A Taxing Narrative: - Miscalculating Revenues and Misunderstanding the Conflict in Afghanistan

The failure to address this corruption and the Taliban’s other sources of financial support, including that of foreign donors, left the US and its allies blind to the risks to the Afghan Republic and ill-equipped to counter the rise of the Taliban as a political and military force. [...] 51 The allegation of the Taliban acting as a cartel prompted long- time Afghan analyst and expert Thomas Ruttig to rebuke UNODC’s failure to reflect on the growing evidence of those in the government’s deep involvement in the drugs trade.52 While the narrative of the narco-insurgency subsided during the Obama government, with the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbroo. [...] With origins in the UN Security Council resolution of the late 1990s65 and the subsequent imposition of sanctions on the Taliban regime in 1999 following their refusal to hand over Bin Laden, the annual sanctions monitoring report offers estimates on the revenues the Taliban derived from the production and trade in illegal drugs, and repeatedly cites the Taliban imposing a tax rate of 10 percent o. [...] The political challenges of prohibiting trade while incurring the ire of swathes of the rural population following the opium ban— a point the Taliban leadership made at the time— alongside the often equally problematic relationships between those in the Afghan government and drug traffickers, has not deterred the UNSMT in its line of argument. [...] In this context, the Taliban’s taxation of the opium crop and the production and trade of opiates and methamphetamine, can be seen as more of a political act rather than an economic one, particularly in the context of the Afghan government’s efforts at the behest of western donors, primarily the US, to destroy the standing crop, regardless of whether farmers had viable alternatives.