Editor's note: The following is adapted from an address National Interest Executive Editor Justine A. Rosenthal delivered at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars on June 12, 2007. For a summary of the event, click here.
We have long held the image of the white-linen-suited drug lord as the symbol of the illicit economy, but our newest members of the financial underground are quite differently clad. These are the terrorists who used to fight for revolution and now fight for greed. Terrorists who fought for statehood and now kidnap for profit. Terrorists who spoke of liberation but now raze villages to meet their bottom line. The illicit economy is on the rise. Counterfeits, drugs, people and information all flow throughout our porous, evermore borderless world.
Terrorists have always needed to finance their violence, and considering the fact that they function at the fringes of society, this funding has often come from illegal enterprises. But now that money can become such a temptation it can often override ideological motivations. Such groups continue to use their ideological rhetoric to mask their drive to profit both because it can help them continue to recruit and because it can help them avoid being persecuted and prosecuted as criminals (Terrorists can often cut far better deals with the government than drug lords.)
For-profit terrorists are not pure ideologues (though some may remain more true to the cause than others), and they aren't purely criminals-because they continue to use political rhetoric as a front for their illegal activities. For the most part, for-profit terrorists start out with some real (and sometimes valid) political motivations. But when they shift their priorities and become pure profit-seekers, they turn into this new breed of terrorist.
There are three main catalysts that transform terrorists' motivations from the political to the financial: destruction of the leadership structure; political changes that debunk the ideological basis of the group; and opportunities for financial gain so great that they subsume ideological motives.
Leadership is often an important cohesive for terrorists. Since the mainstay of so many groups is young recruits, a visionary leader that can control and guide the organization becomes the tie that binds. When leaders are assassinated or incarcerated, their vision may die with them, changing political dynamics only expedite the process. But, when facing a leadership vacuum, only groups familiar with the spoils of war and with the pre-existing infrastructure to sustain criminality head down the path towards for-profit terrorism.
Abu Sayyaf (ASG) is one such band of terrorists. ASG began their life as a Filipino-Muslim secessionist terrorist group. Though independence for the Philippines' Muslim minority remains an official goal, the death of their founder, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, in 1998 left the group without a clear ideological purpose.
After the death of Janjalani, the group moved deeper and deeper into kidnapping, increasing their efforts by almost 400 percent. Pre-1998, the group engaged in six kidnappings; post-1998, in 21. Their success in receiving high ransom demands pushed the group further down this profiteering road. Of late, it seems like ASG may be returning to their pure Islamist roots. But, this points out two important additional dangers of this phenomenon. First, they have partly become guns-for-hire. So, they may be willing to act out just about any violence for the right price. And second, Al-Qaeda and Jemmah Islamiyaah (their two main co-conspirators) now have a fully-funded and pretty malleable group as a partner.
Similarly, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)-although it is unclear whether or not this group continues to function-originally sought Islamic rule across several Central Asian nations, starting with dismantling the secular regime in Uzbekistan. Central Asia's porous borders afforded the group control of many of the drug smuggling routes throughout the region. The IMU was involved in the opiate trade from the beginning, but treated it as a means to their ideological ends. However, depleted leadership and fighter ranks engendered a shift towards maintaining a hold over 70 percent of the drug trade in the Caucusus and smuggling routes, rather than on the rise of Islam.
The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) is an African example of a politically driven group quickly corrupted by the lure of profit. Founded as a proxy of the corrupt Liberian leader Charles Taylor with a mandate to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone, the lucre from diamond mines became too great a temptation to resist. Sierra Leone provided a perfect setting for profiteering; a country with little law and order but vast natural resources. Within months of the RUF's initial attacks, their assaults increasingly targeted diamond and mineral mines. Money seduced the RUF; their politics were soon overwhelmed by the compulsion to profit.
Observe the recent crisis in the Gaza Strip. The Bedouins on the Sinai Peninsula largely responsible for providing Hamas with AK-47s may argue that they resent state control, but rampant poverty and little in the way of economic opportunity lies at the core of this ideological profiteering conundrum. What is happening in the Egyptian and Gaza underground is nothing new, but it is a part of a prevalent and evermore dangerous phenomenon: a vibrant black market mixing with ideological opportunism.
Sometimes it's not leadership vacuums or quick profits that change a group. Sometimes it is simply the changing times, as the FARC exemplifies. Marxism's fading allure in light of the fall of the Soviet Union shifted the group's goals. Despite little more than 5 percent of popular backing, waning rhetorical efficacy, popular repudiation of the violence and government attempts at peace negotiations, the FARC has prospered. Their political goals are no longer clear, but their illegal industrial infrastructure thrives. FARC's expansion since the 1980s is directly correlated to the growth of the drug trade in the areas they control. They now earn $617 million a year from cocaine, $560 million from extortion and almost $100 million from kidnapping.
But what seems to make most clear that their goals may really have changed is the way they spend their money. They spend almost $110 million a year on the chemicals needed to make cocaine. But they only spend $15 million on weapons purchases. In for-profit terrorism, funding is an end in itself.
For profiteering terrorists, criminal enterprises not only help them make money, they also reinforce and expand the types of environments they need to function. Drug production creates criminal fiefdoms void of normal licit commerce. Kidnapping campaigns make areas so dangerous that people avoid going anywhere near them. At the same time, ransom demands and extortion add to the terrorists' coffers while disrupting the normal functioning of society. Smuggling routes are filled with bandits creating lawless danger zones. And, once these terrorists gain loose autonomy for the purpose of engaging in criminality, a vicious cycle of anarchy and illegality takes hold.
When they are feeling most emboldened, they directly attack the state. In their less violent moments, they take advantage of the poverty and failing governance within the region. The IMU reportedly paid hired hands between $100 and $500 a month for their services. The FARC also buys loyalty-with salaries for collaborators often double what Colombian soldiers earn. The FARC's expenditures on bribery are over $12 million each year. And the RUF was able to convert much of the Sierra Leone military into paid sobels (soldiers by day, rebels by night). At their most desperate, they even recruited the homeless wandering the capital.
Future Threats
What does all of this mean for future trends? For-profit terrorism poses a potentially serious problem: as the illicit economy expands and these violent actors take hold of an increasingly large market share, it is possible we will witness more violence, more disorder and more capable groups. Beyond the expanding governance black holes induced by this type of terrorism, we face the danger that these financially viable terrorists have an ideological malleability and adaptability that creates opportunities for cooperation with groups that pose a more traditionally destructive threat to the global security environment.
We've seen a rash of cooperation among terrorist groups that bridges vast regional and political divides, with suspected cooperation between the FARC and Al-Qaeda the most bizarre and potentially most dangerous. The possibilities for trans-continental, trans-ideological networking and profiteering abound.
In post-Saddam Iraq, kidnapping is now an industry. In 2004, there were about two kidnappings daily in Baghdad. Now, thirty to forty Iraqis are kidnapped nationwide from morning to night. Meanwhile, insurgents-for-hire are rumored to be paid anywhere from $100-$2,000 per attack, depending on how dangerous their mission. The lawless regions created through this violence have also created the perfect profiteering environment in the oil, arms and drug trades. Now, a symbiotic relationship mixing burgeoning supplies of illicit goods with increasingly porous borders in Iraq, much of the Middle East, South Asia, and, most specifically, Afghanistan has created a cross-regional zone of violence and criminality.
There we see the symbiosis between lawlessness, for-profit terrorism and ideological violence. The Taliban, warlords and various insurgent groups have taken full advantage of the floundering occupying force. With a weakened government and economy, a growing insurgency and increasing numbers of fighters motivated more by profit, Afghanistan was and is ripe for the picking. As entire swaths of South Asia and the Middle East become governance black holes, the situation just feeds on itself.
These growing, mutually beneficial relationships between terrorists with ideological malleability and "purer" groups-particularly in light of an expanding global black market-create a danger. Terrorist networking of this sort leads to better-equipped, better-trained and more lethal groups. The more we understand the intertwining nature of for-profit terrorists both with one another and with more politically driven groups, the more aggressive our approach to tackling the problem should become.
In Colombia, former-President Pastrana gave the group control of 42,000 square kilometers of land during peace talks that began at the end of the 1990s, solidifying its drug business and abetting its propaganda strategy. In Sierra Leone, government overtures to the RUF exacerbated its extortion and criminal activities. The misperception of for-profit terrorists as fighters for a political cause serves only to improve their hand and, in worst-case scenarios, give them greater territorial control and undeserved political legitimacy.
This boils down to as it often does, nation-building. Weak states, weak infrastructure and weak government control strengthen the for-profit terrorist. As long as the profiteers can buy-off, bribe and intimidate, the illicit economy will expand and the terrorists' purses will overflow.
Justine A. Rosenthal is the executive editor of The National Interest.
