Seeds of Terror

How Drugs, Thugs and Crime are Reshaping the Afghan War

Gretchen Peters

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781851688913
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The astonishing expose of al Qaeda and the Taliban’s booming drug trade

"Seeds of Terror" will reshape the way you think about the West's enemies, revealing them less as ideologues and more as criminals who earn half a billion pounds every year off the opium trade. With the breakneck pace of a thriller, author Gretchen Peters traces their illicit activities from vast poppy fields in southern Afghanistan to heroin labs run by Taliban commanders, from drug convoys armed with Stinger missiles to the money launderers of Karachi and Dubai. Based on hundreds of interviews with Taliban fighters, smugglers, and law enforcement and intelligence agents, Peters makes the case that we must cut terrorists off from their drug earnings if we ever hope to beat them.

1. THE NEW AXIS OF EVIL

OUR BATTLE GROUP WAS A RAGTAG CREW OF SCRUFFY AFghan cops and stony-faced American mercenaries. Our target was opium fields profiting the Taliban.

As the first light of day cast a pink glow across the desert, the Afghans rewound their turbans to cover noses and mouths, clicked ammunition clips into Kalashnikovs, and piled onto tractors and Bedford trucks. Wearing flak jackets, baseball caps, and dark sunglasses, the men from DynCorp silently checked their M4 rifles, and peered out across the bleak horizon.

I scribbled into my notebook as my colleague Nasir filmed the scene. John, my husband, was busy taking photos. Journalists rarely had access to ERAD, the poppy eradication force, especially in remote, lawless Helmand. Armed to the teeth and already covered in dust, our convoy looked like something out of Mad Max. We wanted to capture it all.

That morning before dawn, an advance team patrolling the roads had come upon a group of insurgents planting an IED in our path. Once the Afghan police colonel and the DynCorp team leader identified where the would-be bombers came from, they decided to pay their village a visit. As punishment, the ERAD team would destroy their opium crops.

Around the cloud of dust that rose as we bumped along the Zamindavar Plains, poppy fields stretched as far as the eye could see: intense fuchsia blossoms floating in brilliant seas of green. Simple mud huts hugged the banks of irrigation canals. Veiled women hoisted buckets of water out of wells. Turbaned farmers tended their crops, staining their fingers black with the opium gum as they scraped it off the buds. The scenery actually looked lovely, not that I was able to sit back and enjoy it. We were deep in Taliban country and would be lucky to make it through the day without an attack.

Inside our four-by-four, we rode in nervous silence. My mind replayed the array of nightmares that might befall us: ambush, IED, suicide bomb. Villagers along the road watched stonily as our convoy lumbered past. Each time a man approached on a motorcycle, or we slowed down to cross over a stream, my teeth clenched and my heart rose in my chest. It took about an hour to reach the target village. It felt like forever.

The Afghan police and the DynCorp soldiers quickly fanned out in a perimeter around the lush fields, their weapons ready. Tractors went to work churning up the poppy buds. Overhead, a Huey-2 helicopter buzzed the pastures, patrolling for ambushes. We were hundreds of miles from any place that could justifiably be called civilization, with about a hundred boots on the ground and one bird in the sky to protect against a ferocious, battle-hardened enemy.

In the end, the only confrontation came when a skinny farmer, tears streaming down his face, emerged from his mud hut with two filthy children to hurl insults at the eradicators. “Why don’t you just shoot us now?” he shouted. “If you cut down my fields, we’ll all die anyway.”

Next to him on her knees was his wife, toothless, in dust-covered robes. She reached her arms toward the sky and wailed loudly, beseeching Allah to inflict his wrath upon us. In this neighbourhood, we all knew, her prayers had a decent chance of being answered.

That trip to Helmand, in April 2006, put a face to the fragmentary information I had been hearing for more than two years. I had already interviewed truck drivers, farmers, police, and several governors from the southern provinces. The insurgents, they said, had teamed up with criminals. Kandahar’s top counternarcotics cop, Ahmadullah Alizai, put it this way: “The smugglers forged a direct link to the Taliban and al Qaeda. They get the terrorists to move their drugs.”¹

U.S. authorities started seeing the trend, too. In late 2003, American sailors boarded two rickety-looking dhows in the Persian Gulf. On board, they found a couple of wanted al Qaeda terrorists sitting on bales of heroin worth $3 million.² A few months later, U.S. counternarcotics agents raided a drug smugglers’ lair in Kabul, confiscating a satellite telephone. When CIA agents ran numbers stored in its memory, they discovered the telephone had been used repeatedly to call suspected terrorist cells in western Europe, Turkey, and the Balkans.³

Suddenly, links between terror groups and narco-traffickers began popping up all over Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was the start of things to come. The Taliban insurgency launched a comeback in the spring of 2003, just as opium cultivation exploded across southern Afghanistan.⁴ U.S. troops searching a terrorist hideout in Uruzgan Province found a drug stash worth millions of dollars.⁵ U.S. spy satellites tracked cargo ships leaving Pakistani shores laden with Afghan heroin, and returning with weapons and ammunition for the insurgency.⁶ DEA agents brought smugglers with ties to Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden to the United States to face justice.

If the accumulating incidents were troubling, it wasn’t until I saw the vast scope of Helmand’s poppy crop that I felt real alarm. Sloshing about the muddy fields, I realized these lovely flowers could one day fund whatever deadly ambitions terrorist groups based in this region had. “Drugs are going to change everything,” I thought.

In 2006, Afghanistan produced the largest illegal narcotics crop a modern nation ever cultivated in a single harvest. Two-thirds of it was grown in areas where the Taliban held sway, if not outright control.⁷ It’s no coincidence that it was also the bloodiest fighting season since Mullah Omar’s regime was toppled five years earlier, with about four thousand deaths. These two circumstances are codependent: the insurgency is exploding precisely because the opium trade is booming. In 2007, Afghanistan’s poppy crop expanded a further 17 percent, with 70 percent grown and processed in the Taliban-dominated south. In 2008, drought reduced Afghanistan’s poppy output by 19 percent. But more than 98 percent of it was cultivated in insurgent-held areas, where more than three thousand tons of opium were stockpiled, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Senior U.S. commanders now predict Afghanistan will turn out to be America’s “bad” war and Iraq the “good” one.⁸ An American soldier was more than twice as likely to die in Afghanistan as in Iraq by the end of 2007, reversing earlier trends, while Jane’s Information Group rated Afghanistan the third most unstable territory after Somalia and the Gaza Strip.⁹

In video statements, the insurgents no longer speak of their ambition to take Kabul; their battlefield tactics have shifted to protecting poppy fields and drug convoys. Campaigns for territorial gain, such as a 2007 Taliban push into Deh Rawood district in Uruzgan, now support smuggling activities.¹⁰ Deh Rawood is perched along the most important drugsand arms-trafficking route in Uruzgan, connecting to Iran in the west and Pakistan in the south. Poor security in general is vital to the opium trade, preventing aid programmes and other development that might offer poor villagers alternatives to the narcotics trade. “Drug smugglers do not want to see this country become stable,” said Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister.¹¹

Helmand Province, where I travelled with the poppy eradication force, is about the size of West Virginia. If it were a separate country, it would be the world’s leading opium producer, with the rest of Afghanistan in second place. It’s also where links between the Taliban and the opium trade are strongest. “Most of the insurgency there is drug-related,” says Ali Jalali, Afghanistan’s former interior minister. “It’s 100 percent intertwined.”¹² The province’s total population is less than 1 million—with tens of thousands of families displaced by the fighting. Taliban gunmen patrol the streets of towns they control, hanging alleged spies for the NATO coalition in public squares.¹³

In 2007, UNODC valued Helmand’s total poppy output at $528 million, a figure that prompted the conclusion among U.S. and UN officials that Helmand is a wealthy place.¹⁴ Poppy can fetch as much as twelve times more than other staple crops, like wheat and melons. “Helmand’s farmers are not poor,” a senior UNODC official told me in 2006. “Actually there are a lot of rich ones among them.”¹⁵ It is true traffickers and a handful of large landowners earn tens of millions off Helmand’s poppy crop, and we need to go after those individuals. However, the vast majority of farmers and sharecroppers are barely eking out a living. Household data collected by the Afghan government, and analyzed by two leading scholars on the Afghan drug trade, calculate a per capita daily income of $1, hardly reflecting Helmand as a land of plenty.¹⁶ “We grow poppy, but the drug smugglers take it from us,” said Haji Ramtullah, a farmer in Maarja district. “We sell it cheaply. Then they take it over the border into Pakistan. They make twice as much as we do.”¹⁷

Another argument one hears from U.S. officials is that the poppy farmers have alternatives but do not take them. Helmand receives more U.S. aid than any other Afghan province, they often add. That’s true; however, much of the money has been spent on large infrastructural projects that won’t show concrete change for ordinary Afghans for years. Meanwhile, cash-for-work and alternative livelihood programmes funded by USAID have been costly failures. One $18 million, U.S.-funded programme shut down in 2005 after gunmen killed eleven of the local staff and guards.¹⁸

Everywhere you look, there are horrific reports filtering out about daily life in this violent and lawless province. Farmers there often say they must grow opium to survive, and they are not exaggerating. The Taliban threaten dire consequences for anyone who fails to meet opium quotas set by the traffickers. With too few foreign troops to launch a proper counterinsurgency campaign, NATO commanders are forced to rely on aerial bombardments, killing hundreds of civilians and hardening the Afghan villagers against the West. The provincial government and police are notoriously corrupt—with most profiting from the opium trade as well. “We are caught here between the Taliban and government,” said Dastoor Khan, a Helmand farmer, expressing a commonly heard sentiment.¹⁹

Yet instead of intensifying efforts to go after the traffickers and money launderers behind the insurgency, the U.S. government has pushed for broadscale aerial spraying of poppy fields. Wide-scale spraying would play into the hands of traffickers and terrorists. If implemented, this policy would drive up opium prices, thus increasing profits for drug dealers and the Taliban, and make life even harder for already debt-ridden Afghan farmers—exactly the results the U.S. government and NATO don’t want.

It’s easy to see how we got into this mess. Finding a way out presents a greater challenge. One can blame the current predicament on a combination of geography, poverty, and the “light footprint” approach. Landlocked Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world, with social indicators on par with places like Burundi and Ethiopia. Almost one in four Afghan children die before they reach age five and average life expectancy is just forty-three years. Per capita GDP was estimated by the World Bank in 2003 to be a mere $310.

The nation’s infrastructure is pitiable, with one phone line for every five hundred people, few paved roads, not a single functioning sewage system, and a capital city that grinds along on just a few hours of city power per day. The economy is in shambles, inflation is skyrocketing, and along the rugged Pakistan frontier, many tribes have survived for centuries by smuggling goods through the forbidding mountain passes. Financial hardships weigh on ordinary Afghans as much as security concerns. In a 2006 survey by the Asia Foundation, Afghans named poverty and unemployment as more critical concerns than the Taliban.²⁰

After 9/11, the international community paid lip service to the strategic importance of a stable Afghanistan, but never committed the resources to actually create one. Despite troop increases to the NATO-led mission, Afghanistan has the lowest troop-to-population ratio and one of the lowest international aid-to-population ratios of any major conflict zone in the past ten years.²¹ The mandate for peacekeepers with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not go beyond Kabul for its first two years of existence, and there were fewer than ten thousand U.S. troops deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom—which covered the rest of the country—through 2002. As former national security advisor Richard Clarke put it, “There were more cops in New York City than soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan.”²² It was the perfect soil for an insurgency and a criminal economy to take root and flourish.

As poppy output mushroomed, donor nations started bickering over how to deal with it. The Pentagon, with the largest number of people and greatest amount of resources to throw at the problem, refused to take command, saying it blurred the central mission of hunting down terrorists. Top U.S. commanders, including former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, often quipped: “We don’t do drugs.”²³

But many recognized what was coming. “Nobody in the military who’s been out here questions that drugs are the problem,” says a U.S. official who used to be based in Kabul. “They jus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The New Axis of Evil
• 2. Operation Jihad
• 3. Narco-Terror State
• 4. The New Taliban
• 5. The Kingpin
• 6. Follow the Money
• 7. Mission Creep
• 8. Zero-Sum Game
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index