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
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Malou Innocent: A Real Team of Rivals
Obama's hesitancy in Afghanistan is an implicit recognition that the United States might not succeed in laying a centrally administered facade onto Afghanistan's preexisting society.
THANK you!!!!!!!!! It is as simple as that.
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.
ONE WORD..........GREED !!!
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.
They will use there expertise to make good cite zens out of those folks.
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.
There's a promising future here?
I'm tired of all of this BS.
Time to move on (or under.)
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?
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.
This Confederacy of Dunces tops the cake!
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.