Looking For A Sign

SOMEWHERE along the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden and his top al-Qaeda henchmen are planning their next strike. But will they be able to keep the wolves from the door?

The wolves in question are the Shadow Wolves, the native American unit established in 1972 to patrol the US-Mexico border for drug smugglers.

As of this week, according to newspaper reports, they are being transferred to the eastern front of the war on terror.

"The name Shadow Wolves refers to the way we hunt, like a wolf pack," veteran Bryan Nez told Smithsonian magazine in 2003. "If one wolf finds prey, it will call in the rest of pack."

And the analogy is apt. While the American search for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan has so far relied on high-tech measures such as drone aircraft, the Wolves rely on the ancient traditions of "cutting for sign".

"Sign" could be footprints, broken twigs, discarded scraps of food — anything to indicate a human presence. "Cutting" is searching for signs or analysing them once found.

The two dozen members of the Shadow Wolves, who range in age from their late 20s to their early 50s, have been amazingly successful in tracking down drug smugglers on the US-Mexico border.

In the year to October 2002, for example, the Wolves seized 50 tonnes of illegal drugs being smuggled over the border, nearly half of all drugs intercepted in Arizona.

The Wolves — who are recruited from a number of Indian tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache — have also been invited to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to teach police how to search for smuggled chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Now they will be "cutting for sign" in the war on terror. With the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the failure to hunt down bin Laden, will the Wolves succeed where the US military has failed?

Maybe, says Neil James, executive director of the Australian Defence Association.

The problem is that desert terrain leaves far fewer human traces than, say, forests or grassland.

"The odds are theyll have some success, but well just have to wait and see. Its difficult terrain," Mr James says.

While it is true the border between the US and Mexico is also sparsely covered, Mr James says it is not like the landscape along Afghanistans border.

"Ones a low-altitude desert with lots of woodland, the others a high-altitude mountain desert. Basic topography tells you theyre different. Thats not to say in certain areas of Afghanistan the Shadow Wolves will not do very well."

"Cutting for sign" is also known as visual tracking. Sadly, the skills have died out among recent generations of Aboriginal Australians, Mr James says.

But the Australian Army still trains its soldiers in the techniques.

"With the majority of the armys soldiers being recruited from the city today, there is still a need to train soldiers in close-country operations and visual tracking," Captain Ben Robinson told the Australian army newspaper in November.

"Each year the Jungle Training Wing of the Combat Training Centre … conducts jungle operations exercises, ambushing and visual tracking courses."

Mr James says visual tracking was an essential part of the Australian Armys strategy in the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s and in later conflicts.

"There was some use of tracking skills in Vietnam. The armys always maintained competency in this and they run a visual tracking course at the School of Infantry.

"The SAS (Special Air Service Regiment) and other units keep the skill up, but its a difficult skill."

The Shadow Wolves can:

■ Look at desert vegetation and tell how recently a blade of grass was touched by a human.

■ Spot a hair snagged on a low branch.

■ See twigs bent or broken by a passer-by.

■ Spot a single fibre strand left by a marijuana-filled sack.

■ Discern faint footprints and tell if they belong to illegal immigrants or drug smugglers.

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