In 2004, Osama bin Laden explained his plan for Afghanistan: “All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.” He concluded: “So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. ”
Bin Laden has been dead for a year, but his strategy continues to work in Afghanistan. Well over a decade after he first formulated his economic “bleed until bankrupt” strategy, the United States continues to spend hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars in Afghanistan on generally fruitless counterinsurgency operations, which do little but benefit ambitious American careerists, U.S. private corporations and corrupt Afghan kleptocrats — a malign network of graft and corruption that now includes the Taliban.
When I was embedded with U.S. troops in the war-zones of eastern Afghanistan, the soldiers told me the U.S. government was wasting tens of billions of dollars each year on scandalously mismanaged development and logistics contracts. We’d be hunkered down on embattled forward operating bases and the soldiers would compare the U.S.-backed Afghan government to the Mafia. Everybody was on the take, they said, including the insurgents. “We’re funding both sides of this war,” the soldiers would wryly say.
Among the tales from the front lines: U.S.-funded “Alternative Livelihood” projects — grotesquely expensive counternarcotics programs that ostensibly paid Afghan farmers to not grow opium poppy crops — fatten the accounts of private development companies, corrupt Afghan officials and insurgents. Joel Hafvenstein, a development official, documented the failed counternarcotics program in “Opium Season.” He wrote that after one payday in a Helmand Province village, his Afghan colleague remarked, “You know, I think half of the people we paid today were Taliban.”
A congressional investigation verified that the U.S. military was helping to finance the Taliban. The military gave contracts to provide security for military logistics convoys to well-connected Afghans, who subcontracted to warlords, who then paid off the Taliban. The congressional report concluded: “Protection payments for safe passage are a significant source of funding for the Taliban.”
U.S.-funded development projects, big and small, were perfect conduits for graft and extortion. Security for the Khost-Gardez highway, for example, was subcontracted to a known insurgent leader on the U.S. Special Operations “kill or capture” list. He got $160,000 a month to protect the road from himself. On small development projects, such as wells and irrigation projects, U.S. officers told me the insurgents skim from both the contractors and the villagers paid to do the work.
The graft is so routine that there are reportedly Taliban business offices in Kabul and Kandahar where U.S.-funded contractors negotiate with Taliban engineers to determine their take.
America’s distracted aid to the enemy goes beyond graft. For example, the U.S. spent over $100 million rebuilding the Kajaki Dam in southern Afghanistan after it was bombed in the 2001 invasion. As power lines again snaked across southern Afghanistan, American press officers touted Kajaki as a glittering centerpiece of American aid. But in 2010, researchers discovered that over half the electricity was going to areas controlled by the Taliban. “The more electricity there is,” an Afghan tribal affairs officer said, “the more money the Taliban make.”
U.S. soldiers, development officials and others on the ground in Afghanistan have told me the corrupt system is so entrenched that the only option is to withdraw. “It’s the perfect war,” one U.S. intelligence officer sarcastically told me. “Everyone is making money.” It’s working out for everyone but the Afghan people, the U.S. soldiers on the ground and the American public.
That would have made Osama smile.
Douglas Wissing, a journalist who embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, is the author of Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban (Prometheus, 2012).
