Tell me if this sounds familiar.

The U.S. trains paramilitary forces to fight war against American enemies. Trained forces fight U.S. enemies, but later change sides or comprise a different and often greater menace. U.S. forces find themselves fighting combatants that they themselves trained.

Take a guess at what country I’m talking about.

Afghanistan?

Good guess. Try again.

Iraq?

Not as good a guess as Afghanistan, but not bad.

The Afghans were our surrogate soldiers against Russia in the early 1980s. We armed them and trained them as best we could. We even instructed a young Muslim Jihadist named Osama Bin Laden.

We also supplied and trained some of Saddam Hussein’s forces in their late-80’s campaigns against Iran and, when we went over there for the first Gulf War, we faced some of the very same weaponry we’d provided them just a few years earlier. But that was a long time ago.

The success of the late Bush Administration surge in Iraq had nothing to with anybody we trained. It was primarily achieved by paying enemy combatants to stay home and keep carnage on the down-low so things could settle down and we could look good in the press.

The most recent example of Uncle Sam turning our half-earned tax dollars into attack animals that turn on their handlers isn’t happening in the Middle East or the Money-Pit on Terror. It’s happening right here in North America, and some of our southern border states have a front row seat.

The core of the Zetas, a drug-muscle splinter group that used to do the dirty work for the Gulf Cartel, was trained in special ops, counter-narcotic ops, counter-insurgency, light to heavy weapons proficiency and covert communications at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, by the U.S. 7th Special Forces group in the mid to late 1990s. They worked for the Mexican Armed Forces for awhile, but the good guys didn’t pay enough, so they switched sides. Then they decided they could run things better than the Gulf Cartel and now they’re the scariest border presence in the Mexican drug war. Whole towns exist without law enforcement. Whole cities are afraid to go out after dark.

The Zetas don’t spare women and children; the Zetas don’t even spare pregnant women.

Boy, we sure know how to pick ‘em. When is Uncle Sam going to stop using psychopaths as errand boys? Shouldn’t we finally admit that Uncle Sam is something of a psychopath?

Hold those thoughts.

What if we simply met with our former trainees in the Zetas and offered to pay them to kick back with Tecates at the beach in Matamoros or Veracruz? It worked in Iraq.

Even better, what if we recalibrated their American-trained, psychopathic blood lust to once again work in our favor.

Right now the drug trade across the US-Mexican border is considered to be worth $20-$40 billion and the Zetas don’t have a big piece of it. Illegal immigrants are bringing unwanted attention to border drug channels and our efforts to stop them have been about as effective as the Army Corps of Engineers’ levees in New Orleans. The “gringo’s little helper” trade has to cross our southern border, so why don’t we simply enlist the Zetas to police both flows of traffic?

A serious contingent of their operation is our baby. Why not bring it into the fold and kill two birds with one stone. The Zetas want more of a foothold in the narcotics market and we don’t like their friends and neighbors sneaking over to have babies and steal our jobs. If the Zetas controlled the border, they could get our drugs to us with less expense and headache and we could start getting baked for a song. And their fellow countrymen would remember their handiwork on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Valley and be too terrified to cross them, much less the border, especially if the Zetas started stitching their skinned faces on soccer balls or placing the heads of woman and children on pikes at all the border crossings.

Heck, we could even make the Zetas a government-subsidized branch of Blackwater (a.k.a. Xe Services, LLC) and then their ruthlessness would be legitimized.

God Bless American ingenuity.