Who Is Funding The Taliban? US, of course...

The article by Jean MacKenzie originally appeared in GlobalPost. This is part of a special series by GlobalPost called Life, Death and The Taliban. Click here for a related article Funding the Pakistani 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 cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, or as the Taliban call 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.

Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, former Taliban minister to Pakistan said “The Taliban does not have many expenses, they are barefoot and hungry, with no roof over their heads and a stone for their pillow.” “Afghanistan is full of guns,” he said. “We have enough guns for years.”

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 between $100 million and $300 million — still a small fraction of the $4 billion poppy industry.

Now administration officials have launched a search for Taliban sponsors. U.S. special envoy Holbrooke 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, “That is simply not true.”

The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban’s war chest comes from poppy.