Last decades of the 20C warmer than in past 400 years

High Confidence in Surface Temp Reconstructions Since A.D. 1600
National Research Council Report.

There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, boreholes, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" of past surface temperatures to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new report from the National Research Council. Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, said the committee that wrote the report, although the available proxy evidence does indicate that many locations were warmer during the past 25 years than during any other 25-year period since 900. Very little confidence can be placed in statements about average global surface temperatures prior to A.D. 900 because the proxy data for that time frame are sparse, the committee added.
http://nationalacademies.org/morenews/20060622.html

Full text of report
http://fermat.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html

Real life in Baghdad?

Cable below, from the US Ambassador to Iraq in Baghdad to the US Secretary of State, was leaked to the Washington Post 18 June 2006; it was sent 6 June 2006.

R 121430Z 06
Fm Amembassy Baghdad
To Secstate Washdc 5042
Info Iraq Collective
Unclas Baghdad 001992
E.O. 122956: N/ATags: phum, prel, asec, amgt, iz

Subject:
Snapshots from the Office: PublicAffairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord

Sensitive

1. (SBU) Beginning in March, and picking up in mid-May, Iraqi staff in the Public Affairs section have complained that Islamist and/or militia groups have been negatively affecting their daily routine. Harassment over proper dress and habits has been increasingly pervasive. They also report that power cuts and fuel prices have diminished their quality of life. Conditions vary by neighborhood, but even upscale neighborhoods such as Mansur have visibly deteriorated.
Women's Rights2. (SBU) The Public Affairs Office has 9 local Iraqi employees. Two of our female employees report stepped up harassment beginning in mid-May. One, a Shiite who favors Western clothing, was advised by an unknown woman in her upscale Shiite/Christian Baghdad neighborhood to wear a veil and not to drive her own car. Indeed, she said, some groups are pushing women to cover even their faces, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative.
3. (SBU) Another, a Sunni, said that people in her middle-class neighborhood are harassing women and telling them to cover up and stop using cell phones (suspected channel to licentious relationships with men). She said that the taxi driver who brings her every day to the green zone checkpoint has told her he cannot let her ride unless she wears a headcover. A female in the PAS cultural section is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats in May. She says her neighborhood, Adhamiya, is no longer permissive if she is not clad so modestly.
4. (SBU) These women say they cannot identify the groups that are pressuring them; many times, the cautions come from other women, sometimes from men who they say could be Sunni or Shiite, but appear conservative.They also tell us that some ministries, notably the Sadrist controlled Ministry of Transportation, have been forcing females to wear the hijab at work.

Dress Code for All?
5. (SBU) Staff members have reported that it is now dangerous for men to wear shorts in public; they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts. People who wear jeans in public have coe under attack from what staff members describe as Wahabis and Sadrists.

Evictions
6. (SBU) One colleague beseeched us to weigh in to help a neighbor who was uprooted in May from her home of 30 years, on the pretense of application of some long-disused law that allows owners to evict tenants after 14 years. The woman, who is a Fayli Kurd, says she has nowhere to go, no other home, but the courts give them no recourse to this assertion of power. Such uprootings may be a response ny mew Shiite government authorities to similar actions against Arabs by Kurds in other parts of Iraq. (NOTE: An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militias are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq. One editor told us that the KDP is now planning to set up tent cities in Irbil, to house Kurds being evicted from Baghdad.)

Power Cuts and Fuel Shortagesa Drain on Society
7. Temperatures in Baghdad have already reached 115 degrees. Employees all confirm that by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without. That was only about four hours of power a day for the city. By early June, the situation had improved slightly. In Hai al Shaab, power has recently improved from one in six to one in three hours. Other staff report similar variances., Central Baghdad neighborhood Bab al Mu'atham has had no city power for over a month. Areas near hospitals, political party headquarters, and the green zone have the best supply, in some cases reaching 24 hours. One staff member reported that a friend lives in a building that houses a new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city power 24 hours a day.
8. (SBU) All employees supplement city power with service contracted with neighborhood genarator hookups that they pay for monthly. One employee pays 6500 ID per ampere to get 10 amperes per month (75,000 ID = USD 50/month). For this, her family gets 6 hours power per day, with service ending at 2 am. Another employee pays 9000 ID per ampere to get 10 amperes per month (90,000 = USD 60). For this, his family gets 8 hours per day, with service running until 5 am.
9. (SBU) Fuel lines have also taxed our staff. One employee told us May 29 that he had spent 12 hours on his day off (Saturday) waiting to get gas. Another staff member confirmed that shortages were so dire, prices o the black market in much of Baghdad were now above 1,000 Iraqi dinars per liter (the official, subsidized price is 250 ID).
Kidnappings, and Threats of Worse
10. (SBU) One employee informed us in March that his brother in law had been kidnapped. The man was eventually released, but this caused enormous emotional distress to the entire family. One employee, a Sunni Kurd, received an indirect threat to her life in April. She took extended leave, and by May, relocated abroad with her family.

Security Forces Mistrusted
11. (SBU) In April, employees began reporting a change in demeanor of guards at the green zone checkpoints. They seemed to be more militia-like, in some cases seemingly taunting. One employee asked us to explore getting her press credentials because guards had held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to nearby passers-by "Embassy" as she entered. Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people.

Sectarian Tensions Within Families
16. Ethnic and sectarian faultlines are also becoming part of the daily media fare in the country. One Shiite employee told us in late May that she can no longer watch TV news with her mother, who is a Sunni, because her mother blamed all government failings on the fact that Shiites are in charge. Many of the employee's immediate family members, including her father, one sister, and a brother, left Iraq years ago. This month, another sister is departing for Egypt, as she images the future here is too bleak.

Frayed Nerves and Mistrust in the Office
17. (SBU) Against this backdrop of frayed social networks, tension and moodiness have risen. One Shiite made disparaging comments about the Sunni caliph Othman which angered a Kurd. A Sunni Arab female apparently insulted a Shiite female colleague by criticizing he overly liberal dress. One colleague told us he feels "defeated" by circumstances, citing the example of being unable to help his two year old son who has asthma and cannot sleep in the stifling heat.
18. (SBU) Another employee tells us that life outside the Green Zone has become "emotionally draining." He lives in a mostly Shiite area and claims to attend a funeral "every evening." He, like other local employees, is financially responsible for his immediate and extended families. He revealed that "the burden of responsibility; new stress coming from social circles who increasingl disapprove of the coalition presence, and everyday threats weigh very heavily." This employee became extremely agitated in late May at website reports of an abduction of an Iraqi working with MNFI, whose expired Embassy and MNFI badges were posted on the website.

Staying Straight with NeighborhoodGovernments and the 'Alasa'
19. (SBU) Staff members say they daily assess how to move safely in public. Often, if they must travel outside their own neighborhoods, they adopt the clothing, language, and traits of the area. In Jadriya, for example, one needs to conform to the SCIRI/Badr ethic; in Yusufiya, a strict Sunni conservative dress code has taken hold. Adhamiya and Salihiya, controlled by the secular Ministry of Defense, and not conservative. Moving inconspicuously in Sadr City requires Shiite conservative dress and a particular lingo. Once-upscale Mansur district, near the Green Zone, according to one employee, by early June was an "unrecognizable ghost town."
20. (SBU) Since Samarra, Baghdadis have honed these survival skills. Vocabulary has shifted to reflect new behavior. Our staff -- and our contacts -- have become adept in modifying behavior to avoid "Alasas," informants who keep an eye out for "outsiders" in neighborhoods. The Alasa mentality is becoming entrenched as Iraqi security forces fail to gain public confidence.
21. (SBU) Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted through "local providers" whose affiliations are vague. As noted above, those who are admonishing citizens on their dress are not known to the residents. Neighborhood power providers are no well known either, nor is it clear how they avoid robbery or targeting. Personal safety depends on good relations with the "neighborhood" governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by militias. People no longer trust most neighbors.
22. (SBU) A resident of upscale Shiite/Christian Karrada district told us that "outsiders" have moved in and now control the local mukhtars, one of whom now has cows and goats grazing in the streets. When she expressed her concern at the dereliction, he told her to butt out.

Comment
23. (SBU) Although our staff retain a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see that their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials. Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us towards news that comports with their own worldview. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don't abate.

Khalilzad
NNNN

Scanned pdf version (text as above) is on http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/graphics/iraqdocs_061606.pdf

Google expansion

Google thinks big in search for worldwide domination

On the banks of the Colombia river, the company is planning to build a machine so powerful that none of us will need a computer of our own. Our correspondent reports on the race to beat Yahoo and Microsoft

James Doran

The Times 15 June 2006

IN LARGE black letters on a 50-foot-wide suggestion board hanging in the lobby of Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters is scrawled the message: Take Over The World.

Some of the ideas on the board are doubtless tongue-in-cheek, but this one sums up Google’s ultimate ambition.
Many of the seemingly outlandish suggestions are marked with a big red tick. These are the ideas that have come to fruition in the seven years since Google was founded.
A Google spokeswoman insists with no hint of irony that all the others are being worked on by some of the world’s brainiest boffins somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of the futuristic university campus they call the Googleplex. Even the one about teleporting.
Google is locked in a race with Microsoft and Yahoo to dominate the internet. In turn, it is intent on transforming our lives into a series of digitised functions out of which it intends to make ever larger fortunes.
Imagine a computer so big and so powerful that none of us will ever again need a PC, just an internet connection to link us to the bit of that giant PC that contains all our data. That internet connection could either come in the shape of a very small, very cheap desktop screen and modem with minimal processing power, a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, or even a television.
Such a world is not so far away. In fact we are three quarters of the way there already and many tech-savvy computer users take advantage of similar services already offered by Google and others.
But to achieve this goal for computer users worldwide Google would need a supercomputer, or supercomputers, the size of, say, two football fields — coincidentally the size of the complex Google is building on the banks of the Columbia River.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said recently that would take about 300 years at current rates to index all the information in the world.
“To be better at what we do we need to have more servers, to be bigger and to be faster,” Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice-president for operations who is responsible for developing the company’s computing power, told The Times.
But what will it do with all that power and information, once it comes online? The denizens of Google Labs are charged with coming up with life-enhancing inventions that Google can turn to its financial advantage.
Already Google has the rudiments of an internet telephone service called Google Talk. With enough capacity to roll out a reliable service worldwide it could easily take on the likes of BT.
Froogle is the company’s online shopping tool. But imagine being able to order from your mobile phone your groceries from Tesco, a new suit from Selfridges, and a bunch of flowers from your local florist and have them delivered to your front door as you sit on the bus on the way to work.
These are ideas that have been bandied about since the internet was in its infancy. But with a series of giant supercomputers powering its searches and related services Google hopes it can bring these ideas into the everyday.

Books, newspapers and magazines would be things of the past if Google had its way.
If all published material were digitised and stored by Google, anything written by any author anywhere in the world could be downloaded and read at any time. The same goes for scholarly theses, school curriculums, training manuals and bluprints. Students from Southend to Somalia could study together in a forum where class size would be no problem.

Once a student has downloaded a curriculum or textbook he or she would need a word processor or a spreadsheet program to do their homework.
But Microsoft Word and Excel are expensive. Enter Google once more. The company has recently put its own word processor and spreadsheet program online that anyone with an internet connection can use for free.
All these ideas have Bill Gates, the Microsoft chief, Yahoo and countless other high-tech and software companies squirming as the Google juggernaut gathers speed on the information superhighway.
Talking of highways, if you have ever been stuck outside a rainy pub on a Saturday night in need of a cab, Google’s latest invention is for you.
The company is testing a mobile tracking device that will help to find a vacant taxi, the right night bus, or indeed the appropriate Tube train or tram to take you home.
These are just a tiny proportion of the ideas being mulled over inside the Googleplex. The Mountain View campus is an astonishing place. The atmosphere of intellectual discussion and invention, the quiet hum of all those brains, makes one think of a university in Renaissance Florence, or 15th- century Rotterdam. The chief difference is that the Googleplex seems to be populated by several thousand Star Trek conventioneers.
The company has created a café society with dozens of outdoor tables where nutritious vegetarian and organic food is served free around the clock. Clutches of young Indian men earnestly sip fruit and vegetable cocktails, locked in debate about whichever of the life-changing ideas they happen to be working on. Inside, young people in student garb sit in massage chairs or on exercise bikes or stand around pool tables; one even plays the piano. All of them, the company insists, are deep in thought. There is a free laundry, several dry-cleaning drop-off boxes, even an onsite mechanic. The mundane is taken care of so the Google boffins can concentrate on their inventions.
Louis Monier, the founder of the former Google rival Alta Vista and the godfather of internet search engines, can be found wandering around the corridors, rubbing his beard in professorial contemplation.
“We need to keep thinking up ideas to make people want to use Google instead of using Yahoo! or MSN or another search engine,” he said. Mr Holzle, who also resembles a college professor, agrees — but he has a grander vision for Google.
“I see in the future that the massive global community that the web inevitably creates will break down all borders,” he said with a true zealot’s quiet intensity.
“National borders, ideological borders, technological borders and so on. The internet will bring about great things for the world and for people.”

The scale of Google's ambition

Rhys Blakely

The Times 15 June 2006

The size of Google’s secret computing complex in Oregon – as big as two football fields – sheds light on only a fraction of the company’s ambitions.

The three big internet companies – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – are locked in a battle that will shape our behaviour for decades to come. The key to victory is how information – ranging from the addresses of local restaurants to television schedules to sophisticated data on, say, the workings of the world’s stock markets – is handled and distributed. This will be the overarching problem the PhDs (Google has for some time been engaged in a global recruiting drive, seeking out only the very brightest) who work in the Oregon "Googleplex" will be working on.
Google recently hinted at the scale of the task when Eric Schmidt, the company’s chief executive, revealed its own analysts have worked out that it would take 300 years to make all the world’s information searchable.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all working on the premise that if information can be searched it can – in Silicon Valley jargon – be "monetised". So far, this has meant that adverts can be attached to it.
Google makes the lion’s share of its revenues – the company's sales came in at more than $2 billion in the first three months of this year – by adding ads to search results on its flagship google.com website. But it is worried that these revenues will eventually – and inevitably – slow. To counter this it is using its vast $10 billion cash pile in a breakneck drive to diversify.
Among other things, the company also wants to be a television station (Google Video), a telephone company (GoogleTalk), a classified ads site (Google Base) and an online retailer (Froogle). Yahoo and Microsoft have ambitions along the same lines.
Among the seemingly more outlandish ideas seriously considered by Google have been the construction of a "space elevator" – a massive conveyor belt that would take payloads into space.
But Google’s competitors will be far more worried – for the time being – about its ambitions closer to home. In particular, Microsoft, the world’s largest software developer, is under threat after Google recently added to its suite of software products by revealing a spreadsheet program, a rival to Microsoft’s market leading Excel, and a word-processing package, Writely, designed to wean users off Microsoft’s near ubiquitous Word.
This new generation of "web-based applications" use huge "server farms" – massive clusters of machines that can harness far more computing power to solve a problem than a single PC can. These farms – the Oregan site is almost certainly home to one – are used to store and process data and a user's PC effectively becomes a dumb terminal, used to access the supercomputer "brain" through the web.
Google has also been busy entering markets by proxy. It is the source of a massive amount of funding for the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox internet browser – the main rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mozilla is an open "source company" – which means it shares the blueprints – or "source code" of its products with anybody who wants them.
Microsoft regards these sort of companies as public enemy No 1. It is hard not to see Google’s activity as calculated to irk Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, the world’s richest man. The ploy has probably worked – Microsoft’s share price plunged earlier this year after it said it would spend $2 billion in an effort to keep up with Google.
There are even suggestions that Google wants to build its own version of the internet. Already the company has offered to make San Francisco into one giant "hotspot" – where people with a wireless connection can access the web for free. But it has also advertised for experts in "dark fibre" – the thousands of miles of optical cable that were laid at the height of the dot-com boom but which have since gone unused. It could conceivably use these as a kind of super-internet, capable of transmitting much more information at much higher speeds than currently possible on the web. The Oregan site could play a key role in such a project by allowing Google to host vast amounts of data there.
Taking all these projects - just a taste of Google's portfolio - in aggregate, a picture forms where one day in the future Google will not only help you find stuff on the web – for free. It will also bill you for using its voice and data network (a senior BT executive last week identified Google as the major threat to his company). You will not even need to visit Amazon.com to buy a book, since the entire canon will be available online through Google Print, the controversial plan to digitise the world’s great libraries. If you get lost away from your PC, Google Maps will help you find your way – probably through your mobile phone, a gadget on which Google has its sights firmly set.
And if you need to urgently send a payload into space, there’s even a chance it will be able to help you there as well.

If you wish, see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex
http://www.google.com/corporate/culture.html
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/inside_google/
http://www.braintique.com/research/mt/
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Photo_gallery_Inside_the_GooglePlex/0,39023769,39223136,00.htm (London Office)
http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39154338,00.htm (London Office)
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/search/story/0,15886,1645883,00.html (London Office)

Afghanistan's unsettled future

Afghanistan: On the Brink
By Ahmed Rashid

New York Review of Books, 22 June 2006

Afghanistan's Uncertain Transition from Turmoil to Normalcy
a report by Barnett R. Rubin
Council on Foreign Relations, March 2006, 43 pp., $10.00

Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan
by Ann Jones
Metropolitan, 321 pp., $24.00

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Viking, 336 pp., $25.95

1.

In December 2005 I spent several hours a day in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul interviewing some of the people who passed by. The hotel, perched on a hill at the edge of the city and long ago written off by the Intercontinental chain as a loss, has been through some rough times in Afghanistan's twenty-three years of war. In 1992 I spent more than a month using the hotel as a bunker to avoid getting hit, first as the Communist regime crumbled and then as the civil war unfolded across the city below me. For much of the following decade the hotel was without regular electricity or running water and you never saw an Afghan woman there.

In 2005, sitting on a sofa in the hotel's lobby, I found on my left a former Taliban commander with a beard down to his waist, and on my right a young and beautiful Afghan woman from Herat, whose only concession to "covering up" was a very loose and flimsy head scarf. They were both members of the new Afghan parliament that had been elected on September 18; for the past week they had been receiving instruction from UN experts on what a parliament was and how to behave in one. The two-hour lunch breaks allowed the members of parliament (MPs) to meet each other informally. As he argued with the woman, I could see that the former Taliban officer was still in a state of shock that she was there at all.

An even bigger shock must have been the seating arrangements on December 19, 2005, when the parliament was inaugurated by President Hamid Karzai in the presence of US Vice President Dick Cheney, who arrived twenty minutes late. Men and women MPs were seated next to each other in alphabetical order—and there were no complaints. That does not happen in Iran or in the Arab world; the largely rigged parliaments in most Muslim countries enforce strict segregation.

The parliament has proved that it is not a tightly controlled vehicle for Karzai or the Americans. It set about its first task in March 2006 with the kind of earnestness and professionalism one might expect from much older bodies. In Afghanistan's presidential system of government, the country's new constitution gives parliament the power to approve the president's cabinet and the MPs did just that. They politely demanded that each of Karzai's twenty-five cabinet ministers present their credentials, say what they had achieved and hoped to achieve, and then answer tough, rapid-fire questions from the MPs.

Even more remarkable was that the proceedings were, for the first time, broadcast live on TV and on radio. A large part of the population watched them. For a month work came to a standstill while mesmerized Afghans heard tribal and warlord ministers fumble for words as they sought to explain themselves. Eventually on April 20 parliament approved only twenty ministers, forcing Karzai to fire five of his nominees.

It is hard to overstate the importance of such a freewheeling parliament and the first general elections experienced by Afghans since 1973. Some 6.6 million Afghans had cast their vote and 41 percent of them were women. Women hold sixty-eight seats or 27 percent of the 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, or lower "House of the People," and one sixth of the seats in the Meshrano Jirga—the upper house or Senate called the "House of the Elders." That is by far a greater number of women in parliament than in any other Muslim country, or, for that matter, in many Western countries. Yet an estimated one third of the male MPs consists of warlords, gross violators of human rights, or men involved in drug smuggling. It is what you get after more than two decades of war.

The voter turnout last September was only 53 percent, compared to 70 percent for the presidential elections in 2004. The reasons for the low turnout have everything to do with the perilous state of Afghanistan today, the lack of security, and the disillusionment of voters.
The elections brought to a conclusion the UN-sponsored process that began in late November 2001, when the UN officials Lakhdar Brahimi and Francesc Vendrell persuaded the Afghan factions to meet in Bonn to outline a "road map" for the future. Since then the Afghans have debated and voted on a new constitution, freely elected a president and a parliament, and set up councils in all thirty-four provinces to run their own affairs. By now over 60,000 militiamen have been disarmed, five million children have been sent back to school, and some health care is being provided beyond Kabul. The growth of Afghanistan's gross domestic product (GDP)—excluding its booming production of opium—has averaged around 17 percent each year since 2002.

This year GDP growth is expected to amount to 14 percent, and the government will finance 60 percent of its annual budget with its own revenue rather than from Western and other donors—even though the funds for the entire development and reconstruction budget still come from donor countries. Yet government revenue will total only 5.4 percent of non-drug GDP in 2006, "less than any country with data," according to the latest Council of Foreign Relations report on Afghanistan by Barnett Rubin. Ominously he also points out that the postwar economic boom is now coming to an end. Rubin, the best of a handful of American scholars on Afghanistan before September 11, still knows Afghanistan better than anyone else. His report for the Council on Foreign Relations makes depressing reading, whether in showing what was not done at the right time or what still needs to be done.

2.

Attempts to resurrect the Afghan state during the last five years have been dependent on four sets of players. On the Afghan side there are Karzai and his ministers, the warlords, and struggling human rights workers. The international community has been led by the UN secretary general's special representative to Afghanistan. The first three special representatives —Brahimi, followed by the Frenchman Jean Arnault and the German Tom Koenigs—have helped administer the elections, the parliament, and the government, and they have coordinated their activities with the UN development agencies and some eight hundred Western and Afghan non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well.

The most influential international officials have been the Americans, led by the US ambassador and the successive American generals who have led the coalition forces, which now number 23,000 troops. (Most of them are Americans who are hunting down members of al-Qaeda.) The most decisive and intrusive foreign official in Afghanistan was Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as US ambassador from 2003 to 2005 and is now the US ambassador in Iraq. Initially, the US government refused help with peacekeeping in Afghanistan. A more recent participant in this activity in Afghanistan is NATO, which, since August 2003, has led the eight-thousand-strong International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, in Kabul. This year NATO will deploy 11,000 more troops as it sets up provincial reconstruction teams in twenty-three of the country's thirty-four provinces. Next year US forces will merge under NATO to create a single command.

It is now five years since George W. Bush declared victory in Afghanistan and said that the terrorists were smashed. Since the Bonn meeting, in late 2001, a smorgasbord of international military and development forces has been increasing in size. How is it, then, that Afghanistan is near collapse once again? To put it briefly, what has gone wrong has been the invasion of Iraq: Washington's refusal to take state-building in Afghanistan seriously and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq. For Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money, and a lack of coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives on the part of Western and Afghan leaders. The Bonn conference created the scaffolding to build the new Afghan structure, but what was consistently missing were the bricks and running water. Inside the scaffolding there is still only the barest shell.

One consequence has been a revived Taliban movement that has made a third of the country ungovernable. Together with al-Qaeda, Taliban leaders are trying to carve out new bases on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. They are aided by Afghanistan's resurgent opium industry, which has contributed to widespread corruption and lawlessness, particularly in the south. The country's huge crop of poppies is processed into opium and refined into heroin for export, now accounting for close to 90 percent of the global market. This spring's crop is expected to be larger than ever, and reports suggest that drug smugglers are increasingly forming alliances with Taliban fighters. According to the Independent in London, Islamic fighters agreed to temporarily suspend their campaign of violence during the poppy harvest this year, to ensure maximum profits. The Afghan government has shown a fatal incapacity to deliver services to its people and the West has failed to deal with interfering neighbors, such as Pakistan and Iran.

The situation was becoming so critical that many concerned donors, but especially the United Nations, debated how to formally continue extending support to Afghanistan after the process agreed on at Bonn was completed. In February 2006, Karzai, the UN, and a large group of nations signed the Afghanistan Compact in London, setting out, once again, the world's commitment to Afghanistan and in turn Kabul's commitment to state-building over the next five years. Praised as a major declaration of the world's solidarity with Afghanistan, the compact is in fact an admission of strategic failure. Many of its goals can be found in numerous promises, agreements, and pledges that were made, and never fulfilled, by the US, Britain, and other powerful nations as far back as 2001. The compact may well be a case of too little too late—even if it could be fully carried out. Rubin observes that the Afghan government will be held accountable for any failure to meet the compact's ambitious goals, but the Western nations that sponsored it cannot be held accountable. We have seen the same pattern in Iraq and Sudan. The international community makes promises that remain unfulfilled, only to remake them a few years later, freshly packaged.

NATO's supreme commander, the American general James Jones, is fond of saying that Afghanistan's main problem is drugs, not the Taliban. However, without taking on the Taliban, the drug problem cannot be addressed. In the four southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Uruzgan, the Taliban and their mafia friends from Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia command farmers to grow poppies so they can rake in money from taxes and peddle heroin abroad to fund their movement. These provinces are the main base and command center for the Taliban and are now entirely devoid of any signs of economic reconstruction or the presence of NGOs. I was told that British, Dutch, and Canadian troops under NATO command will be deployed in these provinces this summer; but they have adamantly refused to address the poppy problem, and each country has a different strategy for contending with the Taliban. The British say they will go on the offensive; the Dutch say they will act defensively. Thus the NATO forces seem more like a coalition of the unwilling than anything else, and the Taliban have started to challenge them with an accelerated summer campaign of bombings and ambushes.

At a conference in Madrid on May 17, General Jones made an impassioned plea to the twenty-six NATO countries who are sending troops to Afghanistan this summer to end the national restrictions that they impose on their own forces. There are now some seventy-one restrictions on how the forces can be used, he said, making it extremely difficult for the commander of ISAF to run an effective military campaign—whether it's winning people's sympathies or fighting the Taliban. Jones told me he was doing his best to get the caveats down to a manageable number.
The day after the conference, as Jones left Madrid, the Taliban attacked in four provinces in southern Afghanistan. Trying to seize a small town in Helmand province, they sponsored two suicide car bomb attacks, ambushed convoys, and planted mines. A total of 105 Afghan civilians, police, and Taliban died—the bloodiest single day since the war ended in December 2001. A Canadian woman soldier and an American contractor were also killed.

The American government has demanded that NATO become more active, because, I was told, the beleaguered Donald Rumsfeld is desperate to bring some American troops home by November's congressional elections. Around three thousand of the 23,000 US troops now deployed in Afghanistan are scheduled to return home this summer and Western intelligence officials say several thousand more may depart before November. The start of an American withdrawal in the midst of a vicious Taliban resurgence naturally infuriates Karzai and his government; it is particularly disillusioning for millions of Afghans who, unlike their Iraqi counterparts, still equate a sizable US military presence with security, continued international funding, and reconstruction. In Iraq practically the entire population wants the Americans to leave, however pleased they are about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the survival of the new Afghan government has depended upon the leadership of the US and its ability to convince the rest of the world to rebuild the country. The US needs to contribute money to carry out its promises and show it is willing to stay the course. It is doing neither.

Since 2003 when the Taliban first began to regroup, they have gradually matured and developed with the help of al-Qaeda, which has reorganized and retrained them to use more sophisticated tactics in their military operations. As recently as a year ago, the main Taliban groups were composed of a few dozen fighters; now each group includes hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, and horses. They burn down schools and administrative buildings and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government. In the south, they operate with impunity just outside the provincial capitals, which have become like Green Zones. Approximately 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some three hundred already this year. There have been forty suicide bombings during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five years. Some 295 US soldiers and four CIA officials have been killed in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001 —140 by hostile action.

The Taliban movement is partially directed from Quetta, in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province, where it has been allowed to flourish largely undisturbed by the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf. The Pakistanis have never started a military operation against the Taliban in Ba-luchistan or arrested a single senior Taliban commander—although several minor officials have been handed over to Kabul. Taliban logistics, training, and recruitment were formerly dependent on allies in Pakistan such as the fundamentalist Islamic parties that rule Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. But the Taliban is now well entrenched in southern Afghanistan too. Al-Qaeda has also put Taliban members in touch with insurgents in Iraq; the result is that the Taliban members are learning how to plan and carry out suicide bombings, make and plant mines, and detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They thus have been able to prepare increasingly deadly ambushes for Afghan and Western troops.

3.

North of Baluchistan, in the Pakistani Pashtun tribal areas of North and South Waziristan and adjacent provinces in Afghanistan, a more international kind of insurgent movement has taken root. It is led by al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban, and includes members of the Afghan Taliban, Central Asians loyal to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Chechens, Uighur and Chinese Muslims, and other Afghan groups led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. They are fighting largely in the east and northeast of Afghanistan, but have also demonstrated an improved capacity to set off car bombs and mount suicide attacks in Kabul and other major cities. They have been able to hold off Pakistani troops who were sent to Pakistan's border areas by Musharraf under considerable US pressure in the spring of 2004. However, Pakistan is not the only problem. Barnett Rubin writes that all of Afghanistan's neighbors—Iran, India, Russia, and the Central Asian Republics—oppose a long-term US presence and have funds for their own Afghan proxies just as they did during the civil war in the 1990s. They are waiting for the Americans to leave.

The lack of security is a direct consequence of the small numbers of Western forces on the ground. Quite apart from the countryside, they have failed to secure even the major cities and highways so that aid agencies can work. For five years the US Pentagon has single-mindedly pursued al-Qaeda while failing (just as it has done in Iraq) to acknowledge the need for a coherent plan to restore civil society in Afghanistan, as well as the importance of hunting down the Taliban, which it has treated as a local, Afghan problem that US troops should not be concerned with. The result has been the absence of a clear US strategy for dealing with Pakistan. This has deeply frustrated the Afghan leadership, while creating periodic shout-ing matches between Karzai and Musharraf on CNN. The effectiveness of the American campaign against al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is itself questionable, since the group's two top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large. The Americans claim to have caught numer-ous leaders they describe as Number Three in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, although every time a Number Three is caught another seems to take his place.

Second on Rubin's list of Afghanistan's most serious problems is "corrupt and ineffective administration without resources." Once the war in Iraq began, the government received too little money and support to make its ministries capable of delivering services to the people. In this vacuum, warlords and cabinet ministers were quickly won over by bribes from members of the drug trade; they sought out business and property deals for themselves. But the major nations were squabbling over Iraq and paying little attention. Rubin observes that poverty, hunger, ill health, and gender inequality are so bad in Afghanistan that the country remains at the bottom of every global ranking.

In Afghanistan, the drug trade has undermined everything from security to development, while increasing public frustration with the government. Afghanistan produces 87 percent of the world's heroin according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), based in Vienna. UNODC estimates that the value of all opiates produced in Afghanistan last year was $2.8 billion—out of which only $600 million reached the farmers. That is much less than the average estimated $2.5 billion per year that Western donors have provided Afghanistan since 2001. The aid programs supposed to provide alternative livelihoods to farmers producing poppies or help them grow other lucrative cash crops are derisory when compared to what the drug smugglers offer. The best-functioning programs to help farmers are run by opium traffickers who provide improved varieties of poppy seeds, fertilizer, and better methods of cultivation to increase opium yields and even large-scale employment during the poppy harvest. When we compare Afghanistan's situation today with that of 2001, we see the country now needs to develop an entire alternative economy to replace the drug economy.

That international donors refuse to invest in the agricultural regions where 70 percent of the population live has been a critical failure. Another has been the failure to fund infrastructure projects. In the five years since the US-led invasion not a single new dam, power station, or major water system has been built. Only one major intercity highway has been completed. Only one in three Kabul residents has electricity, which works only one out of every three nights. Rubin points out that until 2003 funding for Afghanistan's reconstruction was below that of East Timor and Haiti. Meanwhile, the US and NATO are spending between $15 billion and $18 billion a year on their military operations. Most tragic of all, Western populations are hardly aware of the crisis because there has been chronic failure to report on Afghanistan, especially in the US.

4.

Recently I asked a friend who is a senior reporter with CNN why CNN has not had a staff reporter in Kabul or Islamabad for over a year. These are, after all, two capitals that are cen-tral to the Bush administration's "war on terror," and the lack of reporters meant that the 18,000 US troops in Afghanistan are getting almost no mention in CNN's international news coverage. In view of recent decisions by Time magazine, The New York Times, and other major press organizations to fire hundreds of journalists, I thought my friend would talk of cost-cutting measures and reduced budgets for reporting in dangerous areas. Instead he answered, "You can add other major capitals, such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Tehran, that are also going uncovered."
He told me that the problem in these Muslim capitals is not one of cost, but that very few senior staff members are volunteering to be stationed there. Nor are young American men and women, who a few years ago would be volunteering to report from Asia and the Middle East, coming forward. In contrast, in Britain, dozens of young journalists have been applying to report from both regions, whenever jobs come open. "Americans, especially young Americans, do not want to travel to Asia or the Islamic world, anywhere there may be danger," my CNN friend said. "It's a sad time for American journalism."

The two books under review, however, have been written by adventurous Americans who have lived in Afghanistan and Pakistan and have come to know both countries well. Ann Jones, the author of several feminist books, arrived in Kabul in December 2002, about a year after the US stopped bombing the country. She began to work for a small but effective NGO called Madar, or Mother, an organization set up some years earlier to help women in Kabul who had been widowed during the country's many conflicts. In Kabul in Winter, Jones describes her visits to down-and-out Afghan women in prisons and her experience teaching English to female teachers—jobs nobody else wanted to do.

Her book finely evokes the places Jones came to know. "Kabul in winter," she writes,
is the color of the dust, though the dust is no color at all. It's a fine particulate lifted by winds from old stone mountains and sifted over the city like flour. It lies in the streets and drifts over the sidewalks where it compacts in hillocks and holes. Rain and snowmelt make it mud. Mountain suns bake it....

When Jones visits young Afghan women in prison, she finds they were almost invariably put there after being abused, raped, or burned by their own men. She describes a typical case:
Dustana said she was about twenty, though her sallow skin and sunken cheeks made her look older. She had been in prison for six months. She too had been married off, but only a few months after the wedding, her husband's brother came to her house and ordered her to leave it because her husband had divorced her. The brother showed her an official-looking paper, but being illiterate, she couldn't read it. She asked to talk with her husband, but the brother said she could not. Instead he delivered her to the house of her aunt.

There, after some time, the aunt introduced her to a man from Bamiyan and said that she must marry him. She did as she was told, but the marriage was a fake, and the next day the new "husband" disappeared. The brother of the original husband, having come into a little money, also disappeared. (Zulal [Jones's translator] turned to me: "Is this not also in English 'prostitution'?") Then, to Dustana's surprise, her husband showed up. He brought the police and insisted they arrest Dustana on charges of adultery and bigamy. After investigators reported their findings to the prosecutor, she was brought to court, convicted of "illegal marriage," and sentenced to five years in prison.

There are, Jones writes, numerous codes of law—penal, legal, customary, and religious—that women have to conform to in each tribe or ethnic group. The question of women's rights is never raised. If they don't obey orders, or resist being abused, the men in their lives can have them arrested. As in many Muslim countries there is no specific law against rape—an Afghan woman who reports being raped is usually charged with adultery. Despite a new constitution that guarantees women's rights, many judges are barely literate and know only Sharia or Islamic law.

Unfortunately Jones uses part of her book to rehearse the recent history of Afghanistan. She has not talked to the politicians and revolutionary leaders who made much of this history and has to rely on printed sources which make her account reminiscent of other Western histories of the region. Jones also indulges in a long diatribe against what she sees as the warlike, misogynist character of Afghan society, and the Western journalists who failed to criticize it. "Afghans are famous fighters," she writes. "Fierce, implacable, ruthless, bold, savage, brutal—these are the adjectives attached to them in history books." She is particularly critical of Western journalists such as the foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan, who in the 1980s and early 1990s celebrated the heroism of Mujahideen fighters. Their reportage, she writes,
sometimes read like fan mail, tinged with a kind of homoerotic glorification of manliness, yet safely homoerotic because these tough, fierce, idealized bearded warriors seemed the very pinnacle of macho masculinity.

This kind of feminist anger is present throughout her book. At the same time, Jones sometimes relies on broad generalizations of the kind she criticizes in other journalists, as when she suggests that Western women working in Kabul dream of having an affair with their handsome Afghan drivers.

Jones is much more informative in her account of teaching English to female schoolteachers, a sobering experience in a country ravaged by years of Islamist rule and civil strife:
Our class meets in a school in the midst of a neighborhood of grim Russian-built apartment blocks. Once exclusively a high school, it is now used for primary and secondary (middle) school students as well. The different age groups are supposed to use the building in separate shifts, but at any hour the hallways seem filled with small noisy boys who run up and down screaming and fighting while little girls wrapped in big white chadors sit silently in the classrooms. Women teachers stand hopelessly in the corridors amid the swirl of shouting boys, as if there is nothing they can do. It is like a prep school for mujahidin—training up another generation of the kind of guys who wrecked the place during the civil wars.

Jones harshly criticizes Hamid Karzai for not taking a stronger stand about women's rights, although it could be argued that he has not been able to establish sufficient control of the country's legal system for any such pronouncements on his part to make a serious difference. But she writes perceptively about Washington's cronyism in its funding of development projects. The complaints of Afghans and Iraqis that hundreds of millions of dollars of development assistance are being squandered are quite understandable when, as Jones writes, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) hired consultants for $1,000 a day to report on the way that projects were being carried out. Afghan experts could do such tasks just as well for a small fraction of the cost.

In Afghanistan the biggest USAID contractor for education is Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C.–based consulting company that has close connections to both the Pentagon and the State Department. In 2003 it received a $60 million contract from USAID to develop primary education in Afghanistan. The Washington Post, in recent reports, has described the failure of this project. Primary schools built at a cost of $174,000 each could have been built by Afghan contractors for $20,000 or less.

In Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson, whose story is recounted by the journalist David Relin, is even more intrepid than Jones. A brilliant and well-known mountain climber, who today could be earning millions endorsing rucksacks in outdoor magazines, Mortenson decided instead to build a school in the most remote corner of northern Pakistan, a place that is unknown to all but very few Pakistanis.

Relin describes how Mortenson grew up in Africa, joined the US Army, trained as a nurse, and became a climber. In Pakistan in 1993 he was separated from a mountaineering party while trying to climb K2, the second-highest peak in the world, and was rescued by the extremely poor residents of a village called Korphe, which is situated on the edge of giant glaciers in Baltistan, a corner of Pakistan close to China:

Korphe was far from the prelapsarian paradise of Western fantasy. In every home, at least one family member suffered from goiters or cataracts. The children, whose ginger hair he had admired, owed their coloring to a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor.... The nearest doctor was a week's walk away in Skardu, and one out of every three Korphe children died before reaching their first birthday.

After Mortenson recovered he promised to build the villagers a school. His mother started a Pennies for Pakistan at the school where she teaches in Wisconsin. At home in Montana he sold everything he owned and lived in his car so he could save money for the project. In the meantime he lost his girlfriend and his job, and seemed to be going nowhere. He finally met Tara, the love of his life, and married her a few days after their first meeting.

Finally Mortenson received a $10,000 gift from a rich benefactor, which he used to establish the Central Asia Institute—an NGO dedicated to building schools—and returned to Pakistan. In the meantime he encountered mullahs who issued fatwas against him. It took him three difficult years to build his first primary school in Korphe, but in the next three months he built three more. He immediately understood why many experts have concluded that improving the lives of the people in such regions depends on educating girls. By now, he has built fifty-five schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, where 24,000 students are being educated.[*]

In telling Mortenson's story, the book also traces the history of the severely orthodox madrasas in Pakistan and describes how rich Arab Wahabbis arrive with suitcases of money to fund them. Well before September 11, Mortenson became a foresighted advocate of strengthening the Pakistani education system as a means of countering Islamic extremism. But the strongest part of his book is its account of how his single-minded pursuit of his plan to build a school inspired a wide and unlikely cast of characters to join him in his ventures. Among these, for example, are the tribal elders who befriended him, a taxi driver who became his guardian angel, and the Wazirs from Waziri-stan who kidnapped him while they were high on hashish. At one point, Mortenson was called before Pakistan's Shia clerics, who had been deliberating about whether his school-building work could be permitted under Islamic law:
Inside stood the eight imposing black-turbaned members of the Council of Mullahs. From the severity with which Syed Mohammed Abbas Risvi greeted him, Mortenson presumed the worst. With Parvi, he sank heavily down on an exquisite Isfahan carpet woven with a pattern of flowing vines. Syed Abbas motioned for the rest of the council to join them in a circle on the carpet, then sat himself, placing a small red velvet box on the plush wool before his knees.
With due ceremony, Syed Abbas tilted back the lid of the box, withdrew a scroll of parchment wrapped in red ribbon, unfurled it, and revealed Mortenson's future. "Dear Compassionate of the Poor," he translated from the elegant Farsi calligraphy, "our Holy Koran tells us all children should receive education, including our daughters and sisters. Your noble work follows the highest principles of Islam, to tend for the poor and sick. In the Holy Koran there is no law to prohibit an infidel from providing assistance to our Muslim brothers and sisters. Therefore," the decree continued, "we direct all clerics in Pakistan to not interfere with your noble intentions. You have our permission, blessings, and prayers."

The drawback of Mortenson's story, as told by Relin, is that it says little about the wider background of world events. While Jones's book goes on at too great a length about regional history, Three Cups of Tea does too little. The tumultuous political climate in which Mortenson found himself is rarely explained sufficiently, and when events are described, there are numerous mistakes in names and dates, as, for example, in the account of the Afghan factions fighting the civil war in the 1990s. Too much is said about Mortenson's attempts to raise money and too little about the far more interesting period following September 11, when Mortenson took on the task of helping Afghans build schools. Inevitably, Mortenson's book has much to say about the American failures in Afghanistan. "Everywhere we went, we saw US planes and helicopters," says Julia Bergman, one of Mortenson's supporters who visits Afghanistan with him after September 11. "And I can only imagine the money we were spending on our military. But where was the aid? I'd heard so much about what America promised Afghanistan's people—how rebuilding the country was one of our top priorities...."

Both Mortenson and Jones make a plea for Americans to learn from history, something the Bush administration has consistently refused to do. Bush visited Kabul for the first time on March 1, 2006, for a few hours, where he remarked on how brilliantly everything was going. In his more lucid moments, Zahir Shah, the former king of Afghanistan, now ninety-two years old, recalls the first US president to visit Kabul. That was President Dwight Eisenhower, who also came for a one-day visit, on December 9, 1959, when, at forty-five, the King ruled the country and was considered young. Shah remembers that he asked Eisenhower for more economic aid for his impoverished country, as well as diplomatic help to improve Afghanistan's deteriorating relationship with Pakistan, and a sustained US presence to protect the country. The help he received was meager and ineptly supplied. Some things never change.
—May 24, 2006

Notes

[*] The Web site of the project is www .ikat.org.

Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and writer. He is the author of the best-selling Taliban and, most recently, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. He is a BBC contributor and writes for several newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph and the International Herald Tribune. (June 2006)

Ice highway leading to an Antarctica road network?

The first couple of items refer to the 'ice highway'. The rest of the websites refer to (scientific)work being done in Antarctica by Australia, New Zealand, Poland, United Kingdom, United States of America. All the websites contain information about Antarctica generally and about the Antarctic Treaty.

USA's Science-Driven "Ice Highway" Hitting Rough Sledding in Antarctica
http://www.siteselection.com/ssinsider/snapshot/sf041213.htm
(includes map [of possible 'highways'], photos, websites and statistics)

See also: Icy Overland Trip May Add Ground Vehicles to South Pole Supply Missions
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=105718&org=olpa&from=news

'California on ice' — the last great land grab
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/california-on-ice-151-the-last-great-land-grab/2006/04/21/1145344279959.html

Antarctic 'cold rush' raises fears for last great wilderness
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/04/want04.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/04/ixnews.html

Australian Antarctic Division
http://www.aad.gov.au/default.asp
(Official Australian Govt website about Antartica: very large website and with news from the individual Australian bases there)

Antarctica New Zealand
http://www.antarcticanz.govt.nz/
(Official NZ site showing the work ANZ)

British Antarctic Survey
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/index.php
(Official website of the BAS; large website about the BASs work, especially in the Antarctic; excellent introduction to the Antarctic Treaty; news from the individual UK bases there)

United States Antarctic Program
http://www.usap.gov/
(Large official website with lists of scientific projects; lots of photos)

National Science Foundation – Office of Polar Programs
http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OPP
(Large official website with details of polar scientific results and much else)

Polish Antarctic Station Henryk Arctowski
http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/dab/ and
http://www.dab.waw.pl/