The United Nations has called on the American government to control its security contractors in war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The report comes amid embarrassing revelations of some security forces excesses in Afghanistan and Iraq, as Washington increasingly appears to have failed in controlling its unregulated mercenary forces.
Political analyst Chip Pitts joined Press TV to discuss the controversial issue.
Press TV: A recent UN report has called on the U.S. to better regulate its mercenary forces, as these organizations employ people guilty of gross human rights violations. The U.S. doesn't seem to be able to fully control the actions of its own forces on the ground, how rational is it to expect that simple regulation will bring these elements of the war into control?
Chip Pitts: Well actually it isn't very rational. As you will probably point out that privatization of war is a very flawed model. Obviously if you have profit in the war, that can lead to perpetuating conflict instead of resolving it, it's imperative not only that we have greater 'due diligence', as the UN has called for rightly, to make sure that there aren't human rights violators that are perpetuating atrocities in some cases, but most importantly that we reconsider the very model of war. Since Dick Cheney inaugurated it the 1991 conflict with Iraq, the model has proven to be very ineffective and counterproductive.
Press TV: In Afghanistan there's been a 29% increase in armed contractors, continuing the radical privatization of war under Obama. With so much tax payer's money being spent on the war, how would the American public react to the revelation that much of it is going to for-profit organizations?
Chip Pitts: I think that most of the Americans knew the extent to which the private contractors were involved. If they read for example some of the recent documents released in Wikileaks not only regarding the Afghanistan war but also the Iraq war, I think that they would be shocked. Even those that are familiar are shocked.
But the problem is that, given the other issues facing the American public right now, unfortunately they don't have the opportunity to gather information and exercise the duties and responsibilities that come with citizenship. So the idea that we should have a military industrial complex governing war has been warned against long ago by President Eisenhower and yet it's an expanding problem in the U.S. foreign policy.
Press TV: These private contractors make up to 50% of the U.S. fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan. Does this shed some light on how well the status quo has been maintained under Obama after Bush? What does that spell out for the recent draw down in Iraq and the slated 2011 pullout from Afghanistan?
Chip Pitts: The problem is the expose of inherent contradictions in the U.S. policies. On one hand these 40,000 private contractor employees are an important part of security for NGOs as well as the Afghan government and top officials. On the other hand the idea of using them for development is part of the counter-insurgency doctrine. An inherent contradiction and I think that it's increasingly apparent that the idea of a surge and adding more private contractors and even adding more direct troops from the U.S. government, the idea of a military solution to the problem in Afghanistan is not one that will work.
Press TV: There are reports that the U.S. is looking to install permanent military bases in Afghanistan -- a strategic alliance as it is called. But a recent study group in Afghanistan has concluded that any U.S. presence will be detrimental to regional security. Is regional security a U.S. concern or is there more to it?
Chip Pitts: This is the great game isn't it. The idea of trying to control the world's energy resources and other key minerals that are in finite supply by establishing domination over parts of the land that are extended part of the U.S. Empire is not the best approach to lasting security. We really need to think about other approaches to these issues and obviously the idea of a permanent military base in Afghanistan would be a recipe for continued and in fact perpetual conflict. We really need to think of cooperative solutions with the other regional powers, solutions taken into account for the interest of people in Afghanistan, human rights' rule of law, recipes for peace instead of recipes for perpetual conflict.
(Source: Press TV)
Photo: Chip Pitts is a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and Oxford University, and Professorial Fellow at the SMU Law Institute of the Americas