Vic Socotra

21 February 2009

The Great Game

(Headline from Juarez)

I got up and walked the Visiting Dog. He is a remarkable animal with all the personality in the world, and a young enough bladder that he let me sleep again after emptying mine. His Mistress, Sara 1, is in the Bahamas, soaking up sun and looking for investment bankers, who are an endangered species here.

Consequently, the small white and black dog is here for the week, and we have swiftly settled into a routine. When we returned, I found myself immersed in the Great Game.

It inspired and fascinated me from middle school on; finding Kipling’s novel “Stalky and Company” in the school library transported the world of the Fifth Form to the Northwest Frontier, infused with a vigorous Victorian sense of duty and adventure. It was more than a world away in time and place from suburban Detroit. It was a story about life and death, but being young, I knew little about either.

As a bit player in the Game myself later, I have felt an increasing sense that it has left the Khyber Pass and settled on the Rio Grand. The Saturday morning traffic was filled the news from Juarez, the sister city to El Paso.

Los Zetas is the gang of the moment there. The Zetas were originally members of the Mexican Army’s elite Airborne Special Forces Group (GAFE), many of whom were trained in counter-insurgency tactics by United States forces. They got the full bag of training in small-group tactics, massive application force, air assault and intelligence preparation of the battlefield.

In the late 1990s, drug lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen began to recruit GAFE veterans to establish a professional security service for his distribution network. His incentive for recruitment of this Praetorian Guard was to provide salaries considerable above those provided by the Mexican Government.

His strategy paid off. Guillen’s competition was literally decapitated.

If you want to meet terror, these are the boys who can provide it. They are connected- this is about networks, after all- to sophisticated and amoral thugs in Guatamala, and the FARC cocaine production cartel in Colombia.

The Zetas are not the only game in town; they have a major rival in the form of an outfit called Los Negros, who are less sophisticated but even more spectacularly brutal.

I won’t give you the details of the recent atrocities with your cornflakes. But trust me, it is truly awful. Those that would stand against them are heroes. But many of them are dead heroes, and that is one of the reasons that northern Mexico’s fate hangs in the balance in the great game.

Juarez, for example, is a Zeta stronghold, and there are watchers at the airport and on the highway bridges, at the bus station and in the plaza. Consequently, it is the most dangerous city in North America. At the moment, the drug lords of the Gulf Cartel (the Gulf of Mexico, not the other one) have ordered the execution of a policeman every 48 hours until the new chief of police (a retired Army major) quits. Placards to that effect are hung around the necks of the victims. The police chief's predecessor fled to El Paso some months ago.

My feeling about Mexico is thus one of quiet alarm. I have felt for years that the war on drugs was hopelessly mis-focused. The problem is here in America, where the demand for illegal substances has manufactured an excellent business case for monstrous cruelty that stretches from the areas of cultivation, murders its way along the routes of transportation, and corrupts at each step, right up to the doorstep of Big Pink.

I don’t know what the answer is, and there appears to be a dearth of good ones. When I was in the targeting business, though, my first recommendation was to turn out the enemy’s lights, and see how they could fight in the dark.

In the case of a narco-foe who can outspend and outfight the government, I am left with the only viable option, aside from bloody stalemate, as being their money supply. We could try that by a variety of traditional and unconventional means. But the war on drugs is old, far older than the War on Terror, and even with all the new tools in the kit-bag, the violence has escalated to the point that Mexico may be on the verge of collapse.

I am left with the conclusion that the legalization and regulation of drugs, controlled as prescription medication, taxed as relentlessly as tobacco and alcohol, would be a positive step in breaking the business case that is ruining the Hemisphere.

I understand how unpalatable that is, and how intractable the arguments about it. I ran into that buzz-saw at the War College, when our seminar of mostly conservative career officers split vocally and emotionally down the middle on the question.

Half believed, to varying degrees, that the War on Drugs was counter-productive and represented a feckless attempt to change human nature with police and military power. The other half believed that drug use was wrong, regardless of any other context, and should be expunged by any means necessary.

I realized it was like the argument on abortion. There is no middle ground on that question. For one side, there is only the issue of murder. On the other a question of Choice, and the nuance of gestation. For one, mortal sin, for the other a question of personal liberty. No chance of middle ground or compromise. None.

The same is true in only slightly less degree in attitudes regarding the War on Drugs. The whole notion harks back to something bifurcated and fundamental that lives in the American soul, like the Moral Majority and college binge drinking. That we survive as a nation of libertines and true believers is one of our most remarkable traits.

The war on drugs is a reprise of the Wets-versus-Drys conflict that led to the ill-advised adventure with Prohibition. The American Saloon was the cradle of evil for some, and the center of social society for others.

The Volstead Act was the very pinnacle of our moral ambivalent. It made the production and sale of alcohol illegal, but the possession of it no crime. It spawned a shadow government in the form of the Mob that still exists, since the tripod of illicit revenue generated by vice can apparently stand, even on one or two legs.

I know the danger of the slippery slope, and the insidious nature of relativism. But we have local bars today that are not the epitome of the old Saloon system. The war on drugs is a question that contains national security, the Great Game and life and death as well. In the end, the libertarian in me says the choice to destroy one's self is one's own and not the business of the government. It becomes a matter of shared concern when the murder and corruption spills over into the destruction of a whole society on our doorstep.

It might be worth our safety if we took away the ability of the Zetas to buy ammunition.

But I digress. The Great Game has come here, but it remains strongest where it began, on the Northwest Frontier. You know that the jihadi murderers in Mumbai sustained their rampage with stimulants? Did you know that one of the most effective was top-quality coke from the FARC?

Tomorrow: The War for Pakistan

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