U.S. Afghan entanglement follows distorted logic

Scan page 12

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images corporations.

(Left) U.S. soldier wounded by IED blast near Kandahar on June 25.

Iraq and Afghanistan and their numbers are comparable to the numbers of troops, to such an extent that U.S. officers claim that they cannot maintain their operations without them.

Thus, while there are growing scandals about these groups and some sanctions against them, they continue to get contracts from the U.S. government and the turn in the U.S. strategy suggests that they will be more used rather than less.

The U.S. client ruler of Afghanistan himself has now sounded an alarm about the mercenary groups. The New York Times reported Aug. 22: “Karzai, who last week decreed that foreign security contractors must disband in the next four months, said on ABC’s ‘This Week’ program that these workers are obstructing the development of Afghan police and security forces. ‘I am appealing to the U.S. taxpayer not to allow their hard-earned money to be wasted on groups that are not only providing lots of inconveniences to the Afghan people but actually are, God knows, in contact with Mafia-like groups and perhaps also funding militants and insurgents and terrorists through those funds,’ Karzai said.”

The Afghan chief argued that the mercenary forces were undermining the regular military and security forces that are the central pillars of the state. In fact, they are undermining the state itself. But that is true not only in Afghanistan but in the United States as well, as the use of foreign mercenaries for security in Katrina-struck New Orleans indicated most dramatically. Ultimately, if the armed forces of the state become a network of mafias, they can become less and less useful as the instrument of any rational political policy.

Moreover, it is not the mercenary groups alone that are undermining the Afghan state. It is also the very traditional CIA. The New York Times reported Aug. 26: “The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.” The aide in question was Mohammad Zia Salehi, chief of administration of the Afghan National Security Council. The article commented: “Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.”

The following day The New York Times picked up on a Reuters dispatch reporting that a “significant number” of officials in the Karzai regime are on the payroll of the CIA. Bribing officials is a strange way of opposing corruption.

In this web of intrigue, the double game being played by Pakistani officials is hardly exceptional. In its Aug. 23 issue, The New York Times was able to offer a concrete account of the Pakistani military’s covert support for the Taliban and opposition to any peace agreement with the Taliban that does not suit Pakistani interests. The paper learned the true story behind the arrest of Taliban leaders in Pakistan, which at the time the U.S. hailed as evidence of good work by its Pakistani ally:

“Now, seven months later, Pakistani officials are telling a very different story. They say they set out to capture Mr. Baradar, and used the C.I.A. to help them do it, because they wanted to shut down secret peace talks that Mr. Baradar had been conducting with the Afghan government that excluded Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime backer.

“In the weeks after Mr. Baradar’s capture, Pakistani security officials detained as many as 23 Taliban leaders, many of whom had been enjoying the protection of the Pakistani government for years. The talks came to an end.”

The article went on to quote an anonymous Pakistani security official as follows: “‘We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us,’ said a Pakistani security official, who, like numerous people interviewed about the operation, spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. ‘We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians.’”

Facing the growing hostility of the majority of Afghans and of 160 million Pakistanis and the covert hostility of the Pakistani security forces, there would (continued on page 9, in “New book distorts the legacy of Malcolm X and Black nationalism”)