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June 4, 2007

Former Leader Talks of Return to Pakistan, and Maybe Power
By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 3 — Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is stirring up Pakistani politics by quietly talking through intermediaries about a power-sharing deal with the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and suggesting in an interview that she could return to Pakistan before the end of the year.

Threatened with arrest and dogged by corruption charges, Ms. Bhutto has sat out the last eight years in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, while still leading what is arguably the country’s largest opposition party. In that time, she has seen General Musharraf, her former chief of military operations, seize power in a coup. She has watched the political turmoil build as Pakistanis grow restless under military rule, galvanized most recently by General Musharraf’s ouster of the chief Supreme Court justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, was heavily represented in a peaceful rally for Mr. Chaudhry in Abbottabad on Saturday, just weeks after more than 40 people died in Karachi in clashes related to his ouster.

As Pakistan veers toward elections this year, General Musharraf has run into mounting opposition over his plans to seek a second term. Ms. Bhutto, 53, is raising her profile once again and positioning herself as savior of the nation, someone who can lead Pakistan back to democracy and provide a more reliable ally than General Musharraf, whose performance she criticized in fighting terrorism and extremism.

Under General Musharraf, she noted, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have used lawless areas of northern Pakistan to regroup and cause havoc in neighboring Afghanistan and within Pakistan itself. Yet Washington continues to support General Musharraf, she said, giving him billions of dollars in assistance since 2001.

Despite his repeated insistence that Ms. Bhutto will not be allowed to participate in the elections, General Musharraf, according to aides and diplomats, has been conducting discreet negotiations for some kind of deal that would allow her to return and him to stay on as president. The corruption charges, which Ms. Bhutto says are politically motivated, might then be dropped. “General Musharraf says that he wouldn’t allow me back and I interpret that to mean that he would then arrest me and prevent me from having freedom of movement and freedom of speech and freedom of association,” Ms. Bhutto said in the interview, which took place recently at one of her homes outside Pakistan. “In any event I’d like to go back, and I’m looking at the window between September and December to do that.”

To some, the prospect of Ms. Bhutto’s return confronts Pakistan with an unsavory choice, one it has faced before. Since its independence in 1947, this nation of 149 million that now has nuclear weapons has alternated between rule by generals who have fronted for a domineering military and civilian politicians who have won an enduring reputation for corruption. They have by turns worn out their welcomes. The country has had no fewer than four Constitutions, four military takeovers of government, and never experienced a constitutional transfer of power.

General Musharraf seized power in a coup in October 1999, overthrowing Ms. Bhutto’s successor, Nawaz Sharif, who also lives abroad to avoid prosecution on corruption charges. General Musharraf was at that time embraced by much of the population, wearied by turbulent years of short-lived, self-serving civilian governments. Yet today, Ms. Bhutto, part of a storied family dynasty, is probably the most popular politician with national appeal. If allowed to return, she may well be in a position to form the next government and serve again as prime minister, even if General Musharraf remains as president, if both agreed.

The daughter of a politician executed by the military, educated at Harvard and Oxford and the first woman to serve as prime minister in the Islamic world, at age 35, Ms. Bhutto captivated supporters in the West as well as many Pakistanis in her early days. She was twice prime minister, from 1988 to 1990 and then from 1993 to 1996, when her personal and political fortunes unraveled.

She left Pakistan eight years ago under a cloud. She was embroiled in a family feud when her brother, Murtaza, tried to claim leadership of the party their father founded, the Pakistan’s People’s Party.

Her brother was shot dead in 1996. Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was jailed on suspicion of the murder, though the case was never proved. Ms. Bhutto says the killing was a plot by Pakistani intelligence to divide and weaken her family.

That same year, Ms. Bhutto’s three-year-old government was dismissed amid accusations of mismanagement and corruption. Three months later she suffered a resounding defeat in elections. While she says the balloting was rigged, the polls also reflected the disillusion and anger of Pakistanis over a deteriorating economy, rising violence and a leadership that many here felt was concerned only with itself.

Though she has lived in self-imposed exile since 1999 to avoid prosecution for corruption, she denies wrongdoing. Her party fared badly in the previous two elections, after she and her husband left the country, but it remains politically strong.

No date has been set for the next elections, but the voting must take place by the end of the year. “Ultimately, for the elections to be credible, it is important that the participation should not be denied to a leader of a party, and a party which is the most popular party in the country,” Ms. Bhutto said.

For the general’s part, after a series of political missteps in recent months, including the suspension of the justice, he finds himself in ever greater need of allies if he is to win re-election by Parliament. Some of his supporters see Ms. Bhutto as the preferred moderate partner.
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The violence in Karachi that left more than 40 people dead on May 12 occurred after parties backing General Musharraf clashed with members of the Pakistan People’s Party and other opponents as the justice flew in to make a speech. After that, Ms. Bhutto declared that all negotiations with General Musharraf were off. But in the interview she made clear that she still wanted to find a smooth transition to democracy.

“The fact that he was ready to engage with the P.P.P. was positive,” Ms. Bhutto said. “I think he toyed with the idea of moderate forces getting together.” Ms. Bhutto presents herself now as a leader who not only can help Pakistan thread a potentially treacherous course back to civilian rule, but also as someone who can stem a tide of extremism, a claim that opponents say she is exaggerating to gain favor in the West.

Two battle lines are being drawn in Pakistan, she said, military dictatorship versus democracy, and moderate Islam versus extremism. While General Musharraf is her most obvious foe, she says the elections may also be Pakistan’s last chance to choose a moderate path. “My fear is if we don’t act in these elections, by the next elections it might be too late,” Ms. Bhutto said.

“Anyone who has lived in Pakistan knows very well that there is a group of people who believe in a war against the West,” she added, referring to religious extremists both in the government’s intelligence agencies and in jihadi groups. “And it is not just that, it is the hatred that they preach.”

A negotiated transition to democracy remains her preferred option, she said, because violent confrontation could quickly be usurped by extremists. “If the streets hold sway, then it is anyone’s guess who actually captures the movement,” she said. “After all, when there was a revolution in Iran, nobody expected the religious parties to triumph.”

But Ms. Bhutto warned that while General Musharraf may speak in favor of moderate Islam, the advisers and the military and intelligence extremists around him, who hold the strings of power, were working against it. “The country is actually run by military hard-liners,” she said. “It remains my concern that these hard-liners want to destabilize democracy in Pakistan because their agenda is to bring about a soft Islamic revolution,” she added. “They are building secretly on their militant cells across the country.”

She pointed out that despite the general’s declared policy of leading Pakistan toward “enlightened moderation,” Al Qaeda and the Taliban had used northern Pakistan to regroup, and the Taliban influence was seeping into other parts of the country. She said she was appalled that the government had made deals that allow foreign militants sway in parts of the country. She pointed out that the building of madrasas, religious schools that have been used to recruit militants, had increased.

Critics have long charged that the situation was not wholly different even under her government, when Pakistan backed the Taliban and used Islamic extremist groups as levers against its neighbor, India, in their dispute over the border territory of Kashmir. But Ms. Bhutto defended her government’s performance in fighting terrorism, saying that even though she supported the Taliban in their early days, during her time in office there were no Qaeda terrorist training camps in Pakistan, and no terrorist acts anywhere in the world connected to Pakistan.

She said she had collaborated with the F.B.I. in the arrest of Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and had cracked down on extremist groups. At least six terrorist plots, including the London transit bombings, have been traced to Pakistan since General Musharraf took power.

“Look at what there was in 2002, and see how much worse the situation has got by 2007,” she said. Despite her alarm, Ms. Bhutto said she believed that the religious extremists in both the intelligence circle and jihadi groups were running out of options. And open and fair elections would show just how little support the religious parties and extremists actually had in the country, she said. “Elections are important because at the end of the day when we empower the people, the minority extremists will get totally marginalized and sidelined; their strength is being disproportionately blown up,” she said.

“It is a battle for the heart and soul of Pakistan,” she said. “It is also a battle for the rest of the Muslim world and the world at large. It is not just Pakistan. What we are doing in Pakistan has much larger implications not only on Afghanistan and India, but in my view for the larger world.”

June 4, 2007
Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal

By DAVID S. CLOUD and DAMIEN CAVE
BAGHDAD, June 3 — Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “to protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.

The assessment offers the first comprehensive look at the progress of the effort to stabilize Baghdad with the heavy influx of additional troops. The last remaining American units in the troop increase are just now arriving.

Violence has diminished in many areas, but it is especially chronic in mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhoods in western Baghdad, several senior officers said. Over all, improvements have not yet been as widespread or lasting across Baghdad, they acknowledged.

The operation “is at a difficult point right now, to be sure,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the First Cavalry Division, which has responsibility for Baghdad.

In an interview, he said that while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly.

That is forcing American commanders to conduct operations to remove insurgents from some areas multiple times. The heavily Shiite security forces have also repeatedly failed to intervene in some areas when fighters, who fled or laid low when the American troops arrived, resumed sectarian killings.

“Until you have the ability to have a presence on the street by people who are seen as honest and who are not letting things come back in,” said General Brooks, referring to the Iraqi police units, “you can’t shift into another area and expect that place to stay the way it was.”

When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan.

Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the senior American ground commander in Iraq, said in a brief interview that he never believed that a midsummer timetable for establishing security in Baghdad was realistic. “This was always going to be conditions-driven,” he said, noting that he always had expected it would take until fall to establish security across much of the city.

But in order to meet that timetable, he added, the Iraqi Security Forces would have to make strides in coming months at maintaining security.

“Ultimately the I.S.F., and specifically the police, are the key to holding an area,” he said. “We have to within the next four months move them more toward holding the areas we have cleared.”

The last of the five combat brigades ordered to Iraq as reinforcements as part of the security plan will increase the number of American troops in the city to around 30,000, up from 21,000 before the operation, an American officer said.

In addition, around 30,000 Iraqi Army and national police forces and another 21,000 policemen have been deployed in Baghdad. Many of the Iraqi units have turned up at less than full strength and other units have been redeployed from the capital, General Brooks said, leaving fewer than expected.

American commanders have also had to send troops outside the capital, to deal with a sharp rise in violence in Diyala Province and to search for American soldiers kidnapped south of the capital.

In some parts of the city, commanders have yet to attempt large-scale clearing operations. For example, American forces have moved into only a small portion of Sadr City, the vast slum on the city’s east side that is a Shiite stronghold.

Sending large number of troops in there could incite heavy violence and opposition from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s largely Shiite government, several officers said. The problems facing American troops are illustrated in troubled western Baghdad. In the Rashid district there, the First Battalion, Fourth Brigade of the First Infantry Division has been working since March to carry out the security push.

When the battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, moved in, it was replacing a lone American Army company of 125 soldiers. Yet even with three times as many soldiers patrolling the area, violence has worsened. Last month, 249 bodies were found in the sector, up from 98 the month Colonel Frank arrived, according to statistics compiled by the battalion.

Lately, his troops have been hit by a wave of roadside bomb attacks that have killed five of them and wounded 13 others. “We have a tough fight ahead of us,” he said.

The district includes Ameel, Baya, Jihad and Furat, mostly mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods abutting the road to the Baghdad airport where his troops have established three patrol bases. Before the new strategy, there were none.

The area, a mixture of poorer urban slums and middle-class dwellings, once home to many retired professionals, has been troubled for years. Violence dipped there and across the city in the first months of the year, but has since worsened.

Militants, many associated with the Mahdi Army of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, have resumed a push to drive Sunnis from their few enclaves, American commanders said. One of the area’s last Sunni mosques was bombed Wednesday.

“This area used to be primarily Sunni, but in the last six months Jaish al-Mahdi has conducted essentially a cleansing campaign,” said Colonel Frank, using the Arabic name for the Mahdi Army.

In addition to carrying out sectarian killings, the Mahdi Army controls two of the area’s three gas stations, which refuse to sell to most Sunnis. Gunmen regularly attacked trash trucks when they entered Sunni areas until the American military began providing security. Sunni homes are also the targets of arson attacks if their occupants fail to heed warnings to leave, he said.

Sunni insurgents have fought back as well, with two large car bomb attacks in largely Shiite sections of Baya and Ameel that killed more than 60 people, officers said.

The sectarian violence was especially disheartening to some American officers because it occurred in May, the same month that they were undertaking the centerpiece of the Baghdad security plan — a neighborhood clearing operation.

The battalion’s troops, augmented by more than 2,000 soldiers in armored Stryker vehicles, went block by block through the neighborhood, arresting suspected insurgents and destroying arms caches.

But since the Stryker unit has moved on to a different area of Baghdad, “there’s been a reinfiltration” by Shiite fighters and intimidation squads, who had left the area when the operation began, said Capt. Tim Wright, the company commander responsible for the neighborhood.

In addition to the dumped bodies being found every day, more Sunni families are departing. Soon, he said, they may all be gone.

Colonel Frank, of Cuba, N.Y., who served a previous Iraq tour in Mosul in 2003 with the 101st Airborne Division, said his forces were having some success in neighboring Ameel at keeping sectarian violence under control. Thirty Sunni families have returned to the neighborhood recently, he said.

But American officers worry that many members of the largely Shiite police force sympathize or collaborate with the Mahdi Army.

The local commander of the Iraqi national police, a force run by the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, has been replaced three times since March.

One of those commanders, Col. Nadir al-Jabouri, a Shiite described by Colonel Frank as the most aggressive and even-handed Iraqi officer he had seen. But he was detained in late March by the Interior Ministry and accused of having ties to insurgents.

“He was not a protector of the people; he was a terrorist,” said Col. Vhafir Kader Jowda, his Shiite replacement.

American patrols have been attacked in a wave of deadly bombings recently, sometimes within sight of police checkpoints, officers said.

Ten soldiers under Colonel Frank’s command have been killed since March. At least eight of the recent attacks in the area have used explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, powerful bombs able to pierce armored Humvees.

When Colonel Frank went to the Ameel police station recently accompanied by a reporter and asked for help in capturing a local Shiite sheik believed to be behind the bombings, the police official he was meeting with spoke in a whisper. “They listen to us,” he said, pointing to a ventilation grill on his wall. “I am in danger just by meeting with you.”

A few weeks earlier, angered by the attacks on his soldiers, Colonel Frank ordered a video camera hidden near an abandoned swimming pool along a main road in Ameel, near a police checkpoint, where patrols had been hit repeatedly.

When the video was examined after another attack, it showed two Iraqi policemen talking with companions, who were heard off-camera, apparently laying an explosive device. Minutes after the policemen were seen driving away, the camera showed a powerful bomb detonating as an American Humvee came into view.

The video of the attack, which just missed the vehicle and caused no casualties, was shown to a reporter from The New York Times.

After police commanders were confronted with the video in mid-May, six Iraqi officers were arrested, Colonel Frank said.

But the episode has not been forgotten. At a weekly meeting where military commanders and police chiefs sit around a horseshoe-shaped conference table at one of the American bases, Capt. Adel Fakry, the Ameel police commander, complained that American soldiers on patrol were showing “distrust” toward his officers.

“The reason there is distrust,” Colonel Frank responded, his voice rising, “is because I have a video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came from your station.”

There had been “some mistakes,” Captain Fakry responded, looking taken aback by the confrontation. Not all of the six officers were from his station, he added before ending the conversation by flipping open his cellphone and making a call while the meeting continued.

The same distrust has hampered relations throughout Baghdad since the strategy began. In Shula, a neighborhood just east of Kadhimiya, north of Rashid, American troops in March discovered a group of Iraqis in police uniforms setting up an E.F.P. near a bridge. They were using police vehicles to provide cover.

The American soldiers killed two of the bomb planters. They later discovered that one had a badge granting him wide access to the Green Zone, the fortified area in central Baghdad where the American Embassy and most Iraqi government buildings are situated.

“That’s the level of penetration that these guys have,” said Lt. Col. Steven M. Miska, deputy commander of the Second Brigade, First Infantry Division, which is charged with controlling northwestern Baghdad.

June 3, 2007
A Legal Debate in Guantánamo on Boy Fighters

By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The facts of Omar Ahmed Khadr’s case are grim. The shrapnel from the grenade he is accused of throwing ripped through the skull of Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, who was 28 when he died.

To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.

But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.

His age is at the center of a legal battle that is to begin tomorrow with an arraignment by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of Mr. Khadr, whom a range of legal experts describe as the first child fighter in decades to face war-crimes charges. It is a battle with implications as large as the growing ranks of child fighters around the world.

Defense lawyers argue that military prosecutors are violating international law by filing charges that date from events that occurred when Mr. Khadr was 15 or younger. Legal concepts that are still evolving, the lawyers say, require that countries treat child fighters as victims of warfare, rather than war criminals.

The military prosecutors say such notions may be “well-meaning and worthy,” but are irrelevant to the American military commissions at Guantánamo. Mr. Khadr is one of only three Guantánamo detainees to face charges under the law establishing the commissions, passed by Congress last year.

“International law,” the Justice Department asserted in a court filing in the case last week, “does not prohibit an individual under 18 from being prosecuted for war crimes.” Even so, prosecutors said that if they won a conviction, they would seek something less than a life term, given Mr. Khadr’s age. He is 20 now.

Whatever the outcome, his case seems destined to become a landmark, though some scholars say not enough attention has been given to its importance. “What is the precedent that we are setting with this unique step?” asked Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about child fighters.

Mr. Khadr’s case offers a snapshot of relatively new questions surrounding the legal treatment of child fighters globally, though advocates for children have tended to focus less on young terrorists and more on children who fight in civil wars, like Ishmael Beah, whose best-selling memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” recounts his bloody days as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war.

Mr. Khadr may not be the most sympathetic figure for those pressing for the more forgiving interpretation of international law. He was born in Canada to a family with such deep Al Qaeda ties that some newspapers there have called them Canada’s first family of terrorism.

He is the youngest detainee at Guantánamo Bay, nearly blind in one eye from injuries sustained during the July 2002 firefight in which Sergeant Speer was mortally wounded and another American soldier was severely injured. Last week, Mr. Khadr said he wanted to fire all of his American lawyers, and some of them said they understood why he might distrust Americans after five years at Guantánamo.

Still, they argue that war-crimes prosecutors should focus on the adults who press children into service, not on the children themselves. The charges against Mr. Khadr, they said in a recent court filing, cross a line in the treatment of children that no other country has crossed “in modern history.”

The prosecutors, they say, included in their charges acts that occurred when Mr. Khadr was younger than 10. Mr. Khadr “was subject to undue adult influences,” said Muneer I. Ahmad, an associate professor at the American University Washington College of Law, who has represented Mr. Khadr.

“If Omar had had his free choice,” Professor Ahmad said, “what he would have chosen to do is ride horses, play soccer and read Harry Potter books.”

It is an appeal to emotion that the prosecutors are likely to meet with their own. Sergeant Speer left a wife and two small children. His widow, Tabitha, said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter last week that Mr. Khadr’s youth entitled him to no special consideration.

“Given the opportunity, he would do it all over again,” she wrote. “He was trained to do exactly what he did, regardless of his age.”

To the prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is the essence of a young man who should be held to adult standards. American officials say his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces in 2003, was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.

One of Mr. Khadr’s brothers is in a wheelchair as a result of that 2003 shootout; another told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “we are an Al Qaeda family.” Ahmed Khadr traveled internationally from Canada under the auspices of handling charity money for Muslims. In the mid-1990s, he was held for a time in Pakistan on suspicion of helping finance the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.

After he was released, the Khadrs and several of their six children moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they lived at times in the same compound as Osama bin Laden, officials have said. “All of the children were indoctrinated into the Al Qaeda way of thinking,” said the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force.

After Sept. 11, Mr. Khadr made deliberate choices to join Al Qaeda and eventually to kill Sergeant Speer, Colonel Davis said in a recent interview. “There is a difference,” Colonel Davis said, “between a 15-year-old who makes a spur-of-the-moment decision and someone who made a long-term choice.”

Captured bloody and bullet-riddled after the firefight that killed Sergeant Speer, Mr. Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. At least three other juveniles, perhaps as young as 12, were also held there for a time. But they were released in January 2004, the military said.

Mr. Khadr’s lawyers have said in court that he has been subject to physical and psychological torture that exploited his youth, another example of what they say is a violation of international principles that children be accorded special protections.

In legal filings, the lawyers have asserted, for example, that an interrogator at Guantánamo told Mr. Khadr when he was 17 that if he did not cooperate he would be sent to Egypt where he would be confronted by “Soldier No. 9,” a man who the interrogators said would be sent to rape him.

Asked about the accusations, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said they “may be raised by counsel during the course of the trial” but he would not discuss the specifics of the accusations. Commander Gordon added that detainees “have frequently made allegations of abuse while in detention in order to garner public support.”

In their filings, the prosecutors concede that some treaties require special treatment of children caught in warfare. Some of those treaties, they noted, have not been ratified by the United States, and others do not specifically ban prosecution of combatants who are 15 or older.

Some legal experts acknowledge that it is difficult to define precisely what international law requires in the treatment of child fighters. It is a fluid discipline, with few enforcement mechanisms, and there are inconsistent precedents and treaty provisions.

But even those who say there is no bar to the war crimes prosecutions of youthful fighters say the growing use of child fighters around the world means that Mr. Khadr’s case could become pivotal.

“More and more child soldiers are being recruited, and they are committing heinous crimes. This is an issue the international community is going to have to confront,” said Michael A. Newton, a former military prosecutor and expert on the law of war who teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School.

The two sides in the Khadr case interpret some international legal documents differently. One subject on which they differ is a treaty to which the United States is a party, a 2002 United Nations agreement dealing with child fighters.

The defense notes that the agreement requires countries to demobilize captured child fighters and to provide assistance for their physical and psychological recovery “and their social reintegration.”

The defense lawyers say that means sending them home. That would be inconsistent with the potential life term Mr. Khadr faces on charges of murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

But government lawyers note that the child-soldier treaty does not expressly rule out war crimes prosecutions for juveniles. Another international child-soldier provision that has become a central issue in Mr. Khadr’s case is a law approved by the United Nations for the prosecution of war crimes after the Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990s. It specifically provides that “persons of 15 years of age” and older can be charged with war crimes.

Colonel Davis said that was a significant precedent. “If the United Nations has signed on to the principle that people who are 15 can be prosecuted for war crimes,” he said, “the notion that we’re blazing a new trail with Mr. Khadr is a false assumption.”

But the former chief war crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, David M. Crane, said in an interview that soon after he was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in 2002, he announced that he would not prosecute anyone under 18.

Mr. Crane, a former senior Pentagon legal official who is now a professor at Syracuse University Law School, said the Sierra Leone civil war included a catalogue of horrific acts by teenagers and children. But he said he concluded that warriors under 18 did not have the intellectual and emotional maturity to be prosecuted for war crimes.

“I called them as much victims as the people they raped, maimed and mutilated,” he said.

One person who has reached a different conclusion about the culpability of child fighters is Layne Morris, a housing administrator in a Salt Lake City suburb. Mr. Morris is a former Army Special Forces sergeant, who, like Mr. Khadr, is half-blind because of the firefight that day outside Khost, Afghanistan.

On a recent day, Mr. Morris remembered the stream of shots from AK-47s inside a compound a coalition patrol had surrounded. He remembered the hand grenades that kept coming over the wall. And he described the feeling of the shrapnel that took half his sight.

He said the battle did not unfold quickly, as it sometimes seems in the retelling. American forces surrounded the compound. And then they waited. Some women from the compound emerged and were allowed to leave, Mr. Morris said. A boy fighter would have had the chance to walk out of the gate, too, he said.

There were shots. And more waiting, as the Americans called for air support.

Anyone who was inside had a choice of fighting or surrendering, he said, including Mr. Khadr.

“There is just no way you can say this is a poor befuddled, brainwashed kid,” Mr. Morris said. “This is a kid who made a whole lot of decisions on his own.”

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