Fighting transnational terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and its various offshoots—and even more localized terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and al-Shabab requires effective international collaboration. Counterterrorism, therefore, is a prime collective-action function of the United Nations and other global and regional multilateral institutions.

Yet those multilateral institutions with broad membership and cumbersome decisionmaking and accountability processes have often produced sluggish responses—even paralysis—in authorizing (let alone directing) timely and effective action against terrorists and their allies. The frustrations are contributing to growing skepticism as to the future of multilateral security institutions and operations. But the perceived necessity of combatting terrorism has also been the mother of inventive, if not always ideal, mechanisms through and around the institutional blockages.

The balance sheet on cooperation

In the absence of adequate collective efforts to stanch trans-border terrorism, there are new pressures to resurrect national barriers to the movement of people and goods. This risks reversing the recent evolution away from the sovereignty-über-Alles Westphalian international system. One consequence of persistent terror threats has been the resurrection of various border controls within the European Union, in effect rescinding the Schengen agreements among most of the EU countries, plus Norway and Switzerland. It has also created temptations to go it alone, with some countries resorting to unilateral actions such as bombing raids against terrorist camps to avoid dealing with the inhibitions, different threat perceptions, interests, and commitments of presumed counterterrorism partners.

But effectively countering terrorists who can inflict lethal damage across national borders demands cooperation among states whose civilian populations are targets. Ideally, such multilateral cooperation will be multifaceted and worldwide. And ideally, it would include capabilities for anticipating, intercepting, and capturing or killing those engaged in or responsible for terrorist acts. The multilateral arrangements can be of great practical value, giving those actively engaged in counterterrorist action access to their partners’ intelligence and territory. Multilateral endorsements and collaboration can also be of crucial political value, in sharing the costs and risks of the operations and providing them with legal and moral legitimacy. 

But there’s another side of the multilateralism coin: it can be slow. Partners must agree on when, against whom, how, and with what rules of engagement a counterterrorism action is planned. This can be problematic when swift and extremely secret responses to pending or ongoing threats are needed. The international checks and balances may be good for accountability, but they can also have bad paralyzing effects.

Case study: Afghanistan

How, then, to maintain the burden-sharing and accountability virtues of multilaterally-endorsed and conducted counterterrorism while minimizing its susceptibility to debilitating gridlock? 

Most important, the governments doing battle against terrorism need to adapt their arrangements with each other to the volatility of the current polyarchic world, where many diffuse centers of state and non-state power keep proliferating. 

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the subsequent Resolute Support arrangements in Afghanistan are a good example of an adaptive and innovative multilateral military counterterrorism alliance. No doubt, the alliance arrangements aren’t perfect, reflecting the constraints and limitations inherent in international collective action arrangements, now further complicated by the emergent polyarchic relationships. This has generated frustration among coalition partners, and particularly in the United States. Nonetheless, as even the unilateralism-happy administration of George W. Bush quickly learned, they were still better than solo action.

The 9/11 attacks set in motion a large and complex multilateral security operation. For the first time, NATO invoked Article 5 of its founding treaty—the collective defense clause. The Bush administration sought the legitimizing function of NATO endorsements for its counterterrorism responses, including the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida and topple the Taliban regime. 

The international checks and balances may be good for accountability, but they can also have bad paralyzing effects.

Yet the Bush administration was determined not to allow U.S. counterterrorism operations and alliance leadership to be encumbered by NATO’s unwieldy procedures, especially the NATO Council’s consensus rule that effectively gives all members veto power. Moreover, the immediate military response to 9/11 consisted of a small and presumably nimble special operations deployments to work in tandem with forces in Afghanistan. But that largely solo action with a grab-bag of local proxies turned out to be insufficient. Although international forces toppled the Taliban regime within two months, the Afghan proxies turned out to be highly unreliable allies for continuing the fight. 

It became clear that a much more robust, accountable, and internationalized force was needed to stabilize a post-Taliban Afghanistan. U.S. representatives and military commanders were creative in “working” the NATO system so that it did not interfere with the ISAF’s semi-autonomous operations (after August 8, 2003, ISAF was formally but not actually subordinate to NATO). Outside of the NATO and ISAF frameworks, the CIA and U.S. special operations forces undertook their own missions. A favored approach was to ensure that NATO mandates to ISAF and/or U.S. commanders were vague enough to allow for flexible implementation that aligned with U.S preferences.

Running a 42-country, political-military, counterterrorism-counterinsurgency coalition is a systemic challenge that requires some imagination. There are lots of different interests, as well as varying levels of commitment. Skillful diplomats and pragmatic military commanders devised mechanisms for avoiding the collective action frustrations. That required, to some extent, living with restrictions on national deployments. To be sure, those restrictions fueled not just inhibitions but resentments on the battlefield (for example, U.S. soldiers complained that ISAF stood for “I Saw America Fight”). But without flexibly accommodating divergent allied interests, many fewer countries would have contributed at all.

Moreover, although particular countries were specially relied upon for the performance of ISAF’s various missions (routing out al-Qaida, preventing the return of the Taliban, and state-building), any country’s opting out of its assigned role would not collapse the whole operation, and the abandoned role could be performed by another country. 

[T]hese arrangements will usually have to be negotiated between the participant countries at the level of operational commands, rather than imposed hierarchically from national capitals.

Better than the alternative

The ISAF operations in Afghanistan have hardly been an unqualified success. The counterinsurgency and state-building efforts are struggling, and the survival of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban political dispensation remains precarious at best.

Still, the Afghanistan case shows the burden-sharing virtue of multilateralism. But specificity is key: collaborative arrangements need to be functionally-specific for a particular set of countries and carefully defined to suit their capacities (rather than amorphous or open-ended). Another lesson for future multilateral collective security operations is that these arrangements will usually have to be negotiated between the participant countries at the level of operational commands, rather than imposed hierarchically from national capitals. This will help flag implementation problems early on and make other adjustments in a timely manner.

The kind of modular mode of multilateralism we’ve described here is imperfect and requires careful management. But it is by far the better approach—practically and morally—than either the debilitating paralysis of overly-ambitious and highly-institutionalized collective action, or the resentments generated by largely unaccountable unilateralism. 

      

 

 

Vanda Felbab-Brown writes that after more than a decade of struggles against al-Qaida and the Taliban, U.S. President Barack Obama hoped to extricate the United States from participating militarily in Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency. But as the end of his presidency approaches in the summer of 2016, Afghanistan again faces crisis. Very few trends in the country are going well. The U.S. drone killing of the Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in Baluchistan, Pakistan in May 2016 provides a fillip to the embattled Afghan government and may in the long-term result in fragmentation and internal withering of the Taliban. But that outcome is not guaranteed nor likely to materialize quickly. In fact, the Taliban swiftly announced Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, a deputy to Mullah Mansour, as its new leader to avoid the tensions and chaos that surrounded Mansour’s appointment.

The Taliban has mounted and sustained its toughest military campaign in years, and the war has become bloodier than ever. Despite the Taliban’s internal difficulties, its military energy shows no signs of fizzling out. The influence of the particularly vicious Haqqani network within the Taliban has grown. Moreover, the Islamic State established itself in Afghanistan in 2015, although it faces multiple strong countervailing forces.

Most ominously, Afghanistan’s political scene remains fractious and polarized. The National Unity Government of President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive officer and rival Abdullah Abdullah (created in the wake of the highly contested presidential elections of 2014) has never really found its feet. Fundamental structural problems of the government remain unaddressed, and after two years in power the government may face its end as a result of a possible Loya Jirga assembly in the fall of 2016. Even if the Jirga does not meet, Afghanistan’s leadership will face potentially debilitating crises of legitimacy. Afghanistan’s elite has not taken any steps to heal the country’s deep and broad political wounds. Instead, the dominant mode of politics is to plot the demise of the government and focus on a parochial accumulation of one’s power at the expense of the country’s national interest, and even the very survival of the post-2001 order.

Struggling to deliver the promised improvements in government efficiency and reduction in corruption, President Ghani staked the two first years of his presidency on negotiations with the Taliban. In order to facilitate the negotiations, he reached out to Pakistan in a daring and politically costly gambit in the fall of 2014 and repeatedly since. The payoff so far has been limited and Ghani’s political space is shrinking. The death of Mullah Mansour is likely to complicate the process even more.

In the paper, Felbab-Brown discusses the evolving international support for Afghanistan; military developments in Afghanistan since the fall of 2014 and the intensity of the Taliban’s battlefield thrust; the Taliban’s internal cohesion, fragmentation and leadership successions; President Ghani’s outreach to Pakistan and the effort to negotiate with the Taliban; and Afghan political processes and trends.

Downloads

• Blood and faith in Afghanistan: A June 2016 update

      

 

 

An American drone strike that killed leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour may seem like a fillip for the United States’ ally, the embattled government of Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. But as Vanda Felbab-Brown writes in a new op-ed for The New York Times, it is unlikely to improve Kabul’s immediate national security problems—and may create more difficulties than it solves.

The White House has argued that because Mansour became opposed to peace talks with the Afghan government, removing him became necessary to facilitate new talks. Yet, as Vanda writes in the op-ed, “the notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.”

[T]he notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.

Mullah Mansour's death does not inevitably translate into substantial weakening of the Taliban's operational capacity or a reprieve from what is shaping up to be a bloody summer in Afghanistan. Any fragmentation of the Taliban to come does not ipso facto imply stronger Afghan security forces or a reduction of violent conflict. Even if Mansour's demise eventually turns out to be an inflection point in the conflict and the Taliban does seriously fragment, such an outcome may only add complexity to the conflict. A lot of other factors, including crucially Afghan politics, influence the capacity of the Afghan security forces and their battlefield performance.

Nor will Mansour’s death motivate the Taliban to start negotiating. That did not happen when it was revealed last July’s the group’s previous leader and founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died in 2013. To the contrary, the Taliban’s subsequent military push has been its strongest in a decade—with its most violent faction, the Haqqani network, striking the heart of Kabul. Mansour had empowered the violent Haqqanis following Omar’s death as a means to reconsolidate the Taliban, and their continued presence portends future violence. Mansour's successor, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s former minister of justice who loved to issue execution orders, is unlikely to be in a position to negotiate (if he even wants to) for a considerable time as he seeks to gain control and create legitimacy within the movement.

The United States has sent a strong signal to Pakistan, which continues to deny the presence of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network within its borders. Motivated by a fear of provoking the groups against itself, Pakistan continues to show no willingness to take them on, despite the conditions on U.S. aid.

Disrupting the group’s leadership by drone-strike decapitation is tempting militarily. But it can be too blunt an instrument, since negotiations and reconciliation ultimately depend on political processes. In decapitation targeting, the U.S. leadership must think critically about whether the likely successor will be better or worse for the counterinsurgency endgame.

      

 

 

As the world debate drug policy at the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016), opium poppy remains deeply routed in Afghanistan. Narcotics production and counternarcotics policies there are of critical importance not only for drug control in the country and worldwide, but also for the security, reconstruction, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Perhaps nowhere in the world has a country and the international community faced such an extensive illicit drug economy as in Afghanistan. Given deteriorating security, economic, and political conditions in Afghanistan, there is no realistic prospect for radically reducing the Afghan opium poppy economy and the Afghanistan’s economy dependence on it for years.

In 2007 opium production climbed to a staggering 8,200 metric tons (mt).[1] As a result of the subsequent oversaturation of the illicit opiates market and the intense outbreak of a poppy disease, production subsequently fell to 3,600 mt in 2010 but rose again to 5,800 mt in 2011 and remained with some fluctuations at this level. [2] In 2015, as a combination of market saturation and correction and poppy disease (and far less so as a result of sustainable policies), in 2015 opium production declined to 3,300 mt again.[3] These levels of production are enough to supply most of the world’s opiates market.[4]

For two decades, opium has been Afghanistan’s leading cash-generating economic activity. Valued at the border, profits from opiates represent about 10-15% of GDP.[5] But when one takes into account macroeconomic spillovers, with drugs underpinning much of other legal economic activity, drug easily constitute between a third and a half of the overall economy.[6] The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) provides a smaller number – namely, that the farmgate value of opium production in Afghanistan represents single-digit percent portion of the GDP, such as, for example, about 4% of the country’s GDP in 2013.[7] But this number is misleading. By focusing on farm-gate value only, this number does not take into account value-added in Afghanistan or economic spillover effects, such as the fact that much of consumption of durable and non-durables as well as construction is underpinned by the opium poppy economy.

For much of the rural population, the opium poppy economy is an essential source of basic livelihoods and human security. When access to the opium poppy economy is cut off, such as through bans on cultivation or eradication, large segments of the rural population face economic emiseration and deprivation even in terms of access to food, medical treatment, and schooling for children.[8]

The significance of the opium poppy production for the Afghan economy and crucially for employment will only grow as Afghanistan has entered serious economic and fiscal crises due to the departure of international military forces, the presence of which structured much of economic activity in Afghanistan over the past decade, and due to political instability and persisting insecurity scaring away investment and generating large capital flight.

The Taliban offers itself as a protector of poppy farmers, drawing great political capital as well as physical resources from opposing eradication and taxing the poppy fields. Measuring the size of illicit economies and any derivative numbers, such as profit levels, is notoriously difficult, but it is estimated that somewhere between 20-40% of the Taliban’s income comes from drugs.[9] But the Taliban is not the only actor profiting in multiple ways from the opium poppy economy. So are various criminal gangs, often connected to the government, the Afghan police and other elements of the Afghan security forces, tribal elites, and many ex-warlords cum government officials at various levels of the Afghan government, including the top one.

In short, the illicit drug economy exacerbates insecurity, strengthens corruption, produces macroeconomic distortions, and contributes to a vast increase in drug use and addiction in Afghanistan But it also provides a vital economic lifeline for many Afghans and enhances their human security. It thus produces political capital for those who sponsor opium poppy cultivation and it is politically explosive for those who sponsor eradication.

Neither opium poppy cultivation nor heroin production is a new, post-2001 phenomenon: each robustly existed during the Taliban era and before. Already during the 1990s, the Taliban sponsored and taxed opium poppy cultivation.[10] Its 2000 ban on cultivation drove production down by some 90% for one year, but was unsustainable…and indeed not sustained.

Other decreases poppy cultivation and opiate production since 2001, like last year’s, have been largely driven by the saturation of the global and local drug markets, by poppy crop disease, or by temporary coercive measures in certain parts of Afghanistan that could nonetheless not be sustained and have mostly already broken down.

The structural drivers of the Afghan poppy economy, including critically insecurity, political power arrangements, and a lack of ready economic alternatives, remain unchanged and cannot easily be overcome for years to come. The Taliban and related insurgencies remain deeply entrenched and pose a serious threat to the survival of the Afghan government and a potential trigger of an expanded civil war. Although also facing serious constraints on its expansion and sustainment and now also internal fragmentation and the rise of a rival Islamic State in Afghanistan,[11] the Taliban feels the battlefield momentum is on its side. As U.S. and ISAF troops significantly reduced their presence, they handed to the Afghan security forces and people an on-going war that has significantly intensified in 2014.[12]

Unfortunately, many of the counternarcotics policies adopted during most of the 2000s not only failed to reduce the size and scope of the illicit economy in Afghanistan, but also had serious counterproductive effects on the other objectives of peace, state-building, and economic reconstruction. Most counterproductive of all, eradication and bans on opium poppy cultivation, often born by the poorest and most socially marginalized, have generated extensive political capital for the Taliban and undermined counterinsurgency. In a courageous break with a previous counterproductive policy, the Obama administration wisely decided in 2009 to scale back poppy eradication in Afghanistan, but it struggled to implement its new strategy effectively. Although the Obama administration backed away from centrally-led eradication, Afghan governor-led eradication haphazardly goes on but since it is extremely politically explosive and dependent on good security conditions, it is minimal in its intensity.

Blanket interdiction efforts only vertically integrated smuggling networks. Selective interdiction focused on Taliban-linked traffickers, conducted by NATO’s International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan (ISAF) between 2008 and 2014, complicated the Taliban’s logistics, but did not severely weaken the Taliban. Moreover, during the surge in Afghanistan, ISAF-led interdiction became at times so intense that it approximated eradication in its negative effects on farmers’ well-being and their receptivity to Taliban mobilization. But the reduction in ISAF presence means that the scale of interdiction has radically declined, and like the rest of Afghanistan’s policy is subject to political favoritism, patronage, and corruption. Under such circumstances, interdiction efforts can thus reshuffle who controls a local drug market within a district or a province and alter the individual’s (often top politician’s) political power and resource access, but does not produce system-wide effects on drug production and smuggling in Afghanistan.

Often designed ineffectively and implemented poorly, alternative livelihoods efforts rarely have generated sustainable income for poppy-dependent populations, if they have materialized at all.

These outcomes are not surprising, and both Afghanistan and the international community should have expected them. Lessons from anti-poppy policies in Thailand, Burma, and even China as well as against coca in Peru, Bolivia, and Peru clearly indicate that even under the most auspicious circumstances, such as in Thailand in the 1980s, a significant sustained reduction of opium poppy cultivation would require years, even decades, of systematic and well-designed efforts as well as a prior end to military conflict.[13]

Given high world demand for illicit opiates, suppression of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan would not leave a highly lucrative market unsatiated, but would shift it elsewhere. Unlike coca, for example, opium poppy is a very adaptable plant that can be grown under a variety of climactic conditions. Theoretically, its cultivation could spread to many areas –Central Asia, back to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, or West Africa.[14]

By far the worst scenario from a global security perspective would be the shift of poppy cultivation to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Khyber-Pakhtunkwa or even Punjab of Pakistan. For over twenty years, Pakistan has been a major heroin refining and smuggling hub in the region. It has an extensive hawala system, including for moving drug profits. Today, these territories also have extensive and well-organized salafi insurgency and terrorist groups that seek to limit the reach of the Pakistani state and topple the Pakistani government. A relocation of extensive poppy cultivation there would be highly detrimental to global security and counterterrorism interests since it would contribute to a critical undermining of the Pakistani state and fuel jihadi insurgencies and terrorism. Such a shift would not only increase profit possibilities for Pakistani belligerents, but also provide them with significant political capital by allowing them to become an important local employer sponsoring a labor-intensive economy in areas with minimal employment opportunities.

Nor would Pakistan be a newcomer to the drug trade. During the heyday of illicit poppy cultivation in Pakistan in the 1980s, opium poppy was grown in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the then Northwest Frontier Province (NFWP; now renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkwa), with agencies such as Bannu, Khyber, and Dir being significant loci of cultivation. In many of these areas, opium poppy cultivation involved entire tribes and represented the bulk of the local economy in these highly isolated (geographically, politically, and economically) places.[15] Pakistan was also the locus of heroin production and smuggling, with prominent and official actors, such as Pakistan’s military and intelligence services deeply involved in the heroin trade.

Counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan must be judicious, well sequenced, and well prioritized. Eradication should remain suspended. It should only be undertaken in areas where a legal economy already exists and generates sufficient livelihoods. Interdiction operations should predominantly target the most dangerous actors, such as international terrorist groups, the Taliban and the Islamic State, but also violent disruptive powerbrokers who oppose the Taliban but seek to bring down the Afghan government for their own political power-plays. Alternative livelihoods efforts should be streamlined into overall economic development and human capital development. Focused on secure areas, such efforts must include both rebuilding the rural economy and creating off-farm opportunities. Improving access to treatment for addicts and undertaking smart approaches to prevent opiate abuse should be greatly elevated in policy and funded far more extensively than has the case so far. The latter is probably the most feasible, as well as important, policy tool. But perhaps the most important policy implication is patience and realistic expectation: Aside from some major exogenous shock, such as the outbreak of some poppy disease persisting in the Afghan soil for years to come, opium poppy will flower in Afghanistan for decades.

This article was originally published by Ahora in Spanish.

[1] See United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007: Executive Summary,” August 2007, http://www.unodc.org/pdf/research/AFG07_ExSum_web.pdf.
[2] UNODC, “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2014,” November 2014, http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Afghan-opium-survey-2014.pdf: 7.
[3] UNODC, “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2015,” http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/_Afghan_opium_survey_2015_web.pdf: 8
[4] See UNODC, World Drug Report 2011 (New York: United Nations, 2011), http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/WDR2011/World_Drug_Report_2011_ebook.pdf: 45
[5] William Byrd and David Mansfield, “Afghanistan’s Opium Economy: An Agricultural, Livelihoods, and Governance Perspective,” The World Bank, revised version, June 23, 2014: ii.
[6] See UNODC, “Afghan Opium Survey 2007;” Since 2002, the percentage of drugs to licit GDP has oscillated between 60 and 30 percent, not because the illicit economy has been reduced, but due to the expansion of some sectors of the legal economy, such as telecommunications. See, for example, Christopher Ward and William Byrd, “Afghanistan’s Opium Drug Economy,” World Bank Report No. SASPR-5, December 2004, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/12/5533886/afghanistans-opium-drug-economy.
[7] UNODC, “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2013,” December 2013, http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Afghan_Opium_survey_2013_web_small.pdf: 12.
[8] See, for example, David Mansfield, “From Bad They Made It Worse,” Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), May 2014. http://www.areu.org.af/Uploads/EditionPdfs/NRM%20CS6%20ver%202%20(2).pdf.
[9] See, for example, Christopher M. Blanchard, “Afghanistan: Narcotics and U.S. Policy, Congressional Research Service,” Report No. RL32686, July 2009, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32686.pdf; and Letizia Paoli, Victoria A. Greenfield, and Peter Reuter, The World Heroin Market: Can Supply Be Cut? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41-83 and 111-114.
[10] Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2010): Ch. 5.
[11] Borhan Osman, “Toward Fragmentation?  Mapping the Post-Omar Taliban,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, November 24, 2015.
[12] Erin Cunningham, “Taliban Fighters Seize Afghan Territories as NATO Chief Visits in Kabul,” The Washington Post, March 15, 2016.
[13] Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Improving Supply Side Policies: Smarter Eradication, Interdiction, and Alternative Livelihoods and the Possibility of Licensing,” LSE Drug Reform Series, May 2014, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2014/05/07-improving-supply-side-policies-felbabbrown/improvingsupplysidepoliciesfelbabbrown.pdf.
[14] For a discussion of these drug markets and their history of drug production and trade, see, Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Drug-Conflict Nexus in South Asia: Beyond Taliban Profits and Afghanistan,” in Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Clifford May, eds., The Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater: Militant Islam, Security, and Stability (Washington, DC: Foundation for Defense of Democracies, May 2010): 90-112, and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “West African Drug Trade in the Context of Illicit Economies and Poor Governance,” Brookings Institution, October 14, 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/speeches/2010/1014_africa_drug_trade_felbabbrown.aspx.
[15] Amir Zada Asad and Robert Harris, The Politics and Economics of Drug Production on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Border (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003) and Nigel J. R. Allan, “Opium Production in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” in Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes, Michael K. Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, and Kent Mathewson, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 133-152.

      

 

 

Event Information

As the world prepares for the April 2016 Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016), there is an emerging "dissensus" among states on how best to address the costs, harms, and risks associated with illicit drugs. An increasing number of countries in the Americas and Europe are now opposed to punitive counterdrug policies and are experimenting with reform, even as major powers such as Russia and China continue to defend a prohibitionist interpretation of the international counternarcotics regime. And the United States, once the global regime’s chief enforcer, is now itself a hotbed of experimentation as nearly half of its states have implemented medicinal or legalized access to cannabis.

On April 7, the Brookings Foreign Policy and Governance Studies programs hosted a conversation on what we can learn from drug policy reforms now being conducted in the United States and across the globe and what flexibility will exist in the global counternarcotics regime for implementing improved drug policies after UNGASS 2016.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #UNGASS2016

For more on this topic, check out:

Brookings Project on Improving Global Drug Policy

The new Brookings Essay "The medical marijuana mess: a prescription for fixing a broken policy" by John Hudak

Video

• UNGASS 2016 and beyond: Seizing the opportunity to improve drug policy

Audio

• Vanda Felbab-Brown explains UNGASS 2016

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160407_drug_policy_ungass_transcript

      

 

 

Editors' Note: Al-Shabab’s operational capacities and intimidation power have grown in the past year, writes Vanda Felbab-Brown. Many of Kenya’s counterterrorism policies have been counterproductive, and counterinsurgency efforts by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) have at best stagnated. This piece was originally published by The Cipher Brief.

April 2 marked one year since the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab attacked the Garissa University in Kenya and killed 148 people, galvanizing Kenya to intensify its counterterrorism efforts. Yet al-Shabab’s operational capacities and intimidation power have grown in the past year. Many of Kenya’s counterterrorism policies have been counterproductive, and counterinsurgency efforts by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) have at best stagnated. State building in Somalia is only creeping, with service-delivery by the federal government and newly formed states mostly lacking. Politics continues to be clan-based, rapacious, and discriminatory, with the forthcoming 2016 elections in Somalia thus far merely intensifying political infighting.

Al-Shabab: A rejuvenation

Despite internal and external threats to its effective functioning, al-Shabab is on the upswing again. It has carried out dozens of terrorist attacks within Somalia, including against hotels used by government officials as workspaces and housing, and on beaches and in markets throughout the country. It has raised fear among the population and hampers the basic government functionality and civil society mobilization.

In February 2016, al-Shabab, for the first time, succeeded in smuggling a bomb onboard a flight from Mogadishu. Disturbingly, it has been retaking cities in southern Somalia, including the important port of Merka. It has also overrun AMISOM bases and seized weapons and humvees: one such attack on a Kenyan forward-operating base was likely the deadliest ever suffered by the Kenyan military. Al-Shabab’s operational capacity has also recovered from the internal rifts between its anti-foreign-jihadi, pro-al-Qaida, pro-ISIS, and Somalia-focused factions.

Not all the power jockeying has been settled, and not all leadership succession struggles have been resolved. Moreover, an ISIS branch independent of and antagonistic to al-Shabab is trying to grow in Somalia and has been battling al-Shabab (in a way that parallels the ISIS-Taliban tangles in Afghanistan). Nonetheless, al-Shabab is once more on the rise and has recovered its financing from charcoal, sugar, and other smuggling in southern Somalia, and from taxing traffic and businesses throughout its area of operation, including in Mogadishu.

Although the terrorist violence is almost always claimed by al-Shabab, many of the attacks and assassinations are the work of politicians, businessmen, and clans, intimidating rivals or seeking revenge in their disputes over land and contracts. Indeed, with the clock ticking down to the expected 2016 national elections in Somalia, much of the current violence also reflects political prepositioning for the elections and desire to eliminate political rivals.

Kenya and AMISOM: Don’t sugarcoat it

In contrast to the upbeat mood among al-Shabab, AMISOM efforts have at best been stalled. With the training of Somali national forces going slowly and the force still torn by clan rivalries and shackled by a lack of military enablers, the 22,000-strong AMISOM continues to be the principal counterinsurgency force. Counterterrorism attacks by U.S. drone and special operations forces complicate al-Shabab’s operations, but do not alter the balance of power on the ground. In its ninth year now, and having cost more than U.S.$1 billion, AMISOM continues to be barricaded in its bases, and many of Somalia’s roads, even in areas that are supposedly cleared, are continually controlled by al-Shabab. In cities where AMISOM is nominally in charge, al-Shabab often rules more than the night as AMISOM conducts little active patrolling or fresh anti-Shabab operations even during the day. Rarely are there formal Somali forces or government offices to whom to hand over the post-clearing “holding and building” efforts. There is little coordination, intelligence sharing, or joint planning among the countries folded under the AMISOM heading, with capabilities vastly uneven. The principle benefit of the Burundi forces in Somalia, for example, is that they are not joining the ethnic infighting developing in their home country.

Ethiopia and Kenya still support their favorite Somali proxies. For Kenya, the key ally is Sheik Ahmed “Madobe,” a former high-level al-Shabab commander who defected to create his Ogadeni anti-Shabab militias, Ras Kamboni, and who in 2015 got himself elected president of the newly-formed Jubaland state. Along with Madobe and other Ogadeni powerbrokers, Kenyan Defense Forces control the Kismayo port. Like al-Shabab, they allegedly illegally tax smuggled sugar, charcoal, and other goods through the port and southern Kenya. In addition to these nefarious proceeds on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, Kenya’s other interests in Somalia often clash with those of Ethiopia and the Somali national government, including over projecting power off Somali coast and strengthening local warlords and militias who promise to keep Ogadeni mobilization in Kenya down.

At home, Kenya’s counterterrorism activities have been not only parochial, but often outright counterproductive. Post-Garissa dragnets have rounded up countless Kenyan ethnic Somalis and Somali immigrants and refugees. Entire communities have been made scapegoats. For a while, the Kenyan government tried to shut down all Somali hawala services based in Kenya as well as to expel Somali refugees and shut down their camps. Accusations of torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings by Kenyan Defense Forces, the police, and other security agencies are widespread. Meanwhile, despite U.S. counterterrorism training and assistance such as through the Security Governance Initiative, debilitating corruption plagues Kenya’s security forces and agencies.

Somalia’s government: Old and new mires

The Somali federal government and the newly formed state-level administrations mostly falter in delivering services that Somali people crave. Competition over state jobs and whatever meager state-sponsored resources are available continue to be mired in clan rivalries and discrimination. Unfortunately, even newly formed (Jubaland, Southwest, and Galmudug) and still-forming states (Hiraan and Middle Shabelle) have not escaped rapacious clan politics. Dominant clans tend not to share power and resources with less numerous ones, often engaging in outright land theft, such as in Jubaland. Civil society contributions have been marginalized. Such misgovernance and clan-based marginalization, as well as more conservative religious politics, are also creeping into Somaliland and Puntland, the two more stable states. Throughout Somalia and in Northeast Kenya, al-Shabab is skillfully inserting itself into clan rivalries and mobilizing support among those who feel marginalized.

The expected 2016 national elections further intensify these clan and elite political rivalries. The hope that the elections could take the form of one man, one vote was once again dashed, with the promise that such elections will take place in 2020. Instead, the 2016 electoral process will reflect the 4.5 model in practice since 2004, in which the four major clans get to appoint the same proportion of the 275 members of the lower chamber and the minority clans will together be allotted half the MP positions that each major clan gets. This system has promoted discriminatory clan rivalries and elite interests. The 54 members of the upper chamber will be appointed by Somalia’s states, including the newly formed and forming states. This arrangement requires that the state formation process is finished well before the elections, but also problematically increases the immediate stakes in the state formation. Finalizing the provisional constitution and getting it approved by a referendum—another key item of the Vision 2016 agreed to by the Somali government and international donors—is also in question.

Perhaps the greatest progress has been made in devolving power from Mogadishu through the formation of subnational states. But there is a real risk that rather than bonding Somalis with state structures as the international community long hoped for and prescribed, the power devolution to newly formed states will instead devolve discriminatory and rapacious politics.

      

 

 

In a new Brookings Cafeteria podcast (audio below), Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown discusses the upcoming Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016), to take place April 19 to 21.

U.N. member states will convene to reassess global drug policies. Some countries, particularly within Latin America and Western Europe, see the existing policies as ineffective and counterproductive. Others, particularly in East Asia and the Middle East (as well as Russia), staunchly support them. As a result of changing domestic policies, including state-level marijuana legalization, the United States is no longer interested in playing the role of the world's toughest drug cop.

Where we are

For the past 30 years, global drug policy has focused primarily on criminalizing drug trafficking, disrupting drug markets and supply, seizing drug shipments, and imprisoning users. During this period, Latin America has experienced staggering levels of drug-related criminal violence, while counterdrug policies have often proved politically destabilizing. Facing eradication of their crops without alternative livelihoods in place, coca, marijuana, and poppy farmers have often felt alienated from their governments. 

In East Asia, there is as much drug trafficking and production as in Latin America—but violent criminality is very low. Coupled with very different historical memories, there is thus not the same impetus for drug policy reform. Several Middle Eastern countries find themselves contending with drug addiction. But as drug trafficking there is becoming increasingly intermeshed with terrorism, the Middle East, too, is disinterested in reform. 

Where we’re likely going

The United States—the original architect of the global counternarcotics regime and for decades its chief global enforcer—is experiencing an evolution of its drug policies. It has not insisted on poppy eradication in Afghanistan, for example. Domestically, some progress has been made to adopt harm-reduction strategies, far more effective than imprisoning users and destroying their and their families’ lives, with disproportionate negative effects on African Americans. Efforts are under way to release non-violent drug offenders from U.S. prisons. Most crucially, U.S. states are legalizing recreational marijuana, something Uruguay has done—in a different way—at the national level. Even though, shockingly, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs William Brownfield recently criticized harm reduction as a back way to legalization, the United States now advocates flexibility in the interpretation of global counternarcotics treaties.

[T]he United States is no longer interested in playing the role of the world's toughest drug cop.

The so-called “zero draft” document that’s been circulated outlines in broad language how to deal with drugs, reiterating (as the previous UNGASS sessions have done) a nominally holistic approach. However, that seeming consensus is paper-thin. To its credit, the most recent document emphasizes non-punitive policy tools that were clearly not the thrust of previous documents and puts a greater premium on human rights and public health. It also situates drugs within the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. It hardly goes as far as some drug policy advocates prefer, but even moderate liberalization remains contentious among supporters of existing policies. Many contradictions and unaddressed issues remain: The document fails to discuss marijuana legalization and its potential spillover effects, for example, thus ignoring a key contentious issue and papering over the deep global “dissensus” about drug policy. 

In fact, the international community is heading toward not only a fractured pluralism, where countries will increasingly go their own ways on drug policy, but also a contentious pluralism, as drug policies in one country affect others. Therefore, flexibility in treaty interpretation could be difficult to sustain in practice, even though it is the best solution for dealing with the global disagreement. Hopefully, such pluralism will help bring about policies that are better-tailored toward local settings. It could also help countries learn from policy experimentation and ultimately adopt better, more humane, and effective policies toward drug trafficking and use.

Post-UNGASS, policy disagreements and opportunities will continue. Countries will seek to discern the degree to which they can experiment with their own drug policy designs. The new global consensus that might emerge is that counties will disagree with both the goals of drug policies and the methods.

Audio

• Vanda Felbab-Brown explains UNGASS 2016

      

 

 

This April, the U.N. General Assembly will meet for a Special Session on the World Drug Problem. After decades of conformity with a hardline “war on drugs” formerly promoted by the United States, there is increasing dissensus within the international community about how to best address the costs and harms posed by drugs. For years, some European countries have quietly diverged from policies based on aggressive suppression of drug production and the criminalization of users. More recently, some key Latin American states have openly challenged the global counternarcotics regime and called for reforms. 

Yet the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states still cling to hardline drug policies, an approach that is also supported by Russia and many Asian countries.

On March 7 in Doha, we met with police and military officials, NGO representatives, and academics from across the Middle East to discuss the rising drug challenges in the region and the increasingly contested global regime. We found the Middle East and North Africa are grappling with intensifying drug problem—increased use, spread of drug-related communicable diseases, and widening linkages between drug production and smuggling and violent conflict and terrorism. And there is a growing sense that the repressive policies against illicit drugs long-applied in the region have not been effective in counteracting these negative trends.

Ugly trends, ugly policies

MENA countries have by and large not taken an active or vocal role in global drug discussions. Many governments do not collect or disclose data on levels of drug production, trafficking, and use. Drugs are a social taboo, with little public or government attention to the problem. In fact, the region’s drug policies are most notable for extraordinarily high levels executions of accused drug traffickers—in the hundreds per year in Saudi Arabia and Iran. This policy is increasingly rejected by the international community, even by the stringent International Narcotics Control Board. Even very small possessions of medications such as codeine can be deemed illegal in the region, such as in Dubai, and result in imprisonment or worse.

Despite poor data, there is nonetheless a sense that drug use is on the rise in MENA. The abuse of Captagon in Saudi Arabia has been known for years, and for decades Iran has been among the world’s largest consumer countries of opiates. Drug use could well be on the rise elsewhere in Iraq and Syria, although records are kept poorly or not at all. Bored, unemployed, frustrated young people and war-traumatized dislocated populations are understandably vulnerable to the temporary escape offered by drugs. 

[R]ecords are kept poorly or not at all.

Refugees pose a new challenge for states designing policies to address drug use. Immiserated, segregated, and lacking legal economic options, some in the refugee populations may find employment in the Middle East’s long established drug smuggling networks. Badly-integrated and highly marginalized diaspora communities often have small segments that become crucial vectors of international smuggling. Unfortunately, some governments in the region have responded by denying—wrongly—humanitarian non-governmental organizations’ authorization to distribute crucial palliative and mental illness medications for fear that these will be diverted into the illicit economy.

Prevention policies have been largely ineffective in containing rising drug use. Drug treatment is underprovided throughout the region. In the Gulf, even relatively progressive Qatar established its first drug treatment center only in the past few years. Conservative societies in the region tend to stigmatize users, so few seek out help. Consequently, the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis among intravenous drug users has not been contained. 

Badly-integrated and highly marginalized diaspora communities often have small segments that become crucial vectors of international smuggling.

Cash for militants, cash for the poor

In the Middle East, drug production and trafficking has long funded violent conflict. In Lebanon, for example, Hezbollah and various sectarian militias taxed the cultivation of marijuana and opium poppy in the Bekaa Valley beginning in the 1970s. ISIS now appears to be smuggling local weed too. Efforts to eradicate the crops and provide alternative livelihoods for the valley’s poor farmers have ebbed and flowed, depending on pressures from international community. Alternative development policies have often been cast too narrowly and have relied on questionable substitute crops such as tobacco. 

Synthetic drugs are also a problem for the region, particularly where poorly governed or ungoverned areas provide cover for laboratories. The production of Captagon is increasing in Lebanon and it is even more widely produced in Syria, where it is smuggled and taxed by ISIS for revenue. ISIS fighters are also alleged to consume Captagon to increase their fighting prowess and brutality (echoing amphetamine-fueled violence by West African fighters in the 1990s). Drug trafficking has funded terrorists and militias in Libya, most notably Mokthar Belmokthar’s terrorist group. This group has taxed a broad range of smuggled goods, but its narcotics that captures the headlines. 

Alternative development policies have often been cast too narrowly and have relied on questionable substitute crops such as tobacco.

The region also experiences problems with legal drugs, such as qat in Yemen. While qat is culturally acceptable, it decreases productivity of users, increases family indebtedness, and causes severe overexploitation of scarce water resources to support its cultivation. Yemen’s water scarcity is one of the largest in the world. For many women in Somalia during the Shabab era (and today in places such as Djibouti), peddling qat was the only source of livelihood even as it made their husbands unproductive and drove households into high debt.

But suppressing production and trade may not be politically or economically sustainable, as even the terrorist group al-Shabab learned in Somalia when it tried to disrupt qat trading. Like with its 1990s predecessor al-Itihaad, prohibition of qat use and trade caused al-Shabab to lose crucial support from influential business leaders and clan chiefs, undermining the political entrenchment of the group. 

Bright spots?

There are some positive counter-examples in the region. Recognizing that its highly punitive policies have failed, Iran has adopted some important harm-reduction measures even while clinging to executions and even though many treatment centers, especially for women, have to operate hidden from view. Along with Morocco, it has been experimenting with methadone maintenance, needle exchange, and other harm reduction measures as well as ways to improve the effectiveness of treatment. Some 420,000 Iranian addicts are reported to receive methadone maintenance and 76,000 buprenorphine treatment. Morocco’s vibrant drug policy conversation even includes civil society voices favoring the legalization of marijuana use and possibly even cultivation, which would a return to the policies in place in the early 20th century. Turkey has been a model since the 1970s of how to produce medicinal opiates and prevent their diversion into the legal drug trade. With the help of U.S. legislation in the 1970s that guaranteed Turkey and India that the United States buys 80 percent of opium for medicinal purposes from these two countries–and with the implementation of very good control practices, such as the use of so-called poppy-straw concentrate method—Turkey eliminated illegal poppy cultivation while keeping its farmers employed. Local militants such as those in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) or Turkish criminal groups have never been able to penetrate the legal medical production and instead fund themselves by smuggling opiates from Afghanistan. 

In North Africa, Morocco has witnessed a reduction in marijuana cultivation. So there are some cases where well-designed policy responses can have an impact on drug production. Looking further abroad, Thailand—once a major source of drugs in the infamous “Golden Triangle”—offers another positive model for how to wipe out poppy production humanely through a combination of strong economic growth and rural development. MENA governments might look to Thailand for lessons.

[S]ocial taboos, traumatized dislocated populations, state fragility, weakness and corruption of law enforcement, rivalrous geopolitics, and intense conflict all inhibit effective drug policies.

Breaking the cycle

In the Middle East and North Africa, social taboos, traumatized dislocated populations, state fragility, weakness and corruption of law enforcement, rivalrous geopolitics, and intense conflict all inhibit effective drug policies. 

If governments and civil society in the region do not start thinking deeply about drug trends and policies, the threats and harms will grow much more intense. Governments and NGOs need to start gathering and disclosing data on drug use and better map drug smuggling. Drug use should be depenalized: Throwing users into jail will not stop use and may facilitate radicalization. Use should be destigmatized and better treatment provided, while public health approaches should also be adopted. If governments force eradication before effective alternative livelihoods are in place, it is likely that farmers will only be further pushed into the arms of militants (and such policies should not be intensified in the Bekaa Valley, for example). 

There is no easy way to disrupt terrorist drug funding, the eternal dream of governments around the world. But interdiction can more effectively target the drugs-terrorism nexus. The first step, before all else, is to acknowledge drug challenges are on the rise in the Middle East and that repression is not stopping them. 

      

 

 

After decades of neglect, Latin American governments are increasingly focusing on urban slums. What often spurs their policy interventions is a desire to counter violent criminality leaking out from the poor marginalized slums controlled by gangs into the city centers the better-off residents want to keep safe. But tackling the socioeconomic dynamics of slums -- the trap of poverty, discrimination, lack of public goods and social services, and rule by nonstate actors -- is not only complex, but also costly. Governments, elites, and middle classes tend not to want to spend resources on slums. Effective policies have to be sustained for decades, and political will and tax revenues for such complex state-building are frequently scarce.

Focusing on a discreet intervention – providing low-cost housing – becomes tempting. Rarely is it sufficient. The condition of the buildings alone is not what makes a slum a slum. Moving residents from slums to better low-cost housing has encountered systematic challenges not just in Latin America, but also in other places where it has been tried, such as Kenya. Instead, policies need to focus on broader community dynamics, including public safety, legal job creation with sufficient income, human capital development, and robust connectivity of slums to economically-thriving areas, something residents of the latter often don’t want.

Paradoxically, real estate dynamics can have pernicious effects. If broader pacification does take hold and public safety in slums increases, some slum areas can become desirable real estate with vast development possibilities. Developers may well seek to buy the land by offering “better” low-cost housing to slum residents to get them to move. Since many slum residents do not have title to their residences, forced displacement also occurs, albeit under the cloak of being nice to the poor.

Instead of being limited to the provision of alternative residences, policies to address slums need to be about inclusion, economic growth, safety, and connectivity of slums with the thriving city parts, and accountability of city-governance authorities.

This commentary was originally published by the Inter-American Dialogue’s Latin America Advisor. 

      

 

 

Editors' Note: This post is based on a forthcoming book by Vanda Felbab-Brown titled "The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It."

As the world celebrates World Wildlife Day on March 3, the planet is experiencing alarming levels of species loss—caused, in large part, by intensified poaching. Wildlife trafficking and its associated activities affect national and international security in a myriad of ways: They can provide support to criminal groups, increase risks of health epidemics, and further degrade the already fragile ecological systems on which humans depend. Efforts to combat wildlife trafficking, meanwhile, provide new opportunities for cooperation between the United States and China, among other countries. 

Emptying forests, savannahs, and oceans

This unrelenting poaching crisis has been under way for well over a decade. It’s stimulated by the greatly expanding demand for animals, plants, and wildlife products particularly in China, East Asia, and among East Asian communities around the world. The crisis has been enabled by extensive and increasing corruption among park rangers and customs officials in many wildlife source countries, including in Southern and Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia. The problem has also been exacerbated by the complicity of local communities living near parks, and facilitated by the sheer scale of legal trade among which wildlife contraband hides. The growing firepower of poachers and desperation of policies adopted in response—such as to shoot poachers on sight—have multiplied the violence levels associated with poaching and wildlife trafficking.

Elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers are being illegally slaughtered at massive rates. Beyond those iconic species, many other animals are captured, killed, and trafficked for trinkets, for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) substances, or for the global pet trade. In combination with habitat destruction and global warming, hunting and poaching might eliminate entire genera of species, further undermining remaining ecosystems. 

Although East Asian countries—particularly China, Vietnam, and Thailand—are the key consumption and demand markets, the United States is widely believed to be the country with the second-largest consumer market for trafficked wildlife. But new demand (and supply) markets are once again rising in Latin America: Much illegal trade in parrots takes place in Brazil, for example, and many affluent Mexicans love boots made of snake skins. Demand also comes from other places often ignored in the story of the global slaughter, including in various East and West African countries (which are often described merely as source countries). Oceans are being emptied of creatures as well, be they sharks, tuna, sea cucumbers, or seahorses.

At our own risk

The rate of species extinction, now as much as 1,000 times the historical average—and the worst since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago—deserves to be seen, like climate change, as a global ecological catastrophe. It merits high-level policy initiatives to address its human causes. 

In addition to irretrievable biodiversity loss and economic losses due to ecosystem degradation, wildlife trafficking also poses serious threats to public health. Diseases linked to wildlife trafficking and consumption of wild animals have included SARS and Ebola. Wildlife trafficking could thus be the trigger of a global pandemic. 

Wildlife trafficking can also support other forms of organized crime and fuels violent conflict, though the links are often exaggerated. Militancy represents just a sliver of wildlife trafficking.

Thai highway police officers look at a tiger's skin confiscated from smugglers at an unknown location in Thailand . Credit: Reuters/Wildaid.

Could ivory laundering soon be ended?

At this moment of acute crisis, wildlife trafficking is attaining unprecedented policy attention. The United Nations Security Council has discussed how to stop wildlife trafficking, and the goal of eliminating the problem was incorporated into the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Wildlife trafficking has also been an important subject in the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. The governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany have increased spending on combating wildlife trafficking around the world, expanding the menu of the diplomatic and law enforcement efforts, as well as plans to provide alternative livelihoods and reduce demand.

Perhaps most important, the United States and China have committed themselves to fighting global poaching. The United States has tightened many of its own rules, trying to close loopholes for the laundering of trafficked wildlife. For years, indifferent and even outright complicit in global wildlife trafficking, Chinese law enforcement agencies have confiscated and crushed illegal ivory and seized other illegal wildlife products—such as rhino horn and Asian black bear paws—in several raids. (However, systematic enforcement of wildlife regulations is not yet frequent or a priority for Chinese authorities.)

Crucially, after years of international lobbying, China promised in 2015 to declare illegal its official market for ivory, which had been a crucial driver of elephant poaching and a facilitator of ivory laundering. China has not said when this will take effect, but there is a widespread expectation that the market will be prohibited by the end of 2016. In January 2016, Hong Kong’s leader, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, followed China’s example and announced that Hong Kong, too, will totally ban the sale of ivory—once again without specifying when. The decision is still welcome, since Hong Kong has long served as perhaps the major hub of ivory carving and laundering.

Paradoxically, China’s economic downturn may be good for wildlife and conservation efforts: with less disposable income, wealthy and middle-class Chinese and East Asian consumers may spend less on wildlife luxury goods, giving animals around the world a breathing pause.

An animal carer feeds a baby female pangolin with liquified food from a syringe at Bangkok's Dusit Zoo, one of several hundred mammals recently seized in raids by Thai police. Credit: Reuters.

Keeping wild things wild and abundant

It’s not enough to provide temporary reprieve, or to tighten the trade loopholes that allow laundering of ivory, rhino horn, geckos, and many other animals. Nor is it enough to simply beef-up interdiction, or even to vastly improve the economic alternatives to poaching in order to motivate local communities to buy in to conservation. 

The bottom line is that demand for wildlife products must be reduced and kept low. To reduce demand, messaging campaigns should emphasize less altruistic appeals and long-term negative public goods consequence rather than the immediate personal costs of consuming wildlife. In particular, this includes stressing the negative effects to one’s health, such as emphasizing high mercury content in shark fins. Visible dramatic health consequences often were the mobilization core of other environmental campaigns, such as against acid rain and ozone depletion. Anti-poaching and anti-wildlife consumption campaigns should further seek not only to debunk the bogus purported benefits of consuming wildlife to one’s sexual life, such as that consuming rhino horn powder will enhance sexual prowess, but in fact emphasize the outright negative sexual effects—namely, that consuming wildlife products or having them in one’s possession will severely negatively affect the prospects for dating. This latter method has been effective in reducing cigarette and drug use. Moreover, campaigns to reduce demand for wildlife should focus on resistance to peer pressure and not rely on general awareness programs.

There is no silver bullet in policy to stop the bullets of poachers. Nor is there a one-shoe-fits-all design, and policy choices are highly contingent on specific settings. But that does not mean that we should give up the efforts to stop poaching. It is our moral imperative as well as in our own self-interest to do all we can to preserve the planet’s species and biodiversity. 

Graphics created by Rachel Slattery.

     

 

 

Editors’ Note: Organized crime actors have increasingly adopted advanced technologies, with law enforcement agencies adapting accordingly. However, the use of ever fancier-technology is only a part of the story. The future lies as much behind as ahead, writes Vanda Felbab-Brown, with criminal groups now using primitive technologies and methods to counter the advanced technologies used by law enforcement. This post was originally published by the Remote Control Project, a project hosted by the Oxford Research Group.

The history of drug trafficking and crime more broadly is a history of adaptation on the part of criminal groups in response to advances in methods and technology on the part of law enforcement agencies, and vice versa. Sometimes, technology trumps crime: The spread of anti-theft devices in cars radically reduced car theft. The adoption of citadels (essentially saferooms) aboard ships, combined with intense naval patrolling, radically reduced the incidence of piracy off Somalia. Often, however, certainly in the case of many transactional crimes such as drug trafficking, law enforcement efforts have tended to weed out the least competent traffickers, and to leave behind the toughest, meanest, leanest, and most adaptable organized crime groups. Increasingly, organized crime actors have adopted advanced technologies, such as semi-submersible and fully-submersible vehicles to carry drugs and other contraband, and cybercrime and virtual currencies for money-laundering. Adaptations in the technology of smuggling by criminal groups in turn lead to further evolution and improvement of methods by law enforcement agencies. However, the use of ever fancier-technology is only a part of the story. The future lies as much behind as ahead (to paraphrase J.P. Wodehouse), with the asymmetric use of primitive technologies and methods by criminal groups to counter the advanced technologies used by law enforcement.

The seduction of SIGINT and HVT

The improvements in signal intelligence (SIGINT) and big-data mining over the past two decades have dramatically increased tactical intelligence flows to law enforcement agencies and military actors, creating a more transparent anti-crime, anti-terrorism, and counterinsurgency battlefield than before. The bonanza of communications intercepts of targeted criminals and militants that SIGINT has come to provide over the past decades in Colombia, Mexico, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world has also strongly privileged high-value targeting (HVT) and decapitation policies-i.e., principally targeting the presumed leaders of criminal and militant organizations.

The proliferation of SIGINT and advances in big-data trawling, combined with some highly visible successes of HVT, has come with significant downsides. First, high-value targeting has proven effective only under certain circumstances. In many contexts, such as in Mexico, HVT has been counterproductive, fragmenting criminal groups without reducing their proclivity to violence; in fact, exacerbating violence in the market. Other interdiction patterns and postures, such as middle-level targeting and focused-deterrence, would be more effective policy choices. 

A large part of the problem is that the seductive bonanza of signal intelligence has lead to counterproductive discounting of the need to:

1. develop a strategic understanding of criminal groups’ decisionmaking—knowledge crucial for anticipating the responses of targeted non-state actors to law enforcement actions; Mexico provides a disturbing example;
2. cultivate intelligence human intelligence assets, sorely lacking in Somalia, for example;
3. obtain a broad and comprehensive understanding of the motivations and interests of local populations that interact with criminal and insurgent groups, notably deficient in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; and 
4. establish good relationships with local populations to advance anti-crime and counterinsurgency policies, such as in Colombia where drug eradication policy antagonized local populations from national government and strengthened the bonds between them and rebel groups. 

In other words, the tactical tool, technology—in the form of signal intelligence and big-data mining—has trumped strategic analysis. The correction needed is to bring back strategic intelligence analysis to drive interdiction targeting patterns, instead of letting the seduction of signal data drive intelligence analysis and targeting action. The political effects, anticipated responses by criminal and militant groups, and other outcomes of targeting patterns need be incorporated into the strategic analysis. Questions to be assessed need to include: Can interdiction hope to incapacitate—arrest and kill—all of the enemy or should it seek to shape the enemy? What kind of criminals and militants, such as how fractured or unified, how radicalized or restrained in their ambitions, and how closely aligned with local populations against the state, does interdiction want to produce? 

Dogs fights or drone fights: Remote lethal action by criminals

Criminal groups have used technology not merely to foil law enforcement actions, but also to fight each other and dominate the criminal markets and control local populations. In response to the so-called Pacification (UPP) policy in Rio de Janeiro through which the Rio government has sought to wrestle control over slums from violent criminal gangs, the Comando Vermelho (one of such gangs), for example, claimed to deploy remote-sensor cameras in the Complexo do Alemão slum to identify police collaborators, defined as those who went into newly-established police stations. Whether this specific threat was credible or not, the UPP police units have struggled to establish a good working relationship with the locals in Alemão.

The new radical remote-warfare development on the horizon is for criminal groups to start using drones and other remote platforms not merely to smuggle and distribute contraband, as they are starting to do already, but to deliver lethal action against their enemies—whether government officials, law enforcement forces, or rival crime groups. Eventually, both law enforcement and rival groups will develop defenses against such remote lethal action, perhaps also employing remote platforms: drones to attack the drones. Even so, the proliferation of lethal remote warfare capabilities among criminal groups will undermine deterrence, including deterrence among criminal groups themselves over the division of the criminal market and its turfs. Remotely delivered hits will complicate the attribution problem— i.e., who authorized the lethal action—and hence the certainty of sufficiently painful retaliation against the source and thus a stable equilibrium. More than before, criminal groups will be tempted to instigate wars over the criminal market with the hope that they will emerge as the most powerful criminal actors and able to exercise even greater power over the criminal market—the way the Sinaloa Cartel has attempted to do in Mexico even without the use of fancy technology. Stabilizing a highly violent and contested—dysfunctional—criminal market will become all the more difficult the more remote lethal platforms have proliferated among criminal groups.

Back to the past: The Ewoks of crime and anti-crime

In addition to adopting ever-advancing technologies, criminal and militant groups also adapt to the technological superiority of law enforcement-military actors by the very opposite tactic—resorting asymmetrically to highly primitive deception and smuggling measures. Thus, both militant and criminal groups have adapted to signal intelligence not just by using better encryption, but also by not using cell phones and electronic communications at all, relying on personal couriers, for example, or by flooding the e-waves with a lot of white noise. Similarly, in addition to loading drugs on drones, airplanes, and submersibles, drug trafficking groups are going back to very old-methods such as smuggling by boats, including through the Gulf of Mexico, by human couriers, or through tunnels. 

Conversely, society sometimes adapts to the presence of criminal groups and intense, particularly highly violent, criminality by adopting its own back-to-the-past response—i.e., by standing up militias (which in a developed state should have been supplanted by state law enforcement forces). The rise of anti-crime militias in Mexico, in places such as Michoacán and Guerrero, provides a vivid and rich example of such populist responses and the profound collapse of official law enforcement. The inability of law enforcement there to stop violent criminality—and in fact, the inadvertent exacerbation of violence by criminal groups as a result of HVT—and the distrust of citizens toward highly corrupt law enforcement agencies and state administrations led to the emergence of citizens’ anti-crime militias. The militias originally sought to fight extortion, robberies, theft, kidnapping, and homicides by criminal groups and provide public safety to communities. Rapidly, however, most of the militias resorted to the very same criminal behavior they purported to fight—including extortion, kidnapping, robberies, and homicides. The militias were also appropriated by criminal groups themselves: the criminal groups stood up their own militias claiming to fight crime, where in fact, they were merely fighting the rival criminals. Just as when external or internal military forces resort to using extralegal militias, citizens’ militias fundamentally weaken the rule of law and the authority and legitimacy of the state. They may be the ewoks’ response to the crime empire, but they represent a dangerous and slippery slope to greater breakdown of order.

In short, technology, including remote warfare, and innovations in smuggling and enforcement methods are malleable and can be appropriated by both criminal and militant groups as well as law enforcement actors. Often, however, such adoption and adaptation produces outcomes that neither criminal groups nor law enforcement actors have anticipated and can fully control. The criminal landscape and military battlefields will resemble the Star Wars moon of Endor: drone and remote platforms battling it out with sticks, stones, and ropes.

     

 

 

Editor’s Note: The following chapter is part of the report, "After the Drug Wars," published in February 2016 by the London School of Economics and Political Science's Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy.

Even as the administration of Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto has scored important reform successes in the economic sphere, its security and law enforcement policy toward organized crime remains incomplete and ill-defined. Despite the early commitments of his administration to focus on reducing drug violence, combating corruption, and redesigning counternarcotics policies, little significant progress has been achieved. Major human rights violations related to the drug violence, whether perpetrated by organized crime groups or military and police forces, persist – such as at Iguala, Guerrero, where 43 students were abducted by a cabal of local government officials, police forces and organized crime groups. This has also been seen in Tatlaya and Tanhuato, Michoacán, where military forces have likely been engaged in extrajudicial killings of tens of people. Meanwhile, although drug violence has abated in the north of the country, such as in Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Tijuana, government policies have played only a minor role. Much of the violence reduction is the result of the vulnerable and unsatisfactory narcopeace – the victory of the Sinaloa or Gulf Cartels. 

The July 2015 spectacular escape of the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and the world’s most notorious drug trafficker – Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo – from a Mexican high-security prison was a massive embarrassment for the Peña Nieto government. Yet it serves as another reminder of the deep structural deficiencies of Mexico’s law enforcement and rule-of law system which persists more than a decade after Mexico declared its war on the drug cartels.

The Peña Nieto administration often pointed to the February 2014 capture of El Chapo as the symbol of its effectiveness in fighting drug cartels and violent criminal groups in Mexico. The Peña Nieto administration’s highlighting of Chapo’s capture was both ironic and revealing: ironic, because the new government came into office criticizing the anti-crime policy of the previous administration of Felipe Calderón of killing or capturing top capos to decapitate their cartels; and revealing, because despite the limitations and outright counterproductive effects of this high-value-targeting policy and despite promises of a very different strategy, the Peña Nieto administration fell back into relying on the pre-existing approach. In fact, such high-value-targeting has been at the core of Pena Nieto’s anti-crime policy. Moreover, Chapo’s escape from Mexico’s most secure prison through a sophisticated tunnel (a method he had also pioneered for smuggling drugs and previously used for escapes) showed the laxity and perhaps complicity at the prison, and again spotlighted the continuing inadequate state of Mexico’s corrections system.

Read the full chapter here.

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• Cuidado: The inescapable necessity of better law enforcement in Mexico

     

 

 

Major cities of the world will increasingly play a large role in the 21st century distribution of global power. Public policy decisions of city-level governments will affect major transnational issues such as climate change policies and global financial and trade developments, as well as issues related to global security, poverty, and social advancement patterns. In some cases, the impact of policy choices by global cities may have stronger domestic and international impacts than decisions of national governments. As urbanization continues to intensify, more than 70 percent of the world’s population will soon live in urban spaces.

More than ever, the state’s governing capacity and legitimacy will be shaped by how the state manages public security, suppresses insecurity and crime, and what kind of order it delivers in urban spaces. Indeed, how urban public safety is handled in the 21st century will determine citizens’ perceptions of the accountability and effectiveness of the state in upholding the social contract with its citizens.

Layers of insecurity

The nature and patterns of urban violence vary widely around the globe, with urban security having many dimensions. All cities need to address issues of street crime—the very fundamental basis of public safety—as well as organized crime, which includes extortion and contraband smuggling in slums and in city centers. 

Both of these types of criminality can at times be intertwined with homicides. Indeed, the first and inescapable element of public security provision is to reduce homicides as much as possible, since high homicide rates destroy social fabric and undermine social capital. Homicide rates of 10 or more per 100,000 residents tend to be classified as epidemic levels. As homicide rates rise to epidemic levels, effective prosecution falters, and social controls and law enforcement deterrence capacity weaken. In those circumstances, all kinds of crimes tend to rise.

Other public security challenges include:

Have’s and have not’s

Yet in many of the world’s major cities, neither public safety provision—including through law enforcement but also beyond—nor social development have kept up with the pace of urbanization and the threats that urban spaces experience. Instead, the state has at times either yielded or sometimes purposefully outsourced the delivery of order and public goods to non-state actors. Sometimes these actors are benevolent (such as legal businesses, public-private partnerships, non-government groups, and religious authorities), and sometimes they are dangerous and malevolent (such as criminal and militant groups). In the latter case, the abdication of state responsibility fundamentally undermines the bonds between the citizens and the state and can fuel militancy. However, order and public goods delivery, including of security, by criminal and militant groups often outcompetes the provision of such public goods by the state. Thus, non-state actors acquire political capital with local populations. Local populations often prefer a criminal or militant order to intense violence, persisting violent contestation, or marginalization and neglect by the state.

How urban public safety is handled in the 21st century will determine citizens’ perceptions of the accountability and effectiveness of the state in upholding the social contract with its citizens.

Many global cities are experiencing a deep and growing bifurcation between developed and reasonably safe city sectors of economic growth and social advancement, on the one hand, and vast urban slums stuck in a trap of poverty, marginalization, and violence on the other. Karachi, Jakarta, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City, Medellín, Rio de Janeiro are prominent examples. Such bifurcation is also present in many U.S. and European cities—be they Paris, Brussels, Birmingham, Los Angeles, or Baltimore, even though the schism is often less extreme. Addressing violence and lifting the slums and poor areas from this trap is among the major challenges for many governments. 

Responses and trade-offs

Securing global cities thus involves a panoply of policies. Security and anti-crime policies alone are neither sufficient nor appropriate for responding to all threats and vulnerabilities. Other policies, such as socio-economic approaches to responding to crime and militancy, resilient measures for infrastructure failures, and enhancing first-responder capabilities (including to natural disasters), are just some of the necessary tools. 

Security and anti-crime policies alone are neither sufficient nor appropriate for responding to all threats and vulnerabilities.

At the same time, security and anti-crime policies are needed in every city. They need to be de-conflicted and ideally harmonized with one another. Tensions often emerge among security policies designed to respond to different threats: Aggressive preemptive anti-terrorism policies based on intense policing of particular communities and de facto fishing for potential militants can, in the short term, avert some terrorist attacks, for instance. But they can easily clash with basic community policing principles and thus augment alienation, crime, and even incidence of terrorism itself in the medium term. Similarly, aggressive enforcement of anti-immigration policies can easily produce negative side-effects by weakening anti-crime policies as a result of diminished intelligence flows, thus augmenting the power of organized crime. A failure to politically, socially, and economically integrate migrant communities—paired with a failure to provide them with adequate rule of law and public safety—can produce spaces rife with crime and militant recruitment. 

In war zones, the harmonization challenge is one of transitioning from policing defined as counterinsurgency to effective anti-crime policing—the latter is necessary for the functioning of a legal economy and an effective and legitimate state. Soldiers do not tend to make good policemen, though governments in warzones and in countries with high levels of violence and police corruption tend to resort militaries for basic policing. And the international community is not well set up to deliver effective policing assistance: With expeditionary police forces absent, outside soldiers are sent to teach policing techniques (or rather their vague approximations), and police reform programs rarely succeed. 

Context, context, context

These are merely some of the challenges—both in terms of threats and in terms of policy responses—that city administrations, national governments, and the international community will need to grapple with. 

One policy does not fit all. There are a myriad of security threats, issues, and vulnerabilities that cities need to address, and all urban spaces are different. While being informed by best practices as well as the lessons from policy failures from across the world, an effective policy will need to be tailored to specific challenges and to specific institutional, developmental, and cultural contexts.

     

 

 

“Paris, San Bernardino, New York, Boston, Mumbai, Kabul, Baghdad, Aleppo. Cities tend to dominate the headlines, particularly when it comes to the issue of security,” Brookings Executive Vice President Martin Indyk said to open the inaugural panel of the new Securing Global Cities (SGC) project at Brookings. “And it is cities,” he continued, “that have become more and more the drivers of … economic growth [and] personal security in the 21st century.” Indyk moderated a panel of distinguished experts who identified complex threats and problems that cities face and examined some of the tools that governments can use to address them.

Equip cities to deal with future issues

Former Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno (U.S. Army, Ret.), now a senior advisor at JPMorgan Chase and co-chair of the SGC project with Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, shared some of the lessons he has learned on how to equip cities to deal with future development and security issues. His key points focused on the rapidly increasing interconnectedness of the world through information, the rise of megacities, and the “interrelationship” among economics, governance, and security. Watch:

Gen. Odierno also responded to an audience member’s question about how cities that strive for openness, migration, and multiculturalism can balance those aspirations with reassuring the people who already live there that migration is not a security risk. Noting that the world will continue to see huge refugee flows in coming years, he said that

What you can’t do is allow them to come into your country and then segregate them. Segregate them by where they live, segregate them by what rights they have, segregate them by what jobs they can hold, segregate them about what they can do.

He added a personal note, telling the audience that his grandfather was an Italian immigrant and that he, General Odierno, became head of the U.S. Army. “So that’s how you solve this problem,” the general said, “you have to allow them to be totally integrated, not segregated.

Lessons from Mumbai terrorist attacks

Brookings Distinguished Fellow Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor to the Indian prime minister and also India’s foreign secretary, spoke about what India learned from the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. He emphasized that terrorists “want to dominate the news cycle” and “provoke a disproportionate response.” So, he said, “don’t give it to them.” Watch:

Menon also spoke to the issue of preemption, which requires intelligence, but which also means “you have to start walking this very fine line between peoples’ freedoms and preemption.” He noted that India’s first law that accepted the idea of preemption came about after the Mumbai attacks. Finally, Menon explained the problem that sophisticated terrorist attacks “require support or connivance from state entities.” How, he asked, “do you convince states that this is counterproductive?”

Additionally, Menon said that it is not realistic to eliminate this kind of security problem or to prevent all casualties—though various tools of intelligence sharing and preemption could reduce the odds of a successful attack.

Bifurcation of cities and the problem of slums

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings, observed that “one of the defining characteristics of what’s been happening in cites over the past several decades is a great sense of bifurcation.” She explained bifurcation within cities (a relatively secure core versus vast slums); bifurcation between cities and the countryside; and bifurcation between cities within a country. Watch:

In her remarks, Felbab-Brown also concentrated on the problem of non-state actors providing governance in slums, and how this “intersects in complex ways with counterterrorism.” One problem, she noted, is that counterterrorism policies often “go quite fundamentally against the basic principles of community policing.” She also emphasized the intertwined problem of “who has trust and who has authority in the community?” Felbab-Brown explained that increased security will “likely bring you some sort of effect much faster than socioeconomic approaches,” but that does not address the trust and authority issue.

Felbab-Brown made a further point about what she described as “failed cities,” where “in major urban areas there are many parts of the city—often the largest parts in terms of the number of people who live there but also the territory—that have been left behind decades ago … by the government [and] by the more privileged members of society.” She noted that these areas don’t have basic services, job creation, and are growing. “Most of the migration from the rural areas,” she added, “is not taking place into the wealthiest centers of the cites … it’s taking place into slums.” And dealing with these problems requires enormous resources and a “decades-long willingness to increase taxation on the rich and middle-class to provide for the urban poor.” However, “often then the willingness evaporates as soon as violent criminality goes down and stops encroaching on the city center.”

Lessons in crime reduction from Colombia

The next speaker was Juan Carlos Pinzon, ambassador of Colombia to the United States and previously his nation’s defense minister. He described the efforts his government has made to reduce terrorism and organized crime, to address poverty, and to create jobs in his country, with particular emphasis on the cities of Cali, Medellin, and Buenaventura. Amb. Pinzon explained that one solution was to increase policing in all three cities, including a military police intervention in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura. “Increasing that kind of capability,” he said, “was necessary to show presence, to provide security, and to offer to the citizens the sense of presence that is sometimes necessary to create security.” But he added that this was not just a military or a security problem; instead, “at the end this is a justice problem.” The addition of more attorneys and prosecutors allowed an improvement in the legal process to address crime. Further strategies included helping mayors with the resources for investment, education, jobs, and health care.

Amb. Pinzon summed up the lessons learned in Colombia by noting that “security requires an integrated effort,” not just a military solution that goes after the “bad guys.” And part of this integrated solution is to offer people alternatives on education, job creation, and anything else “that really gives stability long term.” Watch:

Amb. Pinzon also contemplated the question, “what is ‘victory’?” in terms of security and cities. In Colombia’s case, he explained, “we were able to reduce the size of the problem to 30 percent of what it was 15 years ago … the size of the FARC, ELN [two guerilla groups] and crime in general is 30 percent of what it was.” But this level of success didn’t come about purely through military means, Amb. Pinzon said. Instead, political tools were necessary: it was “more a mix of security and political discussions,” he said. 

Three principles: resources, intelligence-sharing, organizational linkage

Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, outlined three principles that he says “have been important in our response” in the United States. These are: adequate resources—specifically human resources, not robots; “marrying up” national-level intelligence with “what the cop is learning on the beat and on the street”; and sorting out the linkages, relationships, and mechanisms whereby organizations and people across all levels of government can work together. Watch:

“One thing I’ve learned from my colleagues in metropolitan studies over the years,” O’Hanlon added, “is how cities in general struggle to unify themselves at the right level of planning because they are usually multijurisdictional. … [In the Washington, DC region] we have planning going on at the city, regional, state, and national levels and getting all of these different entities to work together is a hard problem that is going to vary from case to case.”

The panelists also discusses the importance of infrastructure (including water delivery, policing, economic development); the use of technology for surveillance and its intersection with civil liberties; the migration of new people into cities (mostly into slums); corruption; and the critical importance of leadership.
Reflecting on his experience leading the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq and commanding overall forces there, General Odierno offered one additional lesson: “There are limits to military power,” he said,

And so no matter how good you think you are or how much capability you have you can’t accomplish everything with military power alone. It has got to be integrated with good governance; it has got to be integrated with the creation of jobs and economic development. And if it’s not, it is going to be really difficult.

Watch the full video and get more information about this event here.

Securing Global Cities is part of the Global Cities Initiative, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan Chase is a donor to the Brookings Institution. Brookings recognizes the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.

Video

• Equip cities to deal with future issues
• Lessons from Mumbai terrorist attacks
• City bifurcation and the problem of slums
• Lessons in crime reduction from Colombia
• Three principles for securing global cities

     

 

 

Event Information

On February 10, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings convened a panel discussion to introduce Securing Global Cities, a new project based in Foreign Policy's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Securing Global Cities will be co-chaired by Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and General Ray Odierno, former chief of staff of the U.S. Army and JPMorgan Chase senior advisor. It is part of the Global Cities Initiative, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and JPMorgan Chase.

The goal of the project is to help cities around the world improve the physical safety of their citizens from various forms of violence. The overarching motivation of the project is the belief that cities have much to learn from each other by analyzing systematically and sharing best practices that strengthen their roles in a globalized world, bolster their economies, and protect their communities and citizens.

The project will identify different types of threats--from terrorists to narcotraffickers and other international criminal networks, gangs, insurgents, and abusive security forces--and examine the various tools that governments can deploy to address these diverse and complex problems. The tools will include reformed and strengthened police forces, justice systems, paramilitary and military institutions, intelligence capabilities, and a range of other instruments.

The discussion was moderated by Martin Indyk, executive vice president of Brookings.

JPMorgan Chase is a donor to the Brookings Institution. Brookings recognizes the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #GlobalCities.

Video

• The future of securing global cities
• Equip cities to deal with future issues
• Lessons from Mumbai terrorist attacks
• City bifurcation and the problem of slums
• Lessons in crime reduction from Colombia
• Three principles for securing global cities

Audio

• The future of securing global cities

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160210_securing_global_cities_transcript

     

 

 

2016 is shaping up to be a potentially critical year for Afghanistan. ISIS is rising there, the Taliban is gaining ground, the stability of the Afghan government is deteriorating by the day, and national elections are coming in October. The US, China, Pakistan, and the Afghan government are currently holding talks aimed at bringing the Taliban to the table to try negotiate an end to the war.

Of those countries, it's Pakistan that is the most significant. Pakistan has probably the most influence of anyone over whether those talks will succeed in getting the Taliban to agree to sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with the Afghan government. But there's a lot more going on with the peace talks that are perhaps the country's best or only remaining hope.

To understand how this works and why it matters, I spoke to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Afghanistan. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Jennifer Williams: Could you start by just explaining how Pakistan has been involved in the conflict between the Taliban and Afghanistan historically?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: That goes back to the creation of independent Pakistan, with issues having to do with the Pashtun minority in Pakistan, which is also the majority population of Afghanistan, and irredentist claims by Afghan Pashtun politicians, as well as the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, who at different times supported either Pakistan or Afghanistan and played the two against each other.

Then you have the Taliban emerging in the 1990s, and Pakistan fully supports the Taliban: They help equip it, they provide intelligence, advisers, and during the Taliban era when they ruled country, Pakistan is one of only three countries that recognize the Taliban regime.

They continued supporting the Taliban throughout the past decade, and US-Pakistan relations became very fraught and complicated. It's never been easy. Pakistanis sometimes use the expression that the United States treats Pakistan like a condom: uses it when they need it then discards it when they are finished with it. It's a fairly common saying in Pakistan, especially in the military. So there is a sense of betrayal on the part of the United States, untrustworthiness, that it's an exploitative relationship on the part of the US toward Pakistan.

I should also say that Pakistan has long supported many Islamic extremist groups as part of its asymmetric policy toward India, and some of these groups have now mutated, or they slipped Pakistan's full control.

Even with respect to the Afghan Taliban, there is a lot of support from the Pakistani state intelligence services and military to the Afghan Taliban. At the same time, Pakistan has been under enormous US and international pressure to act against them, and so they will take the occasional action against the Afghan Taliban as well. But those actions are mostly seen as halfhearted, incomplete window dressing.

JW: So what role is Pakistan playing today? I know that they just had the four-party talks and that Pakistan has been insisting that these talks take place in Pakistan. Are they trying to speak for the Taliban?

VFB: I'm not sure that it's a fair characterization that they are speaking for the Taliban. Certainly the Afghan government, including in the latest talks, often insinuates or alleges that Pakistan speaks for the Taliban. But they clearly do not.

The relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan is hardly smooth and perfect. Many members of the Afghan Taliban deeply resent the level of Pakistani interference, even as the group has been supported by Pakistan. There is a lot of Afghan Pashtun nationalism also among the Taliban that deeply resents the influence and attempts at control by the Pakistani state.

Part of the key issue in the relationship is that although Pakistan supports the Afghan Taliban, and although it has historically supported other extremist groups, it does not have perfect control. And arguably, its control is diminishing. And so they posture, they do their double game. They want to appear strong, and so they posture that they have much greater control than they have, but at the same time they deny that they have any nefarious role.

In reality, they are playing both sides against the middle, and they often have much less capacity to control and rein in the extremist groups, including the Afghan Taliban, than many assume. The widespread criticism of Pakistan is one of its duplicity and its nefarious activity and its lack of willingness to act against the Afghan Taliban. Those are true, but they are also coupled with limits to their capacity. They are riding a tiger that they cannot control fully.

So they have been hosting these four-way talks that involve them, the US government, the Afghan government, and the Chinese government. The Afghan government is desperate to achieve some sort of negotiated deal with the Taliban. It feels under tremendous pressure, the military is taking a pounding from the Taliban, and the government lacks legitimacy.

The US has similar views on the notion that the way out of the predicament in Afghanistan is a negotiated deal. The Chinese also like the idea. They have their own influence in Pakistan. China would very much like to say that they finally achieved what the US failed to do over the past decade, that they will bring peace to Afghanistan, and that they will do it by enabling the negotiations.

Pakistan is responsive to China. Their relationship with China is much stronger than their relationship with the United States. They often tell the US that China is their old friend, that China is the country that hasn't betrayed them, unlike the United States. China has promised massive economic development in Pakistan at $40 billion. The Pakistanis often say to the US that the Pakistan-China relationship is "greater than the Himalayas and deeper than the ocean." Very flowery.

JW: What's the relationship like between the Afghan government and Pakistan today?

VFB: The crucial man there really is the Pakistani chief of the army staff Raheel Sharif; no relation to [Prime Minister] Nawaz Sharif. I think that there is sort of goodwill and motivation right now, even on the army staff — but that is juxtaposed with, again, the limits of control even the chief has. With almost clockwork regularity you have a round of negotiations in Pakistan or you have a meeting between Raheel Sharif and [Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani, and the next day a bomb goes off in Kabul and people die, or the Indian consulate is attacked.

All those ploys are meant to destroy any beginning of a more positive relationship and have been very effective in subverting the process. The same goes on between Pakistan and India. Meanwhile, Ghani is taking an enormously risky strategy with respect to the negotiations. It's vastly unpopular in Afghanistan, and many, many Afghans hate Pakistan and blame it for all of their troubles.

They use Pakistan as the explanation of everything that ever goes wrong in Afghanistan. And the Pakistanis are responsible for a lot, but there's much, much blame and responsibility that lies on Afghan politicians and Afghan people.

So Ghani's outreach and engagement with Pakistan is extremely unpopular. He's spending an extreme amount of political capital, and does not have support from his partner in the government, Abdullah Abdullah, and the northern Tajik factions that hate Pakistan with great vitriol. So the more Pakistan is unable to deliver things like the Haqqani network, reducing or stopping its attacks in Kabul, the more politically impossible for Ghani the process will be.

JW: So what does that mean in terms of the stability of Afghanistan's unity government?

VFB: The unity government is extremely strained. "Unity" it isn't. The Pakistani negotiation angle is just too big for the strain. It might be strategically important. It might be a very significant element in getting any negotiation going, but it's also extremely politically costly, and the longer it doesn't produce anything, the more politically costly and unsustainable it will be.

In October, there are supposed to be parliamentary elections and district elections in Afghanistan, and, more important, this loya jirga [a national assembly of Afghan elders]. And unless there is some sort of major breakthrough by the summer, a lot of the negotiations and political process with both the Taliban and Pakistan will be put on ice, because it will just be politically impossible in the context of the loya jirga and the elections.

So they really have until the summer to make some sort of breakthrough, and then you will have months of morass and extreme political instability in Afghanistan, but it will also not be conducive in any way to improving either the relationship with Pakistan or the negotiations.

JW: How does Pakistan fit into the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan? What's the relationship there? And how might this affect the peace negotiations?

VFB: The rise of ISIS-Khorasan is one of the most interesting developments. It complicates the negotiations for the Taliban. They oppose the negotiations, and they're a big problem for Mullah Mansour and those who want to negotiate. They enable defections, make them easy, and make them costly.

At the same time, it is interesting because ISIS does not have the same linkages to Pakistan that the Afghan Taliban had, even though ISIS includes many defectors from the Taliban. They quite specifically reject what they call the "yoke" that Pakistan has put on the Afghan Taliban, and they call the Afghan Taliban leadership traitors because of the close relationship with Pakistan.

Moreover, ISIS-Khorasan also has quite a few members of various Pakistani extremist groups like Lashkar-e Taiba and members of TTP [Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan]. So there is also a lot of resentment and hostility toward Pakistan.

I think the rise of ISIS might make Pakistan be cooperative to some extent, but on the other hand, I think it will also reinforce in the mind of many Pakistan security controllers that it's important to cultivate the Afghan Taliban as friends against the bigger danger of ISIS.

JW: Now that ISIS-Khorasan has directly targeted Pakistan, the consulate in Jalalabad, do you think Pakistan will take action?

VFB: I think they'll take action against ISIS and groups like Tehrik-e Taliban. I don't think it will produce more resolve to go after the Afghan Taliban. That's my view. Others are hoping that they will finally accept the realities and really believe that they have to fight all of the insurgents, all of the terrorists, and that they cannot differentiate among them. I am not persuaded that that will, in fact, happen.

JW: So what does this all mean for the prospects for peace? Are you hopeful at all?

VFB: I think the peace negotiations are important, but I am skeptical that anything will happen quickly.

I think that if by summer the Taliban has been willing to join the negotiating table, that will be an important breakthrough, but nothing will be agreed. The summer will be very bloody, and then there will be the political [wrangling] associated with the loya jirga and the elections.

In my view, even if the Taliban comes to the negotiating table, we are looking at years of negotiations, and certainly no breakthrough before 2017 and likely much longer.

And so the question is whether we, the United States, are prepared to stand by with Afghanistan for that long and whether the Afghans will have the resolve. So it's really important that the military and the police fight as hard as they can, because the weaker they fight, the more they defect, the more intimidated they are, the more brain drain that flows from Afghanistan, the stronger the Taliban is viewed and the more intransigent they will be in the negotiations. Now the negotiations will be very much about the military battlefield as much as they will about what's happening at the table for a long time.

This interview was originally published by Vox.

     

 

 

Event Information

Due to this weekend's snow, Brookings will be closed on Monday, January 25.  This event will be rescheduled for a later date.

Across the globe, non-state actor violence, whether criminal or extremist, is increasingly attached to “enterprises” that fund them. These groups offer alternative ideas of power and forms of governance, which they achieve through a process of undermining and displacing formal state institutions. In weak, fragile and failed states, criminal entrepreneurs take advantage of the limited ability of national authorities to deliver human security and basic services, and use the vacuum created by ineffective governance to turn their own provision of “social services” and illicit employment into social and political capital.

On January 25, the Africa Security Initiative and the Latin America Initiative at Brookings and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime will host a panel discussion to analyze these trends in West Africa. Alessandra Fontana of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will highlight why the need to address criminal economies within a context of illicit financial flows is increasingly a priority for OECD states; Tuesday Reitano and Mark Shaw of the Global Initiative will detail their analysis prepared for the OECD on illicit economies and their impact in West Africa; former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Deputy Chief of Operations James Soiles will comment on law enforcement efforts in the region; Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown will discuss what factors influence the size and scope of political capital that organized-crime groups and terrorists obtain from their participation in illegal economies and Latin America Initiative Director Harold Trinkunas will moderate and provide a comparative view from Latin America. Following the panelists’ remarks, the group will take questions from the audience.

This event will be webcast.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #OrganizedCrime

     

 

 

In this interview, Vanda Felbab-Brown addresses issues of terrorism, organized crime, and state responses within the context of Boko Haram’s terrorism, insurgency, and militancy in the Niger Delta. She was interviewed by Jide Akintunde, Managing Editor of Financial Nigeria magazine.

Q: The Boko Haram menace has been with Nigeria for seven years. Why is it that the group does not appear to have run out of resources?

A: Boko Haram has been able to sufficiently plunder resources in the north to keep going. It has accumulated weapons and ammunition from seized stocks. It also taxes smuggling in the north. But its resources are not unlimited. And unlike other militant and terrorist groups, such as ISIS or the Taliban, Boko Haram faces far more acute resource constraints.

Q: Boko Haram is both an insurgent and a terrorist group. Does this explain why it is arguably the deadliest non-state actor in the world and the group that has used women for suicide bombings the most in history?

A: Boko Haram’s record in 2015 of being the deadliest group is a coincidence. Very many other militant groups have combined characteristics of an insurgency and a terrorist group. Its violence belies its weaknesses as much as its capacities.

Boko Haram’s resort to terrorism, often unrestrained terrorism and unrestrained plunder, reflect its loss of territory and most limited strategy calibration and governance skills. Its terrorist attacks, including by female suicide bombers, also reflect the limitation of the military COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy. For instance, after the international clearing, little effective control and “holding” is still exercised by the Nigerian military or its international partners.

Q: Although many views have rejected economic deprivation or poverty as the root cause of the insurgency, almost everyone agrees that military victory over the group would not help much if economic improvement is not brought to bear in the Northeastern Nigeria – the theatre of the insurgent activities. Is this necessarily contradictory?

A: Economic deprivation is hardly ever the sole factor stimulating militancy. There are many poor places, even those in relative decline compared to other parts of the country, where an insurgency does not emerge. But relative economic deprivation often becomes an important rallying cause. And indeed, there are many reasons for focusing on the economic development of the north, including effectively suppressing militancy but it also goes beyond that. Improving agriculture, including by investing in infrastructure and eliminating problematic and distortive subsidies in other sectors, would help combat insurgency and prevent its reemergence.

Q: While Nigerians remain befuddled about the grievances of Boko Haram, we are clear about the gripes of the militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta: they want resource control, since the Nigerian state has been unable to develop the area that produces 70 per cent of the federal government’s revenue. So, is the state always just and right in suppressing militant groups?

A: Indeed not; the state is hardly always just in suppressing militancy, even as suppressing militancy is its key imperative. Economic grievances, discriminations, and lack of equity and access are serious problems that any society should want to tackle. Even if there are “no legitimate grievances,” the state does not have a license to combat militancy in any way it chooses. Its own brutality will be discrediting and can be deeply counterproductive.

The Nigerian state’s approach to MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta) is fascinating: essentially the cooptation of MEND leaders through payoffs, but without addressing the underlying root causes. The insurgency quieted down, but the state’s approach is hardly normatively satisfactory nor necessarily sustainable unless new buyoffs to MEND leaders are again handed over. But that compounds problems of corruption, accountability, transparency, and inclusion.

Q: We can raise the same issue about economic justice in the way criminal and terrorist organizations operate their underground economies. How flawed have you found the alternative social orders that the leaders of criminal and terrorist organizations claim to foster?

A: The governance – the normative, political, and economic orders -- that militant groups provide are often highly flawed. They often underdeliver economically and they lack accountability mechanisms, even when they outperform the state in being less corrupt and providing swifter justice.

However, the choice that populations face is not whether the order that militants provide is optimal or satisfactory. The choice that matters to people is whether that order is stable and better than that provided by the state. So the vast majority of people in Afghanistan, for example, say they don’t like the Taliban. But they don’t like corrupt warlords or corrupt government officials even. It’s not the absolute ideal but the relative realities that determine allegiances or at least the (lack of) willingness to support one or the other.

Moreover, the worst outcome is constant contestation and military instability. A stable brutality is easier to adjust to and develop coping mechanisms for than capriciousness and unstable military contestation.

Q: The Nigerian amnesty programme seemed to be a model in resolving issues between the state and the non-state actors in the Niger Delta, given the quiet in that region in the past few years of the programme. But since the political power changed at the federal level, we are seeing signs of the return of sabotage of oil installations. What models, say in Latin America or elsewhere, can help foster more sustainable peace between governments and non-state actor militant groups?

A: I don’t think that the MEND programme is a model, precisely because of the narrow cooptation I alluded to. Many of the middle-level MEND commanders as well as foot soldiers are dissatisfied with the deal. And much of the population in the Delta still suffers the same level of deprivation and exclusion as before. The deal was a bandage without healing the wounds underneath. It’s a question how long it will continue sticking. Despite its many urgent and burning tasks and a real need to focus on the north, the Nigerian government should use the relative peace in the Delta to move beyond the plaster and start addressing the root causes of militancy and dissatisfaction there. 

This interview was originally published by Financial Nigeria.