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Comment by lolcraft | Hacker News Reader

> Contracting with the enemy: 80% of DOD contracts in Afghanistan fund Taliban

No. We have here a classic case of the submitter not reading the article.

What this article is about is the perfectly boring fact that DoD's funding overseeing is not anal enough to extend to 80% of contracts made in Afghanistan, since they're so piss cheap, and checking for compliance is so difficult. Yeah, it would be cool if those contracts were taken by Taliban shell companies to fund their warfare operations. And I'm sure a few of them are. But that's not what the article is about, and that's largely not what's happening.

Take that away, and what we get is, I'm afraid, a very boring story that could interest some accounting wonks somewhere, but not many more. Not nearly as interesting as the title hints at. Massive dissapointment.

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I'm very familiar with Afghanistan (I spent a few years there as a contractor), and very familiar with the subcontracting process. The article actually understates the problem.

Virtually 100% of the contracts in Afghanistan which involve transport are contracted to local vendors. Those vendors pay off the Taliban to not attack them; this has been known inside the contracting community ~forever, and publicly since at least 2005. The going rate is about 10-15% of total project expenses; usually it goes from DOD to prime to potentially a sub to a local trucking company to either a relative who is Taliban affiliated, or via a local government/warlord person who is Taliban affiliated.

The risk isn't that random contracts are possibly to Taliban front companies; it is that virtually every trucking and logistics operation (except air) funda the Taliban with a substantial percentage of contract amount.

For the high dollar contracts, or those with substantial on-base performance requirements (e.g. GD/L-3 supplying IT personnel), the prime contract isn't the issue, but the subsidiary support contracts those contractors sign. E.g. when they pay for their living trailers to be brought on base, the trucking company is either closely Taliban affiliated, or pays 10-15% of the trailer contract to Taliban. This means even the big contracts are paying a few percent to the Taliban, indirectly.

The issue is that if the US had zero presence in Afghanistan, none of these contracts would exist. After opium, contracting-related extortion is the major funding source for the Taliban; higher than extortion of the local Afghan economy (other than opium).

If we decriminalized [Afghan] opium, either by buying/destroying or buying/medicalizing (or just decriminalizing narcotics worldwide), and pulled out of Afghanistan, there would be no funding to keep the bad guys going.

You lost points with the whole "legalize heroin" thing at the end :-). That said, this issue (Taliban extortion) was covered on the major news channels as well. But the questions that were raised were two fold. One, how did people validate that their bribes were actually paying for protection, and the relative cost of bribes versus the relative cost of private security (aka Blackwater) to protect the supply convoys.

I don't think anyone in the stories had credible reasoning (they were pushing the "Taliban Toll Roads" meme pretty hard). Now I can believe that actually getting a handle on what was or was not going on here, given the situation with both Pakistan and Afghanistan is difficult if not impossible. And I can certainly believe that percentages of these contracts are going to shady people. But what wasn't clear was how much of this was simple theft and how much was part of the "war effort."

Your response seems credible, and I'm glad you brought this to everyone's attention. It's just one more reason I think we should get the hell out of Afghanistan. But please don't submit misleading titles.

It was mostly that the stupid title "Contracting with the Enemy" is itself relatively context-free when linked from outside, and figuring out a useful title for the remaining characters is non-trivial. I hate sites that use anything but bland and descriptive titles for articles; the subtitle can be "cute" if they want it to be. Traditional print publications presume you're reading their articles in context within their publication.

The submitter didn't even need to read the entire article. That information was available in the first sentence:

"More than 80 percent of the Defense Department’s Afghanistan reconstruction contracts are vulnerable to putting U.S. taxpayer money into enemy coffers, a government watchdog says in a new report."

I added "may" to try to make the headline more accurate, but this isn't just a paperwork deficiency.

There are many other contractual clauses which aren't always correctly documented (no sex trafficking, DBA coverage, etc.), none of which people really make much of an issue about, because they generally don't happen even when the documentation is absent. Deficiencies clauses to prevent money going to Taliban is an issue due to the numerous cases of this before the 2012 NDAA; deficient paperwork in these contracts is much more likely an indicator of pre-NDAA operations continuing, and those were shown to be contributing materially to the Taliban.

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