President Trump is growing increasingly interested in a proposal from Erik Prince, the former head of Iraq War security firm Blackwater, to replace military personnel in Afghanistan with private contractors, NBC reported Friday.
Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, said the Pentagon’s 17 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks haven’t yielded a decisive victory partly because military personnel are rotated through the country without spending enough time there to effectively implement winning strategies.
Initial efforts in Afghanistan in 2001, with Central Intelligence Agency officers, warplanes and Special Forces personnel, devastated the ruling Taliban in a matter of weeks, he said, and using private contractors who would work side-by-side with Afghan forces on a long-term basis could duplicate that success. Prince’s former company, Blackwater, shows the challenge involved, however: Some of its guards were convicted in 2014 of federal charges linked to a September 2007 shooting at Baghdad’s Nisur Square that left 14 unarmed civilians dead and more wounded.
Prince told NBC that he hasn’t spoken with the president directly about his plan, but is planning a media campaign he hopes will convince Trump to embrace it. Blackwater, which the former Navy SEAL founded in 1997, was renamed Xe Services in 2009 and later taken over by private investors who dubbed it Academi. He now leads Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-listed security and logistics company.
The choice in Afghanistan today is between a conventional plan that Prince says hasn’t worked and “a small and unconventional plan that does work,” he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “Every special forces officer I’ve talked to, if you ask them honestly, they’ll say that is the approach that works. They might not like my plan specifically, but small and unconventional and living with and working with the Afghans is the only way to do it.”
Leaving the Pentagon in charge of decisions on the war, Prince said, would mean only continuing conflict. He believes the president’s decision to campaign against “endless wars” was correct and says Trump should have stuck with that approach rather than spending $62 billion to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
White House advisers are worried the the president’s growing impatience with the lack of success in Afghanistan will prompt him to take the proposal seriously, NBC said.
A National Security Council spokesperson said Friday that no such plan is under consideration.
Trump remains committed to finding a political solution that would end the Afghanistan war, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said earlier this week.
“We’re exploring all avenues for dialogue in close coordination with the Afghan government, and we’re going to continue to do that,” she said.
