US Treasury beefing up staff in Afghanistan to disrupt Taliban’s terror financing

US Treasury beefing up staff in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury Department is sending more staff to Afghanistan to target the financial networks that provide money for the Taliban, a Treasury official said Wednesday.

The boost in personnel there, along with additional staff dedicated to that effort here in Washington, will coincide with the Pentagon’s surge in military troops heading to the war over the next several months, said David Cohen, assistant treasury secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

While U.S. counterterrorism officials repeatedly point to al-Qaida’s dwindling numbers and eroding financial support, they say the Taliban, which is putting up a fierce fight against U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan, is still well funded. The insurgents finance their terror activities through the country’s lucrative narcotics trade and donations from supporters in the Gulf who often route the money through Pakistan.

“It has sufficient resources to sustain its recruiting and training infrastructure, conduct devastating attacks on Afghan civilians and present substantial resistance to our troops,” said Cohen, speaking at a forum at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

There are currently more than a dozen Treasury staffers in Afghanistan, and it was not clear Wednesday how many more will be dispatched to the battlefront.

Treasury staff work alongside military, intelligence and drug enforcement authorities in Afghanistan to choke off the insurgents’ funding networks, including money laundering operations used by drug dealers, offshore banking and cell phone transfers and more informal operations such as the hard-to-penetrate hawala money-brokering system that flourishes in the Islamic world.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium, the main ingredient in heroin, with the drug trade there accounting for 90 percent of the worldwide production. According to the United Nations, more than $300 million from the illegal drug trade flows to Taliban fighters, and while opium cultivation dropped over the past two years, it is likely to remain fairly steady this year.

On al-Qaida, Cohen warned that while the core terror group is in its worst financial shape in years, it is not bankrupt and can still tap a “willing pool of donors.” He also noted that al-Qaida affiliates in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, who are now getting less financial support from the main al-Qaida network, are now increasing their independent efforts to fund their terrorist activities.

As a result, there have been spikes in kidnappings for ransom and extortion in those regions, as well as drug trafficking. To date, however, Cohen said there still appears to be no link between the piracy incidents off the coast of Somalia and the al-Shabab terrorist network there, which is linked to al-Qaida.

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