As an intelligence officer or journalist, you've got to know which sources you can trust. And a source who's never let me down told me this week (3/30) that the terrorist multinational based in Pakistan is coming apart. According to this insider's insider, the Pakistan-headquartered Afghan Taliban is furious at the Taliban's Pakistani wing because its assaults on the Islamabad government triggered a stunning backlash. Unleashed at last, Pakistan's military launched a series of offensives aimed at smacking down the domestic Taliban.  Good news at last.  If only there were the same in Afghanistan, where our president made a furtive six-hours-in-the-night visit Sunday (3/28).   The Taliban laughed at Obama, saying he was afraid to come during the daytime and calling him a thief in the night.

The mass murder of innocent civilians in the Moscow Metro suicide bombings on Monday (3/29) has again brought into focus the evil of radical Islamism and the imperative of civilized people everywhere to stop it. As clear-cut a case of Islamist barbarism as it is, however, it is difficult to make sense of the spiraling violence in Russia without reference to Vladimir Putin's disastrous anti-terrorism policies. A Moslem terrorist group from Chechnia - a province in a region of southern Russia called the North Caucasus - has claimed responsibility for the attack.  It is the latest incident in a long struggle between the Chechens and their Russian overlords. Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, President Putin from the very beginning of his tenure in the Kremlin ten years ago showed himself completely unwilling to consider any negotiated settlement with the Chechens.  He pursued a strictly military solution, and set up a puppet regime in the Chechen capital of Grozny instead. Putin's attitude is characterized by his vulgar promise to the resistance to "rub them out in the latrine."  He made that promise in 1999.  This week he slightly rephrased it, promising the resistance will be "scrapped from the sewers."  Thus we could call his anti-terrorism policy Putin's Sewer Strategy.  Unfortunately for him, it is his strategy that is in the toilet, not the terrorists.

It's wretched enough that our "friend" Ahmed Chalabi has become Iran's point man in Iraq. Now "our man in Kabul," President Hamid Karzai, is quietly shifting his loyalty to Tehran. Beyond Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad's recent chummy visit to Karzai -- reported by the media but downplayed by Washington -- Iran's been training Taliban forces to kill our troops more efficiently. Karzai hasn't complained. Nor has he objected to Tehran's expansion of its support for its clients in western Afghanistan. He wants that support for himself. Far from being a gleaming apostle of democracy, Karzai's just another hustler from the lands that perfected the con. Like Chalabi, he knew the magic words to say to Americans, then did whatever he wanted for himself, his fantastically corrupt family and his cronies. Karzai's people despise him; his allies distrust him; his enemies mock him. And our troops keep him in power. Does that sound like a formula for success? One that we should ask our soldiers to risk their lives for?

An alliance between the Marxist Left and Jihad Islam - known as the Red-Green Alliance - is on the march.  Israel is not the only target of the Red-Green alliance. Its operations span the globe. In Nigeria on Sunday night (3/07), the Jihadists led the charge. With the apparent collaboration of the Moslem-dominated Nigerian army, Moslem gangs entered three predominantly Christian villages around the city of Jos and killed innocent civilians, including children with machetes, axes, and daggers. The worldwide leftist media ignored the atrocity - or said it had nothing to do with religion.  And while this was going on, Joe Biden was in Israel -- and promptly showed where the Obama administration's true sympathies lay:  with the Red-Green Alliance.

Threats, bombs and at least 36 dead didn't stop Iraqis from voting on Sunday, March 7. But the harder part -- forming a new, more inclusive national government -- lies ahead. Formal results won't come for a few days. We'll learn how many votes, authentic and fraudulent, went to each of the big five parties and fringe elements. But the news looks good, so far. There are solid grounds for sober optimism and the expectation of slowly improving government in Baghdad. The elections happened. And they were genuinely contested -- not merely on ethnic or religious lines but on national issues, as well. For all its tragic missteps, the Bush administration may have done a great thing in the end: Democracy in Iraq may work to a serviceable degree. That would, indeed, change the Middle East for the better over time.  History may owe President Bush a great debt of gratitude.

I was wrong. For years, I've argued that our government should pay more attention to South America. Now Hillary Clinton has -- and, boy, is it ugly. With tragic back-to-back earthquakes dominating the headlines from south of the border, a desperate ploy by the hard-left Argentine government -- backed by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez -- threatens to shake the continent's political landscape. And Secretary of State Clinton, during her whirlwind tour down south, managed to outrage our British allies and assist despised President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in her family's assault on Argentine democracy. Clinton's diplomatic malfeasance in Buenos Aires wasn't an accident. She spoke for President Obama, who loves Third World liberation rhetoric and seems to think Britain's still colonizing his family home in Kenya. Here's the backstory that our media's ignored:

Last week was not a good one for proponents of social re-engineering of the U.S. military.  They had been buoyed by the previous week's congressional testimony of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, widely seen as evidence the Pentagon was prepared to accede to President Obama's demand that avowed homosexuals be allowed to serve in the armed forces.  Now, however, four other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have weighed in, and all bets are off on the idea of experimenting with - and possibly breaking - the All-Volunteer Force.  One by one, they poured cold water on Mr. Obama's agenda of homosexualizing the US military.

The President has wrestled control of the health care debate away from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by finally introducing his own plan. Unfortunately, the White House's proposal includes everything we found untenable about the old Senate bill - only this one is even more expensive! This is what you might call putting "perfume on a pig." What's in this "new" proposal? It has the unpopular (and arguably unconstitutional) individual mandate that forces people and employers to purchase health insurance - only this time with much harsher fines on employers who choose not to go along with another expensive government mandate. It has provisions that will make employers think twice before expanding their workforce. It has cuts to Medicare Advantage, a popular program which allows seniors to pay a little more money out of pocket for better coverage. And, of course, it still has sweetheart deals - only this time they've been extended even more.

On Feb. 17, I joined a group of prominent conservatives assembled for the purpose of unveiling a document dubbed The Mount Vernon Statement. It was intended to emulate an earlier articulation of the principles that unite the right issued 50 years ago at the Sharon, Conn., home of William F. Buckley Jr., known as The Sharon Statement. The Sharon document advocated victory over totalitarian Communism.  By contrast, the Mount Vernon document made no mention at all of today's totalitarian ideology - what authoritative Islam calls Sharia - or the threat it poses to America, let alone declare that victory should be our purpose in dealing with this menace. Still, the Mount Vernon Statement is a paragon of robust national security-mindedness in contrast to what took place in the succeeding three days at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's equivalent of Gen. Stan McChrystal -- by Pakistani agents and CIA operatives is a big win. Subordinate only to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's CEO, Baradar ran the Taliban's military operations in Afghanistan. Responsible for the upgrade in insurgent tactics -- fighting smart, rather than just fighting -- he also created the Taliban's hearts-and-minds campaign. For two weeks, he's been under interrogation by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency. The CIA's also involved in the questioning on some level -- but the ISI always holds back some chips. The grab won't affect the ongoing fight for Marjah in Afghanistan, but the loss of Baradar's operational savvy could degrade future Taliban operations. And if he sings -- as we're told he's doing -- it could be the biggest anti-Taliban bonanza since 2001. Or maybe not.

Sarah Palin, who is considering a run in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, is using her public platforms to reassemble the coalition of security hawks, social conservatives and blue collar workers that propelled Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. Her support for Israel serves her in building support among both security hawks and social conservatives. Unlike Obama's empty protestations of support for Israel, Palin's support is obviously heartfelt and therefore will not diminish while Obama remains in office. And as Palin becomes stronger, her ability to influence the US debate in a manner that constrains Obama's freedom to intimidate Israel into allowing Iran to become a nuclear power will rise. In spite of Palin's extraordinary support for Israel, the American Jewish community overwhelmingly rejects her. As Jennifer Rubin noted in her article, "Why Jews hate Palin," in Commentary magazine, Jews disapproved of Sen. John McCain's choice of Palin as his running-mate by a 54 to 37 percent majority. The sneering broadsides published against Palin by leading American Jewish writers are legion. In her article, Rubin gives a number of reasons for American Jews' rejection of Palin.

In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber. With fumbling terrorism czar John Brennan walking point, administration spokesmen attacked those who believe that treating would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab the way we handle shoplifters harms our national security.  With its desperate counteroffensive on this issue, the White House is struggling to recover from the PR debacle over the decision to award Abdulmutallab (and other terrorists) rights to which they are in no way entitled. The White House position is a PR blend of lies, half-truths and ignorance. Let's strip out the politics and lay out the facts from an intelligence professional's perspective:

As the administration fiddles and fumbles with its soft- on-terror policies at home, one Obama-blessed campaign abroad is hitting al Qaeda and its franchises hard: the drone war. Drones work. They kill terrorists. Important terrorists. And we don't have to squabble about where to put their shredded bodies on trial. For all the billions poured into Afghan pockets, the continuing giveaways to well-connected contractors, the abuse of our military as glorified aid workers and terrorist targets, and the general strategic incoherence in Washington, we're getting this one thing right. On Tuesday (2/02), an up-the-ante wave of attacks fired 18 missiles from Unmanned Aerial Systems. (UAS is our term of the week for drones.) The strike hit a terrorist stronghold, killing another dozen or more militants.  Cool.  Very cool.

One of the key objectives of the Tea Party people is the strict enforcement of the 10th   Amendment :  "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." As an early 1960s vintage member of the then-new conservative movement, I remember us focusing on the 10th amendment during the 1964 Goldwater campaign. It has been a staple of conservative thought, and the continued dormancy of 10th  amendment enforcement has been one of the failures of our now half-century-old movement. As the Tea Party movement in so many ways seems to represent the 2.0 version of our movement, I am thinking about the 10th  amendment anew. It strikes me that the best way to revive the 10th  Amendment is to repeal the 17th Amendment -- which changes the first paragraph of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution to provide that each state's senators are to be "elected by the people thereof" rather than being "chosen by the Legislature thereof."