Trump’s ruthless war on USAID-CIA nexus

Although a lot of conjecture and suspicions usually accompanied the USAID funding ventures abroad, hardly had any one expected that an American president himself (Donald Trump) and his team would double down and blow the lid off the USAID-CIA partnership for intelligence gathering and covert operations overseas.

With his war on the USAID and CIA, Trump has only endorsed some of those conspiracy theories which highlighted these often internecine covert activities with devastating consequences for target societies. Besides its own billions of dollars, the CIA dug into the cache of the whopping $40 billion annually that the USAID, according to Mike Benz, a former, doled out to vested interests in the recipient countries in the name of agriculture, food, sanitation, reconstruction and of late climate.

The Trump-Musk onslaught on the USAID and its nexus with the CIA took me back to my book Pakistan: Before and After Osama.

Written shortly after the discovery and elimination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, the book surveyed the circumstance surrounding the CIA, and excerpts from it simply endorse Trump’s assertion on this partnership.

“In 2009, the UNHCR engaged BEFARe for conducting a mapping of the Afghan population in Pakistan, i.e. Population Profiling Vulnerability and Response (PPVR). The primary objective of this exercise was to ascertain as to how many Afghans still lived on the Pakistani soil and to assess vulnerabilities among them because most lived either in camps or make-shift slum dwellings. Health, sexual violence, poverty, and unemployment count among the most important vulnerability indicators. For this project major donor for BEFARe was the USAID.

“To the surprise of many officials within the UNHCR, the PPVR was revised to PPV in early 2011 and hundreds of young enumerators were hired to conduct the survey, predominantly in northwestern border regions. Abbottabad, Chitral (in the far north), Malakand/Swat were also among the focus locations, where surveyors went from door to door to collect basic data on households and their strength. Within the first few weeks, the survey alarmed many UNHCR officials because of serious reservations on the way the profiling was being conducted.

“‘BEFARe surveyors were collecting GPRS coordinates of every individual they encountered in target localities,’ said a well-placed UNHCR official, on condition of anonymity. If you get coordinates of every individual that means violating individual privacy laws, a job performed usually by local intelligence agencies, the source pointed out.

“Even more disturbing was the fact that BEFARe refused to share the complete data with Pakistan government and even many within the UNHCR. It was accessible only to a very few UNHCR individuals. This prompted many to suspect the entire operation as something probably linked to CIA campaign to identify possible links between individuals and Bin Laden and his senior comrades such as Zawahiri.

“No surprise that within days of Bin Laden’s killing, all the surveyors and enumerators were prematurely sacked and the PPV project wrapped up.”

Now let us recall the polio campaign that Dr Shakeel Afridi had launched across the then FATA and some northern parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. This too bore the USAID-CIA signatures.

The admission on this came from Mike Benz, a former State Department official during the first Trump administration, who is meanwhile leading the Trump administration’s escalating discourse on USAID and the security establishment. He said the following in an interview with Glenn Greenwald on System Update platform recently.

“You recall how in 2011, the CIA was busted running a fake vaccine clinic in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden was their claim and …. they wanted to register these people in the hope of getting connection with the population. But it turned out that it was a whole fake plan and designed to get the United States to get data on Pakistanis.”

Majority of US Congressmen were up in arms when the Abbottabad Commission in January 2012 ordered Afridi’s trial for treason. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, who had headed the CIA when Afridi was enlisted to work for the agency, pleaded for his immediate release in a CBS News interview.

The Raymond Davis, Dr Shakeel Afridi and BEFARe cases basically reinforced what had been an open, though unsubstantiated, secret until then – the manipulative role the CIA and the US security establishment had been playing for decades in developing countries.

Books such as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, The Devil’s Games, Obama’s Wars and Directorate S offer plenty of evidence on the dictating as well as surreptitious role of the US security establishment in the name of national security interests. Private security contractors such as Raymond Davis served as the mainstay of this power play.

Latest revelations by Mike Benz, their endorsement by Elon Musk and President Trump’s aggressive posturing vis a vis the nexus between the security establishment and USAID – all that obviously filled many Pakistanis with a sense of vindication of their suspicions about the American intelligence operations in their country, and how CIA proliferated Pakistan through Blackwater DynCorps, BEFARe or UN affiliates such as UNICEF and the UNHCR for its operations, using USAID as the front. They also coopted four Pakistani private security companies, including the Islamabad-based Inter-Risk, with lucrative, mouth-watering deals.

The list of USAID’s beneficiaries includes the BBC, Reuters and the Politico. The latter’s $8 million grant has been suspended henceforth.

Probably just the tip of the iceberg that was used to engineer coups, stir up colour revolutions and cobble up new governments in target countries. Coming from the American president himself, these dramatic revelations indeed sound surreal.