Boost for Africa's depleted soils
By Mark Kinver
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

A $180m (£90m) five-year project to revive sub-Saharan Africa's depleted soils has been launched in Nairobi.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa's (AGRA) Soil Health Program will work with 4.1 million farmers to regenerate 6.3m hectares of farmland.

Organisers hope the scheme will boost farmers' incomes, improve crop yields and protect the region's soils.

Initial funding has been provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

"Currently, farm yield in Africa is one-quarter of the global average, and one-third of Africans face chronic hunger," said Dr Namanga Ngongi, AGRA's president.

"We know that the use of high quality seeds, combined with the rejuvenation of African soils, can begin to turn around this dismal situation."

Focus on women

The programme will give particular attention to women, who make up the majority of small-scale farmers, who are best placed to know how various crops fare in local soils, explained Dr Akin Adesina, AGRA's vice president for policy and partnerships.

"No one size can fit all," he said. "We will work with farmers and researchers to develop locally adaptable soil interventions."

Unsustainable practices in recent decades had led to soil degradation in the region. For example, continuous cultivation of land without replacing nutrients taken up by crops had led to a fall in soil fertility.

Degraded soils were also prone to erosion and were unable to retain moisture.

Researchers said the poor conditions meant that farmers were more likely to clear forests and savannahs as they searched for arable land.

"AGRA's goal of enabling small-scale farmers to produce more on less land will have multiple social, economic and environmental benefits," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, which is one of the project's partners.

""It can reduce the pressure to clear new land for agriculture, which in turn can assist in countering deforestation, conserving biodiversity and triggering improved management of Africa's wealth of natural and nature-based assets."

The Soil Health Program will form one aspect of the organisation's work to improve the plight of the region's farmers in the global agriculture sector.

It will also work with the continent's institutions to improve the information, education and training offered to farmers, workers, students and scientists.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7209608.stm

Published: 2008/01/25 18:29:18 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

December 23, 2007
Where Boys Were Kings, a Shift Toward Baby Girls

By CHOE SANG-HUN
SEOUL, South Korea — When Park He-ran was a young mother, other women would approach her to ask what her secret was. She had given birth to three boys in a row at a time when South Korean women considered it their paramount duty to bear a son.

Ms. Park, a 61-year-old newspaper executive, gets a different reaction today. “When I tell people I have three sons and no daughter, they say they are sorry for my misfortune,” she said. “Within a generation, I have turned from the luckiest woman possible to a pitiful mother.”

In South Korea, once one of Asia’s most rigidly patriarchal societies, a centuries-old preference for baby boys is fast receding. And that has led to what seems to be a decrease in the number of abortions performed after ultrasounds that reveal the sex of a fetus.

According to a study released by the World Bank in October, South Korea is the first of several Asian countries with large sex imbalances at birth to reverse the trend, moving toward greater parity between the sexes. Last year, the ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, still above what is considered normal, but down from a peak of 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990.

The most important factor in changing attitudes toward girls was the radical shift in the country’s economy that opened the doors to women in the work force as never before and dismantled long-held traditions, which so devalued daughters that mothers would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.

The government also played a small role starting in the 1970s. After growing alarmed by the rise in sex-preference abortions, leaders mounted campaigns to change people’s attitudes, including one that featured the popular slogan “One daughter raised well is worth 10 sons!”

In 1987, the government banned doctors from revealing the sex of a fetus before birth. But experts say enforcement was lax because officials feared too many doctors would be caught.

Demographers say the rapid change in South Koreans’ feelings about female babies gives them hope that sex imbalances will begin to shrink in other rapidly developing Asian countries — notably China and India — where the same combination of a preference for boys and new technology has led to the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses.

“China and India are closely studying South Korea as a trendsetter in Asia,” said Chung Woo-jin, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “They are curious whether the same social and economic changes can occur in their countries as fast as they did in South Korea’s relatively small and densely populated society.”

In China in 2005, the ratio was 120 boys born for every 100 girls, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Vietnam reported a ratio of 110 boys to 100 girls last year. And although India recorded about 108 boys for every 100 girls in 2001, when the last census was taken, experts say the gap is sure to have widened by now.

The Population Fund warned in an October report that the rampant tinkering with nature’s probabilities in Asia could eventually lead to increased sexual violence and trafficking of women as a generation of boys finds marriage prospects severely limited.

In South Korea, the gap in the ratio of boys to girls born began to widen in the 1970s, but experts say it became especially pronounced in the mid-1980s as ultrasound technology became more widespread and increasing wages allowed more families to pay for the tests. The imbalance was widest from 1990 through 1995, when it remained above 112 to 100.

The imbalance has been closing steadily only since 2002. Last year’s ratio of 107.4 boys for every 100 girls was closer to the ratio of 105 to 100 that demographers consider normal and, according to The World Factbook, published by the Central Intelligence Agency, just above the global average of 107 boys born for every 100 girls.

The preference for boys here is centuries old and was rooted in part in an agrarian society that relied on sons to do the hard work on family farms. But in Asia’s Confucian societies, men were also accorded special status because they were considered the carriers of the family’s all-important bloodline.

That elevated status came with certain perquisites — men received their families’ inheritance — but also responsibilities. Once the eldest son married, he and his wife went to live with his family; he was expected to support his parents financially while his wife was expected to care for them in their old age.

The wife’s lowly role in her new family was constantly reinforced by customs that included requiring a daughter-in-law to serve her father-in-law food while on her knees.

“In the old days, when there was no adequate social safety net, Korean parents regarded having a son as kind of making an investment for old age security,” Professor Chung said. It was common for married Korean men to feel ashamed if they had no sons. Some went so far as to divorce wives who did not bear boys.

Then in the 1970s and ’80s, the country threw itself into an industrial revolution that would remake society in ways few South Koreans could have imagined.

Sons drifted away to higher-paying jobs in the cities, leaving their parents behind. And older Koreans found their own incomes rising, allowing them to save money for retirement rather than relying on their sons for support.

Married daughters, no longer shackled to their husbands’ families, returned to provide emotional or financial support for their own elderly parents.

“Daughters are much better at emotional contact with their parents, visiting them more often, while Korean sons tend to be distant,” said Kim Seung-kwon, a demographer at the government’s Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.

Ms. Park, the newspaper executive, said such changes forced people to rethink their old biases. “In restaurants and parks, when you see a large family out for a dinner or picnic, 9 out of 10, it’s the wife who brings the family together with her parents, not the husband with his parents,” she said. “To be practical, for an old Korean parent, having a daughter sometimes is much better than having a son.”

The economic changes also unleashed a revolution of a different sort. With the economy heating up, men could no longer afford to keep women out of the workforce, and women began slowly to gain confidence, and grudging respect.

Although change is coming slowly and deep prejudices remain — in some businesses, women are pressured to leave their jobs when pregnant — women are more accepted now in the workplace and at the best universities that send graduates to the top corporations.

Six of 10 South Korean women entered college last year; fewer than one out of 10 did so in 1981. And in the National Assembly, once one of the nation’s most male-dominated institutions, women now hold about 13 percent of the seats, about double the percentage they held just four years ago.

Shin Hye-sun, 39, says she has witnessed many of the changes in women’s status during her 13 years at the TBC television station in Taegu, in central South Korea. “When I first joined the company in 1995, a woman was expected to quit her job once she got married; we called it a ‘resignation on a company suggestion,’” she said. Now, she said, many women stay after marriage and take a three-month break after giving birth before returning to work.

“If someone suggests that a woman should quit after marriage, female workers in my company will take it as an insult and say so,” Ms. Shin said.

According to the World Bank study, one of the surprises in South Korea was that it took as long as it did for the effects of a booming economy to translate into changes in people’s attitudes toward the birth of daughters.

The study suggests that the country’s former authoritarian rulers helped slow the transition by upholding laws and devising policies that supported a continuation of Confucian hierarchy, which encourages fealty not only to family patriarchs, but also to the nation’s leaders.

With the move toward democracy in the late 1980s, the concept of equal rights for men and women began to creep into Koreans’ thinking. In 1990, the law guaranteeing men their family’s inheritance — a cornerstone of the Confucian system — was the first of the so-called family laws to fall; the rest would be dismantled over the next 15 years.

After 2002, the narrowing of the gender gap signaled that attitudes about the value of women — and ultimately of daughters — had begun to catch up to the seismic changes in the economy and the law.

And last year, a study by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs showed that of 5,400 married South Korean women younger than 45 who were surveyed, only 10 percent said they felt that they must have a son. That was down from 40 percent in 1991.

“When my father took me to our ancestral graves for worshiping, my grandfather used to say, ‘Why did you bring a daughter here?’” said Park Su-mi, 29, a newlywed who calls the idea that only men carry on a family’s bloodline “unscientific and absurd.”

“My husband and I have no preference at all for boys,” she said. “We don’t care whether we have a boy or girl because we don’t see any difference between a boy and a girl in helping make our family happy.”

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Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Washington, DC, Saturday, January 26, 2008
Thank you for the kind comments, John [Hamre], and, Sam [Nunn], thank you for your kind remarks as well. I should note that John has had the courage if not necessarily the good judgment to accept my invitation to chair the Defense Policy Board. And I thank him for it.
Well, it’s a real pleasure to be back in Washington – not – (laughter) – the place where Harry Truman said you spend the first six months wondering how the hell you got here and the next six months wondering how the hell the rest of them got here. (Laughter.) To quote Senator Alan Simpson, “Washington is the only place where those who travel the high road of humility encounter little heavy traffic.” (Laughter.) The only place in the world you can see a prominent person walking down Lover’s Lane holding his own hand. (Laughter.)
Well, looking out to the audience today, I see no shortage of friends, colleagues, and distinguished figures from the worlds of politics, diplomacy, business, the military, and academia. I’m sure that conspiracy theorists would have a field day with this gathering, right up there with the trilateral commission and fluoridated water. (Laughter.) I have to say you begin to think in those terms when you’ve had a guy wearing a football helmet covered with tin foil outside the White House for a year holding a sign accusing you of controlling his brain waves. (Laughter.)
There are many friends here today, but I would like to just indulge myself by singling out three people: first, Dave Abshire, CSIS co-founder, still going strong and still bettering our understanding of statecraft and the importance of integrity and leadership; Anne Armstrong, former ambassador to the United Kingdom, stalwart supporter of CSIS and perhaps most important to me former member of the board of regents of Texas A&M. Had it not been for Anne’s support, I would not have been selected as president of A&M; And, finally, George Schultz. As I wrote in my book more than 10 years ago, I believe history will record George as one of America’s greatest Secretaries of State. (Applause.)
Two months ago, giving the Landon lecture at Kansas State University, I made the case for increasing the capacity of America’s civilian tools of statecraft and for better integrating them with the hard power of our military, or as John Hamre once put it, to combine the tools of "intimidation" with the tools of "inspiration,” also called smart power. Of course, what got the media’s attention was the man-bites-dog aspect of the speech, the Secretary of Defense calling for a significant increase in the budget of the Department of State.
I dare say, Secretary Schultz, I suspect that did not happen during your tenure. (Laughter.) And so, John asked me to talk about this subject here today. In recent years, we have seen that the close of the Cold War, an event that raised hopes for an era of prosperity, tranquility, and, quote, unquote, “the end of history” also had the effect of unfreezing ancient hatreds and unleashing new pathologies. The revived monsters of the past have returned far stronger and more dangerous than before because of modern technology, both for communication and for destruction and to a world that is far more closely connected and interdependent.
For years to come, we will deal with a new, far more malignant form of global terrorism rooted in extremist and violent jihadism, new manifestations of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian conflict, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, failed and failing states, states enriched with oil profits and discontented with their place in the international system, authoritarian regimes facing increasingly restive populations that seek political freedom as well as a better standard of living, and, finally, we see both emergent and resurgent great powers whose future paths remain unclear.
These challenges have two things in common. First, they are, by their nature, long term, requiring patience over years and across multiple presidencies. Second, they cannot be overcome by military means alone and they extend well beyond the traditional domain of any single government agency or department. They require our government to operate with unity, agility, and creativity, and will require devoting considerably more resources to non-military instruments of national power.
In the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, one of the most important lessons that has been learned, and to a large extent, relearned is that military success is not sufficient. Our efforts must also address economic development, institution building, the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good or at least decent governance, public services, training and equipping indigenous security forces, effective, strategic communications, and more. These so-called soft capabilities along with military power are indispensable to any lasting success, indeed, to victory itself as Clausewitz understood it, which is achieving a political objective.
Despite the heroic effort of individual soldiers and diplomats and many successful operations – the surge in Iraq being the most recent and compelling example – the whole of our government’s activities has often added up to less than the sum of the parts.
The military and civilian elements of our national security apparatus have responded unevenly and have grown increasingly out of balance. For example, in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen have filled the void created by the absence of civilians available to deploy and operate in different and dangerous environments. I dealt with this shortly after becoming Defense Secretary when the Iraq surge was announced.
A key part of the plan was more provincial reconstruction teams. The Department of Defense soon thereafter thereafter received a memo from State asking for military personnel to fill the civilians slots on the PRTs. As you might imagine, this provoked a somewhat negative response in Defense.
But the problem is not will; it is capacity. In many ways, we are still coping with the consequences of the 1990s, when with the complicity of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, key instruments of American power abroad were reduced or allowed to wither on the bureaucratic vine. The State Department froze a hiring of new Foreign Service officers for a period of time. The U.S. Agency for International Develop dropped from a high of 15,000 permanent staff during the Vietnam War to about 3,000.
And then there was the U.S. Information Agency. At one point, its directors included the likes of Edward R. Murrow. It was split into pieces and folded into a corner of the State Department. Since September 11th, and through the efforts of first, Colin Powell, and, now, Condi Rice, the State Department has made a comeback. Foreign Service officers are being hired again and foreign affairs spending has about doubled since President Bush took office.
But shortfalls persist. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with several dozen U.S. ambassadors who were visiting Washington for a Chiefs of Mission conference. The speaker who preceded me on the program was the Director General of the Foreign Service, the State Department’s chief personnel officer. I’m told that his briefing was sobering, bordering on grim, of unfilled billets across the word due to shortages of mid-level and senior-level officers, caused by earlier hiring freezes and the staffing requirements of Iraq. Additionally, about 30 percent of AID’s foreign service officers are eligible for retirement, valuable experience that cannot be contracted out.
This is why I believe we need to think about America’s investment in foreign affairs on a fundamentally different scale. It is useful to remember that the amount of national treasure it would take to fund a major boost in civilian capabilities is relatively small. In a week and a half, I will go to Capitol Hill to present the fiscal year 2009 Defense budget. It’s no big secret that the total will be somewhere around a half a trillion dollars. The total foreign-affairs request last year was $36 billion, about what the Pentagon spends on health care. Another comparison – the Army is planning to add about 7,000 more soldiers in 2008 to the active Army. It’s part of a multi-year expansion. In pure numbers, that is equivalent to adding the entire U.S. Foreign Service to the Army in one year.
Beyond filling current voids in staffing and operations, a permanent sizable increase in the ranks of foreign service, if done properly, would have significant institutional benefits in terms of State’s capacity and its influence vis-à-vis other agencies.
To give you a military example, a certain percentage of officers, even in time of war and when the force is stretched, are always enrolled in some kind of advanced training and education and leadership, strategy, or planning at the staff and war colleges and at graduate school. No such float of personnel exists for the Foreign Service. The same is true of planning. Between the joint staff, the services, and various commands, the military has thousands of officers dedicated to planning in some form. That kind of capacity does not exist on the civilian side of the government.
Despite the relatively modest amounts of money involved, getting the additional resources and authorities for soft power is not an easy sell politically. It simply does not have the built-in, domestic constituency of defense programs. As an example, the F-22 aircraft is produced by companies in 44 states; that’s 88 senators. (Laughter.) However, within the senior ranks of the military, a real constituency does exist for strengthening the non-military tools of national power. Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff once said as Chief of Naval operations that he would hand over a portion of his budget to the State Department in a heartbeat, assuming it was spent in the right place.
After all, civilian participation is necessary to the success of most military operations. As we have seen in PRTs and elsewhere, the inclusion of even a few properly employed civilian experts becomes what the military calls force multipliers
But we have to be realistic about how much even well-funded civilian agencies can do to reduce the demands on our armed forces to conduct what in recent years has been called non-traditional missions. Ever since General Winfield Scott led his army into Mexico in the 1840s, virtually every major deployment of American force has led to a longer military presence to maintain stability. General Eisenhower, when tasked with administering North Africa in 1942, wrote, “The sooner I can get rid of all of these questions that are outside the military in scope, the happier I will be! Sometimes, I think I live 10 years each week, of which at least nine are absorbed in political and economic matters.”
During World War II, the Army even established a school of military government whose students played a key role in post-war Germany and Japan. And after much of the military establishment said “never again” following Vietnam, U.S. Armed Services found themselves again policing and rebuilding places like Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and, now, Afghanistan and Iraq. The requirement for the U.S. military to maintain security, provide aid and comfort, begin reconstruction, and stand up local government and public services will not go away. At least in the early phases of any conflict, military commanders will no more be able to rid themselves of these tasks than Eisenhower was.
As a former U.N. Secretary General once said about peacekeeping, “It is not a job for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it.” I told an Army gathering last year that it is hard to conceive of any country challenging the United States directly in conventional military terms for some time to come. We can expect these so-called asymmetric operations, messy, protracted struggles without clear battle lines or exit strategies to be a mainstay of the 21st century battlefield.
So the military must retain the lessons and institutionalize the capabilities it has learned and relearned in these key areas. The military and our government as a whole is grappling with the reality that the fundamental nature of conflict as we’ve long perceived it has changed. As we have seen from the recent campaigns, the once stark black-and-white divisions between war and peace have faded. And so, America’s national security apparatus, military and civilian, needs to be more adept in operating along a continuum involving military, political, and economic skills in a gray area that is likely to be persistent, containing opportunities as well as dangers. These scenarios will call for more shaping and influencing and less compulsion of friends, adversaries, and, most importantly, those in between.
Over the past 15 years, we have tried to overcome post-Cold War challenges and pursue 21st century objectives with processes and organizations designed in the wake of the Second World War. The National Security Act that created most of the current interagency structure was passed in 1947. The last major legislation structuring how American dispenses foreign aid was passed during the Kennedy administration. The U.S. government has tried, incrementally, to modernize our posture and processes in order to improve interagency planning and cooperation mostly through a series of new directives, offices, coordinators, tsars, and various initiatives.
And there are some signs of progress.
Two years ago, Secretary Rice initiated was has been called transformational diplomacy. She questioned why the United States had as many diplomats stationed in Germany, a nation of 82 million people, as in India with a billion people. People and resources are being moved from where they made sense during the Cold War to where they make sense now.
At last year’s State of the Union, President Bush called for a new civilian reserve corps in the State Department, a permanent, sizeable corps of deployable experts comparable to the National Guard in the military arena.
New joint authorities have been granted by Congress to State and Defense that allow us together to train and equip partner security forces with more speed and flexibility than in the past.
The number of civilians deployed in PRTs has increased over the past year. And the State Department recently announced that it is doubling the number of Foreign Service officers assigned to military headquarters in the United States and abroad. In fact, one of the two deputy commanders of the new Africa Command will be a State Department officer.
A new executive order on national security professional development encourages Foreign Service officers and civil servants from State as well as the military and other departments to serve tours in other agencies in a way that enhances their career and promotion prospects.
We are also looking toward more untapped resources outside of the government, places where it’s not necessarily how much you spend, but how and where you spend it. After World War II, the defense establishment realized it needed to be better connected to the academic and scientific communities, not only for new technology and weaponry but for their insights into history, strategy, and economics. And this led to the creation of institutions like RAND.
We are once again trying to mine these resources for cultural expertise. Over the past year, for example, the military has been advised by anthropologists in Afghanistan called human terrain teams. In one case, the anthropologist pointed out that in one Afghan village, there were many widows, and that their sons might feel compelled to take care of them by joining the Taliban where many of the fighters are paid. And so, the American officers started a job training program for the widows. Similarly, American land grant universities like Texas A&M have deployed teams to Iraq and Afghanistan that provide valuable expertise in agriculture and other areas.
As in any new venture, there has been resistance. The human terrain teams have met with some pushback in academia where the military is sometimes viewed with a certain measure of suspicion. But it is important that we take advantage of the expertise available outside the ranks of the government.
As important and promising as many of these initiatives are, they have often been created ad hoc and on the fly in a climate of crisis. We need to figure out how to institutionalize and integrate programs such as these. The ultimate answer is probably not going to be recreating the old USIA or AID or simply adding more deployable people to State and other agencies. New approaches and new institutions are required for the 21st century.
Looking forward, bureaucratic barriers that hamper effective action should be rethought and reformed. The disparate strands of our national security apparatus, civilian and military, should be prepared ahead of time to deploy and operate together.
I should note that some of these challenges are not new. Our government has always been plagued by turf wars and stovepipes and conflicts over personality and ideology. During the Cold War, there were military, intelligence, and diplomatic failures in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Granada, and many others. Getting the military services to work together has been a recurring battle that has had to be addressed time and again. But despite the problems, we understood that the nature of conflict required us to develop and support key capabilities and institutions and, over time, devote the necessary resources, people and money, and get enough things right while maintaining the ability to recover from mistakes along the way. I suggest this is our task today.
To this end, the Department of Defense will soon award a contract to an independent, non-partisan, non-profit group to produce a study that in effect tries to answer the question I posed at Kansas State. If we were to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947 for the 21st century, what would it look like? What new institutions, arrangements, and authorities would it create? I look forward to seeing the result, which perhaps might form the basis of legislation or at least debate in the next administration.
In closing, I have observed that repeatedly over the last century, Americans averted their eyes in the belief that events in remote places around the world need not engage this country. How could an assassination of an Austrian archduke in unknown Bosnia-Herzegovina affect us, or the annexation of a little patch of ground called Sudetenland, or a French defeat in a place called Dien Bien Phu, or the return of an obscure cleric to Tehran, or the radicalization of a Saudi construction tycoon’s son?
What seems to work best in world affairs, historian Donald Kagan wrote in his book, “On the Origins of War,” is that the possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose. In an address at Harvard in 1943, Winston Churchill said, “the price of greatness is responsibility.” The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility. Our country has now, for many decades, taken upon itself great burdens and great responsibilities, all in an effort to defeat despotism in its many forms and to preserve the peace.
Today, across the globe, there are more people than ever seeking economic and political freedom, seeking hope, even as repressive regimes and mass murderers sow chaos in their midst. For all of those brave men and women struggling for a better life, there is and must be no stronger ally or advocate than the United States of America. Our responsibilities to them and to the world in the final analysis are not a burden on the people or the soul of this nation. They are, rather, a blessing. Thank you

Fallujah focuses on TV, radio
Local people involved in creating programs
By BRYAN PEARSON
BAGHDAD -- The name Fallujah was once synonymous with anti-American insurgency, but these days, locals are more concerned with making or enjoying hit TV and radio shows.
A television station set up by state-funded Iraqi Media Network -- which has Al-Iraqiya as its national flagship -- provides a steady flow of programs that staff say express "the thoughts of freedom" and are designed to counter Al-Qaeda ideology.

Large parts of Fallujah remain in ruins after being pounded during brutal fighting in 2004, when U.S. forces took on hardcore Sunni insurgents and Al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the city.

But like other parts of Al-Anbar province, Fallujah has seen its Sunni population turn against its former Al-Qaeda allies in the past year.

"Our programs are prepared by the local people of Fallujah. They are diversified and deal with issues of the locals," said Abdul Majid Dahham, station manager of Fallujah FM, which broadcasts 16 hours a day.

Another station, Fallujah Sawt Al-Hur, or Free Voice of Fallujah, broadcasts six hours a day, while the television channel has a slot of two hours every evening before 8 p.m., when it links up with the state-run Al-Iraqiya channel.

An estimated 400,000 people live within the 20-kilometer radius covered by Fallujah TV, but no viewing figures for the station are available. Dahham admits that the quality of the programming is often poor.

"The educational programs for children and cultural events for adults need to be improved," he said.

To survive and develop, employees say, Fallujah's fledgling TV and radio stations must receive more funds from the government.

"Despite the current modest output, the stations cover the whole of Fallujah and its suburbs," said Mohammed Sami, 26, a Fallujah TV correspondent.

"We used to work in total secrecy in the first few weeks, avoiding risks and threats," he added. "The locals had no idea what we were doing, but now the situation is better than it was."

Free Voice of Fallujah radio has a team of 12 staff, including four women, who put together programs for the city's residents.

"We are working to provide information to locals that is especially aimed at discouraging violence," said station director Ali Hadi.

"Our station is a local one because we understand Fallujah's problems and how they can be tackled."

February 11, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
No Manchurian Candidate

By ROGER COHEN
I believe Barack Obama is a strong but not uncritical supporter of Israel. That is what the Middle East needs from an American leader: the balance implicit in a two-state solution.

Yet it’s a tough position for Obama to hold in this presidential campaign because his Jewish credentials are under scrutiny.

On January 22, with Gaza sealed and the suffering of Palestinians prompting calls for a U.N. Security Council statement deploring their plight, Obama penned a strongly-worded letter of support for Israel.

“The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks against Israel, and should make clear that Israel has a right to defend itself against such actions,” Obama wrote to Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Otherwise, he declared, it should not speak at all.

The Security Council remained silent; Obama’s still uncertain standing with Jews in the United States and Israel was strengthened. But rumors, many scurrilous, still swirl. Most have questioned the degree of his commitment to Israel.

“The biggest problem is a lack of familiarity, an exotic name and malicious assaults,” David Axelrod, who is Obama’s chief strategist, told me. “There’s no ambiguity in his position on the Middle East.”

The attacks, mainly anonymous e-mails, have woven together various threads — his middle name “Hussein;” schooling in Muslim Indonesia; his Chicago pastor’s embrace of the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan; and his calls for dialogue with Iran — to portray Obama as the Muslim Manchurian candidate.

Leading American Jewish organizations have denounced these “hateful e-mails.” Obama has condemned Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and made clear he disagrees with his pastor, the Rev. Jerermiah A. Wright Jr., whose magazine honored Farrakhan last year. But he’s not broken with Wright, the man who ushered him to his Christian faith.

Some doubts clearly persist among U.S. Jews, who account for just 2 percent of the population but a higher percentage of voters, and one with wide influence. On a recent four-day trip to Florida, David Harris, the executive director of the nonpartisan American Jewish Committee, encountered the following questions:

Did Obama really attend a madrassa? What are his relations with Wright? Why does he have former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (viewed as cool toward Israel) on his foreign policy team?

“You could sum the concerns up as ‘does Obama feel Israel in his kishkas?’” Harris told me, using the Yiddish word for guts. “And does he have the steel and spine for the tough moments or believe diplomacy is the be-all and end-all of international relations?”

Such worries have surfaced in Israel, where Danny Ayalon, a former ambassador to the United States, has described Obama’s candidacy as cause for “concern.”

Still, many American Jews, particularly younger ones, are gravitating to Obama. Hillary Clinton, whose pro-Israel credentials are watertight, took close to two-thirds of the Jewish vote in the New Jersey and New York primaries. But in California the Jewish vote was almost equally divided, and in Connecticut and Massachusetts Obama got more Jewish votes.

“There’s a generational transition,” said Douglas Bloomfield, a former legislative director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “The baby boomers are now the older generation and Clinton is their candidate. Younger Jews are more pro-Obama. A majority of Jews want a two-state peace, but are intimidated by a vocal right wing.”

Obama should resist such intimidation. I understand the immediate political calculus that makes a forthright statement of his pro-Israel sentiments critical. That is why, in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last year, he did not even mention Jewish settlements.

That’s also why when Obama made an accurate statement in Iowa last year to the effect that “Nobody’s suffering more than the Palestinian people,” he later massaged the phrase to suggest the suffering was self-inflicted. And that’s why his letter to Khalilzad was so emphatic in its pro-Israel tone.

That’s O.K.. Obama has to play hardball now. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, also sent a letter — the day after Obama’s — calling for the U.N. to condemn “the terrorist tactics employed by Hamas.”

Foreign policy will roar back once this is a straight Republican-Democrat fight. A Democrat who’s going to win has be strong on core American defense principles, which include Israel’s security.

Obama feels Israel in his kishkas, all right. Equally, he feels dialogue, which has been his way of getting things done since he became a Chicago community organizer in the 1980s. There would be no six-year time-outs on Israel-Palestine under an Obama presidency. “He’d be actively involved from day one,” said Axelrod.

Jews should get over the scaremongering: Obama is no Manchurian. Nor is he blind to the fact that backing Israel is not enough if such U.S. backing provides carte blanche for the subjugation of another people.