Category: National Security

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Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis Mexico National Security Politics The War on Terrorism War on Drugs

7 Reasons to Legalize Marijuana

[digg-reddit-me]

On this April 20th, the case to legalize marijuana is a no-brainer. There are at least 7 things that could be accomplished by legalizing it:

  1. Stabilize Mexico. The drug cartels are waging a war against the Mexican government and each other funded mainly by the profits from marijuana sales in the United States. Legalizing marijuana would create an opportunity for the current government’s attacks on the cartels to succeed – as the cartels would need to scramble to find alternate sources of revenue while fighting a war against a military bolstered by American aid.
  2. Stop wasting money on a failure. Barack Obama called the war on drugs “an utter failure.” Since he took office, he has vowed to cut the fat from the federal budget and eliminate failed programs. At a time when our tax dollars are at a premium, why should we continue to waste money on a failed government program?
  3. Protect the legitimacy of our laws. Almost half of all Americans admit to have tried marijuana – including 3 of our past 3 presidents – which means that they all broke the law. Such flagrant law-breaking undermines respect for the Rule of Law – and more important, once Americans break the law they can see how distorted the government propaganda campaign against marijuana is – further undermining respect for the government. America is currently waging a war on its citizens the likes of which have rarely been seen in history – as we imprison a greater percentage of our population than any other nation on earth and continue to militarize our police as they stop enforcing community standards and instead impose federal policies using extreme force.
  4. Stop aiding terrorists. According to a 2004 Congressional report, the illegality of drugs has incentivized a vast system of money laundering, smuggling, and corrupting of government officials – as well as created failed states and lawless regions – all of which aid terrorists seeking to carry out attacks on the United States. The criminalization of marijuana creates the biggest incentive on all of these fronts.
  5. Reduce crime. The War on Drugs has been militarizing America’s police forces and eating up resources which has led to a statistical uptick in non-drug related theft and violent crime synchronous with this shift. As police resources are spent enforcing federal drug laws – arresting, testifying, surveiling – and as the police become more militarized and distant from the communities they are charged with policing – serious non-drug related crimes increase. One report quantified this by explaining that every additional drug arrest leads to an increase of 0.7 Index (serious) crimes [page 6 of the pdf].
  6. Stimulate the economy. Obama may have tittered at the question, but there is precedent – the repeal of the prohibition of alcohol when FDR took office during the Great Depression. 
  7. …I’ll let Tim Meadows make the final point for legalization by explaining why not to smoke marijuana:

[Image by Torben H. licensed under Creative Commons.]

 

Continue reading “7 Reasons to Legalize Marijuana”
Categories
Morality National Security Politics

Torture is worse than immoral: it’s tactically stupid

Former CIA operative and current thriller writer Barry Eisler as interviewed by Scott Horton:

[T]orture is also an excellent way to get the subject to confess to anything at all, which is why it was a wonderful tool for the Spanish Inquisition and for the secret police of assorted totalitarian regimes. But if the goal is to produce accurate, actionable intelligence, torture is madness, as Alexander argues in his book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, torture is worse than immoral: it’s tactically stupid. It produces false confessions, which can be used to confirm mistaken suspicions and even outright policy fantasies; it instills an insatiable thirst for vengeance in most people who are subjected to it, and so creates new, dedicated enemies; it permanently brutalizes its practitioners; and it cuts us off from intelligence from the local populace because so many people will refuse to inform on someone if they fear he’ll be tortured. [my emphasis]

Bush’s use of torture in the War on Terror demonstrated this amply – for example in the contrasting stories of Abu Jandal and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

Categories
Law Mexico National Security Pakistan Political Philosophy

The Soft Underbelly of the Modern State

[digg-reddit-me]In other periods of history, opponents of a state would assassinate leaders to force changes in policy. The leader was invested with such power that removing him or her from his position would create an opportunity to change a government’s policies and overall posture towards the world. Today, although assassination is still a tool, the focus of opponents of the state – who are mainly identified as terrorists today – is to attack the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law – the primacy of laws over all individuals, including those in power, a principle which prevents authoritarianism, the arbitrary use of power, and anarchy – is perhaps the most valuable and vulnerable asset a state can have. Without it, there can be no democratic discourse or free elections and no free market. Yet the Rule of Law is especially vulnerable as it relies upon a wide range of institutions and conditions – all of are required to achieve the public trust needed: an independent judiciary; a professional police corps; a relative peace; the transparency of laws and law-making; the right of every individual to be given a fair hearing if they are being held by the state; a sense of basic justice within the society. A single rogue cop, a corrupt judge, or an unjust law undermines the Rule of Law – and if it is not well-established, can destroy it.

Reading about Mexico and Pakistan – the two major nations the U.S. Joint Forces Command listed as major nations that could suddenly collapse in the next year – one is confronted again and again with what each has in common: the Rule of Law is being deliberately subverted by major groups within these nations. If either nation is not able to maintain some semblance of the Rule fo Law within it’s borders, they will have effectively collapsed.

In Mexico, the Rule of Law has been undermined for years but is perhaps now finally reaching a tipping point. As Marc Lacey reported in the New York Times:

The cartels bring in billions of dollars more than the Mexican government spends to defeat them, and they spend their wealth to bolster their ranks with an untold number of politicians, judges, prison guards and police officers — so many police officers, in fact, that entire forces in cities across Mexico have been disbanded and rebuilt from scratch.

Steve Fainaru and William Booth reported in the Washington Post that:

The government is attempting to vet and retrain 450,000 officers, most at the state and municipal levels, employing lie detectors, drug tests, psychological profiling and financial reviews to weed out corruption and incompetence. Nearly half of the 56,000 officers vetted so far have failed.

Police corruption is clearly endemic in Mexico. It is for this reason that President Felipe Calderón has tasked the military with taking on the drug cartels – and it is also for this reason that many local police forces are now run by former military officers. But as the Lacey article makes clear, even the military is compromised – both from within by informants paid off by the cartels – and by the army-sized force of former soldiers that works for the cartels:

Although Mexico’s military is regarded as significantly less corrupt than the country’s police forces, defense officials estimate that 100,000 soldiers have quit to join the cartels over the past seven years.

As evidence that Mexico is even more compromised, Lacey reports that:

The reach of the drug kingpins has even the army fearful. Many soldiers cover their faces while on patrol to avoid being identified and singled out by the drug cartels. The army also recently began allowing soldiers to grow their hair longer, because military-style crew cuts were believed to be putting off-duty soldiers at risk.

Sam Quinones writing for Foreign Policy described how thoroughly Mexico had changed in the past decade, recounting anecdotes about the flagrancy of the cartels’ violation of laws.  Mayor José Reyes Ferriz of Ciudad Juárez lives across the border in Texas because he is not safe in the town he was elected to govern. The cartels have brought Mexico almost to a breaking point because they have undermined the Rule of Law through large portions of the country. The law is obviously a barrier to their illegal activities. Fainaru and Booth reported a senior advisor to President Calderón explained the motivation behind the desire to use the military to attempt to combat the cartels:

The executions, the decapitations, the confrontations between the drug gangs. There was a perception in society of lawlessness, that there was no state.

This perception is enough to destroy a nation – which is why the Mexican government has taken such drastic measures to combat it. At the same time, the steps taken by President Calderón – using the military – have themselves undermined the Rule of Law. As Monte Alejandro Rubido, a senior public security official explained the tradeoff:

It can be traumatic to have the army in control of public security, but I am convinced that we don’t have a better alternative, even with all the risks that it implies.

It is good that Calderón realizes that there is a tradeoff. His judgment remains that this is the least worst option – and his goal is one that we in America must share – the restoration of the Rule of Law in our neighbor. 

Similarly, in Pakistan, the Rule of Law has been undermined by the central government – as former President Musharaff disbanded the Supreme Court, as President Zardari refused to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry for a time and seemed to use the Court for partisan purposes – while at the same time, the Rule of Law is being directly attacked by the religious extremists who have now taken to attacking police academies.

The Rule of Law is a nation’s most valuable asset – and unfortunately it is also most vulnerable. It faces threats from government overreaction, from rogue forces within the government, from unjust laws, from corruption, and from extremists who violently oppose the state itself. Mexico and Pakistan are becoming destabilized because large groups are attacking the Rule of Law – and each government’s own reaction to these groups additionally undermines the Rule of Law.

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Outlasting America in Afghanistan

Andrew Sullivan’s take on Afghanistan strikes me as the sad but honest truth of the matter:

America’s relatively tiny stake [in Afghanistan] means that we will always be outlasted by those with deeper commitments, wider knowledge and much greater fanaticism. And yet we plow on …

It happened before – after the forerunners of the Taliban drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

Categories
Colombia Foreign Policy Mexico National Security Politics The Opinionsphere War on Drugs

The Price of Prohibition I: Propping Up The Mexican Cartels

[digg-reddit-me]We are keeping the finger in the dike.

Sgt. David Azuelo of the Tuscon, Arizona police force as quoted by Randal C. Archibold in The New York Times.

I’ve been arguing for some time that the War on Drugs and the prohibitionist policies underlying it must be ended for the sake of our national security. I’ve made the argument from a civil libertarian point of view; I’ve made the argument that the War on Drugs is interfering with the fight against terrorism; and I’ve made the argument based on the fact that this war is destabilizing our neighbors. 

Here’s a parallel argument:

The Pentagon listed Mexico as a country that might collapse suddenly into a civil war between the central government and the cartels. A top cabinet official in Mexico claimed that “unless [the cartels are] confronted, ‘the next president of the republic would be a narco-trafficker.” The levels of violence in the country now are astounding – with higher rates than those in Iraq in recent months – and they are continuing to spill over the border into America. We are currently supplying both sides of this conflict with weaponry and funds – and the conflict is escalating. Mexico is now following the route of Colombia by militarizing it’s approach to the problem of drugs. For decades, war raged in Colombia to stop the drug smugglers – inflicting an enormous cost on the country as they – in the words of an influential and prestigious report by former Mexican, Brazilian, and Mexican presidents, “implemented all conceivable measures to fight the drug trade in a massive effort whose benefits were not proportional to the vast amount of resources invested and the human costs involved.” The report explains that the “traumatic Colombian experience” should teach other nations “not to make the mistake of adopting the US prohibitionist policies.”

Yet, that is what Mexico is doing. For decades, America has waged a war on the suppliers of drugs and on drug users at home and abroad. The casualties have been high – but no matter the body count or the number of arrests has gone, the War on Drugs has remained “an utter failure.” This failure has allowed the reach of the Mexican cartels to extend far into America:

United States law enforcement officials have identified 230 cities, including Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston and Billings, Mont., where Mexican cartels and their affiliates “maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors.”

As Stephen Walt explained in Foreign Policy:

[O]ur policy helps enrich drug lords and make it possible for them to destabilize whole governments, as they are now doing in Mexico and Afghanistan. 

As The Economist reported:

[P]rohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before…[T]he war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless…

At the same time, the harm reduction strategy of the European Union, while mitigating the effects of drugs locally, has exacerbated the effects of drug production and smuggling elsewhere.

The failure of both the War on Drugs and the harm reduction strategy has created an enormous market incentive for smuggling, for money laundering, and for corrupting government officials. Together, these and other effects of the Drug War create a sense of lawlessness which is exactly where the cartels thrive. The cartels are able to thrive in part because the scale of their operations and the enormous profits generated give them both incentive and means to experiment with different methods of smuggling, money laundering, and corrupting officials. If there were a way to reduce these profits, it could undercut their successes in all of these areas and undermine the incentives that drive them to take these steps. The cartels might no longer be able to acquire military-grade weaponry; they might not be able to afford to buy subs to smuggle items in; they might not be able to afford to buy off the top Mexican drug enforcement official. 

We have reached the point that The Economist has characterized as a choice between “A calculated gamble, or another century of failure.” The calculated gamble is to legalize drugs, or at least marijuana.

People have asked me if legalizing marijuana would really make a difference in undercutting the Mexican cartels.

Marijuana represents 60 to 70% of the profits that fuel the Mexican drug cartels. Legalizing it would take away one of the main props holding them up – just as legalizing alcohol helped rollback the gangs that dominated American cities in the 1920s.

Violence in Mexico stemming from the drug war is destabilizing the country and spilling over into America. With a single move, we could remove the monopoloy which gives them 60 to 70% of the cartels’ revenue – in a single move, we could take away their “king crop.” Without the enormous profits of marijuana propping up the rest of the drug market, the costs of smuggling would increase. The distribution network would be pressured. The cost of bribing officials would likely increase as harder drugs would be the only things being smuggled and enforcement could focus more on these drugs. The pressure on our criminal justice system that is currently imprisoning a higher percentage of our people than any nation on earth would be eased. Border guards would be able to focus more on harder drugs, or even on serious threats to our security, rather than searching teenagers for pot. All of this would undermine the cartels – most of all, taking away 60-70% of their profits.

We have reached a point where one of our most aggressive drug czars has publicly stated that he “wouldn’t care” if marijuana were legalized! Where another former drug czar has acknowledged that marijuana “pose[s] no significant public health problem.”  These are men who led the fight against drugs. A massive propaganda campaign, $40 billion a year, millions of arrests, and untold casualties and – and the price of drugs has remained the same and the extent of drug use has barely been affected.

Why are we continuing a failed policy that only serves the interests of the Mexican cartels it is propping up?

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security Politics

Sarkozy: Right on nothing, prescient on everything

Judah Grunstein in Foreign Policy:

Yet if Sarkozy has been right on almost nothing, he has been prescient on almost everything, guided by the attention-seeker’s instinctive flare for tomorrow’s crisis today. (For instance, his decision to engage Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the time of Lebanon’s presidential impasse in January 2008 later paid off in access to crucial back channels during the Gaza war.) His logic is the logic of the deal, where both fault lines in opinion and emerging consensus create leverage points that maximize France’s influence. His handling of last year’s NATO summit – where he sided with Germany to successfully oppose expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, while pacifying Washington with a much-needed troop increase to the Afghanistan deployment — is a perfect illustration of how he manages to turn France into either the tiebreaker or the consensus sealer.

France’s return to the heart of NATO will certainly not spell the end of France’s independence and autonomy, nor will it prove the alliance’s undoing. But both will be changed, in ways that no one – least of all Sarkozy – can foresee. Rich in symbolism, profound in consequences, unpredictable in effect: The move is typical Sarkozy, for whom it is the deed, and not the outcome, that matters

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National Security

Collective Intelligence and the Military

In tackling the question of how an American military that spends so much money on it’s military and has enormous resources available to it and is almost certainly the greatest fighting force in the history of the planet might have lost Iraq if it were not for the intervention of a single general who shifted strategy, Louis A. DiMarco in the Small Wars Journal [pdf] asks:

[W]hy did the war effort of the most sophisticated army in the world come down to a final moment “Hail Mary” pass that was reliant on the genius of an individual commander for victory?

The answer DiMarco proposes lies in the structure of the current American military. In an interesting historical aside, DiMarco discusses how the military discovered the power of collective intelligence:

The French led by Napoleon in 1806 soundly trounced the Prussians, perhaps the best of the eighteenth century professional militaries. In response, a group of Prussian reformers carefully studied the nature of French success and determined that though they could replicate or copy French tactical and operational methods, they had no ready answer to the command genius of Napoleon. Ultimately, however, they hit on a unique counter to the genius of the opposing commander. They determined that although it was impossible to train a commander to be a genius, or even to find and cultivate genius ability among junior officers, what was possible was to find and identify exceptionally bright junior officers. The Prussians determined that by carefully identifying, training, educating, mentoring, organizing and networking the brightest minds in the Prussian army they could artificially create a corporate genius that was an extremely powerful competent command capability that could outperform the individual genius of an opposing general.

DiMarco has some interesting suggestions for how the military can, with some relatively minor adjustments, once again tap into this collective decision-making – but I’m not in a position to evaluate his suggestions. So read the article for yourself.

Categories
Foreign Policy Iran Iraq National Security The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

The Iran-Iraq Balance

Musings on Iraq writes:

For the last several decades, security in the Middle East has been largely defined by outside powers. From the 1970s on the U.S. tried to play Iran off of Iraq. The 2003 invasion disrupted this balance of power, and the U.S. has been attempting to rebuild it ever since. Iran has been adamantly opposed to re-creating this system, preferring a friendly Iraq rather than a new enemy. This conflict over ideas about security is at the heart of the dispute between Iran and the U.S.

(H/t Andrew Sullivan.)

This observation is not new – but it is concise and distills the essence of Iran’s moves with regards to Iraq – whether they be asserting influence over the Iraqi leadership, undermining the American occupation by supplying weapons and other support to the Shiite insurgency, pulling back the Shiite insurgency to allow the surge to succeed, offering help in the run-up to the war. A less charitable phrasing of the above – which states that Iran just wants to avoid having Iraq as an enemy – is that Iran wants to have significant control over Iraq, or at least influence there. But either way, the essential dispute between America and Iran in Iraq is not over issues but over Iranian influence itself. This is true if you look at most Iranian-American disputes – they are not over issues as much as they are over limiting or expanding Iranian influence. 

In the end, there are only two real points of contention: Israel and nuclear arms. They are serious issues, but it seems likely that a pragmatic Iranian leadership could make bargains on each. If America is able to finally create a Palestinian state – or make significant progress on this front – it will give Iran an opening to accept Israel. On nuclear weaponry, a pragmatic government might be persuaded to refrain from taking the final steps in developing a nuclear weapon once it could prove that it had reached the point where it had the knowledge and equipment to do so. If Iran remained an adversary in the region, the prospective nuclear weapon could still cause significant trouble – but if it were brought into an alliance with America, it would not.

And as I have maintained before – Iran and America are natural allies on most issues – even if the current president Ahmadinejad represents the part of Iran Americans are most suspicious of.

Categories
Foreign Policy Morality National Security

The Opposite of Counterinsurgency

Simon Romero in the New York Times:

Military officials chafe at the reports of abuses. “Human rights people say, ‘Some civilians have been killed, how horrible,’ ” Defense Minister Ántero Flores Aráoz said in an interview in Lima. As for Rosa Chávez Sihuincha, the pregnant woman killed in Río Seco, he suggested that she got what she deserved.

“What the hell was she doing in Vizcatán?” he said. “Was she praying the rosary? No way. Either she was transporting coca leaves for processing or she was taking chemical products or she was part of the logistics of this Shining Path group.”

It’s incredible what can be justified by war.

Categories
National Security New York City Reflections

Liberty in the Face of Men With Guns

[digg-reddit-me]In which I recount the story of a minor incident that occured yesterday (St. Patrick’s Day) in Midtown Manhattan, that is entirely unimportant in it’s impact, but significant in what it reveals about being an American citizen.

For regular users of the Long Island Railroad and the New York City subway system, the message is repeated and insistent, as disembodied voices over the loudspeakers intone:

Backpacks and other large containers are subject to a random search by the police.

I was in a hurry to make my train, but I had to drop off a FedEx package first, so I dashed around the corner to deposit that. This took me in the exact opposite direction from where I needed to go – but I moved quickly. I crossed 42nd Street on a fast-blinking “Stop” hand, but made it without blocking traffic. From there, it was a half-block to the subway station – which I got through moving into and out of the strolling mobs of tourists and the slower-paced commuters. As I entered the subway station, I could see the turnstile and knew that I only had to make it down the three flights of stairs to make my train. 

I noticed a portly, bald-headed cop twirling something – a police baton perhaps – casually strolling into and out of the rush hour crowd. He pointed at me as I went to swipe my MetroCard: “Random security search. Get over to the desk,” he said. It’s minor thing, I know. But in that moment, of being casually ordered around while doing no wrong in a public place while everyone around me continued on – I felt a surge of anger at being told what to do, of frustration at being impeded while trying to make my train, of annoyance at the inconvenience, of the slight fear that comes from entering into an interaction with armed men who are regarding you with some suspicion, of resentment at being casually ordered about. I wondered if I was doing something that made me a target – my walk, my age, the fact that I made eye contact with the police. 

But I did what I was told – after a moment of slight hesitiation in which I looked around to make sure the officer meant me. He nodded and said, “You.” At the desk, there was a different officer. He seemed apologetic. Behind him was a third officer, hand on his weapon holster, stern-faced. “Put down your bag.” I did. Waited a beat. The officer behind said, “Open up the pockets,” with an attitude suggesting I should have known better than to wait before doing this. Another spasm of annoyance at that attitude.

“All of them?” I ask. My bag has eight pockets. “Just the main ones,” the second officer said, still apologetic. “I know you don’t have anything in the bag.” Then why are you looking? I thought, but at the same time, relieved that he thoughtI look and act trustworthy. He looked at the bag – perhaps even into the pockets. I can’t imagine he would have found anything with his search unless it was shining brightly. “Thanks,” he said. I hurried back off – and missed my train by about 20 seconds – it pulled out of the station as I was still descending the stairs.

That’s it. The encounter is truly trivial. I missed my train – but this is but a small inconvenience. None of the officers were abusive. There was a slight attitude – but no one’s perfect. I don’t oppose the policy of random searches, although I’m not sure how effective it is.

But within this interaction something important occurred – something that occurs every day across the world: The local political authorities set up a checkpoint to search innocent people in the hope of finding or deterring illegal activity. In some nations this is routine and perhaps becomes accepted. The bursts of anger and annoyance I felt but did not act upon become dulled or perhaps aren’t even felt by citizens of these nations. These citizens perhaps become inured to the daily violence being done to their essential liberties. Or perhaps they don’t.

What exactly had happened? Armed men picked random people from a crowd and searched their belongings for signs of illegal activity. In my case, through no fault of my own, I was temporarily detained and pressured to allow the authorities to search my possessions. My personal space was violated. My private possessions were searched. I was pressured to consent to a search without a warrant. For a moment, I was regarded as a person of suspicion, on the “other” side of the law – and my freedom was suddenly at the whim of the armed men around me. In a primal sense, my liberty was violated. Violence was done to the God-given, inherent rights I enjoy as a human being – which the American government was formed to protect. 

Yet – I do not oppose this policy. I am not saying what the police officers did was wrong. If this policy of random searches prevents a single terrorist attack, it’s probably worth it, in my opinion. Steps were clearly taken to ensure that I was inconvenienced as little as possible. From what I recall, I had the right to walk away from the search and not enter the subway. But that does not change the fact that my rights were violated – perhaps with due cause and sufficient safeguards – but they were violated nevertheless, and I could feel on a gut level that they were being violated.

Now imagine all of the circumstances in which there are additional factors making a search like this more intrusive and seem more unjust – if I needed to go through it every day instead of once in a year; if I was required to submit to it instead of having a choice; if the officers seemed to bear me some kind of ill-will; if I was a member of a targeted ethnic group; if I did not accept the legitimacy of the authority conducting the search – or if I had no say over how they acted. Imagine if the procedures were more intrusive.

Imagine what emotions Palestinians must feel having to be searched by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints; that Iraqis must feel being searched by American troops to move about their own country. Imagine as the anger builds up at each minor injustice, each negative attitude, each time one’s impotence in the presence of men with guns  is brought home.

One thing that is easy to forget when creating checkpoints such as this is the fact that each search is a violation of the liberty of an individual. It may be in the interests of justice – but there is a tradeoff involved. This isn’t about the ACLU agitating for more rights – it is about my sense of liberty moving about in a free society. To lose that is a precious thing. To be denied it is something that will make anyone angry. 

Which is why I’m glad I felt violated by this occurence – it lets me know that I still am alive, that I still consider myself a citizen in the basic American sense of the word. 

Continue reading “Liberty in the Face of Men With Guns”