May 27, 2008
Optimism Grows as Marines Push Against Taliban

By CARLOTTA GALL
GARMSER, Afghanistan — For two years British troops staked out a presence in this small district center in southern Afghanistan and fended off attacks from the Taliban. The constant firefights left it a ghost town, its bazaar broken and empty but for one baker, its houses and orchards reduced to rubble and weeds.

But it took the Marines, specifically the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, about 96 hours to clear out the Taliban in a fierce battle in the past month and push them back about 6 miles.

It was their first major combat operation since landing in March, and it stood in stark contrast to the events of a year earlier, when a Marine unit was removed in disgrace within weeks of arriving because its members shot and killed 19 civilians after a suicide bombing attack.

This time, the performance of the latest unit of marines, here in Afghanistan for seven months to help bolster NATO forces, will be under particular scrutiny. The NATO-led campaign against the Taliban has not only come under increasing pressure for its slow progress in curbing the insurgency, but it has also been widely criticized for the high numbers of civilian casualties in the fighting.

The marines’ drive against the Taliban in this large farming region is certainly not finished, and the Taliban have often been pushed out of areas in Afghanistan only to return in force later. But for the British forces and Afghan residents here, the result of the recent operation has been palpable.

The district chief returned to his job from his refuge in the provincial capital within days of the battle and 200 people — including 100 elders of the community — gathered for a meeting with him and the British to plan the regeneration of the town.

“They have disrupted the Taliban’s freedom of movement and pushed them south, and that has created the grounds for us to develop the hospital and set the conditions for the government to come back,” said Maj. Neil Den-McKay, the officer commanding a company of the Royal Regiment of Scotland based here. People have already started coming back to villages north of the town, he said, adding, “There has been huge optimism from the people.”

For the marines, it was a chance to hit the enemy with the full panoply of their firepower in places where they were confident there were few civilians. The Taliban put up a tenacious fight, rushing in reinforcements in cars and vans from the south and returning repeatedly to the attack, but they were beaten back in four days by three companies of marines, two of which were dropped in by helicopter to the southeast.

In the days after the assault began, hundreds of families, their belongings packed high on tractor-trailers, fled north from villages in the southern part of the battle zone, according to marines staffing a checkpoint. The Taliban told them to leave as the fighting began, they said. Hospital officials in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, reported receiving eight civilian casualties as a result of the fighting, including a 14-year-old boy who died from his injuries. The marines did not sustain any casualties, but one was killed and two were wounded in subsequent clashes.

Marines from the unit’s Company C said the reaction from the returning civilians, mostly farmers, had been favorable. “Everyone says they don’t like the Taliban,” said Capt. John Moder, 34, the commander of the company. People had complained that the Taliban stole food, clothes and vehicles from them, he said.

There are about 34,000 American troops in Afghanistan, with more than 3,000 marines having been sent into the country after NATO requested additional help in the south, where the Taliban are particularly strong.

The deployment occurred almost a year after up to 19 unarmed civilians were killed and 50 people wounded on March 4, 2007, when a Marine convoy opened fire after a suicide car bomb wounded one marine. On Friday, the Marine Corps said it would not bring charges against two of the commanding officers from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit for the episode, a decision that was greeted with dismay in Afghanistan.

The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, had a checklist of tasks around the country for 3,200 marines when they arrived in March. But the majority of them have spent a month in Garmser after changing their original plan, which was to secure a single road here, when they realized how important the area was to the Taliban as an infiltration and supply route to fighters in northern part of Helmand Province.

“This is an artery, and we did not realize that when we squeezed that artery, it would have such an effect,” said First Lt. Mark Matzke, the executive officer of Company C.

They also realized it was worth exploiting their initial success. The whole area was unexpectedly welcoming to the American forces and eager for security and development, Captain Moder said. “Us pushing the Taliban out allows the Afghan National Army to come in,” he said. “This is a real breadbasket here. There’s a lot of potential here.”

This southern part of Helmand Province, along the Helmand River valley, is prime agricultural land and still benefits from the large-scale irrigation plan kicked off by American government assistance in the 1950s and 1960s. It has traditionally been the main producer of wheat and other crops for the country. During the last 30 years of war, however, the area has given way to poppy production, providing a large percentage of the crop that has made Afghanistan the producer of 98 percent of the world’s opium.

The region has long been an infiltration route for insurgents coming across the southern border with Pakistan, crossing from Baluchistan Province in Pakistan via an Afghan refugee camp known as Girdi Jungle. The Taliban, and the drug runners, then race across a region known ominously as the desert of death until they reach the river valley, which provides the ideal cover of villages and greenery.

With such a large area under their control, the Taliban were able to gather in numbers, stockpile weapons and provide a logistics route to send fighters and weapons into northern Helmand and the provinces of Kandahar and Oruzgan beyond.

The Taliban, who kicked out villagers and took over their farmhouses, were also mixed with an unusual proportion of Arabs and Pakistanis, Major Den-McKay said.

“The majority of elements in this area are Arab and Pakistani, and the locals detest them,” he said. The insurgent commanders were from Iran, which shares a border with Afghanistan to the southwest, as well as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, he said.

Afghan villagers confirmed that there were local Afghan Taliban fighting, too. But they also said that there were Pakistanis, ethnic Baluchis from southern Iran and Arabs fighting as well.

Locals complained that the Taliban taxed them heavily on the opium harvest. They demanded up to about 30 pounds of opium from every farmer, which was more than the entire harvest of some, so they were forced to go and buy opium to meet the demand, said Abdul Taher, a 45-year-old farmer.

“We had a lot of trouble these last two years,” said Sher Ahmad, 32. “We are very grateful for the security,” said his father, Abdul Nabi, the elder of a small hamlet in the village of Hazarjoft, a few miles south of Garmser. “We don’t need your help, just security,” he said.

Villagers were refusing humanitarian aid offered by the marines because the Taliban were already infiltrating back and threatening anyone who took it, Lieutenant Matzke said.

After a month in the region, the marines have secured only half of a roughly six-square-mile area south of Garmser. Taliban forces operating out of two villages are still attacking the southern flank of the marines and are even creeping up to fire at British positions on the edge of the town.

But the bigger test will come in the next few weeks as the marines move on and the Afghans, supported by the British, take over. The concern here is that the Taliban will try to blend in among the returning villagers and orchestrate attacks.

Major Den-McKay said they were ready. “The threat will migrate from direct attacks to suicide attacks” and roadside bombs, he said.

Now on his fourth tour in Afghanistan, Major Den-McKay said he had seen considerable progress in the confidence and ability of the Afghan security forces. Reinforcements of the police, trained and mentored by the British and Americans, have already moved in and are working well with border police and intelligence service personnel, he said.

The marines, meanwhile, prepare for their next move. To the south are miles upon miles of uncontrolled territory where the Taliban still operate freely, as well as a dozen other districts around the country demanding their attention.

News April 23, 2008, 8:16PM EST text size: TT
IBM vs. Tata: Who's More American?
The Indian giant's TCS makes most of its money in the U.S., while Big Blue does the bulk of its business abroad

by Steve Hamm

Quick quiz: Which company is more "American"—Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services, or Armonk (N.Y.)-based IBM (IBM)? Evaluate the two based on where they make their sales, and the answer is surprising. TCS, India's largest tech-services company, collected 51% of its revenues in North America last quarter, while 65% of IBM's were overseas.

This juxtaposition helps explain investor reaction to the companies' most recent earnings reports. TCS stock declined by more than 10% on Apr. 21 after it reported that earnings for its fourth fiscal quarter fell short of expectations. IBM, by contrast, beat estimates on Apr. 16. Its stock is up 3% since then and 25% since mid-February.
"No Slackening of Demand"

A tale of two strategies is playing out amid shifting global economic conditions. TCS, like the other top Indian tech-services outfits, has long focused on big American and British corporations. Now that the U.S. is slipping into a recession, the Indian companies are vulnerable. TCS, though, insists its financial shortfall doesn't signal a fundamental weakness. It says a handful of U.S. clients canceled expansion plans in the fourth quarter, and the company agreed to defer payments by two big customers. "There's no slackening of demand," says N. Chandrasekaran, the company's chief operating officer. "The pipeline is good. We just had some specific situations."

IBM's strong results stem from a strategy of diversifying into emerging markets by its services business, which represents about half of overall revenues. Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge says IBM has a two-track approach: In the U.S., where clients are economizing, it helps them cut costs, while in emerging markets, it helps customers build out their technology infrastructure.

In India, where IBM is now the No. 1 seller of technology services, its revenues grew 41% last quarter."Our success starts with how global we are, which is intentional," says Virginia M. Rometty, who runs global business services for IBM.
IBM and Accenture: Setting the Bar?

TCS is the most geographically diversified of the top Indian tech-�services companies. Others rely on the U.S. for 60% to 70% of sales, and all are scrambling to broaden their business. TCS, which last year set up a unit targeting emerging markets, saw revenues increase 40% there in the past fiscal year. Infosys Technologies (INFY), India's No. 2 services player, on Apr. 15 warned that it might face a slowdown in demand. It, too, has launched an initiative aimed at China, India, Latin America, and the Middle East. Kris Gopalakrishnan, the company's chief executive, cautions that Infosys is playing catch-up with the likes of IBM and Accenture (ACN). "It will take three years to make a significant difference to our revenues," he says.

Meanwhile, the Indian companies aren't in a terrible spot; after all, their services are designed to help clients simplify their businesses and save money. Until the U.S. economy pulls out of the doldrums, though, they will have to sell more aggressively and plan carefully so they don't end up with too many employees, which would pinch margins.

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11089517

A tale of two Mexicos
North and south
Apr 24th 2008 | CUETZALÁN AND OAXACA
From The Economist print edition

Why can't its stagnant southern states catch up with the rest of Mexico?

IT IS not a place where misery reveals itself immediately. Fields climb over mountains, green as Ireland. A smattering of attractive hotels cater to tourists visiting the local waterfalls. Bells ring out from the two churches that dominate opposite ends of Cuetzalán, a small town in the northern mountains of the state of Puebla. But the appearance of a pastoral idyll conceals a poverty trap.

Mexico's southern states are more mountainous and rural than the north, with a bigger proportion of Indians. And on almost any socio-economic indicator, these areas lag behind the rest of the country. At the bottom are Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, but parts of Puebla and Veracruz are little better off. In a human-development index comparing Mexican municipalities, drawn up for the United Nations, 95% of the places in the bottom decile are in the south. In the north, 12% of people in rural areas are extremely poor, against 47% in the south, according to the Woodrow Wilson Centre, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

Although politicians have long been aware of this gap, government efforts to tackle it have accomplished little. A grandiose Plan Puebla-Panama, launched by President Vicente Fox in 2001 to develop the south, stayed largely on paper. The “March towards the South”, a scheme of the same year to attract investment, paid businessmen to create jobs that in some cases never materialised, says Gerardo Esquivel, an economist at Colegio de México, a university in Mexico City.

Felipe Calderón, Mr Fox's successor, also has plans. Reasonably enough, these focus on infrastructure: one of the south's obvious handicaps is that getting products to ports and airports, let alone to the United States, is slow and expensive. The government hopes to mobilise from public and private sources investment in roads totalling $28.7 billion over his six-year term, including $6 billion this year. Some of these will be in the south, including a new highway along the Gulf coast and feeder roads to both coasts. Some critics, such as Mr Esquivel, say this is not enough.

Others question whether roads alone can help. José Antonio Aguilar, an official in Puebla, says that the past four years have seen “a total transformation” of his state's infrastructure “but we haven't been able to turn this into growth in income.”

Perhaps the crux of the problem is that there is little incentive for private investment in the south because the population is too poor and dispersed, says Roberto Newell of the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness, a private think-tank. The paradox, says Eduardo León of the Boston Consulting Group, a management consultancy, is that “we must depend on the government to create non-governmental sources of investment.”

The roots of stagnation are complex. As well as difficult geography, they include ethnic discrimination and poor education. In addition, it is both a cause and consequence of economic torpor that politics in the south remains the province of strongmen. Incompetence, corruption and even violence are common. In Puebla, the governor has been accused of helping to cover up a paedophile ring (he denies it, and the federal Congress dropped an investigation). The city of Oaxaca, once a tourist magnet, is only slowly recovering from seven months of protests in 2006 calling for the ouster of the state governor, in which a score of people were killed. Adalberto Castillo, head of a local chamber of commerce, estimates that the state's economy would be some 20% bigger today had the protests never happened.

A self-styled Zapatista revolutionary army took over parts of Chiapas in 1994. It has not formally called off its rebellion, which involves some 20,000 people. But the federal government now quietly supplies electricity and water to the villages the Zapatistas still control, according to Xavier Abreu, an official at the federal government's agency for indigenous people.

The Zapatista rebellion raised Mexicans' awareness of race discrimination. But this remains a problem. The majority of the population in every one of Mexico's 100 poorest municipalities is of indigenous descent, says Mr Abreu. One policy designed to help the poor Indians is bilingual education. But the flaws of the public education system are magnified in the south. In practice, the teachers' union rather than the government controls teaching appointments; the union sometimes appoints a teacher who speaks a different indigenous language to his pupils, according to Mr Abreu. A typical adult in the south has only six years of schooling; the corresponding figure in northern Mexico is 8.1 and 9.7 in Mexico City. And those years of schooling are not full years: local education officials report that in urban areas in the south an average teacher spends only 110 of the notional 200 days of the academic year actually in the classroom. The record is even worse in rural areas.

Mexicans of indigenous descent face cultural barriers too, some of them self-imposed. Mr Newell argues that Mexican society has not negotiated its way around the difficult question of how to retain respect for Indian traditions while integrating the countryside economically. “It is a cruel choice,” he says, “but you have to give up some differentiation.” Amerindian culture dictates maize as the staple crop; a smallholder farming a few acres with a hoe cannot compete with Iowa combines. Better infrastructure and education in the more urbanised north mean that the benefits of Mexico's membership of the North American Free-Trade Agreement have accrued there, while income in the south stagnates because of low productivity.

Yet not all is gloom in the south. In some places there are signs that local government is becoming more efficient. By updating its property registry, Guerrero's state government has raised its annual revenue from property tax by 38%, which officials hope will result in higher public investment. In Puebla, officials are encouraging farmers to switch from maize and coffee to higher-value crops, such as bamboo and fruit. Such schemes are not helped by the fact that government agricultural subsidies go disproportionately to the richer north. And they are exceptions.

The big wealth gap polarises politics, too. In the north, Mr Calderón won 43% of the vote in the 2006 presidential election, while only 24% went to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, his populist rival. But in the south Mr López Obrador won 40%, and Mr Calderón 27%. This regional divide contributes to political gridlock. The right plays to its electoral strength in the north, and the left to its constituents in the south, squeezing out opportunities for compromise and progress. The latest example concerns a desperately needed reform to liberalise Mexico's declining state-owned oil industry, opposed by Mr López Obrador. The south instinctively favours big government and mistrusts private initiative.

With each passing year, the socio-economic gap widens. Monterrey, Mexico's northern industrial capital, is starting to resemble south Texas. Many parts of the south still look like a northern extension of Guatemala. But unless the government shows a greater ability and willingness to tackle its problems, the south will not just remain stuck in its poverty trap but risks handicapping the country as a whole

Hafsia Hersi to star in 'Kirkuk'
Rezo Films selling film internationally
By NICK VIVARELLI
Hafsia Hersi is attached to star in "The Flowers of Kirkuk," a Romeo and Juliet tale that marks a rare co-production between Europe and Iraq.

Gallic boutique Rezo Films is selling the film internationally. Hero Talabani, wife of Iraqi president Jala Talabani, is among co-producers of the pic, set during Saddam Hussain's ethnic clensing in Kurdistan.

Hersi is a recent winner of the Venice fest's Marcello Mastroianni prize for promising actress, as well as a Cesar nod in the same category.

Iranian-born Fariborz Kamkari wll helm the pic. His Tehran-set "Black Tape" unspooled in Venice and Edinburgh, and was banned in Iran.

"Flowers" producer is Fabrizia Falzetti via her Rome-based FARout Films. Hero Talabani's Sulifilm, based in Sulemany City in northern Iraq. Talabani also owns Kurdistan satellite channel Kurdsat, the first Kurdish satellite channel and the most popular onechannel. Kurdsat has been airing ads searching for extras and about 1,000 candidates have responded.

Gallic producer Vincent Macheras and his Lorival shingle, Swiss producer Marcel Hoehn and Swiss TV T&C are also on board as co-producers.

Located 150 miles north of Baghdad, Kirkuk was among Kurdish cities where Saddam used chemical weapons against Kurdish Iraqi civilians starting in the early 1980s. The romance at the center of "Flowers" is between a young woman from Baghdad and a Kurdish doctor who is trying to save the victims of Saddam's attacks.

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117986311.html

Qatar gets into film biz with 'Rumi'
Project budgeted at $25 million
By NICK VIVARELLI, ALI JAAFAR
The gas-rich Gulf state of Qatar is getting into the international film biz with "Rumi -- The Fire of Love," an English-language biopic of Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet and a founder of Sufism, with Deepak Chopra on board as script consultant.

Pic, casting in L.A. for an A-list U.S. star to topline, is budgeted at $25 million, the bulk of which is to be provided by the Qatar Foundation, headed by Sheikha Mouza, wife of the emir of Qatar.

Indian helmer Muzaffar Ali, who has long been associated with Sufi music and Sufism, will helm "Rumi" with Oscar-winning lenser Vittorio Storaro on board behind camera.

Italo producer Igor Ubaldi is shepherding via his Rome-based Istar Prods.

Uboldi said shooting is expected to start in January in Turkey and other Middle Eastern locations where the founder of the order of the Whirling Dervishes embarked on his spiritual quest in the Middle Ages.

Rumi's poetry has been widely translated globally, with millions of present-day readers.

The project, which charts Rumi's quest from the age of 12 and his transformation into an ecstatic mystic, had previously been set up in the United Arab Emirates. Project is believed to have been nixed by the Abu Dhabi-based regulatory org National Media Council after local concerns were voiced over the depiction of Sufi Muslims drinking and dancing.

Qatar is the world's largest supplier of liquified natural gas. Execs in the Gulf state, home to ink-generating news channel Al-Jazeera, have been prepping plans to enter the film biz for some months now. The "Rumi" project is the first of what is expected to be a number of film initiatives announced this year.

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117986234.html