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Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/23/2021 9:43:38 AM 08/20/21 Friday This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia. 'Both Stick and Carrot': US Threatens Afghan Taliban With Terrorist List if it Repudiates Promises by Morgan Artvukhina \ US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Friday that listing the Taliban* as a terrorist organization was one tool in several that Washington could use to lure the Afghan militant group into living up to its promises, which include renouncing terrorism and ending support for terrorist groups. Asked at a Friday press conference about whether the threat of being placed on the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list was a pressure tool Washington was using to get results from the Taliban, Price responded that it was. “We have a number of tools at our disposal. The Taliban, right now, is a specially designated global terrorist group. They’re on the SDGT designation list. That is one tool. It’s both a stick and ...a carrot, a potential inducement, to induce the Taliban to uphold those basic international norms, the basic rights of its people," Price said. "But the FTO list, other sanctions, that’s one single tool.” The SDGT list, maintained by the US Treasury, is used for applying financial sanctions to groups that frustrate their operations, while the FTO prohibits material support for them and is much higher profile. The Taliban was added to the SDGT list in 2002, but while the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, is listed as a foreign terrorist orqanizationunder Executive Order 13224, the Afghan Taliban is not. According to US state-funded media outlet Voice of America, "political expedience has obligated keeping the group off the list" in order to ease negotiations with the group, which has fought an 18-year insurgency against the US occupation and US-backed Afghan government. "There is no doubt that the Taliban occasionally attacks civilians intentionally, not accidentally, and that's the definition of terrorism," James Dobbins, a former US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told VOA in 2017. "And, thus, the designation would be accurate enough. The question is whether or not it would serve the US and Afghan government purposes for that step to be taken." The Haqqani Network, another Islamic extremist group allied to the Taliban, is on the FTO list, though. However, in 2012, when the US State Department added the Haqqani Network to the list, the Taliban said there was "no separate entity or network in Afghanistan by the name of Haqqani" and that the group's purported leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is a member of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban's top leadership council across the border in Pakistan. After capturing the Afghan capital of Kabul on Sunday, the Taliban promised to form an inclusive government and invited women to join it, while promising amnesty to government employees who worked with the US-backed regime. However, in speaking about women's rights, a Taliban spokesperson said other nations must respect their cultural values. The last time the Taliban Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/23/2021 9:43:38 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/23/2021 9:43:38 AM were in power, from 1996 until 2001, women were essentially deprived of social and political rights. The Taliban has also made promises about not allowing groups to use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack other countries. That promise was aimed partly at the United States, which invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the first Taliban government in October 2001 in retribution for the Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to operate and train in the country, including planning and executing the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. However, their promise was also aimed at China, which is concerned about the Taliban's past refuge for the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a terrorist organization in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region that seeks to separate the province from China. However, the US has already taken some measures against the Taliban since it seized power, including freezing Afghanistan's assets in US banks, arguing there had been no "formal transfer of power to the Taliban." *The Taliban is listed as a terrorist organization in Russia. This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia. They Succeeded Before, But Can the Taliban Clamp Down on Afghanistan’s Opium Crops Again? by Morgan Artvukhina In the 1980s, the US encouraged the Mujahedin to use the opium trade to help finance their anti-communist insurgency, even as it launched a War on Drugs crusade at home and across Latin America. When the US later invaded Afghanistan in 2001, it found uprooting opium impossible. Afghanistan is presently the world’s largest source of opium and drugs derived from opium, such as heroin. While the Taliban* attempted to eradicate the plant in its final years of power, after the US invasion the group encouraged poppy cultivation as a way to finance their insurgency. However, as the Taliban outlines its new plans for governance after seizing power on Sunday, the issue of the narcotics trade has once again come up. "We are assuring our countrymen and women and the international community, we will not have any narcotics produced," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters in Kabul on Tuesday. "From now on, nobody's going to get involved (in the heroin trade), nobody can be involved in drug smuggling." Mujahid also asked for "international assistance" in combating cultivation of the flowers, which are picked before they bloom in order to harvest the powerful painkiller from their seed pods. The Taliban is seeking to replace them with other crops, as has been implemented with some success in places like Colombia, with respect to the coca plants used to produce cocaine. According to a 2020 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), poppies are cultivated in 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, where some 224,000 hectares of them were sown that year. That volume of cultivation increased by 37% from 2019, with the most dramatic increases in the southern and western regions. Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/23/2021 9:43:38 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/23/2021 9:43:38 AM Between 2002 and 2017, the US spent some $8.62 billion on counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan with little effect, according to a report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). In another report this past July. SI GAR noted that “Drug interdiction and arrests continue to have a minimal impact on the country’s opium-poppy cultivation.” "The Taliban have counted on the Afghan opium trade as one of their main sources of income," Cesar Gudes, head of the UNODC’s Kabul office, told Reuters. "More production brings drugs with a cheaper and more attractive price, and therefore a wider accessibility." With the insurgents entering Kabul on Sunday, "these are the best moments in which these illicit groups tend to position themselves" to expand their business, Gudes said. The US CIA and Pakistani ISI began encouraging Mujaheddin leaders to push poppy cultivation in Afghanistan during their insurgency against the socialist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and their Soviet allies in the 1980s as a way to supplement their incomes, according to MintPress News. The trade grew to a huge 4,600 tons by 2000, before the Taliban quickly moved to stamp out the trade, declaring the use of heroin and hashish and the cultivation of opium to be against the Prophet Mohammad’s teachings in an attempt to win international legitimacy. At this they were quite successful, with just 185 tons being harvested the following year, earning them praise in Washington and the pages of the New York Times. Gretchen Peters, author of the book "Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al-Qaeda,” told Agence France-Presse that the Taliban’s ban was “a ploy” made possible by their incredible profits in the 1990s. "They are not going to get rid of the drug trade because they are too tied up with it,” she said. "Afghanistan cannot survive without opium. It is simultaneously killing Afghanistan while also keeping a huge number of people alive." As Sputnik has reported, a flurry of meetings and discussions have taken place between Afghanistan’s neighbors and other regional powers in the week since the Taliban took Kabul without a fight and then-President Ashraf Ghani fled into exile. Iranian and Chinese diplomats have both met with the Taliban recently to discuss their terms of recognition and trade, which includes renunciation of terrorism, and the US has similarly indicated that it could lower financial sanctions against the Taliban if it complies with its promises of renouncing terrorism and building a diverse government that respects human rights. With the Taliban seemingly more interested in international legitimacy following its recent conquest of power than during its first time in power, it seems likely they could clamp down once again, even if it’s nothing more than a shrewd political ploy. This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia.