‘Outsourcing’ the war effort

Scan page 12

More and more, the big business press, as well as liberal investigative journalists, are reporting how the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan has become entangled in a web of corruption and intrigue. In particular, the “outsourcing” of military tasks to private profiteers leads the intertwining of the occupation with criminal networks and even with the enemy that the U.S. government is devoting hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to defeat.

The Jan. 21 issue of the Huffington Post carried an article from GlobalPost reporting that a number of U.S. government agencies are investigating corruption related to military and development contracts: “As GlobalPost first reported in September, USAID’s Office of the Inspector General is probing allegations of a protection racket in which Afghan subcontractors are paying protection money to local Taliban leaders to prevent their projects and employees from being targeted. That investigation is underway, but USAID officials have declined to comment on specifics of the case.”

In the Jan. 22 issue of the liberal on-line journal Counterpunch, Malalai Joya, an independent Afghan feminist radical, declared: “In the last eight years, they [the occupiers] have turned my country into the centre of drugs. ... They are saying to the poor farmers, ‘stop planting poppies,’ but the governors of these provinces are drug traffickers. Four persons who have high posts in Karzai’s cabinet are famous drug traffickers.”

Counterpunch summarized: “US complicity in the multibillion dollar drug trade, as evidenced by Hamid Karzai’s brother’s close connections to both the CIA and the heroin underworld ... have made it clear that poppies are not just a convenient cash crop for the 12 Socialist Action FEBRuary 2010 struggling farmers. They are a new natural resource and the drug lords and their occasional allies in the occupation forces are the new colonialists who mean to prosper in the market that leaves most Afghans living in dire poverty.”

Moreover, the intrigue extends to Pakistan, a country of 180 million people, where public opinion has been whipped into a fury of hatred of the U.S. by repeated and now multiplying illegal bombings of alleged Taliban targets in which many Pakistani civilians have been killed.

The Dec. 13 Taliban suicide bombing in Khost revealed that the Blackwater (now Xe Services) mercenary outfit is working (on military and assassination protects) with the CIA, despite earlier denials by the U.S. government. Two Blackwater operatives were killed, along with six CIA agents.

In his recent visit to Pakistan, Defense Secretary Gates let the cat out of the bag about U.S. mercenaries operating within Pakistan, with the shamefaced approval of supine Pakistani officials. Jeremy Scahill reported in the Jan. 22 web edition of The Nation: “On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that Blackwater is operating in Pakistan. In an interview on Express TV, Gates, who was visiting Islamabad, said, ‘They [Blackwater and another private security firm, DynCorp] are operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,’ according to a DoD [Department of Defense] transcript of the interview.”

Gates then tried to get the cat back in the bag, to no avail. As The Wall Street Journal reported, ‘Defense officials tried to clarify the comment Thursday night, telling reporters that Mr. Gates had been speaking about contractor oversight more generally and that the Pentagon didn’t employ Xe in Pakistan.’” The Blackwater (Xe) operations did have a local cover, but there can hardly be any doubt that the U.S. government stands ultimately behind its operations.

Scahill continued in The Nation, “Today [apparently Jan. 22, although the date is not specified], the country’s senior minister for the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Bashir Bilour, also acknowledged that the company is operating in Pakistan’s frontier areas. Bilour told Pakistan’s Express News TV that Blackwater’s activities were taking place with the ‘consent and permission’ of the Pakistani government, saying he had discussed the issue with officials at the US Consulate in Peshawar, who told him that Blackwater was training Pakistani forces.”

“Bilour’s statements,” Scahill commented, “are consistent with what a former Blackwater executive and a US military intelligence source told me in December—that Blackwater is working on a subcontract for Kestral, a Pakistani security and logistics firm. That contract, say my sources, is technically with the Pakistani government, which helps cloak Blackwater’s presence.”

Scahill went on to quote one of his earlier articles: “According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral’s forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as ‘frontier scouts’).

“The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater ‘is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral’s folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they’re having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams (continued on page 8, in “Supreme Ct. opens door to Mumia’s execution”)