Summaries here and here and here.

Contours of chaos.

At the Al-Yarubia primary school for boys in Ramadi, the violent capital of Iraq’s vast western Al-Anbar province, teachers must give a strange lesson, helping children to learn to hide.

“Kids, if there is fighting, what should a pupil do,” the Sunni teacher asks the class sitting politely behind their desks.

All know the answer by heart, but it is the adult who answers: “Get away from the windows, stay in the classroom” and “hide under the desks,” which the children promptly do.

As if it were play, they disappear. In the suddenly empty room, not a head peeks out. Article

There’s that pesky reality again. (emphasis added)

Kiki Munshi was showcased by the media in September as a seasoned U.S. diplomat who came out of retirement to lead a rebuilding group in Iraq.

Now she is back home, angry, and convinced that President George W. Bush’s new strategy of doubling the number of such groups to 20 along with a troop surge of 21,500 will not help stabilize Iraq.

A diplomat for 22 years, she quit her job last month as leader of a Provincial Reconstruction Team — groups made up of about 50 civilian and military experts that try to help Iraqi communities build their own government while strengthening moderates.

“In spite of the magnificent and often heroic work being done out there by a lot of truly wonderful people, the PRTs themselves aren’t succeeding. The obstacles are too great,” Munshi said this week in Washington, where she was pressing her view at the State Department and to Congress.

“Once again we are proceeding to lay people’s lives on a line drawn with faulty information. Once again the fantasies of the ‘policy-makers’ drive decisions without much link to the realities on the ground,” said Munshi, who retired from the foreign service in 2002.

Her postings included Romania, India and Sierra Leone before Iraq, where Munshi said he had felt a “moral obligation to sort out the mess we have made there.” Article

Keeping up with the courts-martial:

A young Marine involved in the April killing of a 52-year-old Iraqi man was sentenced to eight years in prison on Saturday, the fifth of eight troops to plead guilty and be sentenced in the incident.

Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington, 22, pled guilty to conspiracy and kidnapping. In exchange, prosecutors dropped murder, larceny and housebreaking charges.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, Pennington will testify against the remaining three Marines, two of whom plan to fight murder and conspiracy charges. Article

Summary here and here.

A toll most terrible.

…Figures given by Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission show that more women burned themselves to death this year in the southern province of Kandahar than anywhere else in the country.

Last year, Herat in the west - where most girls marry at around 15 - was top. Deputy minister of women’s affairs Maliha Sahak says that 197 incidents of self-immolation have been recorded since March 2006, 35 of them in Kandahar province alone.

A total of 69 women lost their lives. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan says that Kandahar’s only hospital for women, which has 40 beds, received 29 cases of suicide in the space of two months. Twenty of those women had set themselves alight.

[snip]

Deputy women’s minister Maliha Sahak points to last year’s protocol involving many Afghan ministries, the Supreme Court and the human rights commission. It was passed with President Hamid Karzai’s approval and banned the marriage of a woman if she is under 18 years old.

She says another law is in the pipeline which will require agreement from both man and woman for their wedding to be legal. The women’s ministry is to mount an awareness campaign targeting men in an attempt to reduce the violence. Article

Extending chaos.

George W. Bush has breathed new life into the Afghan war. With his decision to send 3,500 more U.S. troops to that country, he has also made it more difficult for Canada to get out.

[snip]

That wasn’t the original plan. A little over a year ago, U.S. commanders spoke of drawing down their troop strength there from what was then about 21,000 soldiers.

The idea at that time was that America would hand off Afghanistan to allies like Canada in order to focus on Iraq. To that end, the U.S. put the bulk of its troops in Afghanistan under NATO command.

But that was before the last congressional elections, when Bush still thought he had a free hand in Iraq. It was also when he thought he could still pacify that chaotic country.

Now, with Democrats controlling the U.S. Congress, Republican Bush is no longer free to do whatever he wants. What’s also become clear is that he cannot succeed in Iraq.

All political leaders seek legacies. So far, that of George W. Bush does not look stellar. He risks being remembered as the first U.S. president to lose a war he deliberately started.

For a man who styles himself a wartime president, this must be difficult to bear. How could someone who revels in the title of commander-in-chief leave office without winning at least one war, somewhere?

[snip]

But where? Was Bush really serious about taking on Iran? Or could he find a war somewhere else that was easier.

His speech on Thursday suggests the latter. Bush, it seems, has rediscovered Afghanistan. His Democratic opponents routinely hector him for not putting enough troops into that country. Now, he is taking their advice.

Conventional wisdom suggests that this is good news for the Canadian and other NATO forces already fighting there. The theory goes that if America finally puts all of its muscle into Afghanistan, the Taliban insurgents will surely be defeated.

In fact, this may not be true. The old Soviet Union adhered to the same theory when it invaded Afghanistan in force in 1979 to bolster a client government which – like that of current President Hamid Karzai – was trying to modernize the country, battle obscurantist insurgents and improve the lot of women. History will show that the Soviets lost. Article

Summary here.

Related, and noted FYI.

Look for more and more fronts to suddenly be declared crucial, for more and moe “thems” to be used as jaundiced justification for the ramping up of tensions, spending and militarism..

It is estimated between 300 and 500 terrorists belong to al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa, many of them trained in Afghanistan. Its website and newsletter indicate strong sympathy for the Iraqi jihadists’ cause, encouraging young men to travel to Iraq to join the terrorist campaign.

According to the US military 20% of suicide bombers in Iraq are now Algerian. It says that al-Qaeda has started running training camps in northern Mali for Islamic militants from other north African countries. The recruits are then sent back to carry out operations in their home countries. Article