The US is not Withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2014

Resource Wars are just beginning and Iraq and Afghanistan are clear examples as might be intervention in Syria. The future will consist most likely of mercenaries being paid by Western governments to procure the pipeline routes and not bother at all with using national armies to do so because the casualty rate of 'our boys' make bad public relations for the government when advocating wars. 

2014 is not a date when British troops are 'withdrawn'. Mostly, they will be but a number will be there along with mercenaries and private contracters to whom war has been 'outsourced'. This is what is meant by politicians such as Defence Minister Philip Hammond when they use Orwellian terms such as 'drawdown' now as opposed to withdrawal.

The Fiscal Times reported ,

 '.....the military withdrawal does not mean the United States is out of the country entirely. The country is leaving tens of thousands of contractors behind.

According to the latest contractor census performed by the industry group Professional Overseas Contractors, there are currently 110,404 contractors still working in Afghanistan. Of these, 33,444 are Americans. The rest are either Afghan or from another country.

These workers do everything from serve food to cut hair to provide security. They outnumber U.S. troops by nearly 40,000. For every one American soldier, there are 1.46 contractors.  

The vast majority of these contractors are in the private security business, working for the State Department to protect diplomats. This means they are armed to kill on behalf of the U.S. government. 

Once the military leaves completely, these contractors will be responsible for training Afghan police and troops, building Afghan infrastructure, conducting development projects, and protecting workers. Under the terms of the Afghan-American strategic partnership agreement signed last summer, just a small number of U.S. troops are going to remain in the country until 2024. Much of the work currently being done by the military will be left to contractors to complete .

“It’s a de facto army, a de facto military presence there. They are a de facto logistic and supply chain,” Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, told The Fiscal Times. “We’re going to be relying on contractors across the board. They will be doing all of the things that go into nation building.”'

 The battle to secure the building of the TAPI pipeline will continue along with drone strikes and other means of enforcing global power without it getting too much bad publicity at home. So much for the idea that Afghanistan was a 'humanitarian intervention'. The advocates of that are stragely silent now.