Seeds of Terror: How Drugs, Thugs and Crime are Reshaping the Afghan War

By Gretchen Peters

The astonishing expose of al Qaeda and the Taliban’s booming drug trade

Seeds of Terror will reshape the way you think about the West’s enemies, revealing them less as ideologues and more as criminals who earn billions of pounds every year off the opium trade. With the breakneck pace of a thriller, author Gretchen Peters traces their illicit activities from the vast poppy fields of southern Afghanistan to heroin labs run by Taliban commanders, from drug convoys armed with Stinger missiles to the money launderers of Karachi and Dubai. Based on hundreds of interviews with Taliban fighters, smugglers, and law enforcement and intelligence agents, Peters makes the case that we must cut terrorists off from their drug earnings if we ever hope to beat them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781851688913

Gretchen Peters

Gretchen Peters has covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade, first for the Associated Press and later for ABC News. A Harvard graduate, 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 Pervez Musharraf. She lives in the United States with her husband, the Robert Capa Gold Medal-winning photojournalist John Moore, and their two daughters. She is the author of Seeds of Terror.

Reviews for Seeds of Terror

[cutiger80 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent perspective on the main problem facing the people of Afghanistan and those countries and organizations seeking to help them develop their long neglected country. If you want to know why we aren't making any progress and need to continue to place more assets and lives in harms way then you should read this book.

[chatterbox_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is unquestionably an important topic, but the book doesn't do it justice. The narrative meanders around in circles, repeating points both major and minor; the reader is left to drown in detail. As someone who has been following the news, little of this felt new or surprising to me; I'm sure that some of the details were specific to this book, but they weren't set apart or highlighted in such a way that I could appreciate them. Ultimately, it read like a long -- a very long -- newswire story, without enough life or color to bring the story and color alive. A good narrative nonfiction book finds a way to organize its material and make it compelling; this one doesn't.