After eight years, US-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next year to avoid perceptions that the conflict has become unwinnable, the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

Mr Gates said victory was a “long-term prospect” under any scenario and the US would not win the war in a year’s time. But US forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support.

Mr Gates said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published yesterday:

“After the Iraq experience, nobody is prepared to have a long slog where it is not apparent we are making headway,”

“The troops are tired, the American people are pretty tired.”

Deep public unhappiness with the war in Iraq helped sink George Bush’s public approval ratings, making him the most unpopular president in recent history in some surveys.

While not predicting a parallel fate for the Obama Administration, Mr Gates stressed the need for progress in Afghanistan.

Mr Gates has spoken in the past about the public’s fatigue with war. In the interview, he went further by offering a more specific time-frame for needed progress as well as the consequences of failing to meet it. Mr Gates has overseen an overhaul in the Administration’s Afghanistan strategy in recent months, sending 21,000 additional troops and choosing a new commander to lead the international effort.

“This is where we are really getting back into the fight,”

The strategy switch came after rebel attacks rose dramatically last year and casualties suffered by US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops surpassed record levels.

President Barack Obama said last week that he hoped to “transition to a different phase” after the Afghan presidential election on August 20.

Mr Gates said Americans would have the patience to continue the war in Afghanistan only if the new military approach began to lift the conflict out of deadlock.

“If we can show progress, and we are headed in the right direction, and we are not in a stalemate where we are taking significant casualties, then you can put more time on the Washington clock,”

With a new strategy in place, General Stanley McChrystal, now the top commander in Afghanistan, and General David Petraeus, head of US forces in the Middle East, are due to provide their assessment of the effort in Afghanistan early next month.

Mr Gates said the commanders were free to provide an honest assessment, but also cautioned that additional troops might not be approved.

“I did not want either of them to feel constrained in making their recommendations,”

“That is not to say we will accept all of their recommendations.”

The war in Afghanistan is officially a NATO mission. Mr Gates said the alliance was facing the challenge of rising casualties just as the overall coalition war effort was beginning to function better. British forces have had 15 soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan this month, and Canada has lost five service members.

“There has been an extraordinary amount of political courage as some of our partners have taken some really devastating casualties,”

“The British have had a rough couple of weeks.”

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, george bush, pentagon, Robert Gates

The wife of the next head of Britain’s spy agency has posted pictures of her husband, family and friends on the social networking site Facebook, details which could compromise security, a newspaper said on Sunday.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service in November. The SIS, popularly known as MI6, is Britain’s global intelligence-gathering organisation.

In what the Mail on Sunday called an “extraordinary lapse“, the new spy chief’s wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are.

The paper said the Facebook page had “virtually no privacy protection” and could therefore be viewed by any of the many millions of Facebook users around the world. They were swiftly removed once authorities were alerted by the newspaper’s enquiries.

Though the Facebook profile for Sir John Sawyers has now been removed, this brings up an interesting question of whether we all have to officially declare what social networks we belong to.

Sir John Sawers, who will be known by the code-name “C” when he takes up his new post, currently serves as Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
The newspaper said:

“There were fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder could have compromised the safety of Sir John’s family and friends,”

Publishing the story on its front page and the pictures on a double-page spread, the Mail on Sunday said the information

“could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists”.

It was the latest in a string of security blunders, lapses and leaks by British officials that have embarrassed the government of embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Technorati Tags: Ambassador to the United Nations, Facebook, Gordon Brown, Lady Shelley Sawers, MI6, Secret Intelligence Service, Sir John Sawers, SIS

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews just released. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Saddam, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region”.

The then US president George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. At the time Bush administration officials strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The director of the archive, Thomas Blanton, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Saddam’s conversations with the FBI secret. An FBI spokesman, Paul Bresson, said he could not immediately explain the reason for the redactions.

The 20 formal interviews took place in 2004, between February 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28.

Saddam was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and hanged in December 2006.

Technorati Tags: george bush, Paul Bresson, saddam hussein, Thomas Blanton, WMD

Michelle Obama, whom French fashionistas regard as the best-dressed American first lady since Jackie Kennedy, has lived up to her sartorial reputation during her trip to Paris, sporting a wardrobe of fashion-forward classics by top American designers.

But the woman who put more-casual retailers such as J Crew on the fashion map also showed a weakness for high-end fashion “a la Francaise”, taking her two daughters on a private shopping trip to the exclusive children’s couture house Bonpoint.

Mrs Obama’s visit to the City of Light was widely billed as a rematch of the “duel of charm” that pitted her in a glamour contest against France’s first lady, the former supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

The two faced off before the cameras only once during Mrs Obama’s latest visit from Friday until Monday. For D-Day commemorations in Normandy, the first ladies chose strikingly similar looks, both in creamy white, knee-length dresses with contrasting belts and kitten heels.

The heels were a departure for Ms Bruni-Sarkozy, a leggy Italian-born heiress who leaped to fame in the early 1990s as a top model. Since she married France’s diminutive leader Nicolas Sarkozy last year, the 175-centimetre-tall first lady has largely stuck to flats for her public appearances.

Ms Bruni-Sarkozy’s outfit, which also included a swingy black cashmere coat, was signed Christian Dior – her favourite label. Also true to form, Mrs Obama’s dress was by Narciso Rodriguez, one of the stable of American designers she champions.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph said photos of the two striding side-by-side on the red carpet at Saturday’s commemorations were

“surreally interchangeable with shots from a catwalk show … They could almost have been modelling some designers’ collection named ‘First Lady Spring 2009′ “.

French fashion weekly Elle said the two looked like “twin sisters” and hailed their “sophisticated, feminine” 1950s-era looks as “a success: We want more!”

A similar thing happened at their last meeting, at a G-8 summit in the French border city of Strasbourg in April, when both showed up in stylish but proper coats embellished with flowing bows at the neckline and co-ordinated with matching dresses.

Then, the European fashion press generally concurred that Mrs Obama’s Thakoon ensemble, in black silk with fuchsia flowers, stole the show from Ms Bruni-Sarkozy’s Dior outfit in putty grey.

But it appeared that Ms Bruni-Sarkozy’s sophisticated Parisian style might be winning Mrs Obama over.

On Sunday, the US first lady and daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, went shopping at Bonpoint, a children’s clothing store favoured by wealthy Parisians and international jet-setters such as Sofia Coppola.

Bonpoint’s store in the Saint Germain des Pres neighbourhood was closed for inventory on Monday and store officials were not available to discuss what, if anything, they bought. The brand, known for its airy stores carrying cashmere baby sweaters and smocked pastel frocks, was a far cry from CrewCuts, J Crew’s children’s line, which the Obama girls wore to the inauguration.

Mrs Obama and the girls met the President in Paris, on the last leg of his six-day tour of four Middle Eastern and European countries. Barack Obama left Paris for Washington, DC, on Sunday morning, leaving his wife and children to enjoy the French capital on their own.

Apart from the D-Day commemorations, Mrs Obama’s Paris visit was a private one, closed to the press. Photographers and camera crews caught images of her and the girls visiting the city’s must-see monuments, including the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre modern art museum and Notre Dame cathedral.

For those visits, Mrs Obama stuck to her signature looks, wearing cardigans and flats for her trip to Bonpoint and a teal jacket and printed scarf for the Eiffel Tower.

Mrs Obama and the girls also attended a private luncheon hosted by the Sarkozys. The event, at the gilded Elysee presidential palace, looked like an advance fete for Sasha’s eighth birthday on Wednesday.

It wasn’t immediately clear what Mrs Obama or Ms Bruni-Sarkozy wore to the lunch, so fashion watchers will have to hold on for round three of the first ladies’ fashion face-off.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-to-kisa2s

Technorati Tags: Carla Bruni, Michelle Obama

An Air France passenger jet with 215 people on board has gone missing after dropping off the radar over the Atlantic off the Brazilian coast Monday, a Paris airport official said.

“The plane disappeared from the screens several hours ago. It could be a transponder problem, but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected.”

“We are very worried,”

Air traffic control lost contact with the Airbus A330 at 0600 GMT after it took off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, where it had been due to land at 0910 GMT.

Technorati Tags: A330, Air France, Jet

A White House intern who had a 17-month affair in the 1960s with the former US president John F. Kennedy is to tell her story for the first time.

Mimi Beardsley Alford, now 66, a retired New York church administrator, will receive an advance believed to be worth nearly $US1 million for her memoirs.

Mrs Alford, who is breaking her silence after more than 45 years, maintained the secret until a new Kennedy biography was published in 2003.

That book revealed that he began an affair in June 1962 with Mimi Beardsley, then a 19-year-old student.

Ms Beardsley was tracked down and identified as a divorcee working for a Manhattan Presbyterian church who had told nobody about the affair. She gave a brief statement confirming a “sexual relationship” had lasted until his assassination in November 1963, but has said nothing more since then.

In an added twist, the young Ms Beardsley was educated at the same exclusive private academy earlier attended by Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, who was to become the president’s wife. Mrs Alford – she has since remarried – is now working on a memoir entitled Once Upon A Secret, about hiding such an explosive episode in her past for most of her life, The New York Times reported.

Susan Mercandetti, executive editor at Random House, declined to say how much Random House had paid for the book, but a person familiar with the negotiations said it was close to seven figures.

Mark Reiter, Mrs Alford’s agent, said it would not be a tell-all memoir.

“The story has three acts to it: before the White House, during the White House, and then the really powerful part is what happens afterwards. What’s the impact on your family life, your marriage, knowing that this happened to you in your early life and you have chosen to keep it a secret.”

Technorati Tags: affair, intern, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, JFK, Mimi Beardsley Alford

The mass hysteria from the right rolled in overnight, just two days after Wanda Sykes appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and gave Rush Limbaugh a taste of his own medicine. Much like when Limbaugh would gleefully sing “Barack the Magic Negro” on a daily basis or when he rabidly, and brutally ripped into Michael J. Fox and his illness – Sykes decided to take it to the next level in her digs aimed at Rush.

Sykes, who was on fire riffed hard on Limbaugh – claiming she was the 20th hijacker on 9/11 but missed the plane because he was so strung out on Oxycontin, and that while Rush “hoped Obama failed”, she hoped Limbaughs “kidneys failed”. Undoubtedly, it was a fun routine – and with anything funny – all hell has broken loose with commentators and politicians alike chiming in on why they hated what Wanda said.

It’s shocking that right wing politicos/talking heads are taking so much (and I sense, contrived) outrage over Sykes stand-up routine. If you simply add up all things “disgusting”, “vile” or any other adjective being used to describe Sykes routine – that Rush Limbaugh has said just over the year or two you would come up with a compilation that would over shadow anything Sykes said to such a degree, it would be silly to even compare the two, and their public commentary.

Technorati Tags: Comedy News, Daily Show, Daily Show Wanda Sykes, Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart Wanda Sykes, video, Wanda Sykes, Wanda Sykes Daily Show, Wanda Sykes Jon Stewart, Wanda Sykes Rush Limbaugh, Wanda Sykes White House Correspondents Dinner

Record numbers of people have taken to the streets of France, in the biggest demonstrations since Nicolas Sarkozy’s election to the presidency, to protest about his handling of the economic crisis.

Unions estimated that more than 3 million people took part in demonstrations across the country on Thursday, in the second general strike over the economic crisis in two months. Police put the figure at 1.2 million.

One in three people supporting the protest – the highest public backing for a strike in a decade.

Mr Sarkozy maintains he is the only person who can face down street protests and pursue his reform plans.

But he faces growing anger and an array of demands. Protesting teachers and doctors claimed the cuts to public sector jobs resulting from his reforms would kill schools and hospitals.

Private-sector employees, including cashiers, bank clerks and car workers, protested over poor pay, factory closures and rising unemployment.

On the march in Paris, Roland Bonnot, a primary teacher from Dijon, said that in the suburb where he taught parents were in constant fear of unemployment after the announcement that a mustard factory was closing.

“Children are now picking up on the anxiety and not performing well at school,”

The strike disrupted transport, schools, airports, government offices and even theatres. Unions demanded job protection, an increase in the minimum wage and a U-turn on Mr Sarkozy’s move to cut taxes for the very rich. But the Government insists there will be no concessions.

The Government is concerned about the increasingly radical nature of protesters. Sony factory workers held a chief executive hostage over redundancies last week.

Mr Sarkozy has focused on a €27 billion stimulus plan through public and private investment instead of boosting consumers’ pockets with tax cuts or higher welfare spending.

He argues that without investment leading to job creation, France will not be able to recover as fast other countries.

Technorati Tags: Nicolas Sarkozy, Paris, reforms

If ever the world would have forgiven a man for not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it would have been now. No one would blame Barack Obama if he focused exclusively on the economic crisis, pushing the foreign policy in-tray to the back of his desk. After all, there’s only so much even a Messiah can handle.

For all that, the new US President has crammed a slew of foreign policy moves into his first six weeks, any one of which would have made big news in normal times.

Instead, in the age of global economic meltdown, they have had to fight for more than fleeting media attention.

Most visible have been the big declarations, whether announcing the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, avowing that “the United States of America does not torture” or ordering that Guantanamo be closed.

In just the last week, we’ve had the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, dispatching officials to Syria as well as inviting Iran to talks on the future of Afghanistan – extending a hand to two states previously consigned to outer darkness.

The start of the month brought the revelation that Obama had written a secret letter to his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, hinting at a deal in which Moscow would lean on Iran, urging it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, in return for the US scrapping its planned installation of a missile defence system in Russia’s eastern European backyard. A gesture to cap it all: the Obama Administration has moved to ease trade and travel restrictions with Cuba.

The question – 50 days into the administration – is:

is there a common thread of logic running through these moves, one that we might describe, however prematurely, as the Obama doctrine?

The first unifying theme, sounded minutes after he took the presidential oath, is a repudiation of the legacy of his predecessor. Obama is determined to signal to the world that he is the unBush. Some on the left and right alike have suggested that this is more symbolic than real, that in fact the basic lineaments of US policy remain in place.

Obama will keep rather a lot of troops in Iraq until the end of 2011, just as the Bush administration planned; he has intensified US involvement in Afghanistan, sending 17,000 more troops; and Robert Gates, George Bush’s defence secretary, remains in this post under Obama.

Put that to the Obama team and they don’t wholly deny it. The US did not become a different country on January 20, they say; its interests have not changed overnight.

What no one denies is that there is a clear advantage for the US in the rest of the world believing that a profound change has come about. Which is why the declaration by the Vice President, Joe Biden, that the US is pressing the “reset button” has become the current catchphrase of US diplomacy.

A benign assessment of the Obama record so far would see two other early traits.

The first is a readiness to speak the truth. Asked by The New York Times last week whether the US was winning the war in Afghanistan, he replied tersely: “No.”

After the Bush years, when those who followed the evidence were dismissed as dullards imprisoned in the narrow-minded confines of the “reality-based community”, such candour is a relief!

Second, there are some signs of imaginative thinking. Deploying the veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process, George Mitchell, to the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of those ideas that seems obvious – but only because it makes so much sense. The same goes for allocating the Afghan-Pakistan, or “Afpak”, file to the hardball maestro Richard Holbrooke.

But plaudits surely go to Obama’s direct appeal to Medvedev, with its echoes of the former US president John Kennedy’s resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Just as JFK agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey if the Soviet Union took theirs away from Cuba, so Obama implicitly made a similar offer to Russia: you get Iran to back down and I’ll remove my interceptor missiles and radar stations from Poland and the Czech Republic. If such an initiative were to work, the knock-on effects would be multiple.

Take one: Israel has long hinted that if its friends were to make the Iranian threat go away, it would respond by moving forward on the peace track. For a long while that was assumed to mean military action against Iran. But if Obama’s Russia gambit were to succeed – and the critics claim Gates started work on these lines a year ago – the goal of an Iranian nuclear freeze, with all its ancillary benefits, would be achieved without a shot being fired.

To be clear, this is not guitar-strumming hippie dovishness, as the escalation in Afghanistan confirms – though one administration official warns against overinterpreting that move. It is a “time-buying exercise”, he says, ensuring things don’t get worse on the ground while the White House undertakes a strategic review of the entire Afpak region, from where, it argues, every major al-Qaeda attack since September 11, 2001, has emanated.

I’m told this was the thrust of Biden’s message to NATO’s North Atlantic Council in Brussels this week: not some kind of “wussy multilateralism”, with lots of cosy meetings and platitudes, but a “results-oriented” desire to get things done – and the belief that that only happens when the world acts in concert.

To be sure, these are only the early signals in the early days. But from a President with his hands full, they are encouraging.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, barack obama, george w. bush, President

While Bernard Madoff sits in his New York cell facing a life behind bars today, the search for any accomplices continues.

By choosing to plead guilty in court, Madoff has robbed the prosecution and victims of the chance to hear details of how he perpetrated the world’s biggest fraud to date. Questions about whether Madoff acted alone or in concert remain unanswered but the victims of Madoff’s fraud will hope that remains a temporary state of affairs.

Speaking in court yesterday, the assistant US attorney, Marc Litt, said:

“The Government’s investigation continues. Both in terms of finding assets and anyone else who may be responsible for this fraud.”

The biggest question marks hang over whether family members including Madoff’s wife Ruth, brother Peter, sons Mark and Andrew and niece and legal adviser Shana played any role in the fraud.

Ruth Madoff owns $US70 million of property, including a $US7 million Manhattan penthouse, and has caught the attention of investigators who want to seize assets in the wake of the scandal. Her lawyers claim her assets are unrelated to the fraud.

Lawyers to sons Mark and Andrew, who held trading positions at Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, insist they

“had no knowledge whatsoever of the fraud”.

The two were responsible for blowing the whistle on their father after he told them:

“It’s all just one big lie.”

The role of brother Peter, chief compliance officer at the company, has also been called into question by lawyers who point out he would have been responsible for checking whether trades had taken place and the veracity of claims over the fund’s returns. The whole family will be under scrutiny.

“To see him for the first time, I’m just very emotional and close to falling apart,”

Sharon Lissauer said, biting back tears.

“I lost all my savings. I don’t have anything else. If only he could reveal where [the assets] are and help make the investors whole.”

As television helicopters circled overhead and hundreds of cameramen and photographers crowded around, Madoff walked briskly into the courthouse. He would not re-emerge. He pleaded guilty to 11 felony charges, including securities fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. At 11.13am, a little more than an hour after the proceedings began, an expressionless Madoff was led away to jail. Sentencing is set for June 16.

If the nation’s economic crisis needed a face, Madoff supplied it. And if average citizens watching their retirement savings sink needed to see a Wall Street villain hauled off in handcuffs, Madoff on Thursday supplied that, too.

Zsa Zsa Gabor might look back on her film roles with a wry smile today. The Hungarian-born actress once acted in a little-known film entitled The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk.

As one of the victims of Madoff’s $65 billion fraud, the irony of the title is unlikely to be lost on the nonagenarian film star.

Technorati Tags: Bernard Madoff, fraud, Zsa Zsa Gabor