The Center for Public Integrity

This list was created from data covering contract transactions executed in fiscal years 2004, 2005, and 2006, where the reported place of performance was Iraq or Afghanistan. The data — available from the General Service Administration's Federal Procurement Data System — is limited to the 100 vendors receiving the most obligated funds during this three-year period.

When the Center for Public Integrity published its first "Windfalls of War" investigation, in October 2003, up-to-date data on federal contracting activity was not available. As a result, Center staff gathered contract amounts from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Since then, however, most such contracts for the post-war efforts list Iraq or Afghanistan as their "place of performance," making the contracting process more transparent and the search for data—available from the General Service Administration's Federal Procurement Data System—more methodical.

Contract amounts in the new data represent actual dollars obligated for products or services. Because of variability in how amounts were reported in the 2003 documents, amounts from the original report cannot be accurately combined or compared with dollar amounts in the 2007 update.

The updated data does not include all Iraq reconstruction contracts. For example, contract transactions handled by the Army Joint Contracting Command Iraq/Afghanistan is maintained in a separate system. Though summary information about those contracts is available from various sources, including the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction quarterly reports to Congress, detailed transaction information is not generally available to the public.

The Center has requested information about these contract transactions under the Freedom of Information Act. That information will be added here as it is made available.

KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company, according to a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. In fact, the total dollar value of contracts that went to KBR — which used to be known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and until April 2007 was a subsidiary of Halliburton—was nearly nine times greater than those awarded to DynCorp International, a private security firm that is No. 2 on the Center's list of the top 100 recipients of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction funds.

Another private security company, Blackwater USA, whose employees recently killed as many as 17 Iraqi civilians in what the Iraqi government alleges was an unprovoked attack, is 12th on the list of companies and joint ventures, with $485 million in contracts. (On November 14, the New York Times reported that FBI investigators have concluded that 14 of the 17 shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, and that Justice Department prosecutors are weighing whether to seek indictments.) First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting, which immediately precedes Blackwater on the Top 100, came under fire in July after a pair of whistleblowers told a House committee that the company essentially "kidnapped" low-paid foreign laborers brought in to help build the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad. First Kuwaiti and the U.S. State Department denied the charges.

Other key findings from the Center's analysis:

• Over the three years studied, more than $20 billion in contracts went to foreign companies whose identities—at least so far—are impossible to determine.

What do "narcoterrorism" in Colombia and Islamist terrorism in the Middle East have in common?

Very little, except that since the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, countries that vow to help the United States fight either one find it easier to attract large amounts of U.S. military training and aid.

In the popular understanding, the Bush administration's "global war on terror" is aimed at hunting down al Qaeda and its allies, the people who "want to attack us again." But the globe includes South America and in it the heavily Roman Catholic Colombia, home to only a tiny number of Muslims and to the world's largest cocaine industry. Colombia's famed drug cartels have spun off both left-wing and right-wing guerrillas who control much of the countryside and spawn endemic corruption, violence and human rights horror stories.

The country's share of U.S. Foreign Military Financing shot up from zero in the three years before 9/11 to more than $100 million in the three years after. Colombia is also the fifth-largest recipient of the Defense Department's new Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP), collecting almost $1.5 million in the three years after 9/11 for the training of the country's military and security forces — which are still routinely implicated in human rights abuses against their own citizens.

The runaway winner of the post-9/11 race for new U.S. military aid dollars is Pakistan, but where did the money go?

Human rights activists, critics of the Pakistani government and members of Congress all want to know, but most of the money — totaling in the billions — came through a Defense Department program subject to virtually no congressional oversight.

That is a major finding of more than a year of investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). U.S. military aid to Pakistan since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks includes almost $5 billion in Coalition Support Funds, a program controlled by the Defense Department to reimburse key allies in the global war on terror. Pentagon reports that ICIJ obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that Pakistan is the No. 1 recipient of these funds — receiving more than 10 times the amount that went to the No. 2 recipient, Poland — and that there is scant documentation of how the money was used.

Pakistan also benefited from other funding mechanisms set up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. In the three years after the attacks, Pakistan was the third-largest recipient of the Pentagon's new Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, designed to train foreign forces in counterterrorism techniques. More than $23 million was earmarked for Pakistan in fiscal 2006 for "Improving Counter Terrorism Strike Capabilities" under another new Pentagon program referred to colloquially as Section 1206 training, which allows the Pentagon to use a portion of its annual funding from Congress to train and equip foreign militaries. Pakistan finished first in the race for this new Pentagon-controlled training.

Uzbekistan presents one of the clearest examples of the paradox confronting the United States in its war on terror: As it pursues Islamist extremists around the world, it sides with a repressive despot out of what is perceived as military necessity.

Uzbekistan is a country run by a dictator. Despite that, the Central Asian state, which borders Afghanistan to the south and has a Muslim population of 24 million out of 27 million, was an early ally in the U.S.-led war on terror. The former Soviet state is also a place where a poor human rights record didn't stop the U.S. government from providing it with nearly $100 million in military aid in the three years following September 11, 2001, a 1,000 percent increase over previous U.S. military assistance, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' database of U.S. military aid.

American largesse helped secure access to a crucial former Soviet air base, Karshi-Khanabad, or "K2," from which the U.S. military could support its forces deployed in Afghanistan.

The strange tale of U.S.-Uzbek cooperation began just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when a U.S.-Uzbek "status of forces" agreement was signed on October 7, 2001. That same day, the air campaign against Afghanistan began. Through the agreement, the U.S. was formally allowed to place troops on the ground in Uzbekistan and to use the K2 air base in the eastern part of the country for combat and humanitarian missions.