Businessmen asked to devise Afghan options
WASHINGTON — President Donald 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 Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have discussed their proposals to rely on contractors instead of U.S. troops in Afghanistan with both Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law.
On Saturday morning, Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, a U.S. official said. 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 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 Prince and 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.
Last month, Trump gave the Pentagon authority to send more U.S. 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, Trump’s aides have expressed concern that he will be locked into policies that failed under the last two presidents.
Feinberg, whose name had previously been floated to conduct a review of the nation’s intelligence agencies, met with the president on Afghanistan, while Prince briefed several White House officials, including McMaster.
After selling his stake in Blackwater in 2010, 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 Trump’s education secretary.
If Trump opted to use more contractors, it could 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. Feinberg controls DynCorp through Cerberus Capital Management, a firm he co-founded in 1992.
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 U.S. military. “The appeal to that,” he said, “is you limit your boots on the ground and you limit your casualties.”
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.