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Mr. Sarkozy increased this year’s withdrawal of troops to 1,000 from 600, and said that French troops would hand over security duties in one of their main areas of responsibility, Kapisa Province, northeast of Kabul, beginning in March, at least four months early.

“Continuing the transition and the gradual transfer of combat responsibilities will let us plan for the return of all our fighting forces by the end of 2013,” Mr. Sarkozy said after a meeting here with Mr. Karzai.

The moves followed an attack a week ago by a rogue Afghan soldier who fired on unarmed French troops embedded with Afghan forces on a training mission in Kapisa, killing 4 soldiers and wounding 15, 8 of them seriously. The attack was a major blow for France, and occurred amid a tough re-election campaign for Mr. Sarkozy. His main rival for the presidency, the Socialist François Hollande, has promised to pull all French troops out by the end of this year, contending just last Sunday that “our mission there is finished.”

Mr. Sarkozy said that the level of Taliban infiltration in the Afghan Army “has been underestimated,” but he insisted that the acceleration was not due to the deaths of the French soldiers, but due to “the outstanding job our soldiers have done” training the Afghans. A few hundred soldiers would probably remain in Afghanistan purely for training exercises with the Afghan forces under a cooperation treaty the two presidents signed on Friday.

Standing with Mr. Karzai at a news conference, Mr. Sarkozy said he had informed President Obama of the proposal to speed NATO’s handoff and would discuss it with him this weekend.

“We have decided in a common agreement with President Karzai to ask NATO to consider a total handing of NATO combat missions to the Afghan Army over the course of 2013,” Mr. Sarkozy said. At the last summit meeting of NATO, in late 2010, it had agreed to do so by the end of 2014.

France intends to broach the proposal first at a meeting of NATO defense ministers next week, he said.

A senior NATO official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation, said the French decisions were bound to create problems for the alliance because they would give encouragement to the forces fighting the Afghan government, supporting the idea that attacks on NATO and coalition troops would push governments to leave Afghanistan sooner than planned.

But the accelerated French withdrawal has more symbolic than strategic weight. France has the fifth-largest contingent in Afghanistan, with an official count of 3,900 troops. Its forces have been in a largely defensive posture for the past year or longer, focused on preventing any further loss of troops’ lives, according to a NATO official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Since 2001, 82 French troops have been killed in Afghanistan.

Potentially more worrisome is the proposal for NATO to accelerate the transfer to Afghan control by a year, to the end of 2013 rather than 2014. So far only half of the country’s population is in areas handed over to the Afghans. The most troubled areas remain under international forces. In many cases in the less troubled areas, Afghan control is only nominal and coalition forces remain as support.

Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Karzai cited changing circumstances in Afghanistan as the reason for NATO to change its calendar, but it may also serve as cover for the new French position.

After the attack on the French soldiers in Kapisa, Mr. Sarkozy suspended France’s combat training work there and said he would consider an early withdrawal. He sent his defense minister, Gérard Longuet, to Afghanistan to investigate. But this week, French officials said that alliance solidarity was important, that security must be reassessed, and that France would not accelerate its withdrawal this year. On Friday, they insisted that the early French withdrawal would be orderly, not hasty.

Steven Erlanger reported from Paris, and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/world/europe/france-to-speed-afghan-withdrawal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“The situation there does not allow the leadership to be present,” a Hamas official in Gaza said. “There are no more Hamas leaders in Damascus.” The official and others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hamas leaders had left the Syrian capital because of security concerns.

But they said that Hamas, which rules here in Gaza, had not yet made a decision about closing its Syrian offices or where to moves its headquarters. Mr. Meshal has spent most of the past month on the move in the region.

Hamas had hailed the Arab revolts that toppled the governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but it was embarrassed when Syrian dissidents moved against President Bashar al-Assad, who has played host to exiled Palestinian leaders for years.

On Sunday, Mr. Meshal is scheduled to make his first official visit to Jordan since he was deported in 1999. Qatar, one of Mr. Assad’s most vocal Arab critics, played mediator in arranging for Mr. Meshal’s visit to Jordan, which is expected to include a meeting with King Abdullah II. Jordan was the first Arab country to urge Mr. Assad to step down.

Hamas announced this month that Mr. Meshal wished to step down as the chief of the movement’s political bureau, which he has led since 1996, but the exact nature and meaning of his resignation remain unclear. Some said the announcement was a sign of an internal power struggle, others as a maneuver aimed at displaying his popularity. Still others said that Mr. Meshal had his eyes on a bigger position beyond Hamas.

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/world/middleeast/khaled-meshal-the-leader-of-hamas-vacates-damascus.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

At a funeral for one of the more than 5,400 victims of Syria’s unfolding civil war, fighters from the opposition Free Syrian Army kept a menacing watch, their faces covered with scarves and balaclavas as they stood at the edge of a square, carrying assault rifles and grenade launchers. Thousands of demonstrators marched behind the coffin beneath the green, white and black banner of the opposition — not the Syrian government’s flag. Suspected state security agents were grabbed by the crowd.

The growing violence and assertiveness of the loosely organized military force hinted at the expanding role of armed fighters in a movement that began peacefully more than 10 months ago and that now seems to attract more defectors from Syria’s military by the day. After months of a withering government crackdown on the opposition, many protesters have come to welcome the fighters as a bulwark against the security forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

The Free Syrian Army’s leadership is based over the border in Turkey. It is unclear whether it has any organizational control over the local, ad hoc militias in Syria that one person described as “franchises.” The scene in the square in Saqba showed that the ranks of the fighters had been buttressed by army conscripts and others, including air force veterans. In some places the militias are filled with local men, and in others, like Saqba, many of the defectors come from other parts of the country, welcome but somewhat mysterious guests.

“We don’t know who their commanders are,” said Rafaat Obeid, 37, one of the demonstrators. “We know they protect us.”

The growing numbers of armed rebels — and the determination of the government crackdown — has led to a rising tide of violence. The leader of the Arab League’s observer mission acknowledged on Friday that killings had accelerated despite the delegates’ presence. In a statement, the mission chief, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed al-Dabi of Sudan, warned of the “significant” escalation of violence in the previous three days and said it threatened negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.

Few of Syria’s opposition strongholds were safe on Friday as a government offensive unfolded across the country. The streets of Homs, Hama and Idlib came under shelling and sniper fire and were choked by clashes with opposition activists.

In the Free Syrian Army, the government faces what is surely a gathering threat. The rebels have fanned out across the country, forming militias that seem to be organizing mostly at a local level.

Khaled Abou Salah, a spokesman for the Homs Revolution Council, said brigades of Free Syrian Army soldiers in the city answered to neighborhood commanders who coordinated their efforts with officers in other parts of the country. The corps included engineers specializing in explosives and civilians, often men wanted by the government. Their ranks were growing, he said.

“Each time they bring new forces here, some of them defect,” he said.

In interviews last week, some residents of Homs, including several Christians and Alawites, expressed fears that hard-line Sunnis known as Salafis were forming armed groups and stoking violence. Those fears — which some said were overblown and ignored similar Sunni worries — reflected mounting concerns among secular activists that as the conflict drags on, an Islamist presence in some militias was giving the uprising an increasingly sectarian character.

One prominent leftist activist in Homs, heeding the concerns, said he was pressing his fellow activists to renounce the armed movement and stick to peaceful protests.

The tensions played out this week between secular and Islamist activists, with the Islamists pushing to name the weekly Friday protests “Al Jihad,” as other activists pushed for “the Right to Self Defense.” The secular activists won.

“The Syrian uprising is not a Sunni jihad against unbelievers,” said Rami, a protest leader in Damascus. “It is a Syrian uprising against a dictator’s regime, and for that reason there are protesters from Alawite, Christian, Druze, Ismaili and other sects,” he said.

In Saqba, a Free Syrian Army commander echoed that sentiment, saying that the fighters in the city crossed sectarian lines. “My colleagues’ names are George, and Joseph,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Huwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria; an employee of The New York Times from Beirut, Lebanon; and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/world/middleeast/violence-rises-sharply-in-syria-flustering-arab-league-monitors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The pace of growth was faster than in the third quarter, when gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1.8 percent.

Even so, both  figures were below the average speed of economic expansion in the United States since World War II. Above-average growth in the quarter would have helped to make up for the destruction wrought by the Great Recession.

“At this rate, we’ll never reduce unemployment,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The recovery has been postponed, again.”

Still, the 2.8 percent rate is likely to be seen by many as something of a relief, given that just last summer many economists were predicting the country would soon dip back into recession. Whether this modestly brisker pace of growth will continue is unclear, however.

One of the biggest drags on growth in the last quarter was government spending at the federal, state and local levels, according to the Commerce Department report. National defense spending fell a whopping 12.5 percent, for example. Strapped state and local governments are likely to continue cutting back in 2012, as they have done nearly every quarter for the last several years.

At the federal level, Congress has not yet decided whether to renew a temporary payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits past February, when both are scheduled to expire.

Consumer spending rose at an annual pace of 2 percent, slightly better than the 1.7 percent in the previous quarter. But there were signs that the increase in spending might have been driven by borrowing based on expected improvements in the economy and that consumers were starting to retrench again.

“It will be very hard for consumption growth this quarter to match what we saw last quarter,” said Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics. “Remember that with consumption at 70 percent of G.D.P., slower consumer spending growth can mean much slower G.D.P. growth.”

Among the more optimistic signs recently, many American companies have reported strong profits in recent months. In addition, new orders for manufactured durable goods, reported on Thursday, exceeded economists’ expectations in December by growing 3 percent.

And companies like General Electric and Lockheed Martin closed the year with record order backlogs, a sign that, at least for some businesses, demand is so strong that they cannot produce quickly enough. The backlogs portend solid manufacturing growth going forward, and suggest to some economists that the United States could weather the European sovereign debt crisis relatively unscathed after all.

On the other hand, so far in this recovery, corporate success has not necessarily benefited American workers and consumers. Today, the economy produces more than it did when the recession began in 2007, but it manages to do so with six million fewer jobs.

Companies seem reluctant to use their burgeoning profits to invest in new workers.

“Businesses have been holding much higher levels of cash than they have in past,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/business/economy/us-economy-grows-at-modest-2-8-percent-rate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The concerns, stemming from an analysis that the I.M.F. has been quietly sharing with European officials and Greece’s creditors in recent weeks, come at a crucial time for Athens.

The new Greek government is in dual-track talks with private and public sector creditors, trying to make the case that its program for reducing long-term debt is working. The government seeks to persuade private creditors to provide relief by taking some losses on their bond holdings, and to persuade its public sector lenders to release a scheduled allotment of bailout money, possibly as much as 30 billion euros ($39 billion).

Without that next payout, the nation is almost certain to default when a bond repayment of 14.4 billion euros ($18.7 billion) comes due in March.

The repercussions of a default would be hard to predict. But it could create a contagion of financial fear that could spread to other weak euro zone economies and force Greece to become the first nation to leave the 17-member euro currency union, a departure whose social and political ramifications might also defy prediction.

A key to securing the next bailout payment could be Greece’s reaching a new debt-revamping agreement with its private sector bondholders. Charles H. Dallara of the Institute of International Finance, the group representing the private creditors, was to meet Thursday evening in Athens with the Greek prime minister, Lucas D. Papademos. There was no word about the status of those talks by late Thursday.

Negotiations between the two sides have foundered twice already over disagreement on how much loss private investors should be willing to absorb on bonds.

As Greece’s woes have escalated, so have its demands on the amount of loss the creditors should accept. While creditors have said they would be willing to accept a loss of 70 percent on their new bonds, Greece and its backers have been pushing for more by demanding that these securities carry an interest rate below 3.5 percent.

Greece is effectively bankrupt, staggering under a debt load that the I.M.F. now estimates as equal to about 160 percent of its gross product, with an economy so weak the government can no longer meet debt payments on its own. That is why it is to receive as much as 130 billion euros ($169 billion) in bailout money under an agreement struck last October with the so-called troika: the European Union, the European Central Bank and the I.M.F.

In return for regularly scheduled installments of that money, however, Greece is supposed to be meeting strict economic reform and budgetary targets.

Greece’s last bailout package was underpinned by an I.M.F. analysis that forecast a debt-to-G.D.P. ratio of 120 percent by the year 2020. Now the I.M.F. is forecasting a ratio that could rise to 135 percent by that year, largely because of a collapsing economy that shows no sign of reversing course.

The new projections cast new doubt on whether Greece can ever escape its downward financial spiral without defaulting on its debts.

Greece’s economy is estimated to have shrunk by more than 6 percent in 2011. Some specialists say they believe that the downturn for this year could be as much as 5 percent. And the general sense among economists from the troika of public institutions financially supporting Greece is that the economy has not yet found the floor.

“We have become much less optimistic on growth,” said one official from the group, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “And if growth falters, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio goes up. One cannot be in denial of this reality.”

Bankers familiar with the details of the new I.M.F. forecast say it has been held up as the main reason private sector bondholders should be forced to accept a larger loss on their Greek securities. In recent days, top European officials and the managing director of the I.M.F., Christine Lagarde, have talked about how European institutions might have to contribute more funds to keep Greece afloat.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/business/global/grim-economic-forecast-for-greece-as-it-negotiates-with-creditors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In Irbeen, less than 10 miles from the capital, the observers hopped out of their heavily guarded convoy to examine two bodies of victims of recent violence that were lying in the street, then raced off a few minutes later as a group of protesters approached. In their rush, they were not able to look at three other bodies, an observer later said.

Later, they swept into the suburb of Harasta, where soldiers lined the entry road, taking up positions that suggested momentary control. Some sat on the sidewalk, and others milled about outside a store.

The streets emptied as the observers arrived. Their security guards drew their guns and searched the rooftops before the Arab League delegation inspected a cache of captured weapons in a house, including assault rifles and ammunition, as well as the opposition flag.

Afterward, they drove back to their hotel, having witnessed little of what is occurring in the neighborhoods that are posing a sharp and growing challenge to the government’s rule.

Arab League observers and government officials said on Thursday that a lengthier tour in Harasta, Irbeen and nearby Douma would have been impossible because antigovernment protests had become routine and gunmen, including many allied with the protesters, were attacking the security services with growing strength.

“We can’t go into certain neighborhoods, like Douma,” said one member of the security team guarding the observers. “We will be killed.”

The truncated visit also revealed the limitations of the observer mission, as the conflict shifted from frequently deadly confrontations between protesters and the government to clashes between armed groups and security forces.

Many observers said they felt more vulnerable after a recent report by the head of their mission, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed al-Dabi, that was perceived, at least by the Syrian government, as casting equal blame on opposition gunmen for the violence in the country. As a result, the observers seemed especially reliant on the government’s security as they traveled on Thursday. They did not meet with any opposition activists, not even one with whom they had scheduled an appointment so that the activist could give the observers a list of people detained by security forces.

An observer, Jaafar Kibeida, one of the mission’s leaders and a former Sudanese diplomat, said the activist would not have been able to visit them, surrounded as they were by the government’s army. For weeks, Mr. Kibeida said, the observers had repeatedly sought out opposition figures as they made their visits.

“People are more furious,” Mr. Kibeida said “The mood has changed.”

A visit to Douma — where the observers seemed to be most needed — was out of the question. Over the last week, the army and the security services have tried to rout hundreds of opposition gunmen who were controlling parts of the town.

After cutting off electricity and cellphone service, the government began storming Douma on Thursday, activists said, arresting hundreds of people during house-to-house searches before pulling back to the outskirts at night.

An activist in Douma, who gave his name as Muhammad, said the town had been considered “liberated” but indefensible. Though about 500 fighters were protecting Douma, Muhammad said, they could not guard all its dozens of entrances.

”It was like hell in Douma,” he said.

Fierce fighting continued on Thursday in Hama, in central Syria, where activists said the bodies of at least 23 men executed by the security forces had been discovered. The report, by the opposition Local Coordination Committees, could not be confirmed. The group posted a video of the bodies of men it said had been found in the Bab Qibli area, including several victims whose hands or feet were bound and who appeared to have bullet wounds to the head.

The Syrian state news agency, Sana, said that security forces had clashed with an “armed terrorist group” in Hama, arrested several people and killed “many others.” The news agency said that the authorities had seized explosives, remote detonation devices and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.

The observers’ visit on Thursday started with the longest stop of the day, at the office of the governor of the Damascus countryside, Hussein Makhlouf, who conceded that armed gunmen “controlled some areas.” The gunmen gained that control, he said, after President Bashar al-Assad’s government had kept its promise to the Arab League and withdrew tanks from cities.

The meeting continued behind closed doors, where a police official told the observers that opposition fighters had spent two days trying to attack a police station in Irbeen, at one point, using a bulldozer, according to Mr. Kibeida, the observer.

“The situation was not good for us to go today,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/in-syria-arab-league-monitors-face-severe-limits.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.

But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.

No issue in Israel is more fraught than the debate over the wisdom and feasibility of a strike on Iran. Some argue that even a successful military strike would do no more than delay any Iranian nuclear weapons program, and perhaps increase Iran’s determination to acquire the capability. Security officials are increasingly kept from journalists or barred from discussing Iran. Much of the public talk is as much message delivery as actual policy.

With the region in turmoil and the Europeans having agreed to harsh sanctions against Iran, strategic assessments can quickly lose their currency. “They’re like cartons of milk — check the sell-by date,” one senior official said.

But conversations with eight current and recent top Israeli security officials suggested several things: since Israel has been demanding the new sanctions, including an oil embargo and seizure of Iran’s Central Bank assets, it will give the sanctions some months to work; the sanctions are viewed here as probably insufficient; a military attack remains a very real option; and postattack situations are considered less perilous than one in which Iran has nuclear weapons.

“Take every scenario of confrontation and attack by Iran and its proxies and then ask yourself, ‘How would it look if they had a nuclear weapon?’ ” a senior official said. “In nearly every scenario, the situation looks worse.”

The core analysis is based on an examination of Iran’s interests and abilities, along with recent threats and conflicts. Before the United States-led war against Iraq in 1991, Saddam Hussein vowed that if attacked he would “burn half of Israel.” He fired about 40 Scud missiles at Israel, which did limited damage. Similar fears of retaliation were voiced before the Iraq war in 2003 and in 2006, during Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In the latter, about 4,000 rockets were fired at Israel by Hezbollah, most of them causing limited harm.

“If you put all those retaliations together and add in the terrorism of recent years, we are probably facing some multiple of that,” a retired official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing an internal study. “I’m not saying Iran will not react. But it will be nothing like London during World War II.”

A paper soon to be published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, written by Amos Yadlin, former chief of military intelligence, and Yoel Guzansky, who headed the Iran desk at Israel’s National Security Council until 2009, argues that the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is largely a bluff.

The paper contends that, despite the risks of Iranian provocation, Iran would not be able to close the waterway for any length of time and that it would not be in Iran’s own interest to do so.

“If others are closing the taps on you, why close your own?” Mr. Guzansky said. Sealing the strait could also lead to all-out confrontation with the United States, something the authors say they believe Iran wants to avoid.

A separate paper just published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies says that the fear of missile warfare against Israel is exaggerated since the missiles would be able to inflict only limited physical damage.

Most Israeli analysts, like most officials and analysts abroad, reject these arguments. They say that Iran has been preparing for an attack for some years and will react robustly, as will its allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Moreover, they say, an attack will at best delay the Iranian program by a couple of years and lead Tehran to redouble its efforts to build such a weapon.

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/israelis-see-irans-threats-of-retaliation-as-bluff.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Addressing students in the southern city of Kerman, Mr. Ahmadinejad blamed the West for what he called its “excuses” for not restarting negotiations and heaped scorn on the United States and Europe over new sanctions, which target Iran’s oil industry. While they have hurt ordinary Iranians, he said, the sanctions have done nothing to weaken Iran’s resolve in the face of “bullying” over its nuclear program.

“You are the real enemy of the people and are putting pressure on them,” the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Mr. Ahmadinejad as saying. “I admonish you to pave the right track and do not make any excuses while the time is ripe for negotiations.”

The remarks come ahead of a visit by United Nations nuclear inspectors to Iran next week and March 2 parliamentary elections in Iran, where the economy has sputtered under the weight of sanctions and high inflation. With the country’s currency, the rial, having weakened to a record low against the dollar, Mr. Ahmadinejad on Wednesday reversed himself and allowed interest rates on bank deposits to rise in an attempt to ease inflationary pressure. The move was seen as a rare tacit admission of the effect the sanctions have exerted in Iran.

The uranium enrichment program in Iran has become the most urgent point of contention between Iran and the West, which has long suspected the Iranians are working to build a nuclear weapon despite their repeated denials. Iran has said it is enriching uranium for civilian energy and medical purposes. Israel, which considers Iran its most dangerous adversary, has hinted at the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Mr. Ahmadinejad said publicly on Thursday that the sanctions had created hardships for average people in Iran but that they would weather the difficulties. He added that Western insistence that sanctions are aimed at curtailing its nuclear program and not at the Iranian people was “a big lie.”

While Mr. Ahmadinejad said he was ready to resume nuclear talks, his comments did not appear to bring Iran closer to resuming negotiations with Europe and the United States. The previous round of negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program broke down over a year ago after Iran presented conditions considered unacceptable to the West.

European leaders are waiting for Iran to respond to an October letter seeking a resumption of talks without preconditions if Iran agreed to discuss its nuclear enrichment program. During the last talks, Iran refused to discuss that main issue, seeking instead the removal of sanctions and the recognition of a right to enrich uranium before negotiating could begin.

Some Western diplomats have viewed Iran’s latest public offers of negotiations as an effort to buy time, allowing the country to enrich more uranium as talks get under way. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements on Thursday did not appear to coincide with any official diplomatic response, European officials said. Earlier this month during a visit to Turkey, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said that his country was ready to resume negotiations. He said discussions were under way about the site and date, Iranian news media reported, and that the talks would “most probably be held in Istanbul.”

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/ahmadinejad-says-iran-is-ready-for-nuclear-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Although the pay-raise limits are modest, and would not start until 2015, the proposed cuts are certain to ignite a political fight in Congress, which since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has consistently raised military salaries beyond what the Pentagon has recommended.

Increasing health insurance fees for former service members and closing bases are also fraught with political risk, particularly in an election year when the Republican presidential candidates are charging that President Obama is decimating the military.

Next year’s Pentagon budget is to be $525 billion, down from $531 billion in this fiscal year. As the Pentagon is called on to find $259 billion in cuts over the next five years — and $487 billion over the decade — the department’s base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will nonetheless rise to $567 billion by 2017. For comparison, the current Defense Department base budget is $531 billion.

Although troops left Iraq and the Obama administration has announced plans to drawn down in Afghanistan, the new budget proposal will include a request for $88.4 billion to pay for overseas combat operations next year. The current combat contingency account is $115 billion.

The modest changes to military pay and benefits were an acknowledgement of the political risk of loading budget cuts on the backs of active-duty and retired personnel. Other savings are to come, as expected, from reducing the size of the military and canceling or stretching out weapons purchases.

Presenting an equal political challenge was an announcement by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that President Obama will ask for another round of base closings and realignments — never popular with a Congress that tries to preserve military spending, and jobs, in local districts.

Pentagon officials said savings from any future base closings were not factored into the five-year budget that Mr. Panetta was sending to the White House, but one official described the closings as “the right thing to do.”

There were already objections on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Panetta made his public presentation. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that until the United States shut down some American military bases in Europe, “I’m not going to be able to support” closing down bases in the United States.

Mr. Panetta has disclosed that two heavy Army brigades will come home from Europe over the next decade, leaving an airborne brigade and a Stryker cavalry brigade on the continent.

Most of the broad outlines, and even many of the finer details, of the budget cuts described Thursday by Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were previously disclosed.

But even as the administration vows to focus on the Asia-Pacific region while not decreasing American influence and deterrence in the Persian Gulf, a number of warship and jet-fighter programs useful in long-range missions are being trimmed.

Purchases of the Marines’ F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be stretched out over more years, in order to accrue immediate savings. Six of the 60 Air Force tactical jet-fighter squadrons will be eliminated.

To find savings, the Navy will retire seven cruisers, and slow work on amphibious ships and an attack submarine. Two littoral combat ships will be eliminated.

But all 11 aircraft carriers, the Navy’s crown jewels, will be preserved.

As previously disclosed, the Army will drop to 490,000 personnel, from 570,000, and the Marine Corps to 182,000, from a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak of 202,000.

The military’s cargo fleet also will take a hit, with the retirement of 27 giant C-5A’s and 65 of the smaller C-130’s.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/us/pentagon-proposes-limiting-raises-and-closing-bases-to-cut-budget.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Officials of the group, the International Republican Institute, said the Egyptian authorities had blocked its Cairo chief, Sam LaHood, from boarding a flight at the airport several days ago. His father is Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary and a former Republican congressman from Illinois. Officials of the group said Egyptian legal authorities told them four others, including two other Americans, had been barred from travel outside the country as well.

Officials of its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, also said on Thursday that six of its employees had been banned from traveling, including three American citizens. It was unclear how many other Americans working at similar groups may also be banned from travel.

The episode comes at a tense moment in relations between Washington and Cairo. A year after a council of generals took power after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, Washington has begun publicly urging them to turn over authority to civilians as soon as possible. And legislators have begun agitating to put new conditions about the transition to democracy on the more than $1.3 billion a year in military aid that the United States sends Egypt, although the Obama administration has shown no inclination to allow such a move.

Egypt’s ruling military council, in turn, has been suggesting for months that the United States may have been financing nonprofit human-rights groups and democracy-building groups with an agenda to destabilize Egypt, part of a growing drumbeat of anti-Americanism that has emanated from the military-led government. The generals have often sought to blame outbursts of violence in the streets on such foreign interference.

The military council has also kept in place Mubarak-era laws requiring any foreign financing of Egyptian nonprofit organizations to pass through the government and go only to licensed groups. The government rarely issues licenses to genuinely independent civil society groups, ensuring that almost all of them remain in a kind of legal twilight and vulnerable to prosecution — including the American-backed groups.

Since the ouster of Mr. Mubarak a year ago, the American government has begun providing some financing more directly to Egyptian nonprofit groups without going through the Egyptian government, acting in the expectation that Egypt’s political transition meant a more open policy toward civil society groups.

But several months ago, the military-led government began a formal legal investigation into foreign financing of Egyptian nonprofits, and it culminated recently in raids by armed police squads who confiscated files, computers and money from four such groups, including the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The institutes have close ties to the Congressional leadership and work to promote the practice of electoral democracy in countries around the world.

Lorne W. Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, expressed concern over the investigation and the Egyptian government’s refusal to abide by promises to end the case and return documents, computers and cash seized from his organizations and the others.

“Here we are all these weeks later and all these assurances later, and things are getting worse,” Mr. Craner said in Washington.

The raids ignited a new firestorm of criticism from Congress and the United States State Department. American officials, including Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and Ambassador Anne Patterson, both said they had received direct assurance from members of the ruling military council that it would end the raids and return the confiscated property. But officials of the government have subsequently defended the raids as a legitimate part of the investigation and said that no property would be returned until the inquiry was closed.

President Obama has also brought the matter up in a telephone conversation with Egypt’s acting head of state, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the White House said in a recent statement.

At a previously scheduled press conference in Cairo, Michael H. Posner, an assistant secretary of state responsible for human rights issues, warned repeatedly on Wednesday that before Egypt can get its annual aid from Washington, the administration must certify to Congress that the country is making progress toward democracy.

“It is the prerogative of Congress to say that our future military aid is going to be conditioned on a democratic transition,” he said, and the issue of freedom of association and the raids on nongovernmental organizations “is very much a part of that package. »

He added, “Obviously any action that creates tension with our government makes the whole package more difficult.”

He declined to comment specifically on the American citizens who have been prevented from travelling, and referred questions about them to the organizations they are affiliated with.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/egypt-bars-son-of-ray-lahood-from-leaving.html?partner=rss&emc=rss