KABUL, Afghanistan — The Republican presidential race echoes even in Kabul.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton took a rare shot at one of the Republican party’s ascendant candidates on Thursday, poking fun at Herman Cain over his suggestion that he didn’t need to bother learning the names of leaders of obscure foreign countries.

Clinton was chatting casually with Afghan President Hamid Karzai as the two posed for news photographers when the topic turned to Cain and his unusually frank comments in an interview the week before. Cain’s mocking reference to Afghanistan’s neighbor Uzbekistan — and his assertion that he didn’t need to know details about “insignificant” countries — made an impression on the Afghan leader, Clinton said.

“The president was saying he saw a news clip about how Mr. Cain had said ‘I don’t even know the names of all these presidents of all these countries,’ you know, like, whatever,” Clinton said, with an exaggerated wave of her hands.

“All the ‘Stans, whatever,” Karzai chimed in, as both laughed.

With troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of medical care for veterans is expected to skyrocket in coming years. A study released Wednesday suggests that a huge chunk of those costs could be devoted to treating the invisible wounds of war.

The study focuses largely on the costs of caring for veterans from previous conflicts — mostly the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War — and it examines data from only one year, 2007. But what it found was telling: the Department of Veterans Affairs spent nearly three times as much on services for vets with mental illness or substance abuse than on those without such conditions.

Vets with mental health issues accounted for about one in seven using the VA’s health services but nearly one-third of the system’s costs.

Those findings, the study’s authors say, have important policy implications.

A recent hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Harry Hamburg — Associated Press) At a time of mounting budget pressures on the federal government, the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday issued a warning: Don’t slice too deeply into how much the nation spends on spying.

Cuts that go too far “will compromise missions such as strategic warning, counterterrorism activities, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity,” the committee said in a letter sent to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which has been getting more than its fair share of advice lately.

Steep reductions could also backfire, the intelligence panel said, leading “to higher costs in recovery or response due to the failure to prevent a terrorist attack or avoid unnecessary conflict.”

The committee didn’t make the connection explicit, but was clearly alluding to the massive federal spending over the past decade — much of it triggered by the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks and the mistaken belief that Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons.

Cybersecurity researchers have found a piece of malware on computer systems in Europe that bears startling similarities to Stuxnet, the mysterious virus that was used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and it appears to have been designed to secretly gather intelligence.

In a new paper, U.S.-based researchers at Symantec say that the code – dubbed Duqu — was written by whoever unleashed Stuxnet, or perhaps by someone who had access to the computer language underlying it. The new code was written to capture information that can help “mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.”

“Duqu is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack,” the paper said.

Although the codes share similar traits, they differ in significant ways. Stuxnet’s payload was designed specifically to disrupt the machines that controlled the speed of centrifuges in a uranium enrichment plant in Iran. Duqu is designed to capture data such as computer keystrokes (including, say, passwords) and system information.

The Marines can have their bracelets, after all.

Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, has decided to carve out an exemption in the service’s uniform regulations to allow “KIA bracelets” following an uproar over news reports that the jewelry, honoring the fallen, had been banned.
(Carol Guzy — The Washington Post)

The policy change takes effect immediately, according to a statement released Tuesday by the Marines. A formal directive was expected to be disseminated throughout the Corps later this week.

“We are acknowledging the close personal nature of our ten years at war and the strong bonds of fidelity that Marines have for one another, especially for those fellow Marines who we have lost,” Amos said in the statement.

Marine Corps Uniform Regulations specifically prohibit the wearing of most jewelry. Enforcement of that policy has been spotty when it comes to the memorial bracelets, but the Marine Corps Times, which is not affiliated with the service, found rule-conscious officers less willing to look the other way.

That, in turn, produced this story — and a good deal of controversy.

The family of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born al-Qaeda operative killed in a CIA drone strike, has released the Colorado birth certificate of his son in response to reports that the teenager was actually a twenty-something militant when he was killed last week.

The document, released to The Washington Post, shows that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was born on Aug. 26, 1995, in Denver to his father, who was born in New Mexico, and Gihan Mohsen Baker, an Egyptian.
Click here to see larger image. (Courtesy Awlaki family)

The spelling of the family name on the birth certificate is Aulaqi, but most American news organizations use the spelling Awlaki.

Abdulrahman Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in the past three weeks in U.S. airstrikes. His family has said that he was a noncombatant and was with a group of other teenagers when the group was targeted.

Awlaki’s father, Anwar, was killed late last month in a CIA drone attack. Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside him.

The elder Awlaki was described by President Obama as the chief of “external operations” for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. The family rejected that characterization and said he was not a “militant.”

A fourth American was killed in 2002 in Yemen in a U.S. attack. That CIA drone strike targeted Abu Ali al-Harithi, a Yemeni accused of planning the 2000 al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole. Kamal Derwish, an American, was in Harithi’s vehicle but he was not the target of the attack.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta — Associated Press)

Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, a regular on the foreign policy speaking circuit in this country, is seeking access to top U.S. lawmakers as he plans his return home after several years of self-imposed exile. And so he’s hired a local lobbying firm, to the tune of $25,000 a month, to help facilitate the effort.

So far, the investment appears to have paid off. Early this month, Musharraf met with six U.S. senators — including Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and ranking committee Republican John McCain (R-Ariz.), as well as Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the senior minority member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Musharraf also sat down with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who just four years ago denounced him as delusional and undemocratic after he suspended Pakistan’s constitution and imposed emergency rule.

The congressional meetings were widely publicized in Pakistan, where Musharraf has struggled to maintain an image as an international player as he plans to return and run for president.

A spokeswoman for Levin said the senator found the session “useful” but was unsure what role Musharraf could play in helping to repair U.S.-Pakistani relations.

(Courtesy Justice Department)

Federal prosecutors have released a photograph that they say proves a Northern Virginia man met this summer with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — just a few months before the U.S. citizen was arrested on charges of gathering information about anti-Assad protesters and providing it to Syrian intelligence.

The photo was introduced as evidence in Alexandria’s federal court Monday during a hearing in which prosecutors urged a judge to detain Mohamad Anas Haitham Soueid, 47, on charges of acting as an agent for a foreign government and making false statements. The photo’s release came days after the Syrian Embassy in Washington said it was “ludicrous” for prosecutors to claim that Soueid met privately with Assad.

Soueid, a Syrian-born naturalized citizen, has been detained since his arrest last week. Prosecutors say the Leesburg resident collected videos of people demonstrating against the Damascus government and sent the recordings to a Syrian intelligence agent.

More than 3,000 people have died in clashes with Assad’s government in six months of protests.

The director of national intelligence on Monday forecast a “double-digit” reduction in the intelligence community’s multibillion budget over the next 10 years, and said that the government would try to find much of the savings by cutting back on contractors.

In proposing reductions in what is now an $80.1 billion annual budget, James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence, said that he was going to try to “protect people” and that he hoped to find “one half the savings” by reducing overlap among the myriad computer systems now operated by the 16 intelligence agencies that make up the community.

(Melina Mara — The Washington Post)

Still, he said, the government’s effort to reduce the federal deficit would mean significant belt-tightening by intelligence officials.

Speaking at a symposium of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation in San Antonio, Tex., Clapper said he had just delivered to the Office of Management and Budget a proposal that “calls for cuts in the double-digit range — with a B — over ten years.”

The family of Anwar al-Awlaki is asserting that the U.S.-born cleric’s son, killed last week in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen, was a 16-year-old noncombatant who “paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”
Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in late September. His son was kiled two weeks later. (Associated Press)

In a statement, their first since the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki last month, the family says the cleric’s son was an American citizen who was living in the Yemeni capital until mid-September, when he left his mother a note saying he was going in search of his father. He was killed Friday in a U.S. drone strike while “barbecuing under the moonlight” with other teenagers, the family said.

A family member reached in Sanaa confirmed the Awlakis had released the statement.

The family said they had been shocked to see reports suggesting that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 21-year-old al-Qaeda operative. On a memorial page set up on Facebook, they posted photos of the teenager.

“Look at his pictures, his friends and his hobbies,” the statement said. “His Facebook page shows a typical kid.”