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What The War On Drugs Teaches US About The War On Terrorism

"This is a different kind of conflict," said General Richard B. Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Pentagon briefing in October.
He was speaking of the war on terrorism. "The closest analogy would be the
drug war." Since September 11, comparisons between the two wars have been
rife: Both are said to involve an elusive and resourceful enemy capable of
inflicting tremendous damage on the United States; both are cast as a long,
drawn-out struggle that requires concentrated efforts on multiple fronts;
and both are led by a powerful "czar" authorized to knock heads, challenge
budgets, and mobilize resources.

Heaven help us. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure.

Every year, the federal government spends almost $20 billion to fight
illicit drugs.

It has tracked planes in Peru, sent helicopters to Colombia, installed
X-ray machines along the Mexican border, and sent AWACS surveillance planes
over the Caribbean. Yet drugs continue to pour into this country.

Cocaine today sells at record-low prices and heroin is available at
record-high purity levels.

And despite the 1.5 million drug arrests made every year and the 400,000
drug offenders now in prison, the level of addiction in the United States
remains stubbornly high. So to the extent that the war on terrorism
emulates the war on drugs, we're in big trouble.

Is there another way? Over the past 10 years, I've studied the drug war on
various fronts: from the coca fields of the Andes to the smuggling zones
along the Mexican border to the drug-ridden neighborhoods of New York and
Washington, D.C. And that experience leads me to believe that the war on
drugs offers valuable lessons on how--and how not--to fight the war on
terrorism.

Consider, for instance, the idea that in fighting terrorism we should focus
on its "root causes." Such an approach was succinctly described by Philip
Wilcox, Jr., the U.S. ambassador at large for counterterrorism from 1994 to
1997, in the October 18 New York Review of Books. To respond to the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with military force, Wilcox
asserted, would simply generate more terrorism.

Instead, he wrote, the United States should adopt a foreign policy that
"deals not just with the symptoms but with the roots of terrorism, broadly
defined." America, Wilcox continued, should seek to moderate the
"conditions that breed violence and terrorism" through efforts to "resolve
conflicts"--especially the one between Israelis and Palestinians--and
through "assistance for economic development, education, and population
control."

A similar case has frequently been made with respect to both the production
and consumption of drugs.

The world's poor, who cultivate drugs for export, need better economic
opportunities. And to reduce the level of drug abuse in America, we need to
address the socioeconomic conditions that generate it. Studies suggest that
drug abuse is especially prevalent in disadvantaged communities and that
programs to create jobs, provide housing, and raise the minimum wage could
help shrink the pool of potential addicts.

Clearly, though, such programs would take many years to bear fruit.

In the meantime, drug abuse--and all its attendant harms--would flourish.

So, too, with terror.

America does need to address the poverty and desperation that fuel the
fires of Islamic fundamentalism, just as it must overcome the
foreign-policy legacy that makes the United States a target. Yet solutions
to these problems may take decades to unfold-- and in the interim, the
Osama bin Ladens of the world would be free to wreak their havoc.

In the short run, a more direct antidote is needed.

Stubborn Roots

For some, that antidote is "going to the source" of the problem.

Here, too, there are clear echoes of the drug war. In the case of
terrorism, the most immediate source, of course, is bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
But as President Bush has said, the war on terror "will not end until every
terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." And
there has been general agreement that a revived Central Intelligence Agency
should be a principal policy instrument. The agency's ability to gather
intelligence and to carry out covert operations, it's said, makes it an
ideal institution to combat terrorism. Writing in The Wall Street Journal,
Herbert E. Meyer, a senior CIA official during the Reagan years, decried
the agency's recent passivity and urged it to become more aggressive, as it
was under William Casey, his former boss. "We smuggled weapons to freedom
fighters throughout the world, we smuggled bibles into the Soviet Union
itself, and we mined harbors in Nicaragua," Meyer wrote.

Such tactics, he asserted, helped to bring about the collapse of communism
and could vanquish terrorism, too.

David Ignatius, in a Washington Post column, praised the CIA's
Counter-Terrorism Center in Langley, Virginia, for its covert capability
"ranging from paramilitary operations to the sort of dirty tricks and
political subversion that can overthrow governments supporting terrorism."
Even Seymour Hersh, who has written so extensively about U.S. misadventures
abroad, blamed the U.S. government's failure to detect September 11 largely
on a weakened CIA. Ruing a 1995 directive that discouraged the use of
recruits with unsavory records, Hersh wrote in The New Yorker that
"hundreds of 'assets' were indiscriminately stricken from the CIA's
payroll, with a devastating effect on anti-terrorist operations in the
Middle East." In recent years, an unnamed senior general told him, "we've
been hiring kids out of college who are computer geeks.

This is about going back to deep, hard dirty work, with tough people going
down dark alleys with good instincts."

According to the Post, the administration has already added more than $1
billion to the CIA's antiterrorism budget--much of it for new covert
actions, including the killing of specified individuals. "The gloves are
off," one senior official told Bob Woodward. "The president has given the
agency the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that
were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway."

For those of us who have covered the drug war, this also sounds
depressingly familiar.

For nearly three decades, the United States has attempted to fight drugs by
attacking them at their "source": the countries that cultivate, produce,
and smuggle them. Leading this effort has been the Drug Enforcement
Administration. In the mid-1980s, the DEA's main target was Pablo Escobar
and the Medellin cartel; together, they were said to control as much as 80
percent of the cocaine entering the United States. In 1993, after years of
wiretaps, spying, and raids, the Colombians, helped by U.S. operatives,
finally managed to corner and kill Escobar. And the Medellin cartel
disintegrated along with him.

Their demise did produce some short-term benefits.

In the world of Colombian drug traffickers, Escobar stood out for his
brutality, and his death led to a temporary fall-off in the number of car
bombs and political assassinations. Yet the vacuum left by the Medellin
cartel was quickly filled by the rival Cali cartel.

Another problem is the culture of the FBI. The recent string of scandals at
the bureau--from the Waco cover-up to the Wen Ho Lee investigation--does
not inspire confidence. And the bureau's reluctance to share information
with other federal agencies and with local authorities has hindered many
investigations. In the first case of anthrax to hit New York City, at NBC,
the FBI did not immediately inform the city about the letter that was
thought to be suspicious--an oversight that infuriated Mayor Giuliani. At a
congressional hearing in late October, Giuliani called for legislation that
would increase the sharing of information between federal and local
law-enforcement agencies.

Such bureaucratic fragmentation has generated fresh ideas about new
institutional arrangements for fighting terrorism.

Despite their qualms about the new police powers legislated in the name of
antiterrorism, even some civil libertarians support consolidating federal
intelligence efforts in a single agency.

Morton Halperin, a longtime leader of the American Civil Liberties Union,
told an October 16 forum sponsored by The American Prospect that he favored
creation of one agency that would be both more effective and more accountable.

Jack Riley, a counterterrorism specialist at the Rand Corporation, adds
that "when you start looking at where the gaps are in U.S. efforts to fight
terrorism, they are probably easier to fill here than overseas." The CIA
could still supply the FBI with foreign intelligence. As long as the two
agencies continue to function separately, however, it's hard for them to
piece together a comprehensive picture of how terrorists operate both here
and abroad and coordinate forces to confront them.

What is needed, Riley says, is a seamless new organization that brings
together counterterrorism specialists from these two institutions as well
as from other federal organizations. Investigators, intelligence analysts,
financial wizards, customs specialists, communications whizzes, immigration
experts, liaisons to foreign and local police departments--they all need to
be joined together in a new agency with one overarching goal: preventing
future terrorist attacks in the United States. In the end, Riley adds, we
need "a terrorism equivalent of the DEA."

My initial reaction on hearing this was to shudder.

For in fighting the drug war, the DEA has been singularly ineffectual.
Despite the huge increases in its budget and staff over the past 20 years,
it has failed in its mission to reduce the supply of outlawed drugs in this
country. That's because the drug problem in America is at heart a
public-health problem--one that no amount of arrest and prosecution can
contain.

But terrorism is different.

It's a highly lethal threat directed by calculating criminals at America's
very core, and it must be confronted with every available weapon.

The new Office of Homeland Security, whose duties seem to encompass
everything from stocking smallpox vaccines to bolstering airport security,
is too diffuse and weak to carry out the task at hand. For that, America
needs an entirely new and independent body--a Terrorism Prevention Agency.
And given the hopelessness of the war on drugs, frustrated agents from the
DEA could be assigned to it. At a new TPA, they might actually be able to
do some good.