217: Winning Against Global Networks (Part I)

Please join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know.

 

Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations

and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization.

 

With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started.

---

 

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

---

Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

---

Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy

---

Transcript

00:00:10    JACK GAINES
I love a quote you had about starting as a journalist and how they just drop you into some shitty situation. You got to quickly figure it out and then explain to others what's going on.

00:00:21    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, I mean, when I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And all I knew was that I didn't want to be in school anymore. All of my professors were recommending that I go in the master's or PhD program and become a professor. And I knew I didn't want to do more school. And the only things that I really liked were traveling and writing and researching. And so somebody was like, well, why don't you try journalism? And I was like, oh, OK, that sounds like a good idea. And for years, I literally thought that journalism was something you did when you couldn't think of anything else to do. I didn't even know there were like Columbia University and a prestigious school for it. But what I've realized and appreciated. Since leaving the industry and moving into other sectors in the information space and the research space is that it really trained me for a lot of things. I can write quickly. I can respond. That capacity to be dropped into somewhere and quickly figure it out. And there is a methodology. And particularly working for the Associated Press, we were drilled on the methodology of... rigorously assessing what the most important points are and putting them first and going from the most important point down to the lesser important points because literally stories get cut from the bottom. And unless they're big features that are meant to take 8 ,000 words or something, but bot news gets cut from the bottom. And I'm old enough that the first newspaper I worked for still laid it out with... gluing the copy to the page and then mimeographing it. And so they literally would say, we have to take two inches off your story. It would have to be written so the bottom could just be cut. Then I moved into doing broadcast, radio and television, where you usually have to explain your story in a minute 40 or less, sometimes 45 seconds. And so that really gives you a rigorous training. in boiling something that can be quite complicated, especially in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, down to a very, very basic thing. Once I moved into working as a consultant to the government, several of the military commanders I worked for would always have me be the one that would brief high -level policy. I first thought that that was just because they wanted to tell that they had a woman on their team. But I actually realized that it was because I was accustomed to and trained in explaining something in really simplified terms in a minute and a half. And that was often all we had time for. If you're trying to brief a four -star or an assistant secretary, you're not going to get much time. Right.

00:03:11    JACK GAINES
And when you're in the back of the room and you're watching somebody struggle to get to the point, I'm sure you're gritting your teeth going, you're dying here.

00:03:17    GRETCHEN PETERS
Oh, yeah. They're reading their PowerPoint painful. And so I really realized later on that those skills that I learned as a journalist were actually very, very useful. And I wasn't intimidated by being dropped into some place that I knew nothing about. When you work for the AP, it's just a really good training for explaining what's going on. And then that kind of led you to writing a book,

00:03:41    JACK GAINES
then that kind of led you to writing a book, Seeds of Terror, back in 2009. Terrific book, by the way. And it's funny because I worked in 2013 at the Kabul embassy running the Taliban counter -influence program. And one of my complaints was that they were producing as much income through illicit trade as what the U .S. coalition was bringing in to fight them. We had a gap in our understanding of how powerful and capable this force was because we were not accepting that they had money. And they had access and they were using it against us.

00:04:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
So one of the things that I learned when I worked for DOD, and I worked mainly with the intelligence folks, is that military intelligence traditionally is trained to try and figure out where the artillery is coming from. And things like, what is the physical terrain? What is the physical terrain and where is our enemy positioned? They don't look at money. They don't look at how their adversary is financed because traditionally the United States has fought other states. And so the adversary is financed by the other state. And so in these irregular warfare situations, there was kind of this broad acceptance that the Taliban was being funded by donations. Pakistan, but also donations from the Muslim faithful in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That was widely accepted. And it was true. But from my research, that money represented a fraction of their earnings. And the vast majority of it came from drugs and extortion and timber smuggling and artisanal mining and all sorts of schemes. And what's also interesting is that if you got down to the company level intelligence officer, that guy or occasionally that woman knew all of that. They knew what the local commanders were doing around them to earn money, but they would never report on it. It was in their heads. And so I would go and meet with them and say, how are they making money locally? And they would sit there and explain it all. And I would say, why am I not seeing this in your intelligence reports? And they'd be like, do you think that's important? They'd never been told to report on it. And so it was just something that was happening in kind of in plain sight all around them. And there was kind of a total strategic failure. to try and understand how the adversary was financing himself, to try and disrupt that financing. And it's funny because it's one of the main dictums in Sun Tzu's teaching. I'm a big fan of Sun Tzu, but one of his main dictums is it's much better to destroy his donkey cart than to shoot a soldier. You'll have much more impact because they won't be able to supply themselves. They won't have the funds to mount an army. And it's something we just didn't work on. in that case. And there was a recent story that we talked about before agreeing to do this podcast, this recent story about the Russian smuggler that was supplying goods to Ukraine.

00:06:43    JACK GAINES
That was Maxim Marchenko?

00:06:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah. There was still a failure to break down his donkey carts. And this is the blind spot that I felt like I was banging my head against the wall to explain for years. You can go and arrest Chapo Guzman or the commercial equivalent that I always give is that we could go and fire a drone strike at the CEO of Toyota and it wouldn't stop them from putting out cars. So what is it in Toyota's supply chain that if you disrupted it would grind their supply chain to a halt? The reason I use the Toyota example is that there was a fire in a Toyota plant that produced a certain valve that went into every single Toyota model. And it destroyed that plant. They didn't have an alternative source for that valve. And it cost the company, I forget what it was, but something like 20 % of GDP that year because they couldn't replace it. And so it ground everything to a halt. And so when I've worked as an advisor on these projects, I've tried to help my clients and partners. understand, to map the supply chain from soup to nuts and to look for that moment, that part where there's no resiliency in the supply chain. Because what tends to happen with U .S. government interventions or interdiction efforts, law enforcement tends to hit them over and over and over in the places where their activities are the most visible. The reason they focus on big drug busts, then they drag it all out in front of the cameras.

00:08:12    JACK GAINES
reason they focus on big drug busts, then they drag it all out in front of the cameras. it's easier for them to show that in Congress, a call for funding, than it is to spend two, three years on a network and maybe get it to collapse.

00:08:27    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, with a very predictable result that they become more resilient at those levels. And yet in the fly chain, they're not resilient at all. They don't have a deep bench at all. And if you take one or two people out, arrest them, kill them, whatever's allowed under the rules of engagement, we'll throw the entire network into a disarray.

00:08:47    JACK GAINES
Right. And so we need to change the grading funding to focus on did you take the network out? Is this a recurring issue or not? And show that as success versus the big catch or the supply drugs.

00:08:59    GRETCHEN PETERS
100 percent. They're graded and funded and promoted. And those things have very little long term impact.

00:09:05    JACK GAINES
Matter of fact, drug cartels now kind of plan on getting a big shipment caught. They almost prep for it.

00:09:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
Not just that. We had evidence when I was working with the DOD in Afghanistan that the Taliban were actually calling in tips to the coalition. They would send a drug shipment down one road, maybe a reasonably timey one by Taliban standards, and then they'd have a much bigger one going down another road. They'd tip off the coalition to the small one in order to provide cover for the much bigger shipment that was moving somewhere else.

00:09:36    JACK GAINES
A gold flag or a red herring.

00:09:38    GRETCHEN PETERS
False flag, yeah. I'm sure drug traffickers in other parts of the world do it too. Why wouldn't they?

00:09:43    JACK GAINES
Yeah, I'm sure they do. The cost of doing business is that they're going to lose some percentage to seizures.

00:09:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
cost of doing business is that they're going to lose some percentage to seizures. But even organizations like the UNODC and the DEA acknowledge that at best, they tend to seize between 10 and 15 percent of the total supply. Even those numbers, I think, are optimistic.

00:10:02    JACK GAINES
I think they are too, because the market price of most of these drugs remain constant.

00:10:07    GRETCHEN PETERS
The main salt? Yeah, constant.

00:10:09    JACK GAINES
Yeah, that was a great point. You actually are one of the few people I know who's taken down networks. The one I remember is when I was at AFRICOM, you were in South Africa, and you worked with some partners and allies to take down a smuggling network on the east coast of Africa that was doing all kinds of trade along the coast and then shipping it up into Southeast Asia, correct?

00:10:30    GRETCHEN PETERS
The operation was run by the DEA Special Operations Division. A lot of people played a role in making it happen. But I had been hired with my colleague Kathleen Miles to map the supply chains that were moving elephant ivory and rhino horn from sub -Saharan East Africa to mainly consumer markets in East Asia, Vietnam, China, places like that, Malaysia. And what we found, there had been a very unfortunately misleading article that got a lot of attention about Joseph Kony. That was a cover article in National Geographic by one of Geographic's big, famous authors. And it basically had convinced the U .S. government and various other people, lots of conservation groups, that Joseph Kony was the big player in smuggling ivory, which was nonsense. Kony's army were doing all sorts of terrible things at the village level, but they were like 150 guys. They were mostly malarial most of the time. They'd moved. tiny amount of elephant ivory. And what we found when we started looking into the supply chains was that the big players that were moving multi -ton shipments of ivory off the coast of Africa were the same networks that were moving multi -ton shipments of drugs and timber and containers full of people off the continent. Those were the people that had the capacity to move illegal goods through ports. They had bought off senior customs officials. We were working on this project through my then NGO and we were funded by State Department, USA, the Elephant Crisis Fund, a few other groups. But I knew one of the DEA agents who was based in Kenya who had helped get members of this one network arrested that we believed were sort of the super facilitators for a lot of the ivory and drugs that were moving off the Swahili coast. not just from Kenya, but mainly from Mombasa, but also from Uganda and Tanzania and to some extent partnered with some other smugglers in Mozambique. And once we managed to team up with this DEA team and started looking into it, it was fascinating. I got to listen to some of the undercover recordings and Bhaktash Akasha, who was the head of this network out of Mombasa. was bragging to the DEA's confidential sources who he thought he was going to do this big drug deal with. He was bragging to them about how he had a route into various countries. He was like, we've got a route into Uganda. We've got a route into Tanzania. We've got several routes into Mozambique. And what I realized listening to him is that he was not talking about a physical route like a road or a airstrip. He had all of those things. He had access to all of those things. But he was talking about a corrupt pathway in each of those countries. Then he would start talking about which vice presidents were on his payroll and which customs directors were on his payroll. which logistics companies were secretly shadow -owned by him and his family or shadow -owned by the, it was always the president's brother, sort of like Afghanistan, and how they sort of had this vast underworld network that was hiding in plain sight. Having an inside view on how all of that worked really gave me a much better perception of the importance of really mapping these supply chains and all of the supporting. entities, the tiny airlines, the trucking companies, the freight forwarding companies, those guys did get arrested. Eventually, they got not extradited. They paid off the court system more than $2 million to make sure none of their extradition hearings ever went forward. So eventually, under pressure from the U .S. and various other things happened, the president of Kenya just handed them over. They were just sort of expelled from the country, and they're still in jail in the United States. And after that, there wasn't an ivory seizure of more than, I believe, a few kilos coming out of Mombasa for several years after their takedown. And so it was a case where taking out the kingpins did make a big difference because it disrupted those corrupt pathways.

00:14:46    JACK GAINES
But there were multiple people throughout the node that were picked up, not just the guy who was just bragging about his network, right?

00:14:54    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, multiple people picked up and extradited, but also one of them flipped and started cooperating with the DOJ. And so there was a huge expose of their criminal network throughout Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania. And so that made it a lot harder for those entities to move illicit goods.

00:15:12    JACK GAINES
Right. That would be a great case study to show the example of how networks work and how to break them.

00:15:18    GRETCHEN PETERS
It was a great learning experience for me. I can say that.

00:15:22    JACK GAINES
We figured it out that time and we actually collapsed the network. How come we're not figuring it out now? What seems to be the lesson lost?

00:15:29    GRETCHEN PETERS
Well, I think the lesson lost, number one, is that simply taking out the Kinkin is usually not going to have much of a long -term impact. That you don't want to just arrest the Pablo Escobar or the Chapo Guzman. You need to map the network. from soup to nuts, to look at what happens at the procurement phase, what happens at the sort of production phase, the drug labs where it's mixed up. And that might happen in several phases. Who are the people that are able to move it both at the national level, say it moves around Africa first or South America first, and then who moves it transnationally and who receives it in the consumer markets and how it gets distributed at the consumer level. And once you understand all of that and the key players, you can start developing strategy to interdict key players at each point to really collapse the production. And you can look for places where there aren't a lot of redundancies, like the Toyota valve strike. So I used to talk about something called the martini glass model of the criminal supply chain, because normally what you find is that there are lots and lots of actors. at either end of the supply chain. So there'll be lots and lots of farmers growing opium in Afghanistan or lots and lots of farmers growing coca in Colombia or weed or whatever it is. There'll be lots and lots of poachers poaching elephants comparative to the exporters. Then there'll be lots and lots of people. who sell whatever the illicit good is on the retail end. The guys standing in the corner selling dime bags or the people selling pills on Snapchat today. But in the middle, in that stem of the martini glass, there's very, very few networks that have the capacity to move multi -ton shipments of illicit goods through transnational ports of entry. And those are harder to replace. So if you can get to that level and take them out of business, it's much harder for that to get reconstituted. And if you can expose at the same time the criminal patronage networks that make their business possible, then you really add bang to your buck.

00:17:40    JACK GAINES
Right, because then they can't just reform that network.

00:17:43    GRETCHEN PETERS
Right. But either end of the supply chain, under Timit Waugh's model, those tend to be the people who are the most visible. The farmers that are growing the crops or the people that are selling drugs or selling whatever it is are much more visible. They have to be more visible. But they're also easily replaceable. And so another paper I wrote a few years ago called The Curse of the Shiny Object. talks about the fact that human beings intuitively tend to attack problems where we see them. But we can really have a lot more impact if you attack the problem where it's not as visible. As humans,

00:18:17    JACK GAINES
humans, we hide our most secretive, critical things. We don't put our most sensitive parts out in public. That makes sense.

00:18:24    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exactly. But also the places where illicit activity is more visible has to be more resilient because the criminal networks know it's going to get. interdicted. And so it's sort of predictable that they'll make it easier for them to replace the guy that's driving drugs across a corner. But certainly in a lot of parts of the world, in the court systems, they really, really like to catch somebody with a trunk load of drugs or a trunk load of eyes. And then they like to catch them in flagrante. And it's much, much harder under certain judicial systems to prove a conspiracy. And I used to have this argument with U .S. government officials about Afghanistan. I would be trying to convince them that the Taliban was a major drug trafficking organization. They would want to hear The Intercept with Mullah Omar on the phone trying to trade a bag of heroin for a dirty bomb. He's not the guy that does that. He's the Tony Soprano. sitting in the back of whatever the Taliban's equivalent of the Bada Bing is, collecting envelopes of money from his guys who do that. He coordinates the network and he keeps the network together, which is also an incredibly difficult job because, again, we're talking about violent criminals. These guys are constantly getting into beefs with each other. So the person who's running the network, it is very much like a lot of those mafia movies where the New York mob is fighting the New Jersey mob all the time. That used to happen all the time in Afghanistan, and I saw it in Africa as well. And so the really powerful network commanders were not the ones that actually did the wheeling and dealing. They're like the conductor of the orchestra. Another one of my often repeated sayings is that a criminal supply chain, it's kind of like an old line about Gilda Radner doing everything as Fred Astaire, only backwards and in heel. We have all the same roles and functions and operational nodes as a commercial supply chain. And they're usually hiding in plain sight.

00:20:37    JACK GAINES
And my concern now is that with the success of the Taliban and Hezbollah in surviving attacks and conflict, it has become a playbook for upcoming emergent autocrats, kleptocrats, and also states that want to conduct state capture or neocolonialism as Russia is doing in Central Africa. It's their playbook now for creating chaos and disorder while then setting up an illicit network and then replacing the political sphere with people that support them so that they can lock that country up and then start reaping out all the resources.

00:21:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
Absolutely. I mean, we've seen that on Afghanistan, which has been handed back to essentially a narco -terror regime. We've seen it in Russia as probably the preeminent example of a really, really powerfully criminalized. society that's creating all sorts of havoc around the world. I don't know if you tracked even Dudley and Jeremy McDermott's website and publications called Inside Crime, but they've been doing some really fascinating reporting recently, both on state capture, but also cocaine production across Central and South America, which is just exploding and gross. And they're also tracking the formation of new multinational networks. that include Italian and Albanian crime networks that didn't used to function in Central and South America that are moving unprecedentedly huge amounts of cocaine into Europe. And they're also writing about the growing power of the narco insurgency in Mexico, where 60 percent of the states of Mexico are now really severely impacted by the narco presence. And these multifaceted networks are forming new and more complicated. global supply chains. And I just critical that our government and other partner governments understand how these are structured from end to end, how they work together from end to end. I just don't know that there's a lot of that kind of strategic analysis going on, but we can measure the impact. Colombia alone, according to some of the recent Inside Crime reporting, cocaine production increased by as much as a thousand tons just last year. That's yielding a supply that's over $66 billion. That's almost 20 % of Colombia's GDP. We're back to sort of 1980s level. And again, that's just Colombia. I could tell you similar stories about South Africa and Congo and some of the stuff that's going down in Burma. Ecuador is another place. Venezuela. So it kind of feels like everywhere I look, there's higher and higher levels of state capture going on. Even here in the United States, there's been some reporting about dark money behind some of the big crypto packs that are really going after politicians in this country who are just suggesting that crypto products should have the same regulations as other securities. And so pretty scary stuff. And I think the other thing. that is not anywhere near well enough understood, including by me, in part because we haven't had the resources to study it, is the extent to which illicit networks are financing disinformation and misinformation campaigns on social media. We know they're out there. We know that the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, to some extent, are financing big and destructive misinformation campaigns. But I don't think there has been anywhere near a comprehensive enough effort to understand some of the illicit networks that seem to be financing this kind of stuff.

00:24:13    JACK GAINES
Is there state -sponsored criminal organizations leading the effort? Or is it that the criminal organizations are kind of running the PRC and Xi Jinping just happens to be the guy that's there as the leader on their behalf? Because Sam Cooper, the reporter, he had Christopher Mayer on. And Vera was talking about how the Macau criminal family is who supported Xi Jinping and actually helped him rise to president, which means that if they got him there, I like what mom used to say, you know, I brought you into this world. I could take you back out again.

00:24:49    GRETCHEN PETERS
Right. They're going to take a pound of flesh. That's for sure.

00:24:52    JACK GAINES
Yeah. So and so that makes me question, is PRC a criminal state or what?

00:24:57    GRETCHEN PETERS
Totally. John Casara has done some really interesting work on that, too. It's a big topic to get your arms around. But some of the money laundering efforts, TD Bank just went down for what was it like a two point something billion dollar fine. Just crazy amounts of cash being deposited into TD Bank accounts by mainly Chinese students studying in the United States and not Chinese American students, but actual. Chinese students here on student visas that were possibly being forced to do this, who knows, to pick up fentanyl money and deposit it into accounts. But when a foreign student attending college in Chicago is depositing millions of dollars in cash, a bank should flag that and stop it from happening and alert authorities. It's not a normal thing for college students to have millions of dollars in cash. Right.

00:25:54    JACK GAINES
I found it. $18 trillion in transactions. Right.

00:25:57    GRETCHEN PETERS
I mean, crazy.

00:25:58    JACK GAINES
So basically, almost the U .S. budget.

00:26:01    GRETCHEN PETERS
And it's not the only bank. Word on the street is there's a couple more banks about to go down in this investigation. So I'll be fascinated to hear what those supply chains look like. And I will be very interested to see what emerges from those court cases about the involvement of the Chinese government. And the way that they intersected both with criminal networks out of China, but also the way they intersected with criminal networks in Mexico.

00:26:27    JACK GAINES
Well, the reason that I suspect there's a playbook that's been built around these processes is that when Assad finally stabilized from the Civil War and it looked like he was going to stay in power, he immediately went to distributing narcotics in Italy. It seemed like someone had said, OK, now that you have some control, this is what you need to do. You need to start making money. You can do that by setting up a little circle of oligarchs. and then have them start doing narcotics chain, go send it to Italy. And that's when he started getting busted for selling drugs. I've thought, it seems like there's a pattern they're following. It's very similar to other patterns in other countries where a dictator will take control and suddenly trafficking is up, narcotics is up, and then they maintain this long -term instability in the country in order to do whatever they want, like in South Sudan.

00:27:13    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exactly. There's this sort of fantasy in our development space that we think that dictators in these countries want to stabilize things, but they don't. Because if they stabilize things and impose the rule of law, then they can't smuggle anymore. That's the source of income. So we mustn't go into these situations thinking that stability is the end goal of the government officials there. Another way to look at it is that if we want to try and stamp out that illicit activity, say there's drugs coming into the United States that we want to curtail, you have to look at ways to give those networks some sort of peace dividend. Maybe you can interdict and arrest some of them, but some of them you're going to have to convince as part of your end strategy to getting into something that's not illegal or at least not dangerous to the United States. And so I don't see that strategy happening either. It kind of has to be a lot more nuanced and holistic than what I view as sort of very blunt approaches, like we'll arrest this guy, we'll seize a couple tons of dope, and then we'll call it a victory, move on. And actually stabilizing a region, shifting their economy on a substantial level, if you're talking about a place like Afghanistan or Colombia, where a large percentage of GDP comes from drugs or other illicit activity. Shifting that is a massive investment. And what we've seen, again, in places like Colombia and Afghanistan is that we're not very good at imposing it. In fact, I'd say we suck at that.

00:28:49    JACK GAINES
Yeah, because we want them to make free choices. And free choices is that the gangster down the street is kind of pointing a gun at your head and say, hey, why don't you mule this drugs for me and I'll give you a little money. We don't give the opportunity for anything like that to be successful. If there is a criminal organization running a country, that you're able to freeze their assets and negotiate reforms in exchange for them recovering what they had hidden all those times. And what that does is after the reforms, then they have to get out of the country, and that reformed country then shifts back over to a representative government and economy. But it's going to take that type of reverse extortion, basically, to get these type of people. All you know is getting them out of the way.

00:29:28    GRETCHEN PETERS
All you know is getting them out of the way. and or working with them much more closely to help transition a government into some new economy. There's two examples of this, at least that I know of in Afghanistan. In 1980s, during the Muj period, and also post -2001, senior drug traffickers came to the United States and said, look, I'd love to get my community away from growing opium, but I need financial support to do it. We need to have our irrigation systems rebuilt. We need to have new markets developed for us. Afghanistan used to be, in the 70s, one of the world's number one exporters of raisins. It was one of the plans for Afghanistan was to reinvigorate their raisin industry. And the California raisin lobby got in the way of that. They didn't want to lose market share. So it's farmers in the United States and Europe would never survive without farm subsidies. And essentially what the drug traffickers are offering Afghan farmers, and the same is true in Mexico and South America, is a subsidy program. They come and they prepay their profits. They do it at a predatory rate. But effectively, these are farm subsidies. And if we don't come in and say, OK, we're going to help you guys grow wheat or pomegranate, but we're going to subsidize you to get back into that industry and we're going to consistently be there. That's what we never were able to prove to the Afghans. In the few places where there was real investment in it, people did shift, and they were able to make those economies work. But it was all at a very, very small scale, and it never lasted that long. Because before you knew what, we were ready to pull out again. The surge was over. We were done. We weren't going to keep troops in Helmandar. We weren't going to keep them in Kandahar. And so it all just collapsed. These are changes that aren't going to happen in six months' time. They're going to happen over the course of a decade. When we start to look at the investment that you have to make, I guess one of the biggest enemies to the kind of comprehensive reform that I'm talking about or that we're talking about is the short termism and the fact strategies generally only lasted a year or two in places like Afghanistan and administrations would change. And now we're in a situation between the Democrats and the Republicans where when you switch national security policy and foreign policy really changes course. And so if I were an Afghan farmer or Colombian farmer, I wouldn't listen to us either.

00:31:48    JACK GAINES
We're a little skittish.

00:31:49    GRETCHEN PETERS
skittish. We change our mind too much. So,

00:31:51    JACK GAINES
yeah. But I think part of that one year you're talking about is because people like me, I went in for one year to redesign the Taliban counter -influence program. I redesigned it. I relaunched it. And then I was out. And then the next person coming up is like, well, I don't know. You know, even though I was showing results, who knows what their thoughts were. So they may rewrite it in their own image. And so that's the difficulty of the one -year tour is there is nothing solid that can be created.

00:32:19    GRETCHEN PETERS
And it's not even one -year tours that are part of a five or 10 -year plan. You have a one -year tour, but you're trying to implement A, B, and C outcomes. And whoever follows you will be tasked with following those up with. the ENF. It was just sort of every year there was a completely different plan. That was to me one of the big failings in Afghanistan. And I think we're seeing some of the similar problems in Ukraine. I think the number issue is that there's this misconception among a lot of policymakers that you can just sanction an entity and that's the end of the story. That to me is one of the other big problems. The government will announce sanctions and then that's it. And they sort of assume that all sorts of things happen as a result. Another argument that I used to make when I was working in this space was to say that the sanction is kind of like an arrest warrant. Then you've actually got to resource Akeem to then go out and enforce those sanctions and try to put those businesses out of business and to go and arrest people who are sanctions busting. And if you don't, the sanctions are just a piece of paper.

00:33:26    JACK GAINES
Just create a workaround after you for anything that did happen. Yeah. Colin, what are you working on now?

00:33:31    GRETCHEN PETERS
So I had an NGO that was doing mapping work on transnational organized crime networks to actually do the sort of supply chain mapping that I was talking about. And we still do that work, but we rebranded ourselves as the Alliance to Counter Crime Online because we started discovering the extent to which a lot of illicit networks were shifting their activities into cyberspace. And in particular, onto social media platforms. If you had asked me years ago, where would you buy ivory or drugs online? I would have said the dark web, Silk Road, East West, one of those dark web marketplaces. But actually, a lot of it is on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. Most people on the dark web, they're on social media. And so that's where the criminals are, too, at least at the retail level. And in many ways, illicit actors are also organizing on social media. They're using Facebook groups, so they're using WhatsApp groups or Telegram groups to organize and coordinate, put out hits on people. If you've never looked at narco Twitter or narco Instagram, it's just astounding the extent to which Mexican narco organizations use those platforms to recruit, to advertise about the gangster lifestyle, to put out hits on people in some cases, to announce hits on people. to coordinate strategy, all sorts of stuff. It's amazing the way that illicit networks are using social media. And so we've been working to try and get the laws changed, governing liability for hosting illicit content and conduct. And we have been also doing research and also doing advocacy work and public education.

00:35:11    JACK GAINES
It's spreading criminal networks even faster because it's instant and it's global.

00:35:16    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exponential. Any crime sector that we've looked at. Once it starts trending on social media, the rates of crime look like a hockey stick and is across every sector we've looked at. Human trafficking, the spread of child sex abuse content, drug trafficking, wildlife crime, animal abuse, kidney trafficking, things that I didn't even know were a thing, like the illegal tarantula trade and the illegal orchid trade. once it moves online and starts connecting buyers and sellers through the algorithms. And the algorithms play an important role in growing these crime sectors. But there's other tools, translation tools, embedded payment platforms. There's all sorts of ways in which social media is really reshaping criminal supply chains. And you can get to the point where quite a few steps of the criminal supply chain. will happen on social media platform. And really just producing the good and physically moving it is one of the only parts that doesn't happen online. And if the criminal good is, say, a video of a child getting raped, literally the entire thing can happen on social media. Literally the entire criminal supply chain can happen online.

00:36:35    JACK GAINES
Are we at a point where global criminality is going to start overcoming global governance? Or is it just... that it's just feeding off of us until everything collapses?

00:36:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
I hope not, but I think we could possibly be heading into an era sort of like a new dark ages where lots of parts of the world are basically ungoverned spaces or they're governed by illicit organizations. And we see a decline in both good governance, but also human rights. And we'll probably see all sorts of follow -on migration crises as a result of that.

00:37:10    JACK GAINES
Like an exploitation economy.

00:37:12    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exploitation economy. Exactly. That's the word I was looking for.

00:37:15    JACK GAINES
Well, thank you. Do you have any last thoughts, any projects beyond that that you want to talk about or meetings or public events that you want to pitch? I think what I'd like to pitch is that as we head into 2025, I hope that there is greater attention paid to both the high level of state capture that's happening in a lot of parts of the world and greater attention paid to the way that the internet

00:37:22    GRETCHEN PETERS
think what I'd like to pitch is that as we head into 2025, I hope that there is greater attention paid to both the high level of state capture that's happening in a lot of parts of the world and greater attention paid to the way that the internet is changing illicit supply chains and the way illicit actors operate and that we in the United States do more to address the laws that give tech companies immunity for that needs to come to an end, but also that we really start to rigorously enforce our very, very powerful anti-corruption laws and to really rigorously pay attention to the problem of state capture globally. Cool. Well, thank you, Gretchen, for your time.

00:38:08    JACK GAINES
This was awesome.

00:38:09    GRETCHEN PETERS
All right. Well, thank you so much. It was great to see you again.