Israel has announced it will construct a fence along its border with Egypt to curb the flow of people, goods and arms. The fence will not stretch the entirety of the border, which is mostly uninhabited desert, but will concentrate on the densly populated areas near the Gaza strip.

PM Netanyahu said, “We cannot let tens of thousands of illegal workers infiltrate and inundate our country.”


Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said "This issue does not concern us at all. Israel is building something on its own soil and there is no link between that security fence and our construction along the border with Gaza."


Writing in Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli daily, Eitan Haber argued on Monday that Israel would soon be “an entire state living behind fences, surrounded on all sides by an ocean of enemies“.
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The recent attack upon the CIA forward operating base last week has illuminated a murky pillar of the US counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

James Kitfield of the National Journal considers the moral and legal foundations of the Obama administration's significant increase of drone strikes within Pakistan in the last year.


Dawn.com, an english language Pakistani publication, considers the unintented consequences of drone strikes on the Pakistani tribal populations. According to this article, inhabitants of local Waziristan " said families lived in fear over the prospect of a Hellfire missile annihilating their home without warning."


Today Gen. David Patreus of US Central Command was interviewed by CNN's Christiane Amanpour. Here is a pertinant exerpt from the full transcript:



AMANPOUR:
Well, I ask you this because a new video has emerged showing the Jordanian Al Qaida double agent, with Baitullah Mehsud's brother, essentially saying why he blew up himself in that CIA base in Afghanistan. And it seemed to have quite a lot to do with the drone attacks. Does that concern you?



PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, Baitullah Mehsud and his organization carried out horrific attacks inside Pakistan, and that is what I think should concern the Pakistanis, as certainly it concerns us.

AMANPOUR: But how much of a concern for you is the backlash against those drone attacks?


PETRAEUS: Well, let me talk about it in a general context, if I could. And that is in the conduct of any campaign, particularly a counterinsurgency campaign, there has to be enormous effort in trying to minimize the loss of innocent civilian life, to minimize collateral damage. And that does, indeed, characterize our campaigns.


General McChrystal -- among the number of initiatives that he has undertaken has been to issue counterinsurgency guidance that gets right at that issue and then has been quite -- really very, very determined in implementing that, as well. There will be loss of innocent life in war, but we have got to make sure that we minimize it and that we try to avoid it just about at all costs.


The Long War Journal is a blog that accounts for all US drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The site provides in depth analysis of drone strike frequency, lethality, civilian casualities, location plus in depth analytic essays.


Finally, a MUST READ NYT op-ed by Boris Gromov, governor of the Moscow region and commander of the 40th Soviet Army in Afghanistan during the 1980's and Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO.

They write, "In fact, we were the first to defend Western civilization against the attacks of Muslim fanatics. No one thanked us." Sheer brilliance!!