Saudis bankroll Taliban while King supports Afghan government

Fifteen years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the US 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 US - 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 rich 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 hard-line 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 US 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? 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 $1bn, 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. Last year, Afghan security forces even discovered families of al-Qaida members entering eastern Afghanistan with a stash of gold bars, Rahmatullah Nabil, the former head of Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said. 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 condition of strict anonymity, citing the extreme sensitivity to upsetting Saudi Arabia.Covert peace effortsIt was September 2008, the holy month of Ramadan, and King Abdullah was hosting an iftar dinner in Macca. 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 Jeddah, 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.Trouble on the HorizonDespite those covert efforts, the Saudi kingdom, publicly and officially, has been largely absent in Afghanistan. While paying lip service to the US mission, Saudi Arabia has not built a significant project in its own name in Afghanistan in 15 years. Yet the official Saudi neglect stands in stark contrast to the wealth of private Saudi funding that has done more than bolster the Taliban and allied militant groups in the region. It has also spawned hundreds of universities, madrasas and radical groups that have extended Sunni influence and that Afghans fear are sowing seeds of future turmoil. The Iranians, too, have been busy building madrasas, universities and cultural centres for the Shia population, and even a road to the border with Iran. The rivalry underlying the scale of such competing funding, Afghan officials and others warn, spells trouble. In 2001, Afghanistan had just 1,000 madrasas. Today, there are more than 4,000, the majority of them built in the last few years.Which Saudi now?Upon his election 2014, Afghanistan's current president, Ashraf Ghani, chose Saudi Arabia for his first official trip. Then five months later, after a second trip to meet the new Saudi king, Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, Ghani pledged Afghani support for Saudi Arabia's military coalition for Yemen. In return, Ghani wanted Saudi Arabia's rulers to stop the flow of funds from rich Saudi sheikhs to the Taliban and encourage the Taliban back into negotiations. Yet other Afghan officials and local diplomats are deeply sceptical. One diplomat in Kabul said tracking the flow of illegal money was virtually impossible. Another, who had served in Saudi Arabia, doubted that Riyadh would change, adding that the vast royal family is split into fiefs often working at odds with each other. The scale of the Taliban's recent offensive also has left many Afghans wary.