Soldiers Gone Wrong

The Washington Post is reporting today on an American platoon that went crazy in Afghanistan:

The U.S. soldiers hatched a plan as simple as it was savage: to randomly target and kill an Afghan civilian, and to get away with it.

For weeks, according to Army charging documents, rogue members of a platoon from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, floated the idea. Then, one day last winter, a solitary Afghan man approached them in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. The "kill team" activated the plan.

One soldier created a ruse that they were under attack, tossing a fragmentary grenade on the ground. Then others opened fire.

According to charging documents, the unprovoked, fatal attack on Jan. 15 was the start of a months-long shooting spree against Afghan civilians that resulted in some of the grisliest allegations against American soldiers since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Members of the platoon have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones.

I am not at all surprised; I am more puzzled that this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time. That it doesn't is a testimony to the ability of modern armies to impose limits on the violence of their soldiers. One way they do this is by promoting adherence to military law and taking all breaches of it very seriously; and this explains part of why most career officers were so strongly opposed to Bush's torture regime.