Customer Reviews

From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation

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This is a fascinating book. It uses data from two seemingly different realms--drug smuggling to terrorism--to illustrate some key organizational issues facing both drug traffickers and terrorists, on the one hand, and the governments that combat them, on the other. The book examines the interaction between these actors and draws some important lessons for governments. The linkage is made explicitly on page 1: "As members of the U.S. intelligence community acknowledge, drug enforcement raids in Colombia during the 1990s serve as models for today's counterterrorism missions. . . ."

There are a handful of key concepts that underlie the analysis. One of these is competitive adaptation. The author defines this in the following terms (page ix): ". . .terrorists and counterterrorists not only learn, they learn from one another, through complex interactions in shared social systems. . . ." Another key concept is "organizational learning." This book explores how organizations learn. Methods of learning might include "metis," experience in the field, and "techne," abstract technical knowledge. Terrorists and drug traffickers use experience based in practice, the lessons of which will vary from context to context. States and their competitors tend to develop "competency traps," in which they come to depend on what has worked in the past and do not anticipate organizational learning from their nemeses.

The book's first part looks at drug trafficking in Colombia as a case study. The second chapter lays out how the traffickers' decentralized networks "allow them to process information and adapt their activities in response to knowledge and experience" (page 23). Because they are more agile, the small networks have an advantage over state organizations. Chapter 3, to provide symmetry, focuses on governmental responses to drug traffickers. Competitive adaptation is not a one way street. Chapter 4 uses the concept of competitive adaptation to explain the governments' versus traffickers' dynamic relationship. Chapters 5 and 6, in essence, reprise this analysis, with the case study being the relationship between terrorists and counterterrorists.

The conclusion explores key lessons from the two case studies. Among these: (a) governments simply cannot be as agile as their non-state based antagonists; (b) governments should not simply mimic terrorist/traffickers tactics, since these would violate the very essence of America's commitment to civil liberties and processes of popular government [As the author says on page 226: ". . .we must avoid sacrificing the political values and institutions that define us as a society"]; (c) governments must avoid "competency traps," in which they come to depend upon particular tactics that seem to work, without realizing that their antagonists will adapt and that the tactics that once worked may cease to do so and without continuing to experiment with alternative approaches that might work together; (d) government agencies must stay away from developing vested interests in magnifying the threats posed against them to justify their missions.

This is an important work that those interested in the contestation between governments, on the one hand, and drug traffickers and terrorists (and like organizations), on the other, will find thought provoking. The methodology is based on qualitative techniques, and one can always raise questions about how representative those being interviewed are or how accurate their comments are. However, that said, this book makes a strong case in support of its thesis.

Truth in advertising: the author is a colleague of mine. However, my response to his book is pretty much independent of that fact.

I've read many books on terrorism and have found many of them well written. This literature is one of the very best. It uses information by practitioners and provides like no other resource. A must for anyone in the terrorism/trafficking field.

Michael Kenney gives us valuable and unexpected insights into how organizations learn and innovate under adverse economic and social conditions. Possibly without realizing it, he takes the Mertonian notion of creative deviance and expands it into an image of a self-organizing and emergent process that is more responsive to environmental change than structured problem solving on the part of government agencies. Drug traffickers and terrorist, to be sure, are extreme cases of criminality. They are also organizations that are persisting in their attaining of objectives and survival in what can at best be considered uneeven competitive arenas. The techniques they employ are replicable in legitimate organizxations that must nevertheless engage in market creative deviance (competing outside the box) to survive. It would be an unusual but valuable book for managers engaged in highly comeptitive and hostile markets to read.