Funding the Taliban: More COIN Heresy in Afghanistan

Many people will tell you that the US finally gets counterinsurgency. It’s difficult, complicated and often demoralising, but we do know what we’re supposed to be doing. There’s loads of little success stories from Iraq and Afghanistan to point to, don’t you know.

And then you read a story like today’s How the US Army Protects Its Trucks: By Paying the Taliban — and it’s hard not to think that at least in Afghanistan, at the broader strategic level, we don’t actually know what we’re doing. A key element of COIN is denying funding to insurgents and, if necessary, providing resources to indigenous counterinsurgent forces. Instead, the Taliban are raking in millions skimmed off of US security contracts — not just because of corruption and cronyism, but as an unintended consequence of rules of engagement and other military/strategic decisions.

It’s not a new story, but the article provides a number of interesting cites and stories. The gist of it is: Coalition forces need to move large amounts of military supplies around the country by truck. Very expensive contracts are arranged with local security and shipping companies, which are usually attached to a warlord or local power broker. But the Taliban and other armed groups control traffic on the roads and must be paid off to allow a convoy through without being attacked. Ka-ching!

In intrastate conflicts, bribing militants at checkpoints is of course nothing new and largely unavoidable. What is striking about the situation in Afghanistan, however, is the sheer amount of money that is likely being funneled into Taliban coffers; the common estimate is that at least 10 percent of foreign contracting money is diverted into payoffs to avoid attacks. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars. In a country as poor as Afghanistan, that kind of money goes a long way.

The military’s hands are basically tied: having been posted to provincial bases, they need their supplies. The manpower (government or private) required to protect convoys simply isn’t there, given the size and terrain of the Afghan battlespace. The corruption networks that feed this process are not merely opportunistic but embedded in current political structures and arrangements. This is a problem that cannot be resolved at the tactical or even operational level, but it does not seem to command a lot of attention at higher levels of decision-making. New approaches that call for concentrating on cities and larger towns and gradually expanding areas of stability, do not really address the problem of convoys being attacked as they travel through empty rural spaces.

It is, however, reassuring that greater attention is being paid to deciphering the sources of Taliban funding and moving to block them. Perhaps uncovering the real size of militant profits from our own contracts will shock people enough to move on this issue.

At any rate, the article also points to a few other issues that come up often in crime-conflict discussions, such as the problems that arise from the personalisation of politics in conflict zones — ie, the destabilising effects of political and economic systems based on individual power politics rather than depersonalised institutions and processes. Meet the Wardaks:

NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan. What NCL Holdings is most notable for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghan’s current defence minister, General Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahideen against the Soviets.

Earlier this year, the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named as one of the six companies that would handle all the US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract, for “host nation trucking”, was large but not gargantuan. But over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a weapons system”, the US military expanded the contract 600% for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “Service members will not get the food, water, equipment and ammunition they require.”

Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360m, or a total of nearly $2.2bn. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10% of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defence minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold…

The private security industry in Afghanistan has developed quite differently from the private military model seen in Iraq, where firms such as Blackwater were arms of the US government. The industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.

Apparently, the Afghan intelligence service suggested to the Americans a while back that instead of paying these huge sums of money for warlord protection/militant payoffs, the money be used to put together a professional convoy protection force. According to the article, ‘the suggestion went nowhere’.

An American trucking executive sums it up: ‘The army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them’. And in the process, enriching local warlords who act as middlemen.

Military commanders on the ground don’t like it but have to live with it. But the rest of us should take a step back and ask: what are we really doing here? To me, this is one of the values of raising issues of corruption and criminality in the conflict arena — people can sit around day and night debating political and military strategies, but unless those plans include options for conducting COIN without having to pay the insurgents to let you do it, I’m not sure how much progress we can really expect.

‘Afghans Oppose US Hit List of Drug traffickers’

Interesting article linked here in the Washington Post from last week with deep relevance to the debates at CCN. We have talked about the need to move away from a simple ‘logistical nexus’ mindset, as well call it, regarding considerations for the overlap between crime and conflict, as this leads to a primarily ‘disrupt’ and ‘destroy’ focus in activity. Our contrasting position, which we are increasingly arguing, is that one must also consider the ‘conceptual nexus’ and ‘governance subversion nexus’ forms of the crime-conflict issue also (see the link above ‘What is the Crime-Conflict Nexus?’). The WP article reveals some of the current problems with that mindset in action. Though, I still think there are more problems with this than the article recognises…

Follow-up: Sex and Security

A few weeks back I mentioned a new MICROCON report on peacekeeping and local sex industries. Today’s Asia Times carries a related story on the use of brothels by private security contractors in Kabul.

A report by the Washington, DC, Project on Government Oversight recently released publicly tells of the wild naked antics of members of ArmorGroup (AG), which has a United States State Department contract to provide security for the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Hardly mentioned is the use of local bordellos by some contractors. It took a lawsuit filed on September 9 by James Gordon, a former ArmorGroup director of operations, and subsequent whistleblower, against ArmorGroup North America and associated defendants – ArmorGroup International (AGI), Wackenhut Services Inc (WSI), and various management individuals – to bring details to light. Among other things he charges that AG:

* Allowed AGNA managers and employees to frequent brothels notorious for housing trafficked women in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and shutting down the plaintiff’s efforts to investigate and put a stop to these violations.

* Deliberately withholding documents relating to violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act allegedly committed by AGNA’s program manager and other AGNA employees when responding to a document demand from US Congressman Henry Waxman on behalf of the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The article also recounts failed investigations into allegations that DynCorp employees participated in trafficking-related activities in Bosnia, starting ten years ago with reports that “five male DynCorp employees had purchased female prostitutes from a Serbian organized crime outfit.”

The details in the article should prove interesting to anyone looking at the in-theatre behaviour of private security contractors and the lengths to which corporate entities will go to protect their reputations and revenue streams. The author, David Isenberg from PRIO, also has a forthcoming study on these issues.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about corruption as a strategic problem in Afghanistan. I don’t think most people think of brothels and sex trafficking when they think about corruption in this context, but to the extent that such behaviour by foreign forces (private or not) contributes to local perceptions of foreigners as corrupt or illegitimate, perhaps it should be part of the conversation.

Fated to Pretend

We’ve all heard a lot recently about how, among the Afghan Taliban, there is only a small hardcore of deeply ideologically committed members, and that most are there for a variety of non-ideological, expedient reasons.

This is not particularly unique to the Taliban. Research into criminal street gangs has produced a tonne of evidence that only a very small minority of gang youths are truly committed to the ‘contraculture’ values of the group. See L. Yablonsky (1959), ‘The Delinquent Gang as a Near Group’, Social Problems, Vol. 7, pp.1-8-117; and N. Gerrard (1964),  “The Core Member of the Gang”, The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 361-371. For most youths, it is social (rather than ideological) sense that keeps them as active participants.

This also highlights, in my opinion, a peculiarity: when talking about groups we fight with military forces, we talk about ideology, but re. groups we face in our own societies that we tackle with police, we call it ‘culture’ or ’sub-culture’. I think we’re dealing with the same thing here and we’re limiting the potential of our research by not recognising this. We’re going to be developing more on this at the CCN project. We’ll keep you updated as things emerge.

But either way (and as an excuse to bring in some music to CCN), it seems most youths are fated to pretend:

The Dorronsoro Report on Afghanistan: But What About Criminality?

You should read Gilles’ Dorronsoro’s new Carnegie paper on The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan. It’s provocative, informed and does not shy away from tough recommendations. It’s gotten a lot of attention for two of its arguments: first, that the Taliban are not a loosely connected umbrella group but a coordinated revolutionary movement operating on a national basis; and second, the US should focus on preventing Taliban expansion in the north and around Kabul rather than reinforcing a more or less doomed mission in the south and east.

Dorronsoro doesn’t claim to address the sources of Taliban revenue or the role of criminality in the conflict so I suppose it’s a bit snarky to note the general lack of such information in the report — except that given his access and insights, and his refreshingly straightforward approach, it would be interesting to see his take on these issues included.

He does offer a few points relevant to our focus, while noting generally the problems of corruption and the lack of police and judicial processes. He also offers this pointed critique with respect to international aid:

International aid, which is part of a war economy, has created a rentier society where foreign money is considered an entitlement. In some places, people rely on foreign subsidies (of which a small part is directed to infrastructural development) distributed by the PRTs or other international bodies. Far from appeasing social tensions, this has created high expectations, growing discontent, and a great deal of local jealousy between communities. In addition, the insurgency has benefited as much as the population from the influx of money through extortion.

Interestingly, he disputes a claim we have often seen — that the Taliban rely heavily on paid fighters. Dorronsoro writes: “The insurgency accepts heavy losses, which contradicts the claim that a majority of the Taliban are motivated by money.”

I’m not sure about this. This logic might hold true if Taliban foot soldiers were more like traditional mercenaries — offering their services in a competitive marketplace, motivated mainly by profit and highly incentivised to participate in lower-risk situations. But from the accounts I have read, the men who fight with the Taliban for money do so precisely because they don’t have any other options (no jobs, no way of leaving the country, etc). If the choice is between occasionally working for the Taliban or starving, then the Taliban will seem a better option even with a high risk of death or injury.

Dorronsoro seems pretty confident in his assertion, so I’d be interested in seeing what others might think on this issue.

The Other Problem with Narco-Insurgency

The Washington Post this weekend offers a fantastic piece of reportage on a Marine battalion’s ‘change in mission‘ upon being deployed to Now Zad, Afghanistan. Originally sent to train Afghan police, they arrived to find a deserted town: not only devoid of police, but empty of civilians. Insurgents had taken over the town and the Marines’ new mission was to clear them out, despite not being equipped or supported for major combat operations.

It’s a fascinating article and well worth a read. One detail in particular caught my eye in the recounting of the Marines’ struggle to clear out an insurgent compound (how difficult are COIN operations? a Marine platoon with air support struggled for seven hours to get past an estimated half-dozen insurgents).

A group of Marines has trouble clearing an armed man out of a basement in the compound. Despite being hit he won’t stop shooting at them, and they can’t convince him to surrender either.

So they kept throwing in grenades and lining up to go in. Culliver had been on the receiving end of grenades before, and he knew how you couldn’t hear afterward. But still, each time they went in, they shouted in Pashtu for the shooter to surrender. They kept getting shot at for their trouble. Never one to mess around, Buegel, the platoon sergeant, applied some C-4 explosives, but even that got them nowhere. The shooter just kept shooting. He wasn’t going down despite being hit repeatedly…

Finally, the smoke-filled basement went still. Culliver heard Karell empty his M9 through the window as a final precaution, and then the Marines went in. Culliver was second through the doorway. Through the smoke, he saw the mortally wounded shooter. He saw him reach for his AK-47.

The Marine in front of Culliver fired two rounds. Both hit the shooter in the head, according to Culliver. After the smoke cleared, Culliver wasn’t surprised to find syringes. He had guessed the shooter, like others, had been amped up on something — despite all his wounds, the man never cried out.

The use of mind-altering substances by combatants is an enduring feature of war, but that doesn’t mean we have a thorough grasp of the implications in the context of modern warfare. I highly recommend a Strategic Studies Institute paper by Paul Rexton Kan: Drug Intoxicated Irregular Fighters: Complications, Dangers and Responses.

The complexity of many ongoing and persistent conflicts in the post-Cold War is partially attributed to the widespread presence of drug intoxicated irregular fighters. Drug consumption in contemporary wars has coincided with the use of child soldiers, has led to increased unpredictability among irregular fighters, provided the conditions for the breakdown of social controls and commission of atrocities, and caused the lessening of command and control among the ranks. Although the nonmedical use of drugs by combatants has a long history, recent encounters of professional armed forces have demonstrated the need to reinvestigate the reasons irregular combatants consume drugs, the type of drugs they consume, how they acquire drugs, and the consequences for professional militaries.

As Dr Kan notes, there is a solid base of discussion on the use of the drugs trade to finance irregular war-fighting forces. When we think, for example, of the problems spawned by the opium industry in Afghanistan, we tend to think of the pots of money flowing into Taliban coffers that allows them to sustain their insurgent operations. But as the article above shows, there is another problem: the presence of intoxicated militants in combat. What effects are they having? Do we know how to cope with them?

It is important to view narco-trafficking as a strategic problem, but in doing so we should not neglect the tactical and local-level effects. It’s safe to say that it does matter if irregular fighters are drugged up, and it does matter that the transnational drugs trade in Central Asia also ensnares hundreds of thousands of locals in hopeless drug addiction and criminality. There is much to say on this topic, and we’ll return to this in future posts.

Reading List: The Opium Curse

If you are anything like me, you have a stack of reading material several feet high on your desk, a running list of books and articles to acquire, and a dozen tabs open on Firefox at all times.  There is simply too much to read, most of the time. Yet once in a while something comes along that I think the readers of this blog would appreciate, but that I know I won’t be able to get into for a bit. I’d like to acknowledge these under the Reading List header: pieces that seem really interesting but that I cannot at all vouch for yet (caveat lector !)

This week’s entry: Opium for the Masses? Conflict-induced Narcotics Production in Afghanistan (University of Oslo)

…war conditions are both destructive and creative. Military actions destroy existing lines of production, and new illegal opportunities arise as law enforcement becomes weaker. The traditional explanation for why the production of illegal substances is so high in conflict areas, however, focuses on drugs-for-arms strategies. This explanation rests on centralized power within rebel organizations or governments, where strongmen organize the growing of illegal substances to finance military campaigns.

We emphasize a reverse mechanism, what we call conflict-induced narcotics production. It rests on more fragmented power where local producers and leaders react to military activities by raising drug production; not because they want to hoard cash to buy arms, but because the production decisions reflect a new social and economic situation, and a shorter time horizon. In the case of Afghanistan, the key is the observation that opium cultivation requires a minimum of investments and provides a maximum of economic turnover. These are desirable features under the political instability generated by conflict.

Why do production decisions change? Opium is more drought resistant than wheat, the main alternative crop, and opium does not require road transportation. Military activities that destroy infrastructure such as irrigation and roads therefore make opium relatively more profitable…

Violence and political instability also make it possible to ignore the law (large production notwithstanding, opium has been illegal in Afghanistan since 1945 (UNODC, 1949)). As David Keen (2000, p. 22) stresses, conflicts should be regarded as “the emergence of an alternative system of profit, power, and even protection.” The social stigma attached to illegal activities easily vanishes, expected punishment declines, and local protection is taken over by militia leaders and warlords. A fragmented state enables warlords and local leaders to earn a living by protecting poppy cultivators, opium traders, and laboratories…

Since the physical conditions and climate are extremely well suited for opium production in Afghanistan, a large change in opium production can come about by a small alteration in incentives caused by conflicts. The physical and social conditions for poppy cultivation and heroin production constitute the opium curse of Afghanistan, we argue, where illegal displaces legal production.

The Flood Strategy: Never Going to Work

I have a huge amount of respect for Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (not least because of the delightful Costa’s Corner. And he Twitters! ). So it’s hard for me to understand how he could possibly get behind the latest proposal for CN in Afghanistan.

United Nations officials in Afghanistan are attempting to create a “flood of drugs” in the country intended to destroy the value of opium and force poppy farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat. After the failure to destroy fields of the scarlet flowers in Afghanistan’s volatile south, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is to stop the drugs from leaving the country in the first place.

“Manual eradication is incompetent and inefficient,” UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa said during a visit to the western Afghan province of Herat. “So we want to see more efforts to stop the flow of drugs across Afghanistan’s borders and the hitting of high-value targets to create a market disruption. “We want to create a flood of drugs within Afghanistan. There will be so much opium inside Afghanistan unable to go out that the price will go down.”

Officials admit that the plan is a second-best solution to intensive eradication campaigns.

To be frank, I don’t think this is a second-best solution. I think it’s no solution at all. Let’s look at the Iranian border:

Costa got a first-hand view of that issue this month from the porthole of a UN helicopter chartered to fly along a portion of the 580-mile border that separates Afghanistan from Iran. The vast swaths of desert are thinly populated with a scattering of mud brick villages, and there is little to stop smugglers crossing the border.

While the Iranians, fed up with the problems created by the country’s 1 million heroin addicts, have taken steps to build ditches and walls along the frontier, the Afghans lack even a fraction of those resources.

On the Afghan side of the border, Costa visited one of 24 squalid border checkpoints supported by a sprinkling of EU money, where the commanding officer told the UNODC chief that his men needed heavy weapons to defend themselves against the much better armed smugglers who race through the huge gaps in the border.

Last summer I had the chance to cross the Tajik-Afghan border at Sherkhan Bandar (from the Tajik side). Our car approached a gleaming new border facility built with EU funds… and then swerved around it, tackling a rutted dirt road leading to a small trailer-like building. This was the actual border post. Dozens of Chinese and Pakistani trucks surrounded it, waiting for the right official to show up and accept their bribes so they could cross the border without being searched.

It was explained to me that the new border facility was not in use because of a dispute in Dushanbe over which ministry should control it (and thus control the revenue streams emerging from it). As we pulled away toward Afghanistan, we had a lingering view of the shiny and expansive compound — and the lone guard sitting at the striped road barrier, prepared for traffic that would seemingly never come. (And you thought your job sucked.)

All this, of course, does not even begin to account for the thousands of miles of virtually unguarded border regions that Afghanistan has.

The article also points to the tension between counternarcotics and local economies:

Their efforts have been further undermined by a recent decree by President Hamid Karzai to close down small cross-border markets which had been a source of economic activity in an otherwise barren wilderness. The local UNODC officials say the decision by Karzai, apparently taken to protect customs revenues, is “killing the villages”.

The governor of Herat province, Ahmad Yusef Nuristani, said young people in the border areas had no choice but to join the drug smugglers to survive. “They were trading areas that kept people busy with legitimate businesses so they would not be tempted into employment by the drug traffickers,” Nuristani said.

And finally, we have yet another headache to worry about:

The UNODC country chief, Jean-Luc Lemahieu, also warned that the strategy of capitalising on falling opium prices could be torpedoed by Chinese drug dealers looking to Afghanistan to supply China’s growing army of heroin addicts. “I think we have a two-year window before the Chinese pick up on the Afghan market. Currently the Chinese dealers source their heroin from the Golden Triangle. The networks have not yet been established.”

It will be interesting to see the impact of this both at the micro level — the dynamics of the opium trade in the country — and the political level — how would it affect Chinese policy toward the Afghan conflict? I’m curious whether it will actually take two years to come about. Chinese goods are already carpeting the country, and China is the leading source of the precursor chemicals flowing into Afghanistan to convert opium to heroin.

At any rate, I’m still a fan of Mr. Costa, if for no other reason than this quote:

Costa said his request that the World Food Programme buy only Afghan wheat had been rejected by “free market ayatollahs who think political stability is less important than free market principles”.

Occasional Taliban

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a trainee reporter in Farah, forced to publish pseudonymically, who recently wrote about the district’s ‘Occasional Taliban’. His report supports the contention that most Taliban fighters participate in the conflict on an ad hoc basis, and many are largely motivated by the need for cash. (See David Kilcullen’s recent The Accidental Guerrilla for more on this subject.)

“I am the only breadwinner in our family of eight,” said Abdullah Jan, a 22-year-old from a small village. “I went to Iran three times to try to find work, but I was expelled. I was in debt, and my father told me to go to the city. I looked for a job for three weeks, but then my brother got sick and needed medical treatment. He later died. Two of my friends then suggested that I go to the local Taleban…”

“My first assignment was to attack the police checkpoint in Guakhan district,” recalled Abdullah Jan. “We killed four policemen, and we lost two of our own. Another one was injured. The fight lasted for two hours, with the real Taleban encouraging us from behind the lines, saying ‘go on, further, move, move, move.’

“When it ended, I was paid 400 afghani by the local commander. He said that if I performed better in the future, I would get more money. Since then, I have participated in five more attacks, and I make about 1,000 afghani per week.”

Under this ad hoc arrangement, Abdullah Jan is a Taleban for only a few hours per week. Other than that, he goes about his business like any other citizen. He has no gun or any other equipment that marks him as an insurgent, and he does not consider himself to be one.

“I am just fighting for the money,” he said. “If I find another job, I’ll leave this one as soon as possible.”

From a Taliban perspective, this may be a pretty wise approach to manpower. Fighters cannot be identified when ‘off-duty’ and easily disappear within the civilian population. Paying them on an ad hoc basis is not that expensive  given Taliban resources (1000 afghani is about $20) and it provides a level of stability and predictability in payouts; it is somewhat reminiscent of US companies discerning the advantages of hiring workers on an hourly wage with no benefits. Given economic deprivation in the region, paying fighters in this way probably ensures a steady stream of recruits, who then bear the brunt of military action while the ‘real Taliban’ remain behind in relative safety.

The potential disadvantage is that cash-motivated fighters will melt away if economic conditions improve — as Abdullah says, he will no longer fight for the Taliban if he can find a proper job. However, there is a self-reinforcing aspect to this state of affairs that makes improvements less likely:

By some estimates, up to 70 per cent of the Taleban are unemployed young men just looking for a way to make a living. In Farah, Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul, and other southern provinces, the majority of insurgents are fighting for money, not ideology.

But they are caught in a vicious circle: as long as their provinces are unstable, there is little investment that could generate employment opportunities. However, in the absence of jobs, they join the insurgents, prolonging the violence and guaranteeing that security and development, remain but a distant dream.

The article also highlights how local men weigh the pros and cons of different kinds of illicit paid work. The main disadvantage of being a hired fighter seems to be the possibility of death. Abdullah, however, plays down this risk. “I have to work with the Taleban,” he insisted. “There is no other job except stealing or kidnapping. I think this is better than stealing. If we are killed, we are martyrs. This is what the mullahs say. They tell us we are doing jihad.”

This line of thinking — fighting is better than stealing — suggests that even fighters who are economically motivated are also swayed by normative concepts associated with both crime and militancy. Of course, understanding why individuals engage in different (or multiple) types of illicit work is necessary if effective counterstrategies are to be developed.

A Thousand Words

Ariana’s Cartoon of the Day

“If you help me today, I will be there for you tomorrow.” – Karzai to the warlords

[Radio Free Afghanistan: Karzai and the warlords]

The Enduring Dichotomy: Insurgent or Criminal

A recent post on the Foreign Policy blog, and a predictable riposte to it, show how enduring the insurgent/criminal dichotomy remains in strategic analysis.

Gretchen Peters — whose upcoming book, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda, will hopefully be a must-read — suggests the new US foreign policy approach creates space for reconceptualising the Taliban as criminals instead of terrorists or extremists.

The Obama administration has promised “a new way of thinking about the challenges” facing the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it’s also high time it starts thinking in a new way about America’s enemies themselves. The Taliban and al Qaeda have long portrayed themselves as holy warriors, battling under the flag of Islam. Most people in the West have accepted this characterization, imagining them as long-bearded fanatics, while Washington constantly refers to them as “terrorists” and “extremists.” No doubt they are. But, having studied their operations at the village level in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than three years, another descriptor also seems useful to me: criminal. When you examine the day-to-day activities keeping their networks financially afloat and probe how they interact with local communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda start to look a lot more mafiosi than mujahideen.

The criminal activities of Taliban militants are diverse and well known:

In some parts of the south, they collaborate with drug traffickers to dictate poppy output. They provide armed protection for opium convoys leaving Afghanistan’s farm areas and protect heroin labs along the Pakistan border. In addition, they work with kidnapping rings that have snared diplomats, journalists, U.S. contractors, and wealthy local businessmen. They cooperate with gunrunners, human traffickers, and the smuggling gangs that illegally export millions of dollars worth of Afghan antiquities. They also extort monthly payments from legal Afghan businesses, terrorizing village shopkeepers and even nationwide cellphone providers, attacking their homes and premises if they don’t comply.

The post makes some interesting points, but ultimately there are flaws in this approach that mirror the flaws in an approach that views Taliban militants solely as political or ideological actors. Peters is right to focus on the normative implications of a switch in terminology — the fact that the illegitimacy of criminality could be better harnessed to diminish local support for the Taliban.

In these deeply conservative Muslim communities, where religious leaders hold tremendous authority, few dared speak out against people who define themselves as “holy warriors.” But when we framed the insurgents as criminals, they opened up, describing in clear detail how the militants’ illicit activities directly and adversely affect their lives. Speaking in terms the people there can understand will improve America’s ability to win local support for the critical task of cutting off terrorist leaders from their illicit profits.

However, the militants are not only engaged in ‘illicit activities’ — they are also kidnapping, raping, killing and beheading Afghan villagers as a means of coercion and enforcing passivity among the civilian population. No matter how successfully we portray them as criminals, their use of force will likely compel local populations to do their will. In short, they are militants and criminals. While the two terms have different connotations, and it would be a good idea to emphasise descriptors that convey illegitimacy, I’m not convinced that this kind of normative strategy alone will do much good as long as civilians are largely unprotected from violent coercion.

Joshua Foust at Registan is not really convinced either, and makes some good points about the historical connections between insurgency and criminality. Unfortunately, he also strays into the dichotomy approach:

Indeed, the biggest problem with Peters’ argument for considering the criminal element of the Taliban is that, quite unlike the criminals who run the opium smuggling networks, the Taliban does not appear to be primarily profit-driven. Criminals want to maximize income, while insurgents want to govern—at the margins a semantic difference, perhaps, but one that is nevertheless vital to understanding why the differences between the two group types matter far more than the similarities (starting with the very salient observation that, despite even substantial collaboration, criminal groups and insurgents remain discrete organizations).

This is a very common argument: criminals seek profit, insurgents want to govern. There are (at least) two problems with this approach.

First, ‘to govern’ is often assumed to be an end-state objective in itself — but why does an insurgent want to govern? (Assuming that this is an actual insurgent objective; clearly some militants pursue more limited objectives.) Some insurgents may be motivated by political or ideological factors; some seek self-determination for an oppressed constituency; but some are motivated by many of the same drivers as criminal actors, namely profit and prestige. In countries and regions with rampant corruption, governance implies not just political power but an opportunity to accumulate phenomenal amounts of money with impunity. (The most corrupt politicians in the world are billionaires.)

Second, as some of my colleagues’ posts have noted, criminal actors do not solely aim to maximise income. Prestige and social value play a role; and some criminal warlords operate virtual fiefdoms, enjoying the power to ‘govern’ even if it is not legitimate.

In essence, it may be analytically more difficult or messy to consider non-state actors as both militant and criminal — but that is a limitation of our analytical approaches, not necessarily a reflection of reality. I have to disagree with Foust’s suggestion that the differences between the two ‘group types’ are more important than the similarities, if only because this dichotomy of insurgent/criminal is so firmly embedded in our political, legal, military and analytical approaches that the similarities are often obscured.

Sharp Increase in Child Trafficking in the UK

The Guardian reports a 90 per cent increase in child trafficking cases in the UK, with the largest plurality coming from Afghanistan.

A total of 957 children, including more than 400 from Afghanistan and 200 from Africa, were picked up by local authorities in the eight months between April 2008 and the end of the year. At least 53 came from Iraq in a development that appears to back up warnings this week from aid agencies and police in the war-torn country of a growing trade in child trafficking to countries including Britain and Ireland…

The children are often hidden in the backs of lorries which travel through ports in Kent and Suffolk and others are smuggled through Heathrow and Gatwick on false papers, according to care officials and the victims’ testimonies. It is thought many are trafficked for exploitation in prostitution and domestic servitude.

Anti-trafficking campaigners are particularly concerned that one in eight of those taken into care go missing. Case workers who help victims said the children are commonly told by their traffickers, often under threat, to flee care…

In Kent, where the largest proportion of trafficked children arrive, facilities to look after suspected victims of child trafficking are thin on the ground. There is only one residential reception centre which can accommodate two dozen children. Yet in the last recorded eight months, authorities there had to try and help 255 Afghan children, 55 from Iran, 50 from Iraq and 49 from Eritrea as well as others from Vietnam, China, Kosovo, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

For more on Iraqi criminal gangs trafficking children, see here.

The fact that many of the originating countries are currently or recently suffering from violent conflict helps explain the trend — but not completely. It is interesting, for example, that Kent received more children from Iran than Iraq. The presence of Chinese trafficking victims may say more about the sophistication and resilience of Chinese networks in the UK than anything else. As well, it is likely that only a fraction of victims are actually caught, skewing analytical interpretations.

Last year The Guardian drew a more explicit link between conflict in Afghanistan and child trafficking.

The number of Afghan children discovered being smuggled through Dover has risen dramatically in the last 12 months after a surge in violence between Taliban and Nato forces in Afghanistan. Kent county council picked up 265 smuggled Afghan children between April 2007 and March 2008 – a 55% increase on the previous year. Close to half of all foreign children suspected of being trafficked or smuggled through Britain’s busiest ports now come from Afghanistan.

Kent’s reception facilities are full, mostly with Afghan boys fleeing violence, and one in five go missing after being taken into care. The authorities suspect they enter the hidden economy or fall into exploitation elsewhere in Britain.

Death threats from the Taliban and pressure to undertake suicide bombing missions are among the reasons for fleeing given by the Afghan children. Speaking at a council reception centre in rural Kent, Khalid, the 17-year-old son of a Taliban farmer killed two years ago, explained that his brother threatened to kill him if he did not join the Taliban too.

“I was forced to leave Afghanistan because of pressure from my brother and other members of the Taliban to join their forces and take part in suicide bombings,” he told the Guardian. “I was against the idea, but I had no choice. I had to run away.”

The fact that some children willingly leave their countries does not diminish the criminal aspects of trafficking — first, because many of the children end up being exploited for criminal purposes; and second, because the traffickers themselves are often part of an organised criminal enterprise. A 2007 Home Office report states:

Traffickers of children seem to vary between those that are highly organised and linked with other organised crime, particularly immigration and vice, and those that are individually opportunistic and have trafficked a child on a more informal basis. Traffickers from Albania and China seem to be the most sophisticated and organised. Informal trafficking on the other hand tends to be mainly in regard to exploitation in domestic servitude as well as some instances of sexual exploitation. Trafficking for domestic servitude is often carried out by families that bring over children from source countries in order to look after their children and family members.

The problems of preventing and reducing trafficking are manifold. The victims are difficult to find, and may be unable or unwilling to assist in prosecuting traffickers. Open borders, such as in the EU, facilitate migration. Laws against trafficking may be insufficient or poorly implemented.

One of the key problems, however, is that laws and policies designed to snare traffickers risk criminalising their victims — which is not only a human rights concern, but a deterrent to securing the cooperation of victims in taking down the trafficking rings. Policies improving the rights of trafficking victims are coming online, but it remains to be seen how well they are implemented.

The Home Office has admitted there are barriers to victims of human trafficking seeking help and last week launched a national mechanism so that any suspected victim will be referred to the UK Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield. It is part of a series of measures which followed the introduction of the Council of Europe convention on human trafficking which came into force in Britain on 1 April. [The Guardian]

Whatever may be done in the UK, trafficking is likely to remain a severe problem within Afghanistan itself (where most victims end up in Pakistan or Iran, exploited for labour or sex). This IOM report (pdf) details the scale of the problem.

Moving Forward in Afghanistan: Lessons Learned from Colombia

Which Way in Afghanistan? Ask Colombia for Directions

Scott Wilson, The Washington Post

5 April 2009

Crime-conflict analysis would benefit from a great many more comparative studies. Wilson provides a brief one here, making a convincing case for the relevance of the Colombian experience for Afghanistan (whilst burying the critical differences in context that make the comparison problematic).

The conflicts in Colombia and Afghanistan share far more similarities with one another than either does with Iraq, which I covered in 2003 and 2004. The Taliban have caves and Colombian guerrillas their triple-canopy jungle and mountain hideouts — terrain far more useful to insurgencies than Iraq’s desert. Afghanistan’s opium poppies fund the Taliban, just as coca fuels Colombia’s guerrillas. As Pakistan does for the Taliban, Venezuela and Ecuador provide sanctuary to Colombia’s insurgents.

Perhaps the most important parallel, though, is the lack of a strong central government. Colombia’s government has rarely held sway beyond Bogota’s nearly two-mile high plateau, and the frail Karzai administration in Kabul has a similarly short reach. As a result, Colombia has relied on brutal paramilitary forces to support a weak army, alienating much of the population in the process. In Afghanistan, that role is played by U.S. forces, which, although by no means as savage as the Colombian irregulars, have cost Afghanistan’s government support among a people famously hostile to foreign invaders.

Noting the measurable increase in stability in the country, Wilson offers four key lessons:

First, a surge of U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan may be less useful than further increasing the number of military trainers being deployed to help build a viable Afghan army. Second, the administration should focus less on stopping the heroin trade and more on establishing functioning state institutions — from schools to health clinics. Third, efforts to seal off border sanctuaries do not work and divert military resources from the central job of protecting civilians. The fourth lesson is a stark one: It will take time. The Colombian effort has taken nearly a decade and counting.

The article is well worth a read. Also of interest is the success in weaning non-ideological members away from the guerrilla movement, and the way in which anti-FARC paramilitaries — deemed necessary proxies for a weak state — came to be as brutal, predatory and heavily involved in the drugs trade as the guerrillas they were ostensibly eliminating.

This Particular Surge Makes Sense

When it comes to Afghanistan, some things are always going to be tricky — such as, isolating and targeting militants immersed in the civilian population. On the other hand, some policy decisions fall into the realm of the ‘bleeding obvious’ — like, perhaps it’s a good idea to send more than twelve anti-drug agents to the world’s foremost producer of opium.

AP reports:

American authorities are planning a broad new campaign to choke off the prime source of financing for insurgency in Afghanistan, sending in dozens of federal drug enforcement agents to disrupt the country’s massive opium trade and the money that streams to the Taliban.

The surge of narcotics agents, which would boost the number of anti-drug officials inside Afghanistan from a dozen to nearly 80, would bolster a strategy laid out last week by the Obama administration to use US and NATO troops to target “higher level drug lords.” Detailed plans described to members of Congress behind closed doors earlier this month suggest the effort will be modeled after the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s campaign against drug cartels in South America.

Also a good idea? Tackling the flow of drug financing.

The new Afghanistan anti-drug effort will also hone in on money flow, but it will concentrate on the money laundering operations used by drug dealers. The effort will trace both high-tech operations like offshore banking and cell phone transfers and more informal operations like the hard-to-penetrate hawala money-brokering system. Defence officials declined to reveal details of the new Afghanistan programme, and instead met with lawmakers in a closed session to provide additional information.

Some commentators have complained that the new Af-Pak strategy is ‘more of the same’. Steps like these suggest that its implementation will not be.