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Saudis Bankroll Taliban in Afghanistan

(New York Times) Carlotta Gall - Fifteen years and half a trillion dollars later, the U.S. is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money. Saudi Arabia has backed Pakistan's promotion of the Taliban. Over the years, wealthy Saudi sheikhs and rich philanthropists have stoked the war by privately financing the insurgents. All the while, Saudi Arabia has officially, if coolly, supported the American mission. Saudi officials deny official support for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hard-line Sunni groups. In interviews with the New York Times, a former Taliban finance minister described how he traveled to Saudi Arabia for years raising cash while ostensibly on pilgrimage. The Taliban has also been allowed to raise millions more by extorting "taxes" from hundreds of thousands of Pashtun guest workers in the kingdom and menacing their families back home, said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser, now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Nasr describes a Saudi strategy of building a wall of Sunni radicalism across South and Central Asia to contain Iran. With the Americans leaving, there is the sense that Afghanistan is up for grabs. In recent months, the Taliban has mounted a coordinated offensive with 40,000 fighters across 8 provinces - a push financed by foreign sources at a cost of $1 billion, Afghan officials say.
2016-12-08 00:00:00
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