QUOTE OF THE DAY
Gates is allergic to most forms of publicity. He hates the Sunday talk shows, which he regards as Washington insiders talking to each other. He hates town hall meetings, which aides say he views as stagecraft. He hates schmoozing with members of Congress (many of whose pork-barrel projects Gates would like to cut). And he hates the time-wasting bureaucracy of the Pentagon, in which strong ideas get neutered in the search for consensus.
--David Ignatius, Washington Post
PAKISTAN
Blast Kills Dozens in Pakistan - Shaiq Hussain and Pamela Constable, Washington Post
A massive suicide truck bomb ripped through a luxury hotel in the Pakistani capital Saturday night, killing at least 60 people and wounding more than 250 as the building was engulfed in flames, officials said.
Witnesses and officials said the bomber drove up to one side of the heavily guarded hotel and detonated more than a ton of explosives, leaving a 30-foot-deep crater.
Television footage of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, located just blocks from major government buildings, showed smoke billowing and flames leaping from windows as bloodied survivors staggered out of the lobby.
Police said that many people had been trapped inside and that the death toll would probably rise. Officials said some of the victims were foreigners, including at least one American. Marriott said in a statement that several hotel security guards who had gone out to examine the truck were among the dead.
The bombing, one of the deadliest attacks ever in Pakistan, occurred just hours after the new president of this nation of 160 million delivered his first speech to Parliament and vowed to free Pakistan from the "shackles of terrorism."
More at the Washington Post, Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, BBC News, The Australian, ThreatsWatch, Long War Journal and Abu Muqawama.
Pakistan’s President Calls for End to Terrorism and Criticizes Intervention by US - Carlotta Gall, New York Times
President Asif Ali Zardari addressed a joint session of Parliament on Saturday, his first speech there since his election two weeks ago, and offered a program of peace and reform while vowing to root out terrorism and extremism.
Mr. Zardari, who is seen as pro-American but is confronted by public hostility to American policy toward militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, said his government was determined to meet the challenge posed by terrorist and extremist elements in those areas.
His government would offer peace to anyone willing to renounce violence, and would invest in development and political reform of the border areas, but would use force as a last resort to those who challenged the authority of the government.
He declared that his government should be firm in its resolve not to allow terrorists to use Pakistani soil to carry out terrorist activities against any foreign country, and said he wanted to improve relations with two of Pakistan’s neighbors, Afghanistan and India.
But he also warned that Pakistan would not abide further American military incursions into the border areas. “We will not tolerate the violation of our sovereignty and territorial integrity by any power in the name of combating terrorism,” he said in a comment that was broadly greeted by legislators, who loudly thumped on their desks to show their support.
More at The New York Times.
Pakistan's Double Game - Washington Times editorial
Washington has good reason to be wary of the Pakistani government and military, and it's no secret what the problem is: The Pakistani army has been heavily infiltrated by Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers, and the same is true of Pakistan's security service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In important respects, the current difficulties between the United States and Pakistan are but the latest chapter of a long-running dispute between the two nations over Pakistan's relationships with al Qaeda and other radical Islamist forces in the region. During the 1990s, Pakistani governments headed by the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her successor as prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and then Gen. Pervez Musharraf, went out of their way to placate the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan while the ISI was known to maintain good relations with al Qaeda. This situation changed to some degree after September 11, when Gen. Musharraf began in essence playing a double game (in exchange for $10 billion in assistance from the US taxpayer): assisting US forces in capturing and killing al Qaeda operatives part of the time, while providing the terrorists with sanctuary, bases and protection the other part of the time.
This approach may have seemed bearable to US policymakers several years ago, when the Taliban appeared to have been routed in neighboring Afghanistan. That situation no longer exists, and Pakistan's role in sheltering jihadists has become less and less tolerable. Pakistan's continued refusal to take action against terrorists operating on its soil may be on the verge of opening a dark new chapter in relations with the United States.
More at The Washington Times.
AFGHANISTAN / IRAQ
Bush Crafts a Handoff - Jim Hoagland, Washington Post opinion
In its final months, the Bush White House -- along with the Pentagon -- is laboring hard to avoid crippling disruptions during the coming transition by locking in policies for the year to come. The idea is to move down in Iraq, up in Afghanistan and sideways on Pakistan.
This triple-play strategy was essentially put in place during a July 23 meeting involving Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the "tank," the chiefs' secure conference facility at the Pentagon. Little has filtered out from this meeting, "which was limited in attendance and tightly held even by the standards of the tank," says one Pentagon official.
But the shape of that day's decisions has since been made apparent by plans to send to Afghanistan about 5,000 U.S. combat troops who would have normally deployed to Iraq over the next five months. An additional 3,000 troops will leave Iraq for home in that same period.
More at The Washington Post.
IRAQ
Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm - Dexter Filkens, New York Times
At first, I didn’t recognize the place.
On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.
Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.
When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?
There are plenty of reasons why this peace may only amount to a cease-fire, fragile and reversible. The “surge” of American troops is over. The Iraqis are moving to take their country back, yet they wonder what might happen when the Americans’ restraining presence is gone. The Awakening, a poetic name for paying former Sunni insurgents not to kill Americans or Iraqis, could fall apart, just as the Shiite Mahdi Army could reanimate itself as quickly as it disappeared. Politics in Iraq remains frozen in sectarian stalemate; the country’s leaders cannot even agree to set a date for provincial elections, which might hand power to groups that never had it before. The mountain of oil money, piled ever higher by record oil prices, may become another reason to spill blood.
But if this is not peace, it is not war, either - at least not the war I knew.
More at The New York Times.
Tom Ricks's Inbox - Tom Ricks, Washington Post
Some very senior Bush administration officials are rushing to claim credit for backing the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, calling it the turning point in the war. But before they spike the ball into the end zone, they might want to listen to John McCreary, a retired analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who now puts out a daily e-mail report called "NightWatch." He brings the savvy of a career intelligence official to bear on the day's events - a function similar to the one he used to perform for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here, in part of his Sept. 11, 2008, bulletin, McCreary explains why he expects violence to increase in Iraq.
More at The Washington Post.
US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
The Plain Vanilla Revolutionary - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion
Bob Gates looks uncomfortable in his pinstriped suit, standing in the hot sun outside the US Embassy here before a gaggle of Afghan reporters. But he wants to send a message of contrition to a country that is angry about civilian deaths caused by US airstrikes. He announces later that the United States will adopt a new approach of compensating the victims of such accidents first and then investigating the details.
It's a small change in policy, but one that is characteristic of Gates's management style as secretary of defense. If the people of Afghanistan are upset, he wants to do something about it -- now! -- before their anger undermines the war effort. At the Pentagon, where log-rolling and bureaucratic inertia are a way of life, this insistence has been something of a revolution.
Gates has emerged this year as Washington's favorite Cabinet secretary. Both Democrats and Republicans talk of keeping him on in the next administration. Though a fierce proponent of American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been a leading skeptic of war with Iran and of any new Cold War with Russia. In a sharply polarized Washington, he has been a throwback to an earlier style of bipartisan national security policy.
More at The Washington Post.
EUROPE
Creeping Islamization in Europe - Diana West, Washington Times opinion
"Is Europe lost?" The answer to the second question is, "No, not yet." And losing Europe, I would add, is by no means inevitable. But that doesn't mean the continent isn't currently hell-bent to accommodate the dictates of Islamic law, bit by increasingly larger bit. Such a course of accommodation, barring reversal, will only hasten Bernard Lewis' famous prediction that Europe will be Islamic by century's end.
And what do I mean by "accommodation"? Well, to take one tiny example, one snowflake in a blizzard of such examples, there are schools in Belgium that not only serve halal food to Muslim and non-Muslim alike (old news), but, according to a recent French magazine report, no longer teach authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. (Don't even ask about the Holocaust.) For a more substantial, indeed, keystone example of accommodation, we can look to England, where, it pains me to write, Sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. According to press reports this week, the British government has quietly, cravenly elevated five Sharia courts to the level of tribunal hearings, thus making their rulings legally binding.
More at The Washington Times.
NEWS & OPINION NOTES
Iraq
Promoting a Vision of Tourist Bliss in Baghdad’s Dusty Rubble - New York Times
Bomb Kills 3 Near Sports Field in Northern Iraq - New York Times
Chief of Iraq Journalists Union Wounded in Blast - Los Angeles Times
Study: Surge of Violence Led to Peace in Iraq - Foreign Policy blog
Afghanistan / Pakistan Tribal Areas
Karzai Agrees To Meet With Palin - Washington Post
A Warning on Terror from Frontier Frank - The Times
The Long War
Terrorism Financing Case Back in Court - Washington Post
Bin Laden the Poet to be Published - The Times
Book Ban Myopia - Washington Times opinion
Bin Laden Statements, 1994-2004 - Secrecy News blog
Bin Laden Spoke - Nukes and Spooks blog
The bin Laden Tapes Cache - PrairiePundit blog
Complex Operations
COIN vs. Conventional Diplomacy - World Politics Review blog
US Intelligence Community
An Argument for Open Source Intelligence Secrecy - Secrecy News blog
United Nations
US Backed UN General Despite Evidence of Abuses - Washington Post
UN-American - Washington Times opinion
Africa
S. Africa: Mbeki Forced Out as Rival Seizes Power - The Times
S. African President Mbeki to Step Down - Washington Post
South African President Mbeki Agrees to Step Down - Washington Times
South Africa’s President to Quit Under Pressure - New York Times
SA's Mbeki Says He Will Step Down - BBC News
ANC Tells Thabo Mbeki to Stand Down - Agence France-Presse
Mbeki Resigns - Outside the Beltway blog
Niger Delta Rebels Say They Hit Another Pipeline in ‘Oil War’ - New York Times
Nigeria: Pipe Hit Claim in Delta 'Oil War' - BBC News
Nigerian Militants Begin Ceasefire in Delta - Reuters
Uganda Rebels in Surprise Attack - BBC News
AU Plane Sparks Mogadishu Battle - BBC News
Americas
Chavez eyes China, Russia, more on "Strategic"-Interest Tour - AFP
The Chavez Bagman Trial - PrairiePundit blog
Asia / Pacific
US Relations Shadow Japanese Election - Washington Times
Thailand, Insurgents Agree in Indonesia to End Violence in South - Kyodo
South Korea Considers Suspending Aid to North - Reuters
The Caucasus
Chechnya’s Victims - New York Times book review
Europe
Financial Crisis In Russia Raises Stakes for Putin - Washington Post
Russia’s Arms Buildup Will Hit a Wall - Westhawk blog
British Prime Minister’s Grip on Job Is Weakened - New York Times
Kosovo, Georgia: Neighborhood Bullies - Washington Post opinion
Middle East
Israel PM Olmert Tells Cabinet He is Resigning - Associated Press
Israel: From Now On it Gets Messy for Mrs Clean - The Times
Ramadan Brings a Slew of TV Serials and Ads - Los Angeles Times
South Asia
Czech Ambassador Killed in Pakistan Carnage - Agence France-Presse
US-India Nuclear Bond? - Washington Times opinion
BOOKS
In a Time of War - Bill Murphy
The West Point cadets Murphy follows through their baptism by fire are an admirable sample of young American men and women: intelligent, ambitious and intensely patriotic.
Baghdad at Sunrise - Peter Mansoor
This compelling book presents an unparalleled record of what happened after US forces seized Baghdad in the spring of 2003.
The Strongest Tribe - Bing West
From a universally respected combat journalist, a gripping history based on five years of front-line reporting about how the war was turned around–and the choice now facing America.
Tell Me How This Ends - Linda Robinson
After a series of disastrous missteps in its conduct of the war, the White House in 2006 appointed General David Petraeus as the Commanding General of the coalition forces. Tell Me How This Ends is an inside account of his attempt to turn around a failing war.
We Are Soldiers Still - Joe Galloway
In their stunning follow-up to the classic bestseller We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam and reflect on how the war changed them, their men, their enemies, and both countries - often with surprising results.
EVENTS OF INTEREST
2 October - Civil Affairs Roundtable (Public Event - Roundtable). ROA Headquarters, One Constitution Ave, NE Washington, DC. Sponsored by the Reserve Officers Association. In earlier roundtables, the observation was made that the center of gravity for stability operations is the human population in the area of operations. Civil affairs professionals and information operators are the key national security resources for influencing the human population. Civil affairs professionals assist in humanitarian operations and building civilian capacity. Information operators develop messages and keep the population informed. This roundtable will explore the relationship between the civil affairs and strategic communications functions.
3-7 November - Counterinsurgency Leaders' Workshop (COIN Workshop). Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Sponsored by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center. This event is a five-day program focused on understanding the fundamentals of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This is a version of the same extremely popular workshop offered to hundreds of military and civilian attendees over the past two years. The COIN Center has expanded the number of slots available to compensate for the high demand of previous sessions. The proceedings are UNCLASSIFED and registration is open to all interested US government and allied personnel.
6-7 December - Boyd Conference 2008 (Conference). Charlottetown, Prince Edward, Canada. There is an opportunity to hold a short, intense seminar on the applicability of Boyd’s ideas, particularly operating inside the OODA loop and grand strategy (sustaining our own morale and attracting the uncommitted), on the weekend of December 6-7 at the University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PEI. Canada. The theme would be applying these ideas to conflict in the post-Iraq era, and more specifically to the types of diffused, networked, “open source” armed conflicts that some have called “fifth generation warfare.” We are also interested in exploring solutions, such as the role of “resilient communities” (RC), for countering them. As Oil and food prices have climbed and the mortgage crisis has grown, the need to think more about Resilient Communities has become more urgent. We may have to re-invent our world! We envision this as a working seminar to help shape the policy agenda in the first year of the new administration.
