Taliban and Al Qaeda Financiers Are Tied at the Hip!!

By Victor Comras

Could it be that while the Taliban is awash with cash, Al Qaeda is struggling for every dime? This is the supposition that emerges from recent assessments by different sets of experts. But can such a thesis stand in the face of the continuing close cooperation between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and with what is now occurring in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa? International terrorism alerts are now at their highest levels since just after 9/11. And senior US officials are warning that a major terrorist attack against the United States should be considered imminent.

The thesis that Al Qaeda may be running out of cash has been given increased credence recently at the Council of Foreign Relations and several other think tanks. The fall-off in donations to al Qaeda, they maintain, stems largely from the increased pressure being placed on potential terrorist financiers by national and inteernational regulators, and may also reflect the general international economic downturn. After all, money is now tight all over. According to Treasury Assistant Secretary David Cohen “al-Qaeda is in its weakest financial condition in several years (and)…as a result, its influence is waning." Similar claims have been made by Richard Barrett who leads the group of experts supporting the work of the UN’s Al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee.

At the same time there are clear indications that Taliban cash reserves remain solid. According to a recent well sourced story in the New York Times, the Taliban continues to bring in huge sums from “the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations.” While the Taliban’s cash flow from Afghanistan’s poppy fields comes as no surprise, the amount of foreign donations they continue to receive is a real eye opener.

According to the CIA (as reported in the Washington Post), Taliban leaders and their allies received some $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan. Soliciting, collecting, transferring, distributing and masking such transactions requires a very extensive, sophisticated and well camouflaged financial network. And, such a network could not have been constructed overnight. Let’s be clear. The Taliban inherited, and built upon, the extensive financial network already established by al Qaeda during its heyday in Afghanistan. With al Qaeda’s leaders in deep hiding, it was in the interest of both groups to turn control over this network to Taliban intermediaries. The Taliban continues to draw funds today from those same donors in Pakistan, the Gulf region, Southeast Asia and Europe that long supported al Qaeda. And, these donors continue to include a variety of Muslim fundamentalist organizations and charities, as well as wealthy Al Qaeda/Taliban supporters.

There is nothing new to claims that local al Qaeda cells are now left to fend for themselves financially. That has long been the case since al Qaeda morphed many years ago into the loose network of cells that now carry out its terrorist attacks. They have always had to rely on their own financial sources, except when it comes to mounting a major attack. The situation in Yemen is quite different. There al Qaeda remains well organized and well funded. “Those who finance al-Qaeda in Yemen are the same who finance it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and used to finance it in (Saudi Arabia) before they were defeated," according to Yehia Ali al-Rai the speaker of the Yemeni parliament. So, lets withhold declaring our success in strapping al Qaeda for cash, at least until we can make the same claim vis a vis the Taliban.