With ‘drug boat’ strikes, Trump leans into war on terror tactic against cartels

At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, FBI Director Kash Patel celebrated the Trump administration’s labeling of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and told lawmakers the United States should go after narcotraffickers like it did al-Qaida in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“We must treat them like the al-Qaidas of the world because that’s how they’re operating,” Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Targeting cartels with law enforcement alone has failed to destroy them, he said, adding that the U.S. needs to bring other tools to bear.

“In order to eliminate them, and that’s the key —eliminate the drug trade and eliminate the pouring into the country of narcotics — we have to use authorities at the Department of War and the intelligence community to go after the threat like we did terrorists when we were manhunting them,” Patel said.

The administration has provided few details on the scope of its anti-cartel campaign, but it has adopted — at least in part — the blueprint of military strikes from the global war on terrorism that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The White House has trumpeted a series of lethal strikes — three and counting — against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea.

After the first one, President Trump posted online a black-and-white video that shows a fast-boat speeding through open water before bursting into flames. He said 11 suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were killed, but the administration has not provided any evidence to support its assertions.

After the second strike, Trump was asked by reporters about providing evidence that the boat was indeed carrying drugs and posed a threat to the U.S.

“We have proof. All you have to do is look at the cargo, it’s spattered all over the ocean. Big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” he said.

He added that the government also “recorded evidence” but he did not elaborate.

The administration has said the president took action under his Article 2 powers as commander in chief and in self-defense.

Questions about threats to U.S.

But experts and some lawmakers have condemned the strikes on civilian narcotraffickers as illegal, extrajudicial killings.

Luca Trenta, a professor at Swansea University in Britain who studies U.S. foreign policy and covert action, said the administration’s military strikes in the Caribbean represent a massive escalation in the use of force, and suggest the president can target whomever he wants, whenever he wants.

“It’s a really bad thing if the president of the United States can decide that a group of civilians that might pose some kind of remote threat can be killed without any form of due process because who is to say what group will be targeted next?” Trenta said.

During the global war on terror, the U.S. targeted al-Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups under the legal authority passed by Congress after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The U.S. conducted military strikes in active conflict zones but administrations also stretched that authority to target groups outside such areas if a particular group was deemed a military threat to the U.S., Trenta said.

“None of this would apply to the current situation due to the nature of the target and the lack of a threat that the target was posing,” he said.

In the case of the Trump administration’s first strike in the Caribbean, an individual briefed on the attack told NPR the boat had turned around and was returning to shore when it was hit, raising further questions about how it could have posed a direct threat to the U.S.

The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Loss of intelligence

There are also questions about whether the war on terrorism blueprint would be effective against drug cartels.

“Certainly, the lethal strikes off Venezuela are an unprecedented change in U.S. actions,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The U.S. has had a lot of interdiction in the Caribbean across many decades, and that interdiction has focused on arresting people, manning the boats and seizing cargo. This has generated intelligence.”

“The thing that’s different now is not that there is interdiction, but that the interdiction seeks to kill people, not arrest them,” she said.

Felbab-Brown is skeptical about the Trump administration’s claims that the military strikes will stop the flow of drugs or create a deterrent effect, preventing people from joining drug trafficking organizations or running drugs to the U.S.

She said lethal strikes in the post-9/11 war on terror didn’t deter people from joining those terrorist groups, and in places like Pakistan and Somalia, she said, the strikes drove some to join extremist groups.

As for drug traffickers, “they face a tremendous amount of risk already,” she said, including arrest and imprisonment, as well as the chance of death at sea.

For years, the U.S. has interdicted suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean, seizing cargo, arresting crew members and interrogating them for information on their networks, bosses and political patrons.

In the case of Trump administration’s first drug boat strike, officials have said publicly the U.S. could have intercepted the vessel but decided to blow it up instead.

Losing the intelligence gained from those arrests, Felbab-Brown said, is a “real downside” to the lethal strikes.

Ripple effects down the line

During the war on terror, the U.S. generally conducted drone strikes on terrorist targets because the local government would not or could not arrest the suspected terrorists, or because sending in U.S. forces was deemed too politically or militarily risky, said Daniel Byman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But lethal strikes were always pitched as an alternative to arresting people, he said, “because when you arrest someone, you could question them, gather information and in so doing, you could stop the next attack or find the next leader.”

Still, American intelligence and military officials generally view the lethal strikes on terrorist groups like al-Qaida as effective for a range of reasons, he said.

“They weakened the leadership, they created disorganization within the group, they forced it to hide,” Byman said. “And as a result, there were far fewer attacks.”

In the case of the Trump administration’s anti-cartel campaign, he said, there was the option, at least in the first strike, of boarding the vessel.

“You could try to arrest the people and try to get information — but it seems that killing them, rather than being the last resort, was the first resort,” he said.

There’s also a slew of possible ripple effects from the administration’s use of force.

Felbab-Brown says criminal groups could shift to land-based smuggling routes, but such changes have sparked turf wars.

“Traditionally, any kind of changes to smuggling routes in Latin America or in the Americas more broadly have been accompanied by high levels of violence,” she said.

There’s also the possibility of public backlash if U.S. strikes kill innocent civilians, as happened during the war on terror.

“There were innocent people who died,” Byman said. “Even when intelligence was pretty good, which i think it was in most of the counterterrorism era, it’s never perfect.”

He added that no country likes being bombed, and U.S. strikes could trigger a nationalist backlash. He also points out that in Latin America there is a lot of sensitivity to U.S. military force because of the long history of American interventions in the region.