Aram Roston’s article How the US Funds the Taliban for The Nation illustrates how the millions of dollars the US is spending in Afghanistan to ensure its supply convoys get through is ending up in the pockets of the Taliban.

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.

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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. 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, 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, The Nation.

So just to labour the point – on the one hand the Taliban are receiving money not to shoot US supply trucks and on the other the Taliban they are killing US soldiers – what on earth is the benefit of our occupation of Afghanistan we are doing nothing more than inflaming the situation – if our troops weren’t there than we wouldn’t need to pay the Taliban vast sums to supply them – We won’t get anywhere if we continue this bizarre state of affairs. And what does Warlord, Taliban or Mujahedeen leader protection money say about how democracy works – badly. Why are we surprised that President Hamid Karzai’s government is corrupt.