The Economics (and Accounting) of Al Qaeda in Iraq

The Boston Globe:

... contrary to speculation that Al Qaeda in Iraq was reliant on international donations, this wasn’t a source of funding either. The group was self-financing. In fact, the core organization of Al Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar province was so profitable that it sent revenue to associates in other provinces of Iraq, and perhaps even further afield. The group raised millions of dollars annually through activities such as simple theft and resale of valuable items such as cars, generators, and electrical cable, and hijacking truckloads of goods, such as clothing. And their internal financial record-keeping was diligent, with all the requirements of expense accounts in regular businesses. A central unit of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s hierarchy required operatives to keep records of even the smallest outlay and to turn over their “take” to upper-level leaders, who made the spending decisions.

These carefully monitored expenses occurred in the context of what was literally a workforce. While people tend to think of Al Qaeda as simply a band of fighters, in reality there was a large organization needed to facilitate attacks and create support within the local community - all of which required money. As such, Al Qaeda in Iraq maintained an expanding payroll of members, imprisoned members, families of members, and dead members’ families, with ever fewer fighters and revenue producers. On the hook to provide for many local Iraqis, it had to resort to increasingly unpopular methods for generating revenue.

Beyond these daily expenditures, Al Qaeda in Iraq had big-ticket expenses. Launching attacks was one recurring overhead cost. An attack involved salaries for operatives, safe houses, transportation, weapons, and a crude form of life insurance for the wounded or for families of those killed. (By contrast, most civilian households in Anbar lacked any form of insurance.) Given these pressures, cash flowed fast in and out of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s central command in Anbar. About every two weeks, Al Qaeda doled out funds to pay not only for attacks, but also for housing, medical, and bureaucratic needs.

Osama bin Laden, game theorist

This post is not about bin Laden's decision to hide in plain sight, although that seems to have been a pretty good strategy. We take his decision to reside next to Pakistan's top military training center as a given. The question is, should he have arms in his compound? One's initial reaction is that it is quite odd that he was not armed.

Once the Americans discover where he is, their choices are limited. A small, quick raid is the most likely to minimize the chances word will leak to Osama (and he escapes) or that the Pakistani military becomes involved (bloodshed and embarrassment for the U.S.).

If he is armed and resists, he will be killed. If he is not armed it will be difficult for the Americans to know he is unarmed so he is killed -- in particular, he does not want to be taken alive so he has every incentive to act like he is armed.

In either case he's dead. Which does he prefer? To be killed unarmed. In death he'd get good PR out of it. Killing an unarmed person raises questions about the justice of the killing.

Or does it, now that you know the reason he was not armed?

Democratic terroritorial occupation, and suicide terrorism

Scott Ashworthy, Joshua D. Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher W. Ramsay:

[I]f a terrorist group chooses suicide tactics, then it is highly probable that a democratic country is occupying its homeland. This fact is certainly consistent with the existence of a "close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements." In the remainder of this paper, however, we show that it is also consistent with either a weak or non-association, as well as with a strong negative association. The data Pape collects are only minimally informative about the association between military occupation and suicide attacks.
...
It is important to note that our critique of Pape's analysis does not make the well-known point that association does not imply causation. Rather, because Pape collects only instances of suicide terrorism, his data do not even let him calculate the needed associations. The conditional probability of suicide terror tactics given territorial occupation, religious extremism, or any other potential cause, is unidentied and, thus, the attributable risk is also unidentied. Only after these identication issues are resolved can the equally important issue of determining whether the correlations have a causal interpretation be addressed.

The paper (pdf) is here. Thanks to The Monkey Cage for the pointer.

$1,000,000,000 per life saved

Kip Viscusi's estimate as reported to Bryan Caplan:

Viscusi told me that, in his judgment, the median number of deaths from domestic terrorism [terrorism occuring in the US] in the coming year will be zero, and the mean number of deaths in the coming year will be 50 - "or about half the number of motor-vehicle related deaths per day." If Viscusi is right, it's safe to say that we're [the US] annually spending more than a billion dollars per life saved.

Everything is connected

Item 1.

The NHS has traditionally depended on overseas doctors to help keep the health service running. The most recent figures show that almost 128,000 of the 277,000 doctors on the GMC register have been trained abroad.

Of these 1,985 are from Iraq and 184 from Jordan.

The skills gap has meant that, with the exception of consultants, doctors did not require a work permit until last year.

Ministers changed this only as the expansion in medical school places several years ago led to a boom in UK-trained doctors.

Item 2.

The latest crisis has come about because there were only 22,000 jobs for 30,000 junior doctors. The glut in applicants was caused by the introduction of a system where those who started training two years ago are competing for the same jobs as those who began three or four years ago.
...
the British Medical Association condemned the [NHS] system. Dr Faith Harries, a junior doctor, who has been offered no interview said: "I came out of medical school with £42,000 debt. I thought I was guaranteed a job in training in the UK — because I thought I would be able to pay it back. Now I am thinking of going abroad."