COIN in Mexico? Share This /

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave Mexicans a jolt on Wednesday when, in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, she compared their country’s drug cartel violence to an “insurgency.”

[W]e face an increasing threat from a well-organized network drug trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America. … These drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency. All of a sudden car bombs show up which weren’t there before. So it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narcotraffickers control certain parts of the country – significant parts. In Colombia it got to the point where a third of the country – nearly 40% of the country – at one time or another was controlled by the insurgent FARC.

President Obama has since walked back the Colombia comparison a bit, telling a Spanish-language U.S. newspaper interviewer that “You can’t compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia.” However, Secretary Clinton’s insistence that Mexico’s gangs and cartels are “morphing” into an insurgency still stands.

This is a concern, because some poor policy choices can result from viewing criminal gangs and narcotrafficking syndicates – whose only truly political goal is to keep government from disrupting their business – as “insurgents” or revolutionaries.

If gangs and cartels are insurgents, it would follow that the proper response would be counterinsurgency (COIN). The term refers to the process of regaining government control over territory and populations in zones controlled by anti-state movements. While it includes civilian elements, COIN is ultimately a military strategy. The U.S. government is supporting robust COIN programs in Iraq’s Sunni triangle, in Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces, and in Colombia’s La Macarena region.

It is unclear from her remarks whether Secretary Clinton is, in fact, implying that Mexico needs a classic counterinsurgency campaign or a beefed-up military offensive. If so, then she is recommending the wrong course for Mexico, whose government has already deployed its military extensively in a 3 ½-year-old offensive against the cartels. Despite strong U.S. support, rising violence indicators make plain that the military strategy has not worked.

Secretary Clinton is not the first to use the language of “insurgency” to describe Mexico and Central America. Her words echo analyses from a relatively small literature that seeks to erase the distinction between cartels and insurgents in Latin America. Two analysts who promote this “gangs as insurgents” thesis, both of them retired Army colonels, are Max Manwaring of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute and Robert Killebrew of the Center for a New American Security.

Both authors forcefully portray gangs and cartels as a threat to U.S. security on a par with insurgents and terrorists. Manwaring describes gang and cartel activity as occurring in the “nonstate battle space.”

[S]treet gangs are a mutated form of urban insurgency. That is, these nonstate actors must eventually seize political power to guarantee the freedom of action and the commercial environment they want. The common denominator that can link gangs to insurgency is that some gangs’ and insurgents’ ultimate objective is to depose or control the governments of targeted countries.

“It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish the terrorist from the cartel member,” wrote Killebrew last November, “because they are operationally and organizationally interbreeding and morphing into one and the same.”

Though neither author’s policy recommendations are detailed, Killebrew and Manwaring come to similar conclusions about what must be done. Interestingly, what they describe doesn’t sound like traditional, military-led COIN. They recommend a response that is heavily civilian, multifaceted, and “holistic.”

Manwaring: The power to deal with these kinds of threats is not hard combat firepower or even more benign police power. It involves soft, multidimensional, multilevel, multilateral, political, psychological, moral, informational, economic, and social efforts, as well as police and military activities that can be brought to bear holistically on the causes and consequences, as well as the perpetrators of violence.

Killebrew: Fortunately for us, our recent experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has begun to nudge American strategy and policy toward more integrated solutions than purely military or purely diplomatic choices, and we have begun to rebuild the civilian institutions with which we engage the world.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s own descriptions of its stated “new” plan for Mexico point to a civilian governance and justice effort, a big change from the mostly military 2008-2010 Mérida Initiative. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson told a congressional committee in May that the focus is changing:

[W]e are moving away from big ticket equipment and into an engagement that reinforces progress by further institutionalizing Mexican capacity to sustain adherence to the rule of law and respect for human rights, build strong institutions, promote full civil society participation, transform the nature of our borders, and by providing intensive technical assistance and training.

Though vague, this is clearly not a description of a counterinsurgent approach. However, Jacobson’s testimony reflects the Obama administration’s view of more than four months ago, and the situation is evolving.

Secretary Clinton’s newest remarks come at a time when, as the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal have reported in recent days, the Obama administration is weighing a possible major increase in U.S. aid to Mexico.

If this debate takes place in a framework of “insurgency” and the Plan Colombia experience, the result could be troubling for at least three reasons, beyond the obvious human rights concerns.

1. As the Obama administration weighs and develops a big new aid package for Mexico, it will be considering how to sell it to a new U.S. Congress that is likely to be far more conservative and far less willing to run up the deficit for foreign aid – unless it is military aid. In 2000, the Clinton administration sold Plan Colombia, an appropriation of 75 percent military aid, to a very conservative Republican-majority Congress. Once again, the language of confronting an “insurgency” and appeals to the Plan Colombia experience may lead the Obama administration to de-prioritize justice, civilian governance and economic opportunity in favor of a mostly military package that is an easier legislative sell. If a big new aid package is in the offing, a new tranche of military hardware will be easier to get past approprators than would be a program that is truly “holistic” and civilian-led.

2. Whether in the literature or in Secretary Clinton’s remarks, describing criminal syndicates as “insurgents” distracts from a badly needed discussion of how the United States’ own domestic choices worsen the problem. Counterinsurgency campaigns, after all, don’t involve domestic policy at all. This language could become a dodge to avoid walking into political minefields like reducing U.S. addicts’ demand (by increasing spending on drug treatment, a tough sell to conservatives), limiting sales of assault weapons (and thus taking on the gun lobby), and tightening U.S. money-laundering enforcement (which requires confronting the banking lobby). The language of “insurgency” externalizes the problem.

3. This language, as well as the relevant literature, also tends to “black box” the state on the receiving end of U.S. assistance. The simplistic view of our “partner” is that of a beleaguered government that must be defended and kept from “failing.” But as the United States has found with the recurring headache of corruption in the Afghan government, states are very hard to defend when they are thoroughly penetrated by the criminals themselves. The human rights community – with its focus on impunity and protecting those who denounce abuse – usually sees more clearly the danger of supporting government institutions that have fallen under the influence of the “bad guys.” But human rights concerns have rarely been central to COIN campaigns.

These are patently undesirable outcomes. So why is Secretary Clinton using the dire language of insurgency and citing Plan Colombia? It could be that her comments are, in fact, directed at the U.S. and Mexican governments. The Obama administration and U.S. Congress have responded to Mexico’s security crisis by evading the domestic challenges in (2) above, and then creating the illusion of action by sending a package dominated by military hardware, very little of which has even been delivered. The government of Mexico – which vehemently rejected Secretary Clinton’s “insurgency” analogy – has intensified its military and police crackdown, but has moved more slowly on the police and judicial reforms that a successful public security effort would require.

Perhaps, by talking about insurgency and evoking a major aid package that came with a heavy investment from the recipient country, Secretary Clinton was seeking to light a fire under both governments. Instead of proposing a potentially disastrous COIN effort in Mexico, her intent could have been to forge the political will necessary to hasten reforms in Mexico, and to sell a mostly civilian, institution-focused aid package to a reticent U.S. Congress.

But that interpretation may be too optimistic.