Bribing the Taliban: the Italians have form

Fifteen years after Italy rocked the world with its 'tangentopoli' (bribesville) scandal - showing corruption as a way of political life - it stands accused today of a secret policy of buying off the Taliban from attacking Italian troops in Afghanistan.

Bribery led to tragedy in the Sorobi valley east of Kabul because - it is alleged - when the Italians pulled out they forgot to tell the French who were replacing them that they had been buying peace from the Taliban with hard cash.

The French entered the valley in relaxed mode and suffered 10 dead in an ambush on a supply convoy - the worst single killing of a group of ISAF soldiers to date. The bodies were stripped and mutilated; the Taliban paraded for videos in French uniforms and kit.

Shocking maybe, but the story broken by the Times and reported by The First Post should not surprise. Bribery seems to be an established way of life or m.o. in a number or recent Italian peacekeeping exercises.

A po-faced statement from the Italian embassy in London today denies any such payments were made. Yet I understand the Times has been ultra-cautious in its charges because the prime source was US intelligence intercepts of mobile phone conversations between Italian Intelligence (SISMI) agents and Taliban warlords.

Similar charges have been laid before. It is believed that the Italians tried the same approach with insurgents when they were in Nasiriya in southern Iraq. They are also believed to have used a system of subsidy and reward to buy off militias in Somalia in the 1990s.

It's the kind of thing the British did in the Indian Raj, and Afghanistan, in the 19th Century. A former British Chief of Defence Staff, Lord Boyce, loves to quote the Kipling-esque adage, "You can't buy an Afghan's loyalty for life, but you can rent it by the hour."

The bribe tactic is very limited and often rebounds on the bribers. A senior Afghan security official speaking unofficially in London today said he was sure that some kind of greasing of Taliban palms had been going on. He didn't like it, and he thought it self-defeating.

He said he thought payments had been made, possibly by the Italians, to a notorious Jihadi warlord called Ghulam Yahya Akbari, a former mayor of Herat and known as the 'Tajik Taliban'.

"He used the money to build himself an army and buy in fighters. So we had to kill him," my Afghan security source told me.

Akbari and 15 of his leaders and fighters were killed in a special forces strike in western Herat in early February this year. He is known to have hosted Saudi recruits to al-Qaeda and to have been an ally of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami, an extreme Taliban affiliate with strong Pakistani backing.

The French and many other ISAF allies feel betrayed by the alleged Italian financial operations. As for the Italians, have they not heeded the tale of Ethelred the Unready, King of the Western Saxons, who believed he could bribe the Norse invaders to keep off his turf? Though he paid his 'Danegeld' - actually silver, not gold - by the sackful, the Vikings kept coming back for more. ·