Under Contract

The Invisible Workers of America's Global War

Noah Coburn

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781503605367
• eBook ISBN: 9781503607163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

War is one of the most lucrative job markets for an increasingly global workforce. Most of the work on American bases, everything from manning guard towers to cleaning the latrines to more technical engineering and accounting jobs, has been outsourced to private firms that then contract out individual jobs, often to the lowest bidder. An "American" base in Afghanistan or Iraq will be staffed with workers from places like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Turkey, Bosnia, and Nepal: so-called "third-country nationals." Tens of thousands of these workers are now fixtures on American bases. Yet, in the plethora of records kept by the U.S. government, they are unseen and uncounted—their stories untold.

Noah Coburn traces this unseen workforce across seven countries, following the workers' often zigzagging journey to war. He confronts the varied conditions third-country nationals encounter, ranging from near slavery to more mundane forms of exploitation. Visiting a British Imperial training camp in Nepal, U.S. bases in Afghanistan, a café in Tbilisi, offices in Ankara, and human traffickers in Delhi, Coburn seeks out a better understanding of the people who make up this unseen workforce, sharing powerful stories of hope and struggle.

Part memoir, part travelogue, and part retelling of the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of workers, Under Contract unspools a complex global web of how modern wars are fought and supported, narrating war stories unlike any other. Coburn's experience forces readers to reckon with the moral questions of a hidden global war-force and the costs being shouldered by foreign nationals in our name.

CHAPTER 1

MERCENARIES, CONTRACTORS, AND OTHER HIRED GUNS

MATTA TIRTHA

In July 2015, I stood on the hillside of a small town at the edge of the Kathmandu Valley and took in the rapidly expanding metropolis of Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu, from about 10 miles away. I was there to interview several Nepali security contractors who had guarded, among other things, the U.S. embassy in Kabul, but before the contractors arrived, I paused in a clearing to take in the view.

The name of the town, Matta Tirtha, translates to “the path of the mother.” The town is known in mostly Hindu Nepal for a shrine that sits above it in a shady courtyard, the hills of the valley shooting up above. That day, the shrine was primarily occupied by six young boys who were jumping in and out of the stone pool at the center of the small religious compound to cool off. A few other devotees strolled by, mostly enjoying the view and fresh air. On Nepali Mother’s Day in the month of Baisakh, the town swells with mourners who come to pray for mothers who died in the past year. Visitors are both Hindus and Buddhists. Nepal’s 80–20 split between the two tended to create syncretic melding more often than it created serious divides. It was common to come upon shrines with elements from both religions. This was a far cry from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, where it is assumed that essentially all Afghans are Muslims.¹

Having spent the past ten years working in and traveling back and forth to Afghanistan, my eye was drawn to elements like the shrine, which demonstrated the contrasts between the two cultures. In the Matta Thirta, for example, a group of young men sat at a teahouse under a pipal tree sharing tall bottles of beer, while several young women walked by in skirts, and the two groups eyed each other in a way you would never see in Afghanistan, where casual dating is unheard of. Seeing women without a head covering was, of course, different–but for some reason, I was most shocked by the occasional woman driving a motorbike. I was conditioned by my time in Afghanistan, where there were virtually no women who drove.

Despite these differences, there were numerous reminders that while Afghanistan and Nepal are separated by some of the highest mountains in the world, they are not all that far from each other geographically or sociologically. In reality, the Nepalis who guarded American bases had far less in common with the Americans they were protecting than the Afghans they were supposed to be protecting the Americans from.

The politics and the cultures of both societies are shaped by the steep mountains they live below and the fertile valleys that run out of them. In Matta Tirtha, as in Afghanistan, extended families live together, carefully cultivating fertile plots of land. Patriarchal structures mean that parents are respected and families remain close. These practices, in turn, shape how people in these communities see each other and the world they live in. In both Afghanistan and Nepal, most will tell you that those in the mountains are heartier souls, while people on the plains are softer, yet generally better at business and politicking.

While most of the divides in Nepal are along caste lines and most in Afghanistan are ethnic and tribal, both of these splits create low levels of resentment that occasionally boil up, particularly against the ruling elite who control most of their countries’ main resources. In both places, there are often land conflicts between neighbors and even more resentment aimed at large landowners who don’t live in the area. As a result, most rural communities attempt to regulate their own affairs and avoid the meddling of government officials. Just as important, both countries are extremely poor, burdened by indirect colonial legacies, ineffective and corrupt politicians, and neighboring countries (Pakistan in the case of Afghanistan and India in the case of Nepal) that bully them, taking advantage of their isolation.

Despite these similarities and their close geographic proximity, formal ties between the countries are virtually nonexistent. There is no Nepali embassy in Kabul and no Afghan embassy in Kathmandu. The closest Nepali embassy to Afghanistan is in Islamabad, which serves as diplomatic representation for Nepalis in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran—not an ambassadorship that I can imagine many coveting. But this lack of diplomatic links belies a long history of Nepalis traveling to Afghanistan, particularly during times of war.

Historically, the kingdom of Nepal expanded westward in the early nineteenth century, and, for a time, the western border of the country was only a couple of hundred miles from the eastern frontier of Afghanistan. Later, when the British invaded Afghanistan in the middle of the nineteenth century, they were supported by tens of thousands of “Indian” troops, many of whom were actually Nepali.² On one level, it was tempting to jump to the conclusion that with the U.S.-led invasion, a new, more subtle American empire had taken over for the British Empire in South Asia, relying on Nepali private security contractors instead of Nepali soldiers. However, while the parallels are important, so are the differences and the ways in which the American experience in Afghanistan was unique.³

TWO COUNTRIES

Links between Nepal and Afghanistan are not simply historical.

As I stood looking out over the Kathmandu Valley, my eyes were drawn to one of the newest and largest houses in town. Contrasting sharply with its neighbors, it was painted a rosy pink with bright red trim and had reflective neon green glass windows and several large balconies. The clashing colors were slightly disturbing against the lush mountain backdrop. The home looked similar to what my friends in Kabul would have called a narco-palace: monstrosities usually built by Afghan warlords, presumably using money from drug trafficking (though often these figures had profited more from lucrative contracts with the American military) in Kabul’s premier neighborhoods, using an obnoxious mix of architectural elements from Pakistan, Dubai, and Bollywood.

The similarities between the house and those Kabuli palaces were not coincidental. Yogendra, the owner of the house in Matta Tirtha, had grown up in a small building that still stood next door, now dwarfed by the new home. He made his fortune driving in armed convoys through Kabul’s congested streets. Passing beneath such palaces in armored SUVs for six years, he decided he wanted a house just like those palaces and carefully saved his money. Once back in Matta Tirtha, he told me, he used half of everything he saved to build this new house. The rest he was saving for a rainy day.

He was not alone, he explained, as we sat in his enormous and slightly dim reception room, far larger than any I had seen in other Nepali homes. As Yogendra, well built and stern looking, went on with the story of his time in Afghanistan, he became more animated and smiled at the memories. Seven of his friends, all from Matta Tirtha, had gone to Afghanistan and worked for the same company, DynCorp, one of the key U.S. private security contracting companies there. DynCorp was best known in Afghanistan initially for providing President Hamid Karzai’s security detail, but eventually it became responsible for tasks ranging from training the Afghan police to opium eradication.⁴

It was not by chance that so many from the town had worked for DynCorp. After one man was successful at securing a lucrative job in Afghanistan, it was common for him to recommend some of his friends and neighbors to his American or European boss. Getting from Nepal to Afghanistan legally was no easy task, and it was much easier with help from someone in managing the hurdles. Many of those I interviewed over the year not only knew each other, but took similar routes to Afghanistan, both physically and in terms of their life stories.

Yogendra first spent eighteen years as an officer in the Nepali Army. There he served with Resham, Himesh, Bhek, and Surya, all neighbors of his. The army paid frustratingly low wages. Enlisted soldiers in 2016 were paid less than $120 a month, and it was even worse when he was a recruit thirty years earlier.

Hoping to find a way to earn more, he tried to join the Nepali peacekeeping soldiers who were sent to Lebanon in support of the U.N. mission there. Nepalis assigned to international missions received better compensation, but competition for these positions was fierce. As the Nepali saying goes, you had “to keep people in your hand” through connections and bribes to get a posting. Yogendra did not have connections. He was also concerned that the army might get involved domestically in the growing Maoist insurgency, which had destabilized large parts of the Nepali countryside in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So he took early retirement after hearing that several of his neighbors had gotten positions at one of Kathmandu’s exclusive, foreigner-only casinos as security guards.

The pay at the casino was better, a couple of hundred dollars a month, but there, while on smoke breaks with the other security guards, he began to hear stories of former Nepali soldiers who made thousands of dollars a month working in Iraq and Afghanistan. Twelve Nepalis had been killed in Iraq a few years before, including one who was beheaded. But while they sat around gossiping, they rarely discussed such incidents. How dangerous could it be inside a base?

When Surya, one of his neighbors from Matta Tirtha who worked as a contractor in Afghanistan, came home on leave, pockets filled with cash, Yogendra decided to give it a chance. So he went into Kathmandu and visited the broker’s office that Surya had used, and in early 2008, he found himself headed to Afghanistan.

STATIC SECURITY

Contracting is not a new phenomenon in the American military. During the American Revolution, German mercenaries fought for both sides, the eighteenth-century version of private security contractors.⁵ Contracting in its current form, however, increased substantially during the Vietnam War and grew rapidly in the most recent decades.⁶ The advent of the all-volunteer army in the United States created a military labor shortage, and contracting simultaneously helped address this problem while lessening public opposition to America’s wars abroad. In the first Gulf War, one out of every hundred individuals deployed was a contractor, but by the time America invaded Iraq again in 2003, roughly half of those deployed were contractors.⁷

This made the American military presence much less American: 80 percent of those contractors were not American citizens.⁸ In 2010, the United States had 175,000 soldiers deployed to war zones, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, simultaneously, 207,000 contractors funded by the Department of Defense, like Yogendra, in these theaters.⁹

Many of the contractors were laborers who were not generally thought of as mercenaries, since they mostly built bases and worked in dining halls.¹⁰ Others did resemble mercenaries in the more conventional sense. Despite this, many in the military and the private security industry insist there is a clear divide between private security contractors and other contractors, but from the view of those supplying the labor, Nepalis and others like Yogendra, who were willing to take whatever work abroad they could find, this divide meant little.¹¹ And though Yogendra certainly did not consider himself a mercenary, the concept was blurry.¹² Yogendra did not go on patrols to attack an enemy, but the convoys he drove in were still called “missions,” and he often went out expecting to be attacked, draw fire and shoot back. Some private security companies even set up quick reaction forces, which closely resembled their military counterparts.¹³ Those whom I interviewed who were most active in ongoing operations tended to be involved in work such as opium eradication, but most were in support positions, guarding walls, vehicles, or “clients,” generally high-profile diplomats or aid workers in need of close protection.¹⁴

The contractors I interviewed who acted the most like soldiers were generally those who worked on supply convoys.¹⁵ The United States typically did not use American military personnel to defend supply lines to many of their small forward bases scattered across the country or, in some cases, even the roads to their larger bases. Contractors were hired to deliver the necessary supplies to many of these bases. Such convoys were under frequent attack by the Taliban, and the organization of the convoys included complex preparations for attacks. These convoys often received little to no air support or other resources from the international military.

Many of the troops I had interviewed previously tended to assume contracting is not as dangerous as soldiering, a questionable stance, I found. From the very beginning of the conflict, international contractors were deliberately targeted by insurgents, and as early as 2004, for example, eleven Chinese laborers working on a road-building project in Kunduz were killed.¹⁶ These numbers kept increasing. By early 2016, 2,300 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan, and the Department of Labor had reports of 1,644 contractors killed in the country.¹⁷ This gap is probably even narrower since these numbers include only cases reported to the Department of Labor by contracting companies, which also meant compensation had been paid to the families of the dead contractor.¹⁸ Reading statistics and casualty lists, I found cases in Nepal where contractors who were killed or injured were not included in these counts, suggesting a potentially much higher actual casualty rate. Considering the intense media coverage of American soldier deaths, it seems likely that the number of U.S. military personnel killed is accurate. This is not to take anything away from the danger the troops faced, but as I spoke with Yogendra and others, I increasingly felt that the idea that contractors were different from soldiers because they were not in the same amount of danger was wrong. As I gathered more interviews, it also became apparent that for some of these contractors, the Taliban threat was only one of many dangers they faced.

When Yogendra first arrived in Afghanistan, he w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: No Small War
• 1. Mercenaries, Contractors, and Other Hired Guns
• 2. Nepalis at War
• 3. One Blast, Many Lives
• 4. Costs and Compensation
• 5. Manpower
• 6. Two Hundred Years of Gurkhas
• 7. “Who Will Be a Gurkha?”
• 8. Through the Colonial Looking Glass
• 9. The Labor of War
• 10. A Protective Government?
• 11. Of Roses and Revolutions
• 12. Economic Ottomans
• 13. Turkish Engineers and Other Heroes of the Intervention
• 14. Building an Empire?
• 15. Detained
• 16. Kidnapped
• 17. Hom Bahadur
• 18. The Boredom of Being Trafficked
• 19. Accountants at War
• 20. Classes and Genders at War
• 21. Returning Abroad
• 22. When You Can’t Go Home
• 23. Where the War Went
• A Note on the Research
• Time Line of Relevant Dates
• Notes
• Sources
• Index