How do you think the Sergeant that killed the Afghani civilians should be dealt with?

I’m a San Diego, California guy. I don’t believe in the death penalty. He should be discharged and dealt with accordingly however and if evidence comes up with him being guilty he deserves what ever sentence fit. If he his truly crazed however, jail might be the next best step for him in society.

I think that he should be tried, and the death penalty should be on the table.

My thoughts are that the Army created a monster and it is the Army that are ultimately responsible for this poor guys actions.

@pussinboots Well in America we like to try people on an individual basis. My buddy in the Army isn’t a problem. On an individual basis, in my buddies case the Army has shaped his life for the better. So we can’t really judge the Army as a whole.

@marinelife Honestly, what does the death penalty teach us?

Great. Yes, let’s show the world how a civilized country acts by killing a person who has killed people.

Oh, and it will also serve to bring back to life all of the people he murdered.

@whitecarnations It could happen to your buddy….......constant tours in War Zones seeing friends blown apart day in day out and the constant threat of you could be next ? I’m not saying that the Army did this I’m saying that the Army should evaluate more,give these guys some sort of councelling every week…...... make the councelling very open so that there is not stigma attached for attending such programmes….because as we all know It’s not a very manly thing to ask for help,especially in a job that involves killing for a living. If things( mental issues ) are bottled up then it’s only a matter of time before the results of stifling those issues manifests.

@pussinboots The Army’s business is taking a lot of uneducated people to do grunt work. (Of course a majority of high rankings are college prepared and give out the orders for the ost part) I love my military and no one is forced to join. But I also know they chose the Army over college. So when the Army knows someone wants to join a grown mans club that blows things up, and shoots things with sophisticated weaponry, that kind of evaluation is good enough for them. They deal with the mental issues with “benefits” upon retirement.

@pussinboots The bottom line it’s an individual basis. No body knew Kurt Cobain was going to commit suicide. Doing rock’n roll shouting at the top his lungs, singing angry lyrics… Wait army soldiers are hired to kill.. what makes me think they would just all of a sudden flip out in an environment they are not so familiar with.. (this is my sarcasm) however the bottom line is anyone, at anytime, in any profession can flip a switch, screen or not screened, it’s a birth right.

@whitecarnations Like this guys going to get his mentalissues dealt with ? “after the horse has bolted ” absolutely pointless.

@pussinboots Exactly. His situation is beyond fucked.

Pin a medal on his chest.

The purpose of war is to utterly destroy the ability of the enemy to fight back, by the fastest and most efficient means possible. This is the principle of “total war,” as first codified by Clausewitz in his seminal Vom Kriege, the basis of modern warfare. Total war is based on the notion that war is not a game; war is brutal, ugly, evil, and occasionally necessary. If it becomes necessary to engage in war, then any and all means necessary to bring about the swiftest conclusion to the war must be used.

Since the evil, rich, white pricks who rule Amerika decided it was necessary to go to war, then total war dictates that we must and should murder whatever quantity of people is necessary in order to make it physically impossible for the enemy to fight back. If that means murdering women and children, then that is what must be done. If it means using atom bombs to incinerate every lifeform in Afghanistan, then that too must be done.

War is not noble. War is not brave. War is a horrible, awful, terrible thing. And we have a moral responsibility to be as vicious and ruthless as necessary to minimize the amount of evil by winning it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I’m definitely against the death penalty. Some sort of rehabilitation and incarceration.

I’ve been reading he had been treated for a brain injury from a vehicle rollover accident when he was stationed in Iraq. He’ll be court martialed and most likely sit on death row forever. I wonder how many tours he’s had overseas?

A whole lotta wtf going on in this thread.

He should be court martialed, mentally evaluated, stripped of all rank and benefits, and jailed for a long time depending on the outcome of his evaluation. Not a fan of the death penalty.

Handed over to the Afghans so they can try and sentence him. :D

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard I second your thoughts. A lot of wtf.

He should be given the same consideration any American citizen gets who went crazy and killed someone. Hey! I know… let’s do the same thing they did with that Islamic nutcase who killed all those people at Fort Hood: call it “workplace violence” and have him shipped off to a nuthouse! : )

He should be tried under the military justice system, and if found guilty, sentenced to an appropriate military justice sentence.

I do not believe in the death penalty, but life in prison with no parole sounds good to me for people who knowingly kill like that for no reason. On the other hand, if he is mentally ill, then life in prison may not be appropriate.

@whitecarnations I am not in favor of the death penalty, but it is in use as the law of the land. All of the people he butchered got the death penalty. i think it should be considered in his case.

@ragingloli

That would set an unacceptable precedent for military personnel. Letting the nation where soldiers are fighting prosecute and sentence them for infractions while under arms would have a decidedly chilling affect on all military personnel. I know that I, for one, would not join a military which held its soldiers in such low regard. Yes, the incident was horrific. Yes, there should be a determination as to sanity. Yes, if he is adjuged sane ( which is MOST unlikely ), he should be tried with the death penalty as an option, but only by the judicial system to which he was subject at the time… the UCMJ.

Unacceptable for you, maybe. I think it would be fantastic, as it would prevent a lot of nutters joining, thinking they will get away with a slap on the wrist for murding innocent civilians.

You would. : /

The military is now claiming he has a head injury from an accident in Iraq 2 years ago. Of course they will take this postition and hope it excuses his behavior. It won’t. The Afgani’s will want blood.
He needs to be brought back to the US, and tried. It is the American way, and will demonstrate who we are.

This whole thing makes a great argument for NOT becoming militarily involved in countries where there is no discernable justification for our being there. America has forgotten who we truly were and as a consequence we go to war on the whims of men with ulterior and venal motives. We need to bring ALL overseas military home and let the rest of the world find some other way of resolving their own conflicts.

@SmashTheState, please confirm that you are being ironic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. There are people who really do believe in the total war doctrine.

I don’t believe in the death penalty. I think he should be given to the Afghan courts and if they decide to kill him, so be it. In my opinion, someone who intentionally guns down children deserves worse than death. He should be locked up for the rest of his life and studied like an animal.

I’ve supported escalating our military presence in Afghanistan because I thought it was better than the alternative. The Taliban have killed a huge number of civilians and our presence, as bad as it is, at least contributed to some stability and security. Also, we destroyed the country and we owed it to the Afghans to try to rebuild it, economically and politically.

Well, this incident has made me change my mind. I understand the shooter is not representative of the army as a whole and there are psychopaths in any large population of people. Or maybe he really has a head injury in Iraq. The point is that we should not heavily arm a large population of people, some of whom are undoubtably head injured or psychopaths, and put them in control of a country they know nothing about. I’m no longer convinced the benefits outweigh the costs and risks.

@CaptainHarley, I actually think there’s a pretty big difference between this guy and the Fort Hood shooter. The Fort Hood shooter killed soldiers who were engaged (or about to be engaged) in warfare with what he saw as his “side.”

This guy deliberately killed innocent civilians, mostly children.

Trial, followed by either execution or the rest of his life in a loony bin, depending on what the trial finds.
@tom_g No, see, it shows the rest of the world how seriously we take his offense.

@Qingu The doctrine of total war is the only rational, compassionate way to wage war. To quote verse 31 of the Tao Te Ching, “Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is his highest value. If the peace has been shattered, how can he be content? His enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself. He doesn’t wish them personal harm. Nor does he rejoice in victory. How could he rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men? He enters a battle gravely and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral.”

Have you read Vom Kriege? Do you understand why it was such a revolutionary way of thinking about war? Until the late 19th century (in Europe, at least), war was a game played between competing nobility. My soldiers would line up here, yours would line up there, and we’d tally up the losses at the end of the day over brandy. Clausewitz, who had studied the tactics of Napoleon, realized that what made Napoleon so effective was his application of overwhelming and completely unrestrained force. He did not give the enemy time to set up, he did not politely form neat lines, and where he could use his cannons to turn his opposition into splashes of gore and smoking boots, he did so without hesitation.

And what Clausewitz realized is that the application of maximum force made for short wars. People die in wars, but most people die from disease, starvation, and dirty drinking water, not battle wounds. Through the application of total war, you remove the enemy’s ability to resist, thereby ending all hostilities as quickly as possible. It is ruthless, yes, and utterly without pity. But it minimizes losses on both sides to the bare minimum. If two sides are going to engage in war until one side or the other is victorious, is it not better to wage war as quickly as possible, doing whatever is needful to bring the conflict to a final and unarguable conclusion?

I was being only slightly facetious when I said they should pin a medal on the man’s chest. He is a warrior, and in war, the duty of a warrior is to kill. Quickly. Efficiently. And with utter ruthlessness. If the murder of women and children will bring the war to a faster conclusion, then that is what a warrior must do. To do anything else is cruel. Afghanistan has spent a century being “pacified” by outsiders, from the British Empire to Russia to NATO. And because of the unwillingness of outsiders to bring such a massive oversufficiency of firepower to bear that they utterly exterminate the capability of the Afghanistanis to resist, Afghanistan has endured a century of torment and privation.

@SmashTheState You cannot compassionately wage war.

@filmfann

I disagree.

@filmfann You do no one any service by making ejaculatory declarations of axiomatic talking points. That looks fine on a placard, but the fact is that wars happen. Given this reality, the most compassionate way to wage a war is total war. Read Vom Kriege.

Genocide is not compassionate.

@CaptainHarley @SmashTheState Can you cite any war you feel was compassionate?
I am unaware of any battle won with hugs.

@filmfann

Wars can be compassionate to the degree that those fighting them are compassionate. The NATO intervention in Kosovo was, to a great degree, compassionate.

@ragingloli @filmfann I can’t have a discussion with slogans.

@ragingloli

War does not equal genocide.

Can you answer the question?

@CaptainHarley
That is what STS advocates. Exterminating an entire population to win a war. And calling that “compassionate”. It is insane and offensive.

World War II was a good war, in that we were on the right side, and we were fighting a terrible evil.
Given that, I would never suggest it was compassionate.

@ragingloli (1) I did not advocate genocide. (2) Neither did Clausewitz.

I’m not going to retype my short little essay. Please read it to understand what I’m actually saying. The fact that we’re seeing an armload of one-sentence responses ten seconds after the previous posting shows that there is no rational thought going on. People are forming reactions based on emotional triggers without any period of reflection. That might be fine in Social, but this is General, and there needs to be a higher level of discussion here.

Mahatma Gandhi embraced the idea of fighting an idea without violence, which is as close to a compassionate defense as I can imagine, and even he acknowledged that he would fail such a battle against Nazi’s.

@SmashTheState
It is the inevitable conclusion of your doctrine. If genocide brings the war to a faster conclusion, then that is what must be done.
Do not try to back away from the logical and inevitable implications of your own doctrines.
It reminds me of the musings of Javik, the Prothean. He said that he would have destroyed the Krogan Homeworld with the planet killer bomb the Turians planted on the planet, and exterminated the entire species, to end the Krogan rebellions swiftly.

The man is sick. His victims were chosen at random so he didn’t have a beef with any of them. Keep sending people overseas over and over again to fight. This is what you will get sometimes.

I have noticed some comments ^^ above siting soldiers are uneducated and ignorant as if… a college educated soldier put in a similar situation would somehow impervious to it? Or they join to be manly and have an excuse to kill , seriously? Not going to expend time and embarrass you for saying that…you know who you are.

@SmashTheState Total war doctrine entails killing mothers? Children? So they would not be able to wage war against you when they grow up? That’s compassionate to you? Did those kids declare war on you THEMSELVES?

@mazingerz88 To treat war as a game, with rules of fair play, is a horrible thing. The vast majority of the millions of people who have died in Iraq have not died from gunfire, they have died from dirty water and starvation and lack of sanitation and shortages of medicine. It is not merciful to drag out a war over the span of a decade. It is, in point of fact, cruel and sadistic to wage years-long military campaigns because of a squeamishness about the optics of killing a few thousand innocents.

The doctrine of total war is about minimizing the evil of war by ending it as quickly and efficiently as possible. War is by its nature evil. If war must be waged – and it must, for howsoever long we permit our nations to be run by sociopathic, corporate god-kings – then we have a moral duty to ensure that war is treated as the terrible thing it is and not as a national pastime for years on end.

I have heard about this a lot in the media over the past 24 hrs or rather I have heard the same small smattering of supposed facts bantered about and so I would say that I still do not know enough about this to make any kind of judgment.

@SmashTheState

Sometimes excercising a bit of compassion can actually bring a war to a speedier conclusion. For example: if an invading force decides that it is going to do everything it can to protect prisoners of war ( which the US has always done in the past, in compliance with the Geneva Conventions ), word will get out that the US protects prisoners and does not execute them, thus encouraging more enemy combatants to surrender. Killing prisoners will definitely make others think several times before surrendering.

@SmashTheState Just like to point out that your statement about not being able to have a discussion with slogans is kinda ironic, given your pseudonym.

@SmashTheState I really do understand what you are saying. The cold logic in there is quite…well, logical. Convincing. I’m not a student of history so I have no idea if this doctrine has ever been tested. Maybe a variation of it has been tried. By Hitler maybe? As for Iraq or Afghanistan, I could not see how this doctrine could work in the long run if tried. In this day and age, if a country like the US executes this doctrine, would the whole country be able to live with that? I guess I’m just wondering whether this doctrine is actually feasible.

Also, just imagining warring countries with push-button nukes following this doctrine? Can’t believe I would say this but I think I would prefer the cruel, immoral 10 year wars anytime.

“I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today? Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, 18 February 1943.

I wouldn’t recommend it

To answer the original question, I don’t think the soldier can carry all the blame for this. He was sent there by the US military, he was wearing a military uniform and carrying an army issue weapon. He didn’t live alone he lived on a US military base. He had buddies, he had a commanding officer. Did no one see any sign that he was starting to crack?

@SmashTheState said: The doctrine of total war is about minimizing the evil of war by ending it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
That rather reminds me of the beginning of the Iraq war, where we avoided battles to get to the heart of Iraq quickly. The Generals now concede that while that shortened the initial conflict, it caused the second part of the war to last far longer. Years longer.
I support the use of the A bomb in Japan at Hiroshima. By your logic, that was compassionate. I can’t imagine how you can feel that way, given the evidence.

@SmashTheState, as others have pointed out, what you are advocating is tantamount to genocide.

Keep in mind that the civilians this soldier killed weren’t even on the Taliban’s side. The father of the eight children the soldier murdered feared the Taliban and deliberately moved closer to the US base, and supported Karzai’s government and the occupation. Guess how he feels about the US and the Afghan government now.

I know you must feel like a badass sitting on the Internet and quoting von Clausowitz. I hope you understand what your advocation of the deliberate, targeted murder of civilians says about you.

This whole topic makes me very sad. Sad for the Afghanis killed, sad for their remaining families, and sad for the soldier who killed them.

Does this make it more likely that the US will exit Afghanistan without having any serious local capability for pacifying the country? Or keeping the peace? Such as it is.

Will the Taliban take over again once the US leaves? The people of Afghanistan hate the US. There has never been any country that could successfully invade Afghanistan, and the US certainly doesn’t seem like it will change that pattern.

We will leave—in a year or in five years, and the Taliban will take over again. Or maybe they’ll just be a part of a complicated scene there. In any case, we won’t have any friends there.

Really, there’s no way we can institute a democracy of the kind we’d like. The best thing is to get out and let the chaos continue. Hopefully we will have empowered women a bit, and they’ll be able to manage to care for themselves. But it’s hard to imagine that happening. So abandoning Afghanistan would mean abandoning women to the depredations of Afghan men and the Taliban. Yet staying means abandoning women to the depredations of American soldiers.

It’s hard for me to see which way is less evil.

@mazingerz88 Thank you for taking the time to consider a cogent response rather than simply engaging in reaction formation on the basis of “it doesn’t make me feel good.” The doctrine of total war was created at a time when nuclear weapons weren’t even imagined of, but subtracted of their emotional baggage, they’re simply overwhelming force writ large. Burning a city and salting the earth takes longer, but it’s just as destructive, and we’ve been doing that for millenia. If we’re looking at war from a game theory perspective, two nuclear-armed opponents attacking each other has a payoff structure which is colloquially referred to as “a game of chicken.” The thing about chicken is, it’s not possible to win it. If you look at the payoff structure and assume logical players, then if you are challenged to chicken, the best possible outcome for someone accepting the challenge is mutual loss, since you know the challenger (being logical) will not challenge and then turn away; the challenger will always carry through on the threat, or there’s no possible benefit in making the challenge. Therefore, two nuclear-armed opponents will never attack each other. And indeed, this is what we’ve seen historically.

As for the rest of you (and the silent lurkers expressing themselves through GAs) who figure that warfare ought to be conducted on the basis of your feelings, and advocate for the death of millions through years of suffering and deprivation so that you needn’t have to deal with the restless sleep which comes from having to SEE the DIRECT results of people who are murdering in your name – shame on you. You are the reason the State is forced to put on a dog-and-pony show of “merciful warfare” which spares you from seeing a handful of dead children on your television set during your supper at the expense of quiet millions dying out of sight where you can safely ignore them.

@wundayatta, I think it’s relatively clear that the majority of Afghans want a Taliban-style government. There are some notable exceptions (Hazara shi’ites who the Taliban massacred, educated folks in Kabul, women who know enough to know their relative situation). But most Afghans don’t want a democracy, they want a backwards Islamic state. To make matters worse, many Afghans prefer the Taliban’s rule to the ultra-corrupt regime of Karzai, and who can blame them.

The fact that Afghans on the whole seemed to get more upset about the accidental burning of a Quran than the deliberate massacre of women and children is telling. What is the point of installing democracy in a country where something like the Taliban would probably be democratically elected anyway?

It’s a problem without a solution. Maybe 10 years ago, if we didn’t spend all our resources invading Iraq, we could have successfully decoupled Al-Qaeda from the Taliban and formed some kind of truce with them, and worked to improve Afghan society through nonmilitary means.

@Qingu your statement; “The fact that Afghans on the whole seemed to get more upset about the accidental burning of a Quran than the deliberate massacre of women and children is telling. What is the point of installing democracy in a country where something like the Taliban would probably be democratically elected anyway?” hits the nail on the head. I believe the same statement could be make about Iraq. Guess we will find out soon.

@SmashTheState, sorry, you don’t get to act high and mighty when you’ve advocated the deliberate murder of innocent civilians and shown yourself to be amenable to genocide. You also didn’t answer my question. The people the soldier murdered were on our side. How on earth does that support your position?

Also: I consider myself a utilitarian. So let’s talk numbers. You say a million Iraqis have died, mostly from poor sanitary conditions brought about by years of warfare. You use this as an argument to… well, I’m not exactly sure. Are you saying that “shock and awe” was not enough and we should have actually nuked Iraq, or something?

Are you even aware of what actually happened in the Iraq War? The Hussein government fell in a matter of weeks. “Winning” that war was easy and trivial. Then the country descended into a near civil war. Most of what we call “the Iraq War” involves dealing with this civil war, often fighting against civilian-clothed terrorists in urban areas. In this respect the Iraq War was much more like a police action than your absurd comparison with the MAD doctrine between the US and the USSR. Also, considering the Shi’ites and the Sunnis were actively killing each other whether or not we were there, your “1 million Iraqis killed” figure would likely stay the same whether or not we stayed there.

Unless you are advocating nuking Fallujah or engaging in “total war” against civilian populations that harbor civilian-clothed insurgents? Because then we’re certainly talking about more than 1 million direct civilian military deaths. Engaging in “total war” in population centers also tends to have the effect of destroying a lot of useful infrastructure… which was your original complaint.

We haven’t fought a total war since World War 2. Shall we compare civilian casualties per capita in WW2 to Iraq? Here’s a hint: it’s an order of magnitude difference. Vietnam falls somewhere in between.

You haven’t really thought this through. I could forgive that, if your conclusion wasn’t so appalling and repulsive.

I know you must feel that you’re somehow above the fray, being an anarchist who bravely lobs invectives at corporate America on the Internet. But think about what you’re saying. “We should pin a medal on his chest,” referring to a guy who kicked down the door of our civilian allies and murdered a woman and eight children. Shame on us? Shame on you.

@rojo, I actually think the situation in Iraq is pretty different than Afghanistan. Most people in Iraq are literate. Iraq has modern infrastructure. It has access to the outside world through telecommunications and the Internet. It has a history of national governance (albeit a horrible one)—it has institutions, in other words. It’s majority Shi’ite, but is used to being led by Sunnis, which means that religion in public life does not have the same kind of homogenous expectations that it does in Pashtun Afghanistan.

All of these things will help Iraq build something like a modern society, even if it ends up like the “Islamic Republic” of Iran. But none of that is true in Afghanistan.

@Qingu I have a solution, but it is long term and speculative and requires the development of a new kind of “armed” service—a service armed with real peace-making and community building techniques. We have always been lying to ourselves that we are not in the business of nation building, but unfortunately, we can’t win these wars without leaving the place better than we found it, and without doing it in a culturally sensitive way.

Now perhaps there are some military commanders in Afghanistan who understand the culture and the politics and have some idea of how to build culturally relevant connections that can actually win hearts and minds. If there are, I haven’t heard of them. I’m sure if I were there, I’d have a few ideas, but if I were there, I’d be hiring a bunch of academics who could help me understand what is going on, and using that information to design an intervention that would achieve our goals.

I agree with loli here.

@Jude It feels weird to say it, but I do too. And with @Qingu, but that’s happened once before.

It is a mistake to think that Afghans are any less ‘upset’ than we would be over the deliberate massacre of women and children. They are probably in a state of shock and want to grieve in private.

@flutherother they aren’t grieving in private they are burning effigys of Obama in the streets,the guy whos wife and kids were killed moved to this area because of the presence of the US base.
He felt safer living there.

@wundayatta, great answer. I agreed with you 100 percent… up until the point of hiring academics.

At least in Afghanistan we had a kinda, sorta, maybe justification. In Iraq we didn’t even have that. We don’t belong in either country and we need to stop kidding ourselves that we’re building democracies, or helping either country in any way.

Sometimes liberators get mistaken for conquerers .

And sometimes people looking for new markets can be mistaken for liberators.

There’s really not much marketable in Afghanistan, though. The country is a trash heap.

You know this line isn’t a good one when the military brass are the ones trumpeting the supposed riches of the country several years after they already invaded and occupied it.

Afghanistan does have a lot of mineral resources though.