An American Lion

Just like his wife, Montgomery McFate, Sean McFate can’t wait to tell you how wonderful he is and how he knows better than anyone how to make a lot of money getting the military to do what he thinks it should do:

In May 2004, I was hired for an unusual job: The U.S. State Department contracted DynCorp International, a private military company, to build Liberia’s army. I was tapped as an architect of this new force. Previously I had worked for both the U.S. military and Amnesty International. I was a rare bird — an ex-paratrooper and human rights defender — and thus a good fit for this unprecedented task.

When I arrived in Liberia in 2004, the country’s army was, at best, a mess. After decades of civil war, soldiers’ hands were as bloodied as any rebels’. The troops were undisciplined, unpaid, and undertrained. They were a motley crew that protected no one in a country where pretty much everyone was vulnerable to violence. And it was our job to turn them into a professional military.

Today, just five years later, Liberia’s soldiers are among the best in the region. They have been vetted, trained, paid, and readied for action. The difference was the impact of that little-known U.S. initiative — the first of its kind — that literally rebuilt the Liberian army from scratch. Our goal was for the Liberian army to fill the role of U.N. peacekeepers as the latter were slowly phased out, and it worked astonishingly well.

Now that model might be of use again. President Barack Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan is predicated on creating Afghan security forces to replace coalition soldiers. The idea of training local troops to replace U.S. or international ones is not a new one; the United States famously tried to do it and failed in Vietnam. More recently, in 2005, then-President George W. Bush outlined his plan for Iraq and the aim that “as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” Yet the United States’ ability to raise foreign forces has been paltry. This is because raising an army is difficult and dangerous: Do it too well and it might turn into a Praetorian Guard or a vehicle for a coup d’état. Do the job poorly and it could terrorize the citizens it is sworn to protect and much worse.

Do it too well and you could delude yourself into thinking that training the Liberian Army is a useful tool for comparison.

I don’t think Mr. McFate has the credibility to boast about building an Army out of what is left of the armed forces of Liberia, nor does it make any sense to compare that effort to building the Afghan military. When he says that his team”vetted” the recruits, does it sort of not strike one as being ridiculous to think that vetting a Liberian for service in the military with flyers at bus stops is a little easier than vetting an Afghan to serve in the Afghan army, given the known infiltration of the ranks of the Afghan military by the Taliban? In order to propel Taliban recruits into the Afghan military, all one would have to do is compel a handful of people to say positive things to the “vetting” team about a recruit, and kill anyone who might say something negative.

Given this tidbit:

Sean McFate is the son of Mary Lou Sapone (a.k.a. Mary McFate), the NRA-connected private spy who infiltrated the gun control movement for about 15 years. Her tale was first disclosed by Mother Jones last week. That article noted that Sean, a Brown- and Harvard-educated paratrooper, and his wife, Montgomery McFate, a controversial Pentagon adviser, had once both worked for Mary Lou Sapone’s business, which specialized, according to an old version of Montgomery’s resume, in “domestic and internal opposition research” and “special investigations.” Sean and Montgomery McFate might also have been involved in Mary Lou Sapone’s penetration of the gun control community.

More recently, Sean McFate was program director of the national security initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank boasting an advisory board composed of four former Senate majority leaders: Howard Baker, Bob Dole, George Mitchell, and Tom Daschle. That is, he was until the appearance of the Mother Jones story on his mother.

I also think that one should acknowledge that Lieutenant Colonel Chris Wyatt was the military officer in charge of the training, and that he was forced to defend the notion of using contractors back in 2008. In fact, McFate isn’t even mentioned in that Voice of America article. It’s a little difficult to reconcile how he can now claim to have built the Liberian Army when he wasn’t even worth mentioning or interviewing by a decidedly friendly news outlet that wanted to promote the success of rebuilding the Liberian military.