Veterans for Common Sense

British Prime Minister Tony Blair will meet Tuesday with the Muslim Council of Britain, the broad representative body of the country’s estimated 1.6 million followers of the various forms of Islam. It is a big tent organization, designed to include some radical and semi-militant groups, in the hope of brining them into the political system and separating them from hard-line extremists. But this makes it all the more difficult for Blair to win their endorsement of his plans to license Islamic clerics, and regulate mosques and madrassas (Koranic schools).
    
    Britain’s Home Office (rather like the Department of Justice in the United States) is drafting a system of accreditation and qualification for would-be Muslim clerics. They will have to be fluent in English and pass a test in British civic knowledge, and new applicants are expected to undergo a new state-sponsored training course that will promote moderate Islam. An estimated 1,800 of Britain’s 3,000 full-time Imams come from overseas, mainly from Pakistan, and many come with Saudi sponsorship and after some study in Saudi Arabia.

    
    Many of the moderate elders of Britain’s Muslim community will go along with Blair’s plans, which also have the backing of the Muslim Members of Parliament. The mainstream of Muslim opinion is now prepared to admit that the four British-born bombers of the London transport system were influenced by extremists at their mosques in Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, and during visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that this radicalization of some young Muslims is a problem that the community must address.
    
    “The Muslim communities are not reaching those people who they need to engage with and win their hearts and minds,” says Sadiq Khan, the Muslim Labor MP for the London suburb of Tooting. “What leads someone to do this? The rewards they are told they will get in the hereafter – it is incumbent on Muslims to tell them that nowhere in Islam does it say this, and in fact what you will get is hellfire.”
    
    But younger firebrands are less and less likely to listen to their elders, particularly in that sub-group of British Islam that comes from Pakistan – the group that seems to have spawned the most extremism. Indeed, the ethnic and linguistic divisions among British Muslims mean that in reality they form several distinct communities whose common language and common culture is English.
    
    According to the 2001 census, 69 percent of Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims come from the Indian sub-continent, and just over half of them were born there. The rest, 46 percent, were born in Britain. The largest group, over half a million, stems from Pakistan, and of them almost half come from the poor district around Mirpur where the building of the Mangla dam in the late 1950s and early 1960s created a vast pool of homeless and landless peasants, who were then recruited to low-wage jobs in the textile industry of northern England. They clubbed together to bring over Imams from home to run mosques and teach the Koran, imported wives from Mirpur through arranged marriages, and created urban versions of their traditional Mirpuri villages under the grey English skies.
    
    The textile industry itself then declined, locking this community of poor and ill-educated people in a grim cycle of unemployment, welfare, female illiteracy and low expectations. The rustbelt that stretches across Lancashire and Yorkshire is the region where the anti-immigration British National Party, a thuggish group with neo-Nazi links, gets up to 20 percent of the vote from an almost equally ill-educated and hopeless white working class. And yet this is also the area that produces most of the dozen of so ‘honor killings’ carried out each year by angry fathers or brothers, when a Pakistani girl falls in love with a British boy.
    
    The next largest group, nearly 400,000, come from Bangladesh, mostly from the Sylhet region, and are very different. They speak Bengali rather than Urdu, eat rice rather than roti, dress differently and follow a notably more relaxed form of Islam, and are concentrated in East London rather than northern England. They tend also to be more entrepreneurial, and more open to education opportunities for their children, who have a better record of getting to university than the Pakistanis.
    
    The third major group is the Muslims of Indian origin, many of whom came to Britain in the early 1970s as refugees from East Africa after Uganda’s President Idi Amin decided to expel them. They have become perhaps the most desirable and successful group of immigrants that Britain ever welcomed. They have produced more millionaires, more doctors and more college graduates, than any other ethnic group – the British included. One in 20 is a doctor.
    
    The 31 percent of British Muslims from elsewhere are mainly from Somalia and Turkey, each with about 50,000. Another 100,000 come from Nigeria, Malaysia or Iran, and then students and refugees and the political exiles and Arab intellectuals who have given the British capital the nickname ‘Londonistan’ make up most of the rest.
    
    So the reality behind the term ‘British Muslim’ includes a wealthy London surgeon, an unemployed and barely literate textile worker in Oldham, a Malaysian accountancy student who wants to go on to business school, a fiery newspaper columnist who dare not go home to Saudi Arabia, a female government clerk who lives with her English boyfriend and no longer sees her outraged family, and a prosperous restaurant owner in East London.
    
    They have little in common – except for the sense of alarm that somehow they will share in the blame, or suffer the backlash, for the London bombings. But some of the things they do have in common are striking. Muslims are much more likely to be unemployed. Around 15 percent of Muslims, both male and female, are registered as unemployed, compared to 4 percent of the rest of the population. The British government’s Labor Force Survey found that Muslims are more likely than any other group to be ‘economically inactive’, those in long term unemployment or not even seeking work. In the same survey, 31{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Muslims in work had no qualifications.
    
    Muslims are five times more likely to marry by the age of 24 than any other Briton. And Muslims have the youngest age profile of all religious groups: 34 percent are under the age of 16, compared with 25 percent of Sikhs, 2 percent of Hindus and 18 percent of Christians. And they tend to live together; two-thirds of the 600,000 Muslims who live in London reside in the two East End boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets. And more than any other ethnic or religious group, they tend to live in rented public housing.
    
    These are the disparate groups and individuals that Tony Blair hopes to rally to the common identity of Britishness, by which he means a full-hearted commitment to democracy, and the freedom of speech and religion and lifestyles that it involves. And in these days of al-Qaida, Blair has to convince them that being British may have to include closed circuit TV cameras in the mosques and government licenses for Imams. What has yet to be addressed is what happens if some members of the Muslim Council Britain simply say no.

A lawyer for Jose Padilla, an American accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb,” went before a federal appeals court Tuesday and demanded the U.S. government either charge his client with a crime or set him free.

But a Bush administration lawyer told the court that the president must have authority to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists who come to the United States intent on killing civilians.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert suspected of being an al-Qaida operative, was seized in 2002 after flying from Pakistan to Chicago on what authorities said was a scouting mission for a plot to set off a conventional bomb laced with radioactive material. Padilla also is suspected of planning to blow up apartment buildings in several cities by filling them with natural gas.

President Bush declared Padilla an “enemy combatant,” a designation that allows the military to hold someone indefinitely without charges. Padilla is in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., and has been held for the past three years.

At issue before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is whether Padilla _ an American seized on U.S. soil _ should have been designated an enemy combatant.

“I may be the first lawyer to stand here and say I’m asking for my client to be indicted by a federal grand jury,” Padilla’s lawyer, Andrew Patel, told a three-judge panel of the court, widely regarded as the most conservative in the nation.

Patel later told reporters that the government should “put up or shut up _ it’s that simple.”

In a packed courtroom under tight security, Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig pressed Bush administration lawyer Paul Clement on whether the government was suggesting that the battlefield in the war on terror now includes U.S. soil.

“I can say that. I can say it boldly,” Clement said.

But Clement did not emphasize that point in his arguments, saying instead that Padilla can be held as an enemy combatant because he trained overseas before flying to the U.S. to carry out the mission. That is akin to crossing enemy lines to commit a “hostile act,” Clement said.

“It would be very, very strange to say an intent on blowing up apartment buildings and killing U.S. citizens again is not a hostile act,” he said.

Luttig also closely questioned Patel, suggesting his position that Padilla’s case should be handled like any other criminal case “is a failure to recognize the real-world circumstances that can confront a president of the United States.”

The judge offered a scenario in which the president is informed in the middle of the night that a suspected terrorist has just arrived in New York and is expected to detonate a bomb within minutes. Could the president have the military capture the suspect? Luttig asked.

Patel said he could, but that the suspect would have to be turned over to civilian authorities as soon as possible.

The 4th Circuit received the case after a South Carolina judge ruled that the government must charge Padilla with a crime or release him.

The same court two years ago upheld the president’s right to detain another U.S. citizen designated as an enemy combatant, Yaser Esam Hamdi. However, Hamdi was released and flown to Saudi Arabia after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled he could challenge his detention in U.S. courts.

A key difference in the two cases is that Hamdi was captured while fighting alongside the Taliban on the battlefield in Afghanistan, while Padilla was taken into custody in the United States.

The court usually takes several weeks to rule.

 WASHINGTON, July 20 – About half of Iraq’s new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only “partially capable” of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment. 

Only “a small number” of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without American assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of “planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations” with allied support, the analysis said.

The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis’ readiness levels that the military has provided. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said the 160,000 American-led allied troops cannot begin to withdraw until Iraqi troops are ready to take over security.

The assessment is described in a brief written response that Gen. Peter Pace, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was provided to The Times by a Senate staff aide. At General Pace’s confirmation hearing on June 29, Republicans and Democrats directed him to provide an unclassified accounting of the Iraqis’ abilities to allow a fuller public debate. The military had already provided classified assessments to lawmakers.

“We need to know, the American people need to know the status of readiness of the Iraqi military, which is improving, so that we can not only understand but appreciate better the roles and missions that they are capable of carrying out,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said at the hearing.

General Pace’s statement comes as the Pentagon prepares to deliver to Congress as early as Thursday a comprehensive report that establishes performance standards and goals on a variety of political and economic matters, as well as the training of Iraqi security forces, and a timetable for achieving those aims. The report was due on July 11, but the Pentagon missed the deadline.

The Defense Department is required to update the assessment every 90 days. From a single American-trained Iraqi battalion a year ago, the Pentagon says there are now more than 100 battalions of Iraqi troops and paramilitary police units, totaling just under 173,000 personnel. Of that total, about 78,800 are military troops and 94,100 are police and paramilitary police officers. The total is to rise to 270,000 by next summer, when 10 fully equipped, 14,000-member Iraqi Army divisions are to be operational.

American commanders have until now resisted quantifying the abilities of Iraqi units, especially their shortcomings, to avoid giving the insurgents any advantage.

In General Pace’s seven-sentence response, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, he stressed, “The majority of Iraqi security forces are engaged in operations against the insurgency with varying degrees of cooperation and support from coalition forces.” He added that many units had “performed superbly.”

At a Pentagon news conference on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended this approach of describing the Iraqi units’ abilities in general terms only.

“It’s not for us to tell the other side, the enemy, the terrorists, that this Iraqi unit has this capability, and that Iraqi unit has this capability,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “The idea of discussing weaknesses, if you will, strengths and weaknesses of ‘this unit has a poor chain of command,’ or ‘these forces are not as effective because their morale’s down’ – I mean, that would be mindless to put that kind of information out.”

Iraqi and American commanders have set up a system that grades Iraqi military and special police units in six categories: personnel, command and control, training, equipping, ability to sustain forces, and leadership. Using these measurements, Iraqi battalions are graded on a scale of one (strongest) to four (weakest). The military is still devising measurements for regular police units.

Level 1 units are able to plan, execute and sustain independent counterinsurgency operations. By late last month, American commanders said, only 3 of the 107 military and paramilitary battalions had achieved that standard. At the lower end, Level 4 units are just forming and cannot conduct operations. Units graded at levels in between need some form of allied support, often supplies, communications and intelligence. 

Mr. Rumsfeld said such measurements were just part of the calculus in judging individual units or their parent organizations.

“One way is to look at it numerically,” he said. “How many are there? How many have the right equipment? The other way to look at it is the softer things. How is the experience? Are they battle-hardened? How’s the morale? What kind of noncommissioned officers and middle-level officers do they have? How’s the chain of command functioning? What’s the relationship between the Ministry of Defense forces and the Ministry of Interior forces?”

American commanders have said for months that training Iraqis in Western-style policing tactics and techniques would be one of the most challenging tasks, in large part because of the lack of a law-enforcement tradition among the Iraqi police.

About a half of their police battalions are still being formed and are “not yet capable of conducting operations,” General Pace wrote.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Armed Services Committee’s ranking Democrat, visited Iraq this month and praised the military for devising a system for rating Iraqi units akin to what the American military uses to judge the combat readiness of its own forces.

But in a report issued July 11, Mr. Levin said American and Iraqi officials needed to develop measurable benchmarks for when Iraqi units are deemed capable enough of dealing with insurgents to allow American forces to begin to withdraw. “Without such a plan, Iraqis may never assume the responsibility for taking back their country,” he said.

Senior American commanders maintain that the Iraqis are making progress. In the past few months, more than 1,500 American troops have joined Iraqi units as advisers, in most cases living and working with individual units. In addition, dozens of American Army and Marine units are working with Iraqi in counterinsurgency missions.

Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., commander of the Third Infantry Division, which is responsible for Baghdad and the surrounding area, predicted earlier this month that by October there should be a full, 18,000-member division of Iraqi soldiers sufficiently trained to take the lead in securing the Iraqi capital.

The Army told John Conroy on July 8 that it did not want him, despite his master’s degree in business and his marathon-proven fitness. Just shy of 41, he is too old.

But by next year, Mr. Conroy could be in a uniform.

With the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard all on pace to fall short of their recruitment goals for the year, the military is reconsidering its age limits for recruits.

Allowing older soldiers could be costly in terms of benefits, and there is the thorny issue of whether older men and women can keep up with the young. But many in the military argue that 40-somethings are in better physical shape today and point out that thousands of middle-age soldiers are already rotating through Iraq.

On Monday, the Pentagon filed documents asking Congress to increase the maximum age for military recruits to 42, in all branches of the service. Now, the limit is 39 for people without previous military service who want to enlist in the reserves and the National Guard, and 35 for those seeking active duty.

At a subcommittee hearing in the House on Tuesday, David S. C. Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said lifting the age limit was one of several tools needed to turn recruitment around.

“There is a segment of the population that is older, that would like to serve,” Mr. Chu said at the hearing, “and we’d like to open up that aperture for the military departments to use as they see fit.”

When asked how 42 was chosen, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Wednesday that it would bring the policy in line with a recent provision that allows the military to commission officers until that age. Even if the age limit is raised, she said, the Marines and Air Force planned to accept new enlistees only through age 35.

The proposal, intended for the 2006 defense budget now pending in Congress, could further ease the military’s historic reliance on young recruits. In March, the Pentagon rewrote its policy from the 1960’s that limited new recruits to people under 36, raising the age limit for Army Reserve and Guard recruits by five years, to anyone younger than 40.

Another step-up in age, like other ideas now being discussed – like the Guard’s request to expand the number of legal immigrants allowed to enlist – would add millions of people to the military’s pool of potential applicants. In a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the military was studying how many people 40 and over might enlist.

“It’s not the answer exclusively,” said Lt. Col. Mike Jones, the Army National Guard’s deputy division chief for recruiting and retention. “But we tend to miss our numbers on the margins, by 10 or 11 percent.” If people who are older filled half of that, he said, “maybe it’s good for America.”

Mr. Conroy, a married father of two young children, says he wants to tackle a new challenge, and to give back to the country that has helped him succeed. He says he earns a six-figure salary and owns his house and cars debt free, so it is the perfect time for him to start a new, meaningful adventure.

“I’m just interested in serving my country,” Mr. Conroy said in an interview from St. Louis, where he works in information technology. “I have no debt. I’ve done everything I want to do.”

At the very least, raising the age limit to 42 – a choice that some applicants consider as arbitrary as 39 – would open the doors to peers.

Pentagon figures from 2004 show that roughly 25 percent of the 343,000 people who serve in the Army National Guard are 40 or older. Among the 25,000 members of the Army National Guard now mobilized, mostly in Iraq, 3,952 are over 50.

Older soldiers have also been added to the ranks through stop-loss, a policy that extends the tours of soldiers beyond their enlistment contracts.

“People are living longer now, and things have changed since Vietnam,” said Brig. Gen. David Grange, former commander of the Army’s First Infantry Division, who retired in 2000. “Age should not be discriminate.”

The primary concern is fitness. A number of the eager applicants dismissed an age limit as unnecessary given the tests already administered to gauge performance.

Some commanders, though, question whether older soldiers will be able to perform on par with younger peers, particularly as they age or when they are deployed in Iraq’s desert heat or in the high altitudes of Afghanistan.

“It’s the endurance factor, your muscular energy,” said Lt. Col. Leah Sundquist, 42, the recruiting and retention commander for the Oregon National Guard, who worked as a mobilization readiness officer until December. “It is hard as you get older to maintain the stamina that a younger individual would do in terms of heat, rigorous movement and the gear you’re wearing.”

Potential costs might also crush the plan. Daniel Goure, a former Defense Department official who is now a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute, a policy research group in Virginia, said the military would save some money by not having to pay for college tuition for older recruits and spend some on increased doctors’ visits. “We don’t know quite yet what the overall impact would be,” he said.

Nonetheless, Army officials are keen on including people like Mr. Conroy. Members of the National Guard are part-time soldiers, they point out, already accustomed to having a business executive in his 50’s at the same rank as a 24-year-old just off active duty.

A Guard officer who has worked on recruiting issues in California, and who insisted on anonymity because he is not permitted to speak to reporters, said he was troubled about having to turn away a 41-year-old truck driver with a bachelor’s degree who wanted to apply his skills to the military, and a 42-year-old lawyer who wanted to be an infantry officer. Both applicants passed the physical fitness test.

Maj. Gen. Gus Hargett Jr., commander of the Tennessee National Guard, said he had received letters in the last year from at least two men who were about 45 and eager to enlist. “One of them ran marathons,” General Hargett said. “We ought to let a guy like that serve. I am not in favor of lowering the standards, but we should offer the opportunity of service to all Americans who are qualified.”

Older recruits, some suggest, might be well suited for policing places like Baghdad and Kabul. Sgt. Rowe Stayton, 54, a former F-15 fighter pilot, who re-enlisted in 2002 in the Army National Guard with credit from more than a decade of earlier service, said adding soldiers over 40 would “bring maturity and good judgment.”

One night in Baghdad during his yearlong tour in Iraq, he said, a young soldier shouted at a truck of Iraqis to halt and unlocked the safety on his weapon without knowing whether the vehicle posed a threat.

“I told him, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll stop when they see us,’ ” said Sergeant Stayton, who left the Air National Guard in 1987 at a rank of major. “Turns out, it was three Iraqis working for an American contractor who were going home after getting off work at 11.”

In addition to maturity, Sgt. Stayton said, age and education attracted respect from Iraqis. Now at home in Denver trying to restart his law practice, he said he looked forward to seeing more soldiers with graying hair among the ranks.

“I could see a battalion of older soldiers coming together in Iraq and functioning on the ground for a year,” he said. “I guarantee it would be the most effective combat unit there. They would win over more hearts and minds than any tour over there.”

A majority of U.S. soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds psychological stress is weighing particularly heavily on National Guard and Reserve troops.

Still, soldiers’ mental health has improved from the early months of the insurgency, and suicides have declined sharply, the report said. Also, substantially fewer soldiers had to be evacuated from Iraq for mental health problems last year.

The Army sent a team of mental health specialists to Iraq and Kuwait late last summer to assess conditions and measure progress in implementing programs designed to fix mental health problems discovered during a similar survey of troops a year earlier. Its report, dated Jan. 30, 2005, was released Wednesday.

The initial inquiry was triggered in part by an unusual surge in suicides among soldiers in Iraq in July 2003. Wednesday’s report said the number of suicides in Iraq and Kuwait declined from 24 in 2003 to nine last year.

A suicide prevention program was begun for soldiers in Iraq at the recommendation of the 2003 assessment team.

The overall assessment said 13 percent of soldiers in the most recent study screened positive for a mental health problem, compared with 18 percent a year earlier. Symptoms of acute or post-traumatic stress remained the top mental health problem, affecting at least 10 percent of all soldiers checked in the latest survey.

In the anonymous survey, 17 percent of soldiers said they had experienced moderate or severe stress or problems with alcohol, emotions or their families. That compares with 23 percent a year earlier.

The report said reasons for the improvement in mental health are not clear. Among possible explanations: less frequent and less intense combat, more comforts like air conditioning, wider access to mental health services and improved training in handling the stresses associated with deployments and combat.

National Guard and Reserve soldiers who serve in transportation and support units suffered more than others from depression, anxiety and other indications of acute psychological stress, the report said. These soldiers have often been targets of the insurgents’ lethal ambushes and roadside bombs, although the report said they had significantly fewer actual combat experiences than soldiers assigned to combat units.

The report recommended that the Army reconsider whether National Guard and Reserve support troops are getting adequate training in combat skills. Even though they do less fighting than combat troops, they might be better suited to cope with wartime stress if they had more confidence in their combat skills, it said.

Only 55 percent of National Guard support soldiers said they have “real confidence” in their unit’s ability to perform its mission, compared with 63 percent of active-duty Army support soldiers. And only 28 percent of the Guard troops rated their level of training as high, compared with 50 percent of their active-duty counterparts.

Small focus groups were held to ascertain troop morale.

The report said 54 percent of soldiers rated their units’ morale as low or very low. The comparable figure in a year-earlier Army survey was 72 percent. Although respondents said “combat stressors” like mortar attacks were higher in the most recent survey, “noncombat stressors” like uncertain tour lengths were much lower, the report said.

The thing that bothered soldiers the most, the latest assessment said, was the length of their required stay in Iraq. At the start of the war, most were deployed for six months, but now they go for 12 months.

Asked about this, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference that the Army’s 12-month requirement is linked in part to its effort to complete a fundamental reorganization of fighting units.

“I’ve tried to get the Army to look at the length of tours and I think at some point down the road they will,” he said.