Soon after being sworn in as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld
made headlines by delicately questioning current national drug policies.
Much to the delight of drug-war critics both in and out of government,
Rumsfeld told Congress that “the drug problem in the United
States is overwhelmingly a demand problem, and to the extent that
demand is there and it’s powerful, it is going to find ways
to get drugs in this country, to our detriment.” He also indicated
he would be examining the U.S. role in Colombia, where a shooting
war is taking place between drug cartels and the Colombian government.
Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington,
and a military historian, cautions that it’s too soon to predict
whether the Bush administration will make any significant changes
in national drug policy. “Rumsfeld’s statement was one
of the most enlightened views to come out of the federal government
in years. ... I’ve talked to many active-duty military personnel
in private, and they are the ones who are most passionate against
this ‘war,’ believing that it is a policy action that
will lose in the end. They don’t want their beloved institutions
tarnished in this disastrous effort.”
Defense Department officials, policy experts and military analysts
interviewed for this article agreed that, despite some recent successes
by the U.S. government in seizing large shipments of drugs and capturing
smugglers, there is an uneasiness associated with military and defense
industry involvement in a war whose cause is decidedly domestic
in nature.
In 2001, the White House office of national drug control policy
will spend roughly $18 billion, of which approximately $2 billion
to $3 billion will be for the Pentagon’s activities in the
conflict. Another $20 billion will be spent by U.S. states and localities.
“There is a definite food chain in all of this”, said
a defense industry official. “If you could somehow track one
single dollar through this whole process, you’d probably find
it travels through the military, defense industry, law enforcement,
public health and commercial banks, all of which have a mission
or money interest in all this. Everyone is involved in some way.”
There are constitutional and organizational reasons why the war
on drugs has been “detrimental to military readiness and an
inappropriate use of the democratic system,” said former Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger in a recent interview. In 1988, Weinberger
became one of the first high-ranking government officials to publicly
warn the nation about the problems of involving the military in
what he viewed as a domestic law-enforcement problem.
In an editorial published in the Washington Post, he warned that
cries for the use of the military made for “hot and exciting
rhetoric, but would make for terrible national security policy,
poor politics and guaranteed failure in the campaign against drugs.”
Nonetheless, Weinberger said, “Something has to be done,
and we can’t give up because it’s a difficult task.
Just because you can’t stop bank robbers doesn’t mean
you legalize them, but I would not expand the military’s role
any further than it is in civilian law enforcement.
“My preference would be for the Coast Guard to have primary
responsibility for drug interdiction and, where appropriate, cooperate
with military elements. But I do think one-half of our funds should
go to supply reduction and one-half to demand reduction.”
U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Tom Conroy described the drug war as a “steady-state
war in which the U.S. is buying time until demand reduces. We have
to do something. We can’t do nothing.”
That viewpoint infuriates Timothy Lynch, a drug policy expert at
the Cato Institute, and editor of “After Prohibition,”
a publication focusing on national drug policy. According to Lynch,
the political and military leadership should have heeded Weinberger’s
advice 14 years ago. “The military needs to be ‘detoxed’
from its current role, which is entirely inappropriate. One of the
most dangerous things is that there are now so many loopholes in
Posse Comitatus that it is little more than an assemblage of words.”
The drug policies and programs now in place, said Lynch, “have
a life of their own. ... I get so tired of hearing that ‘something
must be done,’ or ‘we are doing the best we can.’
You should never underestimate the power of inertia here in Washington.
“Who in government is going to stand up and say, ‘We
need to change direction,’ or what agency is going to turn
down funding for this? This should have been a public health issue,
not a military issue.”
Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel and a military analyst for NBC
News, told National Defense that the current national drug policy
seems destined to get the nation mired in a Vietnam-like conflict,
only this time closer to home, in Colombia. He sees parallels between
the political-military thought process that got the United States
into Vietnam and the thinking that drives U.S. policy on Colombia.
In both instances, contractors, advisors and special forces were
dispatched. “It’s formulaic,” he said.
“We can’t wait to do something stupid,” said
Allard. “Before we deploy, let’s ask some intelligent
questions,” he said. “Our [special operations] soldiers
are extremely capable, but the other guys—the guerillas and
drug producers—have an exit strategy, and we don’t.”
Special operations forces, he added, are “too easy to commit.
Drugs are not [their] primary mission.” In terms of civilian
involvement, he noted, “I believe that drugs both corrupt
the political process and the criminal justice process. That has
to be taken into account.”
A senior government official with the White House drug policy office
agreed with Allard that there are problems inherent with military
involvement in the drug war, particularly the public perception
that it’s a military driven project. “It is a mistake
to view this as solely a military problem. ... Our policy is more
akin to treating a cancer than fighting a war. Our number-one goal
is to prevent abuse, and our goal is a mix of attacking both supply
and demand.”
The uniformed services are involved in air, land and sea anti-drug
support operations. The Navy and the Coast Guard work the waterways,
and Air Force pilots in F-16s fly in hot pursuit of drug-smuggling
pilots in their Cessnas. Special operations forces are on the ground
in Central and South America, advising host government forces on
counterinsurgency techniques. They also are active within U.S. borders.
According to Brian Sheridan, principal deputy assistant secretary
of defense for special operations, they play a support role in making
“America’s citizens safe by substantially reducing drug-related
crime and violence.”
In a statement to Congress, Sheridan indicated that $95 million
was spent in 1999 supporting domestic law enforcement with excess
military equipment and foreign-language translators. The Defense
Department funded schoolhouse-training programs provided to domestic
law enforcement personnel.
The U.S. National Guard has 126 rotary and fixed-wing aircraft
dedicated to fighting in the drug war. A National Guard official
who requested anonymity indicated that, “We have 116 OH-58
helicopters and 10 C-26 fixed-wing aircraft, which are the Guard’s
counter-drug assets.” They are deployed in 32 states across
the United States for counter-drug operations. The Guard also is
looking at new technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles to
use in domestic drug operations.
Dyncorp, a government contractor, in Reston, Va., provides the
State and Justice Departments with a one-stop-shop, counter-drug
support expertise. The company supports drug-war operations at both
the front and back ends—from airborne crop-dusting in Colombia,
to asset forfeiture experts who work at 385 Justice Department sites
in the United States.
Dyncorp operates in obscure places such as the Peruvian naval base
in Pucalpa and the jungles of Colombia—where the drugs are
produced and shipped. The company is working currently under a $316
million contract for assistance and management of the Justice Department’s
“asset forfeiture program.” According to a Dyncorp spokesman,
most of the 1,000 staff members in the program hold “secret”
clearances and have been involved in more than 60,000 asset seizures
in the United States. Among other things, they provide “criminal-intelligence
collection and analysis, forensic support and asset identification
and tracking.”
Contractors such as Dyncorp and MPRI (based in Alexandria, Va.)
frequently are caricatured by the news media as “mercenaries”
run amok in the war on drugs. In a recent interview, a senior U.S.
State Department official bemoaned the fact that, “Dyncorp
and the State Department have unfairly become a stalking horse for
criticism of Plan Colombia. ... All I can say is that most of the
Dyncorp employees down there in Colombia are from Colombia and very
few are American. For their security, [all I can say is that] this
is a nuts-and-bolts support contract, nothing more.”
“Everyone calls us mercenaries, but not one person at MPRI
carries a gun, “ said Ed Soyster, a retired Army general and
MPRI spokesman. “The lieutenant general with a mission has
a hell of a lot more latitude than we do. We are held to the letter
of the law and, besides, we want to get paid. If we don’t
meet contract terms, we don’t get paid. The contract is the
failsafe for abuses. In addition, we are able to do many things
that free up the guys in uniform.” For example, MPRI manages
the Army’s ROTC program at 217 universities in the United
States.
MPRI is seeking new business opportunities from domestic law enforcement
agencies, said Soyster. “Law enforcement guys like to talk
to ‘cops’, not generals.” The company is assembling
retired and second-career law enforcement officials, such as police
chiefs and ex-drug enforcement agents, to develop “change
strategies” for the drug war.
For every step forward in the drug war, there seems to be an equivalent
step backward, officials said. The total tonnage of illicit drugs
interdicted must be measured against gross amounts that make it
into the country. According to Coast Guard Adm. Terry Cross, the
intelligence community provides classified estimates of total drug
flow into the United States. “We interdicted 11 percent of
the total amount of cocaine in 2000, which was about 60 metric tons,”
he said. “It doesn’t sound like a lot in terms of percentage
of the total, but measured in street value, it’s a lot of
money.”
Drug seizure statistics provided by the U.S. government should
be viewed carefully, said Tree, the military historian. “They
capture those who are dumb enough to get caught. After three decades
of this, we are worse off according to all public health indicators
and statistics than we’ve ever been. If you argue with their
numbers or want to change the paradigm from law enforcement to public
health, they label you as a ‘legalizer.’”
One questionable U.S. policy, according to Lynch, is the practice
that encourages a U.S. Navy warship to hoist the Coast Guard flag
before firing on a craft suspected of carrying drugs—with
the rationale that a Navy ship flying the Coast Guard flag has transformed
into a Coast Guard vessel for purposes of meeting the limitations
of Posse Comitatus. It comes perilously close to the military making
arrests,” said Lynch. “These drug policies have generated
so many obscure rules on the books that dangerous games like this
can be played.” He also questioned why the Coast Guard is
operating in waters that are far away from U.S. borders.
Coast Guard cutters operate off the coast of South America, said
Cross. Two-thirds of the cocaine is transported through Mexico,
and “our very best chance is to get it before it makes its
way into Mexico. That dictates that you make that effort a long
way from your border. No matter what we do, some drugs will get
through, but you have to send a signal that there will be a price
to pay for producing and transporting drugs and using them.”
About one-half of all cocaine seizures in 2000 were made with the
help of Navy warships, along with Dutch and British vessels. If
Defense Department assets and the military services were not committed
to this mission, said Cross, “we would not be successful by
any measure.”
Meanwhile, the White House drug policy office recently announced
that roughly 26,000 hectares of illicit drug crops were successfully
sprayed and destroyed in Colombia. Allard’s reaction is “What
does that mean?” The side effects of that operation are refugees
spilling over into bordering countries, and new coca plantations
are moving from Colombia and appearing in the northwest corner of
Brazil.
According to eyewitness accounts and the United Nations Global
Internally Displaced People Project, Colombia ranks second behind
Sudan, with 2 to 3 million refugees crossing over into neighboring
countries as the direct result of both the long standing Colombia
civil war and the U.S. drug war.
“I just returned from a trip to Colombia,” said Tree.
“Our policies are causing huge displacements of people. These
people are incredibly impoverished. If their crops are ruined, they
have few options. The soil is too acidic for the types of crops
we are forcing them to grow. They either go to the city for handouts,
move into Brazil and chop down a few acres of rain forest to grow
new crops, or they turn to the number one and two employers around:
the guerillas and the paramilitaries. Our policy is incredibly flawed.”
He traveled to a remote area, about 10 kilometers from the border
with Ecuador. It is a bleak picture, said Tree. “There’s
no sign of the state or any organized economy. There’s no
infrastructure, no newspapers, no radio. ... The first contact that
these people—who have been chewing coca leaves as part of
their culture for hundreds of years—have with the state is
with fumigation planes, helicopters, contractors and advisors telling
them to destroy their crops. They don’t understand why we
are attacking them.”