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Blackwater founder is pushing for privatisation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan
A new crop of senior American officials in Afghanistan has raced to contain a dual crisis on the battlefield and in a potentially explosive election dispute. But it is a different U.S. figure — the mercenary executive Erik Prince — who has been the talk of Kabul these days. More than a year after first laying out his plan to President Donald Trump to privatise the U.S. war in Afghanistan with a cadre of contractors — and a private air force — Mr. Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security firm that became infamous for killing civilians in Iraq, has seemingly been everywhere.
Sales pitch
And as he has made his sales pitch directly to a host of influential Afghans, he has frequently been introduced as an adviser to Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Prince is pushing his plan at a particularly vulnerable time for the country. Afghan security forces are dying at a record number of 30 to 40 a day largely in a defensive posture against Taliban that has gained territory. The government is beset by repeated political crises as parliamentary elections, delayed for three years, are scheduled for next month. Presidential elections are set for April. Interviews with a half-dozen political figures who have met Mr. Prince in recent months reveal an executive determined to sell a vision of how his contractors could offer an official military withdrawal from Afghanistan to a war-weary American public and President. Mr. Prince is positioning his pitch as a cheaper middle option between continuing a largely failed military strategy at an expensive annual tab of tens of billions of dollars, and a complete security withdrawal that some fear would abandon 17 years of costly Western efforts to remake Afghanistan. Mr. Prince laid out what he called a “rationalisation” of private contracting already happening: a leaner mission of 6,000 private contractors providing “skeletal structure support” and training for Afghan forces. Small teams of Special Forces veterans embedded with Afghan battalions for about three years, he said, would ensure the continuity lacking now with U.S. soldiers rotating out every year.NY Times
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/erik-prince-the-new-talk-of-kabul/article25139559.ece
