Mission creep in Afghanistan

Mon, 07/20/2009 - 12:55pm

Today we learned that the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan are now spearheading a major effort at (drum roll) ... prison reform. We've figured out that the brutal treatment that even petty criminals face while in jail is facilitating Taliban recruitment in the prisons, and so the United States is going to build some new facilities and try to get the Afghan government to change its incarceration practices. Your tax dollars at work.

Given that we are trying to defeat an insurgency, I don't have a big problem with any initiative that might weaken Taliban recruitment. But am I the only one who sees the irony in this situation? Prison reform is badly needed back here in the United States -- where the incarceration rate is the highest in the world (Russia and Belarus -- well-known bastions of freedom -- are #2 and #3). In fact, the incarceration rate in the United States is nearly four times the world average, and nearly seven times higher than in the EU.  Recidivism rates in the United States are also high (about 60 percent), which suggests that prison life isn't doing a very good job of rehabilitating convicts. As sociologist Bruce Western has shown, this situation has far-reaching negative consequences. Although Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) has been trying to spearhead a reform effort, this hasn't generated a lot of momentum so far. So the Afghans may get significant prison reform before Americans do.

Let's not forget how we got here: about eight years ago a small group of anti-American criminals hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into buildings in the United States. The ringleaders of the plot were in Afghanistan, and the Afghan government (at that time under Taliban control) refused to give them up. So the United States invaded to overthrow the Taliban and capture the al Qaeda leadership. Unfortunately, we failed to get the latter, and we bungled the subsequent reconstruction effort by going into Iraq, thereby enabling the Taliban to make a comeback. So now we're escalating there once more, in a potentially open-ended effort to build a functioning and legitimate Afghan state. And now that means fixing their prison system too. How does one say "mission creep" in Pashto?

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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mr walt says, "Let's not forget how we got here..."

by wadosy on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 3:01pm

Bin laden repeatedly denied involvement in 9/11.

The taliban repeatedly offer to surrender bin laden if bunnypants will supply evidence of bin laden's participation in 9/11.

hijackers started popping up after 9/11, alive, well, and pissed off.

October 7, 2001, Bunnypants starts bombing afghanistan without any proof of bin laden's involvement

November 11, 2001, Rove goes to hollywood, after the invasion of afghanistan

December 14, 2001, the phony tape of bin laden's confession surfaces

fbi director mueller cant prove IDs of hijackers…

...which is bad enough, but he also had to admit he could find no evidence of bin laden’s connection to 9/11... and this after the invasion of afghanistan and a supposed exhaustive search for evidence...

…and bin laden is not wanted for participation in 9/11, according to the FBI’s wanted poster…

.

Things to think about: for those of you who believe in the official conspiracy theory of 9/11

you can start by providing proof of bin laden's involvement in 9/11, other than one inept video of a poor double confessing on such a garbled sound track that nobody can understand it.

then you can discuss karl rove's visit to hollywood ---a month before the video surfaced and a month after bunnypants started the war--- for the express purpose of recruiting hollywood into the war on terror.

then you can explain how the low quality of the tape was a necessity, even coming from hollywood, since bin laden's double was so unconvincing.

and finally, you can explain how bunnypants is justified in attacking afghanistan even before the manufactured evidence was so conveniently found.

You are making the taliban, who refused to surrender bin laden without having proof of his involvement in 9/11, look positively noble in comparison to bunnypants, who apparently bombed afghanistan without any proof at all.

remember back to the week just before the video surfaced, and the main media's hysterical promotion of the video ---"delayed one more day to process", "delayed one more day to confirm", "delayed one more day to whatever"--- and the "whatever" being the building of expectations to a feverish pitch so the shit quality of the video would be overlooked, drowned in a week of nonstop 24/7 hype ... an example of war propaganda at its worst.

the simple fact is, there was no evidence, bunnypants was taking all kinds of heat for refusing to provide evidence to the taliban, he was taking heat for attacking without showing proof, and so he needed to cook up evidence.

it's a very short hop from manufacturing evidence to frame someone ---in this case, bin laden---- to covering up evidence that will incriminate the people who are actually running things ---AIPAC, israel, and oily corporate fascist fellow travelers......

.....in fact the frameup and the coverup are one and the same.

.

now then, had i been running things, and in planning the 9/11 caper, i decided that, for example, stephen walt would be the designated patsy, i would have grabbed as many of walt's friends and associates as i could lay my hands on, and i would send them to gitmo or abu ghraib or some other expert torturers, and i would “interrogate” walt's friends until they “confessed” that stephen walt was the mastermind of 9/11.

it’s real simple to see why torture is a vital part of this project: you need to fabricate evidence to justify your project.

and you have to fabricate the evidence because you know that the evidence you need does not exist.

and you know the evidence you need does not exist because you know you yourself committed the crime.

It's one of those mantras of

by blue13326 on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 2:01pm

It's one of those mantras of leftists like yourself that we bungled stability and reconstruction in Afghanistan by going into Iraq; yet history provides us with an explanation for our predicament that is at least equally persuasive: That Afghanistan simply isn't a country that can be successfully managed from millions of miles distant. In fact, Afghanistan may very well be a country that defies successful central governance in general; certainly, the British, the Russians and scores of warlords throughout its history can attest to the difficulty of the task.

It's important for academics such as yourself to shift away from superficial political analysis whose goal was simply to demonize Bush to a realistic assessment of what our goals should be in Afghanistan. Yes, it was politically advantageous to blame the failures in Afghanistan on Iraq; but, you've won that battle, it's time to declare victory and move on. Only through a realistic assessment of what is possible in Afghanistan can we begin to set achievable goals to bring the struggle there to a successful conclusion.

and it goes without saying that i would endow mr walt...

by wadosy on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 8:37pm

...with supernatural will-o'-the-wisp properties that would enable him to survive as poster boy for the expanding "war on terror".

.

anyhow, if you insist on continuing to drink the kool-aid, here's how it must have happened...

osama was on the internet one day, and stumbled across PNAC's call for a new pearl harbor, and osama sez to himself, "huh! i'll fix those guys' wagons! i will stage a new pearl harbor for them! ...and everyone will think those assholes from PNAC dun it!"

so osama rigged the 2000 election so the signers of the PNAC document, people like cheney, rumsfeld and the usual assortment of likud loons, got installed into positions that would have enabled them to make 9/11 happen, had they been inclined to make 9/11 happen, which they were most definitely NOT ---despite their yearnings for a new pearl harbor as expressed in the PNAC document they signed.....

then osama organized everything, from the training of the pilots to the security at the airports to the standdown at NORAD to oneill's job at the trade center, including bunnypants' month-long absence from dc while the shit was coming down.

osama even dispatched five mossad guys to film the event....

well, you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men... little did osama know that the PNAC guys had enough juice to reverse the frameup, and osama found hisself dragging his dialysis machine from pillar to post in an effort to escape the wrath of PNAC.

>>>But am I the only one who

by sreekanth on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 8:54am

>>>But am I the only one who sees the irony in this situation? Prison reform is badly needed back here in the United States -- where the incarceration rate is the highest in the world

There is no irony. High incarceration rates don't prove that we don't have a good prison system, though high recidivism rates probably do. Anyway, it's apples to oranges : the Afghan effort, from what you described, was to reduce violence in prisons, by police and guards, on prisoners. In US prisons, I don't think we have that problem, apart from anecdotal prisoner on prisoner violence and rapes (and I'm not sure what those stats are).

But as a broader question, since you opened this rathole, what is your suggestion on what we should do, since we do seem to have a violent streak in the American psyche ? The idea of throwing criminals back on the street has been tried : most of the readers here are familiar with NYC in the 80's and the squeegee people.

So if the prison stats are the underside of the same American national character that produces some of our most desirable attributes, like enterprise, and openness and being considered "the toughest tribe in Anbar", I'm willing to accept this as a package deal.

prison reform in America

by Lure D. Lou on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 9:12pm

will not occur until we deal with racism and other forms of prejudice in the court and prison systems. Also, in many states prisons are a large part of the 'local economy'...upstate New York mightily benefited from the ridiculous Rockefeller drug laws.

and btw...the squeegee people you mention may have just been poor...that's not a criminal offense in the enterprising America you obviously envision...one might say it was enterprising but uptight New Yorkers didn't want goop on their beemers as they were headed to the Hamsters...I mean the Hamptons like hamsters

nice perspective

by NattyB on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 9:14am

Dear Professor Walt,

Nice reminder on "how did we get here."

It reminds me of something my IR professor in college said to us when describing US foreign policy.

"Our goal is to go right across the the river. Yet, we don't go across the river. We end up downstream. Why is that?"

Mission creep is a scary thing. The Iraq invasion began as mission to defend the US National Security interests by preventing the possible proliferation and use of Iraq's WMDs (itself a terribly undescriptive term). Yet, here we are, 6 years and counting. And yet there are still people who defend the invasion and say it was worth it on moral grounds, as well as National Security grounds. Which is frankly quite scary.

Funny

by haplo1998 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 9:54am

Hilarious!

But pointing this out in places where many people will hear you isn't popular - why, asking question and pointing out inconsistencies is just anti-American commie talk! I know so because they told me on Fox News.

A tad overdue...

by kmaup727 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 12:22pm

For decades, officials have witnessed inmates in American prisons participating in gang recruitment while incarcerated. Therefore it should be no different in places like Afghanistan or Iraq (both near the top of the failed states index). I fear that if our outstanding military is only now tackling the situation of minimizing these activities, our job in Afghanistan has many more failures to come. It's been reported numerous times over the eight years in Iraq how the prison systems there become facilitators for terrorist breeding. Why has our leadership apparatus waited so long to confront this issue? Is it being addressed now only because of the troop increase in that state?

when will it end???

by newageads on Sat, 07/25/2009 - 12:17pm

can we finally pull out???

Chris
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