The Weaponisation of Everything by Mark Galeotti

Author:Mark Galeotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: urn:ean:9780300253443
Publisher: Yale University Press, London

EXPEDITIONARY WARFARE, GODFATHER-STYLE

Do these kinds of operations really matter in the grand scheme of things? Although criminals, like the hacker who crashed Liberia, may play a role in the kind of weaponised anarchy discussed in Chapter 11, in the main they are not going to bring down a country or force a 180-degree change in policy, although they can undermine sanctions. The real impacts of the weaponisation of crime are subtler. They are a substantial force multiplier for other aggressive means of coercion and suasion. They can be – and are – used to raise ‘black account’ funds to support political subversion. They are able to silence whistle-blowers and annoying critics. They hack the compromising information your spies can exploit. In the final analysis, as yesterday’s Americans showed in Sicily and today’s Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine, hostile states can even use organised crime to pave the way for more conventional military operations.

Secondly, they eat away at the political and economic resources of a target state. If smugglers are crossing your borders with impunity, if hackers seem to be able to make sport of your critical systems without trouble, if gangs are brawling and killing in your streets without fear, then how credible does your state appear, and how likely is it that people will start looking for alternative, radical solutions to their worries? Tough-on-crime rhetoric has eased the rise of corrupt authoritarian populists from Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines (who vowed ‘to litter Manila Bay with the bodies of criminals’) to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (who affirmed that ‘a policeman who doesn’t kill isn’t a policeman’), many of whom adopt what has been called a ‘pay to play’ approach, whereby foreign countries and companies can flout local laws and shape policy, if the right people prosper. At other times, the need to fight crime may even leave a country open to leverage. For example, south-eastern Myanmar’s Karen region, long troubled by vicious conflict between separatists and government forces, witnessed the emergence of all kinds of criminal businesses, such as illegal casinos and industrial zones, largely connected to Triads forced out of Cambodia. Such has been the scale of the problem that Myanmar had to turn to China for assistance in dealing with it, further tightening its dependence on its northern neighbour.

More generally, crime costs. Britain’s National Crime Agency in 2019 estimated that serious and organised crime cost the country at least £37 billion a year: close to the same size as the total UK defence budget. If you are having to divert resources to customs patrols and drug treatment centres, to fraud restitution programmes and police restructuring, then that money cannot be spent on the military, or foreign aid, or other instruments of power projection. Speaking of power projection, states can use the underworld to bypass and undermine sanctions and other instruments often used to try and curb aggressive or transgressive regimes.

Furthermore, the economic penetration described in the previous chapters is often carried out with or in collaboration with criminals.

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