Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Are Pentagon contracts funding the Taliban?
An Afghan contractor stitches name badges for German armed forces Bundeswehr and NATO allied forces at his shop at Camp Marmal, in Mazar-e-Sharif, northern Afghanistan April 15, 2009. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
Jean MacKenzie covers Afghanistan for GlobalPost. She is program director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan, which she’s held for four years. This article originally appeared in GlobalPost.
KABUL — It seemed like such a good idea at the time.
At a staff meeting in 2006, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who was then commander of Combined Forces Afghanistan, took a sip of bottled water.
Then he looked at the label of one of the Western companies that were being paid millions of dollars a year to ship bottled water by the container load into Afghanistan.
