Taliban finance

Washington Post:

The Taliban-led insurgency has built a fundraising juggernaut that generates cash from such an array of criminal rackets, donations, taxes, shakedowns and other schemes that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to choke off the movement's money supply.

Obama administration officials say the single largest source of cash for the Taliban, once thought to rely mostly on Afghanistan's booming opium trade to finance its operations, is not drugs but foreign donations. The CIA recently estimated that Taliban leaders and their allies received $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan.

For the past decade, the U.S. Treasury and the U.N. Security Council have maintained financial blacklists of suspected donors to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The U.N. list, originally designed to pressure the Taliban to hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, requires all U.N. members to freeze the assets of designated Taliban officials and their supporters.

The U.N. and Treasury blacklists were greatly expanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since 2005, however, only a handful of alleged Taliban benefactors have been added to the lists.

Some American and Afghan officials said the U.S. government, which had been a leading nominator of names for the U.N. blacklist, paid less attention to Taliban donors after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Until recently, they said, Washington had also been preoccupied with preparing sanctions against individuals and companies doing business with the Iranian government.

Richard Barrett, the coordinator of the United Nations' Taliban and al-Qaeda Monitoring Team, said Taliban sympathizers are much more skillful today at masking their donations and ensuring that the money cannot be traced back to them.

"It's been very, very difficult to identify these people," Barrett said. "You can track the money flow and say this money came from the Gulf, but it's a lot more difficult to confirm the source."

...

It should not be that hard if the governments in the area have adequate money laundering laws. Large cash withdrawals should trigger investigations which track the flow of funds to their ultimate destination. That is much easier than trying to track the flow from the receiver. But even if you are stuck with the latter, you should be able to then look for comparable withdrawals of funds.