The Old Whore Keeps Repainting Her Face

War formerly was easy to recognize and define.  In the good old days of not that long ago, most (but, critically, not all) wars were fought between states using organized, identifiable armed forces.  Almost as much ink as blood was spilled on defining the nature of belligerents, the rights of non-combatants, and the limits which might be applied reasonably in the use of armed force.

The exception to the readily defined inter-state war was insurgency.  But even that breed of cat came to be defined and understood over the past two hundred years.  Over time the customary rights and immunities were extended from uniformed soldiers under national flags to those seeking the overthrow of the established political order by force and violence.  After World War II the major powers of the world even came to official agreement regarding the rights of an occupied citizenry to resist the occupying forces even though in the real world these understandings are often more honored in the breech than in the observance.

In most recent years the introduction of non-state actors, part time insurgents, full time terrorists, criminal gangs with ambitions which transcend mere minor league avarice have come to complicate the old picture with results which are most discomfiting to policy makers and military operators alike.  Accompanying these instrumental changes has been a major shift in motivation on the part of advocates of violence.  High on the list here are the reawakening of religious passions and the profit motive.

Both religion and profit have raised the attractiveness of the newer and less readily defined forms of war.  When looking at venues as disparate as Afghanistan and Mexico, the observer not only sees the prominence of the newer forms of non-state, non-uniformed combatant forces but also the potency of both belief and the quest for profit.  For practitioners of older forms of war and coercive diplomacy, the development of alternative means and motives has been an unwelcome and all too often unrecognized phenomenon.

To look briefly at Afghanistan, it has become unpleasantly evident that the power of the mosque, or, to err on the side of accuracy, the local cleric, has more than simply offset the effectiveness of both the escalation of American forces and the new technologies of battlefield supremacy.  It has become the key to looming American defeat.  Not to put too fine a point on this Afghan dagger, the universal message of the thousands of clerics holding forth every Friday has been the need for solidarity in resistance to the foreign infidel.  Given that the mosque and the Friday sermon are the single most important source of news and opinion in Afghanistan, this is a development filled with difficulty for the US.

The resolutely anti-American, anti-foreigner, anti-West, anti-infidel message not only empowers those in the Afghan population most opposed to the outside presence, it undercuts all the well-intentioned efforts at "nation building" in the country.  The total inability of the US and its allies to sell their good intentions to the clerical establishment of Afghanistan has assured that each, every, and all the dollars and lives expended in the quest to transform Afghanistan have been wasted.

The clerical resistance couched as it is in the compelling language of belief has both grown and become more strident year to year since the first American boots hit the Afghan soil.  When the US made the fateful choice to switch objectives in Afghanistan from those of a simple punitive expedition to ones of national transformation, the door was immediately opened to the linkage of faith and nationalism--a linkage which cannot be either undone or defeated.

The single greatest reason the security situation has continued to deteriorate year over year is not the open border (although this is a non-trivial consideration) but rather the monolithic opposition of the Muslim clerics.  The opposition is so solid and so widespread that it has political implications, as when Karzai echoes the complaints of the clerics.  Taken with the corruption and inefficiency of the Karzai government, his necessary tilt in favor of the clergy serves to put the international coalition under stresses which will enervate its effectiveness, fatally.

The US is posed for failure not because the opposition has any military advantage.  It is posed for failure not because it has fought the war with inappropriate tactics and methods.  It is facing failure because the faith which motivates the opposition as well as the uncommitted majority of Afghans has proven obdurate.  The US is facing failure ultimately because decision makers failed to consider the nature of the human terrain in the country and limit the goals of the war to those which would be acceptable to the majority of the human terrain.

In short, the US and its allies are likely to be defeated because the Bush/Cheney administration did not recognize the nature of war as understood by Afghans.  As a result of this, the administration allowed or encouraged a redefinition of goals which was way, way too expansive.  At the end of it all, what can be written is that the US was defeated not by bullets or by the enemy having a better theory of victory but by the very nature of the human terrain and its understanding of war.

To our immediate south Mexico is engaged in a prolonged and very bloody conflict.  The irony is that the Mexican government cannot define accurately what is going on beyond the self-evident outpouring of corpses on the streets of Mexico.  The US government is no better off being unable to decide if Mexico is in the throes of insurgency or simply an unusually large scale turf battle between criminal syndicates.  Not that the semantics matter to the average Mexican as he steps over the blood and bodies of the previous day's festivities.

But, what is at work in Mexico is not an academic dispute over semantics or theories of conflict.  It is hard if not impossible to fight any sort of war without knowing what is at stake, what would constitute the better state of peace for which the war is being waged.

Four years ago when he launched the effort against large scale criminal, primarily drug trafficking, gangs, President Calderon probably believed he was inaugurating a simple program of robust law enforcement.  Whether policemen or soldiers did the job, it was the traditional task of compelling acceptance of the law's dictates by the criminally inclined.  There was nothing new at work here.

Whatever Calderon's intentions might have been, no matter what he expected, the outcome was both far more prolonged and bloody as well as inherently destabilizing than he or anyone anticipated.  The Mexican police and military quickly became simply one more combatant in an already underway multi-party struggle over territory and markets.  The government unintentionally became one more gang in a several gang armed contest.

Paradoxically, the entrance of the government allowed greater inter-gang violence.  Whether because of suborned treachery or simply as a fallout from its efforts, the armed forces and police would tilt toward one gang or another in each of the several contested areas.  By so doing, the security forces assured a process of consolidation would occur which would ultimately strengthen the successful gang in its goal of having a "law free zone" in which to carry out its profit making activities.

The process favored the criminals from the beginning.  The drug smugglers knew why they were fighting.  They had goals.  They defined the better state of peace.  By limiting its concept of operations to one of traditional law enforcement, the government was actually clueless in the real world.

The narco-trafficking gangs wanted two things: To eliminate rivals in the several corridors and to establish law free zones so they could operate without fear.  With a few psychopathic exceptions, the leaders of the several syndicates were indifferent as to which of the two traditional methods of accomplishing these goals would be used.  Silver or lead, the choice was up to the recipient not the grantor.

The combination of means as well as the unity of goals gave the advantage to the criminals.  Had Calderon never initiated his Made In Mexico war on drugs, the contest would have been settled with rather less blood and much more corruption.  One gang would have bought out the survivors of the others and established a profitable monopoly.  The law free zones would have been created through corruption not killing and terror.

This conclusion is predicated not on some belief that Mexicans are naturally given to crime and corruption to any unusual degree.  Rather it is based on the history of Mexico, the long-standing traditions of buying one's peace, one's freedom from authority.  More it is based on the equally hoary social, political, and economic dynamics of Mexico, including the remote indifference of the Mexican elites and their tool, the government, from the realities of life as they impinge on the majority of people.

The challenge presented by the Calderon Declaration of War resulted in the development of a form of war not seen even in the days of "narco-democracy" in Columbia two or three decades ago.  The new form of war represents a hybrid of gang conflict and defensive insurgency.  Over the past four years the criminal syndicates shifted from use of graft and corruption to secure territory to a reliance on violence and terror to create the necessary law free zones.

As a result, one which was easily predictable, the gangs have become the de facto shadow government in large swaths of Mexico's border states.  These same states are productive of more than a quarter of Mexico's GDP.  Most of their population and more of their territory now exist outside the authority of Mexico's government or governmental forces.

By virtue of not recognizing that the government was embarking on a new form of the old game of war, the Mexicans have lowered the national flag over a goodly part of their state.  At the same time the criminals have become a de facto government, in effect levying taxes--and collecting them, establishing whatever passes for law along most of the border, and have expanded their criminal enterprises into areas far removed from mere smuggling of drugs to the US.  This means the gangs have given themselves both more political will and more means to act in lieu of the official government.

This does not imply that Mexico is a failed or failing state.  It does imply that Mexico is in a far more desperate contest for survival in recognizable form.  It implies that US policy with respect to assisting the Mexican government has failed as well.

This failure will provide more challenges for the US in the months and years to come.  As the smugglers become more ambitious and more far reaching in their efforts and connections, the probability of diplomatic linkages with states hostile to the US increase as does the risk of adverse personnel and supplies being inserted into the US.

Other than the outcome, there is no real close resemblance between traditional forms of war and what is happening in Mexico.  When night falls, either the Mexican government will or will not be in control of the border states.  It either will or will not have unimpeded sovereignty over its territory.  Right now it looks very dismal for Mexico.

The irony here is that the impending Mexican failure like that of the US in Afghanistan is rooted in a failure to identify accurately the new features of war in play.  It is also rooted, again like the American failure in Afghanistan, in not realising that the local folk define what constitutes war and how to fight it.  It is, again like Afghanistan, based on an insistence that there is only one play book for war fighting--and the government wrote the book, not the locals.