Ironically, the United States appears to be forgetting one of the most important lessons from the War on Terror—that competent international partners are the most important component of a sustained campaign against a discrete and amorphous opponent abroad. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States never succeeded in building central governments capable of sustaining a campaign against our common enemies. Instead, we tried to kill our way out of a war.
The United States is again poised to rush headlong into the same mistake. It appears sorely tempted to engage in unilateral lethal strikes against the cartels. If the United States decides to use force against these cartels, it will do little to solve the deeper, longer-lasting structural issues that facilitate their persistence. Just like the Taliban or ISIS, the cartels will just reconstitute and return to business as usual when American attention wanes.
Nonetheless, the United States appears poised to pull the emergency lever and resort to violence. With our next breath we may claim victory. And in that one motion we'll both pat ourselves on the back and turn it on the issue, calling it solved and leaving it for future Americans in future pain under future leaders. All while real Mexicans continue to suffer.
We should not resort to lethal strikes. Instead, the United States should focus its attention on the real problem—the insidious corruption with which the cartels have infected various levels of the Mexican government.
The good news is that this is a mission that the United States national security apparatus is well-positioned for. International criminal organizations consider the United States largely uncorruptible. We have professional law enforcement services at the federal level. These agencies have enormous budgets and mature oversight procedures. There are entire units of the Department of Justice dedicated to public corruption crimes, both centralized at Main Justice and distributed among the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices. We know how both how to fight corruption and insulate against it.
And we should know who in Mexico is corrupt. With the elevation of cartels as a national security threat, the U.S. Intelligence Community is likely dedicating more resources to surveilling Mexican cartels. Unlike domestic surveillance, intelligence collection abroad is largely unrestrained. It is Executive Branch policy—not the U.S. Constitution—that restricts this collection. That policy permits collectors to crawl around into the most intimate details of non-Americans’ lives. And the intelligence community receives more than $100 billion annually to help do it. There is no reason why the United States should not know who exactly within the Mexican government is helping the country’s most dangerous cartels.
We should not sit on that information. Instead, we should arm prosecutors with it. As several high profile prosecutions have demonstrated, we can extradite corrupt officers to face charges in the United States. For lower-level officials who are not worth it, we can pass the information to trustworthy Mexican authorities to act on.
By helping Mexico clean up corrupt officials, we are helping build a force capable of taking on these insidious groups. In the end, for all the pain that the cartel cause the United States, they cause Mexico far more. In the same token, for any resolve that the United States has to take them on, Mexico has far more. Wise American policy helps Mexico turn that resolve into capable and sustainable action.