The War Dogs go Marching Home
Jay Ramesh
Not all War Dogs go to heaven, but most of them will be heading back home to the US. In the midst of a large-scale troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Pentagon is looking to avoid making mistakes similar to the ones in Iraq. As long as the Afghan government is firing rounds at Taliban strongholds, someone’s going to need to be selling them the bullets. That’s where contractors come in.
War dogs, a popular term for civilian arms contractors, are the lifeblood behind any military-industrial complex. They supply the guns needed to fire at other people, and as long as there’s a conflict in the world, you can bet that there will be war dogs selling arms. The Taliban is still fighting the Afghan government, and Afghanistan needs arms to equip its soldiers. But recently, things have become a bit complicated.
The US war in Afghanistan had been raging for almost 18 years before former president Donald Trump dramatically deviated from traditional US policy and negotiated with the Taliban. In February 2020, a peace deal was signed between the two parties, in which the US agreed to finally withdraw all troops from the country by May of 2021. That deadline has since been symbolically moved by the Biden administration to Sept. 11, 2021, but the process of withdrawal has already begun.
At the time of the peace deal, there were 12,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan, but by the beginning of 2021, there were an additional 18,000 contractors still working in the country. These contractors, some working for other departments such as USAID, are also withdrawing, casting doubts on the future of the Afghan military and future stability in the region.
The task is proving to be a logistical nightmare. The inability of Afghanistan to handle the coronavirus pandemic has made matters worse, as around 1,000 US citizens are being evacuated from the country due to medical emergencies. Despite these problems, the military has been using a Transport Isolation System, an evacuation method developed to combat the 2014 Ebola outbreaks, to safely evacuate US citizens infected with the virus.
But alongside questions of the sheer logistics of the US withdrawal lie uncertainties about the future of Afghanistan. The nation relies on US contractors to provide much of its military equipment, including helicopters and aircraft. Aircraft and helicopters rely on maintenance to be provided by contractors and engineers, so the entire state of the Afghan air force is potentially at risk.
As the US begins to withdraw and leave ghosts of the past behind, the legacy of the War in Afghanistan will live on. The troops may be heading home, but thousands remain dead as the country struggles with four decades of almost constant conflict. When the War Dogs go marching home, they will be leaving behind a broken, war-torn nation in which the Taliban still remain, over two decades later. The future of Afghanistan is as uncertain as ever.