I think this is a story worth sharing with every voter you know.
(Please join below.)
Today’s New York Times is reporting on the mismanagement of a $300 million DoD contract to supply weapons and munitions to the Afghan army, in support of the war against the people who actually attacked us on 9/11.
As you know, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated over the last year as our over-stretched troops, and our Afghan government partners, battle an intensifying Al Qaeda / Taliban insurgency.
So ensuring equipment and logistics for Afghan forces is obviously a critical priority. So how has the Bush Administration managed it?
...[T]o arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
The story actually gets worse, paragraph by paragraph. Want to test your mettle? See how many paragraphs you can get through without turning away in disgust. TPM offers a summary.
Now you might be tempted to think that this is a big problem because of the obvious mismanagement and corruption (AEY beat out 9 other bids; there is surely another shoe to drop here, if anyone bothers to look) -- another "your tax dollars at work" story.
Please think again.
The more important implication is one that has been far too slow to penetrate the thick skulls of too many voters: Republicans are not only completely incompetent in managing national security affairs – they clearly do not really even care.
Your local KFC is managed far better than the Bush Administration has managed this critical element of the war in Afghanistan, and provisioning Afghan troops is only one of dozens of key challenges that they apparently can't even be bothered to pay attention to.
If the award of the AEY contract does not meet the standard of treason, what does?
This story also provides a good sense of the value of oversight that our Democratic Congress has been providing (since they’ve attained that magical power of subpoena): it's taken more than 14 months, and the attention of a fricken newspaper to begin to address this outrage.
Again, I think this is a story that should be shared with every voter, along with the question:
What the hell has happened to our country, and how long are we going to wait before we do something about it?