Cowboys of Kabul’ Allegedly Defrauded Uncle Sam of Millions
By David Axe July 28, 2009 | 2:05 pm | Categories: Af/Pak
A Houston couple, in debt to the tune of $260,000, apparently saw their financial salvation in the lucrative security contracts coming out of the under-manned U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. Now, seven years later, Del and Barbara Spier are set to go on trial for defrauding the government. If convicted on all the charges, they face more than 30 years in prison.

In May 2002, the Spiers founded U.S. Protections and Investigation. Soon, USPI inked an initial $8.4-million deal with the engineering firm Louis Berger Group, which had scored a $214-million contract to rebuild Afghanistan’s war-ravaged infrastructure. “USPI’s job was to provide security for contractors repairing a 300-mile road stretching from Kabul to Kandahar,” Daniel Schulman writes in Mother Jones.

It’s bad enough that the U.S.-led coalition even needed mercenaries to protect road workers. Worse, USPI allegedly forged murky partnerships with Afghan strongmen, stuffed its payroll with phantom employees and skimped on equipment for their few, flesh-and-blood employees, defrauding the U.S. government of some $17 million, in the process. The group that Schulman calls the “cowboys of Kabul” traveled “the same road of incompetence, corruption and graft in Afghanistan that we’ve seen so many times in Iraq over the past several years,” Paul McLeary observes. The gear the Spiers provided to their employees (pictured) was so piss-poor, that one fed-up USPI merc raided a former Taliban weapons depot, in order to supply his men with weapons. “I found a Conex box filled with Russian RPGs still in the plastic,” the man told Schulman.

In one final ironic twist, when USAID finally wised up to the Spiers’ shenanigans in 2007, the team that raided their Kabul office included Blackwater mercenaries, in addition to Afghan cops and FBI and USAID agents. In our lawless war-on-a-shoestring in Afghanistan, we even need mercenaries to help police the mercenaries.