Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda,   ISBN:9780312379278

Customer Rating: 

Ms Peters has done great service by bringing the role of drugs in Afghanistan and Pakistan to our attention. The book is well researched and the author has shown great dedication in her work given the risk to journalists in that part of the world. Unfortunately, the book is poorly organized and not very well written. At times it is repetitious. It does not follow a timeline. Much of it could be deleted without losing much of its value. Overall, I think it would have been a much better article in a magazine or newspaper. It you trudge through it however, you will be rewarded with an interesting viewpoint on how to win the war on terror. Given that so much of our tax dollars is being spent in Afghanistan, the American people need to become much more knowledgeable on that region.

Customer Rating: 

In this short, but remarkably good book, Peters argues and presents a good deal of evidence to support her argument that both the revived Taliban movement and the continued existence of al Qaeda are subsidized in part by the ill-legal export of opium products (mostly Heron) from Afghanistan to the West. She argues that the current strategy of indiscriminately destroying opium crops is counter-productive since widespread destruction simply raises the price of opium products on the world market. Her theses is that rather than destroying crops or paying farmers not to produce opium, the proper strategy would be to disrupt the flow of money to the Taliban and al Qaeda movements by various methods and to target the principal Afghan and Pakistani drug traffickers.
In order to understand how to disrupt this flow of money, Peters has developed a good deal of accurate information on how the movement of money into and out of Afghanistan is actually accomplished. She does a particularly good job in describing the new Taliban's (and al Qaeda's) juxtaposition of the traditional Islamic banking system called 'Hawalla' with Western style commercial banking, and how money laundering affects both systems. She correctly points to the UAE as a center for dubious financial activities and indeed the flow of narcotics. Peters also characterizes Pakistan's role in this trade as ambiguous at best and describes Pakistani efforts to stop the narcotics trade as uneven. For example, trucking consortiums based in Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas appear to be major carriers of illicit drugs to the port of Karachi, Pakistan. There is also the still murky role of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) organization and its love-hate relationship with the Taliban and possibly al Qaeda. Is the ISI trying to halt or trying to support the Afghan narcotics trade? Perhaps the answer to this question is yes. A book well worth reading by anyone with an interest in Afghanistan, counter terrorism, or counter-narcotics.

Customer Rating: 

Despite its depressing subject matter, the book itself was pretty easy to get through, maybe partly because it wasn't that long. What kept me reading was the accessible language, easty-to-follow structure, and interesting characters. Although you won't finish this book with detailed knowledge of all the intricacies of drug smuggling and how it finances terror groups, you (at least I gained) a basic framework to understand the situation and some idea of who the different players are and how they interact with each other.

I did appreciate all the other reviews. But, I noticed there was some sort of conspiracy theorist in the mix, and, I have to confess, I have no idea where this viewpoint comes from.

One minor problem, I caught one spot where the date the Taliban threw their chips in with the Taliban as 2004 at Spin Boldak. Should that have read 1994? I was thoroughly confused when I read that part.

Anyways, I wouldn't have minded if this book was a little longer. This could've used a couple more chapters.

Customer Rating: 

This book is very informative on an issue that has been ignored at the national level for far to long. It truly makes the case that the aim of our military forces should be Afghanistan. A drawback of the book,however, is that it makes the point over and over again and advances very slowly towards the overall conclusion drawn by the author. I would recommend this book to others with an advisory that it is not a light read. (Not surprising considering the author describes her own work in this way also)

Customer Rating: 

After seeing an interview with the author on Bill Moyer's Journal, I wanted to read more about how terrorism is financed.