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With American attention diverted to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis and a hard-fought national election, national security experts have largely overlooked the bitter countercartel war in Mexico. But that war, which is beginning to overlap the U.S. border, is only the forerunner of an even more serious threat. Sometime in the near future a lethal combination of transnational terrorism and criminal gangs is going to cross the U.S. border in force. According to some, it already has, and we haven’t even noticed.

Concern about transnational terrorism and organized crime is nothing new. The collapse of the Cold War spurred the growth of international gangs newly freed from state controls and made available on the gray market enormous quantities of arms and arms-related materials. At the same time, revolutionary groups in South and Central America began diversifying from social revolution into the enormously profitable drug trade that serves North America, turning thousands of trained soldiers into drug mercenaries in the services of organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and others. In Mexico, powerful criminal families began organizing the cartels that today are challenging the Mexican state. At the same time, criminal gangs — the hired guns of the Mexican cartels — began a period of exponential growth, in Latin America and in the U.S.

One gang in particular, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, is prototypical of the gangs’ particularly bloody and widespread growth. MS-13 originated in El Salvador and Los Angeles from demobilized veterans of the Salvadoran civil war. Since the 1980s, MS-13 has spread throughout the U.S. to Washington, D.C., Oregon, Alaska, Arkansas, Texas, California, Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Canada and elsewhere. MS-13 traffics in any kind of illegal trade, but principally in drugs. It enforces discipline by the crudest tortures, terminating in death by dismemberment for informing or attempting to leave the gang. The second-greatest concentration of MS-13 in the U.S., after Los Angeles, is in the Washington, D.C., area, where a large immigrant youth population provides recruits and a supportive culture. MS-13 is a particular, extremely violent and disciplined international organization, far more deadly than the local gang-bangers who hang around the 7-Eleven flashing their 9mm handguns and worrying parents.

CRIMINAL TERRORISM SURGE

The present surge in international crime and criminal terrorism — an accurate description — would be mostly a matter for the police and Interpol had it not been for two other phenomena of the late 20th century. The first, of course, is the growth of international terrorism for religious or political purposes with some state sponsors, principally Iran, and, in this case, the growth of Islamic radicalism south of our border. While some religious extremism is clearly nihilistic, much has a political objective — especially terrorism sponsored by Iran, whose foreign policy appears to be an admixture of Islamic fervor and Iranian geopolitical maneuvering. Latin America is not immune to Islamic influence, since there has been a considerable Muslim immigration to that region, particularly since the Lebanese Diaspora began in the last decades of the 20th century. As a result of immigration and proselytizing, Islam has become one of the fastest-growing religions in Latin America; more than 6 million Muslims live in South American cities, many of them dispossessed and subject to radicalization. In specific locales — particularly the tri-border area between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil around the town of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay — fundraising for Hezbollah, al-Qaida and possibly Hamas takes place amid an environment of drug and arms trafficking, money laundering and other illicit activities. Mario Baizan, a former Argentine presidential adviser, described the town as “one of the world’s biggest centers for financing of the pro-Iranian militant group Hezbollah.” The tri-border area, the Andean Ridge countries bordering Colombia, and routes north through Central America and Mexico are checkpoints on routes for drug, arms and human traffic moving north toward the U.S. border.

ANTI-AMERICAN SOCIALISM

The second phenomenon has been the rebirth of virulently anti-American socialism in South America, led by Venezuela under its charismatic leader, Hugo Chavez, and his growing alliance with state-sponsored terrorism. While the tendency in U.S. circles is to view Chavez as something of a buffoon placed temporarily atop a modern and friendly state, his term in office has lasted sufficiently long to inspire like-minded anti-American movements in other Latin countries and, more significantly, for Venezuelan money to open official doors to Iran, Syria, Cuba, Russia and other countries generally opposed to the U.S. Strengthened trade and technology agreements, with Iran, including weekly Iran Air flights between Caracas, Damascus and Tehran, put Chavez’s government solidly in control of a state increasingly involved with movements that support terrorism throughout the world, especially in South America.

Chavez’s openly friendly and supportive ties with the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah have made Venezuela a base for Hezbollah activities throughout the hemisphere. One authority has noted, “Venezuela under Chavez has become a safe haven and launching pad for radical Islamist activities in the Western Hemisphere.” Gen. Marcos Ferreira, a former director of the Venezuelan National Guard’s border control, said the Chavez government has issued false identities and Venezuelan passports to a large number of terrorist operatives. And news investigations have found that Middle Eastern terrorist groups — among them Hamas, Hezbollah, and Gama’a Islamiyya — are operating support cells in Venezuela and other locations in the Andean region.

These four factors — the post-Cold War tidal wave of international crime, the growth of international criminal gangs and cartels in North and South America, international terrorism’s enclaves in South America, and Latin states friendly with terrorist organizations and their sponsors — are all combining to threaten core American security interests in new ways. Further, the threat is inside the U.S. now. With regard to gangs alone, a recent conference on counterterrorism and criminal gangs noted that “criminal gang activity is a national security threat today. ... It is presently challenging civil order in some contested areas in the U.S., and could continue metastasizing into a more serious threat in three areas; as an active challenge to civil order itself (as in Mexico today), as an enabler or support network for terrorist attacks in the U.S., and by establishing a permissive, lawless environment that passively supports anti-U.S. activity.” Gang relationships with terrorists are difficult to pin down, as gangs and terrorists operate beneath the radar of most U.S. defense planners. Gang and terrorist “crossovers” have occurred previously, most famously in the case of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. As the relationship between criminals and terrorists continues a sort of dialectical change, attacks by combinations of terrorists and violent gangs are taking place today south of the U.S. border and are migrating through various channels across the border into the U.S. itself.

Thus far, the reaction of U.S. defense planners to this combination of thugs and terrorists inside and outside our borders has been mostly tactical: understandable concern for the effects of chemical or biological attacks, the threat of assassinations and so forth. However, it is past time to recognize the growing combinations of crime and terrorism as a strategic challenge as serious as any armed attack by a conventional nation-state. In fact, the challenge may be even more serious than a conventional war, because many of the combatants are inside the U.S. today, conducting unrecognized “asymmetric warfare” against the U.S. and its institutions. The challenge, then, as planners deal with the tactical issues, is to recognize this lethal combination of crime and terrorism as a strategic threat to the U.S., sort out, in conjunction with our allies in the hemisphere, an approach to defeating it, and then find the resources to do so. Here are some starting points.

First, as the professor said, we have to define the problem. The same blend of outlaw behavior that threatens civil order in Mexico is closely related to the destabilization of emerging states in West Africa. The Taliban gangs that move drugs to European drug markets are related in spirit, if not in kind, to pirates off the Somali coast. Mexican cartel members, Colombian drug gangs and Hezbollah terrorists all operate, and relate to one another, in an environment that either is hostile to state controls or, more commonly, seeks to make the state a so-called “empty shell” that supports their activities. Empty shells produce ungoverned spaces, in the sense that state controls don’t exist, but the rules laid down by the cartels, or by Hezbollah, or by MS-13, do exist. Ultimately, the drug wars in Mexico are about who actually rules in Mexico City or Juarez. And those spaces exist in the U.S. today — ask any police officer.

In this struggle to expand and control ungoverned spaces, political boundaries, which matter a lot to governments, military forces and police departments, only matter to the crooks and terrorists because they can exploit them as weaknesses. As one experienced anti-gang policeman said, “When we ran ’em out of New York, the murder rate went up in New Jersey.” More strategically, Colombia’s FARC narco-guerrillas exploit sanctuaries in neighboring states. Both examples are directly related.

NARCO-TERRORISM

It is impossible to address any of the current threats — insurgencies, terrorism, drug cartels or criminal gangs — without recognizing the social pathologies that make them effective in modern times, whereas in another time they might never have reached a level of violence that enables them to challenge a state. The first pathology, of course, is the drug culture and the enormous drug market inside North America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. The billions and billions of dollars of illicit cash that flows from drug sales, and the struggle for markets and the world’s drug routes, is enormous. Drug profits underlay much of the world’s above-ground economy, from the more opulent lifestyles of the developed world to small villages and businesses in Africa and South America. In many states, drug profits are the leading cause of wealth. Clearly, if drug profits are creating an actual threat to the U.S. — and they are — something more than military action or police work will be necessary to attack the social and economic conditions that support them. Any military planner will recognize this as a counterinsurgency challenge.

Next to the scope and spread of the drug business, al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations are smaller and less pervasive, but obviously still a threat to the U.S. and to civil order worldwide. For many such organizations, though, liaison and cooperation with the drug business began early; Colombia’s FARC, Peru’s Sendero Luminiso, the Taliban in Afghanistan and even al-Qaida all have incorporated drug money into their finances, and all have cooperated, at one time or another, with drug kingpins or been kingpins themselves. For some, the drug business and terrorism are so intertwined that distinctions are meaningless — as in the case of FARC, for example. Drug money, and other funding from sympathetic co-religionists, coupled with either religious or ideological extremism, is the fundamental enabler for the so-called “global guerrilla,” or terrorist, of today and of tomorrow.

Finally, the global combination of illegal wealth and extremism with weak, struggling or corrupt governments delegitimizes the idea of the Western-style state, the rule of law and democratic, progressive societies. In societies ruled by drug cartels or religious extremists, power structures differ radically from the modern state’s notion of secular law, equal rights and due process. Instead, we find the power of the caudillo, the mullah or the most powerful local thug. In some cases, though, dictatorially run governments can, in fact, make the trains run on time and ensure social services to those who before had been the victims of official corruption or abuse. Hamas won the Palestinian elections of 2006 largely because it had proven itself to be a relatively more honest and effective supplier of services to the majority of Palestinians, who were repelled by the corruption and inefficiency of Fatah, the “statist” party. The same goes for the early Taliban in Afghanistan. Because individual needs may be addressed more rapidly by dictators, the legitimacy and even desirability of the messier, slower and more error-prone concept of democratic government is under pressure today as never before. Democratic government is losing its allure.

If drug gangs, religious terrorism and a concomitant declining faith in representative government are security challenges facing the U.S. today, the first and most essential step toward a comprehensive solution is to recognize the extent of the challenge. This is irregular warfare on a global scale, against enemies who could have written the book on asymmetric challenges to the U.S. and its allies. Like irregular warfare waged in more conventional countries, counterstrategies must include not only military forces, but also diplomatic, political, social and economic elements as well, all integrated into a national and international response. Bureaucratic barriers to effective coordination — for example, between the Defense and State departments, or between the State and Justice departments, must be minimized.

With regard to diplomatic and other initiatives, some prioritization will be necessary to discriminate which countries might pose the greatest threat to the U.S. if their territories become staging grounds for cartels, gangs and terrorist movements that directly threaten us. In this case, Mexico and other countries to the South move to the top of the list. Mexico is a special case, because of its location along the U.S. southern border, its modern state infrastructure and its particular history with the U.S. It is fighting a virtual civil war against drug cartels that derive most of their funding, and a large amount of their arsenals, from illicit activities inside the U.S. Because Mexico has a special relationship, support to its government must be discrete, generous and apolitical; issues of immigration, business development and internal social reform cannot be divorced, either in America’s executive branches or Congress, from the critical issue of Mexico’s survival and U.S. national security. After Mexico, the survival and stabilization of other key Central and South American states — among them continuing our support to Colombia — must be prioritized and executed. After the Western Hemisphere, the drug and terrorist-vulnerable states of West Africa, particularly Liberia and Namibia, should be considered.

Military support to diplomacy is perhaps the most easily discussed, since the American military establishment has been learning the hard way for the past several years about support for political strategies, irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. At a fundamental level, confronting drug gangs and religious extremists in Central and South America will call for the most sophisticated U.S. support for counterinsurgency strategies. The first, and most important, rule in counterinsurgency is this: The U.S. will not win counterinsurgency wars in someone else’s country; it can only help someone else win counterinsurgency wars in their own country. In the case of the southern cone states, U.S. military involvement has an emerging success story in Colombia. But not all Central and South American states, if any, will require or want that level of U.S. support. An upgraded ability to provide security assistance when requested, and to manage military assistance and training discretely, will likely be the extent of U.S. military involvement. It is important to note, though, that for most countries whose stability is threatened by terrorism and gangs, effective counterinsurgency boils down to intelligence collection and analysis and police work, two fields in which U.S. security assistance is weakest and, in the case of police training, generally barred. Congressional action is needed in this and other areas to make security assistance more useful to countries whose stability is threatened by narco-terrorism.

SOLUTIONS WITHIN

Inside the U.S., many agencies, including the Border Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, are supporting counterterrorism, counterdrug and countergang operations. But the front line of anti-gang and anti-terrorism work in America’s federal system remains local police forces supported by local jurisdictions — counties, towns and cities — that are outgunned and outnumbered, in many cases, by international gangs such as MS-13 and local copycats. Local police forces, whose operating budgets come from county and city commissions under fire to cut taxes and economize, are normally caught between fighting serious gang crime — conducting a type of local counterinsurgency operations — and the other law enforcement functions that fall normally to local cops. In one locality, an excellent gang intelligence unit — unusual in itself — keeps paper files on local gangs because its antiquated data management systems fail too often to be trusted. Serious federal assistance to local police forces — in manpower, information sharing and regional coordination — is overdue.

Beyond police work, though, U.S. lawmakers must begin to address social and domestic issues that support the gang and drug culture — and thus provide ungoverned space for terrorism — as a matter of national security. Immigration reform is an excellent example of a national domestic issue intrinsically involved in international gang culture that must be addressed. Prison reform is another — overcrowded prisons that warehouse minor offenders next to hardened gang members have become gang universities that take in amateurs and produce hard cases. Improvements in education, work-force development and other social priorities are no longer stovepiped issues, but have become part of the challenge of isolating and eliminating a drug and crime culture that has become a national security challenge.

None of this is easy, and all of it is “irregular.” The enemy follows no rules, wears no identifiable markings — except perhaps gang tattoos — and attacks his objectives only indirectly, by undermining the opponent’s will to prevail. There is no single enemy network to attack, or hostile command and control system. In many cases, American security experts continue to be unaware of the threat posed by the axis of international gangs and terrorists, overseas and within America’s own borders. Much more can be said. But the challenge now is to recognize the threat, comprehend its many dimensions and better coordinate the counterattack.