4GW in America's Backyard

By BJ

While the dual insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are what most of us focus on when discussing fourth generation warfare, it isn’t there that the US faces its most dire threat. As John Robb states:

The only existential threat the US faces in the near term, is from global guerrillas in Mexico and not the Middle East. A breakdown there could result in massive population movements, refugee centers, and the spread of guerrilla warfare into US border states.

The LA Times put out a long and interesting article examining just how dire the situation is in Mexico. Though the place names and causes of conflict are different, the article reads very similar to those of the paradoxically far more familiar battlefields half the world away.

Helmeted army troops steer Humvees past strip malls in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, some of the 40,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police officers President Felipe Calderon has deployed to secure large swaths of the country against entrenched drug traffickers.

. . .

Criminals unleash machine guns and grenades in urban battles that the State Department describes as "equivalent to military small-unit combat."

In the year and a half since Calderon launched a crackdown against drug gangs, about 4,100 people have died, the government says. At least 1,400 have been killed so far this year, including 170 in Tijuana, about 400 in Ciudad Juarez and 270 more in the western state of Sinaloa.

. . .

Political analysts say the campaign has succeeded mainly in pushing violence from one region to another, without uprooting the mafias that are challenging the power of the Mexican state. Federal troops often are introduced only after particularly violent outbreaks. They have helped bring calm to Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas state, for example, only to see the killing increase in Baja California and Chihuahua, or farther south in Guerrero state.

"It's a strategy of temporary occupation that achieves just moments of relative quiet, only to return to worsening violence," said Eduardo Valle, a writer and commentator who once worked as an advisor in the federal attorney general's office.

Even the rhetoric from the Mexican government has a familiar ring to it.

The president asserts that the level of violence is one measure of success. He says the cartels have been hurt badly, and that they are now lashing out at the government and battling one another for control of territory.

Given the likelihood that the various splinter groups formed by the decimation of the “old guard” cartel leadership will eventually slow their internal fighting as territories and influence become more defined, the danger to both the Mexican state and the US will increase dramatically.

It’s clear from some of the assassinations of top cops and officials in the Mexican government and drug raiding teams being ambushed that the power structure has been thoroughly infiltrated. Such infiltration virtually guarantees that efforts to eradicate the gangs will be more cosmetic than effective. That gives the gangs virtual free reign to operate from a safe haven, in much the same way as the Taliban does now in Pakistan. As Bill Lind puts it:

. . . operating within a hollowed-out state may benefit many 4GW entities more than replacing the state. A Potemkin state protects 4GW organizations from foreign attack; the U.S. cannot go after drug gangs within Mexico except in a surreptitious manner, because doing so would violate Mexican sovereignty.

And so one begins to see just what shape part of the threat will take. The other part comes from the US side of the border. How will the threat be treated? To treat it as a war is tempting, because in war the Executive gains great power, but as DNI’s Chet Richards points out, such an usurpation of power may not be wise.

While such powers have proven useful when the country faces the military forces of another country, they also allow the president to undertake activities that would be counterproductive if used against a guerrilla-type opponent, where the outcome depends primarily on moral elements — that is, on our ability to attract allies, maintain our own determination, and dry up the guerrillas’ bases of support.

Granted that for myself, this is almost as far geographically as the wars in the Middle East, but the same can’t be said for my co-bloggers, and the political choices made when there is such a conflict likely to spill across the border will affect everyone on the continent.

Definitely something to keep an eye on as it develops.