Afghan government funds Taliban schools

The U.S. Funds the Afghans

The Afghans Fund the Taliban

• Remind me again why we are in Afghanistan???

(UK Telegraph)  -  The Afghan government is funding schools and hospitals run by the Taliban as the militant group seeks to establish itself as a legitimate administration in large swathes of the country, a new film has found.   

A report by a BBC team granted rare access to the group’s stronghold in Helmand province found the Taliban has been forced to present itself as somewhat modernised since Afghans have grown used to government services and a different way of life after the group was ousted from official power. 

The Taliban has grown in confidence three years since Western troops withdrew from the country.

“They are trying to set up a mini-state – if not the actual state – in Helmand,” Auliya Atrafi, a journalist from the BBC Afghan service who made the film, told the Telegraph.  

“In the evening when we sat with the elders and the local leaders, they asked us: ‘Where do you think we will be in 10 years time?’ We knew what they were thinking. They see themselves in ten years time as the government.”

Girls get primary education but after that schools
cater for boys under the Taliban

Taliban special forces are well armed

It (Taliban) now controls more than 80 percent of Helmand Province, where hundreds of British soldiers died fighting the group.

He and his team were eventually allowed to spend four days under the watchful eyes of Taliban minders in Sangin and Musa Qala, the group’s defacto capital.

The team visited a boys’ school and a hospital funded and supplied by the central government in Kabul, but run by the Taliban.

A school administrator told the crew that the Taliban do not interfere with government school inspections and allow teachers to follow the national curriculum issued by the Kabul government.

However, a doctor at the hospital said the arrangement had “failed,” and that the dual system had left a vacuum of responsibility.

"I haven't been paid in the past six months - not only me but also the entire staff of the hospital," he said.

The team were also told not to film anything to do with the opium trade - a major industry in the region and has been used in the past by Taliban and non-Taliban warlords as a source of revenue.

Mr Atrafi and his team saw no women on the streets, mobile and internet communications are banned, and they spoke to a teenager who received 40 lashes for watching a Bollywood film.

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