While President Biden said he will withdraw troops from Afghanistan, it’s not clear if his plan extends to the thousands of contractors working for the Pentagon that are still in the country.
When asked about this issue on Friday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said he wasn’t sure. “So on the contractors, we don’t know exactly. There are some preliminary plans. And clearly, the goal is to get all our personnel out and I suspect that contractors will be part of that. But whether there’ll still be a need for some contractor support, I just don’t know,” he said.
The US plans to continue supporting the Afghan military and Air Force. Since the bulk of the maintenance for these armed forces is performed by US contractors, there’s a good chance the Pentagon will justify a continued presence of private contractors.
According to numbers released in January, there are over 18,000 contractors working in Afghanistan. About 4,700 of the current contractors are Afghans that were hired locally. The remaining come from outside of the country, including about a third who are US citizens.
According to Stars and Stripes, 1,575 of the contractors are armed mercenaries, mostly Americans and other foreigners. While this number is only a small fighting force, it could be combined with intelligence operatives and proxies like the Afghan military to give the US the ability to strike inside Afghanistan.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday that the US wants to maintain “counterterrorist assets” in the region. On Tuesday, The New York Times cited current and former US officials who said the US “will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives” to conduct operations inside Afghanistan.
I fully expect to see between 1,575 and 18,000 US ‘contractors’ killed in short order by the Taliban if they remain in Afghanistan. Uniformed military or mercenaries, they are invaders and I have no doubt they will be dealt with accordingly.
Yep. The farmers will put down their plows and pick up their weapons again.
As we bomb the place again, more will hook up with them.
So, in essence, we will be removing a small faction and aren’t really leaving.
When it’s “unclear”, it’s very clear.
Of course the contractors and cia would remain to lute the country resources and to capture the opium money…!
loot………….
Biden is playing an April Fool’s Joke after April Fool’s Day. He is like Obama, he doesn’t mean what he says.
He doesn’t even know what he says.
Eric Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater USA, now called Academi, has written and stated more than once that there are 45,000 “civil security contractors”(mercenaries to common people) in Afghanistan. To quote or rely on United States government numbers for anything, let alone military operations, at best, causes one to smile, if not burst out laughing. The so-called War on Terror, particularly the War of Aggression and War Crimes in
Afghanistan demonstrates for the umpteenth time no reasonable person can trust what the U. S. government says it will do or has done.
Was there not the so-called Afghanistan Papers?
dennis hanna
I’d be interested to know what kind of firepower these “civil security contractors” dispose of and how they’re organized. Do they have their own air and artillery support?
I keep an eye on job offers in Afghanistan. One recent one I saw paid $80k per year and the only job requirements were 1) familiarity with the M-60 machine gun and 2) the ability to sit for eight hours at a time. In other words, $80k per year to sit in a sandbag bunker guarding a warehouse. It was actually tempting if I just needed the five or ten minutes to refamiliarize myself with the M-60. Factor in the need to be willing to die screaming when there are no longer US government aircraft on station and US 155mm artillery pieces sited in on the area outside the warehouse and $80k seems a little low.
For those who have fond memories, or have forgotten about the M60: https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/m60-machine-gun-was-loved-hated-by-gis/
In many locations they do operate drones and COIN light aircraft. That is all the air support needed against no opposition. We just saw how far that can go in the Azerbaijan-Armenia brawl.
To that we can add the “Afghan” air force supplied and paid by Americans and manned by various contractors. that is growing, and it not in the least indigenous to Afghanistan.
OOPS! He didn’t mention them, or, stopping sending drones and bombs from on high. When means; we ain’t withdrawing nothing.
The non-withdrawal withdrawal.
Completely predictable and completely transparent Neocon Kabuki.
The contractors should be free to station their employees in Afghanistan and our Government should be free from having to pay for them – I wonder if the Afghan Government will want to pay their salaries
US won’t leave—’cause they realize that if they leave, the Chinese will come in with money and no false “noble” pretensions regarding a business agenda. If there is anything that an ego driven nation like the US cannot handle, is for someone to “one-up” them and to usurp their authority
As always, read the fine print before taking a victory lap:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/16/contrary-to-what-biden-said-u-s-warfare-in-afghanistan-is-set-to-continue/