Politically Incorrectness
Excellent observation, I’ll take a stab at identifying some parallels:
1. Politicians use fear mongering to sell both the war on drugs and the so called war on terror. To challenge the sanity of either so called war would be met with calls of being unpatriotic and your proposals to downsize (rightsize) the effort would be portrayed as a “grave” risk to national security. Are drugs really a risk to national security? Is the problem the producers in Afghanistan, Burma or Peru or the consumers in the West?
2. Drug abuse and terrorism have been part of man’s history for thousands of years and will continue to be. You can’t address the underlying social, economic, and political problems by deploying the Army, and in many cases you simply make the problems worse.
3. While some State Actors have mutually beneficial relationships with both terrorists and drug cartels, for the “most” part both problems are outside the realm of the state, thus leaving regime change or military coercion against a state as an option that can rarely be used. Transnational problems require a transnational response (a coalition), and while many of our war on drugs activities have facilitated this coalition, or war on terrorism has harmed it.
4. Both Wars are common in the fact that once we start pursuing a strategy we rarely change course (bureaucratically entrenched) regardless if that strategy produces results or not. Wouldn’t be better served by directing those billions of dollars on truly building our homeland defense capability (more bomb detection equipment in our airports, more transit police, etc.) to “mitigate” the risk of terrorism in the U.S. than launching our Army overseas to try to change a culture? Our Army still has important “supporting” roles in both of these wars, especially when a viable military target emerges, but that is much less ambitious than a regime change.
5. Are we really fighting either war? Don’t we still permit sanctuaries for both drug cartels and terrorists? How many punitive attacks have we conducted on terrorist camps in Pakistan or Syria? How many raids have we conducted on drug cartels in South America? If the military solution was the answer it would be relatively simple, but we know it isn’t. The complications associated with those courses of action are unacceptable.
6. I would argue that neither war can be won in the sense that the enemy leadership capitulates, but the effects of terrorism and drugs can be mitigated to an acceptable level if we take a different approach which means putting the military back in a supporting role for these two so called wars and putting the bulk of money spent into social and economic programs. Change won't happen overnight. Again if a military target surfaces like the Taliban in Afghanistan, we always have that option, but lets get a grip on using the military to fundamentally change a foreign society.
