Saudi Arabia: still funding the Taliban?

Yesterday in Downing Street I asked Gordon Brown whether Saudi Arabia is still funding the Taliban. I was attending a news conference he was hosting with Pakistan’s President Zardari.

Mr Brown did not address my specific question. Sidestepping the Saudi aspect, he described the MI6 financial units that are now hard at work tracking Taliban transactions and bank accounts.

Just as the United States originally backed Bin Laden and al-Qaida in their war to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan, so the Saudis funded the Taliban’s holy war to achieve the same aims. The policy fitted the Saudi Wahhabi commitment which seeks to export this very conservative form of Islam well beyond Saudi borders.

A couple of years back I asked Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud, about Wahhabi extremism and the threat it posed in the funding of mosques and radical madrassas in Pakistan.

Saud did not deny the funding of schools and mosques (indeed, amid the gathering chaos in Pakistan they are still funding them). He took exception to my labelling Wahhabism as extremism.

“My great great (can’t remember exactly how many greats) grandfather was Wahhabi himself – he was no extremist,” Saud declared with some anger.

Nevertheless, the question of continuing Saudi support for the Taliban, however obscure or covert, is one that deserves an answer. It’s a question oil-dependent nations in the west don’t like asking.

The Saudi royal family is not a regime you can afford to tangle with, either on this issue or on others, such as the oppression of women or Saudi Arabia’s woeful human rights record.