{Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro chat in Cuba|The two dined at the presidential palace and waved to hundreds of Ecuadorean from its balcony, where a big Iranian flag flew|Raul said his 85-year-old brother and Ahmadinejad met for two hours Wednesday, “a demonstration that his brain is working very well.” Fidel Castro stepped down in 2006 due to an illness that nearly killed him, but continues to write essays on world events|Trade between the two nations has been meager|denied involvement|HAVANA – Two of Washington’s top irritants, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro, discussed world events for two hours, and the Iranian leader on Thursday described the retired Cuban revolutionary as healthy and engaged, and declared their two countries to be allies “fighting on the same front.” “It made me enormously happy to see the comandante healthy and fit,” Ahmadinejad said through a translator at an impromptu airport appearance alongside Fidel’s brother, Cuban President Raul Castro, before flying off to Ecuador|

Related Posts

Dirty money: Germs and dope cling to your cash
Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, said the incident “reflects the deepening mistrust between the coalition and their Afghan counterparts.” She added that the incident exemplifies the “poor communication” between coalition and Afghan forces. In the more than 30 attacks Afghan government troops have carried out on NATO forces this year, 51 service members, mostly Americans, have died, more than the last two years combined, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports. U.S. and NATO forces suspended joint field operations with the Afghans last month because they became such a problem, Martin reported. Just last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the joint operations had resumed although the reasoning behind the suspension appeared to have changed. On Wednesday, ISAF Deputy Commander Adrian Bradshaw, a British lieutenant general, told reporters that the suspension was related to the violent protests stemming from an American-made online video ridiculing the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. Bradshaw also insisted that insider attacks accounted for 4 percent of the war’s total casualties, even as reporters pointed out that they represent one-fifth of casualties from this year. His attempt to downplay the effect of the attacks contrasted with recent comments by NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who acknowledged the strain they’ve put on international troops, CBS Radio News reporter Teri Schultz reports. “No doubt insider attacks have undermined trust and confidence, absolutely,” Fogh Rasmussen said Monday. Outside Combat Outpost Little Blue, north of Kandahar, Afghanistan, Army Staff Sgt. Stephen Christopher Whitfield told CBS News correspondent Charlie D’Agata that he was concerned having his base right next to another base manned by armed Afghan forces. “Of course it does, with the insider threats that are taking place in the last couple of months,” said Whitfield, “but you deal with whatever situation you have, and we’ve never had a problem out here.” Innocent said recent controversies such as the online video showing U.S. soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters and the burning of copies of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, at a military base created the perception of a lack of respect for Afghan cultural values. “This is a sort of a confluence of the factors that created this incident,” Innocent said. Ruben, however, said the attacks go much deeper than a sense of disrespect. “The notion that green-on-blue violence is basically the result of personal problems between Afghan troops and their American partners is nonsense, but the Pentagon doesn’t want to consider the alternative,” he said. That alternative embraced by Ruben, a former Pentagon official who’s now a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, is that the attacks are ideologically inspired, noting that the attackers aren’t just killing international troops but are also turning their guns on fighters in the Afghan army. “It can’t be solved by being more polite with Afghan colleagues,” Ruben said. In fact, a Taliban commander told CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan in an interview broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday that insider attacks “part of our new military strategy” and “the orders come from the top.” Al Qaeda fighters have been coming into Afghanistan to work on the attacks with the Taliban, said the commander, who spoke to Logan on condition of anonymity. He told her that more than a dozen Qaeda militants operate under his command. Ruben wouldn’t say whether Saturday’s incident would have happened if Western soldiers didn’t feel threatened by insider attacks. “All I can say,” he said, “is it certainly is going to lead to some itchy trigger fingers.”

No comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *