Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumContractors who powered US war in Afghanistan stuck in Dubai
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) Some of the foreign contractors who powered the logistics of Americas forever war in Afghanistan now find themselves stranded on an unending layover in Dubai without a way to get home.
After nearly two decades, the rapid U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has upended the lives of thousands of private security contractors from some of the worlds poorest countries not the hired guns but the hired hands who serviced the American war effort. For years, they toiled in the shadows as cleaners, cooks, construction workers, servers and technicians on sprawling American bases.
In the rushed evacuation, scores of these foreign workers trying to get home to the Philippines and other countries that restricted international travel because of the pandemic have become stuck in limbo at hotels across Dubai.
As the U.S. brings home its remaining troops and abandons its bases, experts say the chaotic departure of the Pentagons logistics army lays bare an uncomfortable truth about a privatized system long susceptible to mismanagement one largely funded by American taxpayers but outside the purview of American law.
https://apnews.com/article/us-war-afghanistan-contractors-dubai-a5fe2dadffd222102d2875b776dbe794
hedda_foil
(16,371 posts)sanatanadharma
(3,689 posts)... using the military for anything other than defending our national borders, not the inside of other sovereign borders.
An invasion is not an invitation and small wonder that anger arises against the uninvited. Occupation is not the ethical step two after invasion. Rebuilding is the moral imperative after destruction.
A real WW2 Marshall Plan rather than the second debacle in Iraq might have truly brought Afghanistan out of the 19th century.
Imagine the change that could have been wrought by building a modern autobahn road system in Afghanistan; jobs, money, infrastructure, flow of commerce, a way out of town...
...but no! After twenty years there, the USA leaves Afghanistan like Pleasantville, where the end of the road just brings one back to where they were.