[On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, an American official said. Mr. Mattis listened politely but declined to include the outside strategies in a review of Afghanistan policy that he is leading along with the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.]
By Mark Landler, Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon
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Erik
D. Prince in 2014. He was a founder of the private security firm Blackwater
Worldwide.
Credit Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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WASHINGTON — President Trump’s advisers
recruited two businessmen who profited from military contracting to devise
alternatives to the Pentagon’s plan to send thousands of additional troops to
Afghanistan, reflecting the Trump administration’s struggle to define its
strategy for dealing with a war now 16 years old.
Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private
security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire
financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have
developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in
Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist,
and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people
briefed on the conversations.
On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their
ideas, an American official said. Mr. Mattis listened politely but declined to
include the outside strategies in a review of Afghanistan policy that he is
leading along with the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.
The highly unusual meeting dramatizes the
divide between Mr. Trump’s generals and his political staff over Afghanistan,
the lengths to which his aides will go to give their boss more options for
dealing with it and the readiness of this White House to turn to business
people for help with diplomatic and military problems.
Soliciting the views of Mr. Prince and Mr.
Feinberg certainly qualifies as out-of-the-box thinking in a process dominated
by military leaders in the Pentagon and the National Security Council. But it
also raises a host of ethical issues, not least that both men could profit from
their recommendations.
“The conflict of interest in this is
transparent,” said Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who wrote
a book about the growth of private armies, “The Modern Mercenary.” “Most of
these contractors are not even American, so there is also a lot of moral
hazard.”
Last month, Mr. Trump gave the Pentagon
authority to send more American troops to Afghanistan — a number believed to be
about 4,000 — as a stopgap measure to stabilize the security situation there.
But as the administration grapples with a longer-term strategy, Mr. Trump’s
aides have expressed concern that he will be locked into policies that failed
under the past two presidents.
Mr. Feinberg, whose name had previously been
floated to conduct a review of the nation’s intelligence agencies, met with the
president on Afghanistan, according to an official, while Mr. Prince briefed
several White House officials, including General McMaster, said a second
person.
Mr. Prince laid out his views in an op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal in May. He called on the White House to appoint a
viceroy to oversee the country and to use “private military units” to fill the
gaps left by departed American soldiers. While he was at Blackwater, the
company became involved in one of the most notorious episodes of the Iraq war,
when its employees opened fire in a Baghdad square, killing 17 civilians.
After selling his stake in Blackwater in
2010, Mr. Prince mustered an army-for-hire for the United Arab Emirates. He has
cultivated close ties to the Trump administration; his sister, Betsy DeVos, is
Mr. Trump’s education secretary.
If Mr. Trump opted to use more contractors
and fewer troops, it could also enrich DynCorp, which has already been paid
$2.5 billion by the State Department for its work in the country, mainly
training the Afghan police force. Mr. Feinberg controls DynCorp through
Cerberus Capital Management, a firm he co-founded in 1992.
Mr. McFate, who used to work for DynCorp in
Africa, said it could train and equip the Afghan Army, a costly, sometimes
dangerous mission now handled by the American military. “The appeal to that,”
he said, “is you limit your boots on the ground and you limit your casualties.”
Some officials noted that under the government’s conflict-of-interest rules,
DynCorp would not get a master contract to run operations in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for Mr. Feinberg declined to
comment for this article, and a spokesman for Mr. Prince did not respond to a
request for comment.
The proposals Mr. Prince presented, a former
American official said, hew closely to the views outlined in his Journal column
— in essence, that the private sector can operate “cheaper and better than the
military” in Afghanistan.
Mr. Feinberg, another official said, puts
more emphasis than Mr. Prince on working with Afghanistan’s central government.
But his strategy would also give the C.I.A. control over operations in
Afghanistan, which would be carried out by paramilitary units and hence subject
to less oversight than the military, according to a person briefed on it.
The strategy has been called “the Laos
option,” after America’s shadowy involvement in Laos during the war in
neighboring Vietnam. C.I.A. contractors trained Laotian soldiers to fight
Communist insurgents and their North Vietnamese allies until 1975, leaving the
country under Communist control and with a deadly legacy of unexploded bombs.
In Afghanistan until now, contractors have been used mainly for security and
logistics.
Whatever the flaws in these approaches — and
there are many, according to diplomats and military experts — some former
officials said it made sense to open up the debate.
“The status quo is clearly not working,” said
Laurel Miller, who just stepped down as the State Department’s special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “If the United States is going to
chart a way forward towards a sustainable way of protecting our national
security interests, it is important to consider a wide range of options.”
Despite Mr. Bannon’s apparent inability to
persuade Mr. Mattis, Defense Department officials said they did not
underestimate his influence as a link to, and an advocate for, Mr. Trump’s
populist political base. Mr. Bannon has told colleagues that sending more
troops to Afghanistan is a slippery slope to the nation building that Mr. Trump
ran against during the campaign.
Mr. Bannon has also questioned what the
United States has gotten for the $850 billion in nonmilitary spending it has
poured into the country, noting that Afghanistan confounded the
neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration and the progressives in
the Obama administration.
Mr. Kushner has not staked out as strong a
position, one official said. But he, too, is sharply critical of the Bush and
Obama strategies, and has said he views his role as making sure the president
has credible options. Mr. Mattis has promised to present Mr. Trump with a
recommendation for a broader strategy this month.
Like General McMaster, Mr. Mattis is believed
to support sending several thousand more American troops to bolster the effort
to advise and assist Afghan forces as they seek to reverse gains made by the
Taliban. But he has been extremely careful in his public statements not to tip
his hand, and has not yet exercised his authority to deploy troops.
Aides and associates say that while Mr.
Mattis believes that Mr. Prince’s concept of relying on private armies in
Afghanistan goes too far, he supported using contractors for limited, specific
tasks when he was the four-star commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command.
“No one should diminish the role that they
play,” Mr. Mattis, then a general, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in
March 2012. “It is expensive, but there are places and times where having a
contract force works well for us, as opposed to putting uniformed military to
do, whether it’s a training mission or a security guard mission.”
The Pentagon has developed options to send
3,000 to 5,000 more American troops, including hundreds of Special Operations
forces, with a consensus settling on about 4,000 additional troops. NATO
countries would contribute a few thousand additional forces.
“It seems likely that the new strategy in
Afghanistan will look a lot like what was proposed at the end of 2013,” said
James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as NATO’s top military
commander.
Some critics say the increase will have
little effect on the fighting on the ground. In May, Dan Coats, the director of
national intelligence, testified that the situation in Afghanistan would
probably deteriorate through 2018 despite a modest increase in American and
NATO forces.
Asked in June by reporters in Brussels about
that analysis, Mr. Mattis responded curtly, “They’re entitled to their
assessment.”
James Risen contributed reporting. Kitty
Bennett contributed research