Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 Secretary of State Powell seconded President Bush by promising that the United States would attack terrorism on every front, saying "we have to make sure that we go after terrorism and get it by its branch and root." This has meant not only stern warnings and threats to countries that harbor or finance terrorists, but getting at those who support terrorism financially.
If U.S. officials are even remotely serious about cutting off a significant portion of the money that finances terrorist activities - and political violence in general that might or might not fit a narrower definition of terrorism - one of the options on the table should be ending the War on Drugs. There is little doubt - although experts vary about specific percentages as is understandable when dealing with covert and clandestine activities - that the policy of drug prohibition is an enormously important factor that makes it probably the single biggest financier of terrorist activities around the world.
A few drug warriors have made the connection, in a popular yet illogical way. House Speaker Dennis Hastert unveiled a new Speaker's Task Force for a Drug Free America in September, noting that "the illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Laden. By going after the illegal drug trade, we reduce the ability of these terrorists to launch attacks against the United States." President Bush in December noted that illegal drug use puts money in the hands of terrorists and regimes that support them. There's a speck of truth in these contentions, but Bush and Hastert have the cause and effect precisely wrong.
It is not the drugs themselves but the policy of drug prohibition that, as Orange County Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, author of the recent book "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It," has pointed out, radically "profitizes" the drug trade and makes enormous sums of money available to those skilled in intimidation, bribery, inducing corruption and perpetrating violence. Prohibition creates what economists - see Mark Thornton's excellent 1991 book, "The Economics of Prohibition," - call a "risk premium," an opportunity for those willing to take the risks of engaging in an illicit business to reap enormous profits.
The structure created by prohibition and efforts to evade it means that cocaine and heroin sell in the United States and other developed countries for 20 to 40 times what they otherwise would. That means there's plenty of money to spread around among criminals, and to engage in other activities. Drug traffickers and international terrorists - as well as guerrillas, revolutionaries and x other perpetrators of politically inspired violence - share certain common interests that make it likely that they would make some connections.
They share interests in finding secure hiding places and bases of operations, relatively secure transit routes for contraband and people, large sums of hard-to-trace cash and large quantities of weapons. It is logical that terrorists and drug traffickers would hook up eventually.
And sure enough, they have. John Thompson of the McKenzie Institute, a Canadian think tank, recently explained some of the dynamics to Ottawa Citizen writer Dan Gardner. "It used to be that terrorism was funded by nation states, particularly the old Soviet Union," he said. "But as the Soviet Union weakened in the 1980s, more and more insurgent groups, terrorist groups, started to resort to organized criminal activities to pay their bills."
A few state sponsors remain, including North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Syria, though they try to hide their activity. Insurgent groups raise money from expatriates, either through voluntary means or extortion. And a few wealthy individuals like Osama bin Laden fund terrorism through their personal fortunes.
But, says Thompson, "the big money earner for most of them seems to be narcotics." As the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy (www.cfdp.ca/terror.htm) emphasizes, "Remember, it is drug prohibition that generates huge profits for these groups. Without prohibition, drug profits would be a small fraction of what they are now." Common Sense for Drug Policy in the United States has set up a Web site (www.narcoterror.org) with numerous links that explain the connections between prohibition and terrorism.
Law enforcement officials reinforce the point. In a 1994 interview Iqbal Hussain Rizvi, chief drugs officer for Interpol, told Reuters, "Drugs have taken over as the chief means of financing terrorism." Alain Labrousse, of the French organization Observatoire francais des drogues et des toxicomanies, told a Canadian Senate hearing that "the creation of the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] was financed by intense heroin trafficking from Istanbul."
The ongoing civil war in Colombia has been made much more intense and violent by prohibition. The FARC insurgent group in the 1980s found it could sustain and enhance its insurgency by "protecting" and "taxing" cocaine growers. The right-wing paramilitaries, formed to protect farmers and plantation owners from leftist guerrillas, are believed to get about two-thirds of their funding from the drug trade. Concentrating on the war on drugs has not only helped to finance terrorism and political violence worldwide, it has led to strange anomalies that have helped terrorism. Before Sept. 11 the United States was one of the few countries in the world to financially support the oppressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
With about $125 million in 2001. Why? Because the regime had officially banned opium poppy production and was considered a loyal ally in the Holy War on Drugs. (The amount stored was plenty to keep the trade uninterrupted, however.) So the U.S. government's attitude before September was: "Oppress women, persecute Christians and harbor terrorists? No problem if you pretend to control drugs."
The Boston Herald ran a story in October detailing how the FBI in the 1990s missed a chance to penetrate and perhaps neutralize the al-Qaida network due to focusing on drugs. They had a confidential informant named Raed Hijazi who practically begged them to pay attention to Nabil al-Marabh, an al-Qaida member involved in a terrorist cell who ended up being arrested after Sept. 11. But the FBI was interested only in people involved in heroin trafficking.
That points up another reason to reconsider prohibition. Speaker Hastert's preference, "going after the drug trade," "would tend to increase the risks of drug trafficking, eliminate competitors, and raise profits," as Jacob Sullum pointed out in the December issue of Reason magazine, so it would be counterproductive. Even more significant, as Sullum noted, U.S. resources are finite.
"Every dollar spent intercepting drugs is a dollar that could be spent intercepting bombs. Every agent infiltrating a drug cartel is an agent who could be infiltrating a terrorist cell." I'm making an assumption here with which some may disagree, that the War on Drugs cannot be "won" no matter how much money and resources are poured into it.
I would hope that 80 years of futility would be enough to convince most people. Sir Keith Morris, who was the UK's ambassador to Colombia during much of the 1990s, finally came around. In a July 2001 article for The Guardian he wrote: "Colombia has now been involved in anti-narcotics efforts under U.S. pressure for 30 years ... and for the past 12 years there has been intense international cooperation.
But as General Serrano, the highly respected former commander of the Colombian police told me in March, in spite of all that the flow of drugs has increased. The cost: tens of thousands dead, more than a million displaced people, political and economic stability undermined and the country's image ruined."
The United States has interrupted some of the financial tentacles of terrorist organizations by freezing funds and shutting down ostensibly charitable organizations with connections to terrorists. But the single most significant thing it could do to defund terrorists and other dealers in political violence worldwide would be to end the War on Drugs.
The fact that such a step would also reduce wasted government spending, reduce corruption, enhance property rights and civil liberties and reduce the harm caused by drugs would be a welcome side benefit.
