WARS are no more fought for territorial conquests or ideological reasons, much less for causes such as democracy, human rights or social justice. Modern wars are essentially resource wars or fought for profits and hegemony though the pretext may be different.

The Bush administration’s ‘war on terrorism’ is no different. It is, in fact, more ominous for it remains undefined, being pursued in abstract. But it has already begun yielding lucrative profits to arms dealers, private military concerns, some of which are subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies, and friends of the US cabinet members. It became possible after restrictions on military aid (read loans) and arms sales to hitherto unfriendly regimes were largely done away with last year. It is another matter that 32 countries, out of 67 which have received or are about to receive US military assistance, were identified by the State Department as having “poor” or “worse” human rights records.

After 9/11, the arms sales and loans have been made easier with a view to boosting US arms industry which had been ailing since the end of the cold war. So, the race is on to arm governments which have suddenly become useful now. According to a report carried by “Arms Sales Monitor” in its August 2002 issue, about $390 million is to be distributed among nations providing support to US operations in the war on terror and another $120 million ‘for certain classified activities.’ Since 9/11, Congress has appropriated $30 billion in emergency money to support the campaign against terrorism. About half of this amount has gone to the Pentagon, much of it to buy weapons, supplies, and services.

On October 13, the New York Times carried a revealing report which said that Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former company, the Halliburton, is “benefiting very directly from the war on terrorism.” From building cells for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a Halliburton unit called KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root). It is an exclusive logistics supplier for both the navy and the army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation. The contract recently won from the army is for 10 years.

According to the NYT, private military contractors are the “new business face of war”. They provide “stand-ins for active soldiers” in everything from logistical support to battlefield training and military advice at home and abroad. By subcontracting (outsourcing) state terrorism to private entities, the US government abdicates itself from any moral fallout of the confrontations. At present, some are engaged in providing training in the use of live ammunition to American troops in Kuwait under the code name Desert Spring. One military firm, DynCorp, has just been hired to protect President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan who was the target of an assassination attempt in the recent past. The role of these private military companies is fast becoming important in the modern warfare because they are willing to go where the Pentagon would prefer not to be seen. In the last few years, they have sent their employees to Bosnia, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia and other global hotspots.

Motivated as much by profits as politics, these companies, about 35 in all, include such familiar names as Kellogg Brown & Root, DynCorp, Vinnell, SAIC, ICI of Oregon and Logicon. One of the best known, MPRI (Military Professionals Resources Inc.), boasts of having in its employment “more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon.”

The hard fact is that the Pentagon “cannot go to war without them”. The shift in policy (Executive Order 12333) occurred during the Reagan-Bush period under which so-called “national security” and “intelligence” functions were allowed to be “privatized.” During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the NYT says, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in 10. No one knows for sure how big this secretive industry is, but some military experts estimate the global market at $100 billion.

According to John J. Hamre, deputy secretary of defence in the Clinton administration, private armies are becoming indispensable with the passage of time. Which means more business and more profits and a promising future. They are already performing tasks as mundane as maintaining barracks for overseas troops, as sophisticated as operating weapon systems or as secretive as intelligence-gathering in Africa.

The Carlyle Group, world’s largest private equity firm with more than $12 billion in assets and specializing in buyouts of defence and aerospace companies, is another company poised to make a substantial sum of money from the global “war on terror.” Reason: former US President George Bush Sr, father of the incumbent president, works for the firm. According to “Baltimore Sun”, former secretary of state James Baker III and former Bush Sr campaign manager Fred Malek also stand to make much gains. Former Republican defence secretary Frank Carlucci (a college roommate of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), is the Carlyle Group’s chairman and managing director.

A strange aspect of post-9/11 war on terror is that in order to sell arms and training to certain countries the Pentagon is renaming the armed groups fighting for freedom, ethnic rights or a separate state as “terrorists.” Even the 38-year-old civil war in Colombia has been redefined by the American policy-makers as a war between “our Colombian allies and terrorists.” In the Philippines, “counter-terrorism aid” has been provided to Arroyo regime (which cleverly played the Al Qaeda card) to enable it fight the Abu Sayyaf group which is actually struggling since long for liberation of Moro territory, mainly inhabited by the Muslims. What is more interesting to note is the fact that counter-terrorism aid has also been allocated to help the Nepalese military to fight out Maoist militants, despite a State Department testimony that there’s no evidence that these dissidents are connected to Al Qaeda.

A report released by the Centre for Defence Information, an independent research group, last year said that there were 28 terrorist groups operating in 18 countries. According to a State Department’s report, the United States provided 16 out of these 18 countries with arms, military and CIA training during the past decade. In all, the US has sold weapons or training to almost 90% of the countries it has identified as harbouring terrorists. Under new US arms export policy, the entire emphasis is on ensuring lucrative profits to certain favoured companies, rather than resolving the crucial issue of terrorism.