Drug violence in Mexico is intensifying even by traffickers’ barbaric standards.

In recent days, heavily armed hitmen launched coordinated attacks on federal police stations in western Mexico and dumped the semi-naked, bloodied bodies of 12 federal agents by a mountain highway, killed two U.S. Mormons in their Mexican community and killed a mayor in a northern ranching town.

A surge of 10,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez has failed to stop the killings there, which are in fact higher than last year when there were only a handful of soldiers on city streets.

President Felipe Calderon says the violence is a sign the drug gangs are weakening, but with 12,800 drug war deaths since he took office and reports of rights abuses by soldiers, calls are growing for a change of strategy.

Those making the calls include senators from Calderon’s own party, opposition politicians, security analysts, Mexico’s Human Rights Commission and international rights groups. But few if any are coming forward with proposals because the police forces that would replace the soldiers on Mexico’s streets are corrupted and a drive to clean them up could take years. For now, Calderon is sending 5,500 more troops and police to his home state of Michoacan to stop the flare-up there.

One thing Calderon could do to weaken traffickers is to go after their cash. That could have a domino effect on cartels’ power to buy guns and to corrupt officials. Headline-grabbing army operations may seem more impressive than the behind-the-scenes work of tracing money laundering, but U.S. anti-drug officials say it is key to Mexico’s success.

So far, Mexico has fallen short. An International Monetary Fund report published in January found Mexican authorities have only made 25 convictions for money laundering since in 1989 and Mexican law does not allow for the quick freezing of traffickers’ assets. In short, Mexican money laundering laws do not meet international standards and many cases are not properly investigated.

With $40 billion at the heart of the drug war every year, surely it shouldn’t be too hard to find some of the dirty money.

There was no one there but us and the fake chickens.

I visited the U.S. Army’s training center at Fort Polk in Louisiana this month with some fellow foreign correspondents to see soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division training for a mission in Afghanistan. For 21 days, the soldiers are meant to live and operate as if they had already deployed to the war zone. (You can see the story here.)

The center goes to great lengths to recreate the experience that troops will face in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means fireworks to simulate bomb explosions, fake blood to make casualties look realistic, and Afghan or Iraqi role-players to act as civilians, security force members and interpreters.

The Army even allows “relaxed grooming standards” for the soldiers who play insurgents — they are allowed to grow beards and long hair to look the part.

The trainers produce a daily newspaper which reports on the previous day’s events in the fictional Afghanistan, along with an enemy propaganda sheet which can be filled with lies.

But perhaps the most striking symbols of this attention to detail are the mock villages created with the help of Hollywood set-dressers. We visited one that was close to completion with C.J. McCann, the Army official in charge of the villages. It was rather eerie, standing in the otherwise empty village on a windswept day. The place felt like a cross between a ghost town and a spaghetti western set.

The fake fruit and vegetables, the fake carcasses hanging outside the butcher’s shop, the washing hanging out to dry, and the uncannily lifelike fake chickens… they may seem over the top to some. But the Army says the more realistic the setting, the better the training for its soldiers.

Unlike the villages, the video below is not Oscar-worthy. It was filmed with a small, mobile phone sized camera, with the wind whipping around us. But it provides a feel for the level of detail in the villages as McCann explains how they came to be built and how they force soldiers to think about the effect they have on civilians — even with actions as basic as getting vehicle antennas caught in power lines.

(Just in case you were wondering, TRADOC is the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. And Fort Irwin is the Army’s other major training centre in the United States, located in the Mojave Desert in California.)

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced on Tuesday to 25 years in prison for ordering two massacres in the 1990s when Peru was at war with leftist guerrillas, and the ruling could haunt the current president, Alan Garcia.

In his first term in the 1980s, Garcia, frustrated that the brutal Shining Path insurgency had taken over El Fronton prison, told the navy to attack it. The prison, which sits on an island just off the coast of Lima, was bombed by airplanes before soldiers went in on the ground to retake control. Many unarmed prisoners were summarily executed. More than 200 were killed at El Fronton and two other prisons where rebellions were repressed in 1986.

Rights groups say the Fujimori verdict could increase pressure to put Garcia, who leaves office in 2011, on trial. Luis Giampietri, who is now vice president, was in charge of the navy at the time of the attack.

Picture Credit: Reuters/Mariana Bazo. Peruvian President Alan Garcia speaks to media, Nov. 27, 2008.

                                              By Jon Herskovitz

North Korea says somewhere up in the sky, a satellite it launched at the weekend is beaming to earth two revolutionary paeans: “Song of General Kim Il-sung” for the founder of the reclusive state and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” for the son who succeeded him when he died.

U.S. and South Korean officials said the North Korean rockets did not send anything into space and all pieces of the rocket crashed into the sea, including the claimed satellite, which might have been North Korea’s oversized attempt to replicate an iPod.

The North Korean report was a a bit of a blast from the past because North Korea made a similar claim in 1998 that it had sent a satellite into orbit playing the exact same two songs.

There is far more to North Korea’s hit parade of songs than the two homilies it said were aboard its rocket. This is a country where soldiers sing, farmers sing, the hundreds of thousand gather in the centre of the capital Pyongyang to dance in special days and a refined teenage girl always has her accordion ready to play a tune.

The North Korea songbook is diverse. It has the dance number “Let’s Dash Forward to Build a Great Prosperous and Powerful Nation”. It has a tune for choral groups called “May the Song of a Happy Soldier Reverberate Far and Wide,” and it has a children’s song called Generalissimo Kim Il-sung Danced With Us.” Here are the lyrics as translated into English by the North:
On the New Year’s,
We danced together hand in hand
We danced out of our wish for his pleasure
The Generalissimo danced with us
Out of his wish for our happy future.
His parental love for us
Moved us to tears.
Our respect and filial devotion are growing.
The Generalissimo danced with us.

I saw this song performed about a year ago at the Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace when I went to Pyongyang for the New York Philharmonic concert. The school is dedicated to the performing arts and the children, many still of primary school age, sang and danced their way through songs such as “Jingle Bells” and “We are Faithful Only to Kim Jong-il.”

When they grow older, the North Korean song book awaits them. Here is a top 10 list in no particular order of North Korea’s greatest hits:

* “Song of Defending Homeland”
* “The Ten-point Programme of the Association for the Restoration of the Fatherland”
* Let’s Dash Forward to Build a Great Prosperous and Powerful Nation”
* Let’s Hold Higher Rifle of Working Class”
* “Hopeful Is the Future of Us under the Care of the General”
* “May the Playing of My Accordion Resound Forth”
* “Song of the Coastal Artillery Women”
* “We Will Defend the Headquarters of Revolution with Our Lives”
* “Our General is Best”
* “We Have Planted Apple Trees on Mountains”

Perhaps, the next time North Korea attempts to launch a satellite, it might want to load a few of these tunes in order to expand its repertoire.

{Photos of Kim Jong-il with  with scientists and engineers involved in a rocket launch and a protest in Seoul against the launch]

The Somali pirates who released a Saudi supertanker got a $3 million reward, according to their associates. Good money in one of the world’s poorest and most war-blighted corners.

But the waters off Somalia are getting ever more crowded with foreign ships trying to stop the pirates. As well as potentially making life more difficult for the hijackers, it has become a real illustration of the much talked about global power shift from West to East in terms of military might as well as economic strength.

This raises a question as to whether this will lead to close cooperation, rivalry or something altogether more unpredictable.

This week the United States said it planned to launch a specific anti-piracy force, an offshoot of a coalition naval force already in the region since the start of the U.S. “War on Terror” in Afghanistan in 2001.

It wasn’t clear just what this would mean in practical terms since U.S. ships were already part of the forces trying to stop the modern day buccaneers, equipped with speedboats and rocket-propelled grenades. It was also unclear which countries would be joining the U.S.-led force rather than operating under their own mandates.

The U.S. announcement came two days after Chinese ships started an anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden. This is the first time Chinese warships have sailed to Africa, barring goodwill visits, since Ming Dynasty eunuch Admiral Zheng commanded an armada 600 years ago.

As my colleague Sanjeev Miglani wrote last month, the Chinese deployment was being scrutinised by the strategic community from New Delhi to Washington.

The Chinese had actually been catching up to other Asian countries. India already had ships in the region. So did Malaysia, whose navy foiled at least one pirate attack this month. Reasserting its might, Russia had sent a warship after the big surge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden between Somalia and Yemen. The European Union has a mission there.

For Asian countries there is good reason to send warships. This is the main trade route to markets in Europe and their ships have been seized. Attacks on shipping push up insurance rates and force some vessels to use more fuel on the longer, safer route around Africa instead of taking the Suez Canal.

But there certainly appears to be evidence too to back up the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends 2025” report late last year that highlighted the relative decline in Washington’s long term influence in the face of the rise of China and India.

As well as being a chance for the world’s old and new powers to show their strength in terms of numbers, the anti-piracy operations off Somalia could prove something of a test of effectiveness.

While the hardware the navies have will always outclass that of the pirates, the new powers may have an advantage in more robust rules of engagement. That might lead to mistakes, however. In November, India trumpted its success in sinking a pirate “mother ship”. It later turned out that a Thai ship carrying fishing equipment had been sunk while it was being hijacked. Most of the crew were reported lost.

There is a lot of sea to cover, one of the reasons why naval forces have had so much difficulty in stopping the hijackings, but the presence of so many navies in the same area at the same time must raise questions over how well they are going to work together.

Will this become a model for cooperation in a new world order? Or are there dangers? Might this also end up being a display of how little either East or West can do in the face of attacks by armed groups from a failed state with which nobody from outside seems prepared to come to grips? What do you think?

(Picture: Commanding officer of a U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser monitors the pirated ship off Somalia REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Handout)
(Picture: Forces from French naval vessel “Jean de Vienne”, seen in this January 4, 2009 photo, capture 19 Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. REUTERS/French Navy/handout)

With the Rudd Labor government now in power for just over a year, it’s worth looking what at has changed in the country’s foreign policy and its security implications for the region. Is the region, particularly Southeast Asia, ready for Australia’s new advances?

Howard’s pragmatism and ‘forward defence’ doctrine over the previous dozen years was unashamedly aimed at garnering an image of being a “considerable power and significant country” (Downer, 2006). Howard’s loyalty to the United States, no-matter-what, was also aimed at banking up some credit with Washington on the security front. Given the concerns of the time over terrorism (in particular the attack on Bali which killed dozens of Australians), one could argue his staunchly pro-American policy was well founded. Moreover, Downer was quite dismissive of past Labor policy on developing a closer relationship with its immediate neighbours. In 2006, he said of Labor: “In effect, they argue for a retreat to regionalism.”

Last week, Rudd spoke of Australia returning to this regionalism. He spoke of the “dawn of the Asia-Pacific century”, “regional engagement” and Australia’s interests in being pro-active about shaping the strategic environment in the Asia-Pacific. At the same time, the Sinologist Rudd is aware he must keep the China and India plates spinning, conscious of their strategic and financial importance to his commodity-driven economy.   

But for over a decade before Rudd’s election, Australia’s relations with its immediate neighbours were frosty. Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad railed at Howard, and argued Australia was not “Asian” in any sense and therefore his attempts to become more involved in Asian affairs should be resisted by Asian countries. Ties with Indonesia were frayed over East Timor. There was friction with Singapore over human rights. And then there was Pauline Hanson, who shot to popularity on a populist policy of curbing Asian immigration to Australia.

So, is Southeast Asia ready for Australia’s renewed overtures? Or does their history prevent reconciliation?     

By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Of further concern was the fact that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was targeting British targets abroad, while the loyalist paramilitaries were more localised.

“But when loyalists started, for example, buying weapons on the (British) mainland and abroad, we took that very seriously and certainly didn’t regard them as more ‘friendly’,” the MI5 veteran told me. “They were quite dreadful thugs.”

  
Israel is one of the world’s most security-conscious countries. Israeli mobile-telephone text message services provide fast news alerts of any incident of violence, major or minor, to whoever is interested. Some turn out to be accurate, some not. This is a sample of alerts taken at random from the last half of September and presented verbatim, without comment. IDF stands for Israel Defence Forces. PA is Palestinian authority.  
   * Police: Bedouin boy killed in jordan valley played with
bullet and not killed by israelis like palestinians claimed.   
  * Pal caught in Old City of Jrslm with a knife. No inj
reported.   
  * IDF: general closure of all PA areas until after Rosh
Hashana holiday.    
* lots of rocks thrown at cars near beitar on the husein
bypass road. no inj reported.  
   * in response to shooting which injured jew light on Alei
Zahavrd, dozens of right wing jews entered A-Dik (Kalkilya) to
protest   
  * Hebron: rockthrowing between Jews and Arabs continues near Cave of Patriarchs    
* IDF apprehended palestinian with 30cm knife by Suafat in
north Jerusalem    
* Police from Carmiel find ammunition weapons and prepared
explosives in an abandoned house in Dir al Assad in the north.
No inj. reported.
    * three firebombs throwb at cars near Taupach junction. No
inj. reported.   
  * car slams into a group of people at least 10 reported
wounded … passerby shot and killed terrorist … terorist was
driver a regular car not a tractor this time 10-15 reported
wounded at this time … sixteen of the wounded from IDF
soldiers on a tour of Jerusalem   
  * Car travelling near Sechem by Gilad JCT damaged by rocks
no injuries reported   
  * pa sources explosion in tunnel on rafah egypt border 1 pal
dead 4 wounded   
  * rock throwing in hussam bypass road near beltar damaged to cars one person injured very light  
   * in the Al Barazail area in south Gaza Egyptian security
forces detonated a tunnel five palestinians killed others
missing.   
  * wanted palestinian wounded near beit lechem while trying
rersist arrest
    * the idf announced it is activating one emergency number
for all areas in judea samaria and jordan valley which is 1208     * IDF detonates 2 explosive devices uncovered on security
fence between nachal oz and karni   
* three palestinian cars and a tractor storm roadblock near
ramallah trying to run over soliders no injuries reported
drivers apprehended  
   * palestinian attempting to stab soldier at hawarrah
checkpoint apprehended no injuries    

So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has succeeded – by the skin of his teeth — in getting Britain’s House of Commons to approve new police counter-terrorism powers that were condemned by civil liberties groups, a former prime minister, a U.N. human rights investigator and several dozen of Brown’s own Labour MPs. The Guardian newspaper writes about ‘Liberty, security and an anxiety over lost rights’.

And even the government admits the power to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days before charging or releasing them has never been needed until now: it wants it as an insurance policy against future attacks or plots in which the police may need more than the 28 days they now have in order to investigate tangled international links, false identities and masses of encrypted computer files.

So what’s going on? The bald figures suggest Britain is way out of step with other democracies. The six weeks allowed under the bill for initial questioning of terrorism suspects compares with one day in Canada, two in the United States, Germany, South Africa and New Zealand, five in Spain and 12 in Australia.

But the bald figures don’t tell the whole story. Police in most European countries, for example, hand cases over to a judge or prosecutor after the first few days and the suspect may wait in jail for months or years while the investigation proceeds. Britain can also plausibly argue, on the basis of the number of plots intercepted in the past few years, that it is more threatened than most countries by al Qaeda-inspired militants.

Opinion polls suggest the public backs Brown on this issue, although his overall popularity rating is dire. And with the House of Lords likely to oppose the bill and send it back for re-consideration by the lower chamber, Brown is far from being out of the woods.

Expect more debate in coming months on possible alternative means of tackling terrorism — particularly on whether to let British police, like their counterparts nearly everywhere else, use evidence from tapping suspects’ phones as ammunition to prosecute them in court.

Despite the embarrassment caused this week when a senior security official left top-secret intelligence documents on a train, the British authorities have a strong record in countering terrorism. Since 2004 the country has seen at least one major plot each year, and many smaller ones. Only one succeeded: the July 2005 London suicide attacks that killed 52 people. So far, 2008 has been a quieter year — but the emergence of any major new threat could once again shift the goalposts in the security debate.