I always knew the US used a lot of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. I just never suspected that the number of mercenaries the US government employed would be so large it would exceed the number of official, government issued troops over there:
Civilian contractors working for the Pentagon in Afghanistan not only outnumber the uniformed troops, according to a report by a Congressional research group, but also form the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel recorded in any war in the history of the United States.
Okay, you say. But is that a problem? Well, read this and then decide for yourself:
More fundamentally, the contractors who are a majority of the force in what has become the most important American enterprise abroad are subject to lines of authority that are less clear-cut than they are for their military colleagues.
What is clear, the report says, is that when contractors for the Pentagon or other agencies are not properly managed — as when civilian interrogators committed abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or members of the security firm Blackwater shot and killed 17 Iraqi citizens in Baghdad — the American effort can be severely undermined.
As of March this year, contractors made up 57 percent of the Pentagon’s force in Afghanistan, and if the figure is averaged over the past two years, it is 65 percent, according to the report by the Congressional Research Service.
You know what’s really interesting? A lot of the people the companies we hire hire are Afghans. In other words we are hiring companies that in order to make a profit off this war hire the cheapest labor source available. And I suspect we have no idea how well they vet these “temporary contract employees.” How many are criminals, for example. How many are actually working for the Taliban? How would the Pentagon know? We’ve witnessed how well the US government has managed its contracts with the company formerly known as Blackwater, the one that was headed up by Erik Prince, a man who was convinced he was a 21st Century Crusader on a mission from Jesus Christ to kill Muslims. A company, by the way, whose government contract the US just extended. That’s right the company of shoot ’em up cowboys who bragged about how many hadjis they killed is still working for your United States government:
The mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater International, which was banned from Iraq by its government after a Baghdad massacre which killed 17 civilians, will see its contract extended in the country by the U.S. State Department, according to a published report.
So the company banned by the Iraqi government is still working for the US State Department in Iraq? Oh, but it’s worse than you think. We are still using this company despite ongoing criminal investigations into the following alleged illegal activities by Blackwater’s founder and it’s top executives:
Controversy has surrounded the private security firm practically since it was founded, but erupted anew recently when former employees accused Blackwater’s founder and former CEO of murdering or facilitating the murders of other employees who were preparing to blow the whistle on his alleged criminal activities.
The sworn statements also say that founder Erik Prince and Blackwater executives were involved in illegal weapons smuggling and had, on numerous occasions, ordered incriminating documents, e-mails, photos and video destroyed. The former employees described Blackwater as “having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the ‘Blackwater Man Camp’ in exchange for one American dollar.” They add even though Prince frequently visited this camp, he “failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men.” […]
The former employees additionally claim that Prince was engaged in illegal arms dealing, money laundering, and tax evasion, that he created “a web of companies in order to obscure wrong-doing, fraud, and other crimes,” and that Blackwater’s chief financial officer had “resigned … stating he was not willing to go to jail for Erik Prince.”
Murder. Illegal weapons smuggling. Child prostitution. Money laundering. Tax evasion. This was the company the US government used in Iraq for security and to which it paid millions of dollars. And let’s not forget KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s former firm), to whom we paid billions of dollars. A company well known for providing our troops unsanitary water to drink, electrocuting soldiers in showers, the practice of slavery and gross overcharging and fraud for services rendered to the US government. How many other shady companies and shady characters are employed by the US to fight these increasingly unpopular wars? We do know that it’s highly questionable what kind of value the US is getting from these private contractors for the money it’s spent and continues to spend on them:
Responding to the Congressional research report, Frederick D. Barton, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was highly questionable whether contractors brought the same commitment and willingness to take risks as the men and women of the military or the diplomatic services.
He also questioned whether using contractors was cost effective, saying that no one really knew whether having a force made up mainly of contractors whose salaries were often triple or quadruple those of a corresponding soldier or Marine was cheaper or more expensive for the American taxpayer.
With contractors focused on preserving profits and filing paperwork with government auditors, he said, “you grow the part of government that, probably, the taxpayers appreciate least.”
On the other hand, isn’t free enterprise just the bomb? What better way to make money than have the United States fight wars overseas that are doomed to last for generations? And it doesn’t matter which political party is in power! Now that’s a sweet deal. For the contractors, anyway. For the rest of us? I’ll let you come up with your own appellation to best describe it.
