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Introduction
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introdudion Through the activities of the DPS, the notion of the US as world policeman is transformed from a metaphor to a reality. - JOE STORK, "World Cop: How America Builds the Global Police State;' 1970 In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-laced waistcoat somehow levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings. - FRANCIS JENN I NGS, Empire ofFortune, 1988 In a March 19, 2010, cover story, "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight;' Newsweek reported that although the United States had spent $6 billion trying to create an effective police force in Afghanistan, officers could barely shoot a rifle or hit a target fifty meters away, and much of the ammunition wound up being used by insurgents. Mohammed Moqim, an eight-year veteran ofthe force, was quoted as saying:"We are still at zero. [Recruits] don't listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen:' Tracy Jeansonne, a sheriff from Louisiana who worked as a police trainer for the defense contractor DynCorp from 2006 to 2008, added: "A lot of the police officers wanted to be able to extort money from locals. If we caught them, we'd suggest they be removed. But we couldn't fire anybody. We could only make suggestions:'] While critical of U.S. policy, the Newsweek article, as these comments suggest , conveyed the impression that more sustained American managerial oversight could rectify the shortcomings ofthe police programs and help overcome local cultural impediments to success. Historically, however, persistent oversight by the United States has often been catastrophic for the subject society, largely because of the repressive function for which the police programs were designed. What is ignored in much mainstream commentary is the fact that American strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia today is consistent with practices honed over more than a century in the poor nations of the global periphery. Presented to the public as humanitarian initiatives designed to strengthen democratic development and public security, police training programs achieved neither, but were critical to securing the power base of local elites amenable to U.S. economic and political interests. These programs helped to facilitate the rise of antidemocratic forces, which operated with impunity and above the law, contributing to endemic violence and state terrorism.' In his essay "Shooting an Elephant:' George Orwell recounts his experiences as a young man serving with the British colonial police in Burma. He felt despised everywhere he went. Toward the end of his tenure, he was called on to shoot a stray elephant that had encroached on public space. Although he felt guilty for doing so, he wanted to uphold the manly public image that the colonialists were trying to convey. And so, against his better conscience, he performed the deed. Summing up the episode, Orwell comments that, in the police, "you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks ofthe men who had been bogged [flogged] with bamboos:') Orwell's observations contain a large measure of universality and could have been echoed by Americans stationed in colonial enclaves such as the Philippines and Haiti, or in the Cold War era in South Vietnam, or in the Middle East today. Compared to its European counterparts, the American empire, especially since World War II, is unique in its reliance on indirect mechanisms of social control and the use of native proxies to promote its strategic interests. Accordingly, its elephant killers have been predominantly native to their region but no less hated. Over the years, as U.S. imperial attention has shifted from one trouble spot to another, police training and financing have remained an unobserved constant, evolving with new strategies and weapons innovations but always retaining the same strategic goals and tactical elements. The programs have been valued as a cost-effective, covert mechanism for suppressing radical and nationalist movements, precluding the need for military intervention, which was more likely to arouse public opposition, or enabling the drawdown of troops. With remarkable continuity, the United States has trained police not just to target criminals but to develop elaborate intelligence networks oriented toward internal defense, which allowed the suppression of dissident groups across a wide range and in a more surgical and often brutal way. The United States in effect helped to modernize intelligence-gathering and political-policing operations in its far-flung...