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Notes -
A war on drugs is much harder to wage when you must at least nominally abide by constitutional protections of the legal rights of the enemy and conduct the war through the standardized channels of the domestic justice system. Hunting the cartels would have none of these restrictions; the NSA and CIA and other alphabet soup agencies could be off the leash de jure rather than merely de facto, and there would be no need for legal entanglements of any kind. This does not make such a campaign a good idea, but if it's a bad idea, it's for reasons other than these in particular.
You are correct in that -- the voting public would be willing to tolerate foreign civilian collateral damage in a way they won't when the victims are US citizens.
However, foreign operations face different challenges. I gather it is harder to get good intelligence on the operations of the Taliban than on the operations of some US based drug lord. Arrests of low tier enemies give can give you insights that you can't get from just bombing people.
The common theme on the domestic 'war on drugs' and a potential war on the cartels is that the number of people who are willing to risk their freedom and lives to make a fortune selling drugs when there is an opening in the market seems near endless.
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