Monday, March 29, 2010
10 more years and everybody in Afghanistan will be rich
Thanks to the largess of Uncle Sam. We have spread $ Billions on contracts with locals and no idea where the money goes.
Hamed Wardak, the soft-spoken Georgetown University-educated son of an Afghan cabinet minister, has a Defense Department contract worth up to $360 million to transport U.S. military goods through some of the most insecure territory in Afghanistan. But his company has no trucks.But that is OK with some, for obvious reasons.
Instead, Wardak sits atop a murky pyramid of Afghan subcontractors who provide the vehicles and safeguard their passage. U.S. military officials say they are satisfied with the results, but they concede that they have little knowledge or control over where the money ends up.
Although security for trucks carrying U.S. military supplies around Afghanistan is considered a particularly lucrative source of extortion, the administration has not investigated it or even estimated its scope, according to several officials involved in Afghanistan policy, none of whom was authorized to discuss the issue on the record.Understandable but what is the real price. How much of the corruption comes back at US troops from the Taliban? Is any of it worth it? We would be a lot better off pulling out of Afghanistan and just paying off whoever is in power. Save lives and money.
Congressional investigators who have opened a probe into the Defense Department's $2.16 billion Host Nation Trucking (HNT) contract described what one called "willful blindness" on the part of a U.S. military that "likes having its trucks showing up and doesn't want to get into the details of how they got there."
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