In this morning’s New York Times, Eric Schmitt has a front page article about the Afghan prisons. I was elated that the article made the front page, and doubly elated that right there, in front of god and everybody, they quoted something of the real extent of the U.S. problem with indefinite detention and torture: Three dozen prisons holding 15,000 prisoners.

Oh, and by the way, Admiral Mullen wants them fixed up because, "It is essential to who we are as a fighting force that we get this right. We are better than what I saw in those pictures."
Yes, you heard right, "those pictures". Those would be the very same ones that President Obama is fighting to keep from releasing. Yet another clue as to what their content is.

Nowhere in the article is there any question of the use of prisons in Afghanistan at all. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer who is litigating the habeas corpus claims of some of the Bagram prisoners for International Justice Network, said at one of her public talks that before the U.S. entered Afghanistan in 2001, there were 600 prisoners in the whole country. Now, even the New York Times can count, and the U.S. military can admit, there are 15,000. But they’ve imported yet another guy from the Iraq War to apply yet another solution from Iraq to yet another problem in Afghanistan.

The article is based on a report by Maj.Gen. Douglas Stone, who has experience reforming prisons in Iraq. His biggest recommendation is to separate the extremist prisoners from the general population so they can’t spread terrorist militancy, and they will build another brand new prison to do that. Gee, the last brand new prison they built, at Pol-e-Charki, now has 4,300 prisoners, including those shipped there from Bagram and Guantanamo, in  the Bush administration move’em or lose’em program when the Supreme Court started writing on the wall.

So what is wrong in Afghanistan? The place is like the discussions in the Obama administration about indefinite detention and closing pariah prison sites, writ large. What has always been wrong there was the failure to understand the difference between military and civilian. The prisoners are not clearly delineated between military and civilian prisoners, they are not charged in large numbers, the whole effort there has military and civilian parts which are not distinguished, there are two militaries operating with different mandates, and parts of the prison system are run by any of the armies, including the U.S., NATO, and the ANA. When you mix the mission of the police with the mission of the military, there is a name for the consequences — most countries call it either martial law or military rule.

But early on, the Germans, who had the job of building up the police, thought by many to be the most crucial task towards fixing a failed state, underfunded it and didn’t do it, because it looks nowhere near as good as handing out food to refugees on European TV. So the police are corrupt, and the military runs prisons (source: Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos). And the current thing in the South, which Admiral Mullen and General Stone are worried will bring a fresh wave of prisoners, isn’t pure military, or shouldn’t be, either. It’s about drugs and money (sources, Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos, Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror). And crime families who hire militants. There are many parts to helping a fractured country regain stability. But they won’t work right if they are put in a blender and mixed up until they can’t be separated one from another. The other famous place where military and police missions are hopelessly entwined is in the Israeli occupied territories. It’s so screwed up that nobody knows what the applicable law is anymore, and there hasn’t been anything anyone would lovingly claim as peace.

So why are we doing this? I think that one reason is that we Americans love prisons. No, really. America invented the use of prisons for criminal punishment in the early 19th century. Adam Liptak, the chief legal correspondent for the New York Times, recently wrote a book on it. But he didn’t somehow read what Stuart Grassian wrote about American solitary confinement. So he didn’t know that in addition to people from all over Europe coming to America in the 1840′s to see the bold new experiment, there were also the Charles Dickenses who wrote about people driven mad by extreme isolation. Now we are convinced that the rule of law means lots of imprisonment. In some countries, they don’t believe this. Afghanistan has traditionally been one of them. Iraq has not. But prisons are us, so we will gladly import what works in Iraq to the people of Afghanistan. And make believe we can do something there in separating the truly bad guys from the rest, that we’ve never been able to do in our own prisons. Even with 2 million prisoners to test it on.

I guess charity isn’t the only thing that begins at home.