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KABUL, Afghanistan – A new generation of senior US officials in Afghanistan has embarked on a race to contain a double crisis on the battlefield and in a potentially explosive electoral conflict. But it's a different American character – the mercenary leader Erik D. Prince – who is talking about Kabul these days.
More than a year after presenting for the first time his plan to President Trump to privatize the US war in Afghanistan with a core of subcontractors and a private air force, Mr. Prince, founder of the security firm Blackwater , become infamous for killing civilians in Iraq has apparently been everywhere.
And since he has made his selling point directly to many influential Afghans, he has often been presented as an adviser to Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Prince is moving his plan forward at a particularly vulnerable time for the country. Afghan security forces are dying to a record 30 to 40 people a day, mostly in a defensive position against a Taliban who has gained territory. The government is plagued by numerous political crises, with legislative elections postponed to three years, scheduled for next month. The presidential elections are scheduled for April.
Interviews with half a dozen politicians who met with Prince in recent months – as well as an interview with Mr. Prince by The New York Times during his trip to Kabul in September – reveal a determined leader to sell a vision of its subcontractors could offer an official military withdrawal from Afghanistan to an American president and public exhausted by the war.
According to these officials, he has increasingly found a receptive audience among Afghan brokers, meeting everyone from the smallest militia commanders to former cabinet officials, to the regional strongmen, several candidates for the presidency.
Most of these Afghans have in common the desire to see President Ashraf Ghani gone. And Mr. Prince's lobbying circuit, including his many visits to Kabul, Washington and the United Arab Emirates, made him increasingly unwelcome with Mr. Ghani, who rejected repeated requests to meet Mr. Prince.
Some government officials have even tried to block Prince's visa, according to Afghan officials and relatives of Mr. Prince.
Several officials close to Mr. Ghani say they see Prince's plan not only unsustainable in the midst of a complex Taliban conflict and peace effort, but also a politicized threat to the president. Afghan before the presidential election next year.
And they say that Mr. Ghani's uncompromising opposition to a secure security presence has made him an obstacle to Mr. Prince's ambitions.
In a speech on Monday, Mr. Ghani, angry, sent a thinly veiled criticism to Mr. Prince and his plan.
"Foreign mercenaries will never be allowed in this country," he said.
In a statement issued by Ghani's national security adviser on Thursday, the Afghan government would not allow the fight against terrorism to become a "for-profit enterprise".
"We will examine all the legal options against those who are trying to privatize the war on our land," the statement said.
Prince positions his argument as a cheaper middle ground between pursuing a largely failed military strategy with an expensive annual tab of tens of billions of dollars and a total withdrawal of security that, fearing that some fear dropping out 17 years of costly Western efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.
During the interview, Mr. Prince described what he called a "rationalization" of private contracts: a lightened mission of 6,000 private contractors providing "structural support" and training to Afghan forces. . He added that small teams of Special Forces veterans integrated into Afghan battalions for about three years would provide the continuity that is lacking today with the replacement of American soldiers every year.
They would be supported by air with a fleet of contracted aircraft driven by joint teams of Afghans and contractors. About 2,500 US special operations forces would remain in the country for counterterrorism missions. All of this, Mr. Prince said, would reduce the annual cost of the war to about one-fifth of the current amount.
He denied trying to influence the Afghan political process to achieve this vision. He said the only money he had spent on Afghanistan was the $ 1,500 cost of producing a 10-minute video to explain his plan.
"The Afghan people will have elections and they will make the choices with which they will live," Prince said. "But I will talk to any party in Afghanistan that will want to think of another way of doing that actually stops the bleeding."
Prince also linked his proposal to an effort to exploit Afghanistan's mineral wealth, including rare earth deposits – a favorite topic of Trump, who It is complaining that the United States is not pulling enough resources from their war efforts.
In a multimedia presentation The Times has seen, Prince has listed one of his goals: "Developing and Producing Key Rare Earth Minerals to Restore the High-Tech Supply Chain in the United States". During his visit here in Afghanistan, he also met with Afghan mine officials, whom he described as exploratory meetings.
Prince's former company, Blackwater, has won hundreds of millions of dollars in military contracts with the United States, mainly in Iraq, before being blacklisted after its contractors civilians massacred in Baghdad in 2007.
His business has since been reincarnated. His latest company, Frontier Services Group, based in Hong Kong, has contracts in Africa and Asia, and is backed by Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company.
Prince's initial urge to privatize the war in Afghanistan last year was overturned by two of the most senior members of Trump's national security team: HR McMaster, National Security Advisor time, and Jim Mattis, Secretary of Defense. They persuaded Mr. Trump to increase the number of soldiers and resources in Afghanistan.
Mr. Prince now estimates that the winds in Washington are changing in his favor. Mr. McMaster left and Mr. Mattis often disagrees with Mr. Trump.
At some meetings in Afghanistan, Mr. Prince was introduced as a person with the ear of Mr. Trump and whose close relations with the president's entourage are on the list of points of sale.
In the letter sent by Mr. Prince to Mr. Ghani in the spring of 2017 in search of a meeting, he said his sister, Betsy Devos, was a member of Trump's cabinet, an Afghan official said.
Nevertheless, Prince's current plan for Afghanistan has many skeptics.
"The idea that these subcontractors incorporated into Afghan units are just" training "is almost laughable," said Laurel Miller, senior foreign policy expert at RAND and former US diplomat in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"And the idea that privatizing the war will save money is certainly laughable," she said. "If this idea did not promise to be an important source of income, then those who would benefit would not do as much."
Ms. Miller said the proposal was based on a misdiagnosis as to why the conflict was deadlocked. Although there are leadership and capacity issues among Afghan forces, the Taliban has demonstrated that they can support their insurgency against the use of force far superior to that proposed by Mr. Prince's proposal. she declared.
Changes in training and counseling tactics would not turn deadlock into victory or end of war, she said.
"In any case, bringing in foreign mercenaries would be likely to provide excellent recruitment slogans for insurgents," she added.
This is an allusion to how the Taliban has already made a propaganda argument about the US occupation and would most likely consider a wave of mercenary forces backed by the US as even more despicable.
Even many Afghan political leaders who consider certain elements of Mr. Prince's proposal founded – including the inclusion of Afghan force trainers for longer periods and the establishment of better air support and Medical evacuation for Afghan commanders – expressing their concern about the possibilities of a private security presence less responsible than the US military.
When stressing what Prince's proposal might look like in practice, many political figures pointed to the example of CIA-led Afghan forces operating in several parts of the country. . But these militias, backed by intelligence service providers, have been repeatedly accused of violence against civilians.
Mr Prince insists that the American public eager to impose a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and leave a security vacuum in the foreground is the danger.
"Eventually, America will get tired," he said. "At that time, you are a suicide vest in a gathering room away from an incident involving many victims that kills a group of Americans and makes people say," What is it done here? We have been doing it for 18 or 19 years. "
