Thomas Friedman: Private contractors not right kind of help in Iraq

By Thomas Friedman 2:47 PM Thursday, November 5, 2009

In 2003, I was on a trip to Iraq and had arranged an appointment in the Green Zone with a member of the then-Iraqi Governing Council. Security was tight.

I was with my Iraqi translator, a middle-aged man who had once been a teacher. When we arrived at the council, after a long walk, I showed my ID to two uniformed U.S. soldiers. They told me to wait, went inside and out came a man wearing a fishing vest and Australian bush hat.

He never properly identified himself, but it was obvious that he was a “civilian contractor” from the logo on his shirt. When I tried to explain why we were there, he literally told me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak.

Then he told my Iraqi translator to sit in the blistering heat while he tookme inside to see if our Iraqi interviewee was available.

That was my first encounter with one of the private security guards, service suppliers and aid workers — aka civilian contractors — who have since become an integral part of U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some were even used at Abu Ghraib to do “enhanced interrogations” — aka torture — of suspected terrorists. Today there is no operation that is too sensitive not to outsource to the private sector.

As we debate how many more troops to dispatch to Afghanistan, it might be a good time to also debate just how far we’ve already gone in hiring private contractors to do jobs the State Department, Pentagon and CIA once did on their own.

A good place to start is with the Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger’s new book on this subject, “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.”

Every year, more and more of the core business of national security — diplomacy, development, defense and even intelligence — “is being shifted into the hands of private contractors — much more than our public realizes,” Stanger said to me. One big reason why we’ve been able to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with so few allies is because we’ve basically hired the help.

“Afghanistan and Iraq,” explained Stanger, “are our first contractors’ wars, differing from previous interventions in their unprecedented reliance on the private sector for all aspects of their execution. According to the Congressional Research Service, contractors in 2009 accounted for 48 percent of the DOD work force in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan. ... Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap, we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions.”

Or, we would need real allies.

I am not against outsourcing, improving government efficiency or hiring the best people to perform specialized tasks. But we’ve fallen into a pattern of outsourcing some of the very core tasks of government.

As more and more of this government work gets contracted and then subcontracted — or as Stanger puts it, “when money and instructions change hands multiple times in a foreign country” — the public interest can get lost and abuse and corruption get invited in.

We’re also building a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions.

In 2008, notes Stanger, roughly 80 percent of the State Department’s requested budget went out the door in the form of contracts and grants. The Army’s primary support contractor in Iraq, KBR, reportedly has some 17,000 direct-hire employees there.

The U.S. military is now proposing a huge nation-building project for Afghanistan. I might be more open to that if we had a true global alliance to share the burden of an effort that will take decades. But we don’t.

European publics do not favor this war, and our allies will only pony up just enough troops to get their official “Frequent U.S. Ally Card” renewed. We’ll make up the difference by hiring private contractors.

The government may operate more efficiently with private contractors. And outsourcing can often deliver real innovation. Still, I’m old-fashioned: When America is acting abroad, I prefer our public services to be provided as much as possible by public servants motivated by, and schooled in, the common good and simple patriotism — not profits or private ambitions.

Thomas L. Friedman writes for The New York Times.

Share this article