Gretchen Peters

Please see today’s New York Times story about an army captain in Ghazni province fighting for the release of a young man he believes has been wrongly accused. I often argue we ought to deploy beat cops to work the streets of Afghanistan because they would best understand the situation we face there. Capt. Black, himself a former police officer from Baltimore, is just the kind of person we should be listening to, not charging with insubordinance.

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.

This week the BBC reporter Owen Bennett-Jones, who I do not know well but whose work I have long admired (if you want a good and concise read-in on recent history in Pakistan, do yourself a favor and order his book) put out this excellent report from the Northwest Frontier Province.

In it, he quoted locals fleeing Taliban-held areas of Swat, and described what he calls a changing attitude towards the Taliban in Pakistan. Read this section (emphasis mine):

I have come to a place about an hour’s drive from Peshawar, 50 miles (80km) from where there has been intense fighting.

There are many people on the move here who have run away from that fighting and they have brought with them eyewitness accounts of the brutal things they have seen under the Taliban’s control of the Swat valley over the past few months.

“They were beheading people, they were shooting innocent people without any warning, they were terrifying us,” one woman tells me.

“They were stopping our kids from going to school, they were kidnapping young boys.”

A man standing nearby is also eager to talk.

“With my own hands I have buried 18 people who were beheaded, even children,” he tells me grimly.

“They are not friends, they are not our allies, they’re our enemies, they are criminals, they are gangsters.”

Such strong public criticism of the Taliban is new – the mood has changed in Pakistan.

I agree with OBJ that the mood has changed in Pakistan, and I would argue that ordinary people in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas also turned against the Taliban some time ago. Months back, I was chatting online with a friend from Wana, in South Waziristan and he was positively enraged about “gansters,” as he called them, who make up the TTP, the Urdu acronym for the Taliban Movement of Pakistan. I asked why he chose the word “gangsters” and he shot a message back to me: “There is not a crime in the world they have not committed,” and went on to describe widespread robbery, gun battles in the streets, and their engagement in all sorts of smuggling. 

The reports filtering out about life in southern Afghanistan are equally disturbing, as I describe in my book. On both sides of the AfPak border people’s lives are being chewed up by a brutal blend of extremism and crime, made worse by endemic corruption and a critical lack of governance. 

But as much as this widening insecurity presents an enormous security challenge, it also presents an opportunity for western nations hoping to stabilize the region. Ordinary people both in Afghanistan and Pakistan want nothing more than a secure environment where they can live and prosper. There are widespread misperceptions here in the U.S. that the Pashtun tribes who populate the border areas are ungovernable. I argue that people in the border areas (and in fact people across both Afghanistan and Pakistan — just look at the lawyers movement in Pakistan or the recent protest by brave Afghan women in Kabul) want rule of law and better governance. Our best and only exit strategy for this region is to give that to them — and fast.

“Stability operations,” the new buzz word in Washington for nation-building, is not only the fastest and cheapest option, it is the morally right one, and it will improve our nation’s security too.

A SKINNY man opened the gate at the sprawling compound in Quetta, in western Pakistan. When I asked if the property belonged to Afghanistan’s most powerful drug smuggler, he smiled and nodded. “Haji Juma Khan has 200 houses,” he said. “And this is one of them.”

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.