The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion The next 9/11 might come from Mexico, Pompeo says

By
Contributing columnist
January 24, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EST
Spent bullet casings litter the ground near a house in Jesús Maria, Mexico, on Jan. 7. (Martin Urista/AP)
4 min

As bad as news from the U.S. southern border has been lately, Mike Pompeo warns that it might get much, much worse. His insights as secretary of state and CIA director during the Trump administration are causing him to warn of a possible nuevo-once, another 9/11 — this time arising from chaotic regions of Mexico.

Pompeo sounds the alarm in his new memoir, “Never Give An Inch.” For some reviewers, the most timely content will likely be Pompeo’s denunciation of the double standard that applies when it comes to handling classified material. Written before the drip-drip-drip of President Biden’s documents scandal — “Garage-gate,” anyone? — the text foresees the lengths to which many in the media would go to minimize the offenses of a Democrat compared with former president Donald Trump.

Let’s hope Pompeo is not as prescient about the lawless regions of Mexico. “Every American should know that today, the United States faces significant ungoverned spaces close to places such as El Paso, Phoenix and San Diego,” Pompeo writes. “Significant parts of Mexico are no longer policed by the central government,” he adds. “There are entire well-armed militia forces — the private armies of Mexican criminal syndicates — that impose their gangland rule without government interference.”

American audiences of the TV series “Breaking Bad” or the novels of Don Winslow have a sense of the Mexican cartels but not necessarily an understanding of the real-world threat they pose to the United States.

Already, overdose deaths and addiction related to fentanyl and other opioids is a crisis that claims hundreds of American lives every week. There were more than 107,000 overdose deaths in 2021 and “drug traffickers are increasingly mixing fentynal with other types of drugs — in powder and pill form — in an effort to drive addiction and attract repeat buyers” according to Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram. Precursor chemicals to fentanyl are thought to be manufactured primarily in China, but the manufacture of the drug overwhelmingly occurs in the “ungoverned spaces” of Mexico.

That’s not the only threat, however. “My assessment is that Mexico as a safe haven and launching point for terror operations inside the United States is a serious possibility within the next ten years,” Pompeo concludes.

He’s not alone in these thoughts. Republican Reps. Dan Crenshaw (Tex.) and Michael Waltz (Fla.) are Special Operations forces veterans of the war that became necessary when similarly lawless regions of Afghanistan became home base for al-Qaeda. They’ve introduced a congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the Mexican drug cartels. The proposed AUMF would give the president “authority to use all necessary and appropriate force” to strike at the nine cartels named in the resolution.

Crenshaw and Waltz are no batty backbenchers. They are serious thinkers about national security who believe conditions are so dangerous that a military response might be necessary. Pompeo would no doubt vote for such a resolution were he still a member of the House representing Kansas.

Pompeo reminds his readers that Trump saw this coming when he mused about “flying drones into Mexico to take out the cartels with missiles.” The criticism was predictably harsh. “Leftists at CNN and MSNBC prattled on about how this would violate Mexican sovereignty,” Pompeo writes, “which they seemed to care about more than our own.” Like anyone paying attention to facts and not just personalities, Pompeo knows the threats posed by border lawlessness go far beyond the numbers of migrants passing through from Central American countries.

But don’t imagine that this will be easy. The deeper the United States was drawn into Afghanistan, the murkier the lines became between our enemies and our allies. We don’t want to find ourselves years from now sending our fighters to knock down one cartel after another, only to realize that we’re doing the dirty work for their competitors. As long as demand for drugs in the United States remains high, bad and dangerous people will be drawn into the extraordinarily profitable world of international narcotics trafficking.

America’s need to control its southern border — and the Biden administration’s failure to do so — will be a defining part of the 2024 election. Bound up in that conversation will be fentanyl and terrorism, as well as refugees and undocumented arrivals. To borrow a phrase from the summer of 2001, the lights are blinking red. We can’t say we weren’t warned.