For the Taliban, A Crime That Pays

There were no seats left on the Kandahar-to-Kabul flight, so Johan Freckhaus decided to take a chance and return to Afghanistan's capital by car. After nine years in the country, the construction executive understood the danger, but with his long beard and fluency in Dari, the nation's most widely spoken language, he could pass for an Afghan. He might have made it, if one guerrilla at a highway checkpoint in Ghazni province hadn't searched the car carefully enough to find Freckhaus's hidden French passport.

The contractor was promptly shackled with tire chains, blindfolded and hauled away. For the next three weeks, the kidnappers moved him around the countryside every night before setting him free on June 19 this year. According to the commander of the Taliban fighters who grabbed Freckhaus, French authorities paid roughly $1.5 million for the hostage.

As if Afghanistan didn't have enough problems, the Taliban have spawned yet another: an epidemic of ransom kidnappings. Such crimes used to be rare, and the perpetrators were usually common thugs who stuck close to Kabul. That's changed in the last couple of years, as the Taliban learned to abduct foreigners and Afghan business people instead of killing them. Since then, kidnapping has become one of the guerrillas' main revenue sources, second only to facilitating and protecting the country's $4 billion-a-year narcotics trade. If you add up only the reported ransoms in some of the highest-profile kidnappings of the past two years, the total comes to more than $10 million a year—and that's a deceptively conservative estimate. Most abductions and payments are never publicized. The windfall has helped the Taliban to come back strong from near defeat, and the threat of kidnapping has made travel all but impossible in much of the country, crippling reconstruction efforts.

One of the earliest victims was Gabriele Torsello, a bearded, turbaned Italian photojournalist. Two years ago he was on a bus heading out of Helmand province when it was flagged down by a group of Taliban who were clearly expecting him. One gunman boarded the bus, ignored the other passengers and ordered Torsello off. "They came directly to me," Torsello recalls. "No one else was searched or questioned." He was freed on Nov. 3, 2006, after 22 days. The Italian government has refused to confirm reports that €2 million was paid for his release.

Four months later, the Taliban trapped another Italian journalist in Helmand. Fighters for the notorious commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund seized Daniele Mastrogiacomo, a war correspondent for La Repubblica, together with his driver and his translator. Dadullah's men killed the driver immediately. Three weeks later they freed the Italian reporter in exchange for an undisclosed sum of cash and the release of six jailed Taliban, including Dadullah's brother. Then they cut the translator's head off. Afghan President Hamid Karzai came under such heavy criticism for the prisoner release that he has never repeated it.

Despite that, hostage negotiations routinely start with the insurgents demanding a prisoner release. Taliban commanders seem embarrassed to talk about ransoms. But the talks always come down to money. (Among other things, cash can bribe underpaid prison guards or finance a breakout, like the one in Kandahar this June where at least 350 captured Taliban escaped.) "Nobody—no government—wants to acknowledge ransoms, but you gotta do what you gotta do," says Jack Cloonan, president of the U.S. crisis-management firm Clayton Consultants. "The truth is, everyone talks to [kidnappers], either directly or through back channels. And everyone pays ransoms."

Foreigners pay best. The Mastrogiacomo deal caught the attention of a top subcommander in Ghazni province, Abdullah Mansoor. A large, portly man with a mean streak even longer than his black beard, he ordered his men to keep a close eye on their stretch of the Kandahar-Kabul highway. In July 2007, two of Mansoor's fighters hit the jackpot—a big white passenger bus traveling unescorted with a group of 23 Christian missionaries from South Korea. Mansoor proved he was serious by killing two of them. The others were free by the end of August. The South Korean government denies that any ransom was paid, but Mullah Nasir and other Taliban sources say the price was at least $5 million, and a senior Afghan government official confirms that figure.