Afghanistan Should Say No to Privatizing America’s Longest War in History

For good reasons, the Afghan government has denounced as ‘destructive and divisive’ a proposal by Erik Prince, the founder of private military contractor Blackwater, to privatize the 17-year-old war in the Asian country.

"In no manner does the government of Afghanistan condone this destructive and divisive debate," a statement from the Afghan Office of the National Security Council said on Thursday, adding that the Afghan government and people would never “allow the counter-terrorism fight to become a private, for-profit business.”

Prince promoted his proposal on Kabul television last week for the government to allow foreign contractors to support Afghan forces in the fight against the Taliban, claiming it could end the war in "six months." Prince's idea, which first surfaced last year during President Donald Trump’s review of the Afghanistan strategy, has already raised ethical and security concerns among the international community:

A- The employees of the notorious private military company have been charged with killing Iraqi civilians and wounding many others in the past, using gunfire and grenades at a busy Baghdad intersection on September 16, 2007. An FBI agent once described the atrocity as the “My Lai massacre of Iraq.” They were never held to account, although Washington claims otherwise.

B- Afghanistan is still suffering from insecurity and violence years after the US and its allies invaded the country as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror. The military invasion removed the Taliban from power, but their militancy continues to this day – with a helping hand from ISIL, Al-Qaeda and US-led occupying forces.

C- It was former CIA director Leon Panetta and his top lieutenants - many of them holdovers from the Bush administration - that farmed out assassinations to their Blackwater subsidiary in Iraq. More astonishing, though, is that the holdovers continued to function as CIA’s top managers under president Barack Obama. In other words, the Blackwater program is still ongoing and that explains why the Trump administration has decided to hike the number of its private mercenary forces in Afghanistan.

D- There is a loophole, known as “Operational Flexibility”, created by just one sentence in the language of the National Security Act of 1947. The sentence can be abused as authorization for all manner of crime by the US government. The former Obama team exploited that ambiguous language very well. The Act stipulates that the CIA director shall: "Perform such functions and duties (assassinations) related to intelligence affecting the national security as the President or the National Security Council may from time to time direct."

E- Make no mistake. The proposed new mission is about "Operational Flexibility", where Blackwater mercenaries will be free to roam the streets of Kabul where the gloves come off with no limits. The "gloves" to which many US officials refer means legal restrictions are gone. And with “no limits” they mean there will be no limitations on the pursuit of Taliban militants in Afghanistan. 

F- If the proposal by Prince goes ahead, and if the Afghan government agrees, mercenaries like Blackwater will be dispatched to Afghanistan on death contracts for “excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy” assassinations and “accidental” shootings of innocent civilians under the pretext of “Operational Flexibility”, and as usual no organization in the world, including the United Nations, would ever be able to hold them to account.

G- Seeing the Taliban as the problem is what the War Party continues to do with its proposed privatized re-entry into Afghanistan. After all, occupation is great, whatever it takes to secure profits for the murderous Military-Industrial Complex and its private killers, even if that requires a contractor tsunami under a false premise to defeat the Taliban.

In this, the Blackwater mercenaries will be among the most flagrant killers, but hardly alone. There will be also numerous reported “incidents” of mass murder conducted by US soldiers, Special Forces operatives, and private contractors in the coming weeks and months. Many more such incidents will be unrecorded, because no victims will ever survive to tell the story. 

That’s why the Afghan government should say no to the Blackwater business venture. Those mercenary outfits should never be allowed to have the blood of countless civilians on their hands all over again. The war criminals of American imperialism will never be brought to justice, and as is customary, no human rights organization in the world, including the United Nations, would ever be able to stop them.

The truth is, the people of Afghanistan want peace, not war and certainly not American mercenaries, who breed war and suffering. They know first-hand that for-profit warriors proliferate armed conflict - as long as there is someone to pay, there will always be a sectarian war to start, expand or prolong. History of Iraq shows us that they often maraud between contracts, preying on the innocent. These private killers should never be allowed to operate in Afghanistan, where political will for peace is still the only need that must be met and cherished by the people and their government.

Source: Fars News