A rogue soldier’s murderous rampage in an Afghan village Sunday was just the latest round of killing and retaliation between Americans and their supposed Afghan allies that makes finding a path to ending the decade-long war with some measure of success and honor increasingly unlikely, experts said.
American military officials were struggling to understand why a veteran Army staff sergeant who is married with two children left his base to kill 16 civilians, including nine children.
But even before that tragic killing spree the level of fear and hatred between the Afghan people and Americans in that country was undermining all of the goals of the U.S. mission there, according to a number of American and Afghan officials.
“We do not trust each other,” said a former senior Afghan official, who spoke on condition that they not be named. “This is a tragedy beyond words — what happened to the U.S. soldiers in retaliation for the Quran burnings is a tragedy. This [Sunday’s killings] may be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The sergeant, who is reported to be from a unit based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, an Army and Air Force installation near Tacoma, Wash., set fire to 11 of the bodies, four of which were young girls under the age of six, the Associated Press reported.
The civilian massacre comes on the heels of the killings of six U.S. soldiers over the past several weeks, when word spread throughout the region that the U.S. military had accidentally burned Qurans and other religious books at Bagram Air Base.
And Americans in Afghanistan were braced for the situation there to get worse. On Monday the Taliban issued a statement calling U.S. troops “sick-minded American savages.” They promised revenge for the innocent victims of Panjwai district, a rural region outside Kandahar, saying they would kill Americans to atone “for every single martyr with the help of Allah.” Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, spokesman for ISAF, said the U.S. military is prepared for any contingencies and “we are constantly reassessing our security posture and they are adjusted as needed.”
Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, warned that the civilian deaths should not be used as an impetus to derail the administration’s current exit strategy or security partnership with the Afghan government.
O’Hanlon said if the U.S. pulls out too soon and does not stick to its current plans to leave trainers and U.S. special forces to help stabilize Afghanistan, the entire country and parts of Pakistan will wind up in the hands of the Taliban or mired in civil war. “Either is possible if we don’t stick with the strategy,” he said. “It is terrible but I would be very surprised if [the civilian killings] was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” O”Hanlon said. “What is the alternative strategy? There isn’t one.”
Some experts said the U.S. mission in Afghanistan headed toward a trap when President Obama decided to approve a surge in the U.S. military forces there while almost simultaneously setting an exit date.
At an August, 2009 Veteran’s of Foreign Wars meeting, Obama said of Afghanistan “this is not only a war worth fighting,” but, “this is fundamental to the defense of our people.” By the end of the year, Obama first described his intention to pull all forces out of Afghanistan by 2014.
That was a flawed strategy, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely.
“It’s always been an unconventional war. It’s never lent itself to nation building and we continue to try and fight it in a conventional way,” Vallely said. “We need to reposition the U.S. forces, today and tomorrow. The troops have victories all the time on the ground but there are no identifiable victories for America.”
The 30,000 troop surge was too small, and the announced withdrawal date a critical error, said James Carafano, senior defense analyst Heritage Foundation.
“The mistake with the surge is that the president gave commanders half the troops they needed and half the time to get the job done,” he said. “We would not be in the fix we are today if the president had listened to commanders on the ground.”
But Carafano said the answer was not as simple as putting more special operations forces into the country to target al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. “The [special forces] guys will be the first to tell you that won’t work,” he said. “Establishing sufficient governance and security to keep the Taliban from coming back requires a robust counterinsurgency campaign … You can’t kill your way out of this.”
Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner’s national security correspondent. She can be reached at [email protected].
