by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2008 | Conflict and security, Global system, South Asia
Daniel’s a hundred per cent right to call for an end to some of the more stupid measures taken in Afghanistan in the name of counter-narcotics work. Take aerial spraying off the table? Absolutely. Avoid alienating farmers in order to avoid swelling the insurgents’ ranks? Sign me up.
But I think we need to go much further than this. Daniel argues that coalition forces in Afghanistan should focus on:
…arrests and the prosecution of drug lords and their backers in government. Unless these “narcotics entrepreneurs” are targeted, arrested and prosecuted, little will change.
As he noted yesterday, the FT’s recent leader on this subject agrees with him, arguing that:
…while crop eradication and locking up bad guys may be an important part of addressing the crisis, they are not by themselves a solution. That can only come over years of a sustained and consistent strategy to develop a real market economy which would provide a better livelihood for farmers than the dangerous and volatile drugs business.
That will, it is true, require security and a role for the military. It will mean targeting the middlemen, smugglers and, yes, chemists who operate the infrastructure of the drugs business, hitting their finances and improving co-operation with Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Above all, it will mean that while the small poppy farmer escapes the attentions of the authorities, the big drug barons do not. That demands ending the de facto impunity enjoyed by some Afghans, a move that can be sanctioned by only the president.
I hate to be a sceptic, but, well, I’m a sceptic. Targeting the big drug lords, the middlemen and smugglers is certainly preferable to targeting small farmers from a development point of view. But it’s still pretty pointless. Just look at Colombia, where massive resources to the war on drugs have made negligible impact. True, interdiction efforts can influence the street price a bit – maybe even quite significantly, as in the aftermath of the destruction of the Medellin Cartel in 1989 – but the effects never seem to last much beyond a year. For all the hullabaloo about the war on drugs, the long term price trend for most illegal narcotics has been downwards.
What’s more, we all know that this emperor has no clothes. When I worked in the government, I used to ask the Afghanistan experts I came across what assessment had been made of what effect even a best case scenario on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan would have on the street price of heroin in the UK, or how we could be sure that production wouldn’t just be displaced to Turkmenistan instead. The answers I got back were never very encouraging.
None of this, of course, is to dispute the underlying point about just how corrosive organised crime is to the legitimacy and effectiveness of states (c.f. Mark’s recent post on Guinea-Bissau, or mine on Italy and Mexico). But the point is that if we want to halt that process of corrosion, the it’s not Helmand, or even Kabul, that’s the front line. The real front line is with our policy of Prohibition, and the fantastically profitable economic opportunities that it introduces.
The war on drugs will never, ever be won on the supply side. And until we figure that out and internalise it in our policies, the margins on illegal drugs will remain astronomical, the incentives for organised crime and insurgent movements will stay irresistible, and states will keep failing. After all, we can all see that Prohibiton in America created and sustained Al Capone. So which bit about sustaining his inheritors at the global level is it that we don’t get?
by Daniel Korski | Jul 30, 2008 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, South Asia
I hope my fellow bloggers will forgive me this self-indulgent post, but I could not resist. You see, the FT has a leader about the Afghan drugs trade, arguing:
The first thing to say is that while crop eradication and locking up bad guys may be an important part of addressing the crisis, they are not by themselves a solution. That can only come over years of a sustained and consistent strategy to develop a real market economy which would provide a better livelihood for farmers than the dangerous and volatile drugs business.
That will, it is true, require security and a role for the military. It will mean targeting the middlemen, smugglers and, yes, chemists who operate the infrastructure of the drugs business, hitting their finances and improving co-operation with Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Above all, it will mean that while the small poppy farmer escapes the attentions of the authorities, the big drug barons do not. That demands ending the de facto impunity enjoyed by some Afghans, a move that can be sanctioned by only the president.
Wise counsel; but is it also a little familiar? This is what I wrote on 27 May and again on 4 June this year:
First, the international community must forego the idea that it can sequence coercive and development activities; it is simply not possible given the conditions now or in the foreseeable future. Better therefore not to promise development in exchange for poppy eradication or think conditionality can work.
Second, the international community needs to take aerial eradication off the table and make clear that traffickers, not farmers, are the problem. Because Afghan farmers do not use chemicals, aerial eradication will likely be blamed as the cause of disease, premature deaths or crop destruction, which is a regular but unrelated occurrence in Afghanistan, as in any developing country. The Afghan government, already mistrusted, would suffer from any backlash, thus turning an insurgency into an insurrection.
Instead, the government should focus on rolling out the Afghan state, prioritizing the provision of security to local farmers. The international community, in turn, should focus on building local capacity to maintain security and deliver basic services.
Crucially, this should be coupled with arrests and the prosecution of drug lords and their backers in government. Unless these “narcotics entrepreneurs” are targeted, arrested and prosecuted, little will change. Though, this should be done under the nomenclature of anti-corruption – which Afghans care about – and not of counter-narcotics, which most Afghans think is a Western focus.
The difference lies in the FT’s focus on the development of a market economy and my added point that insecurity comes from the corrupt Afghan police, the reform of which is a sine qua non of an improved counter-narcotics policy. Readers may remember that I advocated drastic solutions to be on the table, including dismantling the Ministry of Interior entirely, placing the police force under the Afghan National Army, or setting up a new gendarmerie-style police initially under the army.
Pardon me, dear readers, but I feel quite pleased with myself. If I could actually spell and string a well-sounding sentence together I too could have been writing FT leaders (even if only on a small and obscure topic). Not a bad feeling to end the day on.
by Daniel Korski | Jul 14, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, UK
The recent spate of knife-killings in London and the British government’s response illustrates the continuing problems policy-makers face in dealing with complex, cross-departmental issues – ten years after Tony Blair sought to develop a “joined-up” approach to policy-making.
It is hard to know whether there has been an increase in knife crime generally – but four fatal stabbings one day last week in London brought to 50 the number of people slain by knife this year in the capital, and of those 20 were teenagers.
To rein in the threat, Britain’s Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will unveil new measures tomorrow. Trailed in the media has been the idea of forcing knife-carrying youths to visit stab and knife-crime victims in hospital to see for themselves the effects of knife crime.
But you don’t have to be an opposition politician to feel that the government’s focus on law enforcement needs to be broadened to also address the underlying causes of the knife-crime surge, including economic dislocation, family break-down, drug and alcohol abuse, debt, problems in the education system etc. etc. It was Gordon Brown, after all, who coined the famous phrase “tough on crime; tough on the cause of crime”.
To develop a cross-cutting strategy, the government should take a leaf out of Alex and David’s work, and seek to build a “shared operating system” that can develop and implement a new knife-crime policy across the multiple layers of government involved, including Whitehall departments, City Hall, the London Boroughs, the private sector etc. etc.
Here’s what I’d do if the Prime Minister asked me for advice (a pretty unlikely scenario, I admit):
- Jointly appoint, with the London Mayor and the London Boroughs, a high-profile Youth Crime “Czar” with Cabinet and a £ 10 million discretionary budget. Serious, top-flight candidates like John Reid, Charles Clarke, Paddy Ashdown come to mind. The appointment of a senior police officer will not do.
- Give the “Czar” real authority to propose changes in policing, credit provision, education etc. etc. That is, authority to cut across all departments, whether in Whitehall or City Hall.
- But this should not be another review. The task for the “Czar” is to draw up – and start implementing – a plan for dealing with the knife-crime issue, with a 400-day deadline.
Taking a leaf out of counter-insurgency theory, ideas to be considered by such a “Czar” could include:
- The establishment of permanently-based, 24-hour mixed civilian/policing teams in troubled neighborhoods. These teams could “patrol” neighborhoods and include parents and other community workers.
- Quick-impact economic projects, which can aim to give idle youths short-term employment or skills development, ideally developed with the private sector.
- “Targeting” potential trouble-makers for pre-incident counseling, re-socialization through trips to Africa for troubled youths.
- Development of a pilot scheme for the Peace Corps-style idea advanced by David Cameron.
The knife-crime problem in London has been a long-time coming and it will take a long time to deal with. But many other cities, including New York, have been successful in dealing with similar issues.
To my mind, the answer requires a re-tooling of the bureaucratic system, the appointment of a single focal point, and the implementation of a comprehensive strategy. Anything else will grab the headlines, but is unlikely to address the problem.
by David Steven | Jul 11, 2008 | Global system
Last night, I was on Capitol Hill for the launch of the FCO’s new book on public diplomacy. As Alex noted earlier, we have a chapter in the book on public diplomacy and global issues.
At the launch, Jim Murphy underlined that the mission of the public diplomat was to foster “shared awareness and understanding” and to use that to catalyse “common platforms for action.”
But this is, he emphasized, a developing agenda. “No government in the world, as far as I am aware, has by itself managed to develop a coherent theory of modern influence. Nor determined a systematic approach to the practice of such engagement,” he said.
I am now off to Brookings for a seminar that will explore with the Minister what a theory of influence might look like. More on that later, but in the meantime, an extract from our chapter that sets out the scale of the challenge that public diplomats face:
First, public diplomacy is about building shared awareness – a common understanding of an issue around which a coalition can coalesce. The task here is not simply to accumulate information, which often exists in abundance, but rather to invest in analysis, synthesis and dissemination. Are state and non-state actors using the same data? Has a common language emerged? Is there a hub for discussion and debate?
Shared awareness should be the precursor to the construction of a shared platform. The new public diplomacy will usually – perhaps invariably – be a multilateral pursuit. The objective is to build a network of state and nonstate actors around a shared vision or set of solutions: something a bilateral programme will seldom be able to do. This vision or solution need not be provided by a particular government and then ‘sold’ to its partners. The approach is less top-down that that: a really compelling vision will in itself have sufficient power to draw together a network and motivate it to campaign for change.
The end point is institutionalising this network’s beliefs, thinking and structures into a framework for managing a particular problem. Given the amorphous and dynamic nature of the challenges we face, this framework will seldom be a permanent one. Rather, it will involve the creation of a shared operating system that distributes our response to a risk, and is flexible enough to evolve as that risk evolves. The result should be a change in the structure of globalisation, a rewiring of our ability to act together in the face of a collective challenge.
