Law in order: Reconstructing U.S. national security.

• Author: Wechsler, William

FEW TOOLS of U.S. foreign policy are as vitally important and as consistently overlooked as law enforcement. Terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, sanctions busting and foreign corruption are serious challenges confronting American policymakers, and law enforcement has an important-- sometimes central--role in combating each of these threats. That role suffers, however, from two fatal flaws. First, differences in bureaucratic culture and viewpoints between the law enforcement and national security communities make coordination difficult. Law enforcement agencies generally refuse to see themselves as components of U.S. foreign policy. Nor does the traditional foreign policy establishment adequately appreciate the distinct culture, capabilities and constraints that characterize U.S. law enforcement agencies. Second, there are structural impediments to effective coordination, both among the various law enforcement agencies and between such bodies and the traditional national security agen cies. Federal law enforcement agencies, themselves riven by turf battles, lack proper civilian oversight and are organizationally ill-suited for integration into the wider foreign policy community.

Previous administrations have tried, but failed, to solve these problems. Too many important actors prefer things as they are, most significantly the various Federal law enforcement agencies themselves. In the past, the need to fix the systematic inefficiencies bedeviling Federal law enforcement seemed less pressing. But the world has changed, and U.S. law enforcement must change with it. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, law enforcement reform is too important to be left to FBI directors and Customs commissioners.

International Crime: A Threat to U.S. National Security

FOR MOST of American history, there has been a bright line on the Federal level between national security threats on the one hand and criminal threats on the other. The former were international, the latter domestic. The international side was the purview of the military and intelligence agencies; the domestic side that of the law enforcement agencies. This separation was primarily intended to prevent military encroachments on civilian authorities and civil liberties. The fear of militarism in American civil society remains deeply embedded in the national consciousness and has long been incorporated into American governance. U.S. government actions are still defined by the Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 to prohibit the military from performing certain domestic police functions.

In recent decades this bright line has blurred. Traditional crimes in the United States have increasingly been found to have links to criminal networks overseas. Narcotics trafficking, most obviously, cannot possibly be combated by domestic law enforcement operations alone. A bipartisan consensus also has emerged that the threat from foreign narcotics trafficking is not just a law enforcement concern but a matter of national security as well. Thus in 1987 did President Reagan overrule his Secretary of Defense and instruct the military to go abroad to help fight the war on drugs.

As technology advanced and borders became increasingly porous after the Cold War, it became increasingly evident that international crime in all of its various forms threatened U.S. national security interests. Sometimes the threats were direct. Terrorists groups like AlQaeda, no longer as dependent on state sponsorship, began targeting Americans at home and abroad. They also engaged in a host of criminal activities apart from terrorism, from arms trafficking to people smuggling to securities fraud. Vast networks of criminals based in Russia, Nigeria, Latin America, East Asia and elsewhere went global, infiltrating the United States as one of the world's most lucrative targets. Hackers halfway around the world broke into U.S. computer systems, including sensitive systems belonging to the military and intelligence agencies.

International crime also poses indirect threats to U.S. national security. Criminal syndicates have corrupted government officials, undermined democratic governance, and hindered economic development in many countries. This has been well documented in post-communist states like Russia, developing countries like Nigeria, post-conflict societies like Bosnia and countries of particular concern to the United States like Mexico. In Colombia, groups engaged in drug trafficking, terrorist activity and other serious crimes even challenge the government itself for control over territory and the population, just as typical communist insurgencies did a few decades ago.

Criminal syndicates have also helped to undermine regional stability. In Sierra Leone, for instance, the illegal smuggling of "conflict" diamonds helped finance a brutal civil war. Elsewhere in Africa and around the world, arms trafficking by organized criminal networks has stoked regional conflicts that might otherwise have died down. Criminal syndicates have been instrumental in violating U.S. and international sanctions regimes in such places as Iraq and Serbia. Russian criminal organizations are reportedly involved in smuggling materials for weapons of mass destruction--chemical, biological and nuclear. In other places, such as in Albania, criminal organizations have driven regime change, as when the collapse of a pyramid scheme precipitated anarchy and flooded next-door Kosovo with small weapons. Financial crimes such as money laundering and counterfeiting have the potential to undermine national banking systems and thereby to destabalize the global financial system. Economic crimes such as piracy--both physical and intellectual--affect U.S. companies' competitiveness in foreign markets.

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate

GIVEN THESE considerable stakes, all appropriate foreign policy tools should be employed to combat criminal threats to U.S. security interests, and those tools should be employed in a coordinated process according to a comprehensive strategy. Unfortunately, this commonsense view is far too uncommon in Federal law enforcement agencies today.

As to the direct threats to this country--terrorism, drug trafficking and international organized crime--nobody denies that Federal law enforcement has a critical and even a predominant role to play. But other tools of U.S. foreign policy also need to be deployed to combat international crime, including bilateral diplomacy, cooperation in multilateral forums, financial sanctions, and in some cases covert operations and overt military campaigns. In these cases, obviously, law enforcement activities must be integrated into the overall strategies, even in those instances when law enforcement has the lead. Sometimes this works well. When it comes to the rendition of terrorists from abroad, for instance, U.S. law enforcement agencies have developed excellent working relationships with the military and intelligence agencies. But law enforcement officials who are accustomed to the considerable freedom of action and limited civilian oversight that domestic operations afford often chafe when confronted with the need t o coordinate with others when operating abroad.

Americans are proud that nobody in the United States, not even the president, is above the law. This principle is drilled into the consciousness of every law enforcement officer. Since the abuses of Federal law enforcement by the Nixon Administration, Federal agents have taken refuge in the axiom that criminal trails should be followed to their conclusion by non-political technical experts, no matter what the wider consequences may be. Law enforcement officers remain suspicious that requests for "coordination" with other government agencies, even on matters of foreign policy; are subterfuges for political interference. Even worse from the point of view of many Federal law enforcement agents is the argument that law enforcement objectives--putting individual criminals behind bars--should sometimes be subordinate to other objectives, such as disrupting a terrorist network, winning a military campaign, or "merely" maintaining positive bilateral relations with certain other countries. Some law enforcement agencie s have become especially adept at using the media and the Congress to draw attention to allegations of "political interference" in such cases.

This viewpoint is extremely shortsighted. First, the isolation of law enforcement agencies from other agencies and from the interagency process harms the effectiveness of law enforcement operations themselves. U.S. diplomacy is too often...