US supplying material support to the enemy?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Washington Post:

The U.S. military has only minimal knowledge of - and virtually no control over - the thousands of Afghans it pays to guard its operating bases and other installations, including "warlords and strongmen linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery," as well as the Taliban, Senate investigators said in a blistering report released Thursday.

The bipartisan report, compiled after a year-long investigation by staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, notes that the military has recently launched its own investigations of the situation and has taken steps to address it. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has issued new contractor guidelines.

Still, the Senate investigation found that a failure to properly vet, train and supervise the Afghan subcontractors, hired by U.S. and other firms with multimillion-dollar military contracts, has cost U.S. lives, undermined the mission in Afghanistan and "helped play into the hands of the enemy," committee Chairman Carl M. Levin said.

Some of the Afghan security subcontractors, Levin (D-Mich.) said at a Capitol Hill news conference, are "creating the very threat they are hired to combat." Investigators reviewed more than 125 Defense Department security contracts dated between 2007 and 2009. They provided detailed accounts of two specific contracts in which subcontractors had direct and well-known ties to the Taliban. The report recounts one instance in which a military raid on a Taliban meeting being held at the house of a subcontractor led to the death of an American Marine.

...

So did Levin subpoena the Taliban to gather all this evidence? Or, are their some assumptions based on suspicions of those dealing with the contractors? Perhaps that model of anti corruption, Karzai provided the goods as part of his anti contractors program.

I am not saying it is not so, but I think there are reasons for skepticism at this point.