Warlord cash flow is a positive feedback loop

Follow the Money! Follow the Money! The secret to why we engage in useless, seemingly-counterproductive wars! What is the magic of Privatization? Why is it profitable to convince people to slaughter each other? Follow the Money!

Notice how the Warlords are filling exactly the same niche as Prince's Blackwater Xe, as are a large majority of the Taliban. Mercenaries. Roughly 60% of "our" forces in Afghanistan are now mercenaries.*

IanWelsh.net:

June 22, 2010

by Dave Anderson

The BBC, among many other news agencies, are reporting on a Congressional investigation into Afghan security contractors and the US supply lines. The gist of the story is simple; privatizing convoy protection means pumping massive amounts of money into warlords who have every incentive to inflate the need for their services while also minimizing their risk. That means staging elaborate ‘faux’ ambushes and paying off insurgent groups that are strong enough to overrun convoys that are under their protection.

The document states that trucks carrying food, water, fuel, and ammunition may be supplying up to $4 million (£2.7m) per week to the firms.

A US congressional committee is expected to hear the evidence on the investigation from senior officials at the US Department of Defense later on Tuesday.

‘Vast protection racket’The congressional subcommittee that carried out the investigation says that bribes are paid to the Taliban and virtually every governor, police chief and local military commander whose territory the convoys pass through.

One of the security companies in question is alleged to be owned by two cousins of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The report released late on Monday says the security agreements violate laws on the use of private contractors, as well as US Department of Defense regulations.

The report states that “although the warlords do provide guards and coordinate security, the contractors have little choice but to use them in what amounts to a vast protection racket”.

This is not surprising. Rumbles of this have been making the press for months now. Smart bloggers have been pointing out the logic and incentive structure of warlordism and decentralized armed groups cutting deals for local interests instead of American interests for even longer. The same basic set-up occurred in Iraq as local reconstruction funds were often paid to ‘respectable’ businessmen and tribal elites who then distributed the cash to their supporters as well as to insurgent groups through a bewildering array of kickbacks and sub-contractors to the subcontractors.The anti-government insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan continued to grow as the US poured more money into each respective nation. The crumbs that fell off the US funded gravy train were more than sufficient to arm and sustain fighters who were able to deny the US its maximalist objectives. The more we spend in Afghanistan, the more crumbs we generate, and the more the Taliban and other anti-government and anti-US groups can raise. It is a nasty positive feedback loop that won’t be broken unless the United States, and more importantly Barrack Obama realizes he can take the short term domestic political hit of abandoning maximal goals and embracing a minimal and much cheaper goal set.

That is unlikely due to the revolt of the generals, fear of being called weak, a possibility of a Republican House in 2011, and the shut-down of the only Keynesian spending Blue-Dog Democrats and Republicans will support, military Keynesian spending.

*This from the Washington Post, 12-15-2010:

The CRS study says contractors made up 69 percent of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan last December, a proportion that "apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by the Defense Department in any conflict in the history of the United States." As of September, contractor representation had dropped to 62 percent, as U.S. troop strength increased modestly.

This from Bloomberg.com, 3-10-2009:

Vice President Joe Biden said at least 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are mercenaries who could be persuaded to lay down their arms, stepping up U.S. calls for outreach to “moderate” elements of the insurgency.

An oddball Global Warming Analogy:

More energy retained in the global weather system=more energetic storms, more extremes of hot and cold, draughts and floods.

More money into a war=more graft and corruption, more mercenaries killing other mercenaries, as well as more civilians, breeding more energetic terrorist storms, as well as more extremes of all kinds.

This might require a post of its own...

Rogue Nation Slaughters Innocents at Funeral

Imagine if the nation was North Korea. What would be the US reaction?

Or if Iran were doing it? Neocons and liberals alike would call for an invasion.

After all, collective punishment is a war crime.

But alas. It's only us. So, not a peep out of our representatives.

I'm still waiting for that change you can believe in.


via Truthout:

"Dozens Dead" in US Drone Strike

Tuesday 23 June 2009

by: | Visit article original @ BBC News

Qari Zainuddin, shown here with his bodyguards, was assassinated on Tuesday.
(Photo: Ishtiaq Mahsud / AP)

At least 45 people have died in a missile strike by a US drone aircraft in Pakistan, officials there have said.

The people killed in South Waziristan region had been attending a funeral for others killed in a US drone strike earlier on Tuesday.

Intelligence officials said at least 45 people had been killed and dozens more injured in the later strike, when two missiles were fired.

But a local official told BBC News the death toll was more than 50.

The region is a stronghold of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

The Crash of '09—and the Collapse of '10

The word from Pakistan...

By Humayun Gauhar

Letters To My Son…

My dear Muhammad Ali -

I told you that it’s a funny world getting funnier. Many American analysts are saying that America’s real economic collapse could come by the end of this year. “It will come to known as The Crash of 09,” they say. Others, especially a Russian political analyst, are predicting its physical collapse too. There’s no doubt that the country is up the dirtiest of imaginable creeks without a paddle. But what’s amazing is that America remains mired in stunning denial, continuing to make bad situations worse with useless bailout plans and messing around with the world instead of facing up to the reality that its time as a hyper-power is up, that’s its economic system has failed and that its only recourse is to end its adversarial doctrine and get out of its lost wars as painlessly and honorably as possible. There’s no point in going on flogging dead horses. The only sensible thing that survival demands is to craft a new moral economic and financial system and a moral foreign policy.

The deep recession verging on depression that we have seen so far was caused by the crash in the US housing market. Since other developed industrialized nations, especially of Europe, were aping the shenanigans of unchecked and poorly regulated American bankers and financiers, the collapse of their markets, banks and economies followed like dominoes. Iceland was the first to officially declare bankruptcy. Its GDP is only about $6.5 billion but its banks had lent something like $65 billion while its regulators were asleep on the wheel. Britain has not declared bankruptcy officially but we all know that it is bankrupt for all intents and purposes and none of its banks and financial institutions has any legs left.

However, this is only the aperitif. Wait for the crash of US commercial real estate, which analysts think happen by autumn this year. Shops are closing down and there’s no one to rent them. Companies are retrenching and freeing up a lot of office space or closing down entirely and vacating even more precious office space with no one to rent it again. Huge skyscrapers are becoming ghost-scrapers. All this expensive commercial real estate is mortgaged to the hilt. With no rental income coming in, the loans against them will become difficult to service and there will be fearsome default. There’s insurance and re-insurance here also and the amounts involved are mind-boggling. No bailout plan would come even close to coping. When the commercial real estate collapse comes, all hell will break loose. And if multinationals like General Motors and Ford call it a day, it won’t just be thousands upon thousands of people unemployed (though its heartless to use the word ‘just’ here). Two entire towns will be become ghost towns. That’s terrible. If you count the number of people ­ wives, children and parents ­ who are dependent on those incomes, it becomes worse than terrible. It becomes absolutely and totally unconscionable, while corrupt and greedy bankers and the likes of Bernie Madoff have made off with billions ­ perhaps trillions ­ of dollars and are still doing so because “our contracts say so.”

Then there is Professor Igor Nikolavich Panarin whom I came across in a December 2008 article by Andrew Osborne of the Wall Street Journal no less, not some fly-by-night rag. If he has got it right, next year will come to be known as ‘The Collapse of 2010′ for that is when the USA will disintegrate into six separate entities. Those six entities, says Prof. Panarin, are The California Republic, The Central North American Republic, Atlantic America, The Texas Republic, Hawaii and Alaska going back to Russia.

With millions of Chinese living on America’s western seaboard (The People’s Daily’s circulation there alone is over five million) The California Republic, Prof. Panarin thinks, will either be part of China or come under Chinese influence. The Central North American Republic will be part of Canada or under Canadian influence, Atlantic America may join the European Union, The Texas Republic will be part of Mexico or under Mexican influence and Hawaii will go either to Japan or China.

Prof. Panarin is a former KGB analyst and a Russian professor of political science, Dean of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Academy in Moscow and author of several books on geopolitics. Thus one can hardly call him a fruitcake. Actually, he first made this prediction not after the economic meltdown that started last year but in Linz, Austria, in September 1998 in front of 400 delegates at a conference devoted to information warfare and the use of data to get an edge over a rival. Of course it was received with consternation. “When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise,” he says. Later, many delegates asked him to sign copies of the map. Its like when the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd made his famous forecast in 1976 about the collapse of the Soviet Union 15 years before it actually did and many people laughed. But Todd had the last laugh.

Prof. Panarin doesn’t say that America’s collapse is a forgone conclusion. “There’s a 55-45 percent chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. But if it comes it will be driven by three factors ­ “mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the US will break into six pieces. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the US. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The US will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.” All we Pakistanis thus have to do is hang in there and soon America will not be meddling in our affairs any more, what to talk of General Patraeus’s adviser David Kilcullen saying that Pakistan could fall apart in five or six months.

It’s not easy to comprehend the collapse of an empire or a superpower. When termites are eating away at their vitals for years one cannot see it. People are too much in thrall of their power, wealth and panoply. Thus when the collapse comes it seems sudden, and takes people by surprise. “I went to sleep last night and when I woke up next morning the Soviet Union was gone.” The most powerful war machine ever built couldn’t save it. Remember the British Empire on which “the sun would never set”? It set so firmly that only six decades later Britain is not only bankrupt, it has become America’s appendage, a third rate power and could itself disintegrate soon with Scotland seceding. The history of the world is replete with the demise of civilizations, empires and superpowers. The graveyards of nations are full of their bones.

That there may be something to what Prof. Panarin says is borne out by the fact that the late Bush administration made contingency plans to impose martial law in case of economic collapse or massive and violent social unrest with blood on the streets. His predictions seem plausible, even probable, if all the dire scenarios come right, as they have thus far. According to Rand Clifford the US has already made plans to “round up insurgent US citizens” and detain them in what are called “Rex 84″ camps. Plus they have made “safe facilities” for members of Congress and their families. A report by the Phoenix Business Journal says that, “A new report by the US Army and War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.” The Journal’s story quote from the War College report: “Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” It needs saying that the military regularly makes plans for the most dire of situations, however seemingly unlikely.

Let Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter and an early supporter of Barack Obama have the last word. The US is “going to have millions and millions of unemployed people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there’s public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in Americahell there could even be riots.”

humayun.gauhar@gmail.com

Chris Floyd. Read his Blog

A wealth of riches:

Mission Accomplished

Written by Chris Floyd

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Oil Closes Over $100 for 1st Time (Washington Post) Exxon Mobil Profit Hits $40.6 Billion (Bloomberg) The Million Year War (TomDispatch.com)

other posts on the page:

Pakistanis Reject Tyranny, Terrorists and the "Terror War"

Hundred-Year Hangover: Betrayal and Blindness in the Making of the Modern World

The Courtier's Choice: Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy

Let Us Now Praise Judge Scalia, Who Gives Us Hope in This Dark Hour
If the Republic Had Not Died a Long Time Ago, This Indeed Would be the Death of the Republic

The man who knew too much

This story in the Guardian, about Rich Barlow, a former CIA Pakistan expert who now lives in a trailer in Montana, encapsulates nearly everything that is wrong with the direction this country has been traveling the past few years.

Lee Bollinger: fearless denouncer of US-designated dictators

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Distant Ocean:

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger blasted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday, accusing him of exhibiting "all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." I have to wonder if Bollinger is actually familiar with the definition of the word or with Iranian politics in general, since 1) Ahmadinejad was in fact democratically elected in 2005 and 2) he's largely a figurehead, since ultimate authority for domestic and foreign policy rests with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (hint, Lee: that's what "Supreme Leader" means).

As I was watching Bollinger's grandstanding recitation of valid criticisms freely intermingled with Bush administration talking points--a veritable blueprint for the demonization script that's being used to set the stage for war with Iran--I started to wonder if Bollinger reserved his dudgeon only for US-designated enemies. An article today in the Nation pointed me to the (unsurprising) answer, in the form of Bollinger's handling of a similar event with General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in September 2005. Here are some excerpts I've transcribed from Bollinger's introductory encomium for Musharraf:

Rarely do we have an opportunity such as this to greet a figure of such central and global importance. It is with great gratitude and excitement that I welcome President Musharraf and his wife, Sehbah Musharraf, to Columbia University. ...

We at Columbia are eager to listen. As a community of scholars and as students and faculty who come from everywhere in the world, we take a great scholarly and personal interest in what the President has to say. The development in Pakistan over the past several years, from its economic growth to its fight against extremism and terrorism, are vital issues for all of us. Mr. President, as you share your thoughts and insights you will give our students, the leaders of tomorrow, first-hand knowledge of the world their generation will inherit.

And here's yet more of Bollinger's fawning during that event, from Pakistan's presidential web site itself (via Angry Arab):

"President Musharraf is a leader of global importance and his contribution to Pakistan’s economic turnaround and the international fight against terror remain remarkable - it is rare that we have a leader of his stature at campus," said Lee C Bollinger, the President of Columbia University.

After delivering his introductory speech, Bollinger rushed home to transfer the print of Musharraf's boot from his tongue onto a piece of paper, so he could frame it, hang it above his desk, and admire it lovingly every day.

Bollinger's unwillingness to distinguish an elected president from an actual, flesh and blood dictator, and his eagerness to point out the crimes of official enemies while whitewashing those of official allies, extends to Columbia's World Leaders Forum itself. If you look at their bio link for Musharraf, you'll see this creative rendition of history:

General Pervez Musharraf assumed the office of chief executive of Pakistan in October 1999, having been appointed chief of staff of the army a year earlier. After calling general elections in 2002 and then restoring the constitution, he became president and commander of the armed services of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in October of that year.

They source their biographical text completely to a BBC article about Musharraf. So what does that BBC article actually say?

General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 which was widely condemned and which led to Pakistan's suspension from the Commonwealth until 2004. ...

In 2002 General Musharraf awarded himself another five years as president, together with the power to dismiss an elected parliament. The handover from military to civilian rule came with parliamentary elections in November 2002, and the appointment of a civilian prime minister.

General Musharraf has retained his military role, reneging on a promise to give up his army post and to become a civilian president.

"Seized power in a bloodless coup"? "Awarded himself another five years as president"? No, no, no, that will never do. Let's see...how about "assumed the office of chief executive of Pakistan" and "became president"? Yeah, that's much better.

It's rare that you get such a crystal clear demonstration of the willingness of intellectuals and institutions to restrict their criticisms to officially-designated enemies. It would be nice if Bollinger's rank hypocrisy were only laughable, but unfortunately it's also very dangerous; his eagerness to embrace the Bush administration's Iran propaganda, and to do so in a high-profile forum, has helped move us one step closer to war.

(To clarify one thing: I'm all for bozos like Ahmadinejad being confronted and dressed down. But I'll take it seriously the day I see someone like Bollinger do it to Henry Kissinger, or Bill Clinton, or Ehud Olmert, or George Bush, or....)