NATO’s Own Mercenaries Supply the Taliban

So in the news today, The Guardian has this story: Nato admits mistakenly supplying arms and food to Taliban.

Nato forces mistakenly supplied food, water and arms to Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, officials today admitted.

Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province…

A Nato spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.

Nothing like delivering rocket propelled grenades into the hands of the Taliban to help “win” in Afghanistan.  

According to the story on the ammo drop in the New York Daily News:

“The cargo consisted of 7.62-mm. small-arms ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and food and water. It did not contain any guns,” NATO said.

Upon delivery to the Taliban, the pallets were left unguarded. Even in the unlikely case of the Taliban did not already have guns to use the ammunition, it will surely obtain them in short order. Even without guns, the ammunition and explosives can be used to form lethal IEDs.

So is this a case of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, or something else?

Well, NATO denies they’ve switched sides in the conflict. In The Guardian story, a NATO spokesperson is quoted as saying:

“We are aware of it but we are not fired up about it. It sounds like someone made a mistake. It was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy.

“The forces on the ground are working to get the message across that we do not deliberately supply the Taliban with arms.”

According to the story, “Afghan politicians have said they do not believe the drop was an accident.”

So how could such a “cock-up” happen? According to the story about the incident from the AFP, private military contractors, mercenaries made the drop.

“On March 25, a private helicopter company was contracted, on behalf of an ISAF unit, to resupply an Afghan National Police (ANP) outpost located in a remote mountain area” of Zabul provine, an ISAF statement said.

According to the NY Daily News, NATO spokesman, Portuguese Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco, “would not identify the air cargo firm or disclose how many RPGs and how much ammunition was airdropped to the enemy”.

NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan has been critically hampered for years by a lack of helicopters. In an October 2007 story, the Globe and Mail reported Beleaguered NATO set to charter helicopters (cached).

NATO plans to rent helicopters to resupply front lines and remote bases in southern Afghanistan – an unprecedented move that could reduce ground casualties even as it exposes the unwillingness of major European allies to send their choppers into dangerous, Taliban-infested areas.

Defence ministers meeting today in the Netherlands are expected to approve chartering up to 20 large helicopters, flown by civilian contractors, to provide vital airlift and reduce the number of military convoys exposed to roadside bombs.

Not only was this to be an unprecedented move for NATO, but the cost of chartering helicopters to fly supplies was expected to be high, more than $100-million a year. The price NATO troops would have to pay when NATO’s own mercenaries delivered weapons to the Taliban was not publicly disclosed.

Did the mercenary pilot and navigator just make a human mistake? Who knows? We don’t even know who they were employed by — and NATO isn’t saying.

The Bush administration blames its NATO allies for not providing enough helicopters for the Afghanistan mission. What U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others in the administration overlook is that America’s military helicopters are bogged down in a war of choice in Iraq. If the U.S. was not in Iraq, then it would have resources to fight in Afghanistan.

Last week, a British court ruled Faulty army gear may breach human rights.

Sending British soldiers out on duty with defective equipment may breach their human rights, the high court ruled today.

In a potentially significant verdict for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr Justice Collins ruled that a soldier “does not lose all protection simply because he is in hostile territory carrying out dangerous operations”.

Using mercenaries in Afghanistan endangers NATO soldiers there just as much as shoddy equipment. The use of mercenaries by NATO is a betrayal of the troops. By adopting the Bush administration’s efforts to privatize wars, NATO members have betrayed their fighting men and women they’ve ordered to serve in Afghanistan. This mercenary “cock-up” is just further evidence of their betrayal.