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Imagine that a foreign army comes to occupy your country. Drones and jet aircraft launch missiles and drop bombs on your homes. Helicopters strafe your neighborhoods with machine guns. They kill people you love: your wife, your grandparents, your parents, your teenagers, your little children who make you laugh. People you love die by the dozens and by the hundreds.
When you and your friends gather to bury your loved ones, they kill you there as well, out in the open where you cannot protect yourself. After each massacre, the occupying army apologizes for the regrettable incident. “We are sorry,” the army says. “We will do everything we can to prevent such incidents in the future.” Then it kills more members of your family.
At last you have had enough. You say, “We want you to go. We mean it: we truly want you to go. You say you want a friendly relationship, but we know you will continue to kill our families and say how sorry you are. If you try to stay here, we will make you go.”
Then one Sunday at two in the morning, a soldier who has had too much to drink walks off a military base in the Panjwai district of Kandahar to a nearby village. His weapon is loaded. The soldier walks into a home and murders eleven people, going from room to room as they try to escape. The victims include women and little girls age under age six. Blood spatters the walls. The soldier moves on to two more homes and kills more civilians with his automatic weapon.
He pours chemicals over the still-warm bodies to burn them.
The soldier’s superior officers and public relations officers respond rapidly. They issue statements to reassure everyone, statements designed to protect the army and its mission. The people who speak for the occupying army say, “We’re sorry. We truly wish this regrettable incident had not happened.”
If a soldier walked into your home and shot your little girl, would you believe that?
The Jeffersonian 
We have been there ten years too long. In 2001 we had certain definable goals. Eliminate Al-Qaeda’s sanctuaries in Afghanistan, topple the Taliban government for supporting Al-Qaeda, and kill Bin Laden and as many of his associates as possible. We accomplished the first two, screwed up the third. Most Afghans welcomed the initial invasion. But then it was time to get out. We should have wished Karzai good luck and promised him some military aid but not troops. Could things have turned out any worse? Karzai would either have governed better or perished. Our relations with Pakistan (100 nuclear weapons anyone?) wouldn’t be so poisoned. Afghan wedding parties would not have been bombed, villages would not have been destroyed in US-Taliban fighting, Korans would not have been burned (if you’re going to fight abroad, you’d better learn something first about your ally’s [or enemy’s] culture!)
I really think most of our forces try to do their best. But they have no business fighting in a long civil war abroad. How many speak the language(s), know the culture(s)? If an Afghan informant has a grudge against someone, he can call them Taliban; we send out our drones and kill them. *No* war is without atrocities and civilian casualties, even by “good guys.” We can even skip over WWII, Vietnam, Rwanda, Bosnia. Over 10,000 American prisoners died on British ships in New York harbor during the Revolutionary War. Civilians died at Vicksburg, Gettysburg, during Sherman’s marches; free blacks were enslaved in PA and MD by Lee’s army. Prisoners were murdered by the Allies in WWI, by the Israelis in the Six-Day War. I, for one, am *not* looking forward to a quick, surgical (ha-ha) war against Iran.
What worries me is that Pres. Obama will manage to mollify Afg. just enough to keep us from being kicked out ASAP. Then we’ll have two or maybe many more long years of useless fighting. The situation in Afghanistan makes “Vietnamization” look good. I don’t think most South Vietnamese liked us much in 1970-72, but Americans didn’t face the degree of hatred that they do now.
One thing, Steven. So far I have heard it was the actions of one man, not a “party of drunken soldiers.” Small consolation to the victims.
Thank you for an excellent comment! I have changed the original post so it refers to a single soldier. The army identified Staff Sergeant Bales this week, and has identified no one else.
The Korans got caught up in the base’s standard trash disposal routines. Throw them into the burn pit! An Afghan soldier saw the Korans loaded onto the truck that was about to leave for the burning area. He tried to alert an officer who could stop the truck’s departure, but the truck got away. The guy at the burn pit tried to get the books out when he saw the mistake. It all happened because someone upstream didn’t lock those books up instead letting them be thrown out.
The books were confiscated in the first place because prisoners wrote messages in the margins and communicated that way. Some might say you’d want to keep that inter-cell communication channel open to monitor what the prisoners say. If you want to shut the communication channel down, you have to remove the Korans.
The person who decided to confiscate those books should have thought, before the first book came out of the first cell, what are we going to do with those Korans? If you don’t have a good answer to that question, leave them in the cells. Finding a secure place to store them, though, doesn’t seem that hard. It’s a prison, after all.