The details are sparse, but reports are one US service member walked out of his base yesterday and opened fire on a row of Afghan houses, killing at least 16 people inside including young children:
(NYT) — Villagers in Belandi in the Panjway district of Kandahar, where the shooting took place, said the service member had attacked three houses, killing at least 16 in total. Five other villagers were wounded, they said. After the killings, villagers collected the bodies, and drove them to a nearby American military base to protest. Burn marks could be seen on some of the bodies, and the villagers said that five of the dead were young girls, age 6 or younger.
This is exactly the cycle of violence bin Laden hoped to create when he planned the 9-11 attacks ten-years ago. Bin Laden now sleeps with the fishes and Al Qaeda has been decimated. It’s time to get out of Afghanistan, there’s simply no reason to maintain such a large, nation-building presence in this place any more.
Thanks again, GW Bush, for losing a war we should have won in order to fight one we didn’t need.
The guy is a genius – he figured out a way to get the US kicked out of Afghanistan, ending the war.
What is the current state of Afghani culture? If we pull out now, will it go back to conditions of oppression under a regime like the Taliban or will it be closer to the conditions in the 60s and 70s?
Did it ever make sense to establish a large nation building “presence”?
redpanda #3 – Sometimes, things are so screwed up that you can’t change it. Afghanistan is as screwed up now as it was when the British were there 170 years ago or when the Soviets were there 30 years ago.
As cruel as it sounds, nothing can be done except walk away and close the border, because nothing that foreign invaders do can change it. The only thing that would change it – mass murdering those who support a culture of repression, which means most of the men – is not an acceptable option. The Afghan people will just have to figure out right from wrong the hard way.
I find it amazing that countries which call themselves “democracies” can’t figure out that you don’t impose change from the outside. Change has to be wanted and caused by those inside, or it will never be accepted. That’s how and why the US separated from England in the first place.
Good points. Wasn’t that one of the big reasons for the prime directive, after all?
Hmmm.. Is there as much outrage when the Taliban massacre innocent Afghani civilians as they regularly do?
I’m pretty sure the Taliban hold the record for murdering innocent Afghanistanis. Let’s never forget that. Or just how brutal, misogynist, inhumane and generally nasty the Taliban and other Jihadists were and still remain.
SteveO, that just sounds like a child’s excuse: “it wasn’t just me, miss, the others did much worse…”