Or is the right acronym SNAFU? I’ll let you decide after you read this:
Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
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. And it 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.
Maybe the right phrase is Catch 22? No wonder Obama doesn’t like the options presented to him by his military advisers. More troops = more private contractors = more fraud = more money to Taliban = more dead troops and Afghan civilians. Which would then require a further escalation, because why stop this insane circus ride we’re on? Then again, maybe if we just went away and stopped paying all these crooks, rogues and death merchants and focus on simply fixing up our our own house everyone would be better off.
Certainly things couldn’t get worse. Besides, then Blackwater (excuse me, Xe) could be hired by all the warlords and drug lords and crooks Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan to “fight for their freedoms” and we, the people of America, could stop funding a right wing private mercenary army with US taxpayer dollars that no sane person would ever have thought possible just fifty years ago.
