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
Gretchen,
First of all thank you for such a detailed response. I’m glad we can discuss this in sober terms (that’s not always the case for these things, as I’m sure you know). I’ve posted a response to your comment on my site as well, but I thought it probably wouldn’t matter in whose forum we had this discussion—which is, as you said, crucially important to U.S. policy in the region.
I think up front I should clarify probably a big way in which our thinking diverges: I draw a sharp distinction between affairs in Pakistan and affairs in Afghanistan. That isn’t always the most accurate reflection of the reality on the ground, but the interests of parsimony, I think, necessitate a bit of a limitation of scope (much like how you had to downplay the role of government corruption since your focus was the Taliban).
It is that divergence which I think explains the bit about corruption and even the Chechens and Uzbeks. With regards to the corruption, you spend a great deal of space discussing the Pakistani government’s problems with corruption, but I don’t believe I missed you discussing the Afghan government’s problem until page 134. And I’m afraid I have to stand by my original point that if there is broad, almost universal consensus that government corruption is a bigger and more difficult problem than a narco-insurgency… why write about the narco-insurgency?
I get that al Qaeda attacked us, and we have to stop them (believe me, I really do get that). And I think you and I are in very strong agreement that fixing the Afghan (and Pakstani) government is probably the only long-term solution to doing that. So… wouldn’t the real challenge be fixing the government? Colombia didn’t see a lot of progress on its drug front until its politics settled down and became significantly less violent. For example.
About the governance bit, we are in agreement that drugs flourish in ungoverned spaces. My research, however, would indicate that is merely a feature of ungoverned spaces and conflict zones, and that they do not necessarily require an insurgency to drive their cultivation (whether an insurgency exploits it is another matter entirely). You can see this in Afghanistan, where before the Taliban took over the North, contested or Northern Alliance areas of the country had the greatest amount of opium cultivation, and not the Taliban strongholds. I guess this can very quickly devolve into a fruitless and circular discussion of root causes, but there is a big difference between “the Taliban and AQ happen to take advantage of the drugs” and “the Taliban and AQ are primarily responsible for the drugs.”
The reason I remain so hesitant to draw a hard and fast correlation between the two is that a) in many areas like Khost and Nangarhar, poppy cultivation (or its absence) has been unrelated to the deepening insurgency; and b) there remains tremendous ambiguity about the militants’ precise relationship to the drug.
You’re right to note that this results in deeply contradictory information, and you presented some of that, but that doesn’t make it into the absolutism of your central thesis: a causes b, heroin causes al Qaeda. Even with the data you presented in your book, that conclusion just isn’t supported.
I guess where my skepticism overpowers my knodding head is in the conflation of drug lords, Taliban commanders, petty criminals, and whatever else might be contributing to the problem. We both would agree that the problems in Afghanistan are incredibly complex, and that all of these factors overlap and influence each other. I wish more leeway than scattered mentions of it showed up in your book, then.. which again, I get isn’t the point.
Who knows. Maybe I’m just complaining the scope is too narrow to accompany the real breadth of the opium problem in Afghanistan. Which is why when you note that insurgent and militant groups engage in illicit activities and tax legal goods to raise funds, I again nod my head in agreement and wonder why you only limited your discussion to opium. Because
For the record, I limited my discussion of Uzbek and Chechen militants to Afghanistan alone. I’m intimately aware of what they do in Pakistan.
Finally, I need to cop to not doing sufficient justice to the last, policy-oriented section of your book. While we part ways on whether even going after traffickers is a good idea or not, that is definitely the strongest part of your book, and the part I enjoyed reading the most. And to an enormous degree, we are in agreement in that area as well.
So I think what we have is really a disagreement on the margins, with substantial agreement on the broadest strokes of the severity of the opium problem. Which ain’t bad (and it’s why my review is so overwrought), you know?
Thanks for replying so swiftly. I would clarify that I am not trying to suggest that “the Taliban and AQ are primarily responsible for the drugs” or that “heroin causes al Qaeda.” That is why I traced the growth of the opium trade in Afghanistan over three decades, and from before either group existed. I am trying to suggest that from the days of the muj, fighting groups that have operated along the border have been tied to drugs, and other criminal activity, and that their deepening involvement is changing these groups. Also, if we follow the money, I believe it will lead us to the leaders of those groups. This is known as an “organizational attack structure” by law enforcement. That is how I would describe the central theme of my book.
But I believe that we are in broad agreement about what Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Central Asia, for that matter) need, and that is rule of law.
Similar to David Kilcullen’s model of four overlapping frameworks that define today’s threat environment (pp 7-27 of the Accidental Guerrilla) I believe there are a variety of overlapping frameworks that can help explain the complex environment along the border: one is the global history of insurgencies morphing into criminal groups (and if you look back in history, the Sicilian Mafia, China’s Triads and Japan’s Jakuza all started out as anti-state groups…meaning that the Mullah Omar of today could be the Tony Soprano of tomorrow. Another, as you correctly note, is the fact that ungoverned spaces are a magnet for extremism, crime, gangsterism and lots of other bad stuff. A third model which comes into play in parts, but not all, of the Afghan side of the conflict are decades and sometimes centuries-old tribal rivalries, and the way these groups compete for a slice of the pie.
I’m afraid I still don’t really get your argument that I shouldn’t write a book on subject X just because subject Y has a bigger dollar value. To my mind, and with all due respect, that’s like saying, we shouldn’t study diabetes since more people die of cancer. But we can agree to disagree on that.
I think there are gaps of knowledge about how money is raised by the various AfPak anti-state groups and how it moves between them. I tried to fill some of those gaps, but I think there is far more work to be done. Again, thank you for responding so quickly.
Gretchen Peters,
I have been studying the AfPak extensively since April of 2008. I have just picked up your book. I read the first 30 pages – intrigued to say the least. I see others have already reviewed your book. Within a few weeks, I will review it as well. I hope to join the discussion. I am interested in HJK and the laundering connections through Dubai. I am also interested in drugrunners for the Russian mafia, though I don’t know if your work holds enough pages to delve deeply into the CAR states. Regardless of any criticisms I may have, I am interested in discussing the issues with you in depth in time. Look forward to the rest of your book.
Thank you for your critical eye,
Gary H. Johnson, Jr.