In September 2011 Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a key Northern Alliance leader and the only Tajik to be President of Afghanistan, was murdered after Taliban emissaries promised to deliver him an important message of peace. When welcomed, they blew him up.

In August 2011, after a conspiracy that lured in members of our Seal Team Six with other heroic Americans, the Taliban set up an ambush and murdered them.

Following those brutal attacks, President Obama’s strategy has been to hasten negotiations with the Taliban. Additionally, the Obama administration has now not only offered to release known Taliban terrorists from detention, but has already released some and additionally offered to legitimize our sworn enemy by furnishing them a princely office in Qatar.

In return, Obama’s agents defend that they are being tough on the Taliban by demanding that they not use the office to raise funds to support their terrorism. That is a bit reminiscent of the Clinton-Albright demand of North Korea that if we give them nuclear technology, they must promise to use it for electric generation and not weapons.

According to many Afghans, all of these and other Obama Administration actions give substantial credence to the Taliban claim, supported privately by some Pakistani leaders, that the U.S. has lost in Afghanistan and is now begging them for negotiations. One Taliban leader who was released from detention by the Obama administration for medical and end of life purposes, is now back in command and recently demanded on Afghan TV that since the Americans have now lost and are begging for negotiations, Afghans disloyal to the Taliban must come ask forgiveness and for safety from the Taliban.

(more…)

Just over a year ago, we broke the exclusive story that Mullah Omar had been taken into custody by the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).  We also predicted that Mullah Omar would never be seen alive again.

Today, news outlets are reporting Afghan intelligence claims that the Pakistani ISI has killed Mullah Omar.

Are these reports accurate, or is this some sort of a disinformation campaign, launched by the ISI, in order to make Pakistan look like it is cracking down on terrorists who heretofore have been given safe haven in Pakistan?

(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’re joined by D.B. Grady, a correspondent for The Atlantic, author, paratrooper, and veteran of Afghanistan, to discuss the regional fallout from the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

D.B. Grady’s Website
The Atlantic: Veteran’s Day
DC Examiner: Pakistan’s Role as Bin Laden’s Protector
RCW: Pakistan’s Osama Problem
RCW: In Osama’s Death, a Vindication of Obama’s Choices
RCW: Should Obama Have Captured Bin Laden?
(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to discuss the importance of Osama bin Laden’s death photos, and why waterboarding is an important tool in the war against terrorism.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Closer look at bin Laden’s compound
White House Weighing Release of Bin Laden Photographs from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Deck of Aircraft Carrier
‘Cheney’s assassination squad’ just killed bin Laden
Pej: Means To An End
Republicans note harsh interrogation helped bin Laden operation

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Pej on Twitter
Follow Elizabeth on Twitter

Of course it’s great that Osama bin Laden is dead. It’s wonderful. People should be celebrating and dancing in the streets. Are Muslims dancing in the streets the way they were dancing when bin Laden took the Towers down? Crowds of cheering Americans gathered Sunday night outside the White House in Washington and at Ground Zero in New York, chanting “USA, USA.” Not a burka in the crowd. I think that’s very telling. But what is most significant about bin Laden’s death is what it reveals about Barack Obama and Pakistan.

When Obama spoke about the killing of bin Laden Sunday night, he was shameless. Every other word was “I.” I am really surprised that Obama didn’t insist that bin Laden be brought to Manhattan to stand trial. Seriously. Obama can puff himself up and shamelessly strut like peacock, claiming credit for the death of Osama bin Laden, but Gd bless our troops. Hats off to the US military that has been relentless, dogged and brave for ten years in their mission to kill that devout bastard.

In fact, it was intelligence gleaned from interrogating Gitmo detainees, specifically Khalid Sheik Muhammad, that led to capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. These are the very techniques that Obama and Holder have stopped and fought to reverse. Obama railed against these interrogations and wanted to prosecute the CIA interrogators who led to this capture.

Obama’s chest pounding leads to some troubling conclusions. If he takes credit, that causes other problems. Remember: when Muslims were killing innocent people in Afghanistan because fringe pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran in Florida, Obama said that Jones should curtail his freedom of expression, implying that he would be responsible if Muslims killed anyone because he burned a Koran. But if we follow Obama’s line of thinking, if Muslims go jihad now and start killing people because of the death of bin Laden, who will be responsible for those deaths? Barack Obama.

How does he reconcile such crippled thinking?

(more…)

The Washington Post has just reported that Mullah Omar suffered a heart attack on January 7^th and was rushed to the hospital by Pakistan’s spy network, the Inter-services Intelligence Agency.

And how is it that the ISI was right there to provide Omar with complimentary ambulance service?  Because, as we exclusively broke in May of last year, Omar has been in Pakistani custody since March 2010.

America is being played.

Remind me how much aid money we are pumping into Pakistan and what it is purchasing us?

(more…)

President Barack Obama’s now concluding trip to India seems to have turned out to be a failed or at the very least unhelpful effort. His false starts, unhelpful comments and bad policy moves mark this visit as a bit of a mess.

Obama made multiple gaffes not only for India but for his own party back home not to mention his nation. As his political party was delivered a severe blow and his agenda was cut off at the knees on election day he was seen dancing happily all across the continent with a lavish visit paid for at the taxpayer’s expense even as those same taxpayers were enraged at wild government spending sprees. As the Indians worried over Obama’s foreign policy he refused to call the those that attacked them in Mumbai terrorists and finally on his exit from the country he delivered yet another one of his digs at his own country saying that America is a nation in decline.

Things began going wrong for The One even as he first arrived in one of the most vibrant nations on earth. For one thing he arrived a lesser president than when he originally set up the trip. His party was delivered a stunning and historic blow as the GOP picked up over 60 seats in the federal seat of power and hundreds more in the state legislatures in the Nov. 2 election, a feat that hasn’t been repeated since WWII. So Obama arrived with his mandate splintered and his power diminished. He is a president with less power to help his Indian hosts do anything.

(more…)

During the Bush years, when the fight against Islamic terror was still relatively new, big newspapers and other media outlets raced to publish or broadcast major state secrets of the war.  The New York Times splashed all over its front pages the secret of the warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists.  They and other papers published on Page A1 the secret of the black sites abroad, including the names of the countries that were helping us covertly detain terrorists.  They published the details of the enhanced interrogation techniques we were using to extract life-saving information from top al Qaeda terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  USA Today
published a memorable piece detailing the specifics of the SWIFT program to track terrorist financing.

When these stories broke, most Americans were outraged at the lack of journalistic responsibility.  How dare these left-wing outfits publish secrets that would likely empower our enemies with high-value information and endanger American lives?  Normal Americans were aghast.

But the nutcases on the Left are not normal.  They were so consumed with Bush Derangement Syndrome that they were automatically opposed to everything he did and were willing to imperil the nation in order to hurt him. National security was way down the list of priorities.  The Bush White House begged these papers not to publish these state secrets, for fear of enhancing the enemy’s intel.  The papers told the White House to take a hike.

The Left elsewhere cheered the Times and the others.  They were simply doing their patriotic duty, you see: informing the public of the evils of the Bush administration.

Of course, it would have been their journalistic and patriotic duty to inform the public of the evils of the ACTUAL ENEMY, but I digress.

(more…)

One month ago we broke the exclusive story of Mullah Omar’s capture.

Additional confirmations have come from The Jawa Report, Oliver North, Milblogger Baba Tim, Blackfive.net, and even The Nation.

Then, two weeks ago, Newsweek published a report that the Taliban is in serious turmoil because Mullah Omar is MIA.

Today, Iranian State Television reports that the Pakistanis are indeed harboring Mullah Omar.

Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi, a former senior member of the Taliban and governor of central Urozgan Province under the Taliban regime, is quoted as saying:

Pakistani security forces are harboring the fugitive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar in Karachi.

As the tempo of Omar stories increases, so does the pressure on Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as the Obama administration and the CIA to deal with the Omar issue.

(more…)

From the noted miliblogging site Free Range International comes this confirmation of Big Government and Big Journalism’s exclusive story by Brad Thor about the capture by Pakistani authorities of Mullah Omar:

Which brings me to my final topic and it is not something Americans should be happy about. I have been hearing for weeks rumors about the detention of this guy:

I have heard about this from both prominent Afghans and from a source from the USG who has impeccable credentials and has never been wrong in the past. The media story is here and that story is that the Pakistan ISI has Mullah Omar under house arrest, that our government knows this but for some reason wants to keep it a secret. I need to stress that not everyone I have contacted about this story has heard these rumors and a few important, well informed milbloggers flat out do not believe them. Regardless this story has legs and if it is true there is a huge huge problem. That problem is very simple – there should be no doubt about what happens when an allied intelligence service gets their hands on Mullah Omar. There is nothing to discuss, nothing to think through, nothing to spin, there only this; give him to us. Immediately. End of negotiation. There should be no question on the part of the USG about what to do with this dirtbag either. He is an unlawful enemy combatant and needs to be detained and held for trial by military tribunal. There is no other conceivable option. If this story proves true, and I think it is, what the hell is going on back in DC? This isn’t a game, dammit, it’s war and needs to be treated as such.

The reported Pakistani capture of Taliban founder and overall leader Mullah Omar is potentially a game changing event in the Afghanistan war, with profound implications for the stabilization of Pakistan.

If the report is correct, and if Omar is persuaded to talk (which is not at all assured) the information he has could reduce the Taliban networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan to a level at which – for a time – they were no longer an existential threat to both governments.  And, equally important, he could expose the details of the Iranian support of the Taliban, naming people in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan who give and receive arms, funding and training.

But let’s not celebrate too quickly.

First and foremost, we need to get the Pakistanis to delay giving him into US custody.  That is contrary to our normal instincts, but this man – taken alive and brought to any US detention facility other than Guantanamo Bay — would be Mirandized and pushed into the civilian criminal justice system where he, and his ilk, manifestly don’t belong. We would be forfeiting months of probable success in interrogating him.

The other reason to keep Omar in Pakistani custody is the Iran question.  The Obama administration still hasn’t formed the so-called “high-value detainee interrogation group” promised as the alternative to the now-banned “enhanced interrogation techniques” which proved so valuable in the Bush era.

If Omar can be persuaded to give up information on Iran, it should be either to CIA or US military intelligence personnel or to the Pakistanis.  US civilian interrogators would be more susceptible to Administration pressure to ignore information about Iran which might put them in the position of having to do something serious in response to the information.  Obama wants no inconvenient truths interrupting his “open-hand” strategy to Iran.

(more…)

UPDATE: Jawa Report confirms Mullah Omar has been captured.

Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.

According to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program there is a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda network in the years prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the period during and immediately thereafter.

At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately.  From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.

When this explosive information was quietly confirmed to United States Intelligence ten days ago by Pakistani authorities, it appeared to take the Defense Department by surprise. No one, though, is going to be more surprised than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  It seems even with confirmation from the Pakistanis themselves, she was never brought up to speed.

(more…)

Islam? Islam? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?

We awake to news that after extraordinary police work, investigators have made an arrest in the attempted car bombing of Times Square in New York.  Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani native-turned-naturalized-U.S.-citizen, was taken into custody late last night. He was naturalized last year, and shortly thereafter, made a trip to Peshawar, Pakistan–a hotbed of Islamic terrorist activity and recruitment.

I have read countless reports about the arrest, in newspapers and websites big and small.  So far, I have not seen a single mention of his faith.  Not a single reference to his being Muslim.  We’re left to deduce that by his Pakistani ethnicity and name.

Political correctness has stripped us of our ability to be brutally honest about the nature of the threat we face.  It’s not from a bunch of maniacal Catholics or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists.  The lethal threat is coming from radical Muslims.  Even after September 11, even after repeated terror attacks and attempts here and abroad, we still cannot be truthful and outspoken about it?  Pathetic.

(more…)

The Washington think tank New America Foundation has been reporting on drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq for quite some time and its tally of kills by U.S. drones reveals an interesting thing. It shows that drone kills under President Obama are far and away higher than those under Bush.

Reliable numbers of those killed by U.S. drones are obviously hard to come by. Strikes are deep in unfriendly territory and subject to obfuscation by both a U.S. government that isn’t too keen on reporting kills as well as its enemies that try to downplay the strikes in order to discredit their effectiveness. Because of this the NAF reports a range between which the truth may lie.

For instance, in these first few months of 2010 NAF reports that so far between 141 and 240 people have been killed by U.S. predator drones. This includes “collateral damage” as well as the deaths of actual terrorists.

That is a pretty wide span, to be sure. But if we choose some middle point between the NAF’s estimates of predator drone kills we can see that during Obama’s year in office drone kills have gone up precipitously.

Between 2009 and today a middling estimate of drone kills clocks in at 692. However, according to the NAF the kills tallied by U.S. drones during the Bush years — all of the Bush years — is about 392.

The kills during this one year of Obama’s term in office seem to have doubled compared to the number during the Bush years. I’ll say that again: in just one year Obama has doubled Bush’s drone kill rate.

(more…)