"The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them"

By Steve Hynd

Today's must-read is by Aram Roston over at The Nation as he gets in-depth about a major part of the Taliban's funding: "the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes" in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors and Taliban alike.

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: "The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money." That is something everyone seems to agree on.

...Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan's intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I'm told are "very detailed" reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.

The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.

The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban's protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? "The American soldier in me is repulsed by it," he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. "But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, 'Hey, don't hassle me.' I don't like it, but it is what it is."

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, "We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics."  

One of the major players in this channeling of DoD money to the very people U.S. soldiers are fighting, Roston explains, is a company called NCL Holdings. It's run by Hamed Wardak, son of the Afghan defense minister and former intern at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, who is advised by Milton Bearden, the CIA guy who headed up the Reagan-era sending of arms to the Afghan mujahedeen and who recently testified on Afghanistan issues before the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. Over the Summer, NCL Holdings won a $360 million logistics contract from the U.S. military even though Wardak had little security or trucking background. Here at Newshoggers, we recently wrote about Wardak and Bearden's U.S. lobbying group, the Campaign for a U.S. - Afghanistan Partnership, which has spent $190,000 lobbying Congress to escalate the number of troops in Afghanistan.

But NCL isn't the only well-connected group making a mint for itself and its Taliban friends off U.S. taxpayers. Others include relatives of President Karzai, the parliamentary speaker's son and the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief.

Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war--to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.

Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road.

...The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah "charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers."

It's hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly--security, extortion or a form of "insurance." Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That's impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, "He works both sides... whatever is most profitable. He's the main commander. He's got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows."

Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan's and Ruhullah's convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan's services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister's son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai's cousins, for protection.

I'm strongly reminded of Jonathan Landay, star McClatchy reporter, and his claim in an interview back in March that U.S. officials -- not U.S. contractors, but officials -- are complicit and involved in the corruption in Afghanistan. This is a rotten apple barrel we're nowhere near to glimpsing the bottom of, yet.