Journalist Gretchen Peters puts the opium trade squarely at the centre of the Afghanistan problem, says Kanika Datta
Ever since Nato forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, that country’s flourishing opium trade has been in the background of global consciousness. To most casual observers, however, its existence is regarded as just another feature of the chronic dysfunctionality of the region — fundamentalism, general lawlessness, women’s oppression, warlordism and so on.
With Seeds of Terror journalist Gretchen Peters has put the opium trade squarely at the centre of the Afghanistan problem. As the book sets out to prove — and does so comprehensively — this is not a minor side business operated by a bunch of poor, amoral farmers, renegade warlords and Pakistan’s ISI/military complex all out to make a generous buck. Instead, as she shows, it has provided the vital funding for Afghan insurgency for years and has certainly played a key role in keeping Nato forces on the back-foot for eight years.
Breaking the back of this narco-terrorsim, she argues, lies at the heart of the Afghan problem. As she explains in the book, “[I]t’s not possible to handle the insurgency and the opium trade as separate issues. Whether Nato commanders like it or not, they are already fighting a drug war in Afghanistan.”
From the perspective of a conflict in which US administration and intelligence agencies are clearly running out of ideas, this marks not just a novel perspective but a significant pointer to a more lasting solution.
The critical issue, of course, is for policy-makers to recognise the truth first. Reporting from southern Afghanistan, the heart of the poppy trade, in the late 1990s and then again after 2001, Peters was initially interested in how the insurgency was being funded. As she started asking around, she discovered growing evidence of the deep involvement of the Taliban in the drugs trade.
Day-to-day investigations on the Af-Pak border suggested that the insurgents functioned “more as members of the mafia than the mujahideen — it was quite clear that they were involved in criminal activities all along,” Peters said in an interview to Business Standard.
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Yet, she discovered, most Western officials chose to — and continue to — be in denial. Till today, policy-makers stick to the conventional view that the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda — Taliban’s “holding company” as it were — is being financed by donations .
Indeed, Peters says, “there is lots of evidence that Washington was aware of the issue and America helped cover it up.” Her book reproduces several declassified intelligence documents that suggest just this, though she writes, “Most U.S. government documents from the era have been meticulously excised whenever the twin subjects of ISI and heroin came up.”
This “ignorance” was, of course, convenient as long as the mujahideen acted as the US’s covert warriors in their proxy war with the USSR in the eighties. If 9/11 revolutionised threat perceptions for the US and Europe, it did not change the basic approach towards Afghanistan — more boots on the ground, more sophisticated weaponry and so on.
As Peters says, “The Americans have been fighting the war by trying to take out one Taliban leader at a time. That’s a little like reaching inside a car and pulling out a piston instead of stopping the supply of gasoline.”
With this book, Peters hopes to “put reality on the table”. The significance of this “reality” is that it does much to alter the clichéd “clash of civilisations” prism through which the world — especially the West — views Islam. Peters says that the entire operation is predicted on a purely bastardised interpretation of the Quran, which specifically forbids the production and consumption of opium. Traders — who are little more than plain criminals — legitimise their activities by arguing that selling opiates to “infidels” has Quranic sanction. As she writes in her book, “Around Kabul, one often hears concerns that Afghanistan is turning into another Iraq. The parallels are actually closer to Colombia.”
The credibility of Peters’ thesis in uncovering the nature of this flourishing illegal trade is borne out by field research backed by meticulous documentary evidence. Armed with a research grant from the US Institute of Peace, Peters initially worked the field through interpreters and local assistants.
Later, as hostility with the West ratcheted up, her presence became a liability to her colleagues, so she worked through local research assistants whom she refers to as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 to protect their identities.
Peters argues that there is little that can be done on the demand side to smother the trade because the drugs produced in Afghanistan end up in Iran, Russia (the biggest consumer) and Pakistan. She suggests the Nato forces would do better to target traffickers — some 50 of them have, in fact, been identified. She also suggests that providing an alternative source of micro-finance to Afghan farmers to grow other food and cash crops would be a good way to divert land away from poppy production.
Part of the reason poppy cultivation is popular in the region is that the crop is drought resistant — an important consideration in a country in which the irrigation system has been virtually destroyed. Many farmers, she discovered, did not really want to grow the crop and only did so because of the generous crop pre-payments they received from drug traders and for lack of alternatives. They were well aware, too, of the fact that such trade contravened the tenets of the Quran, a good opportunity, she pointed out, for the US to make the Quran “an ally”.
Compellingly written, the book goes beyond the run-of-the-mill journalists’ accounts that are flowing out of the region to make a point that should be essential reading for every policy wonk in Washington.
SEEDS OF TERROR: THE TALIBAN, THE ISI AND THE NEW OPIUM WARS
Author: Gretchen Peters
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 302
Price: Rs 495