Drug Wars
By Michael Jacobson
My colleague Matt Levitt and I had a piece in The New Republic today, on the growing involvement of terrorist groups in criminal activity -- and particularly in the drug trade. In the piece, we have some recommendations for the Obama administration on how they can make greater use of law enforcement tools to take advantage of this growing nexus.
Here is an excerpt:
This past week, President-elect Obama declared that "Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are our number one threat when it comes to American security," pledging to "do everything in our power" to eliminate safe havens which terrorists can use to plan attacks against the U.S. As these terrorist networks become increasingly transnational, one of the key roadblocks against destroying them is the difficultly of achieving international cooperation in counter-terrorism initiatives.
To overcome this challenge, the Obama administration needs to change the way the U.S. government thinks about the "War on Terror." Taking advantage of the growing involvement of terrorist groups in criminal activity, his team should increase the use of law enforcement tools as a key pillar of his counterterrorism strategy. While terrorist groups can hardly be defeated by prosecutors and police officers alone, these tools can greatly increase the effectiveness of our efforts to capture and neutralize them.
Before 9/11, Al Qaeda funded and controlled operations directly from its base in Afghanistan. The group provided funding for the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Today, the terrorist threat is far more decentralized, and Al Qaeda's central command is not funding operations as it once did. Left to their own devices, budding terrorist cells have resorted to criminal activity to raise the funds for attacks.
The cell that executed the devastating 2004 Madrid train bombing plot, which killed almost 200 people, partially financed the attack by selling hashish. The terrorists who carried out the July 7, 2005, attacks on the transportation system in London were also self-financed, in part through credit card fraud. In Southeast Asia, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jemaah Islamiyah financed the 2002 Bali bombings, in part, through jewelry store robberies.
While terrorist groups are involved in a wide variety of criminal activity, ranging from cigarette smuggling to selling counterfeit products, the nexus between drugs and terror is particularly strong. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, 19 of the 43 U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations are definitively linked to the global drug trade, and up to 60 percent of terror organizations are suspected of having some ties with the illegal narcotics trade.
To read the rest of the piece, click here