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$360 Million in Tax Dollars To The Taliban?

Posted Aug 17, 2011 by Howard Altman

Updated Aug 17, 2011 at 08:17 AM

In and of itself, $360 million sounds like a lot of money.

Especially when you consider that’s how much of your hard-earned tax dollars may have wound up in the hands of the Taliban. But the figure, reported by my old colleague (and the last guy to have this beat) Richard Lardner, represents only a drop in the proverbial bucket of money we are spending to help (re)build Afghanistan.

Lardner and Deb Riechmann of the AP broke a story about the findings of the task force set up by then-General David Petraeus to look into what happens to money spent on and in Afganistan.

The conclusions by Task Force 2010 represent the most definitive assessment of how U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.