She's young, stylish, sharp and pretty, and Indians are falling for her. Yep, it seems that Pakistan's new 34-year-old foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, has accomplished what years of tense diplomacy haven't been able to -- create some genuine goodwill between the two constantly sparring nations. In her first official visit today to India since taking over the foreign ministry last week, Khar met with her Indian counterpart, S.M. Krishna. The two agreed to boost security, trade, transportation, travel, and cultural links between the countries -- in what analysts called some of the most productive talks between the two sides since Pakistani militants killed 166 people in Mumbai three years ago. But it's her youth and glamour that are credited with creating a "fresh start atmosphere."  She later met with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

But who really cares what happened behind closed doors. More importantly: she got high marks for wearing Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, classic pearl and diamond jewelry, a blue designer dress, and toting an Hermes Birkin bag. And thus ladies and gentleman, a glamour icon is born. We give it three months before Vogue comes calling... wait, maybe two.

Indian papers and news programs today gushed over Khar, praising her beauty and style.  The Times of India headlined their front page story: "Pak Puts On Its Best Face." The Navbharat Times said the country was "sweating over model-like minister." The Mail Today said she had brought a "Glam touch to Indo-Pak talks" and asked, "Who says politicians can't be chic?" These are not the usual superlatives Pakistani diplomats are used to getting in the Indian press.

Of course, not everything was picture perfect. The Indian press did attack her for meeting with a Kashmiri separatist group later in the day.

But overall, it was hard not to sense the generational shift as Khar spoke about "a new generation of Indians and Pakistanis [who] will see a relationship that will hopefully be much different from the one that has been experienced in the last two decades" after meeting with the Indian foreign minister who -- through no fault of his own, save for his misfortune of being born 79 years ago -- did totally look like her grandfather.

As Seema Goswami, a leading Indian social commentator, put it, "She's incredibly young pretty, glamorous and has no fear of appearing flash. She wore pearls when she arrived and diamonds for the talks. We're so obsessed with her designer bag and clothes that we forget she first held talks with the Hurriyat [Kashmiri separatists]. She could be Pakistan's new weapon of mass destruction."

The May 2^nd Navy Seal raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad led to a crisis in relations between the United States and Pakistan that is still being felt. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in Islamabad now, is the latest high level envoy sent to try to mend fences. Officials say he is on a mission to "bridge the trust gap and repair ties" with his Pakistani counterparts in the intelligence world. But, as part of its fence-mending initiative, did the United States really promise Pakistan's government they wouldn't take a similar unilateral action again in the future?

That's what Pakistan's prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, is claiming in an interview today with the Guardian.

"They have assured us in future there will be no unilateral actions in Pakistan, and there would be co-operation between both agencies," he said, identifying Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as personally pledging that to him.

Pakistan's President made a similar -- though less explicit -- statement after he met with Secretary Clinton back in May.  He said, both sides agreed to "work together in any future actions against high-value targets in Pakistan."

No similar statements have come from the American side, however. In fact, public comments from Clinton and others would seem to contradict Pakistan's understanding. After the raid, Clinton told CBS News, "We've made it clear to people around the world that if we locate someone who has been part of the al Qaeda leadership, then you get him or we will get him."

President Obama has also said, given similar circumstances, the United States would act the same way.

"Our job is to secure the United States," he told the BBC in May. "We are very respectful of the sovereignty of Pakistan. But we cannot allow someone who is actively planning to kill our people or our allies' people."

In his interview with the Guardian, Gilani said the United States could have trusted Pakistan's intelligence service to help in May's raid, but since that didn't happen, the country "had a lot of reservations" about the operation.

He told the Guardian any future operation in its territory would be "totally unacceptable."

Public opinion would further aggravate against the United States and you cannot fight a war without the support of the masses. You need the masses to support military actions against militants.

Perhaps as a sign of the fraying relationship, last night Gilani told an audience of British and Pakistani business leaders in London that China -- not the United States -- was his country's most important foreign relationship.

"China is a rising power and Pakistan's all-weather friend. This is a relationship that has no parallel. Uniquely, there are no downs but only ups in Pakistan-China relations. China is a source of pride and strength for us," the prime minister said.

Hamid Karzai's younger half brother, Ahmad Wali, was a master of balancing various powerful forces in southern Afghanistan -- tribal leaders, U.S. and NATO military and intelligence interests, allegedly even powerful drug lords. It's what made him such a valuable asset to his older brother.

He was also a link for President Karzai to the murkier side of Afghan politics -- tribal power. Karzai may have won the presidency through elections, but he maintained power the way politics in Afghanistan has always been played -- through patronage and tribal links.

Moreover, Ahmad Wali managed the troubled southern city of Kandahar, keeping it in his brother's political sphere. As Vali Nasr, a former senior advisor to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, put it, "Afghan politics is all about power brokers and their webs of relationships. The bigger your web, the more powerful you are."

His assassination -- which the Taliban has taken credit for -- leaves a number of tricky questions for Karzai and the United States.

Did the Taliban just send a message about negotiations?

Just last month, Hamid Karzai said peace talks with the Taliban are "going well." As relations between Karzai and the United States have become more contentious -- and the U.S. drawdown begins -- the Afghan president has grown more open in public to reestablishing relations to the Taliban.

As far as negotiating tactics go, killing the leader's brother isn't exactly a way to send a positive signal. Even if they didn't kill him, as Matthieu Akins suggests, they are still taking credit.

"It would suggest they are not in a reconciliation mood," Nasr told Foreign Policy.

President Obama has seen political negotiations as necessary to ending the war. Karzai's death may have just delivered a severe blow to those hopes.

"It puts the burden on the United States and the Karzai government," said Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. "Will we suspend talks with the Taliban because they claimed credit for something like this? The burden is on Karzai. He's been calling them his ‘brothers,' talking to them, and encouraging them to make peace."

Who fills the sizable power vacuum in Kandahar?

Ahmad Wali was an easy figure to criticize -- a man with murky ties and no clear political ideology -- but his absence will be felt in Kandahar, a city key to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.

"Good or bad, he was nevertheless Karzai's most important instrument and pillar of authority in Kandahar," Nasr said. "Without him, we'll have a much more dangerous time dealing with that city."

Now, who will manage the complex web of tribal power brokers there? Potentially the Taliban, said Nasr. But expect some battles between aspiring warlords over his turf.

Karzai will surely try to fill the breach with someone else. But there's no guarantee his new man -- whomever that may be -- will be able to keep the lid on the city with quite as much success.

What does his death mean for the United States?

The United States could never seem to make up its mind about the younger Karzai. They acknowledged his vast corruption and dirty dealings, but also seemed to realize his brand of Afghan power politics was necessary, to a degree. He was regarded by U.S. intelligence officials as "indispensable," according to the Washington Post, even if he "has long been viewed with mistrust by American military officers, who describe him as an obstacle in their efforts to fight corruption and bolster the rule of law."

Last March, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told his subordinates to "stop saying bad stuff about" the younger Karzai and to work with him.

Karzai had ties to the CIA (some reports say he was on their payroll in exchange for security forces and providing safe houses around Kandahar). But many in Washington also believed he was tied to the opium trade and other illicit activities.

Still, Khalilzad said that when he was ambassador, the United States dealt with him effectively on a number of security issues, as well as facilitating engagement with local leaders. "He was seen as being helpful," he said.

However, another former U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry called Ahmad Wali Karzai an obstacle to U.S. efforts, according to a leaked diplomatic cable obtained by Wikileaks.

"One of our major challenges in Afghanistan [is] how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt," he wrote. The memo singled out Ahmad Wali as "widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker."

Good or bad, his death surely complicates efforts to bring peace to the southern region of Afghanistan -- and clearly highlights the lack of security for the highest echelons of the government there.

The price tag for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq since the 9/11 attacks is somewhere between $3.7 and $4.4 trillion, according to a new report released today. The staggering figure is nearly four times higher than the U.S. government estimate. Just last week, President Barack Obama pegged the cost over the last decade at $1 trillion.

The new estimated cost provided by a research project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, is also much higher than most previous attempts to quantify the operations.

A March 2011 Congressional Research Service report estimated the war funding at $1.4 trillion through 2012 and the Congressional Budget Office pegged the cost from 2001 through 2021 at an estimated $1.8 trillion, according to Reuters.

A 2008 report by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, however, put the estimated combined cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between $5 and $7 trillion. They included interest on debt, future borrowing to pay off debt, the cost of a continued military presence, and health care and counseling for veterans.

Catherine Lutz, a professor of anthropology at Brown and one of the project's directors, told Foreign Policy her group also took into account future costs, such as obligated expenses for injured soldiers in the decades to come. 

According to a White House spokesperson, the number disparity between the trillion-dollar figure the president used this month and the Brown report comes down to methodology -- and what you choose to include. The administration is counting only the "direct costs of war," the spokesperson said, which includes just the money appropriated for the budgets of the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community.  Officially, the White House says the "total amount appropriated for war-related activities" is $1.3 trillion, which could rise to $1.4 trillion in 2012.

Nora Bensahel, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said it's fair to include more than just the cost of current operations when coming up with the "total cost" of the war -- including things such as veteran care.

"There are people who are being injured today who will need health care for a long time after the conflict ends," she said. "That's not part of the current cost, but it's certainly directly related."

Bensahel, who has not read the entire report, said other expenses mentioned in the press were less fair -- including factoring in lost opportunity costs.

"I don't think that's an appropriate cost to include because every expenditure of money includes some trade-offs," she said.

According to the report, the United States has already spent between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan. The project also looked at the cost of war in terms of human casualties. The number of total deaths it calculates (225,000) is "a very conservative estimate," said Lutz.

"Seeing the death toll, how many of the allied uniform folks have died and seeing the civilian numbers was the biggest shock for me," she said.

31,741 uniformed allied soldiers and contractors -- from U.S., Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani security forces, as well as contractors -- have been killed. And the report claims that at least 137,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Journalists and humanitarian workers accounted for between 434 and 521 deaths.

The goal of the project was to give the public "a fuller sense of what's at stake," Lutz said. "I think it's the case that we've had an atrophying of public information sources [looking into these questions]. Journalism is in a challenged state and there's a real heavy spin machine out there. Whatever one's political project, it's accompanied by a heavy dose of misinformation. We really feel it's important for foreign policy and domestic policy decision-making to know this information."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich attacked President Barack Obama's assertion in his June 22 speech announcing the troop drawdown in Afghanistan that the "tide of war is receding." He said the country is facing a "tsunami of violence building offshore," according to Politico.

"I want to challenge the president to withdraw the phrase because it totally misleads the American people, and presents a delusional version of the world," he said at a Maryland Republican Party dinner in Baltimore.

Gingrich said the White House should have taken stronger action against Pakistan after it reportedly arrested CIA informants who helped the United States find Osama bin Laden.

"We should have taken extraordinary actions against Pakistanis -- within 24 hours," Gingrich told the crowd. "We should have said if you don't release those people you can assume we have no relationship and we'll chat with you from India."

He also accused the president of "sleepwalking" through the threat of a nuclear Iran.

Romney to fundraise in London

One of Mitt Romney's favorite knocks on Obama is that he is too European. In the words of the GOP frontrunner, the president takes "his inspiration not from the small towns and villages of New Hampshire but from the capitals of Europe." So, it might strike some people as a little surprising that Romney is planning to travel to London next month -- which, after all, is one of those "capitals of Europe" -- to attend a fund-raiser, according to the Boston Globe. Very few presidential candidates have held fundraisers on foreign soil. Rudy Giuliani was the first in 2007 -- also in London -- and Obama held one in the London home of Rupert Murdoch's daughter, Elizabeth, in 2008.

According to the Globe, suggested contributions for the July 6 party at Dartmouth House -- "a building not far from Hyde Park that has marble fireplaces, Louis XIV walnut paneling, and a painted ceiling by Pierre Victor Galland" -- is $2,500 a person.

Santorum and Beck discuss Israel

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was on Glenn Beck's Fox News show yesterday, and the pair discussed more than just kissing "on the mouth" -- though they did discuss that too.

Israel -- and specifically efforts to delegitimize Israel -- came up. Santorum said the United States should not force Israel to take part in negotiations since the "Palestinian Authority [and] others in the Middle East refuse to accept Israel's right to be there."

"Do you think America has enough courage to turn the tide on Israel," Beck asked the presidential candidate."

"If we had a strong leader who had the respect of the world," Santorum said. "We see now...a president backing away, who is an internationalist, someone who sees his role as almost transcending the presidency...and sees his role as to work with the international community to their ends. Not to the ends of the national security interest of our country. Not to the end of supporting allies who are strategic for us. But to the ends of some greater goal."

Whenever the two get together, the Middle East seems to come up. In April, they agreed that there is a coalition of "Sunni, Shia, socialists, and Islamists and jihadists working together [to form] a caliphate," Santorum said. Beck said the caliphate "begins with Turkey, Egypt and Iran."  

His latest attack came Saturday:

You remember a few years ago I was saying thank you to the foreigners for their help; every minute we were thanking them. Now I have stopped saying that... They're here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they're using our soil for that.

Even as Karzai's rhetoric has turned sharply anti-Western and anti-American, it's not clear he actually wants foreign troops to withdraw, a step that could endanger his government's stability.

Still, his language has frustrated U.S. officials, who feel that he is undermining the war effort. "At the point your leaders believe that we are doing more harm than good, when we reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption," outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eichenberry said, in response to Karzai's latest verbal barrage. "The American people will ask for our forces to come home."

So what's behind Karzai's anger? A chorus of officials and analysts think he has simply become unhinged -- U.S. intelligence reports have reportedly voiced the theory that he is "manic-depressive."

But others believe that Karzai is calculating that anti-American statements will burnish his nationalist credentials and curry favor with the Afghan population.

"He doesn't want to be seen as a lackey of the United States, he cultivates a sense of separateness," said Vali Nasr, who served in the Obama administration on Afghanistan-Pakistan policy until this spring. "My read of him is he doesn't trust our strategy and doesn't believe we have a commitment to him."

The contested 2009 presidential election, during which he was accused of vote fraud by many observers, represented a turning point in his relationship with the United States, Nasr said.

"In the past two years, he's come to doubt our commitment and strategy," he said. "And he sees what we demand of him as counter-productive to his political ambitions. So he lashes out."

Still, Karzai is running the risk of undercutting support for the military intervention that is crucial for him to fend off the insurgency. Polls indicate that Americans are losing patience with the Afghan war. And when Afghanistan's leader vociferously condemns American soldiers as occupiers, their impatience only grows.

"He's systematically been creating the impression that we are wasting our time over there," Nasr said.

Below, Foreign Policy compiled some of Karzai's most notorious recent statements.

Read on

It's time for one of Washington favorite parlor games -- predicting what the president will say before he says it.  What we know is that tomorrow President Obama will announce his plans for a troop reduction in Afghanistan. Thirty-three thousand surge troops were added in 2009, with the promise that by this summer they would begin to come home. But how many and how fast is still an open question.

Officially, the White House says the president is still "finalizing" his decision. And indeed, some of his key advisors reportedly disagree on what to do. Gen. David Petraeus-- the current Afghanistan commander who will soon take over the CIA -- and many of the generals are pushing for a pretty small initial withdrawal of no more than 3-4,000 troops. On the opposite extreme, some in the administration and outside want a far broader withdrawal. Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president's senior advisor on Afghanistan, advocates pulling 15,000 troops out by the end of the year and another 15,000 by the end of 2012, according to the New York Times. Carl Levin, the influential senator and chair of the armed services committee, backs that approach as well. Vice President Joe Biden -- who was a critic of the surge before it was cool -- reportedly wants all 30,000 surge troops gone within 12 months. Defense Secretary Bob Gates is pushing for something in the range of 5,000 troops -- a brigade -- this year and another 5,000 over the next winter, according to the Times.

Where will Obama come down?

The L.A. Times cites Pentagon and administration officials saying the reduction will be about 10,000 by the end of the year. If true, it would be a significant move by Obama. Petraeus has warned Obama that taking out that many troops that quickly "could create problems for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan" especially if other countries follow America's lead and begin withdrawing, the paper said.  But a faster withdrawal decision would seem to bolster the president politically at home. A recent NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll found that 54 percent of the country approves of Obama's handling of the war but are growing impatient with the decade-old conflict.

The Washington Post cites administration officials saying Obama will likely remove far fewer than 10,000 -- probably in the Pentagon-approved range of 3-5,000, though the officials warned that no final decision has been made.  Interestingly, according to the Post, the president had hoped to announce progress on another front at the same time as the troop withdrawal -- reconciliation talks with the Taliban. But those talks have stalled and there is political confusion over the U.S.'s partner in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, whose rhetoric has been growing more and more incendiary -- some would say unhinged -- of late.

The New York Times presents a third theory, attributed to an "official," that the president tomorrow might not give any specific withdrawal number. He might only announce a date for the final drawdown of all the surge troops sometime in 2012 -- but leave the timetable vague and rely on commanders in the field to make suggestions. This was the approach he used in Iraq. According to the Times, administration sources said the president would most likely pull out "the entire 30,000 troops by the end of 2012."

Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, was gunned down by one of his bodyguards today in a crowded marketplace -- the highest-profile killing in Pakistan since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the latest blow to the country's beleaguered civilian government. Pakistan's interior minister has suggested that Taseer's killing was related to his support of repealing the country's controversial blasphemy law, which earned him the ire of Pakistan's religious parties.

Nevertheless, you'd think that those who supported Taseer's assassination would be relegated to the lunatic fringe -- or at least be reticent about shouting their praise for the act from the rooftops. Not so. Admirers of the gunman, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, have set up a Facebook page to commemorate the killer. In a few short hours, the page has been flooded with hundreds of posts by supporters lionizing their newfound hero.

"May Allah protect Malik Mumtaz; he has indeed made us very proud as Muslims," reads one representative post written by Kamran Qureshi who, if his Facebook information is to be believed, resides in Lahore. Sounds like the Pakistani security services just got the names of a number of individuals with whom they might want to have a conversation.

Speaking  in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on Monday, President Barack Obama lamented America's stubbornly high unemployment and promised to outline for the gathered students a "vision that will keep our economy strong and growing and competitive in the 21st century."

There was applause as the students sat on the edges of their chairs in anticipation. Unfortunately, what followed only proved that the president should have gone to his eye doctor instead of the Winston-Salem. It was at best, a case of partial vision.

It began with a "recognition" that in the past few decades revolutions in technology and communications and the integration into the global economy of two billion new people in India and China had touched off fierce competition among nations for the industries and jobs of the future to replace the auto mechanics and machinists that Forsyth Technical Community College, where he was speaking, had been founded many years ago to produce. It continued with the argument that the winners of the competition would be the countries with the most educated workers, the most serious commitments to research, the best roads, bridges, high speed trains and airports, the fastest Internet connections, and the most innovation.

The president emphasized that the most important competition the United States faces is not the competition between Republicans and Democrats, but the competition between America and its economic competitors around the world. "That's the competition we've got to spend time thinking about," he stressed.

He went on to reassure the audience that America will win this competition because it has the world's best universities, smartest scientists, best research facilities, and most entrepreneurial people. Indeed, entrepreneurialism is "in our DNA" he said.

But then the vision became a bit cloudy. Despite the reassurances of American superiority, the president said the country is in danger of, indeed is, falling behind -- in high school graduation rates, the quality of math and science education, in the proportion of science and engineering degrees we hand out, in attracting research and development facilities compared to India and China, in R&D spending, and in Internet speed and connections.

Are you a little confused by how we could be falling so badly behind if we have the best universities, best research facilities, smartest scientists, and most entrepreneurial people? All I can tell you is that the president says we are facing in "Sputnik Moment", calling to mind the shock America felt in 1957 when the Russians launched the first earth satellite. To respond to this challenge, he emphasized that we must set the goal of "Made in America."

Hey, nothing wrong with that. At this point, I was cheering. He's the first president in my memory who has dared to say that we need to compete by actually making things. So I give the first half of the vision an A.

But then Obama turned to how we're going to come back and regain leadership by increasing education and R&D spending, improving our infrastructure, and doubling our exports by negotiating more free trade agreements like the one just concluded with Korea.

Aside from the Korea deal (which I'll address in a moment),these are all good things to do and we should do them. But doing them will not by itself reverse the decline in our competitiveness. Actually, the Korea deal illustrates both why this is true and why the president's vision is still impaired. South Korea's workforce is not better educated than America's. Nor does it spend more on R&D, nor is its labor inexpensive like that of China, and nor is it nearly as entrepreneurial. Yet the United States a growing trade deficit with South Korea and is far behind it in areas like liquid crystal displays, various kinds of semiconductors, cell phones, and much more.

What the Koreans do is target development of key industries with special financing and regulations and manage their currency to be undervalued versus the dollar as a kind of protection of the domestic market cum subsidy of exports, impede foreign penetration of domestic markets through a wide variety of formal and informal non-tariff barriers, fail to enforce intellectual property rights of foreign enterprises operating in South Korea, and make foreign investment in Korea extremely difficult as a practical matter.

I am not saying these things to attack South Korea. If these policies work, and they obviously do, South Korea has every right to keep them in place. But obviously Korea is engaging in a different kind of globalization than we are. And equally obviously, the president doesn't recognize that. Thus the president expects that this new free trade deal is going to increase U.S. exports to Korea and create 70,000 jobs in the U.S. But any deal that allows currencies to be managed in such a way as to stimulate exports and inhibit imports - to mention just one factor -- is not going to result in surging U.S. exports or in surging U.S. job creation.

The White House eye doctor needs to prescribe glasses that will allow the president to see the other half of the playing field and to recognize that he must play with a full deck of cards. More education and R&D? By all means, bring them on. But he also needs to respond to the industrial targeting, exchange rate, investment, and getting realistic about the globalization policies and practices of our economic competitors.

Clyde Prestowitz is president of the Economic Strategy Institute and author of The Betrayal of American Prosperity.  

Are we surprised to learn, via WikiLeaks, that American diplomats in Colombo blame Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his top officials for the massacre of tens of thousands (by most estimates) of Tamil civilians during the final months of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war? The goods are in a Jan. 15 cable sent by U.S. Amb. Patricia A. Butenis on the eve of Sri Lanka's presidential elections (which Rajapaksa won handily). Butenis was assessing the country's ability to come to terms with the atrocities committed in the protracted conflict between the government and the Tamil Tigers rebel group, which was defeated in May 2009 after nearly three decades of fighting.

In May, the Sri Lankan government announced plans to launch a "truth and reconciliation commission," modeled on South Africa's post-Apartheid investigation, to look into the brutal last phase of the war, in which large numbers of Tamil civilians were trapped between the government and rebel troops. Human rights groups aren't exactly holding their breath for the results of the ongoing inquiry, led as it is by the same government that was allegedly responsible for most of the carnage. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and International Crisis Group -- which released a sweeping and damning report on the war crimes in May -- all turned down invitations to participate. Butenis, it turns out, was similarly nonplussed, writing:

There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power. In Sri Lanka this is further complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country's senior civilian and military leadership, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and opposition candidate General [Sarath] Fonseka.

This last observation gets headline treatment from the Guardian, and it is notable for Butenis's willingness to name names. But the State Department has been fairly clear, albeit more diplomatic, about what it thinks happened in the spring of 2009, in a report released in March:

The government's respect for human rights declined as armed conflict reached its conclusion. Outside of the conflict zone, the overwhelming majority of victims of human rights violations, such as extrajudicial killings and disappearances, were young male Tamils, while Tamils were estimated to be only 16 percent of the overall population. Credible reports cited unlawful killings by paramilitaries and others believed to be working with the awareness and assistance of the government, assassinations by unknown perpetrators, politically motivated killings, and disappearances.

An August report from State also (cautiously) expressed concern about the integrity of the government's commission. In short, Butenis's assessment is generally consistent with what humanitarian workers on the ground in Sri Lanka at the time of the conflict thought State's position was -- one that may not have been shared by American defense and intelligence personnel, who were believed to be less squeamish about the military campaign against the Tigers.

I asked Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka project director for ICG, about the cable. He says it contains few surprises:

It's certainly consistent with how the embassy and the State Department are looking at the situation. They knew bad things happened -- they're calling them "alleged" war crimes, but I think in a quiet moment they would say they were war crimes. They recognize that that happened. But they don't think there's the space internally for it to be addressed. So I don't think we're learning a whole lot new. What would tell us more, and what will be more interesting, and where the issues are a bit more gray, is what happened during the war -- what did the U.S. government know, and what did it do, or not do, to prevent the worst abuses and suffering?

Violence has engulfed Karachi since Oct. 16, with close to 90 dead across the city. An Oct. 17 special election to replace assassinated Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) legislator Raza Haider boiled over long-held tensions between the MQM and the Awami National Party (ANP). Haider was shot dead at the Jamia Mosque in Nazimabad, a suburb of Karachi, on Aug. 2.

Street violence is nothing new to Karachi; the army was forced to restore order in the 90's, and clashes have oft-occurred in the last few years. After Haider's death, MQM leaders insinuated that the ANP was responsible, sparking street clashes which left dozens dead. (The MQM and ANP, along with the Pakistan People's Party [PPP], rule Sindh province in a coalition government; on the national level, the PPP and the MQM rule together.) The MQM retained the seat as the ANP boycotted the poll.

While affairs in Pakistan's northwest grab the Western headlines, the street battles in Karachi are more important to the Pakistani state. The MQM-ANP violence is not merely political, but carries ethnic undertones. The MQM is largely composed of muhajirs, Urdu-speakers who fled India during the 1947 partition, while the ANP is backed by Pashtuns. Karachi has long been overwhelmingly muhajir, and politically dominated by the MQM, but Pashtuns -- including Afghan refugees and internally displaced Pakistanis, as well as economic migrants -- have entered the city in increasing numbers over the last three decades. Apparently, familiarity does breed contempt in Pakistan's most important city.

Karachi has been spared the widespread suicide bombings that have hit cities like Peshawar and Lahore, but the MQM has blamed increasing levels of violence on Pashtun migrants, alleging that they've both brought Taliban elements with them and are not doing enough to prevent the "Talibanization" of Karachi. The ANP, not suprisingly, disputes this. (For an example of MQM feelings towards the ANP, read this press release on the recent violence from its head, Altaf Hussain -- the ethnic code isn't very subtle.)

So while the attention paid by the U.S. military, politicians, and media to Pakistan focuses almost solely on the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), it is ethnic conflict, not militant Islam, that is a bigger danger to the stability of the Pakistani state. For now, the killings are alleged to be targeted -- though this round-up from Dawn seems to point to randomized violence as well. Karachi was entirely shut down Wednesday, and Pakistan can ill afford a situation in which its most vital economic hub is cut off.

The Pakistani military seems to have come to the conclusion that if they can keep the Afghan Taliban onsides by neglecting to crack down, they're willing to pay the cost of whatever the Pakistani Taliban -- at the moment, outside their nominal control -- dishes out. But the ethnic conflict exploding on the streets of Karachi this week may turn out to be the far more serious threat. 

Thousands of politicians all over the world are now on Twitter, and not all are using the social networking tool wisely. Take Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, a businessman who owns the Daily Times newspaper and is said to have been close to Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister.

On Saturday, he tweeted this ill-conceived joke:

"One of first politicians to condemn mad Florida pastor Terry Jones was Sara Palin who said 'it was inhuman to burn a Korean'! God bless USA"

Apparently not everyone got it, because he later tweeted:

"I'm amazed that the simplistic pathetic remarks to my JOKE that Sarah Palin can't tell difference between a KOREAN and QORAN! Humour?"

He followed up that tweet with this winner:

"My farms rice crop has never been better because of the rains.Almost ready now ,huge robust grain practically no canal water was required"

A bit insensitive, perhaps, given how the vast swaths of the country have been inundated by catastrophic flooding, not to mention the inherently sensitive politics of land ownership in Pakistan? No matter. When criticized by journalist Dean Nelson (@delhidean) of the Daily Telegraph, who asked, "will you give ur crop to farmers whose land was flooded by Sindh landowners?," Taseer tweeted resignedly: "These r retards i have 2 deal wth."

Nice.

In an inspired bit of YouTube surfing, Gawker has assembled a compilation of military recruitment commercials from around the world. There are a few clunkers -- three minutes is an awful long time to watch a Russian paratrooper sort of rapping in front of an obstacle course -- and I have my doubts that this Japanese ad is not an elaborate sophomoric hoax, but on the whole they make for pretty fascinating viewing.

Watching these as an American, the most immediately noticeable thing is how little time most of the ads spend overtly appealing to patriotism. There's Estonia, which does it cheekily, and Lebanon, which does it with a slow-motion sentimentality that would be cloying under other circumstances but is actually quite poignant in the context of a country that is eternally trying to keep things together. France and India, meanwhile, both hearken back to the U.S. military ads of the pre-9/11 era, in which we mostly see the life-advancing stuff that enlistment is supposed to get you, with a minimum of actual warfighting. (A career in the Indian army evidently prepares you for a lifetime of golfing and competitive diving.)

The Ukrainian army opts for an admirably straightforward "you'll get girls" approach. Singapore features a naval vessel transforming into a giant robot, presumably developed to contain the same giant lava monsters that have long plagued the U.S. Marines. Britain's jarring entry -- which a student of post-colonialism would have a field day with -- looks like it was directed by Fernando Meirelles. (This kind of "I dare you" approach to recruiting must work in the U.K. -- back in the '90s, when the U.S. Army was mostly promoting itself as a way to pay for college, the Brits ran magazine ads showing a Royal Marine eating worms as part of a survival training course.)

But the real winner here, I think, is Sweden, which is promoting military service to young women as a means of avoiding working as an au pair for awful Americans:

Due to a combination of high unemployment levels that have decreased U.S. wages and increased salaries in India's outsourcing sector, the head of India's largest business process outsourcing company told the Financial Times that American call center workers are becoming just as cheap their Indian counterparts: 

Pramod Bhasin, the chief executive of Genpact, said his company expected to treble its workforce in the US over the next two years, from about 1,500 employees now.

"We need to be very aware [of what's available] as people [in the US] are open to working at home and working at lower salaries than they were used to," said Mr Bhasin. "We can hire some seasoned executives with experience in the US for less money."

So does that mean that when I talk to "Jason" about my broken hard-drive, his name will actually be Jason?  Not necessarily.  FT goes on to say that another Indian IT outsourcing company has begun recruiting workers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and has plans to make half of their 110,000 workers non-Indians.