US Paying Afghan Taliban Millions for Protection

According to a story in the UK Guardian the US military is paying the Afghan Taliban tens of millions of dollars each year to protect it’s truck conveys which are the lifelines for American bases and troops in the country.

When will the US government and military ever learn? When you don’t understand the culture, the tribal relationships, the language, or even the type of war that you are fighting your chances for success are not good. In fact they are zero. The poor American taxpayer is paying huge sums for both sides of the war effort. We are being taken for fools and suckers.

It seems that there is a web of civilian trucking companies receiving millions in payments to transport supplies and to defend trucking conveys. Guess what? The companies that receive the US Department of Defense shipping contracts and contracts to protect the trucking conveys are allied with family members or cronies of high level officials in the Hamid Karzai government including President Karzai’s family. It’s even worse than that. The ties run straight to the Taliban.

These “trucking” companies then pay off warlords and the Taliban to “protect” the conveys from attack. So the US is funding a significant amount of the Taliban war effort against the US. The Taliban must think that Americans are the stupidest people on the face of this earth.

I lived in Pakistan not long after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan so I have some understanding of the wide spread corruption and tight family ties in that part of the world. If you are unwilling to pay for certain services you will not get the service and bad things will happen to you. Everyone is trying to get a cut of your money, especially if you are an American. One example I ran into in Lahore was with telephone service.

Every month or two a telephone company employees would call the office and ask about our telephone service. “Is it working properly” he would ask. At the time of his call we would say “yes, fine, thank you”. Within a few minutes all of our lines would go dead. It didn’t take us too long to figure out that this was the telephone company linemen’s way of reminding us that they controlled the telephone line pairs at the local office and that to get any service at all a small under the table payment had to be made. We paid as we needed the telephones. What would you do?

I’m sure that this type of extortion demand is common and not well received by the US military in Afghanistan. But as an Army officer says in the Guardian article “it is what it is.” Either you pay or bad things will happen to you.

I really wonder how much President Obama and his “dream team” understand about life in that part of the world? I Lived in Lahore, Pakistan for 30 months in the early 90′s. That doesn’t make me an expert in the affairs of the region but I expect I know more about how things work than most decision makers in Washington, D.C.

I was one of a handful of American businessmen living full time in Pakistan at the time. I worked as a financial consultant for a powerful Pakistani family so through their introductions had high level government and banking industry contacts in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad.

I can tell you from personal experience that as a foreigner without the right contacts, introductions, and experience gained by living in the local economy you will be lost. Fortunately, I was working for a strong man with his own little army that commanded both respect and fear so enjoyed an umbrella of protection. The kind of protection that the US is paying the Taliban dearly for in Afghanistan in order to move truck conveys to American bases.

The way that America is being played by the many complicated factions in Afghanistan assures that the American effort will prove to be futile. Our leaders seem to just not know what they are up against. We are being played by the Karzai crowd as well as by the warlords, even the Taliban have joined in. American funds and ignorance have made wealthy men out of those with connections and ambition. I’m sure they will welcome an Obama surge as it will expand their profits even more.

Afghanistan will bleed America dry. My advice to Obama is simple. Don’t do it. Adding more troops to Afghanistan would be a horribly expensive blunder. The more troops the more supplies and truck conveys will be required to support those troops. That means even more funding for the Taliban protection racket. The more we surge the better funded the Taliban become. It is a fatal catch 22 loop that only a fool would get involved with.

Is there anyone in Washington who is listening? Can any rational person really believe that the Taliban pose a serious military threat to the US? Yes, I know we are told that if we pull out of Afghanistan Al-Qaeda will regroup and plot once again to attack the US mainland. Really, it is now believed that the planning for the 9/11 attack was completed more from Al-Qaeda cells in Frankfurt , Germany and South Florida, USA than from Afghanistan. What we should fear is spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fight a war we can’t win in one of the most hostile environments on earth.

What we are now doing further destabilizes the Af-Pak region and makes the region and the world less safe. It seems to me that paying our enemies for protection is nothing but bizarre and makes the Taliban all the stronger. If we don’t have the manpower to defend our own conveys we should face up to a few bitter facts and save our treasure and our troops lives.

Can anyone in Washington give a valid reason for fighting the war in Afghanistan other than the US had hoped to run an oil pipeline through it some day? Don’t give me this freedom and democracy crap. That doesn’t play too well when you are supporting a totally corrupt government elected with votes from rigged, stuffed ballot boxes.