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Taliban fighters prepare to hand their weapons over to Afghan authorities on 31 July 2011. AP Photo/Rahmat Gul/PA
Taliban

Taliban took around $360m from US funds - report

The US military estimates that Taliban militants and associates took hundreds of millions from US taxpayer funds through “reverse money-laundering”.

AFTER EXAMINING hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan, the US military estimates $360 million in US tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals and power brokers with ties to both.

Power brokers — a term widely used in Afghanistan — refers to Afghans who leverage their political and business connections to advance their own interests.

The losses underscore the challenges the US and its international partners face in overcoming corruption in Afghanistan. A central part of the Obama administration’s strategy has been to award US-financed contracts to Afghan businesses to help improve quality of life and stoke the country’s economy.

But until a special task force assembled by Gen David Petraeus began its investigation last year, the coalition had little insight into the connections many Afghan companies and their vast network of subcontractors had with insurgents and criminals — groups military officials call “malign actors.”

In a murky process known as “reverse money laundering,” payments from the US pass through companies hired by the military for transportation, construction, power projects, fuel and other services to businesses and individuals with ties to the insurgency or criminal networks, according to interviews and task force documents obtained by the AP.

“Funds begin as clean monies,” according to one document, then “either through direct payments or through the flow of funds in the subcontractor network, the monies become tainted.”

The conclusions by Task Force 2010 represent the most definitive assessment of how US military spending and aid to Afghanistan has been diverted to the enemy or stolen. Only a small percentage of the $360 million has been garnered by the Taliban and insurgent groups, said a senior US military official in Kabul. The bulk of the money was lost to profiteering, bribery and extortion by criminals and power brokers, said the official, who declined to provide a specific breakdown.

The official requested anonymity to discuss the task force’s ongoing investigation into the movement of US contract money in Afghanistan. The documents obtained by the Associated Press were prepared earlier this year and provide an overview of the task force’s work.

Overall, the $360 million represents a fraction of the $31 billion in active US contracts that the task force reviewed. But insurgents rely on crude weaponry and require little money to operate. And the illicit gains buttress what the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, referred to in a June report as a “nexus between criminal enterprises, insurgent networks and corrupt political elites” in Afghanistan.

More than half the losses flowed through a large transportation contract called Host Nation Trucking, the official said. Eight companies served as prime contractors and hired a web of nearly three dozen subcontractors for vehicles and convoy security to ship huge amounts of food, water, fuel and ammunition to American troops stationed at bases across Afghanistan.

The US Defence Department announced Monday that it had selected 20 separate contractors for a new transportation contract potentially worth $983.5 million to replace Host Nation Trucking.

Officials said the new arrangement will reduce the reliance on subcontractors and diminish the risk of money being lost. Under the new National Afghan Trucking Services contract, the military will be able to choose from a deeper pool of companies competing against one another to offer the best price to move supplies.

The new arrangement also gives the US more flexibility in determining whether security is needed for supply convoys and who should provide it, according to a description of the contract.

The Pentagon did not provide the names of the 20 companies picked due to worries that larger contractors who weren’t selected might try to coerce them into a takeover, the senior defence official said. None of the eight prime contractors affiliated with the Host Nation Trucking contract are part of the new arrangement, the official added.

HEB International Logistics of Dubai, a Host Nation Trucking prime contractor, “made payments directly to malign actors,” one of the task force documents reads. In 2009 and 2010, an HEB subcontractor identified in the document only as “Rohullah” received $1.7 million in payments.

A congressional report issued last year said Rohullah — whose name is spelled Ruhallah in that report — is a warlord who controlled the convoy security business along the highway between Kabul and Kandahar, the two largest cities in Afghanistan.

David Zimmerman, an HEB manager in Kabul, said the company would have no comment until it is able to review the task force’s findings.

Author
Associated Foreign Press
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