29 April MARFORCOM Media Summary

Early Bird summary

Wednesday’s Early Bird leads with an article from the New York Times reporting that American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.
The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.
The Pakistani government's inability to stem Taliban advances has forced the Obama administration to recalibrate its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy a month after unveiling it, the Washington Post reports.
What was planned as a step-by-step process of greater military and economic engagement with Pakistan -- as immediate attention focused on Afghanistan -- has been rapidly overtaken by the worsening situation on the ground. Nearly nonstop discussions over the past two days included a White House meeting Monday between Obama and senior national security officials and a full National Security Council session on Pakistan yesterday.
A tripartite summit Obama will host next week with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will center heavily on the Pakistan problem rather than the balance originally intended, officials said.
New consideration is being given to a long-dormant proposal to allow U.S. counterinsurgency training for Pakistani troops somewhere outside the country, circumventing Pakistan's refusal to allow American "boots on the ground" there. "The issue now is how do you do that, where do you do it, and what money do we have to do it with?" said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity yesterday.
The San Antonio Express-News reports that Pakistan's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday his country wants control of all American drone aircraft flying over the country's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Ambassador Husain Haqqani warned that the war on terrorism in the region could be lost if Pakistan doesn't operate the unmanned aerial vehicles used to kill insurgents.
U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas near Afghanistan are “creating more Taliban,” he said. A White House spokesman said the administration would not discuss UAVs.
“Do we want to lose the war on terror or do we want to keep those weapons classified?” Haqqani told the San Antonio Express-News after a speech before the local World Affairs Council. “If the American government insists on our true cooperation, then they should also be helping us in fighting those terrorists.”
The New York Times reports Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Tuesday that Iraqi forces had recently arrested a leader of the Sunni insurgency who had been in league with members of Saddam Hussein’s ousted Baath Party.
Iraqi officials say the insurgent, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, is the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.
The Washington Post reports that Russian news agencies cite one of the country's deputy defense ministers as saying that more that 35,000 officers are to be fired in 2009 as part of sweeping military reforms.
ITAR-Tass and other agencies quote Nikolai Pankov as giving the figures on Tuesday.
Wide-ranging reforms announced by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov in October envisaged cutting 200,000 of 355,000 military officers by 2012.
Russia's armed forces have been downsized to 1.13 million troops from the 4 million-member Soviet Army, but observers say Russia has done little to streamline its military.
The reforms, aimed at decreasing Russia's troops to below 1 million, have drawn increasingly loud grumbling from the top military brass. Several top generals who opposed them have lost their jobs.

Media summary

1. Leading newspaper headlines: Sen. Arlen Specter's surprise defection from the Republican Party to join the Democrats was the lead story in all the papers. (Slate Magazine)
2. Pakistan army retakes key town: The Pakistan army says it has taken control of a key town in Buner district in the north-west, a day after starting an offensive against the Taleban. (BBC)
3. Security tight at Afghan celebration: Police have been deployed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as a ceremony is held to mark the 17th anniversary of the overthrow of the Communist government. (BBC)
4. Ex-Marine speaks out against Iraq war: For Benjamin "Benji" Lewis, the turning point began when a crying Iraqi woman approached his dug-in position during the first siege of Fallujah in April 2004. (Mail Tribune, Oregon)
5. U.S. cybersecurity “embarrassing”: America's cybersecurity has been described as "broken" by one industry expert and as "childlike" by another. (BBC)

Leading newspaper headlines

Sen. Arlen Specter's surprise defection from the Republican Party to join the Democrats was the lead story in all the papers. Assuming that Al Franken is eventually seated as senator from Minnesota, that gives the Democrats a 60-person, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which will ease passage of key Obama administration priorities like health care reform and capping carbon emissions. Political considerations motivated Specter's switch; he said internal polling showed that his chances of surviving a Republican primary challenge in 2010 were "bleak."
The Washington Post runs a Dan Balz analysis inside about what the move might mean for the Republican Party: "The question now is whether Specter's departure will produce a period of genuine introspection by a party already in disarray or result in a circling of the wagons by those who think the GOP is better off without those whose views fall outside its conservative ideological boundaries," he writes. "Specter's shocking departure may provide a wake-up call to Republicans that a broad reassessment is urgently needed."
The New York Times has an op-ed by Olympia Snowe, a moderate Maine Republican senator who might have seemed a more likely candidate for defection, called "We Didn't Have to Lose Arlen Specter."
"It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of 'Survivor' — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you're no longer welcome in the tribe. But it is truly a dangerous signal that a Republican senator of nearly three decades no longer felt able to remain in the party," she wrote.
Mainstream Republicans, however, tried to put a brave, or defiant, face on the news. Most of the papers quote Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, saying Specter left "to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record." And USA Today notes that the Republican congressional campaign committee e-mailed a fundraising appeal citing Specter with the subject line "Good riddance."
This is not the first time Specter has changed parties; early in his political career he switched from the Democrats to the Republicans. USA Today digs up a nice tidbit from Specter's biography in which he called that move "almost like changing my religion." (The book, Passion for Truth, has a subtitle he may now regret: From Finding JFK's Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton. It's out of print but available for $0.01 from several sellers on Amazon.)
The move appeared to be effective immediately: The New York Times noticed that he sat on the Democratic side of the dais at a committee hearing shortly after his announcement.
Both the NYT and Post run front-page photos of 5-year-old Edgar Hernandez, whom the Mexican government has identified as the first person in Mexico to come down with the variant of swine flu that is threatening to become a global epidemic. It's not clear why the boy came down with the flu, but his home town is host to large pig farms. The Wall Street Journal reports that new cases of the flu were found on four continents yesterday, and the number of cases confirmed in the United States rose to 66, including five people who were hospitalized. The Los Angeles Times takes a more cautious tack and notes that the number of new cases in Mexico appears to be leveling off, and World Health Organization officials said that even if a pandemic occurs, it's likely to be mild.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials warned other countries to not ban U.S. pork as a result of the swine flu, the Post reported, and even tried a little rebranding. "This really isn't swine flu. It's H1N1 virus," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
The U.S. "surge" in Afghanistan is going to target poppy-growing areas, the NYT says, and that will likely provoke bloody battles with the Taliban. Poppy growing is the main source of income for the insurgency, and U.S. commanders believe the Taliban is likely to fight hard to defend it. And their credibility is on the line, as well: Poppy farmers pay protection money to the Taliban and will expect the Taliban to hold up its end of the bargain when the U.S. disrupts the cultivation. What effect will this have on Afghan hearts and minds? The piece ends with a pessimistic kicker, an anecdote of some American soldiers on patrol stopping to talk to an Afghan farmer. "I'm very happy to see you," the farmer told the Americans. "Really?" one of the soldiers asked. "Yes," the farmer said. The interpreter sighed and spoke in English. "He's a liar."
But Afghanistan is receding in importance now: The recent advances by the Taliban in Pakistan are forcing the United States to recalibrate its new AfPak strategy to focus more heavily on Pakistan, reports the Post. Among the initiatives being considered is a plan for U.S. troops to train Pakistani soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques.

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Pakistan army 'retakes key town'

Pakistan ground forces linked up with air forces in Dagar
The Pakistan army says it has taken control of a key town in Buner district in the north-west, a day after starting an offensive against the Taleban.
Soldiers were dropped from helicopters into the town of Dagar and were linking up with ground forces.
The area is less than 100km (60 miles) from the capital, Islamabad.
The government is concerned the Taleban are trying to extend their control beyond the Swat Valley, an area which they largely control already.
"The airborne forces have linked up to police and Frontier Constabulary in Dagar," the military spokesman said.
See a map of the region
The army said 50 militants and one soldier were killed.
Two ammunition dumps were destroyed by security forces and 70 members of the security forces were abducted by militants, with 18 later released, the army said.
The army launched its assault in the valley, only a few hours drive from Islamabad, on Tuesday afternoon as jets bombed militant positions.

The Pakistan army said 50 militants were killed in the Dagar operation
The BBC's Mark Dummett in Islamabad says that the army's assault in the valley means there is a real fear now that the violence will spread.
But our correspondent says that so far the government's peace deal with radical clerics in the Swat Valley seems to be holding.
Dagar resident Saleem Dil Khan said when the army arrived "a lot of firing took place early in the morning, a curfew is imposed in the area and they are not allowing us to come out of our houses.
"We are very much worried."
The Pakistan government says there are as many as 500 armed Taleban fighters in Buner in violation of a peace agreement.
The peace deal between the two sides this year allowed Sharia law to be adopted in large parts of Malakand division - which includes Buner, the Swat Valley and Lower Dir - in return for the Taleban laying down arms.
Fighting in Lower Dir, another mountainous region in the north-west, had ended, said chief military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas, according to the AFP news agency.
Exodus slows
However the BBC's M Ilyas Khan - who is in Lower Dir - says that house-to-house searches in the town of Maidan are continuing.
Our correspondent says that the large exodus of people fleeing Lower Dir towards the town of Mardan - further south - to escape the fighting has now reduced to a trickle.
Most roads in Lower Dir are still closed to traffic, but the authorities are allowing pedestrians to use them.
The army said about 75 militants and 10 security personnel died in the operation. There is no independent confirmation of the figures.
Tens of thousands of people had fled the area and many houses were damaged.
The increase in army activity follows criticism from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Pakistan was abdicating to the Taleban.
Last week she said the Taleban posed a "mortal threat" to the world security.

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Tight security at Afghan ceremony
By Martin Vennard
BBC News


Remains of the Soviet occupation can be seen all over the country
Police have been deployed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as a ceremony is held to mark the 17th anniversary of the overthrow of the Communist government.
On the same day last year militants tried to assassinate President Hamid Karzai, who has decided to scale down this year's commemorative events.
The day when Kabul finally fell to the mujahideen is usually marked in the Afghan capital by a military parade.
But the government says its budget can be better spent elsewhere.
Ascent of Taleban
It said it would donate the money it would have spent to victims of recent floods and an earthquake in Afghanistan.

Security was tight even though the celebrations were low-key
But that was not the only reason for calling off the parade.
At last year's event militants killed three people as they tried to assassinate President Karzai.
And the security forces have been deployed at prominent locations throughout the capital this year.
On Monday, 12 militants and a police officer were killed in clashes just to the south of Kabul.
While the decision to call off the parade has been welcomed by some, it has not been popular with everyone.
Some former members of the mujahideen say the authorities are not treating the anniversary with sufficient respect.
As part of the low-key celebrations, Mr Karzai hosted a meal for dignitaries at the presidential palace.
While events 17 years ago marked the end of the Communist government, which had been backed by Soviet troops, they also led to the Taleban's ascent to power.
The mujahideen agreed to form a government, but the factional fighting that followed allowed the Taleban to gain control in 1996.

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Ex-Marine speaks out against Iraq war
Corvallis man who served two tours in Iraq plans three Rogue Valley presentations

April 29, 2009

By Paul Fattig
Mail Tribune
For Benjamin "Benji" Lewis, the turning point began when a crying Iraqi woman approached his dug-in position during the first siege of Fallujah in April 2004.
Lewis, 23, was serving as the mortar man and the acting linguist for his Marine Corps unit.
"It was a pretty intense time — for the first five days we had little or no sleep," recalled the Corvallis resident. "This woman was approaching our position. People started shooting at her."
Lewis quickly began yelling for a cease-fire.
"It was evident she wasn't a threat — I ran out of my foxhole to see what was going on," he said. "Her face was encrusted with salt crystals from crying. She let me know that the night before, her house had collapsed from the mortars, that she had lost two children."
He and others in his group asked their commander to have her taken to a Red Cross site. Their request was denied.
"So we gave her a bottle of water and sent her back," he said. "I was the one responsible for putting mortar rounds on her house ... this was the first sign to me that maybe we weren't in Iraq on a humanitarian mission."
Lewis is speaking out against the war in three presentations in the Rogue Valley this week, beginning Friday evening in Ashland. Cpl. Lewis completed his four-year hitch, including two combat tours to Iraq, in the Corps in 2007, receiving an honorable discharge.
"I was a good Marine — I never got into trouble," he said.
It wasn't until he was notified last October that he was being considered for involuntary activation in the individual ready reserves and a third Iraq deployment that he began speaking out. Under most enlistment contracts, the IRR program provides that a Marine can be called up for four years following discharge.
"By this time, I made up my mind not to participate," Lewis said, noting he is opposed to the war both on legal and moral grounds and challenges the legality of the IRR program.
The Marine Corps notified him on April 16 that his IRR orders had been canceled.
But the college student is continuing to speak out and counsel other Iraq War veterans.
"The general feeling among many is that they are struggling with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)," he said. "Some I've talked to want to be recalled so they can go back to Iraq and die there for atonement."
Born on a U.S. Air Force Base in Lubbock, Texas, where his father was a career officer, Lewis joined the Corps in 2003. After being trained to fire mortars, he was selected for Arabic language training.
From Fallujah, his unit was sent to Haditha, where the Marines established their headquarters in a police station for several months.
"When we came back on leave, we found out the insurgents had executed all the police in a soccer stadium," he said, adding the police were killed apparently because of their association with the Americans.
"We felt awful."
Lewis, who later served a year as an urban combat instructor in the Corps' Twentynine Palms base in Southern California, returned to Fallujah during his second tour. Much of his time was spent manning checkpoints.
"There was an Iraqi gentleman who wanted to get into the city but I told him we were closing the checkpoint for the night," Lewis said. "I told him he would have to come back in the morning.
"The guy said, 'I've got this great idea. Why don't you go home, then I'll be able to go home.' "
Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com.

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US cybersecurity 'embarrassing'
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley


Experts say the cyber threat is increasing at an accelerating rate
America's cybersecurity has been described as "broken" by one industry expert and as "childlike" by another.
The criticism comes as President Obama prepares to release the results of a review he ordered.
Tim Mather, chief security strategist for RSA, told BBC News "the approach we have relied on for years has effectively run out of steam."
Meanwhile Alan Paller from the SANS Institute said the government's cyber defences were "embarrassing."
The government review, which will outline a way forward, is expected to be opened up for public comment at the end of this month.
At the same time, President Obama is also expected to announce the appointment of a cybersecurity tsar as part of the administration's commitment to make the issue a priority.
For many attending last week's RSA conference in San Francisco, the biggest security event of its kind, such focus is welcome.
"I think we are seeing a real breaking point in security with consumers, business and even government saying enough, no more. Let's rethink how we do this because the system is broken," said Mr Mather.
"Laws of procurement"
Over the last couple of weeks, the heat has been turned up on the issue of cybersecurity following some high profile breaches.
One involved the country's power grid which was said to have been infiltrated by nation states. The government subsequently admitted that it was "vulnerable to attack."

The review will provide a roadmap for tackling cybersecurity
Meanwhile reports during the RSA conference surfaced that spies had hacked into the Joint Strike Fighter Project.
The topic is very much on the radar of politicians who have introduced a number of bills to address security in the virtual world.
One includes a provision to allow the President to disconnect government and private entities from the internet for national security reasons in a cyber emergency.
The latest bill introduced this week by Senator Tom Carper has called for the creation of a chief information officer to monitor, detect and respond to threats.
Mr Paller, who is the director of research for security firm SANS, believes the government's multi-billion dollar budget is the most effective weapon it has to force change.
"The idea of cybersecurity leadership isn't if it's the White House or DHS (Dept of Homeland Security). It's whether you use the $70 billion you spend per year to make the nation safer."
He said the best way to ensure that was to require industry to provide more secure technology for federal acquisitions.
"If you want to change things, use the laws of procurement," suggested Mr Paller.
"Hot seat"
There is a growing view that the industry is also at a crossroads and has a responsibility to alter the way it operates.

There are 32,000 suspected cyber attacks every 24 hours
"I think we are more aware of security than ever before," said Benjamin Jun, vice president of technology at Cryptography Research.
"We are looking at risk in a new way and the good security practitioners are in the hot seat. It's time for them to do their job."
It is also time for them to come up with new technologies that can keep pace with and move ahead of the threats that affect the whole of cyber space said Asheem Chandna of venture firm Greylock Partners.
"For the evolution of the internet, I think we need the next wave of innovation. The industry clearly needs to step up and deliver the next set of technologies to protect people and stay ahead of the bad guys."
He also believes the smaller innovative companies in Silicon Valley could help the government be more productive if they were not effectively locked out of the process by the big established firms.
"We want smaller companies that are innovating in Silicon Valley to be given a better chance to help government agencies meet their mandate but the bureaucracy to do this hinders these companies.
"Instead they go to commercial customers because they see the value, they move fast, they see the return on investment and the competitive advantage it can give them. The federal government is more of a laggard in this area," said Mr Chandna.
"Silver lining"
There is undoubtedly a consensus that the security of the internet needs to be improved and that attacks are taking their toll on everything from banks to credit card companies and from critical infrastructure to defence.

The President has likened threats to the internet to that of a nuclear attack
"There is a silver lining to this dark cloud," said Mark Cohn the vice president of enterprise security at security firm Unisys.
"Public awareness, and that among the community and interested parties, has grown tremendously over the last year or two.
"Cyber security affects us all from national security to the mundane level of identity theft and fraud. But that means society as a whole is more receptive to many of the things we need to do that would in the past have been seen as politically motivated."
For security firm VeriSign, a shift in how people practice security is what is needed
"Security is a state of mind," said the company's chief technology officer Ken Silva.
"Up until now we have relied on the inefficient system of user names and passwords for security. Those have been obsolete for some time now and that is why our research is focused on making authentication stronger and user friendly."
To that end, VeriSign has introduced a security application that produces an ever changing password credential for secure transactions on the iPhone or Blackberry. To date the free app has been downloaded over 20,000 times.
"It's one thing to say security is broken, but the consumer doesn't care until it affects them," said Mr Silva.
"But if we as an industry want them to use stronger security measures we have to make it easy and more user friendly."
Indeed Mr Cohn believes everybody has to play his or her part as the online world becomes increasingly integral to our lives.
"It may seem like we are under attack and the world is more dangerous but in some ways the threat environment is shifting.
"Now the greater concern for people is protecting their information, their identity, their financial security as we move to put more information online like our health records and our social security records.
"We are at a crossroads and this should be viewed as a healthy thing," said Mr Cohn.

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