Archive for June 12th, 2013
How many Private Contractors in Afghanistan? Have any Idea What 108,000 of them are Doing there?
Posted on: June 12, 2013
108,000 Private Contractors Are 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 the number of private contractors in Afghanistan increasing, and that the Pentagon is also unable to tell what they are even doing there.
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) and about 18,000 private security contractors. 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 for every American soldier.
Aubrey Bloomfield published in World on June 4, 2013:
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 a private army will remain in the country for years.”
108000 Private Contractors Are in Afghanistan and We Have No Idea What Theyre Doing
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.”
The growing use of private contractors give lie to the idea of a withdrawal from the country, and 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.”
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.
Picture Credit: U.S. Air Force
Adonis Diaries 