By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
STUTTGART, Germany, May 8, 2012 – A new
task force at U.S. European Command is helping other U.S. government agencies
and their international counterparts confront trafficking in illicit goods and
services that officials call a major national security threat to the United
States.
Eucom stood up the Joint Interagency
Counter Trafficking Center here in September to focus on trafficking in drugs,
weapons, humans and other illicit commodities, as well as their financing, Army
Brig. Gen. Mark Scraba, the center’s director, told American Forces Press
Service.
Its role is to marshal military
resources to support a whole-of-government approach to a skyrocketing problem
that extends far beyond European borders.
“Europe has become the illicit trafficking
intersection of the world,” Scraba said, a transit zone for illicit shipments
originating not only in Europe, but also in the Middle East, Asia, and
increasingly, South and Central America.
Scraba noted a variety of factors:
Europe’s central location, a lucrative cocaine market that pays four to five
times the U.S. street value, and increasing challenges traffickers face getting
drugs across the southern U.S. border.
“So there is an incredible incentive for
drug organizations to expand and open up new franchises in Europe,” Scraba
said.
Compounding the challenge, he explained,
is the fact that traffickers who once operated independently have aligned their
efforts. They see the value of working together as they use the same organized
networks to traffic their materials.
The result, Scraba said, is far more
sophisticated criminal networks able to operate across national borders. Among
the greatest concerns, he said, has been the convergence of drug and terror
networks.
All of this contributes to corruption of
legitimate governments as well as global financial and trade networks, Navy
Adm. James G. Stavridis, the Eucom commander, said during an interview with the
Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service. “It undermines fragile
democracies. It has a real human cost.”
Scraba described the step-by-step
process that occurs. “Trafficking feeds corruption. And if you have corruption,
that leads to instability within the governing process of a country,” he said.
“If you then have instability and corruption in the day-to-day governing of a
country, then that spreads to regional instability. And regional instability …
has the second- and third-order effects of impacting multiple regions,
requiring a response by the international community.”
Particularly troubling, Stavridis
recently told Congress, is the trafficking networks’ links to terrorism and
insurgencies and their ability to undermine stability, security and
sovereignty. The same networks that move narcotics, weapons and people also
transport terrorist operatives, he said, and this trafficking, regardless of
the commodity, bankrolls organized crime, terrorists and insurgents.
For example, drug trafficking through
Europe has had a significant impact on security in Afghanistan. The Taliban
made more than $150 million in 2009 alone through the sale of opium, the United
Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimated in its 2011 World Drug Report. That
same year, the U.N. estimated that 75 to 80 metric tons of Afghan heroin
reached Central and Western Europe, and another 90 metric tons transited
through Central Asia to Russia.
Concerned about this growing threat,
Stavridis took the lessons of U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task
Force South in Florida that he previously commanded to create Eucom’s
smaller-scale operation from existing resources.
With fewer than 40 staff members,
including representatives of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and other U.S.
government agencies focused on trafficking, it serves as a “fusion
organization” matrixed to other Defense Department and U.S. government
agencies. This, Scraba said, leverages military capabilities to help them
operate more effectively.
“We are the cog in the wheel” that
reaches out to and helps connect the other spokes, he said. That runs from
providing translators to monitor known trafficking networks and technology to
help federal law enforcement officials to more efficiently inspect shipping
containers to teaching police dogs to sniff out drugs or explosives.
Eucom shares intelligence and lessons
the military has learned supporting U.S. interagency partners’ counternarcotics
efforts in the United States, Scraba said. The command recently ran a
conference for 14 partner nations, providing law enforcement communications
training and sharing lessons learned in running an operations center.
“This gets at the center of gravity for
why we exist: to support our U.S. agency efforts,” Scraba said.
“The bottom line,” he explained, “is
that trafficking is a network of networks. And in order for us – the United
States and international community – to have the best chance of disrupting and
dismantling illicit trafficking, we, too, have to be a network of networks.
“That is the U.S. military, supporting
the U.S. interagency and then collaborating with international organizations
that share the same concern and have the same objectives with regards of
disrupting and dismantling illicit trafficking,” he added.
Just eight months after it stood up, the
new Eucom task force is getting a warm reception from interagency and
international partners alike, who recognize the contribution it can make to
their countertrafficking efforts.
All recognize the extent of the problem,
Scraba said, and the need to work together to confront it.
“There is no question that it is a
problem, and there is no question that this is a team sport and that it
requires the international community working together to combat this,” he said.
That’s essential to disrupting
trafficking and making Europe inhospitable to traffickers, he said. Americans
should care that it succeeds, he added, because it’s a matter of “invest now,
save later.”
“It is clear and documented that
trafficking distorts economies. It erodes sovereignties. It corrupts
democracies. It accelerates extremism. It weakens allies and feeds terrorism,”
he said.
“All that adds up to a threat to the
U.S. homeland,” he continued. “And that, from a national security perspective,
is the ‘So what?’ as far as why trafficking is such a significant issue here in
Europe.”
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