Book Review:

Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
By Gretchen Peters
Thomas Dunne Books, 2009 (320 pages)

Earlier this month, President Asif Ali Zardari asked where is the Taliban getting its funding from. For a partial answer, he need not look further than in the bloodshot eyes of one of Pakistan’s six and a half million heroin addicts.

The Pakistani Taliban gets its funding from a variety of sources: ‘taxes’ on the timber and gems trade, extorting small businessmen, kidnapping, and bank robberies. But drugs are undoubtedly a major component of finances.

Gretchen Peters, a journalist formerly with ABC News, has written an excellent book on what’s generally described as the Afghan drug trade. But, as she demonstrates quite effectively, defining the industry as Afghan is inaccurate—it is a regional phenomenon. Drug profiteers have achieved a level of integration between actors across multiple Central and Southwest Asian states that regional economic pacts have failed to. Linked together are Afghan peasants, security officials, leading politicians (e.g. Hamid Karzai’s brother), and insurgents, as well as border guards, smugglers, politicians, and intelligence services in Iran and Pakistan, and a variety of actors in Gulf Arab emirates.

In one of the best displays of how drugs brings together disparate actors, Peters reveals that Abdur Rashid Dostum, an Afghan Uzbek warlord (secular and anti-Taliban, albeit barbaric), has been “in cahoots” with terrorist groups such as Tahir Yuldashev’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and (prior to his death) renegade Afghan Taliban Mullah Dadullah.  Interestingly, both Yuldashev and Dadullah give Dostum only one degree of separation from Baitullah Mehsud.  [And Abdullah Mehsud surrended to Dostum's militia in December 2001.]

What brings all these actors together is cash.  Peters writes: “Across Afghanistan, traditional enemies are working together wherever there’s a chance to make money.”  Drugs are also, in a sense, a form of currency used by militants to barter for vehicles and weapons.

In Pakistan, the drug trade has linkages to Afghan militants based there, Baloch leaders, tangential politicians affiliated with the PPP and PML-N (and I’d add — probably the ANP or PkMAP as well), the military-intelligence establishment (though this peaked in the 1980s), and possibly even the Karachi Stock Exchange (used for money laundering).  The problem in Pakistan at times has been that one arm of the state has been working to root out the drug trade, while the other hand has used the trade to fund its clandestine activities.  

Pakistan has effectively eliminated poppy growth inside its territory, but it is the major transit point for Afghan drugs.  The deletrious impact of the drug trade comes in the form of the syringes that wash up on the Karachi shores, the subsuming illicit trade via Afghanistan that denies Pakistan over a billion dollars in annual duties revenue, and the terrorists that have been murdering innocent Pakistanis in recent years.

So how can the drug trade be neutralized?  Peters recommends a nine-pronged program to combat the regional drug trade.  Contrary to what one might expect, eradiction of poppy crops is proposed only as a last ditch option.  Peters’ solution is smart — the toughest action is reserved for the drug smugglers, not the impoverished farmers.  Starting with eradication would likely only serve to boost the price of heroin, benefitting drug smugglers while enraging rural Afghans.  The Afghan Taliban, as Peters shows, is quite adept at market manipulation.  Its remarkable success in eradication in its last two years in power was not combined with eliminating the enormous heroin stockpiles; this only resulted in a massive increase in heroin prices, hurting farmers while increasing Afghan drug dealers’ and Taliban profits.   

Peters’ reporting depends heavily on U.S. intelligence reports provided to her. It seems as if the worst wrongdoing the U.S. can commit is apathy. That could be true, but Peters’ readers would be better served by a more direct engagement with questions surrounding the historic and present U.S. connection to the drug trade in Afghanistan and nearby.

Seeds of Terror is a quick and engaging primer on the drug trade emanating from Afghanistan — a primary cause for regional instability and state weakness.