The last thing a battle hardened killing machine that’s been plucked out of one hellhole in Iraq for another in Afghanistan is prepared for is a test on his social skills, particularly with Dari-speaking, Turbaned men who look like the guys they will likely be shooting at in the near future.
But in yet another insane-sounding twist in today’s insane Long War counterinsurgency policy in Afghanistan, we hear that U.S Marines are taking classes ahead of their deployments on how to break the ice with village leaders. According to a very telling feature in The Washington Post Tuesday, the Marines aren’t exactly sailing to the head of the class, and would probably rather be on the firing range –or anywhere else for that matter.
For over a year now we have endured seemingly endless introductions to the Shura, or high level meetings with the village elders and leaders, in which soldiers and Marines, “working to win over the local population,” place their guns respectfully outside the tent, take off their shoes and sit criss-cross, listening to grievances and bestowing money and other resources in exchange for fealty. It becomes at once, a ritual fraught with colonial overtones that only get more pronounced the longer we occupy their cities and villages and the more desperate for local assistance and loyalty we become. And if the the Marjah and Kandahar operations are any gauge, so far they do not seem to be working.
We try to learn everything about the locals, and then game them, in order to advance our military goals against the enemy. It is all about us, and for that we can never be entirely sincere. So we shouldn’t expect the Marines to effectively “act” sincere.
And that is why it will never work. The only one gaining anything here is Mann and his private contracting operation, which effectively has gamed the U.S government, and won.
