The military's response to a discovered atrocity is to lie about it if possible. This is not from shame. In Afghanistan, the Pentagon knows that the Taliban cannot defeat American forces, but public opinion in the US can. If lying doesn't work, spin, spin, spin. In the latest atrocity by US forces, in which a GI killed sixteen Afghan civilians for fun, or maybe from boredom, the Pentagon is saying that he had suffered a head injury. Oh. (The magazine The Nation quotes Afghans as saying that there were several Gis, drunk and laughing. I guess they all had head injuriies.)
The atrocities will continue. They always do. They are part of war, especially of wars against populations. Most go unreported. A few years back I was in China and met a young Puerto Rican vet from New York. His mother had taken him on tour to celebrate his live return from Afghanistan. He told me of being on patrol in some town when a woman had accidentally blocked the path of the sergeant in charge of the patrol. He rifle-butted her. A small thing, not up there with splashy atrocities like killing a bunch of children. The kid said he knew it was wrong, but in a firefight you have to depend on the other guys and you can't risk having the sergeant down on you. He didn't say anything.
If you suggest that such behavior isn't a real good idea, the hardnosed will say, what the hell, tell them to get over it, we've got a war to fight. Thing is, Afghan men are as hard as any who ever lived, and they take mistreatment of their women seriously. They take the murder of their childrn for fun seriously. A horizontal butt-stroke to the face of someone's wife means that you aren't going to win your war. Pissing on Afghan dead, kicking their doors in at three in the morning, kill teams sportively murdering civilians, all the things that boot camp makes inevitable—they all mean you are not going to win your war.
Even Republicans can tire of killing, or conceivably can. But it is not just the weariness of Americans with endless war that threatens the Pentagon. The Afghans hate the United States, and their soldiers have begun killing US troops. The Pakis, furious at American intervention and random killing with those fun new drones, are at the point of revolt. The atrocities will continue because, after all the medals and stories of heroism at the O-club, the high-fives and the teary-eyed tributes to the fallen, atrocities are what armies do.
When you have trained men to behave in a certain way, don't be surprised when they do.
