A thief, a dirty politician, and a suicide bomber walk into a bar ...

• Author: Pillar, Paul R.
• Position: Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism - Book review

Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism

by Louise I. Shelley

Cambridge University Press, 380 pp.

Yes, terrorists conspire with criminal networks and corrupt officials. But that doesn't mean cracking down on crime and corruption will stop terrorism.

It is easy to think of bad things going together, and of bad people doing multiple types of bad things. Sometimes such patterns are real and not just a matter of cognitive consistency. It is a reality with terrorism and crime, even though terrorism is inherently a political act and most crime is more about enrichment. Terrorists are heavily involved in a wide variety of crimes. You probably don't realize just how heavily and how wide, however, unless you have read Louise Shelley's Dirty Entanglements. The book is an encyclopedic treatment of the subject. Whatever ways terrorism and crime have ever intersected are likely to be reflected somewhere in this book. The author has scoured for examples from all over the world, from material cited in more than 1,500 endnotes. It is almost enough to make one believe that these two forms of bad behavior always go together.

The connection between terrorism and crime ought not to be surprising, given that kidnapping people and killing them--the sorts of things terrorists do--are themselves crimes. This simple fact has sometimes gotten lost in the years since the 9/11 attacks amid ideologically driven efforts to define terrorism and counterterrorism as "war" rather than as a matter of criminal justice. A propensity to break the rules and commit one crime has always been associated with a propensity to commit other crimes, and not necessarily crimes of exactly the same type, which is why there are career criminals and recidivism. A nexus between terrorism and other forms of criminal behavior has long been both acknowledged and also the subject of some serious study.

Where Shelley goes beyond most earlier work on the topic is not only in the sheer volume of the evidence she has amassed but also in adding corruption to terrorism and crime to produce a trifecta of interrelated bad behavior. The malevolent cycle on which she focuses involves corrupt government officials facilitating organized criminal activity which it turn aids terrorist operations. Her principal argument is that such connections are a major part of understanding why terrorists are able to do what they do, but that such understanding has too often been lacking and government...