Shooting up: counter-insurgency and the war on drugs.

• Author: Brands, Hal
• Position: Book review

Shooting Up: Counter-Insurgency and the War on Drugs

Review by Hal Brands

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counter-Insurgency and the War on Drugs, Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press. 2009, ISBN 978-0815703280, 273 pp., $28.95

As the war in Afghanistan has returned to the center of policy debate and public discourse in the United States, so have the links between the drug trade and the Taliban insurgency. As observers like Gretchen Peters and others have established, the opium trade provides al Qaeda and the Taliban with massive revenues, thereby allowing them to purchase weapons, bribe officials, expand their operations, and ingratiate themselves to the poppy growers who depend upon their protection.

This problem of a narco-insurgent nexus is not new. Drugs have long funded insurgent groups in Peru, Colombia, Burma, India, and elsewhere, providing them with a powerful weapon in their struggles against established governments. As Vanda Felbab-Brown points out in her new volume on this subject, however, policymakers have frequently drawn precisely the wrong conclusions about combating narco-funded insurgencies. Viewing counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics as two sides of the same coin, they have ended up pursuing strategies that do little to restrain the drug trade or limit its profits, and much to alienate the population and drive them into an alliance with the insurgents.

Felbab-Brown develops this argument in a relatively slender book of six chapters--an introduction, a conclusion, a theoretical chapter, and three case studies. The theoretical chapter lays out Felbab-Brown's "political capital model" of insurgent participation in illicit economies. This participation typically brings insurgent groups substantial material and military gains, by allowing them to purchase better weapons, pay better salaries, and conduct more ambitious operations. Even more important, illicit trade allows the insurgents to derive greater political power. Narcotics-funded insurgent groups can put poor peasants to work and distribute food and essential services in areas where there is little government presence. "Unlike ideology, which typically promises hard-to-deliver benefits sometime in the future," Felbab-Brown writes, "sponsorship of the illicit economy allows belligerents to deliver immediate benefits to the population." Moreover, where the locals are wound up in illicit economies--as in the coca fields of the Andes--the insurgents can...