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More and more, the big business press,
as well as liberal investigative journalists, are reporting how
the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan has become
entangled in a web of corruption and intrigue. In particular, the
“outsourcing” of military tasks to private profiteers leads the
intertwining of the occupation with criminal networks and even with the
enemy that the U.S. government is
devoting hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to
defeat.
The Jan. 21 issue of the Huffington Post carried an
article from GlobalPost reporting
that a number of U.S. government agencies are investigating corruption
related to military and development contracts: “As GlobalPost first
reported in September, USAID’s Office of the
Inspector General is probing allegations of a protection racket in
which Afghan subcontractors are paying protection money to local
Taliban leaders to prevent their projects and employees from being
targeted. That investigation is underway, but USAID officials have
declined to comment on specifics of the case.”
In the Jan. 22 issue of the liberal on-line journal Counterpunch,
Malalai Joya, an
independent Afghan feminist radical, declared: “In the last eight
years, they [the occupiers] have turned my country into the centre of
drugs. ... They are saying to the poor farmers, ‘stop planting
poppies,’ but the governors of these provinces are drug traffickers.
Four persons who have high posts in Karzai’s
cabinet are famous drug traffickers.”
Counterpunch summarized: “US complicity in
the multibillion dollar drug trade, as evidenced by Hamid
Karzai’s brother’s close connections to both
the CIA and the heroin underworld ... have made it clear that poppies
are not just a convenient cash crop for the struggling farmers. They
are a new natural resource and the drug lords and their occasional
allies in the occupation forces are the new colonialists who mean to
prosper in the market that leaves most Afghans living in dire poverty.”
Moreover, the intrigue extends to Pakistan, a country of
180 million people, where public opinion has been whipped into a fury
of hatred of the U.S. by repeated and
now multiplying illegal bombings of alleged Taliban targets in which
many Pakistani civilians have been killed.
The Dec. 13 Taliban suicide bombing in Khost
revealed that the Blackwater (now Xe Services) mercenary outfit is working (on
military and assassination protects) with the CIA, despite earlier
denials by the U.S. government. Two
Blackwater operatives were killed, along with
six CIA agents.
In his recent visit to Pakistan, Defense
Secretary Gates let the cat out of the bag about U.S. mercenaries
operating within Pakistan, with the
shamefaced approval of supine Pakistani officials. Jeremy Scahill reported in the Jan. 22 web edition of The Nation:
“On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that Blackwater is operating in Pakistan. In an
interview on Express TV, Gates, who was visiting Islamabad, said, ‘They [Blackwater and another private security firm,
DynCorp] are operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,’ according to
a DoD [Department of Defense] transcript of
the interview.”
Gates then tried to get the cat back in the bag, to no
avail. As The
Wall Street Journal reported,
‘Defense officials tried to clarify the comment Thursday night, telling
reporters that Mr. Gates had been speaking about contractor oversight
more generally and that the Pentagon didn’t employ Xe
in Pakistan.’” The Blackwater (Xe)
operations did have a local cover, but there can hardly be any doubt
that the U.S. government
stands ultimately behind its operations.
Scahill continued in The Nation,
“Today [apparently Jan. 22, although the date is not specified], the
country’s senior minister for the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Bashir Bilour, also
acknowledged that the company is operating in Pakistan’s frontier
areas. Bilour told Pakistan’s Express News TV
that Blackwater’s activities were taking
place with the ‘consent and permission’ of the Pakistani government,
saying he had discussed the issue with officials at the US Consulate in
Peshawar, who told him that Blackwater was
training Pakistani forces.”
“Bilour’s statements,” Scahill commented, “are consistent with what a
former Blackwater executive and a US military
intelligence source told me in December—that Blackwater
is working on a subcontract for Kestral, a
Pakistani security and logistics firm. That contract, say my sources,
is technically with the Pakistani government, which helps cloak Blackwater’s presence.”
Scahill went on to
quote one of his earlier articles: “According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral’s forces in sensitive counterterrorism
operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in
conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force,
known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as ‘frontier
scouts’).
“The Blackwater personnel are
technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often
gets blurred in the field. Blackwater ‘is
providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism
operations] and Kestral’s folks are carrying
a lot of them out, but they’re having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go
out with the teams when they’re executing the job,’ he said. ‘You can
see how that can lead to other things in the border areas.’
“Blackwater, he said, is paid by
the Pakistani government through Kestral for
consulting services. ‘That gives the Pakistani government the cover to
say, “Hey, no, we don’t have any Westerners doing this. It’s all local
and our people are doing it.” But it gets them the expertise that
Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work.’”
The New York Times raised an alarm about the expanding
covert war in an editorial Jan. 11: “There are many reasons to oppose
the privatization of war. Reliance on contractors allows the government
to work under the radar of public scrutiny. And freewheeling
contractors can be at crosspurposes with the
armed forces. Blackwater’s undersupervised guards undermined the effort to win
Iraqi support.” [The editorial noted that a third of the egregious
cases of abuse in Iraq were
perpetrated by mercenaries.]
“But most fundamental is that the government cannot—or
will not—keep a legal handle on its freelance gunmen. A nation of laws
cannot go to war like that.”
In fact, it is inevitable, as abundant lessons of history
show, that imperialist adventures will undermine the democracy of the
home country and offer incentives for its capitalist corporations to
become more corrupt and predatory.
The privatization of the U.S. military, a
result of the capitalist offensive of the end of the 20th century, has
clearly aggravated this tendency. In a complex part of the world and in
a complex time, it threatens to bring disastrous consequences of all
those involved and affected.
It is clear, after a year of the Obama
administration, that none of the parties that serve big business in the
United States, not the
Democratic Party of Obama any more than the
Republican Party of the Bushes, is going to extricate the country from
the ramifying entanglements of its official and covert military forces
in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area.
Only a thoroughgoing public exposure of the U.S. rulers’
operations (both public and private) and independent mass protests in
the street can halt and reverse the slide into an endless and expanding
war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area—and perhaps disasters of an
unforeseeable scope.
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