Antony Loewenstein

A review of my book Disaster Capitalism in US magazine Salon followed by an interview with its journalist Ben Norton:

“The corporation is now fundamentally more powerful than the nation-state,” writes journalist Antony Loewenstein in his new book “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe.”

“Many ongoing crises seem to have been sustained by businesses to fuel industries in which they have a financial stake,” he explains. “Companies that entrench a crisis and then sell themselves as the only ones who can resolve it.”

Loewenstein, a columnist for the Guardian, traveled the world in order to understand just how multinational corporations profit off of such chaos. The Australian-born yet decidedly cosmopolitan journalist devotes the meticulous and daring tome to reporting on the foreign exploitation he witnessed in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and the destructive mining boom in Papua New Guinea, along with seemingly dystopian prison privatization in the U.S., predatory for-profit detention centers for refugees in Australia and ruthless austerity in Greece.

In the book, Loewenstein expertly shows how corporate control of not just the domestic, but also the global political system has led to a drastic “erosion of democracy.”

A quote he chooses as the overture sets the tone for the ensuing pages. “It is profitable to let the world go to hell,” warns scholar Jørgen Randers, a professor of climate strategy at Norwegian Business School, while railing against “the tyranny of the short term.” This quote succinctly summarizes exactly how disaster capitalism operates.

The concept of disaster capitalism is derived from a similar work, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” an influential 2007 book by journalist Naomi Klein. In some ways, “Disaster Capitalism” can be seen as a sequel to Klein’s book, yet Loewenstein’s formidable work stands out in its own right.

Salon sat down with the journalist to discuss one of the more explosive controversies he uncovers in his book: how the U.S. war in Afghanistan was privatized.

Loewenstein spent time in war-torn Afghanistan, as well as neighboring Pakistan, researching for “Disaster Capitalism.” His compelling recounting of his experiences paints a picture of a crisis-stricken world in which virtually everything has been privatized, in which private military companies, or PMCs — 21st-century warlords — exercise more control over countries than their own inhabitants.

A slew of Western multinational corporations quite familiar to Americans appear throughout the chapter, including Northrop Grumman, DynCorp, Halliburton and more.

The personal interactions Loewenstein has with military contractors on the ground are some of the most fascinating. A British PMC managing director the journalist met in Kabul, whom he refers to simply as Jack, bluntly admits his corporation “survives off chaos.”

Predicting future U.S. wars in Africa, Iran and Korea, the corporate military executive tells Loewenstein, “If we can make money, we’ll go there.”

“I’m my own government,” Jack boldly declares.

“Disaster Capitalism” bolsters Loewenstein’s growing body of important work. Among his other books are “Profits of Doom: How Vulture Capitalism Is Swallowing the World,” a kind of 2013 prequel to “Disaster Capitalism”; “The Blogging Revolution,” a 2008 investigation of how bloggers around the world challenge their oppressive governments; and the best-selling “My Israel Question,” an exhaustive 2007 account of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, and a profound and intimate exploration of the author’s Jewish identity.

For his previous books, Loewenstein traveled widely, from Palestine to Iran, from Saudi Arabia to China, from Cuba to Egypt and beyond. For “Disaster Capitalism,” Loewenstein went even further. When Salon contacted him to schedule an interview, the intrepid journalist seemed every time to not only be in a different country, but even on a different continent.

This is the first in a two-part review of Loewenstein’s reporting in “Disaster Capitalism.” Another piece will be devoted to Loewenstein’s findings in Haiti, a small country that has been virtually taken over by Western NGOs. Loewenstein spoke with Salon about both little-discussed yet tremendously important issues.

Jack, the British PMC managing director you met in Kabul, said “we don’t call ourselves mercenaries.” Are they mercenaries? Should they be called that?

Not all private security interests in Afghanistan are mercenaries; many men are just security guards protecting embassies or Western interests. But mercenaries are a little-reported aspect of the war, either directly engaged in killing or capturing suspected insurgents (a key failing of the Western war in the country has been its insistence on designating any opponent of the conflict as “Taliban” and therefore “terrorist”) or training Afghan forces to do the same thing, often inflaming conflicts in local villages.

You call imperialism “the dirtiest word in modern English” and note, “There is not a country I visited for this book in which the legacy of imperialism does not scar the landscape and people.” You also point out that “there were often more contractors than soldiers in Afghanistan.” Jack said it is cheaper for countries to use PMCs than it is to put their own boots on the ground.

Do you see this as an outsourcing of imperialism and neo-colonialism, if you will? Is this how war will work in the future?

The U.S. government, along with its many allies, likes using private assets to further geo-political interests. The initial motivation when invading Afghanistan was revenge for 9/11, but this quickly morphed into a messy project to control the nation and partner with a corrupt central government and warlords across the country.

The reason I use the term “imperialism” to describe the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and beyond — along with U.S.-backed autocratic partners in the Middle East, South America, Asia and Africa — is that there’s no other way to describe attempts to secure energy reserves and economic influence in the modern age.

War has always worked this way, but the inclusion of globalized private entities removes one more level of accountability. Today in Afghanistan there are around 30,000 contractors working for the Pentagon alongside the U.S. military and Special Forces. And the Pentagon won’t acknowledge how many soldiers are truly fighting ISIS in Iraq.

Can you talk more about Afghanistan’s enormous natural resources, the TAPI pipeline, drugs, etc.? This is little discussed. Why do you think that is?

During both the Soviet and American occupations of Afghanistan, huge discoveries of natural resources occurred. There is an estimated U.S. $1-4 trillion of untapped minerals, oil and gas and yet most of it is unreachable due to security concerns and corruption.

I have been investigating these issues for my book, and also the documentary in progress, “Disaster Capitalism,” with New York filmmaker Thor Neureiter.

Natural resources will not sustain Afghanistan after most of the Western aid dries up, and neither the U.S. government nor Afghan authorities have any answers for long-term sustainability (the proposed TAPI pipeline crossing Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Turkmenistan is ambitious but prone to problems).

Drug cultivation has soared during the U.S. occupation. Too many Western reporters have framed the Afghan war as simply between U.S. forces and the Taliban when in reality Afghanistan has a complex history that never tolerates long-term occupation.

You write about the “military-enforced bubble,” in which the foreign occupying army is completely out of touch with the locals. An Afghan translator told you the U.S. “only understood force.” Can you expand?

A constant refrain I heard in Afghanistan, during my visits there in 2012 and 2015, was the inability and unwillingness of U.S. and foreign forces to listen to the Afghan people. It’s one reason the U.S. relied on faulty intelligence to understand what Afghans were thinking about their presence.

As the security situation deteriorated after 2004-2005, and U.S. forces falsely framed any Afghan who opposed the occupation as Taliban, the U.S. used a failedcounterinsurgency program (designed by David Petraeus and Australian David Kilcullen) that inflamed Afghans.

There has never been accountability for this plan, including by the countless Western journalists seduced by U.S. military talking points.

You talk about the relationships between the U.S. military, USAID and private companies, and say “military and humanitarian work were all too often fused in the post-9/11 world.” Can you comment?

A key component of USAID in the post 9/11 world is using the military to deliver its goals. This fundamentally misunderstands the importance of maintaining neutrality when delivering aid.

The U.S. government’s SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) regularly reports on the U.S. $110 billion spent in Afghanistan on so-called nation building since October 2001, and how USAID was regularly used as a mask for a corporate and military agenda across the country.

Where else is the private security industry growing?

The definition of private security is expanding to include the growth of private armies in often unregulated and chaotic places (from Iraq to Afghanistan and Libya to Syria). South African mercenaries were working in Nigeria against Boko Haram and Colombian forces operated in Yemen thanks to the United Arab Emirates.

You write “the Bush administration saw its ‘war on terror’ as a boon for the private sector.” Has the Obama administration has done the same?

Post 9/11, the Bush administration saw an opportunity to implement an extreme neoconservative agenda with the support of its friends in the private sector. They claimed it would save money and be more efficient but the reality was uncontrolled mercenaries and private security in countless war zones.

When Barack Obama was a candidate for President in 2007, he pledged to change this out-of-control contracting since 9/11. However, nothing has improved since he took office due to a number of factors including failing campaign finance laws and Congressional inertia to punish corporations breaking the law.

You conclude the chapter saying, “we created chaos.” What do you think the legacy is of the now 15-year U.S. occupation, especially now, with the rise of ISIS and the resurgence of the Taliban?

The Taliban now control more of Afghanistan than at any time since October 2001. President Obama has now pledged to maintain an indefinite occupation and the U.S. military claims U.S. forces will need to stay in the country for decades to support a failing Afghan state.

The presence of ISIS only complicates the picture, especially for Afghan civilians.

The longest war in U.S. history has not achieved any of its stated goals and the Afghan people, often forced to choose between the Taliban and a U.S.-backed warlord, often pick the former. That’s the legacy of the U.S. war.

Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter at @BenjaminNorton

UAE newspaper The National interviewed me about my book Disaster Capitalism, especially the privatised military adventure in Afghanistan and failed aid in Haiti:

Australia’s refugee policies are designed to inflict harm on the most vulnerable. Last week I was interviewed by Turkish international news channel TRT World in Berlin about the issue (my interview starts at 19:54):

My investigative feature in UAE newspaper The National (PDFs of the stunning looking feature DC.front and DC.spread):

The human cost of the Afghan war has been devastating. The United Nations estimates that at least 20,000 Afghan civilians have been killed since 2001 and violence is worsening across the country.

United States president Barack Obama, fearing an Iraq-style state collapse after withdrawing the bulk of US forces from there in 2011, has pledged to maintain an indefinite presence of 10,000 soldiers, tens of thousands of contractors (the Pentagon claims up to 30,000) and an unknown number of special forces. Foreign occupation is seemingly permanent.

Former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and commander of US special operations command, General David Petraeus, argued in a recent Washington Post opinion piece that Washington should step up its bombing campaign to halt a resurgent Taliban. There’s no evidence that this failed strategy, advanced in Iraq and Afghanistan over more than a decade, would be any more successful this time.

Afghan resources, estimated to be worth billions of dollars, have provided very little money to the general population.

During my time in Afghanistan last year whilst investigating the mineral, oil and gas industries, I witnessed the suffering of local people around proposed mining sites, such as Mes Aynak in Logar province. They were kicked off their lands, without jobs, and were attacked by the Taliban, ISIL and the Afghan military.

Countless western and Afghan corporations have made a killing in the country since 2001, often replacing functions once undertaken by the state, and with little accountability. This policy has been pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

A 2010 US Congressional report, Warlord, Inc, found that the US military was indirectly paying the Taliban and warlords, via private contractors, to ensure safe passage for their goods across the country.

The ideology behind outsourcing war existed before September 11 but accelerated after the attacks on New York and Washington. Apart from enriching corporate friends of the George W Bush administration, it was framed as a way of saving money for the US taxpayer (the evidence for this is missing) and reducing the responsibility of the state to manage its own affairs.

Afghan civilians have borne the brunt of this policy. There is currently no sustainable vision by Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to support his country when western aid inevitably reduces to a trickle.

The US defence department’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) had grand ambitions in Afghanistan. Embarking on its work there in 2009, the Pentagon group pledged to exploit the country’s large and untapped mineral resources and to attract international investment.

Former head Paul Brinkley told the Washington Post in 2011 that, “we do capitalism. We’re about helping companies make money. That mindset cannot exist in a humanitarian organisation. It’s like asking General Motors to make potato chips.”

After being established in 2006 to stabilize war-torn Iraq, TFBSO had remarkable freedom to act independently without adequate oversight. It attracted US$8 billion (Dh29.4bn) in private investment commitment in Iraq with little long-term evidence that former state-run businesses benefitted from the money. In Afghanistan, Brinkley brought Google to Kabul to start an information technology industry while pledging to expand the nation’s fruit and carpet trades.

On-the-ground investigations, however, revealed the paucity of TFBSO’s legacy. The US government-appointed special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar) has released a number of reports demanding accountability for the group’s spending. It has been stymied at every step of the way.

The US has spent more than $110bn in US taxpayer funds to support reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001. It is now the country’s longest war and yet the outcome has been desultory. Sigar head John F Sopko gave a speech in November at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University where he said that more than 300 reports issued since the group launched in 2008 had brought some successes.

Sigar had conducted “nearly 900 investigations, resulting in 103 arrests, 136 criminal charges, 100 convictions or guilty pleas, 78 sentencings, and roughly $945 million in savings for American taxpayers”, he said. This amount is a tiny fraction of the financial commitment made by Washington in the past 15 years.

In a November letter to US defence secretary Ashton Carter, Sigar showed how 20 per cent of TFBSO’s 2010-2014 $822m budget was spent on private villas and security guards in Kabul.

“If TFBSO employees had instead lived at DoD [department of defence] facilities in Afghanistan”, it said, “where housing, security and food service are routinely provided at little or no extra charge to DoD organisations, it appears the taxpayers would have saved tens of millions of dollars.”

Sigar estimated that in 2014 alone, the 10 TFBSO staff would have paid just $1.8m to live at the US embassy.

Another report, released in October, accused TFBSO of spending up to $43m to build a natural gas filling station in the northern Afghan city of Sheberghan when a similar facility in Pakistan cost only $500,000.

“One of the most troubling aspects of this project”, Sigar said, “is that the department of defence claims that it is unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation or outcome.”

TFBSO was disbanded last year after consistent allegations of ethical breaches and financial irregularities. But its legacy lives on. The first Sigar report of 2016 found that TFBSO had spent up to $488m since 2009 attempting to develop viable oil, gas and mineral businesses in Afghanistan, but achieved nothing sustainable. Corruption and rampant violence conspired against it.

The lack of accountability of Washington’s war in Afghanistan was exposed when Sigar chief Sopko wrote to defence secretary Carter in October and chastised his department for “no longer having any knowledge about TFBSO, an $800m programme that reported directly to the office of the secretary of defence and only shut down a little over six months ago”.

I asked the department of defence to respond to Sigar’s allegations against TFBSO, and spokesman Army Lt Col Joe Sowers told me that, “we welcome continued review by Sigar in their effort to ensure the TFBSO activities are properly assessed and analysed.  With respect to holding someone accountable, to our knowledge, Sigar has not identified or accused any particular individual of malfeasance. The department will cooperate fully with any investigations.”

Sigar said to me that there had been no official response from the department of defence to its 2015 report detailing extensive TFBSO use of private villas in Kabul. Likewise there was no substantive comment after Sigar accused TFBSO of massively overcharging for the natural gas filling station in Afghanistan.

Former TFBSO head Brinkley now runs the investment company Nawah, in Jordan. Critics accused him of entering the private sector too soon after leaving the US government in 2011 – only four months afterwards – though he told me that he “did so in accordance with the ethical rules established by the government to do so”.

Brinkley explained that during his time running TFBSO, from 2006 to 2011, oversight “was very, very rigorous. The recent media reports about Sigar studying TFBSO spending appear to be focused on activities that occurred after my departure. However, to assist in providing some important context and history, I voluntarily met with four members of the Sigar study team in mid-December”.

Brinkley believed that TFBSO was “based on the belief that the US government can offer economic improvements as instruments of foreign policy. Failing to provide a hopeful future for young people in conflict-ridden countries leads to frustration and sympathy with insurgents … I felt we served the [TFBSO] mission well”.

Amidst all the carnage and mismanagement in Afghanistan, it is the civilians who have suffered the most. The Taliban today control more territory than at any time since they were overthrown in 2001. The prospects for the country, after almost 15 years of foreign occupation, are grim. There is every indication that contractors, such as DynCorp and Fluor Corporation, will continue making a fortune profiting from the conflict. However, according to Sigar, it’s nearly impossible for American auditors to assess their work because they can only access about 10 per cent of the country due to insecurity.

These facts don’t mean that some outspoken Afghans aren’t still fighting for improvements.

Shughla, a Fulbright alumni from Kabul (and member of peace initiative the Afghan Fulbrighters for Peace), told me that she blamed many international agencies for ignoring the real needs of Afghan women since 2001. “There was a limited assessment of cultural and contextual background”, she said, “and gender relations in the policies were one of the reasons why Afghan women made fragile and hindering progress despite the gigantic investment.”

Shughla argued that there needed to be empirical research “undertaken by civil society, government agencies and international donors as to where, what and how to improve the livelihood of Afghan women who are manoeuvring in a highly patriarchal and tribe-oriented society.”

The general failure of the USAID project in Afghanistan can be attributed to many factors, but a lack of local consultation was fatal. “Mohammed”, an Afghan in Kabul working for an international financial organisation who requested anonymity over security fears, said that the majority of USAID-funded projects had “largely failed to have significant impact on the life of Afghan people. Those who develop these projects are sitting in Washington DC with very little understanding of the realities in this country”.

I asked Mohammed why projects condemned by Sigar were so ubiquitous in Afghanistan. “The contractors have little access beyond Kabul city”, he said, “with very poor understanding of the country, and try to remotely manage their projects. In order to keep their senior counterparts in the government happy, they usually provide them favours that can border on corruption. Accountability mechanisms are very weak.”

This accurately articulates a key problem for the US mission in Afghanistan since the beginning. A lack of transparency has bedevilled the project since 2001, and president Obama, despite pledging during his 2007 campaign to clean up the bloated contracting racket, has done nothing.

History will not be kind to the litany of American mistakes and crimes during its longest war.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.

Last week I was interviewed from Berlin by the US radio program Majority Report with Sam Seder. We discussed my book, Disaster Capitalism, Haiti, the Clinton Foundation and Australia’s brutal refugee policies.

The leading French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique has published a strong review of my book, Disaster Capitalism (PDF here: LoewensteinDisasterCapmLMD216):

Les catastrophes n’ont pas le même sens pour tout le monde. Antony Loewenstein s’intéresse ici à tous ceux qui « profitent des désastres » — le tremblement de terre de 2010 en Haïti, par exemple — pour privatiser, déréguler et faire fructifier leurs affaires. Mercenaires, multinationales de la sécurité, sociétés minières, secteur de la construction, etc. : de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée au Pakistan, le journaliste présente une vaste palette de chefs d’entreprise qui prétendent venir en aide à des Etats confrontés à telle ou telle difficulté. On visite ainsi des prisons privatisées aux Etats-Unis, des camps de détention de migrants en Australie et au Royaume-Uni, des parcs industriels entourés de bidonvilles et transformés en nids douillets pour les entreprises américaines ou sud-coréennes en Haïti. Et l’on découvre la symbiose parfaite entre précarisation, paupérisation, surveillance des populations d’une part, et affaires lucratives de l’autre. L’auteur identifie une tendance qu’il observe sur toute la planète : « le remplacement de la démocratie par le “business plan” ».

Written by Eva Spiekermann, Google Translate tells me it says the following in English:

Disasters do not have the same meaning for everyone. Antony Loewenstein is interested by all those who “take advantage of disasters” – the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, for example – to privatize, deregulate and grow their business. Mercenaries, security multinational mining companies, construction industry, etc. : Papua New Guinea Pakistan, the reporter has a wide range of business leaders that claim to help states facing a particular challenge. Thus privatized prison visits to US detention camps for migrants in Australia and the UK, industrial parks surrounded by slums and transformed into cozy nests for US or South Korean companies in Haiti. And we discover the perfect combination of insecurity, impoverishment, population monitoring on the one hand, and lucrative business on the other. The author identifies a trend he sees on the planet, “the replacement of democracy by the” business plan “.”

My column in the Guardian:

Australia first introduced onshore detention facilities in 1991 at Villawood in Sydney and Port Hedland in Western Australia. Mandatory detention came in 1992. Bob Hawke’s government announced it was because “Australia could be on the threshold of a major wave of unauthorised boat arrivals from south-east Asia, which will severely test both our resolve and our capacity to ensure that immigration in this country is conducted within a planned and controlled framework”.

More than 20 years later, the rhetoric has only worsened against the most vulnerable arriving from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka. Policies that years ago seemed unimaginable, such as imprisoning refugees on remote Pacific islands, are the norm and blessed with bipartisan support.

The sad reality is Australia’s refugee policies are envied and copied around the world, especially in Europe, now struggling to cope with a huge influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Walls and fences are being built across the continent in futile attempts to keep out the unwanted. A privatised security apparatus is working to complement the real agenda. Australia is an island but it has long implemented remote detention camps with high fences and isolation for its inhabitants.

As a journalist and activist who has publicly campaigned against Canberra’s asylum policies for over a decade, this brutal reality is a bitter pill. In early 2014 I called for UN sanctions against Australia for ignoring humanitarian law and willfully abusing refugees in its case both on the mainland and Nauru and Manus Island. I still hold this view but must recognise facts; the international mood in 2016 for asylum seekers is hostile. As much as I’d like to say that my homeland is a pariah on the international stage, it’s simply not the case.

When Denmark recently introduced a bill to take refugees’ valuable belongings in order to pay for their time in detention camps, this was remarkably similar to Australia charging asylum seekers for their stay behind bars. Either directly or indirectly, Europe is following Australia’s draconian lead.

Consider the facts in Europe: after Sweden and Denmark reintroduced border controls, a borderless continent is now in serious jeopardy. The Schengen agreement – introduced in 1985 to support free movement between EEC countries – is on the verge of collapse. In early January, the European Union admitted it had relocated just 0.17% of the refugees it pledged to help four months earlier. In 2015 more than 1 million people arrived by boat in Europe.

This mirrors Australia’s lacklustre efforts to resettle refugees in its onshore detention camps. Figures released by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in December found that asylum seekers had spent an average of 445 days behind barbed wire. In both Australia and Europe there’s general acceptance of these situations because those seeking asylum have been so successfully demonised as potential terrorists, suspiciously Muslim and threatening a comfortably western way of life.

Germany, a nation that took in more than 1 million refugees in 2015 despite being unprepared for the large numbers, is now facing a public backlash against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance, leading to fear and rising far-right support. Australia has taken far fewer people with little social unrest and yet still unleashed over two decades a highly successful, though dishonest, campaign to stigmatise boat arrivals. The result is the ability of successive Australian governments to create an environment where sexual abuse against refugees is tolerated and covered up. A politician is unlikely to lose his job over it.

Europe and Australia promote themselves as regions of openness. It’s an illusion when it comes to refugee policy. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, despite his bombastic and discriminatory attitude towards refugees and Jews, is increasingly viewed across Europe as providing necessary warnings of the continent’s struggles. EU officials in Brussels told the New York Times that Orban was often right but wished he hadn’t couched his comments in conspiracy theories. Too few in Hungary are publicly resisting this wave of racism.

“Whenever Hungary made an argument the response was always: ‘They are stupid Hungarians. They are xenophobes and Nazis,’” Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman, told the Times. “Suddenly, it turns out that what we said was true. The naivete of Europe is really quite stunning.”

Brussels has proposed an Australian-style border force to monitor the EU’s borders and deport asylum seekers. Germany and France support the move. This proves that the most powerful nations have little interest in resolving the reasons so many people are streaming into Europe (such as war and climate change) and prefer to pull up the drawbridge. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott encouraged Europe to turn back the refugee boats and it seems Brussels is listening. Europe is also copying Australia’s stance of privatising the detention centres for refugees.

None of this worries Rupert Murdoch’s Australian. In light of the New Year’s Eve sex attacks in Cologne, the paper editorialised in early 2016 that Europe must avoid “reckless idealism” and embrace an “enlightened world” where gender equality is accepted by all. The outlet has not expressed similar outrage with the immigration department’s blatant disregard for refugee lives. It’s also unclear how pushing for military action in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and other Muslim nations, pushed by the paper for years, contributes to an “enlightened world”.

It’s comforting to think of Australia as a global pariah on the world stage, pursuing racist policies against asylum seekers from war-torn nations. But it’s untrue. Canberra’s militarised “solution” to refugees is admired in many parts of Europe because it represents an ideology far easier to process and sell than identifying and adapting to changing global migration patterns.

None of this should stop activists fighting for a more just outcome, in both Australia and Europe, but today it’s more likely European officials will ask Australian officials for advice on how to “stop the boats” than chastise it for mistreating a raped refugee.

Australia has become an inspiration for all the wrong reasons.

Late last year I was interviewed by US website Shadowproof about my book, Disaster Capitalism. It was a live conversation with any number of subscribers tuning in from across the world:

My investigation in the Guardian:

Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagós islands look like a tourists’ paradise – the 88 mostly uninhabited islets are filled with palm trees and white, sandy beaches. But the archipelago has been best known as a smugglers’ paradise.

Described by the UN as a narco state, Guinea-Bissau has long been a drug trafficking hub for South American cocaine cartels. And although this illegal trade appears to be declining thanks to US and UN counter-narcotic policies, the country still bears the scars and remains dogged by the same poverty and institutional weaknesses that allowed the drugs industry to take hold in the first place.

On Bubaque, the main inhabited island, there are no roads, just dirt tracks. People live in mud-brick homes, and pigs and dogs meander in the streets. Most of the small guesthouses are empty; despite nascent efforts to promote the islands’ rich biodiversity, tourism has yet to take off. At Bubaque’s airstrip on a November day, the small terminal was empty and men on bikes rode along the “runway”, hacked out of the grass and scrub.

This isolation was one of the elements that attracted drug traffickers to this area in the heyday of west African drug trafficking in the first decade of the millennium.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says it became clear around 2005 that drugs worth billions of dollars were being shipped through west Africa. Between 2005 and 2007 (pdf), more than 20 major seizures were made in the region, most at sea but some on land. Hundreds of commercial air couriers were detected carrying cocaine from west Africa to Europe.

The UNODC noted that the same period saw coups, attempted coups and even the assassination of a president in Guinea-Bissau. “While the conflict appears to have occurred along well established political faultlines, competition for cocaine profits raised the stakes and augmented tensions between rival groups,” it said.

After the US Drug Enforcement Administration arrested Guinea-Bissau’s former navy chief, José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, in 2013 for trafficking cocaine into the US, smuggling briefly slowed.

The ambassador of a European country in Bissau, who did not want to be named, said drug smuggling had declined since Na Tchuto was arrested. “Before this, local smugglers were brazen, driving around in expensive cars,” he said. “But after the arrest of Na Tchuto, people became scared. They thought US drones were flying above the country.” There is no evidence that US drones came anywhere near Guinea-Bissau.

The former justice minister Carmelita Pires denied Guinea-Bissau was a narco state but acknowledged that smuggling occurred. “We don’t produce drugs and people here don’t have enough money to consume drugs,” she said. During her last period in government in 2014 and 2015, only 15 locals and foreigners were in jail for drug trafficking and 13.5kg of cocaine was intercepted. She realised this made only a small dent, but added: “We don’t have money and drug smugglers have so much of it.”

In November, UNODC told a press conference in Bissau that about 34,000kg of cocaine and 22,000kg of marijuana had been seized in Guinea-Bissau since 2011, with 58 traffickers prosecuted. However, limited resources meant constant monitoring was impossible, and drugs inevitably got through.

One factor behind the drop in trade is the West African Coast Initiative, a joint project between UN agencies, Interpol and the regional bloc Ecowas, which began in 2009 to fight drug smuggling, organised crime and drug use in Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

But the defence minister, Adiato Djaló Nandigna, said in December that the Bijagós islands were still the “most vulnerable” region in terms of drug smuggling. Portugal recently gave Guinea-Bissau two boats to plug surveillance gaps. According to multiple defence sources in Bissau, the country has no operational boats to fight the trade and no reliable police outposts outside the capital.

Fernando Jorge Barreto Costa, the deputy director of judicial police, said: “We have a lack of means to fight drug smugglers. Drugs are arriving more by sea than by plane and it’s very hard for us to investigate it. We don’t have the capability to intercept boats. If we receive news about drugs at sea, it takes two to three days to get an answer from authorities for action. This is too slow, and by then the drugs and people may have moved on.”

Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s poorest countries, ranking 178 out of 188 in the UN’s human development index. Political instability has blighted the lives of its 1.8 million people; since independence in 1974, no leader has served a full term, and the nation is still recovering from a 2012 coup. In August, President José Mário Vaz sacked his government.

In March, international donors pledged more than €1bn (£726m) to support a 10-year development plan meant to attract tourists and investors, according to Reuters.

“Every effort must be deployed so that Guinea-Bissau will no longer be a burden on the international community but will instead become an example to be followed,” President Vaz said. Growth is expected to have risen to 4.7% in 2015, compared with 2.6% a year earlier, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Mario José Maia Moreira, UNODC’s representative in Guinea-Bissau, is leading a programme to support a transnational crime unit and the state’s first drug-testing lab. “Stability is the greatest issue facing Guinea-Bissau,” he said. “All the evidence shows that there’s a large quantity of drugs [still entering the nation], and whenever a political crisis comes you see [more].”

My investigation in Foreign Policy:

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau — The headquarters of the Judicial Police, the government agency charged with prosecuting Guinea-Bissau’s war on drugs, sits on a dusty street in the middle of this deceptively quiet West African capital city. Inside is the country’s only drug-testing laboratory, a recent addition thanks to a surge in European Union funding to curb the flow of illegal narcotics north toward its borders.

Without guards or metal detectors, the lab hardly feels like the front line in a war against violent criminals thought to be trafficking billions of dollars worth of cocaine each year. But officials say the assorted vials and testing equipment here represent an important, if limited, first step toward routing the South American cartels that have ventured thousands of miles from their home turf to stake out an ideal drug transit point in one of Africa’s weakest states.

“We want to diminish 80 to 90 percent of the drug trade flowing into Guinea-Bissau,” said Sargento Natcha, the lab’s soft-spoken coordinator, as he tested a small sample of cocaine with a kit bought with donor funds. “The EU has promised to send more equipment.”

But the odds are stacked against Natcha and his team at the lab. Key players in the country’s notoriously corrupt government — the same government that must act on any leads produced by the lab — are thought to be backing the drug trade. The United Nations has dubbed Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished nation of 1.7 million, Africa’s first “narco-state.” For decades, its governing elite is known to have opened the country to South American drug barons who use it as a base for smuggling vast quantities of cocaine to Europe, according to the United Nations. According to the United Nations, 60 percent of the cocaine consumed in Western Europe makes its way through West Africa.

The routes are varied, with some drugs transported through the Sahara — passing through Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, and Morocco and then on to Southern Europe — and other shipments crossing the Atlantic bound for the United States. Guinea-Bissau is a key hub in both cases. According to a 2012 U.N. report, an estimated 50 Colombian drug lords were based in Guinea-Bissau, operating alongside members of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel. The report estimated that they were flying 2,200 pounds of cocaine into the West African nation every night.

Smugglers have gained a foothold in the tiny West African nation in part because of its persistent political instability, experts say. Since independence in 1974, the military has participated in nine coups or attempted coups and no elected political leader has ever served a full term in office. Current President José Mário Vaz fired two prime ministers in 2015, deepening a political crisis that has strengthened the resolve of the military brass to protect cocaine trafficking as their key source of income.

“During military dictatorships [that lasted until 1994] the military was used to getting benefits [from drug trafficking],” said Miguel Trovoada, head of the U.N. Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau, adding that desire to control the drug trade has fostered political instability since then. “In all the coups, the military didn’t take over governance responsibilities, leaving that to others.”

Much of the country’s ruling class is now thought to be implicated in the trade, forming what Mark Shaw, a professor of criminology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, calls an “elite protection network” for the cartels. Senior military figures in particular provide security and logistics to South American drug cartels in exchange for money and drugs, according to Shaw.

Examples of corrupt military officials abound: In 2013, the former army chief of staff, Gen. Antonio Indjai, was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York for trying to import cocaine into the United States, though he denies the allegations and remains a free man in Guinea-Bissau. Likewise, former navy chief José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto was captured in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting in 2013 and a year later pleaded guilty to importing narcotics, including cocaine, into the United States.

The international community has gradually woken up to the problem. The United States, European Union, and United Nations, in particular, have invested billions of dollars in recent years in battling the drug trade and supporting development. In addition to Natcha’s lab, aid dollars have helped set up a transnational crime unit that supports the government’s anti-corruption department, according to Mário José Maia Moreira, the representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Guinea-Bissau. Moreira said his office is also working to obtain boats that can be used to conduct seizures, since the country’s counternarcotics units currently lack operational vessels.

But progress has been slow. Moreira estimates that dozens of tons of cocaine still move through Guinea-Bissau every year, a figure that he reckons is less than in the past but still worth more than “the entire annual military budget of many West African countries.” This year, only 11 kilograms of cocaine have been seized so far — or a tiny fraction of the estimated total that flows through the country en route to European countries every year.

“If you were a drug smuggler from South America, wouldn’t you choose Guinea-Bissau, considering the system and the fragility of the country itself?” said Moreira. “The authorities are still very fragile in terms of resources.”

A recent report by the respected Jane’s Intelligence Review confirms Moreira’s assessment. In addition to accusing the military for being “complicit” in the drug trade, the report concludes that Guinea-Bissau “remains an important hub for cocaine trafficking to Europe, despite the anti-trafficking initiatives of the United Nations and other international organisations.”

Outside the capital city, drug smugglers operate virtually unmolested by authorities. In the fishing village of Kassumba, a known smuggling hub near the border with Guinea, law enforcement has no visible presence at all. White sandy beaches and palm trees give the impression of calm, but the reality is very different: According to the UNODC’s Moreira, smugglers drop sealed packages containing small quantities of cocaine into the coastal waters here. The packages are retrieved by local fishermen and passed on to military officials and politicians, who oversee their safe transport to Bissau.

Those members of the security services that are not a part of the official smuggling racket remain woefully under-equipped. On Bubaque Island in the Bijagós island chain, an archipelago of mostly uninhabited land known as a center for smugglers, five hours by slow boat from Bissau, a soldier named Djibril Sanha explained how he’d been tasked with combating drug trafficking and illegal fishing, but had been given virtually no resources.

“We have no boats, no communication devices, and only our mobile phone,” he said in an interview. “I don’t understand what I’m doing here. You give us a head and stomach but no legs.”

Despite billions of dollars spent over the last decade by international donors, the weakness of West African states like Guinea-Bissau continues to attract opportunistic traffickers. Much of the aid has simply been swallowed up by corrupt officials who are in on the game; some of what was promised was never disbursed because of fears that this might happen. Meanwhile, collaboration between drug traffickers and the government has only deepened, according to U.N. officials.

Back in the drug-testing lab in Bissau, the scale of the challenge before officials like Natcha was clearly on display. The coordinator furnished a list of names of traffickers who had been caught at the airport in 2015 with cocaine in their stomachs: None was carrying more than 2.5 kilograms (about 5.5 pounds). But more importantly, none had any known affiliation with the government.

This month I have a feature in The Nation magazine about the failed mining industry in Afghanistan, a key theme of my film-in-progress, Disaster Capitalism. I was interviewed today by US Minnesota radio about my research on the subject and the troubles facing the country:

During my recent New York book tour for Disaster Capitalism, I recorded an interview on The Laura Flanders TV show. It’s airing this week on TV channels around the world: