"When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another." — Thomas Jefferson
Last week the Taliban in Afghanistan downed a US Chinook helicopter carrying 25 navy SEALs and 7 other Afghan security forces with a two or three hundred dollar rocket propelled grenade launcher (RPG). This was the same type of weapon used by the Somalian war lords in Mogadishu to bring down two Black Hawk helicopters. This was the largest loss of American lives in the past two years in this unending war against 11th century tribal Muslims. A war that seems unwinnable — a war with no real defined mission for success except the killing of suspected terrorists.
U.S. military authorities are referring to the downing of the helicopter used by U.S. Special Forces as a one-off incident. While that may be the case, the downing of a U.S. military helicopter, with as many as 25 members of the Navy SEALs aboard it, will be a source of emboldenment for the Taliban. Should the Taliban be able to reproduce this incident in the future, it will enhance its position on the battlefield as well as the negotiating table.
A Pentagon spokesperson described the incident as a one-off incident and cautioned against reading too much into it and said that this did not constitute “a watershed or a new trend.” Indeed, the available evidence does suggest that the Taliban militiamen got lucky in this particular incident in the province of Wardak in central Afghanistan, when a team of Navy SEALs tried to rescue rangers who were pinned down in a firefight with the jihadist militiamen.
Even though the Taliban may have gotten lucky this time around, they will definitely want to try and reproduce this incident in the future, just as U.S. military officials are investigating the incident in terms of trying to understand how this happened and how it can be prevented in the future. The Taliban can be expected to do their own probe in which they would want to be able to glean from “lessons learned.”
The point to note here is that while the tactical military skills and circumstances may be reproducible, but in the long run the frequency of such events essentially depends upon the Taliban having advanced intelligence on helicopter missions. And that’s where they will run into some problems, because ultimately it depends upon how good the Taliban penetration is of the Afghan security forces and how much U.S. military authorities are sharing with their Afghan counterparts.
Should the Taliban be able to bring down additional helicopters in the near future, then that allows them to extract concessions from the United States on the negotiating table in terms of the circumstances of withdrawal and the share of power that the Taliban will be demanding in a post-NATO Afghanistan [Source: Stratfor]
While Stratfor, a highly respected intelligence source, is looking at the implications of this incident in Afghanistan and the so called “War on Terror” I think we need to step back a bit and look at where the real threat to pur national security is coming from. It’s Mexico.
Just this week the entire 26 man police force of Mexican town resigned due to threats from the drug cartels. AFP news reported:
“An entire police force of 26 officers quit their posts in a northern Mexican town after two of their colleagues were killed in an armed attack, local authorities said Thursday.
"The officers were afraid and resigned," said Jaime Dominguez Loya, the mayor of Ascension, a town of 5,000 people in Chihuahua state home to Mexico's most violent city of Ciudad Juarez.
The mass resignation follows several attacks in recent weeks on police in the town, which lies on major drug-trafficking routes to the United States.
The mayor has now called for help from regional and federal authorities.
An entire police force resigned in 2009 from Villa Ahumada, another town in Chihuahua, following attacks allegedly led by drug gangs. Regional and federal security forces now police that town.
More than 41,000 people have died in violence blamed on Mexico's drug cartels since the end of 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed some 50,000 troops to tackle organized crime.”
Another report in the London Telegraph states:
“The mass resignation follows several attacks in recent weeks on police in the town, which lies on major drug-trafficking routes to the United States.
"The officers were afraid and resigned," said Jaime Dominguez Loya, the mayor of Ascension, a town of 5,000 people in Chihuahua state home to Mexico's most violent city of Ciudad Juarez.
The mayor has now called for help from regional and federal authorities.
An entire police force resigned in 2009 from Villa Ahumada, another town in Chihuahua, following attacks allegedly led by drug gangs. Regional and federal security forces now police that town.
More than 41,000 people have died in violence blamed on Mexico's drug cartels since the end of 2006, when President Felipe Calderón deployed some 50,000 troops to tackle organized crime.”
While these two reports are similar I show them for the purpose of emphasis on the global interest in this ongoing war waging just south of our border.
In another incident the police chief of Ciudad Juarez resigned due to death threats from the drug cartels. AP reported that:
“Public Safety Secretary Roberto Orduna announced he was leaving his post only hours after gunmen killed a police officer and a jail guard and left signs on their bodies saying they had fulfilled a promise made Wednesday to slay at least one officer every 48 hours until Orduna quits.
The slayings were a grim sign that criminal gangs are determined to control the police force of the biggest Mexican border city, with a population of 1.3 million people across from El Paso, Texas.
Mayor Jose Reyes insisted earlier Friday the city would not back down.”
A retired army major, Orduna took over as chief in May after former Public Safety Secretary Guillermo Prieto resigned and fled to El Paso following the slaying of his operations director.
For Orduna's protection, the city built his bedroom at the police station so he didn't have to go home. He also travels in different vehicles when he does go out.
The report continues by stating the violence is spreading like wildfire and crossing our borders on a daily basis:
“Homeland Security officials have said they will bring in the military if the violence continues to grow and threatens the U.S. border region.
"The violence is spreading like wildfire across the Rio Grande," said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. "It's a major national security problem for us that is much more important than Iraq and Afghanistan."
Robert Almonte, executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers Association, said that, while El Paso has been spared most of the violence, the escalating killings across the border in Juarez are worrisome.
I think it's jarring ... we can't even fathom those kinds of things happening here in the United States," Almonte said.
Also Friday, the U.S. State Department renewed a travel advisory warning Americans about the increased violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
This has been going on for years now and the criminal gangs seem to be winning the war. In October 2010 the Financial Times reported:
An entire police force in a northern Mexico community resigned on Tuesday afternoon after its station came under heavy fire by suspected drug traffickers, local authorities confirmed.
Santos Salinas Garza, mayor of Los Ramones, a rural area about 60km to the east of the city of Monterrey, confirmed that about 15 officers had fled out of terror.
They resigned because of this situation,” he told local media.
On Monday night, gunmen drove up to the police station and peppered it with automatic fire and at least two grenade launchers. Preliminary investigations found more than 1,000 bullet casings by the building.
Nobody was injured in the attack, but six police vehicles were destroyed and the white and orange police station, which authorities had inaugurated just three days before, was pockmarked with bullet holes.”
Professor Grayson states in his book Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State:
“The inability of the Mexican government to appreciatively curb the rashes of sensational murders, including castrations and beheadings, has elevated the specter among pundits that Mexico might become a failed state.
Mexico is not a failed state but increasingly municipalities are governed by "dual sovereignty." Mayors and councils operate in one sphere; plaza bosses, who have their own police forces in the form of thugs, operate in another. The latter want to conduct business, historically involving drug processing, storage and distribution but increasingly including elements such as human trafficking, kidnapping and control of contraband sales, with impunity.
In many cases, the worst violence occurs close to the 2,000-mile border with the United States. Cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez virtually have been closed to foreign travellers, yet the atrocities that have made them such dangerous destinations go largely unreported—Mexican newspapers fear that their presses will be bombed; U.S. newspapers have stopped sending correspondents. Although the violence has trickled into the United States, it has yet to pour over the border. The prospect looms but remains unlikely in part because leaders of the new cartels do not want to encourage the type of direct involvement that the United States has exercised relative to Columbia.”
Just today Fox News reported:
“Authorities say they have found the bodies of four police officers and a civilian dumped in the western Mexico state of Michoacan, along with the body of an unidentified man.
The dead include two policewomen and two male officers, all from the neighboring state of Colima.
The Michoacan state prosecutors' office says all the officers were off-duty when they vanished Saturday. They were still wearing their uniforms when their bullet-ridden bodies were found Monday.
Michoacan state is home to two feuding drug cartels, La Familia and The Knights Templar.”
Mexico's government is suspending about $102 million in federal law enforcement grants to 80 percent of the country's most violent municipalities because they haven't shown progress in using the money.
National Public Safety System secretary Juan Miguel Alcantara says 172 cities and towns have failed to "demonstrate advances" in improving police equipment, training and salaries.
He says that among the problems is a failure to raise police salaries, which are so low they encourage corruption.
Alcantara told Milenio TV on Monday that Ciudad Juarez, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, cities along the border with Texas, are among those being cut off.
The money is given three times a year to cities with the highest kidnapping and murder rates.
In a related story Fox News reported on August 8th that U.S. intelligence agents may now be working in Mexico:
“The Mexican government is acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agents operate in Mexican territory to help combat drug cartels, but refused to discuss a report they have been posted to a base in northern Mexico and have helped in interrogations, wiretaps and running informant networks.
The participation of U.S. agents and the designation of a new U.S. ambassador, Anthony Wayne, whose last posting was Afghanistan, has raised concerns that America may view Mexico as an Afghan-style battleground.
Mexico has already acknowledged it allows U.S. drones to conduct non-piloted surveillance flights over Mexican territory, though it says it "controls" the flights; a Mexican official is present in the drones' control room.
"In recent months, Washington's growing military, political, intelligence and police interference has been documented in many ways, as has the Mexican government's acceptance of it," the newspaper La Jornada wrote in an editorial Monday.”
Mexico is our third largest supplier of oil with 1,108 barrels per day with Canada at 2,114 and Saudi Arabia at 1,122. This is more than Libya where we are spending over a billion dollars to remove a dictator that poses no threat to the security of the United States. In Afghanistan we have spent untold billions and to date we have lost 1,731 soldiers in this 10 year war. The majority of these deaths have been in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. To date Mexico has seen over 41,000 deaths (mainly to civilians and police) in the same period. In a speech to the Center for American Progress (a George Soros funded left-wing organization) Alan Bersin, the head of the Customs and Border Patrol stated it would take 500,000 agents to seal our southern border. Whether he is correct or not is debatable.
It is time to focus on our southern neighbor and do like we did in Colombia when we “assisted” the Colombian Special Forces get Pablo Escobar. Mexico is far more dangerous and we need to use our military’s prowess, technology and intelligence to eliminate these drug cartels before hey spill over into our cities.
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