Erik Prince has been in the news lately, doing the rounds of various television shows to make the case for his plan to privatize the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Depending on who you listen to, either Mr. Prince’s efforts are finding support within some quarters of the Trump administration or this privatization effort is never going to happen. Given the possibility that there might be support for this plan, I believe it merits close scrutiny. Like Mr. Prince, I agree that the war in Afghanistan is going nowhere. Despite Department of Defense (DOD) assurances that the strategy is working, we see the Taliban’s control and influence throughout the provinces growing, slowly, but growing nonetheless. The Afghan government and security forces are proving ineffective at countering the Taliban, despite all our training efforts. We do need to look at different options in order to find a way ahead in Afghanistan because our current efforts are not cutting it.
I have to admit that I have not seen Mr. Prince’s plan other than what has been reported in the news, though I have seen the detailed proposal Mr. Prince made to various other countries, one that is very similar to what he is proposing for Afghanistan. Succinctly, he proposes proffering 6,000 military contractors to work with and train Afghan forces to fight the Taliban while providing 90 aircraft for close air support. The plan calls for using fewer personnel and aircraft which will lower the cost of the war. I am sure there are plenty of details I am missing but these are the salient parts of the plan.
Many will say this plan basically does what the U.S. military is doing but with fewer resources, not necessarily a recipe for success. Mr. Prince has countered this by saying only U.S. Special Forces (SOF) are really doing this, while conventional U.S. military are not living and fighting with Afghan forces the way his contractors would. Mr. Prince’s second issue is Close Air Support (CAS), plus surveillance and medevac. His argument is that Afghan forces don’t receive this air support, which he would provide via his commercial contract. The third issue he would deal with is governance. Corruption is endemic, leading to a lack of equipment and ammo for Afghan troops as well as other serious problems. He would address this problem by inserting his employees in a support role to handle much of the logistics and support for Afghan units to root out the corruption.
The first problem we will run into when privatizing the war is that the Afghan government is not in favor of this approach. They have said no to the idea. Therefore, in order to make this happen we would have to expend a lot of political and financial clout to make it happen, and we would end up with a program shoved down the throats of the very people it is supposed to help. It is likely that, in the face of this, the Afghan government would not be wholeheartedly supporting the program. This is a big issue. It is hard, if not impossible, to win a war without the backing of the government you want to win.
Next, we would need to look at who is doing the training and support with Afghan troops. As Mr. Prince points out, U.S. SOF do a good job training Afghan forces. That is because SOF are trained in this kind of activity; that is their reason for being. Other forces, including Navy SEALs, Royal Marines and other troops from which Mr. Prince would hire his contractors, are not trained for this type of activity. I’m sure he can provide this training for his contractors but the U.S. military is already doing this with their new Security Forces Assistance Brigades.
With contractors living and working with Afghan forces we are likely to see more insider attacks against these contractors, which will lead to a new host of problems on how to deal with. How will Afghan forces deal with and relate to what amounts to mercenary forces? I know we call them contractors, and we call similar Russian contract forces mercenaries, but if we are being honest, the Afghans will see them as mercenaries, not fighting for their nation but for money. I am not trying to denigrate these contractors; they have all fought bravely for their countries when in uniform but, and this is an important but, the enemy will play this up. They will highlight that Afghan forces are working with mercenaries, that the Afghan government has hired mercenaries to prop up their government and reap a propaganda victory. This will have a serious effect on morale within Afghan forces. Remember, the enemy always has a vote in our plans and they will take advantage of this. Couple this with discussion of tapping in to Afghanistan’s mineral resources…and you have a narrative of mercenaries and the U.S. stealing Afghanistan’s future. This is a recipe for disaster. An analogy of the British East India Company will have even greater applicability regarding points of our discussion. Remember, the East India Company rule of India ended in the Indian Mutiny.
The idea of getting in the logistics chain to root out corruption is noble but likely to fail. The Afghans have come up with more ways to divert money and resources than we can even imagine. They will run rings around the contractors.
There is some wishful thinking about how this program will reduce Pakistan’s leverage in Afghanistan and make it a more responsible player, i.e. more in line with U.S. interests. But it is just that: wishful thinking. The problem with that thinking is that Afghanistan is a strategic issue for Pakistan; its control, or at least neutralization, is of vital importance for Pakistan’s survival in their view. It will be easier for Pakistan to support operations against military contractors than U.S. forces. There will be less negatives in Pakistan’s view of killing international contractors than U.S. troops.
There is a lot of wishful thinking in this plan, but no one is playing devil’s advocate. There is no discussion of what else could happen, no planning for failure in some areas, no real discussion on where the enemy could negate the positives. That is understandable when trying to sell a product—it is counterproductive to spell out the negatives—but in formulating national security strategies, that is exactly what you must do. You cannot rely on your assumptions. You must test them, attack them, and tear your assumptions apart before you make a decision. I have seen this at the most senior levels of government, where someone paints a rosy picture with no discussion of failure and consequences. This plan sees what it wants to see.
The real problem with the notion to privatize the Afghan war is similar to all other U.S. operations in Afghanistan. It is a tactical and operational plan, not a real strategy. Throughout this war, one of our major faults is that we have allowed tactics to dictate strategy. We have allowed tactics to draw us deeper into something for which we had no intention of becoming entrenched. This is the same problem we ran into when we first became involved in Afghanistan supporting the mujahedeen against the Soviets. We had no long-term plan for Afghanistan. We walked away when Russia left, allowing the country to slide into civil war and into the arms of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
We are now stuck with supporting an unpopular and deeply corrupt government that, as Mr. Prince has correctly pointed out, has little legitimacy and support of the Afghan people. Our intervention in that country, rightly so after 9/11, has resulted in little benefit to the average Afghan, even though it has enriched a small group of Afghans. We have been in Afghanistan for 17 years. The Afghans have been in some form of conflict for 40 years now. We have an enemy with sanctuaries in a neighboring country, an enemy that continues to increase its effective hold over the countryside despite U.S. military assurances to the contrary, an enemy that is able to mount larger operations than before. We have a population that, while generally not favorable to the Taliban, would like to see an end to war. This is all too familiar to those who lived through Vietnam.
Mr. Prince is correct that leaving Afghanistan now would potentially turn the country into a haven for terrorist groups. So, what do we do? What do we really want in Afghanistan long-term? I don’t have the answers, otherwise I would be sitting at the National Security Council (NSC). What I do know is that we cannot win, regardless of whether we privatize or not, by tying ourselves to a corrupt and unpopular government. We cannot beat the Taliban unless we provide the Afghan people with positive long-term gains. We cannot win unless we start to solve the problem of Pakistan, and that leads through India. We need an integrated strategy that takes into account all the variables, and until we do that, no amount of tactical innovation will solve the problem.
