"The United States (taxpayer) is spending more than $6 billion a month in the conflict."...(Afghanistan)
8/19/11, "The Secret Alliance," New Republic, Vanessa M. Gezari, "A strange conspiracy theory takes hold in Afghanistan"
"I remember the first time an Afghan told me that the United States and the Taliban were working together. It was February 2010, and I was in Zormat, an old trading town in the lap of snow-covered mountains, between Kabul and the Pakistani border. Zormat is dominated by a prosperous bazaar, where shelves stocked with Indian wedding bangles, Pakistani fruit juice, British potato chips, and Nair depilatory cream hint at the survival of ancient smuggling routes and Afghans’ increasingly cosmopolitan tastes.
At a shura, I met Hajji Eid Mohammad Youdo, a respected tribal elder with a thick graying beard. Youdo had been a mujahedin leader and an enemy of the Taliban. After the U.S. invasion, one of his friends was arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay, and Youdo discovered that he, too, was on the U.S. capture list. He hid in the mountains and ultimately made his way to Kabul, where, he told me, he got then-American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to write out a guarantee of his innocence. Youdo was, to say the least, frustrated that he had somehow managed to end up being hunted by both sides. “There are times when I think the U.S. and the Taliban are working together,” he said."... (subscription for remainder of article)
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8/19/11, "US troops may stay in Afghanistan until 2024," UK Telegraph, Ben Farmer, Kabul
8/17/11, "$360M lost to insurgents, criminals in Afghanistan," AP, Reichmann and Lardner
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"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."...
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The Taliban has never stopped being in charge and taking money for everything that goes on in Afghanistan. Since it's not a war, merely a bunch of business deals, US cronies make money along with warlords, pedophiles and others across the middle east. Both Bush and Obama camps have declared it a situation with no end in sight. Plenty of Republicans have a knee jerk reaction to this such as, "Yeah, however long it takes, God Bless America." So they buy it, instead of realizing it's a giant crime, killing and maiming Americans, ripping the life out of its middle class. A few deals like this for a decade or more would kill any nation. Our government is an openly criminal operation. It is as plain as day. ed.
9/27/2009, "Insurgents play a perilous mountain game," TheAge.com.au (Australia), by Paul McGeough and David Brill
"Everyone, even the Taliban, gets a slice of the action when it comes to building roads in Afghanistan....
- Winks, nods and timely backhanders make the insurgents a key, albeit unofficial, party when big money is divided.
It is effectively the Taliban who decide which local contractors will work on a project - either by setting a level of protection money that the contractor can afford to pay, or
The Taliban also keep an eye on local individuals who get work on the project -
- especially those doing the all-important security jobs."...
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