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WACC
Speaker
Series
Program
 Gretchen
Peters
Seeds of
Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
December 3rd, 2009
Date:
Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009
Location:
Westin Charlotte
Google Map
Time:
12:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Cost: $ 40 (WACC members); $ 55(non-members)
Lunch included
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Bio: Gretchen Peters has covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a
decade, first for The Associated Press and later as a reporter for ABC News.
Peters was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the 2007 assassination of
Benazir Bhutto and won the SAJA Journalism Award for a Nightline segment on the
former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. She has worked with leading media
outlets including The National Geographic Society, The Christian Science Monitor
and The New Republic, and she has been a commentator on NPR and CNN. She now
lives in the US with her husband, Robert Capa Gold Medal winning photographer
John Moore and their two children.
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Most people think of the Taliban and al Qaeda as religious
fanatics fighting an Islamic crusade from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. But
that doesn’t explain their astonishing comeback. Why, eight years since 9/11,
does the CIA say they are better armed and better funded than ever? Seeds of
Terror will reshape the way you think about America’s enemies, revealing them
more as Mafiosi than mujahidin who earn as much as a half a billion dollars
every year off the opium trade and other criminal activity. Seeds of Terror
traces their illicit activities from vast poppy fields in southern Afghanistan
to heroin labs run by Taliban commanders, from drug convoys armed with Stinger
missiles to the money launderers of Karachi and Dubai.
Author Gretchen Peters makes the case that we must cut off the Taliban and al
Qaeda from their drug earnings if we ever want to beat them. This battle isn’t
about ideology or religion. It’s about creating a new economy for Afghanistan –
and breaking the cycle of crime, corruption and extremism that has gripped the
region for decades. Seeds of Terror is based on hundreds of interviews
with Taliban fighters, smugglers, and law enforcement and intelligence agents.
Their information is matched by classified documents shown to the author by
frustrated U.S. officials – who fear the next 9/11 will be far deadlier than the
first – and paid for with heroin profits.
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