Monday, November 15th, 2010
Stephan: Don't you love it. We can't find enough money to feed ourselves, or build essential infrastructure, but we have billions to just fling at Iraq and Afghanistan for building there. As this and a hundred other stories like it demonstrate most of this money produces nothing, and no one is even quite sure where the money has gone. General Petraeus, beloved by neocons, doesn't seem to have much interest in investigating.
You can be damn sure it is flowing into the pockets of a small group of individuals and corporations, who just get richer by the month. As this investigative report says, 'Most of the U.S. contracting dollars goes to U.S. or multinational contracting giants. Only 22 percent of U.S. development assistance funds reached the local Afghan economy, according to a study by Peace Dividend Trust, a nonprofit working with the U.S. government. The reverse was true for Great Britain, which didn't funnel most of its aid through international companies. As a result, more than 70 percent of British aid reached the Afghan economy..'
Meanwhile one in eight Americans are on food assistance. And nobody, least of all the Obama Administration with its obsession over bi-partisanship, seems to be able to stop the gravy train. Every time I read these stories and look at the pot holes in the roads, I ask myself, when did the American middle class decide to destroy itself?
SHAHRI BUZURG, Afghanistan – For more than a year, Afghan police chief Rajab Mohammed and his men have worked out of a dark, cramped mud home in a remote corner of Afghanistan while waiting in vain for construction workers to finish building the U.S.-funded police station across the street.
With winter fast approaching, some of the men, who’d been sleeping in a dirt courtyard, recently took over the idle construction site and set up cots inside the half-built station after they learned that the U.S. government had fired the Afghan company responsible for the project.
The U.S. is spending billions of dollars to build facilities like the one in Badakhshan for Afghanistan’s expanding national police and new garrisons for its army. The ambitious program is a linchpin of President Barack Obama’s strategy to strengthen Afghan security forces so 100,000 U.S. troops can come home.
However, like much of the wider Afghan reconstruction effort, it’s faltering, according to current and former U.S. officials, Afghan and American contractors, and contract documents.
Dozens of structures across the country either were poorly constructed or never completed at all. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers who were supposed to be living in garrisons by now are still housed in […]
