Our Confused Policy in Afghanistan
There are a lot of ways to parse this story about the alleged video of soldiers urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. It seems ugly, but desecration of corpses has a long history in Afghan conflicts (often consisting of cutting off male-only body parts). And it's bizarre to see people more upset about peeing on corpses than with corpsifying them in the first place.
But at the end of the day this is what I think is broken about the Afghan conflict. You don't send warriors into a brutal guerrilla war with no rules and simultaneously expect them to be goodwill ambassadors as well. Given that these are two activities whose Venn diagrams of skills and mindsets have so little overlap, the military does a pretty good job trying to do what its being asked, but over the long run it's a losing game (somewhere in here there is an Ender's Game reference about trying to meld empathy with killer instincts).
By the way, exactly what is our goal in Afghanistan, will someone remind me? We have been successful when __________________ ?
