The War at Home

Much as I'd rather not beat the Mexico-is-the-new-Colombia meme into the ground, it's worth looking at Ken Ellingwood and Tracy Wilkinson's "Calderon's Drug Offensive Stirs 'Wasp Nest.'" This L.A. Times story portrays a northern Mexico that is now fully militarized and occuped by the federal army.

The force's highly visible presence has caused the local assassins to change tactics, substituting pistols for AKs and beat-up cars for SUVs. In other words, the bad guys now have to get much closer to their targets to kill them, an undoubted benefit--but it remains to be seen how well the army treats Mexican civilians and thus, whether the civilians see the federals as liberators or occupiers.

The signs in the Ellingwood/Wilkinson story aren't encouraging, but then the Mexican army may just be experiencing the same (occasionally lethal) growing pains that U.S. forces met when they faced occupation duties post 9/11:

Activists say soldiers trained for combat, not police work, have run amok at times.

Margarita Rosales, a laundry worker in Juarez, said her son, Javier, 21, was found dead in April after he and a friend were seized by soldiers and federal police after a night of drinking. His body bore marks of a severe beating, she said. Rosales said the friend told her that Javier, an X-ray technician, was singled out because he was heavily tattooed.

"He didn't sell drugs. He wasn't involved in that kind of thing," she said. "If they had found kilos of drugs, kilos of cocaine -- but why? There is no reason why."

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, human rights ombudsman for the state of Chihuahua, said his office has received 200 complaints of abuse by the military, including allegations of suspects being tortured to extract information, wrongful detention and seven killings. Nationwide, complaints against the army tripled between 2007 and 2009.

Robert Kaplan Interview by Michael Totten

Well worth the read. Totten caught up with Kaplan a few weeks ago, immediately after the end of the Sri Lanka insurgency, and their conversation ranges from the Horn of Africa to the Russian Arctic, with stops in between for how India, China, Russia and Iran will all affect U.S. interests.

Note that both Kaplan and Totten agree that Persian soft power is a strong and possibly decisive factor in places like Turkmenistan.

Twitter Silliness

THE MICRO-MESSAGING SERVICE HASN’T MADE A DAMN BIT OF DIFFERENCE IN IRAN.

With advance apologies to my colleagues whose job it is to spread the Good Word about social networking services to yet-benighted duchies and baronies within the federal government:

A strange-bedfellows combination of public diplomats, bloggers and assorted techies has been frothing since Iran-election protesters apparently used Twitter to both organize gatherings and appeal to the outside world for help. For a few days it appeared (in Western media accounts) that all Iran was tweeting when it wasn’t being kicked and beaten.

And yet, Twitter has really changed nothing except to lightly augment accounts of election-related disputes and rioting—and it enjoys that prominent role only because there have been few alternatives, what with Iran’s idled Internet and cell-phone networks and its lack of Western reporters.

As Noam Cohen pointed out in last Sunday’s Times, only a relatively small number of Iranians apparently used Twitter to organize protests; Iran is still primarily a word-of-mouth country rather than a texting or an Internet country.

And Twitter has other problems, among them that it’s so easy to use that pro-government forces use it themselves to spoof protest organizers and disseminate propaganda. Not to mention that those tweeting almost always lack training as observers or journalists; they’re just people who are frightened or angry and liable to write whatever they’re thinking at the moment—which is precisely what Twitter was designed for.

If anything, YouTube should be given credit for getting Iranian civilian videos of thug violence out of Iran, rallying world opinion in a visceral fashion that 140 dry characters cannot. In fact YouTube is choked with videos of baseej violence, and nothing has changed because of them, either.

Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei continue to move all the levers of power, speculation about Moussavi’s and Rafsanjani’s whereabouts and intentions notwithstanding. After some initial restraint, the Tehran government has deployed its knee-breakers in earnest to lock down both the capital and the provinces, and they appear to be succeeding.

As someone pointed out in the quaint, analog world of radio here in D.C. today, the first street protests against the Shah started in 1977 but didn’t reach critical mass until 1979.

My advice to Twitterers: Wait a couple of years to see whether #Revolution occurs, then a decade or so after that for everyone to write their books, before anyone proclaims that Twitter has come of age.

The Slope Steepens

RECESSION, SWINE FLU, DRUG-FUELED VIOLENCE YANK MEXICO DOWN.


I remember Mexico's economic crisis in 1994, with its abrupt devaluation of the peso and the deep recession that followed. The country recovered brilliantly then, but I continue to have a bad feeling that Mexico is heading to where Colombia was in the 1990s.

The recession has already hammered both domestic industry and workers' remittances from overseas. The swine-flu outbreak is about to crush the third pillar of Mexico's economy, foreign tourism, with Mexico City hotel bookings suddenly off by 30-50 percent, according to NPR this morning.

Most worryingly, drug-gang violence continues to expand from the area around Ciudad Juarez to yesterday's city-wide ambushes of police in Tijuana.

From a reputational standpoint, things can't get much worse for Mexico--or can they?

Currently the Mexican government, corrupt and slow to act though it may be, does function; as others have noted, the trash gets picked up, kids go to school each morning, the food supply is safe, mail is delivered, certain commodities are kept relatively inexpensive. As a result, citizens have at least a minimal level of confidence that the federal government is legitimate.

However, that feeling could easily be shaken if either of two plausible events occurs: a) swine-flu deaths increase sharply and the government fails to intervene successfully or in time, or b) drug gangs stage a stand-up, set-piece battle with Mexico's military, signaling the emergence of an alternative power center in the country.

Either of these events would also cripple much-needed foreign direct investment.

In all, it looks a lot like Colombia circa 1990: potential and actual breakdown of public services and safety with an attendant erosion of faith in the central government, while the narcotraficantes provide an alternative source of jobs and infrastructure.

I'll really start worrying if I read newspaper stories about the narcos setting up their own courts to try criminals and settle civil disputes, aping the authority and legitimacy of the legitimate government just like the FARC.

Up with USIA

IN WHICH A SKEPTIC IS CONVERTED TO THE CAUSE OF A NEW, INDEPENDENT U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY.

I spent part of last Friday afternoon at the semi-annual meeting of the Public Diplomacy Council, a group of retired State Department and U.S. Information Agency employees whose primary goal seems to be to revive USIA through any means necessary. (I'm a member primarily because I write about PD and soft power, not from any past affiliation with these agencies.)

Not having been involved in foreign policy the Cold War, I've always wondered at some advocates' messianic zeal about reviving USIA. Luckily I ran into WhirledView's Patricia Kushlis, with whom I'd corresponded over the past few years but never met.

Pat boiled it down to unity of effort: When USIA was around, you had a specific group of people who had one mission, who had their own budget, and who had institutional knowledge and memory of how to communicate with overseas publics. Contrast that with today, where budgeting and control of USIA's functions is fractured among State, the BBG and even the Defense Department.

She implied that getting everything back under one roof would lead to smarter, more focused PD. I'm also sure that a reconstituted, independent USIA would be able to persist and carry out its work even in periods of parent-agency neglect, as the empty chair of the Undersecretary for PA and PD demonstrates today at State.

So I'm now fully on board with the new-USIA program. Extract the former USIA's functions from their current agency homes, and pour them into a new agency. Give nouveau USIA the authority to ask for its own budget. And let it start the quiet, decades-long business of rebuilding the U.S.'s reputation abroad.