Troops on the border

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Will the US eventually send troops to Mexico to battle drug cartels?

By Ruben Navarrette Jr. — Special to GlobalPost

Published: May 22, 2009 21:33 ET

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The troops were unarmed, and they lent a hand to the Border Patrol by fixing vehicles, repairing fences, manning detection systems, building roads and performing other duties typically done by Border Patrol agents. This freed up the agents to do what Americans expect them to do: patrol the border in search of illegal immigrants. By all accounts, the program — which ended in 2008 — was a total success.

Administration officials have said the role of the National Guard troops in the drug war would be similar. Imagine a scenario where troops lighten the load on U.S. customs agents and thus allow those agents to inspect more vehicles than they do now. And no matter what, they won't be doing domestic law enforcement in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

This is an idea that is both pragmatic and promising, but it might also be the first step in a long journey that will eventually take us where some Americans might not want to go: eventual deployment, with the permission of the Mexican government, of a manageable number of U.S. special forces to launch an Iraq-style counterinsurgency against Mexican drug cartels. Why not? The Pentagon has already labeled Mexico a state in danger of "rapid and sudden collapse." For those who believe that, how do they avoid sending U.S. troops to prevent that collapse, which would create something we can't afford at our back door: chaos.

Given that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently made his own trip to Mexico City to meet with top officials and then returned to immediately brief Obama on — according to media reports — possible uses for the U.S. military in the Mexican drug war, my hunch is that there is more than one contingency plan in the works.

Instead of trying to be popular, Obama should start getting serious about the drug war by making the American people comfortable with the idea of sending troops into Mexico. After all, that's a reality that could be difficult to escape.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune, and a weekly contributor to CNN.COM.

Read more GlobalPost dispatches about the drug war:

Sizing up Mexico's war on drugs

Record number of guns in Mexico traced to the US

Trouble on the US-Mexico border

Comments:

2 Comments.

Posted by mrprogressive on May 23, 2009 10:46 ET

Excellent reporting, terrible conclusion.

In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000. We have 5% of the world's population, 25% of it's inmate population. We've give billions to Colombia for the war on drugs. We have expanded the roles of the FBI. We created an entire government agency, the DEA, to stem the flow. We've put thousands of people on the border. And instead of realizing that the "war on drugs" is a stupid recreation of the prohibition, the solution is to call in the military? All that is going to happen is the military will fail, attribute it to a lack of resources / political will, demand more resources, and then unsurprisingly wreak havoc, killing people and solving nothing.

We should be taking about decriminalization.

Posted by Aztlan Buster on May 23, 2009 16:01 ET

Regular military should have been on the border since 1986 with strict orders to stop the onslaught.