The second chapter of that novel could begin thusly:

BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: Security sources said today that an intelligence official was killed following an armed attack against him west of the capital, Baghdad.

The source told Aswat al-Iraq that the assassins crossed his road and shot him dead.

No other details were given.

Maybe one of those Scandinavian mystery novelists my wife is always reading needs to move to Baghdad.

[Insert here a lame joke about finally understanding certain TRADOC papers.]

Actually, the bust is not as wacko as it seems. From what I've seen, many people working in drug and alcohol abuse are people who have experienced problems themselves, and some of them do have relapses. So, ironic but not funny. (HT to http://court-martial-ucmj.com/)

Mexican drug boss Tony Tormenta ("storm" in Spanish) went out Butch Cassidy-style in a running firefight the other day across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Not only automatic weapons, but also grenades, were involved. Final score: Drug gang lost 4, Mexican marines lost 3, with one observer, a Mexican reporter, also killed. Border bridges were briefly closed.

Speaking of violence against journalists, a leading Russian reporter got his legs, jaw and fingers broken by someone who apparently disliked the attention he has given to political extremist groups. It takes real courage to write honestly about politics in today's Russia.

Here's a report from my friend and CNAS colleague Bob Killebrew, who has been hanging out in Colombia. It sounds like the we could learn a thing or two from the Colombian government. 

By Col. Robert Killebrew (U.S. Army, ret.)
Best Defense Bogota bureau chief

That the United States has had to painfully re-learn the lessons of counterinsurgency is by now a staple of strategic culture; the story of Gen. David Petraeus and our new counterinsurgency manual is well known even in places that wouldn't know a guerrilla from a traffic cop. 

What we don't yet fully understand is that the nature of insurgency itself is changing. In a sense, Iraq and Afghanistan are only the beginnings -- call them "insurgency 101" -- of a dialectical change in warfare that is locating crime, terrorism and insurgency in a shifting network of state and nonstate actors that will make fighting "insurgents," or drug cartels, or violent gangs, much harder for status quo states like the United States. In the hemispheric-wide narco-war that now covers North and South America, the Mexican drug cartels and their fellow travelers - including the Venezuelan government and their Iranian allies -- the only success story so far is Colombia, and some of their lessons are worth considering.   

First, context. Colombia had had a rocky time in the 20th century with its military establishment. By the late 1970s, the military existed virtually outside the government as part of a compromise deal to keep the generals happy and the politicians away from security issues.  As a result, when the Marxist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) began to make inroads in the 1980s, military action was divorced from the political life of the country, and though the military was fighting a war against the FARC, it was losing because the fighting had no political context. So a painful lesson the Colombians had to learn was to bring the military into a political relationship with the rest of the government, and for the government -- not just the generals -- to take ownership of the war.  

Read on

Here's a comment from our drugs ‘n' violence reporter, who lately has gone all "old media" and has been moonlighting for the Washington Post's op-ed page.  

By Jennifer Bernal-Garcia
Best Defense cocaine cartels correspondent

The new issue of Foreign Affairs features an article by former DEA Administrator and former CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner titled "The New Cocaine Cowboys - How to Defeat Mexico's Drug Cartels." It provides a great overview of the factors that led to the current situation in Mexico, covering pre-existing corruption but also the incremental efforts of the past three presidential administrations to try to curb cartel influence. It also, however, misses a number of points that would have made it truly timely and therefore falls short of providing a true outline for government success.

Bonner makes three main assertions. First, Mexico can learn important lessons from Colombia's struggle against its own cartels in the ‘90s. It is a more apt comparison than the Plan Colombia period, as has been already pointed out by scholars like Vanda Felbab-Brown of Brookings. Basically, fighting very fragmented cartels requires the skillful use of law enforcement against every level of their organizations.

Read on

I didn't realize that the U.S. military still gives jail time for marijuana use. I wonder if it was because this case involved an officer. 

Stars & Stripes reports that a Navy doctor, Lt. Cdr. Anthony Velasquez, who had been accused of molesting female patients, pleaded to some charges and was given a deal in which most of the charges were dropped -- and he wound up not doing any time, and his fine was suspended.

Somebody wearing Navy stars has some ‘splaining to do.

(HT to the IC)

A few days ago a former Mexican presidential candidate apparently was kidnapped. Yesterday half the police force in a town quit after two of their colleagues were ambushed. Attacks on the political and security systems look like an insurgency to me.

This looks like a classic candidate for an inter-agency wargame: How could the various arms of the U.S. government, from military to legal to diplomatic, economic and political, help the people of Mexico? 

Here is a report review by a CNAS colleague of mine.

By Jennifer Bernal-Garcia
Best Defense illegal drugs correspondent

I sat down recently with the 2010 National Drug Threat Assessment  NDTA), which came out last month. Bottom line up front: good on thoroughness, bad for your morale.

Some takeaway points:

While the failure of the "war on drugs" is an oft-rehashed theme, the NDTA goes into specifics. The availability of most illegal drugs -- heroin, marijuana, meth and MDMA -- throughout the country is increasing, mostly as a result of ramped-up production in Mexico. Apparently the costs resulting from lost productivity associated with drug abuse, the burden on the justice system, and the environmental impact of drug production are a staggering $215 billion.

Read on

Gunmen killed two Americans and a Mexican associated with the staff of the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez.

"The cartels are already in full operation in the US in most cities, wake up Americans! It is your problem too, it is your OTHER war," comments "Jen" in Mexico.

Here's a guest post from Jennifer Bernal of CNAS regarding a recent Washington Post article about Mexican cartel operations inside the United States:

By Jennifer Bernal
Best Defense Drugs, Crime & Terror Beat Reporter

The story caught my eye because beyond outlining the mind-boggling scale of certain Mexican cartel operations in the U.S., it illustrates a key question when fighting them: Does fragmenting groups ultimately make detecting and dismantling them easier or more difficult? In Mexico, Felipe's Calderon government has been repeatedly criticized for trying to take on all the country's drug cartels at once with agencies that did not have the capacity to do so. It is argued that the extreme flexibility of the cartels simply allows them to reconfigure, and they end up striking back with more horizontal and unruly violence.

The story of the Flores brothers shows how associations between domestic gangs and international drug trafficking organizations can spring up in ad hoc ways, which contributes to easily-shifting alliances. In the case of the Flores brothers, their father and older brother ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel. While the article does not explicitly state whether the brothers joined a local Chicago gang like the Latin Kings or the Two-Six, it's easy to speculate that they would, with their family ties providing the necessary bridge between the two types of groups.

Read on

The Mexican navy, operating far inland, whacked a major drug lord. (Apparently the navy has good intelligence and is less corrupt than other security forces.) I think the situation in Mexico is shaping up as something less than a war but more than a criminal action. What to call it? Given Mexico's location, this should be of more than academic interest to the United States government and its military. My CNAS colleague and mentor Bob Killebrew is doing a study on the merger of crime and terrorism in Mexico and other western hemisphere nations.

Jesus Alcazar/AFP/Getty Images

For all you national security law junkies, here's a firsthand report from my CNAS colleague Jennifer Bernal on the American Bar Association's two-day long annual hoedown on National Security Law. (I know, what was second prize?):

There was one panel that I made not sure not to miss: 'Narco-violence Along the Border,' correctly -- in my opinion -- flagged as 'an emerging issue in national security law.'

I work on issues related to this narco-violence at CNAS, so I found the fact that this issue was prominently featured at the ABA conference both striking and encouraging. Now, as with most unsettling geopolitical phenomena, one can argue at different levels whether and how the situation in Mexico poses a national security threat to the United States. (The 'failed state' argument that an unstable southern neighbor is inherently detrimental to U.S. security versus the view that only considers direct attacks on the U.S. homeland, and so on.) What is certain is that the drug war in Mexico now routinely spills across the border. (It's why cities in places like Arizona are now tremendously unsafe, with drug-related kidnapping rates that have tripled in the past eight years.)

As the panel moderator put it: To what extent should we deal with drug-trafficking groups with the same methods we use with terrorist ones? How should the U.S. government handle the line between law-enforcement and intelligence- and military-oriented responses? Given a national legal framework that depends on formal categories (citizen vs. non-citizen, state vs. non-state) and the ways in which drug violence and associated problems repeatedly defy them, the answers are complicated indeed.

Unfortunately, the panel fell flat of my expectations by omitting to address these questions completely. The preceding discussion, 'Legislative Update on Developments in National Security Law,' was as jargon-y as you would expect from its title, setting my expectations for the upcoming one. Yet -- and as ironic as this sounds -- what was missing from the panel on narco-violence was a discussion of, well, law. What we got instead was a very thorough run-down of the situation in Mexico. The panelists discussed mounting death tolls (more than 5,600 casualties in 2008 alone), the alarming amount of manpower and firepower wielded by cartels, the chaotic nature of the confrontations between them, as well as the ways in which the U.S. exacerbates the conflict (drug demand and gun supply). Most of this information was on point, but it never evolved into a policy discussion.

Fact: most people don't know as much as they should about Mexico. (This became painfully obvious during a low moment in the panel when the speaker asked the audience a number of very basic questions about the country, to astounding general silence.) There's value to informing people. Yet I would have hoped for more from a discussion hosted by the ABA. Even what is arguably the biggest and most obvious legal question when it comes to policies to curb U.S. drug demand, the de-criminalization of marijuana, emerged as an afterthought in the very last question of the Q&A. Really?

Certainly, even just getting the facts right is important. It's also why I'll take this chance briefly to discuss two particular items of misinformation that I hear cited at just about every turn. I don't mean to claim that they're the most important, only that they keep coming up and require clarification.

(Read on)

A veteran Special Forces trainer, one-time Sgt. 1st Class Kelly Stewart, fluent in German and knowledgeable about evasion techniques, is convicted in Vilseck, Germany, of sexual assault and kidnapping, and then sent to a hotel room escorted only by a sleepy member of his unit? And the Army is surprised that he takes off and disappears in the black Audi Q5? (But he eventually saw the light and turned himself in. But apparently not before taking some poison that wound him up in intensive care at Walter Reed. This guy is out to beat the astronaut lady who wore Depends.)

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images