[Iran Press TV Latest] Richard Holbrooke, the United States' special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, says some fundamentalists based in Persian Gulf states are financing the Taliban.
Who'da ever expected that?
Some official sources in Pakistan estimate the budget for Taliban forces -- stationed on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border -- to be between three and four billion dollars, BBC reported. Holbrooke says such a huge amount of money could not be acquired only through illegal drug trafficking.
If they don't have intel saying precisely where in the Persian Gulf the money's coming from I'd like to know what the intelligence community's been doing for the past eight years...
| Like which country, or like which bank and account? Would Ambassador Holbrooke say anything before the accounts were frozen? |
Ahmed Ghani, the governor of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, also says that it is clear that the money comes from outside of Pakistan because Pakistan does not give the money to the Taliban.
Not at the moment, anyway. At least not to all of it...
| No, no, of course not. The ISI gives money, and training, and senior liasons. And Pakistani individuals and groups give money, and their sons -- sometimes even of their own free will. Or so I've heard. |
After the September 11 attacks in the US, some Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, froze bank accounts that were used to finance fundamentalists but the move was not effective in halting their activity, the BBC report said.
It would have only been effective had they wanted to make it so. They were still thinking "strategic depth" until the monster got away. Every time it looks like they might get it back under control they go back to it, at which point the monster starts eating their children again.
Only in 2008, the US-led coalition forces spent over $16 billion on the war in Afghanistan, which shows that the Taliban must be receiving a huge amount of financial support.
| I'm confused.Because the Coalition wages war with expensive equipment and highly trained troops instead of masses of cannon fodder, therefore the Taliban must spend an equal amount for reversing the formula? |
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