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Bribing the Enemy | Politics

Bribing the Enemy
Jules Witcover

Forty-five years ago, on a very brief reporting stint in South Vietnam, I found out that the American mission there was paying "tolls" to the enemy Viet Cong for safe passage of supply trucks to the U.S. forces in the north of the partitioned country.

Convoys were routinely halted en route by these "toll collectors" and paid off on the theory that the American effort required that arrangement. The discovery was the clincher for me that something was basically very wrong about our involvement in that misguided war.

Now, nearly half a century later in another increasingly misguided war, comes a congressional investigation report that alleges basically the same deal in Afghanistan. It says the U.S. government has been funding "a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials and perhaps others" under the guise of providing U.S. troop security there.

Democratic Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, aired the charge the other day in hearings on the report on the government's Afghan Host Nation Trucking contracts, worth $2.16 billion to eight Afghan, American and other Middle East private firms.

These truckers, the report says, provide the vehicles for more than 70 percent of the total goods and materiel distributed to U.S. troops in the field over hundreds of miles of highway controlled by the assorted warlords, police and private militias, who have hundreds of guards armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

In releasing the report, the chairman said these providers of "protection" appear "to risk undermining the U.S. strategy for achieving its goal" that could "require reconsideration of the overall strategic approach to our mission in Afghanistan."

In the Soviet Union's decade-long war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, the report notes, military troops were used to man and guard truck convoys. In contracting out the huge task to private contractors, it says, U.S. forces have been freed up for counterinsurgency work, but that the Department of Defense has been "largely blind" to the consequences in terms of the widespread protection racket.

Tierney issued the warning on the day Gen. Stanley McChrystal's criticisms of White House war strategists made headlines, leading to his firing the next day by President Obama and replacement by Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq.

The report is certain to intensify pressure from liberal Democrats on President Obama to reiterate his commitment to start taking U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by July of next year. Both Obama and Petraeus, now the top American commander overseeing the war there, have said in recent days that any pullout will be contingent on conditions at the time.

The expensive use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has long been a political thorn in the side of the Obama administration and its Republican predecessor. This has been particularly true in the security area but also in the American forces' reliance on local transportation contracts to move food and other vital supplies.

The report says local warlords have charged local subcontractors as much as $1,000 to $10,000 in monthly bribes to assure safe passage of their trucks through important routes in territories under their control. Some of them are said to be relatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and corruption has been widely reported within his regime.

The warlords, the report says, "thrive on a vacuum of government authority and their interests are in fundamental conflict with U.S. aims to build a strong Afghan government."

When the private truckers have "self-reported to the military that they were being extorted by warlords for protection payments for safe passage and that their payments were funding the insurgency," the report says, "they were largely met with indifference and inaction."

According to the committee's report, the most powerful warlord known as Commander Ruhullah is "prototypical of a new class of warlord in Afghanistan" who "readily admits to bribing governors, police chiefs and army generals." Yet, the report says, no top Defense Department or intelligence agency official "has ever met him."

Here is just another headache awaiting Petraeus in taking over the Afghanistan challenge from McChrystal.

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