A US soldier has killed more than a dozen Afghan civilians, many of them women and children, in a night-time shooting spree in southern Afghanistan.Corruption is epidemic, the Afghan Air Force is apparently being used to smuggle guns and narcotics. The NGOs are leaving because of concerns about security.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, condemned the shootings as "intentional murders" and demanded an explanation from the US.
The victims of the shootings, which left up to 16 civilians dead, included nine children and three women, Karzai's office said in a statement.
I have no idea how this all can be turned around. I believe that if there was a time when we could have prevailed in Afghanistan, it was gone by 2005. We squandered the chance we had to make a difference and, since then, it has been more a matter of denying the flow of the tide of the war. The cheerily optimistic pronouncements from first the Bush Administration and now the Obama Administration have been the equivalent of putting pretty siding over a rotting structure.
So now comes the question: How many more soldiers are going to die for this mistake?
It is well past time to go, for the sake of our troops. War is not the answer, to borrow a phrase from my youth.
ReplyDeleteIt most certainly is a mess.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I heard this today and thought, oh fuuuuuck....pack and go FAST.
ReplyDeleteBut of course, we won't.
I predicted this sort of thing almost a decade ago, which is the logical result of the "kill them all" military training combined with a "pretend to be police most of the time" mission. Our military is trained to be on a battlefield, and they can't help but treat civilian neighborhoods like battlefields if you jam them into that situation.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't excuse the behavior, but it also condemns the leadership who should have understood the inevitability of these sorts of actions.
Gee, Improbable Joe, "the "kill them all" military training combined with a "pretend to be police most of the time" mission."
ReplyDeleteSo we train the soldiers to pretend to be police but act like soldiers. Now if only the police who are pretending to be soldiers would act like police.
And, of course, nobody in the last 3000 years has prevailed in A-stan except for Attila the Hun and the Sikhs, both of them by doing "pyramids of skull" behavioral modification. Something really, really simple that seems to escape the Brilliant Minds at the War College. You know, like a land war in Asia?