Departure of most foreign combat troops and
infighting between rival groups has weakened perceived legitimacy of war
By Jon Boone and Sami Yousafzai
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A gathering of a
breakaway Taliban faction in the border area of Zabul province,
Afghanistan, in August.
Photograph: Mirwais Khan/AP
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The Afghan Taliban are facing a cash crisis
with donors unwilling to bankroll an insurgency whose victims are increasingly
civilians rather than foreign troops, according to several members of the
movement.
Mullah Rahmatullah Kakazada, a senior
diplomat under the Taliban regime, told the Guardian that the Taliban was in an
increasingly precarious financial position despite chalking up several dramatic
battlefield successes in the last year.
“The war is becoming unpopular because of all
the bad publicity on civilian casualties,” he said. “These people who give
money don’t want to spend it on mines that kill children.”
The Taliban have long collected donations
from sympathisers around the region, including wealthy Afghan and Arab
businessmen in the Gulf.
But now the movement’s finances are so
weakened that some of its most seriously injured fighters are no longer welcome
at Pakistan’s private hospitals because they cannot settle their bills,
according to Taliban sources.
Kakazada said the departure of most foreign
combat troops since 2014, and the outbreak of bloody infighting between rival
Taliban groups, had weakened the legitimacy of a war the Taliban still portray
as a struggle against “foreign occupation”.
Although not a participant in the 15-year
insurgency, Kakazada remains close to the movement’s leaders. His views echo
those of active Taliban officials who spoke to the Guardian.
One senior figure in the Taliban’s leadership
said donations had first slumped after the announcement in July last year that
the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, had died years previously.
The death in a US drone attack of his
successor, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, this year further damaged the movement’s
fundraising efforts because Mansoor, a well-connected businessman, personally
dealt with many of the donors.
The Taliban’s other main source of funds, the
taxing of economic activity in areas they control – especially the massive
opium economy of southern Afghanistan – has also been disrupted by infighting.
In the summer the movement’s current leader, Mullah
Haibatullah Akhundzada, an Islamic law specialist derided in some quarters for
his lack of combat experience, clashed with Mullah Ibrahim Sadar, the head of
the military council, who is based in opium-rich Helmand.
A Taliban source said Ibrahim defied demands
to send cash to the Quetta Shura, as the Taliban’s leadership council is known,
and in a letter taunted Akhundzada for living in safety in Pakistan.
“Helmand used to send lots of funds to Quetta
Shura in the Mansoor era. But Ibrahim has stopped sending money and instead
told Akhundzada to move to Helmand,” a Taliban intelligence officer said.
Kakazada said there was widespread agreement
among senior figures that the Taliban must try to negotiate an end to the
conflict with the Afghan government, although many of its foot soldiers
disagree.
“The fighters on the ground have no idea, but
90% of people in leadership positions believe it is not going to plan and we
are not going to repeat the 1990s again,” he said, referring to the Taliban’s
earlier conquest of almost the entire country.
He said some of the Taliban’s recent
successes, such as overrunning the city of Kunduz, did not mean the movement
could win an outright military victory.
“For the Kunduz operation the Taliban
prepared for one year just to take a city for one week. Afghanistan has 34
provinces so it would take 34 years to take the country for just one week,” he
said.
“We don’t have momentum. But the government
can’t win either. It’s a stalemate but we are using all our energies on
fighting and not thinking about peace.”
Kakazada said there was a strong peace lobby
within the Taliban, including under the leadership of Mansoor, seen by some
analysts as a hardliner on talks. “He knew that war was not in the interest of
Afghanistan and he was serious about starting a dialogue between Afghans,”
Kakazada said.
Mansoor endorsed a 2013 strategy drawn up by
Kakazada that called for talks with the Afghan government and efforts to “reach
an understanding” with the international community.
But Mansoor pulled out of a Pakistan-brokered
process after just one meeting between the Taliban and representatives of the
Kabul government, held in the Pakistani hill station of Murree in July 2015.
Kakazada said neither Mansoor nor other
leading figures in the Taliban would allow any peace process to be dominated by
Pakistan, a country that is both an essential partner for the Taliban but also
the object of widespread resentment and suspicion.
“The Taliban want to get away from the
influence of Pakistan in order to have respect among Afghans,” he said. “They
don’t want to give the impression they are being forced into talks in someone
else’s interest.”
A spate of recent arrests of senior Taliban
officials in and around the city of Quetta has been widely seen as an attempt
by Pakistan to assert control over the movement.
Pakistan was reportedly alarmed last month
when Taliban diplomats held talks without Islamabad’s knowledge with
Afghanistan’s intelligence chief in Qatar, the Gulf state where the movement
has established a presence that is largely outside the influence of Pakistan.
Kakazada said such pressure tactics had made
Pakistan increasingly unpopular within the Taliban, and the country was
“running very fast towards isolation”.
“Arrests are not a solution the Taliban will
accept,” he said. “Pakistan can facilitate but not interfere.”
The level of anger towards Pakistan among
some members of the Taliban was revealed last month in a letter written by Syed
Mohammad Tayyab Agha, the former head of the Taliban’s Qatar office, to Mullah
Akhundzada.
Agha demanded the Taliban dramatically reduce
violence in Afghanistan and cut all ties with Pakistani intelligence, and said
the Taliban’s leadership should abandon their sanctuary in Pakistan.
“How can the Taliban leadership, now camped
in Pakistan, demand that people in Afghanistan or elsewhere pledge allegiance
to them?” he wrote, according to Radio Free Europe, which obtained the letter.
“To be able to make independent decisions,
you, the members of our leadership council, and heads of our various
commissions, should leave Pakistan,” he wrote. “The presence of our movement’s
key decision-makers and institutions in the prevailing situation there means
Pakistan can impose things against the interests of our movement and
Afghanistan.”
Kakazada dismissed the idea as impractical.
“If we left Pakistan we would not survive one week,” he said.
