The next US president stands to inherit a potentially more dangerous challenge in Afghanistan and Pakistan than the situation that led to the September 11 attacks in 2001.
   The situation is so serious that analysts say the incoming administration will need to move quickly on a broad new initiative to address the Pashtun region, which both countries share, with a mix of military pressure and economic aid.
   ‘It will be extremely important to have an effective new strategy right out of the box. They cannot wait for a lengthy transition,’ said J Alexander Thier of the US Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded Washington think tank.
   The two US presidential nominees, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, have pledged to make Afghanistan a top priority if elected to the White House on November 4.
   Whoever enters the Oval Office will have to find more than 10,000 additional troops requested by commanders in Afghanistan even as military officials say more units will become available only if Washington cuts forces in Iraq or breaks its rules on how long troops should spend at home between deployments.
   The next president will also face the prospect of a wavering commitment to Afghanistan by some NATO allies. ‘There is concern that some of our allies and partners may be looking for an exit,’ the defence secretary, Robert Gates, said recently.
   The region is far more complex than in January 2001, when the president, George W Bush, first entered office and Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was giving haven to al-Qaeda, which was behind the attacks on New York and Washington eight months later.
   ‘The next president is going to have to understand that this conflict does not exist within the geographical contours of Afghanistan. It exists within the mental contours of the Pashtun nation, which straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,’ said Nathaniel Fick, a former US Marine Corps officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
   Today the United States and NATO are losing ground against an escalating Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, despite the presence of 64,000 western troops, while al-Qaeda has regained strength in Pakistan’s tribal region beyond the easy grasp of US forces.
   More disturbing still, analysts say, Pakistan is now facing an existential threat from Islamist militants at a time when the nuclear-armed nation and its new civilian government are engulfed in extraordinarily difficult economic problems.

Increasing attacks on aid workers is ‘severely undermining’ aid agencies’ work in Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands are displaced due to violence and natural disasters, a monitoring body warned.
   ‘An unprecedented number of attacks, murders and harassment of humanitarian aid workers is severely undermining the ability of humanitarian agencies to reach displaced Afghans in need,’ said the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council in a new report on the situation.
   Some 29 aid workers have been killed this year, leading the Afghan government to urge foreign nationals and aid workers to limit their movements and review their security.
   The IDMC warned that the violence would hurt Afghans most. ‘The tragedy for these people is that as their needs are rising, said Norwegian Refugee Council secretary general Elisabeth Rasmusson.
   According to the IDMC, at least 200,000 Afghans who were forced to flee their homes before 2004 due to violence and natural disasters still remain displaced.
   The estimate did not cover those forced to flee since the US-led war that toppled the Taliban regime, as well as those displaced during the winter of 2007 and drought of 2008.

Demonstrators in Bihar staged street marches and political parties demanded an investigation on Monday after a Bihar resident was shot dead by the police in Mumbai.
   The shooting and protests were the latest examples of conflict between the thousands of workers from impoverished areas of northern and eastern India seeking work, and anti-immigrant groups in Mumbai led by ambitious politicians.
   The 23-year-old man from Patna was killed inside a bus in Mumbai after he fired a shot and pointed his gun at passengers.
   Television pictures showed the man gesturing that he wanted to speak to someone, before he was shot. The police initially said he was trying to take hostages, then changed their story and said the man probably wanted to meet the city’s police chief.
   Witnesses said the man repeatedly demanded a meeting with Raj Thackeray, leader of the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena, a militant Hindu group based in the Mumbai area. Thackeray is accused of fuelling anti-immigrant rhetoric ahead of national and local elections due next year.
   MNS supporters were charged by the police last week with beating up hundreds of migrant workers who had come to Mumbai from eastern and northern India.

Pakistani and Afghan officials and tribal leaders agreed Tuesday to make contact with Taliban militants in an attempt to end the raging insurgent violence along their porous border.
   The declaration came after two days of talks in Islamabad aimed at finding a lasting solution to the unrest which has wracked the region since the US-led toppling of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in 2001.
   It follows the revelation that the Afghan government met with former members of the Taliban government for talks in Saudi Arabia and comes amid reports that Washington is also ready for a change in strategy.
   ‘We agreed that contacts should be established with the opposition in both countries, joint contacts through the jirgagai (mini-tribal council),’ said former Afghan foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, the leader of the Afghan side.
   Asked whether that included the Taliban and other militants, Owais Ghani, leader of the Pakistani delegation, said: ‘Yes, it includes all those who are involved in this conflict situation.’
   The meeting of 50 officials and tribal elders from both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border was a follow-up to a larger ‘peace jirga’ held in Kabul in August 2007. Violence has soared on both sides of the rugged frontier in recent months, with Washington and Kabul urging Islamabad to tackle militant ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan’s tribal belt from which attacks in Afghanistan are launched.

North Korea on Tuesday threatened to turn South Korea into ‘debris’ unless Seoul stops what it described as a policy of confrontation.
   ‘The puppet authorities had better bear in mind that the advanced preemptive strike of our own style will reduce everything ... to debris, not just setting them on fire,’ the North’s military said in a statement.
   ‘It will turn out to be a just war... to build an independent reunified state on it,’ it added.
   The North warned that its army would take ‘a resolute practical action’ if the South continues its ‘confrontational racket,’ scattering anti-Pyongyang leaflets and conducting a smear campaign ‘with sheer fabrications.’
   It said North Korea has a ‘more powerful and advanced preemptive strike of our own style as we have already stated before the world’ than that of South Korea.

A pregnant Pakistani teenager was mauled by dogs and then shot dead by her in-laws over a property dispute, the girl’s parents and a human rights group said.
   But 17-year-old Tasleem Solangi’s death was later justified as an honour killing by a local jirga or tribal council over allegations that she had affairs with other men, they claimed.
   The incident, which happened in March but details of which have only emerged, is the latest honour killing that has claimed the lives of more than 150 women this year.
   Gulsher Solangi, from Khaipur district, 425 kilometres from the southwestern city of Karachi, said his daughter’s new family, who deny any wrongdoing, repeatedly beat her after her marriage and demanded she transfer land and pay money to them.
   She was killed when he refused to hand over his property, he added.
   ‘I saw my daughter running helplessly trying to save herself from hounding dogs,’ the 59-year-old farmer said, adding that he was held inside a house as his daughter was thrown to the baying pack.

The one week countdown to the most hard-fought presidential election in history gets underway Tuesday with Barack Obama and John McCain vowing to fight to the finish for every last vote.
   The White House rivals were to hold competing rallies Tuesday in the rust-belt state of Pennsylvania before splitting, with Republican McCain fighting a rearguard action in North Carolina and Obama heading to Virginia.
   Despite holding a robust poll lead nationally and in battleground states, Democratic nominee Obama, 47, warned against complacency as he prepared to air a costly 30-minute ‘infomercial’ on major US networks Wednesday evening.
   ‘Don’t believe for a second this election is over,’ the Illinois senator bidding to be America’s first black president said Monday in Pittsburgh, whose withered steelworks are symptomatic of Pennsylvania’s industrial blight.
   ‘We can’t let up. Not now. Not when so much is at stake,’ he added in what aides called his ‘closing argument’ to voters.
   Obama’s caution appeared to be justified by a new poll Tuesday which suggested the race was tightening.
   The Zogby poll of 1,202 likely voters had Obama’s lead shrink nearly a point to 49 per cent, while McCain fell 0.4 points 44.7 per cent. The number of undecided voters had risen to 6.3 per cent, up 4.9 per cent from 24 hours earlier.
   For McCain, Pennsylvania and its swollen ranks of disaffected, white, working-class voters is must-win territory on November 4, along with historically Republican bastions such as North Carolina and Virginia.
   The Arizona senator, 72, vied to reignite fears of ‘socialism’ by citing a 2001 radio interview given by Obama where he appeared to lament the failure of the 1960s civil rights movement to bring about greater financial equality.
   ‘That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your money and giving it to someone else,’ he told a rally in Dayton, Ohio.
   The challenge facing McCain was underlined by his choice this late in the game to head to North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic White House hopeful since 1976 but is now a raging battleground.
   Virginia is an even deeper shade of Republican ‘red,’ having last backed a Democrat for the presidency way back in 1964. But Obama has a double-digit poll lead there, and is hoping the forecasts could portend a landslide in his favour.
   The Republican was to address a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the vast Fort Bragg army base, as the former Vietnam prisoner of war hammers Obama as unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.
   ‘I have fought for you most of my life, and in places where defeat meant more than returning to the Senate,’ McCain said in Dayton.
   Meanwhile there was uproar in the Los Angeles gay enclave of West Hollywood after a Halloween display showed a figure resembling Republican vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin hanging by a noose.

US Muslims are facing tough times fearful about growing suspicions of Islam amid false rumors that Democratic nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim and could have links to terrorists.
   The Illinois senator, who on November 4 could become the first black American elected to the White House, is Christian. But as a son of a Kenyan father and American mother, he spent his childhood in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim nation.
   ‘Not since the election of John Kennedy (a Catholic) in 1960 has the religious faith of a US presidential candidate generated so much distortion as the false claims generated by extremist critics that senator Barack Obama, the candidate of the Democratic Party, is a stealth Muslim,’ said a joint petition by some 100 Islamic scholars.
   ‘This is part of an Islamophobic hate campaign that fuels prejudice against Americans who practice their Islamic faith and Muslims worldwide,’ the group who themselves ‘concerned scholars’ stressed.
   In September, a controversial DVD on Islam was circulated in Florida, adding fuel to the fire of the US election campaign.
   The video, titled ‘Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West’ and released more than a year ago by a group called Clarion Fund, showed images of young children reciting appeals for jihad mixed with archival footage of Hitler Youths.
   Already stigmatised in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Muslim community of the United States feels it has been ostracised during the current election campaign.
   ‘The problem is there has been so many smears against Islam and Muslims that the candidates are very reluctant now to engage with Muslims for fear of coming under attack by their opponents,’ said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights advocacy group.
   ‘That’s a very disturbing situation.’ In June, Obama presented his apologies to two women wearing Islamic scarves who wanted to have their picture taken with the Democratic candidate but were hassled away by party activists.
   And just a couple of weeks ago Republican nominee John McCain was forced to step in at a rally when a member of the audience suggested Obama was an Arab. McCain scoffed at the suggestion and referred to his opponent as the father of a ‘decent family.’
   ‘Fortunately, we have courageous individuals like Colin Powell who came up against that kind of thinking,’ said Hooper.
   But ‘we are hoping that public officials and public leaders in our society would take up this call to reject Islamophobia,’ he said. ‘We are still waiting for it to happen.’
   Powell, a Republican who was a member of the administration of the president, George W Bush, came out recently in support of Obama’s candidacy and also rejected Islamophobic attacks.
   ‘Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?’ Powell asked rhetorically. ‘The answer’s no. Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated (with) terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.’
   But the prejudices remain strong. A president of a Republican club in New Mexico, Macia Stirman, was forced to resign recently after declaring that she could not understand why people wanted to put a Muslim to the White House.

Veteran Republican lawmaker Ted Stevens was convicted of corruption, putting his once-secure US Senate seat in jeopardy and improving Democrats’ chances of reaching the all-important political threshold of 60 seats in the chamber.
   A US court on Monday found Stevens of Alaska, the longest serving Republican senator with some 40 years in the Senate, guilty of corruption one
   week before he is up for reelection in the narrowly-divided US Senate.
   Stevens, 84, was convicted on all seven counts of making false statements on mandatory financial disclosure forms he filed between 1999 and 2006, a court source said.
   The Alaska senate seat, long considered safely Republican, now seems vulnerable: Democrats are banking on big gains in the Senate in the November 4 election, where five or six Republican seats in the 100 strong-chamber are likely to change hands.
   The Democrats are hoping to hit the magic 60 seat-barrier needed to pass major legislation and break Republican filibuster legislation delaying tactics. They currently enjoy a 51-49 edge in the 100-seat Senate, with the help of two independents.
   In recent opinion polls Stevens trailed his Democratic challenger, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, by less than one percentage point.
   Stevens was found guilty of accepting gifts from a company known as VECO, an Alaska-based firm which provides oil field support, between 1999 and 2006.
   He was convicted of receiving more than 250,000 dollars worth of gifts, mainly in material and labour that doubled the size of one of his homes. Two VECO executives pleaded guilty last year to bribing government officials, including an unnamed state senator.
   At a press conference in Washington after the verdict, government prosecutor Matthew Friedrich, acting assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, said the case underscored the government’s commitment ‘to hold elected officials accountable when they violate our laws.’

The United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday it is bracing itself for an estimated 30,000 displaced people fleeing to camps near the city of Goma in Democratic Republic of Congo after fresh fighting.
   Staff are ‘struggling to prepare for the arrival of an estimated 30,000 displaced people forced to flee camps and villages to the north of the city amid fighting between rebel and government forces,’ UN High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists.
   ‘Many more could be on the way from areas further north that have been affected by the fighting in recent days,’ he said.
   The Nord-Kivu region in eastern DRC has been the scene of renewed intense fighting between government and rebel forces. The city of Goma was said to be tense after demonstrations by residents on Monday that reportedly left five people dead, Redmond said.
   The UN’s food aid agency, the World Food Programme, last week estimated that 200,000 people have been displaced in Nord-Kivu by violence which began at the end of August.
   Earlier this month, the UN chief, Ban Ki-moo, urged the DRC government and renegade ethnic Tutsi leader Laurent Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People to observe an ‘effective’ ceasefire and to cooperate for a separation of their forces.
   He then warned that the fighting between the two sides could spark a ‘wider conflict in the region’ and urged all states in the region ‘to prevent their territories and nationals from being used to aid armed groups in the eastern DRC.’

Israeli parliamentary parties on Tuesday started discussing a date for snap elections amid political turmoil that has left the Middle East peace process in limbo.
   Both foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party and the right-wing Likud party of hawkish former premier Benjamin Netanyahu, the two frontrunners for prime minister, favour holding elections as soon as possible.
   Senior Kadima MP Tzachi Hanegbi told military radio that February 3 would be a ‘good date’ while the head of Likud’s parliamentary bloc Gideon Saar said elections should be held ‘as soon as possible.’
   The president, Shimon Peres, formally initiated the election process on Monday after Livni failed to assemble a new government coalition. Livni, 50, was elected last month as Kadima leader and hopes to also take over as prime minister from Ehud Olmert, who stepped down in September over graft allegations but remains at the head of a transition government.
   MPs now have three weeks to agree on a date for the election, failing which parliament will be automatically dissolved and a vote held three months later in February 2009. Two Israeli ministers on Tuesday called for a freeze on already stalled talks with Syria and the Palestinians until a new government is sworn in.
   ‘(Negotiations) cannot advance during the election period with us and the United States,’ said the interior minister and Kadima MP, Meir Sheetrit.
   ‘In the current political situation no agreement can be ratified by the transitional government and parliament. There can be no significant progress and the Syrians and the Palestinians understand this,’ he told public radio.
   The national infrastructure minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a senior Labour Party member, said the interim government ‘cannot make strategic decisions affecting the existence of the state of Israel.’
   ‘On security issues it must act, but as far as political issues are concerned it is better to wait for the results of the elections and the formation of the next government,’ the former defence minister told public radio.
   Israel and the Palestinians formally relauched peace talks at a US-hosted conference in November 2007 with the goal of ending their decades-old conflict by the end of the year — but the talks have made little visible progress.

The New York newsroom of Reuters News was evacuated for nearly three hours on Monday after receiving an envelope with a ‘puff of powder’ in it, Reuters spokeswoman Jolie Hunt said.
   The police told staff to evacuate the 19th-floor Times Square newsroom after Brian Rhoads, the company’s managing editor for the Americas, opened an envelope and a ‘puff of powder’ came out of it, Hunt said.
   Police isolated the envelope, and Rhoads, and then told the 140 members of staff to leave as a precautionary measure while they investigated. Staff made arrangements to ensure the company could put out a news file from other offices.
   Nearly three hours later, Hunt said authorities told Reuters the powder was harmless and workers returned to the desk.
   The New York office is the headquarters of Thomson Reuters, the parent company, and the newsroom is the firm’s second largest after London.

Russia opposes the deployment of European Union monitors in two Georgian rebel provinces and will enforce security there itself, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Tuesday.
   ‘Security in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is assured by Russian military contingents after the recognition of their independence by Russia,’ Lavrov said at a press conference with the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner.
   ‘As far as the European Union monitors are concerned, we believe the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan should be respected. It says they should be deployed in areas adjacent to Abkhazia and South Ossetia,’ Lavrov said.
   The European monitoring mission, comprising 225 unarmed observers, deployed in Georgia on October 1 as part of a ceasefire agreement agreed by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to end an August war between Georgia and Russia.

A regional meeting failed to break a deadlock threatening Zimbabwe’s power-sharing accord on Monday, prompting the 15-nation Southern African Development Community to call for an urgent full-scale summit on the crisis.
   Officials said the summit could be held this week or next week in an attempt to persuade president Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and opposition factions to implement the accord, widely seen as vital to any effort to pull Zimbabwe out of economic meltdown.
   The Southern African Development Community said the allocation of the interior ministry, which oversees the police force, was a sticking point in negotiations between ZANU-PF and the opposition on forming a cabinet.
   SADC convened Monday’s meeting amid fears the September 15 power-sharing deal was about to unravel after weeks of fruitless negotiations between ZANU-PF and the two factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.