Headline in today’s Washington Post: Despite Sept. 11, Interest Still Low In Foreign News.

Michael Buerk, an anchor for the BBC evening news, has announced his retirement. As the Guardian notes, “Buerk became a household name presenting the Nine O’Clock News, a job he split with Peter Sissons. He made the headlines after an on-air exchange with the BBC’s arts correspondent Rosie Millard, reporting from the Oscars in a revealing Vivienne Westwood outfit. After the interview, he raised an eyebrow and said: “That was Rosie Millard, winner of the best supporting dress.”

Anyone reading this would not want to live in Afghanistan—you can pretty much forget about accessing the Web unless you’ve got a satellite phone—but a lot of people are heading there, and I don’t mean the aid workers and diplomats who are raising Kabul’s real-estate prices to Manhattan levels. The UNHCR press office emails updates to journalists, and its newest figures for returning refugees are astounding—more than a million Afghans have gone home since the Taliban fell. There are lots of problems in the country, and we read about them almost every day, but Afghans, voting with their feet, are happier with the way things are than with the way things were.

Excerpts from the UNHCR’s Afghanistan humanitarian update #62:

* More than 900,000 refugees have voluntarily repatriated to Afghanistan since March 1 when the Afghan Interim Administration and UNHCR started to assist returnees. More than 100,000 returned this week alone. Another 200,000 Afghans have gone back spontaneously since the Taliban fell, with most arriving from Pakistan and Iran. More than 160,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) have also been assisted home while many others have gone back on their own.

* UNHCR had planned to assist up to 1.2 million Afghans home this year, but it has now tripled the planning figure for Pakistan alone to 1.2 million, while also expecting 400,000 to return from Iran and that another 400,000 IDPs would be assisted homewards.

Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hizbollah, is believed to have issued the fatwa that encouraged suicide terrorists to detonate truck bombs outside the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. But as David Ignatius points out, he was among the first Muslim clerics to condemn the 9/11 attacks and he described Osama bin Laden as “profiteering” from misery in the Muslim world. The column by Ignatius provides an interesting look into the divisions within the ranks of Islamic radicals; these days Fadlallah’s attention is focused not on attacking the U.S. but on “this bizarre situation called Israel.”

It’s hard to imagine that America beating Portugal at anything would be newsworthy, but the American team’s 3-2 victory over Portugal in their World Cup match today is amazing; it’s the most significant U.S. soccer win since 1950. Then again, the World Cup is always amazing—the passions it arouses, the harmony it provokes, and the wars it ignites. Last year I wrote about a colorful soccer riot in Belgrade, when the best Serbian teams faced off, but it was minor compared to what can happen during the World Cup. The best way to understand the tournament’s emotional import is to cast aside the sports pages and read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War. It chronicles, in Kapuscinski’s minimalist style, the conflict that was ignited after El Salvador and Honduras split their World Cup qualifying matches in 1969. Here’s a bit of it:

The Salvadoran team arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and spent a sleepless night in their hotel. The team could not sleep because it was the target of psychological warfare waged by the Honduran fans. A swarm of people encircled the hotel. The crowd threw stones at the windows and beat sheets of tin and empty barrels with sticks. They set off one string of firecrackers after another. They leaned on the horns of cars parked in front of the hotel. The fans whistled, screamed and sent up hostile chants. This went on all night. The idea was that a sleepy, edgy, exhausted team would be bound to lose. In Latin America these are common practices.

The same armoured cars carried the Honduran team straight from the playing field to the airport. A worse fate awaited the visiting fans. Kicked and beaten, they fled towards the border. Two of them died. Scores landed in hospital. One hundred and fifty of the visitors’ cars were burned. The border between the two states was closed a few hours later.

The war began shortly thereafter. It lasted 100 hours and left 6,000 dead and more than 12,000 wounded. The deciding game was held on neutral ground, in Mexico. El Salvador won 3-2.

Oddly, I feel somewhat relieved after learning about the many ways in which the CIA and FBI failed to prevent 9/11. Until these stories emerged, I had the terrifying (and erroneous) impression that Al Qaeda succeeded by outsmarting the very smart FBI and CIA. It’s quite scary to think your enemy is smarter and stronger than you are.

It turns out the intelligence community was not smart at all. The FBI knew that suspicious Middle Eastern men were training as pilots, and the CIA knew that two Al Qaeda members were living in the United States under their real names—but nothing was done. That means the 9/11 hijackers may not have been evil geniuses; perhaps they were just plain evil, and they succeeded because we were just plain stupid.

It’s pretty clear the FBI and CIA are aware of their shortcomings and are fixing them. Field agents who send alarms to headquarters are not going to be ignored any longer. So the stories about official negligence, though unsettling, are reminders that the terrorists did not breach the best defense America could muster; they slipped through gaping holes that are no longer so gaping.

There’s been a lot of attention focused on the role played by the Special Forces in getting rid of the Taliban, and the role of smart bombs and JDAMs and Daisy Cutters and all manner of military materiel. But what about money? When I was in Kandahar in December I learned that cash played an unusual role in winning the allegiance of key warlords and their fighters. For example, the arsenal of Gul Agha, who seized Kandahar from the Taliban, included a Land Rover filled with money, apparently provided by his friends in the Special Forces.

The Los Angeles Times is weighing in with a delightful story about the money trail in Afghanistan, noting that “the CIA’s small army of operatives often has worked less like James Bond than like bagmen, handing out bundles of $100 bills—often with sequential serial numbers—to purchase intelligence and support.” The story quotes a CIA officer as saying, “The Taliban conquered the country with bribery and negotiation, and basically, that’s the way we reconquered it—with help from air power.” The piece includes a wonderful anecdote about a CIA officer handing $10,000 in cash, plus a Thuraya satellite phone, to a powerful warlord. “Is that all?” the warlord replied. “Is that all you give to someone who knows where to find Osama bin Laden?”

Anyway, it became a source of amusement in Kandahar to notice the shiny satellite phones and GPS gizmos and new weapons and realize that my tax dollars paid for these things. The CIA might have been a bit too generous, though. One evening, a soldier approached me, showed me a satphone and GPS locator and asked me what they were and how much they were worth. Another day, a commander I was interviewing asked me to teach him how to use his new Iridium satphone. When I showed him how, he was mightily impressed and treated me with the deference usually accorded to a member of the Special Forces, which I’m sure he thought I was.

You know things are not going well in a country when businessmen begin commuting to work in helicopters, not to avoid traffic jams but to avoid being kidnapped or shot on the streets. Things are not going well in Sao Paulo, according to The Washington Post:

Michael Klein quietly stared out the window. His pilot clipped low over the honeycomb-like slums and clogged highways below. More than halfway through a nine-minute commute, the copter grazed over a cluster of inner-city prisons. A squad of machine-gun-toting guards stood near a perimeter wall, their gaunt faces squinting upward as Klein’s copter buzzed by. “The perspective is different from up here,” remarked Klein, a graying hulk of a man and executive director of Casas Bahia, one of Brazil’s largest electronics retailers. Over the din of the blades, he told a reporter that “it even looks beautiful sometimes. Up here, however, it is safe. Down there—.” He paused, staring across the metal and glass horizon. “Well, it’s another story.”

Al Qaeda is linking up with home-grown terrorists in Pakistan for new attacks on westerners and Gen. Musharraf’s regime, according to this story in The Washington Post. Not all stories about the activities and intentions of terrorists can be believed, but the Post’s is detailed and carries the joint byline of Karl Vick and Kamran Khan. Vick is a staff writer, and an excellent one, but of greater importance is the other byline—Khan’s. He is a stringer (part-timer) for the Post who works in Karachi for The News, a leading Pakistani daily. Khan is one of the best-sourced journalists in Pakistan, with great connections inside the country’s sprawling security apparatus, so whenever I see his byline, whether in the Post or the News, I pay attention. The credibility of a story depends not just on the publication it appears in, but on the reporter who writes it; bylines help me figure out whether I should believe what I am reading.

While I’m on the subject, Salman Rushdie has a useful opinion piece about Kashmir in today’s New York Times. That’s a byline to watch, too.

This is my newest article, in the June issue of Outside; a profile of Tomaz Humar, an amazing dude. For an easy-to-read text version, go here.

From the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times:

The White House and Congress are trumpeting their determination to bring economic opportunity to the people of Africa. But first, a few million sub-Saharan farmers will have to suffer.

Government officials and independent economists say the big subsidies doled out to U.S. farmers will contribute to global overproduction of wheat, corn, cotton and other basic crops. That, in turn, will drive down world commodity prices, making it more difficult for small, unsubsidized Third World farmers to compete.

The headline over the story is quite appropriate: U.S. Exports Misery to Africa With Farm Bill.

That’s the message, though with greater complexity and shading, of a new book, “Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam,” by Gilles Kepel. Although the author is a French professor, I’m intrigued by his thesis because it’s in line with what I’ve seen in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where anti-American feelings run high among ordinary people, but not as high as their desire to live in peaceful, prosperous societies. Kepel argues that 9/11 was the work of hardline Islamists who had failed to gain support or power through less-sensational means; although we still need to worry about terrorist cells that existed before 9/11, there’s less cause to be concerned about new cells forming in its wake. “The attack on the United States was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation and decline of the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength and irrepressible might,” Kepel writes. His book is reviewed in today’s New York Times.

Anyone checked out ChristopherHitchens.com lately?

Today’s Washington Post has a detailed reconstruction of the March battle in which seven American soldiers were killed during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. An excellent story.

It’s hard to believe, but ten years ago to this day I filed my first story about the war in Bosnia. Feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

When I was an intern at The Washington Post, the foreign editor was Jim Hoagland, a Francophile who treated me well, perhaps because I lived in Paris for a year and he assumed I loved the French as much as he did (I did not). Hoagland is now the Post’s principal foreign affairs columnist, and his columns are filled with hard information and strong analysis; he doesn’t try to be cute or fancy, just useful. His column today is an example; the Bush Administration, he reports, has concluded that Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is not living up to his anti-terrorism promises:

After internal debate, the U.S. intelligence community now accepts that Musharraf allowed the 50 to 60 guerrilla camps in Kashmir that harbor some 3,000 fighters to come back to life in mid-March after two months of quiescence. Two other Musharraf promises—to prevent cross-border terrorism from Pakistan or Pakistani-controlled territory, and to dismantle permanently Pakistan’s Islamic fundamentalist organizations that preach violence—have also withered as American attention has been focused on the Middle East.

“The debate about what is going on has been settled,” says one U.S. official involved in the contentious discussions here about Musharraf’s abandoned pledge to cut off help and training that his intelligence services and military give to terrorists in Kashmir and India. “The rate of infiltration into Indian-occupied Kashmir is above the rate of a year ago. What is still being debated is Musharraf’s intention. Is he unable or unwilling to prevent what is happening? And what do we do about either case?”

One of the delights of reporting in Pakistan—or India, for that matter—is that English-language newspapers are prevalent and important and, in many cases, enjoyable reads (both the truth and the English language are stretched in exciting ways). The crisis between Pakistan and India has led me back to the papers I read when I’m in Pakistan. Dawn is the largest and most reliable, though The News tends to have more scoops. However, Dawn’s website is superior to The News’. For what it’s worth, out of the top 12 stories on Dawn’s site today, eleven revolve around preparations for war. Few of the stories bother to mention the string of terrorist attacks that have given India little choice but to lash back at Pakistan, which is directly or indirectly responsible for the current mess.

Ed Vulliamy, who filed the first eyewitness dispatches about Serb-run prison camps in Bosnia, writes in The Observer that journalists should testify at war crimes trials. “I believe there are times in history—as any good Swiss banker will tell you—[when] neutrality is not neutral but complicit in the crime,” Vulliamy argues. “We are entering a new world that seeks not only to report the legacy of tyrants and mass murderers, but to call them to account. Why should journalists of all people—whose information will be of such value—perch loftily above the due process of law?” I tend to side with Vulliamy, but shades of grey are involved, so no journalist should be compelled to testify, or feel compelled to do so.

Why can’t Thomas Friedman say “I was wrong”? His column on Sunday argues, rightly, that President Bush’s war on terrorism fails to embrace non-military strategies that would help ensure America’s security. “I blame him for squandering all the positive feeling in America after 9/11, particularly among young Americans who wanted to be drafted for a great project that would strengthen America in some lasting way—a Manhattan Project for energy independence,” Friedman writes.

What’s strange about Friedman’s advice is that after 9/11 few journalists banged the bombing drum as strongly as he did. Why did President Bush not begin a peaceful Manhattan Project to complement the military campaign? In part, because influential voices like Friedman’s were doing little other than shouting about the military option. Belatedly, Friedman notes that turning America into a fortress state does not make us safe: “A war on terrorism that is fought only by sending soldiers to Afghanistan or by tightening our borders will ultimately be unsatisfying.”

Can the United Nations do anything right? The surprising answer, in light of the U.N.‘s failures in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda during the 1990s, may be “yes.” East Timor’s new government takes over from the U.N. on Monday, and as The Washington Post notes, East Timor’s leaders “are saying something that few other beneficiaries of U.N. governance ever have: The international effort to reincarnate their country has been a success.”