This is an issue nobody really wants to discuss officially, but unofficially, everybody's got something to say about it. And according to the articles below, everyone's got some valid points.
Here are two articles I found on the Reuters website by Global Post journalists.
Noteworthy points:
- The Americans (or specifically, American contractors) are involved, directly and indirectly.
- The Afghan government is involved, directly and indirectly.
- Drugs are only a small fraction of the funding source.
- Afghan Taleban's finances are based on terrorism and intimidation (shocking!).
- Crime is a main source of funding for Pakistani Taleban.
- Rich Middle Easterns are involved.
- "Foreign state hands" can never be rules out.
Disclaimer: Needless to say, the opinions expressed below are not mine.
Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You don’t want to know
12:40 August 13th, 2009
The article by Jean MacKenzie originally appeared in GlobalPost. This is part of a special series by GlobalPost called Life, Death and The Taliban.
KABUL — It is the open secret no one wants to talk about, the unwelcome truth that most prefer to hide. In Afghanistan, one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country.
Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, call it extortion, or, as the Taliban themselves prefer to term it, “spoils of war,” the fact remains that international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy.
“Everyone knows this is going on,” said one U.S. Embassy official, speaking privately.
It is almost impossible to determine how much the insurgents are spending, making it difficult to pinpoint the sources of the funds.
Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, former Taliban minister to Pakistan, was perhaps more than a bit disingenuous when he told GlobalPost that the militants were operating mostly on air.
“The Taliban does not have many expenses,” he said, smiling slightly. “They are barefoot and hungry, with no roof over their heads and a stone for their pillow.” As for weapons, he just shrugged. “Afghanistan is full of guns,” he said. “We have enough guns for years.”
The reality is quite different, of course. The militants recruit local fighters by paying for their services. They move about in their traditional 4×4s, they have to feed their troops, pay for transportation and medical treatment for the wounded, and, of course, they have to buy rockets, grenades and their beloved Kalashnikovs.
Up until quite recently, most experts thought that drug money accounted for the bulk of Taliban funding. But even here opinion was divided on actual amounts. Some reports gauged the total annual income at about $100 million, while others placed the figure as high as $300 million — still a small fraction of the $4 billion poppy industry.
Now administration officials have launched a search for Taliban sponsors. Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a press conference in Islamabad last month that drugs accounted for less of a share of Taliban coffers than was previously thought.
“In the past there was a kind of feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan,” said Holbrooke, according to media reports. “That is simply not true.”
The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban’s war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.
But perhaps U.S. officials need look no further than their own backyard.
Anecdotal evidence is mounting that the Taliban are taking a hefty portion of assistance money coming into Afghanistan from the outside.
This goes beyond mere protection money or extortion of “taxes” at the local level — very high-level negotiations take place between the Taliban and major contractors, according to sources close to the process.
A shadowy office in Kabul houses the Taliban contracts officer, who examines proposals and negotiates with organizational hierarchies for a percentage. He will not speak to, or even meet with, a journalist, but sources who have spoken with him and who have seen documents say that the process is quite professional.
The manager of an Afghan firm with lucrative construction contracts with the U.S. government builds in a minimum of 20 percent for the Taliban in his cost estimates. The manager, who will not speak openly, has told friends privately that he makes in the neighborhood of $1 million per month. Out of this, $200,000 is siphoned off for the insurgents.
If negotiations fall through, the project will come to harm — road workers may be attacked or killed, bridges may be blown up, engineers may be assassinated.
The degree of cooperation and coordination between the Taliban and aid workers is surprising, and would most likely make funders extremely uncomfortable.
One Afghan contractor, speaking privately, told friends of one project he was overseeing in the volatile south. The province cannot be mentioned, nor the particular project.
“I was building a bridge,” he said, one evening over drinks. “The local Taliban commander called and said ‘don’t build a bridge there, we’ll have to blow it up.’ I asked him to let me finish the bridge, collect the money — then they could blow it up whenever they wanted. We agreed, and I completed my project.”
In the south, no contract can be implemented without the Taliban taking a cut, sometimes at various steps along the way.
One contractor in the southern province of Helmand was negotiating with a local supplier for a large shipment of pipes. The pipes had to be brought in from Pakistan, so the supplier tacked on about 30 percent extra for the Taliban, to ensure that the pipes reached Lashkar Gah safely.
Once the pipes were given over to the contractor, he had to negotiate with the Taliban again to get the pipes out to the project site. This was added to the transportation costs.
“We assume that our people are paying off the Taliban,” said the foreign contractor in charge of the project.
In Farah province, local officials report that the Taliban are taking up to 40 percent of the money coming in for the National Solidarity Program, one of the country’s most successful community reconstruction projects, which has dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the country over the past six years.
Many Afghans see little wrong in the militants getting their fair share of foreign assistance.
“This is international money,” said one young Kabul resident. “They are not taking it from the people, they are taking it from their enemy.”
But in areas under Taliban control, the insurgents are extorting funds from the people as well.
In war-ravaged Helmand, where much of the province has been under Taliban control for the past two years, residents grumble about the tariffs.
“It’s a disaster,” said a 50-year-old resident of Marja district. “We have to give them two kilos of poppy paste per jerib during the harvest; then we have to give them ushr (an Islamic tax, amounting to one-tenth of the harvest) from our wheat. Then they insisted on zakat (an Islamic tithe). Now they have come up with something else: 12,000 Pakistani rupee (approximately $150) per household. And they won’t take even one rupee less.”
It all adds up, of course. But all things are relative: if the Taliban are able to raise and spend say $1 billion per year — the outside limit of what anyone has been able to predict — that accounts for what the United States is now spending on 10 days of the war to defeat them.
Funding the Pakistani Taliban
By Shahan Mufti - GlobalPost
Published: August 7, 2009 10:24 ET
MARDAN, Pakistan — Standing in the lush plains of Mardan in the Northwest Frontier Province, the rugged and arid mountains that enclose the Peshawar valley on all sides may appear farther than they actually are. A few dozen miles to the north and west in the mountains, the Pakistan army has been engaged in a bloody battle with Taliban militants for years over the control of territory.
The armed guerrilla fighters have avoided forays onto the flat plains of Mardan, but driving through the main market of the city where vendors sell everything from kebab to Kalashnikovs, or among the cattle in leafy tobacco fields, or the large 16-wheeler trucks on the potholed roads, there are traces of Taliban, even here.
You don't see Taliban foot soldiers — young men with the signature long hair, black turbans and beards — cruising the streets in the backs of pick-up trucks shaking down shop owners like gangsters. But in this bustling town and many others much farther away from the war zones, the Taliban's financial engine is chugging at full force right under the nose of law enforcement.
“The money is coming in from more sources than we know,” said Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, a native of the nearby town of Charsada, who served as the interior minister under former President Pervez Musharraf. Sherpao was the man responsible for organizing civilian law enforcement when the Taliban first emerged on the scene in Pakistan.
Having survived two targeted assassination attempts and no longer serving in the government, he said “if they can dry up their revenues, (the militants) won’t last for long.” But tracking the money, he said "isn’t an easy job.”
And it's not just Sherpao who's worried. Cutting off the revenue streams of the Pakistani Taliban is something that U.S. President Barack Obama’s ****** special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has linked to the successful completion of the American campaign in Afghanistan.
During his last visit to Pakistan in June, Holbrooke told reporters that in the past the traditional belief in Washington was that all the money came from the drug trade in Afghanistan. “That is simply not true,” he was quoted saying. In a press conference in Islamabad he announced that a member of the U.S. Treasury Department will be added to his staff to find out "where the money really comes from."
Traditionally, guerrilla groups thrive on one large favored revenue stream. For example, the FARC in Colombia has leaned heavily on the trade of coca for three decades and the diamond trade has fueled years of war in Africa. Just over Pakistan's border, the Afghani Taliban have a deep hand in the cultivation and trade of poppy.
While poppy has been largely eradicated from Pakistan, the political leadership and military planners in the country say that a chunk of the Afghan drug money still makes its way to Pakistani Taliban hands — to the tune of $200 million dollars a year, according to Pakistani military estimates.
An official at the Anti-Narcotics Force in Pakistan said that tracking terrorism funds is "far beyond our official mandate." But the force is working closely with the military to "stop drug money from getting into dangerous hands" and is stacked at all levels with retired and serving military generals.
But following this money across borders is especially difficult because much of it moves through the hawala system, which transfers money through unofficial money lending networks. In the hawal system, drug money is thrown in to the same pile as legal expat remittances, making it impossible to fully trace.
The tactics of the Pakistani Taliban suggest though that its needs go beyond a cut from the Afghan poppy industry, which the State Department estimated at $4 billion in 2007. The Pakistani Taliban shares a name with the Afghan group, but when it comes to the
money, Sherpao said the rule is: "live off the land."
Back in 2005, television camera crews in Swat, Pakistan, captured for the first time images of Taliban collecting donations from locals. Then, wooden carts with mounds of cash were parked on the street sides as women were seen dropping their jewelry into bags for masked young men
carrying AK47s.
The Pashtun militancy first grew in the tribal areas of Pakistan when the Pakistan military ventured to the Afghan border for the first time in history. At the time, the American military said that the Taliban had moved its bases into Pakistan and major high profile
ex-Afghan-mujahedeen leaders were traveling freely across the porous ****** border.
But by 2005 groups claiming to be part of the umbrella Taliban Movement of Pakistan (TTP) had started popping up in places like the Swat Valley, which has no border with Afghanistan. In Swat, the leadership of the major Taliban group came from the remnants of an old secessionist movement in the region that dates back to the 1970s, decades before the Taliban existed.
As the Pakistan army moved deeper into the steep green valley to battle these new groups, the Taliban couldn't just rely on the dwindling goodwill of a few poor ideological supporters. Like any good business, it diversified.
A report by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington published in June claims that millions of dollars are also ending up in Pakistani Taliban coffers from its control of the trade in counterfeit cigarettes. The report estimates that profits from the illicit cigarette trade may account for as much as 20 percent of total funding for these terrorist groups.
“After poppy, tobacco is probably the biggest revenue generator,” for the Taliban, said Ikram Sehgal, a former major-general in the Pakistan army who now runs one of the largest private security firms in the country.
Plus, officials constantly identify new Taliban revenue streams. The environmental protection agencies in Pakistan are blaming the “timber mafia” — illegal loggers — for funding the militancy. Last year the Taliban took over a dormant marble mine near the Afghan border, which then reportedly generated tens of thousands of dollars for it every month.
Aftab Sherpao, the former interior minister, said the Taliban also would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past from emerald mining in the Swat Valley.
But nothing, it seems, pays better than good old crime. Rackets, extortion, kidnapping and banks heists are all helping the Pakistani Taliban pay the bills. Earlier this year the Taliban reportedly demanded nearly $1 million from Sikh minorities in their areas as jizya, or “tax.”
A thousand miles away, five men were arrested in June in the city of Karachi, the country's financial hub, for funding Taliban groups. The men were “involved in robbing banks and trailers on highways” and “different crimes” to provide funding to the Pakistani Taliban,
according the city’s police chief. The police also said the suspects were planning to kidnap businessmen in Karachi.
“Kidnapping is a major revenue source for them,” said Gen. Athar Abbas, the central spokesman for the Pakistan Army. “Sometimes we don’t even know how much has been paid to get people released so it’s hard to keep track,” he said. While the official stories mostly recount escapes, ransom is usually paid — “sometimes in the millions of dollars,” said Abbas.
But to Abbas and many others in Pakistan, stopping the drug trade in Afghanistan is still the key to controlling the militancy in Pakistan. “I don’t agree with (Holbrooke’s) assessment,” he said. “The opium trade is still the backbone of the funding” for militants in Pakistan.
Former minister Sherpao said that since the pay-offs in the drug trade in Afghanistan go up to the “highest levels,” “it’s not easy to control it from this side.”
Sherpao's suggestion is echoed frequently by Pakistani officials who say that Afghan officials, including the Afghan president, are involved in the drug trade and thereby complicit in financing the Taliban militancy inside Pakistan.
It's a not a purely academic debate. By hitting such a disparaging note in the funding debate, Pakistan is then able to build political pressure on Afghanistan and the United States to do more on the other side of the border.
The Pakistan government now also routinely points the finger at India for backing the Pashtun and Balochi insurgents in Pakistan through consulates in Afghanistan.
This month, basking in the glory of a fairly successful anti-Taliban offensive in the Swat Valley region, the Pakistani government used U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit as an opportunity to announce that it had presented the Indian Prime Minister with evidence
of his country's involvement in financing and aiding terrorism in Pakistan.
Looking in another direction, Holbrooke has said that the U.S. would look closely at wealthy individuals on the Arabian peninsula who might be funding the Taliban in Pakistan. That might be difficult, however. A 2003 study by the World Bank suggests that drug money transacted between the Middle East and Afghanistan goes through the opaque hawala system.
Before this, for a few years the U.S. had maintained that the Pakistan army and intelligence outfits were themselves funding the insurgency they were fighting. And now the debate has come full circle — a common refrain in Pakistan echoed by many from retired diplomats to retired militants is that the “Taliban are agents of America."
How is the Pakistani Taliban financing its war? There is no easy or singular answer. And in the ensuing confusion everyone is blamed while no one admits to anything. In the end, it might be this blame game that the Taliban profits from most.