The defence secretary, Robert Gates, made a direct appeal to Europeans on Sunday to support the war in Afghanistan, warning that violence and terrorism could surge worldwide if NATO was defeated there.
   While admitting policy mistakes – and his own role in one of them – Gates urged the allies to come together in the fight against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and said the credibility of NATO itself was at stake.
   ‘The threat posed by violent Islamic extremism is real – and it is not going to go away,’ Gates told an annual gathering of security and military experts in Munich, Germany.
   ‘I am concerned that many people on this continent may not comprehend the magnitude of the direct threat to European security,’ said Gates, admitting public support for the war in Afghanistan was weak in Europe.
   His speech was the latest move in a campaign he has undertaken – sometimes quietly, sometimes through blunt public statements – to persuade NATO allies to supply more troops and resources for the mission.
   Although France has indicated a willingness to send more troops, Germany has been adamant that it cannot do more.
   Gates said NATO could not afford ‘the luxury’ of letting some nations conduct less dangerous missions while others did more fighting and dying – a remark which appeared aimed at Germany, which confines its forces to the safer north of Afghanistan.
   After his speech, several German politicians criticised Gates, with one accusing him of public ‘finger pointing’, but the Pentagon chief said he had not meant to single out specific countries and called Germany ‘a little overly sensitive’.
   ‘This is a problem that the alliance has, not that any individual country has,’ Gates said. ‘The finger was never pointed in Germany’s direction.’
   Gates branded Islamist militancy a movement built on false success, saying ‘about the only thing they have accomplished recently is the deaths of thousands of innocent Muslims while trying to create discord across the Middle East.’
   ‘What would happen if the false success they proclaim became real success – if they triumphed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or managed to topple the government of Pakistan? Or a major Middle Eastern government?’ he asked.
   ‘With safe havens in the Middle East, and new tactics honed on the battlefield and transmitted via the internet, violence and terrorism worldwide could surge,’ he said.
   Gates cited more than a dozen attacks or plots against European targets, including bombings in London and Madrid, and recalled the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
   ‘Imagine if Islamic terrorists had managed to strike your capitals on the same scale as they struck in New York,’ he said.
   ‘For the United States, the lessons we have learned these past six years – and in many cases re-learned – have not been easy ones,’ Gates said. ‘We have stumbled along the way, and we are still learning.’

Myanmar’s unexpected announcement of a timetable for elections in 2010 could prove meaningless with Aung San Suu Kyi and other top democracy leaders locked away, analysts said Sunday.
   The military announced late Saturday that it would hold a constitutional referendum in May to set the stage for elections in 2010, in a move that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy called ‘surprising.’
   If held, the polls would be the first since 1990, when the NLD won a landslide victory – even though Aung San Suu Kyi was already under house arrest. She has been confined to her home in Yangon for 12 of the last 18 years.
   Analysts said the regime’s announcement raised more questions than answers, especially about what role pro-democracy forces would be allowed to play in elections in a country ruled by the military since 1962.
   Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar at Australia’s Macquarie University in Sydney, said he was sceptical elections would be meaningful because so many pro-democracy activists have been arrested.
   ‘The opposition movement is the weakest at the moment because so many of them are all locked up,’ Turnell said.
   Amnesty International estimates the regime holds at least 1,850 political prisoners, including about 700 arrested during the junta’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protests in September 2007.
   The protests led by Buddhist monks were the biggest challenge to military rule in nearly 20 years. At least 31 people were killed and 74 went missing when security forces violent broke up the crowds, according to the United Nations.
   Apart from Aung San Suu Kyi and senior NLD members, the junta has also arrested top student leaders who rallied against the junta in 1988 in a far larger uprising that resulted in more than 3,000 deaths.
   Many leaders of that uprising had been released over the last four years and had returned to political activism, only be thrown back into prison.
   ‘With Aung San Suu Kyi and so many democracy leaders under detention, it will be very difficult for opposition groups to organise for elections,’ said Aung Naig Oo, a Thailand-based Myanmar analyst.
   Turnell said the junta should release Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners to ‘make elections meaningful.’
   ‘Unless they are released, it will be totally unmeaningful,’ the academic said.
   Trevor Wilson, a former Australian ambassador to Myanmar, agreed.
   ‘They cannot have elections while so many people are in prison for carrying out peaceful political activities,’ Wilson said.
   ‘They need to free political prisoners. We have to insist they do.’
   Even if Aung San Suu Kyi were released, the constitution the junta proposes to bring to voters in May would bar her from running for president.
   Win Min, a Thailand-based Myanmar academic, said the absence of Myanmar’s most prominent opposition leader would undermine the legitimacy of any polls.
   ‘She is a true hero of people, and excluding Aung San Suu Kyi undermines the elections,’ Win Min said.

Israel considered intensifying its military operations in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Sunday after an Israeli child was seriously wounded by rocket fire from the territory.
   The prime minister, Ehud Olmert, huddled with security officials before hosting the weekly cabinet meeting which was expected to be dominated by the situation in Gaza, where Israeli strikes have killed 20 people over the past week, all but one of them militants, officials said.
   Calls for Israel to step up its military operations against Gaza have mounted after an eight-year-old boy had to have a leg amputated after being hit by shrapnel from a rocket fired from Gaza that slammed into the southern town of Sderot on Saturday.
   ‘Why don’t they kill the Hamas leadership?’ read a headline in the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot while the tabloid Maariv wrote that Saturday’s attack ‘raises once again the dilemma regarding a large-scale ground operation in Gaza.’
   Ever since Hamas seized control of Gaza almost eight months ago, calls have mounted in Israel for the army to launch a major offensive against the territory in a bid to stop the rocket fire.
   Olmert has so far resisted the pressure, preferring to continue with air strikes and small-scale ground operations against militants firing rockets or mortars into Israel.
   Speaking to army radio ahead of the cabinet meeting, housing minister Zeev Boim of Olmert’s centrist Kadima party called for the army to target Hamas’s political and military leadership in Gaza in response to the rockets.
   ‘War is war and in Gaza, one has to speak the language of war in order to make oneself understood.

Mounting tensions between the partners in Nepal’s peace deal are posing a serious challenge to its stability two months ahead of polls meant to transform the country into a republic, analysts say.
   Former rebel Maoists faced heavy criticism this week after their supporters were accused of attacking and wounding 17 people, including a member of parliament, who were campaigning in the west for Nepal’s biggest party, the Nepali Congress.
   Later the same day, hundreds of police raided the headquarters and offices of the controversial Maoist Young Communist League, with local media reporting that the raids were retaliation for the beatings.
   On Wednesday, a Maoist announcement that they will revive local-level Maoist organisations prompted accusations they are restarting the parallel government they ran in areas under their control during the bitter insurgency.
   ‘We are approaching a critical few weeks,’ said analyst Rhoderick Chalmers, Nepal’s country director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention think-tank.
   ‘It was inevitable that things would bubble up at some point. There is a lot of jealousy and rivalry (in the interim government) so it’s not surprising,’ said Chalmers, saying the worsening tensions have highlighted the fragility of the country’s 2006 peace deal.
   ‘Just because you have signed a piece of paper does not mean you have genuine consensus. It (the interim government) is a convergence of interests that may or may not last,’ said Chalmers.
   The elections on April 10, designed to elect a body that will rewrite Nepal’s constitution, now look set to take place amid questions over whether the peace pact can hold.
   In December, the country’s interim parliament – made up of Maoists and mainstream parties – approved a motion to scrap the monarchy and declare a republic immediately after the election.
   But a survey last week showed that 49.3 per cent of Nepalese wanted some form of monarchy preserved. The monarch is considered by devout Hindus to be an incarnation of the Hindu god of protection Vishnu.
   In addition, there has been festering ethnic unrest in the south that has killed at least 200 people in the last year, and dozens of small bombs have been thrown at political rallies.
   Leaders of ethnic minority groups announced plans Saturday for strikes and other protests next week to press the government to bow to their demands.
   ‘The Mahadhesi people want the government to guarantee a federal state structure with greater autonomy and the right to self determination before the polls,’ said one ethnic leader, Rajendra Mahato.
   The United Nations, which is investigating the alleged Maoist attack in the west of Nepal, said there was no place for violence ahead of the polls.

Kenya’s feuding parties on Sunday headed into a decisive week of negotiations on a compromise deal to end the conflict over disputed elections that has left more than 1,000 dead.
   Chief mediator Kofi Annan hopes a settlement can be reached in the coming days between the government and the opposition, whose row over who won the presidential election in December ignited Kenya’s worst crisis since independence.
   The eruption of rioting, the police raids and tribal violence since the December 27 vote has also displaced some 300,000 people, shattering Kenya’s image as one of Africa’s most stable countries.
   Negotiators for the president, Mwai Kibaki, and opposition leader Raila Odinga were to resume talks on Monday in a Nairobi hotel to hammer out details of an agreement that could include the formation of a power-sharing government.
   ‘I think everyone realises that we have a serious problem in the country,’ Annan, a former UN secretary general, said last week, setting the stage for the crunch talks.
   ‘We are all agreed that a political settlement is needed, that a political settlement is necessary and we are working out the details of such a settlement.’
   Launched nearly two weeks ago, Annan’s mediation mission is seen as Kenya’s best hope for a political solution to end the violence that has seen Kenyans killed at the hands of machete-wielding mobs, burnt in churches and driven off their land.
   Kenya descended into turmoil after the country’s central elections commission proclaimed 76-year-old Kibaki, in power since 2002, winner of the election.

Sri Lanka’s army chief again vowed to defeat Tamil separatists but refused to set a deadline for the end of the decades-old conflict, saying the rebels remain a potent force, a report said Sunday.
   Army general Sarath Fonseka said in an interview with the Lakbima weekly newspaper that a military campaign to capture the rebel-held Wanni region in the north begun in March last year was moving according to plan.
   He however refused to give a timeframe for defeating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have fought for more than three decades to establish an independent homeland for minority Tamils in the Sinhalese-majority island.
   ‘They are an organised force with a lot of experience. They have thousands of fighters. I don’t conduct the war looking at deadlines and timeframes,’ Fonseka said in the interview published Sunday.

Some 12,000 people from Sudan’s Darfur region have crossed the border into neighbouring Chad after heavy bombardments and armed attacks by Sudanese forces and the Janjaweed militia, the UN refugee agency said on Sunday.
   The refugees have fled to the Birak region of southeastern Chad after attacks on Friday and Saturday by the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia, UN High Commissioner for Refugees spokeswoman Helene Caux said.
   Eastern Chad remains a highly volatile area after recent fighting between Chadian government and rebel forces, which led the UNHCR to evacuate staff from the country and thousands of Chadians to cross to neighbouring Cameroon, Caux said.
   However, the fresh refugees from Darfur ‘have been through the worst already,’ she added.
   The UNHCR is sending an assessment team to the region and hopes to move people by truck to existing camps for Darfur refugees on Monday, she said.
   The Sudanese army on Saturday confirmed its troops had carried out military operations in western Darfur and regained control of three communities, pushing out rebels to Chad.
   ‘Army forces carried out large-scale operations combing the areas of Abu Suruj, Serba and Salia,’ army spokesman Othman Mohammed al-Agbash told the official news agency SUNA, referring to areas in western Darfur.
   The Justice and Equality Movement rebels said that Sudanese troops backed by Janjaweed militia had attacked the three communities north of Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, killing dozens of civilians on Friday.
   JEM commander Abdel Aziz Nur al-Asher said by telephone then that soldiers with 65 vehicles, backed by air support, launched the first attack alongside 600 Janjaweed fighters on camels.