Why Doesn't the World Care About Pakistanis?

Because they live in Pakistan

BY MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

The United Nations has characterized the destruction caused by the floods in Pakistan as greater than the damage from the 2004 Asian tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined. Yet nearly three weeks since the floods began, aid is trickling in slowly and reluctantly to the United Nations, NGOs, and the Pakistani government.

After the Haiti earthquake, about 3.1 million Americans using mobile phones donated $10 each to the Red Cross, raising about $31 million. A similar campaign to raise contributions for Pakistan produced only about $10,000. The amount of funding donated per person affected by the 2004 tsunami was $1249.80, and for the 2010 Haiti earthquake, $1087.33. Even for the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, funding per affected person was $388.33. Thus far, for those affected by the 2010 floods, it is $16.36 per person.

Why has the most devastating natural disaster in recent memory generated such a tepid response from the international community? Something of a cottage industry is emerging to try to answer this latest and most sober of international mysteries.

There is no shortage of theories. It's donor fatigue. It's Pakistan fatigue. It's because the Pakistani government is corrupt and can't be trusted. It's because the victims are Muslim. It's because people think a nuclear power should be able to fend for itself. It's because floods -- particularly these floods -- spread their destruction slowly, over a period of time, rather than instantaneously. It's because of the tighter budgets of Western governments. It's because of the lingering effects of the financial crisis.

There's a degree of truth to all these explanations. But the main reason that Pakistan isn't receiving attention or aid proportionate to the devastation caused by these floods is because, well, it's Pakistan. Given a catastrophe of such epic proportions in any normal country, the world would look first through a humanitarian lens. But Pakistan, of course, is not a normal country. When the victims are Haitian or Sri Lankan -- hardly citizens of stable, well-government countries, themselves -- Americans and Europeans are quick to open their hearts and wallets. But in this case, the humanity of Pakistan's victims takes a backseat to the preconceived image that Westerners have of Pakistan as a country.

Pakistan is a country that no one quite gets completely, but apparently everybody knows enough about to be an expert. If you're a nuclear proliferation expert, suddenly you're an expert on Pakistan. If you're terrorism expert, ditto: expert on Pakistan. India expert? Pakistan, too then. Of South Asian origin of any kind at a think-tank, university, or newspaper? Expert on Pakistan. Angry that your parents sent you to the wrong madrassa when you were young? Expert on Pakistan.

This unique stock of global expertise on Pakistan naturally generates a scary picture. Between our fear of terrorism, nervousness about a Muslim country with a nuclear weapon, and global discomfort with an intelligence service that seems to do whatever it wants (rather than what we want it to do), Pakistan makes the world, and Americans in particular, extremely uncomfortable. In a 2008 Gallup poll of Americans, only Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, North Korea, and Iran were less popular than Pakistan.

The net result of Pakistan's own sins, and a global media that is gaga over India, is that Pakistan is always the bad guy. You'd be hard pressed to find a news story anywhere that celebrates the country's incredible scenery, diversity, food, unique brand of Islam, evolving and exciting musical tradition, or even its arresting array of sporting talent, though all those things are present in abundance.

How bad is it? Well, in 2007, when the Pakistani cricket team's national coach, an Englishman named Bob Woolmer, was found dead in his hotel room, the first instinct of the international press was that a Pakistani team member must have killed him. This is the story of modern day Pakistan.

Contrary to what many Pakistani conspiracy theorists believe, the suspicion and contempt with which the country is seen with is not deliberate or carefully calculated. It's just how things pan out when you are the perennial bad boy in a neighborhood that everyone wishes could be transformed into Scandinavia -- because after 9/11, the world cannot afford a dysfunctional ghetto in South and Central Asia anymore. Or so goes the paternalist doctrine.
It is bad enough that the Pakistani elite don't seem eager to cooperate with this agenda of transformation; now, nature also seems to be set against it. The floods in Pakistan are the third major humanitarian crisis to afflict the country in recent years. The 2005 earthquake and the massive internal displacement of Pakistanis from Swat and the FATA region in 2009 were well-managed disasters, according to many international aid workers. While international support was valuable in mitigating the effects of those disasters, most experts agree that it was Pakistanis, both in government and civil society, that did the heavy lifting.

The 2010 floods, however, are a game-changer. The country will not and cannot ever be the same. The loss of life, disease, poverty, and human misery themselves are going to take years to overcome. But the costs of desilting, cleaning up, and reconstructing Pakistan's most fertile and potent highways, canals, and waterworks will be exhausting just to calculate. The actual task of building back this critical infrastructure is a challenge of unprecedented proportions.

Last week, I visited a relatively well-to-do village called Pashtun Ghari in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Pashtun Ghari is right off the historic Grand Trunk Road, and less than two miles from the river. Flood victims there did not feel abandoned by authorities, indeed they were quite satisfied with how they had been taken care of. Still, there was inconsolable despair among residents. Why? The town's entire livestock population, some 2,300 cows, had perished beneath waters that stood more than 10 feet high in the first wave of flooding. Those cattle are both assets and income generators for Pakistani villagers along the Indus River. There is no recovering from losing that quantum of livestock.

The fact that people in other countries don't like Pakistan very much doesn't change the humanity of those affected by the floods or their suffering. It is right and proper to take a critical view of Pakistani politicians, of their myopia and greed. It is understandable to be worried about the far-reaching capabilities of the Pakistani intelligence community and reports that they continue to support the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is even excusable that some indulge in the fantasy that a few hundred al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are capable of taking over a country guarded by more than 750,000 men and women of the Pakistani military, and the 180 million folks that pay their salaries.

But are the farmers of Pashtun Ghari, of Muzzafararh and Dera Ghazi Khan, of Shikarpur and Sukkur, really obligated to allay these fears before they can get help in replacing their lost livelihoods? Twenty million people are now struggling to find a dry place to sleep, a morsel of food to eat, a sip of clean water to drink -- and the questions we are asking have to do with politics and international security. The problem is not in Pakistan. It is where those questions are coming from.

Pakistan has suffered from desperately poor moral leadership, but punishing the helpless and homeless millions of the 2010 floods is the worst possible way to express our rejection of the Pakistani elite and their duplicity and corruption. The poor, hungry, and homeless are not an ISI conspiracy to bilk you of your cash. They are a test of your humanity. Do not follow in the footsteps of the Pakistani elite by failing them. That would be immoral and inhumane. This is a time to ask only one question. And that question is: "How can I help?"

Mosharraf Zaidi has served as an adviser on international to Pakistan for the United Nations and European Union. He writes a weekly colum for Pakistan's The News and blogs at www.mosharrafzaidi.com.

By Greg Miller and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 24, 2010

For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, CIA analysts see one of al-Qaeda's offshoots - rather than the core group now based in Pakistan - as the most urgent threat to U.S. security, officials said.

The sober new assessment of al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen has helped prompt senior Obama administration officials to call for an escalation of U.S. operations there - including a proposal to add armed CIA drones to a clandestine campaign of U.S. military strikes, the officials said.

"We are looking to draw on all of the capabilities at our disposal," said a senior Obama administration official, who described plans for "a ramp-up over a period of months."

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, stressed that that analysts continue to see al-Qaeda and its allies in the tribal areas of Pakistan as supremely dangerous adversaries. The officials insisted there would be no letup in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden and other senior figures thought to be hiding in Pakistan.

Indeed, officials said it was largely because al-Qaeda has been decimated by Predator strikes in Pakistan that the franchise in Yemen has emerged as a more potent threat. A CIA strike killed a group of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen in 2002, but officials said the agency has not had that capability on the peninsula for several years.

"We see al-Qaeda as having suffered major losses, unable to replenish ranks and recover at a pace that would keep them on offense," said a senior U.S. official familiar with the CIA's assessments.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as its Yemen-based group is called, is "on the upswing," the official said. "The relative concern ratios are changing. We're more concerned now about AQAP than we were before."

Al-Qaeda in Yemen is seen as more agile and aggressive, officials said. It took the group just a few months to set in motion a plot that succeeded in getting an alleged suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

More important, officials cited the role of Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American-born cleric whose command of English and militant ambition have helped transform the Yemen organization into a transnational threat.

Philip Mudd, a former senior official at the CIA and the FBI, argues in a forthcoming article that the threat of a Sept. 11-style attack has been supplanted by a proliferation of plots by AQAP and other affiliates. "The sheer numbers . . . suggest that one of the plots in the United States will succeed," he writes in the latest issue of CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. In the future, he said, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region will not be the sole, or even primary, source of bombing suspects."

U.S. officials said the administration's plans to escalate operations in Yemen reflect two aims: improving U.S. intelligence in Yemen and adding new options for carrying out strikes when a target is found.

The CIA has roughly 10 times more people and resources in Pakistan than it does in Yemen. There is no plan to scale back in Pakistan, but officials said the gap is expected to shrink.

Details of the plans to expand operations in Yemen have been discussed in recent weeks among deputies on the National Security Council at the White House, officials said. According to one participant, the talks are not about whether the CIA should replace the U.S. military in its leading operational role in Yemen, but "what's the proper mix."

Although the CIA has expanded the number of case officers collecting intelligence in Yemen over the past year, officials said the agency has not deployed Predator drones or other means of carrying out lethal strikes.

Instead, attacks over the past eight months have been the result of secret military collaboration between Yemen and the United States.

U.S. Special Operations troops have helped train Yemeni forces and helped them to execute raids. A senior U.S. military official said the United States has not used armed drones in Yemen, mainly because they are more urgently needed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, intermittent strikes on al-Qaeda targets have involved cruise missiles and other weapon that are less precise.

An airstrike on a suspected gathering of al-Qaeda operatives in Marib province on May 25 involved a cruise missile launched from a U.S. naval vessel. Among those killed was the deputy governor in the province, who was reportedly seeking to persuade the militants to give up their arms. The human rights group Amnesty International later said it found evidence that U.S. cluster munitions were used in the attack.

Proponents of expanding the CIA's role argue that years of flying armed drones over Pakistan have given the agency expertise in identifying targets and delivering pinpoint strikes. The agency's attacks also leave fewer telltale signs.

"You're not going to find bomb parts with USA markings on them," the senior U.S. official said. Even so, the official said, the administration is considering sending CIA drones to the Arabian Peninsula "not because they require the deniability but because they desire the capability."

A senior Yemeni official indicated that the government would not welcome CIA drones. "I don't think we will ever consider it," the official said. "The situation in Yemen is different than in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is still under control."

Introducing a covert CIA capability might also improve the U.S. ability to carry out attacks - perhaps from a U.S. base in Djibouti - if the Yemeni government were to curtail its cooperation.

That relationship is "in as positive a place as we've been for some time," the senior administration official said. But, he added, "we always have to be in a position where we are able to protect our own interests should that be necessary."

The concern about al-Qaeda in Yemen is remarkable considering that the group was all but stamped out on the peninsula just a few years ago and is known more for near-misses than successful, spectacular attacks.

Indeed, some government intelligence analysts outside the CIA argued that it would be wrong to conclude that al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen has eclipsed the organization's core.

"We still do view al-Qaeda core as they view themselves," a senior U.S. counterterrorism analyst said, "which is the vanguard of the jihad, providing a lot of global direction and guidance."

Even under constant pressure from Predator attacks, al-Qaeda has proven remarkably resilient. Officials also stressed that it is surrounded by other militant groups in Pakistan that share its violent aims.

The U.S. citizen who planted a failed bomb at Times Square earlier this year, for example, said he had been trained by the Pakistani Taliban.

But concern about AQAP has risen sharply in the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day attack.

U.S. officials cited recent indications that AQAP has shared its chemical bomb-making technology with other militant organizations, including Somalia-based al-Shabab.

Because Yemen is an Arab country and the ancestral home of bin Laden, some analysts fear that it could be more difficult to dislodge al-Qaeda there than in Pakistan.

Officials acknowledged that since a military strike missed Aulaqi in December, they have had few clues on his whereabouts. Aulaqi has been linked to three plots in the United States, and his presence has further radicalized his peers.

"The other leaders of AQAP are predominantly Yemenis and Saudis, and their worldview and focus is on the peninsula," said the senior U.S. counterterrorism official. Aulaqi "brings a world view and focus that brings it back here to the U.S. homeland."

millergreg@washpost.com finnp@washpost.com

Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

__________________
You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Karin Brulliard
Wednesday, August 25, 2010

SUKKUR, PAKISTAN - The United States is diverting some of its five-year, multibillion-dollar aid package for Pakistan to flood recovery and will reevaluate plans for the remainder because the disaster has dramatically altered the country's needs, the top U.S. aid official said Wednesday.

The floods, triggered by the start of monsoon rains a month ago, have submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, washed away entire settlements and sparked fears of unrest. More than a million homes have been destroyed. In places where schools or hospitals previously needed improvements, they will now have to be built from scratch.

"I fully envision some of the priorities will have to shift, and shift so that there's more of a recovery and reconstruction focus," Rajiv Shah, chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told reporters here.

Shah was in Pakistan to see the destruction caused by the floods, which was apparent as his plane descended into this hardscrabble city in the southern province of Sindh, one of the hardest-hit areas. Below, a sea of opaque brown water, broken only by treetops, stretched to the horizon. It cloaked the sugarcane and wheat fields that sustain the region in normal times.

Under a raging sun, homeless families and their livestock sought shade along roadsides. Thousands of others were staying at a squalid tent camp, where aid workers briefed Shah on the numbers of sick children and their efforts to teach the brightly garbed women there about health and hygiene.

"Everything, everything was destroyed by the flood," said Baboo Shaikh, 65, who left his village near the city of Jacobabad 22 days before, a day before the water came and swept much of it away. Shaikh sat with his family of 15 in a low-slung, fly-infested tent, which he described as "congested."

Congress passed a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan last year - long before the flooding - and most of it was slated for development. Little has been doled out, but USAID officials have spent months planning where it would go, including to several "signature" projects related to water and energy.

On Wednesday, Shah said that "every part of the portfolio" would have to be reexamined, although even that could not begin until the floodwaters recede and needs could be assessed. For now, he said, $50 million of the package will be redirected to flood recovery.

Many areas previously deemed priorities - agriculture, power, irrigation - are likely to remain at the top of the agenda, Shah said. But the types of projects might have to be more rudimentary or broad, and new sets of long-term problems are likely to emerge.

"We will need to reassess the full extent of our commitment to the people of Pakistan and do whatever is most appropriate and most effective to really help people recover," Shah told reporters.

The American aid package was meant to strengthen the fledgling civilian government in a country with a strong tradition of military rule. But it was also intended to counter the rising influence of extremist Islamist groups, some of which are providing flood relief. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has said that they could use the crisis as an opportunity to recruit fighters.

Shah ran into those forces - although apparently accidentally - on a visit Wednesday to a makeshift, U.S.-funded relief camp at a Sukkur school. The camp is touted by U.S. officials as being run by Save the Children and the U.N. World Food Program, which receive USAID funding.

But another visible presence at the operation Wednesday was the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, a charity wing of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a banned organization viewed as a front for the militant group behind the deadly 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

U.S. officials said after Shah's visit that they had not been aware of the Islamist charity's role at the camp and that they have no control over which organizations helped when and where.

There are 1,800 relief camps in Sindh province alone. The United Nations said Tuesday that 800,000 people are still marooned in cut-off areas, and the agency appealed for 40 more helicopters to help reach those hinterlands.

On Monday, Zardari said it would take at least three years to see progress on reconstruction, adding that he did not think Pakistan would "ever fully recover."

But Shah said the flood could ultimately lead to better public services and infrastructure. He pointed to U.S.-funded schools built after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, which are more structurally sound.

"This might be an opportunity to build a health system that reaches more people," Shah said. "Five or 10 years from now, Pakistan's agricultural economy could be much better off because we used the opportunity."

At the school, a row of women had more pressing needs. They pointed to their bare, cracking feet and asked Shah for lotion and for money.

"What is the most important thing that we can do to help?" Shah asked one woman.

She thought, then edited that previous list to one word: cash.

__________________
You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Greg Miller and Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 27, 2010

The CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of President Hamid Karzai's administration, in part to maintain sources of information in a government in which the Afghan leader is often seen as having a limited grasp of developments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The payments are long-standing in many cases and designed to help the agency maintain a deep roster of allies within the presidential palace. Some aides function as CIA informants, but others collect stipends under more informal arrangements meant to ensure their accessibility, a U.S. official said.

The CIA has continued the payments despite concerns that it is backing corrupt officials and undermining efforts to wean Afghans' dependence on secret sources of income and graft.

The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a significant number of officials in Karzai's administration are on the payroll. Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, disputed that characterization, saying, "This anonymous source appears driven by ignorance, malice or both."

A former agency official said the payments were necessary because "the head of state is not going to tell you everything" and because Karzai often seems unaware of moves that members of his own government make.

The disclosure comes as a corruption investigation into one of Karzai's senior national security advisers - and an alleged agency informant - puts new strain on the already fraying relationship between Washington and Kabul.

Top American officials including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) have expressed concern about Karzai's efforts to rein in anti-corruption teams, as well as intervention in the case against the security adviser. The aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi, is accused of accepting a $10,000 car as a bribe in exchange for his assistance in quashing a wide-ranging corruption probe.

The issue carries enormous stakes for the Obama administration. Concerns that the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt have prompted a congressional panel to withhold billions of dollars in aid, and threaten to erode American support for the war.

But Karzai supporters accuse their U.S. counterparts of exploiting the issue, and the Salehi arrest in particular, to humiliate the Afghan leader while ignoring more pressing priorities.

In the latest sign of his vexation, Karzai said Thursday that President Obama's timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops "has given courage to the enemies of Afghanistan," and complained that the United States wasn't doing enough to force Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.

"We haven't progressed in the war against terrorism," Karzai said in a statement.

The CIA has maintained relationships with Afghan government officials for years. But the disclosure that multiple members of Karzai's government are on the CIA's payroll underscores the complex nature of the American role in Afghanistan. Even as agency dollars flow in, U.S.-backed investigative units are targeting prominent Afghans in the government and trying to stem an exodus of more than $1 billion in cash annually from the country.

Gimigliano, the CIA spokesman, declined to comment on the agency's financial ties to Afghan officials. "This agency plays an essential role in promoting American goals in Afghanistan, including security and stability," he said. "Speculation about who may help us achieve that is both dangerous and counterproductive."

The agency's approach has drawn criticism from others in the U.S. government, who accuse the CIA of contributing to an atmosphere in which Afghans are conditioned to extend their hands for secret payments in almost every transaction.

"They'll pay whoever they think can help them," the U.S. official said. "That has been the CIA attitude since 2001."

A second U.S. official defended the agency's activities and alluded to a simmering conflict within the U.S. government over the scope of American objectives in Afghanistan, and the means required to achieve those goals.

"No one is going to create Plato's Republic over there in one year, two years, or 10," the official said. "If the United States decides to deal only with the saints in Afghanistan, it's in for both loneliness and failure. That's the risk, and not everyone in our government sees it."

U.S. and Afghan officials said the CIA is not the only foreign entity using secret payments to Afghan officials to influence events in the country.

A prominent Afghan with knowledge of the inner workings of the palace said it operates a fund that rewards political allies with money that flows in from the Iranian government and foreign intelligence services as well as prominent Afghan companies eager to curry favor with Karzai. The source said the fund distributes $10 million to $50 million a year.

A U.S. official said Turkey and Saudi Arabia are among the other countries funneling money into Afghanistan.

Salehi, the target of the corruption probe, is accused of taking a bribe in return for his help in blocking an investigation of New Ansari, a money transfer business that has helped elite Afghans ship large sums of cash to overseas accounts. U.S. officials worry that the stream includes diverted foreign aid.

But authorities said the Salehi investigation is also focused on his involvement in administering the palace fund - doling out cash and vehicles to Karzai supporters - as well as his role in negotiations with the Taliban.

Salehi's job put him at the center of some of the most sensitive assignments for the Afghan government. Another national security official, Ibrahim Spinzada, has orchestrated the government's talks with the Taliban and traveled with Salehi to Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The payments from the palace are "part of the politics here," said a second senior Afghan official. Some people receive "a special salary. It is part of intelligence activities."

Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Afghanistan's national security adviser and Salehi's boss, said in an interview that he had spoken with Salehi on Thursday and that Salehi denied working with the CIA. "I don't think that Salehi is a spy," Spanta said, adding that Salehi was "shocked and he absolutely rejected it."

U.S. officials did not dispute that Salehi was on the CIA payroll, which was first reported by The New York Times. But officials sought to draw a distinction between agency payments and corruption probes.

"The United States government had nothing to do with the activities for which this individual is being investigated," the second U.S. official said. "It's not news that we sometimes pay people overseas who help the United States do what it needs to get done. . . . Nor should it be surprising, in a place like Afghanistan, that some influential figures can be both helpful and - on their own, separate and apart - corrupt to some degree."

The flow of CIA money into the region dates to the agency's support for mujaheddin fighters who ousted Soviet forces three decades ago.

The spigot was tightened during the 1990s but reopened after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of the money went to support warlords whose militias helped to overthrow the Taliban regime, which had provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda training camps. Salehi had served as an interpreter for one of the most prominent of those warlords, Abdurrashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose forces played a critical role in the campaign against the Taliban.

The CIA bankrolled Afghanistan's intelligence service, and its financial ties to government officials has proliferated in recent years.

"There are probably not too many officials we haven't met and contacted and paid," a former CIA official said.

The CIA has a long-standing relationship - though not a financial one - with Karzai himself. The agency's station chief in Kabul traveled with Karzai during the war against the Taliban, at one point shielding him from the blast of a misdirected bomb. The station chief has since served two tours in the Afghan capital at Karzai's behest.

millergreg@washpost.com partlowj@washpost.com

Partlow reported from Kabul.

__________________
You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Joshua Partlow and Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 31, 2010

KABUL - Afghanistan's Central Bank has taken control of Kabul Bank, a politically potent financial institution partly owned by President Hamid Karzai's brother, and ordered its chairman to hand over $160 million worth of luxury villas and other property purchased in Dubai for well-connected insiders, according to Afghan bankers and officials.

The Central Bank's intervention aims to shore up Afghanistan's largest private bank, whose faltering finances threatened to wreak both economic and political havoc. Kabul Bank handles salary payments for Afghan soldiers, police and teachers, and has taken in more than $1 billion in deposits from ordinary Afghans.

U.S. officials have long worried that trouble at Kabul Bank could trigger financial mayhem, a prospect that would leave Afghan security forces without pay, threaten unrest by angry - and often armed - depositors, and gravely undermine President Obama's entire Afghan strategy.

The decision to move on Kabul Bank was made by Karzai after evidence was presented to him about the bank's illicit dealings by the Central Bank governor, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, at a meeting about a month ago. Top U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus was present for the meeting, according to Kabul Bank insiders, who spoke on condition of anonymity and said that Petraeus urged Karzai to take action.

Some Afghan businessmen said they considered Karzai's decision to confront Kabul Bank as his first significant move in the fight against corruption in Afghanistan.

(Read about the millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai)

In an effort to head off a possibly catastrophic financial meltdown, the Central Bank summoned Kabul Bank's top management, including chairman Sherkhan Farnood and chief executive Khalilullah Fruzi, to its Kabul offices on Monday and ordered them to resign. In place of Fruzi, a former gem trader, authorities installed a Central Bank official, Masood Ghazi, to take charge of Kabul Bank's day-to-day operations and to untangle a large portfolio of hidden, off-the-books loans, said people familiar with the discussions.

(Read about how Farnood once said, "What I'm doing is not proper... but this is Afghanistan.")

The bank had previously been shielded by the political clout of its shareholders, who include Mahmoud Karzai, the president's brother, and Haseen Fahim, the brother of Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim, who is hospitalized for heart surgery in Germany, according to sources close to the situation. Kabul Bank also contributed to President Karzai's fraud-tainted reelection campaign last year.

The Central Bank has not taken ownership of Kabul Bank, which has scores of branches across the country, only taken over its management. The new acting chief executive is expected to be in place for three months until the Central Bank can recruit independent management.

Murky transactions by Kabul Bank, first detailed by The Washington Post this year, include large property purchases in Dubai with bank money. The properties include 16 multimillion-dollar villas on Palm Jumeirah, a luxury development in the Persian Gulf, and two towers still under construction. All were registered in the name of the bank's chairman, Farnood, a world-class poker player, and that of his wife.

Farnood stepped down as chairman Monday at the Central Bank's request and agreed to transfer the titles to the Dubai properties to Kabul Bank. Several of the Palm Jumeirah waterfront villas, each with a swimming pool, are occupied by prominent Afghans including Mahmood Karzai, and the family of former vice president Ahmad Zia Massoud.

Mahmood Karzai, who used to run an Afghan restaurant in Maryland and holds around 7 percent of Kabul Bank's shares, said he will vacate the Dubai villa purchased with bank money. It is unclear what others plan to do.

Of the takeover, Karzai said: "This is a very good thing. We can now work according to regulations of the Central Bank."

The Central Bank has sought to keep secret its plans for Kabul Bank, fearing that public speculation about the bank's solvency could spark a run on the bank, which has branches across the country. "We don't want to make a panic in the market so we are handling it very carefully," said one Central Bank official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The precise state of Kabul Bank's finances will not be clear until authorities complete a full review of its books, and the bank's future will depend in part on the Dubai property market, where the price of real estate purchased with cash from the bank has slumped and created big losses, at least on paper.

Another major source of concern, said bankers and officials, is a hidden web of large loans, mostly to Kabul Bank's own shareholders. Afghan regulators failed to uncover the insider loans, which likely exceeded legal limits, despite assistance from the U.S. Treasury Department, which has advisers in the Central Bank.

Kabul Bank's biggest creditor, said bank insiders, is Haseen Fahim, a minority shareholder, who borrowed at least $92 million to fund various business ventures, which in turn won contracts at U.S. bases and sites in Afghanistan operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. One bank insider said Fahim took out $178 million in loans.

Fahim, who has a huge house on Dubai's Palm Jumeirah, recently paid back $26.5 million. His loans were handled by Fruzi, the ousted chief executive, who got his start in business buying Afghan precious stones while living in Poland in the 1990s.

Fahim, who is currently in Germany with his ailing brother, the vice president, said in a telephone interview that he took loans totaling $92 million from Kabul Bank to finance an oil venture, Afghan Gas Group, as well as logistics and transport companies, and a cement plant. He said he owes Kabul Bank, with interest, $22 million, and that he has assets including land and a gold market in Kabul worth about twice that.

"If the Central Bank says I want these [Kabul Bank loans] to be returned then I will comply with that," he said.

Fahim described the government takeover of Kabul Bank as hasty and said the government should have allowed shareholders time to return the overseas money. His home in Dubai, he said, is registered in his name and was bought with personal funds.

"Naturally, this will affect the market," Fahim said. "The bank should have had an opportunity to address the concerns of the Central Bank."

Kabul Bank was once hailed as a banking pioneer in Afghanistan, where it introduced ATMs, produced glossy brochures and drummed up business by holding prize-drawings for depositors. But it then expanded into the airline business, took in politically connected figures as shareholders and became a symbol of the cowboy crony capitalism that has helped disfigure the country after the U.S.-led rout of the Taliban in late 2001.

Kabul Bank's two biggest shareholders are Farnood, the ex-chairman, and Fruzi, the former chief executive. The two men, both Russian speakers who spent years in Russia and the former Soviet bloc, have in recent weeks been locked in a tumultuous struggle for control of the bank.

One bank shareholder said they fell out after Farnood uncovered loans far in excess of what the official balance sheet showed. Usually based in Dubai, he flew to Kabul to confront Fruzi, whose brother controls the bank's heavily armed security force. But a second shareholder said that the dispute began when Farnood returned to Kabul claiming that the losses in the Dubai property market were the bank's responsibility, not his own.

This second shareholder alleged that Farnood handed over his information about the bank, detailing the involvement of Mahmood Karzai and others, to American investigators in Kabul, information that helped build the case that was later presented to Karzai. Others said Farnood just threatened to give evidence to the Americans, but didn't. Farnood, said a person familiar with the clash at Kabul Bank, threatened other shareholders that "America is behind me" and would provide him bodyguards.

"As both sides were going at each other, and then going to external entities, that made the president nervous, that made American investigators nervous, and that made the Central Bank nervous," this person said. "And that led to this decision."

Afghan bankers said the Central Bank's intervention is a risky move that should help recover assets but could also unsettle the country's already fragile financial sector. "It would be very difficult to manage a Kabul Bank collapse," said one prominent banker in Kabul. "It will be a disaster for the country."

A senior Afghan official, however, said that the Central Bank's intervention lanced the growing boil at Kabul Bank.

"We are fully assured that it will run smoothly and we'll recover some of the damages," the official said. "There is nothing to worry about."

Higgins reported from Dubai.

partlowj@washpost.com higginsandrew@washpost.com

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You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Scott Wilson
Wednesday, September 1, 2010

As President Obama convenes the first direct Middle East peace talks in 20 months, the question many observers here and in the region are asking is what, if anything, makes this round any more hopeful than the last.

One reason for optimism may be the shared regional fear of Iran, which has only grown since talks broke off between Israelis and Palestinians in December 2008.

Obama began a series of bilateral meetings Wednesday morning with the four leaders involved in the talks. Each has his own interest in seeing them succeed, but Iran's threat is a common concern to all of them.

To be sure, success is a long shot, thanks to a divided Palestinian national movement, a right-leaning Israeli public and the energetic extremes on both sides that are interested in seeing peace talks die before any compromises can be reached.

Iran's ambitions, which have cast a long shadow over the greater Middle East, may serve as a common bond keeping a frail peace process intact despite threats that have arisen even before the negotiations open Thursday at the State Department.

Iran's nuclear program and spreading political influence through a swath of Sunni Arab countries have alarmed the region's kings and elected autocrats for years.

As the clock ticks down on predominantly Shiite Iran's nuclear program, though, it becomes more urgent for Israel and its Arab neighbors to achieve peace and face together the shared threat to their security and political stability.

The dynamic brings an "enemy of my enemy" calculation to this round of talks, binding the Jewish state's security interests to those of its Sunni Arab neighbors more tightly than in the past.

The negotiations' chaperones in Jordan and Egypt are also more threatened by Iran, through its proxies and widening political influence, than they were 20 months ago, giving their leaders a greater incentive to keep Israelis and Palestinians at the table until a deal is reached.

"I can say, with respect to this conflict, [Iran] is an important issue," George J. Mitchell, Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, told reporters this week.

In 2001, at the start of the second Palestinian uprising, Mitchell led a commission at the request of then-President George W. Bush to examine ways of ending the violence and achieving long-term Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Mitchell said he re-read his report when he took up his new job and was struck by the fact that it did not contain a single mention of Iran.

"And yet on my first visit and subsequent visits, during which I met with leaders of, I believe, 14 or 15 countries in the region, without exception Iran was included in the conversation," Mitchell said. "And in most of them, it was the first or second item mentioned. So clearly it is an important issue and one which has an impact on this process."

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who met first with Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday, may be more willing than he was to turn against his far-right coalition partners on issues such as extending a settlement freeze past its Sept. 26 deadline and their opposition to any compromise on East Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim the city as their future capital.

Netanyahu will need Obama's support if he decides to undertake a military strike against Iran, either before or after he carries it out. His willingness to stick with peace talks, which Obama has called a priority, would win him goodwill in what has so far been a stormy relationship between the two men.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas also has reason to fear Iran, which has crossed sectarian lines to support Hamas, the armed Islamist group, with money and military training. Abbas's secular Fatah movement fought a virtual civil war with Hamas, which now runs the Gaza Strip, over several months in 2007.

Reconciliation between the two main Palestinian political movements is not near, and on the eve of new direct talks, Hamas's armed wing killed four Israeli settlers in the West Bank in what observers there believe was a proxy strike against the peace process itself.

"There are going to be extremists and rejectionists who, rather than seeking peace, are going to be seeking destruction," Obama said Wednesday after his meeting with Netanyahu. "And the tragedy that we saw yesterday, where people were gunned down on the street by terrorists who are purposely trying to undermine these talks, is an example of what we're up against."

Depending on the terms, a peace agreement with Israel would almost certainly strengthen the aging Abbas's hand against Hamas, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Abbas was scheduled to meet with Obama early Wednesday afternoon.

Obama is then scheduled to see two Sunni Arab leaders frightened by Iran, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. They lead the only two Arab countries at peace with Israel, under treaties that have proved a near-constant source of tension with the nations' pro-Palestinian publics.

Abdullah, who will follow Abbas into the Oval Office, warned of an expanding "Shiite Crescent" extending from Iran through northeastern Saudi Arabia and into southern Lebanon and Syria soon after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

His little kingdom is squeezed between the West Bank and Iraq, where he said Iran could take advantage of post-invasion chaos to ensure that a Shiite majority would eventually lead the country.

Abdullah's fears grew following the brutal sectarian violence that flared in Iraq in 2006 and during the war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, that same year. The region's episodic violence inflames his country's Palestinian majority, threatening his pro-Western stance and empowering Jordan's own Islamist movement.

Mubarak also has reason to fear Iran's influence with Hamas, whose leadership has acknowledged receiving assistance from the Islamic Republic.

Gaza, now run by Hamas, has been a constant source of instability on the Egyptian border. The Israeli blockade of the strip has angered Egyptians and brought public demands that Mubarak allow more Palestinians to enter the country in order to escape the siege.

But he is reluctant to do so because Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Islamist movement in Egypt and a serious threat to Mubarak's evolving plans to have his son succeed him in office.

A strong Hamas is a problem for Mubarak - and Iran is interested in just that. And peace between Israel and the Palestinians is perhaps the best way for Mubarak - and Jordan, Israel, the Palestinians and the United States - to counter those ambitions.

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You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Greg Jaffe and Leila Fadel
Washington Post Staff Writers

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military's war is officially over in Iraq, even as the future of the country remains undecided. The signs of the end were everywhere Wednesday, despite the presence of about 49,000 American troops who remain mostly sequestered on large U.S. bases.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates touched down in the morning at al-Asad Air Base, which was once home to 22,000 Marines and now serves primarily as a takeoff point for planes ferrying troops home from Iraq. He took questions from troops who pressed him with queries about their retirement and health benefits and barely mentioned the war. By afternoon, Gates and Vice President Biden were presiding over what will likely be the war's last four-star change of command.

The events served to amplify President Obama's message Tuesday that it was time for the United States to "turn the page" in Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 was followed by a series of American blunders, such as the failure to plan for the postwar occupation, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the often heavy-handed use of force, which fed the chaos and unrest that enveloped the country after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Even as Gates praised U.S. troops who fought in Iraq, the defense secretary declined to say whether he thought the war's ambiguous outcome was worth the cost in American money and lives. "I think that it really requires a historian's perspective in terms of what happens here in the long term," Gates said.

Gates's remarks reflected the American ambivalence about a war launched on the faulty intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The war "will always be clouded by how it began," Gates said.

The war's outcome is also far from certain. Nearly six months after its most recent national election, Iraq's political parties remain incapable of forming a coalition government. Remnants of the insurgency remain and are capable of pulling off horrific attacks. There are also unresolved disputes between Arabs and Kurds over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq that could spur further unrest.

"Our men and women in uniform . . . have accomplished something extraordinary," Gates said. "How it weighs in the balance over time remains to be seen."

Senior U.S. officials sent a strong message to the Iraqis on Wednesday that they would have to solve the country's internal problems increasingly on their own. "It is time for Iraq to move forward," the outgoing U.S. commander, Gen. Ray Odierno, said at his change-of-command ceremony at Camp Victory, the once-bustling hub of U.S. military forces in Iraq. Odierno turned over his command to Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, an unusually low-key, behind-the-scenes commander.

In a sign of the changes to come, Biden used the change-of-command ceremony, held beneath the glittering chandeliers of one of Hussein's palaces, to press Iraqi leaders to resolve the political stalemate that is paralyzing the country. "The Iraqi people voted in large numbers and expect a government that reflects their votes," he said.

Even as the American military presence in Iraq dwindles, the United States is still engaged in what amounts to a major nation-building effort there. That effort, Biden said, will be increasingly led by the State Department and not the military, which is still taking casualties in the country. On average, about 12 to 15 U.S. troops are wounded each month.

The change in mission for the military is evident in the somewhat awkward new terminology that U.S. military commanders have concocted to describe their new role. In briefings, commanders have jettisoned the word "combat" and routinely refer to their troops' activities as "partnership" operations. Gates on Wednesday presided over a first-ever "Responsible Drawdown of Forces Ceremony," in which he passed out 20 awards to U.S. service members in Iraq.

One of the biggest questions facing the United States is whether Congress will foot the bill for a civilian-led nation-building effort. Although lawmakers have been reluctant to cut funding to U.S. combat troops, they seem far more willing to cut aid to the Iraqis. The Obama administration's request for $2 billion to train and equip Iraqi army and police forces was recently cut in half by the Senate.

Another big question is what kind of presence the United States will have in Iraq after the end of 2011, when all U.S. forces are supposed to have left. It is possible that the new Iraqi government could ask U.S. troops to remain in some capacity to help safeguard Iraq from its neighbors.

In Baghdad, Obama's pledge to "turn the page" on Iraq drew mixed responses from Iraqis. "They said, 'We are leaving,' " said Hussein Ali, a resident of the Adhamiya area. "What have they left behind them besides widows, orphans, poverty, a destroyed infrastructure, no government, and martyrs?"

Others welcomed the departure. "We can take care of our problems," said Omar Ahmed, a 30-year-old student. "We can deal with it better than them."

jaffeg@washpost.com fadell@washpost.com

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You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 3, 2010

SUKKUR, PAKISTAN - A suicide bombing at a Shiite demonstration in the western Pakistani city of Quetta left at least 55 people dead Friday, triggering fears of an outbreak of sectarian violence as the nation continues to struggle with ruinous floods.

The strike followed a suicide attack that killed at least two people in northwest Pakistan at a mosque of the Ahmedi sect, another religious minority whose members are the frequent victims of Islamist extremists. On Wednesday, suicide bombers struck a Shiite march in the city of Lahore, killing at least 30 and sparking riots.

The Pakistani Taliban, an offshoot of the Afghan group, claimed responsibility for the Lahore bombing. The United States added the militant organization, which American officials say was behind the failed Times Square bomb attempt, to its terrorism blacklist this week. A Pakistani Taliban leader said Friday that the group plans more strikes in the United States and Europe.

Attacks by Islamist radicals slowed during the past month as Pakistan coped with its worst-ever natural disaster, which has left 1,600 people dead and displaced millions. Although it was unclear whether militants were offering a reprieve or were themselves weakened by the floodwaters, this week's bombings seemed to mark an end to that lull.

The bombing in Quetta injured at least 100 people. It occurred in a busy commercial area as Shiite Muslims - a minority in a nation where most people are Sunnis - gathered for a procession to express solidarity with Palestinians. Similar marches were held elsewhere in Pakistan.

Television footage showed vehicles and motorbikes aflame in deserted streets. According to the news network Express 24/7, surviving protesters fired guns, contributing to the injuries.

Quetta is in the province of Balochistan, one of Pakistan's least populated and poorest regions. The province has also been hit by flooding, but the government has restricted the movement of international aid agencies in the area, where separatists have been waging a low-level insurgency for years.

Monsoon rains that sparked flooding in late July let up this week and floodwaters continued to recede, allowing more Pakistanis to return to the cities and villages they had evacuated weeks before.

But vast swaths of southern Pakistan, including areas surrounding the Sindh province city of Sukkur, remained underwater, and millions of people were still living in thousands of tent camps set up across the nation. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani said the inundations had caused as much as $7 billion in damages.

Emergency relief workers and officials said hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis remained stranded on patches of dry land and warned that water-borne illnesses and hunger remained threats.

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You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 4, 2010

IN MUSA QALA, AFGHANISTAN U.S. Marines and British civilian advisers are waging two wars in the hilly northern half of Helmand province: They're fighting the Taliban, and they're quarreling with each other.

The disagreements among the supposed allies are almost as frequent as firefights with insurgents. The Americans contend that the British forces they replaced this spring were too complacent in dealing with the Taliban. The British maintain that the Americans are too aggressive and that they are compromising hard-fought security gains by pushing into irrelevant places and overextending themselves.

"They were here for four years," one field-grade Marine officer huffed about the British military. "What did they do?"

"They've been in Musa Qala for four months," a British civilian in Helmand said of the U.S. Marines. "The situation up there has gotten worse, not better."

The disputes here, which also extend to the pace of reconstruction projects and the embrace of a former warlord who has become the police chief, illuminate the tensions that are flaring as U.S. forces surge into parts of southern Afghanistan that had once been the almost-exclusive domain of NATO allies. There are now about 20,000 U.S. troops in Helmand; the 10,000 British soldiers who once roamed all over the province are now consolidating their operations in a handful of districts around the provincial capital.

The new U.S. troops in the south are intended to replace departing Dutch soldiers and relieve pressure on under-resourced and overburdened military personnel from Britain and Canada, where public support for the war has fallen even more precipitously than in the United States. But the transition entails significant new risks for U.S. forces, who are now responsible for more dangerous parts of the country.

To the south of Musa Qala, U.S. Marines are in the process of moving into Sangin district, where more than 100 British troops - nearly one-third of that country's total war dead - were killed over the past four years. Senior Marine officers initially resisted being saddled with the area, which they dubbed "the killing fields," but they relented after pressure from top U.S. commanders.

The influx also has elicited conflicting emotions from coalition partners. British and Canadian officers say they didn't have the manpower or equipment to confront a mushrooming insurgency by themselves, but they also cringe at the need to be bailed out by the United States.

"There's a mix of relief and regret," said a British officer. "We've spilled a lot of blood in Sangin and Musa Qala, and we're quite frankly happy to leave those places, but we don't want this to look like another Basra," referring to the southern Iraqi city that U.S. and Iraqi forces had to rescue after it was seized by militias upon a British pullout in 2007.

More than a dozen U.S. and British military and civilian officials were interviewed for this story, but almost all of them spoke on the condition that they not be identified by name because of the sensitivity of the issue.

A more aggressive stance

Here in Musa Qala, a large town surrounded by farms and rocky hills, the arrival of the Americans has also prompted debate about whether a more offensive posture by coalition troops will stem the insurgency, or whether deals, compromises and a concentration of resources around key population centers will be sufficient to achieve stability.

British forces rolled into Musa Qala in early 2006 after the Taliban killed the district chief, but the troops left later that year after striking a deal with the insurgents to not attack the town. The truce was short-lived, and by the following February, hundreds of Taliban fighters recaptured the area, prompting the British, aided by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, to conduct a large operation in late 2007 to wrest control of the district center.

The British pushed the Taliban out of the town and the immediate environs. The troops eventually established front lines about four miles north and south of the town center that they patrolled up to, but generally not across, meaning everything beyond those lines was insurgent country. President Hamid Karzai, with the agreement of the British, named a former Taliban commander as the new district governor in an attempt to reintegrate insurgents into peaceful society.

Marine officers said the commander, Mullah Salem, was mercurial and corrupt, and his drug-addled personal militia ran roughshod over the area, but British military and civilian officials deemed Musa Qala stable enough. Life began returning to normal within the security bubble. Shops and schools reopened, and policemen came back to work.

But when the U.S. Marines arrived this March to take over the area, they deemed the status quo untenable. Within 48 hours, they punched beyond the northern front line and seized a town that had long been a Taliban stronghold. Marine units now are targeting insurgents well beyond the old southern line. The Marines also leaned on the provincial governor to replace Mullah Salem, and they have sought to disarm his militia.

"They didn't pursue the Taliban," the Marine commander here, Lt. Col. Michael Manning, said of the British. "We'll go after them."

The result of the more aggressive posture, Manning said, has been a doubling of the area under the control of the Afghan government. "The Taliban is losing ground here," he said.

But British diplomats and stabilization advisers, who still have lead responsibility for reconstruction and governance matters in the province under a deal worked out between Washington and London, contend that the Marine expansionism has resulted in more insurgent activity in the town center. The Taliban has expanded efforts to intimidate Afghans working for the government, and earlier this summer, an insurgent shot the district director of transportation in the face in the bazaar, less than a quarter-mile from the main Marine base.

"The Marines are too focused on pushing north and south," one British official said. "They're neglecting the place where all the people are, but the Taliban aren't. They're moving back into those places."

Manning and other Marine officers argue that their operations actually have made the town center safer. They maintain that the bazaar has tripled in size since they arrived, in part because the combat operations to the south have improved security along the main route trucks use to bring goods into the area.

The district governor and several shopkeepers concurred with that assessment. "When the British were here, they didn't care about security in the bazaar. They would fight and leave," said Sher Agha, the owner of a small shop where people can make telephone calls by satellite because there is no mobile phone service here. "The Marines patrol all the time."

The top Marine commander in Helmand, Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, played down the tensions between his forces and British civilians. He said the changes that have occurred in Musa Qala would not have been possible without the British having "paid a large price in blood" in the district over the past three years. "We went in with different tactics, but our success is based on the work that was done before," he said in an interview.

Contrasts in rebuilding

Manning makes little effort to conceal his frustration with the pace at which the British are rebuilding the area. Musa Qala's grand mosque, which was destroyed in the 2007 military operation and now is a giant hole in the ground, was supposed to have been rebuilt two years ago. The British, he said, also pledged to construct - but failed to deliver - a bridge over a riverbed that floods every winter, forcing people to rely on ferries.

He keeps a wooden sign in a trunk in his office that reads, "Promise Everything, Deliver Nothing." He said he found it in an encampment that British engineers had vacated. "That was their attitude," he said.

British officials said the delays with the mosque and the bridge are the result of helping to teach the Afghan government how to take charge of such projects. "The U.S. approach is focused on getting it done. The British focus is on building up the government to deliver," said a Western reconstruction official in Helmand. "The process is more important to the Brits than the Americans."

There also is a difference of opinion about the importance of Musa Qala in general. The Marines insist the British-run provincial reconstruction team has shortchanged this area and the neighboring district of Now Zad. The reconstruction team has insisted its focus should remain in other areas, including in and around the volatile district of Marja, because those places have been deemed more important by top U.S. commanders in Kabul.

The lack of support has not deterred Manning. He has built a temporary bridge with shipping containers, sandbags, plywood and dirt-filled barriers that were originally designed to protect bases from explosions. It is not elegant, and it will not survive the rainy season, but, he said, "it's better than nothing."

"International forces have made promises upon promises to the people here," he said. "We've got to give them something."

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You cannot hate a person when you know him

By Greg Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 6, 2010

Iran is steadily stockpiling enriched uranium, even in the face of toughened international sanctions, according to a U.N. inspection report that raises new concerns about the ability to monitor parts of the Islamic nation's nuclear program that could be used to make a bomb.

Citing a broad pattern of obstruction, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday that it cannot confirm quantities of certain nuclear materials, has a growing list of unanswered questions about enrichment sites and disagrees sharply with Iran's recent decision to eject two inspectors.

Overall, the agency "remains concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military organizations," according to the report, including the possible "development of a nuclear payload for a missile."

The report estimates that Iran has accumulated about 2.8 tons of low enriched uranium - material that, if further refined, could be used to make as many as three nuclear bombs - and suggests that Iran is making headway toward uranium that is weapons-grade.

So far this year, Iran has produced about 50 pounds of uranium enriched at 20 percent purification levels, according to the report. Iran had not previously exceeded purification rates of roughly 5 percent. A level of 90 percent is generally considered to be weapons-grade.

Iran says that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but U.S. and other Western officials say that Tehran is pursuing a weapon.

Experts said the report, a quarterly update sent to the 35 member nations of the atomic agency as well as the U.N. Security Council, suggests that Iran is becoming more aggressive in denying inspectors answers about and access to nuclear sites.

"The thing that stands out more and more is how Iran is not cooperating, [even on] inspections under traditional rules," said David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. While Iran has long kept aspects of its program hidden, Albright said, "what you've seen over the last year is that Iran is making it difficult for the IAEA to do its job at declared sites."

The report describes a series of recent developments at the main declared site, Natanz. Last month, Iran informed the agency that it had underestimated the accumulation of nuclear material there and that it had mistakenly broken seals on materials or equipment.

The IAEA said that it has not been granted access to a heavy water production plant, forcing it to rely solely on satellite imagery to assess the plant's operations. The agency said it also has been denied information about plans for new enrichment facilities that Iran has said it intends to build.

In a recent reply, Iran said that "it would provide the agency with the required information 'in due time,' " according to the report. Tehran has previously argued that it is not obligated to disclose even the existence of such facilities until they are completed.

U.S. officials suspect that Iran is pushing its nuclear program as far as it can under U.N. inspections, with an aim of giving the nation's leaders the option to quickly reconfigure facilities to rush forward the production of a bomb.

Iran says, for example, that it is enriching uranium at 20 percent levels to produce fuel rods for a medical research reactor. But U.S. officials say Iran's explanation is implausible, in part because it doesn't have the sophistication to work with medically useful fuel rods.

Despite Iran's ongoing work, U.S. intelligence agencies have recently concluded that it would take about a year, even under a rushed scenario, for Iran to develop a bomb.

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You cannot hate a person when you know him