Pentagon may leave but its hired Military Contractors will continue to thrive in Afghanistan

President Joe Biden has decided to withdraw  from Afghanistan and “end America's longest war.” The drawdown of 2,500 American boots on the ground will start on May 1 and is scheduled to be completed by September 11.  

 

His administration is set to reallocate the resources employed in Afghanistan to Indo-Pacific. That there is little justification for the continuation of  American soldiers in Afghanistan is acknowledged across the political spectrum. Many analysts see the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as a “vexing and largely failed chapter in American foreign policy”.

 

But when did the US military invade to rebuild Afghanistan? It penetrated Kabul only to reassert the American primacy as a  part of its strategy to reshape the middle east. So where is the question of failure? Pentagon lost just over 2000 soldiers in its twenty-year occupation of Kabul. Since 2002 America has spent $88.32bn on building the Afghan National Army and police force, mainly to help the occupying army stay safe and safeguard the imperial infrastructure. 

It is a strange argument that the US is worried about the spate of violence that may erupt after its withdrawal. The point is that over the past two decades Washington has been the main perpetrator of violence in Afghanistan. The US forces have brazenly employed air raids dropping precision-guided munition and MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst Bomb) with impunity, making Afghanistan the “deadliest places in the world to be a civilian”. 

The invasion has been milked by the military-industrial complex (MIC) to push its neoliberal agenda of privatising military operations. Pentagon bought the idea because it helped the government reduce political costs of the wars and  wage “forever wars”.  

Both, Iraq as well as Afghan wars, are linked to the re-emergence of private military companies (PMCs). The US government is now the world's largest consumer of private military and security services.  

The US Congress Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded in 2011 that the two wars led to an “unhealthy over-reliance” on contractors.” Contractors constitute more than half of the military personnel working for the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Using the twin wars, the MIC expanded from being a supplier of military hardware to provider of military logistic and even combat services in the hostile zones.  

This expansion is important to understand because besides the US military, Taliban and Afghan government the fourth actor that will determine the future of Kabul is the “invisible army” created by corporates. 

The majority of the mainstream analysis is focused  on the withdrawal of 2500 official US troops but there is hardly any discussion on the 18000 military contractors that continue to float in Afghanistan. 

The removal of US troops will eventually lead to the reductions in requirements for contracted support, however, it would be foolhardy to presume that they will all pack their bags along with the US army.

Afghan war may have been bloody and costly for the US State, but it has been a booming business for private military companies (PMCs) that hire cheap mercenary workforce from poor countries, form a “disposable army” of “Third County Nationals,” to imperial ambitions of the American elite.  According to a recent US government report “about 4,700 of the contractors are Afghans hired locally, but nearly three-quarters come from outside the country, including about a third who are U.S. citizens… Many of the rest are from developing countries such as Uganda and Nepal.” 

According to Deborah Avant, a scholar with rich body of work on privatisation of security, In the Afghan war more than 3,814 US contractors have died while only 2,300 US military personnel lost their lives.  

Post the exit, the PMCs may not be directly contracted by Pentagon, they could continue operations inside Afghanistan through proxies or subsidiary companies based outside the United States. America may formally exit but informally its military influence will continue to linger in Kabul. 

The US will not disentangle from a country that is geo-strategically placed to serve its interests against Iran, Russia and more important China. Landlocked Afghanistan provides access routes to Iran, Pakistan, and Russia. 

In the age of connectivity, America will not commit the strategic mistake of vacating the vantage spot that enables it to overlook the new coalition building between Iran, Russia and China.  

China and Russia see Afghanistan as a part of a larger set of regional connectivity rather than just a terror-infested country. They seek stability in Afghanistan to ensure the security and safety of the alternative trade routes that are coming up in the area. This need is particularly acute for China, which has invested  $60 billion in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor  (CPEC) to gain an opening into the Arabian Sea. Abandoning Kabul would also mean reduced influence in Pakistan and leaving the entire region for exploitation by Russia and China.   

President Trump who initiated a talk with the Taliban to facilitate withdrawal of US troops was also responsible for the increase in the involvement of PMCs in Afghanistan. During his presidency, the use of private security contractors in Afghanistan increased by more than 65 percent .

However, much like his predecessor, Donald Trump, Biden maintains silence on the future role of military contractors (a euphemism for corporate military entities). And the role envisaged for them in the post-exit strategy designed to hold the Taliban accountable. 

However, learning from the East India Company’s example and privatisation of US occupation of Afghanistan is being actively considered in the US elite circles. 

The Indian Afghan Policy that is largely focussed on  the use of Taliban by Pakistan after the so-called US withdrawal will have to take into account the changing imperial infrastructure in Afghanistan. Also of interest will be the attitude of Private military companies towards the Taliban and how they would use it to advance their profits as well as the US strategic objectives.  

Twitter:@AtulBeret

KEEP PENTAGON OUT OF INDIA’S MoD

Photo Courtesy: OutlookIndia.com 

‘Military diplomacy’ sounds like an oxymoron. Diplomacy is about culture and finesse –graduated gratification of desire- military is about roughing it out and instant success. However, the phrase ‘military diplomacy’ is as frequently used as ‘cultural diplomacy’. While the latter “conjures up images of ambassadorial dinner parties and the elite pastimes of the Fererro Rocher set,”[1] the former is more about gunboats. 

The two are often hyphenated because, diplomacy is as much about pressurization, as it is about persuasion. And more often than not, coercive military power either precedes or follows foreign policy. 

It is perhaps to avoid the use of an oxymoron that a high powered working group at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi has titled their recent report as, “Deliberations on Military and Diplomacy.”[2] 

Besides catering to “restructuring the Ministry of Defence (MoD)... to ensure greater integration of the civilian bureaucracy with the Armed Forces Headquarters” - the IDSA document, is also guided by pragmatic imperatives to use ‘defence cooperation’ and Indian “military professionalism, including the high standards of its military training institutions and capacities in the field of international peacekeeping ...in furtherance of its foreign policy objectives.” 

The aim to integrate military into the national decision making process is laudable. However, what needs a more rigorous debate is the effort to conjoin the civil-military reform with foreign policy imperatives – re-orienting the Indian military from a force guarding the nation to a resource to be exploited to secure a place on the high table of “international security politics”. 

Simply put, the proposed reforms are less inclined towards self–correcting the existing anomaly in the national higher defence management and more to satiate the American demands to have well trained military manpower at its disposal in Asia.[3] 

The US financial resources and security ambitions are precariously perched on a fiscal cliff.[4] United States has enough fighter planes and satellites to soften any land on earth, what it does not have is the unlimited quantity of boots on ground to actually go and occupy the conquered land. As Robert Kaplan says in his latest book, “anyone who truly believes that geography has been pivotally downgraded is truly ignorant of military logistics - of the science of getting significant quantity of men and materiel from one continent to another.”[5] 

Since Washington does not have the money to ensure mobility of its troops across continents, it is urging New Delhi to contribute its soil and soldiers to sustain the falling empire. And many, with a fetish to see India as a vassal state with ‘great power’ tag have no hesitation to suggest using India’s ‘demographic dividend’ to please pentagon. 

The IDSA document uses terms like “benign security provider “and ‘defence cooperation’ to add academic flavour to the American demands. In sharp contrast, Lt Gen (Retd) Satish Nambiar, in his article placed as an annexure to main document, openly admits that time is ripe for India to follow Henry Kissinger’s prescription and “behave like the British Raj” and share America’s security burden in the Indian Ocean Region. In order, to support his case for making the Indian armed forces expeditionary, Nambiar, goes to the extent of citing historical examples from World War I and II, where millions of Indian men were used as cannon fodder to save and expand the British Empire. One hopes that the general is his eagerness to send Indian troops on “out of area missions” is not hinting at rechristening the Indian army as American–Indian Army. 

The Indian military leadership has always been a step ahead of the bureaucracy in courting Pentagon. This fact came up when Wikileak exposed a 2009 US Embassy cable addressed to Hillary Clinton that blamed India's civilian leadership and bureaucracy for adding road blocks to the fruition of Indo-US strategic partnership – “slowing down a relationship that the military brass was keen to accelerate.” [6] A point reiterated in the latest report by S. Amer Latif, of Centre for Strategic and International Studies, report on Indo-US relations, where he elucidates, 

“Although the Indian military is keen for a much closer relationship with its U.S. counterparts, the MOD bureaucracy is consistently in the background, keeping the services on a tight leash. The reluctance for closer ties has stymied deeper strategic discussions between the U.S. and Indian. armed forces, and has also caused frustrations on the U.S. side about last-minute cancellations of exercises, courses, or visits. The MOD’s reluctance has also led to strict prohibitions on social contact between active-duty U.S. and Indian officers outside official business. Such restrictions stymie the development of personal relationships, which could be helpful in times of crisis.” [7] 

More interesting is Latif’s highlight on Indian military’s recommendation to boost up the Indo-US ties, which sadly rely on seeking foreign appointments for Indian military leaders in PACOM and Central Command and also executive level courses at the Asia-Pacific Center for Strategic Studies or the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies.[8] 

The Indian military has little experience of swimming in the international political pool. Therefore, their concerns largely revolve around protecting their corporate interests, based on seeking foreign tenures and well advertised American military equipment. International politics is a dirty game. Recent revelations, on Falkland War have thrown adequate light on how the CIA, instigated the, Junta in Argentina to invade Falkland Island, and simultaneously, provided tacit support to Britain to win the war. 

The well-designed war elevated Margret Thatcher to the status of ‘iron lady’ giving her the required energy to push forward Regan’s privatization agenda in UK. On the other hand, poor General Galtieri, after losing the war was pushed into a corner in Buenos Aries. According to former CIA boss, William Casey, Argentinian General had “wrongly believed its (his) support for US covert operations in Central America would mean Washington's 'acquiescence' for the 1982 invasion.”[9]

Why look as far as Argentina - Pakistan military’s more than six decade old relationship with Pentagon offers a good example of how the armed forces that are mortgaged to the empire can wreck havoc for their own nation. The idea of strategic tie-up with US is fraught with great dangers of making our military an entity that can become bigger than the state. We need to reform our civil-military conundrum, but that cannot happen in the backdrop of US imperial demands. India is not so bankrupt that it needs to put the lives of its young men on the negotiating table to sustain their relevance in the US scheme of things. India cannot be Pentagon’s Back Office to make itself a great power. [10] 

[1]The Art of diplomacy, BBC News, 28 February, 2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6403643.stm

Also see, Mark Lamster, “The Art of Diplomacy”, The Wall Street Journal, , 10 October 2009.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574459753201012282.html


[2] “Deliberations of a Working Group on Military and Diplomacy”, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses(IDSA), New Delhi, January 2013, http://www.idsa.in/system/files/book_MilitaryDiplomacy.pdf

[3]Net Security Provider: India’s Out-of-Area Contingency Operations, IDSA Task Force Report, Magnum Publishers, 2012.


[4]“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense”, Department of Defence, USA, January 2012, http://www.defense.gov/news/defense_strategic_guidance.pdf


[5] Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography , eBook, location 697, 2013

[6] Siddharth Varadarajan, “U.S. cables show grand calculations underlying 2005 defence framework”, The Hindu, March 28, 2011


[7] S. Amer Latif, U.S.-India Military Engagement - steady as they go, A report of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, US, December 2012, http://csis.org/publication/us-india-military-engagement


[8] Ibid.


[9] Brendan Carlin, “US may have accidentally helped to start Falklands war by encouraging Argentinians to invade islands, admits ex-CIA chief”, Mail Online, 30 December 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2254755/US-accidentally-helped-start-Falklands-war-encouraging-Argentinians-invade-island-admits-ex-CIA-chief.html#ixzz2HTj1ffNA

[10] Atul Bharadwaj, India as Pentagon’s back office?, The Indian Express, 25 June 2003, http://teleradproviders.com/nbn/editorialstory.php?id=MTAwOQ%3D%3D

AN EMPIRE WITH A “JAIPUR FOOT”

The crescendo of “shrieks of class war” in Washington is shaking the foundations of post war “consensual empire”. The empire is falling apart with its two legs - money and military - unable to march in tandem. The problems plaguing the dollar are being diagnosed almost every second. However, Pentagon’s plans in the era of weak economics are not adequately highlighted by the Indian media and the strategic community that is busy making forays into the South China Sea.

The US armed forces need money to maintain military bases and ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. For the year 2012, Pentagon has proposed a budget of $671 billion. The White House reeling under the burden of huge deficits has asked Pentagon to slash its budgets and contribute at least $350-400 billion as notional savings over a period of ten years. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen is palpably unhappy with such orders. Speaking to a gathering of business executives in Washington he said that Pentagon would do its bit but was not obliged to be "billpayer for everyone." Such statements are in sharp contrast to what the former US Defence Secretary Roberts Gates said a few months ago about the cuts, “Any nation – could only be as militarily strong as it was economically dynamic and fiscally sound.”

Mullen and other military officials will have to answer many more uncomfortable questions in times of class war. The politically awake “Paul” is asking “Peter” - how come you have no money for me, but you obviously have money to spend on maintaining some 700 odd military bases abroad that are manned by roughly 2, 55,000 soldiers, accounting for roughly 50% of the global defence spending. Paul is also pointing fingers at money guzzlers like the F-35 project that is costing more than the Australian GDP (($924 billion). Pentagon has ordered 2,443 of these 5^th generation aircraft. Thousands of the not-so rich and poor Americans protesting on the Wall Street are asking – why should they tighten their belts when the country has enough money to train approximately 100,000 foreign soldiers annually in 180 countries around the world.

Undeterred by union-walas, the Defense Secretary Leon Panetta puts up a clichéd argument that budget cuts “would do catastrophic damage to our military and its ability to protect the country." Panetta, a true-blue ‘class’ warrior, and a votary of balancing the deficit and debt by slashing benefit and pension programmes favours building more military bases overseas and training more foreign personnel. It is for this reason that the US military is reopening its drone base in the Republic of Seychelles. The base opened in September 2009 was closed down early this year.

Seychelles  a beautiful island in the Indian Ocean is locates about 1000 miles off the east coast of Africa. The US plans to base MQ-9 Reaper UAV at the Mahe airport, Seychelles. Reaper, the pilotless vehicle has an endurance of 30 hours and can log maximum speeds up to 275 mph, this gives the US-wide range of options for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering over the vast stretches of Indian Ocean. In addition, the US also plans to use PC-3c Orion from Mahe. It is reported that drones are also to be fitted with Hellfire missiles and bombs. All this is being achieved by positioning only about 75 odd US soldiers on the island. The Seychelles base is in addition to the one already existing in Djibouti and another one is likely to open in Ethiopia. All this infrastructural development is happening in the name of ‘anti-piracy’. One doesn’t know when some eminent strategic thinker will start referring to these bases as a string of diamonds and make them as popular as the Chinese ‘string of pearls’.  

While we are continuing to focus on Chinese entry into Africa, the US is building robust inroads into African militaries. Four years ago, the US had launched an international security cooperation initiative - Africa Partnership Station (APS) - under the tutelage of   Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa. According to a press release of the US Sixth Fleet, “APS is aimed at strengthening global maritime partnerships through training and collaborative activities in order to improve maritime safety and security in Africa.” Last month, about 40 students from Tanzania, Kenya, Mauritius and the Seychelles were trained at Mauritius under the APS programme.

If in Africa, the raison d’être for military bases and alliances is piracy, in Asia, China is the bête noire that has to be dealt with. Since the pentagon is short on cash; countries like India and Japan are being wooed to help maintain the empire. The American expects these two strategic allies to help take a large chunk of their naval burden in the region. The India navy is being courted by the US Pacific Command to behave as a big daddy in the Indian Ocean and to act as an enfant terrible in the South China Sea. 

Japan is being urged to become a “normal” state and give up their fetish for ‘self-defence”. Washington has rekindled Tokyo’s imperial instincts, by helping it set up its first-ever post-war overseas military base in Djibouti. India too is being incorporated into the same game plan. Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on his recent visit to India, openly urged India to abandon any thoughts of making an alliance with China. Speaking at the Indian Council for World Affairs Shinzo Abe elaborated – “China will remain both an opportunity and a risk for a long time to come. America meanwhile is destined to become weaker in relative terms. But let us not jump onto a wrong bandwagon and choose a wrong partner… there is no question which side we, Japan and India, should take.” Listening to Shinzo Abe it was difficult to comprehend his motives for the visit -was it Indo-Japanese bilateral ties or to pitch for America?

The dollar-driven leg of the empire is on the verge of being amputated. This would make the American military leg limp before the last fall. But despite the glaring reality, the 21st century Churchills’ in America don’t want to give up on the empire so easily. Therefore, all “maritime democracies” are being asked to pitch in their naval resources to help make a “Jaipur foot” for the one-legged empire - limping from Tokyo to Delhi.