The General’s New Mission

Pakistan's latest Army chief holds the key to next week's vote, and to the future of his unstable nation.

By John Barry, Zahid Hussain and Ron Moreau
NEWSWEEK


He stands at one end of the back row in his class photo, a stern-looking man in a pale uniform, aloof from the grinning, khaki-clad Americans beside him. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was only one military officer among 993, including 123 from foreign armed services, in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College's class of 1988. Still, the ramrod-straight, six-foot Pakistani caught the notice of some at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. "He was a very quiet guy, very sober, very serious," says retired U.S. Army Col. William Kiskowski. "But very smart." While classmates recall a party given by Kayani and his wife—liquor was served, but the couple didn't touch it—they say Kayani kept mostly to himself. "He is a very easy man to underestimate," says a longtime U.S. Army friend whose job prevents him from speaking for attribution. "When he does speak he tends to mumble. So those meeting him for the first time will possibly go away thinking he is perhaps not quite as smart as people have said. This would be a terrible mistake."

Kayani had better be every bit that smart—and lucky, too. He's been tasked with one of the toughest, most urgent military assignments in the world: reforming Pakistan's armed forces and rescuing the country itself from possible collapse. Unless the 55-year-old four-star general can do that, and quickly, the official outcome in next week's parliamentary elections could be beside the point. The long dictatorship of Gen. Pervez Musharraf has left the Army widely distrusted and deeply demoralized, while armed allies of Al Qaeda rampage in the countryside and suicide bombers terrorize the cities. Since taking over as chief of Army staff (his formal job title) less than three months ago, Kayani has raced to undo the damage. "He's by far the best officer I've come across in the Pakistani Army," says a Western military official in Islamabad with experience on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. But will the best be good enough? "No matter how progressive and capable he is, that doesn't mean he can turn everything around in the time allotted to him," adds the official, who is not authorized to be quoted by name. "He's dealing with an institution that is a proverbial dinosaur, and very resistant to change."

Kayani could face an even bigger challenge in the wake of the Feb. 18 vote. He has sworn from the start to get the military out of politics, and he's made no exceptions for soldiers and officers assigned to the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Military Intelligence (MI) agencies. Unauthorized contact with any politician is now a firing offense, and troops this Election Day are to do nothing at the polls beyond keeping them secure. Even so, just about everyone in Pakistan is bracing for the possibility of widespread violence. Opposition candidates are already crying foul, complaining especially that the Interior Ministry's Intelligence Bureau (IB) and its paramilitary Rangers are intimidating candidates and planning to meddle with the polls. "The IB is much more dangerous than the MI or ISI," says Samina Ahmed, the South Asia director of the International Crisis Group. "The IB works more closely with local police and knows the administration and the local players."

The fears are compounded by the threat of further terrorist attacks. "There is a strong feeling within the military that there will be an aftermath of violence no matter who wins," says the Western military official. "The big question is, how will Kayani and the Army deal with that, if it happens." No one knows the answer. Despite his order for the Army to withdraw from politics, Kayani has never explicitly said he wouldn't order his forces to crush civil unrest if it threatened Musharraf's presidency. And if Kayani did issue such an order? "Would the Army do it?" says his longtime Army friend. "Yes, in my view. But it would be very distasteful." Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who got to know the Pakistani military closely as commander of the U.S. Central Command in the late '90s, agrees: "They wouldn't allow chaos. But they'd be very reluctant, because of the importance they place on their relationship with the people."

In recent weeks a steady parade of top-level U.S. officials have visited Kayani to make up their own minds about him. Most—including CIA chief Michael Hayden, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon—have come away confident that Kayani knows what he's doing. Hayden and McConnell hinted to Kayani that the Americans would like to send additional U.S. personnel into the country to battle Al Qaeda, according to a U.S. official who refused to be named on such delicate issues. The Pakistanis rebuffed the notion, exactly as the Americans had anticipated. Instead, both sides agreed to increased Predator flights and more sharing of U.S. intelligence with the Pakistanis. "A lot of [U.S.] folks like him," says the official. "Nobody hates him."

In fact, Kayani is almost everything his American partners could want: a deep-thinking, thoroughly professional military man who ascended through the ranks by his own merits and who is convinced that the armed forces should stay out of politics. (And the economy: he's already suggested the Army will turn over two of the biggest companies in its $1 billion empire, as well as some pricey real estate, to the government.) His primary recreation is golf, and his only obvious affectation is a long ivory cigarette holder. "He is a man who is temperamentally given to reading, reflection and to listening more and talking less," says analyst Nasim Zehra, a fellow at Harvard's Asian Center. Kayani was born into Army life. His father, a senior NCO, couldn't send the boy to the best schools, where commissioned officers' kids went. To this day Kayani's English is less fluent than that of many more-privileged officers who serve under him.

That only underscores his achievements. Before enrolling in the elite command school in Kansas he graduated first in his class at the Army Staff College in Quetta, Pakistan, and he took the advanced course for infantry officers at Fort Benning, Ga. It served him well. Studies at Fort Leavenworth were tough on many of Kayani's foreign-born classmates. "They didn't have the grounding," says Kiskowski. "But Kayani did. He had a really good command of American battlefield tactics."

But stopping the armed extremists will take more than that. Some senior officers continue to deny the rising danger from the insurgents, and the security services have historic ties to and sympathies for jihadists in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Still, counterinsurgency is one of Kayani's highest priorities. The day after he was named Army chief, he paid the first of several morale-building visits to the troops in Waziristan. The security-conscious Musharraf seldom went near the insurgent-ridden place. In recent weeks the Army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps have responded to Kayani's encouragement, cleaning out militant strongholds in the Swat Valley and taking the fight to Waziristan. Still, the Army doesn't have the experience and training it needs to achieve lasting gains, or even an overall strategy against the insurgents. For six decades, Pakistan's military has been dedicated to the threat of conventional war against India—nothing like the dangers that are now posed by the homegrown Taliban on the opposite side of the country.

The Americans are eager to help. The latest U.S. defense budget allots $75 million to train and equip the paramilitary Frontier Corps, which the Pentagon views as better suited than Pakistan's regular Army for counterinsurgency. But aid alone won't solve the worst weakness of the Pakistani Army: its conservative, old-school command culture. Kayani can't afford for his fellow officers or the civilian public to think he's too close to the Americans. "It would do him great harm if he is pegged as America's puppet," the Western military official says. Now, says Shuja Nawaz, author of a forthcoming history of the Pakistani armed forces, "Kayani will do what he thinks is right for Pakistan—not what the United States necessarily wants."

At this point they want basically the same thing: a stable, democratic Pakistan that can defend itself against the jihadists. That goal remains elusive. Kayani has warned publicly that no counterinsurgency campaign can succeed without the public's full support. And yet less than half of Pakistan's people favor using Army forces against Al Qaeda and its allies. The last thing Kayani needs now is a bunch of camouflage-painted American Rambos running around Waziristan. Still, it won't be easy watching him go it alone.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/109585

© Newsweek Mag

Scotland Yard concludes that the former Pakistani prime minister died from head injuries. But some Bhutto supporters still believe she was slain by gunfire.

By Fasih Ahmed
Newsweek Web Exclusive


Scotland Yard's conclusion that Benazir Bhutto died from a "rapidly fatal head injury" may not quiet Bhutto supporters who still believe she was slain by an assassin's bullets. Extracts of the Yard's report were made public here in Pakistan by the British High Commission on Friday.

"The only tenable cause for the rapidly fatal head injury in this case is that it occurred as the result of impact due to the effects of the bomb blast," U.K. Home Office pathologist Dr. Nathaniel Cary states in the report. "In my opinion Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto died as a result of a severe head injury sustained as a consequence of the bomb blast and due to head impact somewhere in the escape hatch of the vehicle." The report, ruling out the possibility of gunshot injuries, states that Bhutto's "only apparent injury" was "a major trauma to the right side of the head."

The report says that while "the lack of an extended and detailed search of the crime scene, the absence of an autopsy, and the absence of recognized body recovery and victim identification processes" complicated the Yard's task, available evidence was "sufficient for reliable conclusions to be drawn." The Yard's report says that while Bhutto's "exact head position at the time of the detonation can never be ascertained, the overwhelming conclusion must be that she did not succeed in getting her head entirely below the lip of the escape hatch when the explosion occurred."

The Yard's findings were also announced at a midday press conference by Pakistani police official Abdul Majeed in Rawalpindi. "This is the categorical and definite opinion of an independent investigation," he said. Majeed categorized the two men arrested on Thursday in connection with the assassination as facilitators and said Pakistani investigations into the assassination were ongoing. "We are absolutely independently and on merit investigating the case," he said. "And honestly, as well."

While Bhutto's family and party officials cooperated with the Yard's investigation, according to the report, its conclusion contradicts the accounts of party officials who were riding with Bhutto in her vehicle on Dec. 27 when her convoy was attacked outside an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

"We heard three or four shots first, and [Bhutto] fell into the car," says Sen. Safdar Abbasi, whose wife, Naheed Khan, was Bhutto's political secretary. "Her head was in Naheed's lap and her feet were pointed toward Makhdoom [Amin Fahim, vice chairman of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party]," Abbasi told NEWSWEEK. Abbasi was seated behind Bhutto, Khan and Fahim in the car. "We were trying to wake her up when he noticed blood dripping into Naheed's lap. Naheed cradled [Bhutto's] head and screamed that a part of the skull was not there," said Abbasi. "That's when the explosion happened."

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who has been accused of not doing enough to protect Bhutto, ceded to calls for an independent inquiry and announced Scotland Yard's engagement in a televised address on Jan. 2. Since then he has attributed the swift hosing down of the crime scene within an hour of the attack to incompetence, blamed tribal militant Baitullah Mehsud for sponsoring the assassination, and blamed Bhutto for not heeding security warnings and standing through the sunroof of her SUV.

But the Yard's report has been greeted with skepticism by Bhutto's party and may not provide much of a reprieve for Musharraf, whose political fate rests on the upcoming Feb. 18 elections, in which Bhutto's party is considered the front runner. "We haven't rejected [the Scotland Yard report] out of hand," Sherry Rehman, spokeswoman for the PPP, told NEWSWEEK on Friday. "We still say that the cause of death is a bullet injury." Supporting the U.S. Senate resolution introduced by Sen. Joseph Biden on Feb. 7, she said the party would renew calls for an international inquiry under the auspices of the United Nations into the "hidden hand that lay behind this assassination, into the financiers, sponsors, perpetrators, organizers of this heinous crime."

Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher of Pakistan's influential Friday Times, feels Pakistanis will view the Yard's report with "utter disbelief." She told NEWSWEEK that it could strengthen the suspicions of the "uninformed" about international involvement in the assassination. "Given the testimony of the people riding in the car with her and the video footage, I can't get my mind around [the Yard's conclusion]," she said. "Benazir died on Musharraf's watch. That's the bottom line."


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/109364

© 2008 Newsweek.com

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Imran Khan: Better A ‘Bad Democrat’

I've heard talk about the U.S. going in. They're talking about a million armed men. It would make Iraq look like child's play.

NEWSWEEK


Pakistan's Imran Khan, a world-renowned cricket star turned politician, visited the United States recently to urge Washington to end its support for President Pervez Musharraf. With Pakistan descending into ever more bloodshed and chaos, and parliamentary elections fast approaching, Khan spoke with NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria, Tony Emerson and Jonathan Tepperman about the spiraling crisis and what Washington should do about it. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What do you hope to achieve by meeting with U.S. politicians?
Khan: Musharraf has convinced people here that he is the only one who can combat terrorism and protect Pakistan's nuclear weapons. I've come to give the other side of the story.

What do you expect to happen in the parliamentary elections on Feb. 18?
Had the elections been held right after Benazir [Bhutto's] assassination [on Dec. 27], her party would have swept everywhere. I knew she was popular, but even I was surprised by the emotions that erupted after her death. Now the results will be more mixed.

How will Musharraf ' s party do?
You can't campaign: there's such fear of suicide attacks, and the opposition think the government will stage something. If there's low voter turnout, there's a much better chance of being able to rig the election. That's what Musharraf is hoping for. But there's a 50 percent chance he won't hold elections at all because [his party] would get so few seats.

Why?
It's not just Benazir's murder. There's an economic meltdown taking place. There are blackouts. Factories are closing. Unemployment is increasing. There's a huge fiscal deficit. A trade deficit. A wheat deficit. This has never happened before.

Are the Americans pushing for elections?
The only thing the Bush administration is pushing [for] is Musharraf. I cannot understand it. Last year was the bloodiest year in Pakistan's history. We had almost 60 attacks. [Extremists] hit the Army right in its headquarters. The whole tribal area could blow up.

What ' s the answer? Musharraf has tried force, and signing deals, in the tribal areas.
No one understands these areas. I don't think many people in Pakistan understand them.

[And] there hasn't been a planned strategy. The U.S. occasionally puts pressure on Musharraf and he does something, but it's all window dressing, token stuff. Bush arrives in Pakistan; they kill 145 people in Waziristan and say, "We've just demolished terrorism." But the casualties the Army is taking are unsustainable. It is going to refuse to continue.

What approach would work, then?
The Pashtun tribes have turned against the Army, not for religious reasons but out of revenge for casualties inflicted. As a result, there is chaos. Everyone is petrified. If anyone is thought to be pro-government, the Taliban come after them. If you are supposed to be a terrorist, the [security services] go after you. But eventually they will have to start a political process. It is the only option.

But this area is seen as the locus of global terror. What should the West do? Nothing?
I've heard talk about the Americans' going in there. Do they understand that they're talking about a million armed men in the tribal agencies? It would make Iraq look like child's play. You only have to look at history. The tribes only unite when foreigners come in. The tribes united against the Mughals, the Brits, the Sikhs, the Russians. All the Americans have to do is come in, and this whole area is going to go up in flames.

So what do you advocate?
Look, it's a mess. It was a mistake to turn the Taliban against you. They were just illiterate religious beggars. Those people, the more you kill them, the more they're going to come after you. Now you have to separate the Pashtuns from Al Qaeda and start negotiations. It will be a slow process, but they are very good at negotiation. That's the route to go.

But how do you persuade Pashtuns to allow the United States to go after Al Qaeda?
Pay them. For a fraction of the money spent on the war, they might have delivered Osama bin Laden. A little bit of money would have given them a stake in peace.

How do you start the process now?
You [must] have credible brokers. Musharraf is now attracting terrorists. The fundamentalists are targeting him. The Pashtuns are targeting him. So you need to have free and fair elections to set up a genuine elected government that can negotiate.

Do you see a figure emerging from elections who could hold the country together?
My contention, after watching the mess Musharraf has made, is that even a bad democrat would be better than a military man. Army men are not equipped to deal with the world. They are used to giving and taking orders, no debate. They have always made a mess of the country. Whatever emerges from democracy—it'll be messy, I'm not saying we'll have utopia—but we'll be going in the right direction.


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107553
© Newsweek Mag

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Pakistan’s Forgotten Man

If we lock up our judges and subvert the law, those who believe in a more brutal kind of justice will triumph.


NEWSWEEK


In the past months, as the crisis in Pakistan has worsened, key figures in the Bush administration, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have spoken out about the need for free and fair elections and have condemned extremism. Yet they've continued through-out to support the man who poll after poll show to be the least popular public figure in Pakistan, less so even than Osama bin Laden: President Pervez Musharraf. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte went so far as to call Musharraf an "indispensable ally" just days after the general declared de facto martial law and suspended Pakistan's Constitution.

All the while, U.S. officials have ignored a man who lives a mere stone's throw from Musharraf. This man's exclusion might seem understandable: barbed wire surrounds his home, the phone lines are cut and the gate is padlocked from the outside. Yet he is no dangerous criminal. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is the chief justice of Pakistan. He's also one of the most popular figures in the country, according to recent polls, and its best hope for returning to a democratic path.

Chaudhry was an unlikely figure to become public enemy No. 1. He was appointed chief justice in June 2005 by Musharraf himself. Once on the bench, though Chaudhry proved independent, he was no iconoclast. Yet he acted in ways that made Pakistan's powerful elites nervous. He expanded the jurisdiction of his court in the domain of human rights, refusing to tolerate police abuses. He reached out to victims of forced marriages and Pakistan's unjust rape laws. He blocked a number of land developments that would have harmed the environment. And in the process, he made some powerful enemies: many of the developers he stymied were Musharraf cronies or Army officers.

The chief justice made himself even more unpopular in 2006 when he began to probe into a growing scandal over missing persons. In the years since September 11, Pakistan had suffered a disturbing number of forced disappearances, as individuals were yanked off the streets, allegedly by security personnel. As the number of victims grew, mothers, wives and daughters of the disappeared began to picket the Supreme Court. Finally the justices took notice and in 2006, after several hearings and much prodding by the court, some 200 missing people were released from custody. Musharraf was reportedly angry with the move and told the Americans that Chaudhry had ordered the release of 60 terrorists arrested during the Red Mosque crackdown. In fact, it was three other justices, none of whom were fired, who had released those captives; Chaudhry wasn't even involved in that decision.

It was probably the matter of Musharraf's own future that sealed Chaudhry's fate. Late last year Musharraf began to worry that if the chief justice insisted on following the letter of the law, Musharraf would be barred from running for another term as president (since the Constitution disqualifies anyone in uniform from standing for the office, and Musharraf was still head of the Army). To prevent any objections, on Nov. 3 Musharraf fired the Supreme Court judges, had them arrested and also detained the attorney pleading the case against him: me.

This was not the first time Musharraf had moved against the chief justice. He had first ordered him to resign in March 2007, and when Chaudhry refused, had removed and detained him, though the justice was unanimously reinstated by 13 members of his own bench in July.

It was Chaudhry's campaign to get back onto the court that turned him into a national hero. After he was sacked, bar associations across the country invited him to speak. As he traveled the country, millions came out to receive him. Wherever he went, men, women and children poured out to cheer him on for having defied the increasingly unpopular general. Showing solidarity became a way to denounce the president. Ordinary citizens cheered Chaudhry with defiance in their eyes. I know—for I was his driver during this tour.

Chaudhry's brave stance soon won him accolades around the world: Harvard Law School gave him its highest award, the Medal of Freedom, and the New York City Bar Association made him a rare honorary member.

Yet U.S. officials remain unmoved, despite a letter Chaudhry sent to Western leaders last week protesting his treatment. Blind to the overwhelming support Chaudhry enjoys at home and abroad, Washington continues to pay lip service to the need for an independent judiciary in Pakistan while doing nothing to support one. This strategy is dangerously shortsighted. The United States has every reason to worry about terrorism and instability in Pakistan. But allowing Musharraf to continue arresting judges and peaceful protesters will only strengthen the terrorists' hand. If we lock up our judges and subvert the legal process, then those who believe in a more brutal kind of justice will triumph. It's therefore high time to take a stand. From now on no dignitary should visit the president on his hill without making it a point to inquire about the prisoner on the hill nearby. Due process and democratic principles demand nothing less.

Ahsan, a former minister for law, justice and the interior in Pakistan, is currently president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. He has been detained without charge since Nov. 3.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107546


© Newsweek Mag

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Another Failed State?

Kosovo's declaration of independence isn't likely to solve its many problems—or defuse tensions in the troubled Balkans


Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 3 : 09 PM ET Feb 17, 2008

Kosovo declared independence Sunday, but it's unlikely any time soon to become the world's 193rd country. What it will almost certainly be is a failed state, unrecognized by the United Nations, unable to govern itself, dependent on Europe for its police and NATO for its armed forces.

After eight years as an international protectorate and billions of dollars in aid and reconstruction funds, its economic prospects are grim. Unemployment is 57 percent, and among youths it's more like 70 percent; half the population is under 25. Small wonder then that its chief export is organized crime. It remains ethnically cleansed of its Serb minority, who only survive in the province under armed guard by NATO. And it has the potential of provoking a wider conflict as other powers try to work out just what to do about yet another intractable Balkan mess.

In theory, Kosovo has been self-governing since NATO bombed the Serbian province for 78 days in 1999, and the United Nations under Security Council Resolution 1244 declared it an autonomous province under U.N. protection but also confirmed that it was part of Serbia. Kosovo was never a federal part of Yugoslavia, as were the other parts that broke away from Serbia's domination; despite its majority Albanian population, its long historical association with Serbia, which regarded it as something akin to the nation's Jerusalem, put it in a different class.

But massacres by Serbian troops in the province led to NATO intervention, and a U.N. mandate. Since then, the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), along with the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), has administered all of Kosovo's civil institutions, and NATO's Kosovo Protection Force (KFOR), has provided its military protection. Efforts by the United Nations to broker a deal with Serbia on transition to independence failed last year; with Russia's support, Serbia has been intransigent on giving Kosovo anything more than mere self-rule—well short of full independence.

Finally, Kosovo's elected Parliament met Sunday and Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci read a statement declaring Kosovo "independent, sovereign and democratic." The move was expected, and Albanians filled the streets of their capital, Pristina, waving American and Albanian flags as well as the new Kosovo one (a blue banner with a yellow map of Kosovo under several stars).

But in any real sense, it remains a protectorate. There was no move to turn over U.N.-administered ministries to Kosovars, at least not so far. Because the status of the U.N. mandate is unclear, however, and the Russians will likely veto any extension of it, last week the European Union announced that it would send a 2,000-strong "police and justice" force to the territory, and NATO has said it will continue to provide security with KFOR.

In Serbia, the running joke was that the country was like Nokia: every year there was a new and tinier model of the state Slobodan Milosevic two decades ago sought to makeover into Greater Serbia. There was plenty of anger, as well. The declaration of independence provoked rioting on the streets of Belgrade, with hooligans and ultranationalists stoning police and throwing Molotov cocktails, trying to reach Western targets like the American Embassy and McDonald's outlets. Kosovo looms over the country's messy and unstable political scene; Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, an implacable foe of the EU and America, leads a shaky coalition including pro-Western elements; he called Kosovo's move "the illegitimate declaration of a puppet state on the territory of Serbia." In the recent Serbian presidential election, Boris Tadic, a pro-Western leader, only narrowly defeated the Radical Party candidate, Tomislav Nikolic, who was widely seen as a stand-in for the party's leader, an accused war criminal, Vojislav Seselj, now on trial at the Hague. Nikolic ran on a bellicose position about Kosovo.

No one expects even a more extreme Serbian government to try to invade Kosovo, at least as things stand now. But Serbs are furious about treatment of their minority in Kosovo, about 200,000 of whom have fled since the United Nations and NATO took over, and Albanian gangs began retaliating against Serbs wherever they could. Another massacre might well spark stronger reaction in Serbia, and perhaps even intervention. And unlike 1999, Serbia now has a strong ally in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has been talking tough on the Kosovo issue; the Russians called for an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to meet Monday. And KFOR is a much weaker force than it originally was, with U.S. troops drawn down for Iraq and other NATO partners worried about staffing Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. secretary of State who was America's point man during the Balkan wars, has previously called for reinforcing KFOR, especially if Kosovo declares independence—which it has just done.

In the coming days, it's widely expected that the United States and many European countries will recognize Kosovo's independence. But Russia will certainly veto its admission to the United Nations. And even the EU will face difficulties internally, with six of its 22 member states unlikely to endorse the move; these include Spain, Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Slovakia. For countries like Spain, with its restive Basque region, and Cyprus, where the Turkish north of the country has declared a rump state, Kosovo is a dangerous precedent. It's the first time since World War II that the internal borders of a European country are being redrawn, with the exception of course of Germany. But then, Kosovo is no Germany.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112945

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

A Sharp Departure



The EU has a plan to lure talented foreigners to its shores, setting up a new global race—for brains.

William Underhill
NEWSWEEK

Updated: 10:34 AM ET Mar 15, 2008


Over the last eight years, more than 10 million foreigners have immigrated to the European Union, plugging the gaps at the cheaper end of the labor market that an aging native population can no longer fill. More will certainly follow as the demographic crunch approaches. By midcentury a third of all Europeans will be retired, and demographers predict the EU will need another 20 million workers to fill that gap by 2030. But in the contest to attract the best brains, Europe is falling far behind. "Highly qualified" foreign workers now account for just 1.7 percent of a working population of 290 million people, according to the EU, barely half the rate for the United States and eight points behind Australia.

So now, in an effort to attract big brains from abroad, the European Commission wants to create an express line for the EU labor market. The plan would create a "blue card," inspired by the U.S. "green card," a renewable permit that would allow highly skilled workers and their families to move easily between member states and jobs. In time, cardholders would also qualify for permanent-resident status. "With the European blue card, we send a clear signal," European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said last year. "Highly skilled workers are welcome in the EU."

It's also a signal that the race to attract the world's best talent is picking up speed. For all the attention that has been focused on the rising obstacles to immigration into the United States, particularly since 9/11, the maze of barriers is even more daunting in the EU. Each of its 27 member states has a different set of rules, and immigrants who hope to move from one country to the next must navigate an entirely new system.

The blue card's proponents had hoped to streamline the complexities, and offer immigrants access to a continent-wide job market. But Europe's multilingual makeup puts it at a distinct disadvantage to the United States. While an Indian computer programmer with a green card can travel freely from one U.S. state to another with no linguistic difficulties, going from Britain to Germany is likely to be another story. "Language is always going to be the fly in the ointment," says Georges Lemaitre, at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The EU also remains deeply divided over the touchy issue of immigration, with some of the largest states wary of any interference from Brussels. Britain was opposed to the scheme from the start. Austria, where foreigners account for 10 percent of the population, is uneasy at the prospect of more immigration. Germany has expressed doubts about encouraging incomers while its unemployment rate hovers around 8 percent. Unemployment is even higher in some Eastern and Central European nations, which are loath to see immigration rules eased when their own citizens are still denied open access to some of the EU's biggest economies, including France and Germany.

Responding to these criticisms, the Commission modified the blue-card plan. Cardholders and their families will still be able to move from country to country without returning home first, but EU member states will be able to impose their own quotas on migration, and cardholders will need to prove they have a job awaiting them before settling in another state. The blue card is "a good idea in principle, but the fine print gets in the way," says Jakob von Weizsäcker, an economist at the Brussels think tank Bruegel, which came up with the original blue-card proposal. "What we have now is just not enough to turn around Europe's poor performance."

Of course American businessmen make similar warnings. They say both the H-1B visa and the green card—the standard tickets into the U.S. job market for foreign professionals—are oversubscribed and expensive for employers. In 2007, the 85,000 H-1B visas were snapped up in a few months, at costs of up to $6,000. Backlogs in green-card applications often leave skilled workers in legal limbo for years. Microsoft's Bill Gates warned last year that such hurdles were shutting out "the world's best and brightest."

Still, Europe's obstacles may be harder to overcome. Perhaps the biggest issue is that Europe's heavily regulated business environment discourages migrants, says Steven D'Haeseleer of BusinessEurope, a Brussels group that represents EU employers. "The blue card would only have its full impact if it were introduced into a vibrant, wealth-creating economy," he says. "And at the moment that's much more the case in the United States." So at least when it comes to cards, it may be some time before blue is the new green.


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123443

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Morton Abramowitz
NEWSWEEK

Updated: 10:48 AM ET Mar 15, 2008


It is rare for a small country to take on the European Union and the United States. But that is precisely what Serbia is doing. With the support of extreme nationalist parties, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has made Kosovo the defining issue of today's Serbia, and is trying to reverse the independence of Kosovo and reassert Serbian control.

Over the last month the Kostunica-led government has carried on an enormous diplomatic effort to prevent other states from recognizing Kosovo's independence, and they are leaning on other nations to revoke their recognition. Kostunica has also told Kosovo Serbs to cease cooperation with the new government and the EU mission. Worse still: he is trying to cement Serbian control over the northern portion of Kosovo—in effect partitioning Kosovo, without recognizing the independence of the remainder. In so doing, the nationalist Serbian leadership has committed its country to confrontation with both Kosovo and the EU mission that guides and oversees it.

In rejecting Kosovo's independence, Serbia's leaders are railing against the tide of history. Kosovo's independence ended a long, rocky history of Serbian rule, which exploded in 1999, when Serbian forces expelled 800,000 members of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. Serbian forces were driven out of Kosovo by a sustained NATO bombardment. Many Serbs, perhaps most, reluctantly and painfully, recognized that Kosovo was no longer part of their country. After the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, the new Serbian leader, Zoran Djindjic, recognized that Kosovo was a thorny domestic political problem, but that the province's status had to be resolved once and for all if Serbia were to be transformed. Unfortunately, Djindjic was assassinated in 2003 by virulent Serbian nationalists before he could make a move on the Kosovo issue.

Taking his place was Kostunica, who had also participated in efforts to overthrow Milosevic. He was greeted by American and European leaders as a savior, a democrat dedicated to the law who would guide Serbia along a European trajectory. But Kostunica turned out to be a fierce 19th-century nationalist, far more an ideological adherent to the cause than the opportunistic Milosevic, and he was committed to doing whatever was necessary to maintain Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. Specifically, he wanted the territory of Kosovo but not its people, and he created a political environment in which opposition voices fear for their safety. All the while, Moscow stood at his side, preventing the Security Council from adopting the U.N. plan for Kosovo's independence. And in recent days, he has been remarkably successful at convincing a number of countries that the U.N. resolution that ended the NATO war provides for Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo indefinitely. It does not, nor does it preclude Kosovo's independence. Yet the West has failed to marshal its own forces to refute Kostunica's claim and persuade many fence-sitters to recognize Kosovo's independence. Other countries have withheld recognition, fearing it would encourage independence movements within their borders.

Now it is decision time for the Serbian people. This month Serbia's bitterly divided coalition government broke down over differences over Kosovo and the country's ties to the EU. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for May. Kostunica is prepared to forsake the EU for Kosovo, but Serbian President Boris Tadic, whose party was Kostunica's principal partner in the defunct coalition, professes to believe that somehow Serbia will keep Kosovo and still pursue EU membership. The EU is encouraging this posture, hoping his party can form a coalition government, sign agreements with the EU and over time abandon its dedication to keeping Kosovo. But initial polling indicates Tadic will have difficulty putting together a new coalition, and the elections may well produce a backward-looking nationalist coalition, a very weak coalition or both.

Serbs will have to decide whether they will continue to follow their fiercely nationalist leadership into greater international isolation, forsaking growth and integration into Europe, or side with the more Westward-looking opposition. In this defining moment the West must somehow convey to the Serbian people how much is at stake and the danger of making the wrong choice. The West must circumvent Belgrade's nationalist politicians and make clear to the Serbian people that there is another path, another future for them as a real democracy. Our message must be: "We feel your loss; there was no practical alternative. Your nationalist leaders are leading you into oblivion, and you belong in Europe."

At the same time, the EU and the United States must work together to preserve Kosovo's stability, prevent violence and partition, secure greater international recognition of Kosovo and help it become a working state. Doing otherwise would severely damage Western credibility and threaten wider Balkan instability and the European order. While always holding out an olive branch, the West must not permit Serbia and Russia to undermine an independent Kosovo, or use Kosovo as an excuse to forestall Serbia's—and Kosovo's—development into healthy European states.


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123448

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Melinda Liu
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 5 : 09 PM ET Mar 14, 2008


Once again riots have exploded, shots have rung out, and blood has flowed in the streets of Lhasa. And once again the Chinese authorities' habit of overreacting threatens to keep making things worse. As police battled against angry Tibetan protestors, shops were set on fire, vehicles (including at least one tourist bus) overturned, ethnic Chinese attacked and tear gas fired into crowds in the worst civil unrest in Tibet in nearly two decades. Although these reports are extremely difficult to confirm, death toll estimates cited by Western media ranged from two to as many as 20.

For those of us who wrote stories about Tibetan protests and the blood-tinged imposition of martial law in Lhasa in March 1989, it felt a bit like deja vu all over again. 1989 was the last time such violence has wracked the Tibet Autonomous Region, where Chinese soldiers marched into Lhasa in 1959 to enforce Beijing's heavy-handed sovereignty over the remote Himalayan region. Since then Tibetan militants have agitated for outright independence, while the exiled religious leader the Dalai Lama has criticized what he calls "cultural genocide" in Tibet and has lobbied for greater autonomy.

As in 1989, what began as relatively modest protests against Chinese rule in Tibet--in both cases, initiated by monks at Drepung monastery--escalated into wider unrest after authorities cracked down with detentions and brute force, triggering yet more protests. Once again, authorities are scrambling to keep foreign media out of Tibet; foreign correspondents are chafing under regulations requiring them to get prior permission before traveling to the roof of the world. Once again, government censors are busy trying to shape the news. As I write this, coverage of the Lhasa riots has been continually blacked out from television news reports on the BBC and CNN (including one that, just before the cut, showed the anchor saying, "we've heard that CNN's reporting on Tibet has been blacked out….")

Once again, a proximate cause of the turmoil was the March 10 anniversary of the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, during which Tibet's religious leader the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India. There was even a similar eeriness when, at one point Friday, the police presence in Lhasa seemed to ebb -- emboldening more and more protestors to pour into the streets. Monks from the Ramoche temple joined the unrest en masse, and crowds set about smashing and setting ablaze buildings "with real or perceived Chinese connections," reported Radio Free Asia. Targets included the popular Tashi Delek restaurant run by Tibetans seen to be pro-Beijing.

Then security personnel struck back with tear gas and live ammunition, their shots ringing out in the traditional Barkor area of ancient Lhasa. But this time, unlike 1989, the stakes are much higher. Although we didn't know it back then, the Tibetan turmoil was a precursor of the even more violent crackdown that unfolded several months later in Beijing, snuffing out the Tiananmen Square protests. One of the reasons those demonstrations managed to grow so large was because the government was deterred from cracking down, for a time, by the looming May 1989 state visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev whose VVIP arrival in Beijing was to mark the end of decades of Sino-Soviet hostility.

This time round, Beijing is slated to host the 2008 Summer Olympics in just five months' time. That means international scrutiny of China's human rights record - as well as nearly everything else, from pollution levels to traffic jams to the condition of Beijing's toilets - has been intensifying for months. It also means Chinese authorities need to be on their best behavior in the run-up to the Summer Olympics. Perhaps with the lesson of 1989 in mind, the government has made huge efforts to eliminate anything that might tarnish Beijing's image.

A recent spate of PR setbacks appears to have rattled Chinese authorities, and now the potential for over-reaction seems great. "They're simply just freaking out now," says one foreign analyst involved in monitoring Olympics preparations. One example cited by the analyst, who requested anonymity, was the recent live concert in shanghai by Icelandic singer Bjork, who hit a raw nerve in the Beijing regime when she exclaimed "Tibet! Tibet!" after singing her unauthorized song "Declaration of Independence".

That unexpected outburst prompted china's Ministry of Culture to declare that Bjork had "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people". It later also declared that she'd broken Chinese law, and that the ministry would "further tighten controls on foreign artists performing in China in order to prevent similar cases from happening."

Since then officials have been frantically re-examining all sorts of cultural programs. One project that's now up in the air is the filming of "Mao's Last Dancer" - based on Li Cunxin's best-selling memoir of his life in the prestigious dance academy overseen by Mao Zedong's ruthless wife Jiang Qing - which was supposed to start Monday. In other words, it has no direct relationship to Tibet. Nonetheless, on Tuesday the production was told that they would not be able to start filming - despite having lined up a prestigious cast including Joan Chen and Kyle Maclachlan -- and that, in the post-Bjork era, all cultural projects now have to be vetted by no less than the State Council, the equivalent of China's cabinet.

The traditional Olympic torch relay, meanwhile, has become even more controversial. Beijing plans to have runners bring the Olympic flame to the top of Mt. Everest in Tibet - using special technology to keep the fire burning at such high altitudes. That's been criticized by critics who contend that Tibetan culture and language have languished, and that Tibetans have become economically marginalized, under Beijing's governance.

To ensure there is no repeat of last year's protests at Everest base camp by pro-Tibet Western activists, Chinese officials have simply barred ordinary mountaineers from climbing the Tibetan side of Everest from now to May 10, provoking huge squawks from members of mountaineering expeditions. Now Chinese authorities are learning on the government of Nepal to impose similar restrictions on mountaineering activities from the Nepalese side. The Kathmandu government has already said it will suspend the registration of any trekking company with a member who takes part in any anti-Chinese act, such as "raising the Tibetan flag on the summit of Everest." Which raises the question: if they have to lock down the entire country in order to hold a protest-free Olympics, will Chinese authorities declare success?


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123339

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

A Conservative Conundrum

The reformists fared badly in Iran's parliamentary elections, but Ahmadinejad may end up being the true loser.

Greg Bruno, Council on Foreign Relations
Updated: 2:14 PM ET Mar 19, 2008

Polls were barely closed when Brussels fired the first shot condemning Iran's March 14 parliamentary elections. The U.S. State Department waited only a little longer in seconding EU concerns. The counter-strikes were equally swift on the Iranian side: the country's Supreme Leader issued a statement heralding conservative victories as a blow to Iran's "enemies," while Mohammad-Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, dismissed criticism as "hasty prejudgment."

Missing from the high-profile war of words were answers to a vital question: who won? Like many things inside Iran, a lack of transparency in the voting process makes that a hard question to answer. On paper the spoils went to the establishment. Conservative candidates close to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad control about two thirds of the 190 races settled so far, putting conservatives on track to control roughly the same majority of the 290 seat-parliament as held in the current government. Conservatives won a majority of seats from districts inside Tehran, normally considered a reformist stronghold, and reformists are protesting the results. All told, reformist candidates are expected to win as many as 50 seats once second-round runoffs are completed in coming weeks. Independent and minority candidates will fill out of the chamber.

But conservatives' strong showing may not mean a continuation of the status quo. Some observers say voters opted for conservative candidates directly opposed to the economic policies of President Ahmadinejad, who could face a tough reelection battle in 2009. A number of the president's rivals won seats, including the country's former chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, speaker of the current parliament. Kassam Kasir, a political correspondent for Al-Arab newspaper in Qatar, says the election results illustrate the electorate's deep displeasure with Iran's economic fortunes. (The Economist Intelligence Unit notes Iran's inflation hovers around 19 percent and its annual gross domestic product is forecast to fall.)

The disqualification of as many as 1,700 reformist candidates was also closely scrutinized, and prompted some moderates to threaten a boycott of the vote. Kasra Noori, an Iranian journalist and one of many moderates banned from running, tells Newsweek he was tossed for a lack of commitment to Islam. "As far as I know I'm a good Muslim, and it seems that I'm also enjoying a relatively good reputation in public," he said.

Though reformists from districts outside of Tehran are poised to pick up seats, the overall results disappointed many. Reformist voters who supported previous reform candidates say they have grown tired of supporting a movement that has little political sway within Tehran's clerical hierarchy. "I support [former President Mohammad] Khatami, but what is the point of voting in an election when the result is known in advance?" one voter told The Guardian newspaper during a recent campaign rally south of Tehran. "Even when Khatami was president, he was not allowed to do anything. So why would I vote?" Supporters of conservative candidates, meanwhile, cherished their victory. "If the parliament and president are the same [party], the country will progress," Rana Sheidaiee, whose family backed hard-line candidates, told the Christian Science Monitor. "When they are different, energy is wasted on internal fighting."

Yet many other questions remain unanswered. For one, who voted? Some estimates put turnout at 60 percent, a healthy showing despite widespread disqualifications. But reports of polling varied widely. Farideh Farhi, an expert in Iranian politics at the University of Hawaii, says she is " a bit skeptical" of official turnout figures. Quoting official sources, TIME reports roughly 1 million fewer Iranians cast ballots this year compared to 2004. Arguably a more pressing unknown is how effective conservative lawmakers will be in challenging Ahmadinejad's mandates. Larijani says the new parliament will be "much more effective than the current one, and give priority to national interests." But in an interview with CFR.org, Farhi says change will depend on who leads parliament, "and whether or not the leadership of the parliament is willing to challenge Ahmadinejad on those issues more than they have been willing to do in the past."


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/124250

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Should we prepare for big wars or small ones? After Afghanistan and Iraq, the answer might seem obvious, but the truth is harder and more expensive: both.

By Evan Thomas and John Barry
NEWSWEEK
updated Mar 24, 2008


Great armies and navies are always tempted to fight the last war, especially if they won it. The British Army entered World War I wedded to the "up and at 'em" infantry advances of Waterloo—even though by the turn of the century the Maxim gun had made such tactics tantamount to suicide. Truly fearsome militaries prepare to fight the next war. Think of how the German Army used planes and tanks in a coordinated blitzkrieg to outmaneuver the Allies at the outset of World War II.

But what if a military must prepare to fight not one war, but two very different kinds of war? That is the challenge facing the world's greatest superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The American military must continue to ready itself for high-tech warfare; it must still be able to fight "big wars" against rising powers like China. At the same time, it must anticipate what military planners blandly term "low-intensity conflict" but what Rudyard Kipling more aptly called the "savage wars of peace"—small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have cost America so dearly in Iraq.

The tension over which war to prepare for has created a generational divide in the American military, particularly the U.S. Army, between old bulls who want to focus on all-out combat, drowning the enemy in precision firepower, and young upstarts who believe that in today's messy world of failing states, firepower is not enough—it is necessary to win hearts and minds. Many of the combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who are among the most capable and experienced young officers America has had in a generation, fall into the latter camp. But the uncomfortable fact is that the U.S. military may not have the resources to be able to fight both kinds of war with any assurance of victory. Though political leaders have barely begun to address the problem, the shape, size and funding of America's armed forces is one of the most pressing issues the next president will face.

The end of the cold war was supposed to give the winning superpower a breather. In 1999, the then presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke of his desire to "skip a generation" of weaponry, to move to a shiny new age of high-tech warfare in which sensors, satellites and computers would replace manpower. Among military planners, phrases like "network-centric warfare," "digitization" and "the transparent battlefield" were all the rage. The new thinking was given a partial test after 9/11 when the military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's push to employ a faster, leaner, more-wired force worked well. In Afghanistan, Special Forces working with local warlords used their laptops to call in precise airstrikes and topple the Taliban; in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks could boast that "speed kills"—and Baghdad fell in less than three weeks.

Then came disaster. In Afghanistan, American forces and their unreliable allies were not able to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban survived to fight another day. The growing insurgency in Iraq overwhelmed U.S. forces and left a good portion of the American people and their elected representatives believing that the war was a lost cause. The military seemed caught by surprise, its high-tech forces unable to defeat a shadow army that wired bombs with garage-door openers and the sort of cheap electronic gizmos that could be purchased from RadioShack.

In retrospect, the military's unpreparedness seems puzzling. According to the Congressional Research Service, since the end of the cold war in 1990 the U.S. military has been deployed 88 times—to fight in a series of savage little wars of peace from Somalia to the Balkans to Sierra Leone. Didn't the Army learn anything from the experience?

The answer is yes and no. The older generation of officers—the generals who run the show—were trained to fight the Soviet Army as its tanks powered through the Fulda Gap in Germany. These officers were steeped in tank battles and artillery duels, and although the Big One never came, they did get a chance to fight a conventional armored conflict against the Iraqi Army in 1991, crushing Saddam Hussein's forces in less than 100 hours. After the gulf war, the Army shrank in size by about 40 percent. The officers who advanced to the top ranks tended to be conventional warriors; the outliers and mavericks—the few who knew other cultures, had trained Third World armies and had studied the small wars of the colonial era—were confined to the ghetto of Special Forces or let go altogether. The men who ran the lightning invasion of Iraq and the long, botched occupation that followed tended to be Desert Storm vets who knew little or nothing about counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, however, a younger generation of officers has been bloodied in the city streets of Iraq, fighting against hidden foes. (Some of these same officers were deployed on nation-building missions to the Balkans or Africa or Haiti in the 1990s.) In Iraq, these young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels have had to desperately improvise, to make up tactics as they go along. Naturally, some are furious at their higher-ups for sending them to war so unprepared. In May 2007, one of them, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote a blistering piece in Armed Forces Journal called "A Failure of Generalship." He painted the Army's high command as a bunch of none-too-bright conformists. The promotions system, he wrote, "does little to reward creativity and moral courage." On the contrary, to move up, an officer "must only please his superiors." Yingling pointed out that no one seemed to be taking the fall for failure in Iraq.

He had a point: Gen. George Casey, who presided over the downward spiral between 2004 and 2006, was rewarded by being made Army chief of staff. By contrast, Gen. George Marshall, in his first year as Army chief of staff under FDR in the run-up to World War II, fired 34 generals and 445 colonels from an Army half the size of today's force. After war came in December 1941, he further relieved 17 division commanders. So why no comparable purge during the Iraq War, which has already lasted longer than World War II? More was at stake during 1941 to 1945, of course, but it is also true that the commanders in Iraq were following the policy decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld. The failure of imagination started at the top. True, more officers should have challenged their civilian bosses, but that is rarely the way in a U.S. military obedient to civilian control.

Under the twin pressures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has dramatically changed its training for officers and soldiers. Now, at its National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert, infantry units are plunged into a nightmarish theater in the round: a network of a dozen "Iraqi" villages, complete with several hundred "Iraqis"—the leading roles played by a cast of Arabic-speaking extras supplied by a contractor.

But the real test of the Army's commitment will be whether the military retains and promotes the experienced young officers coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. "One of the challenges we have as senior leaders is that ... we have to change the Army," says Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 in Iraq who was recently named vice chief of staff of the Army. "We have to make sure we don't lose this." His boss in Iraq, counterinsurgency guru Gen. David Petraeus, says that the military is beginning to make accommodations for officers who are repeatedly deployed and can't take the war-college courses needed for promotion. Still, young officers were dismayed to see some of Petraeus's own "brain trust" of smart colonels passed over for promotion in recent years. The fact that Petraeus was brought back to Washington, D.C., last fall to oversee the most recent promotions board was taken as a sign that the Pentagon leadership recognized those frustrations.

But simply tipping the balance over to small-war fighting isn't the answer, either. The U.S. Army last week published a critique of the Israeli military's performance in its fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. It concluded that the Israelis, preoccupied with counterinsurgency efforts in Gaza and the West Bank, had neglected training for conventional combat and paid a heavy price. Yet if the U.S. Army needs to prepare for both Big War and Small War and nation-building postwar, how can it juggle the competing demands of each?

Counterinsurgency and nation-building in particular are labor-intensive; there is no substitute for boots on the ground. The current U.S. Army is stretched to the limit: after their third or fourth tours in Iraq, young officers are fretting about their stressed families. Partly because the Army has been decentralized to be able to fight in smaller, more-mobile units, there is a serious shortage of captains and majors. The minimum requirements for enlisting are dropping, allowing in more and more teenagers who never finished high school.

Some experts think that the active Army needs to nearly double to 800,000 or more troops. But where will the money come from? Every soldier now costs, on average, roughly $125,000 a year. At the same time, the centerpiece of the Army's current plans for the big war out there sometime is the high-tech "Future Combat System," a $300 billion family of vehicles networked into an all-seeing whole by sensors, UAVs and satellites. It will be up to the nation's political leaders to decide whether to make some hard choices or try to convince the voters that they need to pay for it all. Too bad this is a topic that is rarely discussed during the presidential campaign.


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