Afghan Embassy Scandal's Link to Cost-Cutting Security

Project on Government Oversight

By now most Americans are all too used to the dispiriting reports of the security situation in Afghanistan. But the graphic images of U.S. embassy guards engaged in all manner of obscene, drunken behavior that emerged last week were still shocking. The revelations were presented in detail by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight (POGO), which sent a letter on Sept. 1 to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposing an alleged atmosphere of fear and coercion among guards at the embassy in Kabul, which involved bacchanalian parties, hazing, prostitution and drunkenness. "The lewd and deviant behavior of approximately 30 supervisors and guards has resulted in complete distrust of the leadership and a breakdown in the chain of command, compromising security," the letter concluded. But while the embassy scandal may have come as a rude surprise to many Americans, Congress and the State Department have been fielding troubling complaints and reports about the contractor overseeing security for more than two years.

And no one was likely less shocked by the embassy scandal than James Sauer, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Marines from Massachusetts who was hired in December of 2006 to prepare to take over responsibility for the safety of 1,000 employees at the Kabul embassy. Virtually from the moment he arrived in Afghanistan as an employee of a unit of the private security contractor ArmorGroup, which had a contract to manage embassy security starting in July of 2007, Sauer knew there were problems. According to a 46-page complaint Sauer filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., at almost every step of the way he ran into interference from senior company executives. They allegedly told him he just had to put a "good face" on the project, acknowledging that the company had put in an unrealistically low bid in order to win the coveted $187 million contract. Sauer said he was told he would just have to "make do" so that ArmorGroup International, based in London, could still manage to squeeze a profit from the operation.


That meant Sauer would have to buy substandard vehicles, replace American employees with cheaper South Africans and pay what Sauer thought were slave wages to the Nepalese Gurkhas, who make up nearly two-thirds of the embassy's 450 guards. The situation would eventually get so bad, the POGO documents said, that it would prompt two threats of mass walkouts by the Gurkhas. Guards would end up suffering chronic sleep deprivation because the staff was 20% shorthanded.
An exasperated Sauer declared in the complaint that he repeatedly tried to draw the line. "There needs to be a clear understanding, acknowledgment, and willingness to correct the financial deficiencies built into this thing by the business development people," he wrote in one e-mail to top executives, according to the court document. "You are going to have to go into the margin — either commit to spending the money, or pull the plug on this now before ArmorGroup looks more stupid than a box of rocks."


In June 2007, one month before he was to officially start managing security for the embassy, Sauer found himself fired, along with his deputy, another retired Marine, Peter Martino of New Hampshire. Their case — which had the support of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public-interest group that promotes government and corporate accountability — was settled out of court; its terms bar the parties from speaking about the case, and Sauer's attorney says neither she nor her client can speak to TIME. Sauer, however, isn't the only former ArmorGroup employee to make similar allegations about the embassy contract. On Sept. 9, James Gordon, the former operations director at the embassy, filed a suit against his former employer, claiming it forced him out after he blew the whistle on its misconduct. "Their goal was to maximize their profits, provide a fig leaf of security at the embassy and pray to God that nobody got killed," he told reporters Sept. 10 in a press conference by phone from Kabul, where he is working for another security firm he refused to name. Gordon added that employees and managers were allowed to "frequent brothels notorious for housing trafficked women," activity about which the company allegedly misled the State Department and Congress. Wackenhut Services Inc., the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., company that is now the parent of ArmorGroup International, said that Gordon "voluntarily resigned" and that his "factual allegations and legal claims were overstated, ill-founded, not based on any personal knowledge, or otherwise lacking in legal merit." It also said it was cooperating fully with State Department investigations and referred all questions there.

Taken together, the complaints help explain how such a high-profile contract, flawed from the outset, could have led to the current scandal. ArmorGroup's record at the embassy has not been impressive; according to the POGO letter, nearly 90% of the Americans and other Western expats quit in the first six months of its contract, which meant there had to be constant training of new staff and a dissolution of any semblance of team cohesion. At one point, 18 guards were not at their posts, requiring embassy personnel to be redeployed to fill critical gaps. The State Department said it docked the company $2.4 million for this. The poor English skills of many of the Gurkhas required cross-cultural pantomiming.


ArmorGroup's employees did not even appear to be fully aware of the ground rules of their contract. In one incident, according to POGO, guards set out from the embassy at night, armed and dressed in turbans, equipped with the embassy's night-vision equipment, to secure portions of the road between the embassy and the guard base in Camp Sullivan several miles off. But this action violated ArmorGroup's contract, which is only for static security — that is, guards at specified posts. (The role of traveling bodyguards for embassy personnel is contracted out to another firm, Xe, the company formerly known as Blackwater.) What's more, the mission left remaining embassy security personnel without any night-vision equipment, or "largely night blind," as the POGO letter put it.

Even before the POGO letter to Secretary Clinton, the ArmorGroup contract was under scrutiny. The State Department issued the first of eight "deficiency letters" in July 2007, the same month ArmorGroup took over embassy security. But after each complaint, the company somehow persuaded the State Department that the problems were being addressed. In April 2008 the State Department's contracting officer warned this was the company's "final opportunity" to correct shortcomings, and a September 2008 letter declared termination was being considered. In the end, however, the department renewed the contract until July 2010.

"The Kabul embassy contract can be viewed as a case study of how mismanagement and lack of oversight can result in poor performance," concluded a Senate committee investigation published in June. POGO has said it has lost confidence in the State Department and called for the Pentagon, which has a mixed but improving record at handling contractors, to "immediately" take over supervision of the guards. The State Department, which has launched a number of investigations, continues to insist that, as appalling as the guards' behavior was, embassy safety was never actually jeopardized.

One central problem, explains Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade association, is "the tendency of the U.S. government to go for the lowest bidder no matter what, and the result is that even the better companies end up cutting their contracts to the bones, and as a result these problems are more frequent than you'd like." Although currently there is no law requiring the government to take the lowest bidder — though there is draft legislation to make it so — bureaucrats tend to favor the low bids so as to avoid being called up to Capitol Hill to justify their decisions.

The problems have been exacerbated by the global consolidation of the security industry. In 2008, ArmorGroup was bought by G4S, the largest security company in the world. G4S also bought ArmorGroup's rival, Wackenhut, which now runs ArmorGroup in the new conglomerate. Before they found themselves under the same big tent, Wackenhut and ArmorGroup had competed for the U.S. embassy contract, which ArmorGroup won with a substantially lower bid. Now, Wackenhut has found itself managing the Kabul embassy contract anyway. In June, Wackenhut vice president Samuel Brinkley admitted to Congress, "We feel we can safely say that adequate guard services for the Kabul embassy cannot be provided for the contract price." Instead of making a profit, he said, the firm was losing $1 million a month. "We would welcome any help that the [Senate] Subcommittee [on Contracting Oversight, of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs] might be able to provide to enable the government to pay a more reasonable price for security for the embassy."

AP Journalists Emilio Morenatti, Andi Jatmiko Wounded In Afghanistan Bombing

In this undated photo, AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko is seen working. A roadside bombing has wounded two Associated Press journalists embedded with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan. Photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko were traveling with the military when their vehicle was struck by the bomb Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009. (AP Photo)

KABUL — Two Associated Press journalists wounded in a bomb blast while on assignment with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan were evacuated to a medical center in Dubai on Wednesday after being treated at a military hospital.

The Army, meanwhile, released additional details of the attack, including word that two U.S. soldiers were also wounded in the bombing of a light armored vehicle called a Stryker near the Pakistani border.

Photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko were traveling on Tuesday with a unit of the 5th Stryker Brigade when their vehicle ran over a bomb planted in the open desert terrain, the military said.

All four wounded were taken by helicopter to a military hospital in Kandahar. The journalists arrived around midnight Wednesday in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where they were to receive further treatment.

Jatmiko suffered leg injuries and two broken ribs. Morenatti, badly wounded in the leg, underwent an operation in Kandahar that resulted in the loss of his left foot.

The two soldiers, who were not identified, also suffered leg wounds – one of them severe. One of the wounded soldiers crawled out of the vehicle and applied a tourniquet to the other injured soldier, according to Capt. Denis Lortie, commander of Bear Troop, 8th Squadron of the 5th Stryker. Another soldier also applied a tourniquet to Morenatti.

Four other soldiers in the vehicle were not injured, Lortie said.

The attack took place as four Stryker vehicles were on patrol 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of the town of Spin Boldak and 120 miles (193 kilometers) southeast of Dahaneh, a Taliban-held town where helicopter-borne U.S. Marines launched an operation before dawn Wednesday to uproot the militants.

Morenatti, 40, a Spaniard, is an award-winning photographer based in Islamabad who has worked for the AP in Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. He was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2009 by Pictures of the Year International.

In Spain, where Morenatti is widely known, Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Morenatti's wife, Marta Ramoneda, to offer assistance, the Foreign Ministry said.

Jatmiko, 44, of Indonesia, has reported for the AP from throughout Asia for more than 10 years. Indonesian diplomats contacted the AP in Kabul to express concern for Jatmiko and seek assurances that he would be cared for.

AP President Tom Curley said their injuries reflected "the risks that journalists like Emilio and Andi encounter every day as they staff the front lines of the most dangerous spots of the world. We are grateful for their bravery and their commitment to the news. Our hearts are with them and their families, especially Emilio's wife, Marta, and Andi's wife, Pingkan."

Journalists have faced increasing danger from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, as they go on assignment with Western troops carrying out new offensives as part of the effort by the United States and its allies to turn the tide of the Afghan war.

IED attacks are now the cause of the majority of U.S. and NATO deaths in Afghanistan.

According to figures from the U.S.-based Joint IED Defeat Organization, the number of incidents from IEDs soared to 828 last month, the highest level of the war and more than twice as many as in July 2008.

The IED used in Tuesday's attack employs a pressure-plate detonation mechanism to complete an electrical circuit under the weight of a passing vehicle.

Eighteen journalists were killed in Afghanistan between 1992 and 2008, making it the 11th most dangerous country in the world for media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least one more has been killed this year.

Journalists have also been kidnapped in Afghanistan.

In June, New York Times journalist David Rohde and Afghan journalist Tahir Ludin escaped after being held more than seven months by the Taliban. They were abducted Nov. 10 south of Kabul while heading to interview a Taliban leader, and were later moved across the border into Pakistan.

Morenatti, too, has been kidnapped, although not in Afghanistan. In October 2006, the AP photographer was abducted in Gaza City and freed unharmed after 15 hours.

The Poppy Fields Of Afghanistan

By Katie Couric

Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News

Today I rode in a black hawk helicopter over the poppy fields in southern Afghanistan with Brigadier General John Nicholson, Secretary Robert Gates and a few other folks.

I thought of that famous poem from World War I, John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields." It's one of my mom's favorites.
"In Flanders fields the poppies grow/Between the crosses, row on row," he writes.
I expected the poppies to be bright red flowers like the artificial ones people wear as a remembrance on Memorial Day, but there weren't any like that.
On the flight I was wearing a headset, so I could hear the Brigadier General briefing Sec. Gates on the opium situation.
The poppy crop is being harvested right now and made into opium which will later be refined into heroin. In fact, two thirds of the world's heroin supply comes from southern Afghanistan. Opium production accounts for 60 percent of this country's economy and it fuels the engine for the insurgency, with the Taliban making $70 to $100 million dollars a year.
So, how do you cut off this powerful source of drugs and money?
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has said destroying the poppy fields would only strengthen the Taliban. As Sec. Gates told me today, you have to find a crop to replace the poppies or every farmer becomes a Taliban recruit.
The U.S. military is bullish about helping with an agricultural transformation....encouraging farmers to plant pomegranates or vineyards, arranging microfinance and giving economic incentives. Officials say Afghanistan is an agrarian culture, relying on farming for centuries and NOT poppies. Agricultural teams will be coming from the states to offer advice and water experts may help direct farmers about what can thrive in this often drought stricken land.
Whether they will be inspired to start anew is up for grabs, but there is little doubt that the Taliban in their role of narcotics traffickers will fight ferociously to keep the drugs and money flowing.
Something called "the killing season" begins after the poppy crop is harvested and some farmers pick up their guns and become fighters again. As the U.S. pursues a more aggressive strategy towards the opium drug trade and dispatches soldiers to the fields of southern Afghanistan, it may be a very bloody summer.
Photos:





This post originally appeared at CBSNews.com.

Obama Got Afghanistan/Pakistan Right

For those of us who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was extremely important that the new president get the situation in Afghanistan right. Not just for America's security, but for those troops still in Afghanistan, and those heading to Afghanistan to put their lives on the line in the war. With today's announcement, President Obama has shown that he "gets it." That's why we at VoteVets.org are supporting the plan with a petition, which you can sign on to, right here.

There's a lot to like about the plan. But, there are three key things I'm particularly focused on, that represent a stark departure from the previous administration. They show that this president not only has reasonable goals in the region, but a good idea of what it will take to get there.

Point One: The Military Can't Do It All
The president recognizes that the war against terrorists requires much more than just throwing troops at the problem. That alone will go a long way towards setting policies that make America safer, and taking the burden off our military.

The president said today, "To advance security, opportunity, and justice - not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces - we need agricultural specialists and educators; engineers and lawyers.... These investments relieve the burden on our troops. They contribute directly to security. They make the American people safer. And they save us an enormous amount of money in the long run - because it is far cheaper to train a policeman to secure their village or to help a farmer seed a crop, than it is to send our troops to fight tour after tour of duty with no transition to Afghan responsibility."

This is key, and something that was lacking in the region for a long time. Those hardline radicals who want to take control thrive on poverty and misery of the people. The single best thing we can do to ensure that the Afghan people aren't so destitute and broken that they're tempted to join these radicals, is to send civilian training and humanitarian aid.

Point Two: Though it's the "War in Afghanistan," we need to treat it like a region
That the president made a point of including Pakistan in this strategy, offering greater aid to them if the Pakistani government makes more of an effort to work and coordinate with us, is as smart as it is practical.
Everyone - myself included - has not helped when we bind the efforts in the region under the name "The War in Afghanistan." This is a regional problem, that requires a regional solution.

President Obama understands to get the support of the Pakistani people, which will make it easier to get the help we need from the Pakistani government, it takes carrots. And his plan focuses squarely on that. His support for legislation sponsored by Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar that authorizes $1.5 billion in direct support to the Pakistani people every year over the next five years, along with another bill that creates opportunity zones in the border region will go a long way towards getting the cooperation we need to really focus in on al Qaeda, and close in on them from the Pakistani and Afghan sides of the border region.

Point Three: There is a tighter focus, open to reaching out to some of the enemy
Maybe most importantly, this president has given up the pipe dream of setting up a European-style democracy in Afghanistan, and instead has refocused our goals on a more urgent mission - protecting America and the world from terrorism.

We've finally left fantasy-land, where America can simply go somewhere, topple a government, and western-style democracies will pop up and thrive. Afghanistan is a very different beast. And, while the president committed to helping build out infrastructure for the Afghan people, and improve the lives of the Pakistani people, he's not letting dreams of a grand new western democracy get in the way of more practical and tighter goals - namely, fighting al Qaeda and taking the region away as a home base for the terror network, forever.

To do so, the president recognized something that I wrote about last week - there are elements throughout the region that are fighting us now, but could become our partners. This might have been the most striking parts of the President's speech:

"There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course. That is why we will work with local leaders, the Afghan government, and international partners to have a reconciliation process in every province. As their ranks dwindle, an enemy that has nothing to offer the Afghan people but terror and repression must be further isolated. And we will continue to support the basic human rights of all Afghans - including women and girls."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Now, will everything go exactly according to plan? Of course not. Nor is this going to be quick. But with the points above, and the rest that the President laid out, those of us who served finally have confidence that this President gets it, and will keep us on the right course - the reasonable and practical course. That's something we veterans have been waiting for.

Crossposted at VetVoice.com

Dangerous mission in Afghanistan

By Katia Moskvitch

Some 14,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in the nine-year occupation of Afghanistan [AP]

As millions of Russians mark the 20th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Ervand Ilynsky, a Kazakh mountaineer, recounts a dangerous secret mission he led in the first days of the occupation.


On February 15, 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, the premier of the Soviet Union, ordered the complete pullout of troops from Afghanistan.

Nearly two million Afghans - a vast majority of them civilians - and 14,000 Soviet soldiers died during the nine-year occupation.

Many of the Soviets were killed in battle, but some died even before getting to Kabul.

In late December, 1979, two days before the Soviet invasion was made official, a military aeroplane carrying 67 paratroopers crashed in the Hindu Kush mountain range, some 80km from the Afghan capital.

The ill-fated IL-76 had also been on a top secret mission, transporting a black leather briefcase containing the plans for the upcoming invasion.

And that briefcase had to be retrieved, at any price.

Seek and retrieve
On December 26, 1979, a group of eight Soviet mountaineers in bright red parkas were told they would be on a routine civilian rescue operation from the Kazakh capital Almaty to the neighbouring Pamir Mountains.
  

A young general in Soviet air force uniform came forward to meet them.

"We're going to make an exchange," he said. "You give me your passports and I give you your pistols."
"Pistols?" someone from the group said. "Why?"

But the general did not elaborate.

Once up in the air, they were flying over countless snowy mountain ridges when the pilot announced they were crossing the state border.
"What's going on? Where are we going?" asked Ervand Ilynsky, the team's leader.
The answer was short, but clear: "Afghanistan."
De-classified
Thirty years later Ilynsky, now 68, talks about the trip as if it had just happened.
"We had no idea what was happening. We didn't yet know about the Soviet invasion, no one did, it was officially announced only the next day," he told Al Jazeera, sitting in his office in Almaty, in the Central Army Sports Club where he has worked as a mountaineering instructor for almost two decades.
"But when our plane was getting ready to land in Kabul, we saw hundreds of Soviet troops down there on the ground and we began to wonder."
Soviet forces had started crossing the border months before, at a request of the pro-Soviet Afghan government asking for help in its conflict with anti-communist Mujahideen rebels, supported by the United States.
First, helicopters arrived, followed by tanks, air force and, finally, infantry.
Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan president, knew of the movements, but what he didn’t know was that he was on the Soviets' death list.
As Ilynsky and his team got off the plane in the Kabul airport, the Soviet special forces' Alpha group was preparing to storm Amin's palace.
On December 27, 1979, Amin was killed.

The war had started.

Tricked into service
Ilynsky said that when he and his people learnt that they, civilian sportsmen with no army training except for a few mandatory university military courses, were tricked and brought to a military conflict, they couldn't believe it.

Ilinsky a few years before his secret mission [Courtesy: www.mountain.ru]

But they knew there was no turning back. "We were told that a Soviet plane had crashed somewhere in the mountains and that we had to get there to begin rescue operations," he said. "But even getting there was dangerous."

They saw Mujahideen fighters firing at Soviet tanks and helicopters, a few hundred metres from where they were passing in their BMP, an infantry fighting vehicle.
Luckily, the Mujahideen didn't fire at Ilynsky's team. "I guess when they saw eight guys dressed in strange, bright red parkas, they must have thought we were from some kind of a peacekeeping organisation," he said.
"Those parkas might have saved us there, but we began to fear for our lives, so we asked the military to give us proper arms. They exchanged our pistols for Kalashnikov's and told us to make them visible even when we went to the market to buy food, this way we'd be safe," said Ilynsky.

Heavy snow
The rescuers were taken to the crash site by helicopter, but the pilot wasn't able to land in Hindu Kush and had to turn back.

Ilynsky suggested bringing civilian sports pilots from Kyrgyzstan, those who had years of experience flying in the mountains.

When they arrived, the team was finally able to get down and start digging.

"It was very cold up there, at some 4,680m, and snowing very heavily," recalled Ilynsky. "Before it crashed, the plane was going over the Nowshak Peak of Hindu Kush when it touched it and went down.
"The wreckage was buried in the snow and the bodies, or rather body parts of our paratroopers were scattered all over.

"If we felt something under our feet, we started digging. We dug out legs, arms, torsos. We also found the black box; it was of orange colour, by the way.

Black leather briefcase
They spent New Year's Eve there, among human remains in the Afghan mountains, and on the following day were able to locate and retrieve the black leather briefcase.

When they handed it to the supervisor, the "rescue operation" was over.

They had to leave the site, even though it meant leaving behind the many bodies they didn't have time to dig out and give a proper burial.

But it seemed like it didn't matter anymore.

The eight mountaineers returned home on January 6, 1980. They continued with their lives, conquering new peaks around the world, but they have yet to receive any official recognition from the Soviet leaders.

Ignored
The Soviet military archives make no mention of the mountaineers or their top-secret rescue operation in Afghanistan.

The mountaineers weren't paid for their efforts nor have they received any honours.

"There is no mention of us nowhere," said Ilynsky, who is now retired and gets an equivalent of some $200 in monthly pension.

"I could be receiving at least two times that if I had a document confirming I am a veteran of the Afghan war," he added.

In 2000, the Kazakhstan Union of the Veterans of Afghanistan decided to award them medals.
Ukraine honoured them too, after having found documents that they signed when they were given arms during the operation.

Five alive
Only five of them were still alive to receive the honours – Ilynsky, Kazbek Valiev, Nikolay Panteleev, Sergei Fomin and Yury Popenko.

Three others, Gregory Lunyakov, Vadim Smirnov and Valery Khrishchaty had perished in climbing expeditions some years after the secret mission.

After 30 years, there still hasn't been a word from Moscow.

So what was in there, in those secret invasion plans locked away safely in the black leather briefcase, that was so important to the Soviet leaders?

Ilynsky has asked himself this question a thousand times.

He wonders if he will ever get an answer.

CIA rises to occasion with free Viagra for Afghan tribal chiefs

Things are looking up in the war in Afghanistan because of a novel approach being used by the CIA .
According to The Washington Post , intelligence agents are handing out free Viagra to aging Afghan tribal chieftains to get them to rat out the Taliban.
And the trick is working. The story is that one old Afghan chief who has four younger wives told the operative who gave him four pills, "You are a great man."
The old goat must have thought it was a magic trick, and so did his young wives, I'll betcha. They probably all sat around the next morning over tea asking each other, "What got into Omar?"
Call it a method of mass seduction, if you want. But what's intriguing about the effort is that you know that to come up with an idea like this, the CIA must have held high-level meetings — with a PowerPoint presentation. What exactly they pointed at I'll leave to your imagination.
But no matter how you slice it, this sure beats the heck out of waterboarding, doesn't it? Just think how much higher the world's opinion of America would be if we had used the hanky-panky party popper technique more often.
It does point out one of life's truths, though. If you do things right and get down to basics, you can get what you want without bullets and then spend the rest of the day sitting around laughing.
Did you ever wonder about that stupid TV ad for a sexual performance drug that shows the couple sitting in separate bathtubs? How you gonna get any business done sitting in separate bathtubs? Even an Afghan warlord could tell you that ain't gonna cut it.
You're probably wondering why the CIA doesn't just buy these guys off by giving them wads of cash instead of pumping them up with dope for Mister Happy. Simple. Some previously destitute goatherd shows up with a roll of bills, and the Taliban figure out some funny business is going on, right?
On the other hand, maybe the Taliban are wondering why all these old guys are spending so much time in the tent these days. There's steam coming out from under the flap.
And isn't it a shame that Viagra wasn't around during westward expansion. If Custer had had some of this stuff to parcel out at Little Bighorn, maybe he wouldn't have ended up full of holes.
Just think of how this could have changed American history books. Instead of buying Manhattan for a handful of beads, the white man could have scored the island for a Cialis prescription.
The trouble with this is that as soon as the Taliban figure this out, they'll be buying the same drugs off the Internet. And we'll end up in something a little different from the traditional arms race.
John Kelso's column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 445-3606 or jkelso@statesman.com.

CIA offering Viagra to win over aging Afghan warlords

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 : CIA agents are offering potency drug Viagra and other gifts to win over Afghan warlords in the US-led war against Taliban insurgents, the Washington Post reported.

Paying for information is nothing new for the Central Intelligence Agency, but officers have started employing unusual incentives to persuade Afghan local leaders to share intelligence about the Taliban's movements, the Post wrote, citing unnamed sources in the spy service.

"Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people — whether it's building a school or handing out Viagra," a CIA operative who has worked in Afghanistan was quoted as saying.

CIA agents have offered pocket knives and tools, toys and school equipment, travel visas, medical services including surgeries and sometimes the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra for Afghan chieftains, the paper said.

The aging chieftains often have up to four wives and are open to the Viagra pill as a way to "put them back in an authoritative position," said another official.

More customary bribes such as cash and weapons can create problems, because guns fan fall into the wrong hands and a sudden influx of cash can draw too much attention, agents told the paper.

Four Viagra pills transformed the attitude of one influential 60-year-old warlord who had been wary of the United States.

"He came up to us beaming," one official told the Post. "And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area."