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WASHINGTON, DC –  Flanked by the embattled President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, a weary looking President Barack Obama used a press conference to angrily denounce as “Alarmist and inflammatory” a recent report issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation that declared the massive chain of UN administered Mexican Refugee camps in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as “a bottomless well for narco-insurgency” and “a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States”. The camps, home to at least 2.5 million Mexican nationals, are dominated by the “Zetas Confederales”, a loose and ultraviolent umbrella militia aligned with the feuding Mexican drug cartels that now control upwards of 80 % of Mexico.

President Obama’s political fortunes have been reeling recently in the wake of high profile incidents that include the kidnapping of his Special Envoy for Transborder Issues, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and the car bombing assassination of popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that killed 353 people in Sacramento last month. Both events have been tied directly to factions of Zetas “hardliners” who operate with impunity on both sides of the US-Mexican border. President Obama used the conference to point to the “clear and hold” COIN strategy that has recently restored order and even a degree of tourism to Las Vegas, once the scene of bloody street battles between Zetas, local street gangs and  right-wing American paramilitary groups, as a sign of the success for his administration.  Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill remain skeptical and say that it is likely that President Obama will face a primary challenge next year from Senator Jim Webb (D- Va), a former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, who called the president’s COIN strategy “The right course of action” but ” Two years too late”….

That fictional scenario above is offered as a thought experiment.

Thursday, in a statement that was issued in part for public diplomacy purposes, DNI Adm. Dennis Blair, dismissed any strategic implications regarding the strength of Mexico’s drug cartels that the Mexican government is struggling to suppress:

Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. [Let me] repeat that. Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. The violence we see now is the result of Mexico taking action against the drug cartels. So it is in fact the result of positive moves, which the Mexican government has taken to break the baneful influence that many of these cartels have had on many aspects of Mexican government and Mexican life.

While it might be tempting to ask what the good Admiral is smoking, Blair is neither a naif nor a fool but a very experienced and saavy intelligence manager who is engaged in pushing a political line of the Obama administration, in deference to the wishes of the government of Mexico. The line is being peddled on many fronts; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has just declined offers for increased appropriations for improving border security in favor of “surging” Federal agents on a temporary basis (i.e. a political show that will accomplish nothing). Here is SECSTATE Hillary Clinton on the same subject on the same day as Adm. Blair while on an official visit to Mexico:

On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton noted that no official of the Obama administration had ever used the phrase “failed state.” She said Mexico faced a “public safety challenge,” likening it to the surge of drug violence in American cities in the 1980s. And she lavished praise on the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, for taking strong measures against the drug cartels.

This line that Mexico is fundamentally sound, while helpful to President Calderon’s political standing when expressed in public, is analytically speaking, sheer nonsense, and if enforced in private, counterproductive to having sober USG interagency planning sessions to make certain that worst case scenarios, like the one imagined above, never come close to materializing. Such politicized groupthink also interferes with effective cooperation with Mexico to address a 4GW type problem that has already mestastasized to a dangerous degree into American territory. Earlier, while still free of Mexican diplomatic and political pressure, the U.S. military accurately assessed the potential threat of Mexico devolving into a failed state in this JFCOM planning document (we won’t be seeing anything like this in public again, barring leaks):

In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.

….The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.

Banning terminology like “failed state” or admission of adverse data points from Mexico or the Southwestern U.S. (!) into an integrated analytical picture because the self-absorbed and greedy oligarchy that rules Mexico heatedly objects, is a recipe for policy failure and “snowballing” interrelated problems as each new development is inadequately addressed for political reasons. This new eggshell to tread carefully upon is going to be added to our longstanding, politically determined, refusal to contemplate our own drug policy honestly in light of it’s effect on our national security interests (We are turbocharging guerillas, Islamist insurgents, terrorists and criminal networks all over the globe with billions of American narco-dollars and corrupting and demoralizing our own allies in the process).

If the current situation in Mexico existed anywhere else in the world, our national security elite would already be discussing the potential for a mass exodus of refugees at given levels of escalating violence. The United States government conceives of the border in terms of an economic immigration problem not as a political mass-migration problem; such an event, spilling over into the hot deserts of the American border states, would very likely overwhelm the capacity for adequate humanitarian response. A Katrina moment in the cacti.

Recall the difficulties the Carter administration had with the relatively minor refugee influx in 1980 known as the Mariel Boatlift when 120,000 Cubans were permitted by Fidel Castro to flee the Communist paradise for life in the United States, along with imprisoned criminals and mental patients whom Castro deported along with the boatlift. A full blown civil war in Mexico could generate 20 to 30 times that number of refugees, among whom narco-guerillas or terrorists or independent bad actors could operate freely, much as refugee camps elsewhere in the world have been breeding grounds for militias, criminal organizations and terrorists.

SECSTATE Clinton, at least, should know all of this very well. The handling of the Marielitos issue by Jimmy Carter probably cost her husband the governorship in Arkansas and led him later as President to enforce a very tough line against Haitian refugees, fearing a deluge of desperately poor Haitians fleeing dictatorship and internecine political violence. It would be far better to prioritize Mexico as a national security issue today, than let it evolve into a transnational powder keg tomorrow. There are, I must observe, far more Mexicans than Haitians in this hemisphere.

But proper response requires empirical investigation and analytical clarity, followed by sensible and determined policy designed to short-circuit negative trends, not empty political assertions designed to tread water, obfuscate and delay action. We have time, but not unlimited time.

(Special thanks to Morgan, Pundita and John Robb for their insights, concerns and/or suggested links yesterday on this issue which were helpful in clarifying my thoughts).

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (Full PDF Article)   Stratfor reports on Mexico, news ignored by our mainstream media

Latest Academic Mexico Trip Report    “Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?”    Mexico’s Instability Is a Real Problem

Mexico – Failed State/Failed Policies?   Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state  Why Vicente Fox is going straight to Hell 

MEXICO’S BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE   What if A State Failed and Nobody Cared?   American Narcotics: $10 Billion In Mexico

Mexico: Growing Terror and Close to Collapse    The effects of our drug war in Mexico

Mexico is not a poor country   Assessing the threat at our southern border    Mexico’s Columbian Exchange    State of War

 Look who’s sneaking into the country using known drug routes   Mexico plagued by myriad interlaced netwars – a TIMN analysis

SWC Thread (Slapout) w/ Links    Mexico’s Struggle with ‘Drugs and Thugs’ (Full PDF Article) 

Sites Linking to this Post:

Soob – Top shelf analysis of Mexico’s civil war and the looming cross border nightmare NEW!

Newshoggers.com (Hynd) – Is Mexico A National Security Threat? NEW!

TDAXP – Recommended Reading  NEW!

Fausta’s Blog – The “Who painted it?” Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean 

RBO – Zenpundit: A Mexican Standoff with Reality 

MountainRunner – It sure is quiet around here… a few links and musings during the silence 

Threatswatch.org (Schippert) – Exposición Perro y Caballo de la Administración Obama 

John Brown’s Public Diplomacy – March 30 

Peace Like a River – Cables, dispatches and memoranda 

SWJ BLog – A Mexican Standoff with Reality…

Committe of Public Safety – Cartel War Zen

Pundita – Washington continues to plays ostrich about Mexico (Riehl World View – Viva la Revolucion ; Wretchard – Our Southern Neighbor)

HG’s World – Zenpundit Channels Orson Wells in War of the Narco-Cartels

Chicago Boyz – A Mexican Standoff with Reality

More as they develop….

Cheryl Rofer called for national security/ foreign policy/defense bloggers to think hard regarding the strategic calculus of a state possessing just a few nuclear weapons:

What strategies are available to a country with fissionable material sufficient for 1-5 nuclear weapons, some of which may be assembled? Take into account probable responses, and assume some sort of rationality on the holders of these weapons and material. You may specifically refer to Iran and North Korea, or any other nation, or make the scenario(s) more general. Flesh out the scenario with some support

Many have answered the call ( I am still working on my response) and here they are with key excerpts:

Wizards of Oz

….Therefore, we will pursue a four-fold strategy we call “Deterrence Light”:

1. INTERNAL SECURITY: Ensure the secrecy of our fissile material. Maximize employment of decoys and spoofs so as to preserve this material should it ever be needed….

2. EXTERNAL AWARENESS: Inform the world of our technological accomplishment — and embed in our announcements disinformation regarding the exact disposition of our research establishment and weapons complexes….

Hidden Unities

….Yesterday, the Iraqi Kurds announced the formation of a Kurdish confederation, minutes after introducing shocked IAEA officials inspecting Turkish nuclear facilities to a mountain bunker where two nuclear warheads (one loaded on a hybrid American-Israeli missile) were housed. Iraqi Kurdistan leaders informed the Iraqi government they were joining a Kurdish confederation but were not (as of this moment) interested in seceding entirely from Iraq. Revenues would continue to be shared as previously agreed and Kurdish units would be available to defend Iraq against Iranian aggression. Iranian Kurdish leaders explained their position to the Supreme Leader of Iran and noted targeting of Tehran and Iranian oil fields by several nuclear devices was existent. The Syrians were equally appraised of their own prime real estate being targeted

Armchair Generalist

….Next, I will want to develop an indigenous capability. I won’t let any Proliferation Security Initiatives stop valuable material shipments. My engineers and scientists will train in the best universities overseas as I develop my “nuclear technology” program, which will have the purpose of supplying my people with limitless, inexpensive electricity to power their homes. Now the United States and European nations will offer me low-enriched uranium, and that will do – for starters. Once I get the nuclear technology program, I’ll build a second reactor and centrifuges for the HEU processing.

Dreaming 5GW (Arherring)

…. The 5GW Strategy: Ironically, even though the 4GW Operation benefits from more weapons being available, the 5GW strategy only requires one (and with the proper preparation you might even be able to get away with none, but that’s an advanced class). Essentially, the objective is to prove the potential of multiple weapons by openly displaying the existence of at least one weapon. Should you possess only two, one should be test-detonated and the other should be openly displayed to an authority that can realiably vouch for its authenticity. This very controlled transparency is a 5GW affect on observation that triggers existing assumptions, rule-sets and responses both in countries that are targeted and in countries that are merely in the audience

My esteemed blogfriend of longstanding, Sir Younghusband of Coming Anarchy, took issue with my remarks in the previous post and commented ( seconded by ubiwar):

“Historians and futurists use complementary methodologies …”In my experience futurists and historians are at one another’s throats over methodology. I would like to compare these methodologies in more detail. Can you elaborate on what you mean?

There is a clash of professional cultures and perspectives between academic historians and futurists, no argument. That’s why I used the term “complementary” in the previous post – the respective methodologies are divergent enough to remediate the weaknesses of the other for those thinkers open to broadening their analytical horizons. Not everyone has the comfort zone demonstratedby Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz; methodologically conservative “old school” historians who disdain the skill-sets of even cognate social science fields and highly speculative futurists are quite likely to talk past one another. A shame, in my view.

To begin, it’s an epistemological error to confuse either field with physics. Futurism has strongly imaginative, insight-generative and generally “fuzzy” aspects even when rarefied computer modeling, prediction markets or mathematically advanced techniques for making probabilistic estimates are being employed  (none of which I am qualified to comment upon in depth) and as a field, it is still in the pioneering stage.  History has a longer intellectual pedigree, stretching back to Herodotus and Thucydides with the advent of modern historical techniques beginning with Leopold von Ranke and the professionalization of academia by the German university system that became the model for the Western world, particularly the noveau-riche United States of the late 19th century. Historical methodology is accepted by historians as a yardstick to measure one another’s work and is the basis for much of the nitpicking “gotcha” nature of historiagrahical criticism. Alternative methods are viewed with suspicion; it took decades for academic historians to begin giving any credence whatsoever to oral history, for example.

Ideally, historians approach a question with skepticism and attempt to fnd an explain causation within an accurate context by working backwards toward the point of origin. “Primary source” documents are privileged as evidence by which they mean certain kinds of documents, preferably government records and memoranda, alongside private papers, scrutinized with great care. These are supplemented by authoritative secondary material that helps the historian understand the primary sources within the accurate context of the time rather than anachronistically. These discrete facts and clues are then reinterpreted by the historian in the form of a comprehensible narrative that does not deviate from the evidentiary trail. History is a craft, not a science.

Naturally, historical methodology, which seeks to demonstrate the verifiable, is an approach with the potential for generating enormous lacunae. Government officials do not always put their most sensitive discussions or actions on paper or destroy such documents after the fact (ex.- both Beria and Khrushchev ransacked Stalin’s private archive after the dictator’s death). Even when such papers exist, they are seldom readily accessible or are written in euphemistic, elusive, terminology or bureaucratic jargon. The unofficial, personal, relationships upon which many decisions hinge are often entirely absent from the “official” paper record as are often the human circumstances of the “deciders”. It takes superhuman detective work to fill in these kinds of blanks and a tolerance for sources of uncertain reliability ( this is a job for…a biographer! See Ron Chernow, Robert Caro etc.).

Futurists, as the term implies, look forward, rather than back. They begin with intuitive assumptions and engage in a variety of means of extrapolation ranging from ( among many)  logical-philosophical thought experiments mapped out as decision trees to the construction of imaginative but complex scenarios for “free play” exercises to building models of great mathematical rigor. Futurists scan widely for potential variables and patterns. Imagination and synthesis play a significant role in framing the initial starting point for analytical extrapolation. Futurists are t panoramic vision to the historian’s telescope ( or at times, microscope).

The problem with futurists is that their predictions are all too frequently in error, generally suffering from a bias toward dystopian outcomes, overestimation of the linear downstream effect of favored variables relative to the effects of the variable’s interaction with all other variables along with overestimating of the synchronicity of all variables (most variables are asynchronous – otherwise the human race would be in a near-constant state of catastrophe. The “perfect storm” rarely comes together). Their scenarios, in other  words,  lack the level of “friction” present in historical case studies, much less that of real life.

Futurists can inject a far greater range of possibilities to consider for causation for historians while historians can help bring greater realism to futurist scenarios. The two fields, both of which must deal with uncertainty, are ready-made for collaboration

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated recently featured the “Powers of 10” video by IBM; by today’s hyperkinetic attention span, it might be considered “long” but the impression it makes is very powerful, particularly on those not well acquainted with physics.  Dave justly called it “9 Minutes of video you will never forget”. Here it is:

One of the themes that I stress with my students, when we are trying to analyze a primary source, is the danger of relying upon one’s own habitual perspective and frame of reference. An important element of a mental perspective is scale and the general tendency of people to visualize new concepts only in terms of the scale in which they go about their daily lives without any comprehension of alternate orders of magnitude leads to serious logical errors. The distortion becomes still worse, when matters of science or economic policy or planning are involved and the person trying to analyze is equally unable to conceive of using different time frames.

IF OUR RESPONSE WAS BEING PROBED, WE FAILED

If you are a regular reader of Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye , then you know that he is a dog aficianado who raises them for show and for specialized training. Naturally, the contamination and recall of pet food was a story he had been following with a considered care that I have not. Dave has put forth an intriguing thought experiment however “Wargaming an attack on the food supply“:

“Although we have an entire enormous expensive facility within DHS ostensibly devoted to the subject of biodefense including agro-terrorism, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, to my eyes much of what’s available in open source form on this subejct seems very rudimentary.

*a toxin or pathogen would be introduced into a basic food item either via a producer, distributor, or manufacturer

*the item would be packaged and distributed throughout the country

*the retail products would be purchased by consumers

*individual cases of injury or death would begin to appear

*complaints would be made to retailers and/or brand name vendors

*at some point relevant government agencies would become engaged

*there would be a scramble for causes and sources

*conflicts between agencies would emerge

*at some point the toxin or pathogen would be identified, its source might be identified, and a solution put into place

Some number of lives would have been lost, resources consumed in pursuing the problem, and the ultimate solution would bring that process under control but the objective of the attack would already have been accomplished: there would be a diminution of confidence in government, society, and other people.

A modern economy and modern society operates on trust.”

Dave has much more, of which you can read the rest, here.

If you recall the infamous anthrax letters, Dave is outlining a hypothetical 4GW style systempunkt test of our bureaucratic response capacity, which I am sad to say, remains obtuse and palsied in the face of the non-obvious.