Robert Naiman: Our Corrupt Occupation of Afghanistan
[Robert Naiman is senior policy analyst at Just Foreign Policy.]
Is it just me, or is the pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan growing rather tiresome?
There is something very Captain Renault about it. We're shocked, shocked that the Afghans have sullied our morally immaculate occupation of their country with their dirty corruption. How ungrateful can they be?
But perhaps we should consider the possibility that our occupation of the country is not so morally immaculate - indeed, that the most corrupt racket going in Afghanistan today is the American occupation.
US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts in Afghanistan consists of protection payments to insurgents, Aram Roston reports in The Nation. In southern Afghanistan - where General McChrystal wants to send more troops - security firms can't physically protect convoys of American military supplies. There's no practical way to move the supplies without paying the Taliban. So, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, we're supplying both sides of the war.
Meanwhile, two thirds of the nearly $30 billion in international aid to Afghanistan has been routed through foreign consultants, companies and organizations hired by the US government and its allies, Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe. Afghan officials complain that American civilian advisers are often overpaid, underqualified and unfamiliar with the culture of the country. A typical US adviser earns about $500 per day - several times what the average Afghan earns in a month, Stockman notes. That's about $125,000 a year - not a bad chunk of change, even by US standards. It's more than the household income of about 85 percent of American families. The total cost of such an adviser, including security and accommodations (note that most people - in Afghanistan, like the US - have to pay for their own accommodations out of their salaries or wages) is about $500,000 a year.
The Afghan government now has a program to hire its own advisers from friendly Muslim countries like Turkey and the UAE. The US supports this program with a $30 million contribution. But that contribution represents 1.1 percent of the $2.7 billion that the US plans to spend on economic assistance to Afghanistan next year. The vast majority of the funds will be used to hire US contractors. So for every dollar we spend on paying American contractors, we spend a penny on a much cheaper program that allows Afghanistan to hire people who know the culture, speak the language, have more expertise and can move around Afghanistan with less security because they aren't Americans...
Read entire article at Truthout
Is it just me, or is the pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan growing rather tiresome?
There is something very Captain Renault about it. We're shocked, shocked that the Afghans have sullied our morally immaculate occupation of their country with their dirty corruption. How ungrateful can they be?
But perhaps we should consider the possibility that our occupation of the country is not so morally immaculate - indeed, that the most corrupt racket going in Afghanistan today is the American occupation.
US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts in Afghanistan consists of protection payments to insurgents, Aram Roston reports in The Nation. In southern Afghanistan - where General McChrystal wants to send more troops - security firms can't physically protect convoys of American military supplies. There's no practical way to move the supplies without paying the Taliban. So, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, we're supplying both sides of the war.
Meanwhile, two thirds of the nearly $30 billion in international aid to Afghanistan has been routed through foreign consultants, companies and organizations hired by the US government and its allies, Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe. Afghan officials complain that American civilian advisers are often overpaid, underqualified and unfamiliar with the culture of the country. A typical US adviser earns about $500 per day - several times what the average Afghan earns in a month, Stockman notes. That's about $125,000 a year - not a bad chunk of change, even by US standards. It's more than the household income of about 85 percent of American families. The total cost of such an adviser, including security and accommodations (note that most people - in Afghanistan, like the US - have to pay for their own accommodations out of their salaries or wages) is about $500,000 a year.
The Afghan government now has a program to hire its own advisers from friendly Muslim countries like Turkey and the UAE. The US supports this program with a $30 million contribution. But that contribution represents 1.1 percent of the $2.7 billion that the US plans to spend on economic assistance to Afghanistan next year. The vast majority of the funds will be used to hire US contractors. So for every dollar we spend on paying American contractors, we spend a penny on a much cheaper program that allows Afghanistan to hire people who know the culture, speak the language, have more expertise and can move around Afghanistan with less security because they aren't Americans...