‘Haji the hero’: the great American ‘debt-berg’

Afghan contractors who, despite putting their lives on the line by working for Americans, are continually exploited.

As unpaid bills amounting to millions or perhaps even billions of dollars pile up from one end of Afghanistan to the other, the rapid decline of American popularity in this country of seemingly eternal warfare and civil strife is clearly understandable.

“The American government owes me $1.3 million for completed work,” complains one Afghan contractor hired to construct specialised facilities in one of the huge American bases scarring the hostile landscape. “Payment was due 14 months ago but not a single dollar has come through. I have had to sell some prime property in Kabul, along with some machinery, so I can pay off my own local suppliers so that they, in turn, can pay their own people who simply cannot afford to wait any longer for their dues.”

This complaint is just the tip of the great American outstanding ‘debt-berg’ and it is echoed over and over again by local contractors who, despite putting their lives on the line by working for Americans, are continually exploited.

Obtaining lucrative American contracts was, not so very long ago, the dream of Afghan contractors who queued up in droves to bid for construction and other project work associated first with the establishment and then with the expansion of American bases from which armies of occupation attempt to enforce their own version of stability as war machine profits mount up back home.

As the occupation drags on and is scaled either up or down according to White House decrees and American perceived necessity, so, too, does the anger of Afghan contractors and those in their direct and indirect employ escalate. This anger and disgust at American duplicity is one of the few things that actively trickles down to a surprising number of the Afghan population as contractors and their employees all have extended families to support and all belong to various increasingly dissatisfied tribes who, in the long years of war, have already lost so much.

A limited number of affected contractors have attempted to get their dues via American courts of law but the cost is prohibitive and cases drag on for years.

Others tackle this highly volatile issue via the Afghan legal system which has countless drawbacks of its own and others yet race from pillar to post trying to figure out what to do.

One Afghan contractor, though, has unsurprisingly under the circumstances taken the law into his own hands and used the very same heavy machinery and equipment whose hire charges of $300,000 remain unpaid after seven months of entreaties to actually barricade a project operated by the American company. Working out of a heavily fortified American base in Helmand province, the contractor has managed to bring on-site operations to a grinding halt, sending those who owe him money into paroxysms of volcanic rage in the process.

Immediately after manoeuvring his barricade into place last week, ‘Haji the Hero’, as he is known, did an eminently sensible thing. After informing the American company concerned that the barricade will be removed after he receives his dues in cash, in hand, he has disappeared into the Afghan tribal labyrinth where, win or lose his audacious gamble, he most certainly has a tale to tell.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2012.