The Trafficker-Terrorist Myth

7 May 2012, 0510 EDT

Another Sunday, another military puff-piece from the NY Times. Yesterday’s issue promoted the idea that America is threatened by a drug trafficker-terrorist network emanating from Central America. The source of this idea is–no surprise–the U.S. military, our fearmongers in chief. But the Times unquestioningly reported their statements as front page news, as part of a longer article about the new Central American wars such propaganda is justifying.

According to Col. Ross A. Brown, commander of the military’s Central America operations, his mission is “disrupting and deterring the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists who would do harm to our country.” Or as his boss Vice Adm. Joseph D. Kernan affirms, combating the drug cartels is “necessary to preventing terrorists from co-opting criminal groups for attacks in this hemisphere.”

What is one to make of this claim? What evidence or logic supports the “potential” of this trafficker-terrorist “nexus?” There is none. But Kernan supports his assertion by noting one “insidious” parallel between terrorists and traffickers: “They do not respect borders.”

What a profound insight! Surely that explains everything! And the Times dutifully bolsters the claim with allusions to oh-so-scary bête noirs du jour—Honduras’s “vast ungoverned areas” where homicide rates are some of the “highest” in the world. [Notes to Times editor: What do you mean by “ungoverned”—something like the locales all over America where countless citizens consume illegal drugs daily? Might this insatiable American demand for drugs have just a little to do with Honduras’s homicide rates?]

But it seems too much to ask the reporters of our most important newspaper to think about this claim, rather than assume, following the military’s suggestion, that all things evil must go together. Yet now that the trafficker-terrorist “axis of evil” is being used to mutually reinforce two senseless wars, the logic of this connection cries out for examination.

Sure, the few “terrorists” who are genuinely trying to harm the U.S.—as opposed to countless wannabes who spout off about doing so in blogs or emails—might dream of drug-trafficker profits. But why would drug-lords agree to share the wealth? Last I checked, they are not charities.

And why would kingpins want to work with terrorists? For one thing, the vast majority of the bozos we inflate into terrorist “threats” are laughably incompetent. They’d never make it in the sophisticated drug empires that we’ve stupidly created through our War on Drugs.

In any case, working with terrorists would threaten the traffickers’ profits. There are few better ways to cure an addict than the possibility of his supplier blowing himself up on delivery.

Worse yet, forging such a link might lead to even more U.S. resources being thrown against the druglords. It might even convince more Americans to decriminalize drugs—the greatest blow that could be struck against drug traffickers. No, if nothing else, kingpins are savvy businessmen. Why would they want to destroy their own best market or make their operations more difficult than they already are?

What of Kernan’s claim that terrorists might “coopt” criminal groups? As any military man should know, cooptation is a weapon of the powerful—yet terrorist group are far weaker than drug cartels by all measures except bluster. Any terrorist’s attempt at cooptation would likely be met by the traffickers’ own deadly force.

No the trafficker-terrorist “potential nexus” should be seen for what it is–yet another transparently illogical excuse for projecting American military force in places where it will do no good.

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But don’t look to the Times to point these things out. Indeed, the article is another example of “stenographic journalism,” slavishly reporting the propaganda of the powerful as “news.” The article’s focus is how the U.S. is using the “lessons” from a decade of counterinsurgency to fight the War on Drugs.

Normally, the word “lessons” would suggest that we have in fact learned something. So what exactly have we learned? According to the Times, the main lesson of COIN was to move troops from “giant bases to outposts scattered across remote, hostile areas so they could face off against insurgents.”

But what have been the results? A decade after our invasion of Aghanistan, much of the country remains a no-go zone for American troops. Only our drones dare patrol it–bravely raining death upon “suspected insurgents,” aka, all too often, civilians. The Afghan troops we have so skillfully and expensively trained are riddled with recruits who regularly turn their weapons on Allied troops. President Obama, fearfully shuttling into Bagram Air Force base (yes, a “giant base”) by dead of night, has inked an agreement for another decade of futility in the graveyard of empires. And, surprise, Afghanistan remains a major source of drugs for the world. Or, as the article so coyly puts it, the U.S. has “lowered expectations of what Washington can do to halt heroin trafficking there.”

So much for the supposed lesson that “forward bases” can work to fight drugs in Honduras. Inadvertently, however, the Times highlights the real lessons our leaders have learned. The “new offensive” in Central America is “emerging just as the United States military winds down its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

What a coincidence! A new battlefield opens as others dwindle. But wait, the War on Drugs, first declared in 1971 by Richard Nixon, is hardly new. Still, it serves its purpose–just as the War on Terror doubtless will for decades to come. Anytime America wearies of one theater for military extravagance, it can always shift to another eternal “threat.”

Indeed, as the Times trumpets, Honduras “showcases the nation’s new way of war: small-footprint missions with limited numbers of troops . . . and narrowly defined goals.” And the most important lesson of all: these “small-footprint” operations, may be fought “with little public notice.” After all, why should the taxpayer need to know about the millions the State Department lavishes on our incorruptible Honduran allies for machine guns and “air support” without which, one Honduran honcho admits, “we can’t do anything?”

Fortunately, however, the U.S. military has evidently chosen to post its best and brightest to lead the fight on this pressing new front. That would be Col. Brown. He commanded the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment’s Third Squadron in southern Baghdad in 2005-06. As the Times reports, without irony, in 2005-06 Iraq was “so violent that President George W. Bush ordered an increase in troop levels to retake the initiative.” It is unclear whether Brown’s Central America deployment is a promotion or a demotion.

Whatever their fighting credentials, however, Brown and Kernan at least know how to deploy “psy-ops”–against the American people. Hence, the trafficker-terrorist “potential nexus.”

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