The US military spent $14000 Billion during two decades of war in Afghanistan and the Middle East, enriching arm manufacturers, dealers and contractors.which shows large scale corruption and patronisation of some particular loyals.
A detailed, full-page report in The Wall Street Journal shows that since Sept 11, 2001, US military outsourcing pushed up Pentagon spending to $14 trillion. One-third to half of that sum went to contractors.
The report includes numerous examples of how American tax-payers’ money was wasted on projects that never came to fruition. On one such project, “the Pentagon spent $6 million on a project that imported nine Italian goats to boost Afghanistan’s cashmere market. The project never reached scale.” Five defence companies — Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co, General Dynamics Corp, Raytheon Technologies Corp and Northrop Grumman Corp — took the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services.
The newspaper collected the data from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, area scholars, legal experts and others who are working on the hidden impact of America’s wars.
The WSJ report also includes some rags-to-riches stories: A young Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline.
A California businessman running a bar in Kyrgyzstan started a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue. Two Army National Guardsmen from Ohio started a small business providing the military with Afghan interpreters. It grew to become one of the US Army’s top contractors, collecting nearly $4 billion in federal contracts.
The Biden administration has now ordered an inquiry to determine how the reliance on battlefield contractors multiplies the war cost.
The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), created to monitor the almost $150 billion spent on rebuilding the country, collected hundreds of reports of waste and fraud. A SIGAR survey released in early 2021 found that, of the $7.8 billion earmarked for projects, only $1.2 billion, or 15 percent, was spent on new roads, hospitals, bridges, and factories. At least $2.4 billion was spent on military planes, police offices, farming programs and other development projects that were abandoned, destroyed or used for other purposes.
The US Agency for International Development gave $270 million to a company to build 1,200 miles of gravel road in Afghanistan. The USAID canceled the project after the company built 100 miles of road in three years of work that left more than 125 people dead in insurgent attacks.
In 2008, the US had 187,900 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the peak of the US deployment, and 203,660 contractor personnel.
When President Barack Obama ordered most US troops to leave Afghanistan at the end of his second term, more than 26,000 contractors were in Afghanistan, compared with 9,800 troops.
By the time President Donald Trump left office four years later, 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, along with 2,500 troops.
More than 3,500 US contractors died in Afghanistan and Iraq and more than 7,000 American service members died during two decades of war.
The contractors often used Afghans to do their work but paid them only a fraction of what they would pay an American or a European employee. Average monthly income for Afghan linguists fell from about $750 in 2012 to $500 in 2021. Some
Afghan linguists working alongside US soldiers in the toughest parts of the country were paid as little as $300 a month.
In January 2010, an Afghan interpreter working for a contracting firm Mission Essential on an Army Special Forces base near Kabul grabbed a gun and killed two US soldiers.
CASUALTIES: Data collected after years of litigation and months of investigation persuaded The New York Times to conclude that civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were much higher than the United States ever acknowledged.
Summing up its efforts to probe the US wars in the greater Middle East region, the newspaper wrote: “The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.” But the documents NYT obtained showed “flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability”.
The newspaper got access to the Pentagon documents about the war through Freedom of Information requests beginning in March 2017 and lawsuits filed against the US Defence Department and the Central Command.
NYT reporters also visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials. The findings, published this week in a two-part report, revealed that the US air war was “deeply flawed” and the number of civilian deaths had been “drastically undercounted”, by at least several hundreds, NYT reported.
The document contradicted the Pentagon’s claim that the drone technology made it possible to destroy a part of a house filled with enemy fighters while leaving the rest of the structure standing. The NYT report revealed that over a five-year period, US forces executed more than 50,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, with much less than the advertised precision.
Noting that before launching airstrikes the military must navigate elaborate protocols to estimate and minimise civilian deaths, the report acknowledged that often available intelligence “can mislead, fall short, or at times lead to disastrous errors”.
The newspaper pointed out that sometimes videos shot from the air did not show people in buildings, under foliage or under tarpaulins or aluminum covers. Besides, “available data can be misinterpreted, as when people running to a fresh bombing site are assumed to be militants, not would-be rescuers”, the report added.
“Sometimes men on motorcycles moving ‘in formation’, displaying the ‘signature’ of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles,” the report observed.
NYT cited three specific reports to prove this point. One such case was a July 19, 2016 bombing by US special forces of three presumed Islamic State militant group’s staging areas in northern Syria. Initial reports were of 85 fighters killed. Instead, the dead were 120 farmers and other villagers.
Another example was a November 2015 attack in Ramadi, Iraq, caused by a man seen dragging “an unknown heavy object” into an Islamic State position. The “object”, a review found, was a child, who died in the strike.