The problems facing the police in Chicago and our military in Afghanistan are similar. Of course, the result of police failure in Chicago is unacceptable, our children beating hell out of and shooting each other. In Afghanistan, of course, we can just leave, which is what we should do.

The starting point in both Afghanistan and the south side is the hostility or at least the absence of goodwill toward the occupying forces. And goodwill (and the ‘snitching’ and neighborhood watching it generates) is essential to peace; the only alternative way to make peace is economically/politically impossible, flooding the conflict zone with five or six times as many troops/cops as are there now.

The first step toward remedying the goodwill deficit is for the occupying forces to have goodwill toward the local peoples. Which is not easy. Middle class cop bosses and America’s careerist generals, and the cop and occupying army cultures, are not natural sources of goodwill toward local impoverished populations.

Let’s look at the generals. They carry out a policy of occupation whose purpose is incoherent (has something to do with Al Queda, which ain’t in Afghanistan), and whose means explicitly, hell triumphantly, sacrifices many civilian lives in order to make sure the occupier soldiers suffer minimal casualties. Ain’t no goodwill in that. Now, can a real purpose be created or re-articulated into something that is worthwhile for Afghans? Nope. We actually tried ‘helping Afghanistan become a nice country’ and that plays badly with U.S. voters. Can the warfare means be modified so that far many fewer Afghan civilians die in exchange for a few more Americans deaths? Realistically, no chance in hell of that.

How about the middle-class cops patrolling the poorest and largely African -American neighborhoods on Chicago’s south side? I imagine most officers look at these neighborhoods as the wild west, as uncivilized ‘warzones’ (a term Jesse Jackson unfortunately uses way too often (not that he’s the only one)).

Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s quite as hopeless a situation as the one in Afghanistan, in part because many cops are African-American, and because, generally, the police are (of course) far closer linguistically, culturally and socio-economically to the poor and working class Chicago south side than are our occupying troops to the peoples of Afghanistan. So, there’s some reasonable basis for human connections and eventual trust and goodwill between the ‘occupier’ and poor largely black south side neighborhoods. Realistically, though, change will take time and needs to come from the top, Mayor Daley, who is clueless about and sucks at all of this.

In Afghanistan, the people’s reaction to foreign troops is a logical response to the occupying army’s attitude toward them, and things are similar on the south side of Chicago. When a common tactic of the police has been tortured-out false confessions (the easy, lazy, don’t-give-a-shit alternative to the ambiguous hard work of finding the real criminals), and the current mayor was a key enabler of that torture, do we expect poor African-American neighborhood goodwill? When robocop ask-the-right questions-later SWAT teams invade and destroy poor people’s housing and possessions over largely victimless crimes like drug dealing, do we expect poor African-American neighborhood goodwill?

But the Chicago police and their approach to poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods can change. And nearly all the neighborhood wants them to be there if they’re there to prevent ‘victim crime’ rather than to be just another source of fear and blundering destruction. Heck, most of the neighborhood probably wants them there preventing drug crime too (however pointless I think that is). But they don’t want them to do ‘their jobs’ like out-of-control armor-plated thugs and assholes, not caring enough or too fearful (like our troops in Afghanistan) to take the time to distinguish victim and victimizer in the warzone (Mayor Daley, btw, is ‘brilliant’ on mixing up victims and victimizers). Reform, just not acting like an asshole, is hard but not impossible.

Police can begin now to create goodwill by taking off the robocop attitude and getting to know the people they serve from a sidewalk rather than from behind a squadcar window. Then cops may begin treating poor and African-American south siders as innocent and law-abiding people unless there is real evidence otherwise. (I.e., more or less like they treat in yuppie neighborhoods.) In a relatively short time, the police would be able to reach out respectfully towards and ally with the vast majority of the poor neighborhoods in a shared fight against serious crime. Cops unwilling to do so should be fired. Right?

As for our troops in Afghanistan, they also should start really caring about the people in the lands they ostensibly serve; one way to show that is to refuse to fight in ways that are criminally uncaring toward civilian life. It shouldn’t be hard to find such fighting ways, since they are standard operating procedure.