Abstract

In this episode, Dr Noah Coburn discusses his latest book Under Contract: The Invisible Work of America’s Global War. He elaborates how colonial era structures for recruiting Gurkha soldiers from Nepal came to be remobilised for providing low-cost precarious labour for the American war in Afghanistan.

This podcast series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, Principal Research Fellow and Dr Ameem Lutfi, Research Fellow, at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

[Alessandro Arduino]: Welcome to the 16th episode of the National University of Singapore-Middle East Institute’s podcast series Boots Off the Ground: Security and Transition in the Middle East and Beyond. In this series, we look at the future of warfare; we will see uniformed soldiers — or “boots on the ground” — being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapon systems and cyber warfare. My name is Alessandro Arduino and I am the co-host for this series, along with my colleague, Ameem Lutfi.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you everyone for joining us. We’re very delighted and excited to have with us today, Dr Noah Coburn, who is a socio-cultural anthropologist who focuses on political structures and violence in the Middle East and Central Asia. He’s currently working at the Bennington College where he teaches courses on the overlap of politics, power and culture and has conducted field work — in addition to Afghanistan — in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Nepal, India and Turkey. He’s a very accomplished author who has published reports for various think tanks in Washington, in addition to academic journals including the United States Institute of Peace, Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.  Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr Noah Coburn.

[Noah Coburn]: Absolutely my pleasure. I really think the series that you have organised is fascinating and I’m privileged to be participating in it.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Noah, thank you again. I would like to start our conversation, first and foremost, by saying that I really enjoyed your most recent book Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America’s Global War. Often, we read and we hear about high-level dealings and geopolitics, for example, the NATO-led alliance for the global war on terror. Recent information about the US and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) leaving Afghanistan – and the focus is centred on the military; the boots on the ground – leaving Kabul right now.  However, in your book, you tell us that behind this broad coalition there was even an ever-broader coalition that entangled labour exporting states, private contracting companies, subcontractors and brokers who work together to supply all the labour necessary for the war effort. I know that right now, this entire geography requires a lot of time but we are really hoping that you could lay for our listeners the contours of these formal and informal infrastructures. The floor is yours, Noah.

[Noah Coburn]: Thank you.  I should preface this all by saying that as an anthropologist, my approach is highly ethnographic.  Hence, I view a lot of these things from the ground upwards so a lot of my understanding here comes not from the international relations literature but more from, frankly, how these contractors experience the war and that’s a lot of what I’m trying to get at.  In terms of the broad contours though – and I go through more of this in my book – of course the idea of contracting and mercenaries is not a new phenomenon in warfare. It is worth mentioning that in the post-9/11 wars, it has really looked quite different than it did in the past. In the first Gulf War in the 1990s that the US was involved in, there was one contractor for every 100 soldiers. At the height of the war in Afghanistan, there was one contractor for every one American soldier in Afghanistan. During the Trump administration, when numbers started to draw down, the balance shifted in the other direction and there were three contractors for every one soldier on the ground. This is a real shift; we’ve had known a lot about the long history of the military industrial complex but now we see the real labour – the real work of war is increasingly being done by what the military refers to as Third Country Nationals (TCNs) who are really mostly citizens of the Global South, from poorer countries who migrate towards these conflict zones and are paid by contractors or more frequently, subcontractors.

This, of course, creates some really odd contradictions when you go to a US military base in Afghanistan. Until recently, oftentimes it was not a US soldier who will be standing in that watchtower; it was a Nepali contractor who was doing the work of guarding that American base.  There are these odd contradictions where I talk about the fact that, frankly, the Nepalis oftentimes had far more in common with the Afghans than they did with the Americans and yet you had the Nepalis guarding that American base from Afghans. What we see here – and I think this takes us back to some of the bigger lessons – is a real outsourcing of labour but also an outsourcing of death and injury where the political consequences of a wounded or killed American soldier are so high that they have been replaced by non-western bodies.  Inherent in this is also a fundamental lack of transparency in this new system – it makes the war less visible to everybody, even to the soldiers themselves who are on the ground. My real aim in the book is to understand how these Nepalis and other groups perceive and understand that conflict and what it might mean for war, going forward.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much for laying out that broad picture. It’s interesting that you mentioned that it is the process of outsourcing military work to private companies that has a much longer trajectory that gets, perhaps, accelerated during the war on terror because you focus on a group –   the Nepalis as you have mentioned –  who actually have been in this line of work or at least in this sort of economic sectors for perhaps at least a century, if not more. Having been recruited to India, Singapore and of course England, it was very fascinating that – in your book you mentioned – it’s easy to forget that, looking at the current system of British recruitment of the Nepalis. Even today, it’s easy to forget that the empire is over or that colonialism has ended. So, can you sketch out some of these older systems of recruiting Nepali soldiers and Nepali military workers? How did it work and in what ways, perhaps the US, managed to piggyback themselves and give them a boost or head start by piggybacking themselves onto this older system?

[Noah Coburn]: Let me start by saying that I’m fascinated by the ways in which America is so unaware of its own imperialism and it’s even more unaware of the way that the American empire builds on these previous empires and adds on to some of these pathways and processes of empire.  For example, in Afghanistan, by far, the majority of private security contractors from the Global South are from Nepal and if you ask a US soldier why are the people who are guarding their base from Nepal, they don’t actually know why they are from there and not from Bangladesh, for example. However, if you ask a British soldier the same thing, they almost always know immediately. The reason is because of the Gurkha legacy. The British have been recruiting Nepalis into the British army – and previously the Imperial army – since the early 19th Century. There were hundreds of thousands of Nepalis fighting for the British in World War I and II.  In a lot of ways, that has left this legacy of Martial Race Theory of the brave proud Gurkha and that has a really fraught political history in Britain.   Till this day, we still see a continuation of the process and about 200 Nepalis are recruited into the British army every year and this really impacts young people in Nepal because the stories of Nepalis going into the British army – succeeding, bringing money home and living the good life – continue to circulate in Nepali society. However, with only 200 going each year, the year I observed the recruitment process, there were 6,000 applicants.  You see a very small number actually getting in and what this results in is literally thousands of young men who have dropped out of school, perhaps assumed some debt during the training process trying to get into the British army and are now looking for employment.  Where do they find employment? They oftentimes find employment in this much riskier sector of private security contractors so you have the Americans inheriting these Gurkha soldiers; proud brave warriors and even inheriting some of these understandings of the Martial Race Theory without really understanding where it came from.

[Alessandro Arduino]: In more than a year of talking about private military, private security and even mercenaries in our podcast, we always look at the perspective of outsourcing security. I really like what you are putting on the table now, talking about outsourcing death and injuries. As you just mentioned about the Gurkha legacy, you make a very provocative argument in your book saying that: as much as one would like to criticise the continued imperial nostalgia in the current British recruitment system, it is different from what we are seeing now with the Americans –   the former still much better than what the Americans offer. From the perspective of the soldiers, it’s a way out of a previous system. How do these two differ?

[Noah Coburn]: That’s a terrific question and while I’m not a historian, this project has made me think much more about the history of both the British and the American empires and also, to think ahead about how the US empire will be remembered.  I think one of the ways it will be remembered is as an empire of contracts and contracts are specific legal documents – they have a start date, an end date and have no lasting obligation to the individual involved in the contract. So, if you are a contractor working for the US military, the day your contract is over, you no longer have any relationship to the US military.  While not apologising at all for forms of British imperialism, I just want to point out the difference. When you talk about British subjugation, it at least defines subjects as subjects and there is some relationship between the subject and that centre of power. While this is highly problematic, it creates this enduring relationship and hence, to this day in Nepal, there are British retirement homes and British medical facilities for veterans of the British army who have returned to Nepal.  When there was some talk of eliminating the recruitment of Nepalis, you saw somewhat of a great s pushback from white British citizens pushing to continue that colonial relationship, which it what it really is.

At the same time, in contrast with that, I spoke with many Nepalis who were injured while working on a US contract and the treatment here is entirely different. One of the Nepalis I talked to was involved in an attack, got injured and his contract was terminated the next day.  What this means is, to a large extent, these Nepalis and other TCNs are not eligible for a lot of the support system that a typical veteran would receive if they got injured in that war, in some ways. and I think this is connected, more broadly, to what is going to be a somewhat impermanent legacy that we see the Americans having in a place like Afghanistan. Biden’s pullout of Afghanistan continues today and we see bases being looted and these – I’ve done some writing about the way they are built out of primarily plywood and containers – are being chopped up and being resold. This is in real contrast to, for example, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan where the Soviets built large neighbourhoods, dams and they were sort of a lasting Soviet architecture. A lot of what the empire of contracts is, is its paper – it’s money exchanging hands and once the contract is over, it all sort of blows away in the wind.

[Ameem Lutfi]:  That’s fascinating and one of the real strengths of the work or what I really enjoyed was that it tells us not just how things look like on paper but how they really operate on the ground – through both formal and informal practices.  One thing that seemed clear from the various examples and ethnographic cases that you discussed – roadblocks or choke points were almost like a structural feature of the entire apparatus. It seemed like they were built on purpose, because as one would expect, the roadblocks slow down certain people and from the perspective of soldiers who are trying to go abroad, they might be a hindrance but they create their own circulation and economy around themselves by having brokers who say they can help to get them over the roadblocks for a certain fee. This figure of brokers, or dalal in Nepalese, seems to be a constant presence throughout, from Nepal to Afghanistan and even further. Would you be able to outline some of the main roles these brokers play in the recruitment process and beyond that as well?

[Noah Coburn]: Absolutely, and I want to tie this back to some of my previous comments about the lack of transparency around this system. The lack of transparency, I argue, is a deliberate feature of the system. If the system was more transparent, it would be easier for these workers to navigate it and much harder to exploit them. But instead, as you refer to them, there are these series of roadblocks –    visas, contracts, crossing borders and purchasing plane tickets. These are all things you need to know how to do and pieces of paper you need to get and every step along the way there is a broker who can “help” you with this.

You have at the earliest stage, village brokers who will go to the village in Nepal and connect you with a broker who is in Kathmandu and that broker in Kathmandu will promise you a job in one of these war zones.  Oftentimes, you then get handed off to a broker in India and you might spend some time in India waiting for a visa or a contract to come through and then that broker will hand you off to another one in Kabul, potentially.  There’s really this global network of brokers – I even encountered a married couple where both of them are brokers but one is Indian and the other, Afghani. I mean, it’s even creating these kinship networks that extend across these borders but they are then deeply linked to the corruption around contracts in Afghanistan, more generally. So you have other contracts supplying not just labour but goods too, goods to these bases. You have, oftentimes, Afghan firms that are connected to international firms who are providing fuel and food and a lot of this work is being done by a similar network of brokers.

Ultimately, it is this group that profits the most from the war, not the individual contractors themselves. The latter group oftentimes are lucky if they can earn a decent wage for a few months and return home with it but these brokers earn actual exponential fees – by charging a typical worker maybe three months’ salary is pretty normal – to secure that initial contract.  In the worst scenarios, it’s mostly these brokers who are committing very egregious human rights violations. In the cases that I found where brokers were kidnapped or imprisoned or detained in some ways, where passports were taken from them, it was the brokers who were actually doing that and I don’t think this is a sign that the transnational corporations that oversee all of this are somehow clean and pure. It allows them actually to keep their hands clean in many ways and make sure that some of that exploitation gets outsourced to these brokers so that they can sort of claim innocence from it. Since none of this would work if you did not have massive webs of human trafficking and the companies don’t want to be seen as involved in that human trafficking, it gets outsourced to  brokers who do the actual trafficking for them.

[Alessandro Arduino]: It’s great especially when you mentioned that an empire of contract is on paper and these days, we see all these bases folding like a castle of cards. You also mentioned that it’s a different legacy from the previous Soviet one. When the Soviets – the Red Army – retired from Afghanistan, everybody was betting that the Najibullah regime was going to fall in a matter of hours and the Mujahideen will seize the day. It didn’t go that way; Najibullah stayed in power for more than three years and then the problem started just when the Russian funding was dwindling. In this respect, the Soviet led not only, as you mentioned, a building but also a legacy of mechanics of people who were able to repair helicopters, tanks and make the war machines work. What we see today doesn’t look like it’s the same. I don’t know if we can refer to this as a problem in the relationship of contracts but we see that the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) is leaving bases faster than the Taliban are able to occupy it. In recent days, more than a thousand ANA soldiers have been fleeing to Tajikistan while on those back borders, they are pushing back into Afghanistan. Having said that, I have a question related to the grey area. You just mentioned that this system of brokering is a part of a very important grey area; it is one important cog in the contracting machine.  In securing supply for bases and workers, these brokers say that sometimes they pay protection money, especially to the Taliban-connected warlords. To what extent do you think this statement is true?

[Noah Coburn]: I think the important thing to realise about the war in Afghanistan is that the reason why this is the longest war that the US has been involved in is not due to ideological reasons but instead, it is because so few people really want to see it end. You have a situation where the Afghan ruling elite has benefited from international attention; they’ve benefited from aid flows into the country. As you point out, there’s this shadowy network of brokers and commanders who provide the war with their supplies and labour and they benefit from that. These shadowy networks and commanders are in turn tied to the Afghan ruling elite in a lot of different ways. One of the things I point towards in the book – I don’t argue that the individual contractors are perpetuating the war per se, but something important to point out about them is that they are quite different from a soldier. For the individual contractor, as soon as the war ends, so does his pay check.  Inherently, most of the contractors I interviewed were not particularly eager to see the war end because that would be the end of their jobs and they would have to find another war elsewhere.

In some of my classes, I do this mapping exercise of all the different actors – both international and Afghani, who are involved in the war over the last 20 years.  One of the things that you realise as you do this mapping exercise and start asking the question of who really wants to see the war end now, the answer usually comes down to Afghan civilians and US soldiers.  Almost every other group has some sort of investment in seeing the conflict continue, even if it’s at some sort of low level so I think this mode of contracting has really perpetuated some of these incentives that have made this the longest war that the US has been involved in.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Since we’re on to speaking about grey areas and suspicious places, one of the sites of war that your work beautifully paints are these hotel-like spaces. I want to know if you could describe them more clearly: they are base stations, somehow, like waypoints or midway houses for soldiers who are out of jobs or are looking to transition into another work or don’t have visas but these places are so central to your work. I’m wondering if you could lay out and describe, maybe sketch out a little bit for our listeners, what these places look like and what functions do they serve.

[Noah Coburn]: This is a great question. There’s been some preliminary work done on these places but I think this is sort of a rich area for further research. To sketch out what some of them look like, there is a whole variety of them but to give you one example, there’s a neighbourhood in New Delhi that is primarily a backpacker neighbourhood but it’s also become known as a place where Nepalis and other South Asians who are not from India will come to meet with brokers and  labour recruiters, turning it into and a place they  wait at for their visas.  One of the places  I spent quite a bit of time at was a Nepalese restaurant which at first glance, will seem like it’s  aimed at serving Western tourists –  little cafe tables set up on the street – but if you walked  past the tables and  kitchen and go up   a dark flight of stairs, there were two large extensive rooms  filled with young Nepali men who were staying in very low-cost hotels in the area and this is where they would come for Nepali food as well as to to meet, gather, exchange gossip and try to  figure out who had gotten a contract.  It became sort of a hub of these workers who were coming and going from  different war zones. In a place where information is exchanged and the young Nepalis try to make sense of some of the shadowy promises that  brokers  made and the brokers in turn are  telling  stories that reinforce the need for them to pay  broker fees, for the most part.  I would say that this is just one example and it is tied more broadly to a whole series of offices around the Kathmandu Airport, for example, which is often times where one of the initial steps that some of these workers will take in going to these labour offices – I can talk more about that later – but are these very interesting places because labour recruitment firms are again, very immaterial. They don’t have much in them because they don’t do anything other than connect a worker to a contract and send them along their way so once again, there’s something very impermanent about these spaces.

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s worth pointing out that I think, oftentimes, the western image of war in Afghanistan has strong permanent US bases in the middle and yet these bases are, first of all, oftentimes inhabited by a lot of these contractors.  An American base might not primarily have Americans in it – Americans might be the minority but then there’s also these constellations of private bases around it.  Oftentimes, the fuel for a base is not stored there itself but a contracting firm builds a fuel depot down the road and huge walls with barbed wire around it, guarded by Nepali Gurkhas.  If you encounter this base, oftentimes, the Afghan communities that I’ve interviewed near them will say that’s an American base. It looks like an American base, it acts like an American base and yet it is not an American base at all because it’s being run by a private contracting firm.

I’ll say these less visible spaces are also where some of the worst stories of exploitation I’ve heard have come from.  The contractors themselves will often tell you that they would much rather be on one of the larger bases surrounded by international soldiers because they were less likely to be exploited and abused in those settings than in satellite constellations of private bases where there was no real oversight; no one watching what was going on there.  However, it is also the Nepalis who oftentimes knew the most about the corruption and schemes because they were literally witnessing one tanker of fuel driving off to a US base and the next one being sold at the market.  These infrastructures that are built up around what we think of as a more traditional military-industrial complex, is sort of a fascinating world that’s difficult to access.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Your point of view is very unique and you have been  in Afghanistan for a long time researching this and I was just thinking that if some of our listeners are joining us only from the middle of our podcast, it seems like we are talking more about human resource management practice than the future of warfare but in that respect, it is not news – as you just mentioned – that peace will mean the end of the job for these contractors.  An old Italian chap, Niccolò Machiavelli, said that the prince cannot rely on mercenary for the same reason and when I say “prince”, I’m not referring to Eric Prince, of course.

In your book, you not only look at the Gurkhas and the Nepalis but you also compare them with other workers from different countries including India, Turkey and Georgia. In your opinion, in what ways did the experience of war differ depending on nationality – especially if the Indians, Turks or the Georgians were to recollect their life in Afghanistan compared to the Nepalis?

[Noah Coburn]: That’s a great question. It really gets at, I think, some of the ways that conflict is beginning to shift because while you see some differences in nationality, a lot of this has much more to do with positions and companies than it does with the experience of being a member of a certain country’s military so what you get is some similar flows. From Nepal, you have flows of private security contractors, primarily. From Turkey, a lot of the engineers and architects of these bases and infrastructures.  India provides a lot of people who manage HR and IT. The Philippines provides a lot of the cooks and the cleaners who do take care of the hospitality of the base – for lack of a better word but at the end of the day, oftentimes when these individuals would recount their experiences, one of the things that I found quite interesting was there were certain companies that had reputations for being more or less benevolent – shall we say – companies that took care of their workers; provided them a good salary and had nice places to say.  Then, there were other companies that tended to be much more exploitative and would put them in large barracks and don’t always pay them on time.  What ended up happening is, if I was interviewing a Nepali and an Indian who had worked for Company A that was very benevolent, their experience was much more similar than a Nepali who had worked for Company B, which was exploitive.  I think one of the things that you’re going to realise is that as these individuals go on and as war continues to evolve in this manner, they’re you’re not going to say they fought for the French or Germans but instead, they’ll say they fought for DynCorp or I fought for Supreme or fought for one of these other companies and that will potentially be the hallmark of conflict, in future.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Since we’re on the question of hallmark, we had, in one of our previous podcasts, Joshua Reno who spoke on how military bases animate a range of uncanny markets and social scenes where wastes end up and I’m not tempted to think if some of these workers who had been mobilised by the entire logistics and military machinery, were produced for the global war on terror.   Now can these workers, in a way, also be thought of as military waste – as people who might soon be left out of jobs or looking for similar nature of work and trying to find work in other places? As Alex had mentioned in his earlier comments, at this point in time where we’re seeing the bases close down in Afghanistan, what do you think would happen to these workers from various countries now that the war in Afghanistan and Iraq is over?

[Noah Coburn]: That’s a terrific question and I think a lot of the themes from Joshua Reno’s work resonate in my work as well. I tend to think of these workers, perhaps, not as military waste but as almost military fuel. I’ve been doing a little followup research recently with some of the Nepalis and others whom I interviewed, to see where they are now and  where they’re going and what’s interesting  is the ways in which they are looking for that next war.   A lot of them are going to look for jobs in Iraq where the US still has a significant contracting presence but many are looking towards Gulf countries that have increasingly relied on private contractors to expand their militaries. Beyond that, you then get shadowy groups that tend to hire these contractors as well. I’ve been talking to Nepalis who are looking to work on oil rigs off West Africa or go to the DRC or to South Sudan and one of the things that I think you’re going to see is, while the role of contractors in Afghanistan was not at all transparent, they are moving into a world that’s even less transparent.  I think the US relying so heavily on contractors for the past 20 years, in fact, has in many ways legitimised the practice globally. It’s no longer an outlier or something that can be easily condemned and you’re already seeing countries like Russia relying on it increasingly in places like Syria and you’re going to see these global companies acting more like militaries as they decide to protect themselves and their enterprises wherever they are.

[Alessandro Arduino]: As you mentioned about the Gurkha brand before and we can see that this  probably is still quite alive and profitable – a brand that is related to the fact that Gurkha fighters are considered brave, ruthless but extremely loyal and that came from the 19th century from the British Empire but I would like to ask a specific question – When I was working on one of my  books China’s Private Army which looks at China’s private security firms, I witnessed that in China, the Gurkha brand resonated extremely well. However, they had a problem of fake Gurkhas and by that, I mean just a simple Nepalese citizen that, in one way or another, they pumped up their CV and mentioned non-existent military affiliated background as a Gurkha. Have you had, in your experience in Afghanistan, heard a similar story?  Also, in your opinion, can the Gurkha brand find a new life, not only in Africa but also along the lines of Russia and China that are looking to quickly expand their private security military sector?

[Noah Coburn]: Absolutely and I think in some ways, this is already happening. I didn’t find many of them but I did interview a handful of Nepalis who had gone on to do private security details in Russia and China.  You can see that already – the brand, in many ways, has sort of stretched beyond the border but I will say that the Nepalis themselves have done a good job of cultivating and making sure that the brand remains robust. In many ways, while you’re not paying for Nepalis as much as a US soldier, you end up paying them more than you would be paying a Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan or someone from another country so they’ve already established that their value is above the market price for a typical person from a poor South Asian country, for example.

In terms of the authenticity of what it means to be a Gurkha, this is where there is much to play with because in fact, it’s difficult to define a Gurkha. Oftentimes, when Nepalis use it, they refer to  somebody who has gone off and fought in the British army and yet, those Nepalis who went off and fought in the Indian army are oftentimes referred to as Gurkhas also.  As you point out, Nepalis who have served in the Nepali military are sort of one step below that and Nepali citizens who have no military experience are one step further below. Yet, oftentimes, in this international market, they will still use the Gurkha name as a way of commanding more value.  What we see, as some of these private security contractors have gotten more savvy about how this works, is if you are supplying Gurkhas to the US Embassy, for example, what that company does is they hire one or two “real” Gurkhas who have British military experience and speak English very well. They’ll hire one or two of them for every 20 to 30 Nepalis that they hire who don’t have any military experience or have very light military experience from the Nepali army and then tell the US Embassy that all of the guards are Gurkhas when in reality, you only have two Gurkhas there who are potentially real Gurkhas.  The Head Gurkhas are the ones who command the most and many a times, those in the embassy don’t even realise that there’s a very strict hierarchy of the Nepali who has had British military experience – they may be getting paid five times more than the rate that a Nepali who doesn’t have that experience. I really do think that this is going to be something that we continue to see evolving as it circulates in other places like Russia and China.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much for that. I want to ask a question more specifically from the perspective of our listeners here in Singapore. I know your book mentions Nepalis coming and working for the Singapore Police Force (SPF). Can you give us some insight into how this system works and are there communities of former Singaporean police officers in Nepal, currently?  As an offshoot, you mentioned that after it turned out that the private contractors in Afghanistan couldn’t find the required number of British Gurkhas, the best alternative they had were Singaporean police officers. How did the switch from British Gurkhas to Singaporean ones happen?

[Noah Coburn]: It’s a great question and fascinating that I was able to interview probably about a dozen Nepalis who had been with the SPF, to see the ways in which it very much dovetailed with the process of the British recruitment. For example, recruitment into the Singapore police happened simultaneously with recruitment into the British Army, and the tests to bring them in are very similar. The SPF is thought of as one significant step below the British military. In part, right now, that’s because if one joins the British military, there is a clear path to British citizenship for Nepalis. So if you serve in the British army for three or four years, there’s a clear way for you and your immediate family to gain citizenship. In Singapore, the Gurkhas don’t get that but what they get instead is the ability to bring their families and they live in compounds in Singapore. I also spoke with several Nepalis who are the sons and daughters of Singaporean police officers who had grown up in Singapore but are not Singapore citizens.  What happens here is that, once their father is at the age of retirement, they move back to Nepal as a family and for some of these Nepalis who grew up in Singapore, this is a very odd experience of moving back to Nepal. The community of Nepalis who had been in Singapore is a very tightly knit one back in Nepal where they built a clinic so there’s a private hospital just for Singaporean police that’s funded entirely by the community and I was able to go to a couple of these community gatherings.  For major holidays and festivals, they all come together – and I didn’t get enough of a chance to sort of chase this down statistically – but clearly, there’s also intermarriage going on.  Singaporean police sons and daughters will end up marrying each other and you have these kinship networks within the Singaporean police and you can argue that they’re almost somewhat generating a new caste system based on this type of labour. I think what you have is that the history of Nepalis in Singapore is obviously very deep but what you’re getting is some similar processes that are replicating themselves in the Gulf –very wealthy oil states that don’t have a lot of citizens who want to do the policing or military labour. Of course, when you go to Dubai, a lot of the security at the airport and hotels are the lower-level military folks and are similarly building on this Gurkha brand so in some way, the Singapore model is a very old one that was generated by the British colonial period and in other ways, it may be a model for the future for a lot of wealthy countries.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Noah, on a different note, one of the issues that we have been discussing and debating quite extensively in our podcast is about how to regulate the private military and security industry. We have an extensive co-operation with the International Code of Conduct; we have seen, in our podcast, the UN Working Group on mercenary activities. As you mentioned several times throughout the podcast and especially in your book, the main issue is transparency. With multiple layers of contracting providing a way for states to avoid responsibility – especially for the care of injured private soldiers – in your book, you underlined very well the necessity and the importance of regulation. From your point of view, having been in Afghanistan interviewing Gurkhas as well as Nepalese contractors in Nepal, what kind of step do you think the international community has to push to avoid committing the same problem and improve transparency and regulation? Do you think that a market-and-forces mechanism is just enough in providing better accountability?

[Noah Coburn]: Let me begin by saying that my recommendations here will be difficult to implement. This is a very complex issue and similar to the war, I would say there’s a lot of incentives to not be regulated so I think in many ways regulation is the only path forward and yet, it will be a very difficult one.  Why the difficulty? Well, pause for a minute and return to this idea of what some of these labour firms and private security firms do –  a private security firm, in some ways, especially one that’s set up internationally in Dubai, is someone  using a laptop to communicate with a broker in Nepal, sending  Nepalis to Dubai and  some others to Afghanistan, giving them  guns and then placing them at an American base or otherwise, in Afghanistan.

Now, for example, this private security contracting firm commits some egregious human rights abuses and gets shut down. What we’ve seen repeatedly is that the person with his laptop sitting in the office closes it and leaves.  He opens another office door, puts a new name on it and  starts the same business all over again. The lack of infrastructure means little investment so it’s all based on his personal connections. He then brings some of these folks with him and they just restart the business and frankly, this is as you referred to: Eric Prince. This is why Eric Prince has had so many reincarnations. These companies, even the most egregious ones, are able to easily change their names and start afresh someplace else.

All this being said, I really think the only path forward is to do more to hold these firms accountable. One of the slightly odd suggestions I’ve heard is to have some sort of certification – a certificate of non-human rights abuse and I think it might actually be one of the few things that could be implemented fairly easily. – It works the same way as going to the grocery store and buying a certified organic vegetable. If you’re from a certified organic farm, you have to fulfil certain regulations and then all of a sudden, you get a boost up in that contracting process so a firm that says it’s going to be more transparent and agrees to follow certain regulations, perhaps, gets some sort of “star” and that enables it to get better contracts.  However, let me also say that in some ways, the cat is already out of the bag as the US has set the precedence for this widespread contracting. Most European countries have made some similar moves and now, this is something that’s gained legitimacy across the globe again. If you don’t have the US and some of these Western European countries, particularly Germany and Great Britain, enforcing some much stricter regulations soon, I think we’re going to pass a certain tipping point where a lot of the conventional rules of war will no longer be relevant as they apply primarily to soldiers and the world of contractors is much more difficult to regulate.

[Ameem Lutfi]: This has been a fascinating discussion but unfortunately, we’re running short of time. As a final question, I want to ask you something broad and this is something we’ve been presenting to all of our listeners in every episode of this podcast – What, in your opinion, would warfare look like 30 years from now?  I’m wondering if you could answer it from the perspective of what would be the enduring legacies of the privatisation of the American global war on terror.

[Noah Coburn]: I think a lot of the predictions that you read commonly in international relations literature about cyber warfare, drones and reliance on special forces; I think all of that are, for the most part, accurate. From my perspective, what doesn’t get enough attention is the way the global divide between the rich and poor is going and how it continues to be exacerbated and shape the way war is fought. In the US and Western Europe in particular, there is such a political cost for a dead soldier; that we are spending all this money to fight wars through drones and military equipment to make sure that we don’t lose any soldiers and yet, at the same time, there are all these other workers and necessary human components of the conflict that I believe are still going to be there. They need to be setting up the bases that drones fly out of, provide fuel and guard the bases.  We are going to continue to see insurgent groups like the Taliban and Al-Shabab and if they are going to be fought against, they will have to be confronted with some sort of military force. You are going to see individuals like these Nepalis increasingly pushed forward into that frontline.  I think what you’re really going to see is a lot of the new technology changing some aspects of how wars are fought. It really changes those aspects for the Westerners who are involved in the war and increasingly, you will have wars fought by proxies – between citizens of poor Global South countries contracted by companies in the Global North.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much, Noah, for this very exciting talk. We could have gone on for much longer and we hope to have you again soon, in some form or another. Thank you to all our listeners for joining us too and we will meet soon in our next episode.