Declawing Terrorists by Defunding Them

How do you cut terror groups down to size? Cut off the money.

Today policy-makers, law-enforcement officials and military leaders struggle to come up with innovative ideas for neutralizing terrorist organizations and their activities. One such idea, not given much thought until after Sept. 11, is attacking terrorist financing structures, methods and sources.
Attempting to destroy terrorists by denying them financing or interrupting their money stream is unlikely to succeed as a sole point of effort for at least three reasons. First, organizationally, terrorists are structured to slip behind, around and underneath centralized organizations, rules and bureaucracies. Second, terrorist organizations can conduct operations for literally pennies on the dollar, and any serious effort to interrupt these financially insignificant activities will have serious second- and third-order effects on the larger financial community. Third, even with the thousands of laws enacted and the historically unprecedented cooperation between partner nations, terrorism continues to escalate by nearly every conceivable measure. Bluntly put, counterterrorism financing reform simply doesn’t work.

This is not to say that the United States and the larger worldwide community should ignore terrorist financing — instead, it should take a different approach, using the lion, the African predator, as a model. In order to understand the predator model, we need to define who our enemy actually is and understand the three reasons given above for the failure of financing reform. Only then will we be able to structure a more effective mechanism for interdicting terrorist organizations through their financing rather than by trying to starve them out of existence.

By: Brant