The Shadow Wolves: First American Warriors Hunting Bin Laden!

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From Australia comes this report (3-12-07):

AN elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan's borders.

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-Qaeda fighters have been slipping in and out of Afghanistan. Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves...

Some military experts want the Shadow Wolves to help to track down bin Laden. Despite a $US25 million 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". [Full text from The Sunday Times, London, in The Australian]