Mexico v. AfPak

TW: I would put this one in the food for thought category, not to be taken too literally but interesting nevertheless.

From Economist:
"THERE is this third-world country that's both a major producer and transition zone for drugs, that has a long, difficult-to-control border through rough, arid terrain where populations that share a common language and ethnicity on either side seem to transition freely, where the police are so lawless and ineffectual that the government has to replace them with regular army troops, where local government is so corrupt and so enmeshed with the warlords who control the drug trade that some people are talking about devolution to failed-state status, and where open gun battles raging on a near-daily basis between army troops, drug warlords, and civilians have killed thousands of people so far this year; and it’s not Afghanistan.

Over 1,800 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year in the city of Ciudad Juarez alone, right across the border from El Paso, the Guardian reports. Local newspapers call the situation "criminal anarchy"; a government human rights investigator who recently fled to El Paso to escape death threats suspects many of the executions represent "social cleansing" by the Army, murdering drug addicts, street kids, and other vulnerable targets. For Mexico as a whole, there have been roughly 9,000 drug-related murders so far this year. One political scientist points to the 120,000 soldiers who deserted from the Mexican army between 2000-6, saying many have "joined the enemy"...

So, what should America do? Should we deploy troops to northern Mexico, employing an extensive counterinsurgency strategy to hunt down drug gangs and protect local populations, and send thousands of aid workers to establish jobs programmes and reduce corruption in the Mexican government? Most Americans would treat such a proposal as absurd. And rightly so. The job of suppressing drug gangs and reasserting the legitimacy of the state in Mexico is a task that will be carried out by the Mexican state, and America can only play a limited role in assisting that, particularly given the long and touchy history of American interference in Mexican affairs.

And yet for some reason we believe that American policy is capable of accomplishing things in Pakistan and Afghanistan that we would never dream it could do in Mexico, even though Mexico is right next door. Nobody in America is under the illusion that some policy shift by America is going to solve all of Mexico's problems on any timeframe, let alone one of a few years. We have a healthy recognition that problems like the drug trade and the gun trade, the unhealthy interdependence of America's desire for cheap labour and Mexico's low levels of economic development, and the shaky legitimacy and effectiveness of local Mexican governance in many places are long-term, intractable problems. We recognise this because Mexico is right next door. The place feels real to us; it's not some kind of abstraction we can remake in our optimistic fantasies. It would be encouraging if the Obama administration adopted a similarly realistic attitude towards its aims in Afghanistan."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/10/nation_building.cfm