Why the Afghanistan war deserves more resources, commitment and political will

AP

EIGHT years after the deceptively swift toppling of the Taliban, the prospects for the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan seem worse than ever. Every Western casualty, every reinforcement and every pious political homily on the “justness” and “necessity” of the war seem only to leave the mission floundering deeper and more hopelessly. Already battered by mounting casualties, Western support for the war has been further dented by an Afghan presidential election in August, wildly rigged in favour of the incumbent, Hamid Karzai. Against this gloomy backdrop, Barack Obama is faced with a request from the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for large numbers of new troops (see article). The decision may define his presidency. Despite the difficulty—indeed, because of the difficulty—he should give the general what he needs.

The alternative is not, as some opponents of an Afghan “surge” suggest, less intensive, more surgical “counter-terrorism”, relying on unmanned air raids and assassination. Mr Obama seems, rightly, to have ruled that out. General McChrystal, a special-forces veteran, is emphatic it would not work. On its own, it is more likely to kill civilians and create new enemies than to decapitate and disable al-Qaeda. A counter-terrorist strategy is a euphemism for withdrawal—which is what plenty of Westerners think should happen.


Surge or surgical?
If the West is wearying of its Afghan adventure, it is hardly surprising. The country’s unruly tribes and mountainous landscape make the place hard to pacify. Voters thousands of miles away struggle to remember why their soldiers are dying there. Reminders that they are depriving al-Qaeda of the base from which it plots the West’s destruction stretch credulity when the terrorists do just that from Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Yet the arguments for staying remain strong. First, the West has a security interest in preventing the region from slipping into a maelstrom of conflict. Pakistan, with 170m people and nuclear weapons, is vulnerable to the Taliban’s potent mixture of ethnic-Pushtun nationalism and extremist Islam (see article). Anarchy in Afghanistan, or a Taliban restoration, would leave it prey to permanent cross-border instability. Second, defeat for the West in Afghanistan would embolden its opponents not just in Pakistan, but all around the world, leaving it open to more attacks. And, third, withdrawal would amount to a terrible betrayal of the Afghan people, some of whose troubles are the result of Western intervention.

Millions of refugees have returned and millions of children have the chance to go to school. But the West has failed to protect civilian lives, to bring the development it promised, to wean the economy off its poppy-addiction and to ensure fair elections—and failed even to agree about what it is trying to do in the country. The Western-dominated United Nations mission has fractured in a public row between its two senior officials. Locally, NATO forces have done fine and heroic work. But too often the best initiatives are dropped when the best commanders end their tours. The Afghan conflict, it is often said, has been not an eight-year war, but eight one-year wars. NATO comes off worse each time. And so to the fourth and most important reason for persisting in Afghanistan: the coalition can do much better.

General McChrystal is an impressive soldier with a coherent plan. The West’s forces have got to know their enemies: not just the Taliban but also other terrorist networks and countless local warlords and thugs. The coalition’s leaders, at least, seem to have grasped that it must behave not as an occupying army but as a partner, whose aim is to build up the local forces that will ultimately ensure Afghanistan’s security. And soldiers and civilians are beginning to understand that development aid can benefit local people rather than foreign consultants and contractors.

The coalition, however, lacks three essential components of a successful strategy. It needs a credible, legitimate government to work with, the resources to do the job and the belief that America’s president is behind this war.

Many Afghans find it bizarre that the West should devote so much money to Mr Karzai, yet be unable to hold him to account over something so basic as stuffing ballot boxes on an industrial scale. For most, however, the local and provincial leaders matter more than the distant central government.

That is where the constitution drawn up after the overthrow of the Taliban went wrong. It envisages a centralised state. Provincial governors, for example, are appointed by the president. This flawed framework needs to be replaced with one which reflects the reality of a diverse, decentralised country. Agreeing on a new constitution would also help shift the focus of political debate and get around the election debacle.

If you’re going to do it, do it properly
As for resources, it is worth remembering that in 2006, before the American surge, prospects in Iraq looked far bleaker than they do now in Afghanistan, even though the allies had many more foreign and local troops. General McChrystal is believed to have offered a range of proposals to increase the number of American forces—at present about 62,000 out of a total of some 100,000 foreign troops—by between 10,000 and 60,000 troops. Mr Obama may be tempted to compromise—to show military resolve by acceding to the commander’s request, yet appease anti-war opinion by picking the lowest number.

This would be a mistake. General McChrystal says that the core of his strategy is its first stage: to regain the initiative. To do that, a substantial surge is needed. Gordon Brown’s announcement of an extra 500 is a welcome gesture, but will make little difference. Mr Obama should send at least 40,000 more.

Most of all, Mr Obama needs to fight this war with conviction. His wobbles over the last month have done more to comfort his enemies and worry his allies than any recent losses on the ground. Only if he persuades his troops, his countrymen and the Taliban that America is there for the long haul does he have a chance of turning this war around.

The fight to dominate cloud computing will increase competition and innovation

Illustration by Jon Berkeley

THERE is nothing the computer industry likes better than a big new idea—followed by a big fight, as different firms compete to exploit it. “Cloud computing” is the latest example, and companies large and small are already joining the fray. The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered as a service, over the internet, from vast warehouses of shared machines. Documents, e-mails and other data will be stored online, or “in the cloud”, making them accessible from any PC or mobile device. Many things work this way already, from e-mail and photo albums to calendars and shared documents.

This represents a big shift. If you store more and more things online, and access more and more software through an ordinary web browser, it suddenly matters much less what sort of computer you have, and what kind of software it is running. This means Microsoft, which launches the newest version of its Windows operating system this month, could lose out—unless, that is, the software giant can encourage software developers and users to migrate to its new suite of cloud-based services. Its main rival is Google, which offers its own range of such services, and continues to launch new ones and interlink them more closely. Yahoo!, which is allied with Microsoft, and Apple also offer cloud services for consumers; specialists such as Salesforce and NetSuite do the same for companies. Amazon has pioneered the renting out of cloud-based computing capacity. Some firms will offer large, integrated suites of cloud-based services; others will specialise in particular areas, or provide the technical underpinnings necessary to build and run clouds. But battle has been joined (see article).


Life among the clouds
The new approach has great promise. It makes life easier for consumers (no need to install any software) and cheaper, too: many cloud services are free, supported by advertising or subsidised by a minority of users who pay for a premium service. Using a cloud-based e-mail service means you do not have to worry about losing all your e-mail if your laptop dies, and you can access your mail from any web browser. As cloud services expand, the same will be true for other documents and data.

There are also benefits for companies. By switching to cloud-based e-mail, accounting and customer-tracking systems, firms can reduce complexity and maintenance costs, because everything runs inside a web browser. Providers of cloud services, meanwhile, can benefit from economies of scale. Why should every company or university set up and maintain its own mail server, when Google or Microsoft can do it more efficiently? Companies are already happy to rely on utilities to provide electrical power, after all. Cloud computing will do the same for computing power.

The ability to summon computing capacity from the cloud when needed will also give the software industry a shot in the arm. During the dotcom boom, the first thing a start-up had to do was raise the money to buy a room full of servers. If a website experienced a sudden surge in popularity, more servers were needed to meet demand. Today a capacity can be rented as needed, allowing cloud services to scale up smoothly. This lowers barriers to entry and promotes innovation and competition. It also presents an opportunity to Microsoft, Amazon and other companies that are hoping to create the cloud platforms on which other firms will offer services.

To anyone familiar with the history of computing, there is an obvious concern: that one company will establish a dominant position and attract the attention of antitrust regulators. What IBM did in the mainframe era, and Microsoft did in the PC era, one of the new challengers may succeed in doing in the cloud.

Regulators are already acting to head off incipient problems. They are signalling worries about, for instance, overlapping board members at Apple and Google, or the indefinite retention of search histories by search engines. So far none of these skirmishes has led to a big court battle—something technology firms, which are keenly aware of the industry’s history, are anxious to avoid. But there are three areas where users of cloud services should be vigilant, and providers must be responsive, or regulators may yet step in.

A storm brewing?
First is the familiar risk of technological lock-in, as rival companies promote their own, mutually incompatible, standards and formats, as they have done in the past. Moving data from one cloud-based storage system to another, for example, is not always easy. Buyers of cloud services must take account of the dangers of lock-in, and favour service providers who allow them to switch between services without too much hassle.

Second, storing so much personal information, and using it to target advertising, has privacy implications. Consumers who are unwilling to pay for cloud-based services will have to put up with some advertising based on their online activities, since it pays the bills. Most users will be happy to trade some privacy for free services, but they should have control over their personal data, and be able to amend the profiles which service-providers compile and use to target advertising.

Third, data stored in the cloud may not be safe. This month tens of thousands of people with Sidekick smart-phones, for example, lost their address books, calendars, photo albums and other personal data, all of which were being stored in the cloud by Danger, an aptly named subsidiary of Microsoft. But a disaster on this scale is unusual: occasional outages are more common. Ensuring that cloud-based systems become more reliable is in the best interests of the firms that provide them, if they want to attract and retain customers.

Prodded by users and regulators, providers of cloud services are gradually moving towards new standards and greater transparency and reliability. If they do not move fast enough, regulators may yet have to intervene more forcefully. But cloud computing’s advantages already outweigh its drawbacks for many consumers and business users. In contrast with previous computer-industry battles, a single victor seems unlikely this time around. May the best clouds win.

In the wake of a terrible surge in terrorism, Pakistan’s army prepares to enter the lair of its Mehsud militants

AFP

AFTER descending the jagged heights of South Waziristan, a remote part of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan, Wazir Khan Mehsud reached safety last week with his three small children, 40 other relations and their bundled possessions. They had come to Dera Ismail Khan, in the “settled area” of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) that borders Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt, to escape an army assault on the local Taliban. Militants of the Mehsud tribes, these fighters represent one of the most formidable of several tribally based Islamist gangs in north-west Pakistan. The army now vows to crush them.

Recent acts of terrorism confirm the need for this. On October 9th a suicide blast in Peshawar, NWFP’s capital, killed 52 people (see picture). On the following two days the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi were attacked by ten militants, five of them from South Waziristan. Three were said to be Uzbeks, members of an Islamist group driven from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan and from there, after America’s invasion of 2001, into South Waziristan. In a 22-hour battle, nine militants and 14 others, including a passing brigadier, were killed. It could have been worse. The militants at one stage made 22 hostages huddle round a suicide-bomber. Pakistani commandos shot him dead. Another teenage suicide-bomber killed 45 people on October 12th in NWFP’s Malakand region, which the army captured from another Taliban gang in May. And on October 15th roughly 25 militants launched co-ordinated attacks on three police bases in Lahore, as a suicide-bomber drove into a police station in Kohat in the north-west.


All these attacks were probably launched from South Waziristan, long the most hostile of Pakistan’s seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Despite at least three army offensives and peace deals with the Mehsud and other militants, the region has been a jihadist haven, more or less, since 2001. Besides the Uzbeks, al-Qaeda and a ragbag of Punjabi jihadist groups are present. And the Taliban have learned their arts. A Mehsud commander called Qari Hussain has become famous for training suicide-bombers. The army reckons that, of over 200 suicide blasts in Pakistan in the past two years, 80% were launched from South Waziristan.

Since ending its Malakand operation, which it considers a turning-point in a previously undistinguished seven-year campaign, the army has deployed 28,000 troops to blockade the Mehsud’s fief, which has also been bombed. Over 100,000 people, a third of the population, have fled into NWFP. Most, given the hospitable way of Pushtuns, have found shelter with relations. They have no alternative. Unlike the offensive in Malakand, in which over 200,000 of the 2m displaced people were allowed sanctuary in refugee camps, this operation provides no shelter for Mehsud fugitives.

For security reasons, the United Nations, which lost five staff when a suicide-bomber attacked an office of the World Food Programme in Islamabad on October 5th, is also absent. And the army has often prevented local charities from dispensing food aid to the Mehsud refugees, apparently fearing this would be funnelled to the Taliban. In dusty Dera Ismail Khan, where most of the displaced have been registered, no food has been distributed for a month. Arriving footsore and broke in Dera Ismail Khan, Wazir Mehsud was dismayed to discover so little to eat, and that his house back in South Waziristan had been flattened in an air raid.

The army is now planning a ground attack on the Mehsud militants. The terrain is forbidding and, with the winter snows expected next month, so is the weather. The Mehsud Taliban also seem to be in better shape than the army had hoped.

Their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in August by an American drone. He was also the supreme commander of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an alliance of 13 Pushtun Taliban groups of which he had been a founder. On his death a leadership battle ensued, motivated, the army claims, by his lieutenants’ desire to lay hands on a vast fortune that their dead “emir” had accrued by extortion and foreign donations. A 28-year-old militant, Hakimullah Mehsud, allegedly al-Qaeda’s favourite and a cousin of Qari Hussain, was declared his successor. But, until this month, when video footage of him was televised, he was thought by foreign and local spies to have been killed in a fight with his chief rival, Waliur Rehman. Some reports said Mr Rehman, who had been put in charge of South Waziristan, was also dead. But he was heard on a telephone intercept on October 11th exhorting a follower to pray for success in the Rawalpindi attack.

In another sign of the Taliban’s resilience, the army has had limited success trying to divide them. The leader of a rival Mehsud Taliban militia, supported by the army, was killed by the genuine article in June. Having no popular support, its fighters are locked down in Dera Ismail Khan under army protection.

The army seems to have done better in buying off the Taliban belonging to other tribes. To help keep the Mehsud fighters out of NWFP, it has armed militants of the small Bhittani tribe, despised by the Mehsud. It also seems confident that it can ensure the neutrality of two powerful Taliban commanders of the Wazir tribe, Mullah Nazir, who controls most of the rest of South Waziristan, and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in neighbouring North Waziristan.

Despite the almost permanent state of war between the Wazirs and the Mehsud, these commanders forged an alliance with Baitullah Mehsud last February. And in June, when the army began its operation in South Waziristan, it seemed they might even honour it: Mr Bahadur’s men killed at least 23 soldiers in an ambush. But the army, which exacted a bloody revenge for that attack, considers this unlikely. If history means anything, it will have paid hefty bribes to Mr Nazir and Mr Bahadur, with whom it has also previously made peace deals. In recent days it has showed restraint in repelling attacks by Mehsud and Uzbek militants in North Waziristan, viewing these as an effort to draw Mr Bahadur and his men into the fight.

This is time-honoured frontier strategy, not unlike the methods of bygone British and Mughal imperialists, who also failed to pacify South Waziristan. But Pakistan has an additional problem. The Wazirs, who occupy relatively fertile land close to the border, have strong ties to Afghanistan. Their Taliban are therefore eager to kill NATO soldiers fighting there.

Jihadists among the Mehsud, without easy access to the border with Afghanistan, have instead directed their Islamist rage against the state of Pakistan. Their natural enemy was, and is, the Pakistani government. However, high-ranking Mehsuds in the Pakistani army and bureaucracy, all with relations in or living under the Taliban, have sought to protect them. This may help explain why in February 2008 a thunderous army assault into the Mehsud territory was unaccountably called off, admittedly after it had killed over 1,000 Mehsud and Uzbek fighters.

Yet something has changed. Emboldened by its success in Malakand and by public hostility to the Mehsud Taliban, at whose hands thousands have suffered, the army at last seems intent on smashing them. This will not be easy.


Inheritors of a warrior culture, the Mehsud Taliban are much stronger than their cousins in Malakand, never mind their daunting terrain, foreign allies and local support. Nor would a victory over them have much bearing on the insurgency in Afghanistan. If anything, the Afghanistan-centric Wazirs have already gained strength from it. No problem, says the army. It promises to fix that lot next. According to Major-General Athar Abbas, the army spokesman, “If you get the biggest bully in [the tribal lands], all the other guys will fall into line.”

The truth, alas, is that if the army is not actively supporting the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, as is often alleged, it sees little point in taking them on. That may explain why Mr Nazir and Mr Bahadur seem happy to co-operate. If they believed the army meant to pick them off piecemeal, as it says it will, they would surely maintain their alliance with the Mehsud Taliban.

Another local militant, an Afghan called Sirajuddin Haqqani, is an even harder case. The prime suspect in all suicide blasts in Kabul, he has close ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and controls a swathe of territory in North Waziristan and eastern Afghanistan. Yet the Pakistanis claim no knowledge of his whereabouts.

Pushmi-pullyu politics
The same goes for Mullah Omar and other senior members of Afghanistan’s former Taliban government. They are known as the “Quetta shura”, after the capital of Pakistan’s western province of Baluchistan, where they are believed to be based.

It is not hard to see why the army is reluctant to turn on these Taliban. It wants a stable Afghanistan, friendly to Pakistan, and not too influenced by its main rival, India. It has never believed the multi-ethnic, but strongly Tajik, government cobbled together under President Hamid Karzai can provide this. Above all, it considers such an arrangement unacceptable to Afghanistan’s Pushtuns, the country’s historic rulers and biggest group, who are close cousins of its Pushtuns in the tribal lands and NWFP. So long as America and its allies do not respond to this grievance, Pakistan is sure they will fail, quit Afghanistan in chaos and leave the way open for the Taliban to return. That Mr Karzai’s government is welcoming investment from India makes a bad situation almost intolerable.

As Afghanistan’s Pushtun insurgency spreads, it is hard to disagree with the Pakistanis’ analysis. Their passivity—or duplicity—has played a big part in the chaos, but it is not primarily responsible for it. The problem lies in Afghanistan, among the Pushtun. Pakistan’s generals, however, are not especially happy to be proved right on this. Apart from a few bearded officers, perhaps, they would not choose to see the Taliban back in Kabul. The semi-literate clerics, whom Pakistan helped to power in the mid-1990s, were awkward neighbours.

Given the choice, the Pakistanis would rather see prompt negotiations between all Afghanistan’s Pushtuns, the Taliban included, and the government, which they ideally would mediate. This would lead to a new Pushtun-heavy government in Kabul. Leaving aside the notion of Pakistani mediation, utterly unacceptable to Afghans, a more representative government is also what America and its allies want. But differences arise over how to get there.

Before America talks to the Taliban—a prospect it finds unappealing—it wants to weaken them. It is therefore urging Pakistan to deny the militants a haven, which does not go down well with Pakistan’s army. In recent weeks army agents have helped whip up a storm of anti-American propaganda in the country’s media. This is an easy task, since America is widely hated, despite all the cash it provides. Last month Congress approved an increase in non-military aid to Pakistan of $7.5 billion over five years. Yet paradoxically, this gift has made relations between the two countries much worse.

The problem is the conditions with which the aid comes. Congress demands frequent evidence that Pakistan is cracking down on jihadists, especially those committed to attacking India. It wants to see no nuclear proliferation. And the army is to keep its nose out of politics. Ostensibly, these are things that Pakistan’s political parties and generals all support. But, encouraged by the top brass, who have condemned the aid bill, opposition parties and the media have taken huge offence. To placate them, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was dispatched to Washington this week to request a face-saving compromise before President Barack Obama could sign the bill into law.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari, has been weakened: his opponents strengthened. General Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, took pains to brief Shahbaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab and brother of Mr Zardari’s main rival, Nawaz Sharif, on his displeasure at the bill. The briefing was said not to be political, and that was no doubt true. But only in the sense that Pakistan’s generals consider foreign policy too important to be left to politicians.

A truce is unlikely to herald lasting peace between Japan and its neighbours

Illustration by M. Morgenstern

JAPAN’S nearest neighbours have long been less ready than has the rest of Asia to forgive and forget the country’s aggressive past: a brutal colonisation of Korea in 1905-45 and a creeping occupation of China from 1931 leading to total war. Both projects were pursued ruthlessly and entailed civilian massacres, torture and slavery in factories, mines and military brothels.

So Yukio Hatoyama, Japan’s new prime minister, has pleased the neighbours by promising that rule by his Democratic Party of Japan would transform Japan’s relations with them. He made the pledge in both Seoul, where he met South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, on October 8th, and then in Beijing at a three-way summit with China’s leaders. Unlike the weasel-worded Liberal Democratic Party, which long ran the country, Mr Hatoyama’s new government, he says, “has the courage to face up to history.”


Both Mr Lee and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, were delighted. Dealing honestly with historical matters, they affirmed, would make it much easier to tackle contemporary challenges together—notably, getting North Korea to give up its nukes, and deepening economic co-operation. Mr Lee said Mr Hatoyama had opened the way for “future-oriented relations”. The talk now is of reviving old plans for an undersea tunnel linking South Korea and Japan. Emperor Akihito may visit South Korea, a first. Both South Korea and China have applauded Japan’s proposal for a jointly compiled history textbook.

If only it were so simple. For all the bonhomie now, past hopes for “future-oriented” relations have often been frustrated. One problem is disputed territory (see map). Japan contests Dokdo, a rocky outcrop controlled by South Korea, while China claims the Senkaku, held by Japan. In addition, Japan contests Russia’s control of four northern islands seized in August 1945. Over the years Chinese, Japanese, South Korean and Russian diplomats have all berated The Economist over our maps.


Japan insists Dokdo should be called “Takeshima”. The South Koreans insist on the “East Sea” in place of the Sea of Japan. Over Dokdo/Takeshima, the websites of Japan’s and South Korea’s foreign ministries wage a virtual war, with pop-up cyber “history halls” and the like (in South Korea’s case, in nine languages). Yet both sides look merely ridiculous. Japan’s justification glides over the fact that its 1905 claim marked a first step in imperial annexation. South Korea argues that Dokdo has been “Korean” since 512, but uses the name for a country that did not exist until 1948. Competing for legitimacy with North Korea, the South also insists on the “East” rather than the “Chosun” Sea, since “Chosun”, a much more common reference in old Korean documents, is these days associated with the North. Empty specks of rock do duty as stand-ins for wider and even touchier historical issues.

Things would be better if Japan were now readier to call a slave’s spade a spade. It has apologised many times for its brutal past, but only in vague terms, expressing “remorse” for ill-defined damage. Most apologies, including the one that has since become a template, by the then prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, at the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, appear to say sorry to the Japanese people first. Mr Hatoyama does not call for the imperial family to break the so-called chrysanthemum taboo by admitting guilt on behalf of the wartime emperor, Hirohito. Nor does he suggest that the Diet (parliament) pass a law expressing national contrition instead of merely making statements. So, on this, he does not look like a mould-breaker. But then the leaders of South Korea and China may not want him to be. Being able occasionally to beat Japan for its lack of remorse is not all bad.

But Alexis Dudden of the University of Connecticut points out* that as vague apologies proliferate, the human victims of imperialism, though winnowed by old age, are ever less ready to accept them. The many wartime “comfort women”, or sex-slaves for the army, of whom South Koreans made up the biggest number, for example, want individual apologies and redress from the state. Despite abundant and harrowing testimony, Japan admits only general responsibility. The foreign ministry refers not to the women, but to “the issue known as ‘wartime comfort women’”.

When America’s Congress called on Japan in 2007 to apologise for the comfort-women system, Ichiro Ozawa of the DPJ, now the party’s secretary-general, threatened a Diet resolution damning the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His demeaning of the comfort women was grotesque but symptomatic: even today, many Japanese believe the atomic horror washed away any guilt for devastation in other parts of Asia.

Small comfort
But then the South Korean government gets more worked up about Japanese claims on a guano-flecked rock more than it does about the comfort women. After all, many of the men sending women to the front were, well, Koreans, working for the colonial authorities. Later, from 1948, the instruments and executors of Japanese repression were hitched to the new South Korean state—under American military tutelage to boot. That is all too inconvenient to highlight today.

So official versions of history tend to veer away from the truth, not towards it. You only have to look at the Chinese history on display at the extravaganzas for last year’s Beijing Olympics or this month’s National Day celebrations. The first (traumatic) 30 years of the Communist Party’s 60-year rule were airbrushed out. History, as Simon Schama, a master of the craft, says, should be the instrument of self-criticism, not self-congratulation. Not just in dictatorial China, but also in democratic South Korea and Japan, history still has far to go if it is to serve that aim.

At least 52 people were killed in a suicide-bombing in a busy market in Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. It was one of several attacks in different parts of Pakistan, including one in which 23 people died at the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, and a series of co-ordinated attacks on police buildings in Lahore and Kohat. The bloodshed was linked to a planned offensive by the army against Islamist militants in the tribal area of South Waziristan. See article

Pakistan’s army complained about the terms of a bill going through America’s Congress, tripling non-military aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion over five years. It requires the secretary of state to certify that Pakistan is dismantling nuclear-proliferation networks and not supporting militant groups.

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, cast doubt on the impartiality of a commission investigating fraud in the presidential election held on August 20th, after one of its Afghan members resigned alleging foreign “interference” in its work. Mr Karzai won the preliminary tally with 55% of votes, but the commission’s findings could force a second-round run-off. See article

China and Russia signed trade agreements worth $3.5 billion during a visit to Beijing by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister.


China and India exchanged criticism over a visit to Arunachal Pradesh by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister. China, which claims sovereignty over most of the state, accused Mr Singh of ignoring its concerns. India described these remarks as unhelpful.

Japan announced that it will stop refuelling ships in the Indian Ocean for the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan when its current legal mandate expires in January. The government said it was looking for other ways to support the NATO campaign.

Sticks and stones
Authorities in Iran said they would investigate claims by Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of parliament who was a candidate in the disputed presidential election in June, that security forces had raped and tortured protesting demonstrators. The implication was that Mr Karroubi could be punished if, as seems likely, his claims are dismissed.

Three bombs went off in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s western Anbar province, killing at least 23 people, including tribal leaders, Iraqi army officers and members of Sunni groups known as Awakening Councils, which are opposed to the insurgents. Many victims were attending a meeting to promote reconciliation. The government blamed the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda.

Two suspected al-Qaeda men were killed in a shoot-out in Saudi Arabia. The pair, dressed as women and wearing explosive vests, were shot after firing on security forces near the border with Yemen.

A fortnight after soldiers loyal to Guinea’s military ruler killed more than 150 protesters calling for civilian rule, a Guinean minister said that China had agreed to a deal worth $7 billion to exploit the country’s minerals. See article

Slowly, slowly
Barack Obama moved a step closer to getting a health-care bill passed by Congress. The Senate Finance Committee, probably the most significant of the five committees working on the bill, approved its version by 14 votes to nine. One Republican senator, Olympia Snowe of Maine, voted with the Democrats. See article

The prospects for progress on a climate-change bill also brightened a little, with news that an influential Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, might be willing to help forge a bipartisan deal. See article

Hillary Clinton, who lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama last year and is now America’s secretary of state, said that she has “absolutely no interest” in running for president again.

Rude awakening
Reuters

Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, sent police to shut down Luz y Fuerza del Centro, a state-owned electricity firm where featherbedding and inefficiencies cost the government $3 billion a year. The electricians’ union protested. See article

Argentina’s government enacted a controversial broadcasting law that will increase government control over the broadcast media and will oblige Grupo Clarín, the biggest media group, to sell off radio stations and television channels within a year.

In Honduras talks to try to end the country’s political conflict continued between representatives of Manuel Zelaya, the ousted president, and the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti.

Cuba’s government denied Yoani Sánchez, a blogger, an exit visa for her to travel to New York to receive a prize from Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism.

Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, nationalised a Hilton hotel on the island of Margarita. The Caracas Hilton was nationalised in 2007.

The long haul
AP

After a century of hostility, Turkey and Armenia promised to establish diplomatic relations and reopen the border between them. But the deal must be approved by both parliaments, and nationalists in both countries object to some of its provisions. Turkey and Syria also agreed to remove visa restrictions for travel across their shared border and announced joint military exercises, a few days after Turkey cancelled an air exercise with Israel.

In Russia, to no one’s surprise, the ruling United Russia party won nationwide votes to local and municipal councils by a landslide. More surprisingly, opposition politicians walked out of parliament, complaining of vote-rigging, and threatened to demonstrate in protest. See article

Jean Sarkozy, the 23-year-old son of the French president, became a candidate to chair the development corporation of La Défense, a financial centre near Paris that aims to challenge the City of London. Accusations of nepotism put pressure on the government, already suffering from a cabinet minister’s confession that he took part in sex tourism. See article

Romania’s government collapsed after a vote of no confidence in parliament. The vote was connected to political in-fighting before presidential elections due next month and may jeopardise the cash-strapped country’s relations with the IMF. See article

Gloom and pragmatism ahead of the Copenhagen climate-change summit

THE planet is warming, but the mood among climate negotiators seems as chilly as ever. On October 9th the penultimate round of talks before December’s climate-change summit in Copenhagen ended in Bangkok. Only one session remains, in Barcelona in November. Leaders are now busy lowering expectations, saying that this summit will be a prelude to a “Copenhagen II” in 2010.

One problem is procedural: what to do with the Kyoto framework. Some European countries, and many of the poor ones, want to keep it, since it requires the rich economies to bind themselves to numerical targets for cutting their emissions. But it will be difficult for Barack Obama’s administration to sign up to a Kyoto-style deal: the Senate made it clear that it would refuse to ratify the treaty even before George Bush walked away from it. The European Union negotiating block is edging away from supporting a Kyoto-like architecture for Copenhagen, infuriating some poor countries.


One of the two big practical questions is: by how much does the world need to cut emissions? Japan and the EU have set eye-catching headline goals. America has not—though cap-and-trade legislation seemed to advance this week (see article). The rich world wants concrete promises from poor countries. Hu Jintao, the president of China, now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged to cut the carbon-intensity of the country’s economy but he has not said by how much. India says that it will accept only a limit on emissions per person that matches rich countries. That is so easily satisfied that it is no condition at all.

The second big question, less discussed in Bangkok, is what rich countries will pay poor ones both to adapt to climate change and shrink their use of carbon. China has said that rich countries should pay 1% of their GDP a year—which would be $400 billion. Gordon Brown has suggested $100 billion a year. Despite some clever ideas about using small investment guarantees to unlock bigger flows of private capital, the gap remains large.

One deal at Copenhagen does look likely. Deforestation makes Indonesia and Brazil among the biggest sources of greenhouse gases. It accounts for 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Brazil has offered an 80% cut, and Indonesia 26% less deforestation than would happen with “business as usual” by 2020, if rich countries help pay for it. (They have not, yet.)

But on another issue, the Bangkok talks went backwards. Poor countries suggested language that would allow compulsory licensing of low-carbon technologies developed in the rich world. Neither the EU nor America wanted that.

Negotiations always look bleakest as their deadline approaches. Even so, the chances are receding of a deal that sees countries promise explicit cuts in emissions. That does not mean Copenhagen is fated to be a failure. But it does mean a great deal of work next year if the world is not to give up trying to stay cool.

Rewarding hope —Michel Rocard

The Nobel Committee has taken a large risk by not rewarding an acknowledged contribution. But that risk may have been worth it, because peace, being hard to achieve, must be nurtured with hope

By awarding its Peace Prize for 2009 to Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee took a big risk. Even if Obama is obviously something of a pacifist, the president of the United States leads the world’s most powerful military, one that is still waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, on its face, the choice does not appear to be an obvious one.

Some observers around the world criticised the Nobel Committee for rewarding only lofty rhetoric by anointing Obama as this year’s peace laureate. I believe that this criticism is perverse and inappropriate — and thus dangerous. For it consists in condemning hope as nothing more than ephemeral words.

Yet, in politics, words can be actions. Obama’s speech in Cairo earlier this year contributed, at the very least, to a change in the climate of the relationship between the Muslim world and America. The words that Obama has said to Iran may not yet have borne fruit, but talks with Iran have resumed and the International Atomic Energy Agency will send inspectors to the nuclear plants near Qom that had been secret until last month.

It is also thanks to words — two statements followed by a conversation — exchanged between Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that a joint programme for bilateral nuclear disarmament was initiated. The outcome of this effort is to be submitted to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in the spring of 2010.

Almost everyone knows that the dangers of nuclear proliferation can be reduced, and eventually resolved, only through concerted action by the international community. No country can manage the process on its own. So the step taken by Presidents Obama and Medvedev is essential, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, seeking big cuts in Britain’s nuclear arsenal, has publicly endorsed it.

Despite its silence, there are hints that China views this process with approval. And, of course, the French must reveal their stance on nuclear disarmament. For, in this crucial case, actions need to follow words.

But if the diplomatic future of nuclear disarmament looks promising, such is not the case with the other issues. For example, the dialogue with Iran, and with Muslims in general, remains dependent on resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, the persistence of which pollutes dialogue and prevents progress.

Both protagonists in that conflict remain starkly divided. In both Israel and Palestine, political leadership is very weak. The fact that in Israel a parliamentary majority still permits the expansion of settlements — the construction of 200 new housing units was recently authorised, despite a warning from Obama — means that those who would undermine peace remain in action.

In continuing to expand settlements, Israel leaves gradually less and less room for the creation of a viable Palestinian state, which requires a contiguous and unified territory. There is something criminal in the determination of some Israeli forces to destroy this opportunity, and something tragic in the helplessness of the rest of Israeli society to prevent it.

Elie Barnavi, former Israel ambassador in France, has just published a prominent book entitled Today or Perhaps Never (Aujourd’hui ou peut-être jamais), and sub-titled The Case for an American Peace in the Middle East (Pour une paix américaine au Proche Orient). His study highlights the overall decline of the situation and the increasing difficulty of reaching a peace settlement. He clings to the hope evoked by Obama, and to the fact that, unlike his two predecessors, Obama did not wait until the last year of his term of office to address the problem.

At the moment, the problem is even more serious, since the suspension of settlement expansion, which is key to any peace talks, is not supported in Israel. As a result, we are in a difficult period, because realising the hopes expressed by Obama will require increased American pressure on Israel, a stance that is unpopular at home. But if nothing happens, we will inevitably face another failure.

Following that reasoning, Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize came too early, because nothing has, in fact, happened yet. On the other hand, this award strengthens the visibility, authority, and international legitimacy of the American initiative. All is not yet said and done, and success remains possible.

The Nobel Committee has taken a large risk by not rewarding an acknowledged contribution. But that risk may have been worth it, because peace, being hard to achieve, must be nurtured with hope. —DT-PS

Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France and leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament