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Private Military Contractors also Creating Problems in Afghanistan
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Carl Robichaud,
World Politics Review,
10/31/2007
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After the Sept. 16 Blackwater scandal, which drew unprecedented attention to the role played by private security contractors (PSCs) in Iraq, these firms have increasingly come under scrutiny in other theaters of war, such as Afghanistan. But while efforts in Afghanistan to rein in PSCs seem to parallel those in Iraq, they are driven by different dynamics—and have very different implications.
Earlier this month, the Afghan parliament, emboldened by the Iraq legislature's attempt to assert jurisdiction over contractors, drafted a law that could curb operations by private security contractors. Then last week Afghanistan's Ministry of the Interior (MOI) went a step further, shutting down four Afghan private security firms.
These steps sound similar to those taken the Iraq government, but there are important differences. In Iraq, virtually all private security contractors are international companies with Western employees. In Afghanistan, many private security groups are indigenous, often under the control of a single faction, and even the large international firms operating there rely upon local militiamen for much of their manpower.
The Ministry's focus so far has been on small Afghan security firms that have a peripheral role. According to police and Western officials, plans are also in place to shut down 10 more contractors, including some that protect foreign embassies. The media has generally interpreted the ministry's actions as a "crackdown" on private security contractors, but the truth is more complicated.
A Checkered Past
In Afghanistan, problems with security contractors are hardly new. Their actions have attracted little media attention in the West but have sometimes outraged Afghans, as when, during the October 2004 Presidential campaign, one of President Karzai's DynCorps bodyguards slapped Afghanistan's minister of transport in the face. The action, a serious insult in Afghan culture, became for many Afghans as a symbol of foreign imperiousness.
But while Afghans privately resent—and sometimes publicly denounce—security contractors, there has been no action against them. For years, several contractors have operated in Afghanistan with virtually no oversight or accountability. While foreign civilians operating in Afghanistan are generally subject to Afghan law and U.S. military personnel come under U.S. military jurisdiction, foreign security contractors fall into a legal gray area. Sometimes they are prosecuted in U.S. courts, as when a contractor working for the CIA in 2003 was convicted of misdemeanor assault for beating to death an Afghan detainee over the course of a two day interrogation (the lack of an autopsy prevented a murder charge). Other times there is no trial at all, as when a contractor with U.S. Protection and Investigations (USPI) was whisked out of the country after shooting and killing his interpreter in 2005.
Business has been booming for private military contractors in Afghanistan. They number in the dozens and include multimillion dollar corporations like Blackwater and Dyncorps. It has also been a lucrative field for small, ad-hoc Afghan groups, some little more than militias looking to make a quick buck.
The Defense Department says the U.S. military employs 1,000 security contractors, and the State Department and the government of Afghanistan also hire PSCs. Estimates on the number of private security personnel in Afghanistan exceed 10,000 for registered groups alone. This number is small in absolute terms when compared with the number of PSCs in Iraq, but it comprises a substantial military presence for Afghanistan. If this figure is accurate, private security personnel outnumber the troop contribution of every nation but the United States, and are almost a third the size of the Afghan National Army (estimated at around 35,000).
The men comprising these forces are mostly Afghans, former combatants from mujahideen militias. As a result, reliance upon these forces has had the pernicious consequence of sustaining and empowering some of the nation's most irresponsible actors. Barnett Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan, argues that security contractors "have hired, armed, and trained militias that were supposed to be demobilized and disarmed, enabling them to persist and profit as part of the 'private sector,' awaiting the spark that will set off another civil war."
One example cited by Rubin is Din Muhammad Jurat. Jurat, a Northern Alliance militia leader who has been implicated in organized crime and in the murder of a parliamentarian, secured a lucrative position with USPI. He now provides "former" fighters from his militia as security guards for reconstruction projects. Just this year, his men were involved in the beating of Afghanistan Attorney General Abdul Jabbar Sabet, who belongs to a different faction. Reliance on these sorts of actors, argues Rubin, is "corrupting the Afghan police and administration."
Behind the Crackdown
A "crackdown" on some of these firms may well be in order. According to some sources, however, the Ministry of the Interior's recent closures were not driven by a desire to achieve accountability but a desire to consolidate power.
One Kabul insider, quoted by Rubin on his blog, noted that the timing of the "crackdown" is suspicious, since it comes just as the ministry completed a set of legal regulations that would bring the industry under control. The regulations, finalized on Aug. 5, have "since been put on the shelf by the [government of Afghanistan] which has started now to 'crack down' instead of introducing a legal procedure. . . . I cannot help the impression that some competitors closely linked to the president are trying to (a) extract bribes from the PSCs for not being shut down arbitrarily and (b) eliminate rivals." It is no coincidence, he argues, that "nobody so far has questioned the PSCs owned by illustrious people" or "operating under the control of local warlords . . . in the East and South either."
Looking Ahead
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, security contractors have filled a power vacuum that was created when the administration opted for a military deployment with neither the size nor the mandate to stabilize the country. The coalition's inability to establish security, and its subsequent failure to stand up an effective police training effort, forced it to rely upon hired help.
"If you don't have enough military forces, very often that is a way out then, to count on private security companies," observes Maj. Gen. Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff with the NATO forces in Afghanistan. Even the Kabul official quoted by Rubin acknowledges that "The real challenge to the government is the fact that the Ministry of Interior does not have the capacity to replace the protection guaranteed by the private companies outside of Kabul." National police could replace some of the guards in the capital, but they are not yet up to harder missions like guarding the Kajaki Dam in Helmand.
So in the short run, the United States and NATO will rely heavily upon private firms to provide security and to train the Afghan police. This is especially the case in police training, for which DynCorps won a multibillion dollar contract, and in counternarcotics.
But this necessity should not obscure the fact that this model has grave costs that go far beyond the financial. In the case of Afghanistan, over-reliance upon Afghan security firms threatens to corrupt the government and perpetuate illegal militias even as over-reliance upon international security firms threatens to undermine Afghan support for a foreign presence. In the short run, we may be stuck with a heavy reliance upon private security contractors, but we should not pretend that this approach was inevitable—or that it is sustainable.
Carl Robichaud is a Program Officer at the Century Foundation, where he writes on nonproliferation and directs the Foundation's Afghanistan Watch program. This article was published by World Politics Review.
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