Hope is not a plan

While we're sending an additional 3,000 troops to Kuwait, the Mexican government is sending 3,000 soldiers and police -- backed by 28 boats, 21 planes, and 9 helicopters -- to Tijuana to deal with a spate of murders there (more than 300 in 2006).

BBC article

An independent panel led by former Liberal minister John Manley has suggested that Canadian troops should remain in Afghanistan "indefinitely," if several key conditions are met. Specifically, he recommends that the Canadian contribution to ISAF should be removed at the end of the current Canadian mandate (that ends in February, 2009) unless:

• NATO sends 1,000 additional troops to support Canadian forces in southern Afghanistan
• More military equipment and training are provided for the Afghan army

This report, assembled under the leadership of a Liberal party loyalist for the current Conservative government is expected to carry a lot of weight, especially as the Liberal party is directly opposed to the war effort. Whether the rest of NATO will be willing to pony up the additional troops and supplies is, however, uncertain. As we have seen, George Bush has historically been unwilling to send troops to Afghanistan even when his own officers are begging for more reinforcements, and the Marine Corps has suggested that they could do a lot of good there.

Canada has been an important participant in the war against the Taliban and their associates in Afghanistan, and they've taken concomitant losses as a result - 77, which is on par with UK casualties in that theatre (for reference, the war in Afghanistan has led to 87 UK deaths and 480 US deaths).

BBC article

Casualty counts from the Operation Enduring Freedom Fatalities Page at icasualties.org.

In a commentary piece reprinted on the Rand site, Brian Jenkins asks if Mexico could become a failed state, and offers some reasonable if currently unpopular suggestions for ways to boost what is in many ways our closest neighbor:

The United States could, of course, take two bold steps: It could dramatically reduce the Mexican traffickers' profits - and therefore their power to corrupt - by treating drug consumption as a social problem and investing more in domestic demand reduction and treatment, as many policy-research studies have recommended. Source-country control and interdiction are the costliest and least effective components of the US war on drugs. As long as US demand remains high, criminals will draw huge profits.

The United States could also move to legalize and fully integrate the more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, the majority of whom are from Mexico, and adopt a system of work visas that reduces the need for running the border and takes the profit out of human smuggling. Thus far, the United States has addressed illegal immigration from a legal and economic perspec-tive, but there is a national security aspect to it, as well. It is simply not in the national security interest of the United States to have a floating underworld population of 12 million people who are vulnerable to blackmail and other pressure. The security of the nation would be better served by legalizing and fully integrating them into society, however unpopular that may be with certain sectors of the American electorate. In any case, neither of these approaches seems likely to be implemented.