I swear, I don’t know which is freaking me out more today, Pakistan or Mexico.
The AP reports from Lahore,
An opposition leader declared Thursday that the bloody ambush of the Sri Lankan cricket team shows security in Pakistan has ”collapsed,” while a government official said authorities had identified the attackers. …
”The security system in Pakistan under this regime has collapsed because this government is too busy doing other things, they are too busy in their quest for power,” Mushahid Hussain, an opposition leader told a televised media conference. ”They should be held responsible.”
ToL’s six unanswered questions about the attack tend to support Hussain’s point.
Then there’s Tom Ricks’ report:
As Mexican troops drove by in Humvees in downtown Juarez, Mexico, a textile salesman told a reporter, “The drug hitmen are in control here. Things are out of control, there’s so much death. At six o’clock I go home and I don’t go out at all after that. There are so many killings.”
Under the heading MEXICO UNDER SIEGE, the LA Times describes a three-hour riot inside a Juarez jail that left 20 gang members dead and three more critically wounded (the warden denies that two federales were among the dead). The last time U.S. forces entered Mexico was 1919, when they were after Pancho Villa, Ricks notes.
So okay: One meltdown is going on in a country with nukes on the other side of the globe, the other in a country hopeless at everything but cooking and beauty, just across the street from El Paso. Which is the bigger problem for us? How long before they converge?
In my opinion, these two particular spots are part of much larger problems no one seems to know how to frame, much less solve. What the world needs is some really good strategic thinking and cooperation; what the world gets is consistent extension and expansion of failed policies and violent conflict at every level of human society.
Re Packistan:
There has never been a time since Islam came into being that its believers have not engaged in violence to acquire political power, and often the acquisition of that power brought Muslims into direct conflict with followers of the other two major monotheistic religions, i.e. Jews and Christians (the West). Muslim expansion was not checked in the west until the mid-700s in France, and it took the next 700 years for Christian armies to push Muslim politiacl authourty out of Spain. There was also violent conflict with Hinduism and Buddhism as Islam moved east from it point of origin toward Indonesia. That eastern conflict ultimately led to the creation of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Packistan in an effort to separate the two populations and avoid bloodshed. When there was no more room for geographic expansion, and when Muslims began to disagree among themselves on issues of authority and doctrine, internal power struggles began, and those struggles continue to this day. The upheaval in Packistan is a variation on that theme. Islam does not have stabalizing and self-sustaining political institutions like those of the Western World, hence perpetual political instability and perpetual violence. A Nobel Prize should go the the person who can figure out a way to help the Muslim world establish some system, any system, that would lead to political stability within those societies. There are so many factors working against those born into the Muslim world: the way the religion treats women (half its human assets); the poverty; the geography. The list is long, and those people will never be able to move in the right direction to solve any of these problems without political stability. When Packistan (and India) acquired nuclear weapons, the problems in that part of the world became problems for all the rest of us, and we have yet to even begin finding solutions.
Re Mexico:
The situation on our southern border (and in Columbia) is driven by the United States market for drugs, and the problems in Packistan and Afghanastan are certainly drug (poppy as a cash crop) related. For the United States as a whole, these are self-inflicted wounds, even though it is a relatively small part of our population that constitutes this market. Eliminating the voracious appetite for drugs right here in the United States would go a long way toward solving no only the domestic problems tied to drug use, but also these other international problems. How that is to be done is another Nobel Prize project no one seems to be thinking through strategically.
I wish I had some fresh ideas to offer.
As if there were never such a thing in history as the Holy Roman Empire, or the British Empire, or the Spanish Conquest . . .
Lotus @ 2
There were those things, and I do not defend the merits of any of the three. The British Raj certainly contributed to the antagonism between the Muslim world and the Western world, and the British paid a terrible price for attempting to expand their empire into Afghanistan. I am not sure I follow the point you are making. I did not intend to suggest that the West is blameless on the stage of world history, far from it. But I am suggesting that the West has been able to establish more stable political institutions that distribute and make for the peaceful transfer of power with far less violence (violence that inevitably harms the innocent civilians as much as the armed participants). I think both the Muslim world and the West stand to benefit from stable governments in the Muslim world regardless of what institutions evolve there to achieve that stability. The West found its way there through all the misadventures you have identified and many, many more.
There’s the only convergence I can see, Outsider. One of the problems in both countries, but particularly in Mexico, is the U.S. drug trade. If we legalized drugs and started to treat them as a medical and mental health problem, much of the violence in Mexico would be ended. Pakistan has many things going against it, not the least of them being well-armed religious fanatics and corrupt politicians (Mexico has its share of the latter, of course).
I’m worried about Mexico more than Pakistan at the moment, because it’s closer. Juarez and El Paso are literally right across the river from each other. Tijuana isn’t very far from San Diego, either. The violence has been going on for some time now. I remember reading about it in travel bulletins in late 2007. That’s a long time for a gang war of this magnitude, and I see no sign of its ending.
Cujo@4:
I could not agree with you more. Money drives the drug trade (one of capitalism’s dark corners), and illegality keeps the retail price high enough to bring more and more sellers into the market. Take another approach, and you go a long way toward reducing the profits that empower those who are currently operating in that market.
The War on Drugs has taken on a life of its own. I do not know how much money the United States pours into interdiction, enforcement, and incarceration, but I do know it is a gigantic expenditure that gets bigger every year. We do not have to abandon that approach overnight in order to reduce the profit in the trade. We could first consider legalizing marijuana and allowing people to grow marijuana for their own consumption. (I wonder how much revenue and profit would be generated by a government licensee selling standardized marijuana taxed at $10 per ounce.) After that, the next step would be to find a way to legalize and control the other drugs that are generating the profits the thugs are fighting over. I do not know whether America is ready for a rational drug policy. If that debate ever truly got started, I suspect the interests that are vested in the current drug trade would spend a lot of money to maintain the status quo.
Outsider, decriminalization quickly followed by taxation would rationalize a whole lot on this side of the border, and take the wind right out of the Mexican drug gangs too (hate to imagine what their Plan B might be, though).
Lotus, what Plan B could be worse than the current results of Plan A? We spend an enourmous amount on interdiction, enforcement, and incarceration (money we could use on another approach), and these efforts do not solve the problem. Meanwhile, the narco-terrorists are awash with money and have no hesitation to use it as they see fit.
We would be better served if our first question were: How can we deprive these people of the money they are using against us? For example, when we are willing to accept the secrecy of “off shore banking” (including Swiss banking) we enable drug dealers, tax evaders, racketeers, third-world dictators, and arm merchants to more easily secure and use their ill gotten gains. We are fast approaching the time when that will have become too dangerous to tolerate. There comes a point when the law abiding people have to assert their authority to enforce the social contract, and that requires looking at problems like the United States drug market square in the face and being open minded enough to recognize the failure of an approach that has been given more than a fair chance to succeed. Juarez is a wake-up call, a preview of what can happen when the thugs get the upper hand, and that cannot happen without their having a lot of money and a steady stream of American income.
Makes perfect sense to me, Outsider, but there’s an awful lot of ready money and violence aligned against perfect sense here.
Granted, Lotus, and maintainig present course and speed will mean a year from now there will be still more ready money and no less violence aligned against a change in United States public policy.
The governments of both countries very well may fail within the next four years.