Drug War to Combatting Terrorist Insurgency

Mexican military burning marijuana in drug-war public relations event.

“This is a terrorist insurgency,” says Connie Mack, the Republican who chairs the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mack, who introduced the Enhanced Border Security Act in mid-December, believes that the Merida Initiative has failed and that the administration needs to revamp the counterdrug assistance program to include a “counterinsurgency plan.”

Adopting the language of the Obama administration’s new strategy to “combat transnational organized crime,” Mack warns that both Mexico and the United States are facing a “terrorist insurgency” waged by transnational criminal organizations “along our southern border, with operations across Mexico and Central America as well as in over 1,000 U.S. cities.”

Five years after President Felipe Calderón launched Mexico’s drug war in December 2006 and three years into the Merida Initiative counterdrug assistance program, there is widespread anxiety in Mexico that the government is not gaining the upper hand on the drug cartels and that the drug-related violence, which has left a toll of 50,000 dead, will continue into the next sexenio, the six-year presidential term.

Whatever their politics, most close observers of the drug war in Mexico would agree with the Republican firebrand from Florida congressman that the last five years of Mexico’s drug war have done little to increase governmental security and social stability. Most assessments of the Merida Initiative’s impact on Mexico and Central America are similarly negative.

The basic facts of the drug-related crisis in Mexico are clear enough, but what’s not so evident is its character and identity.

As President Calderón’s sexenio draws to an end and as the U.S. government evaluates its involvement in Mexico’s drug war and its border policy, new questions are being asked about drug threat and about the proper response.

Mack insists that traditional counternarcotics strategies are insufficient and out of step with the changing character of the drug trade in Mexico and in Central America.

What we are seeing in the region is not simply the business and violence of drug-related crime, says Mack. Instead, Mexico and the drug transit countries of Central America are facing insurgency and terrorism that threatens the security of region and of the United States.

Mexico has vociferously rejected Mack’s contention that the drug cartels represent an existential threat to state power.

But the basic facts of the drug war – widespread territorial loss of effective governing power, the involvement of local drug bosses in politics, the massive deployment of the military, the increasing firepower of the cartels, the war-level loss of life, and the use of horrific violence to make statements – seem to support Mack’s contention that Mexico is facing what he variously calls a “terrorist insurgency” and a “criminal insurgency.”

The inability of the Obama administration’s expanded border-security operations to significantly obstruct the crossborder flow of drugs from Mexico also points to the inadequacy of the U.S. response, whether at home or in Mexico.

Mack is, of course, not alone in his characterization of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) as insurgents and narcoterrorists. Nor is he the only major public figure who is raising alarm about an increased threat to U.S. national security. 

Two retired U.S. generals, including the former chief of the U.S. Southern Command, came to similar conclusions in a recent report commissioned by the Texas state government alarmingly titled Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment.

There’s no disputing the severity of the drug-related violence in Mexico and Central America. Yet the increasing discussion of the security implications of illegal drug trade also relates to the Obama administration’s own attempt to redefine the domestic and international drug problem as a battle against transnational criminal organizations.

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Drone Fantasies in the Borderlands

Homeland Security's High Tech Vision of Border Security

Candice Miller, the Republican chair of the House Border and Marine Security Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee, is effusive in her praise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), referring to the drones as “fantastic technology” that have proved “incredibly, incredibly successful in theater.”

As the new chair of the subcommittee that oversees the air operations of Customs and Border Protection, Miller has become one of the leading congressional advocates of increased domestic drone deployment. Miller is a member of the House Unmanned Systems Caucus, which works to increase drone use and open U.S. airspace to UAVs.

Over the past few years Texas Republicans – most prominently Gov. Rick Perry, Senator John Cornyn, and Cong. Michael McCaul – have been the among the leading high-profile proponents of drones for border security. Democratic Party politicians also generally share the mounting enthusiasm in Congress for this high-tech fix for border security.

Neither the high price tag for the Predator and Reaper drones – more than $15 million apiece – nor the inability of CBP to offer any substantive documentation of their successful deployment deters congressional drone boosters.

In support of the department’s use of drones for border security DHS officials routinely assert that drones are a “force multiplier” and that UAVs form an essential part of the “technological pillar” of border security. Congressional drone boosters commonly echo and amplify these DHS claims.

Yet DHS assertions about the success, value, and worth of drones in border security operations suffer a widening credibility gap six years after Predator drones first started patrolling the southwest border. UAVs may, as Miller states, be fantastic technology.

The purported achievements fall more into the realm of pure fantasy.

DHS has steadily expanded its drone fleet, and Congress has offered more cheerleading for drones than oversight.  Due diligence and accountability are nowhere to be found.

What makes this absence of proper oversight and good management especially shocking is that the waste, inefficiency, and strategic blunders of the drone escalation mirror the monumental failures of the SBInet “virtual fence” project – the other major DHS venture into high-tech border security.

Customs and Border Protection, which has eight drones in its UAV fleet with another two projected to be delivered by early 2012, projects a 24-drone fleet according to its strategic plan. Congressional members, alarmed about an array of perceived border threats, have pressured CBP to quickly increase its drone fleet and patrol areas despite CBP acknowledgements that it lacks the capacity and personnel to deploy the drones it already has.

Multiplying the Border Force

Since the inclusion in 2003 of immigration and border security agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, CBP has increasingly adopted a military lexicon to describe its operations. That makes sense since CBP since for the first time CBP had an explicit security mission – as evident in the wholesale adoption of the term “border security.”

Over the past six years CBP has spent more than $2 billion to create a “technological pillar” for border security. The other two border security pillars are personnel (Border Patrol and CBP agents) and infrastructure (mainly the border fence).

The two main components of CBP’s new technological border security are the “virtual fence” project (first known as SBInet and now called the Alternative Technology Plan) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In both cases, one from the ground and the other from the air, surveillance technology monitors stretches of the border and intelligence analysts attempt to determine if the received data includes evidence of illegal border crossings.

In both cases, CBP promotes these high-tech surveillance programs as “force multipliers.” That’s a Department of Defense term meaning a “capability that, when added to and employed by a combat force, significantly increases the combat potential of that force and thus enhances the probability of successful mission accomplishment.”

The claim, then, is that UAVs increase the capability of the Border Patrol by increasing the effective scope of their patrols.

The ostensible logic of the force-multiplying effect of UAVs is persuasive, just as the CBP assertion that the virtual fence functions as a force-multiplier has been presented as common sense – that technology enhances productivity.

One problem with the “force multiplier” argument for border drone deployment is that DHS has never provided any data to support the assertion. The other main problem is that DHS probably cannot supply this supporting data because it is simply not true.

UAVs might be better described as being manpower-intensive rather than force-multipliers.

At any time, it is more likely that CBP drones are sitting on U.S. military bases along the border rather than serving as the Border Patrol’s “eyes in the skies.”

Why is that? Numerous reasons.

Bad weather, including cloudy conditions and winds, is a common explanation. Another is that CBP and its Office of Air and Marine lacks the personnel to operate the drones.

Attempting to explain why it is so challenging to get drones in the air, Gen. Kostelnik, who as OAM chief directs CBP’s drone program expressed his frustration with preconceived notions that the unmanned character of UAVs:

We're not flying to the full potential, not because of aircraft or airspace limitations, but because we're still building the force. We're still growing the crews….

We are all here talking about unmanned. The real issues have nothing to do with the unmanned part. The real issues are all about the manned piece, and this is a manpower-intensive system.

The manpower-intensive character of UAVs, observed Kostelnik, is especially true for “the remotely piloted ones like the Predator.” As the retired general explained, the Predators require two pilots for any one mission, but also large teams to handle launching and grounding. The manpower crunch obstructing more Predator patrols is also due to all the analysts required to do the “intel kind of things” with the steady stream of images transmitted by the drones.

Despite all the emphasis by CBP on the force multiplying advantages of UAVs, neither Kostelnik nor anyone else at CBP has offered any public description of exactly how much “manpower” drone missions require.

Although UAVs have the capability of flying as much as 20 hours, most missions apparently average about 10 hours, while the many training missions are still shorter.

During the same subcommittee meeting, Kostelnik was asked to give members some idea of the number of crew members required for a drone mission. According to Kostelnik, a typical drone mission requires three crews in addition to the two pilots – one handling navigation and the other directing the sensors -- to handle launching, landing, and recovery.

But what makes UAV missions so “manpower-intensive” is the data management and analysis associated with the stream of images flowing into the control centers.  “Taking the data takes more people,” explained Kostelnik, and the “data that comes out of our aircraft is now sent to processing, exportation, and dissemination cells.”

This complex data input component of UAV surveillance is what Kostelnik, using military jargon, called a “distributed infrastructure” that complements the command control centers on military bases where the pilots and aviation crews work. Another five full-time people are necessary, noted Kostelnik, to “tell the sensor operator where to look and the pilot where to fly.”

The OAM chief estimates that there could be 50 people involved in a typical drone mission.

Without even taking into account the number of Border Patrol agents deployed in planes, helicopters, and ground vehicles, the OAM chief estimated that UAVs depend on teams of fifty or more. Counting those agents that hunt down suspected illegal border crossers, it’s likely that more than a hundred Border Patrol agents and other support staff be involved in any one UAV surveillance incident.

Although CBP officials have repeatedly testified in Congress about the progress and success of the drone program, the CBP has not produced any hard information about the numbers of men and women involved in a typical UAV-driven border arrest or drug seizure. 

(Next: Drones Down on Border -- More Time on Ground and Accident Rates)

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The Decline and Possible (albeit doubtful) Rise of Phoenix

Not too long ago when entering Metro Phoenix from the east, dropping down from the old mining town of Globe with the ever-alluring Superstitions rising ragged to the north, the same questions kept nagging me.

How is this possible? How long can it last?

The sea of red-tiled roofed mini-mansions spreading inexorably across the desert? The sudden rush of traffic on eight-lane speedways where not long ago there wasn’t anything but the breath-taking expanse of the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert. The profane climb of progress and development up the Superstition foothills.

At least, part of the modern miracle of the Valley of the Sun wasn’t a mystery. It’s likely that most Phoenicians don’t know where the water for their pools and showers come from. That’s because the massive water-diversion projects that channel the drainage of mountain watersheds and allotments of the Colorado River to their home were built before the population boom of the last few decades.

But as the city kept booming, would the water keep flowing.

The more perplexing question was the source of the money for all the luxury home construction, for all the consumption at all the new malls, for all the SUVs that race down Buckeye, Camelback, Baseline, and all the major streets of the metro grid.

That was a mystery. Could it possibly be that growth did beget growth endlessly? If that were indeed true, it constituted an assault on reason, common sense, and my own belief system. Yet each time I drove through Phoenix, the sprawl kept pushing out the boundaries of the city. In the nineties and into the new century, the pace of development intensified.

How was this possible? Phoenix was a money machine that magically produced wealth without any productive base.

Could it be that the valley’s “Real Estate Industrial Complex” (coined by journalist Jon Talton) was right that growth could build upon growth as part of a virtuous new capitalist cycle – skirting the rules of traditional capitalist accumulation and sustainability?

Finally, in 2007 this speculative development burst, and all those of us who were repulsed and mystified by the Phoenix boom were vindicated.

Nearly five years into the bust, Andrew Ross has written a book, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, that’s a delight for those who abhor the model of progress and consumption that Phoenix embodies.

Ross explores why Phoenix may be the least sustainable city in the world, and why it too may fade back into the desert just as the Hohokam civilization, which occupied the same valley, did when it too became unsustainable. 

Yet Phoenix is not alone in its unsustainability. At least in part, what made its rise out of the dust of the Native American civilization so frightening was that, while exaggerated, its patterns of development were not so different from those seen throughout America – the mall civilization, the resource gluttony, and the headlong pursuit of growth.

Ross describes Phoenix as “a horizontal hymn to unsustainable development.” He went to Phoenix not just to reveal the fallacies of the Phoenix development model but also to explore the citizen activism, policy advocacy, and alternative planning that is attempting to reconfigure the development model.

“If urbanization is an open-ended process, as Jane Jacobs so firmly believed, then the greening of cities is a grand act of improvisation, maybe the last heroic effort in places where it can still make an appreciable difference,” writes Ross, adding that Bird on Fire “is beguiled by that hope, even when there is little reason for it.”

No doubt that the sustainability activism and environmental justice movements that he describes in this instructive book are inspiring. Yet, in the end, Phoenix will undoubtedly remain model of unsustainability and a portent of the future that awaits not only the Valley of the Sun but for the entire American way of life.

In his concluding chapter, Ross makes a case for a new environmentalism and new sustainable development philosophy that stresses equity. “What if the key to sustainability,” asks the author, “lies in innovating healthy pathways out of poverty for populations at risk, rather than marketing green gizmos to those who already have many options to choose from?”

Ross writes that his research in Phoenix led him to conclude that “the key to addressing biophysical damage and eco-depletion lies as much in the drive for equity as in the kinds of technical improvements that show up in the manager’s metrics.”

Hate or love Phoenix, Bird of Fire is the book for you. 

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Immigration Crackdown Successful, Drug War Not So Much

Dispatches From Obama's Other Wars — on Immigrants and Drugs

By Tom Barry, AlterNet
Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 13, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153323/dispatches_from_obama%27s_other_wars_%E2%80%94_on_immigrants_and_drugs

President Obama came to office promising immigration reform in his first term. As a candidate and as president, Obama also made it clear that he stood firmly in supporting the “rule of law,” even if the law was overdue for reform.

Nearly three years into his administration, Obama has failed to make good on his promise of immigration reform.

But that’s not surprising to close observers of immigration politics. Since Republican opposition blocked comprehensive immigration reform mid-2007, there’s been no clear legislative path for an immigration reform bill.

The anti-immigrant constituency of the Republican Party adamantly opposes any reform that would include legalization of the immigration status of the estimated 11 million immigrants lacking visas, green cards, or working permits.

Within the Democratic Party, support for comprehensive immigration reform has steadily eroded over the past decade. Even with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, an immigration reform bill that included legalization provisions would have little chance of moving forward absent strong presidential leadership.

The president has repeatedly affirmed his continuing support for immigration reform. But the president never — despite all his expressions of support and all his promises — made immigration reform a real goal of his administration. There’s been no leadership or even an attempt to set forth a new vision of immigration reform that could transcend the divides of the current debate.

This too can be readily explained. No one could have expected the president to put immigration reform — whose main prospective beneficiaries aren’t even voters — ahead of the economic stimulus program, medical care reform, and other pressing issues, such as financial regulation reform, extension of unemployment benefits, and passing the budget.

Nonetheless, the failure of President Obama to chart a new path toward pragmatic immigration reform has deeply disappointed reform advocates and the immigrant community. After all, this is an issue that acutely affects the lives of millions and its lack of resolution creates tragic divides in families and roils the stability of thousands of communities.

But even for many who can excuse Obama, citing the constraints of politics in a badly divided America or for those who skeptically viewed Obama’s promises as political manipulation, the administration’s harsh enforcement of immigration laws and its wholehearted embrace of border security have surprised and shocked.

Drug War Continues Under New Name

The first three years of the Obama presidency have also left drug policy reformers reeling.

As a candidate, Barack Obama distanced himself from the illegal drug issue, but he did indicate that his administration would end the four-decades-old “war on drugs” and shift U.S. drug policy to a more balanced, less militarized framework. Candidate Obama also indicated that he didn’t oppose the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

At the same, though, Obama scoffed at questions about drug legalization as if this were not a serious issue and only a concern of the social fringe.

As promised, the Obama administration has dropped the drug war rhetoric that has framed U.S. drug policy over the past four decades. Instead, the administration has reframed the drug war as part of a combat against transnational organized crime. Within the White House’s Office on National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), there is, as promised, more emphasis on the need to treat drug users, not simply incarcerate them.

However, in all but name, the drug war under Obama has escalated, both abroad and at home, particularly along the southwestern border.

Under the new rubric of “combating transnational organized crime,” the Obama administration has increased U.S. support for the drug war in Mexico, increased federal support for state and local drug task forces, and mounted a coordinated crackdown on illegal drug use and trafficking in the Southwest.

This summer the administration released its National Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, whose main focus is international drug trafficking. All the federal departments and agencies — DOD, DHS, DOJ, DEA, FBI, AFT, and ONDCP — previously involved in the “war on drugs” have adopted the new official language about transnational crime.

Foreign drug war ventures, like those in Mexico and Colombia, are now designated as fronts in the combat against “transnational threats” and “transnational criminal organizations.” 

Under this administration, the Department of Homeland Security has become more of a drug warrior agency, launching an array of counternarcotics initiatives that are closely tied to new border security and immigration enforcement operations.

Along the border, the administration has made Arizona the forefront of its new combat operations. DHS selected Arizona in 2009 as the location of the Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats — with other similar counterdrug alliances planned for three other sections of the border.

The Justice Department, the traditional home of most of the federal government’s domestic drug control operations, has also elevated its profile as a committed combatant against illegal drugs, with an array of new border-related initiatives aimed at transnational crime and criminal aliens.

With respect to immigration, DOJ has challenged the rights of states like Arizona and Alabama to institute their own immigration-enforcement policies. Similarly, DOJ is asserting federal supremacy in drug law enforcement over new state initiatives, particularly with respect to medical marijuana.

Immigration and Drug Policy Joined

Immigration enforcement and drug enforcement are not disassociated issues.

There is, of course, the common denominator that violators of immigration and drug laws are committing nonviolent infractions that don’t endanger public safety or security except in rare cases. Immigration and drug possession infractions, too, are both victimless “crimes.”

In both cases, the immigrants and drugs targeted by law enforcement illegally cross the border into the United States. The border security operations mounted by the U.S. government over the past decade — the border fence, the electronic virtual fence, the doubling of Border Patrol officers, and drone patrols — aim to stop both illegal immigrants and illegal drugs.

Policy reform advocates and activists in both camps have been careful to keep the two issues separate. Immigration policy reformers and immigrant-rights advocates are rightly concerned that immigrants, both legal and unauthorized, are being increasingly categorized as “criminal aliens.” 

The Obama administration has reinforced and expanded the “criminal alien” programs at both DHS and DOJ. The large numbers of the immigrants labeled as “criminal aliens”  it deports each year reinforces currents of public opinion that conflate immigrants and criminals as public safety threats.

Most immigrants categorized as criminal aliens have criminal records only because of new government policies that create criminal consequences (jail and prison time) as well as immigration consequences for illegal entry or reentry.

But many are indeed criminals in the more traditional sense, having violated federal or state laws. Of these crime-committing criminal aliens, however, only a small number have been convicted of major crimes that do threaten public safety. It shouldn’t be a surprise that many immigrants, like tens of millions of U.S. citizens, are involved in the illegal drug market, mostly as consumers but also as smalltime dealers.

There is a difference, though, a major difference between immigrants and citizens. According to changes in the immigration statutes instituted under Republican congressional leadership in the mid-1990s, drug control violations are considered felonies under immigration law and result in deportations – not just for immigrants here illegally but for legal immigrant residents as well.

In DOJ’s immigration courts, streams of immigrants, legal and illegal, come before immigration judges with records of drug possession or minor cases of drug dealing. As the crackdown ensues, the U.S. justice and immigration systems are tracking down these cases – and immigrants, usually in their twenties and thirties, are being ordered removed, often to countries they barely remember, where they have no remaining relatives, and where the language is now foreign.

Purging Criminal Aliens

Attempting to demonstrate that it is focusing on ridding the country of “criminal aliens,” the Obama administration had ramped up programs such as Secure Communities and others that target immigrants with a criminal record and those who have been arrested but not convicted. In doing so, it can count on widespread public support on the assumption that few Americans, even among immigration reform supporters, would object to removing criminal immigrants from the country.

Nowhere is the intersection and overlap between immigration enforcement and drug control so pronounced as along the border. Illegal border crossers and illegal drugs have long been the central concerns of the Border Patrol.

However, as the Mexican government’s drug war has escalated (counting on increased support by the Obama administration) and as border security hawks have stoked fears of spillover violence, the border security buildup under this administration has led to an unprecedented merger of drug control, border control, and drug control.

Drug-sniffing canine teams at Border Patrol now routinely check travelers in the U.S. borderlands. Only rarely are illegal border crossers now caught at these checkpoints. Instead, drugs are the main focus, and the main victims are U.S. citizens and legal residents caught with small stashes of drugs for personal use.

As the drug war intensifies and the border becomes more fortified, drug gangs and cartels are exploiting, extorting, and terrorizing immigrants heading to the United States.

No doubt that the U.S.-Mexico drug trade, Mexico-U.S. immigration flows, and the U.S.-Mexico border have all become more violent. All have become the province and territory of criminal organizations and gangs.

Absent the deeply flawed legal and policy frameworks for immigration and drugs, these traditional patterns of human behavior are nonviolent and victimless activities. Yet, bad laws and the righteous enforcement of these laws have bred the violence and transnational crime that the Obama administration so tragically battles.

Three Years, and How Many More?

During the past three years, the immigration and drug issues have become increasingly interrelated.  As the 2012 general election approaches, the Obama administration offers us this dismal policy panorama:

• Immigration incarcerations, detentions, and deportations have risen to record highs in recent history.
• Border security operations and infrastructure buildup continue to expand.
• The post-9/11 escalation of border control measures (now under the policy framework of border “security”), which was initially driven by a determination to stop illegal immigrant flows (based at first on fears of foreign terrorists), is now more focused on drug interdiction.
• Apprehensions of illegal border crossers have steadily declined, and population of unauthorized immigrants is also declining.
• Fewer immigrants are illegal crossing the border, but illegal drug flows continue to meet rising U.S. demands despite the billions of dollars spent on border security and drug war assistance to Mexico.
• The administration’s policy of targeting “criminal aliens” for imprisonment and deportation has put immigrants with drug violations increasingly at risk of both immigration and criminal enforcement.
• With respect to policy reform, the prospects for immigration reform have steadily diminished, given the hostile political climate and the failure of the Obama administration to articulate a persuasive new vision of immigration and border policies.
• With respect to drug reform, the administration has routinely defended drug prohibition, rejected legality of medical marijuana sales, and under the new policy framework of combatting transnational criminal organizations has beefed up the drug crackdown on the border and in Mexico.

Overall, when measured by apprehensions, removals, and population counts, the crackdown on immigrants (with immigration or criminal violations) is making steady progress.

Strictly considered without normative considerations, this new enforcement regimen could correctly be assessed as a success – with regard to upholding the “rule of law” and to restoring respect for the much-criticized ability of the government to enforce immigration law and control the border.

In contrast, the combat against transnational organized crime and illegal drugs, when measured by levels of drug consumption, drug prices, and drug flows, has utterly failed, at least thus far. Arrests and drug seizures are higher, yet the U.S. drug market is thriving. Drug production in Mexico is increasing, and drug flows through and from Mexico have also increased despite the escalation of combats and wars on both sides of the border.

Never before have so many Americans consumed marijuana, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. Meanwhile, drug-related crimes have declined, paralleling the general decreased in crime rates.

Any evaluation of the administration’s drug combat strategy must also include its contribution to the horror of drug-war related murders in Mexico. Failing to summon up the courage and conviction to call an end to drug prohibition, the Obama administration bears direct responsibility for this continuing scourge.

Nearly three years into his administration, President Obama would be hard put to explain how the immigration-enforcement, border-security, and drug-control operations of his administration differ substantively from those of the Bush administration.

Obama can rightly say he has ended the “war on drugs” since he declared it over. But instead we get a combat against transnational crime that is just as militaristic across the border and just as intolerant and punitive at home.

Obama can also correctly observe that he has ended workplace immigration raids and allowed immigration authorities to weigh humanitarian impacts in making deportation decisions. Yet more immigrants than ever are being deported, and the administration has extended its immigration enforcement apparatus into most communities through the Secure Communities program — all in the name of homeland security.

Going into the electoral season, the immigration and drug policy crises have worsened. As in the past, the Obama administration has justified these flawed and counterproductive policies by citing the threats to border security, homeland security, and even national security.

Tom Barry is the author of Border Wars (Boston Review Books). He directs the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com.

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