One must welcome the realism shown by the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Russia in recognising drug trafficking as a major source of funding for terrorists. Meeting in Trieste on Friday, Shah Mahmoud Qureshi and his Afghan and Russian counterparts, R. D. Spanta and S. Lavrov, agreed to cooperate in a number of fields, including terrorism, drug production and trafficking, regional stability and sustainable development.

According to a statement the three decided to explore the potential of cooperation in areas of border control, exchange of information on terrorist activities and organisations, training anti-terrorist and anti-drug police personnel and promoting tolerance and inter-cultural dialogue. Expressing the belief that terrorists could not be defeated merely by law enforcement, they called for the affected region’s socio-economic development. One harsh reality seems to have made the three ministers focus on the drug trade — Afghanistan has returned as the world’s largest drug producer.

More regretfully, powerful elements in the Kabul government are allegedly involved in drug smuggling, and the Karzai government has been unable to act against them. This was a godsend for the Taliban. In fact, as Richard Holbrooke told Congress recently “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” have gone waste in destroying crops without achieving the desired results, for this only served to drive the peasants into Taliban hands.
The various Taliban factions run billion-dollar empires. They need — and manage to get — big money for sustaining military operations, which require not only an uninterrupted supply of sophisticated weapons but also a modern logistics system, besides an underworld that runs recruitment, brainwashing and training centres. The point to note is that not all this money comes from the drug trade, for there are other sources of funding available to the Taliban, including from those who have misguided concepts of philanthropy.

While the activities of the drug barons can perhaps be tracked if not totally crushed, detecting the flow of non-drug money to the terrorists is a truly difficult job, because this system is more subtle. This makes us wonder whether the plethora of intelligence and security agencies we have possess the skills and investigative techniques needed to intercept and break up the infrastructure of this source of funding for the rebels. While the tripartite cooperation is welcome, the onus perhaps is on us in Pakistan because of the subtlety of the challenge and its effect on the current military operations against the Taliban.