Pheeew. Holbrooke strikes again – almost:

SHAIKH SHAHZAID CAMP, Pakistan — U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, red-faced and sweaty, sat on the dirt floor of a stifling tent as Aslam Khan, a 38-year-old laborer, spoke haltingly of his family’s panicked flight from a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban forces in their mountain village, three hours north of here.

Holbrooke asked some questions about the Taliban but got few answers. “Are these all your children?” he asked with a smile. Yes, Khan said, he had nine.

“Your daughter is beautiful,” Holbrooke continued, nodding toward a young woman who sat quietly at the edge of the family. Her head was covered in a royal-blue scarf that revealed only her stunningly dark eyes.

“That’s not my daughter,” Khan said abruptly. After an awkward silence, the woman explained that she was a Pakistani police officer. It was unclear whether she was there to protect Holbrooke from the refugees, or to monitor what they told him.

Something tells me that explaining away near-gaffes like this one as a problem of implementation won’t be any easier than it was last time.

H/t Chris.

I guess things were getting a little dull:

More than 100 Romanians forced from their homes by racist attacks are likely to abandon Northern Ireland.

They were forced to take shelter in a church overnight, are currently taking refuge in a leisure centre and will offered temporary homes in student accommodation.

A mother of two, who said she only wanted to be known by her first name Maria, said everyone was now adamant that they wanted to return to Romania.

Maria said that attacks on their homes, mostly the smashing of windows, had been intensifying over the last two weeks but came to a head on Tuesday when racist thugs broke in and threatening her and her children.

Read the full article.

Check out ex-spook Bob Baer on power politics in Iran, in TNR:

Iran is not a theocracy. It is a military dictatorship headed by Khamenei and advised by a coterie of generals from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Army, as well as hard-liners in the secret police. Ahmadinejad is little more than the spokesman for this group. He may have a say in the day-to-day management of the economy and other parts of Iranian administration–but all important decisions, particularly those related to Iran’s national security, including rigging presidential elections, are made by Khamenei.

Read the full article.

As if there weren’t enough problems in the neighborhood… after years of moribund existence, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is in the news. See these two items in The Economist: Unrest in Uzbekistan: Fata Fergana and The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan: Here Comes Trouble. CTlab friend and Jihadica frontman Thomas Hegghammer has also pointed out a new Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) report on an IMU successor organization of sorts, the Islamic Jihad Union, authored by FFI Fellow Einar Wigen. Go read. 

An interesting byte on CTlab friend Tom Johnson, of the Naval Postgraduate School, and his involvement with Canadian COIN approaches in RC South. I had the opportunity to meet up with Tom briefly when he blew through Kabul on his way to Kandahar; his work on Taliban messaging is second to none.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — International forces have failed to quash the insurgency in Afghanistan because they have failed to understand the Taliban’s common-touch campaign, a key architect of Canada’s bold new “model village” strategy said Sunday. At its heart, Prof. Thomas Johnson said, the counter-insurgency is “essentially an information war” the Taliban have been winning hands down. “We need a change in strategy,” said Johnson, the director of the Program for Culture and Conflict studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “All counter-insurgency is local (and) this is a rural insurgency. We need to go where the Taliban are operating 24/7, 365 days a year.” The only way to do that is to leave the military-secured bases that are essentially garrisons cut off from the country and people around them and go into villages on a full-time basis, he said. “We need to embolden the traditional villager system so they can give the Taliban the finger,” he said in an interview at the Canadian out-reach compound in Kandahar city. Johnson’s work caught the eye of Canadian Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance, the senior military commander in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province. The two men, along with a couple of other experts, joined forces to design Canada’s leading-edge approach of trying to normalize small population centres on the five main approaches to Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city.

Read the full article here.