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Department of Uh-Oh, a continuing series
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.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 26, 2006 at 03:50 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
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.
Posted by: DK at Jul 26, 2006 5:17:49 PM
Talking to my brother-in-law on leave from Afghanistan, this is what AQ does too. They hang out in Pakistan and pay people to plant IED's and similar.
Posted by: DaveH at Jul 26, 2006 5:33:06 PM
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.
Posted by: cfw at Jul 26, 2006 6:46:15 PM
Why doesn't the U.S. pay >$12/day for them to join the Afghan Army? Surely $15 or $20/day is much less than it costs to have a U.S. soldier out there.
Posted by: Martin Gordon at Jul 26, 2006 7:58:58 PM
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.
Posted by: vkri at Jul 26, 2006 8:11:07 PM
I think you're misreading it. They're signalling their strength. They could just pay $5/day, and outbid the army. However, way overpaying does two things. First, it indicates that they're not short of cash, that they're secure. Second, it indicates that they can get the best fighters out there. In short, they're trying to demonstrate that they're more established and more legitimate than the government.
The risk interpretation is logical but doesn't match the facts on the ground. The risk of dying as a Taleban fighter isn't that much higher, and Afghans aren't that risk averse.
Nor is it the case that they have to pay a lot of money in order to attract fighters, because they are considered so distasteful.
No, I read this as signalling.
Posted by: Ennis at Jul 26, 2006 10:30:13 PM
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.
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Jul 26, 2006 10:32:15 PM
You would think the lessons of 'Braveheart' would have filtered into the American military. We need to be thinking on all levels not just will this J dam hit its target.
Strangely enough, McNamara in the fog of war talks about this. He said that what we failed to understand with Krushchev was that he had domestic political concerns that were driving his international politics. We have to fight our international political battles by understanding local issues (local afghanis are poor, etc.) But no 'we don't have to understand the enemy' right?
Posted by: RWP at Jul 26, 2006 10:33:09 PM
From where does the Taliban get the money to make these payments? Saudi Arabia, anyone?
Posted by: Peter at Jul 26, 2006 11:11:26 PM
I've heard that the US government does something similar, and even with American citizens in the US itself! They hang out at shopping malls and pay young men to join their army.
Posted by: jb at Jul 26, 2006 11:33:27 PM
I'd assume most of it comes from Iran's massive trade surplus.
Posted by: Chris Mann at Jul 27, 2006 1:31:15 AM
Peter,
From the drug trade among other things. Afghanistan is responsible for upto 90% of the world's Heroin production. The Taliban and its minders control at least a part of this trade.
There is a South American analogy to this too in the way the drug trade and the FARC feed off each other in Colombia.
Chris Mann,
Evil as Iran may be, they do not fund the Taliban. They even were close to war with Taliban controlled Afghanistan sometime before 2001 (the Taliban murdered a large number of Iranian diplomats and others). Furthermore, they are on different sides of the sectarian divide. The Taliban tried to ethnically cleanse Herat and the Hazarajat regions of Afghanistan of their dominant Shia population. This is not something the Iranians particularl y liked.
Posted by: vkri at Jul 27, 2006 4:33:44 AM
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.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at Jul 27, 2006 10:55:19 AM
I read a similar story about the specialized pay for bombmakers (IEDs) in Iraq. Either way, with good intelligence gathering, the going rate could be used as an indicator of the pro-democratic military effort. Theoretically, if the terrorist wages increase over time, it is possible that civilians are less willing to take the money and fight as terrorists and/or that there are less terrorist to fight due to death, desertion or capture.
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