Michael Brenner -- The Afghan Delusion --- Counter insurgency has been at the heart of the "war on terror." It has failed -- in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The main reasons are readily identifiable. Some are generic; others specific to time and place. War kills a lot of civilians as well as combatants. That holds for "precision" drone strikes as well as mainforce operations (1). That is one. That breeds resentment and hostility. Consequently, the potential pool of recruits for the bad guys grows exponentially -- especially in tribal societies. It's like trying to remove water from a boat by scooping it in the stern and dumping it in the bow. This has become an American specialty. In Iraq, we went one step further in creating a potent enemy movement from scratch. --- Long-term foreign presence alienates the locals. That is two. Nobody likes to be dictated to by foreigners, nobody likes legions of soldiers tramping around their country, nobody likes to be belittled or disparaged. It's is not just Texans who warn: "Don't Mess With T....." This is true even where the foreigners do provide some tangible benefits. Yet, the unstated premise of the GWOT is that the United States must hang around in order to make sure that the terrorists are fully suppressed and that there can be no resurrection. For that is a logical corollary to the commitment to a policy of zero tolerance for uncertainty when it comes to terrorism. This is the Mother Delusion. -- Long-term success depends on creating stable political systems wherein security is provided by competent local authorities, including military and police, considered legitimate by the populace. That is three. In short, nation building and state building. It is treacherously difficult. Historically, the United States has tried its hand at that on many occasions, in many places. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba: several times each. Iraq, Afghanistan: all-out effort, absolute failure. Somalia, Mali: partial effort, failure. Let's not forget Vietnam. The Philippines is the half-way exception. Of course, it was culturally a far more congenial place to attempt social engineering. It also took 46 years of occupation; that translates into staying in Iraq until 2049 and Afghanistan until 2047. (Post-war Japan and Germany are irrelevant to this assessment given the unique, unreplicable circumstances). --- Afghanistan saw its share of torture. Personal testimony is now confirming longstanding reports that torture was routine at Begram and endemic at bases in Kandahar, Oruzgan, and Wardak provinces as well as elsewhere in the South and East (2). In the early years, most of the persons abused were innocent of any terrorist associated action. Many were seized (and then abused) on the word of local warlords who made fortunes trafficking rivals, competitors, other tribal leaders or just anyone whose delivery filled a quota of "Taliban." So a 12-year-old boy sex slave, or the wrong Qasim, or the illiterate farmer who bore the same name as the deputy Foreign Minister -- all fed the American chain of prisons. Most of these prisoners suffered some type of physical abuse, many tortured, several killed. This practice went on unabated for a number of years. The warlords, the drug lords and a motley assortment of other entrepreneurial types were America's staunchest Afghan supporters in the towns and villages where they were the indigenous backbone of the occupation. The boy's story is a perfect parody of the times. He was confined in the compound of a pro-American local personage who had been falsely accused of being a Taliban by an envious local rival. The boy was presumed guilty by the Army's standard of propinquity. His "liberation" led to solitary confinement in a Guantanamo cage -- euphemistically known later as "protective detention." --- Three aspects of this stunning record deserve mention in regard to delusion. First, Americans generally cannot accept that torture was an official policy or that so many Americans would participate in carrying it out. Second, the critical element in this abusive behavior was vengeance. The people who committed these acts were animated by the same passions felt by most Americans. In this sense, they were acting as the peoples' surrogates. Torture of persons for whom there was not a shred of evidence of wrongdoing had no instrumental purpose. They were stand-ins for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In fact, the Taliban as an organization had dissolved by a natural process of defection and acceptance of a new order in a manner very similar to how it has first emerged. They seeped back into society from whence they had come -- reverse osmosis. There were virtually no violent acts directed against American forces in Kandahar and elsewhere in the South between 2002 and 2004. We needed an enemy, so we imagined one. Thanks to this mentality, the real thing actually did rematerialize. Acute demand generated the desired supply. At first in the form of zombie enemies, later the real thing. The terrorism market mechanism worked. Supply emerged to meet the demand. -- Third, the American occupation in Afghanistan was as feckless and incompetent as the fiasco in Iraq. This conclusion is unavoidable in light of the record. This applies to the Army's war against a phantom terrorist enemy, to the ignorance that led to the occupation enterprise becoming hostage to local warlords, and to nation-building programs whose primary success was in lining the pockets of the warlords and American contractors. -- The corresponding delusions are: Americans are a moral people incapable of evil deeds and evil policies; the United States observes the rule of law and the precepts of humanity in dealing with other peoples; we are an exceptionally competent society that knows how to get things done and to perform daunting tasks with efficiency and honesty. - More, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/the-afghan-delusion_b_5637604.html?utm_hp_ref=afghanistan