"Fighting corruption proves difficult task in Afghanistan; Questions arise on contracts to transport goods" by Karen DeYoung, Washington Post | March 30, 2010
PFFFFFFFTT!!
Yeah, I guess it would be difficult to fight when you are causing it.
WASHINGTON — 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 US military goods through some of the most insecure territory in Afghanistan. But his company has no trucks.
Instead, Wardak sits atop a murky pyramid of Afghan subcontractors who provide the vehicles and safeguard their passage.
US military officials say they are satisfied with the results, but they acknowledge they have little knowledge or control over where the money ends up.
But it is NOT A PROBLEM, huh?
Where are the U.N SANCTIONS or at least the CALL for them, 'eh?
Oh, right, Afghanistan is not Iran.
According to senior Obama administration officials, some of it may be going to the Taliban, as part of a protection racket in which insurgents and local warlords are paid to allow the trucks unimpeded passage, often sending their own vehicles to accompany the convoys through their areas of control.
The essential question, said an American executive whose company does significant work in Afghanistan, is “whether you’d rather pay $1,000’’ for Afghans to safely deliver a truck, even if part of the money goes to the insurgents, or pay 10 times that much for security provided by the US military or contractors.
It's called WAR PROFITEERING, America, and AIN'T IT GREAT!?
I guess you now know why the TALIBAN are NEVER DEFEATED, huh?
President Obama made a surprise trip to the country Sunday to press President Hamid Karzai to do more to clean up corruption in Afghanistan.
Pffft.
Yeah, whatever, MSM!
Congress has warned repeatedly that US assistance depends upon progress in this area.
Yup, sure, Congress is going to cut off funding.
I have been waiting for that since 2006 when DemocraPs took over.
The US is increasing its military presence in Afghanistan and is preparing, along with NATO forces, for an assault on the Taliban’s spiritual home in the southern city of Kandahar.
There you go; spirituality is back.
A senior military official said yesterday that the offensive will begin in June, the Associated Press reported.
The likelihood that US money is finding its way to the enemy as well as lining official pockets — allegations Wardak says could be true for other transport contractors but for not his company — is “one of the many very important things that came to light’’ during last fall’s White House strategy review, an administration official said.
Oh, like here in AmeriKa!
The problem extends beyond military supply transport to Afghan-provided security for reconstruction and other US-funded projects, according to John Brummet, audit chief for the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, known as SIGAR.
“If you go to the US Embassy, to USAID, to the Army Corps [of Engineers] and ask if they can assure that their money is not going to the Taliban, they’d be hard-pressed to say,’’ he said.
Prime contractors such as Wardak’s NCL Holdings, Brummet said, “say that subs take care of their security,’’ but US officials “do not have visibility on who is providing it.’’
According to Ray Dinunzio, SIGAR chief investigator, “there is no database in the US government’’ that provides reliable subcontractor information.
Odd, seeing as we have a database for everything over here.
See: Tools of Tyranny: DMV Database
I gue$$ $ome people and thing$ do not belong in a government databa$e, huh?
The US-led coalition command in Afghanistan does not dispute that assessment. Although there is “rigorous’’ oversight of prime contracts, the command said in a statement, “the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent.’’
How much double-talk can you down, readers?
I'm full up.
Both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the issue in congressional testimony explaining Obama’s new strategy. Clinton called “siphoning off contractual money from the international community . . . a major source of funding for the Taliban.’’ Corruption, she said, “frankly . . . is not all an Afghan problem.’’
Yeah, so POUR MORE IN and PAY OFF the "enemy."
But DON'T TALK PEACE with them, no, no!!!
Congressional investigators who have opened an inquiry into the Defense Department’s $2.16 billion Host Nation Trucking contract described what one called “willful blindness’’ on the part of a US military that “likes having its trucks showing up and doesn’t want to get into the details of how they got there.’’
You see the RACKET, readers?
Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman of the national security subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, opened an investigation in December into what he said were “serious allegations . . . that private security providers for US transportation contractors in Afghanistan are regularly paying local warlords and the Taliban for security.’’
In letters to Gates and each of the eight trucking firms, Tierney asked that all documents related to the transport operations and security subcontractors be provided to the subcommittee by mid-January.In the meantime, yea to the the war spending.
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Update:
GENEVA — Afghanistan remains mired in poverty, corruption, and violence despite an estimated $35 billion in aid being poured into the country between 2002 to 2009, the United Nations said yesterday.
So WHO STOLE IT ALL, huh, TAXPAYERS?
A report by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights asserts that more than two-thirds of Afghans live in dire poverty.
That is what EIGHT YEARS of LIBERATION have brought?
Many are disillusioned with their government and the international community for failure to provide basic needs such as security, food, and shelter, it said.
No, we have been too busy destroying the place and killing people.
And I KNOW JUST HOW the AFGHANS feel re: government!
“Widespread corruption further limits access to services for a large proportion of the population,’’ the report found, accusing Afghan officials of advancing their own interests at the expense of the general population.
Wow, Americans know JUST HOW YOU FEEL, Afghans!
Women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities suffer the worst discrimination, it said.
Wow, Americans know JUST HOW YOU FEEL, Afghans!
The 26-page report also criticized the international community for placing too much emphasis on security and too little on long-term development.
Well, development was never really an option other than looting tax dough.
If the U.S REALLY WANTED TO DO IT, it would have been DONE!
Of course, when you are FUNDING the INSURGENCY, well....
Related: The Boston Globe's Invisible Ink: Taliban Checkbook
More than eight years after a US-led military coalition ousted the Taliban, Afghanistan has the world’s second-highest maternal mortality rate and the third worst rate of child mortality, according to the report.
I'll bet the bombings, missiles, and combat operations has not helped.
“Only 23 percent of the population have access to safe drinking water, and only 24 percent of the population above the age of 15 can read and write,’’ it said.
Yeah, but recent operations are getting hospitals and schools up and rebuilding the place, yup.
A spokesman for the UN human rights office said the world was failing to address these problems despite pledging a new beginning for the country at a 2001 conference in Bonn, Germany.
For many Afghans, the only way to survive is to take up arms and perpetuate the “vicious circle’’ of war and poverty that has plagued the country.
Which WORKS OUT GREAT for the WAR-MAKERS, huh, cui bono?
Yeah, who brought that plague, anyway?
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