Mexico Deploys Troops to Outskirts of Mexico City

“This deployment may represent another “firebreak” crossed concerning the criminal insurgencies taking place in Mexico.”

Two points:

1. All insurgencies are criminal. Otherwise they would not be insurgencies. All insurgencies are also political in purpose.

2. No criminal organization that has profit as its primary purpose is an insurgency no matter how much it comes to challenge government in the pursuit of those profits.

When we conflate these two purpose-based categories simply because most political insurgencies tend to employ criminal enterprises to fund their movements, and just because most large criminal organizations tend to generate a disruptive effect on government, we lose sight of the aspects of each that we must focus on to achieve success. Such conflation leads to strategies of tactics aimed at defeating the symptoms of an organization’s activities, and diverts focus away from programs aimed at reducing their very reason for existing in the first place.

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than the existence of these organizations that some label as “criminal insurgencies” is the very activity of applying that label and thinking of those organizations in that confused context. How we categorize problems should be based upon their primary purpose for action, and that category should suggest the family of activitiy best suited to resolving the problem they cause.

COIN against a profit-focused criminal organization is as inappropriate as conducting a law enforcement campaign (or “war”, in most cases) against a politically-focused insurgent organization. Tactics, Techniques and procedures will often apply to each problem, but the context and the overall framework of approach must be completely different to achieve any kind of durable effect.

I realize it is a snappy term that gets people’s attention. But it is inappropriate, illogical, unhelpful and dangerous. That all trumps “it sounds cool.”

respecfully,

Bob