The War We Cannot Win

The subject of this essay is not  the war in Iraq, but another war that the U.S. has been fighting for about 30 years now, and which has cost of billions of dollars and the lives of thousands of people on both sides. What war could I be talking about? Surely you would be aware of a war that is currently being fought overseas, and which is involving U.S. troops and private contractors (fighting as proxies for U.S. troops)! No. This is the silent war. It’s the war that flies under the public’s radar. It’s the war on drugs that is being fought in Central America.

In the 1980s, the U.S. became involved in a number of military actions in Central America by sending military aid, advisors, and development aid to dictatorships fighting “communist” insurgent groups. Stopping the advance of communism up through Mexico (and into Texas?) was an issue of national security. The legacy of our involvement in Central America was a victory over the Sandinistas, but an association with horrendous human rights abuses in El Salvador and Guatemala with no real gain in national security. This shameful abuse of power should have taught us a lesson about fighting wars with vague and unrealistic objectives. As with Vietnam, it should have taught us a more practical lesson about trusting the conduct of those wars to proxy governments. The war on drugs has been fought since President Nixon declared the war in 1971 – two years before the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Twenty-two years later this war has yet to achieve its objectives! It’s the war that no one hears about, as if we were barely aware that it exists. It surfaces in the news only occasionally when one reads of American casualties. Let’s take a look at the “Drug War” and the disturbing lessons about policy-making when we are dealing with issues of “national security.”

The U.S. invoked national security to justify the drug war, just as it did the Vietnam War, the Cold War actions in Central America and the continuing sanctions and embargo against Cuba. Actually, Cuba provides a good example of how politicized decision-making results in nonsensical policies. The research and lobbying group, Citizens Against Government Waste, recently called attention to the U.S. government’s funding for TV Marti – a senseless holdover from the Radio Free Europe days of the Cold War. We fund an operation that pays 55 reporters, producers and technical people to generate five hours of news and programs each day broadcast to enlighten the people of Cuba about the evils of their own government. TV Marti has been broadcasting for 13 years and has cost the American taxpayers 160 million dollars over that time. The irony is this: the Cuban government jams the signal, and no one in Cuba actually sees the program! (From Citizens Against Government Waste, www.cagw.org) 

Why would the government continue to spend millions of dollars on a disinformation program that is so obviously futile? The answer lies in the politics of decision-making when “national security” interests are invoked. I would argue that the war on drugs, as it is being fought, is like the folly of our policies toward Cuba. We continue useless and expensive efforts in the name of an unachievable ideal because we cannot bring ourselves to admit that the ideal is unachievable.

The drug war is a continuation of the same flawed policy process that led to a limited war, fought by proxies, to stop the advance of “communism.” The drug war is a limited war, fought by proxies, to protect Americans from drugs. These well-intention but poorly understood objectives led to an inability to clearly define what constitutes a “victory.” In the absence of tangible success, administrative agencies supply statistics that show we are “winning” the war, just as the body count in Vietnam became a substitute for victory. Although the body count statistics were in our favor, we all know how that war ended.

Ted Carpenter, in his book Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (N.Y.; Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), takes the Drug War apart piece by piece, and shows the futility of our efforts to stop drugs from pouring across our borders. Neither drug interdiction nor crop eradication has been effective in stopping the drug trade, but the drug-war bureaucracies continue to report sporadic successes and predict victory. They are unable to challenge the political consensus that we must not “lose” the war on drugs. No DEA administrator wants to admit that the war is already lost… especially since his job is at stake. (For a very interesting and readable account of the drug war during the 1980s, I recommend Michael Levine’s book Deep Cover (Lincoln, Nebraska: iuniverse.com, 2000)). As the books subtitle reads, it is “the inside story of how DEA infighting, incompetence and subterfuge lost us the biggest battle of the drug war.”

Given the bureaucratic nature of the drug war, official estimates of coca eradication are almost certainly inflated. There is an incentive within the government agencies to report the most optimistic figures that they can justify, and previous eradication estimates have been, in Carpenter’s words, “scarcely more reliable than the infamous ‘body counts’ used by the Pentagon to measure the progress of the Vietnam War.” (Carpenter, 10)

This problem has recently been acknowledged and addressed by the new DEA administrator, Asa Hutchinson. He admitted in a statement reported by Knight Ridder in 2001 that drug seizures had been double-counted, and said the DEA has to “make sure of the accuracy of the statistics” in the future. (Lenny Savino, “Hutchinson promises to end drug agency’s use of inflated statistics,” Knight Ridder, August 3, 2001. Downloaded from ephost@ epnet.com October 14, 2003). The article claimed that hundreds of DEA arrests attributed to sweep operations in the Caribbean “turned out to be routine marijuana busts by local police.”

The untrustworthiness of our own agencies is a symptom of the political climate surrounding the drug war, which has made it too politically sensitive to admit any kind of rational cost-benefit analysis. Even those who know we are losing cannot say so publicly. Worse, failure has not caused us to re-think our premises about winning a supply-side war in South America, but rather has become a justification for greater effort and more resources. Such was the irony of Vietnam and Central America. Failure became an excuse for renewed resolve, which means the expenditure of more resources and troops.

In 1990 representatives from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia met in Cartagenas to proclaim an anti-drug alliance and pledged a renewed commitment to drug interdiction and crop eradication. The U.S. pledged more financial aid for these countries, as their police and military forces were acting in place of U.S. soldiers. In the first year following the Andean Initiative, the U.S. gave $21 million to Colombia for the National Police and another $72 million to the military’s counter-narcotics units. Bolivia received nearly $16 million for drug control and law enforcement, and Peru received $20 million, principally for military and police. (Carpenter, 51)

In December of 2000 and January of 2001 the U.S. (in partnership with host country governments) initiated an unpopular program of extensive spraying of herbicide in Colombia. Called “Plan Colombia” the program reportedly destroyed about 75,000 acres of coca and poppy, but U.S. satellite photos suggest that Colombian growers had much more than that under cultivation. The total acreage may have been as high as 340,000 acres. The U.S. ambassador to Colombia at the time admitted, “It’s quite possible we’ve underestimated the coca in Colombia. Everywhere we look there is more coca than we expected. There is just more out there than we thought.” (Carpenter, 77) There are also more drugs entering the U.S. than we thought, as a graph of drug prices over the past decades has a downward trend. Price is an indicator of supply, and if the drug war were effective we should see street prices rising. Instead they have been gradually falling.

Militarizing the drug war did not result in a measurable reduction in the supply of drugs reaching the U.S. It did provide a propaganda weapon for revolutionary groups in Colombia and Peru. These countries’ governments were portrayed as puppets of the U.S. to the extent that they prosecuted the drug war. To the extent that they did not cooperate, they risked losing U.S. aid or even being “de-certified” and losing their trading privileges.

Consequently, Andean countries have cooperated with U.S. interdiction and eradication programs just to the extent necessary to qualify for aid. Their internal efforts have been held back by a lack of commitment to what they generally perceive as a North American problem. They are under pressure from within their own countries to allow the cultivation of coca, since it is a cash crop for poor rural farmers. In Peru coca cultivation is a national tradition; the leaves are still chewed as a mild stimulant; and you might find coca tea brewing in the lobby of your hotel in Cuzco, as I did. Caught between internal and external pressures, it is not surprising that Andean governments fight the drug war mostly on paper in order to appease their citizens and still qualify for U.S. aid.

Another Knight Ridder report in 2002 noted that as soon as eradication efforts in Peru and Bolivia stopped, local farmers were “back at it.” The author pointed out that when prices for coffee and other substitute crops were at historic lows, it was politically impossible for host governments to crack down on coca farmers. Opposition parties within the Andean countries used cooperation with U.S. eradication efforts as a political issue against their own governments. As the news report stated, “Government opponents and insurgents in all three countries (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia) are siding with the cocaine industry.” In the face of this failure, what was the response by the State Department? Here is the State Department’s undersecretary for Latin America and the Caribbean responding to the news:

“I think what it shows is that we cannot put our guard down, that this war against traffickers and narco-terrorists is never over.” (Kevin Hall and Cassio Furtado, “Andean coca production nears all-time high despite billions in U.S. eradication,” Knight Ridder, July 19, 2002. Downloaded from ephost@epnet.com October 14, 2003.)

The irony of the statement that “this war will never be over” was apparently lost on Undersecretary Reich.

The drug war and the war against “communism” share common failures, and these failures are not military. They are embedded in the flawed decision-making process that results from using “national security” as a justification for fighting an unwinnable fight in the pursuit of a vague objective. The unpopularity of the drug war and of U.S. military involvement in Central America in general has made successive U.S. administrations unwilling to commit the massive resources that would be called for if we were actually fighting for our national security. Good thing too, as even the commitment of thousands of U.S. troops would likely result in a Vietnam-like quagmire.

Why do I say the war on drugs is unwinnable? I say it based on our twenty-year history of drug interdiction and eradication efforts, which have produced no significant reduction in the supply of drugs here in the U.S. Probably the most important reason for this is the “balloon effect,” which means that if you squeeze the drug trade in one area, it pops up in another one. In an example of the balloon effect, guerrillas and traffickers have moved their operations to Ecuador as U.S. contractors and the Colombian military have stepped up aerial surveillance. As Peter Lippman notes in his editorial on this web site, Colombian guerrillas now operate along the Ecuadorian border, exposing the communities there to the violence of Colombia’s civil war.

With greater enforcement in Colombia and Mexico, the drug trade today is moving to islands in the Caribbean. The Dutch island of Curacao is just 60 miles off the coast of South America, and handles a large volume of cargo ships and cruise ships through the port at Willemstad. An article in The Denver Post recently noted that cocaine seizures at Willemstad have doubled since last year. The murder rate on this island of 150,000 people also doubled, largely due to drug trafficking. (The Denver Post, July 28, 2003, 2A) This parallels our experience in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s. When we clamped down on the drug cartel in Cali, Colombia, drug cartels in Guadalajara stepped in to supply the market. Increased interception efforts only diverted the routes of supply, and even then we only intercepted a small fraction of the estimated total.

Today our interception rates are still dismal. An officer of the Antillean Coast Guard said that despite increased enforcement efforts, they only intercept about ten percent of the estimated total drug trade through the islands. He was quoted in the Denver Post as saying, “If we catch 10 percent of what comes through, we’re lucky.” (Denver Post, July 28, 2003, 2A) Before you jump to the conclusion that this calls for more boats, more officers, and stiffer penalties, consider that the interdiction rate by the U.S. Coast Guard is about the same!

The Coast Guard, the State Department, Customs, and the DEA are all aware that drug interdiction efforts only stop a small percentage of drugs from entering the U.S. In 2001 the U.S. policy objective was to intercept 20 percent of drugs bound for the U.S. That is a rather ambitious goal, given the length of the U.S.-Mexican border and the number of alternate routes and methods of transport available to drug traffickers. That same year the commandant of the Coast Guard admitted that our seizure rate was only about 10 percent of the estimated total. Worse, as containerized shipping becomes a more logical method of importing drugs, our seizure rate will probably decrease to the single digits. U.S. Customs only inspects about three percent of commercial shipping, leaving a 97 percent chance that a drug shipment will not be detected. (Patrick Clawson and Rensselaer Lee III, The Andean Cocaine Industry, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) 11)

Sadly, the limited commitment to the war on drugs means that evidence of failure can always be the justification for escalation. They have a name for this: mission creep. What begins as an interdiction effort widens to an interdiction and eradication effort, and then to a military action against growers and guerilla groups. Even as failure became an excuse for more troops, more aid or more bombs, escalation produced a frustrating lack of progress. Consequently, U.S. politicians have had the drug war fought by proxy – with private contractors and troops from the host government, both financed by the U.S.

An article in the Chicago Tribune in November 2002 drew attention to the little-known war being fought in the skies over Colombia by “more than 100 pilots, mechanics and others” working for the State Department. Some of them piloted the spray planes and some flew the gunships that went along on the spraying missions. The use of private contractors to fight the drug war in Central America shows a wariness of making a large, visible commitment to a war with few success stories in its twenty-year history. In this way the eradication efforts keep a low profile, and avoid attention-grabbing casualty reports of U.S. troops. The Tribune article mentioned this as a motive for using contract specialists instead of the Army:

“U.S. critics say the private contractors are proxies for the U.S. military in a place where the public would not allow a more direct American involvement.” (Gary Max, Chicago Tribune, “U.S. civilians wage drug war from Colombia’s skies,” November 12, 2002. Downloaded from ephost@epnet.com October 14, 2003.)

The ultimate solution for this kind of failed action is for the American public and our political leaders to acknowledge that American power has its limits. There are things that we cannot do. There are things that we should not do, even if we can, because they would require a commitment of troops, money and time that is far beyond our tolerance. We need to learn to distinguish between wars that are worth the cost of fighting, and token wars fought for lofty and unachievable ideals – such as ridding the world of its supply of drugs. The victory in Iraq is a measure of the success of American power when properly focused, but it was only made possible by the events of 9/11 and the commitment to spend billions of dollars, and to commit U.S. troops en masse for an indefinite period of time. Even with such resolute commitments, success should be carefully evaluated in a politically neutral environment. Remember that a similar commitment was made in the Vietnam War, which we persecuted for nearly 30 years without success.