Over the past several months, drug-related violence in Mexico has been soaring, accelerating an already alarming trend of rising drug-related deaths and contributing to what one former U.S. official has called “a decade-long bloodbath.” More

In the summer of 1975, I took off hitchhiking from the mountains of southwest Virginia to visit a college girlfriend in New England. Less than 300 miles into the trip, my thumb lost whatever magic it once possessed. After striking out for six hours on an Interstate ramp in Hagerstown, Maryland, I hoofed to the nearest Trailways bus station and bought a ticket to Connecticut. More

There has never been progress by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, unless you are asking the U.S. military contractors or the Afghan drug barons, of whom an extremely large share are our allies in the Afghan government, militias and security forces, there has only been suffering and destruction. American politicians, pundits and generals will speak about "progress" made by the 70,000 American troops put into Afghanistan by President Obama beginning in 2009, along with an additional 30,000 European troops and 100,000 private contractors, however the hard and awful true reality is that the war in Afghanistan has only escalated since 2009, never stabilizing or deescalating; the Taliban has increased in strength by tens of thousands, despite tens of thousands of casualties and prisoners; and American and Afghan casualties have continued to grow every year of the conflict, with U.S. casualties declining only when U.S. forces began to withdraw in mass numbers from parts of Afghanistan in 2011, while Afghan security forces and civilians have experienced record casualties every year since those numbers began to be kept by the UN. More