Donations keep Taliban financially afloat
An interesting article (h/t Jihad Watch) from the Wall Street Journal, which discusses how it’s more than Opium money which keeps the Taliban financially solvent:
U.S. officials recently concluded that the Afghan Taliban may receive as much money from foreign donors as it does from opium sales, potentially hindering the Obama administration’s strategy to rehabilitate Afghanistan by stopping the country’s drug trade.
Gen. David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said in a recent interview that the Taliban has three main sources of funding: drug revenue; payments from legitimate businesses that are secretly owned by the armed group or that pay it kickbacks; and donations from foreign charitable foundations and individuals.
“You have funds generated locally, funds that come in from the outside, and funds that come from the illegal narcotics business,” he said. “It’s a hotly debated topic as to which is the most significant and it may be that they are all roughly around the same level.”
Gen. Petraeus estimated that the Taliban raise a total of “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” each year from the three sources, and said the U.S. doesn’t have precise figures.
The Taliban have depended in part on foreign support for decades. In an interview last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said some Afghan militants could draw on “external funding channels” created in the 1980s for wealthy Muslims — with U.S. support — to funnel money to Islamic fighters battling the Soviet military. “It wouldn’t surprise me if those channels have remained open,” he said.
Those external funding channels, were one of the primary responsibilities of Osama Bin Laden, during the war against the Soviets, so hopefully it doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Like Hezbollah and many other terror groups, the Taliban’s funding structure is widely diversified. While counternarcotics operations are very important in defeating them in the AfPak theater, it’s a mistake to imagine that there is any one silver bullet when it comes to how to prevent them from funding their operation.