Trump strategist Steve Bannon and son-in-law adviser Jared Kushner are seeking a way to keep from sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan by adopting plans proposed by a billionaire and America’s most notorious mercenary to supply “private military units” to take on the role of American soldiers and Marines there. Private contractors for security and support roles have for years been part of the mix in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the approaches being suggested by the two men would take this beyond its previous parameters.
Four weeks ago, Pr*sident Trump gave U.S. generals the green light to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to shore up the security situation there. After nearly 16 years of war, that situation has steadily deteriorated as the Taliban has gradually grabbed more territory, now accounting for about 40 percent of the nation’s land area, according to U.S. military sources. The war extends well beyond territory the Taliban actually holds, however, sometimes reaching into the capital city of Kabul itself.
U.S. Army chiefs in Afghanistan have been seeking the additional troops. Within the Trump staff, a strong difference of opinion about what to do in Afghanistan arose in great part because past strategies under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had only limited and temporary success. But Trump himself decided to go along with the generals, leaving up to them exactly how many troops to add to American forces now deployed in Afghanistan.
The official cap, set by President Obama last year, is 8,400. But there are another 2,000 or so U.S. troops there, counted as only temporary and not part of the cap, even though many have been in the country for months. Trump decided to let the generals decide how many additional troops—Army and Marines—will be sent, but the Pentagon seems to have settled on about 4,000. There is a call for a few thousand more NATO troops as well.
Because no new strategy has been announced, there is zero reason to believe that a total of, say, 20-25,000 U.S. and allied troops will accomplish any more than the 140,000 who were there when Obama began withdrawing them in 2011.
The people who Bannon and Kushner sent to talk about their ideas with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis are Erik Prince, who founded the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide (and is the brother of Education Secretary Betty DeVos), and Stephen A. Feinberg, the billionaire who owns the military contractor DynCorp International, apparently didn’t persuade him. Mattis reportedly listened politely and that was it. But, depending on whether Trump remains in office long enough, an increasingly less certain prospect, Mattis’s decision may not hold permanently.
Mark Landler, Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon report:
The highly unusual meeting dramatizes the divide between Mr. Trump’s generals and his political staff over Afghanistan, the lengths to which his aides will go to give their boss more options for dealing with it and the readiness of this White House to turn to business people for help with diplomatic and military problems.
Soliciting the views of Mr. Prince and Mr. Feinberg certainly qualifies as out-of-the-box thinking in a process dominated by military leaders in the Pentagon and the National Security Council. But it also raises a host of ethical issues, not least that both men could profit from their recommendations.
“The conflict of interest in this is transparent,” said Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who wrote a book about the growth of private armies, “The Modern Mercenary.” “Most of these contractors are not even American, so there is also a lot of moral hazard.”
At the end of May, Prince offered his strategy in a May 31 Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. A U.S. “viceroy” should be in charge of all coalition efforts, he said:
For 250 years, the East India Company prevailed in the region through the use of private military units known as “presidency armies.” They were locally recruited and trained, supported and led by contracted European professional soldiers. The professionals lived, patrolled, and—when necessary—fought shoulder-to-shoulder with their local counterparts for multiyear deployments. That long-term dwelling ensured the training, discipline, loyalty and material readiness of the men they fought alongside for years, not for a one-time eight-month deployment.
An East India Company approach would use cheaper private solutions to fill the gaps that plague the Afghan security forces, including reliable logistics and aviation support. The U.S. military should maintain a small special-operations command presence in the country to enable it to carry out targeted strikes, with the crucial difference that the viceroy would have complete decision-making authority in the country so no time is wasted waiting for Washington to send instructions. A nimbler special-ops and contracted force like this would cost less than $10 billion per year, as opposed to the $45 billion we expect to spend in Afghanistan in 2017.
His plan would focus not on nation-building, he wrote, and would cost far less. But he also suggested that the viceroy would change laws, root out corruption, and build legitimate business alternatives to the opium trade that is still the backbone of the nation’s weak economy. Odd how that sounds pretty much like nation-building. Guess who the investors in those business alternatives—the big one being mining—would be? It’s the 21st Century version of a banana republic. Not so different than the ones that came into being in Central America a century ago.
So the U.S. and NATO troops come home, no doubt eliciting hurrahs from citizens of the nations who have deployed these troops, and the mercenaries are placed in charge, gaining less media coverage than the pitiful amount devoted to America’s longest war since Osama bin Laden was killed. They wouldn’t be under military control, leaving them with all the potential for violations of human rights that mercenaries throughout the ages have engaged in.
The growth in hiring mercenaries to replace U.S. troops in uniform is hardly new. When Obama took office in 2009, the ratio of mercenaries to soldiers was about 1-to-1 in Afghanistan. By this time last year, it was closer to 3-to-1.
As Sean McFate wrote in The Atlantic 11 months ago:
Private military contractors perform tasks once thought to be inherently governmental, such as raising foreign armies, conducting intelligence analysis and trigger-pulling. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they constituted about 15 percent of all contractors. But don’t let the numbers fool you. Their failures have an outsized impact on U.S. strategy. When a squad of Blackwater contractors killed 17 civilians at a Bagdad traffic circle in 2007, it provoked a firestorm in Iraq and at home, marking one of the nadirs of that war.
Contractors also encourage mission creep, because contractors don't count as "boots on the ground." Congress does not consider them to be troops, and therefore contractors do not count again troop-level caps in places like Iraq. The U.S. government does not track contractor numbers in war zones. As a result, the government can put more people on the ground than it reports to the American people, encouraging mission creep and rendering contractors virtually invisible. [...]
Contracting is big business, too. In the 2014 fiscal year, the Pentagon obligated $285 billion to federal contracts—more money than all other government agencies received, combined. That’s equal to 8 percent of federal spending, and three and a half times Britain’s entire defense budget. About 45 percent of those contracts were for services, including private military contractors.
The record of mercenaries operating in Afghanistan is not a pretty one. A Senate report in 2010 found that sub-contractors hired by private contractors were tied to bribery, kidnapping, murder …. and anti-coalition attacks.
No U.S. plan has worked in Afghanistan. While blame for some of the failures can be laid at the feet of incompetence or the unwarranted “idealism” of plans like Gen. David Petraeus’ counter-insurgency model, there’s certainty that whether the current path is maintained or something as whack as what Prince and Feinberg have proposed is adopted, in two years from now or ten, things are unlikely to be any different. However, we can be sure of one thing—more graves.