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Soundtrack: famous broadcast by
Gordon Sinclair "The Americans" June 5, 1973
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 26 2001
Jackleg ragtag Taleban cannot exist without bin Laden and his
money, says Taleban defector
By STEPHEN FARRELL IN ISLAMABAD
The London Times
A SENIOR Afghan defector who worked at the highest levels of the
Taleban Government revealed yesterday how the influence of Osama bin
Laden runs through the regime to the very top. During his five years
as Head of Documentation in the Department of Administrative
Affairs, Sayed Masoud — effectively the Taleban’s Sir Humphrey —
took minutes at Kabul’s Council of Ministers and personally passed
on orders to the council from its supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad
Omar.
Professor Masoud, 44, said that he had to take daily tranquillisers
to cope with the strain of dealing with semieducated mullahs who ran
the country without reading or properly understanding documents put
before them. One official was hired for a senior position in the
Ministry of Transport, he claims, after citing previous experience
as a rickshaw driver in Pakistan.
He gave warning that the regime would never hand over bin Laden
because of his money, influence and the thousands of Arab, Sudanese,
Chechen and Afghan fighters personally loyal to him.
“They are two sides of the same coin: Osama cannot exist in
Afghanistan without the Taleban and the Taleban cannot exist without
Osama,” Professor Masoud said. “He has too many soldiers and he has
a psychological hold over the Afghan people. People are afraid even
of the mention of Osama bin Laden. If an Afghani asks a shopkeeper
about him, he will not say if he likes him or doesn’t like him, he
will simply walk away.”
Bin Laden’s legion of foreign Mujahidin had become more prominent in
Kabul in the past two years and more open in their demands, he said.
“They used to come into our office and speak through translators,
but recently they came in themselves speaking English and wanting to
be given houses in the best area of Kabul.”
A Dari speaker and former professor in the Economics Department at
Kabul University under the previous regime, Professor Masoud said
that when the Taleban took over Kabul in 1996 his economic expertise
proved useful to them. He and 20 Pashto-speaking Taleban were moved
into the top positions in the department, whose 800 junior civil
servants remained in place and carried on their work, however
reluctantly.
He worked with 15 clerks on the first floor of the
Qasr-al-Ma’amoureen (Palace of Administration) in central Kabul,
where faxes in Pashto arrived nightly at 8pm from Mullah Omar’s
headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar, the first town to
fall to the Taleban in 1994 and still its heartland. Less urgent
orders arrived by courier on twice-weekly flights from Kandahar.
“The civil servants do all the work and they (the Taleban) just sign
the papers. In the very beginning they did not even know what they
were signing and they are only now learning the ABCs of policy,” he
said.
“When they arrived people trusted the Taleban, they welcomed them in
the hope of avoiding corruption, and the Taleban did restore
security. In the beginning they were pure, they didn’t like fine
clothes and such things and they avoided cooked meat, saying, ‘We
are poor, we should eat potatoes.’
“This lasted about two years but now there is much corruption. Every
Taleb now hopes to wear an expensive watch, good clothes and to
drive a big vehicle.”
Now in hiding in Pakistan and seeking asylum, Professor Masoud said
that one of the most sinister aspects of the system was corruption.
He claimed to have personally witnessed what he regarded as
kickbacks, with hundreds of thousands of dollars regularly paid into
Mullah Omar’s own account at the state-owned Bank of Afghanistan,
including by foreign airlines to overfly Afghanistan.
One experienced Taleban observer, however, said that the cash
dealings were less likely to be greed on the part of Mullah Omar, a
notoriously “austere” cleric, but an illustration of the
cash-dependent anarchy with which the “feudal” Taleban system was
run, with money flowing from Kabul to Kandahar often for personal
disbursement by Omar or other senior figures.
“The financial system is so rudimentary that money is collected in
wads. To get something done, you hand it to Omar and he gives it to
a local commander he wants to fight for him, to feed or arm their
fighters or to entertain and do all the other things expected of an
important local figure,” the analyst said. “One thing we have been
hearing from exiles recently is that one of the reasons the Taleban
are in trouble this year is that this financial system is breaking
down, but we don’t know why. Perhaps simply because it is so basic.”
Professor Masoud further claimed that Mullah Omar ignores or even
encourages corruption among the Taleban’s lower echelons as a means
of ensuring loyalty and routinely took a cut from the country’s
massive opium-producing industry that until last year provided 75
per cent of the world’s supply.
Professor Masoud believed that the Taleban would fragment and fall
if Afghans were presented with a credible alternative, but a strike
by the United States without involvement of the United Nations or an
alternative regime would serve only to drive disaffected or even
anti-Taleban forces back into their camp.
“It is a mistake to discuss whether they are weak or strong,” he
said. “Their weakness or strength depends entirely on the world’s
policy. If the world goes ahead carefully, they will fall. If it
makes a mistake, they will be strong.”
