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How the US Funds the Taliban

By Aram Roston

This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

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. (more…)

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - In a remarkable parallel with a turning point in the Vietnam War 44 years ago, United States President Barack Obama will preside over a series of meetings in the coming weeks that will determine whether the US will proceed with an escalation of the Afghanistan war or adjust its
strategy and reduce the US military commitment there.

The meetings will take place in the context of a request from General Stanley A McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, for 40,000 additional troops, which reached Washington over the weekend. That would bring the total US troop strength to 108,000 - nearly a 60% increase.

Obama has hinted at serious doubts about being drawn more deeply into the war in Afghanistan, and administration officials have signaled that a key
issue is whether the proposed counter-insurgency war can be won.
(more…)

U.S. Afghan Campaign Plan Says Key Groups Back Taliban

By Gareth Porter

The leak of the “initial assessment” of the war in Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in the war, with its blunt warning that “failure to provide adequate resources” is likely to result in “mission failure”, was part of an obvious effort to force the hand of a reluctant President Barack Obama to agree to a significant increase in U.S. troops.

The version of the classified McChrystal assessment published on the Washington Post website Monday has many redactions, indicating that it had been prepared especially for the purpose of leaking it the press.

What may be even more important about McChrystal’s assessment, however, is that it presents a highly discouraging picture of the situation in Afghanistan – and that the Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan to which he had agreed just three weeks earlier was even more pessimistic than his “initial assessment”. (more…)