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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (20722)	5/12/2009 1:05:04 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 23908

Somali pirates guided by London intelligence team, report says Document obtained by Spanish radio station says 'well-placed informers' in constant contact by satellite telephone The Somali pirates attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean are directed to their targets by a "consultant" team in London, according to a European military intelligence document obtained by a Spanish radio station. The document, obtained by Cadena SER radio, says the team and the pirates remain in contact by satellite telephone. It says that pirate groups have "well-placed informers" in London who are in regular contact with control centres in Somalia where decisions on which vessels to attack are made. These London-based "consultants" help the pirates select targets, providing information on the ships' cargoes and courses. In at least one case the pirates have remained in contact with their London informants from the hijacked ship, according to one targeted shipping company. The pirates' information network extends to Yemen, Dubai and the Suez canal. The intelligence report is understood to have been issued to European navies. "The information that merchant ships sailing through the area volunteer to various international organisations is ending up in the pirates' hands," Cadena SER reported the report as saying. This enables the more organised pirate groups to study their targets in advance, even spending several days training teams for specific hijacks. Senior pirates then join the vessel once it has been sailed close to Somalia. Captains of attacked ships have found that pirates know everything from the layout of the vessel to its ports of call. Vessels targeted as a result of this kind of intelligence included the Greek cargo ship Titan, the Turkish merchant ship Karagol and the Spanish trawler Felipe Ruano. In each case, says the document, the pirates had full knowledge of the cargo, nationality and course of the vessel. The national flag of a ship is also taken into account when choosing a target, with British vessels being increasingly avoided, according to the report. It was not clear whether this was because pirates did not want to draw the attention of British police to their information sources in London. European countries have set up Operation Atalanta to co-ordinate their military efforts in the area. guardian.co.uk

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (20722)	9/22/2009 2:04:05 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 23908

Two-Front Wars — Theirs and Ours [Victor Davis Hanson] Something is not quite right about the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan war. For nearly eight years, yearly casualties in Afghanistan sometimes were less than a month's losses in the dire days in Iraq (e.g., 98 Americans killed in 2006 in Afghanistan, 112 killed in Iraq during December 2006). And while many argue that we took our eye off the ball, to quote the president, by going into Iraq to fight the optional war and shorting the essential one, it remains true that while Iraq was hottest, Afghanistan was weirdly sometimes quietest. One might suggest of course that the Taliban and their Arab terrorist allies were quietly and stealthily laying low, regrouping, gathering support, and then blew back onto the scene in a fury in late 2008 and 2009, but that would still be at a post-surge time in Iraq when we were already deploying more Marines to Afghanistan. Just as likely are two other developments never mentioned: 1) Just as Iraq was our second theater in the war on terror, so it was for al-Qaeda and generic jihadists as well. They diverted thousands into Anbar Province and Baghdad proper rather than into Afghanistan; and while for a period they gained traction, ultimately they lost thousands in combat or through defection. That fact may have weakened their efforts in Afghanistan rather than strengthened them; and after their material and psychological defeat in Iraq they have returned their attention to the single front in Afghanistan. In other words, they took their eye off the ball in Afghanistan and focused on Iraq, but lost both materially and psychologically, and now, like us, are refocusing on the single front. 2) We were far more able to inflict casualties (given the terrain, geopolitics, and nature of the fighting) in Iraq than in Afghanistan, and that resulted in both more damage to terrorism in general, and a greater sense of deterrence than was true of the fighting alone in Afghanistan/Pakistan. When bin Laden and Zawahiri announced that Iraq was the major front in the terrorist war on the U.S., they raised the stakes, and were in essence inviting terrorists to go there rather than to Waziristan. Note we hear no more from either one of them about winning in Iraq, the central front in Iraq, the need to join jihad in Iraq, etc. Now, it is all Afghanistan again. Polls in the Middle East are now quite different from the radical Islam's glory days following 9/11 when al-Qaeda and bin Laden were iconic; the latter's ratings have nosedived along with the tactic of suicide bombing. Rather than seeing the spike in violence in Afghanistan as a sign of a lost theater, it may well be that the Islamists are now increasingly unpopular, down to one front, and waging their all on a last big effort to demoralize us. Both in conventional wars and in insurgencies (as we saw in 2007 in Iraq) sometimes the fiercest fighting is near the end rather than the beginning of the war, as a final offensive is seen as a last gambit. All this means that we should meet the challenge, support the president, and deal with the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies as we did in 2007 to the terrorists in Iraq, despite the wide differences in culture and conditions on the ground in the respective countries. If there really is such a thing as a global war on radical Islamic terrorism, and bin Laden is to be taken at his word that both Afghanistan and Iraq have at times been alternately central fronts in that war, then it would be a tragedy that after fighting a two-front war, and winning one, we, rather than the losing enemy, would become demoralized by our success, and they emboldened by their defeat. corner.nationalreview.com