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Afghanistan |
What Do The Taleban Spend Afghanistan’s Money On? Government expenditure under the Islamic Emirate |
2023-05-14 |
Link to full report at the link. [AfghanistanAnalysts] When the Taleban captured power in 2021, they moved swiftly to take over domestic revenue collection, adopting Ministry of Finance systems for taxes and customs. As insurgents, they had been diligent tax collectors and brought a wealth of experience in collecting money from people, but little in spending it – outside the war effort. Since foreign donors no longer support the Afghan state, it is now Afghan citizens who pay for what their government does. While the Islamic Emirate has been relatively open about revenues, it has been cagey about how it spends money. In this report, AAN’s Kate Clark and Roxanna Shapour have put together what little is known or can be found out about Taleban spending plans and priorities. They find large sums of money allocated to security and contingency codes and relatively little to social services apart from education. They also conclude that following the money reveals how well Afghan bureaucracy continued despite the upheaval of regime change – and how fully the Taleban have captured it.This report attempts to fill in some of the gaps in Emirate spending, drawing on the very limited data available. It brings together information from three main sources: The Taleban Ministry of Finance mini-budget for the last quarter of 1400 (21 December 2021 to 20 March 2022) with its breakdown of planned spending of 53.9 billion Afs, which is the best we have from the Emirate about its spending priorities, as the information it subsequently released concerning its 1401 budget was just a few sentences long.
This is the second part of reporting on Emirate finances. Part 1, Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state, was published in September 2022. |
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