By Anna Massoglia and Julia Forrest, OpenSecrets, 8/20/21

In the months leading up to the U.S. ending its 20-year war in Afghanistan and the Taliban gaining control of the country, major defense companies were awarded contracts in Afghanistan worth hundreds of millions of dollars and spent tens of millions lobbying the federal government on defense issues. 

The Department of Defense issued nearly $1 billion dollars in contracts to 17 companies related to work in Afghanistan that was set to continue past the May 1 withdrawal date. 

It’s unclear what will happen with some of those contracts as the U.S. evacuates operations in Afghanistan.

Texas-based defense contractor and construction firm Fluor received contracts of at least $85 million this year for work in Afghanistan. The company recently said it will “continue to do everything we can to repatriate all employees required to leave Afghanistan.” Fluor spent over $1.4 million on lobbying in the first half of 2021, around $115,000 more than the firm spent in the same period in 2020. 

In May, defense contractor Leidos was awarded a $34 million government contract to continue providing logistics support services for the Afghan Air Force and the Special Mission Wing. The U.S. Army Contracting Command awarded Leidos an initial $727.89 million contract on Aug. 17 in 2017. Leidos spent $1.18 million on lobbying in the first half of 2021. 

On March 11, the Defense Department signed a contract with Salient Federal Services for information technology infrastructure in Afghanistan, a deal worth approximately $24.9 million and set to be completed in March 2022. 

It’s not yet known if these contracts will be voided now that the situation has drastically changed in Afghanistan.

The following day, the Defense Department signed a contract with Textron for $9.7 million in force-protection efforts in Afghanistan, an effort that was expected to be completed by March 2022, long after even Biden’s planned withdrawal date. Textron spent $4.47 million lobbying in 2020 and has already spent $2.4 million in 2021.

Maryland-based defense support services conglomerate Amentum Services was awarded more than $305 million in defense contracts mentioning Afghanistan since 2008. The Department of Defense awarded DynCorp International, which was subsumed by Amentum in 2020, more than $4 billion in defense contracts mentioning Afghanistan since 2008.   

Amentum Services, which was awarded tens of millions of dollars in government contracts in 2020 alone, spent $980,000 on lobbying the federal government on defense issues in 2020 and another $340,000 in the first half of 2021. 

Security contracts worth $68.2 million with Aegis Defense Services, a private security service organization, were also slated to be completed in 2023 and 2026. 

Five of the top defense companies, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, spent a combined $34.2 million in lobbying in the first half of 2021 compared to about $33 million in the same period of 2020. Raytheon spent the most on lobbying with $8.23 million so far in 2021. The second most was spent by Lockheed Martin at $7.4 million. 

The Congressional Research Service found that the Defense Department also obligated more money on federal contracts during the 2020 fiscal year than all other government agencies combined with around 31% of its contracts going to the five companies. 

People with ties to the defense industry have also been in positions to influence decision-making about the withdrawal from Afghanistan — including Retired General Joseph F. Dunford and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), who are two of three co-chairs on the congressionally-chartered Afghanistan Study Group.

The majority of plenary members on the Afghanistan Study Group, which advised President Joe Biden to extend the originally-negotiated May 1 deadline for withdrawing from Afghanistan, also have ties to the defense industry. A couple of those members include former President Donald Trump’s principal deputy director of national intelligence, Susan M. Gordon, and Stephen J. Hadley, former President George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser…

Read full article here.

Two US veterans, Matthew Hoh and Daniel Sjursen, explain how the war in Afghanistan was lost, Afghans suffered, and military contractors profited — all while the American public was kept in the dark. Guests: Danny Sjursen. Retired US Army officer, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point. His latest book is “A True History of the United States.” https://twitter.com/SkepticalVet

Matthew Hoh. Former Marine and State Department official who resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan over U.S. policy in September 2009. Now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. https://twitter.com/matthewphoh

By Jeff Hawn, Responsible Statecraft, 8/12/21

Jeff Hawn is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of International History at The London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis and the post-Cold War international order.

On June 21 2021, the Russian prosecutor general’s office added the New York-based Bard College to its growing list of undesirable foreign organizations. In practice, this will mean Bard will be unable to continue its long-running partnership with St. Petersburg State University which has helped thousands of U.S. and Russian students undertake educational exchanges. Placing Bard on its list of undesirable foreign organizations is the latest step by the Russian government to limit avenues for cultural, diplomatic, and educational exchange with the United States. The U.S. government has done little to counteract these limitations, a trend that will be counter-productive in the long term.

The United States is engaged in an active and often hostile competition with Russia, but, instead of investing in building a robust network of Russian experts, Washington has neglected to invest in the field. The damage is well documented. In 2012, Title VIII funding, which authorizes federal money to be directed to Slavic language training and advance research, was cut sharply from $4.5 million to $3 million per year. This is part of a growing trend in the United States that applies across government, academia, and NGOs, where, despite increased confrontation with Moscow, knowledgeable experts are competing for ever fewer resources.

George Kennan, the oft-cited dean of Russian studies in the 1940s and 1950s, argued that, in order to actually understand Russia, you needed to get Russian mud on your boots. In other words, it’s not enough to read about the country, but rather it’s important to live there and understand its complex and often misunderstood history and culture.

The experience of the Cold War seemed to prove Kennan right. Having had only a few dozen Russian experts in the 1950s, by the 1990s the United States boasted several hundred across government and academia. Yet many had never had the opportunity to visit Russia, and thus their perceptions of its foreign and domestic policies were not necessarily well grounded. Hence, for many years U.S. experts believed the Soviet Union was more viable than it truly proved to be.

The collapse of the USSR inflicted an additional blow to Russian studies in the United States. An overconfidence and deep misunderstanding of the implications of the death of communism led the U.S. talent pool on Russia to dry up. That pool has not been replenished despite increasing tensions with Russia. The fault lies largely with the U.S. government’s priorities.

Unlike the 1950s, there has been no increase of funding for Russian studies and indeed the macro trends in Washington seem to act more to deter those who want to engage in Russian studies rather than encourage them. The outsourcing of background checks for security clearance to lowest-bid contractors means that would-be Russian experts applying for entry-level federal positions face daunting obstacles. Even if they are somehow able to navigate the highly dysfunctional hiring process, they still face a very arduous clearance ordeal that can result in disqualification, often on the grounds of concern over foreign contacts or connections acquired during educational or cultural exchanges. The lesson for would-be Russian scholars is: why bother trying to cultivate expertise if it will only serve to disqualify you?

That is not to say Washington is bereft of genuine expertise. But the increasingly polarized environment that rewards jingoism and punishes nuanced analysis means that many experts have been left on the sidelines.

Read full article here.

Krystal and Saagar are joined by foreign policy expert Richard Hanania to debunk the lies told by neocons about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and explain where the US went wrong in the war

Ryan Grim, Alyssa Farah and Kim Iversen discuss the situation in Afghanistan with Christian Parenti as U.S. troops withdraw and the Taliban takes over.

As the Taliban have now effectively taken control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, there is much that our political class, policymakers and media talking heads should reflect on and many lessons to learn. But it appears unlikely that this will happen.

I remember going to my first antiwar rally in October of 2001 to protest our attack on Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11. No one I knew wanted to go with me. I didn’t see how dropping bombs on regular Afghanis who had nothing to do with Bin Laden or the 9/11 attacks would help anything, especially after the Taliban had offered to hand over Bin Laden if the U.S. would stop bombing their country – an offer George W. Bush refused. It was a fairly small protest in San Francisco organized by the ANSWER coalition. I wouldn’t stop feeling like an outcast for my views until a year and a half later when antiwar protests swelled in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. But the Bush administration merely blew off the largest and most coordinated antiwar rallies in the history of the world as “a focus group” that could be ignored.

As Sarah Lazare said on Twitter, the US press should be talking to those of us who were against this debacle to begin with, who could foresee the problems with trying to oppose a tactic with war, with trying – in the case of Afghanistan – to build a modern democratic country that is far from even being an industrialized country in terms of development and has no experience with democracy but is still largely a tribal nation that has been at war for most of the last 40 years (see my previous post on Afghanistan). I feel terrible for the plight of Afghan women and the prospect of sharia law, but we really had no business giving false hope to the women of Afghanistan that they could live as a modern western country when that was not the conditions that exist in Afghanistan – even with a western country propping up a corrupt and unpopular government. It certainly wasn’t going to be the conditions when that western country leaves. Now I see pundits and even left-leaning commentators on Twitter using this as an excuse for why we should have kept delaying the inevitable and stayed forever. If the government we are propping up collapses after 20 years, it will collapse after 25 or 30 or 50. The problem isn’t leaving too soon, the problem is the original policy of going in in the first place and thinking we can throw money at people who will then build a functioning democratic government with no skills, history or experience to do so. Sticking with something that doesn’t work after 20 years won’t make it suddenly work, it is just a form of denial.

Ironically, some of us are old enough to remember when George W. Bush campaigned on a more “humble” and less interventionist foreign policy and railed against “nation-building.” Watch this clip for yourself.

As for the speed with which the Taliban have accomplished taking over many provincial capitals and now Kabul, I can only wonder at how utterly inept our intelligence analysts must be to have predicted last week that Kabul could fall within 30 – 90 days and then have it happen less than a week later. This begs the question: do these people have a clue what’s going on anywhere in the world? Below is a press conference from a couple of weeks ago in which Biden says he doesn’t think the Kabul government will collapse upon the exit of US troops. Though Biden deserves some credit for following through on Trump’s withdrawal process, It would have been better to have prepared the American people for the fact that the Taliban were likely to take over and that the logistics of the withdrawal were not going to be pretty. But that would have entailed acknowledging that the policy was misguided to begin with and reminding us that we have been consistently lied to for years by military leaders and politicians about the situation in Afghanistan.

This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm

— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) August 15, 2021