The Pakistani Taliban's Emerald Mines

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday, a headline on the NewsNow news aggregator caught my eye: Taliban seize another emerald mine in Swat valley.

Scores of Pakistani Taliban fighters have taken over an emerald mine in the restive northwestern Swat valley and begun mining operations there after building trenches and bunkers.

Over 70 armed militants stormed the emerald mine at Gojaro Killay Amnavi area in Shangla district yesterday and occupied it.

The militants built bunkers around the mine and announced that workers would be given 50 per cent of all income from mining operations, media reports said.

The mine, the second largest in Shangla district, had been leased by the Pakistan government to the US firm Luxury International for Rs 40 million a year.

The American firm recently pulled out of the area due to an upsurge in violence in Swat.

The local Taliban had recently taken over another emerald mine at Fiza Ghat, a resort on the outskirts of Mingora, the main city in Swat and the militants have employed hundreds of labourers to work round the clock to excavate emeralds.

There's two interesting things going on here. The first is perhaps the most obvious - the Pakistani Taliban are diversifying their revenue streams away from kidnapping and drug trafficking. Instead, they're entering into arguably legal territory. Emeralds are not themselves illegal even if the means by which they're procured might be contested by the Pakistani government, who had intended to re-lease the mine after the US firm was unable to fulfil its contract. They're also a very lucrative source of income, weight for weight far more so than raw poppy or opium (it's refiners and dealers in the West who make the real money from Afghan opium being turned into heroin).

That might have implications for Obama's plan to choke off the Afghan Taliban's income through a COIN-based effort to reduce poppy growing in Afghanistan. Recall that when the Taliban were in power, they had a very effective ban on poppy growing and Afghan opium production fell to an historic low. If the Afghan Taliban follow their cousins' lead and diversify, Obama's strategy may end up hurting America's warlord allies more than the Taliban. It's going to hurt them anyway, and it will be a race between depriving the Taliban of cash and the inevitable backlash against the U.S. from those warlords - many of whom are in the Afgfhan government or provide the small amount of law and order that exists in rural areas not yet under Taliban control.

Secondly, this move shows a continuation of a trend towards the Taliban providing at least adequate government, albeit at gunpoint, my colleague Fester first noticed back in July of last year. Back then, the NY Times reported that the Taliban had successfully settled, by force, a tribal dispute that had prevented Pakistan's most lucrative marble mine from operating. The Pakistani government had tried for four years to settle the feud, with no success.

But in April [2008], the Taliban appeared and imposed a firm hand. They settled the feud between the tribes, demanded a fat fee up front and a tax on every truck that ferried the treasure from the quarry. Since then, Mir Zaman, a contractor from the Masaud subtribe, which was picked by the Taliban to run the quarry, has watched contentedly as his trucks roll out of the quarry with colossal boulders bound for refining in nearby towns.

“With the Taliban it is not a question of a request to us, but a question of force,” said Mr. Zaman, a bearded, middle-aged tribal leader who seemed philosophical about the reality of Taliban authority here. At least the quarry was now operating, he said.

The takeover of the Ziarat marble quarry, a coveted national asset, is one of the boldest examples of how the Taliban have made Pakistan’s tribal areas far more than a base for training camps or a launching pad for sending fighters into Afghanistan.

The Taliban split the mountain of marble, of even finer quality than Carrara marble, into allotments for each tribe and village, then let them get on with the mining. In return, they took a flat fee for adjudicating the dispute and a tax on every truck of marble going for refining (where the Pakistani government levy their own tax).

The same process of government by being the local monopoly of force is in evidence in the seizing of these emerald mines. Notice that the Taliban employed miners at both sites and "announced that workers would be given 50 per cent of all income from mining operations". They got the mine working, and earning revenue for locals as well as themselves, when no-one else could. That's practically a definition of effective government, especially in places like the Swat Valley, and COIN doctrine holds that an insurgency or militant group that far entrenched with the local populace is almost impossible to dislodge without a massive kinetic operation to dislodge them by extreme force. The Pakistani military seem severely disinclined to try that and Predator drone attacks aren't going to cut it.

COIN doctrine suggests that the best way to deal with such a government-in-being is to treat it as the government it is and negotiate. The drawback, of course, is that the insurgency-cum-government might not want to negotiate. The Pakistani Taliban's recent adventurism in taking its fight into Pakistan's heartland through high-profile attacks, despite pleas from the Afghan Taliban not to do so, suggests it is in no mood to do a deal that doesn't offer it significant compromises. That's a problem for Obama's Af/Pak strategy, which seems to me to have seriously underestimated both varieties of Taliban's ability to deliver more effective governance than the titular governments of the regions they now control.