Secretary’s Ouster in Pakistan Adds to Tension With Army

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani fired his defense secretary, a retired general and confidant of Pakistan’s army chief, on Wednesday as the civilian government appeared headed for a collision with the country’s powerful military leadership
Mr. Gilani accused the dismissed secretary of defense, Naeem Khalid Lodhi, a former general and corps commander, of “gross misconduct and illegal action” and of “creating misunderstanding between the state institutions.” He replaced Mr. Lodhi with a civilian aide, Nargis Sethi.
Military officials warned on Wednesday evening that the army would be likely to refuse to work with Ms. Sethi, signaling the possibility of a serious rupture between the army and the civilian government. “The army will not react violently, but it will not cooperate with the new secretary of defense,” said a military officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation.
Tensions between the government of President Asif Ali Zardari and the army leadership have grown worse since the publication of a controversial memo purportedly drafted by the government shortly after an American raid last year killed Osama bin Laden. The memo appeared to solicit help in stopping a possible coup by the humiliated Pakistani military.
Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, called an emergency meeting of his top commanders for Thursday.
Ordinarily, the defense secretary here is appointed with the consent of the army chief and acts as a bridge between the government and the military. The role is more powerful than that of the defense minister, a position filled by a politician from the governing party.
The military has warned the prime minister that his recent statements against General Kayani would have “serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences for the country.” Mr. Gilani had accused General Kayani and Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the director general of Pakistan’s intelligence service, of acting as a “state within a state” and reminded them that they were accountable to the Parliament. Those statements were seen as suggesting that they could be removed from power.
The defense secretary’s signature is required for any appointment, or termination, of a member of the military leadership. By installing a defense secretary of his own choice, Mr. Gilani appeared to be seeking greater leverage for his government in dealing with the military.
Speculation about the government’s intentions to dismiss the two commanders was fueled by news reports in the stridently anti-American press in Pakistan, where many people view the United States as an arrogant adversary instead of an ally. That view has spread in the months since the Bin Laden raid last May and the deaths of 26 Pakistani soldiers in an American airstrike near the border with Afghanistan in November.
Pakistani analysts said the firing of Mr. Lodhi might signal that the festering conflict between the army and the government was reaching a critical stage.
“It is a desperate measure,” said Ikram Sehgal, a defense analyst and a former army officer. “They want the army to react and to make a coup.”
Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a military and political analyst, said the firing would only exacerbate the situation for the civilian government. “If the prime minister now tries to fire the army chief, it will have very dangerous consequences,” Mr. Rizvi said.
Mr. Lodhi, who retired from the army last March and became defense secretary in November, became embroiled in a controversy last month after he submitted a statement in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Defense Ministry, saying that the civilian government had no operational control over the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Pakistan’s powerful spy agency. Saying that Mr. Lodhi had overstepping his authority, Mr. Gilani objected to the blunt statement, a public acknowledgment that while the intelligence services are technically answerable to the prime minister, they are widely perceived to act independently of civilian control.
A military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that the relationship between Mr. Lodhi and Mr. Gilani broke down after the prime minister’s staff pressed Mr. Lodhi to contradict statements about the controversial memo by the army and intelligence chiefs, Generals Kayani and Pasha. The two told the Supreme Court last month that the memo — said to have been orchestrated by a former ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani — was authentic, and pointed to a conspiracy against the military. The government and Mr. Haqqani have said that they had nothing to do with the memo, which came to light in October.
“The government had prepared a draft that stated that the Ministry of Defense does not agree with General Kayani and Genera Pasha’s opinions about the veracity of the memo,” said the military official, who was present during the discussions. “General Lodhi refused to sign the document, saying those were not his words.”

G.M. Looks to Luxury Cars for Higher Profit

DETROIT — After a humbling bankruptcy and $50 billion government bailout in 2009, General Motors has rebounded with steady profits and a fresh lineup of competitive vehicles. 
But the next stage of the comeback poses new challenges for the nation’s largest automaker as it tries to make up for lost time when it suspended many of its product programs. The company started to catch up last year by turning out new small cars and mainstream sport utility vehicles. Now G.M. is focusing on beefing up its roster of higher-profit, luxury models for its Buick and Cadillac divisions.
On Tuesday, G.M.’s strategy was on display here at the North American International Auto Show when it presented a new small Buick S.U.V. called the Encore that goes on sale next year. Earlier, G.M. introduced the much-anticipated Cadillac ATS, a compact sedan intended to compete with top-selling luxury models from BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
While G.M.’s sales in the United States increased 13 percent last year, its executives acknowledge that more growth was needed to improve profits in the coming year. With Europe and other international markets in the doldrums, G.M. is under pressure to further broaden its product lineup and increase margins in its home market.
“We are making our money here in the U.S., and we’re going to have to keep doing it,” said Mark L. Reuss, president of G.M.’s North American division.
Luxury cars like the Cadillac ATS can provide thousands of dollars more in profit than a more mainstream product.
Mr. Reuss said that expanding the Buick and Cadillac brands was essential to improving G.M.’s overall results. G.M. is also introducing a full-size Cadillac sedan this year, as well as a compact Buick called the Verano.
Industry analysts were impressed by the quality and design of the new G.M. entries on display in Detroit, but questioned whether their incremental sales would be enough to increase the bottom line.
“They’re really nice products, but can they sell enough to bring in the revenue?” asked Ron Harbour, head of the automotive unit of the consulting firm Oliver Wyman. “What they really need is to sell more of the volume products like the Silverado pickup and the Chevrolet Malibu midsize sedan.”
G.M.’s big crosstown rival, the Ford Motor Company, is also increasingly dependent on the American market to contribute the bulk of its profits. But Ford avoided bankruptcy and continued to invest in new vehicles, even when the economy soured.
In addition, Ford’s reputation soared with consumers because — unlike G.M. and Chrysler — it was able to survive without financial help from American taxpayers.
“By not going into Chapter 11, we were able to preserve our product-cycle plan, keep our management team intact, and maintain continuity,” said Lewis Booth, Ford’s chief financial officer. “We never missed a beat.”
G.M. has tried hard to distance itself from the bailout by the Obama administration. Its 2010 public stock offering took away some of the stigma of being “Government Motors.”
But the Treasury Department still owns 26 percent of the company. And because G.M.’s stock price has been mired in the low $20s after going public at $33 a share, the government has been reluctant to sell the remaining stake at a loss.
So G.M. is now in the position of relying on North American profit to carry the company financially and convince investors it deserves a better stock price.
Although G.M. sales are growing globally, the company’s chief executive, Daniel F. Akerson, said he is more focused on improving financial results than simply adding sales around the world.
“We need to focus on profits and margins and not necessarily try to post numbers on the board,” he told reporters at the auto show.
G.M. has had seven consecutive profitable quarters, through the third quarter of last year, which was its last reporting period. But the year ahead will be tough because virtually all automakers are looking to earn much of their profits in the resurgent American market.
No one will be pulling harder for G.M.’s success than President Obama, who counts the rescues of G.M. and Chrysler among the successes of his administration’s economic policies.
As if to underscore the importance of Detroit’s revival to the administration, three cabinet secretaries — commerce, energy and transportation — were among the visitors to the media previews at the auto show this week.
G.M. executives, however, seemed to be weary of questions about the government’s role in its comeback and the taxpayers’ continued ownership stake in the company.
Mr. Reuss said he was concerned that the G.M. bailout would be constantly resurrected as a political issue in this year’s presidential election.
“The only thing I can control,” he said, “is the performance of North America with great products, great pricing and disciplined production.”

For Europe, Few Options in a Vicious Cycle of Debt

Europe has a $1 trillion problem.
As difficult as the last two years have been for Europe, 2012 could be even tougher. Each week, countries will need to sell billions of dollars of bonds — a staggering $1 trillion in total — to replace existing debt and cover their current budget deficits.
At any point, should banks, pensions and other big investors balk, anxiety could course through the markets, making government officials feel like they are stuck in a scary financial remake of “Groundhog Day.”
Even if governments attract investors at reasonable interest rates one month, they will have to repeat the process again the next month — and signs of skittish buyers could make each sale harder to manage than the previous one.
“The headline risk is enormous,” said Nick Firoozye, chief European rates strategist at Nomura International in London.
Given this vicious cycle, policy makers and investors are closely watching the debt auctions for potential weakness. On Thursday, Spain is set to sell as much as 5 billion euros ($6.3 billion) of government bonds. Italy follows on Friday with an auction of more than $9 billion.
The current challenge for Europe is to keep Italy and Spain from ending up like Greece and Portugal, whose borrowing costs rose so high last year that it signaled real likelihood of default, making it impossible for the governments to find buyers for their debt. Since then, Greece and Portugal have been reliant on the financial backing of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
The intense focus on the sovereign debt auctions — and their importance to the broader economy — starkly underscores the difference between European and American responses to their crises.
Since 2008, there has been almost no private sector interest to buy new United States residential mortgage loans, the financial asset at the root of the country’s crisis. To make up for that lack of investor demand, the federal government has bought and guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars of new mortgages.
In Europe, policy makers are still expecting private sector buyers to acquire the majority of government debt. Last month, in perhaps the boldest move of the crisis, the European Central Bank lent $620 billion to banks for up to three years at a rate of 1 percent.
Some officials had hoped that these cheap loans would spur demand for government debt. The idea is that financial institutions would be able to make a tidy profit by borrowing from the central bank at 1 percent and using the money to buy government bonds that have a higher yield, like Spain’s 10-year bond at 5.5 percent.
But the sovereign debt markets continue to show signs of stress. Italy’s 10-year government bond has fallen in price, lifting its yield to more than 7 percent, a level that shows investors remain worried about the financial strength of Italy’s government.
And European banks appear to be hoarding much of the money they borrowed from the central bank, rather than lending it to governments. Money deposited by banks at the European Central Bank, where it remains idle, stands at $617 billion, up from $425 billion just a month ago.
“It’s hard to see why a banker would want to tie up money in a European sovereign for, say, three years,” said Phillip L. Swagel at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, who served as assistant secretary for economic policy under Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
Italy’s troubles highlight how hard it is to generate demand for a deluge of new debt from a dwindling pool of investors. The country needs to issue as much as $305 billion of debt this year, the highest in the euro zone. By comparison, France, with the second highest total, needs to auction $243 billion of new debt, according to estimates by Nomura.
Governments like Italy’s are at the mercy of markets because they simply don’t have the cash to pay off even some of their bonds that come due. They must issue new bonds to cover their old debts, as well as their budget deficits, at a time when investors are growing scarce.
Banks, traditionally big holders of government bonds, have been selling Italian debt. “We’ve seen a lot of liquidation by non-European investors,” said Laurent Fransolet, head of European interest rate strategy at Barclays Capital in London. For instance, Nomura Holdings in Japan slashed its Italian debt holdings, mostly government bonds, to $467 million on Nov. 24, from $2.8 billion at the end of Sept.
European banks have also been dumping the debt. BNP Paribas, a French bank, cut its exposure to Italian government bonds to $15.5 billion at the end of October, from $26 billion at the end of June.
Italian banks, though large owners of their government’s obligations, may not want to take on too much more, to keep their investors happy. Shares in UniCredit have fallen more than 40 percent since last week as the Italian firm has tried to raise capital to comply with new regulations.
There are ways to avoid spectacularly bad debt auctions, at least in the short term.
The central bank can help by buying a country’s bonds in the market ahead of a new debt sale. That would help bolster prices at the auction, or at least keep them stable.
There is also some evidence that banks’ government-bond selling may have abated at the end of last year, according to Mr. Fransolet. Central bank figures show European financial firms acquired $2.4 billion of Spanish government bonds in November, after selling a monthly average of $4.8 billion in the preceding three months.
Governments may also be able to attract new buyers to their bond markets. Belgium sold $7.2 billion of government bonds to local retail investors last month, in part appealing to their patriotism.
Opportunistic hedge funds, betting the market is too pessimistic about certain European countries, may also bite. Saba Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund headed by the former Deutsche Bank trader Boaz Weinstein, owns Italian government bonds, though it does so as part of a wider trading strategy that includes bets that could pay off if Europe’s problems worsen.
But it is doubtful that Italy and Spain can find enough new buyers this year to bring their bond yields down to sustainable levels. Instead, if their economies slow — and if their governments become unpopular — debt auctions could fail and their cost of borrowing could rise even more.
All eyes would then turn to the central bank for drastic action. It could lend more cheap money to banks, in the hope that some of it might find its way into government bonds. Or it could become a big buyer of government bonds itself, printing euros to finance the purchases.
But that may not be a lasting solution, since the central bank’s actions could scare off private investors. Typically, when government-backed organizations like the central bank hold a country’s debt, their claims on the debtor rank higher than those of other creditors. For that reason, private investors might think their holdings would fall in value if the central bank became a big owner of Italian debt — and they might retreat.
At the same time, the crisis response in the United States did not depend solely on government-backed entities like the Federal Reserve to buy housing loans. Professor Swagel of the University of Maryland points out that banks and investors also took large losses on existing housing debt. While painful, the mortgage debt proved less of a drag on the financial system.
So far, Europe has been averse to taking permanent losses on government bonds. Except in the case of Greek debt, European policy makers have shied away from any plan that could mean private holders of government debt get hurt.
However, Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, recently argued in a Financial Times editorial that Italy’s debt should be reduced to 90 percent of the gross domestic product from 120 percent. In such a situation, investors might suffer a 25 percent hit on the value of their Italian bonds, he said.
Such haircuts might seem like the recipe for more instability right now. But if Europe struggles to find buyers for its debt, more radical options are likely to be considered. Europe’s debt problem is huge, and the experience in the United States suggests dealing with it may take several, more drastic approaches.
“If you go halfway, you’ll never get to the end,” Professor Swagel said. “And that describes European policy-making.”

Mexico Updates Death Toll in Drug War to 47,515, but Critics Dispute the Data

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government updated its drug war death toll on Wednesday, reporting that 47,515 people had been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón began a military assault on criminal cartels in late 2006. 
The new official tally provided by the attorney general’s office included data only through September, and it showed that drug-related killings increased 11 percent, to 12,903, compared with the same nine-month period in 2010. Still, a government statement sought to find a silver lining, asserting that it was the first year since 2006 “that the homicide rate increase has been lower compared to the previous years.”
But that will hardly calm a public scared by the recent arrival of grisly violence in once-safe cities like Guadalajara, nor will Wednesday’s limited data release silence the increasingly loud call for better, more transparent government record keeping.
The Mexican government has failed to create the tracking system it needs to understand criminal trends and improve security, experts say, even as it has become more secretive with the limited information it has.
“Our frustration is that they have some information and some numbers, something that would be valuable and they are not releasing them,” said Eric Olson, a security expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “And there is a whole bunch of other things that are not well defined and can lead to erroneous conclusions.”
The number of drug-related deaths is the subject of much dispute. Government officials last gave a figure — 34,612 — at the end of 2010, promising to update their tally regularly. They did not follow through. A group of Mexican and American academics, including Mr. Olson, began pleading with the Calderón administration for death figures, along with other data known to be collected, including violent episodes involving the military. But members of the group say they were ignored.
Pressure began to mount late last year as the government received several public records requests seeking information on crime-related deaths nationwide. The Calderón administration initially said that the data was confidential for reasons of national security, then last week the government said that the figures would be published after further study. The release on Wednesday came after Mexico’s freedom of information agency said it would ask for an investigation if the data was not released.
Now, the question is whether the report accurately reflects the reality on the ground. Some Mexican news organizations have arrived independently at similar totals, whereas others have found that the government regularly undercounts the number of drug-related deaths.
“Since there are very few actual investigations, those are approximations at best,” Mr. Olson said. “They’re hunches. There is not really a way of knowing precisely if it was caused by organized crime or a drug trafficker or not.” Molly Molloy, a librarian at New Mexico State University who closely tracks deaths in Ciudad Juárez and other parts of the country, said that given the investigative failures, the most reliable figures come from the Mexican census agency, which identified 67,050 homicides from 2007 through 2010, nearly double the government’s count of drug-related deaths for that period.
Inconsistent responses to The New York Times for requested public records from every Mexican state suggest that the data problems begin at the local level. The federal tally of drug-related homicides is at least partly a compilation of figures from state prosecutors’ offices, but these offices do not appear to have consistent systems for recording or releasing such data.
While some state prosecutors’ offices complied with requests for information on drug-related deaths, others denied tracking the most basic information, arguing it was the job of the federal government to do so. Veracruz, which has grown increasingly violent in the past few months, said in a letter that it “does not generate the statistic you request,” and furthermore, that the information was “reserved and/or confidential.”

Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

Mormons Uneasy in the Spotlight

A new poll of Mormons in the United States finds that while one of their own is making unprecedented progress in a bid for the presidency, many feel uneasy in the spotlight, misunderstood and unaccepted in the American mainstream.
Despite this, a majority of the Mormons polled said they believed that acceptance of Mormonism was rising and that the American people were ready to elect a Mormon as president. It is a sunny outlook for a religion that is consistently ranked near the bottom, along with Muslims and atheists, on favorability surveys of various groups.
“On the one hand, Mormons do feel they are discriminated against, and that their coverage in the news and, even more so, in popular culture isn’t helping,” said David Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and a Mormon who served as a consultant on the poll. “But you also find this strain of optimism that things are going to get better and this is an important moment for Mormonism.”
The survey of more than 1,000 Mormons by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life was conducted between Oct. 25 and Nov. 16, 2011, by landline and cellphone and has a margin of error of plus or minus five percentage points.
Mormons make up less than 2 percent of the American population.
In a church known for its energetic young missionaries, three out of four Mormon respondents were raised in the faith, and about one in four were converts.
Two-thirds of the Mormons polled described themselves as politically conservative (compared with 37 percent of American adults), and 74 percent of them said they were either registered Republicans or lean toward the G.O.P. (That compares with 45 percent of American adults over all.)
Mitt Romney, who is leading in the Republican presidential contest, is resoundingly popular among Mormons, rated favorably even by 62 percent of the Mormon registered voters who said they were Democrats or leaned that way. The reason?
“He’s seen as more than just a political candidate,” Mr. Campbell said. “He’s a path breaker for the faith.”
Other Mormon politicians did not fare as well, though, perhaps because they are perceived as too liberal or because they are not as well known: Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah who is also seeking the Republican nomination, was perceived favorably by half of Mormons in the poll who are registered voters.
Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, a Democrat from Nevada, was rated favorably by only 22 percent.
Nearly all Mormons in the survey, 97 percent, said they considered Mormonism to be a Christian religion. That stands in stark contrast to the general public, of whom just over half agree. But a vast majority of Mormons in the poll said they believed in Mormon doctrines that were distinctive from traditional Christian churches: 94 percent said they believed that the president of the church is a prophet of God, and 95 percent said they believed that families can be bound together eternally in temple ceremonies. Only 22 percent said that some teachings of the Mormon church “are hard for me to believe.”
Mormons are more devout than those of other faiths, the survey found. Three out of four said they attended religious services at least weekly, while four out of five said they prayed at least once a day and tithed the required 10 percent of their income to the church each year.
Gregory Smith, senior researcher at the Pew Forum, said, “That is a level of religious commitment that is much, much higher than we see among the public as a whole, and is even higher than we see among other religious groups with high levels of religious commitment,” like white evangelicals and black Protestants.
“Mormons and evangelicals have a fair amount in common with each other,” Mr. Smith said. “Large numbers in both groups are politically conservative, are Republican and are religiously committed.
“Despite that,” he said, “Mormons perceive a fair amount of hostility directed at them from evangelicals.”
Half of the Mormons polled agreed that evangelical Christians were “unfriendly toward Mormons,” compared with 22 percent who said that “people who are not religious” were unfriendly.

Economic Woes Loom Larger as G.O.P. Heads South

NORTH, S.C. — The grim just gets grimmer here at the Edisto Grocery, where all day long people with not enough work come to eat $2.25 fried bologna sandwiches, pick up some horse feed and complain about the price of diesel. 
“Jobs are all I hear about every day. Where are the jobs?” said Pete Bradley, who owns the small store and gas station here in Orangeburg County, where unemployment is 15.6 percent and the median income is $32,699.
After stops in Iowa and New Hampshire, states that are doing relatively well economically, the Republican presidential race is coming for the first time to a state that is struggling mightily through the downturn and, like much of the country, has distinct pockets of poverty and prosperity.
Just a 45-minute drive from the Edisto Grocery toward the capital city of Columbia, South Carolina looks quite different. Here, in Lexington County where Gov. Nikki Haley lives, unemployment is 7 percent and the median income is $51,523. New companies, lured to South Carolina by generous tax incentives and the state’s right-to-work policies, are hailed as heroes.
Amazon’s sprawling new distribution center could net as many as 2,000 jobs. The Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corporation, a maker of respiratory medicine, will break ground in the same industrial park this month and bring about 700 jobs. Continental Tire plans to invest $500 million to build a plant in nearby Sumter County.
Building on those potential new jobs, Ms. Haley delivered a message of promised prosperity last week as she traveled to the wealthy coastal communities of Charleston and Myrtle Beach with the presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, trying to give him an edge in the Jan. 21 Republican primary.
Mr. Romney hopes that message will secure South Carolina and, with it, the nomination. For the last 32 years, whoever has won in South Carolina has become the Republican candidate for president.
As it does in much of the rest of the country, the economic gap looms large in this state. Since 2007, South Carolina has lost 78,000 jobs, many of them in construction. The question is whether economics will overshadow the reliable platform of smaller government and deep social conservatism important especially to poor and middle-class white Republican voters in South Carolina.
Although it is a relatively small state — it ranks 24th in population and 40th in size — South Carolina is a place of stark contrasts between the haves and the have nots, and one in which the political landscape can be brutal and difficult to anticipate.
Three bands of wealth run across the state. Fiscally conservative but less socially conservative retirees populate the coast. To the northwest, along the Interstate 85 corridor toward Charlotte, N.C., Spartanburg’s BMW plant and other manufacturers offer solid jobs for a region with deeply felt conservative views on social issues and Christian institutions like Bob Jones University.
In the center of the state sits the capital, Columbia, where a recent burst of new business and a state government dominated by a Republican majority and a governor who rode to office on a wave of Tea Party support help define the political playing field.
The Republican primary will probably be a study in the balance between social conservatism and the economy, many here believe. And although issues of black-white relations remain an undercurrent in the state where the Civil War began, courting black voters is not much of a factor for Republicans.
“Blacks, whether they are rich or poor or middle class, largely vote Democrat,” said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics. “Poor whites tend to vote Republican.”
Pamela Barksdale, an African-American and an unemployed former BMW worker who lives in a part of northeast South Carolina that was devastated by the collapse of the textile industry, said neither she nor any other black person she knew would ever vote for a Republican.
“Do you think I want to choke myself to death?” she said.
In South Carolina, Mr. Buchanan said, the Republicans are the party of conservative social issues and limited taxes.
As a result, many Republican candidates here are trying to position themselves as the true social conservative while being mindful of the importance of promising economic recovery.

Mr. Romney, perhaps more than any other candidate, is pushing the economy as a campaign theme. Ms. Haley is his echo chamber. Certainly, she said in an interview by phone while on the road with Mr. Romney in New Hampshire, Republican voters in South Carolina want a candidate who believes marriage should be only between a man and a woman and abortion should be outlawed. 
But, she said, the state is not as narrow as people think.
“This is the South Carolina that elected a 38-year-old Indian female,” she said. “The No. 1 focus is jobs, spending and the economy.”
How much Ms. Haley’s support for Mr. Romney factors into the race will be closely watched. Although some here applaud her nearly singular focus on sharply reducing government spending and lowering the state’s unemployment rate, which now sits at 9.9 percent, she is not broadly popular.
A December poll by Winthrop University showed only a 35 percent approval rating among all registered voters, lower than that of President Obama, who had a 45 percent rating. Among Republicans, her approval rating was 53 percent.
The state may also be, in the coming years, something of a national study on the effects of deep cuts in government spending for education and social programs.
“We’ve all seen our state budgets erode unmercifully,” said Jeffery S. Allen, interim director of the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs, which is based at Clemson University. “Lots and lots of people desperately need the help of government to survive. The big question we’re looking at for the future of the state is: are things sustainable at the level to which they have been cut?”
That will probably be writ large in towns like Laurens, where the economy has been devastated first by the collapse of the textile industry and then by the recession. Conversations about the presidential election do not engage people as much as the price of a state lottery ticket, which will double to $2 on Sunday.
Farther south, in Orangeburg County, the outcome of the Republican primary does not seem to matter much, either. It is a hand-to-mouth existence for many, with little hope that a new president would change their lives.
“People are too tired to care,” said Tina Sullivan, 47, who manages three bars in Orangeburg. “If they have any money, they’ll come spend it drinking because they are so depressed.”
Randy Shumpert, who makes a living drilling water wells in nearby Neeses, wants a true social conservative in office. And he also wants more work. But he does not see anyone who appeals to him.
“I plan to vote, but it’s just terrible what we have to vote for,” he said.
To Mr. Shumpert and others at the Edisto Grocery, including one Democrat who happened to wander in and joked that he was the only one in the county who was not black or a woman, no one feels a part of the national race that is descending on the state.
“These people don’t care about us,” Mr. Shumpert said. “We’re the little people.”

In Rare Public Appearance, Assad Addresses Rally in Syria

BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Bashar al-Assad of Syria appeared in public on Wednesday for the first time since the uprising against his rule began 10 months ago, addressing a rally in Umayyad Square in Damascus. He thanked the crowd for its support and pledged to defeat what he said were conspiracies against his country. 
In the turbulent city of Homs, a Western journalist was killed on Wednesday when another pro-government rally was attacked.
Mr. Assad’s speech, his second in two days, appeared intended to convey confidence and project authority, even as protests against him persist in some of the country’s largest cities. The crowd in Damascus cheered for Mr. Assad, with some people shouting, “Shabeeha forever, for your eyes, Assad,” a reference to loyalist militiamen who have played a major role in suppressing demonstrations and the activists who organize them.
“We will defeat the conspiracy, without any doubt,” the 46-year-old president told the crowd, which appeared to number in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. “We will make this phase the last one of the conspiracy.”
The appearance came on an eventful day in Syria. France 2 Television said that one of its journalists, Gilles Jacquier, 43, was killed by an exploding shell in Homs. Syrian television and a human rights group based in London said that another Western journalist was wounded there, in what appeared to be an insurgent attack on a crowd of Assad supporters. And one of the 165 observers sent to Syria by the Arab League to check compliance with the government’s promise to end the violence resigned on Wednesday, calling the mission’s work a farce.
Mr. Assad appeared at the Damascus rally unexpectedly, wearing a jacket but no tie. His British-educated wife, Asma, and two of their children were also present; images broadcast on Addounia TV, a Syrian channel that is close to the government, showed Mrs. Assad in a black hat, with the children standing in front of her, smiling as her husband spoke to the surging, ecstatic crowd.
Mr. Assad’s televised speech of nearly two hours on Tuesday was his first public address since June; that he followed it with a public appearance the next day seemed to indicate an effort to counter his government’s image of isolation.
“I belong to this street,” Mr. Assad told the crowd in the square on Wednesday, speaking for about 10 minutes, apparently impromptu. “I came here to draw from your strength.”
A loyalist who attended the rally and spoke on the condition of anonymity said, “I swear to God, it was ecstatic — God protects him.”
Sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe, Turkey and the Arab League have battered Syria’s economy, and the league’s decision to suspend Syria’s membership in November was humiliating for a country that sees itself as a fulcrum of the region’s politics. The league’s 165 observers, who arrived in Syria last month, have complained of obstruction and attacks from both sides.
The observer who resigned on Wednesday, Anwar Abdel Malik, said he left because he felt that the mission was serving the interests of the government rather than trying to end the crackdown on protesters.
By the United Nations’ account, more than 5,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began, including more than 400 people since the observers arrived. Mr. Malik described the situation as a humanitarian disaster.
“The mission was a farce, and the observers have been fooled,” he told Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite network based in Qatar. “The regime orchestrated it and fabricated most of what we saw, to stop the Arab League from taking action against the regime.”
He added, “The regime isn’t committing one war crime, but a series of crimes against its people.”
Khaled Abu Salah, an activist from Homs, a city near the Lebanese border that has been a hotbed of unrest, said that Mr. Malik, an Algerian who was once a political prisoner himself, was particularly moved after seeing the disfigured body of a protester named Abdel Jarim Darwish, from the Baba Amr neighborhood.
“After he saw this body during his tour of Baba Amr, he could not leave his hotel room for two days,” Mr. Salah said. “I think this was one of the reasons behind his resignation.”
Mr. Jacquier, an experienced reporter who had covered wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, was on assignment for a well-known television program called “Envoyé Spécial,” France 2 said in a statement.
The channel reported that Mr. Jacquier and a photographer, Christophe Kenck, had entered Syria legally and were interviewing street vendors in a pro-government neighborhood in southern Homs when a spontaneous demonstration began nearby.
The channel said that the specific events leading to Mr. Jacquier’s death were not clear, but that it appeared that he had become separated from Mr. Kenck when shooting broke out at the demonstration, and that he took refuge in a building that was hit by fire. Mr. Kenck was wounded.
According to Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists, Mr. Jacquier was killed by a shell that exploded among a group of journalists. A spokeswoman for the Dutch Foreign Ministry told reporters that a Dutch freelance journalist also was injured in Homs.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France paid tribute to Mr. Jacquier’s “exemplary career.”
“He was only doing his job as a journalist, by covering the violent events that are now taking place due to the unacceptable repression from the government against the population,” Mr. Sarkozy wrote. He said that France would investigate the circumstances of Mr. Jacquier’s death.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and Maïa de la Baume from Paris.

Survey Finds Rising Perception of Class Tension

Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.
About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor in the United States, a survey by the Pew Research Center found, a sign that the message of income inequality brandished by the Occupy Wall Street movement and pressed by Democrats may be seeping into the national consciousness.
The share was the largest since 1992, and represented about a 50 percent increase from the 2009 survey, when immigration was seen as the greatest source of tension. In that survey, 47 percent of those polled said there were strong conflicts between classes.
“Income inequality is no longer just for economists,” said Richard Morin, a senior editor at Pew Social & Demographic Trends, which conducted the latest survey. “It has moved off the business pages into the front page.”
The survey, which polled 2,048 adults from Dec. 6 to 19, found that perception of class conflict surged the most among white people, middle-income earners and independent voters. But it also increased substantially among Republicans, to 55 percent of those polled, up from 38 percent in 2009, even as the party leadership has railed against the concept of class divisions.
The change in perception is the result of a confluence of factors, Mr. Morin said, probably including the Occupy Wall Street movement, which put the issue of undeserved wealth and fairness in American society at the top of the news throughout most of the fall.
Traditionally, class has been less a part of the American political debate than it has been in Europe. Still, the concept has long existed for ordinary Americans.
“Americans have always acknowledged that there are Rockefellers and the lunch-bucket guy,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center, based at the University of Chicago. “But they believe it is not a permanent caste, but a transitory condition. The real game-changer would be if they give up on that.”
Going by the survey’s results, they have not. Forty-three percent of those surveyed said the rich became wealthy “mainly because of their own hard work, ambition or education,” a number unchanged since 2008.
The survey’s main question — “In America, how much conflict is there between poor people and rich people?” — was based on language used by Mr. Smith’s center at the University of Chicago, Mr. Morin said.
Mr. Smith said the question was often understood to mean, “Do the rich and the poor get along?” and “Do they have the same objectives?”
The issue has also become a prominent part of the political debate. President Obama has pressed the case that income inequality is rising as election season has gotten under way.
It has even crept into the Republican presidential primary race. At a debate in New Hampshire last Saturday, Rick Santorum criticized Mitt Romney for using the phrase “middle class,” dismissing the words as Democratic weapons to divide society. And conservatives have been wringing their hands over Newt Gingrich’s recent attacks on Mr. Romney’s past in private equity, saying they are a misguided assault on free-market capitalism.
Independents, whose votes will be fought over by both parties, showed the single largest increase in perceptions of conflicts between rich and poor, up 23 percentage points, to 68 percent, compared with an 18-point rise among Democrats and a 17-point rise for Republicans. Sixty-eight percent of independents believe there are strong class conflicts, just below the 73 percent of Democrats who do. (The survey’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for results based on the total sample.)
“The story for me was the consistency of the change,” Mr. Morin said. “Everyone sees more conflict.”
The demographics were surprising, experts said. While blacks were still more likely than whites to see serious conflicts between rich and poor, the share of whites who held that view increased by 22 percentage points, more than triple the increase among blacks. The share of blacks and Hispanics who held the view grew by single digits.
What is more, people at the upper middle of the income ladder were most likely to see conflict. Seventy-one percent of those who earned from $40,000 to $75,000 said there were strong conflicts between rich and poor, up from 47 percent in 2009. The lowest income bracket, less than $20,000, changed the least.
The grinding economic downturn may be contributing to the heightened perception of conflict between rich and poor, said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
“Rich and poor aren’t terribly distinct from secure and unemployed,” he said.
The survey attributed the change, in part, to “underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society,” citing a finding by the Census Bureau that the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of the population increased to 56 percent in 2009, from 49 percent in 2005.
“There are facts behind it,” Mr. Smith said of the findings. “It’s not just rhetoric.”
Robert Rector, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, took issue with that, arguing that government data routinely undercounted aid to the poor and taxes taken from everyone else.
To him, the findings did not mean much, “other than that the topic has been in the press for the last two years.”

Miss. Court Halts Quick Release of Some Pardoned

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi judge has temporarily blocked the release of 21 inmates who'd been given pardons or medical release by Republican Haley Barbour in one of his final acts as governor.
Circuit Judge Tomie Green issued an injunction late Wednesday at the request of Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood.
Hood said he believes Barbour might've violated the state constitution by pardoning some inmates who failed to give sufficient public notice that they were seeking to have their records cleared.
Barbour said in a statement Wednesday, a day after leaving office,that he believes people have misunderstood why he gave reprieves to more than 200 inmates. Most received full pardons, while others received suspended sentences because of medical conditions. Barbour said 189 of the inmates had already completed their incarceration.
Barbour was limited to two terms and issued the list of pardons and early releases Tuesday about the time his successor, Republican Phil Bryant, was being inaugurated. Barbour wouldn't answer repeated questions about the pardons Tuesday.
In Wednesday's statement, Barbour said: "The pardons were intended to allow them to find gainful employment or acquire professional licenses as well as hunt and vote. My decision about clemency was based upon the recommendation of the Parole Board in more than 90 percent of the cases."
The pardons angered even some of Barbour's most ardent supporters in Mississippi, including some conservatives who say the actions tarnished his legacy. It also has created concerns within the state that his decisions may make Mississippi look backwards. Yet Barbour is unlikely to face political repercussions from the decisions — he has said he doesn't expect to run for any elected office, nor does he expect to be chosen as a GOP vice-presidential nominee.
Barbour spokeswoman Laura Hipp was not immediately available for comment about Green's decision to temporarily block release of the 21 inmates. It was not clear how many of the 21 are convicted killers.
Section 124 of the Mississippi Constitution says any inmate seeking a pardon must publish notice about his intentions. Before the governor can grant it, the notice must appear 30 days in a newspaper in or near the county where the person was convicted.
Hood said it's not clear whether all the inmates pardoned by Barbour met the publication requirement, and that he believes it's likely that some did not.
"It's unfortunate Gov. Barbour didn't read the constitution," Hood said Wednesday.
Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Suzanne Singletary told The Associated Press that five inmates let out over the weekend are the only ones on Barbour's list who had been released as of Wednesday evening. She said the 21 were still in custody because processing paperwork generally takes several days. Among other, things, state law requires the department to give victims 48 hours' notice before an inmate is released.
Neither Hipp nor Barbour's lead staff attorney, Amanda Jones Tollison, responded to questions about whether Barbour's staff verified that pardoned inmates had met the 30 days' publication requirement.
Each of the five inmates released this past weekend had worked as a trusty at the Governor's Mansion. They are David Gatlin, convicted of killing his estranged wife in 1993; Joseph Ozment, convicted in 1994 of killing a man during a robbery; Anthony McCray, convicted in 2001 of killing his wife; Charles Hooker, sentenced to life in 1992 for murder; and Nathan Kern, sentenced to life in 1982 for burglary after at least two prior convictions.
Singletary said each of the five men published legal notices in local newspapers within the past month.
Hood said several of his staff members spent hours Wednesday calling newspapers and checking whether others on the clemency list published their notices in advance. He said Green agreed to his request to require each of the five who've been released to appear in court to prove they met the publication requirement. He did not say where or when those appearances would take place.
Relatives of the killers' victims said they were outraged by the release, and some said they're worried for their own safety.
Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman, considered running for president this year but announced last April that he would skip the race because he didn't have the "fire in the belly." The 64-year-old is now on the paid speakers' circuit and is also working for a Jackson-area law firm and for BGR, the Washington lobbying firm he founded two decades ago.

If You’re Mad for ‘Downton,’ Publishers Have Reading List

The British melodrama “Downton Abbey” is already the darling of American public television. Now it has become a marketing tool for booksellers and publishers hoping to tap into the passion of the show’s audience.
Publishers are convinced that viewers who obsessively tune in to follow the war-torn travails of an aristocratic family and its meddling but loyal servants are also literary types, likely to devour books on subjects the series touches.
So they are rushing to print books that take readers back to Edwardian and wartime England: stories about the grandeur of British estates (“Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle” by the Countess of Carnarvon); the recollections of a lady’s maid (“Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor” by Rosina Harrison); and World War I (“A Bitter Truth” by Charles Todd), the bloody backdrop to the show’s second season, which had its premiere in the United States last Sunday on PBS, drawing 4.2 million viewers.
“We’re just riding that ‘Downton Abbey’ wave,” said Stephen Morrison, the editor in chief and associate publisher of Penguin Books, who watched Season 1 last year and began planning which books to release around the time of the Season 2 premiere. “I think the story lends itself to great television but it is also the themes of great literary writing, with all the twists and turns in the characters.”
Book publicists have swarmed Twitter, where “Downton Abbey” has been endlessly discussed and analyzed, to drop suggestions and link to alluring titles in both their e-book and print editions, borrowing hashtags like #downtonabbey and #downtonpbs that are already in heavy circulation.
“Love Downton Abbey?” the Knopf Twitter account asked on Tuesday. “May we suggest Wade Davis’s INTO THE SILENCE — a book capturing the twilight of this elite #downtonpbs.”
Rebecca Lang, a publicist for Penguin, wrote on Twitter on Monday, “Are all ladies’ maids as manipulative as O’Brien? Find out by reading ROSE, written by a true lady’s maid.”
Bookstores, in the middle of a typical January lag in sales, have tried to seize the moment. Barnes & Noble is running a promotion featuring books that connect to “Downton Abbey,” including “Love in a Cold Climate” by Nancy Mitford, a novel about the quirks of the British upper class.
Last Friday, Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., hosted a preview of the first episode of Season 2, which was attended by more than 50 people. The store also set up a prominent display of a dozen “Downton”-related titles.
“It’s a great opportunity to build some sales,” said Stan Hynds, a book buyer for the store. “We’re trying to push books on the British aristocracy, the Titanic and World War I as well.” For some antsy “Downton” fans, picking up a book or two has helped pass the time between episodes. Claire Griffiths, of Houston, drove to her local bookstore on Friday in search of something “Downton-esque,” leaving with a war novel and “Below Stairs,” a memoir by a kitchen maid.
“I’m just enjoying the show so much, I thought I needed to get a book about it,” Ms. Griffiths said. “And I was watching the war scenes and thinking, I don’t know enough about this. So maybe I can learn something in the process.”
Julian Fellowes, the creator of the series, has been deliberate about dropping open-ended references into the scripts, said his niece, Jessica Fellowes, who wrote “The World of Downton Abbey,” a best seller in Britain. It was published last month in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, which printed 100,000 copies, and it has cracked the Top 100 list on Amazon.
“He wants to drive people to find out more for themselves, whether through Google or in books,” Ms. Fellowes said in a telephone interview. “He was always deliberately oblique.”
For publishers, the craze over “Downton” serves as a kind of mood ring revealing the cultural tastes of viewers who are also likely to be book buyers, in the way that “Mad Men” inspired the revival of skinny ties and patterned sheath dresses (though no one seems to be suggesting that “Downton Abbey” will rekindle a longing for the corset).
LuAnn Walther, the editorial director for several imprints at Knopf, said that editors there had dug into the backlist to find any books that they could resurrect in time for Season 2.
One book, “War Poems,” is a collection that includes many examples from the 1910s, an especially rich period for poetry, she said.
Sales representatives have been calling bookstores to suggest titles that would be appropriate for a “Downton”-themed display, including a fresh paperback edition of “Parade’s End” by Ford Madox Ford, considered a masterpiece war novel.
“We’ve seen so much from World War II, but we haven’t seen much from this period, and I think Americans are getting interested in that, partly because of the show,” Ms. Walther said.
St. Martin’s Press, which published Mr. Fellowes’s satirical novels, plans to repackage them with covers that refer to his title as the creator of “Downton Abbey.”
Some recently published books were the result of fortunate timing. Bruce H. Franklin, the publisher of Westholme Publishing, a small press in Yardley, Pa., just reissued “What the Butler Winked At,” a memoir by Eric Horne, who worked as a butler for more than 50 years, beginning in the 1860s.
Mr. Franklin said he did not own a television and had heard about “Downton Abbey” only when a sales representative for his distributor excitedly pointed out that the book might pick up sales from fans of the show. So far, he has gone back to press three times.
On Tuesday, Joe Pilla, a buyer at Rizzoli bookstore in Manhattan, placed an order for “Downton”-related books, including “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” by David Cannadine.
Mr. Pilla said the current “Downton” rage recalled the 1970s, when he was working in an Atlanta-area bookstore and “Upstairs, Downstairs,” a precursor to “Downton,” was sending people into bookstores.
“Those public TV audiences are book-buying audiences,” Mr. Pilla said.

Struggling, Perry Finds Place Where His Message Sticks

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Jack Boyer’s father died when Mr. Boyer was 8. Raised by a single mother, he “lived a wicked life,” married at 19 and, two years later, after “she and the Lord straightened me out,” accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Almost four decades later, he is pastor of a Baptist church in the northwest part of this state.  
On Monday evening, Mr. Boyer and his wife drove to Stax’s Original Restaurant here to hear Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whom he is supporting in the presidential race. “I prayed about my decision about him,” he said. “I already knew what I wanted, and I found it in him.” He cannot think of a single issue, he said, where he disagrees with Mr. Perry.
Mr. Perry is still in the doldrums here in the latest polls, and it is not yet clear whether his recent decision to stay in the presidential race and compete here will prove smart. With poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and recent polls, he barely met the hurdle for qualification for the Jan. 19 CNN debate in Charleston, two days before the South Carolina primary.
Despite those setbacks, Mr. Perry seems to have found in South Carolina a place where he can connect with some crowds, with stump speeches, sometimes before a hundred people, that preach reverence for Jesus Christ and for the military. He appears looser and more confident than he has been for some time, perhaps since the days when he was considered a front-runner, which ended with his string of poor debate performances.
Now, though, he has more humor and humility as he courts the votes of South Carolinians. He recounts a journey from “walking down the aisle of my church and giving my heart to Jesus Christ when I was 14 years old” to “standing up for the Ten Commandments on the grounds of our Capitol in Texas.”
“The fight never ends,” he says.
It is a contrast to his experience in New Hampshire. There, despite an investment of time and effort, he often got skeptical questions, charmed some but won over few, limped out of the state weeks before Tuesday’s primary and received fewer than 2,000 votes.
In Iowa, where social conservatives are more powerful, he drew crowds in rural areas, but even after hearing him speak, many folks would still tick off all their options — Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — unsure of their choice.
Here, though, the crowds who have come to see him the past few days in the more socially conservative parts of the state have seemed to like more of what he believes in. That often has had more to do with how he and his wife, Anita, come across personally than with any particular piece of policy.
“What you see is what you get, and he stands on the same foundation that I stand on,” said Patty Whetsell, a Republican activist in Greenville who was at Stax’s. “He acknowledges God in his life, and without God, where would we be? He’s not like some pastors who think they own their church. He acknowledges those around him. And his wife is a great asset. She’s submissive to him, as she should be.”
While the warmer reception may be lifting his spirits, the question is whether it will boost his electoral prospects, still spiraling downward as of the latest poll: last week a survey by CNN, Time and ORC International found that he had just 5 percent of support from likely South Carolina primary voters, compared with 8 percent a month earlier. That drop is all the more surprising because Mrs. Bachmann, who had also invested a lot of time here and was thought to have similar appeal to social conservatives, left the race before the survey was conducted.
Part of the explanation is plain: many of Mrs. Bachmann’s supporters — and, it would seem, some of Mr. Perry’s, too — have migrated to Rick Santorum. In response, Mr. Perry has been attacking Mr. Santorum as the “King of Earmarks.” He has also outdone another rival, Newt Gingrich, in delivering the most caustic attack on Mitt Romney’s leveraged-buyout career, calling him a “vulture” who picked the bones of companies clean.
Mr. Perry still has influential Republican backers here working for him, including Representative Mick Mulvaney and the former state party chairman Katon Dawson, and a small-government, hawkish platform that should play well with a lot of voters here. But even so, others in the party say, the debates will most likely prove too much to live down.
“A lot of South Carolinians were eager to like him, but then they got a good look in those early debates and decided that he wasn’t presidential timber,” said Chad Walldorf, a business owner who helped lead the transition team of Gov. Nikki R. Haley, who has endorsed Mr. Romney. “You get one chance to make a first impression.”
Mr. Perry will not say whether he will pull out of the race, as is widely expected, if he has another poor showing at the Jan. 21 primary. “That’s trying to call the game in the first quarter,” he said, adding, “I’m not here to come in second.”

Republican Rivals Batter Romney in South Carolina

COLUMBIA, S.C. — For the Republican presidential candidates who want to stop Mitt Romney in South Carolina, it comes down to this: How far are they willing to go?
A day after Mr. Romney’s victory in New Hampshire left his rivals running out of time to block his path to the nomination, he was greeted here by a wave of attacks on his business record, his past support for abortion rights and his character.
With little left to lose, Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and their allies sought to portray Mr. Romney as insufficiently steadfast in his conservatism in this very conservative state, threatening a scorched-earth approach to the primary to be held here on Jan. 21.
But there were some signs that a pressure campaign from the party establishment — encouraged and to some degree organized by pro-Romney forces — was forcing his rivals to recalibrate if not rethink the attacks. A growing chorus of high-profile Republicans criticized the attacks on Mr. Romney’s earlier career buying and selling companies as Democratic talking points.
Two days after former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah said that Mr. Romney “likes firing people,” The Associated Press reported him as saying on Wednesday: “If you have creative destruction in capitalism, which has always been part of capitalism, it becomes a little disingenuous to take on Bain Capital,” Mr. Romney’s former firm.
But Mr. Gingrich said he would not back off as an outside “super PAC” supporting him introduced a scathing video about Mr. Romney’s work at Bain. And Mr. Perry kept up his critique of what he has called Mr. Romney’s “vulture capitalism.”
It was Day 1 of what is shaping up as a 10-day test of whether conservatives can marshal the arguments, tactics and unity to slow Mr. Romney and rally around a single alternative — and of whether Mr. Romney, now in a commanding position, can show the muscle needed to stamp out the opposition and take control of the party.
Mr. Romney utilized the full force of his formidable campaign machinery to create a backlash against the attacks on his record at Bain. Employing resources no other campaign can match, his Boston headquarters held conference calls with his huge array of endorsers around the nation, sent talking points to supporters and enlisted go-betweens to tell leaders of the pro-Gingrich group Winning Our Future that they were harming the party with the attacks.
At the very least, Mr. Romney’s team appeared to have made headway in casting his opponents as abandoning their own party’s longstanding support for the free market. It received backing Wednesday from two political voices that have had the respect of the Tea Party movement here in ways Mr. Romney has not: Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, who has endorsed Mr. Romney, and Senator Jim DeMint, who has not.
“I am baffled by the fact that we are putting the free market on trial here,” Ms. Haley said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’m concerned for my party. The free market’s what we fight for.”
Speaking on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” Mr. DeMint lectured Mr. Gingrich: “Newt, you’re a great American. Get back on your positive focus. Talk about your big ideas.” He singled out Mr. Gingrich’s attacks on Mr. Romney for changing his position on abortion, saying, “This idea of condemning people who change their minds is not a good idea for any of us.”
It was potentially critical cover in a state where Mr. Romney’s past positions in favor of abortion, and his Mormon religion, could tilt important evangelical voters against him. Mr. Romey seemed to try to get out ahead of the possibility that evangelical voters might spurn him based on his Mormonism, saying on MSNBC on Wednesday morning that he was not running for “pastor in chief” and emphasizing the economy and national security.
Those comments came as national evangelical leaders prepared to meet in Texas this weekend to consider backing one of Mr. Romney’s rivals, and his campaign was on guard for any movement to coalesce behind an alternative to him.
In the morning, Mr. Romney had declared the attacks against his business background a failure. But later, with others taking on his opponents for him, Mr. Romney did not mention the subject when it came time to address supporters here Wednesday evening. He kept his focus instead on President Obama.
The spirited new phase of the campaign was on full display here; on a Christian radio station, a commercial for Rick Santorum informed listeners that he had home-schooled his children, supported anti-abortion legislation and called for “all conservatives to unite.” Ron Paul’s campaign was showing an advertisement attacking Mr. Santorum for “a record of betrayal” on federal spending. 

But it was Mr. Gingrich and the “super PAC” supporting him, Winning the Future, that was being watched most carefully. With millions of dollars behind it from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, it was poised to have as big an effect on Mr. Romney as any other opposing force.
At a private meeting of Mr. Romney’s national finance committee on Wednesday morning, Senator John McCain helped make the case that it was time for Republicans to begin gathering around Mr. Romney’s candidacy and pushing back against the attacks from Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Perry and other rivals.
But the pro-Gingrich group’s leaders did not seem to be shaken by that or by more direct pressure on them to cease and desist.
“We’re not going to back off an inch,” said a senior adviser to the group, Rick Tyler, who took issue with the accusation from Mr. Romney’s supporters that his group was “attacking capitalism.”
“This isn’t about attacking capitalism,” Mr. Tyler said. “This is about Mitt Romney’s record on jobs, but more importantly, it’s about who is best qualified, given their records, to create jobs in South Carolina.”
The Republican pressure came from all sides. A voter approached Mr. Gingrich in Spartanburg, S.C., and said that he, too, opposed Mr. Romney. But he pleaded for him to “lay off the corporatist versus the free market” language.
While Mr. Gingrich said, “I agree with you,” he sought to draw the distinction that his criticism was not an attack on capitalism. His spokesman followed up with a statement that he did not intend to soften his stance, which he made clear in a message to supporters.
“There’s no more time for talking about stopping Mitt Romney,” the message said. “We’re going to do it next week in South Carolina or he’s almost certain to be the Republican nominee, whether conservatives like us want it or not.”

Justices Give Churches a Freer Hand on Employment

WASHINGTON — In what may be its most significant religious liberty decision in two decades, the Supreme Court on Wednesday for the first time recognized a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference.
The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a decision that was surprising in both its sweep and its unanimity. “But so, too, is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission.”
The decision gave only limited guidance about how courts should decide who counts as a minister, saying the court was “reluctant to adopt a rigid formula.” Two concurring opinions offered contrasting proposals.
Whatever its precise scope, the ruling will have concrete consequences for countless people employed by religious groups to perform religious work. In addition to ministers, priests, rabbis and other religious leaders, the decision appears to encompass, for instance, at least those teachers in religious schools with formal religious training who are charged with instructing students about religious matters.
Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia who argued the case on behalf of the defendant, a Lutheran school, said the upshot of the ruling was likely to be that “substantial religious instruction is going to be enough.”
Asked about professors at Catholic universities like Notre Dame, Professor Laycock said: “If he teaches theology, he’s covered. If he teaches English or physics or some clearly secular subjects, he is clearly not covered.”
The case, Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 10-553, was brought by Cheryl Perich, who had been a teacher at a school in Redford, Mich., that was part of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the second-largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. Ms. Perich said she was fired for pursuing an employment discrimination claim based on a disability, narcolepsy.
Ms. Perich had taught mostly secular subjects but also taught religion classes and attended chapel with her class.
“It is true that her religious duties consumed only 45 minutes of each workday,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “and that the rest of her day was devoted to teaching secular subjects.”
“The issue before us, however, is not one that can be resolved with a stopwatch,” he wrote.
Instead, the court looked to several factors. Ms. Perich was a “called” teacher who had completed religious training and whom the school considered a minister. She was fired, the school said, for violating religious doctrine by pursuing litigation rather than trying to resolve her dispute within the church.
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Wednesday’s decision could have pernicious consequences, by, for instance, barring suits from pastors who are sexually harassed.
“Blatant discrimination is a social evil we have worked hard to eradicate in the United States,” he said in a statement. “I’m afraid the court’s ruling today will make it harder to combat.”
Bishop William E. Lori, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ ad hoc committee for religious liberty, called the ruling “a great day for the First Amendment.”
“This decision,” he said in a statement, “makes resoundingly clear the historical and constitutional importance of keeping internal church affairs off limits to the government — because whoever chooses the minister chooses the message.”
Chief Justice Roberts devoted several pages of his opinion to a history of religious freedom in Britain and the United States, concluding that an animating principle behind the First Amendment’s religious liberty clauses was to prohibit government interference in the internal affairs of religious groups generally and in their selection of their leaders in particular.
The Establishment Clause prevents the government from appointing ministers,” he wrote, “and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.” 
The decision was a major victory for a broad range of national religious denominations that had warned that the case was a threat to their First Amendment rights and their autonomy to decide whom to hire and fire. Some religious leaders had said they considered it the most important religious freedom case to go to the Supreme Court in decades.
Many religious groups were outraged when the Obama administration argued in support of Ms. Perich, saying this was evidence that the administration was hostile to historically protected religious liberties.
The administration had told the justices that their analysis of Ms. Perich’s case should be essentially the same whether she had been employed by a church, a labor union, a social club or any other group with free-association rights under the First Amendment. That position received withering criticism when the case was argued in October, and it was soundly rejected in Wednesday’s decision.
“That result is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “We cannot accept the remarkable view that the religion clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”
Requiring Ms. Perich to be reinstated “would have plainly violated the church’s freedom,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. And so would awarding her and her lawyers money, he went on, as that “would operate as a penalty on the church for terminating an unwanted minister.”
In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the courts should get out of the business of trying to decide who qualifies for the ministerial exception, leaving the determination to religious groups.
“The question whether an employee is a minister is itself religious in nature, and the answer will vary widely,” he wrote. “Judicial attempts to fashion a civil definition of ‘minister’ through a bright-line test or multifactor analysis risk disadvantaging those religious groups whose beliefs, practices and membership are outside of the ‘mainstream’ or unpalatable to some.”
In a second concurrence, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote that it would be a mistake to focus on ministers, a title he said was generally used by Protestant denominations and “rarely if ever” by Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists. Nor, Justice Alito added, should the concept of ordination be at the center of the analysis.
Rather, he wrote, the exception “should apply to any ‘employee’ who leads a religious organization, conducts worship services or important religious ceremonies or rituals, or serves as a messenger or teacher of its faith.”
At the argument in October, some justices expressed concern that a sweeping ruling would protect religious groups from lawsuits by workers who said they were retaliated against for, say, reporting sexual abuse.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Wednesday’s decision left the possibility of criminal prosecution and other protections in place.
“There will be time enough to address the applicability of the exception to other circumstances,” he wrote, “if and when they arise.”

We’re Eating Less Meat. Why?

Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we’re less than one-twentieth of the population.
But that’s changing.
Until recently, almost everyone considered their dinner plate naked without a big old hunk of meat on it. (You remember “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner,” of course. How could you forget?) And we could afford it: our production methods and the denial of their true costs have kept meat cheap beyond all credibility. (American hamburger is arguably the cheapest convenience food there is.) This, in part, is why we spend a smaller percentage of our money on food than any other country, and much of that goes toward the roughly half-pound of meat each of us eats, on average, every day.
But that’s changing, and considering the fairly steady climb in meat consumption over the last half-century, you might say the numbers are plummeting. The department of agriculture projects that our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007. Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.

The report treats consumers as victims of government bias against the meat industry. We’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.

Holy cow. What’s up?

It’s easy enough to round up the usual suspects, which is what a story in the Daily Livestock Report did last month. It blames the decline on growing exports, which make less meat available for Americans to buy. It blames it on ethanol, which has caused feed costs to rise, production to drop and prices to go up so producers can cover their increasing costs. It blames drought. It doesn’t blame recession, which is surprising, because that’s a factor also.
All of which makes some sense. The report then goes on to blame the federal government for “wag[ing] war on meat protein consumption” over the last 30-40 years.
Is this like the war on drugs? The war in Afghanistan? The war against cancer? Because what I see here is:

• a history of subsidies for the corn and soy that’s fed to livestock
• a nearly free pass on environmental degradation and animal abuse
• an unwillingness to meaningfully limit the use of antibiotics in animal feed
• a failure to curb the stifling power that corporate meatpackers wield over smaller ranchers
• and what amounts to a refusal — despite the advice of real, disinterested experts, true scientists in fact —  to unequivocally tell American consumers that they should be eating less meat

Or is the occasional environmental protection regulation and whisper that unlimited meat at every meal might not be ideal the equivalent of war? Is the U.S.D.A. buying $40 million worth of chicken products to reduce the surplus and raise retail prices the equivalent of war?
No. It’s not the non-existent federal War on Meat that’s making a difference. And even if availability is down, it’s not as if we’re going to the supermarket and finding empty meat cases and deli counters filled with coleslaw. The flaw in the report is that it treats American consumers as passive actors who are victims of diminishing supplies, rising costs and government bias against the meat industry. Nowhere does it mention that we’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.
Yet conscious decisions are being made by consumers. Even buying less meat because prices are high and times are tough is a choice; other “sacrifices” could be made. We could cut back on junk food, or shirts or iPhones, which have a very high meat-equivalent, to coin a term. Yet even though excess supply kept chicken prices lower than the year before, demand dropped.
Some are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons. The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.
I can add, anecdotally, that when I ask audiences I speak to, “How many of you are eating less meat than you were 10 years ago?” at least two-thirds raise their hands. A self-selecting group to be sure, but nevertheless one that exists.
In fact, let’s ask this: is anyone in this country eating more meat than they used to?
We still eat way more meat than is good for us or the environment, not to mention the animals. But a 12 percent reduction in just five years is significant, and if that decline were to continue for the next five years — well, that’s something few would have imagined five years ago. It’s something only the industry could get upset about. The rest of us should celebrate. Rice and beans, anyone?

Taiwan Vote Lures Back Expatriates in China

BEIJING — The only thing more striking than the $32,000 diamond-encrusted eyeglasses on display at the Baodao Optical department store here is the bronze statue of Chairman Mao that greets shoppers entering what is billed as the world’s largest eyeglass emporium. 

That is because Baodao Optical’s owners are from Taiwan, the island whose governing party, the Kuomintang, fought a fierce — and losing — civil war against Mao’s Communist forces before fleeing the mainland in 1949 with more than a million refugees. The rival governments have yet to sign a peace accord.
But by choosing to display Mao’s likeness and his famous credo “Serve the People” so prominently, Baodao Optical reveals how far some Taiwanese businesses will go to romance a Chinese market that many see as the wellspring of their future prosperity.
Such gestures have become especially freighted as an estimated 200,000 people return to Taiwan for an election on Saturday whose outcome could determine the future of a relationship that has warmed steadily since President Ma Ying-jeou swept into office there in 2008.
Mr. Ma, of the Kuomintang, is facing a vigorous challenge from Tsai Ing-wen, a low-key academic whose Democratic Progressive Party has long advocated formal independence, a position that in the past inspired Beijing to lob missiles into the Taiwan Strait. Polls suggest that the race is too close to call, with a third candidate expected to draw around 10 percent of the vote, largely from Mr. Ma.
The growing political heft of the Taishang, the name given to the million or so Taiwanese in China who have staked their livelihoods on its expansive economy, has become a point of contention in a race that has raised existential questions about a Taiwan increasingly ensconced in Beijing’s embrace.
Because Taiwan does not allow absentee balloting, Taishang executives have been urging their compatriots to return home to vote, warning that a victory for Ms. Tsai could anger Beijing and prompt it to yank back the welcome mat. But Taishang business leaders have done more than exhort. They have arranged for discounted plane tickets, pressed Chinese airlines and those from Taiwan to add 200 flights and have offered their employees paid holidays that coincide with Election Day, which falls just more than a week before the start of the Chinese New Year.
When seats on regularly scheduled flights to Taiwan sold out, business groups in and around Shanghai and Guangzhou organized charter flights. Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, an electronics manufacturing giant based in Taiwan, is reportedly flying home 5,000 of his employees.
“Many Taishang weren’t that interested in the race, but when they saw how close it was, they got very concerned,” said Lin Qingfa, chairman of the Beijing Association of Taiwan Enterprises, a group that counts 300 companies among its membership. “There is a feeling that if Tsai Ing-wen is elected, cross-strait relations will suffer and so will our business opportunities.”
Ms. Tsai and her allies have cried foul, saying such efforts pander to the Chinese Communist Party, whose overarching goal is to reunify Taiwan and China, even if by force. Although the candidates are campaigning largely on domestic concerns, among them stagnant incomes, a growing wealth gap and evaporating jobs, Ms. Tsai has also cast her opponent’s pro-Beijing policies as a first step to selling out Taiwan’s sovereignty.
Bi-khim Hsiao, vice president of the New Frontier Foundation, a research institute financed by the Democratic Progressive Party, said efforts to sway the election went beyond arranging half-price flights. Ms. Hsiao said mainland officials were visiting Taiwanese-owned factories and pressuring businessmen to vote for Mr. Ma, an accusation Kuomintang officials reject.
“In the past, each time the Chinese attempted to interfere in our elections it backfired,” she said, alluding to the 2000 race, when Beijing’s warnings of “bloodshed” helped produce a narrow victory for the pro-independence candidate Chen Shui-bian. “This time is no different,” she added. “We are confident not all Taishang will vote for Ma.”
Analysts and business leaders agree, estimating that 70 percent to 80 percent of Taiwanese who live and work in mainland China are backing Mr. Ma. But their numbers could be pivotal, especially if there is a repeat of 2004, when Mr. Chen was re-elected by a margin of fewer than 30,000 of the 13 million votes cast.
These business tycoons and Taishang who have benefited from the relaxation of cross-strait ties are clearly motivated this year,” said Chen-shen Yen, director of the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “They appear to be voting for their pocketbooks, not with their hearts.” 

For business owners at least, the benefits of playing ball with Beijing are hard to deny. Direct flights have turned a daylong odyssey into a 90-minute puddle jump. In 2010, Taiwan’s exports to China hit a record $115 billion, up 35 percent from a year earlier. And Mr. Ma’s détente opened the door to mainland tourists, with more than three million of them arriving since 2008.
If the experience of Baodao Optical is any indication, cultivating the Communist Party establishment has its rewards. Since 1997, the chain has opened more than 1,000 stores across the mainland, with 2,000 more on the drawing board, executives say. By contrast, the company has 300 shops on Taiwan, whose population of 23 million is comparable to Shanghai’s. “There’s not much more expanding we can do at home,” said Keri Chang, the company’s marketing director for northeast China. “Our future is here.”
Like a good many Taiwan expatriates, Ms. Chang, 40, has strong feelings about the status quo, which means another four years of Mr. Ma and his nonconfrontational ways. When she first arrived here as a college student in 1999, she recalled, she was hectored by students and teachers who accused her of seeking to split the motherland by pursuing an independent Taiwan.
These days, her mainland Chinese friends and colleagues are mostly filled with admiration. They sidle up to her and gab about Taiwan’s pop culture and fashion, and speak longingly about its democracy and uncensored news media. “They mostly want to imitate us,” she said.
The admiration appears to go both ways. Cai Zhisheng, 38, a sales manager at the store, said his first year in China had helped chip away at the ugly stereotypes he held about China. Like many Taiwanese, he thought mainlanders were rough-edged, backward and cold. “But what I’ve found is most people are not uncivilized or impolite,” he said. “In fact, people are really friendly, especially when they find out I’m Taiwanese.”
But even Taiwanese who have done well are having second thoughts about getting too close. Tavanic Yantun, a senior marketing manager at Adidas, suspects that Beijing is seeking to manipulate Taiwan into submission, a prospect that grows more likely as Taiwan’s economy and that of its giant neighbor become interdependent.
Since the onset of the global financial crisis, he has watched as scores of well-paying jobs in Taipei have disappeared. Last year, he was lured to the mainland by an irresistible pay increase. “I had never been to China until the job interview,” he said.
The experience has been largely positive. He, too, has been warmed by the enthusiasm of Chinese colleagues who can recite dialogue from Taiwanese television. Others quietly ask him to bring back banned history books. But he is also frustrated by their insistence that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. “Even well-educated friends are brainwashed when it comes to Taiwan,” he said. “I worry one day we might have to give up our freedoms.”
With a few days before the election, Mr. Yantun said he was still undecided. Should he vote for the continued reconciliation championed by Mr. Ma or the wariness advocated by Ms. Tsai? “I guess I’m torn between my own selfishness and the future of Taiwan,” he said.

Against Odds, Path Opens Up for U.S.-Taliban Talks

WASHINGTON — Over the last year, Marc Grossman, a veteran but low-key diplomat, led a small team of American officials who met secretly from Doha, Qatar, to Munich with a shadowy representative of Afghanistan’s Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in hopes of starting peace talks.
The Obama administration’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war, initially brokered by Germany’s spy service, showed promise but have been scuttled more than once by rumors, deliberate leaks in Kabul, Islamabad and Washington and the assassination of the top Afghan negotiator in September by a supposed envoy wearing a bomb in his turban, Afghan and Western officials said.
Then, Mr. Grossman and other administration officials were caught by surprise when the Taliban announced last week that they were prepared to take an important step by opening a political office in Qatar.
Now, despite doubts in the administration, misgivings on Capitol Hill and the erratic objections of the most important partner in any potential peace deal — President Hamid Karzai — the administration’s best hope for ending the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical juncture. Next week, Mr. Grossman and his team are rushing back to the region to consult with several allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and if Mr. Karzai gives his blessing, will resume preliminary talks with the Taliban representative before another opportunity slips away.
The Qatar office would be the first of what the officials described as a series of reciprocal steps that could include the release of at least five senior Taliban officials held at the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Wednesday that the administration was “still in the preliminary stages of testing whether this can be successful.”
But she went on to say that for the first time there appeared to be support for a political resolution that included leaders of the radical Islamic government that ruthlessly ruled the country from 1996 until the American invasion after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“The reality is we never have the luxury of negotiating for peace with our friends,” Mrs. Clinton, who has pressed the initiative within the administration, said at the State Department.
“If you’re sitting across the table discussing a peaceful resolution to a conflict, you are sitting across from people who you by definition don’t agree with and who you may previously have been across a battlefield from.”
The negotiations — potentially as historic and as politically wrenching as the Paris peace talks that ended the Vietnam War — come after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and they could unfold in the middle of President Obama’s re-election campaign.
The reversal of the Taliban’s longstanding public refusal to negotiate with the United States — and the administration’s willingness to reciprocate — punctuated a highly compartmentalized effort that has proceeded in fits and starts, with the knowledge of very few officials, according to administration and Afghan officials involved in the negotiations. Begun by the American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, who died in 2010, it has been conducted by his successor as senior representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey who came out of retirement to take on what has been described as one of the most difficult jobs in government. His team includes about a half-dozen State Department, Defense Department and intelligence officials.
Only a month ago, when envoys from dozens of countries gathered in Bonn, Germany, hoping to announce a new push for political reconciliation in Afghanistan, the effort appeared moribund. The fiercest opposition came from Mr. Karzai, whose position on the prospect of talks, one senior administration official said, involved wild swings in mood and position.
Under pressure from the administration, however, Mr. Karzai ultimately relented, dropping his objections, though he continued to make demands on the location of any Taliban office until the day after it was announced.
With the United States and NATO already having announced that they would withdraw most international forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the search for some kind of political reconciliation between the new government and the Taliban became an imperative for the administration.
Nearly a year ago, Mrs. Clinton first signaled the opening for talks by recasting the administration’s longstanding preconditions: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as “necessary outcomes.” 
By then, Germany’s intelligence agency had already brokered a meeting in Munich in November 2010 between the Americans and Tayeb Agha, an English-speaking former aide and spokesman for the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, who is believed to remain in hiding in Pakistan.
Initially, the Americans were wary, having been recently embarrassed by an imposter posing as a top Taliban envoy (who ultimately made off with tens of thousands of dollars in payments).
The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May added momentum to the peace efforts, underscoring the increasingly limited ties between Al Qaeda and the remaining Taliban. One of the conditions that the United States has sought is a Taliban renunciation of Al Qaeda and international terrorism.
Over the course of what officials described as several meetings, Mr. Agha verified his true identity and connection to the Taliban leadership in hiding by posting a prearranged message on a Web site used by the group, according to the officials.
That led Mr. Grossman, a veteran diplomat whose style has been far more low-key than the flamboyant Mr. Holbrooke’s, to meet with Mr. Agha personally in October in Doha, Qatar, to discuss “confidence building” measures, including the opening of a political office.
Then things ground to a halt. Mr. Karzai, still angered by the killing the month before of the official in charge of reconciliation, Burhanuddin Rabbani, balked at the prospects of a Taliban office in Qatar. Mr. Karzai has often reacted angrily to diplomatic efforts that he perceives are under way without sufficient consultations. His aides in this case said he was properly notified.
Mrs. Clinton and other officials have repeatedly said publicly that any reconciliation effort must be led by the Afghans themselves, and yet privately they have pressed very hard for the Afghans to do so, the officials said.
”I don’t think it’s a secret that we need the Afghans — we need Karzai to be part of this,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul. Is he? “He says so. We’ll have to see.”
The situation pivoted sharply shortly after Christmas, officials and Western diplomats in Kabul said. In meetings up and down Afghan government, American and other Western officials made the stakes clear: if President Karzai wanted to leave a peace deal in place when his final term ends in 2014, this was his best chance. The Americans wanted the Qatar office to happen, the Europeans were on board and, most important, it appeared the Taliban’s leadership was willing.
A senior Afghan official acknowledged “divisions” in the presidential palace over the matter between those with pro-Western sympathies within President Karzai’s inner circle, and those whose wariness of America and its objectives in Afghanistan runs deep.
The official said that even though Mr. Karzai agreed to the Qatar office in the days after Christmas, he remained “uncertain” about whether the Taliban were sincere. That skepticism is shared by many in Washington.
“What actually ends up unfolding and what understandings are reached to launch something more visible and serious — all of that has not been fully determined yet,” a senior administration official familiar with the effort said.
As the process becomes more visible it is likely to face more intense scrutiny, especially on Capitol Hill. The release of high-level Taliban leaders from Guantánamo would certainly risk a political backlash in an election year. To criticize Mr. Obama for trying to close the prison, Republicans often point to instances in which some former detainees took part in terrorist or insurgent activity, and lawmakers from both parties tied the administration’s hands even further by imposing new restrictions on transfers.
A Taliban transfer could be the trial run of that system, and administration officials are studying the most recent version as they consider the deal. It requires the secretary of defense and the secretary of state to certify to Congress that the government to which a detainee would be transferred has certain steps to ensure that the detainee will not engage in terrorist activity.
Such a certification must take place 30 days before any transfer. While the administration provided a classified briefing to leaders of the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees about aspects of the reconciliation talks proposal late last year, it has apparently not yet made any formal certification.
Rather than releasing the five Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, the idea appears to be a transfer to the custody of Qatar, whose government would keep them under some form of control — like surveillance, house arrest and blocking them from travel abroad. Those conditions remain subject to negotiation.
Mrs. Clinton, who met with Qatar’s prime minister at the State Department on Wednesday, said no transfers were imminent.
Even now, the officials said, much remains uncertain, including the role of Pakistan in any negotiations, as well as the willingness of any of the sides to come to terms on meaningful, lasting reconciliation that would protect what the United States considers nonnegotiable: a peaceful, democratic government that preserves the gains made over the last decade.
Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander who lives in Kabul and a cousin of the administration’s liaison with the Taliban, Mr. Agha, said in an interview that the former government now sought peace, even if it remained committed to its Islamic vision of Afghanistan.
“The Taliban want peace like all of our Afghan brothers and sisters,” he said. “We believe in Islam, and we believe that Afghanistan should be an Islamic state. But the Taliban do not think that they can bring a true Islamic state only by force. We can bring those changes in many ways — by negotiating, by speaking.”