And now decades later, the United States seems to have continued this approach. The release of the Afghanistan Papers revealed that over the course of the past 20 years the United States flooded Afghanistan with a trillion dollars, which quickly went into the hands of various military contractors and advisers and lined the pockets of government officials. Like the British before it, the United States adopted a policy of paying off and co-opting local warlords and drug traffickers. One executive is quoted by The Washington Post as saying, “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and did, without reason.” Meanwhile, war merchants, profiteers and contractors enjoyed hefty paychecks in Kabul.
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