The silhouetted figure in the foreground and square crop differentiate this image from an underwear fashion show in Seoul. The crop gets rid of distracting elements on the sides and focuses the attention on the male models. View this week’s Your View showcase here.

That the situation is bad in Afghanistan is obvious. Quite how bad is open to debate following the 20-hour attack by insurgents on Kabul, though former Indian intelligence chief B. Raman put it rather succinctly on his Twitter feed @SORBONNE75. “If one considers totality of picture—anti-terror, anti-insurgency—- US far from prevailing in Afghanistan. US troops after 10 yrs in same position as Soviet troops after 8 yrs were in 1987—victory increasingly elusive.” Yet as has been the case for years, the United States has few good options in Afghanistan. Pulling out altogether would not only leave Afghanistan dealing with a bitter civil war but could further destabilise Pakistan.  Staying runs the risk of testing the patience not just of western public opinion but also of Afghans, who as the Afghanistan Analysts Network said, could come to see foreign forces as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  ”The possible perception among Afghan residents that the presence of foreigners is a catalyst for attacks may lead to a growing conclusion that the problems related to their presence far outweigh the benefits,” it said. In the meantime, talks with the Afghan Taliban in order to try to reach a political settlement  appear to be going nowhere and are unlikely to become any easier after the attack on Kabul. Early indications are that the United States is determined to stay the course – U.S. ambassador to Kabul Ryan Crocker played down the attack - and concentrate on  negotiating an agreement allowing it to keep troops in Afghanistan well beyond the 2014 deadline it has set for handing over security to Afghan forces. Crocker also blamed the Pakistan-based Haqqani network for the attack while  U.S. General John Allen, the head of coalition forces in Afghanistan, said the United States would continue to try to convince Pakistan to rein in the militant group. In short, business as usual and indeed business as it has been for years, with the United States trying more or less to hold its ground in Afghanistan, while struggling to convince the Pakistan army to act against the militant proxies it once nurtured to counter India. That pressure is likely to be accompanied by a continued or intensified campaign of drone bomb attacks on militant targets in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan. On the Pakistan side, there is as yet no obvious sign of a change of stance.  After a bitter fall-out following the raid by U.S. forces who found and killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, the United States and Pakistan have begun working together again – at least in targetting al Qaeda. The Pakistan army made a point of stressing “the intimate cooperation between Pakistan and United States intelligence agencies”  after the arrest in Quetta earlier this month of al Qaeda operative Younis al Mauritani. But that cooperation does not yet stretch to Pakistan turning on its former militant allies. The army says it is fighting on too many fronts already and must give priority to tackling the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other groups which threaten Pakistan rather than launching yet another military operation to clear out areas like North Waziristan, where the Haqqani network is based. The army’s reluctance to turn on its old militant allies, however, also stems from a deep-rooted psychological angst about Pakistan’s security.  Once these Islamist militant groups are gone, Pakistan will have no leverage left to defend itself against its much bigger neighbour India to the east, nor against an India-friendly Afghanistan to the west.  Traditionally, to a military mind, defence of borders equals national security – an idea that remained unchanged even after Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons. And nor would Pakistan have reliable proxies which it believes might help give it influence in Afghanistan. A report just produced outlining what the Pakistani establishment hopes to see in Afghanistan makes it clear that it still sees a role for both the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network in a political settlement in Afghanistan. It is in changing that psychological angst about Pakistan’s security that the United States has hoped to find its elusive solution. Yet there is no evidence that in the short-run Pakistan’s borders are going to become any more secure. On the Indian side, a slow-moving peace process is making slow but steady progress, helped in part by a focus on improving trade relations. But those gains are fragile, vulnerable to a major new attack on Indian territory, like the 2008 assault on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants. They are also offset by growing tensions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with both countries accusing the other of failing to take firm enough action against militants operating on both sides.  One hope is that Pakistan will shift its focus eventually from external security to internal security – with a functioning democracy and better governance helping to deliver both political and economic security.  This internal security would in turn help it build better economic and trade ties with both Afghanistan and India, locking all three countries into the kind of economic inter-dependency that make it in their interests to retain friendly relations. But that will take very a long time. And as George Perkovich at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued in a report titled “Stop Enabling Pakistan’s Dangerous Dysfunction”, the very process of building democracy has often been undermined by the U.S. reliance on the Pakistan army as its main partner in fighting militants. (At its worst, that conundrum means that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan requires it to work most closely with the Pakistan army, thereby undermining a transition to democracy in Pakistan which could make it easier for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan.) There are not going to be any easy solutions to all this.  But the United States is not the Soviet Union. For all its financial troubles, the U.S. economy is in nowhere near the state of decay that the Soviet economy reached when the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan. And unlike the Soviet Union, the United States does not have a superpower actively campaigning against it, as Moscow did when the U.S. backed insurgents fighting the Soviet occupation.  Washington’s policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan might need some rethinking, but it seems to be determined to stay the course. In that sense, the Kabul attack changed very little.

Instead, prosecutors said, Cosmo used new investments to pay returns to investors, in a classic Ponzi structure. Media accounts dubbed Cosmo a “mini-Madoff” following his arrest in January 2009, because of the similarity of his scheme to that of New York investment manager Bernard Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar swindle, which had been discovered only weeks earlier.Cosmo pleaded guilty in October 2010 to federal mail and wire fraud charges. Under federal sentencing guidelines he faced up to 40 years in prison.In contrast to many of Madoff’s victims, who were well-off Manhattan residents, charities and companies, prosecutors said, Cosmo and Agape preyed on working-class families, U.S. soldiers and others who wound up losing all or part of their life savings.”The defendant’s actions crushed the hopes and dreams of everyday citizens,” Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.An attorney for Cosmo declined to comment.SECOND FRAUD-RELATED CONVICTIONAccording to prosecutors, Cosmo fraudulently convinced investors to pour more than $400 million into the Agape companies between October 2003 and January 2009, telling them their money would be used to fund short-term secured bridge loans to commercial borrowers and make other short-term loans to small businesses.Investors were promised returns as high as 80 percent on their investments, prosecutors said. While a small amount of their funds were actually spent on commercial loans, the majority of new money went to paying returns to other investors, prosecutors said.Cosmo admitted to using about $80 million in investor funds to perform unauthorized trades in commodities and futures markets. Prosecutors said he also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars without permission to fund a lavish lifestyle — including hotel rooms, limousine rides and jewelry purchases — and to pay Agape brokers for bringing in new clients.This will be the second fraud-related prison term for Cosmo. In 1999, he was sentenced to serve 21 months after admitting to having misled investors, commingled funds and forged documents while working at a stock brokerage firm. He was stripped of his broker’s license by the National Association of Securities Dealers in 2000 and forbidden from associating with other registered securities dealers.In January 2009, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a separate lawsuit against Cosmo and the Agape entities. It was stayed pending resolution of the criminal charges.The case is United States v. Cosmo, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, no. 09-2255.

BANK OF AMERICA MERRILL LYNCHBofA Merrill Lynch said Michel Sindelar will join the company in January 2012 as head of CEEMEA Emerging Markets Equities. Previously, he was managing director and head of Emerging Markets Equity Product at Morgan Stanley.

The company sold $1 billion of six-month bills due April 11, 2012, at a 0.095 percent stop-out rate, up from a 0.091 percent rate for its $1 billion of six-month bills sold a week ago.The three-month bills were priced at 99.994 with a money market yield of 0.025 percent, and the six-month bills were priced at 99.952, with a money market yield of 0.095 percent.Settlement is Oct. 12-13.

* German 30-yr Bund auction seen well-received despite flat 10/30 curveBy Emelia Sithole-MatariseLONDON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - German government bonds fell on Wednesday as traders sought to push prices lower before a German sale of 30-year Bunds and pending European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso’s unveiling of a bank recapitalisation plan.Bunds reversed gains made earlier after Slovakia stalled efforts to give new powers to the euro zone’s rescue fund for indebted states.The Slovak parliament may hold a new vote as soon as Thursday to approve the fund but the rejection highlighted the barriers leaders face in finding a comprehensive solution to the euro zone’s debt crisis.Barroso said he would propose a plan to help European banks which are facing severe funding pressures due to market worries about their exposure to debt issued by Greece and other peripheral euro zone countries.That will offer the latest sign of what direction European leaders may be taking after Germany and France promised to come up with a comprehensive solution to the crisis.”There’s a bit of concern about what Barroso is going to say. That creates a bit of uncertainty because we don’t know how the plan is going to come out in terms of the details,” said Achilleas Georgolopoulos, a strategist at Lloyds Bank.”Is he going to propose something which is very optimistic, that is going to build up expectations relative to Merkel/Sarkozy or something which is less optimistic that will create problems in terms of market perception. It’s not really a risk-off move,” he said.The Bund future was last 33 ticks down at 134.20 with technical charts painting a mixed outlook, according to RBS analysts.”A closed gap from Sept. 2 and together with a triple top pattern suggest further downside potential to the targets at 132.78 and 131.33/00, while short-term momentum indicate a pause or even a bounce in the trend,” the strategists said in a note.CASH INFLOWS TO HELP 30-YEAR BUND SALECash 10-year yields were 2.6 basis points up at 2.114 percent with the 30-year Bund yielding 2.847 percent , up 2 bps before the auction of 2 billion euros of 30-year Bunds later in the session.The German 10/30-year yield gap has gap has tightened some 25 bps since early September to 74 bps, its tightest since July as 10-year Bunds have underperformed during the unwinding of safe-haven bids as European policymakers showed a sense of urgency in dealing with the two-year debt crisis.Although the flattening of the curve may not be positive for the sale, it is likely to be well covered by around 19 billion euros of cash inflows from German coupon and redemption payments, with small amount on offer also expected to help.”The 30-year German benchmark looks cheap on a number of metrics, particularly on an outright basis — on yield and asset swap terms — and on cross-country versus the US,” Lloyds strategists said in a note.”Given that this is the last tap of the 30-year this year, and the relatively scarce ultra-long supply for the remainder of 2011, this auction should be well supported.”