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The Drunken Scotsman

By Steve Hynd

My homeland has always had a reputation as a boozing nation. In fact, alongside our likewise hard-drinking cousins the Irish, the joke is that without alcohol we would have conquered the world. And we had a good stab at it even so, as the engine room of the British Empoire and originators of many of the ideas that ended up in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as a light for the world.

But alcohol has always been Scotland's bane, it's escape from social and economic deprivation that caused more poverty and heartache in return. Never more so than in recent years when it has fuelled a kife-and-yobs subculture which has seen violence soar to ignominious world-record levels (although murder rates are still lower than America's proving that guns don't kill people but they certainly help a lot). Moreover, when teens rebel against their elders they rarely err on the side of abstinence, and so Scotland has a problem with hard drugs which is a direct consequence of its drinking culture too.

So, a new study has been published which claims to show that, after taking into account road deaths and cancers caused by hard boozing, Scotland's drinking problem accounts for better than one in twenty of all deaths. That's one death every three hours and far higher, almost double, what earlier estimates had said. There are calls for the political parties to put aside their usual partisan sniping and take concrete action - including price fixing.

Dr Peter Terry, chairman of the British Medical Association Scotland, urged political parties to unite behind the SNP government's plans for minimum pricing to combat alcohol abuse.

Speaking at the BMA's annual conference, he said: "We must first stop the year-on-year increase in alcohol-related illness.

"The minority SNP government has proposed some quite radical legislative suggestions to tackle this problem, including a minimum unit price. In Scotland this suggestion will require the support of MSPs from the other political parties.

"I implore them to put party differences aside and provide that support. They, and the Scottish people they represent, must address the exponentially growing problem of alcohol-related disease in all its forms and the only proven way to do that is to include legislation on the price of alcohol as part of that strategy."

Labour spokesperson Cathy Jamieson endorsed Dr Terry's call for political unity.

She said: "We need a national consensus to tackle Scotland's hard-drinking culture involving all of our political parties, health organisations, the police and the industry itself. Labour has suggested a ban on billboards advertising alcohol near schools and a mandatory code of practice for retailers, but we will look seriously at any credible proposals from any source that will reduce the level of problem drinking in Scotland."

Tory health spokesperson Mary Scanlon warned the government should not rely on pricing as a "single tool solution".

The aim with such a price fixing policy would be to set the unit price high enough to deter, but not so high as to create a black market demand. Increasing the price would most effect young drinkers, who are most likely to binge-drink and suffer a higher than average number of alcohol-related deaths. But the Tories are also right that existing legislation, like that against licensed stores selling to under-age drinkers, is more often observed by breaking it than not.

Scotland has always had a drink problem, but now it is being forced to admit the true severity of that problem. One death every three hours in a population of about 5.5 million. Yet Scotland isn't that much more of a boozy culture than, say, Texas where I now live - and Texas' drunk-driving limits and enforcement are a joke by Scottish standards for just one example. Scotlands rude awakening should be an alarm call for others too.

Finally, A Sensible Af/Pak Opium Policy

By Steve Hynd

We've written a fair bit here about what we all believe to be Obama's disasterous non-plan for the Af/Pak region, a plan that is simply Bush-lite without a benchmark for progress in sight and without any kind of exit plan. But credit where it's due, the Obama administration has finally gotten something right.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication -- for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country -- was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

''Eradication is a waste of money,'' Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.

''It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication,'' he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.

Instead, the US is to concentrate on assisting farmers who abandon poppy cultivation, boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops.

While Holbrooke did not provide the AP with a dollar figure for the new U.S. commitment, he told the G-8 ministers that Washington was increasing its funding for agricultural assistance from tens of millions of dollars a year to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, the current G-8 president.

''We're essentially phasing out our support for crop eradication and using the money to work on interdiction, rule of law, alternate crops,'' Holbrooke told the AP.

...The G-8 ministers along with Afghan counterpart Rangin Dadfar Spanta issued a statement at the end of their three-day summit Saturday saying it was urgent to find alternatives for farming communities where ''narco-trafficking and extremism are endemic.''

They said sustainable farming was key to Afghanistan's and Pakistan's future in that it would boost incomes, create jobs, improve rural development and lower regional tensions.

''Food insecurity and chronic poverty are root causes of civil instability and forced migration,'' the statement said.

As Fester noted back in December, US policies of eradication have been a disaster in Columbia too.

Newshoggers alumni Libby Spencer is happy with the policy change: "I could have written that statement. Come to think of it, I did -- too many times to count," but she, I'm sure, is aware that previous, lower key, promises of alternative crop development in Afghanistan have been plagued by a failure to follow through. Hopefully, now that these alternatives are official policy rather than piecemeal experiments, the funding and resourcing will come.

Possibilities in Drug Policy?

By Fester:

Stealing an entire post from Mark Kleiman:

The issue of the New Yorker on the newsstands tomorrow has a John Seabrook profile of David Kennedy and his focused deterrence/targeted zero tolerance/pulling levers approach to reducing gang and drug-market violence. Jeremy Travis, who runs John Jay College (where Kennedy teaches) has put together a national network of cities willing to try out the new strategies, and has raised some serious foundation money to help out.

Meanwhile, Angela Hawken has crunched the numbers on the HOPE probation-enforcement program in Hawai'i. We now know that it's possible to get people with serious drug habits and serious criminal histories to behave themselves: if you learn how to deliver swift and certain sanctions, the sanctions don't have to be severe and you don't have to deliver them very often. And since the criminally-active population accounts for the bulk of drug sales, not only does that reduce crime, it also shrinks the markets.

Back at the ranch, we have an Attorney General and a drug czar who don't think that locking up everyone in sight is the solution to anything, and Jim Webb seems to be serious about doing something on the over-imprisonment problem.

There are two big problems with the current war on drugs. 

First, it does not work.  If I wanted to, I could find at 'reasonable' prices pretty much anything that I wanted to smoke, snort, shoot, crush, chew or inhale in under two days (yeah, I am old and respectable now as I used to be able to make that claim 'in under twelve hours').  Secondly, it produces several massive public policy externalities including massively disproportional justice system interactions, the evisceration of the 4th Amendment and tens of billions of dollars in direct, recurring costs as well as significant destabilization of drug producing nations. 

So if there are a couple of programs that are offering the promise of controlling most of the negative externalities of the drug trade (controlling gang violence, reducing property crimes, reducing recidivism) that would be excellent news if these programs are expanded to scale. 

Local coins for COIN

By Fester:

Zenpundit earlier this month reviewed the Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen and he noted one of the major problems in the entire COIN literature:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience - key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy

This leads to a massive disconnect in planning, policy and goal sets, as operational goals (securing a modicum and 'decent' level of violence) overrides the minimally existent political constraints and goals. 

The 10 second description of the official US Army counter-insurgency doctrine is simple:

Enhance the host government's legitimacy and capability while denying legitimacy and capacity to the insurgent(s).

From this, everything else derives including the strong inclination to NOT using air strike, the argument that the best metric of success is not body counts but secured villages or neighborhoods.  This basic axiom should guide the actions of every leader from the E-4 fire team leader to the Secrtary of Defense and the President.  All actions that contribute to legitimacy and capacity enhancement of the host government are productive actions strategically.  All actions that do not aid in supporting legitimacy and capability are self-defeating actions. 

Time Magazine reports on the current US plan for Afghanistan.  It involves a surge of a few additional brigades, a doubling of the Afghani Army, increasing the national police force and expanding local militias.  There are many problems, including the dispersion of the legitimacy of violence to non-state militias, but there is a far more pragmatic concern of sustainability:

That's the reason the Obama Administration is considering doubling the size of Afghanistan's military and national police forces, to roughly 400,000. That's more than triple what U.S. officials had estimated would be needed to defend the country shortly after the U.S. invaded in late 2001....

But there's a problem with the option of doubling the size of the Afghan security forces: Officials inside and out of the Pentagon warn that the bill for setting up such a large force, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion annually for several years, could prove daunting — more than double the budget of the Afghan government, and way more than could be sustained by Afghanistan's own economy for the foreseeable future.

Implied with this statement is that the current Afghanistani force structure is more expensive than the government's current budget.  So doubling the force structure either means the Kabul government will forever be a client government begging for outside funding to fund its oversized armed forces or it will be incapable of providing basic public services or it will be subject to the whims of the IMF and economic cycles that dwarf the Kabul government's capacity to influence.  None of those scenarios are legitimacy enhancing scenarios. 

The disconnect will lead to a minimization of political goals as our national decision loop short circuits itself to subjugating itself to the known processes instead of grappling with the needed questions as to what end states are achievable and desirable. 

Mexico and drug cartel update

By Fester:

Just a couple of notes (via the Agonist) on the situation in Mexico concerning the narco-insurgencies that are occurring:

Guatamala is experiencing the displacement effect as drug groups are dodging Mexican government efforts by moving over the border to lightly policed and patrolled areas of Guatamala:

Via Reuters

Brazil will finance Guatemala's purchase of six military airplanes and a radar system to help it tackle a growing threat from drug gangs within its borders, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said on Tuesday....

And the LA Times has more:

Gunmen unleashed a furious barrage of bullets and at least one grenade, in some cases finishing the job point-blank. When the shooting stopped that day in April, five of the 10 Guatemalan agents lay dead and a sixth was wounded.

The fleeing killers, identified by authorities as members of the Mexican drug gang known as the Zetas, left behind a cargo truck packed with 700 pounds of cocaine. More stunning was the cache found in a brick warehouse: 11 M-60 machine guns, eight Claymore mines, a Chinese-made antitank rocket, more than 500 grenades, commando uniforms, bulletproof vests and thousands of rounds of ammunition....

During the last year and a half, the Zetas have carved a bloody trail across Guatemala's northern and eastern provinces. More than 6,000 people were slain in Guatemala in 2008. Police say most of the killings were linked to the drug trade.

As the recent blood bath shows, the violence is now threatening the capital, deep in the interior....

Already, traffickers operate freely in rural stretches nearest Mexico: building secret airstrips in the northern province of Peten to ferry shipments of cocaine, paying small-time farmers to grow poppy and moving contraband across the porous frontier into Mexico.

Another Mexican drug cartel is covering out a traditional 20th century government replacing insurgency in the south and west of Mexico. The other interpretation is they are applying Capone's methods to a decent chunk of Mexico. Again via another LA Times story:

Whether by intimidation, purchase or direct order, drug gangs can sometimes dictate who is a candidate and who is not, and put some of their own people in races -- a perversion, critics say, of democracy itself....

"It is a way to win power with fear, where the authorities either don't have the capability to fight it, or have the capability but not the inclination," said German Tena, president of the Michoacan branch of the country's ruling National Action Party.

"There are mayors and politicians who 'let things happen,' and there are some who have sold their soul to the devil," said a high-ranking Michoacan state official who agreed to discuss the sensitive topic of corruption in exchange for anonymity.

La Familia also has steadily diversified into counterfeiting, extortion, kidnapping, armed robbery, prostitution and car dealerships. The group offers money or demands bribes; increasingly, people in Michoacan pay protection money to La Familia in lieu of taxes to the government.

My emphasis on the last. If this truly is the case, than La Familia has successfully delegitimatized the government's monopoly on force and has replaced it with its own quasi-legitimacy of force utilization. 

Recidivism and Gitmo

By Fester:

Recidism is the big news today as the Pentagon is claiming roughly 1 in 7 Gitmo releasees have been engaged in violent terrorism after they were released. That is about a 15% recidivism rate.
That is actually an exceptionally low recidivism rate for individuals released from US prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has looked at recidivism numerous times, and usually at least half of all individuals released from a US prison will be convicted of another crime within a few years of release. Here is some data from 2004:

Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.

So a 15% recidivism rate in almost any other context would be a near best of class program. Mark Kleiman's advocacy of the HOPE intensive monitoring probation program produce's a lower recidivism rate, as well as some mental health court programs but those are the exceptions. So either Gitmo releasees received amazing rehabilitation services in Gitmo OR most of them really were not involved in much besides trying to get by with their lives.

Again, America, grow a pair.

Drug Czar Calls for end to "War on Drugs"

by anderson

Despite the Obama administration's disturbing grasp on "continuity" with previous Bush administration policies, vis-à-vis state secrets, US attorneys, and the policy prescriptions of a coterie of surgin' generals, a dose of domestic sanity seems to be permeating some reaches of the White House, as Obama's "drug czar," Gil Kerlikowske, has called for an end to the failed "war on drugs."

The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use. ...

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice alone, with treatment's role growing relative to incarceration, Mr. Kerlikowske said.

If, in fact, this does spell the beginning of "new" thinking in Washington regarding the drug issue, that is nothing but good news.  Because Mr. Kerlikowske is dead wrong: the US government has been at war with people in this country.

But as we've seen in so many other situations, if the Republicans and the prison-industrial complex get noisy over this -- as they surely will -- we could see a retreat from confrontation by this White House, which, so far, has been an all too familiar pattern in the first few months of Obama's term.

All-Out Mexican Drug War In America: Scary Or Just Scary Stories?

By Steve Hynd

Last week Fester wondered just who is driving the current crop of scary stories about the Mexican drug war coming to the United States. While he writes that there's plenty of reason to be concerned about Mexico - it shows all the hallmarks of a "hollowed out" state - it's unclear that the most lurid tales are actually true.

Tales that hype the threat of Mexican drug cartels as being the equivalent of several army divisions poised to invade, like this from the L.A. Times on March 15:

The Feb. 21 attack on police headquarters in coastal Zihuatanejo, which injured four people, fit a disturbing trend of Mexico's drug wars. Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.

Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government's 2-year-old war against drug organizations, which are evolving into a more militarized force prepared to take on Mexican army troops, deployed by the thousands, as well as to attack each other.

Or this from Homeland Security Today on March 5:

Intelligence is said to indicate that the cartels have begun to amass high-powered military munitions at strongholds along the border, as well as acquiring potent weaponry inside the US, with the intent to provide these munitions to street soldiers in the US charged with enforcing the cartels' stateside operations. Many of these ruthless enforcers are hardened, violent Latin American-tied gang members, not a insignificant number of whom are ex-members of the Mexican and US military, or elite Mexican and US special forces.

...Disturbingly, according to US Defense Department intelligence components tracking Mexico's cartel operations, Mexico's two dominant cartels have amassed more than 100,000 street soldiers, which is nearly on par with Mexico's 130,000 member armed forces, or the equivalent of ten US Army divisions.

...Indeed. Mexico's law enforcement and military face narco-combatants equipped with automatic weapons, RPGs, anti-tank and anti-personal vehicle rockets, 40mm grenade machine guns, other heavy machine guns, 50-caliber sniper rifles, hordes of military grenades and high explosives, mines and booby traps, night vision goggles, electronic communications interception equipment, encrypted communications, sophisticated information operations, submersibles, helicopters and modern aviation transportation

The HSToday also says the cartels have told their people, who've had training from ex- military gang members, to engage US law enforcement with a "full tactical response" if challenged. But we've seen nothing even close to that in recent Mexican drug gang arrests in Texas, New Mexico or California. Almost all have been relatively quiet, routine busts - and there's certainly not been anything close to a fullscale "tactical response" by the gangsters.

While there's doubtless a problem - there have been deaths and corruption enough to show that - it's very much less likely that these scariest stories of special-forces trained, well armed narco-divisions poised to pour across the border. So who stands to gain most by pushing them? Hard right political interests, Homeland Security on another turf-grab, arms manufacturers looking at the dwindling of their Iraq and Afghanistan money trees? Someone needs to do some digging.

Mexico and media memes

By Fester:

Doug J at Balloon Juice asks a good question on why there is so much attention about Mexico in the national news right now instead of perculating in the COIN/4GW/non-conventional warfare blogger background that I hang out with:

If you’re like me, you find it fascinating when a new wingnut talking point appears out of nowhere. Here’s a new one: Mexico is like Iraq but possibly worse. I’m not sure why this is such a relevant comparison, but apparently it is. Here’s Lou Dobbs talking about it, here’s Bill O, and here’s the Washington Times. And you probably already know how excited Glenn Beck is about the Mexican drug cartels.
Where’s this one going? Are Mexican drug cartels ready to replace Islamofascists as public enemy number one? Or is this a flash in the Fox pan?

I know talk about Mexican destabilization has been an ongoing low-level murmur in some blogging circles. I started worrying about Mexico hollowing out in May 2008 as I looked at cash flow constraints in the context of record high oil prices. 40% of Mexico’s federal budget is derived from oil revenue. Right now, it looks like Mexico could be hitting an Export-Land oil crisis in the next couple of years as exports crash due to the combination of higher domestic consumption and rapid depletion of mature fields, most particularly Canterall. Zenpundit, Fabius Maximus and other non-conventional warfare and security bloggers have been looking at Mexico as a falsiafiable test case for 4GW theory for even longer than I have.

This cluster of bloggers have been interested in Mexico because conditions are seemingly ripe for massive state disruption, destabilization and delegitimatization. Mexico is partially a rent based economy with weakening social ties, at risk due to hot money flows in and out of the country, large scale corruption and a massive non-state sector that is based on black market activity. Those characteristics are characteristics that 4GW theorists would argue characterize a state that is at deep risk of hollowing out by a determined network that is opposed to an expansive state.

Now as to why the right wing echo chamber is paying attention to Mexico, I have no good idea. But there is something in the story in and of itself that deserves more attention.

Stopping Cartel Cash Flow...

By Fester:

The news that the US Border Patrol's focus on the southern US border is changing is welcome news for those worried about Mexican state instability.  Previously the Border Patrol was primarily worried about immigrants and goods coming north from Mexico into the United States.  Now the Border Patrol will be devoting significant resources to arms and cash going south into Mexico and towards the major drug cartels.

From the San Fransisco Chronicle:

California lawmakers and the Obama administration have begun to shift U.S. border policy with Mexico, abruptly changing focus from illegal immigration to the flow of cash and weapons from the United States that is fueling a savage war between the Mexican government and powerful drug cartel

Government officials say 90 percent of the arms in the drug wars come from the United States, including grenades and rocket launchers. Southbound drug cash is estimated as high as $25 billion a year....

Okay, this is a good start, but it is an insufficient step as cash is cash and it is fairly fungible.  Alternative routes will be found to get cash back to the cartels.  And as far as arms, Steve and I have repeatedly pointed out that there is a global marketplace for small and medium arms sales that has successfully and profitably operated in much hotter zones than Mexico such as Iraq.  Arms will find their way to people with the cash and desire to purchase them. 

So these are good starting steps, but I think they are crisis reactions and not a systemic response to ways of cutting off the cartels' cash flows which is premised on supplying a desired product into a black market with high profit margins.