Taliban and the Drug and Weapons Trade.

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Taliban paid $300 million a year to help opium crops​

UN says 2008 crop is second-largest

News Services
Published: Wednesday, August 27, 2008

VIENNA -- Opium producers in Afghanistan pay the Taliban $300 million a year to keep certain provinces unsafe and thus free for cultivation, the head of the United Nations drug office said today.

"About $73 million flow from the peasants alone to the Taliban, but in total it's about $300 million that the Taliban receive from the insurgents," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told the Austrian daily Die Presse.

"The insurgents have an economic interest in maintaining insecurity," he concluded.

In an interview with AFP, Costa also noted that much of the money came through a 10-per-cent "tax" on farmers that was sometimes claimed by corrupt officials.

According to the UN's latest Afghanistan Opium Survey, published yesterday, 98 per cent of the country's opium this year came from seven southwestern provinces, "where there are permanent Taliban settlements, and where organized crime groups profit from the chaos."

Two-thirds of it was produced in the southern province of Helmand, which experiences some of the worst insurgency-linked violence, the report said.

Afghanistan, source of more than 90 per cent of the world's heroin, had its second-largest opium crop in 2008, the UN said.

The harvest fell six per cent to 7,700 tonnes from last year's record 8,200 tonnes, in part because of a drought.

Taliban paid $300 million a year to help opium crops

---------------------
The 'do more' crowd could do quite a bit by refocusing on the some very very serious issues in Afghanistan.

We have had Islamic charities banned because some fund raiser they did at some point was for a group that might have had links with another group that was banned by the US (though not at the time the fund raiser was done).

On the other hand, we have here a government supported by the US, and warlords supported by the US, who are reportedly neck deep in the drugs and weapons trade that is supplying the Taliban.

At the very least, the articles posted in this thread describing the thriving weapons trade in the North, and the money from drugs in the south (Afghanistan), should remove any doubts about how the Taliban are being financed.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Time to Target the Taliban Drug Cartel​

August 29, 2008 02:35 PM ET | Sam Dealey | Permanent Link

This week the United Nations released new statistics on Afghanistan's opium production, and the upshot is that the country will remain the world's top producer of opium by a country mile. This should hardly come as a surprise, and most might be tempted to throw away the report as useless. But read between the lines and it's clear why the stubborn Taliban insurgency is gaining ground and, more important, how those gains can be cut back.

The big takeaway is that the report shows a continuation of Afghanistan's bifurcation. In the north, where the Taliban is weakest, poppy cultivation is all but stamped out. In the south, where the Taliban is strongest, poppy cultivation flourishes. The two phenomena—Taliban strength and opium cultivation—aren't coincidental. The Taliban are wholly linked to the drug trade, profiting from the taxes they levy on poppy-producing farms and villages, the protection offered by the region's powerful corrupt class, and the broader trafficking networks that allow not only the free flow of drugs but of men and weapons, too.

When I was in Afghanistan reporting on the drug trade for a GQ story two years ago, I argued that counternarcotics was critical to stabilizing Afghanistan. This is a sentiment shared by a number of observers and policymakers, most prominently and recently Tom Schweich, a former top official at State overseeing Afghanistan's drug problems. Last month, Schweich wrote an excellent account of his counternarcotics travails in the New York Times magazine.

There's a whole host of carrots the international community uses to persuade farmers not to grow poppies, and where civil society exists, such as in Afghanistan's north, those may have some usefulness. But in the restive south, only the stick will work.

Schweich puts a greater emphasis on eradication than interdiction. And while I agree that destroying poppy cultivation, particularly by aerial spraying, would be effective, I believe the heart of the matter lies in disrupting the drug networks and forcibly taking out the Mr. Bigs behind them.

Interdiction requires muscle, and while the DEA and its mentored Afghan units have made a good effort, the task in Afghanistan is simply too big. Effective interdiction needs more manpower, helicopters, and real firepower, and only militaries have the capabilities.

But NATO forces, including those of the United States, resist participation in both eradication and interdiction. The military views counternarcotics as essentially a law enforcement problem and worries that getting involved with it in Afghanistan would expose troops to further participation in the broader (and unwinnable) global war on drugs.

Instead, international forces have favored a "sequencing" approach, in which the Taliban is defeated militarily and then counternarcotics is tackled. That kind of prioritizing would be fine and well if the two scourges were separate, but of course they're not. Drugs feed a bottomless salad of corruption, porous borders, and enemy revenue and havens. Until NATO forces realize this, the bifurcation of the country will continue, perhaps even irreparably.

Antonio Costa, the U.N.'s drug czar, summed it up well: "There is now a perfect overlap between zones of high risk and regions of high opium cultivation. Since drugs are funding insurgency and insurgency enables drug cultivation, insurgency and narcotics must be fought together."Harrumph.

Time to Target the Taliban Drug Cartel - Sam Dealey (usnews.com)

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Metric tonne of explosives recovered from Quetta
​

Quetta: Security forces have seized one thousand kilogrammes of explosives and arrested three suspected militants from Hazar Ganji area after a heavy exchange of fire, late on Monday evening.

According to official sources, security personnel deployed in the area signalled to a suspected vehicle to stop on a tip off but the driver, instead of stopping, sped up the vehicle and attempted to escape.

Occupants of both vehicles were soon involved in a heavy firefight as security personel returned shots after sustaining a hail of bullets.

Following a spectacular chase through Hazar Ganji, security personnel succeeded in intercepting the vehicle and capturing three suspected militants.

“On search of the vehicle, 1000 kg of high explosive was recovered from the vehicle packed in bags,” a senior police officer stated, adding that one suspect who was injured in the shooting had been admitted to the hospital.

Security forces handed over the suspects to the relevant authorities for interrogation. Sources confirmed that an initial investigation had revealed that explosives were smuggled to Quetta from the border area for conducting subversive activities within in the province.

DAWN.COM | Balochistan | One metric tonne of explosives recovered from Quetta

More explosives from Afghanistan coming into Pakistan?

 

[Neo]

For the Taliban, A Crime That Pays​

How ransom kidnappings, once a rarity in most of Afghanistan, have become a cash source second only to the narcotics trade for the country's insurgents

Road Warriors: Daniele Mastrogiacomo (bottom center) with his driver and his translator (right), who was killed​

There were no seats left on the Kandahar-to-Kabul flight, so Johan Freckhaus decided to take a chance and return to Afghanistan's capital by car. After nine years in the country, the construction executive understood the danger, but with his long beard and fluency in Dari, the nation's most widely spoken language, he could pass for an Afghan. He might have made it, if one guerrilla at a highway checkpoint in Ghazni province hadn't searched the car carefully enough to find Freckhaus's hidden French passport.

The contractor was promptly shackled with tire chains, blindfolded and hauled away. For the next three weeks, the kidnappers moved him around the countryside every night before setting him free on June 19 this year. According to the commander of the Taliban fighters who grabbed Freckhaus, French authorities paid roughly $1.5 million for the hostage.

As if Afghanistan didn't have enough problems, the Taliban have spawned yet another: an epidemic of ransom kidnappings. Such crimes used to be rare, and the perpetrators were usually common thugs who stuck close to Kabul. That's changed in the last couple of years, as the Taliban learned to abduct foreigners and Afghan business people instead of killing them. Since then, kidnapping has become one of the guerrillas' main revenue sources, second only to facilitating and protecting the country's $4 billion-a-year narcotics trade. If you add up only the reported ransoms in some of the highest-profile kidnappings of the past two years, the total comes to more than $10 million a year—and that's a deceptively conservative estimate. Most abductions and payments are never publicized. The windfall has helped the Taliban to come back strong from near defeat, and the threat of kidnapping has made travel all but impossible in much of the country, crippling reconstruction efforts.

One of the earliest victims was Gabriele Torsello, a bearded, turbaned Italian photojournalist. Two years ago he was on a bus heading out of Helmand province when it was flagged down by a group of Taliban who were clearly expecting him. One gunman boarded the bus, ignored the other passengers and ordered Torsello off. "They came directly to me," Torsello recalls. "No one else was searched or questioned." He was freed on Nov. 3, 2006, after 22 days. The Italian government has refused to confirm reports that €2 million was paid for his release.

Four months later, the Taliban trapped another Italian journalist in Helmand. Fighters for the notorious commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund seized Daniele Mastrogiacomo, a war correspondent for La Repubblica, together with his driver and his translator. Dadullah's men killed the driver immediately. Three weeks later they freed the Italian reporter in exchange for an undisclosed sum of cash and the release of six jailed Taliban, including Dadullah's brother. Then they cut the translator's head off. Afghan President Hamid Karzai came under such heavy criticism for the prisoner release that he has never repeated it.

Despite that, hostage negotiations routinely start with the insurgents demanding a prisoner release. Taliban commanders seem embarrassed to talk about ransoms. But the talks always come down to money. (Among other things, cash can bribe underpaid prison guards or finance a breakout, like the one in Kandahar this June where at least 350 captured Taliban escaped.) "Nobody—no government—wants to acknowledge ransoms, but you gotta do what you gotta do," says Jack Cloonan, president of the U.S. crisis-management firm Clayton Consultants. "The truth is, everyone talks to [kidnappers], either directly or through back channels. And everyone pays ransoms."

Foreigners pay best. The Mastrogiacomo deal caught the attention of a top subcommander in Ghazni province, Abdullah Mansoor. A large, portly man with a mean streak even longer than his black beard, he ordered his men to keep a close eye on their stretch of the Kandahar-Kabul highway. In July 2007, two of Mansoor's fighters hit the jackpot—a big white passenger bus traveling unescorted with a group of 23 Christian missionaries from South Korea. Mansoor proved he was serious by killing two of them. The others were free by the end of August. The South Korean government denies that any ransom was paid, but Mullah Nasir and other Taliban sources say the price was at least $5 million, and a senior Afghan government official confirms that figure.

Still, most victims are Afghans. Hardly anyone else dares to travel overland now. Not long after the Koreans' capture, Mustapha Barakzai was grabbed on the same stretch of highway. The 22-year-old student, whose mother is a member of Afghanistan's Parliament, was heading for Kabul by car with his uncle and two friends, one of them a policeman named Pahlawan. Mansoor's gunmen were waiting by the road for them; one of them had the car's license number written on his hand. He showed it to Barakzai as the four men were being hauled away.

On the morning of Sept. 13—the first day of Ramadan last year—the gunmen dragged Pahlawan off, and half an hour later they took Barakzai to a nearby field. His friend lay in the dust, bound and blindfolded. The gunmen forced Barakzai to watch while one of them cut off the policeman's head. Then Mansoor stuffed a mobile phone into Barakzai's hand and ordered: "Call your mother." Barakzai's family paid $100,000 as fast as they could raise the cash. His captors set him free a few hours later, along with the other two survivors. The kidnappers kept the car, offering to return it for an extra $10,000. Soon after Barakzai's release he heard that Mansoor had been killed in a U.S. military operation. But more than a year after the ordeal, the young man still gets threatening phone calls saying money won't save him if he's ever caught again.

No one knows how many Afghans have been kidnapped by the Taliban. Until recently the field was a wide-open scramble among local guerrilla bands who kept most of the proceeds for themselves. This May the organization's No. 2 leader, Mullah Bradar, finally issued a set of rules for all Taliban kidnappings. Commanders are now required to notify the supreme military council, the shura, whenever a kidnapping takes place; no one but representatives designated by Mullah Bradar may negotiate terms for a hostage's release or take ransom payments, and at least two thirds of any cash deal must go to the central shura. A special panel has been set up to investigate alleged rule breakers.

Local chiefs have begun feuding over the best roads. In more than a half-dozen provinces, the shura has ruled that each backcountry subcommander will be granted a stretch of main highway. But the turf battles are starting to recall the days of the warlords in the early 1990s. In some places, Taliban kidnappers appear to be working with professional criminals and corrupt police, much as the three groups collaborate in the opium provinces. And the threat is spilling across the border into Pakistan's tribal areas.

The attacks have paralyzed large parts of Afghanistan. International aid workers have been forced out, major projects have been halted and business confidence, already shaky, has been all but destroyed. One reason Afghans welcomed the Taliban's rise in the '90s was because the armed group drove out the bandits and warlords, making it safe to move around the country. Now the same group is making it anything but. The Afghan National Army is stretched too thin to keep even the main highways secure, and the Coalition has never had enough forces in the country to fill the gap.

It's small comfort that the Taliban are having trouble keeping order in their own ranks. For kidnapping Johan Freckhaus, the military council awarded $20,000 to Anwar Farooq, the local chief who directed the job, along with $2,000 to each of the 23 fighters who carried it out. That's good money in a country as poor as Afghanistan, but Taliban sources say Farooq was furious: he thought he and his men deserved a far bigger cut. At last word he was still arguing with the higher-ups.

Freckhaus himself says he's not sure what his freedom cost. "The Taliban said there would be a prisoner exchange," he told NEWSWEEK last month at a café in Paris. "The government said a ransom was paid. Both sides have their story." One thing he's sure of: he's not moving back to Afghanistan until the place gets a little safer—and that might take a while.

 

[Spring Onion]

Kidnapping for ransom was always a lucrative business in Afghanistan and recently in parts of Khyber Agency in Pakistan.

The kidnapping for ransom is popular among all sides and all groups in Afghanistan. saying that only Taliban are using it for money is just like cosing eyes from the same crime being done by Karzai government officials.

 

[bernard]

Neo, above article shows that world doesn't needs taliban and its a waste made of waste people who lost control of their lives.
whether everyone in pakistan-afghanistan accepts it or not ,there is need of a cohesive force, if NATO members shows difference in opinion and weakness,taliban will survive for a long time, time to clip it entirely.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Neo, above article shows that world doesn't needs taliban and its a waste made of waste people who lost control of their lives.
whether everyone in pakistan-afghanistan accepts it or not ,there is need of a cohesive force, if NATO members shows difference in opinion and weakness,taliban will survive for a long time, time to clip it entirely.

As Jana pointed out, Kidnapping for ransom was practiced long before the Taliban started doing it. It isn't the result of the Taliban, it is the result of a lack of proper institutions, lack of development and poverty.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Threads merged.

 

[muse]

NATO forces to begin attacks on Afghan drug lords
By Thom Shanker Published: October 2, 2008


WASHINGTON: NATO forces in Afghanistan will step up attacks on drug lords and narcotics traffickers who are supporting an insurgency that over the past year has rebounded and is responsible for rising violence, the top American commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday.

The comments by the commander, General David McKiernan, made clear that international troops in Afghanistan were not going to eradicate crops that make Afghanistan the world's top supplier of opium poppies, which are processed into heroin.

But by drawing a clear link between the narcotics trade and its role in the insurgency, McKiernan was outlining what could be an important and expanding role for American and NATO troops as they seek to eliminate a source of money and weapons for the insurgency.

"I think there's a need for increased involvement in ISAF in assisting the Afghan government in counter-narcotics efforts," said McKiernan, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF. "Where we can make a clear intelligence linkage between a narcotics dealer or a facility and the insurgency, I consider that a force protection issue and we can deal with that in a military way."

NATO commanders always have the right to take steps to protect their troops. It is under this authority that McKiernan is authorizing attacks on drug lords that are helping the insurgency.

Specifically, McKiernan said that his forces would be authorized to attack narcotics bosses, their foot soldiers and infrastructure if they are linked to the movement of weapons, improvised explosives or foreign fighters into Afghanistan.

Some non-governmental organizations have urged international security forces to take an active role in eradicating the poppy crops. But American and NATO officials have vigorously rejected those proposals, saying such decisions should be left to the Afghan government, which would also have to develop alternate livelihoods for the farmers.

Even so, McKiernan noted that NATO's senior commander, General John Craddock, has approached the alliance to see whether the mandate for Afghanistan should be reopened to determine "if there are some increased authorities that NATO should exercise" to include eradication.

"We should expand our support to that," McKiernan said at one of two separate news conferences he held here on Wednesday.

McKiernan said today's fight in Afghanistan is against more than just Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, but also "a very broad range of militant groups that are combined with the criminality, with the narco-trafficking system, with corruption, that form a threat and a challenge to the future of that great country."

The general said that the Taliban will take in at least $100 million in heroin proceeds this year alone.

In recent weeks, McKiernan has officially request three additional brigade combat teams for the mission, an increase of more than 15,000 over the 8,500 already approved by President George W. Bush. He said that given the complex terrain, there also is a significant need for more helicopters.

As military commanders and political leaders review the strategy for Afghanistan, McKiernan expressed doubts that a successful effort that enlisted tribal forces to the coalition side in Iraq could be repeated in Afghanistan.

Especially in Anbar Province, a western region of Iraq that was a base of the Sunni-led insurgency, American military officers were able to convince tribal leaders to support the coalition fight against Al Qaeda and other insurgents in a program variously called the Iraq Awakening and Sons of Iraq.

"The difference in Afghanistan is that needs to be an Afghan-led effort to engage the tribes," McKiernan said.

In Afghanistan, there "is a degree of complexity in the tribal system which is much greater than what I found in Iraq years ago," McKiernan added. "And I also find that of the over 400 major tribal networks inside of Afghanistan, they have been largely, as I said earlier, traumatized by over 30 years of war, so a lot of that traditional tribal structure has broken down."

McKiernan, who has been critical of Pakistan's efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters using safe havens there to carry out attacks against allied forces in Afghanistan, said he was "cautiously optimistic" that an ongoing assault by Pakistani forces against militants in the tribal area of Bajaur could put a dent into extremist operations in the border region.

"I am encouraged by the military operations that the Pakistani army and Frontier Corps have undertaken," said McKiernan, who cautioned, however, "It is probably too early to see if there's been an effect on the sustainment of foreign fighters, of supplies, of facilitation on the Afghan side of the border.

McKiernan also praised the appointment this week of a new head of Pakistan's top spy organization, saying the new director general, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, is likely to carry out reforms of an agency that the general said has had "institutional and historical" ties to the Taliban and other militant networks

 

[Imran Khan]

its ok he control karzai old job what he has benifit if he can't do smmugling when his brother is dimmy presedent

 

[was]

now he should shut up and stop barking on pakistan

 

[dr.umer]

Here is the picture of Ahmed Wali Karzai.

 

[RabzonKhan]

Another good news from Afghanistan.


Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Heroin Trade

By JAMES RISEN
October 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.

The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.

Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, now the chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistan’s second largest city, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks by longtime foes.

“I am not a drug dealer, I never was and I never will be,” the president’s brother said in a recent phone interview. “I am a victim of vicious politics.”

But the assertions about him have deeply worried top American officials in Kabul and in Washington. The United States officials fear that perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his brother are damaging his credibility and undermining efforts by the United States to buttress his government, which has been under siege from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money, several senior Bush administration officials said. Their concerns have intensified as American troops have been deployed to the country in growing numbers.

“What appears to be a fairly common Afghan public perception of corruption inside their government is a tremendously corrosive element working against establishing long-term confidence in that government — a very serious matter,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, who was commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and is now retired. “That could be problematic strategically for the United States.”

The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in interviews last week.

Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according to current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. In meetings with President Karzai, including a 2006 session with the United States ambassador, the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief and their British counterparts, American officials have talked about the allegations in hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country, said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks.

“We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there,” one official said. But President Karzai has resisted, demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said. “We don’t have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment,” a White House official said. “That allows Karzai to say, ‘where’s your proof?’ ”

Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the president’s brother.

Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White House officials dispute that, instead citing limited D.E.A. resources in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the reasons for the lack of an inquiry.

“We invested considerable resources into building Afghan capability to conduct such investigations and consistently encouraged Karzai to take on the big fish and address widespread Afghan suspicions about the link between his brother and narcotics,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, who was the coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq at the National Security Council until last year.

It was not clear whether President Bush had been briefed on the matter.Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied that the president’s brother was involved in drug trafficking or that the president had intervened to help him. “People have made allegations without proof,” Mr. Hamidzada said.

Spokesmen for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An Informant’s Tip

The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan investigators to the drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006.

The informant, Hajji Aman Kheri, was arrested a year later on charges of plotting to kill an Afghan vice president in 2002. The Afghan Supreme Court recently ordered him freed for lack of evidence, but he has not been released. Nearly 100 political leaders in his home region protested his continued incarceration last month.

Mr. Kheri, in a phone interview from jail in Kabul, said he had been an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States intelligence agencies, an assertion confirmed by American counternarcotics and intelligence officials. Several of those officials, frustrated that the Bush administration was not pressing for Mr. Kheri’s release, came forward to disclose his role in the drug seizure.

Ever since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, critics have charged that the Bush administration has failed to take aggressive action against the Afghan narcotics trade, because of both opposition from the Karzai government and reluctance by the United States military to get bogged down by eradication and interdiction efforts that would antagonize local warlords and Afghan poppy farmers. Now, Afghanistan provides about 95 percent of the world’s supply of heroin.

Just as the Taliban have benefited from money produced by the drug trade, so have many officials in the Karzai government, according to American and Afghan officials. Thomas Schweich, a former senior State Department counternarcotics official, wrote in The New York Times Magazine in July that drug traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. “Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government,” he said.

Suspicions of Corruption

Of the suspicions about Ahmed Wali Karzai, Representative Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has focused on the Afghan drug problem in Congress, said, “I would ask people in the Bush administration and the D.E.A. about him, and they would say, ‘We think he’s dirty.’ ”More.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Arming the Taleban​

By Kate Clark
BBC News, Afghanistan

All kinds of weapons are on sale in the Tribal Areas

"We sometimes seize arms and ammunition," said a Taleban commander in south-eastern Afghanistan.

"We're using whatever weapons are left over from Russian times and we buy from different sources - Pakistan, Iran, Russia - wherever we can get them."

I met the Taleban commander, a veteran of 30 years of war, in a safe house - one of the typical mud-built, fortress-like houses of the south-east where a six-metre (six-yard) high wall protects an extended family all living in the same compound.

The night before, I had been woken by the noise of small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. A nearby government office was being attacked.

The Taleban are targeting main roads and towns.

Their tactics differ from the mujahedeen who, fighting the Soviet occupation 30 years ago, started by taking villages and building up "liberated" territory.

The Taleban's aim, said the commander, was to force the American army to leave.

"We're ambushing the Americans, planting roadside bombs. We never let them relax," he said.

Iranian arms

He said their favourite weapons were Iranian:

"There's a kind of mine called the Dragon. Iran is sending it and we have got it. It's directional and very powerful."

Taleban commander in south-east Afghanistan
The most popular weapon of all is a type of Iranian mine
Taleban commander

The Dragon appears to be a local name for what is internationally called an Explosively Formed Penetrator.

As the commander testified, it can penetrate the armour of Humvees and even tanks.

He said it was only available to special groups and you had to have "good relations" with the Iranians to get it.

Former mujahedeen fighter Shahir - which is not his real name - said Iranian weapons commanded a premium price:

"The beauty of the Iranian-made AK47, for example, is that it can also fire grenades. It costs $200-$300 dollars more than a Kalashnikov made elsewhere."

Shahir said there were two routes for Iranian weapons to reach the Taleban.

"There are people inside the state in Iran who donate weapons. There are also Iranian businessmen who sell them."

Britain and America have also alleged that elements in the Iranian state are helping to fund the Taleban, but it is rare to get confirmation from the Taleban side.

The Iranian Embassy in Kabul denied the allegations, saying Tehran supported the government of Afghanistan.

Open border

The most common route for getting weapons is from Pakistan.

Extensive arms markets and a local industry grew up in the Tribal Areas in the 1980s when there was Pakistani, American and Saudi support for the anti-Soviet Jihad.

"Buying arms there is as easy as buying a couple of bags of sugar," said Shahir.

"You'll see one or two Kalashnikov rifles hanging up outside a shop to show it's selling arms. Inside there's everything that money can buy - grenade-launchers, guns, even missiles and mines."

The Pakistani border is open to arms and fighters.

This summer, al-Qaeda fighters, who have found a safe haven in the Tribal Areas, have streamed across.

"There are Chechens here," said the Taleban commander.

"Uzbeks, Iranians, Arabs, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, even some Germans and British fighting with us."

Mujahadeen dealers

He also spoke about another, even murkier route for arms:

"Often, Russian and Iranian weaponry comes from the north. The northern arms dealers are well-known men, some of them have links and connections with Iran and Russia from Jihad times. And yes, they are the ones who used to be fighting the Taleban. "

I travelled to the north of Afghanistan to find out more about this extraordinary allegation - that commanders who fought the Soviet occupation and later the Taleban were now arms dealers who were selling weapons to their old enemy, the Taleban.

The insurgency has been good for business, two arms dealers, interviewed separately, admitted. Demand was up, not just from insurgents, but also locally in the north.

Fear of a strengthening Taleban had created a burgeoning northern market for weapons.

One dealer said the big arms dealers were selling to the Taleban:

"Most are former mujahadeen commanders. They've grown rich from the opium poppy trade and they're well connected. They actually use police convoys to transport the weapons."

'Balance of power'

But the question remains - why would Northern Alliance commanders, however corrupt, want to sell weapons to their old enemies?

Why play such a dangerous game? Profits are good, dealers said, but were not the only reason.

"The big dealers are war criminals," said one dealer.

"They've killed people and stolen their land. They know that if the government in Kabul became strong and stable, people would be able to demand justice."

"And if the Taleban took over, there would be also consequences. So they want to keep the current balance of power. And meanwhile, they're feathering their nests."

Government officials in Kabul were candid about the problems they face.

Arms from Pakistan were the main source for the insurgency, said the Deputy Interior Minister, Gen Daoud.

He said that in the past authorities had seized weapons and ammunition being smuggled from the north to the south.

He admitted there was police corruption, but denied former mujahedeen or Northern Alliance commanders could be involved.

"Mujahedeen is a very holy name - you should not mention it in the same breath as the word criminal," he said.

However, Gen Farahai, head of counter-terrorism for the Afghan police, said commanders were involved:

"From the north, sometimes they're selling ammunition and weapons to the Taliban and other illegally armed groups. And from the south, drugs are coming."

Afghanistan has endured a bloody summer.

With the Taleban armed to the hilt and the insurgency sucking in weapons from every quarter, there is a sharp sense of fear in the air.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Arming the Taleban

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Taleban 'getting Chinese arms'​

By Paul Danahar
BBC Asia bureau chief, Beijing

Britain has privately complained to Beijing that Chinese-made weapons are being used by the Taleban to attack British troops in Afghanistan.

The BBC has been told that on several occasions Chinese arms have been recovered after attacks on British and American troops by Afghan insurgents.

The authorities in Beijing have promised to carry out an investigation.

This appears to be the first time Britain has asked China how its arms are ending up with the Taleban.

Boasting

At a meeting held recently at the Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing, a British official expressed the UK's growing concern about the incidents.

When asked about the latest British concerns, the Chinese foreign ministry referred back to a statement made by their spokesman Qin Gang in July who said China's arms exports were carried out "in strict accordance with our law and our international obligations".

For their part, the Taleban have recently begun boasting that they have now got hold of much more sophisticated weaponry although they refused to say from where.

Afghan officials have also privately confirmed to the BBC that sophisticated Chinese weapons are now in the hands of the Taleban.

They said these included Chinese-made surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft guns, landmines, rocket-propelled grenades and components for roadside bombs.

A senior Afghan official told the BBC: "Chinese HN-5 anti-aircraft missiles are with the Taleban, we know this... and we are worried where do the Taleban get them, some of these weapons have been made recently in Chinese factories."

Another Afghan official who deals with counter-terrorism said: "Serial numbers and other information from most of the Chinese weapons have been removed in most cases and it's almost impossible for us to find out where they come from but we have shared our concerns with the Chinese and the Americans also."

Worried

The Afghan government considers China to be a friend, and a much less meddlesome ally than the other big player in its neighbourhood, India.

But, the counter-terrorism official added, "China is worried about the presence of the US in the region".

Southern Afghanistan has been awash with Chinese made arms for decades which are some of the cheapest on the market.

In the past the Taleban got them via the Pakistan intelligence agency, the ISI, or bought them directly from arms smugglers.

But it is extremely unlikely the ISI would now allow them access to anti-aircraft missiles or armour-piercing ammunition.

The Pakistani army's relationship between militants in its tribal areas along the Afghan border has deteriorated sharply in recent years after Washington put pressure on President Musharraf post-9/11 to crack down on al-Qaeda and Taleban groups operating inside Pakistani territory.

So the Taleban might well use any sophisticated new weapons it received against the Pakistani army.

It is not in China's interest either to arm Pakistan-based militants.

Over the last couple of years Chinese workers in Pakistan have been targeted by militants, in retaliation for the Pakistani army allegedly going after hard-line Muslim Uighur leaders from China's Xinjiang province, hiding in the tribal areas.

Proxy network

So instead of Pakistan being the transit point for these weapons, the finger is being pointed by many commentators towards Iran.

The Afghan government has long acknowledged privately that Iranian intelligence agencies have been active in southern Afghanistan post-9/11.

Iran has been pursuing a policy of building up proxy networks to be able to attack American forces in response to any US attacks against Teheran's nuclear infrastructure.

A Shia Iran and the Sunni Taleban had been firm enemies since 1998.

Then, Iran threatened to invade western Afghanistan, when the country was largely controlled by the Taleban, after nine of its diplomats were massacred in Mazar-e-Sharif.

But times have changed, now America is a common enemy and senior American commanders in Afghanistan have acknowledged the growing ties between the two.

The complication for both the UK and US is China.

Unnamed US officials have recently been quoted as saying that China has been selling arms to Iran which Iran is then passing on to insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Iraq.

China's booming economy and its seat at the UN security council have made it an important player on the world stage.

It is a major trading partner for the UK whose economy has benefited enormously from China's cheap goods.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's newly-appointed British Minister for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch Brown acknowledged to journalists in Beijing last week that countries "need to work with China to get things done in today's world".

China is going to have to show that getting things done also means stopping its arms illegally ending up in the hands of men bent on killing British troops.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Taleban 'getting Chinese arms'