Watch Gretchen on the Daily Show.
Listen to Gretchen on WBUR’s On Point.
Listen to Gretchen on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Read an interview with Gretchen on Time Magazine’s Website.
Watch Gretchen’s Presentation with Merchant of Death author Doug Farah at the New America Foundation.
Watch Gretchen on Washington Unplugged.
Listen to Gretchen on NPR’s Fresh Air
Listen to Gretchen on WAMU’s Koji Nnamdi Show.
Listen to Gretchen on Coast to Coast AM
Reviews:
IT IS rare that a journalist writes about some aspect of American foreign policy, makes an impassioned plea for change and finds her advice adopted.
Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s man for South Asia, announced last month that, in the revamped campaign against the Taliban, America would no longer push for the eradication of opium crops, which he said was counterproductive and a waste of money. Instead, America would target the traffickers who back the Taliban, and then lure the impoverished Afghan opium farmers to the American side with alternative crops.
Mr Holbrooke did not cite Gretchen Peters’s new book, “Seeds of Terror”, but his script sounded eerily similar to her careful analysis of the nexus between the Taliban, the poppy fields and the White House. Ripping up opium plants with tractors and threatening to kill crops by aerial spraying with lethal chemicals has pushed Afghan farmers into the grip of the militants, she argues. “I’m a spray man myself,” Ms Peters quotes President George Bush as saying. But spraying helped the traffickers and their terrorist brethren by driving up opium prices, increasing margins and making life harder for the farmers, exactly the outcome that America did not want.
To persuade policymakers to acknowledge that the Taliban was largely financed by heroin took a surprisingly long time. American forces resisted taking on the drug traffickers who were well connected to the government in Kabul. That was not the job they were there to do, argued the Pentagon. By last year the connection between drugs and terrorism became hard to avoid. The Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that opium provided the Taliban with 70% of its revenue. About 50 refineries operated in Taliban-held areas. In short, says Ms Peters, the Taliban had turned into a new FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the terrorist group that became so adept at supporting rural peasants against their corrupt government.
Reviewed by Lewis Perdue
AFGHANISTAN MAY NOT BE WHAT YOU thought it was. According to Seeds of Terror, most of the Taliban’s religious fanatics have been replaced by organized gangs of big-time drug thugs whose primary goal is to protect their cut of the multi-billion-dollar Afghan heroin trade. In this book, which is subtitled How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda, Gretchen Peters estimates that the Taliban gets at least 70% of its funding from the heroin trade, and that both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda also benefit from global dope.
While Western media pundits wring their hands about the Afghanistan troop surge turning into another Iraq, Peters, who covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for the Associated Press and ABC, writes that “the parallels are actually closer to Colombia. The Taliban and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia both got their start as modern-day Robin Hoods, protecting rural peasants from the excesses of a corrupt government. Strapped for cash and needing the support of local farmers, both groups began levying a tax on drug crops.”
Then, Peters explains, both the FARC and the Taliban started providing protection for the drug lords, gradually taking control of the drug refineries and strongarming farmers to meet production quotas. Severe punishment or death awaited those who failed or refused. Finally, the FARC and the Taliban established themselves as alternate systems of a dictatorial government, ruling by fear and violence.
And like the FARC, which tried to maintain a virtuous “people’s army” facade, the narco-terror leadership of today’s Taliban uses jihad as a convenient public-relations cover to gloss over its greed and lust for power. Peters tells us that Helmand province — one of the key battle areas for the current U.S. military surge — produces more than half a billion dollars a year in opium.
“If it were a separate country,” Peters writes, “it would be the world’s leading opium producer….It’s also where links between the Taliban and opium trade are the strongest.”
Small wonder, then, that fighting is fiercest there today. But all across Afghanistan, wherever there are drugs, the Taliban is there with protection: attacking NATO checkpoints so opium shipments can get through, planting mines around opium fields and rigging explosives to take out soldiers who dare trespass on the poppies.
Seeds of Terror makes it clear that the Taliban could not have achieved its preeminent position in the illegal global drug trade without the blundering of every U.S. President beginning with President Carter. Peters tells us that Jimmy Carter, in 1979, signed off on secret aid to Afghan guerillas fighting against the Soviets despite warnings that the groups were moving dope. President Reagan continued the policy of looking the other way.
After the Russians left in 1989, President George H. W. Bush terminated most aid — hundreds of millions of dollars worth — to the guerillas and government. “Overnight, that left 135,000 armed Afghans and their families no way to support themselves,” says Peters, quoting a former CIA officer.
When President Clinton took office in 1993, his administration eliminated what little financial support was still trickling toward Kabul, thus forcing the population to rely on its only cash crop, opium. Money did begin to flow with the second Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the damage had been done: The Taliban had become a potent, well-financed adversary, and military errors to come only complicated matters.
The U.S. military, Peters tells us, “doesn’t do drugs.” That is, despite the fact that the Taliban insurgency runs on the lifeblood of opium, the military refused to support anti-drug operations. “One Green Beret complained that he had been ordered to disregard opium and heroin stashes when he came across them on patrol.”
The results of these bone-headed decisions become more significant in the light of a Stanford University study Peters cites: “Out of 128 conflicts studied, the 17 which relied on ‘contraband finances’ lasted five times longer than the rest.” Seeds of Terror offers layer after layer of fascinating information about the deadly consequences of decades of disastrous policy decisions. This is a well-written, well-documented and exemplary work of journalism.
LEWIS PERDUE, a former Washington correspondent and journalism professor, is editor of WineIndustryInsight.com.
Gretchen Peters’s excellent Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al-Qaeda explores how the opium industry fuels the Taliban, feeds systemic corruption in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and increases regional instability. The Afghan opium industry earns a half billion dollars a year. The Taliban shelters poppy producers and distributors and is now flush with opium-derived funds. Today, the Taliban is a financially self-sustaining militant jihadi movement. Her basic thesis is that Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be fixed unless the eco-system of opium and Taliban militancy is severed.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials estimate that the Afghan Taliban pays its contract soldiers $150 a month, contrasted with $40 paid to a government policeman. Moreover, the narco-Islamic- jihadis corrupt local Afghan administrators and politicians, who sell entire districts to the Taliban, according to Peters. Across the border, a Pakistani customs official tells her: “The vast majority of provincial authorities are corrupted,” and “smugglers connected to the highest level of the Pakistani government” receive support and safe passage.
Ironically, the smugglers whose activities bankroll the Taliban are said to like dancing and music and most “keep young boys,” according to one Afghan she interviewed. Others have hosted debauched parties with Russian prostitutes on private estates. Regional drug smugglers launder their dirty money in the Karachi Stock Exchange and the United Arab Emirates.
There are some gems in the book. Peters describes “short-termers,” Western diplomatic and development specialists sent in by foreign governments, who tend to bury problems on their watch rather than solve them, returning to accolades at home.
The challenges confronting Pakistan are immense and perhaps intractable. Nicholas Schmidle has written a gripping and readable contribution to understanding the embattled landscape of Pakistan. He does so with genuine empathy for the peoples of the country and intimations of the challenges that lie ahead. Gretchen Peters has penned a disturbing book and plainly states that unless the opium-smuggling industry is put out of business, the nation-building exercise in Afghanistan is destined for failure. We should heed her warnings.
The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia):
July 11, 2009 Saturday Final Edition
The poppy problem keeps growing; A lot more Canadians are likely to die from Afghan heroin than to perish on Afghan soil
BY: Michael Byers, Special to the Sun
Last November, I met a beautiful and cheerful young woman who was literally bursting with song. She was high on heroin, arms bruised from needle punctures, and so terribly thin that her pyjamas flapped as she danced through the vomit- and urine-stained halls of one of Vancouver’s cheapest hotels.
By now, the young woman is probably dead — one of the latest Canadian victims not just of the war on drugs, but also of the war in Afghanistan.
Gretchen Peters’s Seeds of Terror is essential reading for anyone concerned about public policy in the drug, defence or diplomatic domains. The former ABC News reporter draws on decades of field experience, numerous interviews and secret government documents to demonstrate that opium — not religious or political ideology — poses the greatest challenge to the United States and NATO in Afghanistan today.
She traces the origins of the crisis to the United States’ unqualified support for the mujahedeen in the 1980s. Focused on winning a proxy war against the Soviet Union, policymakers looked the other way as their local allies began to refine opium into heroin and smuggle it to Europe and North America.
A decade later, after the mujahedeen had morphed into the Taliban and taken power in Kabul, they continued to rely on heroin as a major source of income.
It might have been possible to close down the drug labs and smuggling routes during the first year or two of the U.S.-led occupation. But the Bush administration instead shifted its attention to Iraq, leaving only 10,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2002.
As Peters explains, this forced NATO commanders, short of boots on the ground, “to rely on aerial bombardments, killing hundreds of civilians and hardening the Afghan villagers against the West.”
The mission was further compromised by a narrow focus on capturing or killing the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership. In late 2001, U.S. troops detained Haji Juma Khan, whom they knew to be a drug smuggler with ties to the Taliban. But when they realized that he couldn’t lead them to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, they let him go.
Over the next seven years, Khan moved some $7 billion worth of opium to international markets.
According to Peters, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was concerned that Afghanistan “could turn into another costly drug war like Colombia” and rejected any engagement in counter-narcotics activities as “mission creep.”
There are important similarities between the Taliban and Colombia’s rebels, who go by the acronym FARC. Both groups began as an armed resistance to a corrupt government before evolving into a service agency for drug smugglers and international crime syndicates.
As Peters explains, heroin has transformed the Taliban into a “gangland-style grouping of tribal leaders, businessmen, regional warlords, and thugs.” She surveyed 350 people involved in the drug trade along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: “Eight-one percent of respondents said the Taliban commanders’ first priority was to make money, rather than to recapture territory and impose the strict brand of Islam they had espoused while in power.”
Drug money has also enabled the Taliban to re-arm, recruit new members and expand its geographic reach. Today, much of southern Afghanistan is under de facto Taliban control.
The expanded Taliban influence facilitates the growing of even more poppies: More than 98 per cent of the 2008 crop came from insurgent-held areas.
Peters’s principal concern is that the Taliban’s involvement with heroin might enable its ally, al-Qaida, to strike U.S. territory with a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.
Heroin is, of course, an insidious weapon of mass destruction itself. By 2007, Afghanistan accounted for a staggering 97 per cent of the global supply.
Cheap Afghan heroin has flooded into Vancouver on ships from China and India. The number of Canadian civilians dying as a result of Afghan heroin likely far exceeds the number of Canadian soldiers being killed on Afghan soil.
But destroying poppy fields in Afghanistan is not the answer. Peters explains that “wide-scale spraying would play into the hands of traffickers and terrorists” by driving up opium prices and thus increasing profit margins for drug dealers and the Taliban while making life even harder for Afghan farmers.
Nine years ago, the UN drug control program offered the Taliban $250 million to stop the cultivation of poppies. The Taliban agreed and was able to reduce the acreage planted with poppies by more than 90 per cent. However, the Taliban leadership also bought and stockpiled huge stores of opium before imposing the ban, selling it after prices had increased tenfold.
At the same time, “the poppy ban sparked a humanitarian disaster” for Afghan farmers, hundreds of thousands of whom defaulted on loans, sold off their land and livestock and fled to Pakistan.
Paying Afghan farmers to grow other crops is not the answer, either. In 2003, after the British introduced a $140-million crop substitution program, more Afghan farmers planted poppies in order to become eligible for being paid to switch crops the following year.
Eight years after 9/11, Peters argues that “the single greatest failure in the war on terror is not that Osama bin Laden continues to elude capture, or that the Taliban has staged a comeback, or even that al Qaeda is regrouping in Pakistan’s tribal areas and probably planning fresh attacks on the West.” Rather, “it’s the spectacular incapacity of western law enforcement to disrupt the flow of money that is keeping their networks afloat.”
She advocates military action, including air strikes against heroin labs and drug-smuggling convoys and the targeted killing of upper- and mid-level traffickers. At the same time, she advocates negotiations with the Taliban and concedes that “defeating the insurgency and the drug trade will now take years, maybe decades of sustained investment and effort.”
There is no denying that drug money, terrorism and technology are a potentially catastrophic mix. But Peters arrives at her military solution after only the briefest consideration of its possible limitations. For instance, although she identifies the parallel between Afghanistan and Colombia, she makes no attempt to assess whether the use of military force against drug traffickers has succeeded in the South American country.
Nor does she mention the concerns some NATO governments have expressed over targeting criminals, rather than combatants, with air strikes.
She dismisses a much-discussed alternative approach — that of purchasing Afghan opium for medicinal use — with the unconvincing argument that the demand for morphine has already been met. This is not the case in the developing world.
Peters also fails to mention the most radical and perhaps sensible policy alternative of all. Civil libertarians argue that legalizing drugs (and regulating and taxing them) would be more effective and, ultimately, less harmful, than futilely trying to eliminate them through force of arms.
These disagreements aside, there is one more reason why this is a must-read book: Peters has apparently succeeded in convincing Barack Obama, because many of her policy prescriptions have been adopted by him.
Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of B.C. He is a board member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
Power of the Poppy
It isn’t just the Taliban that benefits from Afghanistan’s drug trade
By KATHY GANNON
In Afghanistan, opium has bankrolled the good, the bad and the ugly. It has often been difficult to tell them apart.
First there was the “good”: In the 1980s, opium-using and opium-funded holy warriors, backed by the U.S., fought invading Russians in the last Cold War battle. Even the CIA was said to be involved in the drug trade then, using poppies (from which opium is made) to finance the insurgency and, it was rumored, to get Russian soldiers hooked on drugs.
Then came the “bad”: In 1992, the holy warriors came to power when the Russians left Afghanistan. They grew poppies at a phenomenal rate and used the profits to underwrite their internecine killing, support terrorist training camps and fatten their overseas bank accounts. In 1996, they were thrown out by the “ugly”—the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban’s core membership was made up of some of the same holy warriors. Yet when the Taliban was ousted, it had wiped out opium production—perhaps to drive prices up and make a windfall, perhaps to win United Nations approval.
Today, the good, the bad and the ugly all flourish in Afghanistan—sometimes together, sometimes apart. But it’s not clear who is benefiting most from the drug trade. Is it the Taliban and al Qaeda or members of Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government? Statistics vary wildly, but the U.N. estimates that drugs bring in upward of $300 million annually to the Taliban’s coffers. That still leaves billions unaccounted for.
In “Seeds of Terror,” Gretchen Peters makes a valiant attempt to dissect this difficult subject, but even her exhaustive research leaves a lot questions unanswered. She cites documents from U.S. intelligence sources and the Drug Enforcement Agency that portray the U.S. and its allies as reluctant partners with bad guys, who routinely exploit their country’s poppy crops for various purposes. Alliances with the unsavory, the reasoning goes, can be used to fight for a greater good—beating the Soviets in the 1980s, beating back the resurgent Taliban now.
But such a claim obscures the uncomfortable truth that the U.S. and the international community have had a direct role in putting the unsavory in power. In “Seeds of Terror,” the claim appears to be corroborated—but by false information. “The Northern Alliance swept into Kabul installing its people . . . in key security posts,” Ms. Peters writes, referring to late 2001. “To cobble together support for his weak coalition government, the U.S. appointed leader Hamid Karzai, who began handing out important positions like they were trophies.”
But the Northern Alliance didn’t sweep into Kabul. It was put there by the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom. And it wasn’t Mr. Karzai who handed out the trophies but the U.N., with the backing of Washington, at a meeting in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001. The Bonn agreement decided who would occupy the new government’s key posts, including key security posts and the presidency itself (which went to Mr. Karzai). Thus many in Afghanistan today say that the West is culpable for Afghanistan’s bad governance—and for its increasing poppy production—because the U.S. and its allies returned to power the very warlords and drug kingpins who had given rise to the Taliban in the first place.
A great deal of misinformation has emerged since the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, and it is repeated so often that it is now taken for truth. An example from “Seeds of Terror”: that the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was linked to Osama bin Laden before the Taliban took over Kabul in September 1996. To make that connection, Ms. Peters says that Omar belonged to a mujahedeen group—the Hezb-e-Islami, under the leadership of the Yunus Khalis—that sheltered bin Laden when he fled Sudan for eastern Afghanistan in early 1996. But Omar belonged to Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi’s Harakat-e Islami group, which had no affiliation to bin Laden. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Omar fought in southern Kandahar and didn’t know bin Laden before the Taliban takeover.
At first blush this would seem to be a minor error. Yet it is hugely significant, because the men who actually welcomed bin Laden when he reached Afghanistan from Sudan were the same men that the U.S. and its allies in Enduring Freedom put into power once the Taliban had been driven out. These same new rulers have led the long hunt for bin Laden. No surprise that he hasn’t been found.
The installation of the unsavory into power might also explain how Afghanistan went from being essentially opium-free in 2001 to producing more than 4,000 tons of opium during just the first two post-Taliban years. Those in power, supported by the U.S. and its allies, then did exactly what they had done before the Taliban took over. They set up little fiefdoms and extorted money from the international community to stop producing drugs. Yet all the while they were also planting poppies in previously poppy-free areas. Some in the Afghan military and anti-narcotics ministry have drug-dealing reputations that go back decades.
It is Ms. Peters’s belief that, ultimately, opium is at the heart of al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s financing and that following the drug-money trail and choking it off is central to winning the war on terror. But the answer to the big question is more important: Who has the deepest involvement in the drug trade—the Taliban or the Western-allied government? Is the lawlessness that has made winning the peace in Afghanistan so elusive rooted in the government’s participation in the drug trade? At some point, the U.S. and its allies will have to clean out relationships that have been built on nefarious ties between Kabul’s government and its patrons. Such an effort is a key to Afghanistan’s future and to the value of Afghanistan’s elections this summer.
Gretchen’s Reply (Published on July 8, 2009):
On June 26, the Weekend Journal published a review of my book Seeds of Terror by Kathy Gannon. Ms. Gannon was my boss back when she was bureau chief of AP’s Pakistan office in the late 1990s.
I respect the many years she spent covering the region, however, she has based her review on incorrect historical data and charged me with making claims I have not, so I feel I must respond.
Ms. Gannon writes that the Taliban leader Mullah Omar got his start fighting under Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi and his party, the Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami (which she identifies as the Harakat-e Islami group). I do not dispute this, however there is also clear evidence that Mullah Omar switched allegiances on a number of occasions, also fighting under Yunis Khalis, as I cite in my book.
The BBC correspondent Rahimullah Yusufzai, an expert on the Taliban, says Omar was a low-level commander during the Soviet resistance, and many commanders like him in southern Afghanistan routinely switched allegiance depending on which party could provide money and weapons. This is backed up on page 19 of the Taliban, where Ahmed Rashid quotes Mullah Hassan, a Harakat fighter and later a senior Taliban official, as saying: “I knew Omar extremely well but we were fighting on different fronts and in different groups but sometimes we fought together.”
In her review, Ms. Gannon suggests that I claim Omar’s membership in the Khalis group meant he was close to Osama bin Laden by 1996 when the Saudi fugitive arrived back in Afghanistan from Sudan. I never make such a claim, and page 80 of Seeds of Terror describes how bin Laden set about trying to ingratiate himself with the Taliban leadership upon his 1996 return.
These may seem like trifling details – and indeed they have little to do with the overall theme of Seeds of Terror, a subject Ms. Gannon barely discusses in her review. It is ironic Ms. Gannon uses these details to accuse me of spreading “misinformation,” given that she does not get all the facts straight.
Gretchen Peters
Kirkus:
Emmy-nominated journalist Peters exposes a particularly ugly bit of geopolitical blowback—the reconstitution, via Afghanistan’s opium crop, of the forces behind 9/11.
Formerly an ABC News reporter in Afghanistan, the author has delved deeply into that country’s forgotten corners, conducting in-depth research and an impressive range of interviews. After the Bush administration neglected Afghanistan in favor of war with Iraq, she writes, “It was the perfect soil for an insurgency and a criminal economy to take root and flourish.” The Pentagon, NATO and the international aid community all fumbled the drugs issues. Now, as a result, “UN officials estimate the Taliban and the smugglers they work with have stockpiled as much as 8,000 tons of opium—enough to supply the world’s heroin addicts for two years.” Peters argues that the Afghan insurgency has followed the pattern established by Columbia’s FARC: Drug profits increase the rebels’ arsenal and viciousness, and eventually protecting their drug business takes precedence over ideological purity. The same pattern is apparent in European terror cells—in 2004, the Madrid plotters financed their operation through the sale of Ecstasy and hashish. In Afghanistan, the situation is complicated by a reluctance to acknowledge the problem that long predates al-Qaeda, as confirmed by Peters’ interviews with CIA and DEA personnel who gingerly monitored the situation in the waning years of Soviet occupation, when no one wanted to admit the mujahideen were increasingly involved in trafficking. More recently, the opium trade has been central to the Taliban’s resurgence, as a smuggler acknowledged to Peters: “They bought low, they sold high.” The author quotes intelligence sources who worryingly claim that al-Qaeda operatives are accompanying large drug shipments in the Arabian Sea. She also provides valuable background, explaining the complex money-laundering methods used by these outlaws and identifying the largest smuggler in Southeast Asia (currently in American custody), who served as an intelligence source while doing business simultaneously with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. An important reminder that “if you want to go after terrorists, you have to go after drugs.”
Booklist:
Sure to be hotly discussed, this new book explores the often labyrinthine connections between terrorism, the American government, and the heroin trade. Based on the author’s years-long investigation, the book shows that the events of September 11, 2001, should not have come as a surprise to the U.S. government.
As long as ago as 1988, she writes, when Mikhail Gorbachev announced that Soviet troops would withdraw from Afghanistan, observers wondered whether a “deadly mix of heroin smugglers and Islamic extremists” would emerge out of the turmoil. In 1992, when the United States withdrew its support forAfghan rebels, the mujahideen, it was virtually inevitable that many of those resistance fighters would turn to the drug trade to support their families (around the same time, a small group of Muslims called the Taliban began using drug profits to set their war plans in motion). Providing valuable historical context for the war on terrorism, Peters shows, clearly and persuasively, how events that are happening today were set in motion by what took place in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s.
Publishers Weekly:
Journalist Peters draws on 10 years of reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan for this important examination of the nexus of [drug] smugglers and extremists in the global war against terrorists. Citing firsthand testimony, classified intelligence reports and specialized studies, Peters builds a solid case for her contention that the union of narco-traffickers, terrorist groups, and the international criminal underworld is the new axis of evil.
Ground zero is Afghanistan, where the rejuvenated Taliban depend on opium for 70% of its funds and there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the drug trade. Peters argues that the failure to halt this money flow to terrorist networks is the single greatest failure in the war on terror, and warns that stanching the flood of drug money into terrorist coffers is essential.
The author offers a less-than-convincing strategy to sever the link, including military strikes against drug lords, alternative-livelihood programs for small farmers, regional diplomatic initiatives and a public relations campaign. Prescriptions aside, Peters has exhaustively framed one of the thorniest problems facing policy makers in this long war.
A.V. Club:
Taliban leaders openly look down on the consumption of opium among their followers, but the drug trade may be the single largest instrument by which they’ve been able to control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Though a reportorial stumbling block saps the force from her controlling argument, Gretchen Peters makes a clear case for the drug-induced instability of the region inSeeds Of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling The Taliban And Al Qaeda.
Opium used to be just another cash crop in Afghanistan until the Taliban, trying to rebuild its forces after the Soviet invasion, saw an untapped cash resource in the vast network of farmers who grew it. Harnessing corruptible local police to keep local growers in line, the Taliban implemented a network of ruthless organization in which protection fees are paid all the way up to the top leadership, keeping the rank and file fearful even as they’re rewarded for their loyalty. The influx of easy cash has altered the Taliban’s internal raison d’être from explicitly pushing a theocracy to joining forces with any group that stands to turn a profit for it. (Its power over the rest of the country is so extreme that other thugs have taken to calling themselves Taliban to extract their own fees.) While it’s far from the only organization to fund its work with drug money, the Taliban’s collusion with al-Qaeda, providing the cash-strapped organization with backing in exchange for military assistance, seals its part in what Peters calls the new axis of evil, which flourishes where coalition forces in Afghanistan were unable to provide long-term aid.
Peters spent more than two years in Afghanistan’s Helmand province reporting on the opium trade and its relation to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and her digging into money-laundering techniques fit to fuel an international criminal network reveals just how powerless outside investigators are against bank-free transfers and the largely unregulated Karachi Stock Exchange. At other times, a swell of biographical background overwhelms Peters’ wary tales of tracking drug kingpins and interviewing suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
Yet Peters’ critique of the incomplete, often haphazard American response to the opium trade contains a huge hole, though not one of her creation: Since there’s no direct link between bin Laden and opium smuggling, which for some higher-ups is reason enough to separate military insurgents from illegal growers, Seeds Of Terror balances on a supposition, though a likely one. Still, her suggestions for the Obama administration and coalition forces offer hope that the final piece of evidence has yet to be introduced in the case against the Taliban.
Seeds of Terror gets mentioned in the media and on blogs:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=153879
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/03/finally_getting_serious_about.php
http://war-poverty.suite101.com/article.cfm/gretchen_peters_on_al_qaeda_and_the_heroin_trade
http://thegrumpysociologist.blogspot.com/2009/05/book-review-seeds-of-terror-how-heroin.html
For those who speak Spanish, the former Spanish Ambassador to Pakistan José María Robles Fraga mentions Seeds of Terror in this report:
TRIBUNA / INTERNACIONAL|JOSE MARIA ROBLES FRAGA
Islamabad asediada, el mundo en peligro
- 25.05.2009
ANTES de que hayamos tenido tiempo de darnos cuenta de lo que estaba pasando, han saltado a las portadas de los periódicos del mundo entero las noticias sobre los avances de los talibán paquistaníes que, desde el valle de Swat, consiguieron llegar la semana pasada hasta unos escasos 100 kilómetros de Islamabad, la capital de Pakistán. La reacción del ejército del país no se hizo esperar, y en las últimas horas se ha recrudecido la contraofensiva. Las últimas informaciones hablan de que las fuerzas militares paquistaníes habrían abatido a más de 1.000 talibán, y durante todo el fin de semana han penetrado en el valle del Swat -bastión islamista por excelencia-, hasta su capital: Mingora.
Conviene, por la importancia de los hechos, profundizar en lo que está sucediendo en la región. Desde principios de 2007, la amenaza que sufre la capital de la República islámica de Pakistán es una realidad que se ha manifestado en los progresos de este movimiento insurgente ligado a Al Qaeda fuera de las zonas tribales pastunes, en múltiples atentados y en el empeoramiento de la situación de seguridad de Islamabad. Esta degradación no ha cogido, sin embargo, por sorpresa a los conocedores y expertos de la zona, que confirman el descenso al caos, título del último libro de Ahmed Rashid, que describe el fracaso de las políticas occidentales ideadas para combatir el terrorismo yihadista a partir del 11 de septiembre de 2001.
Peshawar, la capital de la provincia de la Frontera del Noroeste paquistaní, nexo de unión con Afganistán, está fuera de control para los occidentales. Y el riesgo de atentados y secuestros se ha extendido progresivamente incluso a los barrios más protegidos de Islamabad y a las partes del país más alejadas de la frontera afgana, incluyendo el Punjab.
Entre el desinterés de los europeos y las sucesivas políticas de EEUU en esta lucha contra Al Qaeda y sus aliados locales se ha acabado por poner en peligro la existencia misma del único Estado musulmán con armas nucleares, y con ello las bases mismas de la seguridad y la estabilidad de la región y de todo el mundo. Eso es lo que está hoy en juego, además de la capacidad de análisis y de acierto de buena parte de la elite diplomática de Washington y de los principales gobiernos de Occidente. La batalla de Afganistán se juega ya en el interior de Pakistán, al otro lado de la llamada línea Durand, y en un medio y unas condiciones bien diferentes a como empezó la guerra contra el terrorismo.
Pakistán no es ya la retaguardia, es el otro frente de una contienda que empezó con los ataques a las Torres Gemelas de Nueva York y que dura desde entonces. Con todo, Pakistán no es un Estado fallido, sino una nación viva que rechaza mayoritariamente a los talibán y que cuenta con energía y capacidad suficientes para, con la ayuda de sus aliados, vencer este terrible enemigo.
Lo que no tenemos ya es tiempo que perder, ni cabe escusa alguna para la inacción o el desinterés, o para dejar solo a nuestros aliados norteamericanos en la solución de este problema. Europa es la primera afectada por los peligros que provienen del país más peligroso del mundo y de su entorno. Y por eso a los europeos nos deben preocupar mucho los riesgos de proliferación nuclear que resultarían de una descomposición del Estado paquistaní o de que ese país sea la retaguardia o el origen de los ataques a las tropas de la ISAF desplegadas en Afganistán -más de 700 efectivos son españoles-. Tampoco hay que olvidar las conexiones paquistaníes con las redes de Al Qaeda europeas y el peligro cierto de infiltraciones extremistas en las comunidades de paquistaníes en Europa. Por lo que a nosotros atañe, después del Reino Unido es probablemente España el país de la la UE con una mayor y más reciente colonia de esa proveniencia.
En los últimos años se ha producido una modificación muy importante del mapa de los riesgos y amenazas y del escenario internacional ligado al yihadismo y el terrorismo internacional. La base territorial de Al Qaeda se ha extendido y reforzado en Pakistán, no sólo como resultado del modo con el que fue destruida parcialmente su base afgana en 2002, sino también por las debilidades y ambigüedades del aparato de seguridad paquistaní y, en fin, del fracaso de una estrategia de seguridad nacional basada en la exportación de la yihad a los vecinos en búsqueda de garantías políticas y militares que son hoy sencillamente imposibles. Es hora de construir la seguridad de Pakistán sobre bases más sólidas y fiables.
El déficit de interés de Europa es inaceptable. Hay un papel importante que debemos y podemos jugar en la supervivencia y el desarrollo de un país clave para nuestros intereses estratégicos más relevantes. Para hacerlo debemos adaptar a toda velocidad el mapa de nuestro despliegue diplomático y las prioridades de nuestra acción exterior, acompañando la reflexión y el esfuerzo que está haciendo la nueva Administracion de EEUU y reforzando los mecanismos de coordinación europeos.
Es necesario, por ejemplo, que las instituciones europeas dispongan de un enviado especial único para Afganistán y Pakistán con la capacidad, el apoyo y los medios necesarios para hablar y actuar en nombre de la UE. Además debemos poner todos los recursos posibles y disponibles al servicio de una emergencia internacional que exige medidas inmediatas en materia de apoyo financiero, ayuda al desarrollo y asistencia humanitaria.
El apoyo a la democracia paquistaní no debe consistir sólo en movilizar fondos para sostener los programas sociales de un Gobierno débil en plena maniobra de ajuste económico y sometido a los embates del terrorismo y a una guerra terrible en el corazón mismo de su país. La dificultad y la complejidad del caso residen precisamente en que mientras no es aceptable ni imaginable la quiebra del Estado, la salvación de su proyecto nacional pasa por un cambio fundamental en su dirección histórica, en su modelo estratégico y por profundas reformas sociales y políticas.
ES IMPOSIBLE vencer al cáncer terminal del enemigo talibán y el yihadimo si el Estado debe luchar con una mano atada a la espalda por el enfrentamiento eterno con la India, y si su ejército dedica su principal atención a la perspectiva de una guerra total con su vecino oriental mientras sigue siendo incapaz de combatir a los insurgentes por falta de medios y doctrinas adecuadas. Es también inimaginable una respuesta política al movimiento talibán si se mantienen las bases de un sistema feudal y tribal que niega los servicos básicos a gran parte de su población y toda posibilidad de progreso a millones de ciudadanos atrapados en una inamovible situación de pobreza, injusticia e ignorancia.
Hace falta por ello una nueva estrategia de desarrollo que en el marco de las Naciones Unidas y de su proceso de reforma acelere los planes para lograr los objetivos del milenio en Pakistán. Es, en fin, poco probable que logremos desmontar el entramado yihadista si no acabamos con las bases económicas que lo sostienen gracias al cultivo y el tráfico del opio y de sus derivados, como señala el libro de Gretchen Peters Las semillas del terror.
Lo más urgente es ahora movilizar inmediatamente los recursos necesarios para atender a los centenares de miles de desplazados internos por los combates en Swat, que se enfrentan a los rigores del verano en la peor de las situaciones posibles. España deberá contribuir sin duda a los llamamientos financieros de las organizaciones internacionales y, en mi opinión, iniciar a la vez la reflexión oportuna para dar a Pakistán un lugar importante en nuestra Ayuda oficial al Desarrollo. Nuestros compatriotas ya lo hacen de forma privada y también lo hicieron cuando ocurrió el terremoto de Cachemira de 2005. España no puede dejar de seguir ahora este ejemplo cívico cuando nos enfrentamos a una tragedia civil y humanitaria que tiene además por causa un terrorismo que nos amenaza también a nosotros de forma tan grave.
Europa, sin duda, deberá acelerar el paso en esta difícil crisis regional que abarca ya a dos países de la zona, que pone en dificultades a toda la región y que es hoy ya el principal reto de seguridad del mundo. España, cuando asuma el año próximo la Presidencia europea, se encontrará con la responsabilidad decisiva de asumir un protagonismo y un papel propio en esta nueva frontera de la realidad internacional. Nos jugamos mucho en este embite y la respuesta que demos deberá estar a la altura de la amenaza y de los riesgos existentes.
Nos toca actuar en una parte del mundo alejada de nuestras tradicionales áreas de atención, de gran complejidad y con mayores incertidumbres y riesgos que nunca. Por ello necesitamos una actuación concertada con nuestros socios y aliados. Nada de esto será posible si nuestros líderes políticos no asumen la urgencia de este reto y ponen esta guerra y esta amenaza entre las prioridades de nuestra política exterior.
El mundo se ha hecho más pequeño y el coste de la desatención o de la pereza en Pakistán y Afganistán es hoy inasumible. El polvorín del planeta está en esos dos países y la mecha es cada día más corta.
José María Robles Fraga es diplomático y fue embajador de España en Pakistán entre 2005 y 2009.
Ever since my book The Mystique of Opium in History and Art[Parkstone, 2002] appeared, I have recieved queries about its political influence in Afghanistan. I am now able to refer all interested parties to Seeds of Terror, the best work on the current situation, and, I think, a model for future investigative reporting in general. As I read it I antiipated what Jon Stewart would later say about being “turned on” by it.
Don Wigal
NYC
I saw u on tv and u stood your ground, like that and u r a cutie, i am not who u think i am, i go thru life being invisable, but u, cutie pie have me very intrigued!! i have served in the places that u talk about, i have the utmost respect that u went there and saw it from both sides, very courageous, it tells me as a seasoned vet that you will get your story, i have been trained to do what i do and i hardly talk to strangers, if u know what i mean, i saw a bunch of comments on your website, possers, i am the ntrue thing, and yes, i still think u r a cutie!!
Hi,
I’m the feature writer for Poverty/World Development at Suite101.com. I posted a review of “Seeds of Terror”.
I hope it is ok that I used the book cover.
If I did not credit it right, please correct me.
I can always edit it.
I would feel honored if you would place a link to my review on your website.
I’m very impressed with the book.
Christine Welter
http://war-poverty.suite101.com/article.cfm/gretchen_peters_on_al_qaeda_and_the_heroin_trade
Dear Gretchen:
Thanks for publishing my article. Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post has recently written about paying Afghan farmers not to cultivate poppies. From the tone of it, it seems to me that we will make the deadly mistake of short-sighted policy, not paying the occupational change subsidy long enough for farmers to take up either new crops or new occupations. Short-sightedness will only expose farmer cooperation to Taliban retribution unless loss of income to them is long term enough to help put them out of business.
I’ve tried to explain how a $730 million investment returns OECD nations $216 billion in annual saved societal costs to be returned as a profit on the original investment.
You talked about talking personally to Richard Holbrooke, and that he was willing to make mistakes, but how do you keep him from making the one mistake he must not make, that of trying to implement this policy on the cheap without planning it well and considering the long term?
Your thoughts are solicited. If they are going to do this, they need to do it right. I would like you to be able to write a sequel to How Opium Profits the Taliban as How Lack of Opium Income Puts Taliban Out of Business. Hope to hear your comments
Best!
Walton
If you want to call it’s 814-466-8747 (State College, PA)