John P. Sullivan pointed me to a very fascinating article in the Dallas Morning News that has gone under the radar so far. It looks like the Feds are drawing up a blueprint for joint counter-cartel operations in Mexico:
"Alarmed by spiraling drug violence along their shared border, U.S. and Mexican officials say they foresee an enhanced U.S. role in the battle against powerful cartels, including joint operations that could involve private American contractors or U.S. military and intelligence personnel."
At least in the operational sense, this is a strong move in the right direction. This is essentially a classical Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission setup optimized for the terrorism/criminal netwar era, with a combination of advisers and contractors. Contractors, however demonized, can play a good role in training and organizing foreign personnel provided they are directed (and held accountable) as agents of the US government--especially when a discreet footprint is the only option available. Think, for example, of MPRI's work training the Croats in the Bosnian war that finally enabled them to crush the Bosnian Serbs and pivot to destroy the Croatian Serbs holding the Krajina pocket.
I found this comment by a University of Texas professor end of the article very interesting:
"I really characterize this as a civil war, even if it's not formally declared. ...We're seeing all the casualties of a war, people murdered, people wounded, people fleeing their homes, social disintegration and chaos. This is more like Afghanistan than Colombia, with regional, powerful chieftains who operate with complete authority, oftentimes through graft and corruption."
This is really the essence of criminal insurgency--a criminal non-state actor waging violent war against the government, and power being directed into the hands of warlords. Warlordism has historically really only ended by three or four outcomes--unification by a strong ruler, a commercial/technological/social change that centralizes power, or the spread of a strong unifying ideological or religious movement.
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