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From the New York Times

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N.Y.U. Report Casts Doubt on Taliban's Ties With Al Qaeda

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan Taliban have been wrongly perceived as close ideological allies of Al Qaeda, and they could be persuaded to renounce the global terrorist group, according to a report to be published Monday by New York University.

The report goes on to say that there was substantial friction between the groups' leaders before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that hostility has only intensified.

The authors, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, have worked in Afghanistan for years and edited the autobiography of a Taliban diplomat, many of whose ideas are reflected in the report. The authors are among a small group of experts who say the only way to end the war in Afghanistan is to begin peace overtures to the Taliban.

The prevailing view in Washington, however, is “that the Taliban and Al Qaeda share the same ideology,” said Tom Gregg, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan and a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at N.Y.U., which is publishing the report. “It is not an ideology they share; it is more a pragmatic political alliance. And therefore a political approach to the Taliban ultimately could deliver a more practical separation between the two groups.”

Some American officials have argued that the military surge in Afghanistan will weaken the Taliban and increase the incentive to negotiate. But the report cautions that the campaign may make it harder to reach a settlement.

The report, “Separating the Taliban from Al Qaeda: The Core of Success in Afghanistan,” says attacks on Taliban field commanders and provincial leaders will leave the movement open to younger, more radical fighters and will give Al Qaeda greater influence. The authors suggest that the United States should engage older Taliban leaders before they lose control of the movement.

The authors do not oppose NATO's war, but suggest that negotiations should accompany the fighting. A political settlement is necessary to address the underlying reasons for the insurgency, they write. Otherwise, they warn, the conflict will escalate.

The report draws on the authors' interviews with unnamed Taliban officials in Kabul, Kandahar and Khost, and on published statements by the Taliban leadership. The authors indicate that Taliban officials fear retribution if they make on-the-record statements opposing Al Qaeda.

Nevertheless, Taliban leaders have issued statements in the last two years that indicate they are distancing their movement from Al Qaeda. The report says the Taliban will not renounce Al Qaeda as a condition to negotiations, but will offer to do so in return for guarantees of security.

The report reflects many of the arguments put forward by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, whose autobiography, published in English as “My Life With the Taliban,” the authors edited. Mullah Zaeef lives under a loose house arrest in Kabul after being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and has been an intermediary between the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the Taliban.

The report argues that Taliban leaders did not know of the Sept. 11 attacks in advance and that they appeared to have been manipulated by Osama bin Laden, who then lived in Afghanistan.

In November 2002, the report says, senior Taliban figures gathered in Pakistan and agreed to join a process of political engagement and reconciliation with the new government of Afghanistan. Yet the decision came to nothing, since neither the Afghan government nor the American government saw any reason to engage with the Taliban, the report says.

A member of the Haqqani family, which leads what American officials regard as the most dangerous Taliban group, came to Kabul in 2002 to discuss reconciliation, but he was detained and badly treated, the report states.

Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who prepared a strategic policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Obama in 2009, places the Afghan Taliban alongside Al Qaeda in the “syndicate of terrorists” threatening the United States. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, has maintained an “alliance, even friendship” with Mr. bin Laden that “seems to have remained intact to this day,” Mr. Riedel writes in his book “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad."

Yet others say that there is a clear ideological divide between the two groups and that the Taliban are not engaged in international terrorism.

“Al Qaeda is an organization that has a clearly articulated vision of global jihad, and that is not the case with the Haqqanis and the Taliban,” Mr. Gregg said. “Their focus is on Afghanistan, the country they are from.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/world/asia/07afghan.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Killing of Missionary Rattles Texas Border

PHARR, Tex. — Mexico has always had a reputation here as a place where things can go wrong in a hurry. But the fatal shooting of a Texas missionary across the border late last month has reinforced the widely held belief in this region that the country has become a lawless war zone.

The missionary, Nancy Davis, who had worked in Mexico for decades, was shot in the back of the head by gunmen in a pickup truck who had pursued her and her husband for miles in Tamaulipas State.

Her husband, Samuel Davis, piloted his bullet-ridden truck across the two-mile international bridge here, driving pell-mell against traffic on the wrong side of the bridge to evade the pursuers and reach an American hospital. He arrived on the United States side too late to save Ms. Davis, 59.

State Department officials say that 79 American citizens were murdered in Mexico in 2009, and that at least 60 were killed last year from January to November, though an official annual figure has yet to be compiled. The numbers have been rising since 2007, when 38 American citizens were murdered in Mexico, State Department records show.

In late September, an American man was shot to death while he and his wife were riding water scooters on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake. A month later, a student at the University of Texas, Brownsville, was taken off a passenger bus and killed by gunmen. Then in November, four men from San Marcos, Tex., along with a 14-year-old visitor from Chicago, disappeared in Nuevo Laredo and are presumed to have been abducted, the F.B.I. said.

The heaviest toll is in El Paso, where many residents cross the border regularly to conduct business or visit family.

In early November, for instance, four American citizens were killed in separate crimes over one weekend, including a 15-year-old boy. All of the victims were ambushed and shot to death while visiting Ciudad Juárez, which has become one of the most murderous cities in the world because of a battle between the Sinaloa cartel and the remnants of the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes gang.

“We know that many of our winter Texans enjoy traveling to Mexico, but they should understand that we cannot guarantee their safety after they cross the border,” Steven C. McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in a warning issued after Ms. Davis's death.

Relatives described Ms. Davis as an ebullient and devout woman who loved working with people in rural Mexico. She was a registered nurse and had worked as a midwife in Mexico, in addition to teaching Bible classes. She also composed religious songs on the piano and sewed her own prairie-style dresses.

For decades, she and her husband had run a charity — the nondenominational Gospel Proclaimers Missionary Association in Weslaco, Tex. — that raised money to build churches, hold revivals and distribute Bibles in poor Mexican villages, mostly in the states bordering Texas.

About a year ago, Ms. Davis and her husband moved their base of operations from a small Mexican town in Nuevo León State to their house in Monte Alto, Tex., where they had raised their two grown sons. They had also curtailed their trips to Mexico in recent months after having some close scrapes involving highway robbers, said Melody Reynolds, a niece of Mr. Davis's.

But last week the couple had received a message from the pastor of one of the churches they had established during their 30 years of missionary work, Ms. Reynolds said.

The pastor said the church was in financial trouble and needed cash. The couple generally drove an older model car while in Mexico to avoid attracting carjackers, but that vehicle was in the shop, so they took their 2008 Chevrolet pickup truck. The police in Pharr say they think that choice made them a target.

The trip took three days, and the couple were on their way home when a group of men brandishing guns began tailing them, Ms. Reynolds said.

They were just outside San Fernando, 87 miles south of the border. It is a region that has been plagued over the last year by battles between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas.

Mr. Davis decided to run for it, but the truck behind him caught up. Several miles later, two other trucks tried to block the road, but Mr. Davis managed to get past them, Ms. Reynolds said.

The Pharr police chief, Ruben Villescos, said the motive for the attack remained a mystery. He said the men in the three trucks followed Mr. Davis for miles and boxed in his pickup to force him off the road. Several shots were fired, and Ms. Davis was hit in the back of the head.

One slug went through the passenger side window and through the windshield near Mr. Davis, Ms. Reynolds said.

“He says to this day he doesn't know why he's alive,” she said. “He got shot at. Apparently it wasn't his time to go.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/us/07border.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Pharmacies Besieged by Addicted Thieves

BINGHAM, Me. — The orange signs posted throughout Chet Hibbard's pharmacy here relay a blunt warning: We Do Not Stock OxyContin.

Mr. Hibbard stopped dispensing the highly addictive painkiller last July, after two robbers in ski goggles demanded it at knifepoint one afternoon as shocked customers looked on. It was one in a rash of armed robberies at Maine drugstores last year, a sharp increase that has rattled pharmacists and put the police on high alert.

“I want people to know before they even get in the door that we don't have it,” Mr. Hibbard said of OxyContin, which the authorities say is the most common target of pharmacy robberies here. “Outside hiring an armed guard to be in here 24/7, I don't know what else to do.”

Maine's problem is especially stark, but it is hardly the only state dealing with pharmacy robberies, one of the more jarring effects of the prescription drug abuse epidemic that has left drugstores borrowing heist-prevention tactics from the more traditional targets, banks. In at least one case, a tiny tracking device affixed to a bottle let the police easily track a thief after a robbery.

More than 1,800 pharmacy robberies have taken place nationally over the last three years, typically conducted by young men seeking opioid painkillers and other drugs to sell or feed their own addictions. The most common targets are oxycodone (the main ingredient in OxyContin), hydrocodone (the main ingredient in Vicodin) and Xanax.

The robbers are brazen and desperate. In Rockland, Me., one wielded a machete as he leapt over a pharmacy counter to snatch the painkiller oxycodone, gulping some before he fled. In Satellite Beach, Fla., a robber threatened a pharmacist with a cordless drill last week, and in North Highlands, Calif., a holdup last summer led to a shootout that left a pharmacy worker dead.

The crime wave has spurred pharmacists to tighten security measures and add ones they may never have imagined. Many have upgraded their surveillance cameras; some have installed bulletproof glass and counters high enough to keep would-be robbers from jumping them, giving these pharmacies the aesthetic of an urban liquor store. In Tulsa, Okla., where there was a steep increase in drugstore robberies last year, at least one pharmacist now requires customers to be buzzed in the door.

Meanwhile, the police are quietly experimenting with new tools. In Lewiston, Me., last fall, a Rite Aid pharmacist handed a robber who threatened to shoot her five bottles of OxyContin, including one that contained a tracking device.

According to court records, the device led the police to the suspect's home on a rural road shortly after he fled the store. They gathered evidence there, arrested the suspect a few days later and indicted him last month.

The Drug Enforcement Administration does not routinely investigate reports of pharmacy robberies, and therefore “it cannot be determined what factors are contributing to these types of thefts,” a spokeswoman said.

But some local law enforcement officials have been overwhelmed enough by the incidents to seek help. Thomas Delahanty II, the United States attorney in Maine, announced recently that the federal authorities would help investigate the heists from now on and prosecute some of the cases.

Federal charges could bring more prison time, Mr. Delahanty said, describing the surge in such robberies as “staggering numbers that can't be ignored.” There were 21 in Maine last year, according to the D.E.A., up from two in 2008 and seven in 2009.

In Biddeford, Me., a city of 21,000 that has had seven pharmacy robberies since December 2009, Roger Beaupre, the police chief, said he was urging the stores to require customers to remove hoods and sunglasses before entering and to consider caging in their pharmacy counters.

Police officers there got free training in how to investigate pharmacy heists last month from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. The company also trains pharmacists on how to prevent robberies and what to do should they fall victim to one, said Rick Zenuch, its director of law enforcement liaison and education.

“The very first tip we give them is comply, comply, comply,” Mr. Zenuch said. “Do exactly what the suspect wants, to end the encounter as soon as possible.”

In Washington State, where more than 100 pharmacy robberies have taken place over the last three years, law enforcement officials say the penalty for second-degree robbery, when the pharmacist may be threatened but no weapon is shown, is too weak. Dan Satterberg, the King County prosecutor, said he had submitted a bill to the Legislature to increase the minimum jail time to three years from three months.

“Word travels fast on the street about what an easy target the pharmacies are and how much profit can be made and what small punishment is attached,” Mr. Satterberg said.

OxyContin goes for $1 a milligram on the street, Mr. Satterberg and other law enforcement officials said, and the most popular pill is 80 milligrams.

Many pharmacies in Washington have deterred would-be robbers by putting time-release locks on the safes where they store narcotics and staggering their inventory, Mr. Satterberg said. Perhaps as a result, the number of armed robberies at pharmacies there dropped to 23 in 2010 from 49 in 2008, according to the D.E.A.

Still, Mr. Satterberg said, the threat of robbery has made it difficult for retail chains in the state to recruit enough pharmacists in recent years.

“They feel very vulnerable when so many people are so desperate to get what they keep behind those counters,” he said.

In sheer numbers, Florida, Indiana, California, Ohio and Washington have had the most armed robberies of pharmacies since January 2008, according to the D.E.A. But Maine, Oklahoma and Oregon had the sharpest increases last year.

All but a handful of the Maine robberies took place at Rite Aid and CVS stores, some of which were hit multiple times.

In Tulsa, Okla., where pharmacy robberies last year far outpaced bank robberies, the police said the crimes were now more often committed by gangs who want to sell the drugs than addicts in search of a fix. Robbers there often demand Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, along with opioids, said Sgt. Dave Walker, who runs the robbery unit of the Tulsa Police Department.

In Bingham, a remote town of about 1,000, the men who robbed Mr. Hibbard's pharmacy, E.W. Moore & Son, were caught and sent to prison, as was another robber who held up the store at gunpoint in 2006. But despite that comforting fact and the store's nine surveillance cameras and high-tech alarm system, Mr. Hibbard and his employees still jump when the place is quiet and they hear footsteps coming up the ramp, they said.

“I stood right between him and his knife,” said Lori Pratt, a pharmacy technician, referring to one of the robbers. “I was all ready to go on the Internet after it happened and get a Taser gun.”

Unlike Mr. Hibbard, Rite Aid has chosen to keep stocking the drugs that are popular with robbers, said Eric Harkreader, a spokesman. But the company now limits the amount of certain drugs in stores at any given time.

“If they are going for lots of quantity at once, we don't want to help them out,” he said. “But we certainly want to have the prescription available for all its legitimate purposes.”

In Biddeford, a Rite Aid that was robbed twice last year was struck again last week. The suspect, who demanded OxyContin and fled into the night, remains at large.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/us/07pharmacies.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Fraternity Shooting Kills 1 and Hurts 11

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Two men have been arrested and charged in a shooting at a fraternity house near Youngstown State University that killed one student and injured 11 people, the police said on Sunday.

The suspects, both in their early 20s, were charged with aggravated murder, shooting into a house and 11 counts of felonious assault, said Chief Jimmy Hughes of the Youngstown Police Department.

The men were involved in a dispute during a party at the house early Sunday, Chief Hughes said. They left the event, returned later and began firing outside the house, which was bustling with 50 or more people, he said.

The Mahoning County coroner's office identified the dead student as Jamail E. Johnson, 25. He was shot once in the head and multiple times in his hips and legs, said Dr. Joseph Ohr, a forensic pathologist with the coroner's office.

The 11 people injured ranged in age from 17 to 31. Most suffered slight injuries, but two were shot in the abdomen. The most seriously hurt was a 17-year-old who had a critical wound near one ear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/us/07frat.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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