KABUL – He could bring a fresh face to the pinnacle of Afghan politics for the first time in eight years, replacing a discredited president grappling with corruption, a flourishing narcotics trade and a Taliban insurgency growing more powerful by the day.
The 49-year-old Abdullah Abdullah, a trained ophthalmologist, is a sophisticated intellectual and a skilled diplomat. But he's "less of a natural politician" than incumbent Hamid Karzai, said James Dobbins, who served as President George W. Bush's first envoy to Afghanistan.
Karzai was chosen to lead Afghanistan's first post-Taliban government in 2001 "because he was a conciliator, somebody who could get along with a wide range of factions and not antagonize them," Dobbins said.
Abdullah, on the other hand, is less colorful and lacks the charisma and "personal touch" of his opponent.
Even if Abdullah wins the presidency in a runoff, his administration would risk ending up much like his predecessor's — hobbled by warlords, ethnic alliances and corruption.
"Everybody wants responsible government, but unfortunately the next administration is likely to again be weak and dysfunctional, a coalition of warlords and bad guys, no matter who is in charge," said Haroun Mir of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies, a Kabul-based think-tank. "It's inevitable."
Afghanistan's electoral commission is expected to announce as early as Saturday whether Karzai will face Abdullah in a runoff. Preliminary results of the August vote showed Karzai won with more than 54 percent. But election officials may order a second-round vote if investigators probing fraud allegations void enough of his votes to drop him below 50 percent.
Karzai's ambassador to the U.S., Said Tayeb Jawad, said Thursday a runoff was very likely.
Karzai's relations with the U.S. have become increasingly strained in recent months, a deterioration attributed in part to American frustration over government corruption and U.S. airstrikes that have inflicted civilian casualties — eating away at Karzai's popularity at home.
As president, Abdullah would likely mend ties with Washington. At the same time, relations with neighboring Pakistan, whose support is essential to combating Taliban militants on both sides of the border, may only get worse, as they did when Abdullah served as Karzai's foreign minister, said Wadeer Safi, a political science professor at Kabul University.
Pakistan supported Taliban fighters in the 1990s when they were battling the ethnic Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, of which Abdullah was a prominent member. That baggage would make Pakistan "deeply suspicious of any Abdullah presidency," Safi said.
"How Abdullah would handle it, that's the big question," he said.
Moreover, whoever wins the presidency will assume leadership of a nation in tatters. Afghanistan has lacked effective government ever since the Soviet invasion of December 1979 plunged the mountainous country into decades of war and chaos.
Mir described Abdullah as a "results-oriented" leader and said he would face high expectations to show concrete progress within six months — much more so than Karzai, whose interest is directed toward consensus-building rather than achieving results.
"Everybody has clear ideas about what needs to be done," said Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. "The question is what they're going to do when they get in there and have to make the trade-offs."
Karzai, son of a Pashtun tribal chief, moved former warlords into civilian posts to keep a balance among regions and ethnic groups, and Abdullah would likely have to do the same, Dobbins said.
Abdullah's father was also Pashtun — an ethnic group that comprises 42 percent of the population and accounts for the overwhelming majority of Taliban ranks. His mother was Tajik, an ethnic group in the north that makes up 27 percent. Other groups include Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmens.
Despite a Pashtun heritage, Abdullah is widely perceived as a northern Tajik because of his intimate association with the Northern Alliance. Abdullah's close ties to the Alliance would make it more difficult for him to reach out to the Taliban than Karzai, who was born in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar province.

"One of the most important challenges for an Abdullah presidency would be satisfying Pashto aspirations and calming fears that this represented a Tajik ascendancy," Dobbins said.

Neumann believes Abdullah would have to balance the demands of his former Northern Alliance colleagues for a major share of jobs and power against those of the Pashtuns and other groups "to achieve some kind of tribal balance."

Karzai has built a support base across the nation's myriad ethnic groups not by reaching out to individual voters, but by shrewdly cementing alliances with regional power-brokers and warlords, Safi said. In a country with over 70 percent illiteracy, many voters cast ballots for whomever is favored by their tribal leaders.

Safi doubts Afghanistan is ready for democratic elections.

"You have to have education and development, you have to have people who can think for themselves, and then you can have a real election," Safi said. "We do not have this now. There is no security, there is no free and fair. People can only hope somebody will give them a good life."

MADRID – Spain's Parliament approved a law Thursday narrowing the scope of a cross-border justice doctrine which had allowed judges to indict people like Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden.
The existing legislation allowed judges like Baltasar Garzon to prosecute egregious crimes committed in other countries even if there was no link to Spain. The practice had irked some countries targeted in probes by Spanish magistrates, particularly Israel and China, and led to accusations that Spain was behaving like a global policeman.
Under the reformed version of the law, such cases can now be undertaken only if there were Spanish victims of the crime or the alleged perpetrators are in Spain.
The bill was passed by the lower chamber, called the Congress of Deputies, in June and then went to the Senate, which made minor amendments. The lower chamber gave the bill definitive approval on Thursday. Of 327 lawmakers present in the 350-member chamber, the vote was 319 in favor, five against and three abstentions.
Spain's ruling Socialists and opposition conservatives laid the groundwork for the new law in May — a rare show of unity among two parties that are at each other's throats on just about everything else.
But the new law is not retroactive, meaning the dozen or so cases currently being investigated will proceed. These include probes into alleged Chinese abuses in Tibet, an Israeli air force bombing in Gaza that killed 14 civilians, and alleged torture at the U.S. prison for terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Garzon had Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, arrested in London in 1998 and tried to have him extradited to Madrid to face charges over torture and other abuses during his regime. Britain ultimately declined to hand him over, citing Pinochet's poor health.
Garzon indicted bin Laden in 2003 over the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

FRESNO, Calif. – Farmers in the most prolific agricultural region in the country should be planting winter romaine lettuce and calculating spring cantaloupe acreage at this time of year.
Instead the romaine packing company left this year for the searing Sonoran Desert of Arizona, where there is more reliable water. And cantaloupe? Who knows whether there will be water to irrigate it.
"How bad does it have to get for people to take action?" farmer Jeremy Freitas asked a panel of state agricultural officials Wednesday, choking back tears.
They had come to California's agricultural heartland for an update on the state's water crisis. They left hearing that — even after a year of discussing possible quick fixes to the delivery problems that have fallowed tens of thousands of acres, forced bankruptcies and contributed to record unemployment — farmers are no more certain about their water supplies.
As California prepares for its fourth year of drought, farmers are nervous in California's San Joaquin Valley. The valley's eight counties, if they were their own state, would be the top producing one in the nation. Nearly all the U.S. cantaloupes, garlic, almonds and processing tomatoes come from here. And so do nearly 400 other commodities — more than anywhere else.
The lack of water in the state's reservoirs, coupled with the environmental collapse of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where water from the state's wet north is pumped south to irrigate fields, has restricted the amount of water some of the state's most prolific farmers receive to as little as 10 percent of normal.
"It's October going to March quickly and we can't seem to get an agency to move," said farmer Dan Errotabere, who lost his romaine contract when the local packinghouse moved to Yuma. "We need action. We need agreements now. We need certainty in the Central Valley now."
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants a special legislative session this fall to look at issues surrounding California's aging water infrastructure, built 50 years ago for a population one-third the size. The most ambitious, a peripheral canal to move water from the north around the Delta, is at least 15 years away.
Meanwhile, farmers have been begging for several quick fixes so they count on water in 2010, including temporary suspension of the Endangered Species Act so water can be pumped to them even if it kills threatened smelt. Congress once granted a temporary reprieve to New Mexico but so far has declined to do for California.
Also unresolved after a year of discussions: environmental issues related to transferring water from wet regions to dry ones; a clear sense of how much agriculture contributes to the environmental degradation killing smelt and salmon in the Delta compared to urban impacts; and a "two-gates" project that would block fish from the large pumps that transfer water from the Delta into delivery canals but would allow farmers water in the spring.
This year nearly 500,000 acres were left fallowed across the valley, half of that in the Westlands Water District, where farmers historically have created the state's highest yields of almonds, garlic and tomatoes with the most junior water rights. Several thousand acres of almonds and pomegranates died, though canals carrying water to Southern California passes by them.
Across the region farmworkers were idle, hardware stores suffered lost sales and tractor dealers didn't move John Deeres. Food banks turned away hungry families.
University researchers estimate $700 million in farm losses in 2009 alone, not counting taxes or the loss of value on farmland where water is no longer reliable.
"You think we had a tough year this year?" said Marvin Meyers, an almond grower on Fresno County's dry west side. "Wait 'til next year."
Farmers and the advisory board of the California Department of Agriculture said the state's $36 billion agriculture industry cannot afford another season of uncertainty. More packing houses they depend on to send their fruits, nuts and vegetables around the world will move to more reliable areas — across the border into Mexico they fear — if they cannot count on a reliable supply.
Another year of pumping salt-laden water from underground aquifers could kill their soil, they say. Board members warned that the Westlands Water District on the valley's west side is the first to be hit by the crisis, but the water problems are spreading to the state's other agricultural regions.
Some avocado growers in San Diego County are cutting trees back to stumps because the limited available water is too expensive.
"Where will the next shoe drop?" said board member Adan Ortega Jr.

PARIS (AFP) –
France's Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand appeared to have saved his job on Friday after an emotional television appearance in which he admitted paying male prostitutes but denied sex with Asian boys.

Mitterrand faced calls for his resignation this week over his autobiographical novel "The Bad Life" in which the main character describes paying for "boys" in brothels in Thailand and Indonesia.

He appeared on French television late Thursday to deny the book was a defence of paedophilia and to insist that the males he had sex with in Asia were consenting adults.

Mitterrand said President Nicolas Sarkozy had given him full support, and the two men on Friday made a public appearance together -- to launch a museum exhibition on Istanbul -- suggesting that his job was safe for now.

Justice Minister French Michele Alliot-Marie said she found her colleague's television appearance "moving" and called him "a very good minister."

But Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front said keeping him in office showed there was "one morality for the privileged" and another for ordinary people.

Political analyst Dominique Reynie said "you don't need to be a genius to understand that the response of Marine Le Pen is in harmony with what a very large majority of the French are thinking."

Le Pen on Monday ignited the controversy over Mitterrand's 2005 book when she called for his resignation over the book.

That came after the party attacked Mitterrand for his staunch defence of filmmaker Roman Polanski, who is being held in Switzerland on a US warrant for a 1978 conviction for sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Sarkozy hired Mitterrand in June, delighted to bring the nephew of late Socialist president Francois Mitterrand into his right-wing government. The minister is also a friend of Sarkozy's supermodel wife, Carla Bruni.

Mitterrand was forced to make Thursday's television appearance after left and right-wing politicians demanded he respond to allegations that "The Bad Life" endorsed sex tourism.

"I absolutely condemn sexual tourism," the 62-year-old told TF1 television. "I condemn paedophilia, in which I have never in any way participated, and all the people who accuse me of that type of thing should be ashamed."

Mitterrand has previously explained that in his book, marketed as a memoir but which he now says its not "entirely autobiographical," he had used the term "boys" to describe all males.

Asked if he regretted paying for sex with "boys" in Thailand, and if he had made a mistake by so doing, he replied that he had committed "a mistake, without doubt, a crime, no.

"Because I was each time with people who were my age and who were consenting," he said. "You recognise somebody who is 40 years old. A 40-year-old boxer really does not look like a minor."

The minister, who previously had a successful career as a writer, documentary-maker and television presenter, also warned that "one must not confuse homosexuality with paedophilia."

Arnaud Montebourg, a prominent opposition Socialist lawmaker, said Friday that Mitterrand's "tardy condemnation of sexual tourism is in contradiction with his writings which contain no condemnation of this sort.

"If he was not minister, would he have had the right to so much consideration and such understanding?" he asked.

Mitterrand's defence of "The Bad Life" back in 2005 was broadly accepted and the book was praised for its shocking honesty and literary quality.

But now, as a minister in a government that campaigns against sex tourism, his position is more difficult.

The passages in the book that have sparked controversy deal with the hero's description of the mixture of feverish excitement and guilt he feels as he visits brothels and boy bars in Thailand and Indonesia.

"All the rituals of this market of youths, this slave market, excite me enormously," the book says. "Money and sex, I am at the heart of my system."

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