Insurgency

When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Insurgent A Novel Veronica Roth Katherine Tegen Books, 544 pp.: $17.99, for readers age 14 and up There's no questioning the impact of "The Hunger Games. " Its success has given birth to an explosion of dystopian young adult literature that invariably unfolds in some environmentally compromised, governmentally bizarre future version of the United States. The more successful books in the genre rearrange society in ways that are unfamiliar and inventively oppressive, creating a perfect petri dish for young heroines to rise up against their circumstances in ways that not only reveal their inner strengths but lead to romance.

The Islamic teacher sat on the wooden porch of his house smiling politely, his infant son playing at his feet. Those who study the Koran are automatically suspect, Dul Nasir Hama said, adding that he's not a terrorist nor are his students part of the insurgency. As he spoke, a Thai army patrol skirted the grounds of his madrasa in Pattani, a jungle area of southern Thailand with a long history of violent clashes between Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists. "They're afraid to come in here," he said.

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai suggested Thursday that a speeded-up departure of Western troops is the only way to prevent a recurrence of "painful experiences" such as the sight of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead insurgents. In a statement issued by the Afghan presidential palace 24 hours after the Los Angeles Times published photos showing U.S. troops with the remains of suicide bombers and mugging for the camera, Karzai called the behavior depicted "inhumane and provocative.

The Yemen summer has seethed with pitched battles and bloodshed, raising fears that the country will tumble into further disarray even as Washington has more than doubled its military and security aid. Gun fights and explosions break out in spasms across a nation at the dangerous intersection of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. In the south, an Al Qaeda-linked network has carried out strategic attacks on security targets, while in the north, a rebel group has renewed fighting against rival tribes and government forces.

The July 25 Column One ("Shots to the Heart of Iraq") describing American soldiers' accidental harming of Iraqi civilians was a brilliant propaganda piece for the insurgency. By describing in prominent detail the failures of our soldiers over there (while ignoring their successes), The Times only encourages the terrorists to continue their efforts, knowing that the Americans, and not terrorists, will be blamed by the Western media for the continuing violence. If I didn't know better, I would think that The Times, at least based on this article, is a branch of Al Jazeera.

Mexico's violent drug cartels increasingly resemble an insurgency with the power to challenge the government's control of wide swaths of its own soil, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday. Clinton's comments reflected a striking shift in the public comments of the Obama administration about the bloodshed that has cost 28,000 lives in Mexico since December 2006. They come as U.S. officials weigh a large increase in aid to the southern neighbor to help fight the cartels.

The boys at the Arabian Gulf Elementary School knew what they were supposed to say when a visitor asked about the American soldiers occupying Iraq. With their teachers looking on approvingly, they waved their hands in excitement and jumped to their feet when called upon. "Since the Americans arrived we have only had problems," declared 12-year-old Mahmoud Ali, a rail-thin child with buckteeth. "We must resist them!" "We must force them to leave, with bombs, with explosives.

The first question was the obvious one. Why are you known as Mullah Tractor? "I read one or two Islamic books, so people call me Mullah. And then I bought a tractor. So I am Mullah Tractor. " Mullah Tractor wore an orange jumpsuit, signaling maximum security. He looked to be about 60 years old, with thin downturned lips, a contoured nose that might once have been broken and a short black-and-white beard. His real name is Gul Shah Wazir, and he is in U.S. detention in Afghanistan, accused of being a member of the Taliban.

As Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh struggles to retain power in the face of weeks-long protests, the central government's control over restive provinces in the north and south has weakened substantially in recent days, both officials and insurgent leaders said Tuesday. For years, Yemen has battled a tribal insurgency in the north and Islamic militants in the south, and both groups have capitalized on the political turmoil of the last two months to make territorial gains. The most visible indication of the losses came Monday when a large explosion occurred at a munitions factory in Jaar, a city in the southern province of Abyan, killing more than 100 people.

BRUSSELS - The United States and its allies are promising to provide more than $4 billion a year for Afghanistan's army and police after international forces depart in 2 1/2 years, but they still lack firm financial pledges to meet the target, U.S. officials said. As a result, Afghan officials fear that they won't have the resources necessary to fight what is expected to be a still-virulent insurgency after most foreign troops withdraw by the end of 2014. The escalating financial crisis in Europe and uncertainty about how long Afghanistan's cash-strapped government will need major military aid are making it difficult to nail down contributions, U.S. officials acknowledged.

From the White House to the American Embassy in Kabul, American officials rushed to distance themselves from the actions of U.S. soldiers who posed for photographs next to corpses and body parts of Afghan insurgents. Two photos of incidents from a 2010 deployment were published Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times. In one, the hand of a corpse is propped on the shoulder of a paratrooper. In another, the disembodied legs of a suicide bomber are displayed by grinning soldiers and Afghan police.

IDLIB, Syria - Scattered around the house that Abu Nadim once shared with his wife and five children are hints of its former existence: a SpongeBob SquarePants pillow, a baby's crib, a woman's purse. Now the four-room home is a bomb-making workshop. Bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, containers of peroxide and acetone and powdered aluminum cover the floor, along with boxes of wires, PVC pipes, computer parts and cigarette ash, as if someone had wandered through without thought for an ashtray.

Suspected insurgents fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades Tuesday at a government delegation offering condolences to villagers in a district of Kandahar province where a U.S. soldier is accused of going on a shooting rampage. No one in the delegation, which included two brothers of President Hamid Karzai and a number of high-level officials, was injured, but a member of the Afghan security forces was killed and another was wounded, witnesses and officials said. Members of the delegation, which also included the Afghan army chief of staff, a Cabinet minister and the Kandahar governor, had just emerged from a mosque in Panjwayi district when gunfire erupted, officials said.

In Afghanistan, to be a judge is to be a target. Officials on Sunday reported the assassination of a provincial jurist from a restive eastern province. His 8-year-old daughter was killed along with him, they said. For the last several years, the Taliban and affiliated insurgent groups have carried out a concerted campaign of assassinations, taking aim at influential local figures — tribal elders, community leaders, municipal and provincial officials — because of perceived loyalty to the central Afghan government.

  On the face of it, President Hamid Karzai has every motive to do all he can to bring about talks with the Taliban. Instead, the Afghan leader is emerging as a prime impediment to urgent U.S. efforts to jump-start negotiations with the insurgents. Since the start of his second term in office, Karzai has repeatedly declared that his top priority is finding a political settlement to the bloody Afghan conflict and bringing the "disaffected brothers" back into the social and political fold.

Neither man was senior in his realm: a U.S. Army captain with a civil affairs group and a Sunni sheik of a middling tribe. Both had elders of greater authority above them. To their critics and rivals, the two men were opportunists with outsized egos. And yet, it is now clear that Capt. Travis Patriquin and Sheik Sattar abu Risha were major figures in the amazingly quick evolution of Iraq's Anbar province from a "lost cause" Al Qaeda stronghold in 2006 to a shining example by mid-2007 of the U.S. military and Sunni tribes teaming up to thwart the insurgency.

Washington and Mexico City are unsure whether Mexico today resembles Colombia's insurgency of 20 years ago. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks it does; some Mexicans and, maybe, President Obama think not ("The wrong solution in Mexico," Opinion, Sept. 10). As the American ambassador in Colombia when the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was at riding high, and later when he was defeated, I side with Clinton in seeing many parallels. The parallels begin with the Colombia of the Escobar days being a large, progressive democracy with a vibrant economy.

After France, the deluge? The announcement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy that his troops would sharply accelerate their departure from Afghanistan cast a harsh light on potential cracks in the U.S.-led military coalition in the country. Although the Obama administration and the NATO force sought to portray Friday's declaration in Paris as neither surprising nor unilateral, it marked not only an effective end to France's combat role in Afghanistan, but a breaking of Western ranks as an unpopular war drags into a second decade.

Reporting from Camp Pendleton -- The former Marine officer who gave Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich the order to "clear" an Iraqi house near the site of an explosion that had just killed a Marine testified Friday that he expected Wuterich and his squad to "kill or capture the enemy I thought was in that building. " William Kallop, who was a lieutenant in 2005 and is now a stockbroker in New York, said he believed insurgents inside the house were firing on Marines and thus the house could be deemed "hostile.