"Not every Taliban is an extremist ally," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said last week. One of the primary tasks of President Obama's Afghanistan strategy review, she said, is "trying to sort out who is the real enemy." Trying to persuade those insurgents deemed less extreme to lay down their arms or switch sides will be a major component of the Obama administration's new approach.

--Washington Post

AFGHANISTAN / PAKISTAN

As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks - Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times. Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision. But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military. A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room. “The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”

Fraud Panel Throws Out Votes in Afghan Election - Sean Maroney, Voice of America. The UN-backed commission investigating reports of fraud in the Afghan presidential poll has ordered the country's election officials to invalidate results at 210 polling stations. Diplomatic sources in Kabul say they believe the findings set the stage for a second round of voting. The Electoral Complaints Commission says it found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" after its nearly two-month-long investigation into Afghanistan's August 20 poll. In its report, the Commission says some polling stations had what it described as "uniform markings" on all of the ballots that were submitted. In a statement released Monday, the ECC ordered the country's separate Independent Election Commission to invalidate what it called "a certain percentage" of each candidate's votes, but it did not elaborate. UN spokesman in Afghanistan Aleem Siddique says it is now up to Afghan election officials to decide what to do next. "We expect the Independent Election Commission to implement those orders and move swiftly to announce either a final certified result or the requirement for a second round as stipulated by Afghan electoral law," Siddique said. Preliminary results from the election showed Afghan President Hamid Karzai winning with 54 percent. His nearest rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, had 28 percent. But the US-based election monitoring group, Democracy International, calculated the ECC's findings and found that Mr. Karzai's new vote total fell below 50 percent, requiring a second round. Mr. Karzai's spokesman, Waheed Omer, tells VOA they are reserving judgment until after election officials make their ruling.

Hamid Karzai Faces Another Ballot After 1m Votes Ruled Out - Jerome Starkey, Giles Whittell and James Bone, The Times. President Karzai was under intense pressure last night to accept a deal with his main opponent or a second round of voting in Afghanistan’s disputed election after UN-backed observers declared more than a million first-round votes invalid. Sources at the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) confirmed that its two-month inquiry had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud”, reducing Mr Karzai’s share of the vote from 55 to 48 per cent - and requiring a run-off ballot under Afghan law. The ruling presents President Obama with a diplomatic crisis in Kabul to add to the military quagmire, and leaves Mr Karzai’s credibility in tatters. He has dismissed the ECC’s evidence as “totally fabricated”. Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s spokesman, said: “It has been obvious to the world that allegations of fraud had to be investigated.” He added that it was now “incredibly important for the world to see that Afghan leaders are willing to make this process legitimate”.

Karzai Expected to Agree to Runoff - Karen DeYoung and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post. Obama administration officials said they expect Afghan President Hamid Karzai to announce Tuesday that he will accept a runoff in his country's disputed election, after the invalidation of nearly a million of his votes by the commission investigating fraud in the Aug. 20 race. The findings by the UN-backed International Complaints Commission, released Monday after two months of political turmoil, stripped Karzai of nearly a third of his tally. That brought him below 50 percent of the total and triggered a constitutionally mandated second round of voting between him and the runner-up, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. Senior administration officials, while palpably relieved at what they said had been an apparent breakthrough in tense negotiations with Karzai, remained reluctant to state unequivocally that he had agreed to a runoff.

Afghan Leader Said to Accept Runoff After Election Audit - Sabrina Tavernese and Helene Cooper, New York Times. Under heavy international pressure, President Hamid Karzai appears set to concede as early as Tuesday that he fell short of a first-round victory in the nation’s disputed presidential election, but the path to ensuring that the country has credible leadership remains uncertain, American and European officials said Monday. The officials said Mr. Karzai was moving toward accepting the findings of an international audit that stripped him of nearly a third of his votes in the first round, leaving him below the 50 percent threshold that would have allowed him to avoid a runoff and declare victory over his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah. Mr. Karzai’s apparent capitulation came after an all-out push by Obama administration officials and their European allies. But even if Mr. Karzai ends his strong resistance to a runoff, that will not resolve the country’s political crisis, officials say. It would be difficult to hold a new election quickly, as the Afghan winter approaches, and delaying the selection of a new government until the spring could allow the Taliban to make further gains across the country.

Pakistan Continues Waziristan Offensive - Ayaz Gul, Voice of America. Pakistan's military says an anti-Taliban ground assault backed by air support is progressing well in the mountainous region near the Afghan border. Officials say that at least 78 insurgents and nine soldiers have died since the offensive was launched on Saturday. The fighting is taking place as USCentral Command Chief David Peraeus and Senator John Kerry held talks with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad. Pakistani authorities say the "decisive military" offensive is targeting insurgents in the South Waziristan tribal region where al-Qaida and Taliban militants have set up terrorist training facilities for staging attacks in Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan. Army spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas says security forces have killed dozens of militants since the army launched its offensive on Saturday. The spokesman told a news conference Monday that troops have seized control of several key mountain tops and cleared villages. "They had installed the anti-aircraft guns on top of the hill features, which were knocked out. So they were all prepared for defending the area (but) it is good tactics on our part that all those crucial weapon systems were knocked out in the first go so that had collapsed their defense and therefore they have vacated the area," Abbas said. He says the area where militant leaders are based is under siege and there is almost no possibility of anyone escaping. But the spokesman would not set a timeframe for the military offensive to end.

As Pakistan Makes Gains, Resistance From Taliban - Salman Masood, New York Times. The Pakistani Army said Monday that it was progressing in its push into the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan, but it acknowledged that it was meeting strong resistance. The military began the much anticipated offensive against Taliban militants over the weekend, with about 28,000 troops backed by artillery and fighter jets moving into the region from three directions. After three days of fighting, army troops had taken control of important tactical heights overlooking the town of Kotkai, which is the home of Qari Hussain, a Taliban commander notorious for training suicide bombers, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army spokesman, at a briefing here. And on Tuesday, Reuters quoted unnamed security officials as saying the Pakistani forces had captured Kotkai. In the past 24 hours, 18 militants were killed while two soldiers died in clashes, General Abbas said. Twelve soldiers were wounded. It is difficult to confirm the official figures because no journalists are accompanying the troops, and the area is considered too dangerous for foreign or local journalists to visit independently.

Pakistan Says Offensive is Gaining Ground - Karin Brulliard and Haq Nawaz Khan, Washington Post. Pakistani soldiers surrounded militant hideouts and seized heavy weapons in the Taliban-riddled hills of South Waziristan on Monday, military officials said. On the third day of a major ground and air offensive to root out Islamist insurgents, officials said, the army faced pockets of stiff resistance that included rocket fire. But they said they were making progress, killing 18 fighters in a tribal region that Pakistan says is home to plotters of a recent series of deadly domestic assaults. The United States considers South Waziristan a haven for militants attacking international forces in Afghanistan and planning attacks overseas. "The government has a strong resolve to wipe out terrorism from this area," Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told journalists in Islamabad, the capital. "These terrorists are a threat to national and international peace." Two Pakistani soldiers were killed as forces pushed farther into the semiautonomous border area, bringing the total killed since Saturday to nine, military officials said. One tribal elder in the area with ties to the Taliban, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said 20 insurgents had been killed during the three-day offensive, not 78, as the military asserted. Neither account could be independently verified because entrance to the area and many nearby towns is blocked.

Pakistan Targets Mehsud Hometown - Zahid Hussain and Rehmat Mehsud, Wall Street Journal. Pakistani forces closed in on the hometown of the Pakistan Taliban's leader Monday, pursuing an offensive into the South Waziristan tribal region while swarms of refugees streamed out of the area. The long-awaited invasion is aimed at dismantling a Taliban mini-state in a region that has become a base for al Qaeda and a magnet for jihadis. US officials have said they are providing surveillance and intelligence feeds to support the effort. The Waziristan offensive against the Pakistan Taliban, which began over the weekend, has eased a controversy between Islamabad and Washington over a $7.5 billion US aid package. On Monday, top US officials met their Pakistani counterparts in a bid to ease concerns over conditions attached to the aid. Since the start of the Waziristan operation before dawn Saturday, the army has killed 78 militants and lost nine soldiers, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, spokesman for Pakistan's military. Gen. Abbas said the roughly 30,000 soldiers in the operation had made significant progress, despite the presence of about 10,000 battle-hardened Pakistani and foreign militants, many of whom had taken up well-defended positions in the mountainous region. "The troops have come under intense attack in many areas," he said. "The insurgents have vowed to fight until the end.

Gates to Press Asia, NATO for More Afghanistan Support - Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service. As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates travels this week to Japan and South Korea before heading to a NATO defense ministers conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, he’s expected to ensure the issue of support for Afghanistan remains solidly on front burner. In a break from the frequent national defense team sessions President Barack Obama has called in recent weeks as he reevaluates the US strategy in Afghanistan, Gates will be on the road this week, shoring up long-standing alliances. But senior defense officials traveling with him confirm that he’ll also press for more coalition support at every stop along the way. In Tokyo, the secretary will get his first challenge in that regard as he becomes the first US Cabinet member to meet with the newly installed Japanese Democratic Party government. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama announced last week that Japan’s naval refueling mission that supports the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan will end in January. Japan’s Maritime Defense Force has been deploying a supply ship and destroyer to provide fuel and water to US and British naval ships in the Indian Ocean since 2001. The mission will end after the agreement, which has been renewed annually for the past eight years, expires.

‘You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers.’ - David Rohde, New York Times. He explained that under a cease-fire agreement between the Taliban and the army, all civilians were required to get out of their cars when an army convoy approached. For Taliban vehicles, though, only the driver had to get out. The practice, I realized, allowed the Taliban to hide kidnapping victims and foreign militants from the Pakistani Army. That morning, Badruddin arrived at the house in Miram Shah where I was being held with Tahir Luddin, an Afghan journalist, and Asad Mangal, our driver. We had been taken hostage on a reporting trip south of Kabul, Afghanistan, in November 2008 and moved to Pakistan’s tribal areas. Badruddin announced that he was taking us out of town to a snow-covered hillside to shoot the final scene of a video that would be released to the news media. He was determined to make it look as though we were being held in the frigid mountains of Afghanistan, not in a bustling city in Pakistan.

Endurance Test - Roger Cohen, New York Times opinion. When it comes to Afghanistan, hawks back Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 or more troops while doves try to parse the distinctions between the Taliban and Al Qaeda to justify rejecting his view and eventually heading for the exit. Right? No, wrong. I’m a hawk on Afghanistan but for that reason I’m skeptical of a major troop surge because it might bolster the view that there’s a quick fix for a country that’s the fifth poorest in the world, enjoys life expectancy of 44, and has been lacerated by three decades of war. In Afghanistan, 30 years of fighting now demand 30 years of partnership from the United States. The troop numbers game, in which President Obama looks wobbly, is in fact a distraction. Numbers matter less than endurance, details less than overall design. A word that needs to pass Obama’s lips soon is just that: “endurance.” Afghanistan, as he has said and must not unsay, is the “necessary war.”

The Slowly Vanishing NATO - Anne Applebaum, Washington Post opinion. There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces: Most of the war's European critics want to know why their boys are fighting "for the Americans," not for NATO. Most of the American critics dismiss the European contribution as useless or ignore it altogether. As Jackson Diehl pointed out Monday, the central debate about future Afghanistan policy is taking place in Washington without any obvious contributions from anybody else. I'm not going to blame the US administration alone for this: It's not as if Europe has put forward a different plan - and there was certainly a moment, back at the beginning of this administration, when that would have been very welcome.

The Battle for Pakistan - Shuja Nawaz, Wall Street Journal opinion. Rising violence, targeted and random, has become a fact of life in Pakistan today. It threatens the country's political and economic future - and there still does not appear to be a strategy to stop it. The fledgling civilian government, composed of a weak coalition of opportunistic parties, has conceded to the military responsibility for organizing campaigns against insurgents who have set off a wave of attacks across the nation over the past two weeks. The latest military campaign in South Waziristan, launched Saturday, is a good example of the disconnect between the government and the military. The government has ceded all strategic authority to the army, and without civilian leadership, no military strategy can succeed there. It also reflects the continuation of a pattern that began soon after the Pakistan People's Party government succeeded the autocratic regime of President Pervez Musharraf last year. The then new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, briefed the government opposition leaders on the deteriorating security situation and asked them to provide him with direction. He had to wait four weeks before being told to proceed with plans for clearing Taliban militants out of the Swat Valley.

IRAQ

Violence Threatens Barack Obama’s Pledge to Pull Troops Out of Iraq - Oliver August, The Times. President Obama’s pledge to withdraw US troops from Iraq and end combat operations there by September 2010 is under threat because of increased levels of violence and bickering within the Iraqi parliament, the top US general in the country has told The Times. General Ray Odierno said that militant groups were likely to conduct a bloody campaign in the months ahead, as Iraqis prepare for national elections at the beginning of next year. “It’s clear that al-Qaeda and other groups do not want the elections to occur,” he said in an interview. “What I think they will try to do is discourage people from voting by undermining the authority of the Government of Iraq with attacks, so that people lose faith in the democratic process.” The Iraqi parliament has failed repeatedly to pass a new election law because of arguments over whether ballot papers should give the names of candidates, or of parties only. MPs are now talking about delaying the election, planned for January 16.

Election Law Stalls in Iraqi Parliament - Anthony Shadid and Nada Bakri, Washington Post. The Iraqi parliament failed for a second time Monday to vote on an election law crucial for organizing elections in January that will choose a new parliament and serve as a milestone in American plans to withdraw combat troops from the country. As is often the case in Iraq, deadlines come and go. But election officials face a logistical challenge ahead of the Jan. 16 vote, the first national election since 2005. They say they need the law passed now to give them roughly three months to prepare for the vote, although they could gain a week or two if the election is delayed. But after that, parliament's term expires, throwing Iraq's nascent political system into an unconstitutional limbo, just months before the US military wants to begin withdrawing troops in earnest. "If they don't pass a new law, a curse is going to fall on the political parties," warned Safia Sahhal, a secular lawmaker. "Why? Because this is what Iraqis want." "We don't know what we're going to do," added Faraj al-Haidari, the head of the Independent High Electoral Commission, which organizes the election.

Army Cancels Brigade’s Iraq Deployment - Michael J. Carden, American Forces Press Service. An Army brigade slated to deploy to Iraq in January was relieved of its deployment orders this weekend without current plans for a new mission, Pentagon and Army officials said here today. The 10th Mountain Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was off-ramped by Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top US commander in Iraq, because of the improved security situation there, and not to bolster forces in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters. “This [decision] is based on General Odierno’s assessment of the security environment in Iraq,” Whitman explained. “It reflects the continuing improvements in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to be able to safeguard their people as well as their institutions.” The 3,500 soldiers who make up the brigade will continue training and honing their skills, awaiting a new mission, which is the normal posture for troops in garrison. Pentagon officials have no plans, as of yet, to deploy the brigade to Afghanistan, Whitman said. The strategy assessment involving Pentagon and White House officials and commanders in Afghanistan still is ongoing, and no decisions for additional troops have been made, he added. Cancellation of the brigade’s deployment was a decision about Iraq, the Iraqi security environment and the Iraqi security forces that was “based on the situation in Iraq, not Afghanistan,” Whitman said. The brigade was intended to replace the 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, an Army National Guard unit from Clinton, N.C. The North Carolina Guard unit still is expected to return from its 12-month deployment on time in February, which will bring the number of brigade-size units in Iraq to 10. That statistic is subject to any future decisions that could be made about forces needed in Iraq, Whitman said. About 117,000 US servicemembers are now in Iraq.

Washington Plays Host to Iraqis in Search of Investment - Gina Chon, Wall Street Journal. The Iraqi government, backed by the Obama administration, kicks off its biggest post-Saddam investment roadshow in Washington Tuesday, to convince American businesses to join the country's reconstruction efforts. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is speaking at the opening day of the conference, which is considered to be the first major event under an agreement between the two countries that outlines their long-term relationship in economics, trade, education and culture. Dozens of Iraqi government officials, provincial governors, state investment commission authorities and others will give presentations. They will present overviews of sectors such as oil, agriculture and construction, which have been hobbled since the 2003 US-led invasion, and investment opportunities in about 750 projects, according to National Investment Commission Chairman Sami al-Araji. The conference comes at a time of relative optimism for foreign investors here. Parliament this month amended investment legislation that makes it easier for foreigners to secure land for investment projects. The cabinet has approved a giant oil-field development contract - a $15 billion investment commitment from a consortium led by BP PLC. Oil officials are closing in on other big deals with majors including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Eni SpA.

Iraqi Campus Is Under Gang’s Sway - Timothy Williams and Riyadh Mohammed, New York Times. Mustansiriya University, one of Iraq’s most prestigious universities, was temporarily closed this month by the prime minister in an effort to rid it of a shadowy student gang accused of murdering, torturing and raping fellow students, and killing professors and administrators. The decision to close the 24,000-student university in northeast Baghdad was made last week after members of the group, the Students League, beat and pistol-whipped Abdullah al-Bayati, 63, an education professor, on campus. The professor and his wife, who also teaches there, have been publicly critical of the group. To offer incontrovertible evidence to skeptics about the dangers of teaching at Mustansiriya University, Professor Bayati decided to make a point: He went to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s office wearing his bloodied clothes and with untreated gashes on his face and head. The next day, the prime minister, once a student at Mustansiriya, ordered the university closed for one week. Although Baghdad and most other areas of the country are now generally free of the armed militias that caused much of the violence during Iraq’s sectarian warfare, Mustansiriya seems a remnant of that chaos. It is under the sway of an armed group of violent Shiite students in engineering, literature, law and other disciplines; faculty members; and campus security guards.

IRAN

IAEA Discussing Uranium-Enrichment Plan with Iran - Lisa Bryant, Voice of America. The International Atomic Energy Agency is hosting a meeting in Vienna to discuss plans to enrich Iranian uranium outside Iran, and then ship it back to Tehran. If the talks are successful, they may mark a breakthrough for Iran's controversial nuclear program. The Vienna talks gather officials from the United States, Russia, France and Iran - along with those from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is hosting the meeting. They will discuss a tentative agreement, reached earlier this month in Geneva, for uranium from Iran to be enriched outside that country. The uranium would then be returned to Tehran for use by a small research reactor making medical isotopes. According to reports, the deal would have Russia taking in partially enriched Iranian uranium for further enrichment. France would then convert the material into metal rods to be used by the Tehran reactor. The plan follows months of deadlock over Iran's nuclear program and the recent discovery of a previously unknown nuclear-enrichment plant near the Iranian city of Qom.

US, Allies Begin Talks with Iran on Nuclear Program - Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times. Iran threatened to accelerate its uranium enrichment capabilities if talks with world powers that began Monday in Vienna don't yield a compromise on an international plan to provide materials for Tehran's nuclear program. Negotiators from the United States and its European allies are seeking a deal that would allow Russia to enrich uranium up to 20% to fuel an Iranian medical research reactor to produce isotopes for treating cancer. The agreement would ease Western concern over Iran developing the ability to raise its own enrichment levels, which Washington says could move Tehran closer to building a nuclear weapon. Iran has indicated it would allow another country to enrich a portion of its uranium, but it announced hours before the Vienna gathering that it would step up its enrichment capacity if the talks failed. Iranian officials say their nuclear program is for civilian power and medical research. They have expressed irritation over international pressure and have been both hard-edged and conciliatory in efforts to avoid new economic sanctions. The talks opened with new acrimony as Tehran threatened to "retaliate" against the United States and Britain after Sunday's suicide bombing in southeastern Iran that killed six commanders in the Revolutionary Guard.

Iran to Continue Enriching Uranium, Regardless of Talks - Voice of America. An Iranian official says Tehran will not abandon its uranium enrichment activities, regardless of the outcome of talks with world powers. A spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Shirzadian, made the comments to Iran's state-run news agency (IRNA), just hours before talks begin in Vienna about Iran's controversial nuclear program. The discussions among representatives from Iran, Russia, France, the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency are expected to focus on a proposal to have Iran ship uranium to Russia and France for conversion to reactor fuel. Shirzadian says Iran will continue to enrich uranium at a lower level, even if Tehran agrees to accept more highly-enriched uranium from Russia and France. Western diplomats consider third-party processing to be a confidence-building measure. They say it will ensure that Iran's uranium is enriched to levels suitable for civilian use but below what is needed for nuclear weapons.

Iran Threatens to Back Out of Fuel Deal - David E. Sanger, New York Times. Iran opened two days of nuclear talks with the United States, Russia and France on Monday with veiled public threats that it could back away from an agreement to ship more than three-quarters of its stockpile of nuclear fuel out of the country, unless the West acceded to Iranian demands to provide it with new fuel. At the end of a nearly four-hour session, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said little about the negotiations other than “We’re off to a good start.” Other participants in the talks, which filled an oversize conference room at the agency’s headquarters, said that although Iran’s representatives did not reject outright the idea of sending the country’s fuel to Russia and France for further enrichment, its negotiators stopped well short of reaffirming the statements the country made in talks on Oct. 1. “This was opening-day posturing,” one participant in the talks said, declining to be identified because all sides had agreed not to discuss the specifics of the negotiations. “The Iranians are experienced at this, and you have to expect that their opening position isn’t going to be the one you want to hear.”

Iran Sets Defiant Tone at Start of Talks Over Nuclear Programme - Catherine Philp, The Times. Iran struck a defiant note as it entered a new round of nuclear talks yesterday, insisting that it would not hesitate to produce highly enriched nuclear fuel if it did not get what it wanted out of negotiations. The hardline statement came as Iranian representatives met Western and Russian officials in Vienna for talks that were overshadowed by a suicide attack that Tehran blamed on American and British Intelligence. Representatives from France, the US, Russia and the UN met Iran to build on a proposal that was agreed in principle in Geneva this month to provide Tehran with nuclear fuel for its reactor that produces medical isotopes. Iran had sought to buy 20 per cent enriched uranium - more enriched than that used to fuel nuclear power but lower than that needed for a weapon - from the West. Russia and France offered instead to take Iran’s stocks of low-enriched uranium out of the country for conversion to a higher grade, a compromise that would prevent its from being diverted to a suspected weapons programme and delay the moment when Iran has sufficient fuel for a weapon. Yesterday, however, the Iranian nuclear spokesman said that “if the talks do not bring about Iran’s desired result ... we will start to make the higher enriched uranium ourselves”.

Iran Accuses Pakistan, Western Nations of Supporting Attackers - Elizabeth Arrott, Voice of America. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asked Pakistan to hand over those he says are behind a suicide bombing Sunday that killed more than 40 people, including several top commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard. Iranian officials also accuse the United States and Britain of supporting the attackers. Mr. Ahmadinejad told Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari that the presence of "terrorist elements in Pakistan" cannot be justified and insisted Islamabad arrest those involved. Iranian state media report the two spoke by phone one day after a suicide bomber killed more than 40 people in the southeastern region Sistan-Baluchistan, along the Pakistani border. An internet statement in the name of the militant group Jundallah claimed responsibility for the blast. The attack, on Revolutionary Guard commanders and Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders gathering for a reconciliation meeting, was among the most brazen in the Islamic Republic in years. Ali Nouri Zadeh is the director of the Center for Arab and Iranian Studies in London. He argues that the security breach has hurt the image of the Revolutionary Guard, which he notes, took part in the crackdown on anti-government protests earlier this year.

Nuclear Swap - Washington Post editorial. For now, at least, nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West have narrowed to an issue that was not even on the agenda a month ago: Iran's possible export of most of its existing stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia and France, which would turn it into fuel for an Iranian research reactor. This is both a bad and a good development. It is bad because it diverts attention from Iran's continuing refusal to comply with UN resolutions ordering it to cease uranium enrichment and from its failure to accept Western proposals even for a temporary freeze. But if Iran goes through with the agreement in principle announced by the Obama administration on Oct. 1, the tangible good would be the removal from Iran of most of the known raw material it could use to make a bomb - and a probable delay of one to two years in the West's estimates of how quickly it could produce one. It's still unclear whether Tehran will go through with the deal in a timely fashion. According to International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohammed ElBaradei, talks on the arrangement in Vienna got off to a "good start" Monday; other reports were less positive.

US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

Admiral Cites Need to Prepare for All Threats - Gerry J. Gilmore, American Forces Press Service. Military commanders of the future should be proficient at managing high-tech communications networks and also should know how to wage conventional, irregular and hybrid warfare, a senior US Navy officer said here today. A rapidly changing world presents an array of new threats and challenges to US national security, Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward, deputy commander for US Joint Forces Command, based at Norfolk, Va., told attendees at the annual C4ISR Journal Integration Conference held in Arlington, Va. C4ISR is military shorthand for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “To look at the world that we’re in right now we’re in constant conflict. … As we see the future, that leader is going to be critical,” Harward said. Space-based and aerial sensor equipment, part of the military’s C4ISR infrastructure, provides joint commanders added sets of “eyes” used to survey the battle space, Harward said. Yet, he added, those same commanders must be able to understand, manage and act on the information they’re receiving. Joint Forces Command is “focused, first and foremost, on the leader,” the admiral said. Consequently, he added, the computerized C4ISR system should now be considered leader-centric instead of network-centric.

AFRICA

No One Worthy: Mo Ibrahim Prize for Good Governance in Africa Goes Unawarded - Jonathan Clayton, The Times. The pitiful state of democracy in Africa was highlighted when the organisers of a multimillion-pound prize for good governance said that they had decided not to give out the award this year. Only three years after it was set up the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership - the brain child of Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese-born mobile phone tycoon - has apparently run out of suitable candidates. The problem for the organisers is that the $5million (£3million) prize plus $200,000 salary for the rest of the recipient’s life is restricted to former presidents and heads of state who have stood down from office in the previous three years. That rules out most of Africa’s leaders, many of whom have been in power for decades. This year the favourites for the award, which is funded by Mr Ibrahim, included South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria’s and John Kufuor of Ghana. None appears to have been deemed worthy.

US Announces 'Integrated' Sudan Strategy - Dave Gollust and Joe De Capua, Voice of America. The Obama administration, capping a months-long review process, Monday announced a new strategy of incentives and possible punitive actions to restore peace in Darfur and assure implementation of Sudan's north-south peace accord. Key benchmarks in the Sudanese peace process are approaching including national elections there next April. The new policy approach was announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who cited a sense of urgency, and collective agreement within the Obama administration, on how to bring peace to Darfur and salvage Sudan's troubled Comprehensive Peace Accord, the CPA. A written statement by President Obama said he will renew, later this week, tough sanctions against the Sudanese government over Darfur. The President said if the Khartoum government acts to improve the situation on the ground and advance peace, there will be incentives, but if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community.

North-south Conflict to be Emphasis of New US Policy on Sudan - Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post. The Obama administration's new policy toward Sudan, formally announced Monday, turns the spotlight back on where the troubled nation's problems first began: the split between the Islamic north and the largely animist and Christian south. Although the world's attention has been focused on the tragedy in the Darfur region of western Sudan, administration officials argued Monday that a faltering peace accord that ended Africa's longest-running conflict is under increasing strain and needs to be repaired. If that deal - brokered by the Bush administration in 2005 - collapses, officials and analysts say, then hope will be lost for a solution to Darfur. The two-decade conflict between north and south led to the deaths of 2 million people. Alex de Waal, a Sudan analyst with the Social Science Research Council, said the emphasis on the north-south conflict is significant.

White House’s New Sudan Strategy Fits Envoy’s Pragmatic Style - Ginger Thompson, New York Times. In their first African venture together in 2006, the future president and the former fighter pilot stood in what had been Nelson Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island, once an international symbol of oppression. It was, by many accounts, the beginning of a friendship between President Obama and the former pilot, Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration. And in March, the president enlisted the general to help resolve another African scourge in Sudan, where a campaign of killing has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions displaced. On Monday, the administration unveiled a new policy in Sudan, outlining an effort that officials said was aimed at ending the mass human suffering there, promoting a definitive peace and preventing Sudan from serving as a haven for terrorists. Though the details of the policy remained classified, senior administration officials described it as a mix of incentives and pressure to compel cooperation from the government in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. Glaringly absent were the tougher sanctions and no-flight zones that Mr. Obama had called for in his bid for president. Rather than issuing threats to the Sudanese government, the policy proposes to “engage with allies and with those with whom we disagree.”

US Unveils New Sudan Policy of Carrots and Sticks - Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times. The White House on Monday unveiled a Sudan policy that seeks a middle ground between punishing the country for its actions in Darfur and appeasing it, a step away from the get-tough policy advocated by President Obama during his election campaign. The announcement of the new policy came after seven months of debate within the administration. It was cautiously welcomed by advocates of stringent measures to end the violence in Darfur, who expressed relief that the White House did not adopt a more conciliatory approach. The administration wants Khartoum to end the fighting between Darfur rebels and government-backed militias. But it also is trying to persuade President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir's government to cooperate in fighting terrorism, and in implementing a 2005 agreement that ended a civil war between the country's northern and southern regions. Under the new policy, administration officials said they would renew sanctions on Sudan for its actions in Darfur, which the US has declared to be genocide. But they also will offer incentives for cooperation on key issues. The policy also seeks to resolve an internal dispute among key parts of the Democratic Party constituency and powerful lawmakers.

Hague Court Considers Sudanese Rebel Leader Case - Lauren Comiteau, Voice of America. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has begun a preliminary hearing to determine whether Sudanese rebel leader Bahr Idriss Abu Garda must stand trial for war crimes. Abu Garda is charged with leading an attack against African Union peacekeepers in Darfur two years ago. Bahr Idriss Abu Garda appeared in court Monday dressed in a gray suit and stripped tie instead of his familiar fighter's khaki and turban. Wearing glasses, he listened intently as the court officer read out the charges against him. "Mr. Abu Garda jointly and with..forces under his control killed 12 …peacekeeping personnel and attempted to kill 8 peacekeeping personnel," a court official stated. There are three counts in all: violence to life or murder, attacking peacekeeping personnel and property, and pillaging. They all stem from a September 2007 attack on an African Union peacekeeping base in the contested Darfur region of Sudan. Twelve peacekeepers were killed and another eight wounded in the assault that prosecutors say the 46 year old Abu Garda helped lead. Two other rebel commanders have also been accused of the crimes. But Abu Garda, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, is the only one who has voluntarily appeared in court. Prosecutors are considering issuing arrest warrants for the other two.

Talking to Sudan - New York Times editorial. President Obama is offering Sudan’s leaders an opportunity that they do not deserve but is necessary. The administration will replace a punishment-heavy approach with one that is more balanced. Khartoum, he said, can look forward to rewards if it brings stability to Darfur and South Sudan and to tougher sanctions if it does not. We have difficulty accepting the idea of any outreach to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for directing the genocide in Darfur. Washington officials insist that they will not work directly with Mr. Bashir but will try to negotiate with other Sudanese officials. We are skeptical that any of Mr. Bashir’s henchmen can be trusted to keep their word. But complete isolation wasn’t working, not least because other countries - most notably China, which buys oil from Sudan - were never willing to cut their ties. The violence in Darfur - where some 300,000 people have been killed and 2.7 million driven from their homes - has lessened. But the situation remains dire.

AMERICAS

Brazil Assigns $60 Million to Bolster Rio Security - John Lyons, Wall Street Journal. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to deploy federal police and allocate $60 million in aid to Rio de Janeiro after a weekend shootout downed a police helicopter and raised questions about the city's ability to host safe Olympic Games. Mr. da Silva made the announcement on a day when a third policeman involved in the helicopter crash died of his wounds and police conducted operations in at least six of the city's hillside shanty towns, called favelas, where the clashes took place. Police officials also said they recovered at least one high-caliber machine gun capable of shooting down a helicopter. Thus far, an estimated 21 people have died, Rio police say, in weekend violence that flared during turf wars between criminal gangs. Violence isn't unusual in Rio, where the murder rate places it among the world's most dangerous cities. But Rio's successful campaign to host the 2016 Olympics has brought new urgency to the issue. Proponents of the city's bid convinced Olympic officials that the city would keep spectators and athletes safe with an increased police presence and other measures.

Honduran Talks Deadlocked on Reinstating Zelaya - Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times. Representatives of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the de facto government that replaced him in a coup returned to negotiations Monday, but the two sides remained deadlocked over whether to return Zelaya to power. Both delegations had suggested Monday as a deadline for resolving the dispute, or calling off talks altogether. De facto President Roberto Micheletti abruptly announced Friday that the Supreme Court was the body that should decide whether to reinstate Zelaya. The head of Zelaya's team, Victor Meza, called the proposal "absurd" and countered that the Congress should make the decision, arguing that returning Zelaya to office was a political matter, not a judicial one. The Supreme Court has endorsed the coup, and Zelaya's supporters do not trust it to be an impartial arbiter. The Congress also signed off on the coup and voted Micheletti into office, but Zelaya may believe there is more room for political jockeying among legislators. Micheletti's representatives favor deferring to the court because they want Zelaya to be brought to trial immediately on various charges, including abuse of power. The two sides have agreed on all other points in a plan drafted in July by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, including a decision to forgo amnesty for people involved in the coup and the events leading up to it. But the final point, Zelaya's reinstatement, appears to be the deal-breaker.

ASIA PACIFIC

Indonesian Appointments Taint Prospects for Economic Overhauls - Tom Wright, Wall Street Journal. The new cabinet of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono features choices likely to be popular with foreign investors as well as some who analysts say lack the credentials to achieve economic overhauls. Mr. Yudhoyono, who was re-elected in July and will be officially sworn in to a second five-year term on Tuesday, had promised to appoint a cabinet comprised mainly of technocrats - instead of representatives of local political parties, who dominated his cabinet in his first term. Top appointees, local media reported, include politicians from the Golkar Party, which has strong support among government employees but also has a history of blocking efforts to streamline bureaucracy and privatize state enterprises. Mr. Yudhoyono offered a Golkar member the industry-minister portfolio, local media reported. A spokesman for Mr. Yudhoyono couldn't be reached to comment. Indonesia's resource-dependent economy is forecast to grow 4% this year due largely to a rebound in global commodity prices. Analysts say the country needs broad legislative and legal changes - including steps to slash red tape, reduce corruption and make it easier to finance big infrastructure projects - to maintain investors' interest. The cabinet is likely to be formally announced on Wednesday at the earliest. In recent days, a number of candidates have said they have been asked to serve.

EUROPE

Kurdish Rebels Surrender as Turkey Reaches Out - Nicholas Birch, Wall Street Journal. In the first concrete sign that months of efforts by Turkey's government to end a 25-year Kurdish insurgency could bear fruit, eight Kurdish rebels crossed over the border from Iraq on Monday to give themselves up. Accompanied by 26 Kurdish villagers who fled Turkey more than a decade ago, the members of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, were detained by police and taken in for questioning by Turkish prosecutors. Though not the first time such a gesture has been made, it comes months into what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has described as his government's "democratic opening" to Turkey's Kurdish population, who make up about a fifth of Turkey's 70 million inhabitants. The PKK has fought a guerrilla war aimed at separating Kurdish areas from the rest of Turkey. Tens of thousands of people, mostly Kurds, have been killed since the fighting began in 1984. "If they are released, then this is a historic turning point, the start of the PKK's descent from the mountains," Mehmet Metiner, a former adviser to Mr. Erdogan, said of the eight PKK members, in a telephone interview. The returning Kurdish villagers are likely be questioned and set free, according to Nusirevan Elci, one of 45 lawyers who traveled to the border to represent the group. About 11,000 Kurdish civilians who fled Turkey in the 1990s live in a United Nations refugee camp across the border in Iraq.

US Seeks to Keep Watching Russia’s Weapons - Thom Shanker and Peter Baker, New York Times. With a key arms control treaty set to expire soon, the Obama administration is searching for ways to keep inspectors in Russia or else it risks losing American eyes on the world’s second most formidable nuclear weapons arsenal for the first time in decades. The administration has been negotiating a replacement for the pact, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, which goes out of force on Dec. 5. But even if the talks produce a new agreement by then, the Senate and the Russian Parliament will not have time to ratify it before the old one expires - and some Republicans on Capitol Hill are warning that approval is far from certain. In the absence of a treaty or an ad hoc but legally binding “bridge” authority, American inspectors would be forced to leave Russia when the treaty expired, and Russian inspectors would have to leave the United States. State Department lawyers are examining several options in hopes of preserving the ability to monitor and collect information about Russia’s nuclear weapons, administration officials confirm.

Clinton's Pitch to Moscow Gains Little Back - Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times. It's not easy to craft a new relationship with Russia. Just ask Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. During a two-day visit to Moscow last week, she went out of her way to improve ties, going beyond even what her friend and Russian-speaker Madeleine K. Albright tried when she held the job from 1997 to 2001. But while the body language is better, the Russians appear to be pocketing the US moves and giving little in return, diplomats and analysts say. "So far, the 'reset' of the relationship has been mostly on the U.S. side and that remains the case after [Mrs. Clinton's] meetings," said Angela E. Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. In particular, the US is looking for help from Russia on Iran. The Russians have said they share the West's goal of preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, but remain reluctant to back diplomacy with the threat of more sanctions. The Russians are participating in a proposed international plan to enrich uranium for Iran that will be sent back to Iran for peaceful uses only. Talks on implementing the plan took place Monday in Vienna, Austria. But that is about as far as Russia wants to go with the US.

MIDDLE EAST

Painful Mideast Truth: Force Trumps Diplomacy - Ethan Bronner, New York Times. As the Obama administration tries to broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a dark truth lurking: force has produced clearer results in this dispute than talk. The results of the violence may prove short-lived - and possibly counterproductive; condemnation of Israel and Hamas is likely to grow after the United Nations Human Rights Council voted Friday to endorse a report detailing evidence of war crimes in Gaza. But the reality that war can work is playing a crucial role in the region’s festering conflicts. Some Palestinians are talking again about armed struggle. And Israeli officials, who say their censured military operations have been highly successful, are keeping track of a series of ticking clocks as they ponder still another military endeavor - against Iran. The payoff from the use of force in the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is evident. It was only after the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s that Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization and started to consider a two-state solution, and after the second - and very bloody - uprising that it left Gaza in 2005.

UN: Israeli Spy Devices Caused Lebanon Blasts - Voice of America. A United Nations probe into mysterious blasts in southern Lebanon indicates Israel had planted spying devices in the area during its war against Hezbollah. The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon said its preliminary investigation into two explosions showed they had been caused by the detonation of underground sensor devices. It said the Israeli military apparently planted these devices in border towns in 2006. A Lebanese military source says the spying gadgets exploded when they were discovered by Lebanese forces in recent days. The blasts occurred in the southern border towns of Houla and Mais al-Jabal. There are conflicting reports as to whether the devices were booby-trapped or detonated by remote-control upon discovery. Hezbollah also accused Israel of planting the spying devices. In response, the Israeli army issued a statement late Sunday accusing Hezbollah of trying to divert attention from the militant group's violations of the UN resolution that ended their month-long war.

US Ambassador to UN Visits Israel This Week - Voice of America. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, is traveling to Israel Monday to speak at a conference and while in the Middle East will hold talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. On Wednesday, Rice will take part in a conference hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres. During her three-day visit, US officials said Rice will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The United States is trying to get Israel and the Palestinians to resume peace negotiations, but Rice's meetings are described as bilateral in nature. The ambassador's visit comes at a time when Israel is irate about a UN report accusing both Israel and the militant group Hamas of committing war crimes during the Gaza conflict at the beginning of this year. The Israeli Cabinet said Sunday that the three-week offensive against Hamas was legitimate self-defense.

Maryland Scientist is Charged with Spying for Israel - Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post. A Chevy Chase scientist was charged Monday with trying to sell top-secret information to Israel for $11,000, federal prosecutors said. Stewart D. Nozette, 52, was arrested on a charge of attempted espionage and is being held pending an initial appearance Tuesday in US District Court in Washington, authorities said. Authorities said the charges stemmed an undercover sting operation in which an FBI agent posed as an Israeli spy. Nozette allegedly passed the agent sensitive information through a "dead drop" at a DC post office in recent weeks, authorities said. Nozette worked for the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1990 through 1999, prosecutors said. He was credited with helping develop a radar in 1994 that suggested ice on the south pole of the moon. He was president of the Alliance for Competitive Technology, a nonprofit group he founded in 1990. He has held security clearances as high as top secret and had regular access to classified information as recently as 2006, federal authorities said.

The West Bank's Gold - Howard Schneider, Washington Post. For centuries, olive harvesting here has been a mostly local industry. Farmers, their relatives and neighbors beat the trees with sticks or strip the olives from branches by hand, then cart them to a local press and sell or trade the oil in nearby markets. Harvest workers keep a share of the crop for their labor, and olive press owners keep a share of the oil - a testament to the small-scale, bartered nature of the undertaking. That model can help sustain a household, but in a new factory on the outskirts of this northern West Bank village, an effort is underway to reshape the olive industry so it can help sustain a wider Palestinian economy. With savvy marketing in the United States and Europe, and fair-trade and organic certifications that attract top dollar from Western consumers, a six-year-old farmers cooperative is breaking some of the traditional bounds of the olive industry and beginning to pull in hard currency from abroad.

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast - Robert L. Bernstein, New York Times opinion. As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state. At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them - through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform. That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag - and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

SOUTH ASIA

A Report Links Suspect to the Tamil Tigers - Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post. Raj Rajaratnam has been a major backer of a Maryland-based charity that the US government later blacklisted for allegedly financing the Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan terrorist group that was defeated by Sri Lanka's government this spring. According to public tax filings, Rajaratnam listed himself as the chairman and director of Tsunami Relief, a nonprofit charity using the Galleon Group as its address. In 2005 and 2006, Rajaratnam reported that the charity gave $1 million to the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, based in Cumberland, and $2.5 million to its Sri Lanka parent group. The US government in 2007 froze the assets of the US-based branch and barred contributions to it, saying it financed terrorism. The Treasury Department called the group a front organization for the Tamil Tigers (formally, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam).

EVENTS

The US Military Academy’s Department of History is pleased to invite you to a West Point Symposium on the History of Irregular Warfare, 18-20 November 2009. The symposium will feature the scholarship of five cadet panel presenters with commentary by distinguished guest scholars, including: Dr. Stephen Biddle as our keynote speaker, Dr. Jeremy Black, Col. Robert Cassidy, Dr. Conrad Crane, Dr. George Herring, Dr. Brian Linn, and Dr. Peter Mansoor. Additionally, Dr. James Le Sueur (Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics, 2005) will present a special lecture on Algerian society since 1963. Col. Gian Gentile, a History faculty member, will participate as part of the “Visiting Scholars Panel” with Dr. Crane, Dr. Mansoor, and Col. Cassidy. (Invitation and POC Information) (History of IW Symposium Agenda)

BOOKS

Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan - Doug Stanton.

Horse Soldiers tells the important story of the Special Forces soldiers who first put American boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001. Fighting alongside the Northern Alliance, the troops, often riding on horseback, achieved several important victories against the Taliban.

War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age - Thomas Rid and Marc Hecker.

War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected trends are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt: the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the Web. Both in cyberspace and in warfare, the grassroots public has assumed increasing importance in recent years. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Web 2.0 rose from the ashes. This newly interactive and participatory form of the Web promotes and enables offline action. Similarly, after Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the US military into a lean, lethal, computerized force crashed in Iraq in 2003, counterinsurgency rose from the ashes. Counterinsurgency is a social form of war - indeed, the US Army calls it armed social work - in which the local matrix population becomes the center of strategic gravity and public opinion at home the critical vulnerability.

The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars - David H. Ucko.

Confronting insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has recognized the need to "re-learn" counterinsurgency. But how has the Department of Defense with its mixed efforts responded to this new strategic environment? Has it learned anything from past failures? In The New Counterinsurgency Era, David Ucko examines DoD's institutional obstacles and initially slow response to a changing strategic reality.

Journey into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda - Thomas P. Odom.

In July 1994, Thomas P. Odom was part of the US Embassy team that responded to the Goma refugee crisis. He witnessed the deaths of 70,000 refugees in a single week. In the previous three months of escalating violence, the Rwandan genocide had claimed 800,000 dead. Now, in this vivid and unsettling new book, Odom offers the first insider look at these devastating events before, during, and after the genocide.

Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage - Donovan Campbell.

Donovan Campbell, first as a Marine and then as a writer, shows us that the dominant emotion in war isn’t hatred or anger or fear. It’s love. His story stands as a poignant tribute to his men–their courage, their dedication, their skill, and their love for one another, even unto death.

The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose - Anthony Zinni and Tony Koltz

The intellectual complement to Zinni and Clancy's bestselling Battle Ready (2004), a narrative memoir salted with specific policy recommendations, this volume provides the former US Central Command chief's analysis of America's current global position. Zinni begins by asserting that America's status as "the most powerful nation in the history of the planet" has created a de facto empire. The US has no choice: if it fails to take the lead, nothing significant happens. At the same time, Americans must recognize that, in a global age, there can be no zero-sum games.

The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education - Craig Mullaney

The Unforgiving Minute is the ultimate's soldier's book - universal in its raw emotion and its understanding of the larger issues of life and death. Mullaney, a master storyteller, plunges the depths of self-doubt, endurance, and courage. The result: a riveting, suspenseful human story, beautifully told. This is a book written under fire - a lyrical, spellbinding tale of war, love, and courage. The Unforgiving Minute is the Three Cups of Tea of soldiering.

Great Powers: America and the World after Bush - Thomas P.M. Barnett

In civilian and military circles alike, The Pentagon’s New Map became one of the most talked about books of 2004. “A combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Carl von Clausewitz on war, [it is] the red-hot book among the nation’s admirals and generals,” wrote David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Barnett’s second book, Blueprint for Action, demonstrated how to put the first book’s principles to work. Now, in Great Powers, Barnett delivers his most sweeping - and important - book of all.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One - David Kilcullen

A remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror. Kilcullen takes us "on the ground" to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the big global war (the "War on Terrorism") and its relation to the associated "small wars" across the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Chechnya, Pakistan and North Africa.

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 - Thomas Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began.

Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned - Rufus Phillips

Phillips details how the legendary Edward G. Lansdale helped the South Vietnamese gain and consolidate their independence between 1954 and 1956, and how this later changed to a reliance on American conventional warfare with its highly destructive firepower. He reasons that our failure to understand the Communists, our South Vietnamese allies, or even ourselves took us down the wrong road. In summing up US errors in Vietnam, Phillips draws parallels with the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests changes in the US approach. Known for his intellectual integrity and firsthand, long-term knowledge of what went on in Vietnam, the author offers lessons for today in this trenchant account.

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq - Peter Mansoor

This is a unique contribution to the burgeoning literature on the Iraq war, analyzing the day-to-day performance of a US brigade in Baghdad during 2004-2005. Mansoor uses a broad spectrum of sources to address the military, political and cultural aspects of an operation undertaken with almost no relevant preparation, which tested officers and men to their limits and generated mistakes and misjudgments on a daily basis. The critique is balanced, perceptive and merciless - and Mansoor was the brigade commander. Military history is replete with command memoirs. Most are more or less self-exculpatory. Even the honest ones rarely achieve this level of analysis. The effect is like watching a surgeon perform an operation on himself. Mansoor has been simultaneously a soldier and a scholar, able to synergize directly his military and academic experiences.

The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq - 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. We interpret reality through the clouded prism of our own experience, so it is unsurprising that Bing West sees Iraq through the lens of Vietnam. He served as a Marine officer there, and he thinks politicians and the media caused the American public to turn against a war that could have been won. Now a correspondent for the Atlantic, West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that the "endgame" in Iraq turns out better than in his last war.

Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq - 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. Linda Robinson conducted extensive interviews with Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and spent weeks with key US and Iraqi divisions. The result is the only book that ties together military operations in Iraq and the internecine political drama that is at the heart of the civil war. Replete with dramatic battles, behind-doors confrontations, and astute analysis, the book tells the full story of the Iraq War’s endgame, and lays out the options that will be facing the next president.

The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 - Bob Woodward

Woodward interviewed key players, obtained dozens of never-before-published documents, and had nearly three hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush. The result is a stunning, firsthand history of the years from mid-2006, when the White House realizes the Iraq strategy is not working, through the decision to surge another 30,000 US troops in 2007, and into mid-2008, when the war becomes a fault line in the presidential election. As violence in Iraq reaches unnerving levels in 2006, a second front in the war rages at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In his fourth book on President George W. Bush, Bob Woodward takes readers deep inside the tensions, secret debates, unofficial backchannels, distrust and determination within the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the US military headquarters in Iraq. With unparalleled intimacy and detail, this gripping account of a president at war describes a period of distress and uncertainty within the US government from 2006 through mid-2008. The White House launches a secret strategy review that excludes the military. General George Casey, the commander in Iraq, believes that President Bush does not understand the war and eventually concludes he has lost the president's confidence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also conduct a secret strategy review that goes nowhere. On the verge of revolt, they worry that the military will be blamed for a failure in Iraq.

We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam - Harold Moore and 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. It would be a monumental task for Moore and Galloway to top their classic 1992 memoir. But they come close in this sterling sequel, which tells the backstory of two of the Vietnam War's bloodiest battles (in which Moore participated as a lieutenant colonel), their first book and a 1993 ABC-TV documentary that brought them back to the battlefield. Moore's strong first-person voice reviews the basics of the November 1965 battles, part of the 34-day Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Among other things, Moore and Galloway (who covered the battle for UPI) offer portraits of two former enemy commanders, generals Nguyen Huu An and Chu Huy Man, whom the authors met - and bonded with - nearly three decades after the battle. This book proves again that Moore is an exceptionally thoughtful, compassionate and courageous leader (he was one of a handful of army officers who studied the history of the Vietnam wars before he arrived) and a strong voice for reconciliation and for honoring the men with whom he served.

In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point' Class of 2002 - 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. Most come from career military families and hold conservative opinions. Murphy describes their four years at West Point with respect even when discussing their love lives and marriages. All yearn for battle, and most get their wish. The book's best passages describe the confusion of moving to Iraq or Afghanistan and fighting insurgents, for which they lack both training and equipment. All feel something is not right but concentrate on the job at hand; some inevitably die or are grievously wounded.

Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy - Steven Metz

Today the US military is more nimble, mobile, and focused on rapid responses against smaller powers than ever before. One could argue that the Gulf War and the postwar standoff with Saddam Hussein hastened needed military transformation and strategic reassessments in the post–Cold War era. But the preoccupation with Iraq also mired the United States in the Middle East and led to a bloody occupation. What will American strategy look like after US troops leave Iraq? Metz concludes that the United States has a long-standing, continuing problem “developing sound assumptions when the opponent operates within a different psychological and cultural framework.” He sees a pattern of misjudgments about Saddam and Iraq based on Western cultural and historical bias and a pervasive faith in the superiority of America’s worldview and institutions. This myopia contributed to America being caught off guard by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, then underestimating his longevity, and finally miscalculating the likelihood of a stable and democratic Iraq after he was toppled. With lessons for all readers concerned about America’s role in the world, Dr. Metz’s important new work will especially appeal to scholars and students of strategy and international security studies, as well as to military professionals and DOD civilians. With a foreword by Colin S. Gray.