HOW YOU FUND TERRORISM

-INTERVIEW: The Hard Edge of American Values: Robert D. Kaplan on how the United States projects power around the world-and why it must (Atlantic Unbound, June 18, 2003 )

[Q:] You consider Colombia to be a very important example for the future of U.S. intervention in world affairs. Why should we be paying attention to that country?

[A:] I could have used the Philippines, I could have used Nepal. Colombia is important for two reasons here. First, we are deeply involved, yet no one is paying attention to it, which is an example of how we find ourselves in an imperial position in the world. There are many places where we are deeply involved that aren't even covered by the news media. The news media tends to interpret American imperialism solely through what's been in the headlines-Afghanistan first, now Iraq. Second and more specifically, the problems that Colombia presents are an exaggerated form of the kinds of problems that we are likely to face over the next ten or twenty years in managing our affairs around the world. North Korea and Iraq, the countries that have gotten the headlines recently, really have old-fashioned, Cold War, dinosaur-style regimes. So while these problems, North Korea and Iraq, will be with us for some years yet, they essentially already represent the past. Whereas Colombia is a sign of the future, in the sense that it has these guerilla organizations that are sort of centerless corporations split up into baronies and franchises, where it's hard to get your finger on the pulse. And it's very, very hard to defeat them, because you stamp out one element and there are all these other elements around the country. Colombia also represents how so much of terrorism around the world is interrelated with crime. The part of al Qaeda represented by Osama bin Laden is not an example of that. They are very utopian and ideological. But most of these groups that we're going to have to deal with have radical politics that are interrelated with crime.

Another reason why Colombia is so important, which I didn't have space to mention in the piece, is that we are constantly reading about these disputes between the State Department on the one hand and the Pentagon on the other. It's like they are these two poles of opposing bureaucracies. But when you get into the field, this totally dissolves, because any major U.S. program anywhere is an interrelationship between the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. If the agencies don't work together seamlessly, the program itself doesn't work. Plan Colombia, which is the name of the whole gamut of foreign and military aid that we are providing to the Colombian government was, up until post-Saddam Iraq, the largest foreign interagency operation that the U.S. government had in the world. Plan Colombia represents billions of dollars of interagency cooperation. And interagency is really the only way we can ever operate into the future.

[Q:] You describe FARC, the main guerilla group in Colombia, as being "Karl Marx at the top and Adam Smith all the way down the command chain." Can you tell us what you mean by that?

[A:] Karl Marx means that the front that the group presents to the world is ideological, in this case left-wing/communist/socialist. But beneath that front it's all based on profits and crime. The FARC has lost its ideological edge and has kind of devolved into profit-making enterprises, involving kidnappings, drugs, and siphoning off oil-pipeline revenues.

The ads that showed a direct relationship between drug use and the unintentional funding of terrorism were much reviled, particularly by the libertarian Right. Most of the critics were presumably just ignorant of, or unable to accept, the evidence that the drug trade does indeed fund terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda. But other folks seemed to believe that since they support legalization of drugs they aren't responsible for the effects of purchasing drugs while they're illegal. These attitudes combine a willful blindness and an abdication of responsibility. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 20, 2003 1:38 PM