Major General Athar Abbas addresses a news conference in Rawalpindi on April 28, 2009.

According to Dan Rivers of CNN, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbasof the Pakistan Army has said that: “many of the Taliban’s arms are coming across the border from Afghanistan.” When Rivers asked him “if that includes NATO weapons, as suggested in recent reports,” he agreed. According to Rivers, “He says Washington is too focused on the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. The United States should ‘stop worrying about the nukes and start worrying about the weapons lost in Afghanistan,’ he says.” (Emphasis added.)

Rivers reports that “A U.S. government report last month warned that the Pentagon did not have “complete records” for about one-third of the 242,000 weapons the United States had provided to the Afghan army, or for a further 135,000 weapons other countries sent. The Afghan army ‘cannot fully safeguard and account for weapons,’ the Government Accountability Office found. I ask how well armed the Taliban are, and he says they are ‘very well equipped from the border area.’ He also conspiratorially suggests they also are getting weapons and support from ‘foreign intelligence agencies.’ When I ask what that means, he smiles and says he can’t elaborate — declining to repeat the speculation in the press here that India, Pakistan’s traditional rival, may be somehow involved in stirring up trouble on Pakistan’s northwestern border.”

But Rivers doesn’t realise that India is not the only suspect (see, e.g. here). Abbas said “agencies” (in plural), His claim is supported by recent admission by the US that the Taliban are not funded entirely by opium. (There has been a conspiracy of silence over the awkward fact that due to the Taliban’s ban on opium production for religious reasons, on the even of US bombing of Afghanistan, the country’s opium production was negligible; it is under the US sponsored government that opium production and exports has reached record levels.)

According to a recent Wall Street Journal story byYochi J. Dreazen, “U.S. officials recently concluded that the Afghan Taliban may receive as much money from foreign donors as it does from opium sales.”

The article quoted Gen. David Petraeus: “You have funds generated locally, funds that come in from the outside, and funds that come from the illegal narcotics business,” he said. “It’s a hotly debated topic as to which is the most significant and it may be that they are all roughly around the same level.” But, for compulsions of their own, US officials look for Muslim individuals, charities, and states. Even as an empirical matter, they are not prepared to investigate the possibility of Indian, Russian, or Israeli funding of the many groups lumped today under the rubric of “Taliban”.