$160 Million of US Taxpayer Money to Fight Corruption in Afghan Customs!?!?!

by Mark Angelides

As the media complain about security spending for President Donald Trump and his family, they happily overlook the billions of dollars wasted on seemingly contradictory programs to hold up corrupt governments we are supposedly at war with. Are they just ignorant? Or is the war not actually a war?
To start with, there is so much conflicting information on when the war actually began; it has been renamed, repurposed and twisted in so many ways that even official sources seem to be at odds with each other about when war kicked off, and even when it finished!
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, who I’ll cover in another article, seriously dodgy stuff going on here) state that activities have been taking place in Afghanistan since 1999, ostensibly the al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee which linked the two groups. Then came a series of events in 2001 which culminated in the September 11th attacks.
They provide a timeline that shows how accords were reached and peaceful relationships were undertaken including the setting up of a new “friendly government.”
But why then do all the major news agencies say that this is at least a fifteen year war? And more importantly, why did the US government spend $160 million dollars to help curb corruption in their Customs process?
As reported in Breitbart: “To help combat the issues related to the endemic corruption that has plagued the Afghan government’s cash-based customs payment system,” former President Barack Obama’s USAID awarded the $161.6 million contract to Chemonics Inc. to implement an electronic payment system between 2009 and 2017.
This was apparently paid to help remove the cash-based system of Customs Duties that prevented the Afghan government collecting their cut. But why would we be ensuring a government of a country we are at war with is getting their full tax revenue?
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says that “Improving the efficient and effective collection of customs duties is important to the government’s long-term sustainability,” pointing out that the Afghan government has been failing to collect enough revenue to cover its expenses…But aren’t we at war?
The US government departments word everything so carefully to show that we have a “war IN Afghanistan” without quite pushing the notion that America is “AT war, “ and this is one of te reasons why there has never been any actual progress.
It seems that this is nothing more than an operation to keep the US in a “state of war” without actually wanting to do anything to end it. And this is the reason there will be significant pushback on any proposals by President Trump.