LibriumArcana.Games

War:
noun
1.
a conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by land, sea, or air.
2.
a state or period of armed hostility or active military operations: The two nations were at war with each other.
3.
a contest carried on by force of arms, as in a series of battles or campaigns: the War of 1812.
4.
active hostility or contention; conflict; contest: a war of words.
5.
aggressive business conflict, as through severe price cutting in the same industry or any other means of undermining competitors: a fare war among airlines; a trade war between nations.

I've been reading Killing Pablo, a short and rather light account of the career of and manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the cocaine kingpin of Medellin, Colombia.

What interests me about this subject is how Escobar essentially mounted what was initially a fairly successful insurrection. The cartels assassinated a presidential candidate, the Minister of Justice (who basically got Pablo ousted from the congressional seat he held), and numerous other government officials. At the height of the campaign the government suspended jury trials (couldn't find anybody to sit on a jury), went to anonymous judges (who still got murdered), and finally suspended habeas corpus. It was a sustained terrorism campaign aimed at the highest levels of power, and it was brutally effective. The anti-Pablo task force was initially designed with the head having a one-month tour of duty, in order to make some effort to spread the risk fairly.

Now, this never was defined in formal terms of warfare, but it certainly sounds like a war. Given that insurgency has proven to be seriously effective in the past century, combined with the trends of global criminal organizations and urbanization, where do we define a situation as warfare? I've said for some time now that the cartel mess in Mexico is more of an insurrection or even a civil war than a criminal issue- Sinaloa and the Zetas are straight-up acting as administration and law enforcement in their territories.

Colombia is a fertile field for this discussion because it actually shows the trends going both ways. FARC starts out as a leftist revolutionary movement, but transitions into drugs and banditry fairly seamlessly and plays the kidnapping games with the best of them. On the other side if it, you had the Medellin and Cali cartels operating as drug trafficking operations that eventually challenged governmental authority to the point where Bogota ended up negotiating Escobar's surrender on the basis of no extradition and him only being charged with one minor charge. (They also let him build his own prison to his own specifications.)

So bearing that in mind, what gives us our new definition? What's our bright line? For me, I think the distinction comes back to operational policy on the part of the criminal organization. Typically, a criminal organization tends to have a certain discretion when dealing with the state- targeting law enforcement/state officials brings down a level of heat that they can't deal with. So when you have an organization that's powerful enough to blatantly target state officials, be they law enforcement, civil officials, etc., and they systematically exercise this power to challenge the state, that's when you've crossed the line.

The distinction is important because the definitions change both what's legally allowable as well as how citizens perceive the situation. We all saw through the past decade how ambiguity is directly detrimental to society, such as in the case of law enforcement stretching the shit out of the definition of terrorism in order to get more funding and attention for matters such as drug enforcement.

Thoughts?

ETA: They actually killed more than one presidential candidate, my bad.

What the terms that popular media uses for what's happening in Mexico right now is message framing. If they're just a "drug cartel" who is "attacking the government," then to the casual viewer of news, this sounds kinda bad, but nothing really scary - and even a little noble. It sounds like something you can rationalize as happening "over there", so more attention isn't paid to it.

The problem is, of course, that it's nothing more than a political ploy - if this situation were given more scrutiny, then our drug enforcement laws (and hence the War on Drugs) get much more scrutiny as well. This is something that is not wanted by those currently in power in the US - if they can give it a name that sounds properly sound-bite-ish and do nothing about it, that's a political win.

rhoenix wrote:What the terms that popular media uses for what's happening in Mexico right now is message framing. If they're just a "drug cartel" who is "attacking the government," then to the casual viewer of news, this sounds kinda bad, but nothing really scary - and even a little noble. It sounds like something you can rationalize as happening "over there", so more attention isn't paid to it.

The problem is, of course, that it's nothing more than a political ploy - if this situation were given more scrutiny, then our drug enforcement laws (and hence the War on Drugs) get much more scrutiny as well. This is something that is not wanted by those currently in power in the US - if they can give it a name that sounds properly sound-bite-ish and do nothing about it, that's a political win.

I don't think it's as sinister as all that. It's that we're entering a transitional era and people are resistant to changes in terminology.

Also, I don't honestly think that were people more apprised of the situation (the news of which is completely and readily available through all sorts of information channels) that there'd be any more serious push to examine our drug policy. Much as you and I might wish otherwise, a large segment of the population is totally down with the War on Drugs and thinks that any substantive change in policy means we're just lining their chilluns up and tying off their arms for them.

Back on topic: bandits have transitioned into revolutionary movements before, but really the easy flow between megabucks criminal enterprise and military activity is pretty epic now. I honestly wonder what you'd get for a GDP from Sinaloa, for example.

A outfit like Sinaloa or the Zetas can't create a first-world military. However, combining the financial depth they have with modern insurgency tactics means that Mexico won't be getting rid of them anytime soon. And the real kicker is that right now they don't have to provide full-fledged monetary support to the areas they hold. While they're taking over aspects like law enforcement, they're still able to direct a much larger percentage of their funding to guns and butter than the Mexican government.

There's no need to change the definition of war. Insurgency still falls within that definition quiet handy. What you might mean is the legal state of being at war, which is different.

For example, in Afghanistan, we are fighting a war. Legally the United States is not at war. This is because of several different reasons.

1: No legal entity to be at war with. In an insurgency, the insurgents don't have a legal organization as such they cannot declare war in the sense that The People's Republic of China or the United States of America could. If the US were to formally declare war on the Taliban for example, it would be granting them legal status which it doesn't want to do.

2: Lack of formal declaration. Covered that above, if neither sides declare war, you're not legally at war. Even if for example, USN destroyers are sinking your subs in the Atlantic, or flying robot assassins from the US are killing your leaders.

The legal state is different from the actual events on the ground. Once you realize that, you realize that the definition of war doesn't require a change, it still covers everything going on. You just have to keep in mind there's a separate legal thing going on as well.

Okay, so when do we flip from criminal activity to insurgency? Like I said, what concerns me about this is locking down as much of a definition as we can so we can provide the appropriate response. You send cops to fight crime, you send soldiers to fight wars. The two jobs are very starkly different.

The convenient crossover between the War on Terror and the War on Drugs is precisely the sort of thing that concerns me, or really even the militarized nature of the War on Drugs prior to 9/11. Mind you, I've long been arguing that we shouldn't go around declaring 'war' on social problems to begin with, but basically defining something as a war opens up the toolkit for governmental response. As much as possible, I would prefer that the toolkit have these definitions because we already have issues with turning quasi-military response loose on our citizenry. This is something that goes beyond American society, naturally, and it's an issue that I think pretty much most governments are going to end up coming into contact with, if not suffering from directly.

Okay, so when do we flip from criminal activity to insurgency? Like I said, what concerns me about this is locking down as much of a definition as we can so we can provide the appropriate response. You send cops to fight crime, you send soldiers to fight wars. The two jobs are very starkly different.

Not necessarily. Look the move from criminal activity to insurgency is really based on one thing, are the people doing this trying to challenge government control of an area?

Let look at crime here, the mob mostly does smuggling (drugs, people and guns in order of profit last I checked) and distributing illegal goods and services (drugs, gambling, prostitution, so on and so forth). They don't try to force the government out of areas nor do they challenge government authority. Their main strategy is to keep government attention off of them.

FARC, the Mexican Cartels, the Taliban, etc, actively fight to reduce, control or outright force government authority out of a space. Either by terrorism or targeted killings.

Basically when it goes from bribing policemen and judges and hoping the FBI doesn't notice you to lobbing grenades at governors and forcing town sheriffs to flee to Texas for political asylum, then you have an insurgency on your hands. Let's not make any mistake the Cartels in Mexico don't have any ambition to replace the Mexican Government (yet) but they do want to control most of it. Our mobs simply want the government to not see them. The reason for much of this is the strength of law enforcement and the government vs the rebelling party. If the Taliban was in Russia, they wouldn't be an insurgency anymore, Vlad Putin (yes, it's a nickname) would have strung them up by their internal organs by now and murdered their families when they came to get revenge (Afghanistan would also look like Chechnya in the 90s, this isn't a good thing). Alot of anti-insurgency work is police work, because you're trying to re-establish law and order in an territory. That's not just police work, you need people to rebuild the infrastructure, to set up and maintain schools, get the economy functioning, rebuild a civil society that doesn't think chopping off your neighbors head with a machete is a good solution to the argument of whose dog is pooping on the wrong yard.

Which involves warfare (two groups with guns duking it our for political and economic power) but not war (the legal state of two organizations fighting warfare for political and economic reasons). There's a difference.

Essentially that is what I was looking for, and we agree on where the line is- when they actively target and attempt to displace government authority, it's crossed the line.

All cool then.