Yen firmer but near lows, Asian shares capped

TOKYO (Reuters) - The yen remained near recent lows on Tuesday, as attention turned to the appointment of a new Bank of Japan governor.

Regional share markets held to tight ranges as the absence of catalysts and a holiday in the U.S. overnight capped demand.

The yen, which has dropped 20 percent against the dollar since mid-November, fell further at the start of the week after financial leaders from the G20 promised not to devalue their currencies to boost exports and avoided singling out Japan for any direct criticism.

The choice of the next BOJ governor and two deputies has drawn market attention as a gauge to how strongly Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is committed to reflating the economy. The G20's message was that as long as Japan pursues aggressive monetary easing to achieve that goal, a weaker yen as a result of such domestic monetary policy will be tolerated, analysts say.

"But that means that some other economy's monetary conditions have been tightened," said Barclays Capital in a note.

"Japan hasn't even changed its policy stance thus far, and the effect of expectations of a looser setting have led to limited moves in domestic interest rates, but the sell-off of the JPY has been marked and has clearly caused unease in other economies."

Market reaction was muted to the release of the minutes of the BOJ's January 21-22 meeting, when the bank set a 2 percent inflation target and pledged to an open-ended quantitative easing from 2014, but the yen was bought when Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters Japan has no plans to buy foreign currency bonds as part of monetary easing, a trader said.

The dollar was down 0.2 percent to 93.75 yen, but remained near its highest since May 2010 of 94.465 hit on February 11. The euro also eased 0.3 percent to 125.05 yen, below its peak since April 2010 of 127.71 yen touched on February 6.

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> was nearly flat.

The Nikkei stock average <.n225> opened down 0.6 percent, after closing up 2.1 percent on Monday to approach its highest level since September 2008 of 11,498.42 tapped on February 6. <.t/>

Australian shares <.axjo> inched down 0.1 percent on the back of weakness in metals prices, with investors focusing on local corporate earnings for direction after a three-month rally that has taken the market to 4-1/2 year highs.

Seoul shares <.ks11> opened little changed, and were expected to struggle to find momentum on worries about the weak yen.

"The market has been taking a breather recently after staging a recovery earlier this month," said Lee Jae-man, an analyst at Tong Yang Securities in Seoul. "The weaker yen has been priced in to some extent, and the pace of its fall is expected to slow down."

Disappointing earnings pushed European shares lower on Monday for a third straight session of losses while U.S. markets were closed for the President's Day holiday.

The euro was steady around $1.3348. The currency eased slightly on Monday after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said in a speech at the European Parliament that "the exchange rate is not a policy target but is important for growth and price stability" and that its rise is "a risk."

The risk of an inconclusive outcome in Italy's election this weekend added to investor concerns.

Sterling hovered near a seven-month low against the dollar touched on Monday after a key policymaker made comments about the need for further weakness, while recent poor data has spurred worries of another British recession.

U.S. crude fell 0.4 percent to $95.47 a barrel.

(Additional reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Miyoung Kim in Seoul; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

Read More..

The Lede: Answering Readers’ Questions About the Meteorite Strike in Russia

You asked us great meteor questions, readers, ones that went beyond the mere fact of the seriously cool video coming from all over Russia. But we wanted to give you a deeper look at the science behind bombardments from space, so we called in a respected source to help.

Clark R. Chapman is a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and a pioneer in the field of asteroid threat assessment. He is co-author of the 1989 book, “Cosmic Catastrophes,” with David Morrison, a senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

#NYTScience @WilliamJBroad Was the Russia case an exceptional one or is the earth constantly hit by meteor (mostly in non inhabited places?

— Gilberto Gribaudo (@GilGribaudo) 15 Feb 13

This is an unusual strike. It will take a while for analysis of the videos, and presumably of the seismic records of the explosion, before we can estimate the size of the projectile. I’m guessing it’s a once-in-a-decade kind of event.

Why unusual?

It’s unusual in the sense that it’s rare. It’s not the kind of event that happens very often. Also, they’re talking about maybe 1,000 people injured and some in the hospital. I’m not aware of a strike that has caused that much injury. That’s because it hit in a somewhat populated part of Russia, instead of the ocean or the desert or the middle of Siberia where relatively few people would have got hurt.

What are the statistical odds of a meteor this size & how often does a meteor of any size hit earth? @nytscience @williamjbroad #NYTScience

— Kylie Sobel (@KylieSobel) 15 Feb 13

These things happen continually. This one was probably a few meters in diameter but they’re flying by the Earth all the time. And they hit – ones this big – maybe once in a decade. Things that would really devastate a city if they hit would occur maybe once every few centuries. It happens on a scale (of meteors small and large). Anyone living out in the countryside or a rural area, if the skies are clear, can look up at night and see apple-seed-size meteors hitting every few minutes, or at least every few hours.

Is the meteor that his Russia 2012 DA14, the same one everyone was talking about, or a different one? #NYTScience

— Sasha Smith (@SashaSmish) 15 Feb 13

Conceivably it could be part of a swarm, but it’s not associated with DA14 [the big asteroid that is to fly close by the Earth on Friday]. They’re on totally different trajectories. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but their orbits are totally different. They both intersect the Earth, more or less, but the asteroid is moving maybe south to north and the Russian meteorite west to east. They’d have to be coming in the same direction to be part of a swarm. It’s a remarkable coincidence that what may be the most damaging meteor strike in modern history would happen on the same day as the closest passage of an asteroid as big as DA14.

How big is DA14?

It’s about 100 feet across.

Should we be scared? What can we do?

The estimated danger from a large impact has dropped in recent decades because of telescopic observations and sky surveys. We should continue to monitor the skies for undiscovered large asteroids and for very much smaller ones that could still be quite dangerous, depending on where they hit. We should continue to look.

No space telescope now searches for such threats. Would such a device help?

That kind of project wouldn’t find what hit Russia (as the asteroid was too small) but it would find ones that are much more dangerous. And once they were detected, we could warn people. We could say, “It’s going to hit such an area at a certain time on a certain day and you should stay away from the windows.” You could provide warning of impacts that could be dangerous.

Could we divert a planetary threat?

If it’s found early enough – quite a few years in advance of its hitting – then NASA and the European Space Agency and other space agencies have the technology to divert the asteroid so it would miss the Earth.

Read More..

Mindy McCready Is Dead in Apparent Suicide

Breaking News

By Steve Helling

02/17/2013 at 09:30 PM EST

Country singer Mindy McCready has committed suicide, multiple sources close to her tell PEOPLE. She was 37.

Professionally, McCready was best known for her multi-platinum debut album Ten Thousand Angels. In recent years, it's been the singer's personal troubles making headlines, though she was attempting to reestablish her music career. In 2010, McCready released a new album titled I'm Still Here.

She is survived by her son Zander, 6, with ex Billy McKnight, and Zayne, 10 months.

In January, McCready's life partner and Zayne's father, singer-songwriter David Wilson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Just three weeks later, a judge ordered McCready to be committed to a treatment facility to cope with mental health and alcohol issues and her sons were placed in foster care.

Story developing …

Read More..

UN warns risk of hepatitis E in S. Sudan grows

GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.

U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.

Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.

He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.

Read More..

Japan stocks rally, yen resumes fall after G20

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese shares rallied and the yen fell on Monday after Tokyo escaped direct criticism from its G20 peers on its aggressive reflationary plans that have weakened the currency.

"With Japan, as yet, using various measures to ease monetary conditions domestically, we do not expect a large international backlash against its efforts and look for the JPY to continue to decline gradually as the easier monetary conditions feed through into FX," Barclays Capital said in a note to clients.

The G20 declined to single out Tokyo but committed to refrain from competitive devaluations and said monetary policy would be directed only at price stability and growth. Japan said this has given it a green light to pursue its policies unchecked.

Taking their cue from the G20, the Nikkei average <.n225> opened up 1.3 percent as the yen resumed its downtrend. <.t/>

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> was nearly unchanged. The pan-Asian index briefly hit a 18-1/2-month high on Friday and had its best performance since the week of January 6 with a 1.2 percent weekly gain.

On Friday, MSCI's all-country world index <.miwd00000pus>, a measure of global equity activity, traded down 0.26 percent, while European shares closed lower and U.S. stocks ended flat.

Australian shares rose 0.3 percent as miners gained on hopes that top customer China might start buying after the Lunar New Year holidays, while blue chips Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Telstra Corp Ltd dropped after trading ex-dividend.

Markets in China and Taiwan resumed trading after a week-long holiday.

In Seoul, the Kospi <.ks11> opened down 0.1 percent, partly weighed by concerns over continued yen weakness that could erode the competitive edge of Korea's exporters.

"There is not much else to go on today except the currency, so everything depends on where the yen goes," said Toshiyuki Kanayama, senior market analyst at Monex.

The dollar rose 0.3 percent to 93.75 yen inching closer to its highest since May 2010 of 94.465 hit on February 11. The euro added 0.1 percent to 125.26 yen, still below its peak since April 2010 of 127.71 yen touched on February 6.

The market's focus is now on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's nominee for the next Bank of Japan governor. Abe is expected to announce his choice in coming days.

Sources told Reuters that former top financial bureaucrat Toshiro Muto is leading the field of candidates to become the next central bank governor. It is expected that he would intensify stimulus efforts to reflate the economy.

STOCKS CONSOLIDATE

Data from EPFR Global on Friday underscored that a consolidation was underway in global equities after their recent rally. It showed investors worldwide pulled $3.62 billion from U.S. stock funds in the latest week, the most in ten weeks after taking a neutral stance the prior week. But demand for emerging market equities remained strong, with investors putting $1.81 billion in new cash to stock funds, the fund-tracking firm said.

Demand for commodities will likely be in focus as China returns to the market.

Investors are also expected to focus on fiscal talks in Washington, where policymakers are discussing a package of budget cuts set to kick in on March 1. Analysts say the austerity measures could hurt the U.S. economy.

U.S. crude fell 0.2 percent to $95.64 a barrel.

(Additional reporting by Sophie Knight in Tokyo; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

Read More..

A Ticket, a Lie and a British Official’s Downfall

LONDON — It began mundanely enough with a speeding violation 10 years ago.

But it escalated, through the tangled, explosive passions of a failed marriage and one partner’s new love affair, into one of the most tawdry political scandals Britain has seen in years.

And it has claimed the political career of an ambitious cabinet minister, Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat who resigned his position as energy and climate change secretary in Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government and his parliamentary seat. He now finds himself facing what the judge in the case has described as the strong likelihood of a prison sentence.

Mr. Huhne’s former wife, Vicky Pryce, a prominent Greek-born economist who was joint head of the Government Economic Service until 2010, may go to prison, too, if a verdict expected this week finds her guilty of perverting the course of justice by falsely certifying that she, and not her husband, was the driver who had been speeding.

That was the offense to which Mr. Huhne (pronounced HEWN) pleaded guilty when the trial began two weeks ago, though he had maintained for years — up to the moment the court sat — that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Along the way, the trial veered far from the speeding offense, into painfully intimate details of the couple’s family life, in what some British commentators have described as an egregious invasion of their privacy.

The court has heard that Ms. Pryce, 60, a mother of five, twice faced demands from her husband that she have an abortion, and that she acceded the first time, to her bitter regret. It has been told of her fury and humiliation when Mr. Huhne, who is 58, left her for a female political aide, Carina Trimingham, who was previously in a relationship with another woman.

It heard, too, of her subsequent decision to reveal the speeding ticket switch to one of Britain’s most widely read newspapers, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, in order to “nail” her former husband and “bring Huhne down,” as she expressed it in e-mails shown to the court.

Evidence at the trial showed The Sunday Times aggressively encouraging Ms. Pryce to join in an effort to end Mr. Huhne’s career.

In the e-mails introduced by the prosecution, the paper’s political editor, Isabel Oakeshott, assured Ms. Pryce that going public with the story of the subterfuge over the speeding ticket in front-page articles without naming her as the person who falsely signed as the driver would inflict “maximum, perhaps fatal damage” to Mr. Huhne, by then a minister in the government and in the process of divorcing Ms. Pryce. This, Ms. Oakeshott said, would achieve “the dual purpose of bringing Huhne down, if we can, without seriously damaging your own reputation.”

The evidence also included a string of text messages between Mr. Huhne and the couple’s youngest child, Peter, now a 20-year-old college student. Distressed by what Mr. Huhne had done to his mother, the youth responded to overtures for understanding with expletive-littered repudiations in which he said, “You are the most ghastly man I have ever known,” “I hate you” and “You make me sick.”

The justification given in court for venturing so deeply into the couple’s family life was that Ms. Pryce had employed the rarely used “marital coercion” defense, adopted into English law in 1925. Using this as a plea, a woman can be found not guilty of any crime other than treason or murder if she can show she committed it under coercion from her husband while he was physically present.

Ms. Pryce asserts that her husband pressured her insistently to take the blame for the speeding violation, while the prosecution has argued that she was a willing partner in the subterfuge and constructed her account of the episode out of a desire for revenge for her husband’s affair and his abrupt ending of their 25-year marriage, shortly after he became a minister.

That has made the entire sweep of the couple’s troubled marriage and divorce an open book in court, in a way that has made allies of powerful groups that have not always seen eye to eye. Among those are women’s rights advocates deeply sympathetic to Ms. Pryce and people critical of the judiciary for leaping to the defense of individuals’ privacy rights in some cases and for adopting a seeming indifference to the same rights in others.

Read More..

Beasts of the Southern Wild-Inspired Louisiana Grub for the Oscars

By Alison Schwartz

02/16/2013 at 08:30 PM EST

Nitehawk's Oscar dish, with Quvenzhané Wallis (inset)

Courtesy Nitehawk; Inset: FOX Searchlight

With Feb. 24's 2013 Academy Awards drawing closer, there's no better time to whet your appetite for all things movies – literally.

Embrace your inner film buff one bite at a time starting with one of this year's Best Picture nominees: Beasts of the Southern Wild. You'll take a trip to the bayous of Louisiana courtesy of Brooklyn's Nitehawk Cinema, which is serving up Oscar contender-inspired dishes to moviegoers in celebration of the film industry's biggest night.

Pair your po' boy and hush puppies with an adults-only beverage. (Yup, that means the movie's 9-year-old star (and youngest Best Actress nominee ever), Quvenzhané Wallis, couldn't quite indulge in this gin-based treat.)

Fried Oyster Po' Boy with Hush Puppies and a Spicy Remoulade

Servings: 4

• 20 shucked oysters, cleaned
• 2 cups buttermilk
• Salt and pepper
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 3 tbsp. Old Bay seasoning
• 6 cups canola oil
Marinate oysters in buttermilk, salt and pepper for at least an hour. Mix flour with Old Bay. Heat canola oil in a pot large enough that the oil only fills it half way to 350ºF over medium heat. Use a candy thermometer to keep track of temperature. Remove oysters from buttermilk, dredge in seasoned flour, and fry in canola oil until crispy and golden brown. Season with salt when oysters are removed from the oil. Let oysters drain on paper towels. Serve on a toasted baguette. Cut into four pieces with hush puppies and remoulade. (See recipes below.)

Remoulade• 4 oz. Dijon mustard
• 2 oz. ketchup
• ½ tsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp. prepared horseradish
• 1 clove garlic
• ½ tsp. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. black pepper
• ¼ cup olive oil
• 1 stalk of celery, chopped
• 2 tbsp. parsley, cleaned and chopped
• ¼ Spanish onion, chopped
• 2 tbsp. paprika
• 2 dashes of Tabasco sauce
• Pinch of cayenne pepper
• Pinch of chili flake
• Salt and pepper
Puree all items in a food processor until smooth. Season to taste.

Hush Puppies• 2 scallions, chopped
• ¼ Spanish onion, diced
• 2 eggs
• 6 oz. buttermilk
• 4 oz. bacon fat
• 2 tbsp. baking soda
• 4 tbsp. baking powder
• 2 cups cornmeal
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 oz. sugar
• 1 tbsp. Old Bay seasoning
• Salt and pepper
• 6 cups canola oil
Mix scallions, onion, baking soda, baking powder, cornmeal, flour, sugar, Old Bay, and salt and pepper well. In a small pot, melt bacon fat and set aside. Add the buttermilk and eggs into dry ingredients until incorporated, making sure not to over-mix. Slowly add in melted bacon fat. Let batter rest for 20 minutes. Over medium heat, pour the canola oil in a pot large enough that the oil only fills it halfway to 350ºF, using a candy thermometer to monitor temperature. Using a small cookie scoop, spoon batter into oil, making sure not to overcrowd the oil. Fry until golden and cooked through, about three to four minutes.

Wink’s Bathtub Gin

Makes one cocktail

• 1.5 oz gin (recipe recommends Bulldog Gin)
• ¾ oz. Lillet Blanc
• ½ oz. crème de cacao liqueur
• ½ oz. fresh lemon juice
Add all ingredients to an ice-filled pint glass. Shake well and strain over fresh ice into a rocks glass.

The 85th annual Academy Awards will air live on Sunday, Feb. 24, on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

Read More..

UN warns risk of hepatitis E in S. Sudan grows

GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.

U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.

Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.

He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.

Read More..

G20 steps back from currency brink, heat off Japan

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations declared on Saturday there would be no currency war and deferred plans to set new debt-cutting targets, underlining broad concern about the fragile state of the world economy.

Japan's expansive policies, which have driven down the yen, escaped direct criticism in a statement thrashed out in Moscow by policymakers from the G20, which spans developed and emerging markets and accounts for 90 percent of the world economy.

Analysts said the yen, which has dropped 20 percent as a result of aggressive monetary and fiscal policies to reflate the Japanese economy, may now continue to fall.

"The market will take the G20 statement as an approval for what it has been doing -- selling of the yen," said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. "No censure of Japan means they will be off to the money printing presses."

After late-night talks, finance ministers and central bankers agreed on wording closer than expected to a joint statement issued last Tuesday by the Group of Seven rich nations backing market-determined exchange rates.

A draft communiqué on Friday had steered clear of the G7's call for economic policy not to be targeted at exchange rates. But the final version included a G20 commitment to refrain from competitive devaluations and stated monetary policy would be directed only at price stability and growth.

"The mood quite clearly early on was that we needed desperately to avoid protectionist measures ... that mood permeated quite quickly," Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters, adding that the wording of the G20 statement had been hardened up by the ministers.

As a result, it reflected a substantial, but not complete, endorsement of Tuesday's proclamation by the G7 nations - the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

As with the G7 intervention, Tokyo said it gave it a green light to pursue its policies unchecked.

"I have explained that (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe's administration is doing its utmost to escape from deflation and we have gained a certain understanding," Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters.

"We're confident that if Japan revives its own economy that would certainly affect the world economy as well. We gained understanding on this point."

Flaherty admitted it would be difficult to gauge if domestic policies were aimed at weakening currencies or not.

NO FISCAL TARGETS

The G20 also made a commitment to a credible medium-term fiscal strategy, but stopped short of setting specific goals as most delegations felt any economic recovery was too fragile.

The communiqué said risks to the world economy had receded but growth remained too weak and unemployment too high.

"A sustained effort is required to continue building a stronger economic and monetary union in the euro area and to resolve uncertainties related to the fiscal situation in the United States and Japan, as well as to boost domestic sources of growth in surplus economies," it said.

A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.

The United States says it is on track to meet its Toronto pledge but argues that the pace of future fiscal consolidation must not snuff out demand. Germany and others are pressing for another round of binding debt targets.

"We had a broad consensus in the G20 that we will stick to the commitment to fulfill the Toronto goals," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. "We do not have any interest in U.S.-bashing ... In St. Petersburg follow-up-goals will be decided."

The G20 put together a huge financial backstop to halt a market meltdown in 2009 but has failed to reach those heights since. At successive meetings, Germany has pressed the United States and others to do more to tackle their debts. Washington in turn has urged Berlin to do more to increase demand.

Backing in the communiqué for the use of domestic monetary policy to support economic recovery reflected the U.S. Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, or QE, to promote recovery and jobs.

QE entails large-scale bond buying -- $85 billion a month in the Fed's case -- that helps economic growth but has also unleashed destabilising capital flows into emerging markets.

A commitment to minimize such "negative spillovers" was an offsetting point in the text that China, fearful of asset bubbles and lost export competitiveness, highlighted.

"Major developed nations (should) pay attention to their monetary policy spillover," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying in Moscow.

Russia, this year's chair of the G20, admitted the group had failed to reach agreement on medium-term budget deficit levels and expressed concern about ultra-loose policies that it and other emerging economies say could store up trouble for later.

On currencies, the G20 text reiterated its commitment last November, "to move more rapidly toward mores market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, and avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments".

It said disorderly exchange rate movements and excess volatility in financial flows could harm economic and financial stability.

(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, Lesley Wroughton, Maya Dyakina, Tetsushi Kajimoto, Jan Strupczewski, Lidia Kelly, Katya Golubkova, Jason Bush, Anirban Nag and Michael Martina. Writing by Douglas Busvine. Editing by Timothy Heritage/Mike Peacock)

Read More..

U.S. Troops Leave Afghan Outposts, Still Facing Fire

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Afghanistan Army soldiers, left, and their American counterparts on Thursday destroyed a Taliban firing position in a village in Kandahar Province. More Photos »

STRONG POINT HAJI RAHMUDDIN II, Afghanistan — When the last American soldiers to occupy this squat, lonely outpost in southern Afghanistan pulled out this week, they left the same way earlier units had arrived: ready for a fight.

They were leaving this violent patch of land outside Kandahar, the south’s main city, just as Taliban fighters were filtering back in from winter havens in Pakistan. It was, as First Sgt. Jason Pitman, 35, bluntly put it, “no time to get stupid.”

The Americans knew they would be most vulnerable in their final hours after taking down their surveillance and early-warning systems. The Taliban knew it, too, and intelligence reports indicated that they had been working with sympathetic villagers to strike at the departing soldiers. Two days earlier, the militants made a test run against the outpost, taking the rare step of directly engaging it in a firefight, albeit a brief one, soon after the first radio antennas came down.

On the same day that President Obama announced that roughly half of the American troops still in in Afghanistan would withdraw this year, and that Afghan forces would begin taking the lead in the war, the smaller-scale departure from the Haji Rahmuddin II outpost was an uncelebrated milestone.

But it pointed at a harsh reality of the process: that some of the withdrawal will happen under fire in areas of the Taliban heartland where the idea of Afghan-led security remains an abstraction. With the start of the annual fighting season just weeks away, some of the hardest-won gains of the war are at risk of being lost.

In the years since the Obama administration’s additional tens of thousands of American soldiers and their Afghan allies pushed into the grape fields, pomegranate orchards and opium poppy fields of southern Afghanistan, some islands of relative calm have been cleared.

But even though this corner of Kandahar Province — the Zhare district — was also a focus of the troop increase, it is far from calm. And it is not unique: many areas in the south and east where troop pullouts are under way have had only tenuous security gains at best, despite years of hard-fought American-led advances.

The Taliban here have not given up their fight, on ground where Mullah Muhammad Omar and his followers first rose up against a local warlord, in the movement’s genesis. In one telling indication of the level of strife in Zhare, even many Afghans are hesitant to make the hourlong trip from Kandahar to the district’s mud-brick villages, many of which stand semiabandoned after three summers of intense fighting.

“My sons live in Kandahar City, and they do not like to come back here,” said Abdul Malik, an elder from Tieranon, a village in central Zhare. Once you are in the villages, he added, “anything can happen.”

The American withdrawal is picking up pace regardless, and American commanders have begun to cede even the most contested of ground to Afghan forces.

There are still places “that the Taliban can find sanctuary, and we still believe there is an informal network or support structure in place that they can rely on,” said Maj. Thomas W. Casey, the executive officer of the Third Battalion, 41st Infantry, which operates in the eastern and central half of Zhare.

So the Americans are out on patrol alongside Afghan units here almost every day, and running larger operations on a regular basis. Last week, they used a weapon that shoots a line of explosives and is intended to clear mined roads to knock down roughly 600 yards of trees that could provide cover for Taliban scouts and attackers.

On Thursday, they demolished a hill that the Taliban had used as a fighting position. Three huge explosions — 100 pounds of high explosives were used in each of the last two, which could be felt over a mile away — reduced the hill to dust and dirt. The Americans on the mission outnumbered Afghan soldiers nearly three to one.

There are some things the Americans have to do solo because the Afghans cannot do them, nor will they be able to anytime soon, commanders say. One example is using high-tech surveillance — blimps, drones, cameras mounted on towers at every base — to help spot militants before they attack, and to direct airstrikes against them. They have launched numerous such attacks in the past month alone.

Bryan Denton contributed reporting.

Read More..