Pubdate: Sun, 22 Jul 2012
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA)
Copyright: 2012 New York Times.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/pm4R4dI4
Website: http://www.post-gazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/341
Authors: Charlie Savage and Thom Shanke,The New York Times

U.S. DRUG FIGHT TURNS TO AFRICA, GANGS' NEW HUB

New Units Not Only Combat Traffickers but Also Skepticism

WASHINGTON - In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the 
United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics 
police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as 
part of an effort to combat the Latin American trafficking 
organizations that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine 
into Europe.

The growing U.S. involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation 
of anti-drug efforts in Central America, according to documents, 
congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at 
the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

In both regions, U.S. officials are responding to fears that 
crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling have prompted 
traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further 
corrupting and destabilizing them.

The aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how 
greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs 
as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.

"We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and 
counternarcotics issues," said Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of DEA's 
Europe, Asia and Africa section.

The initiatives come amid a surge in successful interdictions in 
Honduras since May - but also as U.S. officials have been forced to 
defend their new tactics after a commando-style team of DEA agents 
participated in at least three lethal interdiction operations 
alongside a squad of Honduran police officers.

To date, officials say, the DEA commando team has not been deployed 
to work with the newly created elite police squads in Africa, where 
the effort to counter the drug traffickers is said to be about three 
years behind the one in Central America.

The officials said that if Western security forces did come to play a 
more direct operational role in Africa, for historical reasons they 
might be European and not American.

In May, William R. Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for 
international narcotics and law enforcement, a leading architect of 
the strategy on display in Honduras, traveled to Ghana and Liberia to 
put the finishing touches on a West Africa Cooperative Security 
Initiative, which will try to replicate across 15 nations the steps 
taken in battling trafficking groups operating in Central America and Mexico.

Mr. Brownfield said the vision for both regions was to improve the 
ability of nations to deal with drug trafficking, by building up 
their own institutions and getting them to cooperate with one 
another, sharing intelligence and running regional law enforcement 
training centers.

But because drug traffickers have already moved into Africa, he said, 
there is also a need for the immediate elite police units that have 
been trained and vetted.

"We have to be doing operational stuff right now because things are 
actually happening right now," Mr. Brownfield said.

Some specialists have expressed skepticism about the approach. Bruce 
Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin 
America and counternarcotics, said that what had happened in West 
Africa over the past few years was the latest example of the 
"Whac-A-Mole" problem, in which making trafficking more difficult in 
one place simply shifts it to another.

"As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but 
they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are 
incredibly weak - I don't care how much vetting they do," Mr. Bagley 
said. "And there is always blowback to this. You start killing people 
in foreign countries - whether criminals or not - and there is going 
to be fallout."

U.S. government officials acknowledge the challenges, but they are 
not as pessimistic about the chances of at least pushing the 
trafficking organizations out of particular countries.

And even if the intervention leads to an increase in violence as 
organizations that had operated with impunity are challenged, the 
alternative, they said, is worse.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom