Gretchen Peters

If you have reached my website, you are probably someone who is interested in Afghanistan and Pakistan, national security or counternarcotics issues. You may have mistakenly visited the website of my namesake, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters, who (curiously) is releasing her new album the same week my book, Seeds of Terror comes out. Perhaps our publicity tours will overlap, but somehow I don’t think so.

Writing the book and getting it published has been a tremendously rewarding experience for me, however one of my great frustrations has been the fact that this story is constantly evolving, and every time new information emerges, I want to update the book. Unfortunately, book publishing doesn’t work that way.

So I have decided to start this blog, which I hope will serve as a living, breathing complement to the book, providing fresh information as it emerges both about events and characters described in the book, as well as news stories and reports that I find pertinent to the subject. I encourage visitors to leave comments or send me tips about stories I might find interesting (although I can’t promise to respond to all of them).

Shortly, I plan to post a blog about how criminal activity helps the Pakistani Taliban as they gain ground. Today I’d like to direct readers to this story in the Christian Science Monitor written by my friend Rehmat Meshud about the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Meshud, who is facing new challenges from a local rival. One thing I came across over and over during my research for Seeds of Terror was how rivalries between the mujahidin in the 1980s and Taliban commanders today have repeatedly beset their ability to gain ground. Such rivalries may not offer western authorities new allies (the man challenging Baitullah is also an extremist, for example) but they may serve to weaken the Taliban from within. 

Want to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban?

Stop thinking of them as terrorists.

The Obama administration has promised “a new way of thinking about the challenges” facing the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it’s also high time it starts thinking in a new way about America’s enemies themselves. The Taliban and al Qaeda have long portrayed themselves as holy warriors, battling under the flag of Islam. Most people in the West have accepted this characterization, imagining them as long-bearded fanatics, while Washington constantly refers to them as “terrorists” and “extremists.” No doubt they are. But, having studied their operations at the village level in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than three years, another descriptor also seems useful to me: criminal. When you examine the day-to-day activities keeping their networks financially afloat and probe how they interact with local communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda start to look a lot more mafiosi than mujahideen.

Read the full story here.