The Taliban and the state
The Taliban’s approach to rule was one in which the state did not
play as central a role as one might have thought. They needed a
radio station to propagate their decrees and a religious police to
enforce them, but beyond this, the ‘Islamic Emirate’ went through
the motions of ‘state-like activity’ but did not make any serious
attempt to mobilise resources systematically with a view to redis-
tributing them in accordance with policy guidelines. The bound-
aries between the Taliban as a movementand the ‘Islamic Emirate’
as a proto-statewere ill defined, as one would have expected given
the role of Mulla Omar as superordinate authority.
The nature of the economy under the Taliban contributed to this.
The Taliban were not even able to control the Afghan currency
(Rubin, 2000: 1797). Instead, they presided over a criminalised
economy in which the revenues which they obtained, apart from
$10 million from Pakistan to pay salaries, came largely from activ-
ities that the wider world viewed as illicit. One source of revenue
was the exploitation of ‘transit trade’ and other smuggling between
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Under the Afghan Transit Trade
Agreement of 1965, certain goods could be imported into
Afghanistan through Pakistan, free of Pakistani customs duties. It
is clear that a significant proportion of the goods thus imported
were then smuggled into Pakistan, where they were sold in smug-
glers’ markets. Under the Taliban, this trade was augmented by the
transportation into Pakistan of goods imported into Taliban-con-
trolled areas of Afghanistan from Dubai and other trading ports in
the Persian Gulf. The value of this trade was estimated in a World
Bank study at $2.5 billion, and the profit to the Taliban as high as
$75 million, although it was not pooled so as to permit efficient
budgeting (Naqvi, 1999: 1).
Another source of revenues was opium, of which Afghanistan
under the Taliban became the world’s largest producer. It is a myth
that opium was the main crop cultivated in Afghanistan under the
Taliban. In 1998, on the eve of drought, cereal production totalled
3.85 million tonnes (FAO/WFP, 1999: 5), compared to 2600 tones
The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 235