It’s a $cam! The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century --Tomgram Dispatch

[KoKo]

Roads to Nowhere, Ghost Soldiers, and a $43 Million Gas Station in Afghanistan

By Tom Engelhardt

So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures. There was the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used? And don’t forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies).

There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are “no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about” what the task force did with its money. As ProPublica’s Megan McCloskey writes, “The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism."

Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere.

All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form of overcharges and abuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America’s war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies “invested” in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies.

Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted. And don’t forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.

In other words, in the post-9/11 years, “reconstruction” and “war” have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption.

And let’s not forget another kind of “reconstruction” then underway. In both countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65 billion in Afghanistan. What’s striking about both of these security forces, once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those police academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station. It can’t be purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly “stood up” have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they were filled not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of “ghost personnel.”

Much More at........

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176068/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_roads_to_nowhere%2C_ghost_soldiers%2C_and_a_%2443_million_gas_station_in_afghanistan

[potone]

1. I can't bear to read the full article.

What is quoted is enraging and sickening enough. Just imagine what we could have had for that money if we had invested it in this country's infrastructure?

[KoKo]

5. I know..

Believe me..I read it and it made me sick. I posted the snips of the most recent parts of what we are paying for this..the whole article reveals much worse.

Yeah...

[merrily]

2. Please remember: The elderly and disabled are the ones you should be hating, not the MIC.

Bernie Sanders 2016.

[2naSalit]

3. Thanks for posting! K&R!!

[colsohlibgal]

4. Yet The Right Preaches About Controlling Spending

It would be funny if it weren't so disengenious.

It ties in to the 2 Santa Claus theory of the right. Spend like drunken sailors when in office, then say we must tighten our belt when they are out. They have perfected this con.

It relies on the preponderous and burgeoning dumbing down of the citizenry, by Faux News and other GOP TV sources, and nothing much but infotainment on the MSM.

[KoKo]

6. ....! Reality Shows, "Honey Boo Boo," Discovery Channel, A&E,

PBS (sponsored by RW Foundations/Corporations, these days)....Jerry Springer, Chatty Talk Shows and Info-tainment Discussions by what are supposed to be News Shows to Inform that only spread propaganda and disinfo.

No wonder Americans are Tuning Out, Dropping Cable and relying on the Internet. But, the "Internet" is a mixed bag these days. The Corporatists have managed to fill sites with "Celebrity Porn" and other distracting "Click Bait."

It gets harder to find REAL (Informative) NEWS even when one cuts the Cable Cord. Still, its better than the Cables and Networks.