John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert who was appointed last week to the defence policy board at the Pentagon, said: “We do not have enough troops to hold what we have cleared in Helmand. The additional American troops are a help, but they are insufficient.
“We have more fighting in Afghanistan in front of us than we have fighting behind us, full stop. This is going to be a harder fight than Iraq. Afghanistan needs [to create its own] national army of 250,000 to enable the allies to depart.”
At present the Afghan national army has about 92,000 troops, while the police force numbers 83,000. More US troops are needed to fill the gap, but first they would have to be diverted from Iraq.
Ok, I know this post is going to tweak a few people out there, because it is just ‘too crazy’ or ridiculous. How could we possibly use PMC’s or PSC’s to ‘hold’ villages?
Well, it’s easy, we first rework what PMC’s can or cannot do in the war (like give them the necessary tools and authorization to defend villages and AO’s) and we open the flood gates of contracts for such a thing. Then we insure the necessary architecture is in place to insure that the company in place is in fact doing good things and following the contract for that village. But none of this is new in the realm of how we set these things up, we just have to do it.
Here is another way to look at this. Take a good look at what the ‘holding’ troops are actually doing in these villages, and logically look at what jobs a company could conceivably perform during that holding operation. Contractors have been used in the defense on US bases, in disaster zones, and for protecting remote civilian camps in places like Iraq, the next progression to me, is using contractors to defend villages. If our goal is to protect people in Afghanistan from the Taliban, and we do not have enough troops to do that, then why not use contractors?
