Illicit Drug Funding: The Surprising Systemic Similarities between the FARC and the Taliban
Abstract
The preponderance of literature and scholarly debate on counterinsurgency (COIN) focuses on the strategic or operational approach: leader-focused, large group-focused, special operations, conventional operations, enemy centric, and the latest, population-centric. While criticism of the latter approach accuses it of plagiarizing work on the subject written in the 1960s, the current debate may result in distraction from how to effectively do long-term damage to insurgent groups. There is a relatively small conglomerate of scholarly work that focuses on illicit sources of funding for insurgencies. Most of the recent scholarship has moved away from, or never focused on, how the two most noteworthy insurgent groups operating today, the FARC and the Taliban, finance themselves. This is a crucial knowledge gap because the similarities in how two seemingly disparate insurgent groups came to rely on illicit crop cultivation are startling. This monograph presents case studies on the two groups that detail their origins and how both groups came to subsume the cultivation, production, and trafficking of illicit drugs. It also compares the two groups as complex systems and draws correlations between illicit crop cultivation and the size and strength of the groups. Illicit drug financing is not simply a functional effort that is subordinate to the COIN approach "du jour." Any serious study of how to defeat these two groups must consider leveraging what has become both groups' primary source of financing against them.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 20, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA525726
Entities
People
- David L. Deatley
Organizations
- United States Army Command and General Staff College