Counter Threat Finance — Not a Silver Bullet

By Vanda Felbab-Brown

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a Senior Fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Felbab-Brown is the author of the forthcoming books, The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It and Militants, Criminals, and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder (with Harold Trinkunas and Shadi Hamid).

For decades, belligerent groups have financed their operations by tapping into a variety of locally available economies, including illegal ones. The Shining Path in Peru was among the first groups to tax drug cultivation and smuggling. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia prolonged its life by being heavily involved in logging. The various ethnonationalist insurgencies in Myanmar have been heavily involved in drug trade, legal and illegal logging, mining, as well as wildlife trafficking. The Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has looted and smuggled antiquities, and traded in oil. The Sudanese Janjaweed have extensively poached West African elephants to finance their operations. Mokhtar Belmokhtar and other militants in the Sahel have smuggled not only in cigarettes and drugs, but also eggs – even if the narcoterrorism label catches public attention and eggterrorism doesn’t.

Since belligerent groups can derive tens of millions of dollars, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars (though not often) per year from these activities, they experience a significant increase in their military power and sustainment capacity. Consequently, a conventional view has emerged that governments should focus on eliminating the belligerents’ physical resources by eliminating the illicit economies on which they rely.

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