The US Military Has Not Learned From US Prison Failures

Top story at nytimes.com right now is a report about the US military’s growing concern that US-run Afghan prisons are helping to foster Taliban expansion. About halfway into the story, we’re faced with a jaw-dropper:

General Stone’s report … recommends separating extremist militants from more moderate detainees instead of having them mixed together as they are now….

Under the new approach, the United States would help build and finance a new Afghan-run prison for the hard-core extremists who are now using the poorly run Afghan corrections system as a camp to train petty thieves and other common criminals to be deadly militants, the American officials said.

Then we learn: “In 2005, the Bush administration began trying to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan, mainly by transferring Bagram prisoners to an American-financed high-security prison outside of Kabul guarded by American-trained Afghan soldiers.” But that prison “could not absorb all the Bagram prisoners.”

It’s amazing how rarely mistakes are corrected — even when those mistakes have been repeated over and over again in recent memory. The story here is that we detain an ever-growing number of criminals in facilities with a small, fixed occupancy, then mix the petty thieves with extremist terrorists and wonder why these facilities seem to grossly overcrowd and function as breeding grounds for terror and violence. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I wonder what David Kennedy has to say about all this.