That attack used “rockets, small arms and grenades” and sought to use four operatives as suicide bombers. They were killed before they could detonate.

One U.S. contractor is dead. Nine U.S. servicemembers are wounded. Two of those nine are said to have returned to duty, and the rest ”are currently in stable condition,” according to an ISAF press release. But it’s been a long time since there was an attack this large on Bagram. Coming a day after the Kabul attack, the message the Taliban seek to deliver is that there aren’t any safe areas for the allies of the Afghan government.

While I can’t go into the sourcing of this memo, it’s penned by someone who began embracing population-centric counterinsurgency to mitigate the deterioration of the Iraq war as far back as 2005 — something that not a lot of CIA operatives bought into, then or today. Despite that pedigree, the CIA operative contends that attempts to protect the population from the insurgency and facilitate the delivery of Afghan government services are fatally undermined by the persistent corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government and its institutions.

His counterproposal, similar to a controversial approach advocated by an Army Special Forces major named Jim Gant, is to use Afghanistan’s various tribes as a proxy for both political legitimacy against the Taliban and a more effective and relevant structure for the provision of governance and economic development. He’s taken to calling it “Tribe-Centric Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense.”

“Press reports indicate the Taliban are already making nighttime inroads back into Marjah, and the ‘government in a box‘ promised by Gen. McChrystal in February isn’t materializing,” the ex-CIA operative said. “That our strategy doesn’t work in a remote hamlet is indicative of what we can expect in Kandahar and elsewhere. Accordingly, Taliban confidence is increasing as they perceive having three key requirements of insurgents — unlimited manpower, unlimited time, and a safe haven in Pakistan.”

I won’t reprint the memo in full, because it contains several passages that would reveal this operative’s identity. Instead, I’m going to excerpt the major sections that explain the argument, with some minor edits for clarity. Here goes:

The best strategy for Afghanistan is a Tribe-Centric Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense (TC UW/FID) approach executed by leveraging the social system that defines Afghan society.

This course of action is most likely to advance the policy goals of:
a) defeating Al Qaeda in the region
b) preventing a national Taliban takeover
c) ensuring nuclear security in Pakistan
d) bringing as many troops home as soon as we responsibly can…

[snip]

Ask a person in Afghanistan, “Who are you?” and they will tell you about their tribe, ethnicity or sect –but not nationality. Deployed to Afghanistan and Pakistan as an operator for a CIA CT codeword program, I remember asking a local about himself whether he considered himself “Afghan.” He laughed and said, “Afghanistan is a line on a map — drawn by the British. There are no Afghan people,” he continued, “except in Kabul but only because it pays so well.”

One contributing factor toward this lack of understanding is how most cultural advisors to high-level US decision makers, as I learned from personal experience at Defense Department Forward Operating Bases, State Department Embassies and CIA Stations, come from a Kabul-centric background. After all, each proved educated and wealthy enough to leave Afghanistan, learn English, acquire a security clearance and secure lucrative western government employment.

Nonetheless, a vast majority of people in Afghanistan do not view as legitimate any national authority from Kabul. Further, Afghanistan lacks the infrastructure of commerce, transport and communication that facilitate the development of national identity. Finally, people throughout Afghanistan do not view Hamid Karzai as a legitimate leader, and that sentiment has hardened in the aftermath of the massive fraud uncovered in connection with the recent election.

Instead—and this is vital for policy makers to understand—the very tribal leaders we seek to influence in our efforts against the Taliban are actually threatened by our support of Karzai. Regardless of our intent, they perceive our actions as empowering his tribe and their tribal allies to dominate the other tribes via the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) and National Police (ANP) once the coalition eventually withdrawals its forces.

This means counterinsurgency in Afghanistan would be counterproductive because our expanded effort to bolster Karzai’s ANA/ANP will make tribal leaders more likely to tacitly or explicitly ally with the Taliban and, in Pakistan, al-Qaeda. They would do so as a pragmatic response to our strategy as it alters dramatically, even if unintentionally, the regional tribal balance of power.

For these vital differences, sending additional brigades to Afghanistan with the COIN-Iraq strategy as a roadmap is the policy equivalent of driving off a cliff, or perhaps more accurately, sending a fleet of new Humvees coasting into quicksand.

For Afghanistan, a better solution is applying an tribe-centric unconventional warfare/foreign internal defense (TC UW/FID) strategy that withdraws significant numbers of conventional forces other than from Kabul to Bagram, maintains a Special Operations Forces footprint, uses interagency personnel more effectively (especially CIA and State) — and empowers all of the above with the resources they need to exert influence on a local level. If our mission in Iraq required local focus, Afghanistan must be hyper-local — again, due to the lack of common national identity, heritage, ethnicity, or even language. In fact, Pashto and Dari are just two of Afghanistan’s dozens of languages or dialects so distinct that people from nearby valleys cannot even communicate with one another.

The execution of a TC UW/FID strategy involves refocusing Special Forces groups away from SOF-style door-kicking and back to their traditional mission of training and equipping indigenous forces. SF units should be engaging and equipping key tribal leaders, with CIA, State and other civilian departments such as Agriculture offering tailored incentives for cooperation, with coalition forces ready to assist if needed. Tribal leaders in Afghanistan will welcome a TC UW/FID approach because it respects their social hierarchy, preserves their prestige, and leverages their natural dislike for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In that light, TC UW/FID is the strategic path most likely to prevent the terrorist safe-havens that could incubate another 9/11.

There are a couple of points and observations worth making in the interests of balance. First, while I don’t pretend to have nearly the experience in Afghanistan that this ex-operative has, I’ve talked to many Afghans there who identify primarily as “Afghan.”

Second, a tribal-based approach has recently crashed and burned in eastern Afghanistan, where an effort to capitalize on the Shinwari tribe’s willingness to fight the Taliban in exchange for cold hard cash encountered the insurmountable obstacles of inter-tribal rivalries; hostile and threatened Afghan government structures; U.S. civilian unwillingness to risk alienating the Afghan government; and simply insufficient U.S. knowledge of the complexities of Afghan tribal structures and how to navigate them. Any proposed tribal-based strategy needs to explain why this time would be different.

Finally, there’s an ongoing debate in U.S. military and academic circles about whether “tribal structures” are even viable intellectual prisms through which to understand Afghanistan. That debate is too complex to adequately capture here. But if you’re interested, read through this colloquy at Small Wars Journal or the Cliff’s Notes version at Abu Muqawama.

But the ex-operative argued that applied carefully, a tribal approach could still yield promising results.

“The point that tribal engagement is tough holds true for the south, where tribal structure has been significantly weakened by the drug economy and the Soviet scorched-earth approach against tribes,” the ex-operative said. “The tribes have stayed intact in the east, so that’s where we start this.” He predicted southern Afghanistan would require up to a year to “reinvigorate” tribal structures. ”So drugs and Soviet impact make it tougher in the south, but it’s still the way they’ve lived for millenia and thus a natural outcome to re-establish.”

Donald Rumsfeld called the Gitmo detainees "the worst of the worst." (Wikimedia Commons)

In February 2004, Ubrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi was charged with conspiring with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to attack and murder civilians and destroy property. The government claimed that al Qosi was an armed guard and driver for Osama bin Laden going back to 1996, provided logistical services and supplies for an al Qaeda compound in Kandahar, and traveled to to Kabul to fight with an al Qaeda mortar crew near the front lines.

Al Qosi was never tried on those charges, however, because in 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the military commissions unconstitutional and a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Congress re-created the commissions with a new law later that year, and Al Qosi was charged again in 2008.

[Law]Then in January, just after President Barack Obama took office, he suspended the 2006 military commissions while he decided what to do with them.

Now, about a dozen military commissions cases that were left in limbo are being revived. And, the government is sending more suspected terror cases for trial there – either at Guantanamo Bay, where they’re currently located, or in Thomson, Illinois, where they could be moved. Judging from recent protests against sending the suspected co-conspirators of the September 11 attacks to civilian trials, some might think that convicting terror suspects in a military commission would be easier. But the new Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in October and signed by the President, is an untested military system that, like its earlier incarnations, is ripe for constitutional challenge. Whether it will provide the swift justice the Obama administration and others hope for remains to be seen.

The case of al Qosi, now being heard before the new military commission, highlights the sorts of problems that lawyers say are likely to come up in many military commissions trials. Most importantly, they include a range of constitutional challenges to the new military commissions law itself, from whether its jurisdiction inappropriately extends beyond war crimes to include ordinary criminal acts, to whether the law’s permissiveness about the use of hearsay evidence against terror suspects violates their rights to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against them.

Although the case has been pending for almost six years now, at a hearing earlier this month, the government announced for the first time that it wanted to add more charges against al Qosi alleging he participated in a conspiracy with al Qaeda dating back to 1992. That’s also the date that Osama bin Laden allegedly began urging others to attack the United States, according to a U.S. criminal indictment of bin Laden. If the government can show that al Qosi participated in the conspiracy dating back to that time, then he could be held responsible for all of the crimes it committed between 1992 and 2001, when he was captured.

“That’s the way the conspiracy charge works,” said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, who attended the military commission hearing at Guantanamo Bay in al Qosi’s case earlier this month. “You don’t need to have participated in all of the acts that the conspiracy carried out.”

Advised of the four years’ worth of new charges only hours before the government sought to add them, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, al Qosi’s lead military defense lawyer, protested, calling them “sweeping changes” that would require al Qosi’s defense team to travel to Somalia, Ethiopia and Chechnya to prepare for a trial.

At the hearing, the judge rejected the government’s request to add more charges to the current case against al Qosi, but said it could withdraw the case and refile it with those new claims. If prosecutors do that, however, it will only highlight one of the tenuous bases for the new military commissions, which is its broad jurisdiction.

The crimes the government wants to add in al Qosi’s case did not even take place in the United States or against it. But under the new Military Commissions Act, they can be considered part of a larger conspiracy to attack the United States, and al Qosi’s support for al Qaeda in that period can be considered a war crime.

“It’s absurd in these circumstances,” said Prasow. “But in a conspiracy, the action that the defendant has to take doesn’t need to be criminal. It can be cooking for people, as long as you have a meeting of the minds of all the participants. The government will argue that joining al Qaeda is a meeting of the minds, and a joining of the intent to carry out bad things.”

“We are breaking new ground,” conceded Navy Cmdr. Dirk Padgett, the military commissions prosecutor, at the hearing, according to a blog post Prasow wrote from the hearing at the time. Prasow says the prosecutor defended his bid to reach back to 1992 because “the planning, the conspiracy began years before.”

But are conspiracy to attack and providing substantial support for those attacks even war crimes prosecutable by military commission? That’s not at all clear.

Lachelier last year moved to dismiss the case against al Qosi on the grounds that neither of these charges have traditiionally been considered war crimes, so the military commissions don’t legitimately have jurisdiction to prosecute them.

In fact, that could pose a serious problem for this latest incarnation of the military commissions, as even the Justice Department has acknowledged. In July, Assistant Attorney General David Kris testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.”

Congress enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2009 with its broad jurisdiction anyway, and despite senior Justice Department officials’ own doubts, the government is proceeding to prosecute al Qosi for conspiracy and providing “material support” to al Qaeda. Those charges “continue to fly in the face of traditional understandings of law of war violations,” wrote Devon Chaffee, advocacy counsel for Human Rights First, in a blog post she wrote after attending the al Qosi hearing.

Indeed, when the MCA was enacted in October, civil liberties and human rights group objected in large part because it swept into untested military commissions with unknown rules ordinary crimes that have been successfully tried and appropriately belong in federal court.

Now, it’s not clear what is legitimate in the newly reconstituted commissions. “You don’t know what law applies,” Lachelier said of the military commissions. “You pick and choose. You try to draw from international and federal precedent.” How the commissions will use those remains unclear, however.

Another potential challenge to any conviction by the commissions, Lachelier explained, is that the military commissions allow the use of hearsay testimony in circumstances where it would be inadmissible in a federal court. That, too, could become a constitutional problem if convictions are appealed. “The right to confrontation is still significantly diminished in the military commissions,” Lachelier said, referring to the right to the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment right to confront and cross-examine witnesses. If the government claims the witnesses are not available, “these could be trials on paper,” she said.”That’s not what the confrontation clause and the Supreme Court would allow.”

Recently, Lachelier filed four more motions in al Qosi’s case. She claims that the military commission lacks jurisdiction over her client because the prosecutor hasn’t proved he’s an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” — meaning he was a member and substantial supporter of al Qaeda. She also claims that the Military Commissions Act is an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder, meaning a law designed only to punish a certain group of people (in this case unprivileged enemy belligerents), and that it violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution because it applies only to aliens (non-citizens).

Many of these claims have been made in military commission cases before. But since this is a new commission with no binding legal precedent, it will have to decide these issues all over again. “The question is, what law applies?” asked Lachelier. “And how will the commission interpret it?”

Ultimately, it may be the Supreme Court that answers these questions, probably several years from now. And if the court holds that Congress and the President overreached in the MCA of 2009, the government’s prosecution of Mahmoud al Qosi, and any other terror suspects charged before the new military commissions, will have to start all over again.

“These are all still open issues,” said Lachelier. “There are so many moving parts.”

Chinook helicopters fly over U.S. forces in Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo)

Former employees of ArmorGroup, the private security company that holds a State Department contract to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, unveiled new allegations against the besieged contractor a week after photographic evidence emerged of its guards engaged in physical and sexual harassment. In a press conference revolving around an unlawful-termination lawsuit filed against ArmorGroup, former senior company officials said ArmorGroup was aware of widespread fraud; intentional use of non-English speaking guards to save money at the expense of embassy security; operations of a shell corporation in order to win contracts intended only for American companies; and even involvement in prostitution — and that the State Department knew about at least some of the company’s illicit practices.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The allegations came from John Gorman, a former manager of ArmorGroup’s Kabul contract, and James Gordon, the former director of operation’s at ArmorGroup’s North American branch, headquartered in McLean, Va. Gordon, who yesterday sued the company for wrongful firing in federal court, spoke by teleconference from Kabul, where he said he was employed by an unspecified security company. Gorman and Gordon’s revelations come after the Project on Government Oversight wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last week detailing accusations of fraud in ArmorGroup’s $189 million contract; and a year after their former colleagues and fellow whistleblowers, James Sauer and Peter Martino, filed a similar lawsuit.

Both Gorman and Gordon said ArmorGroup intentionally misrepresented its cost requirements to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security in order to win the contract to protect the embassy when it was initially put up for bid in 2006. Gordon’s lawsuit alleges that Michael O’Connell, ArmorGroup North America’s vice president of operations, emailed Sauer on March 11, 2007, “AGNA bid this at a very low price and a very low margin,” adding the next day that the timelines and resources given to State in its proposal “don’t match up,” but it wasn’t “a big deal unless” the State Department contracting officer’s representative “calls us on it.”

One immediate consequence of the emphasis on hiding fraud, Gordon said, was hiring Nepalese guards, known as Gurkhas, who did not speak adequate English to guard the embassy. “It was impossible to safeguard the embassy with a guard force that couldn’t communicate with one another,” he said. “I was told that no language test had ever been given. I immediately reported this violation to the Department of State. To this day, AGNA has not corrected the problem.”

The Washington Independent reported on Friday that ArmorGroup’s predecessor on the embassy security contract, MVM Inc., lost its contract in 2007 precisely because the Gurkhas it hired spoke inadequate English. Gordon said it was “common knowledge” within ArmorGroup why MVM had lost its contract, but persisted with the inadequate guards anyway. Gorman added that ArmorGroup also misled the State Department about hiring male and female interpreters familiar with all Afghan and coalition languages, but “no such people existed.”

Gorman, a retired Marine who now works as an addiction counselor in Connecticut, was fired from ArmorGroup’s Kabul office on June 13, 2007, after he, Sauer and Martino prepared a formal report for the Regional Security Officer of the embassy, Nick Pietrowicz, detailing numerous breaches of contract that he said compromised the security of the embassy. Among them: recruiting people who had inadequate military records and other identification, and “one individual who had been fired from a previous project for pulling a pistol on another employee while drunk.” Gorman said that he felt personally endangered, as he was jeopardizing a $187 million contract in Afghanistan and another security contract with State worth $500 million in Iraq. “Not popular” was how he described himself with his ArmorGroup colleagues. Pietrowicz, a State Department officer, found the prospect of violent retaliation against the whistleblowers so acute that he “asked if we wanted to stay in his apartment on the embassy compound,” Gorman said.

Gordon, a citizen of New Zealand and a military veteran, issued a variety of new allegations against ArmorGroup. He said ArmorGroup’s logistics manager spent contract funds to purchase “counterfeit North Face jackets and Altama boots” for the guards from his wife’s company in Lebanon, which “could never keep the men warm during the cold winters in Afghanistan,” and the company ignored a State Department order to fire the manager after Gordon informed State of the abuse. Similarly, ArmorGroup succeeded in getting money released from the State Department to uphold a fleet of beat-up vehicles used to transport guards that were colloquially known as “white coffins.” But “the money was immediately transformed to ArmorGroup International [and] the escort vehicles were never bought,” Gordon said.

Perhaps most seriously, Gordon said that he found out that both guards and even ArmorGroup program manager Nick Du Plessis were regularly frequenting brothels in Kabul. “Many of the prostitutes in Kabul are young Chinese girls who were taken against their will to Kabul for sexual exploitation,” Gordon said. Federal contracting regulations designed to support the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act prevents contractors from “procuring commercial sex acts during the period of performance of the contract,” meaning that ArmorGroup could lose its contract if State learned of the violation. Yet Gordon’s lawsuit alleges he was shut out of an investigation into the solicitation of prostitutes at the behest of Armor Group’s London-based parent company, despite recurring evidence that ArmorGroup employees continued to solicit prostitutes and perhaps even run their own prostitution services. A trainee boasted to Gordon “that he could purchase a girl for $20,000 and turn a profit after a month.”

Gordon said that he “immediately notified the State Department” and ArmorGroup North America’s president, but “to my knowledge, neither AGNA nor the State Department conducted a follow up investigation.” In July 2008, despite repeated formal warnings from the State Department about inadequate fulfillment of contract responsibilities, the State Department re-awarded the embassy security contract to ArmorGroup. The State Department’s inspector general, Howard Geisel, opened an investigation into the ArmorGroup contract last week.

Neither ArmorGroup nor the State Department responded to requests for comment on the lawsuit or the allegations made by Gordon and Gorman by press time, but The Washington Independent will print whatever responses it eventually receives.

A lawyer for Gordon, Janet Goldstein, said the pattern of ArmorGroup International squelching inquiries from employees of ArmorGroup North America, alleged in the lawsuit, suggested that ArmorGroup North America is “essentially a shell company” existing to “acquire, bid on and award contracts that have to be awarded to a U.S. company.”

Gordon alleges in the lawsuit that while he was not formally fired, he was pushed out of the company in February 2008 after leaving him “with nothing to do but sit in my office and play solitaire.” He is not suing for any specific dollar figure, and his lawyers said his lawsuit was an attempt to get the State Department to redress concerns about ArmorGroup’s embassy security contract that still exist.

Gorman said that he disbelieves that ArmorGroup is adequately protecting the Kabul embassy today, despite both company and State Department assurances that it is in no danger. “They need to say that because if they say the embassy is insecure, they give a green light to the Taliban,” he said.

–

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This smells more like crisis management than accountability. For one thing, as the Project on Government Oversight and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) have disclosed, the embassy’s security staff — that is, the State Department employees who interface with ArmorGroup — have known about this sort of behavior for years, and yet ArmorGroup’s contract was renewed last year. The State Department’s spokesman Ian Kelly put forward that knowledge like it was exculpatory. It’s one thing to note that the State Department senior leadership just found out about ArmorGroup’s problematic track record a few days ago. The embassy in Kabul can claim no such ignorance.

But the Project on Government Oversight, the good-government watchdog nonprofit that exposed the latest abuses, confirms that it was contacted yesterday by the Office of the Inspector General for the State Department and was told it could “neither confirm nor deny” that it was investigating the organization’s allegations. Which is, uh, bizarre, given Kelly confirmed it yesterday afternoon. POGO ran into this wall of silence just shortly after 4 p.m. yesterday. But Kelly’s briefing ended, according to the official transcript, an hour earlier. Clearly these are some diligent investigators we’re dealing with.

What’s more, POGO informed the inspector general’s office that it will not turn over any of the whistleblowers whose accounts formed the basis for the allegations, according to executive director Danielle Brian. Already, the organization says, at least one whistleblower has been fired in an act of retaliation.

–

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Well, except…

QUESTION: Just the discrepancy between what I think some folks from OIG were saying that they were only notified yesterday. You said that they were notified ten days ago. Can you just clarify that? I mean, are you sure it was ten days ago that OIG was first – that they –
MR. KELLY: Oh, you might be right. You might be right on that.
QUESTION: Well, can you –
QUESTION: Can you –
QUESTION: — get that for sure?
MR. KELLY: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I may have misspoke on that one.

But even that discrepancy is relatively minor. Kelly said that the State Department sent ArmorGroup nine letters since 2007 complaining about its fulfillment of contract responsibilities. And he meant this as an exculpation, not a concession that State has faced systemic problems in exercising oversight of its security contractors. For instance:

MR. KELLY: Starting in June 2007, all the way through April 30, 2008, and then actually there was a ninth [letter to ArmorGroup from State], and this was the most serious one. It’s called a show cause notice. A decision to issue a show cause notice is a serious matter and was not taken lightly. The issuance of a show cause notice was necessary due to repeated staffing shortages, which had been brought to the attention of the contracting officer. The show cause notice was the first step towards considering termination of the contract and was carefully considered by all concerned parties. … This was September 21^st, 2008.

But according to Project on Government Oversight Executive Director Danielle Brian, that “most serious” show-cause notice may have been first issued on Sept. 21, 2008, but it had a rather serious predecessor:

[I]n July 2007, State issued a “cure notice,” a formal advisory that AGNA’s deficiencies were endangering the performance of the contract. In the cure notice, State identified 14 performance deficiencies, including the failure of AGNA to provide an adequate number of guards, relief personnel, and armored vehicles. The contracting official stated “I consider the contract deficiencies addressed below to endanger performance of the contract to such a degree that the security of the US Embassy in Kabul is in jeopardy….”

A follow-on cure notice was issued in April 2008, for, among other things, “failing to correct many of the deficiencies identified in the July 2007 cure notice.” And then State re-awarded ArmorGroup its $189 million contract the following July.

In addition to the potential for more pre-election attacks by the Taliban, speculation abounds about the possibility for post-election political violence between different factions. The presidential elections would go to a second round if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of votes cast. If a second round happens, the top two candidates would face off in early October. Some observers worry that if there are signs of widespread fraud or voter intimidation; a losing candidate may not accept the legitimacy of the results and might turn to violence to settle scores.

Some worries exist about possible post-election violence over provincial election results too. In meetings DI election observers had in Jalalabad over the last few days, for example, residents expressed worries about possible post-election violence between three main tribal families running different candidates.

The legitimacy question is is a crucial one. At Wednesday’s event at the St. Regis, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan special envoy, said that very little of the administration’s plans for aiding Afghan governance and economic development could proceed before the election of a government widely seen as legitimate. The point holds just as true after the Aug. 20 election as before.

[Update: Sorry, Aug. 20 is  Thursday, not Wednesday.]

It’s not just State Department employees who come with their own security details outfitted with huge SUVs and pointed weapons. Afghan government officials now travel in similar fashion, leaving drivers flummoxed about what to do to get out of the way. Some convoys pull up to sedans and point guns at the drivers, others set up checkpoints with varying rules on how not to get shot and still others simply close off roads that Afghans once traveled freely on.

When there’s foreign dignitaries coming through the capital city of a war-torn country, there’s going to be contracted security. And those security contractors do not typically feel any need to make nice with the locals. Instead, to keep the locals at a safe distance — safe for the dignitaries, that is — from the officials they guard, the contractors use fear, intimidation and, on occasion, violence. Already we’re seeing Blackwater Xe affiliates firing on unarmed civilians for the crime of driving too closing to them while the contractors had been drinking. More security contractors in Kabul raises the awful prospect of another Nisour Square.

Relatedly, in a few weeks, the State Department’s security contract, known as the Worldwide Personal Protective Services deal, gets re-awarded. I’ll be paying close attention to whether State looks to switch over contractors from the Xe-DynCorp-Triple Canopy triad it currently employs.