There’s an interesting piece in the news about an elite group of Native American trackers, the Shadow Wolves, who are being sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden. BushCo has been unsuccessful — these guys will probably get the job done right:

The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico.

But the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan and the US military’s failure to hunt down Osama bin Laden – still at large on his 50th birthday on Saturday – has prompted the Pentagon to requisition them.

US Defence Secretary Robert M.Gates said last month: “If I were Osama bin Laden, I’d keep looking over my shoulder.”

The Pentagon has been alarmed at the ease with which Taliban and al-Qa’ida fighters have been slipping in and out of Afghanistan. Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves.

The unit has earned international respect for its tracking skills in the Arizona desert. It was founded in the early 1970s to curb the flow of marijuana into the US from Mexico and has since tracked people-smugglers across hundreds of square kilometres of the Tohono O’odham tribal reservation, southwest of Tucson.

Harold Thompson, a Navajo Indian, and Gary Ortega, from the Tohono reservation, are experts at “cutting sign”, the traditional Indian method of finding and following minute clues from a barren landscape. They can detect twigs snapped by passing humans or hair snagged on a branch and tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt.

Some military experts want the Shadow Wolves to help to track down bin Laden. Despite a $US25million bounty on his head and the use of billions of dollars worth of sophisticated equipment, US forces have so far failed to fulfil President George W. Bush’s promise to capture bin Laden “dead or alive”.

This elite band of trackers has quite a reputation, in 2004 the Shadow Wolves took “their unique skills to Eastern European and Central Asian states to train border officers there.” A January 2003 Smithsonian Magazine article describes the Shadow Wolves as “An all-Indian Customs unit—possibly the world’s best trackers” who use “time-honored techniques to pursue smugglers along a remote stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Rather than relying solely on high-tech gadgetry— night-vision goggles or motion sensors buried in the ground—members of this unit “cut for sign.” “Sign” is physical evidence—footprints, a dangling thread, a broken twig, a discarded piece of clothing, or tire tracks. “Cutting” is searching for sign or analyzing it once it’s found.

Nez relies on skills he learned growing up on the Navajo Nation reservation in northern Arizona, and he cuts sign like other people read paperbacks. Between October 2001 and October 2002, the Shadow Wolves seized 108,000 pounds of illegal drugs, nearly half of all the drugs intercepted by Customs in Arizona. The group has also been invited to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakstan and Uzbekistan to help train border guards, customs officials and police in tracking would-be smugglers of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

If these guys are successful, they will take their place in American History alongside the Code Talkers, whose code was never cracked by the Japanese in WWII. The N.Y. Times also featured the Shadow Wolves in a story last week. Since Bush has blown nothing but hot air over Osama for the past few years, it would be a pleasure to see these guys kicking ass and bringing him in. Make no mistake, Democrats want Osama caught perhaps more so than Bush, himself. John Kerry has said over and over that Bush dropped the ball when he let Osama slip away at Tora Bora. Here’s a new shot at getting the job done right.

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