Cashing In on the Decision to Keep U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

[Octafish]

DynCorp, which has made unaudited billions in profit in Afghanistan, is helping train and stuff, construction like, yeah.



Cashing In on the Decision to Keep U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

Why Obama dropping his promise to end America's longest war is going to give contractors billions of dollars.

by Kate Brannen
ForeignPolicy.com, Oct. 30, 2015

In August, the nation’s top military officer came to President Barack Obama and bluntly asked him to break a promise to bring the last American troops home from Afghanistan by the time the president left office.

Obama had been repeating the vow for years, but Gen. Martin Dempsey, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States needed to keep at least 5,000 troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016 to ensure that the Islamic State didn’t take root there and to prevent al Qaeda from moving back into the country. In July, the Pentagon discovered that the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks had been running a pair of large training camps in southern Afghanistan, including one that covered nearly 30 square miles.

The president, anxious to prevent Afghanistan from turning into another Iraq, told Dempsey that he was willing to consider the troop request. First, though, he wanted the general to tell him the “no kidding” cost of keeping U.S. forces there — including what the Pentagon would pay the thousands of contractors needed to house, feed, and support U.S. military personnel. Wisened after years of overseeing two wars, Obama didn’t want to let the additional cost of contractors escape him, particularly since the military rarely includes it in its proposals. The exchange was first reported by the Washington Post. The White House declined to comment on the president’s decision-making.

That Obama even factored “in contracting costs marks an evolution in the way leaders think,” said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. “Just 10 to 15 years ago, contracting costs came as an afterthought,” he said. “Now they are part of strategic planning. This makes sense, since the majority of ground personnel are contracted.”

This is certainly true in Afghanistan, where there are 30,000 contractors working for the Defense Department, according to the latest Pentagon tally. Of these, roughly 10,000 are U.S. citizens. The rest are local or third-country nationals from states like Nepal. The Pentagon figures don’t include the thousands of other contractors working for the State Department, USAID, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

CONTINUED...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/30/cashing-in-on-the-decision-to-keep-u-s-troops-in-afghanistan/

PS: Weird how there's never money to rebuild the American economy, but there's plenty of money for those waging wars without end in Afghanistan and around the world.

[antigop]

1. Disgusting. nt

[Octafish]

5. KA-CHING: The Company Getting Rich Off the ISIS War

KA-CHING: The Company Getting Rich Off the ISIS War

For the Middle East, the growth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been a catastrophe.
For one American firm, it’s been a gold mine.

by Kate Brannen
08.02.15

The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

But that hasn’t kept defense contractors from doing rather well amidst the fighting. Lockheed Martin has received orders for thousands of more Hellfire missiles. AM General is busy supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvee vehicles, while General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition.

SOS International, a family-owned business whose corporate headquarters are in New York City, is one of the biggest players on the ground in Iraq, employing the most Americans in the country after the U.S. Embassy. On the company’s board of advisors: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—considered to be one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq—and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.

The company, which goes by “SOSi,” says on its website that the contracts it’s been awarded for work in Iraq in 2015 have a total value of more than $400 million. They include a $40 million contract to provide everything from meals to perimeter security to emergency fire and medical services at Iraq’s Besmaya Compound, one of the sites where U.S. troops are training Iraqi soldiers. The Army awarded SOSi a separate $100 million contract in late June for similar services at Camp Taji. The Pentagon expects that contract to last through June 2018.

A year after U.S. airstrikes began targeting the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, there are 3,500 U.S. troops deployed there, training and advising Iraqi troops. But a number that is not discussed is the growing number of contractors required to support these operations. According to the U.S. military, there are 6,300 contractors working in Iraq today, supporting U.S. operations. Separately, the State Department is seeking janitorial services, drivers, linguists, and security contractors to work at its Iraqi facilities.

While these numbers pale in comparison to the more than 163,000 working in Iraq at the peak of the Iraq War, they are steadily growing. And with the fight against ISIS expected to take several years, it also represents a growing opportunity for defense, security, and logistics contractors, especially as work in Afghanistan begins to dry up.

“It allows us to maintain the façade of no boots on the ground while at the same time growing our footprint,” said Laura Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University whose recent work has focused on regulating private military contractors.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/02/the-company-getting-rich-off-of-the-isis-war.html

Has Corporate Owned News broadcast this story: REGULATING Defense Contractors?

If they did, We the People might get angry enough to want to hold someone to account. As Corporate McPravda doesn't, it's clear they are part of the problem, PROTECTING the traitors and warmongers who lied America into wars without end for profits without cease.

[smirkymonkey]

2. Ugh! How depressing.

K&R.

[Octafish]

6. The American Government Is Funding Human Trafficking

DynCorp and others are accused "Human Trafficking," which must be a nicer way of saying "using people for the most inhumane purposes imaginable."

The American Government Is Funding Human Trafficking

The ugly business of how military contractors find their workers

by Jessica Schulberg
The New Republic, Nov. 14, 2014

In September 2012, President Obama issued an executive order asserting a zero tolerance policy for government contractors who violated human trafficking laws. He specifically targeted recruitment fees that workers in southeast Asia frequently pay for work with military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is currently investigating Dyncorp, Fluor, and their subcontractor Ecolog after discovering that thousands of their employees paid such fees to secure jobs in Afghanistan.

Since 2007, the Army has awarded Dyncorp and Fluor a combined $16.8 billion to run a contract called the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). The contractors oversee everything from laundry, to food preparation, to construction on military bases throughout Afghanistan. These companies, in turn, have relied on the subcontractor Ecolog to hire workers in Dubai, many of whom came from south Asia after paying a recruiter in their home country several thousand dollars.

Recruitment fees are the most common, but least punished form of human trafficking. “We protect women and children, but these are dark-skinned men,” says Sam McCahon, an attorney based in India. “The fact is 80 percent of human trafficking is for labor—only 20 percent is sex trafficking.” It is not surprising that labor trafficking is seen as a lesser evil than sex trafficking. The argument often goes: Is it really so bad to charge a worker in India a one-time fee in exchange for a job overseas with higher wages than he could find in his own country? But recruitment fees essentially create a system of indentured servitude. Workers usually take out high-interest loans in their home country to pay the fee, and the payments can trap them in their new jobs. Recruiters often mislead workers about their salary and the location of their job—promises of high-paying jobs in Jordanian hotels turn into custodial positions on U.S. military bases in warzones.

Obama’s executive order was not the first attempt to fix this. The 2009 rulebook for contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan forbade recruitment fees, and three years earlier, a ban on recruitment fees was incorporated into the U.S. legal code. In fact, the practice has been illegal since the Anti-Kickback Act of 1986. But none of the existing legislation has worked.

“The government says it has a zero tolerance policy, and yet there’s fairly credible allegations that these guys have been involved in trafficking and they continue to win government contracts,” says Steven Watt, a human rights attorney at the ACLU. “It’s pretty far from a zero tolerance policy.”

McCahon is more blunt: “This is the only situation in which the government uses U.S. tax dollars to fund human trafficking,” he says. “It’s not that we’re idly sitting by; we’re actively paying for it. It’s like the U.S. government is the John, telling the pimp, ‘We need bodies here, but we aren’t going to look at how you got them, or if they are even getting paid.’”

CONTINUED...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120269/contractors-violate-us-zero-tolerance-policy-human-trafficking

Bosnia '99 is a particularly sore point for DynCorp, where the company's employees were alleged to have been involved in the sex trade not that there isn't anything wrong with that.

[smirkymonkey]

12. This is outrageous...

“This is the only situation in which the government uses U.S. tax dollars to fund human trafficking,” he says. “It’s not that we’re idly sitting by; we’re actively paying for it. It’s like the U.S. government is the John, telling the pimp, ‘We need bodies here, but we aren’t going to look at how you got them, or if they are even getting paid.’”

If only people knew what was really going on over there, but no they are more worried about their tax dollars going to pay for food for hungry children and medical care for poor people than they are about funding human trafficking overseas to the tune of billions.

[Skittles]

3. well isn't that special

[Octafish]

8. Psst, Buddy! Wanna a great deal on Afghan's only natural gas pumping station?

Lots of questions about DOD's $43 million gas station in Afghanistan

The compressed natural gas station was supposed to help Afghanistan transition of oil imports by building natural gas demand. But the Defense Department didn’t study whether this was actually feasible, according to a government watchdog.

By Lonnie Shekhtman, Staff
Christian Science Monitor, NOVEMBER 3, 2015

In a report to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, a federal inspector can’t contain his astonishment over an “ill-conceived” compressed natural gas station built by the US Department of Defense in Afghanistan for $43 million of US taxpayers' money – 140 times more than it should have cost.

Such a station would have cost a maximum of $500,000 in neighboring Pakistan, wrote John F. Sopko, of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a group created by Congress in 2008 to monitor Afghanistan reconstruction projects and activities.

“Even considering security costs associated with construction and operation in Afghanistan, this level of expenditure appears gratuitous and extreme,” Mr. Sopko wrote to Secretary Carter in his October report.

[font color="green"]What’s more, writes Sopko, the DOD’s task force responsible for building the gas station has refused to cooperate in the investigation, claiming that since the project ended in spring, the DOD can’t find anyone to answer Mr. Sopko’s questions.[/font color]

“Frankly, I find it both shocking and incredible that DOD asserts that it no longer has any knowledge about TFBSO (Task Force for Stability and Business Operations), an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and only shut down a little over six months ago,” Sopko wrote in the report.

CONTINUED...

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2015/1103/Lots-of-questions-about-DOD-s-43-million-gas-station-in-Afghanistan

Har har. Can't even find somebody at the Pentagon to take his phone call. Loooooooser!



I might not co-operate, either, if my future employment prospects depended on keeping my wug shut. Look what happened to Kenny Boy's ENRON vice chairman, Cliff Baxter. They wanted to put a gas pipeline across Afghanistan all the way to Pakistan so they could ship it to their gas energy plant in India.

Har har it is to laugh.

[n2doc]

4. Cuz We gotta Win!

[Octafish]

11. They were so worried about public protest, they outlawed showing the coffins on tee vee.

This mural at MOCA in LA lasted about a day.



A parable...

Your Military Industrial Complex at Work

On Dec. 8, 1992, after George Herbert Walker Bush was defeated at the polls by Bill Clinton with an assist from Ross Perot, he ordered the U.S. military into Somalia. Operation RESTORE HOPE was sold at the time as a "Humanitarian Mission," a phrase rarely used in conjunction with anything the guy did as president, as vice-president, as a Congressman from Texas or in his time at CIA for anyone other than his cronies and partners in crime.

A history lesson...

What Poppy Bush's last new mission in Somalia did accomplish was to leave a crisis -- a huge dog turd in a burning bag of a crisis -- on the welcome mat at the front door of the White House for incoming President Bill Clinton. After that, things got off on the "right foot," from peace and prosperity for all to healthcare for the public and continued welfare for the wealthy. And the humanitarian mission? It quickly devolved into a fiasco of the first order, culminating in the disaster seared into the public consciousness as "Black Hawk Down."

Oh. Not that it's on tee vee or anything where millions might see it, but we're still in Somalia.

PS: Thank you for the Singer cartoon, n2doc. That says it all about why so few say anything anymore.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. They're still trying to figure out a way to pretend we didn't lose another war.

[Octafish]

13. Mission Impossible: Afghanistan

by VIJAY PRASHAD
CounterPunch, Oct. 30, 2015

On October 15, United States President Barack Obama stepped away from his campaign pledge to remove all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan. He said that the nearly 10,000 troops that were now in the country would remain and that by the end of the year they would be reduced to half that number. During Obama’s tenure, in other words, U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan. To be fair to Obama, he has cut the U.S. troop presence from 1,00,000 in 2010 to a mere 5,000 at the end of 2015. This is as close to a withdrawal as one might expect from the U.S.

One of the main reasons to retain a military force is that it provides the lever for the U.S. to expand its troops in Afghanistan if necessary. A total withdrawal would give it no standing to increase troop levels without new authorisations from the Afghan government. As it is, these 5,000 troops will provide the basis for an extension as and when the U.S. government wishes. Already the longest war in U.S. history, the Afghan campaign is not to end in the short term. It will extend for at least another few years.

The U.S. has two main strategic goals in Afghanistan—to prevent the return of Al Qaeda and to train the Afghan National Army (ANA). Nothing more is to be expected from the U.S., neither “nation-building” nor an anti-narcotics programme. If these latter form part of the U.S. brief, they only do so marginally. Investment in infrastructure and in social welfare of the population has been minimal. What are colloquially known as the Kabul Kleptocracy and the Poppy Mafia will be untouched by the U.S. presence. In fact, they have established themselves as major players in the very government that the ANA—trained by the U.S.—is pledged to protect.

SNIP...

The Obama administration built on the George Bush administration’s drone programme as the hammer to beat down the mercury. Between 2011 and 2013, the U.S. conducted Operation Haymaker to take out the main Al Qaeda and associated terrorists in northern Pakistan and in southern Afghanistan.

According to documents leaked to The Intercept, this programme killed few real targets and produced more bitterness and anger. Firstly, about nine of every 10 people killed in these strikes were not the intended targets. This was perhaps through poor intelligence. The source that leaked these documents explained that the U.S. designated “military age males” (MAMs) as reasonable targets and designated those hit as “enemy killed in action” (EKIA). Ryan Devereaux, who wrote one of the stories for The Intercept, said that the targets that did get hit in most cases were neither Taliban nor Al Qaeda “but also local forces with no international terrorism ambitions, groups that took up arms against the U.S. after American air strikes brought the war to their doorsteps”. In other words, according to the U.S. government’s own assessment, the drone wars had no positive strategic effect. In fact, they had the opposite—producing the conditions for the creation of more insurgents.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/mission-impossible-afghanistan/

PS: Heartbreaking in every way, Tierra_y_Libertad. Oh, well. When the idea is to wage war without end for profits without cease, then it really is "Mission Accomplished!"

Libertad.

[WillyT]

9. K & R !!!

[antigop]

10. Thanks, Octafish. nt