The Latest Attempt To Win The Afghan War: Replace The Soldiers With Mercenaries

Authored by Daniel Lang via SHTFplan.com,

One of the most controversial aspects of the Iraq war was the heavy use of defense contractors, who were in many cases paid vast sums of money to do jobs that you’d think an ordinary soldier could do. When it was all said and done, defense contractors had reaped $138 billion dollars by providing security, logistics, and construction services. Among the most notorious of these contractors was Blackwater, whose employees gained a reputation for reckless behavior that caused many unnecessary deaths.

Fast forward to today, and now Blackwater’s founder, former Navy Seal Erik Prince, is pushing for a plan to win the war in Afghanistan by replacing the soldiers with defense contractors. Prince first suggested the plan last May in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he described this idea in colonial terms. The private military units would be based on units that were deployed by the British East India Company, and would be lead by a single person who he referred to as an “American Viceroy,” that would report directly to the president.

As strange as it may sound, Trump appears to be taking the idea seriously. It’s hard to blame him. Afghanistan is now America’s longest running war, and no matter how many soldiers, generals, aid, or money we throw at the country, nothing seems to bring stability. 

Which is why this radical new plan probably looks very enticing to Trump right now.

Under his proposal, private advisers would work directly with Afghanistan combat battalions throughout the country, and the air force would be used for medical evacuation, fire support and ferrying troops.

 

Prince said the contractors would be “adjuncts” of the Afghan military and would wear that nation’s military uniforms. Pilots would only drop ordnance with Afghan government approval, he said.

 

Currently, troops from a U.S.-led coalition are stationed primarily at top level headquarters and are not embedded with conventional combat units in the field. Under the plan the contractors would be embedded with Afghanistan’s more than 90 combat battalions throughout the country.

In addition the plan will supposedly cost $10 billion per year, which is a far cry from the $40 billion that is currently being spent. It would involve replacing much of the 8,400 troops who are currently stationed in Afghanistan with 5,500 contractors, and provide a privately owned air force of 90 planes that wouldn’t give fire support without the permission of the Afghan government.

However, there is one problem with this plan. There’s probably a good reason why our soldiers aren’t embedded with the Afghan army in such a decentralized fashion. It probably has to do with the fact that our soldiers are routinely killed by Taliban sympathizers masquerading as Afghan soldiers (many of whom are severely demoralized, poorly paid and equipped, and lead by corrupt officers). Without separating the contractors into heavily fortified compounds (as our military does right now), and by spreading them thin across a vast and desolate country, these contractors would be extremely vulnerable.

It’s certainly a unique plan that is at least different from what our military has been doing in Afghanistan since 2001, which has been more of the same, year after year. But it’s also fraught with danger and the potential for disaster. This is Afghanistan we’re talking about. When it comes to military operations led by advanced nations, disaster is always the safest bet. After all, they don’t call Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” for nothing.

Perhaps instead of asking how we could win the war in Afghanistan, we should be asking ourselves how we can get out as fast as possible and cut our losses.

It’s been 16 years, and there’s no sign that the people in that country have any interest in becoming the kind of liberal democracy that we want them to be. And without that support, there is no military plan in the world that will ever give us a satisfying victory in Afghanistan.

Trump's Slide Into Endless-War Syndrome

Authored by Ivan Eland via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump touted his nationalist “America First” foreign policy, which implied that he wanted to stay out of foreign brushfire wars. Even before that, he tweeted his disapproval of American involvement of the Afghan War.

The photograph released by the White House of President Trump meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria

Yet now he has delegated the authority to his Secretary of Defense to send several thousand more troops to Afghanistan to join the almost 9,000 that remain there advising and assisting Afghan forces and hunting Islamist terrorists. And that is not the only instance in which the Trump administration has gone against his original inclination or is contemplating it.

Trump appears to be delegating the troop re-escalation decision for Afghanistan to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, because the president wants to be able to dodge responsibility in case that policy is ultimately unsuccessful, just as he blamed the botched Special Operations raid in Yemen on the military. Re-escalation is likely to fail, because the administration has no strategy for turning the already-lost conflict around. Adding 3,000 to 5,000 troops, according to a U.S. military that never wants to admit losing a war, would allow American troops to “advise” Afghan troops in battlefield areas, instead of remaining at higher headquarters, and also to call in U.S. air and artillery strikes in support of those local forces.

Yet the Afghan War is the longest conflict in American history, and no conception of “success” can be realistically imagined. How can an augmented force of 13,000 or 14,000 American advisers have success helping a still pathetic Afghan military (even after 16 years of U.S. training), when 100,000 much more potent U.S. combat troops could not defeat the Taliban during all those prior years of conflict?

And if the Taliban’s gains on the battlefield aren’t enough, the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan has caused some Islamist militants to pledge allegiance to the even more radical and brutal ISIS group. One can easily see that when the 3,000 to 5,000 troops have little effect on the battlefield, which is the probable outcome, the military will begin demanding a more sizeable re-escalation of the endless conflict.

Should we give the U.S. military a blank check for perpetual war until it comes up with a face-saving way to exit with honor? Such a ruse didn’t fool anyone in the Vietnam War.

India’s Interests

The original U.S. enemy, Al Qaeda, is already a spent force in that part of the world. In addition, the Indian government is assisting Afghanistan economically and Afghan forces militarily and would have an incentive to do much more if the United States withdrew from the fight. India doesn’t want its arch rival Pakistan’s support of the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan to result in a Taliban-controlled or influenced Afghan government that will augment Pakistan’s power in the South Asian region. Thus, the United States could let India, which has greater strategic interest in this local war than does the United States these days, take over countering the Taliban and ISIS in the region.

Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter pilots fly near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, April 5, 2017.  (Army photo by Capt. Brian Harris)

In addition to re-escalating an already unsuccessful Afghan War, some in the Trump administration want to ramp up the fight in Syria and assistance to the Saudi Arabian-led coalition against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are loosely aligned with Saudi-rival Iran.

Trump, seemingly only to prove he was tougher than President Obama was in Syria, mounted a for-show cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base after an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Before the U.S. attack, the Trump administration warned the Russians and the thus the Syrians that it was coming, thus severely mitigating its effect.

Lately, however, some in the Trump administration want to widen the war against ISIS in Syria to include Iranian-sponsored militias that are also fighting ISIS. Yet the perils of escalation in Syria became apparent when a Syrian government plane dropped bombs near U.S.-sponsored rebels, U.S. aircraft shot down the plane, and then the Russians declared that any American aircraft flying over Syrian government-controlled areas would be tracked as potential targets. Russian downing of an American aircraft or vice versa would be an unneeded and dangerous escalation between two nuclear-armed great powers over the outcome of a civil war in a country that is not strategic to the United States.

The desire of some Trump administration officials to go after Iranian-sponsored militias in Syria is part of a larger Trump inclination to support Saudi Arabia in its regional rivalry with Iran in the Persian Gulf. That regional rivalry is also playing out in the destitute country of Yemen, with the United States selling the despotic Saudis a fresh batch of expensive military equipment, some of which will probably be used to kill Houthis in Yemen, including lots of civilians. Yet if Syria is not strategic to the United States, the poor nation of Yemen is certainly not either.

In the Syrian civil war, the United States should sit back and watch its adversaries fight each other — ISIS and other radical Sunni Islamists versus Iran, Iranian-sponsored militias, the autocratic Syrian government, and Russia.

In the internecine conflict in Yemen, the Saudi coalition, which has already killed many civilians, is hardly better than Iran.

In the Afghan civil war, the United States should accept defeat, withdraw its forces — instead of re-escalating the war — and let India fully take over assisting the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban and ISIS.

In sum, Trump should avoid getting co-opted by the U.S. military and honor his campaign rhetoric, which implied staying out of non-strategic brushfire wars.