Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Raw Story
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday defended his decision to ban private security contractors from operating in public in Afghanistan, saying many of the organizations tasked with providing security are engaging in terrorist activities, working with “Mafia-like” organizations and “looting and stealing from the Afghan people.”
Karzai also speculated that some groups may be acting as security contractors during the day and as terrorist groups “at nighttime.”
Last week, Karzai gave security contractors working in Afghanistanfour months to cease operations. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour on ABC’s This Week, the Afghan president said the move was necessary because the for-profit contractors were destabilizing the country’s fight against militants.
“We’ve decided to bring an end to the presence of these security companies who are running a parallel security structure to the Afghan government,” Karzai said, “who are not only causing corruption in this country, but who are looting and stealing from the Afghan people, who are causing a lot of harassment to our civilians, who we don’t know whether they are security companies in daytime and then some of them turn into terroristic groups at nighttime.”
Karzai argued that security contractors “are wasting billions of dollars in resources and they are definitely an obstruction, an impediment in a most serious manner, to the growth of Afghanistan’s security institutions, the police and army.”
