Afghan bystanders look at the wreckage of a damaged car near the site of a suicide bomb attack in Kandahar, Aug. 18.

The security situation in Afghanistan is bad at the moment, as NATO-led forces face a growing Taliban resurgence. There are 40,000 foreign troops there now (including 14,000 from the United States), but that is not enough to maintain control of villages all over the country.
The Afghan Army is slowly growing, in both size and competence, but it is still too small to protect a frightened, war-weary population.
To better the situation, the United States has recently made it a priority to improve the training of local policemen in Afghanistan, district by district.
Corruption has been an enormous problem among police departments, which are often controlled by local warlords and militias.
So we are working to train both rank-and-file policemen and their commanders.
But even if this strategy is successful, it will take years, and we may not have that much time.
It makes no allowance for complicating events--a collapse of security in Pakistan, for example.
We are creating more battalions for the Afghan Army as fast as possible. But it takes time to train senior officers and staff. Time is also needed to build the mobility and technological sophistication required to compensate for the Afghan Army’s small size.
A better strategy would be to institute a draft in Afghanistan. A draft would make it possible to gather a much larger military force, and far more quickly, around the core professional force already in place.
President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan Parliament are likely to embrace a draft as a national response to the present threat from the Taliban.
Afghanistan has a long tradition of having a draft. It’s true there would be obstacles: The old draft registers no longer exist, and it would not be acceptable today to exempt certain tribes, as once was done.
Also, the Afghan government would need to find a way to pay the new force. (Historically, Afghan draftees were paid almost nothing; they served as a duty.) But Afghans can find solutions to these problems.
History suggests it would be possible to organize the new, large force quickly. During the Korean War in the 1950s, the United States helped build a 700,000-man army in a nation with a population only about two-thirds that of Afghanistan.
In the Greek civil war in the 1940s, we helped build a Greek security force of 182,000 soldiers in two years. These armies were not as sophisticated as today’s forces, and they did not require new body armor, high-technology communications equipment and armored Humvees.
But they were sufficient to overcome threats greater than those Afghanistan now faces.
An enlarged army would strengthen Afghanistan’s central government, thereby diminishing the power of the often corrupt local police departments.
The Afghan army has a good officer corps respected by the Afghan people.
The insurgency is already being fought mostly by small army units.
Rather than build new battalions, we could simply add more platoons and companies. This would reduce the need to train additional senior officers and it would make it possible to promote the good officers we have already identified.
Once the draft began, foreign trainers would still be needed. So it would be important to challenge our NATO partners to play a larger role in training the new troops.
But the numbers of trainers needed would actually be smaller than the number of foreign battalions we currently need-but do not have-from NATO.
Ronald E. Neumann
IHT.COM

Revelations that the British government contemplated supporting an anti-communist coup in Italy in 1976 is not as surprising as might at first seem.
It confirms a long British tradition of marching in lockstep with the global policies of the United States, even when those policies were morally ambiguous or misguided.
The political conditions of cold-war Italy that emerge from the declassified Foreign Office documents published by the Rome daily La Repubblica would appear to justify the prevailing sense of strategic panic.
The Italian Communist party (PCI) was threatening to achieve power through the ballot box, held back only by the fragile bulwark of a corrupt and effete Christian Democrat party (DC).
Communist participation in the government of a key Nato ally, as proposed two years later by DC leader Aldo Moro, could have momentous consequences.
“The presence of communist ministers in the Italian government would pose an immediate security problem for the Alliance,“ Britain’s ambassador to Nato, John Killick, warned London.
The security of nuclear bases in Italy could be at risk, military secrets were likely to leak to Moscow, and the US Sixth Fleet’s land base in Naples would no longer be secure.
It was not, then, surprising that a Foreign Office planning document, drawn up on May 6 1976, should consider “Action in support of a coup d’etat or other subversive action.“ British opinion was by no means monolithic on the subject.
The country was, after all, under the Labour government of James Callaghan. Though apparently attractive, the idea of a surgical military coup was “unrealistic“ for the Foreign Office planners, and an authoritarian government was considered just as unpalatable as a government comprising communists.
Britain’s ambassador to Rome, Sir Guy Millard, wisely concluded there was not much his country could do, lamenting the fact that the fate of the country was in the undependable hands of the DC. But British planners ran through the whole gamut of options, including “Subversive or military intervention against the PCI“.
The latter included financial support for “democratic forces“ and the encouragement of a coup.
Callaghan was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the subject, highlighting the “grave harm“ that would be caused if the documents became public, revealing Britain’s “interference in the internal affairs of a European ally“.
All this was at a time when Italy was wracked by industrial unrest, terrorist bombings and authentic coup plots enjoying varying degrees of support from the US government. 1976 saw the arrest on coup-plotting charges of Edgardo Sogno, a former resistance fighter turned anti-communist partisan who had also served as a diplomat in Washington. Sogno claimed in a memoir that his coup project had been given a green light by the Rome CIA station chief, who assured him of US support for “any initiative designed to keep the communists out of government“.
In 1990, Sogno told the magazine Panorama that he had made a personal commitment to shoot anyone who was prepared to form a government with members of the PCI. The admission, and the anti-communist planning outlined in the Foreign Office documents, provide an interesting backdrop to the fate of Aldo Moro.
The moderate DC leader was kidnapped by the Marxist revolutionaries of the Red Brigades on the day he was due to present a new government--enjoying for the first time the external support of the PCI--for a confidence vote in parliament.
He was shot dead after 55 days in captivity, on May 9 1978.
The maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli, who had close ties to the Italian intelligence services and the anti-communist P2 masonic lodge, described the kidnap operation as bearing “the hallmark of a lucid superpower“.
Moro had to be removed because his “historic compromise“ with the PCI was disturbing the post-war balance of power, he claimed. Like the FCO planners, Pecorelli saw the development as potentially destabilising for Moscow as well as for the west, its eastern bloc hegemony threatened by the model of Enrico Berlinguer’s democratic “Eurocommunism“.
Much plotting evidently went on to underpin Italy’s dramatic “years of lead“ and much more of it has yet to emerge.
Philip Willan
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

An election officer holds up a ballot during the counting of votes at a polling station in Taipei, Jan. 12.

Legislative elections in Taiwan have given the opposition Nationalist (KMT) party a two-thirds majority and handed President Chen Shui-bian a stunning rejection.
Voters turned their back on Mr. Chen’s confrontational politics and his focus on national identity over practical measures to improve the lives of ordinary Taiwanese.
The results could be good for Taiwan if all parties recognize the message in this ballot and adjust their policies accordingly.
If, however, it is seen as just another swing in the political pendulum and another excuse for settling scores, then the KMT will face the very same humiliation the next time it goes to the polls.
The elections gave the KMT 81 seats in the 113-member Legislative Yuan, and its allies won another five.
Mr. Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party won only 27 seats. The results are a substantial gain for the KMT, which held just 49 percent of the seats in the old assembly. Significantly, the KMT now has a two-thirds majority that will allow it to dominate the legislature.
The elections are in many ways a referendum on Mr. Chen’s administration.
A fierce defender of Taiwanese nationalism and aspirant to de jure independence for Taiwan, Mr. Chen’s presidency has been dedicated to strengthening Taiwanese--as opposed to Chinese--identity and keeping the mainland at a distance.
The president, like other hardline activists within the DPP, already considers Taiwan to be an independent country and he has labored to make the divisions both deeper and permanent.
This policy has infuriated the government in Beijing, which considers Taiwan to be a renegade province and labels Mr. Chen “a splittist.“
It has steadfastly refused to have any dealings with him and has warned of potentially dangerous consequences if he pursues his agenda.
The president’s policies have also tested the island’s friends, who consider them needlessly provocative and potentially destabilizing.
The KMT campaign focused on the island’s economic troubles, arguing that Mr. Chen’s agenda aggravated Taiwan’s ills--erecting barriers to trade with the mainland was thought to be particularly damaging--and diverted government attention from matters of real significance to voters.
The DPP was also hurt by several corruption scandals that involved members of Mr. Chen’s family, and undermined the party’s longtime claim that it was clean, unlike the KMT.
The election results could be a harbinger of the March 22 presidential vote. Mr. Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT candidate in that race, hopes to ride the groundswell to the presidency.
While no Taiwanese candidate is prepared to unify the island with China as Beijing seeks, Mr. Ma and his party seek better relations with the Chinese government, arguing that more stable cross-relations will, among other things, help the Taiwan economy.
Mr. Chen resigned his post as DPP party chairman as soon as the scope of the defeat became evident.
“The biggest and most crushing failure since the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party,“ acknowledged Mr. Chen, was his responsibility.
The question now is whether the DPP candidate in the March ballot, Mr. Frank Hsieh, can correct the party’s image and tack back toward the center by the vote. Hardliners worried that Mr. Hsieh was not a true believer and tried to lock in their pro-independence platform to ensure that Mr. Hsieh would not be able to move back to the center.
Last weekend’s vote suggests staying the course would be political suicide but ideologues prefer purity to victory and are ready to give other reasons for the DPP shellacking in the poll.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP