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-- Less than 6% of Afghans have access to electricity available only sporadically.-- Women's literacy rate is about 19%, and schools are being burned in the south of the country and teachers beheaded in front of their students.
--Many women are also forced to beg in the streets or turn to prostitution to survive.
Afghanistan, Inc. - The Lucrative Business of War-Profiteering
Those wondering why the US engages in so many conflicts (aside from the geopolitical reasons) and is always ready for another might consider the fact that wars are so good for business. Corporate America, Wall Street and large insider investors love them because they're so profitable. It shows up noticeably on the bottom line of all contractors the Bush administration choose to "rebuild" Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also been a bonanza for the many consultants, engineers and mercenaries working for them who can pocket up to $1,000 a day compared to Afghan employees lucky to earn $5 for a day's work when they can find it.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, huge open-ended, no-bid contracts amounting to many billions of dollars were awarded to about 70 US firms including the usual array of politically connected ones whose names have now become familiar to many - Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons, Shaw Group, SAIC, CH2M Hill, DynCorp, Blackwater, The Louis Berger Group, The Rendon Group and many more including the one that nearly always tops the list, Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root. Since 2001, this arguably best-connected of all war-profiteers was awarded $20 billion in war-related contracts the company then exploited to the fullest by doing shoddy work, running up massive cost-overruns and then submitting fraudulent billings.
Halliburton and other contractors have managed to build permanent military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan for the Pentagon and prisons to house and torture whomever US authorities choose to arrest and for whatever reason. But their work is nothing short of shoddy and sloppy when it comes to assessing the job they've done rebuilding both countries. In Iraq Halliburton did such a poor job repairing the country's oil fields the US Army estimates it's cost the country $8 billion in lost production. It also botched the simple job of installing metering systems at ports in southern Iraq to assure oil wasn't being smuggled out of the country.
No Serious US-Directed Effort To Rebuild Two War-Torn Countries
Far more important for most Iraqis and Afghans, there's been no serious effort to rebuild these war-torn countries across the board. That effort is desperately needed to restore the essential infrastructure destroyed in both conflicts like power generating stations and water and sewage facilities, but the funding for them has been poorly directed, lost in a black hole of corruption or wasted because of inefficiency, design flaws, construction errors or deliberate unwillingness to do much more than hand out big contracts to US chosen companies then able to pocket big profits while doing little for the people in return for them. It also shows in the state of the countries' basic facilities like schools, health clinics and hospitals that are in deplorable condition with little being done to improve them despite lofty promises otherwise. One example is the US pledge of $17.7 million in 2005 for education in Afghanistan that turned out, in fact, to be for a private for-profit American University of Afghanistan only available to Afghans who can afford its cost - meaning none of them but the privileged few.
It's clear the US occupier has no interest in helping the people it said it came to "liberate" unless by "liberate" it meant from their freedom to be able to exploit and abuse them in service to the interests of capital which is all the Bush administration ever has in mind. Just as Iraq has the misfortune of having a vast oil reserve beneath its sand the US wants to control, so too Afghanistan happens to be strategically located as part of a prime transhipment route over which the Caspian Basin's great oil and gas reserves can be transported by pipeline to the warm water southern ports the US wants to ship it out from to countries it will allow it to be shipped to. These are the reasons the US invaded both countries, and that's why no serious effort is being made to do any reconstruction or redevelopment to help the people. There are also reports, unconfirmed for this article, that hydrocarbon reserves have been discovered in the northeast of Afghanistan amounting to an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of oil and from 15 - 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. If this proves accurate, it will be one more curse for the Afghan people who already have an unbearable number of others to deal with.
There isn't likely to be relief for them in reconstruction or anything else as long as the US occupies the country and remains its de facto ruler. It's sole funding priority (besides what it ignores lost to corruption) is to its chosen contractors and the bottom line boosting profits they get from being on the corporate welfare dole. A revealing window into this and how reality diverges from rhetoric is seen in a June, 2005 report by the well-respected Johannesburg based NGO Action Aid. It documents what it calls phantom aid that's pledged by the US and other countries but never shows up. At most, maybe 40% of it does while the rest never leaves the home country. It goes to pay so-called American "experts" who overprice their services but provide ineffective "technical assistance" for it. It also obliges recipient countries to buy US products and services even when cheaper and more accessible ones are available locally. The report goes on to accuse the US to be one of the two greatest serial offender countries (France being the other one) with 70% of what it calls aid requiring receiving countries to get from US companies (and much of that is for US-made weapons) and that 86% of all the US pledges turn out to be phantom aid. So, in fact, so-called US donor aid to rebuild a war-torn country is just another scam to enrich politically-connected American corporations by developing new export markets for them. Iraq, Afghanistan and other recipient countries get nothing more than the right to have their nations, resources, and people exploited by predatory US corporations as one of the spoils of war or one-way trade agreements.
All of this has caused deep-seated mostly repressed anger that erupted in Kabul this past May in the worst street violence seen in the capitol since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. It happened after a US military truck speeding recklessly smashed into about a dozen civilian vehicles at a busy intersection killing five people in the collision. It touched off mass rioting in angry protest against an already hated occupier with crowds of men and boys shouting "death to America, death to Karzai" and blaming the government and US military for what happened. People set fires to cars, shops, restaurants and dozens of police posts. They also attacked buildings and clashed with US forces and Afghan police on the scene throwing rocks at their vehicles. US troops responded by opening fire on unarmed civilians killing at least 4 and leaving many others injured. When it finally ended, eight people were reported dead and 107 injured. This uprising in the Kabul streets showed the great anger and frustration of the people breaking out in mass rage in response to one dramatic incident that symbolized for them everything gone wrong in the country now under an unwanted occupier, the oppressive US-installed Northern Alliance "warlord" rule, and the deprivation of the people suffering greatly as a result. There's no end of this in sight, and it's almost certain the resistance will only intensify in response as it's now doing.
Growing Resistance Against Repression and War Crimes
Like the mythological phoenix rising from the ashes, the Taliban have capitalized on the turmoil and discontent and have reemerged to reclaim most parts of southern Afghanistan. This part country has long been ungovernable and is known as an area too dangerous even for aid agencies. The Taliban now openly control some districts there, have set up shadow administrations in others, and have moved into the province of Logar located just 25 miles from Kabul where they have easy access to the capitol. For the British who know their history, it should be no surprise. Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of North West Frontier Province in bordering Pakistan spoke of it when he said: "Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over." Surely the former Soviet occupiers also could have told George Bush in 2001 what he'd be up against. The Brits could have as well.
The Taliban are now gaining supporters among the people fed up with the misery inflicted on them by the US and multinational force invaders and the Northern Alliance rule that's even more repressive than the Taliban were during their years in power. It led to their 1990s rise and conquest of over two-thirds of the country in the first place. It happened in the wake of the vacuum created in the country following the withdrawal of the defeated Soviet forces. During the decade-long conflict while they were there, the Afghan resistance fought the West's war with its funding and arms. It was heroic and the darling of the US media. But once the war ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, Afghans were abandoned and left on their own to deal with the ravages of their war-torn country and the chaos of warlordism and civil war that erupted in its aftermath. Out of that despair and with considerable aid from Pakistan, the Taliban fighters emerged and by 1996 had defeated the competing warlords to control most of the country.
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