Hey everyone, now that I’m completely spammed up the blog with my old posts, now it’s time for me to actually get to write one in real-time! Obviously I made it safely back to the States and have had some time to work on finishing up my project, which I just managed to get punched off to my adviser. I am glad I didn’t wait around until the 11th hour to finish up the research aspect of it though–Irene clearly was out to get any of us who decided to procrastinate…

I must say, it does feel nice to have the project done–looking back at all of those old entries as I copy-pasted them onto the blog certainly helped give me some perspective of just how much work I’ve done this summer. I think the paper has turned out tremendously well, and although I wasn’t able to squeeze it all into a 5-page memo a la your most hardcore policy memos, I was able to fight it down to seven pages with footnotes. I must say, trying to impart so much information into so little space it substantially more challenging than trying to meet a word/page minimum–there’s no opposite version of “fluff,” only hack and burn and revise, revise, revise…to try to get all the important information across.

I did finally finish up all of those policy recommendations, so here’s just a quick summary of my results: I ultimately determined that the most likely evolutionary futures between the relationship between organized criminal elements in the Sahel and AQIM involve either a status quo-style arrangement where the two bodies work with each other on an ad hoc basis as is convenient, or in fact (in what I would argue is the best-case scenario), AQIM actually devolves from mimicking and co-opting organized crime in the Sahel to finance acts of terrorism to become an organized criminal element in-and-of-itself, purely for profit. i do think there is some small chance that AQIM might strengthen the current relationship and possibly even absorb the financial sides of the preexisting criminal elements, but I think this possibility is far more remote than popular news headlines might lead you to believe.

With those futures in mind, I ended up evaluating three policy proposals. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I pretty much decided that a Yemen-style covert drone war was probably not a great way to go, as unintentional civilian casualties and accusations of government complicity with the “evil” U.S. would only serve to push fringe radicals over to the side of organized crime/terrorism and heighten civil strife in what is in more cases already very fragile governing situations. I also considered a regional cooperative framework model, where organization from perhaps the EU or UN might help the states affected by this issue help themselves, but I also ended up discarding this model because of underlying tensions and rivalries already extant in these states. Instead, my ultimate policy recommendation was that the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) the international community continue to engage the affected states on an individual basis, promoting economic growth, CT, and good governance. However, insofar as I recommend changes to current policy, I also recommend that the U.S. stop the current ad hoc approach and substitute a more comprehensive strategy for these economic and diplomatic efforts with a more firm CT basis at its core.

I have to say, this was a fun project, especially with all the traveling and interviewing I got to do with U.S. officials in Congo. If I wasn’t already doing an honors thesis on nuclear weapons strategies, I probably would want to continue along with this. It’s probably good to take a break though, so I suppose I’ll set this on a shelf for a while and maybe pick it up again at a later date.

I hope everyone else had as great a summer as I did!

N.B. My apologies for putting these all up so late–my research had me in the Democratic Republic of the Congo all summer, where I had absolutely zero internet access outside of work hours. I did have my computer with me however, so here are the copy-pasted entries I wrote while over there:

Welp, here’s Post #3. I’m eight weeks into my Congo adventure and I’ll be headed home in just a few days. I’m not exactly as far along in my project as I would have liked due to internet and research capabilities limitations I’ve had to deal with, but I’m still pretty happy with what I’ve got so far. I’ve totally finished up my intro, historical background, current threats section, most of my future forecasting, and a little more than half of my policy proposal evaluation. Fortunately I’ve got about a week and a half to work on this when I get back, plus I think technically we’ve got about a week and a half more once school starts to get this all wrapped up, so I have no doubt I’ll be completely done with this come time for deadlines.

As expected, the future forecasting for a problem of this magnitude with only my resources (even once you include internet once I get back to the States) has been a little too substantial of a research question in-and-of-itself for the level of project I’m working with. Instead, I ended up opting to rank relationship evolutions in order of perceived likelihood, predominantly drawing on the external professional literature to make that assessment. Broadly, I looked at the number of times variations on one of my three forecast scenarios have appeared in the literature I have and what the authors are saying about those futures. Surprisingly, it seems like the more recent literature consensus is that a lot of the “doomsday”-style predictions about a merger between AQIM and organized criminal elements in the Sahel is a bit overblown–at this point in my research it appears like a status quo-style future or one where AQIM actually devolves into yet another criminal organization are far more likely. I was definitely originally expecting something a little more scary security-wise, but I suppose that’s all the more relevant to making sure we pick an appropriate policy response.

As for that response, I think I’ve pretty much laid out three different options the U.S. could take. #1 is very Yemen-style, where the U.S./international partners wage a relatively covert war on these terrorists and their organized criminal counterparts. That probably was a much more viable option when the worst-case merger scenario seemed to be more likely–I’m now thinking that such a strategy would have more blowback repercussions than it would benefits. The other two policy proposals I’m exploring deal with more regional cooperation and independent U.S. engagement in each state–however, I think the evaluation on those two will have to wait until I can get back to the States and do a little further research on those CT options.

In the meantime, I am quite looking forward to getting back to the land of paved (and painted!) roads, clean water, and pervasive (and cheap!) internet. I think I have to do a summary/conclusions-style post, so I’ll be sure to let all of y’all know how everything turns out.

N.B. My apologies for putting these all up so late–my research had me in the Democratic Republic of the Congo all summer, where I had absolutely zero internet access outside of work hours. I did have my computer with me however, so here are the copy-pasted entries I wrote while over there:

Post #2–I guess that means I’m halfway through. I must say, it’s been tough staying diligent to this project while here in Congo. There’s simply too many different things to experience. That said, I have been making some good progress on the project. I’m basically finished with the historical review section of the essay and have just about finished tackling the statement of the problem. Terrorism in the Sahel seems to be quite pervasive and yet quite the under-studied topic–it’ll be great to get back to the ol’ U.S. of A. and its internet and libraries to see if I can supplement some of my original pre-project data-mining with some new stuff now that I have a laundry list of other questions that need answering.

The future forecasting and policy proposal section of the essay will take up these last three weeks or so, which I’m strongly guessing is going to be the hard part. From the information I have, it seems like organized crime in the Sahel has always been a problem, dating almost as far back as tran-Saharan trade does. It’s clearly gotten worst in the post-Colonial era, and the Soviet-U.S. dyadic rivalry certainly didn’t help things in these ungoverned spaces south of the Maghreb. On the flip-side, however, this is very much a post-Cold War problem, with the withdrawal of much foreign support from the two superpowers from these struggling North and East African states. I may have to slightly amend my original plan, where I was going to simply decide which future forecast was the most likely, to ranking evolutionary futures in order of likelihood and modify my policy proposal grading criteria to include suitability along the largest spread of possible futures. That of course will make the policy selection process much more difficult, but I’ll jump off that bridge if and when I get to it.

In the meantime, I do think I’m going to take a quick break this weekend to do some traveling–I hear there’s a really cool bonobo preserve right outside of Kinshasa, and as much as I’m excited about this research, I’m certainly not going to let it get in the way of experiencing as much of this country as possible. Don’t worry though, I’ll be back on the work horse soon!