It looks like Erik Prince is too toxic even for the Somali “government”, who need any help they can get:
Although to be fair, it’s more likely that this Saracen International bunch became a lot less useful to the official government when they signed up to train anti-piracy militias in Puntland. Not that the government is against anti-piracy measures, but building up Puntland as an independent actor is another thing entirely.
It seems like a lot of policy is shifting towards recognizing a quiet partition of Somalia, where the autonomous regions of Puntland and Somaliland are recognized as having their shit together and treated as de facto mini-states, while the lawless regions of the country remain as screwed as ever. It probably violates the arms embargo, but that sort of thing can be fixed. And that means the Somali government isn’t the only game in town anymore. If it has to compete for international backing, it doesn’t have much of a track record to compete on.
Meanwhile, in other news of private guns:
Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.
Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,” Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.
Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.
His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.
What is it with former Iran-Contra people? They just keep coming back, always up to something sketchy.
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