A BETTER STRATEGY AGAINST NARCOTERRORISM

It is widely recognized that access by belligerent groups to the
gains from drug production and trafficking contributes to the
intensity and prolongation of military conflict.

Also, that such groups -- terrorists, insurgents, or warlords -- grow
stronger when they successfully exploit the drug trade.

The United States' response -- its antinarcotics policy -- emphasizes
crop eradication. This strategy is too simplistic and, ultimately, ineffective.

Incorrect assumptions

Because anti-government forces can derive large financial resources
from the drug economy, Washington has given high priority to
eradication in its relations with Afghanistan, Colombia, and Peru,
among other countries. The United States also insists that other
Western countries and local governments adopt the same approach.

This view of the drug-conflict nexus, however, neglects crucial
underlying dynamics of the interaction of illicit economies and
military conflict. Consequently, it frequently undermines government
stabilization, the war on terrorism, and even, ultimately,
counter-drug efforts themselves.

The view prevailing in the U.S. government assumes that belligerents
simply gain financial resources from their access to the illicit
economy, which they can convert into greater military capabilities
and use to expand the conflict.

Consequently, the logic goes, if the government eradicates the
illicit drug economy, the belligerents will be significantly weakened
if not altogether defeated.

This narcoterrorism/narcoguerrilla thesis ignores not only the
extreme difficulties in successfully eradicating the illicit drug
economy in a particular country, but also the highly unpredictable
effects of eradication on the profits of the belligerents. Crucially,
it also ignores the important side-effect of strengthening the bond
between the belligerents and the local population.

Many terrorist and insurgents groups do in fact exploit a variety of
illicit economies, including drugs.

Depending on the locale and time period, other illegal or semi-legal
commodities include conflict diamonds, special minerals, human
beings, weapons, and illicit activities such as extortion,
kidnapping, illegal logging, money laundering, and the illicit
manufacture of passports.

Such illicit economies exist in some form virtually everywhere, both
within and outside the locales of military conflict.

Inevitably, terrorists, insurgents, and warlords exist in locales of
illicit economies and will frequently attempt to exploit them.
Examples of belligerent groups profiting from the drug trade include
the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the FARC, the
AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), the ELN (National
Liberation Army) in Colombia, the Shining Path and the MRTA (Tupac
Amaru Revolutionary Movement) in Peru, the IRA (Irish Republican
Army) in Great Britain, the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) in
Yugoslavia, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the PKK (Kurdistan's Workers
Party) in Turkey, and the ETA (Basque Fatherland and Liberty) in Spain.

Differences in the groups' characteristics affect their ability to
penetrate the international drug trade.

Territory-based organizations such as the Taliban can control and tax
the cultivation and processing of illicit crops, for example.

But it is extraordinarily hard for a loose network without a
substantial territorial base -- such as al Qaeda today -- to profit
from cultivation and processing. It is much more likely that groups
like al Qaeda will attempt to control some part of the international
smuggling routes or some aspect of money laundering. In fact, most of
the tangential evidence publicly available regarding al Qaeda and
drugs indicates that it could have penetrated the international
traffic with drugs beyond the border of Afghanistan.

A better al Qaeda strategy

If al Qaeda is in fact profiting from en route trafficking, then
eradication is a distinctly ineffective solution.

Even if all drugs in Afghanistan were eradicated, in the absence of a
large-scale reduction of worldwide demand for opiates, opium poppy
cultivation would simply shift into another territory -- the
so-called balloon effect.

The likely candidates for picking up production slack from
Afghanistan would be Myanmar, Pakistan, and the former Soviet
Republics in Central Asia. In all three cases, al Qaeda would
probably be able to maintain control of a part of the international
traffic, and if cultivation relocated into Pakistan and Central Asia,
might well be able to tax some cultivation as well. Paradoxically,
successful eradication in Afghanistan -- a pipe dream, currently --
might well make efforts to combat al Qaeda substantially more difficult.

If al Qaeda has in fact penetrated some aspect of the international
drug traffic, efforts should concentrate precisely on where the nexus
between terrorism and drugs lies in this case -- en route
interdiction -- even though interdiction is very difficult.

Efforts should also concentrate on another difficult but vital aspect
in the fight against narcoterrorism: combating money laundering.

Key misconceptions about narcoterrorism stem from a failure to
understand the full scope of the benefits that terrorists,
insurgents, and warlords derive from the drug trade.

Belligerents make much more than money on the drug trade.

They also derive substantial military tactical advantages, and
crucially, political benefits from sponsoring the illicit economy.

Financial benefits to belligerent groups are frequently in the
hundreds of millions of dollars.

Their profits grow as they move from simply taxing the producers
(peasants) of the illicit substances, to providing protection and
safe airstrips to the traffickers, to taxing precursor agents or the
final illegal commodities, to controlling parts of international
trafficking routes, to getting involved with money exchange and
laundering. These profits are used to improve military capabilities
by facilitating procurement, to increase the salaries paid to
soldiers, and to improve logistics.

The facilitation of procurement and logistics allows belligerent
groups to optimize their tactics and strategies for achieving their
larger goals. These groups no longer need to attack military arsenals
for procurement and can concentrate on strategic, and visible targets.

A successful sponsorship of the illicit economy thus speeds up the
process by which terrorists and insurgents can transform themselves
from a ragtag band of insurgents-in-hiding to a formidable belligerent actor.

Most important, and neglected by the conventional wisdom on
narcoterrorism: belligerents derive significant political gains,
particularly political legitimacy, from their involvement with the
drug economy. They do so by protecting the local population's
reliable, lucrative, and frequently sole source of livelihood from
the efforts of the government to repress the illicit economy.

They also frequently protect peasants from brutal and unreliable
traffickers, by bargaining with traffickers for better prices on
behalf on the peasants, by providing otherwise absent social services
such as clinics and infrastructure to the local population, and by
claiming nationalist credit if a foreign power threatens the local
illicit economy.

This political legitimacy is frequently very thin, but nonetheless
sufficient to motivate the local population to withhold intelligence
on the belligerents from the government if the government attempts to
suppress the illicit economy.

Obtaining this local human intelligence is one of the key and
irreplaceable ingredients for victory against terrorists and insurgents.

These three components of gain also reveal the very uneasy alliance
between narcotraffickers and belligerent groups.

The belligerent groups provide the traffickers with protection from
the government's repressive policies, with a safe transportation
system, and make sure that drug producers (peasants) deliver the
promised raw materials for the illicit commodities. In return, the
drug dealers provide the belligerents with financial benefits and
intelligence on the government's military movements. However, the
relationship is inevitably complicated by the fact that the
belligerents have multiple audiences and interests: they also protect
the population from the traffickers and bargain for greater prices on
behalf of the population, and they demand great financial payoffs
from the traffickers and seek to displace the traffickers from
aspects of the illicit economy.

Far from having morphed into an identical actor with identical goals,
the guerrillas and the traffickers frequently have many competing interests.

Accordingly, government policies should be designed to split the
tactical and rather fragile alliance between the two actors, bidding
them against each other and allowing them to undermine each other.

Getting access to drugs vastly increases the staying capacity of
belligerents. Yet weaning terrorist groups and insurgents from the
drug trade by eradication is extraordinarily difficult.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, eradication may not reduce the
financial benefits of the belligerents; rather, it might just as well
increase the international market price for the drug to such an
extent that the final revenues for the belligerents may be even greater.

In fact, it was the desire to boost farmgate prices for opium that
motivated the Taliban to undertake extensive (even if temporary)
eradication in 1999-2000.

Moreover, the extent of the financial losses to the terrorists and
insurgents also depends on the adaptability of the belligerents,
traffickers, and peasants: their ability to store drugs, replant
after eradication, increase number of plants per acre, shift
production to areas that are not being eradication, use
genetically-altered high-yield, high-resistance crops, or switch to
other illicit economies. The FARC in Colombia, for example, makes
only 50 percent of its income from drugs.

The rest comes from extortion, kidnapping, and other activities. In
Myanmar, after production of opiates shifted to Afghanistan, many
warlords and insurgents changed to the production of synthetic drugs
and easily maintained their income.

There has not been one case in which eradication bankrupted the
belligerent group to such a point that it eliminated it. The desired
impact of eradication to decrease the financial resources of the
belligerent group is far from certain and is likely to take place
only under the most favorable circumstances. Eradication increases
the political benefits to belligerent groups.

Local populations are all the more likely to support such groups and
to deprive governments of intelligence about them. Without viable
alternative livelihoods for vulnerable populations, eradication loses
hearts and minds and at the same time fails to significantly weaken
belligerent groups.

Defeat the belligerents first

If the United States is concerned about the stability of a government
struggling with narcoterrorism and the defeat of
terrorists/insurgents, it should refrain from insisting on crop
eradication until belligerents are defeated.

Drug eradication should only be undertaken once a local government
has full and firm control over its territory.

The need to control the drug problem in the United States is better
served by a combination of interdiction at U.S. borders and demand
reduction by law enforcement and treatment of addicts.

Although an interdiction policy at U.S. borders would not stop the
supply of illicit substances to the American market -- because of the
inherent difficulties of effectively patrolling such a long border --
it would eliminate the host of counterproductive effects associated
with source country eradication, and the money spent would double as
money invested in homeland defense against terrorism.

To get at insurgent/terrorist financial resources, the United States
should focus on combating international as well as source-country
money laundering, on interdicting the financial flows to the
insurgents, and on beefing up its international interdiction
capabilities. In so far as a local government can prevent insurgents
or terrorist groups from penetrating a drug-producing region, it
should of course do so, such as by establishing a cordon sanitaire
around drug-producing regions.

To the extent that source-country counternarcotics policies are
promoted by the United States, they should focus on alternative
development and interdiction. Comprehensive alternative development
that goes substantially beyond crop substitution will not in the
short run defeat the belligerent movement, but can in the long run
increase the chances for stability once the insurgents have been
defeated as well as eliminate some of the causes of the conflict.

A sequential approach, which first attempts to defeat the terrorists
and insurgents and only then focuses on the elimination of the drug
cultivation, has a much greater chance of success than simultaneously
fighting both evils.