For a man who is sometimes seen as the Palestinian politician that the Israelis and the Americans like best, Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad was in a strikingly robust mood during a two-hour press conference in Ramallah yesterday. While too polite to criticise the Obama administration, he nevertheless had a clear message in the wake of the failure by the US to persuade the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to grant a freeze on Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank as a precursor to serious negotiations.

He suggested that the Palestinian leadership no longer had much interest in a "process for the sake of a process" and he questioned what Mr Netanyahu's "equivocal" endorsement of a Palestinian state really meant.

Mr Fayyad had been much struck by a report from the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, arguing that the 60 per cent of the West Bank controlled by Israel and designated as Area C under the Oslo accords, including the Jordan Valley, should not be handed over in any peace deal. If the Israeli establishment was envisaging a "Mickey Mouse state" along these lines, he said, then "it looks like it would not come close to what we have in mind."

Gunmen have attacked law enforcement buildings in Pakistan, with at least 18 people reported killed in Lahore and eight in a suicide bombing elsewhere.

The highest-profile target in Lahore was the Federal Investigation Agency offices. There were also co-ordinated attacks on two police academies.

Meanwhile, in the north-western town of Kohat, a suicide bomber rammed his car into a police station, killing eight.

There has been an upsurge in violence in Pakistan in recent weeks.

Lahore itself was long spared the brunt of Pakistan's militant violence, but there have been a number of attacks in the city since the start of the year.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is damaging his standing with his own supporters as he careens back and forth between Israel and the United States. As his support fades, Palestinians are beginning to discuss a possible successor. Someone who might pave the way for reconciliation between Abbas' Fatah party and the radical Hamas.

Laila al-Bukhari has a limp handshake. It is hard to believe that her hands once attached explosive belts to Palestinian suicide bombers.

Al-Bukhari, now 32, was released just days ago after spending seven years and four months in an Israeli prison. Her eyes constantly dart around the room as she talks, as if to make sure that she is no longer incarcerated in a small cell at Damun Prison in the Israeli port city of Haifa. Instead she is sitting in the large living room of her parents' house, a former British governor's residence in the Palestinian city of Nablus in the mountains of the West Bank.

The young woman is wearing trousers and a T-shirt, her reddish-brown hair is tied back into a ponytail, and her bare feet are inserted into white platform sandals. Bukhari, a member of the secular Fatah movement, is not a devout Muslim.

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan.  The statistic is likely to play into the escalating debate in Congress over the cost of a war that entered its ninth year last week.

Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations  Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate.

"It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome," Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense panel, said in an interview with The Hill. "When I heard that figure from the Defense Department, we started looking into it."

The Pentagon comptroller's office provided the fuel statistic to the committee staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion. The Obama administration uses this estimate in calculating the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan.

An influential Pentagon strategist advocates a fifty-year counterinsurgency campaign.

Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon's plan for a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond.

Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are hidden.

Among the top experts responsible for this fifty-year war plan, concocted in 2005 in windowless offices in the Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier, an anthropologist, former top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and current aide to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Kilcullen is a media favorite, the subject of a long New Yorker profile by George Packer, glowing columns by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and weighty late-night conversations with Charlie Rose.

Kilcullen's recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla, presents the case for a Long War of fifty or even 100 years' duration, with chapters on Iraq (a mistake he believes was salvaged by the military surge he promoted in 2007-08), Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a five-to-ten-year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees as the center of the terrorist threat) and even Europe (where, he says, human rights laws create legislative "safe havens" for urban Muslim undergrounds).