US defeat tied to Afghan war becoming business

KABUL (Pajhwok): US military contractors made fortunes as Washington outpoured money for the Afghan conflict, a media report said on Monday.

The Department of Defense spent 14 trillion dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

According to the newspaper, a California businessman running a bar in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan launched a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue.

An Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline.

Hailing from Ohio, two Army National Guardsmen initiated a small business providing the military with Afghan interpreters that grew into one of the army’s top contractors. It amassed nearly $4 billion in federal contracts.

The Pentagon spent six million dollars on a project seeking to import nine Italian goats to fuel the Afghan cashmere market. The project, however, failed to reach scale.

Meanwhile, political analysts tied the US defeat in Afghanistan was to the war morphing into a business.

“One of the main things that caused the collapse of the Afghan government and the US defeat in Afghanistan was the war becoming a business,” remarked one analyst Muqadam Ameen.

Sadeq Hameedzui, another  analyst, was quoted as saying: “The corruption existed at a high-level, even the salaries of the (Afghan) security forces were being embezzled.”

Christopher Miller, the Trump administration’s acting defense secretary, insisted a lot had to be outsourced to contractors while fighting a war with an all-volunteer military smaller than in past conflicts and without a draft.

In reaction to the WSJ report, the Islamic Emirate said despite pouring a a lot of money into Afghanistan, the country had not been reconstructed.

PAN Monitor/mud

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