Comparer l’Afghanistan et le Mexique

Comparer l’Afghanistan et le Mexique

Bernd Debusmann, un commentateur important de Reuters qui s’intéresse beaucoup à la situation de guerre G4G sur la frontière entre les USA et le Mexique, présente une analyse inédite d’une comparaison entre l’effort US en Afghanistan et l’effort US à la frontière mexicaine. On trouve ce texte sur Reuters, le 30 juillet 2010.

«The United States is spending around $6.5 billion a month on the war in faraway Afghanistan, where a large part of its effort is meant to help the government assert its authority, fight corruption and set up functioning institutions.

«Closer to home, the U.S. has allotted $44 million a month to help the governments of its closest neighbours – Mexico and Central America – assert their authority, fight corruption and set up functioning institutions.

»The two cases raise questions about American priorities. If money were the only gauge, one might draw the conclusion that it is 147 times more important for Washington to bring security and good governance to Afghanistan than to America’s violence-plagued next-door neighbours — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

»In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez alone, 6,000 people have died in the past two and a half years, a number that dwarfs the military death toll of Afghanistan since the war there began in 2001. Central America, according to a U.N. report, has become the region with the world’s highest murder rate, an average of about 1,300 a month. […]

»Most of the blood-letting is blamed on drug traffickers fighting each other and the state, and on armed disputes between rival criminal gangs. To help the governments in America’s backyard tamp down the violence, then President George W. Bush signed into law, in June 2008, a three-year $1.6 billion security cooperation agreement, the so-called Merida Initiative. (So named after the Mexican city where it was hatched).

»What effect has it had, so far? Virtually zero, largely because very little of the assistance in training and equipment the U.S. promised has been delivered. In July, a report by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of congress, found that just nine per cent of the agreed total had been “expended.”

» “Deliveries of equipment and training have been delayed by challenges associated with insufficient number of staff to administer the program, negotiations on interagency and bilateral agreements, procurement processes, changes in government, and funding availability,” the GAO said. In other words: things got stuck in red tape.»

dedefensa.org