By Pratap Chatterjee (Special to CorpWatch)
Photo by Ron Nobu Sakamoto
Basir “Steve” Ahmed was returning from a bomb-clearing mission in Khogyani district in northeastern Afghanistan when a suicide bomber blew up an explosive-filled vehicle nearby. The blast flipped the military armored truck Ahmed was riding in three or four times, and filled it with smoke. The Afghan translator had been accompanying the 927th Engineer Company near the Pakistan border on that October day in 2008 that would forever change his life.
“I saw the gunner come out and I followed him. The U.S. Army soldiers helped pull me out, but I got burns,” says Ahmed, who had worked as a contract translator with U.S. troops for almost four years. “The last thing I remember was the “dub-dub-dub” of a Chinook helicopter.” A medical evacuation team took the injured men to a U.S. Army hospital at Bagram Base.
Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from the shrapnel wounds in his scalp and the severe burns covering his right hand and leg.
A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio, the largest supplier of translators to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to CorpWatch, the company said that Ahmed’s “military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir’s POC called MEP’s manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist.”
Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.
Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.
Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of U.S. contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the U.S. military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The company they work for has become one of the largest employers of translators in the country.
Mission Essential Personnel
In the wake of the U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, Pentagon contracts for translators to support U.S. troops hastily ballooned from one contract for 30 translators in Kuwait in 1999, to arrangements for thousands of contractors spanning several countries today. The recruitment and management of these translators was initially handled by San Diego-based Titan, now a subsidiary of New York-based L-3 Communications, one of the top ten U.S. military contractors. (See also “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq: A CorpWatch Report on L-3/Titan, Updated December 2008 with Recommendations from Amnesty International.”)
By 2006, Titan came under fire from the Pentagon for providing the military with fewer than half of the number of translators specified under its contract. Soldiers also commonly complained that the Titan translators, on whom they relied to communicate with Afghans and Iraqis, had very poor language skills.
When Titan’s original contract expired in 2004, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) put it up for competitive bid. In September 2007 INSCOM awarded a five-year contract worth up to $414 million to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan to Aegis Mission Essential Personnel, a start-up company created by Chad Monnin, a U.S. Army Special Forces reservist who was injured in a parachute accident, and two of his colleagues.
MEP had two advantages over other businesses in competing for federal contracts: First, with revenue of less than $6 million and under 500 employees it qualified for preferential treatment as a “small business”; and second, under the Veterans Benefit Act of 2003, Monnin qualified to apply for certain federal contracts set aside to help disabled military veterans.
MEP (the company dropped Aegis from its name shortly after winning the contract to avoid confusion with a controversial British private security company) promised to provide the military with more, as well as better, translators.
Salaries Slashed
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