Up to 56,000 more contractors likely for Afghanistan, congressional agency says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504850_pf.htmlBy Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 16, 2009; A17
The surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan could be accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 contractors, vastly expanding the presence of personnel from the U.S. private sector in a war zone, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.
CRS, which provides background information to members of Congress on a bipartisan basis, said it expects an additional 26,000 to 56,000 contractors to be sent to Afghanistan. That would bring the number of contractors in the country to anywhere from 130,000 to 160,000.
The tally "could increase further if the new [administration] strategy includes a more robust construction and nation building effort," according to the report, which was released Monday and first disclosed on the Web site Talking Points Memo.
The CRS study says contractors made up 69 percent of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan last December, a proportion that "apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by the Defense Department in any conflict in the history of the United States." As of September, contractor representation had dropped to 62 percent, as U.S. troop strength increased modestly.
As the Pentagon contracts out activities that previously were carried out by troops in wartime, it has been forced to struggle with new management challenges. "Prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, contracting was done on an ad-hoc basis and was not adequately incorporated into the doctrine -- or culture -- of the military," according to the CRS report. Today, according to Defense Department officials, "doctrine and strategy are being updated to incorporate the role of contractors in contingency operations."
The Pentagon's Joint Contracting Command in Afghanistan has increased the size of its acquisition workforce and is adding staff to monitor performance. To enhance oversight, Congress has appropriated $8 million for an electronic system that will track all contract-related information for Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ad-hoc subcommittee on contracting oversight, led by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), is scheduled to hold a hearing on the increase in the number and value of Afghanistan contracts. She plans to focus on ensuring that contracts are adequately managed and "whether contracting oversight lessons learned from Iraq are being applied in Afghanistan," according to her staff members.
Contracts, in the meantime, continue to be solicited and awarded. Over the past week, the military awarded a $44.8 million contract to a Florida firm to provide dogs and their handlers for operational use in areas of southern Afghanistan along the Pakistan border, where some of the most violent fighting is taking place.
The U.S. command in Afghanistan also published a notice that it would be seeking intelligence analyst services from a contractor that include "collecting, analyzing and providing recommendations necessary for the government to produce and disseminate intelligence products in several subject areas." The contract would be for one year, plus options for four additional years.
The Defense Logistics Agency disclosed that it is looking for a contractor that can provide distribution and warehousing services for U.S. and NATO forces in the Kandahar area, which is near the center of fighting. The contractor is to supply the workforce needed to receive, store, inventory and prepare shipment of up to 4,000 items using government-provided warehousing facilities and open storage areas.
U.S. Contemplates More of the Scarcely Believable in ‘Af-Pak’http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/us_contemplates_more_of_the_scarcely_believable_in_afpak_20091215/Posted on Dec 15, 2009
By William Pfaff
The writer David Halberstam, author of a cruel analysis of the people who gave America the Vietnam War, “The Best and the Brightest,” observed that “no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing. More, its thrust and its drive may not be in any way akin to the desires of the president who initiated it.” He had a hard time making his Vietnam-era interlocutors agree, for part of being one of the military and civilian best and the brightest was that you didn’t need advice from journalists.
It is another characteristic of official life that you are discouraged from applying lessons from experience and history (in the military case, before that experience has been incorporated into field manuals and regulations placed in front of you).
This rumination is motivated by the scarcely believable news that the people who are running the war in Afghanistan are contemplating an air attack on a Pakistan city in order to kill one of the most important figures in Pakistan’s own foreign and security policy.
Pakistan, as most sensible people know, is in the grip of forces that could tear the country apart if that happened—which would make it the third nation, after Iraq and Afghanistan, to be devastated by the United States since that fateful day in September 2001 when the so-called war on terror began.
The idea is for the United States to bomb Quetta, one of Pakistan’s principal cities, the capital of its largest province, Balochistan, which already experiences separatist forces. Quetta is a major Pakistan military base, home of the century-old Command and Staff College inherited from the British army.
A reported American threat is not just one of sending drones over this city of 850,000 people, with missiles meant to kill Mullah Omar, the leading figure in at least one branch of the Taliban; senior al-Qaida figures also supposedly in Quetta; and Siraj Haqqani, called the most important Taliban leader in the country, whose men are supposed to pose the biggest threat to NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Haqqani is also, as it happens, a major and longstanding Pakistani strategic asset and ally. He will be a vital factor in the regional reconciliation and strategic settlement that will follow America and NATO’s defeat. That is the most important objection to the supposed plan.
The Pakistanis believe that the NATO expedition in Afghanistan is an ill-conceived and futile affair from which, after killing and being killed in large numbers, and accomplishing nothing useful, the Europeans and Americans will depart, just as the U.S retreated from Lebanon under Ronald Reagan, after the 1983 attack on the troops’ barracks in Beirut, and Bill Clinton pulled U.S. troops out of Somalia not long after losing the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993.
After the foreigners leave, Pakistan will find itself once again in the awkward geopolitical and militarily dangerous situation in which nature and the vagaries of man have placed it. Its avowed great enemy is India, with which Pakistan shares a very long eastern border, with Iran to its west, and Afghanistan on its long northwestern frontier. A friendly Afghanistan therefore offers strategic depth in case of Indian attack, and access to Central Asia, while Iran is a corridor to the Middle East. This is the sort of thing they teach at the Quetta Command and General Staff College.
The American generals seem to be saying to Pakistan: You henceforth will ignore your own national security interests and devote yourself to our interests, whatever the cost to you. You will hand over all of the Taliban’s leaders and men in your country, and place your army under our strategic control. Otherwise, we will bomb your cities.
Why, according to the Los Angeles Times, “senior U.S. officials” think this is a good plan I cannot for the life of me tell you. I think it is a way to wreak further havoc in the region and do fundamental damage to the United States itself.
Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at
www.williampfaff.com.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34419592/Millions of missing Bush admin. e-mails found
Computer technicians have uncovered 22 million messages believed lost
BREAKING NEWS
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Two nonprofit groups say that computer technicians have found 22 million White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush.
The two groups say the electronic messages were previously mislabeled and effectively lost.
An announcement Monday by the two groups is the latest development in a controversy that surrounded the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic recordkeeping system.
The two private organizations — the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — say they are settling lawsuits that they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.
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