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One way of funding Taliban

US Ambassador Resists Troop Increase in Afghanistan

The US ambassador to Afghanistan is warning against sending more troops to fight in the Afghan war. In a last-minute dissent, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent two cables this week casting doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government addresses corruption and other internal problems. Eikenberry also criticized the lack of aid and development money allotted for Afghanistan. His request to increase non-military spending by 60 percent has gone unheeded so far. Eikenberry delivered the warning right before President Obama’s war cabinet held a critical meeting Wednesday on proposals to send up to 40,000 additional troops. Eikenberry was appointed earlier this year after retiring from a military career that included commanding US forces in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007.

Now there is a new report that reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. “How the US Funds the Taliban” is the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine.

Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack. The practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. US military officials in Kabul told Roston that a minimum of ten percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts consists of payments to the Taliban.

That translates into millions of dollars being funneled to the Taliban. This summer, anticipating a surge of US troops, the military expanded its trucking contracts in Afghanistan by 600 percent to a total of over $2 billion.

Aram Roston talking:

US has to maintain, obviously, all these bases, these forward operating bases and combat outposts throughout Afghanistan. They have to supply them. The way they supply them is trucking convoys, civilian trucking convoys. They call it “Host Nation Trucking,” and what they mean is that Afghan-owned trucks and Afghan drivers drive everything. They drive all the supplies, the guns, the MRAPs, the ammunition. Just everything needs to get to these—every part of Afghanistan. And they’ve issued these large contracts, but they don’t protect the convoys. By definition, these convoys are driving through some very tough terrain, controlled by warlords, by the Taliban, by insurgents.

And what they’ve ended up doing—and this is apparently unanimous, with some small exceptions—is the security companies reach arrangements with the local Taliban, the local warlords and various insiders to pay them off for protection. It’s very much like an extortion racket and very much like a protection racket, and it amounts to huge amounts of money. Some say ten percent, some say far more than ten percent, of the convoys. Some say that most of the security budgets are going towards these payments to the Taliban and to the tribal leaders and the warlords. The fact is the US often doesn’t even know who they’re paying off. These contractors don’t necessarily know who they’re paying off. They just know they’re bad guys. So they’ve ended up with this bizarre situation, and there’s nothing they can really do about it.

Watan Risk is an extraordinary company. It’s run by two brothers, the Popal brothers. They’re relatives of the President of the country. They’re also convicted felons here in the United States for drug offenses. And one of them was an interpreter and basically a spokesman for the Taliban at the end of the Taliban regime in 2001. And yet, here he is now. He and his brother run this very lucrative, very important, very big security company, Watan Risk Group. According to many people It runs this very important corridor. It controls it, because it has a relationship with the key warlord and commands who controls that.

Highway 1, which runs through Kandahar, which leads you to the South, leads to the war zone. This is where you need to go to get to the conflict, to the border, and so forth.

On October 29th, 2001, there’s this news conference in Islamabad. If you remember, while the US began its campaign against the Taliban, there was a Taliban ambassador in Pakistan who was talking as a representative. His main interpreter and representative was this English-speaking gentleman who looked very distinctive. He had an eye patch, he was missing an arm, and he had this huge beard and this black turban. This is Ahmad Rateb Popal. He has now trimmed his beard. He looks different. He still has the eye patch. But he’s now an international businessman, rather than the interpreter for the Taliban. He’s a relative of the President of Afghanistan. And it’s one of these things where everybody seems to have to pay this company if they want security along this very important route. And they control convoy traffic heading through that region.

Another companies is NCL Holdings, which is run by the son of the Minister of Defense, has a $380 million contract. But the Minister of Defense claims he knows nothing about the son’s contract.

Everybody knows he’s—his name is Hamed Wardak. His father’s name is Rahim Wardak. Rahim Wardak was a mujahideen leader during the fight against the Soviets. The US worked with him. Case officers like Milt Bearden, a top CIA official at the time, and the station chief in Islamabad, he worked with him. The fellow shows up in the book Charlie Wilson’s War, as does Milt Bearden, the CIA official.

So, somehow this general’s son ends up starting this. He’s an American, American Afghan. He starts this company called NCL in 2009 and wins this contract that, over the summer, blossoms into a $360 million contract to transport American goods throughout the country. It’s incredibly lucrative.

This is a guy who was raised and schooled in the United States, valedictorian at Georgetown 1997, a Rhodes scholar, then interned at the think tank American Enterprise Institute.

A portion of the money goes to pay off the local warlords or Taliban when they’re delivering stuff.

a lot of people know about it there. And Afghans are very upset by it, too. A top Afghan security official brought it to my attention. He says he’d been trying to fix it in secret for a long time, bring it to the Americans’ attention, and little has happened. American contractors, security contractors and trucking contractors, said they’ve brought it to the attention of American officials, American military officials. And they assure me the American military officials have been told, you know, many times. These people don’t want to be doing this. They don’t want to be paying money to the people that the US is fighting.

It is international money. Much of it’s American money. This contract $2.2 billion, that’s like a big chunk of Afghanistan’s GNP. They functionally don’t have much of a budget. It’s all international money coming in.

It’s like a carnival of really strange characters who are getting very, very rich off this war.

Discussion with Aram Roston.

Aram Roston, Investigative journalist and author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi. He’s written the cover story in the latest issue of The Nation magazine, “How the US Funds the Taliban.”

– from democracynow.org

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