Maybe Reading a Bit Too Much

“Diverse Sources Fund Insurgency In Afghanistan,” the Washington Post emotes. “The Taliban-led insurgency… 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.”

Aside from providing me an opportunity to tell Gretchen Peters I TOLD YOU SO, there’s something else to explore. We have these words “the insurgency,” and “funds” and “private donations.” They’re all very useful in describing the conflict in Afghanistan, and often I use the word “Taliban” as a shorthand for “the various insurgent groups.” But this WaPo article seems to use “the insurgency” and “the Taliban” as if they are literally the same thing, especially when discussing funding blacklists.

Then there is the issue of how private donations may or may not directly fund the Taliban. Much like how many Islamic charities shut down in the United States after September 11 turned out to have been donating to extremist causes without their donors’ consent, it is entirely possible that many of these front organizations operate without their donors’ knowledge.

It also seems clear from that article that “funding” itself is a slippery concept. In the South, both taxation, checkpoints, and “legitimate” business/security arrangements with the smuggling rings represents a big chunk of income for the Taliban groups down there. The insurgents operating in a place like Khost, on the other hand, most likely do not have money wired to them from Quetta. Similarly, it seems clear the insurgents up in Nuristan get their income from timber and gem smuggling, and probably not from the chromite smugglers further south.

All of which goes to show just how complicated the insurgent landscape is. A lot of military spokesmen speak of an “insurgent syndicate,” which is meant (I believe) to imply a certain confluence between illicit economic activity and the insurgency. The challenge with such a term is it also implies a certain degree of top-down organization structure, which is simply not born out by the publicly available facts.

In this sense, the government’s otherwise-understandable insistence on secrecy starts to make less sense. It is possible that many donors to Persian Gulf charities are simply unaware their money might be going to fund the Taliban. Publicizing that could potentially reduce the available number of donors, if for no other reason than the “taint” of publicly knowing some wealthy man’s money went to fund terrorism. But in order to describe the enemy and its funding streams properly, they reveal just how much they’ve been able to learn about them (or not, as the case may be). This is obviously an age-old problem for democracies in wartime, and I have no idea where the appropriate trade-off is. But it needs to be adjusted—right now, the current balance is simply not very effective.

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Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust