Call it the Casablanca defense: "I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here." That was the undercurrent of officialdom's reactions to revelations about the -- ahem! -- shocking behavior going on among the private security guards protecting the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
But faux horror is appropriate enough because nothing highlighted in the recent report by the watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight (POGO), should really come as a surprise. POGO's 12-page letter, based on testimonials from more than a dozen disaffected guards and publicly addressed to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, described the dysfunctional American core of the operation of some 450 guards, two-thirds of whom are Gurkhas. There was abusive hazing and collective degeneracy, as abundantly revealed by photos of guards cavorting around a huge bonfire in various stage of undress, drinking vodka off each other's backsides, and regaling each other with public urination. Although far less sinister than the Abu Ghraib snaps, these new inconvenient images still conveyed something of the Lord of the Flies atmosphere that whistle-blowers say had curdled into a subculture of coercion and intimidation, undermining the chain of command and jeopardizing safety at one of the United States' largest and most besieged embassies. How else to explain the fact that 90 percent of incumbent expats left the job in the first six months after embassy security was taken over by ArmorGroup?
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Still, much of the reaction in Washington misses the real import of this episode. It's certainly not about the hazing or the prostitution highlighted by the embassy's former operations director. Nor should the press be focused on how many guards are being dismissed, when there are legions more happy to become replacements. The real problem is a global private security industry (increasingly publicly listed) that averts its eyes from the sordid details on the ground as long as its employees make the numbers, and the industry's incestuous relationship with an undertrained, and still effectively unaccountable, contracting bureaucracy that likes to talk about "lessons learned" from Iraq, but is demonstrating just the opposite by its performance in Afghanistan.
The case also exposes the disturbing flaccidity of most U.S. inspectors general, who should be having career-boosting field days with all the waste, fraud, and abuses in Afghanistan, but are instead showing up late, with no evident sense for the jugular. Sadly, that's particularly true of the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, who was chosen, according to my sources, precisely so as not to repeat the robust (i.e., administration-embarrassing) record of his counterpart in Iraq. Together these flaws are contributing significantly to the corrosion of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
One of the driving forces here is the corporate profit motive, and the money-grubbing tactics are well-laid out now in two civil complaints filed in the D.C. District Court by former senior company employees, the first in April 2008 (settled out of court) and the other last week. To win the coveted $187 million contract, ArmorGroup North America -- effectively acting as a front for ArmorGroup International (AGI) in London (which is owned by Wackenhut Services, a subsidiary of British-Danish firm G4S, the world's biggest security concern, with revenues last year of $9.85 billion) -- seriously low-balled its bid. That compelled it to cut corners wherever it could: replacing Americans with cheaper South Africans, putting the Gurkhas on stingy wages, and buying refurbished cars from Iraq -- staff called them "white coffins" -- rather than the properly armored vehicles promised in the contract. A measure of the bare-knuckle scruples of this charming firm: AGI's human resources director, Carol Ruart, insisted, allegedly, that the Gurkhas be locked in their rooms until they agreed to work for even less after they threatened a walkout over wages and shabby treatment.
Kabul managers were particularly concerned about the quality of recruits. Reports from pre-deployment training in Texas had already flagged objectionable behavior such as "lewd, aberrant, and sexually deviant behavior, including sexual hazing, urination on one another and equipment, bullying, 'mooning,' exposing themselves, excessive drinking," according to the later complaint. There were concerns some might be mentally imbalanced; one pulled a gun on another while drunk. Another ArmorGroup security guard, with a criminal record, allegedly shot and killed two fellow guards in Baghdad's Green Zone recently.
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