"Subcontractors are impossible to trace."...
7/25/11, "U.S. trucking funds end up in Taliban hands," Reuters
"Cash from part of a $2.16 billion U.S. transportation contract in Afghanistan has ended up in the hands of Taliban insurgents, the Pentagon said on Monday.
The disclosure is another example of the persistent difficulty the U.S. military has in keeping its massive war funding from reaching the insurgents it is fighting in the unpopular, decade-old Afghan war.,
The United States is spending more than $6 billion a month in the conflict.
Pentagon officials have repeatedly warned of the need to tighten controls on U.S. contracts and last year announced the creation of a task force to crack down on misuse of funds by contractors, some of whom pay Taliban protection money.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said the discovery of the siphoning of funds from the trucking contract was part of that previously announced effort. He said the U.S. military's Central Command, which oversees the Afghan war,
aimed to sign a new trucking contract in September.
"Central Command's contracting command is working on a new Afghan trucking contract to ensure greater transparency into subcontractors," Lapan told reporters.
The details from the internal study by NATO forces in Afghanistan were first reported by the Washington Post.
- in the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq."
9/19/10, "U.S. contractor accused of fraud still winning big Afghan projects," McClatchy, Marisa Taylor and Warren P. Stroebel
US under great "political pressure to pump billions into Afghanistan," 'subcontractors are impossible to trace.' Louis Berger Co. was a big democrat donor.
- (Above article won a 2011 Nat. Press Club award).
9/27/2009, "Insurgents play a perilous mountain game," The Age.com.au (Australia) by Paul McGeough and David Brill
"Deals in which the Taliban top up their coffers by
- demanding as much as 30 per cent of the value of a contract as protection money are rife.
As project manager for the US contractor Louis Berger Group, Mr Yahn is aware of the Taliban pressure on his local contractors - their staff get kidnapped and their vehicles burnt, they are harassed and threatened, and many of their workers fear for their lives....
The Taliban rules insist on maximum local employment and, among other things, that
It is easy to be shocked by all this. But Mr Yahn says he has seen it all before - in another place, at another time.
- "You do construction work in New York City and you'll find the same thing, just different labels - there, the factions are politicians, the Mafia and labour unions. In New York, Boston, on the Baltimore docks, there's a lot of this stuff at work," he says.
"They're not all bad," he says of the Taliban, drawing a parallel with the
"They have their beliefs and maybe they don't want to send their children to school, but if they're not disrupting my project, they are moderate Talibs.""...
via American Thinker
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