convergence

Miklaucic and Naím
are groups and individuals that see international opportunities earlier than most of us, even
earlier than other multinationals. They are capable of recruiting and hiring some of the best
talent in the world; they can afford highly trained and talented professionals in information
technology, law, finance, and banking, as well as politicians, journalists, generals, judges, and
diplomats. Meanwhile, the government agencies that have to deal with them are often highly
resource-constrained.
By the way, we are not talking about the U.S. Government or the governments of its
wealthy allies. The greatest threat is to governments in the developing world that have very
limited resources and multiple compelling and competing demands on those resources.
Many of these nations, though often small and poor, are the partners upon which we must
increasingly depend to support our efforts in counterterrorism, combating transnational crime,
providing humanitarian and disaster relief, peacekeeping efforts, and meeting other emerging
challenges. These include not-so-small countries such as Mexico, Nigeria, and Iraq. Even in
the case of the United States, there is an asymmetry between the capabilities, resources, dynamism,
and speed of networked illicit organizations and networks and those of the agencies
tasked to combat them.
Looking back over the past generation one cannot easily find many instances of strategic
success in the struggle against illicit networks. There have undoubtedly been successful campaigns
against specific organizations or individuals. One can find instances in which a law
enforcement agency or a government has neutralized a specific network or ring or taken down
notorious individuals. People go to jail—some are executed—and networks are dismantled. But
any government would be very hard-pressed to show even one market for illicit internationally
traded goods or activities in their country that is smaller today than it was 20 years ago. The
Medellín and Cali cartels that once terrorized Colombia have been dismantled, and the poster
child drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed. Yet the enterprise was replaced by a less monopolistic
(or duopolistic) arrangement and the quantity of cocaine coming from Colombia has not decreased.
Indeed globally, “Long-term seizure trends show that cocaine, heroin, and morphine as
well as cannabis seizures—in volume terms—almost doubled between 1998 and 2009, while
seizures of ATS [amphetamine-type stimulants] more than tripled over the same period.” 3
According to a much-cited 2008 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
report, “The share of counterfeit and pirated goods in world trade is estimated to have increased
from 1.85 percent in 2000 to 1.95 percent in 2007.” 4 More recent estimates project the global
value of counterfeit and pirated goods could reach $1.77 trillion by 2015. The same growth
trend is likely to be found in illicit trafficking in persons, weapons, natural resources (for example,
timber, minerals, and wildlife), and cultural items (art and archeological items, among others).
States and governments around the world are losing the battle. Moreover, the problem has
evolved beyond criminal networks. It has evolved beyond even the convergence, globalization,
and diversification of illicit networks described and discussed throughout this book. What we
must worry about today and tomorrow is the emergence of criminal states; governments that
have succumbed to this scourge and been taken over by criminals, and in fact governments
that have become themselves criminal enterprises. Our collective lack of understanding of
how criminal enterprises become governments, and how some governments have taken over
criminal enterprises not to dismantle them but to use them for their financial, political, and
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