The New Nation - Internet Edition

Indian papers blame intelligence failures in Mumbai attacks

AFP, New Delhi

Indian newspapers on Friday slammed the government and intelligence agencies for failing to prevent the Mumbai attacks, saying the country's anti-terrorism forces were ill-prepared for the militants.

"Mumbai Maimed, Nation Shamed" read the banner headline in the Mail Today, which said the country's intelligence agencies "had no clue of the impending attack" despite spending huge amounts of money on anti-terror measures. An editorial in the Hindustan Times reflected the tone of much of the coverage, saying that "losing our best officers to frontal assaults is a brave but utterly hopeless way of fighting modern terror.

"It is time to learnt that global terror cannot be fought without transforming our national security." The Times of India editorial, titled "It's War-Mumbai attacks challenge the nation to fight back," also questioned why anti-terror agencies had failed.

"How well do we run them, how well-resourced are they, and is there proper coordination among them to maximise and collate information?" it said. Noting the time lost in deploying special forces, the paper said: "The point is that even in circumstances where personnel and infrastructure were available, planning and execution are shockingly poor."

The Indian Express poured scorn on the secret services. "What are the intelligence mechanisms that failed to pick up a terrorist plan with as much micro-planning as this one?" it said. "What can be done so that this does not recur? Because without working through this question, there can be no closure."

The paper also launched a personal attack on the Indian prime minister via a front-page opinion piece, saying there was "a special responsibility on Manmohan Singh's shoulders." "In 1991, he liberated our economy. Over the past five years, he modernised our foreign policy," it said.

"Partly distracted by that, and partly by the politics of his coalition, he has not been able to make the slightest difference to our internal security. He has to now start fixing that." Other banner headlines exclaimed "Terror Uninterrupted," "Fear, Pain, Anger" and "Mumbai At War."

The Hindu newspaper took a caustic tone, saying that India's "fractious and often bitter religious politics has not helped in keeping religiously motivated terrorism in check."

"The strengthening of the intelligence machinery with increased manpower and more sophisticated equipment, which is promised every time a terrorist attack takes place, brooks no further delay," it said.

All papers honoured the 15 or more security personnel were killed, including the head of Mumbai's anti-terror squad.

"An officer and a gentleman lays down his life," read one tribute.

Australia, Singapore upgrade India travel warnings

Reuters, Singapore

Australia and Singapore upgraded travel warnings for India on Friday, telling nationals to reconsider plans to go there after coordinated attacks by suspected Islamist gunmen killed at least 121 people in Mumbai. "We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to India at this time because of the very high risk of terrorist activity by terrorists and militant groups," the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in an official advisory on its website (http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/India).

Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs also advised that Singaporeans should postpone travel to Mumbai unless they have a pressing need to go to India's financial hub, where operations were underway to free hostages held in three main centres.

"Singaporeans should also avoid all non-essential travel to India," the Ministry said in a statement.

Pakistan, India ties chill after attacks

AP, Islamabad

The Mumbai terror attacks threaten to chill improving ties between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan just as the West is trying to get Islamabad to focus on al-Qaida and Taliban close to the Afghan border.

India has not singled out Pakistan as being linked to the strikes, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday said militants based outside his country carried them out.

That was widely understood in Pakistan to be an accusation of its involvement. Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said Pakistan "should not be blamed like in the past." "This will destroy all the goodwill we created together after years of bitterness," he told The Associated Press. "I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents."

Deteriorating relations between Pakistan and India, which have fought three wars since 1947, would greatly complicate U.S. foreign policy in the region.

Incoming President-elect Barack Obama has said normalizing ties between the two South Asian neighbors will be a major plank of his broader campaign to stabilize Afghanistan and and beat al-Qaida in the region.

"You can't cozy up to a country that is accusing you of complicity in terrorism," said Shaun Gregory, an expert on South Asian terrorism at the University of Bradford in Britain. "Any sign of Pakistani involvement would be extraordinarily damaging."

On Friday, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani called his Indian counterpart and condemned the attacks, according to state-run Pakistan Television, which gave no details about the conversation.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice telephoned Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari late Thursday to discuss ties and the regional situation, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

In 2001, militants fighting Indian-rule in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir attacked the parliament in New Delhi, helping push the countries to the brink of war a year later.

It is widely believed that Pakistan used to provide material and tactical support to militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, but there has been less cross-border infiltration in recent years amid U.S. pressure after the Sept. 11 attacks.

India accused Pakistan's intelligence services of helping Taliban militants bomb its embassy in the Afghan capital in July, killing 58 people. Pakistani officials say there is no evidence to support the allegation.

Some analysts speculated that the terrorists' goal may have been to trigger a collapse in India-Pakistan ties possibly to the levels of 2002, when New Delhi deployed tens of thousands of troops to the border.

"In this situation, when all our energies are focused on fighting the militants, we cannot afford to shift our attentions to the eastern border," said Ishtiaq Ahmad, professor of international relations at Quaid-i-Azam University in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "This is a very risky moment."

The attack late Wednesday saw teams of gunmen attack at least 10 sites, including two luxury hotels, a railway station and a Jewish center, in the financial capital of Mumbai. More than 100 people were killed.

Relations between India and Pakistan have improved in recent years, helped by a reduction in the flow of militants into Kashmir, the divided and violence-torn territory at the core of their dispute.

Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, declared over the weekend that India posed no threat to Pakistan and called for the heavily militarized border to be opened for trade.

In an address to the nation Thursday, the Indian prime minister said the group that carried out the attacks "was based outside the country" and warned its neighbors "that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated."

Earlier, Indian navy spokesman Capt. Manohar Nambiar said navy officers had boarded a cargo vessel it suspected of ties to the attacks that had come to Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan. He later said the ship was not linked in any way to the strikes.

While the investigation into the attacks was only just starting, many analysts said the terrorists were more likely to be indigenous, Indian extremists blamed for a series of bombings this year than Pakistani-linked ones.

Analysts also noted that India's government stood to benefit politically for hinting at the involvement of its old rival - rather than admitting some of its own 145 million Muslims had become radicalized.

"It will always want to label this militancy as foreign rather than to accept it has its own problem," said Gregory, the South Asian terrorism expert. "That sells much more easily to the Indian public than admitting serious grievances within its Muslims."

An Indian media report said a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attacks in e-mails to several media outlets. There was no way to verify that claim.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who was in India for talks on a slow-moving South Asian peace process, has said his country will cooperate in any investigation.

Inter-Korean railway, tours to halt as ties worsen

Reuters, Puja

A cargo train between North and South Korea and tours from the South to the communist state stopped on Friday under a border clampdown called for by Pyongyang in anger at the conservative government in Seoul.

But a large number of South Koreans who work at a joint industrial enclave in the North Korean border city of Kaesong were being allowed to keep permits to enter the factory park there, despite an earlier vow by Pyongyang to expel many of them by December 1, officials said. "Today is the last day of Kaesong tours, and today is the last day of the train runs," Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a briefing in Seoul.

The border restrictions and the expulsion from the industrial park come about a week before regional powers are expected to meet in Beijing to resume talks on ending the North's nuclear arms program and compensate it with economic and energy aid.

The last train run of a sole empty cargo car powered by an electric locomotive pulled out of the seldom-used Munsan station for the final run to Kaesong 40 minutes behind schedule.

Train services between the two Koreas were halted during the 1950-53 Korean War. The start of the regular freight train run last year was hailed as a milestone in reconciliation for the two states which, in the absence of a peace treaty, are technically still at war.

But the trains have mostly been empty because it is cheaper for companies at the Kaesong factory park to move goods by trucks. North Korea said in January this year it wanted to halt the service that runs along a 20-km (12-mile) stretch of track.

Analysts said the tours to the city of Kaesong, started about a year ago, might have been viewed by reclusive North Korea as destabilizing because they allowed visitors from the South to see just how destitute their neighbor is and gave its residents a glimpse of their wealthy southern neighbors.

While the border was being shut to trains and tours, as many as 1,700 people have been told they can keep their permits to enter the Kaesong factory zone, spokesman Kim said.

But the first of the approximately 1,000 people, including government officials, began pulling out on Friday and some expressed disappointment that their role was cut short.

"I wish South-North ties would improve as early as possible so that we can return to do our jobs," Kim Chang-soo, with the joint management office, said as he crossed the border.

The factory park has provided cash-starved North Korea with hundreds of millions of dollars and is expected to be operating near normally on Monday, despite the border clampdown.

"There were always concerns North Korea would use economic projects t as political leverage," said Dong Yong-sueng, a research fellow at Samsung Economic Research Institute.

He said the real damage to North Korea is that South Korean firms would now hesitate to invest there.

The two Koreas were in talks about allowing even more of the 4,200 pass holders to cross the border regularly, Kim said.

The Kaesong factory park, about 70 km (45 miles) from Seoul, is the only major economic connection between the two Koreas. A total of 88 South Korean firms employ more than 33,000 low-wage North Koreans there to make goods such as watches and clothes.

Tigers could go back to guerrilla war as mini state crumbles

AFP, Colombo

A pledge by Sri Lanka's Tamil rebel leader to fight on despite a military onslaught raised fears Friday of a return to a hit-and-run guerrilla war as his mini-state faced potential collapse.

Separatist chief Velu-pillai Prabhakaran vowed Thursday the rebels would "continue with our struggle until the alien Sinhala occupation of our land is evicted," referring to Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese population, and appealed to Tamils abroad for support to shore up his military machine.

Government forces have surrounded Prabhakaran in his political capital of Kilinochchi in the biggest-ever military campaign in the history of Sri Lanka's armed separatist struggle, which dates back to 1972. Prabhakaran's speech delivered over Voice of Tigers radio contained veiled threats against civilians and suggestions the rebels would revert to hit-and-run attacks as their territory shrank, observers said.

"Prabhakaran acknowledges there's fighting all around him and that he's under siege," said retired army brigadier general Vipul Boteju. "When he says he will fight on, it means he will return to his classic guerrilla tactics."

State radio warned Friday that Tiger rebels could resort to "desperate attacks" and called for public vigilance as heavy fighting raged in the island's northern regions where Tamils predominate.

Security across the country had been stepped up, officials said, after a spate of bombings in Colombo and elsewhere targeting key political and military figures as well as government installations.

Recent bombings against public transport were seen as retaliation for similar strikes by security forces inside rebel-held territory where the Tigers have maintained a mini-state since 1990, including their own police, courts and banks in Kilinochchi.

"No sane voice is being raised either to abandon war or to seek peaceful resolution to the conflict," Prabhakaran said in his broadcast, adding the Sinhalese community across the board supported the war.

Rebel-turned-politician Dharmalingam Sithadthan said Prabhakaran had accused all members of the majority Sinhalese community of supporting the government's war effort.

"This suggests he's preparing the ground to justify indiscriminate attacks against civilians," Sithadthan said. "When the LTTE is militarily weakened, they will resort to high-profile guerrilla attacks."

He said he saw the guerrillas going back to the hit-and-run tactics they had adopted in the early 1980s.

The Tigers were known for massacres of Sinhalese civilians until the turn of the century when they changed tactics to target mainly security forces and the economy as they developed a conventional military capability.

Unlike previous Sri Lankan leaders, the hawkish President Mahinda Rajapakse has said he will accept nothing short of surrender from the Tigers.

Diplomats noted his war effort has generated a wave of support and he has won every local election since stepping up pressure on the Tigers.

Gorbachev hopes for new US policies under Obama

AP, Moscow

Some Russians call Barack Obama the American Gorbachev because of his promises to bring change to his country. And the real Mikhail Gorbachev said Thursday that change is what the U.S. wants and needs.

"America needs its own perestroika," the former Soviet leader said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press.

With the overwhelming election of Obama, "the entire world felt that America wanted change and was expecting change," said Gorbachev, 77.

Obama's detractors in Russia express hope that his policies will lead to the demise of the United States, pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 following Gorbachev's liberal reforms.

But Gorbachev said the world needs a strong America, as shown by the current global financial crisis, and he urged Washington to use its power for the good of all.

"America is needed - an America that is strong, democratic and sure of itself - for the entire world, not just for Americans," he said. "We are seeing that if it's bad for America, it's bad for us all."

He said many world leaders, including those in Russia and Iran, are eager for improved relations with Washington, and he urged Obama not to miss the opportunity.

For many Americans, Russia has moved to the top of the list of rogue nations, Gorbachev said. He expressed hope that Obama would usher in a new period in U.S.-Russian relations when he becomes president in January.

Russia shocked the West with its invasion of neighboring Georgia in August. And when most world leaders were extending congratulations to Obama on his victory, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to station short-range missiles in Kaliningrad on NATO's borders if the United States pushed ahead with missile defense sites in Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev said it was not an attempt to test the young president-elect.

"This was simply something from a past era," he said. "As you do to us, we will do to you. t We don't need this."

He urged Obama to "muster his courage" and reconsider the decision to station missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in negotiating arms reduction treaties and ending the Cold War.

In the interview at the Gorbachev Foundation, his Moscow think tank, he was relaxed and seemingly comfortable in his statesman-like role. Although popular abroad, he commands little attention in Russia, where many blame him for the Soviet collapse.

Even so, he remains politically active in Moscow, where he co-owns one of the few newspapers still willing to criticize the Kremlin and plans to create a new political party.

Gorbachev is cautious in his criticism of the political system created by Vladimir Putin, who in his eight years as president brought parliament and regional governors under Kremlin control. But he has nothing but praise for Putin himself, whose popularity and power remain unchallenged in his new role as prime minister.

Under Medvedev, Putin's protege who took over in May, Russia is moving quickly to change the constitution to extend the presidential term from four years to six years. Many see this as opening the way for an early election and Putin's return to the Kremlin, but Gorbachev said this was unlikely.

Iraqi parliament approves landmark US military pact

AFP, Baghdad

Iraq's parliament on Thursday approved a landmark military pact that will see all US troops withdraw by the end of 2011, eight years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and plunged the country into chaos.

After 11 months of hard-nosed negotiations with Washington and a flurry of internal negotiations leading up to the vote, the pact was approved by 149 members of the 198 who attended the session of the 275-member assembly. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shiite-led government succeeded in corralling a comfortable majority to support the historic agreement, including the main blocs representing the country's Sunni and Kurdish minorities.

"This is an historic day for the great people of Iraq," Maliki said in a televised address after the parliamentary vote.

"We have achieved one of our most important accomplishments by signing an agreement for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq, and restoring the sovereignty that we lost more than two decades ago," he said.

"(The agreement) restores Iraq and its national sovereignty, preserves its wealth, and returns it to the international community as a free country."

The agreement was approved by the cabinet a week ago and is now virtually guaranteed to be ratified by Iraq's presidential council.

US President George W. Bush hailed parliament's approval of the "historic" agreement, saying in a statement that it "affirms the growth of Iraq's democracy and increasing ability to secure itself."

The measure would govern some 150,000 US troops stationed in over 400 bases when their UN mandate expires at the end of the year, giving the Iraqi government veto power over virtually all of their operations.

It marks a coming-of-age for Maliki's government, which drove a hard bargain with Washington, securing a number of concessions over nearly a year of tough negotiations.

The accord has still drawn fire from certain quarters, including followers of the hardline Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who reject any agreement with the United States.

As the voting on the pact began, several Sadrist MPs pounded tables in a bid to hinder the vote, chanting "Yes, yes to Iraqt No, no, to the occupation," but the 30-member bloc failed to defeat the agreement.

The vote came after a flurry of last-minute negotiations in which the main Sunni parties secured a package of political reforms from the government and a commitment to hold a referendum on the pact no later than July 30.

Should the Iraqi government decide to cancel the pact after the referendum it would have to give Washington one year's notice, meaning that troops would be allowed to remain in the country only until the summer of 2010.

The international agreement will be binding on US president-elect Barack Obama when he assumes office next year, but he could also unilaterally cancel the pact with a year's notice or withdraw all US troops at any time.

The pact was made possible in part by dramatic improvements in security over the past year, with US and Iraqi forces largely containing the violence and the chaos that erupted in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion and Saddam's ouster.

But moments before the vote, two people were killed and more than two dozen wounded in separate suicide bombings in northern Iraq targeting local security forces, underscoring the lingering violence in the country.

In the bloodiest attack, south of the city of Mosul, a suicide car bomb rammed into a police patrol, killing two civilians and wounding 25 others, including 15 policemen, police said.

AIDS cases in Asia to hit 10m by 2010: Experts

AFP, Manila

Cases of HIV/AIDS could hit 10 million in Asia by 2010 -- more than doubling the current estimate-unless nations take stronger steps to control the disease, experts warned on Friday.

Meanwhile there could be 500,000 new cases each year as infection rates rise among men having sex with other men.

Some 50 million women are being endangered by the high-risk behaviour of husbands and boyfriends, said Amala Reddy, of the Joint United Nations Programme on Aids. The new estimates were announced by officials at the unveiling of an online database on HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region.

The site, at www.aidsdatahub.org, contains information on HIV prevalence, risk behaviour and government response in various Asian countries and even in regions within these countries.

It brings all information on HIV/AIDS in Asia to one place where it can be accessed by governments, non-government organisations and researchers, the experts said at the Asia Development Bank headquarters in Manila.

Reddy conceded that the situation in the Asia-Pacific was not as bad as in Africa, where as much as 20 percent of the population in some countries may be infected.

In Asia, the disease would likely infect three to five percent at most and was still concentrated among high-risk groups like sex workers, intravenous drug users and men having sex with men, she said.

But she warned there was still a great risk as there were an estimated 75 million men in Asia who frequented prostitutes and 10 million prostitutes.

There were 20 million intravenous drug users and men who had sex with men-both bisexuals and homosexuals.

In addition, there were 50 million women at risk because they were the wives or girlfriends of men who engaged in high-risk behaviour, she added.

She warned that in many Asian countries, the HIV/AIDS prevalence was rising among men who engaged in sex with other men.

In some Asian countries, such men may continue to have sex with their wives and other women, she added.

ADB special adviser Ian Anderson said that while the relative number of HIV/AIDS infected people in the Asia-Pacific are small, they could have a serious effect as most of them are in their most economically-productive years.

"Because it is relatively small, this is the time to keep it small. So we won't have to put the genie back in the bottle later," he said.