Guns for Hire

They were called mercenaries in the past. Now, they are called private security firms. Let’s not get hung up on names for the moment.

Rebecca Ulam Weiner meditates in the Boston Globe about the merits of sending to private security firms to troubled areas such as Darfur to assist with peacekeeping and relief operations.

Aid agencies and NGOs in Darfur haven't had many good days lately. The beleaguered African Union peacekeeping force has few resources to spend defending an NGO like Save the Children, and the ability of such organizations to continue working in the area is very much in question. ''You can't expect people to work in conflict zones without protection," says Christopher Kinsey, a scholar with the Joint Services Command at King's College London and author of the forthcoming book ''Corporate Soldiers and International Security" (Routledge), ''especially as noncombatant immunity is no longer respected." Kinsey believes there's a legitimate role for private military companies in humanitarian operations.

Issues beyond cost and effectiveness need to be balanced against accountability issues. There’s that A-word again.

Such an answer may suggest a reflexive discomfort with privatizing force. But it also represents some nuanced, widely shared concerns. The first, and most common, is accountability. And it isn't merely hypothetical, considering the alleged involvement of private contractors in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the recent conviction of the military contractor Custer Battles for government contract fraud in Iraq, and earlier, in Bosnia, the involvement of Dyncorp contractors in a forced prostitution ring.

''There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical," allows Isenberg. ''How do you ensure oversight, compliance with international humanitarian law, follow the rules of warfare, rules of engagement, comply with the Geneva Conventions, and the whole bureaucratic panoply of rules that come into play?" Particularly when you're trying to preserve fast, flexible, and inexpensive deployment.

Compounding the problem of accountability is the fact that private companies are of course not just out to save the world, but to make money. Assuming an industry made up of rational actors, eager to maximize profits, can loyalty to a particular firm-or a particular client-be maintained? Can standards? What happens when there are conflicts of interest? The industry claims that it would only accept contracts from legally recognized bodies, but what if this body were an unsavory regime?

Without uniform regulation of the private military industry, the answers to these questions largely depend on one's faith in the market's power to encourage good behavior. As Kinsey sees it, the industry actually takes corporate responsibility quite seriously. ''It's not because the companies are being altruistic," he says. ''It's beneficial in the long term for them to conduct themselves responsibly."

More fundamentally, many believe that the international community has a special responsibility to take on problems such as Darfur-and that outsourcing humanitarian interventions to the private sector is just another way of sidestepping the hard political debates that should take place in public.

But the abstract ideal of an engaged international community might seem a rarefied consideration in light of the realities on the ground.

The United States has abdicated its role in these kinds of peacekeeping operations because it is committed to fighting wars of dubious success and value. Yes, there have been voices in the current regime calling for more assistance to beleaguered areas such as Darfur. These same people realize the political liability any real action imposes given the Iraq War and the sudden explosion of the immigration issue. Isolationism is far from dead despite the global objectives of the current regime.

The market only cares about politics as a means for keeping the market moving inexorably along. That doesn’t change how tempting it looks to buy some guns for hire for places like Darfur.