[Pak Daily Times] HE was only on the ground for 48 hours, but America's top diplomat John F. I was in Vietnam, you know Kerry Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a lucky hat, conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State... may well have helped prevent Afghanistan from sliding into another bloody ethnic war. The helicopters were waiting for the US Secretary of State when he arrived in Kabul from Beijing early Friday on a last-minute mission to broker an end to a tense political impasse. Some 48 hours later they flew him back over the darkened city streets from the fortress-like US embassy compound to his plane — a deal triumphantly in his hand.
Few had believed it possible that Kerry could bring together two presidential rivals bitterly at odds over disputed elections, and help avert fears of ethnic violence in a country ravaged by decades of war. But the indefatigable 70-year-old dropped a political bombshell when he announced that rivals Abdullah Abdullah ... the former foreign minister of the Northern Alliance government, advisor to Masood, and candidate for president against Karzai. Dr. Abdullah was born in Kabul and is half Tadjik and half Pashtun... and Ashraf Ghani had agreed that every one of the eight million votes cast in their June run-off poll would be audited. Just days earlier the two men were barely speaking, as Abdullah vehemently accused Ghani of stealing victory by stuffing the ballots.
But standing next to each other with Kerry late on Saturday before the world's cameras, they clasped hands, smiling, and raised them in the air. With that single dramatic show of unity, Kerry may well have helped guide Afghanistan's young democracy away from a return to the bloody ethnic civil war of the 1990s. The announcement followed two days of marathon meetings, with Kerry and his staff shuttling between the two candidates and their teams in the embassy. He also met for hours one-on-one with each candidate.
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U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran will be declared the winner.
[Al Ahram] Security has been tightened in Sinai, with military operations claiming 18 bully boyz since the beginning of this month. Additional measures are expected soon, especially in light of the continuing existence of border tunnels, more of which have been discovered recently.
Even if only on a very small scale, these tunnels permit the infiltration of dangerous elements into Egypt. Since the beginning of the month, security authorities have tossed in the slammer Don't shoot, coppers! I'm comin' out! more than 200 individuals being smuggled through these tunnels. Although most were Africans trying to enter Israel via the Egyptian border, such figures indicate that there are still weak points on the map.
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[Independent] A speech by an ex-MI6 boss hints at a plan going back over a decade.
How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."
The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit.
In Mosul, Shia shrines and mosques have been blown up, and in the nearby Shia Turkoman city of Tal Afar 4,000 houses have been taken over by Isis fighters as "spoils of war". Simply to be identified as Shia or a related sect, such as the Alawites, in Sunni rebel-held parts of Iraq and Syria today, has become as dangerous as being a Jew was in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe in 1940.
There is no doubt about the accuracy of the quote by Prince Bandar, secretary-general of the Saudi National Security Council from 2005 and head of General Intelligence between 2012 and 2014, the crucial two years when al-Qa'ida-type jihadis took over the Sunni-armed opposition in Iraq and Syria. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute last week, Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasised the significance of Prince Bandar's words, saying that they constituted "a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed".
He does not doubt that substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: "Such things simply do not happen spontaneously." This sounds realistic since the tribal and communal leadership in Sunni majority provinces is much beholden to Saudi and Gulf paymasters, and would be unlikely to cooperate with Isis without their consent.
As for Saudi Arabia, it may come to regret its support for the Sunni revolts in Syria and Iraq as jihadi social media begins to speak of the House of Saud as its next target. It is the unnamed head of Saudi General Intelligence quoted by Dearlove after 9/11 who is turning out to have analysed the potential threat to Saudi Arabia correctly and not Prince Bandar, which may explain why the latter was sacked earlier this year.
Nor is this the only point on which Prince Bandar was dangerously mistaken. The rise of Isis is bad news for the Shia of Iraq but it is worse news for the Sunni whose leadership has been ceded to a pathologically bloodthirsty and intolerant movement, a sort of Islamic Khmer Rouge, which has no aim but war without end.
The Sunni caliphate rules a large, impoverished and isolated area from which people are fleeing. Several million Sunni in and around Baghdad are vulnerable to attack and 255 Sunni prisoners have already been massacred. In the long term, Isis cannot win, but its mix of fanaticism and good organisation makes it difficult to dislodge.
"God help the Shia," said Prince Bandar, but, partly thanks to him, the shattered Sunni communities of Iraq and Syria may need divine help even more than the Shia.
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As for Saudi Arabia, it may come to regret its support for the Sunni revolts in Syria and Iraq as jihadi social media begins to speak of the House of Saud as its next target.
Ralph Peters predicted the KSA regret at the monster they have created. Certainly explains Champ's reluctance to engage ISIS in the very early stages.
[SultanKnish] As Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas targets and Hamas rockets fall on Israeli towns, some wonder how did Gaza come to run by Hamas terrorists. The answer is that the world forced Israel to let them in.
In the early 90s, Nissim Toledano, a border police sergeant, was kidnapped by terrorists on the way to work. After an extended search, he was found dead in a roadside ditch. In response to that attack and numerous other atrocities committed by Hamas, including a planned massive car bombing, Israel made the decision to deport 400 Hamas terrorists. Among them were the past and present day leaders of Hamas. You might assume that the story ends there. And you would be wrong.
Scathing. And much shameful history I'd somehow missed, as I was religiously reading the New York Times and listening to NPR at the time.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Pak Daily Times] HE was only on the ground for 48 hours, but America's top diplomat 
