American taxpayers have unwittingly paid more than $150 million to companies throughout the Middle East that are known to have helped finance terrorist attacks on US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, according to a new internal US government report.
At least 43 companies based in Afghanistan were found to have ties to terrorist networks according to findings by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the leading US oversight authority on reconstruction in Afghanistan. SIGAR’s report seems to suggest that the very groups being targeted by the US through counter-insurgency operations sometimes become the beneficiaries of the federal government through contracted work.
“It’s like the United states government is subsidizing the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, those groups that are trying to shoot and kill our soldiers,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), a member of the Senate’s Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, told ABC News. Sheehan was among a group of senators who wrote a letter to the Army in 2012 “expressing concern about where US dollars were going. [source RT]
Nota Bene: this morning, I was looking for any opportunity to use the theme tune from the adult-caught-with-his-knickers-down-in-public TV show Benny Hill, which this blogger thought was just a wonderful indictment of Social Standards when it was first aired through the seventies i.e. when I was a lad. Originally a track by Boots Randolph called Yakety Sax, it became synonymous with the Benny Hill Show. Great, farcical, relevant.