Ordinarily, these rifles are always in demand in the tribal areas as no self-respecting adult Pashtun tribesman dare be seen in public without one. But demand, it turns out, is shooting through the roof. Prices for new rifles has doubled, to Rs 50,000 now. Used Kalashnikovs fetch Rs 35,000. Thanks to the escalation of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, supply of second-hand rifles has petered out and while demand has taken off. Prices of complementary goods have also risen: ammunition, rocket launchers and military apparel have become more expensive.

Americans and insurgencies are good news for Darra. It was, after all, America's first war in Afghanistan helped modernise its arms industry with capital and technology.

« ok, I'm done now

"The targeted killing campaign also bolstered Israeli morale. In the last five years, Israel has lost more than 1,000 people to terrorism. No government can remain idle as its citizens are slaughtered, and, in a grim fashion, the killings of terrorists created a sense among the Israeli public that its government was striking back and protecting them."

This is actually a non-trivial benefit. One of the key enablers/ goals of terrorism is to spread the impression of precisely the opposite idea: that the government and society are weak and corrupt, and protection is impossible. This was codified in the late 1960s by Marxist terrorists (the predominant kind at the time) like Marighella. Tiptoeing through a number of Osama's videos also show a similar underlying message, for which targeted killings provide a grimly effective countermessage.

In an age where terrorist leaders think nothing of sending children with Down's Syndrome out as suicide bombers, repeatedly (as usual, the Palestinians invented this one), these measures also restore moral equilibrium to the battlefield.

Byman does note that the practice has limitations, however, and that Israel's experience may be instructive. He makes essentially three points in the abbreviated newspaper versions of his February-March 2006 Foreign Affairs magazine article, and they fall into two broad headings.

Capture vs. Kill: The Intelligence Dimension

One of which is that capture is usually preferable to execution due to the information that can be extracted. Of course, it is not always a realistic option, and Byman acknowledges this. Still, when it is possible:

"Moral considerations aside, arrests allow interrogation, and interrogation leads to information that can disrupt planned attacks or lead to the capture of other operatives. And mistakes [in kill-focused operations] are inevitable...."

I would concur, but flag the underlying assumptions: [1] that an effective interrogation regie eexists; and [2] that captured prisoners are not likely be released while they still represent a danger. If either of those assumptions are not true, or become no longer true, his recommendation may suffer a fatal blow.

Byman also raises the issue of foreign governments and cooperation as an additional intelligence consideration:

"Israel operates in a tiny area that it has penetrated with intelligence assets — and still, it has made mistakes. The U.S., in contrast, must operate globally and in regions where its intelligence is weak.

Israel, moreover, could not rely on the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat to arrest the suspects when Israel identified them. The U.S., however, relies heavily on the cooperation of allied governments in arresting and disrupting suspected terrorists."

This is a valid point, and deciding whether or not to execute a specific operation has to take this into account. On the other hand, once again we must flag the underlying assumption. Beyond a certain point, non-cooperation from a government in policing its own territory can, should (indeed, must) cause the calculus to shift. For "allied cooperation" to be a viabe argument for anything, there must be either sufficient cooperation or serious enough retaliatory consequences to make respect for their sovereign perogatives worth it.

This caveat may become more and more central in some darker scenarios for The Islamist War's future - for instance, as the full long-term consequences of EUrabia become apparent. Meanwhile, one hopes our "friends" the Saudis have been reminded of this often since 9/11.

Clear Policies and the Question of Civilians

Byman again:

"Perhaps the biggest lesson the U.S. can draw from Israel is the need for transparency. Israel has a robust public debate on the controversial policy. While the government does not share specific intelligence, the targeting criteria are understood by all. The result is a broad consensus. In the U.S., in contrast, the process is secretive and, if mistakes occur, a backlash is possible. Although transparency may result in missed opportunities, the result would be a more sustainable policy."

Unreservedly true. In holding that discussion, however, one must raise those missed opportunities and their costs as one discusses where the bar is to be set. Recall, for instance, the failure to kill the Taliban's nominal leader Mullah Omar in the early days of the war, for the ridiculous reason that some pipsqueak lawyer in CENTCOM [a] was goven authority to vet it; and [b] wasn't sure about it.

The Guardian mentions this incident in its Novemmber 3, 2001 article "Winter is coming and the Taliban are strong as ever. What now for the war on terror?" - which is also a useful reminder of the "quagmire" rhetoric at the time. The US Air Force Magazine's November 2002 "An Air War Like No Other" recap of the air campaign over Afghanistan mentions it too. But the original source was The New Yorker in their Oct. 22, 2001 FACT feature:

"That night, an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft, under the control of the C.I.A., was surveilling the roads leading out of Kabul. The Predator, which costs forty million dollars and cruises at speeds as slow as eighty miles an hour, is equipped with imaging radar and an array of infrared and television cameras that are capable of beaming high-resolution images to ground stations around the world. The plane was equipped with two powerful Hellfire missiles, designed as antitank weapons. The Predator identified a group of cars and trucks fleeing the capital as a convoy carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Under a previously worked-out agreement, one knowledgeable official said, the C.I.A. did not have the authority to "push the button." Nor did the nearby command-and-control suite of the Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain, where many of the war plans had been drawn up. Rather, the decision had to be made by the officers on duty at the headquarters of the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida.

The Predator tracked the convoy to a building where Omar, accompanied by a hundred or so guards and soldiers, took cover. The precise sequence of events could not be fully learned, but intelligence officials told me that there was an immediate request for a full-scale assault by fighter bombers. At that point, however, word came from General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM commander, saying, as the officials put it, "My JAG" — Judge Advocate General, a legal officer — "doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire." Instead, the Predator was authorized to fire a missile in front of the building — "bounce it off the front door," one officer said, "and see who comes out, and take a picture." CENTCOM suggested that the Predator then continue to follow Omar. The Hellfire, however, could not target the area in front of the building—in military parlance, it could not "get a signature" on the dirt there — and it was then agreed that the missile would attack a group of cars parked in front, presumably those which had carried Omar and his retinue. The missile was fired, and it "obliterated the cars," an official said. "But no one came out."

It was learned later from an operative on the ground that Omar and his guards had indeed been in the convoy and had assumed at the time that the firing came from rocket-propelled grenades launched by nearby troops from the Northern Alliance. A group of soldiers left the building and looked for the enemy. They found nothing, and Omar and his convoy departed. A short time later, the building was targeted and destroyed by F-18s. Mullah Omar survived.

Days afterward, top Administration officials were still seething about the incident. "If it was a fuckup, I could live with it," one senior official said. "But it's not a fuckup — it's an outrage. This isn't like you're six years old and your mother calls you to come in for lunch and you say, 'Time out.' If anyone thinks otherwise, go look at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon." A senior military officer viewed the failure to strike immediately as a symptom of "a cultural issue"—"a slow degradation of the system due to political correctness: 'We want you to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him.' No collateral damage." Others saw the cultural problem as one of bureaucratic, rather than political, correctness. Either way, the failure to attack has left Defense Secretary Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors," the officer said. "But in the end I don't know if it'll mean any changes."

That was the first major indication I had that the West was in serious danger of losing the Global War on terror, and may be in a terminal civilizational phase.

One should also raise the point very forcefully that deliberately using the presence of civilians to immunize oneself from attack is itself a war crime, and note the applicable rules in the Fourth Geneva Conventions.² CPO Sparky's excellent March 2003 article, "Human Shields or Mercenaries?" goes into more detail, and notes:

"When our leaders decry a practice as a "war crime" but then allow such practices to affect planning (even though we are under no obligation to do so), the enemy now knows that he has successfully affected operations in his favor and he continues to use it. The very success of the tactic encourages the enemy's inclination to not take the "war crime" threat seriously, because "you have to catch me first."

Thus vitiating one of the key purposes of the Geneva Conventions, which was to provide protection to civilians in wartime by clearly separating them from military actors. One described well and in depth in Bill Whittle's essay "Sanctuary."

In other words, the cooperation of "anti-war" and/or co-belligerent elements in making collateral civilian casualties a major political issue as part of their political strategy, simply ensures that the practice will spread and far more civilians will be put in harm's way. The general failure to focus on the war crime dimension of terrorists like al-Qaeda, the PLO, et. al. also exacerbates this problem.

Worse, to the extent that states submit to these gambits, it also creates a false feeling of security on the part of civilians. This, too, has consequences. For starters, it means they see much less of a personal threat when the latest tin-pot dictator or terrorist cabal co-locates military targets among them. If revolutions are dangerous and the terrorists promise to kill you for blabbing, while the West promises not to kill you regardless, what's the incentive pattern here?

The result, of course, is more frequent decisions NOT to take action against a government whose actions may in fact threaten their lives rather directly. Or NOT to risk providing information or support to the authorities re: terrorist elements in their midst.

These are not trivial side-effects, and taking the battle to the Left on this issue is important for the West's long term success in the war.

Conclusion

Targeted killings work. While their ultimate manifestation per Robert Heinlein's "Friday"³ is not possible, they are disproportionately effective against "Netwar" organizations that rely on clandestine recruitment and looser command and control.

Footnotes:

¹ A similar dynamic could be observed in the American Mafia, which was decimated by a series of arrests and convictions. The next generation of leaders were basically a bunch of young punks who couldn't fill the old guard's shoes - indeed, one can trace a steady decline from the Luciano/Gambino era to leaders like John Gotti to his ineffective successors. The Sicilian Mafia, which is far safer from American law enforcement and has done far better against its own local law enforcement, now runs a good chunk of the show in America.

² Note that the Additional Protocols, introduced in 1977, were not signed by the USA. The last portion it signed was the Fourth Geneva Conventions in 1949.

³ In Heinlein's "Friday," he briefly describes a tactic whereby a very good intelligence organization figured out which enemy commanders were competent, and assassinated only those people, leaving only the morons in charge. Needless to say, they went on to win the war handily. To take this idea to a more personal level, it's well-known that weak managers tend to promote even weaker people who cannot threaten them. Look around your workplace (if you work or have worked for an organization of any size), and imagine what would happen if someone pulled that kind of "Friday" stunt there.

« ok, I'm done now

In the history of the Atlantic slave trade, the French turned four times as many Africans into slaves as the Americans did, they used them far more brutally, and French slavers not only got a head-start on Americans, they continued the slave trade -- legally -- until 1830, long after the rest of Europe had given it up. And they kept at it clandestinely until after the U.S. Civil War. France officially abolished slavery in its colonies only 14 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and then only under pressure from slave uprisings.

The French New World settlers outstripped the Americans in their greed for slave labor. When the U.S. acquired Louisiana from France, the first governor sent out from Washington reported back that, "No subject seems to be so interesting to the minds of the inhabitants of all parts of the country which I have visited as that of the importation of brute negroes from Africa. This permission would go further with them, and better reconcile them to the government of the United States, than any other privilege that could be extended to this country. ... White labourers, they say, cannot be had in this unhealthy climate."

* * *

French interlopers had jumped into the Atlantic African slave trade in the early 16th century, a century before the first Yankee set sail for Africa. Nearly 200 ships bound for Sierra Leone sailed from three Norman ports between 1540 and 1578. A Portuguese renegade, sailing under the French flag as Jean Alphonse, was one of the pioneers of the "triangle trade" between Africa, the New World and Europe.

The French government sought to promote plantation economies in its West Indies colonies. With capital, credit, technology -- and slaves -- borrowed from the Dutch, these islands began to thrive as sugar export centers. The Dutch established the first successful French sugar mill in 1655. By 1670, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Christopher had 300 sugar estates.

Realizing slaves were the key to this, a monopoly Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, largely financed by the state, was organized in 1664. A French fleet took many factories from the Dutch in Gorée and the Senegambia in the 1670s. In 1672, the French government offered a bounty of 10 livres per slave transported to the French West Indies. This spurred the formation of a second monopoly company, Compagnie du Sénégal, founded in 1673. By 1679 it had 21 ships in operation.

French slavery totals in the 17th century were lower than they might have been due to incompetence, bankruptcies, and mismanagement and strict royal rules about buying from, or selling to, other empires. By the 1720s, however, French private traders had broken the monopolies and the slave trade boomed under the French flag.

During the 1730s alone, the French shipped probably more than 100,000 slaves from Africa. The government raised the bounty per slave delivered to 100 livres, and in 1787 upped it again to 160. By the 1760s the average number of slaver ships leaving French ports was 56 a year, which does not sound like a large number, but they were big ships, averaging 364 slaves per boat. The attendant horrors of the Middle Passage, of course, were multiplied in the bigger ships. In 1767 the French overtook the British in sugar production for the first time.

Conditions on sugar plantations were harsh (though French sugar colonies were no better or worse than Spanish, Dutch, or British ones). During the eight-month sugar harvest, slaves sometimes worked continuously almost around the clock. Accidents caused by long hours and primitive machinery were horrible. In the big plantations, the captives lived in barracks; women were few and families nonexistent.

Compared to this, North American cotton plantation slavery featured much less ferocious labor and allowed family units to exist. Which is one reason France required a steady flow of thousands of slaves a year -- to replace the ones the French had worked to death -- while America's slave population grew naturally even after the U.S. slave trade had ended.

Nantes by far was France's leading slave port. Between 1738 and 1745, Nantes alone carried 55,000 slaves to the New World in 180 ships. All told, from 1713 to 1775 nearly 800 different vessels sailed from Nantes in the slave trade. But Bordeaux, Le Havre, and La Rochelle were leaders in the trade, too. Saint-Malo, Harfleur, and Rouen also played a part. French slave ships bore such ironic names as Amitié (La Rochelle) and Liberté (belonging to Isaac Couturier in Bordeaux). The novelist Chateaubriand's father, of Saint-Malo, was active in the slave trade in the 1760s. In 1768, Louis XV expressed his pleasure at the way "les négociants du Port de Bordeaux se livrent avec beaucoup de zèle au commerce de la traite des nègres."

In the late 1660s, the French settled the abandoned western half of the island of Santo Domingo, and by the early 1680s this new colony, which the French called Saint-Domingue, had 2,000 African slaves. By the 1740s, Saint-Domingue had replaced Martinique as the empire's largest sugar producer. Its 117,000 slaves that year represented about half the 250,000 slaved in the French West Indies. Coffee, introduced in 1723, only made the plantations more profitable -- and increased the demand for slaves.

By the late 1780s Saint Domingue planters were recognized as the most efficient and productive sugar producers in the world. The slave population stood at 460,000 people, which was not only the largest of any island but represented close to half of the 1 million slaves then being held in all the Caribbean colonies. The exports of the island represented two-thirds of the total value of all French West Indian exports, and alone were greater than the combined exports from the British and Spanish Antilles. In only one year well over 600 vessels visited the ports of the island to carry its sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cacao to European consumers." [Herbert S. Klein, "The Atlantic Slave Trade," Cambridge, 1999, p.33]

To keep the supply of African captives flowing, the French government had permanent establishments at the Senegal River and Whydah on the Gold Coast. French free traders worked seasonal camps from the Senegal to the Congo and even East Africa, where they became serious competitors to the Portuguese in Mozambique. The slaves they bought there went to the French Indian Ocean island colonies, which also were thriving on sugar exports.

Slavery went deeper than this in French society. In the 17th century, the French navy galleons were manned by slaves, including hundreds of Turks (some of them captured by the Austrians after the Siege of Vienna). In 1679, the Senegal Company provided 227 African slaves for this purpose.

Nor was their slaving activity limited to Africans. As late as 1820s the French were engaged in a slave trade in Sumatra, on the island of Nias (in the news recently as an earthquake site), taking 1,000 slaves a year from there to Ile de Bourbon (modern Réunion).

The rise of the French slave trade meant the number of black Africans living in France grew. A law of 1716 clarified their position by allowing masters from the islands to keep their slaves captive while in France. But a law of 1738 decreed black slaves could not stay in France more than three years, otherwise they would be confiscated by the Crown (and likely put to work on the royal navy's galleys).

The motive for this was the French authorities' eagerness to preserve their nation's racial purity, as illustrated by a royal declaration of 1777 which forbade entry of any black into France because "they marry Europeans, they infect brothels, and colors are mixed." The restrictions rarely were enforced, however, and six years after the 1777 decree a ministerial circulaire complained that blacks continued to be imported. Merchants in Nantes kept so many black men and women in their fine houses that they could give négrillons or négrittes to members of their household as tips, and by the time of the Revolution there were enough nègres in Nantes to form a battalion (which got a dreadful reputation for murder and pillage).

* * *

The leading figures of the Enlightenment condemned slavery, but they made little impact on French popular or political opinion. Abbé Raynal in 1770 published a book (in Amsterdam) arguing that slavery was contrary to nature and thus wrong. The clergy of Bordeaux, however, demanded it be prohibited as an outrage to religion and the parlement of Paris ordered it burned by the public executioner.

The French Revolution brought such antislavery men to power. English abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson were delighted and encouraged the French liberals to put their words into action. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789 had stated, "Men are born free and are equal before the law."

So you might think, in the interest of consistency, the French would have ended the slave trade and liberated their chattels at that time. You'd be wrong.

A Société des Amis des Noirs had formed. One of its leaders was Condorcet, who urged France to follow the example of America, which had set an end date to the slave trade and where leaders from all sections looked forward to the day, expected soon, when American slavery would die a natural death. Condorcet held up America as an example to France in this regard because America's leaders knew they would "debase their own pursuit of liberty if they continued to support slavery."

But the négriers of Nantes wielded power and influence. The Constituent Assembly took up the topic of the slave trade in March 1790. So far from curtailing slavery or the slave trade, it simply passed a decree: "Whoever works to excite risings against the colonists will be declared an enemy of the people."

The French Assembly even had the equivalent of the American three-fifths clause, which gave the West Indian colonies 10 deputies in Paris, even though they numbered only a few tens of thousands of free settlers. But the Assembly rejected a few free mulattoes who turned up among the West Indian deputies and refused to seat them.

Shortly afterwards, a delegation from the newly founded and revolutionary Armée Patriotique of Bordeaux reached Paris and told both the Jacobin Club and the Assembly that five million Frenchmen depended on the colonial commerce for their livelihood, and that both the slave trade and West Indian slavery were essential for the prosperity of France. Another committee was then entrusted to make a report on slavery. That body, however, did little more than denounce attempts to cause risings against the colonists. Mirabeau was shouted down when he tried to oppose this. The assembly voted for the committee's proposals for inaction and, until 1793, the French slave trade continued to receive a subsidy in the form of a bonus for every slave landed. Nantes in fact enjoyed its best year ever as a slave city in 1790, sending forty-nine ships to Africa. For the slave merchants in that politically radical city, the word "liberty" seems to have signified the idea that the slave trade should be open to all. [Thomas, p.522]

Mulattos in Saint-Domingue, learning that their hopes for equality in the new system had been quashed in the Assembly, rose in revolt, and turmoil spread through the colonies. This forced the leaders of the Revolution to reopen the issue and condemn slavery -- in principle. It was not enough. Saint-Domingue's slaves then rose in a bloody insurrection. There were 450,000 blacks, most of them slaves, against only 40,000 whites (mulattoes numbered about 50,000).

Finally, in August 1791, the Assembly declared anyone who landed in France to be free, and in 1794 the Convention in Paris declared the universal emancipation of slaves. But it was too late to save Saint-Domingue. The British occupied the colony and re-instated slavery, and by the time they handed it back to France at the Peace of Amiens (1802) the French had gotten over their flirtation with emancipation and were back in the slavery business. But they couldn't re-establish their control. Saint-Domingue fell in the only successful slave revolt in history and was reborn as the free nation of Haiti. And the shortage of sugar in Paris that resulted from the slave revolt had precipitated the riots that brought the Revolution crashing down from its high ideals into authoritarian repression.

* * *

The 1794 declaration of universal emancipation did not actually outlaw the slave trade. Yet even this proved unenforcable; the colonies required slaves, and under Napoleon, slavery was reintroduced.

The French never recovered Haiti, though they coveted it for a generation, and France's slave trade had been temporarily shut down by the Napoleonic Wars. But after the restoration of the Bourbons the French retained Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana on the South American continent, all major sugar-producing colonies.

If it had not been for British pressure, the slave trade might still be tolerated in France. But the British had taken a strong anti-slavery position. The French press railed at the British for using morality as a cloak for their supposed desire to rule the world. And the French desire to keep the British at bay, and to compete with them in the seas, seems to have had a lot to do with the French decision to turn officially against the slave trade.

But it also is true that an abolitionist movement had taken root among the fashionable in Paris, headed by Madame de Staël and the Marquis de Lafayette. It was built on admiration of the English abolitionists, a rise of Christian morality, and a cult of le bon nègre. They began to circulate petitions and pamphlets. Prominent French writers led the opposition to the change, with racist diatribes against Africans.

When the Duc de Broglie became prime minister, he brought abolitionist sympathies and opinions with him into the government. In 1817 the French government published a decree curtailing the slave trade to French colonies, but the enterprising merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux simply switched their destinations to Cuba.

The entire slave trade finally was declared illegal in France in March 1818. But that merely converted a tolerated trade to a clandestine one. With the local banks and political interests dominated by slave traders and their money and marriage ties, there was little hope of enforcement. French officers expelled from the Navy after the Restoration had taken up the slave trade. Their comrades still in the fleet turned a blind eye to their activities, or were easily bribed to do so. The French filled in the market for slaves in Cuba and Brazil in place of the Spanish, who had foresaken the trade as immoral.

Twice as many ships left French ports on the slave trade in 1819 as had sailed the year before. In 1820, the British Navy's annual report on the fleet's work in interdicting the slave trade noted that the Americans were next to Britain in their "good intentions," "sincerity," and practical work to end the trade. Spain, Holland, and Portugual got bad grades. "But France, it is with deepest regret I mention it, has countenanced and encouraged the slave trade, almost beyond estimation or belief." It was so bad that "France is engrossing nearly the whole of the slave trade," and in the 12 months ending in September 1819 "60,000 Africans have been forced from their country, principally under the colours of France." They were taken mostly to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba. [Paul Johnson, "The Birth of the Modern," p.330]

As late as 1825, slave chains and manacles could be openly purchased in Nantes. On average, French négriers in the 1820s brought in 4,000 slaves per annum. Guadeloupe was the center of this activity, absorbing 38,000 slaves from 1814-1830. Martinique followed with 24,000, and French Guiana with 14,000. "[I]t was an unusual trade in that French merchants from Nantes continued to dominate the trade to the end and were the only Europeans still active in the trade after 1808." [Klein, p.198] As late as 1830, Nantes kept 80 ships engaged in the slave trade.

The French, like the Americans, even after they ended the slave trade refused to submit to the British Navy -- the only maritime power large enough to police the Atlantic -- boarding and searching their vessels. Under cover of national pride, the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux continued to ship slaves. They kept it up even after the American government had, like the British, begun to use its authority to curb the trade.

In 1820, a British cruiser chased a French slaver, La Jeune Estele, whose captain, once he saw himself being overtaken, started throwing barrels overboard. In each was a pair of slave girls, age 12 to 14. Public opinion in Britain was shocked, but in France the people blamed the British.

In 1821, an over-zealous U.S. Navy lieutenant named Stockton seized four French-flagged vessels off Africa, convinced that they were slavers from North America operating in disguise. He manned them with American crews and sailed them to Boston. But the French government was outraged -- at least one of the vessels, La Jeune Eugénie, certainly was French, and it was going for slaves. The French ambassador called on Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and loudly threatened war if satisfaction was not made. President Monroe hastily backed down and assured the French that the Americans no longer would search vessels under French or any other foreign flag. Stockton's supicions were reasonable, however. Slave traders of other nations often sailed under the French flag to avoid British searches.

Only in 1830, under Louis-Philippe, was the slave trade made a crime and punishment enforced. A treaty with Britain even allowed British naval searches of French vessels in certain cases. Yet as late as 1848, recently imported slaves from West Africa were found on Martinique and Guadeloupe.

During the 1840s, the government in Paris talked of the eventuality of emancipation, but it always found a reason not to act. One common excuse was that the government was too cash-strapped to pay the slaveowners the compensation they deserved for the loss of their property.

Slavery finally was abolished in Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion by the government that came to power after the 1848 revolution, spurred by slave uprisings in the colonies. A year later legislation passed granting the owners of France's 248,560 slaves compensation from a sum of $120 million francs.

Even the end was not really the end. From 1850 to 1870 some 18,400 Africans were carried to the French West Indies illegally, probably by Cuban slavers.

*Figures are from Hugh Thomas, "The Slave Trade," Simon & Schuster, 1997. The numbers necessarily are estimates, but historians are in broad agreement about them. There's a "low" and a "high" figure for African slavery, and Thomas' numbers represent the low figure. But the overall comparison does not change much if you use the (earlier) higher numbers: Slaves delivered to French West Indies come in as 1,635,700, compared to 559,800 for British North America and the U.S.

« ok, I'm done now

"How long will it be before al Qaeda and other Islamic non-state forces make their own alliances with the drug gangs and people smugglers who are experts in getting across America's southern border? Or use the excellent distribution systems the drug gangs have throughout the United States to smuggle something with a bigger bang than the best cocaine?"

Maybe a while - to say that allowing this would be bad for the drug lords' business is a massive understatement. Still, this isn't the most stable set of individuals we're talking about here, and control over the network is, ah, less than perfect.

If Islamist terrorists dangled a couple mil before the right mid-level person, anything is possible. And the current "border enforcement as joke" situation does not fill me with confidence.

Lind concludes:

"Just as we see states coming together around the world against the non-state forces of the Fourth Generation, so those non-state forces will also come together in multi-faceted alliances. The difference is likely to be that they will do it faster and better. And, they will use states' preoccupation with the state system like a matador's cape, to dazzle and distract while they proceed with the real business of war."

Or crime... even as the distinction blurs. Money laundering is global, and the major organized crime groups mostly cooperate rather than compete. As their power grows, they acquire global-level interests. Meanwhile, the terrorist IRA has become the "RAfia," allied with its suppliers in FARC. It is not alone in making this transition.

And in the background, the technological barriers to biological tools are falling. Furthermore, the same people who are currently in the drug trade have strong reasons to pick that technology up and begin building expertise, in order to refine their product.

I've said before that al-Qaeda is just the tune-up as we step toward a fundamentally different reality. I wasn't kidding. As I noted at the close of The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc.:

"Preparing for those eventualities will test our civilization in new ways. It will test not only our brains, but our will and unity. Not just our military, but our culture and values. Think through the full implications of these trends, and the possible responses to them. If you can't come up with plausible cases for at least 2 conclusions that surprise you, you probably aren't thinking hard enough.

The ground is shifting under the feet of the nation state as a political entity. Real structural changes are in the offing, of a kind that can create a very different world. Are we up to the challenge? I don't know. What I do know, is that there is no scriptwriter behind the scenes to ensure a happy ending.

WE are the scriptwriters. Happy endings are NOT guaranteed. And the drama is just beginning."

« ok, I'm done now

The way I understand Mr. Breault's testimony, the Liberal Party was embezzling government funds allocated to the Ministry of Public Works with the full knowledge and winking consent of its then Minister, the now-discredited Alfonso Gagliano. These funds were embezzled by being 'spent' on contracts doled out to faithful Liberal-friendly advertising firms in Montreal. Little or no work was completed for these payments, but no matter, none was expected. The true reason the Liberals were handing out these contracts was so that the advertising firms would then recycle the money back into the Liberal Party of Canada in the form of political donations.

Some of the money was siphoned off and never actually reached the outstretched arms of the Liberal Party, it went into the pockets of people who were working for the Liberals in Quebec, in order to purchase their loyalty. People were put on the payroll of these firms and never showed up to work, but were still paid, a la Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. The available testimony on the CQ blog just gives us the basics, so we don't know if these individuals then turned around and donated the money they received back to the Liberal Party; i.e. they were just another buffer to throw off the scent of the money for government of Canada accountants who might be trying to follow the trail.

Now I understand the Quebec Sponsorship Program; before, it never really made sense to me.

For example, since the referendum was held in 1995, why was the Sponsorship Program only shut down seven years later? The standard Liberal explanation for the Sponsorship Program was that the Canadian government was trying to increase the profile of Canada and its institutions in the Province of Quebec, in order to lessen the risks of Quebec leaving Confederation. But even back before the Sponsorship program got underway, the independence movement in Quebec was already fading away. Parti Quebecois Premiers such as Bouchard and Landry were having a tough time staying in power due to their fiscal cutbacks and perceived slight shift towards the neo-conservatism which had already swept across the United States, English Canada, and many parts of Europe and Latin America. This angered the voters and made them elect Jean Charest's Parti Liberal in Quebec in 2002. Federally, the Bloc Quebecois was doing a fine job of defending Quebec's interests without even bothering to talk about independence. They even stopped mentioning sovereignty-association several years ago.

So why was the Sponsorship Program still going on?

The entire rationale for the Sponsorship Program seemed suspect. No Liberal official was ever able to adequately explain exactly how slapping up a bunch of Canadian flags all over Quebec was supposed to make Quebec separatists feel more like staying part of Canada. Were I a separatist, waking up and seeing Canadian flags waving out the window would definitely make me see red. If anything, I would be insulted and feel more like working to make Quebec independent.

Think about it. All Canadians know that we are experiencing a great deal of friction with the United States right now. If you, as a Canadian, woke up one morning to see U.S. flags all over the place, wouldn't you feel a bit alarmed? Maybe even angry? Sure, some conservatives out west would celebrate by throwing their cowboy hats in the air and roasting a steer... but you get my point.

Back to the scandal, Mr. Breault apparently broke down crying while recounting that on one occasion in which he was being extorted by Gagliano's lieutenants, he feared for his life. He seems to have realized that he was in over his head.

I find it ironic that Breault was being extorted over a government contract to provide advertising for Via Rail, which is the direct descendant of the passenger train services of the CPR, which also figured prominently in the previous worst-ever scandal in Canadian history, the Pacific Scandal, which forced Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald from office in 1873.

Breault will probably make an ideal candidate for the witness protection program after this trial is over. This sad tale illustrates the severity of the scandal.

Whether or not the Liberal Party was in cahoots with the Mafia will be difficult to prove. Gagliano himself, after returning from exile in Denmark, vehemently denied ever being part of any 'family' or 'organization' of that sort. However, it is well-known that a former hitman turned FBI informant, Frank Lino, fingered Gagliano as being a made man in the Bonnano 'famiglia' of New York.

If in fact the Liberal Party is not working with, and has never had friendly relations with the Mafia, they certainly are well-versed in the art of laundering money, Mafia-style. Everything I read of Jean Breault's testimony is almost identical to some of the scams I have read about which have taken place over the years in places such as the Phillippines, Argentina, and Mexico. The only difference is that the Liberals were not actually funneling money into offshore accounts in Switzerland and Panama - although they may have been, that just hasn't come out in the testimony so far.

Near as I can tell, the Quebec Sponsorhip Program was not designed to 'Increase the Visibility of Canadian Federal Institutions in Quebec', it was designed to be a cash cow. Its true purpose was Mafia-style money laundering, conceived, designed, approved, and implemented from the very top.

It's entirely possible that Jean Chretien knew nothing about the scam, although the onus is on him to prove it. After all, his brother Gabriel is a central figure in the scandal, as is his designated point man in Quebec, Alfonso (Big Spender) Gagliano. Guilty or not, Chretien will deny everything and get off; he's a lawyer with some of the best connections money can buy. Still, some heads are going to roll for this, whether an election is forced soon or not.

Realizing what had been going on in the back rooms and dimly lit restaurants of Ottawa under Chretien's tenure, it seems a wholly good thing that Chretien was overthrown by Paul Martin, or else the scam might have been going on still, today. However, whether you're a Conservative, a Liberal, a supporter of the NDP or even a separatist, you have to kind of feel sorry for Martin because even though he requested the public inquiry, he's going to go down in flames when this government falls.

Unless I see unequivocal evidence, solid proof, that Paul Martin had absolutely nothing to do with the Sponsorship Program, other than closing it down, I cannot see myself voting for the Liberal Party in the looming election, or even the one after that. Only if an airtight case is made that all the corrosive elements in the Liberal Party have been completely purged would I even remotely consider it.

Even then, I probably wouldn't vote Liberal because I have several other problems with them. I live in downtown Toronto, which is supposedly the centre of Liberal power. When you live and work here, though, it really doesn't feel like the Liberals are paying attention to the concerns of this city at all. Maybe if you live in Medicine Hat or Fredericton you might assume that everyone in Toronto and Southern Ontario is happy with our friends the Liberals, but that is absolutely not the case. They just take our money and shovel it all over the country. If we ask for some of it back, even Liberal MPs whose ridings are in Toronto tell us to shut up and stop being selfish. Once they get elected, they move to Ottawa and become trained seals.

People from all over the country come here with little or no skills expecting to find a job waiting for them. When they don't find one, they end up smoking crack and living on the streets and Toronto has to pay to take care of them. Meanwhile, foreign immigrants with doctorates in engineering and medicine are driving taxis or delivering pizzas. The Toronto Star recently printed an article stating that Chinese immigrants are leaving the country in droves, because there aren't enough opportunities here. Where are they moving to? China!

When a communist country can provide more opportunities than Canada, we have a serious problem which needs to be looked at urgently. As a matter of fact, one of my oldest friends moved to Shanghai last month to work as an architect. He doesn't even have any Chinese background. There was nothing for him here. How does Paul Martin respond to Ontario's budget deficit? What does he do when Toronto tells him it can no longer afford to fully maintain basic services like transit and sewers? He sends a cheque... to Newfoundland, allowing them to keep their oil and gas revenues while collecting still more of Toronto's and Ontario's taxes.

My friends and I used to laugh about what the government does with our taxes. We would joke that they stuff airplanes with bags of money and dump them over Quebec. That's what makes the Sponsorship Scandal so disturbing - the Liberals were actually doing that for at least five years, and it's just not funny anymore.

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• It Is The Time of the 'Decent People' (March 14/05) re: the "RAfia" in Ireland, a theme addressed more fully in "Terror, Inc."

• Strangling Syria's Regime, by Tom Holsinger (Feb 24/05)

• Narcocainia, South America (Aug 03/04)

• The Crime Money Bubble, by M. Simon (July 16/03)

• Russia's Rising Darkness (May 27/03)

• North Korea's Tony Sopranos (Jan 22/03)

• Colombia: All FARCed Up (May 17/02)

• Counterterrorism in Tribal Societies is also somewhat relevant, as sponsorship of organized criminal and/or terrorist activities has strongly tribal dimensions in many parts of the world.

Terrorism is an easy pattern to reach for if a strong organized crime movement finds itself under pressure from governments. Organized crime, meanwhile, offers an independent source of money to terrorists of all stripes - the critical element that has determined the longevity of terrorist organizations world-wide over the last 50 years. Organized criminal activity also creates a source of instability and trouble in weak or failed states, while weakening them further and creating even more fertile recruiting grounds and refuges for terrorist organizations (see Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy", also reviewed by The Brothers Judd blog and referenced in our Recommended Reading Lists). And officials in state sponsors of terrorism run by unaccountable dictators often find that millions of dollars in criminal income is an attractive proposition.

It's a vicious and intertwined cycle - and a subject we'll continue to cover here at Winds of Change.NET.

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In 2002, the Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour estimated that 1.2 million children had been trafficked. Babies were trafficked for adoption. Pre-pubescent boys and girls were trafficked as beggars or selling items on the streets. Adolescent girls were used for prostitution and sexual exploitation. In Greece, thousands of children were working in the streets - begging, and selling small items - in all the major cities of Greece. Ninety percent of them were Albanian. One can only imagine how these children were being treated.

An Albanian girl trafficked to Greece told Terre des Hommes that “Our bosses ill-treat us when we play or don’t want to work”. A former police officer investigating their predicament reported to Terre des Hommes that: "Numerous children described to us the ill-treatment they had been subjected to, such as being burned with cigarettes on their bodies, slapped, insulted, made to swallow shampoo for having looked ill, and obliged to sleep outside..."

Children in all forms of exploitation are conditioned to believe that they have no alternative and are thereby deprived of motivation to escape. The research in Greece revealed that Albanian children were taught that the police would beat them, that social workers were also a source of danger and that the only person the child could trust was his or her boss.

Terre des Hommes: Study on Child Trafficking

In many countries it's standard practice that illegal immigrants are deported, children as well as adults, without any court proceedings. Greece, not only denies the children victim status, it also considers them guilty of illegal entry into the country, arrests them and deports them. These minors end up back in the hands of traffickers who simply wait at the border where trafficked children are being dumped and take control of them again.

We went to Greece on foot. Four days' walk. We injured ourselves when we tried to escape from the police who were pursuing us. We had a lot of "scares" during this journey to the Greek border, because it was very dangerous". Mirela, 15 years old, describing her first journey to Greece when she was 4 years old.

Until 2000, their main activity was begging. The technique for making money is summed up by Mirela: "during the winter we had to wear light clothes to provoke pity among the Greeks and encourage them to give money." From 2000, the trend moved towards the sale of small items (handkerchiefs, icons, telephone cards…) and flowers.They are now "more presentable", well-dressed and no longer aim to inspire pity like before. What has not changed is the exploitation of the children who often work more than 12 hours a day, constantly walking through the town, and subject to ill-treatment inflicted by their employers.

Naïm, 14 years old, says, he "lost control" of how many times he went begging in Greece since he was 6. Today, his former bosses are his role model. They encourage him to cross the border with two kilos of marijuana.

The trafficking of Albanian children in Greece

What happened to the children who were trafficked the last ten years in Greece? We don't really know, there isn't much information on the subject. Children are not being reported missing in Albania for several reasons, including distrust of the authorities in the Roma communities where a lot of these children come from, lack of awareness and education about human rights, and also involvement of the parents in the trafficking. Greek police measures may have made the traffic less visible but it didn't go away - the children are still there.

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On an end note: I've been keeping track of Maria, Alexandra and Constantino. Maria graduated from 7th grade last year. She's behind in school but she's catching up and she's self-confident and well-adjusted. Maria's mom had another baby, this one didn't come home either, but Maria is not working anymore. Alexandra and Constantino are in school but continue to work at night selling small icons. All three of them dream of going back to Albania and they miss their grandparents. Maria said she liked it better in Korça because "everyone is poor there so you don't feel it as much." I told you she was wise.

Mirupafshim, my friends.

(evariste - faleminderit, and a thimbleful of cognac to you)

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Cutting off that route would cause an immediate massive dive in their income while they establish new routes through Turkey for their high value, low bulk, exports. And having to share with their new Turkish cutouts would cut their profit margins.

Smuggling through Lebanon is a critical source of income for Syrian's ruling gangsters. It pays for much of their regime protective forces. A temporary shutoff of that income, and a longer-term reduction in their profit, would likely bring about regime collapse faster than the slower economic collapse.

The real drawback here, IMO, is that there might not be a replacement regime, i.e., 1980's Lebanese type chaos, for a while. Syria's Alawite minority (Shiite-related - about 10% of the population) has been dominant for many years (the Assad clan are Alawites) and is violently unpopular. There is a fair chance of it suffering genocidal massacre and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Sunni majority when the Alawites lose power.

IMO the major reason for American caution in dealing with Syria is not difficulty in inducing regime change, but whether the consequences might be worse for some time, i.e., chaos with Islamic terrorist controlled sanctuaries in some parts of the country, and eventual emergence of a truly nutball Islamic regime. Much of this is really just fear of the unknown, but we would be taking a significant chance.

So put Bashir Assad (or Syria's Baathist gangster confederacy) in the place of Blazing Saddles black sheriff Cleavon Little, in the immortal scene from Mel Brooks' movie where he holds a gun to his own head and shouts:

"Don't shoot or I'll shoot the nigger!"

Hey, it works for North Korea...

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