Some years ago, the Albuquerque Journal ran a story about the "Shadow Wolves," a one-of-a-kind unit of the U.S. Customs Service composed of all Native American agents who combined ancestral skills with modern technology to run down drug smugglers in the Arizona desert.

The unit -- made up of 19 field officers and two supervisors from a variety of Indian peoples, including the Apache, Oglala Sioux, Navajo, Lakota, Kickapoo, Chickasaw, Pima and Tohono O'odham tribes -- accounted for more than 70 percent of the marijuana seizures in the southern Arizona desert region where they worked, the 2003 Journal story said.

Now, according to a story in The Australian (hat tip to michellemalkin.com), this elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists along Afghanistan's frontier.

The new U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last month: "If I were Osama bin Laden, I'd keep looking over my shoulder," The Australian reported.

The widely reported resurgence of the Taliban and the continuing failure to locate Bin Laden, who if still alive celebrated his 50th birthday last weekend, prompted the military to enlist the skills of the Shadow Wolves, who have gained international respect for their tracking skills, the paper reported.

The unit was formed in the early '70s to curb the flow of marijuana and other drugs from Mexico into the United States across the hundreds of square miles on the Tohono O'odham tribal reservation that straddles the border southeast of Tucson, according to The Australian and profiles such as this one from the online Smithsonian magazine.

Malkin also links to this "unofficial tribute site " that sings the praises of the Shadow Wolves.

Author and Atlantic magazine writer Robert D. Kaplan got himself in a little PC hot water a couple of years back when he referred, in the online Opinion Journal, to the battlefield of the current global war on terrorism as "Indian Country ."

He argued that the challenge of the early 21st century military is not to bring tanks and massed troops and firepower to the "dirty little struggles" throughout the Third World but to adopt the guerrilla tactics employed by the tough, elusive 19th century Apaches.

The U.S. Army back on the frontier never learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective against the Indians than large, heavily encumbered movements -- whose equivalent today are "convoys of humvees bristling with weaponry that are easily immobilized by an improvised bicycle bomb planted by a lone insurgent," Kaplan wrote.

No, the U.S. West was won because a deluge of settlers aided by the railroad finally brought security, according to Kaplan.

"Now there are no new settlers to help us, nor their equivalent in any form," Kaplan wrote. "To help secure a more liberal global environment, American ground troops are going to have to learn to be more like Apaches."

And, with the Shadow Wolves on the scene, maybe that's what's happening.