Will the US Soldier Shooting Incident Ruin the US Army’s Reputation and Cause it to Pull Out?

Early in the morning on March 11, a U.S. soldier killed 16 Afghan civilians during a shooting rampage in Kandahar. The brutality of the event was utterly shocking. In the middle of the night, the soldier broke into the houses of the Afghan civilians, killed them while they were sleeping and attempted to burn the bodies. Most of the victims were shot in the head. At least nine of the victims were children and three of the victims were women. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the event was an “unforgivable act” and an “intentional killing.” The Taliban threatened to behead American troops to avenge the killings.

According to nationalist reasoning, when an outsider commits a crime against some of the citizens of a nation, it will be seen as a crime against the entire nation. The criminal, meanwhile, will cause a negative label to be attached to the nation and government of the criminal; thus, the situation turns into an international political conflict. There are many examples of individual crimes turning into international conflicts in history, for example, when a Serbian youth killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on the eve of World War I; or just before World War II, when the USSR invaded Finland as an act of vengeance against the death of one of its soldiers. Some observers have predicted that this massacre will cause a wave of protests against the U.S. in Afghanistan. However, apart from 1,000 Afghans assembling outside the U.S. military base in Kandahar to hold up the bodies of the dead, there have been no raging protests from the date of the killing to March 14.

Perhaps the raging protests are still fermenting, or perhaps it is because, by some lucky fluke, the American government handled the crisis successfully. It seems that President Barack Obama has studied the principles of rapid apology put forth by Professor S. Franz from a Massachusetts university, because soon after the event he apologized to Afghanistan. After promising to severely punish the murderer, he emphasized that it was an individual action and the government hoped to distance itself from the action so as to prevent escalations of violence. The Department of Defense said that the death penalty would be considered for the violent soldier. The U.S. government has also done a good deal to placate the family members of the civilian victims. Although many people are asking how many more times U.S. soldiers will participate in mindless violent acts, both the American and Afghan investigators believe that the act was undertaken by an individual, and was probably committed while the soldier was intoxicated.

The Afghan authorities and the Afghan people seem to be calm, in stark contrast with the intense response to the incident during which the Quran was burned a few weeks ago. Afghanistan defeated the extremist theocracy of the Taliban regime just over ten years ago, but now the people gradually feel more and more hopeless when faced with the incompetence of Karzai’s secular administration. As a result, the people have decided to go back to mixing politics with religion, reviving the spirit and faith that was lost. In this context, a crime against the religion of the Afghan people, which they revere so much, is a matter of life or death.

Take the Quran burning incident, for example. On February 20, while the U.S. Army at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul was taking trash to the landfill, some U.S. soldiers put a large number of Quran books in pile of trash to be incinerated. This shocking scene was witnessed by two Afghan people who were passing by the landfill. The Quran burning incident at Bagram Air Base incited several days of anti-American protesting and riots, during which two U.S. consultants and four U.S. soldiers were killed. Even though Obama sent a written apology as soon as possible, it had no effect: The riots lasted for a week before they calmed down.

In the past, a British soldier purposefully committed a crime against the sanctity of religion, specifically against the soldiers who practiced Hinduism or Islam in the Indian army, which caused a temporary but bothersome war of independence. Surprisingly, once India used “nonviolent noncooperation” to fight for independence, the people of the country began to kill each other and the Indian government actually invited the colonizers to continue to govern the country. What this means is that when the colonialists entered a backward region as conquerors, their overall judicial administration of killing could quickly settle a dispute and keep it from escalating. The colonialists would not support senseless killing, whether it was covered by extraterritoriality or fell within the judicial structure of the colony, and thus they supported the local people’s right to determine their religion and culture. This situation could more or less be applied to the U.S. Army today. The U.S. Army should define its mission as a mission to help the Afghan people return to law and order, and constantly report news about the casualties it has had when fighting against enemies in Afghanistan; moreover, it should consider these casualties to be a contribution to the Afghan cause. As long as it can do this, a significant portion of the Afghan people will not be willing to view a crime committed by an individual as a tragic massacre committed against the entire nation. Furthermore, they will be more willing to let crimes be processed as criminal cases under a judicial framework.

This can also explain the incident in 2005 where the U.S. Army burned the corpses of Taliban soldiers, as well as the incident on January 11, 2012, where U.S. soldiers urinated on the dead bodies of armed anti-American forces. These incidents provoked the widespread disgust and widespread protesting of the Afghan people, because they are a public humiliation of Islam religion and culture, directly conflicting with Afghan culture.

The recent incident where the U.S. soldier killed Afghan civilians occurred soon after protests over the urination incident and the Quran burning incident happened; however, it seems that the events were never linked. The former incident could be considered in two ways. Either the U.S. Army mismanaged its soldiers and a U.S. soldier became violent after drinking, or some soldiers have been spending too much time at war, thus many people have mental breakdowns due to mounting pressure. As a freak incident, the event’s influence could be equated with that of an unmanned aerial vehicle mistakenly killing a number of Afghan civilians. On the other hand, the urination incident and the Quran burning incident directly hurt the pride of the Afghan people. As the U.S. Army tries to withstand attacks on the military and economic front, these incidents cause a cultural conflict, which will severely influence the image and reputation of the U.S. Army. If U.S. troops suddenly had to pull out due to major setbacks, the U.S. would certainly be criticized for starting trouble and ultimately abandoning everything in Afghanistan.