A Better Strategy Against Narcoterrorism

By Vanda Felbab-Brown, AlterNet. Posted February 14, 2006.

[Editor's Note: This essay is part of a series of Audits of the Conventional Wisdom, a project of the Center for International Studies at MIT.]

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.

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a a Ph.D. Candidate in MIT's Department of Political Science and a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

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