Back to Basics

AP Photo/Allauddin Khan, FileAfghan policemen walk ahead of the U.S. soldiers with the NATO- led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) during a foot patrol in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, in this Jan. 7, 2012 file photo.

A NATO report leaked to British news outlets found that Taliban leaders are confident they will regain power in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdraws, and said the insurgency has not been seriously eroded by the military efforts of America and its allies.

That report illustrates the hazards of negotiating with the Taliban while preparing to pull out of the country, according to military analysts and Afghan officials.

The classified NATO report, titled the “State of the Taliban,” concluded that “many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban. Once ISAF [NATO-led forces] is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable.”

The report, leaked to the BBC and other British news organizations, was based on material collected from “27,000 interrogations of more than 4,000 captured Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives” along with other foreign fighters and civilians.

“This leaked NATO report should give pause to those who are pushing for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban,” said Lisa Curtis, a former CIA analyst now with the Heritage Foundation. “There are well-founded concerns that the Taliban are not interested in genuine peace talks and are trying to string the U.S. and international community along in talks that would simply allow them to play for time.”

Numerous Afghan opposition leaders to President Hamid Karzai and former senior Afghan officials interviewed by The Washington Examiner questioned U.S. insistence on peace negotiations with the Taliban, saying the radical group continues to bomb and infiltrate government installations. The death of former Afghan President and High Peace Council leader Burhanuddin Rabbani last year by a Taliban suicide bomber is just one example of the Taliban’s goals to take control of the country again, they said.

“When the Taliban was in power from 1996 to 2001, only three nations recognized this brutal, terrorist government — Pakistan, [the United Arab Emirates] and Saudi Arabia,” said a former senior Afghan official who asked not to be named. “Now, because the U.S. wants to pick up and run, the Taliban are worth speaking to? Or is it that we are handing Afghanistan over to the Taliban under the guise of a peace process?”

The insurgency’s “strength, motivation, funding and tactical proficiency remains intact” despite more than 10 years of warfare in Afghanistan to dismantle the extremist group’s power, according to the NATO report.

This month the Taliban announced the opening of a political office in Qatar, a first step in holding peace talks with the United States ahead of the planned withdrawal troops in 2014.

The Taliban also called for the release of five high-level Taliban officials being held at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Karzai’s peace council, and his cousin Hekmat Karzai, director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul, also requested the release of these prisoners. Marc Grossman, U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said last week that the U.S. has not made a decision as whether to release the five prisoners.

Curtis said the Taliban are drawing out the peace process, in part to assure the release of those prisoners.

AP Photo/Marco Ugarte Felipe Cabrera Sarabia, alias "El Inge," is shown to the press under the custody of army soldiers at the federal organized crime investigations headquarters (SIEDO) in Mexico City, Monday Dec. 26, 2011. According to federal authorities, Sarabia is a close associate and head of security for Mexico's most wanted criminal, Joaquin Guzman Loera, alias "El Chapo," leader of the Sinaloa cartel in the Durango mountains region and a high priority target for Mexican and U.S. law enforcement.

Mexico’s long, bloody war on violent drug cartels has had the unintended consequence of boosting the fortunes of a sophisticated criminal organization headed by one of the world’s most notorious criminals, federal anti-drug agents and officials said.Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel and one of the richest and most powerful criminals in the world, continues to elude both Mexican and U.S. law enforcement.

Chapo, who was No. 55 on Forbes magazine’s 2011 list of billionaires, has seen his net worth grow as Mexican President Felipe Calderon has openly warred with drug cartels since 2006 in a conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 46,000 police, soldiers and civilians. Calderon targeted cartels that had engaged in wanton violence as they tried to supplant Guzman’s operation.

“The Sinaloa Cartel has unfortunately benefited from Mexico’s decision to focus on breaking up the most violent cartels first,” said a U.S. official who asked not to be named. “Mexico’s success against [Los] Zetas has at least temporarily improved the Sinaloa Cartel’s position as they move in to take over territory.”

For nearly two decades Guzman, whose nickname “Chapo” means “Shorty,” has been vying for control of transit routes along the U.S. southern border to move narcotics, contraband and people into the United States, federal law enforcement officials said.

His drug cartel is considered one of the best organized criminal syndicates in the world, with tentacles reaching far inside the United States, Central America, Africa and Europe. He has amassed an army of foot soldiers and hired killers, and he uses his fortune to buy corrupt judges, prosecutors, cops and military officials.

“Chapo is what we would consider a high priority target,” said Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Jeffrey Scott, a special agent who worked on operations targeting drug cartels along the Arizona border.

Scott said Mexico’s stepped-up drug war against the cartels causes a shuffling of the deck in which one cartel “unfortunately may benefit from government intervention, but only for a short period of time.”

Mexican and U.S. law enforcement agencies have increased cooperation and joint operations to combat cartels over the past four years, he said, adding that Mexico has extradited more than 400 wanted drug dealers to the U.S. since 2007.

Los Zetas, a paramilitary force started by deserters from Mexico’s Special Forces military unit, has increased its presence in Chapo’s territory over the past year, leading to bloody skirmishes in Mexican cities along the U.S. border. The gruesome nature of the fighting was highlighted last week by the discovery of five severed heads in Durango, Mexico.

The narcotics smuggled across the border are destructive enough, but American officials are concerned that the cartels are open to helping terrorist groups smuggle people and weapons into the United States.

A senior official told The Washington Examiner that U.S.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey walks away from the podium at the conclusion of their news briefing on the defense strategic guidance, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012, at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/world/2012/01/defense-chief-admits-there-some-risk-slashing-military/2066486#ixzz1iiZtZejN

President Obama’s new defense strategy which slashes tens of thousands of troops from the Army and Marine Corps and cuts about half a trillion dollars from the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade exposes the U.S. to “acceptable risk,” according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who said that was necessary in the face of new budget realities.

But critics charged Thursday that the president cut too much muscle along with the fat, and has left the United States vulnerable.

Obama, who made a rare appearance at the Pentagon to unveil his strategy, said the doctrine requiring the U.S. military to be prepared to win two major wars will be scaled back to one that allows the U.S. to win one war and disrupt enemies in other parts of the world.

Panetta said we “will no longer need to be sized to support the kind of large-scale, long-term military operations ” of recent decades. He said the decision comes with “some level of additional but acceptable risk.”

But retired Army Maj. Gen. Timothy Haake, who served with the Special Forces, said the shift in doctrine is a “dangerous strategy dictated by poverty.”

Haake said announcing such a shift in strategy will only embolden enemies and potential adversaries such as Iran, North Korea and China.

“It makes it a much more dangerous world when you declare that you can only handle one war at a time,” Haake said. “If you’re going to reduce your deficit it shouldn’t be on the back of the military.”

Others saw the president’s strategy as a thoughtful response to the modern world. Michael O’Hanlon, defense expert with the Brookings Institution, said the new strategy allows the Navy and Air Force to be strengthened without piling up deficit spending.

O’Hanlon said the strategy focuses on threats like terrorism and cyber-warfare and counters Chinese and Iranian air and sea power.

However, the doctrine includes significant cuts to both Army and Marine Corps ground forces. Defense officials said the Army will go from 570,000 to 490,000 over the next decade. The Marine Corps is expected to be cut from 200,000 to roughly 180,000 active duty members.

Although the doctrine won’t cut the budget of U.S. Special Operations Forces or intelligence agencies, Adm. William McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the House Armed Services Committee Thursday that cuts will affect the ability to carry out specialized missions.

Jeffrey F. Addicott, a former special forces lawyer who is now a terrorism law expert in San Antonio, said the cuts fit a dangerous pattern in American history. “After World War I we decimated our military while our enemies were building theirs,”he said. “Before World War II we were practicing with broomsticks and plywood cutouts.”

Washington Examiner The Obama administration announced Thursday that it has signed an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, selling more than $30 billion in highly advanced F-15 fighter jets and sending other advanced weapons to the kingdom just as tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia’s regional neighbor Iran continue to escalate.The sale of 84 new aircraft, and the upgrading of 70 F-15s already in the Saudi air force, sends “a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the Gulf and broader Middle East,” said Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro. “It will enhance Saudi Arabia’s ability to deter and defend against external threats to its sovereignty.”

The first new aircraft will be delivered to Saudi Arabia in early 2015, Pentagon officials said.

The approval, which was signed on Christmas Eve, comes just days after Tehran threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Congress has passed a bill to place strict sanctions on Iran because of Tehran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons. U.S. military officials warned Wednesday that the U.S. would not tolerate any shutdown of the vital oil waterway route by Iran.

Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran escalated in October when the U.S. Justice Department announced that members of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard were plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in Washington through the use of Mexican drug cartel assassins.

The deal with Boeing is expected to create more than 50,000 American jobs, and help 600 suppliers of parts in more than 44 states. About 5,500 Saudi personnel will receive training on the weapons systems and aircraft until 2019, Pentagon officials said.

Boeing CEO Jim McNerney said Thursday in a news release that “we appreciate the efforts of the Obama Administration and the trust of King Abdullah’s government in finalizing the agreement, which will support tens of thousands of American jobs and help the Kingdom enhance its defense capabilities and diversify its workforce.”

White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters in Hawaii, “This agreement reinforces the strong and enduring relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia and demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a strong Saudi defense capability as a key component to regional security.”

The F-15 sale is part of a larger $60 billion package that will send Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, plus high-tech missiles and bombs, to Saudi Arabia.

When the Saudi government first requested the package in April 2010, it met with congressional resistance from members who said it could create a threat to Israel. Shapiro said those concerns have been discussed but he would not disclose details, saying he was “not going to get into private diplomatic discussions” that the U.S. has had with Israel.

Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner’s national security correspondent. She can be reached at scarter@washingtonexaminer.com.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, gestures during a meeting with victims of violence in Mexico City, Thursday June 23, 2011. Calderon says he doesn't regret his strategy to fight organized crime, despite calls to end a confrontation that has killed at least 35,000 during his administration. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

“It’s the elephant in the room that nobody is talking about,” said one senior U.S. official, who asked not to be named. “Our neighbor to the south is being ripped apart at the seams. We need a strategy with Mexico that is sustainable. A national security vacuum has formed that endangers our homeland.”

President Felipe Calderon’s policy to use the Mexican military to wage war against the drug czars has led to violent deaths for nearly 50,000 people in the past five years — including police, soldiers, cartel members and innocent victims.

Beheadings, mutilations and assassinations of senior Mexican officials have destabilized Mexico, according to U.S. officials who work on the southern border. The drug routes created by the cartels — tunnels, porous border terrain and waterway passages — pose serious national security risks to the U.S., officials said.

The attention given to Mexico during the Bush and Obama administrations has been dwarfed by Iraq and Afghanistan as well as uprisings in the Middle-East. But Mexico appears to be entering a critical moment.

Calderon’s presidency comes to an end next year. Former Mexico City Mayor Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist who narrowly lost his last bid for presidency under the Democratic Revolutionary Party, announced last week that he will run for office again. One of Obrador’s campaign promises is to re-evaluate Calderon’s drug war.

But Calderon remains committed to his approach, and claims it is working. He is pushing the Mexican congress to approve initiatives that will rebuild the nation’s local police forces, which have been mired in corruption.

Whoever wins next year’s election will be confronted with the drug cartel crisis and may be forced to come up with a new approach, American experts said.

“We need to have a continued sense of urgency in regards to Mexico,” said Ray Walser, senior policy analyst focusing on Mexico and Latin America for the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Walser, who worked with the State Department from 1980 until 2007, said, “You need a stronger and more stable environment in Mexico. It has lacked media attention because frankly, it’s not a priority. We are not focused on the Western Hemisphere and the threats that lie there. We’ve pretty much ignored Latin America, Central America, the major security crisis in Mexico.”

The U.S. has delivered more than $1.6 billion dollars in assistance to Mexico since 2007.

American military trainers have been working with Mexican Marines. And a number of American security contractors and CIA operators have been sent to Mexico this year to aide the struggling Mexican government with the crisis, U.S. officials said.

“It’s going to take a concerted effort to ensure our neighbor and friend doesn’t lose its footing on the drug war,” the US official said.

In this April 16, 2011, file photo anti-government protesters shout slogans during a demonstration demanding the resignation of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in Sanaa, Yemen. Saleh, was a key U.S. ally but violent protests demand his removal. The conflict has put all CIA and military counterterrorism operations on ice, officials said, leading to fears that the increasingly sophisticated terrorist group will grow even stronger.

Violent uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, coupled by strained relations between the Untied States and Pakistan, are overwhelming American counterterrorism efforts aimed at al Qaeda, giving the terrorist organization breathing room to plan attacks on the West, intelligence analysts and military officials say.

Upheaval in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and other Muslim nations has dislodged or distracted some of the U.S. allies who once helped the intelligence community, from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to his counterpart in Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who headed the Obama administration’s Afghanistan-Pakistan review last year, said, “in the short term the upheavals in the Arab world are a big setback for counterterrorism against al Qaeda and its allies.”

Riedel said deposed or endangered officials like ex-Vice President of Egypt Omar Sulaiman, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s defected Foreign Minister Musa Kusa and embattled President Saleh of Yemen and Syrian leader Bashar Assad “fought al Qaeda ruthlessly,” said Riedel, who is now a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution.

“Now they are gone or going,” he added. “Who ever replaces them will not be as effective, at least at first. Al Qaeda has in its own words ‘great expectations’ that it can exploit this opening.”

Al Qaeda leaders have made it clear they intend to seize the opportunity. In their latest March issue of Inspire Magazine, American born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, writes “the outcome doesn’t have to be an Islamic government for us to consider what is occurring to be a step in the right direction. Whatever the outcome is, our mujahideen [holy warrior] brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the rest of the Muslim world will get a chance to breathe again after three decades of suffocation.”

Alix Levine, a counterterrorism expert and director of research at security consulting firm Cronus Global said, “[Al Qaeda's] response to this pressing question is very strategic — they approve of peaceful demonstrations as long as violence is not ruled out — proving that they care about the people while still not criticizing the message inherent to their ideology.”

Strained relations with Pakistan have also damaged counterterrorism efforts against al Qaeda and the Taliban. One U.S. official said that Pakistan’s demands to cut off drone strikes and remove special forces and CIA officers from the region is a huge setback at a time “when we need to be working together to dismantle and kill” al Qaeda.

Current counterterrorism analysts agree that the global crisis has directly affected their ability to gain momentum on al Qaeda since uprisings began in January.

NOGALES, AZ - Hundreds of cars wait to pass from Mexico into the United States at the border crossing on December 10, 2010 in Nogales, Arizona. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

A decrease in the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States from Mexico touted by federal officials is a fiction created by an unwritten policy to avoid arresting those crossing the border illegally and instead to use a variety of tactics to turn them back across the border, federal law enforcement agents said.

“This unspoken policy isn’t anything new,” said one federal law enforcement official, who asked not to be named for fear of reprimand. “For years we have been verbally ordered to ‘turn back south’ aliens who already illegally penetrated the border. Agents are verbally ordered to ‘TBS’ illegal entries by using intimidation tactics … therefore, the agency avoids documented arrest numbers.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics said in February that the number of illegal aliens has dropped by 1 million from the record 11.8 million in the country in January 2007. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the decrease is the result of adding more agents along the border, and fewer persons attempting the crossing because of a decrease in jobs in the United States.

However, several Border Patrol agents say those numbers don’t reflect the reality of a porous border where arrests are discouraged as part of an unwritten policy aimed at limiting the numbers of detained illegals. Some segments of the border are deemed off-limits for detentions, the agents said.

Cochise County, Ariz., Sheriff Larry Dever received a letter of reprimand from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher this week for telling Fox News Channel that border agents were not making arrests but using tactics to force the illegal aliens back across the border.

Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher said in the letter to Dever that his “assertion is completely, 100 percent false.”

But agents interviewed by The Examiner said Dever’s comments are an accurate reflection of what is an open secret on the border — that the goal is not to arrest illegal immigrants but to attempt to turn them back.

Agents won’t come forward because “they know they will become the target of the investigation and in the end nothing will change,” said T.J. Bonner, recently retired president of the National Border Patrol Council.

Border agents working along the Rio Grande River in Texas told The Examiner that sometimes scare tactics to drive back illegal aliens across the river came close to ending in the deaths of the migrants, as well as the agents. “Some didn’t know how to swim so they would start to drown and we’d have to go in to save them,” an agent working along the Texas-Mexico border said.

Arturo Chavez Chavez, Mexico's attorney general, speaks during a press conference in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte, File)

Mexico’s Attorney General Arturo Chavez resigned Thursday, in the face of  harsh criticism from women’s groups that he did little to solve hundreds of rapes and murders plaguing the state of Chihuahua.

President Felipe Calderon announced the resignation but did not elaborate on the decision.

Marisela Morales has been nominated to take Chavez’s place.  She would be the first woman to fill the post in Mexico’s history if confirmed by the Mexican Senate.

Chavez, who was nominated in 2009, is the second attorney general to resign since Calderon took office in 2006.

More than 35,000 people have been killed in cartel violence during the Calderon presidency.

The turmoil in Egypt kept America’s security and military leaders on edge Saturday, fearful of a worst-case scenario in which a massive arsenal supplied by the U.S. falls into the hands of Islamic extremists.

Egypt’s massive military, with more than 1000 M1 Abrams battle tanks, 220 F-16 fighter jets and 150 attack helicopters including Apaches, has grown through the years after the historic peace settlement with Israel in the 1970s. U.S. foreign policy has seen investment in Egypt’s military as a key to stability in the region. But with control of the country uncertain, that military becomes a wildcard.

“The substantial military resources of Egypt falling into the hands of an unknown future Egyptian government has a much greater potential to being a security risk for the US,” said a U.S. military official, on condition of anonymity.

On Saturday, after the Egyptian cabinet formally resigned at the demand of Mubarak, an official who spoke to The Washington Examiner by phone said “no one is speaking [for the government] because in reality we have no government.”

As the world focuses on turmoil in Egypt, a simmering insurrection is threatening to boil over in Yemen, with potentially dire consequences for the United States, analysts said. Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Yemen’s cities this week, imperiling the corrupt government of one of the world’s poorest countries — one that has become a haven for some of the most dangerous al Qaeda operatives. Read More

The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement in Egypt, has called on President Hosni Mubarak, 82, to resign. The group is not listed by U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization, but many western analysts see its views as extremist. Egyptian law does not allow the Muslim Brotherhood to run for parliamentary elections, although some members run as independents.

James Carafano, senior defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said the situation in Egypt resembles the same shift in power during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, but that it is still too early to predict that Mubarak will be succeeded by an extremist government.

Carafano compared the Obama administration’s Middle East policies with those of former President Jimmy Carter’s before the revolution in Iran.

“If Egypt became an Islamist state it would be a huge setback for the administration,” Carafano said. “In the last two years, Obama played nice with Iran, made speeches in Cairo and pushed for talks with the Palestinians” instead of holding those accountable for their actions and policies.

Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria and Yemen, among a number of other Muslim nations, could potentially see similar uprisings in their nations, said Chistopher Boucek, a Yemen specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“I wouldn’t think that a month ago anybody would of thought that the Tunisian government would fall or that this would happen in Egypt,” Boucek said. “Even Middle East experts didn’t see this coming.

One of the terrorist masterminds behind the September 11 attacks has been identified as the cold-blooded killer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002, according to a new report released by The Center for Public Integrity.
The 80-page investigative report links Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is being held indefininately in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for his role in planning the al Qaeda terror attacks in 2001, as the primary killer in the Pearl video.
According to the report,  U.S. Officials were able to positively identify Sheik Mohammed by comparing the veins in his hands to those in the hand of the killer on the video. The identification was confirmation of Mohammed’s own confession to CIA interrogators after his capture.
The report  describes how Mohammed first cut Pearl’s throat with the hope of capturing it on video to use as a propaganda tool. The video camera failed to operate so Mohammed had to do it again but this time he decapitated Pearl and then mutilated his body, burying him on the compound. According to the report the guards on the compound washed the blood off the floor and then prayed on the spot shortly after Pearl’s killing.