They set production quotas for certain regions. PETERS: Well, the Taliban government showed us how they make money off of poppy farmers their first time around in the late '90s. MARTINEZ: Well, I was going to ask then - because I've been wondering how things might be different for a Taliban government - so the Taliban as a government when it comes to making money off of poppy farmers. The Taliban I would compare more to the FARC in Colombia or Hezbollah, which is - you know, they're insurgent or rebel groups that are trying to play a role in politics as well. government, but they're not trying to take over the country. They might be trying to capture institutions and corrupt high-level officials within the Mexican state and, I would argue, within the U.S. PETERS: Well, a Mexican drug cartel makes no pretense of being a religious organization, and they're not trying to capture the state.
MARTINEZ: How similar is what the Taliban does when it comes to opium to, say, what a Mexican drug cartel might do? And there have been reports of Taliban actors trafficking the drugs themselves further and further from Afghanistan. We then later on saw certain commanders get heavily involved in the money laundering phase of the drug supply. And so we saw Taliban commanders in some areas start to run drug refineries or get involved in exporting shipments of drugs or providing their fighters as protection on big drug shipments that traffickers from Pakistan were moving through the region. Over time, what we saw was that they recognized opportunities to make more money by engaging more deeply in the drug trade. It might have meant taxing drug shipments that went out. In the early days of the movement, we saw Taliban commanders mainly earning money by taxing activities that went on in their control zones or in areas where they operated. PETERS: So the Taliban has integrated vertically throughout the opium trade in the two decades since they were last in power. MARTINEZ: So when it comes to raising money via the opium trade, how exactly do they do that? How do they go about earning that money? Other factions, like the ones located in the east and in the southeast, don't have so much of a revenue stream from narcotics specifically, and they tend to make their money in other ways - from extortion, from kidnapping, from timber trafficking, a wide range of activities. So certain factions of the Taliban, particularly the ones that are down in Kandahar and Helmand and the drug-producing areas out in the south and the west, are probably making the vast amount of their funding from the drug trade. PETERS: Well, it's important to state that there are more than one Taliban. MARTINEZ: In 2009, you estimated that the Taliban was getting 70% of their funds from opium.
And so they clearly have been earning more money from all these activities than they needed to run their insurgency. The Taliban has been earning far more from trafficking drugs and other illicit activity, ranging from extortion rackets to timber trafficking, artisanal mining, kidnapping schemes, for almost two decades now. GRETCHEN PETERS: They're awash with cash. Gretchen Peters is executive director of the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime, or CINTOC, and she says despite all of this, the Taliban is well funded right now. over the weekend to prevent the Taliban from getting them. Treasury froze billions of dollars in Afghan government reserves stored in bank accounts in the U.S. With the Taliban in charge, that's changing. That's according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko. About 80% of Afghanistan's budget has been financed by the U.S. The Taliban is moving from insurgency back into the seat of power in Afghanistan, and one of the biggest questions they face is where to get the cash to run the country.
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