Center for a New American Security

I can't be sure, of course, but I would guess my readership is pretty near the last group of U.S. readers on the internet who need to be reminded of this day and what it means. For our readers outside the United States, today is Memorial Day -- a day when we remember those who have fallen on the field of battle. Again, I suspect my readers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc. are more likely to know men and women who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan than the average reader browsing espn.go.com to check out news from the NBA playoffs this morning.

Many thanks to all of our readers who have served the allied nations in combat, and especial thanks to those who have sacrificed in blood.

This morning, a few articles of note caught my eye. The first was this article on civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should we accord them the same honor we extend to servicemen?

But don't expect President Obama to remember or thank the contractor personnel who died supporting our troops or diplomatic missions. Instead, expect to see contractor personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be portrayed as expendable profiteers, adventure seekers or marginalized members of society who are not entitled to the same respect or value given to members of the military.

While I agree that contractors are often subjected to cartoonish stereotypes like the ones mentioned above, I respectfully disagree on the question of whether or not they should be accorded the same respect given to our fallen servicemen. Contractors are active not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but all over the world in environments where the U.S. military is not present. They often work for large, transnational corporations which negotiate contracts to provide certain services and then reimburse their workers with financial incentives in league with the difficulty and danger of those services. While contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan may be great patriots (and are often veterans themselves), they find themselves conducting operations there and elsewhere working for for-profit corperations. That's a lot different than a kid in 2-22nd Infantry on patrol in Paktia Province or wherever. So, sorry -- circumstances matter. And while the U.S. military cannot do its job without the support -- especially the logistical and engineering support -- provided by expeditionary contractors like KBR and Bechtel, those individual contractors should not be honored in the same way we honor our nation's fallen soldiers and sailors.

Second, Paul Farnan has a nice apology (in the classical sense of the word) for General David McKiernan:

Over the past year, I have seen our focus in Afghanistan shift from kinetic military operations to one of engaging the population, building the capacity of the Afghan government, and ensuring that the military's top priority is the training and mentoring of the Afghan army and police. Integrated strategic planning with the United Nations and the Afghan government is now the rule rather than the exception, as it was when McKiernan arrived last June. The general has traveled around the country and has held countless forums, known as shuras, with Afghans in various localities. He has engaged local and provincial leaders one on one to hear their concerns and ensure that they understood the intentions of the international coalition. All of our Special Forces operations combined cannot win the support of the Afghan people the way these shuras do. [AM: And to whom is that remark directed toward?] ...

This struggle is not about killing insurgents. We have killed more insurgents than we can count over the past seven years and have moved no closer to victory by doing so. This struggle is about the Afghan population. Afghans must believe that their government will provide them greater security and opportunity for prosperity than the insurgency will. We are not naive; we know that military operations must continue and that some people must be killed -- but under McKiernan a more holistic approach to winning the peace has been our focus.

This is great, if it is true, and I have no reason not to believe Mr. Farnan. As my readership has heard me say on this blog and on various mainstream media, a perception had grown that McKiernan did not "get" counterinsurgency warfare. This may be unfair. And again, as I said on NPR and the Rachel Maddow Show and elsewhere, it appears as if General McKiernan was not so much a bad general -- he actually seems to have been quite competent -- as just not the right guy for the specific job. Or maybe not the guy that Secretary Gates and General Petraeus felt would either win the war as fast as they needed to see progress toward that end or with whom they did not feel as comfortable working as with General McChrystal. I don't know. But I do know this: as excited as I was and am to see a real sense of urgency about Afghanistan, and as excited I was to see a certain ruthlessness in President Obama, Secretary Gates, and General Petraeus, I also have a tinge of sadness: General McKiernan was hard done by, and I think the U.S. Army officer corps and most commenters recognize that unless he was guilty of some kind of insubordination we do not know about, then his relief could have been handled in classier way by all parties.

Yochi Dreazen, just back from Afghanistan, has a must-read article in the Wall Street Journal on the proliferation of private security companies in Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A contingent of Army Rangers was moving toward a target in late October when it came under fire from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Fearful the team would be wiped out, U.S. officers called in air strikes. When the dust settled, 22 Afghans lay dead and six American soldiers were wounded.

Just who these dead Afghans were is still unclear. Afghan and some U.S. officials say they were hired by an Afghan road-construction firm to protect nearby workers. The security company confirms their employment. But other U.S. military officials say the Afghans were militants who targeted American troops.

Armed private security companies are proliferating in Afghanistan -- hired in many cases to protect Afghan companies doing work for the U.S. And for the American forces who regularly encounter these armed men, it is perilously hard to discern their identities and their loyalties. Some of these guards may be linked to the militant leaders or drug traffickers who regularly battle U.S. troops. ...

Three officers from the military's Special Operations Command, which oversees elite units such as the Rangers, Delta Force and the Seals, disputed the notion that the dead Afghans were legitimate security personnel.

"Why they were awake at 0200 local, and firing accurately (on a moonless night) at a patrol, and their compound looked like an armed fortress -- all unanswered questions," a senior commander with U.S. Special Operations Command said via email. "The circumstances ... did not point to any actions in good faith."

With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors' critical involvement in the American war effort.

At the end of last September, there were "over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.

Contractors "have become part of our total force, a concept that DoD [the Defense Department] must manage on an integrated basis with our military forces," he also said in prepared testimony for a hearing yesterday of the Senate homeland security subcommittee. "Frankly," he continued, "we were not adequately prepared to address" what he termed "this unprecedented scale of our dependence on contractors."

No, no we were not. And no matter how you feel about PMCs -- pro, con, neutral -- the fact that we cannot exert some control over their actions in a war zone is not good. In a combat zone, there are always going to be things out of the control of the commander -- fog of war and all that -- but roving bands of armed Americans should not be one of those things. Abu Muqawama has written a bit about PMCs -- often called "Private Security Companies" (PSC) -- before on this blog's pages, and he has still yet to find a common-sense solution to the presence of PMCs on the battlefield much better than the one Malcom Nance's 9-step proposal on the Small Wars Journal blog a while back:

1. Establish an Army controlled Force Protection Command (FPC) for PSCs.
2. Properly Arm the FPC PSCs for Counterinsurgency.
3. Standardize the entire FPC force.
4. Dispel Mercenary Title.
5. End the Mass Contracting of Third Country National (TCNs).
6. Implement Strict Accountability.
7. Make PSCs An Integral Part of the Strategy … Legally.
8. Remove Colonel Cathcart and Korn from the battlefield.*
9. Hold Everyone to the Same Standard.

It's awfully tough to do #6, though, when we're pressing for loopholes exempting contractors from Iraqi Law. Abu Muqawama understands why we're doing this, but it doesn't send the right message. Rather, it looks as if we're not going to hold PMCs responsible for their actions. Again.

WASHINGTON — With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire in 11 months, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.

...the American quest for protections for civilian contractors is expected to be particularly vexing, because in no other country are contractors working with the American military granted protection from local laws.

*Read Catch-22, kids. Otherwise, check out Malcolm's original piece for an explanation. (Abu Muqawama's favorite scene from Catch-22 -- click here.)

Abu Muqawama woke up early this morning, hit the gym with his cousin, drank a protein shake, and then packed all the guns into the back of the truck to hit the shooting range. "Nothing celebrates the birth of the Baby Jesus like firepower," Abu Muqawama's cousin remarked in between magazine changes. Indeed. And there's no better taste than a handful of beef jerky with the just faintest hint of gun oil. Yum.

It's just as well Abu Muqawama didn't stay at home and read the papers, because since he returned he's read nothing but bad news -- including that peach of a story Charlie linked to below this post.

First off, the PMC story gets worse and worse. (And those brave few souls who stick their necks out to defend PMCs -- you know who you are -- get quieter and quieter.) Check out this article from the Washington Post, which includes the counterinsurgency quote of the day, courtesy of T.X. Hammes:

I still think, from a pure counterinsurgency standpoint, armed contractors are an inherently bad idea, because you cannot control the quality, you cannot control the action on the ground, but you're held responsible for everything they do.

Amen.

And if that doesn't depress you enough for Christmas Eve, try this book review:

Upon hearing mention of people who have caused death and destruction in our world, such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, most decent people will react negatively. While Dr. Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan may not elicit the same reaction, it's high time to include him on that list...

It's one thing when some left-wing congressman from Vermont starts yapping about Blackwater in an effort to score some cheap political points against President Bush. It's another thing entirely when the Federal Bureau of Investigations finds that 14 of 17 contractor shootings in Iraq were unjustified. This should raise some difficult questions -- even for Abu Muqawama's legions of Blackwater-defenders -- because, keep in mind, the big picture here is the ongoing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. And these shootings, well, don't help that at all.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, according to civilian and military officials briefed on the case.

The F.B.I. investigation into the shootings in Baghdad is still under way, but the findings, which indicate that the company’s employees recklessly used lethal force, are already under review by the Justice Department.

Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek indictments, and some officials have expressed pessimism that adequate criminal laws exist to enable them to charge any Blackwater employee with criminal wrongdoing. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to discuss the matter.

The case could be one of the first thorny issues to be decided by Michael B. Mukasey, who was sworn in as attorney general last week. He may be faced with a decision to turn down a prosecution on legal grounds at a time when a furor has erupted in Congress about the administration’s failure to hold security contractors accountable for their misdeeds.

Representative David E. Price, a North Carolina Democrat who has sponsored legislation to extend American criminal law to contractors serving overseas, said the Justice Department must hold someone accountable for the shootings.

Goodness me. Afghanistan Watch and afghanistanica have posted the in-flight voice recorder transcript to a Blackwater-piloted flight that killed three U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This makes for harrowing and morbid reading. Blackwater apologists and U.S. tax-payers -- not to mention the families of the soldiers -- will not want to read what follows. The full transcript is even more disturbing than this excerpt:

The transcript and recording start at 0318:37 (7:18:37 a.m. local time)

PILOT: I hope I'm goin' in the right valley.

CO-PILOT: That one or this one?

PILOT: I'm just gunna go up this one.

CO-PILOT: Well, we, we've never or at least I've never done this Farah.

PILOT: We'll just see where this leads.

CO-PILOT: Twenty seven million people in this country, boy, you wouldn't wouldn't guess that cause there just everybody's scattered out.

PILOT: Yeah.

PILOT: But I'm now I mean I was really surprised at how you can almost always look down and see somebody or somethin' er.

CO-PILOT: Yeah, yeah, there's seem to be dwellings just about every where you go.

CO-PILOT: Yeah this is fun!

PILOT: We're not suppose to be havin' fun though.

CO-PILOT: Exactly.

PILOT: No fun allowed god-(expletive).

CO-PILOT: It's supposed to be all work we can't enjoy any of it.

PILOT: Exactly.

CO-PILOT: Cause we're getting' paid too much to be havin' fun.

PILOT: You're god-(unintelligible) right.

...

(Sound similar to stall warning tone single beep)

MECHANIC: Got a way out?

PILOT: Yeah.

PILOT: We we can do a one eighty up in here.

MECHANIC: Yeah, I'd pick one side or the other to... ah.

PILOT: Drop a drop a quarter flaps.

PILOT: (expletive).

MECHANIC: Okay, yeah, you're... ah.

CO-PILOT: Yeah let's turn around.

PILOT: Yeah, drop a quarter flaps.

MECHANIC: Yeah you need to--ah--make a decision.

(Sound of heavy breathing starts)

PILOT: God (expletive)!

MECHANIC: Hundred, ninety knots, call off his airspeed for him (unintelligible).

(sound similar to stall warning starts and continues until end)

PILOT: Ah (expletive, expletive)!

MECHANIC: Call it off, help him out, call off his airspeed for him (unintelligible) butch.

CO-PILOT: You got ninety-five.

CO-PILOT: Ninety-five.

PILOT: Oh God!

PILOT: Oh (expletive)!

MECHANIC: We're goin' down.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: God!

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: God!

(End of recording: 0350:00, 7.50 a.m. local time)

Source: National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB)

The original article from Der Spiegel.