Webs of Corruption

Trafficking and Terrorism in Central Asia

Mariya Omelicheva, Lawrence Markowitz

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231547918
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Counterterrorism experts and policy makers have warned of the peril posed by the links between violent extremism and organized crime, especially the relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism funding. Yet Central Asia, the site of extensive opium trafficking, sees low levels of terrorist violence. Webs of Corruption is an innovative study demonstrating that terrorist and criminal activity intersect more narrowly than is widely believed—and that the state plays the pivotal role in shaping those interconnections.

Mariya Y. Omelicheva and Lawrence P. Markowitz analyze the linkages between the drug trade and terrorism financing in Central Asia, finding that state security services shape the nexus of trafficking and terrorism. While organized crime and terrorism do intersect in parts of the region, profit-driven criminal organizations and politically motivated violent groups come together based on the nature of state involvement. Governments in high-trafficking regions are drawn into illicit economies and forge relationships with a range of nonstate violent actors, such as insurgents, erstwhile regime opponents, and transnational groups. Omelicheva and Markowitz contend that these relationships can mitigate terrorism—by redirecting these actors toward other forms of violence. Offering a groundbreaking combination of quantitative, qualitative, and geographic information systems methods to map trafficking/terrorism connections on the ground, Webs of Corruption provides a meticulously researched, counterintuitive perspective on a potent regional security problem.

1

THEORIZING THE TRAFFICKING-TERRORISM NEXUS

Intersections of criminality, insurgency, and terrorism have shaped the emergence of a vast landscape of violent actors with diverse organizational structures and changing agendas. Over the past thirty years, these intersections have become increasingly complicated and multifaceted. The interface of the state with organized crime and violence has made the nexus even more complex through the participation of public officials, local politicians, and security agents in criminal activities. While advances have been made in understanding the linkages between terrorist and organized criminal organizations, the origins, nature, and consequences of the trafficking-terrorism nexus remain hotly debated. Any attempt to disentangle and explain the relationships between trafficking and terrorism, therefore, must do so by providing a greater conceptual clarity about the phenomena under study, presenting the assumptions that underlie the conceptual links between drug trafficking and terrorism, and articulating the causal narrative about the role of various socioeconomic, geographic, and political factors in shaping the nexus.

In this chapter, we outline our argument in several steps. In the first section, we provide brief history of the concept of the nexus and critically assess the approaches commonly used to explain it. In the next section, we present a reformulation of the nexus, which also describes the range of outcomes in our theoretical framework. The third and fourth sections then turn to outlining the argument of the book. In the third, we draw on the theoretical and empirical literature on transnational terrorism and crime to make several propositions on what factors make the nexus more likely to emerge. In the fourth, we elaborate a general model by which the state produces specific types of the trafficking-terrorism nexus, and we discuss the implications of these types for varying levels of terrorist violence.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DRUG TRAFFICKING AND TERRORISM

The idea of a “crime-terror” nexus is relatively new. The concept and broader analytic trends emphasizing the convergence of terrorism and transnational organized crime appeared in the 1990s. The etymology of the term, however, can be traced to the earlier idea of “narco-terrorism” coined by the former Peruvian president, Fernando Belaunde Terry, in the 1980s. In its original meaning, “narco-terrorism” was used in reference to the Shining Path’s attacks on the Peruvian counternarcotic police. In the 1980s, the concept was extended to the use of terrorist tactics by drug trafficking organizations in Colombia that sought to coerce the government into abandoning its policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the United States. Soon after, U.S. president Ronald Reagan adopted the term “narco-terrorism” to condemn ties between international drug trafficking and terrorism among the USSR’s allies.1 The concept gained currency in the post–Cold War environment, frequently used in reference to the FARC and the Taliban’s reliance on revenues from drug trafficking to finance their insurgent activities. Meanwhile, a more comprehensive idea of the “crime-terror” nexus emerged during the 1990s, inspired by the linkages between criminal groups and insurgent actors amid civil war in the Balkans. As it moved from political discourse to academic and policy analysis, the concept of a “crime-terror” nexus focused less on the appropriation of criminal methods by terrorist groups or violent tactics by criminal cartels, and more on direct interactions and alliances forged between criminal and terrorist groups.

The origins and evolution of the “crime-terror” nexus highlight three approaches to studying intersections of terrorism and organized crime. First, an operational perspective emphasizes “activity appropriation” and conceives of the “nexus” narrowly, as the use of crime, such as drug trafficking, by a terrorist organization as a source of funding, or the use of violence by a criminal group.2 Operational analyses document the scope of activity appropriated by one type of organization from another and determine the degree to which the borrowed criminal or terrorist activity helps the group accomplish its goals.3 Second, an alternative organizational perspective focuses on the organizational linkages between groups: how criminal and terrorist organizations use each other’s expertise, skills, networks, and institutional structures for mutual advantage. For example, to facilitate safe passage of its cadres through the European states, Al Qaeda collaborated with Italian mafias, which provided safe houses and forged travel documents.4 An organization analysis often produces a typology of collaboration between terrorist and criminal organizations and how these organizational linkages further progress toward the realization of the groups’ goals.5

A third approach, a threat convergence analysis, integrates these two perspectives and considers both organizational and operational facets of terrorist and criminal groups’ interaction. This integrative perspective conceives of the nexus in a broad sense, either as a “continuum” tracing changes in organizational dynamics and the operational nature of terrorism and organized crime over time, or as a “sliding scale” where groups move back and forth over time between ideological and profit motives and different types of intergroup cooperation.6 Along this continuum, different types of relationships—alliances, tactical uses of terror or criminal activities for operational purposes, and convergence into a single entity displaying characteristics of both groups—may develop between criminal and terrorist organizations.7 Tamara Makarenko, who pioneered this approach, has placed terrorist and organized crime groups on different ends of a security continuum.8 Between these two extremes, there is a “gray area” with several variations and combinations of crime-terrorism intersections that can develop over time, including categories such as political criminals (who are closer to the organized crime end) and commercial terrorism (which is closer to the terrorism end). Marakenko’s model sought to capture ways in which groups—through the appropriation of each other’s activity or an alliance with the criminal/ideological counterpart—can transform into new hybrid types of organizations that no longer fit neatly into existing categories. Some groups were even hypothesized to exemplify a true crime-terror convergence.

As noteworthy as these three approaches are, they suffer from several shortcomings. First, threat convergence perspectives are based on the assumption that changes in the motivations of terrorist and criminal groups lead to terrorist-criminal intersections. The growing demand for sources of funding, for example, will lead a terrorist group to become more involved in criminal activity. This tight cause-effect relationship leaves little room for considering other motivations, for example, increasing group cohesion or rewarding new recruits as motives for the group’s engagement in human trafficking,9 or the independent effects of other variables, such as socioeconomic development or access to markets, contributing to the emergence of the nexus between crime and terrorism.

Second, a corollary effect is that these approaches account poorly for change over time. Specifically, they are ill equipped to explain why some terrorist groups that are engaged in criminal activities undergo changes in their motivation structure, while others appear to sustain long-term involvement in organized crime without an observable impact on the group’s primary goals.10 For example, the growing demand for sources of funding that incentivizes a terrorist group’s involvement in crime may alter the terrorist group’s motivational structure over time. Once engaged in criminal activities, politically motivated groups may continue to further their original goals, or crime may become an end in itself rather than just a means of financing their activities. Moreover, the tautological logic underpinning these approaches—which infer causes from the range of outcomes posited on the crime-terror scale—raises questions of research design. As Karl Popper long ago identified, even the most elaborate theories, if premised on circular reasoning, lack explanatory power since they cannot be falsified.11 Consequently, these “continuum”-based typologies are useful heuristic devices for classifying terrorist-criminal intersections, but they do not (on their own) generate propositions that can be empirically tested.

Third, the conventional notion of the crime-terror nexus takes a blanket approach to terrorism and conceals important variations in the nature and motives of the perpetrators of violence. This all-inclusive approach does not distinguish between the multiple and diverse types of localized militancy embedded in local political economy and social structures, on one side, and transnational terrorist networks challenging global discourses and practices, on the other.12 As a result, it occludes the relationship between criminal and militant groups with the state and society and how their attitudes to space and locality inform the nature of intersections between the drug trade and violent activities.

Finally, in seeking to craft explanatory accounts that reach across a range of cases, these approaches view terrorist-criminal connections as largely unrelated to the central actor in contemporary politics: the modern state. While many of the networks and relationships connect nonstate actors, nearly all of these interactions are enabled (if not controlled by) the states within which these actors operate. Indeed, many of the empirical case studies accompanying these approaches provide ample evidence of varied ways in which states shape the trafficking-terrorism nexus. Local elites often provide political protection for criminal activity (and to insurgents as leverage against an overreaching central government). State officials within corrupt bureaucracies actively pursue positions that enable them to influence, direct, and extort payments from these informal activities. Sweeping arrests, abuses of authority, and ongoing predatory rent-seeking behavior by state security apparatuses frequently exacerbate these terrorist-criminal interactions in unintended ways.

Our framework begins to redress these problems by designing a theory that enables us to estimate the effects of a range of independent variables on the prevalence of the nexus, assess the role of the state in fundamentally shaping the nature of the nexus, and evaluate its implications for levels of terrorist violence. We begin with the premise that terrorism and drug trafficking are both activities and organizations that have the possibility of sharing organizational and operational similarities and are affected by broadly similar opportunities and constraints. Furthermore, we assume that terrorist and drug trafficking groups are pragmatic actors who forge alliances or engage in criminal and political activity when doing so carries the promise of assisting the groups in accomplishing their goals. Crafting a framework to study the terrorism-trafficking nexus, however, is not without its challenges. We consider drug trafficking and terrorism to be patterned spatial and temporal phenomena that can be studied systematically. At the same time, we engage in a more nuanced study of the crime-terror nexus in local contexts by “unpacking” the “crime” and the “terror” sides of the nexus and closely examining the ties of violent groups to the local politics, society, and economy.

Yet violent actors vary across space and time in complicated ways. Some groups are deeply rooted in their local contexts and seek a degree of autonomy from the state. They emerge out of local disputes, subethnic political divisions, or negotiations of power between the center and periphery, and they are embedded in existing social and commercial networks, long-standing social structures, and local political economies. Although they may opportunistically exploit transnational illicit flows or tenuous affiliations with the international terrorist “brands,” these localized insurgencies seek to influence the space within which they operate. Transnational militant networks, by contrast, are more loosely connected to territory, typically conducting their operations in pursuit of broader ideological and political objectives.13 In practice, of course, it is often difficult to untangle local militant or local criminal groups from their transnational networks. Regions such as West Africa are home to a variety of local violent and criminal organizations that simultaneously form tactical alliances with international terrorist movements and seek to advance their standing in local political and economic milieus. Transnational terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabaab have taken advantage of regional dynamics to plug in and benefit from pervasive criminal activities, while seeking to concurrently expand their politica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Theorizing the Trafficking-Terrorism Nexus
• 2. Mapping How Trafficking and Terrorism Intersect
• 3. Convergence and Coexistence: Divergent Paths of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
• 4. Emerging Relationships Within the Nexus: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1. Socioeconomic Predictors of the Trafficking-Terrorism Nexus
• Appendix 2. The Impact of Drug Trafficking on Terrorism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index