FPI Overnight Brief: January 19, 2010

Afghanistan

Seven Taliban attackers, including a suicide bomber driving an ambulance, hit the center of Kabul on Monday morning, killing five people, wounding at least 71 and demonstrating their ability to strike at the hub of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Gen. Abdul Ghafar Sayed Zada, the head of the criminal investigative division of Kabul's police department, said security forces had shot five of the attackers, who were armed with AK-47 rifles, rocket launchers and grenades, not far from President Hamid Karzai's palace, the Ministry of Justice and the Central Bank in Afghanistan's capital. – AP

President Hamid Karzai's nomination of a record three female candidates to cabinet posts was a short-lived victory for women in Afghan politics. In rejecting the majority of Karzai's nominees for the second time, Afghanistan's parliament dealt a blow to both the president and women's advocates around the country… Although critics claimed that some nominees were inexperienced or aligned with warlords, women parliamentarians and political experts generally praised the female candidates' qualifications ahead of the vote of confidence. Palwasha Hassan, the rejected nominee to replace outgoing Women's Affairs Minister Husn Bano Ghazanfar, is widely known as a dedicated women's rights activist. – Deutsche Welle

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he doubts Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar will ever make peace with the elected Afghan government. Gates said Monday a process of reconciliation and reintegration of Taliban fighters is essential to success in Afghanistan. He was referring to the invitation from Afghan leaders to lure fighters with no strong allegiance to terrorists away from the insurgency and reintegrate them into Afghan society. – Washington Post

The pace of President Obama's troop buildup in Afghanistan hinges in part on a narrow, pothole-riddled dirt track that is controlled by a 33-year-old suspected drug lord and by the whims of the Pakistani military.  It is down this road each month that thousands of cargo trucks bearing U.S. and NATO military supplies pass through the only major border crossing in southern Afghanistan -- the area where most American troop reinforcements are scheduled to deploy. Here at the border crossing, where traffic switches from the left side of the road in Pakistan to the right in Afghanistan, supply trucks must pass along with the flood of pedestrians, donkey carts, drug shipments and materials to make roadside bombs. Only about 2 to 3 percent of the vehicles are regularly searched, and payoffs to border guards are rampant, U.S. military officials say. - Washington Post

The Obama administration offered cautious support for the Afghan government's new outreach effort to the Taliban, expressing hope that lower level militants would reconcile with Kabul even if senior leaders continued fighting. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, at the start of an official visit to India, told reporters that the U.S. welcomed Afghan President Hamid Karzai's new efforts to persuade Taliban militants to lay down their weapons in exchange for jobs, education and security guarantees for themselves and their families.- Wall Street Journal

Pakistan

A missile strike by what was believed to be a remote-controlled U.S. drone plane killed 15 people Monday in the tribal area of South Waziristan, officials said. The strike, which hit the home of a well-known Taliban supporter, was the third such attack in four days against the militant sanctuary. On Thursday, a drone attack in the same area apparently missed the top Taliban leader in Pakistan, Hakimullah Mehsud. – Washington Post

Iran

Last week's failed attempt on the lives of Israeli diplomats in Jordan was apparently carried out on instructions from Teheran, sources close to Jordan's General Intelligence Department (GID) revealed on Monday. Jordanian bombs squad members inspect the site where a bomb targeted a convoy of cars from the Israeli Embassy in Amman, Jordan, Thursday. The sources said the GID was investigating the possibility that the explosives used in the attack had been smuggled into the kingdom by Iranian diplomats.  The attack itself was apparently carried out by local al-Qaida supporters who received money and explosives from Iran, the sources said. – Jerusalem Post

U.S. intelligence agencies now suspect that Iran never halted work on its nuclear arms program in 2003, as stated in a national intelligence estimate made public three years ago, U.S. officials said. Differences among analysts now focus on whether the country's supreme leader has given or will soon give orders for full-scale production of nuclear weapons. The new consensus emerging among analysts in the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community on Iran's nuclear arms program is expected to be the highlight of a classified national intelligence estimate nearing completion that will replace the estimate issued in 2007. – Washington Times

China urged other powers on Tuesday to show more flexibility in dealing with Iran's disputed nuclear programme, playing down prospects of sanctions after six countries met to discuss the standoff.  While Western powers have looked to further sanctions against Iran over its rejection of a U.N. plan to rein in Tehran's nuclear ambitions, Russia and now especially China have resisted such steps and called for more negotiations. Envoys from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China met in New York at the weekend to discuss the standoff. The Chinese delegate at those talks reiterated Beijing's position that it does not back further sanctions against Iran for now.  - Reuters

Iran's defense minister has warned that the Islamic Republic could strike back at Western warships in the Gulf if it were attacked over its nuclear program, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported.  Ahmad Vahidi said there were now more than 90 war vessels in the Gulf -- a waterway crucial for global oil supplies -- and that they had created a "military environment" there. - Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Ukraine

Opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, bitter foes since Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, began a three-week scramble for new support Monday after first-round voting in the country's presidential election thrust them into a runoff.  Near-complete returns from the Central Election Commission gave 35.3% of Sunday's vote to Mr. Yanukovych, the dour but resilient politician whose tainted victory in the 2004 race was overturned after massive street protests against alleged fraud.  His margin over Ms. Tymo shenko, who polled 25%, wasn't wide enough to make him the runoff's clear favorite, political analysts said. Ms. Tymoshenko, a former natural-gas tycoon known for her sharp tongue and crown of braided hair, is considered the more charismatic and aggressive campaigner.  - Wall Street Journal

Obama Administration

[E]ven as Obama has sought to convey an image of a deliberate leader preoccupied with the battle's human toll, he has used military power at least as aggressively as his Republican predecessor did during the waning years of his administration. In his first year in office, Obama has set in motion plans to triple the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan; expanded operations against U.S. enemies in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; and, in one early instance of his willingness to use deadly force, authorized Special Forces snipers to kill three Somali pirates holding an American hostage.  The politician who brashly opposed the Iraq invasion has had more than 443 U.S. service members die while serving under his command. On a chilly October evening, in a stark waiting room at Dover, he leaned toward Dona Griffin less than 24 hours after she learned that her 29-year-old son had been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. - Washington Post

Fred Hiatt writes:  You could wish that his support for Iraq weren't accompanied by such teeth-gritting reluctance. You might have hoped that his commitment to Afghanistan would come with less public ambivalence. But in both cases, he has put national interest ahead of political consideration and committed the United States to success. He has assigned skilled generals to the missions, given them adequate resources and set reasonable goals.  At the same time, he has restored a balance between security and liberty in his handling of terrorists and alleged terrorists. He was right to end abusive treatment of detainees; he was right also to reject an ACLU mind-set in their handling.  Inevitably, in such a minefield of complex moral questions and simpleminded political demagoguery, he's made choices I disagree with. But he has sent a clear message to other nations that the United States is committed to its values and its self-defense, and he's gone a long way toward backing up both with his actions. - Washington Post

Defense

Mackenzie Eaglen writes:  Fully funding defense plans through a defense budget topline that rises annually above inflation would address the greatest dilemma facing the military today, which is mortgaging future capabilities to pay for present operations. Spending on today’s forces has tended to crowd out investment in tomorrow’s forces. The trend of the modernization accounts receiv­ing smaller shares of the core defense budget began with the 1990s procurement holiday that left an enduring imbalance between the procurement and R&D accounts. A flat defense budget in FY 2011 would exacerbate the problem. This is a compounding problem because inadequate near-term defense budgets set unacceptably low baselines for presenting longer-term defense budget proposals.  To close the growing gap between defense needs and defense budget authority, Congress should increase funding for the core defense programs, increase the overall defense budget in a way that permits sufficient growth in the mod­ernization accounts, and increase the share of the modernization accounts devoted to procurement.  - The Foundry

Keith Payne writes -  Yogi Berra noted, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Prediction is a particularly inexact business when the subject is as complex, idiosyncratic, and opaque as the possible roads to war. A review of past issues of the journal, for example, reveals that there was no change in the “Doomsday Clock” immediately prior to the Chinese attack on U.S. forces in Korea in 1950, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In 1969, at the time of the violent Sino-Soviet border clashes, which apparently precipitated a Soviet inquiry to the United States about a pre-emptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities, the journal actually had set the clock back three minutes, as if the prospects for nuclear war had become more remote. In fact, the movement of the clock seems to have been affected only by developments in the areas of nuclear testing and formal arms control  - National Review Online

Russia

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says nuclear disarmament talks with the United States are not easy, but the two countries have so far agreed on a number of issues. "We have taken a fairly serious step forward, and to a significant degree we have brought our positions closer," state news agencies ITAR-TASS and RIA Novosti quoted Medvedev as saying on Saturday, January 16. Talks have focused on a successor to the key 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which expired last December. START strictly limited the US and Russian nuclear arsenals and created a system of reciprocal inspections to verify compliance. – Deutsche Welle

Caribbean

Troops, doctors and aid workers flowed into Haiti on Monday even while hundreds of thousands of quake victims struggled to find a cup or water or a handful of food. European nations pledged more than a half-billion dollars, with $474 million in emergency and long-term aid coming from the European Union alone and $132 million promised by member states. But help was still not reaching many victims of Tuesday's quake — choked back by transportation bottlenecks, bureaucratic confusion, fear of attacks on aid convoys, the collapse of local authority and the sheer scale of the need. – AP

Even as Navy and Coast Guard ships arrived offshore, a round-the-clock airlift intensified and additional dignitaries appeared, the frantic victims of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake were growing more fearful as they pleaded for help and security in a lawless city...There was widespread apprehension that, unless the pace of aid distribution quickens, there could be mass violence as hundreds of thousands of people suddenly lacking food, water and electricity begin to compete for scarce resources.- Washington Post

Up to 10 American civilians have been evacuated for heat stroke or dehydration outside the Port-au-Prince airport. Three of those civilians are being treated for minor injuries, the Pentagon announced Monday.  – Fox News

Bret Stephens writes:  For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break...A better approach recognizes the real humanity of Haitians by treating them—once the immediate and essential tasks of rescue are over—as people capable of making responsible choices. Haiti has some of the weakest property protections in the world, as well as some of the most burdensome business regulations. In 2007, it received 10 times as much in aid ($701 million) as it did in foreign investment.  Reversing those figures is a task for Haitians alone, which the outside world can help by desisting from trying to kill them with kindness.  - Wall Street Journal

Australia

Support for Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fallen as conservative opponents rally behind a new leader, a leading opinion survey showed on Tuesday, but he remains well-placed to win an election later this year. The closely-watched Newspoll in the Australian newspaper showed support for Rudd's centre-left Labor had slipped two points to 54% in the two-party terms that decide elections, while the conservatives were up by the same margin to 46%. – TNVZ

India

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, flying to New Delhi, praised India's restraint and statesmanship following the 2008 Mumbai attacks and remarked at how both India and Pakistan have kept tensions at a "manageable level." Relations between the South Asian neighbors have been strained since India suspended a peace process with Pakistan after the assault on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants. India sees Islamabad as unwilling to go after the insurgents responsible for the attacks, which killed 166 people… In an editorial for the Times of India newspaper, Gates applauded deepening military ties between both countries and "significant strides in developing a stable defense trade." – Reuters

Yemen

While Yemeni Salafism is not as militant as the Saudi variety - Wahhabism -  the mental landscape of the Salafis and Al Qaeda is very similar — conservative, anti-Western, devoted to purifying Islam and returning to the practices they believe existed at the time of Prophet Muhammad. - New York Times

The leader of the Yemeni Shi'ite rebels fighting the government, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, has been seriously wounded, state media on Tuesday quoted a Yemeni official as saying. There was no immediate confirmation from the rebels and there were no details of when or where he was wounded.  The official news agency Saba said Houthi had been wounded and was back in his home village, citing an interview with Deputy Prime Minister for Internal Affairs Sadeq Aburas in the United Arab Emirates al-Khaleej newspaper.  Shi'ite rebels from the Zaidi sect have been fighting government troops in mountainous north Yemen since 2004, complaining of marginalization. The conflict has killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands. - Reuters

The al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen issued fresh threats against the U.S. and its Mideast allies, promising to retaliate against a surge of strikes launched in the past month against its leaders and havens.  Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula also denied statements made by Yemeni authorities late last week that six of al Qaeda's senior leaders in the country, including the man identified as the leader of the group's military operations, had been killed in an airstrike.  "The Yemeni government has been making many false claims...against the mujahedeen leaders in the Arabian Peninsula. The latest of these claims is that it killed six of them," the group said, according to a statement posted on Islamist Web sites. "We assure our Muslim nation that none of the mujahedeen were killed in that unjust and insidious raid; rather, some brothers were slightly wounded." - Wall Street Journal

China

International journalists in China said on Monday that their Google e-mail accounts have been hacked in attacks like the ones against human rights activists, which last week led the search giant to consider pulling out of the country. In announcing a possible exit from China, Google did not specify how the accounts with its Gmail service were hacked or by whom. Information since then has trickled out.  The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China sent an e-mail to its members on Monday warning that reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing said their Gmail accounts had been broken into, with their e-mails surreptitiously forwarded to unfamiliar accounts. - AP

Japan

Arrests, scandals and sliding poll numbers are hobbling the four-month-old government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama as it tries to pass a stimulus bill intended to prevent the world's second-largest economy from tumbling into a double-dip recession. Over the weekend, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan was shaken by the arrest of three current and former aides to Ichiro Ozawa, the party's number-two leader and top political tactician. The three, who include a member of parliament, were charged with falsifying party fundraising reports in connection with the purchase of land in Tokyo. Ozawa's refusals to answer prosecutors' questions about his role in the land deal are souring the public on him and on the new government, according to three polls published Monday. The Democratic Party of Japan took power last fall after it crushed the Liberal Democratic Party in a historic election that ended half a century of nearly continuous one-party rule. - Washington Post

Burma

Kelley Currie writes:  Burma is back in the news amid reports that the ruling military junta has set its upcoming "elections" for October 2010 and is making serious efforts to secure short-range ballistic missiles. Taken with the lack of results from the Obama administration's attempted engagement with the junta, these developments highlight the need for stepped-up regional activism in favor of democracy in Burma, especially from its democratic neighbors. India in particular faces an increasingly untenable balancing act in maintaining its current accommodation of the junta, and will be under growing pressure this year to move toward a policy that better aligns its values and interests. Such a shift would be a boon to those supporting democratic reforms in Burma, as well as to India's own interests and its regional leadership aspirations. – Wall Street Journal Asia

United Kingdom

In a speech at Chatham House, David Cameron, with Pauline Neville Jones, Shadow Security Minister and National Security Adviser to the Leader of the Opposition, set out the Conservative Party’s approach to national security with the publication of ‘A Resilient Nation’.  - UK Conservative Party

Egypt

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition group, has chosen a conservative to become the new leader after the previous one stepped down amid deep internal divisions. Mohammed Badie, 66, a hitherto obscure figure within the group, faces an uphill task to resolve disputes within the Brotherhood and will struggle to further the organisation’s national agenda, analysts say… Mr Badie, previously an obscure figure within the group, was in charge of ideological education. He is believed by some to have been groomed by – and be a front for – Mahmoud Ezzat, the Brotherhood’s most hawkish figure. – The National

Iraq

By barring hundreds of candidates from an upcoming parliamentary election, a controversial commission whose members have close ties to Iran is threatening to disenfranchise members of Iraq's Sunni minority and weaken its fledgling democracy. The commission, led by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who supplied faulty intelligence to the United States in the run-up to the war, and Ali Faisal al-Lami, a former U.S. detainee, was established to help cleanse the Iraqi government of officials who adhered to the ideals of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. But the panel sent shockwaves through Iraq's political establishment when it recently announced the disbarment of 511 candidates for their alleged allegiance to the party. The move has led to recriminations that Iran, through proxies, is trying to rig the vote to ensure that Iraq is solidly in the hands of politicians loyal to Tehran.  U.S. officials, who were caught off guard by the decision, now fear that it could reignite sectarian violence and dash their hopes of political reconciliation in Iraq -- the end goal of the U.S. military strategy known as the "surge." - Washington Post

Ideas

Gulf oil ministers rose to defend fossil fuels as the bedrock of world energy supplies yesterday even as some clean-energy proponents forecast the arrival of a post-petroleum world. Ministers from Qatar and the UAE told the World Future Energy Summit that clean energy would complement, rather than replace oil and natural gas.  Their comments clashed with predictions from others at the conference that continued growth in consumption of fossil fuels and resulting carbon emissions will cause unstoppable climate change, and the world must move quickly to replace the use of oil in transport and heating. – The National