Laurent Gbagbo accuses France of assassination attempt amid fresh fighting and desperation on the streets of Abidjan Ivory Coast’s incumbent leader caught France and the rest of the world by surprise when he refused to surrender, accused Nicolas Sarkozy of an assassination plot, and defiantly held out as rebels attempted to storm his underground bunker. French ministers had confidently predicted that Laurent Gbagbo could cede power within hours, ending the west African country’s four-month crisis. A TV station run by his rival, Alassane Ouattara, played clips from Downfall, a German film about the final days of Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin. But France, the former colonial power, was forced to admit that negotiations for Gbagbo’s surrender had collapsed on Wednesday. Troops loyal to Ouattara launched a ferocious assault on his presidential residence but met with unexpectedly stiff resistance. Gbagbo told French TV channel LCI that his army had only called for a ceasefire, not surrender. “I’m not a kamikaze,” he said by phone. “I love life. My voice is not the voice of a martyr, no, no, no, I’m not looking for death. It’s not my aim to die. “For peace to return to Ivory Coast, I and Ouattara, the two of us have to talk.” Later he told a French radio station: “I am in the residence, the residence of president of the republic. When it rains, can’t one take shelter inside one’s house? We are not at the negotiating stage. And my departure from where? To go where?” Gbagbo’s characteristic play for time dashed hopes that the conflict, which is causing a humanitarian crisis, would be over on Tuesday. Instead there was still a frantic search for food and water in Abidjan and a stench of corpses in the streets. “The fighting is terrible here, the explosions are so heavy my building is shaking,” Alfred Kouassi, who lives near Gbagbo’s residence in the commercial capital, told Reuters. “We can hear automatic gunfire and the thud of heavy weapons. There’s shooting all over the place. Cars are speeding in all directions and so are the fighters.” The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said fighting resumed after talks led by the UN and France to secure Gbagbo’s departure failed. “The negotiations which were carried out for hours yesterday between the entourage of Laurent Gbagbo and Ivorian authorities have failed because of Gbagbo’s intransigence,” Juppé told parliament in Paris, adding that “words have given way to weapons”. Gbagbo, who has ruled Ivory Coast since 2000, resisted pressure to sign a document renouncing his claim to power. His spokesman, Ahoua Don Mello, said: “If Gbagbo has refused to sign the documents they [the UN and France] presented to him yesterday, it is because they proposed something that had no legal and judicial basis.” France’s intervention in support of extraordinary UN air strikes on Gbagbo’s arsenal on Monday night infuriated the incumbent leader, who blames Paris for supporting the north of the country in a 2002-03 civil war. Gbagbo’s spokesman in Paris, Toussaint Alain, told Reuters: “We accuse France of seeking to assassinate President Gbagbo. President Sarkozy is organising the assassination of President Gbagbo. “France will be held responsible for the death of President Gbagbo, his wife and family members and all those who are inside the residence, which is being bombarded by the French army.” Witnesses reported seeing French tanks in the streets of Abidjan, but while the French military confirmed that fighting was under way around Gbagbo’s residence, it denied its troops were involved. A spokesman for Ouattara, the internationally recognised winner of last November’s election, said his fighters were storming Gbagbo’s residence. They had reached the gates of the presidential compound only to see heavy weapons ranged against them, he added, so the operation would take time. Ouattara’s forces have been ordered not to kill Gbagbo, said another spokesman, Patrick Achi. But residents said militias close to Gbagbo and his presidential guard were putting up a stiff resistance, even as most soldiers from the regular army had heeded a call to lay down their arms. Despite the fighting, desperate civilians in the north of the city ventured outside to hunt for water and food. The streets were generally deserted save for these lone scavengers, many of whom walked with their hands in the air to show they were noncombatants. “We haven’t slept, we haven’t eaten, we’ve had nothing to drink,” said Mariam, 17, balancing a plastic container of water on her head and wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Obama Girl” emblazoned in black. “We are all going to die. Even the water we do get is dirty.” Other residents told Reuters they had already walked 10 miles in their quest for drinking water. No one wanted to be out on the streets after a midday curfew imposed by Ouattara for fear of being taken for a pro-Gbagbo fighter. Even in the outskirts of Yopougon, one of Gbagbo’s strongest inner-city bastions, there were demands for him to step down – perhaps not surprising given the nearby presence of patrolling Ouattara troops who seized this neighbourhood on Monday. Ibrahim Cisse, 29, said: “We are just waiting for him to go. It’s Alassane who we are banking on now.” Several other people said pro-Ouattara soldiers had behaved well towards the local population. But they complained that water and electricity supplies went down at the same time as their main assault on Monday and have not been restored. Rubbish was piling up in mounds by the roadside and decaying corpses identified by locals as pro-Gbagbo militiamen remain uncollected. “Tell the people the smell is going everywhere,” 21-year-old Lassane Kone told Reuters. Cash machines are empty, shops are shut and supplies are running out. Public services are paralysed, with ambulances unable to travel in case they are fired on. Those in need of medical attention have nowhere to turn. A war economy has sprung up rapidly. Mariam said the price of atieke – the ground manioc which is one of the staples of the Abidjan diet – has tripled in the space of a few days. At a Ouattara base camp nearby, groups of women circulated between soldiers selling packets of atieke and little sachets of frozen fruit juices. “We are selling a bit so we can eat,” said one vendor. Many of Ivory Coast’s children have been stripped of their innocence. “We heard gunfire, Kalashnikovs, cannons, all that,” said one 11-year-old, interviewed by Save the Children. “It makes me afraid. It makes me feel sad to see all people flee, people displaced by the war, all that, it makes me sad … they were shooting all the time, morning, midday, evening … we will live with this. It hurts me.” The child, who was not named by the charity, added: “Here we eat but we are not full, we eat little. I would like Abidjan to calm down so that we can return home. I want to go back to school. “We need peace in the country. We need a good president too.” Last year’s long-delayed election in the world’s top cocoa producing nation was meant to draw a line under the civil war, but Gbagbo’s refusal to cede power has plunged the country into violence that has killed more than 1,500 people. The international criminal court prosecutor said on Tuesday he was in talks with west African states about referring alleged atrocities in the Ivory Coast to the court after a reported massacre in the west of the country. Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo Alassane Ouattara France David Smith guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara launched what the local media is describing as a “final assault” on Laurent Gbagbo’s bunker today, aiming to capture the rogue president. “We are going to his residence to fetch him and put an end to this comedy,” a spokesman for Ouattara’s side tells the…
Continue reading …On last night’s Daily Show , Jon Stewart summed up the continuing budget crisis thusly: “So Democrats want $30 billion in cuts, Republicans want $60 billion in cuts. Rather than both sides going, well, how about $45 (billion), we’re going to shut the government down.” And, true to form, Stewart’s not…
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Vested interests cause both our financial system and the nuclear industry to compulsively underestimate risk The consequences of the Japanese earthquake – especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant – resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark lessons about risks, and about how badly markets and societies can manage them. Of course, in one sense, there is no comparison between the tragedy of the earthquake – which has left more than 25,000 people dead or missing – and the financial crisis, to which no such acute physical suffering can be attributed. But when it comes to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there is a common theme in the two events. Experts in both the nuclear and finance industries assured us that new technology had all but eliminated the risk of catastrophe. Events proved them wrong: not only did the risks exist, but their consequences were so enormous that they easily erased all the supposed benefits of the systems that industry leaders promoted. Before the Great Recession, America’s economic gurus – from the head of the Federal Reserve to the titans of finance – boasted that we had learned to master risk. “Innovative” financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps enabled the distribution of risk throughout the economy. We now know that they deluded not only the rest of society, but even themselves. These wizards of finance, it turned out, didn’t understand the intricacies of risk, let alone the dangers posed by “fat-tail distributions” – a statistical term for rare events with huge consequences, sometimes called “black swans” . Events that were supposed to happen once in a century – or even once in the lifetime of the universe – seemed to happen every 10 years. Worse, not only was the frequency of these events vastly underestimated; so was the astronomical damage they would cause – something like the meltdowns that keep dogging the nuclear industry. Research in economics and psychology helps us understand why we do such a bad job in managing these risks. We have little empirical basis for judging rare events, so it is difficult to arrive at good estimates. In such circumstances, more than wishful thinking can come into play: we might have few incentives to think hard at all. On the contrary, when others bear the costs of mistakes, the incentives favour self-delusion. A system that socialises losses and privatises gains is doomed to mismanage risk. Indeed, the entire financial sector was rife with agency problems and externalities. Ratings agencies had incentives to give good ratings to the high-risk securities produced by the investment banks that were paying them. Mortgage originators bore no consequences for their irresponsibility, and even those who engaged in predatory lending or created and marketed securities that were designed to lose did so in ways that insulated them from civil and criminal prosecution. This brings us to the next question: are there other “black swan” events waiting to happen? Unfortunately, some of the really big risks that we face today are most likely not even rare events. The good news is that such risks can be controlled at little or no cost. The bad news is that doing so faces strong political opposition – for there are people who profit from the status quo. We have seen two of the big risks in recent years, but have done little to bring them under control. By some accounts, how the last crisis was managed may have increased the risk of a future financial meltdown. Too-big-to-fail banks, and the markets in which they participate, now know that they can expect to be bailed out if they get into trouble. As a result of this moral hazard, these banks can borrow on favourable terms, giving them a competitive advantage based not on superior performance, but on political strength. While some of the excesses in risk-taking have been curbed, predatory lending and unregulated trading in obscure, over-the-counter derivatives continue. Incentive structures that encourage excess risk-taking remain virtually unchanged. So, too, while Germany has shut down its older nuclear reactors, in the US and elsewhere, even plants that have the same flawed design as Fukushima continue to operate. The nuclear industry’s very existence is dependent on hidden public subsidies – costs borne by society in the event of nuclear disaster, as well as the costs of the still-unmanaged disposal of nuclear waste. So much for unfettered capitalism! For the planet, there is one more risk, which, like the other two, is almost a certainty: global warming and climate change. If there were other planets to which we could move at low cost in the event of the almost certain outcome predicted by scientists, one could argue that this is a risk worth taking. But there aren’t, so it isn’t. The costs of reducing emissions pale in comparison to the possible risks the world faces. And that is true even if we rule out the nuclear option (the costs of which were always underestimated). To be sure, coal and oil companies would suffer, and big polluting countries – like the US – would obviously pay a higher price than those with a less profligate lifestyle. In the end, those gambling in Las Vegas lose more than they gain. As a society, we are gambling – with our big banks, with our nuclear power facilities, with our planet. As in Las Vegas, the lucky few – the bankers that put our economy at risk and the owners of energy companies that put our planet at risk – may walk off with a mint. But on average and almost certainly , we as a society, like all gamblers, will lose. That, unfortunately, is a lesson of Japan’s disaster that we continue to ignore at our peril. © Project Syndicate 2011 Japan Nuclear power Nuclear waste Financial crisis Banking Regulators Global recession Climate change Natural disasters and extreme weather Pollution Global economy Joseph Stiglitz guardian.co.uk
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Four-part ITV drama, scripted by Julian Fellowes, will be screened in 2012 to coincide with centenary of disaster Linus Roache and Geraldine Somerville are to head the cast of Julian Fellowes’s dramatisation of the Titanic story. Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, is scripting a series to be screened by ITV next year, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the “unsinkable” ship’s disastrous maiden voyage. Roache, who has appeared in US series Law & Order and films such as Batman Begins, recently appeared in Coronation Street alongside his father William Roache (Ken Barlow). Somerville is known for her role in the Harry Potter films , playing the young wizard’s mother Lily, as well as appearing in BBC1′s Survivors. The cast for the four-part series also includes Celia Imrie, Toby Jones and Perdita Weeks. It begins filming in Hungary later this month, made by Bafta-winning producer Nigel Stafford Clark, whose successes have included Bleak House and Warriors. Television industry The Titanic Drama Television ITV guardian.co.uk
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Haddock flakes keep their shape and make the perfect partner for peppery watercress When we talk about comfort food, fishcakes are always mentioned. Tasty lumps of potato and fish, gently fried – what’s not to like? Salmon is the classic filling, but haddock works just as well. It has a juicy texture and the dense flakes don’t get too mushy when bound with other ingredients. Haddock comes into season at the beginning of May; if you can’t find it in your local fishmonger yet buy it frozen, or use hake instead. I have also added in watercress, which is currently in peak season. It has a delicious, peppery bitterness, which contrasts well with the haddock, and is enhanced by the lemon rind, another ingredient I like to use in fish- cakes. Like most recipes, you can adapt this one by adding other fish and herbs depending on your preference. These fishcakes can be frozen for up to three months, so if you have time make a big batch. They are really moist so you don’t need any sauce – just a squeeze of lemon, or a spoon of mayonnaise if you must. Serve with a watercress or tomato salad. Serves 4 300ml of milk A sprig of thyme 1 clove of garlic 500g haddock fillet 300g floury potatoes eg Désirée, peeled and diced Salt and pepper Lemon rind from half a lemon 1 large handful of watercress leaves, chopped. Extra for salad 3 tbsp plain flour for dusting 3 tbsp breadcrumbs for coating 1 egg, beaten Olive oil In a pan, add the milk, thyme and garlic and bring to the boil. Add the haddock. Lower the heat and simmer for three minutes, then leave to one side – the fish will continue to cook as it cools. Bring the potatoes to the boil in salted water and cook for about 10 minutes. Drain well and mash lightly with a fork so the texture is still coarse. Discard the milk liquid and flake the haddock. Then add it to the crushed potatoes. Mix gently so you do not make everything mushy. Add some seasoning, the lemon rind and chopped watercress, and mould into eight fishcakes. Allow to sit in the fridge for five minutes. Place the flour, breadcrumbs and beaten egg mixture separately on three plates. Dip both sides of the fishcakes into the flour, then the egg, and finally the breadcrumbs. Shake off any excess. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan over a medium heat. Cook the fishcakes in batches, turning every couple of minutes to evenly colour. They should take around five minutes. Check they are heated through by sticking a skewer into the middle and feeling on removal if it is hot. If necessary, flash through a hot oven for a couple of minutes. Serve with a squeeze of lemon. • Angela Hartnett is chef patron at Murano restaurant and consults at Whitechapel Gallery and Dining Room, London Fish recipes Food & drink Angela Hartnett guardian.co.uk
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A new exhibition reveals the astonishing habits of butterflies – including one that drinks a caiman’s tears The sandy-bottomed puddle in a tent on the Natural History Museum ‘s front lawn in London does not look the most alluring of aphrodisiacs. But this shallow pool filled with an elixir of water, salts and minerals will be lapped up by hundreds of male butterflies eager to impress their mates. Bundles of minerals extracted from the puddle will be presented to females, helping them lay more eggs in Sensational Butterflies , a new exhibition showing how these insects taste, smell, emit surprising squeaks – and are daring enough to drink the tears of a caiman. The swallowtails, blue morphos and other live tropical butterflies will be joined for the first time at the museum by the common birdwing, a spectacular black-and-yellow creature and one of the largest butterflies in the world. The very largest of the birdwings, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing – named in honour of Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII – is critically endangered, and could not be brought to the exhibition. Another birdwing caused Victorian entomologist Alfred Russell Wallace such excitement that he “felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death” when he first caught one, forcing him to retire with a splitting headache for the rest of the day. Luke Brown , the manager of the butterfly house, said it was a great thrill rather than a headache to release the common birdwing into the exhibition after being satisfied for the first time that he could obtain specimens from a sustainable farm. All the tropical butterflies in the museum’s butterfly house are bred from common species in their country of origin including Belize, Costa Rica and parts of Africa and Asia. Their chrysalises are packed in cotton wool and flown to Britain, whereupon Brown and his colleagues painstakingly glue each one to a branch in the hatchery. Visitors can then watch the butterflies struggle from their chrysalises, slowly pump up their crumpled wings and take flight. “I love butterflies because they always tickle,” said Sabina O’Harvey, aged 5, one of a group of children from Nightingale primary school in Hackney given a preview of the exhibition, which opens on 12 April. “One landed on my nose and it was ticklish. They were all beautiful.” “I like all of them. I like them when they fly on to my hand, and I like them when they drink,” said six-year-old Hannah. “I’d like them in my home. I’m going to get two and I’m going to feed them every day.” Obsessed with butterflies ever since he walked into a butterfly house as a six-year-old 30 years ago, Brown admitted he still struggles to comprehend the wonder of metamorphosis, and the fact that in as little as one week caterpillars break down and rebuild themselves into butterflies. “To create a completely different creature from this biological gloop is just a natural wonder of the world,” he said. The exhibition reveals there is more than just the miracle of metamorphosis in a butterfly’s life. Scientists are still learning how butterflies use their senses and communicate with each other through sight, smell and sound. Butterflies feed off blood, sweat and tears. Although there are no live butterflies or moths that feed on blood at the museum, there are some tear-drinkers, including Dryas iulia , which will deliberately plunge its proboscis in the eye of a caiman to irritate it and cause it to produce tears, which it then drinks. As the exhibition reveals, butterflies taste with their feet, patting leaves to establish if they are suitable for laying their eggs on. Butterflies can see more colours than any other animal and the exhibition allows visitors to experience what it is like to see through a compound eye. In the butterfly house, visitors can crawl through a tunnel as if they were caterpillars becoming a butterfly and listen to the strange noises emitted by pupae. If disturbed, some pupae will squeak loudly, a defensive mechanism to scare off potential predators. The exhibition reveals that the noisiest butterfly is the cracker butterfly, which makes its cracking sound to communicate with others as well as to warn off predators. Blue morpho butterflies, which are flying in the exhibition, have ears at the base of their wings which, when magnified, look a bit like fried eggs. A scientist is currently investigating whether these ears are used to detect prey: the spectacular morpho is often eaten by bats. Among the first visitors were children who were amazed to learn that lemons grow on trees, while several said they had never seen a butterfly in the wild or in their parks or gardens at home. For some, however, the miraculous sensory powers of butterflies were a bit alarming. Samuel Jacob, five, concluded: “I think they’re scary.” Butterflies Endangered species Wildlife Conservation Animals Insects Museums Natural History Museum Patrick Barkham guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …India has slapped a ban on all food imports from Japan out of fear of radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. The ban will last for three months or until “credible information is available that the radiation hazard has subsided to acceptable limits,” the Indian government says. Many other countries…
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Days after arrest of dissident artist Ai Weiwei, singer who became synonymous with protest movement plays Beijing In China, irony is usually just around the next corner. In the week that Ai Weiwei, the artist and activist, was arrested, Bob Dylan was allowed in to play Beijing. Nobody knows for certain why either decision was taken – but that didn’t bother the 6,000 people who filed into the Workers’ Stadium Arena last night to hear the grandfather of the protest song play his first gig in the land that brooks no dissent. Dylan gigs are famously variable: songs are often transformed beyond recognition. Last night, however, he was singing to the culture ministry’s tune: the concert was performed “strictly according to an approved programme”, a sign of official nervousness that has persisted since Björk’s 2008 Shanghai concert, when she chanted “Tibet! Tibet!” while singing her song Declare Independence. That outburst resulted in a dearth of big-name performers in China. Apart from Beyoncé in late 2009 and Usher in July 2010, they have mostly been B-list acts. Last year, Dylan himself was refused permission to play. Why the change of heart? One former culture minister told the Guardian it may be something as simple as a change of heart in the Chinese embassy in Washington, where officials pore over the record of any artist hoping to play in China, examining their biography, opinions and – above all – previous comments on China. “As personnel change all the time, changes in decisions often only reflect who is in charge. Some are bold, some are cautious,” Shi Baojun says. That doesn’t entirely explain why now, though: “You have to understand the government’s always balancing the need to look liberal with the need to keep control,” says Shi. “They have so many audiences, and there’s often no point in looking for logic because there isn’t much, or any.” The set-list featured some Dylan standards, greeted with increasing enthusiasm by the audience – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, Tangled Up in Blue, Simple Twist of Fate. He also showcased some more recent work – Lovesick, Thunder on the Mountain, Beyond Here Lies Nothin’. From a distance, in his white stetson and drainpipe trousers with a military yellow stripe down the side, he could still pass for the slim youth of decades past. He still has the same tripping, graceful step, although he handles his voice with care now, as if it’s a fragile instrument he doesn’t quite trust. Still, as he growls, rasps, whoops and slides through his repertoire, the effect is still authentic, the attack and the attitude still, as ever, disconcerting and compelling. A guy in his early thirties sitting next to me, Song Xiao Feng, remarked coolly: “We’re not here for the music, we’re here for the legend.” But by the time Dylan reached his encores – Like a Rolling Stone, All Along the Watchtower and finally, Forever Young – most of the audience – about two-thirds Chinese, one-third foreign – were finally on their feet. He wasn’t for everyone – one Chinese guy behind us said: “He’s not singing, he’s talking.” But to most, it looked like he was nailing it. The only words Dylan spoke during the whole evening came at the end, when he introduced the band members. Yet he never seemed the sometimes reclusive and withdrawn performer of recent reports. He looked just like the legend that had drawn most of the audience to pay what are, for Beijing, serious prices – ranging from £30 up to £200. As he left, a young Chinese man, Gong Ping, used a very distinctive Chinese word of respect: “People say he’s out of date, but he has experience and wisdom. He’s a ‘sheng ren’ – a sage, like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King.” As the audience clapped and cheered at the end, the feeling was that we’d seen a unique event for the first, and perhaps last, time in China. Bob Dylan China Ai Weiwei guardian.co.uk
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Security forces target homes of former regime members who have played a vital role in pushing peace talks with insurgents International and Afghan security forces are setting back the embryonic peace process by raiding the homes of former Taliban officials instrumental in promoting talks with insurgents, according to diplomats and leaders of the former hardline regime. At a time when the US has called for a “diplomatic surge” to solve the conflict, the most recent target of the greatly expanded night raids programme, which employs electronic eavesdropping and special forces units on a major scale, was Mullah Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Islamabad and a proponent of peace talks. He is regarded as sufficiently important by the international community that last year an international travel ban on him was lifted, so he could visit London for talks with British officials. Just over three weeks ago, a mixed force of foreign troops and agents from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security attempted to enter his house late at night. Zaeef was not present, but there was an armed standoff between the raiding party and his guards, who also work for the directorate. The raid was called off after what Hamid Karzai’s spokesman described as “interventions by the government leadership”. Abdul Hakim Mujahed, a former Taliban envoy to the UN, said security forces had been tracking a target who had gone into Zaeef’s house; he complained the government of Hamid Karzai was “too weak” to stop such operations. The incident is one of several where former high-ranking Taliban involved in reaching out to current insurgents in order to “reintegrate” them into peaceful life have had their houses raided, or attempts have been made to raid them. “We get phoned up by HPC [High Peace Council] members all the time, complaining that their house has just been raided,” said Mujahed. The HPC, set up by Karzai to foster peace talks, includes many former Taliban officials. Mujahed said western military officers and diplomats were failing to co-ordinate their efforts: “It’s really unhelpful, but we have these different sets of players that are really bad at talking to each other.” An official for Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Kabul said a “reintegration event” had been taking place at Zaeef’s house at the time, and that the security forces would not have interfered had they known about it. He also said Isaf soldiers had been present only to support a directorate-led operation. The Taliban’s former commerce minister, Abdul Razak, also a member of the HPC, said such raids were hugely damaging to efforts to bring peace because they sowed distrust among insurgents considering an end to violence. “They say to us: look, you are with the government now but you can’t even stop your houses being raided. Why should we come for peace, too?” he said. Razak said he was himself had been the subject of a raid, last May, when he was entertaining some of his fellow former Guantánamo Bay detainees for lunch. A team of US soldiers tied up the men and held the women and children at gunpoint as they searched “every last thing” in the house, he said. In November Isaf troops and directorate agents made an aborted night raid on Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban education minister who sits in Afghanistan’s upper parliament. Rahmani emphasised the importance of being able to meet people freely. “Everyone is coming to us – people who don’t like the government, people with peace plans,” Rahmani said. Rahmani and others have long argued that the Taliban should be allowed to set up an office outside the country, with Turkey often suggested as a location, where they could meet representatives from all sides of the conflict without fear of being arrested. Karzai’s spokesman suggested the Isaf was not solely to blame for the mistaken raids, saying the government had told “both our international partners and our security forces” that the private homes of former Taliban living in peace must “be immune from intrusion”. An Isaf spokesman said the international force “fully supports the Afghan government’s reintegration and reconciliation efforts”, but those efforts were complicated by the huge increase in the number of Isaf operations to kill and capture insurgent leaders. “All of these targeted operations are co-ordinated with the Afghan security forces, and all of them have Afghan security force involvement,” he said. “We share our intelligence and will adjust our operations focus based on input and feedback from our Afghan partners.” Michael Semple, a former diplomat closely involved in reconciliation issues, said there were a number of possible explanations for the aborted raid on Zaeef’s house, including that his enemies may have fed false intelligence to security, and the enthusiasm of US counter-terrorism (CT) forces. “As long as there is a terrorist threat, Afghan false reports and CT forces in the field, this kind of thing will happen,” he said. Taliban Afghanistan Hamid Karzai Nato Jon Boone guardian.co.uk
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