Companies have long hired private guards precisely because they don’t trust the Afghan police to protect them in a crisis. The United Nations used Afghan police to guard its staff housing until an 2009 attack on a residential hotel in which Taliban assailants quickly made it past police guards and killed five U.N. staffers. The U.N. has since increased its security to include foreign guards.
Afghans working with APPF have gone so far as to urge the business licensing agency to “stop stalling the process,” according to a letter sent to U.S. government officials by a development company and obtained by the AP.
I posted two relevant stories below about Afghanistan and contractors. The first is this joke of a plan about replacing all PSC’s with the government force called the APPF. Although according to the article below, it doesn’t look like it will happen on time, that the forces are not being properly trained and prepared, that the various clients they serve will have very little to say about the quality or conduct, and the best part, it will be more expensive. So some deal this APPF will be for those clients in Afghanistan that have to use them. lol
And as budgets for aid projects are decreasing, the APPF program is likely to increase security costs substantially.
An APPF guard will cost at least $770 a month, according to an AP analysis of official government figures, while private security providers contacted for this story say they usually charge $510-$630 a month per guard.
To avoid pay cuts for guards, individual companies will have to supplement salaries. And any costs for RMC managers will be on top of this. Once these expenses are figured in, security costs could easily double under the APPF.
The second article below is about all of the incidents over the years of Afghan troops, police or PSC’s that were either mentally insane or the enemy, and killed their western partners. The quote up top is from the first article, and the proof of how many incidents is in the second article.
Supposedly friendly Afghan security forces have attacked U.S. and coalition troops 45 times since May 2007, U.S. officials say, for the first time laying out details and analysis of attacks that have killed 70 and wounded 110.
Oh yeah, that is an assuring statistic. And this second article really didn’t get into all the attacks against contractors, but hey, I guess we don’t count?
All I know is that the APPF is going to be one hell of a money making machine for Karzai, and one hell of a headache for those clients being forced to use them. –Matt
Afghan private security handover looking messy
By HEIDI VOGT
February 10, 2012
The push by Afghanistan’s president to nationalize legions of private security guards before the end of March is encouraging corruption and jeopardizing multibillion-dollar aid projects, according to companies trying to make the switch.
President Hamid Karzai has railed for years against the large number of guns-for-hire in Afghanistan, saying private security companies skirt the law and risk becoming militias. He ordered them abolished in 2009 and eventually set March 20 of this year as the deadline for everyone except NATO and diplomatic missions to switch to government-provided security.
Afghan officials are rushing to meet the cutoff with the help of NATO advisers. But with fewer than six weeks to go, it’s likely that many components will still be missing on March 20. And even once everything falls into place, higher costs and issues of authority over the government guards will remain.
The change imperils billions of dollars of aid flowing into Afghanistan, particularly from the United States. In a country beset by insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, the private development companies that implement most of the U.S. aid agency’s programs employ private guards to protect compounds, serve as armed escorts and guard construction sites.
On March 21, approximately 11,000 guards now working for private security firms will become government employees as members of the Afghan Public Protection Force, or APPF. They will still be working in the same place with the same job. Except now they’ll answer to the Interior Ministry.
“We don’t want to have security gaps. This is really important to our customers and to us,” said the head of the APPF, Deputy Minister Jamal Abdul Naser Sidiqi. It will happen, he says, because the presidential order says it has to.
