himalmag.comhttp://himalmag.com/lessons-never-learnt/
The lessons never learnt
By Tom A Peter
9 April 2014
The US’s contractors in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were frequently embroiled in fraud and abuse. Now they are looking for business in the US.
Flickr/ DVIDSHUB
Seated at a comfortable café in El Paso less than a mile from the United States-Mexico border, Josiah Heyman becomes exasperated speaking about the border security news
du jour. Heyman, an academic at the University of Texas at El Paso, has followed the border security story for decades. He takes a sip of coffee, sucks some excess brew from his overgrown moustache and recaps the issue.
Smugglers often tunnel under the 1954 mile/3144 km-long border to bring drugs, weapons, and people into the US. In one of the most significant tunnel operations, US border enforcement agents seized 32 tons of marijuana. While many of the tunnels are basic, professional engineers construct some of the more advanced underpasses, which can cost several million dollars to build. In the last 25 years, about 170 tunnels have been found.
Finding tunnels still largely requires old-fashioned intelligence work or luck and a keen eye, but the Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) announced that they would begin using robots to search the tunnels they discover. The robots promise to keep CBP agents out of harm’s way, as tunnels often collapse and have poor ventilation, and CBP officials say they do the job more efficiently than a human.
For Heyman, it isn’t a question of whether the robots would work, but whether the growing fascination with technology along the border actually addresses the problems they aim to fix.
“It’s much easier to think that technology is going to solve the problems with tunnels – which are a real issue – than that millions of people are going to decrease their use of drugs”, he says.
