An American media report asserted Sunday that Pakistan is the prime suspect in funding Taliban in Afghanistan, not the Gulf States, or opium, as it was believed in the past. "The Talibanـled insurgency has built a fundraising juggernaut that generates cash from such an array of criminal rackets, donations, taxes, shakedowns and other schemes that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to choke off the movement''s money supply," the Washington Post reported.
According to the wellـinformed newspaper, foreign donors, not drugs, are the largest source of cash for Taliban, the Obama administration officials say. The CIA recently estimated that Taliban leaders and their allies received 106 million U.S. dollars in the past year alone from donors outside Afghanistan. U.S. officials said there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia, UAE or other Gulf governments are giving official aid to the Taliban. Nevertheless, they said they suspect that Pakistani military and intelligence operatives are continuing to fund the Afghan insurgency, although the Islamabad government denies this.
Richard Barrett, the coordinator of the United Nations'' Taliban and AlـQaeda Monitoring Team, says Taliban sympathizers are much more skillful today at masking their donations and ensuring that the money cannot be traced back to them. "It''s been very, very difficult to identify these people," Barrett told Washington Post. "You can track the money flow and say this money came from the Gulf, but it''s a lot more difficult to confirm the source." In July, Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration''s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said "the Taliban was reaping the bulk of its revenue from donors abroad, especially from the Gulf."
For the past decade, the U.S. Treasury and the U.N. Security Council have maintained financial blacklists of suspected donors to the Taliban and AlـQaeda. The U.N. list, originally designed to pressure the Taliban to hand over AlـQaeda leader Osama bin Laden, requires all U.N. members to freeze the assets of designated Taliban officials and their supporters. Some American and Afghan officials said the U.S. government, which had been a leading nominator of names for the U.N. blacklist, paid less attention to Taliban donors after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Until recently, they said, Washington had also been preoccupied with preparing sanctions against individuals and companies doing business with the Iranian government.
As the insurgency has grown in strength, the Taliban and its affiliates have embraced a strategy favored by multinational corporations: Diversification. With money pouring in from so many sources, the Taliban has been able to expand the insurgency across the country with relative ease, U.S. and Afghan officials said. In an Aug. 30 report assessing the overall state of the war, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the Taliban''s range of financial resources made it difficult to weaken the movement. "Eliminating insurgent access to narcoـprofits ـ even if possible, and while disruptive ـ would not destroy their ability to operate so long as other funding sources remained intact," McChrystal wrote.
Money skimmed from the narcotics business ـ Afghanistan is the world''s top opium producer ـ still offers crucial support to Taliban operations, particularly in the southern provinces where opiumـproducing poppies grow in abundance, officials said.
The U.S. military has estimated that the Taliban collects $70 million annually from poppy farmers and narcotics traffickers. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, which monitors opium production, earlier projected that the Taliban and its affiliates earned as much as $400 million a year from the drug trade. The agency later revised the figure sharply downward, to about $100 million a year. Another rich source of revenue: Extortion payments from Afghan and Western subcontractors forced to cough up "protection money" to safeguard redevelopment projects, according to U.S and Afghan officials.
Most money transfers in Afghanistan are made under the hawala system, an informal network of money brokers who traditionally keep few, if any, records about their customers. With help from U.S. officials, the Afghan government has begun to regulate its hawala brokers for the first time. Brokers in seven provinces are now registered with the government and are required to report all transactions each month to the central bank, which conducts audits to ensure compliance. According to the Washington Post, Taliban and its affiliates also move large amounts of cash via human couriers, both domestically and internationally, U.S. and Afghan officials said. "Foreign recruits who travel to Pakistan to train in Talibanـsponsored camps are regularly asked to bring $10,000 in cash with them," a U.S. lawـenforcement official said.ـ

Alwatan Daily