Assessing Strategy and Organized Crime

Juan Manuel Perez has served in the Guatemalan Army. He presently is retired. Throughout his military career, he took various military training courses as part of his professionalization including Strategic High Studies, War College, Command and Staff College, Human Rights, and Peacekeeping Operations. He can be found on Twitter @r_juanmanuel. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.


Title:  Assessing Strategy and Organized Crime

Date Originally Written:  September 15, 2021. 

Date Originally Published:  February 7, 2022.

Author and / or Article Point of View: The author is a retired military member. He believes the deep understanding of strategic theory helps people educate and discipline their thinking to align ends, ways, and means to protect national interests. 

Summary:  Organized crime organizations have stablished a global criminal system.  This influence and power wielded by this system has allowed them to damage the geopolitics, economic, social, and security situation in many countries. The deep understanding of both the threats posed by organized crime organizations, and the capabilities and limitations of strategy, will assure effectiveness when fighting these criminal organizations.

Text:  Illicit money is serious and appealing to criminals. Criminal activities pursuing illicit money progressively scale into criminal networks.  Drug trafficking also enables a criminal modality, establishing the core of organized groups where gangs, maras, and mafias play a starring role. 

The tracking and detection of illegal money into legal economies is a challenge.  Governments struggle to disrupt and cut off illicit capital flows.  This evil advances and progresses between a legal and illegal economy, resulting in a large-scale global network with geopolitical and geostrategic repercussions.  These criminal networks embedded into the financial system become practically undetectable, using technology, artificial intelligence, big data, social media, modern transportation, etc. to conceal and protect their activities[1].   

Criminal networks use geography to their advantage.  Robert D. Kaplan, in his book “The Revenge of Geography[2]” wrote about what the maps predict regarding coming conflicts and the battle against fate. In this sense, the mafia uses geography when it moves illicit shipments, controls multiple regions, zones, and places. The mafia’s global effect and quick process of replacement allow criminal partners to generate new routes and maps, and increase their criminal activity, including the movement and sale of illegal drugs.

The flow of illegal drugs is and will continue to be a critical social problem.  The use of drugs fuels the traffic of them leaving death and violence in its path.  American researchers Edwin Stier and Peter Richards write widely and rigorously about organized crime and point out its evolution in three fields of action.  Stier and Richards make an analogy of biological functions of living beings, where they describe the structural causes and reasons of gestation and development[3]. 

The first phase:  called the predatory phase, is the beginning and characterized by territorial reaffirmation of criminal groups that spread their power through violence, trying to defend their organizations, eliminate rivals, and gaining physical space and to hold their private monopoly on the use of force.  

The second phase:  called the parasitic phase, sees organized crime gain notable economic and political influence combined with a powerful capacity to corrupt public and private organizations.

The third phase:  called the symbiotic phase, is the final state and sees the political and economic system becoming so dependent on the parasite (the organized crime organization) that it expands its activity to satisfy the parasites needs.

Stier and Richards’ analogy symbolizes, in many ways, the features of Hydra, the fresh-water organisms, with many heads and the ability to regrow its tentacles when maimed. 

While Colin S. Gray, one of the great strategic thinkers of his age wrote: ‘’Strategy has a complex nature and a function that is unchanging over the centuries[4]’’, the development and execution of strategy in order to fight organized crime and the threats associated to it (i.e. illegal migration, drug trafficking, cybercrime, weapons trafficking, etc.) require constant reevaluation.  Harry R. Yarger’s book “Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The little book on big Strategy[5],” aligns well with the dynamic threat posed by organized crime organizations.  As resources or budgets (means) are always limited, it is important to invest enough time defining, designing, and developing appropriate strategic guidance to reach the desired outcome. 

Finally, organized crime has taken advantage of the pandemic, increasing their criminal activities by others means. Right now, the organized crime is an authentic threat that affects the societies, governments, states, the security of financial institutions even the functioning of democracy and the international geopolitical equilibrium.  The security, defense, and protection of the citizens will continue one of the top priorities for the states.  


Endnotes:

[1] Phil Williams, “Crime Illicit Markets, and Money Laundering”

[2] Robert D. Kaplan, “The Revenge of Geography”

[3] Edwin Stier and Peter Richards, “Strategic Decision Making in Organized Crime Control: The Need for a Broadened Perspective”

[4] Colin S. Gray, “Modern Strategy,” Oxford: Oxford University Press

[5] Harry R. Yarger, “Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The little book on big Strategy,” https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/20753/Strategic%20Theory%20for%20the%2021st%20Century.pdf

Assessment Papers Criminal Activities Drug Trade Juan Manuel Perez

Alternative Futures: Assessment of the 2027 Afghan Opium Trade

Chris Wozniak is an independent analyst. He holds a BA in Political Economy from the University of Washington. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.


Title:  Alternative Futures: Assessment of the 2027 Afghan Opium Trade

Date Originally Written:  July 3, 2019.

Date Originally Published:  October 3, 2019.

Author and / or Article Point of View:  This article is written from the point of view of a United Nations report outlining the rise Afghan heroin production and the consequences both within and beyond Afghan borders.

Summary:  A sudden exit of western troops from Afghanistan has fostered dramatic expansion of the already robust opium trade. Peace, profitability, and cynical policy calculations have led Afghan and regional players to embrace cultivation and trafficking at a cost to their licit economies, public health, and security. International players seem to think that Afghan peace on these terms is worth the corrosive influence that opium exports are carrying abroad.

Text:  In this 2027 30th anniversary edition of the World Drug Report, we have added an auxiliary booklet with an unprecedented singular focus on Afghanistan’s global impact on the drug supply chain and the threat it poses to security and development across multiple continents. This booklet covers the political landscape that allowed Afghanistan to become the world’s heroin epicenter and key players in the heroin trade. It also addresses the international response to the crisis and the global implications of the Afghan drug economy.

Five years after China’s 2022 acquisition of the port of Karachi through predatory One Belt One Road loans and a cooling in relations with Russia following the annexation of Belarus, major sea and air resupply routes to International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were closed or compromised, making sustained operations in Afghanistan logistically untenable. The subsequent departure of all ISAF troops removed a principal roadblock in peace talks with the Afghan Taliban (Taliban): withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. The resulting hastily negotiated peace deal formalized a power sharing agreement between the existing Afghan government and Taliban shadow government in exchange for renunciation of support and safe haven for transnational terrorists. In practice, a crude federalization has taken effect that leaves the Taliban politically represented in Kabul and in control of the majority of arable countryside used for poppy growth. The Western-supported government of Afghanistan largely retains control of urban centers and major highways needed for processing and export. This delicate equilibrium is largely sustained due to recognition that uninterrupted Afghan opium production is in the interest of both Afghans and international stakeholders and any violence would negatively impact profitability.

Within Afghanistan, an influential lobby shaping the political environment that has had a hand in the opium trade for decades is the transport mafia. Afghanistan has historically been a crossroads of trade and transport interests have long exploited opportunities for profit. The modern transport mafia became robust beginning in 1965 following the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement (ATTA). The agreement allowed the duty free trade of goods from Pakistan into Afghanistan, leading to smuggling of the same goods back across the border for illicit profit. Soviet-Afghan war transport mafia activities included cross-border smuggling of arms to the mujahideen and smuggling of opium on the return journey. Post 9/11, theft of American supplies shipped via Karachi and destined for Afghanistan was another common scheme[1]. The influence of transport mafia interests in Afghanistan is profound in the political and developmental arenas as well. Popular support of the Taliban in the 1990s was largely attributable to the Taliban elimination of highway bandits, making transport much more predictable. Following the improvement in conditions, the profitability of opium smuggling by transport interests proved too popular for even the Taliban’s ban on poppy cultivation and opium. Following the 2001 arrival of American and ISAF personnel, transportation interests continued to grow alongside poppy cultivation, and in 2017 cultivation reached an all-time high of approximately 420,000 hectares – seventy-five percent of the global total[2]. Yields have continued to improve in the years since as Afghans have repaired irrigation infrastructure all over the south and east of the country. Reconstruction of qanats destroyed in the Soviet-Afghan war when they were utilized as tunnels for covert mujahideen movement has been especially important to year-over-year poppy yield increases. Many of the improvements were enabled by international donations until media coverage revealed poppy farmers to be the chief beneficiaries. Subsequent donor fatigue has depressed additional rounds of Afghan development funding, making improvements in health care and education unlikely. With few alternatives, most Afghans are now completely dependent on either poppy cultivation or the transport enterprise for their livelihoods.

Regional players surrounding Afghanistan all reap unique rewards by allowing opium trade to continue. Pakistan has doubled down on the idea of “strategic depth” in any conflict with India that is afforded to them by a friendly Afghan power structure. Allowing the proliferation of poppy farming in Taliban-controlled districts and refining labs throughout the Hindu Kush has benefited Pakistan by restoring a major proxy force that is now self-sustaining. Moreover, extraction of rents from producers and traffickers by Pakistani military and intelligence factions supports asymmetric operations against India in the disputed Kashmir region. Iran has been exploiting the European heroin epidemic by extracting concessions from European stakeholders in nuclear talks in exchange for closure of their border with Afghanistan, thereby closing a major trafficking highway to Europe. Iran’s border closure has had the unforeseen consequence of driving the flow of narcotics north into the Central Asian states and the Russian Federation. Subsequently, Russia has made heroin trafficking into Europe their latest asymmetric effort to disrupt European cohesion, with reports that tacit support of the Russian Mafia by the state has expanded the volume of the Moscow trafficking hub from one third of all heroin being trafficked to Europe to two thirds today[3]. As for the United States, the domestic political atmosphere continues to reward an exit from Afghan affairs despite the diplomatic and security costs incurred abroad. For all of these actors, inaction or an embrace of Afghan heroin is a devil’s bargain. In Pakistan, the drug economy has further hollowed out the licit economy, risking the stability of a nuclear state and calling into question the security of its nuclear materials. For Russia and Central Asian States, drug use has skyrocketed and Russia’s population has been particularly hard hit by a corresponding rise in HIV/AIDS, tripling from an estimated one million citizens in 2016 to just over three million in 2025[4].

Peace in Afghanistan has been achieved at the cost of the public health, security, and economies of nations across the Eurasian landmass. Moreover, it is a peace sustained by a tenuous illicit economy and cynical policy calculations that steadily erode the licit economies of neighboring nations and transit states. Without multinational cooperation to address the corrosive fallout of Afghan heroin exports, the international community will continue to feel the negative effects for years to come.


Endnotes:

[1] Looted U.S. Army Gear For Sale in Pakistan,
Chris Brummitt – http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39542359/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/looted-us-army-gear-sale-pakistan/#.XR0AcZNKgb0

[2] World Drug Report 2018 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.18.XI.9).

[3] Crimintern: How the Kremlin Uses Russia’s Criminal Networks in Europe,
Mark Galeotti – https://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/crimintern_how_the_kremlin_uses_russias_criminal_networks_in_europe

[4] Russia At Aids Epidemic Tipping Point As Hiv Cases Pass 1 Million – Official,
Andrew Osborn – https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-aids/russia-at-aids-epidemic-tipping-point-as-hiv-cases-pass-1-million-official-idUSL2N1551S7

Afghanistan Alternative Futures / Alternative Histories / Counterfactuals Assessment Papers Chris Wozniak Drug Trade