Brookings: Topics - Counternarcotics Policy

Crime–War Battlefields

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:00:00 -0400

In her new article, “Crime-War Battlefields,” published in the June-July issue of Survival, Vanda Felbab-Brown discusses the evolution of war since the end of the Cold War and the eventual rise of policy and analytical focus on the intersection of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and anti-organized crime efforts. She explains how over the past two decades, international peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and other military forces have been neither properly trained nor eager to become involved in dealing with illicit economies and organized crime actors, but have nonetheless become increasingly unable to escape these aspects of their missions. Indeed, some of the missions recently taken on by international military forces have been pure anti-crime missions, such as the anti-piracy operations off Somalia. After surveying the nexus of crime and war from Latin America through Africa and Asia, the article ends with a set of policy recommendations for how modern militaries should deal with the nexus of conflict and crime.

INTRODUCTION

Military conflicts around the world increasingly conjoin political violence, organized crime and illicit economies. In many regions, domestic law enforcement responses to organized crime resemble warfare. Government suppression of urban crime and rural instability in Latin America and South Asia, for example, progressively merges police and military operations. In Mexico, Brazil and Central America, clashes between criminals and the authorities often have the intensity of intra-state urban conflict.

Modern militaries were not designed or trained to deal with illicit economies and organized crime. Nonetheless, the frequency and intensity of international military action at the nexus of violent conflict and crime has increased since the 1990s. Training police forces and devising responses to rising crime have been a key feature, and deficiency, of the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. NATO works alongside the Chinese and Saudi militaries in anti-piracy patrols off the coast of Somalia, in what would normally be regarded as law-enforcement operations.

Although criminals and militants often interact with illicit economies in the same way, it is rare for such groups to merge into a homogenous, monolithic entity. Rather, when a crime–terror or crime–insurgency nexus emerges, their interactions will be unstable. Accordingly, countering domestic crime that threatens national security, or resolving military conflicts that involve criminals and illicit economies, requires a complex, nuanced and carefully calibrated response.

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Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: Survival

Image Source: © STRINGER Mexico / Reuters

How Will the OAS Report Affect the Drug-Policy Debate?

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The OAS produced an overall balanced and measured report. Proponents of decriminalization and legalization have been rejoicing that the report embraced considering such approaches to dealing with marijuana. In its description of four possible scenarios of the evolution of the drug regime in Latin America, the report subtly but surely condemned the existing stance long-adopted by the United States that emphasizes imprisoning users and suppressing drug cultivation and flows. Endorsing experimentation with marijuana legalization and condemning the current approach were almost inevitable conclusions for the OAS review, given that several former presidents, key NGOs and sitting national governments in the region have been the leading activists for drug policy reform.

Various Latin American countries are likely to increasingly break with the existing law-enforcement- heavy drug-suppression doctrine. They may thus usher in an unraveling of the global counternarcotics regime that has existed for more than 50 years. But the world is nowhere near a new consensus

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Editor's note: This article was originally published by the Inter-American Dialogue’s daily Latin America Advisor.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor

Image Source: © STRINGER Venezuela / Reuters

President Obama’s Visit to Mexico: Key Anti-Crime Issues

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:57:00 -0400

Up to two weeks ago it looked like President Barack Obama would be going to Mexico with a very strong hand. Had the gun control measures, which the Obama administration pushed as one of its key domestic issues in the second term, passed in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. President could have arrived in Mexico next week having delivered on a sticky bilateral issue: For more than a decade, successive Mexican presidents have been demanding greater weapons checks and tighter gun control from the United States, with the hope that such measures would reduce the excruciatingly high criminal violence in Mexico.

Mexico’s other long-term demand has been immigration reform: increasing legal job opportunities for Mexican workers, reducing deportations, and allowing Mexican families to travel and connect without great personal security and legal risks. President Obama might yet be in a position to remove the immigration thorn from the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship. Clearly, any immigration reform will not pass before he goes to Mexico next week. But he can credibly indicate that his administration has made immigration reform a key domestic priority and that there is more congressional movement on immigration, including on offering a path to citizenship to the millions of undocumented migrants living in the United States, than there has been in years. And at least until the Boston terrorist attacks, it appeared that immigration reform would finally pass in the U.S. Congress. Those opposing immigration reform or demanding a tightening of borders and fail-proof screening that cannot realistically be achieved, are seizing on the Boston attacks as an excuse for derailing the immigration reform legislation. But the prospect of reform is still very much alive.

In addition to gun control and immigration, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto will want to talk economics. Upon assuming office last year, he announced that he would like to break out of the Mexico-U.S. relationship being captured in the prism of the drug trade violence and collapsed into anti-crime cooperation, and to have the relationship refocus on global and bilateral trade and energy issues.

But security issues will inevitably be on the agenda, and the discussions may not be easy. For a long time, Washington was suspicious that if the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which President Peña Nieto leads returned to power, it might be tempted by its old ways —again lessening Mexico’s determination to tackle organized crime and its penetration into Mexico’s law enforcement and administrative institutions and its grip on large segments of Mexico’s society. Since being elected, President Peña Nieto has repeatedly disavowed any negotiations with criminal groups, but he has also maintained that the priority for his government will be not to disrupt drug flows to the United States (as his predecessor President Felipe Calderón sought to do), but to minimize the terrible drug violence in Mexico. Both the reduced focus on disrupting drug flows and the new emphasis on reducing violence, especially should it lead to changed interdiction and targeting patterns in Mexico, might be difficult to sell to Washington and would require the United States to abandon some of its established, albeit often ineffective and counterproductive, international anti-crime and anti-drug policies.

For its part, the new Mexican government has been surprised and made uncomfortable by the extent and tightness of U.S.-Mexico anti-crime cooperation that was established during the Calderón years. Not only has much of the strategic and tactical intelligence for interdiction and other anti-cartel operations come from the United States, but also, and in an unprecedented way, U.S. advisors have become intimately involved in helping to design and shape tactical interdiction operations of several Mexican entities used for anti-cartel law enforcement as well as in reforming law enforcement institutions in Mexico. Conscious of sovereignty, eager to establish tight control of these security institutions, and seeking to redirect Mexico’s security policy to reducing violence, the Peña Nieto administration has been mulling over whether or not and how to shape U.S.-Mexico security cooperation. It needs to take care not to throw the baby out with the bath water. U.S. cooperation, including intelligence provision and law enforcement reform assistance, continue to be greatly valuable for Mexico, and Mexico is hardly in the position to do without them.

For its part, Washington needs to recognize that seeking to reduce criminal violence, including killings, kidnappings, and extortion, is the right priority for Mexico, and indeed, should be a key goal for law enforcement in any country. The United States should wholeheartedly support that objective in Mexico. But achieving violence reduction in Mexico will not be easy, as President Peña Nieto and his security team have already learned in their first six months. Major questions remain about the details, operationalization, and actual implementation of the security strategy Peña Nieto has outlined. As I detail in my report Peña Nieto’s Piñata: The Promise and Pitfalls of Mexico’s New Security Policy against Organized Crime, many components of the new strategy, such as the organizational reshuffle of Mexico’s security institutions, the establishment of a new gendarmerie, or even the youth-crime prevention focus (important as the last element is for any sustainable long-term strategy to reduce criminality) do not easily, quickly, and directly translate into violence reduction in Mexico.

Paradoxically, the policy that is most directly available to Mexico to reduce criminal violence is the one for which it needs the most cooperation from the United States: changing targeting patterns. Instead of deploying the Mexican military or federal police or the gendarmerie (whenever it will actually become available) merely in response to wherever violence intensely breaks out and making cartel capo decapitation the core of its strategy, Mexico needs to prioritize targeting in a way that will reduce violence. That means abandoning both top-level decapitation and reactive deployment of forces. Instead, a wiser interdiction pattern would be more selective and based on an analysis of which law enforcement actions will stimulate what responses and actions from and among the criminal groups. The changed interdiction pattern can include focusing on the most violent group in a particular area and focusing on the middle layer, as opposed to the top capos, of a cartel. As I also explain in another report, Focused Deterrence, Selective Targeting, Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime: Concepts and Practicalities, strategically choosing the basis of prioritized targeting and moving away from interdiction based only ad hoc on how intelligence becomes available requires careful calibration and an uneasy balancing of the pros and cons of each possible option for prioritized interdiction. It often entails uneasy tradeoffs.

Nonetheless, Washington should not define the prioritized interdiction approach (which can mean not vigorously going after some groups for a while) as yet another manifestation of the corruption of Mexican law enforcement institutions by organized crime groups. In turn, explaining to the United States that prioritizing law enforcement actions is smart policy, not weakness and corruption, requires that Mexico maintains extensive discussions with Washington.

What in the long term will increase the rule of law in Mexico is ensuring that communities obey laws, by increasing the likelihood that illegal behavior and corruption will be punished via effective law enforcement, but also by creating a social, economic, and political environment in which the laws are consistent with the needs of the people and allow citizens to embrace their police forces and state presence. Reducing criminal violence is a key element. Adopting a smarter interdiction pattern is an important first step.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Counterinsurgency, Counternarcotics, and Illicit Economies in Afghanistan: Lessons for State-Building

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:30:00 -0400

Editor's note: The following excerpt introduces a book chapter produced by Vanda Felbab-Brown for the Center for Complex Operations volume, Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization, published in April 2013. In this chapter, Felbab-Brown analyzes U.S. counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan since 2001, how the Obama administration broke with the dominant counternarcotics framework, and the potentially problematic side effects of counternarcotics success.

Since 2001, Afghanistan has become synonymous with the narco-state and the spread of crime and illegality. In 2007 and 2008, the Afghan drug economy reached levels unprecedented since at least World War II. Although the drug economy has declined since, the decrease has largely been driven by the saturation of the global drug market and by poppy crop disease rather than the policies of the international community and the Afghan government. Although several other illicit economies thrive in Afghanistan including the smuggling of legal goods, narcotics receive by far the most attention because they generate the largest profits and the greatest international opprobrium.

Narcotics production and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan are of critical importance not only for drug control there and worldwide, but also for security, reconstruction, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the counternarcotics policies adopted after 9/11 not only failed to reduce the size and scope of the illicit economy in Afghanistan but also had serious counterproductive effects on peace, state-building, and economic reconstruction.

In 2009, the Obama administration wisely decided to scale back eradication efforts in Afghanistan, courageously breaking with 30 years of counternarcotics policies that focused on ineffective forced eradication of illicit crops as a way to reduce the supply of drugs and to bankrupt belligerents. But the effectiveness of its counternarcotics policies there—interdiction focused on Taliban-linked traffickers and alternative livelihoods efforts—has been challenged by implementation difficulties and is ultimately dependent on major progress in improving the security situation and governance in Afghanistan. As of fall 2011, governance in Afghanistan had been steadily deteriorating, with corruption and ethnic tensions rising and political patronage networks becoming more exclusionary, while any security improvements following the 2010 U.S. military surge remain extremely fragile. A civil war post-2014 remains a very likely outcome, with the corollary thriving of the drug trade.

This chapter first details the evolution of U.S. counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan since 2001, situating the changes in the policy within two conceptual frameworks. Next, it describes how the Obama administration broke with the dominant counternarcotics framework in an attempt to synchronize counternarcotics policies with its counterinsurgency efforts. That section also analyzes the implementation challenges President Barack Obama’s counternarcotics strategy encountered—from the side effects of its interdiction focus, to poor governance and the inability to decide whether and how to combat broader corruption in Afghanistan, to defining alternative livelihoods efforts as narrow buying support programs rather than long-term sustainable development. Next, the chapter considers the likely security and political conditions in Afghanistan after a reduction in U.S. combat forces there in 2014. Subsequently, it explores two oft-ignored but potentially problematic side effects of any future counternarcotics success in Afghanistan: what illegal economy may replace the opium poppy economy if it is reduced, and where the opium poppy economy is likely to shift. In conclusion, the chapter offers broader lessons for dealing with illicit economies in the context of counterinsurgency and state-building.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: Center for Complex Operations

Still Knee-Deep In Poppy: The Evolution of Counter-Narcotics Policies in Afghanistan

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:20:00 -0400

Editor’s note: The following excerpt introduces a book chapter produced by Vanda Felbab-Brown for the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) volume, Partners for Stability, published in March 2013. In this chapter, Dr. Felbab-Brown explains how international and domestic counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan cannot be successful without first achieving substantial security improvements and good governance within the country.

Perhaps nowhere in the world have a country and the international community faced such a strong illicit drug economy as in Afghanistan. In 2007 and 2008, the economy reached levels unprecedented in the world at least since World War II. But neither opium poppy cultivation nor heroin production is a new, post-2001 phenomenon: each robustly existed during the Taliban era and before. Although opium production has declined in Afghanistan since 2008, the decrease has largely been driven by the saturation of the global drug market and by poppy crop disease, rather than being the outcome of the policies of the international community and the Afghan government.

Narcotics production and counter-narcotics policies in Afghanistan are of critical importance not only for drug control, but also for the security, reconstruction, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the counter-narcotics 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. 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 has struggled to implement its new strategy effectively. Although it backed away from centrally-led eradication, Afghan governor-led eradication persists. The interdiction policy adopted by ISAF at times approximates eradication in its negative effects on farmers’ well-being and their receptivity to Taliban mobilization, and rural development policies have failed to address structural drivers of poppy cultivation. Moreover, despite the surge in U. S. military forces adopted in December 2009 and important improvements in security in Afghanistan’s south, the 129,469 U. S. and ISAF forces deployed as of May 2012 have not stabilized other parts of Afghanistan, such as the east. The Taliban and related insurgencies have not been robustly defeated even in the south, and they maintain an important foothold in Afghanistan’s north as well. As U. S. and ISAF troops are preparing to depart Afghanistan by 2014, they are handing over an on-going war to Afghan security forces. Although both Russia and the United States have supported counter-narcotics policies in Central Asia, such as interdiction training, these efforts have achieved little systematic effect on either reducing illicit flows, the strength of organized crime, and corruption in the region or encouraging regional cooperation.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: German Council on Foreign Relations

Image Source: © Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

Focused Deterrence, Selective Targeting, Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime: Concepts and Practicalities

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: The following report was first published by the International Drug Policy Consortium, as part of its ‘Modernizing Drug Law Enforcement Project,’ in February 2013.

Introduction

Extensive criminality and illicit economies generate multiple, at times intense, threats to states and societies – to their basic security and safety, and to their economic, justice, and environmental interests. High levels of criminality, particularly criminal violence, tend to eviscerate law enforcement capacities as well as the social capital and organizational capacity of civil society and its ability to resist organized crime. Especially in the context of acute state weakness where underdeveloped and weak state institutions are the norm, goals such as a complete suppression of organized crime may be unachievable. But even in countries with strong law enforcement institutions, law enforcement efforts to suppress the incidence of criminality, particularly of transactional crimes, such as drug trafficking (as opposed to predatory crimes, such as homicides) have at times not succeeded and have generated negative side effects and externalities, such as human rights and civil liberties violations and overcrowded prisons.

Zero-tolerance approaches to crime, popular around the world since the late 1980s, have often proven problematic. They have produced highly unequal outcomes and often greater police abusiveness. Particularly, in the context of weak law enforcement institutions and high criminality, zero-tolerance approaches have mostly failed to reduce crime, while generating new problems. Allocating resources to essentially repressive programs frequently takes place at the expense of investigative capacity. Critically, the lack of prioritization of crimes and criminal groups often diverts police focus from the most violent and serious offenses and most dangerous criminal groups.

Focused-deterrence strategies, selective targeting, and sequential interdiction efforts are being increasingly embraced as more promising law enforcement alternatives. They seek to minimize the most pernicious behavior of criminal groups, such as engaging in violence, or to maximize certain kinds of desirable behavior sometimes exhibited by criminals, such as eschewing engagement with terrorist groups. The focused-deterrence, selective targeting strategies also enable overwhelmed law enforcement institutions to overcome certain under resourcing problems. Especially, in the United States, such approaches have produced impressive results in reducing violence and other harms generated by organized crime groups and youth gangs. Such approaches have, however, encountered implementation difficulties elsewhere in the world.

This report first outlines the logic and problems of zero-tolerance and undifferentiated targeting in law enforcement policies. Second, it lays out the key theoretical concepts of law-enforcement strategies of focused-deterrence and selective targeting and reviews some of their applications, as in Operation Ceasefire in Boston in the 1990s and urban-policing operations in Rio de Janeiro during the 2000s decade. Third, the report analyses the implementation challenges selective targeting and focused-deterrence strategies have encountered, particularly outside of the United States. And finally, it discusses some key dilemmas in designing selective targeting and focused-deterrence strategies to fight crime.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: International Drug Policy Consortium

Image Source: © STRINGER Mexico / Reuters

Has the U.S. "Militarized the Battle" Against Illegal Drugs?

Andrés Rozental — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The whole issue of how the United States and other countries continue to spend these huge amounts of money to ensure that the fight against drug trafficking remains outside the United States needs to be re-considered, not only because the existing interdiction policy has been an abysmal failure, but also because the sale of large quantities of arms and other military hardware to governments in Latin America and the Caribbean has only made their own security and public safety situation worse. The amounts mentioned by the Associated Press are only a small portion of the total budgets spent on unsuccessfully trying to stop drugs from entering the United States.

The only smart solution to the illicit narcotics market is to face the unpalatable, but nonetheless real, fact that drugs—like alcohol, tobacco and other stimulants—are an integral part of social behavior in most countries and that they need to be differentiated, decriminalized, taxed and regulated just like prescription drugs, liquor, cigarettes and the rest. Until that happens, the shameful waste of resources being spent on a 'mission impossible' only fuels the criminal elements involved in the business and raises the associated social, economic and political costs being borne by producing, consuming and transit nations. This relates both to military as well as civilian spending associated with the drug trafficking phenomenon and in my opinion applies equally to the public and private sectors.

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Authors

Andrés Rozental

Publication: Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor

Image Source: © Carlos Jasso / Reuters

Peña Nieto’s Piñata: The Promise and Pitfalls of Mexico’s New Security Policy against Organized Crime

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:30:00 -0500

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has a tough year ahead of him. After six years of extraordinarily high homicide levels and gruesome brutality in Mexico, he has promised to prioritize social and economic issues and to refocus Mexico’s security policy on reducing violence. During its first months in office, his administration has eschewed talking about drug-related deaths or arrests. The Mexican public is exhausted by the bewildering intensity and violence of crime as well as by the state’s blunt assault on the drug trafficking groups. It expects the new president to deliver greater public safety, including from abuses committed by the Mexican military, which Mexico’s previous president, Felipe Calderón, deployed to the streets to tackle the drug cartels.

Seeking to bring violent crime down is the right priority for Mexico, and indeed, should be a key goal for law enforcement in any country. The United States should wholeheartedly support that objective in Mexico. But achieving violence reduction will not be easy, major questions remain about the outlines of the security strategy Peña Nieto has sketched, and some approaches to reducing violence would come with highly negative side-effects.

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Indonesia Field Report II – Bali High, Rainforest Low: The Illicit Drug Trade in Indonesia

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Yet another Western tourist – this time a 56- year-old grandmother from Britain – has become the face of drug trafficking in Indonesia. Her death sentence for smuggling 10 pounds of cocaine worth of $2.5 million in her suitcase has riveted international media. Her story – that she was coerced to smuggle the drugs in order to protect her children and grandchildren whose safety was at stake – vaguely resembles the misfortunes of Bridget Jones from the movie Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. But so far, no miraculous Mark Darcy has landed to liberate her from prison and death row. Rather, human rights groups have criticized the British government for not doing enough to provide an adequate legal defense for Ms. Lindsay Sandiford. But as unfortunate as her story is, and even as it is but one in a long line of Western tourists dramatically apprehended and punished for drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, it is to a great extent a distraction from the drug trafficking problems and trends that Indonesia faces.

Like other countries in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has for decades applied extremely harsh penalties for drug trafficking and drug use. Like in Ms. Sandiford’s case, Indonesian law punishes drug smuggling with the death penalty, or at least a decades-long imprisonment. Merely getting caught smoking a joint can land one in jail for several years. As with elsewhere in Southeast Asia, such harsh penalties have done little to decrease drug trafficking in Indonesia.

In fact, both drug use and drug trafficking appear to have increased in the country. In 2011, Indonesia’s user population was estimated to be approximately 4.1 million, or 1.6 percent of Indonesia’s total population. In 2009, that user population was believed to be only 500,000.[1] If the estimates are equally correct – or more precisely make the same (under)estimation mistakes for both years – that would be an astounding eight-fold increase in three years. The expansion of Indonesia’s middle class, its growing purchasing power underpinned by the country’s economic boom fueled by its primary commodity exploitation and resulting GDP growth rates of over six percent, the stress of increasing inequality, and the democratization and political opening of the post-1998 era are all the kinds of triggers that can increase illicit drug consumption. Just like in China, Indonesians have been developing a taste for methamphetamines, ecstasy, heroin, and ketamine.

If the number of drug seizures, which can be signs of both greater drug flows and greater law enforcement effectiveness, are any indication, trafficking too seems to be increasing. Drug shipments intercepted at the Soekarno Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, arguably the most patrolled and monitored port of entry into the country, have risen from 16 in 2008 to 63 in 2010 and 52 in 2011.[2] With over 18,000 islands and a coastline of over 54 thousand kilometers, the Indonesian archipelago offers the perfect geography for smuggling, never mind how under-resourced and notoriously corrupt the Indonesian law enforcement apparatus is, and how weak and bribery-susceptible the justice system. Even with much less corruption in Indonesia – as critical and pivotal an achievement as that would be – and far greater resources devoted to counternarcotics enforcement, Indonesia would still be the trafficker’s paradise. Particularly since for several years now, prices of illicit drugs in Indonesia are believed to have remained higher than elsewhere in Southeast Asia.[3]

With the poor rule of law and the pervasive and deeply-ingrained corruption that exists in the country, Indonesia’s law enforcement and military officials, even more so than their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are perfectly positioned to dominate Indonesia’s drug trade. The dramatic court showcases of Western tourists smuggling drugs aside, examples of military and law enforcement complicity in drug trafficking abound. Rather laughably, officials at one of Indonesia’s high-security prisons, for example, have been caught cooking meth and supplying both the prison and the nearby city.[4] According to U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, Indonesian military commanders in West Papua have participated in all manner of smuggling, including drug and timber trafficking across the border with Papua New Guinea.[5]

Importantly, however, Indonesia is no longer just a transit country for illicit drugs heading to Australia, China, and Japan, but is also increasingly a destination country. It is also a hot and rapidly expanding meth production center. Since cold medications containing pseudoephedrine are sold in Indonesia without prescription or any registration required, as they used to be in the United States until the early 2000s, cooking meth is easy. A major producer of methamphetamines itself, China supplies the pseudoephedrine both to Indonesia’s pharmaceutical industry and illicit market in a rather unregulated and unmonitored manner.

Ever more, the meth cooks in Indonesia are native, instead of the Dutch who would arrive in their former colony to produce the methamphetamines. Indeed, one of the most important developments in the Indonesian drug market is the growth of Indonesia’s domestic production capacity. The expansion of the synthetic drugs market and the domestication of production have potentially large transformative effects on Indonesia’s landscape of organized crime. Western tourists may well be those most visibly apprehended in Indonesia, but the formation of powerful Indonesian drug-trafficking groups can radically transform the structure and characteristics of the Indonesian criminal market. The emergence of far more powerful and vertically-integrated drug-trafficking groups could alter the market’s proclivity toward violence. So far, it has been a rather peaceful market. It could also change the relationship between the Indonesian state, military and law enforcement officials, and politicians on the one hand and Indonesia’s criminal gangs on the other – a complex web described in Indonesia Field Report I on urban gangs. With far greater profits at stake than in the previous drugs-for-tourists deals, a large meth market is also bound to attract the attention of powerful organized crime groups from other Southeast Asian countries and China, potentially triggering turf wars over the market and once again fundamentally altering the relationship between state and crime in Indonesia. Already, members of Malaysian drug syndicates attempting to smuggle drugs are caught with increasing frequency at Jakarta’s airport.[6]

Although the growing meth market is potentially radically transformative of Indonesia’s criminal market and is certainly highly lucrative, Indonesia is hardly a newcomer to the drug trade. Along with Cambodia, the Philippines, and India, Indonesia has long been a significant producer of cannabis. The Aceh region in Sumatra has been one of the primary cultivation areas, with the pot profits funding Acehnese secessionists and Indonesian jihadists as well as poor farmers.

Historically, various foreign as well as domestic political actors profited from the illicit and licit drug trade in Indonesia. Opium poppy used to be cultivated in Borneo and other islands of the archipelago during the 19^th century. At the turn of the 20^th century, the Dutch imported opium from British India, Persia, and Turkey and sold it in legal government-sponsored shops and smoking outfits as well as to pharmaceutical companies. The Japanese occupation forces taxed the opium-processing factories as did Sukarno’s pro-independence forces who took over the factories from the Japanese. After the end of World War II, the pro-independence parallel government smuggled out large quantities of illegal opium to Singapore to generate revenues to fight the Dutch.[7]

More surprisingly, coca, the quintessential Latin American drug-producing plant, also used to be cultivated in Indonesia. During the 1870s, a Javanese coca cultivar was developed with leaves containing about 1.5 percent cocaine, a much higher potency than the South American coca varieties had at that time. Foreign sales of coca leaves subsequently boomed, with over 1,000 tons of leaves exported to Amsterdam for processing into cocaine in 1912. By 1920, coca exports had increased to 1,600 tons, equivalent to 25 tons of cocaine and surpassing the level of cultivation in Peru and Bolivia during that period.[8] As attitudes toward cocaine use began to change during the 1930s and the European market shrank, Indonesia’s coca cultivation and exports dwindled. By 1935, coca leaf exports from Java fell to less than 10 percent of peak production, and after a few years coca cultivation in Indonesia rather precipitously stopped. The expansion of the global illicit trade in cocaine after the 1970s fueled a massive coca cultivation expansion in the Andes, yet Indonesia’s cultivation has not returned. But now, the illicit market in synthetic drugs has robustly taken off.

Of the various smugglers I was able to interview in Indonesia during my research there in the fall of 2012, none were as reticent as the drug smugglers. Those who organized illegal mining and logging bragged with pride about their capacity to bribe Indonesian authorities – see Indonesia Field Trip Report III on illegal logging and mining. Wildlife poachers and traffickers exhibited with glee, and without any remorse, the animals they slaughtered – see Indonesia Field Trip Report IV on wildlife trafficking. But those who supposedly could talk about local drug peddling and trafficking were tight-lipped, nervously looking over their shoulders and denying any knowledge. The differential penalties – very harsh for drug trafficking and minimal for illegal logging, mining, and wildlife trafficking – may not have reduced the intensity of illicit drug flows in Indonesia, but they have silenced the participants in the illegal drug trade. And yet one needs to wonder not only about the readiness of Indonesia’s law enforcement to cope with the potential growth and power of Indonesia drug trafficking groups, but also about its priorities. The illicit drug trade often generates the most international opprobrium; yet it is the illicit as well as licit destruction of Indonesia’s biodiversity that is most pressing and requires urgent attention from the Indonesian government and law enforcement. After all, the drug trade is in renewable, nondepletable resources -- unlike Indonesia’s forests and unique species that are being overexploited and are disappearing at breakneck speed. Once they are gone, there is no way of bringing them back. Meth will be cooked and consumed decades from now. The only question is who will control the meth market and what kind of political power the market will generate.

[1] United States Department of State Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control strategy Report, March 2012, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/187109.pdf: 262-266.

[2] Multa Fidus, “Malaysian Syndicates Dominate Drug Smuggling in RI,” Jakarta Post, 26 April 2012, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/04/26/malaysian-syndicates-dominate-drug-smuggling-country.html.

[3] Interview with counternarcotics officials, Jakarta, October 2012. Given Indonesia’s rather limited and varied efforts to collect systematic drug data as well as frequent short-term fluctuations in drug prices, such assessments need to be taken with a grain of salt.

[4] Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja, “Indonesian Drug Trafficking Busts Doubled in 4 Years,” Jakarta Globe, 4 April 2011, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/indonesian-drug-trafficking-busts-doubled-in-4-years/433371.

[5] Philip Dorling and Nick McKenzie, ‘Indonesian Army Linked to Drugs,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/indonesian-army-linked-to-drugs-20101222-195kx.html.

[6] Fidus.

[7] Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 290.

[8] David Musto, “International Traffic in Coca through the Early 20th Century, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 49(2), January 1, 1998: 145-156.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Supri Supri / Reuters

Transnational Organized Crime: Whither Antidrug Policy?

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: In an interview with Ania Calderón of the Journal of International Affairs (Vol. 66, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2012 page 169) Vanda Felbab-Brown analyzes the unprecedented pace at which the illicit drug trade is expanding.

Journal of International Affairs: Given that transnational organized crime and insurgency are correlated, though not always, and not everywhere, in your perspective, what are the causes of the relationships when these two do combine?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: In the case of drug trafficking, for example, there are many parts of the world where illicit economies include this type of organized crime. In arguably every single country of the world, there is some aspect of the drug trade; many of them consume, but they usually also generate some level of trafficking as well. Some areas are very big production centers while others are not, but today there is some level of consumption in almost every country, even if it is very small. Production seems to be more concentrated than consumption. Comparatively, there are far fewer places where you have some level of militancy, and usually the two emerge quite separately and independently from each other.

Insurgents rarely start the drug trade. More often than not, what happens is that the drug trade exists in some robust fashion where there are similar types of underlying conditions, such as poor governance, a lack of state presence, and a militant statute operating the area. Eventually, governments have to make decisions on how to react to the drug trade. Do they try to suppress it or, for ideological reasons, do they embrace it? Under some circumstances, do they transform it?

Some argue that participation in the illegal economy transforms the insurgents, in that they stop having political goals and become simply motivated by profit. This argument is often made about the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, for example. I find it simplistic and often inaccurate. Insurgents shape the illicit economy as a result of their militant presence as well as militant patterns of behavior, including organizational capacity, tactics, strategies, and often their goals as well. I cannot think of a case where insurgents themselves are the illicit economy. They usually lack organizational capacity. Nonetheless, they develop what we call the technology of illegality, meaning that they develop the capacity and the network to participate in the drug trade, as well as the knowledge to switch to other illicit trades in which they can participate.

Journal: How would you explain the difference between countries with drug trafficking and violence—for example Mexico, Colombia, or other countries in Central America—and countries with drug trafficking and related violence—such as the United States, Spain, France, or even England?

Felbab-Brown: This is a very appropriate question and one that is often lost in the debate. When you hear the perspective from Latin American governments, and frequently Latin American scholars, they do not make the distinction, and they blame the fact that drug trade means that there is violence. That is not the case. One can take the yakuza in Japan for example. Their primary activity is not drug trafficking; it is essentially that of the mafia, mainly extortion and enforcement of contracts, as well as construction. Nonetheless, the yakuza is the primary distributor of the drug business structure in Japan, and it is an extraordinarily peaceful market. The same happens in the United States—there is a very peaceful market today unlike in the 1980s, especially in a place like Washington, D.C.

So many sectors determine the level of violence, but the critical one is the capacity of law enforcement, i.e., capacity in terms of numbers. But equally critical is capacity in terms of the ability to develop strategies appropriate to the threat that they are facing. To put it less abstractly, it is the capacity of law enforcement to deter certain types of behavior so as to shape the behavior of criminals. I often say that we have to distinguish the key activities of law enforcement with respect to transactional crimes as opposed to predatory crimes. Transactional crimes are something like trafficking, and predatory crimes are something like murder or robbery.

The purpose of law enforcement, with respect to transactional crimes, is to make sure that they have “good” criminals. What does it mean to have good criminals? Essentially, three things: one, that criminals who are participating in the transactional crimes are not too violent. In other words, you want to have the kind of traffickers that you have in the United States. Often these are the same groups that operate in Mexico, but when they are arrested, they do not react by shooting at the policemen; they react instead by extending their hands to allow for the handcuffs to be placed on them, because they understand the consequences of being a major challenge to the state of law enforcement, and that it is not tolerated. So my first criterion of a good criminal is one who is not too violent. There is always a degree of violence in most criminal life. In drug trafficking, you have violence that is inescapable for a variety of reasons, but there are nonetheless great differences in whether you have five murders per one hundred thousand or one hundred murders per one hundred thousand.

A second criterion of a good criminal is one who does not have much capacity to be corrupt. What does that mean? Well, criminals will always be able to bribe border patrol, or customs officers, or even policemen, but they should not have the capacity to buy entire police precincts or entire cities. Preventing this does not necessarily take place through state actions against the criminals—although those can send deterrence messages as well—but through governments’ own auditing mechanisms of their institutions. So this is more about playing defense by securing institutions rather than playing offense with respect to the criminal.

Finally, my third criterion for a good criminal is one who does not provide as many services to society, i.e., a criminal on whom society does not depend for shared economic advancement, justice delivery, distributive resolution mechanisms, or for the provision of security. Once again, this is something that you do not necessarily condition the criminal to do or not do. The state needs to out-compete the criminal by being the provider of these public goods or services.

Now, how does all of this trigger violence? A critical factor is the capacity of law enforcement. It is not inherent that illegal economies, including the drug trade, are violent. There is great variation. But there are other factors apart from the quality of law enforcement, such as the central balances of power within the criminal market. Are there few groups that have developed a balance of power and defined territories, or many small groups that constitute a slim market of mom-and-pop types of enterprises that do not have the capacity to trigger or generate any violence? Or is there a power imbalance in the system, where the decision of one group within the criminal market can pull the entire system into something that interferes with the capacity of law enforcement and that also operates independently of law enforcement?

There are other factors at play, like the age of the managers, also called capos. There is quite a bit of evidence that the younger the capos, the more violent the market. Most of the time, the people who are killers tend to be very young, usually in their twenties and sometimes much younger than that. In the late 1990s, Hong Kong and Macau were trying hard to hide the major escalation of violence between the Chinese tong and the triads (both are terms for Chinese crime syndicates). The reaction by the police chief in Macau was somewhat humorous and absurd, but at the same time not completely so. In an effort to assure people, especially tourists coming to Macau, that they did not need to be afraid of all the gang violence, he claimed that Macau had “professional killers who don’t miss their targets,” and who never kill innocent bystanders. In Mexico today, you have very much the opposite, such as a boy being hired to kill ten people in the hope of getting among them the intended victim. This is very different from when someone pays $400,000, for example, to hire a professional hit man to kill one person. It is a very different market that has a lot to do with internal management and the agent capacity of the criminal manager, as well as the capacity of the law enforcement.

There is a debate about the extent to which guns influence violence levels. Many people say that the more guns, the more violence. I tend to have a more nuanced and certainly more of an outside view on that. I believe there is very strong evidence that weapons cargo influences street level violence—for example, the escalation of street disputes among boys into an armed encounter, such as a dispute over a girlfriend, or a dispute in a pub. There is very strong evidence that controlling weapons reduces these kinds of killings. I do not think there is robust evidence at all that strategic violence among criminal groups is triggered by the prevalence of weapons. They almost always have weapons, and they almost always have access to weapons.

Journal: Could you give a few examples of the role of the state in increasing the scale of transnational organized crime, even though it may be unintended, and what policies or programs have been successful in diminishing or even controlling it?

Felbab-Brown: Actually, it is not always unintended that the state scales up or intensifies organized crime—sometimes it is very much intended. In some countries, the state is quite indistinguishable from organized crime. They are popularly called mafia states. In other cases, you have inadvertent consequences. In Mexico, the way President Calderón chose to confront the drug trafficking groups greatly intensified the violence. His administration inherited a law enforcement that had collapsed after decades of tolerance or so-called management of organized crime. He also chose a tactic that greatly intensified the violence: exerting an assertive message. Often, policy interventions can have other unintended consequences in shaping organized crime in a way that might not necessarily be good. There are many common policies, such as standing up for strife in the communities of a country, which is a double-edged sword. Specialized interdiction units often have a history of becoming sophisticated coup forces. You can have other policy interventions, such as eradication, that identifies insurgency or shifts drugs to even more problematic areas.

On the positive side, I think the United States is an example of mass progress in fighting organized crime. In the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, many police departments were too corrupt to control organized crime groups. In the seventies and the eighties, there was a major cleaning up of these departments. Some of it had to do with law enforcement and some had to do with taxes, which resulted in a demographic shift, moving minorities, including the Italians, out of the ghetto and toward living in a more diversified manner within the larger population. The absence of their concentration shifted the power of organized crime, which had earlier mobilized and controlled neighborhoods.

Italy is another success story. I would say it is far less complete than the United States and far more challenging, but nonetheless the power of the mafia and the tolerance of the mafia were very much challenged. There are also organized crime groups that do not get much attention, such as in India, which are very powerful, but not very violent. And then you have Latin America as the outlier, not just by the presence of organized crime but because of the violence levels generated by the organized crime groups. Only parts of Saharan Africa are on par with violence in Latin America, and their organized crime tends to be shaped very differently.

Journal: You mentioned in your book, Shooting Up, that governments need to think about which illicit transaction in the economy will replace the one they have eliminated. What should be the role of the government in controlling one over the other, and specifically how should this be addressed on an international scale in a globalized economy?

Felbab-Brown: This is a very controversial question. Most of the time governments tend to fight illicit economies and not think about what will replace them. Policies are often premised on the erroneous idea that simply suppressing a particular part of the illicit economy will mean that legality will emerge. Frequently that does not happen, especially when large segments of the population cannot participate in the legal economy and are dependent on illegality for their survival. In those cases in particular, the propensity towards shifting to other forms of illegality is very high. On the other hand, if you have a finite supply of traffickers and a large segment of the population that does not depend on illegality, then it is quite possible that suppression alone will be sufficient, and no replacement economy will arise. In the case of global networks that have large societal dependence and participation in illegality, it is almost impossible to make sure that if you suppress one illicit economy, another one will not emerge.

So it mostly depends on the setting. There are some illicit economies that need to be the priority when it comes to suppression—smuggling nuclear materials, for example. This is an economy that is rather minimal in scale but nonetheless the consequences could potentially be so exorbitant that suppressing it needs to be a priority. The priority, in my view, should be to think about which illicit economy is the most dangerous and poses the greatest harm, and to focus on methods to minimize that economy.

But there are some tough questions in this area. Is it preferable to suppress the drug trade, even if the resulting outcome means more intensive illicit logging, for example? I would make the argument that since the drug trade will continue somewhere else, it is far better to focus on preserving trees than on minimizing drug flows. For biodiversity and global warming reasons, timber and log life are depletable resources and under some circumstances are not renewable, whereas the drug trade isn’t. So, for me, paying predominant attention to the drug trade is the wrong locus of priority. Again this is a minority view and most governments—for normative reasons and due to the drug enforcement regimes built by the United States over the last fifty years—still place emphasis on the drug trade as opposed to other adverse economies. I often make the argument that the drug trade is not the most harmful; there are other illicit economies that pose greater harm. So governments have to prioritize, as well as choose the means to manage and suppress the illicit economies.

Journal: You have talked elsewhere about the political capital of illegal economies. Could you explain what you mean by this?

Felbab-Brown: The political capital of illicit economies refers to the legitimacy that participation in these markets has solidified. Basically, it is how the society perceives criminals or militants that sponsor the illicit economy. Do they see them as Robin Hood heroes? Or do they see them as devout antagonists? This has to do with how much society is willing to cooperate with the state and law enforcement in suppressing the illicit economy.

In Shooting Up, I mentioned that there are four factors that define the sponsorship that illicit economies give to criminals. And the reason that they give any legitimacy in the first place is that they are clever enough to use both the profits and the management of the illicit economy to provide public goods to their communities, such as security. That might sound paradoxical, but often both criminals and militants, although they are the sources of insecurity in the first place, are also providers of certain liberties. These groups are vicious and brutal and impose great restraints on the behavior of the individual, but at the same time, they may also suppress murders, robberies, and punish rapes. They are providers of public order. Criminals and militants also provide dispute-resolution mechanisms so one might even argue that they are providers of justice. In places where they are the only providers of order, this gives them political capital.

To determine whether a society sees criminals as legitimate or antagonists, we look simply at the state of the overall economy in the country. Essentially, is the country rich or poor? Do many people depend on the illegal economy for their livelihood or not? Is it the United States or is it Bolivia? If the only way you can make a living is to cultivate coca in Bolivia, most people will believe that cultivation of coca might be illegal but it is not illegitimate. So sponsoring the cultivation of coca will have created political capital. In a place like the United States, where very few people depend on the illegal economy for survival, most of society thinks people in ghettos who fail the drug test or who cultivate marijuana or coca are criminals, and they should be punished.

The second factor is very much related to the first factor: What is the character of the illicit economy? Is it labor intensive? So when we take something like nuclear smuggling, it is something that is done by very few individuals. The smuggling methods are limited to people that you could usually count on the fingers of one hand, so it doesn’t provide a livelihood to many people at all. If you have a country where the only illegal economy that is present is nuclear smuggling, it would not have wide political capital, because it cannot employ many people, and the population will not profit from it.

The third factor is whether there are abusive traffickers present. To manage an illegal economy—that is how you obtain organized crime—you usually need someone who acts as a facilitator of the business plan. You have criminal groups, such as the Sicilian mafia, which can have managers with very widespread acceptance within society. So if an outside militant group tries to take over an illicit economy, they won’t be accepted because the traffickers who behave like a state, and often are more benevolent and reliable than the state, have already captured the political capital. On the other hand, you can have traffickers who are extremely abusive and very unpredictable and may compete with another actor to gain political capital, say traffickers in Afghanistan in the 1990s. They were very predatory and did not deliver services or public goods to society. So when a new group came in, took over the illicit economy, and used the proceeds to build mosques and clinics and set up rules and redistribution mechanisms, they gained political capital.

The final factor is the response of the state to the illicit economy, which might vary from suppression, to laissez faire, to legalization. For simplistic purposes, if you have a very poor economy, where a large number of people depend on the illegal economy for basic survival, the more the state tries to suppress the illegal economy, the more it hurts large numbers of people. As a result, more people dislike the state and more political capital goes to sponsor the illicit economy. On the other hand, if the state does not suppress it, their political capital might be greatly undermined.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: Journal of International Affairs

Image Source: © Carlos Jasso / Reuters

Where Is the Drug Policy Debate Headed Next?

Andrés Rozental — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

There are now 22 states that have passed initiatives either legalizing recreational or medical marijuana. With laws in almost half of the 50 states now in conflict with the federal government, which purports to maintain its prohibition on the production, distribution or consumption of cannabis and other narcotics, something has to give.

But the issue is not limited to contradictory federal and state laws within the United States. Countries like Mexico, the Central American nations and some Caribbean islands, which have been at the forefront of the fruitless fight against illicit drugs entering the United States from their territories, are now faced with a growing conundrum.

While expensive and failed interdiction efforts have effectively been subcontracted by Washington to third countries, there is a clear tendency within the world's largest drug consuming country to remove both the stigma and legal prohibition against individual consumption. This will inevitably lead to a reconsideration of why we are spilling blood and spending huge sums of money to satisfy outdated laws that Americans themselves are gradually repudiating. Mexico, in particular, needs to re-examine its strategy in light of these recent developments and make a decision as to whether it wants to continue to fight a battle that a majority of Americans in a recent Gallup poll opposed.

It is time for America to wake up and face the reality of its drug culture by harmonizing federal laws with citizen's demands and ending the criminalization of drugs. Mexico and many other countries in the region and beyond will benefit by removing the sale of at least soft drugs from organized crime and bringing it under the same controls that the government applies to alcohol and tobacco. Demand creates supply in this market just as it does in any open economy; as long as the demand remains, drugs will be supplied. Better to tax, regulate and supervise the market than to continue a failed strategy of pretending that the problem wouldn't exist if only producing and transit countries didn't allow drugs to reach the U.S. market.

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Andrés Rozental

Publication: Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor

Image Source: © STRINGER Mexico / Reuters

What Legacy Does Felipe Calderón Leave in Mexico?

Andrés Rozental — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Felipe Calderón's achievements, such as they are, will be quickly overshadowed by his legacy of a failed strategy in the fight against organized crime and the drug cartels, an unfulfilled pledge to create sufficient jobs to absorb new entrants into the market and a lackluster economic growth record.

Although the country's economy has performed reasonably well when compared to other middle-income nations and most industrialized ones, much of this has been due to a tenuous recovery in the United States, a competitive currency and a resumption of consumer spending on durable goods that Mexico produces for the U.S. market. There is little evidence that the underlying structure of Mexico's economy has improved sufficiently to weather another downturn in the United States or indeed a continuing global recession. Almost nothing was accomplished in getting needed structural reforms passed, nor was there any attempt to define an industrial policy for Mexico beyond promoting the automotive and aerospace sectors.

On the security front, there is little to praise vis-à-vis the current administration's accomplishments. Not only is the high level of deaths attributed to the war on cartels and other criminals ample proof that violence is still very much the order of the day, but the flow of drugs into the United States as well as the wave of assault rifles and other arms coming into Mexico continue relatively unabated.

Incoming President Peña Nieto will hopefully concentrate his government's efforts on achieving the reforms needed to accelerate economic growth, provide many more jobs, reform outdated state institutions and give Mexico the rule of law that is required to build confidence among Mexicans and foreigners alike. Success on these fronts will give longterm sustenance to Mexico's current economic performance.

Authors

Andrés Rozental

Publication: Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor

Image Source: © Henry Romero / Reuters

Solving the Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime Problem Without Greater Violence

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: This article was originally published by The World Today Magazine.

How to solve the problem without generating even greater violence

Policies that focus on suppressing drug flows are often ineffective in suppressing organized crime. Under the worst circumstances, such as in Mexico or Afghanistan, policing policies, such as high-value targeting or eradication of illicit crops, can trigger intense criminal violence or strengthen insurgencies. But neither is legalization an effective shortcut to law enforcement. On its own, it is unlikely to address a host of problems associated with organized crime.

Illicit economies exist in some form virtually everywhere. For example, some part of the illegal drug economy – production, trafficking, or distribution – is present in almost every country. Although the drug trade is widely believed to be the most profitable illicit economy, dwarfing others such as the illegal trade in wildlife or logging, its impact on society and the intensity of violence and corruption it generates vary in different regions and over time.

Like Colombia in the 1980s, Mexico today is blighted by violence. But although many of the same drug trafficking groups operate in both Mexico and the United States, their behaviour is strikingly different north of the border where their capacity to corrupt state institutions is limited and the level of violence they generate is small.

Indeed, what characterizes the US drug market today – most of which operates behind closed doors, off the streets, and over the internet – is how peaceful it is. Such variation is found in other contexts too: the Yakuza, even while dominating the construction economy in Japan, is far less violent than Hong Kong’s tongs or Latin America’s organized crime.

Many things account for the variation in violence, including demographic factors, such as the age of criminal capos and the geographic concentration of minority groups, levels of poverty, the balance of power in the criminal market as well as the capacity of policing agencies and their choice of strategies. Beyond violence, the strength and presence of the state are critical in determining the impact of illicit markets on society.

Political capital of crime gangs

Organized crime has a particularly vicious impact on the state if it can create strong bonds with larger segments of the population than the state can. Many people around the world in areas with an inadequate or problematic state presence, great poverty, and social and political marginalization are dependent on illicit economies for their livelihood.

Criminal (as well as militant) groups provide the marginalized population with employment and an opportunity for social advancement. They can also provide a level of security, suppressing robberies, thefts, kidnapping, and murders as well as providing informal courts, despite their being instigators of crime and instability in the first place. As a result, criminal entities can gain political capital with local communities.

Why legalizing drugs is not the answer

Although frequently portrayed as an effective solution to the problem of organized crime, mere legalization of illicit economies, particularly of drugs, is no panacea.

Proponents of legalization as a mechanism to reduce organized crime make at least two arguments: it will severely deprive organized crime groups of resources. It will also free law enforcement agencies to concentrate on other types of crime.

A country may have good reasons to want to legalize the use and even production of some addictive substances and ride out the consequences of greater use. Such reasons could include providing better health care to users, reducing the number of users in prison, and perhaps even generating greater revenues and giving jobs to the poor.

Yet without robust state presence and effective law enforcement, both often elusive in parts of the world such as Latin America or Africa, there can be little assurance that organized crime groups would be excluded from the legal drug trade. In fact, they may have numerous advantages over legal companies and manage to hold on to the trade, perhaps even resorting to violence to do so. Nor does mere legalization mean that the state will suddenly become robust and effective. Persistent deficiencies in the state explain why there is so much illegal logging alongside legal logging, for example, or why smuggling in legal goods take place.

Organized crime groups who stand to be displaced from the drug trade by legalization can hardly be expected to take the change lying down. Rather, they may intensify their violent power struggles over remaining illegal economies, such as the smuggling of other contraband or migrants, prostitution, extortion, and kidnapping. To mitigate their financial losses, they may also seek to take over the black economy, which operates outside the tax system. If they succeed in organizing street life in this informal sector, their political power over society will be greater than ever.

Nor does legalization imply that police would be freed up to focus on other issues or become less corrupt: The state may have to devote more resources to regulating the legal economy.

Additionally, a grey market in drugs would probably emerge. If drugs became legal, the state would want to tax them – to generate revenues and to discourage greater use. The higher the tax, the greater the opportunity for organized crime to undercut the state by charging less. Organized crime groups could set up their own fields with smaller taxation, snatch the market and the profits, and the state would be back to combating them and eradicating their fields. Such grey markets exist alongside a host of legal economies, from cigarettes to stolen cars.

Designing effective crime policies

Without capable and accountable police that are responsive to the needs of the people and are backed-up by an efficient, accessible, and transparent justice system, the state cannot manage either legal or illegal economies.

Reducing the violence associated with drug trafficking should be a priority for police. Governments that effectively reduce the violence surrounding illicit economies often may not be able to rid their countries of organized crime; they can, however, lessen its grip on society, thereby giving their people greater confidence in government, encouraging citizen co-operation with law enforcement, and aiding the transformation of a national security threat into a public safety problem. That can happen – and many countries have succeeded in doing so – in the absence of legalization.

An appropriate anti-crime response is a multifaceted state-building effort that seeks to strengthen the bonds between the state and marginalized communities dependent on or vulnerable to participation in illicit economies. Efforts need to focus on ensuring that communities will obey laws – by increasing the likelihood that illegal behaviour and corruption will be punished via effective law enforcement, but also by creating a social, economic, and political environment in which the laws are consistent with the needs of the people.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: The World Today Magazine

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Afghanistan Trip Report VI: Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: A Good Strategy Poorly Implemented

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: The following article is one of a series of reports based on the author’s fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2012. In this piece, she analyzes the evolution and outcome of counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan, with a special emphasis on the policies of the Obama administration. Read Felbab-Brown’s other recent reports on Afghanistan in “Firefight in Kabul” and “The Road to Jalalabad.” She also writes about the 2014 withdrawal of U.S. forces in "The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership", ISAF’s logistical challenges and the complex political realities in northern Afghanistan in “Crossing the Salang,” and the Afghan Local Police and other self-defense forces in Afghanistan in “The Afghan Local Police: It’s Local, So It Must Be Good…Or Is It?"

Narcotics production and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan are of critical importance not only for drug control there and worldwide, but also for the counterinsurgency, stabilization, economic, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the counternarcotics policies adopted during the 2000s decade had serious counterproductive effects on these objectives.

In a courageous break with thirty years of counter-narcotics policies that focused on ineffective forced eradication of illicit crops as a way to reduce the supply of drugs and bankrupt belligerents, the Obama administration wisely decided in 2009 to scale back eradication in Afghanistan. Instead, its counternarcotics strategy emphasized selective interdiction of high-level and particularly Taliban-linked traffickers and comprehensive rural development.

But the effectiveness of the administration’s well-thought-out counternarcotics strategy has been challenged by major implementation difficulties. Effective implementation is ultimately dependent on achieving robust progress in improving security and governance in Afghanistan -- the former very tenuous at best, the latter overwhelmingly characterized by corruption, abuse, and incompetence. Critical problems have also arisen as a result of misguided policies in the field. Interdiction has lost its selective focus on high-level Taliban-linked traffickers and become indiscriminate in targeting small-level farmers. In most of Afghanistan, including some of the most strategic areas, alternative livelihoods efforts have not amounted to comprehensive long-term development. And eradication and bans on poppy are still going on, once again emiserating farmers and driving instability and conflict.

Why Scaling Back Eradication Was a Good Decision

After several years of essentially laissez-faire toward poppy cultivation, far more aggressive interdiction and eradication policies were undertaken in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009. Interdiction was supposed to target large traffickers and processing laboratories. Immediately, however, the effort was manipulated by local Afghan powerbrokers to eliminate drug competition, particularly drug-trade business belonging to their rivals. Instead of targeting top echelons of the drug economy, many of whom had considerable political clout, interdiction operations were largely conducted against small vulnerable traders who could neither sufficiently bribe nor adequately intimidate the interdiction teams and their supervisors within the Afghan government. The result was a significant vertical integration of the drug industry in Afghanistan and an intensified dependence of small traders on powerful patrons. A second negative impact of the way interdiction was carried out was that it allowed the Taliban to integrate itself back into the Afghan drug trade. Having recouped in Pakistan, the Taliban was once again needed to provide protection to traffickers targeted by interdiction.

Manual eradication was carried out by central Afghan units trained by Dyncorp as well as by regional governors and their forces. Immediately, it provoked violent strikes and social protests against it. Another wave of eradication took place in 2005 when reduction in poppy cultivation was achieved. Most of the reduction was due to the suppression of cultivation in Nangarhar province where, through promises of alternative development and threats of imprisonment, production was slashed by 90 percent.

However, alternative livelihoods never materialized for many. The Cash-for-Work programs reached only a small percentage of the population in Nangarhar, mainly those living close to cities. The overall pauperization of the population there was devastating.[1] Unable to repay debts, many farmers were forced to sell their daughters as young as three as brides or abscond to Pakistan. In Pakistan, the refugees frequently have ended up in the radical Deobandi madrasas and have begun refilling the ranks of the Taliban. Apart from incorporating the displaced farmers into their ranks, the Taliban also began to protect the opium fields of the farmers, in addition to protecting traffic. In fact, the antagonized poppy farmers came to constitute a strong and key base of support for the Taliban, denying intelligence to ISAF and providing it to the Taliban.

By 2009, eradication had had the following -- overwhelmingly negative -- effects: It did not bankrupt the Taliban. In fact, the Taliban reconstituted itself in Pakistan between 2002 and 2004 without access to large profits from drugs, rebuilding its material base largely from donations from Pakistan and the Middle East and from profits from another illicit economy, the illegal traffic with licit goods between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rather that weakening the insurgency, eradication strengthened it by driving economic refugees into the Taliban’s hands. Eradication also alienated the local population from the national government as well as from local tribal elites that agreed to eradication, thus creating a key opening for Taliban mobilization. Moreover, the local eradicators themselves were in a position to best profit from counternarcotics policies, being able to eliminate competition – drug business and political alike – and alter market concentration and prices at least in the short term and within their region of operations.

Eradication was thus complicating counterinsurgency and stabilization policies in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration’s decision to focus instead on interdiction and rural development was the right decision.

A Selective Interdiction Policy Has Become Indiscriminate

Under the Obama Administration, the interdiction policy has been geared primarily toward Taliban-linked traffickers. Going after Taliban-linked traffickers was the sole counternarcotics mandate of ISAF forces, though other international and Afghan counternarcotics units could target other traffickers as well. ISAF’s counternarcotics operations have sought to reduce the flows of weapons, money, drugs, precursor agents, and improvised explosive device (IED) components to the Taliban, with the goal of degrading the Taliban’s finances and physical resources through interdiction. Although hundreds of interdiction raids have now been conducted, especially in southern Afghanistan, and large quantities of opium and IEDs have been seized in these operations, it is questionable whether the impact on the Taliban’s resource flows has been more than local. Large-scale military operations to clear the Taliban from particular areas, such as in Marja, Helmand, have affected the insurgents’ funding capacity and resource flows in those particular areas.

But so far, the cumulative effects of the narcotics interdiction effort to suppress financial flows do not appear to be affecting the Taliban at the strategic level. This is because the Taliban fundraising policy has long been to tax any economic activity in the areas where the insurgents operate – be they sheep herding, such as in the north, illegal logging in the east, or National Solidarity Program projects in the center.

The strongest effect of focusing interdiction on Taliban-linked traffickers appears to be at least temporarily to disrupt its logistical chains since many of its logistical operatives handle both IED materials and moving drugs. In combination with ISAF’s targeting focus on mid-level commanders, the prioritization of the counternarcotics-interdiction focus is probably palpably complicating the Taliban’s operational capacity in Afghanistan’s south, where both the military surge and counternarcotics efforts have been prioritized.

But in the zeal to disrupt the Taliban logistical chains and weaken the Taliban’s command structures, especially at the operational middle-level, the ISAF interdiction policy lost the selectivity carefully crafted into the design of the strategy. ISAF units often do not have an easy way to ascertain whether someone is a middle-level commander or not. What does it take to be a middle-level commander – being in charge of three, ten, one hundred Taliban? What does it take to be a Taliban supporter? The dual-focus of night raids and house searches on both capturing “high-value” (whatever that actually means) targets and searching for drugs and explosives has blurred the distinction between farmers and high-value drug or Taliban operatives. Does the fact that a household has opium make the household members Taliban supporters? Obviously not, since many rural Afghans do not hold their assets as cash in a bank, but rather as opium stocks at home. ISAF house searches that seize or destroy any found opium, perhaps under the belief that they are destroying Taliban stockpiles, can in fact wipe out the entire savings of a household. Thus in areas that have been subject to intense interdiction raids, such as Marja or Nad Ali districts of Helmand, the effects of supposedly selective and hearts-and-minds-oriented interdiction can resemble blanket eradication. Often, their impact on the economic well-being of a household is often more detrimental than that of eradication because such searches can wipe out all of the long-term assets of a household and because after eradication, a family can still have a chance to replant. And the effects on stability and the counterinsurgency campaign are the same as from eradication: intense alienation of the affected population from the Afghan government and ISAF forces and susceptibility to Taliban mobilization.

Although the interdiction policy has lost its selectivity at the level of distinguishing small and high-level traders, its selectivity on the Taliban connection has come with problematic side-effects. One of them is to signal to Afghan powerbrokers that the best way to conduct the drug business in Afghanistan is to provide counterinsurgency services, such as intelligence, militias, and real estate property, to ISAF, or to be aligned with the government of President Hamid Karzai. As a high-ranking ISAF official in Kandahar told me in the fall of 2010, “In the current struggle for Kandahar, our nightmare is to have to take on at the same time the Taliban and Wali [the then-alive Ahmed Wali Khan, President Karzai’s brother and the top powerbroker in Kandahar]. But we understand that he has alienated some people in Kandahar.” A former high official of the U.S. PRT in Kandahar similarly explained to me the difficulties the international community has faced when trying to impose redlines on powerbrokers such as General Razziq, now the police chief of Kandahar and a well-known Taliban hunter and previously a warlord and smuggler from the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar. “We gave them [Razziq and other Kandahar powerbrokers] redlines. But very quickly they violated all the redlines. But they are effective in getting things done. We can’t go after them at the same time as we are fighting the Taliban. When the Taliban is defeated, the Afghans will take care of the powerbrokers themselves.” Tolerating the rapacious and thuggish behavior of such useful powerbrokers may be a price necessary to absorb in order to maximize the effectiveness of counterinsurgency on the battlefield in the short term, but when the powerbrokers-cum-drug-traffickers who thus get themselves an out-of-jail card and obtain vast power and profits are some of the most abusive and most reviled warlords, the legitimacy of the Afghan government is critically undermined.

Especially early on, the Obama administration accorded great importance to fighting corruption in Afghanistan. Various Afghan civilian structures, such as the Major Crime Task Force, and equivalent units within ISAF, such as its anti-corruption task force, Shafafyat, were stood up. But Washington demanded that anti-corruption reforms take place with an intensity that ignored Afghan realities and political complexities -- a system in which the highest government officials as well as the lowest ones, line ministries, banking centers, and most international contracts are pervaded by corruption. The lack of prioritization as to what corruption needed to be tackled first and unequivocally thus produced only dramatic promises from President Karzai to fight corruption, with little actual follow up.

Moreover, as the Obama administration decided to wind down its military presence in Afghanistan, Washington began vacillating again in its determination to take on corruption.. Many argued that tackling corruption is a luxury the United States can no longer afford; instead it needs to prioritize “stability” by working through local powerbrokers, instead of being obsessed with their criminal entanglements and discriminatory practices. The downside is that Afghans overwhelmingly resent the lack of respect for law by the powerful in their country and consider themselves governed by an illegitimate thuggish mafia regime. The resulting level of dissatisfaction and alienation among Afghans is so high that it is difficult to see how without significant improvements in governance or at least a major expansion of patronage networks, the current political order in Afghanistan can be stable beyond 2014.

Rural Development Has Often Been Ineffectively Designed

Throughout most of the 2000-2009 period, alternative livelihoods programs were slow to reach the vast majority of the Afghan population, and largely failed to address the structural drivers of opium poppy cultivation. The lack of security and increasing insurgency in the south halted many of the alternative livelihoods projects. A legal microcredit system was lacking in most of Afghanistan. Although some areas, such as Helmand had been showered with aid, much of it failed to reach ordinary farmers. Projects such as the Kajaki Dam, the centerpiece of USAID development efforts in the south of Afghanistan for much of the decade, failed to be completed because of insecurity. At the same time, economic development programs even in the more permissive environments, such as in northern Afghanistan, often simply did not materialize although bans on poppy were secured through promises of alternative livelihoods.

The Obama administration set out to redress this glaring hole in the counternarcotics and stabilization policy in Afghanistan and emphasized rural development, allocating about a quarter billion dollars a year to the effort. But immediately, the economic development programs were plagued by vacillation between two competing understandings of the purpose of economic development projects: Is their purpose to buy off the population and wean it off from the insurgents or are they designed to produce long-term sustainable development?

The buy-off concept has included so-called quick-impact projects carried out by the U.S. military with money from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) or through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) as well as so-called “economic stabilization projects,” also known as District Delivery Program or District Stabilization Framework, carried out by USAID. The latter were conceived as short-term cash-for-work programs, lasting weeks or at best months. Their goals have been to keep Afghan males employed so that economic necessities do not drive them to join the Taliban and to secure the allegiance of the population who, ideally, will provide intelligence on the insurgents. Under this concept, U.S. economic development efforts have prioritized the most violent areas. Accordingly, the vast majority of the allocated funds went to the most contested provinces of Kandahar and Helmand where the U.S. military surge was focused. In 2010, for example, USAID allocated $250 million for the two provinces. [2] And in Helmand’s Nawa district, USAID spent upward of $30 million within nine months, in what some dubbed “[the] carpet bombing of Nawa with cash.”[3] With Nawa’s 75,000 people, such aid amounts to $400 per person, while Afghanistan’s per capita income is only $300 per year.

Although U.S. government officials emphasize that these stabilization programs have generated tens of thousands of jobs in Afghanistan’s south, many of the efforts have been unsustainable short-lived programs, such as canal cleaning and grain-storage and road building, or small grants, such as for seeds and fertilizers. Characteristically, they collapse as soon as the money runs out, often in the span of several weeks. Nor has adequate consideration been given to the development of assured markets; consequently much of the produce cultivated under the USAID-contracted programs will possibly not find buyers and rot. Many other structural drivers of poppy cultivation, such as a lack of legal microcredit, rural infrastructure, and processing facilities and poor productivity and profitability of legal crops, also persist. Nor is there robust evidence that the stabilization programs have secured the allegiance of the population to either the Afghan government or ISAF forces or resulted in increases in intelligence from the population on the Taliban.

Because of the complexity and opacity of Afghanistan’s political, economic, and contracting scene, many of these international programs have continued to flow to problematic, discriminatory, and corrupt powerbrokers, generating further resentment among the population, and intensifying Afghanistan’s rampant corruption and lack of accountability. At other times, they have spurred new tribal rivalries and community tensions.

Nor have these programs yet addressed the structural deficiencies of the rural economy in Afghanistan, including the drivers of poppy cultivation. A microcredit system, for example, continues to be lacking throughout much of Afghanistan. In fact, many of the stabilization efforts, such as wheat distribution or grant programs, directly undermine some of the long-term imperatives for addressing the structural market deficiencies, such as the development of microcredit or the establishment of local Afghan seed-banks and seed markets and rural enterprise and value-added chains. Shortcuts such as the so-called Food Zone in Helmand and similar wheat distribution schemes elsewhere in Afghanistan are symptomatic of the minimal short-term economic and security payoffs (but substantial medium-term costs) mode with which the internationals have operated in Afghanistan. The result: persisting deep market deficiencies and compromised rule of law.

There is a delicate three-way balance among long-term development, the need to generate support among the population and alleviate economic deprivation in the short term, and state-building. A counternarcotics “alternative livelihoods” program in Afghanistan provides a telling example: Aware of the deeply destabilizing effects of poppy suppression in the absence of alternative livelihoods and yet under pressure to reduce poppy cultivation, Helmand Governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal, widely acclaimed as a competent and committed governor, launched a wheat-seed distribution project during the 2008-09 growing season. In order not to grow poppy, farmers were handed free wheat seeds. This program proved popular with the segments of the Helmand population who received the free wheat and the program was emulated throughout Afghanistan and continued in 2010.

Poppy cultivation did decrease in Helmand in 2009, and many enthusiastically attributed the results to the wheat distribution program, rather than low opium prices. And yet there are good reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the program, at least with respect to development and even governance. Because of land density issues in Afghanistan, the lack of sustainability of the favorable wheat-to-opium price ratios under which the program took effect, and the limited ability of wheat cultivation to generate employment, wheat turned out to be a singularly inappropriate replacement crop.[4] Indeed, much of the wheat seed ended up being sold in markets rather than sown.

Due to the insecurity prevailing in Helmand at the time, the program was undertaken without any field assessment of what drives poppy cultivation in particular areas of Helmand and in Afghanistan more broadly.Yet because most people welcome free handouts, the program was popular. But it also became politically manipulated by local administrators and tribal elders who sought to strengthen their power. Although the program was deficient from a development perspective, it brought immediate political benefits to those who sponsored it, including the political machinery of President Hamid Karzai who at that time was seeking reelection. Good governance was thus equated with the immediate handouts and their political payoff without regard for long-term economic development, sustainability, best practices lessons, and optimal decision-making processes.

At the same time, the wheat program and other economic stabilization programs often set up expectations on the part of the population for free handouts from the central government and international community without being economically viable and sustainable in the long term and without requiring commitments from the local community. Thus, many of the CERP and stabilization programs have encouraged the Afghans to expect payoffs for any activity consistent with the interests of the international community, even if the activity is also in their own interest and they would have carried it out anyway.

In line with the 2014 transition, USAID has committed itself to phase out the economic stabilization initiatives and short-term cash-for-work programs and instead transition to economic development programs that focus on long-term capacity building and sustainability. The Afghan government has also embraced such a policy shift. A fundamental change of this sort in the orientation of the development assistance programs is highly desirable. But the forthcoming reduction of the U.S. and ISAF’s presence in Afghanistan and the anticipated smaller budgets after the 2014 transition have diverted much of USAID’s and other international organizations’ attention and energies from field implementation of the programs to programmatic restructuring of their assistance efforts. One large question to be yet resolved is what entities – international or Afghan – will replace the PRTs, which are to be retired in 2014. However problematic in their delivery of economic assistance programs – mostly quick-impact projects rather than sustainable development programs – and whatever their other shortcomings, the PRTs have been the principal provider of economic assistance in some of the most isolated and insecure areas of Afghanistan. It is not automatic that Afghan line ministries – notoriously incompetent and corrupt – or other international development entities will fill the PRT void.

Even with the transition imperatives and priorities, immediate political pressures from the bottom up continue to reinforce ISAF’s predilection for short-term quick-impact projects. Sustainable development requires a lot of time, but the Afghan population has been highly impatient to see some minimal improvements and often has demanded handout programs without regard for long-term sustainability and desirability. Thus, in 2011 again, many short-term quick-impact projects were extended and new large budgets were allocated to them.

Moreover, the persisting, however substantially reduced, insecurity even in high-profile focus areas, such as Marja and Arghandab, can also threaten the limited short-term “stabilization” programs. The Taliban has strongly intensified its campaign to assassinate Afghan government officials, contractors, and NGOs who cooperate with ISAF and the Afghan government. Both implementers and Afghan beneficiaries of the economic programs have been killed. This intimidation campaign has scared off some Afghans from participating in the programs and may again result in local Afghan officials and internationals being more than ever locked up in their compounds and rarely venturing into the field among the Afghans after 2014. Such isolation greatly hampers the internationals’ ability to understand the complex and political dynamics that define any particular area of Afghanistan and hence to design effective assistance programs.

U.S. and ISAF officials emphasize that in cleared areas in the south, shops have reopened on the streets and bazaars seem livelier. Yet Afghan shopkeepers often say that they are trying to make as much money as possible in a short window of opportunity because they expect security to deteriorate again after 2014 and they may then lose all business opportunities. Thus, even for these stabilization programs as for any economic development efforts, security is a critical prerequisite. The faster the international community rushes out of Afghanistan leaving still weak Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the more economic programs in Afghanistan will be undermined.

Counterproductive Eradication Is Still Going On

The Obama Administration has encountered withering criticism from Russia for its counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. Suffering from drug and infectious-disease epidemics and a broader demographic crisis, Russia has complained that its drug and population problems stem from the large supply of heroin from Afghanistan. Refuting overwhelming evidence from forty years of counternarcotics efforts that actions on the supply side tend to have minimal effects on drug-use trends, and unwilling to invest in appropriate drug prevention and treatment facilities, Russia has demanded aggressive eradication in Afghanistan. It also provides counternarcotics training to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But despite Russia’s vociferous complaints, eradication is still going on Afghanistan. The Obama Administration defunded only centrally-led eradication by an Afghan eradication unit that the United States had trained. Eradication efforts led by Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics and provincial governors are still carried out. If the occasional rare major eradication drive or poppy cultivation ban, such as in Nangarhar in 2008 (described below), is discounted, eradication can been seen to have consistently hovered between 2500 and 4000 hectares a year, before and after the Obama Administration’s counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan was adopted.[5]

The current Afghan-led eradication continues to be associated with the same problems that plagued the previous centrally-led eradication. Powerful elites are able to bribe or coerce their way out of having their opium poppy fields destroyed or to direct eradication against their political opponents. The poorest farmers, most vulnerable to Taliban’s mobilization, bear the brunt of eradication. Alienated farmers often join with the Taliban to oppose eradication and entire regions are destabilized as a result. The violent protests against eradication and attacks on the eradication teams in Nangarhar’s Khogyani, Shinwar, and Achin areas this spring provide a vivid example. Eradication targets are often set without regard for their effects on the economic conditions of the farmers, local conflict dynamics, and counterinsurgency efforts. Officials from Kabul often arrive in a provincial capital, round up governors and police chiefs and order them to destroy a predetermined number of hectares of poppy: In the western province of Herat, overall one of the most stable parts of Afghanistan and a major locus of drug smuggling routes, the Ministry of Counternarcotics decided in April of this year that eradication should take place in the Shindand district where insecurity and Taliban presence have been strong, just as ISAF and ANSF were planning to undertake clearing operations there. Any hearts and minds efforts were bound to be eviscerated by the eradication drive, and intelligence flows from the population on the Taliban bound to dry up. At the same time, the intensity of eradication is miniscule -- in the low thousands of hectares per year -- when compared to what is necessary to significantly suppress poppy cultivation in Afghanistan – requiring eradication of over one hundred thousand hectares a year – and to drive cultivation to one of Afghanistan’s neighbors. (Without a significant reduction in global demand, suppression of poppy cultivation in one place will merely drive it to another.) For many years to come, such suppression could only be achieved through sheer brute force since alternative livelihoods cannot be stood up quickly. And of course, such an effort would destroy the larger stabilization prospects for Afghanistan.

Not all poppy suppression efforts in Afghanistan always take the shape of bulldozing the poppy plants. In Helmand, the province with most intense poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, where Governor Mangal has been held up as the paragon of good governance, poppy suppression has also taken the shape of destroying farmers’ water pumps, especially in the poor, insecure, recently liberated poppy areas north of the Helmand river.[6] That approach may minimize how much poppy survives purely on rain water, but it also kills the production of legal crops and destroys the farmers’ means of procuring water for consumption and other household use. Not surprisingly, this approach has effectively played into Taliban’s mobilization efforts.

Bans on cultivation can have as devastating an economic impact on the rural population as eradication. Although hailed as hallmarks of great governance, such as in Nangarhar or Balkh, they are ultimately as politically and economically unsustainable as premature eradication before alternative livelihoods are in place. In Nangarhar, for example, Governor Gul Agha Sherzai has managed to keep cultivation negligible or limited -- driving cultivation down from a 2007 cultivation peak of 18,739 hectares[7] to zero for the next several years. He achieved this “success” through a combination of buyoffs of influential maliks (tribal elders), promises of alternative livelihoods, and threats of eradication of the poppy crops and imprisonment of violators. But the promises of alternative livelihoods have mostly failed to materialize. While farmers close to the provincial capital Jalalabad have often managed to cope by switching to crops such vegetables, increasing dairy production, and working in construction cash-for-work programs, farmers away from the provincial center, such as in the districts of Achin, Khogyani, and Shinwar, have suffered great economic deprivation. As their income has crashed (often by 80%) and no alternative livelihoods programs have been available to them, their political restlessness has steadily grown. Those areas have seen great levels of instability, intensified tribal conflict over land, water, and access to resource handouts from the international community, rebellions of young men against the local maliks supporting eradication,[8] physical attacks on eradication teams, intense Taliban mobilization, and increased flows of militants into and through the province from Pakistan. This year, several instances of significant violent resistance and protests against eradication flared up in Nangarhar, and cultivation has crept up to close to 2000 hectares[9] because many farmers no longer have any means of making a living under the poppy ban and have to fall back on poppy cultivation for securing basic livelihoods for their families.

Several incentives, at times perverse, encourage eradication by Afghan governors and officials of the Ministry of Counternarcotics despite the fact that eradication is instigating instability and hampering counterinsurgency efforts. First of all, some Afghan government officials, especially those with a Communist background, genuinely believe that poppy cultivation is bad for Afghanistan and that its suppression is important, no matter what costs for Afghanistan such suppression generates. Afghan government officials who believe in aggressive eradication also told me during interviews that since the Afghan constitution prohibits poppy cultivation, it is their duty to destroy it regardless of any side-effects. Others believe that pushing ahead with eradication will secure the favor of the international community – whether in Washington or in Moscow. Such considerations are particularly important to those officials in Afghanistan who entertain presidential ambitions, such as Governor Gul Agha Shirzai in Nangarhar or Governor Mohammad Atta in Balkh. Even though as a result of eradication and bans, local populations may be alienated from them and positive links between the governor and the rural population severed, the international community often still hails their performance as a model of good governance to be emulated elsewhere in Afghanistan.

A codification of this international equating of good governance with poppy suppression, regardless of its popular legitimacy, is an Afghan-government program called Good Performance Initiative (GPI) and funded primarily by the United States and United Kingdom. The initiative aims to deliver high-impact development assistance to those provinces that have eliminated or significantly reduced poppy cultivation, or demonstrated other effective counter narcotics achievements. Its objective is poppy elimination and maintenance of poppy free provinces through the provision of financial support for priority development projects.

The program is readily embraced by governors who qualify for the rewards – usually around $10 million a year – because governors do not have any taxation capacity and depend on Kabul for any provincial funds. Rarely however do the GPI funds result in systematic alternative livelihoods programs. Allocations that are not simply diverted for personal profit often amount to one isolated project here and there at best, rather than any robust rural development. A high provincial official in Nangarhar I interviewed in April 2012, for example, could not tell me what happened with all of the GPI funds that Nangarhar received over the past several years, beyond highlighting that one generator was delivered to a district (he was not sure which one) and a university dormitory and several other unspecified buildings were built in Jalalabad, Nangarhar’s capital. Promises of systematic rural development and robust alternative livelihoods made to poppy farmers are thus mostly unmet. Whatever level of poppy suppression has been achieved, it has been achieved mainly through the threat of coercion rather than through the establishment of robust and sustainable legal livelihoods. The outcomes are consequently both fragile and often an additional stimulus to the insurgency and instability in Afghanistan.

With More Poppy on the Horizon, How Can Counternarcotics Policies in Afghanistan Be Smartened Up?

After the 2014 transition in Afghanistan, poppy cultivation is likely to increase to some extent. Yes, the global opiate market has been saturated by Afghanistan’s production over the past decade. But when not driven by a decrease in global opiate prices, downward fluctuations in Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation have been principally achieved through unsustainable economic handout policies, governors’ coercion, or the deterrent effect of ISAF’s presence in some of the key poppy production areas, made more credible as a result of ISAF’s house searches and opium seizures. Thus, some upswing in production after 2014 – primarily in areas squeezed by bans and eradication drives – is likely.

The faster the international community leaves Afghanistan, especially if sustainable comprehensive rural development programs are not in place and if ANSF are unable to cope with resulting insecurity, the more counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan will be undermined. The worst policy under such circumstances or in advance of the 2014 transition would be to insist on more aggressive eradication, such as by providing more funding for the GPI. Instead, interdiction, including by ISAF forces, needs to become far more selective. Seizures should be limited to truly large stockpiles as opposed to any household opium holdings. The quick-impact “economic stabilization” programs should be terminated as soon as possible. Instead, a shift to ground-assessment-based, sustainable comprehensive rural development with robust monitoring capacity to minimize corruption should be completed as soon as possible.

Counternarcotics efforts are a key component of stabilization and development efforts in Afghanistan. However, premature and inappropriate efforts to suppress the drug economy greatly complicate counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and stabilization objectives. Ultimately, they thus also jeopardize economic reconstruction, political consolidation, and the rule of law.

To learn more about the overall transition strategy in Afghanistan, also read Vanda Felbab-Brown’s last analytical report from her recent research trip.

[1] For details, see David Mansfield, Pariah or Poverty? The Opium Ban in the Province Nangarhar in 2004/05 Growing Season and Its Impact on Rural Livelihood Strategies, GTZ Policy Brief No. 1, September 2005, http://www.gtz.de/de/dokumente/en-FinalCopingReportStudyPAL20.7.pdf

[2] Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “In Afghan Region, U.S. Spreads the Cash to Fight the Taliban,” Washington Post, May 31, 2010; and Karen DeYoung, “Results of Kandahar Offensive May Affect Future U.S. Moves,” Washington Post, May 23, 2010.

[3] Ibid.

[4] David Mansfield, “Responding to Risk and Uncertainty: Understanding the Nature of Change in the Rural Livelihoods of Opium Poppy Growing Households in the 2007/08 Growing Season,” http://www.davidmansfield.org/data/Field_Work/UK/FINAL_UK_DRIVERS_REPORT_08.pdf.

[5] For eradication levels over the past decade, see United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan Opium Survey: Summary Findings, October 2011: 15.

[6] For details, see David Mansfield, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Counternarcotics Efforts and Their Effects in Nangarhar and Helmand in the 2010-11Growing Season, AREU, October 2011.

[7] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghanistan Opium Survey 2012, April 2012: 30.

[8] David Mansfield, The Ban on Opium Production across Nangarhar – A Risk Too Far, September 2010,

[9] UNODC: 30.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: Parwiz Parwiz / Reuters

A Better Strategy to Combat Organized Crime in Mexico and Central America

Vanda Felbab-Brown and Eric Olson — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:40:00 -0400

The Cartagena Summit of the Americas where heads of state will meet in middle April comes at a time of acute crime crisis in Latin America and growing opposition to U.S. counternarcotics policies. President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala has called for legalizing the drug trade, following calls for drug policy reform of several former Latin American presidents. El Salvador has been reeling from allegations of a deal between criminal gangs and the government. Mexico has been overwhelmed by drug violence.

Organized crime exploits the “soft spots” along trafficking routes. Squeezed in one area, traffickers seek out regions with underdeveloped rule of law institutions, weak fiscal capacity, extensive corruption, and marginalized populations susceptible to participation in illicit economies. Today’s prime examples are Central America and West Africa.

In response, local governments and external partners, such as the United States, often adopt the wrong policies by defining the problem in absolute terms -- dismantling organized crime or stopping illegal drug flows. Such goals are mostly unattainable and guarantee costly failures. More attainable, but crucial objectives such as reducing the harms associated with the drug trade and other crime – the violence, corruption, and erosion of the social fabric - are largely ignored.

Reducing the violence around drug trafficking is particularly critical. Societies experiencing chronic and uncontrolled violence tend to have little faith in government and can transfer their loyalties to criminal groups that provide a modicum of safety, albeit perverse safety. Governments that effectively reduce violence often do not rid the country of organized crime but lessen its grip on society, thereby giving citizens greater confidence in government, encouraging citizen cooperation with law enforcement, and aiding the transformation of a national security threat into a public safety problem.

Yet those Central American countries – Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala – that have been hardest hit by the shift in trafficking routes have pursued the most counterproductive policies. Iron-fisted (mano dura) approaches that criminalize membership in youth gangs, on the assumption that this would discourage gang membership and crime, have backfired. The extensive imprisonment of even low-level criminals, some rounded up for their tattoos or idling on the streets, flooded ill-equipped corrections systems. Prisons became breeding grounds for hardened criminals. The sheer volume of crime has overwhelmed police forces -- often under-resourced, corrupt, and intermeshed with organized crime -- and resulted in their becoming apathetic and favorably-disposed to vigilante militias.

Nor is the solution merely to stand up specialized interdiction units (SIUs), a favorite U.S. recipe. In the context of weak state capacity and high corruption, SIUs are prime targets for corruption and can turn into powerful and technologically-savvy drug traffickers. The violent Zetas in Mexico and the Kaibiles in Guatemala originated as elite special forces before becoming criminals. If SIUs are stood up, not only must they be carefully vetted at the beginning, but external donors must also devise roll-back mechanisms if such units go rogue.

Moreover, SIUs mostly concentrate on crime kingpins. But such high-value targeting often intensifies violence, by stimulating internal succession fights and turf wars. Mexico is a prime example of where high-value-targeting increased violence, creating a more chaotic situation out-of-government control. Where violence has declined in Mexico, such as in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, it has been because one DTO came to dominate the criminal market in the area.

A more effective law enforcement strategy would focus on four elements:

Developing violence-reduction policing and crime-prevention strategies. Such a strategy might entail prioritizing the most violent group or focusing efforts in a particular geographic location. Different criteria for focusing law-enforcement efforts come with different costs, benefits, and tradeoffs; but the goal is to get away from an unfocused round-‘em-up-lock-‘em-up approach that overwhelms criminal justice systems.

Building up the capacity of police and prosecutors to target the middle layer of criminal organizations – the lawyers, accountants, and lieutenants in waiting – that are the guts of their operations. By weakening this middle layer in a decisive blow, law enforcement undermines the group’s operational capacity and ability to regenerate leadership. If a turf war follows, it tends to be less violent because the DTO has a limited capacity to resist a takeover.
Prioritizing common crime such as theft, street brawls, kidnapping, and extortion by
developing effective local police forces and prosecutions. An effective response to street crime produces several key benefits: It satisfies a key demand of the public and strengthens the bonds and cooperation between the community and the state. It also removes white noise from the overall crime picture and allows law enforcement to develop better intelligence on organized crime.
Building up the entire law-enforcement pyramid from local respondents to street crime to
specialized serious-crime units and prosecutors, instead of merely parachuting SIUs on top of a crumbled and corrupt law-enforcement apparatus.

Ultimately, external assistance to combat organized crime can only be effective if there is a genuine commitment by recipient governments and sufficient buy-in from local communities. U.S. anti-crime policy abroad needs to take both far more seriously, even while steering other countries away from ineffective policies.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown
Eric Olson

Vice President Biden’s Visit to Mexico and Honduras

Diana Villiers Negroponte — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:06:00 -0500

Mexico and Honduras are unusual destinations for official foreign visits for a vice president in an election year. Neither country produces significant political assets for the American Democratic Party. In addition, there is popular sentiment in both countries to blame the United States for the violence caused in large part by America’s unceasing drug demand and export of firearms. Vice President Biden’s visit to both nations does not augur demonstrations of goodwill to the United States. Indeed in Honduras, he risks some hostile reactions from crowds if they are allowed to gather to greet him.

What are the political considerations of this visit for U.S. presidential elections then? Of the 11.46 million Mexicans with legal documents living in the United States, including the 10.7 million old enough to vote, Biden’s visit shows the Obama administration’s commitment to the U.S.-Mexico relationship.

There are 467,943 Hondurans that either have U.S. citizenship or a green card. This number increases by a little over 4,000 new citizens each year. While this number is not large enough to make a political impact, Hondurans do integrate well into American society and usually support the Democratic Party were it not for the president’s inability to pass LEAD, let alone comprehensive immigration reform. The vice president’s visit to Honduras can only strengthen the country’s appreciation for the United States since it follows soon after the tragic death of over 350 prisoners at the Comayagua penitentiary. Young Latinos in the United States who maintain daily contact with their country of birth through cell phones and internet will appreciate the vice president’s willingness to visit two countries tarred with high drug-related homicide. He was not afraid. Biden’s visit demonstrates an understanding of the future influence that young Hondurans and Mexicans are likely to play.

Both Honduras and Mexico are torn by criminal violence. Severed heads, kidnappings of local businessmen and their families, as well as widespread extortion have taken their toll on citizens in both countries. In Mexico, with the police’s inability to keep citizens safe, only 23 percent of those surveyed by Latinobarometro in 2011 believe that democracy is the best form of government in Mexico. Instead of blaming weak national security institutions, it is easier to blame the United States. While cocaine consumption in the United States has declined since 2009, marijuana consumption is up. U.S. firearms continue to flow south, dramatized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive (ATF) debacle that allowed guns to move into Mexico in a misguided undercover operation. The operation went awry when ATF lost track of the firearms until one of those weapons killed a U.S. law enforcement official working out of the U.S. consulate in Mexico.

Strengthening Mexico’s police force, investigative units and intelligence collection requires U.S. support in the form of training and equipment. Transnational criminal organizations operate throughout Central America, Mexico and the United States, making close working relationships essential. However, the close collaboration between the Mexican and U.S. authorities since 2006 was damaged by the WikiLeaks revelation of former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual’s cables to Washington, as well as the ATF fiasco. Recently, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has blamed the violence on the United States. This rhetoric reflects both a fear for the prolonged nature of Calderon’s “war on drugs” as well as deliberate anger at U.S. failure to deliver nothing more than apologies. Calderon remains president until December 1 and Biden’s visit can help to patch up the bilateral relationship with him.

Biden’s visit to Honduras demonstrates the U.S. commitment to work with the Honduran government in combating the scourge of criminal violence that is beyond the government’s ability to control. Following the removal of President Zelaya in June 2009, the United States stepped back from its traditional close relationship with the country and suspended much of its foreign aid. Subsequent months saw a significant increase in the transshipment of drugs through Honduran territory. Today, Honduras has the highest intentional homicide rate in the world, a weak judicial system and politicians scared to take decisive action. President Obama visited El Salvador two years ago to show U.S. support for a new president struggling to control drug traffickers, gangs and pervasive insecurity. That visit made a positive impact. Now Vice President Biden seeks to shore up President Lobo and his government’s efforts to control rampant insecurity and corruption.

To do this, the vice president must pledge U.S. support in police training and equipment improvement, and commitment to job training for Honduran youth. Fortunately, funds for activities of the like have already been approved within the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). Behind the scenes, tough words will be exchanged over corruption and ineffective governance. However, the Honduran government needs U.S. technical assistance, as well as the training of judges in the reformed accusatorial and public system of justice. Without U.S. commitment at the highest level, Hondurans will be tempted to revert back to authoritarian ways to end the violence. With U.S. government support, President Lobo can seek to preserve democratic processes and combine effective law enforcement with social programs to address the underlying causes of the violence. The question arises whether appropriated funds under CARSI are sufficient enough to meet the enormous task of containing the violence in Central America.

Authors

Diana Villiers Negroponte

Lessons on Crime Reduction from Colombia for Mexico?

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published in ReVista magazine.

One of the things that struck me most on my last trips to Colombia in January and June 2011 was the great level of optimism regarding the country’s security accomplishments after several decades of civil war. Many of my interlocutors were brimming with confidence that Colombia was the model to be emulated by other countries facing the witches’ brew of insurgency, organized crime, poverty, and marginalization of social sectors. Government officials especially have been touting the many things Colombia can train other countries in, offering to teach Afghanistan how to conduct counternarcotics operations, the Philippines how to demobilize former fighters, the countries of Central America how to carry out police reform, Mexico how to suppress organized crime.

Mexico especially has been an eager believer, as I discovered during my research in March 2011. The mood there was the opposite: people were gripped by fear of criminal groups and communities ached from the drug-related violence that topped 47,000 dead since President Felipe Calderón came to power and declared a war on Mexico’s drug trafficking groups (DTOs). Despite a steady parade of arrested drug traffickers displayed to TV cameras, few believed that Mexico was making progress against organized crime. But from government offices in Mexico City to NGO meetings in Michoacán and business conferences in Ciudad Juárez, many were latching onto the Colombia model. Businessmen in Ciudad Juárez and Monterrey have hosted delegations from Medellín; Colombian intelligence and police officers have been advising the Mexicans on police reform and intelligence gathering.

Los Pinos, Mexico’s White House, was among the very early buyers of the Colombian way. Its strategy against Mexico’s organized crime had been based on the premise that the threat posed by organized crime will be reduced from one of national security to one of public safety if Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are broken up into smaller groups as they were in Colombia and that the way to accomplish this was to arrest the groups’ key leaders—the so-called high-value targets. As part of the strategy, Mexico’s law enforcement institutions were to be reformed, cleansed of corruption and strengthened in their capacity. Meanwhile, the military was sent to the streets of Mexico to replace or reinforce the overwhelmed police.

But drawing incomplete or distorted lessons, glossing over the complexities of the Colombian story and ignoring particular contexts can deeply undermine the effectiveness of the emulated policies and at times even backfire. To some extent, that has already happened in Mexico.

Take, for example, the central premise of the Mexican strategy that if the DTOs are broken up into smaller entities, security in Mexico will improve. The effect of Colombia’s anti-crime policies in the early 1990s was indeed the emergence of many small groups instead of the two large Medellín and Cali cartels that until then had dominated Colombia’s and the Western Hemisphere’s drug trafficking. None of the smaller groups has managed to accumulate the same level of coercive power and corruption capacity that the Medellín and Cali cartels had. But Colombia’s context was different from Mexico’s, and the break-them-up policy came with different, but in each case highly negative side effects.

The Colombian government finally decided to go after the Medellín cartel with its gloves off in the early 1990s after a decade of on-and-off confrontation and negotiations with its leader, Pablo Escobar, and his cohorts. During the decade, Escobar progressively escalated violence—killing scores of judges and prosecutors, assassinating leading politicians, and blowing up an airliner and major government security agencies.

Critical to the success against the Medellín cartel was cooperation from the Cali cartel, which provided intelligence and eliminated many of Escobar’s people. Although neither DTO was a true “cartel” in the sense of controlling the market price of cocaine, and both operated more as two large franchises under whose umbrella smaller DTOs and traffickers functioned, the market was essentially dominated by the two groups. The Cali cartel, always far less violent and far more integrated into Colombia’s political and business circles than the Medellín cartel, expected that after the demise of its rival, it would be able to take over most of Colombia’s drug market. The Cali cartel was in fact for a while the unchallenged cocaine supplier. It was only the revelation that the Cali cartel contributed vast sums of money to the presidential campaign of Colombia’s President Ernesto Samper and the great pressure from the United States on the Colombian government that ultimately motivated the Samper administration to target the Cali cartel as well.

When President Felipe Calderón decided to take on the DTOs, the Mexican drug market did not have such a neat “bipolar” structure of being divided into two predominant groups. Instead, there were at least six large DTOs. Thus Mexican law enforcement moves against the groups weakened them but did not clearly transfer power to either the state or another criminal group. Instead, the state’s actions disturbed the balance of power among the DTOs and their ability to control territory and smuggling routes and project power to deter challengers. This lack of clarity about the balance of power on the criminal market tempted the DTOs to try to take over one another’s territory and engage in internecine warfare. It has also given rise to highly fluid and unstable alliances among them. Continuing hits by the state against the DTOs without much prioritization have also led to the splintering of the DTOs, giving rise to many new offshoots and new DTOs. They too have been drawn to the fight to survive and expand their power and territorial control. Many have also diversified their operations into other illegal rackets and extortion. The groups may be smaller but the criminal market is far more violent.

Moreover, in neither Colombia nor Mexico did the state effectively fill in the vacuum. In Colombia, the state continued to be unable and often uninterested in providing security and other public goods to its many marginalized citizens. The deficiencies in multifaceted state presence in large parts of country and the power vacuum on the criminal market were filled by other violent non-state actors—the paramilitaries who later in the 1990s created an umbrella political organization, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), and the leftist guerrillas Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). The two groups were able to take over Colombia’s cocaine market, with many independent drug traffickers buying positions of power and military commander titles in the AUC. They also escalated Colombia’s civil war to one of its bloodiest phases ever during the latter half of 1990s and early 2000s.

The lesson that Mexico should have drawn from the Colombian case is that merely breaking up the cartels is insufficient; the state needs to increase its presence in a multifaceted fashion and strengthen not only its authority, but also its legitimacy.

Similarly, the simplistic notion that the Medellín cartel was destroyed when Escobar was dramatically shot on the city’s rooftops reinforced Mexican security officials’ fondness for high-value-target (HVT) decapitation. Also practiced in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and elsewhere, HVT interdiction is based on the assumption that the destruction of a group’s key leadership will make the group lose its operational capacity. Yet there are two flaws present in this assumption and its application to Mexico’s anti-crime efforts. One is that the ability of DTOs to replace fallen leaders is far greater than the ability of insurgent and terrorist groups to do so, in part because the leadership requirements for a drug trafficker tend to be far lower than for a terrorist or insurgency leader. A DTO’s capacity to regenerate leadership is great. Second, the Medellín cartel was destroyed well before Escobar died. Colombian security forces, the Cali cartel, and Los Pepes (an anti-Escobar militia and a core of the future paramilitaries) killed hundreds of Escobar’s lieutenants and foot soldiers before they got Escobar. Essentially, the entire middle-level of the Medellín cartel was eliminated beforehand.

Focus on the middle layer is highly prominent in U.S. and British interdiction operations precisely to prevent an easy and violent regeneration of the leadership of the targeted criminal group. Thus, U.S. interdiction operations often run for months or years and the goal is to arrest as much of the middle layer at once as possible—often hundreds of people are arrested in one sweep. But the Mexican government has been deeply challenged in conducting interdiction in this way— lacking both tactical and strategic intelligence on the DTOs and fearing that sitting on any intelligence piece or asset too long risks its leaking out and going cold.

The story of the so-called Medellín Miracle of using socio-economic policies to combat organized crime that several Mexican cities seek to emulate is also complicated. During the 1980s reign of Escobar and the 1990s reign of the paramilitaries and the FARC, Medellín was one of the world’s most violent cities. In many ways, it was the epitome of drug violence. Colombian president Álvaro Uribe made restoring Medellín a key priority and sent the military to the city in 2002 to retake the poor comunas (slums) ruled by the FARC. The success of “Operation Orion” in defeating the FARC in Medellín was followed by the adoption of a set of progressive social policies by mayors Sergio Fajardo and Alonso Salazar. They took advantage of the greater security in the city and extended a host of development activities to the poor comunas, including infrastructure and public spaces such as libraries. Homicides and kidnapping dropped dramatically.

The policies that Fajardo and Salazar implemented deserve a lot of praise. They connected the poor neighborhoods to the economically productive center, increasing access to jobs and education for the poor population of the crime-ridden comunas. They also restored some hope among the comunas’ residents in a better future and increased the bonds between those marginalized areas and the state that had long ignored them.

But for all these accomplishments, the effect of the policies on violence reduction should not be overstated. More than reducing violence, the policies were enabled by a prior reduction in violence. The FARC defeat in Medellín allowed the crime-lord-cum-paramilitary leader Don Berna to consolidate his control over the city’s criminal markets. His firm grip on the poor comunas and on the city’s criminal rackets drove the significant drop in homicides during much of the first decade of the 2000s. In the latter part of the decade, Don Berna was imprisoned and extradited to the United States, ending his narco-peace, as emerging criminal groups began to fight over drug smuggling and other criminal enterprises in Medellín and the surrounding state of Antioquía. Homicide levels rose close to the pre-Don Berna era. Socio-economic policies have been unable to fully compensate for the persisting lack of public safety in the city and the continuing deficiencies in police capacity to go after the city’s criminal groups.

Over the past decade, also reflecting the results of U.S. assistance, Colombia has experienced very significant progress. Nonetheless, the success is incomplete. It is thus important not to be blinded by the achievements and uncritically present policies adopted in Colombia as a blanket model to be emulated in other parts of the world, including Mexico. While its accomplishments, including in police reform and strengthening of the judicial system, need to be recognized and indeed may serve as an example, the limitations of progress equally need to be stressed. And as with all public policies, molding anti-crime strategies to local institutional and cultural context continues to be a critical determinant of their effectiveness.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: ReVista

Asia, International Drug Trafficking, and U.S.-China Counternarcotics Cooperation

Yong-an Zhang — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:39:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

The end of the Cold War may have heralded an end to certain tensions, but among other unforeseen effects it also precipitated a significant increase in the flow of illegal drugs across traditional national boundaries. International travel has become easier in an increasingly borderless world, and―although international drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have never respected national boundaries―newly globalized markets for drug production and exportation, along with changing patterns of consumption in some societies, have had an enormous impact on drug trafficking. In short, the global market for illicit drugs, and the capacity of providers to deliver to this market, is expanding inexorably around the world. What was once called “the American disease”[1] has become a global one. [2]

The international community first took an interest in the Asian drug trade at the beginning of the 20^th century. The Shanghai Opium Commission in 1909 was the first attempt at regulating drug trade in the region, as countries including the United States, Great Britain, China, Japan, and Russia convened to discuss the growing trafficking of opium. Since then, numerous measures have been adopted by individual countries and collectively to curb the illegal drug trade. This has been especially true since the launch of the “war on drugs.” In spite of these enhanced efforts, the global opiate market has nevertheless exhibited increased growth since 1980. Data gathered by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) indicate global opium production increased by close to 80 percent between 1998 and 2009. The UNODC reports that nearly all of the world’s illicit opium and heroin production is concentrated in “Afghanistan, South-East Asia (mostly Myanmar) and Latin America (Mexico and Colombia). Afghanistan stands out among this group, accounting for around 90 percent of global illicit opium production in recent years.” Upwards of 90 percent of the global heroin and morphine production is provided by Afghanistan and Myanmar. Clearly, the global opiate market has neither been eliminated nor significantly reduced since 1998.[3]

Asian drug trafficking remains a serious threat to both China and the United States. In order to confront this common threat, since 1985 China and the United States have taken numerous steps to cooperate in the interdiction of cross-border drug trafficking. Together, they have made outstanding achievements in the prevention of Asian drug trafficking and in the eradication of opium poppy cultivation in the Golden Triangle region that comprises parts of Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Bilateral cooperation, however, has not been wholly successful, and Beijing and Washington face a daunting set of challenges regarding cross-border drug trafficking. The two nations must reconsider both new and old challenges in both regional and global contexts in their efforts to promote counternarcotics cooperation.

This paper will assess the various threats and challenges that China and the United States face from international Asian drug trafficking. It will examine the historical roots of counternarcotics cooperation between China and the United States, will analyze the limits of this bilateral cooperation, and will provide policy recommendations for the two governments on how to better confront these threats.

[1] David F. Musto, American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control, Oxford University Press, 1999.

[2] Paul B. Stares, Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World, Brookings Institution, 1996.

[3] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), World Drug Report 2010, Vol. 1, New York: United Nations, 2010, p. 37.

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Authors

Yong-an Zhang

Why Eradication Won’t Solve Afghanistan’s Poppy Problem

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: In an interview with PBS Frontline, Vanda Felbab-Brown discusses the widespread effects of opium production in Afghanistan and the outcome of efforts to curb it.

PBS FRONTLINE: How did Afghanistan become the supplier of 90 percent of the world’s opium?

VANDA FELBAB-BROWN: In the 1980s several important changes took place in the international market and in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan in the mid-80s, the Soviet Army ended up adopting a “scorched earth” policy [to systematically destroy agricultural resources]. That is because while the Soviets were able to control the cities, they were never able to control the countryside. The insurgency was always [launching] attacks from the rural areas on the cities and generating instability. The Soviets tried military operations in the countryside, which didn’t control the problem, so ultimately, they decided to destroy the agriculture in the countryside with the idea that this would drive the rural population into the cities, which they could control.

The effect was the complete collapse of the agricultural production of Afghanistan: the destruction of orchards, irrigation canals. The only thing the population could grow was opium poppy, which didn’t require [so much] irrigation, fertilizers or transportation, because Pakistani traders would come to the farm and pick up the opium. So this really unleashed the first systematic cultivation of opium poppy at the time.

At the same time, there was a growing demand for opiates in the world. Production from the traditional supplier — the golden triangle of Burma, Laos and Vietnam — was significantly suppressed. None of the agricultural infrastructure was rebuilt in the 1990s, following the Soviet withdrawal and civil war, and this trend continued through the Taliban era.

PBS FRONTLINE: What effects did opium production have in Afghanistan?

FELBAB-BROWN: From the mid-80s through the mid 2000s, opium poppy was the main source of livelihood for the population.

Even today, when you have a growing legal GDP, opium poppy production is still very important. It is still, at minimum, around 20 percent of the GDP, and that might be significantly underestimating the actual value of opium poppy because it also has repercussions in other sectors. … It is one of the big sources of economic activity in Afghanistan, along with foreign aid. If foreign aid diminishes significantly post-2014 [when U.S. troops are set to withdraw], it will be a very important driver of economic activity.

But there are other effects beyond economic effects. One of them is that since the mid-80s, political power is heavily associated with access to both foreign aid and opium poppy. If you want to be a political actor in Afghanistan — whether you call that a warlord, power broker or politician — much … is dependent on being able to distribute some profit to your community. There are two ways to get access to get such access to money: one is to get access to foreign aid; the other is to get profits from opium poppy. So political power, at least until the mid-2000s, and in a more covert way since the mid-2000s, has been very strongly associated with access to the drug trade.

Read the full interview at pbs.org »

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: PBS Frontline

Image Source: ï¿½ Ho New / Reuters