Starting Points

Sep 2, 2009

Report Details 'Lewd and Deviant' Behavior by Guards at U.S. Embassy in Kabul - washingtonpost.com

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Private security contractors who guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have engaged in lewd behavior and hazed subordinates, demoralizing the undermanned force and posing a "significant threat" to security at a time when the Taliban is intensifying attacks in the Afghan capital, according to an investigation released Tuesday by an independent watchdog group.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) launched the probe after more than a dozen security guards contacted the group to report misconduct and morale problems within the force of 450 guards who live at Camp Sullivan, a few miles from the embassy compound.

The report highlighted occasions when guards brought women believed to be prostitutes into Camp Sullivan and videotaped themselves drinking and partially undressed. It also outlined communications problems among the guards, many of whom don't speak English and have trouble understanding orders from their U.S. supervisors.

"The lewd and deviant behavior of approximately 30 supervisors and guards has resulted in complete distrust of leadership and a breakdown of the chain of command, compromising security," POGO said in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton outlining the security violations.

The report recommends that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates immediately assign U.S. military personnel to supervise the guards. It also calls on the State Department to hold accountable diplomatic officials who failed to provide adequate oversight of the contract.

"These are very serious allegations, and we are treating them that way," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. "The secretary and the department have made it clear that we will have zero tolerance for the type of conduct that is alleged in these documents.

The guards work for ArmorGroup North America, which has a $180 million annual contract with the State Department to protect the embassy and the 1,000 diplomats, staffers and Afghan nationals who work there. The State Department renewed the contract in July despite finding numerous performance deficiencies by ArmorGroup in recent years that were the subject of a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.

At the time, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Moser acknowledged "deficiencies" by the contractor but said "performance on the ground by ArmorGroup North America has been and is sound." Subcommittee Chairman Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) agreed to the renewal of ArmorGroup's contract, though she said she had reservations.

Susan Pitcher, a spokeswoman for Wackenhut Services, the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., company that owns ArmorGroup, declined to comment on Tuesday's POGO report.

In one incident in May, the report says, more than a dozen guards took weapons, night vision goggles and other key equipment and engaged in an unauthorized "cowboy" mission in Kabul, leaving the embassy "largely night blind," POGO wrote in the letter to Clinton. The guards dressed in Afghan tunics and scarves in violation of contract rules, and hid in abandoned buildings in a reconnaissance mission that was not part of their training or duties. Later, two heads of the guard force, Werner Ilic and Jimmy Lemon, issued a "letter of recognition" praising the men for "conspicuous intrepidity" with the State Department logo on the letterhead.

"They were living out some sort of delusion," one of the whistleblower guards said in an interview with The Washington Post from Kabul. "It presented a huge opportunity for an international incident."

The guard, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said he feared retribution, said, "It's insane here. If you didn't go along with the game plan you eventually were going to make a mistake and put yourself in a position" to be let go.

The report said supervisors held near-weekly parties in which they urinated on themselves and others, drank vodka poured off each other's exposed buttocks, fondled and kissed one another and gallivanted around virtually nude. Photos and video of the escapades were released with the POGO investigation.

Conduct of contractors providing security in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the subject of controversy and other investigations in recent years. The government relies heavily on such contractors for security and other needs.

A new Congressional Research Service report said that as of March, the Defense Department had more contract personnel than troops in Afghanistan.

The 52,300 uniformed U.S. military personnel and 68,200 contractors in Afghanistan at the time of the research "apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States," the report said.

About 16 percent of the contractors are involved in providing security, compared with about 10 percent in Iraq.

Although contractors provide many essential services, "they also pose management challenges in monitoring performance and preventing fraud," according to Steven Aftergood, who first disclosed the congressional report on his Secrecy News Web site Tuesday.

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

U.N. Report Cites Sharp Drop in Opium Cultivation in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

KABUL, Sept. 1 -- Cultivation in Afghanistan of opium, the nation's most lucrative cash crop and a major funding source for the Taliban, has fallen sharply this year in large part because an excess supply of the drug has pushed down prices to a 10-year low, according to a U.N. report scheduled to be released Wednesday.

The Obama administration has changed course on its opium policy here, moving away from eradication efforts favored by the Bush administration that senior officials now say wasted millions of dollars. Instead, funding is being directed toward programs to persuade farmers to grow other crops. But more than those nascent efforts, U.N. officials said, the cause of the decline in opium cultivation this year was a deteriorating market for the drug.

"Overall, you could say we are now profiting from a fantastic market correction," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the Afghanistan office of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). "There is just too much supply around, so the attractiveness is diminishing."

The area under opium poppy cultivation fell this year by 22 percent, to 123,000 hectares, or about 304,000 acres, the second consecutive year of decline after a rapid growth of opium farming since the war began in 2001, according to the United Nations' 2009 Afghanistan Opium Survey. Twenty of the country's 34 provinces are considered poppy-free, two more than last year.

Much of the decline was in Helmand province, in the south, where U.S. Marines have launched an offensive against the Taliban. Helmand still accounts for nearly 60 percent of all opium grown in Afghanistan, and drug money continues to fuel the Taliban and the corruption that plagues the Afghan government.

Although the area under opium cultivation declined sharply, the drop in the production of the drug was less dramatic because farmers were able to extract more opium per poppy bulb. Driving both declines, officials said, is a drop in prices to levels not seen since the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from the late 1990s to late 2001. The report found a 40 percent drop in the total value of opium produced, down to $438 million, or 4 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. This helped push more than 800,000 people out of the opium business.

"There's only so much the Taliban can store in the caves," Lemahieu said.

The amount of surplus opium still stashed in Afghanistan is staggering, officials said. The U.N. report said the world's annual demand for opium derivates such as heroin is not more than 5,000 tons, but the drug stockpiles in Afghanistan may be double that. And these stockpiles are durable, Lemahieu said, able to last in good condition for 10 to 15 years. In some areas along the border with Pakistan, opium is used as currency, he said.

The drug industry is so prevalent in places such as Helmand that coalition commanders there say it is often difficult to distinguish between Taliban members, drug traffickers and criminal gangs, all of which take part in the business.

Col. George Amland, deputy commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which operates in Helmand, said that "all those people will coexist very happily as a partnership, while there is a level of chaos," but that his troops are attempting to interrupt and split the networks.

The U.N. report praised Afghan and NATO troops for destroying tons of chemicals, seeds, drugs and 27 labs this year, as well as for moving away from eradication as a policy.

"You've seen some pretty sizable operations down south in Helmand," said Col. Wayne Shanks, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul. "Our presence there and our activities in the area may have contributed to some of those figures" of declining opium cultivation.

U.N. officials estimate that the Taliban collects at least $125 million a year from opium production, including by taxing farmers and levying "protection" fees for cargo trucks transiting its territory. There are also signs that the group is increasingly involved in the high-end value aspects of the business, including converting opium to heroin and trading in precursor chemicals, such as acetic anhydride. Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UNODC, wrote in the report that there is "growing evidence" that "some anti-government elements in Afghanistan are turning into narco-cartels."

Still, officials said the Taliban is wary of compromising its Islamic ideology and placing in jeopardy funding sources from other Muslim countries by fully committing to the drug trade, Lemahieu said.

"Mullah [Mohammad] Omar is still the leader of the Taliban, and he is not a drug trafficker," Lemahieu said. "That ideological sharpness is so important for them. So you cannot compare them yet with the FARC," he said, referring to the Colombian guerrilla group heavily involved in cocaine trafficking.

The U.S. and British governments are rushing to develop programs before the planting season begins in October to encourage Afghan farmers to grow crops such as wheat and fruit instead of opium. The programs offer vouchers to buy cheap seeds and provide farm workers with infrastructure jobs. The U.N. report said a rural development program to employ farmers needs to be as ambitious as the military offensive.

"There is no need to bribe farmers to stay away from drugs: market forces are already doing this," the report said.

As Karzai Gains in Vote Count, Afghans Brace for Unrest - washingtonpost.com

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

KABUL, Sept. 1 -- As vote tallies keep dribbling out from Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, it appears increasingly likely that President Hamid Karzai will reach the 50 percent plus one vote that he needs to win reelection.

But what will happen after that is far from clear, and tension and suspicion have mounted as the vote count drags on amid widening charges of electoral fraud. Afghans are confused, jittery and bracing for street violence -- or at least a protracted period of political polarization and drift.

Legally, the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission will have the last word on whether the fraud was extensive enough to change the results, but its investigations could go on for weeks after the official tally is announced. That leaves open the possibility of a delayed runoff between Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, or even nullification of the election.

"I think it's clear Karzai has won, but that doesn't resolve the crisis we are facing," said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies. "The ultimate goal here is to stabilize the country and defeat the Taliban. If we don't come out of this election with a legitimate and strong government, it could have a major impact on both Afghanistan and on the entire NATO effort here."

Karzai's lead over Abdullah, his former foreign minister, has widened slowly but steadily. On Monday, with nearly half the votes counted, the Afghan election commission said Karzai was ahead by about 46 to 32 percent. But Abdullah has alleged "massive state engineering" of the vote and vowed he will not accept a flawed Karzai victory as legitimate.

Both major candidates have publicly urged their supporters to await the official results, which are expected in about two weeks. But behind the scenes, reports have circulated of threats of violence by the opposition and high-pressure tactics by government officials, alternating with rumors of power-sharing deals between Karzai and Abdullah.

The atmosphere of fraud and strong-arm behavior surrounding the election has also heightened tensions between Kabul and Washington, just as U.S. officials are scrambling to justify their military commitments here and find new strategies to salvage the faltering and expensive war against Taliban insurgents.

American officials have expressed rare public dismay at Karzai's electoral courtship of controversial former warlords. Karzai's aides, in turn, portrayed his recent meeting with the U.S. special envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, as an imperious political lecture from Washington. If Karzai remains in power, it is unclear whether he will seek to mend fences with Washington or continue his populist demonizing of the West.

Despite the domestic and international concerns about an illegitimate election, the complaints commission is also under pressure to somehow address the fraud problem without forcing a second election. Many Afghans and outside observers say a runoff would be costly, stressful and just as vulnerable to fraud and insurgent attacks as the Aug. 20 poll. A flawed single election that lets the country get back to normal, they argue, would be the lesser evil.

"Would a second round clear the air and have more legitimacy? That's a question mark," said one U.N. official here, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He said it might be wiser for Afghans to forge a "consensus of governance, if not government," rather than force another electoral exercise in the middle of a guerrilla war.

But neither Karzai nor Abdullah appears inclined to reach out. Both represent ethnic groups that are bitter longtime rivals with large emotional and economic stakes in the outcome. Both have formed alliances with powerful figures who have demanded significant concessions in exchange for their support.

Abdullah has said several times that he will "defend the Afghan people's vote," while some of his supporters, including experienced militia fighters, have vowed to take to the streets if he is declared the loser. Karzai, in turn, has enlisted the electoral backing of several former militia leaders accused of rights abuses and drug trafficking.

Grant Kippen, the low-key Canadian elections expert who heads the Electoral Complaints Commission, has attempted to stay above the partisan fray as his staff sorts through more than 2,000 fraud complaints. He has said that several hundred are serious enough to potentially affect the results and that he will take as much time as is necessary to investigate them properly, regardless of the rising public tension and pressure for a final outcome.

But a certain amount of discretion and subjectivity is involved in both the vote tally and the fraud detection process, one foreign elections expert said. In addition to the formal complaints investigated by Kippen's panel, he said, polling results that "smell funny," such as a box full of genuine-looking ballots that favor one candidate by 600 votes to 1, can either be "set aside" by the election commission or added to the count.

Kippen's findings could be political dynamite if they show that, as many observers suspect, much of the fraud was committed on Karzai's behalf in the southern region that is his ethnic Pashtun heartland, and where insurgent violence kept hundreds of thousands of people from voting.

Such a finding would raise the prospect of a president being reelected with a slim and questionable mandate from his own supporters and facing the hostility of an opposition convinced that he stole the election.

"There are warlords on both sides of this divide, and we cannot afford to be drawn into another ethnic conflict over this election," said Mir, the policy analyst. "This needs to be a time of reaching out to the opposition, not exacting vengeance. Otherwise, the only beneficiaries will be the Taliban."

Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics - washingtonpost.com

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Taliban has become a much more potent adversary in Afghanistan by improving its own tactics and finding gaps in the U.S. military playbook, according to senior American military officials who acknowledged that the enemy's resurgence this year has taken them by surprise.

U.S. rules of engagement restricting the use of air power and aggressive action against civilians have also opened new space for the insurgents, officials said. Western development projects, such as new roads, schools and police stations, have provided fresh targets for Taliban roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The inability of rising numbers of American troops to protect Afghan citizens has increased resentment of the Western presence and the corrupt Afghan government that cooperates with it, the officials said.

As President Obama faces crucial decisions on his war strategy and declining public support at home, administration and defense officials are studying the reasons why the Taliban appears, for the moment at least, to be winning.

In the spring, Obama outlined a broad new direction for the war that he said his predecessor had starved of attention and resources. He changed the military leadership on the ground, asked Congress for additional money and authorized more manpower. The administration has said that it expects the strategy -- still barely off the ground -- to show results in a year to 18 months.

But many U.S. officials and their allies feel that they are in a race against time and the determination of a battle-hardened enemy that has learned from its own mistakes and those of U.S. and NATO forces over nearly eight years of combat. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, gave Obama an assessment this week of what he described as a "serious" situation.

"The point is that the Taliban, who have had a very clear aim and means from the very beginning, have been able slowly and steadily to get better at what they're doing," said a European official whose country's troops are fighting alongside U.S. forces. More U.S. and NATO troops have been killed in 2009 than in any year since the war began in late 2001; U.S. deaths in August reached an all-time monthly high of 47.

Although McChrystal's report has not been publicly released, officials said it calls for further significant strategic revisions. In the coming weeks, Obama will weigh the merits of McChrystal's recommendations and decide whether to provide whatever additional troops are necessary to implement them.

About a dozen military officials in Washington and at regional command headquarters here and abroad discussed Taliban capabilities and battlefield trends on the condition of anonymity. Most expressed optimism that with time the U.S. strategy could prevail, but said that the Taliban has gained psychological, as well as actual, ground.

"There are periods when an enemy does well and seems better trained and fights harder," one senior defense official said. "The number one indicator we have out there now is that they think they're winning. That creates an attitude, a positive outlook, and a willingness to sacrifice."

The positive outlook has a basis in fact, the official said, as areas of Taliban influence have expanded. "They have enough of the landscape that they control to be able to train more and in closer proximity to where they're fighting. And the people [living] there actually believe the Taliban can do something."

U.S. military officials differ on the extent of Taliban success and the reasons for it. Senior U.S. commanders in eastern Afghanistan, where insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani's network is dominant, said that the sophistication of the insurgents' attacks had increased markedly, beginning with bloody battles along the Pakistani border last summer. To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army's Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.

"In some cases . . . we started to see that enhanced form of attack," said one Army general who oversaw forces in Afghanistan until earlier in the summer. As attacks in the east have increased this year, some officers have speculated that the insurgents are getting more direct help from professional fighters from Arab and Central Asian countries. These embedded trainers, the officers said, play almost the same role as U.S. military training teams that live with and mentor Afghan government forces.

In recent months, the Taliban fighters have used mortars to force U.S. troops into defensive positions, where they are then hit with rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and machine guns. Insurgent units have learned to maintain "radio silence" as they move and to wet down the ground to prevent dusty recoil that would make them targets. They have "developed the ability to do some of the things that make up what you call a disciplined force," including treating casualties, the Army general said.

The insurgents have largely abandoned the large-unit attacks they used several years ago. "In 2005, Marines and Army units were having pretty decisive engagements" against massed Taliban fighters, another senior officer said, adding that "every time, we killed them in very large numbers." Small bases and checkpoints manned by Afghan national security forces have become preferred targets for the Taliban, he said, because they are "isolated and easy to kill," and the Afghan units are relatively easy to infiltrate for intelligence.

Remote areas where the Taliban has been fighting U.S. forces for years, such as the Korengal Valley near the border with Pakistan, "are a perfect lab to vet fighters and study U.S. tactics," said a Pentagon officer. The insurgents have learned to gauge the response times for U.S. artillery cannons, as well as fighter jets and helicopters. "They know exactly how long it takes before . . . they have to break contact and pull back," the officer said.

U.S. officers in southern Afghanistan, where thousands of Marines and British troops are fighting long-entrenched Taliban forces, attributed insurgent gains less to sophisticated tactics than to increased use of roadside bombs -- improvised explosive devices, or IEDs -- laid along U.S. convoy routes in the desert or roads built with foreign aid money.

"They do tend to play to the areas that they're strongest in, the hit-and-run tactics and the employment of IEDs," said Col. George Amland, deputy commander of the Marines in Helmand province.

The Taliban has also taken advantage of changes in U.S. air and artillery tactics, adopted to decrease civilian casualties that have alienated the population. U.S. airstrikes and culturally offensive night ground raids are authorized far more selectively than they were. The Taliban has also adjusted its own tactics, gathering in populated areas and increasing its night operations, and "the playing field is leveled," one U.S. officer said.

A number of officials and experts, within and outside the military, said that while the Taliban was able to regroup militarily while U.S. attention was diverted to Iraq, its widening influence has as much to do with Afghan government corruption, tensions among regional ethnic groups, lack of state service and justice in rural areas, and high rates of unemployment as it does with insurgent efforts.

Military officials expressed confidence in the evolving U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, but also concern about whether there is time to make it work. "I'm not one myself to believe it's a zero-sum game of winning and losing," said an official with long experience in Afghanistan.

"To the Taliban, winning is, in fact, not losing," he said. "They feel that over time, they will ultimately outlast the international community's attempt to stabilize Afghanistan. It's really a game of will to them."

Correspondents Pamela Constable, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Joshua Partlow and Greg Jaffe in Afghanistan contributed to this report.

Sep 1, 2009

Negros is ‘hot spot’ for human trafficking - Manila Times

Image via Wikipedia

NGO launches Step UP campaign, a preventive program to curb problem among youth sector in province

By Ma. Ester L. Espina, Correspondent

Negros Occidental joins the list of provinces on the watch lists of groups working to fight human trafficking and worse, has become not just a source of persons being trafficked in various forms of human slavery, but as another “destination.”

Visayan Forum Foundation executive director, Ma. Cecilia Flores-Oebanda said that their rescue and monitoring operation has indicated that the problem has now been categorized as the third-largest underground business and a $30-million industry.

“This is not anymore a simple migration problem but we have been seeing more and more of these trafficked victims sold and resold many times over,” she added.

She said several residents hailing from Negros Occidental and Bacolod City have fallen victims to human trafficking “many of them ending up in the prostitution trade.”

Oebanda, a native of Negros and was formerly a rebel commander at the height of the insurgency said many of those they have rescued and interviewed come from the CHICKS area in southern Negros and from Banago in Bacolod.

“Worse, and the local government should know this, the province is not only a hotspot for source of trafficked persons but has become a destination,” citing that they have monitored night entertainment centers whose workers are mostly from other regions in the Visayas, said Oebanda.

Oebanda was in Bacolod recently for the launching of the STEP UP project that will be implemented locally by the Negros Ecological and Development Foundation (NEDF) in cooperation with Microsoft as a “preventive program” against human trafficking.

STEP UP, which means Stop Trafficking and Exploitation of People through Unlimited Potential, provides information technology and life skills to potential victims of human trafficking.

NEDF executive director, Roseo Depra, said they have established a STEP UP Learning Center in Barangay Handumanan which she said has been also cited as one of the major areas in Bacolod where recruiters would operate in to entice young boys and girls with hopes of employment in Manila and abroad but “unfortunately they end up in prostitution dens.”

For their first batch of STEP UP scholars, NEDF screened and chose 20 out-of-school youth residents in the area who will undergo a three-month program, which includes matching employment after graduation. In the next three years, Depra said they hope to see more than a thousand youth gainfully employed and helping in the anti-human trafficking advocacy work.

She recounted the tale of a 14-year-old girl from Samar who was recruited for domestic work in Manila but ended up in a prostitution den where she found 100 more girls like her in the flesh trade.

Oebanda said that while their early years focused mostly on rescue operations and legal cases against “head-hunters,” they have shifted direction toward prevention through a community-based program.

She acknowledged that the problem stems from economics and the promise of money which is why more and more of the younger set fall into the trap.

“We need to create a counter-move against this culture of deception and we hope that through STEP UP, we will be able to prevent thousands of youth fall victim to human traffickers,” she added.

Thousands of migrant workers stranded overseas - The Jakarta Post

Image via Wikipedia

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 09/01/2009

More than 1,600 Indonesian migrant workers are living temporarily at the country’s embassies and consulates abroad as the government says it can not afford to send the troubled migrants home.

The Ministry of Manpower reported Tuesday that 257 of the migrants are in Saudi Arabia, 404 are in Jordan, 506 are in Kuwait, 35 are in Qatar, 276 are in Malaysia, 113 are in Singapore, six in Brunei Darussalam and 37 are in Taiwan.

As of June this year, the government has facilitated the return of 13,839 Indonesians detained at the immigration center in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

“Many of our migrant workers work illegally,” the ministry said on its website. The migrants hold haj visas, tourist visas or student visas but work overseas.

Some of the stranded migrant workers had fled from their employers, it added.

The government said it was hard to acquire exit permits from countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, because the Indonesians had not settled legal issues they were involved in, which generally include unpaid salaries and criminal offenses. “The other issue is that the budget to deal with theses issues is limited,” the ministry said.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah admitted that lack of funding posed a huge problem to the government, who would like to send these people back home.

On Monday, the Indonesian Parliament Caucus for Labor estimated that there were 15,000 migrant workers stuck abroad, unable to return home. “This is the responsibility of the state. If the president is serous about dealing with the issue the problem can be solved,” caucus member Badriyah Fayumi said, as quoted by kompas.com.

Battle for Honduras--and the Region - Nation

Image via Wikipedia

Roberto Micheletti, who took power in Honduras following the June 28 coup, has come under intense criticism from the international community for rejecting a compromise, negotiated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, that would allow Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected president forced into exile by the military, to return as head of a reconciliation government. But Micheletti's obstinacy is encouraged by those who see the crisis as a chance to halt the advance of the Latin American left. A month and a half after Zelaya's overthrow, the small, desperately poor Central American country has become the site of a larger battle that could shape hemispheric politics, including Barack Obama's foreign policy, for years to come.

In the 1980s Honduras served as a staging ground for Ronald Reagan's anticommunist operations in neighboring Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and as a portal for New Right Christians to roll back liberation theology. Central America's anticommunist crusade became something of a death-squad Da Vinci Code, pulling together a carnivalesque cast that included first-generation neocons, Latin American torturers, local oligarchs, anti-Castro Cubans, mercenaries, Opus Dei ideologues and pulpit-thumping evangelicals.

The campaign to oust Zelaya and prevent his restoration has reunited old comrades from that struggle, including shadowy figures like Fernando "Billy" Joya (who in the 1980s was a member of Battalion 316, a Honduran paramilitary unit responsible for the disappearance of hundreds, and who now works as Micheletti's security adviser) and Iran/Contra veterans like Otto Reich (who ran Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy, which misused public money to manipulate public opinion to support the Contra war against Nicaragua). The Honduran generals who deposed Zelaya received their military training at the height of the region's dirty wars, including courses at the notorious School of the Americas. And the current crisis reveals a familiar schism between conservative Catholic hierarchs and evangelical Protestants who back the coup, on the one hand, and progressive Christians who are being hounded by security forces, on the other.

Joining the coup coalition are new actors like Venezuelan Robert Carmona-Borjas, who was involved in the 2002 attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. According to Latin American analyst Laura Carlsen, Carmona, working closely with Reich, turned his attentions to Honduras after having failed to halt the electoral success of the left in Venezuela. Starting in 2007, Carmona's Arcadia Foundation launched a press campaign to discredit Zelaya by accusing his government of widespread graft. As Carlsen writes, the "politicized nature of Arcadia's anti-corruption offensive was clear from the start. Carmona, along with Otto Reich, charged President Zelaya of complicity" in assorted misdeeds. The crusade was similar to the way International Republican Institute-linked "democracy promotion" groups destabilized the government of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, resulting in his overthrow in 2004.

Also fresh to the fight is Lanny Davis, a former Hillary Clinton adviser turned lobbyist, who was hired by business backers of the coup to push the Clinton State Department to recognize the Micheletti government. The Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has deep ties to Latin American neoliberals who presided over ruinous policies of market liberalization in the 1990s, now largely displaced from office by the region's new leftists. Clinton pollsters and consultants, such as Stanley Greenberg and Doug Schoen, have worked on a number of their presidential campaigns, often on the losing side.

Three years ago the region, locked into the US sphere of influence by the Central American Free Trade Agreement, seemed immune to the changes taking place in South America, which had brought leftists to power in a majority of countries. But then the Sandinistas returned to office in Nicaragua in 2006. Recently, the FMLN won the presidency in El Salvador, and Guatemala, led by center-left President Álvaro Colom, is witnessing a resurgence of peasant activism, much of it against transnational mining and biofuel corporations.

In Honduras, Zelaya shook things up by raising the minimum wage and apologizing for the executions of street children and gang members carried out by security forces in the 1990s. He moved to reduce the US military presence and refused to privatize Hondutel, the state-owned telecommunications firm, a deal that Micheletti, as president of Congress, pushed. Zelaya also vetoed legislation, likewise supported by Micheletti, that would have banned sale of the morning-after pill. Considering Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's shameful support of the Catholic Church's position on abortion, which resulted in legislation mandating up to thirty-year jail terms for women who receive them, this was perhaps Zelaya's most courageous move. He also accepted foreign aid, in the form of low-cost petroleum, from Venezuela. It would be impossible to overstate the Central American ruling class's hatred of Chávez, whose hand is seen behind every peasant protest and every call to democratize the region's politics and economics. The president of a Honduran business council recently said Chávez "had Honduras in his mouth. He was a cat with a mouse that got away."

The fixation on Chávez usefully diverts attention from the gnawing poverty in the region, as well as from the failure of the neoliberal economic model promoted by Washington in recent decades. Forty percent of Central Americans, and more than 50 percent of Hondurans, live in poverty. The Chávez mania also distracts from the fact that under Washington's equally disastrous "war on drugs," crime cartels, deeply rooted in the military and traditional oligarchic families, have rendered much of Central America into what the Washington Office on Latin America calls "captive states."

For the White House, Honduras is proving to be an unexpectedly difficult foreign-policy test. After condemning the coup, Obama handed the crisis to the State Department. Rather than working with the Organization of American States (OAS), Secretary of State Clinton unilaterally charged Oscar Arias with brokering a compromise, ignoring the concerns of most other Latin American governments that negotiations would grant too much legitimacy to the coup. Clinton has so far been unwilling to apply a range of possible sanctions, including freezing the bank accounts of those who carried out the coup, to force Micheletti to accept the Arias plan. And for those who see Micheletti as the last line against the spread of Chavismo--be it in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador or elsewhere in the Americas--the return of Zelaya, even just to finish the few months left in his term, is unacceptable.

In the late 1970s the Sandinista revolution revealed the limits of Jimmy Carter's tolerance of Third World nationalism. The more Carter tried to appease hawks in his administration, the more he was accused of vacillating, thus paving the way for neoconservatives, under Reagan, to use Central America to showcase their hard line.

A similar dynamic is taking place today. Republicans have rallied around Micheletti, sending a Congressional delegation led by Connie Mack to visit Tegucigalpa. Taking a page out of the Latin American right's playbook, they have redbaited Obama by associating him with Chávez. Obama, said Texas Senator John Cornyn, "must stand with the Honduran people, not with Hugo Chávez." It's the kind of grandstanding that Republicans, absent a domestic agenda, have come to rely on. Venezuela's position on Honduras is identical to that of Brazil and Chile--and, for that matter, the European Union. But the right-wing attacks are effective, largely because self-described liberals repeatedly indulge in the demonization not just of Chávez, as Lanny Davis recently did, but of leftists like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

In early August the State Department seemed to give ground to Republicans, stating in a letter to Republican Senator Richard Lugar that Zelaya's "provocative actions...unleashed the events that led to his removal." This statement, as well as other tepid efforts to pressure Micheletti, bodes ill for the Obama administration's willingness to stand up to right-wing pressure.

Obama himself continues to send mixed signals. At an August summit in Guadalajara of the presidents of Mexico, Canada and the United States, he complained that "critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can't have it both ways." However, no one in Latin America is asking for unilateral US intervention but rather for Washington to work multilaterally with the OAS. By deputizing Oscar Arias, the United States effectively undermined the OAS. On the same day Obama made these remarks, South American presidents, meeting in Quito, Ecuador, reaffirmed their condemnation of the coup and said they will not recognize any president elected under the current regime--a step Clinton's State Department has refused to take.

The failure to restore Zelaya to power will send a clear message to Latin American conservatives that Washington will tolerate coups, provided they are carried out under a democratic guise. As historian Miguel Tinker Salas recently observed in an essay published on Common Dreams, they already sense that Honduras might be a turning point. A conservative businessman recently won the presidency in Panama. In June in Argentina, Cristina Fernández's center-left Peronist party suffered a midterm electoral defeat and lost control of Congress. And polls show that presidential elections coming up in Chile and Brazil will be close, possibly dealing further losses to the left.

In the meantime, Zelaya is rallying supporters from abroad to press for his return. In Honduras, protests continue and the body count climbs. At least eleven Zelaya supporters have been killed since the coup took place. The latest, Martín Florencio Rivera, was stabbed to death as he left a wake held for another victim. Micheletti, for his part, is hunkered down in Tegucigalpa, betting he can leverage international support to last until regularly scheduled presidential elections in November. The future course of Latin American politics may hang in the balance.

About Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, is the author, most recently, of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan). He serves on the editorial committee of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)

The Case for Busting the Filibuster - Nation

Image via Wikipedia

This past spring, Senator Claire McCaskill wrote to me asking for $50 to help elect more Democrats, so we could have a filibuster-proof Senate. Now that Al Franken has finally been declared the sixtieth Democratic senator, her plea may seem moot. But even with Franken in office, we don't have a filibuster-proof Senate. To get to sixty on the Democratic side, we'll still have to cut deals with Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson and others who cat around as Blue Dogs from vote to vote. Whether or not Senator Arlen Specter is a Democrat, the real Democrats will still have to cut the same deals to get sixty votes.

Against his better judgment, Thomas Geoghegan has a website with his other complaints, including a petition demanding that the US Senate cloture the filibuster forever.

Maybe we loyal Dems should start sending postcards like the following: "Dear Senator: Why do you keep asking for my money? You've already got the fifty-one votes you need to get rid of the filibuster rule." It's true--McCaskill and her colleagues could get rid of it tomorrow. Then we really would have a Democratic Senate, like our Democratic House.

She won't. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which paid for her appeal, won't. They use the filibuster threat to hit us up for money. And as long as they do, you and I will keep on kicking in for a "filibuster-proof" Senate, which, with or without Franken, will never exist. Every Obama initiative will teeter around sixty, only the deal-cutting will go on deeper in the back rooms and be less transparent than before.

In the meantime, playing it straighter than Claude Rains, McCaskill and other Democrats tell us how shocked, yes, shocked they are that this deal-cutting is going on. May I quote her spring letter? "I'm writing to you today because President Obama's agenda is in serious jeopardy..."

It still is, as long as it takes sixty and not fifty-one votes to pass Obama's bills. But no, here's what she says: "Why? Because Republicans in the Senate--the same ones who spent years kowtowing to George W. Bush--are determined to block each and every one of President Obama's initiatives."

But why is that a surprise, if there's a rule that lets forty-one senators block a bill? The surprise to people in other countries is that the Senate, already wildly malapportioned, with two senators from every state no matter how big or small the population, does not observe majority rule. Her next line:

"It's appalling really."

It sure is--the way she and other Democratic senators keep the filibuster in place. But let her go on:

"They're the ones who got us into this mess. Now they want to stand in the way of every positive thing the President tries to do to set things right. I'm sure it frustrates you as much as it does me."

Yes, Senator, it frustrates me. But Democratic senators who let this happen and then ask for my money frustrate me even more.

As a labor lawyer, I have seen the Senate filibuster kill labor law reform--kill the right to join a union, freely and fairly--in 1978 and 1994. And, no doubt, in 2010.

And in the end, all we get is a letter from Senator McCaskill asking for more money. Of course, I know there are all sorts of arguments made for the filibuster. For example: "But the filibuster is part of our country's history, and there's much to be said for respecting our history and tradition." Yes, well, slavery and segregation are also part of our history, and that's what the filibuster was used to defend. I'm all in favor of history and tradition, but I see no reason to go on cherishing either the filibuster or the Confederate flag.

Besides, that's not the filibuster we're dealing with.

The post-1975 procedural filibuster is entirely unlike the old filibuster, the one Mr. Smith, as played by the unshaven Jimmy Stewart, stayed up all night to mount in his plea for honest government (though usually it was Senator Bullhorn defending Jim Crow). The old filibuster that you and I and Frank Capra and the Confederacy love so much was very rare, and now it's extinct. No one has stood up and read recipes for Campbell's Soup for decades. In 1975 Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, in his role as president of the Senate, ruled that just fifty-one senators could vote to get rid of the filibuster entirely. A simple majority of liberals could now force change on a frightened old guard. But instead of dumping the filibuster once and for all, the liberals, unsure of their support, agreed to a "reformed" Rule 22. It was this reform that, by accident, turned the once-in-a-blue-moon filibuster into something that happens all the time. The idea was to reduce the votes needed to cut off debate from sixty-seven, which on the Hill is a big hill to climb, to just sixty. Liberals like Walter Mondale wanted to make it easier to push through civil rights and other progressive legislation. What's the harm in that?

The only problem is that, because the filibuster had rendered the chamber so laughable, with renegade members pulling all-nighters and blocking all the Senate's business, the "reformers" came up with a new procedural filibuster--the polite filibuster, the Bob Dole filibuster--to replace the cruder old-fashioned filibuster of Senate pirates like Strom Thurmond ("filibuster" comes from the Dutch word for freebooter, or pirate). The liberals of 1975 thought they could banish the dark Furies of American history, but they wound up spawning more demons than we'd ever seen before. Because the senators did not want to be laughed at by stand-up comedians, they ended their own stand-up acts with a rule that says, essentially:

"We aren't going to let the Senate pirates hold up business anymore. From now on, if those people want to filibuster, they can do it offstage. They can just file a motion that they want debate to continue on this measure indefinitely. We will then put the measure aside, and go back to it only if we get the sixty votes to cut off this not-really-happening debate."

In other words, the opposing senators don't have the stomach to stand up and read the chicken soup recipes. We call it the "procedural" filibuster, but what we really mean is the "pretend" filibuster.

But the procedural, or pretend, filibuster is an even worse form of piracy, an open invitation to senatorial predators to prey on neutral shipping, to which they might have given safe passage before. After all, why not "filibuster" if it's a freebie--if you don't actually have to stand up and talk in the chamber until you're not only half dead from exhaustion but have made yourself a laughingstock? That's what post-1975 senators began to do. In the 1960s, before the procedural filibuster, there were seven or fewer "old" filibusters in an entire term. In the most recent Senate term, there were 138.

At least with the old filibuster, we knew who was doing the filibustering. With the modern filibuster, senators can hold up bills without the public ever finding out their names. No one's accountable for obstructing. No senator runs the risk of looking like a fool. But while they're up there concealing one another's identity, the Republic is a shambles. And now, with a nominal sixty Democratic votes, the need for secrecy as to who has put everything on hold may be even greater than before.

"But just wait till 2010, when we get sixty-two or sixty-three Democrats." I'm sure that's what Senator McCaskill would tell me. "So come on, kick in." But Senator, where will they come from? They could come from bloody border states like yours (Missouri), or from deep inside the South. The problem with the filibuster is not so much that it puts Republicans in control but that it puts senators from conservative regions like the South, the border states and the Great Plains in control. The only true filibuster-proof Senate would be a majority that would be proof against those regions.

An astute book published in 2006, Thomas Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie, argued that to craft a presidential majority Democrats don't need the Southern vote. That may be true (although it turned out that Barack Obama made historic inroads in the South, winning three states there). But there is no way to whistle past Dixie when a non-Dixie presidential majority tries to get its program through the Senate. After 2010, we could have sixty-four Democrats in the Senate and still be in bad shape.

A filibuster-proof Senate, then, is a conceptual impossibility. Even with a hundred Democrats, a filibuster would still lock in a form of minority rule. Because among the Democrats there would arise two new subparties, with forty-one senators named "Baucus" blocking fifty-nine senators named "Brown."

Here's another argument for the filibuster: "If we get rid of it, we'll be powerless against the Republicans when they're in charge." That's why we need it, they say: we're waiting for the barbarians, for the nightmare of President Palin. People in the AFL-CIO tell me this even as the filibuster keeps the right to organize a union on ice and union membership keeps shrinking.

Or as a union general counsel said to me: "Everyone here in the DC office would be freaked out completely if we lost the filibuster. They think it's the only thing that saved us from Bush." Inside the Beltway, they all think it's the filibuster that saved those of us who read Paul Krugman from being shipped off to Guantánamo. Really, that's what many people on the left think. "If Bush ever came back, we'd need it."

Of course Bush, or a Bush equivalent, will come back--precisely because Obama and our side will be blocked by the filibuster. Obama is in peril until he gets the same constitutional power that FDR had, i.e., the right to pass a program with a simple majority (at least after Senator Huey Long finally ran out of words). But let's deal with the canard that the filibuster "saved" us from Bush. What's the evidence? Judicial nominations: that's the answer they give. Go ahead, name someone we blocked. Roberts? Alito? Of course there's Bork, whom we blocked in the 1980s. But we didn't block him with a filibuster.

Think seriously about whom we really stopped. Look, I'm all in favor of opposing atrocious right-wing nominations, and I admit that the filibuster, or at least the GOP's refusal to nuke it, did keep some appellate and district courts free of especially bad people. But I can tell you as a lawyer who does appellate work, who has to appear before these judges, it makes little difference to me if we lose the filibuster. All it means is that instead of a bad conservative, I end up with a really bad conservative. Either way, I still wind up losing.

I think I can say this on behalf of many liberal lawyers who appear before appellate courts: if we could give up the filibuster and get labor law reform or national health insurance, I'd put up with a slightly more disagreeable group of right-wing judges. We'll take the heat.

The fact is, as long as we have the filibuster, we ensure the discrediting of the Democratic Party and we're more likely, not less, to have a terrible bench.

Sure, sometimes liberal Democrats put the filibuster to good use when Republicans are in power. Sure, sometimes a liberal senator can use the filibuster to stop a piece of corporate piracy. It's impossible to prove that the filibuster never does any good. But the record is awfully thin. Look at all the financial deregulation that Senator Phil Gramm and leading Democrats like Larry Summers pushed through only a decade ago. The filibuster did not stop their effective repeal of the New Deal, but it would block the revival of it today.

On the other hand, Republicans and conservative Democrats use their filibusters on labor, health, the stimulus, everything. They can and will block all the change that Obama wanted us to believe in. And even when they lose, they win. For example, when we say that after a major rewriting of the stimulus package--a rewriting that seriously weakened the original bill--it "survived the filibuster," what we really mean is that it didn't.

But let's turn to the final objection: "No one in Washington cares about this. It's not on the agenda. It's a waste of time even to discuss it. What you're talking about is impossible."

What Washington insiders partly mean when they say this is, With a filibuster, any senator can stick up the Senate, and what senator is going to turn in his or her sidearm by giving up the right to demand sixty votes? That's why they're raising a million dollars a day. Otherwise, they'd be peacefully serving in the House. The right to filibuster is what makes each of them a small-town sheriff. That's why it would take massive marches in the streets to force them to give it up.

Indeed, it's hard to imagine how bloody the battle would be. The last time anything so traumatic happened on the Hill was in 1961, when the bigger procedural bar to majority rule was not in the Senate but the House. John Kennedy had just come in, and it was clear that his New Frontier program (we still didn't have Medicare) would go nowhere because of the power of the House Rules Committee chair, the now forgotten "Judge" Howard Smith. Kennedy had to enlist the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, to break Smith's power to stop any bill he disliked from leaving House Rules. In the end, the battle to beat Smith probably killed Rayburn, who died later in the year.

It was an awful power struggle, and many were aghast that Kennedy had thrown away all his capital for this cause. But had he not done it, there probably would not have been a Civil Rights Bill, or certainly not the full-blown version of the Great Society that Lyndon Johnson pushed through after Kennedy's assassination. Imagine having to fight the battle for Medicare today. Without that war on Judge Smith, what we now call the "liberal hour" would not have come.

Nor will any "liberal hour" come in our time, until we bring the filibuster down. I know it seems hopeless. But so did knocking out slavery when the abolitionists first started, or segregation, when civil rights activists began their struggle against Jim Crow. It's a fair enough analogy, since the filibuster is one of the last remnants of racist politics in America: it was a parliamentary tactic used by the Calhounians to make extra certain slavery would stay around.

We should adopt the strategy of the antislavery movement, which in the early stages had three approaches:

1. The laying of petitions on the House. Forgive the archaic legal phrase: I mean petitions to Congress, both houses. In the era of John Quincy Adams--in case you missed the Steven Spielberg movie--there would be mass petitions, with Adams and others reading them on the House floor to the howls of the Southerners. Every group busted by a filibuster should lay on a petition. And start with the House, which is the only place it has a chance of being read.

2. Resolutions by the House, as a warm-up for the Senate. Such resolutions might read: "Resolved, that Congress has no authority to require supermajorities in any chamber except as authorized by the Constitution." Aren't House chairs tired of seeing their bills cast into black holes by senators whose names they never even know?

3. Evangelizing. The most effective tactic in the fight against slavery was the preaching of New England clergy against it. We can start in our battle against the filibuster by enlisting faculty at New England colleges to hold teach-ins. Teach the kids why "Yes, we can" can't happen with the current Senate rules.

By the way, the abolitionists knew the Senate was their enemy, just as it is our enemy today. Let's hope these tactics work for us in getting rid of this last vestige of slavery: Senate Rule 22. What's painful is that we have to cross some of our most sainted senators. But unless we decide to just give up on the Republic, there's no way out. To save the Obama presidency, we may have to fight our heroes.

About Thomas Geoghegan

Thomas Geoghegan, a lawyer in Chicago, is the author of In America's Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled Into a Criminal Trial and Which Side AreYou On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back (both New Press)

Taliban: How Crime Pays for the Growing Insurgency - Time

By Aryn Baker / Kunduz

To understand why America and its allies are losing the war in Afghanistan, consider the story behind one deadly attack. On July 6, in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, a powerful improvised explosive device, or IED, detonated under the wheels of a U.S. humvee. Four soldiers died, as did their translator and a bystander. The makeshift bomb was assembled with goods from the local bazaar. The man who placed it was probably paid the going rate of $750, according to government officials, or more if he captured video proof of dead soldiers. And though the local Taliban covered his expenses and fees, the cash very likely came from money donated by the international community to rebuild Afghanistan's roads, bridges, clinics and schools.

Just a week before the explosion, Hajji Lala Jan, a local businessman subcontracted by a local firm working for the German government — aid agency GTZ to build a road in Kunduz, handed some $15,000 in cash to a Taliban middleman to ensure that his project wouldn't be attacked, according to local officials — though Jan himself denies it. The Taliban cash flow has many sources, and it's impossible to say if German taxpayer dollars directly paid for that IED. Andreas Clausing, country director for GTZ, says such payoffs are "impossible. It is forbidden in our contracts, and we have very strict monitoring." Nevertheless, it is likely that a substantial amount of aid money from many countries — including the U.S. — has made its way, directly or indirectly, into the Taliban's coffers. "Here we have internationals and Afghans turning a blind eye to the fact that we are paying off the very Taliban that we claim to be fighting," says an adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Interior. "It becomes a self-sustaining war, a self-licking ice cream." (See pictures of the battle in Afghanistan's Kunar province.)

That war has become the most pressing overseas challenge facing the Obama Administration, which has already increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 20,000 and is receiving pleas from top commanders to send even more. Barely a week after Afghans went to the polls to vote for a President, the results are tied up in accusations of fraud flying between the two leading candidates, President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. It will be several weeks before an official result is announced. But the political wrangling in Kabul is a sideshow to the increasingly lethal and effective campaign being waged by the Taliban. Drugs, contributions from private donors and — more and more — payoffs from local businessmen ensure that the insurgency stays robust. A Western official estimates that the Taliban is making more than it is spending, "and I don't want to even think about where the rest of that money is going." And as long as the money continues to flow, the war will go on.

Up to now, most explanations of the Taliban's funding have focused on its control of Afghanistan's poppy fields, which provide the raw material for heroin. Last month the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report estimating that the Taliban receives about $70 million a year from the drug trade. But drugs aren't the whole story. "The Taliban obtains revenue from a variety of sources, including extortion of funds from both legitimate and unlawful activity," says David Cohen, the Treasury's assistant secretary for terrorist financing. Major General Michael Flynn, senior military intelligence official at NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan stresses Mafia-like activities such as extortion and kidnapping for ransom. "I would say that there is more money going into the pockets of local leaders [of the insurgency] from criminal activities than there is from narcotics money," he says. (See six ways to fix the CIA.)

It's important to remember that the Afghan insurgency is not a cohesive movement but rather a loose affiliation of groups united by a common goal: the expulsion of foreign troops. Provincial rebel leaders are left largely to make their own plans and find their own funding. Drug money is more likely to go to national leaders of the insurgency, like Mullah Omar, who provide guidance and training for local groups. Local commanders, on the other hand, "absolutely raise their own funds through criminal activities to pay for food, IEDs, weapons and salaries," says Flynn. The billions of dollars spent on reconstruction projects are far too tempting a target to pass up. As a result, the Taliban, once an organization of seminary students seeking to establish a caliphate, is embracing criminal elements that feed on insecurity for financial gain. Together with poor governance, ineffective policing and a weak justice system, the nexus between the Taliban and crime is becoming dangerously entrenched in Afghan society. "The Taliban are acting like a broad network of criminal gangs that enables them to utilize different sources of income," says Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.

See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley.

Afghans are learning the hard way how difficult it is to deal with this level of criminality. The day after the American soldiers died in Kunduz, Jan's construction site was hit. A bulldozer and 12 trucks were torched and two of the drivers caught by the Taliban and held for ransom. Jan, 72, with closely cropped hair, a thick white beard and a string of amber prayer beads, claims he was targeted in retaliation for not paying off the Taliban, even though the provincial governor and district governor say he did. Not that Jan would have refused — he says the Taliban never asked. "If the Taliban had asked for $100,000, I would have gladly paid them," says Jan. "This equipment was worth $230,000." What probably happened, says Abdul Wahid Omerkhil, district governor of Char Dara, where the attack took place, is that Jan paid off the wrong people. "It usually happens like that. You pay one group and you don't pay the other, and they will burn you."

Supping with the Devil
The situation in Char Dara, just 18 miles (about 30 km) from the provincial capital, Kunduz, has gotten so bad that Omerkhil doesn't even spend nights there. Taliban members openly walk the streets and demand usher, a religious tithe, in exchange for adjudicating disputes. From Char Dara, the Taliban is expanding throughout Kunduz. The Taliban's success in the province is attributable to the fact that it can raise money there. In the spring, Mullah Omar dispatched a Taliban "shadow governor" to Kunduz along with a handful of Uzbek, Chechen and Arab fighters, with the intent of threatening the transit of NATO supplies to Kabul. The arrival of Mullah Salam, the Taliban governor, coincided with the return of a local man, Shirin Agha, who had fled to Pakistan after he got into a gunfight at a wedding. While the commanders work independently, they share common tactics, demanding usher, kidnapping for ransom and taking cuts of construction projects. Sitting in the dilapidated foyer of his mansion, Mohammed Omer, the provincial governor of Kunduz, marvels at the scale of the two Taliban leaders' rackets. By his estimate, Salam and Agha amassed at least $100,000 in a month through kidnappings for ransom and protection payments from contractors, who in turn had been paid by international donors. "The problem is that the people here are demanding a school or a road or a bridge, and the foreigners want to help," Omer says. "If we don't build, the people complain, but if we do, this problem arises. Either way, the Taliban benefits." A foreign official in Kunduz who asked not to be identified says, "No one is going to come save these construction companies. The Taliban know that the international community is concerned about security, but they also know it wants to pursue development as much as possible. So extortion is the easiest crime."

It's not just the big foreign-aid projects that get hit. Local businesses are victims too. In Kandahar, says a businessman who asked for anonymity out of fear of Taliban retribution, even the smallest shops pay a "business license" to the Taliban. In his company, which builds towers for mobile-phone transmitters, he estimates that 20% to 30% of total costs go to protection payments. The going rate to protect a transmitter tower runs about $2,000 a month, he says. "You have no choice but to pay these guys. You don't want to do it, but there is no government in these areas, no security, so you have to do what you can to protect your business."

That analysis is confirmed by Sargon Heinrich, a Kabul-based U.S. businessman in construction and service industries. Heinrich says some 16% of his gross revenue goes to "facilitation fees," mostly to protect shipments of valuable equipment coming from the border. "That is all revenue that will ultimately be shared by the Taliban." As an American, Heinrich is troubled by the implication that he may be funding the insurgency. "All of this could be seen as material support for enemy forces," he muses. "But you have to weigh that against everything that is being done in that project. Are you aiding and abetting the enemy if you have to pay to get a school built? It's the cost of doing business here." In fact, protection payments are so widespread that one contractor I interviewed responded incredulously to questions about how the system worked. "You must be the only person in Afghanistan who doesn't know this is going on," he said.

Read "Why Obama's Afghan War Is Different."

See pictures of the U.S. Marines' new offensive in Afghanistan.

Taking the Long View
U.S. and Afghan government officials certainly know about the protection rackets. Afghan Deputy Minister of Public Works Mohammad Rasooli Wali freely admits that the contractors he has hired to help build the multibillion-dollar ring road around Afghanistan — funded by the World Bank, USAID and other nations' development programs — probably pay off the Taliban to protect their sites and equipment. For his part, Colonel Thomas O'Donovan, the departing head of the Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan, which is responsible for about $4 billion worth of U.S. government contracts a year, admits that there is little the Corps can do to stop subcontractors from paying the Taliban. "If we catch them, then they are done. But how do you catch them? It's not like the Taliban give receipts."

So what can be done? Cohen, at Treasury, says an interagency task force has recently been convened on the issue of funding extremists, hoping this will help "protect the critically important work of humanitarian agencies in the region." Flynn, who came to ISAF two months ago with General Stanley McChrystal, the organization's new U.S. commander, thinks the old laissez-faire attitude toward protection money has got to change. "This is happening on battlefields across Afghanistan," he says, "and we have to fix it. Because if we can't fix that, then we can't tell the government of Afghanistan to get its act together." Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan's Minister of the Interior, says increased financing, particularly through extortion, is emboldening the enemy and admits that part of the fault lies with his government. "Yes, I blame [contractors and construction companies] for the fact that they are paying these insurgents, but at the same time, I sympathize with them because they are not doing it out of their own accord but because they are forced to. It is our responsibility as the government of Afghanistan and the international community to provide a secure environment for them to work. And so far, we have not been able to do so." (Read TIME's interview with McChrystal.)

That's in part because some Afghan officials think cracking down on protection rackets would be too difficult and costly, when an easier solution could be found in more development. Deputy Minister Wali says, "If the contractors pay the Taliban — well, that is only for a year, and the road is good for many years. And that brings security." Once the road is completed, he argues, it brings hospitals, police, schools and education. "And once the people know what the peace in the area is like, they will leave their guns and do some agriculture."

But that argument hasn't been borne out elsewhere. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, for example, has become so entrenched in the cocaine trade that it is now difficult to isolate the true ideologues from the criminals that keep the movement alive. The adviser to the Afghan Ministry of the Interior says the costs of enabling the Taliban's protection racket outweigh the benefits of any reconstruction that might come out of it. "It both prolongs the war and feeds criminality, which in turn turns more people against the government." His solution is to encourage local participation. "If you want a school, then make the locals build the school. You want a road, bring in local labor. It might be more convenient to pay off the Taliban, and it might be faster. But the community will protect what the community has built."

Such an approach would take time to bear fruit. The first step would be to shield local populations from the Taliban's threats — mission impossible without more Afghan and Western boots on the ground. Omerkhil, the beleaguered district governor from Char Dara, says there are only 27 police in his district of 80,000 residents "and 3,000 Taliban. The alternative to paying the Taliban is easy. If we had more soldiers, more police and more checkpoints, then I can guarantee you that the Taliban wouldn't be able to do anything."

In the end, only a thriving — and legal — local economy will turn off the Taliban's faucet. "If you have people making more money in a criminal organization than they can [make] working for the government or in the private sector," says a U.S. Treasury official involved in the issue, "it is an indication that we need to do a lot more to create a viable Afghan economy." Correct — and sadly, not something likely to be put right anytime soon.

— With reporting by Shah Mahmood Barakzai / Kabul