Nearly a year into a new war strategy for Afghanistan, the hardest fighting is still ahead, but already it is clear that the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.
That has been the early lesson of the American-led offensive in February in Marja, in Helmand Province, where most Taliban insurgents either were beaten back or drifted away. Since then, Americans and Afghans have struggled to establish a local government that can win the loyalty comfort shoes** of the Afghan people, something that is essential to keeping the Taliban at bay.
The success of the far larger offensive in the coming weeks in Kandahar, the Taliban heartland, may well depend on whether Afghans can overcome their corrosive distrust of President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Mr. Karzai was confronted with that issue when he met with American officials this week, including President Obama on Wednesday. The two leaders seek to repair months of badly strained relations and come together at a crucial moment, both for the NATO countries involved in the fighting and for Afghanistan itself. Mr. Obama plans to begin withdrawing American forces a little more than a year from now.
If the timetable is not daunting enough, an April report by the Pentagon to Congress found that by most measures, the country is, at best, only a little better off now than it was a year ago. Progress so far appears well off pace to meet the American goals.
The insurgency has spread to some new places, notably the north and northwest of the country, although it has diminished in a few areas. It is now made up of more than half a dozen groups with different agendas, making it that much harder to defeat, or negotiate with, even if the Americans and Afghans could agree on a strategy for doing so.
In 120 districts that the Pentagon views as critical to Afghanistan’s future stability, only a quarter of residents view the government positively. And the government has full control in fewer than a half dozen of these districts.
Despite the commitment of more troops by Mr. Obama and a new strategy that has emphasized the protection of Afghan civilians, few in Afghanistan believe that a functional government that holds the country together can be created on the timetable outlined.
“It was very unrealistic to think that in 18 months they would be able, comfortable shoes** with the Afghan government, to secure a very large part of the country which is insecure today,” said Nader Nadery, a commissioner on the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, who travels extensively around the country. “Look at only Marja. It took such a long time just to secure that area.”
The timeline also leaves many Afghans reluctant to back the Americans and the Afghan government, because they fear that the members of the NATO coalition may be leaving soon, Mr. Nadery said. The point was echoed by European diplomats.
“I did not anticipate the increasing sense of uncertainty among Afghans that Americans and Europeans will pack their bags and leave the country in the coming weeks and months,” said Vygaudas Usackas, who recently arrived in the country to serve as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan.
“We all understand we can’t succeed by 2011,” Mr. Usackas said.
Even as American troops clear areas of militants, they find either no government to fill the vacuum, as in Marja, or entrenched power brokers, like President Karzai’s brother in Kandahar, who monopolize NATO contracts and other development projects and are resented by large portions of the population.
In still other places, government officials rarely show up at work and do little to help local people, and in most places the Afghan police are incapable of providing security. Corruption, big and small, remains an overwhelming complaint.
“People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood,” said a senor officer who works closely with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the NATO commander for Afghanistan.
The challenges are clearly visible in eastern Afghanistan, where the military 传奇私服** has come to recognize the limits of American power in this wild terrain. The United States abandoned two combat outposts in the east over the past year — one in Nuristan and the other in the Korangal Valley, in Kunar Province.
Col. Randy George of the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, who has responsibility for the four easternmost provinces, tries to build relationships with tribal leaders in most of his territory, at gatherings called shuras, although he has given up ground to the insurgents in some areas.
The strategy inevitably means allowing the insurgents some havens, as long as those are in sparsely populated areas where the insurgents are unlikely to have much impact. Colonel George said he hoped that if he could embolden Afghan citizens to combat corruption in the more populated river valleys and provincial towns in their areas, they would at least create a government they could support, rather than help the insurgents who attack it.
“We’re not worried about corruption in itself, but we are worried about governance,” Colonel George said.
“Part of that is making sure that we are continuing to connect the Afghan people to the Afghan government as a whole, and when you’ve got a rotten piece of that, the people don’t want to connect to it,” he said.
Over the past year, elders in the east banded together in three districts in Laghman Province to force out three corrupt police chiefs, and in Kunar and Nuristan, they forced out two district governors.
But entrenched officials, some of them Karzai allies, sometimes undercut the efforts, and tribal dynamics are infinitely complicated. In Nangahar, a major effort by the military to persuade a large tribe to sign on to a pact to keep out the Taliban drew criticism from the powerful provincial ed hardy** governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, who appeared to fear that the pact would undercut his power. Since then, no similar pact has been approved.
Such pacts and agreements to oust local leaders require multiple meetings with villagers and elders. Several days a week, Colonel George flies to remote districts to meet with tribal elders, listen to their complaints and try to cajole them into supporting the Afghan government.
This is retail politics; valley by valley, village by village. In a meeting earlier this spring in Asmar, a remote district near the border with Pakistan, elders berated him for giving money earlier in the year to corrupt district leaders — underscoring how difficult it is for the Americans to pick reliable local allies. And by the time the Americans know who is who, they are on the verge of rotating out of Afghanistan.
One village elder at the outdoor meeting looked at Colonel George and said: “You are giving the money to individuals and not to the community. Look at the directors of government agencies, look at the cars they are driving, look at the houses they build — where does that money come from? It’s our money.”
Diplomats who have spent years in the country working with Afghans give the Americans credit for trying, but they warn that it is easy to underestimate the complexity of Afghan tribal relationships and the profound antipathy for the government.
“One of my Afghan friends always says, ‘You want a shura, I can organize one for you in 24 hours,’ ” said Thomas Ruttig, a former German diplomat in Kabul and an expert on the country who founded the Afghanistan Analysts Network. “The problem is, do you have the right ed hardy clothing** people?
“When you give out money, you might end up supporting one side in a local conflict — and not realizing that it’s roulette,” Mr. Ruttig said.
2010年5月12日星期三
Seven Killed in Kindergarten Attack in China
Six kindergarteners and a teacher were stabbed to death and at least 20 other people were injured on Wednesday in an attack at a school in northern China, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
The attack, which occurred about 8 a.m. at a kindergarten in Shaanxi Province, mbt shoes** was one of the deadliest in a bizarre series of attacks on Chinese schoolchildren by apparent lunatics wielding knives and hand tools.
The latest attacks are presumably copycat crimes, and they have ignited fear and outrage among parents. Some parents have spoken of their reluctance to send their children off to school. The anxiety is heightened by the fact that most parents in China have only one child because of the government’s strict birth control policy.
Some schools have increased security in the aftermath of the attacks; it was not immediately clear whether the Shaanxi school had done so.
The injured were taken to a hospital in the city of Hanzhong, Xinhua reported. A nurse answering the phone at the hospital said most of the victims had critical wounds to their heads.
“We are very busy saving people’s lives,” she said before hanging up.
Unlike in the United States, school shootings are rare in China because it is difficult to buy guns of any kind here. Sharp objects and tools are the weapons of choice.
Although official Chinese news organizations have been quick to release initial reports on the string of attacks, the government has been carefully censoring subsequent stories, perhaps to prevent other copycat murders, or perhaps to diminish any suggestion of dysfunction within Chinese society. walking shoes** In presenting China as a “harmonious society” — the signature propaganda phrase of President Hu Jintao — the government often deletes dissonant reports from the Internet and other media platforms.
Some scholars have speculated that the attacks point to the absence of adequate pressure-release valves in a society that is going through significant economic upheaval, where the gap between the wealthy and the destitute is rapidly widening, and where corruption by local officials heightens frustrations among ordinary citizens.
Mental illness, too, is rarely acknowledged here, and thus treatment is in short supply.
The first of the recent wave of attacks took place on March 23, when Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, on China’s eastern coast. After a speedy trial, Mr. Zheng was executed on April 28, the same day that 16 children and their teacher were attacked at a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong.
The following day, in the city of Taixing, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, 29 kindergarten pupils and three adults were injured by an attacker with a knife Protesting parents took to the streets chanting, “We want the truth! We want our babies back!”
The day after that, Xinhua reported, five kindergarteners and a teacher were injured sf** by a man in Shandong Province, also in eastern China. The man beat the five children with a hammer, then doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire with two other children in his arms. The attacker died.
The attack, which occurred about 8 a.m. at a kindergarten in Shaanxi Province, mbt shoes** was one of the deadliest in a bizarre series of attacks on Chinese schoolchildren by apparent lunatics wielding knives and hand tools.
The latest attacks are presumably copycat crimes, and they have ignited fear and outrage among parents. Some parents have spoken of their reluctance to send their children off to school. The anxiety is heightened by the fact that most parents in China have only one child because of the government’s strict birth control policy.
Some schools have increased security in the aftermath of the attacks; it was not immediately clear whether the Shaanxi school had done so.
The injured were taken to a hospital in the city of Hanzhong, Xinhua reported. A nurse answering the phone at the hospital said most of the victims had critical wounds to their heads.
“We are very busy saving people’s lives,” she said before hanging up.
Unlike in the United States, school shootings are rare in China because it is difficult to buy guns of any kind here. Sharp objects and tools are the weapons of choice.
Although official Chinese news organizations have been quick to release initial reports on the string of attacks, the government has been carefully censoring subsequent stories, perhaps to prevent other copycat murders, or perhaps to diminish any suggestion of dysfunction within Chinese society. walking shoes** In presenting China as a “harmonious society” — the signature propaganda phrase of President Hu Jintao — the government often deletes dissonant reports from the Internet and other media platforms.
Some scholars have speculated that the attacks point to the absence of adequate pressure-release valves in a society that is going through significant economic upheaval, where the gap between the wealthy and the destitute is rapidly widening, and where corruption by local officials heightens frustrations among ordinary citizens.
Mental illness, too, is rarely acknowledged here, and thus treatment is in short supply.
The first of the recent wave of attacks took place on March 23, when Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, on China’s eastern coast. After a speedy trial, Mr. Zheng was executed on April 28, the same day that 16 children and their teacher were attacked at a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong.
The following day, in the city of Taixing, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, 29 kindergarten pupils and three adults were injured by an attacker with a knife Protesting parents took to the streets chanting, “We want the truth! We want our babies back!”
The day after that, Xinhua reported, five kindergarteners and a teacher were injured sf** by a man in Shandong Province, also in eastern China. The man beat the five children with a hammer, then doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire with two other children in his arms. The attacker died.
2010年5月10日星期一
Nomination of Kagan Leaves Some Longing on the Left
The selection of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick moderate candidates who often disappoint their liberal base.
Ms. Kagan is certainly too liberal for conservatives, who quickly criticized her nomination on Monday as a radical threat. But much like every other Democratic nominee since the 1960s, she does not fit the profile sought by the left, which hungers for a full-throated counterweight to the court’s conservative leader, Justice Antonin Scalia.
In many ways, this reflects how much the nation’s long war over the judiciary has evolved since Ms. Kagan was a child. While the American left back then used the Supreme Court to promote social change in areas like religion, race and abortion, today it looks at it more as a backstop to defend those rulings. The right, on the other hand, remains aggrieved and has waged an energetic campaign to make the court an agent of change reversing some of those holdings.
Along the way, conservatives have succeeded to a large extent in framing the debate, putting liberals on the defensive to the point where Sonia Sotomayor echoed conservatives by extolling judicial restraint in her confirmation hearings last year and even President Obama recently said the court had gone too far in the past. While conservatives have played a powerful role in influencing Republican nominations, liberals have not been as potent in Democratic selections.
In that vein, then, no Democratic nominee since Thurgood Marshall in 1967 has been the sort of outspoken liberal champion that the left craves, while Justice Scalia has been joined by three other solid conservatives in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. By all accounts, Mr. Obama did not even consider the candidates favored most by the left, like Harold Hongju Koh, his State Department legal adviser, or Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor.
“Why do the conservatives always get the conservatives, but we don’t get to get the liberals?” Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, asked Politico recently, voicing the frustration of the left before Ms. Kagan was selected but when she was known to be the front-runner. “What the hell is that all about?”
Ms. Kagan addressed the point herself 15 years ago in the University of Chicago Law Review: “Herein lies one of the mysteries of modern confirmation politics: given that the Republican Party has an ambitious judicial agenda and the Democratic Party has next to none, why is the former labeled the party of judicial restraint and the latter the party of judicial activism?”
Conservatives reject the notion that what they seek amounts to activism, saying what they want are justices who do not interpret the Constitution and laws to promote a policy agenda. But they said the public has come around to their view that courts have overreached and they have made the issue a potential liability for Democrats.
“What does President Obama gain by putting forward an unabashed progressive, liberal judicial activist?” asked Leonard A. Leo, a conservative leader who helped President George W. Bush confirm Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. “Polling suggests that’s not something that adds a lot of value to his own immediate political objectives.”
The ground began shifting on Supreme Court politics during President Ronald Reagan’s second term when conservatives pushed for candidates who would reverse what they saw as the excesses of the court under Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren E. Burger.
In 1986, Mr. Reagan appointed Justice Scalia and elevated Justice William H. Rehnquist to replace Chief Justice Burger. But Mr. Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork a year later was rejected by the Senate after an ideological clash. Only after that vote and another nominee withdrew did Mr. Reagan finally pick Anthony M. Kennedy, a more moderate conservative.
Leery of another such showdown, President George Bush picked a so-called stealth candidate in David H. Souter in 1990, a move conservatives considered a betrayal after he turned out to be more liberal than expected. A year later, Mr. Bush appointed Justice Thomas, who was a favorite of the right, as were the second President Bush’s choices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. The 2005 nomination of Harriet E. Miers, on the other hand, collapsed amid a revolt by conservatives who feared another Justice Souter.
Liberals have had Scalia envy for nearly a quarter-century, only to be let down. They considered President Bill Clinton’s selections of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer to be satisfactory but not satisfying, much like the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor last year. While Justice Ginsburg came closest to what they were looking for, given her record of advocacy for women’s rights, she disappoints them on the death penalty and in other cases.
Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said conservatives did more to influence Republican nominations because the energy on court advocacy is on the right, which still resents rulings that barred school-sponsored prayer, legalized abortion and upheld some affirmative action programs. “It still lives off of that anger, and nothing of that sort of fire has really taken hold on the other side,” Professor Primus said.
The left, by contrast, focuses on guarding the status quo, a less animating mission. “The quote-unquote liberals are defending the New Deal and Warren court inheritances,” said Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School.
A 2006 study provided some fodder Senator Harkin’s argument that today’s conservative justices lean more to the right than the liberals lean to the left.
Richard A. Posner, a conservative appeals court judge in Chicago, ranked all 43 justices from 1937 to 2006 by ideology and found that four of the five most conservative justices are on the current court. Even the moderate swing vote, Justice Kennedy, was the 10th most conservative over that period. By contrast, none of the current justices ranks among the five most liberal members and only Justice Ginsburg is in the top 10.
Where exactly Ms. Kagan would fall on that scale is unclear since she has never been a judge. She has been a forceful critic of the ban on openly gay service in the military, but has argued for strong executive power, a hot-button issue since Sept. 11.
Some analysts even say she would actually shift the court somewhat to the right, compared with Justice John Paul Stevens.
Mr. Obama described her Monday as a “consensus builder” known for “her openness to a wide range of viewpoints.”
Ronald A. Klain, chief of staff to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a longtime friend, said “she is more of the progressive mold than not” but has a “pragmatic lawyer’s approach to legal questions.”
Mr. Leo said he assumed she would be a reliable liberal but not a Scalia for the left. “Kagan’s probably a vote,” he said, “but probably not the full package.”
Ms. Kagan is certainly too liberal for conservatives, who quickly criticized her nomination on Monday as a radical threat. But much like every other Democratic nominee since the 1960s, she does not fit the profile sought by the left, which hungers for a full-throated counterweight to the court’s conservative leader, Justice Antonin Scalia.
In many ways, this reflects how much the nation’s long war over the judiciary has evolved since Ms. Kagan was a child. While the American left back then used the Supreme Court to promote social change in areas like religion, race and abortion, today it looks at it more as a backstop to defend those rulings. The right, on the other hand, remains aggrieved and has waged an energetic campaign to make the court an agent of change reversing some of those holdings.
Along the way, conservatives have succeeded to a large extent in framing the debate, putting liberals on the defensive to the point where Sonia Sotomayor echoed conservatives by extolling judicial restraint in her confirmation hearings last year and even President Obama recently said the court had gone too far in the past. While conservatives have played a powerful role in influencing Republican nominations, liberals have not been as potent in Democratic selections.
In that vein, then, no Democratic nominee since Thurgood Marshall in 1967 has been the sort of outspoken liberal champion that the left craves, while Justice Scalia has been joined by three other solid conservatives in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. By all accounts, Mr. Obama did not even consider the candidates favored most by the left, like Harold Hongju Koh, his State Department legal adviser, or Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor.
“Why do the conservatives always get the conservatives, but we don’t get to get the liberals?” Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, asked Politico recently, voicing the frustration of the left before Ms. Kagan was selected but when she was known to be the front-runner. “What the hell is that all about?”
Ms. Kagan addressed the point herself 15 years ago in the University of Chicago Law Review: “Herein lies one of the mysteries of modern confirmation politics: given that the Republican Party has an ambitious judicial agenda and the Democratic Party has next to none, why is the former labeled the party of judicial restraint and the latter the party of judicial activism?”
Conservatives reject the notion that what they seek amounts to activism, saying what they want are justices who do not interpret the Constitution and laws to promote a policy agenda. But they said the public has come around to their view that courts have overreached and they have made the issue a potential liability for Democrats.
“What does President Obama gain by putting forward an unabashed progressive, liberal judicial activist?” asked Leonard A. Leo, a conservative leader who helped President George W. Bush confirm Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. “Polling suggests that’s not something that adds a lot of value to his own immediate political objectives.”
The ground began shifting on Supreme Court politics during President Ronald Reagan’s second term when conservatives pushed for candidates who would reverse what they saw as the excesses of the court under Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren E. Burger.
In 1986, Mr. Reagan appointed Justice Scalia and elevated Justice William H. Rehnquist to replace Chief Justice Burger. But Mr. Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork a year later was rejected by the Senate after an ideological clash. Only after that vote and another nominee withdrew did Mr. Reagan finally pick Anthony M. Kennedy, a more moderate conservative.
Leery of another such showdown, President George Bush picked a so-called stealth candidate in David H. Souter in 1990, a move conservatives considered a betrayal after he turned out to be more liberal than expected. A year later, Mr. Bush appointed Justice Thomas, who was a favorite of the right, as were the second President Bush’s choices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. The 2005 nomination of Harriet E. Miers, on the other hand, collapsed amid a revolt by conservatives who feared another Justice Souter.
Liberals have had Scalia envy for nearly a quarter-century, only to be let down. They considered President Bill Clinton’s selections of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer to be satisfactory but not satisfying, much like the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor last year. While Justice Ginsburg came closest to what they were looking for, given her record of advocacy for women’s rights, she disappoints them on the death penalty and in other cases.
Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said conservatives did more to influence Republican nominations because the energy on court advocacy is on the right, which still resents rulings that barred school-sponsored prayer, legalized abortion and upheld some affirmative action programs. “It still lives off of that anger, and nothing of that sort of fire has really taken hold on the other side,” Professor Primus said.
The left, by contrast, focuses on guarding the status quo, a less animating mission. “The quote-unquote liberals are defending the New Deal and Warren court inheritances,” said Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School.
A 2006 study provided some fodder Senator Harkin’s argument that today’s conservative justices lean more to the right than the liberals lean to the left.
Richard A. Posner, a conservative appeals court judge in Chicago, ranked all 43 justices from 1937 to 2006 by ideology and found that four of the five most conservative justices are on the current court. Even the moderate swing vote, Justice Kennedy, was the 10th most conservative over that period. By contrast, none of the current justices ranks among the five most liberal members and only Justice Ginsburg is in the top 10.
Where exactly Ms. Kagan would fall on that scale is unclear since she has never been a judge. She has been a forceful critic of the ban on openly gay service in the military, but has argued for strong executive power, a hot-button issue since Sept. 11.
Some analysts even say she would actually shift the court somewhat to the right, compared with Justice John Paul Stevens.
Mr. Obama described her Monday as a “consensus builder” known for “her openness to a wide range of viewpoints.”
Ronald A. Klain, chief of staff to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a longtime friend, said “she is more of the progressive mold than not” but has a “pragmatic lawyer’s approach to legal questions.”
Mr. Leo said he assumed she would be a reliable liberal but not a Scalia for the left. “Kagan’s probably a vote,” he said, “but probably not the full package.”
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