David Simon's Take On The War in Afghanistan

This week on Fresh Air, Terry interviewed Aram Roston, who'd written an article in The Nation titled "How the US Funds the Taliban".  Apparently US trucking contractors have been paying off the Taliban warlords along the supply routes.  If they don't pay up, their convoys are attacked by snipers and rocket launchers.  As a result, our army is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the enemy its supposed to be fighting.

This sounds like some hardcore David Simon shit.  Let's spend the next few minutes pretending I know anything about this war.



Simon says people don't always serve the interests of the institutions they're supposed to represent.  The question here is who's cheating their employer. 

1)  Are the contractors cheating the US military?  No.  The article says its "an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting."  The military has known for awhile what the contractors are doing, yet they keep paying them, so you can't say they're being cheated.

"Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

2)  Are the contractors cheating the US taxpayers?  No.  Because the military is aware of what the contractors are doing, and has the ability to fire them, the military bears the ultimate moral responsibility for the contractors actions.  Seriously, you expect the contractors to be money grubbers, so if they're grubbing for money, you can hardly call it a betrayal. 

3)  Are individual officers in the US military cheating the US taxpayers?  Yes. 

"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."

At a bare minimum, that corrupt asshole overpaid the contractors by at least $20k. You can guess that its probably a lot more, the contractor has to be getting a premium in exchange for wading in shit.

4)   Are the local Taliban warlords cheating the greater Taliban war effort?  Possibly.  The Taliban is not a monolithic entity, its a loose coalition of hillbilly warlords.  The local Taliban chiefs care more about themselves than the greater cause.  They can take the bribes without caring if it aids the "enemy"; most likely those supplies will be used against some other warlord down the road, not against them.  And after all, if they started attacking convoys, the convoys would find another route and pay someone else. 

In this situation, the US contractors are like drug runners and the local Taliban are like crooked cops.  The crooked cops let the shipments through and say "What do I care?  Its not like this stuff is hurting my people."

5)  Is the US military-industrial-complex, in collusion with the Taliban, cheating the US taxpayers?  Possibly.  War isn't always a zero-sum game;  it can be lose-lose, with the two armies destroying each other, or it can be win-win, with both armies enriching themselves.  For professional warriors, the two sides depend on each other for their livelihood. 

This applies to the drug war, where the police and the drug dealers have a symbiotic relationship. If there were no drug dealers to arrest, the cops would be out of a job.  If there were no cops to arrest them, the kingpins would make less money than an organic farmer. 

There's also a symbiosis between the combatants in Mixed Martial Arts.  People want to see a war, and they pay to see a war, and the bloodier the war, the more money there is to be made in the rematch. You'll never see more man-hugging than after a really brutal fight in the UFC.

Sometimes you can't tell if they're fighting or hugging.

Never forget that after 9-11, people wanted to see a war, and they've paid to see a war.  Some of that money is funding the enemy's effort, but is the Pentagon really cheating if they're just giving us what we wanted?

"Are you not entertained?"