Congressional critics of President Donald Trump’s tactics in the war on drug cartels are badly confused. Because the Department of War, instead of the Drug Enforcement Administration, is now engaging the cartels, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are demanding that the U.S. follow rules of engagement for combat with foreign armies. Those rules, which stem from the Geneva Conventions adopted in 1949 and expanded in subsequent years, are not the rules that apply to our attacks on drug-smuggling vessels off the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela.
Trump’s certification of several drug cartels as terrorist organizations means the rules of engagement that apply are distinct from those that apply in conventional warfare. They have evolved over the past 50 years for specifically dealing with terrorism.
When I first studied terrorism at Oxford in the mid-1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t even have an office on terrorism. Analysts at the agency had just begun studying the phenomenon and producing papers trying to define this stateless merger of militancy, ideology, and often religion.
Most governments, especially ours, treated terrorism as a criminal offense. Fighting terrorism meant preventive measures were limited to tightening security. Jailing terrorists was a matter of gathering evidence, capturing suspects, and putting them on trial.
When terrorists struck, as the Palestinian group Black September did at the 1972 Munich Olympics when it killed two Israeli athletes and took others hostage, there were no rules of engagement for fighting terrorism. First responders at the Munich Olympics were Bavarian police equipped to handle criminals but utterly untrained for engaging militant groups. Their rescue attempt ended in disaster when Black September slaughtered every hostage.
The West German government quickly responded by creating GSG-9, the world’s first military unit devoted exclusively to combating terrorists. Four years later, the U.S. military formed Delta Force, our anti-terrorist equivalent to GSG-9. It took two more years before the CIA established its first Office of Terrorism in 1978, and my late friend Howard Bane became director.
But the law enforcement paradigm for dealing with terrorism prevailed. Howard’s attempts to respond quickly to developing terrorist incidents were badly hampered by agency lawyers. On one occasion, when he tried to dispatch CIA technical teams to Latin America to help a friendly country’s security services deal with an unfolding hostage situation, they were held up for half a day en route while the agency’s legal team debated whether or not the incident constituted a domestic or an international terrorism case.
By the time another friend of mine, Duane Clarridge, became director of the CIA’s first Counterterrorism Center in 1986, federal law had begun to catch up to terrorist tactics. In 1986 and again in 1996, America’s ability to reach beyond our shores in pursuit of terrorists expanded steadily. It became easier to deploy CIA and FBI assets overseas.
But the law enforcement approach to dealing with terrorism was always one step behind ever-evolving terrorist tactics. That meant we were often hamstrung by legal red tape in dealing with new threats.
Sept. 11, 2001, changed the rules of engagement for terrorism. Instead of a criminal matter, it became a national security priority. Special rules of engagement were developed that differ substantially from the rules of engagement for war.
Most notably, assassination was authorized, not only against known terrorists but also high-ranking individuals in terrorist organizations who may not yet have committed any crime. This was no longer a case of proving guilt before inflicting punishment. It was about systematically disabling and dismantling terrorist groups by targeted killings.
Sometimes those killed were American citizens. Drones were used, and so were Special Forces. Often, the assassinations included more than one kinetic “strike” to ensure that the terrorist member was, in fact, dead.
When Seal Team 6 encountered Osama Bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan, he was shot more than once. Accounts of who precisely shot him vary, but the details of his death are consistent. He was hit at least twice and wounded. Then he was shot in the head and killed.
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton watched from the White House Situation Room. So did Leon Panetta, Obama’s director of the CIA. None of them found anything wrong with the killing of Bin Laden and the other terrorists in his compound.
Panetta changed his tune on targeted terrorist attacks when he appeared on NBC Nightly News this week and sanctimoniously pronounced the second strike on a narco-terrorist drug vessel a war crime.
FISHY SMELL COMES FROM DEMOCRATS, NOT FROM DRUG BOATS
The number of U.S. teenagers killed by fentanyl over the past five years is almost double the number of Americans killed by al Qaeda on 9/11. Many other innocent Americans are direct victims of cartel violence. In 2019, nine members of the Langford family were killed in an ambush outside San Miguelito, Mexico. Three women and six children, all U.S. citizens, died in the attack. Five more children were wounded, and one managed to save her life by fleeing into the desert while the slaughter took place.
In Mexico alone, drug cartels are believed to have killed 200,000 people. The cartels’ staggering death toll has been tolerated for far too long. Trump deserves applause for changing the rules of engagement.
John B. Roberts II is a former Reagan White House official, international political strategist, and executive producer of The McLaughlin Group.