Protecting little minds

We've also mentioned this fact, and Gareth Porter now reports on the seldom mentioned understory of the occupation and war in Afghanistan, the US and NATO all pay Afghan warlords for security.

This is at the same time that the US decries Karzai's alliance with warlords, consistency evidently being the hobgoblin of little minds that fail to see the big picture.

Little minds also fail to understand how the US can hope to build a national army in Afghanistan, when loyalty is more directly rewarded to powers outside the structure of the state:

In Uruzgan province, both US and Australian special forces have contracted a private army commanded by Colonel Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.

Khan's security force protects NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the article.

Khan gets US$340,000 per month - nearly $4.1 million annually - for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle, Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

Of course, the MSM, led by the NYT and WaPo, obviously out of concern for these little mind that might risk exploding if confronted with these uncomfortable facts, fail to report them.

See what might happen!