By Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken
A funny thing happened on the way to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. military became privatized. Private contractors, i.e. mercenaries, are now the predominant military force comprising the armamentarium of the United States. In effect, private contractors supplanted the U.S. military as the primary decision-makers and fighting force of the U.S. government.
Private contractors were the saving grace to the need for more troops to fight overseas in multiple countries as well as to staff the multitude of U.S. bases on foreign soil. Very comfortably and conveniently they eliminated the need for a draft and all the problems associated with the selective service. What the American people did not consider is the more-or-less secret, diminishing power of the U.S. government over its own fighting forces.
As law professor Steven Schooner was asked in an interview, “Is there any danger of the military becoming overly dependent on the private sector?” he answered, “There’s no question that the military has become overly dependent on the private sector. When I was a young Army officer, as I learned the military doctrine, … the military relied on contractors on the battlefield only to the extent that they could fight without the contractors. That’s simply no longer the case in the United States military. The United States military can no longer fight effectively without contractors on the battlefield, and that has to be an item of great concern both to commanders and to the public. If we are faced with a legitimate foe that could in fact compete with us in terms of competence on the battlefield … this pervasive presence of contractors could be potentially disastrous.[1]
Every year the federal government spends half a trillion dollars on contracts for goods and services from private companies. The total workforce of those companies -- including workers not on federal contracts -- accounts for 22 percent of American workers, according to David Madland, director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress.[2]
There is no way of knowing the total count of all private contractors. The estimate in June of this year is that there are around 200,000 service members in both Iraq and Afghanistan.[3]
There were over 200,000 DOD private contractors alone in 2009, comprising 53% of the DOD’s workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan.[4] In 3rd quarter FY 2010, USCENTCOM reported approximately 224,433 contractor personnel working for the DOD in the USCENTCOM AOR (Area of Responsibility).[5] Even the casualty list for this year exceeds the deaths of military ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.[6]
By mercenaries, we mean hired soldiers outside of any military chain of command. They can act independently of the U.S. military under the direction of their employer, and their allegiance is not to the U.S. government. They are motivated by private gain. They are usually not citizens or residents where these conflicts take place.
There is a lack of public information on the terms regarding the contracts including their costs and the standards governing hiring and performance. Without this information, how can the corporations and the contracts be documented or evaluated?[7]
In addition, there are factors that make it impossible to know how many contractors there are and how they are used. One is that the number of casualties of private contractors remains unknown. By contracting with private contractors who were former special operation forces and who end up working for corporations, the U.S. is able to deny any official “military” presence in a country, even though there might be as many as 100,000 hired mercenaries there.
Mercenary casualties should be reported more accurately. “It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture …. I'm not accusing either the Bush or the Obama administration of intentionally deceiving the public, but when a president applauds a reduction in military deaths but fails to acknowledge the contractor personnel now dying in their place, someone isn't telling the whole story.” [8]
As to their role in Afghanistan, most recently, Mr. Karzai summed it up best when he lashed out in public, accusing U.S.-funded private security companies of killing people and looting homes and shops. “They violate the law, they kill people, the people get attacked and the civilians get killed by these private security companies,” he said. [9]
Of grave concern, given the change to the military effort, is the question of who has control over the individual armed forces of all these troops operating under different U.S. agencies and corporations. Ultimately, it is possible the president has lost control as commander-in-chief of the military forces of the United States. Can the commander-in-chief fire privatized soldiers? Has the U.S. military itself lost control of troops engaged in armed combat and other maneuvers when privatized soldiers outnumber GIs and are beholden to the dictates of separate and independent corporations?
Who is in charge of operations involving independent contractors? Is the DOD, the Pentagon, other governmental departments or agencies, the president, or the corporations? One thing is certain, the American people, the majority of whom are opposed to these wars, who are supposed to be in charge, are not. Likewise, the Karzai government is not. The fact is the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, the CIA, and USAID, etc., all employ private contractors in foreign countries.
The State Department has steadily increased its use of private contractors over the last 23 years to provide protection overseas, i.e. providing perimeter security to U.S. diplomatic and consular posts; providing worldwide personal protective services, providing bodyguards and static guards for buildings and other infrastructure; deterring visa and passport fraud, overseeing worldwide training and assistance programs in anti-terrorism; providing a courier service for the Department; and, providing a wide range of protective services for the Secretary of State, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN and foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S.[10]
One wonders if full transparency were revealed concerning the number and role of State Department forces involved in the war effort stateside and overseas wouldn’t by itself show that the U.S. State Department has under its command an army operating independently from the U.S. military and commander-in-chief.
The breadth of the private contractor problem boils down to this: Take the example of a United States corporation that still operates on U.S. soil and manufactures tanks for the DOD to use in Pakistan. On the floor of the factory, a worker, who works on building the tanks, rapes a fellow worker, a woman. In fact, there’s a long history in this corporation of sexual harassment, including rape. There is no doubt that the corporation can fire the individual responsible for the crime. However, can the DOD or president of the United States fire the worker? The president, furious by the illicit activity and the fact that the corporation does nothing to quell the abuse, marches into the factory headquarters and tells the CEOs that they must fire the worker. The corporation owners and bosses say no, letting the president know in no uncertain terms that he has no jurisdiction over the workers in their plant. So, the president marches over to the Pentagon and orders his Secretary of Defense to end the contract with the corporation. The Secretary informs the president that it and the State Department have a contract with Pakistan to build the tanks and can’t break it. Besides, without this corporation manufacturing this type of tank, there would be no tanks in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
One thing is certain and that is that an employee can be fired by the corporation (s)he works for -- and there will be no striking, picketing, collective bargaining or disrupting production.
The problems that arise with using contractors rather than the U.S. military forces have been well documented: “ [the] shortcomings with this new system [are]: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy.”[11]
There are significant jurisdictional questions that remain:
- What happens when commanders in the field have no control over the private contractors working in various countries?
- Who controls the drone battlefield when special operation forces and independent corporations run their own ops?
- What happens when the communications during a battle or at any time bypass the members of the U.S. military and instead passes to another department under the Executive Branch, such as the State Department?
- What happens when individual heads of governmental departments and agencies issue orders to commanders on the field? This would include the private, individual armed forces of the Department of Defense, State Department, CIA and other agencies.
Who, exactly, maintains the jurisdiction within the U.S. government to fire individual private contractors when hired by corporations? When the use of private contractors is under no single government department or branch of government, the jurisdictional questions remain ambiguous, untested, undefined, unregulated, and unlawful. The following is a partial list of the military’s assertion of authority over mercenaries/private contractors. It ranges from the Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) or the SMTJ - Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the U.S. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 7), to the Coalition Provisional Authority Orders (CPAs) and their own judicial systems, to DOD Instructions (e.g. DOD 5525.11 -- Criminal Jurisdiction Over Civilians Employed By or Accompanying the Armed Forces Outside the United States, Certain Service Members, and Former Service Members), to the UCMJ and Inspectors General and the Defense Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), to U.S federal courts, to international laws of armed conflict, to Memoranda of Understanding – agreements between the DOD and State Department that coordinate the movement of PSCs (private security contractors) throughout a foreign country.[12]
Have there been prosecutions? Peter Singer, the author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” states that no contractor has been prosecuted for misbehavior in Iraq. There have been some civil lawsuits, for example, the families of the four Blackwater guards killed in Fallujah are suing for wrongful death.[13]
Human Rights First reports, “Over the last several years, scores of well-documented reports of serious abuse by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, both in the context of interrogations and in the use of excessive and often lethal force in various security operations, have not been prosecuted. Through February 2006, only 20 cases of alleged detainee abuse by contractors are known to have been assigned within the DOJ for investigation; only two more cases involving abuse of local nationals are known to have been assigned for department investigation, the most recent of which is the September 2007 Blackwater Nisoor Square shooting in Baghdad. And since military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq began, only one contractor has been tried for violence or abuse towards local nationals. In contrast, to date more than 60 U.S. military personnel have been court-martialed in connection with the deaths of Iraqi citizens and more are under investigation.” [14]
All of these questions are up for grabs and as Jeremy Scahill writes, “The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. ‘We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention,’ said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. ‘In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations.’ Addicott added, ‘If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court.’”[15]
As Scahill summarizes the situation:
“During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command]. ‘What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,’ said Colonel Wilkerson. ‘That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing.’"
“He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. ‘I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it.
“At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."
“Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. ‘When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?’”[16]
The Congressional Research Service (8-25-20) reports:
“Contractors working with the Department of State or the U.S. military (or with any of the coalition forces) in Iraq are non-combatants who have no combat immunity under international law if they engage in hostilities, and whose conduct may be attributable to the United States. Section 552 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for FY2007 (P.L. 109-364) makes military contractors supporting the Armed Forces in Iraq subject to court-martial, but due to constitutional concerns, it seems more likely that contractors who commit crimes in Iraq would be prosecuted under criminal statutes that apply extraterritorially or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or by means of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Generally, Iraqi courts do not have jurisdiction to prosecute contractors without the permission of the relevant member country of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq. Some contractors including those with the State Department, may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq.” [17]
Certainly, the ambiguity can serve a political purpose when the U.S. government needs justification for a war effort: “This arrangement, the former executive [at Blackwater] said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country.”[18]
It also can serve the purpose of increasing military funding, increasing the coffers of the many U.S. corporations involved in these wars, and surrendering the decision-making concerning who dies and how in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, the ambiguity surrounding the relationship among the different players involved in making war, i.e. the U.S. military, the executive and judicial branches of government, corporations and their private independent contractors/mercenaries, is bad and illegal policy and practice.
Neither the executive branch of government nor the Pentagon wishes to acknowledge the political independence of the massive number of mercenaries fighting abroad under our name, but when push comes to shove, these private contractors constitute an “army” beholden only to the CEOs who hire them.
____________________
Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former associate director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. She can be contacted at info@progressiveavenues.org, 415-702-9682.
The Progressive Avenues website is updated regularly: www.progressiveavenues.org
Luke Hiken is a former supervising attorney at the California Appellate Project, and has handled many courts-martial over the years.
End – End- End
[1] Steven Schooner, Private Warriors, Frontline, 6-21-05, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/interviews/schooner.html
[2] “Sweatshop Army -- Why does the Pentagon use low-road companies to feed and clothe our troops?” 9-2-10, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=sweatshop_army
[3] Bowers, Chris, “U.S. withdrawal from Iraq on schedule, but total number of troops overseas the same (for now),” 6-1-10, Open Left, http://openleft.com/diary/18926/us-withdrawal-from-iraq-on-schedule-but-total-number-of-troops-overseas-the-same-for-now
[4] CRS Summary, Schwartz, Moshe, “DOD Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis, 12-14-09, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:bbDx-uHmHzAJ:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf+total+number+of+private+contractors+in+Iraq+%26+Afghanistan&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESirgvzEFkqkk3uz1juX5iCxw9G2EUaHYk7MmTIp90j8sa7F7WcYPGabql2uyJicGl6rRfyJWYgJYx94TLNpGdOSGAwvIuH3dq_VvJnG80csUfnPjIkMWsqp-a9y3KoaBfUM27eF&sig=AHIEtbQcZUyNjxXoQSDE0uPkcBsezxnQbg
[5] Chatterjee, Pratap, “Danger Zone Jobs,” Overseas Civilian Contractors, 10-27-10, http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/category/iraq-2/
[6] Miller, T. Christian, “This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Overseas Civilian Contractors, ProPublica Disposable Army, 9-23-10, http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/
[7] See Taylor, Marisa, “U.S. can’t account for cash to rebuild,” McClatchy Newspapers, 10-27-10, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/27/102724/us-cant-untangle-billions-sent.html
[8] id., Miller, T. Christian
[9] Partlow, Joshua, “Karzai delays expulsion of security groups,” 10-27-10, Financial Times Asia-Pacific
[10] Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for Congress, p. 7, Order Code RL32419, “Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues,” Updated 8-25-08, Elsea, Jennifer K., Legislative Attorney, Schwartz, Moshe, Analyst in Defense Acquisition Policy, and Nakamura, Kennon H., Analyst in Foreign Affairs, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:iZI7eD0HJi4J:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf+Can+the+U.S.+President+fire+civilian+private+contractors&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiuBSgDPhzRGBjT7U0kX-jw-1t6xUdmBtE66lvPWEA6hqjE3IMUKzqJHG_KUipCIsTBtldhHDb7rOv-w2_K7BGLfsCedSrgao6PA6BQBG3OuVUaZ5vovUAgGjEAO7sXCY91xEW4&sig=AHIEtbQO47tfzHdyY8usfGF3-0-0y69GJA ; and updated 9-9-08: http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL32419_20080929.pdf
(See also: Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis, Moshe Schwartz, Specialist in Defense Acquisition, 7-2-10, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf
[11] James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren, “Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq,” NYT, World Section, 10-24-10
[12] For a listing of other management and oversight DOD sources, see Political Vel Craft, Veil of Politics, “Obama Increases Military/Mercenary Contractor Presence by 23% in Iraq and 29% in Afghanistan,”
http://politicalvelcraft.org/2009/09/21/obama-increases-militarymercenary-contractor-presence-by-23-in-Iraq-and-29-in-afghanistan/
[13] Private Warrior, Frontline, Frequently Asked Questions, 6-21-05, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/faqs/
[14] Department of Justice Continues to Ignore Violent Crimes Committed By Private Security Contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan, 1-16-08,
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/etn/2006/alert/195/
[15] Scahill, Jeremy, “Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan,” 11-26-09, Alaiwah!, http://alaiwah.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/blackwater-in-pakistan/
[16] Scahill, Jeremy, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The Nation, 11-23-01, http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-us-war-pakistan
[17] id., CRS, Summary, p. 2
[18] Scahill, Jeremy, “The Secret US War in Pakistan, The Nation, 11-23-01
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Baghdad to investigate role of Blackwater in deaths
By Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi government says that it will investigate whether employees of the Blackwater security company were involved in hitherto undisclosed killings that emerged from the Wikileaks documents.
In addition to a notorious case in Baghdad in 2007, when Blackwater guards killed 17 and wounded 18 civilians, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that it has discovered a further 14 cases when Blackwater personnel allegedly opened fire on civilians. The information comes from the war logs made public by Wikileaks and allegedly shows that a further 10 civilians were killed and seven wounded by Blackwater, a US-based private security company now known as Xe. In one third of cases, the Blackwater guards were protecting US diplomats under a $465m (£300m) contract when they opened fire.
The war logs reveal repeated cases when they shot at civilian vehicles that came close to their convoys, on one occasion even shooting dead the driver of an ambulance who had attended the scene of a bomb attack.
Sunni politicians in Baghdad say that the US military reports confirm and give credibility to their claims over the years that members of their community were being tortured by Shia-dominated security forces.
Iraq Body Count says that the 400,000 Wikileak war logs show that an additional 15,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in addition to the 107,000 in the group's database, which was built up from published sources. From the start of the war in 2003, the US military claimed that it did not have statistics on how many Iraqi civilians were being killed or injured. The aim of this was apparently to try to undermine protests against civilian loss of life as had happened in Vietnam.
The American and British governments both sought to play down civilian casualties in Iraq, claiming that only four out of 18 Iraqi provinces had a high level of violence. The Pentagon did ultimately admit that civilian deaths peaked at between 3,500 and 4,000 in a single month in December 2006.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/baghdad-to-investigate-role-of-blackwater-in-deaths-2115636.html
The Iraqi government says that it will investigate whether employees of the Blackwater security company were involved in hitherto undisclosed killings that emerged from the Wikileaks documents.
In addition to a notorious case in Baghdad in 2007, when Blackwater guards killed 17 and wounded 18 civilians, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that it has discovered a further 14 cases when Blackwater personnel allegedly opened fire on civilians. The information comes from the war logs made public by Wikileaks and allegedly shows that a further 10 civilians were killed and seven wounded by Blackwater, a US-based private security company now known as Xe. In one third of cases, the Blackwater guards were protecting US diplomats under a $465m (£300m) contract when they opened fire.
The war logs reveal repeated cases when they shot at civilian vehicles that came close to their convoys, on one occasion even shooting dead the driver of an ambulance who had attended the scene of a bomb attack.
Sunni politicians in Baghdad say that the US military reports confirm and give credibility to their claims over the years that members of their community were being tortured by Shia-dominated security forces.
Iraq Body Count says that the 400,000 Wikileak war logs show that an additional 15,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in addition to the 107,000 in the group's database, which was built up from published sources. From the start of the war in 2003, the US military claimed that it did not have statistics on how many Iraqi civilians were being killed or injured. The aim of this was apparently to try to undermine protests against civilian loss of life as had happened in Vietnam.
The American and British governments both sought to play down civilian casualties in Iraq, claiming that only four out of 18 Iraqi provinces had a high level of violence. The Pentagon did ultimately admit that civilian deaths peaked at between 3,500 and 4,000 in a single month in December 2006.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/baghdad-to-investigate-role-of-blackwater-in-deaths-2115636.html
Killing Reconciliation
By Jeremy Scahill
**************
"They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
***************
On March 26, 2009, Mullah Sahib Jan, a militant Taliban imam from the Mohammed Agha district in Afghanistan's Logar province, walked into the office of the Independent National Reconciliation Commission, the main body encouraging the Taliban to lay down their weapons and work with the government. He was escorting fifty Taliban fighters who, he said, had committed to ending their fight against the Afghan government and entering the process of integration. To the government, Sahib Jan was a shining example of how reconciliation with the Taliban is supposed to work. But less than a year later, the former militant's story would stand as a devastating symbol of how the actions of US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support.
Throughout Afghanistan, large billboards line the major roads encouraging Taliban fighters to do what Sahib Jan did—reconcile with the government. The billboards show red silhouettes of Kalashnikov-carrying Taliban fighters walking across a line, after which they transform into civilians and join white silhouettes of unarmed Afghans dressed in traditional garb. The message is clear: lay down your weapons and rejoin the family.
When Sahib Jan walked into the reconciliation office, he publicly announced that he and his Taliban colleagues had agreed to work with the government on a peace process after the commission assured him that it would restrict US-led NATO forces from conducting night raids and killing civilians. "If the killing and arrests of people were not stopped," he said, "we would withdraw our support to the government and the foreign forces."
Reconciliation officials in Logar province say that making allies out of figures like Sahib Jan is the centerpiece of their work. Logar and its neighboring provinces, Paktia, Wardak and Ghazni, contain a strong presence of not only the Taliban but also the Haqqani network, the insurgent group portrayed by US officials as having the closest ties to Al Qaeda and a cozy relationship with Pakistan's ISI spy organization. Logar is also home to several tribes that say they have spent the past two years trying to make peace. A crucial part of this, they say, is building enough trust with the Taliban to make a serious case for ending their insurgency. Soon after his initial trip to the reconciliation office, Sahib Jan left his calling as an imam and took a position as a religious adviser to the reconciliation commission. As part of his work, reconciliation officials say, he traveled to hardcore Taliban areas.
"He was preaching to the Taliban, encouraging them to come to the government, telling the fighters there were a lot of benefits to laying down their arms," says Mohammed Anwar, director of Logar's reconciliation commission and an adviser to a local tribal council. Council officials credit Sahib Jan with putting Taliban fighters on the road to reconciliation.
But on the morning of January 14, Sahib Jan's bullet-riddled body lay on the ground outside his family's mud-brick compound in Logar's Safed Sang village. According to local officials and his family, he was killed in a night raid by US Special Operations Forces. "At 1 or 1:30 in the morning, US soldiers pulled up to the gas station in front of our house. We were sleeping in our rooms at that time," recalls Sahib Jan's 18-year-old son, Haider. "They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
According to Haider, US forces entered the compound with ladders and corralled the men into one room, where they handcuffed and blindfolded them. They moved the women to a separate room. "They tied all of our hands and roughed us up a little bit. They were beating us with both weapons and their hands," recalls Haider. "I was tied up from 1 or 1:30 in the morning until 6 in the morning." The family says that during the raid much of their property was damaged or destroyed. As Sahib Jan's sons were tied up, they had no idea of their father's fate until the Afghan translator appeared with US soldiers. They showed them a picture and said, "This is the man we killed."
"It was my father," Haider recalls. The soldiers then escorted the surviving men of the family to their father's body, where they saw about six bullets in it. With that, the Americans left; they have never contacted the family since.
"We have checked our logs and with our units that conduct these types of mission profiles. There is no record of the operation," US Lt. Commander Thomas Porter wrote in an e-mail to The Nation. But an eyewitness to the raid named Azmuddin, who works at the gas station in front of Sahib Jan's home, says, "US forces told me the next morning that they killed him because he had shot at them." Azmuddin says the morning after the raid he was arrested by US forces and taken to the classified Tor Prison, or "black jail," for fifteen days before being locked up at the Bagram prison for four months. In response to NATO's statement, government officials in Logar reacted angrily and swore that Sahib Jan was killed by US forces.
"There was a false report claiming that Sahib Jan was a Taliban, and the Americans conducted a night raid and killed him even though he had been working with us for months," says Anwar, the head of Logar's reconciliation commission. "During the entire time he worked with us, he hadn't participated in any attacks against the government. He worked with us as a religious adviser. Only the US soldiers know why they killed Sahib Jan. We don't know why." The local district chief, Abdul Hameed, says US forces carried out the raid without the cooperation of provincial security personnel. Anwar says that when he tries to contact US forces about these deadly incidents, they won't let him on their base, and the guards always tell him the appropriate officials are too busy or not there.
Officials at the reconciliation office point to several night raids over the past year, which they say targeted former Taliban who entered the process of reconciliation, as devastating to their work. "We are trying to build bridges between the Taliban and the government and trying to find jobs for them. We are working to get them decent housing in return for leaving the Taliban," says Anwar. "We are also trying to ensure that once they turn themselves in, they are not arrested again. How can we encourage reconciliation in good faith in the face of these American raids against the very people who agree to disarm?"
Meanwhile, US and NATO officials proclaim that the Taliban are on the ropes and will eventually be forced to make a deal. "The insurgency is under pressure, under pressure like never before in Afghanistan," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on October 22. "Our aim for this year was to regain the momentum. Now we have it." In recent weeks, such rhetoric has been bolstered by a flurry of reports about senior Taliban officials engaging in direct talks with the Karzai government, and US officials portray Washington as open to some form of a political settlement. But there is an enormous disconnect between the image projected by the US and Afghan governments and reality. On the ground the Taliban seem to be gaining traction and increasing membership despite, or perhaps because of, intensified US targeted-killing operations and night raids.
Two senior officials of the former Taliban government have told The Nation that the Taliban will not engage in any meaningful talks until foreign troops are expelled from Afghanistan and that reports that the Taliban are engaged in serious negotiations are false. "There is nothing going on, no negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans or the Taliban and the [Afghan] government," says Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as the Taliban government's ambassador to Pakistan, in an interview at his home in Kabul. He says if anyone claiming to be Taliban is negotiating, they are essentially nobodies to the movement. "There was no 'peace meeting' because the Taliban reject it."
Privately, US officials have acknowledged that reports in US media outlets of senior Taliban negotiating are propaganda aimed at sowing dissent among the Taliban leadership. "This is a psychological operation, plain and simple," a US official with firsthand knowledge of the Afghan government's strategies told the McClatchy news service. "Exaggerating the significance of it is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency."
The story of Sahib Jan raises a complicated question: was he really an influential Taliban figure? A current Taliban commander from Kunduz told The Nation that there is no evidence of the reconciliation program's success and that rural people are sometimes used as pawns in a game to elevate the status of tribal leaders with the Afghan government by "reconciling" Taliban fighters. "These are people who are just getting salaries from foreign powers or Afghan officials. You and I just invent a group and give them turbans and weapons and they go and say, We are Talibs and we surrender," says the Taliban commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Salahuddin. It is not clear whether Sahib Jan was an example of this, but in terms of public perception in Logar, that is irrelevant. What is not in dispute is that he publicly announced he was a Taliban mullah on the path to reconciliation and was killed in a night raid ten months later.
The US strategy seems to be to force the Taliban to the table through a fierce killing campaign. According to the US military, over a ninety-day period this past summer, US and coalition Special Operations Forces killed or captured more than 2,900 "insurgents," with an estimated dozen killed a day. Between July 4, when Gen. David Petraeus assumed command in Kabul, and early October, according to the military, US and Afghan Special Operations Forces killed more than 300 Taliban commanders and more than 900 foot soldiers in 1,500 raids. "This is precisely the kind of pressure we believe will lead to reconciliation and reintegration" of the Taliban, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently.
Zaeef, the former senior Taliban official, who spent four years in Guantánamo prison, confirmed that the American targeted-killing campaign of Taliban leaders has been successful, but he believes that the strategy will backfire for both the US and Afghan governments. "If these people, important, known people, disappear from the [Taliban] movement, what will happen? Who should [the Afghan government] make a dialogue with?" he asks. "The fighting will not stop. I know the new generation is more extremist than the last generation. The new generation will not listen to anyone. This is a dangerous thing. It will be bad for the Americans, but it will be worse for the people of Afghanistan."
Evidence of this can be found in a recent incident in Paktia province, when the Taliban leadership in Quetta, Pakistan, sent a representative to "reprimand a group of young commanders who were breaking the organization's rules," according to veteran Afghanistan journalist Anand Gopal. "But the defiant young commanders killed the cleric. While such incidents are still isolated, the danger is that as the Taliban undergo a massive demographic change in the coming years, this trend will accelerate, and the ability of Quetta to enforce decisions on its rank and file will be diminished."
Zaeef says the night raids and the targeted killings are strengthening the Taliban and inspiring more people "to become extremist against the Americans." US political and military leaders, he says, "are thinking, 'When we scare the people, they should be quiet.' But this is a different nation. When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. If you are killing five people, twenty, at least, are rising against you. When you are disrespecting the people or the honor of the people in one village, the whole village becomes against you. This is creating hatred against Americans."
The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government exists only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, is producing a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network are gaining support from the Pashtun heartland in communities that would not otherwise be backing them. Since 2005, when Zaeef was released from Guantánamo, "the Taliban have become stronger," he says. "Are the Taliban coming from the sky?" Zaeef asks. "No, it's new people."
Zaeef and Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the former Taliban foreign minister, insist that the Taliban is still the umbrella under which all of the insurgent forces operate. But at the same time they acknowledge that smaller, localized militias not loyal to Mullah Mohammed Omar or the Quetta-based Taliban leadership are popping up more and more. "By killing leaders, the war will not come to an end, but on the contrary, things will get worse, which will give birth to more leaders," says Muttawakil. "Many people might not like Taliban but join them because they are being harassed by powerful Afghans or foreigners and want to get revenge." Many of these newer insurgents live in rural areas of Afghanistan and, for now, fight in their own communities rather than as part of a cohesive national rebellion. "The nature of this kind of war is that it starts from the rural areas, as it started against the Soviet Union. Gradually the war spreads to district centers and then to the center of small provinces," Muttawakil says. "The war has started in rural areas and gradually will spread to big cities."
On a practical level, the discontent in those rural areas with the corruption of the Afghan government and the consistent killing of civilians by US forces is raising the prospect that Afghans offering assistance to the Afghan government and NATO forces—such as allowing safe passage to key supply convoys—may withdraw that support.
* * *
One community leader in Logar, Hajji Showkatt, works with a network of tribal leaders across Logar and its neighboring provinces who broker complex deals with the Taliban and Haqqani network forces to refrain from attacking oil and supply convoys headed to and from Kabul. Part of this involves paying bribes to the Taliban, but the deals also rely on assurances from Showkatt and the reconciliation commission to insurgent forces that they are working to end the night raids and arrests.
In the weeks leading up to Sahib Jan's killing, Logar officials say, there had been three other night raids in the area. Sahib Jan's killing was the final straw. "At the funeral everyone was so emotional when we took his body to be buried. We cursed the Americans," Showkatt says. In response, local people—not aligned with the Taliban—attacked an oil convoy, blowing up more than a dozen trucks, according to local officials. The scorched earth left by the attack can still be seen on the highway running through Logar. "Here is the bottom line: the US is conducting actions that are killing innocent people," Showkatt says. "The Taliban use this as propaganda and say to the people, 'This is what America is about.' It makes them more powerful."
Showkatt, who fought as a mujahedeen against the Soviets, continues to protect supply convoys for the United States and Afghan governments along key routes, but he says that this is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Showkatt and other leaders say they cannot guarantee they will continue to offer convoy protection. "In the mujahedeen times, we stopped all of the Russian convoys in this area," Showkatt boasts.
"We fought the Russians when they were here and we expelled them," adds Showkatt's friend Azrat Mohammed, a former mujahedeen commander from Logar. "Americans are not stronger than the Russians. If they continue with these actions, disrespecting our women, killing the wrong people, inshallah, we will rise up to defeat them too."
Throughout the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, police officials and civilians alike tell stories about personal grudges being settled through death by US night raids, where false intelligence is deliberately passed on to NATO forces to get a rival or enemy killed or captured.
Mohammed is living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, he says, for that very reason. He says he has been warned he is on a list for kill or capture. "I am too afraid to even sleep in my own home at night, so I spend most of my time in the camps in Pakistan. I am afraid the Americans will kill me," he says. "The way the Americans rely on bad intelligence to target people like me, the night raids we keep witnessing, the arrests and the torture and the killing is all making me want to pick up a weapon again. We are not by our nature against the government, but what they are doing is encouraging people to rise up against them."
In Afghanistan, Taliban commanders are fond of characterizing their fight to expel the United States and its allies with the phrase, "You've got the clocks, we've got the time." While US leaders are struggling to define what victory would look like in Afghanistan, the forces they are fighting are not. "We have two goals: freedom or martyrdom," says Taliban commander Salahuddin. "If we do not win our freedom, then we'll die honorably for its cause." The continuing US targeted-killing campaign and renewed airstrikes ordered by General Petraeus seem only to be further weakening the already fragile Karzai government. In plain terms, the United States' own actions in Afghanistan seem to be delivering the most fatal blows to its counterinsurgency strategy and its goal of winning hearts and minds. "I think that the Americans are already defeated in Afghanistan, they are just not accepting it," says former Taliban official Zaeef.
"If the US pulls out, my heart will be very sad because there will be a civil war," says Asif Mohammed, a young driver who escorts supply convoys to Kabul. "If they stay, they will continue killing our women and children." In the end, there could be the worst of both worlds: an escalation in raids by US Special Operations Forces, with their heavy toll on civilians, and a failed counterinsurgency campaign incapable of stopping a civil war.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/155622/killing-reconciliation
**************
"They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
***************
On March 26, 2009, Mullah Sahib Jan, a militant Taliban imam from the Mohammed Agha district in Afghanistan's Logar province, walked into the office of the Independent National Reconciliation Commission, the main body encouraging the Taliban to lay down their weapons and work with the government. He was escorting fifty Taliban fighters who, he said, had committed to ending their fight against the Afghan government and entering the process of integration. To the government, Sahib Jan was a shining example of how reconciliation with the Taliban is supposed to work. But less than a year later, the former militant's story would stand as a devastating symbol of how the actions of US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support.
Throughout Afghanistan, large billboards line the major roads encouraging Taliban fighters to do what Sahib Jan did—reconcile with the government. The billboards show red silhouettes of Kalashnikov-carrying Taliban fighters walking across a line, after which they transform into civilians and join white silhouettes of unarmed Afghans dressed in traditional garb. The message is clear: lay down your weapons and rejoin the family.
When Sahib Jan walked into the reconciliation office, he publicly announced that he and his Taliban colleagues had agreed to work with the government on a peace process after the commission assured him that it would restrict US-led NATO forces from conducting night raids and killing civilians. "If the killing and arrests of people were not stopped," he said, "we would withdraw our support to the government and the foreign forces."
Reconciliation officials in Logar province say that making allies out of figures like Sahib Jan is the centerpiece of their work. Logar and its neighboring provinces, Paktia, Wardak and Ghazni, contain a strong presence of not only the Taliban but also the Haqqani network, the insurgent group portrayed by US officials as having the closest ties to Al Qaeda and a cozy relationship with Pakistan's ISI spy organization. Logar is also home to several tribes that say they have spent the past two years trying to make peace. A crucial part of this, they say, is building enough trust with the Taliban to make a serious case for ending their insurgency. Soon after his initial trip to the reconciliation office, Sahib Jan left his calling as an imam and took a position as a religious adviser to the reconciliation commission. As part of his work, reconciliation officials say, he traveled to hardcore Taliban areas.
"He was preaching to the Taliban, encouraging them to come to the government, telling the fighters there were a lot of benefits to laying down their arms," says Mohammed Anwar, director of Logar's reconciliation commission and an adviser to a local tribal council. Council officials credit Sahib Jan with putting Taliban fighters on the road to reconciliation.
But on the morning of January 14, Sahib Jan's bullet-riddled body lay on the ground outside his family's mud-brick compound in Logar's Safed Sang village. According to local officials and his family, he was killed in a night raid by US Special Operations Forces. "At 1 or 1:30 in the morning, US soldiers pulled up to the gas station in front of our house. We were sleeping in our rooms at that time," recalls Sahib Jan's 18-year-old son, Haider. "They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
According to Haider, US forces entered the compound with ladders and corralled the men into one room, where they handcuffed and blindfolded them. They moved the women to a separate room. "They tied all of our hands and roughed us up a little bit. They were beating us with both weapons and their hands," recalls Haider. "I was tied up from 1 or 1:30 in the morning until 6 in the morning." The family says that during the raid much of their property was damaged or destroyed. As Sahib Jan's sons were tied up, they had no idea of their father's fate until the Afghan translator appeared with US soldiers. They showed them a picture and said, "This is the man we killed."
"It was my father," Haider recalls. The soldiers then escorted the surviving men of the family to their father's body, where they saw about six bullets in it. With that, the Americans left; they have never contacted the family since.
"We have checked our logs and with our units that conduct these types of mission profiles. There is no record of the operation," US Lt. Commander Thomas Porter wrote in an e-mail to The Nation. But an eyewitness to the raid named Azmuddin, who works at the gas station in front of Sahib Jan's home, says, "US forces told me the next morning that they killed him because he had shot at them." Azmuddin says the morning after the raid he was arrested by US forces and taken to the classified Tor Prison, or "black jail," for fifteen days before being locked up at the Bagram prison for four months. In response to NATO's statement, government officials in Logar reacted angrily and swore that Sahib Jan was killed by US forces.
"There was a false report claiming that Sahib Jan was a Taliban, and the Americans conducted a night raid and killed him even though he had been working with us for months," says Anwar, the head of Logar's reconciliation commission. "During the entire time he worked with us, he hadn't participated in any attacks against the government. He worked with us as a religious adviser. Only the US soldiers know why they killed Sahib Jan. We don't know why." The local district chief, Abdul Hameed, says US forces carried out the raid without the cooperation of provincial security personnel. Anwar says that when he tries to contact US forces about these deadly incidents, they won't let him on their base, and the guards always tell him the appropriate officials are too busy or not there.
Officials at the reconciliation office point to several night raids over the past year, which they say targeted former Taliban who entered the process of reconciliation, as devastating to their work. "We are trying to build bridges between the Taliban and the government and trying to find jobs for them. We are working to get them decent housing in return for leaving the Taliban," says Anwar. "We are also trying to ensure that once they turn themselves in, they are not arrested again. How can we encourage reconciliation in good faith in the face of these American raids against the very people who agree to disarm?"
Meanwhile, US and NATO officials proclaim that the Taliban are on the ropes and will eventually be forced to make a deal. "The insurgency is under pressure, under pressure like never before in Afghanistan," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on October 22. "Our aim for this year was to regain the momentum. Now we have it." In recent weeks, such rhetoric has been bolstered by a flurry of reports about senior Taliban officials engaging in direct talks with the Karzai government, and US officials portray Washington as open to some form of a political settlement. But there is an enormous disconnect between the image projected by the US and Afghan governments and reality. On the ground the Taliban seem to be gaining traction and increasing membership despite, or perhaps because of, intensified US targeted-killing operations and night raids.
Two senior officials of the former Taliban government have told The Nation that the Taliban will not engage in any meaningful talks until foreign troops are expelled from Afghanistan and that reports that the Taliban are engaged in serious negotiations are false. "There is nothing going on, no negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans or the Taliban and the [Afghan] government," says Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as the Taliban government's ambassador to Pakistan, in an interview at his home in Kabul. He says if anyone claiming to be Taliban is negotiating, they are essentially nobodies to the movement. "There was no 'peace meeting' because the Taliban reject it."
Privately, US officials have acknowledged that reports in US media outlets of senior Taliban negotiating are propaganda aimed at sowing dissent among the Taliban leadership. "This is a psychological operation, plain and simple," a US official with firsthand knowledge of the Afghan government's strategies told the McClatchy news service. "Exaggerating the significance of it is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency."
The story of Sahib Jan raises a complicated question: was he really an influential Taliban figure? A current Taliban commander from Kunduz told The Nation that there is no evidence of the reconciliation program's success and that rural people are sometimes used as pawns in a game to elevate the status of tribal leaders with the Afghan government by "reconciling" Taliban fighters. "These are people who are just getting salaries from foreign powers or Afghan officials. You and I just invent a group and give them turbans and weapons and they go and say, We are Talibs and we surrender," says the Taliban commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Salahuddin. It is not clear whether Sahib Jan was an example of this, but in terms of public perception in Logar, that is irrelevant. What is not in dispute is that he publicly announced he was a Taliban mullah on the path to reconciliation and was killed in a night raid ten months later.
The US strategy seems to be to force the Taliban to the table through a fierce killing campaign. According to the US military, over a ninety-day period this past summer, US and coalition Special Operations Forces killed or captured more than 2,900 "insurgents," with an estimated dozen killed a day. Between July 4, when Gen. David Petraeus assumed command in Kabul, and early October, according to the military, US and Afghan Special Operations Forces killed more than 300 Taliban commanders and more than 900 foot soldiers in 1,500 raids. "This is precisely the kind of pressure we believe will lead to reconciliation and reintegration" of the Taliban, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently.
Zaeef, the former senior Taliban official, who spent four years in Guantánamo prison, confirmed that the American targeted-killing campaign of Taliban leaders has been successful, but he believes that the strategy will backfire for both the US and Afghan governments. "If these people, important, known people, disappear from the [Taliban] movement, what will happen? Who should [the Afghan government] make a dialogue with?" he asks. "The fighting will not stop. I know the new generation is more extremist than the last generation. The new generation will not listen to anyone. This is a dangerous thing. It will be bad for the Americans, but it will be worse for the people of Afghanistan."
Evidence of this can be found in a recent incident in Paktia province, when the Taliban leadership in Quetta, Pakistan, sent a representative to "reprimand a group of young commanders who were breaking the organization's rules," according to veteran Afghanistan journalist Anand Gopal. "But the defiant young commanders killed the cleric. While such incidents are still isolated, the danger is that as the Taliban undergo a massive demographic change in the coming years, this trend will accelerate, and the ability of Quetta to enforce decisions on its rank and file will be diminished."
Zaeef says the night raids and the targeted killings are strengthening the Taliban and inspiring more people "to become extremist against the Americans." US political and military leaders, he says, "are thinking, 'When we scare the people, they should be quiet.' But this is a different nation. When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. If you are killing five people, twenty, at least, are rising against you. When you are disrespecting the people or the honor of the people in one village, the whole village becomes against you. This is creating hatred against Americans."
The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government exists only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, is producing a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network are gaining support from the Pashtun heartland in communities that would not otherwise be backing them. Since 2005, when Zaeef was released from Guantánamo, "the Taliban have become stronger," he says. "Are the Taliban coming from the sky?" Zaeef asks. "No, it's new people."
Zaeef and Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the former Taliban foreign minister, insist that the Taliban is still the umbrella under which all of the insurgent forces operate. But at the same time they acknowledge that smaller, localized militias not loyal to Mullah Mohammed Omar or the Quetta-based Taliban leadership are popping up more and more. "By killing leaders, the war will not come to an end, but on the contrary, things will get worse, which will give birth to more leaders," says Muttawakil. "Many people might not like Taliban but join them because they are being harassed by powerful Afghans or foreigners and want to get revenge." Many of these newer insurgents live in rural areas of Afghanistan and, for now, fight in their own communities rather than as part of a cohesive national rebellion. "The nature of this kind of war is that it starts from the rural areas, as it started against the Soviet Union. Gradually the war spreads to district centers and then to the center of small provinces," Muttawakil says. "The war has started in rural areas and gradually will spread to big cities."
On a practical level, the discontent in those rural areas with the corruption of the Afghan government and the consistent killing of civilians by US forces is raising the prospect that Afghans offering assistance to the Afghan government and NATO forces—such as allowing safe passage to key supply convoys—may withdraw that support.
* * *
One community leader in Logar, Hajji Showkatt, works with a network of tribal leaders across Logar and its neighboring provinces who broker complex deals with the Taliban and Haqqani network forces to refrain from attacking oil and supply convoys headed to and from Kabul. Part of this involves paying bribes to the Taliban, but the deals also rely on assurances from Showkatt and the reconciliation commission to insurgent forces that they are working to end the night raids and arrests.
In the weeks leading up to Sahib Jan's killing, Logar officials say, there had been three other night raids in the area. Sahib Jan's killing was the final straw. "At the funeral everyone was so emotional when we took his body to be buried. We cursed the Americans," Showkatt says. In response, local people—not aligned with the Taliban—attacked an oil convoy, blowing up more than a dozen trucks, according to local officials. The scorched earth left by the attack can still be seen on the highway running through Logar. "Here is the bottom line: the US is conducting actions that are killing innocent people," Showkatt says. "The Taliban use this as propaganda and say to the people, 'This is what America is about.' It makes them more powerful."
Showkatt, who fought as a mujahedeen against the Soviets, continues to protect supply convoys for the United States and Afghan governments along key routes, but he says that this is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Showkatt and other leaders say they cannot guarantee they will continue to offer convoy protection. "In the mujahedeen times, we stopped all of the Russian convoys in this area," Showkatt boasts.
"We fought the Russians when they were here and we expelled them," adds Showkatt's friend Azrat Mohammed, a former mujahedeen commander from Logar. "Americans are not stronger than the Russians. If they continue with these actions, disrespecting our women, killing the wrong people, inshallah, we will rise up to defeat them too."
Throughout the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, police officials and civilians alike tell stories about personal grudges being settled through death by US night raids, where false intelligence is deliberately passed on to NATO forces to get a rival or enemy killed or captured.
Mohammed is living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, he says, for that very reason. He says he has been warned he is on a list for kill or capture. "I am too afraid to even sleep in my own home at night, so I spend most of my time in the camps in Pakistan. I am afraid the Americans will kill me," he says. "The way the Americans rely on bad intelligence to target people like me, the night raids we keep witnessing, the arrests and the torture and the killing is all making me want to pick up a weapon again. We are not by our nature against the government, but what they are doing is encouraging people to rise up against them."
In Afghanistan, Taliban commanders are fond of characterizing their fight to expel the United States and its allies with the phrase, "You've got the clocks, we've got the time." While US leaders are struggling to define what victory would look like in Afghanistan, the forces they are fighting are not. "We have two goals: freedom or martyrdom," says Taliban commander Salahuddin. "If we do not win our freedom, then we'll die honorably for its cause." The continuing US targeted-killing campaign and renewed airstrikes ordered by General Petraeus seem only to be further weakening the already fragile Karzai government. In plain terms, the United States' own actions in Afghanistan seem to be delivering the most fatal blows to its counterinsurgency strategy and its goal of winning hearts and minds. "I think that the Americans are already defeated in Afghanistan, they are just not accepting it," says former Taliban official Zaeef.
"If the US pulls out, my heart will be very sad because there will be a civil war," says Asif Mohammed, a young driver who escorts supply convoys to Kabul. "If they stay, they will continue killing our women and children." In the end, there could be the worst of both worlds: an escalation in raids by US Special Operations Forces, with their heavy toll on civilians, and a failed counterinsurgency campaign incapable of stopping a civil war.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/155622/killing-reconciliation
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Iraq war logs: military privatisation run amok
Pratap Chatterjee
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 23 October 2010 13.00 BST
The Wikileaks Iraq war logs bring to light previously unknown incidents involving military contractors like Blackwater, acting with legal immunity, which resulted in deaths of civilians during the occupation of Iraq. Photograph: Gervasio Sanchez/AP
Shortly after 10am on 14 May 2005, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down "Route Irish" – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.
A terse, 57-word dispatch in the Iraq war logs published by Wikileaks is the first public evidence of the shooting, as recorded by the US military.
The incident is one of several dozen "escalation of force" incidents involving private security companies in Iraq – which is military parlance for an unwarranted attack, almost all of which have never been previously reported. Blackwater, the company from Moyock, North Carolina, is responsible for about half of the attacks, closely followed by Erinys, a British private security company registered in the Virgin Islands, which seems to have an unusually high number of vehicle crashes.
On my four visits to Iraq in the last seven years, I learned quickly to steer clear of the fast-moving vehicles belonging to these private security companies. The men – sporting identical reflective wrap-around sunglasses, bullet-proof jackets – would aim their high-powered assault rifles and shout "Imshi" ("Move") at any vehicle that came within a 50m perimeter. Sometimes, they would throw plastic water bottles to shock pedestrians into staying away.
Easily the best-known private security company is Blackwater (recently renamed Xe), which rocketed to fame three years ago when four company security guards, escorting a convoy of US state department vehicles en route to a meeting in western Baghdad, opened fire in Nisour Square in Baghdad killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Yet, a query of the Iraq war logs for "Blackwater" or "Nisour Square" turns up nothing, at first.
In this failure to identify what is probably the most notorious carnage of Iraqi civilians, the strengths and weakness of the military reporting process (and, by association, Wikileaks) become startlingly clear. Had the media not reported this incident, there would be no way to identify the company or the location in which this massacre took place. Initially, I wondered: was it possible that the soldier who recorded the incident made a mistake or that the record was erased?
Eventually, I tracked down the incident by trying a few other methods. It is easy to see why I missed the record: there is no mention of the company, or the location, and even the death toll is incorrectly recorded as nine, suggesting that the Pentagon casualty record is incomplete.
Human rights investigators know this problem only too well. Media reports are often incomplete and government reports are sometimes deliberately vague. They are just a starting point from which painstaking research is needed to build up a true picture of what has happened.
Quite possibly, there were many more incidents in which civilians were injured, or even killed, which were never reported. Some of the reports may have been altered before they were entered into the military system. But given the other records that I found, at the very least, Wikileaks has revealed that Blackwater and other private security companies are guilty of many more injuries and killings than the media have previously reported.
Today, there as many as 40,000 armed private security contractors working in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to data collected by Commission on Wartime Contracting staff during the first quarter of 2010.
Some of them are ill-paid ex-soldiers from countries like Sierra Leone who make just $250 a month; others are former US soldiers, who are paid $500 or more per day. These men are often doing the very same jobs that soldiers once did – like guard duty – but with a lot less accountability.
Until quite recently, these men with guns were untouchable: they were protected from any kind of prosecution by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No 17, issued by Paul Bremer, the US diplomat charged with running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
For example, Andrew J Moonen, a Blackwater employee, who has been accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice-president on 24 December 2006, was spirited out of the country and has never faced charges in Iraq. Nor have the five men accused of opening fire in Nisour Square: Donald Ball, Dustin Laurent Heard, Evan Shawn Liberty Nicholas Abram Slatten and Paul Alvin Slough. Lawsuits in the US have also failed.
Blackwater and Erinys were not the only ones who acted with seeming impunity. Perhaps the most egregious incident occurred on 28 May 2005, when the US Marines came under fire from four white Ford pickup trucks and a grey Excursion sports utility vehicle "recklessly driving through Fallujah traveling west – and firing sporadically at vehicles".
The shooters worked for Zapata Engineering, one of five companies originally hired under a $200m contract to supervise the destruction and storage of US military ammunition worldwide. They were paid well for this work: each company manager earned an average of $275,000 a year, under their contract.
Eventually, one of the Zapata vehicles ran over a spike strip in the road near a guard house under the control of the US Marines. The Marines placed 19 Zapata employees under arrest.
At the time, Lawrence Peter, the director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told my colleague David Phinney at CorpWatch:
"I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no company named Zapata that is a licensed private security company under the terms of CPA Memorandum 17. I do not know under what legal authority those men thought they were operating, but it was not in keeping with the law of Iraq nor consistent with what professional, responsible and law-abiding private security companies are doing here."
But Iraqis cannot tell which of these companies are licensed and which are not. Technically, they could complain to the military or raise the matter with yet another private military company named Aegis Defence from Britain, which was in charge of monitoring the movements of fellow private security contractors, under a $293m contract issued in June 2004. Yet Aegis hardly inspired confidence – one of their employees caused an uproar when he uploaded a video of security contractors shooting at Iraqis, with an Elvis Presley soundtrack to match.
Things got even worse when the Washington Post published an article about yet another security company named Triple Canopy, in which team leader Jacob C Washbourne was quoted as saying: "I want to kill somebody today."
Today, the Pentagon says that the random shootings are a thing of the past. In May 2008, an Armed Contractor Oversight Bureau (ACOB) was set up (pdf) by the US government in Iraq. Unfortunately, there is no website or any other public way to contact this important body.
Perhaps the most worrying news about private military contractors came on 18 August 2010, when the New York Times revealed that the US government was planning to double the number of private security contractors in Iraq:
"Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said."
It's not just Iraqis who are worried. At a hearing in congress on 23 September 2010, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior Pentagon auditor, said that he was troubled by the fact that the state department had very little experience to oversee this civilian surge in Iraq:
"(I)t is not clear that it has the trained personnel to manage and oversee contract performance of a kind that has already shown the potential for creating tragic incidents and frayed relations with host countries."
Courtesy Wikileaks, we now know that many more deadly shootings have taken place by these unregulated private security contractors than we knew of before. Given this new knowledge, it is time that we demand an inquiry into the privatisation of the military. Right now, the prime facie evidence is that it has considerably increased the number of unnecessary violent incidents, while reducing military discipline and accountability and costing taxpayers a bundle.
• Editor's note: the incident detailed at the top of this article occurred in 2005, not 2004, as was originally stated; all other details are correct, and the article was amended at 12:00 on 24 October 2010.
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 23 October 2010 13.00 BST
The Wikileaks Iraq war logs bring to light previously unknown incidents involving military contractors like Blackwater, acting with legal immunity, which resulted in deaths of civilians during the occupation of Iraq. Photograph: Gervasio Sanchez/AP
Shortly after 10am on 14 May 2005, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down "Route Irish" – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.
A terse, 57-word dispatch in the Iraq war logs published by Wikileaks is the first public evidence of the shooting, as recorded by the US military.
The incident is one of several dozen "escalation of force" incidents involving private security companies in Iraq – which is military parlance for an unwarranted attack, almost all of which have never been previously reported. Blackwater, the company from Moyock, North Carolina, is responsible for about half of the attacks, closely followed by Erinys, a British private security company registered in the Virgin Islands, which seems to have an unusually high number of vehicle crashes.
On my four visits to Iraq in the last seven years, I learned quickly to steer clear of the fast-moving vehicles belonging to these private security companies. The men – sporting identical reflective wrap-around sunglasses, bullet-proof jackets – would aim their high-powered assault rifles and shout "Imshi" ("Move") at any vehicle that came within a 50m perimeter. Sometimes, they would throw plastic water bottles to shock pedestrians into staying away.
Easily the best-known private security company is Blackwater (recently renamed Xe), which rocketed to fame three years ago when four company security guards, escorting a convoy of US state department vehicles en route to a meeting in western Baghdad, opened fire in Nisour Square in Baghdad killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Yet, a query of the Iraq war logs for "Blackwater" or "Nisour Square" turns up nothing, at first.
In this failure to identify what is probably the most notorious carnage of Iraqi civilians, the strengths and weakness of the military reporting process (and, by association, Wikileaks) become startlingly clear. Had the media not reported this incident, there would be no way to identify the company or the location in which this massacre took place. Initially, I wondered: was it possible that the soldier who recorded the incident made a mistake or that the record was erased?
Eventually, I tracked down the incident by trying a few other methods. It is easy to see why I missed the record: there is no mention of the company, or the location, and even the death toll is incorrectly recorded as nine, suggesting that the Pentagon casualty record is incomplete.
Human rights investigators know this problem only too well. Media reports are often incomplete and government reports are sometimes deliberately vague. They are just a starting point from which painstaking research is needed to build up a true picture of what has happened.
Quite possibly, there were many more incidents in which civilians were injured, or even killed, which were never reported. Some of the reports may have been altered before they were entered into the military system. But given the other records that I found, at the very least, Wikileaks has revealed that Blackwater and other private security companies are guilty of many more injuries and killings than the media have previously reported.
Today, there as many as 40,000 armed private security contractors working in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to data collected by Commission on Wartime Contracting staff during the first quarter of 2010.
Some of them are ill-paid ex-soldiers from countries like Sierra Leone who make just $250 a month; others are former US soldiers, who are paid $500 or more per day. These men are often doing the very same jobs that soldiers once did – like guard duty – but with a lot less accountability.
Until quite recently, these men with guns were untouchable: they were protected from any kind of prosecution by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No 17, issued by Paul Bremer, the US diplomat charged with running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
For example, Andrew J Moonen, a Blackwater employee, who has been accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice-president on 24 December 2006, was spirited out of the country and has never faced charges in Iraq. Nor have the five men accused of opening fire in Nisour Square: Donald Ball, Dustin Laurent Heard, Evan Shawn Liberty Nicholas Abram Slatten and Paul Alvin Slough. Lawsuits in the US have also failed.
Blackwater and Erinys were not the only ones who acted with seeming impunity. Perhaps the most egregious incident occurred on 28 May 2005, when the US Marines came under fire from four white Ford pickup trucks and a grey Excursion sports utility vehicle "recklessly driving through Fallujah traveling west – and firing sporadically at vehicles".
The shooters worked for Zapata Engineering, one of five companies originally hired under a $200m contract to supervise the destruction and storage of US military ammunition worldwide. They were paid well for this work: each company manager earned an average of $275,000 a year, under their contract.
Eventually, one of the Zapata vehicles ran over a spike strip in the road near a guard house under the control of the US Marines. The Marines placed 19 Zapata employees under arrest.
At the time, Lawrence Peter, the director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told my colleague David Phinney at CorpWatch:
"I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no company named Zapata that is a licensed private security company under the terms of CPA Memorandum 17. I do not know under what legal authority those men thought they were operating, but it was not in keeping with the law of Iraq nor consistent with what professional, responsible and law-abiding private security companies are doing here."
But Iraqis cannot tell which of these companies are licensed and which are not. Technically, they could complain to the military or raise the matter with yet another private military company named Aegis Defence from Britain, which was in charge of monitoring the movements of fellow private security contractors, under a $293m contract issued in June 2004. Yet Aegis hardly inspired confidence – one of their employees caused an uproar when he uploaded a video of security contractors shooting at Iraqis, with an Elvis Presley soundtrack to match.
Things got even worse when the Washington Post published an article about yet another security company named Triple Canopy, in which team leader Jacob C Washbourne was quoted as saying: "I want to kill somebody today."
Today, the Pentagon says that the random shootings are a thing of the past. In May 2008, an Armed Contractor Oversight Bureau (ACOB) was set up (pdf) by the US government in Iraq. Unfortunately, there is no website or any other public way to contact this important body.
Perhaps the most worrying news about private military contractors came on 18 August 2010, when the New York Times revealed that the US government was planning to double the number of private security contractors in Iraq:
"Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said."
It's not just Iraqis who are worried. At a hearing in congress on 23 September 2010, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior Pentagon auditor, said that he was troubled by the fact that the state department had very little experience to oversee this civilian surge in Iraq:
"(I)t is not clear that it has the trained personnel to manage and oversee contract performance of a kind that has already shown the potential for creating tragic incidents and frayed relations with host countries."
Courtesy Wikileaks, we now know that many more deadly shootings have taken place by these unregulated private security contractors than we knew of before. Given this new knowledge, it is time that we demand an inquiry into the privatisation of the military. Right now, the prime facie evidence is that it has considerably increased the number of unnecessary violent incidents, while reducing military discipline and accountability and costing taxpayers a bundle.
• Editor's note: the incident detailed at the top of this article occurred in 2005, not 2004, as was originally stated; all other details are correct, and the article was amended at 12:00 on 24 October 2010.
Rogue security companies threaten US gains in Afghanistan war
By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer
posted October 21, 2010 at 2:03 pm EDT
Washington —
Since its Revolutionary days, the American military has been no stranger to the use of paid help – from carpenters to ditch diggers – to wage war. By 1965 in Vietnam, the practice of relying on private defense companies became widespread enough within the Pentagon that Business Week dubbed it a "war by contract."
In Afghanistan, the use of private contractors has reached record levels. A 2010 Congressional Research Service report found that they now make up 60 percent of the Defense Department's workforce. With fewer US soldiers than contractors throughout the war-torn country, the Pentagon is more dependent on private defense contractors than ever in its history.
Contractors bring in fuel and food for American soldiers in Afghanistan along what many consider to be one of the most complex and treacherous supply chains in the history of modern warfare. They keep installations running, guard key NATO bases, and train Afghan police.
IN PICTURES: On base in Kandahar
Yet there is a growing chorus of warnings from both within the US military and on Capitol Hill that the Pentagon's dependence on contractors is undermining its own war efforts. A Senate Armed Services Committee investigation this month further concluded that the widespread use of contractors puts at risk the US exit strategy of training Afghan security forces – Afghan soldiers and police routinely leave the service to take more lucrative jobs with private defense companies.
The Senate investigation also turned up mounting evidence to suggest that largely unmonitored Pentagon contracts with private security companies – half of which are Afghan-owned – may also be lining the pockets of Taliban insurgents who agree not to attack convoys in exchange for cash.
"If you want to know the driving force of corruption in Afghanistan, it's not Afghan culture," warns Anthony Cordesman, a security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It's American contracting."
The Pentagon is beginning to grapple with the complexity of fixing what many now recognize as a deeply broken system. Though reforms are difficult to implement and come with their own risks, a failure to act now, say some US officials, may risk the entire US mission in Afghanistan.
Some contracting problems have long been apparent to US officials. One of them is that some Defense Department contract money goes to warlords who run classic pay-for-protection rackets with their own private militias. What is also clear is that the attrition rate for legitimate Afghan security forces remains as high as 130 percent in some units.
"We get them trained up and certified, and the contractors hire them for more money," says T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Iraq and is now a fellow with the Center for Strategic Research at the National Defense University.
The delay in addressing a lack of oversight surrounding contractors who may also have ties to the Taliban has had consequences, Mr. Cordesman argues. The recent Senate Armed Services Committee report, for example, reflects concerns "that are seven or eight years old." Efforts to address them have been "extraordinarily slow" to take hold, he adds. "Time and again you have created risk to American soldiers. You have almost certainly caused Americans to be killed or wounded – and you have essentially strengthened the enemy."
Without greater controls on contracting dollars, "you have created a threat that is almost as great as the insurgency," he says. "And that is a government that has so many forces corrupting it that it can't win the support of the people."
The Pentagon is increasingly aware of this point and has begun to take a particularly hard look at its reliance on private security firms, which account for roughly 16 percent of all contractors, totaling more than 26,000 personnel operating in Afghanistan.
"We have absolutely no quality control of the people we're putting in these jobs," says Mr. Hammes, who recently completed a study on the strategic impact of contractors in war zones. "And we're authorizing them to use deadly force in the name of the United States."
Citing precisely this point, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced in August that he wants many private security companies – including Blackwater – out of the country by year's end. But the enforcement of this decree remains unclear.
US officials, who continue to negotiate the matter behind the scenes, publicly say that while they agree with the spirit of the decree, the time line is unrealistic. Critics charge that it is an effort by Mr. Karzai tap into the profits of these lucrative companies by consolidating government control over them – a charge Karzai denies.
For his part, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has recently issued a set of guidelines in an effort to improve the contracting process, recommending that the US military use its intelligence resources to investigate Afghan companies vying for Defense Department contracts.
US military officials have also increased pay for Afghan security force trainees in an effort to compete with private security companies. Now they are wrestling with how to more effectively distribute troops to improve security along the highways. "You wouldn't spend the money to hire security along some of these roads if you didn't have to," says one senior US military official in Kabul who is not authorized to speak to the press. "That's one of the things we're looking at."
The Pentagon has also begun relaxing "double dipping" prohibitions – in which Pentagon officials earning pensions after 20 years of service must give the pensions up in order to return to work – in hopes of deploying more contracting specialists to Afghanistan.
"At a time when there's a real deficit of these guys in the theater, it could induce them to come to work," says Richard Fontaine, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. "It's eminently sensible."
More difficult will be making tough choices about which paid contractors pose long-term threats to the US mission. "I mean, paying the Taliban is a really bad idea, but if you stop paying them tomorrow, you put convoys at greater risk," says Mr. Fontaine.
One widespread suggestion is to have senior US military officials making the decisions about which private security companies should be hired to do the jobs, rather than junior troops in charge of contracting. "It's one thing to say we shouldn't pay these guys protection money," Fontaine adds, "but the implications are something only someone at a high level can determine."
"Let's not be childish about this – it's impossible to eliminate corruption," adds Cordesman. "But it is possible to put more pressure on warlords to be more effective and less corrupt." This might involve "shifting money to rivals to put pressure on them," he says. "Money is a tremendous tool as well as a corrupting force if you use it properly."
Ultimately cutting off warlords may actually be feasible, given time. For now, that might mean having more patience with less-connected contractors. "You may not get the same speed of reaction you do if you contract with the enemy," says Cordesman, "but the lasting impact is to build up exactly the capabilities we want at the local level."
posted October 21, 2010 at 2:03 pm EDT
Washington —
Since its Revolutionary days, the American military has been no stranger to the use of paid help – from carpenters to ditch diggers – to wage war. By 1965 in Vietnam, the practice of relying on private defense companies became widespread enough within the Pentagon that Business Week dubbed it a "war by contract."
In Afghanistan, the use of private contractors has reached record levels. A 2010 Congressional Research Service report found that they now make up 60 percent of the Defense Department's workforce. With fewer US soldiers than contractors throughout the war-torn country, the Pentagon is more dependent on private defense contractors than ever in its history.
Contractors bring in fuel and food for American soldiers in Afghanistan along what many consider to be one of the most complex and treacherous supply chains in the history of modern warfare. They keep installations running, guard key NATO bases, and train Afghan police.
IN PICTURES: On base in Kandahar
Yet there is a growing chorus of warnings from both within the US military and on Capitol Hill that the Pentagon's dependence on contractors is undermining its own war efforts. A Senate Armed Services Committee investigation this month further concluded that the widespread use of contractors puts at risk the US exit strategy of training Afghan security forces – Afghan soldiers and police routinely leave the service to take more lucrative jobs with private defense companies.
The Senate investigation also turned up mounting evidence to suggest that largely unmonitored Pentagon contracts with private security companies – half of which are Afghan-owned – may also be lining the pockets of Taliban insurgents who agree not to attack convoys in exchange for cash.
"If you want to know the driving force of corruption in Afghanistan, it's not Afghan culture," warns Anthony Cordesman, a security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It's American contracting."
The Pentagon is beginning to grapple with the complexity of fixing what many now recognize as a deeply broken system. Though reforms are difficult to implement and come with their own risks, a failure to act now, say some US officials, may risk the entire US mission in Afghanistan.
Some contracting problems have long been apparent to US officials. One of them is that some Defense Department contract money goes to warlords who run classic pay-for-protection rackets with their own private militias. What is also clear is that the attrition rate for legitimate Afghan security forces remains as high as 130 percent in some units.
"We get them trained up and certified, and the contractors hire them for more money," says T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Iraq and is now a fellow with the Center for Strategic Research at the National Defense University.
The delay in addressing a lack of oversight surrounding contractors who may also have ties to the Taliban has had consequences, Mr. Cordesman argues. The recent Senate Armed Services Committee report, for example, reflects concerns "that are seven or eight years old." Efforts to address them have been "extraordinarily slow" to take hold, he adds. "Time and again you have created risk to American soldiers. You have almost certainly caused Americans to be killed or wounded – and you have essentially strengthened the enemy."
Without greater controls on contracting dollars, "you have created a threat that is almost as great as the insurgency," he says. "And that is a government that has so many forces corrupting it that it can't win the support of the people."
The Pentagon is increasingly aware of this point and has begun to take a particularly hard look at its reliance on private security firms, which account for roughly 16 percent of all contractors, totaling more than 26,000 personnel operating in Afghanistan.
"We have absolutely no quality control of the people we're putting in these jobs," says Mr. Hammes, who recently completed a study on the strategic impact of contractors in war zones. "And we're authorizing them to use deadly force in the name of the United States."
Citing precisely this point, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced in August that he wants many private security companies – including Blackwater – out of the country by year's end. But the enforcement of this decree remains unclear.
US officials, who continue to negotiate the matter behind the scenes, publicly say that while they agree with the spirit of the decree, the time line is unrealistic. Critics charge that it is an effort by Mr. Karzai tap into the profits of these lucrative companies by consolidating government control over them – a charge Karzai denies.
For his part, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has recently issued a set of guidelines in an effort to improve the contracting process, recommending that the US military use its intelligence resources to investigate Afghan companies vying for Defense Department contracts.
US military officials have also increased pay for Afghan security force trainees in an effort to compete with private security companies. Now they are wrestling with how to more effectively distribute troops to improve security along the highways. "You wouldn't spend the money to hire security along some of these roads if you didn't have to," says one senior US military official in Kabul who is not authorized to speak to the press. "That's one of the things we're looking at."
The Pentagon has also begun relaxing "double dipping" prohibitions – in which Pentagon officials earning pensions after 20 years of service must give the pensions up in order to return to work – in hopes of deploying more contracting specialists to Afghanistan.
"At a time when there's a real deficit of these guys in the theater, it could induce them to come to work," says Richard Fontaine, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. "It's eminently sensible."
More difficult will be making tough choices about which paid contractors pose long-term threats to the US mission. "I mean, paying the Taliban is a really bad idea, but if you stop paying them tomorrow, you put convoys at greater risk," says Mr. Fontaine.
One widespread suggestion is to have senior US military officials making the decisions about which private security companies should be hired to do the jobs, rather than junior troops in charge of contracting. "It's one thing to say we shouldn't pay these guys protection money," Fontaine adds, "but the implications are something only someone at a high level can determine."
"Let's not be childish about this – it's impossible to eliminate corruption," adds Cordesman. "But it is possible to put more pressure on warlords to be more effective and less corrupt." This might involve "shifting money to rivals to put pressure on them," he says. "Money is a tremendous tool as well as a corrupting force if you use it properly."
Ultimately cutting off warlords may actually be feasible, given time. For now, that might mean having more patience with less-connected contractors. "You may not get the same speed of reaction you do if you contract with the enemy," says Cordesman, "but the lasting impact is to build up exactly the capabilities we want at the local level."
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Efforts to Prosecute Blackwater Are Collapsing
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — Nearly four years after the federal government began a string of investigations and criminal prosecutions against Blackwater Worldwide personnel accused of murder and other violent crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cases are beginning to fall apart, burdened by a legal obstacle of the government’s own making.
In the most recent and closely watched case, the Justice Department on Monday said that it would not seek murder charges against Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater armorer accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice president on Dec. 24, 2006. Justice officials said that they were abandoning the case after an investigation that began in early 2007, and included trips to Baghdad by federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to interview Iraqi witnesses.
The government’s decision to drop the Moonen case follows a series of failures by prosecutors around the country in cases aimed at former personnel of Blackwater, which is now known as Xe Services. In September, a Virginia jury was unable to reach a verdict in the murder trial of two former Blackwater guards accused of killing two Afghan civilians. Late last year, charges were dismissed against five former Blackwater guards who had been indicted on manslaughter and related weapons charges in a September 2007 shooting incident in Nisour Square in Baghdad, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed.
Interviews with lawyers involved in the cases, outside legal experts and a review of some records show that federal prosecutors have failed to overcome a series of legal hurdles, including the difficulties of obtaining evidence in war zones, of gaining proper jurisdiction for prosecutions in American civilian courts, and of overcoming immunity deals given to defendants by American officials on the scene.
“The battlefield,” said Charles Rose, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in Florida, “is not a place that lends itself to the preservation of evidence.”
The difficulty of these cases also illustrates the tricky legal questions raised by the government’s increasing use of private contractors in war zones.
Such problems clearly plagued the Moonen case. In the immediate aftermath of the Christmas Eve shooting, Mr. Moonen was interviewed, not by the F.B.I., but by an official with the Regional Security Office of the United States Embassy in Baghdad, the State Department unit that supervised Blackwater security guards in Iraq.
Mr. Moonen’s lawyer, Stewart Riley, said that his client gave the embassy officials a statement only after he was issued a so-called Garrity warning — a threat that he might lose his job if he did not talk, but that he would be granted immunity from prosecution for anything he said.
The legal warning and protection given to Mr. Moonen were similar to warnings that embassy officials later gave to Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square case. In each case, the agreements presented an obstacle to prosecution in the United States. In effect, the Blackwater personnel were given a form of immunity from prosecution by the people they were working for and helping to protect.
“Once you immunize statements, it is really hard to prosecute,” said Andrew Leipold, a law professor at the University of Illinois. “In the field, the people providing the immunity may value finding out what happened more than they do any possibility of prosecution. But that just makes any future prosecution really very hard.”
Justice Department officials declined to comment Wednesday about specific Blackwater cases. But the department has appealed the dismissal of the Nisour Square case, and a new trial has been scheduled for next March in the Virginia murder case after a mistrial was declared. And Justice officials noted that the government had had a number of successful prosecutions against contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including several for sexual assaults and other violent crimes. More than 120 companies have been charged by the Justice Department for contract fraud and related crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, officials said.
Still, a Justice official who spoke on the condition of anonymity acknowledged that the government had faced tough obstacles. “There are substantial difficulties in prosecuting cases committed in war zones,” the official said. “There’s problems with the availability of witnesses, availability of evidence, and the quality of the evidence. You also have claims of self-defense, which are generally difficult, although not insurmountable.”
And self-defense is a more compelling argument in war zones, where many people are routinely armed.
One problem in the Moonen case, for example, was that while Mr. Moonen admitted in his statement to the embassy official that he did shoot the Iraqi guard, he asserted that he had done so in self-defense. The guards in the Virginia case also said that they shot in self-defense when they believed they were facing an attack from insurgents. In the Nisour Square case, the five Blackwater guards who were charged also claimed that they shot only after they believed they were under attack.
Jurisdictional problems also plague the Blackwater cases. Since the Blackwater guards were working under a contract with the State Department, they did not fall under the laws that govern contractors working for the Defense Department overseas. Contractors for the Defense Department are subject to criminal prosecution under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, but it has never been clear whether the law can be applied to contractors for the State Department, like Blackwater. Those contractors generally have greater protections because of the possibility that they might be engaged in fighting.
Until last year, foreign contractors also had immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law, so the Blackwater guards were operating in a legal vacuum, noted Eric Jensen, a law professor at Fordham University. “I would be concerned as a prosecutor that even if you got past the immunization, and the problems with witnesses and evidence, that you may not even have a law that supports the prosecution of a Department of State contractor,” Mr. Jensen said. “Congress has tried to address this, but it’s still a live question.”
Mr. Riley cited these reasons in a letter he wrote in April 2009 to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. about the case and also noted that he believed the government had considered indicting Mr. Moonen to placate the Iraqi government. In a letter sent to Mr. Riley on Monday, notifying him that they were dropping the case, prosecutors also indicated that they would have difficulty proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly in overcoming Mr. Moonen’s claims that he shot in self-defense.
Meanwhile, the government said that the United States ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, had to notify the Iraqi government of the decision, and also provided government officials a letter to be given to the family of the shooting victim, Raheem Saadoun. This year, Mr. Saadoun’s family dropped a civil lawsuit against Mr. Moonen and Blackwater after receiving a financial settlement.
WASHINGTON — Nearly four years after the federal government began a string of investigations and criminal prosecutions against Blackwater Worldwide personnel accused of murder and other violent crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cases are beginning to fall apart, burdened by a legal obstacle of the government’s own making.
In the most recent and closely watched case, the Justice Department on Monday said that it would not seek murder charges against Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater armorer accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice president on Dec. 24, 2006. Justice officials said that they were abandoning the case after an investigation that began in early 2007, and included trips to Baghdad by federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to interview Iraqi witnesses.
The government’s decision to drop the Moonen case follows a series of failures by prosecutors around the country in cases aimed at former personnel of Blackwater, which is now known as Xe Services. In September, a Virginia jury was unable to reach a verdict in the murder trial of two former Blackwater guards accused of killing two Afghan civilians. Late last year, charges were dismissed against five former Blackwater guards who had been indicted on manslaughter and related weapons charges in a September 2007 shooting incident in Nisour Square in Baghdad, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed.
Interviews with lawyers involved in the cases, outside legal experts and a review of some records show that federal prosecutors have failed to overcome a series of legal hurdles, including the difficulties of obtaining evidence in war zones, of gaining proper jurisdiction for prosecutions in American civilian courts, and of overcoming immunity deals given to defendants by American officials on the scene.
“The battlefield,” said Charles Rose, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in Florida, “is not a place that lends itself to the preservation of evidence.”
The difficulty of these cases also illustrates the tricky legal questions raised by the government’s increasing use of private contractors in war zones.
Such problems clearly plagued the Moonen case. In the immediate aftermath of the Christmas Eve shooting, Mr. Moonen was interviewed, not by the F.B.I., but by an official with the Regional Security Office of the United States Embassy in Baghdad, the State Department unit that supervised Blackwater security guards in Iraq.
Mr. Moonen’s lawyer, Stewart Riley, said that his client gave the embassy officials a statement only after he was issued a so-called Garrity warning — a threat that he might lose his job if he did not talk, but that he would be granted immunity from prosecution for anything he said.
The legal warning and protection given to Mr. Moonen were similar to warnings that embassy officials later gave to Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square case. In each case, the agreements presented an obstacle to prosecution in the United States. In effect, the Blackwater personnel were given a form of immunity from prosecution by the people they were working for and helping to protect.
“Once you immunize statements, it is really hard to prosecute,” said Andrew Leipold, a law professor at the University of Illinois. “In the field, the people providing the immunity may value finding out what happened more than they do any possibility of prosecution. But that just makes any future prosecution really very hard.”
Justice Department officials declined to comment Wednesday about specific Blackwater cases. But the department has appealed the dismissal of the Nisour Square case, and a new trial has been scheduled for next March in the Virginia murder case after a mistrial was declared. And Justice officials noted that the government had had a number of successful prosecutions against contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including several for sexual assaults and other violent crimes. More than 120 companies have been charged by the Justice Department for contract fraud and related crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, officials said.
Still, a Justice official who spoke on the condition of anonymity acknowledged that the government had faced tough obstacles. “There are substantial difficulties in prosecuting cases committed in war zones,” the official said. “There’s problems with the availability of witnesses, availability of evidence, and the quality of the evidence. You also have claims of self-defense, which are generally difficult, although not insurmountable.”
And self-defense is a more compelling argument in war zones, where many people are routinely armed.
One problem in the Moonen case, for example, was that while Mr. Moonen admitted in his statement to the embassy official that he did shoot the Iraqi guard, he asserted that he had done so in self-defense. The guards in the Virginia case also said that they shot in self-defense when they believed they were facing an attack from insurgents. In the Nisour Square case, the five Blackwater guards who were charged also claimed that they shot only after they believed they were under attack.
Jurisdictional problems also plague the Blackwater cases. Since the Blackwater guards were working under a contract with the State Department, they did not fall under the laws that govern contractors working for the Defense Department overseas. Contractors for the Defense Department are subject to criminal prosecution under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, but it has never been clear whether the law can be applied to contractors for the State Department, like Blackwater. Those contractors generally have greater protections because of the possibility that they might be engaged in fighting.
Until last year, foreign contractors also had immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law, so the Blackwater guards were operating in a legal vacuum, noted Eric Jensen, a law professor at Fordham University. “I would be concerned as a prosecutor that even if you got past the immunization, and the problems with witnesses and evidence, that you may not even have a law that supports the prosecution of a Department of State contractor,” Mr. Jensen said. “Congress has tried to address this, but it’s still a live question.”
Mr. Riley cited these reasons in a letter he wrote in April 2009 to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. about the case and also noted that he believed the government had considered indicting Mr. Moonen to placate the Iraqi government. In a letter sent to Mr. Riley on Monday, notifying him that they were dropping the case, prosecutors also indicated that they would have difficulty proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly in overcoming Mr. Moonen’s claims that he shot in self-defense.
Meanwhile, the government said that the United States ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, had to notify the Iraqi government of the decision, and also provided government officials a letter to be given to the family of the shooting victim, Raheem Saadoun. This year, Mr. Saadoun’s family dropped a civil lawsuit against Mr. Moonen and Blackwater after receiving a financial settlement.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Machines of War: Blackwater, Monsanto, and Bill Gates
14.10.2010 01:52
Silvia Ribeiro
La Jornada
A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (Blackwater's Black Ops, 9/15/2010) revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State "security services," that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.
Many military and former CIA officers work for Blackwater or related companies created to divert attention from their bad reputation and make more profit selling their nefarious services-ranging from information and intelligence to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training - for other governments, banks and multinational corporations. According to Scahill, business with multinationals, like Monsanto, Chevron, and financial giants such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are channeled through two companies owned by Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These officers and directors share Blackwater.
One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, was the one who made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, entering into the contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate organizations of animal rights activists, anti-GM and other dirty activities of the biotech giant.
Contacted by Scahill, the Monsanto executive Kevin Wilson declined to comment, but later confirmed to The Nation that they had hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and 2009, according to Monsanto only to keep track of "public disclosure" of its opponents. He also said that Total Intelligence was a "totally separate entity from Blackwater."
However, Scahill has copies of emails from Cofer Black after the meeting with Wilson for Monsanto, where he explains to other former CIA agents, using their Blackwater e-mails, that the discussion with Wilson was that Total Intelligence had become "Monsanto's intelligence arm," spying on activists and other actions, including "our people to legally integrate these groups." Total Intelligence Monsanto paid $ 127,000 in 2008 and $ 105,000 in 2009.
No wonder that a company engaged in the "science of death" as Monsanto, which has been dedicated from the outset to produce toxic poisons spilling from Agent Orange to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), pesticides, hormones and genetically modified seeds, is associated with another company of thugs.
Almost simultaneously with the publication of this article in The Nation, the Via Campesina reported the purchase of 500,000 shares of Monsanto, for more than $23 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which with this action completed the outing of the mask of "philanthropy." Another association that is not surprising.
It is a marriage between the two most brutal monopolies in the history of industrialism: Bill Gates controls more than 90 percent of the market share of proprietary computing and Monsanto about 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed. There does not exist in any other industrial sector monopolies so vast, whose very existence is a negation of the vaunted principle of "market competition" of capitalism. Both Gates and Monsanto are very aggressive in defending their ill-gotten monopolies.
Although Bill Gates might try to say that the Foundation is not linked to his business, all it proves is the opposite: most of their donations end up favoring the commercial investments of the tycoon, not really "donating" anything, but instead of paying taxes to the state coffers, he invests his profits in where it is favorable to him economically, including propaganda from their supposed good intentions. On the contrary, their "donations" finance projects as destructive as geoengineering or replacement of natural community medicines for high-tech patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world. What a coincidence, former Secretary of Health Julio Frenk and Ernesto Zedillo are advisers of the Foundation.
Like Monsanto, Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the "Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa" (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM). To this end, the Foundation hired Robert Horsch in 2006, the director of Monsanto. Now Gates, airing major profits, went straight to the source.
Blackwater, Monsanto and Gates are three sides of the same figure: the war machine on the planet and most people who inhabit it, are peasants, indigenous communities, people who want to share information and knowledge or any other who does not want to be in the aegis of profit and the destructiveness of capitalism.
* The author is a researcher at ETC Group
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Exclusive: Blackwater Wins Piece of $10 Billion Mercenary Deal
Never mind the dead civilians. Forget about the stolen guns. Get over the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up withsteroids and cocaine. Through a “joint venture,” the notorious private-security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned.
Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a 2008 campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts.
Eight private security firms have won State’s giant Worldwide Protective Services contract, the big Foggy Bottom partnership to keep embassies and their inhabitants safe. Two of those firms are longtime State contract holders DynCorp and Triple Canopy. The others are newcomers to the big security contract: EOD Technology, SOC, Aegis Defense Services, Global Strategies Group, Torres International Services and International Development Solutions LLC.
Don’t see any of Blackwater’s myriad business names on there? That’s apparently by design.
Blackwater and the State Department tried their best to obscure their renewed relationship. As Danger Room reported Wednesday, Blackwater did not appear on the vendors’ list for Worldwide Protective Services. And the State Department confirms that the company, renamed Xe Services, didn’t actually submit its own independent bid.
Instead, they used a blandly named cut-out, “International Development Solutions,” to retain a toehold into State’s lucrative security business. No one who looks at the official announcement of the contract award would have any idea that firm is connected to Blackwater.
Blackwater’s “affiliate U.S. Training Center is part of International Development Solutions (IDS), a joint venture with Kaseman,” according to an official State Department statement to Danger Room. “This joint venture was determined by the Department’s source-selection authority to be eligible for award.”
Last year, a Blackwater subdivision, the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, changed its name to U.S. Training Center. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan) blasted Blackwater in February for setting up shell companies in order to keep winning government security contracts despite its infamy.
According to State’s statement, the contracting process for the new Worldwide Protective Services deal included a “review” to ensure that companies met “minimum criteria” for eligibility. “This review included a process to determine whether any offerors had been suspended or debarred from the award of federal contracts,” it said. Despite Blackwater guards killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, killing two Afghan civilians on a Kabul road in 2009, and absconding with hundreds of unauthorized guns from a U.S. military weapons depot in Afghanistan using the name of a South Park character, federal contracting authorities have never suspended or debarred Blackwater.
It’s not yet clear what the U.S. Training Center–International Development Solutions–Kaseman “joint venture” will do for the State Department. Worldwide Protective Services is actually a bundle of contracts in one, each governing specific duties for a firm to handle in a given country. Only two of those component contracts have been awarded so far.
One of them is to guard the huge U.S. embassy in Baghdad. That’s gone to SOC, which has ousted Triple Canopy, the incumbent security provider (which will still be part of the overall Worldwide Protective Services deal). If SOC remains the contract holder in Baghdad for the full five years — there’s an annual review — it stands to make nearly $974 million.
But because that so-called “task order” is specifically for on-site security around the gates of the Baghdad embassy, it’s not clear if SOC will also provide the 6,000 to 7,000 security guards the State Department estimates it needs to protect diplomats on the move around Iraq or its other outposts around the country. Last year, the Iraqi government barred Blackwater from doing business in Iraq in response to Nisour Square. But it’s not clear whether this new “joint venture” is eligible to operate in Iraq.
The other task order issued under Worldwide Protective Services is to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. That contract’s gone to EOD Technology, a global firm which has in the past guarded the British and Canadian embassies in the Afghan capital. And that means ArmorGroup North America — last seen with its guards taking tequila shots out of each others’ butts and engaging in extracurricular sex trafficking — has lost a contract worth nearly $274 million over five years.
According to a different statement from the Department of State, the new Worldwide Protective Services contract comes with new safeguards to prevent abuse. Those include mandatory cultural awareness training, the addition of interpreters on all protection missions, financial penalties for poor performance, and a formal ban on alcohol. (Yes — after years of alcohol-related contractor incidents.) Despite these new protections, the department still sees fit to continue business with the most infamous member of the private-security world.
Mystery Merc Group Is Blackwater’s 34th Front Company [Updated]
UPDATE: If International Development Solutions, a mysterious firm partially owned by Blackwater, has its own independent office, it’s hard to find. A business recordssearch co-locates one of the jackpot winners of a State Department contract worth up to $10 million with Kaseman LLC, the well-connected private security security firm that partnered with Blackwater arm U.S. Training Center to win the contract.
That would suggest International Development Solutions — a company few industry experts have heard of, sporting a generic, Google-resistant name — is yet another front group the company set up to win government contracts while concealing its tainted brand. More of a mystery is why the State Department let the company get away with it. Again.
An earlier version of this story reported on the results of a different business records search that turned up a listing for the company in a residential neighborhood of Washington DC. But since it’s more likely that the firm be headquarted in Virginia with Kaseman — who didn’t return phone calls for this story, like Blackwater — I’m removing information on that house, along with an image of it, and hereby issue a full and frank apology to its owner; IDS; Kaseman; Blackwater/U.S. Training Center; and you, the reader; and a shout-out goes to Scrarcher in comments for calling me out on this.
A months-long investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year found that the Army and Raytheon awarded a multi-million dollar subcontract to a firm called Paravant for the training of Afghan troops. Paravant claimed to have “years” of experience performing such work. As it turned out, Paravant didn’t really exist. “Paravant had never performed any services and was simply a shell company established to avoid what one former Blackwater executive called the ‘baggage’ associated with the Blackwater name as the company pursued government business,” committee chairman Carl Levin said in March.
If you like Paravant, you’ll love International Development Solutions. Very few people seem to be familiar with it. Hill sources didn’t know what it was. Both critics of and advocates for the private-security industry were just as baffled. “I’ve never heard of IDS,” confesses Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Project on Government Oversight, in a typical comment.
All of a sudden, though, International Development Solutions is a major player in the private-security field. Last week, Danger Room broke the story of the State Department including it in an eight-company consortium of merc firms, including industry giants like DynCorp, that will hold its elite contract for protecting diplomats and embassies: the Worldwide Protective Services contract. The official announcement of the award gives absolutely no indication that International Development Solutions is tied to Blackwater; State only disclosed that fact after Danger Room pressed it.
Diligent work by the Senate Armed Services Committee determined a web of names under which Blackwater — renamed Xe last year — did business to avoid such baggage. Among them (deep breath): Total Intelligence Solutions; Technical Defense Inc.; Apex Management Solutions LLC; Aviation Worldwide Services LLC; Air Quest Inc.; Presidential Airways Inc.; EP Aviation LLC; Backup Training LLC; Terrorism Research Center, Inc. All in all, the committee found 33 aliases. International Development Solutions appears to be number 34.
Those other spinoffs are generally up front about the services they offer. Aviation Worldwide Services, for instance, is now part of AAR Corp, which provides cargo services and “specialized aircraft modifications” to the military. Total Intelligence Solutions does threat analysis for corporate clients doing business in dicey parts of the world. Its subsidiary, Terrorism Research Center Inc., offers clients classes in DIY counterterrorism and threat prevention. (A forthcoming module: “How to Identify a Terrorist Cell in Your Jurisdiction.”) By contrast, International Development Solutions doesn’t have much of an online profile.
The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein provided a clue as to how the newcomer might have gotten a foot into the door for the Worldwide Protective Services contract. The board of Kaseman, Blackwater’s partner on the venture, is filled with former State Department, CIA and military notables: State’s one-time anti-terrorism chief Henry Crumpton; former CIA Director Michael Hayden; and retired General Anthony Zinni, to name a few. (The CIA and Blackwater have a looooong history.)
Blackwater has a lot it might reasonably wish to obscure. To wit: High-profile shootings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan; murder trials; allegations of steroid and cocaine abuse; improper removal of weapons from U.S. weapons depots using the name of a South Park character.
The big question is why the State Department is continuing to do business with this oh-so-classy-group. In the past, government contracting officials have explained that they can’t stop any company that hasn’t been de-certified from federal bidding from seeking contracts. Blackwater, despite everything, somehow has retained its certification.
But that doesn’t explain why State awarded the contract to the Blackwater-tied company. State has always taken notice of the fact that Blackwater has never lost a single diplomat it’s protected. But that sends the implicit message that State considers foreign lives less valuable than American ones — a problematic one for a diplomatic entity to send. The new Worldwide Protective Services contract was, among other things, an opportunity for State to break from the company that caused an international debacle when its guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. State stood by Blackwater — or at least a company that didn’t want the public to know it was Blackwater.
For years, numerous internal reviews and external watchdogs have criticized State for weak oversight over its security contractors — or worse. In March, the New York Times reported that the department’s oversight officials “sought to block any serious investigation” of Nisour Square. After discovering that State failed to correct years’ worth of security violations from the company hired to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the Project on Government Oversight’s executive director, Danielle Brian, testified last year that the department is “incapable of properly handling a contract.” A former State security official told Mother Jones that a “bigtime revolving door” between the department and the contractors accounts for State’s blase attitude.
“The State Department has supported the Department of Justice investigation and prosecution of this case every step of the way,” reads an official answer the State Department provided when Danger Room asked why it did. “We fully respect the independence and integrity of the U.S. judicial system, and we support holding legally accountable any contractor personnel who have committed crimes.”
But that’s not a substantive answer. What experience does International Development Solutions have with providing security for diplomats in war zones? What makes this unknown company more qualified than at least four other established firms that didn’t win part of Worldwide Protective Services? What sort of due diligence did State perform to ensure that International Development Solutions isn’t another Paravant? [UPDATE] State has yet to address any of those questions.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Afghanistan begins disbanding private security firms
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan has begun disbanding private security companies operating in the country, shutting down eight firms and seizing over 400 weapons, the Interior Ministry said on Sunday.
The move is part of President Hamid Karzai's ambitious plan to take over all Afghan security responsibilities from foreign troops by 2014.
Since Karzai's decree in August, a plan has been drawn up for the process which is expected to be complete by the end of the year, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said. The United Nations and NATO-led International Security Assistance force had given it their support, he added.
"The interior ministry is implementing this plan with seriousness and decisiveness," he told a regular briefing.
The first targets are illegal armed groups operating as private security firms, companies with temporary permits and those who provide security escorts for foreign forces and have been engaged in criminal acts and security breaches.
The government has already closed down an Afghan security firm with 75 employees, and several smaller groups which provided security escorts for convoys, Bashary said.
Firms are exempt whose guards work inside compounds used by foreign embassies and international businesses and aid and charitable organizations.
General David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said late last month that Karzai was also prepared to allow companies operating from some fixed sites, including power plants, to continue their work.
"The plan is arranged in a such a manner that it does not create a security gap, yet at the same time (we can) dismantle the private security companies," Bashary said.
Employees from the firms can join the Afghan security forces if they wish, he added.
IRRITATION SORUCE, COMPETING FOR CONTRACTS WORTH BILLIONS
Bashary said he did not have an estimate of the total number of firms, but there were 52 registered with the government, half of them foreign.
Kabul estimates that up to 40,000 Afghans are employed by these firms, seen as a parallel security operations outside government control. Their heavily armed guards forcing a route through traffic is a common sight on Afghan streets.
Many Afghans see them as operating with impunity, and they have been accused of a series of killings, crimes and scandals, but have rarely been convicted.
Karzai's government tried unsuccessfully last year to register the firms, find out the amount of arms they had and where they came from, and how much money the industry was worth, an Afghan security source has said.
The U.S. State Department said last year it would review its use of contractors at overseas embassies after a scandal over sexual hazing by security guards at its Kabul mission.
When Karzai issued the deadline for the closure of the firms in August, the Pentagon called the deadline "very challenging" but said Washington would work with Kabul and seek to improve oversight and management of private security firms.
(Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison and Jonathan Thatcher)
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