Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/10/city-on-the-hill.html
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And then - he could control the heroin trade.
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The point of a mercenary army, or civilian contractors is to reduce war to a profit generating venture, therefore constant warfare is required, therefore mercenary armies extend conflicts as long as they can, forever, if possible. Ask Dick Cheney, who appointed himself Vice President with one end in mind, creating business for Halliburton, to the tune of almost 40 billion dollars. The fact that Dick isn’t rotting behind bars for war crimes is proof that there is no longer a possibility of justice.
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This rhetoric scares me more than the North Korea - 45 penis measuring contest.
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Hmm, a guy whose entire business revolves around private mercenaries working quietly as an advisor to an unhinged president, recommending that we hire his private mercs and a profit-driven fleet of private planes to install a privately-employed ruler of the country…
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And it is an attempt to grant politicians a level of “plausible deniability” for both the war crimes committed by, and and the deaths of, the people prosecuting the war. Keep in mind that many if not most of the mercenaries employed by private military contractors are not US citizens, making them both their crimes more difficult to prosecute and their deaths less politically costly.
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They are in Yemen already.
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This is only half crazy, given that much of that land through much of its history is controlled by various tribal leaders (warlords) who offer protection to the people in their territory.
Of course traditionally they settled for as much goats milk they can drink and the best fruits of the shepherds labor as compensation, not US backed funding.
I’d say this is a bad idea. I don’t know what a GOOD idea looks like, but this one is a bad one.
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And now we are on to empire building. We invaded a nation that has never attacked the U.S. with the idea that some of the people hiding in the hills might have been related to the 9/11 attacks and now we are discussing installing our own puppet regime.
We are the bad guys here people. We are the Empire.
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I propose simply pulling out.
Conduct an orderly drawdown to zero.
Leave Afghanistan. Admit that it was 16 years of waste. Stop committing the sunk cost fallacy and just walk away.
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That would be best for America.
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Prince has been trying to get his private “air force” off the ground for a while now.
I’d imagine the Taliban will get a kick out of shooting his armored crop dusters out of the sky, but hey, that’s just me.
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Now we just need some spiffy caps with skulls on them.
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I thought we were all going to start drinking tea. We’re only steps away from a monarchy and we already have a stripy red, white, and blue flag.
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viceroy in Afghanistan
Yes, please send tRump and his band of nincompoops there to f’ things up more than they already are. Make tRump Emperor, what could possibly go wrong?
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This model worked so well in the 19th century, I can’t see why anyone would object. Unless they had read, you know, any history at all, or valued democracy and human rights or…
I wouldn’t put it past them. That’s definitely their moral level.
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Do you want to take over the East India Company brand now that Erik Prince is proposing privatising an entire country?
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Lunatics running the asylum. I agree, send 5,500 private mercenaries there…then cut off funding and all contact and leave them there to fend for themselves.
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…Except that the Neo-con empire builders in the US never had ANY interest in Afghanistan. THEY were all excited to invade Iraq because OIL! and “remaking the Middle East.” Their reaction to Afghanistan was more "Okay, I guess so long as it doesn’t distract us from the invasion that we’ve wanted all along. The Soviets (and the Russians before and after them) were interested in Afghanistan because that gets them one country closer to a warm water port. The only UK and US interest in Afghanistan was denying it to Moscow. Once the Soviets were kicked out, we dropped all support for and interest in Afghanistan in a hot minute. Indeed it was that power vacuum mixed with all the weaponry that we’d given out to fight the Soviets that allowed the Taliban to take control and Al Queda to thrive in the first place. Other than Opium, there is just about no resource in Afghanistan to interest the West. And frankly the Taliban had been far worse for Opium farmers than we were.
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