Shooting Up

Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up.
Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups t...