'War on Drugs' inimical to 'War on Terror'?
Merging the two US 'wars' - against drugs and against terrorism - as Washington has formally done after September 2001 might prove a self-defeating proposition. This is the contention of a US scholar, Steven Taylor, who argues that one of the stated aims of the war against drugs, to drive up the price of narcotics so as to discourage users, actually encourages the use of the drugs trade to fund terrorism. 'The cultivation of illicit crops used to produce illegal drugs,' he says, 'may be unrivalled as a ready-made source of funding for terrorist activities.'
Taylor, an associate professor of political science at Troy University in Alabama, developed his argument in Strategic Insights, a monthly electronic journal produced by the Center for Contemporary Conflict at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in an article entitled 'When Wars Collide: The War on Drugs and the Global War on Terror.'
He builds mainly on one of his areas of expertise, Colombia. There, he notes, 'the synergy between illicit narcotics and violence [...] is only a few decades old, only having fully manifested itself since the 1990s'. Unlike armed insurgencies elsewhere in the region, Colombian guerrillas found the drugs trade to be a means of funding their fight. Their counterparts, the paramilitary groups which from early on had links to the drugs trade, also used narcotics as a prime source of financing. 'Via either "taxing" the lands of drug lords, or by directly participating in drug trafficking,' writes Taylor, 'groups in Colombia have demonstrated how connection to a narco-economy can lead to that group's self-perpetuation.'
While the connection between the two, by means of such terms as 'narcoterrorism', has a fairly long history (see box on page 5), it did not become formally embodied in US policy until after September 2001. Indeed, the US Congress took great pains to prevent the use of funds assigned to the 'war on drugs' from being diverted into counterinsurgency. Taylor notes that as recently as 1997 the US ambassador to Colombia, Myles Frechette, stated in a cable to Washington: 'There will be no US government assistance for fighting the guerrillas.' Five years later his successor Anne Patterson was proclaiming, 'The US strategy is to give the Colombian government the tools to combat terrorism and narcotrafficking, two struggles that have become one.' In 2002 the US Congress authorised the use of counternarcotics funds for counterinsurgency purposes in Colombia.
Unintended effects
Taylor points out that 'despite over a billion dollars spent on anti-drug activities in Colombia in recent years, which has led to a reduction in coca under cultivation, the actual price of cocaine has remained quite steady'. He also draws attention to the fact, usually sidestepped by US officialdom, that the US government has spent far more on interdiction efforts (US$1.8bn in 1994-2003, versus US$718m for eradication). 'The goal, of course, was to decrease supply on US streets and to further inflate the price, so as to discourage consumption. However [...] the price of cocaine has been quite steady during that same period.'
The goal has been to drive up the price of drugs so that they become so expensive as to be unaffordable. Taylor says this policy aim creates what Professor Eva Bertram calls the 'profit paradox': that as the government seeks to drive the price of drugs upward in the hopes of stifling demand, the profitability of the production and sale of drugs increases. 'So even if governmental policy is successful in driving up price,' says Taylor, 'it does not have the desired effect of dampening the drug trade.
Instead, it encourages it.' But does this reasoning apply if prices are merely being kept steady? All the available evidence suggests that the profit margins from the trade remain astronomic. The existence of the 'balloon effect' - the shift of drug production from one area to another in response to eradication elsewhere, often accompanied by investment in improving yields - suggests that the margin is such that it justifies the effort and the attendant risks.
Taylor writes, 'A key reason why drugs help fund terrorism is because the war on drugs drives drug profits through the roof. This flaw underscores the degree to which one set of foreign policy objectives are being counteracted by another.'
Conflating the two wars
To this must be added another problem peculiar to the post-2001 period: the conflation of the 'war on drugs' (WoD) with the 'war on terror' (WoT). This phenomenon is clear to see in official US documents. In the 2001 National Drug Control Strategy, written before 9/11, there were only three references to 'terror', all alluding to 'street terror' within the US. By 2005, the National Drug Control Strategy Budget Summary contained 51 references to international terrorism or terror.
'Just as anticommunism was the key to understanding US foreign policy in the Cold War period,' writes Taylor, 'antiterrorism has become the watch-phrase in the current era. If one wants attention and funding, the easiest way to get either to is to have one's cause associated with the global war on terror.' He says this poses serious policy dangers.
One is that it encourages bureaucrats and analysts to see every foreign policy and security problem as a terrorism problem ('the desire to pound square pegs into round holes so that funds and attention can be given to specific programmes'), which can lead to misdiagnosis of policy problems and hence to incorrect conclusions and actions. Another is that as the government attempts to work in one policy area, it may be damaging goals in another.
Taylor's purpose is to draw conclusions which US policymakers can use. He underlines that the Colombian experience can on one hand provide a potential model for the propagators of violence to fund their activities, while on the other the failure of crop eradication to affect the supply and price of cocaine 'should provide an advisory to those who would pursue similar polices in Afghanistan'.
'Ultimately,' he says, 'the collision of these two "wars" may lead_to increased violence in Colombia because it has now been dubbed part of the WoT, while in Afghanistan, now part of the WoD, US policy will likely make it easier for terrorists to fund their activities.'
What is terrorism?
Taylor makes a contribution to a debate the US does not want to engage in, but which a number of other countries wish to see conducted in the UN: how to define terrorism so that this does not remain a matter of 'designation' by Washington. As a starting-point he adopts the definition put forward by HHA Cooper, who says that terrorism is 'the intentional generation of massive fear by human beings for the purpose of securing or maintaining control over other human beings'.
But Taylor takes it further, adding that 'terrorism is a tactic that is aimed primarily at noncombatants for the purpose, typically, of securing the concession of a government'. In practical terms, 'If the main way by which a groups seeks power is through bombing of civilians, kidnapping and murder, and other relatively small-scale attacks that are designed to affect change not through military conquest, but by generating insecurity and fear in the non-combatant population, then that group is a terrorist group.' He does give the impression, though, that arguing this point is a lost cause. 'To put it somewhat glibly (yet still accurately),' he writes, 'terrorism is whatever a given government wishes to call it [and] in the post-9/11 world [...] it sometimes seems that all political violence is defined within the rhetoric of terrorism.'
