Two NATO soldiers have died in two separate incidents in southern Afghanistan, the alliance said in a statement.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh reshuffled his cabinet byhanding over defense and security affairs to a deputy prime minister.

NATO’s Commander in Afghanistan General Dan McNeil has increased his forces in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border due to the contingent peace agreement between Pakistan and the militia dubbed as Pakistani Taliban and the possibility of the new rounds of attacks of Afghanistan Taliban.
There are indications hinting at the progress of peace negotiations between Pakistani Taliban Leader Baitullah Mehsud and the government of Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani. It seems that General McNeil believes that when the local Taliban do not feel challenged by the Pakistani government and army, they will voice more support for Afghanistan’s Taliban and Al-Qaeda and intensify war in the Afghan border areas. This is how the general justifies increasing his forces in the border area.
The issue of compromise between the tribes known as local Taliban and the Pakistani government is an extensive project that pursues diverse objectives. With the withdrawal of Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League from the federal cabinet, the coalition with People’s Party is in doubt and this in itself can be an issue linked to developments in tribal areas. Islamabad faces a radical group in tribal areas which is not conceived as completely local and which is supported by foreign forces. It is clear that no country accepts the responsibility of supporting the local Taliban. Nevertheless, it seems that there is a much stronger regional and international current than the tribal radicalism in Pakistan. This interpretation exists that transferring radicalism linked to Afghansitan’s Taliban and Al-Qaeda to Pashtun areas is less costly for the world as otherwise other countries would have to pay the price. Thus, the developments linked to local Taliban taking place in tribal areas transcend regional considerations and more invisible hands are behind them.
Hence, the solution to this dilemma also transcends the region and cannot be found in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. Furthermore, it must be recalled that developments in Pakistan and Afghanistan are intertwined and any solution must heed both countries’ interests, as otherwise, it is doomed. Separating Pakistani Taliban from Afghan Taliban and separating both currents from Al-Qaeda do not comply with the existing realities. In the Taliban’s eyes, compromise with the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan is only the first phase as the group’s final target is reviving an Islamic rulership with each Muslim state being part of this system. Consequently, the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan do not have the needed legitimacy in this line of thinking.
If a conscious mind views the contingent compromise between the local Taliban and Islamabad from this angle, it can be asserted that the agreement is just the preliminary phase of the show of power by Taliban, which is equipped with radicalism and it cannot be thought as endurable.

Pakistan’s coalition government will survive a dispute over restoring judges fired by President Pervez Musharraf that resulted in Nawaz Sharif’s party quitting the alliance, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said.
Gilani said he hasn’t accepted the May 13 resignations of nine Pakistan Muslim League ministers because he expects them to rejoin as soon as the judges are reinstated, the official Associated Press of Pakistan reported.
“There is no doubt in my mind, there is no doubt in Nawaz Sharif’s mind and there is no doubt in the mind of any political party that these deposed judges will have to be reinstated at the earliest,’’ APP cited Gilani as saying Monday in Egypt, where he attended the World Economic Forum.
Legal officials will soon come up with recommendations on solving issues including how to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry, APP quoted Gilani as saying.

Zardari Acquitted
Meanwhile a Pakistani court acquitted Zardari of a decade-old drug-smuggling charge on Monday, his lawyer said, the last outstanding criminal case against him, Reuters said.
He was accused of drug trafficking in 1997 by the government of then prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
Latif Khosa, Zardari’s lawyer, said he had asked a court in the eastern city of Lahore to acquit his client because the charge was politically-motivated and had not been proven.
“I told the court that dragging out this case would be an abuse of the law. It’s fake and fabricated. I pleaded to the court that this black chapter be closed and Mr Zardari be respectfully acquitted. The court accepted my plea,“ Khosa said.
Courts have in recent weeks cleared Zardari of several criminal cases including one of conspiracy to kill his estranged brother-in-law, Murtaza Bhutto, whom police shot dead in 1996.
Several corruption cases against Zardari in Pakistani courts and abroad have also been quashed under an ordinance introduced by Musharraf late last year which granted amnesty to Bhutto, Zardari and several other politicians.

Pakistan Expects Resolution of Judges Dispute
Pakistan’s coalition government will survive a dispute over restoring judges fired by President Pervez Musharraf that resulted in Nawaz Sharif’s party quitting the alliance, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said.
Gilani said he hasn’t accepted the May 13 resignations of nine Pakistan Muslim League ministers because he expects them to rejoin as soon as the judges are reinstated, the official Associated Press of Pakistan reported.
“There is no doubt in my mind, there is no doubt in Nawaz Sharif’s mind and there is no doubt in the mind of any political party that these deposed judges will have to be reinstated at the earliest,’’ APP cited Gilani as saying Monday in Egypt, where he attended the World Economic Forum.
Legal officials will soon come up with recommendations on solving issues including how to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry, APP quoted Gilani as saying.

Zardari Acquitted
Meanwhile a Pakistani court acquitted Zardari of a decade-old drug-smuggling charge on Monday, his lawyer said, the last outstanding criminal case against him, Reuters said.
He was accused of drug trafficking in 1997 by the government of then prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
Latif Khosa, Zardari’s lawyer, said he had asked a court in the eastern city of Lahore to acquit his client because the charge was politically-motivated and had not been proven.
“I told the court that dragging out this case would be an abuse of the law. It’s fake and fabricated. I pleaded to the court that this black chapter be closed and Mr Zardari be respectfully acquitted. The court accepted my plea,“ Khosa said.
Courts have in recent weeks cleared Zardari of several criminal cases including one of conspiracy to kill his estranged brother-in-law, Murtaza Bhutto, whom police shot dead in 1996.
Several corruption cases against Zardari in Pakistani courts and abroad have also been quashed under an ordinance introduced by Musharraf late last year which granted amnesty to Bhutto, Zardari and several other politicians.

The Defense Department on Monday announced upcoming deployments of more than 42,000 troops, including 25,000 active duty US Army soldiers who would be sent to Iraq beginning in the fall to replace troops scheduled to come home by year’s end.
The deployments would maintain a level of 15 brigades in Iraq, or roughly 140,000 troops--the number military leaders expect will remain on the warfront at the end of July, once the currently planned withdrawals are finished, AP said.
Under the new Pentagon policy effective in August, those active duty Army units will serve for 12 months, rather than the 15-month tours that units in Iraq now are serving.
The bulk of the soldiers deploying later this year returned from Iraq late last year, and will have gotten about a year at home to rest and retrain.
As part of the announcement, the Pentagon alerted four National Guard Army brigades, or about 14,000 troops, to begin preparing for deployments to Iraq beginning early in 2009, and one National Guard Army brigade, with about 3,100 soldiers, to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan in the spring of 2010.
Members of the National Guard are citizen soldiers who train on weekends and for one month during the summer and can be called to active duty or mobilized for disasters if needed.
The Guard announcements, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, are being made far in advance so that soldiers and their families can begin training and other preparations for their service.
Guard brigades heading to Iraq will provide security, while the brigade scheduled to go to Afghanistan in 2010 would train Afghan national forces.
Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq , has said the US will complete the withdrawal of the 20,000 troops that were sent to Iraq last year to tamp down the escalating violence in Baghdad. At the peak, there were 20 brigades with more than 170,000 US troops in Iraq.
Beyond that, he said he wants 45 days to evaluate the security conditions in Iraq, after which he will begin to decide whether more troops can be pulled out. The plan leaves open the possibility that the US could keep 15 brigades there through the end of the year--as voters go to the polls and elect a new president.
Currently there are 155,000 troops, including 17 combat brigades, in Iraq.

Iraqi officials said police on Monday arrested a man suspected of being the top leader of Al-Qaeda fighters in Mosul, who they said had fled the city in the face of an Iraqi security crackdown aimed at rooting out the terror network.
The US military said it was looking into the report, AP reported.
Reports of high-level Al-Qaeda arrests in the past have sometimes proven incorrect.
Maj. Gen. Ahmed Taha, of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, identified the detainee as Al-Qaeda in Iraq ’s Mosul wali (governor), which would make him the terror network’s top figure in the city and the Ninevah province where it is located.
A security official involved in the detention said the suspect, Abdul-Khaliq Al-Sabawi, admitted in questioning to being the Mosul wali.
Al-Sabawi, a former brigadier in Saddam Hussein’s military, fled Mosul before the crackdown was launched more than a week ago and took refuge in the city of Tikrit, 200 kilometers to the south, the official said.
In another incident, Eleven Iraqi soldiers were killed in an ambush Monday by unidentified attackers near the northern city of Mosul , where a major sweep against Al-Qaeda began last week, a local official told AFP.

BRDO, Slovenia - EU Troika meeting in Ukraine.

KARNATAKA, India - The third and concluding phase of Legislative Assembly elections in the Indian state of Karnataka.