Progress in Afghanistan: What's Next After 6 Years of War?

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In summary: US?In summary, the situation in Afghanistan deserves it's own thread, since although it is one of two states in which which the US military is involved in direct conflict with entities designated as terrorists in the 'War on Terror', it is quite different from Iraq.
  • #176
vici10 said:
There was an interesting article today in New York Times about role of mercenaries in the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/wo..._r=1&ref=world
There are more private armies (corporations) in Iraq and Afganistan than actual military.
I differ with your word usage here. I think you want "contractor". Corporations building kitchens or power plants are hardly "private armies", though some of them may be (e.g. Blackwater). In general a contractor does not a mercenary make.

mercenary:
-noun
a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army
 
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  • #177
Watched this talk by Greg Mortenson on C-Span/BookTV a couple of days ago.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/295805-1

If you've got less than 15 minutes to spare, watch from 18 min to 30 min.

And to help plug this, I'll copy the blurbs from Mortenson's latest book:

“ What Greg understands better than most—and what he practices more than anyone else I know—is the simple truth that all of us are better off when all of us have the opportunity to learn, especially our children. By helping them learn and grow, he’s shaping the very future of a region and giving hope to an entire generation.” —Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

“ This week . . . I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of Three Cups of Tea, open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, ‘Let’s just get out of here.’” —Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times

“ Sometimes the acts of one individual can illuminate how to confront a foreign-policy dilemma more clearly than the prattle of politicians. Such is the case with Greg Mortenson, whose work gives insights into an essential element of fighting terrorism.” —Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“ Mortenson’s story serves as a reminder of the power of a good idea and the strength inherent in one person’s passionate determination to persevere against enormous obstacles.” —Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science Monitor
 
  • #178
mheslep said:
I differ with your word usage here. I think you want "contractor". Corporations building kitchens or power plants are hardly "private armies", though some of them may be (e.g. Blackwater). In general a contractor does not a mercenary make.

mercenary:
-noun
a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army

As you have noticed, there are private military companies(contractors) in Iraq and Afganistan. (You mentioned Blackwater). Beside this contractors do also base support, security and construction. Without support there is no army. You missed another part of the definition of a mercenary: "motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain" rather than ideological or patriotic allegiance. Corporations satisfy this part well.

Regarding being foreign, according to CRS Report for Congress "Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis", third-country nationals made up more than half of all contractor personnel.

35lcfu9.jpg


http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf"
 
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  • #179
vici10 said:
As you have noticed, there are private military companies(contractors) in Iraq and Afganistan. (You mentioned Blackwater). Beside this contractors do also base support, security and construction. Without support there is no army. You missed another part of the definition of a mercenary: "motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain" rather than ideological or patriotic allegiance. Corporations satisfy this part well.
Clearly not, if the business is building a school or a power plant.
 
  • #180
Gokul43201 said:
Watched this talk by Greg Mortenson on C-Span/BookTV a couple of days ago.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/295805-1

If you've got less than 15 minutes to spare, watch from 18 min to 30 min.

And to help plug this, I'll copy the blurbs from Mortenson's latest book:
Thanks for that Gokul.
 
  • #181
Most of the "mercenaries" sent overseas perform security duties for VIPs and State Department personnel. Those duties are performed by contractors because those personnel don't require permanent active or reserve combat-zone security details because most of the time they're conducting their business they're not in a war zone. It makes sense to use contractors rather than actual soldiers because we need the soldiers to actually do the fighting, not waste their time guarding motorcades. The Armed Forces are stretched thin enough as is. These same guys can guard corporate VIPs or entertainers when they're in dangerous places and remain roughly permanently employed without there needing to be a war (though war is obviously lucrative for them).
 
  • #182
Good business! I bet these companies do not want the war to stop or that US will get out of these countries.
 
  • #183
mheslep said:
Clearly not, if the business is building a school or a power plant.
Nor is building an airplane (or even building a barracks on a base) "taking part in hostilities". Vici, you are misusing the word.
 
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  • #184
Regarding the question wether privite military contractors are mercenaries see the link below
http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__journal_of_international_law_and_politics/documents/documents/ecm_pro_058877.pdf"
 
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  • #185
vici10 said:
Regarding the question wether privite military contractors are mercenaries see the link below
Which refers to those armed contractors taking part in hostilities, e.g. Blackwater, a small, small part of the '54%' of DoD contractors you referred to up thread.
 
  • #186
vici10 said:
Regarding the question wether privite military contractors are mercenaries see the link below
http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__journal_of_international_law_and_politics/documents/documents/ecm_pro_058877.pdf"

I think it's debatable as to whether using mercenaries even for direct combat is a bad thing at all.

I think the only legitimate argument the paper makes against mercenaries is its "The Use of Private Contractors Undermines Democratic Checks on War-Making". It becomes possible for a country such as the US to hire a professional military force made up of members from various African nations to fight a war in Africa without the US public ever knowing about it. In other words, a government could conceivably conduct an entire war without its people knowing about it. That would be hard for a democratic government to do in practice since that would be a huge chunk of the budget that would have to disappear from view.

In general, the use of mercenaries has a long tradition and it's only in the last 100 years that the practice has fallen into disfavor.
 
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  • #187
Mheslep, please read more carefully. The article says that there is no definition of mercenary acceptable by most of countries. And therefore there is no agreement whether private military contractors should be considered mercenaries.

There is an ongoing debate over whether private military companies, and the private contractors that they employ, should be treated just like any other transnational industry, or whether they should be treated like mercenaries ...

There is article 47 of the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Conventions regarding mercenaries, that is most widely accepted, although it is not endorsed by the United States. Privatization of the military is relatively new phenomena that started in 1980s and became huge with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many legal issues are not yet settled. Article says that some contractors can be considered mercenaries even under narrow definition of Geneva Convention (that was created before widespread privatization of the military). Since there is no proper definition of mercenaries, this term has a moral judgment attached to it. Without going into semantics of the word 'mercenary' it is important to notice that the war in Iraq would not be possible without private military contractors. There is a lot of literature written about private military contractors, but the most known and one of the first are the works of Peter Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings.

If one concentrate just on one part of what private military contractors do in Iraq, those that are armed, then according to Singer:
And finally, there is the sector of firms, such as Blackwater, that has provided armed roles within the battle space. These firms do everything from help guard facilities and bases to escort high value individuals, as well as convoys, arguably the most dangerous job in all Iraq. Such firms are frequently described as “private security” or “bodyguards,” but they are a far cry from the rent a cops at the local mall or bodyguards for celebrities that the term is taken to mean. They use military training and weaponry, to carry out missions integral to the mission’s success, in the midst of a combat zone, against adversaries who are fellow combatants, as opposed to parking lot muggers or paparazzi stalkers of Angelina Jolie. In 2006, the Director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq estimated that 181 of such “private security companies” were working in Iraq with “just over 48,000 employees.”
Source: P.W. Singer “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”

Besides these armed forces military contractors do a lot of things that military does and can be thought as taking part in hostilities such as
During the invasion, contractors maintained and loaded many of the most sophisticated U.S. weapons systems, such as B-2 stealth bombers and Apache helicopters. They even helped operate combat systems such as the Army’s Patriot missile batteries and the Navy’s Aegis missile-defense system.
Source: P.W. Singer “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”

So I do not know on what mheslep bases his conclusion about “a small, small part” of armed contractors. The problem is that in reality no one really knows the exact number of contractors since Pentagon does not even track the number of contractors working for it in Iraq, much less their casualties. According to survey of contractors, at least 20% are in security. The problem is that many big contractors were not included in this survey.

Some hint about number of armed contractors and their participation in hostilities can give the death toll among contractors. According to Singer:
If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, con-
tractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. By one
count, as of July 2007, over 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded
(again the data is patchy here, with the only reliable source being insurance claims made by contractors’ employers and then reported to the U.S. Department of Labor).5 Since the “Surge” started in January 2007 (this was the second wave of increased troop deployments, focused on the civil war), these numbers have accelerated; contractors have been killed at a rate of 9 a week. These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.
Source: P.W. Singer “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”

One of the reasons why private military contractors are used (except enrichment of some private corporations) is that their use allows operations, that might be otherwise politically impossible. The US government could send more troops to Iraq, instead of sending contractors, but this would create “massive outcry amongst the public”. There was no outcry when contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. Death toll of contractors is not included in official death toll, public often does not know about them, besides many of them are not American. It creates perception of less human cost of the war.

Another problem with such contractors is that they are above the law (due to unclear legal status, they are not civilians and they are not also American soldiers). For example,
For example, it was reported that 100% of the translators and up to 50% of the interrogators at the Abu
Ghraib prison were private contractors from the Titan and CACI firms respectively. The U.S. Army
found that contractors were involved in 36% of the proven abuse incidents from 2003-2004 and identi-
fied 6 particular employees as being culpable in the abuses.20 However, while the enlisted U.S. Army soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were properly court martialed for their crimes, three years later, not one of the private contractors named in the U.S. Army investigation reports has been charged, prosecuted, or punished. […]

In another incident in 2005, armed contractors from the Zapata firm were detained by U.S. forces, who
claimed they saw the private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but also US Marines. Again, they were not charged, as the legal issues could not be squared .
Source: P.W. Singer “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”


These are just few examples that shows that private contractors above the law. There are many others. The most famous is of Blackwater. Since it is the most famous I will not go into the details, only a small quote:
Journalist Robert Young Pelton described his month spent embedded with Blackwater contractors in
Baghdad. “They’re famous for being very aggressive. They use their machine guns like car horns.”
Source: P.W. Singer ““Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”


The hint how many of such accidents happens can give the following quote:
As far back as 2005, for example, Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the US 3rd Infantry Division (responsible for security in the Baghdad area at the time) tried to keep track of contractor shootings in his sector. Over the course of two months, he found twelve shootings that resulted in at least six Iraqi civilian deaths and three more wounded. Horst tellingly put it, “These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There’s no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath.”
Source: P.W. Singer “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”

In the 3 years that followed that CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] order, not one contractor operating in Iraq was prosecuted or convicted for any crime involving an Iraqi victim or any kind of conduct in the battle space.
Source: P.W. Singer “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”


One can close one's eyes and pretend that there is only “a small, small” number of private military contractors involved in hostilities but it would be either very naïve or disingenuous. The fact that they are motivated by private gain and the fact that there is no authority over them (at least in practical terms) except their employer create very dangerous situations.

All the quotes of Singer are from “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go To War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency”
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2007/0927militarycontractors/0927militarycontractors.pdf"
 
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  • #188
vici10 said:
Privatization of the military is relatively new phenomena that started in 1980s and became huge with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many legal issues are not yet settled. Article says that some contractors can be considered mercenaries even under narrow definition of Geneva Convention (that was created before widespread privatization of the military). Since there is no proper definition of mercenaries, this term has a moral judgment attached to it. Without going into semantics of the word 'mercenary' it is important to notice that the war in Iraq would not be possible without private military contractors. There is a lot of literature written about private military contractors, but the most known and one of the first are the works of Peter Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings.

Another problem with such contractors is that they are above the law (due to unclear legal status, they are not civilians and they are not also American soldiers). For example,

I only have one issue with the accuracy of your post and that's that privatization started in the 1980's. Actually, it stopped after World War II (for the US, anyway) and restarted in the 80's.

Claire Chenault's Flying Tigers in China just prior to the US entering World War II and in the very early days of US participation of WWII is one example. An example where your mercenaries were considered heroes, no less.

Contractors being above the law is a problem in the case of how the US has used contractors in Iraq. It's not a problem that's inherent to using mercenaries in general.

And in the case of Abu Graib, one should look at how this occurred in the first place. The abused prisoners were most likely of no intelligence value at all, so the US subcontracted out the interrogations to low cost, poorly trained interrogators and assigned National Guard members as the prison guards (with National Guard members usually having less thorough training than active duty troops). If the value of interrogating these folks was so small that it wasn't worth the investment to do it properly, then maybe it wasn't worth doing at all. (Detainees that might have legitimate intelligence value were interrogated by professional CIA personnel, not subcontracted out to the lowest bidder).

I think you have a legitimate point that having to use military personnel to do the interrogations could have created enough of a manpower squeeze that management would have exercised better judgement in how they used that manpower. Considering that poor judgement plagued the entire Bush administration when it came to pursuing the Iraq war, I think it's a little presumptive to assume tighter manpower constraints would have prevented Abu Graib (heck, the administration just ignored generals that said we weren't assigning enough personnel for the job right from the beginning).

In other words, inept leaders will yield bad results regardless of what the rules of war are.
 
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  • #190
vici10 said:
The documentary film "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers" about privite military contractors in Iraq by Robert Greenwald:
Before going off to watch an ~hour of movie, how would you characterize Greenwald's material as a source of information? An unbiased observer with a track record of including facts not convenient for his story? Or a hard left, agenda driven Michael Moore wannabe?
 
  • #191
I'd be interested in any stats that can be found on breakdown (say, soldier/security guard/noncombat) of contractors in Iraq. On its face, the large number of contractors means nothing to me, but if I learned that a third were security guards and a third were doing actual military-style fighting I'd feel differently.

A similar breakdown of the US forces would be useful for comparison, as well.
 
  • #192
vici10 said:
Mheslep, please read more carefully. The article says that there is no definition of mercenary acceptable by most of countries. And therefore there is no agreement whether private military contractors should be considered mercenaries.
Well if you consider the term mercenary hopelessly ambiguous (I don't) then is the above a retraction of your usage of the term in post #175?
 
  • #193
CRGreathouse said:
I'd be interested in any stats that can be found on breakdown (say, soldier/security guard/noncombat) of contractors in Iraq. On its face, the large number of contractors means nothing to me, but if I learned that a third were security guards and a third were doing actual military-style fighting I'd feel differently.

A similar breakdown of the US forces would be useful for comparison, as well.

Then you should read previous posts more carefully, you will find some information in the links provided. Although the similar breakdown of support vs combat of US forces in US, I would be interested to know too.
 
  • #194
mheslep said:
Well if you consider the term mercenary hopelessly ambiguous (I don't) then is the above a retraction of your usage of the term in post #175?

The fact that there is no legal definition of the mercenary that most countries would agree on, does not mean that phenomena does not exist. The purpose of my post was to bring attention to a phenomena of widespread privatization of the military that is largly ignored. In this multipaged thread there was a lot of discussion, but no one seems to mention a role of contractors.
 
  • #195
It is only anecdotal, but I have heard complaint from friends who have served overseas that the contractors (especially blackwater) are generally poorly educated and would not pass the requirements necessary for the regular military.
 
  • #196
vici10 said:
In this multipaged thread there was a lot of discussion, but no one seems to mention a role of contractors.
Could it be because this thread is supposed to be about progress in Afghanistan, and the "role of contractors" is at best tangentially relevant?
 
  • #197
Galteeth said:
It is only anecdotal, but I have heard complaint from friends who have served overseas that the contractors (especially blackwater) are generally poorly educated and would not pass the requirements necessary for the regular military.

And I've heard they're mostly ex-military. Our anecdotes conflict, imagine that.
 
  • #198
vici10 said:
Then you should read previous posts more carefully, you will find some information in the links provided.

Sorry, watching > 1 hour of video plus a few dozen links isn't worth my time. If someone was willing to bring stats into the thread so everyone could examine the figures, that might be.
 
  • #199
I guess it's a good thing the the "contractors" aren't in charge of the operation in Yemen.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39963767

"Joint U.S.-Yemeni security operations in the past year have failed to kill or capture AQAP's top leadership.

'Dry run'?
In a fresh development over the interception of the bombs, it was reported that American intelligence officials tracked several shipments of household goods from Yemen to Chicago in September and considered that the parcels might be a "dry run" for a militant attack.

Intelligence officials believe the tracking of the shipments may have been used to plan the route and timing for two parcel bombs discovered on U.S.-bound planes in Dubai and London.

"That was one scenario that was considered," an official told The New York Times.

The "dry run" involved a carton of household goods including books, religious literature, and a computer disk, but no explosives, shipped from Yemen to Chicago, the report said."
 
  • #200
Galteeth said:
It is only anecdotal, but I have heard complaint from friends who have served overseas that the contractors (especially blackwater) are generally poorly educated and would not pass the requirements necessary for the regular military.

Most of the contractors are skilled laborers (plumbers and carpenters and what not). I have no idea what their education level is, but I know that the current incarnation of Blackwater (now called Xe) has a hiring requirement for anyone wishing to work in security of at least five years military service in a special operations unit. I don't know if they've always had this requirement, but the only people I personally know that ever worked for Blackwater were all ex-special ops (granted, that's only two people).
 
  • #201
Story from Afghanistan

Bibi Aisha, Disfigured Afghan Woman Featured On 'Time' Cover, Visits U.S.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130527903

Apparently, recently the Taliban under Mullar Omar have threatened death to anyone wishing to discuss peace with the Afghan government. This does not bode well for a resolution in the near term. The problem extends beyond Afghanistan into Pakistan.
 
  • #202
http://www.smi.uib.no/seminars/Pensum/Abu-Lughod.pdf

I came across this article while I am progressing through the anthropology course I took.

I feel like anthropologists input is important is developing Afghanistan. Forcing western standards on their society seem to be a naive and useless approach.
 
  • #203
As long as the taliban are able to go in and out of pakistan ,they cannot be eliminated,they will play a waiting game till the US troops move out and then they might simply resume their agenda.

Some say that empires go to Afghanistan to die
The Greeks, Indians, Persians, Mongolians, British,
and Russians have tried to hold Afghanistan but never ...
America Grovelling To The Taliban..
 
  • #204
  • #205
mheslep said:
That is a nonsense opinion blog site. If you have an opinion of your own, why not state it?

yea ,the tone of this blog does qualify for the term "nonsense" but the US is in negotiations with certain "types" of taliban

good ,bad taliban

http://pakteahouse.net/2011/06/27/the-afghanistan-stalemate/

Some kind of negotiations is inevitable(but also dangerous and unpredictable) especially if you are fighting an enemy who has no borders and can blend into the civilian populations easily i.e an outright military victory is not possible.
 
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  • #206
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15901363

"Nato helicopters have fired on a military checkpost near Pakistan's Afghan border, killing up to eight soldiers, say Pakistani officials."

Troubles still seem to be present on the Afgan-Pakistan border.

I also noticed a nice BBC Q&A:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11371138
Nato has begun the long process of handing power over to Afghan forces. Bamiyan became the first province to pass to local control in mid-July, setting in train the gradual withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. Most international troops are scheduled to leave by 2015, provided Afghan forces are ready to take over security.

It also talks of "Isaf operation":
In its mission statement, Isaf says that its role is to "reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development".

Isaf says that its priority, though, is to train the army and police in advance of its pull-out. At $2bn a week, the financial cost of the US military operation is a huge drain on the resources of the United States.
 

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