ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF OSAMA BIN LADEN’S DEATH, his strategy continues to work like a charm in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden explained his plan in 2004: “All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies…. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.”
Well over a decade after Osama bin Laden formulated his economic “bleed until bankrupt” strategy, the United States continues to spend hundred of billions of US dollars in Afghanistan on generally fruitless counterinsurgency operations, which do little but benefit ambitious American careerists, US private corporations, and corrupt Afghan kleptocrats—a malign network of graft and corruption that now includes the Taliban.
When I was embedded with US troops in the warzones of eastern Afghanistan, the soldiers told me the US government was wasting tens of billions of dollars each year on scandalously mismanaged development and logistics contracts. We’d be hunkered down on embattled forward operating bases and the soldiers would compare the US-backed Afghan government to the Mafia, saying everybody was in on the take, including the insurgents. “We’re funding both sides of this war,” the soldiers would wryly say.
The stories were rife out in Afghanistan: US-funded Alternative Livelihood projects, grotesquely expensive counternarcotics programs that ostensibly paid Afghan farmers to not grow opium poppy crops, but instead fattened the accounts of private development companies, corrupt Afghan officials née drug lords, and the insurgents. Joel Hafvenstein, a development official who documented the failed counternarcotics program in his Opium Season, wrote after one payday in a Helmand Province village, his Afghan colleague remarked, “You know, I think half of the people we paid today were Taliban.”
A congressional investigation verified that the US military was helping to finance the Taliban. The military gave well-connected Afghans contracts to provide security for military logistics convoys. The Afghan insiders in turn subcontracted the security to warlords, who then paid off the Taliban. The congressional report, “Warlord, Inc., concluded: “protection payments for safe passage are a significant source of funding for the Taliban.”
US-funded development projects, big and small, were perfect conduits for graft and extortion. A known insurgent leader on the US Special Operations JPEL “kill or capture” list provided security for one USAID-funded road construction project, the Khost-Gardez highway in eastern Afghanistan. The security contractor paid the jihadi $160,000 a month to protect the road from himself. On small development projects, such as wells and irrigation projects, US officers told me the insurgents skim both the contractor and the villagers paid to do the work.
Then there was the story of the Kajaki Dam, a massive US-funded Cold War-era project in southern Afghanistan that was designed to win the hearts and minds of Afghans with irrigation and hydroelectric power. Of course, when the US invaded in 2001 the dam was a priority bombing target. And, of course, after the Taliban retreated the dam was a priority US rebuilding project. The United States eventually spent over $100 million to repair and upgrade Kajaki’s hydroelectric capacity. As power lines again snaked across southern Afghanistan, American press officers again touted Kajaki as a glittering centerpiece of American aid. But in 2010, researchers discovered that over half the electricity went to areas controlled by the Taliban. Once an icon of US assistance to the Third World, Kajaki now served as the symbol of America’s distracted aid to the enemy. “The more electricity there is,” an Afghan tribal affairs officer said, “the more money the Taliban make.”
The system in Afghanistan is so routine, there are reportedly Taliban business offices in Kabul and Kandahar where US-funded contractors negotiate with Taliban engineers to determine their take.US soldiers, development officials, and others on the ground in Afghanistan have told me the corrupt system is so entrenched that the only option is to withdraw. “It’s the perfect war,” one US intelligence officer sarcastically told me. “Everyone is making money.” It’s working out for everyone but the Afghan people, the US soldiers on the ground, and the American public.
In one of history’s great ironies, US taxpayers are funding their own enemy as the American infrastructure and safety net continues to fray. It must have made Osama bin Laden smile.
Bill Johnson says
December 26, 2012 at 9:01 amI am unfortunately a devout cynic and your work does not surprise me in the least. The US will never get out of places like Afghanistan as long as the dollars keep flowing and if not there we will find another crummy place to blow tax dollars and our debt in. It is all about the “Benjamins”