafa’s classmates, a 15-year-old Hazara who moved to Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the northern city of Kunduz five years ago because his parents wanted better-educated children.

The old Afghan rulers “wanted to exploit Hazara people, and they didn’t want us to become leaders in this country or to improve,” he said. But that will change. “By studying we can dictate our future.”

The Hazara gains have already been rapid. Two Hazara-dominated provinces, Bamian and Daykondi, have the highest passing rates on admissions exams for the country’s top rung of universities, according to officials from the Ministry of Higher Education. In the high school graduating class of 2008, three-fourths of students in Daykondi who took the test passed, and two-thirds in Bamian, compared with the national rate of 22 percent.

In a country that has one of the world’s lowest female literacy rates — just one in seven women over age 15 can read and write — the progress of Hazara women is even more stark, especially compared with Pashtun provinces.

Pashtuns, who are mostly Sunni, are the country’s largest ethnic group. While the Taliban insurgency rages in Pashtun regions, and many schools are attacked or forced to close, the enrollment of girls in Bamian schools rose by nearly one-third the past two years, to 46,500, as total school enrollment there grew 22 percent.

Total enrollment in Daykondi rose almost 40 percent to 156,000 over the past two years, and girls now make up 43 percent of students, said Mohammad Ali Wasiq, the Daykondi Province education director. More girls passed the entrance exam for the country’s top-rung universities from Bamian and Daykondi in 2008 than from 10 mainly Pashtun provinces combined.

The Hazaras’ emphasis on educating girls as assiduously as boys, along with a stronger belief in gender equity than is common here, belies the perception of Afghan Shiites left by the passage last spring of a law for Shiites that condones marital rape. Its passage was seen as an effort by President Hamid Karzai to win support from Shiite clerics before elections.

But many Hazara men opposed the law, including officials at the school. A powerful Shiite ayatollah in Kabul condemned the school for its opposition, leading to violent, rock-throwing demonstrations, but only 22 of Marefat’s students dropped out as a result of the pressure, administrators say.

College-educated Hazaras, including women clad in white head scarves, are a growing presence in Western offices in Kabul. And Hazaras have flooded the security forces, and now are a disproportionate fraction of soldiers, while Pashtun representation continues to lag.

Pashtun leaders worry about how their own students are faring even as Hazaras excel, and some even fret whether rising Hazara influence could lead to the largely Shiite Iran having greater sway within Afghanistan.

“The government should work hard to make the opportunity for other places in the country to also go forward,” said Khalid Pashtoon, a Parliament member from Kandahar. He said he had no problem with Hazara gains in education, but added, “The only fear I have is if countries like Iran use it politically in their favor.”

Continued Hazara gains, of course, depend on the Taliban never returning to official power. Aziz Royesh, director of the Marefat school, says he worries how groups that have long held power in Afghanistan will adapt as Hazaras fill more places within the government, military and other influential professions.

“It will be very difficult for them to see that a new generation is coming,” said Mr. Royesh, 40, who fought the Soviet occupiers and never made it past the fifth grade. “Now they cannot use the force of government to prevent specific people from getting their civil rights and their human rights.”

Iran Shielding Its Nuclear Efforts in Maze of Tunnels

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By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Last September, when Iran’s uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country.

In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of the Qum plant only heightened fears about other undeclared sites.

Now, with the passing of President Obama’s year-end deadline for diplomatic progress, that cloak of invisibility has emerged as something of a stealth weapon, complicating the West’s military and geopolitical calculus.

The Obama administration says it is hoping to take advantage of domestic political unrest and disarray in Iran’s nuclear program to press for a regimen of strong and immediate new sanctions. But a crucial factor behind that push for nonmilitary solutions, some analysts say, is Iran’s tunneling — what Tehran calls its strategy of “passive defense.”

Indeed, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has repeatedly discounted the possibility of a military strike, saying that it would only slow Iran’s nuclear ambitions by one to three years while driving the program further underground.

Some analysts say that Israel, which has taken the hardest line on Iran, may be especially hampered, given its less formidable military and intelligence abilities.

“It complicates your targeting,” said Richard L. Russell, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. “We’re used to facilities being above ground. Underground, it becomes literally a black hole. You can’t be sure what’s taking place.”

Even the Israelis concede that solid rock can render bombs useless. Late last month, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, told Parliament that the Qum plant was “located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.”

Heavily mountainous Iran has a long history of tunneling toward civilian as well as military ends, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has played a recurring role — first as a transportation engineer and founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association and now as the nation’s president.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels.

No one in the West knows how much, or exactly what part, of Iran’s nuclear program lies hidden. Still, evidence of the downward atomic push is clear to the inquisitive.

Google Earth, for instance, shows that the original hub of the nuclear complex at Isfahan consists of scores of easily observed — and easy to attack — buildings. But government analysts say that in recent years Iran has honeycombed the nearby mountains with tunnels. Satellite photos show six entrances.

Iranian officials say years of veiled bombing threats prompted their country to exercise its “sovereign right” to protect its nuclear facilities by hiding them underground. That was their argument when they announced plans in November to build 10 uranium enrichment plants. Despite the improbability and bluster of the claim, Iran’s tunneling history gave it a measure of credibility.

“They will be scattered in the mountains,” the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran’s Press TV. “We will be using the passive defense so that we don’t need to have active defense, which is very expensive.”

Mr. Gates, along with other Western officials, has dismissed that line of argument as cover for a covert arms program.

“If they wanted it for peaceful purposes,” he said of the Qum plant on CNN, “there’s no reason to put it so deep underground, no reason to be deceptive about it, keep it a secret for a protracted period of time.”

Iran denies that its nuclear efforts are for military purposes and insists that it wants to unlock the atom strictly for peaceful aims, like making electricity. It says it wants to build many enrichment plants to fuel up to 20 nuclear power plants, a plan many economists question because Iran ranks second globally in oil and natural gas reserves.

Ploy or not, any expansion seems unlikely to zoom ahead. After a decade of construction, Iran’s main enrichment plant, at Natanz, operates at a tiny fraction of its capacity. The Qum plant is only half built. Nuclear experts say the new plants, if attempted, may not materialize for years or decades. Even so, they note that tunnels would be the easiest part of the plan and may get dug relatively soon.

Despite the questions about whether the West can credibly threaten to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, analysts insist that the United States, Israel and their allies will never rule out that option. The Pentagon, in fact, is racing to develop a powerful new tunnel-busting bomb.

“Deeply buried targets have been a problem forever,” said Greg Duckworth, a civilian scientist who recently led a Pentagon research effort to pinpoint enemy tunnels. “And it’s getting worse.”

A Tunnel Expert

Mr. Ahmadinejad began professional life as a transportation engineer with close ties to the Revolutionary Guards and an abiding interest in tunnels.

He helped found the Iranian Tunneling Association in 1998, according to the group’s Web site. That year, the Tehran subway began a major expansion, and Iran, in secret, accelerated its nuclear program.

In early 2004, while mayor of Tehran, Mr. Ahmadinejad served as chairman of the Sixth Iranian Tunneling Conference. He praised the leaders of ancient Persia for creating networks of subterranean waterways and called for the creation of new “tunnels” between the government, universities and professional groups.

“I ask God to help us all,” he said in a paper. Such tunneling conferences, held regularly in Tehran, draw global manufacturers of tunnel-boring machines — giant devices as big as locomotives that dig quickly through rocky strata. Terratec, an Australian maker, noted early last year that Iran had recently become “one of the most active markets in the world.”

Many of the companies keep offices in Tehran. Herrenknecht, a German firm considered the market leader, lists three. Engineers say Iran has hundreds of miles of civilian tunneling projects under way, including subways in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, highway tunnels across the country and water tunnels to irrigate the dry interior.

By all accounts, the seeds of the downward military shift were planted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Iraq hit Tehran and other Iranian cities with waves of missiles. Constructing shelters, bunkers and tunnels became a patriotic duty.

An Opposition Watchdog

In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group, revealed that Iran was building a secret underground nuclear plant at Natanz that turned out to be for enriching uranium. Enrichment plants can make fuel for reactors or, with a little more effort, atom bombs.

Satellite photos showed the Iranians burying two cavernous halls roughly half the size of the Pentagon. Estimates put the thickness of overhead rock, dirt and concrete at 30 feet — enough to frustrate bombs but not to guarantee the plant’s survival.

The disclosure of Natanz set off the West’s confrontation with Iran. Two years later, the International Atomic Energy Agency found to its surprise that Iran was tunneling in the mountains by the Isfahan site, where uranium is readied for enrichment. “Iran failed to report to the agency in a timely manner,” an I.A.E.A. paper said in diplomatic understatement.

Then, in late 2005, the Iranian opposition group held news conferences in Paris and London to announce that its spies had learned that Iran was digging tunnels for missile and atomic work at 14 sites, including an underground complex near Qum. The government, one council official said, was building the tunnels to conceal “its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” The council further charged that Mr. Ahmadinejad and the tunneling association were providing civilian cover for military work and acquisitions.

The council’s assertions got little notice. Some Western experts saw them as overstated. Some questioned the council’s objectivity because it sought the government’s overthrow. Perhaps the biggest impediment was a suspicion of defectors at a time when the American invasion of Iraq was proving to be based in part on Iraqi dissidents’ false claims about Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons.

United Nations atomic inspectors did check out a few of the tunnels at Isfahan, but not at Qum because the plant was on a military base and thus off limits for inspection without strong evidence of suspicious activity.

“We followed whatever they came up with,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the recently departed head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said of the council in an interview. “And a lot of it was bogus.”

Frank Pabian, a senior adviser on nuclear nonproliferation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, strongly disagreed. “They’re right 90 percent of the time,” he said of the council’s disclosures about Iran’s clandestine sites. “That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but 90 percent is a pretty good record.”

In 2007, the council announced that Iran was tunneling in the mountains near Natanz, the sprawling enrichment site. Satellite photos confirmed that.

And Qum became a vindication, though belatedly, in late September, when President Obama, flanked by the leaders of France and Britain, identified “a covert uranium enrichment facility” being constructed there.

Military Warrens

In December, the opposition group capitalized on its new stature to issue a report on Iranian military tunneling. It said Iran had dug tunnels and bunkers for research facilities, ammunition storage, military headquarters and command and control centers. “A group of factories” in the mountains east of Tehran, it said, specialize in “the manufacturing of nuclear warheads.”

Over all, the report raised to 19, from 14, the number of locations where it said tunnels — often multiple tunnels — were hiding military bases and work on arms.

American war planners see Iran’s tunnels — whatever their exact number and contents — as a serious test of military abilities. Most say there is no easy way to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden, widely dispersed and deeply buried.

Among the difficulties, military experts say, are decoy tunnels and false entrances, the identification of which requires good intelligence. The experts add that Iran’s announcement about new enrichment plants may simply produce a blur of activity meant to confuse Western war planners.

David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless search for unconventional arms in Iraq, said the hiding of a plant or two among the rocky labyrinths could pose a particular challenge for Israel. “They have limited intelligence for targeting,” Dr. Kay said, adding that the United States was better equipped to map out Iran’s nuclear terrain.

Raymond Tanter, an Iran expert at Georgetown University who served in the Reagan White House, agreed. “So far, the tunneling has not succeeded to the point that the American technology couldn’t get to it,” he contended. “But it makes Israel’s options more problematic, because they have less of a military edge.”

Doubts notwithstanding, the Obama administration has been careful to leave the military option on the table, and the Pentagon is racing to develop a deadly tunnel weapon.

The device — 20 feet long and called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator — began as a 2004 recommendation from the Defense Science Board, a high-level advisory group to the Pentagon.

“A deep underground tunnel facility in a rock geology poses a significant challenge,” the board wrote. “Several thousand pounds of high explosives coupled to the tunnel are needed to blow down blast doors and propagate a lethal air blast.”

The bomb carries tons of explosives and is considered 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. It underwent preliminary testing in 2007, and its first deployments are expected next summer. Its carrier is to be the B-2 stealth bomber.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in October that budget problems had delayed the weapon but that it was now back on track. Military officials deny having a specific target in mind. Still, Mr. Whitman added, war planners consider it “an important capability.”

Clashes in Egyptian town after Coptic killings

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Clashes have broken out in the southern Egyptian town where seven people died in a drive-by shooting outside a church after a Coptic Christmas Eve Mass.

A BBC correspondent in Cairo said protesters clashed with police at the hospital in the town of Naga Hamady.

The shooting happened as churchgoers left midnight Mass to welcome in the Coptic Christmas on 7 January.

The attack is thought to be in revenge for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Christian man.

Following the reported rape in November there were five days of riots in the town, with Christian properties set on fire and damaged.

The BBC's Yolande Knell, in Cairo, said more than 1,000 Christians had gathered at the hospital to collect the bodies of six of the victims.

Stones were thrown at security forces and ambulances were smashed as they vented their anger, she added.

Three people are reported to have pulled up outside the church in Naga Hamady on Wednesday evening, killing at least six Coptic Christians and a security official and injuring 10 others, including two Muslim passers-by.

Police say the chief attacker in Wednesday's shooting has been identified but no arrests have yet been made.

The church's Bishop Kirollos said there had been threats in the days leading up to the Christmas Eve service - a reason he decided to end his Mass an hour earlier than normal.

"For days, I had expected something to happen on Christmas Eve," he told the Associated Press.

He said he left the church minutes before the attack.

"A driving car swerved near me, so I took the back door," he said. "By the time I shook hands with someone at the gate, I heard the mayhem, lots of machine-gun shots."

Witness Youssef Sidhom told the BBC that the attack shocked everyone, including police guarding the church.

Harassment claims

Naga Hamady is 40 miles (64km) from Luxor, southern Egypt's biggest city.

Coptic Christians - who make up 10% of Egypt's 80 million population - have complained of harassment and discrimination.

Some Copts argue that previous attacks on them have gone unpunished or have resulted in light sentences.

Most Christians in Egypt are Copts - Christians descended from the ancient Egyptians.

Their church split from the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches in AD451 because of a theological dispute over the nature of Christ, but is now, on most issues, doctrinally similar to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Obama administration adds gender identity to Equal Employment Opportunity policies

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Policy Marks First Time Transgender Individuals Are Explicitly Protected In Federal Employment

WASHINGTON – Beginning in 2010, the Obama administration, through the Office of Personnel Management, has started to list gender identity among the classes protected by federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policies. By including gender identity as a protected class, the federal government is stating its commitment to protecting transgender employees and has taken a significant step toward ending employment discrimination of LGBT people in the federal workforce.

Although a long-standing federal law prohibits any federal employment decisions that are not based on merit and another law prohibits sex discrimination, the new EEO policy marks the first time that gender identity discrimination has been explicitly banned from the federal workplace. The policy is now on the federal government’s jobs Web site as a link from more than 20,000 current federal job listings. The American Civil Liberties Union praised the Obama administration for initiating the change in EEO policy and urged Congress to continue to work for further protections for LGBT Americans.

“This new policy is a very significant development,” said Christopher Anders, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “The inclusion of gender identity in federal EEO policies is a very clear statement that the federal government will not discriminate based on gender identity. The Obama administration is demonstrating a strong commitment to an effective workforce by making clear that the federal government will not discriminate against transgender employees.”

The new EEO policy protects federal employees and applicants for federal employment, but federal legislation is still needed to protect millions of LGBT employees working for businesses and state and local governments. The House and Senate currently have versions of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) pending. ENDA, if passed, would be the first-ever federal ban on employment discrimination of LBGT Americans in the workplace.

“Employment discrimination can have a devastating effect on transgender Americans and the families they support,” said Anders. “With its new policy, the federal government is setting a good example for all employers. Although many state governments and businesses already provide workplace protections for transgender employees, explicit protection of transgender federal employees will likely be a catalyst for many more states and businesses to apply the federal policy. With this new policy and ENDA pending in both the House and Senate, we have an unprecedented opportunity to protect the rights of all Americans at work. When Congress returns later this month, both houses should make passing ENDA a priority.”

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A copy of an ACLU report, Working in the Shadows: Ending Employment Discrimination for LGBT Americans, is available at: www.aclu.org/lgbt/discrim/31836pub20070917.html

'Negro' Race Choice On Census Form Sparks Outrage - wcbstv.com

Question #9 Causes Uproar, Asks For Citizens To Pick 'Black,' 'African American' Or 'Negro' From Same Box

A fiery blast from the past is conjuring controversy in the new millennium. The word "negro" is now featured on an official U.S. document and now many are questioning if the Census Bureau is being insensitive.

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It's a word that many African Americans associate with segregation, so imagine how shocked many were to see it on the 2010 U.S. census form.

"The fact that it's 2010 and they're still putting 'negro,' I am a little offended," said Secaucus resident Dawud Ingram.

Question #9 on the this year's census asks about your race. One of the boxes you can choose is "black," "African American," or "negro," all placed next to the same box. Ingram said it's not a word he uses to identify neither himself nor anybody else.

"African Americans haven't been going by the term 'negro' for decades now. It's really confusing," he said.

But census officials disagree, saying they found some older African Americans identify themselves that way and they're trying to be inclusive. In a statement, they said: "Results from the census in 2000 showed that a number of respondents provided a write-in response of 'negro' when answering the question on race."

In fact, Congress approved the form more than a year ago. Newark resident Jabbar Ali can't believe it.

"I thought it was something we left behind a long time ago – the word 'negro,'" said Ali.

Chanou Wilshire said the census form doesn't give her an option since it's got "African American," "black," and "negro" next to the same box.

"It's highly offensive," she told CBS 2.

But not everyone is offended.

"How you define yourself I guess is subjective. But for me, that on a form doesn't offend me at all," said Brooklyn resident Tiffany Campbell.

Others don't understand why the question of race has to come up on any form.

"I'm an American. What's wrong with just being an American?" asked Newark resident Derri Gowns.

Census bureau officials said they're preparing for the 2020 form, asking folks now in a questionnaire whether the word 'negro' should be removed.

Conservatives Finish 2009 as No. 1 Ideological Group

Uptick owing largely to more independents calling themselves conservative

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ -- The increased conservatism that Gallup first identified among Americans last June persisted throughout the year, so that the final year-end political ideology figures confirm Gallup's initial reporting: conservatives (40%) outnumbered both moderates (36%) and liberals (21%) across the nation in 2009.

More broadly, the percentage of Americans calling themselves either conservative or liberal has increased over the last decade, while the percentage of moderates has declined.

Political Ideology -- Annual Trends From 1992-2009

Since 1992, there have been only two other years -- 2003 and 2004 -- in which the average percentage of conservatives nationwide outnumbered moderates, and in both cases, it was by two percentage points (in contrast to the current four points).

"The proportion of independents calling themselves "moderate" held relatively steady in the mid-40s over the last decade, while the proportion of Republican and Democratic moderates dwindled."

The rather abrupt three-point increase between 2008 and 2009 in the percentage of Americans calling themselves conservative is largely owing to an increase -- from 30% to 35% -- in the percentage of political independents adopting the label. Over the same period, there was only a slight increase in professed conservatism among Republicans (from 70% to 71%) and no change among Democrats (at 21%).

Recent Trend in Percentage Identifying as Conservative -- by Party ID

The 2009 findings come from an aggregate of 21 separate Gallup and USA Today/Gallup surveys, including nearly 22,000 interviews. The 1992 to 2008 trends also represent thousands of interviews compiled for each year. Thus, the margins of sampling error around the individual estimates are less than one percentage point.

Trends of the Past Decade

Just looking at the decade that ended in 2009, Gallup's annual political ideology trends document a slight dip in the percentage of Americans calling themselves moderate (from 40% in 2000 to 36% in 2009), while, at the same time, the ranks of both liberals and conservatives expanded slightly.

Gallup measures political ideology by asking Americans to indicate whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. The detailed responses show a slight increase between 2000 and 2009 in the percentage of Americans calling themselves "very conservative" (from 6% to 9%) and less change in the percentage calling themselves "very liberal" (from 4% to 5%). Most conservatives continue to call themselves "conservative" rather than "very conservative," and the same pattern is seen for liberals.

Detailed Political Ideology Findings: 2000 vs. 2009

Republicans Become More Solidly "Conservative"

In addition to the very recent increase in conservatism among independents, a growing percentage of Republicans identified themselves as such starting in 2003. Across the same period, the percentage of Democrats calling themselves conservative dipped slightly, somewhat offsetting the increase among Republicans.

Recent Trend in Percentage Conservative -- by Party ID

Partisans Shy Away From "Moderate" Label

The proportion of independents calling themselves "moderate" held relatively steady in the mid-40s over the last decade, while the proportion of Republican and Democratic moderates dwindled. Between 2000 and 2009, the percentage of moderates fell five percentage points among Democrats (from 44% to 39%) and seven points among Republicans (from 31% to 24%).

Recent Trend in Percentage Moderate -- by Party ID

Democrats Grow Increasingly "Liberal"

Similar to the increased conservatism among Republicans, there was a gradual increase in the last decade in "liberal" identification among Democrats, from 29% in 2002 to 38% in 2007, and it has since remained at about that level.

Recent Trend in Percentage Liberal -- by Party ID

The effect of this shift among Democrats is most apparent when one reviews the trend in their ideological profile over the past decade. Whereas moderates constituted the largest bloc of Democrats in 2000, today they are about tied with liberals as twin leaders, and the proportion of conservatives has declined.

Recent Political Ideology Trend -- Among Democrats

By contrast, the expanded number of conservatives making up the Republican Party has merely strengthened the conservatives' already strong hold on that party.

Recent Political Ideology Trend -- Among Republicans

And despite the recent uptick in conservatism among independents, the largest segment continues to be moderate (although by a smaller margin than previously).

Recent Political Ideology Trend -- Among Independents

Bottom Line

Political independents showed increased attachment to the "conservative" label in 2009, boosting the overall ranks of that group so that it now clearly outnumbers moderates in Gallup's annual averages for the first time since 2004. Longer term, the proportions of Americans calling themselves conservative as well as liberal expanded slightly this past decade, largely because of increased partisan attachment to each label. At the same time, the percentage of "moderates" has dwindled, underscoring the heightened polarization of American politics as the nation heads into a new decade.

Jan 6, 2010

Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in U.S. exaggerated

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Study released Wednesday by researchers at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill
139 people listed as "Muslim-American terrorism offenders" since 9/11
Summarized research involving interviews of more than 120 Muslims in four U.S. communities
Study: Ideology "that justifies the use of violence for political ends" is roundly condemned

(CNN) -- The terrorist threat posed by radicalized Muslim- Americans has been exaggerated, according to a study released Wednesday by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A small number of Muslim-Americans have undergone radicalization since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the study found. It compiled a list of 139 individuals it categorized as "Muslim-American terrorism offenders" who had become radicalized in the U.S. in that time -- a rate of 17 per year.

That level is "small compared to other violent crime in America, but not insignificant," according to the study, titled "Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans."

To be included on the list, an offender had to have been wanted, arrested, convicted or killed in connection with terrorism-related activities since 9/11 -- and have lived in the United States, regardless of immigration status, for more than a year prior to arrest.

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Of the 139 offenders, fewer than a third successfully executed a violent plan, according to a Duke University statement on the study, and most of those were overseas. Read the report:"Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans"

"Muslim-American organizations and the vast majority of individuals that we interviewed firmly reject the radical extremist ideology that justifies the use of violence to achieve political ends," David Schanzer, an associate professor in Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy and director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, said in the statement.

In the aftermath of 9/11, however, as well as terrorist attacks elsewhere in the world, the possible radicalization of Muslim-Americans is a "key counterterrorism concern" -- magnified by heavy publicity that accompanies the arrests of Muslim-Americans, such as that seen in the wake of the November shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 people were killed. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan, a Muslim born in Virginia, is charged in connection with that incident.

Other high-profile incidents include the charging of eight Somali-American men on charges related to what authorities say are efforts to recruit youths from the Minneapolis, Minnesota, area to fight for al-Shabaab, a Somali guerrilla movement battling the African country's U.N.-backed transitional government. At least two young men from Minnesota have been killed in Somalia, including one who blew himself up in what is believed to have been the first suicide bombing carried out by a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In addition, five Americans were arrested last month in Pakistan, and police have said they are confident that they were planning terrorist attacks. A Pakistani court Monday gave police two weeks to prepare their case against the five; authorities have said they plan to prosecute the youths under the country's anti-terrorism act.

But it is the Muslim-American communities themselves who play a large role in keeping the number of radicalized members low through their own practices, according to the study. Leaders and Muslim-American organizations denounce violent acts, for instance, in messages that have weight within communities.

In addition, such communities often self-police -- confronting those who express radical ideology or support for terrorism and communicating concerns about radical individuals to authorities. Some Muslim-Americans have adopted programs for youth to help identify those who react inappropriately to controversial issues so they can undergo counseling and education, the researchers said.

"Muslim-American communities have been active in preventing radicalization," said Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at UNC, in the statement. "This is one reason that Muslim-American terrorism has resulted in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11."

However, "since 9/11, there has been increased tension among Muslim-Americans about their acceptance in mainstream American society," the study said. Muslim-Americans report feeling a stronger anti-Muslim bias from the media as well as from day-to-day interactions.

"While Muslim-Americans understand and support the need for enhanced security and counterterrorism initiatives, they believe that some of these efforts are discriminatory, and they are angered that innocent Muslim-Americans bear the brunt of the impact of these policies."

Steps can be taken to minimize radicalization among Muslim-Americans, the study said. The most important is encouraging political mobilization among Muslims, which helps prevent radicalization and also demonstrates to Muslims abroad "that grievances can be resolved through peaceful democratic means." Policymakers should include Muslim-Americans in their outreach efforts, and public officials should attend events at mosques, as they do churches and synagogues, the study recommended.

Also, Muslim-American communities should widely disseminate their condemnation of terrorism and violence, and those statements should be publicized, the study said. Law enforcement has a role to play as well, by making efforts to increase the level of trust and communication with such communities. This could include the cultivation of Muslim-American informants, the study suggested, a policy that could be developed and openly discussed with community leaders.

Governments can promote and encourage the building of strong Muslim-American communities and promote outreach by social services agencies, the study said. "Our research suggests that Muslim-American communities desire collaboration and outreach with the government beyond law enforcement, in areas such as public health, education and transportation."

And the Muslim-American community can promote enhanced education about its religion and beliefs, the study said. Increased civil rights enforcement can also be an important tool.

However, policies that alienate Muslims may increase the threat of homegrown terrorism rather than reducing it, the study said.

"Our research suggests that initiatives that treat Muslim-Americans as part of the solution to this problem are far more likely to be successful," said Schanzer.

Schanzer, Kurzman and Ebrahim Moosa, associate professor of religion at Duke, co-authored the study, which summarized two years of research involving interviews of more than 120 Muslims in four different communities nationwide -- Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. The study was funded by a grant from the Department of Justice.