I knew things in Afghanistan were bad, but this news just makes the reality of our situation in that country all the more bitter.
From The Nation
by Aram Roston
…In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.
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Now we are directly funding the Taliban, wonderful. And reading that Hamad Wardak had connections to the U.S. conservative think tank AEI (American Enterprise Institute) just makes this even worse, I swear that they just work in fanatical religious settings, and no where else. It doesn’t even seem to matter which religion, as the more fanatical branches are all equally insane.
