The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (21 page)

Accordingly, DynCorp sought to have a law passed in Liberia mandating the demobilization of the legacy AFL. A law is perhaps an extreme measure but is the strongest possible public commitment from the government of Liberia to the United States and the best chance that the contract would go forward. However, it is also a violation of Westphalian sovereignty, since countries—much less corporations—are not suppose to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries.

DynCorp had the additional problem of the transitional Liberian Congress, a kleptocratic and dysfunctional body in 2005. The head of state, Gyude Bryant, had the authority to pass executive orders, which possessed the power of law and effectively bypassed the legislative branch. It was possible for Bryant to issue an executive order mandating the demobilization of the legacy AFL. During the spring, the firm engaged select stakeholders to explore options for demobilization, and wielded considerable yet subtle power to affect stakeholder opinions. It could empower stakeholder groups by choosing which ones to meet with or ignore. Similarly, it could influence leadership selection within groups by picking whom to talk to or disregard. The company could set meeting agendas and sequence issues for discussion, affecting outcomes by strategically proposing solutions for stakeholders to adopt. Stakeholder requests deemed unrealistic, not operationally possible, or unprofitable could be overlooked. If present, embassy officials probably did not challenge DynCorp’s expert opinions, which is not surprising, since the United States contracted the company for its expertise and also wanted to see the legacy force safely demobilized.

On May 2, DynCorp gave a briefing to the Liberian government’s Cluster One committee, which deals with national security issues, outlining two possible courses of action for the demobilization: a “soft” policy option and a “hard” policy option. The soft option entailed a voluntary dissolution of the legacy force, whereby former soldiers would agree to lay down their arms and leave the army in exchange for money. However, it was unclear what would happen to soldiers who refused this deal or if there was even sufficient funding to attract voluntary dissolution. A prudent analysis might find this option risky, since it could fail to demobilize the legacy force, create an indefinite delay of the program, and imperil state security.

Alternatively, the hard policy option recommended that the president exercise his legal prerogative to declare the AFL “demobilized” by a date certain as a matter of law. The advantages of this were clear: financial certainty, finality, and acceleration of the program, outcomes that were important to DynCorp and possibly to Liberia, too. It was reasonable to conclude that the disadvantages
were minor, namely, choosing a demobilization site and possible noncompliance by members of the legacy force, a problem for both soft and hard options.

The brief concluded with a simple decision matrix whereby the company compared the two options using four criteria: simplicity, time, demobilization costs, and risk of noncompliance. And for each option and criteria, the firm assigned a score of one (good) or two (bad). Perhaps not surprisingly, the company’s analysis resulted in the hard option winning over the soft one, and it recommended that the president adopt the hard option by passing an executive order demobilizing the AFL. Two days later the Minister of Defense Daniel Chea sent a memorandum to the president urging him to sign an executive order to this effect, underlining key sentences by hand.

Bryant agreed to pass the executive order, and DynCorp immediately drafted it for his signature. Normally, only Liberian lawmakers possess the privilege of writing legislation, and it remains uncertain if any lawmakers were aware of DynCorp’s political activities. Before the firm presented the draft to the president, it first furnished a copy to its client for approval, and the State Department also made edits.

Once Bryant signed Executive Order 5, officially demobilizing the legacy military, the State Department initiated DynCorp’s contract and paid out millions of dollars to begin work. A few days later, Bryant held a national press conference, announced the new law, and realized DynCorp’s hard policy option. The company even took care to prepare the Liberian minister of defense’s talking points for the press conference, which praised the company.

DynCorp had the ability to influence Liberian domestic politics, like a lobbying firm, and create the conditions necessary for contract initiation. Clearly, this is not something a US Army battalion would do, since it lacks profit motive and the sophistication to influence another country’s laws. Had a US military unit been in charge, it is likely the program would have ended in 2004, when the US realized the Liberians could not demobilize their old army. As Machiavelli warned, private armies are not swappable substitutes for public ones, and changing the means of military operations changes the outcome of the campaign.

The most significant fact of DynCorp’s work in Liberia is that the private sector can raise an army at all. Like Wallenstein, the British East India Company, and other military enterprisers of the past, DynCorp made a military for a client and did so without external assistance other than payment. The Liberia program was
not a public and private partnership involving a hybrid of US soldiers and PMC personnel working together to transform a foreign military, as has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Liberia’s armed forces are unique in that they were generated entirely by the private sector. Furthermore, DynCorp would have had an easier job if it had a less finicky client than the US government and a more permissive context than a large UN peacekeeping mission.

If a company can create an army, then it can deploy it, too, because the expertises are linked. This does not suggest that DynCorp secretly desired to deploy the AFL (it did not), only that it possessed the requisite skills to do so, because, like most PMCs, it enlisted most of its personnel from other military, intelligence, or law-enforcement organizations. The military is a profession that can only be taught by its own, and non-military imposters are anathema. For example, a soldier must have years of experience leading troops to be selected as a drill instructor. All of DynCorp’s instructors were military veterans, adept at commanding tactical units, and could have easily led the AFL into battle, as Executive Outcomes did in Angola and elsewhere. In some ways, this would have been desirable, since the AFL was essentially an army of entry-level privates by 2010 and in need of tactical leadership.

Another example is arming the AFL. In 2006, DynCorp bought and transported small arms from eastern Europe to Liberia, the first legal arms shipment to the country in more than two decades. The State Department helped arrange the legal aspects of the transfer, while the machinations of the deal itself were left to the firm, knowing what to buy, where to buy, whom to talk to, how to ship it, and so forth. It remains well within the company’s grasp to purchase and move small arms around the world without the support of governments. Although DynCorp had no intention of building its own army, taking over the AFL, or illegally supplying weapons to regional actors, the PMC—and others like it—currently possess the ability to do so.

DynCorp acted as a military enterpriser in Liberia, building an army for the client rather than deploying it. The benefits of hiring a private actor for this task are many and include efficiency, innovative approaches, surge capacity, ability to plumb resource pools not accessible to the client, and freedom of action as an “outsider” to stakeholder politics. But contracting also creates complications: poor teamwork between firms, principal-agent issues, asymmetries of information, lack of oversight, difficulties arising from pay problems, and conflicts of interest stemming from the profit motive. There are risks too, notably a company’s ability to influence domestic politics, demonstrating that PMCs are a fundamentally different tool from their public sector counterparts. Finally, there remains a disturbing fact: a company that possesses the expertise to raise an army also has the skill to deploy it. DynCorp created a military yet refrained
from using it, which is admirable but not the point; that a company could do this at all is astonishing.

Many of these risks were mitigated by the fact that Liberia was a mediated market for force, arbitrated by a strong client with market power and international sway. DynCorp was not a mercenary actor but instead a military enterpriser. Military enterprisers benefit clients without threatening overall security, as mercenaries sometimes do, owing to the monogamous relationship between client and company, aligning long-term interests. DynCorp and the United States worked in a public-private partnership that reduced the dangers posed by private force while reaping the benefits. Like Wallenstein and the Holy Roman Empire, DynCorp was not incentivized to betray the United States, its principal and long-term client. Nor was the US government interested in reneging on its contract with DynCorp, an enduring implementing partner that understood the client’s vision, culture, and quirks.

DynCorp’s efforts in Liberia are a rare and qualified success in an era of security force assistance failure. Public sector efforts by the United States, the United Nations, and NATO are comparative disappointments, resulting in hollow forces (Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Sierra Leone), dangerous renegade units (Iraq, Guatemala), and even coup d’états (Mali, East Timor). By contrast, the AFL is a military that remains loyal to the government, and even deployed a small contingent of peacekeepers to Mali in 2013, ten years after its own civil war ended. As a private sector actor, DynCorp took different approaches to building armies from those of its public sector counterparts, and this accounts for some of its success. This suggests that under the right market circumstances, military enterprisers operating in a mediated market for force could prove to be a powerful tool for stability.

Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarters, or take any from you.

—Pirate Captain Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, before his final battle

“The killing was a message to the owners of the ship who paid no heed to our ransom demands,” said Hassan Abdi, a pirate captain operating off the coast of Somalia. The pirates had just killed one crew member and injured another from the cargo ship MV
Orna
that they had hijacked in the Indian Ocean, approximately four hundred nautical miles northeast of the Seychelles in 2010. “More killings will follow if they continue to lie to us—we have lost patience with them.”

Like Liberia, Somalia is a worst-case example of neomedievalism, and, while tragic, it clearly shows neomedievalism’s five characteristics. Somalia has splintered and dissolved into anarchy owing to decades of conflict and chaos. Mogadishu, the capital, is a viper pit of Islamist militants, clan warlords, factional armies, and rogue fighters who have repelled all foreign interventions, including twenty-five thousand UN peacekeepers in the 1990s. Somalia’s ruined cities remain battlegrounds for feuding warlords, and tens of thousands have perished from famine. Religious zealots fight one another in the name of God, mercilessly massacring those who resist salvation. Gunmen of all types—militia, religious, and government—prey upon women and girls as spoils of war, as they rape, rob, and kill with impunity. The lucky ones who escape trek hundreds of miles in search of food, only to end up in crowded, lawless refugee camps, some the size of cities. Somalia is closer to a new Dark Age than to neomedievalism.

The Horn of Africa is the most tragic example of neomedievalism. At its center is Somalia, a quintessential failed state with the dubious distinction of topping
the
Foreign Policy
and Fund for Peace Failed State Index three years in a row. The territory has been without a functional central government since 1991, making it the longest-running instance of complete state collapse in African postcolonial history. Several dozen national peace conferences have been launched to resuscitate Somalia, including many sponsored by the United Nations, but none has succeeded.

While parts of the north have remained relatively peaceful, including much of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, the region is rife with fighting, kidnapping, murder, crime, and piracy. Since 1991, an estimated three hundred fifty thousand to 1 million Somalis have died as a result of armed conflict or its consequences.
¹
Abducting international humanitarian aid workers is practically an industry, and piracy has burgeoned since the second phase of the Somali civil war in 2005, threatening international shipping.

During the 1990s, Somalia disintegrated into at least three semiautonomous areas: Somaliland in the north, Puntland in the northeast, and Somalia in the south. The borders between these informal polities and their neighbors are porous, and tensions remain high. Spillover violence and crime from Somalia threaten the stability of neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya. In an attempt to quell this problem, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006 with troops from Puntland. As Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, explains, the invasion was necessary, because Ethiopia faced a direct threat to its own borders, and “Ethiopian defense forces were forced to enter into war to protect the sovereignty of the nation.”
²
Irregular warfare ensued and ended in 2009, when Ethiopian troops withdrew, marking another victory for the clans in southern Somalia.

Similarly, Somali clans clashed near the Kenya border, destabilizing the region. It is estimated that since the start of 2007, violence has killed at least twenty-one thousand people in Somalia and driven another 1.5 million from their homes, many into neighboring countries, helping to trigger one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies.
³
Over the past twenty years, the Somali refugee camp at Dadaab in Kenya, about one hundred kilometers south of the border, has swelled to nearly three hundred thousand people, making it one of the largest population centers in Kenya and one of the biggest refugee complexes in the world. The United Nations says that Dadaab has ten thousand third-generation refugees, grandchildren of the original arrivals.
⁴
Overcrowding, lack of shelters, and insufficient food have made matters worse, and the camp is a frequent recruiting spot for Somali warlords and militants.

However, consistent with neomedievalism, Somalia’s lack of government does not imply a lack of governance. As with the dons of Jamaica, the lack of a formal central government has given rise to local ad hoc efforts of governance that provide communities with limited public security, dispute mediation, social services, and other political goods. These informal polities range widely
in character and effectiveness. The most visible manifestations of these overlapping and competing authorities are Somaliland and Puntland, semiformal and self-declared administrations.

But even these separatist states have sovereignty in name only, for they compete with clan authorities within their territory for authority and allegiance. The Rahanweyn, Hawiye, Darod, Isaaq, and Dir and their subclans all retain a measure of autonomy within Somalia’s political mosaic. This “radical localization” of politics transpired in the political vacuum left by the central government’s collapse in 1991 and failure of the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM I) in 1992–1993. Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus and researcher John Prendergast describe these independent authorities as “radically localized Somali polities [that] are fluid in structure and authority, overlapping, and situational in nature.”
⁵
Other experts agree that fragmented sovereignty is not unique to Somalia. The rise of informal, localized, and ad hoc authorities that overlap and compete with one another is a growing phenomenon in areas of protracted state failure and an emblem of neomedievalism.
⁶

The most significant actors in the Horn of Africa are not states. During the Cold War, Somalia was merely a pawn to the great powers, but as the world changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so did the world’s interest in Somalia. As the United Nations promoted its muscular vision of a “global transition” to a new world order founded on humanitarian concern rather than the interests of individual states in
An Agenda for Peace
, televisions around the world were flooded with images of dying Somali children, the victims of drought, famine, brutal warlords, and their civil war. Out of a population of 4.5 million people, approximately three hundred thousand died of malnutrition, and at least 1.5 million lives were at immediate risk. Almost 1 million Somalis sought refuge in neighboring countries and elsewhere, creating a massive refugee crisis for the region.
⁷

Somalia was an early test case for the United Nations’ new world order. By spring 1992, the Security Council established UNOSOM I to provide humanitarian relief in Somalia and monitor the cease-fire of the Somali civil war. Although not a success—hence its sequel, UNOSOM II, one year later—it was a groundbreaking Chapter VII peacekeeping mission that served as a prototype for future missions in the Balkans, Africa, and elsewhere. Following its failure, President George H. W. Bush sent US troops to protect relief workers in the appropriately named Operation Restore Hope. This transitioned into UNOSOM II, but it also failed, and the United Nations withdraw all forces by 1995.

Since then, Somalia has persisted in a state of durable disorder and neomedieval warfare. The forces that defeated the UN were not state militaries but non-state actors: warlords and their militias. Mogadishu warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid saw UNOSOM II as a threat to his power, and in June 1993, he attacked the mission, killing more than eighty peacekeepers. Other casualties followed,
driving out the United Nations, whereupon Aidid claimed to be the president of Somalia. In neomedieval fashion, competing local warlords, such as Ali Mahdi Muhammad, challenged this claim, and in 1996, Aidid died of a gunshot wound.

Tending to the victims of the internecine fighting is not the society of states but a league of transnational actors: NGOs, which make up the largest international presence inside Somalia. In 1999, they formed a consortium in Nairobi to coordinate their efforts; it now numbers 191 members.
⁸
It also makes them targets. In 2008, twenty-four aid workers were killed, and another ten remain missing, causing many NGOs to suspend programs and withdraw staff in country. An Amnesty International report found that at least forty Somali human rights defenders and humanitarian workers were killed between January 1 and September 10, 2008, and tersely concludes: “The increasing attacks against humanitarian and civil society workers also testify to the international community’s failures in Somalia.”
⁹

Warlords and their private armies make the laws in much of Somalia’s neomedieval landscape, and their presence is ubiquitous (see
figure 11.1
). One of the most powerful authorities in Somalia is the internationally notorious group al-Shabaab (Movement of Warrior Youth), an Islamic armed group that has successfully waged war against the Somali transitional federal government and its Ethiopian and Ugandan supporters since 2006. In February 2009, the group killed eleven Burundian soldiers who were a part of the African Union peace-keeping mission. The organization also can project force beyond its borders, having launched a coordinated dual terrorist attack in Kampala, Uganda, in July 2010 that killed more than seventy people. Analogous to al-Qaida’s 2004 Madrid bombings, the Kampala bombings by al-Shabaab sent a clear strategic message to Uganda to withdraw its troops from the international peacekeeping mission in Somalia.

Figure 11.1
Warlords and their militia are a law unto themselves in Somalia’s stateless land. (Photo courtesy of Peter Pham.)

Globalization is the main reason those outside Somalia know or care about the neomedieval conflict there. NGOs have used globalized media to highlight the humanitarian crisis in the country, bolster their own legitimacy by enacting the human rights agenda, and nettle international organizations and states to do more. Following an especially fraught period of insecurity, drought, and record-high food prices in 2008, some 3.25 million Somalis were in need of emergency aid from outside Somalia. A coalition of fifty-two NGOs banded together to flood international media and world capitals with the message to drum up the needed assistance. In their statement, they echoed the prerogatives of R2P: “The international community has completely failed Somali civilians. We call on the international community to make the protection of Somali civilians a top priority now.”
¹⁰
World news organizations such as CNN and the BBC even dedicate special watch pages on their websites to al-Shabaab. NGOs’ ability to galvanize the global media and mobilize popular support for the humanitarian cause of Somalia is an example of their de facto political power in the international system.

The darker side of globalization has also fostered a bond between al-Shabaab and al-Qaida. The strongest tie between the two groups is ideological. Using the Internet, a senior al-Shabaab leader released a video in September 2008 praising Osama bin Laden and linking Somalia to al-Qaida’s global operations. A few months later, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s second-in-command, reciprocated with a video praising al-Shabaab’s seizure of the Somali town of Baidoa and assuring followers that al-Qaida would “engage in jihad against the American-made government in the same way they engaged in jihad against the Ethiopians and the warlords before them.”
¹¹
The United States added al-Shabaab to its list of foreign terrorist organizations in February 2008 and maintains that senior al-Shabaab leaders have trained and fought with al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

In an example of the technological unification of the world, al-Shabaab uses the Internet to recruit foreign fighters from around the world—including from within the United States and the United Kingdom. From 2007 to 2009, twenty men left Minnesota, California, and Alabama to join al-Shabaab; all but one were of Somali heritage. In June 2010, two US men from New Jersey were arrested at the airport en route to Somalia to join al-Shabaab. They were inspired by the
Yemen-based US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been described as the “bin Laden of the Internet”; he also inspired US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan to shoot fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty. US Attorney General Eric Holder calls this a “deadly pipeline that has routed funding and fighters to al-Shabaab from cities across the United States” and represents “a disturbing phenomenon.”
¹²

In Somalia’s continuing armed conflict, none of the major actors is a state. The primary actors are international organizations such as the United Nations, which justifies violence on humanitarian grounds in the guise of Chapter VII peacekeeping missions. Abetting its mandate are transnational NGOs, which provide the bulk of external assistance to the Somalis and also highlight the problem in international politics. The actual battles are waged not between national military units but between UN blue-helmet peacekeepers and militants who serve warlords. Victory is determined as much in the realm of ideology as in physical space.