Pubdate: Sun, 22 Jul 2012
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2012 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Authors: Charlie Savage and Thom Shanker

THE DRUG WAR SHIFTS TO AFRICA, HUB FOR CARTELS

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 cartels that are
increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier
escalation of antidrug 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, American officials are responding to fears that
crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling - like Mexico
and Spain - 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 the
D.E.A.'s Europe, Asia and Africa section. "It's a place that we need
to get ahead of - we're already behind the curve in some ways, and we
need to catch up."

The initiatives come amid a surge in successful interdictions in
Honduras since May - but also as American officials have been forced
to defend their new tactics after a commando-style team of D.E.A.
agents participated in at least three lethal interdiction operations
alongside a squad of Honduran police officers. In one of those
operations, in May, the Honduran police killed four people near the
village of Ahuas, and in two others in the past month American agents
have shot and killed smuggling suspects.

To date, officials say, the D.E.A. 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 now 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," Professor
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."

American 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.

"There is no such thing as a country that is simply a transit country,
for the very simple reason that the drug trafficking organization
first pays its network in product, not in cash, and is constantly
looking to build a greater market," Mr. Brownfield said. "Regardless
of the name of the country, eventually the transit country becomes a
major consumer nation, and at that point they have a more serious problem."

The United Nations says that cocaine smuggling and consumption in West
Africa have soared in recent years, contributing to instability in
places like Guinea-Bissau. Several years ago, a South American drug
gang tried to bribe the son of the Liberian president to allow it to
use the country for smuggling. Instead, he cooperated with the D.E.A.,
and the case resulted in convictions in the United States.

Even more ominous, according to American officials, was a case in
which a militant group called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb offered
three of its operatives to help ship tons of cocaine through North
Africa into Europe - all to raise money to finance terrorist attacks.
The case ended this past March with conviction and sentencing in
federal court in New York.

American counternarcotics assistance for West Africa has totaled about
$50 million for each of the past two years - up from just $7.5 million
in 2009, according to the State Department. The D.E.A. also is opening
its first country office in Senegal, officials said, and the Pentagon
has worked with Cape Verde to establish a regional center to detect
drug-smuggling ships.

While the agency has not sponsored units in West Africa before, it has
long worked with similar teams - which are given training, equipment
and pay while being subjected to rigorous drug and polygraph testing -
in countries around the world whose security forces are plagued by
corruption, including the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala
and Panama.

It is routine for D.E.A. agents who are assigned to mentor the
specially trained and screened units to accompany them on raids, but
it has been unusual for Americans to kill suspects. Several former
agents said the recent cases in Honduras suggested that the D.E.A. had
been at the vanguard of the operations there rather than merely
serving as advisers in the background.

By contrast, the effort in West Africa is still at the beginning
stages, officials say. But the problems there are the same - and
growing. Officials described one instance in which a methamphetamine
lab was discovered in Africa, with documents suggesting that it had
been set up by a Mexican trafficking organization. William F.
Wechsler, the Pentagon's top counternarcotics officer, said that
observing drug traffickers' advances into West Africa, and the
response from American and local authorities, was like watching a
rerun of the drug war in this hemisphere in years past.

"West Africa is now facing a situation analogous to the Caribbean in
the 1980s, where small, developing, vulnerable countries along major
drug-trafficking routes toward rich consumers are vastly
under-resourced to deal with the wave of dirty money coming their
way," he said.
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