Safety of Russian Planes in Afghan War Questioned
Safety of Russian Planes in Afghan War Questioned, by Catrina Stewart. AP 8/8/09.
Quote:
MOSCOW - More than a year ago, the U.N. dropped the Russian air transport company Vertikal-T from its approved list of vendors after a fatal helicopter crash in Nepal.
Yet NATO continued to use helicopters owned by Vertikal-T in Afghanistan. And on July 19, one of those choppers crashed at southern Afghanistan's largest NATO base, killing 16 civilians on board.
The crash reflects a little-known reality behind NATO's military push in Afghanistan: It is relying on Russian aviators flying Soviet-design aircraft, who are clocking up lucrative contracts in a country Russian troops left two decades ago.
DynCorp Oversight in Afghanistan Faulted
Saw this article today: U.S.: DynCorp Oversight in Afghanistan Faulted. Excerpt below...
Quote:
WASHINGTON, Feb 27, 2010 (IPS) - Afghan police are widely considered corrupt, unable to shoot straight, and die at twice the rate of Afghan soldiers and NATO troops. After seven billion dollars spent on training and salaries in the last eight years, several U.S. government investigations are asking why.
[...]
But another rather surprising answer was offered in a little-noticed report published earlier this month...
The report - titled "DOD Obligations and Expenditures of Funds Provided to the Department of State for the Training and Mentoring of the Afghan National Police" - says that the U.S. State Department has completely failed to do any serious oversight of the private contractors to whom they paid 1.6 billion dollars to provide police training at dozens of sites around Afghanistan.
DynCorp's International Police Training Programme, run out of Fort Worth, Texas, has won the bulk of the contracts that have been overseen by the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). The company, which has annual revenues of 3.1 billion dollars, has followed a series of wars to run lucrative police training contracts from Bosnia in the 1990s to Iraq in 2003.
DynCorp's work with Kabul began in 2003, almost two years after the fall of the Taliban. It was expanded in 2004 when the State Department issued it a contract to build seven regional training centres, and provide 30 police advisers across Afghanistan.
This initial contract was replaced by a series of related contracts beginning on Aug. 15, 2005, under which DynCorp today employs some 782 retired U.S. police officers and an additional 1,500 support staff. The contracts expired Jan. 31, 2010 but have temporarily been extended till the end of March.
The cost of hiring contractors to train police is high: Each expatriate police officer makes six-figure U.S. salaries - at least 50 times more than an Afghan police officer. Many experts, including the authors of this new report, have questioned the utility of sending police officers - many from small towns in the U.S. - to teach handcuffing and traffic rules to recruits caught in a war zone.
More at the link provided.
PMC / Mercenaries in Afghanistan (catch all)
Afghan Guards Suspected of Colluding With Insurgents
By DEXTER FILKINS
New York Times, 6 June 6 2010
Quote:
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan — For months, reports have abounded here that the Afghan mercenaries who escort American and other NATO convoys through the badlands have been bribing Taliban insurgents to let them pass.
Then came a series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents.
After a pair of bloody confrontations with Afghan civilians, two of the biggest private security companies — Watan Risk Management and Compass Security — were banned from escorting NATO convoys on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar.
The ban took effect on May 14. At 10:30 a.m. that day, a NATO supply convoy rolling through the area came under attack. An Afghan driver and a soldier were killed, and a truck was overturned and burned. Within two weeks, with more than 1,000 trucks sitting stalled on the highway, the Afghan government granted Watan and Compass permission to resume.
Watan’s president, Rashid Popal, strongly denied any suggestion that his men either colluded with insurgents or orchestrated attacks to emphasize the need for their services. Executives with Compass Security did not respond to questions.
But the episode, and others like it, has raised the suspicions of investigators here and in Washington, who are trying to track the tens of millions in taxpayer dollars paid to private security companies to move supplies to American and other NATO bases.
Although the investigation is not complete, the officials suspect that at least some of these security companies — many of which have ties to top Afghan officials — are using American money to bribe the Taliban. The officials suspect that the security companies may also engage in fake fighting to increase the sense of risk on the roads, and that they may sometimes stage attacks against competitors.
The suspicions raise fundamental questions about the conduct of operations here, since the convoys, and the supplies they deliver, are the lifeblood of the war effort.
“We’re funding both sides of the war,” a NATO official in Kabul said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was incomplete, said he believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban....
Heh. Think I said this long ago...
Welcome to South Asia. :rolleyes:
That worked with Alexander as well...