Your tax dollars at work: With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire

[unhappycamper]

A security post on the road controlled by Matiullah Khan in southern Afghanistan. He leads a private army that earns millions of dollars guarding NATO convoys.


With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: June 5, 2010

TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan — The most powerful man in this arid stretch of southern Afghanistan is not the provincial governor, nor the police chief, nor even the commander of the Afghan Army.

It is Matiullah Khan, the head of a private army that earns millions of dollars guarding NATO supply convoys and fights Taliban insurgents alongside American Special Forces.

In little more than two years, Mr. Matiullah, an illiterate former highway patrol commander, has grown stronger than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals say, like appointing public employees and doling out government largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him, he has either rebuffed them or had them removed.

“Oruzgan used to be the worst place in Afghanistan, and now it’s the safest,” Mr. Matiullah said in an interview in his compound here, where supplicants gather each day to pay homage and seek money and help. “What should we do? The officials are cowards and thieves.”

Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster — and sometimes even supplant — ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.

[charlesg]

1. Why are we even near that worthless hellhole

[burnsei sensei]

2. The informal authority of warlords,

chaotic and arbitrary as it is, has nothing in common with the rule of law.
We should leave the disorderly place where law is rejected in favor of a master's whim over the enslaved.

[madrchsod]

3. obama should watch the real story of charlie wilson`s war

to bad charlie died this year.

[Mari333]

4. knr to counteract the chickenhawks unrec team

[jazzelle]

5. Disgusting

n/t

[truedelphi]

6. He sounds pretty organized. Maybe he has a relative

Equally organized to get the "booming" equipment teams organized on the Gulf.

[mdmc]

7. ..