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NUCLEAR
Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark
China link to nuclear network
Top US official seeks China's support
BLAIR FACES 'PEACE' CHALLENGE ON VISIT TO PARTY CONFERENCE
EU's Patten says any European firms in nuclear scandals
Nuclear energy a must if Europe to fulfil Kyoto criteria
India, Pakistan Open Historic Peace Talks
India and Pakistan Restart Talks After 2 Years
Pakistan demands nuclear papers
AP: Pakistan Nuke Scientist Bought Loyalty
Out of the Nuclear Loop
Iran confirms it is researching use of new centrifuges
Iran Announces Plans To Sell Nuclear Fuel
U.S. Will Stand Firm on N. Korea
U.S.: No Concessions to North Korea
U.N. Nuclear Official to Visit Libya
UN Nuke Chief ElBaradei to Visit Libya Next Week
UN nuclear chief to visit Libya
Half a Proliferation Program
Bush -- Is the Tide Turning? by Rahul Mahajan
MILITARY
U.S. Aides Hint Afghan Voting May Be Put Off
Afghans Seek Vote Despite Security Woes
Afghan President Pushes Ahead with Election Goal
Visit to U.S. aims for 'strategic partnership'
U.S. General Warns of Africa Terror Threat
New Direction in Uganda's Old War
U.S. PROVIDES SUPPORT FOR UAE MISSILE PROGRAM
Navy Jet Fighter Is for Sale on EBay
Federal Contracts
Kuwait parliament group to probe Halliburton deal
Lockheed Martin Demonstrates
Taiwan's Chen Says Unification with China Possible
Bremer pins hopes on UN as exit strategy from Iraq
Bremer Suggests U.S. May Block Islamic Law in Iraq
After Attacks, Iraqi Security Looks Unready
Iraqi Police Net No. 41 on Wanted List
Iraq May Be Slipping Into Civil War
Israeli TV: Army to Collect Gas Masks
Mysterious army movements in Equatorial Guinea
Castro demands Bush make clear assassination policy
Muslim Chaplain's Case Sparks Questions
Military goes high-tech in bid to win recruits
Have the Neocons Killed a Presidency?
For Al Jazeera, Balanced Coverage
U.S. Reportedly to Probe Charges of Vietnam Killings
NATO Still Seeks Karadzic, But Can't Find Him
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Don't sacrifice civil liberties
U.N.: Cuban Dissidents Held in 'Alarming' Conditions
Partisan Denunciations Fly Over Secret Strategy Memos
Homegrown Terror A potent poison.
ENERGY
New Reactor Puts Hydrogen From Renewable Fuels Within Reach
Suncor gets grant to help build ethanol plant
Senate Leaders Plan Vote on Energy Bill
Democrat calls energy bill doomed
ACTIVISTS
Smoking Gun
Spanish demonstrators call for military withdrawal from Iraq
Rejected Iran Reformer Protests in Tehran
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark
(Episode #2: The SIOP Option that Wasn't)
Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D, CDI President, bblair@c...
Feb. 16, 2004
http://www.cdi.org/blair/launch-on-warning.cfm
One of the most rarefied experiences of a newly installed president is his receiving of the "nuclear football" conferring the right to order the use of nuclear weapons in defense of the American national interest. Few, if any, presidents have had a firm grip on the "football" however, as all U.S. presidents receive a misleading briefing on their nuclear weapons rights and responsibilities, and options.
From the time of this highly classified orientation briefing given immediately upon his assumption of the presidency through the end of his tenure, a president is made to believe that he is the nuclear quarterback in control of the nuclear football and would call the shots in the event of a nuclear show-down or enemy missile attack. In the latter case, the short flight time of missiles launched from half way around the planet - 30 minutes from Russia to the American heartland - or from submarines lurking off the U.S. coasts - 10 to 15 minutes to Washington, D.C. -- puts the president in the hot seat. He must evaluate early warning information, weigh his response options, and render a decision within minutes and seconds.
Given the awesome responsibility and authority of the commander in chief in a situation of apparent incoming nuclear missiles, one can only hope for a deliberate, rational act of leadership and prudence that impels a president to refrain from ordering retaliation in the event of a false alarm triggered by faulty sensors or human error.
What is misleading about the briefing is that the president's supporting command system is not actually geared to withhold retaliation in the event of enemy missile attack, real or apparent. It is so greased for the rapid release of U.S. missiles forces by the thousands upon the receipt of attack indications from early warning satellites and ground radar that the president's options are not all created equal. The bias in favor of launch on electronic warning is so powerful that it would take enormously more presidential will to withhold an attack than to authorize it. The option to "ride out" the onslaught and then take stock of the proper course of action exists only on paper. That is what presidents never learn during their tenures. Their real control is illusory. What's more, the truth has been kept from the presidents intentionally.
Military nuclear commanders designed the hardware and procedures of emergency decision-making to ensure that no president would actually deliberately opt to ride out a Soviet nuclear attack, even though U.S. nuclear policy endorsed second-strike retaliation - assured destruction - as the essential element of U.S. deterrent strategy. While the rhetoric of top civilian officials, the theories of academics, the media accounts, and the debates on Capitol Hill revolved around the necessity and sufficiency of being able to retaliate massively after absorbing a full-scale Soviet strike, the nuclear commanders had long since jettisoned this principle. They knew full well that the U.S. nuclear command system would collapse under the weight of such a Soviet first strike, and that their ability to carry out their war plan (the Single Integrated Operational Plan) and achieve the high level of destruction of Soviet military and industrial facilities required by the war plan (which they themselves set at such high levels) depended completely on not waiting more than a few minutes before initiating a large-scale counterattack. Riding out was not a practical choice in the real world, and so the operational system was geared so that presidential approval to unleash U.S. strategic forces before the first incoming Soviet missile reached America would be obtained. And if for some reason timely presidential authorization could not be secured, launch authority quickly cascaded down the military chain of command to ensure that U.S. missiles did not remain sitting ducks for very long.
Presidents were innocent victims of the prevailing overarching principle of deterrence based on second-strike retaliation, never the wiser to the thorough-going engineering of the complex early warning and command system operations so as to deny them any semblance of wartime options aligned with that very principle. Almost no senior civilian official, let alone president, ever caught on to the egregious deception that kept them in the dark about their true options in wartime. One exception was former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga. His close scrutiny of nuclear affairs, combined with a keen intellect, led him to realize that the United States long ago adopted a strategy of launch on warning (LOW) - that is ordering and carrying out U.S. missile launches after early warning sensors indicate an incoming nuclear missile strike but before enemy missiles hit their targets on American soil. He came to this realization quite independently, without helpful testimony from strategic nuclear commanders who doggedly denied their reliance on LOW in public, and virtually all private, fora. The official dogma they expressed was that the United States had the capability to launch on warning and a potential adversary should not assume that a U.S. attack would be ridden out, but that the United States did not rely on LOW. For Nunn, however, it was clear that the apparatus of nuclear control and release was geared to do just that. If it looked, sounded, and walked like a LOW duck, then call it a LOW duck. Nunn declared it a duck, understood that this duck carried serious risks of starting a nuclear war by accident, and proceeded to call for a relaxation of the nuclear hair-trigger on both U.S. and Russian missiles in order to alleviate this danger.
Nunn almost certainly did not fully grasp the commitment to LOW embodied in the nuclear operational world, however. Only the most senior nuclear generals understood the imperative, and they simply refused to admit it, owing to their justifiable apprehension that such an admission would stir enormous public controversy and almost certainly force them to revise operational practices in ways that would put the viability of the U.S. SIOP in jeopardy.
My efforts to expose the hair-trigger status of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and their reliance on LOW have been met with vigorous denials from the nuclear brass. The efforts have been well-grounded in personal experience, confidences with senior U.S. nuclear generals, facts and analysis assembled in articles and books - notably, Strategic Command and Control (Brookings, 1985), The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Brookings, 1993), and Global Zero Alert for Nuclear Forces (Brookings, 1995). But neither this body of work nor any other clarion call from any quarter succeeded in engendering a national debate and reckoning. And the nuclear brass never stepped forward to testify candidly about the true state of affairs - about the illusory nuclear flexibility of the president.
To his great credit, one senior general spoke candidly of the matter soon after retiring from his exhalted position as commander in chief of the Strategic Command in 1994. Former Air Force Gen. George Lee Butler gave an interview in which the truth was finally laid bare for all to read. Here are some excerpts:
"Part of the insidiousness of the evolution of this system ... is the unfortunate fact that, whatever might have been intended by the policymakers (who, incidentally, had very little insight into the mechanisms that underpinned the simple words that floated onto a blank page at the level of the White House), in reality, at the operational level, the requirements of deterrence proved impracticable.... The consequence was a move in practice to a system structured to drive the president invariably toward a decision to launch under attack.... Launch under attack means that you believe you have incontrovertible proof that warheads actually are on the way..... Our policy was premised on being able to accept the first wave of attacks. We never said publicly that we were committed to launch on warning or launch under attack. Yet at the operational level it was never accepted that if the presidential decisions went to a certain tick of the clock, we would lose a major portion of our forces... Notwithstanding the intention of deterrence as it is expressed at the policy level - as it is declared and written down - at the level of operations those intentions got turned on their head, as the people who are responsible for actually devising the war plan faced the dilemmas and blind alleys of concrete practice. Those mattered absolutely to the people who had to sit down and try to frame the detailed guidance to exact destruction of 80 percent of the adversary's nuclear forces. When they realized that they could not in fact assure those levels of damage if the president chose to ride out an attack, what then did they do? They built a construct that powerfully biased the president's decision process toward launch before the arrival of the first enemy warhead." (Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time, Metropolitan Books, 1998, pp. 191-194).
This admission should go down in the annals of nuclear truth-in-packaging, but I am afraid that no president is reading the fine print on the label of his "nuclear football." Maybe hardly anybody cares any more about this state of affairs. But they should care, because the nuclear hair-trigger constitutes a continuing danger of apocalyptic proportions, and the folks behind the scenes who quietly turn high-level policy intention on its head, still cannot immunize their launch on warning configured system from the confusion and false alarms that could trigger an inadvertent nuclear exchange. The early warning and command systems on both sides are inherently susceptible to mistakes and technical malfunctions, and serious false alarms of incoming nuclear strikes have occurred on both sides since the official end of the Cold War. Let the holders of the nuclear footballs beware.
-------- china
China link to nuclear network
By Joby Warrick, Peter Slevin
Washington Post / Sydney Morning Herald
February 16, 2004
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/15/1076779834038.html
Investigators have identified China as the origin of nuclear weapons designs found in Libya last year, exposing yet another link in the chain that passed nuclear secrets through Pakistan to other countries in Asia and the Middle East.
According to US Government officials and arms experts, bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded evidence of China's long-suspected role in leaking nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s. The designs were later resold to Libya by Pakistani scientists through a nuclear network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe.
The documents, some written in Chinese characters, have detailed instructions for assembling a nuclear bomb that could fit on a large ballistic missile. Also included were instructions for making components for the device, said the officials and experts. "It was just what you'd have on the factory floor. It tells you what torque to use on the bolts and what glue to use on the parts," a weapons expert said.
He described the designs as "very, very old" but "very well-engineered".
US intelligence officials concluded years ago that China provided early aid to Pakistan in building its first nuclear weapon - aid that appears to have ended in the 1980s. Still, weapons experts familiar with the blueprints expressed surprise at what they described as a wholesale transfer of sensitive nuclear technology to another country. Notes with the documents suggest China continued to instruct Pakistani scientists on the finer points of bomb-building over several years, the officials said.
China's actions were irresponsible and raise questions on what else China provided to Pakistan's nuclear program, said David Albright, a nuclear physicist and former UN weapons inspector in Iraq who has been briefed on the materials found in Libya. "These documents also raise questions about whether Iran, North Korea and perhaps others received these documents from Pakistanis or their agents."
The documents were handed to US officials in November after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi decided to renounce weapons of mass destruction and open his country's weapons laboratories to international inspection.
The blueprints, flown to Washington last month, have been analysed by experts from the US, Britain and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog.
Weapons experts in Libya also found equipment used in making enriched uranium, the essential ingredient in nuclear weapons. That discovery helped expose a rogue nuclear trading network that, officials say, sent technology and parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
A central figure in the network, Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, last month said he had passed nuclear secrets to others. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf then pardoned him.
Of the many activities linked to Dr Khan's network, the sale of weapons designs is seen as the most serious. Libya appears to have made only minimal progress towards building a weapon and had no missile capable of carrying the 450-kilogram nuclear device depicted in the drawings, the officials said. But weapons experts noted the blueprints would have been far more valuable to the other known customers of Dr Khan's network.
"This design would be highly useful to countries such as Iran and North Korea," said Dr Albright.
------
Top US official seeks China's support in stopping weapons proliferation
BEIJING (AFP)
Feb 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040216135118.dida6654.html
Top US official John Bolton on Monday urged Beijing to help curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction, a day after reports said nuclear weapons designs found in Libya came from China via a Pakistani-led trading network.
The US undersecretary of state said he had extensive discussions with his Chinese counterpart on President George W. Bush's recent proposals to improve international non-proliferation efforts, specifically the proposal to expand the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which aims to intercept weapons shipments.
Bolton said Beijing shared similar goals with Washington on wanting to stem proliferation, and has cooperated with the United States on non-proliferation efforts, including weapons seizures.
"Both China and the United States obviously are firmly opposed to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery," Bolton told reporters.
"We stand ready to enhance cooperation in such areas as information (intelligence) exchange.... China shares the nonproliferation principles and objectives of those countries participating in PSI ..."
However, Bolton, who is in charge of arms control and international security, said Beijing has also been found to have participated in proliferation of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles.
The Bush administration has not "wavered" in imposing economic sanctions against China in such circumstances, he said.
"In fact, we've imposed more sanctions on China and more sanctions generally in just the first three years ... of the Bush administration than the entire Clinton administration in all eight years," Bolton said.
On Sunday, the Washington Post said US government officials and arms experts released documents which showed dramatic evidence of China's long suspected involvement in Pakistan's nuclear program.
It said the documents were found in Libya, some of which included text in Chinese, and contained detailed, step-by-step instructions for assembling an implosion-type nuclear bomb that could fit atop a large ballistic missile.
The designs were sold to Libya by a Pakistani-led nuclear trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, the daily reported.
Bolton confirmed weapons designs were found but refused to comment on reports of Chinese involvement.
US intelligence officials concluded years ago that China aided Pakistan in building its first nuclear weapon until the 1980s.
China's foreign ministry did not respond to phone calls Monday but last week denied it was involved in proliferation.
Bolton said he and Chinese Vice Foreign Ministery Zhang Yesui also discussed China's wish for the European Union to lift an embargo imposed by the EU on arms sales slapped on China after 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
But he said the United States has no plans to lift a similar embargo it imposed on China.
"We did discuss the EU weapons embargo and whether or to what extent the Europeans are going to modify it. That's a decision the Europeans will reach. Our view is we're not going to modify our weapons embargo ...," Bolton said.
French President Jacques Chirac has called for an end to the EU embargo, saying that it no longer makes sense, but Washington has cited ongoing human rights violations as reason to keep the embargo.
Bolton also discussed the North Korean nuclear issue with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Monday said "the ball was in their (the North's) court in terms of how well the second round of six-nation talks to convince the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program, will go.
The talks are scheduled to open in Beijing next Wednesday.
"The issue really is whether North Korea is prepared to make the commitment for the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of its program," Bolton said.
He declined to say whether he was optimistic the talks will bring about concrete results, unlike the first round which ended inconclusively last August.
"I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I'm a realist," Bolton said, adding: "Our position is going to be substantively the same as it was before and that is the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of the program."
-------- depleted uranium
BLAIR FACES 'PEACE' CHALLENGE ON VISIT TO PARTY CONFERENCE
PETER DOYLE
16 February 2004
UK Press & Journal
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=84092&command=displayContent&sourceNode=83929&contentPK=8862047
Young Scottish peace activists, planning to welcome Prime Minister Tony Blair with a massive rally against Britain's involvement in Iraq when he arrives at the Scottish Labour Party Conference in Inverness, have received lessons in the art of peaceful protest from a veteran campaigner.
Tony Blair will visit the Highland capital on February 28 to speak at the Scottish Labour Party Conference at Eden Court Theatre. But in preparation for his visit, teenage peace protesters from across the country converged on Lochinver on the West Highland coast to attend the Act for Peace conference on Saturday, which was addressed by the former general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Bruce Kent.
Mr Kent, an ordained catholic priest, was the public face of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s and had to quit his post in the church to pursue his political interests. Since resigning from the head role at CND, he has helped start the Movement for the Abolition of War and is still active in the peace movement.
Mr Kent said: "I think it is remarkable that young people have come together from all over the place to attend today.
"Politicians follow public opinion, not make it and the peace movement has galvanised a large amount of young people into politics, but not the mainstream political parties.
He added: "The peace movement in the 80s was solely nuclear-focused. The anti-war movement today has a broader base and is much more connected with global issues, such as the economic process and the arms trade." Saturday's one-day peace event attracted just under 100 activists, including many youngsters and one of the organisers was 17-year-old Byrony MacLeod.
The Broughton High School student from Edinburgh said: "It's really important to realise that you don't need to be an old man with a beard to be a campaigner for peace. And it's also really important that politicians sit up and listen to youth when we say we don't want to live in a world full of war."
Speaking alongside Mr Kent was war veteran Tony Flint, representing the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association. Mr Flint served as a medic during the first Gulf conflict in 1991 and suffered a mental breakdown as a consequence. He said: "People are not against the troops. It is the policies that put them in Iraq we are against."
Mr Flint said his precarious state of health was due to the effects of depleted uranium and the "cocktail" of vaccines and tablets he had to take before going into battle.
"I'm an average sick Gulf Vet," said Mr Flint, who claimed more service personnel had died from the effects of depleted uranium and vaccines than in the war itself.
He added: "We know we're dying. We also want to know the true casualty figures. Because of the half-life of depleted uranium, people will be dying from its effects for the next four and a half billion years."
Protesters from all over Scotland are expected to gather outside the forthcoming Scottish Labour Party Conference in Inverness. Judith Jardine, a member of the Highland Justice not War Coalition, said: "We expect between two and three thousand in Inverness at the end of this month."
-------- europe
EU's Patten says any European firms in nuclear scandals should face courts
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Feb 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040216143227.7pbyour3.html
Any European firms which illicitly transferred technology to countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons should be brought to justice, the European Union's Exernal Relations Commissioner said Monday
EU Commissioner Christopher Patten's comments followed media reports quoting Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, as saying many European nations passed nuclear technology to nations like Iran, Libya and North Korea.
"If there are, for example, allegations some European companies have been involved in the nuclear trade, the allegations have to be thoroughly investigated and the companies concerned brought before the courts," he told reporters in the Indian capital, New Delhi.
Kasuri's remarks came after the international spotlight fell on Pakistan when the man revered as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, A.Q. Khan, confessed earlier this month he sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Patten, part of an EU delegation visiting India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, said all countries, even if they have not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), should behave responsibly over the export of nuclear technology.
India, which tested nuclear weapons in 1998, has refused to sign the treaty, calling it discriminatory. The 1968 treaty limits possession of nuclear weapons to five nations -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. Pakistan has also refused to sign the treaty.
"All of us have interest in countries that behave responsibly about proliferation. India has assured us it is exactly what it is doing," Patten said.
Though the EU and India had different views about the treaty, "we agreed on the dangers of proliferation particularly in a world where some states are failing and some states are in danger of becoming havens for terrorists like Afghanistan," Patten said.
The EU delegation was due to travel to Afghanistan on Tuesday and visit Pakistan Wednesday before returning home.
Rather than thinking about changing the treaty to get countries like India to sign it, the focus should be on "how we prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons in a world where there are terrorist organisations," he said.
Earlier in the day, the EU called for an international debate on the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons technology.
"This is an international issue. Many nationalities were involved and (it) needs to be dealt with collectively," said Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen, who led a European Union mission on a day-long visit to India.
Cowen, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said the EU feared the nuclear technology proliferated by scientists like Khan could fall into the "wrong hands."
Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency have said Khan's network became a virtual one-stop-shop for nations wanting atomic bombs, supplying expertise, materials and technical support.
Media reports have said several European businessmen from whom Pakistan sought nuclear help were believed to have assisted Libya and Iran in obtaining nuclear secrets.
----
Nuclear energy a must if Europe to fulfil Kyoto criteria: Spain
MADRID (AFP)
Feb 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040216171710.p7fdprr5.html
EU transport and energy commissioner Loyola de Palacio on Monday said Europe needed to use nuclear energy in order to fulfil its Kyoto treaty obligations, but stressed that recyclable energy sources should also be further developed.
"Spain and Europe cannot dispense with nuclear energy if we wish to fulfil the Kyoto protocol,"
De Palacio said at the release of a Spanish "dictionary" of energy terms aimed at boosting awareness about climate change.
The Kyoto Protocol requires industrialised signatory countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, the carbon-based pollution which results from burning fossil fuels and is blamed for driving global warming.
De Palacio urged Europe to increase the use of renewable energy sources or risk adding to global warming.
She also noted that "Spain is already above emission quotas" for its use of fossil fuels, despite bringing onstream a swathe of nuclear reactors in the past decade to generate some 30 percent of overall energy production.
"We must face up to the situation -- not bury our heads in the sand like an ostrich."
De Palacio pointed out that countries such as Finland and Japan have announced plans to extend their production of nuclear energy, while in neighbouring France nuclear energy is the primary source of electricity generation.
Earlier this month, the environment ministers of France and Germany issued a joint appeal for Russia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to enable the United Nations' agreement to come into force.
In December Moscow signalled it wanted more concessions on the rules regulating foreign investments and clean technology.
The United States walked away from the deal in 2001, dubbing it too costly.
Kyoto requires wealthy industrialised countries to make an overall cut of 5.2 percent in emissions of carbon dioxide gases blamed for global warming by a target date of 2008 to 2012 as compared with the levels of 1990. Spain has made an individual commitment to a reduction of 15 percent.
-------- india / pakistan
India, Pakistan Open Historic Peace Talks
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 16, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-India.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan began historic meetings Monday aimed at preparing for a sustained peace dialogue on Kashmir and other disputes that have divided the neighbors for decades.
Pakistan is eager to show quick progress during the three days of talks, which also are likely to cover confidence-building measures in the nuclear field to avoid an accident -- especially considering admissions of leaks of nuclear technology by the father of Pakistan's nuclear program. India and Pakistan last held formal peace talks in July 2001 in Agra, India.
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee agreed to launch the new dialogue when they met on the sidelines of a South Asian summit in January.
Jalil Abbas Jilani, a director-general in Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, and Arun Kumar Singh, a joint secretary in India's External Affairs Ministry, shook hands and smiled before the start of the meeting. The sides met for nearly two hours before breaking for lunch.
Singh is leading a four-member Indian team at the talks, the first real test of the two sides' willingness to show flexibility on long-entrenched positions, such as the disputed Kashmir region -- the cause of two of the countries' three wars since their 1947 independence.
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said the meeting took place in a ``cordial atmosphere and constructive manner.''
``Both sides expressed satisfaction over the progress made on the first day,'' he said.
The two sides suggested dates for future talks addressing eight issues, including Kashmir, confidence-building measures in the nuclear field, terrorism and drugs, economic cooperation and a river dispute, diplomats said. The timetable was expected to be decided in the next two days.
A ``line of control'' divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, but both claim the Himalayan territory in its entirety. More than 65,000 people have been killed in an insurgency that has raged in India-controlled portions of the territory since 1989.
In the latest violence, suspected separatist rebels shot and killed a local politician Monday as he stood on a roadside in Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, police said.
Two police officers nearby raced to the scene and opened fire on the assailants. One officer was killed and the other wounded as the attackers retaliated, and the attackers escaped.
Meanwhile, in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, more than 500 people from a political group seeking Kashmir's independence blocked a main street for nearly two hours Monday to protest the Pakistan-India talks.
``These negotiations are being held to end the Kashmiris' struggle,'' said Ghulam Nabi War, a Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front leader. ``The two countries are not interested in people of Kashmir. They don't respect their wishes.''
After coming close to fighting a fourth war in 2002, India and Pakistan have moved to restore transport links and diplomatic ties. Soldiers in November halted cross-border firing in Kashmir.
India is also set to embark on its first cricket tour of Pakistan since 1989 -- a breakthrough for the two nations.
With national elections due in India in April, no major decisions are expected by Vajpayee's government in this round of talks. However, the prime minister is expected to stay in power and pursue the peace process.
``We are going to start the process (of negotiations) ... that will mean looking into modalities for the dialogue process and see what meetings should be organized in the next few months to keep up the dialogue on a sustained basis,'' Indian Foreign Secretary Shashank, who uses only one name, told Press Trust of India in New Delhi.
The ``composite dialogue'' between the countries was first agreed to in 1997 and reaffirmed by Vajpayee and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf at a January meeting in Islamabad on the fringes of a regional summit.
The two leaders had previously met for a failed peace summit in July 2001 in Agra, India.
Singh, who arrived Sunday in Pakistan, and his Pakistani counterpart were to map out a plan for future dialogue.
The talks are to be wrapped up by Shashank at a meeting Wednesday with Pakistani Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokar. The officials are the most senior in their ministries below the foreign ministers.
----
India and Pakistan Restart Talks After 2 Years
February 16, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-southasia.html?hp
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan began their first formal peace talks in more than two and a half years Monday, with the dispute over the mainly Muslim Himalayan region of Kashmir high on the agenda.
Three days of talks between foreign ministry officials opened in what Pakistan called a ``cordial atmosphere and constructive manner.'' They are seen as ``talks about talks'' and aim to set the agenda, structure and timeframe for the dialogue process.
The talks will build on a groundbreaking meeting between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last month, a year and a half after the two sides came to the brink of a fourth declared war.
``Right now what you have is the political will of President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee behind these talks,'' Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said.
``There is a new momentum. This momentum must be maintained,'' he told a news conference. ``You should have a clear timeframe and a sustainable process. These talks have to be substantive, structured and sustained.''
In January, Musharraf and Vajpayee appeared to strike up a personal rapport and agreed to restart a peace process that had never really got off the ground in more than five decades since independence from Britain.
Diplomats and analysts say this week's exchanges in Islamabad could provide clues about how open both sides are to addressing the disputes that have divided them, particularly over control of Kashmir.
The two delegations were led by Jalil Abbas Jilani, the director-general for South Asia in Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, and Arun Singh, a joint secretary in India's External Affairs ministry.
The teams will talk for a second day Tuesday to pave the way for a meeting Wednesday between foreign secretaries, the highest-ranking bureaucrats in the rival ministries.
Hours before the talks began, Muslim militants shot dead a senior member of Kashmir's ruling party and a policeman in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, police said.
EIGHT AREAS OF DISAGREEMENT
India and Pakistan aim to revive a ``composite dialogue'' over eight areas of disagreement, a process that ran aground in 1998 and finally collapsed at a failed summit in the Indian city of Agra in July 2001.
Under the previous composite dialogue, foreign secretaries were to discuss the Kashmir dispute as well as ``peace and security,'' code for a range of confidence-building measures meant to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange.
Officials from other ministries would also tackle a range of issues, including trade and economic links, people-to-people contacts and disputes over water sharing, maritime boundaries and the Siachen Glacier, the world's highest battlefield.
Pakistan hopes the two sides will also agree to a timetable for higher-level meetings between foreign ministers and for another summit, seen as vital to prevent the process running aground again.
Diplomats and commentators see signs both sides genuinely want to make a fresh bid for peace and to avoid the pitfalls that have undermined previous attempts to mend their differences.
A cease-fire between their two armies along the line of control dividing Kashmir has held since late November and already helped to improve the atmosphere.
Nevertheless both sides still have a lot to prove.
Pakistan has promised to stop militants crossing into Indian Kashmir to join a 15-year-old insurgency there. It remains to be seen if it will maintain that promise once the snows melt on the high mountain passes that the militants traditionally use.
India, which controls the lion's share of Kashmir, must also allay Pakistani fears that it simply sees the talks as a way to sideline the issue, and to give it time to crack down on the separatist struggle within the picturesque mountainous state.
An important signal will be whether India agrees to put human rights and policing inside Indian Kashmir on the agenda, issues it has often dismissed in the past as ``internal matters.''
The dispute over Kashmir has triggered two wars between India and Pakistan since independence from Britain in 1947. New Delhi claims the region as an integral part of India, while Islamabad backs a U.N.-mandated referendum that would allow the people to chose between India and Pakistan.
The two countries also fought a third war in 1971 over Bangladesh, previously East Pakistan.
----
Pakistan demands nuclear papers
February 16, 2004
By Massoud Ansari
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040216-010346-4620r.htm
KARACHI, Pakistan - The scientist behind a worldwide black market in nuclear technology is involved in high-stakes brinksmanship over his future, refusing to hand over reportedly incriminating documents demanded by Pakistani authorities.
The documents and a tape-recorded statement, which are said to demonstrate that senior Pakistani army officials - including President Pervez Musharraf - were aware of Abdul Qadeer Khan's nuclear proliferation activities, are believed to have been smuggled out of the country for safekeeping by the scientist's daughter Dina.
Pakistani intelligence officials said Mr. Khan first agreed to surrender the documents in return for a blanket pardon but has failed to do so. They believe his daughter is prepared to disclose their contents if legal action is brought against him by the country's military government.
Mr. Khan, 68, a national hero in Pakistan, remained under house arrest in Islamabad over the weekend, and restrictions on his movement were being tightened.
More than a week after Gen. Musharraf granted the scientist clemency after he confessed to selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, he is still in legal limbo. Pakistani officials say he faces 24-hour surveillance for the rest of his life.
The country's foreign office confirmed that the pardon granted to Mr. Khan was conditional. "It is not a blanket pardon. It relates only to his television confession," said Massoud Khan, a spokesman.
The pardon was granted on the grounds that Mr. Khan "had cooperated with the investigation begun by the Pakistani government in November last year, and that he will continue to cooperate."
It would not extend to any activities that may yet be revealed as the investigation into Mr. Khan's actions continues. The spokesman said that the scientist should accept that the security restrictions would continue "indefinitely."
He added: "What we have ensured is that he and his network of associates would never again be able to operate. They have effectively been demobilized."
Intelligence officers, however, said that the scientist remained resistant. "The government has been trying to retrieve the documents since Mr. Khan was offered a presidential pardon last week, but they are yet to receive them, even though he promised," one official said.
The official said the government had originally decided to negotiate a deal with Mr. Khan only after it discovered that his daughter had left Pakistan with the potentially incriminating material.
The scientist is said to claim that all the chiefs of army staff since 1977, including Gen. Musharraf, knew what he was doing and were aware of his actions.
The discovery derailed plans to put the scientist and a number of his associates on trial over their role.
Last month, three senior government officials, including the head of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, held long meetings with Mr. Khan in which they persuaded him to apologize unconditionally and surrender all the documents in return for a pardon.
"The government's concern was genuine," said one intelligence official. "First, because they were unaware of the exact nature and details of these documents, and second, because of Dr. Khan's knowledge of all the secret nuclear dealings.
"If his daughter reveals this secret information in retaliation, it could create manifold problems both for the country and its nuclear program," he said.
--------
AP: Pakistan Nuke Scientist Bought Loyalty
February 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear-Payoffs.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Abdul Qadeer Khan spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy loyalty -- writing checks for anything from seminars to friends' weddings -- in a patronage scheme that allowed him to elude suspicion as head of the world's most successful nuclear black market, senior scientists and government officials told The Associated Press on Monday.
Pakistan acknowledged this month that Khan sold high-tech secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. But signs that the grandfatherly engineer was up to something illegal had been around for years.
``If you wrote to him that you wanted to attend a seminar or that your daughter was getting married, he would write back and there would be a check in there for you,'' said Pervez Hoodhboy, a physicist at Islamabad's prestigious Quaid-e-Azam University. ``Sometimes there would be $50,000 or $100,000. He was very generous and he bought a lot of support, so people didn't say anything.''
Farhatullah Babar, a senator from the opposition Pakistan People's Party, who was also involved in the nuclear program early in his career, said Khan had almost total control to spend government money, and the secrecy of the nuclear program meant there was no oversight.
``The kind of vast administrative and financial powers, without any check on them, that were given to Dr. A.Q. Khan was unprecedented and unusual,'' he told AP. ``The powers given to him were so great that he could use the funds however he wanted. ... Whoever has such great powers, it is a normal human failure to abuse them.''
Pakistan is believed to have spent $5 billion on its nuclear weapons program, which it launched shortly after the 1971 war with India. It was not clear how much of the funds were controlled by Khan, but the figures certainly ran into the hundreds of millions.
Khan's supporters insist that he and six other detained nuclear officials have been made scapegoats to cover up government involvement in the nuclear leaks.
Hussam ul-Haq, chairman of the Khan's Release Liaison Committee, which is lobbying on behalf of the detainees, said Monday that the 68-year-old scientist was under immense stress and had suffered a heart ailment over the weekend.
He and other family members demanded proper medical care for Khan, and said that if he died as a result of not receiving it, the negligence would constitute ``cold-blooded murder.''
Shafiq ur-Rehman, another leading spokesman for the detained scientists' families, said the government was afraid that one day, when he was freed from custody, Khan would tell the real story behind the nuclear proliferation.
``The truth will not be easy to swallow,'' he told a news conference.
But opponents say that there is no doubt of Khan's guilt -- with or without the government's involvement.
A.H. Nayyar, another physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, said Khan portrayed himself as Pakistan's nuclear savior against the threat posed by India. Senior Pakistani journalists and newspaper columnists were said to be on his payroll, said several government officials.
``He meticulously cultivated his image from Day One. He doled out state money to create the image of a hero who was untouchable and beyond any investigation. He worked very hard at that and he was very, very clever,'' said Nayyar.
Nayyar said Khan used the nuclear funds to pay for school playgrounds and university auditoriums, and to help out his friends.
Hoodhboy, a leading peace activist, said Khan could also be vengeful.
After a property dispute involving the university, Hoodhboy claimed Khan got him placed on a no-exit list that barred him from leaving the country.
``People in my profession didn't wonder about his guilt. They knew it,'' Hoodhboy charged.
Pakistan for months vehemently denied any nuclear leaks, but officials have since acknowledged they were aware at least since 2001 -- when President Gen. Pervez Musharraf removed Khan from his post as head of the country's top nuclear lab.
The decision followed a secret report by an anti-corruption body that found Khan had amassed a $40 million fortune, two senior intelligence officials told AP on Monday.
Despite a $2,000-a-month government salary and no family fortune, Khan lived well. He snapped up property in Pakistan and Dubai, and even bought a hotel in Timbuktu, in the West African nation of Mali. He was known for handing out free food to poor people on Fridays and Saturdays, a practice which greatly enhanced his image as a patriot and a pious Muslim.
Several scientists say they warned the government of suspicious activities as early as 1998, but a formal investigation was launched only in November after Iranian revelations to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Libyan officials also later fingered Pakistan as the source of its nuclear technology, saying it paid millions of dollars to a network led by Khan.
A senior official who briefed reporters after Khan confessed and was pardoned by Musharraf said the government would not go after the money.
Khan, who apologized for the leaks in a nationally televised address this month, is now under virtual house arrest while the government continues its probe.
U.S. officials have said the pardon is an internal Pakistani matter, but others have strongly criticized the deal, including the former U.S. chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay.
``I can think of no one who deserves less to be pardoned,'' Kay said.
Nayyar said he didn't think the deal would allow Musharraf to put an end to the scandal.
``Musharraf is trying to hide the role of the armed forces (in proliferation),'' he said. ``But it is a very crude attempt, and I think it is something that the government cannot sustain for very long.''
Hoodhboy added that the lenient government response would encourage others to follow Khan's lead.
``It shows that corruption pays and crooks can make off with the money,'' he said.
AP reporter Munir Ahmad contributed to this report.
--------
Out of the Nuclear Loop
February 16, 2004
By STEPHEN P. COHEN
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/opinion/16COHE.html
WASHINGTON - The news coming out of Pakistan seems more like the stuff of bad fiction: a rogue scientist selling secrets to other countries; an emotional staged confession; a president who claims to be in the dark about it all. The reality, of course, is that the scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, did sell nuclear technology. And Washington has accepted the explanation of Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that Dr. Khan was acting on his own when he did so.
Dr. Khan's confession suits both Pakistan and America, since rounding up Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders (many may be hiding in Pakistan) trumps other concerns. But it is widely believed in Pakistan and elsewhere that the government knew of Dr. Khan's activities. This would make President Musharraf, as well as army and intelligence services, complicit in the nuclear crime of the century.
As improbable as it may seem, though, President Musharraf may, for once, be telling the truth. But the fact that this rogue operation could have been mostly unknown to the Islamabad government and its army should trouble the world even more - and propel Washington into rethinking its policies toward Pakistan.
Strategically, it is unlikely that the Pakistani Army - let alone intelligence officials - would have directed Dr. Khan to sell nuclear secrets to North Korea, Libya and Iraq. Why? It is more important for Pakistan to keep good relations with China than with North Korea, and selling to North Korea certainly angered the Chinese. As for Libya and Iraq, Pakistani strategists knew that helping a Middle Eastern state acquire nuclear weapons would bring the wrath of the Israelis.
Dr. Khan, on the other hand, was no strategist. His claim to fame was as a metallurgist who perfected the rotors on the centrifuge design that he stole from a Dutch plant. He was also part of Pakistan's global technology theft network, which was organized by the government in the 1970's. Dr. Khan eventually expanded his operation to include sales of technology. He set up a call center, where ambitious nuclear powers might dial in and get help on building a bomb. An egomaniac, Dr. Khan also mastered the Pakistani press and in the process transformed himself into a national hero.
The problem, then, was not that the army knew about his escapades (although it might have had some inkling), but that it was not powerful enough to clamp down on him or contend with the public anger afterward. As a result, part of Pakistan's nuclear program may have been out of the effective reach of all government officials, civil and military.
Much of the problem is rooted in the nature of the Pakistani state. President Musharraf claims he is moving his country toward democracy, but few signs exist. Yet under his rule, Pakistan is failing as an autocracy. After all, any tightly run autocracy would not have allowed Dr. Khan the freedom to travel and sell the crown jewels. In the army, General Musharraf was known as a man who didn't care for details. He is a bad listener, and has an exaggerated opinion of his own abilities.
Which makes America's relationship with him all the more perilous. So far, Washington has stood by General Musharraf, who is considered a crucial ally in the campaign against terrorism. In doing so, it has placed its bets on a man who is, at best, well intentioned, but who may be in over his head. Washington's current policy is to accept General Musharraf for what he is, and continue the flow of economic and military aid to this problematic state.
But given that Dr. Khan remains popular and that his activities took place under a civilian government, it would be foolish to press Pakistan to return to a comprehensive democracy right away. Instead, the army needs to withdraw gradually from politics and civilian life. As for General Musharraf, he needs to publicly accept responsibility for the nuclear fiasco and be honest about his own limitations. He might even gain stature by doing so.
Most important, Washington must demand that Pakistan's government and army regain control of its nuclear program - and make any aid contingent on that. The only Pakistan officials who know nuclear strategy and have a grasp of diplomacy are in the army. The bomb is no doubt safer in their hands than in those of another feeble civilian government. So far, we've been asking the wrong question. It's not whether President Musharraf and his army knew of Dr. Khan's activities - but why they didn't.
Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of the forthcoming book "The Idea of Pakistan."
-------- iran
Iran confirms it is researching use of new centrifuges
TEHRAN (AFP)
Feb 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040216150104.nt34mj0n.html
A senior Iranian official has acknowledged Iran is working on an advanced uranium enrichment centrifuge, but denied that such second-generation equipment had already been produced, a press report said Monday.
"That Iran is building a new generation of centrifuge is a lie. Iran is just conducting a preliminary study of the G2 centrifuge and has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hossein Mussavian told the Hamshahri newspaper.
The official is the secretary for international relations in Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, and close to the body's chief Hassan Rowhan -- who last year negotiated a deal with Britain, France and Germany for Iran to cooperate with the IAEA.
Diplomats at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna said last week that UN nuclear weapons inspectors in Iran had found blueprints for an advanced uranium enrichment centrifuge, the G2, that Tehran had failed to declare even as it was claiming to be providing full disclosure on its atomic energy program.
Enriched uranium is used as fuel for nuclear reactors but can also be used for making atomic bombs.
But the diplomats said the discovery was not a "smoking gun" that the IAEA could use to take Iran before the UN Security Council, where it could face sanctions.
Nevertheless, the discovery has raised fresh alarms and has placed the Islamic republic -- accused by the United States of trying to develop nuclear weapons -- under further scrutiny ahead of the publication of a new IAEA report on Iran's controversial bid to generate atomic energy.
The IAEA board had given Iran until last October 31 to reveal all details of its nuclear program.
In addition, Iran had promised Europe's "big three" that it would suspend uranium enrichment, yet appears to be working within a narrow definition of that suspension.
----
Iran Announces Plans To Sell Nuclear Fuel
By Ali Akbar Dareini
Associated Press
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44388-2004Feb15.html
TEHRAN, Feb. 15 -- Iran said Sunday that it plans to sell nuclear reactor fuel internationally, establishing the Islamic republic as a country with the technology required to enrich uranium.
Announcing the decision, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Iran had made an "important achievement" in acquiring the means to enrich uranium, and insisted the project would be for peaceful use.
Once Iran produces nuclear fuel, it will market it under the strict supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he said.
"This is an industry which can both be used by our plants and supplied to the international markets," Kharrazi was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic News Agency. "No one can deprive us of this natural, legal and legitimate right. This industry is strictly for peaceful use."
He added that Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, "but this does not mean that we will give up this industry, which is our national pride."
The United States seeks to restrict countries from acquiring uranium enrichment technology, and Iran's sale of fuel would prove it already possesses the capability.
Washington has said it suspects Iran of conducting a secret program to build nuclear weapons, but Tehran says its program is geared only toward energy production.
On Sunday, Kharrazi accused the United States of trying to influence the IAEA board before it meets in March to hear a report on Iran's compliance record. "Americans want to influence the upcoming IAEA meeting, but we are ready to cooperate transparently and answer all questions. IAEA supervision is carried out carefully and we have nothing to worry about," he said.
U.S. officials have said that if the meeting finds Iran is not in compliance, they could urge the IAEA board to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions or other options.
To dispel suspicions Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, Iran signed an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty late last year allowing unfettered inspections of its nuclear sites. It also suspended its uranium enrichment program -- insisting it was a voluntary, temporary goodwill gesture.
-------- korea
U.S. Will Stand Firm on N. Korea
Arms Talks to Set Stage for Demands
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44600-2004Feb15.html
The Bush administration plans to take a tough stance in upcoming six-nation talks over the North Korean nuclear crisis, barely sweetening a position taken at the last round of negotiations six months ago that Pyongyang must agree to irreversible and verifiable dismantling of its nuclear programs and weapons, administration officials said.
Under the administration's negotiating strategy -- which was broadly decided at a meeting of President Bush's senior foreign policy advisers -- officials would reject North Korea's offer to freeze its nuclear facility at Yongbyon as woefully inadequate. Operations at the facility had been halted under an agreement with the Clinton administration, but North Korea restarted it last year and since then appears to have produced enough weapons-grade plutonium for a half-dozen nuclear devices.
Moreover, U.S. officials plan to stress that North Korea must also fully disclose and dismantle a separate program, identified by U.S. intelligence, to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU). Several officials said a failure by North Korea to admit to the uranium program will make it difficult to continue the negotiating rounds. "If they keep denying HEU, then we aren't going to be able to have some agreement," a senior administration official said.
The talks, scheduled to begin Feb. 25 in Beijing, come in the wake of Libya's decision to give up its banned weapons and after the confession by Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan that he sold nuclear equipment and designs to several nations, including North Korea. The possibility that North Korea may have obtained additional nuclear material during the year of stalemate with the United States has alarmed North Korea's neighbors.
Indeed, the tough approach outlined by administration officials has caused unease among some of the other nations attending the talks, U.S. and Asian officials said. China has pressed the United States to gloss over the uranium program, not mentioning it by name but simply referring to North Korea's "nuclear programs." China has also urged other nations to emphasize the positive in their opening statements and refrain from provocative remarks.
South Korean officials have warned U.S. officials that focusing on the uranium program in this round may be too much for North Korea, and that the United States should be prepared to accept just the dismantling of the Yongbyon facility. The other participants are Japan, which generally supports the administration's tough line, and Russia.
But U.S. officials believe they are entering the talks in a strong position, especially because Khan disclosed he had aided North Korea with its uranium program. U.S. officials say North Korea admitted having a highly enriched uranium program during a meeting with U.S. officials in October 2002, but Pyongyang later denied making such a statement. In the wake of North Korea's denials, China and, to some extent, South Korea had begun to question the quality of U.S. intelligence.
North Korea's reported admission in 2002 led to the current standoff. The Bush administration declared the Clinton-era agreement dead and suspended fuel oil shipments to North Korea. Pyongyang responded by ejecting U.N. inspectors from the Yongbyon facility and restarting it.
U.S. officials plan to point to Khan's confession as further proof that North Korea has a uranium enrichment program. One official, in fact, said there are signs that North Korea is laying the groundwork for admitting the program. He said North Korean diplomats have approached Asian diplomats and, while still denying the program, have asked what they would get if such a program were disclosed.
U.S. officials also will cite Libya's decision to give up its banned weapons programs -- and the rapid moves by the United States to restore relations -- as the course that is open to North Korea. In Libya's case, the North African nation immediately opened up all its programs to U.S. and international inspectors, and U.S. officials said they will expect nothing less from North Korea.
"The objective is like Libya -- not us hunting and chasing [weapons] and working out a partial arrangement about a freeze or working out some kind of pay-as-you-go installment plan for taking apart their weapons program but a commitment to dismantle the whole thing," the senior U.S. official said.
Asian officials said they are looking for the United States in this round to provide details on how the crisis can be resolved. The Chinese appear to have lured the North Koreans back to the negotiating table in part with the promise that the Bush administration will provide more specifics in the coming round.
But while U.S. officials will be explicit in what they demand of North Korea, they expect to be much less concrete in what North Korea can expect in return. Bush has spoken of a "bold approach" that is possible in relations with North Korea, but U.S. officials have not refined the plan beyond a two-page document derived from the work of lower-level officials in early 2002. "We will not lay down a sheet of paper because it has not been agreed to internally in the U.S. government," one official said. "We will dangle it out there but with no specifics."
Another official likened the U.S. presentation in August to a fuzzy Chinese brush painting with a hint of a tree and a mountain. "We'll probably paint in a little more of that painting and answer some of these questions about how this works," he said. "But we're not going to paint them a Western landscape with every detail that is some kind of road map."
In essence, officials said, the Bush administration plans to emphasize the nuclear issues, adding that an overall improvement in relations can emerge from a comprehensive discussion of North Korea's human rights abuses, missile sales, terrorist ties and other issues. That, in turn, could lead to U.S. aid to dismantle the weapons systems, assistance from international financial institutions, removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and an agreement to officially end the Korean War.
Bush in the past has said the United States would agree to provide North Korea with multilateral security assurances. But, in setting the negotiating plan, senior U.S. officials also decided not to specify the sequence and timing of the security assurances. Asian officials said North Korea has indicated that, despite Bush's statements, they still fear a U.S. attack. North Korea also wants a signal from the United States that it would receive energy assistance from its neighbors.
U.S. officials said that such short-term assistance can take place only after North Korea has moved decisively to meet U.S. demands. "If they've taken specific steps, and they are crying for help, we're not going to do it, but other parties could come to us and we'd talk about it," the senior official said
--------
U.S.: No Concessions to North Korea
February 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-US-Korea.html
BEIJING (AP) -- Washington will not offer concessions to North Korea before next week's six-nation nuclear talks, a U.S. envoy said Monday, insisting that Pyongyang must agree to dismantle its weapons programs.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who was in Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials, urged North Korea to follow the example of Libya and renounce nuclear weapons.
North Korea says it will freeze its atomic programs in exchange for oil shipments and security guarantees from the United States. The Bush administration insists North Korea begin dismantling the programs before it can receive any concessions.
``I don't think our position has changed from what it's been for quite some time,'' Bolton said. ``The issue really is whether North Korea is prepared to make the commitment for the complete verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its programs.''
Bolton added: ``I think the Libya case shows how one goes about giving up weapons of mass destruction.''
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in November said his government was renouncing nuclear weapons and he opened its weapons laboratories to international inspectors.
Bolton met Monday with China's top diplomat on the North Korean issue, Wang Yi, and was to meet Tuesday with Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing.
He played down any differences between Beijing and Washington on how to deal with North Korea in the six-nation talks beginning Feb. 25.
``I don't think there is any difference whatever between China and the United States,'' he said.
China is North Korea's last main ally and has played a key role in organizing the talks.
China, the United States, North and South Korea, Japan and Russia last met in Beijing in August. Those talks ended without a settlement.
Bolton said Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's admission that he leaked weapons technology to North Korea corroborated the U.S. belief that Pyongyang has not only a plutonium-based nuclear program but also a uranium-based one, despite repeated denials.
U.S. officials in Washington have said Beijing disagrees with U.S. claims about such a uranium-based program.
``If the North Koreans don't acknowledge the half of their program that deals with uranium enrichment, it's hard to see how you can get a complete verifiable and irreversible dismantlement,'' Bolton said.
-------- mideast
U.N. Nuclear Official to Visit Libya
February 16, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Libya.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- The head of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency will go to Libya next week to check on the progress of work aimed at scrapping Tripoli's nuclear arms program, officials said Monday.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will visit next Monday and Tuesday, ``to review progress in our work,'' said IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky.
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi volunteered to scrap all research into developing weapons of mass destruction in December, opening the way for the IAEA, along with U.S. and British experts, to supervise the dismantling of the country's nuclear weapons program.
ElBaradei is expected to issue two reports this week on the progress of work in Libya and in Iran, which denies running a weapons program but has pledged to work with the IAEA to clear up suspicions about its nuclear ambitions.
Both reports will be reviewed in early March by the IAEA's board of governors.
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UN Nuke Chief ElBaradei to Visit Libya Next Week
February 16, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-libya-elbaradei.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, will travel next week to Libya, which is becoming a key source of information on the nuclear black market that also supplied Iran and North Korea.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Monday ElBaradei would spend two days in Libya to meet senior Libyan officials and review progress in the IAEA's dismantling of the country's nuclear weapons program.
``Dr ElBaradei will visit Libya on February 23 and 24 to review progress in our work,'' IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said.
The IAEA said the visit was part of the process of dismantling Libya's nuclear weapons program, which Tripoli agreed late last year to allow.
However, Western diplomats said it was Libya's description of its own program that gave the IAEA clues about where Iran had obtained its own nuclear technology and know-how.
The IAEA has been investigating a global nuclear black market that helped Iran, Libya and North Korea bypass international sanctions and purchase sensitive nuclear equipment that could be used to make weapons.
The IAEA is preparing reports on Libya and Iran ahead of its March 8 Board of Governors meeting. Gwozdecky said the IAEA would probably release the two reports this week.
-----
UN nuclear chief to visit Libya
VIENNA (AFP)
Feb 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040216174931.f019w8pm.html
The United Nations nuclear chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, will visit Libya next week to review the dismantling of Tripoli's atomic program, two months after the North African state pledged to give up trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The visit by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) comes at a time when revelations from Tripoli are helping unravel a nuclear black market from which Libya and North Korea have benefitted.
ElBaradei has been invited by the Libyan government to visit on February 23 and 24 "to review progress", IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told AFP Monday.
A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said "things have been moving very smoothly" in disarming Libya since it agreed with Britain and the United States on December 19 to dismantle its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The IAEA is the lead agency for verifying nuclear disarmament. ElBaradei visited Libya shortly after the December 19 announcement in order to start the agency's inspections there.
The diplomat said Libyan officials "just wanted to touch base" with ElBaradei prior to an IAEA board of governors meeting in Vienna that begins March 8 and which is to consider a report from ElBaradei on Libya's atomic program.
US and British arms experts, as well as IAEA inspectors, have been active in Libya over the past two months. The IAEA inspectors have mainly been compiling inventories while the US and British teams have been carrying out the actual removing and destroying of equipment and documents, which have included blueprints for nuclear weapons.
The IAEA is due to issue the report on Libya -- as well as one on Iran's nuclear program -- this week to its 35-nation governing board ahead of the board's March 8 meeting, Gwozdecky said.
Libya is expected to win praise for cooperating in dismantling its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, while the report on Iran should be more severe, diplomats close to the IAEA said.
Libya has been cooperating with the United States on disarmament while US officials claim that Iran is still hiding a secret nuclear arms program.
Diplomats said last week that IAEA inspectors in Iran had found blueprints for an advanced uranium enrichment centrifuge, a G-2 model, that Tehran had failed to declare even as it was claiming to be providing full disclosure on its atomic program.
Enriched uranium is used as fuel for nuclear reactors but can also be used for making atomic bombs.
Diplomats said the IAEA had used revelations made in dismantling Libya's atomic program to guide them to what the Iranians had.
"It's the same stuff that the Libyans had. It's really tracking along very much the same lines," a diplomat said.
Senior Iranian official Hossein Mussavian has acknowledged Iran is working on the G-2 advanced uranium enrichment centrifuge, but denied that such second-generation equipment had already been produced, according to a press report in Tehran Monday.
Diplomats said the discovery of Iran's study of the G-2 was not a "smoking gun" that the IAEA could use to take Iran before the UN Security Council, where it could face sanctions.
Nevertheless, it has raised alarms ahead of the publication of the new IAEA report, especially since Iran had halted uranium enrichment as a confidence-building measure.
The IAEA board had given Iran until last October 31 to reveal all details of its nuclear program.
The IAEA said in November that Iran had been hiding sensitive details, including the enriching of small amounts of uranium and plutonium, for 18 years.
-------- treaties
Half a Proliferation Program
February 16, 2004
New York Times
Editorials/Op-Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/opinion/16MON1.html
President Bush has rightly called attention to one of the world's most alarming problems, the quickening spread of nuclear weapons technology, but proposes a disappointingly limited series of responses. The initiatives he set forth last week were all timely and useful and deserve international support. But they do not go far enough.
Mr. Bush called for tighter export controls by the leading nuclear supplier nations, strengthened intelligence and law enforcement against rogue proliferators, and expanded efforts to eliminate or secure nuclear bomb fuel left over from abandoned weapons programs. What he failed to do was put America's weight behind a sustained effort to revise and strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and persuade the handful of countries outside the treaty to join. Also disappointing was his failure to propose increased American financing for the expanded bomb fuel elimination program. In addition, Mr. Bush refuses to recognize that established nuclear powers like the United States undermine antiproliferation efforts when they talk about developing new nuclear weapons for possible use against non-nuclear states.
The president is right to call on the major nuclear supplier states to ban exports of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing equipment to countries that do not now have fully developed nuclear fuel programs. These are the two main technologies for producing bomb fuel. As the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty now stands, signatories are free to dabble in such proliferation-prone technologies as long as they allow regularly scheduled inspections. Several countries, including Iraq and Iran, have exploited this loophole in the past to acquire the means to develop nuclear weapons.
Banning the export of fuel processing technology and equipment is not enough, however. As continuing disclosures about Pakistan make plain, these items can easily be acquired from rogue sources outside the official suppliers group. It would be more effective if supplier states also refused to sell reactors, which they alone can provide, to countries that insist on the right to develop new programs for producing enriched uranium and plutonium fuels. Such a wider ban might not be popular with the nuclear power industry, but it would be a much stronger tool against weapons proliferation.
Over the longer term, the nonproliferation treaty needs to be amended. It should ban nuclear fuel processing while guaranteeing supplies of reactor fuel to countries that accept this ban and subscribe to the treaty's tough new inspections arrangements. Only about 40 countries have so far accepted these arrangements. Mr. Bush rightly proposes banning nuclear equipment exports to countries that have not signed up for strengthened inspections.
Mr. Bush support for the nonproliferation treaty's tough new inspection rules is welcome. But in other areas, his embrace of the treaty, and the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitors it, seemed lukewarm. Amending the treaty will take lengthy negotiations and time, while export controls could, if the supplier countries agree, be applied right away. But law enforcement and intelligence agencies will have an easier time detecting and shutting down new programs for making nuclear bomb fuel if they are outlawed under the treaty. The treaty is now accepted by all but four countries. Controlling nuclear proliferation will be easier when India, Pakistan and Israel sign and ratify the treaty and North Korea, which pulled out last year, returns.
Those countries will not sign on without an American-led diplomatic effort that it is hard to imagine this administration leading. Mr. Bush has gone part of the way toward accepting that only concerted international action can counter the growing threat of nuclear weapons proliferation. The remaining steps cannot be delayed much longer.
------- us politics
Bush -- Is the Tide Turning? by Rahul Mahajan
Monday, February 16, 2004
by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views04/0216-10.htm
For at least six months, I have been resisting early pronouncements of Bush's political death. Most of them seemed to be composed of wishful thinking, extrapolating from simple facts -- the disaster of the Iraq occupation, the mostly jobless recovery, the lies about weapons of mass destruction -- to that phenomenally elusive quantity that is public opinion.
If Ronald Reagan was the Teflon president, then until recently Bush seems to have been made of some special plastic developed by an advanced alien civilization. He took some hits in the polls, but given that this administration has lied about virtually every aspect of its policy (WMD, tax cuts, budget, .) and has presided over a series of disasters for the United States from the 9/11 attacks to a failing colonial occupation to economic stagnation to a collapse of the government's fiscal soundness to a collapse of social services, he hasn't done so badly. His job approval ratings remained in general well over 50% and as late as October of last year, 59% of Americans characterized Bush as "honest and trustworthy."
Furthermore, the administration has displayed a consistent pattern: Unlike Bill Clinton, who really was obsessed with the polls, Bush has been willing to let his ratings slide, let criticism and confusion mount to extreme levels, then defuse it all with a well-timed and heavily-hyped intervention.
There are signs, however, that this time is different.
Bush's latest slide dates from the recent statements of David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group that was tasked with finding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq not only had no weapons but that they couldn't find "the people, the documents or the physical plants" that would have been necessary to produce weapons.
The administration tried to defuse the issue with a couple of items from its usual bag of tricks. First, it tried to turn this issue on its head by claiming that the issue was "intelligence failures" rather than administration deception, orchestrating a campaign to get the media to go along with this spin and planning for a whitewash of the issue by creating an independent commission whose purview is restricted to intelligence methods (see the Executive Order creating the commission at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040206-10.html). Second, it decided to stage a media opportunity by having Bush appear on "Meet the Press."
This was a bit of a gamble, because most past media interventions involved a prepared script, and the effort required of Bush was simply to keeps his lips pursed very tightly so that he wouldn't smirk as he read from the Tele-prompter.
Even though Tim Russert was the perfect softball questioner, refusing to press Bush on such elementary points as why he went to war while inspections were actually in progress, it was a disaster. For once, the administration's mix of warmed-over platitudes and stonewalling didn't work -- not only did Bush have nothing to say, he said it very badly.
And look at the results. Last week, Time magazine's cover article talks about Bush's "credibility gap." A Washington Post poll found 54% of the population believing that Bush had lied or exaggerated about Iraq's WMD, and 50% approving of his job as president. And, for the first time since the war ended, only 48% of Americans approved of the war.
Next, after being pressed hard over well-documented claims of desertion while in the National Guard during the Vietnam War, the Bush administration actually started releasing some of his records. This is the most secretive administration since Nixon's. Dick Cheney continues to stonewall on disclosing the details of his meetings in drafting the 2001 Bush-Cheney energy plan, even after a judge found in favor of the suit by the General Accounting Office. It must have been surreal for journalists who are consistently refused access even to documents that the administration is legally required to make public to suddenly be given the chance to peruse Bush's dental records.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted last Thursday night (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37872-2004Feb12.html) to expand the independent commission's purview to include the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (Dick Cheney's way to get around the CIA) and, in a highly limited way (no subpoena power) to deception by administration officials. It's much less than half a loaf, but given the recent history of extreme partisanship by Republicans in the legislative branch getting even that much through the Republican-dominated committee is a major change.
And even Alan Greenspan, an extreme Bush partisan for the past three years, has broken with the administration by suggesting mandatory limits on tax cuts (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38260-2004Feb12.html) because of the unrestrained growth of the deficit.
Add to all this the facts that Bush is even coming under heavy fire from parts of his own party for his budget shenanigans, and the fact that the previously mentioned Washington Post poll shows Kerry beating Bush by 51 to 43 in a head-to-head matchup, and it's fair to say that this crisis is significantly more severe than any the administration has yet faced.
No one should break out the champagne yet. Bush has not even started spending down his $150 million campaign war chest. Expect him to attack Kerry as an extreme liberal (untrue) and a captive of special interests (true). The recent media attention to Kerry's alleged philandering will allow Bush to try to suggest that dishonesty about interns is far more important than dishonesty that drags the country into war. Once Bush really starts to fight back, all of his recent losses may well be reversed. And even if Bush loses, nobody should expect Kerry to end the occupation of Iraq.
But Bush's recent implosion does provide a huge opportunity. The administration's credibility on foreign policy is noticeably lower than it was even in the brief effloration of a mass antiwar movement last February and March. Only 52% of people now think of Bush as "honest and trustworthy." Now is a time that people might just be receptive to the idea that an administration that would lie to us about everything else may also be lying about what's happening in Iraq, and may even be lying about why it went to war in the first place.
This is an opportunity that cannot be left to the Democratic candidates. In a New York Times op-ed on January 29, Robert Reich, Clinton's former Secretary of Labor, wrote about the need to build a liberal mass movement. He pointed out that the right wing's recent successes grow very much from its grassroots strength; he also implied that Howard Dean's supporters provide at least an embryonic core for such a movement.
Reich's call is right on the money (although his claim that Kerry and his campaign are part of such a movement is not). There is a need for a mass movement that does not restrict itself to support of one candidate or another and does not focus narrowly on "electability" but defines itself around core issues and pushes the public debate (and the position of liberal candidates).
Central to such a movement must be opposition to the new imperialism, to colonial-style occupations, and to the aggressive increase in general militarism. Just as in the Vietnam War, this is once again an issue that everybody knows has an effect on them. Now is the time for a resurgent anti-imperial movement to launch a mass public outreach campaign. The occupation of Iraq, the new American imperialism, and the insane growth of the military budget are in fact issues that you can go door-to-door with. Some essential points for such a movement to address:
1. What the United States is doing in Iraq. Nobody knows that in much of the country, including that capital, Baghdad, people are worse off now than they were under the twin brutalities of Saddam and the sanctions. Since we are not now in the polarizing atmosphere of a push to war, people will be much more open to understanding the human cost of the occupation and the brutality and negligence of U.S. policy. We must also connect the new imperialism, and the specificities of how it is operating in Iraq, to people's lives here. The deliberate destruction of social services in the United States parallels, in a much less intense fashion, the destruction and collapse of social order that is associated with the "regime change" in Iraq.
2. Terrorism. Forget the lame criticisms of the Democratic candidates, that the war on Iraq is a "diversion" from some legitimate war on terrorism. Rather, we must emphasize that the whole policy since 9/11 has dramatically increased the risk from al-Qaeda and associated groups, something that even FBI and CIA officials admitted before the Iraq war, and something that is made clearer every day in Iraq. The policy of turning Afghanistan and Iraq into "failed states," which is precisely what the United States has done, is a disaster. An alternative approach to terrorism must be based on disengagement, allowing the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to generate their own politics, funding for genuine reconstruction (overseen by Afghans and Iraqis), cessation of attempts to control Middle Eastern governments, ending aid to Israel, and accepting international law. Certainly, none of these changes will stop bin Laden and his current colleagues, but they are necessary to create the background so that international efforts to bring them to justice don't backfire and actually worsen the problem by increasing new recruitment of terrorists. People will be willing to hear this now in a way that they weren't after the seemingly "successful" conclusion of the war on Afghanistan. 3. Linking military spending increases (along with tax cuts) to the decrease in social spending. These spending increases include money for current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, for corporate boondoggles (new submarines, more Stealth bombers), and for possible new wars ("missile defense"). We must simultaneously differentiate between U.S. obligations to pay for reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, which are a matter of international law and common decency, and continuing military spending in those countries. Once the tax cuts and the military spending increases are taken care of, our nearly $11 trillion economy can easily manage reconstruction payments as well as an increase in social spending here.
There are many other issues for such an anti-imperial movement, of course, but these three strike most easily to the heart of public opinion. This anti-imperial agenda would be part of a broader progressive agenda that focuses also on jobs, health-care, and economic inequality.
Given the current political opening, this can happen. A mass grassroots movement can make a difference, if it gets started early enough, before the massive Bush reelection campaign starts to shut down that gap and mends the current cracks in the ice. Not only can we dramatically advance public consciousness of the key issue for the whole world, the new American empire, an incidental effect will be to make it more likely that Bush is defeated in the November elections. To the more than one million Americans who marched on February 15: It's time to come out again.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of Empire Notes and serves on the Administrative Committee of United for Peace and Justice. His latest book is "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond" . He can be reached at rahul@empirenotes.org
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Aides Hint Afghan Voting May Be Put Off
February 16, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/international/asia/16AFGH.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
ASHINGTON, Feb. 15 - The Bush administration has begun suggesting that Afghanistan's elections scheduled for June may have to be postponed because of security problems and the failure to register enough voters.
Administration officials said in recent days that security conditions remained dangerous or at least uncertain in a third of the country, hampering registration so badly that only 8 percent of eligible Afghan voters have been enrolled. Among women, only 2 percent have registered.
The United Nations has said at least 70 percent of eligible voters should be registered for the elections to be considered successful. That leaves only four months to achieve a daunting objective at a time when registration workers are avoiding large swaths of the country that are considered unsafe. Afghanistan has about 10.5 million eligible voters.
"I am reasonably confident that we can get enough voters registered and provide security - it won't be perfect - that at least the presidential election can take place in June, or maybe July," said an administration official. But he added that security would have to improve to reach that goal, and that this might not happen.
President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government bear the responsibility for deciding whether the elections must be postponed, administration officials said. But the United States is also expected to play a decisive role in advising the Karzai government about what to do in that regard.
Mr. Karzai is said to be determined to hold at least the presidential election on time, in part because he expects to win. He is also said to be haunted by the memory that civil war erupted in the early 1990's when Burhanuddin Rabbani, a onetime anti-Russia guerrilla leader, refused to step down as president.
Under the Constitution that was agreed upon in early January, Afghanistan is supposed to try to schedule both presidential and parliamentary elections in June.
The administration official said it was very likely that the parliamentary elections, as opposed to presidential elections, would be postponed, possibly until next year, because even beyond security concerns, there were difficulties in setting district boundaries, choosing candidates and organizing political parties for the parliamentary elections. Registration is also hampered by Afghanistan's extensive illiteracy and the fact that perhaps most cities and towns do not have streets or addresses.
Many other experts say that in discussions with administration officials, there is a growing sense that the goal of holding prompt elections of any kind this year is receding.
Bush administration officials insist that American politics are playing no role in the decisions about whether to push for elections, but there is little doubt that President Bush would like to claim an electoral success in Afghanistan as he runs for re-election himself.
Similarly, the administration is pushing for a transfer of sovereignty to Iraq in June, another goal that some in the administration say is being influenced at least partly by the domestic political calendar.
Countering the American desire for an election in Afghanistan in June, many European and Japanese officials and private organizations involved in Afghanistan's reconstruction are in favor of putting off the elections out of fear that chaotic voting may do more harm than good. They also have influence with Mr. Karzai.
Lakhdar Brahimi, a former United Nations coordinator in Afghanistan and the current United Nations envoy to Iraq, is on record as saying elections cannot be held quickly in either country.
Last month, Mr. Brahimi told a closed-door Security Council session that Afghan elections could not be held in June, said an official who was there.
Mr. Brahimi told the National Press Club two weeks ago that "a huge effort will indeed be necessary" to have "free and fair elections" on schedule. He also predicted that the parliamentary election should probably be held in the spring of 2005. Last week, in Iraq, he was trying to convince Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that viable elections could not be held there until the end of the year.
But the administration is resisting a postponement in Afghanistan even as it backs Mr. Brahimi's assessment for Iraq.
"If you read all the statements the administration is applying to Iraq - that security and logistics do not allow for quick elections - you'll see that they apply also to Afghanistan," said Barnett Rubin, a scholar on Afghanistan who is director of the Center for Preventive Action at New York University.
"At least Brahimi is consistent," Mr. Rubin added.
Administration officials say attacks in the unsafe areas are being carried out by forces of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a dissident Pashtun commander in the 1980's uprising that drove Soviet forces from Afghanistan.
Mr. Hekmatyar's forces at that time were subsidized by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Much of the resources for the fighters now come from drugs, which account for half the country's gross domestic product.
The insurgent groups active now are mostly in the southern and eastern parts of the country, especially on the border with Pakistan, where pro-Taliban and pro-Qaeda elements are believed to be sheltering Osama bin Laden. The Afghan authorities have demobilized 2,700 former soldiers of the country's many militias operating under various warlords, but many more remain active.
It is unclear whether Mr. Karzai, who was elected president in a grand assembly called a loya jirga, will run for re-election uncontested, in a vigorously contested general election or with token opposition. The hope of American officials is that he will be re-elected with broad support among Afghans.
In part because Mr. Karzai is expected to win a presidential contest, parliamentary elections pose a much tougher security problem and a more delicate political quandary, administration officials say. Legislative elections, they say, could breed violence and intimidation by warlord groups that might not mobilize in the presidential contest, where they are likely to be marginalized.
The warlords, most of them ethnic Tajiks from the north, had intially been the power behind Mr. Karzai's presidency, though as the balance of power has shifted their independent clout has decreased and Mr. Karzai has either disarmed their groups or has wooed them into his corner.
But the Tajiks, Uzbeks and others who supported the American invasion and who have been marginalized in recent months want parliamentary elections to occur at the same time as presidential elections, reasoning that they have a better chance to wield power through the parliament.
"If you have a presidential election without a parliamentary election, the opponents of Karzai will say that the constitution is being abrogated and Karzai is trying to become a dictator," said Ahmed Rashid, an author of books about the Taliban who has spent many years writing about Afghanistan.
Mr. Rashid has asserted, most recently in an article in The New York Review of Books, that the United States is pushing the election for Mr. Bush's political advantage.
"You cannot have an election in Afghanistan on an agenda set in Washington for the benefit of presidential elections in the United States," he said, adding that in his own travels in the country it became clear that security was too chaotic to hold elections any time soon.
Even many neutral experts and military commanders say a larger force is needed to beef up security before elections. At present, security in Afghanistan is provided by 8,000 to 9,000 American troops, plus 2,000 British, Canadian and other forces and perhaps 5,000 security forces protecting Kabul and Kunduz in the north under the guidance of NATO.
There is a plan for 32 small teams of security forces in different parts of the country to help with registration, but administration officials acknowledge that it has been hard recruiting outside forces to serve in Afghanistan.
--------
Afghans Seek Vote Despite Security Woes
February 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Election.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The Afghan government is sticking to plans to hold a national election in June despite security challenges and the slow pace of registering about 10.5 million eligible voters, a spokesman said Monday.
Presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin said in the month before the polls, thousands of voter registration centers would be set up in villages and districts in a ``massive exercise'' to ensure all those entitled to register are able to.
So far, only about 8.5 percent of eligible citizens have registered, all of them in Kabul and seven other major cities.
``Our position is that elections will take place as planned in June,'' Ludin told a press conference. ``There has not been any revision to the plan as yet.''
``We recognize that it's a massive logistical challenge,'' he said, adding that a test of the legitimacy of the election would be how many people can vote.
The United Nations, which is supporting the election as a key element of Afghanistan's recovery after more than two decades of war, has warned that unless there was an improvement in security, the June poll was unrealistic.
The New York Times reported Monday that some U.S. government officials have begun suggesting that Afghanistan's elections may have to be postponed because of concerns over poor security and voter registration.
Taliban-led insurgents have stepped up attacks on government targets in remote and lawless south and east in recent months, and much of the rest of the country is controlled by warlords with private armies. More than 100 people have died in such violence since January.
While Ludin said that security was a ``concern,'' he played down its significance. ``Our analysis is that it won't be a big obstacle to the elections.''
The election -- probably a presidential ballot, with parliamentary voting next year -- is to take place under a new constitution adopted here in early January -- the first since the ouster of the Taliban by U.S.-led forces in late 2001. U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai is the expected to win.
--------
Afghan President Pushes Ahead with Election Goal
February 16, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-election.html
KABUL (Reuters) - Despite growing security worries and doubts by the U.S. administration, the Afghan government is determined to hold the country's first ever democratic elections in June, presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin said on Monday.
A surge in violent attacks blamed on remnants of the ousted Taliban has raised doubts about the June date, with a huge voter drive still unable to move outside of the major cities.
There are also questions about electoral boundaries and the registering parties if a parliamentary poll is to be held at the same time, as recommended in a constitution passed last month.
``Our position still is that the election as planned is our goal. We are working toward meeting that goal,'' said Ludin, spokesman to President Hamid Karzai, the overwhelming favorite to win the presidential poll.
``We recognize that it is a massive logistical challenge,'' he told a news briefing.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, speaking to reporters in Brussels, raised the prospect of splitting parliamentary and presidential polls.
Afghanistan's new constitution states ``every effort shall be made'' to hold them simultaneously.
``We would prefer in principle to have both together, but it may be impossible to do in the time that's left. Maybe it's possible to have the presidential elections,'' said Solana.
``In any case, we have to work very hard to get a climate of security that will allow to hold presidential elections.''
U.S. CONCERNS
The New York Times reported Monday that unidentified U.S. administration officials had begun suggesting a postponement of elections due to security problems and low voter registration.
That runs against what analysts have said was a goal of the administration to hold the election in June so President Bush could claim the success in his own re-election campaign.
After three decades of occupation and war, and just over two years since the Taliban was overthrown for sheltering al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan has no physical or political infrastructure in lawless provinces to organize a national vote.
Voter registration comes as Afghanistan is experiencing its worst period of violence since the ouster of the Taliban, with more than 550 people killed since early August.
Nearly 900,000 of an estimated 10.5 million voters have registered, but moving the voter drive to the countryside will be hard because the United Nations considers much of the country too dangerous to work in.
Some aid groups say more time is needed for key initiatives, such as a two-year disarmament program, and for foreign civilian-military teams to have an impact in the chronically unstable south and east of the country.
The Afghan government has made repeated calls for more foreign troops and for NATO-led soldiers in the 6,400-strong International Security Assistance Force, based mainly in Kabul, to deploy into lawless regions.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who met Solana Monday, said the lack of resources would limit the alliance's presence across Afghanistan.
``ISAF of course is not able, because of the levels, to go everywhere to support the electoral process,'' he said. ``But we'll certainly have a discussion in the NATO council about what ISAF could do.''
-------- africa
Visit to U.S. aims for 'strategic partnership'
February 16, 2004
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040215-110244-7535r.htm
Prior to his departure for Washington to meet President Bush, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was interviewed in Tunis by Andrew Borowiec, a correspondent for The Washington Times. This is a partial transcript of the interview.
Question: What are your expectations from this visit?
Answer: This visit will offer a renewed opportunity to have a deep and comprehensive dialogue with President George W. Bush and other American officials. The aim is to elevate the Tunisian-American relations to the level of a strategic partnership in all fields.
Q: What is your position concerning the "road map" peace plan established by President Bush for the Middle East?
A: We commend the U.S. administration's position and President Bush's personal and clear support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. We hope the U.S. administration will pursue its endeavors with all concerned parties in order to put an end to the grave deterioration of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories; to revive the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis; and also to review the other processes in such a way as to establish the foundation of a real, just and durable peace for all the peoples in the region.
Q: What about Iraq?
A: We consider it necessary to promptly tackle the situation in Iraq, to endeavor to establish appropriate conditions in order to bring life back to normalcy, and to further involve the international community and the United Nations in managing the postwar period and the reconstruction work. The aim is to ensure for Iraq the conditions of stability and security, while respecting its sovereignty and territorial unity.
Q: What role do you see for the United States in North Africa?
A: Given the important strategic position of this region ... we endeavor to consolidate integration among the countries of the Arab Maghreb Union [five North African states], hoping that our European and American partners will support our action. ... The U.S. Middle East Partnership Initiative ... will certainly accelerate the pace of development in the Maghreb countries.
Q: What are your major achievements in Tunisia?
A: We have made major strides on the path of sustainable development and recorded numerous achievements in the political, economic, social and cultural fields. ... Tunisia ranks first in Africa in the fields of competitiveness and has been included in the list of the 80 most developed countries in the world.
The middle class has been widened, so that it now accounts for two-thirds of the population. The demographic growth rate is 1.1 percent and life expectancy at birth has reached 73 years in 2001, against 67 years in 1987.
We have reinforced liberties and protected human rights. We have changed Tunisia into a pluralist society and its parliament into a multicolored legislative body.
Q: What remains to be done politically and economically?
A: We have already started implementing the provisions of the new text of the constitution, concerning the reinforcement of the plurality of candidacies for the coming presidential elections and the participation of all parties. ... In the economic field, we have tried to ensure Tunisia's adaptation to the economic changes in the world today. ... We have taken measures and offered incentives to consolidate investor confidence in Tunisia and in its economic policy.
----
U.S. General Warns of Africa Terror Threat
Mon Feb 16, 2004
Associated Press
By ANTHONY MITCHELL
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040216/ap_on_re_af/ethiopia_abizaid
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - A clear terrorist threat still exists in East Africa, and greater military cooperation is needed to defeat it, a top U.S. general warned on Monday during a visit to Ethiopia.
Gen. John Abizaid, whose Central Command is responsible for Afghanistan, Iraq and East Africa, said closer "military and intelligence cooperation" was needed between East African governments to prevent extremist groups like al-Qaida from gaining an "ideological foothold" in the region.
"The threat is clear, but the threat can be deterred and can be defeated," he told journalists in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
"This terrorist threat knows no boundary, and when we operate only on a nation-state basis we will be unable to really get at the heart of the terrorist problem which is transnational."
Abizaid pointed out Somalia - which has had no central government since 1990 - as a potential trouble spot in the region.
"We know the terrorists gravitate toward ungoverned spaces, and these are areas where they look for the opportunities to gain recruits, establish safe-havens and move money," he said. "We certainly have indications to believe that people associated with these groups operate in and around areas such as Somalia."
Abizaid, who met with the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, said his visit aimed to assess the capabilities of the region's forces for combating terrorism.
East Africa has already suffered four terrorist attacks, all either claimed by or blamed on Osama bin Laden's terror network. In August 1998, car bombs destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; in October 2000, suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole while it was refueling in Yemen; and in November 2002, attackers tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner minutes before a car bomb destroyed a hotel on Kenya's coast.
Abizaid said the military situation in Iraq was "still difficult," especially in the Iraqi town of Fallujah. But he added that most of the country was stable enough for political activity to take place.
He said more time was needed to find weapons of mass destruction.
"It is clear that the hunt must continue," Abizaid said. "We all know this is a tough and a long fight in Iraq, it won't be over tomorrow and we intend to cooperate fully with Iraqi security institutions and help them help themselves."
----
New Direction in Uganda's Old War
Government Arms Militia to Fight Rebels
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44489-2004Feb15?language=printer
PAGAK, Uganda -- The despondent-looking man with the smudged glasses moved gingerly through this squalid camp, home to 20,000 people and not a single health center.
In a maze of tightly packed mud huts, smoldering pit latrines and dirt footpaths, children lay collapsed on the hot earth, their bellies swollen and sore from hunger, their hair yellowing from lack of protein, their noses raw and leaking.
An entire generation of Ugandans in the north of the country is growing up in places like Pagak, 200 miles north of Kampala, the capital. An estimated 1.4 million of the country's 25.8 million people are living in camps in northern and eastern Uganda. They fled their villages in waves to escape the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla force that has terrorized the population for nearly two decades.
"We can't live like this anymore," said Lemoi, a community leader who has lived in the camp since 1996. "It's just absolutely shameful. . . . We are beggars now. We can't even sleep in separate areas from our children. All of our traditional pride is withered. How long will we be here? Forever?"
Ugandans call it the war that won't end. In the face of a government offensive called Operation Iron Fist, launched in March 2002, rebels have stepped up their raids on villages -- burning huts, reportedly hacking civilians to death with machetes and axes, and abducting children in increasing numbers.
Across the country there is despair about the war in the north. In response to rebel attacks and the apparent inability of the Ugandan military to counter them, the government has in the last six weeks trained and armed 8,000 civilians. The new militia members were portrayed on state television as heroes, marching through towns like Lira, 40 miles southeast of Gulu, proudly wielding their AK-47s.
Human rights groups have criticized the government, saying that children are being recruited. An even bigger concern is that the groups being armed by the government are members of the Langi tribe, ethnic rivals of the Acholi, who live in the north.
"Arming ethnic militia is a very dangerous idea and is nothing to feel proud about," said the Rev. Carlos Rodriguez, a Spaniard who has lived in Uganda for 20 years and works with the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, an interdenominational group.
Security officials recommended that Rodriguez be deported, saying he was spreading false information, according to Ugandan newspapers.
In Lira, where piles of trash fumed and hundreds of people were lined up at camps to collect food handouts, those who have joined the militia said there would not be any problems. Stone-faced and wearing a government-issued green uniform, Nancy Awio, 25, said she had quit her job as a secretary to join the forces. Her father was killed by rebels in November, she said, dragged off by 15 men and beaten in the head and stomach until he hemorrhaged. Awio has 6-year-old twins and said she was worried about the pay the government promised her for being in the militia, but has yet to give her. But she said she is not afraid of death.
"I'm not afraid because I have the techniques to fight in the front lines," said Awio, a bulky woman with serious eyes. "I don't think they can kill me. I was so shocked when I saw my father lying there. It was so painful. That's why I joined."
From his office in Kampala, Felix Okot Ogong, state minister for youth and children's affairs, defended the decision to create the militia, saying it was fine to supplement the army with civilians.
"Everyone wants to join and fight back," said Ogong, who wore a blue pinstriped shirt and said he had just been to see a militia training session. "I don't see any dangers in it. They are not soldiers, they are defenders against the LRA."
The war in northern Uganda began in 1986. The rebel leader is an enigmatic recluse and self-declared prophet, Joseph Kony, who has said he started the uprising to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with a government based on the Ten Commandments.
Some observers say that what Kony really wanted was to avenge his ethnic group, the Acholi, who have felt disadvantaged in comparison with people in the richer south since the British protectorate of Uganda was created in 1894.
Because Kony kidnapped children to create his army, his movement quickly lost popular support and he was dismissed as a lunatic. But his rebels were provided with high-tech firepower by the Sudanese government, which was trying to destabilize the area and deal with its own rebels, based in southern Sudan along the border with Uganda.
Kony and other top rebel commanders are allowed to hide in Sudan's mountains. They stage hit-and-run attacks on civilians at night from the hilly jungle. There are no checkpoints and no rebel-held towns. Rebel commanders do not give interviews or hold peace talks.
In radio broadcasts, Kony has denied having ties to Sudan and frequently quotes biblical passages that he says sanction taking children for a cause. He has said he believes his people must be "cleansed" for not embracing his philosophy. Rebels are known for cutting off the fingers and lips of victims and taking young girls -- some only 9 or 10 years old -- as sex slaves.
"Kony does not have a political agenda, and he no more represents Christianity or the Ten Commandments than the bombers in the World Trade Center represented Islam," said Jimmy Kolker, the U.S. ambassador to Uganda.
Recently, peace talks aimed at ending Sudan's civil war brought hope that Uganda's war would wind down. But Sudan broke a promise made in late 2002 to stop supplying weapons to the Lord's Resistance Army, according to John Prendergast, an Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization that monitors global conflicts.
"As yet, there is not enough pressure to make any diplomatic opening possible," Prendergast said. "The U.S. will have to lean heavily on the government of Sudan to cut off its support to the LRA and bring it to the table to talk."
In Kampala, the government has been fiercely criticized by politicians and ordinary Ugandans for its failure to stop the war. In November, 34 members of parliament walked out of a session in protest, saying the government was not sincere about wanting to end the war in the north.
Andrew Mwenda of Monitor FM, the country's most popular radio station, has been an outspoken critic of the government. He points to ethnic tensions between Uganda's ruling elite -- the Buganda and others -- and the ethnic Acholi, some of whom served in the armies of the governments of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, longtime enemies of Museveni. "The war continues as a sting in the flesh to the Acholi," Mwenda said, sitting in his office amid reams of newspaper clippings. "Meanwhile, the Ugandan army is unwilling to die for Acholi people. I hold these African leaders in horrible contempt. This is the nastiest world I've lived in, and I am just waiting for my ticket to heaven."
The latest bloodshed occurred the night of Feb. 5, when scores of rebels attacked the Abia camp near Lira, tossing hand grenades, torching huts and hacking to death 50 villagers, leaving body parts strewn through the camp. Then, about 13 miles from the scene, the rebels abducted 10 people from their fields.
The men in the camp at Pagak are afraid to leave. They use their savings to buy a local alcohol brewed by wrinkled grandmothers. They laze during the bright days in dark, musty huts.
Every few days, lines form. Chaotic bunches of circular lines snake out into the trampled fields where families wait for small rations of beans and maize provided by the U.N. World Food Program. Their abandoned fields just over the hills are within view on a clear day. Farmers who once grew bountiful crops of sweet potatoes, sugar cane, pumpkins and mangoes are too afraid to plant and harvest.
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U.S. PROVIDES SUPPORT FOR UAE MISSILE PROGRAM
Middle East Newsline
Mon, 16 Feb 2004
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/february/02_17_4.html
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States has approved a program to support a United Arab Emirates's missile program.
The Defense Department has awarded Raytheon Peninsula Systems a $5 million contract for technical assistance to support the UAE's Honing All the Way Missile System Program. The program is one of several UAE missile programs being supported by the Pentagon.
In October 2002, the UAE Air Force signed an agreement for the procurement of Raytheon's AIM-9M Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. These missiles were meant to equip the new F-16 fleet of the UAE.
Officials said the latest Pentagon award will be conducted at Raytheon's facility in West Andover, Mass. They said the contract is expected to be completed by the end of 2005.
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Navy Jet Fighter Is for Sale on EBay
February 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Jet-Fighter-Sale.html
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- You can now have your very own Navy F/A-18A Hornet jet fighter -- but some assembly may be required.
The price for the jet, which formerly belonged to the Navy's Blue Angels aerial demonstration team, is just over $1 million on the auction firm eBay, or about $9 million for a buyer who wants it assembled, painted and certified ready-to-fly.
Only legal U.S. residents can bid. The auction is scheduled to end Thursday.
An F/A-18 in 1997 cost the military $28 million, according to the Blue Angels' official Web site.
Mike Landa, of Landa and Associates, the Washington state brokerage that has listed the fighter on the Internet auction service, told The Virginian-Pilot that the jet is in parts and came out of military service in 1994. Landa wouldn't identify the owner, but said he came by it legally.
``This thing obviously slipped through the system somehow,'' Landa said
The FBI came out to visit Landa after he put the jet up for bidding. They wanted to know ``what are you selling here,'' he said. ``They wanted to have the scoop on it.''
Landa said he has no doubt that someone will surface to claim the Hornet. The jet's model can fly about 1,400 mph and climb 30,000 feet in a minute.
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Federal Contracts
States News Service
Washington Post
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page E08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44693-2004Feb15?language=printer
Information Network Inc. of Lanham won a $33.93 million contract from NASA for technical information services.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $20.94 million contract from the Navy for research and development of the electronic warfare integrated system for small platforms.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $5.22 million contract from the Air Force for hardened night-vision goggles.
Interco Federal System Inc. of Silver Spring won a contract valued at up to $5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for hand tools.
Coffey Communications LLC of Bethesda won a contract valued at up to $5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business-improvement services.
Norfolk Shipbuilding & Drydock Corp. of Norfolk, Va., won a $2.91 million contract from the Navy for the USS Stump.
Danaher Tool Group of Hunt Valley won a contract valued at up to $2.89 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for hand tools.
LB&B Associates Inc. of Columbia won a $2.29 million contract from the General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service for mechanical operations and maintenance services in southeast Michigan.
American Type Culture Collection of Manassas won a $2.19 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for research and development of characterization of human embryonic stem cell lines.
APT LLC of Norfolk won a $569,190 contract from the Naval Supply Systems Command for maritime industrial marts.
MacroSys Research & Technology of Washington won a $290,268 contract from the Transportation Department for a community Web site for truck size and weight.
International Institute of Education of Washington won a $250,000 contract from the Agency for International Development for energy and development services.
Core International Inc. of Washington won a $250,000 contract from the Agency for International Development for people, energy and development services.
Academy for Educational Development of Washington won a $250,000 contract from the Agency for International Development for people, energy and development.
BMH Associates Inc. of Norfolk won a $199,005 contract from the Navy's Office of Naval Research for research and development of the virtual at sea training ship board gaming environment.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $158,218 contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for mounting brackets.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $128,740 contract from the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for services.
Met Laboratories Inc. of Baltimore won a contract valued at up to $125,000 from the General Services Administration for instruments and laboratory equipment.
Management Services Group Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $113,760 contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for pulse generators.
Quality Performance Inc. of Fredericksburg won a $99,421 contract from the Naval Inventory Contro