OP-ED: Obama's Other War on Terror: Mexico (Telegraph, UK)

The note left next to the severed heads of the eight soldiers and state police chief was chillingly direct. "For each of mine that you kill, I will kill 10 soldiers," it read.

It sounds like the sort of gruesome tactic deployed by Islamic terrorists in Iraq. But this horrific scene occurred last month near the main road from Mexico City to the popular tourist destination of Acapulco on the Pacific coast. The soldiers were kidnapped as they left a nearby military barracks and then decapitated in apparent revenge for an army firefight with a narcotics gang in a nearby town that left three drug smugglers dead.

Mexico's rapidly escalating drug wars claimed nearly 6,000 lives last year in a country more commonly associated with sun, sand and ancient ruins than narco-terrorism. Much of the bloodshed is concentrated along the US-Mexican border, where the violence is spilling across the 2,000 miles of shared frontier. Beheaded and mutilated corpses and mass graves turn up on a near-daily basis, often in the heart of cities such as Cuidad Juarez and Tijuana, once-thriving border communities that are now the terrifying fiefdoms of the cartels.

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