Afghan fighting poised to escalate

The arrival of a Marine unit raises hopes that NATO will finally tame the violent south. But many Taliban fighters are returning after a winter lull.
By Laura King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 13, 2008

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — For weeks now, the men in black turbans have been coming. They travel in pairs or small groups, on battered motorbikes or in dusty pickups, materializing out of the desert with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers slung from their shoulders.

With the advent of warmer weather, villagers say, Taliban fighters are filtering back from their winter shelters in Pakistan, ensconcing themselves across Afghanistan's wind-swept south.

"Every day we see more and more of them," said Abdul Karim, a farmer who had sent his family away for safety.

The insurgents aren't the only ones girding for battle.

At the country's main NATO base outside Kandahar, nearly 2,300 U.S. Marines have arrived in the last two months, their presence heralded by the nonstop thunder of transport aircraft and the sprawling tent city springing up on a newly cleared minefield.

The Marine force's final elements arrived days ago and last week began deploying, aiming to bolster British, Canadian and Dutch troops who have been bearing the brunt of fighting in the country's south, considered the conflict's strategic center of gravity.

The conflict in Afghanistan recently has loomed increasingly large in policy debate.

It dominated discussions at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit last month, where President Bush pledged to send more troops and pointedly urged allies to do likewise. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates heard urgent appeals for reinforcements from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, who forecast a substantial upsurge in fighting.

In Afghanistan, where presidential elections are due next year, opinion surveys consistently suggest that a solid majority of the population supports the presence of foreign forces. But people don't want them to stay on indefinitely, and an inconclusive spring "fighting season" could try public patience.

The first-time arrival in the south of a large force of Marines, the 24th Expeditionary Unit based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., has provided what commanders say is a much-needed infusion of firepower. The Marines have doubled the coalition's air capacity; Harrier jump jets, lumbering cargo planes and combat helicopters line the freshly laid tarmac.

Just as crucially, commanders say, Marines' deployment may at last give NATO-led troops the muscle and reach to choke off the flow of Taliban fighters and weaponry into neighboring Helmand province, consistently the most violence-racked in Afghanistan. It is the country's epicenter of opium production and narco-trafficking, whose enormous profits help fuel the insurgency.

In this unforgiving environment, British troops, considered to be among the alliance's most effective fighters, have been forced to confine their efforts largely to the province's northern tier, making the south of Helmand, with its plethora of infiltration routes from Pakistan, a likely zone of deployment for the Marines.

Although allied commanders express satisfaction with the battlefield edge the Marines will bring, the Taliban professes unconcern.

"We have heard all about these Americans, and we are waiting -- let them come," said a Taliban field commander, reached by phone in the Panjwai district outside Kandahar. "They will learn what others before them have learned."

The insurgents boast that they will blend tried-and-true methods with deadly refinements. Beaten badly in previous large-scale frontal assaults on NATO-led troops, Taliban fighters vow to harry them with more powerful and sophisticated roadside bombs, unrelenting suicide attacks and methodical targeting of Afghans who are helping the coalition forces.

Coalition commanders are well aware that the Taliban will try to steer the conflict toward small-scale hit-and-run strikes, but say it is they, not the insurgents, who will seize the initiative.

"They definitely don't want to go toe-to-toe with us," said Col. Peter Petronzio, commander of the Marine expeditionary force now operating out of the Kandahar base.

NATO officials like to point out that even during a period of resurgence over the last two years, Taliban fighters have failed to seize substantial population centers or hold large swaths of territory for long.

But it's not clear whether the insurgents want to do so; instead, they rely on the classic guerrilla tactic of scattering when confronted, then reappearing when it suits them.

Many Taliban fighters are essentially part-timers; villagers say the ranks of locally recruited insurgents will swell in coming weeks after the opium poppy crop has been planted.

With fighting seemingly poised to escalate, one major worry for the coalition is civilian casualties, which spiked during combat last spring. At that time, human rights groups charged that Western troops sometimes too readily called in airstrikes when under attack, obliterating village compounds that might not have contained only insurgents, if any.

Coalition commanders, in turn, have expressed continued frustration with what they describe as insurgents' willful endangering of civilians by launching attacks from within their midst, combined with what they say is the common practice of reporting their own battle dead as civilians.

During the winter months, with harsh weather bringing a relative lull in fighting, the coalition has made a concerted effort to hunt down Taliban field commanders, either capturing them or killing them in pinpoint airstrikes. They describe the mid-level to upper leadership ranks as having been decimated by this campaign.

But senior Western military officials acknowledge that many of these leaders have been swiftly replaced, in some cases by younger and even more ruthless commanders.

"It's a new generation we are seeing, capable of the worst kind of atrocities," said Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco, spokesman of the NATO-led force.

Last week, insurgents slaughtered 17 Afghan road workers in neighboring Zabol province. In response, Afghan and coalition forces hunted down and killed two dozen Taliban blamed for the attack, military officials said Saturday.

Part of the Western alliance's overall strategy is to turn more of the fighting and policing over to the long-troubled Afghan security forces.

American trainers believe they are turning a corner. Recruitment, pay and morale are all up, they say. But although Afghan security forces have played a more prominent role in policing and battlefield engagements over the last year, serious problems remain.

For example, Afghan forces are assigned whenever possible for house searches, an intimate and culturally charged encounter that has inflamed resentment when carried out by foreign troops. However, commanders acknowledge that without careful monitoring, looting sometimes occurs during such Afghan-conducted searches.

Moreover, the Taliban find Afghan police a "softer" target than coalition troops and have killed scores in suicide strikes. Senior police officials matter-of-factly say they believe the insurgents have marked them for death.

"The Taliban have warned me so many times to leave this job," said Haji Saifullah, the district police commissioner in Maywand, a district of Kandahar province that borders Helmand and has become an insurgent stronghold. "They want to plant a roadside bomb, or send a suicide bomber, or shoot me," he said. "So far they haven't succeeded."

Longtime observers of the conflict say that even if the insurgents' strength is flagging, a protracted battle probably lies ahead.

"I think the Taliban are not as strong as in the past," said Haji Dad Mohammad, a Kandahar-based former militia leader who sometimes serves as an intermediary between the government and insurgents. "But still, the fighting will go ahead."

laura.king@latimes.com

McCain, Traveling Along a Tightrope

Bush Policy Is A Presence as He Meets With Leaders

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 24, 2008; A06

PARIS -- Standing along the edge of the Gaza Strip and flanked by a hero of the Israeli military, Sen. John McCain last week invoked the tough rhetoric of President Bush, warning of Iranian influence in the Middle East and cautioning against negotiations with terrorists.

A day later, standing outside London's 10 Downing Street, McCain found himself arguing against his president as he eagerly recounted for reporters his lengthy conversation with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the need for worldwide action to prevent global warming.

Throughout a week-long trip that took him to more than a dozen meetings with leaders in five countries, McCain walked a fine line on Iraq and other issues as the all-but-certain Republican nominee confronted perhaps the central dilemma of his presidential campaign -- the question of what role Bush and the legacy of the past seven years will play in his campaign for the White House.

At home, the answer may determine how well McCain succeeds in keeping his Republican base happy while also attracting the independents and Democrats he will need to win in November. And, win or lose, it will shape his image abroad, where a debate is already raging over whether a McCain presidency would be a de facto third term for the embattled incumbent.

In every city, foreign leaders and journalists attempted to reconcile what they deemed the two sides to McCain: his bellicose rhetoric on Iran and North Korea -- which is more aggressive than Bush's -- and his desire to heal the rift with Europe's leaders by closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, ending what he regards to be the use of torture by American forces and reducing pollution.

Europeans "see him as a trusted hand, knowledgeable," said Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has advised Democratic candidate Barack Obama on foreign policy. "But I think they are a bit worried about him."

Gordon said many Europeans were stunned when U.S. voters reelected Bush in 2004 despite the deteriorating situation in the Middle East. "If we now, after all this, elect someone who agrees with the Iraq policy and is perhaps more hawkish on Iran, they will be surprised," he said.

McCain repeatedly insisted last week that his government-funded trip was not a campaign stunt aimed at voters. Rather, he said, it was a fact-finding mission similar to trips abroad taken regularly by members of Congress in both parties.

"I'm here assessing the situation," McCain barked at an Israeli reporter in the border town of Sderot near Gaza, after flying over Israel with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. "It would not be frankly appropriate for me to talk about what I would do as president."

But the trip was by no means exclusively an information-gathering exercise for McCain.

He paused for a fundraiser with about 100 wealthy American expatriates living in London, who gathered at the ancestral home of Princess Diana and dined on duck salad and ice cream flamb¿. (His aides said the campaign reimbursed the government $3,000 for travel because of the political nature of the fundraiser.) McCain also gave numerous interviews to U.S. television network correspondents who followed him across the continent and to local newspapers in each country, which touted exclusives on their front pages. And he was hardly treated like a member of Congress by world leaders now eyeing him as a potential equal.

In Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy led McCain into the ¿lys¿e Palace past a throng of cameras, where the pair sipped cappuccino around a large table set with grapes. In Israel, he walked past Chagall stained-glass windows to meet with President Shimon Peres at his ceremonial home. In London, protocol dictated the absence of a red carpet at 10 Downing, but there was a photo op in the White Drawing Room.

McCain's political advisers say those images were a valuable reminder to voters of a key asset. "This trip has shown the world Senator McCain's foreign policy credentials and highlighted the depth of his knowledge on international affairs," Rick Davis, his campaign manager, wrote in a memo to supporters.

But there were missteps as well. By incorrectly saying that Iran was training al-Qaeda insurgents rather than Shiite extremists, McCain sparked days of headlines questioning that depth of knowledge he so often boasts of on the campaign trail.

And at the Western Wall in Israel, overzealous photographers sparked a near-riot with police officers, overshadowing McCain's visit to the holy site.

"Was it a good trip? Yeah, it was good" was how one of McCain's senior advisers summed up the journey as the senator from Arizona headed to London for a few days of downtime with his wife, Cindy. "The impression that came back to the American people was someone who was deeply comfortable there in a way that showed he's ready to be president."

McCain's partners on the trip were his two closest allies in the Senate, Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), who now describes his political affiliation as "independent Democrat," and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). In an interview as he traveled by train between Paris and London, Graham said McCain's long-held position on Iraq demonstrates his independence from Bush. While embracing Bush's "surge" policy in Iraq, McCain has never shied from saying that the administration bungled the planning and preparation for the conflict.

"When he thought it was going badly, he was pushing back against the administration. When he thought the policy was going right, he was right with him," Graham said. "The idea that John is an extension of another politician will fail miserably."

Democrats are already trying to morph McCain into Bush, counting on the president's sagging poll numbers and the unpopular war in Iraq to drag McCain down, especially among independents.

In a biting Internet ad that seems a foreshadowing of attacks to come, the Democratic National Committee mocked McCain as nothing more than a clone of Bush. "Why is this man so happy?" the ad asks, showing a picture of a laughing Bush. "Because he found someone to promise a Third Bush Term."

Democrats also hammered McCain for turning a policy trip into a political one and called on him to reimburse the government for the tens of thousands of dollars it would have cost to charter a plane for the exercise. At a news conference at the ¿lys¿e Palace, one reporter asked whether the trip had been a "taxpayer rip-off."

All three senators became indignant. "I'm proud to have taken this trip," McCain declared. "I'm proud to have built up the relationships I have with the president of France and with other leaders."

Lieberman called McCain's willingness to travel the world "one of his great attributes." And Graham noted that McCain had been to Iraq eight times since the war began. "We know the differences between Iraq this year and Iraq last year. These trips have been unbelievably valuable," he said.

And yet, throughout the week there were telltale signs of the presidential campaign.

At the Western Wall, a gray-haired man in the flowing garb of a rabbi repeatedly stood on a stool and yelled: "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. John McCain, the next president of the United States of America."

And when McCain's motorcade pulled up in front of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, a lone American tourist yelled out, "Mac is back!"

Book Details U.S. Pressure On Allies Before War

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01

UNITED NATIONS -- In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.

The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, wrote Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month.

"In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished" for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein's government, Muñoz wrote.

But the tough talk dissipated as the war effort worsened and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Muñoz's account suggests the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.

Muñoz details key roles by Chile and Mexico, the Security Council's two Latin members at the time, in the run-up to the war. Then-U.N. ambassadors Juan Gabriel Valdés of Chile and Adolfo Aguilar Zínser of Mexico helped thwart U.S. and British efforts to rally support among the council's six undecided members for a resolution authorizing the U.S.-led invasion.

The book portrays Bush personally prodding the leaders of those six governments -- Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan -- to support the war resolution, a strategy aimed at demonstrating broad support for U.S. military plans, despite the looming French threat to veto the resolution.

In the weeks preceding the war, Bush made several appeals to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and Mexican President Vicente Fox to rein in their diplomats and support U.S. war aims. "We have problems with your ambassador at the U.N.," Bush told Fox at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Los Cabos, Mexico, in late 2002.

"It's time to bring up the vote, Ricardo. We've had this debate too long," Bush told the Chilean president on March 11, 2003.

"Bush had referred to Lagos by his first name, but as the conversation drew to a close and Lagos refused to support the resolution as it stood, Bush shifted to a cool and aloof 'Mr. President,' " Muñoz wrote. "Next Monday, time is up," Bush told Lagos.

Senior U.S. diplomats sought to thwart a last-minute attempt by Chile to broker a compromise that would delay military action for weeks, providing Iraq with a final shot at demonstrating that it had fully complied with its disarmament requirements.

On March 14, 2003, less than one week before the eventual invasion, Chile hosted a meeting of diplomats from the six undecided governments to discuss its proposal. But U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell moved quickly to quash the initiative, warning their governments that the effort was viewed as "an unfriendly act" designed to isolate the United States. The diplomats received calls from their governments ordering them to "leave the meeting immediately," Muñoz writes.

Aguilar-Zínser, who died in 2005, was finally forced out of the Mexican government after publicly accusing the United States of treating Mexico like its "back yard" during the war negotiations. Valdés was transferred to Argentina, where he served as Chile's top envoy, and Muñoz, a Chilean minister and onetime classmate of Condoleezza Rice at the University of Denver, was sent to the United Nations in June 2003 to patch up relations with the United States.

In the days after the invasion, the National Security Council's top Latin American expert, John Maistos, invited Muñoz to the White House to convey the message to Lagos, that his country's position at the United Nations had jeopardized prospects for the speedy Senate ratification of a free-trade pact. "Chile has lost some influence," he said. "President Bush is truly disappointed with Lagos, but he is furious with Fox. With Mexico, the president feels betrayed; with Chile, frustrated and let down."

Muñoz said subsequent ties remained tense at the United Nations, where the United States sought support for resolutions authorizing the occupation of Iraq. He said that small countries met privately in a secure room at the German mission that was impervious to eavesdropping. "It reminded me of a submarine or a giant safe," Muñoz said in an interview.

The United States, he added, expressed "its displeasure" to the German government every time they held a meeting in the secure room. "They couldn't listen to what was going on."

Muñoz said that threats of reprisals were short-lived as Washington quickly found itself reaching out to Chile, Mexico and other countries to support Iraq's messy postwar rehabilitation. It also sought support from Chile on issues such as peacekeeping in Haiti and support for U.S. efforts to drive Syria out of Lebanon. The U.S.-Chilean free trade agreement, while delayed, was finally signed by then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick in June 2003.

Muñoz said that Rice, as secretary of state, called him to ask for help on a U.N. resolution that would press for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. The United States had secured eight of the nine votes required for adoption of a resolution in the Security Council. Muñoz had received instructions to abstain. "I talked to [Lagos], and he listened to my argument, and we gave them the ninth vote," he said.

Report: France to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan

Associated Press

March 22, 2008 at 9:20 AM EDT

LONDON — A British newspaper says French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to announce next week that France will send 1,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

London's The Times newspaper cites unnamed senior ministers as saying Mr. Sarkozy wants to demonstrate his commitment to the NATO alliance's Afghan mission during his two-day visit to London, which begins Friday.

One minister is quoted as saying Britain's Defence Ministry has made a working assumption Mr. Sarkozy will announce that “slightly more than 1,000 troops” are to be deployed to eastern Afghanistan.

Canada recently pledged to extend its mission in the dangerous southern region of Kandahar to 2011, on the condition that its NATO allies provide an additional 1,000 troops in the region.

The refusal of key European allies such as Germany, Italy and Spain to send forces to join Canada, Britain, the U-S and the Netherlands who are leading the fight in the south has led to months of ugly infighting within NATO.

France is widely expected to boost its role in Afghanistan beyond the 1,900 soldiers current there at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 2-4. However, it's not yet clear whether the French soldiers will be sent to the south.

British and French defence ministries and the presidential Elysee Palace declined to comment on the report when contacted Saturday.

Dual U.S.-Russia Citizens Face Spy Charges

Secrets Sought From Energy Firm, FSB Alleges; Tie to British Council Cited

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2008; A13

MOSCOW, March 20 -- Two brothers who hold dual U.S.-Russian citizenship have been charged with industrial espionage after they allegedly attempted to obtain classified information for foreign energy companies, the domestic successor of the KGB said Thursday.

Ilya Zaslavsky, who worked for a Russian venture of the British oil giant BP, and his brother Alexander were arrested March 12, according to the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB.

The two were detained as they met with a Russian employee of a major Russian energy company in an alleged effort to procure secret material, the FSB told the Russian news media.

The service described Alexander Zaslavsky as an employee of the British Council, a culture and arts organization that is financed by the British government, but the organization said he is not and is simply a member of a British Council alumni club for graduates of British universities.

The Russian government recently forced the council to close its regional offices, saying it was operating illegally. Leading politicians, including President-elect Dmitry Medvedev, have accused the organization of being a front for spies.

The FSB said the brothers were formally charged Tuesday but remained free on a signed pledge not to leave Moscow.

On Wednesday, Russian investigators searched the offices of TNK-BP, a joint venture between BP and three Russian billionaires.

The FSB said investigators found "material evidence" of espionage during the search, including "copies of documents issued by Russian state and executive agencies, reports, analytical materials concerning mineral development, which, according to the preliminary information, comprised commercial secrets."

TNK-BP rejected any suggestion it was involved in espionage. "The company has never countenanced or supported any action designed to contradict or damage the interests of Russia," a company statement said.

The FSB also said it found business cards from employees of "foreign defense departments and the Central Intelligence Agency," according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

A spokesman for the FSB declined to discuss the case; it was unclear whether the FSB meant that the business card was from someone it merely suspected was a CIA operative or whether it was saying that CIA employees were handing out business cards identifying themselves as such.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy declined to comment on the arrests, saying that the mission, as a matter of policy, does not discuss consular affairs of a legal nature.

The probe has led to speculation here that it may be linked to an effort to force TNK-BP's Russian partners to sell their stake to Gazprom, the state-controlled energy company. The company was forced to agree to sell its share in a major gas field to Gazprom last June, but completion of the deal has stalled several times over the final price.

European powers drop bid to push resolution against Iran

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

VIENNA: Facing objections by Russia, China and developing nations, European powers abandoned on Tuesday an attempt to introduce a resolution on Iran's nuclear defiance at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Western diplomats said.

Opponents felt a resolution against Iran would be superfluous a day after the UN Security Council toughened sanctions on Iran and could provoke a Tehran to reduce, not increase, cooperation with UN inspectors, they said.

"The board doesn't need to compete with the Security Council," said an Asian diplomat on the 35-nation governing board of the IAEA. Almost half the governors are from developing nations.

Britain, France and Germany scrapped the resolution after concluding that their goals had been achieved by the Security Council and there was no point risking a schism among UN nuclear policy makers that Iran might exploit, Western diplomats added.

"Iran thought it could manipulate the IAEA to avoid a Security Council resolution while moving forward to develop its uranium enrichment capability," Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, told reporters.

"As the resolution adopted yesterday in New York shows, Iran clearly failed. In fact what the resolution does from a Vienna perspective is to underscore that Iran's file remains open and to fully support the IAEA in its continuing investigation of outstanding issues, particularly with respect to weaponization."

In Tehran, the government rejected the resolution imposing new sanctions as "worthless" and vowed to move ahead with its uranium enrichment program.

"This resolution is contrary to the spirit and articles of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, according to the official press agency IRNA.

"It has been issued based on political motivations and a biased approach. It is worthless and unacceptable."

He said the sanctions would "have no impact on the resolve and determination of the Iranian nation and government to fulfill its legitimate rights in continuing its peaceful nuclear activities within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Iran has pursued a uranium-enrichment program it says is meant only to generate electricity. But its history of nuclear secrecy and continued curbs on IAEA inspections stoke fears it could turn enrichment technology to yielding nuclear arms.

In imposing more far-reaching sanctions by a 14-to-0 vote, the Security Council cited Iran's defiance of demands to suspend enrichment, failure to fully explain past nuclear activity and continued restrictions on IAEA inspections.

The third round of sanctions approved Monday orders a freeze on assets of more Iranian officials and companies with links to the country's nuclear and missile program, and for the first time bans trade with Iran in some goods with both civilian and military uses.

Last week the IAEA's chief of nonproliferation safeguards presented to board diplomats detailed intelligence suggesting Iran had tried to "weaponize" nuclear materials.

He revealed diagrams, slides and video, much of them from a laptop removed from Iran by a defector, indicating administrative links between projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload.

The IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, opening the weeklong governors session Monday, pressed Iran to cooperate with the agency inquiry into the allegations, signaling the IAEA would not take Tehran's flat denials for a final answer.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA repeated on Tuesday that Tehran would have nothing more to do with the inquiry and would never suspend its nuclear program, but would keep its declared enrichment sites under IAEA monitoring despite the new sanctions.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh noted that ElBaradei had certified Iran had resolved six outstanding questions about its past nuclear activity and said arms studies did not count because they were "fabrications" of Iran's chief foe, the United States.

"The alleged studies were thoroughly reviewed in two rounds of talks, and we gave our final assessment," he told reporters invited to a slide presentation held to counter the IAEA one last week.

"The issue is over."

He offered no substance in the presentation, entitled "A Short Glance at Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Activities," to refute the intelligence material.

As talks break down, army is Kenya's best hope

• Fears of more violence as extremists regroup


• Annan is forced to put negotiations on standby

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

Britain yesterday said that the Kenyan army is now "by far the best option" to stop a sectarian bloodbath as peace talks in Nairobi between the government and opposition were suspended.

The foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, Mark Malloch-Brown, said that there was a serious risk of renewed bloodshed if talks broke down irrevocably. About a thousand Kenyans have been killed since disputed elections in December and 600,000 have fled their homes after rival gangs, organised largely on ethnic lines, went on the rampage.

The violence has died down recently as the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has brokered negotiations, but he called a pause to the talks yesterday after several fruitless weeks. He said he would now hold direct talks with President Mwai Kibaki and the opposition leader Raila Odinga.

However, western observers believe that extremists on both sides have used the lull to regroup and prepare for another, and potentially bloodier, bout of violence in Kenya.

"We're going to have to stop the violence," Malloch-Brown said. "The Kenyan military is by far the best option. The question is, can the army be brought in in a non-divisive way?"

He argued that the army is still respected by the Kenyan public as a genuinely national and multi-ethnic institution, unlike the police, but that its generals are reluctant to get involved because they want to maintain its status and unity.

Annan is believed to have issued an ultimatum to Kibaki and Odinga yesterday, telling them they were facing their last chance to contain the conflict before it tore their country apart.

"The talks have not broken down," Annan told reporters later. "But I am taking steps to make sure we accelerate the process and give peace to the people as soon as possible."

He was backed by coordinated statements from the US and European Union threatening sanctions against leaders on both sides if they did not agree to share power.

"I want to emphasise that the future of our relationship with both sides and their legitimacy hinges on their cooperation to achieve this political solution," said Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state. "In that regard, we are exploring a wide range of possible actions. We will draw our own conclusions about who is responsible for lack of progress and take necessary steps."

The EU statement emphasised "that a means of effective power-sharing in Kenya must be found and that individuals who obstruct the dialogue process will have to face the consequences".

Potential sanctions include travel bans aimed at the political elite on both sides, who holiday and send their children to school in Europe and America.

Annan suspended talks between the government and the opposition negotiating teams after it became clear they were going nowhere.

"It was bad on Friday, and it just got worse," said a diplomat familiar with the talks.

Annan has attempted to broker a solution in which the president maintained control of foreign affairs and defence but devolved control over domestic affairs to an opposition prime minister. One of the reasons for the breakdown has been Kibaki's insistence on keeping a grip on the finance ministry.

Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, said the deployment of the Kenyan army could be extremely risky.

"The army has always been non-political. It's very professional, it does a lot of peacekeeping, it's trained by the Brits, it's a regular contingent in UN forces," Dowden said. "The last thing they would want to do is step in. But the bigger danger to them is that as this gets more ethnic and tribal, a middle ranking officer finds his grandmother has been killed and takes off, and once bits break off, the whole army unravels. The whole army holding together as a non-ethnic entity is the last barrier between Kenya and complete meltdown."

New Iran Nuclear Sanctions Delayed

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:42 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- In a setback for the United States, Iran won a two-month reprieve from new U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program on Friday. The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns.

An agreement reached in talks here between six key nations and supported by the European Union gives Iran until November to make progress in answering questions about the program that the United States and others alleged is a cover for nuclear weapons development.

The decision marks another blow for Washington in its diplomatic struggle to toughen existing U.N. sanctions on Iran, whose leader this week declared to the U.N. General Assembly that the nuclear issue was ''closed'' and vowed to defy attempts to add new penalties.

The Bush administration had hoped to capitalize on growing international frustration with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hardline stance in refusing to halt uranium enrichment and reprocessing that he insists are purely for peaceful civilian energy use.

Despite increasing support for new sanctions in Europe -- particularly from Britain, France and Germany -- Russia and China refused to yield, insisting on giving Tehran more time to accept an offer for negotiations in exchange for suspending its nuclear activities.

After talks hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, backed by the E.U.'s top diplomat, agreed to delay a new sanctions resolution.

A joint statement from the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany said they would finalize the new resolution and bring it to a vote unless reports in November from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog and the E.U. foreign policy chief ''show a positive outcome of their efforts.''

At the same time, Rice said, they would continue work on a new sanctions resolution so if there were no progress, the resolution would be ready to be introduced in the Security Council for a vote.

''We'll be working to finalize the text and we will be watching to see what progress takes place ... in the November timeframe so that we can move to Security Council sanctions should there not be progress,'' Rice told reporters after the meeting in a New York hotel.

She also noted that the United States and the European members of the so-called ''P5+1'' group would pursue bilateral financial sanctions against Iran and Iranian government entities. For its part, the United States is considering imposing such measures against elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

However, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner signaled Europe wasn't ready to move on multilateral sanctions quickly. The French, British and Germans will meet with the full EU on Oct. 15 to discuss sanctions, but will wait until the Security Council decides before imposing their own measures, he said.

Kouchner said 14 different types of sanctions were being considered, and he wouldn't rule out Iran's oil industry, the Revolutionary Guards, banks and travel visas as possible targets.

''Nobody refused to follow up, to have a discussion on these 14 items,'' Kouchner told reporters after the meeting, but he added that some leaders were ''completely reluctant'' to accept some of them.

Rice denied that the agreement to put off U.N. sanctions was tantamount to a U.S. cave-in to Russia and China although her top negotiator in the matter, the State Department's No. 3 diplomat Nicholas Burns, allowed that ''the alchemy of this group is such that anything is going to be a compromise.''

Burns, who will meet at least twice with his counterparts in the P5+1 before November to produce a new draft sanctions resolution, maintained that the statement sent ''a very tough and strict message to Iran.''

He said the U.S. saw the statement as a commitment by all signatories to back a third sanctions resolution if there is no positive Iranian response. But U.N. diplomats cautioned that what constitutes a positive response may differ, especially between the U.S. and Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who exchanged sharp words with Rice on the sanctions matter earlier this week, appeared to confirm that thinking by saying Friday's agreement did not automatically mean new sanctions in November.

''The statement is very unambiguous,'' Lavrov told reporters. ''What we discussed today is to concentrate on doing everything to help negotiations to succeed.''

In the statement, the ministers and E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana welcomed a July agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency to answer questions about 20 years of nuclear activity -- most of it secret until just over four years ago.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to present a report to the agency's board of directors in late November on the status of his investigation, which the United States has downplayed because it only relates to past, and not current or future, actions.

Two U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran have failed to persuade it to suspend uranium enrichment and in a Tuesday address to the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmadinejad said the nuclear issue is ''closed'' and vowed to defy any U.N. Security Council move for more sanctions.

No date was set for submitting the new sanctions resolution to a vote in the Security Council because the six nations want to give Solana and ElBaradei flexibility in producing their reports, Burns said.

^------

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Lily Hindy contributed to this report.

Split in Group Delays Vote on Sanctions Against Iran

By HELENE COOPER

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 28 — The United States, Britain and France chose unity over speed and agreed on Friday to delay until November a United Nations Security Council vote on a third sanctions resolution against Iran.

The delay, a concession to Russia, China and Germany — the other three countries in the fragile coalition of six world powers that are seeking to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions — came after a week of haggling on the outskirts of the General Assembly. The six countries issued a statement advising Iran that a diplomatic offer of economic incentives remained on the table if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program.

The statement said the six powers would complete the new resolution and bring it to a vote unless reports from the European foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and the International Atomic Energy Agency in November “show a positive outcome of their efforts.”

Bush administration officials, who have been pushing diplomats to increase sanctions against Iran, said the move to put off a decision until November reflected the harsh realities of getting all six countries to speak with one voice. While officials from Britain, France and the United States were pressing for another sanctions vote right away, China and Russia in particular wanted to wait for another report from the nuclear monitoring agency.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose often volatile relationship with her Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, erupted again this week as Russia refused to go along with immediate sanctions, sought on Friday to minimize the differences between their countries.

“We’ve made it very clear that we’ve always wanted to keep the two tracks under way,” she told reporters in New York. American officials routinely use the phrase “two tracks” to refer to both the sanctions and the negotiations with Iran. “We will be watching to see what progress takes place.”

But her deputy, R. Nicholas Burns, the top United States negotiator on the Iran issue, acknowledged that “the alchemy of this group is such that anything is going to be a compromise.” He took issue with the speech by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before the General Assembly this week, when Mr. Ahmadinejad said that the nuclear dispute with the West, which believes that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons program, is now “closed.”

“I’m sorry, he was badly mistaken,” Mr. Burns told reporters during a news conference. “Here, he has six ministers saying so.”

Iran has maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Clearly, American diplomats were hoping for a bit more this week, but signs emerged early on that they would not get it. During a lunch of ministers from the Group of 8 industrialized nations on Wednesday, Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov exchanged sharp words on the right time to push for more Iran sanctions.

One European diplomat who was present said that “it’s getting to the point that you can’t get any work done if those two are in the room together,” referring to Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about tension between Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov.

Mr. Lavrov told The Associated Press after the lunch that he had strong words with Ms. Rice about whether the time was right for new sanctions when the International Atomic Energy Agency had struck an agreement with Iran about its past activities. Ms. Rice has been clear that she does not think much of the recent forays by Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency’s director, into the Iran negotiations, telling reporters on her airplane last week that the agency would be better off leaving diplomacy to diplomats.

Mr. ElBaradei reached an agreement in July with Iranian officials in which Tehran agreed to provide the agency with answers to questions about more than two decades of nuclear activity, most of it secret.

British Generals Criticize Rumsfeld on Iraq

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 2, 2007; 12:30 PM

LONDON-- The general who headed the British army during the 2003 Iraq invasion said that former U.S. defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's handling of postwar Iraq was "intellectually bankrupt" and pointed to Rumsfeld as "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq."

Mike Jackson, the British former chief of general staff who retired last year, strongly criticized Rumsfeld and the U.S. postwar effort in Iraq in his new book, "Soldier." The Daily Telegraph is to begin serializing the book Monday, after publishing some excerpts and an interview Saturday.

Jackson's stinging comments come at a time of growing tension between the British and U.S. military efforts in Iraq. Britain has been Washington's closest ally since the war began in 2003, but the military relationship has frayed, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown is under growing pressure to speed the reduction of British troops in Iraq.

Jackson criticized President Bush for putting the Pentagon in charge of the postwar administration of Iraq rather than the State Department.

"All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste," Jackson wrote. He said the Pentagon did not deploy even half the troops it would have needed for a country the size of Iraq.

He said Rumsfeld and those around him took it as "an ideological article of faith that the coalition soldiers would be accepted as a liberating army."

Jackson also characterized Rumsfeld's claim that U.S. forces "don't do nation-building" as "nonsensical."

In another newspaper interview Sunday, a second retired British general also slammed the United States over its Iraq policy, saying that it had been "fatally flawed."

Tim Cross, a retired major general and the most senior British officer involved in the postwar planning, said he had raised concerns about the possibility of Iraq falling into chaos but said Rumsfeld dismissed the warnings, the Associated Press reported.

"Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process," Cross said in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.

British anti-drug effort a failure: Afghan official

Sun Sep 2, 2007 7:36AM EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - British efforts to combat opium production in southern Afghanistan have completely failed, Afghanistan's first vice-president said on Sunday, calling for tougher measures, including aerial spraying.

Ahmad Zia Masood said Britain and the United States had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to combat growing of opium poppies used to make heroin.

Yet United Nations' figures released last week showed opium production rose by 34 percent this year, he said.

"It is now clear that your policy in the south of our country has completely failed," he wrote in an article in Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

"In Helmand (in southern Afghanistan), where the British are based, poppies have spread like a cancer," he said. "The province now produces half of Afghanistan's opium."

The main reason the policy had failed was insecurity, he said. "Opium cultivation has continued due to the pressure exerted by the Taliban, who 'tax' every aspect of the poppy crop," he added.

Counter-narcotics policy has been "much too soft", Masood said. "The time has come for us to adopt a more forceful approach. We must switch from ground-based eradication to aerial spraying," he said.

Bringing development and jobs to Afghan people was important, but large sums spent on irrigation projects and road-building had simply made it easier for farmers to grow and transport opium, he said.

Another problem was that counter-narcotics operations were not in Afghan hands, he said. "Poppy cultivation is an Afghan problem and it needs an Afghan solution," he said.

Masood acknowledged there was deep-rooted corruption in Afghan state institutions engaged in combating narcotics and terrorism. "We must wipe out this plague," he said.

Afghanistan's opium crop has risen every year since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban government in 2001, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said on Monday.

Afghanistan produced 93 percent of the world's opium this year and the area of the country used to grow poppies rose by 17 percent, it said.

Asked about Masood's comments, Britain's Foreign Office said it had nothing to add to a statement released in response to the U.N. report last week.

That statement said the increase in opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was a "real cause for concern" and the figures for Helmand "particularly disappointing".

But it said there were signs of progress. In parts of the north and centre, drug cultivation was coming down or stabilizing and the number of poppy-free provinces had increased from six to 13. "Ridding Afghanistan of this curse will take a generation, perhaps more," the Foreign Office said.

British Make Initial Gains Against Taliban

By CARLOTTA GALL

SANGIN, Afghanistan — The British Army compound here in a drug lord’s former villa, with its sandbagged windows and lookout posts and shrapnel-scarred walls, is a reminder that until just a few weeks ago Sangin was one of the most dangerous towns in Afghanistan’s most dangerous province, Helmand.

Since their arrival last spring in this lawless region of mountains and desert, British troops have lost 64 men in almost daily combat against a Taliban force second to none in size and ferocity in the country. The insurgents still control half the province, the most serious threat to Afghanistan’s stability.

Yet despite the presence of thousands of Taliban fighters, and some tough fighting still ahead, British military commanders here say they believe they have turned a significant corner. In recent months they have succeeded in pushing the Taliban back and keeping them out of a few strategic areas.

At the same time, they say, popular support for the insurgents is eroding.

“We see it now as a threat that can be countered,” Maj. Hamish Bell, second in command of the British battalion deployed in northern Helmand, said of the insurgency.

The progress in Helmand is perhaps the most important anywhere in the country, military commanders say, given that the province has the largest concentration of insurgents and produces 42 percent of Afghanistan’s opium crop, which has helped fuel the insurgency. If they can get Helmand right, they say, it could pave the way to broader progress against the Taliban.

But while Helmand shows what is possible in Afghanistan, commanders warn that a long, hard fight remains to win back territory from the Taliban, region by region, village by village, and success is not assured. Nearly six years into the war, a third of Afghanistan’s provinces are in the grip of insurgents, a level far worse than it was from 2002 to 2005, the years immediately after the American-led invasion, when the Taliban were toppled and forced to retreat across the border into Pakistan.

Provinces like Helmand, remote from the capital and relatively calm, were only secured by a light American military presence, leaving them wide open when the Taliban chose to return.

In the other southern provinces, Kandahar and Oruzgan, the Taliban presence remains strong. Fighting the Taliban is like pressing mercury or squeezing a balloon, commanders say: as insurgents are suppressed in one area, they emerge in another.

And once pushed back in conventional fighting, the Taliban switch tactics to suicide attacks, roadside bombs and kidnappings. In one measure of the lingering dangers even here, in early July the 14-year-old son of Sangin’s police chief was kidnapped on a road outside town and killed.

But military commanders say the progress in Helmand is an indication that NATO forces have found their stride since last year, when the Taliban staged a spectacular resurgence, taking advantage of the transfer of southern provinces from American commanders to an expanding NATO force.

As NATO forces have become better established and more numerous in southern Afghanistan, American forces have been able to deploy more troops in the east. There, they are also reporting gains in some border areas. All of this has helped NATO forces take the offensive against the Taliban, rather than fighting from their back foot, as they were forced to do last year, and gain local confidence.

“I don’t think the Taliban will come back,” said Abdul Rahman, 45, a paramedic, the only qualified person working in a small private clinic here. “They have been weakened.” Also the people would not support the Taliban anymore, he said.

What has made the difference here, the British say, is a shift in their tactics and a doubling of force numbers, to nearly 6,000 today, with more troops on the way.

When the British paratroopers arrived in Helmand, President Hamid Karzai asked that they focus on preventing small district centers from falling to the Taliban, so grave was the insurgent threat. Surrounded and cut off, the British came under attack up to seven times a day. They used artillery fire to clear an area just for supply helicopters to land.

Over the winter they deployed mobile marine units to push the Taliban back from besieged district compounds and out of the town centers. In spring and summer, they staged sweeping operations, with help from American, Afghan and small Danish and Estonian units.

In May they pushed the Taliban out of the Sangin area. With three companies in the valley, they have since thwarted attempts by the insurgents to reinfiltrate.

“It’s not over but indications are that the uplift in forces and the more offensive mind-set has been successful,” said Maj. Dominic Biddick, 32, commander of Company A of the Royal Anglian Regiment, now based in Sangin. The British base, once virtually under siege, has not taken a single hit in a month, he said.

The British have now been able to focus on their original counterinsurgency plan, which was to create “inkblots,” or secure zones around the main towns, and gradually expand security outward. In this way they are starting reconstruction projects in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, the town of Gereshk on the main road, and now Sangin.

Strategically located, Sangin, a rich agricultural town on the banks of the Helmand River, commands access to the north, where most of the Taliban are concentrated, and to the hydroelectric dam at Kajaki, a major United States development project.

The Taliban threat remains even in these secure zones. But Lt. Col. Stuart Carver, who commands the Battle Group North, said, “There aren’t big groups of 50 Taliban roaming around town and taking over big parts of the town.”

The strong British and Afghan security presence in Sangin has for the first time encouraged local Afghans to come forward with information on Taliban movements.

This year, the Taliban have lost ground and men, including some high-level commanders, and are struggling to find recruits among the local population, Colonel Carver said.

NATO officials categorize the Taliban into two types of fighters. Tier one, as they are called, are hardened, ideologically driven men who have come back to fight from their rear base in Pakistan. Tier two fighters are local men who may join the war for a variety of reasons — economic, tribal or religious.

“The biggest change from last year to this year is there has been no tier two mobilization,” Colonel Carver said. “They have tried,” he said of the Taliban.

Still, military officers said, the Taliban never seem short of forces. They have filled out their ranks with foreign fighters, mainly Pakistanis, but also a handful of Arabs and Chechens, as well as Afghans from other provinces, like neighboring Oruzgan.

The military has found Pakistani identity cards on dead fighters, as well as papers and CDs with jihadi propaganda in Chechen and Arabic, one officer said. A large group of men from Pakistan’s tribal area of Waziristan were killed in one battle, Colonel Carver said.

But the weakening of the Taliban is apparent even to local people, like Hayatullah, 29, a farmer who fled northern Helmand last year and now lives near the main British camp, Bastian, in central Helmand.

“The Taliban are not stronger,” he said, “If they were strong, they would come down and fight the British here.”

Sangin, which was a ghost town three months ago, is struggling slowly back to life. Shops have reopened, while others lie in rubble, and the initial silent hostility toward the foreign troops is starting to thaw.

A few tribal elders have asked the military for help in clearing irrigation channels. Afghan, American and British military medics offered two days of free consultations in mid-July and were swamped by hundreds of people, including dozens of women and children. That was a step toward acceptance, Major Biddick said.

He and other commanders hope that momentum will build.

“I think the big battle was for local support,” Colonel Carver said. “A proportion of the locals now think we are actually going to stay, and therefore they are prepared to throw their cards in with us. Before, they thought we were going to come in, kill a few Taliban and then leave.”

“It has gone from people too scared to even look at you or wave in case someone was watching, now they will talk,” he added. “It’s a step forward that they will talk to you, and it’s a real step forward that they talk to you as if you can solve their problems.”

After a year and half of intense fighting, not all local people are persuaded, however. “We don’t expect good government, only bloodshed,” said Hajji Mullah Fida Muhammad, an elderly man with a white beard. He said he thought the Taliban were still strong enough to win the town again. Others expected them to try again.

“The Taliban is out there, so we expect more fighting,” said Hajji Mullah Salim, 55, a cloth merchant. He had returned to open his shop, but his family was still camping out in the desert for safety, he said.

There is still talk of a Taliban offensive, but NATO commanders are keeping the pressure on the insurgents, and say the danger now is the shift in Taliban tactics, toward roadside and suicide bombs. The guerrilla tactics are threatening enough and can erode local support, as the local police chief, Hajji Ghulam Wali, can attest.

It was his son who was pulled out of a taxi and kidnapped by insurgents on the road from Sangin to the provincial capital. The Taliban commander, Tor Jan, taunted Hajji Wali on the telephone, telling him to quit his job to save his son.

When he refused, they bound his son’s hands and feet with a chain and returned him dead, riddled with 20 bullets. Then, in mid-July, a bomb detonated in the pushcart of a boy as the police chief’s car passed the town bazaar, killing four people, including the boy.

“They committed a terrible crime,” Hajji Wali said of his son’s killing. “Islam does not permit such cruelty.”

Still, he said, the town was safer. The Taliban, he insisted, “have lost morale, they are weak now.”

“Before we could not go to the bazaar, but now they are hiding and cannot go to the bazaar,” he said.

He, like several Afghan officials interviewed in the province, urged the British to press their advantage and finish the Taliban while the insurgents are down.

Wary of the ease with which the Taliban can reinfiltrate areas, the British are moving with care. British commanders said the job now was now to consolidate control of Sangin and Gereshk, rather than pursue Taliban in their holdouts.

“We could deploy and clear the rest but the danger is if we clear the Taliban out we create a vacuum,” Major Biddick, the British commander in Sangin, said. The Afghan government also needs to catch up in deploying more army and police to fill the vacuum, he added.

“This is setting the conditions 12 months in, and Afghanistan will be measured in decades, not years,” the major said. “We realize it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

UK Report: Errors Made in Sailors Kidnap

By DAVID STRINGER
The Associated Press
Saturday, July 21, 2007; 11:39 PM

LONDON -- British diplomats were too slow to contact a key official who helped broker the eventual release of 15 sailors and marines held hostage in March by Iran, a report by lawmakers said Sunday.

Officials also bungled a decision that allowed some of the personnel to sell their stories to media organizations after their release, despite strong reservations from some sectors of government, Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee concluded.

The British sailors and marines were searching a merchant ship in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iraq, when they and their two inflatable boats were intercepted by Iranian vessels near the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway.

Iran claimed the crew had strayed into its territorial waters, a charge Britain denied, and held the sailors hostage for 13 days. Several of the captured sailors were paraded on Iranian television and "admitted" trespassing in Tehran's waters.

The sailors later said they were blindfolded, bound and faced constant psychological pressure during their detention.

In their report, the lawmakers said Britain had made no application to hold talks with Ali Larijani, Iran's nuclear envoy and an influential foreign policy figure, for seven days after the sailors were seized on March 23.

"Although the Government was making every effort to resolve the situation ... its application to speak to Dr. Ali Larijani could and should have been made much earlier," the report said.

Larijani gave an interview to Britain's Channel 4 News on April 2, signaling that the Britons would not necessarily be put on trial in Iran _ a key sign negotiations were possible, the committee said.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser spoke to Larijani on April 3, and a day later the sailors were freed, an event Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called a gift to Britain.

Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Iran, told the committee that access to Larijani had not been a problem in the past. "It appears odd that an application was not made earlier in the process," the report said.

Lawmakers said Britain placed too much emphasis on using the United Nations Security Council to pressure Iran, and failed to win a U.N. statement that backed London's assertion that the sailors were in Iraqi waters when seized.

"The fact that the government appears not to have been able to achieve its main objectives at the U.N. brings into question the wisdom of its tactical approach," the report said.

Committee members also criticized a defense ministry decision to allow the released personnel to sell their accounts of the crisis to the media.

Lord David Triesman, a minister at the time of the kidnap, said the Foreign Office had indicated it would be a "significant mistake" to allow the sailors to conduct interviews.

Allowing the sailors to appear on television and in newspapers was "a disturbing failure of judgment" and "wholly unsatisfactory," the report said.

Though the crew had returned home to an initially warm welcome, public feeling quickly turned when some sold their stories. One sailor, Arthur Batchelor, was lampooned after he revealed he had wept when his Iranian captors stole his iPod.

A military inquiry into the saga, reported on in June, said there was no single error that led to the sailors' capture, and no cause for disciplinary action. A second independent inquiry slammed the decision to allow the seized troops to sell their stories.

Policing Terrorism

By DAVID RIEFF

When terrorists tried to blow up civilians in London and Glasgow, Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, responded in his own distinctive way. What had just been narrowly averted, he said, was not a new jihadist act of war but instead a criminal act. As if to underscore the point, Brown instructed his ministers that the phrase “war on terror” was no longer to be used and, indeed, that officials were no longer even to employ the word “Muslim” in connection with the terrorism crisis. In remarks to reporters, Brown’s new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, articulated the basic message. “Let us be clear,” she said, “terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions.”

Is the war on terror really a war? President Bush certainly continues to insist that it is, and a war of existential survival at that, although his administration has recently substituted the term “the long war” for “global war on terrorism.” In the past, political figures who denied that the West was locked in a war tended not to get much of a hearing. For example, Senator John Kerry did himself no favors during the 2004 election campaign when he expressed a hope to a reporter for this magazine that fighting terror would come to resemble law enforcement. And Senator John Edwards’s claim in this present campaign cycle that the war on terror is a “bumper sticker” slogan seems to have resonated with comparatively few Americans outside the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Probably no political leader more eloquently made the case that terrorism presents a mortal threat to the West, and to democratic values everywhere, than the former prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair. In a 2004 speech defending his decision to send British troops into Iraq, Blair insisted that he “could see the threat plainly.” The 9/11 terrorists, he said, tried to provoke such hatred between Muslims and the West that “a religious jihad became reality and the world engulfed by it.” Unchecked, Blair concluded, Al Qaeda and like-minded groups would “bring about Armageddon.” No stronger word is imaginable. After all, Armageddon literally denotes the end of the world. How astounding then to hear his successor speak in so different a key.

Brown, it seems, has concluded that the war rhetoric employed by Blair was divisive, threatening social peace between communities in Britain, and counterproductive, making it harder to turn the British Muslim community into the security services’ eyes and ears. In other words, the Brown approach would be the approach of serious crime fighters around the world these days — community policing in which mutual trust is the cornerstone of crime prevention. In general, advocates of this approach avoid the rhetoric of war on the presumption that it only alienates the communities out of which criminals spring.

Brown’s spokesman put the point plainly. “There is clearly a need,” he said, “to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the U.K. It is important that the country remains united.” But what was at stake was far more than a decision to bow to the sensitivities of British Muslims. By emphasizing the criminality of terrorism, Brown effectively changed the terms (and the temperature) of the British debate: he redefined a world historical threat as a manageable danger. It was a decision that won support from the opposition Conservative Party’s former spokesman for homeland-security matters. Conservative columnists, however, were not so pleased. In a USA Today opinion article, Melanie Phillips, a well-known writer for The Daily Mail, claimed that “a society cannot possibly defend itself against a threat it is not even willing to identify.” Britain, she jibed, was waging “a war it dares not name.”

For Phillips and her allies, those who fail to face the challenge of Islamic extremism head on will be to their generation what those who appeased Hitler in 1938 were to theirs. Then, Western leaders convinced themselves that Hitler’s demands were rational; today, a new generation of appeasers has convinced itself, as Phillips puts it, that “Islamic terrorism must be driven by rational grievances such as deprivation, ‘Islamophobia’ or British foreign policy.” They do not understand that terrorists “kill as an act of religious exultation.” By failing to stand up for what it believes in, she holds, the West courts defeat.

But Brown and other advocates of the terror-as-crime view are not necessarily under any delusions about jihadist thinking. Rather, they maintain that preventing terrorism requires winning the hearts and minds of actual human beings — and that declarations of war, including declarations of wars of ideas, are unlikely to be helpful in this regard. Of course, George Bush and Tony Blair thought they were winning hearts and minds by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and at least rhetorically committing themselves to democracy building in the Middle East. Implicitly at least, Brown seems to be saying that this tactic has failed, that the war model has only fueled rage and resentment within precisely those communities whose support is most essential — the Muslim diasporas outside the Islamic world.

With Washington practicing one theory of terror and London the other, we may find out which one is the more realistic. So far, it seems, Brown has had more success in getting influential Muslim groups to denounce terror than Blair did. Meanwhile, in the United States, the campaign of Rudolph Guiliani recently announced that one of the candidate’s senior foreign-policy advisers would be the neoconservative intellectual Norman Podhoretz, whose forthcoming book on the Islamist challenge is called “World War IV.” But so far, World War IV isn’t going very well. Particularly in light of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s recent report that Al Qaeda is as strong today as it was before 9/11, Gordon Brown’s bet on the criminal model, however risky, seems the more sensible course.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the French suburbs

Britain to expel Russian diplomats in extradition disputehttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-ex-poisonedspy17jul17,0,1894170,print.story?

From the Associated Press

8:36 AM PDT, July 16, 2007

LONDON — Britain will expel four Russian diplomats over the Kremlin's refusal to extradite the key suspect in the murder of a former KGB agent fatally poisoned in London, the foreign secretary said today.

Britain has also suspended visa facilitation negotiations with Russia and is reviewing cooperation on other issues, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said. Russia has refused to extradite a Russian businessman to stand trial in London over the killing of Alexander Litvinenko.

"The Russian government has failed to register either how seriously we treat this case or the seriousness of the issues involved, despite lobbying at the highest level and clear explanations of our need for a satisfactory response," Miliband said.

International agreements mean that Andrei Lugovoi, also a former KGB agent, could be extradited if he travels outside Russia, Miliband said.

Britain's Foreign Office declined to specify the rank or position of the four Russian diplomats to be expelled.

"We have chosen to expel four particular diplomats in order to send a clear and proportionate signal about the seriousness of this case," Miliband said.

British prosecutors have named Lugovoi as the chief suspect in the case, and authorities are seeking to try him for Litvinenko's murder.

Litvinenko died Nov. 23 in a London hospital after ingesting radioactive polonium-210. In a deathbed statement, he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind his killing.

The ex-security agent said he first felt ill after meeting Lugovoi and business partner Dmitry Kovtun at London's Millennium Hotel.

Traces of polonium-210 were found at around a dozen other sites in London, including three hotels, a stadium, two planes and an office building.

In Britain, 700 people were tested for polonium contamination and 670 were tested abroad -- including Lugovoi. All were eventually released.

Russia's formal rejection was received a week ago by British prosecutors, who in turn spurned an offer from Moscow to try Lugovoi in Russia.

Russian diplomats face expulsion from Britain

Adrian Blomfield
July 13, 2007
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BRITAIN is poised to expel Russian diplomats for the first time in a decade in protest at Moscow's refusal to extradite the chief suspect in the murder of a KGB defector.

The option is one of several being considered after Moscow formally refused to hand over Andrei Lugovoi, a suspect in the poisoning of former agent Alexander Litvinenko last November in London.

The expulsions would be reminiscent of former Cold War rows between Moscow and London and almost certainly prompt similar retaliation by the Kremlin.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain was reviewing its "range of co-operation" with Russia, and the Foreign Office would move officially to cool relations in the next few days.

British diplomats have declined to comment on what measures, including expulsions, might be taken. But a former diplomat familiar with Russia said it was entirely likely that Britain could decide to expel a handful of middle to low-ranking diplomats because other options are limited.

Britain no longer gives Russia direct aid, removing the possibility of slashing funding, while reducing co-operation in the business sphere would only hurt British investors. Britain is Russia's largest foreign investor, with interests of more than £33 billion ($A77.8 billion).

While expulsions could raise temperatures further, some commentators suggest they represent the best way for Britain and Russia to draw a line under the Litvinenko affair.

Given the seriousness of the incident, which exposed hundreds of people to the radioactive substance polonium-210, Britain is under pressure to respond robustly to the Kremlin's intransigence.

There have been no tit-for-tat ejections since 1996, when Russia expelled four diplomats accused of being spies, prompting Britain to retaliate in kind.

Other commentators say that whatever Britain's response, Russia is likely to react furiously.

President Vladimir Putin has called Britain's demand for Mr Lugovoi's extradition "stupid". Under the country's constitution, Russian nationals cannot be extradited.

Mr Brown's spokesman rejected an offer for Mr Lugovoi to be tried in Russia, saying Britain had no confidence in the fairness or impartiality of Russian courts.

Unlikely duo at center of British case

An Iraqi doctor and an Indian engineer may have connected British attack suspects, two of whom had explored working in the U.S.
By Sebastian Rotella
Times Staff Writer

July 7, 2007

LONDON — Authorities charged an Iraqi doctor Friday in last week's attempted car bombings and identified the driver of a vehicle that rammed into Glasgow Airport as an engineer from India, placing the two at the hub of an unusual mix of suspects of Middle Eastern and South Asian origin.

Prosecutors filed charges of conspiracy to cause explosions against Bilal Abdullah, 27, who worked at a Glasgow-area hospital during the last year. Abdullah became the first of eight suspects in custody, at least six of them foreign doctors or medical workers, to be charged in a case that investigators regard as the latest in a string of Al Qaeda-connected plots against Britain.

The FBI confirmed that two of the doctors had also looked into working in the United States during the last year. Their efforts did not get far, but British officials say some of the suspects were already Islamic radicals by then, and they could have been exploring the idea of an attack on U.S. soil.

Questions persist about the identities of some of the suspects and whether they have ties to trainers or masterminds outside Britain. But it seems increasingly likely that the friendship between Abdullah and the engineer — now identified as Kafeel Ahmed — linked groups of suspects from the Middle East and India and was a central force driving the alleged plot.

Although Islamic extremist networks are often multi-ethnic, that particular mix is unusual in Britain. Extremist cells in previous cases were generally dominated by militants of North African, Pakistani or African origin, with ideologues more likely to be Middle Eastern, counter-terrorism officials said.

Cambridge ties

Abdullah and Ahmed, who allegedly crashed a Jeep Cherokee into the departures terminal at Glasgow International Airport a week ago, grew close at Cambridge. A man who knew them at the time remembers the stocky Indian engineer zooming around the university city on a big motorcycle, with the Iraqi doctor on the back.

"Kafeel was a bit of an adrenaline junkie," said Shiraz Maher, a former fundamentalist who was studying at Cambridge University at the time. "But Bilal was the stronger of the two, and had a lot of influence on Kafeel. I think Kafeel became more devout under Bilal's influence."

On June 29, police believe, the two tried to blow up a pair of explosives-packed cars left in a crowded nightclub district near London's iconic Trafalgar Square, but failed. They allegedly hurried back to Glasgow as police closed in, loaded a Jeep with propane canisters and gasoline and, with Ahmed at the wheel, attacked the airport.

Ahmed set himself on fire during a struggle with police, suffering severe burns that have left him near death, authorities said. Doctors transferred him Friday to a special burn unit in Glasgow.

Before the botched London attack, one of the two suspects left a suicide note, according to a British security official who asked to remain anonymous because of restrictions on talking to the media.

Police had not officially confirmed the names of any of the suspects before charging Abdullah on Friday. Ahmed had been initially described in media reports and by authorities as a Middle Eastern doctor whose first name was Khalid.

In recent days, though, officials said Ahmed is an engineer from India and is apparently related to two Indian doctors also in custody. He may also have Jordanian citizenship and is one of several suspects thought to have used multiple or fraudulent identities, officials said.

"One of the arts these people practice is to conceal their identities," said the British security official. "Some of them have not been interviewed because the investigators want to be sure exactly who they dealing with before they sit down with them."

A British man who had business dealings with Abdullah in Glasgow said the Iraqi provided a British passport issued by the consulate in Jordan. That reinforces reports that Abdullah was born in Britain while his father, also a doctor, was working here. Abdullah has an uncle and cousin in Cambridge.

Maher described Abdullah in an interview this week as an angry extremist influenced by the ideology of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who was killed by U.S. forces last year.

In a second interview Friday, Maher said he also knew Ahmed. They all frequented the Islamic Academy, a student residence and prayer hall in a red-brick house owned by a Muslim charity, during the 2004-2005 academic year, Maher said.

Ahmed is thought to be 27. He is from a well-off family of doctors from Bangalore, Maher said. Ahmed lived in a small bedroom in the house and had an office at Anglia Polytechnic University, where he was pursuing a doctorate in engineering, Maher said.

Ahmed was short and chunky, Maher recalled. He described his shock at the video images from the Glasgow airport of police subduing a shirtless Ahmed, who was covered with burns and soot.

"You feel a kind of mix of emotions," Maher said. "There's a bit of sympathy because I knew this guy. But you also want to grab him, confront him, say, 'What did you think you were doing?' "

Failed recruiting

Maher belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir, a nominally nonviolent but aggressive group that seeks to impose an Islamic caliphate. The cerebral, soft-spoken 25-year-old, who has degrees in law and history, renounced the group in late 2005 and has become a writer and commentator.

Hizb ut-Tahrir militants, one of them Ahmed's roommate, tried to recruit both men but failed, Maher said.

"My cell leader said that if the two of them hadn't been so close, Kafeel would have joined us," he recalled.

Ahmed tried to help Abdullah get a medical position in Britain by asking his brother, a physician, to write a letter fraudulently claiming that Abdullah had practiced at a hospital in Bangalore, Maher said.

Maher believes the brother was Sabeel Ahmed, who worked at a hospital near Liverpool until his arrest Monday. Indian newspapers reported Friday that both brothers had Jordanian passports because their family lived in Jordan when they were children.

The Indian and British media also reported that Kafeel Ahmed had called his family in Bangalore on the day of the airport attack and talked to them about a mysterious project.

Ahmed and Abdullah went on a winter camping trip to the Lake District in northern England with half a dozen fundamentalists in 2005, Maher said. Investigators say the terrorist cells that bombed the London transport system in July 2005 used excursions in the same region to radicalize their members and plan attacks.

"I remember seeing photos of them all bundled up and Abdullah laughing about it, saying it was too cold for him," Maher said.

The two men had contact in Cambridge with a Jordanian doctor who Maher believes may have been Mohammed Jamil Asha, another suspect in the case who was arrested early Sunday with his wife.

Seeking U.S. work

The FBI confirmed Friday that Asha and another suspect had contacted a Philadelphia-based clearinghouse for foreign doctors about working in the United States. The FBI did not identify the second suspect.

The two doctors contacted the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates within the last year, exploring the possibility of working as medical residents, according to a federal law enforcement official.

They took only initial steps to apply for entry into U.S.-based graduate medical-education programs, which requires several tests, the official said. Their U.S. contacts were first reported Friday on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website.

This week, FBI agents searched the offices of the educational commission, which certifies foreign-trained doctors to work as U.S. medical residents. But there are no indications that any of the alleged plotters came into the country or had contacts with any U.S.-based extremists, the official said.

Maher has been trying to imagine the odyssey that took his former friends across the line to violence. He believes Abdullah was a likely leader of the plot because of his fervor, his strong personality, and his reverence for militant ideologues in Iraq. He thinks Ahmed could have been recruited for his engineering knowledge.

"I think Bilal could have groomed him," Maher said. "Bilal never missed morning prayers, but Kafeel missed them now and then. How do you get from that to a suicide bomber?

"I can imagine him and Bilal at the airport, thinking the car is about to explode, all the adrenaline buzz. Then they hit and bang, they are not dead after all. And they are still looking at the Glasgow airport in the shock of knowing they are going to be caught."

rotella@latimes.com

Times staff writers Janet Stobart in London, Josh Meyer in Washington and Henry Chu in New Delhi contributed to this report.

The Iranian Nuclear Challenge

Gareth Evans
Address by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to The Greens/European Free Alliance Conference on Iran: Alternatives to Escalation, European Parliament, Brussels, 4 July 2007 ______________________________________________________________________________

The Urgent Need to Meet the Nuclear Challenge

Over the last decade, there has been a serious, and dangerous, loss of momentum and direction in disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. Stocks of nuclear weapons held by the nuclear weapons states remain extraordinarily and alarmingly high - some 30,000 in all, of which around 12,000 are still actively deployed - with no serious moves in sight to diminish them significantly, and Britain’s apparent determination to replace the Trident system indicating that it is no more serious than any of the other weapons states about moving to meet their own side of the grand NPT bargain, to move steadily toward absolute nuclear disarmament.

India and Pakistan have joined the ranks of nuclear weapons states, and like Israel doing so outside the framework of the NPT; North Korea, after building its capability while in the NPT and subject to its constraints, has withdrawn from the treaty, and now has the fissile material to manufacture perhaps a dozen nuclear weapons. Treaty making and implementation has stalled and there is fear of a new wave of proliferation, with Iran widely seen (accurately or otherwise) as being in the vanguard: determined to acquire full fuel cycle capability, as it is technically able to do while remaining a member in good standing of the NPT, and clearly wanting, at the very least, to keep open the option of stepping across the line out of the NPT and into weaponisation when it has the capacity to do so, precipitating in the process a rush by others in the region to follow suit.

2005 saw two loud wake-up calls in the failure of the NPT Review Conference, and the inability of the World Summit in September to agree on a single line about any WMD issue – despite the recommendations coming to it from the High Level Panel (of which I was a member) and many others to commit to a raft of measures designed to give the NPT and associated measures new life and teeth ( including, e.g., attaching some penalties to withdrawal from the Treaty, having stronger verification measures, developing international means for guaranteeing the external supply of fissile material to civilian users; and putting some real heat on the nuclear weapons states to get serious about disarmament).

We know what needs to be done. The Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which reported last year (and of which I was also a member) has set out the agenda as clearly as it has ever been done, grouping its recommendations into four sets:

o First, agree on general principles of action – in particular that disarmament and non-proliferation are best pursued through a cooperative rules-based international order, applied and enforced not unilaterally but through effective multilateral institutions; and that states, individually and collectively, should consistently pursue policies designed to ensure that no state feels a need to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

o Second, work toward outlawing all weapons of mass destruction once and for all – including through the progressive extension of nuclear weapons free zones (most urgently in the Middle East). The general objective here is not as impossibly romantic as it seems to a lot of people (as even extreme realists like Henry Kissinger now seem prepared to acknowledge). As the Blix Commission put it in two of the most important passages in the whole report,

- Weapons of mass destruction cannot be uninvented. But they can be outlawed, as biological and chemical weapons already have been, and their use made unthinkable. Compliance, verification and enforcement rules can, with the requisite will, be effectively applied.

and, repeating the mantra first spelt out in the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons a decade earlier:

- So long as any state has nuclear weapons others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.

o Third, reduce the danger of present arsenals – in particular through better security of stockpiles; diminishing the role of nuclear weapons by no-first-use pledges, assurances not to use them against non-nuclear weapons states, and by not developing nuclear weapons for new tasks; and prohibiting the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, and phasing out the production of highly-enriched uranium.

o Fourth, prevent a new wave of proliferation - above all by reviving the fundamental commitments of all NPT parties: the five nuclear weapon states parties to negotiate towards nuclear disarmament and the non-nuclear weapon states, while retaining the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, and in particular to explore international arrangements for an assurance of supply of enriched uranium fuel, and for the disposal of spent fuel, to reduce incentives for national facilities and diminish proliferation risks.

Of course the Blix Commission was not unconscious of the argument – very familiar to a Greens audience - that the ‘atoms for peace’ principle is unsustainable, and that civil nuclear energy production (whatever its superficial attractions in an age of anxiety about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming) inevitably will reinforce and make ever harder to control the move toward wider nuclear weapons possession.

But we felt that recognizing and accommodating the demand for civilian nuclear capability was the only possible way the NPT could be held together – and, as it must be, strengthened – in the present environment , and that it would be Quixotic in the extreme to tilt at this windmill while trying to hold together a broad based international consensus in favour of drawing an absolute red line against anything in the nature of weaponisation.

Alternatives to Domestic Fissile Material Production within the NPT System

Leaving aside for present purposes the position of those who are not prepared to support any role for any kind of civil nuclear energy, the optimal non-proliferation solution would be for all fissile material production, and all spent fuel disposal, to be internationalized and fully controlled so as to make impossible any diversion for weapons production purposes.

This remains a dream for many of us, and innumerable efforts have been made over the years, in the IAEA and elsewhere, to get a serious debate started and serious steps put in train, to achieve just that - and other speakers on this panel will no doubt be referring to that effort. Let me refer briefly to just two of the proposals which have been floated.

o International Fuel Bank
Under one of them there would be a moratorium on the construction of new facilities for the enrichment of uranium or reprocessing to allow time for a scheme to be worked out for the multinational control of all such facilities, wherever located.
States complying with non-proliferation commitments would be then able to turn to an international fuel bank, assured that they could buy low-enriched nuclear fuel at market prices. There would be an international framework of agreed rules in which both producers and consumers would have a say on rights of purchase.

Many problems still have to be overcome, however, before this could be workable, for example:

- the unresolved question (certainly asked by Iran and others) as to who exactly would decide whether a country is fulfilling its non-proliferation commitments and thus be entitled to purchase enriched uranium); and

- the fact that there has been no sign of US buy in, not least because it has plans for additional capacity and doesn’t like moratorium, and because it is not happy to even contemplate the internationalisation of its own production. (See WMDC Report, pp 74-5)

o Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
Another proposal – ‘GNEP’ - has been advanced by the US itself last year and discussed with governments in London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing New Delhi and Tokyo. Under it a small number of states would produce enriched uranium and ‘lease’ it to states, and then take back the spent fuel – which would then be reprocessed by a new process which would recover uranium and plutonium in a form that would be unusable in weapons, and could be used in special reactors that would be built only in these fuel-producing states, with a drastically smaller remaining volume of waste. The general idea is to encourage rather than oblige other states to use this system – though if they joined in they would have to undertake to do no enrichment or reprocessing of their own.

There are technical doubts as to whether the proposed new recovery process will work, and political doubts as to whether the return of spent fuel to the ‘leasing’ states will prove acceptable, but the basic problem with this approach is that it adds a visible new inequality – between fuel cycle and user states – to the existing NPT inequality between nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states. The deeper the cooperation between the fuel cycle states the more it would look like a cartel of the powerful. (See WMDC Report pp 75-6).

The Iran Impasse and How to Get Out of It

It is obvious that neither the international fuel bank nor GNEP solutions are going to be available within any kind of time frame that could possibly help resolve the current Iran problem – and that neither of them, even a fully internationalised fuel bank, is likely to be particularly attractive to Tehran anyway.

Nor does it appear that Iran is in any kind of mood to accept a ‘guaranteed’ supply from some other particular offshore source, along the lines proposed by Russia, in return for foregoing its fuel-cycle ambitions and agreeing to indefinitely relinquish whatever right as it has under the NPT to enrich uranium – even in the context of all the sanctions and threatened sanctions that are now on the table, and incentives (including restored relations with the US) that could be put back on the table.

Some are confident that sanctions – particularly the backdoor variety that the US, and Europeans under American pressure, are capable of applying through the banking system, to choke off both trade and investment finance - will ultimately force the Iranians to cave in, but that is not a confidence that we in the International Crisis Group share. Our reading is that, while the potential impact of these kind of measures can never be understated (and were probably decisive, e.g., in South Africa against the apartheid regime) in Iran just too many factors are pulling the other way, including,

- Iran’s sense of national pride, consciousness of its history, and deeply rooted ideology of independence, which cuts across other internal political and cultural divisions, and makes it deeply reluctant to be seen to be pushed around

- Associated with this the sense that Iran is a major, not minor, league player, not least in its own region, and entitled to have the kind of capability that goes with that

- The widespread sense that the West is trying to prevent Iran from having access to scientific progress, patronising it, to keep it in dependence and tutelage

- The sense that the international community’s heart is not really in a full-scale sanctions squeeze – that Russia (although it has gone along with the UNSC so far), China and the great majority of NPT countries don’t really believe that they are at present acting outside the letter or even spirit of the NPT in rushing to acquire full fuel-cycle capability.

Add to all that the Iranians’ current perception that military strike action is a non-starter in the present environment - with, except for a few fringe dwellers, the clear thinking in both the US and Israel that the negatives would far outweigh the positives - and you have all the makings of a full-scale impasse.

Crisis Group has long been arguing that a new approach is needed which goes back to basics – which focuses on strategy rather than immediate tactics - by redrawing the red line.

What matters, from a non-proliferation perspective, is not whether Iran has full enrichment capability, but nuclear weapons. What should ultimately concern Israel, Iran’s neighbours, and a world deeply anxious to avoid further nuclear breakout, is not whether Iran has the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium, but whether it actually makes it and puts it into deliverable bombs. While it may well be too late to stop Iran acquiring its own fissile material, and the technological capacity to enrich it to weapons grade, it is certainly not too late to halt it acquiring nuclear weapons.

To achieve this will require a different diplomatic strategy from that presently favoured by the EU and US. It means abandoning the ‘zero enrichment’ goal in favour of a ‘delayed limited enrichment’ plan. Under this:

o the wider international community would explicitly accept that Iran can enrich domestically for peaceful nuclear energy purposes;

o in return Iran would agree to phasing in over an extended period of years that enrichment program, with major limitations on its initial size and scope, and a very highly intrusive inspections regime – not just the Additional Protocol to which it has already signed up, which is significantly more intrusive than the basic safeguards regime, but (because of the doubts which have arisen – and are in fact widely shared by other NPT parties - about its reporting lapses and general lack of transparency in the past) specially negotiated ‘Additional Protocol Plus’ measures which would enable inspectors to have a rather more exact knowledge of what Iran was doing across a broader range of areas relevant to weapons capability; and

o there would be both incentives – in the form of security guarantees, progressive lifting of existing sanctions, moves toward diplomatic normalisation and the like – and strong disincentives to ensure that the agreement stuck. In particular, Iran would be disciplined by knowing that if at any stage it made any move at all toward weaponisation – through the production of weapons-grade fissile material, or any hardware in which to put it – all hell would break loose. A full range of economic sanctions would take immediate effect (including finance and investment sanctions fully supported by the Europeans as well as the US), and military options would not be off the table.

There are three advantages to this strategic approach, if the U.S. and EU could swallow their reservations:

o It is not inconsistent with what we know about Iran’s actual nuclear intentions. While there is every reason to believe that right across the political and social spectrum there is as an absolute determination to acquire full fuel cycle capability – and as such to be seen as being in the league of those countries capable of becoming nuclear weapons states if they so chose - there is also every reason to believe that no decision has been made to acquire weapons, and there is a very clear understanding of the huge risks that Iran would be running by so doing: not only the possibility of the balance of calculation changing toward a military strike in the US and Israel, but the real prospect of the Sunni neighbourhood reacting in kind.

o The approach proposed would spread the process out over time. If made clear to the Iranians, it would make much more achievable what has so far been unachievable, viz a suspension right now of enrichment-related activity right now to enable detailed negotiations to take place. And not only would those negotiations themselves take time, they would involve the phasing in over time of the various levels of capacity involved. And this in turn would allow time and space for a more moderate political dynamic to take hold in Iran. The internal political scene is multi-textured, multi-layered and always hard to read and predict, but if a new environment can be created of engagement and cooperation with the West, rather than demonisation and isolation by it, there are many analysts inside and outside the country who believe that a completely different mood than that now represented by Ahmadi-nejad is there for the taking, with all that flows from that in terms of security cooperation.

o But the greatest benefit is that it would command genuinely universal buy-in, first from all those NPT signatories who are wedded to the basic NPT bargain and presently totally reluctant to acknowledge any limitation on full ‘peaceful use’ capability, and, secondly, and very importantly, from Russia and China, who are likely to go on being extremely reluctant Security Council enforcers of the present ‘zero enrichment’ strategy, but who are totally willing to be very tough indeed when it comes to Iran actually weaponising, with all that that implies for destabilising the neighbourhood and changing global power balances.

Crisis Group published an early version of this plan 18 months ago, and we know from many consultations since that it has extremely wide appeal as a fallback if the present diplomatic strategy runs into the sand, as now seems very likely.

The obvious downside from the West’s point of view – which will be repeated over and over as this debate continues - is that, although stretching out the process, ‘delayed limited enrichment’ would permit Tehran to eventually achieve full fuel cycle capability, with the risk in turn of weapons acquisition when that happens. But the reality of Iran having that choice, sooner rather than later, and with minimal inspection and supervision along the way, now stares us in the face.

Nobody wants to see the present diplomatic impasse slide into the kind of situation where the West’s unwillingness to compromise strengthens its opponent’s extremists to the point that their country walks away from the NPT, shrugs off any kind of international monitoring, produces a large stock of weapons-grade material and ultimately takes the risk of building its own bomb. We have been there and done that with North Korea. Although there has at last been a major breakthrough in the six party talks, it is still going to be nightmarishly difficult to wholly recover the ground which has been lost to Pyongyang through earlier Western obduracy.

If the present diplomatic strategy is going nowhere but downhill, the only rational response is a new one which may be ideal for no-one but has attractions for everyone. If all diplomacy fails, the alternative course of military action is simply too horrible to contemplate.