Last year, President Trump announced plans to send 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. But given the ongoing quagmire, he’s now reportedly considering a controversial plan from Erik Prince.
Erik Prince — the founder of mercenary firm Blackwater (now known as Academi after briefly rebranding as Xe) and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — is campaigning once again to get the commander-in-chief to green-light his plan to outsource the Afghanistan war to private entities. According to NBC News, Prince is reportedly launching an “air campaign” to persuade Trump to sign off on his proposal.
Prince’s 19-page plan, first published by BuzzFeed News, proposes that Prince’s company Frontier Services Group would play a critical role in the implementation of the plan. This essentially would mean that billions of taxpayer dollars originally earmarked for the U.S. military would be routed to a private company owned by the family member of a cabinet secretary.
Despite the U.S. sending troops to Afghanistan nearly 17 years ago and spending more than $1 trillion, the country is still widely considered to be one of the most unstable in the world. The Fund for Peace’s 2018 Fragile States Index ranked Afghanistan as the ninth-most unstable country out of 178. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Taliban still controls large swaths of Afghanistan, and the terrorist group ISIS has a foothold in the country as well.
“This has all been done before and we know the result; thousands dead, an economy and an insurgency funded by opium [and] rampant corruption,” Adams told Grit Post.
“As always, we’re going to continue to review and look at the best ways to move forward,” Sanders said.
It’s unclear whether or not the ambitious plan Erik Prince would win the final approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, however. Prince may be seen as a security risk, given his attempts to establish a communications back-channel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin prior to then-President-Elect Trump’s inauguration.