Transnational crime/terror 5.

• Author: Parsons, Dan
• Position: Special Report

* Well before the May killing of Osarna bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs, the terrorist organization he headed had become a dispersed, loosely linked network of international terror and criminal groups.

Add to that the existing transnational trafficking in narcotics, weapons and people, and the recipe yields a complicated problem for U.S. military and law enforcement agencies at home and abroad.

"We're going to continue to have this transnational, non-standard set of threats and everything that goes with that," said Garry Reid, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations, during a discussion of future SOF operations at the annual Air and Space conference in September. "Those threats are going to persist in multiple environments over the next 10-plus years."

Countering those threats is made all the more difficult given that the U.S. military can't take its eye off state-level actors to fight non-state, nons-tandard actors.

"Our national defense focus and clearly the focus of our Special Operations Command has got to equally be on ... high-end threats and state competitors of the future," Reid said.

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Events like the Arab Spring have created power vacuums and ungoverned lands where criminals and terrorist groups are able to operate with impunity.

While much of the U.S. military's attention has been on the Middle East, anti-U.S. terror groups and al-Qaida sympathizers have spread elsewhere.

Today, the arc of instability, from West to East Africa to Pakistan to Bangladesh has any number of al-Qaida copycat sympathizers, Arnaud de Borchgrave, senior adviser and director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in January.

Illegal trade is "increasingly converging with ideologically-motivated networks, fostering a new generation of hybrid threats," according to information from the project's website.

Mali and Libya were two examples given by Reid of places where those two forces are converging. A coup last year in Mali left the country's inhospitable north largely ungoverned. "Bandits and kidnappers" have since set up shop.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has reared its head in Mali, operating without constraint in the arid north, some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth.

"Al-Qaida branched into there a few years ago and showed mixed results with proselytizing their ideology" Reid said. "They have not posed a transnational...