Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror

I picked this book up at the library, along with Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish, because both books were subjects of a New York Review of Books review by Ahmed Rashid. As it turned out, neither book gets much attention in the review. Peters is limited to one paragraph:

The depth of the opium problem, for example, has recently been exposed by Gretchen Peters, who in her book Seeds of Terror describes how opium sales have ballooned since 2001, because of either a lack of a coherent strategy by the US or the constant bickering over a strategy between the US and its NATO partners, particularly Britain. Bush refused to use the US military -- the only capable force on the ground -- to interdict drug convoys in Afghanistan and arrest or kill drug lords, many of whom were easily identifiable. Only last year did the Department of Defense agree to use the military for these purposes. During the last six months there have been a series of raids by US Special Forces and Afghan commandos that have netted large amounts of opium, chemicals that turn it into heroin, and many of the drug traffickers. Afghanistan today provides 93 percent of the world's heroin. As Peters shows, from the poppy growers, to the Taliban and other local powers, to the drug lords and their allies in government, the influence of opium money pervades Afghan life.

I suppose one could write a good book about this subject, but it would require a degree of introspection that few journalists have -- one that is certainly lacking in Peters. It's a curious fact that illegal drug networks seem to crop up wherever the CIA sets foot. Also that all of America's wars on drugs have yielded little more than higher prices and greater profits for the druglords. But you also need to look into how the whole drugs issue warps the brains of American strategists. They are so blindered they cannot conceive of a positive development of Afghanistan that does not eradicate the drug trade -- even though, for instance, the US manages fairly well despite hosting the world's largest drug trade.

Peters repeatedly falls into these mind traps, especially when she refers to "narco-terrorism" and "narco-states" -- as if "narco-" makes much difference. Still, there are things to draw from this book. One is the profound level of corruption and cynicism that pervades the entire region. Everyone understands that corruption undermines the legitimacy of the Afghan state, and that the lack of legitimacy is what fuels the Taliban's revolt. But clearly if you look at any other nation in the region (e.g., Pakistan, but also Iran, the ex-Soviet -stans, and you can throw in Russia, India, and China) you'll find pretty much the same corruption. (Less obvious to US observers is the presence of 100,000 NATO troops, which is another powerful source of delegitimacy, one that we steadfastly avoid talking about.)

Lately I've been running into Peters a lot as one of those self-appointed experts committed to keeping the US in Afghanistan no matter what the consequences. Still, the book doesn't give me any faith in her "zero-sum game" solutions: if the DEA can't win its "war on drugs" in America, does it really have any chance in Afghanistan? With underpaid, 70-percent-illiterate police, in a region where the only reason anyone could become a cop is to make a living off graft? With education, in a country where the opium trade has not only long existed, but used to be run by King Zahir Shah himself?

1. The New Axis of Evil (p. 4):

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. 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).

(p. 14):

The DEA estimates opium now provides the Taliban with 70 percent of its financing. UNODC estimates that approximately 80 percent of Afghanistan's 8,200-metric-ton opium yield in 2007 came from Taliban regions and sold at an average of US$86 per kilogram. This would have netted the Taliban more than $56 million in 2007 from the 10 percent tax known as ushr (from the Arabic ashr, which means "ten") that is collected at the farm level. Additionally, more than fifty refineries reportedly operate in Taliban-held areas, where insurgents collect about $250 for every kilogram refined. UNODC estimates that those refineries produced 666 metric tons of heroin and morphine base in 2007, which yields another $133 million and change per year. The Taliban also earn as much as $250 million annually providing armed protection for drug shipments moving through their region, as well as receiving tens of millions of dollars worth of material supplies from smugglers, including vehicles, food, and satellite phones.

2. Operation Jihad (pp. 28-29):

The United States' clandestine adventure in Afghanistan bears remarkable parallels to today's state of affairs. It began in 1979, when Pakistan was ruled by Zia ul-Haq, a mustachioed general who took pwoer in a bloodless coup in 1977, ousting a democratically elected leader [Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom Zia then had executed]. The international community at first isolated the ruling junta, and then abruptly reversed its policy when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Overnight, Pakistan became a frontline state in the cold war, and the conduit for billions of dollars in military and other aid flowing to the Afghan resistance. Washington embraced the mujahideen as valiant freedom fighters, and their jihad in the forbidding Hindu Kush became a cause célèbre bursting with drama and intrigue.

(pp. 29-31):

Through much of the twentieth century, Afghanistan's opium trade was controlled by the ruling family, headed by Zahir Shah, and largely exported to Iran. Afghanistan became a popular stop on the "hippie trail" in the 1960s because of its cheap hashish and striking scenery. When King Zahir Shah was ousted in a 1973 coup, Washington considered Afghanistan's drug trade worrisome, but Pakistan's tribal areas, a lawless border region slightly larger than Rhode Island, was a far bigger concern. [ . . . ]

When the Afghan resistance began, Pashtun tribes in Pakistan's tribal areas grew more poppy than all of Afghanistan put together, and had been smuggling all sorts of commodities for centuries. A 1965 bilateral agreement allowing goods to be transported duty-free from Pakistan's coast to landlocked Afghanistan worked to the benefit of the tribes, giving birth to an elaborate network briskly ferrying commodities in and drugs out. [ . . . ] From time to time, Karachi authorities launched raids into the coastal smuggling dens at Sohrab Goth, a teeming Pashtun slum hugging the seaboard, where they uncovered massive underground narcotics bunkers. After Jimmy Carter's administration signed off on the first secret aid for the anti-Soviet resistance in 1979, members of his own administration worried in a New York Times editorial that the United STates was making a mistake by supporting Pashtun guerrillas who also moved dope. They wrote: "Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos?"

Their concerns were well founded. Reports filtering out of the war zone in the early years of the resistance asserted that rebel-held areas had begun growing poppy on an unprecedented scale. Opium production more than doubled in Afghanistan between 1984 and 1985, from 140 metric tons to 400, according to U.S. government estimates at the time, doubling again in 1986.

(p. 35):

Yunis Khalis, who headed a breakaway Hizb-i-Islami faction, was the third fundamentalist commander [after Gulbuddin Hekmaryar and Mullah Akhundzada] deep in the heroin trade, according to ex-officials, historians, and mujahideen commanders. "Khalis was a drug dealer and a thief," says a former U.S. official. "He was also an effective fighter." As with Hekmatyar, Khalis rise to power was fully dependent on his manipulation of the heroin trade and his ties to Pakistan.

By 1997 Afghanistan outpaced Burma as the world's largest heroin supplier (p. 60):

Next door, the heroin trade was now worth an estimated $8 to $10 billion, more than the government's annual budget and as much as one-quarter of Pakistan's entire GDP. It has created a class of billionaire tycoons with tremendous influence over the new civilian government. The leading smuggler was Haji Ayub Afridi, a tribal chief who ran a massive heroin empire from a luxury fortress in the Khyber Pass. Afridi worked closely with Zia's government to help smuggle weapons to the mujahideen and was believed to coordinate shipments of heroin smuggled out in NLC trucks. Following Zia's death, he allied himself with the Punjabi politician Nawaz Sharif, actually winning himself a seat in the National Assembly in the 1990 general elections. The second most powerful Pakistani trafficker, also tied to moving Afghan heroin, was Mirza Iqbal Baig, a Punjabi cinema owner with close ties to Benazir Bhutto's People's Party and a rentendy to ruthlessness.

3. Narco-Terror State (pp. 68-69):

However, Mullah Omar's movement [the Taliban] -- almost from its inception -- was highly dependent on an intertwined with the opium network spanning the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Drug traffickers and tribes growing poppy were critical to the Taliban's swift and astonishing rise to power. Later on, the opium trade provided vital tax revenue, which kept the pariah state afloat despite global economic sanctions. It also funded the military campaign against the Northern Alliance and supported the global ambitions of Osama bin Laden, who plotted the 9/11 attacks at terrorist training camps he ran in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Fueled by drug money and joined at the hip with al Qaeda, the Taliban turned Afghanistan intothe world's first fully fledged narco-terrorist state.

In July 2000 Mullah Omar announced a total ban on poppy cultivation (pp. 93-94):

Almost overnight,the price of opium at Afghanistan's border shot up from an all-time low of about $28 per kilo to between $350 and $400, according to UNODC and DEA accounts. And despite th ban on growing poppy, western authorities noticed that the Taliban made no effort to seize drug stocks or arrest traffickers. On the contrary, opium bazaars continued to do a brisk business, and the Taliban still collected tax -- now earning much higher revenues from a product that had increased tenfold in value. Levels of heroin purity dipped slightly in western markets over the coming year, but the street price of heroin remained stable, indicating there was virtually no supply shortage.

(p. 99):

In his 2006 autobiography, then President Musharraf claimed his government actually had little sway with Mullah Omar. Contrary to popular belief, he wrote, "our relations with the Taliban were never smooth; in fact they were quite uncomfortable." A U.S. official then on his second posting to Pakistan agreed with the president's assessment, saying that when he returned to Islamabad in the late 1990s, his contacts told him, "al Qaeda replaced us out there. They have the checkbooks." When the Taliban blew up the ancient Buddhas of Bamian, even after Islamabad had dispatched its foreign minister to beg them not to, the Americans concluded Islamabad had created a monster it could no longer control.

(p. 100):

On September 11, 2001, the regional price of a kilogram of opium had reached an all-time high of $746. Within weeks, it had dropped to $95 a kilo, according to the DEA, indicating its owners were dumping their stocks in anticipation of the U.S.-led invasion, possibly for hard currency, possibly to trade for weapons. UN officials believed the Taliban, al Qaeda, and allied drug lords possessed more than 2,800 metric tons of opium.

4. The New Taliban (pp. 106-107):

The Northern Alliance swept into Kabul [in 2001], installing its people, most of them ethnic Tajiks, in key security posts. To cobble together support for his weak coalition government, the U.S.-appointed leader Hamid Karzai began handing out important positions like they were trophies. Fahim became defense minister. Eastern warlord Hazrat Ali took control of Nangarhar, a provine rich in poppy. Western strongman Ismael Khan reinstalled himself in Herat, where he could tax lucrative cross-border traffic with Iran. The Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum got Mazar-e-Sharif and control of trade to the north. He battled over the spoils with a rival warlord, Mohammed Atta. Sher Mohammed, the young nephew of Nasim Akhundzada, was handed the governorship of Helmand.

U.S. officials privately acknowledge the unsavory behavior of various individuals who joined the new government, including allegations that some were tied to drug trafficking, but claimed they were needed in the hunt for al Qaeda.

(p. 130):

The insurgent group with the deepest reach in the drug trade is unquestionably the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). With a network of fighters extending from South Waziristan up through the former Soviet republics, the IMU was cultivated by bin Laden in the 1990s to develop roots in Central Asia. He may have recognized the group's earning potential: Interpol and the DEA report that the IMU controls as much as 70 percent of the multibillion-dollar heroin and opium trade through Central Asia. The group was founded in the late 1990s by the radical mullah Tahir Yuldeshev and Juma Namangani, a former Soviet paratrooper inAfghanistan who defected to the mujahideen.

(pp. 133-134):

It may seem contradictory that terrorists are working with the very police and army they are simultaneously fighting -- not to mention in cahoots with Dostum, a northern warlord who is notoriously anti-Taliban. But it's a pattern repeated over and over. Across Afghanistan, traditional enemies are working together wherever there's a chance to make money. And instability is vital for the drug business, creating a powerful disincentive for Afghan government officials to build a more peaceful country. The Taliban and their allies may be earning hundreds of millions from the drug trade, but one thing almost everyone interviewed for this project agreed on was that crooked members of Hamid Karzai's adminstration are earning even more.

(p. 138):

The corruption doesn't stop at Afghanistan's borders. Iran, which battles one of the world's highest opium addiction rates, has made concernted efforts to stop Afghan opium from enterng its territory, spending more than $400 million a year to fight the problem. It has erected massive ramparts along the border to block smugglers, and lost some 3,400 soldiers and police in battles with drug convoys over the past five years.

However, Iran, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, battles a corruption problem. Multiple sources and western intelligence cables seen by the author report corrupt Iranian intelligence agents are helping to move drug shipments in their vehicles, which have specla plates and don't get searched by Iran's anti-drug police. Sources along the border identified a handful of major traffickers, mainly ethnic Baluch, who cooperate with Iranian secret agents to coordinate Taliban attacks on NATO troops.

5. The Kingpin: Haji Juma Khan (HJK) (p. 157):

As a result of the payoffs, Hussein had received MI and ISI identity cards so vehicles carrying drugs would not have trouble passing checkpoints manned by police and the Anti Narcotics Force, the report claimed. One frustrated Pakistani inspector called the Taliban, the smugglers, and the intelligence agencies an "evil troika," and said five close associates of HJK who had been arrested by police and ANF in Baluchistan were released on orders of the ISI within two weeks.

6. Follow the Money: much ado about money laundering.

7. Mission Creep (p. 186):

Plus, opium make up between 30 and 50 percent of Afghanistan's GDP, and it's not just the insurgents profiting. Complicating the picture is the fact that key allies in the CIA and U.S. military-led effort to hunt down al Qaeda and Taliban are themselves known to run massive drug rings. It is clear that senior officials in the Karzai administration arei nvolved as well, though efforts to fight corruption have stalled badly. The Afghan president raised eyebrows in 2007 when he appointed Izzatullah Wasifi as his anticorruption tsar. Wasifi was convicted two decades ago for trying to sell $2 million worth of heroin to an undercover officer in Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas. Wasifi called the bust a youthful indiscretion.

There were worse cases. In June 2004, counternarcotics agents raided the offices of the twenty-something Helmand goernor Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, where they found nine metric tons of opium. He was removed as governor soon after, but Karzai swiftly appointed him as a member of parliament, and he never faced an investigation, much less any charges against him. Other senior Afghan officials and warlords with known ties to narcotics remain in business, according to U.S. military intelligence documents seen by the author. A number of them still work closely with the U.S. military and the CIA.

(p. 207):

The biggest problem facing law enforcement efforts is widespread corruption and lack of capacity in the Afghan government, judiciary, and police. Almost eight years sine 9/11, amid fresh calls to build a bigger Afghan army, what the nation really needs is a functioning police and judiciary. The Afghan National Police remain largely untrained, underequipped, poorly funded, and riddled with graft. Regional warlords who stpeped into rural power vacuums often installed their private militias as the provincial police. The international community, with Germany as the lead nation on police reform, got off to a slow start transforming these ragtag groups into a 62,000-strong national force.

In 2004, Washington accelerated the effort with a $1.1 billion program, contracted in part to Virginia-based DynCorp International, to put provincial police through eight-week crash courses, using retird American police as trainers. Even this massive investment failed to make much of a difference, however, in part because there were so few trainers per province, and eight weeks was not nearly enough time to turn militia fighters -- 70 percent of them illiterate -- into respectable, trusted law enforcement officers.

Uh, 70 percent illiterate? I don't see how you can run a police force with any illiterate officers?

(pp. 209-210):

Major campaigns to wean Helmand's farmers off of poppy have been expensive failures. A sizable portion of Washington's $600 million Afghan counternarcotics effort is now spent on "alternative livelihood" programs. More than $200 million in U.S. and British funding was designated for Helmand in 2007, a year when poppy output there still increased by 45 percent. In early 2008, the World Bank estimated donor nations would need to invest more than $2 billion in irrigation, roads, and other development projects to entice Afghan farmers away from poppy cultivation. That will be challenging logistically to implement in the south, given NATO and the Kabul government's inability to quell the violence there. A number of facilities built with aid money already sit empty and crumbling. One western-funded school on the edge of Lashkar Gah was turned into a poppy field after it closed in a shower of Taliban threats.

(pp. 211-212):

In 2007, aid worker Joel Hafvenstein, contracted by USAID to help set up Helmand's cash-for-work program, published his memoir, Opium Season. His vivid account of his treacherous year in southern Afghanistan revealed the pressure his team came under from the Bush administration to meet arbitrary quotas they set. Washington dispatched advisers -- hired by the Defense Department but answerable to the State Department -- to get Afghanistan's faltering reconstruction effort off the ground. The advisers ordered Hafvenstein's team to create 2.5 million workdays in Helmand during their first year, a Herculean task that meant employing thousands of people. They appeared to be unconcerned about the nature of the work, but worried about accusations that too much USAID money wentn to pay high-priced foreign advisers. The advisers wanted 70 percent of the cash to be spent on Afghans. "Condoleezza Rice will be getting weekly updates on this project," one of the advisers todl Hafvenstein, who wondered to what extent the targets were for "Condi's benefit," as he put it, and not based on on-the-ground realities.

Ultimately, none of Washington's goals would be met. Hafvenstein and his colleagues fled Helmand after pro-Taliban assailants killed eleven of their local colleagues and guards. Hafvenstein's experience, while tragic, nonetheless evokes the old adage that the U.S. government is the world's last communist institution, with five-year plans, risk aversion, and targets everyone pretends to meet. Planned economies are doomed to failure when their goals are shaped to meet the political priorities of their planners instead of the needs of the people who live under them.

(pp. 213-214):

Washington put forward a five-pillar strategy to fight the opium trade in 2007, with a focus on aerial eradication, alternative livelihoods, interdiction and law enforcement, justice reform, and public information. The Kabul government and most European nations rejected it as too heavily focused on aerial eradication using the herbicide glyphosate, which is commonly sold in the United States under the trade name Roundup. Senior U.S. officials insist their real priority is arresting opium kingpins but admit that the policy also creates divisions sine it will mean going after top officials in the Karzai administration.

"I'm a spray man myself," quipped President Bush, summing up his depth of understanding of the controversial and complex issue in two meetings with stunned Afghan officials. U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood was far less flippant in his messages to Afghan officials, threatening to cut off aid from Washington if they didn't agree to allow crop dusters to wipe out the 2008 harvest.

8. Zero-Sum Game (p. 215):

Wrong. Wiping out poppy fields would actually drive up poppy prices and put more money in the pockets of drug dealers and terrorists. It's basic economics (the Taliban used it themselves when they banned poppy in 2000).

Peters then unveils a long list of things that she wants to do, like decapitating drug kingpins with drone-fired Hellfire missiles. She does not suggest simply legalizing poppy cultivation and letting legal production in Afghanistan drive market prices down for Taliban opium.

Afterword

posted 2009-10-16