Gretchen Peters

According to a recent report for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, American intelligence agencies continue to believe that donations from wealthy sympathisers in the Gulf make up the bulk of funding for the Taliban, al Qaeda and other extremist groups operating along the AfPak (Afghanistan/Pakistan) frontier.

An examination of their day-to-day activities at the ground level suggests otherwise however.

Read the full report here.

I have been traveling and working on a research project in recent weeks, and I have had zero time to blog on the website. But I am taking some time today to post a few recent articles I have written, including this Oped in Britian’s New Statesman:

In Helmand, they protect opium shipments, extort money from poppy growers and operate heroin labs. In Kunar, they smuggle timber and guns. In the Swat valley, they control emerald mines, selling gemstones on the black market. On both sides of the Afghan/Pakistani border, they run a brisk kidnapping racket, snaring wealthy local businessmen, diplomats and journalists from around the globe.

When people in the west imagine the Taliban, most think of bearded fanatics, battling from caves under the flag of radical Islam. Having studied their day-to-day activities for more than five years, when I think of the Taliban I think of Tony Soprano and his gang.

Read the full article here.

In the following far-ranging interview with Failure, Peters discusses the Obama Administration’s approach to Afghanistan, the evolution of the Taliban, the role corruption plays in perpetuating the drug trade, and her own personal experiences reporting from one of the most dangerous regions in the world.

The war in Afghanistan has received increased media attention recently. Why?
In part, because it is going badly. By some estimates the Taliban now controls or dominates as much as sixty percent of Afghan territory, and casualty rates are higher than ever. Also, President Obama said that Afghanistan would be one of his central foreign policy efforts. He said he would refocus attention on the war in Afghanistan and finish it the way it should have been finished from the start.

Read the full interview here.

A new report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gives a concise breakdown of the dramatic change, both in terms of U.S. military strategy and counternarcotics policy, toward Afghanistan since the Obama administration took office.

It’s worth a read, since it zeroes in on the “fruits of neglect” and the culture of impunity that created the problem, and because it pieces together various new intelligence and policy initiatives taking place to fight it. It also argues, correctly, for a new metric for measuring success in the counternarcotics fight and encourages the kind of rigorous debate the United States needs to be having about Afghanistan.

Read the full story here.

In Afghanistan’s poppy-rich south and southwest, a raging insurgency intersects a thriving opium trade. This study examines how the Taliban profit from narcotics, probes how traffickers influence the strategic goals of the insurgency, and considers the extent to which narcotics are changing the nature of the insurgency itself. With thousands more U.S. troops deploying to Afghanistan, joined by hundreds of civilian partners as part of Washington’s reshaped strategy toward the region, understanding the nexus between traffickers and the Taliban could help build strategies to weaken the insurgents and to extend governance. This report argues that it is no longer possible to treat the insurgency and the drug trade as separate matters, to be handled by military and law enforcement, respectively.

Read the full report here.

On July 9, a blogger/intelligence consultant named Joshua Foust wrote a review of Seeds of Terror on the website Registan.

You can read it here.

I’ve emailed him a reply, which I hope he posts, and I am also putting it up here:

Hi Joshua,

I wanted to respond to your blog post on Seeds of Terror both to clarify some issues for accuracy and to further public debate on the important subject of Afghanistan’s drug trade. Having looked around your website, we disagree on some issues and agree on others, including the extent to which ordinary Afghan people are victimized by the opium trade. You have obviously spent time looking at this topic and I thought your concerns deserved a more lengthy response than I would give a casual critic. I hope you will post it. I also plan to link to your review and post my response on my website.

You start off your blog post by saying that it takes me more than 130 pages to discuss corruption, which you regard as the more “pernicious” issue.

I actually agree that it will be a far greater challenge for the NATO alliance and the international community to find reliable partners – both in Afghanistan and Pakistan – and to root out the corrosive issues of corruption and criminality.

However, I did not set out to write an exposé about corruption in AfPak. I believe there has been extensive media coverage of the issue of corruption within the Karzai government and the Afghan police, and that monitoring groups like Transparency International have raised public awareness about the extent of corruption both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I did not intend (nor did I claim) to pen an encyclopedic book detailing every aspect of the AfPak drug problem.

Rather, I sought to research and write about how the drug trade supports the insurgency and extremist groups in the region. That is an issue I felt had not been well documented and about which, as you say, there appears to be much conflicting information.

I believe that insurgencies occur in places that lack good governance. I discuss this in Seeds of Terror, as you note in your review, and I also devote considerable time to the issue of corruption – even in those first 133 pages – especially the long history of connections between the Pakistan military, the ISI and the drug trade.

I am not going to respond to all of your points, but want to address a few broad issues you raised, starting with the issue of correlation vs. causation. You write:

She notes that the Taliban came to power in 2003 “just as opium exploded across southern Afghanistan.” Well, okay. Does that automatically mean opium caused the Taliban? She never really says.

Actually, I think I do. Now, the Taliban did not come into power in 2003, leaving me wondering whether you are referring to the birth of the movement in mid-1994 (and their subsequent takeover of Kabul in 1996) or if you are talking about the 2003 announcement by Mullah Dadullah that they were launching a comeback.

Either way: I discuss at great length the origins of the Taliban, the economic backdrop to their rise to power and their early links to smugglers (both of opium and other commodities) on pages 68-76. In case you missed that point, let me state clearly and for the record that I do believe there is a direct causal relationship between the opium trade (and other smuggling) in Afghanistan and the origins and rise to power of the Taliban.

With regards to the post 2001 Taliban resurgence, there are both correlative and causal factors. There is evidence, for example, that Taliban commanders in Helmand – where few western forces were deployed after the 2001 invasion – tapped into existing opium stockpiles and used money they raised by selling off that opium to regroup and rearm themselves. I’d call that correlative. But there are also “causal” examples, like the story of Taliban forces and trafficking gangs pushing into Farah and Nimroz provinces in 2004/2005 – where poppy cultivation then mushroomed (See page 11 of 2008 UNODC annual opium survey for recent data on the crop size in those provinces).

There is widespread evidence of Taliban commanders collecting tax, extorting businesses and local communities, and also evidence that some of them struggle for money at times (all of this happened during the Soviet resistance as well). There are communities that appear to be victimized more by the local police (take a look at this recent Reuters story, for example), and I have found clear evidence that the Taliban, at least in the south and in some parts of Pakistan, have earned some degree of public respect for implementing impartial justice (this issue is also discussed on page 3 of a recent Atlantic Council report). One thing I have come to learn about Pakistan and Afghanistan, is that nothing is ever black and white.

Another reason this situation is so complex to explain, and sometimes contradictory, is because the wider insurgency is so multi-faceted. It would have been far easier to explain had all the insurgents behaved the same way. But the truth is, and I believe you would agree, that there are various “Taliban” operating along the AfPak border, and they don’t all act alike. In addition to three separately commanded insurgent fronts within Afghanistan (the eastern flank, the southeastern wing and the “original” Taliban in the south), there are also criminal gangs that often get referred to locally as Taliban. Across the Durrand Line, there are various branches of the Pakistani Taliban, along with other Pakistani, regional and international extremist groups.

What is common among these anti-state groups – on both sides of the border – is that they all engage in criminal activity of some sort or another to raise funds. It might be timber smuggling, human trafficking or taking a cut on emerald mines. They also collect “taxes” on legal goods. I compare the way the various groups interact to the way Mafia crime families relate to each other. Sometimes they collaborate, and sometimes they fight each other. They hold regular meetings to decide who has rights to earn in what territory. And when they work together, it is often to earn money.

In this regard, anti-state groups in AfPak are following the pattern of insurgents and terror groups around the world. The phenomenon happening in South Asia is neither new nor unique: It’s happened to the FARC, the IRA and Hezbollah, among others. What is worrisome, among other things, are the growing indications that some fighters in Afghanistan have links to criminal gangs in the West.

I’m not sure where you get the idea that Chechen and Uzbek are fighter are “mythical.” There has been widespread reporting of the IMU and Chechen presence in South Waziristan and the FATA in recent years, where they have battled both the Pakistani army and other militants and tribal elements. The IMU routinely puts out videos, like this one or this one. One of the local journalists who helped me research Seeds of Terror personally met Uzbek fighters who were supporting Mullah Fazlullah in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in 2008. There were reports Tahir Yuldeshev was recently wounded in Waziristan, and even more recently an Afghan reporter emailed me to say there are reports Yuldeshev has since decamped to northern Kunduz.

You accuse me of contradicting myself:

On page 86 we see that U.S. counternarcotics officials say they have no evidence of Osama bin Laden’s direct involvement in the drug trade, but on page 89 we see a former NSC official alleging that bin Laden used Ariana Airlines to launder money and drugs. Make up your mind!

My mind is made up. I believe bin Laden played a key role facilitating the drug trade during the 1990s. But that doesn’t mean I think he routinely got on his sat phone to coordinate jingle trucks full of dope that were traveling down the Chaman highway. Over and over, I heard how senior leaders – be they corrupt state actors, muj commanders or terror chiefs – did not personally muddy their hands in the day-to-day running of drug or other criminal operations. But they made contacts and facilitated relationships that made those deals possible across tribal lines, district and national borders.

Throughout Seeds of Terror, I have labored to present evidence and counter-evidence, and then to analyze that information instead of just cherry picking details that suit my argument. I am the first to agree with you that the conflicting information coming out of different U.S. government agencies has stymied attempts to formulate a coherent counternarcotics policy towards the region.

In my conclusion, I call for greater information sharing and cooperation among the various U.S. agencies that collect intelligence on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe the intelligence community, law enforcement agents and the U.S. military would all benefit greatly from a broad, detailed and classified study of how the insurgency finances operations, as well as how terror groups operating along the border fund themselves. Much more analysis of this issue is needed.

As you note, on page 14 I quote U.S. officials as saying that the DEA believes that 70 percent of the Taliban’s financing comes from drugs. You then link to an AFP story quoting the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan Dan McNeill as saying the figure is more like 40 percent. But actually, if you read the next line of that same AFP story, Gen. McNeill goes onto say, “he had been told by an international expert that this figure was likely low and could reach up to 60 percent.”

So where does the truth lie, at 70, 60 or 40? McNeill didn’t seem to know for sure. I’d raise another question: Can anyone really know? Since Seeds of Terror went to press, I have come to conclude that wondering what percent of the Taliban’s funding comes from drugs is a fairly futile exercise, given that Taliban commanders appear to keep few paper records and, as I said before, there is no longer just one Taliban.

Rather than trying to quantify the amount of money the Taliban and other anti-state groups are earning, I believe the focus should be on identifying and disrupting flows of money reaching insurgent, extremist and terror groups (as well as, of course, corrupt state actors). Degrading the enemy’s source of funding, while simultaneously improving governance, are critical pillars to any counterinsurgency campaign, and Afghanistan and Pakistan will be no exception.

Kind regards, Gretchen Peters

John R. Schmidt, a former foreign services officer who was based in Pakistan and who now teaches at George Washington University, has written an insightful analysis of the political backdrop in Pakistan that has contributed to its current unravelling. Read it here.

I thought his analysis of the land- or manufacturing-based elite that have swapped power with the Pakistan military since the country was founded was right on, as well as his remark, on page 33, that the lawyer’s movement could represent:

“the first stirrings of a civil society that could in time challenge the system.”

Schmidt also carefully dissects the complex and not always friendly relationship between Pakistan’s military and intelligence forces and the various militant Islamic groups they have at times fostered and at times fought.

It’s worth a read.

Watch my appearance on Good Morning America Weekend here about the escape of New York Times reporter David Rohde and his translator Tahir Ludin after seven months in Taliban captivity. Kidnapping has become a growth industry for the Taliban on both sides of the AfPak border, and the case of Rohde, Ludin and driver Asadullah Mangal was typical in that the threesome was kidnapped by a local criminal gang inside Afghanistan and then sold up the insurgent chain of command to end up in a compound in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The camp was run by the Haqqani Group, under the command of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of the legendary mujahidin commander Jalaluddin Haqqani (see my dossiers page for more on Dad). 

Rohde and his associates were by no means unique victims of the kidnapping problem along the AfPak border. The vast majority of the people abducted come from middle class and wealthy Pakistani and Afghan families. Thousands have fled the border areas, or moved out of the country, because of this growing problem. 

When Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in January 2002, his captors intended to make a statement, and they did so by beheading him and releasing a grisly video of his execution. It shocked the world. When David Rohde was kidnapped, his abductors intended to make money — lots of it. In their first request, they asked almost $30 million for his release, according to Western and Afghan officials, along with the release of high value Taliban prisoners being held by the US military. 

The Taliban demand smaller ransoms for locals they kidnap, but the issue is the same. Kidnapping is now a central pillar of the Taliban’s criminal economy. 

By the way, you can also watch me on PBS’s Newshour here.

Three Cups of Tea, the lovely book by mountaineer-turned-humanitarian Greg Mortenson, has captivated American readers and held its position on the New York Times best seller list since January 2007. 

Nonetheless, many Americans have no idea about the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Pakistan, where more than 2.4 million people have fled the Taliban in the Swat Valley and countless more have fled the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, better known here as the “tribal belt.” 

Ahmed Rashid, author of the Taliban and Descent into Chaos, has written an excellent editorial in today’s Washington Post that spells out clearly why we as a nation must help the people of Pakistan. He writes: 

The mass exodus from the battle zone to the southern plains has been the largest and fastest displacement of people since the genocide in Rwanda 15 years ago, U.N. officials say. … U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the United Nations may be forced to cut all its services, including food supplies, by July if its appeal for $543 million in emergency aid goes unmet. After nearly a month, donor countries have pledged only 20 percent of that. The International Committee of the Red Cross — the only aid agency working with civilians wounded from the fighting and with those civilians who have remained in the destroyed towns of Swat — seeks $38 million, which would double its Pakistan budget for this year.

Rashid notes that President Obama has pledged $310 million to help the people of northwest Pakistan, making him “the the only world leader concerned” about them. Arab and European nations have so far not coughed up any major aid packages. 

Times are tough, but I encourage the American people to follow Obama’s lead and send what they can to help the people of Pakistan. Many excellent aid groups are hard at work there, including Greg Mortenson’s CAI, Mercy Corps and Doctor’s Without Borders. 

As Rashid points out:

Strategically, much is at stake. The fighting in Swat is not just against extremism but for the hearts and minds of future generations. 

We are fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and in any counter-insurgency effort the best weapons don’t shoot. By helping to stabilize Pakistan, we will not only make the world a better place, we will make our own nation safer. Unless that happens — and happens fast, the world is “sleepwalking its way to defeat” in Pakistan, as Rashid writes. And the cost of doing too little could be enormous.

In my public presentations about Seeds of Terror, I’m frequently asked for my opinion on proposals to bulk purchase or simply legalize Afghanistan’s poppy crop, either for use in pharmaceuticals or as a bio-fuel.

The questions usually go: “Wouldn’t it be easier if we just bought all the poppy?” Or: “Shouldn’t we just take all that opium and put it into legal drugs?” 

And there’s something to that. I think it’s entirely possible that opium poppy grown legally and hygienically in Afghanistan could one day help supply what the International Council on Security and Development calls a critical shortage of pain killer in the developing world. 

I am also intrigued by recent proposals that include ideas to distribute genetically modified poppy seeds, that would not produce narcotic opium, as part of a broad effort to develop alternative livelihoods. In that case the crop could be harvested and processed to make diesel bio-fuel and animal feed. One of the study’s authors tells me Afghan farmers stand to earn almost as much as they currently do selling opium poppy on the black market and it would not have a negative impact on food production.

These are good proposals but they will work only after Afghanistan has been stabilized, and rule of law is established. 

However if Afghanistan’s poppy crop were legalized tomorrow, there would neither be the infrastructure nor the resources in place to regulate the world’s largest opium crop.

Who will make sure it gets sold to pharmaceutical companies and not to drug traffickers? I bet it won’t be Afghanistan’s notoriously corrupt police, many of whom also profit off the drug trade. 

And who will ensure it gets harvested hygienically? Afghanistan’s Food and Drug Administration? Oh wait, there isn’t one.

Is there a bio-fuel firm that’s ready and eager to build a processing plant in lawless southern Afghanistan? Are there volunteers willing to risk their lives in the war-torn poppy belt to train locals to run it?

Those are only the basic obstacles. The real issue is much larger – and not ours alone to assess: It’s easy for us to sit here in the United States and talk about legalizing Afghanistan’s poppy crop, since almost none of the opiates produced there end up on US streets (and in fact, heroin use in this country is declining, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health).

Folks have a different perspective on legalization proposals in places like Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia and Russia, where heroin addiction rates are skyrocketing. Russia, which has the world’s largest number of heroin addicts, has called on the United Nations to mandate that international troops in Afghanistan launch an aggressive poppy eradication campaign.

It isn’t possible to talk about Afghanistan in terms of “wouldn’t it be easier if…” or “shouldn’t we just…” 

There will be nothing easy about stabilizing Afghanistan. And there is no silver bullet strategy to magically transform it into a “Central Asian Valhalla.”

There is just one exit strategy for Afghanistan. Nation building – from the bottom up. Afghans need roads, schools, security and a strong, clean and stable government. Putting all that in place can’t be done piecemeal. It will take money, time, coordination and patience.

I’m not suggesting that it will be easy. But the cost of not doing it could be unthinkable.