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2. Crime, Terror and the Central Asia Drug Trade
- Author:
- Tamara Makarenko
- Publication Date:
- 06-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University, Scotland
- Abstract:
- Over the last decade, opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been rising incrementally, culminating in a bumper crop in 1999 that produced approximately 80 percent of the global supply of illicit opium. Despite this predicament, the dynamics of the illicit drugs trade in Afghanistan has received little attention. Most media reports and government statements over-simplify the situation, making it appear as though the Taliban controlled the planting, cultivation, production and trafficking of all opiates. For example, The Times, in an article published in January 2000, reported “The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan have become the world's biggest producers and smugglers of hard drugs, overtaking rings in Colombia and Burma. They are now responsible for 95 per cent of all the heroin entering Britain.” Following the September 11 attacks, this responsibility was shared with Usama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network. British Prime Minister Tony Blair thus stated that the “arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets”, and subsequently added that the Taliban and Usama bin Laden “jointly exploited the drugs trade.” This view has also been propagated in the United States by leading news agencies. CNN, for example, explicitly reported that the Taliban both taxed and trafficked in narcotics, which were directly used to finance their military operations.
- Topic:
- Crime, Economics, and Terrorism
- Political Geography:
- Britain, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Taliban, Colombia, and Burma
3. Terrorism and Transnational Organised Crime: the emerging nexus
- Author:
- Tamara Makarenko
- Publication Date:
- 06-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University, Scotland
- Abstract:
- The end of the Cold War and subsequent demise of the Soviet Union ushered in a new international security environment that can no longer be explained by the dominant security paradigms utilised by most Western governments and analysts since World War II. Our understanding of security falling under the rubric of high politics, and focused on maintaining the territorial sovereignty of state actors has been questioned by several ongoing international dynamics. For example, inter-state conflicts have been replaced by rising occurrences of intra-state violence; the state as the central focus of international affairs has given way to a host of non-state actors; and, it has become increasingly evident that the greatest threat to security emanates from the rapidly evolving phenomena of terrorism and transnational organised crime (TOC). In actuality, national, regional and international experience with insecurity over the past decade has confirmed that terrorism and TOC deserve paramount attention precisely because they both span national boundaries, and thus are necessarily multi-dimensional and organised; and, because they directly threaten the stability of states by targeting economic, political and social systems.
- Topic:
- Security, Crime, Economics, and Terrorism
- Political Geography:
- Soviet Union