Customer Reviews

Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

To understand the Taliban and al Qaeda, read this book. "Seeds of Terror" takes you to the heart of the matter—money, not religion. Opium not jihad. Gretchen Peters understands the big picture, the one Obama and the U.S. military desperately need to see.

Opium is still seen as just one means of financing religious fanatics. As Peters reveals, it's much more. For the Taliban, drug money is not just the means; it has become the objective—just like it is for the Colombian and Mexican drug mafias. As she tells us, "The insurgency is exploding precisely because the opium trade is booming."

The Taliban are almost entirely from the Pashtun tribe, and to her credit, Peters speaks fluent Pashto, which may be why the book feels so credible. For ten years, she has tracked the drug racket in every way imaginable, from flying with Pakistanis using forward-looking infrared cameras looking for drug convoys to sipping tea in one of HJK's two hundred houses. HJK, you will learn, was the number one smuggler behind the Taliban, with a billion-dollar drug business extending from Osama bin Laden to Mullah Omar and from Uzbekistan to Dubai. It's a fascinating read.

Peters admits she can't determine the depth of al Qaeda's involvement in the drug trade, although al Qaeda operatives routinely ship drugs to the Gulf. But she proves beyond a doubt that the Taliban has become primarily a criminal operation, and if the Taliban wins, al Qaeda will have its own narco-state.

Here's a hint of what's in the book. Chapter (1) To go after terrorist, you must go after their drug profits. (2) The explosion of heroin during the war to oust the Soviets. (3) The rise of the Taliban and the narco-terror state. (4) How heroin saved the Taliban (and changed them) after we kicked them out. (5) HJK, the sheepherder turned kingpin. (6) How drug money flows outside the banking system—an amazing process. (7) How U.S./NATO policy has avoided the drug war or been wholly inadequate, and how the Afghan government has been corrupted. The final chapter (8) is about what should be done. It's not the most fascinating part, but it may be the most important.

Peters present a nine point approach that seems well thought out, but in my view, her biggest strategic contribution is her thinking on how to attack the drug business. "Twelve percent of the Afghan population lives off the poppy trade. Destroying their livelihoods overnight [poppy eradication]—before providing alternatives—would ... turn more Afghans against the United States. ... The goal should be to cut or eliminate profits for smugglers and financiers at the top." Unfortunately she only goes a little deeper than that, but I think she's headed in exactly the right direction. As Peters has proved, Afghanistan is a narco-terror state, and we need to fight both parts at once--the narcotics business and the terrorist who profit from it.

I floated between three or four stars and settled for the former. At times a confusing read but I believe only because the subject at hand is complex. Also, from the cover jacket I thought this was the author's full decade of experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Turns out that this is basically a researched history, past and present, with possible future solutions to the opium/heroin trade supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Nonetheless, an insightful read of corruption, sleaze and greed. It's not even about religion anymore, it's about money.

The book certainly does make one keep up with current affairs in this part of the world.

As described by Gretchen Peters in Seeds of Terror, this was a common pretext for invitations by Osama bin Laden to wealthy Persian Gulf sheiks to travel to Afghanistan in the late 1990's. Combining business and pleasure, the sheiks were believed to bring in weapons and materiel for al Qaeda and the Taliban and to fly out with loads of heroin. Apparently bin Laden himself often participated in the bustard hunting excursions that represented the pleasure component of the junkets.

Like me you may be wondering what in the world a houbara bustard actually is. We learn from Peters that it's a type of "rare falcon". As it turns out, this is not correct. In fact, the houbara bustard is an endangered, primarily terrestrial bird, which is hunted by falcons and is the most prized quarry for Arab falconers. Hence its near extinction...

Anyway, setting this bit of sketchy scholarship aside, there is much of consequence that we do learn in Seeds of Terror. Essential points of the book are as follows:

* Drug traffickers, terrorist groups, and the criminal underworld represent a new axis of evil that the world needs to confront.

* The Taliban (clearly) and Al Qaeda (implicitly) are prospering from a growing stream of funding from the drug trade.

* Combating the terrorists will require going after the drug traffickers. This is something that for a variety of reasons the US and NATO commanders have been reluctant to do.

* The stakes are exceptionally high. According to the 9/11 Commission, September 11 cost al Qaeda $ 500,000. Al Qaeda has threatened future actions with casualties "too high to count", implying a quest for weapons of mass destruction. The availability of vast amounts of money from drug profits puts them closer to achieving this goal.

* Cutting off this source of funding will be exceedingly difficult, but not impossible.

* Eradication of the poppy crop, to date the focus of anti drug efforts in Afghanistan, is the least effective strategy. Instead, a holistic approach involving diplomatic initiatives; counterinsurgency strategy; blended intelligence and law enforcement efforts; military strikes against drug lords, labs, and transport convoys; development of a farm support network; public relations; disruption of financial flows; and implementation of alternatives for the livelihoods of affected parties is proposed.

Clearly this is important material and the world needs to hope that the appropriate policy makers take note.

Reading this book, particularly wading through the labyrinthine relationships of Afghanistan's various factions, gangs, and power brokers, is tough going. Nevertheless, given the significance of the subject matter, I give it a four star recommendation, in spite of the sloppy ornithology of the bustard business.

The subject matter is fantastic, intriguing and immense. However, the writing in POOR. The author writes as a journalist, jumps from date to date, overquotes unnecessarily, very hard to keep track of a narrative. Mrs. Peters is certainly a great reporter, and historian of our times. Her writing is not.

This book sounded interesting, but in fact, was just the same drivel, repeated again and again, always with such dubious citations as "some people say that Alexander brought the poppy to Afghanistan", or "a source close to Karzai's brother stated that he often saw bags of money traded for heroin". Worse, nothing new was ever introduced. A child could have written this book, using nothing more than [...].

By the time I finished this potentially very interesting work about an unquestionably important topic, I was downright irritable at the circuitous, repetitive and sometimes impenetrable book about what is almost certainly one of the key national security issues we face: the link between narco-trafficking and the terrorism that its profits finance.

Just from keeping up with the news, I knew this was an important topic and one I wanted to learn more of. Alas, this book didn't help much. Part of the problem is the structure -- Peters seems to make the same point over and over again, leaving me wondering why no editor had taken her material in hand and imposed some kind of order and coherence on it. Every so often, a segment would grab my attention, such as her quest into "HJK", the Afghan drug kingpin she compares to Khun Sa, the warlord of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. But then she quickly relapses into making the same point in different ways, relying more on comments from anonymous Westerners and other security officials than other first-hand observations, and quoting reports by other journalists. Why??? if she has spent the last decade in the region, surely she can bring her own observations and reporting to bear, instead of quoting her peers on what seem like banalities, such as: "What is new is the scale of this toxic mix of jihad and dope," writes journalist David Kaplan." That's the same point she's making in 17 different ways in the book; why quote another observer to make it #18?

Putting together this tendency to "tell" rather than "show" the reader what is happening, her reliance on other journalists' narratives to tell the story, and the circuitous nature of the book, left me with a disappointing book on my hands, and one that often felt as if it were written for a wire service or perhaps and news magazine and then streeettttchhhhed to fill an entire book. I'm sure there was new information in here, but frankly, you'd have to be following the drugs/terrorism connection with more than just average curiosity to detect it as it doesn't stand out. This struck me as an effort to drill down more deeply into one part of the vast interlinked criminal world that Misha Glenny chillingly outlined in McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, but it didn't come close to matching Glenny's book in reach or style.

Recommended only to those with a compelling interest in the subject and enough tolerance for ponderous prose to wade their way through this in search of the nuggets it probably does contain. It's certainly a 5-star book, but I can't, in good conscience, award it more than three stars. Even Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, which is little more than a memoir by a young member of one of the anti-opium taskforces that have tried combating the cultivation of poppies in Afghanistan ended up providing me with more insight into the broad issue, including the perspective of the Afghans themselves.

Ms Peters has done great service by bringing the role of drugs in Afghanistan and Pakistan to our attention. The book is well researched and the author has shown great dedication in her work given the risk to journalists in that part of the world. Unfortunately, the book is poorly organized and not very well written. At times it is repetitious. It does not follow a timeline. Much of it could be deleted without losing much of its value. Overall, I think it would have been a much better article in a magazine or newspaper. It you trudge through it however, you will be rewarded with an interesting viewpoint on how to win the war on terror. Given that so much of our tax dollars is being spent in Afghanistan, the American people need to become much more knowledgeable on that region.

Gretchen Peters sheds light on the significance of the drug trade in funding the Taliban and Al Qaeda, stressing the necessity of going after the drug trade to stop terrorism.

I did not read this book thoroughly because it gets bogged down in detail at points and digresses. However, in my preliminary-reading ( intros, chapter / transitions & conclusions, final chapter) I found 'Seeds of Terror' to be a believable description of how the Taliban funds itself by heroin trade.

Comment: Peters might have taken a stronger position on potential solutions, i.e., describing successes in Turkey with legal morphine / codeine production from poppies, Senlis /ICOS' research with Poppy for Medicine programs. (see Poppy For Medicine website)
In a war zone like Afghanistan, the viability of legal cultivation and crude processing of poppy resin at the village-scale is far from certain. My own approach was to involve humanitarian end-users as wholesale buyers of painkillers (but this will endanger aid workers even more than the current level of attacks upon Western aid providers). I believe eradication is a poor strategy which victimizes small farmers. Given the amount of money involved in Afghan heroin trade, international mafias & drug cartels will spend millions to support drug-lords who maintain supplies.

I was very excited to read this book to learn as much as possible about this important region but once I read the first chapter I realized I was reading the same thing over and over again. While this book is divided into chapters each chapter presents the same tired thesis and information. Over quoting people who are apparently knowledgeable in the field means nothing to me as the continuous name dropping and quoting is confusing.