$10 Tabies

Those who work for the Taliban for financial rather than ideological reasons.

Reporting for NPR on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to scale-up efforts to reduce opium production in Afghanistan, Tom Bowmanwrote:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the Taliban make hundreds of millions of dollars off the burgeoning opium trade in Afghanistan, as much as $400 million, that helps them buy weapons and pay local Afghan citizens, who need a job and might not necessarily agree with Taliban ideology. Military officers call them “$10 Tabies” because they are only in it for the money.

These hired hands have also been referred to as “tier 2 Taliban” and the “$10 Taliban.”

Making the case for legalizing drugs in a recent article for The Times of London, Antonia Senior argued:

The victims of this lost war are everywhere. There are those who choose to be victims, like the kids who gather in a slow, sad suicide pact in the bush opposite me. Then there are are the collateral victims: those that the junkies rob to fund their habits, the children trafficked to work on the UK’s cannabis farms. There are 11,000 dead Mexicans on the front line, whose Government’s fraught drugs offensive is tipping the country into failed-state territory. There are the “$10 tabies,” as they are dubbed by the US military — the Afghans who support the Taliban for a share of the $400 million a year opium trade. There are the British and American soldiers killed by weapons bought by opium dollars.