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Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2008, 103 106 REVIEWS Drug gangs and terrorists From Pablo to Osama: trafficking and terrorist networks, government bureaucracies, and competitive adaptation, by Michael Kenney. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007, xiii þ 227 pp., notes to 262, bibliography to 280, index to 293. US$45 (clothbound), ISBN 9780271029313 Excellent cadavers: the Mafia and the death of the first Italian republic, by Alexander Stille. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, 412 pp., chronology to 421, notes to 444, bibliography to 449, acknowledgements to 451, index to 467. US$16 (paperback), ISBN 0099594919 It is not a new idea that the war on drugs and the war on terrorism may be related. What is surprising is that there is so little research and analysis based on this idea. Here are two books that can jump-start attention to the nexus of criminals and terrorists. Kenney begins with the US war on drugs and ends with the US war on terrorism. In an unusual juxtaposition, he reports from the war on drugs with interviews from both narcos and narcs. Both sides have stories of change over time, of battles won and lost; each side is proud of its capacity to adapt to the moves of the other. But the price and quality of cocaine on US streets have not declined in 20 years; the government is not winning. Why not? Here Kenney has recourse to theory and research in organization theory. Beginning in the 1950s, a substantial literature has examined how organizations learn and fail to learn. This literature has examined competitive adaptation in both public-sector and private-sector organizations. The general perspective is that organizations learn when members of the organization learn, but individual learning does not become organizational learning until individual experience is translated into a community of practice. Organizational learning is identified with norms that are not only widely shared but widely recognized as shared. As Kenney sees it, the narcs bureaucratic norms are codified in techne: abstract knowledge, with written and rationalized rules of procedure. In contrast, the narcos expertise is represented in metis: an accretion of unwritten rules developed by practitioners and communicated to apprentices by example in action. The war on drugs is directed from Washington, DC, by the Drug Czar (Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy), whose job is to coordinate the antidrug activities of many different government agencies at federal, state and local levels. In contrast, the narcos are a flat organization, less hierarchical and less centralized; Kenney describes drug cartels as family franchises rather than organizations. This flat-earth view of the narcos will be news to many. Journalists talk about drug cartels and drug kingpins, but Kenney s narco interviewees have a different story. Drug gangs are local networks of friends and family; different gangs specialize in different aspects of production, transportation, distribution, and sales. Killing even so prominent a ISSN 1746-7586 print/issn 1746-7594 online Ó 2008 Clark McCauley DOI: 10.1080/17467580802257080 http://www.informaworld.com
104 Reviews drug lord as Pedro Escobar does not slow the flow of drugs, as new leaders and new recruits quickly replace any losses. The motive power is the market for drugs, a market that provides 200 300 percent profits to those willing to take their chances against the war on drugs. After examining the war on drugs as competitive adaptation, Kenny applies the same perspective to the war on terrorism. Again he describes government agencies as relatively slow and hierarchical, the terrorist challengers as fast learning and networked. Again he suggests that antiterrorist expertise is codified in techne, whereas the terrorists depend on metis. This difference in learning style may be typical of asymmetric conflict. Again he finds an intricate dance of action and reaction, innovation and counter-innovation, in which the government never quite catches up with the more nimble terrorists. As the war on drugs has not been successful, so Kenney does not expect the war on terrorism to be successful. In both wars, information held close to practitioners beats centralized databases. In both wars, competitive adaptation over time means mutual dependence. Drug gangs need the war on drugs to raise their profit margins, and government agencies need the drug gangs to justify their budgets. Similarly, terrorists need the war on terrorism to raise new recruits, and government agencies need terrorists to justify their budgets. A book that reaches so far is bound to leave some questions. Some readers might wish for more help in understanding the meaning of competency trap, a concept Kenney deploys to understand how organizations fail to learn. Some may recall the Drug Enforcement Administration reports detailing efforts to capture Pedro Escobar that were found on Escobar s shelves when he fled his palatial prison, La Catedral (http:// www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs/). Is it possible that some drug cartels may be as centralized and bureaucratic as their government adversaries? Perhaps there is an economic logic that favors increasing centralization for drug cartels, but the war on drugs moved narcos toward decentralization in the same way that the war on terrorism moved Al Qaeda from AQ Central to AQ franchise. Similarly, if extraordinary profits explain the ease of recruiting new gang members, what is the profit that brings new recruits to terrorism? These questions depend on the value of comparing terrorists and drug gangs, and Kenney is persuasive that this comparison leads to organizational parallels worth pursuing and organizational theory worth applying. The pessimistic message of Pablo and Osama is to some extent balanced by Stille s Excellent cadavers. The title cadavers are those of prominent government officials assassinated by the Mafia in Sicily, as distinguished from the more numerous bodies of criminals and ordinary citizens killed by the same hands. Both excellent and common bodies were piling up at an accelerated rate after the Mafia began to feel the power of enormous profits from the drug trade, including about three lives a week lost in Palermo alone in the early 1980s. Drug profits powered a split among the men of honor ; more money and increased violence gave an upstart faction from Corleone an edge against more traditional rivals. In 1992, at the height of its power in Sicily, the Mafia killed two too many. Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone were the leaders of a pool of anti-mafia magistrates in Palermo. They were brave, hard-working, and as interested in bank receipts as crime reports. Their investigations led to indictments of hundreds of Mafiosi in a maxi-trial that began in 1986 inside a bomb-proof bunker-hall courthouse guarded by Army troops and tanks. The trial produced convictions, and, as it began to look like prison sentences were not going to be reversed or minimized on appeal, Mafiosi bombs killed
Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 105 Falcone on the highway from the Palermo airport and killed Borsellino as he visited his mother. The result was public revulsion against the Mafia. Bedsheets with anti-mafia slogans were hung from windows in Palermo. Throngs attended the funerals of the two men. Shrines and rituals developed at the places they were killed. The archbishop of Palermo preached against the killers. In short order, Falcone and Borsellino became anti-mafia martyrs. Stille emphasizes the extent to which Mafia power depended on public attitudes of tolerance and even admiration. Mafia members in Sicily numbered only thousands, but Sicily is poor and perhaps 200,000 profited by the economic activities of the Mafia. In addition, a portion of the population sympathized with the Mafia as representing Sicilian dignity and resistance to the mainland Italian government and its colonial officials in Sicily. Thus, when Sicilians turned against the Mafia, the mob was in trouble. Already imprisoned informers, who had told only part of what they knew, opened up to tell all. Hundreds of new informers came forward. Politicians who had represented Mafia interests began to refuse new requests. The Christian Democrats, leaders of every Italian government since 1946 and long seen as partners with the Mafia against the Communists, lost power and dissolved their party in 1993. Stille ends his story with the possibility that the Mafia could recover if Italian politicians need them again, but there is no doubt that a political revolution followed the deaths of Judge Falcone and Prosecutor Borsellino. Although the power of martyrdom in this history is undeniable, it is important to notice other contributions to the turn against the Mafia. It was not only members of the terrorism pool who were murdered. Mafia-supported politicians who had failed to derail Mafia convictions were also killed. It is possible that the turn against the Mafia depended on politicians moving to protect themselves. As well, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s reduced the political value of Mafia support against the Communists. Stille also points to the importance of ethnicity. Previous anti-mafia efforts had been led by mainland Italians. Fresh from victories against the Red Brigades, carabinieri general Carlo Dalla Chiesa was sent to Palermo in 1982 to lead an anti-mafia campaign. On his first day in Palermo, he attended the funeral of one of his deputies; six months later, he was shot dead with his wife and driver. His death did not produce a mass turn against the Mafia, and Stille suggests that Sicilians were not greatly disturbed by the assassination of one more mainlander sent to control Sicily. In this perspective, the social construction of martyrdom for Falcone and Borsellino depended on the fact that they were themselves Sicilian, born and raised in Palermo. Perhaps most important were the divisions within the Mafia. The ferocious attacks by the Corleonese faction against more traditional Mafia families had created enemies. Men of honor became informers in order to use state power to avenge themselves against the upstarts from Corleone. They only needed to be persuaded that, this time, the state was serious about going after the Mafia and its protectors. Despite a level of power and cultural integration far exceeding that of the Red Brigades at their strongest, the Mafia was badly hurt by state power in the 1990s. Competition within the Sicilian Mafia produced a spiral of violence: more violence between Mafia families led to more informers, then to more Mafia violence to intimidate judicial and political authorities using the informers, then to a public reaction against violence in which Falcone and Borsellino became martyred victims of the Mafia, then to hundreds of new informers and more successful prosecutions. This spiral occurred at a time when the fall of the Soviet Union made the Mafia less useful politically as counterweight against the
106 Reviews Communists. A perfect storm of opportunities gave the Italian government its chance for a major success against the Mafia. In representing the complex interplay of individual, group, and public-opinion levels of analysis, Stille s book provides a case study worth close attention from those who would understand terrorism and how to combat terrorism. The Sicilian Mafia is arguably a terrorist organization: a non-state organization that aims to coerce civilians by threat and infliction of violence. It uses shootings and bombings to make its points. It infiltrates and to some degree represents local political interests and organizations. It uses drug industry profits to sustain its violence. In many ways, fighting the Mafia in Sicily is similar to fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Kenney s comparison of Pablo and Osama suggests the protean and adaptive capacities of criminal gangs facing state power, Stille s history of the Sicilian Mafia suggests the limits of these capacities when the state can capitalize on terrorists mistakes. As government violence in response to terrorists can miscarry to recruit new terrorists, so terrorist violence can open new opportunities for mobilizing state power against the terrorists. Clark McCauley Department of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA editordac@brynmawr.edu