illegal drugs and terrorism

Drug Prohibition Is a Terrorist's Best Friend
by Ted Galen Carpenter
January 5, 2005

Under pressure from Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is urging his people to fight narcotics as ferociously as they fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Such a struggle seems destined to undermine the campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Karzai and his American patrons can prevail against the country's opium growers or its terrorists, but not both.

Afghanistan has been one of the leading sources of opium poppies, and therefore heroin, since the 1970s. Today, the country accounts for more than 75 percent of the world's opium supply. It is clear that some of the revenues from the drug trade -- at least 10 percent to 20 percent -- flow into the coffers of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Ted Galen Carpenter, the Cato Institute's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, is the author of six books and editor of 10 books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (2003).

That is obviously a worrisome development. But it is hardly unprecedented. For years, leftist insurgent groups in Colombia, principally the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and right-wing paramilitaries have been financed largely by that country's cocaine trade. Conservative estimates place the annual revenue stream to the FARC alone at between $515 million and $600 million per year. (In 2002, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia put the figure at "several billion" dollars.)

The harsh reality is that terrorist groups around the world have been enriched by prohibitionist drug policies that drive up drug costs, and which deliver enormous profits to the outlaw organizations willing to accept the risks that go with the trade.

Targeting the Afghanistan drug trade would create a variety of problems. Most of the regional warlords who abandoned the Taliban and currently support the U.S. anti-terror campaign (and in many cases politically undergird the Karzai government) are deeply involved in the drug trade, in part to pay the militias that give them political clout. A crusade against drug trafficking could easily alienate those regional power brokers and cause them to switch allegiances yet again.

Unfortunately, Washington is now increasing its pressure on the Karzai government to crack down on opium cultivation, offering more than a billion dollars in aid to fund anti-drug efforts. In addition, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced in August that U.S. military forces in Afghanistan would make drug eradication a high priority -- a mission that the military properly continues to resist.

U.S. officials need to keep their goals straight. Recognizing that security considerations sometimes trump other objectives would not be an unprecedented move by Washington. U.S. agencies quietly ignored the drug-trafficking activities of anti-communist factions in Central America during the 1980s when the primary goal was to keep those countries out of the Soviet orbit. In the early 1990s, the United States also eased its pressure on Peru's government to eradicate drugs when President Alberto Fujimori concluded that a higher priority had to be given to winning coca farmers away from Shining Path guerrillas. U.S. leaders should refrain from trying to make U.S. soldiers into anti-drug crusaders: Even those policymakers who support the war on drugs as an overall policy ought to recognize that American troops in Central Asia have a difficult enough job fighting terrorists.

There is little doubt that terrorist groups around the world profit from the drug trade. What anti-drug crusaders refuse to acknowledge, however, is that the connection between drug trafficking and terrorism is the direct result of making drugs illegal. The prohibitionist policy that the United States and other drug-consuming countries continue to pursue guarantees a huge black market premium for all illegal drugs. The retail value of drugs coming into the United States (to say nothing of Europe and other markets) is estimated at $50 billion to $100 billion a year. Fully 90 percent of that sum is attributable to the prohibition premium.

Absent a world-wide prohibitionist policy, this fat profit margin would evaporate, and terrorist organizations would be forced to seek other sources of revenue.

Drug prohibition is terrorism's best friend. That symbiotic relationship will continue until the United States and its allies have the wisdom to dramatically change their drug policies.

cato.org

Drugs & Terrorism
by Mike Gray

With the laudable goal of knocking the props out from under international terrorism, House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced last month that he has formed a task force to combat drug trafficking. "The illegal drug trade," says Hastert, "is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama Bin Laden."

Unfortunately, the 48-member "Speaker's Task Force for a Drug Free America" will be led by drug war hawks whose instincts are almost certain to make matters worse. Hastert and his co-chairmen are staunch supporters of current drug policy even though three out of four Americans believe that policy has failed. Ironically, most of these lawmakers are champions of free-market capitalism and they'd be the first to admit that you can't mess with the law of supply and demand. But in this one arena – drugs – they believe they can somehow repeal the most basic law of economics.

History, logic, and recent experience suggest otherwise. If, for example, we were somehow able to actually dent the drug supply -- something we have not managed so far with a $50-billion annual effort -- the price will just go up and so will the profits.

For 80 years we have been trying to wipe out illegal drugs by eliminating the supply, and year by year we have compounded the problem. When we began this crusade in 1914 we set out to rid the world of the scourge of addiction, and after an incalculable expenditure of money and lives we have managed to increase the rate of addiction by 1500 percent. It turns out you cannot alter the fundamental equation of economics, no matter how much money, force, or firepower you throw at it. Daredevil entrepreneurs, attracted by unimaginable profits, will find ways to corrupt the system and expand their markets.

It will be fairly easy, however, for Mr. Hastert and his colleagues to make things worse. Consider Colombia, one of our major partners in the war on drugs, a country that is literally going down the drain right in front of us as revolutionaries, death squads, and corrupt army officers fight for control of the drug trade. Back in the 1980s Colombia went through a horrifying bout with terrorism when the U.S. was chasing the notorious drug lord, Pablo Escobar. Like Osama Bin Laden, Escobar considered human life expendable and he liked to blow people up to get our attention. In his time, he killed hundreds of innocent people before the U.S. put together a secret Colombian commando force to track him down. But the men in charge were so terrified of Escobar that they invited his underworld competitors to join the hunt -- another classic example of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." When Escobar was finally gunned down, these other traffickers simply replaced him and they proved to be much more efficient. Today, despite our best efforts, drug production in that luckless country is raging out of control.

Colombian High Court Justice Gomez Hurtado has some shrapnel in his leg from one of Escobar's bombs and he has something to tell us about terrorism. At a drug policy conference in Baltimore nearly a decade ago, Gomez Hurtado gave a chilling snapshot of the trouble we're in. He said, "The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the State and, if the State resists... they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages."

As we stand transfixed at the specter of 21st Century vandals assaulting the governments of one country after another, it's important to remember that this particular plague could be terminated with the stroke of a pen. The vast illegal enterprises that the U.N. says are raking in some $400 billion a year -- the powerful, murderous combines that threaten to overwhelm the rule of law itself -- all could be cut off instantly by simply taking the drug trade out of the hands of the gangsters and putting it in the hands of government regulators -- just as we finally were forced to do with alcohol.

Those who argue that the cure would be worse than the disease should take another look at the disease.

narcoterror.org