Oops.
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.This isn't going to help public sentiment over the war. Vote Vets has more:
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 druglords, 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.
