Saudi Arabia’s long reach into
FIFTEEN years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the United States is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Afghans are being left to fight their own fight. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money.
With their nation’s future at stake, Afghan leaders have renewed a plea to one power that may hold the key to whether their country can cling to democracy or succumbs to the Taliban. But that power is not the United States. It is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is critical because of its unique position in the Afghan conflict: It is on both sides.
A longtime ally of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has backed Islamabad’s promotion of the Taliban. Over the years, wealthy Saudi sheikhs and philanthropists have also stoked the war by privately financing the insurgents.
All the while, Saudi Arabia has officially, if coolly, supported the US mission and the Afghan government, and even secretly sued for peace in clandestine negotiations on their behalf.
The contradictions are hardly accidental. Rather, they balance conflicting needs within the kingdom, pursued through both official policy and private initiative.
The dual tracks allow Saudi officials to plausibly deny official support for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hardline Sunni groups.
The result is that the Saudis – through private or covert channels – have tacitly supported the Taliban in ways that make the kingdom an indispensable power broker.
In interviews with the New York Times, a former Taliban finance minister described how he travelled to Saudi Arabia for years raising cash while ostensibly on pilgrimage.
The Taliban have also been allowed to raise millions more by extorting “taxes” by pressing hundreds of thousands of Pashtun guest workers in the kingdom and menacing their families back home, said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser.
Yet even as private Saudi money backed the Taliban, Saudi intelligence once covertly mediated a peace effort that Taliban officials and others involved described in full to the Times for the first time.
Playing multiple sides of the same geopolitical equation is one way the Saudis further their own strategic interests, analysts and officials say.
But it also threatens to undermine the fragile democratic advances made by the United States in the past 15 years, and perhaps undo efforts to liberalise the country.
The US now finds itself trying to persuade its putative ally to play a constructive rather than destructive role. Meanwhile, the Afghans have come to view Saudi Arabia as both friend and foe. The question now, as Afghan officials look for help, is which Saudi Arabia will they get?
Prince Turki al-Faisal, who led the Saudi intelligence agency for over 24 years and later served as ambassador to the United States until his retirement in 2007, rejected any suggestion that Saudi Arabia had ever supported the Taliban.
“When I was in government, not a single penny went to the Taliban,” he wrote in emailed comments.
He added that the “stringent measures taken by the kingdom to pre- vent any transfer of money to terrorist groups” had been recognised by Daniel L Glaser, the US assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the Treasury, in testimony to Congress in June. Others say the verdict is still out. “We know there has been this financing that has gone on for years,” Mohammad Hanif Atmar, director of the Afghan National Security Council, said.
“This sustains the terrorist war machine in Afghanistan and in the region, and it will have to be stopped.”
That may be easier said than done. Saudi Arabia remains one of the main sources of what Secretary of State John Kerry recently called “surrogate money” to support Islamist fighters and causes.
Much of that largesse is spread about in pursuit of what Nasr describes as a Saudi strategy of building a wall of Sunni radicalism across South and Central Asia to contain Iran, its Shiite rival.
That competition is being rekindled. With the United States leaving, there is the sense that Afghanistan’s fate is up for grabs.
In recent months, the Taliban has mounted a coordinated offensive with about 40,000 fighters across eight provinces – a push financed by foreign sources at a cost of $1 billion, Afghan officials say.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia is offering the Afghan government substantial defence and development agreements, while Afghans say sheikhs from Saudi Arabia and other Arab Persian Gulf states are quietly funnelling billions in private money to Sunni organisations, madrasas and universities to shape the next generation of Afghans.
“The Saudis are re-engaging,” said Nasr, now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Afghanistan is important to them, which is why they invested so much in the 1980s, and they are looking to make themselves much more relevant.”
Surrogate support
The seven-year Taliban theocracy in Afghanistan was coming to a fiery end. It was 2001, and the Taliban government was collapsing under the US bombing unleashed in retaliation for the September 11 attacks.
Disguising himself as a doctor, Agha Jan Motasim, the Taliban finance minister, escaped over a remote border crossing into Pakistan aboard a Red Crescent ambulance, he said in a recent interview.
In the Pakistani border town of Quetta, he and other Taliban leaders regrouped and began organising the insurgency that continues today. Motasim was appointed head of the finance committee. One of his first stops was Saudi Arabia.
As home to both enormous oil wealth and Islam’s holiest sites, it was the perfect place to make appeals not only to rich Saudi sheikhs and foundations but also to important donors who travelled to the kingdom on pilgrimage from all over the Muslim world.
Between 2002 and 2007, Motasim travelled to Saudi Arabia two or three times a year. Ostensibly he went on pilgrimage, but his primary purpose was to raise cash for the Taliban.
“There were people coming from other countries for umrah and hajj,” he said referring to different Muslim pilgrimages. “Also the Saudi sheikhs would come as well. I would ask them for their help for the war.”
“It was not only the Saudis who would help us but people who would come from different countries,” he recalled. “Saudi Arabia was the only country where I could meet them.”
Once secured, the money could be moved in myriad ways to Taliban coffers, officials said, including through regional banks near Pakistan’s tribal areas and the hawala system of informal money-changers.
Last year, Afghan security forces even discovered families of al-Qaeda members entering eastern Afghanistan with a stash of gold bars, said Rahmatullah Nabil, the former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.
The Saudi authorities often say they cannot control or always identify the millions of Muslims who travel to the kingdom every year on the hajj, said Barnett Rubin, who worked as special adviser to the US envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Taliban always travelled on fake Pakistani passports under assumed names and were unknown to Saudi authorities, said a security official in the region, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the extreme sensitivity to upsetting Saudi Arabia.
US requests to cut the funding yielded little result.
In 2009, US officials complained that the Taliban and other extremist groups were raising millions of dollars during annual pilgrimages, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
A December 2009 cable from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the “most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”.
The cables date from a period when Richard Holbrooke, who died in 2010, acted as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and actively sought to curb funding to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The funding from the Gulf extended well beyond that period and to other groups besides the Taliban, including the Islamic State.
In a leaked email from 2014, Clinton described the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia as “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region”.
Financing such groups, she wrote, was part of a contest between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who were in “ongoing competition to dominate the Sunni world”.
Covert peace efforts
It was September 2008, the holy month of Ramadan, and King Abdullah was hosting an iftar dinner in Mecca. But this was no routine breaking of the fast at sunset.
The feast was an important signal of the king’s personal support for a covert yet still evolving peace effort. Among the dozens of guests were Afghan officials and elders, as well as former Taliban members.
Within months, at a more discreet venue in the Red Sea port of Jiddah, the Saudi intelligence agency convened Afghanistan’s chief adversaries to hash out a peace deal.
Motasim, the Taliban finance minister, the same man who had been collecting money for the insurgency, was named by the Taliban leadership as its representative.
On the other side, the emissary for president Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was his brother, Qayum Karzai.
During three days of intense discussions – breaking at intervals when the men locked horns – a Saudi intermediary nudged the two sides forward.
The peace effort had begun in 2006. The initial broker was Abdullah Anas, an Algerian who had won credibility by fighting the Soviets for 10 years in Afghanistan.
In an interview, Anas said his decision to seek out the Saudis as a thirdparty mediator was obvious, because of the kingdom’s special status as home to Islam’s two holiest sites and its support during the fight against the Soviet occupation.