If you're looking for a good read, and one that confirms what you may have suspected about the international war on drugs, I heartily recommend Mark Bowden's recent book Killing Pablo. You may know Bowden from his previous book, Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 debacle in Somalia that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead. Killing Pablo hasn't received as much attention in the press, but it's every bit the equal of Black Hawk Down.

In Killing Pablo, Bowden tells the story of the U.S.-led effort to kill Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. As he did in Black Hawk Down, Bowden tells it straight, without editorializing. But you'll bristle at the wasted resources and moral compromises involved in the whole sordid mess.

After an 18-month long manhunt involving Delta Force, CIA, and the U.S. Army's "Centra Spike" spy team, a group of Delta-trained Columbian paramilitaries called the "Search Bloc" finally killed Pablo Escobar. That's nothing to cry about. As the book makes clear, Escobar was every bit as bad a guy as U.S. propaganda made him out to be. But just about everything else in this story is tragic. The drug war is devastating the rule of law and the political culture in emerging democracies to our south. And it's doing so in service of a crusade as futile and immoral as any in recent American history.

The drug war enriches men like Pablo Escobar by giving a competitive advantage to distributors who specialize in violence. And the members of Pablo's Medellin cartel were certainly specialists. They routinely assassinated politicians, judges, and reporters, kidnapped and killed members of the Colombian elite, and occasionally buried their enemies alive or (an Escobar specialty) hung them upside down and set them on fire.

Fighting dirty often elicits a response in kind, and that's what happened in this case. In the midst of the manhunt, a clandestine death squad called "Los Pepes" emerged, and began murdering Escobar's associates, relatives, lawyers, and even his lawyers' families. It's unclear whether U.S. officials helped create Los Pepes, but it is clear that American authorities were criminally complicit in the gang's operations. As Bowden notes, Los Pepes somehow got access to charts prepared by U.S. intelligence, listing key players in the Medellin cartel. The hits carried out by Los Pepes corresponded neatly to the charts. In the name of the drug war, U.S. operatives became accessories to murder.

Eventually, the Columbian "Search Bloc" killed Pablo. But killing Pablo didn't do much more than clear the field for the Cali cartel, and after that, the North Valley Cartel. A policy of targeting drug manufacturers and distributors contains the seeds of its own undoing. By shrinking supply, you raise the price, thus sending a signal to ever-more criminal entrepreneurs that profits can be made in the drug supply business. You also bring about all the unpleasant social consequences attendant to deliberately enriching violent criminal distribution networks: gang warfare, corruption, organized crime. And all the while the drugs keep flowing across the border as long as Americans want to use them. Cocaine shipments from Colombia continue to hit record levels: an estimated 450 tons last year, almost twice the level of 1998.