US Indirectly Paying Protection Money to Taliban
In a report, Congressional investigators have said that the US is indirectly paying huge protection money to Afghan warlords, and potentially to the Taliban, to secure convoys carrying supplies to the US troops in Afghanistan, said media reports.
The system adopted by Pentagon to assign private companies the task of moving supplies in Afghanistan, and leaving it upto them to provide their own security, frees American soldiers to concentrate on counterinsurgency.
However, the report which is to reviewed at a congressional hearing today, says that this system’s unintended consequences undermine US efforts to curtail corruption and build an effective Afghan government, reports said.
“This arrangement has fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others,” Representative John Tierney, chairman of a House of Representatives national security subcommittee, said in a statement.
Tierney, a Democrat, said that the system ‘runs afoul’ of the Defense Department’s own rules and may be undermining the US strategic effort in Afghanistan, said reports.
The report, which is prepared by the subcommittee’s Democratic staff, called protection payments ‘a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban’, citing numerous documents, incidents reports and emails that refer to attempts at Taliban extortion along the road, reports said.
Congressional investigators began looking into the Defense Department’s $2.16 billion Host Nation Trucking (HNT) contract in November 2009.
The contract covers 70 percent of the food, fuel, ammunition and other supply distributions to US troops in Afghanistan.
“HNT contractors and trucking subcontractors in Afghanistan pay tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for ‘protection’ for HNT supply convoys to support US troops,” the report said.
“The HNT contractors frequently referred to such payments as ‘extortion’, ‘bribes’, ‘special security’, and/or ‘protection payments’,” the document said.
(Based on internet reports)
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