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From the Strategy Conference…..

An ineffective or inappropriate state response will make this tactic go viral:

….Last week, at least 30 Mexicans from the town of El Porvenir walked to the border crossing post at Fort Hancock, Texas, and asked for political asylum. Ordinarily, their claim would be denied as groundless, and they would be turned back. Instead, they were taken to El Paso, where they expect to have their cases heard.

No one doubts that they have a strong claim. Their town on the Mexican side of the border is under siege by one or more drug cartels battling for control of the key border crossing. According to Mike Doyle, the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, one of the cartels has ordered all residents of the town of 10,000 to abandon the city within the next month.

“They came in and put up a sign in the plaza telling everyone to leave or pay with their own blood,” Doyle said. Since then there has been a steady stream of El Porvenir residents seeking safety on the American side of the border, both legally and illegally. Among them are the 30 who are seeking political asylum.

In recent days the situation in the impoverished, dusty border town has grown worse. According to Jose Franco, the superintendent of schools in Fort Hancock, the cartels have threatened to execute children in school unless parents pay 5000 pesos in protection money.

And on Wednesday night, according to Doyle, several houses in El Porvenir were set on fire, and there were reports of cars loaded with furniture leaving the town.

I saw this coming. I’m sure that so has anyone else studying insurgency or military history who stopped to give the matter five minutes of serious thought. There’s nothing magical about geographic proximity to the United States that would prevent this tactic, if applied widely and backed by lethal examples, from working. What has been done in the villages of Bosnia or Dar Fur can be done in towns of northern Mexico.

Foresight, apparently, does not include governmental officials though:

Authorities fear that an incident might spark a mass exodus by the residents of El Porvenir that might cause them all to surge across the border at once.

Doyle says there are no plans yet to set up camps for an influx of refugees. “There is just no way to plan for that,” he said. “We are waiting to see what happens. We will use the standard natural disaster procedures if it happens — the Red Cross and housing at the schools, and if it gets worse, the state and the federal government will have to step in.”

I would not bet my mortgage that the Feds would step in – at least not until the situation became an unmitigated, if entirely avoidable, humanitarian disaster. Here’s a hint: Very large numbers of people + a desert + no planning – Food – Shelter – Water = Dead children on CNN. Human physiology is the same on the Rio Grande or in Arizona as in Sudan.

“No way to plan for that”? WTF? There’s no examples of handling influxes of war refugees anywhere in world history? Give me a break. What they really meant is that this kind of contingency planning is politically unacceptable to national security officials because it would offend the Mexican government, a few members of Congress and some activist constituencies in the Democratic Party’s base.

Political Correctness in national security affairs is the autoimmune disease of our body politic.

ADDENDUM:

Mexico drug gangs turn weapons on army – latimes.com ( Hat tip to Morgan)

In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico’s organized criminals.In taking such aggressive action, the traffickers have shown that they are not reluctant to challenge the army head-on and that they possess good intelligence on where the army is, how it moves and when it operates.

HG’s World – Zenpundit asks! The End of Mexico? or The End of U.S. Sovereignty?

The bigger question looms, how will this impact the sovereignty of the United States to secure our borders and ensure tranquility?

….You will note after you read the link embedded above that this blog concurred and wrote on the same issue twice last year and the year before.

….When I read each day that the cancer of lawlessness gains control like a reverse “Oil Spot Strategy” right on our southern border; and then read about this and this from the President of a country where we are spending our most precious resource to secure.

ADDENDUM II. –NEW! (hat tip to “The Warlord”):

WaPo – New adversary in US drug war: Contract killers for Mexican cartels?

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO — A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.
The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660 killings in the city in the past year.

Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the bridge to El Paso.
“Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization,” said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso division. “They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it.”

The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, “Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars.”
The mayor of Juarez, José Reyes Ferriz, said that the city is honeycombed with safe houses, armories and garages with stolen cars for the assassins’ use. The mayor received a death threat recently in a note left beside a pig’s head in the city.

I take a very skeptical position toward America’s alliance with Pakistan, whose elite, to put it as charitably as I can, have a myopic policy toward the Taliban and Islamist extremist groups. That said, the DoD has in previous decades, had standing mil-mil exchanges with Pakistan’s Army that were usually better and far more productive than our diplomatic relationship with Islamabad  ( a situation that is mirrored in Latin American relations). This tradition generally involves talented Pakistani officers partaking in training and educational programs with their American counterparts or studying in our war colleges.

Going back through recent articles at SWJ leads me to recommend the following judicious analysis of the Taliban by LTC. Ehsan Mehmood Khan, currently a student at National Defense University. It’s an excellent survey of the Taliban’s strengths at formulating and implementing their political-military strategy within the context of different strategic schools of thought and it should have attracted more attention than it received when it was first published at SWJ Blog.

 A Strategic Perspective on Taliban Warfare

Taliban Warfare has occupied news headlines in the global information expanse for over a decade. It is also a topic of choice for academics and scholars. However, the subject is often viewed and analyzed in a subjective rather than objective manner. It is mostly looked at across the prism of terrorism – atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by a group of non-state, though not stateless, bandits. Seldom has a theorist or practitioner picked up the pen to draw on the military aspects of the war so as to reach correct conclusions as to how could this war come to an acceptable-by-all end. This line of thought and reasoning might hold good for a given category of politicians but the students of military strategy and those involved in kinetic operations in a counterinsurgency campaign remain bewildered on the nature of the war. There is a need to understand Taliban as people, not monster, and as warriors not gangsters. Likewise, Taliban Warfare is required to be understood in correct military perspective rather than a mere act of crime, terrorism or banditry.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.  Here is part III. of a three part series by Charles, entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.

Conflict of Commands III: Two pre-Hasan documents

by Charles Cameron

In my research on the topic of “conflict of commands” I ran across two documents from October and November of 2001 which make for interesting reading in the wake of Major Hasan’s slide presentation and the Fort Hood shooting.

The first is a MEMRI post, and hence both copyrighted and readily available on the web. It s titled Terror in America (23) Muslim Soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan: To Fight or Not to Fight? and dated November 7, 2001, and the intro paragraph reads as follows:

As soon as the U.S. geared up for the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Muslim military personnel in the American armed forces began to deal with the question of the religious permissibility of their participation in battle. Army Chaplain Capt. Abd Al-Rasheed Muhammad, the Imam of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. sent an inquiry on the matter to the North American Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) Council, which in turn referred the matter to clerics in the Arab world. The clerics issued a Fatwa permitting Muslim soldiers to take part in the fighting if there was no alternative, and the council delivered the ruling to Capt. Muhammad. But on October 30, the editor of the Arabic London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that the clerics who signed this Fatwa had changed their minds and abrogated their previous Fatwa with a new one prohibiting participation of Muslim soldiers in the war in Afghanistan.

The rest you can read on the MEMRI site.

The second document was actually posted a little earlier on the State Department site, although it is no longer available there. Dated 16 October 2001 and titled U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Fatwa on U.S. Muslim Soldiers Fighting Terrorists, as far as I can determine, it is currently only present (outside of archive.org) on the Department’s Jakarta site.

Interestingly enough, this document also includes a quote from another person whose name has been much in the news in connection with Islamism: Chaplain Yee — the Chinese-American US Army Chaplain who ministered to the Muslim inmates at Guantanamo Bay, was charged in 2003 with sedition, espionage and other crimes, and held in a Navy brig until all charges against him were dropped. Yee is quoted as saying back in 2001 that “Muslims on his base have come to him with worries about being ordered to fight Muslims overseas”.

I think this document is worth reposting in full, and would simply note my surprise that neither this official State Department statement nor the MEMRI document appears to have formed part of any discussion of the Fort Hood incident in open source materials that I have seen. I hope the IC is doing better in this regard — but if these materials have been overlooked by the relevant classified inquiries too, I wonder whether this might not be yet another result of the sort of thing Gregory Treverton comments on in his 2009 paper “Bridging the Divide between Scientific and Intelligence Analysis” from the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies, Swedish National Defense College:

Analysts do not have the freedom to explore issues by pursuing them down the rabbit hole, so to speak. There is a hard andfast process in place that determines what they look at, when, and in some cases, to what end.

*U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Fatwa on U.S. Muslim Soldiers Fighting Terrorists:

*

U.S. Muslim soldiers need to defend their country and combat terrorism
By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer
16 October 2001

Washington — Two prominent Islamic scholars in the United States have issued a fatwa, or legal opinion, on the importance of American Muslims serving in the U.S. military to defend their country and combat terrorism.

“All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. The Muslim soldier must perform his duty in this fight despite the feeling of uneasiness of ‘fighting without discriminating.’ His intention must be to fight for enjoining of the truth and defeating falsehood. It’s to prevent aggression on the innocents, or to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice,” the fatwa reads.

It was written by Taha Jabir Al-Alawani, President of the Fiqh Council of North America and President of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, and Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti, a member of the fiqh council. The two Islamic scholars issued their legal opinion in response to a query submitted by Chaplain Abdul-Rashid Muhammad, the most senior Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military, who sought guidance on the permissibility of U.S. Muslim servicemen to participate in the war effort in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries.

“Muslims are part of the American society. Anyone who feels he’s fighting in a just war must fight,” Al-Alawani said.

“We abide by every law of this country except those laws that are contradictory to Islamic law,” said Sheikh Al-Hanooti. The sheikh added that U.S. Muslim military personnel may refuse to fight on the grounds of conscientious objection.

“If any Muslim serving in the U.S. Armed Forces has a conscientious objection to combat and believes that it is against Islamic principles to fight in any war, then that individual has the right to stand by his or her concience,” Al-Hanooti said. “They realize, of course, that they may be administratively separated from the military as a result of their choice.”

Muhammad, who is stationed at the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington, says there is no conflict between being a loyal soldier and a loyal Muslim. He is helping some Muslim American servicemen deal with their qualms about fighting terrorists who claim to represent Islam.

“It is time now for us to not only wake up, but speak up,” Muhammad said in a recent interview. “The prophet said when we see evil action we are compelled to change it with our hand, challenge it with our tongue or at least hate it in our heart.”

Muhammad, an African American who was raised as a Baptist, became the first Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military in 1993. Until then, all the 3,150 U.S. military chaplains were either Jews or Christians. In 1996, a second Muslim chaplain was commissioned by the Navy. Since then the number of Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military has grown to 14.

Qaseem Uqdah, a Marine Corps veteran who is executive director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veteran Affairs Council, said the Muslim military chaplains include Muslims who were born into the faith in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Muslim converts, who include several African Americans, an Anglo-American and a Chinese American. Uqdah’s group has been selected by the U.S. military to recommend people as Muslim chaplain candidates.

U.S. military officials say a shortage of candidates with the required education limits the number of Muslim military chaplains. Three Muslim chaplains are currently being trained at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The newest Muslim chaplain is James Yee, a Chinese American and a graduate of the West Point military academy, who was born into a Lutheran family. He became interested in Islam while a student and later spent four years studying Arabic and Islam in Damascus, Syria. Currently he serves with the 29th Signal Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Chaplain Yee said that Muslims on his base have come to him with worries about being ordered to fight Muslims overseas.

“An act of terrorism, the taking of innocent civilian lives is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not,” Chaplain Yee said.

On SECDEF Robert Gates doing Q&A in Pakistan: Attackerman and Duck of Minerva (Vikash Yadav)

The Depth Of Official Pakistani Anger At Us

Simple and plain: the Obama administration has to do something about Pakistan’s legitimate security fears emanating from India. As Gates points out, it’s completely absurd to argue that the U.S. has had a policy of “propping up” formerly-Soviet-allied India, but it doesn’t matter at this point (yes, yes, you guys who are big on “narrative”; score one for you). The Pakistanis believe that the lack of U.S. hectoring directed at India is part of a concerted policy of supporting India at Pakistan’s expense. Consequently, pushing the Pakistani military into Waziristan, to fight fellow Pakistanis, is easily misconstrued as weakening Pakistan for India’s sake.

There were good arguments for not stuffing the India relationship into Richard Holbrooke’s pillbox of headaches. India is too big a relationship to reduce to just a security issue. And for much of last year, the U.S. was waiting for India to elect a new government. But if we mean what we say about security, diplomacy, politics and development being interrelated and mutually supportive/corrosive, then it’s time to broker a real India-Pakistan peace process. Unless we want Gates’ next appearance at the Islamabad NDU to go even worse.

Gates Grilled at Pakistan’s National Defense University

The Defense Department has pulled from its website the transcript of the Q and A session last month between Secretary of Defense Gates and Pakistani military officers.  The frank talk was apparently a bit heated. At one point, one of the Pakistani military officers asked Secretary Gates point blank: “Are you with us or against us?”The transcript reveals a deep level of distrust between the US and the Pakistani military.  It also shows that some junior officers of the Pakistani military do not take ownership of their government’s current offensives against militants in the North West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

Yadav has posted the entire transcript.

Count me as someone who thinks the single most effective move the US could do in the War on Terror is to bomb ISI headquarters with a few 30,000 lb superbombs  shortly after everyone arrived at work. Yes, I know that’s completely non-serious – I’m venting my irritation.

The second best moved be reducing our footprint in Afghanistan to what can be sustained via air from the ‘Stans and cutting off all aid to Pakistan. Every last dime. Our dollars are paying for the IEDs and bullets that kill our soldiers but shhhhhhhhhh….we’re not supposed to talk about that in polite company. That part is serious. We can live without Islamabad. Really, we can. We’ll do just fine. And they’re the bad actors who make a lousy neighborhood a whole lot worse. That Pakistan has legitimate security concerns is true – let’s tighten the screws on those and see if that helps induce a more cooperative attitude as eight and a half years of bribery has been counterproductive.

SECDEF Gates has an unenviable task. Pakistan, or at least an autonomous part of its military, is our enemy in Afghanistan and have been since 2001. Let’s accept that reality and revise our policies accordingly. Being an enemy of the United States ought to come with some costs rather than aid packages.