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[casi] privatization of US military




Excerpt:
"Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in Washington estimates that,
after the latest gulf war, there are five times as many military contractors
on the ground in Iraq as in 1991. Between 1994 and 2002 the U.S. Department
of Defense entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military
companies for a total value of roughly $300 billion, according to the Center
for Public Integrity."

And note this remark:
"In areas as varied as Croatia, Colombia and Sierra Leone, there have been
reports that they have even been drawn into combat. This is no longer
necessarily a bad thing, says Peter Takirambudde, Human Rights Watch’s
executive director for Africa."

No longer a bad thing??!! Raises more questions about HRW

Full article below.

-Rania Masri

=============


Dogs of Peace

U.S. GIs are finally in Liberia. In the next crisis, will private soldiers
replace them on the front lines?

By Eric Pape and Michael Meyer
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
http://www.msnbc.com/news/953542.asp#BODY

Aug. 25-Sept. 1 issue — Harrier jets screamed over-head. Cobra gunships
armed with rockets circled the city. Sea Knight helicopters lumbered through
billowing columns of yellow smoke marking the landing sites where U.S.
Marines alighted last week to seize control of war-torn Monrovia.
        THEY WERE WELCOMED as heroes. Shouting crowds cheered and clasped
the soldiers’ hands. Women sang gospel songs, grateful for a sign that the
fighting that has claimed more than 1,000 lives over the past two months
might finally be over. An orgy of looting ensued as hordes of hungry people
broke into the port in search of food and medicine after two months of near
famine. But there was no denying the upwelling of relief in Liberia’s
beleaguered capital. “Thank you, George Bush,” people cried. “Thank God,
America.”
        A happy ending? Perhaps. Optimists hailed the intervention as a
victory for international humanitarianism, even a model for the future. The
reality is more ambiguous. After all, the American force in Liberia numbers
only 200. They join fewer than 800 Nigerian peacekeepers, dispatched by the
15-member Union of West African States early in August. It took months of
dithering and diplomacy to put together even this modest mission, in the
face of unspeakable atrocities. Overstretched in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Washington made clear that its participation was at best reluctant and would
be neither large nor long-lasting. There’s talk of sending U.N. peacekeepers
in October. But if fighting erupts anew, either in Monrovia or in the two
thirds of the country controlled by the rebels, those plans could fall
apart. And what happens when, almost inevitably, another humanitarian crisis
erupts elsewhere in the world?
        It all begs a question: is there not another way to deal with global
human calamities? Which brings up a seductive (and controversial) proposal
from an obscure British-American company called Northbridge Services Group.
In June, as Liberia was descending into anarchy, the firm offered to slip an
elite brigade of hired commandos into Monrovia to arrest the country’s
president, Charles Taylor, the man indicted by an international tribunal for
war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone and widely considered responsible for
the killing and chaos that brought Liberia to its knees. No waiting for
international peacekeepers. No interminable diplomatic negotiations. No risk
of dead American or multinational soldiers. No more war in Liberia. Had the
offer been accepted, the company claimed in a statement, “many innocent
lives, lost by the failure of the international community to act quickly,
could have been saved.” And Northbridge promised to do all this for a fee of
$4 million.
        Unsurprisingly, leaders in Whitehall and Foggy Bottom scoffed. The
idea of involving mercenaries—or “private military companies,” as they’ve
more recently come to be called—in international crises has long been
politically touchy. Doubts about the company itself added to the skepticism.
Just this April, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw castigated Northbridge
after hearing reports that it might fight alongside rebel armies in Cote
d’Ivoire. Still, Northbridge’s proposal may not be all that farfetched.
Across the world, in fact, the privatization of war—and peacekeeping—has
already become an established feature of geopolitical life.
        Consider some numbers. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in
Washington estimates that, after the latest gulf war, there are five times
as many military contractors on the ground in Iraq as in 1991. Between 1994
and 2002 the U.S. Department of Defense entered into more than 3,000
contracts with private military companies for a total value of roughly $300
billion,, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a journalism watch
group in Washington, D.C. Contractors are training security forces in Iraq,
flying gunships in Colombia, training civilian police in Bosnia and Kosovo
and protecting Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai.
        In areas as varied as Croatia, Colombia and Sierra Leone, there have
been reports that they have even been drawn into combat. This is no longer
necessarily a bad thing, says Peter Takirambudde, Human Rights Watch’s
executive director for Africa. The old notion of the mercenary as a hired
killer is outdated. Properly managed and given a specific mandate by
international organizations or sovereign governments, Takirambudde believes,
private armies can be a useful tool in coping with the world’s humanitarian
emergencies. “It is not a crazy idea,” he says. “Times have changed.”
        Hiring mercenaries for humanitarian purposes gained legitimacy over
the past decade. In the early 1990s Executive Outcomes, a classic South
African mercenary group, made a name for itself stepping into Angola’s
decades-long civil war, seizing lucrative diamond mines for the government.
Then came 1994 and the genocide in Rwanda. Executive Outcomes offered to
deploy 1,500 soldiers to create havens and stop the mayhem at a cost of $150
million over six months. According to various reports, the plan was
considered by the Clinton administration but rejected. In the ensuing
carnage, 800,000 Rwandans were killed in little more than 100 days.
        In 1995 Sierra Leone’s elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah hired
Executive Outcomes to defend his government against the brutal rebels of the
Revolutionary United Front. The company arrived with Russian helicopter
gunships, artillery and air-fuel explosives and within a year quelled the
uprising and drove the rebels out. Some humanitarian groups complained of
“collateral damage” wrought by the company’s savage air attacks. But many in
Sierra Leone, especially ordinary people, regarded these soldiers of fortune
as national heroes.
        Since then, private military companies have taken on a growing array
of generally less visible—but no less comprehensive—roles. In Iraq, private
military companies from the United States guard sites vulnerable to
guerrilla sabotage. A number of companies have sent advisers to train the
country’s new security and police forces, and many more are on the way. In
Colombia, the Washington-based DynCorp is training Colombian forces on
coca-leaf eradication and its contractors are piloting planes that destroy
coca fields. DynCorp also trains civilian police in Bosnia and employed most
of the American contingent for the U.N. civilian mission in Kosovo. When it
came time to replace Karzai’s U.S. Special Forces bodyguards, whom did the
U.S. State Department turn to? DynCorp.
        Many American experts see this trend toward “privatization” as
desirable, as long as it does not involve actual combat and comes under the
auspices of legitimate international or national authority. Col. Thomas
Dempsey, a U.S. defense attache to Liberia in the late 1990s, argues that
only a nation and its leaders have the right to send its people to war.
“When I kill, it is because my president told me to,” he says. If a
contractor shoots someone, it’s for another reason: “to get paid.” But
private military companies are correct in seeing an opportunity. “In Rwanda,
the international community did not step up to the plate,” he says. “There
are conflicts around the world that require external intervention.
Privatized intervention offers a tool to do that.”
        Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a commander of U.S. forces in the first gulf
war, makes a related point. The United States, these days, simply does not
have enough personnel to perform all the tasks required of it. “Our most
precious asset is people, and there are whole categories of things that lend
themselves to being outsourced,” he says. He dismisses outfits like
Northbridge, likening hired fighters to “pirates” and Mafia hit men. But he
agrees that it is almost inevitable that the United States, as its military
presence around the world grows, will turn more and more to private
companies in fulfilling its missions abroad.
        The idea is finding currency among foreign governments as well. In
Britain, the Foreign Office put out a green paper last year that was
surprisingly neutral on private military companies. Though stopping short of
endorsing them, neither did it ban them, as was sought by some members of
Parliament. Instead, the document listed a series of options including
licensing responsible companies. “Today’s world is a far cry from the 1960s,
when private military activity usually meant mercenaries of the rather
unsavory kind involved in postcolonial or neocolonial conflicts,” wrote
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. “The British government would consider the
selective use of private military companies but would not go anywhere near a
combat role,” says Mariyam Hasham, a researcher at the Royal United Services
Institute in London. Barring that, and assuming such companies would not
work against the government’s own goals, the sky is the limit.
        France, by contrast, has taken a tougher stand, passing the
Participation in Mercenary Activity Act on April 3, effectively broadening a
ban on individual mercenaries to include corporations. Africa is in
“turmoil” partly because of the actions of private military companies,
French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told the Senate before the
vote. That said, France retains its famous (some would say infamous) Foreign
Legion, a quasi-private military organization active most recently in Cote
d’Ivoire.
        Inevitably, controversy over the use of private military companies
will grow, and not only because they are being used more and more. The line
between combat, on the one hand, and advising or logistical support on the
other is inherently fuzzy. Indeed, there are instances where the line has
already been crossed, apparently with the knowledge or even encouragement of
the governments involved. According to some press reports, for instance,
contractors from Military Professional Resources Inc. in Virginia helped
plan Croatia’s Operation Storm, an offensive supported by the United States
against the Bosnian-Serb Army that turned the tide in the Balkan war and set
the stage for the Dayton peace accords. The company vociferously denied the
accusations. In 1998 International Charter Inc. of Oregon flew transport
helicopters in Liberia and Sierra Leone to back up Nigerian peacekeepers.
When fired upon, they fired back, according to the Center for Public
Integrity, which claims that ICI received a letter from the U.S. ambassador
in Sierra Leone authorizing them to do so.
        In some cases, regular troops can be less professional than the
retired special ops soldiers staffing companies like Northbridge. West
African peacekeeping forces from Togo and Nigeria, notes Human Rights
Watch’s Takirambudde, come from militaries with a track record of rights
abuses. That can have consequences worse than ineffectiveness. Last week in
Liberia, soldiers from the staff of Nigeria’s commanding officer were seen
loading looted food and consumer goods into a truck—spoils, they unabashedly
admitted, for the general.
        Liberia may thus become a test case—not so much for humanitarian
interventionism, but for the degree to which the international community
turns to the private sector for help. Clearly, enormous amounts of
international aid will be required to feed and stabilize the country. The
U.N. special envoy to Liberia, Jacques Klein, an American career diplomat,
has called for a “massive airlift” and a troop presence close to the 17,500
sent to Sierra Leone during its civil war—a de facto U.N. trusteeship. “If
you’re going to do anything in Liberia,” he told reporters after the U.S.
Marines went in, “you have to control the whole country, including its
borders.” All this would take at least two years, he added, and would
include recruiting a team of international civil servants to re-create the
country’s key ministries, form a caretaker government and create a
professional Liberian army.
        Hundreds of foreign cops would help train an entirely new police
force. Young fighters on both the rebel and government sides would have to
be demilitarized and educated. In short, an entire society must be rebuilt,
and a new generation of private soldiers will no doubt find some role in the
reconstruction.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
With Tom Masland in Monrovia, Adam Piore in New York, Marie Valla in Paris
and William Underhill in London

       © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.






























        France, by contrast, has taken a tougher stand, passing the
Participation in Mercenary Activity Act on April 3, effectively broadening a
ban on individual mercenaries to include corporations. Africa is in
“turmoil” partly because of the actions of private military companies,
French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told the Senate before the
vote. That said, France retains its famous (some would say infamous) Foreign
Legion, a quasi-private military organization active most recently in Cote
d’Ivoire.
        Inevitably, controversy over the use of private military companies
will grow, and not only because they are being used more and more. The line
between combat, on the one hand, and advising or logistical support on the
other is inherently fuzzy. Indeed, there are instances where the line has
already been crossed, apparently with the knowledge or even encouragement of
the governments involved. According to some press reports, for instance,
contractors from Military Professional Resources Inc. in Virginia helped
plan Croatia’s Operation Storm, an offensive supported by the United States
against the Bosnian-Serb Army that turned the tide in the Balkan war and set
the stage for the Dayton peace accords. The company vociferously denied the
accusations. In 1998 International Charter Inc. of Oregon flew transport
helicopters in Liberia and Sierra Leone to back up Nigerian peacekeepers.
When fired upon, they fired back, according to the Center for Public
Integrity, which claims that ICI received a letter from the U.S. ambassador
in Sierra Leone authorizing them to do so.
        In some cases, regular troops can be less professional than the
retired special ops soldiers staffing companies like Northbridge. West
African peacekeeping forces from Togo and Nigeria, notes Human Rights
Watch’s Takirambudde, come from militaries with a track record of rights
abuses. That can have consequences worse than ineffectiveness. Last week in
Liberia, soldiers from the staff of Nigeria’s commanding officer were seen
loading looted food and consumer goods into a truck—spoils, they unabashedly
admitted, for the general.
        Liberia may thus become a test case—not so much for humanitarian
interventionism, but for the degree to which the international community
turns to the private sector for help. Clearly, enormous amounts of
international aid will be required to feed and stabilize the country. The
U.N. special envoy to Liberia, Jacques Klein, an American career diplomat,
has called for a “massive airlift” and a troop presence close to the 17,500
sent to Sierra Leone during its civil war—a de facto U.N. trusteeship. “If
you’re going to do anything in Liberia,” he told reporters after the U.S.
Marines went in, “you have to control the whole country, including its
borders.” All this would take at least two years, he added, and would
include recruiting a team of international civil servants to re-create the
country’s key ministries, form a caretaker government and create a
professional Liberian army.
        Hundreds of foreign cops would help train an entirely new police
force. Young fighters on both the rebel and government sides would have to
be demilitarized and educated. In short, an entire society must be rebuilt,
and a new generation of private soldiers will no doubt find some role in the
reconstruction.
       

With Tom Masland in Monrovia, Adam Piore in New York, Marie Valla in Paris
and William Underhill in London
       
       © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.



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