SÉCURITÉ & STRATÉGIE N°128 December 2016 Confronting Threats from the Political-Criminal Nexus in Greater Central Eurasia: Implications for operations and Royal Supérieur de Défense future armed conflicts Institut Institut Nicolas Gosset December 2016 Confronting Threats from the Political-Criminal Nexus in Greater Central Eurasia: Implications for operations and future armed conflicts Nicolas Gosset Royal Higher Institute for Defence Centre for Security and Defence Studies Avenue de la Renaissance, 30 1000 Brussels ISSN 2295-0915 An electronic version of this document is available and can be downloaded from our website: www.rhid.be The views and opinions contended in this text are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Royal Higher Institute for Defence, the Ministry of Defence or the Belgian government authorities alike. Any question, commentary or remark related to this document can be sent to the following address: Director of the Centre for Security and Defence Studies Royal Higher Institute for Defence 30 Avenue de la Renaissance 1000 Brussels Or by e-mail to: +[email protected] Author Nicolas is a research fellow in Eurasian affairs at the Centre of Security and Defence Studies of the Royal Higher Institute for Defence, and an associated member of the Centre for Development Research (CECID) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he is part of the PhD programme in Social and Political Sciences. After completing his MA graduation in political science (2004) and sociology of organisations (2005), along with a Mphil in international relations (2006), he became a junior fellow of the Belgian Federal Government Endowment for Scien- tific Research (FNRS-FRS), working on a PhD dissertation on the governance of security in post-soviet Central Asia. Before joining the RHID, he carried out ethnographic fieldwork, combining qualitative surveys and long-term action search in several parts of Central Asia, in particular in the Republic of Uzbekistan. For that fieldwork purpose, he was first an invited junior fellow at the IFÉAC (Ins- titut français des études sur l’Asie centrale) in Tashkent, then as an intern with the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. He also collaborated in several international co-operation and develop- ment programmes in the region (UNODC, UNDP-Tacis, ZEF-Unesco) which allowed him to develop his knowledge of local languages and his expertise of the region. Nicolas speaks French (mother tong), English, Russian and Uzbek (working knowledge). His main areas of interest cover issues of ethno-political mobilisation, religious violence and radical groups in Central and South-West Asia, Afghanistan in its complexity, the qualitative analysis of transnational flows, regional cooperation, and defence and security policies in post-Soviet Eurasia; as well as Russia and China’s policies towards the region and the development of the Sino-Russian partnership. Executive Summary As it occurs across the whole central sector of the arc of crisis stretching from the Indian subcontinent in the East to the Sahel Region in the West, organised crime, the trafficking in nar- cotics and human smuggling, the illicit and uncontrolled circulation of armaments and ammuni- tions, all appear to be mutually reinforcing and destabilising factors that deeply threaten Euro- pean security, especially as their matrix and channels prominently overlap shadow networks of international jihadist militancy and its financing. Scoping well beyond traditional categories, a broad diversity of actors, groups and networks have been identified by various research works as operating different parts of the overall criminal-terrorist/insurgent transcontinental conduct stret- ching from Central and Southwest Asia to Europe and the Middle East throughout fragile and/or in-conflict regions at the heart of the Eurasian landmass. The duplication and hybridisation of un- conventional threats emerging out of the interplay of disparate sets of actors proceeding illicitly along this “Trans-Eurasian pipeline” today goes well beyond “traditional” transnational organised crime activities, such as narcotics and fire-arms trafficking, as it also includes smuggling vulne- rable people, the movement of insurgents, irregular foreign fighters, crime enforcers etc., and is often believed to encompass the potential for weapons of mass destruction-related trafficking by designated terrorist organisations. As seems likely in a region historically subject to flux and where the resources of conflict have become so intertwined, identifying the interplay and connec- tivity among these entrepreneurs of crime and violence appear to be all the more important that similar convergence models are also developing in other parts of the world as well, i.e. across the Sahel and in the Horn of Africa, and in the Middle East in particular, that makes understanding their recombining dynamics essential, as they stand increasingly prominent as a critical element in the broader global security context, and certainly that of Europe as a whole. Throughout the broad diversity of territories ranging from the margins of the former Soviet Empire in the Caucasus and Black Sea Region to Indo-Pakistani and China borderlands in Central Asia, now also in broader connection with metastasising hot spots in the Middle East, conflicts of varying intensity, the morass of protracted war and insurgency, and control of “un- governed spaces” by non-state armed groups dedicated to a whole spectrum of violent seditious activities beyond any state monopoly of legitimate violence not only undermine the security of an entire region of a historically great strategic interest for the stability of the world, but also faci- litate the proliferation of a whole range of criminal activities and trafficking of all sorts, both northward/westward and eastward/southward through highly adaptive transcontinental conducts that are able to move a multiplicity of illicit products (drugs, weapons, humans, bulk cash) that ultimately cross the external borders of the EU undetected thousands of time each weeks. Against the backdrop of a lingering 40 year-old long conflict that, still a far from and end, seems to have been, in certain respects, aggravated instead of alleviated by the flawed intervention of the inter- national community, a particularly acute problem, and perhaps the root cause of all others, re- mains illicit drug trafficking from Afghanistan, including its routes, profits, and corruptive influ- ence, and certainly the nexus between the whole political economy of crime its entails and poli- tical violence, violent extremism, and jihadist terrorism, both globally and regionally, with its lo- cal insurgent offshoots in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and the Caucasus. The trafficking of opiates and weapons from Afghanistan continues to create instability and generates extremism, and terrorism at a considerable distance in the Cauca-sus, Kosovo, Fergana Valley, India, China’s Xinjiang Region etc., and can still strike as far as in the United States and in Europe. However conceived under the heading “non-conventional” or “non-traditional”, ensuing security threats shall be best understood in their causal relationship to conventional security pro- blems (active and potential armed conflicts) they predate in most cases as the evolving combi- nation of threats stemming from the convergence and hybridisation of illicit networks that em- powers terrorists, criminals, and proliferators across the Eurasian landmass with the billions of dollars illicit activities generate in crowded shadow economies where the politics of crime is in- creasingly defining the rules of the game in front of states that have little resources and legal or law enforcement capacities and/or are them-selves captured by criminal interests. Throughout the region, a number of states have forcefully consolidated their institutional apparatus over the past two decades, only to find that organised networks with deep and lasting links to the state are div- erting public policy, colluding with criminal and drug-trafficking rings, and weakening public authority and the rule of law. If any, this is well the epistemological reality of much of Greater Central Eurasia today – a reality compounded by the possibility several states in the region are actually susceptible to failure (or have already largely done so.) In broader connection to the Middle East, the former Soviet South, also with its South Asian extension in Afghanistan and Pakistan, i.e. Washington’s “Greater Middle East”, contain a bulk of polities that are physically and governmentally gravely challenged by puzzles and pitfalls in their statehood. This, we argue, is caused by the expansion of a deeply embedded political-criminal nexus within state structures – the consolidation of a “parallel statehood”, whose influence over the judiciary, intelligence sec- tors, security forces, and state structures at large, in addition to the penetration of institutions by criminal actors and the endemic corruption that comes along, the perils of absolutism, and institu- tional animosity toward genuine political participation, all contribute to instability, regime vola- tility, and ultimately state failure. The Afghan and Pakistani cases notwithstanding, criminal groups and organised interests from and within the broader Central Eurasian region have been steadily growing in financial strength, territorial control and political alliances over the past two decades,