The Political Conundrum!

Chad Hunt is a Photographer that is embedded with coalition forces in Afghanistan and has put together an awesome collection of images from his embed. This guy is producing Getty quality images.

Click the link below to check out some of his pictures.

www.chadhuntphotography.com/07/pages/afg_1.html

Suicides reported among soldiers have tapered off from extreme highs of early this year amid intense Army efforts to stem the deaths, but officials are not yet ready to say they have turned a corner on the problem.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the NASA said that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape. But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

Obama has repeatedly threatened to veto a defense spending bill that includes money for the F-22, built by Lockheed Martin Corp. Republicans and Democrats representing districts with jobs tied to the program are fighting hard to keep the F-22.

Suicide bombers posing as guests attacked American luxury hotels in Indonesia's capital and set off a pair of blasts Friday that killed eight people and wounded more than 50, authorities said.

The U.S. military said Friday that three of its soldiers were killed in an attack on a base outside Iraq's second largest city of Basra, in the south.

I published an op-ed in Canada's National Post yesterday examining the problem of religious militancy in Pakistan's military and intelligence services. An excerpt:

Pakistan has engaged in a two-month offensive against Islamic militants in the country's Swat region, a campaign that began when the Taliban captured a district just 60 miles from Islamabad, the nation's capital. As the campaign winds down, and local residents begin to return, significant questions remain about future counterinsurgency operations. For example, while Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has asked Washington for his own armed Predator drones for use against the Taliban, regional newspaper Dawn reports that U. S. intelligence officers oppose this move -- in part because several years ago "American officials gave Pakistan advance word of planned Predator attacks, but stopped the practice after the information was leaked to militants."

This relatively minor disagreement highlights an issue that cuts to the heart of many of the challenges Pakistan faces: support for religious militancy within the country's military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

At its founding, Pakistan's military was shaped by the country's colonial experience. Scholar Shuja Nawaz, whose instalment in this op-ed series appeared earlier this week, notes that Pakistan's army began with an elitist orientation, filled at the upper echelons with British officers who "were in turn succeeded by their native clones, men who saw the army as a unique institution, separate and apart from the rest of civil society and authority."

In the 1970s, two major changes had a lasting impact. First, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto broadened the ISI by creating an internal wing. He wanted to bolster his own power, and had the ISI spy on friend and foe alike. Ironically, the wing Bhutto created would play a role in the coup that toppled him in 1977.

The second change was brought by the man who came to power in that coup, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Zia's religious zeal translated into overtly Muslim public policy positions and imposition of Islamic norms. Zia devoted particular attention to the military, where officers were required to read S. K. Malik's The Quranic Concept of War, and a Directorate of Religious Instruction oversaw their Islamic education. Religious criteria were incorporated into promotion requirements, and Zia mandated formal obedience to Islamic rules within the military.

Click here for the full piece. For more on this subject, see an extended article that I wrote earlier this year for the Journal of International Security Affairs.

By Lt. Col. Paul Fanning

JAMAICA ARMORY, QUEENS — A painted portrait of the late New York Army National Guard Sergeant First Class Joseph McKay of Queens was presented to his family at a special ceremony at the Jamaica Armory on Friday, 10 July.

Mrs. Rose McKay and members of the McKay family were joined by friends and dozens of Soldiers of the 1^st Battalion 258^th Field Artillery, for a special presentation and remembrance.

“That’s my Joseph,” said Rose as looked on the painting through tear-filled eyes with her son Shane, age 15 and daughter Tanisha, age 23. “Thank you. This means so much to us,” she said.

Joseph McKay was among 1700 members of the New York National Guard’s 27^th Infantry Brigade Combat Team that were mobilized and deployed to Afghanistan in 2008 as Combined Joint Task Force Phoenix VII. Sergeant First Class McKay, Specialist Mark Palmateer from Poughkeepsie and Sergeant First Class Matthew Hilton of Livonia, Michigan were killed in an ambush on their convoy on June 26^th 2008 when an Improvised Explosive Device struck their vehicle in Eastern, Afghanistan.

McKay was a career New York National Guard Soldier who first joined in 1977 and served continuously until his death last year. He was a naturalized American citizen from Guyana, South America and lived with his wife and two children in Queens. He was called to State Active Duty following the 9-11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and continued to serve as a volunteer with the Guard’s Task Force Empire Shield providing security support to the civil authorities at New York City’s airports, train stations and other sites until his mobilization and deployment last year for Afghanistan.

Texas artist Phil Taylor and his wife Lisa of the American Fallen Soldiers Project came to New York to personally present the portrait to the family. At the family’s request, a ceremony was organized at McKay’s former armory so that friends and fellow soldiers could attend.

The American Fallen Soldiers Project is a 501© 3 non-profit organization committed to honoring the memory of fallen military personnel by presenting the next of kin with custom portraits of their late loved one at no cost. The project is supported by American Airlines which transports the portraits and the artist free of charge from Texas to locations around the country for in-person presentations. For more information go to www.americanfallensoldiers.com

Soldiers of the New York Army National Guard’s 1^st Battalion 258^th Field Artillery join the family in a group photo.

The latest hotel bombings in Jakarta reflect the tragic reality that even when counter-terrorism policies are pursued systematically and pragmatically over an extended period by governments generally committed to doing the right thing by their people, small groups of people dedicated to destruction will, from time to time, succeed in killing innocents.

It is notable that the bombings took place less than a week after Indonesian voters re-elected the country’s president in a landslide. But also likely to be relevant is the political and ideological splintering that has taken place in the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) group as a result of a series of enforcement activities. One of its leaders, Mas Selamat Kastari, was recently arrested in Malaysia. Two others were arrested in Palembang and Central Java. As highlighted in a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Center issued July 16 Policy_Analysis46[1].pdf that warned of potential JI attacks in the region, "the current leadership tensions and the release from prison of former JI members—at least raise the possibility that splinter factions might now seek to re-energise the movement through violent attacks." If a JI splinter group is confirmed as being behind the bombing, the Australian report demonstrates anew the value of sustained work on terrorism by academic analysts.

One element that governments, as well as terrorists, are likely to factor into their respective missions in days to come is the rapidly deepening role of personalized communications in getting information out immediately after an attack. Twitter and SMS broke the story. Within 30 minutes of the bombs being reported images of the damage appeared on Twitter. Many of the initial photos on media sites were taken by Twitter/social media users. Since the accurate reports on the hotel bombings, inaccurate reports of other incidents involving further bombings that did not actually take place, are propagating through social media.

Such immediate sources of information, accurate and otherwise, provide a new factor in the strategic communications aspects of terrorism. But the on-the-ground work of preventing it requires diligent analytic work as well as an understanding of what is going on in groups whose agendas are often extremely idiosyncratic, as well ugly and extreme. To control them requires, as much as anything, effective intelligence about whatever is welling up from people who in all other respects are at the periphery of a society, not its center.

While many governments have refocused attention to more constructive issues like educating the next generation, saving the planet from global warming, building a sustainable global economic system to sustain a livable world for the long-term, and so on, these types of attacks are not going to disappear on their own. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have to be given the mission, authority, and resources to keep a close eye on extremist groups, most of whom are operating locally even when, as some but not all do, they reach out to others globally, looking for footprints from their communications trails, local criminal activities, and social networks. Whether or not it is a long war, it is a long slog.

Several recent statements issued by such Al-Qaida luminaries as Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid (Al-Qaida's former treasurer) have suggested that Al-Qaida and the Taliban may be suffering from at least a temporary shortfall in funding. In an audio recording released last month, Abu al-Yazid stated, "Jihad needs a lot of money, and the Jihad battlefields need much money." He continued, "Jihad with money is also an obligation. And here we, in the battlefield in Afghanistan, are lacking a lot of money and a weakness in operations because of lack of money, and many mujahideen are absent from Jihad because of lack or absence of money with which they can carry out Jihad. Even many brothers…who want to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Allah, we cannot prepare them because of lack of money."

The NEFA Foundation has now obtained a new online plea posted on a prominent jihadi forum by an individual claiming to be fighting alongside the Taliban, and offering similar sentiments. After discussing the plundering of trucks "carrying supplies for the heretics", the poster stated, "Let the brothers know that I published this news only after being asked by the leaders of the Taliban to do so, to publish this information so that the Muslims will know that we are in urgent need for money until we'll drive out the heretics... Some of the Taliban brothers went out with us with no weapon, since they have no money, I mean, 400 dollars to buy a Kalashnikov…There are some in the Taliban brotherhood who hold Kalashnikovs in one armory. They don't have money for bullets."

An English translation of the posting can be downloaded from the NEFA Foundation website.