Afghanistan Revealed: US Hands Over Millions of $$$...To "Warlords" (DeYoung)

Want a break from the whipped-up drama over General Stanley McChrystal and his "mistake" of an interview? Possibly to read something more significant?

Karen DeYoung writes for The Washington Post:

The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.

The security arrangements, part of a $2.16 billion transport contract, violate laws on the use of private contractors, as well as Defense Department regulations, and "dramatically undermine" larger U.S. objectives of curtailing corruption and strengthening effective governance in Afghanistan, a report released late Monday said.

The report describes a Defense Department that is well aware that some of the money paid to contractors winds up in the hands of warlords and insurgents. Military logisticians on the ground are focused on getting supplies where they are needed and have "virtually no understanding of how security is actually provided" for the local truck convoys that transport more than 70 percent of all goods and materials used by U.S. troops. Alarms raised by prime trucking contractors were met by the military "with indifference and inaction," the report said.

"The findings of this report range from sobering to shocking," Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) wrote in an introduction to the 79-page report, titled "Warlord, Inc., Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan."

The report comes as the number of U.S. casualties is rising in the Afghan war, and public and congressional support is declining. The administration has been on the defensive in recent weeks, insisting that the slow progress of anti-Taliban offensives in Helmand province and the city of Kandahar does not mean that more time is needed to assess whether President Obama's strategy is working.

"I think it's much too early to draw a negative conclusion," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. "I think there's more positive than negative. We're heading toward a year-end assessment, which will be a big one for us." The review was set when Obama announced in December that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and begin to withdraw them in July 2011.

Tierney is chairman of the national security subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose majority staff spent six months preparing the report. A proponent of a smaller U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan and targeted attacks on insurgents, Tierney said in an interview Monday that he hopes the report will help members of Congress "analyze whether they think this is the most effective way to go about dealing with terrorism. Or the most cost-effective way."

The report's conclusions will be introduced at a hearing Tuesday at which senior military and defense officials are scheduled to testify. The report says that all evidence and findings were made available to Republicans on the subcommittee. A spokesman for Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), the ranking Republican, said the lawmaker will not comment until he has seen the entire report.

In testimony shortly after Obama's strategy announcement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that "much of the corruption" in Afghanistan has been fueled by billions of dollars' worth of foreign money spent there, "and one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money."

Military officials said that they have begun several corruption investigations in Afghanistan and that a task force has been named, headed by Navy Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault, director of logistics and supply operations for the chief of naval operations and former head of the Baghdad-based joint contracting command for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, communications chief for U.S. and NATO forces in Kabul, said that the entire Tierney report has not been examined but that Dussault will be "reviewing every aspect of our contracting process and recommending changes to avoid our contribution to what is arguably a major source of revenue that feeds the cycle of corruption."

The U.S. military imports virtually everything it uses in Afghanistan -- including food, water, fuel and ammunition -- by road through Pakistan or Central Asia to distribution hubs at Bagram air base north of Kabul and a similar base outside Kandahar. From there, containers are loaded onto trucks provided by Afghan contractors under the $2.16 billion Host Nation Trucking contract. Unlike in the Iraq war, the security and vast majority of the trucks are provided by Afghans, a difference that Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has praised as promoting local entrepreneurship.

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[...] Afghanistan Revealed: US Hands Over Millions of $$$…To “Warlords … [...]

[Catherine]

Funny - yesterday Aljazeera English devoted their Inside Story programme to this very subject. It repeats on Wednesday (tday) at 1030GMT and will be put online in a day or so at this address:
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insidestory/2010/06/2010622133429161976.html" rel="nofollow">http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insides...

Funding the Afghan Taliban
US citizens have discovered that it is their tax money that indirectly funds Taliban - the very people their troops are fighting in Afghanistan.

A congressional investigation revealed that millions of dollars spent by the US military for security puposes has inadvertently gone into the pockets of the Taliban.

The US pays millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for gunmen to protect the supply convoys. Investigations revealed that these gunmen in turn bribed the Taliban not to attack. When convoys refused to pay warlords, their trucks were often attacked.

The report concluded that this has undermined US efforts to end corruption and build an effective Afghan government. On the contrary, it has unwittingly funded the insurgency.

What are the ramifications for the strategy of the US and its allies in Afghanistan? And how will this impact the Karzai government? Joining the programme are Thomas Ruttig, the co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, Farooq Bashar, a political analyst and lecturer at Kabul University, and Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress.