The War on Terror Has Been Rebranded
On the Privatisation of the "Forever War"
After nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan, President Biden announced he was ending the country’s longest war on the twentieth anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks. Is this show politics or a genuine political move to end the long US presence in the region? You decide.
The Washington Post, AP News, USA Today and The Guardian would have us all believe that this was the case. But an exposé on the US war in Afghanistan by Jeremy Kuzmarov tells a different story as he writes: “Over 18,000 Pentagon contractors remain in Afghanistan, while official troops number 2,500. Joe Biden will withdraw this smaller group of soldiers while leaving behind US Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives — privatizing and downscaling the war, but not ending it.”
The New York Times was one of the few major media outlets to have hinted that its cousin publications’ headlines were a whitewash, noting:
Biden’s claim that he is ending the forever war is misleading. As The New York Times reported, the United States would remain after the formal departure of U.S. troops with a “shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations Forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives.” Their mission will be to “find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic state threats, current and former American officials said.”
What does this mean on the ground for people in Afghanistan? After all, this is a page ripped straight from former president Barak Obama’s playbook who renamed the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in 2009 to the “overseas contingency operations.” Sounds peaceful? Think again.
It was through Obama’s rebranding of US war in the region that his administration successfully created a vast drone warfare operation leading to ten times more airstrikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W. Bush, where during his administration he launched a total of 563 strikes, mostly by drones, that targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries, according to reports by The Bureau. And these numbers don’t include the deaths in Afghanistan where US airstrikes have resulted in 1,337 weapons dropped in 2016 alone.
Counter Jihad: America’s Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria by Brian Glyn Williams, tells the story of America's military campaigns in the Islamic world. Williams asks us to revise our understanding of the War on Terror, providing a retrospective on the extraordinary series of conflicts that saw the United States deploy more than two and a half million men and women to fight in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. While touted by the Obama administration as “surgical” and lean warfare, however, Williams’ book fails to critique how the use of drones, formally called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), have resulted in great numbers of civilian deaths, especially during the Obama administration.
Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron has investigated and written about the use of UAVs in the region and writes:
Many questions have been raised over how the employment of drones by the United States in the sovereign territory of Pakistan—mainly under the pretense of Just War—may be illegitimate and inconsistent with the alleged principles of accuracy and precision…., [T]he great number of civilian collateral deaths in ten years of operations raises doubts about the legitimacy of the surgical nature of drones and consequently incites investigations on their legality. In the case of Pakistan, this article demonstrates that the use of drones in many ways disregards the principles of Just War. In fact, it’s possible to suggest that not only is this practice disruptive to the moral and ethical system of just war, but may be illegal.
He concludes that there is no ethical or legal framework to legitimate the ostensible “surgical” efficacy of drone strikes and suggests establishing a “drone court” to hold the drone program accountable and to establish a U.S. government body that is independent of both the CIA and the Pentagon to review collateral deaths.
Similar to the Obama-era drone warfare programme, the Bush administration had implemented private forces to combat supposed al-Qaida militants using the services of private mercenary armies in the region. Journalist Jeremy Scahill has long documented the dirty wars undertaken by the US government in Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan noting the use of mercenary armies and drone warfare in the region which will forever be a stain on the country. Having investigated and written at length about Blackwater, a private contractor mercenary company active during the Bush administration, Scahill covered the events in 2007, when a group of Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad, for which four guards were convicted in the US, but were later pardoned on 22 December 2020 by then former president Donald Trump. Scahill also notes the complicity across the political aisle during the Obama administration when Joe Biden, then the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had the opportunity to present clear evidence against invading Iraq. Instead, Biden derailed clear and honest debate about whether to engage in war against Iraq noting that Biden “refused to call critical witnesses who could have provided expert witness on the lack of WMD in Iraq.”
In February 2009, Blackwater announced that it would be once again renamed, this time to “Xe Services LLC,” as part of a company-wide restructuring plan after which it reorganised its business units, injected a corporate governance and ethics program, and launched an independent committee of outside experts to supervise compliance structures. The next month, founder and CEO Erik Prince stepped down and in December 2009, he stopped any involvement in day-to-day operations. Prince has not left the military industry by any measure, however, and in 2010 he was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to found a new company, Reflex Responses (R2), that involved creating an 800-man unit of foreign fighters for the UAE while overseeing recruitment for private military companies, such as Executive Outcomes, a former South African private military firm that was hired by several African governments during the 1990s to defeat violent rebellions in addition to protecting oil and diamond reserves.
It is also no coincidence that despite Scahill’s successful work on uncovering the scandal of Blackwater, Erik Prince has since made a comeback during the Trump administration and has been pushing for the privatisation of the war in Afghanistan. In 2018, he laid out the blueprint which was preceded by his having a closed meeting on the subject with members of the House Intelligence Committee on 30 November 2017 among several other meetings in the White House. Prince pitched privatising the war in Afghanistan while offering to supply Trump with a private spy service intended to circumvent the U.S. intelligence community. As TheIntercept reported, his proposals did not succeed, even if he had support from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Kuzmarov’s analysis of DynCorp International having received 69 per cent of State Department funding from 2002 to 2013 is only part of the larger picture. Last year, DynCorp International was awarded $185M by the U.S. Army Sustainment Command to “continue supporting U.S. Army in southern Afghanistan” and in 2019 the U.S. Army Contracting Command awarded DynCorp International a $32.8 million annual time-and-materials contract to train, advise and assist the Security Ministries of Afghanistan. While these contracts are winding down, in December 2019 DynCorp International was again awarded a task order by Army Contracting Command, valued at $554.1 million just a month after DynCorp International was taken over by Amentum, “a premier global technical and engineering services partner supporting critical programs of national significance across defense, security, intelligence, energy and environment.” DynCorp International currently employs numerous “security specialists” whose roles range from “embedded police advisor site lead” to “protective security specialist” to “security supervisor” among many more.
There are many hands in the private military and police industry: in February this year Leidos Inc was awarded $34,115,686 to support services for the Afghan Air Force and the Ministry of the Interior's Special Mission Wing and L-3 Fuzing and Ordnance Systems Inc (part of BAE) was awarded $25,153,211 to “to purchase M734A1 multi-option fuze for mortars and Option VI M783 point detonating/delay fuzes.” Textron Systems Corp has been awarded a $9,730,016 contract for “force-protection efforts” that include “a non-developmental contractor-owned and contractor-operated unmanned aerial system, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance solution to perform operational, engineering and sustainment efforts necessary to effectively execute pre-deployment, deployment operations, post-deployment and engineering support activities.” Dyncorp International LLC was awarded a $42,000,000 contract for aviation maintenance services in Afghanistan and Iraq and Salient Federal Services was warded $24.9m for “mission Critical IT communications” in Afghanistan. Doing the math, it doesn’t sound like the war in Afghanistan is being wound down, but instead is being ramped up on the private front.
With the lessons learned from Blackwater to the recent outsourcing of military and police in the region, it is important to look at the way the US rebrands its wars and covers up the information that reveals the illegal legacy it has created in the Middle East and beyond. As it stands, last week’s headlines in major media are a smokescreen as it is clear that the US has no intention of ending its “forever war” either as a symbolic gesture to those Americans who perished on 9/11 or to end the suffering of the Afghani people. As The New York Times reported, Biden never claimed to end the war and reserved the right to carry out airstrikes and raids against suspected threats in Afghanistan indefinitely—from drones to long-range bombers and spy networks—Biden has simply committed himself to a covert war in Afghanistan without any transparency or due process for the many who are killed by UAVs and private militias.
Announcing the “end” of the war in Afghanistan where service members who weren’t even alive at the time of the 11 September attacks were deployed alongside young troops following in the steps of their parents who served in the same war, Biden stated, “The war in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking.” He might have been sincere in the bare bones of his phrasing, but it is incontrovertibly clear that Biden has simply rebranded the “forever war” in Afghanistan diverting it into the multigenerational hands of private industry.