Forget the Darfur peace agreement signed in May. It isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Violence in the first half of this year has been worse than the same period in 2005, according to a senior UN official yesterday. There have been more raids, more rapes, and more people displaced from their homes - and violence has only gotten worse since the deal was signed a few months ago. What's more, there's no record of the violence taking place. Since mid-June, there hasn't been a single investigation of cease-fire violations. So much for a peace deal. 

This news makes today's announcement from the African Union all the more tragicomic: They have no money past October to pay the 7000 AU troops "monitoring" the non-existent cease-fire. So, what happens after October is anyone's guess. The AU may pull the troops, but Sudan refuses to allow UN peacekeepers in. Plus, the Sudanese government has a powerful friend in China. The absence of AU troops will leave a more obvious void, but it's screamingly apparent that civilians in Darfur are hardly benefiting from their presence as it is. Michael Gerson, Bush's former speechwriter who increasingly led the charge on progress on Darfur during his last year in the West Wing, spoke recently with FP about the lack of international political will to put together a capable peacekeeping force. That is, of course, a huge hurdle. But is that force the only thing that will prevent us from looking back in a year lamenting that the violence in Darfur has only worsened still?  

If the security firm Flexilis has things right, you might want to think twice about trading in your old passport for one of the high-tech models set to come out in October. In a news release and video, the company has revealed that not only can the new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled passports be read by third parties from a distance, but they could also eventually be used to target passport holders for bomb attacks. 

It seems that the shield surrounding the information chip only protects it from being read when the passport is fully closed; a passport even slightly open in a purse or a pocket could easily be spied on. But more than privacy is at stake: one of the readily available, pint-sized devices that read RFID passports can be hitched to explosives rigged to set off automatically when the passport passes within a certain range.

Eventually, Flexilis says, terrorists could enable a reader to distinguish between the chips of different countries and target specific nationalities for attack.

The Flexilis video is slightly comical for its amateurish appearance--it features a mannequin strung from a clothesline and then blasted with model rocket engines--but it's an unsettling reminder that terrorists' methods can be almost as crude. 

In a related story, the UK-based tech monitor The Register offers a report on how to clone the new passport in a few easy steps.

As calls increase for a multinational force that could police the Israel-Lebanon border, there appears to be less hand-raising and more finger-pointing. The US and UK won't send troops because they're overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israelis won't accept the usual UN rent-a-force full of untrained soldiers just out for a paycheck. And no matter who goes, the timing and size of the deployment is sure to be a political minefield in most countries. So just who will step up and monitor a possible cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israeli soldiers? In this week's List, FP takes a look at the countries that might supply the boots on the ground.

Are you concerned that some crazy nation might fire a nuclear weapon at the United States? Maybe Iran or North Korea? The Pentagon isn't.

In fact, the Pentagon is so sure that the United States is safe from nuclear attack, it's closing down its fortified airspace and missile defense bunker, commonly known as Cheyenne Mountain, over the next two years. Located deep inside a mountain outside Colorado Springs, Colo., Cheyenne Mountain was built in the 1960s. It is capable of withstanding a nuclear blast and is equipped for medium-term subterranean living, with such features as a 6 million gallon water reservoir and air filters that cleanse incoming air of nuclear particles.

But the Pentagon believes the Mountain is no longer necessary. NORAD commander Adm. Tim Keeting says U.S. intelligence "leads us to believe a missile attack from China or Russia is very unlikely." Of course, this the same intelligence that told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. So just in case, the Pentagon intends to keep the mountain on "warm standby."

This is a move only the Pentagon could make. Since 9/11, it has spent some $700 million renovating and updating Cheyenne Mountain, and moving the 1,100 people who work inside the Mountain out will cost tens of millions more.

On Sunday, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will hold its first free elections in more than 40 years. International donors have chipped in nearly half a billion dollars to finance the vote - this in a country with only a few hundred miles of paved roads, crippling poverty, little access to health care, and the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping force. But I'm all in favor of freedom, and there's good news out of the country's war-torn east today: three of the main warring militias there have agreed to lay down their arms. Still, the election is a huge logistical challenge: thousands of candidates, rampant intimidation, and the very real possibility of fraud (5 million extra ballots have been printed).

That's just the election. There's the other small matter of rebuilding the country's infrastructure after a devastating civil war that ended in 2002, after killing 4 million people. That war sucked in not just neighboring countries, but tens of thousands of child soldiers, who are now slowly being demobilized. But how do you integrate kids who extorted, murdered, and raped, most because they were forced by elder soldiers, but some because they wanted to?

In a new ForeignPolicy.com exclusive, Paule Bouvier and Pierre Englebert examine the incredible challenges the DRC faces, not just in pulling off this weekend's election, but in making the democratic experiment stick by securing the country and pulling its devastated population out of poverty. Despite all the international investment and the domestic enthusiasm, it's unlikely this weekend's election will deliver a miracle.

I spent yesterday in Haifa. By one estimate, over half its population has gone to stay with relatives further south, and the city is so quiet that it feels as if it is stuck in a perpetual early Saturday morning, a sort of Groundhog Hour.

When the sirens go off, you have about one minute until the rockets hit. The first couple of times you hear them, it is truly scary. In most conflict zones there are some fairly well-understood lines dividing where's safe from where's dangerous—they just never show you the safe bits on television. (Even in Beirut, for instance, a lot of people outside the Hezbollah neighborhoods are more or less carrying on with life as normal.) In some of them, being visibly identifiable as a foreign journalist is better than having a bullet-proof car. But there are no safe areas in Haifa, and Fajr missiles can't read the sign on your windshield that says "PRESS".

But not every alarm is followed by rockets: the warning system covers a wide region, and sometimes there are false alarms. Yesterday there were nine warnings but only one wave of rockets. And a missile has to pretty much score a direct hit on the room you're in if it's to kill you.

And so, as in any extreme situation, people get used to it. One time, the siren went off when we were at the site where, a couple of hours earlier, a missile had struck next to a building. The shrapnel had done this to it:

And you would think that after seeing this any sensible person, on hearing the siren, would at least run indoors to avoid ending up like a Swiss cheese. Well, the bystanders—including, I note, several policemen—decided that the appropriate shelter from an incoming missile is the same as for a passing rain shower: 

Later that day, the alarm sounded as I sat with some people who were enjoying the unusual peace and quiet on the outdoor terrace of a restaurant. Everyone gathered up their belongings, a few took their drinks, and we trooped into the restaurant's cellar bar for a couple of minutes. While we waited, a Palestinian diner found some black humor in Hassan Nasrallah's apology for killing Arab-Israelis as well as Jewish ones. "If I get back outside and my lunch is not there any more," he warned, "I will demand an apology from Nasrallah in person."

Brian Winter writes in today's LAT about his recent travels to Beirut, a city he describes as on the cusp of a kind of cultural revolution. He just didn't realize at the time that it was in store for a revolution of a different kind:

The head of Hezbollah sends his regards," the note read, "but he will not be able to attend your book signing." Bummer, I thought. What else could he possibly be up to? I figured he might be at a rave, or maybe watching the World Cup on one of the big-screen TVs at the sidewalk cafes in Solidere, the heart of the city's stubbornly-won rebirth, where teenage girls in tank tops and women in black burkas mingled well past midnight, casing the jewelry stores and lining up at Dunkin' Donuts.

This was Beirut only two weeks ago, when it still seemed like a post-apocalyptic amusement park. Enough time had passed since the civil war that the handful of battle-scarred buildings that we saw seemed almost quaint. "That's where the Green Line used to be," my guide gushed. "Those are real bullet holes!"

The city pulsed with that giddy, heartbreakingly innocent feel of the early stages of youthful revolution. "SEX!" blared the cover of the June issue of Time Out Beirut, bearing a racy photo of crossed legs with black panties around the ankles. A bullet-ridden water tower downtown had been converted into a discotheque; at the plaza where in 2005 thousands of Lebanese protesters demanded Syria's withdrawal, there was an outdoor jazz festival. Just two weeks before my visit, the rapper 50 Cent had played to a packed house; surely he found it infinitely less threatening than Queens.

It's worth reading the whole thing. And in the current issue of FP, we featured Lebanon as one of the most tourism dependent countries in the world. 

Although Bush and Putin couldn't agree this weekend on Russia's accession to the WTO, they did reach an accord to curtail free trade's dangerous cousin, the illicit international trade in nuclear materials. Happy to find common ground on something, the two unveiled an informal global program that will track weapons and people suspected of carrying them, as well as improve cooperation and encourage joint action to intercept transports and respond to actual threats. The new Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism is a major expansion of the Proliferation Security Initiative, the 70-country effort to track nuclear materials. Rather than focus only on international transfers, the new program will work inside the borders of member countries, setting standards on protection and detection and developing common strategies against terror groups - welcome news indeed from a summit overshadowed by violence in the Middle East. 

The big question, though, is whether an informal network can be effective. With no central organization or headquarters, and little except fear to bind its members together, the organization will have to rely on quick communication and coordinated response - and on trust. 

You'd think the last thing citizens of a country that suffered decades of civil war would want is an all-out attack by one of the most advanced militaries in the world. But some Lebanese and other Arabs around the region (including the Saudis), while obviously not in favor of the Israeli assault, are seeing this crisis as a death knell for Hezbollah and quietly cheering it on. The WaPo ran an analysis piece on the subject today, and ynetnews.com - the English version of the most widely read Hebrew daily in Israel - also has some analysis. A year after the Lebanese successfully booted most of the Syrian influence out of the government, some are realizing that allowing minority parties, like Hezbollah, to make decisions that affect the entire nation does not make for a functioning state.

To declare war and to make military action must be a decision made by the state and not by a party," said Nabil de Freige, a [Lebanese] parliament member. "It's a very simple equation: You have to be a state."

Don't miss the hilarious-though-it's-so-troubling piece in the NYT today on the wildly-flawed DHS National Asset Database. The DHS turns to the list to figure out how to allocate antiterrorism grants to the states. And which state has the most potential targets? Indiana, of course. 

Some of the high-profile targets around the country? A flea market, a small-town apple and pork festival, and a popcorn farm, whose confused owner, when informed by a reporter that his business appears on the list, struggled to come up with a reason why the state included him, responding with "Maybe because popcorn explodes?" 

And more glaring anomalies: Indiana declared more than 5,400 public health assets, about 65 percent of the total such assets declared nationwide. Washington state lists more national monuments than Washington DC. The number of New York's financial targets ranks it just below North Dakota. 

Perhaps we shouldn't be so hard on DHS and the states. After all, as DHS is quick to point out, compiling these assets is hard work. From the DHS Inspector General's report on the database's progress (emphasis mine):

Processing State Submissions Has Been Difficult

States took more than a year to compile information for 17 fields of
identification and location data on each asset to complete their submissions. IP then needed time to resolve numerous formatting issues with the data. IP set a deadline of October 1, 2004, to submit responses but underestimated how much time states would require and the level of difficulty involved. Only 2 of 56 states and territories met that deadline.... 

It was not unusual for states to send multiple submissions to IP....Puerto Rico’s data had to be translated because it was prepared in Spanish.  

Does that make you sleep better at night? Didn't think so. It's snafus like this that earned DHS the worst grade among government agencies in FP's Terrorism Index.  

Here at Passport, we've been following with interest the question posed by David Ignatius over on the WaPo's new blog PostGlobal: How would you mediate the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis? 

There have been some fascinating responses: what apartheid South Africa can teach us about the current crisis; why allowing Hamas to govern - and therefore taking more responsibility for the plight of Palestinians - would have been the wisest (initial) course; why diplomacy there is ultimately a lesson in futility, with no political solution in sight.

Because we're convinced this is an important question, Passport asked Middle East expert Dennis Ross, who was chief US diplomat in charge of Middle East peace under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, for his take on a way out of the labyrinth. Here's what he had to say:

Last year I gave a speech in Gaza and told my audience that the upcoming Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was both a challenge and an opportunity for the Palestinian people. A challenge because they would have to be able to govern themselves and bring order to Gaza once Israel had departed; an opportunity because if they showed the world and the Israeli public that they could govern themselves and fulfill security responsibilities, there would be a compelling argument that what was done and working in Gaza should also now be done in the West Bank. But, as I added, if you fail, even the strongest defenders of the Palestinian cause would have a hard time arguing that a failed model of violence and chaos in Gaza should also be applied to the West Bank. More after the jump.

In an effort to fight the war on terror, the Air Force is putting up $450,000 for a three year study of...blogs. One scientist involved in the project is already proving, with this revelation, that he is worth the money:

Blog entries have a different structure," Ulicny said. "They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself, such as a news event. It's not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, 'I can't believe this happened,' and then link to a news story."

I can't believe this is happening. Check it out here.

It's not often that U.S. policymakers get inside the brains of top terrorists, but the translation of an online book available on jihadist Web sites is providing just such an opportunity. The Management of Savagery, authored by an Al Qaeda insider, is a detailed look into the operational and strategic aspects of Al Qaeda's global jihad against the United States.

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point released the first English translation of the text from Arabic this week. Comparing the strategies outlined in the book to current world events will yield few surprises. The book calls on jihadis to portray America as the invader by confronting the United States abroad (especially in Iraq) and infers that the invasion of Iraq was exactly what Al Qaeda wanted. The strategy does not include major attacks on U.S. soil in the near future because such attacks have the potential to alienate Al Qaeda's sympathizers and boost the moral position of the United States.

European legislation meant to combat international terrorism appears to be aiding the fight against international corporate fraud as well. Today, judges confirmed that three British bankers accused of conspiring from overseas with Enron executives will be sent to the US for trial under the UK's 2003 Extradition Act.

The bilateral legislation, introduced after 9/11 along with a spate of other security measures, was originally aimed at speeding up the extradition of British terror suspects to the US. The extradition proves, however, that the European and American governments' expanded post-9/11 authority can be used to crack down not just on global terrorism - but murky corporate networks too.