What’s
Wrong Today:
As of April
21, the Afghan war had cost 2,314 Americans their lives and wounded 19,701. It
is very early for a complete debrief, but the press has started offering
several under-reported stories for Americans to think about.
First, the
revisionist history has started. According to Andrew Peek at the Fiscal
Times:
is creaking towards an ugly win in Afghanistan. With the growth of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program and the currently successful
presidential elections, we’re finally creating something…Historical
Afghanistan might be ugly; but an ugly win is still a win
Win?
Where’s the win? As soon as we leave, the place will go back to where it was.
All that is visible today is a near-trillion dollar expenditure, with limited
benefit to Americans.
Second, we are beginning to see
in-depth studies of what went wrong in Afghanistan. Neil Gordon, of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reports on just how concentrated US funding
of Afghan reconstruction projects was. Nearly 90% percent of State Department’s
reconstruction funding—$3.5 billion—was obligated in 55 contracts awarded to just
19 recipients. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
(SIGAR) found that, between the beginning of fiscal year 2002 and
March 2013, more than two-thirds of the money ($2.8 billion, or 69%) will go to
just one company—DynCorp.
Readers may
be familiar with DynCorp
International’s colorful history in Afghanistan,
which includes instances of labor smuggling, weak performance and overpayments on a base support services
contract, botched construction work on an Afghan Army garrison, and lawsuits filed by disgruntled
subcontractors.
The second
largest contract recipient is PAE Government Services, which received 15% of
all State Department reconstruction funds. PAE was a subsidiary of Lockheed
Martin until 2011. It
had issues as well:
year, former PAE program manager Keith Johnson and his wife, Angela Johnson, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the
military on vehicle parts purchases in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. The
Johnsons were sentenced to
prison and ordered
to pay $2 million for operating a scheme in which Keith steered millions of
dollars in orders to a shell company operated by Angela and to subcontractors who
provided kickbacks in return
The law
requires the federal government to award contracts only to responsible vendors—those with satisfactory
records of past performance, integrity, and business ethics. Do these contractors sound like they should
be qualified to you?
There
should have been an outcry in Congress. Why no outcry? Follow the money!
Third, Bloomberg just got its hands on a previously undisclosed Pentagon study
that says in part that the US government:
an environment that fostered corruption in Afghanistan by supporting warlords,
relying on private trucking contracts and providing billions of dollars in aid
The details
are surprising. Analysts for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a 65-page
assessment dated Feb. 28 that:
directly threatens the viability and legitimacy of the Afghan state after a ‘large-scale
culture of impunity’ took hold…American forces dependent on Afghanistan-based
trucking companies found themselves trapped in a warlord protection racket
The
Pentagon analysts found that the US coalition “was slow to understand the
integrated and pervasive threat corruption posed” to their mission:
necessary preconditions for combating corruption did not exist due to delayed
understanding of Afghan corruption, decreasing levels of physical security,
lack of political will on the part of both the international community and the
Afghan government and a lack of popular pressure
The assessment
found that the initial US focus in late 2001 on defeating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda “created mutually dependent relationships” that “empowered” warlords,
and “expanded their [warlords] opportunities for financial gain and impeded
later” efforts to counter corruption:
ensconced within ministries and other government posts, Northern Alliance
warlords that the CIA and US military Special Forces teams came to depend on
often ‘used their positions to divert’ government resources, sometimes transforming
them into what came to be known as ‘criminal patronage networks.’
The
widespread use of Afghan trucking companies, which employed security
contractors, became a primary engine of corruption, according to the report:
of the private security companies were of a dubious nature and were paid
protection money, the analysts said. In 2010 alone, the US awarded $2.16
billion to eight Afghan trucking companies that ‘exercised weak oversight”.
By
the time US commanders realized the deleterious effect of this arrangement and
attempted to take corrective action against highway warlords and trucking
companies, they were so well entrenched that any imposed sanctions would have
significantly impeded US logistics
Bloomberg
speculates that once the report is released, it might undercut any remaining
support by Congress and taxpayers for the diminished mission. The war has cost
the US more than $710 billion since 2001, according to the National Priorities
Project, which studies federal spending.
The report’s
money quote may be that the US federal
acquisition system is “more suitable to Peoria than Kabul”. Gee whiz.
Modern nation state meets feudalism; fails at playing feudal lord.
For the US
government to say that it was unaware of the extent of corruption in Afghanistan
is startling. If any of them had bothered to read the history of Afghanistan,
they should not have been surprised.
What an
affront to the intelligence of American citizens.
Finally,
the Fiscal
Times reports
that the US has spent $7.5 billion on counter-narcotic programs in Afghanistan.
The result? Record high opium-poppy
production. A report to Congress by the Special Inspector General
for Afghanistan Reconstruction detailed figures from the United Nations Office
of Drugs and Crime estimating that opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan this
year will reach an all-time high, jumping up 36% from just two years ago:
the decline are seizures of opium and heroin in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013,
the report said. The amount seized was equal to about 1% of annual opium
production
Afghanistan
produces about 75% of the world’s opium, which is estimated to account for 4%
of the country’s GDP. That share of GDP climbs to 14%, factoring exports such
as heroin and morphine. Nice work! We got the exact opposite of what we thought
we were paying for.
Americans should
be saying: “I’m mad
as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore”.
Then they need to ask: All that money spent in Afghanistan,
and for what?
If Americans aren’t distracted by missing planes and racist team owners, they
might also want to focus on questions like:
- Why
aren’t our bridges getting replaced?
- What
happened to the money to fund our schools?
- Why
are returning Afghan veterans begging on street corners?
- Why
are there empty houses down the block?
- Why
can’t their son or daughter get a job and move out?
- Why
can’t they retire?
Has anyone
actually seen their congressperson lately? Why is he/she running the same ads
he/she ran two or four years ago?
Then they
need to ask themselves: How will I make a difference in all of this?
Last night on MSNBC David From (conservative windbag) said that Republicans should insist on more defense spending. He cited as a reason the flap in the Ukraine, as if but for an extra $20 Billion, we would have been able to beat back the Russian in a tank battle in Eastern Europe.
But even a $Trillion dollars for defense would not make the Ukraine a battle the US can win.
But, it does answer why our kids may not have a decent start, if they can even afford college.
The Wrongologist is right to scoff at the efforts of some to declare the war in Afganistan a “win”. No amount of lipstick will make that pig into a lady. Here are some additional musings.
The US is not very good at imperialism. We mostly mean it when we say that we do not have imperialistic motives. Yet, we allow ourselves to dabble in imperialistic enterprises. No wonder that we suck at it.
The Wrongologist repeats the familiar oservation that the US failed to pay attention to Afgan history, both recent and ancient, and failed to appreciate just how deeply entrenched the folkways of feudal society could be. I think that two characteristics of American leadership contributed: our aforementioned, mostly sincere self image as not-imperialists and our more general, longstanding and characteristic exceptionalism. Both factors allowed us to dismiss the applicability of whatever we might have understood from history. “Sure the Soviet Union failed, but they were imperialists. Moreover, even beyond our geopolitical motives, we are different and better than they were.”
No way can the Afgan adventure be judged a “win” on its consequences. Neither can it be judged a proud moment on its conduct, a kind of “We lost, but we comported ourselves well.” Thus, an honest scorecard should reflect both that we did not achieve a positive balance of outcomes AND that our very aims were confused and our hubris was a root cause of our failure. Whatever marginal good things we might have achieved and whatever virturous behaviors might have emerged in the course of our efforts, at bottom and from the beginning the enterprise was doomed by institutionalized self-deception rooted in the kind of prideful attitude that so often “goeth before a fall”. Both means and ends, both behavior and accomplishments, both subjective and objective come up short. We lost the war and the most important reasons we lost it reside within us. Repentance will probably not come for a while, but The Wrongologist correctly calls for an honest appraisal that can and should begin now.
Further to the comments about record high opium poppy production after spending $7.5 billion. We need to remember our other role in this. America constitutes 4.6% of the world’s population, but uses 80% of the world’s opiate supply. (Grover & Gus, 2012)