Posts
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Are US taxpayers funding the Taliban?
“It’s organized crime,” sighed the embassy official, who spoke on the condition that his name would not be used. “It’s insidious.”
It is also going to be very difficult to establish, let alone control. Most of the monetary transactions take place at a sub-contractor level, invisible to balance sheets or oversight committees. Any records that are kept are not likely to make their way into the U.S. government accounting system.
As GlobalPost reported, the Taliban allegedly receives kickbacks from almost every major contract that comes into the country. The arrangements are at times highly formalized and, as GlobalPost spelled out, the Taliban actually keeps an office in Kabul to review major deals, determine percentages and conduct negotiations. The arrangements are often more personal, as when a local supplier pays off a small-time Taliban commander to allow free passage of goods through his patch of insurgency-controlled terrain.
Precise amounts are almost impossible to pin down, but it is, according to those knowledgeable of the process, a conservative estimate that the amount going to the Taliban is in the tens of millions of dollars a year. If the allegation that the Taliban takes 20 percent off big contracts is true, it is possible the Taliban is receiving as much money from the billions of dollars in assistance funds as it does from what traditionally has been its leading source of income: drugs.
With the poppy crop reported to be down this year in Afghanistan and the Afghan and U.S. government boasting of successful interdiction of the crop which fuels what the U.N. has estimated in the past to be a $4 billion a year heroin trade in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence officials say the Taliban is seeking other sources of funding.
U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke has recently asked the Treasury Department to look into the matter of Taliban funding, and has stated publicly that opium and heroin most likely account for far less of the Taliban budget than had previously been thought.
In Afghanistan — the world’s fifth most corrupt government on the Transparency International index — few would raise an eyebrow at graft. Contracts in the relatively stable north of Afghanistan are subject to just as many kickbacks as in Helmand or Kandahar; the difference, according to the embassy official, is the end recipient and the use to which they put the proceeds. “Warlords take the money (in northern Afghanistan),” the source said. “But they are not using it to buy guns to kill our soldiers.”
As the largest international donor, the United States is the major source of such funding, but it is by no means the only one. In an upcoming article, Time magazine outlines similar types of pay-offs to the Taliban in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, which is now experiencing a major increase in insurgent activity. The contracts belonged to GTZ, a German aid organization, but the procedures were very much the same as with USAID-funded projects.
With the practice so widespread, it is a wonder to many, including USAID’s own internal sources, how it has taken so long for it to come to light. The problem, say longtime observers, is partially the fortress in which USAID, the U.S. embassy and other international aid organizations live and work.
“[These people] really had very little idea of how Afghanistan operates,” said a USAID contractor who spent several weeks in Helmand province. “[They] could have as easily been working in an office in Washington as Lashkar Gah. Although some of them had been there for three years, they had had almost no contact with Afghans except for the cooks and cleaners. So, they have no ears to the ground.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment