Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton Page B

even get off his cot to say hi. He just sent his local peon to say he already had the intel.”
    The Contractor holds up a stack of dirty Pakistani rupees. “The puke said thanks and here are some rupees for the cab ride.” He shakes his head. “Company policy is to always give something to someone bringing intel.”
    Looking at the pile of grubby notes, he shakes his head again. “That’s fucked, man,” he says, getting back into the car. What better reason for someone to feed the Americans a bunch of lies than to get a handful of money out of it.
    To be fair, the idea that an armed American civilian would just stroll into a military base with relevant information might give any official pause, since the military only works with established intelligence sources. Walk-ups are considered the most unreliable form of intelligence, but being on the other end of a wad of dirty rupees clearly pisses off the Contractor.
    Reliance on bad intel and the lack of good relations with the local population has compounded the security problems, he says. “When you do a madrassah hit”—that is, a raid on an Islamic school—“the locals get pissed. You don’t always find bad guys, but everyone gets slammed to the ground, zip-tied, bagged, and tagged. You forget to give them a hundred bucks at the door and they’ll swear to get you. They will, too. The next time the Americans are on patrol in their Dumbvees, they are set up.”
    This reminds me of a traditional Pashtun saying Haji told me days before: “If you take your revenge in a hundred years, you are rushing things.”
    Despite the treatment he just received from OGA, the Contractor insists the folks he works directly with are beginning to catch on and improve their methods of collection. “Now we want to get inside the heads of the people we are dealing with. We want a softer, more personal relationship, instead of basing the transaction on money.
    â€œA while back, Rumsfeld said we might be creating more enemies than we are killing…. Duh… But things are changing. We don’t work with local Afghan commanders so much. We also don’t give a shit about what the Paks say, so we are allowed to slide and glide a little more inside Pakistan…. For some reason Pakistan is still like the Catholic Church, where it is sanctuary,” the Contractor tells me. “The bad guys are inside Pakistan using Pakistani protection to attack Americans inside Afghanistan and then running back knowing they won’t be chased. Hopefully, things will change.”
    For now, though, covert operations continue and task force looks for excuses to cross the border, the Contractor says. An American civilian operating inside Pakistan could need help, which gives the U.S. military a reason to cross the border in support, hot pursuit, or just to call in mortar and air fire on nebulous “bad guys.” But until they do, the shadow war depends on men, like the Contractor, willing to work and fight in a no-man’s land just beyond the reach of U.S. power. I ask him if there’s an extraction plan if a mission in Pakistan gets messy. “The extraction plan is that once you are across the border, you are on your own. There is no uplift. You are screwed if things go wrong.” But that vulnerability is essential to the role of a contractor. “You are not in the federal system or in the military system,” he says. “You are deniable, disposable, and deletable.”
    That independence—and the secrecy that goes with it—is part of the Contractor’s code. And, as far as he is concerned, it should remain inviolate even in death. “When we get killed, it’s usually because we fucked up,” he says. “We lost two guys, set up and ambushed. We lost a case officer in a training accident. That, along with [Johnny Micheal] Spann getting killed in the middle of an interrogation, adds