Taliban Didn't Win in Afghanistan, the Defense Contractors Did | Opinion

[enhanced_deficit]

newsweek.com/taliban-didnt-win-afghanistan-defense-contractors-did-opinion-1621111

US War Profiteers the Ultimate Winners In War- Torn Afghanistan

The Citizen
21 AUGUST, 2021

Boondoggie for military contractors

UNITED NATIONS: As the 20-year-old occupation of Afghanistan came to an inglorious end last week, there were heavy losses suffered by many– including the United States, the Afghan military forces and the country’s civilian population.

But perhaps there was one undisputed winner in this trillion-dollar extravaganza worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster: the military-industrial complex which kept feeding American and Afghan fighters in the longest war in US history.

US President Joe Biden, in a statement from the White House last week, was categorically clear: “We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”

“We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future.”

“What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” he declared.

Of the staggering $1 trillion, a hefty $83 billion was spent on the military, at the rate of over $4.0 billion annually, mostly on arms purchases originating from the US defense industry, plus maintenance, servicing and training.

The Afghan debacle also claimed the lives of 2,400 US soldiers and over 3,800 US private security contractors, plus more than 100,000 Afghan civilians.

Norman Solomon, Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy and National Director, RootsAction.org told IPS that in drastically varying degrees, the real losers are everybody but war profiteers.


Taliban Didn't Win in Afghanistan, the Defense Contractors Did | Opinion

Saqib Qureshi , visiting fellow, London School of Economics
On 8/20/21

Afghan Civilians Scramble For Cover as Security Forces Open Fire At Kabul Airport

You've probably read a lot about Afghanistan in the past week, more perhaps than at any time in recent memory. There are any number of hot takes, articles, op-eds and analyses of the Taliban, the U.S. withdrawal and the geopolitical implications of the fall of Kabul. These are all very valuable topics that are worth discussing. But what is curiously missing from much of the conversation is how this failed war had been extensively outsourced to nontransparent and unaccountable actors.

A purported war for a democratic Afghanistan pursued in glaringly undemocratic ways.
It behooves America to consider how and why so much of such a vital conflict was assigned to private contractors—and whether that kind of approach was even partly to blame for the debacle that ensued. It might be. That is not even to broach the topic of whether so much of the world's most powerful country's foreign policy should be in the hands of corporations that do not answer to the people footing the bill, namely, the taxpayer. I would have expected more Americans to be outraged.

Perhaps, one can hope, that outrage will swell over time, as more Americans come to learn of what exactly transpired—and how much of their treasure was squandered. I must insist journalists do their part to follow the money. We cannot let this story slip from the headlines without demanding accountability. Even a cursory examination of what happened would provoke great consternation—revealing, at times, a grim and tragic comedy of errors.

Afghanistan is an unforgiving and mountainous country. One reason perhaps it is called "the graveyard of empires." A whopping 1 percent of the country is thickly forested, which makes the decision of a singular Afghan official—as I detail in my recent book, The Broken Contract—to demand forest camouflage uniforms for the Afghan National Army to be absurd. Nevertheless, each American paid about $.25, for a total $28 million for these marginally useful uniforms.
Perhaps the camouflage did some good, though—after all, the Afghan National Army all but disappeared from view in a very short span of time.

All of these numbers, added together, total around $83 billion, which is the amount of money that went to build up the capability of the Afghan National Army. There is another still more eye-popping amount that should be considered. It is estimated that America spent close to $2 trillion over the course of the entire Afghanistan war, to say nothing of the many Americans who lost their lives, the many more who are seriously injured and the even more who are traumatized.





Related

“The Afghanistan Papers”: Docs Show How Bush, Obama, Trump Lied About Brutality & Corruption of War
Aug 19, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bixeuaa2r58

 

[enhanced_deficit]

‘9/11 millionaires’ and mass corruption: How American money helped break Afghanistan

Published Fri, Sep 10 20216:00 PM EDT Updated 13 Min Ago
Christina Wilkie

Key Points

• In the 20 years since 9/11, the United States has spent more than $2 trillion waging war and nation-building in Afghanistan.
• That money has helped create a tiny class of young, ultra-rich Afghans, many of whom made their fortunes as government contractors.
• But over time, these contracts helped fuel a system of mass corruption that engulfed the country and, eventually, doomed its fragile democracy.

A person shows US dollars outside an exchange office, remained close since August 15th, following their reopening after Taliban takeover on September 04, 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Bilal Guler | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

WASHINGTON – $290 million every day for 7,300 days. That’s how much money America spent on 20 years of war and nation-building in Afghanistan, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Yet it took just nine days for the Taliban to seize every provincial capital, dissolve the army and overthrow the U.S.-backed government last month.
When Taliban fighters seized Kabul without firing a single shot, President Joe Biden blamed Afghans for failing to defend their country.
“Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled the country,” he said on Aug.16. “The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Absent from Biden’s rhetoric was any mention of America’s culpability in a war that began when U.S. soldiers invaded Afghanistan seeking revenge against Al Qaeda for the terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Today, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul is closed and the American soldiers are gone.
But the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States spent waging its war on Afghan soil can still be seen across Afghanistan, for better and worse.
Abandoned air bases, half-finished construction projects and tens of thousands of untraceable guns litter the countryside, all purchased with American money.

VIDEO10:14
How America’s $2 trillion war in Afghanistan ended in chaos

U.S. dollars also created the “9/11 millionaires,” a tiny class of young, ultra-wealthy Afghans who made their fortunes working as contractors for the foreign armies.
A few of these millionaires became role models for a new generation of Afghan entrepreneurs and philanthropists.
But many more exploited their family ties to government officials or provincial warlords in order to secure lucrative contracts.
Over time, U.S. government contracts became the fuel for a system of mass corruption that engulfed the country and, eventually, doomed its fragile democracy.

“The ultimate point of failure for our efforts, you know, wasn’t an insurgency,” said Ryan Crocker, a two-time U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in 2016. “It was the weight of endemic corruption.”

Money exchangers engage in intense negotiations in the Sarai Shahzadah, Kabul’s currency exchange market, which is reopening for the first time since the Taliban took over, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021.
Marcus Yam | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images

The United States, in Crocker’s view, bears responsibility for much of the corruption in Afghanistan because it flooded the country with billions of dollars more than its economy could absorb.
“You just cannot put those amounts of money into a very fragile state and society, and not have it fuel corruption,” said Crocker. “You just can’t.”

Crocker was one of the more than 500 officials interviewed by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction for an internal project called “Lessons Learned.”

SIGAR never meant for the public to read the full, candid interviews. But in 2019, a judge ordered their release, and they were compiled and published by The Washington Post.

Read today, Crocker’s insight into the perils that huge U.S. government contracts posed to Afghanistan seems prescient.
But it was not always the prevailing view.

The 9/11 millionaires

In the early years of the war in Afghanistan, when American soldiers were still hunting Al Qaeda terrorists and battling Taliban fighters, the idea of using local Afghan contractors to supply U.S. military bases seemed like a good one.
By contrast, in Iraq most of the supply and logistics work for U.S. troops was performed by non-Iraqis, typically through contracts with huge multinational firms.
But in Afghanistan, awarding government contracts to Afghan nationals was seen as a key part of the overall U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.
It was even codified into an official Pentagon procurement policy known as “Afghan First,” which was approved by Congress in 2008.
“Employing local nationals injects money into the local economy, provides job training, builds support among local nationals, and can give the U.S. a more sophisticated understanding of the local landscape,” wrote the authors of a 2011 congressional report on military contracting.

Members of the 82nd Airborne Division carry thousands of dollars in Afghani money found hidden away during an early-morning raid October 1, 2002 in an undisclosed location, in southeastern Afghanistan.
Chris Hondros | Getty Images

Several of the Afghans who became millionaires working as U.S. contractors started out as interpreters for American soldiers, accompanying service members on dangerous missions during some of the deadliest years of the war.

cnbc.com/2021/09/10/9/11-millionaires-and-corruption-how-us-money-helped-break-afghanistan.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dCuSBJtZlk


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piPzfseZCoM