Huffington Post | Nick Sabloff First Posted: 11-11-09 06:33 PM | Updated: 11-11-09 07:38 PM
Ahead of today's meeting of Obama's national security team to discuss Afghan war strategy, Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and a member of the war council, sent a pair of classified cables to Washington expressing deep reservations about the possibility of sending more U.S. troops to the country.
Eikenberry's concerns about the deployment of more troops centered around Afghan President Hamid Karzai's unwillingness to clamp down on rampant corruption throughout the country, a situation that has helped the Taliban re-establish itself there, the Post states.
Eikenberry's memos were skeptical of plans to send more troops until Karzai's government steps up its efforts to root out corruption.
But Karzai''s corruption is not the only thing keeping the Taliban in business, according to an explosive new story by reporter Aram Roston for The Nation.
The Nation alleges that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military funds are making their way to Afghan insurgents, including the Taliban. Roston reports that the U.S. is paying off insurgents to persuade them from attacking U.S. supply lines.
This is interestting because the US was paying the Taliban $50 million to keep the poppy crop under control. Now we are paying millions more to the Taliban in protection money to secure the US supply lines. In addition, the Russians have offered to fly supplies into Afghanistan that would save the US money if we started using this option.
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.
This 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.
Read more from the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston
Subscribe to the Rightardia feed: feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/IGiu
Netcraft rank: 5559 http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://rightardia.blogspot.com
Powered by ScribeFire.
No comments:
Post a Comment