OPINION:
COMMENTARY:
In the mid-1980s, while covering most of the developing world, I began to realize something was happening that seemed, at least at the time, counter to the common wisdom.
My American generation of post-World War II optimists had simply assumed that nations as we knew them would naturally hold together. They would brook their problems, but their coherence as organized, civilized societies and states would remain; progress was inevitable for all human beings.
But suddenly I saw, to the contrary, that many countries we had expected would continue to “work” were instead beginning to disintegrate. Our blithe, too-casual assumptions about man’s perfectible modern nature turned out to be, in truth, anti-historical.
From beautiful and supposedly stable countries like Lebanon in the late ’70s, to Iran and its violent Islamic revolution in the ’80s, to the Sikh civil war in northern India and then the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the ’90s, countries began falling apart - and violently. The idea of the “failed state” came into dark vogue.
And now, I realize, we may have unquietly, and with woefully insufficient attention, entered another new phase. Today, the failed states - violent and unruly congeries of peoples with no common principles, like today’s Somalia and the entire Congo area of Central Africa - are suddenly providing their own armies! Their chaos is becoming pervertedly militarized and a horrendous threat to those parts of the civilized world that are left.
First, take the appearance of pirates off the Somali coast - the Horn of Africa. It might at first seem as though these pirate ship attacks on oil tankers, and even pleasure ships, are a petty nuisance to the world.
But the International Maritime Bureau reports there were 111 attacks and 42 successful hijackings off Somalia in 2008. This is not only amazing in terms of the organization of these attacks, but also it means insurance and safety concerns are driving shipping companies to spend millions of extra dollars on insurance and security - and this is only the beginning.
Interestingly enough, these increasingly prevalent raids are more than random attacks by unrelated miscreants; in fact, they represent a new phenomenon that is organized and funded. The Financial Times reports, for instance, that the pirates employ “accountants” to divide up ransoms, that they follow a code of conduct, and that they pay senior members of the clans and local political groups on land. There are also larger “mother ships” to which the smaller pirate ships can retreat for sustenance.
Then there are threats closer to home, in particular the drug cartel “armies,” highly organized and violent to the point of pathological madness, that are causing so much pain and chaos in Mexico, right on the American border.
The U.S. Defense Department recently told The Washington Times that the situation is rapidly approaching civil war, that Mexico’s two most deadly drug cartels together have fielded more than 100,000 foot soldiers, and that this is “an army that rivals Mexico’s armed forces and threatens to turn the country into a narco-state.” Mexico has 130,000 soldiers under arms.
If this is true - and there is every indication it is - then the big cartels (Sinaloa cartel, Los Zetas, Tijuana cartel, Juarez cartel and Beltran Leyva organization) are indeed becoming counterstates or, as some are calling them, “shadow governments,” with their own militaries at their disposal, fighting the nation-states.
A similar evolution has happened historically in many countries, after colonialism, for instance, where the vicious liberation movements became the governments; and it is beginning to happen in Africa already, as in Guinea-Bissau on the West Coast of Africa, where the recent assassination of the president is believed to have been carried through with the involvement of Latin American Colombian drug cartels. (The United Nations estimates that more than $1 billion in cocaine goes through the tiny “state” of 1.5 million impoverished people.)
Indeed, there already are “new armies” inside the United States with the development of gangs, in particular Mexican-American street gangs with origins in the old barrios of Los Angeles and other California cities.
Recently, for instance, the attempted assassination of a South Carolina deputy sheriff, Ted Xanthakis, was initiated by the Surenos gang or SUR-13, whose members were supposed to “kill a cop” for admission to the gang. There are innumerable other examples.
Why does the world not do something about this? Is there anything the world can do about this, or are the supposedly “stable” states themselves in various processes of economic, political and social disintegration that prevent them from acting?
William S. Lind, a brilliant and tough-minded military analyst who wrote the original Marine Corps book on irregular warfare, wrote in his recent column: “Piracy is a barometer of two related qualities in the world of states: the state’s belief in itself and the state system, and international order. … The failure of states to follow ancient law and precedent in dealing with Somali pirates says nothing about the pirates. But it speaks volumes concerning the weakness of the state. … When not even states’ elites believe in the state anymore, why should anyone else?”
The storm that he sees coming could well be a social, political, economic, military and psychological tsunami. Our military, with its dependence upon big weaponry and its incapacity to understand the psychology of its enemies, is particularly incapable of dealing with such a phenomenon.
Our civilization is being threatened every day by new, innovative and uniquely destructive threats. If we can’t sink some poor pirate ships off nonstate Somalia, one wonders what we can do.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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