Six Years Later, US Still Trying to Find a Way to Keep Corrupt Contractor in Afghanistan
The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger.
Behind the scenes, U.S. officials repeatedly have voiced frustration about the company’s work.
In May 2004 — three months after then-President George W. Bush publicly praised the company for its quick construction of a section of the Kabul-to-Kandahar Highway — then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad raised concerns about Louis Berger.
“These problems are now beginning to interfere with the credibility of the U.S. Mission in Afghanistan, and require immediate corrective action,” he wrote.
Later that year, Patrick Fine, USAID’s top official in Afghanistan, questioned the quality of schools and clinics whose construction was overseen by Louis Berger. “It is time to cut our losses and put in place an alternative strategy,” he wrote.
Yet six years later, DOJ is preparing to sign either a non-prosecution or a deferred prosecution agreement with the company so that Louis Berger can continue to work in Afghanistan.
The decision to brush aside the allegations and the evidence and keep doing business with Louis Berger, underscores a persistent dilemma for the Obama administration in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Cutting ties with suspect war-zone contractors in Afghanistan would threaten the administration’s effort to rebuild the country and begin withdrawing some of the nearly 100,000 U.S. troops there next July.
You know all those articles about the corruption of Karzai’s government? The claims that Afghans are just more tolerant of corruption than Americans? The suggestions that, because it’s a developing country, Afghans have to and do learn to tolerate corruption?
Either we’ve become a banana republic sooner than most people realized (perhaps with the FL county in 2000? Or before that?). Or all those attempts to blame Afghan culture for the corruption there are just lame excuses invented to help us overlook our own apparently intractable tolerance for corruption.
But one way or another, it helps to make Afghanistan far too expensive to achieve whatever “victory” our government pretends to be pursuing.
is this any different from the corrupt contracting company called black water?
or the corrupt contractor called haliburton?
No, and in fact McCLatchy put out a short article this morning pointing out that it was precisely the same w/BW and KBR.
Only offered to elite-status frequent
fliersbribers.Cutting ties with suspect war-zone contractors in Afghanistan would threaten the administration’s effort to rebuild the country.
I think they meant “build a country,” and keep the wheels greased on the gravy train terror war victory tour bus.
It’s no longer a matter of getting a corrupt contractor out of Afghanistan. That’s nothing but a symptom of the problem.
What has to happen is for the U.S. government, in all it’s permutations, to get out of Afghanistan, and any equivocation, parsing, or just plain bullshit, from Spencer Ackerman or anyone else, about that, is nothing but the extension of what we were getting from Bush, Rice, Cheyney, and their ilk.
Um, look close at the company’s history and it will all make sense. Oddly, I think your prior post could find a common thread with this post unfortunately.
And the founders bio leads to more ahha moments.
The company is in Morristown, NJ.
Intel work comes in all forms. Especially infrastructure development.
With a generous discussion from John Perkins and Confessions of an Economic Hitman, too, no doubt.
Right, there is that distinct possibility that John Berger is no more than 1) one of those entities that we have long used as a means of enforcing power in developing nations and also 2) a money laundering vehicle for intelligence purposes.
So we can’t get rid of it, bc it is a necessary means of laundering tax payer money to serve clandestine purposes.
Yes. When I saw that Berger story yesterday, and linked to it in comments on the previous post, I was struck also by the common theme. Corruption is now tolerated and entrenched through retroactive immunity and these “deferred” or forgeddaboutit agreements, while protests about corruption are very bad requiring surveillance, even arrest and prosecution. Lord help us.
Add to the “common theme” ties to the same “allies” demonstrated over and over and the
begin to look like intelligence gone wild for one purpose. Unfortunately, then I start sounding all “tin foil-like.”
Oh well, the U.S. is becoming exactly the nation we
are building in Afghan.
And maybe this project, tied to the Berger group, has something to do with keeping the contractor…
I don’t think the government concerns itself much with competent contractors or even achieving substantive goals (whether at home or abroad). Its tolerance of gross incompetence suggests that contracting serves another purpose altogether.
In light of the Wall Street bailout and the mandatory health insurance bill, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the principle purpose of government contracts is to transfer wealth from the public treasury into the private hands of lobbyists and campaign contributors.
This is just emblematic of the Obama administration’s continued refusal to eliminate the burrowed in Bush appointees and the corrupt Bush’s Buddy contractor system. KBR, Haliburton, Blackwater, ALL Bush supporters and contributors. Can there be any doubt that the Louis Berger Group is just another loyal Bushie?
This has some good background information about the Berger fingers in pies of influence.
The spectacle of having good progressive bloggers like Marcy STILL writing about things like this, with a “progressive” democratic president with an 18 seat majority in the Senate and a 77 seat majority in the House, is depressing…almost beyond words.
As someone who sent him money, voted for him, and who was exhilarated when he won, I sure hope the wretched irony of this isn’t lost on the Obama loyalists.
I know he said he would focus on Afghanistan, even as he campaigned, but this was another promise he should have broken, to go along with the Public Option, protecting our coastline from offshore drilling, reining in Wall Street, ending taxes for seniors making less that 50K, and in general, just using the political clout that he came in with, to mount the salvage operation. All of that is disappearing; along with his chances for a second term, and the hope of democrats to effect the changes that we so badly need.
Instead of the optimism, we have the bizarre spectacle of a democratic president in his first term, with those big political majorities, and evidently, no democrat running in a strongly contested race wants to be seen with him. It’s hard to blame them. If any more evidence was needed of the political kiss of death that he’s become, there it is.
Whether we lose the House or not, in about 6 weeks he’s going to become one hell of a lame duck. The idea that he would try to do something about the corporate cash cows of his wars (even if he wanted to, and by now, it’s pretty obvious that he’s…Bushian…about that, too) is ludicrous.
EW,
http://www.chk.com/Media/CorpMediaKits/Hydraulic_Fracturing_Fact_Sheet.pdf
For your reading pleasure!
“Do As We Say and Not As We Do” is a helluva military and foregien policy strategy.
Wait till you see the fetid way the government packages up all the crimes, wrongs and damages owed by BP. And they have been done everything with an eye to that from the outset. The problem with meting out criminal responsibility with all these companies as the government should do is that there are, as I recall, debarment requirements that start to kick in. To get around that the government has to then grant waivers, which is also very messy and basically then gives the bad corporation a free pass going forward because the government has just admitted they know and accept they are dealing with a malevolent corporation. So they just do these fake accountability agreements that are just another cost of doing business the corporation literally passes on to its government customers in future contracts.
“Wait till you see the fetid way the government packages up all the crimes, wrongs and damages owed by BP.”
You are such an optimist today!
Apparently, it would be that BP did no wrong and if you try to show otherwise, you might be harassed instead.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/building-sand-castles-floridas-beaches-illegal-feds-oilhunting-reporter/
Louis Berger has friends in high places.
http://www.metroactive.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11123
http://investors.urscorp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=89381&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=782145&highlight=
Finfoil hat alert…
…but with the FL count (not county) in mind, how do we know pre-election polls aren’t being falsified? If you’re going to steal the count, you better make sure your candidate looks close or ahead in the pre-election polls, right?
Anybody know if polling firms have strong security measures in place so that, say, poll phone calls aren’t easily hijacked via phone circuit shenanigans? Hijack 20 poll calls and you can swing a poll sample of 1000 by 4 points.
Not the easiest thing in the world to pull off, but pretty darn doable these days, I’d bet. But I’ve never heard anything about what security measures are in place at polling firms.
Finfoil = fishy tinfoil, I guess.
A bit more info on Lewis Berger from McClatchy this AM:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/09/20/100874/firm-gets-new-federal-contract.html
Sorry for the late drive-by (we just got back from a trip to the Grand Canyon), but this quote illustrates the double whammy we’ve given ourselves: Not only does perpetuating ties with corrupt contractors hurt our rebuilding effort, but it *prevents* us from making contracts with better contractors, and prevents them from building their business so as to be truly competitive with the corrupt contractors. This perpetuates the morass.
President Obama, meet Tar Baby.
Bob in AZ