In a speech to mark the 21st anniversary of the rebellious left-wing city of El Alto, Morales said the U.S. decision to "declassify" Bolivia as an anti-terrorism partner would lead to the withdrawal of U.S. military equipment deployed for the countries' joint anti-terrorism force, as well as the discontinuation of grants and training courses.

In total, the U.S.-sponsored programs were worth more than $300,000, Morales said.

"It's peanuts. These resources are only there to control Bolivia, to have intelligence agents. We don't want intelligence agents serving the U.S. government," he was quoted as saying.

No one from the U.S. Embassy in La Paz was immediately available to comment.

Washington has been wary of Morales' leftist rhetoric and worries he may make good on an election promise to decriminalize all coca growing, instead of maintaining quotas for cultivation for traditional uses like tea and chewing for altitude sickness and hunger.

It is not the first time Morales has attacked Washington since he was sworn into office in January. Late last month he criticized a U.S. decision to revoke the visa of a close aide and fellow coca farmer.

Several weeks earlier, he attacked Washington's move to cut 96 percent of military aid to Bolivia because it had failed to sign an accord granting U.S. troops immunity from prosecution at the International Criminal Court.

However, Morales has vowed to pursue friendly relations with the Bush administration and has promised to fight the narcotics trade in the world's third-largest cocaine producer.

Despite deep differences with Morales over coca and his political ideology, U.S. diplomats have been positive about their early contacts with the new government.

Mutabar Tojiboyeva, head of the Ardent Hearts group in the eastern city of Fergana, was convicted on Monday after a trial in a small town in Tashkent province, some 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of the capital.

A vocal critic of the Uzbek government, Tojiboyeva has been on trial since January 30 and was found guilty of 13 charges, including threatening public order, fraud, theft and blackmailing local businessmen.

The trial was slammed by human rights groups, which have pointed to a crackdown on dissent in the tighly-controlled Central Asian state with the sentencing this month of two opposition leaders -- Sanjar Umarov and Nodira Hidoyatova -- to 10 years in prison each for fraud.

"We view Tojiboyeva's conviction as part of a pattern of persecution against independent voices and critics within civil society since the Andijan massacre," said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW said in a written statement on Tuesday.

Rights campaigners say state security forces shot dead hundreds of unarmed civilians who joined anti-government protests after gunmen took over the eastern city of Andijan on May 13 last year.

The government has denied such claims, saying that 187 people died, all due to the actions of Islamic insurgents.

"The ferocity of this pattern is unprecedented, even when judged against Uzbekistan's 14-year history of repression since independence from the Soviet Union," she said.

Tojiboyeva was arrested on October 7, the day before she was to leave for an international rights conference in the Irish capital Dublin.

Prosecutors said she received more than 5,000 dollars (4,130 euros) from the US Agency for International Development and 200 dollars from the French embassy.

"The money was used to breach public order and for slander and fraud," an indictment order seen by rights groups read.

The document, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, said the UN General Assembly, which controls the budget, should allow the secretariat to "consider all options for alternative service delivery, including identifying the potential for relocation and outsourcing."

The report gave no details of which services would be outsourced and where but UN staff have indicated that translation and payroll activities would be affected.

Annan, whose second five-year term expires at the end of this year, was due to answer questions from the UN staff at a town hall meeting Tuesday.

The report noted that previous reform efforts had been largely piecemeal and had lacked a "comprehensive strategic vision for the organization as a whole and its future needs and requirements."

Annan said his proposed measures, requested by world leaders at their summit here last September in the wake of the
Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal and evidence of UN procurement fraud, would "enable future secretaries-general to carry out their managerial responsibilities more effectively."

Noting that the UN secretariat's top management structure was not well equipped to handle large and complex operations, he also proposed that the role of deputy secretary general be redefined so as to grant him "formal authority and accountability for managing the organization's operational activities."

Last week, the UN announced that Annan's chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, would take over as deputy secretary general from April 1, succeeding Canadian Louise Frechette who is stepping down.

The report also said that the 25 departments and other entities currently reporting directly to the secretary general should be regrouped into organizational clusters, each led by a senior undersecretary-general.

It also sought to address what it calls the world body's "cumbersome and insufficiently strategic budgeting process" where management performance is not adequately assessed.

The summary therefore proposed that the budget and planning process be explicitly linked to results and managerial performance and that the cycle for reviewing and adopting the budget be shortened.

"The Secretary-General should have expanded authority to redeploy posts as necessary, and to use savings from vacant posts," it noted, adding that "peacekeeping accounts should be consolidated and Trust Fund management streamlined."

Under the bill, foreigners aged 16 or older -- excluding permanent residents such as ethnic Koreans born in Japan -- would be subject to the measures.

Airlines would be required to provide advance lists of passengers and crew members before the flights arrive in Japan.

The government, which approved the bill at a cabinet meeting, aims to see the bill voted into law during the current parliament session ending in June.

Justice Minister Seiken Sugiura acknowledged there was concern over human rights but said the need to improve national security was more important.

"The point is, which is more important -- this (rights) issue or domestic measures to reduce illegal entry and anti-terror measures," the minister told reporters.

"It would be best if we did not have to do this," he added.

The United States, Japan's main ally, introduced similar security measures after the September 11, 2001 attacks, to a mixed reaction by foreign visitors.

The number of foreign visitors to Japan hit a record high 7.45 million in 2005, increasing 10.3 percent from the previous year, according to the justice ministry.

The paradox is that China's military spending is rising sharply just as the overall numbers of military personnel are falling, as China shifts from a strategic doctrine that relied on mass armies and human wave attacks to a far more sophisticated and capital intensive military with modern and high-technology equipment.

The American and Indian commitment to a new strategic partnership, symbolized by the Bush visit to India, owes a great deal to the common concern over the rise of China and the strategic implications of China's headlong economic growth. The Goldman Sachs financial group last week issued a report suggesting that the Chinese economy will be larger than the American by 2050, and Indian security officials are concerned by the prospect of Chinese dominance over Asia.

The news of the new rise in China's military budget was released in Beijing by parliamentary spokesman Jiang Enzhu, who said the country will increase its military spending by 14.7 percent this year to 283.8 billion yuan or $35.3 billion. He noted that the United States spent a greater proportion of its wealth on defense and that China had "no intention of vigorously developing armaments," claiming that much of the new spending would be devoted to higher petrol and fuel costs and to salaries and concluded that China was a "peace-loving nation."

But much of the new defense expenditure of recent years has gone to buy advanced new weaponry, including S0-27 and su-30 warplanes, Kilo-class submarines and Sovremenny-class warships, all from Russia. China also sought to buy the Phalcon AWACS airborne early warning system from Israel, but was barred when the Bush administration pressured Israel to stop the deal. China has also sought, so far without success, to press the European Union to lift its own arms embargo against China, first imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre 17 years ago.

American defense analysts claim that the official Chinese budget massively understates the real level of spending, which they believe to be as much as $100 billion a year, three times higher than Beijing admits. They say that the military research and development budget, the military construction and pension and medical bills and some of the procurement costs are all hidden away elsewhere in the civilian budget. They also claim that profits from private companies owned or managed by the Peoples Liberation Army also swell the real military budget.

The new Chinese budget comes after the publication last month of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, which described the new priorities of the U.S. military as preparing to conduct a "long war" against terrorists worldwide, to improve homeland security capabilities, and to prepare for possible confrontation with China as an emerging superpower rival.

"China is likely to continue making large investments in high-end, asymmetric military capabilities," the Pentagon report said. "These capabilities, the vast distances of the Asian theater, China's continental depth, and the challenge of en route and in-theater U.S. basing place a premium on forces capable of sustained operations at great distances into denied areas."

American military concerns are matched in India, which has watched nervously the construction with Chinese funds and engineers of new ports and naval bases in Pakistan and Myanmar, as China builds a string of bases to protect the sea routs of the oil tankers from the Persian Gulf on which China's energy imports depend. But for India, this new Chinese presence on both its flanks in the Indian Ocean, along with China's central role in arming Pakistan, means that Beijing is a major security concern. India's last Defense Minister, George Fernandes, said publicly that India's new nuclear arsenal was aimed at deterring China.

India security officials told United Press International in interviews in Delhi last week that they have taken careful note of the American report, "The National Security Implications of the Economic Relationship Between the United States and China," published by the Congressional China Security Review Commission (CSRC), which argues that:

"China's leaders consistently characterize the United States as a 'hegemon', connoting a powerful protagonist and overbearing bully that is China's major competitor, but they also believe that the United States is a declining power with important military vulnerabilities that can be exploited."

The report said that "China sees the United States as a hegemonic power that is a major obstacle and competitor for influence in the world; believes the United States is a superpower in decline, losing economic political, and military influence around the world; and China aspires to be a major international power and the dominant power in Asia."

Indian officials broadly agree, which is the background to the new strategic partnership between India as the world's largest democracy, and the United States as its most powerful democracy, each of them nervous at the rise of a China where political power is still a monopoly of the Communist Party.

Indian and U.S. officials are paying particular concern to China's suspected capabilities in unconventional warfare, particularly in cyber-warfare and information warfare, attacking the computer networks on which advanced military forces increasingly depend. The U.S. concerns were first made public by U.S. Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, Commander of U.S. Space Command, who noted in 2001 that, "We see this (cyber-warfare) in terms of capabilities we know they have, we see this written in their doctrine, we see this espoused by their leadership."

Joint alarm about China has led to an unprecedented degree of cooperation between Indian and U.S. forces, with intensive joint exercises between their militaries, which include giving U.S. pilots dog-fighting experience against China's Su-30 warplanes, also operated by India. U.S. and Indian intelligence officials have operated a number of cooperation and data-sharing agreements, most notably in Afghanistan and Central Asia, where both countries share a common concern for Islamic and jihadist radicalism, as well as for China's growth and ambitions.

"Thales Australia has announced its plans to increase its stake in Australian defence contractor ADI Limited to 100 percent," the company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the French parent, said in a statement posted on the ADI website.

Thales said the transaction was conditional on approval from Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board.

No figures were given for the ADI takeover bid, but the number is certain to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Australian newspaper said the United States would be concerned about a French-controlled company handling some of its sensitive military technology.

The US and Australian military cooperate closely and share technology, with "interoperability" between the two forces one of Canberra's stated goals when acquiring defence hardware.

The newspaper said a similar takeover proposal was scuttled five years ago because of security concerns.

Thales is 30 percent owned by the French government, which has questioned elements of Washington's "war on terror", while Australia is a strong US ally that has participated in the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

ADI has annual sales of 700 million dollars and employs 2,500 people.

It has a wide range of contracts with the Australian military providing munitions, minehunter ships, missile frigate upgrades, armoured personnel carriers and software for a fleet of Eurocopter Tiger attack helicopters.

Thales operates in more than 30 countries, has 60,000 staff and annual revenues of 10.3 billion euros (12.4 billion US).

The fighting in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border is the bloodiest in more than two years and marks an escalation in President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's campaign to crack down on al-Qaida and Taliban militants and their local sympathizers.

It also underscored Islamabad's failure to establish governmental control in the rugged region - a possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri - where fiercely independent Pashtun tribesmen have resisted outside authority and influence for centuries.

The trigger of the unrest was a Pakistani army strike against a suspected al-Qaida camp in the border village of Saidgi last week that authorities said killed 45 people, including foreign militants. It was launched two days before a visit by President Bush, fueling speculation Pakistan was flexing its military muscle in the border regions to signal its commitment to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Pro-Taliban tribesmen claimed locals were killed in the assault and, according to officials, ambushed the vehicles of security forces Saturday and opened fire on the main Frontiers Corps base in Miran Shah. The army responded with artillery and fire from helicopter gunships.

Dil Nawaz, 45, a resident of Miran Shah, said he had been stranded with his weeping family in their home for a day as guns boomed around them and bullets ricocheted off the walls. He finally fled on foot with his wife and five children during a lull in the fighting Sunday.

``We saw destruction in the main bazaar. We saw damaged homes. We just kept walking and hours later reached Mir Ali,'' he said.

About 10,000 people have fled the violence. Vehicles were not allowed in or out of Miran Shah, so people had to walk 10 miles to a security checkpoint. Many have ended up in Mir Ali, 15 miles west of Miran Shah, where the situation has stabilized after at least 21 people died in violence Saturday.

A full curfew was declared in Miran Shah except for three afternoon hours for residents to buy provisions, said Sikandar Qayyum, a security official for Pakistan's tribal areas. It would last as long as ``the security situation requires.''

Fighting rumbled on Monday. A militant rocket attack on a residential area for government officials in Miran Shah killed one official's 17-year-old daughter, Qayyum said.

Qayyum confirmed that army helicopter gunships fired on militant positions around Miran Shah on Monday, while militants attacked security checkpoints around Mir Ali and the nearby town of Razmak but caused no casualties.

Musharraf on Monday defended the army's operations, saying hundreds of foreign militants were hiding in North and neighboring South Waziristan.

``They include Uzbeks, Chechens, Middle Easterners, and even some Chinese,'' he told reporters. ``Foreigners are also present in Miran Shah.''

But opposition lawmaker Imran Khan condemned the government for ``the massacre of our citizens in the tribal areas by the use of indiscriminate force.''

Khan was released Sunday from two days of house arrest in Islamabad for trying to organize an anti-U.S. protest during Bush's visit.

Associated Press reporters Riaz Khan in Peshawar and Sailab Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan contributed to this report.

People in North Waziristan who spoke to Asia Times Online claimed that the present battles between the armed forces and the tribals are unlike those of the past, which in essence were skirmishes. They said that now there was a virtual mass mutiny against both Pakistan and its pro-US government in Islamabad.

Asia Times Online broke the story about the establishment of an Islamic state in North Waziristan (see The Taliban's bloody foothold in Pakistan, February 8) after the Taliban took control of the area. Initially, Pakistani authorities avoided clashes and restricted themselves to the district headquarters, Miranshah. There was an unwritten accord between the Taliban and Pakistani forces that they would not encroach on each other's areas.

However, an air raid last Friday, a day before the arrival of US President George W Bush in Pakistan, changed everything. Pakistani authorities claimed they had attacked a group of militants who were infiltrating North Waziristan after attacking a US base in Afghanistan. Local tribes maintain that the air raid killed a number of innocent men, women and children who had nothing to do with the suspect group.

In reprisal, tribals seized control of the district headquarters of Miranshah. Many Pakistani armed-forces personnel were killed, while dozens were forced to surrender and were arrested by the local Taliban.

Pakistan's ground forces could not take on the tribals, so more gunship helicopters were sent in, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 tribesmen on Saturday, according to local estimates. And on Sunday, dozens more were killed. Despite the air cover, Pakistani ground troops are not prepared to risk advancing too far beyond their bases.

Taliban sources tell Asia Times Online that had Pakistan not begun the air raids, sharia courts would have been operational from this month. The Taliban have already established centers all over the tribal area to run local affairs, including their own system of policing.

The fight spreads
The Taliban intend to extend from their base in North Waziristan to Afghanistan to fuel the resistance there against the US and its allies. Similarly, the movement will spread to "mainland" Pakistan in an effort to topple the pro-American government in Islamabad. Pakistan is a key component of the United States' "war on terror".
This anti-government movement will need a leader. The jihadi hardcore is looking for one who will be untainted and not hand-in-glove with the military establishment. So far, a general consensus is emerging that international cricketer turned politician Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf (Pakistan Justice Movement), might be the man for the job.

Khan took a lead role in the protests against Bush's visit to Pakistan, although he received some support from the six-party opposition religious grouping the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA). In fact, Khan was placed under house arrest before his main rally, and in his absence his workers gathered in Rawalpindi, where they were dispersed by police and many people were arrested.

In his distinguished cricket-playing days, the charismatic Khan was featured on the cover of international magazines, and he had a huge following in his own country because of his exploits on the field. Pakistani Islamists, a constituency in the army and the powerful Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan party saw Khan as a leader who could be cultivated as a figure to charm the masses for Islamic revolution in Pakistan.

This was soon after Pakistan won the Cricket World Cup in Australia in 1993, when Khan's popularity knew no bounds. At this time, he retired from the sport and became involved in establishing a cancer hospital.

However, Khan's marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, a daughter of British industrialist James Goldsmith, messed up the designs of the Islamists, and the whole scheme was put on the back burner.

Educated at Oxford, England, and coming from a family that is considered among the elite of Lahore, Khan nevertheless turned out to be a genuine ally of the Islamic radicals as he sided with their cause and the Taliban. The majority of his party comprises progressive thinkers, women's-rights activists and a faction of Marxists, some of whom left the fold because of Khan's tendencies toward Islamic radicalism.

Yet Khan remained a vocal voice against US designs in the region, and even launched a campaign in support of some army officers who were arrested for alleged al-Qaeda connections, and he openly supported the Taliban movement.

Khan is now divorced, so in the eyes of many he is once again in a position to become a leader.

Before his rally in Rawalpindi, he was scheduled for a meeting with this correspondent in Islamabad. But because of his house arrest, he called by telephone to express his anger.

"There may be many dimensions to Bush's visit to Pakistan, but the basic thing is the reinforcement of US influence in Pakistan, which is situated at an ideal strategic location. Musharraf is the vehicle to reinforce American designs in the region," Khan said.

He called the ongoing operation in North Waziristan a prelude of radicalization in Pakistan. "The post-September 11 [2001] events perpetuate the present situation [unrest] and the current North Waziristan situation will further radicalize Pakistani society," Khan said.

He claimed that Musharraf was living in a house of cards and that a single powerful push could force him to step down. "Had Pakistan not been hit by an earthquake [last year], the opposition parties would already have begun their movement to oust Musharraf, but you will see that he will not be able to resist any longer against the present movement."

A million-person march was staged in Karachi on Sunday, and now there is a few days' lull due to Senate elections. In the meantime, the specter of North Waziristan will loom large in the consciousness of the establishment: the fear of a religious hard core, waiting for a leader, joining with the Islamic State of North Waziristan.

According to a report by Pakistani intelligence agencies, as many as half a million Pakistanis stayed in Afghanistan during the Taliban period from 1996 to 2001. Many of them took military training, while others only sought ideological inspiration.

After the September 11 attacks in the US, Pakistan took drastic steps to contain pro-Taliban organizations in Pakistan. Still, tens of thousands of jihadis and their supporters are believed to still be active. At present, the main problem of the religious hard core is to get all of them united in a battle against the establishment and mobilized on the streets.

To achieve this, a revolutionary leader is required who will be popular in the armed forces, with the religious hard core and among the masses.

Stubborn, defiant and extremely popular among the Taliban, Imran Khan might be such a leader.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.

Pakistan, where Bush was rounding off his four-day South Asian tour on Saturday, was first off the block demanding a civilian nuclear technology deal similar to the one Washington signed with its regional rival on the grounds that it was short on fossil fuel.

But, at a televised press conference in Islamabad, Bush ruled out any such deal with Pakistan. ''We discussed the civilian nuclear programme and I explained to him (Musharraf) that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories,'' Bush said.

''What is happening is that, with this deal, the U.S. has itself become the biggest proliferator of nuclear technology,'' Prof. Anuradha Chinoy, disarmament specialist at the Jawaharalal Nehru University (JNU), told IPS in an interview. ''The only difference is that what the U.S. is practicing is selective proliferation.''

Chinoy said the deal went against the ideal of universal disarmament and would only make aspirant countries, denied entry into the select nuclear club, even more dangerous and desperate, as could be seen from the examples of Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.. Iran has already accused the U.S. and India of double standards. As its case moves towards a likely reference to the U.N. Security Council, Iran will certainly raise the 'double standards' pitch.

Worst of all, said Chinoy, the ''U.S. and India are now partners in violating international law by not involving the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the 45-country Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) before agreeing to transfer nuclear fuel and technology''.

Both the IAEA and the NSG are United Nations bodies.

Indian newspapers, however, have been hailing the deal as a triumph for its negotiators' skills. They succeeded in keeping the country's demonstrated capacity to make nuclear weapons away from international inspections while gaining access to advanced reactors and technology for its civilian programme.

On top of that India has all along refused to be signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the grounds that it was discriminatory. It carried out nuclear tests in 1974, attracting international sanctions, but defiantly went on to declare itself a nuclear weapons state in 1998 through a second round of tests.

Following Thursday's deal, Singh told a press conference that under the Indo-U.S. pact the NSG and the IAEA would be made to formulate India-specific safeguards. Under existing rules, by contrast, the NSG cannot supply 'dual-use' nuclear technology to India since it does not accept full-scope IAEA safeguards on nuclear facilities.

So far, though, the agreement has received praise from IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei, who has described it as ''timely for ongoing efforts to consolidate the non-proliferation regime, combat nuclear terrorism and strengthen nuclear safety''.

India has been allowed to classify eight of its existing 22 reactors as military and keep them away from IAEA inspectors and also decide whether any future reactor it builds ought to be classified as civilian or military.

Most importantly, India has been able to keep its entire fast-breeder reactor programme in the military list. Fast breeders use fission caused by fast neutrons and burn highly concentrated or enriched fuel and, theoretically, they generate more fissile material than they consume. And the deal has no caps on fissile material, including weapons-grade plutonium.

Even before Bush landed in India on Wednesday, Singh made pledged in parliament that the fast breeder programme, a pet project of India's secretive Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), would not be compromised in any way.

''It is possible that DAE officials want to have the option of producing nuclear fuel for weapons in these unsafeguarded reactors," said M.V. Ramana, well-known a physicist at Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, located in southern Indian city of Bangalore.

Another possible reason for the fierce resistance put up by DAE, through interviews fed to the media by its chief Anil Kakodkar, is that the fast breeder sites also house facilities for the nuclear reactor that India is developing for its submarines. ''Indian authorities probably don't want IAEA inspectors lurking around there,'' Ramana told IPS. (END/2006)

Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.