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destructive potential per se but in its intractability (due to its transnational nature
and its profitability) on the one hand, and its implications for regional and state
capacities (for transnational cooperation and for domestic governance) on the
other hand.
The drugs trafficking business is intractable for several reasons. Suffice it here to
point out two of them, the one being its transnational nature, and the other its
lucrative nature. Drugs trafficking in Central Asia is transnational: the cultivation
and production of drugs happen almost entirely in Afghanistan; the end market
for the largest share of trafficked drugs is Russia, joined to a smaller degree by
European markets; and the Central Asian states – while drug usage is growing –
are still mostly a transit region. What this implies is that even with the best and
most earnest efforts the individual Central Asian states can only deal a marginal
blow to the illicit business. With ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ – at the two ends of the
chain – remaining strong, it seems especially difficult to curtail the business
through the ‘delivery’ part.
This transnational nature of drugs trafficking requires correspondingly
transnational anti-trafficking efforts. Here the regional and international
cooperation records of recent times indicate that more often than not the
countries involved have been incapable of coming together in transnational antidrug
efforts (see Peyrouse, 2012; Rickleton, 2013). Cooperation against the drug
business has been on the table at all relevant international gatherings and
processes over the years, but in actual fact the regimes in Central Asia and
Russia have been far from ready to cooperate in this regard due to lack of trust,
lack of interest, and/or corruption and complicity of officials in the business.
Unless well-considered and direct new initiatives are promoted in the near future,
it is unlikely that this transnational crime will get an adequate transnational
response.
The other factor that makes drugs trafficking intractable is its profitability. The
UNODC estimated that in 2010 nearly 350 million USD in profits was made by
traffickers into Central Asia, and about 1.4 billion USD by trafficking on to
Russia (UNODC, 2012a: 85). In this ‘journey’ the heroin that cost 3,000 USD
per kilo in Afghanistan would be worth 22,000 USD per kilo in Russia – and,
notably, at its purest (70 per cent) when leaving Afghanistan, heroin would be
diluted and weigh more by the time in reached the final market (ibid.). Even on a
conservative reading of all these estimates, the amount of profit that drug
business can bring in makes it a crime that is hard to resist – and hence even
harder to fight. Given the state of the economies in Central Asia – with
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan especially poor and providing few legitimate business
alternatives – the lucrative business of trafficking drugs will continue to be
highly attractive.
The profitability of drugs trafficking also reflects upon state capacities. While
capabilities for transnational cooperation, as mentioned above, are weak due to
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