https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/reaper-drones-over-houston
Kulak argues that the cartels are extremely vicious, well-armed, well-funded and effective, that US thought leaders moving towards an 'intervention' in Mexico will start another cycle of military fiasco and imperial decline. On the one hand, I agree that US counter-insurgency '''doctrine''' is abysmal and the political dimension would be even worse. Kulak also leaves out how eager other powers would be to fuel this conflict. China and Russia would love to tie the US down in their own hemisphere and so they might aid the cartels. Arguably, they already have been, China sending precursor chemicals to the cartels. So it's a very reasonable argument.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that drug gangs are no match for state power, if used effectively. States have large forces of better equipped, better trained troops. The US has the surveillance infrastructure, wiretapping, hardware backdoors, drones, satellites. The US is (in theory) united while the cartels are divided. At bare minimum you don't see the FBI torturing their competitors in the CIA to death on Liveleak. The US has a stranglehold over drug financing - is it so hard to arrest the drug dealers? Drug dealers have to be contactable by the lowest-IQ, chemically unbalanced dregs of society - how can police be unable to find them and work their way up the distribution chain? They usually have huge tattoos all across their bodies! How could it be that a military acclaimed as the world's strongest is unable to root out some thugs on their own border, thugs that are effectively killing hundreds of thousands of US citizens?
Now I check, cartels are expanding into Europe: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230116-latin-american-cocaine-cartels-bring-violence-to-europe
If, as Kulak says, it is impossible for the US as is to defeat the cartels on the battlefield or in prohibition (he calls for legalization, effectively a negotiated retreat), does this tell us something important about liberal democracy? China would whisk these people away, perhaps never to be seen again. That much is beyond doubt, China wiped the floor with its opiates problem in the 1940s and 50s, when it was much poorer and less technologically advanced than the US. Addicts were sent to compulsory camps to get clean. Drug dealers disappeared. They did a similar kind of intensive suppression as soon as some Uyghur separatists got violent. The insurgency was crushed. China has a similar kind of serious viciousness to the cartels in that they don't pull their punches. Kulak assumes a half-baked, ill-planned hesitant series of reactionary operations, where the cartels get to adapt to drones and each new tactic the US deploys in series, rather than being overwhelmed. Cartel tactics of assassinating leaders would also be effective, causing oppressive checkpoints and blowback. Incompetently targeted US drone strikes would also cause militias to form against the government, he says. This is fairly believable.
In contrast, Afghanistan, under the new Taliban government, has pretty effectively smashed poppy production. Afghanistan was 80-90% of world heroin production! They just ban it and enforce the ban and it works.
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/06/talibans-successful-opium-ban-bad-afghans-and-world
In Helmand, by far Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province, the area of poppy cultivation was cut from over 129,000 hectares (ha) in 2022 to only 740 ha as of April 2023.
(I personally interpret the rest of the article as disguised seething at the Taliban's success where the expert-led US approach failed, from one of said US experts. Maybe he's right and the ban will fail.)
The cartels, the Taliban and China seem to have a level of viciousness that pays off for them, while the US doesn't. Even El Salvador even managed to suppress the cartels fairly effectively, despite tiny resources. This discrepancy, if Kulak is right and the US would lose, is a huge failure for the US and a pretty big flaw in liberal democracy.
So my questions for discussion are:
- Is Kulak right that the US would fail?
- If he is right, is it a flaw with liberal democracy or something else?
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