Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.

By Jeremy Scahill

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan.  During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. “The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight,” according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. “In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant.”

A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are “administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations.” According to one USAID official, the agency is “sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent.” As a result, the agency does not “know … where the money is going.”

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:

In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects.  According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects.  USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.

The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill’s subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: “The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan.” Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.

Why Is the State Department Speaking for JSOC?

By Jeremy Scahill

Interesting chain of command issues seem to be emerging in the official “denials” being offered about my story in The Nation magazine on Blackwater and the Joint Special Operations Command operations in Pakistan. A few hours before the piece was published, I received a call—unprompted—from the office of Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I had not called them. The representative that called would not officially—named and on-the-record—deny the story. Instead, I was offered a comprehensive denial from a “defense official” on “background.” The DoD spokesman Geoff Morell was asked about it on Tuesday. He said the appropriate agency to address this was the State Department, but he did characterize the story as “conspiratorial:”

REPORTER: Thank you for taking the question.  Does the Pentagon have any comment on a report in The Nation today that, puts Blackwater, now Xe Services, firmly at the center of a covert operation in Karachi in Pakistan, from an anonymous source within the military.  And my question is —
MR. MORRELL:  Yes, I — I —
REPORTER:  The question is, you keep denying covert operations in Pakistan, but isn’t this yet more evidence of one?
MR. MORRELL:  Okay, the best person to address this would be the State Department spokesman, who has already put out a statement, or a correction, basically saying these accusations are entirely false. Okay?  But I — for more clarity and more specificity, I urge you to talk to them.

As for what we are doing in Afghanistan — or in Pakistan, rather, I think we have been incredibly forthright about this.  And we have basically, I think, a few dozen forces on the ground in Pakistan who are involved in a train-the-trainer mission.  These are Special Operations Forces.  We’ve been very candid about this.  They are — they have been for months, if not years now, training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military on how to — on certain skills and operational techniques.  And that’s the extent of our — our, you know, military boots on the ground in Pakistan.

Despite whatever conspiratorial theories that, you know, magazines or broadcast outlets may want to cook up, there is nothing to it. And obviously, we’ve also made it perfectly clear that we are willing and able and happy to help the Pakistani military in any other ways that they may see fit.  But at this point, that’s the extent to which they would like our help, in terms of American boots on the  ground.  And so we are totally respectful of that.  And that’s what it’s limited to at this point.

Since when is the State Department spokesman the official spokesperson for JSOC? Since when is the DoS the appropriate party to address allegations regarding US military operations? Nonetheless, the State Department spokesperson, Ian Kelly, was asked about it in the first question at his briefing Tuesday:

REPORTER: Do you have any response to the report in The Nation regarding what it says was a joint operation between the Joint Special Operations Command in Pakistan and Xe Services, nee Blackwater?
MR. KELLY: I do not. I have not seen this article.
REPORTER: So you have no response to that?
MR. KELLY: Well, I don’t know. I’m sorry, you’ve – I just am not aware of this article. We’ll look at it and we’ll see if we can get a response for you.

On Wednesday, the US embassy in Islamabad issued a “correction” saying that the report was “completely false:”

There is no secret operating base in Karachi or anywhere else in Pakistan being run, occupied, or otherwise operated by U.S. military personnel of any command or organization.  The article’s assertions about U.S. government collusion with Blackwater or any other contracting firm are equally baseless and false.

“U.S. government programs for Pakistan are open and transparent and function in partnership with the Government of Pakistan,” said Ambassador Anne W. Patterson.  “U.S. personnel and programs in Pakistan have only one purpose - to assist the government and people of Pakistan as they face the complex challenges confronting their nation.”

The way in which the US military and the Administration have chosen to “deny” this story raises several issues, but chief among them is this: Why is the US embassy in Islamabad now the appropriate source to confirm or deny clandestine military operations that are coordinated out of a task force in Afghanistan? Moreover, as Col. Lawrence Wilkerson stated clearly in The Nation story, going back years, these JSOC missions were done without the knowledge of the US ambassadors in the countries where they operate and were done outside the traditional military chain of command.

Town Hall Meeting on Afghanistan Today in DC

FAULT LINES: AFGHANISTAN

A televised town hall debate hosted by Al Jazeera’s Avi Lewis

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 | 1230pm

THE NEWSEUM
555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20001

Featuring:

Matthew Hoh, Former U.S. State Department Official

General Jack Keane, Former U.S. Army Chief of Staff

Mariam Nawabi, Co-Founder, Afghanistan Advocacy Group

Jeremy Scahill, Investigative Journalist

To RSVP, please send an email to rsvpfaultlines@aljazeera.net.