Brookings Press Blog

“Shooting Up” Author Analyzes Mexico’s Strategy for Winning the Drug War

Mexico’s drug war has claimed more than 18,000 lives in the past three years. Two weeks ago, the wave of violence took a new turn, as gunmen in Ciudad Juárez carried out deadly attacks on American consular employees and their families for the first time. Nonetheless, argues Shooting Up author and Brookings fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, “a more effective Mexican anti-drug strategy, supported by U.S. assistance, is finally underway.” Writing in The Daily Beast, Felbab-Brown notes that the Mexican government has moved from focusing on decapitating drug cartels to a multifaceted response that seeks to dismantle entire networks while increasing investment in public goods and social services. “Such bonds between the community and the state are what at the end of the day will allow the state to prevail over the cartels,” she concludes.

- Read "How to Win Mexico’s Drug War.”

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

Counterinsurgency Expert Vanda Felbab-Brown Quoted in the New York Times

Should the Afghan government reach out to the Taliban? No, says, Shooting Up author and Brookings fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown: “The more there is talk of negotiation, the more the Taliban view it as a sign of weakness. How do you make sure the reconciliation process does not embolden the Taliban to go on the march?” But Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is said to be "privately receptive" to the idea.

- Read the New York Times article.

- Listen to the podcast of a recent discussion of Shooting Up with Felbab-Brown, Brookings vice president Martin Indyk, and Wendy Chamberlin, former ambassador to Pakistan and president of the Middle East Institute.

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

Vanda Felbab-Brown Blogs on the Karzai Brothers for The New York Times

Brookings fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the forthcoming Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, joins Robert D. Kaplan (Center for a New American Security), Frederick W. Kagan (American Enterprise Institute), Stephen Biddle (Council on Foreign Relations), and Andrew J. Bacevich (Boston University) on the New York Times blog, Room for Debate, to discuss the Karzai brothers and the challenges they create for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Numerous reports have linked Ahmed Wali Karzai, the leading power broker in Kandahar and brother of President Hamid Karzai, to drug trafficking. But as Felbab-Brown points out, the Karzais are only the tip of the iceberg: “Indeed, many power brokers in Afghanistan—including some of today’s staunchest eradicators of the poppy crop and members of the Ministry of Interior’s counternarcotics section—have been involved in the drug trade. Because opium constitutes between a third and a half of the country’s gross domestic product (and has been for 20 years), it is deeply embedded in the society’s socio-economic fabric, political arrangements and power relations.”

- Follow the discussion at Room for Debate.

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

Brookings Press Author Testifies Before Senate Panel

On October 21, in testimony before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Vanda Felbab-Brown—author of the forthcoming book Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs—discussed how narcotics production influences security, political, and economic developments in Afghanistan. She also examined the effectiveness of policies to mitigate these effects, offering recommendations for U.S. policy, and equally critically, urging strategic patience: “Meaningful and sustainable progress on narcotics that also advances counterinsurgency and counterterrorism objectives, mitigates conflict, and enhances state building and human security of the Afghan people will take many years and easily decades. Without realistic timelines, there is a real danger that even a well-designed counternarcotics policy will be prematurely and unfortunately discarded as ineffective and that a desire for short-term self-satisfying outcomes will once again drive policy toward ineffective and counterproductive results.”

- Read Felbab-Brown’s testimony.

- Listen to Felbab-Brown discuss opium production in Afghanistan with NPR’s Noah Adams.

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

Four Crises and a Peace Process

Book, Event Examines American Engagement with India and Pakistan

While many assume that the era of India-Pakistan crisis is over, the new Brookings book Four Crises and a Peace Process questions whether new flashpoints might lie just ahead. Authors P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Brookings senior fellow Stephen P. Cohen explore this critical question, made even more urgent by the current political turmoil in Pakistan.

Four Crises … focuses on four contained conflicts on the subcontinent: the “Brasstacks” crisis of 1986-1987, the Compound Crisis of 1990, the Kargil Conflict of 1999, and the Border Confrontation Crisis of 2001-02. All four of the crises are notable because any one could have escalated into a large-scale conflict—or even all-out war—and three of these conflicts took place after India and Pakistan had gone nuclear.

Brookings launched this book last week with an event featuring Cohen; Brookings senior fellow Peter W. Rodman; Teresita Schaffer, director of the South Asia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Ashley Tellis, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ambassador Schaffer said this about the book:

At a time when all of us South Asia watchers are beating our gums daily and more about Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is a useful reminder that the old standby India-Pakistan issue is still with us, that it is an old standby, but that it changes through time and sometimes in significant ways.

Dr. Tellis complimented the authors on “truly an excellent book” and said:

I read it over the Thanksgiving break, and I had read all the previous studies that had been done which fed into the book. This is really, in some sense, much better than the previous work because you have an opportunity to look at four crises in a synoptic fashion, and so you can actually tease out elements of comparison and salient themes that come through the book very, very clearly. It’s written in a wonderful fashion, and I think the organization is absolutely superb with respect to the variables the authors are trying to tease out of the four crises that they have investigated.

- Check out the full event transcript.

- Learn more about Four Crises and a Peace Process.

- Read about Four Crises and a Peace Process in The Daily Times of Pakistan.

Worst of the Worst

New book from Brookings and the World Peace Foundation examines repressive and rogue nations

Repressive regimes tyrannize their own citizens and threaten global stability and order. Worst of the Worst identifies and characterizes the world’s most odious states and singles out which repressors are aggressive and, hence, can truly be called rogues. Robert I. Rotberg and his colleagues define the actions that constitute repression and propose a method of measuring human rights violations. They offer an index of nation-state repressiveness, classifying “gross repressors,” “high repressors,” and “aggressive repressors” or “rogues” on a ten-point scale. Based on arms and drug trafficking, support of terror, possession of weapons of mass destruction, and crossborder attacks, this valuable diagnostic tool will guide the international community in crafting effective policies to deal with injustice in the developing world. The repressors and rogues profiled include Belarus, Burma, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Syria, Togo, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.

- Learn more about Worst of the Worst.

This Week in History

The Nuclear Bomb Is Born

On July 16, 1945, the top-secret Manhattan Project successfully tested the first atomic bomb in Alamorgodo, New Mexico.

On July 22, 1987, in a landmark decision, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles. This decision paved the way for the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the United States that effectively eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Take a moment to peruse these books about nuclear proliferation:

- Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story of How North Korea Got the Bomb, Charles Pritchard (Brookings, 2007)

- Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World, Ivo H. Daalder, ed. (Brookings, 2007)

- Global Non-Proliferation and Counter-Terrorism: The Impact of UNSCR 1540, Olivia Bosch and Peter van Ham, eds. (Brookings, Chatham House, and the Clingendael Institute; 2006)

- U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today’s Threats, George Bunn and Christopher F. Chyba, eds. (Brookings and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, 2006)

- The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices, Kurt M. Campbell, Robert Einhorn, and Mitchell Reiss, eds. (Brookings, 2004).

(Image above is of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945)

Failed Diplomacy Book Event

Panel to discuss Pritchard’s inside story of how North Korea got the bomb

On Tuesday, July 17, Brookings, the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the Korea Economic Institute will host a discussion of Charles “Jack” Pritchard’s new book Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story of How North Korea Got the Bomb. The event—which will take place at 10 a.m. at SAIS in Washington, DC—will feature Pritchard, a former ambassador and special envoy for negotiations with North Korea. Richard Bush, senior fellow and director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at Brookings, will moderate the discussion.  Don Oberdorfer, chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS and author of The Two Koreas (Basic Books, 2001), will serve as discussant.

- Event information and registration.

- UPDATE - Read the event transcript.

- Learn more about Failed Diplomacy.