It's hard to absorb the reality of what we are now hearing. A rogue and deranged US sergeant, tasked with a "village stabilization operation," decided to leave his base and launch a cold blooded massacre of innocents:
Residents of three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. At the first, the man gathered 11 bodies, including those of four girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said.
So first the US forces burn Korans out of incompetence and now one lone sergeant is burning the freshly-murdered corpses of children out of derangement, one can only surmise (and hope). I cannot, frankly, see how the occupation can recover from this series of events. Children have long been collateral casualties of the successful drone war, but this is the first time they have been directly murdered by a US soldier in cold blood and then burned. If this happened in America by a soldier of an army that had been in occupation for over a decade, how do you think public opinion would respond here?
As for US opinion, the latest polling shows that the public wants out:
Sixty percent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan has not been not worth fighting and just 30 percent believe the Afghan public supports the U.S. mission there — marking the sour state of attitudes on the war even before the shooting rampage allegedly by a U.S. soldier this weekend.
Indeed a majority in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, 54 percent, say the United States should withdraw its forces from Afghanistan without completing its current effort to train Afghan forces to become self-sufficient.
Mercifully, this atrocity, unlike much of what occurred at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the Bush-Cheney years, is not policy – far from it. But this act is so barbarous, so counter to American values, and so destructive of the mission that we surely must see some accountability – even if it is merely formal – for this atrocity. We entered Afghanistan to remove the murderer of innocents. A decade later, the roles are, in one case, reversed. These are the risks of warfare. We should recall them before we launch into another even more dangerous one.
(Photo: A mourner cries over the bodies of Afghan civilians, allegedly shot by a rogue US soldier, seen loaded into the back of a truck in Alkozai village of Panjwayi district, Kandahar province on March 11, 2012. An AFP reporter counted 16 bodies — including women and children — in three Afghan houses after a rogue US soldier walked out of his base and began shooting civilians early Sunday. NATO's International Security Assistance Force said it had arrested a soldier 'in connection to an incident that resulted in Afghan casualties in Kandahar province', without giving a figure for the dead or wounded. By Jangir/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 