combat wildlife trafficking

​The U.S. General Accountability Office (USGAO) released a brief but useful report on the activities that U.S. agencies (including the Agency for International Development, USFWS, and Justice Department) have conducted to combat wildlife trafficking (they refer to with acronym CWT). They describe the involvement of foreign terrorist organizations in the trafficking including al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram, al-shabaab, and the Lord’s Resistance Army. Their major critique of the efforts is that it is impossible to assess success because performance targets were not made for the programs. But they admit the failure to evaluate these programs can be attributed to few causes such as “results cannot be attributed solely to U.S. government actions and are dependent on continued combined global effort;  results often require years to document accurately; many potential indicators are metrics with limited or uneven availability of data from the key developing countries; and reporting against metrics could downplay the contributions of other stakeholders, divert resources, and either risk oversimplification or confuse audiences with complicated explanations of the limitations of quantitative targets (p38).” The report is available at http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/679968.pdf