Review: Shooting Up

I’ve just finished reading Vanda Felbab-Brown’s new book “Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs”. I found it an interesting read, with some notable good points, but frustrating in places due to the limitations that Felbab-Brown places on her analysis.

The main crux of the book is that counternarcotics policies frequently benefit insurgents involved in the drugs trade, rather than bankrupting them. Felbab-Brown uses political capital as a catch-all term to describe behavioural changes in different actors towards insurgent/belligerent groups. On the whole, her three main case studies (Peru, Colombia, Afghanistan) are solid, and do back her conclusion that laissez-faire and interdiction policies are better options for governments seeking to quell insurgencies than crop eradication. But this is the start of my frustration with this book. Of course it is better for the governments of Peru, Colombia and Afghanistan to ignore the narcotics issue, woo the farmers and isolate the insurgents. But these governments are not the ones that feel the effects narcotics production. By limiting these case studies to a more-or-less internal analysis of the countries affected, Felbab-Brown misses out the international political dynamics that create pressure for eradication policies. While I am no fan of such policies, time and again they are used as a burnt straw offering in literature related to narcotics production. No, they don’t work, yes, they cause economic disruption, but they have their own internal logic which cannot be dismissed. The war on drugs did not begin with American contractors dropping herbicide in the Andes, it began within the borders of the United States, and I think for a large part, that is where the catalysts for eradication policies remain. Do US congressmen really care about the myriad knock-on effects of the drugs trade on various developing countries? Or do they care about the drug addicts that their voters are hassling them about? I have read some incredibly shoddy reasoning behind eradication, but it would be a mistake to underestimate its appeal to voters and those in power. I’d argue that the internal political dynamics of states such as America are crucial to understanding these issues, even more so in Afghanistan. After all, who in Afghanistan actually benefits in the short term from eradication? The fact that it was even attempted signifies the importance of foreign interests.

My second gripe is that this book fails to accurately describe both the political and economic paradigms that occur in these countries. In particular,  it fails to deal with the positioning of the populace as a group apart from both the state and numerous non-state actors, particularly in the marginal regions that she is addressing. The fact that farmers feel free to switch their allegiance between government and guerilla underlines the fact that these populations are actors in their own right. Particularly in Afghanistan, it strikes me that these groups might want to preserve their relative independence from the state, playing the government and Taliban off against one another. In such situations, the laissez faire policies Felbab-Brown refers to might be more important due to their informal recognition of the autonomy of such groups, though obviously they bring benefits as well. In a similar fashion, the alternate development/livelihoods programs fail, but not because they are destined to do so in insecure environments, but because they cannot compete with the only element of the global economy present in such regions: the drugs trade.

The only absolute howler in the book is Felbab-Brown’s decision to include Northern Ireland as a case study in the conclusion. A model developed to describe the actions of guerillas in the remote rural locations of impoverished countries that grow narcotics with few cultural restrictions on doing so stumbles significantly when describing the actions of paramilitary insurgents in the urban, developed world, supplying harmful drugs to a population with significant cultural restriction on doing so. The public health and moral problems are largely externalised from Felbab-Brown’s three case studies, but in Northern Ireland they cannot, because there is no such externalisation once a group is dealing drugs to the local populace. There is (literally) a world of difference between shipping drugs out of a country and importing or dealing them in a country like Northern Ireland. I don’t think that the political capital model really addresses this difference that is inherent in producing and consuming states. Again, it comes down to an asymmetry of risk and reward between the two environments for involvement in the drug trade.

The main flaw in Falbab-Brown’s otherwise good model is that she does not address the function of narcotics in developing economies in the context of a globalised world. The case studies she cites exist in a global network of states, and the rural economies she studies are integrated into the global economy by the narcotics trade. Because of this, case studies of counter-narcotics policies considered on a national basis fails to take into account the global risks, rewards and political pressures inherent in such activities.