Sixteen years ago, American agents helped Liberia catch a cocaine pilot and put him on trial in New York within weeks. Today, a warden takes cartel money inside a Liberian prison, a coast guard boat turns back from open water because it isn't built to go any farther, and Washington watches mostly from a distance. That distance is the problem.
THERE IS A VERSION OF THIS SCANDAL in which the United States has no real stake. In that version, a boat full of cocaine bound for Europe gets seized in Margibi County, a few Liberian officials lose their jobs, two foreign facilitators sit in a Monrovia cell, and Washington reads about it the way it reads about most things that happen a continent away.
WE DO NOT BELIEVE that is the version of this story America should be content to let stand. The reporting in this newspaper this week made the legal case for restraint -- without a demonstrable link to U.S. territory, commerce, or citizens, American prosecutors have limited grounds to claim this case as their own. But the absence of a prosecutorial nexus is not the absence of an American interest, and it should not be treated as an excuse for American silence.
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START WITH THE NUMBERS, because they are Washington's numbers as much as they are Monrovia's. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimates that at least 30 percent of the cocaine now reaching Europe passes through West Africa's porous coastline, and Liberia's own record seizures this year -- a $19.2 million bust in June, a $317 million bust in July, $336 million more destroyed on live television -- are not evidence of a problem contained within one small country's borders.
THEY ARE EVIDENCE of a trafficking corridor that a handful of overwhelmed West African states are being asked to police more or less alone, with speedboats that cannot legally travel far enough out to sea to catch the ships they're chasing and prison systems porous enough that a warden can allegedly take cartel money on his own mobile phone from inside the facility meant to hold the cartel's associates.
Discover moreCampaigns & ElectionsGeographic ReferenceOpinion & Commentary A CORRIDOR MOVING NEARLY a third of Europe's cocaine supply is not a Liberian problem that happens to be geographically inconvenient for the United States. It is a hemispheric supply chain, and Washington has treated hemispheric supply chains as its business before.
READ CLOSELY, Liberia's own investigators have already said as much themselves. "I will hope they can take these prisoners off our hands to serve as a deterrence for any would-be foreigners wanting to establish drug cartels in Liberia," one member of the joint investigative team told this newspaper -- not the voice of an agency jealously guarding its case, but of officials who know exactly how outmatched they are and are not too proud to say so, even anonymously.
THE ARMED FORCES' OWN CHIEF of staff has been just as candid about the limits of what Liberia can field on the water: boats too small to chase a fleeing ship into deep sea, an operation nearly derailed by its own soldiers' inexperience, a search that only advanced once Nigerian partners were brought in to widen the coverage Liberia's own military could not provide. This is not a country failing to try. It is a country trying in full view of its own limitations, and asking, more or less openly, for help it cannot generate on its own. When a nation's own investigators, in their own words, are hoping a foreign power will relieve them of prisoners they cannot fully process, that is not a request policymakers in Washington should have to read between the lines to hear.
IT HAS ALSO, WITHIN LIVING MEMORY, treated this exact country as its business. Operation Relentless in 2010 was not charity -- it was the DEA identifying an opportunity to break a trafficking network before it grew larger, working hand in hand with Liberian officials who wanted the same thing, and it worked. A Russian pilot went from a Monrovia sting to a New York courtroom in a matter of weeks. That kind of cooperation did not require Liberia to hand over sovereignty, and it did not require every case to have a clean line back to American shores. It required sustained attention, shared intelligence, and a willingness on Washington's part to treat West Africa's drug corridor as a live threat rather than a regional curiosity. Fifteen years later, that attention has plainly lapsed, even as the volume moving through the region has only grown.
None of what Liberia needs from the United States right now depends on resolving the nexus question.
A FUNCTIONING DEA LIAISON PRESENCE, rebuilt and resourced for this moment rather than staffed at a caretaker level, could share intelligence on the networks operating across this corridor even where no American prosecution is possible. The State Department's own International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs bureau exists precisely to fund the kind of capacity Liberia is visibly short of -- coast guard vessels that can actually reach a ship running for deep water, forensic accountants who can trace a prison official's mobile-money account back to a Colombian network, secure custody protocols so suspects awaiting trial cannot keep communicating with their financiers from behind bars. None of that requires an indictment in a U.S. court. It requires a decision in Washington that this corridor is worth the investment before it grows into a bigger emergency than it already is.
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WE ARE NOT ASKING THE UNITED STATES to run Liberia's investigation, or to treat this country as a project rather than a partner. Liberian institutions, however strained, have done real work this year -- record seizures, senior arrests, a warden caught allegedly taking cartel money and stopped before he could do more. What Liberia cannot do alone is out-resource a trafficking network with the reach and financing to move hundreds of millions of dollars in cocaine through a single corridor toward a continent of buyers. That is precisely the kind of asymmetry American law enforcement has stepped in to help correct elsewhere in the world, and it is the kind of asymmetry Washington helped correct in this country once before.
THE NEXUS THAT MATTERS here is not a legal one. It is the plain fact that a trafficking corridor feeding Europe by way of West Africa's weakest links is everyone's problem, including America's, and pretending otherwise is a luxury none of us can afford much longer.
