pmcs will save the world (not)

i'd like to know more about which pmcs the general had in mind, but, folks, we have a problem here:

• The most senior British military commander in Afghanistan yesterday described the situation in the country as "close to anarchy" with feuding foreign agencies and unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption.
• The stark warning came from Lieutenant General David Richards, head of Nato's international security force in Afghanistan, who warned that western forces there were short of equipment and were "running out of time" if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people....
• He described "poorly regulated private security companies" as unethical and "all too ready to discharge firearms"....
• Afghanistan is now one of the poorest countries with an economy and infrastructure in ruins. (Richard Norton-Taylor, Saturday July 22, 2006, The Guardian)

of course, it has long been known that karzai holds sway over just a small area around kabul and the warlords and their armies hold the rest:

• In the absence of effective security forces of the central government, private armies and militias continue to hold sway over most of the countryside (Chairmen’s Report of an Independent Task Force Cosponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, June 2003)

but the general's wording suggests that it is not warlord militias but private sector, western-style, pmcs that are proving to be a greater and greater impediment to peace and reconstruction. let's see: we didn't do afghanistan right so we decided to go fix iraq; that policy is now in tatters (time for the pmcs!), so it looks like it is on to iran; but wait, maybe we'll fix lebanon first....