Shooting Up Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs

Policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin -- stop the flow of drug money, and the insurgency will wither away. This timely book vividly shows how that conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded. Vanda Felbab-Brown shows how guerrilla and terrorist organizations -- such as the Taliban, Peru's Shining Path, and Colombia's FARC -- have learned to exploit illicit markets. Aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire by allowing insurgents to pose as the population's protectors and win further legitimacy. A combination of laissez-faire toward cultivation and aggressive pursuit of traffickers is more likely to be fruitful.