Friday, June 13, 2014

Inside the Ring: Memo outlines Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens

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    • President Barack Obama salutes military service members while watching the inaugural parade from the reviewing stand on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) President Barack Obama salutes military service members while watching the inaugural parade from the reviewing stand on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
    By Bill Gertz
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    The Washington Times
    Wednesday, May 28, 2014
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    A 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans.
    The directive contains noncontroversial provisions on support to civilian fire and emergency services, special events and the domestic use of the Army Corps of Engineers.
    The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority for the use of military arms and forces, including unarmed drones, in operations against domestic unrest.
    “This appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens,” said a defense official opposed to the directive.
    Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”
    “Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states.
    “In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.
    The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use is when federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.”
    “Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions,” the directive states.
    Military assistance can include loans of arms, ammunition, vessels and aircraft. The directive states clearly that it is for engaging civilians during times of unrest.
    A U.S. official said the Obama administration considered but rejected deploying military force under the directive during the recent standoff with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters.
    Mr. Bundy is engaged in a legal battle with the federal Bureau of Land Management over unpaid grazing fees. Along with a group of protesters, Mr. Bundy in April confronted federal and local authorities in a standoff that ended when the authorities backed down.
    The Pentagon directive authorizes the secretary of defense to approve the use of unarmed drones in domestic unrest. But it bans the use of missile-firing unmanned aircraft.
    “Use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” the directive says.
    The directive was signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn. A copy can be found on the Pentagon website: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/302518p.pdf.
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    Gov’t gone WILD: White House reveals plans to target the “threat” of Americans at home

    Gov’t gone WILD: White House reveals plans to target the “threat” of Americans at home

    From Mikael Thalen for Infowars.com:
    Attorney General Eric Holder unveiled his plan to create a new Justice Department task force this week that will focus on the threat of “homegrown” terrorism. 
    In a video posted to the department’s website Monday, which was later removed, Holder argued that the focus on terrorism should “return” to the U.S. as opposed to remaining overseas.
    “We face an escalating danger from self-radicalized individuals within our own borders,” Holder said. “As the nature of the threat we face evolves to include the possibility of individual radicalization via the Internet, it is critical that we return our focus to potential extremists here at home.”
    The “Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee,” an admittedly revamped version of Janet Reno’s post Oklahoma City bombing task force, will include U.S. Attorneys as well as members from the FBI and Justice Department’s National Security Division.
    Holder pointed to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report that claims domestic terrorism has produced more than two dozen incidents since 9/11 as justification for the task force, specifically noting the Boston Marathon bombing and Fort Hood shooting.
    “Horrific terror incidents like the tragic shootings at Fort Hood and last year’s Boston Marathon bombing demonstrate the danger we face from these homegrown threats,” Holder said.
    Holder’s announcement comes only days after The Washington Times revealed a chilling Department of Defense directive that details instances in which President Obama believes he would be authorized to use lethal military force against American citizens. A U.S. official speaking with the Times also revealed how the Obama administration considered using military force against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters.
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    Holder vs. Holder When it comes to terrorists, the AG is at odds with himself.

    Holder vs. Holder
    When it comes to terrorists, the AG is at odds with himself.



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    Andrew C. McCarthy
    Why does the Obama Justice Department seem to have trouble mounting a full-throated, compelling legal defense of Osama bin Laden’s killing? The problem for Eric Holder the attorney general could be Eric Holder the private attorney.
    In 2004, Mr. Holder chose to file an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, the al-Qaeda terrorist sent to our country by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a post-9/11 second wave of attacks. In the brief, Holder argued that a commander-in-chief lacks the constitutional authority to do what his boss, the current commander-in-chief, has just done: determine the parameters of the battlefield. By Holder’s lights — at least when the president is not named Obama — an al-Qaeda terrorist must be treated as a criminal defendant, not an enemy combatant, unless he is encountered on a traditional battlefield.

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    It would be useful if staffers at congressional oversight hearings passed around copies of Holder’s Padilla brief. It is a comprehensive attack on Bush counterterrorism, an enthusiastic endorsement of the law-enforcement approach in vogue during the Clinton era (when Holder was deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who also signed on to the Padilla brief). This might explain why Holder sometimes has difficulty answering seemingly easy questions. That’s what happened this week, when the Senate Judiciary Committee quizzed the attorney general on the lawfulness of the U.S. military’s targeted killing of bin Laden. This should be a no-brainer, unless you are a transnational progressive, such as those in the Human Rights Watch crowd, which does not concede the primacy of American law when it comes to American government action; or a pedant such as Fox’s Andrew Napolitano, who seems to think the Constitution’s words “declare war” have a talismanic quality, as if Congress were powerless to authorize warfare without uttering them.
    A few days after the 9/11 atrocities, Congress — by huge bipartisan margins — enacted a sweeping authorization of the use of military force (AUMF). The AUMF, which was promptly signed by President Bush and has been reaffirmed repeatedly in congressional appropriations signed by Presidents Bush and Obama, states in pertinent part:
    The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
    Congress could not more clearly have empowered the president to launch military operations against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. No one was more responsible than bin Laden, who — to use the crystal clear AUMF terminology — planned and authorized the suicide-hijackings.
    Not only did the AUMF put our nation on a firm war footing, Congress imposed no geographical or situational limitations on combat operations against those determined by the commander-in-chief either to have carried out 9/11 or to have harbored those terrorists. Manifestly, either Pakistan is our ally — as its government and ours both profess — in which case killing bin Laden on its soil is routine (there having been many U.S. strikes against the enemy in Pakistan), or Pakistan was harboring bin Laden in Abbottabad, in which case the AUMF expressly authorizes not only attacks against al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan but against Pakistan itself. Q.E.D.
    Except it’s not that simple for Eric Holder the attorney general, because Eric Holder the private lawyer advocated greater legal protections for terrorists.
    The attorney general told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the killing of bin Laden “was justified as an act of national self-defense.” But self-defense has nothing to do with it. True, the war is a defensive war in response to an atrocious terrorist attack; that, however, does not make each individual operation by which the war is waged an exercise in self-defense. In fact, had such a suggestion been made by a Bush-administration official, Holder would likely have been outraged: In effect, the self-defense rationale would give wartime presidents exactly the “blank check” the Lawyer Left insists they do not have. No, the operation in which bin Laden was killed was offensive, and rightly so.
    As Fox news elaborated, the attorney general also trotted out a second theory:
    Holder said it’s lawful to “target an enemy commander in the field,” just as U.S. forces did during World War II when it [sic] shot down a plane carrying Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. Bin Laden was “by my estimation, and the estimation of the Justice Department, a lawful military target, and the operation was conducted consistent with our law [and] with our values.” Bin Laden made no attempts to surrender and there was “no indication he wanted to do that,” Holder said.
    Notice that Holder’s defense here rests on the premise that bin Laden was targeted in the field, meaning, on a battlefield. If an enemy combatant is encountered on the battlefield and he does not surrender, he may be killed or captured — it makes no difference whether he was armed, as bin Laden apparently was not.



    But hold on: Bin Laden was not confronted on a battlefield. Nor was he, like Admiral Yamamoto, in an aircraft, which theoretically can be a military asset — or even used as a missile, as al-Qaeda has demonstrated. To the contrary, al-Qaeda’s emir was targeted in a residential neighborhood. Though he had some bodyguards, he was in the company of noncombatant women and children.
    For most Americans, that does not detract at all from the legitimacy of bin Laden’s killing. This enemy has declared a global jihad against the United States. Al-Qaeda reserves to itself the prerogative to turn any place of its choosing into a battlefield. In fact, it would be perilous not to assume, when encountering al-Qaeda operatives, that this is exactly what they are up to. Their m.o., after all, is to target civilians for mass murder and to hide among civilians in order to frustrate retaliatory strikes. Consequently, it should make no difference that bin Laden was not found on a traditional battlefield — that he was in a residential compound inside a country with which the United States is not at war.

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    Nevertheless, what is not a problem for most Americans is a problem for Mr. Holder — at least if we’re talking about Eric Holder the prominent Democratic lawyer who filed the Padilla amicus brief, an action that he failed to disclose to the Senate during his confirmation process. Padilla was apprehended coming off a plane in Chicago. He was unarmed and in an airport, not on a traditional battlefield. Though not an enemy commander like bin Laden or Yamamoto, he was clearly an enemy combatant, and a quite deadly one, given the nature of his mission. Yet President Bush did not authorize his killing. Padilla was taken into custody by law-enforcement agents and later transferred to military custody after being designated an enemy combatant — for which the Lawyer Left lustily rebuked the president.
    Plainly, there are some distinctions between the Padilla and bin Laden situations. Not only was Padilla encountered inside our territory (after arriving on a flight from — where else? — Pakistan), he is also an American citizen. But Holder did not limit his argument on behalf of the terrorist to these circumstances. He also forcefully argued that the Bush administration did not have the power to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant because he was not found on a battlefield:
    Amici do not question the power of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to detain persons, even citizens, seized on an active field of battle. We recognize that the President has broad authority as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war or threat to the security of our Nation. . . . But the exigencies of the battlefield present a vastly different circumstance than even the bustle of O’Hare Airport. . . . While the government suggests that Padilla was arrested on a “battlefield,” . . . under its standards the “battlefield” against terrorism could extend throughout the world and the “hostilities” could be of indefinite and perhaps undefinable duration. Legal standards developed to deal with traditional wars cannot be imported wholesale into this very different context.
    Holder was dangerously wrong. Put aside that no war comes with an expiration date. It was not the Bush administration that extended the battlefield “throughout the world.” The standards in question were set by al-Qaeda. That is no doubt why Congress prudently did not attempt to circumscribe the commander-in-chief’s discretion to determine what the battlefield is. We don’t want terrorists to have any sanctuaries.
    This is also precisely why President Obama has “imported wholesale” into his command the traditional concept that a battlefield can be any location where the enemy can conduct operations — which, in al-Qaeda’s case, is any place where its operatives are found. That is the risk a terrorist runs — being an unlawful combatant who flouts laws of war designed to protect civilians, the terrorist must be denied the privileges that reward lawful combatants for conducting warfare honorably.
    Contrary to Mr. Holder’s rationalizations about self-defense and “traditional” battlefields, President Obama was well within his power, under the Constitution and Congress’s AUMF, to order bin Laden’s killing in an offensive raid on a residential Pakistani compound. Only an unambiguous surrender by the al-Qaeda leader might have rendered the killing problematic. It was thus curious to find, in the Fox report, Holder’s supposition that, even if bin Laden had surrendered, there would have been a “good basis” for “those very brave Navy SEALs” to shoot bin Laden — “in order to protect themselves and the other people who were in that building,” including “substantial numbers of women and children.”
    Protections granted to honorable combatants under the laws of war — many of which the Lawyer Left and the Obama administration have pushed to extend to terrorists — generally hold that when quarter is sought, it must be given. It is “especially forbidden,” instructs Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention, “to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion.” It is, moreover, deemed an egregious violation of international law for a country at war to indicate that no quarter will be given, that it will take no prisoners.
    But who knows? Maybe Mr. Holder is evolving.
    —  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
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    Псаки предположила, что фосфорные бомбы под Славянском применила РФ

    Псаки предположила, что фосфорные бомбы под Славянском применила РФ

    Обновлено: 13:53 (мск)
    Тема: Кризис на юго-востоке Украины
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    МОСКВА, 13 июн — РИА Новости. Представитель Госдепартамента США Джен Псаки в ходе пресс-конференции предположила, что фосфорные бомбы под Славянском могли быть использованы российской стороной, сообщает телеканал RT

    На встрече с журналистами Псаки попросили прокомментировать информацию о возможном использовании фосфорных бомб украинскими войсками в окрестностях Славянска в ночь на четверг. Журналист Associated Press, задававший вопрос, отметил, что существуют фото и видео, указывающие на применение этого типа боеприпасов. В ответ Псаки переспросила: «Кем, русскими?» Журналист уточнил, что украинской армией. «Я не видела соответствующих сообщений», — ответила на это представитель госдепа.
    В ночь на 12 июня ополченцы сообщили, что деревню Семеновка в пригороде Славянска обстреляли зажигательными бомбами. В СМИ появились сообщения, что примененные при обстреле бомбы могли быть фосфорными боеприпасами. Нацгвардия Украины позже опровергла сообщения о применении фосфорных бомб  против мирного населения.
    Джен Псаки приобрела известность благодаря своим высказываниям в рамках пресс-конференций Госдепартамента США. Так, представитель госдепа делала заявление о поставках российского газа, транспортируемого «по газопроводу из Западной Европы через Украину в Россию»,  упоминала о «берегах» Белоруссии, к которым немедленно будет переброшен 6-й флот США, если Белоруссия вторгнется на Украину, а комментируя фотографии донецкого ополченца, Псаки утверждала: «На снимках мы видим,  что эти люди, судя по внешним признакам, явно имеют отношение к России». На эти и некоторые другие высказывания тут же обратили внимание СМИ.
    C приложением «Новости Mail.Ru» — читать удобнее!
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    В небе над Калифорнией заметили военные самолеты РФ

    В небе над Калифорнией заметили военные самолеты РФ

    ВАШИНГТОН, 13 июня. Американские ПВО снова зафиксировали вторжение российских военных самолетов в воздушное пространство США

    Как сообщает Washington Post, 9 июня четыре стратегических бомбардировщика дальней авиации Ту-95 и два самолета-заправщика Ил-78 ВВС России появились на американских радарах в районе Алеутских островов в штате Аляска.
    После того, как для их перехвата были подняты истребители F-22 ВВС США, два российских самолета развернулись предположительно в сторону своей дальневосточной авиабазы в Анадыре, а остальные два продолжили полет в юго-восточном направлении. В 21:30 они вторглись в северную зону ПВО США у берегов Северной Калифорнии.
    На перехват их были направлены два американских F-15, после чего российские машины развернулись и направились в западном направлении в сторону своей авиабазы.
    Напомним, аналогичный инцидент с участием самолетов ВВС России был зафиксирован в мае. Тогда российские самолеты Ту-95 пролетели рядом с побережьем Калифорнии и острова Гуам, на котором расположена американская военная база.
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    Releasing the Taliban Five: A Choice, Not an Obligation The U.S. can legally keep captured terrorists even after Afghanistan combat ends.

    June 9, 2014 1:30 PM
    Releasing the Taliban Five: A Choice, Not an Obligation
    The U.S. can legally keep captured terrorists even after Afghanistan combat ends.
    (Getty Images)

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    Andrew C. McCarthy
    As usual, Senator John McCain has not exactly been a model of consistency on the Bergdahl-Taliban swap. First he said he would support such a deal; then, after it was done and popular opinion turned sharply against it, he maverickly condemned it. Still, he could not have been more correct on Sunday in dismissing the Obama administration’s rationale for the exchange.
    Senator McCain was being interviewed by Candy Crowley, the Obama campaign savior in CNN garb. As recounted in a Corner post by Patrick Brennan, Ms. Crowley dutifully spun the reeling administration as being between a rock and a hard place, its options limited to: (a) getting captive Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl back now by exchanging the five Taliban commanders detained at Gitmo or (b) being compelled “to release the [Taliban] detainees when U.S. combat operations end in Afghanistan.” Senator McCain countered that this was a “false choice.” That is correct. Even if combat had ceased in Afghanistan, the release of these Taliban detainees would not have been required by the laws of war.
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    My weekend column discussed the Obama fiction that the war in Afghanistan is coming to an end. In reality, the president is engaged in a slow-motion surrender to the Taliban and its jihadist allies that is arbitrarily scheduled to take two years — arbitrarily, that is, unless you think it is the American political calendar rather than Afghan battlefield conditions that decides when combat ends. Now, on top of that fiction, the administration and Ms. Crowley are stacking yet another, to wit: The winding down of combat operations in Afghanistan equals the end of the war on terror, triggering the law-of-war mandate to release all enemy combatants who cannot be charged with war crimes or other offenses.As we’ve been pointing out here for over a decade, combat operations in the ongoing conflict are taking place under a congressional authorization for the use of military force. The AUMF was enacted overwhelmingly a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Recognizing that the jihad against the United States is a global one carried out by an intercontinental network of terrorist confederates who do not restrict their operations to one country, the AUMF does not limit combat operations geographically. To the contrary, it authorizes the president to use force against the enemy — essentially, any persons, organizations, or countries complicit in the 9/11 attacks, or that have facilitated and harbored those who were complicit — anywhere in the world where the enemy can be found.
    As we’ve also frequently noted, the conflict is labeled the “war on terror” because the government is reticent about naming the enemy — Islamic-supremacist jihadists — for fear of giving offense to Muslims. That, however, is not the only reason for this amorphous label. There is also the difficulty of pinning down the locus of the conflict. It has never been limited to Afghanistan. Consequently, even if the fighting in Afghanistan were really ending, that would not mean the war is over.
    Recall that Osama bin Laden was killed and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. While drone attacks have been suspended in Pakistan at the request of its government, the administration has reserved the right to start them up again at any time because al-Qaeda and its allies — e.g., the Haqqani network and the Pakistani Taliban — still feverishly operate there. Indeed, while President Obama runs around absurdly claiming to have “decimated” al-Qaeda, the enemy is ascendant in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. It is making significant inroads across northern, central, and eastern Africa. It is anything but quelled in Afghanistan, notwithstanding the president’s purblind drawdown — which itself is the logical extension of the irresponsible combat rules of engagement with which the commander-in-chief has straitjacketed our troops.
    Meanwhile, on September 11, 2012, four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, were killed by jihadists in Benghazi — the culmination of a string of attacks against U.S. and Western targets there. Earlier that day in Egypt, home to several top enemy terrorists (including the brother of al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the son of imprisoned terrorist icon Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheikh), jihadists led the storming of the American embassy in Cairo. In Yemen, where U.S. forces killed the infamous al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011, a series of drone-missile strikes were carried out just a few weeks ago, killing dozens of jihadists.
    We could go on at much greater length cataloguing the fighting outside Afghanistan. For present purposes, though, the point is that same AUMF that continues to enable the president to kill enemy combatants also continues to authorize his detention of enemy combatants. When Obama releases enemy detainees — when he replenishes the Taliban with highly capable jihadist commanders, even though the Taliban and its allies are still conducting terrorist operations against our men and women in harm’s way — that is a choice, not a requirement.


    (Getty Images)

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    Andrew C. McCarthy
    It is just priceless to hear Obama-administration officials wail, in response, that President Bush released hundreds of enemy combatants too. Many of the lawyers making Obama-administration policy spent the Bush years volunteering their services to the enemy detainees, demanding that Bush release them and shut down Gitmo. Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, filed a brief on behalf of Jose Padilla — the “dirty bomber” sent to the U.S. by bin Laden and KSM to attempt post-9/11 bombings — arguing that the terrorist should be treated as a criminal defendant, not an enemy combatant. The Obama Justice Department’s third-highest-ranking official, Associate Attorney General Tony West, donated his services to represent John Walker Lindh, captured in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban against U.S. forces. We could go on . . . and on, because there are several such lawyers.
    So yes, the Bush administration should not have released so many detainees. But let’s not forget the context, which included Mr. Holder, as an Obama-campaign flack, delivering fire and brimstone to the “social justice” choir at the American Constitution Society, decrying President Bush’s purported denial of “due process” to “hundreds of accused enemy combatants.” The release of enemy combatants like the Taliban commanders is exactly what Obama and his minions have been working and calling for all along. Now that they have the power to do it and are using it, how craven for them to blame Bush. The Bush administration’s reluctant release of enemy combatants was an accommodation of the Obama Left — to say nothing of Senator McCain’s cabal of weathervane Republicans, who also demanded that Gitmo be shuttered.
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    President Bush was doing his best to weather hostility from the courts and foreign governments toward his sound policy of detaining enemy combatants indefinitely under the laws of war — hostility that was incited by the Obama Left’s demagoguery against this practice. He walked the fine line of keeping top jihadists under lock and key while transferring lesser operatives to governments that gave often half-hearted commitments to monitor them. Inevitably, many terrorists who should not have been sprung returned to the jihad.The idea, however, was to concede the release of lesser players in order to maintain support for keeping the worst of the worst from going back to the battle. For Obama partisans now to argue that Bush released hundreds more detainees than Obama has misses the point that the detainees left at Gitmo when Obama took office in 2009 — over seven years after the detention camp opened — were the worst of the worst. Among them was a special category of incorrigible terrorist: The jihadists that even Obama’s hand-picked review committee, though desperate to make good on the president’s vow to close Gitmo, concluded should not be released. In that category were the Taliban Five — the jihadist commanders Obama has just fortified the enemy by releasing.
    Personally, I do not believe any enemy combatants in detention should be repatriated at this time, when the enemy is on the rise. For argument’s sake, though, if we were still holding any low-level Afghan jihadists who we could be confident would never travel outside Afghanistan to attack Americans, it might make sense to repatriate them after U.S. forces have withdrawn from Afghanistan.
    The Taliban commanders, however, are leaders of the global jihad. As shown by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Tom Joscelyn, they were among the top officials who cemented the Taliban’s alliance with al-Qaeda. That is the very arrangement that gave bin Laden’s network the launch-pad it needed to attack the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000; and New York City and Washington in 2001.
    The conclusion of the fighting in Afghanistan, even if it really had been reached — and it hasn’t, not by a long shot — would not have triggered a legal obligation to release the Taliban Five. As long as the AUMF continues to authorize American combat operations against al-Qaeda and its allies throughout the world, those highly experienced, lethally competent, virulently anti-American jihadist commanders could lawfully have been detained.
    Obama released the Taliban Five because he chose to do so, not because he had to do so.
    — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His new book,
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    Taliban 5 in Bergdahl trade have plenty of time to rejoin fight in Afghanistan Fighting to continue after Americans lea

    Taliban 5 in Bergdahl trade have plenty of time to rejoin fight in Afghanistan

    Fighting to continue after Americans leave

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    • U.S. Quietly Moves Detainees Out Of Secretive...

    The Obama administration has quietly repatriated a dozen detainees from a small U.S. military prison in Afghanistan, moving a modest step closer toward winding down the United States' controversial post-9/11...
    By Rowan Scarborough

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    The Washington Times
    Thursday, June 12, 2014
    Related Stories
    The five Taliban commanders freed by the Obama administration will find an Afghanistan in 2015 that is still home to nearly 10,000 American troops and still in a war that likely will go on for years.
    President Obama says “America’s war in Afghanistan will come to a responsible end” when the last U.S. combat troops leave at the end of 2016, 2 years from now.
    But what goes on, barring a peace deal, is war for the Afghan National Security Forces and the elected government, both trying to survive relentless Taliban who once ruled the country and want it back.
    Analysts say this means the five senior Taliban released in exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will have ample time to join the fight and replenish the enemy’s leadership during and after the Americans and NATO personnel leave.
    “Clearly, they do pose a threat because they’re going to be part of the leadership team again,” said retired Army Gen. John Keane, who served as an adviser to past commanders in Afghanistan. “The fact of the matter is they’re likely to be back in Pakistan with that leadership to influence future operations while the United States military is still there at least for a remaining year.”
    Gen. Keane added that, although the five present a threat to U.S. personnel, “I don’t think it’s high-risk.”
    The deal requires the five to remain in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar for one year. They can re-emerge on the battlefield in June 2015, when the U.S. will have a dwindling force of 9,800 troops that will shrink to 5,000 by year’s end. NATO also is expected to keep some European troops in country. Britain is now the largest European contributor, with 5,000 troops.
    Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, California Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that “although there will be fewer U.S. personnel in Afghanistan in 2015, the return of these five Taliban leaders directly threatens the gains of our men and women who have fought and died.”
    Stephen Biddle, a professor of international relations at George Washington University, said the point being lost in discussing the prisoner swap is that there is no sign the war is ending.
    Mr. Biddle predicts the war will grind on until a settlement is reached or Washington cuts off funding for the Afghan National Security Forces.
    “If the latter comes first, [which is] a distinct possibility, then the ANSF breaks up, the government fails, and U.S. war aims are lost,” he said. “The only meaningful alternative to that scenario is negotiation and settlement. Hence the right way to think about issues like prisoner releases is whether or not they facilitate progress toward settling a war that otherwise won’t end anytime soon.”
    Did the deal move the U.S. in that direction?
    “Not much. That’s my biggest problem with it,” Mr. Biddle said. “Between sacrificing the potential leverage inherent in the Taliban 5 and pre-emptively conceding the issue of U.S. withdrawal, the net of recent policy choices would appear to have diminished the prospects for a settlement rather than enhancing them.”
    At a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday, Rep. Michael K. Conaway, Texas Republican, asserted to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that “the return of these five individuals, once they serve their halfway house nonsense in Qatar and get back into Afghanistan, will strengthen the Taliban and their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do in Afghanistan.”
    Mr. Hagel answered, “Maybe.”
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