US Marines and Afghan troops were making slow progress as they came under attack from snipers on the third day of a major offensive to seize the Taleban’s stronghold in southern Afghanistan.

Multiple firefights broke out in different areas in and around Marjah, the last militant stronghold in the country’s most violent province, Helmand. The US troops leading Operation Moshtarak ”” “Togetherness” ”” advanced only 500 yards today. Marine units twice tried to capture the town’s central bazaar, only to be pushed back.

Coming under heavy fire and sniper attacks, and faced with booby-trapped buildings, the US Marines were forced to call in Harrier jets and attacks helicopters armed with Hellfire missiles.

“There’s still a good bit of the land to be cleared,” said Captain Abraham Spice, a spokesman of the US Marines. “We’re moving at a very deliberative pace….”

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Most American-Chinese disputes reflect China’s unwillingness to endanger domestic goals for international ends. It won’t commit to binding greenhouse gas cuts because these could reduce economic growth and (again) jobs. On Iran, it values its oil investments more than it fears Iranian nukes. Likewise, it worries that unrest in North Korea could send refugees spilling across the border. Because Taiwan is regarded as part of China, U.S. arms sales there become domestic interference. And censorship is needed to maintain one-party control.

China’s worldview threatens America’s geopolitical and economic interests. Just recently, 19 U.S. trade associations wrote the Obama administration warning that new Chinese rules for “indigenous innovation” could “exclude a wide array of U.S. firms” from the Chinese market — or force them to turn over advanced technology. (British firms are so incensed by “overwhelming protectionism” that some may quit China, reports the Telegraph newspaper.)

It would be a tragedy if these two superpowers began regarding each other as adversaries. But that’s the drift. Heirs to a 2,000-year cultural tradition — and citizens of the world’s largest country — the Chinese have an innate sense of superiority, Jacques writes. Americans, too, have a sense of superiority, thinking that our values — the belief in freedom, individualism and democracy — reflect universal aspirations.

Greater conflicts and a collision of national egos seem inevitable. No longer should we sit passively while China’s trade and currency policies jeopardize jobs here and elsewhere. Political differences between the countries are increasingly hard to ignore. But given China’s growing power — and the world economy’s fragile state — a showdown may do no one any good. Miscalculation is leading us down dark alleys.

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Two dangers arise from this loss of Western self-confidence. One is of trying to placate China. The delay in Mr Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in order to smooth his visit to China in November gave too much ground, as well as turning an issue of principle into a bargaining chip. America needs to stand firmer. Beefing up the deterrent capacity of Taiwan, which China continues to threaten with hundreds of missiles, is in the interests of peace. Mr Obama should therefore proceed with the arms sales and European governments should back him. If American companies, such as Boeing, lose Chinese custom for political reasons, European firms should not be allowed to supplant them.

On the other hand the West should not be panicked into unnecessary confrontation. Rather than ganging up on China in an effort to “contain” it, the West would do better to get China to take up its share of the burden of global governance. Too often China wants the power due a global giant while shrugging off the responsibilities, saying that it is still a poor country. It must be encouraged to play its part””for instance, on climate change, on Iran and by allowing its currency to appreciate. As the world’s largest exporter, China’s own self-interest lies in a harmonious world order and robust trading system.

It is in the economic field that perhaps the biggest danger lies. Already the Obama administration has shown itself too ready to resort to trade sanctions against China. If China now does the same using a political pretext, while the cheapness of its currency keeps its trade surplus large, it is easy to imagine a clamour in Congress for retaliation met by a further Chinese nationalist backlash. That is why the administration and China’s government need to work together to pre-empt trouble.

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Senior Chinese military officers have proposed that their country boost defense spending, adjust PLA deployments, and possibly sell some U.S. bonds to punish Washington for its latest round of arms sales to Taiwan.

The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China’s National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency.

The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday.

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What is unusual about China’s reaction to these two traditional issues is the volume of its response and that it is threatening sanctions against American firms. It has just imposed penalties on American chicken imports, in retaliation for US protectionism against Chinese car tyres. The Chinese Government has been very truculent over the alleged hacking of Google and 30 other foreign companies by Chinese cyber-warriors, refusing to investigate ”” which bolsters the belief that the hackers work for the Government.

Nor is America the only Chinese target. The hackers also attacked departments of the Indian Government, including the Prime Minister’s office. In Indian eyes China has become increasingly provocative over the two countries’ long-running territorial disputes in the Himalayas, over which a short border war was fought in 1962. China has been building up its troop numbers along those disputed borders. And to this list you can also add the obstreperous stance China took in the Copenhagen climate change conference last December.

So what explains this apparent rise in Chinese belligerence?…

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The discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We’re quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.

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Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ordered the nation’s atomic energy agency on Sunday to begin producing a special form of uranium that can be used to power a medical reactor in Tehran, but that could also move the country much closer to possessing fuel usable in nuclear weapons.

The announcement Sunday came after several days of conflicting signals from Mr. Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials about whether they were ready to reopen negotiations about giving up much of their country’s fuel in exchange for enriched uranium from another country. The exchange would allow Iran to meet some of its energy needs, but would ease fears in the West because the fuel sent to Tehran would be in a form that would be very difficult to use in a bomb.

The deal fell apart when it was rejected by the leadership in Tehran.

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China has halted its military cooperation with the U.S. and threatened this week to sanction American companies involved in selling arms to Taiwan.

Beijing’s sharp reaction came after Washington announced a $6.4 billion weapons deal to Taiwan. It is something of a role reversal.

Usually, it has been the U.S. sanctioning China. But now, China is pushing back on a raft of contentious issues, from Washington’s efforts to seek sanctions against Iran to President Obama’s plan to meet Tibet’s exiled religious leader the Dalai Lama.

“Let The West Get Used To A Tough China,” was the headline this week in the Global Times, a jingoistic Chinese tabloid.

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Western diplomats at the UN are working on the first stages of a resolution that proposes further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme.

The measures include expanding travel bans and asset freezes on people connected with the nuclear industry.

The move comes despite Iran’s apparent acceptance of a deal to send most of its low-enriched uranium abroad in return for research reactor fuel rods.

Washington has called on Iran to match its words with actions.

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The Obama administration announced the sale Friday of $6 billion worth of Patriot anti-missile systems, helicopters, mine-sweeping ships and communications equipment to Taiwan in a long-expected move that sparked an angry protest from China.

In a strongly worded statement on Saturday, China’s Defense Ministry suspended military exchanges with the United States and summoned the U.S. defense attache to lodge a “solemn protest” over the sale, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

“Considering the severe harm and odious effect of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, the Chinese side has decided to suspend planned mutual military visits,” Xinhua quoted the ministry as saying. The Foreign Ministry said China also would put sanctions on U.S. companies supplying the equipment.

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China has denied any state involvement in alleged cyber attacks on Google and accused the US of double standards.

A Chinese industry ministry spokesman told the state-run Xinhua news agency that claims that Beijing was behind recent cyber attacks were “groundless”.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week asked China to investigate claims by Google that it had been targeted by China-based hackers.

The US search giant has threatened to withdraw from China.

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Mr. Drummond said that an attack originating in China was aimed at its corporate infrastructure.

While the full scope of the attacks on Google and several dozen other companies remains unclear, the events set off immediate alarms in Washington, where the Obama administration has previously expressed concern about international computer security and attacks on Western companies.

Neither the sequence of events leading to Google’s decision nor the company’s ultimate goal in rebuking China is fully understood. But this was not the first time that the company had considered withdrawing from China, according to a former company executive. It had clashed repeatedly with Chinese officials over censorship demands, the executive said.

Google said on Tuesday that that in its investigation of the attacks on corporations, it found that the Gmail accounts of Chinese and Tibetan activists, like Ms. Seldon, had been compromised in separate attacks involving phishing and spyware.

Independent security researchers said that at least 34 corporations had been targets of the attacks originating in China.

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The Archbishop of Sudan accused China on Monday of pursuing a damaging policy of economic gain in his country and urged Beijing to use its influence to help ease rising tension ahead of elections.

Archbishop Daniel Deng said Beijing, which imported $6.3 billion (3.9 billion pounds) of Sudanese crude oil in 2008, should try to help bring together parties at loggerheads over the full implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, including the delivery of credible elections.

“China is looking only for minerals, they are looking for economic benefit. That is all. That is damaging the country. They are not even making peace,” the Anglican archbishop said during a visit to Lambeth Palace in London.

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In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing and the killing a few days later of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, Washington is, as it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, obsessed with “dots” — and our inability to connect them. “The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots,” the president said Tuesday.

But for all the talk, two key dots have yet to be connected: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Northwest Airlines Flight 253 attacker, and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the trusted CIA informant turned assassin. Although a 23-year-old Nigerian engineering student and a 36-year-old Jordanian physician would seem to have little in common, they both exemplify a new grand strategy that al-Qaeda has been successfully pursuing for at least a year.

Throughout 2008 and 2009, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted al-Qaeda’s demise. In a May 2008 interview with The Washington Post, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden heralded the group’s “near strategic defeat.” And the intensified aerial drone attacks that President Obama authorized against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan last year were widely celebrated for having killed over half of its remaining senior leadership.

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A new U.S.-led initiative to revive Middle East peace talks faces steep hurdles even before it’s launched, with Israelis and Palestinians resisting new concessions despite a fresh application of American diplomacy.

President Barack Obama’s first efforts at brokering Middle East peace bore no fruit last year, and the White House now has crafted a two-year plan under which Israelis and Palestinians would hold regular, intense meetings to reach a final peace agreement.

Obama is sending his Mideast envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell, on a series of trips to the region and to Europe starting next week. He’s also enlisting the help of Arab allies, whose representatives are filing through Washington.

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The United States and China are headed for a rough patch in the early months of the new year as the White House appears set to sell a package of weapons to Taiwan and as President Obama plans to meet the Dalai Lama, U.S. officials and analysts said.

The Obama administration is expected to approve the sale of several billion dollars in Black Hawk helicopters and anti-missile batteries to Taiwan early this year, possibly accompanied by a plan gauging design and manufacturing capacity for diesel-powered submarines for the island, which China claims as its territory. The president is also preparing to meet the spiritual leader of Tibet, who is considered a separatist by Beijing. Obama made headlines last year when the White House, in an effort to generate goodwill from China, declined to meet the Dalai Lama, marking the first time in more than a decade that a U.S. president did not meet the religious leader during his occasional visits to Washington.

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Iran set a one-month deadline Saturday for the West to accept its counterproposal to a U.N.-drafted nuclear plan and warned that otherwise it will produce reactor fuel at a higher level of enrichment on its own.

The warning was a show of defiance and a hardening of Iran’s stance over its nuclear program, which the West fears masks an effort to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran insists its program is only for peaceful purposes, such as electricity production, and says it has no intention of making a bomb.

“We have given them an ultimatum. There is one month left and that is by the end of January,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, speaking on state television.

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What has happened, however, makes next year more fraught with challenges and danger than ever in dealing with Iran.

First, Iran was caught (again) cheating and lying about its nuclear program, especially when U.S. and other intelligence agencies revealed a new undeclared uranium enrichment facility near Qom, an installation the Iranians had tried to keep secret. So persistent has been the Iranian policy of deceit and of on-again, off-again co-operation that Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, lost his legendary patience with Iran and denounced the country’s approach.

Second, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election was obviously a rigged affair. The result has been an even greater grip on government and the economy of the Revolutionary Guards and the special police, the Basij, both under the control of the Supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A mixture of political thuggery, institutionalized corruption, religious inflexibility and a morbid suspicion of the West now permeates the Iranian government.

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Good morning. It’s an honor to for me to join this distinguished group of leaders from nations around the world. We come together here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. You would not be here unless you ”“ like me ”“ were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science. Unchecked, climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security, our economies, and our planet. That much we know.

So the question before us is no longer the nature of the challenge ”“ the question is our capacity to meet it. For while the reality of climate change is not in doubt, our ability to take collective action hangs in the balance.

I believe that we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of this common threat. And that is why I have come here today.

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US Special Envoy Lt Gen Scott Gration has also vowed to make saving the CPA a top priority of the Obama administration. However, the “inter-ethnic violence currently witnessed across much of Southern Sudan, the ongoing violence against civilians in Darfur, and the violent attacks on civilians being perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the south-west of the country,” was destabilizing the region, the church warned.

The escalation of violence “will make registration and voting in the elections and referendum very difficult,” the church warned. “The conclusion that is drawn is that this violence is intended to negatively affect the elections and referendum,” it concluded.

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Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.

But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

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Some of Ahmadinejad’s advisers urge him to provide Obama with a “fig leaf” to silence his domestic critics in the US. They argue that the Islamic Republic made a mistake by wrecking Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1979 when “students” raided the US Embassy in Tehran and made hostages of its diplomats. By sinking President Carter, who had been sympathetic to the revolution, the mullahs ended up with a hostile Ronald Reagan, who became the first, and so far only, US president to take military action against Iran, in 1988. Iran should not repeat that mistake by “Carterising Obama”, some Ahmadinejad advisers insist.

Unwilling to contemplate pre-emptive war, some may believe the only alternative is pre-emptive surrender. It is not. It is still possible to raise the cost of Iran’s nuclear ambitions by fully applying the sanctions already approved, but not implemented by the UN resolution and envisaged by the IAEA’s own rules. These include tight control of exports of all dual-use material and equipment to Iran, the inspection and impounding of suspect cargos on board ships and aircraft, and the termination of Iranian access to credit facilities and banking services used for its illicit nuclear project.

The full implementation of existing resolutions would send a signal to Tehran that its “cheat-and-retreat” strategy is not cost-free.

Obama had hoped to kick this can down the road with a mixture of negotiations and symbolic gestures. The latest revelations may make it difficult to continue that tactic. What he faces is a choice between accepting Iran as a nuclear power and taking action to stop it from crossing the threshold.

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People are confused about the war. The situation is difficult to resolve even for those who are here. For most of us, the conflict remains out of focus, lacking reference of almost any sort. Vertigo leaves us seeking orientation from places like Vietnam””where most of us never have been. So sad are our motley pundits-cum-navigators that those who have never have been to Afghanistan or Vietnam shamelessly use one to reference the other. We saw this in Iraq.

The most we can do is pay attention, study hard, and try to bring something into focus that is always rolling, yawing, and seemingly changing course randomly, in more dimensions than even astronauts must consider. All while gauging dozens of factors, such as Afghan Opinion, Coalition Will, Enemy Will and Capacity, Resources, Regional Actors (and, of course, the Thoroughly Unexpected). Nobody will ever understand all these dynamic factors and track them at once and through time. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that a tiger doesn’t need to completely understand the jungle to survive, navigate, and then dominate. It is not necessary to know every anthropological and historical nuance of the people here. If that were the case, our Coalition of over forty nations would not exist. More important is to realize that they are humans like us. They get hungry, happy, sad, and angry; they make friends and enemies (to the Nth degree); they are neither supermen nor vermin. They’re just people.

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President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan changes the equation. The first reinforcements will be Marines headed for Helmand — and a likely showdown in Marjah. There will be hard fighting ahead, just as there was last summer when Marines entered Nawa and other Taliban strongholds. But with enough resources and enough patience, there is little doubt that American troops and their Afghan allies will be able to secure key areas of southern Afghanistan that have slipped out of the government’s grasp.

Then they can begin the hard work of building Afghan government capacity — a process that has already started in Nawa, where the district governor is working closely with the Marines to provide essential services to the people. Local merchants are even taking the initiative to string power lines, previously nonexistent in this impoverished community.

The questions that remain unanswered after the president’s West Point address: Will the troops have the time and resources needed to win? “Win” is a word that Obama avoided. He cited his long-standing goal of “disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” but he spoke merely of his desire to “break the Taliban’s momentum” rather than defeat it altogether. He spoke of wanting to “end this war successfully” but said nothing of winning the war.

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The outside world may be focused on Iran’s intensifying confrontation with the West over its nuclear program. But at home, Iranians are more concerned with an ambitious and risky new effort to overhaul the country’s troubled economy.

If it goes awry, the plan to phase out Iran’s system of state subsidies, which has existed for decades, could profoundly destabilize the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has aggressively championed change. But it could also help wean Iran from its dependence on foreign gasoline and insulate the economy from new sanctions ”” which are a strong possibility if Iran continues to defy Western pressure over its nuclear program.

The new plan has been the subject of frenzied debate in shops, blogs and homes across Iran, not to mention the Parliament. Lawmakers across the political spectrum have warned of catastrophic price shocks once subsidies are lifted. Conservatives seem deeply worried about the repercussions, with some saying the plan could lead to a crime wave, or worse. Opposition leaders like Mir Hussein Moussavi have begun hinting that the government’s failure to stem economic pain could become their new rallying cry.

So, no, I do not make this decision lightly. I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.

Of course, this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America’s war. Since 9/11, al Qaeda’s safe havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali. The people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered. And the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.

These facts compel us to act along with our friends and allies. Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.

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Barack Obama is to set an ambitious timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, with the first troops pulling out by July 2011. The announcement is aimed at countering US public fears that the country is being sucked into a Vietnam-style morass.

Reflecting the increased sense of urgency, Obama is to speed deployment of an extra 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan within the next six months ”“ a much faster timetable than the 12 to 18 months that had been briefed by US officials up until today.

The 30,000 figure is lower than requested by the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, but the Obama administration is hoping that other Nato countries will make up the difference. A senior administration official said the Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, will announce the deployment of extra troops on Friday.

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In late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. James F. Amos released a brilliant book with a thrilling title. It was called the “Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24.” In its quiet way, this book helped overturn conventional wisdom on modern warfare and gave leaders a new way to see the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s a mistake to think you can succeed in conflicts like these by defeating the enemy in battle, the manual said. Instead, these wars are better seen as political arguments for the loyalty of the population. Get villagers to work with you by offering them security. Provide services by building courts and schools and police. Over the long term, transfer authority to legitimate local governments.

This approach, called COIN, has reshaped military thinking, starting with the junior officers who developed it and then spreading simultaneously up and down the chain of command….

The administration seems to have spent the past few months trying to pare back the COIN strategy and adjust it to real world constraints….

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The revised strategy for Afghanistan that President Obama will announce Tuesday is expected to focus new resources on training Afghan security forces and shoring up the central government, an approach certain to revive a debate about the possibilities and the limits of nation-building.

From Somalia, Cambodia, East Timor and the Balkans in the 1990s to Iraq today, world powers have at best a mixed record when it comes to establishing functional, stable governments in countries devastated by war. The efforts have been long and costly, tangible results often hard to measure, and support for a prolonged involvement difficult to maintain.

Congressional leaders have already voiced deep skepticism about pouring billions more dollars into an American-led war that so far has shown little progress toward making Afghanistan self-sustaining.

“You can’t be half in and half out,” said Jonathan T. Howe, a retired Navy admiral who led an ill-fated U.N. reconstruction effort in Somalia in 1993.

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