The headlines to emerge from the shadier corners of private defense contracting these days are, generally, stories of extravagance. Just last week, The Atlantic deemed Edward Snowden “Exhibit A for How Washington Blows Money on Contractors,” in a story that aimed to describe “what the leaker’s $200,000 salary tells us about the absurd cost of privatizing government.” Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, we learned that President Obama plans to target the lush executive pay of federal contractors, alongside another story that attributed Washington’s “New Boomtown” moment to many of these same companies—Booz Allen types who’ve prompted “luxury-condo developers from around the country” to arrive “in droves.”

The “Isn’t it lavish?” theme makes another, almost invisible scandal out of the industry seem all the more perverse. Just yesterday, a remarkable “alert letter” from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) went public. The document addressed itself directly to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, among others—but it is relevant to any American who doesn’t want his or her tax dollars used to extort labor from war-zone workers. Over the course of ten pages, it outlined some Wild West claims about “predatory contracting practices” by an array of prime defense purveyors, many of whom have not been paying their Afghan subcontractors—sometimes for years, and sometimes to the point of starvation. Employees delivering goods and services for U.S. government contracts have been “unable to support their families with necessities (clothing, food and firewood) due to the lack of funds.” Some sixty-nine million dollars in unpaid cash is at stake.

One man got so desperate, the letter says, that he “threatened to set himself on fire in front of the U.S. embassy in protest of nonpayment.” Another man claims he had to flee death threats from his creditors, after a prime contractor failed to pay him for his subcontracted services in Kabul and thus flung him into the quicksand of major debt. The letter’s conclusion, by my reading, was this: while prime contractors in Afghanistan are making billions off of U.S. taxpayers, the subcontractors doing their bidding in a dangerous conflict zone—and, even more so, the impoverished workers who actually hammer their nails and flip their burgers—are, in an astonishing number of cases, starving for support. This is not the best way to win hearts and minds, the Inspector General notes. “The failure of prime contractors to pay their Afghan subcontractors is a serious problem,” reads the letter, “one that poses risks to subcontractors, prime contractors, the U.S. government, and the people of Afghanistan.”

The news made me think of people I’d met in Afghanistan and Iraq while reporting a New Yorker story on grave abuses against third-world logistics workers on U.S. military bases in both war zones. Some seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, beauticians, and construction men were shipped in from across the world to do some of the conflicts’ dirtiest jobs. (Some were trafficked; some were starved; some were sexually assaulted, often with impunity.) Within hours of arriving at Kandahar Airfield to research the story, I met eight Nepalese men, construction workers, who claimed they weren’t getting paid at all. Hammering away in the hot sun with cardboard boxes over their heads to approximate shade, the men worked long hours building a new walkway directly outside the U.S. military’s public-affairs office. They showed me their contracts with Red Sea Engineers and Constructors, a DynCorp subcontractor, promising three hundred and fifty dollars a month. But several months of backbreaking work had passed, and not a dime had been transferred into their accounts, they said. (In many cases, subcontractors’ profits were supposed to be wired directly into their wives’ or parents’ bank accounts back in their home countries; often, families eagerly awaited the funds to pay back loan sharks who’d helped them cover the large fees the workers had shelled out to obtain the war-zone jobs in the first place.)

At first, the men’s claim seemed hard to believe. But I met many Red Sea workers who voiced identical complaints over the next several weeks. Then, in late December, 2010, the Afghan government arrested the chief executive of the company, a then-seventy-five-year-old U.S. citizen named Roy Carver, for allegedly failing to pay his employees, many of whom were Afghan. Soon thereafter, the U.S. military ousted two more subcontracting companies, Bennett & Fouch Associates and K5 Global, alleging that they had neglected to compensate their workers in high-risk jobs. (According to a 2012 U.S. bankruptcy court ruling, the two firms filed for bankruptcy several months later and shared “common creditors, including unpaid sub-contractors.”) U.S. Army commanders voiced alarm. “The failure of firms to pay,” noted a press release from CENTCOM’s Contracting Command in January, 2011, which focussed on the lack of payments to Afghan personnel, “adversely affects counterinsurgency strategy.”

Why has so little changed in the intervening years? Is it simply that we’re sick of paying attention to this interminable war altogether? The contracting crisis we’re seeing in Afghanistan now is nearly the same one I saw in Afghanistan in 2010, and nearly the same one I saw in Iraq before that—although President Obama has since signed a groundbreaking executive order to push back against trafficking and deceptive recruiting on federal contracts. One night back on a U.S. base in Kirkuk, I met a young man from Sierra Leone named Bockarie Marah—a private security subcontractor—who pulled out a worn green notebook filled with transcribed passages from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” He told me that he liked to read by flashlight in his sweltering hundred-man tent when it got late. “All animals are equal,” he recited to me from one of the tattered pages, “but some are more equal than others. That is how we feel here in Iraq. I hope you’ll write that.”

Three years later, I’m just getting around to sharing those words, and regret their relevance. They seem pertinent to the Afghan subcontractors whose financial situation was laid bare by SIGAR’s letter yesterday, at a moment of peak opulence for defense contractors here at home. One hopes that, with this week’s revelation, the Inspector General’s grievances get a fair hearing—before another man threatens to set his flesh on fire, simply in the hope of being heard.

Photograph by Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR.