Former Taliban returning to insurgency
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 3 Comments
A quarter of defectors raising arms again
Broken promises from government and a lack of rewards is leading nearly 25 per cent of Taliban defectors to rejoin the fight against western forces, according to Golden Surrender, a report by a Kabul-based think tank named the Afghanistan Analysts Network. It says NATO’s Peace and Reconciliation Scheme (PTS) is ineffective because of bad leadership and a lack of financial and political resources. Its release comes as western nations and the Afghan government launch a new, $1 billion two-pronged plan to negotiate with the insurgency’s leaders and entice fighters to drop their weapons. The new plan can’t come soon enough—so far the PTS has only reformed 646 of an estimated 36,000 Taliban soldiers over the last five years, and several of the 33 commanders who defected are believed to have returned to their former positions. Threats of retribution against villages, which NATO has tried to fight by establishing community defence initiatives (commonly called militias by critics), have also led fighters to switch sides a second time, while a report by Safety Office, an Afghan NGO, says the PTS has done little aside from creating additional tensions between rival tribes.
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U.S. to keep "all options" open if Hezbollah has Scuds
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 1:06 PM - 2 Comments
Top official says rumoured sale of missiles by Syria is troublesome
As rumours circulate Syria may have transferred Scud missiles to the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah, an official with the U.S. State Department has issued a warning the consequences could be grim if it’s true. Though he declined to say whether the U.S. could confirm the rumours, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman says “all options are going to be on the table looking at this.” Lebanon has dismissed the accusations, saying Israel is trying to turn Lebanon into a target for military attacks. “Threats that Lebanon now has huge missiles are similar to what they used to say about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” says Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
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Iran could have long-range nukes by 2015
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:16 PM - 15 Comments
Pentagon report says Tehran five years away from developing missiles that could reach U.S.
A new security assessment prepared by the Pentagon suggests Iran could have nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States by 2015. James Miller, a senior Pentagon official, warned a congressional committee that “both Iran and North Korea present a significant regional missile threat” and that “the ballistic missile threat today is increasing both quantitatively and qualitatively.” Iran and North Korea are known to have collaborated on missile development, a fact that was reinforced Tuesday with the the announcement of a visit to Tehran by Kim Yong-nam, the head of the North Korean parliament.
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Report exposes religious brutality in Somalia
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 11:21 AM - 4 Comments
Women living in al-Shabaab-controlled areas are routinely beaten
A Human Rights Watch report on the swaths of Somalia under the control of the Islamist militia al-Shabaab describes a life of atavistic brutality and religious extremism. Men have their heads shaved with broken bottles if their hair is too long, and cell phones with “western” musical ring tones are smashed by roving patrols of religious enforcers. Women, however, suffer most. Those who work selling tea in public are whipped. All must where an enveloping burka-like garment, the abaya, which not everyone can afford. One woman who chased her child into the street without it was flogged and then locked in a shipping container. According to another, who was not incarcerated but simply had to live in a community under al-Shabaab’s control: “I felt like I was in a jail.”
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Top al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq killed
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 2:17 PM - 1 Comment
Military strikes take out three of the terrorist group’s key figures
Three top al-Qaeda leaders have been killed over the past few days in Iraq. In an early-morning raid on Sunday, American and Iraqi special forces directed an air strike against a house in Saddam Hussein’s former hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, killing Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who headed the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization consisting of several Sunni insurgent groups. On Tuesday, an Iraqi military spokesman announced that Ahmed al-Obeidi died in an operation in the northern province of Nineveh. Al-Obeidi directed al-Qaeda operations in three of Iraq’s northern provinces.
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Google passwords were reportedly compromised
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 2:12 PM - 1 Comment
Cyberattack said to have targeted single sign-on system
A source with knowledge of the investigation into a recent cyberattack against Google’s servers says hackers gained access to the tech behemoth’s vaunted password-management system which controls access to online services like e-mail and business applications. Though the attackers aren’t thought to have stolen actual passwords, it’s possible last December’s intrusion allowed them to find security weaknesses inside the system that even Google isn’t aware of. The data theft was made possible by a Google employee in China being duped into logging in to a poisoned website that granted hackers access to his computer and those of a group of developers at the company’s headquarters in California. Google first revealed the theft in January and has blamed cyberattacks for its decision to pull out of China.
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Former U.S. official says Iran has too much leeway
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 1:54 PM - 3 Comments
“It may be too late” to stop it from getting nuclear weapons
A former top official with the U.S. government says “it may be too late to stop Iran from becoming nuclear-capable.” The unnamed official, who The Times describes as having “long experience with several U.S. administrations” says Barack Obama hasn’t been forceful enough to dissuade Tehran from pursuing nuclear weapons. “Fifteen months into [Obama's] administration,” the official says, “Iran has faced no significant consequences for continuing with its uranium-enrichment program, despite two deadlines set by Obama, which came and went without anything happening.” One nightmare scenario evoked by the official had Iran passing its weapons off to Hezbollah which could use them against Israel or its other enemies in the region. Meanwhile, Iran announced on Monday that it was moving ahead with the construction of a third nuclear site to go along with those in Natanz and Qom.
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Who's behind the violence in the Caucasus?
By macleans.ca - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 5:36 PM - 1 Comment
Shadowy group targeting security, government officials linked to rise in attacks
Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia have seen a dramatic increase in the number of attacks against security forces and government officials. So far this year, separatists fundamentalists have carried out 23 attacks in the Caucasus, killing at least 34 people. Over the same period last year, there eight attacks that killed 17 people. The latest subway bombing in Moscow shows the attacks have also spread outside the borders of the five republics. A shadowy group callling itself the Caucasus Emirate may be responsible for part of the increase in political violence. Led by Doku Umarov, a veteran of the Russia-Chechnya conflicts, the CE has claimed responsibility for three different attacks involving five suicide bombers between March 29 and April 9. According to STRATFOR, “this is a substantial feat indicating that the Caucasus Emirate can manage several different teams of attackers and influence when they strike their targets.” But while the CE has managed to unite the region’s jihadists under one umbrella, its leadership is “operating in a very hostile environment and can name many of their predecessors who met their ends fighting the Russians,” leading STRATFOR to predict that, “having prodded Moscow so provocatively, they are likely living on borrowed time.”
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Like the commies before them
By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments
Cold war documents bear striking resemblance to today’s nuclear threat
The recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate from 1951 outlines a frightening world where soviet agents could have been everywhere, smuggling bomb parts into the U.S. to construct and detonate with the aid of their American sympathizers. It’s startlingly similar to the security problems of today, where specters of sleeper cells and terrorists with bombs built from weapons tossed out during the cold war haunt the American consciousness. The biggest difference between then—when clandestine submarine landings and a permeable Mexican border were thought to be viable options for Ruskies to get WMDs into the country—and now is that while the U.S. used to know its enemies had weapons and feared whether they’d use them, it now knows that terrorists are willing to detonate a bomb, and has to fear one falling into their hands.
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General warns of cyber attacks
By macleans.ca - Friday, April 16, 2010 at 5:44 PM - 2 Comments
Hundreds of thousands of breaches attempted daily
General Keith Alexander, the man in charge of Cybercom, the U.S.’s new cyber security command, is warning of massive increases in the number of attempts by hackers and foreign countries to breach the nation’s internet security. Alexander told the Senate armed services committee that online infiltration could cause huge damage to the U.S. military and the nation’s infrastructure, and that the government is not prepared to secure itself against such attacks. The Obama administration is promising to spend billions to upgrade cyber defences, and has already hired hundreds of specialists with doctorates in computer technology to work at the Cybercom and start building better security measures.
