No movement in days

The Iraqi troops holding the front in eastern Mosul are perched inside bedrooms and kitchens of homes, on rooftops and in hallways. They haven't pushed forward in days. The water bottles and Styrofoam food containers they've used up pile around them, spilling into the houses' gardens.
Advancing into Mosul has become a painful slog for Iraqi forces. Islamic State group militants have fortified each neighborhood, unlike past battles where they concentrated their defenses in one part of the city. As a result, every advance inflicts relatively high casualties.
Weeks of urban combat have already left some of Iraq's most capable soldiers battered, and only about a quarter of the city has come under their control.
It took up to 10 days for Iraqi troops to move a few hundred meters (yards) and retake the neighborhood of al-Barid, a district of grand, upscale homes where fruit trees grow in the gardens....
If Iraq's military continues at the current pace, they may retake Mosul in the coming months, but at significant costs. Current rates of attrition risk further weakening the military, a legacy that could haunt Iraq's security forces for years.

That last sentence is important, because the Iraqi army is only partly rebuilt after collapsing 2 years ago. If they keep taking losses like this, it could collapse again.

Unsustainable

After two months, the battle to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State has settled into a grinding war of attrition. The front lines have barely budged in weeks. Casualties of Iraqi security forces are so high that American commanders heading the United States-led air campaign worry that they are unsustainable.

6 more months?

When the operation to take the city from the so-called Islamic State (IS) started in mid-October 2016, Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, hoped that the operation would be complete by the end of the year. Instead, the war over Mosul has just entered its third month with no end in sight. Some Iraqi military sources are resigned to a conflict that could last through to summer 2017.
At the start of November, after two weeks of rapid progress, prospects looked good for government forces. But the optimism of the early days has now given way to what looks very much like a stalemate. Depending on which source you consult, it seems Iraqi government forces have taken between a sixth and a quarter of the city from IS but are now finding further progress remarkably difficult, in the process suffering serious casualties.

Even Tal Afar will be a slog

Hashd Shaabi soldiers say operations are slowing as winter sets in and increasing numbers of civilians are being held as human shields. Retaking Tal Afar, they add, could be a long and arduous struggle.

Civilians suffering in Mosul

JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Well, Robert, to put it into a bit of historical perspective, according to some commanders I've spoken with, you'd actually have to go back to World War II to find urban fighting of this ferocity and this scale. So we're talking about a territory that's bigger than Washington, D.C. And then it's riddled with suicide bombers and snipers and explosive experts.

And it's a really old city. There are winding alleys and narrow streets. When I was covering U.S. soldiers on patrol in Mosul in 2003, they had a tough time navigating those streets. But really the main reason it's going so slowly are the civilians. There are still at least 700,000 of them in there.

SIEGEL: We're hearing about conditions for those civilians are worsening. How would you describe what's happening?

ARRAF: Really dreadful and very, very worrying because it's winter now. It's freezing cold and basics are the biggest problem. So with the water, some of the water pipelines have been damaged in the fighting. They're digging wells or they're walking for miles with jerry cans to get water from places that still have it. And some are drinking water out of the river.

There's a real lack of medical care. The U.S.-led coalition bombed the hospital there, saying it was an ISIS hideout. And the medical care there hasn't been great to begin with. Food is increasingly scarce, although it's in the markets. We're told that hardly anyone can afford it. It's really quite a grim situation.

More than twice as many civilians as in Aleppo, so where is all that news media coverage?

Nothing will be solved

“ISIS did not fill a security vacuum in the country, it filled a political one, where Sunnis in Iraq felt so disenfranchised that they welcomed ISIS with open arms,” said Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), speaking at the Chatham House think-tank in London on December 7.
“Iraqi forces will never be able to hold territory taken from ISIS unless the military track is quickly accompanied by a political track, one that addresses the core Sunni grievances… If, after a military victory is declared, Iraq goes back to business as usual and the world's attention to Iraq dissipates, you can be sure that another bloody insurgency will arise within the Sunni areas of Iraq. Yes, we expect ISIS 2.0 to rear its ugly head.”
But while the political and economic conditions that brought about ISIS in the first place are unlikely to change with the fall of Mosul or Raqqa (the group's self-proclaimed capital in Syria), the nature of the response from Sunni groups may differ next time around. According to Michael Weiss, author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, “What ISIS 2.0 could look like might not even be jihadist in nature. A lot of Sunni Arab actors are saying: this will come back but it may take a more nationalistic, secular cast, but make no mistake, there will be another Sunni insurgency because we do not trust Baghdad.” He was speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London in October.

America may never leave Iraq

US policy makers plan an “indefinite” military presence in Iraq and will double the number of American soldiers in the country to 10,000, a senior Iraqi official said on Saturday.
“Washington will not extend its presence on Iraqi soil through new military bases, but it will deploy more soldiers to currently existing bases in the capital Baghdad, the Anbar and Nineveh provinces as well as the Kurdistan region,” the minister told The New Arab, speaking on the condition of anonymity

Aleppo evacuation to complete in days

The evacuation of Aleppo should take no more than two days, Russian and Turkish foreign ministers say, following a rare breakthrough and show of unity by world powers over Syria that allows UN monitors to observe the operation.
A total 37,500 evacuees have so far left the war-torn Syrian city and the goal is to complete all evacuations by Wednesday, Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
The evacuation of of Aleppo would be complete in a maximum of two days, Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, said.

where India messed up

As India continues its scorched-earth campaign against cash, the question baffling many analysts is why a country so unfamiliar with digital payments would outlaw 86 percent of its currency, the most-favored method of settling transactions.
Sample the following three factoids from a study led by Tufts University researchers:

Fewer than 10 percent of Indians have ever used any kind of non-cash payment instrument.
Less than 3 percent of the value transacted in the year ending March 2014 used cards.
Fewer than 2 percent of Indians had used a mobile phone to receive a payment, compared with over 60 percent of Kenyans.
...
It's true that India doesn't have anything like China's Tenpay, controlled by Tencent Holdings Ltd., which runs the WeChat social network, or its larger rival Alipay, owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s banking and payments affiliate, Ant Financial. Paytm, the most popular Indian wallet, is tiny versus Ant, which services 450 million customers in China and was valued by CLSA at $75 billion in September.
Although the Indian startup has witnessed explosive growth since the government's Nov. 8 currency ban, tapping opportunities isn't proving to be easy. Paytm launched an in-store payment app last month, only to withdraw it amid security concerns.

Indian government promises don't add up

So there was tons of new currency being printed and everything was to be normal in next ten days. But ask any level headed Indian - educated or not - and he will tell you that it's not going to happen.

In fact, several new and large discrepancies have emerged in the stated positions of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the government on the printing and distribution of new currencies following the demonetisation of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes on November 8.

These discrepancies include a highly unlikely surge in the supply of high-denomination notes in two days. They also show substantial divergence in figures given by the central banker and those given by the government in Parliament. And finally, there's an unexplained hiatus in the supply of notes for 11 days.

Either Parliament has been misled, or claims about the supply by the RBI are flawed.

India doubles down

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has introduced a fresh set of restrictions on cash deposits of demonetized notes adding to further confusion among consumers in India.

According to the new set of rules, individuals will be able to deposit bank notes above INR 5,000 ($74) only once until the official deadline of December 30. This can however only be done after an explanation to two bank officials as to why this was not deposited earlier. The deposit will then be made only after the bank officials merit it as a satisfactory explanation.