For those of us fortunate to live in the developed world it is perhaps easy to sneer at the rhetorical flourish often used by American and Western leaders to describe their diplomatic and practical support for the prohibition of banned narcotics.
Living with the end product of drug use – the occasional hassle from drug dealers, addiction related theft or even perhaps the addiction of a friend or a relative – is, whilst potentially upsetting and deeply stressful on a personal level, unlikely to elicit the desire for a military response from those involved. Much like the other infamous ‘declaration’ of war (on terror) its usage has been scaled down by policy makers in recent years, feeling that the term has lost some of its power since its inception by President Nixon in 1971.
The conflict in Mexico that centres on the drug trade however has by no means scaled down. Since the introduction of military force by President Felipe Calderon in 2006 the conflict there has exploded in scale, claiming the lives of thousands every year. Despite being (relatively) underreported in British media, over 50,000 men, women and children have now died in the 6 years since President Calderon’s militarisation of the combat.
Bombings, beheadings and assassinations are all legitimate tools of the anti-government campaign, with allegations of corruption and murder rebounding upon the military and police forces in equal measure. After years of this horrific and unceasing violence, there is a growing voice advocating compromise with leaders of all factions, despite frustration on behalf of the government’s major ally, the United States of America.
Now read the last paragraph again, but this time hold the War in Afghanistan in mind as the subject matter rather than the conflict in Mexico. The statements are equally valid in relation to both. Some may say that such wordplay is manipulative – and this is potentially true – but in this case it is very simple to do. The Wars – and they are both wars – in Afghanistan and Mexico have been concurrent in their timescale and yet strangely disassociated in their media representation. One may be forgiven for not being aware of the conflict in Mexico but it cannot be said to be the same for Afghanistan. The death toll for Afghanistan is actually considerably lower than that in Latin America too.
So what does that teach us about the international political narrative? It most definitely shows us the natural prejudice international dialogue has for civil rather than international conflicts. Conflicts often seem to only become fully-fledged wars when there is substantial international involvement – as is the case with Afghanistan.
It also shows that, despite the toning down of the rhetoric by the Obama administration on the War on Terror, this struggle continues to dominate their perspective of the world. It also shows that some elements of Clausewitzian style thinking on war remain – the identifiable enemy (the Taliban), the identifiable aim (their defeat) and the identifiable motive (to secure America from another massive terrorist attack). As the war drags on these traits can and have been diluted. In Mexico however the opposite seems to have been true, with the identity and threat from the Cartels only becoming clear when war began to be waged on them.
It is wars such as those in Mexico that will continue to blur the definitions of what makes a war in the 21st century.
Scholarly opinion has been in agreement that the growth of nuclear weapons in possession of the major states of the world has made large scale warfare on the scale of 1939-45 unthinkable in any real sense. Increasingly conflicts will be fought in the style of Afghanistan and Mexico – gritty, low-scale wars, dragging on for years with no decisive end in sight. In reality both these wars – or conflicts – are a taste of things to come. The Mexican Drug War may be underreported but that doesn’t make it unimportant. The real ‘War on Drugs’, despite the decline in usage of that term, has no real end in sight.
Image: David Maung/Bloomberg News
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[…] For those of us fortunate to live in the developed world it is perhaps easy to sneer at the rhetorical flourish often used by American and Western leaders to describe their diplomatic and practical support for the prohibition of banned narcotics. […]