Who Funds the Taliban?
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Per TFA, the Taliban's GDP is already over 25% of Afghanistan's. At what point do we drop the normative pretense and recognize that they're more of a state than they were when we started bombing them 20 years ago?
A movement is a permanent revolution. A revolution is not a state, nor is it a form of government. It can eventually settle and become a state, while still calling itself a revolution, as the Cuban revolution or Iranian revolution unfortunately did, but that only happens when it crystalizes into a non-revolutionary and stable form, having eliminated all internal enemies. Some movements never crystalize and require permanent enemies (Nazism, Stalinism). These resemble dictatorships and clothe themselves in state functions, but they do not demolish the basic structural aspects of the state. They keep them for appearances. What's left of the state itself operates below the movement and seeks whatever level of normalcy is possible through bureaucracy, just as the movement seeks legitimacy by cloaking itself with the state. i.e. the German state was a hostage of the Nazis. Some plain old despotisms even seek to impersonate revolutions (Gaddafi's little green book, the Kim family mafia). But the Taliban is much closer to the Khmer Rouge, or ISIS. Controlling the economic output of a territory doesn't make a movement a state, much as they may wish it so. At most, the Taliban are a mafia dressed up as a totalitarian movement which controls territory. When they controlled 90% of Afghanistan, there was no Afghan state.
And, FTR, I don't believe that all states are themselves unethical. What I've said is that ethicality is neither necessary nor sufficient for statehood, at least in the "classic" Western political theory definition of the state.
The million dollar question to many Palestinians, I'd wager.
This assumes facts not in evidence, namely: (i) that there will be a peace agreement, and (ii) that the Taliban would honor a peace agreement.
The brute reality seems to be that very shortly, essentially all of the members of the current government will be in exile; hanging from lampposts; or minus their heads.
It seems like there's been a fair bit of (public) wishful thinking by the Biden administration regarding the withdrawal (e.g. that pulling the rug out from under the Afghan government would cause them to somehow pull a rabbit out of their hat). Right now, it seems like it was basically a decision to hand Afghanistan directly to the Taliban, especially now that it has momentum on its side.
Some context: I haven’t been following this at all for most of the last decade, but, some things don’t change. Kabul and the Northern Alliance areas have always been hard to win and hard to hold for the Taliban. They’re not above practicality, and they have common enemies in the border regions of the East and North-West. In the SouthWest, the Marine Corps had success in direct negotiations to combat the common enemy of drug trafficking warlords, which is the whole reason they gained support there in the first place, and similarly became the focus of US operations in the region as well. In this case, I’m not sure that makes sense, however, as the coalition government has, in the past, suffered accusation of influence from these outside enemies. It’s not a stretch to think of them as a financial empire, and unlike the US, most Afghans have stronger ties to their tribes than their 401k.
> Like Japan?
Sorry, I meant more like late 1944/1945, after D-day and past the point where a negotiated peace offered any clear benefit.
> Some context: I haven’t been following this at all for most of the last decade, but, some things don’t change. Kabul and the Northern Alliance areas have always been hard to win and hard to hold for the Taliban.
IIRC, provincial capitals in Northern Alliance areas are falling to them now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/world/asia/the-insurgents...:
> Now, [the Taliban] have seized six cities in recent days, five of which are in northern parts of the country. And experts fear that if government forces are unable to stop their advances in the north, Afghanistan’s capital is more vulnerable than ever.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/3/nikki-haley-pakistan...
The near complete absence of cell phone videos of AGTM attacks from that war is a massive tip-off it clear that they don't have a nation state sugar daddy paying the bill (in contrast with groups in Syria).
Employing services of such good smooth talkers doesn't come cheap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWWVy7z9w8Y
Such guy could've easily billed clients up few thousand bucks per hour if he were to work in the West.
And it shows that these guys have both understanding of good PR, and must be spending much on it.
I don't get it, are cell phone videos hard to get a hold of without "a nation state sugar daddy paying the bill"? The other explanation is that Syria has a much higher GDP per capita ($6,373) than Afghanistan ($2,474), so the populace is more likely to have cell phones which means more footage of AGTM strikes.
All it means is that they don’t have a sponsor or at least a major one that provides them with sophisticated weapons, during the last civil war the Taliban rode into Kabul on soviet tanks.
Syria had tons of weapons to steal, so did Iraq and parties like Iran transferred arms including ATGMs to non state actors involved in the conflict.
ATGMs also may not be as useful in a mountainous country like Afghanistan.
Right now the Taliban is riding in HMMWVs at least the Americans didn’t give the Afghans M1 Abrams tanks like they did with the Iraqis, Kata'ib Hezbollah and ISIL are rolling in M1’s these days in Syria as they managed to “liberate” them from the Iraqi forces.
People overestimate just how easy it is to secure weapons, especially sophisticated ones without a local source. Most illegal arms are those which are bought legally and then transferred illegally or are stolen from those who bought them legally.
This means you need either a local adversary or a local ally that has ATGMs in sufficient quantities to get your hands on them, without that even Nick Cage won’t get you your Kornets.
They are amazingly useful because you can hit a truck or a group of people miles away way more effectively than with gunfire and way more accurately than with mortar fire. You do this when you have nation states giving you their old stuff. When you have to pay your own way you reserve the ATGMs for actual tanks and whatnot.
Look at the videos out of Syria. That's exactly how they're used.
>ATGMs also may not be as useful in a mountainous country like Afghanistan.
If nation states had serious interest in this conflict "local sources" would materialize like they did in Syria. All those TOWs those guys use didn't come from Iraq.
The TOWs in Syria did come from Iraq, the Kornets came from Iran.
There is also the possibility that the Taliban after fighting the Americans for nearly 2 decades also has pretty good opsec they know that the US tracks phones even when they are out of cellular range and in general they came to believe that pretty much anything with a battery can somehow be tracked by a drone with a SIG/MASINT pod and they are probably not that far off.
Looking at both photographs and some battlefield photos they use plenty of man portable rocket systems like RPG-29 and 32.
Guided systems are more complex, heavier and usually require a team to operate. Hauling them on foot in the mountains isn’t ideal and their range is limited since these are still WLOS system at that point they offer no real advantage over RPGs and other unguided weapons.
Also keep in mind that the fighters in Afghanistan are far more likely to be illiterate which means they aren’t likely to be using sophisticated weapons that aren’t point and shoot not to mention mobile phones.
Syria had both a much more modern population to recruit from and far more foreign fighters than Afghanistan has now.
Looking at their weapons and tactics since post 9/11 if indeed they aren’t using ATGMs at the same prevalence as say Syria there are far better explanations than they can’t afford them.
These are man portable weapons capable of taking out tanks and other vehicles at decent range. They are expensive and complicated compared to say an RPG.