I read Balko's book, like, half a pandemic ago? It's a good read, but grim because of course it came out eight years before BLM and CBP dusting protesters and rent-a-thugs sans insignia vanning Antifa in Portland and all the rest. Things were terrible then, they're way worse now.
I read "No Good Men Among the Living" like, this morning. It's just as fucking grim for exactly the same reasons and also came out like eight years ago. Okay, seven. Spot me a year for symmetry.
I'm reviewing them together because they're the same goddamn book.
Yeah, one of them is about domestic police response and the other is about a failed invasion by any other name but the basics are the same.
RISE OF THE WARRIOR COP
1) Conservatives (Nixon) wish to crush counterculture (Hippies)
2) Crime is down, but everyone fears crime, so a boogeyman must be invented
3) Local approaches don't make national campaigns look good, so crime must be nationalized
4) Violent raids make good television so violent raids are preferred
5) Any setbacks can be countered by arguing that the raids weren't violent enough
6) Individual grifters profit off of the massive largesse
7) The system becomes self-perpetuating
8)
NO GOOD MEN AMONG THE LIVING
1) Conservatives (Bush) wish to crush counterculture (muslims)
2) Terrorism is down, but everyone fears terrorism, so a boogeyman must be invented
3) Local approaches don't make national campaigns look good, so terrorism must be nationalized
4) Violent raids make good television so violent raids are preferred
5) Any setbacks can be countered by arguing that the raids weren't violent enough
6) individual grifters profit off the massive largesse
7) The system becomes self-perpetuating
8)
The core problem with fighting crime with troops is that you're never going to get the bad guy. If you're focused on kicking ass you care not a lot whose ass you kick, and if you don't bother to understand the situation the wrong ass is going to get kicked every time. The War on Drugs was invented to give the DEA something to do, and the DEA was invented to win Nixon re-election. Ever since, the DEA has been who you call if you want justification to kick down some doors, and ever since you could easily get justification to kick down doors, kicking down doors has been what you do instead of investigating.
If you need a SWAT team one day a year? And you don't have it? That one day will be the day that makes you lose the election because you weren't prepared to be "tough on crime." So now you have a SWAT team, and you only need them one day a year. So you use them when they aren't needed. I'd watch this on the CBS feed down in LA - CBS would put up a bird twice a day because of course they did, and then they had nothing better to do, so they'd fly around looking for filmable shit. LAPD simplified things by having no less than eleven frequencies for their radios but the minute it involved hot pursuit, SWAT, K9 or anything interesting, it went to "hot shots" so that if all you cared about was the interesting stuff, it was all right there for you. So every single day, LAPD SWAT was there to kick down someone's door, and every single day, every copter was there to film it and before too long, you aren't doing your job if you aren't rolling on a daycare.
You don't care if you're white, of course. I was pulled over once and a stammering kid with two guns and a taser on said "I-I-I'm s-sorry sir I didn't realize you were white" and got back in his car. Had two officers bang on my door at 3am demanding to see the wife I was supposedly beating - they got awfully damn circumspect when I was clearly not brown and lost that circumspection immediately upon banging on the neighbor's door (apartment was vacant - see previous about "investigating").
SWAT's a backronym, by the way. After the Watts riots, Daryl Fuckin' Gates wanted a "Special Weapons Assault Team" to go crack darkie skulls and everyone told him the name didn't exactly scream "law enforcement." So they worked their way back to "special weapons and tactics" and poured 5,000 rounds into a house with four people in it. From that point forth, darkies got warfare. An aside?
This is a book about how white people who blow up buildings end up teaching at NYU while black people who blow up buildings get assassinated.
LET'S PUT SOME AFGHANISTAN ON IT
Gopal does a preamble for Afghanistan kinda like how Ridley Scott did a preamble for Blade Runner - 2017 Los Angeles had Replicants, Afghanistan has Purdah. Gopal makes the point that Purdah isn't an Islamic thing, it's a Hindu Kush thing. He also points out that Afghanistan is only 12% arable land, of which less than half is actually under cultivation:
The rationalists have long pointed to Afghanistan to make their case - history is basically a fat'n'happy valley getting prosperous and raided by the starving mountain tribes, who move in, get fat'n'happy and raided by the starving mountain tribes. Afghanistan, they point out, is always under totalitarianism or anarchy because it's not a country, it's a region of hardscrabble valleys with no shared law, no shared religion, no shared culture and no shared infrastructure where life is nasty, brutish and short. Thus, the only thing you have of value is your women and the only people you can trust not to steal your women are the men who gave them to you and everyone else is one lost goat from murdering you.
Gopal goes one further by pointing out that the first example of white people bitching about the Taliban is about three hundred years old - "Talib" means "student" and in a tribal society where justice is self-serve and ownership is hereditary, the best way to make good is to join the priesthood. His tribe and your tribe may have absolutely nothing in common other than you've both heard of Allah, so the guy who knows Allah becomes the interlocutor for everything.
Afghanistan was, of course, veering from totalitarianism to anarchy when the Soviets stepped in, so the Americans challenged their totalitarianism with anarchy. Once the Soviets left anarchy reigned, and the only thing providing any sort of mutually-accepted justice was ruthlessly-applied Islamic law. Enter bin Laden and the one thing the Americans wanted was the one thing the Taliban couldn't do - hand over a Muslim to the Infidels. Thus, Taliban totalitarianism was replaced with American anarchy.
Gopal follows three people for twelve years - A warlord who was rescued on the day of execution by his buddy Mohammed Karzai, a low-level grifter Talib who went by "Mullah Cable" under the Soviets because of his choice of whips, and a college-educated woman who makes the mistake of canvassing for elections under the Americans. They're all fucked. You know they're all fucked. The woman is the only one who doesn't fuck anyone else over so of course she's the one who's fucked the most. And that was in 2014; she's super-fucked now, of course.
Because it's tribal. It's not who you are, it's who you're related to, and even that may not matter. Mullah Cable describes the experience of American air strikes the first time and is absolutely gobsmacked by the god-like powers of the Americans, but also emboldened by the fact that if you shoot at them they run away because without air support, they're utter cowards.
And that's the thing. The Americans came to Afghanistan to kick ass and chew gum and they didn't bring any gum. So the question was always "who do we shoot" and the answer invariably was "whoever the Afghan we're friends with at the moment tells us to." Gopal details a detainee at Bagram whose principle crime was aiding and abetting an Afghan warlord... who contracted with the Army to build Bagram. Because it's all trade-it-up-the-chain bullshit which means the more important you're supposed to be, the further removed you are from anyone who can judge who you actually are.
While the Soviets basically pitted urban Afghans against rural Afghans and paid both sides to rat on each other, the Americans didn't even have the discipline to keep track of who they'd paid and who they were shooting at. Entire villages were emptied because rival clans could say "this Taliban guy is in there" and men would be shot and buildings bulldozed and women widowed four times in five months because I guess you just showed up on the wrong day, Yankee. Gopal interviews a guy who told Centcom "I can get you al Qaeda, give me five million dollars" so they did, so he went to his friends in al Qaeda and said "give me a million dollars and I won't rat you out to Centcom" and they did, so he went to the ISI and said "al Qaeda's on the run give me 500,000 dollars and I'll show you where they're going" and ISI told him to fuck off "because they are not like you! They pay attention!" Of course that guy was murdered by rivals like two months later because Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was never not going to be a failure. It was going to be a failure for the Soviets whether we were involved or not, it was going to be a failure for us no matter how long we stayed or how much money we threw at it. What Gopal's book illustrates is that our failure was thunderously obvious from day one because we simply didn't apply the resources or attention to figure out what the fuck was going on, so we were forever at the whim of whoever we were talking to in the moment, various grifters calling down the lightning on each other in the interests of getting ahead in a society where you have either anarchy or totalitarianism but usually something in between. Yet what were we doing?
"Nation building."
The title comes from a Pashtun aphorism: "there are no good men among the living, and no bad men among the dead." Partway through the book, Gopal interviews Mullah Cable/Akhbar Ghul about an action against the Americans in which he ambushed a column, blew up a few trucks, and caused the Americans to rain down an air strike on a defenseless village.
- That evening, the commanders regrouped in the mountains. Remarkably, there were no injuries. They spoke among themselves about how cowardly the Americans were, how without their airplanes this war would be over in months. Their mood was triumphant, their narrow escape evidence that God was on their side. Then they received news from the village: the airstrike had flattened a house whose wall Akhbar Ghul had used for cover, and ravaged the apple orchards through which they had escaped.
Akhbar Ghul felt deeply ashamed. He wondered how he could possibly face the villagers. But was it his fault? The Americans had chosen to come to Wardak, he reasoned. he'd never asked for it. They had placed themselves in the middle of the village, and he was doing the best he could - the best anyone could - under such conditions.
Much later, I asked him if he felt remorse. He gave me a surprised look, and said
"You can't ask me that. Americans won't ever feel what we feel. Your problems have solutions."