The Haqqani network - Follow the money

Follow the money. It's an old adage, but one of the best. And journalist Gretchen Peters  knows this more than most. For some years now she has been researching the nexus between money and the various Taliban factions, in particular looking into the opium trade in her book Seeds of Terror, and her pamphlet How Opium Profits the Taliban for the US Institute of Peace.
Now she has produced Haqqani Network Financing: The Evolution of an Industry for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Her groundbreaking study shows in some detail how this remarkable Afghan clan has been able to build up unique cash-generating business enterprises to finance its very effective campaign against the Karzai government and its Western allies.
From its base in Pakistan's North Waziristan - where it exists with the blessing of the ISI - the Haqqanis have created a mafia-like empire that now stretches across Pakistan and into the Gulf. Peters says the Haqqani network is involved in an array of illegal activities: it extorts from businesses in Afghanistan's south-east and in FATA; takes part in kidnap-for-ransom schemes; protects and taxes illicit smuggling rings as well as smuggling itself; has partial ownership stakes in dozens, if not hundreds, of real estate holdings and in construction firms, import-export operations and transport businesses; raises donations from ideological supporters; and finally, is involved in large-scale money laundering.
Peters says that whilst conventional wisdom suggests that all these activities are directed towards supporting the network's military and religious objectives, in fact they are also an end in themselves. She sums it up like this:
"This report will make the case that the Haqqanis have evolved over more than three decades into an efficient mafia-type network exhibiting robust relationships with regional political, military and economic circles, and that members of the group have a financial incentive to remain the dealmakers and the enforcers in their area of operations. The report will also demonstrate how the Haqqanis’ involvement in criminal and profit-making activities has diversified over time in pragmatic response to shifting funding conditions and economic opportunities. At each stage of the group’s history, Haqqani network leaders have leveraged strategic alliances and relationships to consolidate their position of authority within the community and to secure their sources of funding."
Peters says that continued warfare in Afghanistan benefits the Haqqanis financially and that they have little incentive to end the fighting or to give up the autonomy they have found in Pakistan's tribal areas. The network's comparatively small size means its members can adapt to changes very quickly, whilst making it difficult for outsiders to penetrate. It does, however, have weaknesses, including repetitive behaviour, paranoia over traitors and a leadership which may be too small and too centralised.
What is most remarkable is that the network's finances have never come under sustained attack, in part because it is protected by the Pakistani state, but also because US war planners are too focussed on military activity to understand how to take on this kind of enemy. As Peters says: "a stepped‐up U.S. effort to identify and disrupt Haqqani business activities and logistical supply lines, modeled on previous successful campaigns against other transnational crime networks around the globe, could significantly degrade the network’s capacity to cause trouble." Is anyone listening?

Taliban militants who function like criminal gangs

 

Example of a Taliban tax receipt 

In what must be regarded as one of the best, most informative reports written this year on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point  has published Gretchen Peters' superb report on Crime and Insurgency in the Tribal Areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Well researched and containing mounds of fascinating material, this report demonstrates that much of the insurgency in both these countries is primarily a criminal enterprise. This has been a theme pursued by this blog for some time, but Peters' report nails it to the ground, leaving little doubt in the reader's mind. According to Ms Peters:
"Within a realm of poor governance and widespread state corruption, anti-state actors engage in and protect organized crime — mainly smuggling, extortion and kidnapping — both to raise funds and also to spread fear and insecurity, thus slowing the pace of development and frustrating attempts to extend the rule of law and establish a sustainable licit economy. Militant groups on either side of the frontier function like a broad network of criminal gangs, not just in terms of the activities in which they engage, but also in the way they are organized, how funds flow through their command chains and how they interact—and sometimes fight—with each other."
She argues that the prevalence of crime offers possibilities to coalition forces, who can turn people against the insurgents by protecting them from the criminals. Growing numbers of local people, she says, are questioning the religious, political and ideological motives of the insurgents.
In Afghanistan, says Peters, the Quetta Shura of the Taliban increasingly behaves like a traditional drug cartel, seeking to maximise profits by processing opium into heroin. The organisation now demands that money earned from extortion and narcotics flows directly into central coffers instead of being controlled by district-level commanders.

The Haqqani network, based in the east of the country, raises much of its income from kidnapping or protecting smugglers or extortion. A third group, the Hezb-i-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, makes money by smuggling lootable resources such as timber and precious stones or antiquities.
In Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has all the hallmarks of a powerful criminal empire, whose actions are threatening to damage the Afghan 'Taliban' brand name. Evidence of widespread criminality makes it hard to sustain Pakistani efforts to differentiate between 'good' and 'bad' Taliban.
Peters' report is full of examples showing how money is raised by the insurgent groups, including the huge amounts of money raised by 'taxing' trucks that bring supplies to the coalition forces in Afghanistan. These trucks routinely pay up to 40 per cent of the value of the consignment as tax to Taliban gunmen.
The gunmen themselves regularly fall out with each other over spoils, with dozens of fighters having been killed in fire-fights over who has the right to extort. Some of the material Peters references comes from the CTC's Harmony database which includes documents captured from Taliban fighters. These include correspondence showing commanders warning off rivals from carrying out extortions on their territory. Such extortion and 'taxing' is so widespread that in some areas the Taliban actually issues receipts so that traders are not fleeced more than once.
There is an old adage in reporting: Follow the money. In this case, as Peters shows so convincingly, it leads to a cesspit of crime - a million miles away from the stated goals of Islamic justice.

Three books worth reading

I've come across several fascinating books recently that should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand events in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
First, The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen (Hurst and Co, London 2009), a former Australian army officer and now a leading expert on guerrilla warfare and chief counterterrorism strategist for the US State Department. Although it is not solely about Afghanistan, Kilcullen's clear thinking shines out of this book.
There are too many gems of insight in this book to list them all, but here are a few of the more salient points. He argues that the insurgency in Afghanistan is not primarily focussed on overthrowing the Afghan state, but on consolidating the Pashtun areas under their control - on both sides of the border.
He says the strategy is not a classical Maoist protracted warfare insurgency: "A Maoist approach seeks victory through a displacement strategy of building what classical counterinsurgency theorists call 'parallel hierarchies' - a competitive system of control tantamount to a guerrilla counter-state in permanently liberated areas - which then spread across the country and seek to defeat the government in, eventually, a relatively conventional war of manoeuvre. Rather the Taliban appears to be applying an exhaustion strategy of sapping the energy, resources and support of the Afghan government and its international partners, making the country ungovernable and hoping that the international community will eventually withdraw in exhaustion and leave the government to collapse under the weight of its own lack of effectiveness and legitimacy."
How true! He contrasts the Taliban's concentration on providing governance (including courts) in the areas it controls, to the actions of the Karzai government which ignores these issues.
Kilcullen also point to the importance the Taliban attaches to propaganda, again in contrast to both the Afghan government and the Coalition forces: "The insurgents treat propaganda as their main effort, coordinating physical attacks in support of a sophisticated propaganda campaign."
All is not lost, according to Kilcullen, who point to the insurgents' in ability to break out of their Pashtun/international jihadi circle and spread into other ethnicities or language groups.
A second book that also makes fascinating reading is Decoding the New Taliban, edited by Antonio Giustozzi (also published by Hurst & Co). The essays it contains include 'The Taliban and the Opium Trade' by Gretchen Peters, 'The Taliban in Helmand: An Oral History' by Thomas Coghlan, 'The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan' by Claudio Franco. There are ten further essays and many insights in all of them.
Finally, I thoroughly recommend Talibanisation of Pakistan: From 9/11 to 26/11 by Pakistani journalist Amir Mir (Pentagon Security International, New Delhi, 2009). Mir's relentless investigation into the nexus between the TTP and the Pakistan military and intelligence communities is superb, showing as it does how the very forces nurtured by the ISI as an instrument of foreign policy turned on their masters and now threaten the stability of the state itself.