Such a military confrontation in the vital oil lanes of the Persian Gulf would be of major global concern. The warning builds on earlier threats by Iran to seal off the Gulf’s strategic Strait of Hormuz — through which 40 percent of the world’s oil passes — in response to any military attack.

”We have set aside 100 military vessels for each (U.S.) warship to attack at the time of necessity,” Gen. Morteza Saffari was quoted as saying by the conservative weekly Panjereh.

The U.S. and Israel have said military force could be used if diplomacy fails to stop what they suspect is an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Iran denies any aim to develop such weapons and says its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes like power generation.

The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters is based just across the Gulf from Iran in Bahrain.

Saffari said more than 100 foreign warships were currently in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, adding that their sailors were ”morsels” for Iran’s military to target, the newspaper reported.

”Any moment the exalted supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) orders — or should the enemy carry out the smallest threat against (Iran’s ruling) Islamic system — the Guard … is ready for quick reaction,” he was quoted as saying.

By putting the number of foreign warships at 100, the general appeared to suggest Iran has 10,000 military vessels at the ready. Iran is known to have many speed boats used by the Guard, but there is no public information about how many larger military vessels it has.

In January 2008, five small high-speed vessels believed to be from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard briefly swarmed three U.S. Navy ships passing near Iranian waters in the Gulf and delivered a radio threat to blow them up.

The war of words has intensified between Iran and the West since the U.N. Security Council imposed tougher sanctions last month in response to Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a technology that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or material for an atomic bomb.

Iran put its most powerful military force, the Revolutionary Guard, in charge of defending the country’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf in 2008.

”We believe the enemy, through extensive psychological warfare, wants to coerce us, but Iran … is ready,” said Saffari, who was the Guard’s navy chief until early May. ”The enemy won’t dare attack Iran.”  The New York Times

These men allegedly lay a net for the birds, and wait for a number of them to collect in the area. They then capture these birds with the net, put them in cages after freeing them and drive away in a white van.

Madhu Malini, 30, a resident in the area, said she had seen this happening twice, and was concerned about what was happening to the birds.

“I love animals and I was upset at the birds being taken away in this manner. These men hurt the pigeons, especially as many of their bodies get ensnared in the net and their wings break. They should be stopped, especially if they are not licensed by the government,” Malini said.

A number of shop owners in the area confirmed having seen the men in action, but were unable to inform Gulf News of their identities.

One man said that it looked like the men, who appeared to be of Asian origin, waited for a large number of birds to start feeding before they captured them in a net.

Most people expressed concern at what was being done to the birds.

When Gulf News contacted a pest control company in the city that claims to rid residents of problem with pigeons, a spokesman said they only trapped pigeons using anti-bird nets and spikes. He explained that using such nets and spikes prevented pigeons from alighting on surfaces, which eventually drove them away from the place.

He declined to say how many clients they dealt with in a month but stressed: “We do not kill the pigeons or trap them. We just drive them away.”

An owner of a textile shop in the area, said: “We were sure the men must have come from the municipality because we didn’t think ordinary people would be allowed to trap so many pigeons at one go and take them away. So we didn’t ask any questions.”

When contacted, officials at Abu Dhabi Municipality informed Gulf News that the matter did not fall under their jurisdiction.

Further inquiries revealed that the Centre of Waste Management (CWM) sometimes deals with the disposal of animals which have been reported as pests.

A spokesperson at the centre said that it was standard practice to use anti-bird nets or spikes to drive away birds which were being troublesome.

Humane approach

“We believe different pest control companies pursue different options to drive away pigeons which are being a problem to residents. But of course, it is not right to cage them or poison them with chemicals. It is best to use techniques that do not harm the birds,” he said.

He explained that if people complained about birds being a menace, the CWM would first try to remove nests from trees and ledges in the area in order to drive the birds away in the most humane manner possible. He also added that he was not aware of pigeons being too much of a problem in the city. “However, I advise that people not encourage them by providing food and water in areas where they are a menace.”

When told about the people who were trapping the pigeons in cages, the spokesman added that he was not aware of the practice but he conjectured that the men may have been privately capturing the birds for the purposes of hunting.  By Samihah Zaman, Gulfnews

Such payments have already been widely used by US commanders in Iraq, but it is the first time the system is being formally adopted in Afghanistan.

Early on Wednesday, Afghan troops were engaged in a shootout with suspected militants at a house in Kabul.

A day earlier eight US soldiers were killed in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan.The deaths make October the deadliest month for American forces in the eight-year war in Afghanistan.

President Obama is yet to decide whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan. Mr Obama has said he will not risk their lives “unless it is absolutely necessary”.

The latest attacks come amid heightened tension in Afghanistan in the run-up to the second round of a presidential election marred by widespread fraud in favour of incumbent President Hamid Karzai.

‘Re-integration’ programmes

The Commander’s Emergency Response Programme, or Cerp, was set up to give the US military the means to clear roads, dig wells and provide other urgent humanitarian assistance to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the BBC’s Richard Lister in Washington says.

But in Iraq, the money can also be given to insurgents provided they switch sides. Backers of the Cerp scheme say it enabled some 90,000 formerly hostile Iraqis to form local militias and protect their towns from militants, our correspondent says. He adds that now the same authority is being given to US commanders in Afghanistan.

A clause in the annual defence appropriations bill says they can use the money to support the “re-integration into Afghan society” of those who have renounced violence against the Afghan government.

Although $1.3bn (£691m) has been authorised for the fund as a whole, no specific sum has been allocated to the re-integration programmes, our correspondent says.

The Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, has said he envisages the money being used to pay former Taliban fighters to protect their communities. BBC News

Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced. In his early teens, he was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy and graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. There, he worked as a community organizer with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s South Side. During this time, Obama said he “was not raised in a religious household”. Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988.

In February 1990, he was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. Barack Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991. On June 3, 2008 he won the Montana primary election giving him enough delegates to become the first Black American presidential candidate to win a major political party’s presumptive nomination for the office of President of the United States, which later on became the first African-American president in America. President Obama also became the first president to light a ceremonial Diya at the White House to mark the observance of Diwali, the “festival of lights.” And in that occasion he sign a new initiative aimed at expanding opportunities for Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. Gays and lesbians which are still struggling for acceptance and equal rights in the United States, and President Obama has told them “I’m here with you in that fight”.

Moreover, among of Obama’s policies were laid out during his weekly radio and Internet address, Mr Obama said too many small business owners remain unable to get credit despite administration steps to jump-start lending, which was virtually frozen when the financial crisis took hold last year. “These are the very taxpayers who stood by America’s banks in a crisis, and now it’s time for our banks to stand by creditworthy small businesses and make the loans they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs,” Mr Obama said. Further he stressed that “It’s time for those banks to fulfill their responsibility to help ensure a wider recovery, a more secure system and more broadly shared prosperity.”

Furthermore, President Barack Obama says overhauling the health care system, while helping millions of people, also will test whether policy makers can “serve the national interest despite the unrelenting efforts of the special interests.” The administration is building momentum for the president’s overhaul effort after the Senate Finance Committee voted 14-9 this week for a bill that would extend health care coverage to millions of people. One Republican, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, supported the bill, and the measure faces considerable opposition from the health care industry, labor unions and large business organizations.

To date, there is no doubt that President Barack Obama deserves the Nobel peace award. His prominence as a world leader, with a distinct and clearly defined posture toward attaining some semblance of peace on this earth, is being recognized by the Nobel Committee. His efforts have been sincere and gallant, against fiercely formidable odds. Receiving a Nobel Peace award is not meant to be an indication that the recipient has attained peace throughout the world, but in recognition of the potential impact of that individual’s effort towards that end. To keep you abreast of recent developments, just visits the above mentioned for more details and information’s.

Russia was also guilty of breaking international law by invading deep into Georgian territory in response to the attack, the European Union-backed investigation into the causes of the five-day conflict concluded.

The report deals a severe blow to Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili, who has repeatedly argued that he ordered troops into South Ossetia as a defensive action in response to a Russian invasion. Moscow insisted that it sent forces to South Ossetia to repel a Georgian attack.

The nine-month inquiry led by a Swiss diplomat, Heidi Tagliavini, said that the war was triggered by “a large-scale Georgian military operation” against the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali late on August 7, adding: “Operations started with a massive Georgian artillery attack.”

Ms Tagliavini said in a written statement: “None of the explanations given by the Georgian authorities in order to provide some form of legal justification for the attack lend it a valid explanation.”

Her inquiry rejected as not “sufficiently substantiated” Georgian claims of a Russian incursion into South Ossetia prior to the outbreak of the war. But it noted “an influx of volunteers or mercenaries” into South Ossetia from Russia and said that some Russian troops were in the war zone earlier than the Kremlin had claimed.

The Russian air force also bombed targets in Georgia hours before Moscow said that it had begun military operations at 2.30pm on August 8.

The inquiry concluded: “There is the question of whether the use of force by Georgia in South Ossetia, beginning with the shelling of Tskhinvali during the night of 7/8 August 2008, was justifiable under international law. It was not.

“It follows from the illegal character of the Georgian military assault that South Ossetian defensive action in response did conform to international law in terms of legitimate self-defence.”

The report said that there was also no justification for Georgian attacks on Russian peacekeeping forces based in South Ossetia. It went on: “There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation. Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive on 7/8 August could not be substantiated. It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack.

“Consequently, the use of force by Georgia against Russian peacekeeping forces in Tskhinvali in the night of 7/8 August 2008 was contrary to international law.”

The inquiry condemned Russia’s response to the fighting, however, as going “far beyond the reasonable limits of defence”. It said that the Kremlin broke international law in justifying its actions and in recognising South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia’s other breakaway region, as independent states after the war.

Initial Russian defensive actions in South Ossetia were legal, but subsequent military occupation of large parts of Georgia – tanks came within 25 miles of the capital Tbilisi – was not “even remotely commensurate” with the threat posed to its peacekeepers.

Russia’s invasion broke international law and continued destruction of Georgian territory after a ceasefire negotiated by President Sarkozy of France “was not justifiable by any means”. The report added: “In a matter of a very few days, the pattern of legitimate and illegitimate military action had thus turned around between the two main actors Georgia and Russia… It must be concluded that the Russian military action outside South Ossetia was essentially conducted in violation of international law.”

The report rejected the Kremlin’s assertion that it had acted in defence of Russian citizens in South Ossetia, most of whom hold Russian passports. It said that people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia remained Georgian citizens under international law and it condemned Russia’s “passportisation” policy as “an open challenge to Georgian sovereignty and an interference in the internal affairs of Georgia”.

The inquiry described Russian claims that Georgia was committing “genocide” against South Ossetians as “neither founded in law nor substantiated by factual evidence”. It noted that Russia reduced to 162 its initial claim that 2,000 South Ossetians had been killed by Georgian troops.

It accused Georgian and Russian soldiers as well as South Ossetian militias of committing atrocities that amounted to “war crimes”. But the similarity of weapons used by all sides made it difficult to attribute responsibility for particular acts.

The report condemned Russia for failing to control South Ossetian irregulars who it said were guilty of ethnic cleansing of Georgian villagers from their homes in the conflict zone. Georgia’s use of Grad missiles and cluster munitions in its night attack on Tskhinvali amounted to “indiscriminate attacks” on the civilian population.

While Georgia’s attack on Tskhinvali marked the start of the war, the inquiry said that it “was only the culminating point of a long period of increasing tensions, provocations and incidents” involving Russia and separatist leaders in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Assessments of the war had to consider “a great power’s coercive politics and diplomacy against a small and insubordinate neighbour, together with the small neighbour’s penchant for overplaying its hand and acting in the heat of the moment without careful consideration of the final outcome”.

The Kremlin welcomed the report. Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU, said: “It confirms what we’ve know all along – who started the war and who bears responsibility.”

Georgia insisted that the inquiry proved that Moscow had been plotting a war for a long time. Temuri Yakobashvili, Georgia’s Minister for Reintegration, said: “The report proves that Russia was all the time preparing this war and August 7 and 8 were the culmination. The report is not about who started the war; the war did not start on August 7 or 8.”

The inquiry said that Georgia reported 228 civilians killed and 184 soldiers dead or missing in the war. Russia said that 64 of its troops died and 162 South Ossetian civilians.

More than 100,000 people became refugees during the conflict. Several thousand South Ossetians remain homeless and some 25,000 Georgians have been unable to return to South Ossetia. By Tony Halpin, The Times.

India’s Kashmir state government, apparently, said its territory was being taken “inch by inch” through such incursions. Ominously, authorities last week in Kolkata impounded a plane carrying arms from the Middle East to China.

While the foreign ministries in both countries play down the reports, there are concerns that left unchecked, things could spiral out of control.

The spat began in June. Chinese bloggers vented their fury when India abruptly announced that it would be sending 60,000 troops to bolster tens of thousands of soldiers to Arunachal Pradesh – an Indian state that Beijing claims as its own. One online poll in China claimed that 90% of respondents thought Delhi’s actions posed a “threat”.

At the heart of this dispute lies the Tibetan question. Historically, China says Arunachal Pradesh’s 35,000 square miles was part of “outer Tibet”. In a short bloody war, Chinese troops overran Indian positions in the Himalayas in 1962 before retreating. Since then the two sides have tried to discuss their way out of a problem. More than dozen rounds of talks have yielded little.

For years the dispute has rumbled on, attracting little international attention. However, that changed this summer with the arrival of fresh troops – and an Indian airforce squadron of advanced fighters – which analysts say were needed to cope with China’s rising military might, especially in Tibet.

The Indian defence magazine Force points out that the PLA could mobilise four divisions – about 50,000 men – in 24 hours to the Sino-Indian border. “Awesome military projection capability by any standards,” says the magazine in its latest edition.

To get a taste of how difficult things might be for India, in a diplomatic first, China “internationalised” the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, highlighting its disputed status in July. Beijing formally objected to a $60m loan for India because it would fund irrigation projects in Arunachal Pradesh. Although the loan was later approved, Chinese experts say there is still “room to change” the project.

Arunachal Pradesh has been slowly integrated into the Indian state since Delhi sent troops in 1950 carrying papers signed by the Tibetan government in Lhasa, which transferred 35,000 square miles of the Himalayas to India. Beijing rejects Delhi’s claim, saying the region was subject to a crafty piece of real estate theft by British imperialists in 1914 when China was in chaos.

A solution has always been in sight: Beijing relinquishes its claim to Arunachal Pradesh and Delhi gives up its demand for 15,000 square miles of stragetically important Chinese-held mountainous land bordering Kashmir.

But Arunachal Pradesh for China is not just a territorial issue but an existential one. The state is home to the town of Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama, where Tibetan Buddhism’s biggest monastery, after the Potala palace in Lhasa, sits.

Tawang is also the repository of perhaps the last vestige of a Tibet submerged by China’s rise – sustaining the idea of religious freedom for the diaspora and keeping alive a centuries-old culture and language. In conversation, the Monpa people who dominate the local area will tell visitors that Tawang could be Tibetan Buddhism’s new Rome, a base from where to spread the faith.

China is alarmed by such talk. Beijing sees Tawang not as a place of serenity but as a spiritual spy camp – ultimately challenging the ruling Communist party’s control in Tibet. These feelings were heightened when the Indian government said this week it would allow the Dalai Lama to travel to Tawang, adding he was “free to go anywhere in India”.

The present Tibetan leader has not been a regular visitor to the town. He passed through when he fled Tibet in 1959 but he has only been allowed back twice since: once in 1982 and then again 2003. This time around he will open a hospital he funded.

The Indian backing to the Dalai Lama comes at a critical time. The Obama administration said this week that the president would not meet the Tibetan leader during his upcoming trip to Washington – a break with tradition. George Bush and Bill Clinton met the Dalai Lama when he arrived in the American capital. Afraid that the White House was now kowtowing to Beijing before the president’s visit this November to China, Tibet’s government in exile openly said even the US was now “appeasing” China. This is a breakthrough for China – which is unafraid of criticising any head of state for meeting the Dalai Lama, who they see as a man determined to “split the motherland”. So far 170 countries out of 193 in the United Nations have acceded to China’s demands.

This leaves India in a difficult, lonely position. It already sees Chinese ports and military bases strung across the Indian Ocean – the so called “string of pearls” strategy designed to check Indian influence in its backyard. Delhi has been outbid for vital oil and gas resources by its bigger, richer neighbour. On most measures of hard power – number of nuclear weapons, economic size, population – India lags behind.

China is not afraid to flex its muscles: it blocked India’s bid for a UN security council place and tried to shoot down a groundbreaking US-India nuclear deal.

Delhi says it is in the nature of development for the two large Asian nations to compete and co-operate for resources, cash and technology. China is India’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade volumes crossing $50bn in 2008. The two countries, which are both home to millions of poor people, have worked together in trade and climate change – fending off advances from the advanced nations.

For both, Tibet makes it easier to be antagonists rather than collaborators. Unless both manage to work together to resolve their differences there is a chance the two populations will get bogged down in adversarial nationalism. The media war could then explode into bloodier conflict on the roof of the world. By Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian.

They also cautioned about what they said would be dire consequences of any U.S. attempts to edge out President Hamid Karzai. Results from a presidential election last month gave Mr. Karzai a majority, but allegations of widespread ballot-stuffing have stalled the confirmation of his victory and undermined his credibility in the eyes of many Afghans.

These admonishments come after the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, warned that the war here may become unwinnable unless troop levels are raised and the momentum of insurgents is reversed in the next 12 months.

The Obama administration has yet to endorse these findings, and has called for a review of the U.S.-led war effort before making a decision on troop levels. Vice President Joe Biden in particular has expressed skepticism about the proposed troop increase. Senior administration officials said the review was necessary because the war plan that President Barack Obama announced in March was based on the assumption that the election would give Mr. Karzai new legitimacy.

As the war in Afghanistan becomes increasingly unpopular in the U.S. and Europe, one policy option under review in Washington advocates reducing ground forces and relying instead on surgical airstrikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

This would be a recipe for failure, warned one of Mr. Karzai’s senior associates, Education Minister Farooq Wardak. “Airstrikes alone cannot be a strategy to defeat the insurgency and the Taliban. If the air attacks are not followed up by ground operations, they do not yield the results one expects,” he said. “We need additional troops — but not forever.” According to Mr. Wardak, it will take five years before the Afghan army and police can fight mostly on their own.

Parliament member Mohammed Mohaqeq, a powerful former warlord representing the Hazara ethnic minority who backed Mr. Karzai’s re-election bid, offered a similar assessment.

“The current number of soldiers is not enough to defeat the Taliban,” Mr. Mohaqeq said. Should the U.S. start reducing its forces in Afghanistan — currently over 60,000 — “the country will go back to civil war,” he added. “The Taliban are capable of recapturing the capital and the government.”

Mr. Karzai’s spokesman welcomed Gen. McChrystal’s report and said he had no comment on the Obama administration’s review of policy options.

The Taliban’s recent advances to previously secure areas of northern and western Afghanistan were made possible, in part, by growing public anger over the incompetence and graft in Mr. Karzai’s administration, many analysts say.

This anger was reinforced by reports of large-scale fraud in favor of Mr. Karzai in the election on Aug. 20. According to a preliminary count, he won with 54.6% of the vote. That tally can change depending on a review of results from 12% of Afghanistan’s polling stations that was ordered by the Electoral Complaints Commission, a United Nations-sponsored watchdog.

On Thursday, representatives from the ECC, the Afghan government’s electoral commission, and the presidential candidates met in Kabul to choose a random 10% sample from the disputed polling stations. Recounting this sample is expected to take a couple of weeks, compared with months needed for a full recount.

If Mr. Karzai’s final vote tally falls below 50% he will face a runoff against the leading challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister.

Time is of the essence: Such a runoff election will be virtually impossible after snowfall makes many rural roads impassable in early November.

Some Western officials called for flanking Mr. Karzai with a powerful chief executive who will run the government, while others have pushed for a unity government that would include Dr. Abdullah.

But the president’s allies cautioned that any foreign effort to disempower Mr. Karzai could plunge the country into more bloodshed. “Let’s be practical — what is the alternative to Karzai?” said Mr. Wardak. Any U.S. move against Mr. Karzai, he said, “will be seen by the Afghan population as no different from the U.S.S.R. occupation” — and trigger a similar response. By Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal.

Of late, additional reports on the war have been released, all of which highlighted the tragic human civilian cost endured by the Palestinians. The most recent was released by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, which estimates that 1,387 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli offensive on Gaza, of which 320 were minors. Children were targeted, because 252 of those who died were under the age of 16, while 68 were aged between 11 and 18.

In addition, the Israeli human-rights group concluded that almost all of those killed did not take any part in the fighting. “The extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of the Israeli society,” said a statement released by B’Tselem. It further called for an independent and credible investigation into the war.

Undoubtedly, the war in Gaza and Israel’s culpability should not be swept under the carpet – it is the responsibility of the international community to place it high on the agenda as a matter that requires immediate attention.

In addition to the lives lost, basic infrastructure was destroyed on a massive scale. The United Nations has estimated that the losses incurred by the Palestinian economy as a result of the attack is in the region of $4 billion (Dh14.7 billion), which is almost three times the size of the economy of Gaza.

The human losses in the war were immeasurable because Israel followed a blind policy of hitting targets despite the presence of civilians. It is high time that Israel is made to pay for its aggression. Gulf News.

By 2008, the insurgency controlled significant territory and the war stalemated. Eight years after al-Qaeda attacked Americans at home and the United States invaded Afghanistan in response, liberals, conservatives and moderates alike say they don’t know what American forces are fighting for. They doubt that the U.S. will be successful and question what winning even means. Many also no longer seem to view the war through the prism of Sept. 11, 2001; few mention the attacks but many – rightly or wrongly – draw parallels to Vietnam. 

Meanwhile, questions arouse either is it really appropriate to let the military carry the political burden of selling the war? To reminisce, Americans lost the war in the living rooms of America and not the battlefields of Vietnam. Now, most of them are conscious enough and sounded – Can’t we learn this lesson? Public support does not just happen, it must be worked at.  The two wars are very different; the War in Afghanistan resulted from an attack on the United States; while Vietnam didn’t. The draft has been replaced by voluntary military service, meaning far fewer Americans are directly affected; the government drafted people to Vietnam by lottery, making the war central to the lives of most young Americans.

What is perhaps the only thing that could succeed in conquering the unconquerable piece of dirt and rock known as Afghanistan? Bombs and bullets kill Afghanistan’s people and in doing so create Taliban martyrs. Books, schools, free lunch and grassroots social assistance bring comfort and opportunity to enable Afghanis to think about a future that could be. The Taliban and fundamentalists want the future to consist only of the past, and the Taliban will accept nothing less than a strict Islamic state, stuck in the past and stuck in the narrow mind-set of a theocratic Islamic state.

Even more depressing is the reality that there is no guarantee of success, in fact, far from it, considering history is against the U.S. Counterinsurgency experts have calculated historical win rates at 25%, not to mention these types of engagements usually last on average between 10 and 15 years. According to the U.S. military counterinsurgency doctrine they should have 1 troop on the ground for every 50 civilians. Thus, in order to win the battle, the U.S. would have to expand the size of its footprint from 100,000 to 650,000 troops depending on the number of troops sent by NATO and the size and caliber of the Afghan national army.

Be that as it may, however, the soldier’s mission after 9/11 was supposed to be the capture of Bin Laden and hunt down those responsible for the attacks against the World Trade Center and not in the business of nation building. Soldiers have successfully removed an oppressive regime but it is now time to hand back the responsibility of securing the nation to its people. While those who commit acts of terrorism must be brought to justice, one must realize that terrorism is a product of an imperialistic foreign policy.

There is his political platform based on welfare spending and free education. There is his visionary foreign policy and his dream of an Asia united under a single currency. Above all, there is his massive parliamentary majority and his status as the first Japanese opposition leader to win an election outright.

But in other regards, Mr Hatoyama represents much that is regressive in Japanese politics. He was born into a life of wealth and privilege and, in a parliament notorious for the number of “hereditary” family dynasties, he is the most hereditary of all. He is not only the son and grandson, but also the great-grandson, of senior Japanese politicians.

Today Mr Hatoyama will be formally elected Prime Minister by the Diet, posing the urgent question: does such a man have what it will take to see through Japan’s transformation from a “one-party democracy” to a genuine multiparty system?

His great-grandfather was parliamentary Speaker, his father was Foreign Minister and his grandfather was Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). His mother is the heiress to the fortunes of the Bridgestone Corporation, the international tyre company. This summer a Japanese magazine estimated Mr Hatoyama’s personal wealth at 8.6 billion yen (£57 million).

His education, an engineering degree at the University of Tokyo, followed by a PhD at Stanford in California, was as expected for a young man of his background.

Friends confirm the impression, and the inspiration for his “Alien” nickname, of an earnest, cerebral and unimpassioned man who does not naturally connect with the Earthlings around him.

Even after being elected to the Diet as a member of the LDP, he seemed a diffident politician. “I always had the feeling he was a Hamlet character,” said Gerald Curtis, of Columbia University, who has known Mr Hatoyama for 25 years. “ ‘To be or not to be? Should I be a politician or should I have stayed an academic?’ ”

Mr Hatoyama formed the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 1996. The party was generously endowed by his mother and the Bridgestone fortune. He led the party from 1999, but stepped down after three uninspiring years.

His second chance came unexpectedly this year when his predecessor, Ichiro Ozawa, was felled by a scandal. But the scale of Mr Hatoyama’s victory — 308 out of 480 seats — reflected his steady leadership in the final months.

His political platform has been laid out in detail: slash spending on bureaucracy and public works, spend the savings on education and child allowances, cultivate closer relations with China and an “equal” relationship with the US. He defines his philosophy as one of yuai, or “fraternity”.

Such talk has earned him the mockery of one tough former Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone. “Hatoyama only talks about friendship and love,” he said famously. “He’s just like Mr Whippy ice cream.”

Tomorrow Japan will begin to learn whether Mr Whippy will refresh Japanese politics or melt in its harsh sun.

Japan’s new cabinet

Hirohisa Fuji, 77, is reported to be the new Finance Minister. He held the same post in 1993-94

Katsuya Okada, 56, is set to be Foreign Minister, charged with building stronger links with Asia

Shizuka Kamei, 72, is tipped to be the Financial and Postal Services Minister. He is leader of Mr Hatoyama’s coalition partners, the New People’s Party

Naoto Kan, 62, is likely to oversee the National Strategy Bureau. The former DPJ leader is also expected to be named Deputy Prime Minister

Mizuho Fukushima, 53, is to oversee consumer and family affairs. The Social Democrat Party leader will be the only woman in the Cabinet. By Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo