After Leng Professor of International Politics Allison Stanger sat down to an interview with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on Tuesday, March 1, for an episode that aired Wednesday, March 2, The Campus got a chance to ask her a few questions about her experience and her new book, One Nation Under Contract.
Was this your first TV appearance?
No I’ve been on TV before but only channels like C-SPAN (testifying before Congress) and Al-Jazeera.
Do you watch the Daily Show?
Yes I do. It’s one of the few shows I watch on TV right now.
How was talking with Jon Stewart? Did you feel that you were able to communicate your ideas clearly through your conversation with him?
He’s a great guy — very smart, very likeable and he seemed very interested in the book and getting it right, so I was impressed with that. I felt happy with how much ground we were able to cover in such a short period of time.
What percentage of private contractors that the U.S. works with are Americans themselves?
That’s a hard question to answer. It varies with the type of contracting. What’s interesting is I got some new ideas for getting numbers through e-mails from people who watched the program. It’s not something that you can go and easily check at a particular point in time. I guess the big picture is when you look at the whole range of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of them] are not Americans. Most of them are local nationals, Iraqis, Afghans but there are also many third party nationals working — people from countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines who come in and do work like cooking and cleaning. It’s a real mix.
Does this mean that the US is not only indirectly funding the Taliban by contracting local nationals but is also arming Afghans?
We know that 95 percent of security contractors in Afghanistan are Afghans, so you’d better believe we are arming Afghans. It’s part of the Afghan First strategy. Those dramatic points I made on the show are not from non-mainstream sources but from the Pentagon and Congressional reports. The Pentagon has publicly acknowledged that all this money has gone walking. And in Afghanistan, what happens is that they’re trying to guard supply routes for US forces and so they hire a big contractor to secure the supply routes and the prime contractor turns around and sub-contracts out to local Afghan companies. And the way the money gets to the Taliban is they essentially buy safe passage for trucks. So you wind up with this perverse situation where you are funding the enemy in order to fight them. Again, that’s not some kind of out there radical statement; that’s a report from the U.S. Congress. It’s pretty amazing.
Did you agree with Jon Stewart’s assertion that if there had been a draft, it is much less likely we would have invaded Iraq?
Yes, though I think we would probably have gone into Iraq anyway. I don’t think that would have stopped the invasion itself, given the mood at the time and the sort of untruths that were out there, but it certainly would have cut the war short. There’s no question about it, it is easier to fight wars and keep fighting them when all most of us have to do is throw money at them. No one’s got to put their lives on the line except for people who volunteer for the army. But a lot of time people are volunteering for the army because they don’t have as many other options. So it’s not like the burden of war is currently being distributed equally.
Would it be necessary to reintroduce a draft to continue to fight wars?
If you wanted to fight wars without contractors, you would have to have a draft. I myself would like to see a national service requirement. You could choose to serve your country in a variety of ways, and all would serve, for a year, without exceptions. What I don’t like to see is the burden of service being distributed so unequally. The problem with this country is that we’ve become a nation of consumers rather than of citizens. If we’re willing to support war with our money, we should also be willing to support it with our service. War is a deadly business, so I don’t see anything wrong with encouraging people to think twice about whether it makes sense.
How can the U.S. be held accountable for its irresponsible distribution of tax-payer money (citing the Pentagon’s $8.2 billion)? What do you think should be done at home to deal with this issue?
I think we need to demand that there be full transparency in all government contracting. The reason that this is happening is that so much of the spending is shrouded in secrecy. And there are actually laws on the books that say you are required to provide this information to the public, but no one is demanding they be upheld, and that’s what we need to do. It’s interesting, because the Commission on Wartime Contracting issued an interim report this past week basically saying all the things I said on the show — that wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a tale of unprecedented waste, fraud and abuse — and the media didn’t even cover it. It didn’t cover it because they were focused entirely on Charlie Sheen. So it’s not that the information isn’t out there, but we need to pay closer attention to it, and when people start paying closer attention, that’s when you’ll see changes take place.
When did you begin researching for this book? What is it about this topic that first drew you?
I started in 2003. I first got interested in security contracting — the Blackwaters of the world — and then as I got further and further into it I realized that security contracting was just the tip of the iceberg, that we were outsourcing everything from security to laundry to water-boarding. We even outsourced interrogation. This is a widespread phenomenon, so I really wanted to study not just the privatization of security, but the privatization of American foreign policy and its implications.
If you had had more time on the show what would you have said?
I would have talked about [how] when so much of the work of government is in private hands, it creates other problems, because there’s nothing to really push back against the private sector. When government is wholly dependent on the private sector to do its daily work, there’s no one to tell the private sector ‘No.’ And yet there’s a big difference between why the private sector exists and why government exists. Government exists to uphold the common good; the private sector exists to make money — and we want them to be making money. We just don’t want to confuse business with government. We can’t depend on business to keep us safe. A big problem in this country today is that no one is articulating the case for those things that only government can do well. As Jon Stewart put it to me off-camera, it’s like the government needs a PR agent.
Questions by Michelle Smoler,
Features Editor
A second interview with Allison Stanger after her appearance on The Daily Show
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