History > 2014 > USA > International (V)

Peter Kassig

with a truck filled with supplies for Syrian refugees

in an undated photograph provided by the Kassig family.

Photograph: Kassig Family,

via European Pressphoto Agency

Obama Condemns Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig

NYT

NOV. 16, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/middleeast/peter-kassig-isis-video-execution.html

With Schoolgirls Taken by Boko Haram

Still Missing, U.S.-Nigeria Ties Falter

 

DEC. 31, 2014

The New York Times

By ERIC SCHMITT

STUTTGART, Germany — Soon after the Islamist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 teenage girls in Nigeria in April, the United States sent surveillance drones and about 30 intelligence and security experts to help the Nigerian military try to rescue them. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the top general for American missions in Africa, rushed from his headquarters here to help the commanders in the crisis.

Seven months later, the drone flights have dwindled, many of the advisers have gone home and not one of the kidnapped girls has been found. Many are believed to have been married off to Boko Haram fighters, who in the past six months have seized hundreds more civilians, including children, planted bombs in Nigerian cities and captured entire towns.

In Washington, that fleeting moment of cooperation between Nigeria and the United States in May has now devolved into finger-pointing and stoked the distrust between the two countries’ militaries. Nigeria’s ambassador to the United States has accused the Obama administration of failing to support the fight against Boko Haram, prompting the State Department to fire back with condemnations of the Nigerian military’s dismal human rights record.

“Tensions in the U.S.-Nigeria relationship are probably at their highest level in the past decade,” Johnnie Carson, the State Department’s former top diplomat for Africa, said in an interview. “There is a high degree of frustration on both sides. But this frustration should not be allowed to spin out of control.”

Here in Stuttgart, officials at the headquarters of United States Africa Command offered their own bleak assessment of a corruption-plagued, poorly equipped Nigerian military that is “in tatters” as it confronts an enemy that now controls about 20 percent of the country.

“Ounce for ounce, Boko Haram is equal to if not better than the Nigerian military,” said one American official here, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational reports.

The violence is in the meantime spilling into neighboring countries like Cameroon, which carried out its first airstrikes against Boko Haram this week, after militants overran a military base and attacked five villages there. Despite Boko Haram’s advances, United States Embassy officials in Abuja said Nigeria had canceled the last stage of American training of a newly created Nigerian Army battalion.

The United States’ original effort to help locate and rescue the girls produced scant results, American and Nigerian officials said, in part because of distrust. Although the United States reached an agreement with Nigeria last spring to share some intelligence, American officials did not include raw intelligence data because they believe that Boko Haram has infiltrated the Nigerian security services.

The United States has flown several hundred surveillance drone flights over the vast, densely forested regions in the northeast where the girls were seized, but officials in Stuttgart said that with few tips to guide the missions, the flights yielded little information, while diverting drones from other missions in war zones like Iraq and Syria.

When the Pentagon did come up with what it calls “actionable intelligence” from the drone flights — for example, information that might have indicated the location of some of the girls — and turned it over to the Nigerian commanders to pursue, they did nothing with the information, Africa Command officials said.

In addition, United States security assistance to Nigeria has been sharply limited by American legal prohibitions against close dealings with foreign militaries that have engaged in human rights abuses.

Last summer, the United States blocked the sale of American-made Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria from Israel, amid concerns in Washington about Nigeria’s ability to use and maintain that type of helicopter in its effort against Boko Haram, and continuing worries about Nigeria’s protection of civilians when conducting military operations.

Those restrictions have drawn sharp criticism from Nigerian officials. In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in November, Nigeria’s ambassador to the United States, Adebowale Ibidapo Adefuye, said his government was dissatisfied with the “scope, nature and content” of American support in the fight against Boko Haram. He also disputed allegations of human rights violations committed by Nigerian soldiers.

“We find it difficult to understand how and why in spite of the U.S. presence in Nigeria with their sophisticated military technology, Boko Haram should be expanding and becoming more deadly,” he said.

Mr. Adefuye accused Washington of failing to provide the lethal weapons needed to defeat Boko Haram. In June, the Pentagon gave Nigeria some Toyota trucks, communications equipment and body armor. “There is no use giving us the type of support that enables us to deliver light jabs to the terrorists when what we need to give them is the killer punch,” the ambassador said.

In Nigeria, more than 200 schoolgirls have been held captive since last April. Some background information on the Islamist group that has been trying to topple the country’s government for years.

Mr. Adefuye’s speech prompted a strong response from the State Department the next day. “We continue to urge Nigeria to investigate allegations of abuses perpetrated by Nigerian security forces, as well as offer Nigeria assistance in developing the doctrine and training needed to improve the military’s effectiveness,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters in Washington. “We wouldn’t be raising that concern if we didn’t feel and others didn’t feel that they were warranted.”

Groups like Human Rights Watch say the Nigerian military has at times burned hundreds of homes and committed other abuses as it battled Boko Haram and its presumed supporters.

By this time, cooperation on the ground was also wearing thin. When Maj. Gen. James B. Linder, the head of American Special Operations forces in Africa, visited Nigeria in late October, he was barred from visiting the base where American trainers were instructing the new Nigerian Army battalion created to help fight Boko Haram. General Linder was left waiting at the gate in what some American officials viewed as another dig at the Pentagon. Africa Command officials insisted it was a “coordination issue that was remedied with a meeting later in the day.

“We continue to engage with Nigeria on a broad range of training, equipping, and information-sharing projects across all of the military services,” Benjamin Benson, an Africa Command spokesman, said in an email.

Secretary of State John Kerry called Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, on Tuesday in part to discuss Boko Haram.

The strains between the two militaries are not new, and with Nigeria preparing for national elections in February, American officials fear that earlier assessments may overtake their cautious optimism from the spring.

Testifying before House and Senate hearings, administration officials in May offered an unusually candid criticism of the Nigerian military. “We’re now looking at a military force that’s, quite frankly, becoming afraid to even engage,” said Alice Friend, the Pentagon’s principal director for African affairs at the time.

Sarah Sewall, the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, said at a separate hearing that despite Nigeria’s $5.8 billion security budget for 2014, “corruption prevents supplies as basic as bullets and transport vehicles from reaching the front lines of the struggle against Boko Haram.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2015,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
With Schoolgirls Still Missing, Fragile U.S.-Nigeria Ties Falter.

    With Schoolgirls Taken by Boko Haram Still Missing, U.S.-Nigeria Ties Falter,
    NYT, 31.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/world/
    with-schoolgirls-still-missing-fragile-us-nigeria-ties-falter.html

The Palestinians’ Desperation Move

 

DEC. 31, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

In some ways, the decision by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to force a losing vote on Palestinian statehood at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday and then sign papers to join the International Criminal Court on Wednesday was not surprising.

At nearly 80, he has to be tired and deeply frustrated with the failure of years of peace negotiations with Israel to achieve the Palestinian dream of an independent state. He has seen his popularity and credibility plummet as he competed for the support of his people with Hamas, the militant group that would rather lob missiles at Israel than recognize it.

“They have to take some meaningful steps to recover anything of their really shredded credibility,” Nadia Hijab, executive director of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, said of Mr. Abbas’s team in an interview with The Times.

And, in truth, prospects for a two-state solution grow dimmer by the day, with right-wing Israeli politicians opposing a Palestinian state and the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, steadily expanding settlements, making the creation of a viable Palestinian state harder.

But Mr. Abbas’s actions will almost certainly make the situation worse, setting back the cause of statehood even farther. By taking this tack before the Israeli elections, which are set for March 17, he has given Israeli hard-liners new ammunition to attack the Palestinians and reject new peace talks. And he may have set in motion the collapse of the Palestinians’ self-governing authority.

Mr. Abbas began this week by insisting that the Security Council approve a resolution to set a deadline for establishing a Palestinian state, including the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank by the end of 2017. After heavy lobbying by the United States and Israel, the resolution received only eight of the nine votes needed to pass in the 15-member council. The fact is, the United States, which voted against the measure, supports a Palestinian state. And France, which broke with the Americans and voted in favor, acknowledged reservations about some of the details.

Following this defeat, Mr. Abbas moved swiftly on Wednesday to take an even more provocative step in joining the International Criminal Court, through which the Palestinians could bring charges against Israeli officials for cases against their settlement activities and military operations.

While he was under strong pressure from his constituents to do this, he knew well the cost might be great. “There is aggression practiced against our land and our country, and the Security Council has let us down — where shall we go?” Mr. Abbas said at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

The United States Congress had long threatened to impose sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, including the loss of about $400 million in annual aid, if it joined the court. Israel could withhold tens of millions of dollars in tax remittances, as it has before, and could move more aggressively to build settlements in sensitive areas. Mr. Netanyahu also said the Palestinians may now be subject to prosecution over support for Hamas.

How the European Union, another major donor to the Palestinians, might react is unclear. Even though the United States and Israel may want to punish the Palestinian Authority, hasty retaliation could trigger the authority’s collapse and impose major new burdens on Israel.

Under agreements with the court signed by Mr. Abbas, the Palestinians cannot file a complaint against Israel for up to 90 days. They would be wise to delay any action until at least after the Israeli election, when voters will have a chance to decide the country’s leadership. It’s possible that the crisis Mr. Abbas has provoked could bring about fresh consideration of the compromises that both sides need to make to allow their peoples to live in peace. But given the history, it’s hard to be optimistic.

A version of this editorial appears in print on January 1, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: The Palestinians’ Desperation Move.

    The Palestinians’ Desperation Move, NYT, 31.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/opinion/the-palestinians-desperation-move.html

Palestinians Set to Seek Redress

in a World Court

 

DEC. 31, 2014

The New York Times

By JODI RUDOREN

JERUSALEM — President Mahmoud Abbas moved on Wednesday to have the Palestinian Authority join the International Criminal Court, opening a new front in the Middle East conflict that could lead to war-crimes prosecutions of Israeli officials and that risks severe sanctions from Washington and Jerusalem.

The step is part of a strategic shift by the Palestinian leadership to pursue statehood in the international arena after decades of failed American-brokered negotiations with Israel. It came a day after the defeat of a United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory by 2017.

“There is aggression practiced against our land and our country, and the Security Council has let us down — where shall we go?” Mr. Abbas said at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah as he signed the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the court, and a number of other international conventions.

“We want to complain to this organization,” he said of the court. “As long as there is no peace, and the world doesn’t prioritize peace in this region, this region will live in constant conflict. The Palestinian cause is the key issue to be settled.”

An American State Department spokesman called the action “counterproductive,” arguing that it would only push the two sides further apart.

“It is an escalatory step that will not achieve any of the outcomes most Palestinians have long hoped to see for their people,” Jeff Rathke, the spokesman, said in a statement. “Actions like this are not the answer. Hard as it is, all sides need to find a way to work constructively and cooperatively together to lower tensions, reject violence and find a path forward.”

Mr. Abbas, whose popularity plummeted after the battle between Israel and Hamas over the summer, has been pressed by other Palestinian leaders and the public to sign the statute and then use the court to pursue cases against Israel’s settlement policy and its military operations. But the step could have major repercussions, not least because Palestinian officials could also be charged by the court. Israel and the United States have promised to respond harshly to the move.

“There is no question mark as to what are the consequences, that there will be immediate American and Israeli financial sanctions,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. “Those sanctions will gradually become more and more crippling, and this could indeed be the beginning of the end of the P.A. They fully realize that.”

A poll in December by Mr. Shikaki’s group found that just 35 percent of Palestinians approved of the president’s performance, down from 50 percent before the fighting in Gaza. If there were elections now, the poll found, Mr. Abbas and his more secular Fatah party would be defeated by Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates the Gaza Strip. Reconstruction in Gaza after the devastating war has stalled amid continuing acrimony between Hamas and Fatah despite an April reconciliation pact, and analysts said Mr. Abbas was desperate to show that he was effective.
Continue reading the main story

“They have to take some meaningful steps to recover anything of their really shredded credibility,” Nadia Hijab, executive director of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, said of Mr. Abbas’s team. “That fig leaf of action is growing steadily more tattered. They keep saying it’s a new paradigm and they want to use international tools, but now they have actually been put on the spot.”

Meeting after a ceremony marking Fatah’s 50th anniversary, the Palestinian leadership decided to return to the Security Council in the new year, when changes in its membership make passage of the resolution more likely. That could force an American veto that the Obama administration has tried to avoid. Afterward, Mr. Abbas made a show of signing the papers to accede to the international conventions, though the Palestinians cannot take action under the agreements for up to 90 days, a window of time that some in Washington are counting on to calm the situation.

But Israel is scheduled to hold elections on March 17, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians may be eager to show a strong response to what they have long said would be an aggressive unilateral act.

“It is the Palestinian Authority — which is in a unity government with Hamas, an avowed terrorist organization that, like ISIS, perpetrates war crimes — that needs to be concerned about the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement after the signing.

“We will take steps in response, and we will defend the soldiers of the I.D.F.,” he added, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “We will rebuff this additional attempt to force diktat on us, just like we rebuffed the Palestinian appeal to the U.N. Security Council.”

Aaron David Miller, a regional expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said that “in a single move, Palestinians have managed to buck up the Israeli right,” give Mr. Netanyahu “a great campaign issue,” undermine his opponents, “and alienate the Americans in the process.”

The signing came eight months after Mr. Abbas stunned Washington and Israel by having the Palestinian Authority join 15 international treaties and conventions at a time when nine months of American-brokered peace talks were near collapse.

The agreements Mr. Abbas signed Wednesday cover a host of cross-border concerns, including organized crime, safety of United Nations workers, biological diversity, hazardous waste, international waterways, nuclear weapons and cluster munitions.

But the most significant is the one with the International Criminal Court, created in 2002 to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It currently has 122 members, including most of Western Europe but not Israel or the United States.

The Palestinians asked the court in 2009 to investigate Israeli actions during Operation Cast Lead, a three-week military offensive in Gaza, but their request was rejected because they lacked the required United Nations status. A 2012 vote in the General Assembly upgraded Palestine to a nonmember observer state, and some Palestinians had been urging Mr. Abbas to sign the Rome Statute ever since. But questions remain about Palestine’s qualifications, and in any event it is up to the court to decide which cases to pursue.

Shurat HaDin, an Israeli legal group, has already filed war-crimes complaints at The Hague against Hamas. Mr. Abbas said Wednesday night that the Palestinian move meant that other Palestinian officials “will be able to be sued as well.”

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister, said that Mr. Abbas, too, could find himself charged. He warned in a statement, “Someone who has terrorism smeared all over his head should not stand in the sun.”

Earlier Wednesday, several thousand Palestinians, including hundreds of rifle-toting security troops with faces hidden by masks or black paint, marched in a sea of yellow Fatah flags from Manara Square in Ramallah to Mr. Abbas’s headquarters, called the Muqata, for the anniversary ceremony. In Gaza City, at least 1,000 people met in the Unknown Soldier park for a parallel event that had not been publicized.

“I’m here today to express my love for Palestine,” said one of the Gaza participants, Fouad al-Kharobi, who kept his daughters from the event for fear that Hamas would quash it. “I want to see Gaza in a new year that has some kind of stability and peace.”

In Manara Square, several onlookers seemed despondent. “The peaceful solution doesn’t bring any result,” said Jalal Mahmoud, 23. “I don’t want to participate in the march. It is useless.”

Jamal Hashem, who runs a dry-cleaning shop near the Muqata, said he opposed a third intifada, or uprising, against the occupation.

“The Israelis will kill us and the business; I will be dead,” said Mr. Hashem, 44. “I don’t really know what we should do.”

Mahdi Abdul-Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, said criticism of the Palestinian Authority from the public and from intellectuals had mounted in recent weeks.

“The performance in New York was zero, very weak, very disappointing,” he said of the Palestinians’ efforts at the United Nations. “This is the call of the streets. Everybody is calling just to challenge the de facto apartheid regime, just to challenge Israel.”

But Ms. Hijab of the Washington-based Al-Shabaka group said that Wednesday’s move may have been unnecessary. She argued that the Palestinians “need to use the tools they already have to better effect.”

“They could be demanding that the Europeans cut completely any import of settlement products, that they stop settlers from traveling to Europe, and I think they would find ready ears here,” she said from her home in France. “What worries me is that all this joining stuff smacks of buying time, so as not to take action. Doing something meaningful with what you’ve joined is what’s really needed.”

Correction: December 31, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of international treaties and conventions President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority signed on Wednesday. He signed 18 in total, not 22.

Said Ghazali contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, and Majd Al Waheidi from Gaza.

A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2015,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Palestinians Set to Seek Redress in a World Court.

    Palestinians Set to Seek Redress in a World Court,
    NYT, 31.12.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/world/middleeast/
    palestinians-to-join-international-criminal-court-defying-israeli-us-warnings.html

Resolution for Palestinian State

Fails in United Nations Security Council

 

DEC. 30, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

and SOMINI SENGUPTA

A United Nations Security Council draft resolution that set a deadline to establish a sovereign Palestinian state was defeated Tuesday night after it failed to receive the nine votes that are needed for adoption in the 15-member body.

The United States and Australia voted against the measure. France, China and Russia were among the eight countries that voted for it. Britain and four other nations abstained.

The draft resolution, which was introduced by Jordan on behalf of the Palestinians, set a one-year deadline for negotiations with Israel; established targets for Palestinian sovereignty, including a capital in East Jerusalem; and called for the “full and phased withdrawal of Israeli forces” from the West Bank by the end of 2017.

The defeat could potentially lead Palestinian officials to seek recognition in other ways — including by joining the International Criminal Court.

Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said that the resolution was “deeply imbalanced,” setting deadlines that did not adequately take account of Israel’s security needs. “Today’s staged confrontation in the U.N. Security Council will not bring the parties closer to achieving a two-state solution,” she said. “This resolution sets the stage for more division, not for compromise.”

Yet Ms. Power also cautioned Israel against interpreting the vote as “a victory for an unsustainable status quo” and said continued “settlement activity” would also undermine the chances for peace.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement on Tuesday night, “We presented a resolution that is fully in line with international law, and which recalls several previously approved resolutions by the United Nations.”

“Although the majority of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution,” he said, “once again, certain countries continue to ensure impunity to the Israeli occupation and its severe international law violations by not voting in favor of the resolution.”

At first, Secretary of State John Kerry sought to defer a vote on the resolution, which the United States and some of its European allies feared would inflame tensions before the Israeli elections that are scheduled for March and strengthen the position of Israeli hard-liners.

But American officials said it has been clear since Mr. Kerry’s mid-December trip to Europe that the Palestinians would insist on a vote. During that visit, Mr. Kerry met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Erekat and ranking European and Russian diplomats.

So Mr. Kerry worked to line up enough abstentions from American allies like South Korea and Rwanda so that the United States would not have to wield its veto. Jeff Rathke, a State Department spokesman, said Tuesday that Mr. Kerry had called more than a dozen senior foreign officials over the previous few days, including a call Tuesday afternoon to Goodluck Jonathan, the president of Nigeria, which abstained.

Calculating that they were making headway, American officials were eager for the vote to occur this month instead of being deferred until January when the composition of the Security Council will change.

By avoiding a veto, the United States also avoided a fresh irritant in its relations with Arab nations, some of which have joined the United States in the campaign in Iraq and Syria against militants from the Islamic State.

European nations, which have been generally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, were split. Britain and Lithuania abstained, but France and Luxembourg voted in favor of the measure.

François Delattre, France’s ambassador to the United Nations, acknowledged that his government had reservations about some elements of the resolution but said France decided to support it because of “an urgent need to act.”

Jordan, which represents Arab countries on the Council, had earlier pushed for compromise language that could win full support, but Arab diplomats ultimately backed the Palestinian bid to put it for a vote by the end of the year.

“The fact that this draft resolution was not adopted will not at all prevent us from proceeding to push the international community, specifically the United Nations, toward an effective involvement to achieving a resolution to this conflict,” Dina Kawar, Jordan’s ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote.

The decision by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to press for a vote also reflects intense domestic political pressure on him to regain credibility among an increasingly critical public.

In a December poll, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that four out of five Palestinians supported joining more international organizations, while three-fourths of them backed joining the International Criminal Court.

American diplomats have repeatedly warned the Palestinians that joining the International Criminal Court would lead to congressional sanctions.

Nonetheless, the Palestinian leadership has threatened for months to ratify the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, which would make Israel vulnerable to prosecution for crimes against humanity, particularly for its settlement activity.

The Palestinian leadership is to meet Wednesday in Ramallah and announce the next steps.
 

Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

A version of this article appears in print on December 31, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Draft Resolution Setting Deadline for Palestinian State Fails in Security Council.

    Resolution for Palestinian State Fails in United Nations Security Council,
    NYT, 30.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/world/middleeast/
    resolution-for-palestinian-state-fails-in-security-council.html

Gaza Is Nowhere

DEC. 30, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Roger Cohen

GAZA CITY — You trudge into Gaza from a high-tech Israeli facility through a caged walkway that brings you, after about 15 minutes, to a ramshackle Palestinian border post; and then, formalities completed, on you go, through dust and the reek of sewage, past the crumpled buildings and the donkey carts, to arrive at last in the middle of nowhere.

Gaza is nowhere. Very few people go in or out of the 140-square-mile enclave. Most people want to forget about it. The border with Egypt was closed in October. A handful of travelers negotiate the labyrinth of inspections at the Israeli border and proceed into the Jewish state.

I watched a young man passing sand through a sieve as the surface of a road was laid beside the sea in Gaza City. He’d shake the sieve, watch the sand drop through and, finally, tip out the remnants. Again and again he did it, in the dust. He is among the more productively employed of Gaza’s 1.8 million citizens.

There is another war waiting to happen in Gaza. The last one changed nothing. Hamas rockets are being test-fired. A Palestinian farmer has been shot dead near the border. Tensions simmer. The draft Security Council resolution at the United Nations, championed by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, seeking a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank by 2017, amounts to an elaborate sideshow. The real matter of diplomatic urgency going into 2015, for the Palestinian people and the world, is to end the lockdown of Gaza.

“People are mad, frustrated, they have nothing to lose,” Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to the Hamas Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told me. “We are dying gradually so it is better to die with dignity.”

The only dust-free environment is the compound of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. I went to see its director, Robert Turner. He told me that initial estimates of war damage belittled its extent: 96,000 homes of refugee families (against initial estimates of 42,000) are either destroyed or damaged, and 124,000 houses in all. But very little rebuilding material is available. “There’s a vacuum.” he said.

The supposed reconciliation between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas has proved worthless. At the hospital, contracts for cleaners and food are not being paid. Hamas and Fatah blame each other. Turner described “a drift toward more radical groups.” None of the causes of the conflict had been addressed. “Fatah and Hamas and Israel can avert a descent into new violence, but I don’t think that window will stay open for long,” he told me.

Nobody wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human beings.

The enclave is a thorny quandary. Hamas has a vile Charter, a goal of destroying Israel, and it fires rockets on Israeli civilians from among Palestinian civilians. But it is not monolithic. Putting Gaza first would have several merits: forcing Palestinians to unify their national movement and hold long-delayed elections; averting yet another war with its heavy toll in human life and negative impact on Israel’s international standing; ushering a large group of Palestinians out of radicalizing misery; obliging the peacemakers, so-called, to get real or go home; stopping the distraction at the United Nations.

My Gaza road ended at the Shuhadaa al Shejaeya Secondary School for boys. It is about 1,400 yards from the border in eastern Gaza City. You look out past a destroyed juice factory, a destroyed farm-equipment factory and see the tantalizing green fields of Israel, from which Palestinians tend to avert their eyes. The classrooms all have windows blown out or doors blown off. Kids play football in a courtyard imprinted with Israeli tank tracks. Half of them have homes partially destroyed. I asked one student, Saleem Ejla, age 16, what he expected: “War after war,” he shot back.

Hasan al-Zeyada, a psychologist, showed me around. He lost six close relatives, including his mother and three brothers, in an Israeli airstrike on July 20. Of the students at the school, he said that they had no need to be taught history: “They have lived it. They can teach it to me.”

He told me about his 8-year-old daughter, Zeina, who refuses to speak to God since her grandmother was killed and tells her father: “God is a weak one. I will never say God again. He can’t change anything.”

But Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Europeans and Americans can — if they choose to locate the nowhere named Gaza and turn it into somewhere. The alternative is war without end.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 31, 2014, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Gaza Is Nowhere.

    Gaza Is Nowhere, NYT, 30.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/opinion/roger-cohen-gaza-is-nowhere.html

Cuban Exiles at Miami Rally

Denounce Obama for Rapprochement

DEC. 20, 2014

The New York Times

By NICK MADIGAN

MIAMI — The simmering rage that Cuban exiles have shown in recent days against opening diplomatic relations with the Communist government in Cuba poured out in a rally here on Saturday during which President Obama was denounced unsparingly as a traitor and a liar.

Surrounded by Cuban flags flapping in the hot afternoon sun, several hundred protesters loudly excoriated the president in Spanish for his overture to the Cuban government after more than half a century of embargo and political stalemate, a move that they insisted would only cement the Castros’ hold on power.

“The government in Cuba will still repress and throw into jail anyone who opposes the Castro regime,” said Blanca Gonzalez, 65, who moved to the United States 13 years ago and whose son, Normando Hernandez, spent seven years in a Cuban prison for, she said, “practicing independent journalism.” He was freed in 2011.

Many Cuban exiles here have always held an ardent and implacable opposition to any hint of rapprochement with the Castro government. This week’s announcements from Mr. Obama and the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, have revived in stark fashion the resentments of these exiles, many of whom now feel utterly betrayed by the government of their adopted land.

“All Obama is doing is throwing a lifeline to the Castros so that they can continue crushing the people of Cuba,” said Roberto Delgado Ramos, 78, who said he was arrested twice, in 1960 and 1964, for “counterrevolutionary activities” and served a total of 12 years in prison. “The Castros are the ones who need to pay for the blood that they have spilled.”

Many of the demonstrators in José Martí Park — named after a Cuban hero of the island’s struggle for independence from Spain in the 19th century — took issue also with an exchange of prisoners between the two countries.

“I wasn’t surprised that the Obama administration wanted to adopt a policy of appeasement with the Castro government, because that’s what they’ve been doing with the rest of our enemies throughout the world,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who was elected last month to represent Florida’s 26th District in the House of Representatives. Mr. Curbelo’s parents were born in Cuba.

A former member of Florida’s congressional delegation, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican, said that in his announcement on Wednesday Mr. Obama had “deliberately given the impression” that he had lifted the embargo against Cuba — in effect since 1960, and codified into law — “so that the rest of the world invests in Cuba.” Mr. Diaz-Balart said the president had chosen to back the Cuban government now because Venezuela, which has been providing monetary and material support to Cuba for years, could no longer afford to do so.

While some younger Cuban-Americans — many of them born in the United States and only distantly connected to the land of their ancestors — have expressed the view that it was high time for a different political approach to Cuba, a rigid doctrine animates the old guard, many of whom had their properties seized by the Communists after their takeover in 1959 and whose careers and livelihoods were decimated.

And yet some observers of the dynamics of Cuban life in exile have concluded that intransigence serves no purpose, and that elected officials’ defiance in the face of Mr. Obama’s initiative is misguided.

“Much of the opposition is a knee-jerk reaction to change that plays to their political constituencies in Florida, especially the older generation,” said Bruce M. Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami whose specialty is United States-Latin America relations and who has visited Cuba on nine occasions.

While many of the exiles have good cause to be deeply upset with the Castros, Professor Bagley said, their anger has produced nothing tangible to alter the situation in Cuba.

“It is a visceral hatred on their part,” he said. “They lost their country, their property, their family status. This is what has motivated them since 1959, and it drives them still. They are impermeable on this. They simply cannot be reasoned with. Fifty-four years of failure doesn’t faze them a bit — their hatred remains alive and burning.”

At Saturday’s protest, Anitere Flores, a Florida state senator whose parents were born in Cuba, said from the stage: “If the United States doesn’t stand for freedom, then who does? What were all those lives lost for?”

Watching her was Félix Rodríguez Mendigutia, the president of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association, who took part in the failed C.I.A.-led effort to topple Fidel Castro in 1961. The reopening of diplomatic ties to Cuba, he said, was “a betrayal of the people of Cuba.”

“Obama hasn’t talked about stopping the repression,” he said. “Not only that, but the prisoner swap tells any terrorist group around the world that they can capture an American and that he can be exchanged for any terrorist they want.”

    Cuban Exiles at Miami Rally Denounce Obama for Rapprochement,
    NYT, 20.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/us/
    cuba-exiles-at-miami-rally-denounce-obama.html

What Will Israel Become?

DEC. 20, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

JERUSALEM — Uneasiness inhabits Israel, a shadow beneath the polished surface. In a violent Middle Eastern neighborhood of fracturing states, that is perhaps inevitable, but Israelis are questioning their nation and its future with a particular insistence. As the campaign for March elections begins, this disquiet looks like the precursor of political change. The status quo, with its bloody and inconclusive interludes, has become less bearable. More of the same has a name: Benjamin Netanyahu, now in his third term as prime minister. The alternative, although less clear, is no longer unthinkable.

“There is a growing uneasiness, social, political, economic,” Amos Oz, the novelist, told me in an interview. “There is a growing sense that Israel is becoming an isolated ghetto, which is exactly what the founding fathers and mothers hoped to leave behind them forever when they created the state of Israel.” The author, widely viewed as the conscience of a liberal and anti-Messianic Israel, continued, “Unless there are two states — Israel next door to Palestine — and soon, there will be one state. If there will be one state, it will be an Arab state. The other option is an Israeli dictatorship, probably a religious nationalist dictatorship, suppressing the Palestinians and suppressing its Jewish opponents.”

If that sounds stark, it is because choices are narrowing. Every day, it seems, another European government or parliament expresses support for recognition of a Palestinian state. A Palestinian-backed initiative at the United Nations, opposed in its current form by the United States, is aimed at pushing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank by 2017. The last Gaza eruption, with its heavy toll and messy outcome, changed nothing. Hamas, its annihilationist hatred newly stoked, is still there parading its weapons. Tension is high in Jerusalem after a spate of violent incidents. Life is expensive. Netanyahu’s credibility on both the domestic and international fronts has dwindled.

“We wake up every morning to some new threat he has found,” said Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist. “We have grown tired of it.”

This fatigue will, however, translate into change only if a challenger looks viable. Until recently nobody has. But in the space of a few weeks something has shifted. The leader of the Labor Party, Isaac Herzog, has been ushered from unelectable nerd to plausible patriot. Polls show him neck and neck with the incumbent. Through an alliance forged this month with Tzipi Livni, the recently dismissed justice minister and longtime negotiator with the Palestinians, the Labor leader created a sense of possibility for the center left. A post-Bibi Israel no longer seems a fantasy.

“This cannot go on,” Herzog, a mild-mannered man working on manifesting his inner steel, told me. “There is a deep inherent worry as to the future and well-being of our country. Netanyahu has been leading us to a dead end, to an abyss.” Summing up his convictions, Herzog declared, “We are the Zionist camp. They are the extreme camp.”

Here we get to the nub of the election. A battle has been engaged for Israel’s soul. The country’s founding charter of 1948 declared that the nascent state would be based “on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” This is the embodiment of the Zionism of Herzog and Livni. They are both descendants of important figures in Israel’s creation — Chaim Herzog, a former president of Labor sympathies, and Eitan Livni, a former commander of the rightist Irgun militia. For all their differences Labor and Likud, left and right, did not differ on the essential democratic freedoms for all its citizens, Jew and Arab, that Israel should seek to uphold. The new Herzog-Livni alliance looks like an eloquent reaffirmation of that idea.

It is a fragile idea today. Tolerance is under attack as a wave of Israeli nationalism unfurls and settlements grow in the West Bank. This virulent, Jews-first thinking led recently to a bill known as the nationality law that would rescind Arabic’s status as an official language — and proved a catalyst to the breakup of Netanyahu’s government. It also finds expression in the abuse hurled at anyone, including the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, who speaks up for Arab rights. “Traitor” has become a facile cry.

Danny Danon, a former deputy defense minister who is challenging Netanyahu for the Likud leadership, told me his long-term vision for the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria as he calls it, “is to have sovereignty over the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians.” The two-state idea, Danon said, “is finished, and most Israelis understand that.”

In fact the two-state idea is alive but ever more tenuous. It is compatible with an Israel true to its founding principles. It is incompatible with an Israel bent on Jewish supremacy and annexation of all or most of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It can be resurrected, because there is no plausible alternative, despite the fact that almost a half-century of dominion over another people has produced ever greater damage, distrust and division. It can be buried only at the expense of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, for no democracy can indefinitely control the lives of millions of disenfranchised people — and that is what many Palestinians are.

“This election is a critical juncture,” said Ofer Kenig, a political analyst. “We have to choose between being a Zionist and liberal nation, or turning into an ethnocentric, nationalist country. I am concerned about the direction in which this delicate democracy is heading.”

A child of 9 in Gaza has memories of three wars in six years. The child may stand in the remains of the Shejaiya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, gazing at tangles of iron rods, mountains of stone, jagged outcrops of masonry, and air thick with dust. The child may wonder what force it is that wrought such destruction, so repetitively, and why. It is safe to say that the adult this Palestinian child will one day become does not bode well for Israel. The child has no need for indoctrination in hatred.

I was there the other day, in the rubble. Children stood around. I chatted with the Harara family, whose houses were flattened during the 50-day war with Israel that began this summer. Every day Mustafa Harara, 47, comes to gaze at the cratered vestige of his house. He asks where else he should go. It took him 26 years to build. It took five minutes for Israel to demolish it. The reason is unclear. He is no Hamas militant. His electricity business, located in the same area, was also destroyed.

Since the war, he has received nothing, despite the billions for reconstruction pledged by gulf states and others. In June, President Mahmoud Abbas swore in a new government that grew out of the reconciliation pact his Palestine Liberation Organization had signed with Hamas. There is no unity and, in effect, no government in Gaza.

The Egyptian border is closed. Movement through the Israeli border amounts to a minimal trickle. Israeli surveillance balloons hover in airspace controlled by Israel. The 140-square-mile area is little better than an open-air prison. As incubators for violent extremism go, it is hard to imagine a more effective setting than Gaza.

Abbas has not visited since the war broke out. To come after such suffering would have been courageous; not to was craven. Now he is regarded as a stranger by most of the 1.8 million inhabitants of Gaza, the absent father of a nation in desperate need. “Abbas is the one who destroyed us,” Harara says. “What reconciliation? You cannot mix gasoline and diesel.”

This is the abject Palestinian reality behind the speeches about new paradigms, internationalization of the conflict, United Nations resolutions and the like. The legitimate Palestinian quest for statehood is undermined by debilitating division that Abbas is either unable or unwilling to address. In January, he will have been in power for a decade. He shows no sign of organizing the election needed to confer legitimacy on his rule or to reveal the real power balance in Palestinian politics. The citizens of Gaza represent a significant proportion of Palestinians in the Holy Land. How the Palestinian push for statehood can be effective without real unity and the painful compromises between Fatah and Hamas needed to achieve it is a mystery. Surely it is Job 1.

Everyone in Gaza seems to expect another war. “We are dying slowly, so why not die quickly?” is a common refrain. People seem dazed. There is, quite literally, no way out.

Lutfi Harara, the younger brother of Mustafa, whose home was also destroyed, took me to see the little house with a corrugated iron roof he had cobbled together since the war. He showed me photographs of Haifa, his memories of the Israel where he used to work as an electrician before divisions hardened. From rockets and artillery shells found in the rubble of his home, he has fashioned lamps and a vase and a heavy bell dangling from an olive tree — his version of swords into plowshares, and the one hopeful thing I saw in Gaza.

FROM his home I went to see a hard-line Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar. He lambasted Abbas — “he is living on stories” — and told me to forget about a two-state compromise at or near the 1967 lines. “Israel will be eliminated because it is a foreign body that does not belong to our area, or history or religion,” he said. Referring to Israeli Jews, he continued, “Why should they come from Ethiopia, or Poland, or America? There are six million in Palestine, O.K., take them. America is very wide. You can make a new district for the Jews.”

Zahar, with his hatred, is almost 70. Abbas will be 80 in March. Many Palestinians in their 20s and 30s whom I spoke to in Gaza are sick of sterile threats, incompetence and the cycle of war.

“There is no such thing as a happy compromise,” Amos Oz told me. “Israelis and Palestinians cannot become one happy family because they are not one, not happy and not family either. They are two unhappy families who must divide a small house into even smaller apartments.” The first step, he said, is to “sign peace with clenched teeth, and after signing the contract, start working slowly on a gradual emotional de-escalation on both sides.”

Israel is a remarkable and vibrant democratic society that is facing an impasse. It must decide whether to tough it out on a nationalist road that must lead eventually to annexation of at least wide areas of the West Bank, or whether to return to the ideals of the Zionists who accepted the 1947 United Nations partition of Mandate Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab (the Arabs did not accept the division and embarked on the first of several losing wars aimed at destroying Israel).

This election constitutes a pivotal moment. Herzog told me, “We are not willing to accept that mothers and fathers on the other side don’t want peace. They also want it, and I understand that they have a lack of hope just like here.” He smiled, as a thought occurred to him. “You know, I would be very happy to visit my mother’s birthplace in Egypt as prime minister.”

You can follow me on Twitter or join me on Facebook.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 21, 2014, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Will Israel Become?

    What Will Israel Become?, NYT, 21.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/opinion/sunday/
    roger-cohen-what-will-israel-become.html

Resolve Hardened by Massacre at School,

Pakistani Forces Kill Dozens of Militants

 

DEC. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By ISMAIL KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Military action against the Pakistani Taliban intensified on both sides of the border with Afghanistan on Friday, officials said, in a reflection of hardening resolve to fight the group after it carried out the school massacre in Peshawar this week.

In Pakistan, the military said it killed 62 militants in airstrikes and clashes near the border, mostly in the Khyber agency, a tribal area, on Thursday and Friday. The fighting was an indication that the Taliban’s operations have continued to spread out in response to the continuing military operation in the nearby North Waziristan region, which had long been the most concentrated center of militant power in Pakistan.

Just across the border, in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, the international military coalition carried out airstrikes that killed at least five militants. A Western official briefed on the strikes, but speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said that the operation was directly targeting elements of the Pakistani Taliban that were thought to have aided in the Peshawar school killings.

After the school attack, senior Afghan and Pakistani officials reaffirmed their commitment to work together against the Pakistani Taliban on both sides of the border. Militant hide-outs in the rugged and remote Pashtun tribal areas that span both countries have long been a point of tension, with Afghanistan and Pakistan each accusing the other of sheltering militant proxies.

The massacre in Peshawar has prompted a public outpouring of grief in Pakistan, along with calls for tougher action against militants.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the headquarters of the Pakistani Army in Rawalpindi on Friday for a briefing on the security situation. And the army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, traveled to the Khyber agency as the military offensive picked up there.

Just two days after the prime minister reinstated the death penalty in Pakistan, the government announced its first two executions in years. Two men identified as senior militants were hanged at the prison in the city of Faisalabad, the officials said, even as human rights advocates expressed concerns about potential legal abuses in the name of counterterrorism efforts.

Pakistani officials also reported the arrest of at least four people in Punjab Province in connection with the school attacks, though few details were given about their possible roles. The Dawn newspaper reported on its website that the suspects were connected to at least one of the cellphone SIM cards used by the gunmen during the attack.

The military action in the Khyber agency over the past two days was concentrated in the Tirah Valley, near the border, but it involved several different clashes, officials said.

Shahab Ali Shah, an administration official in the tribal region, said that security forces had raided one area of the Khyber agency after receiving a tip from intelligence officials.

In a separate battle, military and civil administration officials said, security forces had beaten back an attack by militants late Thursday night.

“After an hourlong battle, the attack was repulsed,” Mr. Shah said. “Eighteen militants were killed. Their bodies have been shifted to a local hospital for identification.”

The military said that an additional 32 militants were killed when security forces attacked them in two separate ambushes as they were moving toward the border. Three members of the security forces were also wounded in the exchange of fire, said a statement by Inter-Services Public Relations, the communications wing of the Pakistani military.
 

Azam Ahmed contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Resolve Hardened by Massacre at School, Pakistani Forces Kill Dozens of Militants.

    Resolve Hardened by Massacre at School,
    Pakistani Forces Kill Dozens of Militants, NYT, 19.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/world/asia/pakistan-school-militants.html

Obama Unbound

DEC. 19, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Timothy Egan

There may not be a lightness to his step, a lilt in his voice or a bit of jauntiness returned to his manner. The office ages everyone prematurely, and makes spontaneity all but impossible. But President Obama is acting like a man who’s been given the political equivalent of a testosterone boost.

Perhaps the best thing to happen to him was the crushing blow his party took in the midterm elections. Come January, Republicans will have their largest House majority in 84 years — since Herbert Hoover was president. Granted, no politician wants to join Hoover and history in the same sentence. But Obama is not cowering or conceding. He’s been liberated by defeat, becoming the president that many of his supporters hoped he would be.

He promised to be transformative. Instead, especially in the last two years, he’s been listless, passive, a spectator to his own presidency. Rather than setting things in motion, he reacted to events. Even Ebola, the great scare that prompted so much media hysteria it was awarded Lie of the Year by PolitiFact, was somehow his fault. No more. Of late, the president who has nothing to lose has discovered that his best friend is the future.

On normalizing relations with Cuba, on a surprising climate change initiative with China, on an immigration gamble that’s working, and executive orders to protect the world’s greatest wild salmon fishery in Alaska or try to root out gender pay disparities, Obama is marching ahead of politicians fighting yesterday’s wars. In setting an aggressive agenda, he has forced opponents to defend old-century policies, and rely on an aging base to do it.

Are Republicans really going to spend the first year of their new majority trying to undo everything the president has done — to roll back the clock? Will they defend isolation of Cuba against the wishes of most young Cuban-Americans? Will they restore a family-destroying deportation policy, when Obama’s de-emphasis on sending illegal immigrants home has already given him a 15-point boost among Latinos? Will they take away health insurance from millions who never had it before? Will they insist that nothing can be done on climate change, while an agreement is on the table for the world’s two biggest polluters, the United States and China, to do something significant?

The President Obama of the last six weeks is willing to take that bet. The tediously cautious, adrift president who governed before his party was rejected in November never would have.

Of course, it helps to have the wind at his back — gusts of good news.

Remember when Mitt Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of his first term? Obama has done him one better: two years ahead of schedule, unemployment is 5.8 percent. The economy added 321,000 jobs last month and average hourly wages actually rose, on pace to make 2014 the best year for financially battered Americans in almost a decade. And if there’s a Republican somewhere who predicted that gas prices would be well below $3 a gallon in year six of the Obama presidency, bring that prescient pol forward.

Remember, also, the man-crush that Republicans had on Vladimir Putin? Ohhh, Vlad — such a leader! Forceful, militarily aggressive, a manly man. Obama the plodder was getting played by Putin the Great. Now, the Russian president better keep his shirt on, for his country is teetering, increasingly isolated, its currency in free fall. Plunging oil prices have shown just how fragile a nation dependent on oil can be.

And speaking of oil, the incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed, as one of his first orders of business, to push forward Keystone XL, the proposed pipeline to move Canada’s dirty oil though the American heartland. There’s one problem: With low energy prices, the pipeline may no longer pencil out. It’s a bust, potentially, in a free market awash with cheap oil.

With the Cuba opening, one of those events that seem obvious to all the minute it takes shape, the president has Pope Francis as a diplomatic co-conspirator. This leaves Republican opponents of fresh air in Havana lecturing the most popular man on the planet. Even after that all-dogs-go-to-heaven thing turned out to be something that was lost in translation, the pope’s blessing of the Cuba initiative will beat hot air from a half-dozen senators.

Obama’s trademark caution in a crisis still serves him well. He kept his head during the Ebola meltdown when everyone else was losing theirs. Had we gone jaw to jaw with Putin over Ukraine, rather than building the case for sanctions, the world would be far messier. But in finally learning how to use the tools of his office, Obama unbound is a president primed to make his mark.
 

Gail Collins is off today.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Unbound.

    Obama Unbound, NYT, 19.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/obama-unbound.html

The Embattled Dream of Palestine

DEC. 19, 2014

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

The vision of two separate states, with Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace, has been at the core of years of arduous negotiations to solve the Middle East conflict. But with the two-state solution no closer to reality than it was decades ago, some Israelis on the far right are pushing other possibilities — including what might be called a one-state solution that could involve Israel’s annexing the largely Palestinian West Bank. A national election set for March could determine whether this idea has a serious future.

It is, admittedly, a long shot. Anything less than statehood will not satisfy the Palestinians’ longing for a self-governing homeland or end the resentment of Israeli rule that leads to unrest. Successive Israeli governments, including that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have long negotiated on the basis of a two-state solution, and the international community, starting with the United States, remains firmly, and correctly, committed to this end.

Even so, it is little surprise that some are seeking alternatives. After countless negotiating failures, there is declining confidence in a peaceful solution. When the latest American-mediated round collapsed in June, a Pew Research Center poll found that 45 percent of Israelis and 60 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank believe that Israel and a Palestinian state cannot coexist peacefully.

Among those pushing a one-state alternative is Naftali Bennett, the hard-line leader of the Jewish Home party and a challenger to Mr. Netanyahu. The two-state idea centers on Israel’s ceding land seized during the 1967 war, with minor adjustments. Mr. Bennett has a different vision. “You think that we need to give up our land to the ’67 lines, plus/minus, swap it, whatever,” he said recently. “I don’t. My people don’t. We think that would be tantamount to national suicide.”

He says that Israel, which withdrew from Gaza in 2005, cannot tolerate a contiguous Palestinian state that, in his view, would become a haven for terrorists. He would annex some 60 percent of the West Bank where Israel exercises full control, but he would give Palestinians more autonomy in areas of the West Bank administered by the Palestinian Authority, upgrading roads and removing checkpoints. Similar, though hardly identical, proposals abound. Dani Dayan, a leader of Israel’s settler community, is promoting a gauzy notion of “reconciliation” with Palestinians that he admits is “not a plan for permanent peace.” Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s president, is pushing annexation of the entire West Bank as part of a single Jewish state. He would give full citizenship to Palestinians even if annexation left Jews in the minority

As The Times has reported, some Palestinians are also tempted by a one-state solution, but talk of full rights draws skepticism. Many Palestinians who live in Israel and are citizens already feel they are discriminated against and fear this will worsen if Israel adopts a new law under consideration emphasizing the country’s Jewishness over democracy. There are risks in annexation and a one-state solution for Israelis, too. Many Israelis worry that will lead to a Palestinian majority, thus endangering the country’s democratic ideals and Jewish character.

With negotiations stalled and Israel narrowing the space for a peace deal by expanding settlements, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has made a desperation play for a two-state solution. He is pushing the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution that would set a deadline for full Israel withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and for recognition of a Palestinian state. He has strong support from Europe, where some governments have ratcheted up the pressure on Israel by individually endorsing Palestinian statehood.

The United States, trying to protect Israel’s interest, wants at the very least to delay a Security Council vote until after the Israeli election. That makes sense, since a showdown now almost certainly will benefit the opponents of a two-state solution. The campaign — in which a coalition formed by Isaac Herzog, head of the opposition Labor party, and Tzipi Livni, the recently dismissed justice minister, favors a two-state solution — is likely to focus on domestic issues. But the outcome could well determine the prospects for the elusive dream of a Palestinian state.


A version of this editorial appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: The Embattled Dream of Palestine.

    The Embattled Dream of Palestine, NYT, 19.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/the-embattled-dream-of-palestine.html

U.S. to Restore Full Relations With Cuba,

Erasing a Last Trace of Cold War Hostility

DEC. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century as he vowed to “cut loose the shackles of the past” and sweep aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.

The surprise announcement came at the end of 18 months of secret talks that produced a prisoner swap negotiated with the help of Pope Francis and concluded by a telephone call between Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro. The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis.

“We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal, he added, will “begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a “rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

In doing so, Mr. Obama ventured into diplomatic territory where the last 10 presidents refused to go, and Republicans, along with a senior Democrat, quickly characterized the rapprochement with the Castro family as appeasement of the hemisphere’s leading dictatorship. Republican lawmakers who will take control of the Senate as well as the House next month made clear they would resist lifting the 54-year-old trade embargo.

“This entire policy shift announced today is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people,” said Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida and son of Cuban immigrants. “All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to perpetuate itself in power.”

For good or ill, the move represented a dramatic turning point in relations with an island that for generations has captivated and vexed its giant northern neighbor. From the 18th century, when successive presidents coveted it, Cuba loomed large in the American imagination long before Fidel Castro stormed from the mountains and seized power in 1959.

Mr. Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union made Cuba a geopolitical flash point in a global struggle of ideology and power. President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed the first trade embargo in 1960 and broke off diplomatic relations in January 1961, just weeks before leaving office and seven months before Mr. Obama was born. Under President John F. Kennedy, the failed Bay of Pigs operation aimed at toppling Mr. Castro in April 1961 and the 13-day showdown over Soviet missiles installed in Cuba the following year cemented its status as a ground zero in the Cold War.

But the relationship remained frozen in time long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a thorn in the side of multiple presidents who waited for Mr. Castro’s demise and experienced false hope when he passed power to his brother, Raúl. Even as the United States built relations with Communist nations like China and Vietnam, Cuba remained one of just a few nations, along with Iran and North Korea, that had no formal ties with Washington.

Mr. Obama has long expressed hope of transforming relations with Cuba and relaxed some travel restrictions in 2011. But further moves remained untenable as long as Cuba held Alan P. Gross, an American government contractor arrested in 2009 and sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison for trying to deliver satellite telephone equipment capable of cloaking connections to the Internet.

After winning re-election, Mr. Obama resolved to make Cuba a priority for his second term and authorized secret negotiations led by two aides, Benjamin J. Rhodes and Ricardo Zúñiga, who conducted nine meetings with Cuban counterparts starting in June 2013, most of them in Canada, which has ties with Havana.

Pope Francis encouraged the talks with letters to Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro and had the Vatican host a meeting in October to finalize the terms of the deal. Mr. Obama spoke with Mr. Castro by telephone on Tuesday to seal the agreement in a call that lasted more than 45 minutes, the first direct substantive contact between the leaders of the two countries in more than 50 years.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Gross walked out of a Cuban prison and boarded an American military plane that flew him to Washington, accompanied by his wife, Judy. While eating a corned beef sandwich on rye bread with mustard during the flight, Mr. Gross received a call from Mr. Obama. “He’s back where he belongs, in America with his family, home for Hanukkah,” Mr. Obama said later.

For its part, the United States sent back three imprisoned Cuban spies who were caught in 1998 and had become a cause célèbre for the Havana government. They were swapped for Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a Cuban who had worked as an agent for American intelligence and had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years, according to a senior American official. Mr. Gross was not technically part of the swap, officials said, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds,” a distinction critics found unpersuasive.

The United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking, while Cuba will allow more Internet access and release 53 Cubans identified as political prisoners by the United States. Although the embargo will remain in place, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about lifting” it, which would require an act of Congress.

Mr. Castro spoke simultaneously on Cuban television, taking to the airwaves with no introduction and announcing that he had spoken by telephone with Mr. Obama on Tuesday.

“We have been able to make headway in the solution of some topics of mutual interest for both nations,” he declared, emphasizing the release of the three Cubans. “President Obama’s decision deserves the respect and acknowledgment of our people.”

Only afterward did Mr. Castro mention the reopening of diplomatic relations. “This in no way means that the heart of the matter has been resolved,” he said. “The economic, commercial and financial blockade, which causes enormous human and economic damages to our country, must cease.” But, he added, “the progress made in our exchanges proves that it is possible to find solutions to many problems.”

Mr. Obama is gambling that restoring ties with Cuba may no longer be politically unthinkable with the generational shift among Cuban-Americans, where many younger children of exiles are open to change. Nearly six in 10 Americans support re-establishing relations with Cuba, according to a New York Times poll conducted in October. Mr. Obama’s move had the support of the Catholic Church, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Human Rights Watch and major agricultural interests.

President Obama discussed the release of the contractor, Alan P. Gross, who had been held in Cuba for five years, as well as the release of an intelligence agent held for nearly 20 years.
Video by AP on Publish Date December 17, 2014. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

“Five and a half decades of history show us that such belligerence inhibits better judgment,” he said. “Two wrongs never make a right. This is a game-changer, which I fully support.”

But leading Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner and the incoming Senate majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, did not. In addition to Mr. Rubio, two other Republican potential candidates for president joined in the criticism. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called it a “very, very bad deal,” while former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said it “undermines the quest for a free and democratic Cuba.”

A leading Democrat agreed. “It is a fallacy that Cuba will reform just because the American president believes that if he extends his hand in peace, that the Castro brothers suddenly will unclench their fists,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the outgoing chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a Cuban-American.

While the United States has no embassy in Havana, there is a bare-bones facility called an interests section that can be upgraded, currently led by a diplomat, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who will become the chargé d’affaires pending the nomination and confirmation of an ambassador.

Mr. Obama has instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to begin the process of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, and the president announced that he would attend a regional Summit of the Americas next spring that Mr. Castro is also to attend. Mr. Obama will send an assistant secretary of state to Havana next month to talk about migration, and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker may lead a commercial mission.

Mr. Obama’s decision will ease travel restrictions for family visits, public performances, and professional, educational and religious activities, among other things, but ordinary tourism will still be banned under the law. Mr. Obama will also allow greater banking ties, making it possible to use credit and debit cards in Cuba, and American travelers will be allowed to import up to $400 worth of goods from Cuba, including up to $100 in tobacco and alcohol products.

“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time for a new approach.”

He added that he shared the commitment to freedom for Cuba. “The question is how we uphold that commitment,” he said. “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.”
Correction: December 19, 2014

An article on Thursday about the secret negotiations for a prisoner swap that led to the reconciliation agreement between the United States and Cuba misspelled, in some editions, the surname of one of the men freed, a former Cuban intelligence agent imprisoned in Cuba on espionage charges since 1995, and referred incorrectly to him. He is Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, not Sarraf, and he is Mr. Sarraff, not Mr. Trujillo. The same errors appeared in some editions in related articles, one about the announcement of the agreement — which also misspelled his surname as Sarras — and another about the last members of a Cuban spy ring who were released.
 

Reporting was contributed by Ian Austen from Ottawa, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear from Washington, Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City, and Megan Thee-Brenan from New York. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Will Restore Full Relations With Cuba, Erasing a Last Trace of Cold War Hostility.

    U.S. to Restore Full Relations With Cuba,
    Erasing a Last Trace of Cold War Hostility, NYT, 17.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/world/americas/us-cuba-relations.html

Horror Paralyzes Pakistan

After a Methodical Slaughter

 

DEC. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By ISMAIL KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — As Pakistani Taliban gunmen strode through the corridors and classrooms of the Army Public School on Tuesday, spraying teachers and pupils with bullets, one paused from his grisly work to make a phone call.

“We have killed all of the children in the auditorium,” the militant, later identified by the military as Abuzar, told his handler. “What do we do now?”

“Wait for the army to arrive,” came the reply. “Kill them, then blow yourself up.”

That conversation, recounted by a senior security official who said it had been intercepted by Pakistani intelligence, offered sobering proof of the methodical approach and cold resolve of the Taliban militants who, over the course of an eight-hour rampage, killed 148 people in the Peshawar school, at least 132 of whom were children.

On Wednesday, the horror of their actions paralyzed Pakistan, a country with much experience of Taliban atrocities and yet, in this instance, uniquely affected.

Peshawar became a city of small coffins. Through the day, mournful funeral processions wended through the otherwise deserted streets, as the victims of the massacre were escorted to mosques and graveyards.

At the school, army officials led the way to the principal’s destroyed office on Wednesday. The room was devastated, streaked with blast marks and blood, torn by a suicide bomber’s blast. Military officials said they believed the principal, Tahira Qazi, had died trying to save her students — the bodies of two boys were also found in the office.

But elsewhere in the school complex — four main buildings clustered around a central administration block — it was the blood of children that dominated. It was everywhere: smeared on the walls, pooled in the corridors and soaked in abandoned clothes. The smell of explosives and charred flesh filled the air.

The greatest carnage occurred inside the assembly hall, where soldiers said they had recovered over 100 bodies, many piled on each other. Shoes, copybooks and spectacles were scattered amid empty rows of seats where, according to witness accounts, students had cowered in a vain attempt to evade the killers. They were singled out, one by one, and shot in the head.

Some teachers tried to intervene. An army officer was giving first aid lessons on the main stage of the auditorium when the gunmen burst in. A female teacher, officers said, had begged the gunmen to let the children go. She was also executed.

The militant rampage was cut short, officials said, when commandos with the army’s elite Special Service Group entered the school. Retreated gunmen holed up in the central administration block, using it for cover as they opened fire on the advancing soldiers.

The administration block was where the siege ended. Five militants exploded their suicide vests in the lobby; the remaining two charged at the commandos who had taken position outside the building. They also exploded their vests, sending a spray of shrapnel into trees and walls and wounding seven commandos, one of whom received serious injuries to the face.

Those who arrived on the scene afterward said they were traumatized by what they found. “Piles of bodies, most dead, some alive,” said one officer, struggling to hold back tears. “Blood everywhere. I wish I had not seen this.”

In the Taliban’s cruel calculus, those children’s bodies went toward balancing accounts with the Pakistani military, still pressing its antimilitant offensive in the northwestern tribal region. Most of the students were the children of military personnel, the militants’ spokesman said, seeking to publicly justify the gunmen’s targets. Ms. Qazi, the slain principal, was married to a retired army colonel.

On Wednesday, the pupils who had survived the massacre recuperated in the hospital or just counted their luck. Some said they escaped the gunmen by hiding in a nearby graveyard; others played dead for hours, lying among the corpses of their classmates as a gun battle raged between militants and soldiers.

Many children sobbed as they recounted stories of the classmates they saw killed. Some spoke of their own desire for revenge.

Hidayatullah Khan, a 15-year-old student, said he hid under a table in the auditorium, motionless, as other boys were killed around him. When he rose, finally, “I saw piles of bodies lying everywhere,” he said.

Some mourners expressed frustration at the apparent impotence of their own security forces. “What is this army for?” shouted one man at the city’s main Lady Reading hospital, where he had come to collect the body of his grandson.

“Where are their atom bombs and airplanes now?” he said. “They were of no use if they cannot protect us from death in our daily lives.”

There were recriminations inside the army, too. One officer noted with regret that the school had reported a Taliban threat in August. Some teachers openly worried that the school’s perimeter walls were vulnerable to attack, he said. But nothing was done.

Others, though, said they were determined not to succumb to the Taliban’s nihilistic vision for Pakistan. At a candlelit vigil in the upmarket Hayatabad neighborhood, Muhammad Tahir, an architecture student, stressed that the vast majority of young Pakistanis vehemently rejected Taliban ideology.

“These beasts are not human because their actions are barbaric,” he said. “Education is our only weapon against them.”

Before the day was out, mourners gathered in Landi Arbab, a small village on the southwestern edge of the city. Men wrapped in wool shawls wept openly as Mrs. Qazi was lowered into a grave.

She had always been a positive person, they said, full of life and good humor. Some likened her to their mothers. “She did a great service to this village,” said one man who was interviewed by a television report. “It is a great honor to have a school principal come from your village.”

Back at the deserted Army Public School, snipers perched on the rooftops, watching for a potential follow-up attack. In the nearby tribal belt, the Pakistani Army mounted fresh airstrikes.

And on the television talk shows, stony-faced analysts clad in black offered lengthy analyses of what the army forces must do next — and whether, united in pain, their country could also unite to stop the Taliban.
 

Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Declan Walsh from London.

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Horror Paralyzes Pakistan After a Methodical Slaughter.

    Horror Paralyzes Pakistan After a Methodical Slaughter, NYT, 17.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/world/asia/
    horror-paralyzes-pakistan-after-a-methodical-slaughter.html

Taliban Besiege Pakistan School,

Leaving 145 Dead

 

DEC. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By DECLAN WALSH

LONDON — First the Pakistani Taliban bombed or burned over 1,000 schools. Then they shot Malala Yousafzai, the teenage advocate for girls’ rights.

But on Tuesday, the Taliban took their war on education to a ruthless new low with an assault on a crowded school in Peshawar that killed 145 people — 132 of them uniformed schoolchildren — in the deadliest single attack in the group’s history.

During an eight-hour rampage at the Army Public School and Degree College, a team of nine Taliban gunmen stormed through the corridors and assembly hall, firing at random and throwing grenades. Some of the 1,100 students at the school were lined up and slaughtered with shots to the head. Others were gunned down as they cowered under their desks, or forced to watch as their teachers were riddled with bullets.

Their parents crowded around the school gates, praying their children would survive while listening to the explosions and gunfire as Pakistani commandos stormed the building.

With its chilling echoes of a school in Beslan, Russia, where 186 children were massacred in 2004, the terrorist attack in Peshawar traumatized a scarred city that has suffered intense Taliban violence since the insurgency erupted seven years ago. By evening, mosques were filled with mourners carrying small wooden coffins, and residents cried openly in the streets.

A Taliban spokesman said the attack had been retaliation for the continuing military operation against the group in the North Waziristan tribal region. But the image of children’s bodies on the floor of their school auditorium, some of them not yet in their teens, again demonstrated how the Pakistani Taliban’s war has often been taken out on the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

A wave of outrage crossed national boundaries, with statements of support and sympathy coming from around the world.

Even other militant groups felt obliged to comment, though perhaps cynically. A spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, who have pushed civilian casualties in Afghanistan to a new high in the past year, posted a Twitter message criticizing the attack as un-Islamic and expressing shared pain with the victims’ families.

Witnesses in Peshawar said the assault started around 10 a.m., when nine heavily armed militants, disguised in paramilitary uniforms, slipped through a military graveyard and leapt over the back wall of the Army Public School. They rushed through the main building, shooting and flinging grenades before reaching the auditorium. There, according to one Pakistani official, a senior army official was giving a first aid course.

First they sprayed the students with bullets; then they singled out the survivors. “Our instructor asked us to duck and lie down,” a student named Zeeshan said in an interview at the hospital. “Then I saw militants walking past rows of students, shooting them in the head.”

Elsewhere in the school, teachers, realizing what was going on, abruptly canceled classes and exams and tried to protect their charges, who ranged in age from roughly 5 to 17. A 7-year-old named Afaq broke down as he described how the militants sprayed bullets as they rushed into his classroom. “They killed our teacher,” he said, his eyes welling with tears.
Continue reading the main story

Although early assessments suggested that the gunmen had been intent on mounting a long siege — some were carrying stores of food, it was later discovered — a senior security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, insisted that they had shown no intention of taking hostages. “They were there to kill, and this is what they did,” he said.

The school turned into a battleground when commandos from the army’s elite Special Services Group moved in. As the battle for control spread across the school, cornered militants detonated their suicide vests, causing loud blasts that rang across the city. Some attackers appeared to be speaking in Arabic, others in Pashto, survivors later reported.

Some students managed to flee, running from the school in their uniforms of green sweaters and blazers. Desperate relatives rushed to local hospitals or gathered outside the school gates, seeking news of their children.

One man, Muhammad Arshad, sighed with relief after soldiers rescued his son Ehsan. “I am thankful to God for giving him a second life,” he said.

Others never made it. Later in the evening, parents clustered around a list of the dead posted outside Lady Reading Hospital.

As the fighting raged, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reached Peshawar, where he called an emergency meeting of all political parties for Wednesday. “This is a time for us to show unanimity to root out militancy,” said Ishaq Dar, the federal finance minister.

The siege capped a particularly turbulent year in Pakistan. The polio virus has spread from the tribal belt into the most populous city, Karachi, aided by militant attacks on health workers giving vaccines. Political feuding has brought the government, and at times the country’s major cities, to a standstill.

Experts say the North Waziristan offensive of the past summer has scattered militants and loosened their grip on part of the tribal belt. But even that success has come with caveats. The fighting sent more than a million civilians fleeing in a country already awash with internally displaced people. And many militant cells are reported to have merely moved to neighboring districts, or on the other side of the border with Afghanistan.

It offered some relief to citizens that the Pakistani Taliban had, for the most part, failed to deliver the revenge they had threatened when the military offensive began in June. Now, after Tuesday’s school massacre, even that hope has disappeared.

Muhammad Khurasani, the Taliban spokesman, said the militants had targeted the Army Public School because it caters to the sons and daughters of serving army personnel, although some civilian pupils also attend.

“Our shura decided to target these enemies of Islam right in their homes so they can feel the pain of losing their children,” Mr. Khurasani said in a phone interview.

Militancy experts said the attack showed that, despite several major schisms this year, the Taliban remain a force to be reckoned with.

“They want to undermine the Pakistani military’s plan by going after the middle class and their resolve,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former Obama administration official. “They want to tell the public that the Taliban can hit them, and hit them hard, and that the military can’t do anything about it.”

Globally, the attack generated a wave of opprobrium outstripping even the one that followed the attack by a Taliban gunman on Ms. Yousafzai in October 2012. She survived and last week became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I am heartbroken by this senseless and coldblooded act of terror,” Ms. Yousafzai said in a statement on Tuesday. “I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brothers and sisters — but we will never be defeated.”

Her condemnation was echoed by leaders of the United Nations, Britain, the United States and other countries. In Pakistan, peace activists held candlelight vigils while others vented their emotions on social media.

“Blood has been boiling and heart has been crying all day,” wrote Veena Malik Khan, a popular television celebrity, in a Twitter post that described the attackers as “animals.” One newspaper turned its website from color to black and white.

Yet the statements of solidarity and defiance masked an awkward reality. While Pakistan has suffered many bloody atrocities before, the country’s leaders have yet to find a solution to the Taliban insurgency.

Critics say it is partly the leaders’ own fault: The military continues to support the “good Taliban” — select militant groups that share its strategic goals in India and Afghanistan — while the political leadership is often reluctant to criticize the militants openly.

As the bodies piled up in Peshawar, some dared to wonder if this atrocity would be a turning point.

Imran Khan — the former cricketer whose P.T.I. party governs in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, of which Peshawar is the capital — has often been criticized for being sympathetic to the Taliban, refusing to criticize them by name and continuing to advocate peace talks over the current military offensive.

But on Tuesday, he openly condemned the Taliban, saying he had been shocked by the violence against students. “Fight with men, not innocent children,” he said.

Meanwhile, soldiers cleared the last of the school’s four blocks. The principal, Tahira Qazi, was among the dead.

At a city hospital, staffers laid out a row of children’s bodies as armed guards stood over a pile of small wooden coffins.

Correction: December 16, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of an offensive by Pakistan’s military. It is Operation Zarb-e-Azb, not Zab-e-Azb.

Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan and Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud from Peshawar, Pakistan; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; and Eric Schmitt and Matthew Rosenberg from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on December 17, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Taliban Besiege Pakistan School, Leaving 145 Dead.

    Taliban Besiege Pakistan School, Leaving 145 Dead, NYT, 16.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/world/asia/taliban-attack-pakistani-school.html

Sydney Hostage Siege Ends

With Gunman and 2 Captives Dead

as Police Storm Cafe

 

DEC. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHELLE INNIS

SYDNEY, Australia — Heavily armed police officers ended a hostage siege in Sydney early Tuesday, storming a downtown cafe where an armed man had held employees and customers for more than 16 hours.

The captor and two hostages died during the confrontation and four other people were wounded, the New South Wales Police said Tuesday morning.

Live television images of the scene showed intense flashes of gunfire and loud concussions from stun grenades as police officers raced into the building at about 2:10 a.m. local time with weapons drawn, followed later by medics with stretchers.

Andrew Scipione, the New South Wales police commissioner, said the police moved quickly to enter the cafe after gunshots were heard inside. “They made the call because they believed that at that time, that if they didn’t enter, there would have been many more lives lost,” he said. Before the gunshots were heard, he said, the police believed that no one in the cafe had been injured.

Just before the police entered the building, at least six hostages were seen running from the cafe. The police said later that there had been 17 hostages in all.

The police statement reporting the deaths identified the hostage taker as “a 50-year-old man” but did not give his name. Mr. Scipione referred to the man as a “lone gunman” in his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday.

Earlier, the police confirmed reports that the hostage-taker was Man Haron Monis, an Iranian-born man around 50 with a criminal record who called himself Sheikh Haron.

The hostages who died were a 34-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, the police said. One of the injured people was a police officer, who was treated for an injury to the face and was in good condition, the police said.

Mr. Monis’s former lawyer, Manny Conditsis, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in a televised interview before the siege ended that he believed Mr. Monis was acting alone. “His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness,” Mr. Conditsis said, calling his former client “a damaged-goods individual who has done something outrageous.”

Even so, it remained unclear whether Mr. Monis had any accomplices.

The armed man took control of the Lindt Chocolate Cafe on Martin Place in central Sydney around 9:45 a.m. Monday, trapping employees and customers inside. He had a black flag with white Arabic script, similar to those used by Islamic militants on other continents, which was later displayed in a cafe window.

During the day Monday, five people fled the cafe, including two employees, but it was not clear whether the assailant had allowed them to leave or they had escaped.

Auto and rail traffic was halted and nearby buildings like the New South Wales Parliament and the Reserve Bank were evacuated or locked down, and helicopters circled overhead. Police officials said they made contact with the hostage-taker and tried to negotiate an end to the siege.

Mr. Monis was known to the police. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, he was free on bail in two separate criminal cases. He was charged in November 2013 with being an accessory before and after the fact in the murder of his ex-wife, Noleen Hayson Pal, and in April 2014, he was charged with the indecent and sexual assault of a woman in western Sydney in 2002. Forty more counts of indecent or sexual assault relating to six other women were later added in that case.

Mr. Monis pleaded guilty in 2013 to 12 charges related to the sending of poison-pen letters to the families of Australian servicemen who were killed overseas, local media reports said. He was reportedly sentenced to probation and community service.

The police have said that Mr. Monis presented himself as a spiritual healer and conducted business for a time on Station Street in Wentworthville, a western suburb of Sydney.

A website apparently associated with Mr. Monis included condemnation of the United States and Australia for their military actions against Islamic militants in Iraq and Afghanistan. News reports said the site also contained a posting saying Mr. Monis had recently converted from Shia to Sunni Islam, and SITE, an organization that monitors Islamic extremist groups, said he posted a pledge of allegiance to the “Caliph of the Muslims.” The posting appeared to refer to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State militant group, SITE said, though the posting did not mention them by name.

Mr. Monis apparently emigrated to Australia from Iran around 1996, and was previously known as Manteghi Boroujerdi or Mohammad Hassan Manteghi. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation said he was granted political asylum. In a broadcast interview in 2001, he claimed to have worked for the Iranian intelligence ministry and to have fled the country in fear for his life, leaving behind a wife and family.

A Muslim community leader in Sydney, Dr. Jamal Rifi, said in a televised interview that “everything he stands for is wrong.”

“It has nothing to do with Islam as a religion whatsoever, and we have all seen that by his previous action and his current actions,” Dr. Rifi said of Mr. Monis.

Pictures broadcast live on Australian TV show the police entering a Sydney cafe where a man said to be Man Haron Monis, a self-proclaimed sheikh, had been holding an unknown number of people hostage.
Video by Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Publish Date December 15, 2014. Photo by Joosep Martinson/Getty Images.

Dr. Rifi said that he did not know Mr. Monis personally, but that he did know his family well. He said Mr. Monis was not a sheikh.

“He had no religious qualifications whatsoever,” Dr. Rifi said. “He has never been associated with any mainstream mosque, and he is not associated with any of our religious leaders whatsoever. He is self-proclaimed.”

In September, a spokesman for the Islamic State, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, issued a statement calling on Muslims in Australia to carry out attacks of their own. Facing an increase in threats to the country, Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, raised the country’s alert level that month and tightened restrictions on news reporting concerning national security matters.

The grand mufti of Australia, Prof. Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, and the Australian National Imams Council issued a joint statement about the hostage siege on Monday, saying they “condemn this criminal act unequivocally.”

At the news conference on Tuesday, Mike Baird, the premier of New South Wales, said: “Today we must come together as never before. We will get through this.” He described his country as “a harmonious society that is the envy of the world.”

In a show of solidarity, thousands of Australians offered in social media messages to accompany people who dress in traditional Muslim clothing and are concerned about a backlash from the siege. The hashtag #IllRideWithYou was used more than 250,000 times on Twitter by late Monday evening.
 

Austin Ramzy contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Patrick J. Lyons contributed from New York.

    Sydney Hostage Siege Ends With Gunman and 2 Captives Dead
    as Police Storm Cafe,
    NYT, 15.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/world/asia/sydney-australia-hostages.html

Iran Nuclear Pact

Faces an Array

of Opposing Forces

NOV. 16, 2014

By DAVID E. SANGER,

STEVEN ERLANGER

and JODI RUDOREN

WASHINGTON — When President Obama wrote last month to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging him to overcome a decade of mistrust and negotiate a deal limiting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, it was perhaps the president’s last effort to reach a reconciliation with Iran that could remake the Middle East.

Today, Mr. Obama needs a foreign policy accomplishment more than ever, and he sees time running out on his hope of changing the calculus in a Middle East where Americans are, against his instincts, back on the ground. But the forces arrayed against a deal are formidable — not just Mr. Khamenei and the country’s hard-liners, but newly empowered Republicans, some of his fellow Democrats, and many of the United States’ closest allies.

As negotiators head back to Vienna this week for what they hope will be the final round of talks, Mr. Obama’s top national security advisers put the chance of reaching an agreement this month at 40 to 50 percent. “In the end this is a political decision for the Iranians,” Mr. Obama told a small group of recent visitors to the White House, a statement that could be true for him as well.

Yet even if a deal is struck it will be the beginning of an argument, rather than the end of one. For many of the president’s adversaries, the details of whatever deal he emerges with — how much warning the West would have if Iran raced for a bomb, for example — are almost beside the point.

“In every nation involved, this negotiation is a proxy for something bigger,” argues Robert Litwak, a Wilson Center scholar and author of “Iran’s Nuclear Chess: Calculating America’s Moves.”

“Here it is a test of Obama’s strength and strategy,” he said. “In Tehran it is a proxy for a fundamental choice: whether Iran is going to continue to view itself as a revolutionary state, or whether it’s going to be a normal country,” which so many of its young people yearn for it to become.

So far, Mr. Khamenei has avoided making that choice, intelligence assessments by the United States and its allies conclude. While he has authorized President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to negotiate with the United States and its partners, they believe that the supreme leader may decide whether to approve a deal only after his negotiators come home with the details.

That is what happened with a much smaller deal in 2009, which he killed after an agreement was reached in Vienna. And surrounding the ayatollah are hard-liners who have opposed any accord, as well as leaders of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is responsible for the military side of the nuclear program.

But Mr. Litwak’s observation about how the deal is a proxy for other issues applies equally to the rest of the key players in the negotiations: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Western Europe.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has described Iran as an “existential threat” for so long that it is hard for American officials to imagine any deal Israel would support. For years a succession of Israeli governments have described Iran as just six months or so away from a bomb; last year the Netanyahu government opposed even the modest lifting of sanctions.

In recent weeks Mr. Netanyahu has repeated his warning that “the Islamic State of Iran is not a partner of America, it’s an enemy of America,” and said Israel would not abide by any arrangement that leaves Iran as a “threshold” nuclear state — one poised to build a weapon in a matter of months or years.

Israeli officials play down their influence in Congress on the issue and disagree internally on the merits of a deal; some in the intelligence agencies see advantages to more intrusive inspections in Iran. “We have no formal status and no real capacity” in the talks, said Yuval Steinitz, the strategic affairs minister who has been Israel’s primary point man, apart from the prime minister himself, on Iran. “We can only convince, we can only speak and explain.”

The Saudis have a parallel worry: that any deal with Iran would be the opening wedge to a reordering of American alliances in the region, one in which Washington would begin to work on regional issues with the Shiite Iranian state instead of with Sunni Saudi Arabia.

No one has been more outspoken on the issue than Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal, who in recent weeks has warned that the Saudis will build uranium enrichment facilities to match whatever Iran is allowed to retain — even if the kingdom has no use for them. That has raised the specter of an arms race, even if a deal is struck.

Perhaps the most complex political player is Russia. It has remained a key element of the negotiating team, despite its confrontations with the West over Ukraine. It has been a central player in negotiating what may prove the key to a deal: a plan for Iran to ship much of its low-enriched uranium to Russian territory for conversion into fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

But Russian officials may want an extension of the talks that keeps any real agreement in limbo — and thus keeps Iranian oil off the market, so that it cannot further depress falling prices.

Apart from Mr. Obama, the most unambiguous proponents of reaching a deal are the European nations, said Mark Fitzpatrick, an Iran nuclear expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Many Europeans feel little threat from Iran, and believe that Israel, with its own unacknowledged but widely known nuclear arsenal, exaggerates the threat of a nuclear-able Tehran. The notable exception are the French, who have publicly argued for tougher terms in the negotiations and say they see their role as to serve, in the words of one Western diplomat, as “a significant counterweight on the impulse of Obama to make concessions.”

But the biggest counterweight to a negotiating success with Iran may be the new Republican majority in the Senate — including some members, like Senator Lindsey Graham, who have argued that Mr. Obama is overly eager for a deal.

Obama administration officials reject the charge and say that though Mr. Obama is hopeful, he would never sign an accord that did not put Iran a year or more away from being able to produce enough fuel for a single bomb. “Whatever we negotiate we will have to sell in Congress, sooner rather than later,” said one of Mr. Obama’s senior strategists, declining to speak on the record because of diplomatic sensitivities.

“And that works to our advantage in the negotiating room, because it means we can say to Zarif,” the Iranian foreign minister, “ ‘Even if we agreed to lifting sanctions early, or letting you keep all your centrifuges in place — and we wouldn’t — Congress would rebel.’ ”

That rebellion has started. When Congress came back into session last week Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who leads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois issued a statement saying that “as co-authors of bipartisan sanctions laws that compelled Iran to the negotiating table, we believe that a good deal will dismantle, not just stall, Iran’s illicit nuclear program and prevent Iran from ever becoming a threshold nuclear state.” They would enact new sanctions “if a potential deal does not achieve these goals.”

It is a view the new Republican majority will back, along with many Democrats. Mr. Obama could always veto new sanctions, but the warnings themselves may make it harder, administration officials fear, to get Iran to reach a final agreement.

Mr. Obama has made clear that in the near term, he would act on his own authority to temporarily suspend sanctions step by step, as the Iranians complied with a deal; a vote to repeal those sanctions might not come for several years. But he confronts that problem only if there is a deal. If not, American officials hint, they will press for another extension of talks — betting that the combination of falling oil prices, the threat of new sanctions, and the possibility of more sabotage or military action will eventually lead to an accord.

Yet Mr. Khamenei, American and European intelligence officials say, may be betting that time is on Iran’s side. They have concluded that the supreme leader believes the recent election has weakened Mr. Obama, and that the talks have already led to an acknowledgment of Iran’s right to enrich uranium on its own soil — at least in small amounts — and an understanding that whenever a final agreement expires, it will be able to have an industrial enrichment ability much as Japan does.

“What the Iranians are looking for is a narrative of victory,” one American diplomat said last week, “a way to say the West backed down, and admitted Iran will be able to produce its own nuclear fuel one day, in unlimited quantity.” What Congress needs, the diplomat said, “is a narrative that Iran was forced to dismantle what it has.”

Satisfying both, he added, “is what makes the politics of this so much harder than the physics of slowing the bomb program.”
 

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, Steven Erlanger from London, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem.

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Nuclear Deal With Iran Runs Into Obstacles.

    Iran Nuclear Pact Faces an Array of Opposing Forces, NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/
    middleeast/nuclear-deal-with-iran-runs-into-obstacles-.html

Obama Condemns

Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig

 

NOV. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Islamic State militants released a chilling videotape on Sunday showing they had beheaded a fifth Western hostage, an American aid worker the group had threatened to kill in retaliation for airstrikes carried out by the United States in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama on Sunday confirmed the death of the aid worker, Peter Kassig, a former Army Ranger who disappeared more than a year ago at a checkpoint in northeastern Syria while delivering medical supplies.

Mr. Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” Mr. Obama said in a statement from aboard Air Force One that was read to the news media in Washington.

In recent days, American intelligence agencies received strong indications that the Islamic State had killed Mr. Kassig, the group’s third American victim. The president’s announcement was the first official confirmation of his death.

“Today we offer our prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known to us as Peter,” Mr. Obama’s statement said. The president used the Muslim name that Mr. Kassig adopted after his capture, making the point that the Islamic State had killed a fellow Muslim. He acknowledged the “anguish at this painful time” felt by Mr. Kassig’s family.

The footage in the video released Sunday was of poorer quality than some of the group’s previous, slickly produced execution videos.

The video shows a black-robed executioner standing over the severed head of Mr. Kassig. Though the end result of the footage was grimly familiar, it was strikingly different from the executions of four other Western hostages, whose recorded deaths were carefully choreographed.

In the clip released early Sunday, the Islamic State displays the head of Mr. Kassig, 26, at the feet of a man with a British accent who appeared in the previous beheading videos and has been nicknamed Jihadi John by the British news media. Unlike the earlier videos, which were staged with multiple cameras from different vantage points, and which show the hostages kneeling, then uttering their last words, the footage of Mr. Kassig’s death is curtailed — showing only the final scene.

“This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen of your country. Peter, who fought against the Muslims in Iraq while serving as a soldier under the American Army, doesn’t have much to say. His previous cellmates have already spoken on his behalf,” the fighter with a British accent says in the video. “You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four years ago. We said to you then that you are liars.”

Analysts said that the change in the videos suggested that something may have gone wrong as the militants, who have been under sustained attack from a United States-led military coalition and have faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks, carried out the killing.

“The most obvious difference is in the beheading itself — the previous videos all showed the beheading on camera,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in Washington, and a former director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. “This one just shows the severed head itself. I don’t think this was the Islamic State’s choice.” He added, “The likeliest possibility is that something went wrong when they were beheading him.”

Among the things that could have gone wrong, analysts surmise, is that the extremists did not have as much time outdoors as they did when they killed the others. The United States announced soon after the first beheading in August that they would send surveillance aircraft over Syria and residents contacted on social media have reported seeing objects in the sky that they believe are drones.

The first four beheadings were carried out in the open air, with a cinematic precision that suggests multiple takes, filmed over an extended period of time. Carrying out a similar level of production as surveillance planes crisscrossed the skies above would result in extended exposure — heightening risk.

Another possibility, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross said, is that Mr. Kassig resisted, depriving the militants of the ability to stage the killing as they wanted.

“We know that this is a very media-savvy organization, and they know that you only have one take to get the beheading right,” he said.

An Indianapolis native, Mr. Kassig turned to humanitarian work after a tour as an Army Ranger in Iraq in 2007. He was certified as an emergency technician, and by 2012 he returned to the battlefield, this time helping bandage the victims of Syria’s civil war who were flooding into Lebanon. He moved to Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, where he founded a small aid group and initially used his savings to buy supplies, like diapers, which he distributed to the Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

In the summer of 2013, he relocated to Gaziantep in southern Turkey, roughly an hour from the border, and began making regular trips into Syria to offer medical care to the wounded.

He disappeared on Oct. 1, 2013, when the ambulance he and a colleague were driving was stopped at a checkpoint on the road to Deir al-Zour, Syria. He was transferred late last year to a prison beneath the basement of the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo, and then to a network of jails in Raqqa, the capital of the extremist group’s self-declared caliphate, where he became one of at least 23 Western hostages held by the group.

His cellmates included two American journalists, James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning, who were beheaded in roughly two-week intervals starting in August. Mr. Kassig was shown in the video released in October that showed the decapitation of Mr. Henning.

The previous videos of beheadings produced by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, appeared to be filmed in the same location, identified by analysts using geo-mapping as a bald hill outside Raqqa. Each video was relatively short — under five minutes on average — and included a speech by the hostage, in which he is forced to accuse his government of crimes against Muslims, while the masked killer stands by holding the knife.

By contrast, Mr. Kassig’s death appears in the final segment of a nearly 16-minute video, which traces the history of the Islamic State, from its origins as a unit under the control of Osama bin Laden to its modern incarnation in the region straddling Iraq and Syria. In one extended sequence, a mass beheading of captured Syrian soldiers is shown, filmed with long close-ups of details, like the shining blade of the executioner’s knife, mirroring the high production quality of the first four beheading videos.

The part showing Mr. Kassig’s body is amateurish compared with both the footage of the soldiers being killed and previous executions of Westerners.

“The final Kassig execution section is definitely different from previous videos,” said Jarret Brachman, a counterterrorism expert who advises the United States intelligence community. The “message to President Obama from Jihadi John is sloppy, jumbled and redundant. His joke about Kassig having nothing to say seems like a defensive way of covering up the fact that they don’t have a video of his actual beheading or weren’t able to make one.”

In the months leading up to his death, Mr. Kassig seemed to know the end was near.

In a letter to his parents smuggled out this summer, he described his fear: “I am obviously pretty scared to die but the hardest part is not knowing, wondering, hoping, and wondering if I should even hope at all,” he wrote. “Just know I’m with you. Every stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places you showed me. I love you.”
Correction: November 16, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the country where Peter Kassig went in 2012 to help care for those wounded in and those living as refugees from Syria’s civil war. It is Lebanon, not Libya.

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Gaziantep, Turkey, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Confirms That ISIS Killed Third American.

    Obama Condemns Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/middleeast/
    peter-kassig-isis-video-execution.html

Islamic State Claims

It Has Beheaded

U.S. Hostage Kassig

 

NOV. 16, 2014

4:38 A.M. E.S.T.

By REUTERS

CAIRO — Islamic State militants fighting in Iraq and Syria claimed in a video posted online on Sunday that they had beheaded American hostage Peter Kassig.

The video did not show the beheading but showed a masked man standing with a decapitated head covered in blood lying at his feet.

Speaking in English in a British accent, the man says: "This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen."

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the footage, which appeared on a jihadist website and on Twitter feeds used by Islamic State.

The video also shows a number of other people being beheaded.

(Reporting by Omar Fahmy and Lin Noueihed, Editing by William Maclean and Janet Lawrence)

    Islamic State Claims It Has Beheaded U.S. Hostage Kassig,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/11/16/world/
    middleeast/16reuters-mideast-crisis-beheading.html

Obama Moves Close

to Calling Russian Action in Ukraine

an Invasion

 

NOV. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

BRISBANE, Australia — President Obama on Sunday said he told President Vladimir V. Putin in meetings last week that the United States and its allies would continue to impose sanctions on Russia for actions in Ukraine that he edged close to calling an invasion.

The United States, Mr. Obama said, was “very firm on the need to uphold core international principles, and one of those principles is you don’t invade other countries.” The Russians, he said, were supplying heavy weapons and financial backing to separatists in Ukraine.

Speaking at the end of a meeting here of the Group of 20 industrialized economies, Mr. Obama said leaders of European allies confirmed that Russia was still violating the terms of an agreement it signed on Ukraine. He characterized his encounters with Mr. Putin as “businesslike and blunt.”

Mr. Obama’s wide-ranging news conference came at the end of a hectic weeklong trip to Asia that produced a landmark climate-change agreement with China, progress on a number of trade issues, and a return visit for the president to Myanmar, in which he admonished its military-dominated government to keep the reform process on track.

But the trip was also shadowed by renewed fears of Russian incursions in Ukraine. Mr. Obama held a meeting here with European leaders to discuss the prospect of additional sanctions against Russia, after new reports of Russian troops operating inside the country.

The bitterness of Russia’s actions spilled over into the G-20 meeting, with Mr. Putin getting a chilly reception from several leaders. Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada bluntly told Mr. Putin that he needed to withdraw from Ukraine.

Turning to Syria, Mr. Obama said the United States would not make “common cause” with President Bashar al-Assad in the campaign against the Islamic State group. But he said the United States was not weighing ways to remove him from office.

Mr. Obama denied that the United States was changing its strategy against the Islamic State in Syria. He said that while the White House was constantly reviewing its campaign against the militants in both Syria and Iraq, the basic components of it remained in place.

With the American economy currently outperforming those of Europe and Japan, Mr. Obama came into this meeting with a stronger hand than he has had in past meetings. Administration officials said they had succeeded in pushing a message of growth-oriented policies in the communiqué issued by the countries at the end of the meeting. The statement is usually more balanced between the virtues of growth and austerity.

    Obama Moves Close to Calling Russian Action in Ukraine an Invasion,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/asia/
    obama-close-to-calling-russian-action-in-ukraine-an-invasion.html

Finishing Asia Tour,

Obama Promotes

More Ambitious Foreign Policy

 

NOV. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

BRISBANE, Australia — When President Obama ended his last trip to Asia in the Philippines in April, he delivered a defense of his foreign policy as a slow, steady pursuit of American interests — casting himself as a batter who hits singles and doubles, but avoids reckless errors.

As he finishes another tour of the region in Australia this weekend, Mr. Obama seems to have found a formula for a more ambitious approach overseas, built around two issues that only recently climbed to the top of his agenda: trade and climate change.

The scorecard for this trip looks drastically different from the last one: a landmark climate-change agreement with China, a trade deal with the Chinese on technology products, signs of progress on a regional trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a $3 billion pledge to a climate-change fund for developing countries.

Some of the difference is merely a question of timing. Negotiations with the Chinese on the climate and trade agreements had been underway for months. The prospects for a Trans-Pacific Partnership deal improved in recent months, and may actually be helped further in the United States by the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

These issues do not come without traps of their own. Republicans immediately condemned Mr. Obama’s climate agreement with China. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said it would require China to do nothing for 16 years while “creating havoc in my state and other states across the country.”

But administration officials said the accomplishments of the trip exemplified what Mr. Obama hopes will be an “affirmative agenda” in foreign policy — one that will offset the relentless stream of crises he has confronted, including the Islamic State militant group, the Ebola outbreak and Ukraine.

“Even as we have to manage crises, we want to make sure we’re focusing on an affirmative agenda,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “I think that’s the common thread on this trip.”

Mr. Obama clearly relished having momentum as he arrived in Brisbane for a meeting of the Group of 20, the organization of 19 industrial and emerging-market countries plus the European Union. Speaking at the University of Queensland on Saturday, he drew noisy applause when he talked about how the climate deal with China could galvanize efforts to negotiate a new global climate treaty in 2015.

“You’ve got to be able to overcome old divides, look squarely at the science and reach a strong global climate agreement next year,” Mr. Obama said. “If China and the United States can agree on this, then the world can agree on this. We can get this done.”

Mr. Obama’s words carried an extra edge in Australia, where Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a blunt skeptic about the science behind climate change. He boasted to the leaders gathered for the meeting that his government had repealed a tax on carbon emissions — a key tool to curb the greenhouse gases that heat up the atmosphere.

Mr. Abbott tried to keep climate change off the agenda at the Group of 20 meeting, preferring to focus on jobs and economic growth. But Mr. Obama’s $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund, announced in his speech here, made that difficult.

The timing was clearly intended to prod other would-be donors, like Japan, which was expected to announce a contribution of up to $1.5 billion toward the fund’s total goal of $10 billion.

Mr. Obama seemed well aware of what he was doing. Australia and the United States, he said, both have bad track records on carbon emissions because they share a frontier tradition and an abundance of fossil fuels — “which means,” he said, “we’ve got to step up.”

That line drew a burst of applause from the audience. Australian officials listened respectfully but left little doubt where they stood afterward.

“Australia is a resources-exporting economy: coal, gas, uranium,” said Tim Nicholls, the treasurer and minister of trade of the State of Queensland. “We think a sensible debate is absolutely necessary, but we also think there is a future for coal, as there is for gas.”

Mr. Obama came to the meeting with another advantage: The American economy is growing more rapidly than most others, especially Japan’s and Europe’s. He said the United States would push for countries to pursue more expansionary economic policies to stimulate demand and create jobs.

“Over the last few years,” he said, “the United States has put more people back to work than all other advanced economies combined. But America can’t be expected to just carry the world economy on our back.”

Some economists predicted that Mr. Obama’s words would carry weight in a way that they did not in previous years because the United States is so obviously outperforming its peers.

“The rest of the world is looking at the United States with a degree of envy,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “The way that the U.S. has recovered, the way it relatively quickly handled its banking crisis, the shale revolution and so on.”

Still, it is not clear how long the afterglow from Mr. Obama’s trip will last. He must deal with Republicans who have pledged to fight him on issues from an immigration overhaul to the Keystone XL pipeline. Many Democrats will not cheer his success if he manages to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Mr. Obama will also have to deal again with the crises in Syria and Iraq, where the Pentagon is sending more American troops, and in Ukraine, where there are new reports of Russian troops fighting inside the country.

Even in Brisbane, where he spoke hopefully of the reinvigorated American role in Asia, Mr. Obama referred to the other headaches he faced, singling out the international response to the “appalling” downing of a Malaysian jetliner in Ukraine, which killed 38 Australian citizens and residents.
 

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Finishing Asia Tour, Obama Promotes More Ambitious Foreign Policy.

    Finishing Asia Tour, Obama Promotes More Ambitious Foreign Policy,
    NYT, 15.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/world/asia/
    finishing-asia-tour-obama-promotes-more-ambitious-foreign-policy.html

A Final Dash on an Iran Deal

NOV. 15, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

After a year of work, the major powers and Iran face a Nov. 24 deadline for completing an agreement that would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions. While a final round of negotiations is set for this week, high-level talks in Oman last week apparently failed to achieve a breakthrough on important issues, leading to growing speculation that the deadline will not be met.

Since nobody wants to see the process collapse, there is talk about extending the negotiations and even codifying, in broad terms, the considerable progress that has been achieved already.

In one way or another, the momentum must be preserved and the chances for a comprehensive permanent agreement kept alive; anything less would be a tragedy. Iran’s nuclear program has been viewed as a threat by the international community from the day it was first disclosed in 2002. While Iran insists that its program aims only to produce nuclear energy, the size and scope of its activities have raised fears that Tehran might one day produce a weapon. Any deal that can be accepted, or sustained, must be structured so that Iran cannot one day make a dash to build a nuclear weapon without the world having enough warning to intervene.

A successful agreement offers benefits for both sides. Sanctions on Iran would be lifted gradually, bolstering the country’s economy and opening the door to Iran’s reintegration into the international community. With proper verification, an agreement would reassure the world that Iran is interested only in nuclear energy, not in a nuclear weapon, and could make possible cooperation on other challenges, including the fight against the Islamic State.

The diplomatic obstacles lie mainly with Iran and its refusal to reduce its ability to produce enriched uranium, which is used in power reactors and medical research and, in higher concentrations, in nuclear weapons.

A recent report in The Times by David Sanger suggests that Iran is considering a compromise under which it would ship much of its uranium stockpile to Russia for conversion into specialized fuel rods if it reached a broader nuclear deal with the West. Russia would build two nuclear power reactors for Iran — a reactor is already operating at Bushehr — with the possibility of six more after that. Such steps would assure Iran that its power needs would be met indefinitely and that it would have no need for industrial-size uranium enrichment capacity.

Such arrangements would give the United States and its partners — Russia, France, Britain, Germany and China — more flexibility on how many centrifuges (used in the enrichment process) Iran could continue to operate. Iran has some 19,000 centrifuge machines; 10,200 are operating. The major powers initially proposed limiting Iran’s operating centrifuges to 1,500 and then raised that to 4,000. Iran, however, has resisted any reduction. Other unresolved issues include how quickly economic sanctions would be lifted and whether international inspectors would be free to visit suspect facilities.

The consequences of failure to reach an accord would be serious, including the weakening of President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who count as moderates in Iran, and who, like President Obama, have taken a political risk to try to make an agreement happen.

For nearly a year, Iran has adhered to an interim agreement that froze and rolled back its nuclear program. This experience offers some hope that, subject to a rigorous verification regime, Iran will be able to fulfill a more permanent agreement. President Obama took the right step recently when he wrote to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to nudge him toward a nuclear deal. The other leaders should weigh in as well. This agreement is too important to let slip away.

    A Final Dash on an Iran Deal, NYT, 15.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/
    a-final-dash-on-an-iran-deal.html

U.S. Gives North Korea

the Silent Treatment

The New York Times

Asia Pacific | News Analysis

NOV. 9, 2014

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Obama took the unusual step of sending the nation’s top spy, instead of a senior diplomat, to win the release of two American prisoners in North Korea, administration officials said Sunday, specifically to signal that he would not reward the North with sanctions relief or a new round of negotiations in return for the freedom of the latest Americans to be locked up during visits to the isolated nation.

“It was not to pursue any diplomatic opening,” a senior administration official said aboard Air Force One as Mr. Obama departed for China, and as the two Americans sentenced to hard labor in the North, Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller, were landing near Seattle.

The official said the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., was dispatched in response to the North’s request, made in backchannel communications with the administration, for a senior official of the United States government to oversee the release. But Mr. Clapper, a retired general whose career has spanned many conflicts with three generations of North Korean leaders, never met Kim Jong-un, the young dictator whose health, hold on power and progress in developing a deliverable nuclear weapon have all been sources of intense scrutiny to American intelligence officials.

As a matter of diplomatic tactics, the gambit worked: Mr. Bae, a 46-year-old missionary who had been held for two years, and Mr. Miller, 25, were reunited with their families at an Air Force base. But as a matter of strategy, it is unclear that Mr. Clapper made any progress: His message was that for a resumption of relations with the United States, North Korea had to deliver on its past promises to dismantle a nuclear program now believed to have six to a dozen weapons.

That question has frozen North Korea’s discussions with the United States for six years, and all the indications are that the North is accelerating its nuclear and missile programs, rather than backing off.

It is extraordinarily rare for a president to send one of his most senior intelligence officials into the capital of a declared American adversary, so the choice of Mr. Clapper, probably the most hardened veteran of the Cold War now serving in Mr. Obama’s inner circle, was a surprise. It may have also been welcome. “In a national security state like North Korea, they got someone who they think runs the country,” said Christopher Hill, who ran the last set of serious negotiations with North Korea, an experience of frustration and deception that he described in a memoir, “Outpost.”

“My sense of the Obama administration is that they are less averse to talking to the North Koreans” than the Bush administration was, he said, “but are pretty convinced there is nothing there to talk about.”

The White House’s handling of the North Korean prisoner release and its negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program are a study in contrast. Mr. Clapper traveled to North Korea with a brief letter from the president stating that the intelligence chief was his designated representative to retrieve the Americans. It had none of the specifics or the outlook contained in his recent letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.

The difference in approach reveals much about how Mr. Obama views the threats posed by the two adversaries, and the strategies needed to counter them.

If Iran got nuclear weapons, Mr. Obama has often told his aides, a “containment” policy would not work; Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-dominated Arab states would rush to do the same. A regional arms race would ensue, he has said, in one of the most volatile corners of the earth. North Korea, much further along than Iran, has already detonated three nuclear tests.

But in Mr. Obama’s view, the country can be contained: China is already a nuclear power, and Japan and South Korea are treaty allies with the United States, meaning that the United States would be legally bound to act as their ultimate protector against the North.

So Mr. Obama has reacted mildly to many types of North Korean provocation: The seizing of American tourists, the launching of missiles and nuclear tests. The warning about broken promises that Robert M. Gates described as defense secretary — “I am tired of buying the same horse twice” — has outlasted his tenure. There appears to be no enthusiasm in Washington for resuming the “Six Party Talks” with the North — the Asian equivalent of the multination negotiations now underway with Iran — until Pyongyang begins to dismantle nuclear facilities it has promised to take apart.

So while Mr. Obama could have sent a looming political figure like former President Bill Clinton, who negotiated a previous prisoner release, his decision to turn to Mr. Clapper was rooted in the conclusion that entering a negotiation now would ultimately violate the Gates rule.

But it also raises the question of whether the United States is missing Mr. Kim’s first real effort to signal that he wants to resume some kind of dialogue.

There are several theories in Washington about why the North Korean leader would make that attempt now.

One is economic. There are recent indications that the North is concluding that China may not be its supplier, buyer and protector forever. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has followed North Korea’s economic, demographic and political strategies for several decades, noted in a recent essay that there are reports that a military academy near Pyongyang is “displaying placards calling China a ‘turncoat and our enemy,’ ” and that the state-run news services criticized China for its condemnation of recent missile tests. That comes at a time when the North Korean economy, he notes, is more dependent on China than ever before.

Another theory is that a recent United Nations report that laid bare the scope and horror of North Korea’s prison camp system has struck fear among Mr. Kim and his fellow leaders that they could be charged with crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.

“The report did not have much to do with holding American citizens,” Mr. Eberstadt said on Sunday, “but it’s possible they want to show a change of course.”
 

A version of this news analysis appears in print on November 10, 2014, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Gives N. Korea the Silent Treatment.

    U.S. Gives North Korea the Silent Treatment, NYT, 9.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/world/asia/
    us-gives-north-korea-the-silent-treatment.html

Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller,

Released by North Korea,

Land in the U.S.

 

NOV. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — North Korea released two Americans who had been accused of trying to subvert the secretive state, after the director of national intelligence for the United States, James R. Clapper Jr., flew to the country on a secret mission and departed on Saturday with the men aboard his aircraft.

In a terse statement issued by Mr. Clapper’s office, the Americans — Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller — were described as “on their way home, accompanied by D.N.I. Clapper.” Their plane landed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Wash., about 9:15 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday.

Mr. Bae walked off the plane and into the embrace of relatives on the tarmac. Mr. Miller, his head shaved, sprinted down the steps into the arms of his parents, who were waiting for him at the bottom.

Securing the releases was an unusual role for Mr. Clapper, the nation’s most senior intelligence official, whose job is to coordinate policy and operations among the nation’s 16 spy agencies. Gruff, blunt-speaking and seen by many in the Obama administration as a throwback to the Cold War, the retired general is an unlikely diplomat but, in the words of one American official, “perfect for the North Koreans.”

Mr. Bae, 46, had been held for two years after he was detained on charges of using a Christian evangelical organization, Youth with a Mission, to preach against the North Korean government and planning a “religious coup d’état.” After a brief trial, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor on a farm, raising concerns about his fragile health.

Mr. Miller, 25, entered North Korea seven months ago and reportedly tore up his visa, and by some accounts sought asylum. He was charged with unruly behavior, and North Korean officials suspected he was trying to get inside one of the country’s feared prison camps, to write about it later.

Together with the release last month of Jeffrey E. Fowle, who had been held for six months, the decision to let the two Americans go is the latest evidence that Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s unpredictable and untested young leader, is trying his first approaches to the Obama administration since taking power. Officials would not say whether Mr. Clapper traveled with a letter from President Obama — which would be a usual approach — but a senior administration official said he “was there to listen,” and to “reiterate our views.”

Mr. Obama said Saturday that “we’re very grateful for their safe return,” and praised Mr. Clapper for successfully completing what he called “a challenging mission.”

In fact, the specter of Mr. Clapper’s flying into the last stronghold of hard-line communist dictatorship may be the director’s best chance to revise a national image that was bruised when he was asked, in an open congressional hearing, whether intelligence officials collected data about ordinary Americans. “No sir,” he responded. “Not wittingly.”

Months later the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, made clear that, in the most charitable interpretation, Mr. Clapper had issued a misleading statement to protect classified programs; he later conceded in a letter that “my response was clearly erroneous.”

The administration issued almost no details of the trip to North Korea, saying communications from Pyongyang were so scant that they did not immediately know what had taken place in the discussion. It was also not clear whether Mr. Clapper had spoken directly with Mr. Kim or had seen other North Korean leaders; Mr. Kim disappeared from public view this summer with what now appears to have been a painful leg ailment.

Mr. Clapper rarely announces his schedule and can travel with little notice. But last week he canceled, at the last moment, a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He left shortly after that on his trip to the North.

Sending high-level emissaries to the North is a long tradition; in Mr. Obama’s first term, former President Bill Clinton went to secure the release of two American journalists who had been seized on a trip along the Chinese border with the North. But Mr. Clinton’s trip led to no fundamental change in relations, which have been in a deep freeze since the North conducted a nuclear weapons test, its second, in May 2009, just months into Mr. Obama’s presidency. One of Mr. Obama’s top Asia aides, Jeffrey A. Bader, said then that the test made everyone in the White House “North Korea hawks.”

Mr. Obama has not attempted the kind of broad engagement that he has pursued so vigorously with Iran, responding to the North’s provocations by pursuing a policy of freezing the country out of the international economy, in hopes the regime will eventually implode.

But with the Iran nuclear negotiations approaching a major deadline, and the possibility of a new dialogue to test whether Mr. Kim’s advances are sincere, Mr. Obama has a chance to make some headway with two countries that have posed both nuclear and human rights challenges to the United States and its allies.

The president leaves on Sunday for China, North Korea’s last protector. Presumably the subject of how to deal with Mr. Kim, about whom Chinese leaders have expressed suspicion and disdain, will come up in meetings with President Xi Jinping.

Mr. Bae and Mr. Miller’s plane touched down Saturday night, backlit by a nearly full moon dimmed by fast-moving clouds. Mr. Bae emerged first, and was swarmed by about a dozen relatives and friends. He paused for hugs then continued inside, out of sight of the row of news cameras lined up about 100 yards away. After a few minutes, Mr. Miller came out, greeted by a smaller welcoming committee.

At a news conference, Mr. Bae thanked the Obama administration, officials in North Korea and everyone who prayed for him and his family while he was detained. “I just want to say thank you all for supporting me and lifting me up at the same time that I was not forgetting the people of North Korea,” he said.

Speaking of his ordeal, he said, “I learned a lot. I grew a lot. I lost a lot of weight, in a good way.” Some people in the room chuckled. “I’m standing strong because of you,” he added. Mr. Miller did not appear.

Mr. Miller, of Bakersfield, Calif., seemed a bit lost in the interviews he had been allowed to conduct for American television. He went through a brief trial this fall; photos released by the North showed him with eyes downcast, and flanked by uniformed security officials.

He was accused of entering North Korea with the “ambition” to deliberately violate North Korean law so he could experience life in a North Korean prison and become a firsthand witness about the human rights conditions in the North, The Associated Press and The Choson Sinbo, a South Korean paper, reported at the time of the trial.

That may have touched a nerve. In recent weeks a top North Korean diplomat, Jang il-Hun, met in New York with a group of Americans to argue that a United Nations report documenting the North’s extensive prison camp system was based on fabrications.

That report described “widespread, systematic and gross” violations, including enslavement, torture, rape and executions in the prison camps.

The ambassador seemed concerned that Mr. Kim could face charges at the International Criminal Court for human rights violations, and he said the North had only “ordinary prisons,” like those in the United States. “In my country we don’t even know the term ‘political prisoners,’ ” said Mr. Jang, a 32-year veteran of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

South Korea seized upon the release of the Americans to urge North Korea to free a South Korean missionary held there. In May, North Korea sentenced Kim Jong-uk, a Baptist missionary, to life in a labor camp for allegedly trying to build underground churches in the North.
 

Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea, Ashley Southall from New York, and Stacey Solie from Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: N. Korea Frees 2 After Mission by U.S. Spy Chief.

    Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller, Released by North Korea,
    Land in the U.S., NYT, 8.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/world/
    kenneth-bae-matthew-todd-miller-released-by-north-korea.html