KANDAHAR: The Taliban are reported to have demanded a hefty new “protection tax” from Afghan mobile phone companies, as the resurgent group tightens its stranglehold on a rare successful business in a slumping war economy.
According to industry and militant sources, the Taliban’s central leaders demanded the money at a secret meeting last month near Quetta from representatives of four cellular companies in exchange for not damaging their sites or harming their employees.
The move was motivated by an Afghan government announcement in October that it had amassed a windfall of $1.14 million within days of imposing an additional 10pc tax on the operators, according to two telecom company officials who attended the meeting and a third industry executive privy to the information.
“They want us to pay the same amount paid to the government,” one of the officials who was at the gathering told AFP.
“We told them that this will kill our business, but they said: ‘This is the only way to guarantee your people are not harmed and your sites are not burned’,” he added.
A source in the Taliban’s Pakistan-based council said the group was waiting for a formal response from the companies.
“We told them: ‘It is our right to tax you if you want us to protect your (transmission) towers around Afghanistan’,” he said. “‘You will have to pay’.”
The militants have long targeted Afghanistan’s private telecom firms, kidnapping engineers, destroying transmission masts and forcing regular coverage blackouts in volatile areas to avoid detection of their fighters.
Local-level Taliban commanders have been known to extort from businesses operating in their areas, notably the telecom firms and logistics companies supplying Nato bases and Western-funded construction projects.
But this appears to be the first time the central leaders have formally demanded a levy from business enterprises, underscoring how they increasingly operate like a shadow government.
It also highlights the dangers of doing business in conflict-torn Afghanistan — particularly for the telecom industry, fast becoming a battleground in the Taliban’s war against the US-backed Afghan government.
‘We are helpless’
The companies said to be at the meeting — Abu-Dhabi based Etisalat, South Africa’s MTN and home-grown Roshan and Afghan Wireless Communication Company — officially declined to comment.
But one of them confirmed the meeting and tax demand, voicing a mix of helplessness and frustration.
“Ten per cent tax to the Taliban? That means we will have to share our revenue information with a militant organisation,” a Kabul-based company representative said.
“That’s just not feasible. We told them ‘no’.”
But one of the telecom officials who attended the meeting said there was no escaping the Taliban demand, adding that the companies at best could wrangle a concession from the insurgents in future negotiations.
“What choice do we have? All our investment, our infrastructure is at stake,” he said, adding he was unaware what his company’s official response would be.
“But I fear that if we start paying one militant group, others will start harassing us.”
The National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency, declined to comment.
In the past, cellular operators have capitulated to Taliban decrees — in particular, their demand to switch off their signals at night in many insurgency-prone areas.
Wary of intelligence tip-offs and phone intercepts of their fighters, the Taliban last month went one step further in Helmand, enforcing a round-the-clock transmission blackout for nearly two weeks as fighting escalated in the southern opium-rich province.
“Except for the government operator Salaam, all private companies cut off their signals,” Helmand Telecommunications Director Omaidullah Zaheer said.
“Private operators begged me: ‘Do something, we are losing money every day.’
But what can we do? We are helpless.”
Afghanistan boasts 18.5m mobile phone users in a population of 30m, with the fast-growing industry employing around 200,000 people and reporting annual revenue of $150-200m in an otherwise moribund economy.
But around 40pc of the country’s 6,319 base towers are in insurgency-hit areas, according to the communications ministry, and the Taliban have regularly mounted crippling attacks on the infrastructure worth millions of dollars.
The levy demand appears to be an effort to replenish coffers as the Taliban mount an unprecedented winter offensive, in the face of dwindling traditional sources of revenue.
The insurgents are reeling from a sharp decline in opium production, the mainstay of Taliban income; the Nato troop drawdown and consequent loss of “extortion” income from logistics firms; and the shift of Gulf-based donor funds towards the Middle East, experts say.
“That combined with the local imperative to check rival (militant) Islamic State group’s expansion into Afghanistan would logically lead the Taliban to seek out indigenous sources of revenue to exploit, including telecom firms,” a security adviser based in northeast Afghanistan said.
It is difficult to see a solution, with the insurgents already demonstrating their tremendous sway despite a Nato-backed military campaign to suppress them.
Last month, the Taliban told people in the volatile Kunduz province to boycott the MTN, with residents citing an insurgent edict warning that violators would be deemed “government spies”.
The Taliban “ordered all telecom companies in the province to switch off their towers from 5pm to 5am. All except MTN obeyed — hence the ban”, Mawlawi Shamsudeen, a militant commander in Kunduz, told AFP from his hideout.
“Anyone caught carrying their Sim card will not be spared.”
www.dawn.com/news/1233896/afghan-taliban-flex-muscles-with-protection-tax-on-telecom-firms
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