Texas' DynCorp: Poor State Dept. OverSight in Afghanistan

[amborin]

DynCorp Oversight in Afghanistan Faulted

U.S. State Department has completely failed to do any serious oversight of the private contractors

by Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON - Afghan police are widely considered corrupt, unable to shoot straight, and die at twice the rate of Afghan soldiers and NATO troops. After seven billion dollars spent on training and salaries in the last eight years, several U.S. government investigations are asking why.

DynCorp mentor watches Afghan National Police practice riot control tactics at the Kabul Central Training Center. (Photo/Ronald Nobu Sakamoto)Some answers are obvious: Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries of the world, with extremely low literacy and a serious drug problem. One in five police recruits test positive for drugs and fewer than one in 10 can read and write. Unofficial estimates suggest that the Taliban pays twice as much as the government, luring away many candidates from law enforcement careers.

But another rather surprising answer was offered in a little-noticed report published earlier this month after a high-level investigation by two major U.S. government agencies.

The report - titled "DOD Obligations and Expenditures of Funds Provided to the Department of State for the Training and Mentoring of the Afghan National Police" (.pdf) - says that the U.S. State Department has completely failed to do any serious oversight of the private contractors to whom they paid 1.6 billion dollars to provide police training at dozens of sites around Afghanistan.

DynCorp's International Police Training Program, run out of Fort Worth, Texas, has won the bulk of the contracts that have been overseen by the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). The company, which has annual revenues of 3.1 billion dollars, has followed a series of wars to run lucrative police training contracts from Bosnia in the 1990s to Iraq in 2003.

DynCorp's work with Kabul began in 2003, almost two years after the fall of the Taliban. It was expanded in 2004 when the State Department issued it a contract to build seven regional training centers, and provide 30 police advisers across Afghanistan.

This initial contract was replaced by a series of related contracts beginning on Aug. 15, 2005, under which DynCorp today employs some 782 retired U.S. police officers and an additional 1,500 support staff. The contracts expired Jan. 31, 2010 but have temporarily been extended till the end of March."

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commondreams.org

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Agility Attempts to Vault Fraud Charges

Pratap Chatterjee


Agility, a Kuwait-based multi-billion dollar logistics company spawned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is facing criminal charges for over-billing the U.S. taxpayer on more than $8.5 billion worth of food supply contracts in the Iraq war zone. If the lawsuit, scheduled for February 8, is successful, the company could owe the U.S. government as much as $1 billion.....

http://www.corpwatch.org/index.php

[NightWatcher]

1. Dyncorp and Oversight, this is hilarious. Oh wait, ok, we paid 3.1 billion for a toilet seat