Public CompanyV V: The Terror Axis: Taliban, ISI & opium
Gretchen Peters’ Seeds of Terror: The Taliban, the ISI and New Opium Wars (Thomas Dunne Books, Hachette India reprint, Rs 495) tells you why Afghanistan and Pakistan’s North West Frontier provinces will always be on the boil that will spread into the Punjab and increase in intensity, as recent events have shown. Aided and abetted by rampant corruption spread by poppy growers to the Taliban and other local powers, to drug lords and their allies in government, the influence of opium money pervades Afghan life. Afghanistan today provides 93 per cent of the world’s heroin, far exceeding the combined production of Colombia, north Myanmar, Thailand and other regions of the world. Peters examines the depth of the opium problem and describes how opium sales have ballooned since 2001 and continue to grow exponentially, earning more than half a billion dollars off the opium trade. Why and what could be the consequences for us is the central question asked in the book.
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Peters is a journalist who has covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for over a decade for Associated Press and ABC News. Like her Pakistani mentor, Ahmed Rashid (he is also a Pastun), who knows Afghanistan and central Asia like the back of his hand, the information and analysis provided in the book has been gleaned from virtually hundreds of interviews with Taliban fighters, smugglers, law enforcement and intelligence agents that has been cross-checked with American officials who are deeply enmeshed in Pakistan. Very simply, Seeds of Terror is as authentic an account of the murky underworld of the drug trade as you can get without getting bumped off by the mafia.
There are three reasons for the growth of the opium trade. First, the enormous profits to be made in the international market, especially Europe, which has emerged as the key centre for the dissemination of opium drugs. Estimates vary but insiders put the profits at over 2,000 per cent after taking into account the risks and costs involved in getting nabbed. Second, the rampant corruption that goes all down the line from cultivation and production to its conversion into heroin and hashish. Peters, quoting UN sources, says that Afghan opium production was up to 4,851 metric tons in 1999, most of it in Taliban-held areas.
But apart from the laxity in policing (the mountainous Afghan terrain doesn’t make it easy) it was Pakistan’s safe havens for the Afghan Taliban that has to a large extent been responsible for their revival and growing dominance across Afghanistan. It was the ISI that was responsible for the safe hinterland for Taliban that was used to provide a ‘strategic depth’ and also of course to provide funds to the ISI elite in return for a safe passage for goods to reach Karachi port from where they were transshipped to Dubai, Europe and elsewhere.
Apparently, Dubai has emerged as the great transshipment centre. As Peters puts it: “The funding for 9/11 passed through Dubai, and Abdul Qadeer Khan’s network went there to flog nuclear technology. Whether it’s drug smuggling, people trafficking or money laundering, all roads lead to Dubai…If you are a drug smuggler, it would be hard to find a more accommodating region to launder your money. And what better place to park your dirty cash than in a bustling sheikhdom in the oil-rich Persian Gulf?" That the Taliban and the ISI were hand-in-glove has never been in doubt; they needed each other but what was never quite clear was the extent to which they had collaborated, especially in hawala transactions.
In a revealing chapter, Follow the Money, Peters provides a blow-by-blow account of how the system works. “The trading zone that groups Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the UAE is the financial world’s Wild West, where there are disincentives to going legal. Corruption is rife, law enforcement shoddy, and tax evasion the norm. The vast majority of payments — even legal ones — for big ticket items like cars and homes are made in cash, sometimes suitcases of it. Walk into any money-changing market from Kabul to Dubai and you will see dozens of hawaladars counting knee-high stacks of $100 bills — literally millions of dollars in cash. The hawaladars balance their accounts in grimy notebooks, but keep few records of who sent what to whom for authorities to scrutinise. No one has any idea how much they transfer across borders each year, not to mention how much of it is ‘legal’.” This informal transfer system is heavily penetrated by drug dealers, criminals and Islamic extremists and inevitably Dawood Ibrahim gets a special mention of his role in the underworld of finance.
Can anything be done to check terrorists from getting hold of drug earnings? Peters has a few suggestions like bombing poppy farms or raiding their factories, targeting the key operators and so on but it will have little impact because they can pop up at a moment"s notice once the raid is over. The only solution is to interdict the distribution networks but this would require constant vigil by a law-enforcement team. When the stakes are so high and returns so quick, this won"t be easy as many have discovered at great cost.