From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Nov 17 2009 - 18:48:40 EST
How the U.S. Funds the Taliban
By Aram Roston, The Nation
Posted on November 13, 2009, Printed on November 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143898/
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.
Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two
threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who
loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by
which "private security" ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these
ancient trade routes aren't ambushed by insurgents.
A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US
military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL
Holdings. Like the Popals' Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company
in Afghanistan.
What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles,
though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the
young American son of Afghanistan's current defense minister, Gen. Abdul
Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed
Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and
schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown
University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the
neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That
internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI
that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American
conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick.
Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the
firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up
shop in Washington, because of Wardak's connections there. On NCL's
advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA
officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he
was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator
John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as "a legendary former CIA case
officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer." It is not every defense
contracting company that has such an influential adviser.
But the biggest deal that NCL got--the contract that brought it into
Afghanistan's major leagues--was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year
the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six
companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan,
bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across
the country.
At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly
changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing
the coming "surge" and a new doctrine, "Money as a Weapons System," the US
military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other
companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is
not spent: "service members will not get food, water, equipment, and
ammunition they require." Each of the military's six trucking contracts was
bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in
this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and
truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product.
NCL, the firm run by the defense minister's well-connected son, had struck
pure contracting gold.
Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in
Afghanistan. "We supply everything the army needs to survive here," one
American trucking executive told me. "We bring them their toilet paper,
their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles." The epicenter is
Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually
everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army
calls "the Battlespace"--that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry
Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds
of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.
The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the
perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and
Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific
about it: "The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them.
It is Department of Defense money." That is something everyone seems to
agree on.
Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan
American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan,
had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host
Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security
realities quite simply: "You are paying the people in the local areas--some
are warlords, some are politicians in the police force--to move your trucks
through."
Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the
route: "We're basically being extorted. Where you don't pay, you're going
to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay
off who they need to." Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and
sometimes it is low. "Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to
move through an area. It's based on the number of trucks and what you're
carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If
you have dry trucks, they're not going to charge you as much. If you are
carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more."
Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. "If you tell me not to pay these
insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase
exponentially."
Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and
global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US
government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a
result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. "Every warlord has
his security company," is the way one executive explained it to me.
In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated,
although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until
September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed
companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the
defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai's
cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another
relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in
the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the
parliamentary speaker's son, sources say. And so on.
In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations,
is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. One major hauler in
Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in
kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official's
plea agreement in US court in August. AIT is a very well-connected firm: it
is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern
Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief. In an interview, Baba
Jan, a cheerful and charismatic leader, insisted he had nothing to do with
his nephew's corporate enterprise.
But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe
passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat
outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By
definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern
parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don't really protect convoys of
American military goods here, because they simply can't; they need the
Taliban's cooperation.
One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military
supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves
with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for
battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. "They are shooting the drivers from
3,000 feet away with PKMs," a trucking company executive in Kabul told me.
"They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an
up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the
rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that's just a joke. I
carry an AK--and that's just to shoot myself if I have to!"
The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating
collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan
American Army Services points out, "An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled
grenade--you are going to lose!" That said, at least one of the Host Nation
Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents
and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International.
Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it
has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. FHI, like many
other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I've been told by insiders in
the security industry that FHI's convoys are attacked on virtually every
mission.
For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran
American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and
a private security contractor in the field told me, "What we are doing is
paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security
elements is able to deal with the threat." He's an Army veteran with years
of Special Forces experience, and he's not happy about what's being done.
He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more
about who is getting paid off.
"Most escorting is done by the Taliban," an Afghan private security
official told me. He's a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his
finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry.
And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. "Now
the government is so weak," he added, "everyone is paying the Taliban."
To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about.
One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a
trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security
company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south.
Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure
that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed
two armed Taliban vehicles. "Two Taliban is enough," she told me. "One in
the front and one in the back." She shrugged. "You cannot work otherwise.
Otherwise it is not possible."
Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb
Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug
dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the
truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it
as the road to the war--to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to
get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way
through Kandahar.
Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company
officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is
simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road.
Watan's company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel "are
diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the
Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other
group opposed to international support of the democratic process." Whatever
screening methods it uses, Watan's secret weapon to protect American
supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said
to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice.
He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever,
associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters
with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell
me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.
It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had
competition--a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was
killed in an ambush.
So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway.
According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are
hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his
men together, setting them up in 4x4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does
not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief
weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a
fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking
official told me that Ruhullah "charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar.
Just 300 kilometers."
It's hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly--security, extortion or a form
of "insurance." Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the
Taliban? That's impossible to know. As an American private security veteran
familiar with the route said, "He works both sides... whatever is most
profitable. He's the main commander. He's got to be involved with the
Taliban. How much, no one knows."
Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct
knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in
Watan's and Ruhullah's convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per
month for Watan's services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a
$360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense
minister's son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company
owned by President Karzai's cousins, for protection.
Hamed Wardak wouldn't return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA
officer affiliated with the company, wouldn't speak with me either. There's
nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but
disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when
testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands
to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US
policy-makers.
It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking
experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a
contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking
questions. "Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the
son of the minister of defense?" That's what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is
the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the
press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York
Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai
emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan
government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak
had little security or trucking background before his company received
security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. "That's a
questionable business practice," he said. "They shouldn't give it to him.
How come that's not questioned?"
I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed's father, about it.
He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair "Gucci commander"
Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. "I've tried
to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life," the
defense minister said. "This has been something people have tried to use
against me, so it has been painful."
Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced
a rift with his son. "I was against it from the beginning, and that's why
we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to
use my power or influence that he should benefit."
When I told Wardak that his son's company had a US contract worth as much
as $360 million, he did a double take. "This is impossible," he said. "I do
not believe this."
I believed the general when he said he really didn't know what his son was
up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the
next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to
potential insurgents.
Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan's
intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the
American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I'm told are "very
detailed" reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting
from protecting convoys of US supplies.
The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United
States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and
instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard
its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.
The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban's protection is
not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of
the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs
through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies
paying off insurgents? "The American soldier in me is repulsed by it," he
said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. "But I
know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, 'Hey,
don't hassle me.' I don't like it, but it is what it is."
As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan
overall, "We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes
to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent.
Generally it is happening in logistics."
In a statement to The Nation about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks,
the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in
Afghanistan, said that military officials are "aware of allegations that
procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups,
but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is
occurring." He added that, despite oversight, "the relationships between
contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and
others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent."
In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind
eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also
expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that--as
with so much in Afghanistan--the United States doesn't seem to know how to
fix it.
Aram Roston is an Emmy Award-winning investigative producer at NBC News and
the author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life,
Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi (Nation Books), from which this
article is adapted.
© 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143898/