Paying Peter to Kill Paul

When we began our careers in military service, conflicts were often presented to us in black and white terms. There were good guys and bad guys, clear battle lines and we always knew which side we were on, as well as the side of the enemy. However, our experiences on active duty and in the reserves, as well as overseas deployments has taught us that this is regularly not the case. There are myriad complex relationships that transcend roles of good and bad guys.

Private security contractors are among the most complex relationships we have in overseas contingency operations. Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, both domestic and foreign corporations have been contracted to provide security to American bases, dignitaries and logistics convoys. At worst these corporations, such as Xe (formerly known as Blackwater) and Triple Canopy, make our jobs harder through their murky command structure and wild west cowboy attitudes. When Blackwater massacred civilians in Iraq it certainly hindered our counterinsurgency efforts. It wasn't, however, as if they were directly funding the insurgency we were fighting.

No, the private security contractors saved that tactic for Afghanistan.

Writing for The Nation, Aram Roston has uncovered a tangled web of former military and CIA officials, relatives of the Afghanistan President and Defense Minister and various other shady characters who act as a pipeline from the U.S. treasury to the Taliban:

In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.

Here's how the chain works: The U.S. government pays trucking firms to move supplies around Afghanistan to its rural and far flung outposts. These trucking companies then pay private security contracting firms, operated by drug lords, warlords, the Taliban and relatives of senior Afghan Administration officials, or consortiums of any or all of them, for safe passage to American installations. As one American trucking executive said, ""The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.""

As part of the Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, the United States paid Sunni insurgents who previously fought American forces to secure their own neighborhoods from foreign fighters, with the promise that they would later be folded into the Iraqi national security apparatus. That is very different then the way operations are being conducted in Afghanistan, where we are essentially telling insurgents "Here is some money, just don't attack us here. Attack us somewhere else." Then, we give them the money to do it.

Using Roston's excellent investigative journalism as a starting point, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees must investigate the allegations contained therein. We simply cannot continue to put brave men and women in harms way while are tax dollars are funding that harm.

American and NATO service members deserve better than this. We should not send them to possibly die fighting an insurgency that even American contractors working in the operation admit is being funded by DoD. This is simply another example of the rampant privatization of military operations and the corruption caused by it. If a service can be performed by uniformed military, uniformed service members should perform it. If the forces are not available for that service, then that is a fairly reliable indicator that we have overextended our force.

Crossposted at VetVoice.com

 

Follow Jon Soltz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jonsoltz

Comments

[Solange305]

"If the forces are not available for that service, then that is a fairly reliable indicator that we have overextended our force."

THANK you!!!!!!!!! It is as simple as that.

[johnfrum]

This makes perfect sense viewed strictly as an exercise in capitalism. The contractors are maximizing profit by reducing losses incurred by insurgent attacks. You do believe in capitalism don't you? This kind of stuff coupled with the banking fiasco and god knows what else coming down the tube has got to make you wonder. The invisible hand seems to have formed a fist and is in the process of punching the bejeezus out of the American people. Dial up Friedman et al. Maybe they can explain why all this stuff is really a good thing.

[demfriend]

Thanks for accurate info guys! You both are well versed and know your stuff as I know fron all the posts previously. I just wish/hope/desire that those in charge and those of any part willingness to push the information to the front of the media and make these truths known. Our soldiers or Natos do not deserve any more death or injuries as the direct result of our own DOD funding anything which harms them! Jon you have been on MSNBC with Keith and Rachel so drop this on them too!

[lightningbolt]

This makes the entire war in Afghanistan look like a fake theater designed only to make money for the corporations who are sponsoring the war. Defense contractors and the banks who finance the war make more money if the war lasts longer. This is the entire reason why the job was not finished in Afghanistan during the Bush administration. The U.S. decided not to defeat the Taliban because the Taliban are not really the enemy. The Taliban are pretending to be the enemy just so the U.S. can have an excuse to continue being in Afghanistan, making the defense contractors and banks richer and richer. The Bush administration basically used 9-11 to create a fake enemy, the Taliban (who were formerly our friends), just so that they can have an excuse to go to war.

[lightningbolt]

Isn't the Department of Defense committing treason by funding enemy forces?

[fourbrrl]

ONLY U.S. military complex could be THIS F@#$ing STUPID !!!!!!!!!!­!!!!!!!!!!­!!!

[royevatom]

Want to explain to me just exactly why we have the largest Military Budget in the World.
Want to explain to me why we are maintaining a Military Presence on a World Wide basis.
Want to explain to me why we have not learned what history has to teach us.
Want to explain to me why we cannot allow others to live as they please.
Want to explain to me why innocent people are killed and somehow it is acceptable.
Want explain to me why we hire Mercenaries.
Want to explain to me why all this and more is done in my name.
Because I Don't Understand.

[fourbrrl]

dont you know ??????

ONE WORD..........GREED !!!

[PeterNY]

Our war machine keeps thousands of government contractors in business.
Our war machine doles out $1trillion dollars a year of our tax money.
Our war machine is a veritable gravy train for those with heavy lobbying clout.
Our war machine supports over 900 military bases abroad.
Our war machine allows its American contractors to incorporate in foreign tax havens.
Our war machine protects its American contractors from foreign competition.
Our war machine bases provide a net defense budget profit for countries like Germany and Japan.
President Eisenhower warned us. Read his farewell address to the nation.

[lightningbolt]

That war machine is not OUR war machine. It is owned by the corporatocracy.

[martin2]

The way to win this war is to send our Senators and Congress men to Afgan villages
They will use there expertise to make good cite zens out of those folks.

[Louis462]

You're right, martin2. What a mess.

Funding for all this crap meets no resistance while the boobs on this side of the world would defeat health care for Americans for far fewer dollars.

Glad I'm old and on my way out and not looking for a promising future here.

[gonbald]

I'm old too.
There's a promising future here?
I'm tired of all of this BS.
Time to move on (or under.)

[pacem]

Excellent reporting! Now if we could just convince the government to defy their moneyed corporate backers and rectify the situation........

[andycan]

CULPRITS

You put your finger on the sore spot. Yes, US forces are overextended. But the geniuses Cheney and Rumsfeld who conceived the overextension cared to put money in the pockets of mercenary companies such as Dynacorp, Blackwater and Halliburton, rather than serve American interests.
All of this charade was covered up by screaming patriotism and political repression. Now the bills have come in. Will the culprits be held accountable?

[SharlyFarley]

I doubt it. But this is the best argument for withdrawing from Afghanistan I've seen yet. Let's put the energy and money into nation-building HERE.

[billw8017]

Our forces are "over extended" because the mission is not proportionate to the forces applied. In Iraq, the relatively small Rumsfeld army overturned the regime and occupied the country. We could have pulled back to fortified positions and given a national Iraqi movement instructions. We chose to hang in and try to cover all the country while new college grads with no knowledge of the country played at making their laws from the green zone.

In point of fact, our forces if less than in WWII remain among the worlds biggest. Russia has more planes, China has more troops, we have the advantage in ships -- which is reasonable considering oceans divide us from the battlefields -- and rank high in the other military assets. We never had to be the be-all and end-all and expose our troops everywhere. It's not like we did such a good job setting up governments in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I favor more troops: not to send them around the world making pests of themselves, but just as a part of the young citizen's education or civil training. I appreciate the mechanization of war, but that kind of force, if oriented to defense, could easily be less at a huge savings in tax monies better spent for private or social purposes. Our money may not be so well spent even by its own logic and the relative standing of our military may be less than we suppose just from looking at the budgets.

[LCLA]

And I thought Catch-22 was crazy.
This Confederacy of Dunces tops the cake!

[Grom]

If the insurgents can be paid not to shoot at our troops, that's better than a fire fight. Let's find out how much they want to go away. It would proably be cheaper than carrying on the war.

[CitizenLegislatorCC]

"Using Roston's excellent investigative journalism as a starting point, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees must investigate the allegations contained therein."

That is PRECISELY what the next move should be, and the very minimum that's called for from our Congress, as the voice of the American people.

Yet we all know that such hearings are almost certain NOT to happen, don't we? The United States Congress has made it their business NOT to seriously investigate anything having to do with the wars THEY eagerly unleashed on both Iraq and Afghanistan. An abdication of responsibility and duty that started during Republican­-controlle­d Congresses, which basically ceased ALL oversight of the Executive Branch, and has continued into Democratic­-controlle­d Congresses.

John Kerry, Carl Levin, Howard Berman, and Ike Skelton - the committee chairs in a position to hold these hearings - are instead WAITING TO BE TOLD by the Executive Branch what our next move will be in Afghanistan, without doing ANY public due diligence or serious scrutiny of the matter on their own, never mind engaging in any deliberative debate about legislative solutions to the mess that their (never-sin­ce-revisit­ed) 2001 AUMF helped create.

I couldn't agree more about the folly of out-sourcing military jobs. BY DEFINITION that "overextend[s] our force," because when in a genuine fighting war with an opponent anywhere NEAR our mechanized strength, those privatized services would represent a HUGE hole in our flanks just begging to be sabotaged and exploited, to lethal effect.

[farhorizons]

Funding our enemy's war against us? isn't this treason? So will the President put an immediate and total end to this practice, then bring the traitors to justice?

[billw8017]

War is deeply irrational, and ours is the generation of wars. There is hardly a moment in this century when a war or insurgency was not being fought somewhere.

Business affairs are dealt with by practical people and treason, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, can be assumed. Halliburton under Cheney, for example, organized foreign branches to do business with Iraq despite the sanctions against Hussein. Even as we began our build up in Vietnam, Madam Nu of the Presidential family there, was paying the Cong to allow her to run factories in territory they controlled. By 1967 US supplies and weapons were taken directly from Vietnamese ports to Cambodia where a great military auction was established. The Israeli went there to get munitions for the '67 war, A general in the Marines complained that the Cong had more American aid than our native allies did.

Mercenary forces are a proverbial threat to a representative democracy. In these days, the contractors are the most expensive way to do anything. However, privatization evades the Hatch Act and secures large contributions to the political parties: Undemocratic, treasonous, and expensive though they are.