[THS] two-thirds of Pentagon`s personnel in Afghanistan are private

[Peter Webster]

From Le Monde diplomatique:

Afghanistan's outsourced war
by Marie-Dominique Charlier

A worrying two-thirds of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan are private military
contractors, unaccountable to military law or ethics, swaggeringly overbearing, and
not in any hurry to help improve the poor security situation that assures their firms'
current and future profits.

http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2010/02/09/afghanistans-outsourced-war.html

The Central Intelligence Agency hired staff from a private military company called
Blackwater in 2004 as part of a secret program to track down and assassinate al-
Qaida leaders, according to the New York Times of 19 August 2009. The paper's
sources among current and former US government officials said that Blackwater had
helped the CIA with planning, training and surveillance, for which it had charged
several million dollars, but the program had failed to capture or assassinate a single
al-Qaida figure.

Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services following the controversy over its role in
Iraq. Five of its guards escorting a US State Department convoy through Baghdad on
16 September 2007 were accused of shooting civilians in al-Nousour Square, killing
14 (the US count) or 17 (the Iraqi count). In spite of this blunder, and many others,
the contractors headed for Afghanistan, where they have continued in the same
manner. (The case against them was dismissed on 31 December 2009 owing to
procedural errors; the US Department of Justice has decided to appeal against the
decision.) On 5 May 2009 four employees of Blackwater/Xe (operating under the
name Paravant) reportedly shot at a car in Kabul, killing at least one person and
wounding four. On 7 January federal prosecutors in the United States announced
that two of the Xe employees had been charged with killing two Afghan men and
wounding another. The opacity of their employment contracts has not allowed them
to escape prosecution.

Private military companies (PMCs) have evolved rapidly since they first appeared in
the 1990s and now play a key military and economic role in armed conflicts. The
global market for private military services is worth more than $100 billion a year. This
growth has been encouraged by drastic cuts in US army manpower at the end of the
cold war and the decision under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (2001-06) to
"rationalize" defense spending by outsourcing many of the not specifically military
functions to the private sector. The aim was to circumvent Congressional control and
US public opinion, and also to allow greater flexibility in hiring contractors for
clandestine operations.

Estimates of the numbers of PMC personnel in Afghanistan vary from 130,000 to
160,000, the second-largest deployment after Iraq, which it is set to overtake in the
near future. The 30,000 extra US troops bound for Afghanistan could be
accompanied by up to 56,000 additional contractor personnel. PMC contractors will
then account for nearly two-thirds of all the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan, the
highest ratio in any conflict in US history.

The best known PMCs, Xe (Blackwater), DynCorp, MPRI (Military Professional
Resources Inc) and Kellog Brown and Root, are all part of a grouping known as
Private Security Companies of Afghanistan. Their involvement takes a big bite out of
the funds intended for the reconstruction of the Afghan National Army (ANA).

Although they are supposed to play an auxiliary role to the coalition, and to the US
army, the legal status of the PMCs is vague. But behind the "turnkey" solutions they
offer lie big business interests, which influence military decisions in the field. There is
a convergence of financial interests between the PMCs and big US industrial
conglomerates: Most PMCs have been bought up by conglomerates through mergers
and acquisitions, many since 2001.

Moreover, the boom in outsourcing coincides with the need of the US military to
assure their own redeployment: Most of the senior management of the PMCs are
former military officers, who find it easy to make the transition from the public to the
private sector. Former senior officers of US armed forces working for PMCs enjoy a
close relationship with the Pentagon, which gives them easy access to classified
information and guarantees a degree of impunity.

A British contractor said recently that the Americans, the British and other armed
forces were in Afghanistan to win the war, but for his firm, the more the security
situation deteriorated the better. This is not necessarily compatible with conflict
stabilization and the "Afghanization" of peace.

Thanks to their manpower, their representation at the headquarters of inter-allied
organizations and their international connections, the PMCs are in a position to
influence military decisions on operational matters. Employees of MPRI can be found
throughout the hierarchy of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and the
Afghan security forces. They serve as mentors to armed forces general staff and to
governments, help to draft doctrine for the ANA as part of the Combined Training
Advisory Group (CTAG), train officers at the Kabul Military Training Centre (KMTC)
and provide instruction to specialists.

With in-depth knowledge of the Afghan theatre from tours of duty lasting two to four
years, PMC personnel have unrivalled experience of local conditions. Their experience
is a vital asset to the inter-allied staff officers whose tours of duty are rarely longer
than six months. It allows them to co-ordinate, regulate and even promote the
involvement of other PMCs and to steer the perceptions of the military in any
direction that suits them.

According to official sources in the French ministry of defense, the budget allocated
to MPRI for drafting the ANA's military doctrine is some $200 million; the training of
ANA troops will cost nearly $1.7 billion. So the PMCs have no interest in stabilizing the
situation or in the successful Afghanization of the ANA. That would lessen the need
for contractors, which would be against their financial interests. So they take great
care not to pass on their knowledge, and prefer to deputize for Afghan organizations
rather than giving them useful advice.

 "General" Gulbahar, in charge of doctrine at the Afghan National Army Training
Command's doctrine office, says he has been given no target date for the handover
of the drafting of ANA military doctrine to Afghan control. Gulbahar is not unhappy to
be supervised: He is in fact a colonel serving in a position normally occupied by a
general and has everything to lose by questioning the status quo.

MPRI, therefore, has what amounts to a monopoly on the drafting of Afghan army
doctrine, which allows it to justify the prolongation of its assisting role. But MPRI also
shows solidarity with other PMCs: The ANA's logistical doctrine, drafted by MPRI,
names DynCorp as the organization responsible for providing logistics support to the
ANA's air corps, without specifying any restrictions or limitations on the duration of
this role.

The "training" element is highly profitable. The PMCs are recruiting and training 800
instructors as part of a program to combat illiteracy in the ANA, but their
determination to secure the greatest possible return on investment has encouraged
them to extend the duration of the training provided. It would seem that fostering
the ANA's own training capabilities is not a priority. The same applies to logistics
(currently provided by RM Asia), another key element of the PMC monopoly: no
deadlines have been set for the training of Afghan technicians.

Here again, the financial interests of the PMCs, which employ several thousand
contract staff, differ from the military interests of ISAF: But they do not wish to see
operational systems change too rapidly any more than they hope for a swift victory.
They need to be able to influence events and, if necessary, to steer policy at the
operational and strategic levels.

They will soon have a new opportunity to consolidate their position. Brigadier Neil
Baverstock, the British commander of CTAG (located near Kabul), has launched a
drive to systematize the training provided to ANA units by public and private
instructors. This development will lead to greatly increased demand for instructors
and open up new opportunities for the principal contractors, who are already
planning to use in Afghanistan the manpower and resources no longer needed in
Iraq.

New contractors have recently been recruited to draw up "return of experience
report" (retex) procedures for the ANA. The precious information gathered from retex
reports will give the PMCs an overview of the theatre and the opportunity to
consolidate their strategic position in the drafting of doctrine for the ANA as well as in
its training.

As in Iraq, the use of "rent-a-soldier" companies is undermining the credibility of
international armed intervention. You only have to drive through the streets of Kabul
to see this is so. The provocative, aggressive behavior and attitude of some PMC
personnel, and the equipment they carry, are disturbingly like the caricature action
heroes of Hollywood films (portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc). The effect is
devastating: "People in Afghanistan can't tell the difference between ISAF soldiers
and contractors," says a member of the Afghan parliament. "The two are easily
confused and this does not do the coalition any good since the 'private soldiers' are
often very aggressive in their behavior."

How can efforts to put down an insurgency be effective or credible when the
countries contributing to the intervention force, and representing the UN, use
mercenaries whose motivation is not necessarily the restoration of peace? There are
questions about the ethics of contractors and how safe it is to use them. More than
half of the interrogators and all of the interpreters implicated in the Abu Ghraib
scandal were recruited "externally" and worked for CACI International or Titan. The
scandal revealed a complete absence of the military ethic among PMCs. PMCs do not
operate within the same legal framework as state armed forces and are sullying the
image of ISAF among the people of Afghanistan. It's another question raised by the
transition from the outsourcing of services to the outsourcing of war. -- translated by
Charles Goulden


Marie-Dominique Charlier was political adviser to the commander of ISAF
(International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan from February to August
2008 and is a researcher at IRSEM (Strategic Research Institute of the Ecole
Militaire), Paris.

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