Saturday, March 09, 2019

Bring back the mercenaries

I am sort of avoiding headlines, but this story at AlJ has an interview with Blackwater's Erik Prince about a possible solution to the US pull out from Iraq and Afghanistan: Hire private armies to do the work.

LINK



During the early years of the Bush administration's so-called "war on terror", Blackwater grew into one of the most profitable private military contractors in the US. Over the years, it received over a billion dollars worth of government contracts to provide security to top US officials, train members of the Iraqi army and police, and support the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Department of Defense's counternarcotics programme in Afghanistan.
But following the 2007 Nisour Square incident, wherein Blackwater employees killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians at a traffic circle, the firm and its founder shot to international notoriety, highlighting the clear dangers of using armed military contractors on the battlefield. Prince, a former US Navy SEAL, has since been channelling his efforts to train security personnel abroad, including most recently in China, where he launched the Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, a security and logistics company.

Hmm.. China? from the website, the Frontier Services group sounds like China is doing this to guard their vulnerable expats working for Chinese business investments in places like Pakistan, the various Silk Road countries, and Africa...
He has also offered a proposal to end the costly, ongoing US-led war in Afghanistan - the longest in the US history - by privatizing the bulk of it: replacing thousands of US troops with private contractors and sending NATO forces home. But is he really the man to bring peace to the war-torn country?
not my area of expertise, but this guy has met with Trumpieboy in the past, so like a lot of Trumpieboy's ideas, it looks like when he is given a choice of A (stay there with US troops) or B (remove all US troops), he will chose C (outsource it to private armies).

The history of private armies in Africa is mixed: Protecting mines and other resources during times of chaos against "freedom fighters" so beloved of the left (despite the fact that they were murderous thugs) got the western left more upset than Cuba's military troops who did the same thing back then.

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