Gretchen Peters

Most discussion of Afghanistan’s mammoth opium trade treats the problem as if it were Afghanistan’s alone. Pundits blame corruption in the Karzai government. Aid workers want to help poppy farmers grow alternative crops. The military wants to kill or capture 50 traffickers who collaborate with the Taliban.

But too few take note of the fact that the vast majority of profits are actually earned outside Afghanistan. Addiction, Crime and Insurgency, a new report from the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), pulls together some eye-popping statistics in an attempt to refocus attention on the broader consequences — and reach — of the trade.

See the full report here.

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.

I have long been a fan of the brave and determined Afghan reporters at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. They go into areas where few other journalists dare to tread and come back with balanced and insightful reports. If you want to keep up with what is going on in the countryside, read their dispatches.

Two reports out this week are especially good: This story examines the state of voter apathy in Helmand, where thousands of US and British troops are attempting an 11th hour effort to stabilize the province ahead of Aug 20 polls.

Engineer Abdul Hadi, the provincial head of the Independent Election Commission, said that Helmand would have 222 polling centres housing 1,092 polling stations.

But if the security situation does not improve markedly in the next two weeks, dozens of these centres could remain empty.

“You cannot conduct a military operation one day and expect people to come vote the next,” said Shah Nazar, a retired police officer. “People need to feel safe. But under these circumstances, nobody can participate in the elections.” (Read the full story here)

The IWPR reporter, Mohammad Ilyas Dayee, spoke to people in Marja, the scene of recent heavy fighting between the Marines and the Taliban, Musa Qala, a town the Taliban controlled for about four months in late 2006 and early 2007. It’s a sobering assessment of the chances of having a legitimate vote in the country’s largest province.

Meanwhile, another enterprising IWPR reporter actually traveled to a militant-controlled area to attend a rally of sorts where Mullahs were warning people not to vote:

The mullah spoke in generalities for a bit, asking people to maintain their unity. But slowly he came to his main point – exhorting people not to participate in the elections.

“These elections are a trick, a fraud perpetrated by western countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom,” he said. “Whoever participates in these elections will be shamed in front of Allah and his prophet.”

Ehsanullah Ehsan, a member of this group, had a black turban and black clothes. He looked like Taleban, and he told me that they had given speeches like this one in Karokh, Gozara and Oba districts of Herat province. The people in those areas had welcomed them warmly, he added, and the process was continuing.

Ehsan said that he himself had given some of the speeches, and added that participation in the elections was a very great crime.

“The Americans are just picking a puppet for themselves,” he said. “The president of Afghanistan is not going to be elected by the people.”

Ehsan urged participants at the gathering to tell their relatives not to vote.

The purpose of this counter-election propaganda was to motivate people to take up arms against foreign forces rather than vote, said Ehsan.

“Afghanistan has been invaded by these foreigners,” he said.

Ehsan knew how to play on people’s emotions. He talked about subjects designed to make people very angry, such as the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in western newspapers; the alleged abuse of the Koran by Americans; and the “genocide” caused by coalition forces’ bombardment of peaceful communities.

Ehsan told people that the foreigners had come to control our country and our people, and it was the job of each and every Afghan to spread the word that foreigners are the enemies of our culture and our religion.

Ehsan said that the mullahs did not belong to any specific group, but were just trying to serve Allah and rescue Afghanistan from the invasion of the infidels. He did say, however, that the mullahs were being financially supported by the Taleban.

Each of the mullahs had a mobile phone and modern weapons, and they were walking around the area without fear.

Their propaganda seemed to have an extraordinary impact on their audience. (Read the full story here)

It’s a fascinating read, and another indication of how badly NATO, the US military and the international community is losing the public relations war in the rural Pashtun south. It’s another example to me of how the West has deeply underestimated the enemy, and a sign of that old counterinsurgency dictum: “the best weapons don’t shoot.”

As the Obama administration and the Pentagon revamp strategy towards the region, an effective campaign to counter the insurgents’ misinformation campaign will be as critical to any effort to “clear, hold and build.”

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.

My husband, John Moore, who is a great photographer, has just put together several multi-media pieces on the war in Afghanistan, one of which features yours truly.

You can watch them 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

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.

A Taliban fighter recently killed by NATO troops in southern Afghanistan was found to have a tattoo from the Aston Villa Football Club, indicating he may have grown up in Britain’s West Midlands. It was the latest evidence that British Muslims of South Asian origin have joined the fight in Afghanistan. (Read the full report here)

For some time, Royal Air Force spy planes have picked up radio communication between Taliban fighters who speak with thick accents from Manchester, Birmingham, West Bromwich and Bradford, all cities with large populations of British Muslims of South Asian origin.

“But it was a shock to hear that the guys we were fighting against supported the same football clubs as us, and maybe even grew up on the same streets as us,” the Telegraph newspaper quoted an unnamed British military official as saying. 

Some law enforcement officials believe the British Taliban fighters may have links to criminal gangs in the UK whose members are Muslim and who have been connected to selling heroin on British streets. At least one other captured Taliban fighter was found to have British gang tattoos on his arms, according to a western law enforcement advisor to the U.S. military, and there is evidence that various British Muslim gangs have sent fighters to Afghanistan, or sell Afghan heroin on British streets.

The Gambinos, gangsters of Pakistani origin who take their name from the New York crime family, have been linked to selling Afghan heroin in north London and Luton.  So have the South Man Syndicate (SMS) and the Muslim Boys (who are also known as the PDC, or Poverty Driven Children).

“The big bosses have Taliban and al Qaeda connections and we’re often told only to deal it to non-Muslims. They call it chemical jihad and hope to ruin lives while getting massive payouts at the same time,” said a street dealer quoted in this British tabloid.

Members of the Muslim Boys, a gang of Afro-Caribbean Muslim converts (many of who converted to Islam in prison) have boasted to the British media of their links to to al Qaeda, although British officials admit it is hard to tell how much is bravado and how much is a sign of a concrete relationship between extremists in South Asia and the Muslim gangs of the UK.

But some British law enforcement officials believe the link is there – and cause for serious worry. Lee Jasper, the chair of the Lambeth police consultative group has expressed concerns that “the leaders of the Muslim Boys could be a criminalized front for terrorist extremists” in Britain.

BBC reports:

International and Afghan troops have killed 60 militants and made a record drugs haul in an operation in southern Afghanistan, the US military has said.

Its statement said the four-day attack targeted the town of Marja in Helmand province – a Taliban stronghold.

The troops seized 92 tonnes of opium poppy seeds and other drugs, “severely disrupting” a key narcotics centre and command hub of the insurgency.

Click here for the full report.