It seems like there’s no intention — on any side — of settling things in the thirty-year civil war in Afghanistan: it’s simply too profitable. Ostensibly the US has “changed sides” since the 80’s and now backs the same urban/secular factions which the Russians “supported” in their occupation. But the degree to which long-standing relationships have been severed remains in doubt due to the incentives that exist — arms, drugs, security, construction, logistics, etc — to prolong or escalate the conflict.
HAMED WARDAK – NCL HOLDINGS, AACP, ETC.
- National Construction & Logistics (NCL Holdings) was set up in Virginia in 2007 by then 31 year-old Hamed Wardak – son of the current “hard-drinking, under-achieving” Afghan defense minister. The CIA has a seat at NCL’s table through a high-profile 30-year covert-op veteran, Milton Bearden.
- Wardak, “one of the Afghan American community’s most avaricious scoundrels” is a Pashtun who graduated Georgetown in ‘97 under the watch of late neocon Jeane Kirkpatrick. As a post-grad, Wardak was sent to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In later years, he would become involved with the neocon American Enterprise Institute think-tank.
- After 9/11, Wardak — through the Karzai bros Qayyum and Mahmoud — and Don Ritter founded the deeply suspicious AACP.
- Wardak also joined and briefly managed (‘04-05) Technologists Inc, an Afghan security firm founded by Aziz Azimi, which received funding from USAID, US DOD and the Afghan Defense Ministry.
- In ‘02/03 Wardak — who worked for Merrill Lynch — was Karzai’s Finance Minister’s envoy to the US.
- In ‘07 Wardak also set up “Sacrificers For Peace” (Fedayeen-e-Sol) which claims to be a “non-violent multi-ethnic reform movement” opposed to the Taliban, and is also a founding member of CUSAP – Campaign for US – Afghanistan Partnership — see their 2009 policy paper (pdf)
NCL are one of six Afghan contractors awarded “host nation trucking” contracts worth $2.2b over two years — i.e. 10% of [non-drug] Afghan GDP. Another security/logistics contractor paid to protect US convoys is Watan Risk Management, run by convicted narco-trafficker Rateb Popal and his brother Rashid — cousins of President Karzai… I wonder what cargo the “empty” trucks carry on their return trips?
Other transporters include Afghan American Army Services and US-based Four Horsemen International (who are also in Iraq), Afghan International Trucking (AIT) and Afghan Trade Transportation (ATT). James Clifton, a former US Army contracting official has just been sentenced to 40 months in prison for accepting bribes from AIT and ATT.
Sibel Edmond’s Nov-9 article ‘In the Name of a General, his Son, a Spook & the Godmother of Neocon‘ is essential reading.
THE PECULIAR ECONOMICS OF INFINITE WAR
Just how does the US plan to marginalize the Taliban when Afghan subcontractors pay them to protect US supply convoys? Bruce Wilson comments on the recent article by Aram Roston in ‘The Nation’ (not the Pakistani newspaper) which discusses the logistics/bribery side of the US mission in narco-state Afghanistan:
In some cases, as Roston describes, Afghan contracting firms simply pay the Taliban directly, and Taliban vehicles escort the supply convoys. [...] The Afghan government intelligence service suggested to the Americans that they should take the money they’re paying to the Afghan trucking supply contractors and instead spend it to set up a single, heavily armed, professional service. As Roston drily puts it, “the suggestion went nowhere.”
In essence, the US is doling out cash to Taliban and saying, “don’t attack us there, attack us over here“: The Taliban take that money, buy their own weapons and supplies, and attack the Americans at the newly resupplied forward command posts. Lots of bullets and RPG rounds fly about, Americans die, Taliban die, maybe a helicopter gunship gets called in, maybe it gets shot down, maybe it kills some Taliban, maybe they run away first and go back to extorting some more money from the supply convoy that will come to resupply the munitions-depleted American forward command post.
WHO CONTROLS THE AFGHAN NARCO-TRADE? FOLLOW THE MONEY…
An article published by RAWA – the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan — analyses the recent UNODC figures (June ‘09 pdf) on the Afghan drugs trade — showing that 75% of narco-income goes to government factions and “power brokers” enjoying US/NATO support:
UNODC states that a decade ago the Taliban earned $85 million per year from drugs, but that since 2005 this figure has jumped to $125 million. Although this is pitched as a significant increase, the Taliban play a more minor role in the opium economy than UNODC would have us believe and drug money is probably a secondary source of funding for them. Indeed, the report estimates that only 10-15% of Taliban funding is drawn from drugs and 85% comes from “nonopium sources.”
The total revenue generated by opiates within Afghanistan is about $3.4 billion per year. Of this figure, according to UNODC, the Taliban get only 4% of the sum. Farmers, meanwhile, get 21%. And the remaining 75%? Al-Qaeda? No [...] Instead, the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers — in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade.
MORE LINKS:
- Sibel Edmonds’ blog provides a link to an excellent, densely-packed commentary from late-07 by veteran foreign-correspondent, Arthur Kent — “Cashing in on Karzai & Co.” (Watch Kent’s June ‘07 video report “Kabul’s Fat Cats” — or a mid-08 interview with him.)
- James Risen’s March ‘09 NY Times article about former Boston restauranteur Mahmoud Karzai — also worth reading.
- 90min audio (streaming/ram) from a ‘06 John Hopkins/CACI talk by Hamed Wardak.
- May ‘09 article by Hamed Wardak, with advice on how the US can fix things in Afghanistan.
- Hamed Wardak’s token blog and facebook page.
- April ‘09 article by Milton Bearden in CFR publication ‘Foreign Affairs’.
No comments:
Post a Comment