Excerpt - Mexico's Narco-Insurgency and U.S. Counterdrug Policy

Conclusion


As the apparent intractability of the gun issue demonstrates, crafting a comprehensive counter-narcotics strategy will be no easy undertaking. Doing so will require going past the politically popular aspects of counternarcotics, such as interdiction, and zeroing in on more contested issues like guns and demand. In financial terms, funding at the necessary levels all of the programs discussed above will involve expenditures considerably beyond those already approved for Plan Merida. Moreover, creating such a program will entail a determined effort by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to ensure that counternarcotics receives sustained executive-level attention and that the myriad agencies involved -- ranging from the ATF to USAID -- achieve the coordination necessary to preclude one aspect of this strategy from countering the efforts of the others. Finally, it bears repeating that the inter-hemispheric drug trade is so entrenched that even a "perfect" counternarcotics strategy will produce meaningful progress only over the long term.


The costs of action are therefore high, but the price of inaction would be exponentially greater. The effects of drug use in the United States and the potential for the economic and political destabilization of Mexico make counternarcotics an immensely significant national security issue. Addressing this problem effectively will require substantial economic resources and political capital, but, given the stakes, the investment is a necessary one. American policymakers must seize on the current crisis to achieve a balanced counternarcotics policy, one that not only strengthens Mexico's forces of order but also addresses the underlying issues that have long nourished the drug trade and made it so violent. If they do so, the United States may finally begin to make sustainable progress in curbing narcotics smuggling and its devastating effects. It they do not, the Merida Initiative will simply go down as one more failed offensive in the long campaign against drugs.

Excerpt - Mexico's Narco-Insurgency and U.S. Counterdrug Policy