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.

But for now, they are in a “mock Afghan village on the Quantico Marine base,” attempting to get a passing grade in Rapport 101 with a man playing a Mullah. Sloan Mann, the instructor, is armed with  pen and a clipboard at the side. The exchange is cringe-inducing, even for the reader:

Their encounters with the “mullah” felt like bad first dates, with the Americans posing robotic questions about the village. Sgt. Walton Cabrera, 25, an aspiring police officer from Southern California, sat before the mullah but couldn’t ease into a groove. “So . . . how’s everything in the village so far?” he asked. “Has the population changed?

Armed with a pen and report card, Mann, 36, handed up harsh feedback. “No rapport,” he wrote.  (snip)

At Quantico, Mann seemed frustrated by the Marines’ inability to schmooze, through interpreters, with Dari-speaking strangers. As Cabrera interrogated the mullah, one of several Afghan role players hired by a contractor, the questions bounced joylessly from subject to subject.

“What kind of needs do you have?” Cabrera asked the mullah.

“As you can see,” the mullah said, “we don’t have much food and water. There’s not enough schooling. There’s no doctor.”

A few seconds passed in silence. Cabrera looked down at his notebook, searching for something to say. “With that being said, has the population changed?” he asked.

There are so many things wrong with this picture, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

One, the instructor here isn’t military or even State Department, nor any federal agency for which we spend millions of dollars to train U.S personnel in the field. He is a private contractor, head of a seven-person company called Development Transformations, which is getting paid at least $1 million for the job. It’s run by — surprise — an ex-infantry officer who left a post-military job with USAID in frustration because he said the agency wouldn’t expend the energy on the same program in-house. Now, Development Transformations is pulling $1.5 million in annual revenues to do such work. USAID is often complaining, along with the State Department, that the military has taken the lead in areas traditionally advanced by the civilian agencies, like development and public diplomacy, and that up to now, they have not had the resources to compete. Now it seems they’re happy to let the military be the face, and to hire outside folks to teach Marines to engage in what amounts to micro-level public diplomacy. “It’s more efficient,” said Eric Kotoue from USAID.

Really? It seems to me that the longer this war goes on the more contractors pop up to convince the government there is another job for which outsourcing would be infinitely more efficient. And they are making a tidy profit. Not to disparage Mann’s tiny operation, but Uncle Sam has a really rotten record with reigning in costs and waste in war contracting. Really rotten.

Secondly,  how whipsawed must these Marines be at this point? In two weeks they will be joining their counterparts in places like Kandahar, which right now is a hotbed of corruption, Taliban violence and by all accounts, seething anger. Anger with disenfranchisement, broken promises, and above all, the accelerated airstrikes and house to house raids (1,000 a month in Kandahar province under Gen. McChrystal) resulting in the kind of unjust detentions and collateral damage that make village leaders very mad.  After taking over from McChrystal this summer, Gen. Petraeus said he would “review” the rules of engagement that soldiers say are keeping them from killing more, but then issued guidelines for soldiers that are supposed to advance the counterinsurgency through winning over the population. Talk about mixed messages. For Marines who are trained to kill, this has to be too much. Are they killers or courtiers, politicians or police, nation-builders or will breakers? Negotiators or enforcers?

Judging from their wary body language described in the WaPo piece, we can probably guess what they want to be. Who can blame them —  no doubt most of them weren’t thinking about T.E Lawrence when they stepped into that Marine Corps recruiting office.

Which brings us back to the counterinsurgency. 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.

The same goes for the Human Terrain System, which was supposed to employ social scientists and other civilian components to help the military learn about the local populace and pave the way for better understanding and relations. That seems to be falling apart too (and its impact, after years of operation and millions of dollars, is questionable).  It all has the air of futility. And waste.

Maybe that’s the problem — 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.