‘The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.”

The words are from Ulysses S. Grant’s recollections of the Battle of Shiloh. But they are being quoted to me by H.R. McMaster, arguably the Pentagon’s foremost warrior-scholar, to stress that the increasingly common American perception that the Afghan War is lost doesn’t jibe with what he witnessed during his recent 20-month deployment to Afghanistan.

“The difficulties are apparent,” says the two-star Army general, “but oftentimes the opportunities are masked.”

For a sense of those opportunities, consider some of the metrics of battle. When Gen. McMaster arrived in Afghanistan in July 2010—as President Obama’s surge reached full strength—enemy attacks numbered 4,000 a month. A year later, they had dropped to 3,250. In March, there were 1,700. Every month from May 2011 through March 2012 (the latest with available data) had fewer attacks than the same month the year before, the longest sustained reduction of the war.

Meanwhile, Afghan security forces will number 350,000 this summer, up from 240,000 when Gen. McMaster arrived. Afghans now lead nearly half of all combat operations. Eight million Afghan children attend school, including three million girls, compared to one million and zero girls in 2001. Where finding a telephone 10 years ago often required traveling a full day, now more than 12 million Afghans own cellphones (out of 32 million total).

“Our soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors, working alongside Afghans, have shut down the vast majority of the physical space in which the enemy can operate,” says Gen. McMaster. “The question is, how do we consolidate those gains politically and psychologically?”

The political and psychological dimensions of warfare have long fascinated the general, who first became famous in the Army when he led his vastly outnumbered tank regiment to victory at the Battle of 73 Easting in the first Gulf War. Six years later, he published “Dereliction of Duty,” based on his Ph.D. thesis indicting the Vietnam-era military leadership for failing to push back against a commander in chief, Lyndon Johnson, who was more interested in securing his Great Society domestic agenda than in doing what was necessary—militarily and politically—to prevail in Southeast Asia. For 15 years it’s been considered must-reading at the Pentagon.

But Gen. McMaster really earned his renown applying the tenets of counterinsurgency strategy, or COIN, during the war in Iraq. As a colonel in 2005, he took responsibility for a place called Tal Afar. In that city of 200,000 people, the insurgents’ “savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young,” wrote Tal Afar’s mayor in 2006. “This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment.”

Gen. McMaster’s troops fought in Tal Afar with the understanding that victory would not be achieved by using maximum violence to hunt and kill insurgents. Instead, the key tasks were to secure and improve life for the local population, establish reliable local government, and project determination and staying power.

Before long, President George W. Bush was citing Tal Afar as a model. It helped inspire the strategy shift that turned around the Iraq War under David Petraeus, Gen. McMaster’s mentor and a fellow West Point graduate with a Ph.D. and a penchant for quoting theorists like Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the Prussian officer who famously defined war as the continuation of politics by other means.

Now Gen. McMaster has been attempting to apply counterinsurgency strategy in another war most Americans have written off.

As the head of Task Force Shafafiyat—the word means “transparency” in Pashto—his job was to identify how U.S. and Afghan funds flow not only as payments to contractors, subcontractors and local Afghan officials, but as kickbacks or protection money to criminal networks and insurgents. Since August 2010, the coalition says, it has vetted some 1,400 American, Afghan and foreign companies, barring or suspending more than 150 firms and individuals from doing business with the U.S.

Trying to stop corruption in Afghanistan is often seen in the West as akin to trying to stop the tides. Gen. McMaster calls that view “bigotry masquerading as cultural sensitivity.”

But there is little doubt that corruption is a formidable problem. The abuse of official positions of power for personal gain, the general said last year in Kabul, “is robbing Afghanistan of much-needed revenue, undermining rule of law, degrading the effectiveness of state institutions, and eroding popular confidence in the government.”

In 2010, Kabul Bank—Afghanistan’s largest, and the main source of payment for Afghan security forces—nearly brought down the country’s financial system when almost $1 billion in reserves apparently disappeared into the briefcases and Dubai villas of Afghan elites. In another case, Gen. McMaster’s investigators found evidence that Afghanistan’s former surgeon general had stolen tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs from military hospitals.

Though corruption charges have dogged senior officials and intimates of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for years, not a single person with high-level political connections has been convicted of wrongdoing. In many cases, Mr. Karzai appears to have personally blocked or hampered efforts at accountability.

Staying politic, Gen. McMaster notes that Mr. Karzai and other senior officials have at last acknowledged the problem publicly. “Now, have they matched that with decisive action? No. But is [public acknowledgment] a first step? Yes it is.”

Perhaps Gen. McMaster is reluctant to pin too much blame on Mr. Karzai because he thinks the root of Afghanistan’s corruption problem goes deeper, to three decades of “trauma that it’s been through, the legacy of the 1990s civil war . . . [and] the effects of the narcotics trade.” Add to that the unintended consequences of sudden Western attention starting in 2001: “We did exacerbate the problem with lack of transparency and accountability built into the large influx of international assistance that came into a government that lacked mature institutions.”

Yet the Afghan War’s most important factor, in his view, could be the Afghan people’s expectations for the future. “Why did the Taliban collapse so quickly in 2001?” he asks. “The fundamental reason was that every Afghan was convinced of the inevitability of the Taliban’s defeat.”

Today it’s not clear who the strong horse is, so many Afghans are hedging their bets. “What you see in Afghanistan oftentimes,” the general says, “is a short-term-maximization-of-gains mentality—get as much out of the system as you can to build up a power base in advance of a post-[NATO], post-international-community Afghanistan.”

In this respect, the Strategic Partnership Agreement signed last week by President Obama and Mr. Karzai may help, since it pledges some American military and diplomatic commitments through 2024. Gen. McMaster calls it “immensely important.” Still, it doesn’t erase the record of Obama administration rhetoric to the effect that American withdrawal is inevitable even if the enemy’s defeat is not.

Gen. McMaster steers far clear of any such political criticism. Instead, he argues that the Afghan people can be convinced to bet against the insurgency—and in favor of their government—if they see a crackdown on public corruption.

Some of the signs are good. Afghan civil society, he says hopefully, has a growing number of “groups that don’t want to see the gains of the past 10 years reversed, that want a better future for their children, and that are demanding necessary reforms from their leaders.” Last year saw the launch of the Right and Justice Party, with an anticorruption message and multiethnic leadership of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras.

One of the general’s historical models is Colombia, where a few years ago many people believed the government couldn’t stand up to the narco-terrorist FARC insurgency. “What was the problem of Colombia in the late ’90s? It was political will to take [the FARC] on,” he says, adding that U.S. counternarcotics and other efforts helped lay the groundwork that Álvaro Uribe built on after winning Colombia’s presidency in 2002.

We could see such an outcome again, says Gen. McMaster, especially given “the innate weakness of Afghanistan’s enemies.”

“What do the Taliban have to offer the Afghan people?” he asks. They are “a criminal organization, criminal because they engage in mass murder of innocent people, and criminal because they’re also the largest narcotics-trafficking organization in the world. Are these virtuous religious people? No, these are murderous, nihilistic, irreligious people who we’re fighting—we along with Afghans who are determined to not allow them to return.”

Taliban groups, he adds, are increasingly seen by Afghans “as a tool of hostile foreign intelligence agencies. These are people who live in comfort in Pakistan and send their children to private schools while they destroy schools in Afghanistan.” He notes, too, that indigenous Afghan fighters are wondering where their leadership is: “One of the maxims of military leadership is that you share the hardships of your troops, you lead from the front. Well they’re leading from comfortable villas in Pakistan. So there’s growing resentment, and this could be an opportunity to convince key communities inside of Afghanistan into joining the political process.”

As a tool for this, Gen. McMaster praises the U.S. military’s “village stability operations,” which send small teams of Special Forces to live among Afghans in remote villages vulnerable to Taliban intimidation.

Still, it’s easy to get carried away by the glimmers of hope, and the general is very much a realist. For one thing, Pakistan remains a haven for insurgency, and Gen. McMaster says little more than that it “remains to be seen” whether Pakistan’s leaders will conclude that their interests lie in defeating the Taliban.

Just as worrisome, though far less noticed, is the influence of Iran, which is pressuring Kabul to reject the Strategic Partnership Agreement.

“Many of the media platforms that operate in Afghanistan—television, radio, print media—are either wholly captured and run, or owned by hostile organizations or entities,” Gen. McMaster says. The Iranian government has about 20 television stations operating in Western Afghanistan. Another disheartening hearts-and-minds metric: Iran and other foreign entities run more schools in Herat City than does the Afghan government.

Near the end of our interview, we turn to the future of American warfare. U.S. troops are scheduled to end combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014, perhaps sooner. Focus is turning from the Middle East to East Asia, and to the air and sea power required in the Pacific.

Does that mean that for the foreseeable future the U.S. won’t “do” another Afghanistan or Iraq? “We have a perfect record in predicting future wars—right? . . . And that record is 0%,” says the general. “If you look at the demands that have been placed on our armed forces in recent years, I think the story that will be told years from now is one of adaptability to mission sets and circumstances that were not clearly defined or anticipated prior to those wars.”

That’s fortunate, Gen. McMaster makes clear, in light of Clausewitz’s 200-year-old warning not “to turn war into something that’s alien to its nature—don’t try to define war as you would like it to be.”

The global economic crisis has been a boon for transnational criminals. Thanks to the weak economy, cash-rich criminal organizations can acquire financially distressed but potentially valuable companies at bargain prices. Fiscal austerity is forcing governments everywhere to cut the budgets of law enforcement agencies and court systems. Millions of people have been laid off and are thus more easily tempted to break the law. Large numbers of unemployed experts in finance, accounting, information technology, law, and logistics have boosted the supply of world-class talent available to criminal cartels. Meanwhile, philanthropists all over the world have curtailed their giving, creating funding shortfalls in the arts, education, health care, and other areas, which criminals are all too happy to fill in exchange for political access, social legitimacy, and popular support. International criminals could hardly ask for a more favorable business environment. Their activities are typically high margin and cash-based, which means they often enjoy a high degree of liquidity — not a bad position to be in during a global credit crunch.

But emboldened adversaries and dwindling resources are not the only problems confronting police departments, prosecutors, and judges. In recent years, a new threat has emerged: the mafia state. Across the globe, criminals have penetrated governments to an unprecedented degree. The reverse has also happened: rather than stamping out powerful gangs, some governments have instead taken over their illegal operations. In mafia states, government officials enrich themselves and their families and friends while exploiting the money, muscle, political influence, and global connections of criminal syndicates to cement and expand their own power. Indeed, top positions in some of the world’s most profitable illicit enterprises are no longer filled only by professional criminals; they now include senior government officials, legislators, spy chiefs, heads of police departments, military officers, and, in some extreme cases, even heads of state or their family members.

This fusing of governments and criminal groups is distinct from the more limited ways in which the two have collaborated in the past. Governments and spy agencies, including those of democratic countries, have often enlisted criminals to smuggle weapons to allied insurgents in other countries or even to assassinate enemies abroad. (The CIA’s harebrained attempt to enlist American mafia figures to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1960 is perhaps the best-known example.) But unlike normal states, mafia states do not just occasionally rely on criminal groups to advance particular foreign policy goals. In a mafia state, high government officials actually become integral players in, if not the leaders of, criminal enterprises, and the defense and promotion of those enterprises’ businesses become official priorities. In mafia states such as Bulgaria, Guinea-Bissau, Montenegro, Myanmar (also called Burma), Ukraine, and Venezuela, the national interest and the interests of organized crime are now inextricably intertwined.

Because the policies and resource allocations of mafia states are determined as much by the influence of criminals as by the forces that typically shape state behavior, these states pose a serious challenge to policymakers and analysts of international politics. Mafia states defy easy categorization, blurring the conceptual line between states and nonstate actors. As a result, their behavior is difficult to predict, making them particularly dangerous actors in the international environment.

A REVOLUTION IN CRIME

Conventional wisdom about international criminal networks rests on three faulty assumptions. First, many people believe that when it comes to illicit activities, everything has been done before. It is true that criminals, smugglers, and black markets have always existed. But the nature of international crime has changed a great deal in the past two decades, as criminal networks have expanded beyond their traditional markets and started taking advantage of political and economic transformations and exploiting new technologies. In the early 1990s, for example, criminal groups became early adopters of innovations in communications, such as advanced electronic encryption. Criminal syndicates also pioneered new means of drug transportation, such as “narco-submarines”: semi-submersible vessels able to evade radar, sonar, and infrared systems. (Drug cartels in Colombia eventually graduated to fully submersible submarines.) In more recent years, criminal organizations have also taken advantage of the Internet, leading to a dizzying growth in cybercrime, which cost the global economy some $114 billion in 2011, according to the Internet security firm Symantec.

A second common misperception is that international crime is an underground phenomenon that involves only a small community of deviants operating at the margins of societies. The truth is that in many countries, criminals today do not bother staying underground at all, nor are they remotely marginal. In fact, the suspected leaders of many major criminal groups have become celebrities of a sort. Wealthy individuals with suspicious business backgrounds are sought-after philanthropists and have come to control radio and television stations and own influential newspapers. Moreover, criminals’ accumulation of wealth and power depends not only on their own illicit activities but also on the actions of average members of society: for example, the millions of citizens involved in China’s counterfeit consumer-goods industry and in Afghanistan’s drug trade, the millions of Westerners who smoke marijuana regularly, the hundreds of thousands of migrants who every year hire criminals to smuggle them to Europe, and the well-to-do professionals in Manhattan and Milan who employ illegal immigrants as nannies and housekeepers. Ordinary people such as these are an integral part of the criminal ecosystem.

A third mistaken assumption is that international crime is strictly a matter of law enforcement, best managed by police departments, prosecutors, and judges. In reality, international crime is better understood as a political problem with national security implications. The scale and scope of the most powerful criminal organizations now easily match those of the world’s largest multinational corporations. And just as legitimate organizations seek political influence, so, too, do criminal ones. Of course, criminals have always sought to corrupt political systems to their own advantage. But illicit groups have never before managed to acquire the degree of political influence now enjoyed by criminals in a wide range of African, eastern European, and Latin American countries, not to mention China and Russia.

In the past decade or so, this phenomenon has crossed a threshold, resulting in the emergence of potent mafia states. José Grinda, a Spanish prosecutor with years of experience fighting eastern European criminal organizations, maintains that in many cases, it has become impossible for him and his colleagues to distinguish the interests of criminal organizations from those of their host governments. According to Grinda, Spanish law enforcement officials constantly confront criminal syndicates that function as appendages of the governments of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. In confidential remarks contained in U.S. diplomatic cables released by the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, he detailed his concerns about the “tremendous control” exercised by what he termed “the Russian mafia” over a number of strategic sectors of the global economy, such as aluminum and natural gas. This control, Grinda suggested, is made possible by the extent to which the Kremlin collaborates with Russian criminal organizations.

In mafia states, government officials and criminals often work together through legal business conglomerates with close ties to top leaders and their families and friends. According to Grinda, Moscow regularly employs criminal syndicates — as when, for example, Russia’s military intelligence agency directed a mafia group to supply arms to Kurdish rebels in Turkey. More indicative of the overlap between Russia’s government and its criminal groups, however, is the case of a cargo ship, Arctic Sea, that the Russian government claimed was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Sweden in 2009. Moscow ostensibly sent the Russian navy to rescue the ship, but many experts believe it was actually smuggling weapons on behalf of Russia’s intelligence services and that the hijacking and rescue were ruses intended to cover up the trafficking after rival intelligence services had disrupted it. Grinda says that the smuggling was a joint operation run by organized criminal gangs and what he cryptically termed “Eurasian security services.” The Russians were embarrassed, but the outcome was essentially benign, even a bit comical. Still, the affair underscored the unpredictability of a security environment in which it is difficult to distinguish the geopolitical calculations of states from the profit motives of criminal organizations.

“THE MAFIA HAS THE COUNTRY”

Russia is hardly the only country where the line between government agencies and criminal groups has been irreparably blurred. Last year, the Council of Europe published a report alleging that the prime minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, and his political allies exert “violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics” and occupy important positions in “Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organized crime.” The state-crime nexus is perhaps even stronger in Bulgaria. A 2005 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last year is worth quoting at length, given the disturbing portrait it paints of Bulgaria’s descent into mafia statehood. The cable read, in part:

Organized crime has a corrupting influence on all Bulgarian institutions, including the government, parliament and judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is in power, OC [organized crime] figures donate to all the major political parties. As these figures have expanded into legitimate businesses, they have attempted — with some success — to buy their way into the corridors of power. . . . Below the level of the national government and the leadership of the major political parties, OC “owns” a number of municipalities and individual members of parliament. This direct participation in politics — as opposed to bribery — is a relatively new development for Bulgarian OC. Similarly in the regional center of Velingrad, OC figures control the municipal council and the mayor’s office. Nearly identical scenarios have played out in half a dozen smaller towns and villages across Bulgaria.

This state of affairs led Atanas Atanasov, a member of the Bulgarian parliament and a former counterintelligence chief, to observe that “other countries have the mafia; in Bulgaria the mafia has the country.”

Mafia states integrate the speed and flexibility of transnational criminal networks with the legal protections and diplomatic privileges enjoyed only by states.

Crime and the state are also becoming intertwined in Afghanistan, where top government officials and provincial governors — including President Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was assassinated last year — have been accused not just of colluding with drug-trafficking networks but of actually leading them. As the drug trade becomes ever more globalized, African countries have been drawn in, too, becoming important transit points for drugs from the Andean region and Asia on their way to drug-hungry European markets. Inevitably, several African rulers and their families, along with lower-level politicians, military officers, and members of the judiciary, have entered the narcotics-trafficking business themselves. In Guinea, for example, Ousmane Conté, son of the late president Lansana Conté, was officially labeled a “drug kingpin” by the U.S. government in 2010.

Police departments, secret services, courts, local and provincial governments, passport-issuing agencies, and customs offices have all become coveted targets for criminal takeovers. Last year, René Sanabria, a retired general who headed Bolivia’s antidrug agency, was arrested by U.S. federal agents in Panama and charged with plotting to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to Miami. Sanabria pled guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Similarly, a succession of generals who held the chief antidrug post in Mexico are now in prison for taking part in the very kind of crime they were supposed to prevent.

A mafia state has also taken root in Venezuela. In 2010, President Hugo Chávez appointed General Henry Rangel Silva as the top commander of the Venezuelan armed forces; earlier this year, he became minister of defense. But in 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department added Rangel Silva to its list of officially designated drug kingpins, accusing him of “materially assisting narcotic trafficking activities.” The Treasury Department also recently slapped that label on a number of other Venezuelan officials, including five high-ranking military officers, a senior intelligence officer, and an influential member of congress allied with Chávez. In 2010, a Venezuelan named Walid Makled, accused by several governments of being the head of one of the world’s largest drug-trafficking groups, was captured by Colombian authorities. Prior to his extradition to Venezuela, Makled claimed that he had videos, recorded telephone conversations, canceled checks, and other evidence proving he worked for a criminal network that involved 15 Venezuelan generals (including the head of military intelligence and the director of the antinarcotics office), the brother of the country’s interior minister, and five members of congress.

Owing in part to such ties, the cocaine business has flourished in Venezuela in recent years, and the country now supplies more than half of all cocaine shipments to Europe, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. And the drug trade is not the only illicit activity that has flourished in Venezuela’s era of state-sanctioned crime: the country has also become a base of operations for human trafficking, money laundering, counterfeiting, weapons smuggling, and the trade in contraband oil.

In the past, foreign policy scholars generally considered international crime to be a relatively minor problem that domestic legal systems should handle. The impact of crime, they believed, was insignificant compared with the threat of terrorism or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is starting to change. More and more experts and policymakers are recognizing that crime has become a significant source of global instability, especially with the emergence of mafia states.

Criminal gangs, for example, have become involved in for-profit nuclear proliferation. A. Q. Khan, the notorious Pakistani nuclear peddler, claimed that he was spreading bomb-making know-how to other nations in order to advance Pakistan’s interests. But the international network he built to market and deliver his goods was organized as an illicit, for-profit enterprise. Nuclear proliferation experts have long cautioned that nonstate actors might not respond to nuclear deterrence strategies in the same way states do; there is reason to worry, then, that as criminal organizations fuse more thoroughly with governments, deterrence might become more difficult. Perhaps most worrisome in this regard is North Korea. Although North Korea recently announced that in exchange for food aid, it would suspend its nuclear weapons tests, stop enriching uranium, and allow international inspectors to visit its main nuclear complex, the country still remains a nuclear-armed dictatorship whose state-directed criminal enterprises have led U.S. officials to nickname it “the Sopranos state.” Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an expert on the crime-state nexus in North Korea, has written that the country has “the means and motivation for exporting nuclear material,” warning that “proliferation conducted through illicit networks will not always be well controlled by the supplier state,” which adds additional uncertainty to an already dangerous situation.

Even putting aside the alarming prospect of nuclear mafia states, governments heavily involved in illicit trade might be more prone to use force when their access to profitable markets is threatened. Take, for example, the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. According to the Carnegie Endowment’s Thomas de Waal, an expert on the Caucasus, before the conflict, criminal organizations operated highly profitable operations in South Ossetia, where illicit trade accounted for a significant part of the economy. Although direct evidence is difficult to come by, the scale of these illegal activities suggested the active complicity of senior Russian officials, who acted as the criminals’ patrons and partners. Of course, the conflict was fueled by many factors, including ethnic strife, domestic Georgian politics, and Russia’s desire to assert its hegemony in its near abroad. But it is also conceivable that among the interest groups pushing the Kremlin toward war were those involved in lucrative trafficking operations in the contested areas.

PROFITING IN THE SHADOWS

Increasingly, fighting transnational crime must mean more than curbing the traffic of counterfeit goods, drugs, weapons, and people; it must also involve preventing and reversing the criminalization of governments. Illicit trade is intrinsically dangerous, but the threat it poses to society is amplified when criminals become high-level government officials and governments take over criminal syndicates. Yet today’s law enforcement agencies are no match for criminal organizations that not only are wealthy, violent, and ruthless but also benefit from the full support of national governments and their diplomats, judges, spies, generals, cabinet ministers, and police chiefs. Mafia states can afford the best lawyers and accountants and have access to the most advanced technology. Underfunded law enforcement agencies, overworked courts, and slow-moving bureaucracies are increasingly unable to keep up with such well-funded, agile foes.

Law enforcement agencies are also hamstrung by the fact that they are inherently national, whereas the largest and most dangerous criminal organizations, along with the agents of mafia states, operate in multiple jurisdictions. Mafia states integrate the speed and flexibility of transnational criminal networks with the legal protections and diplomatic privileges enjoyed only by states, creating a hybrid form of international actor against which domestic law enforcement agencies have few weapons. The existing tools that national governments can use to counter the new threat — treaties, multilateral organizations, and cooperation among national law enforcement agencies — are slow, unwieldy, and unsuited to the task. After all, how can a country coordinate its anticrime efforts with government leaders or top police officials who are themselves criminals?

The emergence of mafia states imperils the very concept of international law enforcement cooperation. In 2006, the heads of police of 152 nations met in Brazil for the 75th General Assembly of Interpol, the multilateral organization whose constitution calls on it “to ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities.” Interpol’s president at the time was Jackie Selebi, the national police commissioner of South Africa. In his opening address, Selebi exhorted his colleagues “to find systems to make sure that our borders and border control are on a firm footing”; a noble cause, to be sure. Unfortunately, its champion turned out to be a crook himself. In 2010, Selebi was convicted of accepting a $156,000 bribe from a drug smuggler and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence.

But more troubling for Interpol than any single high-profile embarrassment is what insiders call a “low-trust problem,” which has historically stifled the agency’s efforts. “The sad truth is I am not going to share my best, most delicate information with the Russian or Mexican police departments,” one senior official in the United Kingdom’s organized-crime agency told me when asked about Interpol. Even though the agency goes to great lengths to ensure the confidentiality of the information that its member agencies share with it, the reality is that national law enforcement agencies remain wary of revealing too much.

As the role of mafia states has become clearer, law enforcement officers across the globe have begun to develop new policies and strategies for dealing with such states, including requiring high-level public officials to disclose their finances; scrutinizing the accountants, lawyers, and technology experts who protect crime lords; and improving coordination among different domestic agencies. The rise of mafia states has also added urgency to the search for ways to internationalize the fight against crime. One promising approach would be to create “coalitions of the honest” among law enforcement agencies that are less likely to have been penetrated or captured by criminal groups. Some states are already experimenting with arrangements of this kind, which go beyond normal bilateral anticrime cooperation by including not just law enforcement agencies but also representatives from intelligence agencies and armed forces. A complementary step would be to develop multinational networks of magistrates, judges, police officials, intelligence analysts, and policymakers to encourage a greater degree of cooperation than Interpol affords by building on the trust that exists among senior law enforcement officers who have fought transnational criminal networks together for decades. As is often the case, long-term collaborations among like-minded individuals who know one another well and share values are far more effective than formal, officially sanctioned cooperation between institutions whose officers barely know one another.

Unfortunately, despite the near-universal recognition that combating international crime requires international action, most anticrime initiatives remain primarily domestic. And although mafia states have transformed international crime into a national security issue, the responsibility for combating it still rests almost exclusively with law enforcement agencies. Indeed, even in developed countries, police departments and other law enforcement bodies rarely coordinate with their national security counterparts, even though transnational crime threatens democratic governance, financial markets, and human rights.

An important obstacle to combating the spread of mafia states is a basic lack of awareness among ordinary citizens and policymakers about the extent of the phenomenon. Ignorance of the scope and scale of the problem will make it difficult to defend or increase the already meager budgets of government agencies charged with confronting international crime, especially in a time of fiscal austerity. But such awareness will be hard to generate while so many aspects of the process of state criminalization remain ill understood — and therein lies an even larger problem. Devoting public money to reducing the power of mafia states will be useless or even counterproductive unless the funds pay for policies grounded in a robust body of knowledge. Regrettably, the mafia state is a phenomenon about which there is little available data. The analytic frameworks that governments are currently applying to the problem are primitive, based on outdated understandings about organized crime. Addressing this dearth of knowledge will require law enforcement authorities, intelligence agencies, military organizations, media outlets, academics, and nongovernmental organizations to develop and share more reliable information. Doing so, however, would be only a first step — and an admittedly insufficient one.

Mitt Romney will be the GOP standard-bearer in the most ideological presidential election in modern American history. Unlike past contests in which one party would lean mildly left of center and the other somewhat to the right, this one will be unprecedentedly hard-core. Romney had better spend real time preparing how he’s going to substantively promote and defend the virtues of free people and free markets. The outcome of this contest will profoundly impact the kind of country the U.S. is going to be.

Barack Obama and the extreme left know that if he loses the White House their dream of a government-dominated America à la France and Italy goes with him. That’s why their reactions to the sensible entitlement reforms proposed by Representative Paul Ryan (R–Wis.) are shrill, desperate, demagogic, McCarthyesque attacks.

Since the Great Depression advocates of big government have occupied the moral high ground when it comes to debating issues. Government has been portrayed as the friend of the downtrodden. In this view private markets are inherently unstable, as well as cold and heartless. Even if government programs are inefficient, wasteful and counterproductive, their intentions are noble. If a politician proposes a government program to help the poor, anyone opposing it is seen as “uncaring.” Despite the hugely successful presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, following the economic catastrophes of the 1970s, big government believers were still seen as more humane and caring than were free market conservatives.

The recent financial crisis appeared to give the left—always a distinct minority in this country—the opportunity to lastingly alter American culture, economics and politics. Yet here we are, and free market ideology is back stronger than ever. An impressive number of new Republican representatives and senators truly “get” what free enterprise is about and understand that free markets are moral, while big government is not. The good-intentions free ride of big government adherents is coming to a close.

But so much depends on how Mitt Romney conducts his campaign. Some pundits believe that the hard-fought fight for the GOP nomination has weakened the Republican Party. It hasn’t. Romney today is a much stronger, more forceful candidate than he was in 2008 or even three months ago. In recent weeks his rhetoric has improved markedly as he’s talked about restoring American principles and how this is going to be a contest against those who want a government-dominated economy. He is also getting a better grasp on the entitlement reforms advocated by Paul Ryan, which is critical. Ryan’s approach leaves those who are currently receiving or about to receive Social Security and Medicare untouched. Their benefit formulas will remain unchanged. Change comes for those under the age of 55, where the fruitful forces of free markets will be brought to bear. Ryan grasps that allowing more free enterprise in health care means greater benefits for all and lower medical costs.

But Romney’s progress is only beginning. He still conveys a sense of guilt over his own fabulous success. He remains uneasy about advocating reforms that will be tagged as “favoring the rich.” He’s going to have to learn to go on the offensive and boldly hit back against tired anti-free-market labels such as “trickle-down economics” (investment, whether in securities or businesses, is how an economy grows and the standard of living improves). Obama’s approach means that the poor will remain poor and upward mobility in America will come to an end.

The President’s banner of fairness? There’s nothing fair about an economy that stagnates and has high unemployment and underemployment, which is where the President’s ideology is leading us.

In business, success goes to the companies that set the rules of the competition. In politics the candidate who frames the debate wins.

Bearable Truths

A couple of new studies have blown yet another hole in the notion of man-made global warming. Remember those stories a few years ago about how global warming was melting the ice caps, thereby putting polar bears on the road to extinction? Well, a new survey from the government of Nunavut, a Canadian territory, has found that the number of polar bears in northern Canada is flourishing and may be the highest it’s ever been. That census confirms other findings that polar bears are thriving.

Another inconvenient study, from a group of Syracuse University scientists, has come out showing that during medieval times other parts of the Earth–not just Europe–heated up and then cooled down naturally for what turned out to be a mini ice age (1350–1800). Obviously, the world of 1,000 years ago didn’t have a lot of SUVs and coal-fired power plants to account for the warm weather.

Unneeded, Destructive

The federal government’s suit against Apple and several book publishers demonstrates the silliness of antitrust laws. The agreement among Apple and five publishers allowed the publishers to set the price of their wares in Apple’s eBookStore; in return Apple would get a very rich 30% slice of the revenues. These publishers agreed not to sell their e-books at lower prices elsewhere. The deal meant that participating publishers would have to persuade Amazon to charge the Apple price or forgo selling their books on Amazon, which happens to be a humongous marketplace.

The Justice Department doesn’t seem to grasp that the book industry–and every other industry–is in a confounding state of flux, thanks to the Internet. There is competition aplenty. Traditional publishers are fighting for survival. Authors can sell their writings directly online, with no middleman necessary. Amazon, in fact, happens to have a burgeoning service to help these scribblers do just that. In short, it’s not inconceivable that the publishers would have concluded after a while that their deal with Apple was untenable.

The whole concept of antitrust is based on the bogus conception that government intervention is needed to ensure competition. Actually, competition will do the business of curbing any would-be monopolists far better than bureaucrats will. For instance, IBM’s once seemingly impregnable position in computers, from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, was undermined not by the feds but by the rise of minicomputers followed by networked PCs.

Market forces work–if we let them.

This year will likely be the first time in history that a company tops $500 billion in sales. Two oil companies are good bets to pass the mark: the U.S.’ ExxonMobil and the U.K.-registered, Netherlands-headquartered Royal Dutch Shell. In late March I talked with Shell’s CEO, Peter Voser, onstage at a Silicon Valley Churchill Club event.

How did an economist become CEO of Shell? I started out at Shell but left to become the CFO of [Swiss-based] ABB. In 2004 there was a crisis at Shell, and I came back in as CFO.

What was the crisis? The company had overstated its oil reserves in the ground. A few heads rolled for that.

Ouch. And then you became CEO in 2009. Yes—it was a shock to the company! I was the first non-Dutch or non-Brit [Voser is Swiss] to head the company. The second shock was having an economist, not a technologist, at the top. So that gave me a few challenges in the beginning. I had actually said no to the job a few times.

What convinced you to accept the CEO job? The Shell board kept up an ongoing conversation with me. Shell had turned 100 years old in 2007, so we talked a lot about how to make Shell a world leader for the next 100 years. By 2050 the world will have 9 billion, not 7 billion, people; global energy consumption will be at least double what it is now; and China will have 600 million or more cars. The question is how should Shell evolve to serve this new world?

You became CEO in June 2009, during a global economic crisis. What was that like? I saw it as a great opportunity. Shell had become too slow. We’d built up a lot of structures, hierarchies, fat. I wanted to change that from the first day I became CEO.

Speed of transformation is high on every CEO’s list. What are the keys? Two things. First, you have to communicate right from the start—and very clearly—what you want to do. Then, when you start to make changes, you start at the top. We took 20% of Shell’s top management out in order to make the company fitter, with faster decision trees, more accountability ­further down. Then I took the unusual step of asking the top 14,000 people at Shell to reapply for their jobs.

How long did it take to change Shell’s organizational structure? Seven months. I wanted it in six, but I was happy with seven. When you decide to change, you have to move fast.

Where is the world’s energy going to come from? Let’s start with the facts. We estimate that energy demand worldwide will double by 2050. Ninety percent of the new demand will come from non-OECD countries—and half of that from China. The numbers I’ve given you assume gains in ­energy efficiency. If we don’t have those gains, then energy demand will triple by 2050. Remember that energy demand rises fastest in countries that are coming out of poverty, with people buying their first cars and refrigerators. We must assume that the next 20 to 25 years will be a very intensive energy phase.

And your view is that nothing can really replace fossil fuels in 20 to 25 years. Correct. We can achieve efficiency gains rather quickly on the demand side, but big changes on the supply side take decades.

Some futurists say you underestimate the pace of change in wind, solar and biofuels. If you look at the history of new energy technologies, you’ll see they take 25 to 30 years just to get to meeting 1% of global demand. This is not the six months mobile-phone-type of change. Biofuels just met 1% of global energy needs. Solar will meet 1% pretty soon. These are not new technologies. The innovation we really need is in process innovation that cuts speed of adoption. It’s a tough nut to crack.

Why so tough? The global energy system is complex, with incredible logistical challenges.

Have we hit peak oil? We’ve certainly hit the cheap-oil peak. It’s going to get more expensive. All energy is going to get more expensive.

Will Shell always be an oil company? Let me share two areas I think about. One is the relationship among energy, water and food. As the world grows to 9 billion people and also grows more affluent, it’s not only the demand for energy that will double but also the demand for water and food. The second thing I think about is urbanization. Today 50% of the world’s population lives in major cities; in 30 years 75% will. During this period a new 1-million-person city will be created each week. How we get energy, water and food into these cities will be the great challenge of the next several decades.

Would the CEO of Shell ever ­consider buying an electric car? Not as long as coal is the source of most electricity!

As we mark the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, President Obama deserves credit for making the right choice on taking out Public Enemy No. 1.

But his administration never would have had the opportunity to do the right thing had it not been for some extraordinary work during the George W. Bush administration. Much of that work has been denigrated by Obama as unproductive and contrary to American principles.

He is wrong on both counts.

Shortly after bin Laden met his maker last spring, courtesy of U.S. Special Forces and intelligence, the administration proudly announced that when Obama took office, getting bin Laden was made a top priority. Many of us who served in senior counterterrorism positions in the Bush administration were left muttering: “Gee, why didn’t we think of that?”

The truth is that getting bin Laden was the top counterterrorism objective for U.S. intelligence since well before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. This administration built on work painstakingly pursued for many years before Obama was elected – and without this work, Obama administration officials never would have been in a position to authorize the strike on Abbottabad, Pakistan, that resulted in bin Laden’s overdue death.

In 2004, an al-Qaida terrorist was captured trying to communicate with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terror organization’s operations in Iraq. That captured terrorist was taken to a secret CIA prison – or “black site” – where, initially, he was uncooperative. After being subjected to some “enhanced interrogation techniques” – techniques authorized by officials at the most senior levels of the U.S. government and that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel confirmed were consistent with U.S. law – the detainee became compliant. He was not one of the three al-Qaida operatives who underwent waterboarding, the harshest of the hard measures.

Once this terrorist decided that noncooperation was a nonstarter, he told us many things – including that bin Laden had given up communicating via telephone, radio or Internet, and depended solely on a single courier who went by “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.” At the time, I was chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The fact that bin Laden was relying on a lone courier was a revelation that told me bin Laden had given up day-to-day control of his organization. You can’t run an operation as large, complex and ambitious as al-Qaida by communicating only every few months. It also told me that capturing him would be even harder than we had thought.

Armed with the pseudonym of bin Laden’s courier, we pressed on. We asked other detainees in our custody if they had ever heard of “al-Kuwaiti.” Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, reacted in horror when he heard the name. He backed into his cell and vigorously denied ever hearing of the man. We later intercepted communications KSM sent to fellow detainees at the black site, in which he instructed them: “Tell them nothing about the courier!”

In 2005 another senior detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, told us that this courier had informed him that Libi had been selected to be al-Qaida’s No. 3 official. Surely that kind of information is delivered only by highly placed individuals.

A couple of years later, after I became head of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA was able to discover the true name of the courier. Armed with that information, the agency worked relentlessly to locate that man. Finding him eventually led to tracking down and killing bin Laden.

With some trying to turn bin Laden’s death into a campaign talking point for Obama’s re-election, it is useful to remember that the trail to bin Laden started in a CIA black site – all of which Obama ordered closed, forever, on the second full day of his administration – and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009.

This past weekend, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin attacked statements made in May 2011 by me, former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey regarding what led to bin Laden’s death. They misunderstood and mischaracterized our positions.

No single tactic, technique or approach led to the successful operation against bin Laden. But those who suggest it was all a result of a fresh approach taken after Jan. 20, 2009, are mistaken.

By Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal

There is every reason to be deeply skeptical of President Obama’s prospects in November.

Republicans feel an understandable anxiety about Mr. Obama’s coming campaign: It will be all slice and dice, divide and conquer, break the country into little pieces and pick up as many as you can. He’ll try to pick up college students one day and solidify environmentalist support the next, he’ll valorize this group and demonize the other. He means to gather in and hold onto all the pieces he needs, and turn them into a jagged, jangly coalition that will win it for him in November and not begin making individual demands until December.

But it still matters that the president doesn’t have a coherent agenda, or a political philosophy that is really clear to people. To the extent he has a philosophy, it tends to pop up furtively in stray comments and then go away. This is to a unique degree a presidency of inference, its overall meaning never vividly declared. In some eras, that may be a plus. In this one?

Republicans are worried about the power of incumbency, and it is a real power. Presidents command the airwaves, as they used to say. If they want to make something the focus of national discussion, they usually can, at least for a while. And this president is always out there, talking.

But—and forgive me, because what I’m about to say is rude—has anyone noticed how boring he is? Plonking platitude after plonking platitude. To see Mr. Obama on the stump is to see a man at the podium who’s constantly dribbling away the punch line. He looks pleasant but lacks joy; he’s cool but lacks vigor. A lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12 or 20 years ago, little is anchored to the moment. As he makes his points he often seems distracted, as if he’s holding a private conversation in his head, noticing crowd size, for instance, and wishing the front row would start fainting again, like they used to.

I listen to him closely and find myself daydreaming: This is the best-tailored president since JFK. His suits, shirts and ties are beautifully cut from fine material. This is an elegant man. But I shouldn’t be thinking about that, I should be thinking about what a powerful case he’s making for his leadership. I’m not because he’s not.

It is still so surprising that a person who seems bored by politicking has risen to the highest political office in the land. Politics is a fleshly profession, it’s all hugging, kissing, arm twisting, shaking hands. It involves contact. When you see politicians on C-Span, in the well of the House or the Senate after a vote, they’re always touching each other’s arms and shoulders. They touch each other more than actors! Bill Clinton was fleshly, and LBJ. How odd to have a Democratic president who doesn’t seem to like humans all that much.

He’s raised a lot of money, or so we keep reading. He has a sophisticated, wired, brilliant computer operation—they know how to mine Internet data and get the addresses of people who’ve never been reached by a campaign before, and how to approach them in a friendly and personal way. This is thought to be a secret weapon. I’m not so sure. All they can approach their new friends with is arguments that have already been made, the same attacks and assertions. If you have fabulous new ways to reach everyone in the world but you have little to say, does that really help you?

A while back I talked to a young man who was developing a wonderful thing for a website, a kind of constant live TV show with anyone anywhere able to join in and share opinions live, on the screen. You’re on your iPad in the train station, you log on and start talking. He was so excited at the technology, which seemed impressive. But I thought: Why do you think people will say anything interesting or important?

This is the problem of the world now: Big mic, no message. If you have nothing to say, does it matter that you have endless venues in which to say it?

The old Washington gossip was that the Obama campaign was too confident, now it is that they are nervous. The second seems true if you go by their inability, months after it was clear Mitt Romney would be running against them, to find and fix on a clear line of attack. Months ago he was the out-of-touch corporate raider. Then he was a flip-flopping weasel. They momentarily shifted to right-wing extremist. This week he seems to be a Bushite billionaire.

Will all this work? When you look at Romney you see a wealthy businessman, a Mormon of inherently moderate instinct, a person who is conservative in his personal sphere but who lives and hopes to rise in a world he well knows is not quite so tidy. He doesn’t seem extreme.

It’s interesting that the Obama campaign isn’t using what incumbent presidents always sooner or later use, either straight out or subliminally. And that is “You know me. I’ve been president for almost four years, you don’t know that other guy. In a high-stakes world do you really want someone new?”

You know why they’re not using “You know me”? Because we know him, and it’s not a plus.

Here’s one reason why.

There is a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama’s White House. It was seen again this week in Supreme Court arguments over the administration’s challenge to Arizona’s attempted crackdown on illegal immigration. As Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News wrote, the court seemed to be disagreeing with the administration’s understanding of federal power: “Solicitor General Donald Verrilli . . . met resistance across ideological lines. . . . Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s only Hispanic and an Obama appointee, told Verrilli his argument is ‘not selling very well.’” This follows last month’s embarrassing showing over the constitutionality of parts of ObamaCare.

All of this looks so bush league, so scattered. Add it to the General Services Administration, to Solyndra, to the other scandals, and you get a growing sense that no one’s in charge, that the administration is paying attention to politics but not day-to-day governance.

The two most public cabinet members are Eric Holder at Justice and Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security. He is overseeing the administration’s Supreme Court cases. She is in charge of being unmoved by the daily stories of Transportation Security Administration incompetence and even cruelty at our airports. Those incidents and stories continue, but if you go to the Homeland Security website, there is no mention of them. It’s as if they don’t even exist.
* * *
Maybe the 2012 election is simpler than we think.

It will be about Mr. Obama.

Did you like the past four years? Good, you can get four more.

Do the president and his people strike you as competent? If so, you can renew his contract, and he will renew theirs.

If you don’t want to rehire him, you will look at the other guy. Does he strike you as credible, a possible president? Then you can hire him.

Republicans should cheer up.

Killing Bin Laden: Like so many others, the final decision to pull the trigger on the world’s most-wanted man was delegated to an admiral who undoubtedly would have been thrown under the bus had the mission failed.

It’s been almost a year since President Obama’s leadership and foreign policy bona fides were allegedly established by the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. A campaign film narrated by Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks tells of the president’s alleged solitary, agonizing decision.

With apologies to Vice President Biden, maybe President Obama doesn’t carry quite as big a stick as Joe would lead us to believe.

As reported by Big Peace, Time magazine has obtained a memo written by Leon Panetta, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency and now-Secretary of Defense, that says “operational decision-making and control” was really in the hands of William McRaven, a three-star admiral and former Navy SEAL.

“The timing, operational decision-making and control are in Adm. McRaven’s hands,” the memo says. “The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the president. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the president for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and, if he is not there, to get out.”

In other words, it was McRaven’s call to pull the trigger or not on the raid.

Some would say that this is a distinction without a difference, sort of like a head coach in football drawing up the game plan and letting his offensive coordinator actually call the plays. Then, technically, President George W. Bush gets the credit, since it was on his watch our war on terror was declared, Navy SEALs and Special Forces funding was increased and the hunt for Osama bin Laden began.

The Panetta memo, rather than presenting a profile in courage, says “approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the president.” This left enough wiggle room to blame the operation planners and controllers if the raid had gone as wrong as President Jimmy Carter’s famous failure to rescue American hostages held by Iran. This memo left room for the blame for another “Blackhawk Down” snafu to be blamed on anyone and everyone but President Obama.

Luckily, operational control was in McRaven’s hands, and the planning, execution and decision-making were virtually flawless. There was no repeat of the incident years before of Sandy Berger, last seen stuffing classified documents in his pants, telling a CIA and Northern Alliance team in Afghanistan, on that occasion literally a matter of feet away from bin Laden, that if they want to grab him, they’ll have to do it on their own. So they didn’t.

This time, we had an admiral and former Navy SEAL making the decision.

It was McRaven, heading the Joint Special Operations Command, who, on Jan. 29, 2011, began to plan “finish options” for bin Laden alongside his counterparts in a 7th-floor CIA conference room. It was McRaven who commanded the helicopter assault against the al-Qaida leader’s redoubt in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

On that fateful night it was McRaven, linked by secure video from Jalalabad to the White House, who briefed the president, sitting in the corner of the “war room,” in real time as the operation progressed.

Finally, it was the courageous and well-trained Navy SEALs who put their lives on the line and got a small measure of revenge for Sept. 11, 2001. It is President Obama who is falsely taking all the credit.

Friend,

It’s presidential election season and the rhetoric is ratcheting up. And because of that, it’s important to get the facts and know exactly what the record is. Far less important is what’s being said. . . .especially on the campaign trail.

Our president was out on the campaign trail this week on a so called “energy tour”. He even stopped in my state of New Mexico, where he traveled to the tiny oil town of Maljamar to tout his accomplishments. . . .a slick political move because no one would expect a big crowd. Had he gone elsewhere, the reception would’ve likely been rougher because the oil patch doesn’t like Barack Obama. . . .and they have every right to feel this way!

Gas prices are north of $4 a gallon and in all likelihood, these prices aren’t coming down soon. . . .and Barack Obama wants you to believe it’s the fault of the oil and gas industry. . . .he’s just wrong, and his record confirms that.

Before I go further, at my house we compost and recycle everything, we’ve put a solar energy system on our barn, and we’ve put a windmill where we otherwise would’ve needed an electric pump. . . .I’m serious about green solutions. . . .and yes, I’m a Republican!

But I also haven’t lost my common sense. . . .it’s the president’s biased policies against oil and gas that’s hurt this country and helped drive up gas prices.

His administration has poured millions of our dollars down the drain attempting to incentivize alternative energy companies when the private sector should have been relied upon for that money. . . . .and his Secretary of Energy, who previously stated he wanted higher gas prices (to suppress demand). . . .appeared before a congressional committee this week and had the audacity to give himself an “A” for how they’ve handled things.

Tell this to the average working American who’s paying the real price for this administration’s arrogance!

Tune out the campaign rhetoric and focus on the Obama record. . . .and then apply common sense. The election choice this November gets real easy.

Respectfully,

Allen Weh

Friend,

The troubled economy, both here and in Europe, has dominated most people’s thoughts.
Yet all around us are threats, with far reaching consequences to the national security of the United States, which must be dealt with…either on our terms or our enemy’s terms!

In the simmering caldron of the Middle East, Iran’s radical Islamist leaders continue their progress toward attaining a nuclear weapon. And while they do that, unfettered by the timid foreign policy of the Obama administration, they create trouble wherever they can.

Examples include their active support of the brutal Assad Regime in Syria which becomes a dependent surrogate that will aid and abet their ambition to control the entire Middle East, and destroy Israel.

Equally troubling is Iranian involvement in Venezuela, where they are planning a military base on the Paraguana Peninsula that will purportedly include a range of facilities including missile silos…this clearly being a potential threat given it’s within missile range of the continental United States.

Closer to home, the southern border continues to be unstable…within the last few days the entire Juarez Police Department has been intimidated by a powerful cartel threatening to kill one police officer a day until the police chief resigns. Mexico has lost control of parts of its northern border to drug cartels with paramilitary capabilities…in this case right next to El Paso, Texas.

While all of this is occurring, President Obama wants Draconian cuts in our military forces. A reduction of 80,000 troops from the Army, 20,000 from the Marine Corps, and a myriad of other cuts in capabilities across the board.

Cutting our muscle in a time of danger and vulnerability is reckless.

This insanity has to stop, and it’s not a partisan issue…when enemies attack us they don’t ask us for our political registration, they simply try to kill us because we’re Americans.

And besides insuring our safety, we’ll never sustain an economic recovery without a strong national defense…muscle is necessary to both!

Wall Street Journal

With little fanfare, a showdown may be looming over North Korea’s latest missile launch next week. Japan is threatening to shoot down the missile if it flies over Japanese airspace—as a previous North Korean missile did in 1998—and it has deployed Aegis destroyers and Patriot ABM batteries in a show of resolve. The U.S. should do everything it can to help Japan follow through.

North Korea’s new leader Kim Jong Eun announced the test of the Taepodong 2 long-range missile only weeks after agreeing to curtail its nuclear weapons programs in return for American food aid. The launch is part of the usual Kim dynasty pattern of mixing military provocation with the appearance of diplomatic conciliation to extort Western concessions that have always arrived.

So it was after the first North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994 (rewarded by the Clinton Administration with the Yongbyon Agreed Framework deal), and after another in 2006 (rewarded by the Bush Administration with the lifting of money-laundering sanctions and the removal of Pyongyang from the list of terrorism sponsors). Now North Korea is looking for its bribe from the Obama Administration, which until the February 29 deal had shown an admirable unwillingness to negotiate with the regime.

The missile test is even more important to the North as a way to extend the reach of its nuclear threat. The destitute kingdom is believed to have a handful of bombs but no way to deliver them other than by smuggling. A nuclear-armed missile would immediately give Pyongyang more international leverage. The Taepodong 2 has a range of 6,000 kilometers, so a successful test could put Alaska at risk. Previous tests may have been duds, but nobody should treat them as jokes. Iran, which uses North Korean missile technology, will be especially interested in the result.

The U.S. has suspended its food aid, but otherwise its response to the North’s provocation has been mostly words. North Korea has promised not to violate Japan’s or anyone else’s airspace in launching the missile, but that still puts it in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, which passed the last time the North fired a Taepodong 2 in 2009. If the Obama Administration is intent on referring all security issues to the U.N., it should at least enforce the U.N.’s writ when it is so blatantly violated.

The U.S. could help by declaring that it is working closely with Japan and South Korea on a coordinated effort to shoot down the missile no matter where it flies. That might deter a launch in the first place. But in any case it would signal that the U.S. will not allow the North to perfect the means to deliver a nuclear warhead.

It would also be a real-world test of missile-defense technology, and if it succeeds would be a useful demonstration to the world’s rogues that the U.S. and its allies aren’t helpless against their missile attacks. A show of support for South Korea and Japan would also help American credibility in an era when U.S. security commitments have become increasingly questioned.

It’s possible that North Korea will act out militarily if its missile is intercepted, and the allies need to be prepared. But if the allies don’t show resolve in stopping Kim III now, the North will continue to develop the means to be able to hit Japan and the U.S. with a nuclear missile. Having failed to stop the North from developing a bomb, the U.S. can’t afford to let the world’s second most dangerous country become a global missile threat.