The Taliban has found a way to recruit fighters that is less about
winning hearts and minds and more about the enduring appeal of cold
hard cash.They are paying fighters up to $12 (£6.50) a day to
fight the fledgling Afghan National Army, which pays only $4 a day to
its soldiers in the field, according to military officials.
Here is the story.
OTH, this could be a fair market price implying a much higher risk of death and capture for Taliban fighters than for National Army soldiers.
Accordind to Jawbreaker by Gary Brentson (lead CIA operative in Afganistan chasing OBL), it was a pay issue that caused failure to seize OBL.
In other words, the enveloping Afgan troops were paid off to not squash OBL.
I suppose one needs to distribute leaflets to the effect that the CIA/DoD will beat any bona fide offer of pay for warfare – and then be true to the promise.
Jawbreaker makes clear how much difference it makes to have lots of cash to help finance cooperation.
I like having the CIA in charge of $6 million (what Jawbreaker started with) in a suitcase more than I like the CIA playing army and pretending to be properly trained for commanding US troops.
Sending the 101st or Rangers or Delta Force or similar outfits to places like Iraq, Pakistan, etc. without $6 million or so to spread around with broad discretion sounds pennywise and pound foolish.
Maybe the SOP should be to send along an auditor/lawyer too, so one has the classic “lawyers, guns and money.” Beat OBL at his own game.
There is always the risk that someone will steal the money, but balance that against the ability to enlist cooperators, equipment suppliers, information suppliers, etc.
If one reads Ahmed Rashid’s book on the Taliban, one realizes that this is how they gained control over Afghanistan during the civil war in the 90′s. During crucial battles, they paid off key members of the opposing side to switch loyalties. So this is a time tested practice on their part.
Also, terrorists from Pakistan are compensated monetarily, right from the time of their recruitment as children into appropriate madrassas. When a terrorist is killed (say in India) his family gets a pretty sizeable (for the average Pakistani) amount of money in compensation.
The belief is that a lot of the money for this comes from the proceeds of the drug and arms trade, leading to a nice symbiotic economy of drugs, arms and terrorism.
To cfw, I would point out that the U.S. government had a $25 million bounty
on bin Laden, which was announced shortly after 9/11.
From where does the Taliban get the money to make these payments? Saudi Arabia, anyone?
I’d assume most of it comes from Iran’s massive trade surplus.
The logical conclusion is that the only way to “win the war on terror” is to:
#1) legalize drugs to stop that flow of money into terror organizations, and
#2) bomb all middle east oil terminals and sink oil tankers in the Persian Gulf to stop that flow of money into terror organizations.
#2 could also solve the whole global warming problem. I’ll leave it to the reader to consider if the economic loss due to massive oil price rises would be worse than the economic loss due to Iranian nuclear technology being used against western targets.
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