What is scary [about the story of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan] is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books ”” and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes ”” this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny ”” in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan ”” a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

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President Obama plans to lay out a time frame for winding down the American involvement in the war in Afghanistan when he announces his decision this week to send more forces, senior administration officials said Sunday.

Although the speech was still in draft form, the officials said the president wanted to use the address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night not only to announce the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops, but also to convey how he intends to turn the fight over to the Kabul government.

“It’s accurate to say that he will be more explicit about both goals and time frame than has been the case before and than has been part of the public discussion,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity to discuss the speech before it is delivered. “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.”

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Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden’s escape laid the foundation for today’s reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

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Iran’s Government today announced plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants and said work would start within two months.

Each site will be the size of the existing Natanz plant with the aim of producing between 250-300 tonnes of uranium a year.

IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, says the Government ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to begin construction of five uranium enrichment sites that have already been studied and propose five other sites for future construction.

The decision was made during a Cabinet meeting headed by President Ahmadinejad on Sunday evening, IRNA said.

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In declaring Tuesday that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan, President Obama used a phrase clearly meant to imply that even as he deploys an additional 30,000 or so troops, he has finally figured out how to bring the eight-year-long conflict to an end.

But offering that reassuring if somewhat contradictory signal ”” that by adding troops he can speed the United States toward an exit ”” is just the first of a set of tricky messages Mr. Obama will have to deliver as he rolls out his strategy publicly.

Over the next week, he will deliver multiple messages to multiple audiences: voters at home, allies, the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the extremists who are the enemy. And as Mr. Obama’s own aides concede, the messages directed at some may undercut the messages sent to others.

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Mr Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising the US President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban.

A “period of hiatus” in Washington – and a lack of clear direction – had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said.

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President Obama has conducted a final meeting on his military review for Afghanistan, administration officials said, and he is planning to explain his decision in an address to the nation next Tuesday.

“After completing a rigorous final meeting, President Obama has the information he wants and needs to make his decision and he will announce that decision within days,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday morning.

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While President Obama’s decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say.

The latest internal government estimates place the cost of adding 40,000 American troops and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces, as favored by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, at $40 billion to $54 billion a year, the officials said.

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.

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As Mr. Obama nears the end of his review of American strategy in Afghanistan, the issue of how he will prod, cajole or bully Mr. Karzai into taking action on matters he has avoided for the past five years has been catapulted to the center of the discussion.

Administration officials and America’s European allies say that rampant corruption and the illegal drug trade in Afghanistan have fueled the resurgence of the Taliban, and that unless Mr. Karzai moves forcefully to tackle those issues, no amount of additional American troops will be able to turn the country around.

Yet many of Mr. Obama’s advisers said they had seen no evidence that Mr. Karzai would follow through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade. Mr. Obama, who met with his advisers again on Wednesday, is said to be particularly skeptical of Mr. Karzai’s resolve.

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President Obama is to ask members of Nato to provide up to 4,000 more troops to help to break the deadlock in Afghanistan.

Mr Obama is poised to confirm a surge of more than 30,000 US combat troops, according to senior military sources. He will also urge the rest of Nato to provide thousands of soldiers to train new recruits to the Afghan National Army (ANA).

His appeal is set to be largely ignored, however. At present only two Nato members have offered more troops ”” Britain and Turkey ”” and no other country is expected to come up with any, according to alliance sources. Such a response would threaten the credibility of the alliance in Afghanistan and represent a considerable snub for Mr Obama, who was viewed as a welcome change after the administration of President Bush.

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Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”

The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace ”” post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo ”” has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen ”” Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton ”” savvy enough to seize those moments.

Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other ”” a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

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Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s election by default Monday confirms at least a week earlier than expected that the Obama administration will continue for the foreseeable future to have the same mercurial partner in Afghanistan.

Karzai was expected to win the Nov. 7 runoff election easily and continue in the role he has held for nearly eight years, just as President Obama enters the final stage of deciding whether to escalate U.S. involvement in the war.

But the departure of Karzai’s chief rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, deprives him of a genuine win at the polls and potentially undermines the Obama administration’s goal of building a legitimate government in Kabul.

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A U.S. Navy admiral expressed new concern Friday over China’s military buildup and urged Beijing to be clearer about its intentions.

With China’s military growing at an “unprecedented rate,” the U.S. wants to ensure that expansion doesn’t destabilize the region, Rear Adm. Kevin Donegan told reporters on a visit to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.

Donegan referred to China’s expanded weaponry. His remarks echoed the concerns of other U.S. military leaders who have said the growth in China’s military spending ”” up almost 15 percent in the 2009 budget ”” raises questions about how Beijing plans on deploying its new power.

“When we see a military growing at that rate, we’re interested in transparency and the understanding of the uses of that military,” said Donegan, commander of the USS George Washington aircraft carrier strike group, a key part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

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A former Marine captain who became the first foreign service official to publicly resign in protest over the war in Afghanistan says staying in the country is not in America’s interest.

“The losses of our soldiers do not merit anything that comes in line with our strategic interests or values,” Matthew Hoh, who signed on as a foreign service official in Afghanistan after fighting in Iraq, tells NPR’s Melissa Block.

Hoh resigned last month after spending five working months in Afghanistan. In his resignation letter, he said he had “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.”

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It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

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The White House has issued its strongest warning yet that President Karzai cannot count on continued US support if he fails to accept that Afghanistan’s fraudulent election has critically undermined his authority.

President Obama is more concerned at “whether there’s an Afghan partner” worth defending, than with the politically fraught question of how many more troops to send, said Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff and a central figure in White House deliberations on Afghanistan.

His rare public remarks today were echoed by comments from Senator John Kerry, who has flown to Kabul to join efforts to persuade Mr Karzai to accept a second round of voting or enter a power-sharing deal with his opponent, Dr Abdullah Abdullah.

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Whatever we may think, there are way too many Afghans who think our partner, Karzai and his team, are downright awful.

That is why it is not enough for us to simply dispatch more troops. If we are going to make a renewed commitment in Afghanistan, we have to visibly display to the Afghan people that we expect a different kind of governance from Karzai, or whoever rules, and refuse to proceed without it. It doesn’t have to be Switzerland, but it does have to be good enough ”” that is, a government Afghans are willing to live under. Without that, more troops will only delay a defeat.

I am not sure Washington fully understands just how much the Taliban-led insurgency is increasingly an insurrection against the behavior of the Karzai government ”” not against the religion or civilization of its international partners. And too many Afghan people now blame us for installing and maintaining this government.

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If current negotiations falter, international efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program may escalate to the imposition of “crippling sanctions” or even the use of military force. A crucial question that policymakers must consider is whether such punitive measures would help or hinder the popular uprising against the Iranian regime that emerged after the country’s fraudulent June 12 presidential elections.

The so-called green movement — the color has been adopted by the opposition — poses the most serious challenge to the survivability of the Islamic Republic in its 30-year history. Few analysts doubt that if it succeeded in toppling Iran’s hard-line regime, the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program would become far more susceptible to diplomatic resolution.

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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned major powers on Wednesday against intimidating Iran and said talk of sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear programme was “premature”.

Putin, who many diplomats, analysts, and Russian citizens believe is still Russia’s paramount leader despite stepping down as president last year, was speaking after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Moscow for two days of talks.

“There is no need to frighten the Iranians,” Putin told reporters in Beijing after a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

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The latest violence in Pakistan, including a successful Taliban attack on its Pentagon, may be an indication that the country is coming apart, or at least on the verge of sharp change.

The degree to which the calamitous situation is a result of U.S. policy toward it or U.S. actions nearby is open to question. What is clear is that whatever U.S. policy toward Pakistan is at the moment, it is not working to achieve U.S. interests there.

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Excessive praise can be unwelcome and embarrassing. Just ask President Obama, who awoke Friday to discover that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had completed even a year in office. Obama managed to be both abashed and appreciative in his response, but no amount of self-effacing spin can obscure the oddity of this award.

For the president’s critics on the right, the Nobel feeds a narrative in which Obama is more interested in flattering foreigners than in defending U.S. interests. To those in his restive progressive base, it appears that the peacemaker’s mantle has been draped on the shoulders of a president who is presiding over two distant wars and who may soon send as many as 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

For our part, we’re fans of the president. We endorsed him for the job, and we greatly prefer him to his predecessor. But it’s difficult to see why he deserves the peace prize so soon after taking office. The Nobel committee didn’t just embarrass Obama, it diminished the credibility of the prize itself….

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The next world war could take place in cyberspace, the UN telecommunications agency chief warned Tuesday as experts called for action to stamp out cyber attacks.

“The next world war could happen in cyberspace and that would be a catastrophe. We have to make sure that all countries understand that in that war, there is no such thing as a superpower,” Hamadoun Toure said.

“Loss of vital networks would quickly cripple any nation, and none is immune to cyberattack,” added the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union during the ITU’s Telecom World 2009 fair in Geneva.

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Steps by the United States to vastly expand its aid to Pakistan, as well as the footprint of its embassy and private security contractors here, are aggravating an already volatile anti-American mood as Washington pushes for greater action by the government against the Taliban.

An aid package of $1.5 billion a year for the next five years passed by Congress last week asks Pakistan to cease supporting terrorist groups on its soil and to ensure that the military does not interfere with civilian politics. President Asif Ali Zardari, whose association with the United States has added to his unpopularity, agreed to the stipulations in the aid package.

But many here, especially in the powerful army, object to the conditions as interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs, and they are interpreting the larger American footprint in more sinister ways.

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President Obama got what he said he wanted when United States negotiators met with their Iranian counterparts this week in Geneva: direct engagement, without preconditions, with Iran.

But the trick now for Mr. Obama, administration officials concede, will be to avoid getting tripped up. In other words, is the Iranian government serious this time?

The clearest risk is that the Iranians may play for time, as they have often been accused of doing in the past, making promises and encouraging more meetings, while waiting for political currents to change or the closed ranks among the Western allies to break.

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One of the most effective ways for Washington to shape China’s evolution is to remove Beijing’s excuses for inaction by leading ourselves — passing strong climate change legislation, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, making good on President Obama’s disarmament pledges and increasing efforts to alleviate extreme poverty around the globe.

U.S. exceptionalism has often provided political cover to China. In his own speech to the United Nations last week, Obama acknowledged that the United States hasn’t always been a fully responsible superpower, and he pledged to do better.

The Chinese say it is unfair to expect a still-developing China to shoulder so much international responsibility. But the forces of globalization that made China the major power it is today are the same ones breeding threats that only nations acting in concert can address.

China has come a very long way in two generations. Let’s hope that the next 60 years see China’s growth into a model citizen and stalwart supporter of the international system — for its own sake, and for ours.

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The topic is bound to come up in looming talks that officials from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China will have with representatives of Iran.

Unfortunately, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy pointed out last week at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on nuclear proliferation, years of gradually stronger sanctions against Iran for ignoring that body’s to stop enriching uranium have only led to “more enriched uranium, more centrifuges” for enriching it, and a vow to “wipe a U.N. member [Israel] off the map.”

That history shows that more talk will only lead to more talk while Iran forges ahead.

With or without the help of Russia and China, however, the U.S. and European nations, must meet Iranian defiance head on with severe economic sanctions.

The time for talking should be past.

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Locked in a deepening dispute with the United States and its allies over its nuclear program, Iran was reported Monday to have test-fired long-range missiles capable of striking Israel and American bases in the Persian Gulf in what seemed a show of force.

The reported tests of the Shahab-3 and Sejil missiles by the Revolutionary Guards were not the first conducted by Iran, but they came at a time of high tension, days after President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain used the disclosure of a previously secret nuclear plant in Iran to threaten Tehran with a stronger response, including harsher economic sanctions.

Iran says it wants to develop a nuclear capacity for peaceful purposes but many in the west say it is seeking to create a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran says its missile tests have been planned for some time and are not linked to the nuclear dispute.

The test-firing also came days before the first direct contact in decades between the United States and Iran at international talks in Geneva, set for Thursday.

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The United States is threatening to launch airstrikes on Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in the Pakistani city of Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan.

The threat comes amid growing divisions in Washington about whether to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan by sending more troops or by reducing them and targeting the terrorists.

This weekend the US military was expected to send a request to Robert Gates, the defence secretary, for more troops, as urged by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander there.

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Iran began test-firing missiles yesterday, starting days of war games before a confrontation with foreign powers over a previously undisclosed secret nuclear facility.

The revelations about the enrichment plant, at a military base near the holy city of Qom, has dramatically upped the stakes for the meeting in Geneva on Thursday between Iranian representatives and those of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

The US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany had demanded that Iran offer a “serious response” to questions about a military dimension to its nuclear programme, which Tehran insists is purely peaceful.

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If Mr Obama does shift his stance in Afghanistan, history may record that the clinching factor was last month’s fraud-riddled presidential election there. The White House appears to have found this especially rattling when set alongside General McChrystal’s report. For the general’s chief conclusion is that success in Afghanistan does not depend on killing more Taliban fighters. It depends on winning the confidence of Afghans who have been alienated by widespread corruption under President Hamid Karzai and have little reason to support their own government. “A foreign army alone cannot beat an insurgency,” is the general’s conclusion. However certain Mr Obama is that this is the right war, he cannot be sanguine about sending ever more soldiers to prop up an incompetent government that has lost its legitimacy. Mr Obama’s main ambition in life is to transform America at home. The last thing he needs is a Vietnam.

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