How Will Taliban Fund A Government?

After the takeover of Kabul the Militia trying to convince Afghans that life can return to normal. 

There are of course very big questions remaining among them. How the group will finance a government? 

More on that in a moment let's look first at how it funded an insurgency between 300 million and 1.6 billion dollars a year. That's a pretty big range and that's how much the Taliban are estimated to have earned every year as an insurgency. 

We have probably heard has come from the opium trade, Opium used to make illegal drug like heroin.

Now Afghanistan is in fact sitting on a wealth of untapped minerals.

The country has vast reserves of lithium, uranium, rare earths chromite, gold, zinc, natural gas and even oil. Total value estimated at over three trillion dollars.

Now the question is whether a governing Taliban can exploit that wealth something that past governments have been unable to do?

There is a big difference. These resources were on the ground in the 90s as well and they never were able to extract them, So one has to remain very critical of the ability to actually grow the Afghan economy or even their interest in doing so. So obviously apart from the drugs and the illegal mining and the extortion businesses they now are in charge of a country, Whose economy is either a drug economy and don't forget the Taliban did not cooperate the drug trade in order to fight the insurgency. They were born out of the drug trade. 

When we looked at their finances at the UN, from the very beginning their finances was via drug lords. So in a way I doubt that they want to eradicate drug production in Afghanistan and their ability to do so. Because the commanders on the ground basically have no other income source and this country and its economy is highly dependent on foreign aid and that will not change either. 

Obviously the US has stopped its cash deliveries to Kabul. So they will depend on outside help and that's why they are now talking about the quote-unquote inclusive government.

There's rumor that Mr Karzai and Mr Abdullah Abdullah the ones who were in the negotiating team may have some role in this new government.

This is not because the Taliban have a newfound sense of democratic inclusivity, this is an attempt to actually make sure that this international money keeps flowing at least from some.

There's also a large amount of IMF reserves especially slated for Afghanistan. The Taliban are now ruling Afghanistan don't forget there is not only a United Nations security council sanctions regime which includes many of the Taliban leaders who are now controlling Afghanistan a absolute and total global asset freeze, but they're also a host of bilateral sanctions from the EU against individuals and also most significantly from the US. 

So, potentially the new government will have access to those resources in practical operational terms.  They can access them and transfer them to Afghanistan.

Mining and other resources are on the ground and there is absolutely very little infrastructure to get them out at scale. 

The infrastructure which was not built because of the commercial problem still not there, So they would need large scale investment.

Chinese companies have secured large scale mining concessions in Afghanistan but there's still no infrastructure to do so.

These are the possibilities for new Afghan government to cope up with the economic crisis which is going to hit country in near future.