Opium Series

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

Juma Khan’s drug empire, which moves as much as $1 billion worth of opium and heroin a year, forms the backbone of the Taliban. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden all work for him. A March 2004 British intelligence document suggested his influence extended to President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle.

By 2004, Juma Khan’s drug network was a principal source of funding to the Taliban and al Qaeda and a key conduit for their weapons. He ran a massive refinery and maintained huge underground storage depots straddling the border between Helmand and Baluchistan.

Narcotics leaving southwestern Afghanistan follow three general routes. The first goes directly into Iran from Nimroz and Farah provinces. The second dips down into Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province and then heads west for Iran. A third smuggles drugs south to Pakistan’s Makran Coast and then by boat to the Persian Gulf. Juma Khan has also expanded northward, building new smuggling routes through the Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

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. The IMU fighters, many of whom had participated in the anti-Soviet jihad, became partners with the Taliban in moving Afghan heroin through Central Asia to the West.

Opium Series

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

Just before the July 2000 autumn planting season was to begin, Mullah Omar announced a total ban on poppy cultivation. It represented the largest single cutback in illicit drug production ever. But as with so many things in Afghanistan, the truth was murkier. 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. And despite the ban on growing poppy, the Taliban made no effort to seize drug stocks or arrest traffickers. On the contrary, opium bazaars continued to do a brisk business.

The poppy ban was the ultimate insider trader con. The Taliban gambled they would win millions of dollars in international aid while top leaders sold off their opium hoards at far higher prices. Just before the ban, top Taliban leaders purchased huge amounts of opium. After four years of bumper crops, stocks of Afghan heroin were high enough to supply the European market for up to four more years.

The poppy ban sparked a humanitarian disaster, from which some Afghan farmers have never recovered. Hundreds of thousands defaulted on loans or were unable to make it through the winter months without credit and fled to the Iranian and Pakistani border regions. Many sold off land and livestock, even trading their unmarried daughters to poppy merchants to settle their arrears.

On September 11, 2001, the regional price of a kilogram of opium reached an all-time high of $746.

Opium Series

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

In the spring of 1996, Osama bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan heralded a new chapter in the Taliban chronicle, one that would have a dramatic impact on modern history. Unlike other terrorist leaders, bin Laden was not a military hero, nor a religious authority, nor an obvious representative of the downtrodden and disillusioned. He was a rich financier distinguished by his ability to organize an effective network. The financial network of bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people [former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors].

The structure of bin Laden’s network, which always blended business and terrorism, was similar to large, successful criminal organizations: flexible, diversified, decentralized, and compartmentalized. While in Sudan, bin Laden ran construction businesses, imported sugar and soap, and exported sesame seeds, palm oil, and sunflower seeds. He purchased farms, some of them enormous, which grew corn and peanuts and also served as training camps.

The Saudi exile wasted no time in ingratiating himself with Afghanistan’s new masters, helping to bankroll their takeover of Kabul. Bin Laden reportedly put up $3 million from his personal funds to pay off the remaining warlords who stood between the Taliban and the Afghan capital. The cash injection came at a crucial time, and Mullah Omar would never forget it.

Bin Laden served as a middleman between the Taliban and Arab drug smugglers for the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, using commissions to fund his training camps. The sheiks flew in on private jets and military transport planes, touching down at the Kandahar airfield and other smaller airstrips, supposedly to hunt rare falcons. Those flights transported weapons and material to the Taliban and al Qaeda and flew heroin out. It was widely known these hunting teams brought lavish amounts of equipment including vehicles, rifles, and tents, which they left with the Taliban.

Bin Laden hijacked the state-run Ariana Airlines, turning it into a narco-terror charter service ferrying Islamic militants, weapons, cash, and heroin to the Emirates and Pakistan. Mounting concern led to the UN sanctioning the Taliban in late 2000, barring Ariana from flying internationally. The Taliban turned to Viktor Bout, the notorious Russian spy-turned-smuggler whose Sharjah-based air cargo empire served as a sort of FedEx to criminals, rebel groups, and banana republics. Between 1998 and 2001, Bout sold Taliban twelve air freighters and continued to fly weapons, spare aircraft parts, and other supplies into Afghanistan. Flights with narcotics went direct from Helmand to the UAE.

Merchant of Death – detailing Bout’s smuggling empire from Africa to Asia.

Opium Series

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

Pakistan is often described as the godfather of the Taliban. The truth is more complex. Although Islamabad tried to establish influence over the movement soon after its inception, the Taliban’s original benefactors were smugglers. As it was, Islamabad never established much sway over the Taliban, who Pakistani officers complained were willful and stubborn. Pakistan senior generals privately expressed worry to American officials that Islamabad’s covert support for the Taliban had gathered a dangerous momentum no one could stop.

By the early 1990s, Pakistan had more than 1.2 million heroin addicts. They had a major social problem on their hands. During the 1990s, western aid poured money into anti-narcotics efforts in Pakistan, mainly crop substitution efforts, which succeeded in reducing poppy output from a high of eight hundred tons per year to about two. Pakistan was no longer a heroin producer. Instead it became a major transport route for opiates produced in Taliban-held regions, which utilized the same network built up a decade earlier. Although the poppy fields and the processing labs had shifted into Afghanistan, the command and control of the drug trade remained in Pakistan.