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I got Mark Perry on the line Pentagon reporter, this time for the American conservative magazine.
That's the American conservative.com.
Bannon and Kushner want to outsource Afghanistan to mercenaries.
Welcome back.
How you doing?
Good to be here as always.
Oh, and I should say this is the spotlight today on anti war.com.
Of course.
So yes, thank you, sir, for joining us on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Very important story here.
Eric Prince of Blackwater back in business.
What's his new company called now?
Frontier Services Group, FSG, FSG, and they're teaming up with DynCorp, who, as you report in here, I think quoting somebody else, they already run Afghanistan anyway.
They're, I guess, the biggest contractor, a huge contractor throughout the Afghan war as it is.
And now, as we've talked about before on the show, I believe, sir, you have Madison McMaster and the Pentagon staff.
They're basically pulling a Petraeus McChrystal on President, you know, Barack Trump here, the same kind of thing again, trying to roll him into a surge.
And his political advisers are fighting back.
But unlike Obama's political advisers, they actually have a plan, a whole different strategy for the war.
And they're trying to push it.
And so what is it exactly?
And what's the military think?
And what's the president think?
Seems like you're on top of all of this stuff.
Well, if it were up to Mr. Kushner and Mr. Bannon, we wouldn't have a troop surge in Afghanistan.
I think that they understand politically the American people are tired of Afghanistan.
But they're worried that they'll be blamed for losing Afghanistan.
So what are they doing?
They're turning over the war.
They're proposing that the war be turned over to an American contractor, Eric Prince, and Steve Feinberg, who runs a group called Cerberus, which runs DynCorp.
What that means, bottom line is that the American war in Afghanistan would be turned over to mercenaries run by private corporations.
The president apparently likes the idea, although he hasn't said this publicly.
He recommended that Bannon take Steve Feinberg of DynCorp in to see Secretary of Defense Mattis to sell the idea.
Mattis said no, but it's still out there.
And under the plan, the CIA would be contracting with these companies to run the war in Afghanistan, while apparently the American military footprint would actually be drawn down.
This is it.
This is where America's going, guns for hire and foreign wars.
It's a bad idea.
There's a lot of opposition to it here in Washington.
All right.
Well, so let's start with the one part is that everybody's sick of this war and people do want the military out.
Maybe Mattis and McMaster don't want the military out, but the American people have been over the Afghan war for a long, long time now.
And so that part's good.
They have an important premise that they're working from here.
So what is it exactly then, Mark, that's so dangerous about having the CIA run a bunch of mercs in place of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps over there?
Well, it's a good question.
And I've been thinking through what a good example of what happens to a country in the midst of a war that becomes victimized by mercenaries.
And I think the closest example and the current example that we have is Yemen.
We have a humanitarian disaster in Yemen.
The United Arab Emirates has been hiring out mercenaries to carry on the war in Yemen.
Starvation is stalking the country.
The country is in absolute ruins.
The war is endless.
It's a disaster.
For those of our listeners who remember Somalia, it's akin to Somalia.
It's a catastrophe.
And the fear, I think, in official Washington, especially among adults like Madison McMaster, is that turning Afghanistan over to the mercenaries, over to a guy like Eric Prince and Steve Feinberg, would consign Afghanistan to the same kind of future that we see in Somalia and Yemen.
It's a prescription for a humanitarian disaster and not a win at all in any sense of the word.
But it seems like a major error in those pitching this plan is they're kind of saying right up front, yeah, we're going to freeze you out, Mr. Secretary, whose decision it is whether to do this or not.
Once you decide to do it our way, then you'll be turning the whole thing over to Langley and you won't have any control whatsoever.
And that's not a very good way to sell it.
So what am I missing there?
Are they trying to say, and then, yeah, we'll be taking this off of your hands and won't that be a relief, Mr. Secretary, or what?
Well, that's the selling point.
You know, don't worry about Afghanistan.
We'll take care of it.
Now, that doesn't seem like the kind of thing Mattis wants to hear, though.
He wants it to be his responsibility, doesn't he?
I agree.
You're exactly right.
I don't mean to give these guys advice.
I'm just trying to figure out what's going on.
Well, you know, listen, Eric Prince wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal back end of May, very interesting about how the United States should conduct its future conflicts.
Taking into account that the American people are tired of these conflicts, his suggestion was that we take it out of the hands of the US government.
What that means is that you put it in the hands of American corporations who run wars like DynCorp and like Frontier Services Group.
And his metaphor was this would be the East India Company, the British company that ran the colonial empire for the United Kingdom in its heyday in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries.
That Frontier Services Group and that DynCorp would be the new East India Company.
Wouldn't have to worry about deploying the American military.
You'd deploy corporate assets hired and trained by corporations, and the American people wouldn't have to worry about it.
Wars would be run on the cheap, and there wouldn't be any body bags of American soldiers coming home.
So it's kind of a, as I say in the article, it's kind of pitched as the perfect solution.
You know, like wars, we'll take the wars out of your hands and we'll make them part of our corporate structure.
Amazing.
Well, and see, here's the thing, though, is they would need, what, at least thousands of mercs if they're going to take over Bagram Air Base?
And they're going to, what, wage war, build up and support the Afghan National Army in trying to conquer Helmand Province and do a whole new surge or just a partial surge?
Where are they going to get all those mercs?
They're not going to hire that many Americans to do it, right?
So they're going to, like the UAE, they're just going to get Colombians and Nigerians and whoever?
Well, I don't know that you'd be surprised, but I'll say you'd be surprised.
I think our listeners would be surprised at the number of people around the world who would sign up for $80,000 a year, $100,000 a year, $60,000 a year to carry a gun and be deployed in a foreign country.
It's pretty good money.
You get an insurance program.
Maybe you get a little pension.
It's guns for hire.
Listen, after all, the British did it during the American Revolution.
They hired Hessians, German troops to fight the Continental Army.
Made it easier on the British Empire.
Didn't have to worry about the Redcoats coming home in body bags.
Didn't have to explain to the British people why they were fighting this stupid war against the colonists.
This is the same kind of idea.
The East India Company did it too for the British.
Didn't have to explain to the British public what you were doing in South Asia and how many soldiers were there because there weren't any there.
The East India Company was handling it.
It sounds like a very good solution if you believe that we should be in Afghanistan to begin with.
I think that after 15 years we probably shouldn't be, but that's a different debate.
If you're going to run these wars, then the thinking of Erik Prince and Steve Feinberg is, let's try to do it without pressing the American people too hard on something that is turning out to be very controversial.
And it has a certain appeal.
But here's the problem, outside of all the other humanitarian problems and legal problems that this offers, is that it really can't possibly work.
And you can be sure that H.R. McMaster in the White House and James Madison in the Pentagon are absolutely dead set against this.
The White House, you mean the National Security Council under McMaster?
Under McMaster, yeah.
Now Bannon and Kushner are looking for good political solutions as well as good military solutions, and this has a certain appeal I suppose.
But I think the kind of unstated point that I make in the article is, this is just sloppy foreign policy thinking.
The American people are treated every evening to the latest Trumpgate, Russiagate scandal, but if you take your eye off that for a minute and take a look at our foreign policy under the aegis of Kushner and Bannon, it's an absolute chaos.
And the people standing between us and this chaos are H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson and James Madison.
They don't want anything to do with this.
And I think that they'll probably kill it.
It's not dead yet, but I think they'll probably kill this idea.
Well, so it's pretty well reported here, and I wouldn't give the generals that much credit, but I see what you're saying, that these other guys are kind of nuts.
I mean, on the other hand, at least they're trying to sort of kind of wind the thing down or whatever, whereas Madison and McMaster, on the other side, they just want to extend the thing, right?
Only with army and marines instead of mercs.
Listen, truth is that the bar here is very low.
Our expectations of this administration are very low.
If this was the Obama administration, this idea would have never gotten off the ground to begin with.
Well, yeah, that's true.
But, you know, here we are.
And I think that there's a hell of a debate going on in the national security establishment about exactly what we do in Afghanistan.
And my sense is that the resolution of this debate is going to be that Afghanistan really isn't the problem, that Pakistan is the problem.
We're going to have to shape a new policy to deal with Pakistan.
I think we're in the process of shaping that policy now.
Well, yeah, so they keep saying that.
And yet what are their options?
Cut off aid and threaten them a little bit?
It seems like their best idea is threaten them by helping India or like get back at them, sort of, by helping India increase their presence in Afghanistan.
But all that does is create more backlash and give the Pakistanis all that much more reason to keep backing the Taliban.
Well, you're exactly right.
The same way it has been.
You're exactly right, which is why we're not going to do that.
But I do think we're going to get tougher on Pakistan.
I think we're going to make it very clear to Pakistan that they have to move against the Taliban and bring them back to the negotiating table.
That's really what people want here.
They want to sit down with the Taliban and say, all right, let's come to some kind of political solution where you can become a part of the government, where, you know, security is assured, where your interests are represented, but our interests are represented, too.
That kind of political solution, getting the Taliban back to the negotiating table, is really what I think the goal of McMaster and Mass are.
And it's, you know, barring just picking up and leaving, it's probably the next best solution to the Afghanistan conflict.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Thanks.
That really is their plan, is not just lean on the Pakistanis to stop backing the Afghan Taliban, but lean on the Pakistanis to basically negotiate on their behalf or force them to the table, to maybe even threaten to withhold all aid and really turn against them if they don't negotiate a solution.
So you're saying the Americans would agree to, I mean, I'm trying to think of something realistic here.
I mean, if they're going to make an agreement with the Taliban, it would have to be that they get half the country, right?
They get the south and the east and we got to leave because the Taliban are going to settle for less than that.
Well, we have said, we have quietly been taking the temperature of the Taliban for quite some time.
And they always appear to be reticent whenever they think that they're winning on the battlefield.
So I think the goal of the administration would be to convince them that they're not going to win on the battlefield, that they ought to sit down.
It wouldn't be they get one part of the country and the government gets the other.
It would be that they would have to be participants in the government to begin with, and the government would have to agree to that.
I think it's a longer negotiation.
It's going to be a difficult negotiation.
But, you know, there's no negotiation right now.
And to get the Taliban back to the table, we're going to have to lean pretty heavily on Pakistan.
I think the current thinking is that you're going to see that happening over the next six months.
But didn't Obama try that?
And didn't they say, oh yeah, no, we'll definitely talk to the Taliban about acting right, and yet it's in their interest to back the Taliban, you know?
Well, Obama was not as harsh as the current thinking is.
There's a really good thinker inside the National Security Council who works for McMaster.
Her name is Lisa Curtis, who I think understands Pakistan probably better than anybody in town.
That's my view of her.
I have her article here that you linked to in yours.
Again, by the way, it's Mark Perry's article here, guys.
It's Bannon and Kushner Want to Outsource Afghanistan to Mercenaries.
And in fact, this article by Lisa Curtis, you're talking about A New U.S. Approach to Pakistan Enforcing Aid Conditions Without Cutting Ties.
So I'm sorry to interrupt, but go ahead.
Well, it's quite all right.
I mean, I read that article about ten times, and I think it makes real sense.
And if you hear her speak publicly about Pakistan, she really knows what she's talking about.
And in early April, H.R. McMaster reached out to her and brought her into the National Security Council.
It's kind of the thinker on South Asian Pakistan.
And I think that, you know, she's kind of the unknown official here.
It's Mattis McMaster and Lisa Curtis who are trying to put together a strategy for Afghanistan that works.
And I think that McMaster and Mattis are probably following her lead on this.
She has very good thinking on Pakistan.
Now listen, if you're a non-interventionist like me, you kind of look askance at all of this and say, geez, we're going to try to recreate the wheel again.
But as I say, the bar is pretty low.
If we're looking for solutions on foreign policy and you really want those solutions to come from people who know what they're talking about, Lisa Curtis knows what she's talking about.
Lisa Curtis knows what she's talking about.
And we could do a lot worse than by listening to her.
And certainly we could do a lot worse if we listen to somebody like Kushner, Bannon, Prince and Feinberg.
I think the adults in the room, McMaster, Mattis and Curtis, ought to be allowed to take the lead here and let's see where it goes.
Well, I mean, as you say, slim pickings.
And I guess, you know, I haven't read her article yet, but I don't know.
I don't know what's changed that would really signify a Taliban willingness to negotiate when they've said all along, we won't negotiate until the Americans leave or at least agree up front that they're leaving at the end of the negotiation at the very least.
And yet the Americans don't want to ever leave and they want to send thousands more troops, right?
Well, you know, there's talk in town of a mini surge of enablers.
These wouldn't be combat troops.
These would be logistics, aviation, trainers, people like that.
And I think that's a done deal.
Four thousand extra troops to do that, to kind of buttress up, to buttress the central government.
And that's a very non-controversial offer that's on the table right now.
And I think that'll be approved.
Over and above that is the issue.
And, you know, if the choice here is between listening to McManus McMaster and Lisa Curtis, who would like to conduct a war that they believe is in America's interest, you can disagree or agree with that.
That's far better than turning a war over to people like Prince and Feinberg, who are interested in the profit motive.
And it's far easier to get out, eventually, if you have American soldiers bearing the brunt of the fighting rather than mercenaries.
You know, this isn't the kind of thing that the American people should forget about.
I know that we're consumed by Russiagate, but we're conducting a war in Afghanistan and American soldiers are in danger.
And we're not doing well.
And so this is something we need to focus on.
And there are clear choices here.
The choice here is between a policy that's an American policy, whether you agree with it or disagree with it, and a policy that's a for-profit policy, which I think could be a disaster for Afghanistan and a disaster for the country.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm sorry for getting so far off topic with the mercenary thing here.
I mean, it seems like probably we're going to get both, right?
They're going to make some kind of compromise and say, well, we're going to send a bunch of mercenaries, too.
Something like that.
I mean, it sounds like, and I meant to let you talk about this earlier, you mentioned here about how Eric Prince went marching on in there and got into a chess beating contest with McMaster and lost.
But that Feinberg is a lot smarter, and Feinberg went and recruited all of Mattis's best friends to talk to him for him and this kind of thing.
Can you elaborate a little bit and name some names and help us understand that?
Because this is a very well-reported piece here.
You talked to people on the National Security Council and in the military and got a lot of perspective on the politics of the people who are working on getting this thing done.
Well, I appreciate the compliment.
The article took me a while to put together, obviously, and there were very few people who were willing to talk to me on the record.
But the short story here is that Steve Feinberg understands that if he comes off as a guy who's simply interested in a profit motive, his initiative of turning this war over to corporate America is not going to work.
So he recruited very robust and respected officials.
The head of DynCorp, the new head of DynCorp is George Crevo, who is actually a very talented military officer, retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Michael Gefeller is a known quantity, worked at ExxonMobil, worked 26 years as a diplomat, highly respected in town, plus Feinberg.
And my understanding is that Steve Feinberg has on his side on this issue some pretty heavy-hitting former agency, that is to say CIA intelligence officers, who think that this is a good idea.
And the idea is that it's not as if the war wouldn't be on monitor.
This war and the Feinberg kind of Prince initiative would be overseen by the CIA.
So what we're seeing right now in Washington, and I won't take credit, but I think partially as a result of the article, is a debate inside the intelligence services about whether this is a good idea.
And there are people who are Asia hands, who've worked at the agency for years and years and years.
And I've overseen the Afghanistan conflict, who are dead set against us and are weighing in with the CIA.
Director Mike Pompeo to nix this.
It hasn't happened yet.
But it's good to hear.
Isn't this their game plan all along, the CIA, with their counterterrorism pursuit teams and all this stuff?
I guess that's more hiring local mercs than Nigerians.
Well, one of the complaints about the agency over the last 15 years is that it's been increasingly militarized.
And I think we're seeing the result of that.
And part of this bureaucratic battle, there's a lot of people in the CIA who would like to take over for the U.S. military around the world, who think that kind of the twilight struggle means hiring twilight lawyers and this is the way to do it.
What's interesting is that after the article appeared, which is what normally happens with me, the article appears and I get telephone calls from people inside the Pentagon, especially in the retired set of former intelligence officers who are influential.
And it was interesting that the calls were evenly divided between those who said, Mark, this is dead on arrival, it'll never work, and don't worry about it.
And another group of people who said, this is very, very much alive.
Now what that tells me is that this is currently being debated inside the CIA.
I think Mattis just discounts this.
If he has his way, this will never happen.
If H.R. McMaster has his way, this war will never be turned over to mercs.
It's just not going to happen.
But there's a certain appeal here to privatizing our military adventures and kind of lessening the military footprint and taking the Afghanistan conflict and all of our overseas conflicts off the front pages and out of the radar screen of the American people.
It's like hiring drones.
It's the same kind of thing.
Yeah, that's right.
And I don't think we should say this is outrageous, ridiculous.
These guys make a strong case, they have lots of allies, they want to do this, and the American people are sick of the Afghanistan war, this is a way to offload it.
That's their political play, and it's not a bad one.
Well, and as you say in here, reportedly, apparently, I guess you're reporting that Donald Trump read the Wall Street Journal piece by Prince about, yeah, we ought to have a viceroy.
It's just like the actual movie, War, Inc., the John Cusack flick.
We'll have a viceroy and turn the whole war over to the mercs.
And Trump really liked it and said, hey, yeah, let's look into this further, guys.
You know, for Trump, I mean, this, you know, I often say this, and it seems to have a certain resonance or appeal with some people, is Trump is the kind of guy I suppose our listeners would kind of tie him to, you know, a guy like Tony Soprano.
I mean, he spends, you know, he spends the day at the Ba-da-bing, and he comes home at night and he watches the BBC series World at War, and the military has a certain appeal to him.
He always says this, oh, I love the military, they love me, I know more about war than, well, what he knows about war is what he sees on television.
This guy is not a reader.
When I said that he read the Eric Prince article, people called me and said he didn't read it.
Yeah, somebody told him about it.
Yeah, Steve Bannon read it for him and highlighted it and gave it to McMaster.
That's what happened.
Well, I don't know that.
I think he probably read the article, but this has a certain appeal to him.
It's a way of winning without, you know, telling the American people that their sons and daughters are engaged in another 16-year adventure.
So, I think, and he trusts a guy like Eric Prince.
For Donald Trump, a guy like Eric Prince is a great hero.
He's an adventurer.
He's kind of a swashbuckler.
He understands how to run a business, especially through Steve Feinberg, who's a very good friend of Eric Prince's, and who's running a company that, you know, can do this kind of thing.
So, the appeal there for Donald Trump is very real, and that's the danger.
This sounds like an easy solution.
It's not so easy.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
So, back to the troops again.
Assuming that McMaster and Mattis, and Pompeo for that matter, shoot this thing down and just say this is unworkable, and we're back to the regular question of troops.
You said the 4,000 you think is a done deal.
Do you have an estimate for when they're going to announce that?
And, of course, I'm sorry, because I have a very vested interest in the timing here.
Because if they're going to announce it in a couple of weeks, or, yeah, you know, at the end of this month, then I'm going to publish my book at the end of this month.
But if this is 2009, and they're going to keep arguing about this thing into September, and later than that, then I need to go ahead and just publish it now so that my book can take part in this fight.
But if it's going to be obsolete by the time I publish it, I need to go ahead and wait.
You know what I mean?
Well, welcome to my world.
Welcome to my world.
And I keep getting emails from you saying, you know, when are they going to decide this?
When are they going to decide this?
And I keep responding saying, I don't know, but soon.
Yeah, two weeks.
Two weeks.
And I've been saying that for two months, and they still haven't decided.
It's like that movie, The Money Pit.
Two weeks.
We'll be done in two weeks.
Two weeks.
Two weeks.
And it never quite happens.
And I think that we're still a ways away.
But I do believe that at the end of the day, the kind of Bannon, Kushner, Prince, Feinberg initiative to privatize this war will fail.
It's just, it's not going to work.
It's too chancy.
The details are too slippery.
And people are very uncomfortable with it.
And I think that what will be adopted instead is a very robust, very aggressive diplomatic and military policy that targets the Taliban in Pakistan and that pushes Pakistan hard to bring the Taliban back to the table.
I think that that's what people believe the solution is.
They're probably right.
Which means that eventually, not today, not tomorrow, not next week, probably not even next year, but sooner or later, there's no question, the United States is headed out of Afghanistan and looking for a political solution.
You know, I don't know.
It seems like, yeah, but what about the Haqqanis?
And what about all the insurgent fighters who don't take no orders from no Taliban?
And what about the reality of this war?
I mean, all this still sounds fantastic, going to somehow negotiate.
Mattis just said the other day, why would I negotiate with somebody who, he just asserts, could never win at the ballot box?
That's why they fight, because they can't win at the ballot box.
So how am I going to turn civilization over to some beasts like that?
It doesn't sound like he's ready to negotiate with them at all.
Well, James Mattis talks a pretty tough game.
And we noticed this recently.
He was very, very tough on Iran.
But when it really came down to whether we stay inside the agreement that we had with Iran, or whether we break that agreement, he came down on the side of staying inside the agreement.
So he, you know, James Mattis is the kind of guy that will pound the table very effectively.
But he's a Democrat.
He's not a Trump Republican.
I mean, that's the big secret of Washington.
He's a Democrat.
Yes, he's an interventionist, but he's a very careful man.
And I think that we're going to see that, him banging the table out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it really comes down to it, he'd much rather have a diplomatic solution than anything else here.
I hope that's right.
All right, well, listen, I'll let you go.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Mark.
I really appreciate it.
Listen, it's always a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's the great Mark Perry.
He's a Pentagon reporter.
You'll find him a lot of times in Politico magazine.
And here he is at the American Conservative magazine.
Exclusive.
Bannon and Kushner want to outsource Afghanistan to mercenaries.
By the way, he's got a brand new book coming out, too.
The Pentagon's Wars.
It'll be out in October.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
