108,000
Private Contractors in Afghanistan and “We Have No Idea What They’re Doing”
Two recently released reports, one by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and one by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), show that not only is the number of private contractors in Afghanistan increasing, but the Pentagon is also unable to tell what they are even doing there.
By Aubrey
Bloomfield
Policy Mic
June 9, 2013
Policy Mic
June 9, 2013
Citing the reports, David Francis of the Fiscal Times points out that there are now 108,000
private contractors in Afghanistan (over 30,000 of whom are Americans), far
more than the 65,700 U.S. troops still there,and the number was counted at 110,404 last month. That amounts to 1.6
contractors, roughly 18,000 of which are private security contractors, for
every American soldier.
Although the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is
ostensibly winding down towards an eventual handover to Afghan security forces,
as Francis argues, “the increase in the contractors to troop ratio is
yet another indication that although the vast majority of troops are leaving
Afghanistan, a private army will remain in the country for years.”
According to the CRS, the U.S. wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan show the increasing reliance of the military on private
contractors. But replacing the military with private contractors is not
necessarily a good thing. Highlighting the abuses committed by private military
contractors, Angela Snell of the University of Illinois College of Law has
called this trend a “convenient way for the
U.S. government to evade its legal obligations, including the
responsibility to protect the human rights of civilians in war and peace, by
allowing private individuals, rather than official state actors, to
perform services on behalf of the U.S. military.”
Not only does the growing use of private
contractors give lie to the idea of a withdrawal from the country, but they are
also very costly. Although still dwarfed by the ever-mounting total costs of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, CRS reports
that “over the last six fiscal years, DOD [Department of
Defense] obligations for contracts performed in the Iraq and Afghanistan
areas of operation were approximately $160 billion and exceeded total
contract obligations of any other U.S. federal agency.”
Moreover, Francis points
out that the CRS and GAO did not just measure the number of contractors and the
cost, but the reports also assessed the Pentagon’s ability to monitor the work
of contractors. And the results are damning. According to Francis, taken
together the reports:“Amount to yet another indictment of how the Pentagon deals with private workers. CRS found that the Pentagon lacked the ability to document the work each contractor is performing. It also found even when the government has information on contractors, it’s often inaccurate and doesn’t reflect the actual work being done. This leaves the Pentagon unable to determine if the hundreds of billions it’s spending are leading to effective results.”
So despite the increasing number
of private contractors being used and the hundreds of billions of dollars being
spent on them, the Pentagon is not even able to determine what they are doing
or whether it is effective. As CRS reports, the information the Pentagon has on private
contractors is probably not reliable enough to be used to make decisions “at
the strategic level,” thus hindering its ability to tell whether the work
of contractors is contributing to “achieving the mission.”
The U.S.-led wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been massive, and destructive, wastes of lives and money.
Although the U.S. and its allies say that they plan to remove combat
troops from Afghanistan
by 2014, this will in no way be the end of the West’s presence in the
country. Francis reports that much of the work currently done by the
military will be done by the
private contractors after
the military leaves. So while the attention paid to Afghanistan is likely to
continue to dwindle even further, as has been the case in Iraq, as the
military withdrawal picks up, the foreign occupation, by what one analyst has called “a de facto army,” looks set to
continue on.
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