Washington's 40 percent solution to Pakistan's proxy war against NATO in Afghanistan or Pundita's solution. Take your pick.

I begin with thanking Madhu at Chicago Boyz and Zenpundit's Mark Safranski for highlighting my December 17 post, Would the U.S. pay Pakistan's military to help murder American troops if the U.S. had military conscription?. Mark included a helpful history lesson in his comments on the post:

Militaries come in several forms, historically speaking. There are military castes like the Samurai, Spartans or the Janissaries; there are armies of citizen volunteers as with ancient Athens, ancient Rome or Washington’s Continental Army; there are armies built by conscription and finally there are professional mercenaries. Each kind of military has a different relationship with the political community from which it emerged and when a political community changes its form of military, this signals a change in the political community.

The Roman legions annihilated at Cannae by Hannibal were of a different character than the Roman legions lost by Emperor Valens under the hooves of Gothic heavy cavalry at Adrianople (note which set of Romans had the systemic capability to recover and win).

Richard Nixon is the father of our AVF [all volunteer force] and he initiated the transformation at the time for shrewd, self-interested, political reasons. One of those reasons was that a republican (small “r”) military composed of conscripts representing the broad population of American citizens was a politically difficult army to employ ruthlessly for reasons of state compared to a military with the ethos of professional soldiers.

Herein lies the root of the much remarked distance between the American public and the small fraction who are soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines fighting wars on our behalf.

Yet the history Mark summarizes provides no precedent for the situation I discussed in the Conscription post. So while societies with AVFs are historically not as engaged with their militaries as ones where there is conscription, this doesn't explain the relationship between Washington and Pakistan, whereby one government has been in effect paying another to murder its own troops, and doing so on the thinnest rationalizations -- some of which I shot down in yesterday's post; others I've dealt with in several essays going back years.

There is no viable rationale, and the American public is fast running out of excuses for not knowing the score on Afghanistan, which is that counterinsurgency doctrine never got a fair test in the country because there was never any insurgency to speak of; there was and remains a covert proxy war waged by Pakistan's military -- a war funded in no small part by the U.S. taxpayer. A war that needlessly kills and maims many Americans because even the most basic, common-sense actions have never been taken by the American civilian leaders and military commands to discourage Pakistan's military from waging war on Afghanistan.

And despite all the publicity in the USA since the Abbottabad raid about Pakistan's support for terrorism and the public criticism of Pakistan from members of Congress, a host of media figures and high-ranking officials, there has been no real change in Washington's stance on Pakistan. If that's hard to believe, consider:

The 40 Percent Solution

A December 17 Reuters report (updated on December 19) on the foreign aid section of the U.S. spending bill for fiscal 2012 summarizes the stipulations attached by Congress to U.S. aid to Pakistan:

The legislation allocates $850 million for a fund to help Pakistan's military develop counterinsurgency capabilities to fight Islamist militants within its borders. This is actually a slight increase from last year's $800 million but less than the $1.1 billion President Obama requested for the fund in 2012.

However, a massive defense bill Congress passed on Thursday freezes 60 percent of this amount, or $510 billion, until the U.S. defense secretary provides lawmakers with assurances that Pakistan is working to counter improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

So Congress is betting that 40 percent of the aid -- the part that is being given without strings attached -- will not be used by the Pakistani military to help train and supply terrorists who attack U.S. troops and civilian workers in Afghanistan and U.S./NATO supply convoys in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

And as to why the American taxpayer should pay for U.S. forces to further train Pakistan's military in counterinsurgency tactics, which repeated history tells it passes to terrorist groups fighting Americans and other NATO troops, the Reuters report doesn't say. To return to the report:

[...] No number was included for economic aid to Pakistan, leaving the Obama administration to specify the amount in consultation with Congress. This is a comedown for Pakistan; in each of the past three years, about $1 billion or more in economic aid for Pakistan was written into spending bills, in part to meet pledges made under 2009 legislation sponsored by Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar.

Economic as well as security aid was made conditional on Pakistan's cooperation in fighting militants such as the Haqqani network.

The large political rally held on December 25, 2011 in Karachi for Imran Khan was Rawalpindi's answer to all the conditions that Washington has attached to its aid, conditions that were telegraphed many weeks prior to the aid bill's passage. Not long before he was murdered the Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times Online, Saleem Shahzad, reported that the strongly anti-American Khan was being groomed by Pakistani military leaders as Pakistan's next likely (figurehead) civilian leader. As I noted in my April 22. 2011 comments on Shahzad's report:

With some understatement Khan is not U.S.- or NATO-friendly. At the time Shahzad filed his report Khan was leading a two day sit-in outside Peshawar, the capital of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, "planned for Saturday and Sunday to block supply convoys ferrying goods to North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in Afghanistan."

So this is something Washington could see coming: any attempt to tie sticks to U.S. aid to Pakistan would be met with countermoves from Rawalpindi, such as promoting Khan -- whose entire political platform at this time is fighting corruption and standing up to the United States.

The Washington workaround has been a 40 percent solution: no strings on monies always intended to be disbursed to Pakistan, and attach the strings to the phantom 60 percent.

This, despite the fact that even Fareed Zakaria bluntly told Pakistan's foreign minister (in an interview aired on CNN October 2, 2011) that it's been open knowledge for years in American journalistic and diplomatic circles that Pakistan is aiding and abetting the Haqqani Network.

Hina Rabbani Khar didn't bother to keep the contempt out of her voice when she replied to Zakaria's grilling. I'd say she knew she was dealing with people in Washington who make the monsters in her own government look like saints, for even the worst in Pakistan's military wouldn't pay another military to kill its own troops.

On November 13, 2009 The Atlantic Council's New Atlanticist blog published an essay by Donald M. Snow, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama and author of over 40 books on foreign policy, international relations and national security, which dealt with the implications of an all-volunteer force in the United States. Little more than a week after the Snow essay appeared at NA I published Why General Stanley McChrystal is going straight to hell, the first of what must be more than a hundred essays by now on the U.S. government's attempts to placate Pakistan even though it knew that Pakistan's military/ISI was complicit in the murder and maiming of U.S. troops.

I've half a mind to republish the Snow essay and mine right here and now, but will content myself with providing the links to the essays and asking you to read (or re-read) both. Then you tell me what you think should be done about a situation that has no precedent in recorded history.

If your answer is that the United States should immediately withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan: if you and I hadn't egged on Pakistan's military to create a monster that was turned loose on Afghanis I'd say it's the right answer. However, that we weren't really aware of how our tax money was being used, or that some of us weren't even born at the time President Ronald Reagan hailed the Taliban as freedom fighters, doesn't let us off the hook.

If you tell me that we don't dare add another shooting war to our list: there is more than one way to stop Pakistan's proxy war and without the U.S. firing a shot at Pakistan. I've detailed such ways on my blog at least twice, but they depend on something Americans have in short supply, which is patience. There is fast way, however:

The Pundita Solution

The U.S. ambassador to every major NATO country should be instructed to convey to his or her counterpart that President Obama wants to call a special session of Congress to recommend that the United States withdraw from NATO, and to kindly pass this along to the country's leadership.

When the American ambassadors are asked why, they should reply that the President finds himself in a real pickle: he can't order that the United States immediately withdraw from Afghanistan but neither can he continue to tolerate that his government and the governments of other NATO countries are encouraging Pakistan to continue its proxy war against NATO troops and Afghanistan's government.

The ambassadors should also convey that President Obama would be all ears if NATO country leaders had suggestions that would allow him to refrain from calling the special session, particularly because he would have to go into considerable detail in front of Congress to explain why he wants to withdraw from NATO.

That would be a better way of accomplishing the objective than Obama snarling into the phone at NATO country leaders that unless every one of their governments immediately suspended all loans and every kind of aid to Pakistan, including technical assistance, the United States would immediately withdraw from NATO.

There are other tactics along similar lines that can be launched, but it all starts with the U.S. halting every kind of loan, aid and TA to Pakistan, and bringing pressure on the World Bank to the same and nudging Brussels to do the same at the IMF.

The halting should be done without a word of explanation, criticism or threat to Pakistan's leaders. As I've explained before the Pakistanis in charge are adults; they don't need to be told what they already know. They've just been waiting to see whether Washington will ever get serious about having them stop their proxy war. So far, they've had every indication that the answer is no.

A fast withdrawal from NATO would be a drastic step for the United States but there is no use bringing any lessor threat to bear. These other NATO countries want to do business with Pakistan just as the United States does, so Pakistan would continue to play one country off another if there wasn't a coordinated approach.

A coordinated approach would also be helpful in persuading China to hear its phone ringing when Pakistan began whining that the USA was being really mean this time. China has a big interest in seeing peace in Afghanistan. Ditto for Iran. Sooner there is peace, the sooner U.S. combat forces can withdraw.

As to whether Obama would go for the plan -- I think he would, but if he is up against a powerful faction in Washington that does not want peace in Afghanistan on the theory that peace would mean a speedy exit for U.S. combat troops, he would have his work cut out for him.

I honestly don't know whether such a faction exists, although surely there are some in Washington who would like to keep combat troops near Russia and Iran and possibly Pakistan. But when you weigh that desire against what Pakistan's proxy war is doing to Americans, only those Americans with no conscience whatsoever -- real fiends -- would consider the maiming and murder of Americans to be justifiable collateral damage. Such people should have no place in the United States; they shouldn't deserve citizenship here.

In any event the only way such a crime against humanity can happen is in the shadows of the American public's inattention and in the silence of the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of State. So it's time for everyone to step up.

I'll close with a quote from Professor Snow's essay on the AVF:

Veterans’ Day reminds us that military commitment and sacrifice has historically been a national burden, not one borne by those we hire to perform our duty for us (we have, of course, also done that, as in the provision for draftees to hire replacements on the Union side of the Civil War).

Philosophically, the danger is that we become so disconnected from the military obligation that we forget that sacrifice is a national, not a minority, responsibility. I do not want to saddle the military with an unruly force, but I would like a force that is more representative of us all and which cannot be activated without a conscious recognition that we and those we all hold dear may be very personally affected.

Zenpundit's "Do Oligarchies Create Insurgencies?" and Steve Cohen's report on Russia's parliamentary election

Do Oligarchies Create Insurgencies?

Readers who aren't interested in counterinsurgency warfare shouldn't be put off by the title of Mark Safranski's November 29 essay for his Zenpundit blog; the writing goes to the heart of many matters relating to U.S. foreign policy formulation, brings into focus a little-examined downside of democracies, and at the same time challenges a bedrock assumption of "population-centric" counterinsurgency advocates, whose views came to shape the U.S. prosecution of the Afghan War:

Of democracies that have not or have never needed to fight an insurgency, the supposition would be that liberal democracy represents the best vehicle for satisfying popular demands and defusing grievances. Further, there is an implicit assumption that democracies are functionally better at solving social and political problems and are less aggressive than dictatorships or traditional regimes. Therefore, a a key tenet of pop-centric COIN theory, the need for good governance, tends in practice to become conflated with implementing democratic and liberal reforms of regressive and repressive states, as was successfully done in El Salvador, to win over the loyalty of the population for the state.

I would like to believe that this theory is correct for intuitive and anecdotal reasons – it seems like common sense because our experience is that citizens of liberal democracies lead more prosperous, freer and more peaceful lives and are therefore unlikely to pick up arms against their government. Unfortunately, this reasonable assumption may be shakier than it appears and have little relation to success or failure of a COIN campaign

The essay also brings out a disturbing blip in democratic societies. As Mark notes during the course of his conclusions:

Democracies are janus-faced in terms of insurgency. On the one hand, excepting the French Fourth Republic, advanced liberal democracies in the last century have rarely faced a serious rebellion at home (the 1970′s wave of upper-class Marxist terrorism never exceeded a handful of terrorists). On the other hand, these same democracies have an extensive historical record of provoking insurrection in overseas colonial possessions, fighting insurgencies on behalf of client states or even sponsoring insurgents as proxies against unfriendly states. This uneasily complicated relationship between democratic governance and insurgency mitigates any unstated assumptions regarding promotion of democracy as a natural adjunct of COIN; democracy can be highly subversive of traditional mores or it can manifest itself as intolerant and illiberal majoritarianism.

All in all, the writing is a tour de force; I hope it'll eventually prompt a re-thinking in U.S. military and civilian academic circles and at agencies such as the U.S. Department of State about the long-held U.S. policy of viewing democracy promotion as a panacea. Too often the policy has resulted in American values being twisted to install in other countries U.S.-friendly regimes that only give lip service to democracy and are oligarchical if not downright tyrannical in nature, which always blows back on the USA. The U.S./EU-backed Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which switched out one oligarchical clan for another that was less friendly to Russia to run the country, is a prime example.

The current arguments in policy circles about democracy promotion tend to revolve around realism vs. idealism. (See George Friedman's November 6 analysis for STRAFOR, Egypt and the Idealist-Realist Debate in U.S. Foreign Policy, for a thoughtful discussion of the debate.) Mark's discussion goes much deeper than the debate and yet, with the help of a handy chart he devised, is easy for the less wonkishly-inclined to follow.

On a personal note, pondering Mark's arguments gave me a respite from digesting the unrelenting bad news about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan and the ongoing refusal in Washington to fully confront the fact that NATO has been fighting what is chiefly a proxy war in Afghanistan mounted and managed by Pakistan's junta, not an insurgency. After being immersed day after day, year in and year out, in following Washington's attempts to play ostrich, my frustration has worn me down to the point that I don't know whether I can continue blogging because I'm simply making the same points in essay after essay, year after year.

So to transcend if only for a few minutes a situation I consider so vexing and mull over ideas on 'great' themes was good medicine for me. I was feeling so chipper after reading the essay that I wrote a rather extensive commentary on it for the Zenpundit comment section -- Comment #13, for any Pundita readers who're interested.

Russia

In a not entirely unrelated matter, last night John Batchelor sat down with Steve Cohen, my favorite Russia analyst, to discuss the country's recent parliamentary election. I was in such a terrible mood about the Pakistan-Washington situation that I didn't listen to the show although I'll catch up by listening to the podcast. But John's notes on the discussion, posted at his show's blog in the Schedule section, bring out a very important point that relates to the habit of democracies meddling in the affairs of other nations and for purely self-serving reasons. John wrote:

Tuesday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Stephen Cohen, NYU & [latest book] Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, in re: Russian elections:

Russian police still quashing protests; 300 arrests, then 250, including important bloggers who called Putin's United Russia, "the party of swindlers." Who's more surprised, Putin or the West? The West: it portrayed the political system as wholly under Putin's control, which it isn't. Putin's supermajority, 64%, enough to change the constitution, is down in the 50's. Communist Party now doubles to 20%. Yeltsin used tanks vs the Parliament in 1993; now, it's partly liberated for the first time. Also, first time ever that ruling party has lost so thoroughly. On a human level, people start to think that their vote counts.

[John Batchelor comment]: "Putin fixed an election and lost it -- deeply ironical."

A powerful Communist faction wants to transform the CP into a European Social democratic party. Now encouraged. Just (Fair) Russia [party] was formed by the Kremlin to take away votes but now goes its own way; got 35%(?).

Putin's St Petersburg crew? Three groups. 1. 2. Oligarchs. 3. Neolibs, technologist, linked with the West, have acquired power; Alexei Kudrin was the finance minister.

The Kremlin decided to be less heavy-handed than usual; still kept oppo off natl TV. [Kremlin] Worried about developments in other countries: bad elections lead to riots, lead to real opposition. Even Occupy Wall Street has generated nervousness, barred doors and high fences; fear of unseemly protest, demos on ramps that lead up to Kremlin.

Today, John McCain tweeted, "Soon, the Arab Spring will come to Russia."

Russia has jillions of nuclear weapons, so the last thing we want is Russia to be destabilized. Who do these cheerleaders think will come to power -- Thomas Jefferson?

Yes indeed the West and in particular the USA was caught off guard by Russia's healthy opposition movement. Americans were caught off guard because it's almost impossible to get objective news analysis from US sources on Russia unless one follows Steve Cohen's reports on the John Batchelor Show -- and unfortunately, Steve's reports for the show are not on a regular basis.

Instead of news analysis on Russia, Americans get propaganda that's painted Russia's government as a tyranny. So Americans are blindsided again and again by a cadre in Washington, a kind of shadow government, that's oriented not to American interests but NATO/EU interests. Mr McCain is part of that cadre, I might add.

To give you some idea of how it works against American interests to be in the dark about matters Russian, consider how long it took for a route for NATO and particularly U.S. supplies for the Afghan War to be developed that was external to Pakistan. There was tremendous resistance among the 'Get Russia' crowd in Washington to the idea of seeking Russian help, resistance that set back by years the development of the 'Northern Distribution Network' NATO supply routes through Russia and Russia-friendly Central Asian countries.

So billions of dollars worth of military supplies were destroyed or stolen from the Pakistan supply routes, and Pakistan's junta leveraged its control of the route in Pakistan to tamp down U.S. protests against its proxy war in Afghanistan. Exactly how many NATO soldiers and Afghans had to die because of this, God only knows.

But there goes my good mood out the window. The upside is that I am now in just the right frame of mind to finish writing a post I've titled, "Alden Pyle in Pakistan, Part 3."

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The 9/11 attack on the USA, ten years out: "We should not move through history as sleepwalkers."

Pentagon 9/11 memorial

I feel that ZenPundit Mark Safranski's September 11 essay, The Nine Eleven Century? speaks for many Americans both in its summary of the meaning of 9/11 for Americans and its concerns about where responses to the tragedy are leading America as a nation. My regret is that I didn't see the essay yesterday, else I would have posted about it then. The entire essay is an important read but here I quote from the closing paragraphs:

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the fallen and the many members of the armed services of the United States who have served for ten years of war, heroically, at great sacrifice and seldom with complaint, we also need to recall that we should not move through history as sleepwalkers.

We owe it to our veterans and to ourselves not to continue to blindly walk the path of the trajectory of 9/11, but to pause and reflect on what changes in the last ten years have been for the good and which require reassessment. Or repeal. To reassert ourselves, as Americans, as masters of our own destiny rather than reacting blindly to events while carelessly ceding more and more control over our lives and our livelihoods to the whims of others and a theatric quest for perfect security. America needs to regain the initiative, remember our strengths and do a much better job of minding the store at home.

The next ninety years being molded by the last ten is not a future I care to leave to my children. I can think of no better way to honor the dead and refute the current sense of decline than for America to collectively step back from immersion in moment by moment events and start to chart a course for the long term.

America's Light Footprint Era (Revised)

Regarding the revision, kindly see the note at the end of this post.


Zenpundit's Mark Safranski, who read the tea leaves correctly about the limitations of POPCOIN (population-centric counterinsurgency) tactics in Afghanistan, has, I believe, done it again in his latest post, The Tip of a Shadowy Spear . If you want to know what the newly-minted U.S. counterterrorism strategy will look like on the military end, and how the newest phase of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is shaping up, read Mark's essay.

Mark concludes with the observation, "America is headed into the Light Footprint Era, ready or not."

The light footprint will require heavy reliance on special forces and thus, the title of his post. What happens, however, when the tip of the military's spear (special forces) becomes part of the shaft, as the lighter U.S. footprint will demand? Mark's analysis isolates the major downsides of the approach and in this passage raises questions that extend far beyond battle tactics:

Thirdly, an emphasis on a special forces dominant force structure may have the unintended consequence of causing the executive branch civilian officials to move even further away from strategic thinking and incline them more toward reactive, tactical, retaliation.

Misuse of special forces is the American historical norm. Special forces are so well suited for “emergency use” that they are frequently employed for every “priority” mission except those that are intended to have a strategic effect, even when a regular military unit of combat infantry is more than adequate for the task at hand (Or for that matter, using non-military options!) [...]

Although the writing is primarily addressed to the defense policy community and makes use of military terms, the general reader will only need to surmount a few acronyms to understand the ideas put forth. ("AVF" simply means an all-volunteer force, as the U.S. military has today.) But because Mark invokes two terms (FID and mass) that have more than one interpretation (e.g., different branches of the U.S. military have different standardized definitions of what constitutes mass) and branch into somewhat complex concepts, I wrote to ask that he explain what he meant by the terms in the context of his discussion. He replied:

I meant "mass" in the simple terms of large, conventional, deployments as we have in Afghanistan and had in Iraq. [...]

Foreign Internal Defense (FID) are the training and advisory missions and military aid programs extended to other countries facing insurgencies. US special forces, usually Green Berets, teach, train and advise allied armies and police in unconventional warfare, COIN and special forces tactics but do not take a leading combat role as in COIN campaigns. FID missions are quiet, cheap and small in terms of personnel. COIN campaigns feature US forces doing the above but taking a major combat role until the allied forces can assume the burden themselves (Vietnamization).

COIN has a checkered and fiercely debated historical record. Why do we keep doing it? Because the alternative at the moment of decision is usually the collapse of the ally and that involves a hard strategic assessment of the ally's worth, which seldom happens. Easier to punt and play for time.

NOTE -- 2:45 PM ET

Mark doesn't read tea leaves of course, nor (to my knowledge) does he have a functioning crystal ball; he does have excellent powers of observation, which led him to spot several trends that have building for many months and note how these were starting to converge. The result in my opinion is the clearest picture available to the general reader of how U.S. warfare is evolving to meet the challenges of the present era.

Yet the picture has so many wider implications that it's almost impossible to resist the temptation to use it as a springboard for many policy and philosophical discussions. Mark himself, as I indicate above, didn't resist reading in a few implications. My response to the essay was to ruminate so much on the wider implications that my original title for this post was, "East of the Danube" lol. (Don't ask.)

I finally chopped down my discussion to one paragraph, which I've now decided to delete even though I'm fond of it and will probably re-deploy it in a future essay. I did this because Mark has written an important essay, one that deserves to be studied on its own merits before hanging all number of glittering ornaments on it.

"Hollowed out" Mexico and hollowed-out USA

The Republic of International Community as seen from satellite

CNN and FNC -- America's two national cable TV all-news channels -- have been too busy during the past week reporting on the murder trial of Casey Anthony and the antics of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to squeeze in reporting on Mexico (actually they're always too busy to do more than glance at Mexico) so in the manner of a public service I present links to the following recent reports on Mexico. All the reports are important but I think the Reuters one is the 'must read' and biggest shocker.

June 1 - Reuters, Special Report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.

June 2 - The Los Angeles Times, How many have died in Mexico's drug war?

June 5 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexico peace tour: How the drug war changed once-calm Cuernavaca

June 7 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexican drug traffickers' latest weapon: 'monster' narco-tanks

June 8 - Wall Street Journal, Mexico Tourism Feels Chill of Ongoing Drug Violence

A companion read is Zenpundit Mark Safranski's April 5 review of Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries, a series of monographs edited by Dr. Robert J. Bunker. Before I quote Mark's summary of the book, in which he mentions the need for better U.S. policy on Mexico, an aside:

I hate to be the one to break this news to Mark but there can no longer be an American policy on Mexico because there is no longer a United States of America. He doesn't know this because he doesn't watch much television news, but a few weeks of watching CNN will clue him that the USA is no more. In its place is a country called The Whole World (aka RIC - Republic of International Community), which for reasons known only to the rascals who run CNN excludes every world region where CNN is not in hot competition with al Jazeera.

I myself speak of the "country" of the USA, which I think is what seems to be a box of cookies or a milk carton in the foreground of the above satellite photo of the RIC, only as a matter of convention.

As for FNC (Fox News Channel): currently too busy taking pot-shots at other TV news outlets for initially covering up the Weiner story and otherwise too busy trying to find a Republican who can win the White House to notice that a U.S. government is a memory.

(Memo to FNC: The other TV media were initially quiet about Weiner's texting problem not because he's a Leftist but because his wife is Hillary Clinton's closest aide and they didn't want to have to tell the American public that the person closest to the U.S. Secretary of State is an American Muslim of Indian-Pakistani heritage who was raised in Saudi Arabia, you nitwits.)

So before we try to upgrade U.S. policy on the hollowed-out state of Mexico, as the Narcos book terms it, I say let's examine how the U.S. got hollowed out.

One more point before I cede the floor to Mark: His summary doesn't indicate whether the book addresses racism and apartheid in Mexico. I know that Mark is aware of the subject so I think he would have mentioned it, if any of the monographs dealt specifically with racism; frankly I'd be surprised if any did because the topics of Mexican racism and apartheid are taboo in both the USA and Mexico.

Later this week or the next I'll try to rip myself away from the Afghan War long enough to return to those issues, which I touched on in an earlier post. For now, I'll just say that I think Mexico's type of racism is the true "virus" that Dr Bunker talks about.

Now to Mark's summary (see the article at Zenpundit for links to topics and sources):

[...] Narcos Over the Border. ... is one of the more disturbing academic works recently published in the national security field, not excluding even those monographs dealing with Islamist terrorism and Pakistan. If the authors of this granular examination of Mexico’s immense problems with warring narco-cartels, mercenary assassins, systemic corruption, 3rd generation gangs and emerging “Narcocultas”of Santa Muerte are correct - and I suspect they are - Mexico’s creeping path toward state failure reprsents a threat to American national security of the first order.
[...]
Some impressions I gained from reading Narcos Over the Border include:

> The Narco-Cartels and the Zetas, which fight each other as well as Mexico’s military (Mexican police generally are infiltrated, intimidated, outgunned and seriously outclassed by the Cartel gunmen, Zetas and Guatemalan Kaibiles) are better armed and better trained than are the Taliban. The deadly and efficient Zetas and Kaibiles are superior to regular Mexican military forces and have established safe haven training camps in Central America.

> Narco-cartels are properly speaking, no longer narco-cartels but transnational criminal syndicates involved in a wider array of revenue generating activities, but with professional intelligence and military capabilities, and increasingly, political, social and religious agendas that are functionally reminiscient of Hezbollah and HAMAS.

> The Mexican state is severely hampered in its response to the threat presented by the cartels by its own strategic use of corruption as a cost-saving measure and a tool for sustaining elite control of Mexican politics, as well as a method of personal enrichment by members of Mexico’s ruling class.

> The eschewing of the extreme violence by the cartels North of the border appears to be more of a sign of a strategic policy by cartel and Zeta bosses than a lack of capacity or evidence of a lack of infiltration into American society. To the contrary, Mexican cartel links to acutely dangerous American prison and street gangs such as the Mexican Mafia and MS-13 are significant and well documented.

> The cartels are global, not regional or local operators.

> The culture of the Narco-cartels, which draws on some romantic Mexican social and religious underground traditions, particularly the hybrid cartel La Familia, is morphing into a very dangerous “Narcocultas”, a neo-pagan, folk religion featuring ritualistic violence, beheadings and torture-murders carried out for reasons other than economic competition.

[See also Zenpundit's summary , Skulls and Human Sacrifice: Bunker and Sullivan on Societal Warfare at Small Wars Journal]

> Mexico has departed the realm of having a serious law enforcement problem and has graduated to a significant counterinsurgency war against the cartels in which the Mexican state is treading water or making progress against some cartels (possibly displacing their activities to weaker states in Central America).

The authors do not assume the worst-case scenario for Mexico; i.e., state collapse, but rather an insidious “hollowing out” of the state by the cartels and a mutation of Mexico’s native culture to host a 4GW nightmare. As Robert Bunker writes:

What is proposed here is that Mexico is not on its way to becoming a “rotting corpse” but potentially something far worse - akin to a body infected by a malicious virus.

Already, wide swaths of Mexico have been lost to the corrupting forces and violence generated by local gangs, cartels and mercenaries. Such narco-corruption faced few bariers given the fertile ground already existing in Mexico derived from endemic governmental corruption at all levels of society and in some ways, it even further aided the ‘virus’ spreading through Mexican society from this new infection. Among its other symptoms, it spreads values at variance with traditional society, including those:

... conceivably derived from norms based on slaveholding, illicit drug use, sexual activity with minors and their exploitation in prostitution, torture and beheadings, the farming of humans for body parts, the killing of innocents for political gain and personal gratification and the desecration of the dead.

While meticulous, Narcos Over the Border is not all-encompassing in scope. A fundamentally Mexico-centric collection of scholarly articles, it does not deal extensively with American policymakers involved in Mexico’s narco-insurgency, the intricacies of cartel financial operations or undertake case studies of narco activities in Mexican-American communities, though the authors do track narco-cartel and gang presence in cyberspace.

Narcos Over the Border represents a starting point for deeper investigation of narco-insurgency and for a national security community that has thus far treated Mexico as a third-tier problem, a policy call to arms. Strongly recommended.

Kilcullen on COIN

I was just visiting Mark Safranski's ZenPundit blog and saw he's finally able to squeeze in time to read David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One and comment. I haven't read the book yet but I found Mark's comments about “Persistent-Presence” vs. “Repetitive Raiding” to be very interesting.